It was with great difficulty that Lenka and Kristy finally dissuaded Josh Cochran of his urge to go looking for Becki. "She needs some time alone," Kristy said, a little self-consciously, sympathizing with Josh's worry. She had been plagued with doubts herself ever since Becki had fled; she kept wondering if she had been too eager to fix this newly-discovered mess, and overreacted, and driven Becki away into who knew what peril.
"It's getting dark, though," Josh protested.
"I am sure she can take care of herself," Lenka said. "In Terra Group you are trained to do so, aren't you?"
"Yes, but," Josh scowled, "for that you have to be alert." He frowned at Kristy. "She was just a bit preoccupied when she left here, you know? She won't be on her guard."
"Look," Kristy argued, "I said what I thought she needed to hear. I didn't want to hurt anybody, but it had to be confronted. And now she needs some time to herself to do just that, to confront it. I really think it'll be better this way, Josh," she pleaded. "You're going to have to just trust her to look out for herself."
"Ordinarily I would," he shot back, "but lately, with whatever's been bugging her--"
"And just whose fault is that, jackass? Kissing another man's fiancée--your good friend's fiancée, at that--"
"Excuse me," Lenka interrupted. "Quarrelling over this isn't going to help Becki or our mission. You do remember our mission?"
Josh glanced suspiciously from Kristy to Lenka and back again. "Of course. It's on hold, as you'll recall, until things settle down in Jerusalem."
"Not necessarily," Lenka said. A look weighty with meaning passed between her and Kristy, and then by unspoken agreement they played their trump card.
"We've been doing a little research," Kristy said, "while I was recuperating. Pulling Cheriss's notes apart, basically. Lenka has some ideas about the shield. If you'd care to hear them."
The two halves of the locket joined, and their combined holo of Cheriss and Red Flight gave way to the familiar lines of notes, everything that Cheriss had learned about the shield in her months on Terra.
Terra Sancta Group had, of course, transferred those notes to files on several datapads to facilitate analysis. But even now, Lenka still preferred to use the locket itself. The subtlety and drama of Cheriss's method of delivering her notes to Terra Group had not ceased to amaze the Mendellian lady.
"Here it goes," Lenka murmured as they watched. "She's remarkably thorough, you know. Exhaustive, really."
"Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Planetary Shields But Were Afraid To Ask," Kristy quipped.
"At least about this shield in particular," Lenka grinned. "Anyhow, you've both seen this show before. It's excellent information, but the trick is in knowing what to do with the information. I've been giving that some thought, along with what you've told me about Terra Group's mission in Paris, and I have noticed some things. Throughlines, if I may call them that: ideas that Cheriss seems to return to over and over."
"And those would be . . .?" Josh prompted.
Lenka left the locket-display running as she brought out a plain, blue-papered notebook. "Here're my thoughts on it. . . ."
"Cheriss starts out with everything she knows about the shield itself." As Lenka spoke, she displayed relevant sections of the locket notes on a datapad, while pointing out her own insights as scribbled in the blue notebook. "Details about Qualor, the depot from which it was stolen, and about the robbery itself--tactics that Cheriss interprets as being a blend of the Imperial and the piratical. Next, a nearly gapless itinerary of where the shield has gone from there, how it ended up on Terra (fairly directly, as it turns out: Cheriss doesn 't comment on this, but it seems to me that whoever stole it must have planned all along to bring it here. And that means someone with Terran connections already in place, doesn't it?)."
"It would almost have to be someone with Terran connections," Josh shrugged. "How else would they even find us, whether or not they wanted to? You know Cheriss was sent on this mission because she's used to backwater planets. Terra's still way off all the trade routes, even the less legal ones."
"The question," Kristy pointed out, "is how they got those Terran connections."
Lenka nodded. "And if we could determine the answer to that question, it would give us a lead on the thief's identity. That's the first of the throughlines: the Identity of the Thief. Someone with Terran connections in place, and someone using tactics combining Imperial strategies with sheer piracy.
"Anyway, the itinerary continues with the path along which Cheriss traced the shield during her months on Terra. Begging the question, you'll note: If the thief had intended to bring it to Terra all along, implying Terran connections prior to the robbery, why didn't he just take it straight to those connections? Why such a convoluted trail? Cheriss has seen more of this planet in ten months than all of you in Terra Group in your whole lives all put together, I'll wager. Did the thief hope to throw her off? If so, he didn't succeed. Perhaps it's just that she's better than he expected. But what if it has nothing to do with her pursuit of the shield?"
"Maybe he was just muddying his tracks, to be on the safe side," Josh suggested.
"Perhaps," Lenka said. "But what if not? Look here, I've plotted part of that itinerary." She turned to another page in the notebook with a carefully sketched general map of Terra, crisscrossed with lines between various cities. "There's not much pattern to it, you can see. Not even the sort of orderly randomness that might make sense if the thief were muddying the trail. What it looks like to me is simply someone without a destination in mind. Going from one place to the next, always leaving town before Cheriss can catch up with him, but never really heading more in one direction than another."
"Almost like a traveling salesman," Kristy grinned. "Or traveling con man."
"Or traveling auctioneer?" Josh suggested. "Hey, Lenka, maybe I'm reading this map all wrong, but is there actually more than one line?"
Lenka nodded approvingly. "That brings me to my next point: the Splitting of the Shield. We know from Cheriss's notes as well as from Terra Group's experiences in Paris that the shield is not traveling singularly. There's a summary in the notes, also, of Cheriss's research and briefings about the workings of the shield itself. A detailed diagram, here," she flipped to another notebook page where she'd copied out the diagram from the locket, reproducing fairly adequately in the 2-D format what the locket holo had given in 3-D, "shows each separate component as it fits into the whole. You've recognized this one already, of course--the focusing matrix that Terra Group intercepted in Paris. But that is only one part of many. It begs another question: Why was the shield split into these components when it reached Terra? For Cheriss gives no indication that it had been anything but whole before its arrival on this planet. Sometime after arrival, then, it was divided, and it appears that the parts have been traveling separately since then, though the bulk of it, what appears to be the core of the thing, has stayed together. That's what Cheriss spent most of her time here following. It was the whereabouts of the disconnected bits that had given her the greatest trouble in her mission--most of them minor components, some of which the shield doesn't truly need in order to function, and many actually easy to replace, according to Cheriss. That is, always assuming that whoever has the core of the shield also has the extraterrestrial connections to acquire the replacement parts. Then there were those few utterly indispensable parts traveling alone, as well. These smaller components seem to have split up onto a number of separate trails--Cheriss doesn 't have complete itineraries for any of them, but various bits and pieces keep turning up here and there all over Terra, usually on the black market or at some sort of quiet auction like the one yesterday. But as for the core of the shield, she kept tracks on that well enough: it seems to have come to rest as long as two months ago. Just outside of Baghdad."
"We knew Iraqi agents had been meeting with someone claiming to have the shield for sale, back in Paris," Josh nodded.
"The sale must have gone through," said Kristy.
"If the core is indeed what they were selling," Lenka cautioned. "It could have been one of the other components, and the Iraqis just aiming to complete their collection."
"And whoever completes the collection first . . ." Josh gave a low whistle.
"Think on that," Lenka nodded, "and also think on why the thing was split to begin with, because I haven't been able to come to a satisfactory conclusion on that. But there's more, in the meantime. Cheriss also lists names. The final throughline: Who's Who in the Race for the Shield."
"Yeah, we've been trying to dig up information on the people she names," Josh said. "Haven't found anything so far."
"That's why I suspected," Lenka said, "that they were the wrong names."
"What?"
"Cheriss put the names in code."
"But why?" asked Josh, perplexed. "I mean, why that and not the rest of her notes? Everything else has made perfect sense. And it seems pretty likely that she only intended Terra Group to see the locket, so what was the need for code?"
"I'm not sure," Lenka said, "but it looks to me as if the names are possibly in a separate file from the rest of the notes. I don't know why the other file wasn 't coded. Perhaps she wrote that one in a hurry to leave it for us, while the list of names was something she'd been compiling all along." The lady in waiting shrugged and reached for her datapad. "Regardless, the names were in code, as it turned out. Not that I figure I'd have much luck at breaking it, as I've no experience with New Republic codes. But then, the rest of you don't seem to have had any luck even detecting that the code existed. So, I gave it to Zee to see what she could do with it. Turns out that she may not know much French, but she does have a head for cryptography." Lenka smiled and handed Josh the datapad. "She ended up with this."
Amazed, he scrolled through the list of names on the screen. Before long he had spotted a few that were actually familiar. "Hey, I think this is one of the agents Nick identified from our holocam feed at the auction," he exclaimed. "And here's another one I recognize. Cheriss has him listed as one of the agents she' s seen dealing with sellers of the components. Hm . . . she doesn't actually list names of the sellers, does she?" He scanned the list hopefully.
"What do you make of this group?" Lenka pointed at a subset of the list. "These names are Russian."
"Hm, maybe they're the ones I ran into in Paris," Josh suggested. "Listed as toughs who've been following the shield sellers around, trying to get something for nothing, apparently. And--" He stopped cold, nearly dropping the datapad.
"What?" Kristy prompted.
"My God," Josh breathed finally. "If this is right . . . . Lenka, call everyone together. Get Brad back in from his scouting rounds. It's time for a new briefing. At least we're still all close at hand, thanks to being shipbound. . . ."
"Except Becki," Kristy reminded him.
"Well, comm her. And if she's not here when we start, she'll just have to catch up when she gets back," he sighed. "This is urgent. I want everyone to hear Lenka's ideas about Cheriss's notes. And then I want to get in touch with Sci again. Because one of these names I definitely do recognize. And if he's here, looking for the shield . . ." his finger drifted along the datapad's screen, resting ominously on one name: John Wells, American agent pursuing rumors of the shield. "Now would be a good time to call in some backup on this mission."