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losses keenly, as though their deaths were an indictment of failure on his part.
    Which, Sharon realized, was how Maffeo Barberini—now Urban VIII—had been brought up to think in relation to his allies. “Pontiff” had been a late addition to his many titles; first scion and incumbent head of the powerful Barberini family had been roles he inherited upon his birth. He had been trained to think in terms of stratagems against hereditary enemies, and sinecures for loyal vassals—and his ascension to the cathedra of the Holy See did not diminish his adherence to that modus operandi . Urban VIII, never forgetting his family or friends, had left a legacy (well-recorded in the up-timers’ books) of shameless nepotism—for which he was infamous, even among the many early modern popes that had been known for it.
    But now, Sharon wondered, did she see some signs of regret? His brother Francesco was among the cardinals who had been slain attempting to flee Rome. His nephew, Antonio, had made good his escape to Sharon’s refugee embassy by only the slimmest of margins himself, and would not have succeeded at all had not her husband Ruy chanced upon him while he was trying to find a way to escape the city’s walls.
    Urban’s hands were folded passively on the front of his cassock. “I shall pray for your friends and father, Ambassadora. I owe them all a great debt. And, in the case of Thomas Simpson, I owe him my very life—along with you, Señor Casador y Ortiz. If it was not for your bold rescue of me from Sant’Angelo, the rubble of Hadrian’s tomb would surely be my burial mound, now.”
    Urban extended one hand and placed it briefly upon Ruy’s head. Then he turned and left. When Ruy rose, his face was transformed—utterly open, utterly without pretense—rather like a man who remembers, for one brief instant, the innocent hope and faith he had as a young boy. Sharon felt the strangest rush of both tenderness and arousal, seeing him so stripped of his façade for that moment—and then Ruy as she knew him was back: he smoothed aside one wing of his mustaches and turned to her, his dark brown eyes glittering and alert. “We should send word to the exfiltration team in Switzerland,” he said.
    “Word to—? Yes, of course!” Sharon turned to the waiting radio operator. “Odo, raise the exfiltration team. Let them know that contact has been lost with both the group they are to extract and Colonel North’s security detachment. They may have been monitoring and heard it themselves, but it’s also possible that the signal didn’t get through to Chur.”
    “And is there any other message for Chur?”
    “Yes. The extraction team there is to start for the rendezvous point now.”
    “Ambassador, it will be night before they arrive. And if they reach the site early, and must loiter—”
    “Odo. I understand the risks. To all three groups. But if Dad and the rest are on the run, they probably won’t be able to signal again. So we’ve got to consider the abrupt end of their transmission as a call for extraction.” She drew in her breath. “Send the message to Chur—and tell them to move as fast as they can.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    “So, you see,” said Estuban Miro to the other two men, “the USE in general, and the State of Thuringia-Franconia in particular, is most interested in discussing mutual political and fiscal interests with the powers here in Chur.”
    The more animated of the two men leaned forward eagerly, dark hair framing a pale, deceptively soft-featured face, out of which shone two very dark, but very bright, eyes. “And what— specifically what—would those interests be?”
    Miro looked into those intense, unblinking eyes and thought: yes, this was the Georg Jenatsch he’d read about in the Grantville library, the man who killed a political rival with a savage axe-blow and then left the corpse pinned to the floorboards.
    Well, Miro amended, it hadn’t been Jenatsch himself who’d swung the axe