Shadow Puppets (The Shadow 3)

"This is a place of some historical importance," said Graff. "Though few of us know it."

"Ah," said Father knowingly.

And because he had guessed it, Peter realized it should be guessable, and so he guessed. "Achilles was here," he said.

"This," said Graff, "is where Bean and his friends tricked Achilles. Achilles thought he was going to be able to kill Bean here, but instead Bean got him in chains, hanging in the shaft. He could have killed Achilles. His friends recommended it."

"Who were the friends?" asked Mother.

"He never told me, but that's not surprising--I never asked. I thought it would be wiser if there were never any kind of record, even inside my head, of which other children were there to witness Achilles's humiliation and helplessness."

"It wouldn't have mattered, if he had simply killed Achilles. There would have been no murders."

"But, you see," said Graff, "if Achilles had died, then I would have had to ask those names, and Bean could not have been allowed to remain in Battle School. We might have lost the war because of that, because Ender relied on Bean quite heavily."

"You let Ender stay after he killed a boy," said Peter.

"The boy died accidentally," said Graff, "as Ender defended himself."

"Defended himself because you left him alone," said Mother.

"I've already faced trial on those charges, and I was acquitted."

"But you were asked to resign your commission," said Mother.

"But I was then given this much higher position as Minister of Colonization. Let's not quibble over the past. Bean got Achilles here, not to kill him, but to induce him to confess. He did confess, very convincingly, and because I heard him do it, I'm on his death list, too."

"Then why are you still alive?" asked Peter.

"Because, contrary to widespread belief, Achilles is not a genius and he makes mistakes. His reach is not infinite and his power can be blocked. He doesn't know everything. He doesn't have everything planned. I think half the time he's winging it, putting himself in the way of opportunity and seizing it when he sees it."

"If he's not a genius, then why does he keep beating geniuses?" asked Peter.

"Because he does the unexpected," said Graff. "He doesn't actually do things remarkably well, he simply does things that no one thought he would do. He stays a jump ahead. And our finest minds were not even thinking about him when he brought off his most spectacular successes. They thought they were civilians again when he had them kidnapped. Bean wasn't trying to oppose Achilles's plans during the war, he was trying to find and rescue Petra. You see? I have Achilles's test scores. He's a champion suckup, and he's very smart or he wouldn't have got here. He knew how to ace a psych test, for instance, so that his violent tendencies remained hidden from us when we chose him to come in the last group we brought to Battle School. He's dangerous, in other words. But he's never had to face an opponent, not really. What the Formics faced, he's never had to face."

"So you're confident," said Peter.

"Not at all," said Graff. "But I'm hopeful."

"You brought us here just to show us this place?" said Father.

"Actually, no. I brought you here because I came up earlier in the day and swept it personally for eavesdropping devices. Plus, I installed a sound damper here, so that our voices are not carrying down the ventilation shaft."

"You think MinCol has been penetrated," said Peter.

"I know it has," said Graff. "Uphanad was doing his routine scan of the logs of outgoing messages, and he found an odd one that was sent within hours of your arrival here. The entire message consisted of the single word on. Uphanad's routine scan, of course, is more thorough than most people's desperate search. He found this one simply by looking for anomalies in message length, language patterns, etc. To find codes, you see."

"And this was in code?" asked Father.

"Not a cipher, no. And impossible to decode for that reason. It could simply mean 'affirmative,' as in 'the mission is on.' It might be a foreign word--there are several dozen common languages in which 'on' has meaning by itself. It might be 'no' backward. You see the problem? What alerted Uphanad, besides its brevity, was the fact that it was sent within hours of your arrival--after your arrival--and both the sender and the receiver of the message were anonymous."

"How could the sender be anonymous from a secure military-designed facility?" asked Peter.

"Oh, it's quite simple, really," said Graff. "The sender used someone else's sign-on."

"Whose?"

"Uphanad was quite embarrassed when he showed me the printout of the message. Because as far as the computer was concerned, it was sent by Uphanad himself."