Bank du Nord, Plateau de St. Georges Branch,
Geneva
Terra, Prefecture X
30 November 3134
The woman called Norah had come to Geneva in order to start trouble, and she was happy with her assignment. For entirely too long, as far as she was concerned, the Kittery Renaissance had been all about talk, with no action taken. She had almost stopped believing in the one big day that would push their man to the top.
The dream of that day was what had brought her into Cullen Roi’s orbit in the first place, and into the ranks of the Kittery Renaissance. She never spoke of her past—she had buried it along with her dead—but she had brought from it into the present a hunger for vengeance against the Capellan Confederation so fierce that nothing less than the might of the entire Republic of the Sphere was sufficient to carry it out. Only an Exarch could command such a vengeance, and only the right Exarch would command it, but the structure of Devlin Stone’s Republic left her with no voice in the selection of the next Exarch save through the Kittery Renaissance and the activities of Cullen Roi.
This little job by itself wouldn’t be enough to make the necessary changes, but it was a start. A promissory note from the Kittery Renaissance, a little taste now of the cup that would be hers to sup from in the fullness of time.
Mindful of Cullen Roi’s instructions, she had chosen her location carefully. She had avoided the heart of downtown Geneva, where The Republic of the Sphere had its government buildings, and where those in power had their exclusive hotels and residential apartments. That territory was set aside for later.
Nor had she gone into any of the city’s poorest and most dangerous precincts. Trouble happening there was barely noted elsewhere, unless it threatened to spill out and engulf the whole city. No. What she’d wanted—and what she had found—was a middle-class, middling-expensive part of the city, a neighborhood where trouble and conflict were rare enough that even a slight unpleasantness would be enough to make the news.
Trouble in this neighborhood would be taken seriously. The Bank du Nord had a large branch office on one corner, and the Unity Mercantile Corporation had its Genevan establishment on the corner diagonally opposite. The other two corners held a block of business offices, with a law firm taking up most of the bottom floor, and a municipal parking garage. The police station covering this precinct was several crowded blocks away—far enough that their response time would be slower than that of the roving tri-vid team from the local news channel, with a studio only one block over.
Norah derived a certain amount of pleasure from the fact that the place best suited to her goal had also turned out to be on the edge of Geneva’s largest Capellan enclave. As far as she was concerned, it didn’t matter that most of the Capellans living in Geneva were the sons and daughters of people who had occupied these few blocks for generations before Devlin Stone conceived of The Republic. The Republic should have rooted them out and sent them home years ago, she thought. Ten to one they’re only waiting for their chance to sell us out, just like those bastards on Liao. She had trusted the people of the Confederation before, during the past she no longer spoke of, and it had cost her everything she once held dear. I will never, she had vowed, make the mistake of trusting any of these people again. And now that she had the opportunity to sow chaos on some of their doorsteps—well, so much the better.
At half past noon Norah was in place, along with certain members of the Genevan cell of the Kittery Renaissance noted less for the subtlety of their political thought than for the hardness of their fists and the heaviness of their boots. They might have trouble following a line of philosophical argument, but they could follow orders, and—in matters like this, at any rate—they knew how to improvise.
Norah was wearing Capellan-style clothing for the occasion. Her appearance was not, in fact, particularly Capellan, but cultural identity these days was as much a matter of choice as of genetics. What counted was that anyone catching sight of her would see the clothes and think “Capellan” instead of looking closer.
Thus disguised, she waited.
A well-dressed young man stepped into the vestibule of the Bank du Nord, punched a few keys, scratched his temple idly, then left. He had all the appearances of an ordinary man passing through the neighborhood on an errand. In the light of what was to come, no one would remember him.
Henrik Morten had planned his route and activities carefully, right down to his bored nonchalance in the vestibule. It helped that he had actual business to transact—he’d recently come into possession of funds that were best transferred at a location other than his normal bank. Tomorrow, the funds would be transferred again as they made their tangled way to their final destination.
If his timing was right, he’d be just an innocent bystander to what was going to erupt any minute. He passed through the security barrier at the building’s front entrance and paused on the exterior steps to let his eyes adjust to the outside light.
An instant later the sun-dazzle cleared from his eyes, just in time for him to see a Capellan woman stumble and fall away from the crowd, into the path of an oncoming bus. He watched her, and the scene he knew she would cause, out of the corner of his eye.
The woman was lucky. She managed to roll away from the vehicle a fraction of a second before it would have hit her, and scrambled, red-faced and panting, to her feet. Pointing a trembling hand at the man—not a Capellan, Henrik saw—who had been standing nearest her in the crowd, she shouted out an accusation that Henrik didn’t quite catch.
The argument escalated faster than Henrik could follow, collecting a sympathetic crowd of partisan onlookers. He hesitated, acting as if he was torn between the desire to watch the conflict unfold and the desire to get away fast. As he waited, the knot of shouting, gesticulating people grew larger and took up more and more of the sidewalk.
Somebody shouted a political slogan—“Strength and Dignity!” it sounded like, although what those qualities had to do with a woman nearly being run over by a bus in downtown Geneva, Henrik wasn’t sure—and somebody else shouted an insult. One man shoved another into the street, and was himself promptly knocked down by a third. The woman whose stumble into traffic had started the whole altercation was no longer anywhere to be seen.
Henrik turned and walked up the bank’s stairs, jumping quickly to his left to avoid a couple of bank guards moving down the stairs. He quickly returned to his right, placing himself back in his chosen path.
Safe enough, at least for the moment, Henrik stood to watch the end result of the work by a woman whom, before today, he’d only heard about.