Wufan/Elsa's Suspicion:
Are the Void Engineers going to confront Jamelia? If so, this might be a chance to get things out into the air.
[X] (1.2x) Yes
<insert quiet talk between Elsa and Wufan here when they decide to do it>
Director Belltower is at her desk as usual. Wufan has made an appointment to discuss contra-EDE security. As they come in, they notice that Ceres has been left outside the room in a transparent cat box along with a bundle of catnip. There is a note attached informing people that no one is to pet her, and she is currently being punished by being confined in Mew 101 for eating pens.
It makes Elsa uneasy. That looks remarkably like Director Belltower is displaying a sense of humour, which means something else must be going on.
"Ah, Naryshkin, Guo," Director Belltower says without looking up. "Please close the door behind you. Let me just finish this." She underlines a few things with a marker pen, and then snaps the lid back on and files her paperwork. "How may I help you?" she asks blandly.
Elsa hangs back. She's the good cop to Wufan's bad cop and that means he takes the lead. "Now that we're back in Moscow," he says, "I think we do have to consider the risk posed by the MUSCOVITEs."
"Well, you're the experts on them," Belltower says, sitting back behind her desk. Is it the same desk she had before? Elsa doesn't think so. But then again she wouldn't put it past Belltower to change her desk on a weekly basis to avoid people bugging it. She can hear the faint whine of the anti-surveillance jammers in the background. "I bow to your superior expertise."
"I felt it was better to ask you some things," Wufan says. "You saw things that no one else has."
"I was taken out of action early on in the incident. I will try to be useful, but," she shrugs faintly, "unfortunately I don't know where the real Serafina is or even if she's alive. She was the one who commanded most of that incident and had the best birds-eye view."
Wufan nods stiffly. "That is a shame," he says, sitting bolt upright. "Her absence is suspicious - it's too much like a deliberate targeting."
"As you're the experts," Belltower says, probing back in the conversation, "would you say that the people who had subverted my Construct back in Los Angeles were working for the MUSCOVITEs?" She directs the comments at Elsa.
Wufan doesn't twitch and answers for her. Elsa knows he's better at counter-probabilistic actions. "That's why I'm asking you. We both suspect they were passing as Panopticon agents. And you've met a Panopticon agent who went rogue and was working for the MUSCOVITEs before."
"Yes. Your Lt Rajesh," Belltower says. Elsa tries to use her Oracle implant to project what Belltower is saying, but the woman herself is doing some kind of NWO counter-stat thing which makes her behaviour nearly completely opaque to the Oracle. "I wonder when he was compromised."
"I've heard there's an enquiry going on," Wufan says.
"I'd like to hear the results."
"I'll see if that's possible."
"Thank you." Belltower pauses. "So what was it that you wanted to know?"
"Down in the room with the MatTrans, the one that overloaded. You and him fought, didn't you?"
"I stabbed him, he stabbed me," Jamelia confirms. "He had high end hardware and new augs. I wound up in a coma afterwards. He was less lucky thanks to the MatTrans."
Elsa rather wishes that this conversation was a little less NWO. There's only so much two people talking at each other in cold clinical tones that someone can take without going crazy.
"Indeed," Wufan says. "But the thing is, I was wondering how much intelligence you got from him. He was down in his file as quite a fanatic who'd produce his justifications. And I'm sure he'd try to throw you off your game. He had quite the grudge against you. So the question, when it comes down to it," Wufan says, "is this: what did Lt Rajesh tell you?"
Jamelia Belltower looks at them with the flat, neutral look of the born Operative. Which means she's up to something, Elsa is sure of it. Jamelia is better at lying than this usually. "He told me he was working for Control," she says coldly.
The bold affronty of that takes the breath from Elisa's lungs and she's... this wasn't something she expected.
"That is something other MUSCOVITE agents have claimed," Guo says. "You didn't believe him."
"I don't care," Jamelia says bluntly. "I don't know if you're entirely aware of this, Lt Guo, but Control has been gone for over sixteen years. I wouldn't trust an agent who went AWOL for sixteen years and passed over plenty of chances to re-establish contact. I see no reason to trust any claim to be working for an organisation which has done exactly that - even if he was telling the truth. Control never went silent for even a year before. They could have contacted you for rescue. That they didn't indicates that they were gone, one way or another. Dead, or compromised."
"Do you think he was telling the truth?"
Director Belltower narrows her eyes. "He believed he was telling the truth, but he had extensive implants and augmentations he had not possessed when he was in my amalgam," she says. "I know of multiple ways to make a man to believe anything you want him to. That doesn't mean anything." She folds her hands in front of her. "He is the only human agent of the MUSCOVITEs we encountered - him and that delusional construct based on stolen neural scans of Iterator Langley. Operative Gretkov was exhuman, augmented to insanity - not that he was very far from it anyway. I am certain the reason he wasn't purged before was that the locals were too scared of him. Very sloppy. No other assets. I read Sgt Kessler and Constable Cross' report of their dimensional assets. EDE walkers. I have seen a lot of Union operations in my time, and what was done in Moscow wasn't a Union operation."
"Astute," Guo says in almost the same tone she's using.
"The MUSCOVITEs in Moscow flagrantly violated the Timetable in every single way possible and several ways which I hadn't believed could even be done," Belltower says. "That's not the actions of Control. I don't care if it's been compromised by alien intelligences or aliens have occupied their HQ or it's all an act by an alien species trying to break down our resolve. It doesn't matter. The fact is that the MUSCOVITEs are an enemy of mankind and of the Technocratic Union, under the principles of the Precepts of Damien. The Technocratic Union is bigger than Control. They're gone, but we survive."
The clock in the room ticks away. "I notice this wasn't in your report," Guo observes.
"No, it wasn't," Belltower says.
The pause stretches out.
"Why?" the man asks.
"Because I'm not a fool," the woman answers. "If there are aliens out there who are pretending to be Control, then the Union must remain united to oppose them and there are too many idiots willing to fall for that because they long for guidance. If Control is compromised, then the fact that they have not already made contact with the Union indicates there's something blocking them - and the last thing we need is for idiots to try to contact them to confirm. There are too many people who would want to repeat the Autochthonia failure and I fear that that mission drew their attention... and maybe Moscow was retaliation." She pauses, brown eyes unwavering as she leans forwards. "The New World Order is entirely used to the necessity of information control," she says, with just the faintest hint of a smirk creasing her lips. "Only the right people need to know - and no more."
***
Jamelia waits to see how they'll react and how they'll take her deliberate implication that killing her won't stop people knowing. She rests her elbows on Kessler, who is currently pretending to be a desk.
According to him, he plans to give a wooden performance.
