Chapter Fifty-Two: A Secret Tape

When someone knocked on the door of the Rocinante, they had no idea it was Twenty-two until the alien waddled aboard. Toby felt like Mount Bharat had been lifted off his back.

They filled her in on the happenings since her disappearance. She was rather vague with her own account, insisting she’d spent the time recovering with Zero at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Where her left eyestalk had been was now just a patch of skin, without so much as a scar.

When Duffy announced his retirement the following day, Bruce questioned Twenty-two, but she insisted she had nothing to do with it. She’s a horrible liar, Toby thought.

* * *

By Monday the following week, Toby and Feodora had each given a hundred speeches in cities all over Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Oman. Feodora introduced him to a concoction she’d made that kept him from losing his voice, but she warned him he didn’t want to know what was in it. He didn’t ask.

With the destruction of Israel in 2045, peace broke out in the Middle East, and continued to the present day. Or so the country’s leaders claimed. Every few hours they heard explosions in the distance. When they asked about it, they were always told it was construction. It might have fooled Toby, and perhaps even a skeptic like Bruce, but Feodora only shook her head. She displayed for them an amazing ability to identify the type of explosive from the sound alone. Fortunately, after the assassination attempt, the Gray Guard around them had turned into an army, and Toby and Feodora were not allowed anywhere until the new location had been taken apart, brick by brick if necessary.

Toby found campaigning in the region more difficult than anywhere else. The problem, he realized, was that if he said exactly what he believed, he’d lose in a landslide in every country in Islam Nation. A liberal or moderate simply couldn’t beat a conservative in the region without falling down that slippery slope of tailoring your message for the audience. He envied Bruce’s and Melissa’s seemingly natural ability to always stay on message, always answering with what they wanted to say rather than what was asked.

He didn’t resort to lying, only avoiding subjects he didn’t want to talk about. Politics had made him an expert on evasion, though not as good as Bruce and Melissa. Before this campaign he’d always been more of a behind-the-scenes operator. When the subject of gay rights came up—called “yag” rights in Islam Nation, where even the word “gay” was considered obscene—he’d learned to recite excerpts from the local laws on the subject, and how much he believed in following the law, and then change the subject to the more compatible one of the rights of the lower class.

He could have been more direct, and lectured on “yag” rights. He thought it was silly that in this day and age, the majority in some regions still judged a person by their sexual orientation, but as a candidate for office, he had to take that into account.

Much of the Islamic world had a rigid class system, though not as extreme as it had once been in India. Toby’s message of compromise between the upper and lower classes, as symbolized by references to Mount Bharat in India, had taken hold of a certain part of the population in the three countries they were focusing on, all of which were near India’s borders. Mount Bharat became a symbol of their campaign, featured in many of their ads.

Three major events occurred that Monday night.

First, Toby received a message from Tyler. One of the players on the school table tennis team had broken a leg. As first alternate, Tyler was now on the team.

Second, Bruce received the latest polls. They were now statistically tied in Pakistan and Oman, and only a point behind in Afghanistan. They were getting killed everywhere else.

Third, Toby received a call from Rahim Aziz, the prime minister of Pakistan, whom he’d met five years before.

“What I am going to tell you is in strictest confidence,” Aziz said. “You must not tell anyone the source, nor name my sources. Do I have your word on this?” Toby agreed.

“Vice President Rajan Persson alerted us last night to potential criminal activity inside Pakistan,” Aziz said, “at the Islamabad Grand Hotel. An accusation is not enough to get a warrant to bug a hotel room, but the room in question was under the name of the Dubois/Persson campaign. With his permission, we conducted secret surveillance of the room of Dubois’s chief of staff, Phil Farley, who I presume you know.”

Aziz stopped. He looked like a man in front of a firing squad. What had Farley done?

“You have to promise again,” Aziz said, “that you will not reveal my name as your source for what I am about to give you. Nor Persson’s name, as he would know it came from me. I must have your guarantee.”

“You have my guarantee.”

“I am sending you a recording from last night. It is yours to do with as you please. I wash my hands of this, though it will take many washings to clean my soul of what I have seen.” He broke the connection.

A moment later Toby received the recording. He watched from the beginning.

The video showed a panoramic view of Farley’s hotel room, taken from the ceiling above the bed. At the start, Farley was lying in bed, eyes open, presumably watching something on his TC. There was a knock on the door; Farley answered. It was Dubois.

A few minutes later, Toby watched in growing amazement as Dubois and Farley tore off their clothes. A few minutes later they were rolling about in bed.