The interrogation room was of the standard variety: one wall consisting of one-way glass, a light available to shine directly on the interrogee, comfortable chairs for the interrogators and a hard wood one for the hapless subject, with a metal table between them. Old-fashioned in spirit if modern in structure. The twins chuckled at the setup and at the poor old bastard sitting in the hard chair.

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden looked at the Enforcer who served as his translator, at the Enforcers who served as the twins' translators, and finally at the twins themselves. There was no question. These two.. children?.. would kill him, surely. These were not Americans, nor were they even Israelis, which is what he had thought when he first woke up strapped to a bed. There was to be no long-term confinement. They would immediately take what they wanted from him and then he would die. He knew this intuitively, and prayed, making the final preparations for his soul.

But the twins were quite pleased that he had actually survived. If they fear discovery of secret plots, Illuminati will put suicide triggers inside their or their servants' bodies in case of capture. The problem is that such devices are usually very sensitive, and will usually activate on anything that can be considered a method of detection, so it was logical that Osama didn't have anything like that.

His implants had been reset to serve both twins, which was asking for trouble. Experimentation on Enforcers (and one particularly unlucky normal who really pissed off someone he shouldn't have) proved that the implants really would work on behalf of two or more identical entities at the same time, until they gave two or more conflicting commands at once. Then the implants temporarily broke, and occasionally the mind beneath permanently did. The twins, among the only known beings to survive implant withdrawal, found the concurrence amusing.

What they didn't find amusing was the fact that the implants would apparently also work for a faceless voice. When he was brought in for implant resetting, it was swiftly discovered that he had two sets: the usual kind and much simpler ones directly on top of his auditory nerves. The latter were removed, analyzed, and found to be utterly untraceable. Someone, somewhere, had spoke into a wireless transmitter, and Osama heard and obeyed.

Let the interrogation begin. "You have to answer us truthfully and directly. Who implanted you?" William asked in a neutral tone.

"What?" Osama replied. He had no idea. Great.

"I'll try again- whose commands did you obey?"

"God's," Osama answered. It figured. "Why must I obey you now?!"

"Because we're more powerful than God," Howard replied casually, starting before the Enforcer finished translating. "Now tell me, shitface. When did you start hearing God?"

"God has always been with me," Osama answered, causing the twins to sigh.

"Then when did you start doing what he said immediately and without restraint?" Howard asked.

"I have always done what God asks of me." Howard restrained the impulse to just butcher him then and there. The terrorist leader was getting more and more terrified of himself as he realized he couldn't control his immediate answers. Capture was one thing, but this... this...

"When did God start giving concrete commands, telling you directly and in a clear voice to do something?" William tried.

"That was when I was seven years old, reminding me to follow His dictates and fall upon His mercy." William snarled in frustration. When Osama was 7, action-control implants were considered a wishful fantasy.

"Okay. I'm going to try this again," William said, slightly exasperated. "When did you first hear Allah in your ears and not your head?"

"Summer of last year," Osama said, startled. Finally. A fucking answer.

"More specific," Howard commanded.

"Don't know.. July?" he said, the Enforcer translating the Iranian calendar. Osama paused a moment. "July second. God help me, it was July second." He was starting to have an emotional breakdown. He could accept frustration and delay; as Allah wills. He would have welcomed an American bomb making him a martyr so he could receive his 72 houris in Paradise, or death by age, or whatever; Allah's will, again. But this was so far outside his experience and so destructive of his religious beliefs that his reality was becoming undone.

"What did he sound like?" William asked. The implanter using his own voice was doubtful, but worth a shot.

"He talked with the voice of age, patience, and wisdom," Osama replied. No help there. All the suspects who knew Arabic were young or approaching middle age.

"What was the first command he gave you, talking in your ears?" Howard went for.

"He told me.. to protect my mind, to prevent anyone from looking into it." Protect his brain would have been either a better translation or a better command, the twins weren't sure which.

"And the second?" Howard asked, hoping for clues.

"I.. do not remember, exactly."

They spent a half hour asking him details. They kept him off balance, swapping good-cop bad-cop roles at random, trying to crack his mind for a more complete picture. "Tell us what you think we want to know" didn't work, as Osama could not conceive of them as anything other than advanced Westerners and kept telling them things they already knew. "Tell us what you're afraid of telling us" was similarly useless; the twins couldn't possibly give less of a shit about the who's-who of towelheads and he'd be pumped for that kind of information later.

"I'm hungry. Let's have some bacon," William said, and pressed a button in the wall to demand some cooked. Shame they didn't take him to Northberg. They always had bacon.

They continued asking him questions, this time about who he thought God was. Apparently whoever was controlling him had some very thorough knowledge of the Koran and Sunni strictures. It also didn't help that Osama's conflation was utterly complete; he really couldn't tell the difference between the God in his auditory nerves and the God in his head anymore. The first was gone and the second wasn't answering his prayers, but he'd learned to stop asking God for things shortly after he was implanted. One-way communication only, then. How had the controller gotten back information? Osama had no clue, and the fact that the controller's spy might be among the dead bodies left to be obliterated was maddening. Sarah might have had a bona-fide rogue's servant within her reach, now a few pulverized fragments of bone and ashes beneath a huge pile of rocks. But that was hindsight, and worthless.

The bacon arrived on a large plate, the attendant Enforcer placing the white plate into Howard's hands. He set it down with a flourish on the table and smiled, holding out a piece to Osama. "Eat up. It's not toxic, it's not laced with anything, and you're not allowed to puke," he commanded, eating a piece for himself. Osama freaked out at himself, yelling and screaming before his own hand inerrantly guided the bacon into his mouth, which chewed of its own accord. Tears welled up in his eyes, his hands went to his mouth, and he scrambled out of the chair before Howard told him to sit back down and stay there. Eventually he swallowed it, breathing heavily, no words available to him but the name of his God.

"Quit your caterwauling, Allah won't save you," William told him, grabbing several strips of bacon at once and popping them into his own mouth one by one as he talked. "You probably won't ever really understand what we are, but at least now you understand what we do. In case you haven't figured it out, the God in your ears controlling you was one of us. And that's what we're concerned with. Your miserable little organization doesn't matter. Your petty, spiteful God doesn't matter. Those three thousand-whatever dead people don't matter. Whatever war you think you're fighting doesn't matter. Only we matter."

"With that in mind, what group benefited from your actions?" Howard asked, wiping his bacon-greasy gloves off on Osama's beard, and sighed when he got the straight normal-world answer of Al Qaeda, the Palestinian people, et cetera.

"Did you ever get help from an unexpected source?" William tried, and whoever had been puppeteering him had been smart enough either not to let that kind of thing show or simply not to do it.

The twins tried variants of that and every question they could think of, most standard, some not, stopping only when it was beyond doubt that he didn't know anything and they were just embarrassing themselves asking. They'd intended to force-feed him more bacon, but ended up eating it themselves because bacon and why waste any on him? They wanted to splatter him now, but whoever inherited Mohammed's holdings (and possibly Sarah) would want what he knew about normal-world personnel. They commanded Osama to answer the translating Enforcer, commanded the Enforcer to do the standard grilling of captured revolutionaries, and left the room.

They spent some time walking down hallways and tunnels, eager to deal with something other than a clueless terrorist for a while, chuckling at how much the clueless terrorist would want a base like this one. The Bavarian headquarters was more than two hundred years old, a relatively small modern complex sitting atop and alongside a vast sprawling catacombs, some rooms having been moved brick-by-brick in their entirety, a great deal of it disused or archaic although well-maintained. Wood paneling was refurbished, old colors of brown and beige paint matched exactly, candles and torches replaced with soft incandescents, the aesthetic kept much as it was when the local manipulated-monarch was Ludwig the First.

There were places that Enforcers seldom had need to go to, some close to the surface and some not, half-hidden rooms with small knobless doors, some alcoves, and even an old-fashioned secret door that the twins noticed, now powered by modern motors when they pushed the jutting brick. No one was in there conspiring at the moment, but surely people had before and would continue to do so in the future, despite modern encrypted communications. At one point they heard the hum of genuine normal-world traffic from above. Occasionally their phones bleeped as they lost contact with the network, some unassuming and old-looking areas Faraday-caged against wireless transmission. This was a place meant to be conspired in.

"Hey, Howie. I've gotta remind you, Viktor Amsel's an asshole."

"What?" William answered by pointing into a doorless room, lit solely from the outside halls, the brick and wood dating from the late 1800s and the ceiling from more modern times. Someone had used a welding torch on the inside of a four-foot bomb crater to engrave the words:

If you're reading this
Remind the Dominator
Viktor Amsel is
AN ASSHOLE!

Despite the tool used, the handwriting was impeccable, with the last line underlined multiple times. The twins started chuckling, wondering what circumstances had led to this graffiti. "Hey, Billy. Just to make sure you know, Viktor Amsel's an asshole," Howard replied in turn. "I wonder why he's an asshole, though."

"I'm going to guess that the bomb crater in the headquarters has something to do with it."

"Yeah. World War Two. Whole lot of pooch-screwing in that." It was nice to be reminded that their forefathers had their own problems, and that betrayal and intrigue were nothing new. For all the twins knew, Viktor had dropped the bomb himself to eliminate a competitor. It wouldn't be in the database and they probably wouldn't get true answers even if there was someone left who knew the story. The twins held hands as they strolled down a memory lane much older than they were, and then one far older than man as they walked through parts of natural cave systems. Except for discreet ventilation, the natural entrances had been sealed off more than a hundred years ago, replaced by increasingly-hidden hatches and manholes, which themselves had been sealed off before the area was declared a no-go zone by the American military after Hitler ate his gun. These days, the headquarters was so thoroughly protected from prying eyes that it was both possible and pointless to open up some of the old entrances. The twins agreed to open them all once the End of Secrecy was declared, for posterity's sake.

After three hours of revisiting history, they returned to their current problems. Osama looked tired, but less afraid, lulled into a depressive hypnosis by his own voice from the full implant quiz, sitting there even a half hour after it was over, unable to move despite how much he wanted to and how badly he needed to piss, his diseased kidneys leaking back into his bloodstream like a sieve. It had all become a slow, numb nightmare, taking a sharp downturn when he saw the twins again. Why hadn't he known of the existence of such... things? How had they escaped his world view, they who broke God's laws merely by existing? Why hadn't he been told devils walk the earth? He muttered prayers and pondered what it would mean to ask God about this personally.

"I've been considering keeping you around," Howard said. "You're an old, decrepit bastard with kidney problems, a bad haircut, severe religious mania, and if we didn't wash you off, you'd reek like a dragon's asshole." He meant that literally. Those things digested like reptiles. "But you're smart and you have a good grasp of tactics." Osama barely heard the translating Enforcer. What he heard most was the Dominator's voice, and it sounded to him more and more like that of Satan.

"Once we finish developing the retrovirus, we could make you a young man again, and you could serve us through the End of Secrecy and beyond," William added. "You'd spend your days in luxury in between exterminating Muslims," he continued, smiling. Osama's muttered prayers- and his thoughts- became more and more garbled as he realized that they weren't kidding, that they really could make him turn against his people as they made him eat the unclean food.

"But we're not going to let you live," Howard said. "Your plan woke me up at 6 AM," he said, slowly and deliberately, as the Enforcer would translate it the exact same way. He gave it a moment to sink in. 'Six in the morning?' Osama wondered, confused. 'Why does he..'

"NOBODY WAKES ME UP AT 6 AM!!!" Howard screamed, effortlessly ripping Osama's windpipe out and throwing it in one smooth motion. It hit the wall with a bloody thwuck and bounced off. The Enforcer shouted its translation at the dying man, who would have been screaming if he still had the equipment to do it with. William chuckled softly. He had wanted to try the two-commands-at-once lobotomy/kill, but Howard did call the throat-rip well in advance. Osama's bladder and bowels finally relaxed, and he sat there in astonished agony, an old man limply clutching beneath his straggly beard at what used to be his throat, finally expiring in a puddle of his own blood and waste.

The twins started to giggle, William first, then his brother joining in. This was all being recorded to the public database, and the Levels would be strongly discouraged from late-night buzzes on hearing that last line. Good. Time zones be damned; everybody ran on Dominator Time.

But even the Duumvirate needed to keep their appointments, and their next one was in five minutes.


Mohammed Sheyikh sat in a chair in the center of the room and waited for his fate to arrive.

Quite a number of other Illuminati were in attendance, more than the twins expected. They, too, had their minds on the all-important question Howard had asked Osama: Who benefits? The problem was that they had benefited, and with their intuitive skills they acted with such precise opportunism that they could reasonably be accused of having planned it out beforehand. To head this off, they came voluntarily, subjecting themselves to the Dominator's power so he would be less likely to hunt them down afterwards. They also had some contempt for Mohammed, despite their profiting from his stupidity, as he hadn't profited in the slightest with Western forces causing him to lose a great deal of political ground. If the Duumvirate wanted to kill him for his ineptitude, it was fine by the majority of them. They were more worried about each other, as most of them were convinced that there was someone (or a few someones) in the room who had planned it out, each harboring their own suspicions as to who.

The real problem, of course, was that one or more of them could have been right.

The twins had their own suspicions, most of them involving Mohammed. They badly wanted to implant him, but politics forbade. Killing was one thing, but there was just no way they were going to get away with the enslavement of an Illuminatus without serious repercussions, even if he was incompetent. Torture, drugs, and other intelligence techniques were also unacceptable. Donald had swiftly taken advantage of the normal-world crisis to consolidate his power, but that was something the Duumvirate could never do with their own crisis- not to Illuminati. All they could do was ask questions and administer the Illuminati's idea of justice, unless he admitted to being a rogue in which case all bets were off.

"Before this plan came to fruition, did you know anything whatsoever about the implantation of Osama bin Laden?" Howard asked without preamble.

The one thing Mohammed could not, ever, tell them was the truth. How foolish he had been! "A timeshare on your servant's mind," the rogue had said a month after the twins were unimplanted. "But just between us. No record of this. And in return, I release all my claims, say I simply can't be bothered with them." So easy, so simple. What was the man's goal? What was he trying to start, did he have something to prove? Mohammed just assumed the man was an idiot, but he had been the bigger idiot. The man had openly proclaimed he was a rogue (how could Mohammed possibly prove it?); if he let the Duumvirate know, they would surely implant him, a fate worse than death. And he had already decided on a pretense of ignorance.

So he answered, "No. I had no knowledge of this."

"And you also didn't know about what he was training those Saudis for? You didn't know about the flight schools? The training camps, the infrastructure he was trying to build?" Howard asked, looking around the room, seeking and getting tacit confirmation that this was a lethally stupid offense.

"No, Dominator. It is.. my failing," Mohammed answered, staring at the ground. That much was true. He had intentionally not known, subtly ordering his servants to look in other directions, thinking that he would be admonished should anything go wrong, but not attacked.

"And everything you know is in your computer. You have not withheld from your own servants?" William asked. There was only one reason he would ask a question like that. There was no way this could end well.

"That is correct, Dominator," Mohammed lied. He inhaled, to beg, because he knew- maybe he should just confess after all-

And then William stepped up to him as if in a hug, then reached all the way around his head, grabbing his face and twisting, holding on to Mohammed's body while extending his own arm. He overestimated the force he needed for it; he was going for a simple snap, and ended up turning Mohammed's head a full 270 degrees, skin stretched, neck muscles ripped, a few arteries pulled apart, vertebrae snapped, nerves torn from twisting. Mohammed's air flowed out in a strangled gurk. 'Dead, then, not worse. True Allah, take me.' His secrets went to the grave with him.

"Donald," Howard said, turning to him as William let the corpse slump to the floor. Other Illuminati stepped back a bit, wondering why they had come in person if it was going to be more than just Mohammed. 'First they came for...' was going through Gates' head; he had his own reasons to sponsor cyber-terrorism, and had done research into it. Done right, he didn't need to involve any others... but after this, those plans were kiboshed, and he hoped to hell the twins had never heard of them.

The twins expected the reactions. This was going to be a lot more delicate. They could threaten a bit, yes, but Donald had recently attained first level, and the same lynch-mob mood that had let them butcher Mohammed could not be spawned here.

"Ask me anything, Dominator," he said, remembering how the simple interplay of question and answer had served him before. He felt this one coming and had already devised his strategy: Tell them everything, admit to actions but no faults, protect himself without denial.

"The American president had received normal intelligence on the subject of an attack. Why did you not have him act on it?" William asked.

Good, an easy one. "Because I assumed it was cruft." The twins looked at him a bit sideways- good, they didn't know exactly, it let him act as a teacher. "False information. Either exaggerated, supposedly true but never going to be acted upon, or outright lies that had made their way into the normal intelligence pipeline by an ambitious normal, simple normal misinformation, or someone here trying to angle things." He glanced around to spread the paranoia. "If it doesn't make sense as a power grab, and nobody puts it into the system, it's not credible. That is an assumption we all make to keep the bullshit out." The assumption was a valid one. He'd seen all kinds of information received by normals, and most of it was crap. He couldn't be expected to change his policies for that, especially when he had his own plans.

"And the normal president not acting on received information is not a secrecy problem?" Howard asked.

Donald snickered, both at the comment and the fact that things were seeming to go his way. There were a lot of raised eyebrows in the room and a quiet admonishment: After killing someone for incompetence, you can't possibly be that out ot touch. "He's Bush. Ignorance is his stock in trade." Eight years would be enough of it, then the Americans would get sick of it, then he could get someone to run on a platform of change, after which he could do damn near anything he wanted. It was tempting to just use Hillary for it, but there was this one black guy in Illinois who was practically asking to be acquired...

"All right, Donald. I accept that," William said, and the twins relaxed, shortly followed by everyone else in the room. "I know that you're telling the normals that it's a whole new world, and that everything's changed, and I'm sure all of you are finding opportunities to be had." Oh, were they ever. He was tempted to continue by saying that things needed to change here as well, but no. The reverse was better. "It's not a new world. It's still ours." General, unexpected, light-hearted laughter of relief. "And what just happened here should remind everyone of that. Political holdings are not just something in the system, not something that you can put away in a safe somewhere. If you hold it, you must know what goes on in it. Otherwise the next one might not be like this." William paused for effect.

"The next one might be much worse," Howard said.

"The next one might be a secrecy breach," William finished. Having the Dominator use the words 'secrecy breach' to their faces was not an experience any of them liked. "Someone clean up that trash," he said, gesturing to Mohammed's corpse, and the twins walked out to everyone's relief. Still on the same side. Not about to kill their own power base. No mass butchery.

Donald ordered his Enforcer to take care of it before anyone else could, planning to bury the asshole upside-down as a mark of final disrespect. The Dominator, he decided, was right; if he held it, he had to know what went on in it. Size and complexity were just excuses; it's not like he didn't have the servants.

But before he did any of that, his servant Steve had nearly finished his emergency work and was able to come home soon, and Donald was going to strip him out of that Joint Chief's uniform, take off that nasty wrinkle-suit Steve wore for secrecy, and enjoy a long, slow night with his beloved.