Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

But warring with her urge to set Cohen straight was the realization that he’d just handed her an unbreakable, uncheckable alibi for her meetings with Nguyen’s contact.

She’d be a fool not to take it.

Wouldn’t she?

“I was going to tell you,” she said, feeling her heart wrench with the lie.

“Of course you were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” His voice was level and pleasant…but when she probed the intraface, none of his firewalls would so much as shake hands with her internals.

“Have a drink,” he told her, not even acknowledging the aborted contact.

Their eyes met. Li frowned. Cohen smiled.

Except it wasn’t his real smile. It was the bland, pleasant, impersonal smile that meant he’d decided to write someone off so completely he wasn’t even going to bother mentioning it to them. She’d seen that smile only twice before, and neither occasion had made for good memories. She’d never imagined she’d be on the receiving end of it.

“Right.” She picked up the cocktail menu and pretended to look at it. “What’s the plan then?”

“There is no plan. We’ll talk to Fortuné, then we’ll see.”

“And where do we go to talk to the man?”

“The International Zone. Fortuné’s got a favorite bar there, a little place called the Sauve Qui Peut.”

The Sauve Qui Peut was a Legionnaire’s bar: cheap beer, an abiding odor of steak and frites, and Brel and Bénabar chuttering out of speakers that had been blown long before the oldest of the place’s regulars had rotated into the Zone.

The bar back boasted a cluttered shrine of Legion paraphernalia. Flat photos and holos of soldiers fording swollen tropical rivers or jumping out of ancient airplanes, or marching with the medieval battle-axes and butcher’s aprons that the Fathers of the Legion (a few of them Mothers, at least technically) wore on parade days. The shrine’s centerpiece was an antique hand-colored photograph of Colonel Danjou’s famous hand, so immense that the screws where the metal hinges met the wooden fingers were visible at twenty paces. The place was packed but the floor around the back table was empty. And from the minute they walked in Cohen could see Fortuné waiting for them in the shadows.

“Bienvenues en l’Enfer,” Fortuné said, rising behind his table to greet them. His smile was friendly, but the eyes behind the smile were as sharp and precise as the creases in his dress shirt.

If the Sauve Qui Peut was the prototypical Legionnaire’s bar, then Colonel Jean-Louis Fortuné was the perfect Legionnaire. Five foot nine in thick socks and spit-shined jump boots, and not carrying an ounce of fat anywhere on his wiry frame except in the coffee-colored baby face that was the legacy of his Haitian ancestry. A fifth-degree judo black belt. An inveterate but eminently discreet womanizer…or so it was whispered around barracks. His hairline had already been receding when Cohen first met him, and now he was going bald in the no-nonsense manner that was synonymous, to French eyes, with being a man of intelligence, education, and virility.

Li took the hand Fortuné offered and delivered what Cohen suspected was her most bone-crushing handshake. Fortuné bore up well under it; but then he too was wired to the gills, though his dark skin hid the delicate subdermal filigree of ceramsteel filaments.

“I’m a great admirer,” Fortuné said when he’d retrieved his hand from Li’s grasp. “It is a pleasure and an honor to welcome the hero of Gilead.”

“Some people would say the Butcher of Gilead.”

Cohen had never been quite sure how closely Li followed the press coverage of her court-martial. Now he guessed he knew.

“Some people would not be me,” Fortuné said placidly. “They nailed you up for sins above your pay grade. That was the opinion on the chow line when it happened. It still is.”

Li blinked at that, but her internals were so tightly locked down that Cohen couldn’t get any sense of what was going on behind her eyes.

They sat down. Fortuné was drinking a Lorelei, and a wave to the bartender brought two more bottles over at double time. Cohen sipped the crisp, sweet Alsatian beer and smiled at the taste of Hyacinthe’s centuries-gone youth.

Li and Fortuné started talking war. Tours of duty. Planetside rotations. Combat drops. Cohen, who had never been a soldier nor wanted to be, let the talk flow past him like current lifting a swimmer. He came back to Earth with a thump when he heard the word employment roll off Fortuné’s lips.

“I’m not looking to get hitched again,” Li said into the silence that followed. “And even if I were, what’s it to you? Last time I checked you work for UNSec, same as I did.”

“Only in the most limited sense, I assure you.”

“Then who do you answer to?”

Fortuné smiled urbanely. “La France, ma chère, defender of the civilized world.”

“Is that like the free world but with better food?”

Fortuné laughed, and Li unleashed her most dazzling smile on him. She had charisma in spades when she felt like putting out the effort. And for reasons that Cohen didn’t want to think too closely about, she’d decided it was worth her while to charm Fortuné.

“She’s quite a woman,” Fortuné said when she got up to hunt down fresh drinks.

Cohen turned on him. “Don’t even think about it.”

“My friend, I’m neither wealthy enough nor handsome enough to compete with you. I was speaking merely in a professional sense.”

“Well, don’t think about that either.”

Fortuné’s eyes flicked to the front of the bar, where Li was standing on her toes in order to give an attentive reading to the ornate copperplate inscription below the photograph of Colonel Danjou’s hand. Cohen saw her as Fortuné must see her: taut, wired, preternaturally alert, right hand poised habitually over the pistol that she’d had to leave with the hard-faced ex-noncom at what had to be the most explosive coat check in the Holy Land. She ought to be commanding a division, he thought guiltily, not baby-sitting me. He squashed the thought.

“She’s retired,” he told Fortuné.

“Pity.” Fortuné eyed Li’s ramrod-straight back. “Still, if she ever changes her mind…”

“She won’t.”

The buzzing speakers broke out into a rendition of a song that had become the de facto Legionnaire’s anthem in the Evacuation era, and a few of the drunker soldiers around the bar sang along to the famous chorus:

Je voulais quitter la terre, mais maintenent je la regrette J’ai plus le mal du pays, j’ai le mal de la planète

Suddenly the song struck Cohen as sadly telling. A crowd of colonials singing about being homesick for a planet they’d never called home in the language of a country that only existed as a romantic idea and a Ring-side embassy.

“This is all very enjoyable,” Fortuné said, “and I certainly hope you’ll both stay to dinner—not here, somewhere with good food. I know a little one star in Haifa where the cook is pretty and the foie gras is impeccable. But in the meantime I think there was another reason besides my charm and good looks for your visit? What can I do for you?”

Cohen explained briefly the message they needed passed across the Line.

Fortuné stared intently at him, nodding and frowning and muttering oui, oui, oui, oui, as the French often do to indicate agreement…or at least attention.

In this case, it turned out to be only attention. When Cohen was done, Fortuné leaned back in his chair, his dark skin blending with the shadows so that all Cohen could see of him was the blazing white pleats of his summer uniform and the battered stainless-steel wristband of his much-abused Rolex.