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“No one could question—” Graf began.

“Wait.” The admiral craned his neck until he could meet Leia’s gaze. “To answer your unspoken question, yes, I have a copy of the recording, in a secure partition at my home. But I give you my word that neither I nor that copy was the source of the leak. I do not know who was responsible.”

“I accept your assurances, Admiral,” said Leia, turning to Graf. “I don’t accept yours. No one is to be exempt from your inquiry.”

A chastised Graf said quietly, “Understood, Princess.”

For General Carlist Rieekan, head of New Republic Intelligence, the problem was to assess the damage Ourn had done and prevent a recurrence. The first meant discovering exactly what information he had provided to the Yevetha. The second meant explaining how Ourn had escaped official attention until he turned the black box over and turned himself in.

“Not that it’s of any great consequence, Princess, but it looks as though you decked the wrong spy,” said Rieekan.

“Why is that?”

“I had seventy people up all night looking into this, and there’s no plausible link between Belezaboth Ourn and the interception of Tampion,” Rieekan said. “He’s a nobody, with no connections—a small-time parasitic little sneak all puffed up with air. He simply didn’t have an opportunity to acquire and deliver anything at the level of sensitivity of General Solo’s appointment or Tampion’s flight plan.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Very. Ourn fell apart during the night, started telling the truth as fast as he could blubber it out. He doesn’t even know that the general is missing.”

“Then there’s another Yevethan spy—more highly placed.”

“At least one,” said Rieekan.

“The viceroy’s afternoon callers,” said Graf. “Senators Marook, Peramis, and Hodidiji.”

“They are all getting a close look,” said Rieekan.

“What about the black box?” asked Leia.

“Interesting device,” said Rieekan. “Not quite entirely black, but close. We took it into the cold room and opened it in the dark, under vacuum. Good thing we did. The power supply is wired with an oxidation fuse, set to go critical if the box is opened. The yield would probably be about equal to a proton grenade. We took holos and closed it up again, very carefully.

“Then we put it on a dummy transceiver rig, connected the way Ourn showed us. The dummy rig looks like a real transceiver to the device but has only one ten-millionth of the output power needed to actually open a hypercomm channel—just enough for us to record the signal for analysis.

“I just got an update on that before I came in,” Rieekan said, looking down at his datapad. “Apparently the box uses a burst-compression algorithm that we haven’t quite deciphered yet to hide the signal in the noise. Very efficient.” He looked up at Leia. “And distinctively Imperial, according to my senior engineer. Probably hatched right here on Coruscant, back in the days of Section Nineteen and Warthan’s wizards.”

“Can you use what you’ve learned about this one to find the others?” Leia asked.

“Possibly. We should be able to catch any new transmissions. We might get lucky and find some old ones hiding in the archived traffic, now that we know what we’re looking for,” said Rieekan. “But I’d like to suggest another way we might use what we’ve learned.”

“I’m listening.”

“We have the tools for a small campaign of disinformation,” he said. “We have a working black box and a desperately willing turncoat who’ll do most anything we ask. What if we just let him keep talking to the Yevetha?”

Leia nodded thoughtfully. “Do you have any ideas about what we might want to have him say?”

“I have one,” Nanaod Engh interjected, drawing attention to his end of the table for the first time. “We don’t really know for certain if the Yevetha have General Solo, or—forgive me—if the general is alive. Nil Spaar has ignored every message we’ve sent him. He hasn’t even tried to communicate with us since leaving Coruscant, except through his deeds. Perhaps