Chapter Three Towards Aleppo #3
The sequestered annex, which no one was to know about, said that the two sides had agreed to the deployment of Brytish troops and armaments in the Magisterium’s Central Asian venture.
Brytish soldiers and Brytish guns would soon be sent (inconspicuously, which meant that stern reporting restrictions applied) to cross the Channel by night and entrain (the War Office loved that sort of jargon) at Calais for Constantinople, where…
well, where something else was going to happen.
The only people to know about the sequestered annex were the President and his Private Secretary on the Magisterium side, and the First Minister, the Secretary of State for War, and the Chief of the General Staff on the Brytish side.
Normally, the information in the annex would be conveyed to the King at the Private Council, but King Edward the Twelfth was in his late eighties, and no longer had a firm grip of the details of statecraft.
It was felt better to spare him the burden of knowing what was being planned in his name; he would not have had a very clear idea of it even in his prime, and these days he was amiably willing to sign any document placed in front of him.
His penmanship was shaky, his memory was tenuous, but his courtesy was unfailing.
Meanwhile, the Magisterial diplomatic corps was busy researching the causes of the war its forces would soon be called on to fight.
Researching, of course, meant inventing.
In this task Monsieur Delamare’s officials were greatly helped by the Corporate Relations department of Thuringia Potash, or TP; a private company can hide almost anything under a bland title.
What TP meant by Corporate Relations was, basically, arranging wars and then winning them, but doing so under a different name.
TP Corporate Relations could start a war for you, fight it, win it, and all without troubling the courts or interesting the press. It would cost you a fortune.
The chief executive of TPCR, Dr. Emil Sundberg, a social scientist by training, joined Monsieur Delamare in his office before the official talks began. The morning sun glowed richly on the mahogany desk, the snowy blotter, and the President’s deep-black fountain pen.
“A very good morning to you,” said Sundberg, whose chameleon daemon was taking her time to replicate the precise maroon of the leather armchair he was about to sit in. “And many congratulations on your knighthood.”
“I’m deeply honored, of course,” said Delamare, taking the other armchair.
“Do they give you something to wear? A ribbon, or something?”
“The protocol wouldn’t let it be worn in Geneva in any case.”
“No, of course. And were your talks in London productive?”
“Indeed they were. I shall give you a full summary when we meet with our officials later. For the moment I want to hear an outline of what your company proposes.”
“By all means. We strongly suggest that any action we take should be characterized in press releases, briefings, and the like, not as war, but as police action, humanitarian in purpose. We have extensive contacts among governments and press agencies, with whom we have developed a powerful culture of discretion and control, and we have an unparalleled record of news curation, widely recognized for its effectiveness. We can plan and execute a swift—”
“Yes, I’ve read your brochure. I want to hear what it doesn’t say.”
“I wouldn’t want anyone to think,” Sundberg said, having planned and executed a swift change of approach, “that news curation is our major activity. We have extensive experience in the field of controlled, focused, and robust paramilitary action. And all of it will be carried out with total discretion. It will appear from nowhere and vanish back to nowhere.”
“Is that what you did during the raid on the Tashbulak station?”
A tiny quiver shook Sundberg’s eyelids. “Precisely,” he said. “The ‘men from the mountains,’ as we succeeded in naming them, attacked suddenly with speed and power, and withdrew into silence. There is nothing to suggest any connection whatever with Thuringia Potash, or with the Magisterium.”
“Then how do you account for these photograms?”
Delamare reached across to the desk and handed the other man a large envelope.
As Sundberg took out the pictures inside, his daemon crawled up to his shoulder and began to turn the silver-gray of his suit.
The photograms had been taken through a telescopic lens, and the quality was not high, but they showed with perfect clarity a group of white-robed horsemen riding away from the camera, accompanied by three pickup trucks with more white-robed men sitting or standing in the back.
The rear panel of the nearest truck bore the well-known brandmark of TP.
Delamare said, “These were taken nearby, immediately afterwards.”
“They have been forged, of course,” said Sundberg.
“Let us suppose they haven’t. How are you going to explain them?”
“Where have they been seen?”
“In this building. So far, nowhere else. Before long they will appear in newspapers in every country involved in the Tashbulak research, and it will make some difference to the terms of the contract we are going to discuss this morning.”
“I can assure—” Sundberg began, but Delamare cut in with a voice that sliced like a piano wire.
“I repeat: How are you going to answer the charge that Thuringia Potash was involved in the attack?”
“By ignoring it. It’s a contemptible amateur attempt to smear the name of a company known throughout the world for its philanthropy as well as its leading pharmaceutical research, which has benefited people with all kinds of medical conditions. It’s not worth considering.”
“You and your colleagues had better consider it very carefully before we meet later this morning. Save your meaningless corporate-speak for curating the news, and have a serious answer ready. I do not want to see a picture like this again, do you understand?”
“I completely agree, Monsieur le Président. We shall do exactly that.”
Sundberg was finding it hard to look at Delamare’s face.
He had never seen eyes quite so intimidating, although the rest of the President’s expression was mild and even kindly.
His bearing spoke of a comfortable life among luxurious surroundings and agreeable work; his body was solid and slightly plump; his perfectly manicured hands were clasped across his belly; his lightly pomaded dark hair was graying at the temples; his suit of fine dark gray English worsted, his shirt of snowy cotton, his tie of a quietly patterned silk, all proclaimed the successful bureaucrat, the embodiment of worldly experience and power.
Only his eyes seemed to belong to a different character altogether, possibly not even to a human being.
“The men from the mountains, for instance,” Delamare went on. “I want to know who commands them, how you contact them, what you will do when they start acting for themselves.”
“The answer to the last question is that we will dispose of them robustly. They are a rabble, and they have a collective leadership, so they claim, but their most prominent spokesman is called Zafar Sayadov. He is said to come from Azerbaijan, but no one is certain of that. There is also a woman…”
“A woman? In charge?”
“Her position is not clear to us, but she is clearly important. She is called Leila Pervani. She was an academic at the University of Alexandria, an experimental theologian of some kind, until she became involved in this movement.”
Delamare made a note. “How do you contact them?”
“We do that through a network of tradesmen, merchants, camel-drivers, never the same people twice. They are very ingenious, and at times surprisingly disciplined, but fundamentally a rabble, as I say.”
Surprisingly disciplined…Delamare’s view was that no one in Sundberg’s position should find anything surprising.
The President let two small chains of thought begin to unreel in his mind: one concerned the need to establish his own contacts with the men from the mountains, and the other examined various ways of detaching Thuringia Potash from the coming conflict, when the time was right.
They were simply not big enough; their ambitions were limited.
“Thank you,” he said. “I look forward to meeting your colleagues in an hour or so.”
Delamare stood up and extended his hand, with an expression that was almost genial. Sundberg shook it and left, feeling that he had handled the interview with great skill.
—
Colonel Schreiber, who had been ordered to arrest and “disappear” the guide Hugo Beamish, was making a second visit to Les Diablerets, to see what effect explosives had on the opening in the air.
He thought it was a mistake to get rid of the guide, who could still have been useful, but after all they had his detailed notes, and the colonel never questioned his orders.
He’d been told to “destroy” the opening, and the first problem was what Delamare had meant by that.
If Schreiber had been going to destroy a thing, an object (a wooden case, say) a little less than a meter wide and two meters high, it would take a specific amount of explosive, which could be calculated with the help of various tables of figures from the schools of mining or military ordnance training departments.
The colonel had learned all about the process at military college.
He could have blown up a thing very competently: a wooden thing, a metal thing, a solid thing, a hollow thing; there would be a bang and some smoke, and the thing would be reduced to a mass of smaller pieces in no time.
But a nothing was a different problem. You could blow up everything around it, but when the smoke cleared away the nothing might still be there, unaltered.