Fabienne stepped out of the holo-chamber and called into the air, "Geoffrey, I need the American president by téléphone."

A speaker on her desk crackled, followed by her manservant's voice. "Of course. What shall I give as the reason for the call?"

Fabienne frowned. "Give nothing."

"Understood," Geoffrey said. "At once, mademoiselle."

Scurrying noises were heard over the speaker. The heiress walked to a four-inch aluminum-oxynitride window, bulletpfroof, and looked out. Beyond the blurred headlights of Boulevard Périphérique lay Paris. The great city was nearly a kilometer away but nonetheless showed the toll of Anarchy. Mortar ash scarred the façades of buildings, some missing gaping chunks. Burning slums upwind had turned the Eiffel Tower black from its usual brown.

Geoffrey appeared at the doorway. "I have the president, mademoiselle. Line two."

Fabienne neither looked at him nor left the window, merely reached back her palm. Geoffrey hurried in and placed the handset there.

"Edward." She said the name like bland bouillabaisse.

The president said, "What's on your mind, Fabes?"

Fabienne Rivard fumed at this folksy nickname, which the moronic Texan had given her at their introduction years ago.

"It has come to my attention," she said, "that an American corporation is plotting to attack Roche Rivard."

"You're kidding," said the president. "Who'd be dim enough to try that?"

Surely as if it had appeared in the holo-chamber, Fabienne imagined the jowly face of Jim Steed.

"American Dynamics," she said. "As we speak, they are drawing up battle plans."

"And how would you know that?"

"Rivard LLC employs a broad, deep portfolio of information-harvesting techniques."

The president, who'd been elected by dint of wealthy supporters and an avowed aversion to complexity, said, "Bet you do."

Then he whistled—a lascivious sound suggestive of some sex metaphor.

Fabienne ignored the misogyny. "I hope my organization can count on your full-throated cooperation in preventing this unprovoked attack."

The president wheezed. "Half of California seceded last week. My national Guard's busy freeing up the Mississippi River from biker gangs. You think I have the wherewithal to go around preemptively policing some US company's attack? Alleged attack?"

"You won't stop them?"

"I can't stop them. No money, no men...hell, there are days I beg Canada to keep an eye on Seattle for us."

Fabienne released a breathy sigh at this answer, which she'd expected. "Then I must warn you that Rivard will not accept an attack on its headquarters. This will be considered an act of war."

"Act of war? Isn't this whole damn mess a war? How d'ya separate the mud from the pig's slop?"

"I don't understand your farmspeak," she said. "But know this. We reserve all military options when a foreign entity threatens our very existence."

"All military options? What's that mean?"

"All means all. In our beautiful French, the word is tout."

She explained that not only the Pittsburgh plant, but American Dynamics facilities in Reno, Pensacola, Mexico City and more would be in scope as retaliatory targets.

The president barely objected. Fabienne, who knew the state of his forces better than he did himself, had understood his powerlessness going into the call. She'd known the man had no leverage over Jim Steed or—more importantly—Steed's board of directors. She merely needed to establish American Dynamics as the aggressor, thus minimizing the inevitable backlash to Rivard's devastating response.

Next, Fabienne had Geoffrey contact the prime minister of Germany, and after her, the crown prince of Dubai. Some heads of state she pressed similarly to curtail rogue actors in their country. Others she lobbied for a larger Forceworthy spend.

She was in the middle of needling the strongman leader of Zimbabwe—"Congo siphons five thousand barrels each day, and what do do?"—when Thérèse Laurent entered.

Worry was scratched across the blonde's face.

"Excuse me, Kufar," she said into the phone. "I must go. We will talk more soon about your weakened stream."

As she hung up, Thérèse clutched her Grand Planifier tablet over her chest. "What have you learned about New Jersey?"

Fabienne looked neutrally at her amie. "Nothing more."

"Did Leathersby interrogate them?"

"He did. It was a waste."

"How? We must find out if the kernel's truth is known outside the organization! The risks, if we are exposed..."

Thérèse shivered at the thought—or perhaps the thirteen degree Celsius office temperature, which Fabienne insisted upon for the health of the planet.

Fabienne had no desire to blunt her friend's paranoia. Paranoia and vigilance went together like bleu cheese and a Sauternes with notes of apricot and nut. Still, she didn't personally fear the effort by Rafferty and Jones.

She stayed on the topic of Leathersy. "Our esteemed English colleague is done being trusted with female detainees. He may be done altogether here."

But Thérèse wouldn't be diverted from her worry. "If the data loss is connected to the kernel—if people become aware...what may they attempt?"

"They can attempt what they like," Fabienne said. "None can endure the travails of the Great Safe."

"But Rafferty and Jones have interfered before. With the space laser, with the virus—"

"The laser was my father's failure." Fabienne felt her face color. She heard a crack, and looking down at her hands, found she'd unconsciously snapped a pencil in two. "The Americans cannot stop us."

Thérèse licked her full lips. Her Grand Planifier tablet chimed, informing her that some task had slipped behind schedule.

"We have their associate," Fabienne continued. "Rafferty's lover, no doubt. They are American cowboys. They will come for her."

"What if they've co-opted Pomeroy? He was alone with them in that helicopter."

"Oui. And I have dragged the old codger in here a half-dozen times asking this very question, closely observing his fits of palsy. Each time he denies."

"He's skilled at denying."

C'est vrai, Fabienne thought. And if Rafferty and Jones were working with somebody inside Roche Rivard, the threat was indeed greater.

When Thérèse's tablet chimed again, Fabienne took the opportunity to insist she address whatever projects needed attention. Thérèse agreed, chagrined, and left.

Fabienne had Geoffrey get the leader of Zimbabwe on the phone again. Over the course of an hour, she secured another fifteen million euros in security outlays from him and other world leaders.

The manservant accepted back the phone. He started for his cubicle, then stopped and faced the heiress, then started again for the cubicle before finally harnessing his resolve.

"Permit me to say, mademoiselle," he began with ducked head, "that your father would be proud. Henri himself could not have done it better."

Fabienne granted his grovel a smile. "My, Geoffrey, what a compliment. How revealing to hear the wonder in your voice—wonder that I could do a thing as well as my father."

"No, mais non! I meant only to say you're doing a fine job, the company's stature increases with each day, none can possibly question your fitness in regards to..."

She didn't speak up or otherwise relieve the man of his consternation.

Geoffrey Dubois had been a top lieutenant under her father's regime, a peer of Yves Pomeroy's. His womanizing had been notorious, surpassing even Yves's. The complaint hotline Fabienne had established fielded no fewer than fifty calls regarding Geoffrey its first week. He had used a company yacht as a spider's web, luring young females aboard with vague promises of career advantage, sailing them along the Seine, embellishing the famed river's gentle current with champagne and relentless tugs toward the captain's quarters.

Fabienne had listened to many of these hotline accounts personally.

Geoffrey's first task, upon being reassigned as her personal assistant, was to handwrite apologies to every last woman he'd managed during his thirteen years at Rivard.

"You cannot let go of my father," Fabienne observed now. "This loyalty he inspired—it amazes me freshly every day. I lived with this man. We did not see this side."

Geoffrey's hands wrested at his waist. "I miss him dearly, it's true. He was a great man. I don't suppose he is—er, would be..." The manservant gestured dyspeptically down, through the floor. "Capable of visitors? Where he is being held?"

Fabienne raised her eyebrows archly. "Why do you look down?"

"I—eh bien, it is said he may be kept, or may reside, I should better say, someplace in the bowels..."

Fabienne said nothing.

"...but perhaps this is nonsense and I am talking rot! I apologize, I sincerely apologize, please don't take this as a reflect of—of anything at all..."

"Do you believe," she began after some time, "that if my father were capable of company, I would deny him it?"

"Non, certainly not."

"Do you believe I erred when I removed him from public life, Geoffrey?"

"I do not, mademoiselle. I'm sure the decision was the correct one."

"Were you there to hear him repeat the same story to investors during earnings calls, one quarter after the next?"

"Indeed, I recall that he was struggling with—"

"Did you ever speak with the aide who ferried him to the bathroom? Who buttoned his Vuitton jackets for him when he could not manage himself?"

"Yes, I—er, well no, I never personally met the—"

"Then shut up." Fabienne's calves were flexed to solid rock. "Shut up and return to your workstation, and ask no more of my father. Else you may find yourself reunited with him. Permanently."

Geoffrey left too.

The heiress returned to the aluminum-oxynitride window, finding she could not put her father out of mind. She thought of him in his remote oubliette corridor—about which none knew save for a single jailer and the woman who cleaned his cell nightly.

She thought of being a girl, of standing beside him at their large wall map of La France, listening to Henri narrate the family's holdings.

We own factories there, and there—pointing to Reims—and there aussi, my little Fabi.

She would follow his finger around in awe and ask what they owned in Germany or Switzerland or Spain, since those were the countries at the map's periphery.

Not yet, little Fabi. Nothing there yet. But soon...

Fabienne smiled at the memory. Perhaps when the kernel had finished its work, she would visit her father in the depths of Roche Rivard with a globe, and show him their domain now. Allow him to spin the model in his frail hands and feel the oceans, the mountains, the land masses over which they ruled.

Every last bit of it.