“He’s done what?” demanded Matthias, in a tone of rising disbelief.
The duke’s outer office in Fort Lofstrom was home to the duke’s secretary, and during Angbard’s lengthy absence it served as a headquarters from which the Clan’s operations in Massachusetts were coordinated. One of a chain of nine such castles up and down the eastern seaboard (in the Gruinmarkt, but also in the free kingdoms to the north and south), it coordinated the transshipment of Clan cargo along the entire eastern continental coast. Half a dozen junior Clan members were stationed there at any time, each shuttling back and forth at eight-hour intervals. Every three hours a message packet would arrive from Cambridge, and Matthias would be the first to open it and read any confidential dispatches.
This packet had contained a couple of letters, and a terse coded message. It was the latter that had whetted Matthias’s curiosity, then raised his ire.
The youth standing in front of his desk looked very frightened, but held his ground. “It came over the wireless just now, sir, an order to shut down. A blanket order, for the duration of the extraordinary general meeting, sir.” He cleared his throat. “Isn’t that unusual?”
“Hmm.” Matthias looked at him hard. “Well, Poul.” The lad was barely out of his teens, still afflicted by acne and a bad case of deference to authority—especially the kind of deadly, self-confident authority that Matthias exuded—but for all that he was brave. “We’ll just have to shut down the postal service, won’t we?” He allowed his expression to relax infinitesimally, determined not to give the youth any hint of the turmoil he felt.
“Are those your orders, sir?” Poul asked eagerly.
“No.” Matthias cocked his head. A Clan extraordinary meeting, held without warning … it didn’t smell good. In fact, it smelled extraordinarily bad to him. Ever since Esau’s asshole relatives had started trying to rub out the long-lost countess and another bunch of interlopers had joined in, things had looked distinctly unstable. “It sounds to me as if there’s something very big going on,” Matthias said slowly. “On that basis, I don’t think suspending the post is sufficient. We have assets on the other side who may not have got the warning. I’ll need you to make one more crossing to deliver a message, as soon as possible. Then we shut down. Meanwhile, it will be necessary to secure the fort.”
“Secure the—sir? Do you know what’s going on?”
Matthias fixed the young man with a grim stare. “I have a notion that it’s no good. The civil war, lad, that’s what this is about. Pigeons are coming home to roost and promises made thirty years ago are about to be delivered on.” He snorted. “Idiots,” he muttered bitterly. “Wait here. I have to go and get the special dispatches out of the duke’s office. Then I’ll go over what you have to do to deliver them.”
Matthias rose and let himself through the door into the duke’s inner study. Everything was as it had been when Angbard departed, a week ago. Matthias closed the door, then leaned his head against the wall and cursed silently. So close, so damned close! But he couldn’t just sit here. Not with that bitch about to spill her guts at the meeting. Esau’s confession—that the eldest had authorized repeated attempts on Helge’s life—had shaken him. He’d had Helge, Miriam, in his sights: She was a natural fellow traveler for his plans. He’d been getting positioned to bring her into his orbit until the idiot fanatics started trying to kill her, making her suspicious of everyone and everything. With no friends but that weakling Roland, she’d been easy meat before. But now—
He read through his illicit decrypt one more time. The original message wasn’t addressed to him, but that had never stopped Matthias in the past; as Angbard’s secretary he was used to reading the duke’s mail—and also mail for other people on station that passed through the mail room. People such as Sir Huw Thorns, lieutenant of the guard, who right now was over on the other side, making a delivery run. And he had access to the code books, too.
ACTION THIS DAY STOP ARREST MATTHIAS VAN HJORTH ANY MEANS NECESSARY STOP CHARGES OF TREASON TO FOLLOW STOP
Shit. Matthias crumpled the letter in his fist, his face a tight mask of anger. Bitch, he thought. Either his hold on Roland wasn’t as strong as he’d believed, or she was more ruthless than he’d thought. But the old man has made a mistake. Poul, the callow messenger, was in the next room. That gave him an edge, if he could only work out how to use it.
He went back out to his own office, and opened another desk drawer. He smiled to himself at the thought of Angbard’s reaction should he discover what Matthias kept in it, the use to which Matthias had put his access to the duke’s personal files. But right now there wasn’t much time for self-indulgent daydreams. What Matthias needed was a smokescreen to cover his own disappearance, and smokescreens didn’t come any thicker than this one.
First, Matthias removed the most recent addition from the safe: an anonymous CD, the enigmatic phrase “deep throat” scrawled on it in a feminine hand. Obtaining it had taken him a lot of detective work; only the hints turned up by the duke’s background checks on Miriam had kept him searching until it came to light, buried in her music collection. Next, he removed three small stamped, addressed envelopes, each containing a covering letter and a floppy disk. When he left his office a minute later, the drawer was locked and empty of incriminating evidence. And the letters were on the first stage of their journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Clan courier. Letters addressed to local FBI and DEA offices.
The huge ballroom at the back of the Clan’s palace could, when the situation demanded it, be converted into a field hospital—or a boardroom large enough to hold all the voting members of an ancient and prolific business partnership. It was only when she saw it filled that Miriam began to grasp the sheer scale of the power the Clan wielded in the Gruinmarkt.
The room was dominated by a table at one end, behind which sat a row of eight chairs: three for administrative officers of the committee, and one for each head of one of the families. Rows of green leather-topped benches had been installed facing the table, the ones farther back raised to give their occupants a view of the front. The huge glass doors that in summer would open onto the garden were closed, barricaded outside by heavy oak shutters.
The main entrance to the room was guarded by soldiers in black helmets and body armor, armed with automatic rifles. They stood impassively by as Miriam entered, Kara trailing her. “Ooh, look! It’s your uncle!” Kara whispered.
“Tell me something new. Like, where do I sit?” Angbard occupied one of the three raised chairs at the middle of the table, a black robe drawn over his suit. His expression was as grim as a hanging judge’s. The room was already beginning to fill, men and women in business attire seeking out their benches and quietly conversing. The only anomalous touch was their attendants, decked out in archaic finery.
“Excuse me, where should milady sit?” Kara simpered at a uniformed functionary who, now that Miriam was getting her bearings, seemed to be one of many who were unobtrusively directing delegates and partners to one side or another.
“Thorold-Hjorth—that would be there. Left bench, second row if she is to be called.”
Miriam drifted toward the indicated position. Like a company’s annual general meeting, she noted. It was oddly familiar, but in no way comforting. She looked up at the front table and saw that three of the high seats had already been filled—one of them by Oliver Hjorth, who caught her watching and glared at her. The other two held dusty nonentities, elderly men who looked half-asleep already as they leaned heads together to talk. I wish Roland were here, she thought uneasily. Or—no, I just wish I wasn’t facing this alone. Roland would be supportive, but he wouldn’t be much use. Would he?
“May I join you?” someone asked. Miriam glanced up.
“Olga? Yeah, sure! Did you have a good night?”
Olga sat down next to her. “No intruders,” she said smugly. “A pity. I was rather hoping.”
“Hoping?”
“To test my new M4-Super 90. Ah well. Oh, look, it’s Baron Gruinard.” She indicated one of the dried sticks at the board table.
“Is that good or bad?”
“Depends if he’s sitting for the Royal Assizes and you’re brought up in front of him. At most other times he’s rather harmless, but one hears the most frightful things when his court is in session.”
“Um.” Miriam noticed another familiar figure, an elderly dowager in a blue twin-set and pearls. Her stomach twisted. “I spy a grandmother.”
“Don’t make a habit of it.” Olga beamed in the direction of the elderly duchess, who spotted Miriam and frowned, horribly. “Isn’t she impressive?”
“Is that meant to be a compliment?”
The duchess cast Olga a hideous glare and then diverted her attention elsewhere, to a balding middle-aged man in a suit who fawned and led her toward the far side of the room.
“Where’s—”
“Hush,” said Olga. Angbard had produced a gavel from somewhere. He rapped it on the edge of the table peremptorily.
“We are gathered today for an extraordinary meeting,” Angbard announced conversationally. He frowned and tapped the elderly looking microphone. “We are gathered … state of emergency.” The sound system cut in properly and Miriam found that she no longer had to make an effort to hear him. “Thirty-two years ago, Patricia Thorold-Hjorth and Alfredo Wu were attacked on their way to this court. The bodies of Alfredo and his guards were found, but that of Patricia remained lost. Until very recently it was believed that she and her infant daughter had perished.”
A quiet ripple of conversation swept the hall. Angbard continued after a brief pause. “Four months ago an unknown woman appeared in the wilds of Nether Paarland. She was apprehended, and a variety of evidence—backed up by genetic fingerprinting, which my advisors tell me is infallible for this purpose—indicated that she was the long-lost infant, Helge Thorold-Hjorth, grown to majority in the United States.”
The conversational ripple became a cascade. Angbard brought his gavel down again and again. “Silence, I say silence! I will have silence.”
Finally the room was quiet enough for him to continue. “A decision was taken to bring Helge into the Clan. I personally took responsibility for this. Her, ah, induction, was not an immediate success. Upon her arrival here a number of unexpected events transpired. In particular, it appears that someone wanted her dead—someone who couldn’t tell the difference between a thirty-two-year-old countess and a twenty-three-year-old chatelaine, traveling together. In the interests of clarity I must add that nobody in this room is presently under suspicion.”
Miriam’s scalp prickled. Glancing aside she realized that half the eyes in the room were pointed at her. She sat up and looked back at Angbard.
“I believe we now have evidence enough to confirm the identity of the parties behind the attacks on Patricia and Alfredo, and on Patricia’s daughter, Helge. These same parties are accused of fomenting the civil war that split this Clan into opposing factions fifty-seven years ago—” Uproar. Angbard sat back and waited for almost a minute, then brought his gavel down again—”Silence, please! I intend to I present the witnesses that Clan Security has uncovered before you in due course. The floor will then be opened for motions bearing on the matter at hand.” He turned to his neighbor, an elderly gentleman who until this point appeared to have been half asleep on his throne. “Julius, if you please?…”
“Aha!” The old scarecrow bolted upright, raised a wobbling hand, and declaimed: “Calling the first witness—” He peered at a paper that Angbard slid before him, and muttered—Can’t call her, she’s dead, dammit!”
“No, she isn’t,” retorted Angbard.
“Oh, alright then. Think I’m senile, do you?” Julius stood up. “Calling Patricia Thorold-Hjorth.”
Half the room were on their feet shouting as the side door behind the table opened. Miriam had to stand, too, to see over heads to where Brilliana was entering the room, pushing a wheelchair containing her mother. Who looked bemused and rather nervous at being the focus of such uproarious attention.
“Did they take her motorized chair away to stop her running?” Miriam asked Olga.
“Oh, no—”
“Order! Order or I shall have the guards—order I say!”
Slowly order was restored. “That’s odd,” quavered Julius, “I was sure she was dead.” A ripple of laughter spread.
“So was I,” Iris—Patricia—called from her chair. Brill steered her over to one side of the table.
“Why did you run away?” asked Oliver Hjorth, leaning sideways so he could see her, an unpleasant expression of impatience on his face.
“What, uns gefen mine mudder en geleg ’hat Gelegenheit, mish’su ’em annudern frau-clapper weg tu heiraten?” Iris asked dryly. There was a shocked titter from somewhere in the audience. “Obviously not. And if you have to ask that question I also doubt very much that you’ve ever had a gang of assassins trying to murder you. A pity, that. You could benefit from the experience.”
“What’s she saying?” Miriam nudged Olga. I really must try to learn the language, she thought despairingly.
“Your mother is convincingly rude,” Olga replied, sotto voce.
“This is an imposter!” someone called from the floor. Miriam craned her neck; it might be the dowager duchess, but she couldn’t be certain. “I demand to see—”
“Order!” Angbard whacked his hammer down again. “You will be polite, madam, or I will have you escorted out of this room.”
“I apologize to the chair,” Iris responded. “However, I assure you I’m no imposter. Mother dearest, by way of proof of my identity, would you like me to repeat what I overheard you telling Erich Wu in the maze at the summer palace gardens at Kvaern when I was six?”
“You—you!” The old dowager stumbled to her feet, shaking with rage.
“I believe I can prove my case adequately, with or without blood tests,” Iris said dryly, addressing the gallery. “As any of you who have consulted the register of proxies must be aware, my mother has a strong motive for refusing to acknowledge me. Unfortunately, as in so many other circumstances, I must disobey her wishes.”
“Nonsense!” blurted the duchess, an expression of profound horror settling on her face. She sat down quickly.
“I can attest that she is no imposter,” said Angbard. “If anyone requests independent verification, this can be arranged. Does any party to this meeting so desire?” He glanced around the room, but no hands went up. “Very well.” He rapped on the table again with his gavel. “I intend to bring up the issue of Lady Thorold-Hjorth’s absence again, but not at this session. Suffice to say, I am convinced of her authenticity. As you have just seen, her mother appears to be convinced, too.” Spluttering from the vicinity of the dowager failed to break his poise. “Now, we have more urgent matters to consider. My reason for reintroducing Lady Patricia to this body was to, ah, make it clear where the next matter is coming from.”
“Clear as mud,” the elderly Julius remarked to nobody in particular.
“I’d like to call the next witness before the committee,” Angbard continued, unperturbed. “Lady Olga Thorold has been the subject of outrageous attempts upon her person, and has had her lady-in-waiting murdered, very recently—while traveling in the company of Lady Helge. All of this has occurred in the past six months. Please approach the table.”
Olga rose and walked to the front of the table. The room was silent.
“In your own words, would you please tell us about the series of attacks on your person, when and where they began, and why they were unsuccessful?”
Olga cleared her throat. “Last December I was summoned to spend time with Duke Lofstrom at his castle. I had for a year before then been petitioning him for an active role, in the hope that he could find a use for me in the trade. He asked me to escort Helge Thorold-Hjorth, newly arrived and ignorant of our ways, both to educate her and to ensure that no harm came to her. I do not believe he anticipated subsequent events when we arrived at this house—” She continued to enumerate intrusion after intrusion, outrage by outrage, pausing only when interrupted from the floor by a burst of voices demanding further explanation.
Miriam watched in near-astonishment. “Is everyone here something to do with Clan Security?” she asked Kara quietiy.
“Not me, milady!” Kara’s eyes were wide.
Olga finished by recounting how Miriam had brought her to a new world, and how they had been assaulted there, too, by strangers. A voice from the floor called out. “Wait! How do you know it was another world? Can’t it possibly have been another region of ’Merica?”
“No, it can’t,” Olga said dismissively. “I’ve seen America, and I’ve seen this other place, and the differences are glaringly obvious. They both sprang from the same roots, but clearly they have diverged—in America, the monarchy is not hereditary, is it?” She frowned for a moment. “Did I say something wrong?”
Uproar. “What’s all this nonsense about?” demanded Earl Hjorth, red-faced. “It’s clear as day that this can’t be true! If it was, there might be a whole new world out there!”
“I believe there is,” Olga replied calmly.
The gavel rose and fell on the resulting babble. “Silence! I now call Helge Thorold-Hjorth, alias Miriam Beckstein. Please approach the table.”
Miriam swallowed as she stood up and walked over.
“Please describe for the Clan how you come to be here. From the day you first learned of your heritage.”
“We’ll be here all day—”
“Nevertheless, if you please.”
“Certainly.” Miriam took a deep breath. “It started the day I lost my job with a business magazine in Cambridge. I went to visit my mother—” a nod to Iris “—who asked me to fetch down a box from her attic. The box was full of old papers …”
She kept going until she reached her patent filing in New Britain, the enterprise she was setting up, and Olga’s shooting. Her throat was dry and the room was silent. She shook her head. “Can I have a glass of water, please?” she asked. A tumbler appeared next to her.
“Thank you. By this time I had some ideas. The people who kept trying to murder Iris—sorry, Patricia—and who kept going after me, or getting at Olga by mistake—they had to be relatives. But apart from one attempt, there was never any sign of them on the other side, in America that is. I remembered being told about a long-lost brother who headed west in the earliest days of the Clan. You know—we learned—that they, too, use a pattern to let them world-walk, however they can travel only from here to New Britain, to the place I’ve just been telling you about.
“What I’ve pieced together is something like this. A very long time ago one of the brothers headed west. He fell on hard times and lost his amulet. In fact, he ended up as an indentured slave and took nearly ten years to save the cash to buy his freedom. Once free, he had to reconstruct the knot design from memory. Either that, or his was deliberately sabotaged by a sibling. Whichever, the knot he painted was different. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough; where you go when you world-walk depends on the design you use as a key. We now know of two keys, but there’s another fact—the other one, this lost brother’s knot, doesn’t work in America. Our America. The one we go to.
“Anyway, he crossed over repeatedly, because it had been arranged that at regular intervals he should check for his brothers. They evidently intended to send a trade caravan to meet him, somewhere in Northern California perhaps. But he never found his business partners waiting for him, because they were elsewhere, traveling to another world where, presumably, they interpreted his absence as a sign that he’d died. He was cut off completely, and put it down to betrayal.”
“Preposterous!” Someone in the front row snorted, prompting Angbard to bring down the gavel again. Miriam took the opportunity to help herself to a glass of water.
“This brother, Lee, had a family. His family was less numerous, less able to provide for themselves, than the Clan. Just as the ability was lost to your ancestors for a generation or two, so it was with his descendants—and it took longer before some first cousins or cousins married and had an infant with renewed ability. They prospered much as you have, but more slowly. The New British don’t have a lot of time for Chinese merchants, and as a smaller family they had far fewer active world-walkers to rely on.
“Now, the Lees only found the Clan again when the family Wu moved west, less than a century ago. The Lees reacted—well, I think it was out of fear, but they basically conducted the campaign of assassinations that kicked off the feud. Everyone in the Clan knew that the murders could only have been carried out by world-walkers, so the attacks on the western families were blamed—understandably—on their cousins back east.”
She paused. The level of conversation breaking out in the benches made continuing futile. Angbard raised his gavel but she held up a hand. “Any questions?” she asked.
“Yes! What’s this business—”
“—How did you travel—”
“—We going to put up with these lies?”
Bang. Miriam jumped as Angbard brought down the gavel. “One at a time,” he snapped. “Helge, if you please. You have the floor.”
“The new world, where the other family—the Lees—go, is like the one I grew up in, but less well developed. There are a number of reasons for this, but essentially it boils down to the apparent fact that it diverged historically from my own about two hundred and fifty years ago. If you want evidence of its existence I have witnesses, Lady Olga and Brilliana d’Ost, and video recordings. I can even take you over there, if you are willing to accept my directions—remember, it is a very different country from the United States, and if you don’t bear that in mind you can get into trouble very easily. But let me emphasize this. I believe anyone who is sitting in this room now can go there quite easily, by simply using a Lee family talisman instead of a Clan one. You can verify this for yourselves. I repeat: It appears that if you have the ability to world-walk, you can go to different worlds simply by using a different kind of talisman.
“New Britain only had an industrial revolution a century ago. I’ve established a toehold over there, by setting up an identity and filing some basic engineering patents on the automobile. They’ll be big in about five to ten years. My business plan was to leverage inventions from the U.S.A. that haven’t been developed over there, rather than trading in physical commodities or providing transportation. But by doing this, I attracted the Lee family’s attention. They worked out soon enough that I’d acquired one of their lockets and was setting up on their territory. As Olga told you, they attempted to black-bag my house, and we were waiting for them.” She glanced at Angbard for approval. He nodded to her, so she went on. “We took a prisoner, alive. He was in possession of an amulet and he’s indisputably a world-walker, but he’s not of the Clan. I asked for some medical tests. Ah, my lord?”
The duke cleared his throat. “Blood tests confirm that the prisoner is a very distant relative. And a world-walker. It appears that there are six families, after all.”
Now he resorted to his hammer again, in earnest—but to no avail. After five minutes, when things began to quieten down, Angbard signaled for the sergeant at arms to bring order to the hall. “Order!” he shouted. “We will recess for one hour, to take refreshments. Then the meeting will resume.” He rose, scowling ominously at the assembled Clan shareholders. “What you’ve heard so far is the background. There is more to come.”
Morning on the day shift in Boston. The office phones were already ringing as Mike Fleming swiped his badge and walked in past security.
“Hi, Mike!” Pete Garfinkle, his officemate, waved on his way back from the coffee machine.
“’Lo.” Mike was never at his best, early in the morning. Winter blues, one of his ex-girlfriends had called it in a forgiving moment. (Blues so deep they were ultraviolet, the same girlfriend had said as she was moving out—blues so deep she’d gotten radiation burns.) “Anything in?”
“What? On the—” Pete waved a finger.
“Office. Okay, give me five minutes.”
Mike wandered along to the vending machine, passing a couple of suits from the public liaison office, and collected a mug of coffee. Traffic was bad this morning, really bad. And he hadn’t shaved properly either. It was only nine but he already had a five o’clock shadow, adding to his bearish appearance. Don’t mess with me.
Pete was already nose-deep in paperwork that had come in the morning mail when Mike finally made it to his desk. Pete was a morning guy, always frazzled by six o’clock—when Mike was just hitting his stride. “Tell me the news,” Mike grunted. “Anything happening?”
“On the Hernandez case? Judge Judy has it on her docket.” Pete grinned humorlessly.
“Judge Judy couldn’t find his ass with a submarine’s periscope and a map.” Mike pulled a face, put his mug of coffee down, and rubbed his eyes. The urge to yawn was nearly irresistible. “Judge Judy is about the least likely to sign a no-knock—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all about your pissing match with hizonner Stephen Jude. Can it, Mike, he works for Justice, it’s his job to gum up the works. No point taking it personal.”
“Huh. That fucker Julio needs to go down, though. I mean, the goddamn Pope knows what he’s at! What the hell else do we need to convince the DA he’s got a case?”
“Fifty keys of crack and a blow job from the voters.” Pete leaned his chair perilously far back—the office was so cramped that a sideswipe would risk demolishing piles of banker’s boxes—and snorted. “Relax, dude. We’ll get him.”
“Huh. Give me that.” Mike held out a huge hand and Pete dumped a pile of mail into it. “Ack.” Mike carefully put it down on his desk, then picked up his coffee and took a sip. “Bilge water.”
“One of these days you’d better try and kick the habit,” Pete said mildly. “It can’t be doing your kidneys any good.”
“Listen, I run on coffee,” Mike insisted. “Lessee—”
He thumbed rapidly through the internal mail, sorting administrative memos from formal letters—some branches still ran on paper, their intranets unconnected to the outside world—and a couple of real, honest, postal envelopes. He stacked them in three neat piles and switched on his PC. While he waited for it to boot he opened the two letters from outside. One of them was junk, random spam sent to him by name and offering cheap loans. The other—
“Holy shit!”
Pete started, nearly going over backwards in his chair. “Hey! You want to keep a lid—”
“Holy shit!”
Pete turned around. Mike was on his feet, a letter clutched in both hands and an expression of awe on his face. “What?” Pete asked mildly.
“Got to get this to forensics,” Mike muttered, carefully putting the letter down on his desk, then carefully peering inside the envelope. A little plastic baggie with something brown in it—
“Evidence?” asked Pete, interestedly: “Hey, I thought that was external?”
“You’re not kidding!” Mike put it down as delicately as if it was made of fine glass. “Anonymous tip-offs ‘R’ us!”
“Explain.”
“This letter.” Mike pointed. “It’s fingering the Phantom.”
“You’re sure about that?” Pete looked disbelieving. Mike nodded. “Jesus, Mike, you need to learn some new swear words, holy shit doesn’t cut it! Show me that thing—”
“Whoa!” Mike carefully lifted the envelope. “Witness. You and me, we’re going down to the lab to see what’s in this baggie. If it’s what the letter says, and it checks out, it’s a sample from that batch of H that hit New York four months ago. You know? The really big one that coincided with that OD spike, pushed the price down so low they were buying it by the ounce? From the Phantom network?”
“So?” Pete looked interested. “Somebody held onto a sample.”
“Somebody just sent us a fucking tip-off that there’s an address in Belmont that’s the local end of the distribution chain. Wholesale, Pete. Name, rank, and serial number. Dates—we need to check the goddamn dates. Pete, this is an inside job. Someone on the inside of the Phantom wants to come in from the cold and they’re establishing their bona fides.”
“We’ve had falsies before. Anonymous bastards.”
“Yeah, but this one’s got a sample, and a bunch of supplementaries. From memory, I think it checks out—at least, there’s not anything obviously wrong with it at first glance. I want it dusted for fingerprints and DNA samples before we go any further. What do you think?”
Pete whistled. “If it checks out, and the dates match, I figure we can get the boss to come along with us and go lean on Judge Judy. A break on the Phantom would be just too cool.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Mike grinned ferociously. “How well do you think we can resource this one?”
“If it’s the Phantom? Blank check time. Jesus, Mike, if this is the Phantom, I think we’ve just had the biggest break in this office in about the last twenty years. It’s going to be all over Time Magazine if this goes down!”
In the hallway outside the boardroom, the palace staff had busied themselves setting up a huge buffet. Cold cuts from a dozen game animals formed intricate sculptures of meat depicting their animate origins. Jellied larks vied with sugar-pickled fruit from the far reaches of the West Coast, and exotic delicacies imported at vast expense formed pyramids atop a row of silver platters the size of small dining tables. Hand-made Belgian truffles competed for the attention of the aristocracy with caviar-topped crackers and brightly colored packets of M&Ms.
Despite the huge expanse of food, most of the Clan shareholders had other things in mind. Though waiters with trays laden with wine glasses circulated freely—and with jugs of imported coffee and tea—the main appetite they exhibited seemed to be for speech. And speech with one or two people in particular.
“Just keep them away from me, please,” Miriam said plaintively, leaning close to Olga. “They’ll be all over me.”
“You can’t avoid them!” Olga insisted, taking her arm and steering her toward the open doors onto the reception area. “Do you want them to think you’re afraid?” she hissed in Miriam’s ear. “They’re like rats that eat their own young if they smell weakness in the litter.”
“It’s not that—I’ve got to go.” Miriam pulled back and steered Olga in turn, toward the door at the back of the boardroom where she’d seen Angbard pushing her mother’s wheelchair, ahead of the crush. Kara, her eyes wide, stuck close behind Miriam.
“Where are you going?” asked Olga.
“Follow.” Miriam pushed on.
“Eh, I say! Young woman!”
A man Miriam didn’t recognize, bulky and gray-haired, was blocking her way. Evidently he wanted to buttonhole her. She smiled blandly. “If you don’t mind, sir, there’ll be time to talk later. But I urgently need to have words with—” She gestured as she slid past him, leaving Kara to soothe ruffled feathers, and shoved the door open.
“Ma!”
It was a small side room, sparsely furnished by Clan standards. Iris looked around as she heard Miriam. Angbard looked round, too, as did a cadaverous-looking fellow with long white hair who had been hunched slightly, on the receiving end of some admonition.
“Helge,” Angbard began, in a warning tone of voice.
“Mother!” Miriam glared at Iris, momentarily oblivious.
“Hiya, kid.” Iris grinned tiredly. “Allow me to introduce you to another of your relatives. Henryk? I’d like to present my daughter.” Iris winked at Angbard: “Cut her a little slack, alright?”
The man who’d been listening to Angbard tilted his head on one shoulder. “Charmed,” he said politely.
The duke coughed into a handkerchief and cast Miriam a grim look. “You should be circulating,” he grumbled.
“Henryk was always my favorite uncle,” Iris said, glancing at the duke. “I mean, there had to be one of them, didn’t there?”
Miriam paused uncomfortably, unwilling to meet Angbard’s gaze. Meanwhile, Henryk looked her up and down. “I see,” she said after a moment. “Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?”
“Helge.” Angbard refused to be ignored. “You should be out front. Mixing with the guests.” He frowned at her. “You know how much stock they put in appearances.” Harrumph. “This is their first sight of you. Do you want them to think you’re a puppet? Conspiring with the bench?”
“I am conspiring with you,” she pointed out. “And anyway, they’d eat me alive. You obviously haven’t done enough press conferences. You don’t throw the bait in the water if you want to pull it out intact later, do you? You’ve got to keep these things under control.”
Angbard’s frown intensified. “This isn’t a press conference; this is a beauty show,” he said. “If you do not go out there and make the right moves they will assume that you cannot. And if you can’t, what are you good for? I arranged this session at your request. The least you can do is not make a mess of it.”
“There’s going to be a vote later on,” Iris commented. “Miriam, if they think you’re avoiding them it’ll give the reactionary bastards a chance to convince the others that you’re a fraud, and that won’t go in your favor, will it?”
Miriam sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Ma, family solidarity.”
“She’s right, you know,” Henryk spoke up. “Motions will go forward. They may accept your claim of title, but not your business proposals. Not if names they know and understand oppose it, and you are not seen to confront them.”
“But they’ll—” Miriam began.
“I have a better idea!” Olga announced brightly. “Why don’t you both go forth to charm the turbulent beast?” She beamed at them both. “That way they won’t know who to confront! Like the ass that starved between two overflowing mangers.”
Iris glanced sidelong at Miriam. Was it worry? Miriam couldn’t decide. “That would never do,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t—”
“Oh yes you can, Patricia,” Angbard said with a cold gleam in his eye.
“But if I go out there Mother will make a scene! And then—”
Miriam caught herself staring at Iris in exasperation, sensing an echo of a deeper family history she’d grown up shielded from. “The dowager will make a scene, will she?” Miriam asked, a dangerous note in her voice: “Why shouldn’t she? She hasn’t seen you for decades. Thought you were dead, probably. You didn’t get along with her when you were young, but so what? Maybe you’ll both find the anger doesn’t matter anymore. Why not try it?” She caught Angbard’s eye. Her uncle, normally stony-faced, looked positively anesthetized, as if to stifle an image-destroying outburst of laughter.
“You don’t know the old bat,” Iris warned grimly.
“She hasn’t changed,” Angbard commented. “If anything, she’s become even more set in her ways.” Harrumph. He hid his face in his handkerchief again.
“She’s been getting worse ever since she adopted that young whipper-snapper Oliver as her confidante,” Henryk mumbled vaguely. “Give me Alfredo any day, we’d have straightened him out in time—” He didn’t seem to notice Iris’s face tightening.
“Ma,” Miriam said warningly.
“Alright! That’s enough.” Iris pushed herself upright in her wheelchair, an expression of grim determination on her face. “Miriam, purely for the sake of family solidarity, you push. You, young lady, what’s your name—”
“Olga,” Miriam offered.
“—I know that, dammit! Olga, open the doors and keep the idiots from pushing me over and letting my darling daughter sneak away. Angbard—”
“I’ll start the session again in half an hour,” he said, shaking his head. “Just remember.” He turned a cool eye on Miriam, all trace of levity gone: “It cost me a lot to set this up for you. Don’t make a mess of it.”
Down in the post office in the basement of Fort Lofstrom, two men waited nervously for their superior to arrive. Both of them were young—one was barely out of his teens—and they dressed like law firm clerks or trainee accountants. “Is this for real?” the younger one kept asking, nervously. “I mean, has it really happened? Why does nobody tell us anything? Shit, this sucks!”
“Shut up and wait,” said the elder, leaning against a wall furnished with industrial shelving racks, holding a range of brightly colored plastic boxes labeled by destination. “Haven’t you learned anything?”
“But the meeting! I mean, what’s going on? Have the old guys finally decided to stop us going over—”
“I said, shut the fuck up.” The older courier glared at the kid with all the world-weary cynicism of his twenty-six years. Spots, tufts of straggly beard hair—Sky Father, why do I get to nurse the babies? “Listen, nothing is going to go wrong.”
He nudged the briefcase at his feet. Inside its very expensive aluminium shell was a layer of plastic foam. Inside the plastic foam nestled a bizarrely insectile-looking H&K submachine gun. The kid didn’t need to know that, though. “When the boss man gets here, we do a straight delivery run then lock down the house. You stay with the boss and do what he says. I get the fun job of telling the postmen to drop everything and yelling at the holiday heads to execute their cover plans. Then we arrest anyone who tries to drop by. Get it? The whole thing will be over in forty-eight hours, it’s just a routine security lockdown.”
“Yes, Martijn.” The kid shook his head, puzzled. “But there hasn’t been an extraordinary meeting in my lifetime! And this is an emergency lockdown, isn’t it? Shutting down everything, telling all our people on the other side to go hide, that sucks. What’s going on?”
The courier looked away. Hurry up and get the nonsense out of your system, he thought. “What do you think they’re doing?” he asked.
“It’s obvious: They envy us, don’t they? The old dudes. Staying over, fitting in. You know I’m going back to college in a couple of weeks, did I tell you about the shit my uncle Stani’s been handing out about that? I’ve got a girlfriend and a Miata and a place of my own and he’s giving me shit because he never had that stuff. What do you need to learn reading for if you’ve got scribes? he told me. And you know what? Some of them, if they could stop us going back—”
The door opened, stemming his tirade in full flood. The older courier straightened up; the young one just flushed, his mouth running down in a frightened stammer. “Uh, yessir, uh, going back, uh—”
“Shut up,” Matthias said coldly.
One more squeak and the kid fell silent. Matthias nodded at Martijn, the older one. “You ready?” he asked.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Very well.” Matthias didn’t smile, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders. He wore a leather flying jacket and jeans, with gloves on his hands and a day pack slung over one arm. “Kid. You are going to carry me across. Ready?”
“Uh.” Gulp. “Yessir. Yes. Sir.”
“Hah.” Matthias glanced at the older one. “Go on, then.” He advanced on the youth. “I’m heavier than any load you’re used to. You will need to have your key ready in one hand. When you are ready, speak, and I’ll climb on your back. Try not to break.”
“Yessir!”
A minute later they were in another post room. This one was slightly smaller, its shelves less full, and a row of wheeled suitcases were parked on the opposite wall inside an area painted with yellow stripes. The kid collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath while Matthias looked around for the older courier. “Martijn. You have your orders?”
“Yes. My lord.”
“Execute them.”
Matthias removed a briefcase from the rack on one wall then walked toward the exit from the room. He unlocked it then waved Martijn and the younger courier through. Once they were in me elevator to the upper floors, Matthias shut the door—then turned on his heel and headed for the emergency stairs to the garage.
The silver-blue BMW convertible was waiting for him, just as he’d ordered. Finally, Matthias cracked a smile, thin-lipped and humorless. There was barely room for the briefcase in the trunk, and his day pack went on the passenger seat. He fired up the engine as he hit the “door open” button on the dash, accelerating up the ramp and into the daylight beyond.
“Fifteen minutes,” he whispered to himself as he merged with the traffic on the Cambridge turnpike. “Give me fifteen minutes!”
The time passed rapidly. Waiting at an intersection, Matthias pulled out a cheap anonymous mobile phone and speed-dialed a number. It rang three times before the person at the other end answered.
“Who is this?” they asked.
“This is Judas. Listen, I will say this once. The address you want is …” he rattled through the details of the location he’d just left. “Got that?”
“Yes. Who are you and—”
Matthias casually flipped the phone out of the half-open window then accelerated away. Moments later, an eighteen-wheeler reduced it to plastic shrapnel.
“Fuck you very much,” he muttered, a savage joy in his eyes. “You can’t fire me: I quit!”
It wasn’t until he was nearly at the airport with his wallet full of bearer bonds and a briefcase full of Clan secrets that he began to think about what to do next.
A ghastly silence fell across the grand hall as Miriam stepped out of the doorway. She took a deep breath and smiled as brightly as she could. “Don’t mind me!” she said.
“That’s right,” Iris whispered, “mind me, you back-stabbing faux-aristocratic bastards!”
“Mother!” she hissed, keeping a straight face only with considerable effort.
“Oligarchic parasites. Hah.” Louder: “Steer left, if you please, can’t you tell left from right? That’s better. Now, who do I have to bribe to get a glass of Pinot Noir around here?”
Iris’s chatter seemed to break an invisible curtain of suspense. Conversations started up again around the room, and a pair of anxious liveried servants hurried forward, bearing trays with glasses.
Iris hooked a glass of red wine with a slightly wobbly hand and took a suspicious sniff. “It’ll pass,” she declared. “Help yourself while you’re at it,” she told Miriam. “Don’t just stand there like a rabbit in the headlights.”
“Um. Are you sure it’s wise to drink?”
“I’ve always had difficulty coping with my relatives sober. But yes, I take your point.” Iris took a moderate sip. “I won’t let the side down.”
“Okay, Mom.” Miriam took a glass. She looked up just in time to see Kara across the room, looking frightened, standing beside an unfamiliar man in late middle age. “Hmm. Looks like the rats are deserting or something. Olga?”
Beside her and following her gaze, Olga had tensed. “That’s Peffer Hjorth. What’s she doing talking to him, the minx?”
“Peffer Hjorth?”
“The baron’s uncle. Outer family, not a member.”
Iris whistled tunelessly. “Well, well, well. One of yours?” she asked Miriam.
“I thought so.” Miriam took a sip of wine. Her mouth felt bitter, ashy.
“Lady Helge, what a story! Fascinating! And your mother—why, Patricia? It’s been such a long time!”
She looked around, found Iris craning her neck, too. “Turn me, please, Miriam—” Iris was looking up and down: “Mors Hjalmar! Long time indeed. How are you doing?”
The plumpish man with a neatly trimmed beard and hair just covering his collar—like a middle-aged hippy uncomfortably squeezed into a dark suit for a funeral or court appearance—grinned happily. “I’m doing well, Patricia, well!” His expression sank slightly. “I was doing better before this blew up, I think. They mostly ignore me.” He rubbed his left cheek thoughtfully. “Which is no bad thing.” He looked at Olga, askance. “And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”
“This is Lady Olga Thorold,” Iris offered.
“And you are of the same party as these, ah, elusive Thorold-Hjorths?”
“Indeed I am!” Olga said tightly.
“Oh. Well, then.” He shrugged. “I mean no offense, but it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s helping who, don’t you know?”
“Lady Olga has only our best interests at heart,” Miriam replied. “You knew my mother?”
Iris had been looking up at Mors all this time, her mouth open slightly, as if surprised to see him. Now she shook her head. “Thirty years,” she muttered darkly. “And they haven’t murdered you yet?” Suddenly she smiled. “Maybe there’s hope for me after all.”
“Do you know what she means?” Miriam asked Olga, puzzled.
“I, ahem, led an eccentric life many years ago,” said Mors.
Iris shook her head. “Mors was the first of our generation to actually demand—and get—a proper education. Yale Law School, but they made him sign away his right of seniority, if I remember rightly. Wasn’t that so?” she asked.
“Approximately.” Mors smiled slightly. “It took them a few years to realize that the Clan badly needed its own attorney on the other side.” His smile broadened by inches.
“What?” Iris looked almost appalled. “No, I can’t see it.”
“So don’t.” He looked slightly uncomfortable. “Is it true?” His eyes were fixed on Iris.
“If she says it’s true, it’s true,” Iris insisted, jerking her head slightly in Miriam’s direction. “A credit to the family.” She pulled a face. “Not that that’s what I wanted, but—”
“—We don’t always get what we want,” Mors finished for her, nodding. “I think I see.” He looked thoughtful. Then he looked at Miriam. “If you need any legal advice, here’s my card,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Miriam, pocketing it. “But I think I may need a different kind of help right now.” All too damned true, she thought, seeing what was bearing down on them. Nemesis had two heads and four arms, and both heads wore haughty expressions of utmost disdain, carefully tempered for maximum intransigence.
“Well, if it isn’t the runaway,” snorted head number one, Baron Hjorth, with a negligent glance in Miriam’s direction.
“Imposter, you mean,” croaked head number two, glaring at her like a Valkyrie fingering her knife and wondering who to feed to the ravens next.
“Hello, mother.” Iris smiled, a peculiar expression that Miriam had seen only once or twice before and which filled her with an urgent desire to duck and cover. “Been keeping well, I see?”
“I’ll just be off,” Mors started nervously—then stopped as Iris clamped a hand on his wrist. In any case, the gathering cloud of onlookers made a discreet escape impossible. There was only one conversation worth eavesdropping in this reception, and this was it.
“I was just catching up on old times with Mors,” Iris cooed sweetly, her eyes never leaving the dowager’s face. “He was telling me all about your retirement.”
Ooh, nasty. Miriam forced herself to smile, glanced sideways, and saw Olga glaring at head number one. The baron somehow failed to turn to stone, but his hauteur seemed to melt slightly. “Hello, Oliver,” said Miriam. “I’m glad to see you’re willing to talk to me instead of sneaking into my boudoir when I’m not about.”
“I have never—” he began pompously.
“—Stow it!” snapped Iris. “And you, mother—” she waved a finger at her mother, who was gathering herself up like a serpent readying to strike—”I gather you’ve been encouraging this odious person, have you?”
“Who I encourage or not is none of your business!” Hildegarde hissed. “You’re a disgrace to family and Clan, you whore. I should have turned you out the day I gave birth to you. As for your bastard—”
“—I believe I understand, now.” Miriam nodded, outwardly cordially, at Baron Hjorth. Startled, he pretended to ignore her words: “Your little plan to get back the Clan shares ceded to trust when my mother vanished—I got in the way, didn’t I? But not to worry. An insecure apartment, a fortune-seeking commoner turned rapist, and an unlocked door on the roof would see to that. Wouldn’t it?” If not a couple of goons with automatic weapons, she added mentally. Just by way of insurance.
The duchess gasped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Quite possibly you don’t,” Miriam agreed. She jabbed a finger: “He does, don’t you, you vile little turd?”
Baron Oliver had turned beet-red with her first accusation. Now he began to shake. “I have never conspired to blemish the virtue of a Clan lady!” he insisted. The duchess glared at him. “And if you allege otherwise—”
“Put up or shut up, I’d say,” Iris said flatly. “Mors, wouldn’t you say that any accusations along those lines would require an indictment? Before the committee, perhaps?”
“Mmm, possibly.” Mors struck a thoughtful pose, seeming to forget his earlier enthusiasm to be elsewhere. “Were there witnesses? Unimpeachable ones?”
“I don’t think any charges against the baron could be made to stick,” Miriam said slowly, watching him. He watched her right back, unblinking. “And you will note that I made no allegation of involvement in a conspiracy to commit rape on your part,” she added to Hjorth. Or to send gunmen round to Olga’s rooms. “Although I might change my mind if you supplied the cause.” She smiled.
“You bitch,” he snarled.
“Just remember where I got it from.” She nodded at her grandmother, who, speechless with rage, hung on Hjorth’s arm like an overripe apple, ruddy-faced and swollen with wasps. “We really must get together for a family reunion one of these days,” she added. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of poison recipes to share with me.”
“I’d stop, if I were you,” Iris observed with clinical interest. “If you push her any further the only reunion you’ll get is over her coffin.”
“You treacherous little minx! …” Hildegarde was shaking with fury.
“So it’s treachery now, is it? Because I had higher standards than you and didn’t want to marry my way to the top of the dung heap?” Iris threw back at her.
“Children,” Miriam sighed. She caught Olga’s eye.
“I didn’t notice you making an effort to find any suitable alternatives!” the duchess snapped. “And it got the Wu and Hjorth factions to stop murdering each other. Would you rather the feuding had continued? We’d both be dead a dozen times over by now!” She was breathing deeply. “You’ve got no sense of duty,” she said bitterly.
“The feuding, in case you’ve been asleep, was caused by forces outside our control,” Iris retorted. “You gained precisely nothing, except for a wife-beating son-in-law. Your granddaughter, now, has actually done something useful for the first time in living memory in this Clan of parasites. She’s actually uncovered some of the reasons why we’ve been messed up for so long. The least you could do is apologize to her!”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Hildegarde said stiffly. But Miriam saw her grip on Hjorth’s arm tighten.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” Oliver Hjorth muttered in her ear: “You’re quite right about them.” He cast a poisonous stare at Miriam. “Especially that one.”
“You—” Miriam was brought up short by Olga’s hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t,” Olga said urgently. “He wants you to react.”
For the first time, Hjorth smiled. “She’s right, you know,” he said. “On that note, I shall bid you adieu, ladies. If I may conduct you back to civilized conversation, madam?” he added to the dowager.
Iris stared bleakly at the receding back of her mother. “I swear she’ll outlive us all,” Iris muttered. Then she glanced at Miriam. “There’s no justice in this world, is there, kid?”
“What was she talking about?” Miriam asked slowly. “The treachery thing.”
“An old disagreement,” said Iris. She sounded old and tired. “A bit like picking at scabs. Most families have got the odd skeleton in the closet. We’ve got a whole damn graveyard in every wardrobe, practicing their line dancing. Don’t sweat it.”
“But—” Miriam stopped. She remembered her wine glass and took a mouthful. Her hand was shaking so badly that she nearly spilled it.
“You won,” Olga said thoughtfully.
“Huh?”
“She’s right. You went eyeball to eyeball with the baron, and he blinked. They’ll know you’ve got balls now. That counts for everything here. And I—” Iris stopped.
“You got your mother on the defensive,” said Miriam. “Didn’t you?”
“I’m not sure,” Iris said uncertainly. “Old iron-face must be rusting. Either that, or there’s a deep game I don’t know about. She never used to concede anything.”
“Iron-face?”
“What we called her. Me and your aunt Elsa.”
“I have an aunt, too?”
“Had. She died. Olga, if you don’t mind taking over my chair? Miriam seems to be having trouble.”
“Died—”
“You didn’t think I had it in for the old bat just because of how she treated me, did you?”
“Oh.” Miriam bolted back the rest of her wine glass, sensing the depths she was treading water over. “I think I need another glass now.”
“Better drink it quick, then. Things are about to get interesting again.”
There was a low bed with a futon mattress on it. It occupied most of a compact bedroom on the third floor of an inconspicuous building in downtown Boston. The bed was occupied, even though it was late morning; Roland had been awake for most of the night, working on the next month’s courier schedule, worrying and reassigning bodies from a discontinued security operation. In fact, he’d deliberately worked an eighteen-hour shift just to tire himself out so that he could sleep. The worries wouldn’t go away. What if they find her incompetent? was one of them. Another was, What if the old man finds out about us? In the end he’d slugged back a glass of bourbon and a five-milligram tab of diazepam, stripped, and climbed into bed to wait for the pharmaceutical knockout.
Which was why, when the raid began, Roland was unconscious: dead to the world, sleeping the sleep of the truly exhausted, twitching slightly beneath the thin cotton sheet.
A faint bang shuddered through the walls and floor. Roland grunted and rolled over slowly, still half-asleep. Outside his door, a shrill alarm went off. “Huh?” He sat up slowly, rubbing at his eyes to clear the fog of night, and slapped vaguely at the bedside light switch.
The phone began to shrill. “Uh.” He picked up the handset, fumbling it slightly: “Roland here. What is it?”
“We’re under attack! Some guys just tried to smash in the front door and the rooftop—”
The lights flickered and the phone died. Somewhere in the building the emergency generator cut in, too slowly to keep the telephone switch powered. “Shit.” Roland put the handset down and hastily dragged on trousers and sweater. He pulled his pistol out of the bedside drawer, glanced at the drawn curtains, decided not to risk moving them, and opened the door.
A young Clan member was waiting for him, frantic with worry. “Wh-what are we going to do, boss?” he demanded, jumping up and down.
“Slow down.” Roland looked around. “Who else is here?”
“Just me!”
“On site, I mean,” he corrected. He shook his head again, trying to clear the Valium haze. At least he could world-walk away, he realized. He never removed his locket, even in the shower. “Is the door holding?”
“The door, the door—” The kid stopped shaking. “Yessir. Yessir. The door?”
“Okay, I tell you what I want you to do.” Roland put a hand on the kid’s shoulder, trying to calm him. He was vibrating like an overrevved engine. “Calm down. Don’t panic. That’s first. You have a tattoo, yes?”
“Y-yessir.”
“Okay. We are going to go below then, and—when did you last walk?”
“Uh, uh, hour ago! We brought the lord secretary over—”
“The secretary?” Roland stopped dead. “Shit. Tell me you didn’t.” The kid’s expression was all the confirmation Roland needed.
“Wh-what’s wrong?”
“Maybe nothing,” Roland said absently. Shit, shit, he thought. Matthias. It was a gut-deep certainty, icy cold, that Matthias was behind this. Whatever was going on. “Follow me. Quickly!” Roland grabbed his jacket on the way out and rummaged in one pocket for a strip of pills. With his hair uncombed and two day’s growth of beard, he probably looked a mess, but he didn’t have time to fix that now. He dry-swallowed, pulling a face. “Go down the stairs all the way to the bottom, fast. When you get to the parcel room, pick up all the consignments in bin eleven that you can grab and cross over immediately. If men with guns get the drop on you, either cross immediately or surrender and let them take you, then cross as soon as you can, blind. Don’t try to resist; you’re not trained.”
“You, sir?” The kid’s eyes were wide.
“Me neither.” Roland shrugged, tried a grin, gave up. “C’mon. We’ve got to get word out.”
He clattered down the concrete emergency stairwell taking the steps two at a time, stopping at the ground floor. He motioned the kid on down. “Send word as soon as you get through,” he called. Then he stopped, his heart hammering.
“Sir?” He looked up. It was Sullivan, one of the outer family guards who lived on the premises.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Tell me!”
A hollow boom rattled through the corridor and Sullivan winced. “We’re on skeleton strength,” he said. “They’re trying to batter down the door!” The front door was armored like a bank vault, and the walls were reinforced. A normal ram wouldn’t work, it would take explosives or cutting tools to get through it.
“Who?” Roland demanded.
“Cops.”
“How many we got here?”
“Nine.”
“I just sent the kid away. Walkers?”
Sullivan just looked at him.
“Shit.” Roland shook his head, dumbfounded. “There’s nobody?”
“Martijn and young Poul came in with the lord secretary this morning. They’re the only walkers who’ve come over since Marissa and Ivar finished their shift last night. And I can’t find Martijn or his lordship’s proxy.”
“Oh.” Everything became clear to Roland. “How long can we hold out?”
“Against the feds?” Sullivan shrugged. “We’re buttoned up tight; it’ll take them time to bring in explosives and cutting gear, and shields. At least, it will if we risk shooting back.”
“The escape tunnel—”
“—Someone sealed it at the other end. I don’t think it would help, anyway.”
“Let’s hit the control room.” Roland started walking again. “Have I got this straight? We’re under siege and I’m the only walker who knows. The lord secretary came over, but he went missing before the siege began. So did his number-one sidekick. The outer rooms are shuttered and locked down and we’ve got supplies, power, and ammo, but no way out because somebody’s blown the escape tunnel. Is that it?”
“Pretty much so,” Sullivan agreed. He looked at Roland tensely. “What are you going to do?”
“What am I going to do?” Roland paused in the office doorway. “Shit, what can I do?” He opened the door and went in. The control room had desks with computer monitors around the wall. CCTV screens showed every approach to the building. Everything looked normal, except for the lack of vehicular traffic and the parked vans on every corner. And the van parked right up against the front door. Obviously the ram crew had used it for cover.
“We have half a ton of post in transit at any one time,” Roland thought aloud. “There’s about fifty kilos of confidential memos, documents, shit like that—enough to flame out the entire East Coast circuit.” There was a knock on the door. Sullivan waved in the man outside, one of the colorless back-office auditors the Clan employed to keep an eye on things. “We’ve got another quarter of a ton of produce in transshipment. It was due out of here next week. That’s enough to bankroll our ops for a year, too.”
Sullivan looked pissed. “Is that your priority?” he demanded.
“No.” Roland waved him down. “My priority is number one, getting all of us out of here, and number two; not letting that fucker Matthias take down our entire operation.” Sullivan subsided, leaning back against the door frame with a skeptical expression. “It’s going to take eighteen walks to pull everyone out—more than I could do in a week. And about the same to pull out the goods.” Roland pulled out a chair and sat. “We can’t drive away or use the tunnel. How long for them to get in? Six hours? Twelve?”
“I think it’ll be more like three, unless we start shooting,” Sullivan opined.
“Shooting—” Roland froze. “You want me to authorize you to shoot at FBI or DEA agents. Other than in self-defense.”
“It’s the only way,” said the auditor, looking a little green.
“Huh. I’ll table it.” Roland unfrozen, drummed his fingers on the nearest desk. “I really don’t like that option, it’s too much like sticking your dick in a hornet’s nest. They can always point more guns at us than we can point back at them. Has anyone phoned the scram number?”
“Huh?” Sullivan looked puzzled. “Bill?”
“Tried it five minutes ago, sir,” the auditor said with gloomy satisfaction. “Got a number-unavailable tone.”
“I am beginning to get the picture. Have you tried your cell phone?”
“They’ve got a jammer. And snipers on the rooftops.”
“Shit.” I am going to have to make a decision, Roland thought. And it had better be one I can live with, he realized sickly.
“Someone needs to walk over and yell like hell,” Roland said slowly. Sullivan tensed. “But, I’m working on the assumption that this is deliberate. That bastard Matthias, I’ve been watching him.” It was easy to say this, now. “I sent the kid, what’s his name?”
“Poul,” Bill offered.
“I sent him over alone.” Roland’s eyes went wide. “Shit.”
“What are you thinking?” Sullivan leaned forward.
“My working assumption right now is that Matthias has betrayed the Clan. This is all preplanned. He rigged this raid to cover his escape. So he isn’t going to want any random courier walking into Fort Lofstrom and raising the alarm, is he?”
Sullivan’s eyes narrowed as Roland stood up. “You and I,” he announced, trying to keep his voice from shaking, “are going to cross over together. I know what you’ve been thinking. Listen, Matthias will have left some kind of surprise. It’s going to be a mess. Your job is to keep me alive long enough to get out of the fort. Then there’s a, a back route. One I can use to get word to the Clan, later today. It’ll take me about six or seven hours to get from Fort Lofstrom to Niejwein, and the same again to come back with a bunch of help—every damn courier I can round up. I’m assuming Matthias sent everyone away from the fort before pulling this stunt. Can you hold out for twenty-four hours? Go into the sub-basement storm shelter with all the merchandise and blow the supports, bring the building down on top of you?” He addressed the last question to Bill, the auditor.
“I think so,” Bill said dubiously.
“Right. Then you’re going to have to do that.” Roland met his eyes. “We can’t afford for the feds to lay hands on you. And whatever you think I’m thinking, I figure you’re too valuable to write off. Any family member, inner or outer, is not expendable in my book. Sullivan, think you can handle that?”
Sullivan grinned humorlessly at him. “I’ll do my best.” He nodded at the auditor: “He’ll be back. Trust me on this.”
The extraordinary meeting resumed with an argument. “The floor is open for motions,” quavered the ancient Julius. “Do I hear—”
“I have a motion!” Miriam raised her hand.
“Objection!” snapped Baron Hjorth.
“I think you’ll find she already has the floor,” Angbard bit out. “Let her speak first, then have your say.”
“Firstly, I’d like to move that my venture into New Britain be recognized as a Clan subsidiary,” Miriam said, carefully trying to keep a still face. It was bitterly disappointing to risk ceding control, but as Olga had pointed out, the Clan took a very dim view of members striking out on their own. “As part of this motion I’d like to resolve that the issue of this sixth family be dealt with by participants in this subsidiary, because clearly they’re the members most directly affected by the situation.”
“Objection!” Shouted someone at the back of the hall. “Clan feud takes precedence!”
“Are you saying the Clan can afford to lose more people?” asked Miriam.
“Damn the blood! What about our dead? This calls for revenge!” Ayes backed him up: Miriam forced herself to think fast, knowing that if she let the heckling gather pace she could very easily lose control of the meeting.
“It seems to me that the lost family is sorely depleted,” she began. “They had to send a child to supervise an adult’s job. You know, as I know, that the efficiency of a postal service like the one responsible for the Clan’s wealth is not just a function of how many world-walkers we have. It’s also a function of the number of routes we can send packages over. They’re small, and isolated, and they’re not as numerous as we are. However, rooting them out in the name of a feud will uncover old wounds and risk depleting our numbers for no gain. I’m going to stick my neck out and assert that the next few years are going to be far more dangerous for the Clan than most of you yet realize.”
“Point of order!” It was Baron Hjorth again. “This is rubbish. She’s trying to frighten us. Won’t you—”
“Shut up,” grated Angbard. “Let her finish a sentence, damn your eyes.”
Miriam waited a moment. “Thank you,” she said. “Factors to think about. Firstly, a new world. This is going to be important because it opens up new opportunities for trade and development, as I’ve already demonstrated. Secondly, the state of the Clan’s current business. I don’t know how to approach this subtly so I won’t: You’re in big trouble.
“To be perfectly blunt, your current business model is obsolescent. You can keep it running for another two to five years, but then it’ll go into a nosedive. In ten years, it’ll be dead. And I’m not just talking about heroin and cocaine shipments. I mean everything.
“You’ll have noticed how hard it has become to launder the proceeds of narcotics traffic on the other side in the past few years. With the current anti-terrorist clampdown and the beefing up of police powers, life isn’t going to get any easier. Things are changing very fast indeed.
“The Clan used to be involved in different types of commerce: gold smuggling, gemstones, anything valuable and lightweight. But those businesses rely on anonymity, and like I said, the anti-terrorist clampdown is making anonymity much harder to sustain. Let me emphasize this, the traditional business models don’t work anymore because they all rely on the same underlying assumption—that you can be anonymous.
“Many of you probably aren’t aware of the importance of electronic commerce, or e-commerce. I’ve been working with specialists covering the development of the field. What you need to know is that goods and services are going to be sold, increasingly, online. This isn’t an attempt to sell you shares in some fly-by-night dot-com; it’s just a statement of fact—communications speed is more important than geographical location, and selling online lets small specialist outfits sell to anyone On the planet. But with the shift to online selling, you can expect cash money to become obsolete. High-denomination euro banknotes already come with a chip, to allow transactions to be traced. How long do you think it’ll be before the greenbacks you rely on stop being anonymous?
“The fat times will be over—and if you’ve spent all your resources pursuing a blood feud, you’re going to be screwed. No money on the other side means no imports. No imports mean no toys, antibiotics, digital watches, whatever to buy the compliance of the landowners. No guns to shoot them with, either. If you try to ignore reality you will be screwed by factors outside your control.
“But this isn’t inevitable. If you act now, you can open up new lines of revenue and new subsidiaries. Take ancient patents from my world, the world you’re used to using as a toy chest, and set up companies around them in the new world, in New Britain. Take the money you raise in New Britain and import books and tools here. Set up universities and schools. Build, using your power and your money to establish factories and towns and laboratories over here. In a couple of generations, you can pull Gruinmarkt out of the mire and start an industrial revolution that will make you a true world power, whether or not you depend on the family talent.
“You can change the world—if you choose to start now, by changing the way you think about your business.”
There was total silence in the hall. A puzzled silence, admittedly, but silence—and one or two nodding heads. Just let them keep listening, Miriam thought desperately. Then voices began to pipe up.
“I never heard such a—”
“—What would you have us put our money into?”
“—Hear, hear!”
“—Gather that educating the peasants is common over—”
“Silence,” Angbard demanded testily. “The chair has a question.”
“Uh. I’m ready.” Feeling tensely nervous, Miriam crossed her fingers behind her back.
“Describe the business you established in the new world. What did you take with you to start it? And what is it worth?”
“Ah, that’s an interesting one.” Miriam forced herself to keep a straight face, although the wave of relief she felt at Angbard’s leading question nearly made her go weak at the knees. “Exchange rate irregularities—or rather, the lack of them—make it hard to establish a true currency conversion rate, and I’m still looking for a means of repatriating value from the new world to the United States, but I’d have to say that expenditure to date is on the order of six hundred thousand dollars. The business in New Britain is still working toward its first contract, but that contract should be worth on the order of fifty thousand pounds. Uh, near as I can pin it down, one pound is equivalent to roughly two to three hundred dollars. So we’re looking at a return on investment of three hundred percent in six months, and that’s from a cold start.”
A buzz of conversation rippled through the hall, and Angbard made no move to quell it. The figures Miriam had come up with sounded like venture capitalist nirvana—especially with a recession raging in the other world, and NASDAQ in the dumps. “That’s by selling a product that’s been obsolete for thirty years in the U.S.,” Miriam added. “I’ve got another five up my sleeve, waiting for this first deal to provide seedcorn capital for reinvestment. In the absence of major disruptive factors—” like a war with the hidden family, she added mentally “—I figure we can be turning over ten to a hundred million pounds within ten to fifteen years. That would make us the equivalent of IBM or General Motors, simply by recycling ideas that haven’t been invented yet over there.”
The buzz of conversation grew louder. “I’ve done some more spreadsheet work,” Miriam added, now more confident. “If we do this, we’ll push the New British economic growth rate up by one or two percent per annum over its long-term average. We could do the same, though, importing intermediate technologies from there to here. There’s no point trying to train nuclear engineers or build airports in the Gruinmarkt, not with a medieval level of infrastructure, and a lot of the technologies up for sale in the U.S. are simply too far ahead to use here. Those of you who’ve wired up your estates will know what I’m talking about. But we can import tools and ideas and even teachers from New Britain, and deliver a real push to the economy over here. Within thirty years you could be traveling to your estates by railway, your farmers could be producing three times as much food, and your ships could dominate the Atlantic trade routes.”
Angbard rapped his gavel on the wooden block in front of him for attention. “The chair thanks Countess Helge,” he said formally. “Are there any more questions from the floor?”
A new speaker stood up: a smooth-looking managerial type who smiled at Miriam in a friendly manner from the bench behind her grandmother. “I’d like to congratulate my cousin on her successful start-up,” he began. “It’s a remarkable achievement to come into a new world and set up a business, from scratch, with no background.” Oh shit, Miriam thought uneasily. Who is this guy, and when’s he going to drop the hammer? “And I agree completely with everything she says. But clearly, her efforts could be aided by an infusion of support and experience. If we accept her motion to transfer the new business to the Clan as a subsidiary enterprise, it can clearly benefit from sound management—”
“Which it already has,” Miriam snapped, finally getting his drift. “If you would like to discuss employment opportunities—” and a pound of flesh in return for keeping out of my way, you carpetbagger “—that’s all very well—but this is not the time and place for it. We have an immediate problem, which is relations with the sixth family. I’ll repeat my proposal; that the new business venture be recognized as a Clan business, that membership in it be open to the Clan, and that handling the lost family be considered the responsibility of this business. Can we put this to a vote?”
Oliver Hjorth made to interrupt, but Angbard caught his hand and whispered something in his ear. His eyes narrowed and he shut up.
“I don’t see why we can’t settle it now,” muttered Julius. “Show of hands! Ayes! Count them, damn your eyes. Nays!” He brought his own hammer down briskly. “The Ayes have it,” he announced. He turned to Miriam. “It’s yours.”
Is that it? Miriam wondered dumbly, feeling as if something vast and elusive had passed her by in an eyeblink while her attention was elsewhere.
“Next motion,” said Angbard. “Some of you have been misinformed that I announced that I was designating Helge as my heir. I wish to clarify the issue: I did not do so. However, I do intend to change my designated successor—to Patricia Thorold-Hjorth, my half-sister. Can anyone dispute my right to do so?” He looked around the room furiously. “No?” He nudged Julius. “See it minuted so.”
Miriam felt as if a great weight had lifted from her shoulders—but not for long. “A new motion,” said Oliver Hjorth. He frowned at Miriam. “The behavior of this long-lost niece gives me some cause for concern,” he began. “I am aware that she has been raised in strange and barbarous lands, and allowances must be made; but I fear she may do herself an injury if allowed to wander around at random. As her recent history of narrow scrapes shows, she’s clearly accident-prone and erratic. I therefore move that she be declared incompetent to sit as a member of the Clan, and that a suitable guardian be appointed—Baroness Hildegarde—”
“Objection!” Miriam turned to see Olga standing up. “Baron Hjorth, through negligence, failed to see to the subject’s security during her residence here, notionally under his protection. He is not fit to make determinations bearing on her safety.”
Oliver rounded on her in fury. “You little minx! I’ll have you thrown out on the street for—”
Bang! The gavel again. “Objection sustained,” Julius quavered.
Oliver glared at him. “Your time will come,” he growled, and subsided into grim silence.
“I am an adult,” Miriam said quietly. “I am divorced, I have created and managed a Clan subsidiary, and I am not prepared to surrender responsibility for my own security.” She looked around the hall. “If you try to railroad me out of the New London operation, you’ll find some nasty surprises in the title deeds.” She stared at Oliver: “or you can sit back and wait for the profits to roll in. It’s your choice.”
“I withdraw my motion,” Oliver growled quietly. Only his eyes told Miriam that he resented every word of it. There’d be a reckoning, they seemed to say.
“Check your gun.”
“I don’t need to.”
“I said, check it. Listen. I told Poul to go for help. Think he’ll have made it?”
“I don’t see why not.” Sullivan looked dubious, but he ejected the magazine and worked the slide on his gun, then reloaded and safed it.
“Matthias believes in belt and braces.” For a moment, Roland looked ill. “I think he’ll have left a surprise or two for us.”
“So?” Sullivan nodded. “You ready?”
“Ready?” Roland winced, then flipped his locket open. “Yes. Come on. On my back—Sky Father, you’re heavy! Now—”
Roland’s vision dimmed and his head hammered like a drum. His knees began to give way and he fell forward, feet slipping on the damp floor. Sullivan rolled off him with a shout of dismay. “What’s—”
Roland fell flat, whimpering slightiy as one knee cracked hard on the concrete. Red, everything seemed to be red with bits of white embedded in it, like an explosion in an abattoir. He rolled over, sliding slightly, smelling something revolting and sweet as the noise of Sullivan being violently sick reached his ears.
The pounding headache subsided. Roland sat up, dismayed, staring at the wall behind him. It was chipped and battered, stained as if someone had thrown a tin of blackish paint at it. The smell. Roland leaned forward and squeezed his eyes shut. The blackness stayed with him, behind his eyelids. “Belt and braces.”
Sullivan stopped heaving. The stench refused to clear. Roland opened his eyes again. The post room in the basement of Fort Lofstrom had been painted with blood and bits of flesh and bone, as if a live pig or sheep had been fed through a wood chipper. There were small gobbets of stuff everywhere. On his hands, sticking to his trousers where he’d fallen down. He pulled a hunk of something red with hairs sprouting from it off the back of his hand. The furniture was shredded, and the door hung from its hinges as if an angry bull had kicked it.
“Belt and braces,” Roland repeated hoarsely. “Shit.”
Sullivan straightened up. “You sent Poul into this,” he said flatly. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.
“Shit.” Roland shook his head. A pair of legs, still wearing trousers, still attached at the hips, had rolled under the big oak table in the middle of the room. A horrified sense of realization settled over him. “Why hasn’t someone—”
“Because they are all fucking dead,” Sullivan hissed, moving to the side of the door and bringing his gun up. “Shut up!”
Silence. The stink of blocked sewers and slaughterhouse blood and recent vomit filled Roland’s nostrils. His skull pounded, bright diamond-flashes of light flickering in his left eye as the edges of his visual field threatened to collapse. He’d walked too soon after taking the beta blocker, and now he was going to pay the price. “Matthias planted a claymore mine on a wire at least once before,” he said quietly. “Well, someone did—and my guess is Matthias. Sloppy work, using the same trick over. Think there’ll be another one, or will he have used something else?”
“Shut up.” Sullivan darted around the corner and stopped, his back visible: Roland cringed, but there was no explosion. “Yeah. Looks like it was an M18A1, we keep about a dozen in the armory. This here’s the clacker. Bastard.”
“See any more?” Roland shuffled forward slowly, still woozy and in pain from the too-hasty transfer.
“No, but—wait.” Sullivan came back into the devastated post room and looked around twitchily, ignoring Roland.
“What are you after?”
“Some kind of pole. Lightweight. And a flashlight.”
“Let me.” Roland shambled over to the curtain-covered sigil and yanked hard on the curtain. The curtain rail bent and he grabbed it, pulled it away from the wall. “Will this do?” he asked, carefully not looking at the knotwork design on the wall behind it.
“Yeah.” Sullivan took the rod and went back out into the corridor, advancing like an arthritic sloth. “Fuck me, that was bad.”
A thought struck Roland. “Are there any explosives in the armory, apart from the mines? And detonators?”
“Are you kidding?” Sullivan barked something that in better times might have been a laugh. “About a hundred kilos of C4, for starters! And gunpowder. Shitloads of it. Some of his farms, they’ve been, well, productive. Matthias took a serious interest in blowing things up, you know?”
“Gunpowder.” Roland digested the unpleasant possibilities this news opened up. “The fort should be locked down. Where is everybody?”
“Like I said, dead or gone.” Sullivan looked around at him. “What are you going to—”
Roland pushed past him. “Follow me.”
“Hey wait! There might be mines—”
“There won’t be.” Roland dashed down the corridor. There was a servant’s staircase at the end. He took the steps two at a time, until he was gasping for breath. “He dismissed the help. Good of him.” The staircase surfaced in the scullery, and the door was shut. “If I’m right, he’s put the whole damn fort on a time fuse. It could blow any minute.”
“A bomb? There could be more than one, couldn’t there?”
Roland opened the door half an inch, running a finger up and down the crack to make sure there were no wires. “It’s clear.”
“If you do that too fast—”
“Come on!” Through the scullery and up another short flight of steps, round a corner, then into the main ground-floor hallway. The fort was eerily empty, cold and desolate. Roland didn’t bother with the main door, but instead opened an arched window beside it and scrambled through. “Stables!”
Matthias might have sent the servants away, but he sure as hell hadn’t thought about the livestock. Sullivan and Roland saddled up a pair of mares, and the guard worked one of the big gates open while Roland waited, clutching a blanket around his shoulders. “You go get help,” Sullivan panted up at Roland. “I’ll go see if the armory is wired. I might be able to stop it.”
“But you’ll—”
“Shut the fuck up and listen for once! If you get help, you’ll need a safe post room to walk through, won’t you? I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing it for the others. Go get the gods-damned Clan and get back here as fast as you can. I’ll see it’s safe for you.”
Roland paused for a moment. “Take my keys,” he said, and tossed them to the guard. “They’re a master set—only place they won’t get you into is the old man’s office.”
Sullivan took the keys, then watched until Roland disappeared around the first bend in the road before he turned and headed back into the compound thoughtfully. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy: He hadn’t even had to hint about the place being booby-trapped. Now all he needed was time to complete the boss’s business, and a lift home, then he could claim his reward.
The meeting was winding down in a haze of fatigue, recriminatory posturing, and motions to hear trivial complaints. Miriam slumped back in her seat tiredly. Please, let this be over, she thought, watching Iris from the other side of the room. If she was aching and bored, her mother must be feeling ten times worse.
Baron Horst of Lorsburg had the floor, and was using it for all it was worth. “While the provisions of article eighteen of the constitution are still valid, I’d like to raise a concern about paragraph six,” he droned, in the emolient tones of a lay preacher trying to get across the good message without boring his flock into catatonia in the process. “The issue of voting partners failing to attend to bills of—”
He was interrupted by a tremendous banging on the outer door. “What’s that?” demanded Julius the ancient. “Sergeant! Have silence outside the room!”
The sergeant-at-arms marched over to the door, yanked it open, prepared to berate whoever was outside—but instead took a step back.
Roland lurched into the room. He was dressed for the road in a battered gray coat and a hat pulled down over his face: His expression was deadily. Miriam had another surprise coming: Brill was right behind him. “Permission to approach the Dean of Security?” he rasped.
“Approach,” Angbard called. “And explain yourself. Assuming the news is fit for public hearing.”
Roland glanced round the room. “Don’t see why not.” He passed Miriam without any indication that he’d seen her. “Big problem,” he announced tersely, and Miriam swallowed her anger as she realized he was exhausted and out of breath, walking painfully, as if his clothes chafed.
“We’ve been betrayed. Fort Lofstrom is cut off, here and on the other side. What’s worse is, they’ve got the February shipment from Panama sitting in Boston along with the post, and someone has told the Feds—there’s a DEA stakeout in progress.” He nodded at Angbard. “Looks like our traitor has identified himself. Bad news is, he got away and he’s decided to take down the entire Massachusetts end. I only just got out by the skin of my teeth. We’ve got nine outer family members trapped on the other side with a SWAT team on their doorstep. To make matters worse, there are booby traps in Fort Lofstrom—at least one bomb. We lost Poul, Poul of Hjalmar. He walked into a claymore mine.”
“Order! Order!” Angbard leaned down and stared at Roland. “Let’s get this straight. Fort Lofstrom on this side has been barred to us. On the other side, its doppelgänger is under siege. There is a huge consignment sitting over there, and family members who lack the talent to extricate themselves. Is that broadly correct?”
“Yeah.” Roland slumped against the table. “I world-walked into the Fort. Blood all over the walls of the post room. Sullivan got me a horse and, and I rode over to a place Miriam told me about. Used the spare locket she gave me, the one she took from the enemy.” The room was in uproar, half the Clan on their feet. “Lady Brilliana got me on a train in the new world, from Boston to New London. That’s how I got here so fast. The shit hit the fan yesterday. By now, we’re either looking at a pile of rubble on the other side with our people trapped under it and the FBI digging toward them, or something worse.” He rubbed his head carefully, as if unsure whether it was still there. “I had to make three crossings in the past twelve hours.”
“Security summit, clear the room!” called the sergeant-at-arms. “By your leave, sir,” he told Julius apologetically.
“Can we get in from the far side? From New Britain?” asked Miriam.
Angbard stared at her. “You know more about that than we would, I think,” he said. “Your opinion?”
“Hmm.” Miriam thought for a moment. “You’re sure it was Matthias?” she asked Roland.
Roland nodded wordlessly. “Sir?” He looked up at Angbard, tiredly.
“Yes,” Angbard said darkly. “I’ve been keeping an eye on him. I’ve had my suspicions for a while now.” He paused, looking as if he’d tasted something unpleasant. “Obviously I haven’t been watching him closely enough. That’s not a mistake I’m going to repeat.” He glanced at Miriam. “Do you have anything to add?” he demanded.
“I don’t know, but I don’t believe in coincidences, and the way the hidden families kept going after me—” she glanced at Baron Hjorth, who stared back at her for a moment, then looked away. “I think it’s clear who he was in the pay of.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t change my position. I think you should release Lin, send the kid home with a message offering a cease-fire. If they accept, it means your Keeper of the Secrets is cut off with no retreat and no friends. If they refuse, we’re no worse off. It might make them think we’re weak, but that can only be an advantage right now.”
“I’ll think about it,” Angbard said coolly. “But right now it’s not a priority. What would you suggest doing about Boston? If you have any ideas, that is.”
“Uh.” She paused. “Two or three crossings a day: If we do more we’ll be in no condition for anything, and this needs to be fixed quick. I think we’ll have to cross over to New London, won’t we? If Olga and I and a bunch of others go, it’ll take us a bit longer to get to Boston by steam train, but from there it’s one hop into Fort Lofstrom by the back door. Faster than going by stagecoach, anyway. We’ll have to carry some extras, who’ll need to go over into the basement under siege and pull in our people before the FBI and DEA dig through to them. Think that would work?”
“I think it’s our only chance.” Roland looked worried. He seemed to be avoiding eye contact with her.
“Do it,” said Iris, unexpectedly. “It’s your future.” She met Miriam’s gaze. “I’ll be alright.”
“I know you will.” Miriam walked toward her. “Please be here when I get back,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of talking to do.”
Brill cleared her throat. “I’m coming,” she said calmly.
“You can’t—oh.” Miriam turned back to Angbard. “She can come.”
“She’ll have to. How many copies of the lost family’s sign have you got?”
“More than you thought, bro,” Iris butted in. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a battered-looking locket. “I took this off the one who killed my husband and maid and tried to cut your throat,” she told Miriam. She grinned, hu-morlessly. “It never occurred to me to look inside it until you tipped me off. Not that I’m in any condition to use it.”
“Ah. Then we’ve got—” Miriam did a quick stock-take. Hers, Brill’s, Olga’s, the one she’d given Roland, now this one. Plus the smudged and fading temporary tattoos she and Olga wore. “Only five reliable ones. Any more?”
Iris snorted. “Here.” She pulled out a bunch of glossy photographs. “What the hell did you think Polaroid cameras were invented for?” Miriam gaped. “Close your mouth, kid, you’ll catch a fly,” Iris added.
“Get some muscle,” Miriam told Roland. “Ones who can world-walk with us. We’ll need guns and medicine. And clothing that can pass at a distance in New London or on the train—” She paused. “And a plan of the Fort Lofstrom dop-pelganger, and a compass and map of the area. We can pick one up in New London and find where its doppelgänger location is, and then someone to get us in—” another pause. “Why are you all looking at me like that?” she asked.
Another day, another first-class compartment—this one crammed with seven bodies, plus another seven in the compartment behind them—with the window open to let the heat out. “How conspicuous are we going to be?” asked the guy with the toothbrush moustache.
“Just as long as you don’t stop, Morgan,” said Miriam. “Your suit’s all wrong, your coat isn’t a fashion item, and—hell, your hat isn’t right either. They’ll probably take you for a foreigner.” The train clattered over points as it began to slow.
“She’s not kidding,” said Brill. “It’s not like Boston at all, under the surface.”
“Be over soon,” said Roland, staring out the window at the passing countryside. “It all looks like something out of a history book—”
“May you live in interesting times,” muttered Olga, raising a startled glance from Brill.
“Miriam’s been corrupting you.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Ladies, ladies!” They turned and glared as one at Roland. “Is this our stop?” he asked plaintively. He looked decidedly off-color. Miriam decided to forgive him—her own headache wasn’t getting any better, and four trips in thirty-six hours was more than anyone should ever have to make, even with beta blockers and pain killers.
“Not yet.” Miriam refolded the map she’d bought at the station near where Niejwein would be in this world.
“Let me see that.” Ivor, short and squat, leaned over. “Ah.” A stubby finger followed the line into town. “This is Cambridgeport, in Cambridge. The Fort was built on a bluff overlooking the river almost exactly here. That’s—”
“Blackshaft. A rookery,” said Miriam. “Next to Holmes Alley.” She bit her knuckle. “What happens if you try to world-walk somewhere where you’d come out underground?”
“You get a headache.” Roland looked at her curiously. “Why?”
“Nothing,” she said, watching him sidelong.
Brill caught her eye. “Nothing.” She snorted. “It’s that revolutionary friend of yours, isn’t it?”
“Well.” Miriam sighed. “I suppose so.”
“What’s this?” asked Ivor.
“Miriam’s got dodgy friends,” said Olga. “Why is it that we only seem to do business with criminals?”
“I don’t think he’s a criminal; the law disagrees with me, but the law is an ass,” said Miriam. “Anyway, he’s got access to cellars. Lots of cellars and backyards running into the rookery. I think we can go down there, then try to cross over. If we can’t, we can’t. If we succeed we’ll be somewhere in the basement levels. How’d that work out?”
“Angbard gave me some of his keys.” Roland patted his pocket. “We can give it a try. The only thing worrying me is the time it’s taking.”
Liar, thought Miriam, watching him in side-profile. You and me, when this is over, we’re going to need to clear the air between us. She focused on the line of his jaw and for some reason her heart tried to skip a beat. See if we can catch some quality time together with nobody trying to kill me or blackmail you. For a moment she felt a deep stab of longing. We’ve got a lot to talk about. Haven’t we? But not right now, in the middle of a compartment full of Clan couriers, serious-faced and wound up for action.
The train slowed, slid into a suburban station, and paused. Then it was off again, for its final destination—the royal station, five minutes down the line. “Go tell the others, we want the next stop,” said Miriam. “Remember, follow my lead and try not to say anything. It’s not far, but we look like a mob, and a weird one at that. If we hang around we’ll pick up unwanted attention.”
Olga raised an eyebrow. “If you say so.”
“I do.” The train hissed and shuddered as it lurched toward the platform. “Hats on and spirits up. This shouldn’t take long.”
The walk to the pawnbroker’s shop seemed to take forever, a frightening eternity of hanging on Roland’s arm—steering discreetly and trying to look carefree, while keeping an eye open for the others—but Miriam made it, somehow.
“This is it?” he asked dubiously.
“Yeah. Remember he’s a friend.” Miriam opened the shop door, shoved him gently between the shoulder blades, turned to catch Morgan and Brill’s eyes, then went inside.
“Hello? Can I help—”
“I’m sure you can.” Miriam smiled sweetly at the man behind the counter—a stranger she’d never seen before in her life. “Is Inspector Smith here?”
“No.” He straightened up. “But I can get him if you want.”
“That won’t be necessary.” Miriam drew her pistol. “Lie down. Hands behind your back.” She stepped forward. “Come on, tie him!” she snapped at Roland.
“If you say so.” The doorbell jangled and he glanced up at her as Olga and the two other guards entered the shop, followed rapidly by Brill and Ivor, and then the rest of the group. With fourteen youngish Clan members inside, it was uncomfortably packed. “What are you going to do with him?” asked Olga.
“Take him with us, stash him in Fort Lofstrom. Got a better idea?”
“You’re making a big mistake,” the man on the floor said quietly.
“You’re a constable,” said Miriam. “Aren’t you? Where’s Burgeson?” He didn’t say anything. “Right,” she said grimly, lifting the counter and walking behind it. I hope he’s alright, she thought distantly. Another spell in His Majesty’s concentration camps will kill him, for sure. “You two, carry this guy along. The rest of you, follow me.”
They trooped down the steep wooden steps in the back of the shop, along an alley hemmed in with pigeonholes filled with sad relics, individually tagged and dated with their owners’ hopes and fears. Miriam looked round. “This will do,” she said. “I’m going to try the crossing. If I succeed and there’s trouble, I’ll come right back. If I’m not back in five minutes, the rest of you come over. Roland, carry Brill. You, carry Olga. Brill, Olga, you carry us over to the far side, to world two: I don’t want anybody making two successive crossings without a rest between. Be ready for trouble.”
She took her coat off. Beneath it she wore her hiking gear and a bulky bulletproof vest from the Clan’s Niejwein armory. It looked out of place here, but might be a lifesaver on the other side. She barely noticed the captive policeman’s eyes go wide as he watched the cellar full of strangers strip down to combat fatigues and body armor.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Roland as she picked up her shoulder bag again.
“I’m sure.” Miriam grimaced. “Time to go.”
“You’ll never get away with this,” the secret policeman mumbled as she pulled out her locket and, taking a deep breath, focused on it.
Everything went black and a spike of pain seemed to split her skull. Buried alive! she thought, appalled—then reached out a hand in front of her. No, just in the dark. She took another breath, smelling mildew, and swallowed back bile that threatened to climb her throat. Her heart pounded. The flashlight—
She fumbled for a moment over the compact LED flashlight, then managed to get enough light to see by. She was in a cellar alright, a dusty and ancient wine store with bottle racks to either side. “Phew,” she said aloud. She took a second or two to let her racing heart slow down toward normal, then marched toward the door at the end of the tunnel.
The light switches worked, and the cellar flooded with illumination—bright after a minute of flashlight. “Do I wait?” she asked herself. “Like hell. We’ve got people to rescue.” She turned the handle and cautiously entered the passage that led to the servants’ stairs.
Her head ached furiously. It had been aching for days now, it seemed, and she felt worse than sick. If she stood up fast, or moved suddenly, her vision went dark. I can’t do this again, she thought to herself, leaning against the corridor wall. It’ll kill me.
Two hops in a day—one from Niejwein to New London, then another into Fort Lofstrom’s dingy cellars. If she made a return trip to Boston now, she was sure she’d pop an artery. Cerebral hemorrhage, what a way to go. Half of the others were piggybacking, staying fresh as long as possible.
For her sins she’d carried Brill through on the first trip. Now she was paying the price in aching muscles and a borderline migraine.
“Matthias,” she said aloud, with a flash of rage. Bastard thought he could use me, did he? Well, she’d see about that. Once the crisis was under control, and once she’d repossessed Paulie’s stolen CD-ROM. She was certain Matthias had it, and there were only two things to do with it that made sense. Send it to the FBI, or leave it on Angbard’s desk, along with the photos of her and Roland—a potentially lethal embarrassment if Angbard interpreted it as a plot by the lovers to elope and blackmail the Clan into silence. Miriam’s money was on the latter. Once the immediate business was sorted, she fully intended to give Paulie a discreet request and a bunch of cash: enough to hire some private detectives. There were ways and means of finding people who didn’t want to be found, when your resources and patience were unlimited, and she was willing to bet that a spider like Matthias wouldn’t be able to camouflage himself as well as he thought once he left the center of his web. She’d spend whatever it took to find him, and then he’d be sorry.
After a couple of minutes she sighed, then pushed herself upright. She dry-swallowed a painkiller, which stuck uncomfortably in her throat. She was light-headed, but not too light-headed to find her way up to the basement level. Passing the scullery, she ducked inside to grab a glass of water to help the pill go down. Something caught her eye: The door to the cold store lay ajar. She looked inside.
“Oh shit. Oh shit.” She breathed fast as she leaned over the top of the pile—three, maybe four corpses sprawling and stiff, not yet livid—and saw the cruel edges of bullet wounds. “Shit.” She pushed herself upright and looked to the entrance. “Cameras—”
Matthias has a little helper, she realized. How many people did he kill? A great house like this, you couldn’t send all of the servants away—but murdering the skeleton staff bespoke a degree of extreme ruthlessness. Angbard hadn’t been suspicious enough of his own deputy: He’d let Matthias pick and choose staff assignments. Now it looked like she was going to be stuck paying the price.
“Matthias always has a backup plan,” she muttered to herself. “If I was a sick spider sitting at the center of a web, waiting to sting my employer, what would I do?”
She opened the door cautiously. “Roland was afraid of bombs—” She stopped. Where? “The armory is where you store explosives. It’s built to contain a blast. But if Matthias had an accomplice the explosive might be human—”
She panted, taking in shallow breaths. Stop that. Matthias blackmailed people. How many? And what could he make them do—wait for the Clan rescue expedition to show up, then bring the house down on them?
The pantry was empty, a door standing ajar on the kitchen and servants’ stairwell at the end of the hallway. Miriam hit the stairs. It corkscrewed upstairs dizzyingly, halls branching off it toward each wing of the family accommodation. She climbed it carefully, revolver in hand, cautiously scanning the steps ahead for signs of a tripwire. Hoping that the dead servants meant that there’d be no eyes left to watch the video screens. Second floor, east wing, through the security doors on the left, she repeated to herself, hoping that the surveillance, if it existed at all, would prove to be habit-blind.
The east wing corridor was as silent as a crypt, as empty as the passages of a high-class hotel in the small hours of the morning while the guests sleep. Any guests here were liable to be dead in their beds. Miriam came out of the servant’s stairwell and darted down the side of the corridor, crouching instinctively. She paused at the solid wooden doors at one side of the passage and swiped the card-key she’d borrowed from Roland through the scanner at one side. When she heard the latch click, she pushed one door open with a toe and stepped through. This is the security zone? It looked like more rooms, opening off a short corridor—offices, maybe, and Angbard’s outer office door right ahead.
She paused before the door. Her heart was pounding. You. She looked at it. Someone was inside. Whoever killed the servants. A ticking human bomb. Growing anger made her feel dizzy. She carefully moved to one side and raised her gun.
“I really wouldn’t do that,” said a sad voice right behind her left ear. “Put the gun down and turn around slowly.”
She froze, then dropped the pistol and turned around. “Why?” she asked.
A nondescript man leaned against the wall behind her. He was unshaven, and although he was wearing a suit—standard for a courier—his tie was loose. He looked tired, but also content. “It’s about time,” he said.
His gun, Miriam realized. It was pointed at her stomach. She couldn’t identify it. Bizarrely complex, it sprouted handles and magazines and telescopic sights seemingly at random. It looked like a movie prop, but something, in his manner said he had complete confidence in it. The sights glowed red, a dot tracking across her chest.
“It’s about time,” she echoed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
The gunman grinned humorlessly. “The boss told me a lot about you. You’re the new countess, aren’t you? He’s got tapes, you know. And a disk.”
She moved toward him, froze as the gun came up to point at her head. “You were responsible for what’s in the cellar—”
“No, actually.” He shook his head. “Not me. He’s … Matthias likes to hunt. He stalks wild animals. Stalks his enemies, too, looking for a weak point to bring them down.” He looked worried for a moment, then he grinned. “He showed me the tapes he took of you. Looking for a weak spot.”
Her vision hazed over for a moment, turning black with a mixture of rage and the worst headache she’d ever experienced. “What do you fucking want?” she demanded.
“Simple. I’m the rear guard. Your arrival means the Clan rescue party is on its way, doesn’t it?” She didn’t say anything, but his grin widened just the same. “Knew it. You’re my ride out of here, y’know? Little pony. We’ll just be leaving by the back steps, then blow the house down. And I’ll ride out on you. There’s a meeting spot, ready and surveyed and waiting for me. Nice pony.”
“Listen,” she said, trying to focus through her blinding headache, “have you actually done anything for Matthias? Killed anyone? Planted any bombs?”
The gunman stopped smiling. “Shut the fuck up. Now,” he snarled. “Kneel! Move!”
Miriam knelt slowly. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Her head pounded and her stomach, even though it was empty, seemed about to make a bid for freedom through her mouth. “Whatever he paid you—” she began.
“’S’not money. Fucking Clan bitch. It’s who we are. Got it, yet?”
“You and Matthias?”
“That’s right.” He kicked the gun away. “Keep your hands on the floor. Lean forward. Slowly put your wrists together in front. I’ll kill you if you fuck up.” He carefully kept the gun on her as he pulled a looped cable tie out of a back pocket. “Nice pony, we’re going to go riding together. Over to Boston, and then maybe out west to the ranch to see some of my friends. You won’t like it there, though.”
“Shoot me and you won’t get away alive,” she heard someone say in the distance, through a throbbing cloud bank of darkness.
“What the fuck.” He yanked the cable tie tight around her wrists. “You think I give a shit about that, you bitch? Live fast, die young.” He grabbed her hair and pulled, and she screamed. “Leave a pretty corpse.”
Miriam tried to stand: Her legs had turned to jelly somewhere along the line. This is crazy, she thought vaguely. Can’t let him blow up the fort with everyone under it, or on the other side—She leaned drunkenly, almost falling over.
“Stand, bitch!” Someone was slapping someone else’s face. Suddenly there was a hand under her armpit. “Fuck, what’s wrong with you?”
“Three jumps, two hours,” she slurred drunkenly.
“Crap.” A door opened and he shoved her forwards. “Fucking get over it or I’ll start on your fingernails. You think your head hurts, you don’t know shit.”
“What do you want?” she mumbled.
“Freedom.” He pushed her toward the low leather-topped sofa opposite Matthias’s desk. “Freedom to travel. Freedom to live away from this fucking pesthole. A million bucks and the wind in my hair. The boss looks after his own. Drop the fort and deliver you and I’ve got it made. Loads of money.”
He pushed her down onto the sofa. “Now you and me are going to sit tight until your friends are over on the other side.” He waved at the CCTV monitor on Matthias’s workstation. “Then I set a timer and we leave by the back door.” He cleared his throat. “Meantime, there’s something I’ve been wondering. Do you give good head?” he inquired, leaning over her.
Something flickered at the edge of Miriam’s vision. She focused past his shoulder, saw the door open and Roland standing there with a leveled pistol. The gunman turned, and something made a noise like a sewing machine, awfully loudly. Hot metal rain, cartridge cases falling. A scream. Miriam kicked out, catching him on one leg. Then the back of his head vanished in a red mist, and he collapsed on top of her.
“Oh Miriam, you really are no good at this!” trilled Olga, “but thank you for drawing his attention! That creep, he makes me so angry…” Then her voice changed: “Dear Lightning Child! What’s happened to Roland?”
“I—” Miriam tried to sit up, but something was pinning her down. Everything was gray. “Where is he?”
“Oh dear.” Olga knelt in the doorway, beside something. Someone. “Are you wounded?” she asked urgently, standing up and coming toward Miriam. “It was his idea to follow you-—”
Miriam finally sat up, shoving the deadweight aside. Strangely, her stomach wasn’t rebelling. “Get. Others. Go across and finish off. I’ll look after him.” Somehow she found herself on the other side of the room, cradling Roland. “He’ll be alright.”
“But he’s—”
She blinked, and forced herself to focus as Olga leaned over her, face white. “He’ll be alright in a minute,” Miriam heard herself explain. “Scalp wounds are always bloody, aren’t they?” Somewhere a door opened and she heard Olga explaining something to someone in urgent tones, something about shock. “Aren’t they?” she asked, still confused but frightened by Olga’s tone. She tried to rub her sore eyes, rendered clumsy by her tied hands, but they were covered in blood. Then Brill rolled up her sleeve and slid a needle into her arm.
“What a mess,” Brill told someone else, before the blessed darkness stifled her screams.