Monte Carlo, and the Ammonite, 2025
Genevieve walked along the dock in the deepening twilight, the microfilm in her pocket feeling as though it was burning a hole in it.
There was no one else here, apart from Celine, who she would be replacing. She showed no sign of having noticed Genevieve’s approach, but she would be well aware, just not giving anything away in case Genevieve were an enemy operative or even just a civilian who’d somehow not been dissuaded by all the signs that had been erected about how the area had been closed off for maintenance work.
When she got close enough to be within Celine’s earshot, she said, “The hour grows late, my friend.”
Celine turned round at that, and now she did register surprise — not that someone was here, but who that person was. “Madame Kardos!”
“The hour grows late, my friend,” Genevieve said again.
“But tomorrow will be a new dawn,” Celine supplied in a hurry, clearly aghast at having slipped up in the protocol. After a moment, she went on, “But, madame–“
“For the love of all that is holy, how many times have I told you to call me by my name? It’s no use to me having a deputy who stands on ceremony so.”
“I … I’m sorry, Genevieve.” The word sounded strained, strangled almost. “I’ll try my best.”
“When I was a child, my closest friends called me Vivi.”
“I’m not sure– I’ll stick with Genevieve for now, if that’s all right.” It sounded more natural the second time around, so Genevieve decided to let things lie for now. Besides, there were more pressing matters at hand. “But why are you here, at such a late hour?”
“You’re relieved, my dear,” Genevieve said. “I shall be taking your place.”
“I thought perhaps you had come with a fresh update from the Observatory.”
Genevieve patted her pocket. “And I have. But its contents are grave enough that I intend to deliver them in person.”
“Are you certain? Without you here–“
“Without me here, I need to know that my trusted deputy is around to keep everything in order, and to be ready for anything that might happen.”
She could see the uncertainty in Celine’s eyes, that if the news was that bad then the decisions she might be taking in Genevieve’s absence could be of the utmost consequence. But before either of them could say anything further, the water began to roil as the Ammonite surfaced.
As soon as the conning tower had fully breached the froth, it took less than a minute for the gangway to be extended, Claude to be disembarked — if anything, he was even more startled to see Genevieve than Celine had been — and Genevieve to get on board herself. Amid all the noise and hurry, she thought she heard Celine say, “Bonne chance, Vivi!” but perhaps she was just imagining it.
Good luck to us all, she thought as the vessel sank back beneath the waves.
She was ushered down into the well-appointed reception area. If it hadn’t been for the rails holding the books in place on the shelves and the way every piece of furniture was nailed down to the floor, it could have been mistaken for the library of some nineteenth century chateau.
Sitting at a small table in the corner was the New Zealand representative, a man she had never met before but certainly knew by reputation. “Monsieur Taylor,” she said, “you seem a little taller than I had imagined.”
“A lot of people say that,” Taylor said. “Must be something to do with my file photo. Please, join me for a drink.”
There were two tumblers and a carafe of something with a burnt orange colour on the table. The glassware was probably some sort of clever tempered glass to avoid it shattering if mishandled, but it had been cut with the same exquisite care as though it were the finest crystal.
Genevieve sat down opposite Taylor, and was about to help herself, but Taylor waved her away. Instead, a smartly dressed junior officer approached and did the honours.
“The Director Emeritus tells me that he still owes you a drink. I hope you will consider his debt repaid even if he can’t be here in person.”
“Graham Featherington owes me a lot more than one drink,” Genevieve said with a chuckle. “But I guess I’ll take this as a down payment.” She knocked back the sliver that had been poured for her. A very good Scotch, certainly single malt, most probably maturing for a decade or more. “More, please.”
The officer nodded at her and poured again, a more generous measure this time. She was aware of him watching her intently as she took a swig.
“They’re waiting for you below,” he told Taylor after a moment. There was no sign of him having received a signal or
Genevieve felt like a fool for not having realised earlier. This officer was a Cognoscente and he had been using the encounter to double check her credentials in ways that far surpassed her ability to comprehend. Taylor’s bringing up his former boss, her old sparring partner, might well have been deliberate as part of the assessment. Not as crude as the pages-long forms the opposition made their agents fill out every day, but just as effective if being dealt with by someone well trained in advanced techniques.
“I’m sorry if the last minute switch caused you any issues,” she said as he held the hatch open for them.
“Always good to be kept on one’s toes, ma’am,” he said.
She nodded at him and followed Taylor down a spiral staircase, first down past the state rooms, one of which would be her home for the foreseeable future — it was a good thing Celine was roughly her size or it could be an uncomfortable time. They descended further through several decks that were critically important to the functioning of the Ammonite as a submarine, which she had only visited once, or possibly twice, despite doing several months-long stints as the representative for Monaco earlier on in her career, when both herself and the vessel had been considerably younger. Finally, they reached the fore section of the lowest deck, where the real business took place.
Like the reception area she had just left, and the stateroom she would eventually be heading to, the council chamber was furnished as though it was on board a great steamship of an earlier age, almost as though the Ammonite had been designed as a Titanic that would be at home at the bottom of the ocean. The huge submarine — the largest ever built, unless there were other secret undersea operations going on of which they were blissfully unaware — had been funded and built by the Interested Parties using their various black budgets, first conceived in the 1990s and finally finished in a very remote dockyard created especially for the purpose in New Zealand just under twenty years ago. The overwrought elegance of the design was supposed to be cover, so that if anything did become public it could all be written off as some billionaire’s bizarre boondoggle, a vanity project to end all vanity projects. Genevieve was pretty sure, though, that a certain proportion of the team who’d originally conceived it had simply wanted to spend their time beneath the waves in luxury.
The concept was simple in a way: the Ammonite was nearly continuously at sea, making a tour around the world and stopping off at each of the small band of nations that hadn’t followed lemming-like over the cliff edge of intentional ignorance. At each stop, a new representative from the relevant intelligence agency would relieve their counterpart whose tour had just finished, so that at all times the members on board could act as a quorate decision making body if necessary. Longer stops in the more out of the way locations allowed for resupply and rotation of the crew, who had long since themselves become a thoroughly mixed sample of all the nationalities on the council. Each and every one of them, from Captain Cheung down to the lowliest rating were beyond-top-secret agents as well as fully trained submariners.
All of it a safeguard against the eventuality that Genevieve was now about to present to them as a near certainty.
As Taylor ushered her in, the rest of the council was already gathered around the huge mahogany table. Usually, they would have greeted her in the restaurant-cum-bar on the upper deck, Claude’s farewell party segueing seamlessly into her welcoming one. The fact that even before she delivered her information they had cloistered themselves down here was an undeniable sign of the times.
Genevieve looked round at the faces as Taylor went to take his seat. He had carefully chosen one halfway down one side of the table, she saw, de-emphasising his own importance even though his country was the de facto home port of the Ammonite. Amongst the others were only a few she had met in person before, largely as part of her previous trips aboard. Most of her contemporaries from the earlier years had, like her, been promoted out of regular rotation for council duty, but her old friend Rra Moseki was the Botswanan chief of specialist intelligence services.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” she began. “As we have already dispensed with the usual pleasantries, I will get straight to business.” She retrieved the microfilm from her inner pocket and nodded to the lieutenant staffing the room. “You can project this, I trust?” He nodded and took it from her, hurrying away to make the necessary arrangements. Turning back to the council delegates, Genevieve said, “I imagine what news has reached you has already been a cause for concern. The report I am bringing from the Observatory is, I am afraid, worse by far than anything we had feared.”
Commotion erupted around the table, silenced only when the lights dimmer and the first part of the microfilm shining onto the screen immediately grabbed everyone’s attention. It was a list of countries, a long list.
“That’s a lot. But it’s still not enough to secure a two-thirds majority in a general League meeting,” said Francesca Farrugia, the Maltese representative.
“Indeed not,” Genevieve said. The votes of dozens of countries who had been willing to go along with the retreat from the frontiers of knowledge, but stopped short of finding military action justifiable against those who hadn’t, had been their primary strategic focus for many years. “But it doesn’t need to be. The new administration in Washington has recently secretly drafted some … novel legal argumentation that existing motions passed by the League allow, if not require, action against ‘rogue states’ harbouring ‘cognitive terrorists’.”
She watched as their eyes scanned the list. It didn’t take long before it became apparent that the Americans had managed to sign up at least one neighbour for each nation represented on the council with a land border, and plenty of places that could act as forward operating bases for dealing with the islands — even New Zealand, by far the most remote, had to worry that Australia was on the list.
“Most of this diplomatic information is from conventional human intelligence sources. But once we became aware of it, the Remote Observatory was tasked with monitoring their military activity.” She nodded to the lieutenant and the image on the screen swished across until it showed a world map, asterisks marking areas of unusual build-up. Prominent among them were areas close to all those borders, but not close enough to be immediately noticeable to border patrols.
“And we’re certain this is correct?” A small man with a waspish expression, who Genevieve didn’t know but by elimination had presumed was the latest delegate from Singapore, looked at her intently.
“Of course they aren’t,” snapped Lau, from Hong Kong. She had long been sceptical of the Observatory project. “It’s all inference and supposition based on flimsy impressions.”
“My esteemed friend is entirely right,” Genevieve said. “At least from one point of view. But the whole point of our techniques is to synthesise multiple points of view. One ‘flimsy impression’ can never tell us much, it’s true, but dozens, carefully integrated by expert analysts, yield an output that’s far less uncertain. With respect, we’ve had years to practice by now and we think we’ve become pretty good at it.”
Lau harrumphed loudly but didn’t attempt to argue the point further. Genevieve nodded to the lieutenant and he quickly moved through more detailed views of specific areas of the globe. “There is, however, one big limitation.”
“Oh?” said Lau, a gleam in her eye.
“Remote viewers rely on the intersection between objects — construed widely — and their locations to narrow things down. But two thirds of the Earth’s surface is very hard to differentiate amongst.”
“The oceans. You can’t tell what’s going on in the oceans.” Taylor spoke for the first time since they’d entered the room.
“I can tell you that there’s almost certainly a carrier group moving at speed somewhere in the Pacific. But where, and in what direction, we don’t know. And there’s about a 10% chance it’s actually in the Atlantic, on the other side of the world entirely.”
“The Observatory might not know, but it’s obvious, isn’t it?” Taylor stood up, pointing at the map along one wall, almost stabbing his finger into a spot northwest of his home country. “If they’re going to go through with this, it’ll be all of us, all at once. That carrier group is a few days, maybe a week at most, out from New Zealand.”
“Our central estimate for the time for the land forces to make their final preparations is five days,” Genevieve confirmed.
The meeting descended into chaos once again, but now the maelstrom swirled specifically around the lieutenant as everyone pressed on him the urgency of getting a message to the captain, although precisely what that message should be seemed to vary considerably. Some wanted him to dive as deep as possible and go silent, but most wanted to risk returning to near the surface, where they could spool out the low frequency antenna and attempt to get a message out warning of the impending attack.
Taylor cleared his throat loudly. Genevieve and a couple of others turned to face him, but for the most part the hubbub continued unabated.
The time for subtlety was over. “Arretez-vous!” Genevieve yelled at the top of her voice. “Merci,” she said more quietly a few moments later when she had everyone’s attention. “Lieutenant, would you like to give us an update?”
“I fully appreciate the urgency you are all feeling,” he said, “and I will ask the captain to come down to address you as soon as possible. But, without exceeding the limits of my authority, I hope I can impress upon you that he is very unlikely to sanction a return to broadcast depth in the immediate future, due to our proximity to a number of unfriendly shores.”
“Can you give us an estimate for when we might be able to get a message out?” Taylor asked.
The lieutenant’s eyes flicked upwards for a moment, as though consulting a navigational chart inside his own head. “A few hours, but to do so with minimum danger we would need to go further out into the middle of the Mediterranean, rather than head directly to the strait. So we would be delayed overall.”
“Thank you,” Taylor said. Turning to his now slightly calmer delegates, he said, “Quite apart from that, it seems to me that we cannot send a message until we know what that message will contain.”
“It’s quite clear what the message should contain,” Lau said. “We must get the word out, mobilise what defences we can–“
Moseki held up a hand and spoke, his deep voice resonating around the room. “He means, we need to decide whether or not we’re invoking the protocol.”
Genevieve half-expected another outburst, but everyone was completely silent. Surely some of them must have been considering it already, but hearing it laid out so clearly was still sobering. The emergency protocol gave the council on board the Ammonite authority to issue commands to the various national agencies they represented. Theoretically, those orders would be followed without question, the idea being that the council had the best view of the bigger picture. It had never been tested in practice, but Genevieve had always had her doubts whether it would work, especially given that most of the council delegates were usually a rung or two down the hierarchy from the people in charge back home.
Taylor said, “I believe the convention is that we go around the table, first, so that everyone can lay out their initial position, before proceeding to discussion and a binding vote.”
“I will start if no one minds,” Moseki said. “Many of you may not be aware, indeed we have taken pains to disguise the fact, down to using body doubles to make me appear to have been elsewhere, but I have been aboard this tin can for the best part of two years. My country is landlocked and despite multiple attempts to have a change of delegates as we have sailed past the nearest coasts, each time my prospective replacement has not made it to the rendezvous and we’ve received messages warning us off. So I say this as someone who does not necessarily expect to see his home again: we should not do it. We should leave the defence to those who are actually there, not presume to know better from here.”
When it was clear he had finished, Lau, who was sat to his right chimed in. “Not only should we do it, we must. Otherwise this council and indeed the entire Ammonite project are, were and ever shall be completely without purpose.”
As they went round, it became apparent that the majority held similar views to Lau. This was what they were here for in the first place, so it was only natural that they were in favour. A few did express more sceptical views, that things would move too quickly for their interventions to be helpful, or that a full scale invasion would naturally become a matter for governments rather than intelligence agencies, and so what was the point?
When it came to Genevieve’s turn, she hesitated. It was simple enough for her: Celine would take her instructions whether they came with the imprimatur of the council or not. She suspected that Moseki’s opposition stemmed from similar considerations, given that he, like her, was the actual head of his agency. But would it help or hinder the others to be constantly second guessing whether their orders would actually be implemented? In the end, she said simply, “I reserve the right to withhold my judgement at this time.”
“I didn’t realise that was an option,” Taylor said mildly.
“Nevertheless, I have opted for it.”
“Shall we move on?”
The next few to speak were all in favour of invoking the protocol. When it reached Taylor’s turn, he said, “I am almost tempted to follow the example of the esteemed Madame Kardos, but I find myself leaning — ever-so-slightly — towards being against. I look around at us, a cabal of operatives deciding whether to take effective control of our countries from our hidden base of operations, and I see something that even the most deluded conspiracy theorists on the other side would never be able to come up with. We always saw this as a shadow war, the crises the protocol was designed for were shadow war crises, spates of assassinations or new unknown meta-mathematical techniques emerging from the EEE or some other agency of theirs … This is too big for us, I fear.”
There were only a few left to speak after Taylor; they were mostly positive, though they began to express slightly more hesitation than had been evident in some of the earlier speeches. The last to speak was Farrugia. “Perhaps you’re right, those of you who have argued against. We may not be able to help in the situation as it develops on the ground. But realistically speaking, I don’t think we can make it much worse either. So I think we should invoke the protocol, even if the chances of us helping are only minimal. It’s still the better bet.”
“Right then, time for discussion,” Taylor said. He was technically the chair, but the meetings usually proceeded on a much more informal basis than this, given that everyone was spending all their free time together as well as they stayed on board for months at a time. “The floor is open, I suppose.”
The man from Singapore spoke immediately. “I find myself wondering what the motivation behind this is. The delegate from Monaco appears and suddenly everything is proceeding at pace, based only on their say so.”
“Are you saying that all this evidence has been faked?” Genevieve said incredulously.
“I am saying that it is a useful smokescreen to distract us from the real issue here: Voss. She is all we hear about from the Americans, through unofficial contacts and what few official channels still exist. They want her, yesterday. And you are harbouring her. Hand her over, and perhaps this all goes away.”
To Genevieve’s enormous surprise, it was Lau who came to her aid. “She comes and goes as she pleases, we all know that. She probably has boltholes in all of our territories by now.” She turned to Genevieve. “I suppose I should feel offended that she seems to prefer yours to ours, but mostly I feel relieved.”
Moseki leaned forwards. “If I may be allowed to indulge myself with an apt analogy, she has been the largest unknown in our calculations for some time. Knowing what she is planning would undoubtedly be helpful.”
“Maybe she doesn’t have a plan,” Farrugia said. “Maybe there’s no more to it than what there appears to be: a highly impressive auto-didact trying to help others who want to learn the same things she did, in an environment where that’s becoming increasingly difficult. Maybe she is simply very brave.”
“There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity,” Taylor said. “Let us hope she remains on the right side of it, that we don’t get any more of a provocation dumped into our laps.” He looked around the table. “Does anyone have any further points to add before we proceed to a vote?”
For the next half hour or more, they discussed at length the finer details of how the protocol operated and how the message needed to be sent for it to be recognised as valid by those receiving it. All in all, though, the central question seemed to be settled.
When they did come to vote, then, it was something of a surprise to hear more “no” votes than there had been negative views previously. It became clear that various delegates had changed their views, in both directions. “Perhaps we are all too persuasive for our own good,” Taylor said mildly before carrying on taking the vote.
When it came to her turn, Genevieve abstained. However, as they finished going round the table, it became clear that the vote was going to be very close. Even before Taylor announced it, Genevieve could feel her fellow delegates’ eyes on her as they tallied up the votes mentally.
“We have a tie,” Taylor said. “Madame Kardos, I think we must ask you to come off the fence, unless you would like me to use my casting vote as chair.”
Taylor had maintained his opposition to the idea, given the circumstances they found themselves in. If he broke the tie, they would be almost entirely useless as their countries fell to the invaders, eventually reduced to being a group of agents with no agencies, doubtless doomed to squabble over whose fault it had all been as they switched their opulent lifestyle to one of basic rations and neverending biting cold until the nuclear reactor that sat just a few tens of metres behind them finally ran out of usable fuel.
It had all come to her in a flash, her previous scepticism washed away all at once by the prospect of being stuck here indefinitely, unable to disembark even at the original secret shipyard in New Zealand, generally considered the destination of last resort. Even Rra Moseki’s charms might pall somewhere into the second decade. She stood up. “Invoke the protocol.”
There was a great deal of surprised muttering as the meeting broke off to discuss the exact messages that were to be sent to each contact on the surface. Soon, only Genevieve and Taylor were left in the room, apart from the lieutenant.
“I have to say, you took me by surprise there,” Taylor said.
“I surprised myself,” Genevieve admitted. “But look at it this way: perhaps Graham can get me a drink in person after all.”