Another stretcher; the Natpol on it had an arrow in one shoulder, and a bandage around it. The bleeding wasn’t very bad, and it made more sense to get him to a hospital here in the city than to try to extract it in the field. The policeman stopped cursing the enemy and the pain when he saw who was standing over him.

“Report,” Martin said.

“Sir, as soon as they evacuated the ground floor my patrol tried to push up the stairs. It’s a stairwell built around a solid rectangular core and they’re barricading the stairs two times per flight, at least. They’ve got bows and lots of arrows and pila as well. You have to go uphill at them . . . sir, we tried.”

“Carry on,” Martin said to the stretcher-bearers.

The Natpol officer began an apology. Martin cut off the useless blather with a motion of his hand.

“Your men are lightly equipped and mostly past prime fighting age,” he said. “Don’t waste my time. Now, you got at least one of the staff, that woman there, and she was here all through the attack, correct?”

“Yes sir. But she’s not very coherent. Shock, I think.”

Martin walked over to the witness. “Ma’am,” he said.

Something crept into his voice. Her tears stopped, and she stared at him with her mouth a little open, the pupils of her eyes expanding as they met his.

“How many staircases?” he asked.

“One, Mr. President. There was another one but it was salvaged and the floors sealed. The one we use, it’s over there.”

She pointed. He nodded and went on: “The elevator shaft?”

Another pointing gesture. “It was sealed off.”

“You think there were how many of the terrorists?”

“It seemed like a lot but”—her face went blank for a moment, as if her brain was accessing information without the personality getting in the way—“fifty or sixty or a few more.”

“Some of them were Mormons?”

“Most of them, sir. I think. The ones in American uniforms. They were shouting Arise, ye Saints, I know Mormons do that. It was . . . it was all so fast, and there was so much noise and then the blood, blood everywhere, and the ladies were screaming and I didn’t know what to do—”

“Thank you.”

He turned to Koburn, the legate of the Sixth, as she began to sob again.

“Get the elevator shaft open.”

“Sir, the cables will be gone, it’ll be bare.”

Wire cable was prime salvage, with a dozen high-priority uses. It was absolutely certain that they would have been stripped from a building inside the city wall decades ago.

“And it would be a deathtrap if they caught on.”