David Weber - Shadow of Freedom

“Ah?” Michelle took another sip of coffee and raised both eyebrows.

“Ah,” Lecter said with a nod. Then she looked at the piece of silverware her admiral had taken away from her. “Can I please have my spoon back, Ma’am?” she said almost plaintively. “You know how much better I think when I’ve got something to do with my hands.”

Michelle considered her forbiddingly for several moments.

“You can have it back if you promise not to drum with it,” she said after a moment. “One tap , though, and—”

She drew the tip of her left thumb across her throat in a slicing motion and glowered at Lecter.

“I promise to be good, Ma’am.”

“All right then.” Michelle slid the spoon back across the table to her. “Now continue with your explanation.”

Lecter recovered the spoon with a broad smile and started twirling it again, but her blue eyes were serious as she tipped back in her chair.

“Verrocchio’s records were easier to break into than Hongbo’s,” she began. “The encryption wasn’t as good, and apparently he only had two or three personal passwords that he reused a lot.” She grimaced. “Hongbo, on the other hand, had top-flight encryption—by civilian Solly standards, at least—and he was a lot more inventive when it came to generating passwords. We still haven’t gotten into some of his files, and at least one entire folder went up in smoke on us.” She shook her head. “It looks to the computer geeks like he got some high-powered outside help. The kind of help that only makes itself available when you’re hiding something it doesn’t want found, either.”

“And Verrocchio’s records didn’t have that level of sophistication?” Michelle asked thoughtfully.

“No, they didn’t. Despite the fact that Verrocchio was dealing directly with Manpower, and that he’d been doing it long before the situation with Monica ever blew up in Sir Aivars’ face. You’d have thought if Manpower was going to provide technical assistance to one of them, it would have provided it to both of them, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, you would. Unless, of course, one of them was dealing with someone a layer or two up from Manpower,” Michelle said slowly.

“That’s what got me interested in Hongbo,” Lecter admitted. “More interested in him than in Verrocchio, I mean. And when I got interested in him, I put a team on Verrocchio’s correspondence files, looking specifically for memos generated by Hongbo. Or sent by him to Hongbo, for that matter.”

“That must have produced the odd petabyte,” Michelle said dryly, considering the bureaucratic morass of the Solarian League’s civil services.

“There were a bunch of them, Ma’am,” Lecter agreed. “I had them filtered by date and also using strings like ‘Monica’ and ‘Byng’ or ‘New Tuscany,’ though. That reduced the overall sample in a hurry.”

“All right, I’m with you so far.” Michelle leaned back, sipping coffee, and reached for the last cinnamon bun.

“There was still a lot of garbage-in-garbage-out, Ma’am, but a pattern emerged. Back before Monica, or rather in the buildup to Monica, Hongbo was consistently pushing Verrocchio to be ‘more proactive’ even in his official memos. We’ve turned up a side file of private correspondence as well, and he’s even more persistent there. There’s no proof he knew everything Manpower and Technodyne were up to—no direct evidence he knew about Nordbrandt or Westman, for example—but it’s obvious both of them did know about the battlecruisers Technodyne was supplying to Monica. And from their private correspondence, it’s equally obvious both of them were scared to death when they saw what happened to those battlecruisers. You wouldn’t believe how much time, effort, and bandwidth they spent—Verrocchio, especially—on proving to Frontier Security HQ back on Old Terra that whatever happened in Monica, it wasn’t their fault! I suspect a few of the official memos they’d exchanged before it all went south on them got fed to the chip shredder at that point, as a matter of fact.

“But what’s even more interesting to me is that Hongbo, who apparently had been carrying water for Manpower, at least to judge from the memos he was sending Verrocchio, put the brakes on big-time after Monica.” The blonde-haired chief of staff shrugged, still twirling her spoon. “Nothing too surprising about that, I suppose, but then, just before Josef Byng and Sandra Crandall got sent out here, the tone of this correspondence shifts again. All of a sudden he’s subtly encouraging Verrocchio to ‘cooperate’ with Byng. And if you read the official minutes of the meetings between Verrocchio, Hongbo, and Byng before New Tuscany—and between those two and Crandall, before she set off for Spindle—there’s a definite subtext.”

“Subtext?” Michelle repeated.

“Yes, Ma’am.” Lecter nodded. “We’ve both been around enough bureaucrats, civilian and Navy alike, to know how it’s done. The two of them—Verrocchio’s the one taking point, but from my reading, Hongbo was probably the one who was actually steering—double-teamed Byng and probably Crandall into doing exactly what they did. Not only that, they maneuvered Byng and Crandall into making their decisions against Verrocchio’s official recommendations.”

She paused, and silence hovered for the better part of two minutes.

“You know any court of law would chuck that straight out the airlock,” Michelle said at last, her tone mild. “I haven’t looked at the memos myself, of course, but from what you’ve just said, it sounds like Mr. Verrocchio and Mr. Hongbo must be pretty good at the bureaucratic fan dance.”

“I’m inclined to agree, Ma’am. Both of them covered themselves pretty well, at least in terms of ever coming right out in any official setting and saying anything someone could nail them for. And given what they did say, if I hadn’t already been suspicious about Hongbo for other reasons, I probably would have simply accepted that Verrocchio, as Hongbo’s boss, had to be making the decisions. And he clearly was the one making the final decisions. But it’s increasingly apparent to me that he was dancing to Hongbo’s piping. And there’s another thing, too. There’s a Mesan diplomat—a fairly senior trade attaché by the name of Ottweiler, Valery Ottweiler—whose name appears on Hongbo’s calendar of appointments with an interesting frequency. There’s no record of Ottweiler ever having had a private meeting with Verrocchio, but I’ve found over a dozen between him and Hongbo .”

Lecter paused again, and Michelle considered her expression.

“You want to go ahead and let that other shoe drop now, Cindy?” she inquired.

“What other shoe?” Lecter asked innocently.

“The one that doesn’t have anything to do with memos between Hongbo and Verrocchio. The one you found by following some kind of wild, totally illogical hunch.” Michelle snorted. “I’ve known you a long time, you know, and that talent for being…creatively erratic is one reason I wanted you for my chief of staff. So spill it.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Lecter grinned, but then she sobered. “Although, to be fair, it wasn’t really following a hunch in this case. I just took all the names I’d come up with and threw them into the filters for all the records we’ve been breaking into. Including the Gendarmerie’s.”

“Oh?” Michelle cocked her head. “That sounds interesting.”

“Oh, it was, Ma’am. It was! Because it would appear Brigadier Yucel didn’t believe in keeping her nominal superiors fully apprised of her surveillance activities. In fact, she was bugging both Hongbo and Verrocchio. We haven’t turned up anything especially incriminating in the official surveillance files on them—not yet, anyway—but we’re getting into her more secure files now. The ones she kept for herself , not the official record. And yesterday evening, my cyber forensics team turned up at least two meetings that never officially happened—meetings between Verrocchio, Hongbo, Yucel herself, Ottweiler, Volkhart Kalokainos, Izrok Levakonic, Aldona Anisimovna, and Isabel Bardasano. And both of which happened here in Meyers, a couple of T-months before Technodyne offered all those battlecruisers to President Tyler.”