“By what?”
“The five strikers we neutralized on adjacent rooftops were burned beyond analysis. Our after-action forensics indicate that each one was equipped with a biomonitor deadman switch rigged to a medley of thermite and white phosphorous charges. If the heart stops—poof: the body and most of the equipment are vaporized by warheads that explode and then burn at twenty-two hundred to twenty-eight hundred degrees Celsius.”
Caine stared at the tabletop. “Wonderful.”
“Almost as wonderful as the cleanup you and I had to perform less than an hour ago. But here, we had to abandon and burn the evidence ourselves because we have only limited influence over the local authorities.”
Nolan shrugged. “I don’t think we’d have learned much from the bodies, anyway.”
Caine looked hard at Corcoran. “Why not?”
“Because they were amateurs, local freelancers. They came after you without any backup plan, their equipment was second-rate, and they were already here.”
“Waiting for me?”
“No: if our adversaries had had any lead time, if they knew you’d be arriving here, they’d have shipped in an A-team. Real professionals. They’d have done the job right: sure, clean, and with absolute plausible deniability. This bunch—they were local muscle, quickly rustled together with phone calls and a few hundred thousand euros, because someone saw you in this area and got the word back to whoever wants you dead. Our opponents probably had only an hour or two to set something up—and by ambushing you with amateurs and failing, they’ve revealed that they don’t yet have an A-team on site. Meaning that they won’t get another shot at you, because by this time tomorrow, you will have told the last of your secrets. After that, there will be no reason left to kill you. Now: will you sit and join us?”
Caine felt the instinct to remain standing: sitting implied a trust, or acceptance, that he did not feel. But to remain standing was to signal hostility. No middle course. So he sat.
Downing hunched forward. “So—what’s the news from Day One, Nolan?”
“Bottom line: there’s general agreement to create a global confederation. When the five blocs were presented with irrefutable evidence of exosapience, there was a unanimous decision to create a central organization with practical political, economic, and military authority.”
Caine cleared his throat; Nolan paused, nodded. “Just cut in whenever you want. No Robert’s Rules, here.”
“What you’re talking about—sounds to me like it makes the U.N. redundant.”
Downing nodded. “Hardly a surprise: the U.N. was never able to put into practice more than a handful of the edicts that it promulgated or the ideals that it espoused. It’s little more than a symbolic memorial.”
“Whereas now the big powers really want to work together?”
Nolan waved away that notion. “Oh, ‘want’ has never achieved anything. But the threat of exosapience means that they need to work together. Of course, that didn’t keep some of the bigger bulls from locking horns for a while.”
Downing looked up from scribbling on his dataslate. “Beijing and Moscow?”
Nolan nodded. “The predictable axes were ground.”
“But they’re going to play nice?”
“So they say.”
Caine frowned. “This all sounds surprisingly civilized.”
“We knew that there would be a baseline of sanity from some of the blocs. Of course, there were still a few cranky gadflies in the ointment—even from the EU.”
Downing grunted. “Oh? Who?”
“Well . . . Gaspard.”
“But of course. Parisian diplomat of the old school. Wanker.”
“C’mon, Rich, cut him some slack. He’s fighting to maintain some shred of France’s past preeminence—”
Downing tapped his pencil. “Well, he—and the rest of his ilk—will just have to bloody well get used to the fact that France hasn’t been an empire since Napoleon left Moscow.”
“That’s a hard thing for a country to accept.”
“Rot. Look at England: we’ve faced facts and moved on.”
Nolan’s left eyebrow arched. “Oh? Really?” Downing’s mouth was open to begin a rebuttal, but Nolan held up his hand. “For now, let’s just get through the day’s news. Which boils down to this: the Confederation government will be a council of five blocs, two voting members per bloc, and one proconsul with a two-year term.”
Downing tapped his stylus on his slate. “Military authority?”
“Separate forces and R&D within each bloc. However, each bloc structures its forces and production to meet the defense responsibilities assigned to it by the Confederation Council.”