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“Admiral,” Charlie said with a nod. “Principessa.” Sophia Starabba inclined her head. Her left hand rested on her husband’s forearm. Though technically it would be more correct to say it rested on his prosthetic.
Eric looked at Charlie. “I patched them into the video feed from the interrogation. They know everything we know. Well, Arthur knows more than you, and Sophia probably knows more than all of us.”
“You flatter me, Fleet Admiral,” Sophia said in her delicate Italian accent.
“Notice she doesn’t deny it. Now, down to business. We’re fucked. Less fucked than we were before because finally we have someone alive who can confirm we are fucked, and who we can torture for information.”
“I don’t like the idea of a ‘cataclysm,’” Arthur said darkly, echoing Charlie’s thoughts. His words were clipped, his accent precise and proper. If the other man hadn’t trained himself to talk like that, he would have sounded more like Charlie.
Eric leaned forward. “What the hell is big enough to be a cataclysm, considering this fuck has already shot up the admirals and blown up Rome?” The fleet admiral looked incredibly alert, completely focused, even though Charlie knew the man mustn’t have had more than a few hours’ rest in the past forty-eight hours.
“Have you checked out the name Varangian?” Charlie asked.
Eric’s eyes widened. “What a brilliant idea! Why didn’t we think of that?”
Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose. If the fleet admiral wasn’t his superior’s superior’s superior he would…well, probably do nothing. The fucker was big and, according to legend, had berserker blackout rages.
Sophia cleared her throat. “There’s no one—now or ever—in the Masters’ Admiralty with that name.”
“I’ve handed it over to…some associates of ours to dig deeper,” Arthur added. “It’s not a legal name, but if there’s a significance, they’ll find it.”
“And we have to consider that he’s not technically, or currently, a member,” Sophia said. “I have no doubt that Mrs. Rutherford believes the man she calls Varangian is a member, but he’s able to manipulate people. We have to consider that any information Mrs. Rutherford has to be false, even if she doesn’t know that.”
“Don’t ruin this for me,” Eric bitched. “We finally caught someone.”
“It’s better than we had before,” Sophia conceded.
Charlie wondered if Arthur had told his wife about the attempted kidnapping.
“We should make one of those serial killer boards, with all the string and shit, to keep track of everything,” Eric said.
“I’m sure the Spartan Guard will enjoy that,” Arthur mused.
“Or,” Eric went on, “we get a bunch of those dolls. I’m sort of pissed off I didn’t come up with that goddamned Russian doll metaphor myself.”
“It feels more accurate than the way we were thinking about it previously,” Sophia said. “It’s not just about individuals, and perhaps that’s where we’ve been wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“We have not only individuals, such as Mrs. Rutherford, but groups, which could be considered their own separate identities. Take, for example, the Domino. When we decoded the clue, the natural assumption was that meant there were two people—the Domino and their apprentice. If we had instead thought of the Domino not as two people, but as an idea—an old foe of the Masters’ Admiralty—would we have noticed, and acted on, signs that indicated there were far more apprentices than the traditional single person?”
“Um, what?” Charlie asked.
On screen, Sophia rose, returning a moment later holding a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, but not so deep. “I do not have a set of nesting dolls, but imagine this box is the Domino. We identified it, and we knew its parts. There were two things inside. The Domino and the apprentice.”
She opened the hinged lid, turning it to the camera. It was an expensive desk set. Inside was a pencil, pen, letter opener, magnifying glass and a few other smaller boxes.
“More than two things,” Sophia said. “So instead, this box is the mastermind.”
“And Alicia is the pen, her husband the pencil, etcetera?” Eric asked.
“Yes, and no.”
Eric put his head in his hands.
“The box is our foe. The mastermind. We are, perhaps, doing ourselves a disservice because it might be more than one person.”
“Jaysus,” Charlie muttered.
