Tetrarchangel: Timothy J Swann

May 2019

Sixgun:

The pretence, at least, was that they were licensed private detectives. And they did take cases, but only when their money was running short. Those cases were the sort that between them and their respective skills and positions, they could solve easily, and get back to what they were actually focusing upon. The team had been started by James Frost, who was indeed a private detective, had spent his life looking into the various cases that fell through the cracks of official law enforcement, and it was really only by coincidence that he’d come to be fascinated by a single sort of crime, and one that often was lost from police investigation, or at least, effective police investigation. He’d realised, of course, looking into it, that it was not going to be a task he could undertake without help, expert help, and even then it would be difficult, dangerous, and most probably fruitless.

And so he’d gathered some of the people he’d met over his years of investigating, people who he trusted might share some of his interest, and would be able and willing to assist him. His good friend Samuella Kurihara was first… she’d been first violin in the Oakland East Bay Symphony for some time, but was tired of her musical talent. Tired of being a stereotype of a quiet, diligent hard-worker who played the violin through sheer will of persistence. She wanted a change from people’s expectations, wanted a change from doing something civil, and expected, and nice. And though one might not expect a concert violinist to be able to add much to a detective’s service, Samuella had an intuitive gift for patterns that aided Frost’s more methodical approach.

Investigating a case of a bigamist, they had come across the next member of their informal team, a priest called Father Colm Frand, but known to all and sundry as Blaster, for his tendency to say ‘blast’ as his regular expletive and also for his tendency to overuse Star Wars analogies, to the point that his sermons would tend to cite them in a one-to-one ratio with biblical passages. He was well-acquainted with the misdemeanours of mankind having heard all sorts of confessions from the Catholics of Oakland, and came with an air of respectability that got them into all sorts of new place. Most people will talk to a priest; all people will talk to a priest who’ll offer them his hip-flask and do an impersonation of Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The fourth member of the group actually hired them. Candicelia Bracken was an insurance administrator in the health service, such as it was, a patchy amalgam of private and public concerns, who suspected there was fraudulent behaviour going on, but without having the means to prove it herself. She brought in Frost to try and dig out the perpetrator, and he found she did most of the work herself, having idly accessed every private database in the Bay Area. The connections they made brought down an embezzler who had made millions, and it took some time for them to return from the limelight, where they preferred to be.

The final components of the team came as a pair, Fulano Cero, as his passport described him, was a patient being cared for in the community. His psychologist was one Olive Moor. He was a rather tame sociopath who had difficulty not lying, stealing, defrauding and endangering, though he was somewhat too good natured to do anything too violent. His main tendency was to never answer to the same name twice, and Olive had remained his main supervisor despite the fact he had been deemed not able to benefit from intensive therapeutic attention mostly because she was pretty good at going with his idiosyncrasies. When James Frost had approached her looking for psychological input for his investigative project, she had suggested that Cero might be able to offer them unique insights, and it might just keep him out of trouble. Or at least, his usual trouble.

Once he knew he could call on all these peculiar fellows, he called a formal meeting. There was no real need to do so. He’d informed each of them of his mission, as well as the police liaison officer he had worked with in the past and hoped would fill him in on some useful directions, Lieutenant Murphy. But his very obsession was with the proper way of doing things narratively. And a narrative, such as the one he was engaging in, required a team meeting where he clearly laid out his plans. (Indeed, many of his co-workers found his desire to give proper exposition rather tedious).

“Hello, and welcome to the first meeting of The Hunters,” Frost announced, when they had all gathered in the meeting room of his office, putting the necessary stress to indicate the capitalisation.

“That’s what we’re calling ourselves?” asked Olive, wary of anything that would make them too aggressive.

“Look, does it matter?” Samuella responded, “provided we do the job? We investigate the cases?”

“I was inspired,” Frost continued unfazed, “by the legend of the Dark Defender of Miami…” Cero smiled knowingly. Father Colm frowned.

“I thought,” Frand posited, “that that was thought to be a serial killer himself. The early aughts. But definitely someone on the Dark Side.”

Frost was still determined to plough through.

“Who utilised his job, as the legend goes, to go beyond the police and catch serial killers. Whatever he did next is irrelevant. Together, we have a wide set of skills. Lieutenant Murphy has helpfully sent us some of the scraps of information on unsolved murders, missing people, and general rumours that we have the time and inclination to look into. Murphy himself will be busy solving the hundreds of more straightforward violent crimes that affect our fair city. Now, Dr. Moor has some information on the best lead that Candicelia has identified from the mass of random data.”

He nodded to Moor, who stood and addressed the group.

“There have been a number of murders in this state where there has not been any useful forensic evidence, in some cases, because it has been diluted by masses of water, or else other cleaning products. Zhong et al, in 2010, found that being clean, having that feeling of cleanliness, makes us harsh moral judges – our sense of egotistical morality is inflated. We’ve heard of serial killers who have killed with a seeming motive – prostitutes, homosexuals, the like. My theory is that there is a killer out there who found that being meticulously clean took him from being an extreme judge into becoming an executioner.”

“That’s fascinating,” Samuella replied, “but what’s the pattern? Do we have any coherent set of victims?”

Olive’s face fell.

“Not yet. If we have a killer, I can make some suggestions about his characteristics – I’ve already assumed he’s male, for example – but we obviously need to do some research, look at what he have, before we can achieve such a thing.”

“I imagine that me and Samuella might be able to make some headway on that,” Candicelia added.

“Then that’s your assignment,” Frost summated, “I’ll take any easy cases, Father Colm has masses to do, including, well, including some masses, Moor and Cero,”

“That’s Hulano Delgrado,” Cero interrupted,

“Will be trying to work out the sort of people that we’ll be expecting a serial killer who acts in that way, so we can exclude simple attempts to clean up. They’ll feed that on to Bracken and Kurihara. And meet again when we’ve got a half-decent lead.”

About a month passed. Frost did some quick till-fiddling and marital infidelity cases to keep the others in cash. Samuella, with her innate love of and gift for patterns had easily deduced the cases she was confident was their putative serial killer. Frost was certain they were not chasing ghosts. There are no stories that don’t involve some solution, some real villain. He would not be surprised if it ended up being the psychopathic Cero, but he would be surprised if it turned out to be a dead end. Candicelia weaved wonderful digital magic over the details they had, drawing up maps, crunching data, trying random multiple regressions and factor analyses just for the fun of them. She fed the patterns, both intuitive and statistical, back to the pair of Moor and Cero, who tried to figure out the mind of the man. Cero was quite brilliant at playacting, and Moor’s profile was soon being put together:

“Male, white but not American, probably European, forty but fit, history in a medical or otherwise sterile profession ­– biochemistry, maybe ­– and with pre-existing authoritarian political views.”

Samuella had identified a number of potential motives for the crimes. Oakland Police Department had a certain time limit and evidence threshold for actively following up on a murder, and many in the horrendously violent city just did not have the pieces available in the time set. But they left the bits and pieces, the interviews, the account on file, along with their thoughts on which parts of them may well be lies. Amongst those they attached to the Cleanly Executioner, there was an adulterer and a prostitute, a known drug runner and a suspected embezzler. These were easy to expect as the work of some variant on the vigilante, the same sort of killer that had inspired them to start the group. It was the other cases, the ones the police had had even less leads on, that they found curious. Frost pored over them in fascination, and he knew that Moor had done just the same. What possible crimes could they have been judged for?

At a regular coffee meeting with Samuella, he thought aloud:

“Are we dealing with some kind of Seven rip-off?”

Kurihara looked blank.

“Seven. David Fincher. Brad Pitt. Seven deadly sins. Come on, have you watched any classic cinema? What, did your parents make you practise violin instead of watching DVDs?”

“That’s a cheap shot, James.”

“Sorry. But seriously. We’ve got to watch that movie.”

“I don’t think that the killer is trying to tick off a set of separate crimes. I think it just depends on whom he encounters in his kill cycle.”

“You think it’s cyclical?”

“Most serial killers are. Often an accelerating cycle. We don’t have that yet.”

“It’s going to get worse?”

“Maybe. Psychologists, and no doubt Moor is doing this right now, try and box the killers up because it mostly makes it easier to catch the next ones. But each pattern is unique. It’s possible that regularity – given the profile we’ve already put together – suits the killer. Has Candicelia got a list of potential suspects?”

“Europeans of that description living in the Oakland area? Yep, immigration files have proven very helpful. I’m checking on them, just to see if there’s anything obvious about them.”

“Surely the probability of you actually seeing anything is low. Infinitesimal.”

Frost looked thoughtful, as if that idea had not occurred to him at all.

“I guess… I expect to stumble across something.”

Samuella sighed. Frost still acted like he was on television, and just by being outside these houses for a while the killer would give something away. They finished their coffee and went their separate ways:

“See you later,” Frost said, as he always did.

“See you soon,” Kurihara replied, just as she always did.

Frost did not spot any obvious suspicious behaviour. No skulking, no bodies, no blood. He was a little disappointed.

Candicelia had worked out a map of the potential killzone. Moor had looked up some details of criminal psychology and fed her some algorithms, and they now had some sense of what part of the city he seemed to be operating in. All of the murders had fallen somewhere between 8^th and 40^th, between Wood and Brush. If anything, this was impressive. The city blocks were bound to be full of potential witnesses. This killer must be quiet. The killer must be quick. Frost, somewhat reluctantly, desperately wishing that his team would somehow be able to catch the killer in the process of the act, fed this information back to Lieutenant Murphy. The patrols have the bulletin about the expected characteristics of the killer added to their long list of individuals to look out for.

Months passed. The group amassed various bits of information, not really sure how to get any further with their investigation into the Cleanly Executioner, as Frost had forcefully dubbed him. Their informal profiling group just kept on taking the scraps of Oakland and trying to build portraits of the killers. Frost was talking to Cero when he had something of a realisation:

“Do you know why I, Terrentio Paladin-Forster, am in Oakland, Frost?”

“Why?”

“Because I, Triton Kaperski, am a dangerous psychopath.”

“Not so dangerous. You’re helping us. I’ve never seen you hurt… well, anyone.”

“No, but despite my apparent incapability of sympathy, there must be a horde of those like me, Capuchin St. John George. If the violence here is really as we’ve heard, then maybe there’s a host here, or that come here. Imagine… the freedom. What if they walk through New Orleans, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Newark, here, Washington, Buffalo, Kansas City and Cleveland, a pack of lone wolves, these predators of the stories, killing because the numbers will never turn against them?” Cero stretched, and Frost could see his inhumanity calculating, “Were it my will,” Cero continued, “I could kill and never be found. Were it my will.”

He paused, and Frost simply watched him.

“Of course, they might be fantastical. We’re making it up as we go along, daring to make conclusions that the police with their hard evidence can’t. I suspect there are none of these monsters we’ve painted out there. Or one. Maybe the one.”

Frost realised that he might have started something bigger than he could handle. He wanted to catch one murderer of note. He wanted something to do, something to try out with Samuella, he wanted to build a team and hunt the devils among men because it was distressing to keep facing up to mundane evil, to the flaws of man. He wanted willed, Kantian evil – he wanted a demon. Yet if Cero’s suppositions were realistic, then maybe it wasn’t some isolated threat but a plague; he’d read the FBI’s books as much as he’d gobbled up the crime novels. Twenty to fifty of them, by federal estimate.

He didn’t want to believe in the alternative, that the driving force of the humans around him was ‘chaos, hostility and murder.’ Even shades of grey he could accept, but not something fractal and fractured, chaotic and without a through-line.

Kindness, or resignation, or maybe a glimmer of hope is what caused Lieutenant Murphy to invite the team as observers to the murder scene. Webster Street, in a small apartment above a noisy restaurant. Water everywhere. The acrid smell of cleaning products.

“Victim appears to be one Dai Tran, Vietnamese-American of a few generations, but the kill fits your profile, I figured I’d let you take a look.”

Candicelia, determined to see the scene, had moved to a smaller, non-motorised wheelchair that they had just about gotten into the apartment.

“You ever run into this guy, Kurihara?” she asked. Samuella looked more wistful than affronted:

“Not all Asians know each other, Candice. If anything, probability says we should be less likely to than any other ethnicity. But no-one ever thinks about probability when they’re making racial stereotypes. How sad.”

“Just figured I’d ask,” Candicelia responded, “I spend my life playing with those damned numbers and in my experience coincidences are more common than you’d think.”

Frost smiled. He certainly hoped she was right.

“It looks like our guy,” he told Murphy, “what have you got?”

“Water everywhere, which is what got us the tip-off – water and blood seeping down some hollow or pipe or something into the kitchen of the restaurant a couple of floors down. The way into these apartments is round an alley, rather than the obvious front for the restaurant out on Webster, so we’re going to be lucky if we get any decent witnesses. I’ve got my officers doing what they can. Scene of crime have already done the basics, and blasted if we can afford any more than that. I guess I can get you the photos. Just pretend you never gave them to the mental patient.”

“Team. Any thoughts?” Frost addressed his mismatched bunch.

“I, I, I don’t like all this death. The dark side is strong at times like this,” Frand stated, far more hesitant than usual, “and it doesn’t always feel like enough to shine a light.”

Samuella had gotten engrossed in a conversation with the forensic experts just departing. Frost could hear something about blood splatter and dilution.

“Not a rich person, but not terribly poor. Ethnic minority, but then who isn’t? Look at this team you’ve built, Frost, it was as-if you were ticking off some representative list of Americans,” Candicelia tried to add her thoughts to the investigation. Cero just looked on in dark fascination. Moor looked uncomfortable.

“What is it, Olive?” Frost asked her.

“There’s nothing new here. Nothing. We already know all we’re going to know about this man. What I wouldn’t give to look into his eyes. To talk to him. Have him up in the secure unit and just wait until I broke his patience.”

Frost frowned at the harsh words of the normally compassionate psychologist. The actual business of murder was probably not something any of them but him had dealt with. Father Colm would have seen people in state, Moor had no doubt seen a suicide or two, but the way the room smelt of that mix of mordant cleanliness and blood, the unmistakable iron rain, was clearly getting to them. They weren’t Murphy, weren’t homicide. He should get them out of there. Get them back to being abstract hobbyists who might never catch a soul.

They put their heads together repeatedly, taking the details the police fed them and obsessing over them, Moor trying to spot any hallmarks of known madness, Cero musing on this parallel to himself, Candicelia crunching the numbers, Frost trying to get his head around the narratives of the witnesses, such as they were, Samuella just looking over the evidence from a distance, looking for some sign of a harmonic pattern.

They gave Murphy everything they could. He thanked them. And when he got a call from the traffic division, saying that they had intervened in an incident of road rage, and upon searching the car they’d found a barrel of distilled water and a kilo of lye soap, he was glad the team had been there. He’d seen senseless violence beyond the share of a dozen men. He went out almost hoping to find another ganglander dead, when the calls came in, as they did daily. And those mad fools, those strange harlequins, had given him the pieces to get the guy? To arrest a serial killer that had committed a dozen murders in his jurisdiction? He’d shake Frost by the hand, he’d buy them all a few rounds. Those self-proclaimed hunters, working off an urban legend, had actually turned out good for something.

Renoir’s Tete de Jeune Fille (Gabrielle) had been lost since before the Second World War, nearly one hundred years ago. Along with a Pissarro, it had been heading out of Nazi Germany to the United States, when someone had taken it. Possibly Nazis, it had been thought, in the difficult attempts to reclaim art after the war. But such lost pieces got further away from being found with every year they remained absent, and interest, at least, the sort of interest that led to proactive seeking, had faded.

Gabrielle and Aline Renard were the names the twins wore for this escapade. They rarely used their real names, preferring to use names related to the art they were acquiring. They called themselves art procurers, and did so through a variety of means with a spectrum of legality. They had discovered the existence of this lost Renoir in a time when Renoir was remarkably popular – and though he had thousands of works, many missing, they believed it would prove valuable to them and to a museum that would display it.

The Mafia had the painting in storage in Naples, intending to move it from there to Belgium, the best place in Europe to sell stolen art – even in the superstate of Europe, it had maintained certain loopholes in art property law, which even the bureaucracy of Europe had not inspected soundly they were so obscure. Of course, where there’s a profit to be made, miraculous discoveries can occur. The Mafia, such as they were in the present, a sort of loose alliance of various groups that had once been more regional – the Camorra, the ‘Ndrangheta, the Stidda and the SCU, as well as the originally named Sicilians, had discovered this. Art theft and resale, or fake reward claiming, was an easy way to raise some collateral without the risks of the other illegal profitable activities they undertook.

And despite Europol’s best efforts, it was easy to get lost in Europe. It was just that bit too big, and lacking any form of federal marshal, having hideouts in various disparate parts worked well for the organised criminals. In this regard, they turned a blind eye to the actions of those like the Sina twins, because they acted with public-minded intentions – stealing from dubious sources, trying to get paintings back into museums. The one time they’d come even close to being prosecuted, they’d managed to claim the protection of art-loving break-off state New Bohemia, and the case had been dropped with relative ease. If a few of these ‘art liberators’ got killed by the gangs, it saved police officers, and distracted the organised criminals. If they were successful, they’d be retroactively offered protection and permission. The Sina twins, or the Renard twins as they were currently posing, had not yet achieved a big enough procurement to earn them the direct ire of the criminal underworld or the direct appreciation of the law enforcement overworld.

The Renards had ears in every art scene imaginable, ostensibly to find new young talent, but also to catch rumours of stolen art. The rich patrons who often purchased such pieces for their own collection, and could afford the inflated prices in order to outright own a work, were not known for their discretion about their acquisitions. They had a tendency to brag about the artists they had, or had seen at their friends, to the art dealers and gallery curators. And so the twins had scammed, blackmailed and stolen art from such hands, rather than the groups that had originally stolen them, and put it back in museums, for a fee, of course, right across Europe. But when they heard the breath of a murmur of the location of a Renoir lost for so long, they had to investigate it. From their base in Dubrovnik, they set for Switzerland, where an auditor had consulted a local art expert for help with one of the accounts he was working upon. When Switzerland had joined the European Union, it had ceded the rather minor concession of having its banks’ accounts audited ten years after the fact. This essentially created some rather meaningless work for a lot of in-house auditors, but the backlog when the scheme first began, and the continued need to prod the bank meant that one particular account had lasted almost thirty years since the accession without being checked.

The art expert had confirmed the suspicions of the auditor with interest – in the later days of the Second World War, a general of the German Army had, having been given the Renoir as a gift, had it sequestered in a Swiss bank account when it became clear the Allies would win. However, he had been killed by the Soviets, and the account had passed into the hands of Neo-Fascists in Italy, affiliated with the Italian Social Movement and the Ordine Nuovo, but, as with practically all politicians of that time in Italy, the custodians of this account, and possibly other former Nazi treasures, became involved with the entrenched criminal elements such as the Mafia. The Mafia had taken advantage of the slow legitimisation of those far-right organisations by appropriating their illegal elements, such as contraband property. This, at least, was the suspicion of the auditor, who had details of owners which he could cross check with historical crime databases, allowing him to piece together this much of the narrative of the account.

However, only shortly after the opening of Swiss banks to somewhat greater scrutiny, despite the fact it was a low priority account, the items held by it were transferred to an unspecified location. The auditor merely wanted the art historian to confirm that the work referred to was indeed a missing Impressionist piece, as they had, perhaps surprisingly, a category for stolen art. The art historian, on asking a little further, discovered they had categories for gold, other precious metals, jewels, blueprints – they had found in these old accounts innumerate fascinating lost riches, and had documented the existence of them all appropriately. The art historian had been fascinated by the story, and had passed it on to various people he knew to be involved in lost art, including the Sina twins.

The next part of tracking the work was obviously more difficult. Even through archives of cases arising from various anti-Mafia campaigns in the intermediate Italian history, there was no definite location for the painting, which presumably meant it was still held by extant groups. Consultation with an art-loving Italian prosecutor helped narrow down their suspicions, but they were working on illegally procured evidence that didn’t cause as many problems for the twins as for the courts. A large amount of art had been seen handed over from the Sicilian Mafia to the Camorra in the early days of the informal alliance, so they were considered to be the most likely continued owners of the piece. If that was the case, it would be somewhere in their metropolitan stronghold of Naples.

Naples. Jürgen Holz, President of Europe, wants it gone. Almost every day, at least any day when he has to devote any thought to Italy, he says a quiet deist prayer that Vesuvius will blow and wipe it off the map. He’s never admitted this – wishing for genocidal disaster is a career-killer in every profession – but he does desire it. Naples. The Camorra have run it for years, and as part of the Mafia alliance, it is now one of the most criminalised cities in the entire world. There is order, but not law, save the traditional law of the Camorra. And thus, in the Fourth Municipality, the Vicaria Quarter, it is safe for them to keep the work of legendary painters without fear of its recapture or being stolen by a rival group. There aren’t many rival groups anymore.

In a sense, this is what makes it possible for the Sina twins to steal it.

Security is not really high in Naples against criminals. Sleights, crimes, can occur, and will then be reported to someone in the Camorra hierarchy – who are strong at retributive justice more than preventative enforcement. Fear keeps the citizens in line, ensuring that the only illegality is the sanctioned sort. Obviously, citizens talking to outsiders about the goings-on, the strange things that they’ve seen, is forcibly discouraged. The twins take their greatest risk to establish the location, at least within reason, by talking a bit higher up the chain. No passing citizen who lives near a safehouse where they might even have seen the art, if not necessarily recognised it would tell. But the owner of the safehouse? Who intends to sell it to fund more risky deals? He’ll meet with known art dealers of dubious legality. Show them convincing photographic proof of his ownership of it. Set a price. The dealer, the twin who calls herself Gabrielle at the moment, demurs, having confirmed the piece in ownership of this particular Camorra operative. The Camorra, with their spread out, cell-like structure, are perhaps the safest to steal from without swift retribution.

Tete de Jeune Fille (Gabrielle) is beautiful in colour. Gabrielle had only ever seen the black and white photograph that made the oil look like charcoal, but here, she got to grips with the full melancholy, the wistfulness of the piece. She almost wants to snatch it right then, take it from people who see it as just a means to an end, still sure that she does something different to them. To have found it. To bring it back! What a victory it would make, what a story!

And Aline followed the possessor of the painting in the many shadows of the narrow streets where the streetlights only shine if the bosses have been magnanimous this month. There is a greater sense of dread in her than she has ever felt. And she is the calm one. Her sister’s life has been far more troubled than hers, and thus she is the quieter one, the less explosive, with softer footfalls, but it has always been tailing the rich and shady, never the probably murderous. A borrowed Vespa when they get the painting to a car. A quick check on her phone of GPS. The street of the safehouse found. The picture entering. No glimpses for her. Gabrielle had assured her of its beauty. She marked the place and returned to their guesthouse.

The twins undertook recon as French tourists, who are not really worth pursuing or assailing for a cheap camera and over-used, over-worn clothes. The penultimate stage of a plan of almost a year in genuine preparation, but in a sense, an adult lifetime of training and practice. They assumed that French was a safely difficult to decode language. The building had guards who stayed inside, smoked, cradled weapons, and weren’t allowed right into where the art was. But there was no technological security system, just the men. If only could enter quietly enough, it might be possible to get past them and get out with the painting. It would be important not to be distracted by anything else in there.

As the night came, it was easy enough to ensure the faultiness of the power junction and ensure that there would be no light that didn’t fall from the stars. Clambering. How much clambering had they done as children? They were confident that there would be two guards, both armed, but going into a building where they were unsure of the layout, it would likely be best to avoid them. Neutralising them would be difficult. Slipping in from above, they quickly got their bearings, headed for the windowless upper room where the stash was. Unsurprisingly, the door was locked. That must be the room. They then moved silently, and separately, to the other rooms, until they confirmed the location of the guardroom. Confirmed its relation to the bathroom. Waited for one of the guards to need to go. Tripped the first, caught him with a sharp jab as he fell, leaving him incapacitated but having emitted a yelp. Waited in an opportune location as his companion burst through the door to attend to his friend, then Aline, best versed in martial arts of the pair, took him with a kick between the legs and a sleeper hold to floor him, whilst Gabrielle slipped through the door to secure the key at once. A simple tough deadlock, a heavy key, but nothing cleverer. Admittedly, it had taken such work to piece the information together, that the owners of the Renoir must surely have thought none would dream of finding it here. Maybe this was the start of a wave of recoveries…

They opened the door together. There was, as they shone their torch for the first time, feeling confident that the likelihood of detection was low, and found the case containing the canvas. Each one of the many cases was labelled, and they could not help but look. Yet they had decided on their plan. Getting out of the building, the city, the country with a single painting of great value was the plan. They never deviated from the plan. Aline opened the case, to confirm it was indeed the Renoir. The torchlight caught the detail of the model’s hair. It was so powerful; so beautiful, that she practically swooned. Gabrielle, who had already seen the full majesty of the piece, shook her twin, snapped her out of it.
“We have to get out!” she half-snarled, half-whispered, “How long do you think those guards’ll be unconscious?”
Aline agreed, sealed the painting and they returned to their rooftop ingress to get out of there. The theft had been almost too easy. But they did not worry about the ease or otherwise. They were just exhilarated to have the painting.

In the coolness of the night air, they ran. Ran until they got to the car they’d bought cheaply to bring them into the city. Then drove north, passing through Austrian Tyrol until they were flying over the German border and into some simulacrum of safety. The German government still had some claim on the painting, the democratic supplanters of the previous legitimate owners of it, and they told their story to one official after another, first in Bavaria, and then in Berlin.

Details of the theft filtered through the art world, but never enough that it could be proven. Confusion, both deliberately left and naturally occurring, of the location of the theft, which in some tellings of the tale becomes the Mafia stronghold in Sicily, of the manner of the theft, of the speed of the escape, details known only by the German branch of Europol who offered their protection, as the twins expected, when they presented the painting, for a very tidy sum. The German government happily set them up in art-rich Leipzig with surveillance and protection, and they traded off that reputation to stay legitimate for a long while.

Yet out there, in the shadowed worlds, revenge, the sort of revenge that might take years to brew, was being plotted.

It was Isaac’s house, as usual. They had used to rotate, but Isaac Hilary was the one in possession of the most comfortable abode, and as much as they aimed to keep their experiences as varied as possible, it was nice to be able to sit together without getting damp, cramped, or forcibly made to decamp. They did, however, all try to travel to Isaac’s house by different modes of transport, as a somewhat false concession to multiplicity.

Isaac had managed to buy the house in which they met despite property prices and the general poverty of their profession by virtue of his books. Indigo Time, his original work, had proven the most acclaimed, popular, and most importantly to the reclusive Isaac, well-executed example of the genre for a long time. 

Some would consider them an eclectic gathering: Isaac, slipping softly from middle into older age, Gelasia Rissan, whose poise snatched attention and crafted rigorous seriousness, Sekani Ahmed, vain but successfully elegant, and Malcolm Dane, who seemed to intrude upon the personal space of those around him regardless of how far they sat. This cross-demographic grouping was supposedly the most fertile ground for their talents, and some would be convinced by that analysis, others less so, all dependent on exactly where and by what medium they found their interaction with the group. 

They were, in fact, comedians.

It had been Isaac’s idea, inspired by his dabbling in meta-fiction in one of his comic novels. The problem of inspiration is omnipresent for comedians, who usually find themselves describing encounters with people on the street, caricaturing obvious stereotypes and barely concealed public figures or simply ending up with one more bruise and one more laugh. In light of this, Isaac had brought together comedians of three areas outside his own – a stand-up, a TV writer and an actor. That was Gelasia, Sekani and Malcolm, three people chosen almost at random. He tried very hard to create the borderline between coherence and incomprehensible fragments, something best evidenced by a passage from Tempora Ipse, his third novel:

This will, of course, come as no surprise to anyone who has found themselves the Avatar of Time. Zara, who had this experience on her 100 Things to Do before the Inexorable Advance of Death list, the box still unchecked, was not in your position. Looking at the model, she was only capable of an elongated inhalation, the separated spark and phosphorus that could ignite themselves as a ‘but…but…’ The Keeper sighed and waited. That too was easier after understanding  what he affectionately called ‘Round Loop in Four Directions’. Words, as you well know, are not his forte. To try and describe the model, a 3D (but not in a Robert Rodriguez indulging his children way) visual representation of the shape of Time and how it tied to the universe and made a very pretty brooch for its bearer, nostalgia and hope manifest, the Avatar of Time, with words was hard for those who had studied it for their lifetimes. To try and describe it with words as utilised by someone whose close connection to time made them a little slow was a proposition that would and obviously did take an eternity. The product of this eternity was the succinct ‘Round Loop in Four Directions.’ After the Keeper had waited, Zara managed to stop inhaling and stop looking. It wasn’t going to be one of those days. Days, or any denominator of time, were just a little insensitive to use around her now.

The others, by nature keen to hone their comic skills, had agreed. Gelasia was probably the most desperate to improve. This had nothing to do with how funny she was, but to her perfectionism. For her particular methodology, the tone and delivery of what she said was critical – as was the precise material she used as the starting point for her routine. There was always plenty of time in the hotel afterwards, especially considering the effort put in to ensure the hotel was truly and genuinely awful in a way that could not occur by accident on the part of the hotel-owner but only through open misanthropy, to look back on every tenth-of-second failure to adhese to the way the sentence should have been. The night before first coming to the group, she had given a performance that had kept her fretting and pondering for a great deal of time afterwards, mystically failing to remove her bearing the next day as if sleeplessness was a boon to dignity:

“I believe it’s time to start my routine.” A tired sigh. 
“It is very easy to get into habits, and the terrible fact is that any comedian sitting there hearing that would think ‘That’s why there’s so many cross-dressing priests’ as a reflex. In the same way psychologists turn every interaction into therapy,” an aside, indicated by the slight of the head “Mine does,” then fixed upright once more, “All comedians turn the statements of those around them into jokes, but their lives are so bleak, monotonous and woefully filled with comedy,” spoken like an illness, “That they not only turn everything into a joke but also,” she pauses, ” Fail to laugh at them.”
“Comedians who have rants are particularly interesting,” her voice implying anything but, “They are suddenly energised, falsely, by the fact that it’s Edinburgh and they’ve spent three months in previews undertaking the exact same tirade to the word night after night, by some spontaneous topic they’ve plucked from nowhere, and then elevate it to the most heinous crime ever committed, doling out unseemly punishments much to the delight of the crowd. The morons should be eviscerated…And then the laughter.”

Sekani just wanted to have a venue to be funny without adjectives. Well known as ‘the rising star’, ‘the greatest British Muslim comic of our day’, a ‘paragon and bastion of multiculturalism’, and naturally, as ‘the writer of Five,’ his real all-pervading desire was to stop being labelled; it mattered nothing to him that it was all complimentary, because it was full of expectations, legacy, a theme which gave rise to expectations. He had found himself with writer’s block, unable to write anything that wouldn’t be titled ‘the next Five’, and did not consider Isaac’s group an opportunity to find inspiration, just to be funny, to make people laugh and hopefully not to be judged. It is easy to consider him the victim of his own success, for his sitcom Five was everything the waxy songster press had made it out to be:

Jibril, who had gone out for a stand, re-enters. 
“Gabby!” comes the greeting of the increasingly insalubrious Rufus. Jibril grimaces, and walks over to Sasha, who informs him of the status of the situation.
“He’s becoming increasingly obnoxious, and sounds like he’s having delusions. Who’s Gabby?”
“Me,” Jibril groans, recognising how bad Rufus has got, “You know, Jibril – Gabriel, hence Gabby, but that’s a bad sign.” Andresca looks at Jibril curiously, but wearily. She may never deign to speak, but she’s still fascinated. Sasha makes a show of covering her ears; whenever she finds out more about Rufus, she always has cause to regret it. Of course, the risk of contamination in the lab means this action only results in hand-ear proximity rather than actual covering.
“It means he’s becoming effectively intoxicated. Rufus is in fact capable of speaking beautiful and precise Arabic, but only when he is particularly drunk. He somehow represses it when sober. I believe there’s some story about calligraphy and the interaction between Greek and Arabic culture.”

Malcolm believed he could offer his talents to the group – to take them to newer and greater heights. The others, even Isaac now, found it a little awkward that he came. They were all somewhat subject to what had been dubbed in the bar of the Comedy Store the Mock the Week Effect, after the old television show – that comedians inevitably end up hectoring and complaining about other comedians – and that secondly they ended up working with or near them, with the comments still on the record. Gelasia had certainly condemned the public at large for watching The Malcolm Dane Show a collection of sketches of which none sketchier had ever been seen. At best, he had a number of catchphrases familiar to most in the nation; at worst, he was the truest sign of blight in the comedic culture of Britain. 

“Uh, I cannot be having this.”
“I’m a transvestite, not a transsexual, can’t you tell?”
“Yeah, Grandma!”
“Calm down, calm down, it’s not like you’ve got to have heart surgery…”
“Blasters and masters!”
“Luminescent, man… man…”
“Dadadadadadadada dah!”
“It’s always the kittens!”
“And that’s how you make the pie.”

Every couple of weeks they sat around drinking a fine red wine, (at varying paces from Sekani’s none to Malcolm, who seemed to erase wine as if he were unravelling the fabric of reality), and trying to discuss, well, anything that might make them laugh. Give them an idea. This was the night it finally clicked. This was the night the purpose of the gathering was finally achieved.

Isaac was suggesting they should have a party for their year’s anniversary of meeting as a group, a year in which they’d really achieved nothing. Sekani had been on a couple of panel shows, the standard BBC fare, discussing the big political moves of the last year – the consolidation of Europe, the end of representative democracy in Britain, the weird move of President Connors in removing the age-limit for presidential candidates; Gelasia had done the usual tours with her usual degree of moderate success and displeasure. Malcolm was between shows and Isaac books. 
“A party?” Gelasia asked, cynically and a little spooked, “I can’t think of anything more faintly horrifying. At most, we could drink more than usual. I’m not sure how the maths of that works for you, Sekani.”
“Come on – we could invite some friends, meet some new people, it might be fun…” It was easier to get lost in a crowd, after all. Sekani would feel a lot more normal if there were more people. Lost in a writers’ room, lost in a party, not the one man legend that he kept being told he was. Malcolm had stopped following, given the level of inebriation he had reached at this stage in the evening, and so Isaac opened his diary to agree a time and date for this party. Looking across it, a strange thing occurred to him. He’d put down the scattering of notes regarding what happened at each of the meetings, hoping to get some ideas that would emerge from fermentation and words. As he sat there, supposedly browsing it for free time (not that his time was really ever allotted to useful or reasonable things – he was a writer), he saw a pattern begin to emerge. What he was doing was ridiculous, and he was ridiculous for doing it. None of them came here to truly creatively expand – Sekani only because they expected nothing of him, Gelasia because their continual lack of success suited her temperament, Malcolm because he thought he had something to offer but never actually offered whatever it was that was supposed to be, and Isaac because it was one of his ideas and goodness knows how attached he was to his ideas. 

Under the pretence of getting some more wine, he went to his office (a room that more resembled a bondage dungeon, with its Franzen-inspired distraction preventers) to get a dictaphone. The discussion meandered on when he returned, being committed to the electricity for later recall. Eventually, the group of strange, sad clowns said their goodbyes and departed, each visibly (now Isaac truly saw) relieved. Although in his advancing years (he certainly felt old) he often retired straight to bed after such a meeting, he went to his office, disconnected his wired internet, turned off his phone and his other gadgets, and began to type. 

A lyrical fluency entered him, such that he had not felt since before his books had been popular. In that instant, he discovered more about that which the ancients called the Muse, Thalia herself, than he had ever previously experienced. At once, four failed comedians leapt to a sort of fictional life that invigorated them beyond their dismal present existence. It was akin to them finally breaking out of a viral lethargy, suddenly given a hale and hearty misanthropy, well-rounded character flaws, a snappier dialogue than the arrhythmic nigh-stuttering that afflicted their real personae. The group was going to fulfil its purpose – he simply hadn’t dreamed that it was a far more vampiric than group therapeutic mission. The clatter of the keys was soothing, if a touch old-fashioned; noisiness could be avoided but he was an old soul, still trying to create and caper in a medium being abandoned, and it meant that he was working. He wasn’t being dragged away by doubt or expectation – he was incarnating his failure into a body of work, into something that could free him from it. He was letting himself into the writer’s paradox, becoming as metaphysical as his books had been, when he could still write them. The story was quite ordinary, scrapes and japes, and would seem contrived if the characters hadn’t left his porch some few hours ago (he went deeper and deeper and further and further, the prior exhaustions lifting off his back), and would convey his sort of fiery fingers, his furious exhilaration to any who would accompany him at this hour, this three or four AM. He almost thought of calling them back. Almost thought of calling them up and telling them that he had found something. But it was his. His breakthrough… he couldn’t know if it would work for them or break them. That in running from whatever they were taking refuge from by meeting, they had reached a new horizon, a transformation wherein even implausible problems became grist to the mill, and the shackles on his hands loosened. 

Of course, it was the revelation that freed him, not the tale. Art is at the power of the mind, even humour. And after we have these realisations, we find it very difficult to believe the reverse, to restore our mindset to even empathise with the previous position. The loss of faith and its discovery, each seems so inexplicable, that the two people are barely comparable. If, Isaac, applying ideas of character development to himself, really considered it, he’d think it awfully abrupt, and yet strangely undeniable. 

The oddest part, of course, is that I did just the same. I wrote myself into this very corner; I started with if not failed, then extant comedians. You could try and guess who they were! A little gender-swapping, a little resurrection, a touch of fabrication and synthesis, and there I had this sorry group, meeting up, in a timeless incompletion, a story started with years until its end, because what end could come but a change of direction? An excuse to tell four different types of jokes, to write in a few different styles. Gelasia’s bit was going to be my first ever stand-up routine. It was supposed to not go to plan, I was then supposed to digress about how I wrote it for a woman. Who didn’t exist. That was the sort of minor absurdism that tickled me. It was similar with writing Isaac’s part – a sort of fourth-wall breaking that relied on things being more and more ridiculous more than any especial attempt at crafting a joke, although the idea of a timeless being being described as ‘slow’ possibly approached the concept from an oblique angle. 

The group did not meet again. Isaac had the material he needed for his book. He had found how to finish the story. How to write easily again. And it made him laugh, there, to himself, as he went along, because he was laughing at himself.

A short while after democracy ended in Britain, a man in Middlesbrough, a town that had recently been renamed Erimus in the mass, faux-gothic, Latinate rebranding of the nation as Provincia Britannia, realised that he had no idea why what had happened had happened. He had worked all of his adult life, and expected to continue, as one of the few labourers left in the dregs of the steel industry in that city; had a season ticket at the Boro, a niceish if small house in what was once the South Bank area, and somehow his nation had managed to slip into, well, what should he call it? A sort of dictatorship. One that was supported by the United States, one that pursued its interests in return for what? He hadn’t seen any benefit himself. But maybe it was going on out there, in the parts of the world he’d never really focused upon. Concerned that something major had passed him by in the past few months, he went to his local adult education centre and enrolled in a politics class, once a week in the evening. His wife was not pleased that he’d spending an evening apart from her, but he could not shake the sense of unease that he, and she, and practically everyone they knew, everyone in the nation, had let something bad happen. 

“Stern?” the tutor asked, as he walked in, punctual beyond the rest of his classmates, for the first session. “Mr. Brian Stern? Of Erimus Meridies?”
“That’s right,” Brian confirmed, who had never pronounced his home area ‘meridee-ez’ nor heard it said any other way than ‘merry-dies’ and still called it the South Bank like everyone else did. He had no idea of the poor attestation and derivation of the names in the nation. 
“Good. Haven’t had anyone from Meridies before. It’s nice to meet you. You have a pen and paper?” Stern did, “Excellent. Take a seat, I’ll get started when a few more people arrive.”
Enough of the class arrived for the teacher, Mr. Franks, to consider them at quorum and begin.
“Welcome, everyone, to Introduction to British Politics, which is the class which I teach. Basically, today, I’ll introduce the state of British politics at the moment, then next time we’ll work on some of the language we use discussing politics, and the third section of the course involves the history of British politics until recent times. Is that all clear?”
The class gave its primarily non-verbal assent. 
“Okay. Can anyone tell me, and this is not a trick question, who rules our country today?”
The class, a little embarrassed by the seeming ease of this question, paused and hesitated, before Stern himself offered:
“The Apex Council, in their tower down in the Midlands.”
“Exactly,” Mr. Franks smiled, “and can anyone tell me why?”
This stumped the class. There had been explanation on the television, and in the newspapers, and they had been contradictory, or over-simplified, to do with the threat to national security from weak governance, the lack of representation, but they’d never really got it enough to be able to summarise it. That was why they were here. It didn’t bother some people – some who understood it, and some who didn’t, but it bothered them. 
“Good. I’m glad none of you can answer that. Because it’s both complicated, and illustrative. There are lots of reasons, and to understand, we need to understand systems of governance and the history of politics, and by the end of this course, I’ll hope each of you will be able to give me an answer, and have come to your own personal conclusion.”

Brian was feeling a mite patronised, but this was interesting. 
“Presently, we have twelve appointed members of an executive council, which in theory functions a bit like the board of a company, voting on proposals brought by the respective members when the departments they oversee as a group. They do not hear proposals from outsiders, but do, via the Foreign Office, maintain diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. Much of the decision-making is devolved to the Civil Service, who occasionally ask upstairs to keep up appearances. Such a situation has only rarely been seen before, and in very different circumstances. Belgium, for example, in the early parts of this century, failed to agree upon a government and yet continued to function. The difference with them is that we have a government, of sorts. It is not democratic. It is tolerated by our allies, those who remain, because it has not led into oppression or violence… yet. It probably hasn’t affected your lives, and probably won’t. It hasn’t affected mine. And yet, there’s something a bit disturbing about our nation being held in the hand of these people. Three ex-lords, two ex-ministers, four chairman of private enterprise, a retired Air Marshal, a newspaper editor who has kept his job, and the headmaster of a confederation of independent schools. At least when there was a lot of them, they might have had a few people like you and me. Now, I don’t want to give a name to this system of government until the next class, where we’ll discuss the whole range, but it’s important to say that lots of countries, including our own, as it used to be, would think that we were in a bad place.”
They continued, with the group asking him some questions about the Council, and the business that it conducted. Mr. Franks tried his best to give neutral, informative answers, but Sterns could tell that he was struck with an impotent anger, a frustration born of years of struggle, but one he had no direction to push it in. 

He tried to explain some of what he’d learnt, or realised through what Franks and the others had said, to his wife. She listened, but wasn’t really as interested. And in a way, he understood. What could she do, or have done about it? It was the governments that led them into this state as much if not more than the people. He felt more secure thinking about the Cooper Ultimatum, and blaming her and her political partners. 

He enthused about the course at work, and looked forward to the next session, the following week. The feeling of mysterious disaster was alleviated by the thought of getting to grips with it, with expunging the mystery. 

The class was more lively, more prompt, and more confident than the first session, bar the one who had not returned. Franks was a pretty good teacher, and he’d caught the interest that had led them to sign up and built on it. They knew a fair deal about democracy, and he taught them a little about voting systems given it was a while since most of the voted, and it was likely to be some time before they had the chance again. He wanted them to be ready for whatever replaced the Apex Council. And there had been a chance to change the voting system back in 2006 that might have been part of the rot that led to the end of British democracy. Having got around voting, he contrasted republics and constitutional monarchies, and had them put forward their views on King Arthur I, as Prince Charles of Wales had so recently become. His accession had given rise to the Apex Council, in some way, as his mother would no doubt not have tolerated such an idea, and his convincing sprung from the dislike and distrust of the people in both directions to their King. Given he had been effective regent in those months since the election. But Franks did not want to get ahead of himself. No point knowing the story if you couldn’t grasp the ideas it hung upon. They moved to the various sorts of autocracy and democracy, unicameral and bicameral, got them comfortable with the words, divided their juntas from their Supreme Leaders, touched on Communism and Fascism, and liberalism and conservatism, until they were ready to ask the question. A younger woman, whom Stern had somewhat prejudged for her judicious use of prosthetic nails and eyelashes, went for it:
“Then what are we? Are we anywhere on those lines? I mean, we don’t vote, but we’re not oppressed…”
Franks smiled. This was what he had hoped for. 
“We don’t quite know yet. There are plenty of academics, people far cleverer than I am, who have spent the time since the Council was set up arguing over exactly what it is. I’ve heard lots of answers, most of which try and use Greek words to hide the fact that we don’t know what we’re doing, and we still don’t quite know how we let it happen. A form of oligarchy, similar to Gerousia. See! Two big words that are roughly right, but what do they mean? Sure, the Council is rich, and in control, and is a council of sort of elders, certainly, people of existing influence, but it doesn’t quite pin it down, does it? Liberal autocracy is a bit better – it’s definitely non-democratic, but they still protect all our other human rights, unless a lot of money changes hands, and that’s not so different from the old system. Civilian junta is another, which is an obvious parallel in a nation far less involved in the military than it used to be. The one I like best is ‘dictablanda’. It’s a Spanish word, I know, and not obvious what it means without an explanation, The Spanish word for dictatorship is dictadura, and dura, the last part of it, means hard. Dictablanda, then, is soft dictatorship. They have nearly unlimited power and nearly unlimited irrelevance. The bits and pieces of Britain that the government controls – the hospitals, the police, act as they always did, just with a new, less accountable boss. And what do they gain? They do not crave power, to control our lives, but they’re going to make a killing.”

Stern mused on these thoughts, chewing on them thoroughly – they were a fine meal for the mind, looked up some past governments, of his nation and others on the internet, took in their stories. Rented a movie that his wife fell asleep during. He did not feel smug, or superior, just a little better informed, just a little more connected to… the world. 

He suspected, as they gathered for the third and final class in the short introductory course, that the others there felt the same. It was not that some great secret had been unlocked to them; they were not ennobled, not equipped to change the world, but they had been shown some small part of the tapestry of all that is, and could focus upon it in a way never before possible for them. 

The third part had Franks taking them briefly through early systems of organisation, to Athens and the Roman Senate, the Empire, the Kings of Europe, the slow rises of empowered Barons towards Parliament, the Civil War, the increase of the franchise, and the Parliamentary democracy that had held sway for hundreds of years. They then zoomed in on twenty-first century politics. New Labour had briefly reinvigorated the voters, with their undoubtedly charismatic leader and their attempt to claim the centre ground with their policies. Globally, the power of centre-left politics was clearly strong, and Blair and Clinton made firm and natural allies. Intriguingly, campaigning for that election, The Referendum Party delivered a videotape to five million UK households, warning of a coming “federal European super-state”. Four years after the excitement of the end of Major and long-term Conservative rule, people were already disenchanted by the lack of the promised progress. The turnout dropped ten percent from the high water mark of 70%, a matter of millions, and was practically unchanged in the seats won, despite some shift in the votes. In late 2004, after the American election saw the re-election of George W. Bush, Tony Blair ceded power to Gordon Brown, citing their infamous deal. It was later believed that Bush, struck by a moment of conscience, or at least of forthrightness, was honest about the profiteering conspiracy that had led to the war, and was soon to break in scandal in the following year. As the USA’s government was over-turned, the people demanded an election from the already struggling Brown, and so did his party. For the first couple of weeks after the election, it looked like Brown might survive. Michael Howard had failed to capitalise on anti-war sentiment as had Charles Kennedy, gaining only a few seats despite a fair increase in the vote. Howard was considered dangerously right-wing, and Kennedy’s alcholism had been exposed. The parties’ hawks and vultures wanted them both gone. 

Coalition negotiations went between them, with them demanding their leaders’ heads. The parties, and to a lesser extent the people, were willing to accept this, so determined were they to have a non-Labour government. The leadership elections ran, the Liberals accepting they were running for Deputy Prime Minister, but knowing the Conservatives would not be the warmongers that Howard represented, but something more acceptable to their base. David Davis was the successful winner of the leadership election, with party members recognising that given that the people were going to be getting a Prime Minister who again hadn’t campaigned as leader, they ought to pick the one who came from a South London council estate rather than the Etonian, and one who had come out strongly against human rights abuses such as had been seen at Abu Ghraib and were suspected at Guantamano. Although popular, his rival David Cameron had not captured the mood of the party as quickly as Davis. On the Liberal side, expectations untainted by the need for Coalition co-operation, Menzies Campbell had been expected to take charge when Kennedy left, but in the light of their entering government with the Conservatives, the party base, who were already fonder of him than the MPs, thought Simon Hughes, further to the left, would be a good counterbalance to Davis.  

The Coalition was not successful, not strong. The Liberals were perhaps too independent, Hughes fighting every battle he could against the obviously more economically conservative choices of Davis. Davis was more in line with the ideas of Blair and Brown, save for the war, and did not co-operate easily with the new Democrat government of the USA. Few policies and plans came to pass, with the Coalition barely having the voting edge over Labour in opposition, and Davis grew increasingly frustrated. It was rumoured that he had seen in the Security Services checks that Hughes had something of a chequered past, and it wasn’t too hard to find non-confidential proof of that, have it get out in a roundabout way. Certainly, the journalists unsportingly confirmed the proof of Hughes’s sexual misconduct came from within the government. Hughes had The gambit worked, to an extent – Hughes’s resignation led to the 2007 election, where there were Conservative gains against both Labour and Lib Dem losses. The Conservatives were free of the Coalition but ruling in minority government. Davis had whipped up fear of the potential European superstate, of the plans brewing in Europe and the discontent already brewing in the East. It had won him a fair few votes, but cost him political credibility. People were loath to work with him. In sole power, he became increasingly isolationist and isolated. The turnout at the last election had dropped another ten percent, another matter of millions. The party manoeuvred to dispatch its leader once again. The party was becoming increasingly brutal towards its heads. And in Cameron they saw a young man more easily controlled and regulated, more reasonable; and just as the USA did not expect to see a Republican government for many years, the tarnish of the Iraq War still lingered on the Labour Party, losing them voters to those who had been impressed with what the Liberals had managed to fight for in the coalition. Even the turnout was slightly higher than before – this young Cameron seemed a different breed of conservative, and ruling in majority, capable of getting more done than the paranoid Davis and the fractious Coalition. 

It was maybe this betrayal of supposedly compassionate, supposedly green conservatism that doomed Parliament. Cameron pushed through unpopular cuts, and with opposition now thoroughly regionalised, found it easy to underinvest in areas outside the South-East, areas like the class’s own Middlesbrough. But there was a delusional isolation in this government, and a safely buffered Middle England to keep the opinion polls from falling too low. Ideological actions that were always done in the name of the country, and the people, despite the far from convincing electoral mandate, turned droves away from believing in the possibility of political change. The leader of the opposition, David Miliband, was not popular, not adept enough at getting his counterpoint message out, and for the most part had to stand by whilst policies abhorrent to him and his party passed. Many of the people opposed the government, but they did not find their voice in the opposition parties. It was this lack of co-ordinated opposition that gave the government the confidence to try and consolidate with an election after three years in office, which was admittedly still more stable than the previous governments had been. The vote, ever still diminished, swung back to Labour, and Miliband found himself a rather unexpected Prime Minister. Again, Liberal support had been swelling, but it never found itself represented in seats. The time was spent trying to reverse some of the worst consequences of the Cameron years, to remove the damaging impacts to education and health of a belief in competition that surpassed what good it could offer. Social mobility was still shockingly low. Unemployment high. And Miliband lacked the natural brashness of Cameron, was not as invulnerable to criticism, and his Cabinet often gave him undue dissent. Enmity stemmed from the power couple of Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper – critical parts of the government, but deeply antipathetic to Miliband himself. 

Internecine plotting, which had become still more commonplace since the first coalition, led to the now inevitable leadership contest. Each party had almost reached a stage of revolving doors of cabals, favoured high rankers and even leaders. And yet, following each of them, the leaders were determined to avoid the error of Brown, to rule having been passed the premiership, and called for an election, that they rarely won. Cooper, of course, ousting Miliband, was confident in her own ability. In the subsequent, inevitable election, the vote was practically split evenly, and the turnout was below a third of the potential electorate. By offering both the Chancellorship and the Home Office to the Liberal Democrats, she became only the second female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, just as Sarah Connors became President in the USA. Connors and Cooper pushed to work together. Analysts suggested it was because of their gender, but in reality, they made natural allies. However, given Cooper’s already weak leadership in coalition, it was all too easy for Connors’ influence to be seen (and deliberately misconstrued) as intrusive, as a repeat of the subordination seen in the Blair and Bush years. Pressured by her own party, who, like all the registered party members of each of the parties (those who still remained), were easy to anger; pushed by her coalition partners; attacked by a strong opposition, where Cameron, who had not resigned, thrived as a critic, Cooper felt like she was running out of options. She’d entered politics in a time of great optimism, having worked with John Smith as well as Bill Clinton and Gordon Brown. In that time, faith in the American Presidency and the British Premiership had collapsed, and while the Americans had recovered, Britain had hit new heights of apathy, disenchantment and disenfranchisement. She thought that she could shock them into paying attention again.

The Cooper Ultimatum, as the journalists called it, was simple. If there was not a sufficiently representative turnout in the 2015 Election, she would disband Parliament and create an overseeing cross-party Council that would rule until democracy could be made representative again. It was a mad idea, and Cooper knew it. But it was easy for her to point to outside threats – the coming European superstate on the economic front, the increasingly aggressive Russia on the military front – to suggest that she was deadly serious. She saw desperate times; she called for desperate measures. The Queen had fallen ill that year, and such constitutional changes were not swiftly opposed. The Prince of Wales had grown dissatisfied with Parliament and with the people – not helped by his lacking popularity amongst them – and did nothing to stand in Cooper’s way. 

Her gambit ended in disaster. Twenty-three percent turned out in those June elections. And Cooper, having committed, was as good as her word. She moved to set up the Council, fighting through various stalling opposition. When the Queen died in that September, only a day after beating Victoria’s regnal record, the new King was swift to allow the Council to be set up. Practically, it was moved away from London, ostensibly to establish its temporary nature, but also to disentangle it from the reputation of Westminster. A new building, commissioned from a top architect, and an attempt to include non-political figures, led to the Apex Council as it was first branded. That was how democracy fell. And none knew then how or if it might return. 

After that long but engrossing session, Stern felt weighed down by the story. He’d only heard it as from a distance before. The whole class sat, exhausted but now feeling complete. Their teacher, Mr. Franks, did not smile. He was pleased that they’d understood the story as he had told it. After what seemed like a long time in silence, just responding to the mass of information, the story that hadn’t ever been properly told, always before in shouted fragments, they left. Stern did not drive home at once. He just paused, in the night air, outside the college. He didn’t have anything to do with the knowledge. He could not take it and use it to make things right. But he felt glad to know the story. That if democracy in some form or another ever returned, that he’d be more ready for it. That, after all, was what he had wanted. The disquiet was gone. The concern for the nation, the shock at what had happened to it, that was something he could live with. But he shook his head, there in the wind, at the thought of the foolishness that had taken them there.

War is not easily contained. No vessel holds it. It leaks, spills, seeps and corrupts. It fits into the grooves of history and adds to the weak points, until they break. Indonesia had once invaded and occupied Timor Leste, and when it became part of the South-Eastern Commonwealth, engaging in war with the United States, it was inevitable that some part of the war would overflow into East Timor. 

If he hadn’t been under the thumb of Chen-Zing Loak, the real leader of the S-EC, Menyer Akhan, representative of Indonesia might well have tried to use the remilitarised nation’s power to retake the half-island they had lost. They, of course, had larger priorities and larger targets. The East Timorese had cheered the American sabotage of the Indonesian government which had led to the power vacuum that Akhan had stepped into, and the countries had co-existed in if not peace, then mutual disregard. They were suspicious of potential True Marxist Freedom attempts to destabilise their government, and had easily shifted their import-export partnerships to focus on their allies in the Philippines and Australia. They had scrabbled together a military equipped with 20th Century materiel which remained deadly if only a touch slower, a touch less explosive, a touch less accurate. 

So when fleeing Indonesian forces tried to scatter over the border, they were ready. Su-27 Flankers keeping air superiority and bombing the routes the troops and carriers were trying to take. But the East Timorese were a million strong to about two-fifty million Indonesians, and their armed forces were proportionate. The Americans were driving the Indonesians from their strongholds and fortresses, and mobilising East was an option more and more forces were taking. 

It was, perhaps, no surprise that the Runners were there. Based out of Chicago and whatever the most dangerous warzone globally was, they fell somewhere between mercenaries and aid workers, ignoring both international restrictions on where a non-government organisation could operate and the dangers that would normally drive a relief group out. They were well-motivated, well-funded and well-armed. The East Timorese turned a blind eye to them so long as they kept helping refugees, and did not impound their aircraft, their helicopter, their light artillery. A few Indonesian units had sallied through past the border towards where they were taking the people fleeing Oecusse and others from Nusa Tenggara Timur escaping the violence of the war, and had been quickly scared off with a show of force unexpected from such a camp. Their most important members were there… it would not do for them to be killed or captured, either by the Indonesians or the Americans. 

The trio running the camp were Cary Simms, Inese Putens and the overall leader of the Runners, Jubal Wolinksi. Cary Simms had once been an excessively flamboyant man almost ill-suited to underground work, but popular with most of their contacts. Since the recent death of the woman he had loved, he was weighed down with grief, and though he poured himself into his work, he needed a fair amount of support. Putens was a constant ball of rage, and though useful at knowing the loopholes and backdoors in international relations, also needed Jubal to be as constantly hovering as their ‘borrowed’ Apache helicopter. Jubal had spent years as a mercenary defending oil wells in Nigeria, had got tired of innocent blood, decided fraud was more his style, embezzled some significant number of oil millions and set up the organisation. Babysitting emotionally fraught people was not his specialty. 

Nevertheless, the camp was running optimally, or as optimally as the constraints allowed, helping evacuate people to diaspora communities, or simply to safer parts of East Timor, even if Jubal need to occasionally loiter threateningly with an assault weapon. This continued for about two months until their somewhat sketchy radio- and sonographics system caught something big and heavy heading their direction. Jubal hiked out to a nearby vantage point with his binoculars to see what the rumblings meant. Rolling through the jungle were tanks, in formation, armoured personnel carriers, even some artillery. Nothing that size had come their way before. Nothing so organised and orchestrated. This was bad news. He turned to hurry back to the camp, almost falling over a silent woman standing beside him. This vexed him. Jubal had not lived as long as he had by letting people sneak up on him. The woman was tall, very tall, with blonde hair, a thin body, somewhat mannish features, and striking grey eyes. 
“You’re right,” the woman said, in a voice that didn’t sound quite right, “it is bad news.”
“I…” Jubal was fairly shocked. Something about the woman was familiar, but he couldn’t place it at all. 
“Now, you need to get out of here. That force is being led by the self-proclaimed warlord Jamal Nasution, who has decided that ruling East Timor is a little more fun than trying to fight the Americans and their freakish technology. There is no way your base can stand up to them.”
“You think,” Jubal replied angrily, “that I will up and leave, like that, on the advice of a woman who I don’t know because she happened to be able to get to me?”
“Fine,” the woman shrugged, and showed her equanimous open hands, “at least let me speak to the rest of you Runners.”
Jubal scowled and heading off back to the camp, pointedly ignoring whether the woman followed him. 

“So, I’ve been sent here to make sure you get out in time,” the woman said, when Jubal had gathered Inese and Cary together to discuss the incoming enemy soldiers. Despite his annoyance with the woman, he realised she had something to warn them about that they had to respond to, so he had may as well let her speak.
“How could you know about this any quicker than we do?” Inese asked, characteristically mistrustful.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. How about you tell me about yourselves? You’re here with military hardware, protecting civilians on your own initiative?”
Jubal took a deep breath and said what he said every time he was asked about the Runners:
“There are no millions anymore, we are all split. The millions of the world are hungry and they are far from and because of this rich land. We’re responsible… This is my debt, this is what I owe and where I stand and what I have, and this is my penance. It isn’t much and it isn’t someone else’s fault. It’s how blame is dealt out. These are just the cards you get.”
And Cary added, less excitedly than he used to:
“The Runners are the Runners. And we will not be stopped.”
The woman nodded sagely, and pulled out a photo of a man with her eyes, hair that always led those who spotted him in a cafe, or on a city street, and were inclined to write, to call it ‘a field of wheat at midnight,’ ‘the barley in the moonlight’. She studied it intently whilst waiting for the others to be more specific. Inese eventually got fed up:
“Look, Jubal here made a load of money killing Africans and got guilty. He stole a whole lot more and hired the rest of us and bought the kit. We go where no-one else dares. Help the rebels everyone else is suspicious of. Risk life and limb and all the rest to try and make a difference in this world. A difference with guns. A difference with open hands. Everyday, all the time.”
“That’s good,” the woman replied, “It’s always nice when I’m sent to bail out people who deserve it.” She ignored the mystified looks of the trio. She spent most of her time deliberately mystifying people. 
“Does it matter that we’re going to get killed?” Cary asked morosely, “Does it really matter at all?”
Jubal growled, and Inese and Cary, who had had time to get used to him still jumped. The woman was not perturbed. 
“We’re not going down that road, Cary. We are not going to wallow in despair. This… woman has kindly warned me of a danger I could see with my own eyes–”
“This guy was in the Kopassus,” the woman interrupted, “He’s well-trained, he’s scared of the Americans, and he’s headed for you. You are the people standing in his way. And you are not supposed to die. You are supposed to run!”
“I’m not getting crushed by a tank for this, Wolinski,” Inese was testy about such a thought, “I am well used to running when it’s necessary.”
“How can we know that this isn’t some elaborate trap?” Jubal asked.
“A trap? For us?” Cary was sceptical. 
“It’s plausible,” the woman confessed, “since rarely are things as they seem. You’ve already lost at least one of your number to enemy action, after all. You have been biting your thumb at the international authorities, in order to do the right thing, and they might well send an undercover agent against you. However, and I mean this with the utmost seriousness, if they wanted you dead, they’d leave you exactly where you are right now.” She stalked off, leaving the trio to try and figure out what to do. 

Failing to reach a resolution except to step up the armed patrols, the trio split to keep the camp on alert. Cary, curious about what the mysterious woman had said, went to find her in the mess area. 
“What did you mean about already losing one of us?” he asked, desperate to know something about the death of Naomi Wyatt, his love, which had cast him into his continuing despair. 
“Naomi Wyatt,” Cary gasped as she said it, “was killed by American intelligence services. Rather clumsily. And we realised, at that point, that you existed. That you were out there in the forgotten spaces, and that you were important.”
“I loved her. Why are you here now? What about her?”
“She died because of the Americans. Because of Julia Smythe. The reason I’m here, so far from home, after a couple of supposed deaths, is that you are involved in the fight with her. We need your network. We need your help.”
“Our help?”
“You, the Runners, wanted to change the world, wanted to make a positive difference… and you have. But it turns out, in these days, that the world spins on tiny axes. History is made by one woman, in the wrong place, at the right time, and we need every force available outside of the Western comfort zone to aid us.”
“That’s… crazy. Insane.”
“The best stories are. And reality is the best story. Naomi died in a struggle which I am at the forefront of. If you want to fight for her, you persuade Jubal to run.”

And Cary went to do just that. The woman went back to looking at her picture. When was the photograph taken? She wasn’t sure. It must have been… before. It was authentic, how he really looked, rather than some replication. And she tried to fix his image in her mind, tried to keep him alive, tried to remember if identity was real or fake, if there was anything to being, or whether she could shed clothes, skin, name and still be some kind of archetype to live in every other story. Not a healthy thing to think about. She kept her eyes on the photo. The eyes that linked him to her. He was her father. She was his mother. 

Jubal was not convinced by Cary’s arguments: 
“Cary, she gave you meaning when you were grieving. She’s manipulating you. I don’t trust her. I don’t like her.”
“And how close in the warlord and his tanks?”
“Closer. But we can drive them off. Get the guns ready.”
“No.”
“Inese!” he shouted, calling her over.
“Wolinksi.”
“Get the guns ready. We’re going to spook those tanks. You can do the solutions, right?”
“Computer’s working, isn’t it?”
“Get to it. Just ahead of them. Give them some smoke and craters to think about.”

The artillery was old, but that did little to make it ineffective. The shells arced elegantly from its barrels to scatter just afore of where the sensors had placed Warlord Nasution. And indeed, the leaves burnt, the smoke rose, and the road, such as it was, was rendered impassable.

“All you have done,” the intruding woman declared, “is bought a whit of time. See, I’ve persuaded Cary, and now I’ll persuade Inese and then I’ll persuade you. You will run. It is your telos, and it is your destiny and if you wait much longer it will not be enough.”
“What do you think this is, Twelve Angry Men?”
Inese, who had returned to the central HQ, looked bemused.
“An old movie,” Jubal explained. Inese shrugged, and went back to checking the artillery computer in case they needed to do anything more with it. The woman went after her, observing the equipment. She’d not seen anything this serious before. Sure, she’d tangled with criminal elements, terrorists, seen violence, and conducted some, in the interests of her superior, the one who had sent her to save the Runners, but this gun could probably kill more people in a single salvo than she’d done in her life. It was not especially comforting to have someone as misanthropic as Inese Putens operating it. 
“You don’t want to die, especially not for people whom you don’t really like. Why aren’t you leaving?”
“Do you know what I did before I became a Runner?”
“No.
“I was a UN negotiator. I have heard every form of falsehood, deception or mistake. And you are not telling us the truth.”
“The whole truth. There’s not really time for the whole truth. What do you want me to say? I don’t want you to escape? That’s not true, I do. I’m not who I say I am? I haven’t said I’m anyone. I’m not a woman? Who cares? The message I bring is truthful. You won’t win this fight.”
Inese sighed, considered continuing to be contrary, looked at the refugees, had her usual mix of dislike and determination to keep doing good in the world, and acquiesced.

Jubal held out. But he let Cary and Inese orchestrate an evacuation of anyone who couldn’t fight. The scanners showed that the warlord’s forces were making their way around the obstruction made by the artillery. Surmising that the Runners had one big gun, they’d split into two groups that were nevertheless sufficient to wipe out the camp. 
“Damn it, woman, I didn’t live this long by not knowing when I’m beat. But how are the last of us going to get away?”
“Mr. Wolinksi, I’m glad you’ve seen sense at last. Basically, I’m going to stay behind. The old rearguard duty. I survived crazier things just now in Singapore. I’ll be fine. And if not, well, you’ll have escaped, and will receive our requests for help from someone else.”

The team, the most dedicated Runners, prepared to flee as the woman surveyed the utility of the equipment they wouldn’t be able to shift. Wolinksi said the usual words to Cary:
“How shall we leave this dead-dog town?” He responded more brightly than he had in months:
“With the volume up and the windows down.”

Wolinksi then went to say some final words to the woman.
“See you on the way down,” he said to her.
“See you on the road until the fuel runs dry,” she replied.
“And what is your name? Who are you?” Curiosity had nagged at him.
“My name is Martin Smith. And I’m still not sure on the latter.”

Leaving the puzzled Runners fleeing, he contemplated whether he would ever really be Martin Smith again, looked at the picture of his original form. Maybe he’d be ethereal forever, never solid again. Maybe he’d finally die. It’d be interesting to die and not come back. It’d be interesting to live forever. He assumed that his father’s assurances that the Runners would escape, would help them when they needed to find that needle in a haystack, a single woman lost in the whole world, his parallel, whom his father created to do unknowingly whilst he acted in full knowledge, were correct. He assumed his father’s assurances that he would survive, again, were correct also. He’d fallen from a great height, been blown to smithereens, been shot, had seemed to die in various ways, and indeed, as he thought such things, he murmured to himself:
“I am Martin Smith; I cannot die. No death is enough to defeat me, whether a fall or a detonation, whether bullets or blades, whether poison or evisceration. I always return.” 

The artillery piece fired a spray of shells, seemingly at random, making both armoured convoys converging on the camp wary. Smith walked confidently toward the one that contained the command vehicle and Warlord Nasution. As usual, it would be a matter of nerve. The commander was likely egotistical enough to address a woman, indeed, a blonde European, who dared stand in front of him. 

“You! Woman! Why do you stand in my way?” Nasution had gambled on English being universal enough to talk to the supposed woman.
“It’s basically my purpose in life,” Smith smiled, “to stand in the way, to be the distraction, to misdirect anyone and everyone into doing what is required of them.”
“I will destroy you, and I will destroy your friends. War may have driven me out of my land, but I will have this one!”
Smith stood there. There had to be enough stillness for the program to track as he’d set it up. Explosion was going to be mighty close. Old equipment had less precision. The Runners would get away – what stood now on the knife-edge was whether he would live… 

He stood, in a body not his own, his fate out of his hands, as the explosions erupted around him.

Inese Putens cursed just about every nation she could think of. Israel. Palestine. Europe. The USA. Everyone about as far as Britain, when they had the Mandate. As a Latvian-American, and with some Jewish ancestry, she felt well-qualified to curse them all. She’d seen the democratic elections spreading through the Middle East as a young woman, the so-called Jasmine Revolutions, the so-called Social Media Revolutions. She’d seen the conclusion of the Israel-Palestine peace process, and the United Nations at its turning point in securing an agreeable two-state solution. It was this, and the concurrent formation of the United Nations Permanent Mission in Jerusalem, that had inspired her to go into the UN. Along with Gabrielle Halleux, she had been eventually appointed Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Global Conflict Resolution, to move from potential conflict to potential conflict, doing her best to defuse it. But it was one thing to ride the rolling momentum of the UN to push back fractious nations from wars they had no commitment to – her most recent success being to negotiate the boundary between Belarus and Poland that had remained in dispute every since the forcible formation of the state of New Bohemia. A state for the oppressed from the autocratic regime that had once ruled in Poland. Somehow, and she cursed Bohemia and Poland and Europe for it being thus, it had not led to great conflict between the parties, certainly nothing as intractable as her latest ‘assignment’. The assignment was not truly meant. No-one expected her to be able to resolve this, to be able to claw even a semblance of peace back from this coming catastrophe, but someone had to be there.

She didn’t want to be the woman remembered by history for being the negotiator who couldn’t stop Israel and Palestine going to war after the peace process had supposedly succeeded. 

(Actually, the history books tended to skip over the whole episode as one of the many ceasefires between the two sides rather than acknowledging the success of President Connors in forging a two-state solution, if only for a few years. But not knowing this, Putens remained angry at everyone).

Perhaps the USA were the worst. Smythe had become more aggressive and provincial as her presidency had continued long past its sell-by date, and rather than establishing a robust trade deal with the European Union, which she no doubt could have done, being the noted political prodigy she was, she had decided to pursue various proxy wars in the Middle East to secure the dwindling, but still considerable, supplies of natural oil. US training, US funding, US weapons, it was like going back to the time before Sarah Connors had ended US favouritism and intervention in the region. No more letting Saudi Arabia doing what it wanted in exchange for oil deals. No more arms or aid for Israel. It was this complete turnaround in the American foreign policy that had made the peace settlement possible – the UN able to enact ideas from the Peel Commission, the Partition Plan, the Armistice Agreements, the Geneva Accord, and craft a two-state solution. International aid had made Palestine a poor but viable country. Israel’s most vocal opponents of the plan had been defanged by the continuing peace from Palestine and their other neighbours. But that was all, Inese felt, for nothing now. 

Nothing, because of oil. Palestine had never really had a serious industry, and thus also never a serious geological survey. There had been suspicions that Gaza and the associated sea had oil and gas reserves, but during the harder times at the start of the Twenty-First Century, there had not been time to explore whether this was really the case. They maybe even didn’t want to look too hard in case it provoked attack; not to mention the division between Hamas and Fatah turning attention towards the desire for political power over any attempt to garner resources. And of course, the survey and the beginning of extraction had come just when Europe had entered the stage as being able to control the oil supply. Israel wanted it. The USA wanted it. Even some of the other Arab nations wanted it. 

Sitting there, in the UNPMIJ headquarters, she sat, impotent with rage, as eighteen years of peace were coming to an end with audible shellfire and armies mustering, though far from Jerusalem, still very much in her mind. This was a return, a headlong dash into the past, to suicide bombers and concrete walls, to occupation, bulldozers, rocket attacks, and a new generation of division. Eighteen years was about enough time for the fear, the distress, the hatred, the separation to start to fall apart. And men and women not so dissimilar from her were giving up on it. For a little more security, a little more prosperity, and to get that, the cost of a war. She wanted to shout at someone. She wanted to be sick. Images of everyone who had ever fumbled their way towards peace here filled her mind, and she wondered if they felt this way, the withdrawing British knowing what was to come, the United Nations time and time again, the American presidents and all the other diplomats, the few representatives of each side who had seen the need for peace, and when they saw the tide slipping back towards hostility and violence, did they feel this fury? Did they feel betrayed by every single person even tangentially connected? From herself through to some distant cousin left in Latvia and separated by generations and emigration, to the leaders of each nation, to the cleaner she could hear working in the hallway, she gritted her teeth and wished ill upon all of them. 

The USA had essentially held its gun to Iraq’s head. Iraq was still technically a protectorate, it had a very limited army, and the USA had done much to protect it, invest in it, rebuild it, to erase the legacy of a war built on lies. But those oil wells kept churning, kept Iraq independent, allowed it to negotiate with many lands and many allies. And Smythe had had her troops march around, show off their guns and their planes, and said ‘we want it all’. Maybe Inese Putens had spent too long with a mostly successful UN, too much time in its cosmopolitan New York headquarters, too much time with peace activists, diplomats and negotiators. Maybe she had been made to smile through difficult situations for too long. But she had reached the end of her capabilities. As equally as she could not stop the conflict, she could not stop the anger she felt from overwhelming her. 

The airlines were putting on extra tickets, and as a foreign national wanting to get out, she had no trouble getting a ticket to Prague on her credit card, where she assumed a transfer to anywhere in Europe was possible. She used her American passport rather than her diplomatic one. And as she flew, she slept, hands clenched on the arms rest and body still tense, exhausted by her distress. It was only the motion of descent that awoke her, and she felt confined by the plane and her seat, desperate to get off, to keep moving, to run and run and run.

Prague Ruzyně Airport was a busy airport before the European Union’s capital moved there – it had become the busiest one in the whole of the superstate. Crowds of people rushed from lounges to gates to the various shops, and none got close to Putens, since she cast forth a scathing glare that let all of the various Europeans know that they had already offended her to the point of mortal loathing. She stalked from the arrivals area to the last-minute ticket desk, and barked her demand for a ticket to Riga. Pointedly avoiding all but the necessary questions, she was soon back in the air, grinding her teeth through the faux friendliness of pilot and cabin crew, just wanting to be away. When was the last time she hadn’t read a newspaper? When was the last time she missed a TV or radio news bulletin? When was the last time the world wasn’t trying to tear her apart?

On landing in Riga, she bussed to the city centre, then walked to the first rundown car lot she could find. The walking was almost pleasurable. It consumed time. It involved no people; advertising hoardings she couldn’t understand (her grandfather had never spoken any Latvian to her) and allowed her to stomp. This was a childish response to the terrible events that would no doubt occur when the Israelis and Palestinians went to war, but it felt right to her, and she carried on. The car salesman spoke no English, or indeed any of the UN official languages, in which Inese was at least passable, but the cars had prices written on, and Inese had her credit card – they did business, and soon she was driving an old car out into the countryside. 

The city limits petered out. The occasionally tended and tilled fields consumed the landscape. 

It was not beautiful. It was countryside. They had it at home, upstate, and they had it in Israel, though the sun shone brighter there, and they even still had bits of it in Belarus and Poland, the bits that they had been squabbling over when she had been called there. She didn’t know, or at least, couldn’t remember, what part of the land was the place of her ancestry, but she had felt called here, to run away from the conflict and never return to it. Everything she had worked for had collapsed, and the idea of continuing to strive sickened her. She just wanted to find some abandoned farm house, some left behind barn from a more agricultural age, and hide. Never go back to cosmopolitan life, never go back to international work, never go back to New York. Peace had been her life. She’d had some success. She’d never really disliked anyone, excepting maybe Gabriel Halleux, and had only been frustrated with the obstinate people she’d often had to work with. And now that the first of many intractable wars was coming, her whole character had changed. The world had shaped her, and she had become a woman of anger. 

At what looked like the last stop before the end of civilisation, she used a cash machine to acquire some Euros which she hoped would last her until she knew what to do next. Presently, her plans got her as far as waiting for the stars and screaming at the sky. Longing for her own catharsis. 

She sat in the car, when she reached the empty hill, until the sunlight disappeared. She hadn’t seen stars like this in a while. New York didn’t have night anymore. Jerusalem, even, dimmed all but the brightest. She watched them for a while, calmer than before. They would keep working their way across the sky. Yet it did not make her existential, not make her think of her place in the cosmic time, it reminded her that she was here, and she was now, and the anger she felt was justified. They had failed again. Mankind had another bloodstain on its history. And there was nothing she, herself, could do to erase it. She screamed at the air. Screamed at herself. Screamed at every nation and every man. She knew she could not go back, not return to what was. But that did not have to paralyse her. Even as she knew the brand had marked her chest forever and she would never feel calm again, that she would have to keep running, she felt a sense of purpose return. Lashing out was unnecessary. Screaming, raging, letting the anger flow right through her, was unavoidable. As long as it could be let out, she could do something new. She turned, went back to the car, and left, never to return.

Gabriel Halleux had wrestled, in an introspective, existential way, with the ideas of truth, falsehood and fiction for many years. Socialist Party member, General Council representative for Montbéliard-Ouest canton, subprefect of Montbéliard, mayor of the same, prefect of Besançon, president of the Regional Council of Franche-Comté, he had followed a trail in French regional politics before shifting into the UN Department for Political Affairs. His assistance in negotiations soon led to him being selected as the most inexperienced Special Representative of the Secretary General ever, even when the UN was expanding and recording many successes. His remit was the negotiation of territory between nations, which remained a pressing concern as states continued to evolve in that century. Over the course of his career, he had heard various half-truths, distortions, narrow perspectives, and it had been his job, his gift, to reconcile them to a narrative agreeable to all. 

Yet he could see no way to do that here. 

The Bamako Accords in photocopy lay scattered across his desk. These were the papers that even seventy years later described the boundaries between Algeria and Morocco, countries antipathetic ever since, but respecting the borders. When their relations had broken down as they had, on occasion, since the Accords, it had not made much difference. Countries disagreed constantly. Negotiations were rarely necessary. Time would pass and they would normalise again. With that mix of resignation and purpose that the call had come to him: Troops on the border of Algeria and Morocco, massing in the westernmost part of the Saharan Atlas Mountains, waiting for some final insult. Waiting to cause chaos and destruction again. He had flown out immediately and demanded dialogue, and now, having heard the grievances, mostly excuses hiding the hope to extract increasingly rare raw materials from the sparsely inhabited borderlands. Nevertheless, the key part of diplomacy is to accept such claims as they are and as they appear, knowing that committed to a position, diplomats must act in accordance with it, and so if he could find some compelling reason to keep the borders as they were, or some favourable concessions on either side, he could keep the peace.

The next day he pored over satellite imagery, took phonecalls from the leaders of both nations, as well as the Secretary-General of the Arab Maghreb Union, who reassured him in his guess that the real tension was economic. Plenty of citizens of both lands had left for the economic prosperity of Europe, and the whole North African region had had to deal with occasional bouts of political strife, as military leaders fell to democrats, who could not always deliver the promises of their fervent revolutions. Resources being finite, and competing with the economic powerhouse Europe had become, there were often periods of unemployment and high prices. One way to offset this, being followed by Algeria in Halleux’s eyes, was to stir up patriotism and externalise the problems to an enemy. That the regions they hoped to claim had untapped mineral resources would be useful to such claims. Algeria had probably hoped it could take the area and station some roving patrols to keep any Moroccan troops out. Although their armies were of similar size, Morocco still stationed much of its military in the area of Western Sahara it controlled. Algeria had the advantage, and planned to take it before an international response could be considered. A decade ago, they would have certainly succeeded. But the UN had clawed back a bit of its power, its decisiveness. Security Council reform; changes in Russia and China – Halleux had seen this when he had joined the organisation. And as the inevitable press conference approached, he realised he had not a whit of a compelling argument. His face was almost aching from the nigh-perpetual frown that accompanied his reading of the information which he hoped contained a solution. He could not compel two countries with increasing internal discontent that they should respect international law when both desired just a little more land to try and stay afloat in difficult economic times. He would have to make a show of it, certainly, but it would not work. It was not a story they were any longer characters within. 

He needed to tell a story that would express the truth of the situation that was not reality. To bring them back into a narrative that would ensure peace. 

At the press conference, he scoured the faces of various North African correspondents, knowing their area is rarely featured at anywhere near top billing. They asked him a set of straightforward questions, and he easily deflected questions about how he was actually going to prevent the war. Only one journalist seemed really concerned that he manage it… the rest had understandable journalistic priorities, but this young woman, she was passionate for peace. He decided to sent her his card, ask to meet her, if only to convince her she might be better used by an international diplomatic organisation.

Hope Mbuli had only been an international journalist for five years. She’d spent a long time in local news in Chicago, which had given her plenty of time to develop a still greater distaste for violence than when she started. Enough time on the crime beat and the mean streets that when a job opened up at young magazine called the Global Weekly, based in Chicago, about five years ago, she’d signed up. They’d liked her style, liked the way she could catch a story in a quick batch of words; they knew their mixed media audiences were looking for bites of reality – to know and to know fast. And Mbuli knew how to follow a story and get there first. When the ambassador had asked her to meet him, she agreed because it would help the story, give her more information, a more real angle. The closer to reality, to truth, that she could get, the better she wrote. 

They met in his hotel’s restaurant. The day had not passed productively, but he had no way to claw back the time – to imagine that he would find anything more that day was fantasy. He had never been a fantasist. 
“Ambassador Halleux…”
“You know, I don’t actually hold an Ambassadorial rank at present. And besides, we’re not in a press conference. Call me Gabriel.”
“I… must admit I wasn’t sure what to say.”
“Doesn’t your paper have a style guide?”
“An American paper? This far into the Twenty-First Century? With respect, sir…”
“Gabriel. Sir would be correct, but come on. I asked you here as a woman who was interested in the situation and in peace, as I am. Not a Special Representative and a journalist.”
Hope chewed over his words, taking in for a moment that outside of the context of being part of the story, he was a handsome man, barely a couple of years older than her, and yet seeming of another generation. In a different tale, she thought, she might be attracted to him, with his nigh-stereotypical charm and calm accented voice.
“Okay. I am curious why it’s me you’re talking to. There were plenty of people in that conference, plenty who understand the situation better… I haven’t done much field reporting before, and this is a bit overwhelming.”
“Hope, if I may call you that,” Halleux had never made a mistake of a person’s name, “Those people are interested in the story and nothing else. You are interested in what happens to, but you desire a certain outcome, I can tell. You want peace. You want resolution.”
“True, but I don’t think that makes me special.”
“Perhaps,” and he smiled one of those contemplative smiles, “But you seem like someone who could do a good job where I once did, working actively for peace.”
“You used to work in another department of the UN, no?”
“Yes, that’s right. Department for Political Affairs. Lots of negotiation. Lots of listening, trying to get to the truth, or else the truth as everyone could see it. But there’s no point to it if you don’t have the passion for peace.”
“And you think I do?”
“Only you, in the end, can say. I don’t know your story, don’t really know what is the most compelling driver of your motivations, but I’ve spent enough time dealing with people with all sorts of desires, and I like to think I can see kindred spirits.”
They continued the dinner with Halleux explaining some of the intricacies of the situation, and about his life and other negotiations; Hope also talked about her life, where she’d been and what she’d done so far. They parted, politely, with a handshake and a kiss upon both cheeks, as befitted his Franche-Comte origins. 

Halleux had learned to sleep even when he desperately wanted to think things over. He had learned to sleep through gunfire or through the raucous parties of corrupt dignitaries. So when he awoke, he called up coffee and returned to his papers. Honour was not a motivator, nor a mutually beneficial outcome – he could pierce the reasoning of these nations with relative ease. The morning light was beautiful there in Figuig, and it relaxed him even as he grew ever more frustrated. The only other motivator that he could think of that would work here was fear. Fear could overcome conflict because nations are inclined to commit to some violence, but not too much. Neither nation wanted to destabilise the region, which the border conflict would not do – this would not be some domino effect as had happened before in North Africa. States are always interconnected even when they believe themselves independent. Yet what could he say! He could not expect violence to erupt between any other nations, there were no established blocs to oppose one another, and even Western Sahara had a great deal more security than it once did. Mauritania and Mali had no love for Morocco. Even after the UN had successfully negotiated the division of Western Sahara into Moroccan, Mauritanian and Sahrawi territories, they had remained at odds. The Algerians had supported the Sahrawi with arms and training for years, setting them against the Moroccans indirectly. This was no doubt a major reason for the continuing animosity between the nations. Libya and Egypt, a great deal more armed and powerful, kept to their own affairs. They felt like part of the Middle East more than Arabic North Africa, and still that more than North Africa in general. It wouldn’t sell. They had not committed to any of this. If they had, then, they would be compelled to act differently. None of those nations were the sort of nation to back down from a promise. And yet he knew he could not compel any of them to make that move. 

Unless he found a way to become the storyteller. He picked up his telephone.
“Hope? I have a way to resolve this situation. It relies on you. You might have to do something that goes against your integrity. But it’s for peace. I assure you. And I will owe you deeply.”
He explained that if she released a story that suggested that other nations were already committing to support one side or another, they would most likely agree, in public, then do their best to harangue Morocco and Algeria into standing down. The fear of a North African war would scare the sides away from the conflict. But he needed the story, the lie, to be told by someone before he could use it. Hope sounded doubtful. He asked her to trust him. To accept that he wouldn’t ask if there was any other way to avert war. 

She says yes. She’ll run the story. The lie that changes into truth when told. To ensure peace, there is little she wouldn’t do. And thus the renowned negotiator Halleux succeeded again, averting the war with another story, a blend of truth and fiction and falsehood, and everything that lies in between.

June 2039

Moments make up any revolution. Single events that happen suddenly; and then the world is changed. Certainly these events may have their origin and foundation in gradual progressive change, but there always has to be a tipping point. A horizon, crossed. History happens now.

European Intelligence and Security Agency Headquarters, Prague. The aftermath of a battle between known cultist terrorists The Sight and unknown mercenaries. EISA satellites have noted military hardware being used in the battle. The outcome is unclear. Despite being located within the aegis of the European Union, the mountains are a remote area in Romania and therefore satellite tracking has not kept a close watch on them. The analysis had not been given high priority, hence why it only arrives at EISA’s counter-terrorism team today. Pulling the data, they discover that it ties to information from assets in Britain, the suspicious but as yet unproven to be guilty Talen Pharmacology, a provider of medication beyond the expectations of other European drug companies. Given these peculiar circumstances, EISA had been watching them for some time. The information suggests that the mercenaries may be bankrolled by the drugs company, making it incumbent on EISA to investigate the seeming fortress in the mountains. 

Inter-agency co-operation seems to be a problem. Their local agency station in Bucharest made some calls before the two officers, Kridova and Beretti, sent to investigate arrive, and are discussing what they have found out. 
“Our Jandarmeria have already been up there with a Europol team, looking for the Sight’s number one.”
“The Seer,”
“No, they seemed to be interested in the one called Müller.”
“Strange, we have her listed at number two in the organisation.”
“Maybe the Seer is dead – as you say, there’s evidence of a battle.”
“Typical headache. Kridova, call Europol and ask them how they managed to not inform us about a terrorist development this big. We’ll head out to the mountains now before we lose any more time.”

The Carpathian Mountains. Mountainous regions have become prime hideouts in the EU. The fraying of the usual efficient networks, usually observing, checking and regulating, have made them more than the province of mountain people and the ski set. But this area of the Carpathians is different. More inaccessible, more hidden, of a far grander scale. The rock carved into a building. Gates, pillars – and all, now, in ruins.
“Looks like something out of a fantasy book,” Beretti opines. 
His Romanian counterpart is not much of a talker.
“How could we have missed this? This could be the greatest act of violence on European soil in years, and we get the information almost a year later.” 
“Do not look at me. We’ve been busy with all sorts of issues. We have not gone off-task. Just because we beat Russia doesn’t mean they’re not still a problem.”
“I don’t doubt it. It’s just… odd. I don’t think we’re going to find anything here.”
“Wait for Kridova’s update.”
“Up here? Surely we aren’t going to get anything?”
“Might be worth trying.”
“I guess. There a clear high-point nearby?”
“If you can climb.”
“I can.”
Beretti gets a fair distance from the fortress before he gets a connection.
“Kridova?”
“I’m here. What are you seeing?”
“Place is cleaned out. Any evidence from Europol?”
“They almost had Müller, in Poland. Team from their counter-terrorism unit and a Bohemian detective. They lost her. And the Bohemian has not been seen since.”
“Damn Bohemians. What about this place? It’s cleaned out – they take it?”
“No. Was like that when they got there. The Sight’s still out there, they say, and they reckon there was some serious tech up here.”
“Of course. Why didn’t they tell us?”
“I think they thought they had.”
“This is getting too peculiar. We all answer to the Joint Situation Centre in the end, don’t we?”
“We haven’t had anything on this from SitCen since the summer of trouble.”
“Yeah, and we didn’t have anything from them about the South-Eastern Commonwealth having nukes. Face it, EISA doesn’t have teeth like the Americans do.”
“Teeth? They couldn’t stop the first nuclear battle since Japan. At least we don’t have to occupy four whole countries that hate us.”
“I’m coming back to the station. We’ve got to bring in our assets in Talen’s organisation as soon as possible. Maybe she has some idea of what’s going on.”

Meanwhile, a junior NSA agent, a field operative in an agency that had expanded its operations greatly over the long course of Julia Smythe’s presidency, is preparing for a meeting with a superior from another agency. The Homeland Security officer had asked for Scaella Tophet by name, and she wonders, in the brief moments outside his office before she expects to go in why exactly he did. Even with the analytical brain that has made her so useful in her department, she doesn’t figure it out before she’s called in. Of course, she isn’t expecting what he does say:
“Tophet, good, glad you could join me. We’ve been watching you for your entire career, and even at this stage we’re impressed. We just need to know, are you dedicated to the intelligence community of our nation?”
Tophet feels a strange shudder of fear pass through her, as if he suspects her of treason, some hidden misdemeanour that even she is unaware of. Some act of a sleeper agent still mostly asleep. 
“I, yes.”
“Are you dedicated to the President?”
The question baffled more than frightened her, but she knew what the answer ought to be.
“Isn’t that the same question? Yes.”
“Do you believe that cross-agency co-operation could do more to protect this country?”
“What is it you want, sir?”
“Answer the question.”
“There’s always difficulties with divided responsibilities. It can lead to mixed loyalties, to confusion, to competition.”
“Good. Now, if I were to tell you that I wanted to induct you to a group within the agencies working together for the greatest good of the nation and the President, how would you respond?”
“What, some kind of taskforce? I’ve not heard of it.”
“Taskforce… more like cabal. Only the agents that can actually be trusted are involved.”
“So… not everyone in the NSA, say, is trusted by the President?”
“The President has great confidence in your agency; perhaps more so than mine. Your Director, Lieutenant General Corazóno, is one of her most trusted advisors, but it is impossible to ensure the fidelity of every member of our intelligence community, especially given the difficult and secret tasks that we will have to undertake. Some things need more deniability than even the agencies and departments possess.”
“This organisation, how long has it existed?”
“Since President Reagan. He wanted people who thought the way he did, who could be totally relied upon not to fall to the last vestiges of Communism, to be the final, hidden, defence against the enemies of our nation.”
“Including his political enemies?”
“Only in as much as they might endanger the country. For example, we’ve maintained our existence throughout the reigns of subsequent Presidents with other, lesser members of the administration knowing, depending on what we expected they would ask us to do.”
“Sir, I know that we are in different branches of intelligence, but you’re giving away an awful lot of information here, even to an officer your observations indicate is trustworthy. Surely it only takes one to give away a great secret.”
“No-one has ever broken the secret.”
“No-one?”
“We’ve always gotten to them first. Always.”
Scaella shudders, with more real fear than before.
“And what must I do?”
“You’ll be seconded to a team shortly. We have various operations, all presently titled after Christmas carols – plenty to choose from – and some of the agents working on Herald Angel were killed in an incident at Ultra Secure Facility One a few months back. We’ve been slowly supplementing the forces directly loyal to our organisation in North Korea, and we need another group out on rotation. Treachery cannot be tolerated.”
With this, he dismisses Tophet, and she returns to her office puzzled by what is to come. Uncertain of her future. Wondering whether what she will do is truly loyalty. How many enemies lay out there, now they had become occupiers? Since the nuclear attack, fear was everywhere, and everyone in the agencies knew that it was them against the world. But she is troubled, as she waits for her assignment, her team, her journey abroad, she is unsure.

“What do we have?” Kridova asks Sohn, the officer handling the assets inside Talen Pharmacology.
“We had one of our men go to Talen herself, ostensibly for MI5.”
“That isn’t going to hurt relations, is it?”
“Do we need them in this case? They certainly haven’t said anything to us about one of their companies paying for violence inside our borders.”
“Carry on.”
“She acknowledged that she had funded the destruction of The Sight as an act of revenge for their attempts on her life, but gave no information on the equipment there. Our asset believes that she was hiding what happened to it.”
“If she can afford mercenaries, why does she need terrorist resources? Presumably it was a stockpile of weapons, some destructive devices, possibly information as well, but it doesn’t seem worth hiding, or even taking.”
“How closely have we been tailing her?”
“Not really. She goes to business meetings around the world. Distribution deals, mostly, according to our assets.”
“Then I think you should take charge yourself. Follow her movements exactly. She won’t have the kit at her headquarters, but she’s bound to give us some hint as to its location.”
“Do you think it might be a power play?”
“Britain is still in a fragile, transitional state. She has money, drugs, weapons… power is only really one step forward. That’s why we need to keep it in check.”
Returning to the British field office, Sohn makes the arrangements for the identities and information he would need to undertake for his shadowing. 

Tophet is not getting any more comfortable about her position and assignment. Her team are all more experienced than her, having been involved in the cabal for longer, and having had rotations out in the new states; each of them had a propensity for menace that went beyond the hazing of a new team-mate. They had killed, and not merely enemy agents or combatants. Herald Angel’s very objective is the elimination of American citizens who opposed the Julia Smythe regime. It had become quickly apparent that the group had taken the mindset that anyone who opposed the government in this time of war was literally traitorous. Before they ship out, they are staying at a military base, to ‘bond’, and Tophet notices that they were keeping an eye on some of the officers and their chat. 

Sohn doesn’t take to long to notice one rather distinct anomaly in Talen’s journeying. There have been plenty of trips to the heart of governments or of manufacturing, but also a number to a mountainous location in France. Knowing the reputations of mountains in Europe all too well, Sohn informs Kridova and Beretti before heading over, alone, to the location, if only to scout it out. They are keeping it as contained as possible, ostensibly on following up some tenuous leads, but in actual fact because the failure of communication between two branches of the European bureaucracy was so counter to type – excess dialogue – that they suspected enemy action and infiltration. They are trying to strike the right level of paranoia. 

At the location, Sohn notices, thanks to the various listening devices EISA field agents take as standard, a certain additional amount of security to one of the chalet’s, above and beyond the tech found in a playhouse of the rich up in the increasing lawless heights. He knows that they have taken a risk, coming when Talen has; if she is working against Europe, he might be in danger. And yet, as he approaches the house, hoping to catch some scrap of data or see some proof of stockpiled weapons or illegal technology, two individuals leave the house and look straight at him. 
“Officer Sohn! It would seem the time is finally right! Quick, come in!” comes the voice of a gregarious man. The woman beside him looks a little less welcoming, but willing to play along with them if it will get him inside, he complies.

Inside, they tell him that they have been awaiting him for some time, on account of having the technology to see the future. Sohn takes the news calmly, and internally hears only a sardonic voice. Except that they knew his name.
“We’ll need you to present us to the European Council.”
He is addressed by the man. The woman remains silent. And they do not go any further than the entrance chamber.
“I’m an officer of EISA. I don’t have the position to go straight to the European Council.”
“If it is a matter of European security in relation to another power, then you do. You and whoever you’ve been working with.”
“How could you know that?”
“People are going to ask us that forever. Look, I know your name, I know that you’re here for the technology that we stole from The Sight, and that you’re suspicious that EISA has been infiltrated by some external enemy. Well, we know who that enemy is. And how to stop them.”
“We have had a strange time, lately. We have tracked a drugs company that wiped out a cult, and in trying to find the culprits, we find that our own side has already lost them, and failed to tell us. We are clearly out of our depth as an organisation. But you are telling me that somehow, you can see the future, that somehow, you’ve identified the greatest threat we’ve ever faced, and that, now, you just want to come forward? Are you mad?”
The man smiled a smile that went beyond his years, sighed sympathetically, and beckoned Sohn to follow him further into their building. 

Downstairs is filled with all sorts of cybernetic equipment that Sohn doesn’t recognise, but does his best to take note of. If this group did need bringing in, or bringing to justice, these would be the key details. They bring him to a screen, clearly some kind of centre point to the facility, where Mandarina Talen, whom he has been shadowing, a man who looks similar to her and another woman wait. 
“Are you even going to bother with introductions?” Sohn asks, given the way the group are staring at him.
“Sorry, my manners, Officer Sohn,” says the man who has been talking to him throughout, “My name is Tao Sina, and I’m happy to introduce you to Emily Sea,” the quiet woman, “Mandarina Talen, my wife Rosa Sina-Spina,” who nods helpfully, “and our… director, Zack Talen.”
“Sea. Listed as involved in the loss of the second-in-command of The Sight. Talen, Zack. Missing, registered dead almost a decade ago. And that’s just what comes up on the instant files.”
“It was unavoidable that as strange a group as us would form the Destiny Engine Coalition.” Zack Talen takes over the duty of representing them to Sohn.
Sea gives a pointed look.
“Well, apart from Sea. She’s an associate. The bonus for finding us all by herself.”
“We’re wasting time,” Mandarina comments, and Rosa starts to press some buttons on the screen.
“Okay, Officer Sohn, we knew we needed proof in order to get access to the highest level of your government; in two days, your liaison officer in Washington will receive a package of information which she will forward immediately to your Joint Situation Centre, revealing a piece of information very important to you – that it is the USA that has been confounding your operations, and one that is very important to us – that there is a woman called Elizabeth Green who has escaped an Ultra Secure Facility whom the USA are seeking with everything they have.”
“Two days? You have that level of accuracy.”
“Not… exactly. We see fragments, some parts have more detail than others. We knew that you would come soon, and have been waiting, and that relative to you, it will be two days before the transmission.”
“So you want me to report back. Convince my fellow officers? Get through to the European Council?”
“You think they’ll ignore credible evidence of a threat?”
“Credible?”
“You are already aware of the disruption. Do you think that the Joint Situation Centre is not? Do you think that the High Representative doesn’t want answers?”
“Okay. Alright. If you’re mad, well, I’ve solved the ‘case’, as it were.”

Whilst the cabal team has been staying at the military base, the group leader has been telling Tophet about the work of the cabal, how one of its prime agents had found a young prodigy, a woman with the potential to lead the nation to greatness, to strength and to victory. That man was to be their direct superior in North Korea, and had been acting as some kind of agent provocateur, leading on the Communist regimes to attack before they could achieve true power. Tophet, in these conversations, thought that the scale of the nuclear attack showed true power, and understood why the USA had feared unchecked growth. And that the group had manipulated the democratic process, essentially, by pushing forward a woman who though capable of government, was at the very least in partnership with a clandestine organisation with a rather specific agenda, this troubled her. It still does. The relationships between the hierarchies in her love have become tangled – she answers to the President, which as part of the cabal, she put in power and uses in the political sphere. The USA conquered in self-defence, in an attack that it itself provoked, a deed most secret. Tophet had seen the camera feeds turn to fuzz on the news like the rest. She had heard the War Speech. She had heard the President argue for incorporation of the new territories as swiftly as possible, that America might defend itself with more power. But she remained unconvinced. It was acts such as terrorism, such as the missile attack that had inspired her to apply for the NSA in the first place, when they were extending their ambit and recruiting more broadly. What would she visit on the people she hoped to protect by co-operating with the people who had co-opted her? 

That is the moment that changes her.

She begins to ask, instead of simply listen. To use the skills that she was trained in to uncover information. She takes advantage of what little time she has before they go to North Korea, a date that has somehow remained nebulous. And she finds out everything.

Finds out that the undercover agent that ‘found’ Smythe and helped her ascend is called Chester Loan, who had been at the centre of the cabal for many years. Since 2007, barely in the earliest days of Smythe’s power and influence, he had gone undercover as North Korean resistance icon Chen-Zing Loak, ostensibly using a Buyeo nom de guerre, drawing out ancient languages to hide his outsider origins, and distract any of his new compatriots from paying too much attention to his altered features. Finds out that he is their direct superior in North Korea, despite being the man who ordered the missile attack. Finds out that he fed them his Indonesian colleague Menyer Akhan for public execution, to many cheers at home. Finds out that funds were diverted from the US budget in various cuts and selloffs to help fund the revolution and lead the way to war. Finds out that some more of that money procured the nuclear weapons from corruptible elements in China. 

Realises that she isn’t going to make it through the ordeal alive.

Realises that it will still be worth it. 

Does her best, whilst the team is having the suspect members of the army removed for interrogation, to get in contact with an EISA liaison officer in Washington. To put together a package of the information she has been entrusted with, by an organisation for whom a word of the secret is swift death. Access codes for the well-known but never proved to be brutal Ultra Secure Facilities. Details of the cabal, and its various operations: Stille Nacht, which had eliminated countless individuals who potentially threatened the USA across the world, from mercenaries to politicians to spies. Wenceslas, to reduce the co-operation of EISA and ensure it did not investigate too thoroughly the subtle patterns left by the cabal beyond its borders. Midwinter, to provide security to the President above and beyond that given by the Secret Service. Herald Angel, to kill all traitors, with a tight definition of treachery. And finally, the most mysterious, somehow, the most critical, Adeste Fidelis, the recapture of a woman called Elizabeth Green. A woman who had escaped an Ultra Secure Facility. The only one, as far as was known. The greatest betrayal of secrets by any American agent to Europe in history. And though her team had watched her, wondered why her curiosity had increased, they had not kept as close an eye on her as the officers they were disposing off. She takes the window of opportunity. She does her part in the battle for the world.

The Joint Situation Centre accepts a visit from the Destiny Engine Coalition, though the Director remains rather sceptical about their clairvoyant capabilities.
“We’ve had CERN working on that for years! And nothing! You’ll share your information, but not your methods?”
“It has always been important to us to protect our methods, I’m afraid, Director,” Zack Talen replies, the closest thing the Coalition has to a public speaker and a symbolic face. 
“You understand that you are still under suspicion? Using mercenaries in our territory, stealing what must surely be controlled equipment, and providing us with evidence of an operation against us that you could well be undertaking yourself.”
Zack ponders the irony of that sentence.
“Sir, I do understand. But I expect to be vindicated. It is practically moments before you will be leading us to the European Council and telling them the most important news of their lives.”
“Is that… ego, Mr. Talen?”
“Merely an appreciation of the situation as is. Give it a few more minutes and we’ll have a world to save. Together.”

As EISA’s trans-Atlantic wires light up, the team returns, clean, all too clean, and check Scaella Tophet’s activity. Discovers that she had sent information to European intelligence. Do not bother to check what the information is. Go to her room, where she cannot be found. She had gotten off the base – a disadvantage of the unlimited power of members of the cabal. They take chase. And they are faster. They don’t have the same panic. The same naivety. The same desperate forward planning. Just a tracking device. An FBI-issue 4x4. An old change in their joint sense of conscience as they speed down the freeway towards the airport. Their race echoing the race against time that their government, and that of Europe, are about to enter into. Perhaps.

The agents let Tophet leave her car as she goes running for the airport. She is just about sure that she can get a plane anywhere and disappear, then get out to Europe or somewhere that can help her. She’s wrong. The security staff are alerted by the cabal team, and get in her way. The team come to take her. She knows that screams won’t help. There’s already been announcements about a bomb threat; anyone still left in earshot has her down as a terrorist. And when they lead her away, she stays silent. She might have done enough.

It seems she has, for now. The message lights up in the Joint Situation Centre and Zack looks at it, onscreen, with a measure of relief. The Director is stunned. He eventually nods an assent to Zack, accepting the likelihood of trickery being far smaller than the relentless advance of technology. From there to the High Representative, to whom the situation is swiftly explained, and from there to the European Council itself, the representative First Ministers of every nation that made the superstate complete, and Jürgen Holz, the President of the Commission, the most powerful person in Europe. They have been notified of a security-related interruption being expected, but know nothing of what it entails. 
“Ministers, High Representative, President, I come to you to bring a new form of insight and intelligence that myself and the rest of my Coalition have had the difficulty and privilege of exploring and utilising over the last few months. This technology gives us the ability to actively foresee future events, and therefore act to rectify them or else ensure they come to pass. We have been… advised… by our device that you, the European Union, are the best state to ally with, to offer our knowledge and support to.”
A hubbub breaks out, as the First Ministers discuss this seemingly impossible revelation. A future-predicting technology? One that works well enough for their chief spy to recommend it being put on the agenda of the European Council? After some moments, the President silences them, and addresses Zack himself:
“Why now, Mr. Talen? Why would you bring this device to us at this moment? What information do you have?” He has been given some idea that there is a threat to Europe by the SitCen Director.
“It was deemed opportune, and also because we believe this gives the chance to intervene in a global situation in a way that we simply couldn’t without your resources and assistance. At this very moment, the USA, which has undertaken an understandable retaliatory strike in invading and integrating the nations of the South-Eastern Commonwealth, is acting against you proactively. It has aimed to disrupt your intelligence services and therefore keep from knowing the full extent of its actions. Its aim is not defence. We have a suggestion that it is, in fact, conquest. That the attack on Hawaii was instigating by agent provocateurs – that it was, even as the largest nuclear attack in history, a false flag operation,” Zack raises his voice above the growing tumult, “However, we do believe there is a way that we can prevent the group that has organised this, a group that includes the present President, from achieving their goals. We have a limited window in which to move. We believe, furthermore, that they are presently planning a final element to their conspiracy that will allow them to assume full and direct control in their nation and start moving predatorily on others. You’ll receive the information your SitCen has just received from an agent from within this criminal conspiracy, but I’d like to add the insight of the Destiny Engine Coalition to that, rather than merely successfully predicting its arrival, I can help you make sense of what to do with it.”
The European Council takes some time to discuss whether to accept this essentially preposterous proposal. The Minister for the Netherlands makes the cogent point that the discovery of a biological technique for the synthesis of oil changed European history dramatically and without precedent, and why should they be surprised that another technology had come along to do the same. The West Ukrainian Minister agrees, adding that communication, social networking, access to the internet precipitated the Crises that made his nation free, and it is always better to embrace such progress than deny or stifle it. It does not take long, by the standard of the European Council, to agree to listen to Zack Talen’s proposal.
“Ladies and Gentleman, currently, the USA can only be faced head-on, in a military conflict that would lead to untold destruction, and years of guerrilla warfare and insurgency. We are confident that there is a person that can tip that balance, if we can get to her in time. The person who knows the most about the secret cabal that has caused this war is a British woman named Elizabeth Green, currently the only person to have escaped USF-1. We need to find her. If we find her, we think we can bring down the President.”
“Why, then, this Elizabeth Green? Even if we took this to the UN, tried to put together a casus belli, intervened directly in the USA, we are talking about the testimony of a madwoman,” responds the President, convinced of the threat but not yet of the solution.
“I would agree, if it was her testimony that we rely upon. For reasons that are still not completely clear, Elizabeth Green is not just the sole witness to the great machination of the American executive, but also, they believe her to be so. They think she is more dangerous than any single individual in the world. The effort they expend neutralising every one of your spies, they spend on trying to find her and kill her. And if we have her, then we can use her to disrupt the people who have caused this war and lust for further conquest,”
“Then what would you have us do?”
“We give you the information we have, and have EISA try their best to find her, surreptitiously. You talk to Britain. They’ve had enough years under the US yoke to co-operate, and enough resources to increase the speed of your search. And you keep this deathly secret… and use your fine political minds to figure out from what we give you what can topple them. What we can use to turn them on each other. Because we can do nothing direct. You’ve seen what they’ve done in Asia. We can’t have that come here. For the meantime, I need to direct the search and keep feeding you information on secure channels. Let me know if you come up with anything.”
Talen is strangely casual with a Council he by all rights ought to defer to, but he knows that there is no time for formality, and that in the balance of power, the future is on his shoulders more than theirs.

As this heated discussion occurs, the secrets being revealed that will undoubtedly reshape the way decisions are made in the superstate, and could perhaps lead to the deposing of President Smythe and her legions of spies and killers, the cabal team that once included Scaella Tophet is killing her. Slowly. It is important to take your time, sometimes.

They don’t really do anything clever. A tied up woman, fists, sharp knives. It can last as long as they like. They don’t have anywhere else to be tonight. But Scaella, even as she pants out exactly what she knows, exactly what she’s done, and why, even as she’s bruised, battered, bleeding out, she has that last kernel of satisfaction – she has removed the central card in the house. She has gotten a message out where none before have succeeded. With these thoughts, she is dying, murdered by those that thought her their tool, their own agent. She expires, with no hope of intervention, another casualty of power lust and the endless battle of conspirators to stay alive and stay on top. But, just as one moment changes the world, as does one woman. 

And the other woman on whom the world turns in these few moments, this change of eras, the one that the Destiny Engine Coalition calls the One Contingency, the one whom they had managed to identify some short time ago as Elizabeth Green, an aid worker taken into captivity in North Korea, a woman who had escaped and had the great resources of American intelligence and military sent to find her and recapture her, a woman whom they know need help to find. EISA and MI6 each contribute their top agent to the search, along with the well-experienced Emily Sea, representing the Destiny Engine Coalition. These three, then, with every EISA and MI6 agent worldwide listening for the scraps of information that might lead them to finding Elizabeth Green, travel to Indonesia, whilst their codebreakers get to work on the USF files sent by Tophet. 

In Indonesia, they do their best to have a quiet conversation with Aaron Russ, who was once Elizabeth Green’s superior, knowing every question asked risks a leak to the USA, who though they might know themselves to be compromised, cannot know how Europe is reacting. He tells them of how he sent her to the province of North Korea where the Commonwealth had its headquarters, where the nuclear attack was masterminded and commanded. The agents, Kriznar of EISA, Wood of MI6 and Sea of Bohemia and the Destiny Engine, knew that they could not travel that close to the heart of the conflict – being in occupied territory regardless here, to go to where Green had been arrested is far too risky. They discuss, confident that Green must have found some evidence of the conspiracy in that place, been captured, been taken to the nearest prison. 

And yet how to follow that trail? The details of her escape eventually filter through to them, and precious little else. The camp commandant, surprisingly, not one of the cabal but a normal military man, Captain Hugh Silver, a man forced to comply with numerous interrogations, tortures, executions, who finally found his mettle and faked Green’s death, and, the records noted, killed the two stationed agents from Operation Herald Angel and himself. There is footage of Elizabeth Green, and each of the agents consider her, how she appears, what clues they might find. Wonder whether they are too late. Wonder if they will ever find where Silver sent her. Eventually, as they trawl through the masses of information, Kriznar finds that Silver had had a false ID created using the intelligence equipment in the Ultra Secure Facility, with pictures that facially matched a bald-headed Green, with the name Bella Reid. Staying close to the aid agencies, it is not too hard get to the many small flight records and start the painstaking cross-checking, made easier by the meticulous recording of the Ultra Secure Facility which contains a hundred indictments of the American authorities even without their master plan. 

At home, in secret bunkers and other militarily secure facilities, a sequence of meetings occurs between the European and British leaders, always with consultation from the Destiny Engine Coalition. They know they have the evidence to accuse the President of war crimes, but not her capability to respond. There would be a key moment, perhaps once they find out where Green is. But if Green is dead, or lost, then they need to prevent their enemies from focusing on them as the threat. As yet, they come up with no concrete suggestion.

The estimation from the three agents is that Green was dispatched to Rwanda – there is an individual named Reid on an amateurish manifest for a small flight out of North Korea carrying aid workers. There has been a recent famine there, and aid workers seem to be in shorter supply than nations requiring their aid. The nation itself was in tumult, with an individual rather too well armed having declared himself King, and pockets of resistance not yet violent enough to be termed a civil war. The perfect place to lose someone: The perfect place to be lost and never found. They depart at once to Tanzania to move over the no doubt porous border, to go to Kigali and assess the situation. It doesn’t take much to pose as unscrupulous investors, to ask questions of the new regime, try and get a sense of where the money for weapons and other materiel has come from. Conflicting reports suggest it is either America, the unifying factor of all geopolitical mysteries, or China, a body as secretive and confusing as ever. This, however, is not the key to finding Green – instead, they reason, since the refugee camps have been dispersed, the people scattered – some must have met Green, even if they did not realise it. Euphemistically and delicately (the suave Wood doing the most of the talking), they ask about the destination of the famine victims, and discover the existence of a resistance movement. Its name, Vangavange, meaning Formless, suggests that its major asset will be the difficulty in finding it, and yet they know they must.

As the trio of agents try and move as surreptitiously as possible to the Rwandan countryside, the European Council has EISA, via a number of intermediaries, sow doubt in the mind of some American Senators about wartime budgeting, questions that receive inevitably the answer of the information being classified and prohibited. A core of senators and congresspeople disillusioned with the long reign of Smythe, concerned about the prosecution of the war, find on closer scrutiny, scrutiny that is essentially given to them by Europe and the Destiny Engine Coalition, that it is executive orders from the President’s office that is blocking their consideration of some of the war and intelligence funding. With suspicions of corruption by a multi-term President, the Democrats among them prepare to move to the slightly leftward People’s Party of America and the group prepares to ask questions of the administration once they have gathered more information. 

It may not have gone unnoticed. The plans of the plotters are moving apace. They are realising that this is their final chance. That everything they have worked for stands on the brink of disintegration. Each of them, at the head of the conspiracy, considers what they might do if the worst is to occur.

Vangavange are particularly difficult to find. Even with rewarded local guides, paid enough to assuage their fears of betraying the King, it takes much longer than the trio would like, knowing that their enemies, whoever alongside the President has conspired to cause the war, have enough information to be worried. Worried enemies are always more dangerous. When they eventually manage to locate where one of the resistance fighter groups might be operating, they watch from a safe distance as the force uses guile and passion as a counter to the modern arms of the royalists. After the skirmish, they approach them and reveal their identities as forces trying to find any word of Elizabeth Green. Rather than the sketchy rumours they were expecting, they are taken to the underground headquarters of the resistance.

There, they are met by the leader of the resistance and one of the other rebel leaders, both of which claim to have met Elizabeth Green. The leader, an older woman, who does not give them her name, informs them that Green had, after uncovering the connection between Chen-Zing Loak and Julia Smythe, been sent to a refugee camp. The camp had been taken over by US intelligence forces, who hoped to keep her there indefinitely rather than attempt to lock her up again, as well as another secure project. They had procured plausible copies, or else the real versions of, it was impossible to tell, the great enemies of America in the 21st Century. From bin Laden through Jupiter Kamieñ to Chen-Zing Loak, they had assembled a Council of villains, one that they could use to impugn any group they desire. Sea scoffs. It’s madness. The younger leader, who calls herself Nyampinga, agrees that she thought so too. But that they sent Green abroad, given this group was supposedly working with the King, to try and get the news out in America and have the people turn against their leaders. They had not got far enough to their journalistic contact, and though they did not know what had happened to the party, they were certain that they had been intercepted. Green was probably dead.

The resistance leaders believe that the reach of supposed Chinese interference in Africa would be part of a case for hostile actions, at first in a proxy sense starting in Rwanda and against the assumed King, but accelerating and escalating to become a grand war, a war that in reality the Chinese state was not prepared for. The African states involved were merely a convenient area for collateral damage. The group engage in heated discussion of whether this Council is a real threat, or even real at all. Kriznar, of the sort of character that suits spies, a cynical world-weariness, is angry that they may have reached something worse than a dead end; Wood, a more patient man, is also sceptical. It is left to Sea to provide the perspective of the new order: 
“I come from a team that have the technology to see the future. They have some limited capacity to alter it. This… capability has been around for decades, slowly becoming more coherent. This seems a little too neat – as if some narrative causality has dragged Green around the world, but the way my colleagues talk about her – she’s the turning point of everything right now. It shouldn’t surprise us that she’s been here and seen things that sound like something out of pulp fiction. The situation we’re in, we have the power to eliminate Smythe. Nothing less than the most devilish plotting could topple her. Her people loved her! Most still do! She fought back against their worst Pearl Harbour, their worst Nine Eleven. And we’re the outsider enemies! Brits, Europeans, Bohemians, Africans, all of us foreigners to them. Maybe this has all occurred that we will get that one shot.”
Kriznar laughs, a hard laugh that bears no humour. Wood looks puzzled by the whole speech, but the resistance leaders are more compelled. Nevertheless, the orders from the European Council are to find Green, or at least compelling proof of her being killed. They get the most accurate details they can of the route of Green and her companion Daniel Mbuli took to the USA. 

“We’re going in through Mexico. We can’t risk going through their border control. It’ll be a longer journey, but facing off against some anti-immigration vigilantes is easier than Homeland Security. After all, we can be sure that Smythe cut all sorts of budgets to redirect the funding to her puppet enemies,” Wood lays out the plan to the Rwandan rebel who had been assigned to join them, Nyampinga Usabyimfura, on account of her knowing Daniel best. 
“After that we head north to New York, then we’ll move more slowly along west to try and pick up any hint of the trail Green and Mbuli might have left,” Kriznar adds.

The European Council listens in pitched silence to the report from the trio as they head over to Mexico via a roundabout route. Both Zack Talen and his niece Mandarina are with them, and the quiet persists as the formidable intelligences of the group try to see what such information could do. Eventually, a satisfied sigh comes, and the Croatian First Minister stands.
“Our enemies have many advantages upon us. Even with the aid of the Destiny Engine Coalition, we are paces behind. They took the time to find a leader. They found the funding for an enemy that they could control. We don’t, or didn’t, stand directly in their way, but we oppose them merely by existing. They want unbridled power. That, if anything, is what this state opposes. We have many bridles. Now, we know, from what we’ve received from the American whistleblower Scaella Tophet, our own agents in the USA, what our codebreakers have gotten out of their networks and the Elizabeth Green information, that they are not one united leadership. Smythe is no more in charge than Loan, and Miller and Corazóno are not far beneath them. Their entire system is built on power and ambition. For years, they could act with impunity, fearlessly. Now, we have them a little on edge because they know that something has been leaked. But we’ve been careful not to act, and give them a reason to suspect we’ve even come close to figuring them out. Now, my nation knows more than any other, that the quickest way to destroy something is to divide it. With the temperaments of the four at the top of this conspiracy, it won’t take much more to have them actively working against each other. I’ll wager that they’ve already put together contingency plans. Making sure they have agents who are loyal not merely to their country, their agency and the cabal, but to themselves personally. So, we have our agents figure out where Green is, and once we reckon we can present her, we go public. Make accusations of Smythe alone, and hope the others think they can get away with it – they’ll be foolish enough to focus on rivalries and power grabs, maybe even trying to manipulate Green and us. We work with the senators and congresspeople we know we can trust, and count on them to destroy each other rather than retaliate coherently.”
The European Council looks to the Coalition for their affirmation.
“We cannot give you more assurance of this plan from our futurist information, but we believe this course is sensible. It is clearly imperative that they not carry on with their war of conquest. Will the trio be able to get any information whilst in the USA?”
“We’re hoping,” responds the SitCen Director who has been in the most communication with the spies, “that with our existing intrusion, once they’re there, they might be able to get some very privileged information that would be noticed if we attempted to make the attack from here. It may be our only chance to locate Elizabeth Green, if she is in custody rather than dead.”

And yet the first reports that come through, from a low-level CIA database, have her marked as killed after being captured in Cleveland. The trio, now a quartet with Usabyimfura, make their way at once to Ohio, a long drive that is most taxing to the more rural Rwandan; the others have faced sterner trials of endurance. The consensus between them and the signal intelligence group back in Europe is that information previously so hidden, regarding the conspiracy and the one escapee from an Ultra Secure Facility, that this is a false report, perhaps only to satisfy eyewitnesses of the capture. Mbuli’s death, they notice, is substantiated with far more material. However, even higher level remote access does not reveal the truth. They think that they might have to break into a CIA station in Ohio, and begin to prepare and survey for such a task. 

In the days of war-based paranoia, any such infiltration is a measure more difficult, but Kriznar and Wood were selected for being the best. Sea has never failed to learn a new skill quickly, and espionage is no exception. The building’s plans are easily accessible, though they are sure there will have been changes. The broken codes sent from Europe can be used to send a false distress signal and remove some of the no doubt limited fighting force, and they only need to be long enough to crack the internal computer system. Night falls, and they begin. Nearby building. Shared vent, possibly for emergency exit. Confirmed departure from Usabyimfura on lookout. The team move slowly, silently, blackly up into the facility. Two field agents on duty from the four on night team in this provincial domestic location. Easily neutralised. Half an hour before the check-in. Half an hour to set the hacking programme going. To search the facility for any other evidence of Elizabeth Green. Fifteen minutes pass. The programme succeeds. Together the three of them scan through the information, knowing that given the time they’ve spent to get there, they can afford no more wasted. Kriznar spots something in the midst of many details. 
“Look at this: There’s a protection order on a sanatorium in Reminderville, small town not too far from here. No way they aren’t using it to hold prisoners. The reasons for why they are supposed to protect it aren’t here. I think that the CIA are trying to keep her from us and from the other agencies. A little something up their director’s sleeve, perhaps.”
Sea agrees. In a past life, she had done counter-espionage, knew all about hiding people away. They complete the download, slip away, and speed to Reminderville, knowing that the CIA agents will have to suspect the reasons for the break-in. Wood reports in to Europe as they go.
“SitCen, we have a pretty probable location. I’d say it’s go at your end. We’ll be there soon, and should have Green not long afterwards. Let’s turn this thing around.”

It doesn’t take much to stir the world’s media, well bred into a twenty-four hour cycle, with a breaking announcement from the European Council, fairly agreed as the second most important state body in the world. And phones, social media and TV stations begin to buzz towards a blaze as the European Union accuses President Julia Smythe, six-term President of the United States, of false flag endeavours of the highest order – that she caused the nuclear attack on her own people, that she ordered her intelligence agencies to reluctantly commit war crimes, that she had an infiltrator under her command at the highest level in North Korea. They leak various files they had procured from the defector Tophet and their own cyberattacks, enough, they hope, to convince Smythe not to hold on or fight back.

Their calculations are correct. Even as the team they sent to find Elizabeth Green storms the Reminderville Mental Institute, Julia Smythe and Chester Loan both flee the White House and try to head into hiding. This power vacuum as the two most important leaders depart leads Miller of the CIA and Corazóno of the expanded NSA to argue over the emergency control of the US State. Buoyed by the lack of culpability thrown at them by the European dispatch, they hope to apprehend Smythe and sacrifice her for power that can be consolidated out of the crisis. 

Elizabeth Green is indeed where they expect to find her – the signals intercept they left in the CIA system has orders from Hal Miller, the director himself, to bring her to him so she can testify against Smythe. He was indeed the one who had hidden her, for his own purposes. As the chaos was breaking out, Europe is sending through to them reports of various non-cabal security officers and politicians up to the Vice President, allowing them to know they are ahead of their opponents. It is not a matter of force but of requesting her, and she is almost ready for them. She has been waiting for this moment for some time. They set her free, this woman who can scare a global conspiracy. This woman led to her place by destiny. 

Despite Miller’s plan, Smythe and Loan have always been the better players of the game. Always one step ahead. They operate their contingency plans and are soon beyond the reach even of the agents they had do their diabolical will. Miller and Corazóno, who had entered into a tense détente to find and blame Smythe, both expecting to fight each other only afterwards. However, between them, Miller has been working at the endgame more swiftly, and as their respective armed forces move to occupy the White House, in front of hordes of journalists and television cameras, he sends Alexander Dubrovnich, formerly Corazóno’s right-hand man, to capture her. Their commander captured, her forces outmatched, the NSA are massacred. Corazóno dies with them. A hail of bullets. Miller, believing that he can paint himself as the final and only loyalist, dares to contact the Senate and the UN, both in tense emergency sessions in response to the European accusations. He demands emergency powers to solve the situation, claiming that only his intelligence agency has the capacity to restore order. The Senate, wanting to keep power political and deeply suspicious of a man who even claiming to be right, had let a gunfight occur at the White House, instead vested power in Juan Carlos de Ortega, the Vice President, a man who had already done his best to co-operate with Europe. This man too had no blame pointed at him, even in the more private revelations they had brought to the two groups trying to restore peace to the US. At once, Europe sent a delegation including a representative from the Destiny Engine Coalition to fill him in on the entire situation, something he accepts with no small measure of panic.

Arrest warrants are soon forthcoming, and Miller, who had thought himself able to escape suspicion, is taken in quickly. He agrees to testify against his colleagues regardless, grasping that if he is not to be executed he’ll need to give the authorities, such as they are, everything he has. They take him into protective custody – he knows that he made plenty of enemies when he had Corazóno killed. It is his capture that proves yet another critical point – together, in the depths of the intercity, interstitial wastes, the semi-urban gaps, Loan and Smythe had been waiting, knowing that going abroad was unfeasible. Keeping in decent contact by being definitively less well-known and better at direct subterfuge, Chester Loan hears that Miller has been arrested and will co-operate fully. He knows that he can’t keep Smythe on. He waits for her to sleep, then calls in an ambiguous anonymous tip. It’s the local police, nevertheless armed to the teeth, who come. Surround the drab motel. Waiting for them to break. Waiting for them to give in. Smythe awakes, and is frightened, maybe for the first time in a long time. Wonders if Loan has betrayed her. Loan tells her that Miller’s been taken, that he’s turned on them. She relaxes. Relaxes for long enough for him to knock her out, even with his slight age disadvantage having the strength to pistol-whip her. She collapses, a metaphor for the end of her reign. He wonders whether to kill her. Thinks the drama of a trial is a better distraction as he fades away forever. Dons his disguise, blonde wig, prosthetic nose, waits for her to return to consciousness, presses a gun into her back. She begs him to kill her. He leads her at gunpoint outside to the police. Claims to be from a nearby room and heard a commotion. The police arrest her, making something of a scene of it. He walks away. Fades away. 

It is not hard for the angry NSA members of the cabal to find the maximum security facility where Miller is being held. The co-operation between the agencies means that information still flows very freely amongst the cabal. It is ironic, perhaps, that the collusion that he masterminded proves his end, as they set off a riot and the guards unsurprisingly focus on making sure no murderers escape. Very easy for one witness under protection to be killed in retribution. Every regime, it seems, ends in this much blood. 

Every regime, then, needs the just transition to a new way. Before elections can be called, justice needs to be done. Elizabeth Green testifies before the UN, who given the events, the testimony of Miller made before his death, the leaked documents of Scaella Tophet, find her far more credible than anyone would expect of a woman who has spent time in mental institutions and seen as crazy sights as her. They call for the US Senate to work with the European Union, as a neutral investigative party, in trying Smythe and any others found to have been involved in the war.

It is the trial of the century, eclipsing even those of the Bush regime in 2005. Before the Senate, with representatives from each European nation and Zack Talen of the Destiny Engine Coalition, a man now known by the world to be integral in the bringing down of Smythe, a man with rapidly increasing power in Europe, which stands poised to make the USA give them many political concessions, perhaps overtaking them as the superpower for the first time. Smythe is easily found guilty. Using the biocybernetic technology offered to them by the Destiny Engine Coalition, who are otherwise mysterious about their techniques and the sources of their clairvoyant information, they imprison Smythe in a mental prison that serves as a memorial to every life lost in the nuclear attack, the war, and the various covert operations she authorised. They hope that these deaths, once Stalinist statistics to her, will one day inspire contrition in her. 

Politically, Europe receives increased SDRs in the International Monetary Fund, making it the only veto nation rather than the US, nominating rights for the President of the World Bank going to Europe’s President of the Commission, immense amounts of political capital from both its role in defusing the Smythe system without global war. The USA have to accept reparations demands and have a cap placed on defence spending, with their military and intelligence budgets being subject to careful UN scrutiny. Perhaps more importantly, the Destiny Engine Coalition, though seemingly in an advisory role to the European Council, have a great deal of leeway in dictating future plan after their first great success. People assume that this supernatural technology is just an advancement in existing developments, and the information is too valuable for politicians to really question. Zack Talen becomes as synonymous with European leadership as Jürgen Holz, the President of the Commission. A new age has dawned, in a swift sequence of events; history is filled with such strange sequences, the rush that leads to a new world order, the transfer of power from one man to another, from one kingdom to another, from humanity to machinery…

And, no doubt, another vital time shall come, that needs must be told in such pressing present presentation.