The city of Irongate nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians, soot-stained and smoky by day, capped at night by a sky that reflected the red glow of the blast furnaces down by the shpping canal. From the center of town, the Great North-East Railway spur led off toward the coastline and the branches for Boston and New London. West of the yards and north of the banked ramparts of the Vauban pattern fortress sloped a gentle rise populated by the houses of the gentry, while at the foot of the slope clustered tight rows of worker’s estates.
Irongate had started as a transport nexus at the crossing of the canal and the railways, but it had grown into a sprawling industrial city. The canal and its attendant lock system brought cargos from as far as the Great Lakes—and, in another time, another world, it was the site of a trading post with the great Iroquis Nation, who dominated the untamed continental interior between the Gruinmarkt and the empire of the West.
There was a neighborhood down in the valley, rubbing shoulders with the slums of the poor and the business districts, that was uncomfortable with its own identity. Some people had money but no standing in polite society, no title or prospects for social advancement. They congregated here, Chinese merchants and Jewish brokers and wealthy owners of bawdy houses alike, and they took pains to be discreet, for while New Britain’s laws applied equally to all men, the enforcers of those laws were only too human.
Esau walked slowly along Hanover Street, his cane tapping the cobblestones with every other stride. It was early evening and bitterly cold with it, but the street sweepers had been at work and the electric street lamps cast a warm glow across the pavement. Esau walked slowly, foregoing the easy convenience of a cab, because he wanted time to think. It was vital to prepare himself for the meeting that lay ahead, both emotionally and intellectually.
The street was almost empty, the few pedestrians hurrying with hands thrust deep in coat pockets and hats pulled down. Esau passed a pub, a blare of brassy noise and a stench of tobacco smoke squirting from the doorway as it opened to emit a couple of staggering drunks. “Heya, slant-eye!” one of them bellowed after him. Esau kept on walking steadily, but his pulse raced and he carefully grasped the butt of the small pistol in his pocket. Don’t react, he told himself. You can kill him if he attacks you. Not before. Not that Esau looked particularly Oriental, but to the Orange louts of Iron-gate anyone who didn’t look like themselves was an alien. And reports of a white man killed by a Chinee would inflame the popular mood—building on the back of a cold winter and word of defeats in the Kingdom of Siam. The last thing Esau’s superiors needed right now was a pogrom on the doorstep of their East Coast headquarters.
The betting shops were closed and the pawnbrokers shut, but between two such shops Esau paused. The tenement door was utterly plain, but well painted and solidly fitted. A row of bellpulls ran beside a set of brass plaques bearing the names of families who hadn’t lived here in decades. Esau pulled the bottom-most bellpull, then the second from the top, the next one down, and the first from the bottom, in practiced series. There was a click from the door frame and he pushed through, into the darkened vestibule within. He shut the door carefully behind him, then looked up at the ceiling.
“Esh’sh icht,” he said.
“Come on in,” a man’s voice replied in accented English. The inner door opened on light and finery—a stairwell furnished with rich hand-woven carpets, banisters of mahogany, illuminated by gilt-edged lamps in the shape of naked maidens. A ceramic lucky cat sat at one side of the staircase, opposite a guard. The guard bowed stiffly as soon as he saw Esau’s face. “You are expected, lord,” he said.
Esau ignored him and ascended the staircase. The tenement block above the two shops had been cunningly gutted and rebuilt as a palace. The rooms behind the front windows—visible from the street as ordinary bedrooms or kitchens—were Ames rooms barely three feet deep, their floors and walls and furniture slanted to preserve the semblance of depth when seen from outside. The family had learned the need for discretion long ago. Fabulous wealth was no social antidote for epicanthic folds and dark skins in New Britain and if there was one thing the mob disliked more than Chinee-men, it was rich and secretive criminal families of Chinee-men.
Vermin, Esau thought of the two drunks who had harangued him outside the pub. Never mind. At the top of the staircase he bowed once to the left, to the lacquered cabinet containing the household shrine. Then he removed his topcoat, hat, and shoes, and placed them in front of the servant’s door to the right of the stairs. Finally he approached the door before the staircase, and knocked once with the head of his cane.
The door swung open. “Who calls?” asked the majordomo.
“It is I.” Esau marched forward as the majordomo bowed low, holding the door aside for him. Like the guard below, the majordomo was armed, a pistol at his hip. If the mob ever came, it was their job to buy the family time to escape with their lives. “Where can I find the elder of days?”
“He takes tea in the Yellow Room, lord,” said the major-domo, still facing the floor.
“Rise. Announce me.”
Esau followed the majordomo along a wood-floored passage, the walls hung with ancient paintings. Some of them legacies of home, but others, in the European renaissance style, bore half-remembered names. The majordomo paused at a door just beyond a Caravaggio, then knocked. After a whispered conversation two guards emerged—guards in family uniform this time, not New British street clothes. In addition to their robes and twin swords (in the style this shadow-world called “Japanese,” after a nation that had never existed in Esau’s family home) they bore boxy black self-feeding carbines.
“His lordship,” said the majordomo. Both soldiers came to attention. “Follow me.”
The majordomo and guards proceeded before Esau, gathering momentum and a hand’s count of additional followers as befitted his rank: a scribe with his scrolls and ink, a master of ceremonies whose assistant clucked over Esau’s suit, following him with an armful of robes, and a gaggle of messengers. By the time they arrived outside the Yellow Room, Esau’s quiet entry had turned into a procession. At the door, they paused. Esau held out his arms for the servants to hang a robe over his suit while the majordomo rapped on the door with his ceremonial rod of office. “Behold! His lordship James Lee, second of the line, comes to pay attendance before the elder of days!”
“Enter,” called a high, reedy voice from inside the room.
Esau entered the Yellow Room, and bowed deeply. Behind him, the servants went to their knees and prostrated themselves.
“Rise, great-nephew,” said the elder. “Approach me.”
Esau—James Lee—approached his great-uncle. The elder sat cross-legged upon a cushioned platform, his wispy beard brushing his chest. He had none of the extravagant fingernails or long queue that popular mythology in this land imagined the mandarin class to have. Apart from his beard, his silk robes, and a certain angle to his cheekbones, he could pass for any beef-eating New Englishman. The family resemblance was pronounced. This is how I will look in fifty years, James Lee thought whenever he saw the elder. If our enemies let me live that long.
He paused in front of the dais and bowed deeply again, then once to the left and once to the right, where his great-uncle’s companions sat in silence.
“See, a fine young man,” his great-uncle remarked to his left. “A strong right hand for the family.”
“What use a strong right hand, if the blade of the sword it holds is brittle?” snapped his neighbor. James held his breath, shocked at the impudence of the old man—his great-uncle’s younger brother, Huan, controller of the eastern reaches for these past three decades. Such criticism might be acceptable in private, but in public it could only mean two things—outright questioning of the Eldest’s authority, or the first warning that things had gone so badly awry that honor called for a scapegoat.
“You are alarming our young servant,” the Eldest said mildly. “James, be seated, please. You may leave,” he added, past Esau’s shoulder.
The servants bowed and backed out of the noble presence. James lowered himself carefully to sit on the floor in front of the elders. They sat impassively until the doors thumped shut behind his back. “What are we to make of these accounts?” asked the Eldest, watching him carefully.
“The accounts? …” Esau puzzled for a moment. This was all going far too fast for comfort. “Do you refer to the reports from our agent of influence, or to the—”
“The agent.” The Eldest shuffled on his cushion. “A cup of tea for my nephew,” he remarked over his shoulder. A servant Esau hadn’t noticed before stepped forward and placed a small tray before him.
“The situation is confused,” Esau admitted. “When he first notified me of the re-emergence of the western alliance’s line I consulted with uncle Stork, as you charged me. My uncle sent word that the orders of your illustrious father were not discharged satisfactorily and must therefore be carried out. Unfortunately, the woman’s existence was known far and wide among the usurpers by this time, and her elder tricked us, mingling her party with other women of his line so that the servants I sent mistook the one for the other. Now she has gone missing, and our agent says he doesn’t know where.”
“Ah,” said the ancient woman at the Eldest’s right hand. The Eldest glanced at her, but she fell silent.
“Our agent believes that the elder Angbard is playing a game within the usurper clan,” Esau added. “Our agent intended to manipulate her into a position of influence, but controlled by himself—his goal was to replace Angbard. This goal is no longer achievable, so he has consented to pursue our preferences.”
“Indeed,” echoed Great-Uncle Huan, “that seems the wisest course of action to me.”
“Stupid!” Esau jerked as the Eldest’s fist landed on a priceless lacquered tray. “Our father’s zeal has bound us to expose ourselves to their attack, lost a valued younger son to their guards, and placed our fate in the hands of a mercenary—”
“Ah,” sighed the ancient woman. The Eldest subsided abruptly.
“Then what is to be done?” asked Huan, almost plaintively.
“Another question,” said Esau’s great-uncle, leaning forward. “When you sent brothers Kim and Wu after the woman they both failed to return. What of their talismans?”
James Lee hung his head. “I have no news, Eldest.” He closed his eyes, afraid to face the wrath he could feel boiling on the dais before him. “The word I received from our agent Jacob is that no locket was found on either person. That the woman Miriam disappeared at the same time seems to suggest—” his voice broke. “Could she be of our line, as well?” he asked.
“It has never happened before,” quavered the ancient woman next to the Eldest.
He turned and stared at her. “That is not the question, aunt,” he said, almost gently. “Could this long-lost daughter of the western alliance have come here?” he asked Esau. “None of them have ever done so before. Not since the abandonment.”
James Lee took a deep breath. “I thought it was impossible,” he said. “The family is divided by the abandonment. We come here, and they go … wherever it is that the source of their power is. They abandoned us, and that was the end of it, wasn’t it? None of them ever came here.”
“Do we know if it’s possible?” asked Huan, squinting at Esau. “Our skill runs in the ever-thinning blood of the family. So does theirs. I see no way—”
“You are making unfounded assumptions,” the Eldest interrupted. He turned his eyes on Esau. “The talisman is gone, and so is the woman. I find that highly suggestive. And worrying.” He ran his fingers through his beard, distractedly. “Nephew, you must continue to seek the woman’s demise. Seek it not because of my father’s order, but because she may know our secrets. Seek her in the barbarian castles of Niejwein; also seek her here, in the coastal cities of the north-east. You are looking for a mysterious woman of means, suddenly sprung from thin air, making a place for herself. You know what to do. You must also—” he paused and took a sip of tea—“obtain a talisman from the usurper clan. When you have obtained one, by whatever means, compare it to your own. If they differ then I charge you to attempt to use it, both here and in the world of our ancestors. See where it takes you, if anywhere! If it is to familiar territory, then we may rest easy. But if the talent lies in the pattern instead of the bearer, we are all in terrible danger.”
He glanced at the inner shrine, in its sealed cabinet on the left of the Yellow Room. “Our ancestor, revered though he be, may have made a terrible error about the cause of the abandonment. Unthinkable though that is, we must question everything until we discern the truth. And then we must find a way to achieve victory.”
“Hello, Roland’s voice mail. If it’s still secure, meet me at the Marriott suite you rented, tonight at six p.m. Bye.” She stabbed the “off” button on her phone viciously then remarked to the air, “Be there or be dead meat.”
Paulette was bent over the screen of her laptop, messing around with some fine arts web sites, a browser window pointing to a large online bookstore: “Are you sure you mean that?” she murmured.
“I don’t know.” Miriam frowned darkly, arms crossed defensively. “Give me the car keys, I’m going for a drive. Back late.”
Being behind the wheel of a car cleared Miriam’s head marvelously. The simple routine of driving, merging with traffic and keeping the wheels on the icy road, distracted her from the ulcer of worry gnawing away at her guts. At Home Depot she shoved a cart around with brutal energy, slowing only when a couple of five-gallon cans of kerosene turned it into a lumbering behemoth. Afterwards she left quickly and headed for the interstate.
She was almost a hundred and thirty miles south of Boston, driving fast, haunted by evil thoughts, when her phone rang. She held it to her ear as she drove.
“Yes?”
“Miriam?” Her throat caught.
“Roland? Where are you?”
“I’m in the hotel suite right now. Listen, I’m so sorry.”
You will be, if I find you’re responsible, she thought. “I’ll be over in about an hour, hour and twenty,” she said. “You’re alone?”
“Yes. I haven’t told anyone else about this room.”
“Good, neither have I.” They’d rented the room in New York for privacy, for a safe house where they could discuss their mutual plans and fears—and for other purposes. Now all she could think of was the man in her mother’s Dumpster, eyes frozen and staring. “Do you know if Angbard got my message?”
“What message?” He sounded puzzled. “The courier—”
“The message about my mother.”
“I think so,” he said uncertainly. “You sure you can’t be here any faster?”
She chuckled humorlessly. “I’m on the interstate.”
“Uh, okay. I can’t stay too long—got to go back over. But if you can be here in an hour we’ll have an hour together.”
“Maybe,” she said guardedly. “I’ll see you.”
She killed the phone and sped up.
It took her only an hour and ten minutes to make the last sixty miles, cross town, and find somewhere to park near the hotel. As she got out of the car she paused, first to pat her jacket pocket and then to do a double take. This is crazy, she thought, I’m going everywhere with a gun! And no license, much less a concealed-carry permit. Better not get stopped, then. Having to cross over in a hurry would be painful, not to say potentially dangerous; the temporary tattoos on her wrists seemed to itch as she pushed through the doors and into the lobby of the hotel.
The elevator took forever to crawl up to the twenty-second floor, then she was standing in the thickly carpeted silence of the hallway outside the room. She knocked, twice. The door opened to reveal Roland, wearing an immaculate business suit, looking worried. He looked great, better than great. She wanted to tear his clothes off and lick him all over—not an urge she had any intention of giving in to.
His face lit up when he saw her. “Miriam! You’re looking well.” He waved her into the room.
“I’m not looking good,” she said automatically, shoulders hunched. “I’m a mess.” She glanced around. The room was anonymous as usual, untouched except for the big aluminium briefcase on the dressing table. She walked over to the row of big sealed windows overlooking the city. “I’ve been living out of a suitcase for days on end. Why did you call me yesterday?” She steeled herself for the inevitable, ensuring that his next words came as a surprise.
“It’s—” He looked drawn. “It’s about Olga. She’s been shot. She’s stable, but—”
“Was it a shotgun?” Miriam interrupted, startled out of her scripted confrontation.
“A shotgun?” He frowned. “No, it was a pistol, at close range. After you disappeared, ran or whatever, she started acting very strangely. Refused to let anyone anywhere near her chambers then moved into your apartment at House Hjorth, deeply disconcerting Baron Oliver—she did it deliberately to snub him, I think.” He shook his head. “Then someone shot her. The servants were in the antechamber to her room, heard a scuffle and shots—she defended herself. When they went in, there was blood, but no assassin to be seen.”
Miriam leaned against the wall wearily, overcome by a sense that events were spinning out of control. “After I ran. Anything about a corpse in the orangery? Or a couple more in Olga’s rooms? We sure left enough bullet holes in the walls—”
“What?” Roland stood up, agitated. “I didn’t hear anything about this! I got the message about you running, but not—”
“There were two assassination attempts.” Miriam tugged at the curtains, pulling them shut. You can never be sure, she thought, chilled: even though a high building was implicitly doppelgängered, inaccessible from the other worlds, a Clan sniper in a neighboring office block could shoot and then make a clean escape as soon as they reached ground level. “The first guy wanted me in the garden. Unfortunately for their plans, Olga’s chaperone Margit turned up instead. I went back to tell Olga and ran into two guys with machine pistols.”
“But—” Roland shut his mouth, visibly biting his tongue, as Miriam stared at him.
“I don’t think they were working together,” Miriam added after a brief pause. “That’s why I … left.”
“I ought to get you to a safe house right now,” said Roland. “It’s what Angbard will expect. We can’t have random strangers trying to murder Clan heiresses. That they should have shot Olga is bad enough, but this goes far beyond anything I’d known about.” He glanced at her sharply. “It’s as if I’m being kept out of the loop deliberately.”
“Tell me about Olga?” Miriam asked. Well, we know just how reliable Angbard thinks you are. “How is she being looked after? What sort of treatment is she receiving?”
“Whoa! Slowly. Baron Oliver couldn’t afford to look as if he was ignoring an attack under his own roof—he personally got her across to an emergency room in New York, and notified the Duke while they stabilized her. Angbard had her moved to Boston Medical Center by helicopter once she was ready: She’s in a private room, under guard.” Roland looked mildly satisfied at her expression of surprise. “She’s got round-the-clock bodyguards and hot and cold running nurses. Angbard isn’t taking any chances with her safety. We could provide bodyguards for you, too, if you want—”
“Not an issue. But I want to visit Olga.” Miriam put her shoulder bag down on the bed. “Tonight.”
“You can’t. She’s stable, but that doesn’t mean she’s taking visitors. She’s on a drip and pain killers with a hole in one arm and a head injury. Shock and blood loss—it took us nearly two hours to get her to the emergency room. Maybe in a couple of days, when she’s feeling better, you can see her.”
“You said she had a head injury?”
“Yeah. The bad guy used a small-caliber popgun, that’s why she’s still alive.” He looked at her. “You carry—”
Miriam pulled out her pistol. “Like this?” she asked dryly. “Fuck it, Roland, if I was going to kill Olga, I wouldn’t mess around. You know damn well they were hoping to nail me instead.”
“I know, I know.” He looked irritated and gloomy. “It wasn’t you. Nobody with half a wit says it was you, and the fools that do don’t have any pull at court. But your departure set more tongues flapping than anything else that’s happened in years; a real scandal, say the idiots. Eloping with a lady-in-waiting, according to the more lurid imaginations. It doesn’t look good to them, the shooting coming so soon after.”
“Well, I don’t give a shit whether I look good or bad to the Clan.” Miriam stared at him through narrowed eyes. “What about my mother?” she asked.
“Your mother? Isn’t she alright?” He looked surprised. “Is she—”
“I went over there this morning. She phoned last night while I was away. Something about going on a long journey. Today there is a new back door in her kitchen, and a dead man’s body in the Dumpster behind her house, and not a sign of her to be found. I told Angbard that if anything happened to her, heads would roll, and I meant it.”
Roland sat down heavily in the room’s armchair. “Your mother?” His face was pale. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Miriam pursed her lips. “Would Angbard tell you if he was going to order her abducted?”
“Abducted—” Roland began to look worried. “Someone was shot on her doorstep?”
“You’re catching on. Someone was shot with a sawed-off shotgun. And she sure as hell didn’t stuff him into a Dumpster and repair the kitchen door before leaving, or mop up the blood stains. In case you didn’t know, she’s got multiple sclerosis. She’s in a wheelchair right now, and even when the disease is in remission she walks with crutches.”
Miriam watched him go through the stages of surprise, denial, anger, and alarm with gloomy satisfaction. “That doesn’t make sense!” he insisted. “Angbard put her under a protective watch! If someone had gotten through to her I would know about it!”
“Don’t be so sure of yourself.”
“But it can’t be!” He was vehement.
“Listen, I know a shotgun wound when I see one, Roland. I stuck my finger in it and waggled it about. You know something? It was sawed-off, either that or he was shot from at least fifty feet away, and I figure that would have attracted some attention. It makes a hell of a mess. Which ward is Olga in? I have got to go and see her. What the hell is Angbard playing at?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “He’s not exactly been confiding in me lately.” Roland’s frown deepened.
Miriam took a deep breath. “I went over to my house,” she said quietly.
“Oh?” Roland looked slightly stunned, but it wasn’t the expression of a would-be murderer confronted by a surprisingly animated victim: He looked much the way she felt.
“Someone searched it efficiently. They left an, uh, surprise. Behind the front door. I’m not sure what kind except that it’s probably explosive and it’s wired to the handle. Only reason I’m here is I forgot my keys and had to use the back way in.”
“Oh shit—” He stood up, his hand going to his pocket instinctively. “You’re alright?”
“Not for want of somebody trying,” she said dryly. “Seems to me that we have a pattern. First, someone tries to kill me or mess with Olga. They then try harder to kill me and succeed in killing Olga’s chaperone. I shoot one killer and leave, taking Brill with me. Olga moves into my room at the palace and someone shoots her. Meanwhile, people who should know where I’ve gone don’t, and my mother vanishes, and everywhere I’m likely to go on this side starts I sprouting bombs. Can you tell me what kind of fucking pattern I am seeing here, Roland? Can you?”
“Someone is out to get you,” he said through gritted teeth. “More than one conspiracy, by the sound of it. And they’re getting Olga by mistake. Repeatedly. For some reason. And they’re lying to me, too. And Angbard is treating me as a potential security leak, keeping me in the dark and feeding me shit.”
“Right.” She nodded jerkily. “So what are we going to do about it?” She watched him like a hawk.
“I think—” He came to some decision, because he took a step toward her. “I think you’d better come with me. I’m going to take you to Angbard in person and we’ll sort out this out in person—he’s over here now, taking personal control. We can accommodate you at Fort Lofstrom, a fully doppelgängered apartment, round-the-clock guards—”
She pushed his hand away. “I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean, you don’t think so?” He looked surprised.
“I can look after myself, thank you,” she said coolly. “I’m making arrangements. I’ll get this sorted out by Beltaigne. One last question. Do you have any idea who might be trying to kill me?”
“Lots of suspects with motives, but no evidence.” Puzzlement and worry mingled in his expression. For a moment he looked as if he was about to say something more, then he shook his head.
“Well then, that means I win because I do know roughly who’s trying to kill me,” she said, gloomily triumphant. “And I’m going to flush them from cover. Your clue is this: They’re not part of the Clan, and a doppelgängered house on the other side is no defense—but they can’t get at me while I’m here.”
“Miriam,” he rolled his eyes. “You’re being paranoid. I’ll get your mother’s house checked out immediately, but you’ll be a lot safer if we put a dozen armed bodyguards around you—”
“Safer from what? Safe from some blood feud that was ancient before I was born? Or safe from the idiots who think they’re going to inherit my mother’s estate if I can be declared incompetent next May, in front of a Clan council? Get real, Roland, the Clan is nearly as big a threat to my freedom as the world-walking assholes who shot Olga and booby-trapped the warehouse!”
“Booby-trapped—” his eyes widened.
“Yeah, a claymore mine on a tripwire in the doorway. And nobody cleared up the night watchman’s body. Do you begin to get it?” She began to back away toward the door. “Someone set up the bomb, someone inside Angbard’s security operation! And,” she continued in a low voice, “you were in the right places at the right times.”
Roland looked angry. “Miriam, you can’t mean that!” He paced across the room restlessly. “Come on, look, let me sort everything out and it’ll be okay, won’t it? I’ll vet your guards—”
“Roland.” She shook her head, angry with him, angry with herself for wanting to give in and take him up on an offer that meant far more and went far further than words could express: “I’m gone. If you know where I’m going, the bad guys will find out—if you aren’t one of them.” She kept her hand in her pocket, just in case, but the idea of shooting him filled her with a numinous sense of horror.
He looked appalled. “Can’t we just… ?”
“Just what?” she cried. “Kiss and make up? Jesus, Roland, don’t be naive!”
“Shit.” He stared at her. “You really mean it.”
“I am going to walk out the door in a minute,” she said tensely, hating herself for her own determination, “and we are not going to see each other again until next May, probably. At least, not in the next few days or weeks. We both need time out. I need to get my head together and see if I can flush the bastards who’re trying to kill me. You need to think about who you are and who I am and where we’re going before we take this any further—and you need to find whoever’s wormed their way into Angbard’s confidence and whoever shot Olga.”
“I don’t care about Olga! I care about you!” he snapped.
“That is part of the problem I’ve got with you right now,” she said coldly, and headed for the door.
A thought occurred to her as she pulled the door open. “Roland?”
“Yes?” He sounded coldly angry.
“Tomorrow I’m going to get lost again, probably until Beltaigne. Keep checking your voice mail—there’s no need to hold this room any longer.”
“I wish you wouldn’t do this,” he said quietly. She shut the door behind her and departed, her heart infinitely heavier than it had been when she arrived.
Ring ring. There was a breeze blowing, and the park was bitterly cold: Miriam sat hunched at one end of a bench.
“Hello? Lofstrom Associates, how may I help you?”
“This is Miriam. I want to talk to Angbard.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lofstrom is unavailable right now—”
“I said I’m Miriam. If you don’t know the name, check with someone who does. You have five minutes to get Angbard on the line before the shit hits the fan.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Please hold—”
beep beep beep
“Hello?” A different voice, not Angbard’s, came on the line.
“To whom am I speaking?” Miriam asked calmly.
“Matthias. And you are?”
“Miriam Beckstein. I want to talk to Angbard. Right now. This call has been logged by the front desk.”
“I’m sorry, but he’s in a meeting. If—”
“If I don’t get him on the line right now I’ll make sure the Boston Globe receives a package that will blow your East Coast courier line wide open. You have sixty seconds.” Her fingers tensed on the handset.
“One moment.”
Click.
“Angbard here. What’s this?”
“It’s me,” said Miriam. “Sorry I had to strong-arm my way past your mandarins, but it’s urgent.”
“Urgent?” She could almost hear the eyebrows rising. “I’ve never seen Matthias so disturbed since—well. Unpleasant events. What did you tell him?”
“Oh, nothing much.” Miriam leaned back, felt the cold bench bite through her coat, sat up straight again. “Listen. I told you something about my mother. That if anything happened to her I would be really pissed off.”
“Yes?” Polite interest colored Angbard’s voice.
“I’m really pissed off. Really, really pissed off.”
“What happened?” he demanded.
“She’s gone. There’s a dead man in the Dumpster behind her house, killed with a shotgun. She had time to phone me to say she was going on a journey—I don’t know if anyone was holding a gun to her head. Roland didn’t know this. Apparently it happened at the same time that Olga was shot. And my house has been burgled and stuff taken, and somebody booby-trapped the front door.”
“Come here immediately. Or if you tell me where you are I’ll send a carload of guards—”
“No, Angbard, that won’t work.” She swallowed. “Listen. I am about to vanish more deeply than last time. Don’t worry about Brilliana, she’s safe. What I want you to do … look for my mother. By all means. Raise heaven and earth. I am going to visit Olga tomorrow and I do not expect to be stopped. If I don’t leave that meeting and reach a certain point, unhindered, later tomorrow, unpleasant letters will go in the mail. I am serious about this, I am pissed off, and I am establishing my own power base because I believe that civil war you told me about is not over and the faction who started it is trying to fire it up again, through me.”
“But Helge, that faction—” he sounded coldly angry—”they’re your father’s side of your family!”
“That’s not the faction I’m thinking of,” she said dryly. “The people I have in mind never signed on to the cease-fire. Listen, I will be in touch ahead of the Beltaigne conference. I’m going to have some really big surprises for you all, including … well, anyone who tries to declare me incompetent is going to get a really nasty shock. I’m going to keep in touch through Roland, but he won’t know where I’m hiding. So, if you find my mother tell Roland. More to the point, don’t trust your staff. Someone is not telling you everything that happens in the field. I think you’ve got a mole.”
“Explain.” The terser he became the better Miriam felt.
She thought for a moment. Tell him about Roland? No, but… “Ask Roland about the warehouse warning I phoned him. Find out why instead of cleaners calling, someone turned up and booby-trapped the place. Looks like the same style as whoever planted the bomb behind the front door of my house. You didn’t know about that? Ask Matthias about the courier I intercepted on the train. Ask Olga about the previous assassination attempts. By the way, if I think her life is in danger, I reserve the right to move Olga somewhere safer. Once she’s out of immediate danger.”
“You’re asking for a blank check,” he said. “I’ve noticed the withdrawals. They’re big.”
“I’m setting up an import/export business.” Miriam took a deep breath. “I’ll announce it to the Clan at Beltaigne. By then, I should have a return on investment that will, um, justify your confidence in me.” Another deep breath. “I’d like another million dollars, though. That would make things run smoother.”
“Are you sure?” asked Angbard. He sounded almost amused, now.
“A million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money. Yes, I’m sure. It’s a new investment opportunity in the family tradition. Like I said, I’m not setting up in competition—think of it as proof of concept for a whole new business area the Clan can move into. And a way of making Baron Oliver Hjorth and his backers look really stupid, if that interests you.”
“Well. If you insist, I’ll take your word for it.” He was using the indulgent paterfamilias voice again. “It’ll be in your account by the day after tomorrow. From central funds this time, not my own purse.” In a considerably icier tone: “Please don’t disappoint me in your investments. The Council has a very short way of dealing with embezzlement and not even your position would protect you.”
“Understood. One other thing, uncle.”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you tell me about the other branch of the Clan? The one that accidentally got mislaid a couple of hundred years ago and is now blundering around in the dark trying to kill people?”
“The—” He paused. “Who told you about them?”
“Sleep well,” she told him, and hit the “off” button on her phone with a considerable sense of satisfaction. She looked at the sky, saw night was pulling in already. It was time to go pick up Brill and visit the hospital. She hoped Olga would be able to talk to visitors. All she needed was confirmation of one little point and she could be on her way back to the far side, and the business empire she planned to establish.
Boston Medical Center was much like any other big general hospital, a maze of corridors and departments signposted in blue. Uniformed porters, clerical officers, maintenance staff, and lots of bewildered relatives buzzed about like a nest of bees. As they entered, Miriam murmured to Brill: “Usual drill, do what I do. Okay?”
“Okay.” They walked up to reception and Miriam smiled.
“Hi there, I’m wondering if it’s possible to visit a patient? An Olga, uh, Hjorth—”
The receptionist, bored, shoved hair up past her ear bug. “I’ll just check. Uh, what did you say your name was?”
“Miriam Beckstein. And a friend.”
“Yeah, they’re expecting you, go right up. You’ll find her on ward fourteen. Have a nice day!”
“This place smells strange,” Brill muttered as Miriam hunted for the elevators.
“It’s a hospital. Full of sick people, they use disinfectant to keep diseases down.”
“An infirmary?” Brill looked skeptical. “It doesn’t look like one to me!”
Miriam tried to imagine what an infirmary might look like in the Gruinmarkt, and failed. When were hospitals invented, anyway? she wondered irrelevantly as the elevator doors slid open, and a bunch of people came out. “Come on,” she said.
Ward fourteen was on the third floor, a long walk away. Brill kept glancing from side to side as they passed open doors, a hematology lab here, the vestibule of another ward there. Finally they found the front desk. “Hello?” said Miriam.
“Hello yourself.” The nurse at the desk glanced up. “Visiting hours run until eight,” she commented, “you’ve got an hour. Who are you looking for?”
“Olga Hjorth. We’re expected.”
“Hmm.” The nurse frowned and glanced down, then her frown cleared. “Oh, yeah, you’re on the list. I’m sorry,” she looked apologetic. “She’s only taking a few visitors; we’ve got orders to keep strangers out. And she’s on nil by mouth right now, so if you’ve brought any food or drink you’ll have to leave it right here at the desk.”
“No, that’s okay,” said Miriam. “Uh, can you ask if she’s willing to see my friend here? Brill?”
“That’s me,” said Brill, miscueing off Miriam’s request.
“Oh, well—you’re on the clear list.” The nurse shrugged. “It’s just that somebody shot her.” She frowned. “She’s under guard. Spooks, if you follow my drift.”
Miriam gave her a sympathetic smile. “I follow. They know us both.”
“That way.” The nurse pointed. “Second door on the right. Knock before you open it.”
Miriam knocked. The door opened immediately. A very big guy in dark clothes and dark glasses filled it. “Yes?” he demanded, in a vaguely central-European accent.
“Miriam Beckstein and Brill van Ost to see Olga. We’re expected.”
“One moment.” The door closed, then opened again, this time unobstructed. “She says to come in.”
It was a small anteroom and there were not one but three heavies in suspiciously bulky jackets and serious expressions hanging around. One of them was sitting down reading a copy of Guns and Ammo, but the other two were on their feet and they studied Miriam carefully before they opened the inner door. “Olga!” cried Brill, rushing in. “What have they done to you?”
“Careful,” warned Miriam, following her.
“Hello,” said Olga. She smiled slightly and shifted in the bed.
“Excuse me,” the young nurse said waspishly. “I’ll just be finishing here before you disturb her, if you don’t mind?”
“Oh,” said Brill.
“I don’t mind,” said Miriam, staring at Olga. “How are you?” she asked anxiously.
“Bad.” Olga’s smile warmed slightly. “Tired’n’bruised. But alive.” Her eyes tracked toward the nurse, who was fiddling with the drip mounted on the side of the bed, and Miriam nodded minutely. The back of her bed was raised and there was a huge dressing over her right shoulder. Alarming-looking drain tubes emerged from it, and a bunch of wires from under the neck of her hospital gown fed into some kind of mobile monitor on a trolley. It chirped occasionally. “Damn.” Half of her hair was missing, and there was another big dressing covering one side of her head, but no drain tubes—which, Miriam supposed, was a good sign. “This feels most strange.”
“I’ll bet it does,” Miriam said with some feeling. Wow, she thought, thinking about Brill’s first reaction to New York, she’s handling it well. “Did they find whoever did it?”
“I’m told not.” Olga glanced at the nurse again, who glanced back sternly and straightened up.
“I’ll just leave you to it,” she announced brightly. “Remember, no food or drink! And don’t tire her out. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes; if you need me before then, use the buzzer.”
Miriam, Brill, and Olga watched her departure with relief. “Strange fashions here,” Olga murmured. “Strange buildings. Strange everything.”
“Yeah, well.” Miriam glanced at the drip, the monitoring gear, everything else. Cable TV, a private bathroom, and a vase with flowers in it. Compared to the care Olga would receive in the drafty palace on the other side, this was the very lap of luxury. “What happened?”
“Ack.” Olga coughed. “I was in your, your room. Asleep. He appeared out of nowhere and shot … well.” She shifted slightly. “Why doesn’t it hurt more?” she asked, sounding puzzled. “He shot at me, but I am a light sleeper. I was already sitting up. And I sleep with my pistol under my pillow.” Her smile widened.
Miriam shook her head. “Did he get away?” she asked. “If not, did you get his locket?”
“I wondered when you would ask.” Olga closed her eyes. “Managed to grab it before they found me. It’s in the drawer there.”
She didn’t point at the small chest of drawers, but Miriam figured it out. Before she could blink, Brill had the top drawer open and lifted out a chain with a disk hanging from it. “Give me,” said Miriam.
“Yeah?” Brill raised an eyebrow, but passed it to her all the same.
“Hmm.” Miriam glanced at it, felt a familiar warning dizziness, and glanced away. Then she pulled back a cuff and looked at the inside of her right wrist. The same. “Same as the bastard who killed Margit. Exactly the same. While the other bunch of heavies who tried to roll us over at the same time didn’t have any lockets. At all.”
“Thought so,” murmured Olga.
“Listen, they’re after us both,” said Miriam. “Olga?”
“I’m listening,” she said sleepily. “Don’t worry.”
“They’re after us both,” Miriam insisted. “Olga, this is very important. You’re probably going to be stuck here for two or three days, minimum, and it’ll take weeks before you’re well—but as soon as you’re well enough to move, Angbard will want to take you back to his fortress on the other side. It is really important that you don’t go there. I mean, it’s vital. The killers can reach you on the other side, in Fort Lofstrom, even in a doppelgängered room. But they can’t reach you here. Listen, I’ve got a friend here working for me. And Brill’s here, too. You can stay with us, if you like. Or talk to Roland, get Roland to help. I’m pretty sure he’s reliable—for you, at least. If you stay in Angbard’s doppelgängered rooms on this side, the ones he uses to stop family members getting at him in the fort, you’ll be safe from the lost family in world three, and from the other conspirators, but not from the mole. And if you go back to Niejwein, the conspirators will try to kill you.”
“Wait!” Olga struggled visibly to absorb everything. “Lost family? World three? What’s—”
“The assassin who killed Margit.” Miriam tensed. “It’s a long story. I think they’re after you, now, because of me.”
Olga shook her head. “But why? I mean, what purpose could that serve?”
“Because it’ll discredit me, or it’ll restart the civil war, and I’m fairly certain that’s what the bunch from world three, the long-lost relatives, want to achieve. If I die and it can be blamed on one half of the Clan, that starts it up again. If you die and it looks like I’ve schemed with Roland to get you out of the way so I can marry him, it starts up for a different reason. Do you see?”
“Vaguely.” Olga opened her eyes and looked at Miriam. “You’ll have to explain it again later. Do you think they’ll let me stay here?”
“Hmm.” Miriam thought for a moment. “You can stay here to recover. I don’t think even Angbard is stupid enough to move you while you’re ill. You can lean on him to let you stay a bit longer to see what it’s like, too. That might work. If he’s got any sense he’ll work it out from what I told him. But he isn’t safe, Olga.”
Brill turned around. “They abducted—or killed—Miriam’s foster-mother, milady. Yesterday, at the same time they shot you.”
“Oh!” Olga looked pensive. “So. What would you suggest?”
“I think you should stay here for now. When you’re better, I want to—” Miriam caught Brill’s eye—”introduce you to a friend of mine called Paulette. And then we’ll see.” She licked her lips. “I’ve got a business proposition in mind. One that will flush out the bastards who want us both dead, and make everybody involved wealthy beyond belief.” She grinned at Olga. “Interested?”
Almost exactly two weeks later, Miriam sat in front of a mirror in the Brighton Hotel, brushing her hair and pulling a face. It’s definitely getting longer, she thought. Damn that hairdresser! She’d drawn the line at a wig, but even shoulder-length hair was considered eccentrically short by Boston polite society, and a reputation for eccentricity was something Miriam didn’t want to cultivate—it would happen anyway, and could only get in her way. But she hadn’t had hair even this long since she was a teenager. Bloody nuisance, she thought affectedly, then snorted with amusement. This place is getting to me. Even the way they talk!
The house purchase was going ahead, the conveyancing papers and legal to-ing and fro-ing well in hand. Erasmus had taken delivery of no less than ten pounds of twenty-three carat gold, an immense amount by any standard—back in Cambridge it would have paid Miriam’s salary at The Weatherman for almost a year—and had warned his shadowy compatriots to expect much larger amounts to start flowing soon, “from a sympathetic source.” His stock had risen. Meanwhile, Miriam had taken pains to quietly slip into at least two meetings of the Friendly Party to keep an eye on where the money was going. When she’d left money on the collecting tray, it had been with a sense that she was doing the right thing.
The Levelers, despite official persecution (and the imprisonment of many of their leading lights for sedition), had a political agenda she thought she understood, one not too alien from her own. High upon it was a bill of rights; the universal franchise (granting women the vote here for the first time); equal rights regardless of age, race, and sex; and separation of Church from state. That the imperial government didn’t take such things for granted gave Miriam one source of comfort; if she was going to get her start here by smuggling contraband gold to fund radicals, at least they were radical democrats. The ironies in the similarity between her activities and the Clan’s own business model didn’t leave her untouched. She consoled herself with two thoughts: Smuggling gold to undermine a despotic monarchy wasn’t in the same moral league as being the main heroin connection for the East Coast, and she intended to switch to a different business model just as soon as she could.
Miriam checked her appearance in the mirror. With earrings and a pearl choker and the right haircut and dress she could just about pass, but she still felt she was walking a knife-edge in maintaining appearances. New Britain seemed to take class consciousness almost as seriously as the feudal nobility of the Gruinmarkt. It was depressing, and the need to dive into the detail work of setting up a business here left her no time to pursue casual friendships. When she had time to think about it, she realized she was lonely. But at least she had the option of going home in a few more days. That was more than Brill had. Or Iris, wherever she was.
As she locked the jewel box, there was a knock at the door. A bellhop bobbed to her outside. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but you have a visitor.” He offered Miriam a card on a silver tray. Miriam nodded. “Please show Sir Alfred Durant to my table in the dining room. I have been expecting him, and I will join him shortly. I’m also expecting a Mr. Humphrey Bates. If you’d care to see they are offered an aperitif first.”
Miriam left her room and headed downstairs, outwardly calm but inwardly tense. Paradoxically, some things were easier to do over here. The primitive state of the corporate scene made it relatively easy to mount an all-out assault on the captains of industry, for which she was deeply grateful. (An SEC-approved due diligence background check such as she’d have faced at home would have smashed through her public identity as if it was made of wet cardboard.) But other things were harder to fake. People judged your trustworthiness by a whole slew of social indicators, your class background, and the way you spoke and dressed. The equivalent of a dark suit and a PowerPoint presentation would get you precisely nowhere unless you were a member of the right clubs or had been to the correct finishing school. If you were an outsider, you needed a special edge—and you needed to be at least twice as good.
She’d spent most of the day running scenarios for how this meeting could play, ranging from the irredeemably bad to the unexpectedly good. She’d gotten her story prepared, her answers ready, her lawyer in attendance, and just about everything—except her hair—straight. Now all that remained was to see if Sir Durant would bite … or whether he’d turn out to be an inveterate snob, or an overbred twit whose business was run for him by self-effacing middle-class technicians.
She’d reserved the Hanover Room off the back of the carvery downstairs. Most restaurants in this city were associated with hotels, and the Brighton’s was a very expensive, very exclusive one. As she came through the door, two men rose. One of them was the lawyer, Bates, and the other—she smiled at him and dipped her head briefly. “You must be Sir Alfred Durant?” she asked. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“A pleasure, ma’am,” he said, in a hoarse, slightly gravelly voice. Durant was thin and tall, imposing but with a hauteur that spoke more of a weary self-confidence than of arrogance. His eyes were soft, brown, and deceptively tired-looking. “Please, you must call me Alfred. Mr. Bates has been pinning my ears back with stories about you.”
“Indeed.” Miriam’s expression acquired a slightly fixed, glassy overtone as she nodded to her lawyer. “Well, and have you arrived in good health? Has anyone offered you a drink? I say, waiter—”
The waiter hurried over. “Yes, milady?”
Durant raised an eyebrow. “Gin and tonic for me,” he said slowly—or was it melancholia? He likes people to think he drives from the back seat, Miriam noted. Watch this one.
“A sweet Martini for me,” Bates added. Next to Sir Durant he was short, plump, and somewhat overeager.
“Certainly.” Miriam relaxed slightly. “A sherry, please,” she added. “If you’d like to come in, I believe our table is waiting … ?”
The scandalous overtones of a single woman entertaining two gentlemen to dinner in a closed room were mildly defused by her black dress and rumored widowhood. Bates had confirmed that there were no unsalubrious rumors about Sir Durant’s personal life—or at least none she need worry about. Miriam concentrated on being a perfect hostess while pumping Durant for information about himself, and keeping Bates from either drying up or running off at the mouth. Durant was not the most forthcoming of interview subjects, but after the soup she found a worthwhile button to press, and triggered a ten-minute monologue on the topic of car-racing. “It is without doubt the wooden track that makes it so exciting,” Durant droned over the salmon steak—expensively imported by airship from the north—“for with the embankment of the course, and the addition of pneumonic wheels, they get up to the most exhausting speeds. There was the time old Timmy Watson’s brakes failed on the inside straight toward the finish line at Yeovilton—”
After the best part of two hours, both Bates and Sir Durant were reclining in their chairs. Miriam felt bloated and silently cursed the etiquette that prevented her from leaving the table for a minute, but the last-minute addition of an excellent glass of vintage port seemed to have helped loosen Alfred up. Especially after Miriam had asked a couple of leading questions about brake shoe manufacture, which veered dangerously close to discussing business.
“You seem to me to be unusually interested in brakes,” Sir Durant said, cupping his glass in one hand and staring at her across the table with the expression of a well-fed and somewhat cynical vulture. “If you’ll pardon me for saying this, it’s a somewhat singular interest in one of the fairer sex.”
“I like to think I have lots of singular interests.” Miriam smiled. Patronizing old bastard. “I have spent much of my time traveling to far places and I’m afraid my education in the more feminine arts may be a little lacking. Business, however, is another matter.”
“Ah, business.” Bates nodded knowingly, and Miriam had to actively resist the temptation to kick him under the table.
“Business.” Durant, too, nodded. “I noticed your purchase of a company—was it by any chance Dalkeith, Sidney and Fleming?—with interest. A fine engineering venture, once upon a time.”
Miriam nodded. “I like to get my hands dirty. By proxy,” she added, glancing at Bates. “It’s something of a hobby. My father taught me never to take anything for granted, and I extended the lesson to the tools in his workshop.”
“I see.” Durant nodded. “I found the, ah, samples you sent me most interesting.”
“Good.” When she smiled this widely, Miriam’s cheeks dimpled: She hated to be reminded of it, but there was no escaping the huge gilt-framed mirror hanging above the sideboard opposite. Is that rouged harpy in the evening dress really me? “That was the idea.”
“My men applied one of the samples to a test brake engine. The results were precisely as your letter promised.”
“Indeed.” Miriam put her glass down. “I wouldn’t waste your time, Alfred. I don’t like to mince words. I’m a woman in a hurry, and I wanted to get your attention.”
“Can you provide more samples?” His stare was penetrating.
“Yes. It will take about a month to provide them in significant quantities, though. And the special assembly for applying them.” It had taken a week to get the chrysotile samples in the first place, and longer to set up the workshop, have them ground to powder, and set into the appropriate resin matrix. Epoxide resins were available here, but not widely used outside the furniture trade. Likewise, asbestos and rock wool—chrysotile—could be imported from Canada, but were only really used in insulating furnaces. The young industrial chemist Miriam had hired through Bates’s offices, and the other three workers in her makeshift research laboratory, were initially startled by her proposal, but went along with it. The resulting grayish lumps didn’t look very impressive, and could certainly do with much refinement, but the principle was sound. And she wouldn’t be stopping with asbestos brakes—she intended to obsolesce it as rapidly as she’d introduced it, within a very few years, once she got her research and development department used to a steady drip feed of advanced materials from the other world. “The patents are also progressing nicely, both on the brake material and on the refinements we intend to apply to its use.” She smiled, and this time let her teeth show. “The band brake and the wheel brake will be ancient history within two years.”
“I’d like to know how you propose to produce the material in sufficient volume to achieve that,” said Sir Durant. “There’s a big difference between a laboratory experiment and—”
“I’m not going to,” Miriam butted in. “You are.” She stopped smiling. “That’s what this meeting is about.”
“If I disagree?” He raised his glass. Miriam caught Bates shrinking back in his chair out of the corner of her eye.
“You’re not the only big fish in the pond.” Miriam leaned back and stifled a yawn. “Excuse me, please, I find it rather hot in here.” She met Sir Durant’s gaze. “Alfred, if man is to travel faster, he will have to learn to stop more efficiently first, lest he meet with an unfortunate accident. You made your fortune by selling pneumonic wheels—” tires, she mentally translated. “If you pause to consider the matter, I’m sure you’ll agree that cars that travel faster and stop harder will need more and better pneumonics, too. I’m prepared to offer you a limited monopoly on the new brake material and a system that will use it more efficiently than wheel brakes or band brakes—in return for a share in the profits. I’m going to plow back those profits into research in ways to improve automotive transport. Here and now—” she laid a fingertip on the table for emphasis—“there is one car for every thirty-two people in New Britain. If we can make motoring more popular, to the point where there is one car for every two people—” she broke off.
“Not very ambitious, are you?” Sir Durant asked lightly, eyes gleaming. At the other side of the table Bates was gaping at her, utterly at a loss for words.
Many thoughts collided in Miriam’s mind at that moment, a multivehicle pileup of possible responses. But the one that found its way to her lips was, “not hardly!” She picked up her glass, seeing that it was nearly empty, and raised it. “I’d like to propose a toast to the future of the automobile: a car for every home!”
Miriam was able to rent premises for her company in a former engineering shop on the far side of town. She commuted to it by cab from the hotel while she waited for Bates to process the paperwork for her house purchase. She was acutely aware of how fast the luxury accommodation was gobbling her funds, but there didn’t seem to be a sensible alternative—not if she wanted to keep up the front of being a rich widow, able to entertain possible investors and business partners in style. Eventually she figured she’d have to buy a steam car—but not this year’s model.
The next morning she had a quick shower, dressed in her black suit and heavy overcoat, then hailed a cab outside without lingering for breakfast. The air was icy cold but thankfully clear of smog. As the cab clattered across tram rails and turned toward New Highgate, she closed her eyes, trying to get her thoughts in order.
“Two weeks,” she told herself, making a curse of it. She’d been here for six nights already and it felt like an eternity. Living out of suitcases grew old fast and she’d shed any lingering ideas of the romance of travel back when she was covering trade shows and haunting the frequent flyer lounges. Now it was just wearying, and even an expensive hotel suite didn’t help much. It lacked certain essential comforts—privacy, security, the sensation of not being in public the whole time. She was getting used to the odd clothing and weird manners but doubted she’d ever be comfortable with it. And besides, she was missing Roland, waking sometimes from vague sensual dreams to find herself alone in a foreign city. “Seven more days and I can go home!” Home, to her own damn house, if she could just lean on Angbard a bit harder—failing that, to the office, where she could lock the door, turn on the TV, and at least understand everything she was seeing.
The cab arrived. Miriam paid the driver and stepped out. The door to the shop was already unlocked, so she went straight in and opened up the office. It was small but modern, furnished in wood and equipped with electric lamps, a telephone, and one of the weird chord-key typewriters balanced precariously on one of the high, slanted writing desks. It was also freezing cold until she lit the gas fire. Only when it was blazing did she go through the mail then head for the lab.
The lab was a former woodworking shop, and right now it was a mess. Roger had moved a row of benches up against one wall, balanced glass-fronted cabinets on top of them, and made enthusiastic use of her line of credit at an instrument maker’s shop. The results included a small potter’s kiln—converted into a makeshift furnace—and a hole in the ceiling where tomorrow a carpenter would call to begin building a fume cupboard. Roger was already at work, digging into a wooden crate that he’d manhandled into the center of the floor. “Good morning to you,” said Miriam. “How’s it going?”
“I’ll tell you when I get into this,” Roger grunted. He was in his late twenties, untidy even in a formal three-piece suit, and blessed with none of the social graces that would have allowed him to hang onto his job when the Salisbury Works had shed a third of their staff three months earlier. Rudeness concealed shyness; he’d been completely nonplussed by Miriam at first, and was still uneasy in her presence.
“That’ll be the chrysotile from Union Quebecois,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“It should be. If they haven’t sent us rock salt by mistake again.” He laid down his crowbar and straightened up panting, his breath steaming in the cold air.
“If they have, they’ll pay for it.” She grinned. “Go make yourself a pot of tea, I don’t want you freezing to death on the job.”
“Um, yes, Ma’am.” Roger shuffled toward the other back room—the one Miriam intended to have converted into that luxury, a kitchen and indoor toilet block for the work force—that currently held only a cast-iron wood stove, a stack of lumber, and a kettle. He gave her a wide berth, as if being female in the workplace might be contagious. Miriam watched his back disappear before she knelt to pick up the crowbar, and went around the lid of the crate levering out the retaining nails. Men. She laid the crowbar down and dusted her skirt off before he returned, bearing a chipped mug containing some liquid as dark as coffee.
“I think you’ll find it easier to open now,” Miriam remarked, laying one hand on the lid. “What have you got in mind for resin processing this week?”
“I was thinking about the vulcanization process,” Roger muttered. “I want to see how varying the sulfate concentration affects the stiffness of the finished mixture.”
“I was asking about resins,” Miriam pointed out. “In particular, the epoxide sample I suggested you look into on Thursday. Have you done anything with it yet?”
“Um, I was getting to it.” Roger glanced at her face then looked away bashfully.
“That’s why I suggested a timetable,” said Miriam. “You can estimate how long each batch will take to run; you already do that for yourself, don’t you? Put the timetable on the blackboard and I won’t have to keep asking you the same questions.”
“Oh, alright then.” He nodded.
“I wanted the epoxide sample running as soon as possible because we have a possible customer,” she added.
“A customer?” He brightened visibly.
“Yes, a customer.” She kept her face sober. “But we won’t have them if we don’t have a suitable product, will we? They’re going to want an extensive range of samples in about four weeks time, for their own materials testing people. That’s why I want you to get on to the epoxide-based samples as soon as possible. If you time the kiln runs right, you can probably put your sulfate experiments through at the same time. Just as long as they don’t hold up the epoxide.”
Oh, right. I’ll do it that way, then,” he said, almost carelessly. And he would. She’d met Roger’s type before, hammering keyboards into submission in dot-com start-ups. He’d work overnight if he had to, without even noticing, just to get the product ready to meet the deadline—as long as he had a target to aim for. All this thrashing about with rubber and vulcanization processes was just a distraction.
“I’m going to be in the office today,” she added. “I’ve got an idea to work on. The carpenter will be in here tomorrow to work on the fume cupboard, and then the kitchen. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t happen to know any model engineers looking for work? I have some mechanical assemblies to get started.”
“Mechanical—” he almost went cross-eyed. “Why?”
“A better way of applying this wonderful high-friction material to the task of stopping a moving vehicle,” she pointed out. “You think this high-friction compound will work well if you just clamp it to a pneumonic? It’ll work—right until the rubber wall of the wheel wears through and it blows out. What we need is a hub-mounted disk bolted to the wheel with a block of brake material to either side, which can be clamped or released by hydraulic calipers, balanced to apply force evenly. With me so far?”
“Um, I think so.” He looked abstracted. “I, I don’t know any model artificers. I’m sorry. But I’m sure you’ll find someone.”
“Oh I think I will, indeed I do.” She headed back to the office, leaving Roger wrestling a ten-kilogram lump of very high-grade rock wool onto his workbench.
The day passed in a blur. Miriam had rigged a travel transformer for her laptop, which she kept in a locked drawer in the office along with an inkjet printer and a small digitizer tablet. The CAD software was a pain to use with such a small screen, but far better than the huge draftsman’s board and ink pens in the far corner of the room. Between calls she lost herself in an extruded 3D model of a brake assembly—one of her own invention, crude but recognizable as the ancestor of late twentieth-century disk brakes. Another file awaited her attention—steel radial bands for reinforcing tires. The idea was sound, but she kept having to divert into her physics and engineering textbooks. Her calculus was rustier than she was willing to admit, and she was finding some of the work extremely hard.
But perfection didn’t matter. Getting there first mattered. Get there first and just-good-enough and you could buy the specialists to polish the design to perfection later. This was the lesson Miriam had learned from watching over the shoulders of her Silicon Valley colleagues, and from watching a myriad of biotech companies rise and fall—and it was the lesson she intended to shove up New Britain’s industrialists so hard it made them squeak.
One o’clock. Miriam blinked, suddenly dizzy. Her buttocks ached from the hard stool, she was hungry, and she needed the lavatory. She stood up and put the notebook PC away, then headed for the toilet—an outhouse in the backyard. Afterwards she slipped out the front door in search of lunch. Of such elements were a working day made.
In the public environment of the hotel, or the lab, she cut an eccentric, possibly scandalous figure. On the streets she was just another woman, better dressed than most, hurrying about her errands. Anonymity of a kind: Treasure it while you can, she told herself as she lined up at a street corner where a baker’s boy had set up a stand to sell hot bacon rolls. It won’t last.
She returned to the office and had been busy for an hour—phoning her lawyer, then calling a commercial agent at what passed for a recruiting house—when there was a peremptory knock on the side window. “Who’s there?” she demanded, standing up to open it.
“Police. Inspector Smith at your service.” A bushy moustache and a suspicious, beefy face stood behind an imposing warrant card with a crown and heraldic beasts cavorting atop it chased her in through the open window. “Homeland Defense Bureau. Are you Mrs. Fletcher?”
“Uh, yes.” Flustered, Miriam tried to pull herself together. “How can I be of service?”
“I’d like a word with you if I may.”
“Ah, do come in, then.” Miriam hurried to open the door. Shit, what did I do wrong? She wondered. There was a deep hollow icy feeling in her stomach as she hauled the door open and smiled, ingratiatingly. “What can I do for you, officer?” she asked, leaving the door and retreating behind the front desk.
“Ah, well.” He nodded, then remembered his manners and took his hat off.
Bizarre, thought Miriam, fascinated as a bird facing a snake. To her surprise she realized that she wasn’t frightened for herself—only for her plans, which depended on continuity and legality for their success.
“Been in business long?” asked the Inspector.
“No,” she said, tight-lipped. “This is a new venture.”
“Ah well.”
He looked around slowly. Luckily she’d put the computer away before lunch, and everything was much as it should be in an office. He moved to shove the door closed. “Don’t do that,” Miriam said quickly.
“Alright.” He found the one comfortable chair in the office—a wooden swivel chair too low to work at the writing desks—and looked her in the eyes. “How long have you known Erasmus Burgeson?”
“Huh?” Miriam blinked. “Not long. A few weeks?”
“I see.” Smith nodded portentiously. “How did you come to know him?”
“Is this an official investigation?”
“I’m asking the questions. How did you come to know him?”
“Uh.” Miriam considered her options. Not official, she decided. “If this isn’t an official investigation, why should I tell you?”
“Because.” He looked irritated. “Little lady, if you don’t want to cooperate while it’s unofficial, I can go away and waste my time making it official. And then you’ll have to cooperate, and it will be the worse for you because I won’t have to knock on your door polite, like. Do I make myself clear?”
“Perfectly.” She didn’t smile. “I first met Erasmus Burgeson because one of your own officers directed me to him when I asked if he knew where I could find a pawnbroker. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Ah, well.” Smith looked even more annoyed now, but not in her direction. “You wouldn’t happen to know which officer this would be?”
“Hmm. He’d have been on duty in Highgate Close on, um, the morning of Saturday the sixteenth. I think he thought I might be lost. That might be enough for you to find his notebook.”
“Humph. So you asked for a pawnbroker and he gave you directions to Burgeson. Is that all? Why did you want a pawnbroker in the first place?”
The Inspector’s blunt manner was beginning to annoy Miriam. But that’s what he wants, she realized suddenly: He wants me to make a slip. Hmm. “I arrived on the India Line ship Vespasian that morning, after a crossing from Ceylon,” she told him, very deliberately keeping to her story—the Vespasian had indeed docked that day, with some passengers aboard, but was conveniently halfway across the Atlantic by now. “I was so preoccupied with packing my posessions and getting ashore that I forgot to ask the purser to convert my scrip to honest currency. In addition, clothing suitable for the climate of Ceylon is inadequate here. So I thought a sensible first step would be to find a pawnshop and exchange an old pair of earrings and a small pearl necklace for a decent wool suit and the wherewithal to find a hotel room and cable my banker.”
All of which was, very remotely, true—and indeed Erasmus had arranged, for a fee and by way of a friend of a fellow traveler, for the purser of the Vespasian to find a passenger of her name in the ship’s manifest should anyone ask—but it was only as Miriam spun it out in front of Smith’s skeptical gaze that she realized how thin a tale it sounded. If she was in Smith’s shoes she could punch holes in it with very little effort. But Smith simply nodded. “I see,” he said. “Your husband left you adequately provided for, didn’t he?”
Miriam nodded. “Indeed.” Keep it close. Make him dig.
“And so you dabble in manufacturing.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, so Miriam didn’t answer. She just sat tight wearing a politely interested expression, wishing for the phone to ring or something to disturb the silence that stretched out uncomfortably.
“I said, you dabble in manufacturing.”
“I do not ‘dabble’ in anything, Mr. Smith,” Miriam finally stated in her iciest tone. “You’re a police officer. You can go ask the patent office questions—I’m sure Mr. Sagetree will be able to tell you whether there is any merit in the applications I filed last week. The first three, Inspector, of the many I have in mind.”
“Ah. I stand corrected.” Smith leaned back in his chair. “Well then, may I rephrase? Do you have any opinion of Burgeson’s business? Does he strike you as in any way at all being odd?”
Miriam shook her head and allowed an irritated expression to cross her face. “He’s a pawnbroker,” she said. “He’s a very literate pawnbroker with a good line in conversation, but I imagine sitting in the back of a shop gives him a lot of time to read, don’t you?”
“A literate pawnbroker. So this would explain why you have visited his establishment on three occasions?”
Shit, shit, shit—“The first time, as I’ve told you, I needed money and suitable attire. The second time—let me see, on my first visit I had noticed a hat that was not then out of hock. I went back to see if it was available, and also to redeem my earrings and necklace. On the third occasion—well, he’d shown me some of the antiquarian books various of his customers pawned when they fell upon hard times. I confess I was quite partial to a couple of them.” She forced a smile. “Is that a crime?”
“No.” Inspector Smith stood, unfolding smoothly to a good six feet. He was a huge, imposing man, overweight but built like a rugby player, and now she noticed that his nose had been broken, although it had set well. “But you should be careful who you associate with, Mrs. Fletcher. Some people question Mr. Burgeson’s patriotism and devotion to the Crown, you know. He keeps strange company, and you would not want to be taken for one among them.”
“Strange company?” She looked up at Smith.
“Strangers.” He wore a peculiar tight, smug expression. “Frenchies, some of ‘em. And papists. Uppity women suffragists, too.” Miriam glanced past his shoulder then looked away hastily. Roger was leaning in the laboratory doorway, one hand behind his back. I don’t need this, she thought to herself.
“He hasn’t done anything to hang himself yet,” Smith continued, “but there’s always a first time.” He nodded to himself. “I see my job as ensuring there isn’t a second, if you catch my drift. And that the first ’appens as soon as possible.”
Miriam looked past him. “Roger, go back to your workbench,” she called sharply.
Roger turned and shuffled away, bashfully. Inspector Smith shook himself, the spell broken, and glanced over his shoulder.
“Huh. Another bad ’un, I shouldn’t be surprised.” Smith smirked at Miriam. “Wouldn’t want anything to ’appen to him, would you? I really don’t know what the world’s coming to, a single woman running a business full of strapping young men. Huh. So, let’s see. The question is, are you a good citizen?”
“Of course I’m a good citizen,” Miriam said tightly, crossing her arms. “I really don’t see what your point is.”
“If you’re a good citizen, and you were to learn something about the personal habits of a certain pawnbroker—” The inspector paused, brow wrinkled as if he’d just caught himself in an internal contradiction: “casting no aspersions on your reputation, if you follow me, ma’am.” Another pause. “But if you happened to know anything that would be of interest, I’m sure you’d share it with the police …”
“I’ve got a business to run, inspector,” Miriam pointed out coldly. “This business pays taxes which ultimately go to pay your wages. You are getting in the way. I’m a law-abiding woman, and if I find out anything you need to know you will be the first to hear of it. Do I make myself understood?”
“Ah, well.” Smith cast her a sly little glance. “You will, as well, won’t you? Huh.” He paused in the doorway. “If you don’t you’ll be bleeding sorry,” he hissed, and was gone like a bad smell.
“Oh shit,” Miriam whispered, and sat down heavily in the swivel chair he’d vacated. Now the immediate threat was past, she felt weary, drained beyond belief. The bastard!
“Uh, ma’am?”
“Yes, Roger.” She nodded tiredly. “Listen. I know you meant well, but, next time—if there is a next time—stay out of it. Leave the talking to me.”
“Uh, yes.” He ducked his head uncertainly. “I meant to say—”
“And leave the fucking crowbar behind. Have you any idea what they’ll do to you for attacking a Police Inspector with a crowbar?”
“Ma’am!” His eyes bulged—at her language, not the message.
“Shit.” She blinked. “Roger, you’re going to have to get used to hearing me curse like a soldier if you work for me for any length of time. At least, you’ll hear it when the bastards are attacking.” She caught his eye. “I’m not a lady. If I was, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” she added, almost plaintively. And that’s for sure, more than you’ll ever know.
“Ma’am.” He cleared his throat, then carefully pretended not to have heard a single word. “It’s about the furnace. I’ve got the first epoxide mixture curing right now, is that what you wanted?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, relief forcing its way out of her in a shout. “That’s what I wanted.” She began to calm down. A thought occurred to her. “Roger. When you go home tonight, I’d like you to post a letter for me. Not from the pillar box outside, but actually into the letter box of the recipient. Will you do that?”
“Um.” He blinked. “Would it be something to do with the King’s man as called, just now?”
“It might be. Then again it might not. Will you?”
“Yes,” he said firmly. “Don’t like those folks. Not at all.”
After he retreated to his workbench Miriam sat down in front of the manual typewriter and threaded some paper into it—then paused. They can identity typewriters by their typeface, can’t they? she remembered. Sort of like a fingerprint. And they lift messages off used ribbons, too. She pulled out the notebook computer and briefly tapped out a note, then printed it on the battery-powered inkjet printer she’d brought over with her. Let them try and identify that.
She took care to pull on her gloves before feeding the paper in, and before folding it and putting it in the envelope, leaving no fingerprints to incriminate. Then she addressed it and sealed it. If they were tailing Roger or had staked out Burgeson’s shop it was just too bad—nothing she could do would help—but if they were still looking for information she doubted things would have gone that far. Besides which, Erasmus had agreed to make inquiries on her behalf: If the inspector nailed him for sedition, there’d go her most fruitful line of inquiry in pursuit of the hidden enemies who’d murdered her birth mother and tried to kill her.
It was only on her way home, having given the anonymous tip to Roger, that she realized she’d stepped over the line into active collusion with the Leveler quartermaster.
One week and two new employees later (not to mention a signed, formal offer for the house), Miriam practiced her breaking-and-entering skills on the vacant garden for what she hoped would be the last time. After spending two uncomfortable hours in the hunting hide, she felt well enough to risk an early crossing.
Paulette was in the back office doing something with the fax machine when Miriam came in through the door. “What on earth—” She looked her up and down. “Jesus, what’s that you’re wearing?”
“Everyday office outfit in Boston, on the other side.” Miriam dropped her shoulder bag, took her hat and topcoat off, then pulled a face. “Any word on my mother?” she asked.
“Nothing I’ve heard,” said Paulie. “I put out a wire search, like you said. Nothing’s turned up.” She looked at Miriam worriedly. “She may be alright,” she said.
“Maybe.” Black depression clamped down on Miriam. She’d been able to keep it at bay while she was on the far side, with a whole different set of worries, but now she was home she couldn’t hide it anymore. “I’m going to the bathroom. I may be some time. Taking this stuff off’s a major engineering undertaking.”
“Want me to make you some coffee?” Paulette called around the door.
“Yes! Thanks!”
“So you have to play dress-up all the time?” Paulie asked around the door.
“It’s only dress-up if you can stop after a couple of hours,” Miriam said as she came back out, wearing her bathrobe. She accepted a coffee mug from Paulette. “What you’re wearing now would get you arrested for indecent exposure over there.” Paulette was in jeans and a plaid shirt unbuttoned over a black T-shirt.
“I think I get the picture. Sounds like a real bundle of laughs.” Paulette eyed her thoughtfully. “Two thoughts strike me. One, you’ve got a hell of a dry cleaning bill coming up. Secondly, have you thought about putting artificial fibers on your to-do list?”
“Yeah.” Miriam nodded fervently. “Starting with rayon, that came first I think. Then the overlocking sewing machine, nylon, and sneakers.” She yawned, winced at her headache, then stirred the coffee. “So tell me, how have things been while I’ve been away?”
“Well.” Paulie perched on the desktop beside the fax. “I’ve got the next gold shipment waiting for you. Brill is doing fine, and those, uh, feelers—” She looked furtive. “Let’s just say she’s going to be from Canada. Right?”
“Right,” Miriam echoed. “What else has she been up to?”
“She’s been visiting your friend Olga in the hospital. Once she spotted someone trying to tail her on the T, but she lost him quick. Olga is out of intensive and recovering nicely, but she’s got a scar under her hairline and her arm’s in a sling. The guards—” Paulie shrugged. “What is it with those guys?”
“What’s what?”
“Last time she went, she said one of them said she ought to come home. Any idea what that’s about?”
“Uh, yes, probably he was a relative of hers. You say she’s visiting Olga now?”
“Why, sure.” Paulette frowned. “I’ve just got an odd feeling about her. Great kid, but she’s hiding something. I think.”
“If she wanted me out of the way she’s had more than enough opportunities to do it quietly.”
“There is that,” Paulette agreed. “I don’t think she’s out to get you. I think it’s something else.”
“Me too. I just want to know for sure what she’s hiding. The way she and Kara were planted on me by Angbard’s office, she’s probably just reporting back to him—but if she’s working for someone else …” The fax machine bleeped and began to emit a page of curling paper. “Hmm. Maybe I should check my voice mail.”
She didn’t, not at first. Instead she went back into the bathroom and spent almost an hour standing in the cramped shower cubicle, at first washing and thoroughly cleaning her hair with detergents of a quality unimaginable in New Britain, even for the rich—then just standing there, staring at her feet beneath a rain the temperature of blood, wondering if she’d ever feel clean again. Thinking about the expression on Roger’s face when he’d been ready to murder a secret policeman for her, and about Burgeson’s kindly face, high ideals, and low friends. Friends who believed fervently in political ideals Miriam took for granted, and who were low subversives destined for the gallows if Smith and his friends ever caught up with them. Gallows where whoever had kidnapped or murdered Iris belonged—and that in turn led Miriam to think about her mother and how little time she’d spent with her in the past year, and how many questions she’d never asked. And more questions for Roland, and his face as he’d turned away, hurt by her rejection; a rejection he didn’t understand because it wasn’t anything personal, it was a rejection of the world he would unintentionally lock her into, rather than the person he was.
Miriam had lots of things to think of—all of them bleak.
She finished with the shower in much the same black mood she’d been in that fateful evening when she’d first opened the locket and unhitched a mind-gate leading to a world where things turned out to be paradoxically worse. Why bother? she wondered. Why do I keep going? True love would be a great answer if she believed in it. But she was too much the realist: While she’d love to find Roland in her bed and fuck him senseless—the need for him sometimes brought her awake from frustrated dreams in the still small hours—there wasn’t a cozy little cottage for two at the end of that primrose path. Miriam had held her daughter in her arms, once, twelve years ago, kissed her on the head and given her up for adoption. Over the next few years she’d spent nights agonizing over the decision, trying to second-guess the future, to decide whether she’d done the right thing.
The idea of bringing another child, especially a daughter, into the claustrophobic scheming of the Clan filled her with horror. She was a big girl now, and the idea of expecting a man to protect her didn’t strike her as cool. That wasn’t what she’d gone through pre-med and college and divorce and most of med school and the postgraduate campus of hard knocks for. But facing all this on her own was so daunting that sometimes it made her lie awake wondering if there was any point.
She wandered through into the bedroom and sat on the futon beneath the platform bed in the corner. Her phone was still sitting on the floor next to it, plugged in to charge but switched off. She picked it up, switched it on, waited for it to log on, then hit her mailbox.
“You have messages. Message one…” A gravelly voice, calling from ten days ago. “Miriam?” She sat up straight: It was Angbard! “I have been thinking very deeply and I have concluded that you are right.”
Her jaw dropped. “Holy shit,” she whispered.
“What you said about my security is correct. Olga is at evident risk. For the time being she remains in the hospital, but when you return, I release her into your care until Beltaigne, when I expect you both to appear before the Clan council to render an account of your persecution.”
Miriam found herself shaking. “Is there anything else?”
“There’s no news about your mother. I will continue to search until I find something positive to report to you. I am sorry I can’t tell you anything more about her disappearance. Rest assured that no stone will go unturned in hunting for her assailants. You may call me at any time, but bear in mind that my switchboard might—if you are correct—be intercepted. Good-bye.”
Click. “Message two—” Miriam shook her head. “Hello! This is a recorded greeting from Kleinmort Baintree Investments! Worried about your pension? You too—” Miriam hit the delete button.
“Message three: Call me. Please?” It was Roland, plaintive. She hit ‘delete’ again, feeling sick to her stomach. “Message four: Miriam? You there? Steve, at The Herald. Call me. Got work for you.”
It was the last message. Miriam stared at her phone for a good few seconds before she moved her thumb to the delete key. It only traveled a millimeter, but it felt like miles. She hung up. “Did I just hear myself do that?” she asked the empty room; “did I just decide to ignore a commission from The Herald?”
She shook her head, then began to rummage through the clothes in her burnished suitcase, looking for something to wear. They felt odd, and once dressed she felt as if she’d forgotten something, but at least it was comfortable and nothing pinched. “Weird,” she muttered and went back out into the corridor just as the front door banged open, admitting a freezing gust of cold air.
“Miriam!” Someone in a winter coat leapt forward and embraced her.
“Brill!” There was someone behind—“Olga! What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?” Olga looked around curiously. “What kind of house do you call this?”
“I don’t. It’s going to be a doppelgängered post office, though. Brill, let go, you’re freezing!”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said earnestly. “The duke, he sent a message to you with lady Olga—”
“Yo! Coffee?” Paulie took one look at them and ducked back into the kitchenette.
“Come in. Sit down. Then tell me everything,” Miriam ordered.
They came in, stripping off outdoor coats: Olga had acquired a formal-looking suit from somewhere, which contrasted oddly with her arm in a sling. She shivered slightly. “How strange,” she remarked, looking round. “Charming, quaint! What’s that?”
“A fax machine. Everything feeling strange?” Miriam looked at her sympathetically. “I know that sensation—been having it a lot, lately.”
“No, it’s how familiar it feels! I’ve been seeing it on after-dinner entertainments for so long, but it’s not the same as being here.”
“Some of those tapes are quite old,” Miriam remarked. “Fashions change very fast over here.”
“Well.” Olga attempted a shrug, then winced. “Oh, coffee.” She accepted the offered mug without thanks. Paulie cast her a black look.
“Uh, Olga.” Miriam caught her eye.
“What?”
“This is Paulette. She’s my business manager and partner on this side.”
“Oh!” Olga stood up. “Please, I’m so sorry! I thought you were—”
“There aren’t any servants here,” Brill explained patiently.
“Oh, but I was so rude! I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay,” said Paulette. She glanced at Miriam. “Is this going to happen every time? It could get old fast.”
“I hope not.” Miriam pulled a face. “Okay, Olga. What did Uncle A have to say for himself?”
“He came to visit me shortly after you left. I’d had time to think on your explanations, and they made uncommon sense. So much sense, in truth, that I passed them on to him in a most forthright manner.”
Brill cracked up.
“Care to share the joke?” Miriam asked carefully.
“Oh, it was mirthful!” Brill managed to catch her breath for a moment before the giggles came back. “She told him, she told—”
Olga kept her face carefully neutral. “I pointed out that my schooling was incomplete, and that I had been due to spend some time here in any case.”
“She pointed out—”
“Uh.” Miriam stared at Olga. “Did she by any chance have something pointed to do the pointing out with?”
“There was no need, he took the message,” Olga explained calmly. “He also said that desperate times required desperate measures, and your success was to be prayed for by want of avoiding—” she glanced at Paulette—”the resumption of factional disputes.”
“Civil war, you mean. Okay.” Miriam nodded. “How long have you been out of the hospital?”
“But Miriam, this was today,” said Brilliana.
“Oh,” she said, hollowly. “I think I’m losing the plot.” She rubbed her forehead. “Too many balls in the air, and some of them are on fire.” She looked around at her audience; Paulie was watching them in fascination. “Olga, did you keep the locket you took from the gunman?”
“Yes.” Olga looked uncertain.
“Good.” Miriam smiled. “In that case, you may be able to help me earn more than the extra million dollars I borrowed from Angbard last month.” She pretended to ignore Paulette’s sharp intake of breath. “The locket doesn’t work in this world,” she explained, “but if you use it on the other side, it takes you to yet another place—more like this one than your home, but just as different in its own way.”
She took a mouthful of coffee. “I’m setting up a business in, uh, world three,” she told Olga. “It’s going to set the Clan on its collective ear when they find out. It’s also going to flush out our mystery assassins, who live in world three. Right out of wherever they’re hiding. The problem is, it takes a whole day for me to world-walk across in each direction. Running a business there is taking all my time.”
“You want me to be a courier?” asked Olga.
“Yes.” Miriam watched her. “In a week or two I’ll own a house in world three that is in exactly the same place as this office. And we’ve already got the beginnings of a camp in world one, in the woods norm of Niejwein, on the same spot. Once I’ve got the house established, it’ll be possible to go from here to there without having to wander through a strange city or know much about local custom—”
“Are you trying to tell me I’m not fit to be allowed out over there?” Olga’s eyes blazed.
“Er, no! No!” Miriam was taken aback until she noticed Brill stifling laughter. “Er. That is, only if you want to. Have you seen enough of Cambridge yet? Don’t you want to look around here, first, before going to yet another world?”
“Do I want—” Olga looked as if she was going to explode: “yes!” she insisted. “I want it all! Where do I sign? Do you want it in blood?”
Early evening, a discreet restaurant on the waterfront, glass windows overlooking the open water, darkness and distant lights. It was six-thirty precisely. Miriam nervously adjusted her bra strap and shivered, then marched up to the front desk.
“Can I help you?” asked the concierge.
“Yes.” She smiled. “I’m Miriam Beckstein. Party of two. I believe the person I’m expecting will already be here. Name of Lofstrom.”
“Ah, just a moment—yes, please go in. He’s at a window table, if you’d just come this way—”
Miriam went inside the half-deserted restaurant, still filling up with an upmarket after-work crowd, and headed for the back. After weeks in New Britain she felt oddly exposed in a black minidress and tux jacket, but nobody here gave her a second glance. “Roland?”
He’d been studying the menu, but now he rocketed to his feet, confusion in his face. “Miriam—” He remembered to put the menu down. “Oh. You’re just—”
“Sit down,” she said, not unkindly. “I don’t want you to offer me a seat or hold doors open when it’s easier for me to do it myself.”
“Uh.” He sat, looking slightly flustered. She felt a sudden surge of desire. He was in evening dress, like the first time. Together they probably looked as if they were heading for a night at the opera. A couple.
“It’s been how long?” she asked.
“Four weeks and three days,” he said promptly. “Want the number of hours, too?”
“That would be—” She stopped and looked at the waiter who’d just materialized at her elbow. “Yes?”
“Would sir et madame care to view the wine list?” he asked stuffily.
“You go ahead,” she told Roland.
“Certainly. We’ll have the Chateau Lafite ’93, please,” he said without pause. The waiter scurried away.
“Come here often?” she asked, amused despite her better judgment.
“A wise man said, when you’re planning a campaign, preparation is everything.” He grinned wryly.
“Are we safe here?” she asked. “Really?”
“Hmm.” His smile slipped. “Angbard sent a message. Your house appears to be clear, but it might be a bad idea to sleep over there. It’s not doppelgängered, and even if it was, he couldn’t vouch for its security. Apart from that—” He looked at her significantly. “I made sure nobody back at the office knows where I am tonight. And I wasn’t tailed here.”
The wine arrived, as did the waiter. They spent a minute bickering good-naturedly over the relative merits of a warming chowder against the chef’s way with garlic mushrooms. “What has Angbard got you doing?” she asked.
“Well.” He looked ruefully out of the window. “After our last meeting it was like you’d thrown a hornet’s nest through his window. Everybody got to walk around downtown Cambridge in the snow, looking for a missing old lady in a powered wheelchair, you know? I ended up spending a week spying on a private security firm we’d hired. Didn’t find much except a few padded expenses claims. Then Angbard quietly started shuffling people around—again, nothing turned up except a couple of guards on the take. So then he put me back on regular courier duty in the post room, with a guard assignment or two on the side, moved himself to a high-rise in New York—real estate above the thirtieth floor is going cheap these days—left Matthias running Fort Lofstrom and Angus in Karlshaven, and declared that the search for your foster-mother couldn’t go on any longer. Uh, he figured we weren’t going to find anything new after that much time. Well.” He shrugged. “I can’t tell you any specifics about my current assignments, but his lordship told me that if you got in touch, I was to—” He paused.
“I think I can guess,” she said dryly.
“No, I promise! Angbard doesn’t know about us,” he said firmly. “He thinks we’re just friends.”
The appetizers arrived. Miriam took a sip of her chowder. The news about the hunt for Iris depressed her, but came as no real surprise. “Angbard. Does not know. That we, uh, you know.” Somehow the thought made her feel free and sinful, harboring personal secrets—as well as strategic information about the third universe—that the all-powerful intelligence head didn’t. She paused for a moment and studied the top of his head, trying to memorize every hair.
“I never told him,” Roland said, putting down his soup spoon. “Did you think I would?”
“You can keep secrets when it suits you,” Miriam noted.
He looked up. “I am an obedient servant to your best interests,” he said quietly. “If Angbard finds out he’ll kill us. If you want me to apologize for not giving him grounds to kill us, I apologize.”
She met his eyes. “Apology noted.” Then she went back to her soup. It was deliriously fresh and lightly seasoned, and Miriam luxuriated in it. She stretched out her legs, and nearly spilled soup everywhere as she found his ankle rubbing against hers. Or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter. Nearly two months of lonely nights was coming to the boil. “What would you do for me?” she whispered to him over the remains of the appetizer.
“Anything.” He met her eyes. “Almost anything.”
“Well, I’d like that. Tonight. On one condition.” The waiter removed their bowls, discreetly avoiding the line of sight between them—obviously couples behaving this way were a well-understood phenomenon in his line of work.
“What?”
“Don’t, whatever you do, talk about tomorrow,” she said.
“Okay. I promise.” And it was that simple. He surrendered before the main course, a sirloin steak for him and a salmon cutlet for her, and Miriam felt something tight unwind inside her, a subliminal humming tension that had been building up for what felt like forever. She barely tasted the food or noticed as they finished the bottle of wine. He paid, but she paid no attention to that, either. “Where to?” he asked.
“Do you still have an apartment here?” she replied.
“Yes.” She heard the little catch in his throat.
“Is it safe? You’re sure nobody’s, uh—”
“I sleep there. No booby traps. Do you want to—”
“Yes.” She knew it was a bad idea, but she didn’t care about that—at least, not right now. What she cared about, as she pulled her jacket on and allowed him to take her arm, was the warmth at the base of her spine and the sure knowledge that she could count on tonight. All the tomorrows could take their chances.
He drove carefully, back to his apartment in a warehouse redevelopment not far from the restaurant. Miriam leaned back, watching him sidelong from the passenger seat of the Jaguar. “This is it,” he said, pulling into the underground garage. “Are you sure?” he asked, turning off the engine.
She leaned forward and bit his lower lip, gently.
“Ow—” Their mouths met. “Not here,” he panted.
“Okay. Upstairs.”
They worked their way into the elevator without getting too disheveled. It stopped on a neat landing with three doors. Roland freed up a hand to unlock one, and punched a code into a beeping alarm system. Then they were inside. He locked the door, put a chain across it, then bolted it—and she tackled him.
“Not here!”
“Where, then?”
“There!” He pointed through an open door into the living room, dimly lit by an old seventies lava lamp that shed moving patterns of orange and red light across a sofa facing the uncurtained window.
“That’ll do.” She dragged him over, and they collapsed onto the sofa. He was ready for her, and it was all Miriam could do to force herself to unwrap a condom before she launched herself at him. There was no time to pull off his clothes. She straddled him, felt his hands working under her dress, and then she was—
—an hour later, sitting on the toilet, giggling madly as she watched him shower. Both of them frog-naked and sweaty. “We’ve got to stop this happening to us!” she insisted.
“Come again?”
She threw the toilet roll at him.
“You’re violent,” he complained: “That isn’t in The Rules!”
“You read that?”
“Olga’s elder sister had a copy. I sneaked a peek.”
“Ugh!” Miriam finished with the toilet. “Move over, you’re not doing that right.”
“I’ve been showering myself for years—”
“Yes, that’s what’s wrong. Stand up.” She stepped into the bathtub with him and pulled the shower curtain across.
“Hey! This wasn’t in the rules either!”
“Where’s the soap?”
“It does, doesn’t—ow!”
Morning came late. Miriam stirred drowsily, feeling warm and secure and unaccountably bruised. There was something wrong with the pillow: It twitched. She tensed. An arm! I didn’t, did I… ?
Memory returned with a rush. “Your apartment is too big,” she said.
“It is?”
“Too many rooms.”
“What do you mean?”
She squirmed backwards slightly until she felt his crotch behind her. “We managed the living room, the bathroom, and the bedroom. But you’ve got a kitchen, haven’t you? And what about the back passage?”
“I, uh.” He yawned, loudly. She could feel him stiffening. “Need the toilet,” he mumbled.
“Oh shit.” She rolled over and watched him stand up, fondly. Aren’t they funny in the morning? she thought. If only … Then the numb misery was back. It was tomorrow, already.
Damn, she thought. Can’t keep it together for even a night! What’s wrong with me?
“Would you like some coffee?” he called through the open doorway.
“Yeah, please.” She yawned. Waking up in bed with him should feel momentous, like the first day of the rest of her life. But it didn’t, it just filled her with angst—and a strong desire to spit in the faces of the anonymous sons of bitches who’d made it so. She wanted Roland. She wanted to wake up this way forever. She’d even think about the marriage thing, and children, if it was just about him. But it wasn’t, and there was no way she’d sacrifice a child on the altar of the Clan’s dynastic propositions. Romeo and Juliet were just stupid dizzy teenagers, she thought morosely. I know better. Don’t I?
She stood up and pulled her dress on. Then she padded into Roland’s small kitchen. He smiled at her. “Breakfast?” he asked.
“Yeah.” She smiled back at him, brain spinning furiously. Okay, so why don’t you give him a chance? she asked herself. If he is hiding something, let’s see if he’ll get it off his chest. Now. She knew full well why she didn’t want to ask, but not knowing scared her. Especially while Iris remained missing. On the other hand, a plausible bluff might make him tell her whatever it was, and if it was about Iris, that mattered. Didn’t it? So what can I use—oh. It was obvious. “Listen,” she said quietly. “I know you’re holding out on me. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. You haven’t told Angbard. So who knows about us?”
She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting: denial, maybe, or laughter; but his face crumpling up like a car wreck wasn’t on the list. “Damn,” he said quietly. “Shit.”
Her mouth went dry. “Who?” she asked.
Roland looked away from her. “He showed me pictures,” he said quietly. “Pictures of us. Can you believe it?”
“Who? Who are you talking about?” Miriam took a step back, suddenly feeling naked. Ask and ye shall learn.
Roland sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. “Matthias.”
“Jesus, Roland, you could have told me!” Anger lent her words the force of bullets. He winced before them. “What—”
“Cameras. All the cameras in Fort Lofstrom. Not just the ordinary security ones—he’s got bugs in some of the rooms, hidden and wired into the surveillance net. You can’t sweep for them, they don’t show up, and they’re not supposed to be there. He’s a spider, Miriam. We were in his web.” Roland’s face was turned toward her, white and tortured. “If he tells the old man—”
“Damn.” Miriam shook her head in disgust. “When?”
“After you disappeared, I swear it. Miriam, he’s blackmailing me. Not you, you might survive. Angbard’d kill me. He’d be honor-bound to, if it came out.”
Miriam glared at him. “What. What did he ask. You to do?”
“Nothing!” Roland cried out. He was right on the edge. I’m scaring him, she realized, an echo of grim satisfaction cutting through the numbness around her. Good. “At least, nothing yet. He says he wants you out of the picture. Not dead, just out of the Clan politics. Invisible. What you’re doing now—he thinks I’m behind it.”
“Give me that coffee,” Miriam demanded.
“When you called about the body in the warehouse, I told Matthias because he’s in charge of internal security,” Roland explained as he poured a mug from the filter machine. “Then when you told me there was a bomb, I couldn’t figure it out. Because if he wants to blackmail me he needs you to be alive, don’t you see? So I can’t see why he’d plant it, but at the same time—”
“Roland.”
“Yes?”
“Shut up. I’m trying to think.”
Shit. Matthias. Cameras everywhere. She remembered the servant’s staircase. Roland’s bedroom. So Matthias wants us out of the way? It was tempting. “Two million dollars.”
“Huh?”
“We could go a long way on two million bucks,” she heard herself say. “But not far enough to outrun the Clan.”
“You want to—”
“Shut up.” She glared at Roland. He’d been holding out on her. For what sounded like good reasons, she admitted—but the thought made her blood run cold. Roland was no knight in shining armor. The Clan had broken him. Now all it took was Matthias pushing his buttons to make him do whatever they wanted. She wanted to hate him for it, but found that she couldn’t. The idea of going up against an organization with billions of dollars and hundreds of hands was daunting. Roland had done it once already, and paid the price. Okay, so he’s not brave, she thought. Where does that leave me? Am I brave, or crazy? “Are you holding out anything else on me?” she asked.
Roland took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “Honest. The only person who’s got anything on me is Matthias.” He chuckled bitterly, ending in a cough. “Nobody else. No other girlfriends. No boyfriends, either. Just you.”
“If Matthias has primed you for blackmail, he must want something you can do for him,” she pointed out. “He knows he could get rid of both of us by just giving us a shitload of money and covering our trail. And if he was behind these attempts to kill me, I’d be dead, wouldn’t I? So what does he want to do that involves me and needs you—and that he figures he needs a blackmail lever for?”
“I—don’t know.” Roland pulled himself together, visibly struggling to focus on the problem. “I feel so stupid. I haven’t been thinking rationally about this.”
“Yeah, well, you’d better start, then.” Miriam took a mouthful of coffee and looked at him. “What does Matthias want?”
“Advancement. Recognition. Power.” Roland answered immediately.
“Which he can’t get, because … ?”
“He’s outer family.”
“Right.” Miriam stared at him. “Do you see a pattern here?” she asked.
“He can’t get it, from the Clan. Not as long as it’s run the way it is right now.”
“So.” Miriam stood up. “We’ve been stupid, Roland. Shortsighted.”
“Huh?” He looked at her uncomprehendingly, lost in his private self-hatred.
“I’m not the target. You’re not the target. Angbard is the target.”
“Oh shit.” He straightened up. “You mean Matthias wants to take over the whole Clan security service. Don’t you?”
Miriam nodded, grimly. “With whoever his mystery accomplices are. The faction who murdered my mother and kept the family feuds going with judicious assassinations over a thirty-year period. The faction from world three. Leave aside Oliver and that poisonous dowager granny and the others who’d like me dead, Matthias is in league with those assassins. And before he makes his move—”
“He’ll tell Angbard about us, whatever we do. To get us out of the frame before he rolls the duke up. Miriam, I’ve been a fool. But we can’t go to Angbard with it—we’d be openly admitting past disloyalty, hiding things from him. What are we going to do?”