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  “Look, go ahead, same assignment, but in the open now. Tell people you work for us.”

  Ken scratches his head. “Do you think they’ll talk to me if they know I’m from a government? Can’t we say I was volunteering or something?”

  “Nah,” Suzuki says. “Too risky. Better to have you declare yourself than to have someone else sniff it out and catch you in an omission. Pick your targets carefully and try to keep it quiet, get as much intel as you can. Besides, the campaign’s almost over; we’ll have you working higher profile soon enough,” he adds, setting Ken on another of his self-esteem rollercoaster rides.

  * * *

  Yoriko does not want to get beat up or to be a prisoner for even a few days. In an hour, she’s going to be late to pick up her children from school, and while her friend Yua can usually help out for an afternoon, the thought of asking her to raise her children while Yoriko rots in jail makes Yoriko’s eyes water. Besides, Liberty seems to know everything already. Would it do any harm to tell them? If she hesitates, it is mostly to wonder whether they will let her go so easily. All she has to do is say the name of the government that hired her and she can leave? If that’s true, it means they really want to know.

  Which means they don’t know yet.

  The head of security clears his throat, or maybe he’s stifling a yawn, and glances at the time on his handheld. He starts to roll up his sleeves.

  “Okay!” says Yoriko, almost yelling in her anxiousness to cooperate. “I’ll tell you. It was 平和亜紀. They paid me to hang around you guys and see what I could find out.”

  The security chief’s eyebrows go up, then come down again in a puzzled frown. “Those Japanese nationalists?” he says. “They’re not even competing for centenals here.”

  “They heard you were, um, showing some aggression toward the mainland,” Yoriko says. “They wanted to know more. They asked me to find solid intel so they could plan something preemptive.”

  His face hardens again. “And did you?”

  “Nothing more than hints,” Yoriko says, hanging her head as though ashamed.

  “Where’d they hear about it in the first place?” he asks.

  “Not from me!” Yoriko says quickly. “They only contacted me once they were already suspicious.”

  “And why you?”

  “I don’t know. Some Japanese guy gets in my cab, asks if I want to make some extra money.” She lets the tears that have been pressing on her eyes seep out. “I never thought it would be this dangerous!”

  * * *

  When she gets to Kobe, Mishima does a walk-through of the debate venue. Some genius in the events section decided to hold it in the glass-paneled building housing the Disaster Reduction and Human Innovation Institute, established after the Hanshin-Awaji quake at the end of the last century. In theory, the globally broadcast debate doesn’t require a lot of space; in practice, Information raises considerable revenue by selling tickets to the extremely wealthy, so they try to get large auditoriums. This time, they’ve upped the prices for seats inside the moderately sized conference hall, then removed some interior walls and sold additional tickets for people to watch from outside the glass walls, hovering in private or rented crows.

  It’s a security nightmare, but they’ve got a streamlined peacekeeper crow and six prototype scooter-sized tsubame to cover it. Thankfully, Mishima will be stationed inside the hall, so it’s not her problem. She’s not super happy with the setup there, either. They’ve put the stage in the center of the auditorium rather than at one end, both to allow for more of the expensive front-row seats and to avoid seating-arrangement conflicts among the debaters as much as possible. That leaves a lot more angles of attack to cover, so they’ve doubled the standard security complement. While she’s checking emergency exits, she hears a buzz: the walls vibrating with a minor aftershock. Mishima scowls. Why anyone would construct a glass building in an earthquake zone is beyond her.

  Despite all the vulnerabilities and the lack of prep time, the enlarged security team knows their stuff and seems to have things well under control; she’s not sure why she couldn’t have stayed in Tokyo. Since she’s there, though, she might as well take advantage. Mishima flies to Osaka for an early dinner at an okonomiyaki place Korbin recommended, and then heads to Arima to spend the evening soaking in the hot springs. Immersed to her neck in steaming water, she can admit that time off from emergency duty might not be so bad.

  * * *

  Yoriko scurries to her taxi, amazed that they let her go. They must have been convinced by her lie about her employer and her truthful lack of success. Maybe she’s right about how routine this kind of spying is. They didn’t even bother to search her. She has it all worked out in her mind: the route that gets her out of this centenal quickest and goes nowhere near the other Liberty centenal in Naha on her way home. There’s a red light on the first corner, and Yoriko stops for it, her hands shaking when she takes them off the wheel. Traffic lights only turn red when something is coming from the other side, and she shuttles her eyes between the rearview mirror and the cross street. What if the head of security has changed his mind? Is he trying to stop her from getting out? A Sunway finally dawdles by and the light switches back to green. She feels her shoulders slump as soon as she leaves the centenal, although she’s not completely safe yet: she has to look up which governments have extradition agreements with Liberty.

  At least she knows Policy1st doesn’t, and as soon as she crosses the border into their territory, she wants to call Suzuki. She hesitates, though; everyone says that it’s easy for people, or governments, to snoop on calls. She pulls over in a Royal Host family restaurant parking lot and finds the nearest 平和亜紀 office, which is in some small town outside of Fukuoka.

  “Hello, Peaceful Asian Era, humbly at your service,” says the extremely polite Japanese voice on the other end. Yoriko drags her eyes from the rearview to glance at her handheld and sees an impassive office-girl face framed by neat hair and some kind of blouse with a big bow under her chin. She’s glad she doesn’t have her own vid turned on; she must look like a vagrant or a psychopath or a crank caller. The receptionist would click off immediately.

  “Hello, hello,” she stutters. “I was wondering … what is your policy on Okinawa?”

  The receptionist is silent, off-railed from her canned answers by a question that hasn’t made any sense since before she was born. “We don’t have any centenals in Okinawa,” she says finally.

  “But if you did?” Yoriko presses, her eyes still skittering around, hitting the rearview, coming back to the cars around her.

  “All of our policies are available on our Information,” the woman says primly, and clicks off. Yoriko hopes it was long enough to seem credible. She pulls out into traffic again and drives slowly home. She calls Suzuki while packing.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ken walks into the waiting room of a small office in a low apartment building in Miraflores where he has an appointment. He is still trying to figure out how he can present himself now that he’s not undercover. On the other hand, he feels better about the way he’s working with local offices now.

  He called Natalia at the Policy1st office in Lima before he got on his second plane. She sounded harried but reasonably pleased to hear he was coming in.

  “I can’t give you much time,” she said in what he assumes was polite understatement. “What do you need?”

  “What do you need?” Ken asked. “I’m sure you’re campaigning flat out in the centenals you’ve targeted. My mandate is to look at any other centenals—maybe that you think are borderline, maybe that you haven’t had time to fully assess—and see if there are any quick fixes, or anything worth calling in extra troops for.”

  “Okay, cool,” Natalia said. “That would be good. You’ll have a list of priorities by the time you land.”

  Miraflores is at the top of the list, which surprises Ken; he thought the pleasant beachfront centenal would be reliably Heritage. He guesses tha
t Natalia, like Agus, can’t help looking beyond winning local centenals and is strategizing for the Supermajority. If Policy1st can’t win it, the least they can do is help knock out Heritage, open the race up for next time.

  The door opens and a neat little woman nods Ken into her office. He settles himself into the offered chair, hoping the sweat isn’t showing under the arms of his recently purchased guayabera. It’s nice to be back in summertime, but he’s starting to wonder if this climatic ping-pong can be healthy.

  “So, what can I do for you?” she asks.

  “I’m a researcher for Policy1st,” Ken says. He’s decided that “researcher” is still the best way to describe his work; it distances him from campaigning. He pulls a small notebook and a pen from his bag, a trick he’s stealing from those Luddite pollsters in Jakarta.

  It works amazingly well. The small woman, an ex-politician and catedrática, stares at him, chuckles, and immediately opens up. “I’m so glad to see paper coming back into fashion among you young people,” she clucks. “Naturally, one worries about the forests, but as long as we use it in moderation…”

  Ken twists his question to be as indirect as possible. “You’ve noticed a lot of people using pen and paper recently?”

  “Well, certainly among you pollsters,” she says. “That nice young lady who was here the other day was doing the same, although she had a much larger file.”

  “Where was she from?” Ken asks, wondering if the answer can be trusted.

  “Oh, one of the corporates.”

  Ken swallows his eagerness, keeps his smile on. “Is that so? Which one was it?”

  She hesitates a long moment, perhaps hoping that he’ll let it go, and then digs her handheld out of her pocket with a light grunt. “Let me see; it should be in my appointments calendar. Ah, yes, Liberty. She didn’t want to say so at first, but eventually she had to mention it. Nice young lady. All sorts of questions, but very polite.”

  Ken is wondering how he can very politely ask what his counterpart discussed with this dapper, inoffensive woman who is the power broker for at least three centenals, but before he can find a formula that doesn’t sound entirely unethical, she has moved on.

  “So, I suppose you want to know what Policy1st needs to do to win here?”

  Maybe she is answering his unasked question after all.

  “Of course we want to know how we can better serve the people of this area,” he says as smoothly as he can, “but I’m a researcher, not a campaigner, so I’d most like to hear about the issues here, what people are concerned about. Whatever you can tell me.”

  She has barely drawn her breath to answer when Ken jumps to his feet and sprints for the door, getting halfway there before he realizes the profesora hasn’t moved. At first, he thinks she hasn’t reacted at all, but with adrenaline-sharpened sight, he sees her beringed fingers clutching the arm of her chair like talons before they relax. She smiles at him. “Just a little tremor,” she says. “We have them frequently here, although that one was a bit larger than usual. Nothing to worry about.”

  Muttering an apology, Ken edges back into his seat.

  * * *

  Sitting back in the salon chair while the stylist blow-dries, Mishima’s fingers tingle with the urge to access Ken’s Information. Normally, Mishima would have known everything about him long before they slept together, even if she had to scan his file at eyeball level while in the bathroom between the main course and dessert. She can admit it’s a little unfair; in addition to her hyperconnected, high-speed brain, she has easy access to almost any Information, even most protected data, through her job. If he looks her up, he will find very, very little and most of it misdirection (unless she’s underestimated him). But it’s only sensible to check up on someone, especially during the election season. For now, she leaves it. The election will be over in a week, and she’s unlikely to see him before then, anyway.

  Instead, she decides to feed her narrative disorder. Mishima doesn’t have to check her biometrics to know that her brain could use some downtime. She scrolls through her favorite feeds to a Korean soap, the nth-generation descendant of Boys Over Flowers, leans back, and watches the antics of spoiled, implausibly attractive rich kids while the woman massages her hair.

  “You know that content was compiled by underpaid children in Bangladesh.”

  Mishima has a brief flashback to her visit to one of those content-creation sweatshops. The teenagers, mostly girls, manipulating names and images and chunks of text on endless digital storyboards. Their smiles as they crowded around her. Without moving from under the easy fingers of the masseuse, she slides her hand under the smock to touch the handle of her stiletto, and shifts her gaze to the seat next to her, where Domaine is having his ’fro spritzed.

  “Teenagers in Armenia, actually. That was one of my first jobs for Information.” She’d been careless about covering her tracks; the salon bids were neither encrypted nor protected. It must have been easy for him to find her.

  “What?”

  “Checking out corporate claims. Something like what you were doing in Saudi, perhaps?”

  Domaine chuckles, low and rumbling. He’s having a pedicure done along with his hair, toes already fanned out in the bamboo separator, and his laugh sounds like he’s enjoying the foot rub a little too much. “Yes, similar.” He reaches into his pocket and flips something shiny at her. Mishima catches it in the air with a satisfying smack, ready to toss it back if it gives any indication of exploding, but when she looks, it’s just a small disk.

  “Take a look,” Domaine says. “No viruses, I promise.”

  It’s almost a joke—Information antispyware and virus-blockers are legendary—but Mishima doesn’t laugh. She looks, not at the disk, but at him. She has to admit, something about Domaine makes her libido twitch. There’s that fanatical devotion to his ideals, the edge of danger, and his combined underdog/lone-wolf thing. Mishima is happy to have reached an age where she doesn’t need to give in to every urge.

  “What’s on it?”

  “See for yourself,” he says, settling back into his salon chair and closing his eyes. “I’ll wait.”

  Her handheld scans it and finds nothing suspicious, only a few seconds of aud/vid. Still suspicious, Mishima has it play, but with sound on mono and the images translucent, so she can keep an eye on Domaine at the same time.

  It’s a montage of world undesirables—a Saudi minister, the leader of a band of violent Sahelian rebels, a religious autocrat in the former United States—each identified with subtitles, each lauding the micro-democratic election system, which allows them to pursue their decidedly undemocratic ends. Or, as the sheikh puts it: “There is nothing that suits us more than most of the world believing that their will is being carried out by governments that do exactly as they please.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Mishima says when it’s finished. So, that’s what Domaine was doing in Saudi, she thinks. No wonder she didn’t find any connections between him and Liberty.

  “You’re fine with being part of the problem?” Domaine asks, eyes still closed.

  Mishima doesn’t deign to answer.

  “Most people don’t know, or never think about it,” Domaine goes on, finally looking up. “The fact that the election system enables the atrocities of its so-called enemies? It’s going to make a compelling anticampaign ad.”

  Most people don’t care, Mishima thinks. “It doesn’t look like these people were filmed with permission.”

  “As if that matters,” sneers Domaine.

  Mishima laughs. “It would be suicide to use that,” she tells him, tossing the disc back.

  Domaine’s mouth twitches oddly as he tosses the disk in his palm like a coin. “Why, Mishima,” he says. “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “Was there anything else?” The stylist has started the braiding, and Mishima would like to relax and enjoy it.

  “What do you think you’re fighting for, anyway?” Domaine hisses. “Democ
racy? Hardly. The system is creaking already. You’re one or two Heritage wins from a de facto dictatorship. A dynasty.” Domaine nods at his pedicurist, who starts the hairdryer on silent mode and runs it over his newly gilded toenails. He leans over the arm of Mishima’s lounger. “I know you agree with me.”

  Mishima doesn’t look away from her own eyes in the mirror, yawns.

  Domaine glances down at his widespread feet, laughs a little, then leans back in toward Mishima. “Whatever you think of me, I believe you have good intentions,” he whispers. “Which is why I’m going to tell you: be careful of your friends. Not everyone you work with is on your team.”

  “What, you’ve got moles in Information?” Mishima asks, dubious but intrigued.

  “I didn’t say Information. And I didn’t say they were mine.” Domaine leans forward to check his toenails, then slips on sandals and flip-flops away.

  Mishima motions to her stylist and requests that they move into a private room. She’s not going to be able to think, much less relax, expecting him to return at any moment. Before she forgets, she mutters a quick message to the security team leader with Domaine’s description and history to alert him that he’s in the area, then sets her handheld to run a complete scrub. It’s a good use for the enforced downtime of the braiding.

  * * *

  “So,” Ken says, speaking slowly and deliberately as he tries furiously to catch up in his notebook, “you’re saying that some governments are threatening war?”

  “More promising than threatening,” the profesora reflects. “They’re quite open about it, too. And it’s not doing them any harm, as far as I’ve been able to learn. Talk about going after Bolivia or Chile still resonates, even though Bolivia and Chile don’t exist in the old territorial sense.”

  “Fascinating,” Ken says, scribbling away. “Why doesn’t anyone report them to Information or the election commission?”

  “Like I said, many people view this favorably. And the ones who don’t probably don’t take it seriously. After all, what could they actually do?”