Shadow of Freedom

Yeargin Kowalski, on the other hand, was a local businessman and banker. He’d had to deal with the transstellars, especially with Brindle Star, but he’d focused more on the more marginal deals too small to attract Palgani’s attention. In some ways, Michelle supposed, Kowalski had followed in Brindle Star’s wake, gleaning the predator’s leftovers. Another way to look at it, though, was that he’d provided capital to a host of locally owned entrepreneurships which would have been completely squeezed out by the transstellars without him.

When Prime Minister Montview began constructing a genuine government, he’d needed a finance minister to replace the totally incompetent (and totally corrupt) crony Palgani had insisted hold that position in the “official” government. Kowalski had been on his short list from the outset, and nothing anyone had turned up in his background had disqualified him. In fact, he’d been a highly popular choice among those same local entrepreneurs, and there’d never been the least suggestion of dishonesty or corruption on his part.

Because of his dealings with Palgani and Kasomoulis, on the other hand, Kowalski had had a very good idea of where to start when it came to exhuming the transstellars’ books. Not the official books which they’d kept primarily for tax assessment, shareholder earnings calculations, and writeoff purposes, but the real books, the ones which detailed every sordid detail of their actual operations.

Helen Sanderson, originally the Pine Mountain Police Department’s second ranking officer, had been named to head the new Royal Police whose jurisdiction spanned the entire star system. Her immediate superior had been unavailable for the position, since he’d been under arrest at the time and was probably going to spend the next several T-years as a guest of the Meyers penal system. With Kowalski to guide her, and the enthusiastic support of Janice Hannover, a Meyers realtor and commercial farmer who’d been strong-armed into taking the position of attorney general, Sanderson had launched an aggressive probe of the entire “black economy.”

Aside from providing a handful of computer techs to assist in the effort, Tenth Fleet had been perfectly happy to stand back and let the locals deal with their own dirty laundry. It was the last thing Michelle wanted to get involved in, yet they’d been sharing their findings with Lecter from the beginning, and Michelle had always realized Sanderson and Kowalski were almost certain to eventually unearth something with implications for her.

“All right,” she said. “Give me the quick summary version.”

“You want to hear about Palgani and Kasomoulis? Or just about Verrocchio and Hongbo?”

“Which do you think I should be hearing about?”

Lecter pondered for a moment, drumming more loudly with the grapefruit spoon until Michelle reached across and snatched it out of her hand with a glare. The chief staff looked at her for a moment, then grinned.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “And as to your question, eventually I think you’re going to be very interested in what we’ve discovered about Palgani and Kasomoulis. I know I wouldn’t have believed how the hell much money they could siphon off.” She shook her head. “I mean, we’ve always known the amounts have to be huge in any protectorate system, but these two—! Let’s put it this way, neither of them was ever going to reach Klaus Hauptman levels, but both of them were—conservatively—multibillionaires. And the really neat thing about it is that it looks like a lot of what they squirreled away was illegal even under the letter of Solly law. Everybody knew they were doing it, of course, but it was illegal, and that means Hanover and Sanderson are in a perfect position to seize their ill-gotten gains, completely irrespective of what the Crown ultimately does about nationalizing Brindle Star and Newman & Sons’ local assets.”

The chief of staff’s smile was positively seraphic, and Michelle chuckled evilly.

“You’re right, I am going to want to hear all about that eventually. Or at least my nasty side is. The best way to deal with someone like those two is to leave them without a pot to piss in. I mean, a little prison time on top of it would be nice, but taking away all their toys is even better.”

“I know.”

Lecter smiled for a few more moments, but then the smile faded.

“I know,” she repeated. “But aside from the fact that it looks like Brindle Star was probably carrying the occasional illicit cargo for Manpower and some of the other Mesan transstellars—they had a reciprocal agreement with Jessyk, for example—what Sanderson and Kowalski have turned up about them so far is less immediately important then what they’re finding about Verrocchio and Hongbo. Especially Hongbo.”

“You said that already—that Hongbo’s a more important player from our perspective than Verrocchio,” Michelle observed. “I find that a little surprising. Why buy the vice commissioner when you’ve already bought the commissioner?”