“Maybe he does,” the Attorney General conceded. “I suppose a part of it is how much time I spend wrestling with legal briefs and law codes. You don’t want to risk any possibility of ambiguity in those, so you nail everything down in duplicate or triplicate.”

“Very well, then,” Pritchart said. “Let’s see just how brief and concise—in a pleasant way, of course—we can be.”

· · • · ·

Arnold Giancola leaned back in the comfortable chair and gazed at the short, to the point message on his display. It was, indeed, brief and concise, and he felt a cold, unaccustomed tingle of something very like dread as he looked at it.

He’d made only one, very small change in it—deleted a single three-letter word—and for the first time, he felt a definite flicker of uncertainty. He’d known from the moment he’d set out to engineer Pritchart’s foreign policy failure that this moment or one very like it would come, just as he’d always recognized the fire with which he was playing. But now the moment was here. By transmitting his version of this note to Grosclaude, he would finally and irretrievably commit himself. Despite the smallness of the change, this was no minor alteration, nothing anyone could possible explain away as a mere effort to clarify or emphasize. There would be no going back after it, and if the fact that he’d deliberately altered the President’s language ever came out, his own political career would be over forever.

It was odd, he reflected, that he should come to this point… and that even now, he’d broken no laws. Perhaps there ought to be a law specifically requiring a secretary of state not to make any further adjustments to the agreed-upon language of a diplomatic note. Unfortunately, there wasn’t. His quiet but detailed examination of the relevant law had made certain of that point. He’d broken at least a dozen State Department regulations dealing with the filing of true copies, but a good defense attorney could argue that they were only regulations, without statutory authority from Congress, and that as the Secretary of State, his own department’s regulations were subject to his own revision. He’d need a sympathetic judge to make it stand up in court, but he happened to know where he could find one of those.

Not that technical questions of legality would make any significant difference to what would happen to him if his maneuver failed. Pritchart’s fury would know no bounds, and his betrayal of his responsibility to her—and he was too self-honest to use any word besides ‘betrayal,’ even in the privacy of his own thoughts—would raise a firestorm of congressional support for her decision to fire him. Even those who would have agreed with his objectives would turn on him like starving wolves.

Yet even as he thought that, he knew he wasn’t going to allow any doubts, any uncertainty, to deflect him. Not now. He’d come too far, risked too much. Besides, whatever Pritchart might think, it was obvious to him that the High Ridge Government would never agree to negotiate in good faith. He was in the process of educating the rest of the Cabinet to recognize that. In fact, he thought with grim amusement, he was actually educating Pritchart. But the truth hadn’t gone fully home.