The indignant desert birds

[Ale-Yarok]

((This is Act II of an intended four arc story that began with The Winter Of Our Discontent, detailing a major development in Knootoss. If you also want to join, let me know via discord or telegram and we can see what we can do!))

Ale-Yarok City
Protectorate of Ale-Yarok

The Kemetian desert air hit Layla Boom on the jet bridge, and the terminal glass took the blinding light straight on. Above arrivals, a banner screen cycled rates: ∂G to Shekelcoin, Shekelcoin to half a dozen other sponsored tokens. Customs began with kiosks. A stand sold disposable SIN chips beside disposable vapes, energy drinks, and a crypto-driven charging station.

A knot of heavily tanned Knootian Defence Force personnel occupied a strip of seating beside the baggage hall. Boots were off. Sleeves were rolled up. One wore desert camo trousers and a civilian white tee. Another held a paper cup and watched the movement of the belt intensely without moving, his eyes rimmed red. A third lay back with his head tipped to the side, sunglasses still on indoors. A rifle case lay on the floor.

At the belt, two blond tourists in shorts with plastic tubes and foil in their hands argued in slurred English about “the real tables”. A group of Berber Jews in plain sandals and sun hats carried canvas bags printed with a water-drop logo. Layla’s bag arrived wrapped in a sleeve covered with advertisements that the airline had offered “for privacy”.

Outside, the forecourt was a layered queue of taxis, private cars, and tinted vans with company marks. A billboard over the pick-up lanes promoted “THE GREEN FLAME FESTIVAL”, then flipped to “ARBITRATION IN 30 MINUTES” and “JURISDICTIONAL FIREWALLS”, with “PAY IN SHEKELCOIN” in green.

A burly driver in a short-sleeved shirt held up a tablet with her assumed name in clean capitals. He scanned her disposable chip with a handheld reader, then opened the rear door. 

The road into Ale-Yarok City ran past desalination pipes and solar panels. Ahead, gleaming towers crowded the skyline, with lower buildings packed in beneath them. Traffic moved fast and close. Motorbikes cut between lanes with riders in mirrored helmets and small parcels strapped tight. Private security vehicles cruised in pairs. At an intersection, a pop-up betting kiosk stood under an awning. A man in a suit tapped his chip against a street dispenser for 'pleasure pills', waited for a slot to open, and pocketed a packet. Cannabis signage glowed green along a strip of shops. One banner read, in Hebrew and Dutch: “LAB TESTED, TAX OPTIONAL”. Another window advertised “AI PERSONHOOD REGISTRATION” beside a pawn shop offering “gold/data/art”. A block further, a clinic front promised “UNRESTRICTED BODY MODS”.

The hotel sat in the city centre with its name hard-lit in green: “HADERECH GRAND”. The entrance canopy held cameras in recessed housings and a row of matte-black sensors over the doors. Below the name, smaller lettering carried the motto in Hebrew, then Dutch, then English. A doorman in a fitted suit checked Layla’s chip at arm’s length. His scanner chirped once. He stepped aside.

The lobby air was cooled enough to feel like a fridge, while scent diffusers pushed citrus and something antiseptic. Pale stone flooring held embedded light strips that traced routes to counters labelled “CHECK-IN”, “ARBITRATION”, “SECURITY”, “PRIVATE SERVICES”. A wall screen streamed crypto currency promotions alongside live casino odds.

A man in a long coat spoke Arabic into an earpiece, then fed a long code into a wall machine; it printed a metal token which he pocketed. A young woman in a microskirt crossed barefoot, shoes in hand, a red wristband marked “VIP FLOOR” still on. Two older men in kippot and linen jackets sat at a low table with a bottle of water between them, arguing about something in Hebrew. Nearby, a knot of middle-aged Knootian men stood under a vent, faces red, stained shirts clinging to their backs. One fanned himself with a brochure and muttered Dutch at another.

Layla walked to the “PRIVATE SERVICES” desk. The agent was a woman in her forties with cropped hair and a small headset. Her name tag read “RUTH”. Ruth scanned Layla’s chip and looked at the screen. “Anonymous identity confirmed,” she said, in accented English. “Welcome. Suite is ready. Payment terms confirmed.” Layla’s phone vibrated once. A transaction notification flashed.

Ruth slid a slim card across and pointed towards a lift bank guarded by two security staff in matte-black uniforms. One held a compact weapon low against his thigh. “Level sixty-two,” Ruth said. “No corridor cameras. Door access is logged unless you use the panel to insert your code first.”

The lift accepted the card and lit “62”. Inside, a screen offered “ANONYMOUS MODE” as a toggle with a warning: “VOIDS LOST PROPERTY. MEDICAL RESPONSE DELAYS MAY APPLY.”

On sixty-two, carpet swallowed footsteps. Doors sat recessed with small status lights pulsing faintly. A service drone rolled past at knee height, wheels silent, a tray of covered glasses strapped to its back. Layla opened the door to room 6266 and entered.

The suite lighting was low. A sunlit panorama of the city streamed in through a wall-sized window. A dining table held a sealed envelope, a compact camera the size of a coin, and a charging pad with a hardware wallet docked on it.

One man stood near the window with his hands loose at his sides. He was tall, broad-shouldered, pale-skinned, with close-cropped light brown hair and a neat beard. He wore a grey suit without a tie, shirt collar open. A thin earpiece wire ran behind his right ear. He turned when the door closed.

“Don’t worry, Lelooma Amad Kerkas,” he said. “I’m not with Daytan security, and I’m not here to urinate on you.”

[Daytanistan]

Layla Boom had been Ale-Yarok before. Of course she had. It was a sweating hive of untraceable money, temptation, and sin. A crypto arbitration hub. A place you could more easily launder money than ever feel clean personally. It wasn’t just her kind of place - it was the kind of place her clients were drawn to. Her clients were elite men with dirty money and dirtier minds. Generally, she was their procuress, their broker in luxury vice, and occasionally, when they wanted to feel especially big and powerful, she was their whore. That’s what she assumed was the case this visit. Just because she was usually now the one who made the arrangements, ran the girls, and handled the money didn’t mean she couldn’t handle other things, for the right price.

In her native Daytanistan, a lifetime ago, she had lived the life of a princess, a khatun. Her father was a General, a powerful Party member, whose position in the Daytan People’s Army and the regime had made him as wealthy as the khans of pre-revolutionary Daytanistan. They even lived in the former palace of the Khan of Kashoun, filled with luxuries from foreign lands, gold, jewels, high fashion shoes, and flat screen televisions. It was also filled with army officers and powerful men in her father’s orbit. Dangerous men. She had always loved dangerous men.

When one of those dangerous men set Farrokh Nugat’s dogs on her father, another of those dangerous men, a Pantocratorian spy named Michel Mannegiot, fled Daytanistan with her and as much gold as both could carry. They thought it would be enough to set them up for life. They were wrong. In Liberty City, her expensive tastes had not recalibrated to her resources suddenly becoming finite. Michel started to drink. She spent all her stolen gold on exotic oriental rugs and luxury furniture for their crummy apartment, and designer clothes, shoes and handbags for herself. Mannegiot proved unable to pay when the debt collectors came knocking, and so she soon found herself seeking work - any work, so long as it paid well.

That’s when she had found her trade name. Layla Boom. Daytan women were uncommon, even in Allanea, in addition to which she was used to rubbing shoulders with high ranking military and political men, and she found a market existed for work as a high-class escort. From there, she started to work as an exotic dancer, and had two “specialist” acts (one as oriental harem girl, and one as a sexy communist soldier for the uniform fetishists). Then she discovered cocaine, and from there a variety of party drugs, and her expenses grew. She started to do porn, under the screen name Layla Boom, and for a while was extremely well paid for it, but after a few years she ceased to be novel, and her pay cheques grew smaller.

She was drawn into Michel’s world of mercenary special operations and intelligence work by financial necessity. She learned a lot from him, and his networks became her networks. She started to develop the skills which years later would stand her in such good stead making arrangements for exotic entertainment services for her international, high value clientele. But back in 2016, Michel was still in charge, and the business focussed on services which were provided down the barrel of a gun. They took a high risk job, taking on the (in)famous Allanean OAS. Exfiltrating some Pantocratorian aristocrat the Allaneans had rescued from some Action-Nationale camp. The job didn’t pay off. They were both arrested. Since her part had just been to drive the getaway car (and since nobody got away), she served just one year in prison. The main thing was that the Allaneans did not deport her to Daytanistan.

Instead she had ended up in Ernestria when she got out of prison. There she rebuilt her life. Already in her late thirties, she realised she had to “move up the chain” if she wanted to make real money in sex work. So she started to use the things she had learned from Michel, how to sneak goods and people in and out of a country, how to launder money (especially through crypto), how to contact elite figures who paid big money for discretion on top of the big money they’d pay to indulge their grubbiest desires.

She had standards. All her girls chose to work for her. She was upfront with what the clients wanted, and matched girls to jobs for which they were both well-suited and willing. And she never ran underage girls or had anything to do with anybody who did. Finally, she would never ask any of her girls to do something she wasn’t prepared to do herself. And that, she supposed, is what brought her to Ale Yarok. Her clients were powerful men whose money, power, and access could buy almost anything. Buying the attentions of beautiful young women was not difficult for such men, but some of them wanted a more psychologically satisfying experience. They didn’t just want sex, they wanted a powertrip. And when degrading Layla’s girls was no longer enough of a powertrip, for a premium fee, they could degrade Layla.

That didn’t bother Layla. Intellectually she understood what they were after, and knew she could provide it. For enough money she could pretend to enjoy almost anything. Or pretend to hate it if that’s what they preferred. For the right price she could dissociate however much she needed to to get through it. That sort of thing was exactly what she thought had brought her to Ale-Yarok.

So when she walked into room 6266 at the Haderech Grand Hotel in Ale Yarok City, Layla was not scared about whatever gross perversion her wealthy client had in mind for her. She saw the man standing at the window when she stepped into the room. Broad-shouldered, bearded. She closed the door. She spotted the earpiece. He turned around.

“Don’t worry, Lelooma Amad Kerkas,” he said. “I’m not with Daytan security, and I’m not here to urinate on you.”

Her throat tightened when he used her real name, not “Layla Boom”. Layla Boom was the name on her business card. Her real name was leverage. She had been “handled” by security services before, and that’s what this felt like. Still, it also felt like a pay day, and maybe a bigger one than she had expected. She stepped forward into the room, and stood by an armchair. Given the earpiece, she assumed this was not her client, just his man, so she’d act accordingly.

“I can see that.” she said. “I’d like to know who is, though.”

[Knootoss]

((Joint Post between Daytanistan and Knootoss))

Ale-Yarok City
Protectorate of Ale-Yarok

The man by the window crossed to the table and sat with his forearms resting on its surface, hands open. He met her eyes and answered without shifting his posture: “That information is above your pay grade,” he said, as he slid the unopened envelope forward by two fingers, stopping it short of the other side of the table.

“Payment is sufficient to retire in luxury. We propose something with seven figures, deliverable in a token of your choosing,” he said. “You will also be provided with a new identity and the means to start again under it. Documents, accounts, residence. Everything you will need for the transition. This job has no physical risk to you,” he continued. “No violence. No illegal border crossings. Nobody touches you unless you choose it. The job is persuasion and presentation. You will convince a man to sign a contract without paying too much attention to the fine print.” He smiled. “The money changes hands. The signature goes on the electronic document. All of it is recorded. The recording and a copy of the contract are the deliverables.”

Lelooma still stood by the arm chair. She knew the intention of words like 'above your pay grade', and she would show she could play by their rules. She smiled back at the man, the slightest hint of suggestion in her look. It was the smallest hint of her 'don't you want to be nice to me?' face, although she didn't overdo it, she kept her expression professional overall. Most importantly, she didn't noticeably react to the apparent change to the nature of the job.

"Aren't you going to offer me a seat?" she asked, indicating the arm chair below.

The man’s eyes went to the other seat. He lifted a hand, palm open, and indicated it. “Sit where you like, or don't,” he said. “You don’t need permission from me.” She sat. His chin tipped towards the bar. “Minibar’s fully stocked. Take what you want. The room is yours for the next seventy-two hours.” He reached down and placed a compact hard case on the table. “The briefing says you’re effective. I can see why. But you don’t need to do the act for me. You’ve already been vetted. You’re here because you passed.”

“Before I say anything else, we agree on two basics.” Two fingers rose, then dropped. “First, discretion. No stories, no messages, no clever hints. Second, consent to hear the offer. If you’re not interested, you leave, you keep the travel fee and the payment you were already promised, and this ends without drama.”

"Agreed." Lelooma said, simply.

He opened the hard case and folded the lid back. Foam cradled a brushed-metal unit with a narrow screen, two low-profile antenna modules, and a coiled cable in its cut-out. He set the unit on the table, clipped the modules into place, and thumbed it on. Green text woke on the screen: “PRIVACYMODUS” and, beneath it, blinking: “ACTIVEER EXTERNE KOPPELING”. He ran the cable to the suite’s wall panel and plugged it into a recessed port behind a sliding cover. A green line lit on the wall panel: “LOKALE RF-AFSCHERMING: ACTIEF.” He left the case open beside the unit and leaned back. “So,” he asked: “Any questions so far?"

She eyed the envelope which he had slid towards her, but didn't reach for it yet. Instead she looked up and fixed eyes on him.

"What's the contract about? Not the fine print, I mean, the contract. What does the mark think he's signing?" she asked.

“A surprisingly generous licensing agreement for books and films,” he answered. “Foreign-language editions. Translation rights and distribution.” He lifted his eyes to hers and continued: “The mark is Grand Pensionary Maurits Viljoen of Knootoss. You approach him posing as sales rep for Sangar Qalam Media, an Ale-Yarok house acting as middle-man, who is really posing as a representative of the Daytan Commissariat for Foreign Intelligence, Transportation and Anti-Trafficking, in exchange for unspecified consideration on foreign policy matters. He must think he is being bribed. Which he is. He does not know the money and the signature are intended to be used as leverage.”

Lelooma's throat tightened again. Bribing the Grand Pensionary of Knootoss in the guise of her own country's intelligence services was a very different job than she had been expected to be called upon to perform. She took a long moment before responding.

"Does he already expect an offer from Sangar Qalam Media?" she asked.

"We will make arrangements for you to meet with him once you have committed to the job", the man answered. "He has signed many similar contracts. His books have been translated into many languages. There have been a few films where he appears as himself." He paused, speaking faint contempt: "Perhaps the people of Daytanistan deserve to read about his exploits. And he deserves to be compensated far in excess of what is reasonable for such work."

"A man like that, he would be able to run background checks on people he was meeting with." she said. "And it only takes a regular web search to find out Layla Boom is not my real name. If the idea is that I am working for FITAT, albeit indirectly, then I'd need another identity."

“We'll be providing you with a plausible digital presence,” the man explained. “And any inconsistencies will merely reinforce your secondary identity, and make him and his people believe that you might really be a FIFAT agent. It reinforces the credibility of our leverage.” He smiled mirthlessly. "Of course, we will provide you with another identity after you have left the country for a safe jurisdiction. We wouldn't want either FITAT or the EIVD to come after you."

She contemplated the prospect of becoming a target of both agencies briefly. She reached a hand for the envelope, but still didn't open it.

"So. I assume I'm not the only Daytan you could find." she said. "Why did you want me to be the sales rep to meet with the Grand Pensionary?"

"You're a clever girl. I'm sure you have already worked it out", he answered, though he indulged her then: "You have extensive experience with men of his type. You can credibly play the part of someone who moves in elite Daytan circles. You look like the First Girlfriend, albeit with a couple more decades on you." His nose wrinkled in faint disgust. "And I think you'd enjoy the part."

So, she was still there as a whore then. She reflected on that with a smirk, and finally picked up and opened the envelope. He watched her closely. She looked at the figure. It was certainly enough to retire upon, although she had expensive tastes, and knew from bitter past experience that starting a new life could be more expensive than planned. She was smarter now though, of course. She looked at it for a long while, aware that she was being watched, and wanting to see how long she could drag the silence out. He continued to stare patiently, eyes eyes moving over to the devices' display only briefly, to check its status. After the silence had gone on long enough, she smiled, stuffed the paper with the number back inside the envelope, and looked up at him.

"How long until I meet First Citizen Viljoen?" she asked, deliberately affecting her native accent.

"A few weeks. A month, if there are unforeseen contingencies," the man replied. The sound of her accent prompted a small, approving smile. "I suggest you continue your life as normal until then. If you tell me about the new life you desire, we can make preparations in the background. It's best if you do not leave a digital trail searching for nice beach homes on whatever tropical island you end up picking, hmm?"

"I can't swim." she told him simply. "Can I pick any country I like, or do you have a list?"

"You should stay out of Vasconia and South Epheron", the man replied. "It'll be a trade-off between remote and comfortable. There's no list. We want you to be motivated to work with us."

"And if he doesn't sign the contract?" she asked, turning back to the objective.

"In that unfortunate contingency, you will still be moved to your new home. But my employer would be less motivated to provide the pay-out, if you cannot supply the deliverables." He hesitated before adding: "I wouldn't worry about it too much. He is quite corrupt. I would be surprised if you cannot manage it."

"Do you have any rules of engagement? Red lines I shouldn't cross? Warnings?" she asked. "Anything else I should know before accepting your offer?"

He thought about it. "It needs to feel lurid. Dirty. My employers could likely find ways to leak real documents proving actual corrupt dealings, but that's not going to have the potential to bring him down. Nothing else has, so far. If you follow the news, you might have noticed he is already weathering another scandal." His fingers drummed on the table. "You must be the physical representation of everything that is wrong about him. About men like him. Sleeping with him isn't strictly necessary, but it may help. People can likely fill in the blanks whether it has happened or not, provided he shows a clear interest." He then added, deadpan: "If during the assignment you have to kill him, just make sure to kill yourself before you are taken into custody." He paused. "That was a joke."

It was not a joke she cared for, but then, being considered the ideal candidate to become the lurid, dirty, physical representation of everything wrong with the creepy old Grand Pensionary of Knootoss wasn't exactly great for her self-esteem, either. But she was good at not being too proud to get paid. She smiled at the joke away. Men liked it when you smiled at their jokes, she had found.

"Is there any specific... lurid, dirty act you think he might be into? Or would like him to appear to be into?" she asked. "Or would sleeping with someone like me be sufficiently distasteful? I seem to remember he has some pop starlet girlfriend who, you have already pointed out, is younger than me, and I'm certainly younger than him... so I assume that's not scandal enough."

“Henda Hartendief,” he said, with the exasperated tone of a man who had memorised a particularly distasteful file: "Birthdate, July first, 2000." He stared at her briefly, to see how she responded to that.

"Same age as most of my girls." Lelooma said. She found it completely typical that rich and powerful men older than her would have relationships girls who could be her daughter. So long as they were adults, she supposed it was their right to benefit financially from putting up with sweating, sagging flesh and creepy leers.

"Quite", he agreed. "And from a similarly deprived background as your girls. Qubtian migrant family from Breucia. Now equal in rank to the Empress of Excalbia." He shook his head. "You are right, it wouldn't be enough on its own. That is why the deliverables are the tape and the contract. The Knootian public are not going to care about some financial impropriety alone. This is why you must be a seen to be a Daytan agent." He then added: "But any lurid details would offer space for a bonus. Please do not ask me to get into the breeder mindset too deeply. I'm sure you'll have a better read on the man than once you get into the room with him. It is one of your areas of expertise. And one of the reasons why you are the perfect woman for the job."

"You must really hate him, to want that cherry on top." she said with a smile.

"I do not", he lied. "But my employers want to make sure that your assignment is successful. They will be investing a lot of resources into making sure that it provides the desired leverage."

"Sure." she replied, not believing that he didn't hate Viljoen for a second. "I'm sure I can elicit something sufficiently scandalous from him beyond taking a bribe from an ostensible Daytan agent. Men, yes, your type too, don't give me that breeder mindset nonsense, are pigs. And I'm the muck they roll in. I accept your offer."

He rose to offer her his hand, giving hers a cold squeeze. "Not all men", he felt the need to say. "Some of us believe in something greater than ourselves. And you, too, can be an agent of history. Not just a sow rolling in the muck, but a real player, who is paid what she deserves for her... unique talents."

If he wanted to lie to himself and pay her the number in the envelope, Lelooma Amad Kerkas aka Layla Boom was not going to argue the point. She also wasn't going to take umbrage with being called a sow when she had just described herself as muck. She let him squeeze her hand and smiled sweetly. When he let her go, she produced a business card with "Layla Boom - Private Consultant" on the front, and a QR code payment link to her crypto wallet on the back. Her dress had no pockets, so he might have to speculate from where she had produced it as she offered it to him.

[Knootoss]

((Joint post between Knootoss and Daytanistan))

KNN Central Studio
Larushem, Free Republic of Knootoss

The “KNN” sign sat on a block above a façade shaped like an old television set: a single oversized rounded rectangle framing a tall wall of glass and two slim rods rising behind the sign, tipped with small spheres. A small square sat in front of the studio. The mega-residential De Kering pressed close on one side, throwing a hard-edged shadow onto the studio's cladding. Built to take a nuclear blast, its concrete face carried tight grids of small recessed armoured windows, while the lower levels were a sheer, uninterrupted blank plinth.

The ground floor doors opened into a lobby of polished stone. A security island sat central with two scanner lanes and a short queue rail. Above the reception, a wall of screens ran continuously. Layla Boom, under her assumed identity, moved through security without issue, a green light showing as she ran her SIN chip over the security scanner. The barrier gate released with a soft click. Amna Mamood was the name registered to her SIN chip and printed on her business cards from Sangar Qalam Media, Ale Yarok. She was dressed for credibility: a tight white blouse, a bodycon short grey business skirt, and a matching flattering grey jacket. Her long dark hair hung over her shoulders in luxurious waves, and instead of the lethally long false lashes the other day she wore a fashionable pair of glasses with a thick white plastic frame and a luxury brand-name on the side. Behind the glasses her eye make-up was a smokey as she could plausibly claim to be appropriate for an office environment, and her lipstick was a deep red. She carried a black e-document wallet under one arm, and the whole ensemble was completed by matching black patent leather heels (a "modest" four inches) and handbag. She smiled at the officer at the security island as she passed through.

Past a corridor marked “STUDIO ACCESS”, posters and backlit schedules gave way to plain doors and service panels. A lift bank with brushed metal doors and flush call buttons sat recessed at the end. Layla stepped into an empty car and pressed “-3”.

The doors began to close. Then a hand suddenly slid into the narrowing gap and held the edge. The doors reopened. A man stepped in and let his hand fall away.

He was late fifties to early sixties. Grey hair swept back off his forehead, longer on top, clean-shaven. Dark suit and tie paired with a white shirt. His face showed fine lines at the eyes, which were pale blue. He took the spot by the control panel, angled his body to face her, and held her gaze. His confidence and demeanour gave him an air of danger. She had always liked dangerous men.

The doors closed. The car started down.

He flipped the clear cover and pressed the red “STOP” button. The lift slowed and settled between floors. No alarm sounded. No warning light flashed.

He spoke quietly, evenly. “There has been a change of plans.” He kept his eyes on her. “Your target believes you are a Daytan agent.” A pause. Fingertips flat on the panel edge. “You will proceed anyway. The operation is still on.” He kept his voice low. “Afterwards, you will speak with me.”

He looked at her without blinking.

“Do we understand each other?”

"Target?" she asked, frowning. "I don't know what you mean. But I am a Daytan agent. A literary agent."

"Someone in the MBI flagged your identity when the meeting was arranged, Ms. Kerkas," the man answered, the smallest twitch on his face as he acknowledged how she did not immediately fold. Respect, perhaps? "The target is interested in meeting with you anyway. Make whatever promises you need to, then get out of the situation."

He paused before his gaze returned to her: "I can't protect you if you make a run for it. Or harm him in any way."

"Who are you?" she asked, combining her question with a lunge at the elevator control panel. He looked surprised but did not stop her. Nor did he answer her question. She pressed the -3 button again. After a few moments, the carriage started moving again.

"Why would the MBI think I was a Daytan agent then?" she asked. Lelooma Amad Kerkas had never been a Daytan agent, after all. And Layla Boom was a porn star.

He actually smiled. Indulgent. "I never said the MBI thinks you're a Daytan agent."

"Then why are you here? Premature senile dementia?" she asked. It sounded like everything was going according to plan. If he was from the outfit which hired her, she wasn't impressed.

The man's eyebrows rose ever-so-slightly, seeming to take the insult as new information. Instead of answering, he looked towards the elevator door until it began to slide open, facing a subterranean corridor. "Well then. Good luck."

"Weirdo." she replied, and set out of the elevator down the corridor.

From there it was only a short walk past the make-up suites, VIP robing Room, Private Washrooms, until finally hitting the VIP holding area. There she was stopped by a protection detail: a pair of large, muscled men in dark suits wearing AR glasses, and a bored sniffer dog. One of the men held up a SIN scanner and grunted something inaudible as he presented it. She held her wrist to the SIN scanner and gave each man a smile as she did so. "Hi there!" she said sweetly, her voice considerably higher and more bubbly than usual. "I've an appointment to see His Excellency."

The scanner beeped its approval of her presence. There was another grunt before the second man pushed open the door into the VIP holding area beyond. The windowless room was covered in warm grey acoustic panelling. A low, rectangular table sat at the centre on a dense wool rug in muted grey-blue. Around it there were two deep armchairs and a longer sofa in pale leather. Opposite, a credenza and a cooler in brushed aluminium and walnut veneer held the expected hospitality: bottles and cans of every kind of Pink Bunny Cola dominated this space, including rare limited-edition bottles that would fetch a handsome price online. A wall-mounted screen showed a silent live feed from the studio. A digital clock counted down in red numerals to the top of the hour.

Grand Pensionary Maurits Viljoen sat on the sofa with one arm stretched along the backrest, the other holding an open can of Pink Bunny cola, the logo facing forward in his hand, exposed to view as if by habit. He wore a frilly open-collared shirt with half the buttons undone, his trademark purple jacket having been draped over one of the chairs, and his shoes sitting beside them.

Viljoen set his can on the table, the logo facing towards her. He then flicked two fingers towards the cooler, seeming curious to see which type of cola, if any, she'd grab. “Ms Mamood. Welcome. Pink Bunny Cola?” He chuckled. “Fair warning. I don't think they have something like our PBC in Daytanistan. If you drink it, you'll just want to hop to the store for more.”

He spread his legs wide, placing his elbows on them as he looked her over. The smile she had worn into the room froze on her face for a moment as she processed the way the Knootian head of state was presented. Men were such fucking pigs. They never failed to disappoint her, one way or another. Sometimes multiple ways at once. Her expression changed from "eager sales representative" to a woman who knew what was expected of her. She set the e-document wallet and handbag on the table. "No thank you, Your Excellency." she said, and unbuttoned her tailored jacket. "I'm watching my figure."

"Then you should try the low-calorie, sugar-free diet one", he suggested. "It's got the same colour as the others."

In Daytanistan, it was polite to refuse an offer of food or drink two times, and rude to refuse it a third. She wondered if this... what word was sufficient... Viljoen of a man knew that. She tossed her jacket lightly onto an arm chair, and then played with her hair a little so that it sat better on her shoulders. "Oh, thank you, it's very kind of you, but really, I'm not thirsty." she said.

"Your loss", he said, leaning back and watching her fingers as they ran through her hair. "A little bird told me who you really are. A Daytan spy. I've never talked to a Daytan spy before. Are you here to kill me, Amna?" His relaxed posture suggesting that he wasn't too worried about that particular prospect.

"I have no weapons, Your Excellency." she replied. "You're welcome to... search me yourself."

He smiled smugly as he patted the spot on the couch beside him. "Might require a thorough search", he suggested with a slight waggle of his brow. "Come on. Call me Maurits. And tell me why you're really here."

She moved over towards the place indicated in the couch, and sat in the indicated place. "There are two reasons, actually, Your Excellency, Maurits." she told him, suggestively.

"Those being?" he asked, as he made sure she was not carrying any secret recording devices on her person, his fingertips still cold from holding the cooled tin can just prior.

"I really do have a contRACT..." she started, her words being lost to a surprised yelp "...in the wallet, for a very... large... sum, for the privilege... of taking... your book into the Daytan market."

"Just books, or movies too? ‘Around the World in Viljoen Days’ and ‘Viljoen Dares to Dream’ are crying out for Daytan localisations." he said, a little breathily, clearly excited by the prospect of spreading his media empire into Daytanistan. "Of course, now that I've caught you, I have a little more leverage than you'd have imagined. I can only imagine what my old buddy and sparring partner Nugget would do, if he knew you'd been caught. So. What's the other reason?"

"Please, he can't know you've caught me." she whispered urgently. "I'll do anything."

"Anything?" he asked as if saying a dramatic line. "It can be our little secret", he said. "If you get those books published. And maybe a movie?"

"Subtitled or dubbed into Dushtoo?" she asked.

"It loses something when I'm being dubbed, and it is no longer my voice", he admittedly, mournfully. "But we do need the people to understand. It's no good if the people watching the movie can't read." He sighed. Resigned that sometimes, sacrifice was necessary for his legend to be spread far and wide. "So what is the other reason you came?"

"There's a rumor at FITAT about you, Maurits." she told him, her Daytan accent becoming more pronounced as she removed her glasses. "And I want to find out if you really are the greatest head of state in Vasconia."

"Well." He let out a baritone chuckle. "I haven't compared with all of them, but I'm pretty sure I have Queen Gwendolyn beat."

[Daytanistan]

((Joint post between Knootoss and Daytanistan))

KNN Central Studio
Larushem, Free Republic of Knootoss

Three minutes later Layla, or Amna, as it were, was glad that her experience of Vasconian heads of state was more limited than she had implied. She retrieved her glasses and put them back on before looking Viljoen in the eye again.

"So, what does a literary agent have to do to close a deal around here?" she asked him.

Viljoen moved to the sink to wash up, looking content with how things were going. "Show me the contract, and I'll have a look at it later", he called out. "And let me know where I rank in your study of Heads of State. Have I got Nugget beat? Or are you only looking at foreigners?" He took pause as he realised something potentially more concerning: "Will I need to take antibiotics now? It would be just him to try and embarrass me like that. At least I can trust security to slip them into Henda's drinks, I suppose."

Then, as an afterthought, he added: "Oh, by the way, my staff removed those hidden cameras before you came in." He looked her way to see how she'd respond, grinning smugly.

She looked strangely offended, pulling herself up to sit on the couch. She almost pouted when she replied.

"No need for antibiotics." she said with wounded pride. "I'm a clean girl." Unless I caught something from you. "And I had no ridiculous camera."

"Not on your body', he admitted with obviously fake contrition. "But my people found them in this very room." He pointed into several corners. "Top-of-the-line Knootian-made stuff too. It's always good to know a foreign intelligence service has to outsource it's hardware to us. Knootian-made really is the best, hmm?"

He swaggered over towards the pale leather armchair and slipped back into his purple jacket, turning towards a mirror to close the buttons of his shirt. Sitting on the couch, she tensed a little as she thought through the implications. The cameras clearly belonged to her employer then. Did they have what they needed anyway? They hadn't mentioned needing a recording. She straightened up and crossed her arms in front of her as if she was suddenly self-conscious.

"Well..." she said after a little while, a coy smile spreading across her face. "If we're not being recorded, then I can answer your question. Yes. You have Comrade Nugat beat."

His smile widened. "Great", he said, looking at the black e-document wallet on the table. "I'll have my people look at the contract", he said casually. "Will we meet again? I suppose it's not really necessary," he reasoned, his interest in her having deflated precipitously.

She looked across to the e-document wallet on the table, then at him, then suddenly lunged at the document from the couch and snatched it up. She bounced up to her feet holding the device in the air with a triumphant look on her face.

"If I take this with me, you have to see me again." she told him, her voice playfully teasing. "And I have so many other talents. I'm a clean girl. Not a good one."

He looked her over with new-found clarity. Suddenly, the idea of meeting the woman again didn't seem like an especially bright one, despite the thrill of having had this secret agent encounter. "Give me the contract", he said, with a small sigh.

She looked almost crestfallen as she obediently handed him the device and a stylus.

"Are you sure you don't want a second date?" she asked.

"Sure I do", he lied without making eye-contact, flipping through the document without much care. He skipped past the impenetrable legalese to look for his own cut. He crossed out the numbers in the document with the stylus, and wrote in his own inflated numbers, before showing them to her. "Does Nugget allow you to negotiate? My talent doesn't come that cheap. "

"I have... some wiggle room." she replied, looking at the numbers like they worried her, and then giving a somewhat resigned nod. "I suppose you'll call me for that second date?"

"Sure. Of course, you'll have to meet some kind of security check. That's really out of my hands", he said, as he signed the documents with a theatrical flourish, his handwriting immaculate. He handed her the device.

"Of course." she said, sounding defeated as she took back the device with the signed contract. "I can dream, hmm?"

"Always dare to dream", Viljoen agreed. "I say it in one of my books: 'Viljoen Dares To Dream'. You should really read it when it comes out in... uh..." A pause. "Your language." He smiled. "I should head to make-up now. You have the room for at least another half hour, if you want to freshen up."

"Such a gentleman. Thank you, Maurits." she said with a melancholy smile.

On his way out, he leaned forward as though to give her a peck on the cheek. Then clarity, and perhaps guilt, hit him. He patted her on the shoulder instead. "See you around." He waved with a flourish without looking at her as he made for the exit.

Layla picked up Amna's blouse and handbag and went to the sink to wash up. She rinsed and washed, and then as she touched up her make-up in the mirror she allowed herself a moment of self-satisfaction.

[Knootoss]

((Joint post between Knootoss and Daytanistan))

KNN Central Studio
Larushem, Free Republic of Knootoss

Layla was still looking at her own reflection when the door opened behind her. She saw a woman in the mirror before she heard the knock.

Two flat raps came after the handle had already turned. The woman stepped in and pushed the door shut with her heel. She was mid-thirties, medium height, lean. Dark blonde hair pulled back tight into a low bun. She wore a navy blazer over a white blouse tucked into plain dark trousers, flat black shoes with rubber soles. No jewellery. A KNN visitor lanyard hung from her neck. She carried a tablet against her right forearm. Her glasses were black-framed, boxy, slightly too large for her face.

"Ms Mamood? Sorry to disturb you. I am with the Grand Pensionary's scheduling office." Her English was careful and over-precise, with a guttural catch on the hard consonants. "We need to complete your exit processing before the motorcade can clear the building. It should not take more than a few minutes."

She had positioned herself between Layla and the exit without appearing to block it. Her feet were set apart, weight even. Her left hand hung at her side, fingers open, thumb forward. The blazer sat heavier on that side, with a bulge below the hip.

"If you could bring your things and come with me, we will get it sorted quickly."

Layla (or Amna as she was currently calling herself) finished the last touch-up on her lipstick, closed it and put it back in her handbag. She noted the woman in the mirror and in particular the sign of what she assumed to be a gun beneath the blazer. Calmly she turned and left the ensuite bathroom, picking up her jacket from the back of the armchair, and putting it on.

"Wouldn't it make more sense for me to leave after the motorcade's already gone?" Layla asked, her voice calm, but her jaw already tightening. "To avoid the press, I mean?"

The woman's unsmiling expression tightened. "Not to worry, Ms Mamood. This is just routine. I'll only take a few minutes. If you'll come with me?"

"I don't have anything I want to say to KNN." Layla said as she did up the button of her jacket and then stepped forward, ready to go with the woman.

The woman's posture relaxed slightly. "I am with the Grand Pensionary's scheduling office," she repeated as an assurance. "We won't be talking to KNN." She opened the door that led out into the corridor, holding it out for her to go through first.

Layla stepped through, scanning the corridor beyond for exits as she did so. The protection detail outside the door appeared to have left with the Grand Pensionary, but there were two other men lounging on the far side of the corridor, near the elevators and stairwell, watching them closely.

As they moved past the VIP robing Room, a high, flat electronic tone, continuous, piercing, loud enough to feel in the teeth hit at full volume. It cut through the acoustic panelling and turned the sealed space into a box of noise. The tone dropped for half a second. Then a disembodied voice started. Female, synthetic, Dutch first, then English, in a cadence of flat calm:

"Attention. A fire has been detected in the building. This is not a drill. Proceed immediately to the nearest emergency exit. All doors and security barriers have been unlocked. Do not use the lifts. Follow the illuminated exit signs. Leave your personal belongings behind. Proceed immediately to the nearest emergency exit."

The message began again from the top, the alarm tone pulsing between each repetition. Inside the robing room, a man shouted something. Seeing two potential emergency exits, Layla made for the one further from the elevator, moving quickly into a fast walk then nearly to a run as she did so.

The two men near the elevator moved. The first stepped into the centre of the corridor and pulled a compact pistol, levelling it at Layla's chest. The second mirrored him a half-step behind, blocking the path to the stairwell, shouting: "MBI! Stop where you are. Hands where I can see them."

Doors between them opened all at once. A man in a tank top stumbled out hauling a garment bag the size of a body behind him. Two women spilled from another door, stopping when they saw the gun. One dropped a coffee cup that burst on the floor tiles, brown liquid spraying across the carpet.

The make-up suite door burst wide. The thick-necked protection officers that had scanned Layla's SIN came out. Two more came behind, one gripping Maurits Viljoen's upper arm, the other driving a palm between his shoulder blades. Viljoen's face was white. The man behind him caught his elbow and shoved him forward without breaking stride.

Viljoen's lead protection officer saw the gun and drew his own without pause. The gunshot was deafening in the confined space. A brass casing pinged off the corridor wall and skittered across the tiles. The body of the MBI man slammed into the wall before going down hard. Layla twisted, tripped and fell in the opposite direction.

The second MBI man threw himself sideways, weapon up, shouting "MBI! Don't shoot!" too fast, the words running into each other, his back pressed flat to the wall and the barrel of every protection officer's sidearm on him.

Eager to be both out of the crossfire and away from the MBI, Layla got back up on her hands and knees and started forward again, scrambling up to her feet and making once again for the exit. In front of her, two of the protection officers had hustled Maurits Villjoen into the stairwell, whilst the other two kept their pistols trained on the second MBI agent.

The stairwell was poured concrete and steel handrails, wide enough for three people abreast. In front of her, Viljoen's protection agents were waving their pistols and shouting for people to step aside. People screamed and pressed themselves against the wall.

Layla had just hit the -2 landing when she felt a hand on her wrist. The woman in the navy blazer had caught up with her. Layla flicked her jacket button and slipped out of her jacket, leaving the woman holding the arm, while shrieking at the protection agents ahead of her: "Help! She has a gun!"

One of the protection officers turned around, saw the gun in the woman's other hand, and fired. The woman threw herself sideways and fell a few steps down the stairs, as people threw themselves to the ground. It was unclear if the woman in the blazer had been hit, but Layla was clear now. Layla, e-document wallet still in hand although her handbag had been lost in the fray along with her jacket, scrambled up the stairs leaning out of the protection detail's line of fire. Still in her heels she ran up the stairs, not having to employ any acting skills to affect the manner of a terrified civilian trying to escape a burning building in a gunfight.

She managed to scramble past Viljoen and the protection team, which had hustled the Grand Pensionary into the -2 level corridor, moving against the crowd. Layla had just hit the -1 stairwell, which was thronging with panicked KNN employees and visitors, when the lights went out. The stairwell dropped into complete darkness, all sound drowned out by screams, before the green-white emergency strips flickered into life. Layla kept scrambling up the stairs, fending away people in her way with elbows when she had to, until she got into the ground floor lobby. It was dark and filled with hundreds of screaming people. She made her way through the crowd as best as she could towards the exit, keeping a watchful eye over the shoulders of her fellow evacuees as she did so.

The scanner lanes were open and the revolving doors were locked out of their rotation, folded open flat. When she ran through, the acrid Hartstad air hit her nostrils. The square was filling with people, some of whom were being directed towards an assembly point by men in high-vis vests. Multiple sirens were approaching from the distance. Layla knew that her extraction vehicle was only a block away. She started towards it, still moving quickly but settling from a run into a brisk walk the further she got from the building. She brushed her hair away from her eyes as she did so, straightening up her appearance somewhat as she hurried to her getaway car.

It was waiting for her in the agreed location: a heavy Peacock Motors e-Bison Sports Utility Vehicle. The driver, whose name tag said Amir, asked no questions as he sped away for the Lanerian border.

"We're changing plans." she told him after a few minutes, after her heart had stopped racing and her breathing had normalized, her body still swimming in the post-adrenal buzz. "We'll cross the border at Oudhuize, not Berkewold. Clear?"

"Yes ma'am", the driver answered, leaning forward to punch new data into his routing system. The car was already turning towards the highway.

There was a travel case behind the driver's seat which she bent over to pull up onto the back seat beside her, which she had put there that morning. She now opened it and did a last check over the contents. She looked at the fresh passport inside and pondered whether that was compromised too. She put the e-document wallet into the bag, and closed it back up.

"Once we're well clear of the city, we'll need to pull over somewhere to buy a new phone. No malls, some place we can pull up to, pick up the phone, and leave. Do you think you can find a place?" she asked the driver.

The driver thought about it. "Yes, ma'am", he then said tersely.

"Thank you." she said, letting out a breath she didn't realise she had been holding as she did so.

Layla contemplated the driver for a moment. No, he wasn't a boy, and she didn't want to disrespect him, so she gave him a friendly smile, and then let herself sink into the plush leather seats of the electric SUV. She wondered what had happened. She'd done her part, and had even permitted herself to feel smug about it briefly as she fixed her make-up after her interlude with the Grand Pensionary. But the operation had clearly been compromised by then. There had been the man in the lift. He seemed to know the details of her operation and spoke as if he was even involved in it, but she didn't know him. He indicated there was a gap between Viljoen's people and the MBI, which she supposed was plenty evident when she made her escape: Viljoen believed her to be a Daytan agent but the MBI didn't. The MBI seemed to know her real name. Viljoen himself had told her that his people had found her cameras and removed them, and she certainly hadn't planted or arranged for any cameras, but maybe her employer did. If so, then other than that detail which had nothing to do with her own arrangements, Viljoen's people had bought the idea that she was a Daytan spy imitating a Sangar Qalam Media agent. So Viljoen's people hadn't compromised the operation. The man in the elevator and the MBI knew who she really was, but neither of them had seen fit to tell their Grand Pensionary's people. Both wanted her operation to proceed, and both wanted her after the fact, and both seemed to be independent of the other. Had the MBI discovered the operation through their own investigation, and the man been an ill-advised attempt by her employer to let her know before she went in? Or had they both discovered the operation independently?

As she thought about it more, a conclusion hit her which made her feel sick to her stomach. Her employer had compromised the operation. It would suit their aims just fine if she was arrested immediately after getting the Grand Pensionary to sign the contract, so long as they could trust whoever arrested her to be independent of Viljoen's own influence. If that was true, just crossing at a different border crossing may not be enough to get away, and she certainly wouldn't be getting any more of the payment.

"Fuck." she groaned.

Then how had she gotten away? Surely the fire alarm wasn't a coincidence. Neither the MBI nor the Grand Pensionary's people would have pulled it - they were both caught flat footed by it. The most obvious explanation was the man in the elevator. Who then was the man in the elevator? Maybe he did work for her employer. It was probably a good thing she hadn't kneed him in the groin as she had been tempted to, in retrospect. He had compromised both her operation and the MBI's investigation. Either he worked for her employer or was enough of a fellow traveller, so to speak, to want her to succeed. It wasn't certain that he had triggered the fire alarm but it seemed most likely. Maybe she'd still get the money.

First she'd need a new phone.

[Knootoss]

No bullshit. Just KNN.

---

The ticker rolls:

KNN CENTRAL STUDIO ATTACKED | GRAND PENSIONARY SURVIVES | 2 DEAD 17 INJURED | MBI REFUSES COMMENT | ELEKTRIUM Q4 RESULTS BEAT EXPECTATIONS

HAVIK: What you are about to see has not been broadcast before. This footage was obtained by KNN during the security lockdown of our building. The authorities have not released it. We are showing it to you now because you deserve to see what happened here.

Phone footage jerks into focus. It shows a concrete stairwell lit by green-white emergency strips. A woman's handbag lies open on the landing between floors, its contents spilled across the steps: a lipstick, a compact mirror, a phone with a cracked screen. A line of yellow security tape stretches across the doorframe of the landing. The footage holds for three seconds, then cuts to black.

HAVIK: This is a stairwell in the KNN Central Studio. Twenty-four hours later, the belongings are still where they fell. No one has been allowed back inside.

Cut to: wide exterior shot. The KNN building behind police tape. Forensic and law enforcement vans parked near the entrance. A temporary broadcast tent on the far side of the square, cables running to satellite vans. The KNN logo on a portable backdrop. DIRK HAVIK stands in front of the backdrop in a dark suit and open collar. He is holding a microphone. His hair is doing its best in the wind.

Lower-third: DIRK HAVIK | LIVE FROM LARUSHEM — KNN SPECIAL REPORT: KNN UNDER ATTACK

HAVIK: Good evening, I'm Dirk Havik. I'm coming to you from Larushem, outside a building that is tonight a crime scene. Our building. 24 hours ago, shots were fired inside the KNN Central Studio. Armed individuals opened fire in the basement levels while Grand Pensionary Maurits Viljoen was on the premises, preparing for a live interview with Becky!. Sources close to the investigation are tonight calling it what many of us feared from the moment we heard those shots: an assassination attempt, carried out inside a newsroom. The Grand Pensionary survived. At least two of the attackers are dead. Other attackers may still be at large. But the Grand Pensionary was not the only target. This happened here. Inside KNN. And there are disturbing questions tonight about whether the attack on this building was designed to silence more than one voice. Here is what we know.

The screen shows shaky handheld footage, shot from outside the building through a ground-level window. Inside, a blackened electrical junction box is visible on a utility corridor wall, its casing buckled and split. Scorch marks fan upward across the plaster. A tangle of melted cabling hangs from an open conduit above it.

Lower-third: EXCLUSIVE | FIRE DAMAGE INSIDE KNN BUILDING

HAVIK: Just before the shooting, an electrical fire broke out in the building's lower infrastructure. The fire triggered a total evacuation. Our journalists, our staff, and our guests were driven into the stairwells in near-total darkness. Was the fire a coincidence? The authorities have not said. But it happened in the minutes before the shooting. It knocked out power to the floor where the Grand Pensionary was being prepared for his interview. And it opened every locked door in the building.

Cut back to Havik on the square.

HAVIK: Seventeen people were injured in the evacuation. Most in the main stairwell, where the sound of gunfire triggered a stampede. Three are still in hospital in serious but stable conditions. Fourteen others have been treated and released, or are expected to be discharged shortly.

A graphic fills the right side of the screen: a rotating 3D building cross-section, with red flashes on the B2 and B3 corridors and orange figures in the stairwell. The number 17 pulses in white.

HAVIK: People who came to work yesterday morning. People who came here as guests. They ended up running for their lives up darkened stairs while shots were fired behind them. That handbag you saw a moment ago... we're going to show it to you again...

The stairwell footage replays.

HAVIK: ... that handbag belongs to one of them. She hasn't come back for it, because she can't. Nobody can. The building is sealed.

Cut back to Havik.

HAVIK: We want those people to know: KNN has not forgotten you. And we will not stop asking how this was allowed to happen. Now. What happened in that corridor? Grand Pensionary Maurits Viljoen agreed to speak with KNN earlier today. We should warn you: his account is extraordinary.

Cut to: Viljoen is seated in a leather armchair. His legs are crossed, one ankle bouncing on the opposite knee. He adjusts his cuffs twice before the first question is asked. He appears entirely at ease. The interviewer is off camera.

Lower-third: EXCLUSIVE | GRAND PENSIONARY VILJOEN: "I FOUGHT THEM OFF"

INTERVIEWER: Grand Pensionary, thank you for speaking with us. Can you take us through what happened yesterday?

VILJOEN: Well, first of all, thank you for having me. And I know this is going to be huge for your ratings. You're welcome. (He grins, holds it for a beat, then pulls his expression into something more solemn.) But seriously. My thoughts are with everybody who was hurt yesterday. Even the ones I may or may not have ended up hurting. Now. What happened. I was in the preparation suite, getting ready to go on air. Beautiful studio, by the way. Very professional. Henda was with me at some point. She was very brave. She gets scared, you know, she's a sensitive person, an artist, but she held it together. She told me afterwards that she knew I would protect her in that situation. And then the fire alarm goes off. Lights go out. And suddenly there are two... three... maybe four people in the corridor with guns. Not my people. These were assassins.

INTERVIEWER: Assassins?

VILJOEN: Assassins. Killers. Sent to take me out. Because that is what happens when you speak the truth in this country. When you put your neck on the line for the Knootian people, there are forces, and I mean powerful forces, who want to shut you up. And when they can't shut you up with fake videos and media tricks, they send people with guns.

INTERVIEWER: Can you describe what happened next?

VILJOEN: I fought them off.

INTERVIEWER: You personally?

VILJOEN: (He uncrosses his legs, leans forward, plants both feet on the floor.) I was at the front. My detail was behind me. And look, they did a tremendous job. I trained with those men, I've done intense sessions with them, they know I'm not the kind of principal who hides behind a desk. But when those weapons came up, I didn't wait for them to make the call. I said go. I gave the order. And then I moved towards the threat. (He sits back, tugs at his trouser crease.) My readers know this. You have read 'The Viljoen Vision', yes?

INTERVIEWER: I have.

VILJOEN: Then you know about the incident in the Iesus Christi mountains. I think it's a very similar situation. But I have had many other enemies. They're all scattered all over my books, and I don't have the time to read them all right now for clues about the killer. And that is why I am calling on every Knootian, tonight, to go and read those books. Read them carefully. Look at the names. Look at the places. Share your theories, on Verve, everywhere. Because the truth wants to come out, and together, we are going to drag it into the light.

Cut back to: Havik on the square.

Lower-third: KNN INSTAPOLL: "WAS THE ATTACK ON KNN AN ATTEMPT TO SILENCE FREE SPEECH?" — 87% YES

HAVIK: An extraordinary account. The Grand Pensionary's protection detail has not responded to our requests for comment, and we are unable to independently verify all of the details he describes. What we can confirm is that shots were fired, and that two of the attackers are dead. And this is where the story takes a deeply troubling turn. KNN has spoken to multiple employees and guests who were inside the building during the evacuation. Several of them, independently, describe the same thing: two individuals, one presenting as male, one presenting as female or non-binary, both white, between twenty and sixty years old, dressed in plain clothing, who were shot and killed by the Grand Pensionary's protection officers.

Lower-third: WITNESS: ARMED INDIVIDUALS SHOUTED "MBI" BEFORE BEING SHOT

HAVIK: And at least one guest, who has asked not to be identified, told us something that the authorities will need to answer for. This guest says they heard one of the individuals, in the moment before the shooting, shout three letters. M. B. I. We put that account to the office of National Security Coordinator, Diederick Enck. His office declined to appear on camera. They sent a written statement saying, in short, that they do not comment on MBI operations, that an investigation is ongoing, and that the public and the media should refrain from speculation.

Lower-third: ENCK: "NO COMMENT" ON MBI INVOLVEMENT

HAVIK: Neither the MBI nor the Deputy Minister for Policing and Domestic Security have responded to any of our requests for interview. We will let you draw your own conclusions about what that silence means. If you have conclusions, let us know. Use the hashtag #KNN, or leave a voice message on our tips channel.

Havik turns slightly to face a second camera. His expression hardens.

HAVIK: And now let me speak directly. Not as an anchor. As someone who was supposed to be in that building yesterday. Yesterday, armed individuals entered KNN Central Studio. Our building. The building where, every single day, our journalists come to work to do one thing: tell you the truth. Not the version the government wants you to hear. Not what the other side wants you to know. The truth. Someone decided that what happens inside this building is too dangerous to be allowed to continue.

The second camera closes up on Havik's face as he narrates.

HAVIK: Whether this was an attack on the Grand Pensionary, an attack on KNN, or both — and right now nobody in authority is willing to tell us which — one thing is certain: the real target was free speech. The target was us. The target was you.

Cut to: the first camera, showing Havik in the square, with the building in the background.

HAVIK: I am standing here tonight in a tent. In a car park. Because our studios are locked behind police tape. Our equipment is sealed. Our colleagues ran for their lives down darkened stairwells while bullets flew. And not a single other broadcaster in the Western Atlantic region has asked the MBI why it won't comment. Not one. But let me tell you something. We are still here.

Havik gestures behind him at the satellite vans.

HAVIK: They locked our doors. So we set up outside. They cut our power. So we brought generators. They tried to silence us. And here I am, talking to you, live, from the square where it happened. This is what KNN does. This is what we have always done. No fire. No gunman. No locked door. No "no comment." None of it will stop us. So to whoever did this: you failed. You failed yesterday. You will fail tomorrow. And you will keep failing, every single day, for as long as there is a KNN camera pointed at your face.

He holds the camera's gaze for a beat.

HAVIK: We'll be right back. Stay with us.

Warm golden light. A man in his late fifties walks along a beach at sunset with a woman half his age. Soft piano music. They are holding hands. Behind them, a lighthouse stands tall against the evening sky, its beam sweeping slowly across the water. The camera lingers on it. They walk towards it. The beam sweeps again.

VOICEOVER (warm, male, avuncular): Sometimes, the moment is right. The evening is right. She's right. But you just can't seem to rise to the occasion. You're not alone. And until now, there was nothing you could do but hope.

Cut to: a candlelit restaurant. A waiter arrives with a bottle of champagne. The man takes the bottle and works the cork with both hands. It pops. Foam spills over his fingers and down the neck of the bottle. He pours. She watches him, smiling. He holds her gaze.

VOICEOVER: Introducing Verantus by Bonifatius. A short course. Weeks of confidence. Verantus works with your body's own natural pathways to restore what time has taken away, so you can rise to the occasion. Not just tonight, but whenever the moment finds you.

Cut back to the beach. The lighthouse beam sweeps once more across the darkening water. The couple are silhouetted against it. He puts his arm around her. The light holds steady on the tower.

VOICEOVER: Ask your doctor about Verantus. Because you deserve to feel like yourself again.

VOICEOVER (female, rapid): Bremelaverin hydrochloride is a prescription selective melanocortin-4 receptor modulator indicated for men with erectile dysfunction. Course consists of three to five days of oral dosing; effects may persist for up to eight weeks. Side effects may include nausea, facial flushing, transient elevation of blood pressure, decreased appetite, and headache. Do not take Verantus if you have uncontrolled hypertension or a history of cardiovascular events. Verantus should not be combined with other melanocortin receptor agonists. Consult your doctor before use.

[Excalbia]

The Imperial Chancery
Citadel Excalbia

Although Imperial Chancellor Paul Akoak preferred to hold meetings at his residence or in his legislative office, some meetings had to be held in his offices at the Chancery. Today's meeting was one of those.

Akoak say at the head of the table beneath a portrait of Emperor Joseph and flanked the national flag and the Chancery flag. To his right day Grace Petersen, the Minister of State, and to his left, Lord General Rachel Gertrude, ret., the Minister of Defence. Also at the table were Dr. Victoria Kanlnieke, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Lord Admiral Ephraim Allen, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Ilmars Brigaders, the Director of Imperial Intelligences, and Rear Admiral Robert Blumanis, the Chief of Military Intelligence.

“So,” Akoak said, testing his hands on the table in front of him, “what do we know, and what do we think we know about this attack in, what is it, Larshen?”

“Larushem,” Gertrude said, as she opened the folder in front of her.

“Larushen,” Akoak repeated.

Glancing up from her portfolio, Petersen said, “The Embassy has confirmed two deaths from gunshots and an international wanted bulletin issued for a Daytanistani national. The Embassy believes that at least one of the deceased was, in fact, a member of the MBI.”

Akoak leaned back and steepled his fingers in front of him. “That is troubling.” He turned to Brigaders. “What are our sources telling us?”

“Not much more than the Embassy,” Brigaders said softly, with a slight nasally accent. “Except both of the deceased are Knootians and seem to have been there under some form of cover. The woman in the wanted bulletin is not a known Daytanistani operative, and may be an independent operator.” He paused. “Of course, all that falls under the heading of things we think we know, as you put it.”

Akoak turned to Kanlnieke, who drew in a breath, and said, “We have nothing on her on the law enforcement front, but we have instructed all agencies to be on the lookout. We've also coordinated with the Dominion, the Confederation and Saxmere. If she tries to enter the Excalbian Isles, we'll know it. And be in a position to certain her.”

Akoak nodded. “Be sure to offer your Knootian counterpart any assistance they would like from our end.” The Attorney General nodded.

Then, the Chancellor turned to Brigaders. “If this is an attempted assassination originating from within the Knootian Government, it would be most alarming.” He paused. “As of now, gathering Intel on any potential cliques within the Knootian State looking to overthrow the elected government is our number one priority.” He turned to Rear Admiral Blumanis. “And I want your people to use every connection they have inside the Knootian military to find out, first, if they know anything about any plot, and, second, to determine whether or not the military is involved or would support such a coup. Understood?”

Both Brigaders and Blumanis nodded.

Akoak turned to Petersen.”Grace, let's get out a statement deploring the attack, and expressing our support for free speech, a free press and elected government, etc, etc.”

“Will do, Paul.”

The Chancellor drew in a deep breath. “Thank you,” he said. “Let me know as soon as we know anything else.”

[Snefaldia]

Snefaldian Embassy, Hartstad, Knootoss

"...well, I've seen the KNN newsfeeds," said Ambassador Kuwazitni Arkiya from his spot at the head of the long conference table the embassy used for important briefings, "But I am mystified a little by all of the implications. What exactly are we looking at here, before we issue a cable back to Sargedain?" Arkiya, probably the most fashionable of Snefaldia's diplomatic corps, was in a bespoke double-breasted pinstripe suit, with a silk necktie in purple and gold imported from Xirnium. He had always preferred a more aristocratic cut but since being posted to Knootoss had gone for something a bit more mainstream, fabrics that said "I make my money" instead of "I inherited what I've got."

The staff around the table was mostly the usual crowd, but only those with security clearances as they had the addition of the ISITMA station chief for Hartstad, an unassuming woman with a severe black bob cut and extremely sensible grey pantsuit. Her name was Webensenu.

"The situation is still quite unclear," she said. "What we believe is that two Knootians are dead, one of whom is an MBI agent. We are still tracking that down. The suspect is Daytan, but not one who is affiliated with the security services. She may be known to the Sabaris, who did a lot of footwork during the Ostmark war to identify Daytan intelligence efforts and counter their networks. It's possible that she is..."

The Charge d'Affaires coughed, knowing what was coming. "It's embarrassing, but if the identification is correct... she appears to have been a pornographic actress active in Allanea, a high-end escort. Very preliminary, however."

Arkiya goggled a little, then controlled himself. "A patsy?" Webensenu shrugged, which made her look somewhat comical as her shoulders brushed the bottom of her bob cut. "Probably not a patsy. Viljoen is a known lech but he's not stupid enough to hire a callgirl to meet him at the KNN headquarters. She's probably involved somehow, but the "how" is unclear."

The ambassador rapped his fingers on the table. "Was this actually an attempt to take out the Grand Pensionary? A honeypot doesn't make sense, either. Viljoen's always been very good about his image but... frankly, if someone came at him publicly with evidence he'd slept with a high-end former porn star he would probably be able to turn it to his advantage."

The Charge d'Affaires snorted. "He'd just go to Becky! and get half the country feeling bad for him being seduced by some temptress, and the other half wishing they'd gotten some exotic Daytan tail..."

"A honeypot is a possibility," Webensenu went on, ignoring the vulgarity. "But for the moment we don't think so. It's clear he's a target, but for what is not known. We are not ruling out factional issues. The head of the MBI is a career bureaucrat, generally well-regarded and professional. Our sources have kept an eye on the old Invisible Hand folks - the EIVD. There's some suggestion that Taelman has links with them."

Arkiya shook his head. "That doesn't work. The right wingers are predicted to win the next election in a landslide. Why would they give the lefties a chance to replace Viljoen, either by killing him or orchestrating his resignation? And I've been here long enough to know how Taelman works. I have never had the sense he is a particularly subtle operator. Not the kind of conspirator to work with the EIVD."

Webensenu nodded. "We don't think so either, but for the moment we still don't have a lot to go on. What I can tell you is that we are trying our best. Since last year, cooperation from the Knootians has gotten less... friendly. We still have sources and contacts but, as you know, the Anahuac situation spooked them."

The ambassador shook his head sadly. "There's nothing we can do about that. The time I've spent working on de Lange and the others... Sargedain knows this, and there was never anything official, but I think the Knootians got scared the relationship would thaw further, and we were going to start giving information to Anahuac. They've shared less freely than they used to. Publicly, and on most everything else we're on good terms, but intelligence is difficult."

Webensenu nodded. "I know. I've been here since 2024. But that's most of what we have so far. The Citadel will have more to say. There is one figure..." she flipped through her papers. "Yes. Diderick Enck. The NSC. His fingers are all over some less savory things. Not wetworks, really, but blackmail, coercion. Foreign policy stuff. It looks like KNN cameras put him in the area on the day but we're still working on confirmation. He's known to the Excalbians for work on the Confederation. I have less on him than they would. There are lots of reasons why he would be meeting the Grand Pensionary, but if he really was there..."

"...Why would he be at the KNN building." Arkiya finished. "Not the kind who wants to get close to the cameras. Well. I have a meeting with de Lange scheduled for... let's see. Friday, no. Ah, Tuesday. Once we hear back from Sargedain I'll have a better sense of what the situation is and try to get something, anything out of him. And... well, we should probably invite Viljoen to dinner again. I might be able to get him to brag."

"Might?" the Charge d'Affaires asked, incredulous. Laughter spread around the table.

[Excalbia]

The Imperial Chancery
Citadel Excalbia

The Imperial Chancellor walked into the secure briefing room looking slightly perturbed. He sat down at the head of the table under the portrait of the Emperor and gave a slight nod. Then he said, “Where’s the rest of the team? I’d like to wrap this up as quickly as possible. It’s been a long day.”

The Chief of Military Intelligence straightened his uniform and glanced at the Director of Imperial Intelligence. The Director nodded and turned to the Chancellor.

“We’ve already briefed Ministers Petersen and Kanlnieke, and Lord General Gertrude.”

Chancellor Akoak nodded. “OK.”

Director Brigaders cleared his throat. “We’ve pulled together more information on the incident at the KNN studios.” He looked at Rear Admiral Blumanis and continued. “Our military sources suggest that there is most likely no involvement on the part of the Knootian armed forces. It seems their navy is almost completely disinterested in domestic politics. The air force, to the extent it has an interest, seems mostly predisposed to support Viljoen, and the army seems to be politically sidelined.”

Blumanis nodded, and Akoak gestured for Brigaders to continue.

“Where it gets sticky,” Brigaders said, “is when it comes to the men shot in the sub-basement identifying themselves as MBI. From our perspective, that seems unlikely. The MBI is currently run by a career bureaucrat, and is generally professional, technically oriented and focused on foreign intelligence. This wouldn’t fit their profile.”

“So,” Akoak asked, leaning forward, “rogue agents or another cover?’

“Most likely another cover,” Brigaders said, “but that’s an extrapolation on our part.” He paused. “What is interesting is that their National Security Coordinator is Diederik Enck, formerly of the EIVD, and long believed to be an associate of the so-called Order of the Invisible Hand. He was greatly involved in the original Saxmere Crisis. But, there’s no obvious reason why he’d try to kill Viljoen.”

“Anyting else?” Akoak asked, leaning back.

“Two things. The woman that the Knootians are looking for may be a woman who was convicted in Allanea for involvement in an operation alongside Pantocratorian operatives. However, FR is not conclusive; she may have had reconstructive surgery to alter her appearance. And, a reminder: KNN is owned by Rotsenberg. And, it’s very interesting that KNN isn’t playing up the communist boogeyman angle with the Daytanistani woman’s involvement.”

Akoak sat back for a moment, then leaned forward, rubbing his eyes. “So, it’s old home week with Taelman, the Invisible Hand and Rotsenberg floating around in this mess.” He sighed. “Keep looking into this. However, you should know that I spoke with the Emperor and he was very clear about one thing. And, I happen to agree with him. We cannot do anything that would give any appearance that we are intervening or trying to influence Knootian domestic politics. For now, we’re observing. And waiting. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” both intelligence chief said.

[The Resurgent Dream]

Bianca Ferrera’s Apartment
Caer Gawen, Tasat
Caldan Union

Bianca was lying on her bed, her knees bent and her ankles crossed above her. She was in a simple black t-shirt and jeans. She was flipping through her social media accounts. She was on sun.rise, which had a lot of her core fanbase, and on Friendsbook and MyFace and Chirp and Twatter. She was also on Verve and, with her recent prominence in Knootoss, that was receiving a lot more attention. Her social media presence, while certainly containing some very produced images and recordings, was not professionally managed and had been, at times, quite messy. She had leaned into that authenticity without making it fake. She thought people could tell if it was fake, unless they chose not to. Her feed right now was a mix of things. Promoting her last album still and a few appearances. Humour, congratulating others, a bit of shade at Henda though toned down and subtle. There were a few calls for donations to relief funds for both Kemetia and the Zone.There were some thirst traps but they had largely been replaced with vague, romantic posts in the last week or two. She wasn’t quite ready to go public with Xavier yet. Obviously, recent events were mentioned in her page again and again. She had seen the KNN footage. She had seen what people were saying and arguing on line.She couldn’t shake the idea that she should have something to say about this. She had told Xavier as much but she had struggled to find the words. Impulsively, she just positioned her phone and turned the camera on.

“Hey, everybody. It’s Bianca. I know I’ve been in newsfeeds and, well, news, ever since that deepfake with me and the Grand Pensionary of Knootoss who I am not going to just call by his first name like he’s some guy I know. Sorry, commenters. But shit is getting serious with National Action in Pantocratoria and now the Steel Covenant in Knootoss. We have these kind of bigots in Caldas too. We told Reform to fuck off at the last election and they can fuck off again. But, anyway…” She paused and frowned. “Look, someone is coming for Viljoen and it’s really dark and scary. I don’t even really know what happened but some tried to kill a major Atlantic head of state. It’s scary with all these extremists nearby and it’s scary with all the horror in Kemetia. I think we have to stick together. I know it’s easy for me to say that with all of my whatever but we do.”

Then she repeated, “Hey iedereen. Het is Bianca. Ik weet dat ik in nieuwsfeeds en, nou ja, nieuws ben geweest, sinds die deepfake met mij en de Grote Pensionaris van Knootoss die ik niet gewoon bij zijn voornaam ga noemen alsof hij een of andere gast is die ik ken. Sorry, commenters. Maar shit wordt serieus met Nationale Actie in Pantocratoria en nu ook de Legioen van Staal in Knootoss. We hebben dit soort soort bigots ook in Caldas. We hebben Reform gezegd dat ze moesten opflikkeren bij de laatste verkiezing en ze kunnen weer opflikkeren.Kijk, iemand komt achter Viljoen aan en het is echt donker en eng. Ik weet niet eens echt wat precies gebeurde maar iemand probeerde een belangrijke Atlantische staatshoofd te vermoorden. Het is eng met al deze extremisten dichtbij en het is eng met alle horror in Kemetia. Ik denk dat we samen moeten blijven. Ik weet dat het makkelijk voor mij is om dat te zeggen met al mijn… wat dan ook… maar we moeten.”

A weak smile. “It really reminds me of that poem…

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

She pursed her lip as if trying to remember. “It really does meet the moment. That’s not the whole thing but at the end…

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

“I don’t know, guys. What rough beast? I love you guys.” And she posted it on all her platforms.

[Daytanistan]

Novoorqendi, Sabaristan

Layla Boom’s employers had offered to set her up anywhere she liked, outside of Vasconia and South Epheron. She had chosen some place close to home which, nevertheless, she believed would never hand her over to Daytan authorities: the Khanate of Sabaristan. They had purchased a luxury apartment for her in Novoorqendi, her new home, under her new name, Aalyooma Zaan, linked to her new Sabari passport and identity. This was the second time she had been inside.

She had landed in Novoorqendi a few days ago on her flight from Laneria, as arranged. Although she had changed the checkpoint at which she crossed from Knootoss into Laneria out of caution, the moment she had to switch to her new Sabari passport, there was little point in trying to disguise her movements from her employer. If they wanted her to be apprehended at the airport, then they had the details of any passport she might use to do it. So she had spent most of the drive across Laneria trying to talk herself into believing the scenario that her employer meant for her to get away, meant for her to get paid, and meant for her to ride into the sunset on the Sabari steppe. She would learn how to ride a horse first, but that was still her plan too. If she was wrong, she reasoned, she would be detained at the airport, and an agent or proxy would be bringing her somewhere in handcuffs. That didn’t happen. She landed in Sabaristan using her new passport, and took a car service straight to the address she had been given for her new home. The keys she had received with the passport opened the door, as promised. There was a welcoming basket of fruit and champagne. She drank the champagne and threw out the fruit.

Her suspicions had re-emerged just before she opened the door. She didn’t trust the place. She searched it while she drank the champagne, found nothing, and still didn’t sleep there. She left after a few hours and got a room in a nearby hotel, where she had stayed since. She had spent the intervening days making certain arrangements.

Layla Boom did some business in Sabaristan. Not a huge amount, but some. She had most recently sent a girl to a luxury resort on the steppe, to travel alongside a sugar daddy type on a tour with some company called Golden Stallion, Golden Horse, something like that. Well, he wasn’t really a sugar daddy type, he wasn’t some lonely middle-aged senior account manager who had never had time to start a family or learn how to talk to girls but who would pay generously to have a pretty girl go with him on a holiday and give him the girlfriend experience. But he was the organised crime equivalent of that guy, and had been a gentleman to her girl, who had told her how great horse riding was on the steppe as she counted her ducats in thick wads of rubber-banded hundred ducat bills when it was all over. She hoped that girl was doing her graduate degree in Landing now like she had said was her plan, and wasn’t private contracting. The next sugar daddy type might not be so gentlemanly.

Layla knew some Sabaris who weren’t so gentlemanly. Two burly guys who worked private security for foreign VIPs when they visited Novoorqendi. They were war vets, but they didn’t mind working for a Daytan, so long as she paid in full and on time. Layla always paid in full and on time. She had booked a special penthouse party in Novoorqendi for a washed up popstar from the Southern Low Countries, whose royalty payments for his last hit record back in the nineties could still buy whole villages in Daytanistan, if he had been so inclined. She had arranged both security and the entertainment. The boys were only too happy to work for her again, although they were disappointed when she explained that this was a different sort of penthouse party.

So on the day she had arranged with her employers for their rendezvous, she had returned to the apartment with one of her two brutes, a couple of bags of groceries, her travel bag, a bottle of vodka, and some Pink Bunny Cola. After stocking her kitchen, she set the brute up in the bedroom, where she half-jokingly told him she could still handle him, which elicited only a blank look of incomprehension, before she told him to listen and come into the living room if she needed help. Then she went to the kitchen, mixed herself a vodka martini, sat down in the living room and waited.

The same man that she'd met in Ale-Yarok arrived from the direction of the market, carrying a canvas shoulder bag on one strap and a paper tote in his right hand. He wore stone-coloured hiking trousers tucked into lightly scuffed ankle boots, a dark fleece half-zip over a collarless linen shirt, and a Sabari embroidered cap that sat slightly too far back on his head. The cap had been bought recently: the thread on the brim was still bright. His beard was trimmed the same way as before. He performatively checked the building number against his phone, put it in his pocket, and crossed through the lobby without stopping at the desk. When he found the front door to the apartment, he ignored the bell and knocked twice, then stood with his hands loose.

Layla hit the send button on her phone, set it aside, and then stood up, martini in hand, and walked across to the apartment door, which she opened.

“Won’t you come in?” she asked.

He nodded and stepped into the hallway and paused. His eyes went to the bedroom door, which was not quite shut. He looked at it for a moment, then moved into the kitchen and set the paper tote on the counter. He took the hard case out and opened it, crouching at the baseboard socket beside the refrigerator without asking. He clipped the two antenna modules into place, and ran the cable to the wall. The unit's narrow screen lit green. He turned to face her.

"How is Sabaristan?" he asked.

“It will take me a while to adjust, but there are things which remind me of home, in a good way.” she answered, genuinely. She moved over to the kitchen counter where a clean cocktail glass matching the half-full one she carried was resting. “Can I offer you a drink? Vodka martini? Pink Bunny Cola?”

“Please tell me you’re joking about the cola”, he said, with mild amusement. He did not press for a drink, his gaze turning in the direction of the bedroom door. “Can your people be trusted?” he asked. “I want to know how it went.” He reached into his dark fleece half-zip and retrieved a small pistol. He didn’t point it at her, but rather showed it, before putting it down on the marble top of the kitchen island and stepping away from it.

“He’s here in case you try to kill me.” Layla said earnestly, and casually produced a bottle of Pink Bunny Cola from the fridge to show she was serious. “He doesn't speak Dutch, and his English is only just more sophisticated than grunts, and he will be well behaved if you will. Anyway, your man started by offering me a Pink Bunny Cola. Viljoen I mean. But I should start a little earlier. Are you sure you don't want a drink?”

“I”ll have the vodka martini”, the man said, still bemused as he relented, then continuing on in Dutch that struck Layla of having the faintest South Epheronian accent, though he was clearly attempting to affect a general Hartstad accent. He spoke matter-of-factly: “We lost the cameras to a sweep the morning before the op. Contacting you would have been a risk. I am glad you managed to work with our … alternative solution.”

“What was that?” Layla asked.

The man looked at her. “I’m not going to go into operational details, but you did make good on your escape, didn’t you?”

“Yes, and I got both a contract and audio recording. It's not too hard to work out what we're doing. You should have no problem.” she replied. “So was the man in the elevator on the way down yours?”

There was a brief pause as the man recalibrated. His instinct was to reveal nothing, but he’d already given away his surprise. “No”, he said. “The man in the elevator might be a good place to start.”

“Your operational details might be a good place to start.” Layla retorted as she mixed the vodka martini. “Somebody compromised your op. Old guy, grey, smug. He joined me in the elevator and stopped it. Knew my name. Told me Viljoen suspected I was a Daytan operative but agreed to see me anyway.”

“This old guy?” he asked, taking out his phone and typing in something. He showed a profile picture of a man who clearly did not want to have his picture taken.

She nodded and handed him his martini. He continued: “That was Diederik Enck. The National Security Coordinator. Apparently not beyond getting his own hands dirty doing CI”, the man said. Before she could cut in, he added: “Our operation wasn’t compromised. If it had been, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We lost the camera’s in a sweep the morning before the op, but that could have been a regular security sweep getting lucky. We had no reason to believe you had been flagged. Though based on the international search warrant, he clearly did flag you.”

“I asked him why the MBI would suspect I was a Daytan operative if it knew my name. He clarified that he didn’t say the MBI suspected I was a Daytan spy.” she continued. “So, he knew things he didn’t share with the MBI. Did you tip off the MBI? Me being arrested would have worked out for you, since your cameras had been discovered. So long as I was arrested after Viljoen signed.”

“He clearly wanted you to go through with the op”, the man speculated, his fingers kneading his chin before he looked up and gave her a flat look: “Are you seriously suggesting that we told the head of the Knootian secret services about an op against the Knootian Head of State?” he asked.

“The only reasons to allow you to go through with the op would be if he wanted to benefit from it himself. Or …” his gaze turned to the pistol on the marble counter. “If his purpose was to turn you.”

“He wanted to talk to me afterwards. But he didn’t get a chance.” Layla answered. “And since you’re not going to go into operational details, you’re leaving me to speculate. If you didn’t tip off the MBI or Enck, then they each independently compromised the operation, Enck especially. I’m sharing that with you because you might want to find out why. If you don’t want to share with me, that’s fine, so long as I get paid and left alone after today.”

She downed the remainder of her martini, and started making herself another one.

“I know you’re not paying me to think. I’m familiar with that arrangement.” Layla acknowledged.

“We wouldn’t have hired a dumb bimbo to pull this off. And unless you lost the contract, or failed to get him to sign it, you did succeed”, the man answered, his eyes still on the pistol, though he looked more settled. He looked at her. “You do have a signed contract, don’t you?”

“Of course. And an audio recording.” she told him. “Stop looking at the gun. I don’t want it, and if you wanted to use it, you wouldn’t have left it on the table.”

He let out a small sigh and looked back at her. “I wouldn’t trust anything Enck has told you.” He thought for a moment about what to say, then conceded: “What I can tell you is this: we lost access to the camera’s on the morning of your visit. That could have been the protection officer’s sweep getting lucky. Or it could mean that you had been compromised. Either way, we decided that you couldn’t be contacted. So we organised the fire alarm as a contingency.”

“Good. That means Enck didn’t trigger the alarm.” she answered. “Although since he failed to find me in the crowd, I guess it wouldn’t have mattered if he did. So, should I pick up from when I told Enck he was a weirdo and left the elevator?”

“Yes”, the man said, gesturing towards her. “We can reason through this together.”

“The Grand Pensionary’s security detail waved me through.” she continued. “Viljoen offered me Pink Bunny Cola. Twice. If he offered a third time I’d have had to accept. He was half-undressed when I got there, shirt half-unbuttoned, shoes off. It started a lot like one of my more conventional jobs, frankly. He wanted to search me. Personally. He had cold fingers.”

“Could be an indication of diabetes”, the man speculated. “Interesting. Go on.”

“He told me he knew I was a Daytan spy. Speculated what… the General Secretary would do if he knew I’d been caught.” Layla recalled. “So I played damsel in distress. Oh no, Maurits, please don’t tell Nugat you caught me, he’d kill me.”

“I presume you then had intercourse?” He made a face. “Let’s stick to the operationally relevant details. Was there anything else he told you? Anything else you saw? Were there camera’s in the room? Did he act as though he felt you were going to be arrested? Was there anything else he might have said that was… useful?”

“That depends on how you define intercourse. I’m sure you will recognize the act by the sound.” Layla said. “No, he didn’t act like he thought I was going to be arrested. He acted like he wanted to get his rocks off. Some blathering nonsense about film adaptations in Daytanistan was the only other thing on his mind. Then, after he was done, he wanted to put off signing the contract until his lawyers went over it. I think he realized that if I was a Daytan spy, then meeting me was probably really dumb. I’ve seen similar moments of clarity afterwards plenty of times. Never from a head of state. He told me they had found the cameras. I tricked him into signing without getting his lawyers to look at it by telling him we’d have to have a second date if he didn’t.”

“Clever girl.” He showed a small smile that dropped away as he considered the implications: “So they didn’t tell Viljoen that they were going to bring you in. That’s interesting. That’s very interesting.” He thought about it some more. “Did anything else happen before he left the room? I believe you were approached by a handler, a few minutes after Viljoen left with his protection detail.”

“Yes. MBI actually, I assume.” Layla said. “She had a gun. Told me she was with the scheduling office. She followed me out, walking behind me. When the alarm went off I made a break for it. Two MBI officers tried to cut me off, one pulled a gun… things started moving pretty fast. Viljoen’s protection detail stumbled in, with Viljoen in tow. They shot the MBI officer who had drawn a gun on me, and made for the nearest staircase. I made for the same staircase. The woman chased after me. She grabbed my jacket, and I dropped my handbag. There was nothing incriminating in it, but they got Amna Mamood’s phone and purse and ID. Viljoen’s detail shot her too, and I escaped up the stairs behind them. There were other people too, wardrobe people I think, on level -3, and more office workers and others coming into the staircase as I went up. It was pretty chaotic. That’s how I slipped out of the building through the front door - there were hundreds of people around.”

“MBI or EIVD”, the man said, as he considered the supposition. “Enck would prefer to work with the EIVD on this. More links through the Invisible Hand. But it’s possible he had people transfer into the MBI laterally after he became National Security Coordinator.” He frowned, wondering if this was too much to tell her. He ran his fingers through his beard, then finally took a sip from his vodka martini. “And from there, you made it out as planned”, he concluded.

“Yep. I changed the border crossing in case the operation had been compromised enough that my escape route to Laneria was known to authorities, but otherwise, pretty much according to plan.” Layla said. “I’ll pry again about your operational details, and ask how do you know I was approached by a handler after Viljoen left the room?”

“We still had eyes on the corridor”, he said simply. “Until the power was cut.”

“Figures.” Layla shrugged. She finished preparing her second martini, took a sip, seemed satisfied, then walked across the open plan apartment to the living room area, where her travel bag sat beside the couch, and she sat down on the couch next to it. “Is there anything else you’d like me to go over?”

He took a sip from his martini, then sat the remainder down on the marble top, next to his pistol, then followed after her. “I am authorised to make you an additional offer”, he said. “But first, if there’s anything else you’d like to share, I would hear it. Anything you learned that might help.” His brow knit, and he sat beside her. “You have sound instincts about people. And you got close to Enck. What do you believe his intentions were, when he approached you in the elevator? Not at the time. Looking back on it.”

“Since he didn’t work for you, it’s clear he’s no ally of the Grand Pensionary.” she shrugged. “He wanted me to think he worked for whoever had sent me. He tipped his hand though without realizing it, I suppose. He told me there was a change of plan because Viljoen suspected I was a Daytan agent. That’s pretty much exactly what you wanted Viljoen to think. I guess that didn’t occur to me in the spur of the moment, I just thought it was… well, an amateur intervention on your part. He knew my real name. Not just Layla Boom. You surprised me the same way when I first met you in Ale-Yarok. Like I said, he said he wanted to talk to me after the operation. He obviously wasn’t anticipating me running up the fire escape, because I didn’t run into him on the way out.”

“He would have wanted to make the approach himself, because he is an arrogant, reckless bastard”, the man said. “But he’d let his people bring you in. He was probably monitoring you from somewhere else at that point. A cleared room. Or a van.”

“If he sent the MBI, he didn’t feel the need to fill them in on all the details.” she said. “I guess that could still track if he wanted to run it as his own operation without filling in the underlings. Maybe he’d have been worried that the MBI would’ve covered the contract up for Viljoen. He warned me not to harm Viljoen or to run, said he couldn’t protect me if I did. I told him he was going senile or something. I nearly assaulted him… but I figured it would compromise the op even worse.”

“If he told you that, he wanted something from you off the books”, the man said. “Interesting. I’ll have to bring that up with my employers. If you had trusted him, he’d have had all the leverage we were seeking. And possibly compromised our operation as well.” He glanced sideways at her, with something like pity: “Be glad you didn’t. I’ve heard the rumours of what he likes to do with girls. Nothing you’d want to do for money, I suspect.”

“I’ve done a lot of things for money.” she told him, and took a long sip of her martini. She set it down on the coffee table and looked back at him again. “Two people were shot so I could escape.”

“Are you feeling remorseful about that?” he asked. “Nightmares?” He paused, then added: “How did you feel about the mission with those Pantocratorian girls?”

“I felt worse about that, for a number of reasons.” she said quietly, staring into space over his shoulder. She looked back at him. “I don’t know if I feel remorseful about two people who were trying to catch me getting shot, but I do know I didn’t intend for anybody to get hurt. So, is what Enck likes to do with girls worse than killing two people?”

“It is regrettable that the Grand Pensionary’s detail shot those agents”, he answered, staring at the empty glass. “But the reasons matter. Tens of thousands died in Iesus Christi, to bring freedom to that country. Nobody would say that a soldier who went there and killed fascists did an evil thing. The only evil was that those efforts did not succeed. That people continue to suffer there. If a team had been able to kill Bridgette Iesus then, even with collateral damage, with innocent lives lost, it would have changed the course of history. Millions would be leading better lives now.”

He looked back at her: “When they hired you to kidnap those girls, all you were ever going to accomplish was to see them returned to their backwards, primitive Empire, to be brutalised and brainwashed. This mission is… different.” He faltered.

“There was just one girl. And we were trying to bring her back to her family. And I went to prison for my part in it.” Layla answered him quietly. Everyone thought their mission was special. “You said you were authorised to make me an additional offer?”

The man swallowed and composed himself: “My employer is concerned that you may be tempted by Enck’s counter-intelligence operation. I hope that’s not true. I think that’s not true. But even so, there’s a hundred thousand ducats in it for you, on top of what you’ll receive today. To be paid after we have succeeded in what we are trying to do. Think of it as a gratuity for your continued discretion.”

“Enck didn’t make me an offer, and he wasn’t my type.” she replied, her mouth turning in a sly smile. “Maybe if he was the sort of reckless bastard who would try to bring me in himself, instead of sitting in a van. But I’ll gladly accept a gratuity.” She looked down at the travel case next to her and then back to the man. “Would you like the contract now?”

“Yes please”, he said, gesturing for her to proceed. She picked up the travel case, laid it out in front of her and opened it. From it she produced an e-document wallet, and a tiny thumb drive. Inside the case, the man could see a generously proportioned black lacy brassiere. She handed the e-document wallet and thumb drive to him.

“Your contract, and the recording.” she said. The man took his time looking over the device, and the thumb drive, pacing back to the kitchen. After about fifteen minutes, he seemed satisfied, placing the e-document wallet in the canvas shoulder bag, and the thumb drive in his stone-coloured hiking trousers. He produced a thumb drive of his own from the same place, offering it to her.

“For your troubles.”

“My tokens?” she asked. He nodded. She plugged it into the socket on the bottom of her phone, and tapped on the screen. He noticed the way she touched the screen from a lower angle than he might have because of her long, acrylic decorated nails. After a minute or two she smiled in satisfaction.

He grabbed his pistol from the tabletop and hid it in his coat pocket once more. “Pleasure doing business”, he said. “Please make sure that we can stay in touch with you for that gratuity down the road.”

“You don’t need to pay me off to keep me quiet or stop me going to Enck.” Layla said as she walked him out of the apartment. “I’ve had enough dangerous men and secret missions.”

When she opened the apartment door, another burly Sabari fellow was waiting outside. He stood with his hands behind his back, at a respectful distance. Clearly he had been waiting to step in if there was trouble.

“Don’t mind my friend.” Layla said. “He was also just here in case you tried to kill me.”

“It’s good we’re all trusting each other, then”, the man said, his chuckle slightly nervous as he sized up the Sabari man. “Well then. See you again in the future, I hope. That should be the last time.”

He made his way out. Layla watched him go, then went back inside, followed this time by the brute who had been waiting outside. She paid each of the Sabaris with a thick wad of darangs taken from her handbag, and let them leave with a bottle of Pink Bunny Cola each. Then she sat back on the couch to reflect and contemplate the future while she finished her martini.

Her employer was disappointingly mad, she decided, to liken the plot she had been part of to bring down Maurits Viljoen to the Iesus Christi War. Such a long bow could only be drawn in extremism. She preferred to deal with cynics. They kept things suitably transactional. True believers were more dangerous. If his response to the “crossfire casualties” of her mission was to compare them to a war with tens of thousands of Knootian dead, she knew her own life didn’t have much value to him either. She was a loose end, and the one hundred thousand ducat gratuity was bait to keep her accessible in case she ever needed to be “tied off”. It was a lot of money, that was true, but she couldn’t spend it dead, and she had now been paid everything she had originally expected anyway. She wouldn’t take the bait and stay for the trap: but now she needed to decide how she’d disappear from the people who had helped her disappear.

[Knootoss]

De Schuilkerk
Haag, Free Republic of Knootoss

The outer door had no number. It sat between a notary's office and a private home in the Oosterhout. The only mark on it was a small brass plate, tarnished to near-black, that read DE SCHUILKERK. I pressed the bell once. The concierge opened it within four seconds, which meant he had been watching the street camera.

"Good evening, sir."

I handed him my phone and my watch. He placed them in a numbered wooden tray without looking at either and slid the tray into an ornate wall cabinet, then opened the inner door. I passed through into the warmth.

The ground floor was the familiar, handsome room with a bar, leather chairs, low conversation. The lighting was the colour of old cognac. I recognised a few members by the backs of their heads. At the bar, the Vice-Admiral leaned close to a younger woman I did not know, his mouth near the woman's ear, one hand resting on the small of her back. The woman's throat was flushed. There was a stillness to the way she stood. It told me she was caught, waiting to be told what to do next. I liked that.

Beside them, the South Epheronian ambassador stood with his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up. He had thick forearms. He was laughing at something the bartender had said, his head thrown back, the tendons in his neck catching the light. I thought about what it would take to stop that laugh. Not much. A word of implication.

A stockbroker in a 50.000 Ducat suit was negotiating with the part-owner, Elfriede Vezhâlryn. She managed not to look out of place, despite wearing a leather corset, latex skirt, fishnet stockings, vinyl platform boots, and a Xirnumite brigade commissary's high peaked cap.

I took it all in and let my face show nothing but pleasant neutrality before taking the staircase down. The stone stairs were seventeenth-century, worn smooth in the centre, the air growing cooler with each step. By the bottom the air held notes of leather, antiseptic detergent, sweat, and blood. The corridor was narrow, lit by recessed strips at ankle height that threw long shadows upward. I passed a heavy curtain, half-drawn, behind which someone was crying softly and rhythmically.

The gallery opened into the former chapel. The central space held a St Andrew's cross in oiled walnut and a suspension frame of brushed steel where the altar had once stood. Alcoves shaped from the side aisles receded behind thick curtains. In one, two figures moved against each other in crimson half-light. In another, a woman knelt motionless with her hands behind her back, while a man in a dark leather waistcoat chastised her.

I chose the alcove I had reserved: the one at the far end, screened by a heavy curtain that I left half-drawn. Inside, I found everything I had asked for. A padded bench against one wall. A St Andrew's cross in darker wood than the one in the gallery, fitted with leather cuffs on brass D-rings. A low table near the seating held a bottle of Pantocratorian Armagnac and two empty glasses. Against the opposite wall, a glass-fronted cabinet displayed implements in graduated rows: floggers, crops, a coiled single-tail, lengths of rope in black and oxblood, and three ligatures of braided cord hung neatly on hooks.

I sat. I waited. I thought about what I was going to do to her.

Not what I would do to her physically. That had slotted into place immediately. But I had been thinking about the rest of it ever since I made the connections, moving from KNN, to the Rotsenberg family, and finally landing on Cécile. As I waited, I felt the old tingle in my spine, the tightening in the chest, that came whenever I found someone who had built something I could just take. That was the real thrill. Not the games people played in these rooms, although I liked those too. After years of circling each other like predators, I would finally make her submit. I wanted to feel the shift in her posture. That instant of hitched breath and widening of her pupils, when she would come to understand that whatever she thought she had was now mine.

She arrived at a quarter past ten. I heard her heels on the stone before I saw her, a measured pace, unhurried. When she appeared at the curtain I let myself look at her in a way I would never allow myself to do in public.

She looked younger than her sixty-nine years. Her dress was black and clung to her body without revealing it, with long sleeves and dark stockings. She wore the wedding ring from the third husband, the one who had drowned. What made my mouth go dry was not her body, but the power contained in it. She could hold a room without raising her voice and have every young would-be power-broker in the country look at her the way a dog looks at the hand that feeds it. She was one of the most powerful women in the country, and she carried that power well.

"National Security Coordinator Diederik Enck," she said with careful warmth. As if we had just met.

"Cécile. Thank you for coming."

She looked at the alcove. At the implements behind the glass. Her gaze swept over the ceiling. Assessing, categorising. Then her eyes moved to the gallery, in the direction of the woman kneeling in the other alcove. "Is she comfortable, do you think?" she asked.

"She's where she wants to be. Needs to be."

"How reassuring." She reached for the heavy curtain and drew it closed across the alcove entrance in a single smooth motion. The gallery disappeared. The sounds from outside dampened to a murmur. We were sealed in.

She sat in the chair opposite me and placed both hands flat on her thighs. "You said you had something to discuss that required privacy," she said.

"I did."

"This is certainly private." A beat. "Go on."

I did not answer immediately. This was my turf. I let nothing show on my face but polite patience.

"You've been a naughty girl, Cécile."

"Have I?"

I stood. I crossed to the cabinet and opened the glass door. I selected the flogger: eighteen inches of braided leather, weighted tips, a turned walnut handle that sat perfectly in my palm. I'd commissioned it four years ago. I turned back to her.

"I think we should discuss it properly," I said.

I wanted her to refuse. I wanted an attempt at negotiation. That would have been the first surrender, and everything would have flowed from that. But she looked at the flogger, then looked at me, and gave me a single, unimpressed nod. She unbuttoned her cuffs and removed her dress with the efficiency of someone undergoing a medical examination. She folded it once and placed it on the chair. Beneath it she wore a black silk camisole, sleeveless, that showed her arms for the first time. They were lean, pale, surprisingly muscled. There were old scars on the inside of her left forearm, faded to white lines. Straight. Evenly spaced. Not self-inflicted. She saw me notice but did nothing to cover them.

A warning flickered at the edge of my subconscious, but I was already too deep in it, already too committed to the scene I had been composing in my head.

She walked to the cross. She stood with her back to it and placed her wrists against the upper cuffs. She looked at me steadily while I fastened them.

I let the tails of the flogger trail across my palm once, feeling the weight, the familiar resistance of the leather. "You hired the agent that hired the honeytrap," I said, and struck. The tails landed across her shoulder. The sound was sharp.

"The cameras had been wired by someone with building access." I struck again, lower, across the ribs. The skin above the camisole's edge flushed red, but her breathing did not change.

"I know about your meetings with the Black Widow." A third stroke. Harder. Across the same line. She would feel that one for days. Her eyes were fixed on the far wall of the alcove, at a point slightly above my head.

"I know where you got those scars."

I struck again.

"Your people set the fire."

Again.

"Two of my people are dead."

Again.

"You almost got away with it."

Again.

With each word, a stroke. With each stroke, nothing. No flinch. No catch of breath. No tightening of the hands around the cuff-chains. She had the expression of someone waiting for a late train.

I moved closer. I could smell her perfume, something austere and expensive, and beneath it the clean mineral smell of her skin. I leaned in. "I could get you for murder," I said, close to her ear. I struck low, across the hip. "You and the old bitch. The only person you really care about." I struck the same spot. "I could get the whole family."

She turned her head, slowly, until her eyes met mine. I could see the fine lines around them. Nothing behind them at all.

"You have been busy," she said.

I stepped back. I struck again. I varied the rhythm, the angle, the force. I was good at this. I knew the build, the pacing, the shift from impact to sting to deep ache. My palm was warm and damp against the walnut and the tails had a good weight to them and I was hitting her the way I had hit dozens of people in this room.

She gave me nothing. My shoulder was burning. My breath came in short pulls. Her breathing was the same as when I had fastened the cuffs. She had gone somewhere behind her own eyes and she had left her body standing at the cross like a coat on a hook.

My grip on the handle slipped. I adjusted it. My forearm was tight and the sweat on my palm made the leather treacherous. In the gallery, someone laughed softly. The sound was a long way away, but it vexed me.

I stopped. I set the flogger on the bench. I stood in front of her. Her eyes came back from wherever they had been and focused on me with perfect clarity.

"Was that everything you wanted to show me?" she asked.

I kept my face still. I made sure my breathing was even before I spoke. I had lost the scene and we both knew it, but a lost scene was not a lost negotiation.

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. "What do you want, Diederik?"

"I want to decide who sits in Viljoen's chair. And I want it understood, by everyone who matters, that whoever sits there does so because I put them there."

She was quiet for a moment. "Not the chair itself?"

"I don't need to be seen." I watched her face. "Your old woman has had her time. She's dying, Cécile. Whatever she built, she built it for someone else to inherit."

Something tightened around her mouth. A flicker. Then it passed. "And you are?"

"I caught you," I said. "Eleonora didn't see me coming. Neither did you. That should tell you everything about who is strong enough to run this."

She held my gaze from the cross. The marks were darkening.

"You know," she said, and something changed in her voice. Something careful and almost warm, like the edge of a smile she was permitting me to hear. "I have watched you for years."

"Go on."

"Most men crave applause. You don't. You understand real power." She paused. "I have always thought it was wasted on him."

She was right. Viljoen was a circus beast. Perhaps he had been her beast, once. He performed tricks for applause while forgetting who he owed his position to. And after KNN, after the farce that followed, he had tried to shift the blame onto me. Onto me. Talking about "security failures" and "a review of protocols," to journalists too ignorant to realise that I, the man being scapegoated, was the only man who had been doing his job.

I thought about what I would do with the tape. I would make him watch it. I would treat him as he had treated that Daytan. I would watch his face change as he came to understand who had been watching, and who had always been watching, and who had decided to stop watching and start acting. He deserved that. For every year I had wasted propping up his vanity. For every slight he had forgotten because I was not important enough for him to remember.

"The state needs someone who understands how to make people fall in line," she said. Her voice had dropped. Almost intimate. "Someone who can do what needs to be done without flinching." She looked up at me from the cross. "Not everyone can."

"I can."

"I know." The words were quiet. Almost tender. "And that is precisely why what you are proposing could work." She let a silence build, then: "I have seen plans fail because too many people knew. Every person you bring in is a person who can betray you. Every confidence you share is a confidence that can be sold."

"I know how these things work, Cécile."

"I'm sure you do. But you would be surprised how many intelligent men believe they need allies when what they actually need is control. The fewer people who know, the fewer people who can claim a part of your share."

I felt the edges of my mouth tighten into something that was not quite a smile. "I don't trust anyone," I said. "And I don't share. Nobody in the agencies has the full picture. The material is on drives that only I can access. The analysis is in my head."

Something shifted in her expression. Relief, perhaps. "Then you would not have to share any of this with anyone," she said. "Eleonora sits in that penthouse and believes the world still bends to her will. But you have already proven that it doesn't. You found what she tried to hide. You outmanoeuvred her." She paused. "You outmanoeuvred me."

The heat of the thing was building in my chest. I would decide what was a threat. I would decide what was permissible. I would decide who was protected and who was exposed.

"The state needs a firm hand," she said, still looking up at me. "Not Eleonora's." Her voice was low. Offering. "Yours."

"Yes," I said. The word came out harder and throatier than I intended. She held my gaze. The blankness in her eyes was not gone, but something was moving underneath it, the way water moves under ice. I think she fell for me in that moment.

"Then I think we understand each other," she said.

I reached up and unfastened the left cuff. Her wrist was reddened where the leather had pressed. She rotated it once, flexing the fingers. I unfastened the right. She stepped away from the cross and rolled her shoulders, then walked to the table and looked at the bottle and the two empty glasses.

"Will you pour?" she asked. She glanced back at me over her shoulder, holding my gaze longer than necessary.

I moved to the table and broke the seal on the Armagnac, pouring two measures.

Something shifted in the air behind me. Fast and close.

The cord hit my throat before I could get my chin down. Braided. Thin. It bit through the skin and into the windpipe and then my hand was up, fingers clawing at the thing, but it was already buried.

She pulled. I drove an elbow back and felt it connect with bone. She absorbed it. Her weight shifted but the cord did not loosen.

I tried to turn. The cord tightened. I got a heel behind hers and pushed. We staggered together against the cabinet. Glass cracked. Something fell. Her breathing was on the back of my neck. My fingers were slippery with something wet and I could not get them under the cord.

My vision was going. My pulse was changing. Each beat further apart than the last. I could hear the leather of the cuffs creaking on the cross where she had hung a minute ago, swinging slightly from where she had pushed off.

My knees hit the stone floor. The pain was sharp but somehow very distant. I could feel the press of her body behind mine, locked, patient, doing what needed to be done. The way she did everything. Without hurry. Without feeling. Without me.

[Knootoss]

Het Haagse Handelsblad / Hague Business Journal
The most authoritative voice for Knootian Freedom since 1790.

HHH.kn

---

Diederik Enck, National Security Coordinator, 1967–2026

The spymaster who preferred shadows found his end in one

In the early hours of a weekday morning, staff at De Schuilkerk, a private club in Haag's posh Oosterhout area, discovered a body in a reserved room. Police were called by the proprietor, who has cooperated with the investigation. They have confirmed that the death is being treated as suspicious and are seeking to identify multiple persons seen entering the premises that evening. No arrests have been made.

The dead man was Diederik Enck, the Knootian National Security Coordinator. Few public servants have been so widely discussed and so little known. He held the post for six years, but his face was almost unknown to the public. He preferred it that way. His best-known photograph shows a man raising his hand to block the lens, pale eyes staring out between spread fingers, half his face lost to shadow.

De Schuilkerk is described in press reports as a "discreet social club" catering to an elite clientele. Its unofficial membership is rumoured to include senior figures in government, the diplomatic corps, and finance. What takes place on the premises has been widely speculated about, but not by this newspaper. The club operates lawfully. Its members value their right to privacy. The only known proprietor, who holds Xirnumite citizenship, is not regarded as a suspect.

String and pegboards

The irony of Enck's end will not have been lost on those who followed his career, such as it was possible to follow. For years, conspiracy theorists maintained that the national security coordinator frequented precisely such establishments. The claim first surfaced in 2014, when his name appeared on an alleged list of regulars at De Schuilkerk. The person who circulated the list was subsequently discredited and recanted. That the claim now appears to have contained a kernel of truth is uncomfortable for those, including this newspaper, who defended him at the time.

It was characteristic of Enck that the truth and the fabrication were so thoroughly entangled that few people bothered to separate them. Conspiracy theories connected him to the military-industrial establishment, the 'deep state', the Order of the Invisible Hand, mind-control research, inter-dimensional portals, and vampires.

Some of the more terrestrial connections were real enough. Enck maintained professional relationships with figures in Knootian industry throughout his time at the EIVD. One contact in the defence industry called him "a capable operator whose personal network is extensive." A former associate said the EIVD under his leadership had engaged in activities abroad that "would be considered irregular in countries that have now become our allies." A former colleague recalled that he could read De Arcanis Rerumpublicarum in the original, always kept a bottle of Pantocratorian Armagnac in his office, and spoke so quietly that people leaned in to hear him, which may have been the point.

Claws

His public career, to the extent that it was public, traced a path from the Nieuwe Universiteit in Haag, where he mastered in political science, through private consultancy and into the state apparatus. He advised shipbuilders and consulted for foreign firms on what the industry euphemistically terms "political intelligence." Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he was appointed Director of the Economic Intelligence and Security Service (EIVD).

Nearly a decade at the head of that agency allowed him to, as one former colleague put it, "sink his claws into every aspect of its operations." The agency's budget remained largely beyond parliamentary scrutiny. Its activities abroad were whispered to include corporate espionage, the monitoring of foreign activists, and the use of coercion to steer foreign governments in directions favourable to Knootian commercial interests.

His transfer into politics, as Deputy Minister of Foreign Economic Policy under then-Prime Minister Maurits Viljoen, did not appear to change his daily routine. His elevation to National Security Coordinator in 2020, under Prime Minister Van Jonkervelde, gave him formal authority over both the EIVD and the MBI. It was the culmination of a career spent accumulating power without accumulating visibility.

Shots fired

That career ended, in practical terms, before his death, and in circumstances that remain unexplained. The attack on the KNN Central Studio is still the subject of an active investigation. Enck's office issued a written statement declining to confirm or deny MBI involvement and urging the public to "refrain from speculation." The Grand Pensionary has described the incident as an assassination attempt. No other official account has been offered.

Enck bore ultimate responsibility for MBI operations during the period in question. The relationship between his office and the Grand Pensionary's protection service had, according to sources familiar with the matter, "broken down completely" in the days following the incident. Whether the security review announced in the aftermath would have reached conclusions uncomfortable for Enck is now a question for historians.

The last of his kind

In the intelligence community, Enck is already being spoken of as the last of a particular type: the spymaster who built personal empires inside state institutions, who treated parliamentary oversight as an inconvenience, and who regarded the boundary between public service and private interest as a suggestion rather than a rule. Whether one regards this as a romantic tradition or a dangerous one depends on one's politics. What is not in dispute is that it is drawing to a close.

The profile of his successor suggests as much. Mag. Hélène Dessart, born in 1961 in Hesbayeux, entered the Republican Marechaussee, a paramilitary police force, as a junior investigator in 1982. She spent six years in the counter-terrorism section combating the Phalange d'Airain, the Légion du Lys Noir, and their various splinter factions. In 1988 she transferred to the democratised national criminal investigation service, where she led a unit investigating radical organisations across the political spectrum, and then continued to rise up the ranks.

Where he came from private enterprise, she comes from policing. Where he cultivated opacity, she has a documented record of court testimony and public accountability. Parliamentary oversight committees, which had long regarded Enck's tenure with a mixture of suspicion and resignation, welcomed her swift appointment by Prime Minister van Jonkervelde.

Dessart's first action in office was to order a comprehensive audit of personnel and operations across both the EIVD and the MBI. The review is understood to extend to operational practices, financial oversight, and personnel vetting.

Officers with military intelligence backgrounds are understood to have welcomed the change. The civilians have been less accommodating. Several senior officials have left their posts in recent days, with more departures expected. Among the EIVD in particular, there is a perception that the audit amounts to a factional reckoning: the displacement of one tendency within the SLP by another, conducted under the cover of institutional reform.

The objections are made, off the record, by people whose judgement this newspaper has long respected. But we do not share them. The EIVD under Enck operated with insufficient oversight, inadequate accountability, and a culture of personal loyalty that had no place in a republican institution. That its officers are now discomfited by a coordinator who insists on transparency is not evidence of persecution. It is evidence that reform was overdue.

Whether Dessart will succeed in reshaping institutions that Enck spent two decades moulding to his specifications remains to be seen. What is certain is that the era he represented, in which a man could rise from political consultancy to command of the state's intelligence apparatus without ever standing for election or submitting to serious public scrutiny, has ended. It ended, as Enck himself might have appreciated, not with a parliamentary inquiry or a policy review, but in the dark.

Diederik Enck is survived by no immediate family.

[Excalbia]

The Office of Imperial Intelligence
Citadel Excalbia

The headquarters of Imperial Intelligence was housed in a former fort on the capital's Left Bank. The area had been relatively undeveloped until the late 1990s, and there were still swaths of wooded areas. Nestled in one of those areas was a highway exit labeled simply “Fort Rīmars”. The fact that Imperial Intelligence had occupied the fort since the 1940s was neither secret nor advertised.

At the beginning of a long driveway there was a plain sign that read “Fort Rīmars Office of Imperial Intelligence”. At the end of the driveway, around several bends and twists, there was a massive, heavily guarded gate. On the other side of the gate were refurbished buildings that dated to the Great War.

In one of those buildings, Ilmars Brigaders, the Director of Imperial Intelligence, walked into his office to find Dennis Sullivan, the head of the Knootian Section, waiting for him.

“I suppose you heard?” Sullivan asked, as he followed Brigaders into his private office.

“That Enck is dead?” Brigaders asked, slipping into the chair behind his desk.

Sullivan nodded.

“That explains why I heard your people singing ‘The wicked witch is dead’ as I walked into the building this morning,” Brigaders said, briefly flashing a rare smile.

Sullivan chuckled, taking a seat across from his boss. “And it's a fittingly sleazy end - he was apparently strangled in a fetish club.”

Brigaders leaned back. “Well,” he said, “I don't think he'll be mourned by many, but it is suspicious, isn't it.”

“It is,” Sullivan agreed. “The deepfake of Viljoen, then the… whatever that was at KNN, and now this.” He drew in a breath. “Someone is trying to upset the applecart.”

Brigaders nodded. “Taelman?”

“Unlikely.” Sullivan rubbed his chin. “He's already looking good for the next election. And if this was him, it’d be a lot less subtle. And probably not the Hand; that was Enck’s connection.”

“Rotsenberg?” Brigaders frowned. “She's ancient. She couldn't be pulling this off. Could she?”

“That's uncertain,” Sullivan said.

“Well,” Brigaders said, placing his hands on his desk. “We'd better find out before the Chancellor asks. Or even worse before the Emperor asks the Chancellor.”

Sullivan stood. “We're on it,” he said. “Pinging every possible source.”

[Xirnium]

“Did we do it?”

Eléanor Sabelina, LXXVII Countess zy Nelyâmnar, Prime Minister of the Bright Republic, sat in a wing chair and looked across at ‘D.’, her spymaster.

He held a faceted tumbler lightly between his long, thin fingers.

“No, Prime Minister,” he said. “It was not us.”

“She isn’t one of your Butterfly Catchers?”

“No. She isn’t one of ours.”

She gave a small nod. “Then what is this about, ‘D.’?”

He did not answer at once. “I cannot yet say.”

“The Knootians themselves?” 

“Possibly.” He turned the tumbler once between his fingers. “The fuss with the Grand Pensionary. The dead men. Now Enck. It does have the look of an internal redistribution.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“I want the Parade to offer them its assistance,” she said. “Since it was not us.”

“Yes, Prime Minister,” ‘D.’ said. 

[Knootoss]

Haderech Grand Haag
Haag, Free Republic of Knootoss

The VVIP suite had gold leaf on the ceiling mouldings, gold thread in the curtains, and gold trim on the furniture. The carpet was cream with a repeating geometric border in gold. Brass lamps with cut-glass panels hung from the ceiling. The coffee table was inlaid with tessellated mother-of-pearl in a Star of David pattern. A digital board was fixed to the wall, showing the Haderech Grand logo on a slow fade.

The tinted wall-length window showed the Haag skyline, dark cloud shadows moving across the faces of the postmodern towers, their glass catching and losing the light of surprisingly intense sunbeams in slow sequence. Beyond them, the residential arcologies rose in stacked concrete tiers, their upper levels dissolving into smudges of grey-black moisture.

Cécile Prisse-d'Yvoy stood at the window with her hands clasped behind her back. She wore a dark blue suit, cut close, no jewellery except her wedding ring.

At ten past four, the outer door opened. Two protection officers entered first, one scanning the room while the other held the door. Then Viljoen. He looked at the suite, then crossed to the minibar and picked up a 'Mind-Blowing Green' Pink Bunny Cola bottle. "They don't even have this one at the residence," he said. He opened it and drank standing. He then turned to the protection officers. "Wait outside." He laughed. "She's not going to kill me."

The officers left. Viljoen dropped into one of the chairs and stretched his legs out. He pulled out his phone, glanced at the screen, typed something with his thumb, and slid it back into a pocket of his purple pants. He looked at Cécile. "So," he said. "What's this?"

Cécile left the window and sat in the opposite chair. She placed her hands flat on her thighs. "Thank you for making time, Maurits. I know you're busy."

"I'm always busy, Cécile. Today I had three calls, a photo op, and a thing at a school where girls did my nails. The nail thing is on my Verve already." He took another sip and inspected his fingernails.

"It's about you," Cécile said.

"Good topic." He smiled. "What about me?"

"I want to talk to you about your future."

He tilted the bottle towards her. "I'm listening."

Cécile picked up a tablet from the coffee table and tapped it once. The digital board lit up. The Haderech logo dissolved into a full-screen image: a polished mock-up of a book jacket. VILJOEN: THE NEXT CHAPTER. His face filled the cover, chin raised in a bold pose, purple coat sharp against a dark background.

Viljoen looked at the board. His jaw moved once.

"I've been talking to Eleonora Rotsenberg," Cécile said. "About you. About what you've accomplished. About what you could still accomplish." She tapped the tablet. The screen changed. A second mock-up: a promotional poster for a documentary series. VILJOEN: MY STORY. His face was shown in profile, looking regally towards a distant horizon. "A documentary series, broadcast across the full Rotsenberg media network. With a video game and a virtual reality experience."

She tapped again. A third slide: a revenue summary produced by a prominent consultancy. Projected earnings from the book, the documentary, the video game and its planned DLC, the VR experience, international speaking engagements, a development deal for a talk show format. The numbers were large. A drawing of his face in the chibi style appeared, smiling, at the top of each revenue stream.

He leaned forward. His elbows came to rest on his knees. He studied the figures. He reached for the bottle, drank, and set it down without looking away from the board. "Why now?" he asked.

"Because the Vuilendam visit and the KNN incident show how big the appetite is for anything with your name on it. Your numbers after that interview about the assassination attempt were the highest they've ever been." She kept her voice level and warm. "And because I need to be honest with you about something. As a friend."

He looked at her.

"You know that Diederik Enck is dead," she said.

"I know. Good riddance." He made a dismissive gesture with the bottle. "I'm not sorry he's gone. I said so publicly. Many people agreed with me."

"When Enck died, his files were secured by his successor. Dessart. She's been conducting an audit." Cécile paused. "In the course of that audit, she found material that concerns you directly."

Viljoen's expression did not change. "What kind of material?"

Cécile tapped the tablet. The revenue projections disappeared. A video began to play of the VIP holding area at KNN Central Studio, shot from an elevated angle. Viljoen and Layla Boom were sitting on the sofa, visible in crisp 4K.

Viljoen stared at the board. His mouth opened slightly, then closed.

"Enck had his own cameras in the room," Cécile said. "He was running a parallel surveillance operation that nobody, including your protection detail, knew about. When his files were seized after his death, this footage was among them."

"Turn it off," he said.

She tapped the tablet and the board returned to the hotel logo. "The footage covers the full duration of your meeting with the communist spy," Cécile said. "All of it."

"That woman was a literary agent. It was a book deal."

"You told her she was a Daytan spy, Maurits. On the recording."

"That was flirting. Haven't you ever heard of roleplaying?"

"You told her catching her meant she would do anything you asked. And then you... searched her." Cécile's voice did not rise. "We both know what it would do to you if it were broadcast, and the details of the contract made public."

He stood. He walked to the window and put one hand flat on the glass. The Haag skyline sat behind his reflection.

"Eleonora knows. Don't ask me how. But it has been her instinct to go public," Cécile said to his back. "She is furious. She believes the Grand Pensionary was compromised by a communist intelligence operation inside her own building and that the public has a right to know." She waited, then continued: "I have spent the last week persuading her not to. Because I believe that the damage to you, and to Knootoss, and to everything we have built together would be catastrophic. The Grand Pensionary of this country cannot be seen in that situation. It cannot happen, Maurits. Not just for your sake. For the country's sake."

He did not turn.

"This is what I've been able to arrange," she said. "I convinced Eleonora that the story of Maurits Viljoen should not end in a scandal. That the next chapter of the Viljoen story needs to be even greater than the last. That is why these contracts are on the table. That is why this meeting is happening. Because I fought for you."

He finally turned. His eyes were wet but his jaw was set. "It's fabricated," he said. "AI. A deepfake. It's not the first time they've tried to bring me down with fake video. They tried it with Bianca. They tried it with the Vologdov thing. Every time. Fake, fake, fake. The people know it's fake. I'll go on my Verve tonight and I'll tell them. I'll tell a billion people that Cécile Prisse-d'Yvoy showed me a deepfake and tried to..."

"The contract is time- and location stamped and authenticated to you, Maurits." He stopped, and she continued: "Your thumb. Your SIN. Your numbers. Your signature. A forensic examiner will confirm that within a day. The e-document device carries a full transaction log."

He breathed through his nose. His chest rose and fell. "I didn't do anything that anyone in Haag hasn't done," he said. "You think I'm the only one who's signed a deal like that? You think there aren't a thousand, a million contracts just like it floating around this city? I sell books. I sell movies. It's what I do. It's what people love about me. I'm Maurits Viljoen. I'm a brand. That's not a crime. That's the economy. It's always been legal whenever the lawyers use the right words."

"It's a crime when the money comes from what you believed to be a foreign intelligence service, and you accepted it while holding the office of Grand Pensionary. And when it comes from a communist, it becomes aggravated. Maybe even High Treason. I didn't write those old laws. But you've defended them in the past."

"She came to me. I didn't go looking for it."

"That won't matter."

He walked back to the table, standing behind the chair and gripping its back. "So what happens if I tell you to go fuck yourself?"

"Then I can no longer protect you from Eleonora. Or the Estates-General. They're likely to vote to impeach."

"The people won't allow it."

"The people will see the footage."

"They'll see a hit job. They'll see the establishment trying to destroy the one person who tells the truth."

"They'll see you on a sofa with a woman you called a spy, signing a contract for money you shouldn't have taken, in a building that burned down around you two hours later. Ten billion people will watch it, Maurits, over and over, and nobody will be talking about your books."

He said nothing.

"Or," Cécile said, and her voice softened, "you resign next week. You cite personal reasons. You've served with distinction and you wish to pursue new opportunities. Charlie is informed. You endorse whoever the party puts forward as your successor. The Handelsblad runs a warm retrospective. Eleonora ensures the coverage is respectful. Nobody needs to know."

His grip on the chair tightened. The knuckles went white. "I want the deal," he finally said.

"It's yours."

"And the speaking thing has to be international. Not just the usual places. I want the whole Western Atlantic. Big audiences. I want to be flown around in a supersonic."

"KNN's events division will handle it."

He let go of the chair. He picked up the Pink Bunny Cola and drank what was left. "Who's the successor?"

"That's for the party to decide."

"But you know who it is."

"I know who I'll recommend."

"Is it Charlie? Are you kicking her upstairs?"

"Charlie is a good Prime Minister. The Grand Pensionary's office requires a different profile. Charlie wouldn't have the charm and charisma necessary to succeed you."

He looked at the ceiling. He exhaled through his nose.

"There is one more thing," Cécile said. "And I mention it only because your successor will have the power to make it happen, and because I think it would interest you."

"Go on."

"The peace talks in Qubti are heading towards the restoration of the Sultanate. Monarchy is what the powers want. But the old dynasty is controversial. The international community is looking for a credible candidate who could stabilise the region and project legitimacy." She paused. "A renowned hero and experienced head of state, with a global media profile and an established diplomatic record, would be a very strong candidate for us to put forward."

Viljoen's eyes widened. He looked at her. He looked at the board, which was still showing the hotel logo, and she could see him projecting something else onto it entirely. "Sultan," he said.

"It would require diplomatic groundwork. Your successor would need to open the channels. But the profile fits. You would be saving Qubti from itself. Bringing you back to a continent where so many of your adventures happened. Henda's old stomping grounds, too."

"Sultan Maurits." He said slowly, trying the weight of each syllable.

"The palace is supposed to be extraordinary, with large spaces for the Sultan's personal harem," Cécile said. "And the role comes with considerable... personal latitude. You'll need to convert to Islam, but..."

He was no longer gripping the chair. He was standing straight, his chin slightly lifted, his eyes on a point beyond the window where the Haag skyline had been replaced by something else. Minarets, perhaps. Sunlight on sandstone. He adjusted his cuffs. "The Muslims have always loved me", he said. "Anyway. I'll need my people to look at the media contracts," he said.

"Of course."

"And I'll announce on my own terms. My words. My timing. My channels."

"Within the week."

"I'll do it on Saturday."

Cécile nodded once.

He gathered three limited-edition bottles of the mind-expanding Pink Bunny Cola from the minibar, tucking them into the crook of his arm. He buttoned his jacket with his free hand and straightened his collar. At the door he paused. "Sultan Maurits the First," he said, to himself, and walked out.

[Soveriegn States]

Tom Caine's Penthouse
Jefferson, New Virginia

Shannon Coles had been Tom Caine's Press Secretary during his presidency. She had also been his paramour. Although she had left both positions long ago, she remained one of Caine's few close friends. They had remained close even after their breakup had briefly driven her to seek solace with a friend who had turned out to be a foreign intelligence operative.

Despite, or perhaps because of, all that history, Caine had invited her for drinks to discuss his concerns about developments in Knootoss. Once, he would have invited his former Chief of Staff, Rihards Krauklis, for this sort of discussion. With Krauklis having worked against the reelection of Caine's protege, the relationship had been thoroughly ruptured. So, he had turned once again to Coles.

Coles crossed her legs and took a long ship of her drink. Then, she held it in her hands and said, “What's on your mind, Tom? I know you will enough to know that something is bothering you.”

“Not bothering, exactly,” Caine said. He took a drink from his glass, then set it down. “But I am…”

“Bothered?” Coles smiled.

The former president shrugged. “Ok,” he said, “bothered. About Knootoss.”

“Enck’s death isn't that upsetting, is it?” She sniffed. “I know he was in the Order, but he was a jerk. I didn't think you were fond of him.”

“Not at all,” Caine said, flashing a look of disgust. “But, his death, given his position and connections, so close after the shootout at KNN…” He frowned. “It has the earmarks of someone making a move.”

Coles’ expression grew serious. “Who do you think is moving, and who are they moving against?”

“Well,” Caine said, “we know it's not the Order. It's not van Jonkervelde; she's not the sort to make this kind of move.”

“Staalman?”

“Only if he's stupider than I thought. He's looking good for the next election as it is.”

“Well, then,” Coles asked, “who are they going after?”

“My gut tells me it's Viljoen,” Caine said. “That thing at KNN, smells like a cover up for something else. And Viljoen's presence there wasn't a coincidence.”

“If the move is to take out Viljoen,” Coles asked, leaning forward, “why didn't they just finish him in the attack at KNN?”

“I don't think the goal is to kill him,” Caine said. “They want to oust him. Letting them put their own person in. Who and why, I don't know yet.”

“Well,” Coles said, “if you're right, the next development will be Viljoen's resignation, I suppose.”

Caine nodded. “I'd like to know who might be coming before that. I'll talk to some old friends in Knootoss to see what they know.”

“Ok,” Coles said, “what can I do?”

“Do you still have the number for that woman who chatted you up after we broke up?”

Coles blushed. “No…”

“But you could get in touch with her?”

“I suppose…”

“Good,” Caine said. “Get in touch with her. Offer to tell her what I said - I'm sure whoever she worked for has already thought of the same thing - and try to leverage that into some insights into what they're thinking. It'll be another data point.”

“Ok,” she said, still blushing. “And, what will you do if you figure it out?”

“It depends on who it is,” Caine said, picking up his glass. “Maybe nothing. Maybe a heads up to Janice. Maybe a trip to Knootoss to chat with Viljoen.” He took a sip. “If I think it'll be really bad for us, who knows? Maybe I take a little trip to the Citadel.” He took another sip. “But in any case, I want to know.”

[Brasland]

Residenzschloss Friedrichsburg
Markund

It was a cold Spring morning. The King of Brasland sat on a couch in his study. In front of him, behind a low table, sat his sister Helena, the Princess Jan August. They had spent a few minutes discussing regional politics.

"What do you think of Diederik Enck's death?" she asked, sipping from a cup of coffee.

King Georg frowned, twitching his mouth. "Strange," he replied. "Strange things are going on in Knootoss."

"You know something," said Helena, narrowing her eyes.

Georg looked at her and smiled slightly. "Do you remember Aunt Alix's friend, Eleonora of Itayta?"

Helena nodded.

"She was recently in Dillenburg, with Cousin Freddie's mother," he added.

"I see," said the princess, hoping this was not another of the long family stories Braslanders loved to share before making a point.

"I spoke to Freddie last week," he continued. "He mentioned a strange comment that Eleonora made. Before Dillenburg, she stayed at a spa in Knootoss. Turns out, Eleonora Rotsenberg was there."

"The Black Widow!"

Georg smiled. "You know your history, little one." He resumed the story. "Apparently, they had a very unpleasant exchange, but Rotsenberg said something."

"What?"

"That her grandchild is growing in the womb. And that her children will be gods, ruling the stars."

"That's... weird."

"Eleonora Rotsenberg failed in her first attempt to create a dynasty," said Georg. "But a woman like her never truly quits."

"You think this has something to do with Viljoen and Enck?"

"I don't know, but the timing is interesting, isn't it?" said the King. "The deepfake, the assassination attempt, now this. Someone is moving decisively behind the scenes."

[Knootoss]

((Joint Post between The Resurgent Dream, Laneria, Xirnium, Soveriegn States Ernestria, Pantocratoria and Knootoss))

Zuideinde Palace
Haag, Hartstad, Knootoss

The Grand Pensionary's Working Palace sat behind wrought-iron gates on a fashionable street, its white neoclassical façade level with the townhouses on either side. A bronze equestrian statue of Duke Lodewijk the God-fearing faced the entrance from across the cobbles; opposite him, a bronze of his wife Princess Helena Comnena Porphyrogenita stood holding a tulip. Guards in ceremonial uniform flanked the gateposts. Satellite vans and press stations filled the street.

Light in the windowless ballroom came from crystal chandeliers hanging from a barrel-vaulted ceiling. The walls beneath were yellow stucco marble, decorated with Pantocratorian-style plaster friezes. A lectern stood on a low platform at the far end, flanked by the Knootian tricolour and the Grand Pensionary's personal standard. Rows of gilt chairs held the press corps, which had been summoned for what the Grand Pensionary's office described as a 'very special announcement.'

A side door opened and two protection officers came through, followed by Grand Pensionary Maurits Viljoen. He wore a double-breasted purple suit with a starched white ruff, hair set hard with spray. He carried a case of Pink Bunny Cola cans by the handle, pulling a can free from it as he crossed the ballroom floor. He held it out to a plump Knootian newspaper journalist. "Henk. You look terrible. Drink something." He pulled another and pressed it into the hands of a blonde podcaster two seats down without slowing. The third can was lobbed underhand to a cameraman near the sound desk, who caught it against his chest. Viljoen finger-gunned him. "You should have been a keeper." People laughed. He set the case down beside the lectern, took a can for himself, opened it, and drank, before adjusting the microphone.

"Good afternoon. Thank you for being here to see history being made. I know you're used to it by now. Every time Maurits Viljoen calls a press conference, it's history. Some of you have built entire careers off being there when I talk. You're welcome."

There were a few laughs. He set the can on the lectern. "I have several things to tell you. The first is that I have been approached by Eleonora Rotsenberg, who controls the largest media network in the Western Atlantic, and she has begged me, on her frail, wrinkly knees, to be allowed to produce an account of my life and achievements. A book. A documentary series.The works. And I said yes. Because the people deserve it. Not because she begged, though she did. And not because of the money, which is going to be very substantial when I sign the deal. But because my story finally needs to be told properly, produced by the best media team in the world, with modern technology, and Eleonora understood that this is what the people are begging me for."

He looked around: "I mean really, I get so many messages from my fans, Knootian and foreigners, saying: Maurits, Your Excellency, when will there be another movie? When will you write another book? And I have to tell them that there's only so much I can do. Because I have to obey the law. Which I've done much better than the people before me, like Jan-Willem Daatman. He became Grand Pensionary after breaking the law as Prime Minister, remember that? Prayergate. That was me bringing that to light even though he was in my own party. He's dead now."

He picked up the can and took another sip. "Anyway. There is also going to be a video game. You play as me, obviously, and you can do all the things that I have done. Diplomatic negotiations. Hostage rescues. Seduction. Sword fights. Magic. And it looks better than real life. You look at the character and you think: that's him. That's Maurits. And you press the button and he does what you tell him to do. It's extraordinary, really, when you think about the technology. You press the button and there I am, saving somebody." He paused. "There will also be an additional 'download' where you can get extra missions, or wear the suit like I am wearing right now. Maybe if we get this trending we can ask them to put in this suit in the game for free."

He looked pleased with himself a moment before he continued: "For the speaking tour I'll be hitting all the big cities here in Knootoss, in the Caldan Union, Pantocratoria, Snefaldia, Excalbia, Brasland. All the usual places. But also Kemetia and maybe even the Westbund. Xirnium, now that they're no longer communist. And Ernestria too because I've always said that Ernestria Matters and we shouldn't forget them. I told them: don't forget Ernestria." He smiled. "I'll be flying, from Fronten of course, in an Intercontinental Wings supersonic executive jet where the cabin has a full bar, a bedroom with Cyretopolitanian cotton, a bathroom with heated marble floors, and a huge conference table." He drifted for a moment. "The leather on the seats is hand-stitched Pantocratorian that they also use for those cars. They told me the name of the cow. It was a very expensive cow. Probably several cows if you think about it. Because chairs are shaped very differently from cows. And maybe, one day soon, Knootian scientists will be able to grow those cows in vats so they don't have to suffer. Maybe they can even have the shape of chairs."

He set the can down. "Now. About Henda." He held up one hand. "I know what the gossip sites have been saying. I want to address it directly. Henda Hartendief is a remarkable young woman. She was nobody before she met me. No connections. No profile. No future, frankly. I gave her a future. I put her in front of the cameras. I introduced her to people. I got her recording deals. I taught her about lovemaking. I think if you ask her to answer honestly, she would agree with that. Everything she has, she has because Maurits Viljoen saw something in her that nobody else did." He paused. "So when people use AI to write fake stories about trouble between me and the First Girlfriend, I would just say: look at what happened. And then ask yourself who would have the most to lose." He adjusted his ruff. "But this press conference is not about Henda."

He looked down at the lectern. His fingers spread flat on its surface. He breathed in through his nose. His jaw tightened. Something moved across his face and neck, like a rising gorge. He looked like he was about to vomit. His eyes swept the press corps. He opened his mouth. He closed it. He picked up the can of Pink Bunny Cola and drank. He set it down.

"I have been thinking," he said, "about the future. Knootoss is the greatest country I have ever led and probably always will be. But there are other countries. Countries that don't have what Knootoss has, which is me. And I have to ask myself, honestly, whether it is fair to keep all of this..." He gestured at himself, palms open. "...to one nation. There are parts of the world that are crying out for this kind of leadership. And I think... I think I owe it to them." He nodded slowly. "I have many options. But I want the world to know that Maurits Viljoen is not done. Maurits Viljoen is just getting started."

He picked up the can again. Empty. He looked at it, frowned, and pulled a fresh one from the case.

"Questions?"

People began shouting. Viljoen scanned the room and pointed at a young woman in the front row with short dark hair. "Emmy. KNN. Go ahead."

She stood. "Thank you, Grand Pensionary. Congratulations on your... announcement. Which of your many accomplishments as Grand Pensionary are you most proud of?"

"Good question, Emmy." He smiled broadly. "There are so many. I could fill a book with them. And I will be." He laughed. Some of the press corps laughed with him. "But if I had to pick one, it would be ending apartheid in South Epheron. And the blacks in that country love me for it. They really do. I've had people come up to me in airports, in restaurants, in the street, and say: Maurits, you changed my life. You made me equal and free. And that means more to me than anything." He paused, then grinned: "Although the jet is going to be incredible. If you ask good questions, I might let you fly with me"

He shaded his eyes against the chandelier light and scanned the rows slowly as he looked to pick out a different journalist.

"Thank you. Nicholas Reece, The Western Atlantic," said a middle-aged man with light brown, curly hair and a Caldan accent. "There's been renewed attention in the region to the Rotsenberg regime's policies towards dissenters, religious minorities, and the disabled. Rotsenberg has never ceased to defend these policies and, in fact, many of her public criticisms, including that of your predecessor, involve wishing that they could be visited upon them. Do you think a region-wide tour so prominently and explicitly associated with her could be successful?"

"I think it will be a very successful tour. The most successful tour ever, in fact", Viljoen touted. "You know, I love dissenters." He looked sideways to show off more of his jaw, and added in a husky voice: "I'm a bit of a rebel myself." He then tried to think back to what else had been asked: "And I love minorities and the disabled. And they love me. So about the choice of network, sure, if your papers' billionaire owner wants to slide into my DMs and offer a better deal, then he can. Or she. I don't discriminate. Next question?"

"Ken Lau, The Williamsburg Post," said a short, dark-haired man with a Lanerian accent. "Thank you, Grand Pensionary. You said Knootoss would probably be the greatest country you ever led. Do you expect to lead other nations after leaving office and on what would you base such an expectation?"

"I'm not ruling it out", said Viljoen, with a wink for a camera nearer to the side of the stage."But I can't talk about that now. I may have to disappoint someone, and that would be a shame, right? But Knootoss is pretty great, wouldn't you agree?" He laughed.

The Financial Times-Advertiser’s veteran foreign correspondent Zsuzsánna Flavërgynë tried not to roll her eyes at the KNN softball, but paid attention to The Western Atlantic’s question and the Grand Pensionary’s answer. At sixty, she was sharply put together in a short fitted jacket, a slim flared skirt with neatly cut vents, black patent slingbacks, and earrings that flashed in the chandelier light.

“Thank you, Grand Pensionary,” she said. “Did Eleonora Rotsenberg approach you about this opportunity during your visit to her studio in Larushem, where two men said to have been MBI agents were killed, or did that happen later? And have the two of you discussed that incident?”

"This was after, and we've not discussed the attempt on my life", he said, stressing his own reframing. "But it's probably helped, you know. I was told my numbers have never been higher than after they tried to kill me. And that's why free speech is so important, you know?" His chest puffed: "They may try to silence me, but they'll never succeed in taking down my message. Whether I'm leading Knootoss or doing something else." He looked briefly uncomfortable, and reached for the can.

"Matt Williams," a man in a rumpled sportscoat over khakis and a white shirt said coming to his feet, "Liberty House Multimedia. How do you respond to those who say that this... deal is simply cover for a resignation driven by scandal and your attempted assassination? And who do you think will succeed you? And why?"

Viljoen stared at the man using the word 'resignation' with something like anger for a flash. Then a smile wide enough to show teeth framed his face. "First of all, I'd say, the gym is down that way, Matt. Though they have a dress code, so they may not let you in looking like that." He pointed to the exit, and a few people laughed. "Look I can't say under oath that I've never recorded a podcast in my boxers' shorts and a pajama jacket. But that's before they added cameras to those things, right?"

"I do apologize for not having my suit, but I'm afraid the airline lost my luggage," Matt said, smiling. "So, should I take that as a yes to the first question and no to the second? Unless you'd like to clarify your answer, Your Excellency."

"There's great shopping you can do in Hartstad. The best shopping, actually," Viljoen said, still smiling widely. He gestured at the two men from his protection detail who stood off to the side, wearing immaculately tailored black suits and augmented reality glasses. "Talk to those guys after the presser. You can get something nice wherever they're getting it. Don't think purple's your colour, Matt, you know, with the face." He ran an open palm over his own face to illustrate, prompting a few laughs.

"Now, as for your question, I'm just not going to repeat your words back to you, because you're wrong. My numbers are higher than they've ever been. In fact..." He suddenly seized on a thought with enthusiasm: "If I get a hundred million people on Verve asking me not to ... asking me to stay, before tomorrow, well, I may just have to reconsider."

"Have you spoken with Hélène Dessart regarding the progress of the investigation on the attempt on your life?" asked Zsuzsánna, adopting the Grand Pensionary's framing. "It's been suggested that, with Diederik Enck dead, we might never know the full story."

"No," Viljoen answered forcefully. He then thought for a moment, before leaning towards the microphone and adding, sotto voce: "And just between us, off the record, I don't think she's very good. There's a lot of stuff in her record that you journalists should look into. Showing evidence of bias. She's very biased against certain people. So I think you may be right, we may never know the full story. I might reveal a little more in the upcoming book and documentary. But if she says anything about it, as is the case with everyone, even me, I think it's very important to look at bias." Zsuzsánna narrowed her eyes at the way he ended his answer.

Not for the first time, Paula Weichselbraun of Satelliten Fernsehen, Ernestria's main cable-news station, wondered whether her parents were right and she should have gotten a more dignified job rather than journalism. Like selling foot pictures. She stood. "Your Excellency," she said, "I realise that this press conference is, to quote you, not about Fraulein Hartendief," inwardly she was dying, "But there are many Breucians in Ernestria, together with fans in our country," for reasons that escaped her, "Who want to know whether rumours that there has been a separation are true. Can we ask you to comment on that?"

"You're absolutely right, Fraulein", Viljoen answered, repeating the word back to her in over-accented German. "And there are many people in Ernestria, which is a very important country, which I've always recognised - unlike some other countries that haven't recognised it, by the way. It's been a country I've gotten to know well, as I have a growing number of fans there. And so does Henda. And many of those are fans of me and Henda both. I think Henda realises that, too. How heartbreaking it would be if those fans felt they had to choose between us. And I don't think she'd want to do that to our shared fans."

He thought for a moment, then added: "Anyway, I believe in allowing. Women. To. Speak." He said it with the cadence of clapping between the syllables, but without actually clapping. Instead he leaned forward to stare at the Ernestrian journalist: "So I think you should ask Henda about her side of the story. I already said my piece today. Which is that I think I've made her the First Girlfriend she is today, as we've been on this journey together. And that nobody believes the fake AI slop involving Bianca. I don't think Henda believes it. Even the experts from that university said that it was fake."

"Thank you your excellency," she replied, "I wonder if I may ask a final question- how would do you think, or how would you like your time as Grand Pensionary to be remembered?"

"I'd like it to be remembered as having lasted for longer ..." He grinned. "Actually, let's see what Verve comes up with, if the people do ask me to stay. Because I'll do anything for my fans." He threw a pose with an arched back, in profile, before turning his head to the journalists and smiling for pictures.

"So I should probably answer your question, huh?" he finally said. There were a few laughs in the room. "You know, I think when people finally look back on Maurits Viljoen, and I don't just mean, as Grand Pensionary, but also as PM, they'll be nostalgic for the good times."

He ripped the microphone from its attachment on the lectern, forcing he cameras to track him across the stage as he walked from left to right: "See, when Maurits Viljoen came onto the stage, this country was a grim little dictatorship, being run into the ground by a bunch of sad people with no imagination. People that nobody liked, or ever could like. And they didn't even realise it."

He took a few more steps to the right. "A lot of my early adventures were in other countries. They weren't political, because I'm not a political person. But ‘Around the World in Viljoen Days’ and ‘Viljoen Dares to Dream’ gave people something fun, something to actually dream about. My fight against the hidden magicks of the Ostmarker forest shamans. Finding treasure in the buried desert temples of Cyretopolitania. Destroying Bridgette Iesus' nazi superweapons. Sneaking into the perfumed boudoirs of Purple-born Pantocratorian Princesses." A lecherous grin briefly spread over his face before he walked to the edge of the stage.

"So after that, the same boring people are running the show, but you also get the cool and free Knootoss. You know, Pink Bunny Cola, Gay Spray, talking computers. And I'm a huge part of that, you know? It's in all my adventures. I helped make it happen." He tried to sit down on the ledge of the stage, though a stiff back and sore knee made him wince once before he settled in, legs dangling, microphone in hand. He was now close enough for his breath was on the front row of journalists. The room fell to a hush, silence broken only by the occasional snap-snap of professional camera shutters. People in the back rows got up to see what was going on.

"Next thing, it's the 21st century, and people in the SLP come to me. And they're - people like Cécile Prisse-d'Yvoy - they're begging me, saying: 'Maurits, we're becoming irrelevant. We know you like freedom, and you're a hero, and you've got so many fans. You've got to help us out.' And so I help out, you know. And we get rid of the Iesus Inquisition that's secretly in our country. And next to all these grey, mousey little people, I'm just so great that everyone want me to be the leader. And so that's what I do."

He looked around the room slowly before he continued: "The years I've been Prime Minister have been the greatest years Knootoss has ever had. Nobody disagrees with that. We had friendship with all the Western Atlantic countries. No recession. No racism. I end apartheid. I beat back the Excalbians when they get uppity over the Mittelmeer with their navy. I tell Uncle Nugget from Daytanistan to simmer down and stop attacking Brasland, so he does. But we all come out of it as friends. And eventually even the Excalbians have to come back and admit: 'Maurits, you were right. We should be friends'. And that's when I get to host their Emperor, and they love it here, and they adopt our currency, and everything."

He looked back at the stage, thinking he might want to return to the lectern, but then decides that clambering back up would not be a good look. He remains seated: "So Purendal happens, and that's not my fault. I want to run again and clean up the mess. But the party says, people like Cécile Prisse-d'Yvoy again, they say, 'oh Maurits. We need you to be Grand Pensionary. Only you can represent the country on the international stage. Because Daatman is sick, and old, and nobody likes him'. And so I do that, because it's true. But I do wonder what would have happened if I'd run again. I'd have easily beaten back Staalman, there would have been no recession because, unlike Steven, I'm actually good with business. And we would have been in a better place as a country."

He let out a wistful sigh and said: "Alright. let's close the curtains on this thing." He pointed at the person right in front of him. "You there. Peacock News. You get the closing question. Make it worth it."

"Where did it go so wrong for you, Grand Pensionary, that you have been brought to this moment?" asked Marie-Thérèse Rodes, an attractive but distinctly unsympathetic looking Pantocratorian journalist with raven hair, wearing an off-white blazer and skirt and a look of surprisingly deeply held contempt.

He blinked. "Well. That's a rather mean-spirited question." He leaned forward, voice dripping with sympathy. "Who hurt you?"

"Did Eleonora Rotsenberg and Cécile Prisse-d'Yvoy cease to be entertained?" Rodes persisted.

"Oh, my dear, you've got it all wrong", Viljoen said, shaking his head before sliding down to the floor, clutching the microphone in his fist as he stood and looked across the ballroom, eyes pinching from the light of the chandeliers. He raised his voice: "The owner of KNN wouldn't offer to give me the largest media deal in history because she is sick of me. These women, and, if I'm honest, many women, most women, can't help but be captivated by me. By my story. I know there's a certain kind of woman that usually doesn't respond to my charms."

There were a few nervous laughs as he rounded on Marie-Thérèse Rodes. "And I fully support your rights. Unlike most people in Pantocratoria. All of your rights." He smiled at her. She stared back at him, deadpan and unimpressed.

Before she could speak up, he turned back to the other journalists: "And I will continue fighting for Knootians, and Pantocratorians, and whichever country I'll end up in. I have many options. But they'll be lucky to have me, if that's what's on my path. And none of you have seen the last of Maurits Viljoen." He puffed up, his face reddening. "None of you. Trust me. You'll be sick of how much you'll be seeing of me, before long. If that's even possible. But for now, I suggest you keep your eyes peeled and see what happens next."

He dropped the microphone. A terrible echo reverberated through the room as he strode off towards the exit, his protection team rushing to fall in behind him.

[Excalbia]

The logo of the Excalbian Broadcasting Network appeared over a shot of the skyline or Landing. A voiceover announced: “Live from Landing - it's The Definitely Not Ready for Primetime Playhouse, featuring the Late Night Players.” The credits continued to play over night-time street scenes, then cut abruptly to the KNN logo.

A young woman in a professional shot stood in front a podium between two Knootian flags. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, affecting a Knootian accent, “His Excellency, the Grand Pensionary.”

A man wearing prosthetics that made him look vaguely like Maurits Viljoen entered from stage left. He was wearing an outlandish purple suit and riding a unicycle while honking a handheld horn. After circling the stage, the woman grabbed the unicycle and the man jumped down.

He walked up to the podium, leaned slightly to the right and spread his arms with a big smile. “It's me!” He said. “Your favorite Western Atlantic Head of State!”

He took the microphone and began to prance around the stage. “I'm here to tell you that I'm most certainly not resigning as Grand Pensionary,” he said. “No, I'm accepting a promotion to pan-Western-Atlantic Head-of-State-at-large! Yes! That's right! I'm too big to lead just one country. I'm going to all your countries! You'll never know where or when I'll pop up!

“And, they're paying me big, big money to do it. And to write more novels, I mean, memoires, and more sci-fi, oh, I mean bio-pics!” He paused. “Now, I'll evade your questions.”

Another cast member playing a reporter stood. “What about First Girlfriend Henda?”

“Well,” the faux-Viljoen said, “I made her. And she's great. But she's great because of me. But now she's great, and she'll stay great. But I'm great, too. So, ask her.”

“Is this related to your scandals and the assassination attempt?” an actor in a comically rumpled suit asked.

“You need a suit, young man,” not-Viljoen said, dancing around the stage, “I sell these for the low, low price of 199 Western Atlantic Ducats. On sale for 99 Ducats, if I sign it.”

“Well, that's all the time I have.” He fell to the floor and started shaking. “I haven't had a Pink Bunny Cola in 90 seconds and I'm having withdrawals!”

[Ernestria]

Editorial
Farewell to the Purple-clad Prince of Pandemonium

Whilst the Despot of New Constantinople, like his siblings, may have been born in the purple, none has quite lived the purple like Maurits Viljoen. His departure as Grand Pensionary, announced yesterday in what might charitably be called typical Viljoen fashion, brings to a close one of the more singular political tenures of recent years.

Never a man for protocol—or, it seems, an autocue—his exit from a stage he made his own raises more serious questions: about the republic he claimed, sometimes questionably, to serve, and about what has prompted a man for whom subtlety is as alien as modesty to relinquish the Free Republic’s grandest pulpit.

Many readers may breathe a sigh of relief, however temporary, that the Grand Pensionary is going. For one of the foremost military and economic powers of the region to be represented by a man who never met a microphone he did not seize, this may seem like a return to business as usual. Such a tendency, whilst understandable, should be cautioned against. Whilst many screamed into their fists over ‘the Viljoen diplomacy’ meted out to Emperors and dignitaries alike, at least in his own way he was a useful, if frequently overbearing, antidote to the dour-faced Knootoss of stereotype. Or, to put it more frankly, he was a rare spark of excitement in an otherwise leaden political climate.

Seriousness has often been the defining characteristic of Knootoss. The frequent barbs directed at Pantocratoria, one of the Republic’s oldest allies, are less contradiction than recognition. Both states conceive of themselves as serious powers engaged in serious business. Where they differ is not in temperament, but in the assumptions beneath it. Their occasional friction is the quarrel of equals who resemble each other more than either would care to admit.

Even National Humanism was born of a crushing, granite-like seriousness. Whilst Communism, for all its faults, promised utopia, and fascism a perverse national liberation through trenchlines and artillery barrages, the National Humanist end goal was always more officious, perhaps more pious. Only Knootoss could have created an ideology in which the citizen who worked hard, paid taxes and burnt the occasional Bible, would be rewarded with a moon base. With the same empty promises, and often the same people, making the tour again, we ought not to delude ourselves that the next Grand Pensionary might not be a return to ‘business as usual’ but to something altogether darker and more troubling.

Life, wrote the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, is lived forwards and viewed backwards. What the legacy of Maurits Viljoen will be depends much on who his successor will be. Whoever that may be, and whatever direction of travel that might signal for Knootoss and the wider region, we can be sure that it will lack the colour, particularly purple, that he brought to the role. In his own curious way, Maurits Viljoen showed that the life of a people is not measured solely in grain production and SIN payments, but in altogether more human ways. Like loyalty, fraternity, and yes, whisper it now, maybe just a little bit of fun along the way.

[Knootoss]

Maurits Viljoen (He/Him)
@ThePurpleAdventurer

87.368.000 votes/messages/verfjes/tags for me in just over a day!!! The most EVER on Verve. The people have spoken: they love Viljoen. They want Viljoen to stay. That includes FIFTY MILLION Knootians. Imagine if all of us went to Haag together and demanded our FREEDOM!!! #MarchOnHaag #Victory

Shout out to @biancaf for all she did for me (NOT IN BED). 8,25 million in the #CaldanUnion. They love me more than their own leaders who never got Verved this much (sorry @pmcu). And the Confederation loves & supports me even more than Knootoss: 7,8 million Confederals want me to STAY despite it being a TINY RUMP STATE, so the Viljoen-lovers are really packed together. I see bright things happening there. And a shoutout to former President @RealTomCaine for having been a good wing man. I saw he Verved me too. They have an election soon. #ShouldIGetIn? #LibertyParty #JustKiddingUnless?

88 million is less than 100 million though! #PromisesArePromises #Regret so I've told @DrsCvanJonkervelde I'm moving on to greener pastures & endorsing the @SLP nominated successor (though they won't be as fun as me). You will be seeing a lot of me on @KNN channels & finally back on the silver screen. I am also really looking forward to that tour after FOURTEEN YEARS of hard work giving my all for this country as a LEADER.

What do YOU think my best moment as Grand Pensionary was? I said I like Ending Apartheid but there were so many unforgettable moments. (Winning in the Mittelmeer, Stopping "Nugget", making Excalbia friends & hosting their Emperor & Wife, the Knootian Football League Leadership Prize, flying the new J215 Stormjager (did NOT throw up!), cheering up #Vuilendam.

PS #Ernestria I expected more from you, after all I did to make sure Ernestria Matters. Maybe you should buy more Knootian computers because I don't think you can Verve from a Fax Machine or Telegraph. @SuperComputer for desktops and @Syntexis for phones assuming you have Internet.

PPS #Pantocratoria was even worse but they have always been haters & they should let women vote instead of beating them. My numbers there would have been much better if they let ladies & young people Verve instead of "banning" it. Maybe their new government can fix that! #Love #NoHate.

This has been an official announcement. -Maurits #MauritsViljoen

↷1.601.302❤661.171∂2.470

RAISE UP THIS VOICE:♂Cis Male⚤Heterosexual⚭In A Relationship⚛No Religion∂Knootian∂Frontenaar∂SLP∂Redhead

[Soveriegn States]

Tom Caine (He/Him)
@RealTomCaine

Best wishes to Maurits Viljoen (@ThePurpleAdventurer) as he explores new opportunities and new frontiers. #VisittheCSS #MauritsViljoen

↷6789❤16212∂326

RAISE UP THIS VOICE:
♂Cis Male

[Knootoss]

Het Haagse Handelsblad / Hague Business Journal
The most authoritative voice for Knootian Freedom since 1790.

HHH.kn

---

A narrow mandate
Nova Rotsenberg has been elected Grand Pensionary on the narrowest of margins

HAAG - The nomination of Nova Rotsenberg to succeed Maurits Viljoen as Grand Pensionary was tabled with little announcement. That Dr. Rotsenberg is eminently qualified for the office (see "The Rotsenberg Inheritance", this issue) did not prevent her candidacy from arriving on the floor of the Estates-General as a surprise to most of those required to vote on it. Three rounds of balloting followed.

Round 1	226 Req.
Dr. Nova Rotsenberg (SLP)	138
Kand. Jeremy James Bastaard (NVP)	98
Mag. Bram Hofstra (VSF-FP)	84
Dr. ir. Rosenwyn Korfeld (KGP)	71
Mr. Godfried Beyaert (KVP)	59

The first round produced the expected fragmentation (see table 1). Dr. Rotsenberg, nominally the candidate of a combined Social-Liberal and Conservative bloc of 168 seats, received only 138 votes. The shortfall, on a secret ballot where no whip can be enforced, was the first indication that her candidacy was not universally welcomed within her own coalition. Several dozen Social-Liberal and Conservative MPs voted for the centre-right Catholic People's Party nominee, Mr. Godfried Beyaert, who took 59 votes. Dr. ir. Rosenwyn Korfeld of the Greens, in alliance with the Cymric Bloc, began on a modest 71. The United Socialist Front's parliamentary leader, Mag. Bram Hofstra, collected 84 socialist and anarchist votes. Kand. Jeremy James Bastaard, a former leader of the New People's Party, took 98 on behalf of a three-party right-populist bloc.

Round 2	226 Req.
Dr. ir. Rosenwyn Korfeld (KGP)	199
Dr. Nova Rotsenberg (SLP)	147
Kand. Jeremy James Bastaard (NVP)	104

The second round redrew the chamber (see table 2). The socialist and Catholic candidates having withdrawn, their supporters dispersed. The KVP leadership endorsed Dr. ir. Korfeld. This surprised no one acquainted with the Catholic movement's institutional memory of the National Humanist period. But a smaller, more conservative wing of the caucus dissented. Dr. ir. Korfeld's candidacy won 199 votes, absorbing the entire parliamentary left, the majority of the KVP, and the greater part of the dissenting liberals and religious types on the Social-Liberal and Conservative benches. Dr. Rotsenberg advanced to 147. For a moment, the election of a Grand Pensionary by a broad coalition of anarchists, socialists, regionalists, greens, Christian Democrats, liberals and conservative constitutionalists appeared within striking distance.

Round 3	Plurality Req.
Dr. Nova Rotsenberg (SLP)	211
Dr. ir. Rosenwyn Korfeld (KGP)	208
Abstained or spoiled ballot	59

The third round required only a plurality (see table 3). Kand. Bastaard withdrew, and the greater part of the NVP caucus, including General Taelman and Kand. Bastaard himself, supported Dr. Rotsenberg against a candidate perceived to be on the far left. Even so, a substantial minority abstained or voted for Kand. Bastaard despite his withdrawal. A single NVP MP appears to have joined the Korfeld column. The Kommerdijker Voting League's ten members abstained, as theocratic monarchists will when offered a choice between a Social-Liberal and a Green. Latturians First!, whose province sometimes endured the harsher end of National Humanist security policy, delivered its eight votes to Dr. ir. Korfeld. A small portion of the Catholic caucus remained with Dr. Rotsenberg on what may fairly be called a lesser-evil calculation, but the majority did not.

The final tally was 211 to 208, with 31 abstentions. Dr. Rotsenberg is Grand Pensionary. But the distribution that produced it is striking. A Social-Liberal candidate from the party of government has been elected on the decisive strength of votes from a right-populist party whose leader sits in opposition, whilst the principal coalition partners of the Prime Minister backed her opponent. Prime Minister Charlotte van Jonkervelde, whose Social-Liberal, Green and Socialist coalition must now work with the new Grand Pensionary, maintained the constitutional neutrality expected of a head of government during the election of a head of state. Her coalition partners did not.

More consequential aftershocks are likely to be felt in parliament. One Jewish Conservative member has already announced his defection to the KVP. Of greater concern to Drs. Cécile Prisse-d'Yvoy, the SLP parliamentary leader, is the condition of the Social-Liberal Party's constitutional-liberal wing. A cohort of members, possibly numbering in the dozens, is openly discussing whether its future lies in defection to the Greens (which would leave the government majority intact) or in the formation of a new party of liberal-democratic complexion. Either outcome would leave the Social-Liberal Party substantively diminished.

Grand Pensionary Rotsenberg assumes an office whose formal powers are modest and whose symbolic authority is considerable. She does so with a mandate of three votes, extracted from a chamber in which a significant portion of her own party's liberal wing declined to support her and the populist right did. What she does with that inheritance will define the office.