The Cannon Law—ARC(25)

By about halfway down the first page, she realized that it almost certainly was. And that the radio guys up in the attic were going to be damned busy tonight.

Magdeburg



Don Francisco Nasi waited on the sofa in Mike Stearns' office for the report he had prepared to have the impact he was predicting. It had been something of an effort for him to get an unscheduled meeting with Stearns, as the increasing pressure on the office of the Prime Minister of the United States of Europe was filling the man's day from end to end and frequently had him burning the midnight oil. The appearance of free time in the prime minister's daily schedule of meetings was a rare event, and it was only the sheer unwontedness of Nasi needing more than his usual twice-a-week briefing session that had persuaded Stearns' secretary to squeeze him in between one meeting and the next.



They were not in the usual conference room—the office staff was taking the opportunity to get that cleaned out and ready for the next session—but in Stearns' actual working office, which had come to remind Nasi of the kind of room his relatives in commerce and legal practice tended to inhabit: filing and paperwork on every surface, and a complete nightmare for the cleaning staff wherever you looked. The office of a man, in short, who toiled hard at important work and was usually too busy to pay much mind to the details, and furthermore did not make life any easier for his staff.



Even so, Stearns managed to be more effective in his role than most of his equivalents. A willingness to work hard—the contrast with Sultan Murad IV of Nasi's own personal acquaintance was striking, and Murad had the entire Ottoman Empire to run—and to get much of the work done himself set him so far apart from other rulers as to defy comparison. It also made Nasi worry, for he had come to think of Stearns as a friend and, in the two years of their acquaintance, Stearns had visibly aged.



Which made bringing him this latest piece of information something of a trial for Nasi's conscience. Although a sly grin seemed to be—



Mike Stearns chuckled. "You know, Francisco, there are some aspects of twentieth-century spy mastering you've missed."



Don Francisco Nasi raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to one side. He recognized that tone. Mike Stearns, prime minister of the United States of Europe, had a decidedly odd sense of humor. He waited for the punch line.



"Well," said Stearns, leaning back from the report—a report that, by rights, should have been still smoking, so fast had it come from the Secret Service Cipher Office via Don Francisco's own team of analysts—"Seems to me there's one thing about this source that's missing."



"And?" Francisco saw no reason to uncrook the eyebrow.



"Needs a codename. Something with a hint of mystery about it, something that sounds like it belongs in a Len Deighton thriller."



"Let us by all means call him Harry Palmer, then," Francisco said, pleased that he hadn't missed a beat.



"Truce," Stearns said, holding up his hands. "This time, you were ready for me. Still, a name would be good."



"I prefer not, Michael, truly I do. While a codename is a useful administrative convenience within my office, I prefer the reports that come outside that office not to have any identifier on them beyond what is in the product itself."



Stearns gave a low whistle. "Every time I think I've reached the limits of your paranoia, Francisco, you still manage to surprise me. Still, your department. What do we know about this source?"



"Well, he has sent us one message so far, sent anonymously to our embassy at Rome. A plain packet, according to the description, handwritten in Latin. The contents are all about church politics, and he seems to have gotten us the outcome of a curia session a day or two ahead of our regular channel, and a lot faster since that channel sends his dispatches by courier rather than straight to the embassy."



"Well, that's helpful, I suppose."



Francisco pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. "I can't help thinking, Mike, that whoever it is knows about how radio works."



"Hmmm. I wouldn't worry about that too much, Francisco. I think it's past time we started assuming that was a blown secret. We've used it too much in ways that give the game away. Tell the truth, I wish I'd sat on Sharon Nichols and her schemes in Venice, except they were doing us so much short-term good that I didn't think about the long-term security risk. And I should imagine that the Vatican and Don Fernando's people have leaked like crazy."



Francisco gave a loud and theatrical sigh, and said nothing.



Stearns snorted. "Can it, Francisco. All we really needed was a head start, and the giant stone towers bought us one. Even now that they've figured out radio is portable, they've still got to reverse-engineer it. You've seen the reports, only a handful of spark stations on the air yet, and most of those not very good. Don't forget the other part. We can hear their radios, but they can't hear ours. We've still got an edge, just not a secret edge. Anyway, back to this guy in Rome. When I get to the bit of your report headed "Analysis," what am I going to find?"