“I take it from your response that the whole thing smelled as fishy to you people back home as it did to me?”

“To put it mildly, yes.” William glanced at Caparelli, then looked back at his brother. “ONI and Special Intelligence both agree that something about it wasn’t kosher, but of course they don’t agree on what that something was.”

White Haven swallowed a snort of laughter at William’s expression. The Office of Naval Intelligence and its civilian counterpart had a history of disagreeing with one another, and the turf battles when their areas of expertise intersected could be spectacular.

“Would you care to elaborate on that?” he invited after a moment.

“Well,” William leaned back and crossed his legs, “they both agree she must have been dead for some time before the announcement. That ’killed by enemy action while touring the front on Committee business’ is pure crap. We know exactly when and where we’ve knocked out Peep battlecruisers, and none of the dates we have match the one they’ve given. It’s a little more sophisticated than those ’air car accidents’ the Peeps have always favored to explain away disappearances, especially when they’ve got some reason to want to obscure the exact time they disappeared someone, but it’s still a crock, and we know it. As for when she really died, as far as any of our analysts can determine, she hasn’t been seen in public in months, and with that as a starting point, we’ve taken a very close look at the more recent HD imagery of her, as well. At least some of it was faked—and faked very well, I might add—but the earliest example we’ve been able to positively identify is only a couple of T-months old. She may have been dead longer than that, but we can’t be positive.”

“At least we know she was alive recently enough to murder Lady Harrington,” Caparelli put in, and the raw, grating anger in his tone snapped White Haven’s eyes to him. The earl gazed at his superior for a handful of silent seconds, then nodded without any expression whatever and looked back to his brother.

“Should I take it that the disagreement between ONI and SIS is over the reason the Peeps delayed admitting her death?” he asked.

“You should,” William agreed. “SIS thinks she was zapped as part of a personal power struggle between her and Saint-Just or, perhaps, her and the combination of Saint-Just and Pierre. Some of their more… creative analysts have actually raised the possibility that she was the senior inside member of the Leveler conspiracy and Saint-Just found out about it and had her popped. I personally find that a little hard to swallow, but it’s certainly not impossible, especially when you consider the sort of rhetoric she routinely pumped out. But if that was the case, or if it was simply a case of settling a personal rivalry, the Committee may have wanted to keep it quiet until the winners were confident that they’d IDed—and purged—any of her adherents.