Sarah had always wondered why the leader of the general operatives had a plaque on his desk. It had actually been Karl Mandel's replacement for his master's, an old-fashioned bureaucrat who was drafted into the Illuminati for his pure guile. The old man believed in doing everything by the book, and had been so steadfast in this that he even had several highly-accomplished servants help write the book, the tome of information and detailed secret-operations regulations that had become one of the Illuminati's bulwarks. He had also brought some mild normal-world fripperies with him, one of which was the plaque.

Despite its being wholly out of place in an Illuminated setting, it did leave her with an easy-to-recognize symbol of power, and she brought a replacement with her, in a few ounces of gold and hardwood.

The act of taking over was very easy: She simply announced it to the servant managing the base, and if anyone wanted to challenge her, it was his funeral. She had undergone a good amount of training here, and held a great many discussions with professionals four times her age and less than a quarter as lethal. As she strode down steel halls unopposed, a few men gave subtle bows and nodded their heads, their discipline preventing them from showing their elation. Almost all of them had a certain amount of affection for her, having watched the princess of death grow up from a sweet little silent-killer into the champion butcher of men. Our Lady has returned to us. They felt she had always belonged here, and none of them liked the lie she was told- that she would be promoted directly to first level Illuminatus, the first engineered to hold the rank, after she demonstrated enough ability for it. Instead she was implanted and given to the Dominator as a present, as what Sarah suspected was an act of symbolism as much as anything else: 'You, Dominator, may have the power, but here is what we can do to engineereds.' If so, it badly failed.

Walking the halls brought back a great many memories, of her old training instructors, her old challenges, her old room, the one place she thought she was almost completely safe- and where she had been given the sleep gas to prep her for implantation. Had Karl objected? Due to the likely bullshit factor, she wouldn't bother to ask.

Karl was entirely out of contact the whole time. This was usual for him; he made a point of occasionally drafting himself for low-level missions, simply to stay in touch with the rising technology and evolving techniques of his foot soldiers, and he had opted for a refresher the moment he learned the Dominator survived. (Whether or not that was just to get himself out of the line of fire for a while was another don't-ask-and-don't-receive-bullshit question.) It also gave his direct subordinates a chance to experience greater command.

She smiled when she reached his office, a hardwood-paneled 20x20 room in the middle of a steel-and-more-steel base, a hundred feet under a normal library in the middle of downtown Paris, the nexus of a web of underground passageways and hidden spaces, everything in a quarter-mile radius owned to some extent by the assassins. She had been briefed and debriefed by him personally many times; when she was young she had to sit on a tall chair to see over his desk, sometimes looking at the plaque itself to make sure she was in the right room. Now she sat at it, replaced the plaque with her own, and waited for him, spending the time at his computer examining the current state of the general operatives' organization. (He didn't bother with a password to read the files from this terminal- if he didn't want people in this sub-organization to know something, it'd never leave his head.) She gave several nods of approval throughout. Karl had been managing wisely, and had made inquiries (fruitless, sadly) when he'd learned of the attack on the island. There was always the chance that the files she was accessing were formed of complete bullshit, but it held together very well and smelled of reality.

She spent hours familiarizing herself with chains of command and various tactical assets- damn it, if she had been carrying one of those cellphones back in that sewer, she could have had men at her side in ten fucking minutes, tops- and gave Karl a grin when he finally arrived. Cheshire Cat, he thought reflexively.

The assassin lord looked at his most powerful disciple for a moment, standing in the doorway, his expression betraying nothing. If there was one thing he knew from his time in the Illuminati, it was that radical change was the only true constant- the organization would never stagnate. Unfortunately, some changes were better than others, and although he had some feelings for her, he was much more political than his men. "The Dominator should not be this desperate." Disappointing, really. At first he was annoyed when a ten-year-old had taken the position, then gradually won over when the boy had proven more than competent. But giving a personal servant white clothes and putting her into a high-ranking position in place of a real Illuminatus was petty, polarizing, and stupid, despite recent events.

Sarah cut to the chase. "I'm not implanted anymore." Karl's brain took only instants to know what that meant.

On one side of the desk stood a man with more than twenty years of experience in the Illuminati; five of those as a servant, and after his master died of old age and manumitted him to his position (complete with desktop plaque), fifteen of them as a steadily-rising Illuminatus, growing in power with the Illuminati's enormous clandestine-operations apparatus. At his beck and call were several dozen direct operatives, with hundreds of Enforcers, and hundreds more normal operatives thinking they were working for some government agency or other. (He missed the old KGB, but since Vlad Putin started wearing white back in '91 there was no help for it and he had to pretty much remake the Second Directorate himself.) Working with other Illuminati, he could command and direct a force of thousands, far more lethal than any comparable normal force. Here stood a man with a record of kills that would make Idi Amin blanch, a man who felt absolutely nothing when committing murder, not even the satisfaction of a job well done.

On the other side of the desk, leaning back in the chair, was Sarah Mortis Dominus.

Karl felt a sense of vertigo, as if he found himself on the precipice of a ten-story building, the blood rushing out of his head. Sarah showed the faintest smile as she watched Karl go pale. 'I'm screwed,' he realized, which brought a strange feeling of elation at the entirely new experience. He'd been shot at before, gotten into and out of a number of very ugly situations, nearly killed by his master in a fit of anger when Karl didn't realize something about a mission and partially botched it, and then as a master has had to do some ugly cover-ups, and a few 'employment terminations', when his servants fucked things up. But never once was Karl Mandel, himself, royally screwed in an irrevocable way.

"What would you like me to do?" he asked her. If the answer was 'Die' he was a dead man already. If the answer was servitude then he might not even have the option of suicide; by the time he could bring one of his three concealed weapons to his brain stem, she could easily have it out of his hand. The implants hadn't been invented when he had sworn himself to the organization, and he'd always secretly wondered what it was like being controlled like that; he supposed that he'd find out instead of chicken out. Sarah, after all, would be a mistress more than competent.

"Find a new office," she answered, lobbing him his plaque. She knew the answer would confuse him further; she was enjoying it. She couldn't really afford to waste his life, and he hadn't really done very much to her other than feed her the same lie everyone else had, but she could enjoy making him squirm. When he didn't answer for lack of words, she continued, "You heard me. And make sure your name is on the door this time." That would probably be more humiliation than she really wanted to inflict on him, but it would decisively cement the transfer of power.

He started to turn. But if she wanted the operatives to know where he was, then... "Will you be assuming direct command?"

"Don't be stupid. I have more important things to do than get whined at by a bunch of balloon-headed losers who think they can solve everything with someone else's violence. That kind of crap is not my problem anymore. I'm just taking this to make sure I have it when the shit really hits the fan." Sarah wasn't expecting her own venom. Hormones, she figured. She had to go home and get laid.

Karl, for his part, didn't give a shit what her tone was. He was just glad he was retaining control. As he started walking out, Sarah said, "One more thing, Karl." It had an edge to it. He stopped dead in his tracks and turned back around. "I'd like to think that I know you well enough to know that you would never sign up for something so stupid as operations against the Dominator, and the data here agrees. I also know that if they had consulted you it all would have been carried out in a much more professional fashion. However, if I intuit wrong and you are somehow involved in this, I guarantee that you will have much more of a future if you confess everything now than if we have to find you out."

"I have no involvement in, and no clandestine knowledge of, any such operations... Mrs. Dominus," he settled on for a formal title. There was resignation in his voice; he'd wanted badly to know what was going on. None of the resources under his control had been used for anti-Dominator operations, at least not in any wise that he could detect. None of his Enforcers had gone missing, none of his vehicles had been used. The attack had been done amateurishly, panicky. She intuited right; he'd have done things much more professionally indeed.

'Shiva, that was close,' he thought as he walked out and she started typing up orders for Paul's country takeover. Karl didn't really believe in any religion, but to satisfy his occasional longings, he'd created his own. He did, in fact, worship death; for every man, woman, and child his operations killed, he believed it was not only necessary but desirable for the long-term health of the universe. His own death, however, was something he'd rather not face just yet.

He set about finding a new office- not bigger than Sarah's, but near the entrance, more conveniently positioned for everyone who wanted to talk to him in person. The days of worrying about anyone directly attacking this place were long past.

Or, he mused, recalling recent events, maybe not. Across the hall from Sarah's it would be, then.