#9 (Dizzy Beacon) [https://i.imgur.com/Bg3AgNc.png]

Ikaroa glared thunderously at the assembly, her eyes glinting in the reflected light of the large arched window behind her all-too-small, but suitably cowed, audience.

"What do you mean, 'they've just gone'?" she insisted, with characteristically imprudent rage, not at all softened by her gentle Aotearoan accent.

The two officers cowered under her glare. The taller of them glanced to Kaito in the corner, but he was feigning disinterest, flicking through that damn book as though he didn't already know it from cover to cover. Apparently he was going to let Ikaroa get on with the reprimand.

"W… well," said the taller signals intelligence officer, "I mean just what I say. Sixty-seven high-ranking members of the Movement from around the world have simply vanished without a trace. No Network Protocol headers, no STC authorisations. Hell, none of them even set their affairs in order or said goodbye to their friends and family." Kaito twitched almost imperceptibly at this, but the taller man continued. "They've gone from the face of the Earth without a record or a trace. It shouldn't be possible."

"It seems more likely," huffed Ikaroa, "That there's a problem with your intelligence gathering."

"Not possible," interjected the shorter officer. "I've confirmed this evidence, or rather the lack of it, with the best sources we have. If those assets aren't reliable, far greater damage than this could have been done to the Movement before now."

Ikaroa bit her lip, and with her own slightly nervous glance at Kaito, asked, "Are they dead?"

"We don't know," said the taller officer. "All of their transponder signals cut out simultaneously, with no disruption to their vital signs recorded prior. So it seems likely we didn't lose them because they died, but…" he trailed off.

Ikaroa started pacing. "What the hell is this about?"

"That's just it," said the taller officer. "There's no obvious pattern to who vanished, no obvious angle of attack on the Movement that it opens up. People disappeared from cells all over the world. They were all senior, to be sure, but some of them were lead missionaries, some of them cell coordinators, some of them regional delegates to this assembly. It's like they were just picked at random."

Nobody said anything for a moment, as they processed this.

Eventually, Kaito was the one to speak. "Cui bono," he said, quietly, though all heads in the room turned to look at the youthful Japanese man.

He stood, holding his book under his arm. "'Cui bono'?" he asked, looking at their nonplussed expressions. "Doesn't anyone speak Latin any more?"

"That is an intrinsic property of a dead language," dared Ikaroa, knowing nobody else would.

Kaito shot her a brief half smile. "Cicero, the great Roman statesman, was at one time in his life simply a young and relatively unknown lawyer, of great courage and ambition, but little influence. He came across the case of a man named Sextus Roscius, accused of patricide, a crime the Romans considered so disgraceful, and in circumstances so politically sensitive, that no lawyer was willing to defend him. Cicero took the case.

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"His defence was successful, and catapulted Cicero to immediate fame and ultimately to political office. He won by asking the jury 'cui bono?' – 'who benefits' – and persuaded them to recognise that the son had little to gain from the murder of his father, since he already stood to inherit his estate. Instead he laid the blame at the feet of a man named Chrysogonus, who ultimately received the family's six million sesterces by virtue of the favour he enjoyed of the dictator Sulla.

"So with respect to our current mystery, I find myself asking the same. Cui bono? Who benefits?"

A short pause as the assembly waited to see if this was a rhetorical question. As it turned out, it wasn't.

The taller officer, feeling somewhat in the spotlight, cleared his throat. "The Meitagenans?" he ventured, hesitantly, it being the obvious answer, though he was more than a little suspicious that it was a trick question.

"Indeed that would appear to be the case," said Kaito. "The disappearance of sixty-seven senior members of the Movement would undoubtedly strengthen their still precarious position here on Earth. What's more, it would benefit them so much to demonstrate their power in this fashion, that our agents’ grotesque executions would doubtless be displayed for all the world to see. And why stop at sixty-seven? Perhaps those were the only ones among our agents they could identify, but I find it hard to believe, for example, that my brother–" his voice wavered a little here "–could have been successfully identified as a member of the Movement without also implicating me.

"So who benefits from the mere disappearance of these agents in particular?" At this, he launched a holographic display panel, showing a world map, with the locations of the Movement's major cells highlighted. "Take Africa, for example. Our cell coordinator in Khartoum was taken, but in Addis Ababa they took only a missionary. Lagos was completely untouched, despite being both our most critical operation on the continent, and being relatively exposed.

"What those who were taken have in common seems to be a combination of holding both a high-risk role for the Movement, but also, curiously, an obvious successor through whom our operations could continue uninterrupted. This pattern is repeated across the world. It is almost as though those who were taken were saved from some danger, and that those chosen to be saved were chosen with the goal of disrupting the Movement as little as possible.

"So in other words," he concluded. "If I ask who benefits from this, I am forced to conclude that we do." He chuckled. "Anyone want to confess?"

The assembled leaders of the Movement said nothing, looking nervously at each other.

"I thought not," he said, sitting down in the corner again, though he didn't reopen his book, and looked round the room attentively.

Someone spoke from one of the benches. "Nobody here would do something like this without authorisation," she said. "We don't even know how it was done."

The taller officer, still stood facing Ikaroa and Kaito, added, "To say nothing of the fact that we had no intelligence that any of these people were in any specific danger."

"So… we have an ally?" Ikaroa ventured, looking round at Kaito, who looked neutrally at her. "A powerful ally, who doesn't want to make their identity known to us."

"If that's the case," interjected the shorter officer, "They're probably offworld, and so are our missing agents."

Kaito stood again, and again heads turned in his direction, but he didn't immediately speak.

"You have a theory?" ventured Ikaroa.

Kaito smiled and scratched the back of his neck. "It could be any number of actors; the Movement is hardly alone in opposing the Meitagenan Despotate. But I do have a hope, and not, I think, a vain one."

He placed his book on the table in front of Ikaroa, for all the assembled leaders of the Movement to read.

"POLITICAL VOID," it read, "Naomi P. Deus".

"I believe the time has come for us to make a priority of contacting her," Kaito said.

"Is that even possible?" asked Ikaroa.

"I just have a name," admitted Kaito. "But it might be enough." He addressed himself directly to the two intelligence officers. "Find Laila."