Potboiler

Paul nodded. “Capital W. Encryption software. You plug in a source code and out pops a blockbuster thriller, complete with message. Our working theory is that the kidnappers came to the mansion looking for it. They didn’t find it, of course, because we erased it, remotely, after Bill died. So they took Carlotta instead.”

It dawned on Pfefferkorn that she had been at the house at his insistence. If he had allowed her to come to his reading, like she’d wanted to, she would be safe right now.

“We have to get her back,” Paul said. “She’s too valuable to leave out in the field.”

Pfefferkorn found it disturbing that such an accounting could be made at all. “She’s an agent, too.”

“One of the best. Co-architect of the original fictocryption program.”

“So you’re going to hand over the Workbench.”

“No way. Are you kidding? It would give them the capacity to generate an endless supply of encoded blockbuster thrillers. It would give them access to most of our worldwide covert arsenal.” Paul paused. “Including several dozen nukes.”

“Oh, God.”

“We’ll use a dummied version. It’ll produce authentic-looking novels but the codes will be gobbledygook. Your challenge is to sell the Twenty-sixers on it.”

There was a silence.

“Why do they want me?” Pfefferkorn asked.

“I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on that,” Paul said.

Pfefferkorn shook his head.

“It’s highly irregular,” Paul said. “You’re not a trained agent.”

“No kidding.”

“I’d much rather send a strike force.”

“I’d much rather you did, too.”

Pfefferkorn stared at the map, at its impenetrable combinations of consonants. “And if I say no?”

Paul did not reply. No reply was necessary.

Pfefferkorn looked at him. “Who are you.”

“I’m family,” Paul said.

There was a silence.

“Please tell me she’s not in on it, too,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Your daughter? No.” Paul put a hand on Pfefferkorn’s arm. “And let me just say, for the record, because I’m sure you’re wondering: I really do love her.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“It didn’t start out that way, but I do now. And I want you to know that, whatever your decision, whatever the result, you have my word that she’ll be taken care of.”

Pfefferkorn regarded him skeptically. “You framed me for murder.”

“Just showing you what we’re capable of. In case you got cold feet.”

“You stranded me naked in a motel.”

Paul shrugged. “We had reward points that were going to expire.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“Carlotta really does love you, too. I know what it must look like, but that’s the truth. One of the reasons we picked you as Bill’s successor was because you already had an established relationship with her.”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.

“It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” Paul said.

Pfefferkorn shut his eyes. He saw Carlotta fighting to save herself. He saw her beaten and thrown into a cell. He saw her forced to recite a speech. He saw her begging him to come alone. He saw her need, and her need was him.

He opened his eyes.

“When do we begin?” he said.

65.

His reeducation lasted eleven days and consisted of intensive cultural, linguistic, and tactical training. The goal was not merely to cram him with information but to give him the tools to process that information like a Zlabian would. To this end, a large staff was brought in. He was given weapons lessons (from Gretchen), acting and elocution lessons (from Canola), makeup lessons (from Benjamin), moustache lessons (from Blueblood), and so forth. Dozens more agents showed up for an hour or two to instruct him in some minor art before departing on the seaplanes that came and went round the clock. The safe house was a hive of activity, all of it centered on him and none of it with any regard for his comfort. He had never felt so important and yet so demeaned. He understood the need for his teachers to be hard on him. As a teacher himself he knew how much of what passed for education was wishy-washy navel-gazing designed to avoid, at all costs, damaging students’ self-esteem. That didn’t mean he enjoyed slogging through G. Stanley Hurwitz’s magisterial six-volume A Brief History of the Zlabian Conflict. Nor did it make any more palatable the endless variations on root vegetables and goats’-milk dairy, meals meant to accustom him to Zlabian cuisine. He wasn’t any less crapulous after swallowing vast quantities of thruynichka, the stupefying concoction made from root vegetable greens fermented in goat’s whey that he would be expected to consume as part of every Zlabian social interaction. He wasn’t any less sore after an hour of Sockdolager punting him around the karate studio.