Being a two-part message, it didn't entirely register right away. For a moment he looked happy. Then his face started to turn red.
She leaned in close again. "Don't worry, though. I'm leaving you. I'll let you know where to mail the divorce papers. Now, you get back to work."
She started to walk away. "Randi," he called after her.
"Not your fault, Bob!" she called over her shoulder. "Nothing was your fault. You're a great guy."
She felt liberated as she walked back through the store. Her mood was so generous and expansive that she bought a little container of lip balm and a bottle of water. The tiny amount of profit from the sale would be her last contribution to Bob's life.
Then she got into the car and drove south, because that way was a right turn coming out of the parking lot, and traffic was too heavy to wait for a chance to go left. She'd drive wherever the currents of the traffic led her. She wouldn't try to hide from anybody. She'd let Bob know where she was as soon as she decided she was there, and she'd divorce him in a perfectly ordinary way. But she wouldn't bump into anyone she knew or anyone who knew her. She would become effectively invisible, not like someone trying to hide, but like someone who had nothing to hide at all but who never became important to anyone.
Except to her beloved son.
3
COUP
From: JulianDelphiki%[email protected]
To: Volescu%[email protected]
Re: Why keep hiding when you don't have to?
Look, if we wanted you dead or punished, don't you think it would have happened already? Your protector is gone and there's not a country on Earth that will protect you if we lay out the facts of your "achievements."
What you did, you did. Now help us find our children, wherever you've hidden them.
Peter Wiggin had brought Petra Arkanian with him because she knew Caliph Alai. They had both been in Ender's Jeesh together. And it was Alai who had sheltered her and Bean in the weeks before the Muslim invasion of China--or liberation of Asia, depending on which propaganda mill you shopped at.
But now it seemed that having Petra with him meant nothing at all. Nobody in Damascus acted as if it even mattered that the Hegemon had come like a supplicant to see the Caliph. Not that Peter had arrived with any publicity--this was a private visit, with him and Petra passing themselves off as a tourist couple.
Complete with bickering. Because Petra had no patience with him. Everything he did and said and even thought was wrong. And last night, when he finally demanded, "Tell me what you really hate about me, Petra, instead of pretending it's all this trivial stuff."
Her answer had been devastating: "Because the only difference I ever saw between you and Achilles was that you let others do your killing for you."
It was so patently unfair. Peter had devoted himself to trying to avoid war.
At least now he knew why she was so furious at him. When Bean went into the besieged Hegemony compound to face Achilles alone, Peter understood that Bean was putting his own life on the line and that it was extremely unlikely that Achilles would give him what he had promised--the embryos of Bean's and Petra's children that had been stolen from a hospital soon after in vitro fertilization.
So when Bean put a .22 slug through Achilles's eye and let it bounce around a few dozen times inside his skull, the only person who absolutely got everything he needed was Peter himself. He got the Hegemony compound back; he got all the hostages safely returned; he even regained his tiny army trained by Bean and led by Suriyawong, who had turned out to be loyal after all.
While Bean and Petra did not get their babies, and Bean was dying, Peter couldn't do a thing to help either of them except provide office space and computers for them to conduct their search. He also used all his connections to get them whatever cooperation he could from the nations where they needed access to records.
Right after Achilles's death, Petra had simply been relieved. Her irritation with Peter had developed--or merely resurfaced--in the weeks after, as she saw him trying to reestablish the prestige of the office of Hegemon and try to put together a coalition. She began making snotty little comments about Peter playing in his "geopolitical sandbox" and "outstrutting the heads of state."
He should have expected that actually having her travel along with him would only make it worse. Especially because he wasn't following her advice about anything.
"You can't just show up," she told him.
"I have no choice."
"It's disrespectful. As if you think you can drop in on the Caliph. It's treating him like a servant."
"That's why I brought you," Peter patiently explained. "So you can see him and explain that the only way this can happen is if it's a secret meeting."
"But he already told me and Bean that we couldn't have access to him like we used to. We're infidels. He's Caliph."
"The Pope sees non-Catholics all the time. He sees me."