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“Yeah, well,” he finally said. “Say they did come up with some kind of super-weapon. Somebody’s still got to use it, don’t they? And how you gonna get an army here from Faerie with nobody noticing? Especially a Svarestri army?”
“What difference does it make what kind it is?”
He rolled his eyes. He was going to make himself dizzy at this rate. “You just said it. The Svarestri don’t like Earth; think it’s beneath ’em. So they almost never come here. So how you gonna hide a few thousand people who don’t speak the language, don’t know the laws, can’t drive a car and dress completely crazy?”
“In New York? Check them in at the Y.”
He glared at me. “We’re being serious, all right? And seriously, how do you hide something like that right underneath the Senate’s nose?”
“You don’t.”
Ray nodded, looking smug. “That’s right.”
“You bring them over all at once.”
His smile faded. “What?”
“Æsubrand said the idea was to use Geminus’s portal network to bring everybody over on the night of the attack. But then he was killed, and suddenly nobody knew where the portals were. Well, except for Varus, and he wasn’t talking.”
“And how do you know that?” Ray demanded—angrily, because this was starting to sound plausible and he didn’t want it to be true, any of it. “He’d have had to be in on it. He was Geminus’s second!”
“Yeah, but being a crook and a traitor are two different things, and it’s possible that cagey old Geminus hadn’t told his buddy exactly what he was planning to bring in. Either that, or Varus got cold feet. Either way, we know that because Varus stalled and contacted the Senate, once he understood what was going on.”
Ray started to say something else, and then stopped. “But Varus wasn’t gonna tell ’em any details until he got a deal,” he said slowly.
“Only somebody got to him first, used him to set up the only guys likely to stumble across this whole mess, and then killed him and dumped him in a portal.”
“Not knowing it was one I’d hacked.”
I nodded. “So instead of going someplace he’d never be found, he floated over to Olga’s. But a dead body didn’t tell us much, and someone has been doing a damned good job keeping me from remembering whatever I saw at the wharf. Giving the bad guys time to find another way to bring in their army.”
“But they couldn’t,” Ray argued. “None of the other bosses knew where Geminus’s portals were, and you can’t use what you can’t find!”
“Right. Which was why they decided to use yours.”
I could almost hear the record scratch as Ray slowly looked up from pulling on a pair of dress socks, and stared at me. “What?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No, damn it! This…none of this has anything to do with me!”
“Well, of course it does,” I said impatiently. “How many people do you know who have a portal network to Faerie? It’s not like they had a lot of choice!”
“But I…nobody ever…I wasn’t contacted—”
“Because you were in the Senate’s loving embrace. Nobody could get to you. Which was why they had to attack Central.”
“They—” He stopped and just blinked at me for a minute. “You know, people are always saying that you’re cuckoo. Looney Tunes. Off the freaking edge. But I tell ’em, no, she’s okay. She’s just got some…anger management issues. But you know what? They’re right. You’re nuts.”
“Frequently. But that doesn’t change the fact that the bad guys went into Central to get you.”
“They did not!” Ray said, the anger now mixed with a healthy dose of remembered fear. “That was Radu! Everybody knows the guy is some kind of crazy genius. If anyone was gonna figure out what they were up to—”
“It might have been ’Du, yeah. But think about it. Radu came and went to Central via the portal system. He never used the front door. He had a hard time even telling me what level he was on that night, because he’d almost never been in the elevators. So it wouldn’t have been possible for them to know if he was there or not.”
