Chapter 27 - Retirement

The Central Administration was transformed once more and merged with their Artesian allies across the ocean.  It was now the global organization that arose from the League of Nations.  I now knew the significance after my chat with Anna why she handed me back Karl's pen to write the final draft of the charter and when it was handed over to the trade delegation.  They trembled when they gingerly took that charter.

They ran it through a battery of tests and analysis and confirmed the pen flourishes, even the ink was authentic and of it Karl Knutmudsen's fabled pen.  It caused quite a stir and many sleepless nights that they were holding the most recent of Knut's writings in their very hands, not some relic from before the war or since the uprising.

The words were actually Knut's.  While I never can understand the gibberish, the Colonel' staff had it transcribed in much the same way Karl might have assembled his own teachings and they rang much the same as if by some divine coincidence both in the physical instrument and the literal translation.

We could have written the terms of absolute surrender and the Artesians would have signed it and obeyed it dutifully, if we had known the significance of Knut's pen.

The Colonel was made redundant and to his relief never a target of Anna's wrath.  She kindly told him at his retirement party and they shared notes like worthy adversaries after the wars had long ended and clarified points and assumptions they had made over the years.  They were like true friends and students of their craft and while he admitted she won and would have wiped the floor with his carcass, she was the better, but should have.  They embraced and she insisted he call on her and that she owed him many favors for having introduced Anna to me.

Too many coincidences, she still trembles at the thought of that first day.  The pen in her hand, our encounter.  It was all too much and she wanted to drown herself in the stiffest drink at how much an out of body experience it was.  It still is her most memorable moment.

By tradition, adversaries, especially those who were bested would go to some foreign hotel with out a retinue of guards.  They would enjoy their last few meals, take stock of some of life's vices and an assassin's knife or well placed bullet would remind them of their place.  The Colonel was allowed to do all of this, but there was no assassin.  He had an actual boring retirement.

But traditions die hard and an empty bullet casing was placed on his bedside table next to his wrist watch he always took off.  They set the time to exactly when it would have happened and had even fired the shot in the room without stirring him or him the wiser.  All the evidence was on his bedside and he took it as a retirement gift and went to breakfast.

Others were not so lucky and it was like the golden days of the Politiburo.  The major was found in a pool of his own blood at his mistress home.  The captain who we wondered why he resigned so suddenly was found wanting and had been a double agent for the Artesians, he then was outed by the Colonel and the Major who made him into an equally confusing triple agent and was the reason for both their early retirements.

Anna was the most honest and not the Colonel because of how it all happened and so they remained friends and he visited the Artesian cities and marveled at the teachings of the Knut and how he remembers and was there in the same hallways and offices of Karl Knutmudsen as my attache and this made him a celebrity in his own right.