The Revolution Business

Deceptive Practices

A week had passed since the bizarre coronation ritual, and it had been a busy period. Miriam found herself at the center of a tornado of activity, with every hour accounted for. There were banquets with lord this and baron that, introductions until her cheeks ached from smiling and her right hand was red from scrubbing: Their kisses left her feeling unclean, compromised. The dressmakers had moved in, altering garments borrowed from some remnants of the royal wardrobe and fitting her for gowns and dresses suitable for a dowager queen-widow and a mother-to-be. Brill had found time, for a couple of hours every day, to bring a bottle of wine and sit with her while she explained the finer points of political and personal alliances; and Gerta engaged her in conversational hochsprache, nervous and halting at first, to polish her speech. (Which, with total immersion in a sea of servants, few of whom spoke English, was beginning to improve.)

Being Helge was becoming easier, she found. Practice had diminished the role to a set of manners and a half-understood language that she could summon up at need, rather than a claustrophobia-inducing caul. Perhaps she was getting used to it, or perhaps her mother’s private crusade and promise of mutual support had given her the impulse she needed to make it work. Whatever the cause, the outcome was that whenever she paused to think about her position Miriam was startled by how smoothly her new life had locked in around her, and with how little friction. Perhaps all she’d needed all along was a key to the gilded cage, and the reassurance that people she could trust were minding the door.

It had not been Miriam’s idea to put on the gilded robes of state today, to sit on an unpadded chair in a drafty hall and read aloud a variety of prearranged—bloodcurdling and inevitably fatal—sentences on assorted members of the nobility who had been unlucky enough to back the wrong horse. But it had shown up on her timetable for the week—and Brill, Riordan, and her mother had visited en masse to assure her that it was necessary. They’d even hauled in Julius, to provide a façade of Clannish unity. “You need to sit in on the court and pronounce judgment, without us whispering in your ear all the time,” Brill explained, “otherwise people will say you’re a figurehead.”

“But I am a figurehead!” Miriam protested. “Aren’t I? I get the message, this is the council’s doing. It’s just, I don’t approve of the death penalty. And this, executing people just because they did what Egon told them to, out of fear—”

“If they think you’re a figurehead, they won’t fear you,” Iris explained, with visibly fraying patience. “And that’ll breed trouble. People hereabouts aren’t used to enlightened government. You need to stick some heads on spikes, Helge, to make the others keep a low profile. If you won’t do it yourself, the council will have to do it for you. And everybody will whisper that it’s because you’re a weak woman who is just a figurehead.”

“There are a number of earls and barons who we definitely cannot trust,” Riordan added. “Not to mention a duke or two. They’re mortal enemies—they didn’t act solely out of fear of Egon’s displeasure—and we can’t have a duke sitting in judgment over another duke. If you refuse to read their execution order we’ll just have to poison them. It gets messy.”

“But if I start out by organizing a massacre, isn’t that going to raise the stakes later? I thought we were agreed that reinforcing the rule of law was essential. . . .”

“It’s not a massacre if they get a fair trial first. So give them a fair trial and fill a gibbet or two with the worst cases, to make an example,” Iris suggested. “Then offer clemency to the rest, on onerous terms. It worked for dad.”

“Really?” Miriam gave her mother a very old-fashioned look. “Tell me more. . . .”

Which had been the start of a slippery-slope argument. Miriam had fought a rearguard action, but Helge had ultimately conceded the necessity of applying these medieval standards of justice under the circumstances. Which was why she was sitting stiff as a board on a solid wooden throne, listening to advocates argue over a variety of unfortunate nobles, and trying not to fall asleep.

For a man with every reason to believe his fate was to be subjected to peine fort et dure, the Duke of Niejwein was in remarkably high spirits. Or perhaps the reddening of his cheeks and the twinkle in his eye were signs of agitation and contempt. The resemblance he bore to the Iraqi dictator Ali Hassan, who’d been on all the news channels a few weeks ago when the Marines finally got their hands on him, was striking. Whatever the case, when he raised his fettered hands and spat something fast at Miriam she had no problem interpreting his intent.

“He says he thanks you for your hospitality but it is most unnecessary,” murmured Gerta.

“Tell him he’s welcome, all the same.” Miriam waited while her assistant translated. “And I view his position with sympathy.”

“Milady!” Gerta sounded confused. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Miriam glared at her. I am your queen, damn it. Even if I’m fronting for a committee. “Do it.”

“Yes, milady.” Gerta addressed the duke; he seemed confused.

“Have another sweet,” Miriam offered the Duke of Niejwein by way of her translator.

It was, Olga had explained, the polite way to do business with noble prisoners: Offer them candied peel and a silk rope to sweeten the walk to the scaffold where, if his crimes were deemed minor, he could expect the relative mercy of a swift hanging. But Niejwein, for some reason, seemed not to have much of an appetite today. And after having sentenced two earls to death earlier in this session—in both cases they had massacred some of her distant relatives with more enthusiasm than was called for, and Riordan had been most insistent on the urgent need to hang them—she could see why. The earls and their retainers were hired thugs; but Niejwein, as head bean counter, had expedited Egon’s reign of terror in a far deadlier way.

“We wanted to speak with you in private,” Miriam added, trying to ignore the small crowd of eavesdroppers. “To discuss your future.”

Niejwein’s short bark of laughter turned heads; more than one guard’s hand hovered close by a weapon. “I have no future,” Gerta translated.

“Not necessarily. You have no future without the grace and pardon of the crown, but you should not jump to conclusions about your ultimate fate.”

For the first time the Duke of Niejwein looked frightened. And for the first time Miriam, watching him, began to get an edgy feeling that she understood him.

Niejwein was outwardly average: middle-aged, of middling stature, heavy-faced, and tired-looking. He sat on a stone bench before her, arms and legs clanking with wrought iron whenever he moved, wearing a nobleman’s household robes, somewhat the worse for wear, ingrained with the grime of whatever cellar they’d warehoused him in for the run-up to her coronation. He’d been there a week ago, Miriam remembered, staring at her with hollowed eyes, among the other prisoners in the guarded block on the floor of the great hall.

He’d never been much of a warrior or a scholar, according to Brill. She’d asked for—and, for a miracle, been given—Angbard’s files on the man, and for another miracle they’d been written in English. (Angbard, it seemed, insisted on Clan secrets being written in English when they were to be kept in the Gruinmarkt, and in hochsprache if they were to be used in the United States.)

Oskar Niejwein was a second son, elevated into his deceased brother’s shoes after a boar hunt gone wrong and a lingering death from sepsis. He’d distinguished himself by maintaining and extending the royal estates and by tax farming with a level of enthusiasm and ruthlessness not spoken of in recent memory. It was no wonder that Egon hadn’t sent him into the field as a commander, and no surprise that Riordan’s men had seized him with such ease—Niejwein had all the military acumen of a turkey. But that didn’t make him useless to an ambitious monarch planning a purge: quite the opposite. As the old saying had it, knights studied tactics, barons studied strategy, and dukes studied logistics. Oskar was an Olympic-grade tax farmer. Which meant . . .

“Your majesty plays with me,” said Niejwein. “Have you no decency?”

Miriam kept her face frozen as a ripple of shock spread through her audience. That was not how a vassal should address a monarch, after all. How do I deal with this without looking weak? . . .

(Iris—showing a coldly cynical streak Miriam had seldom seen any sign of back home—had laid it out for her in the privy council meeting the morning after the coronation performance: “There are certain rules you’ve got to obey in public. You can’t afford to look like a patsy, dear. If they give you backchat it either means they’re scared to death or they think you’re weak. The former is acceptable, but if it’s the latter, you must be ruthless. The rot spreads rapidly and the longer you leave it the harder it becomes to fix the damage. Put it another way: Better to flog them on the spot for insubordination than let things slide until you have to have them broken on the wheel for rebellion.”)

“We are not playing games,” Miriam said evenly. “We are simply trying to decide whether you can be of use to us. But if you insist on seeing malice in place of mercy, you will seal your own fate.” She waited while Gerta translated. The color drained slowly from Niejwein’s cheeks as she continued: “We understand that circumstances placed your neck under our brother-in-law’s boot. We are prepared to make allowances—to a degree. A prudent woodsman does not chop down all the trees in his forest when autumn comes; he harvests the old and rotten, and keeps the healthy for another year. Only the rotten need fear the axe in this demesne.”

She’d stiffened up again, sitting on this damnable hard-as-a-board throne. Shifting her thighs, she leaned forward as Gerta worked through to the end of the speech. “Are you a rotten bough?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “Or would you like a chance to demonstrate how sound you are?”

Abruptly, Niejwein was on his knees; she didn’t need the blow-by-blow translation to grasp the gist of his entreaties. Her hochsprache was still stilted and poor, but she got the sense that he’d only gone along with Egon’s mad usurpation out of terror while unaware of her majesty’s survival, and he was of course loyal to the crown and he’d be her most stalwart vassal forever and a day if, if only, if—

Damn, he could give lessons in crow-eating to the CEO of a Fortune 100 corporation facing a record loss-making quarter. Miriam managed a faint, slightly perplexed smile as Gerta tried to keep up with the storm of entreaties. Right now, with a royal pardon dangling before his eyes, Niejwein would promise her just about anything to keep his head atop his shoulders and his neck unstretched. Which meant that she’d have to take anything he said with a pinch of salt big enough to pickle a sperm whale. Her eyes narrowed as she considered her options. I can’t kill him now, even if he deserves it—not without looking capricious. But in his undignified hurry to ingratiate himself, the duke was impressing her with his unreliability. Why would he misjudge me like that? she wondered. Chalk it up to another of the gaps between Gruinmarkt and American mores: The political over here was very personal indeed, as everybody kept reminding her.

“Enough.” She raised her right hand and he stopped so suddenly he nearly swallowed his tongue. Miriam took a deep breath. “Rise, your grace. We will not hang a man for a single honest mistake.” Two mistakes in a row and I might change my mind. . . . “We would, however, be delighted if you would stay here as our honored guest, while we restore the kingdom to order. Perhaps your wife and eldest son would care to join us as well. We shall take full responsibility for their safety.” In hochsprache, there were no separate words to distinguish safety from security. “And we would be pleased if you would attend us in session with the council of regents to decide in what manner you can assist us in securing the realm.”

There. She waited for Gerta to translate, watching the succession of expressions flit across Oskar ven Niejwein’s face, starting with stark relief, then fading into apprehension as he realized just how onerous his rehabilitation was to be. You, your wife, and your eldest son are to be hostages under the Clan’s control. You will devote precisely as much time and money to cleaning up this mess as the council demands. And if you don’t play along, we’ve got you where we want you.

Well, it beat the usual punishments for high treason, which included the aforementioned peine fort et dure, or just a straightforward impalement-and-burning-at-the-stake, the traditional cutting of the blood eagle being considered too barbaric for this effete and gentle age.

Miriam suppressed a slight shudder as Niejwein bowed deeply, then bowed again, stuttering a mixture of gracious thanks and praise for her mercy, insight, wisdom, deportment, wit, and general brilliance. She merely nodded. “Take him away,” she said, for the benefit of his jailers, “to suitable accommodation for a high noble whose loyalty to the crown is beyond question.” Which was to say, a cell with a view.

It took three more weeks of ceremonial duties, horse-trading with noble descendants of real (but successful) horse thieves, sitting in court sessions and trying to show no sign of discomfort when her judges pronounced bloodcurdling sentences upon the recalcitrant few—not to mention diplomacy, shouting, and some pigheaded sulking—but at last they agreed to book her into a suite in a boutique hotel near Quincy, with an ob-gyn appointment for the following day. The ob-gyn exam was the excuse; the real purpose was to give her a weekend off, lest she explode.

“I think you can take two, or at most three days off before too many questions asked,” Riordan had said. “Then it will be getting close to Hedge-Wife’s Night and you’ll be expected to officiate—”

“Four,” said Brill, just as Iris said: “Two.” They stopped and glared at each other warily, like cats sizing each other up for a fight.

“People.” Miriam rubbed her forehead tiredly. “I’ve had too much of this.” She waved a tired hand, taking in the high ceiling, the ornate tapestries and rugs that did little to soften the wood and plaster of the electricity and aircon-free room, the discreet chamber pots. They were in private, having exiled the servants for the duration of the brief discussion; they’d be back soon enough, like the rats in the walls that kept her awake in the dead of night with their scuttling and fighting. “I need to decompress, just for a couple of days—”

“We can bring doctors to you, there is no need for you to go to them. If we are secure by winter, then you can retreat to the Winter Palace and spend most of your time in Manhattan,” Iris pointed out.

“That’s months away. And anyway, you can hold down some of my appointments right now if I’m not here,” Miriam told her. “Her grace, the dowager Duchess Patricia Thorold ven Hjorth, mother of the queen-widow, who is indisposed due to her confinement. Isn’t that the formula?”

Iris grunted, displeased. “Something like that,” she conceded.

“Admit it, you want some time off, too, don’t you?”

Her mother shook her head. “Coming back to this life hasn’t been easy. If I give up now . . .”

After much haggling they had arranged that an anonymous carriage would leave town in the morning with Miriam inside, disguised as an anonymous lady-in-waiting of noble rank. An hour later, by way of the Clan’s highly organized courier service, Miriam—wearing jeans and a cotton blouse, feeling almost naked after weeks in court gowns—checked into a four-star hotel near Quincy, with no servants and no visible guards, and and no pomp, ceremony, or stench of open sewers outside the windows.

(That the Clan owned the hotel via a cut-out investment company, and that it was carefully monitored for signs of external surveillance, and discreetly guarded by much better than normal security, was another matter entirely. There was a tacit agreement: As long as Miriam agreed not to test the bars on her cage, everyone could pretend they didn’t exist.)

It had come as a welcome, but monumental, relief to have electricity and air conditioning and toilets and jacuzzis and daytime television and other miracles that had not yet reached the Gruinmarkt. Or even New Britain. It was enough to leave her head spinning and half-dizzy with sudden culture shock: Aside from her brief stay in the safe house out west, she’d been living in strange, backward cultures for months on end. I ought to start with a shower, she thought, almost salivating with the pornographic luxury of it. And turn the air con up to max. And I’ll wash my hair And then . . . the phone rang.

“What the—” She looked round, then made a dive for the room phone. “Yes?” she demanded.

“Ms. Beckworth?” (That was the name.) “This is the front desk, you have a visitor. . . .”

Oh hell. Miriam glanced at her watch. Twenty minutes. “Can I talk to them, please?”

“Certainly, ma’am. . . .”

“Miriam?”

“Olga?” Miriam sat down hard on the edge of the bed.

“Hi! It’s me! I heard you were in town and figured I’d drop in. Mind if I come up?” There was a bright, slightly edgy tone to her voice that set the skin on Miriam’s nape crawling.

“Sure, pass me back to reception and I’ll tell them. Okay—”

A couple of seconds later the handset was back on its cradle. Miriam stared at it, hard. “Shit,” she muttered. Her vision blurred; it’s one thing after another. Her carefully fostered illusion of stolen time wavered: What’s happened now?

There was a knock on the door. Miriam, far less trustful than she’d been even a couple of months ago, checked the spy hole: A familiar face winked at her.

“Come in.”

“Thank you.” Olga smiled reflexively. Then, as the door closed, her smile slipped. “Helge, I am so terribly sorry to impose on you, but we need to talk. Urgently.”

“Oh hell.” Miriam sat down again, her own face freezing in a smile that mirrored Olga’s in its insincerity. “I guessed.” Something’s come up in the past three hours, damn it, and they want my input, even though I’m just a front for the policy committee. Plaintively: “Couldn’t it wait?”

“I don’t think so.” Olga took a deep breath. “It’s about your mother.”

“Shit. She’s not ill, is—”

“No, it’s not that.” Olga paused.

“Yes?” Miriam’s vision blurred as her heartbeat settled back to normal. Iris’s multiple sclerosis hadn’t been far from her mind for years, now; she’d thought she’d gotten used to the knowledge that sooner or later she’d have a really bad relapse, but all it took was Olga’s ambiguous statement to drag her to the edge of an anxiety attack. “It’s not her health?”

“No.” Olga glanced around the room, her expression wooden. “I think—there is no easy way to say this.”

“Yes?” Miriam felt her face muscles tense unpleasantly.

“Your uncle. When he was ill. He told me to collect certain documents and, and bring them to you.”

“Documents?” Miriam sat up.

“About the”—Olga licked her lips—“the fertility clinic.” She stared at Miriam, her expression clear but unreadable.

“You know about it.”

“Know—” Olga shook her head. “Only a bit. His grace told me something, after the, the war broke out. It has been closed down, Helge, the program ended and the records destroyed.”

“My uncle,” Miriam said very slowly, “would never destroy that program.”

“Well.” Olga wet her lips again. “Someone did.”

“Eh.” Miriam shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

“His grace shut down the program, that’s true enough. He had the records copied, though—taken out of the clinic, physically removed to a medic’s practice office pending transfer to Niejwein. He wanted to keep track of the names, addresses, and details of the children enrolled in the program, but while there was fighting in Niejwein it was too risky to move the records there. And it was too risky to leave everything in the clinic. So.”

“You’d better tell me what happened,” Miriam said deliberately.

“I went to see Dr. Darling.” Olga shivered for a moment, then walked across the room and sat down in the solitary armchair. “He’s dead. It was a professional hit, almost a month ago. And his office was cleaned out, Helge. The records are missing.”

“But he—” Miriam stared. “Where does Mom come into this?”

“I had orders to get those records to you.” Olga looked unhappy. “And your mother took them.”

Miriam rolled her eyes. “She was in the same town at the same time, right?”

“Yes.” The set of Olga’s shoulders relaxed. “On its own that would not be conclusive, but—”

“You’re telling me my mother, who spends half her time in a wheelchair these days, assassinated a doctor, stole several thousand sets of medical records, and made a clean getaway? And why? To stop me from getting my hands on the breeding program’s records?” Her emphasis on the last three words made Olga wince.

“I am uncertain as to her motive. But—your mother knew of the program, no? And you must needs be aware of her views on the balance of powers within our circle of families, yes?”

Miriam sighed. “Of course I know what she thinks of—of all that stuff. But that breeding program was just plain odious. I know why they did it, I mean—we’re dangerously short on world-walkers, and if we can use a fertility clinic as a cover to spread the recessive trait around, then pay some of the first generation women to act as donors—but I tend to agree with Mom that it’s destabilizing as hell. And ethically more than questionable, too. But why would she destroy the records or kill Darling? Was there something else we don’t know about?”

“I don’t know.” Olga looked troubled.

“Then why don’t you ask her?” Miriam crossed her arms.

“Because.” Olga bit her lip. “She killed Dr. Darling,” she said, conversationally. “She had her woman Mhara do it, in direct contravention of Security protocols. The other thing, Helge, that you did not let me get to, is that there was another witness present.”

“Really?” Miriam’s shoulders tensed.

“Dr. ven Hjalmar,” said Olga.

“I want him dead.” Miriam’s voice was flat.

Olga shook her head. “We need to find out why she killed Dr. Darling first. Don’t we?”

“But—” Miriam changed tack. “Brill thought ven Hjalmar was dead,” she said. “In fact, she told me so.”

“Hmm. There was some confusion after the palace—Perhaps she was not in the loop?” Olga leaned back and met Miriam’s eyes. “I am telling you this because Mhara’s first loyalty is to Security; she was most upset when she learned her actions were unauthorized. What is your mother doing, Helge? How many games is she playing?”

“I . . . don’t . . .” Miriam fell silent. “Dr. ven Hjalmar,” she said faintly. “Is she cooperating with him?”

Olga stared at her for a long time.

Summer in the suburbs. The smell of honeysuckle and the creaking of cicadas hung heavy in the backyard of the small house on a residential street in Ann Arbor; there was little traffic outside, the neighbors either already in bed or away from their homes, dining out or working late. But inside the house, behind lowered blinds, the lights were on and the occupants were working. Not that a casual interloper would have recognized their activities as such. . . .

Huw sat in front of a laptop in the day room at the back of the house, staring at the running Mathematica workbook through goggles as it stepped through variations on a set. Wearing an oxygen mask, with a blood pressure cuff on his upper arm and a Glock on his belt, he squinted intently as the program flashed up a series of topological deformations of a familiar knot.

On his left wrist, he wore an electronic engineer’s grounding strap, which he had attached to a grounding spike in the backyard by a length of wire—and tested carefully. Two camcorders on tripods monitored his expression and the screen of the laptop. The medical telemetry gear was on order, but hadn’t arrived yet; it would have to wait for the next run. There were other watchers, too, equipped as best as he’d been able to manage in the time available.

“Ouch.” Huw tapped the space bar on the keyboard, pausing the run. “Sequence number 144. I definitely felt something there.” He glanced round. “Elena? You awake back there?”

“This thing stinks.” Her voice buzzed slightly. “And I give you seven more minutes until changeover time, my lord. Would you mind hurrying up and getting it over with?”

Huw stretched, rotating his shoulder blades. “Okay,” he agreed. “Resuming with sequence number 145 in three, two, one”—he tapped the space bar again—“ouch! Ow, shit!”—and again. Then he reached down and hit the start button on the blood pressure monitor. “That was a definite . . . something. Ow, my head.”

The machine buzzed as the cuff inflated. Thirty seconds passed, then it began to tick and hiss, venting compressed air. Finally it deflated with a sigh. “Shit. One fifty-two over ninety-five. Right, that’s it for this run. I got a definite ouch.”

Huw closed the workbook, then removed his goggles and unclipped the oxygen mask. “Ow.” He rubbed at his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, where the rubber had chafed. “How are you coping?”

“Help me out of this thing?” Elena asked plaintively.

Huw stood up, detached the grounding strap, and stretched again. “Okay, let’s see . . .” Elena was fumbling with the gas regulator under her visor. “No, let me sort that out.” A moment later he had the visor unclipped and her helmet swinging open.

“That’s better!” She took a deep breath and began to unfasten her gloves as he attacked the straps holding her backpack in place. “Are you sure the real thing will be lighter?”

“No,” Huw admitted. “And that’s if we can get our hands on one in the first place. I think we’re going to end up having one custom made.” Pressurized suits with self-contained air circulation weren’t widely sold, and some of the suppliers he’d approached had responded with alarming questions; the line between civilian and certain military uses was rather thin, it seemed. “Here, you should be able to get your helmet off now.”

“Oh, that’s nice.” Elena began to work at the high-altitude suit’s catches. It had been a random find in a somewhat peculiar store, and had taken almost a week to restore to working order; so far it was the only one they had, which had put a serious cramp on experimentation until Huw had bitten the bullet and decided to work with an oxygen bottle and goggles as minimal safety precautions. “How do you feel?”

“Head’s splitting,” Huw admitted. “Hmm. Let me just check again.” He ran the blood pressure monitor again. It was roughly the same—alarmingly high for a fit twenty-something—but he was standing up and moving, rather than slouched over a computer: Good. “I think I’m coming down.”

“It was definitely a tingle? Stronger than the last?”

“I think,” Huw paused for thought, “I’m going to skip forward a couple of notches, see how far this sequence runs. I got two weak ones, then this”—he winced—“like tuning in an old radio.”

“A radio? A radio tuned to new worlds?”

“Maybe.” He detached the blood pressure cuff and walked over to the archway leading to the kitchen. “I’m more interested in knowing what class of knot we’re dealing with.”

“What kind of? . . . But it’s a knot! How many kinds are there?”

“I don’t know.” Huw glanced at the coffee machine, then the wine bottle sitting next to it. “Huh. Where’s—” The door chime pinged for attention.

“I’ll get it.” Elena was out of the boots and gloves; she’d managed to unzip the pressure suit as far as the crotch, revealing the rumpled tee shirt and jeans she was wearing inside it. Huw shook his head. “That’d better not be the Jehovah’s Witnesses; they’re going to think we’ve got a really weird family life.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing—oh hello there!” Her voice rose to a happy chirp as Huw looked round. “Come in, be you welcome! He’s in the kitchen, over there, Huw—”

Making a snap decision, Huw palmed the corkscrew and picked up the bottle. Turning, he paused in the doorway. “Sigfrid? What are you doing here?”

Sigfrid—lanky, tall, with a mustache that resembled a corpulent caterpillar asleep on his upper lip—unslung his shoulder bag and grinned. “Eh, his lordship the major sent me. Said you needed spare hands for some kind of project?”

“Well.” Huw raised the bottle. “It’s about time. Do you know if he was sending anyone else?”

“No.” Sigfrid looked uncertain. “At least, he didn’t tell me.”

“Right.” He turned to Elena: “Can you phone Yul? Tell him to pick up food for four this time.” Back to Sigfrid. “So what have you been doing in the meantime?”

“Oh, you know.” Sigfrid shrugged his jacket back from his shoulders and let it slide to the floor. “I was with his lordship of Markford’s household when the pretender went on his rampage? So I had a busy couple of weeks. First a siege, then an evacuation through the backwoods, then lots of running around, hurry up and wait, until they stuck me in Castle Hjorth with the guards detachment.”

“But you’re here now.” Huw nodded to himself. “Want to fetch some glasses?” Elena was on her mobile phone. “Top cupboard, to the left of the kitchen sink.” Sig was never the scholarly sort, but he was bright enough to learn. “Let me fill you in on what we’re trying to achieve here.”

“Surely. The major said something about trying to find other worlds. Does that mean? . . .”

Huw nodded. “Yes. And tomorrow we’re going to try to open up another one.” He pulled the cork free with a pop. “We live in interesting times!”

On their first day in the enemy capital, the reconnaissance team checked into their hotel and commenced operations. Disguised as a family of Dutch tourists, Sir Gunnar ven Hjorth-Hjalmar, accompanied by his married younger cousin Beatrice and her infant son (the elder was back at the family estate, in the care of his nurse), purchased day passes on the double-decker tourist busses that rumbled incessantly through the boulevards and avenues of the city. Sitting on the top deck with a camcorder glued to his right eye, his “wife” gaping in bucolic awe at the colonnaded classical buildings and low office blocks to either side, Gunnar found it amusing to contemplate the police and security checkpoints that swarmed defensively around the federal buildings. They call this security? he asked himself ironically. Hmm. Target-rich environment, maybe.

“What’s that?” asked Beatrice, pointing at the Washington Monument. She spoke hochsprache, the better to aid the disguise; a strawberry blonde with a two-year-old on her hip wasn’t anybody’s idea of an Al Qaida terrorist. She hadn’t spent much time over in the Anglischprache world, beyond the minimum required for the corvée, and her emulation of an awestruck tourist was entirely genuine—because Niejwein, the largest city with which she was familiar, was less than a tenth the size of downtown Washington, D.C.

“It is a memorial to their founding king-emperor, the duke who led their armies during their rebellion against the rightful king over the water.” Gunnar sniffed. “He refused to take the throne, but their aristocrats honor him to this day.”

“How very stupid of him,” Beatrice agreed. “Was he mad?”

“I don’t know.” Gunnar zoomed in on the monument, then panned slowly sideways to take in the neoclassical palaces of bureaucracy to either side of the wide plaza and the shallow pool. Eight and nine stories high, none of them exceeded the height of the spire. Interesting, he noted. “Mark a waypoint, please.”

Beatrice fumbled obediently in her handbag, then produced a tissue and wiped little Anders’s nose. Anders bubbled sleepily as his mother wadded up the tissue with mild distaste and stuffed it back in her bag, along with the GPS machine. “He will need cleaning soon,” she told Gunnar.

“It cannot be helped. A single man, making notes and filming, would attract attention.”

“Of course, cousin. But we will need to stop the carriage to do so.”

Gunnar panned back across the Mall, slowly scanning a frontage of museum buildings. “There are public toilets in all the museums and public buildings here, well-kept and as luxurious as any palace back home.”

“Good.” She glanced behind her. “These buildings. The people own them?”

“Only indirectly. Just as they rebelled against their king and replaced him with none, so they tried to abolish their aristocracy. It grew back, of course, but not in the same image—so there is a ruling class here, but its members are not named count this or lord that.”

“How very confusing! How is one to recognize a superior? . . .”

“You don’t.” Gunnar ignored her evident discomfort. “It’s very confusing at first. But eventually you learn to spot the signs. Their wealth, for one thing. And the way the laws that leash the ordinary people slip past them. They don’t carry arms; other people carry arms for them, it’s a sign of how rich and powerful this empire has become.” Too many words, he thought. The words wouldn’t stop coming; relief at being here, at not worrying about being murdered by the bitch-queen back home, had loosened his tongue.

Beatrice shifted Anders across her lap. “It’s huge,” she said, her voice wavering slightly.

“Of course. This city, Washington, D.C., has nearly two-thirds the population of the entire Gruinmarkt. And it rules over everything from the outer kingdom in our west through the badlands and the mountains to the Sudtmarkt and the Nordmarkt—well, part of the Nordtmarkt belongs to these Americans’ northern neighbor, but that kingdom is also vast, by our lights. But it is still a kingdom and it is still run by a king-emperor of sorts, albeit one of their elite who is formally proclaimed by his peers to rule for four or eight years. And we know how to talk to power.”

“Huh. My tutor told me their king-emperor is elected, that the people choose him. Is this not so?”

“It looks like that, yes, but it’s not so simple. The little people are presented with two contenders, but the ruling elite would never tolerate the candidacy of an outsider. Sometimes a contender tries to look like an outsider, but it’s purely a rabble-rousing pretense. This current king-emperor doesn’t even go that far; his father was king-emperor before last.”

“Huh. Again, how stupid! Sir Gunnar, I think we should move now, before Anders disgraces himself. If it pleases you?”

Gunnar lowered the camcorder and switched it to standby. The tour guide was still droning on in a nasal voice, mangled by the loudspeakers behind the windshield at the front of the open upper deck of the bus. “Yes, let us do so.” The bus swayed as it moved forward then turned in towards the curb. “Follow me.”

The sky was clear and blue, the sun beating down on the sidewalk as Beatrice stepped off the bus with Anders, waiting while Gunnar—determinedly staying in character—collected the push-chair. As he unfolded it, Anders sent up a sleepy moan: Beatrice bounced him, shushing. “Please let us get him indoors.”

“In a moment.” Gunnar glanced round. The bus had stopped close by a huge concrete and stone facade—back home, it would have been the stronghold of a noble family, but here it was most likely a museum of some sort. “Ah yes. We’ll try there.” Holocaust Memorial Museum? Gunnar had a vague recollection that it might be connected with some historic massacre in these Anglischprache folks’ history, but that didn’t matter to him; it was a museum, so obviously it would have toilets and baby changing facilities. “Record a waypoint. And another one in the baby-changing room, if the machine functions adequately indoors.”

The museum had security guards and one of those annoying contraptions that let them peer into visitors’ possessions next to a metal detecting arch. Gunnar was sufficiently familiar with such precautions to have left his weapons back at the hotel, but they still irritated him, reminding him that he was not free to comport himself as an arms-man in this place. If the business of governance was to maintain a monopoly on lethal force, as his baron had once asserted, then the Anglischprache clearly understood this message. Still, discreet signs pointed to the toilets beyond the obstruction, and the little one’s needs must be attended to.

Gunnar cooled his heels in the atrium for a few minutes while his sister-in-law dealt with the child. It was a peculiar museum, he decided, very strange—more like a mausoleum. This holocaust was clearly a most unsavory affair, but why dwell on it? It was confusing: It didn’t even seem to have happened to the Anglischprache themselves, but to some other people. So why bother commemorating it with a museum? But it’s in the right place, he reminded himself. And it’ll be easier to get onto the roof than any of the government offices. If it’s high enough . . .

Beatrice finally emerged from the rest room, carrying a quieter Anders. Gunnar smiled, trying to look relieved. “I think I would like to go upstairs here,” he told her quietly. “Let’s go find the elevator and ride it to the top. Did you get a waypoint?”

“I’m sorry cousin; the machine balked. I think the walls are too thick.”

“Then you will try again on the highest floor. And I shall look for access doors to the roof. If there’s a window, I will film landmarks through it, to estimate the elevation.”

“You have plans for this place?”

“Oh yes, indeed.” Gunnar nodded. “We’re well into Sudtmarkt territory here, but for what I think we shall be doing, that should be no obstacle.”

“You want to doppelganger a museum?”

“It’s a possibility—I want to look at some shops, too. As long as the land is accessible, it will fit my needs. And I don’t recall any cities in the middle of swamps down there. The Sudtmarkt can be bullied, bought, or bribed, and along with elevation that’s all that matters.”

A month had passed since the disastrous mission into Niejwein; Mike had been back in the office for two weeks, alternating between interdepartmental meetings and frustrating sessions in room 4117 when he got an e-mail from the colonel: Tomorrow we’re taking a day trip to the Otis Air National Guard Base on Cape Cod. I’ve got a meeting there, and there are some folks I want to introduce you to.

The aircraft hangar was dim and cavernous after the bright daylight outside. Mike blinked, slightly dazzled, at the thing squatting on the stained concrete in front of him. It seemed misshapen and malformed, like a fairy-tale dragon sleeping in its cave. It was green and scaly, sure enough, and spiky—a huge refueling probe jutting lancelike from the chin beneath its cockpit windows, and infrared sensors bulged like enormous warts from the deformed forehead beneath the hunched shoulders of its engine cowls.

Dragons, however, did not traditionally have high-visibility warning tags dangling from their rotor blade tips, or an array of maintenance trolleys and tractors parked around them. And dragons most especially didn’t have a bunch of Air Force officers chattering next to the huge external fuel tank slung from their port winglet.

Mike had hobbled halfway to the chopper before anyone noticed him. An arm waved: “Mike. Over here, I want you to meet these folks.” He picked up his pace as much as he dared. “Gentlemen, this is Mike Fleming. Mike is a special agent on assignment to our organization from DEA. His specialty is getting under enemy skin. He’s our HUMINT guy, in other words, and he picked up that broken leg in the same line of work as you guys—only on foot. Mike, this is Lieutenant John Goddard, and Captain Simon MacDonald. They’re in charge of flight operations for this little test project—staff and execution both, they sit up front in the cockpit.” More faces and more introductions followed, warrant officer this and tech specialist that, the guys in charge of making the big helicopter work. Mike tried to commit them all to memory, then gave up. The half dozen guys and one or two women in fatigues standing around here were the crew chiefs and flight crew—it took a lot of people to keep a Pave Low helicopter flying.

“Pleased to meet you.” Mike shook hands all round. He caught Eric’s eye. “I’m impressed.” Which statement, when fully unpacked, meant How the hell have you been keeping this under wraps? The implications weren’t exactly subtle: So this is Dr. James’s breakthrough. What happens next?

“Good,” said Smith, nodding. Quietly: “I told them you’re not up to serious exertion, they’ll make allowances. Just try to take it all in.” He paused for a moment. “Simon, why don’t you give Mike here the dog and pony show. I’ll go over the load-out requirements with John and Susan in the meantime. When Mike’s up to speed, we can meet up in the office, uh, that’s room R-127, and share notes.”

“Yes, I’ll do that, sir.” MacDonald turned to Mike and waved a hand at a door some way back along the flank of the green monster. “Ever seen one of these before?” he asked breezily.

“Don’t think so. On the news, maybe?” Mike followed the captain across the stained concrete floor towards the door, going as fast as he could with his cast. The chopper was huge, the size of a small airliner. Blades big enough to bridge a freeway curved overhead in the dimness. The fuel tanks under the stubby wings proved, on closer acquaintance, to be nearly as tall as he was, and as long as a pickup truck. “I don’t know much about helicopters,” he admitted.

“Okay, we’ll fix that.” MacDonald flashed a smile. “This is a modified MH-53, descended from the Jolly Green Giant. Back about twenty years ago it was our biggest cargo helicopter. This one’s been rebuilt as an MH-53J, part of the Pave Low III program. It’s still a transport chopper, but it’s been tailored for one particular job—low-level, long-range undetected penetration of enemy airspace, at night or in bad weather, in support of special forces. So we’ve got a load of extra toys on this ship that you don’t normally see all in one place.”

The side door was open. MacDonald pulled himself up and stood, then reached down to help Mike into the cavernous belly of the beast. “This is a General Electric GAU-2/A, what the army call an M134 minigun. We’ve got three of them, one in each side door and one on the ramp at the back.” He walked forward, towards the open cockpit door. “Night, bad weather, and enemy territory. That’s a crappy combination and it means flying low in crappy visibility conditions. So we’ve got terrain-following radar, infrared night vision gear, GPS, inertial navigation, an IDAS/MATT terminal for tactical datalink—” He stopped. “Which isn’t going to be much use where we’re going, I guess. Neither is the GPS or the missile warning transponders or a whole load of stuff. So I’ll not go over that, right? What you need to know is, it’s a big chopper that can fly low, and fast, at night, while carrying three infantry squads or two squads and a dozen prisoners or six stretcher cases. We can put them down fast, night or day, and provide covering suppressive fire against light forces. Or we can carry an outside load the size of a Humvee. So. Have you got any questions?” He seemed amused.

“Yeah.” Mike glanced around. “You’ve crossed over before, as I understand it. How’d it go?”

MacDonald’s face clouded. “It went okay.” He gestured at a boxy framework aft of one of the flight engineer’s positions. “I’d studied all the backgrounders—but still, it wasn’t like anything I’d expected.” He shook his head. “One thing to bear in mind is that it would be a really bad idea to do that kind of transition too close to the ground. The air pressure, wind direction, weather—it can all vary. You could be in a world of hurt if you go from wet weather and low pressure to a sudden heat wave without enough airspace under your belly.” He registered Mike’s expression. “You get less lift in high temperatures,” he explained. “Affects rotary-winged ships as well as fixed-wing, and we tend to fly low and heavy. With all the graceful flight characteristics of a grand piano, if we lose engine power or exceed our load limit.” He sat down in the pilot’s chair. “Go on, take a seat, she won’t bite as long as you keep your hands to yourself.”

“I don’t think I’d fit. Not ‘til I get this thing off my leg.” Mike leaned across the back of the copilots’ seat, staring at the controls. “Last time I saw this many screens was when I had to arrest a share trader—it’s like a flying dealer desk!”

“Yeah, that’s about right. Of course, if any of it goes wrong it adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘my computer crashed.’ ” MacDonald grinned. “Look, out there. And down. Get a feel for the visibility. What do you think our main problem is going to be?”

“What do I—oh.” Mike frowned. “Okay, there’s no GPS where we’re going. The Clan don’t have heavy weapons, at least nothing heavier than machine guns—as far as we know. Unless they’ve somehow bought some missiles, and they’re pretty much limited to whatever they can carry by hand from one side to the other. So—” He glanced up at the rotor blade arching overhead and followed it out into the middle distance. “Hmm. Where we’re going there are a lot of trees. And the places we want to get inside of are walled. Is that going to be a problem?”

“You ever seen Black Hawk Down?” It was a rhetorical question. “We’ve got ways of dealing with trees. What we really don’t like—our second worst nightmare—is buildings with armed hostiles overlooking the LZ. In general, just don’t go there. The ground pounders can secure the target then we can land and pick them up. The alternative is to risk us taking one on the rotor head, in which case we all get to walk home.”

“What’s your worst nightmare?”

“MANPADs,” He said bluntly. “Man-portable air defense missiles, that is. Not your basic SAM-7, which is fundamentally obsolete, but late-model Stingers or an SA-16 Igla—that’s Russian-made and as deadly as a Stinger—can really ruin your day. From what I’ve been reading, your bad guys could carry them across, they only weigh about twenty kilos. We’ve got countermeasures and flare dispensers, of course, but if they’ve bothered to get hold of a bunch of MANPADs and learn how to use them properly we could be in a world of hurt.”

Mike nodded. “That wouldn’t be good.”

“Well.” MacDonald slapped the top of the instrument console affectionately. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. Because they won’t be expecting anyone to come calling by chopper. It’s never happened to them before, right? So they’ve got no reason to expect it now. Plus, we have God and firepower on our side. As long as the ARMBAND supply holds up we can ship over spec-ops teams and their logistics until the cows come home. You do not want to get between a Delta Forces specialist and his ticket home, if you follow my drift, it doesn’t give you a good life expectancy. So it’s all down to the guys with the black boxes.”

“I don’t know anything about that side of things.” Mike shrugged. “For that, you need to talk to the colonel. But I would guess that we’ve got a bunch of GPS coordinates you can feed into your magic steering box of tricks; sites the Clan used as safe houses in this world, so they’re almost certainly collocated with their installations in the other place. We don’t know what they look like over there, but that’s beside the point if we know where to find them.”

“Well, it also helps to know what we’re meant to do when we get there.” MacDonald grinned briefly. “Although that oughta be obvious—otherwise they’d have sent someone else. So what do you know that you can tell me?”

“I don’t. Know, that is. What you’re cleared for, for example.” Mike paused. “I’m just the monkey—Colonel Smith, he’s the organ-grinder. You’ve been over to the other world, you’ve got the basics, right? But this is new to me. Until this morning, I hadn’t had more than a hint that you guys even existed.”

“There are too many Chinese walls in this business. Not our fault.”

“Yeah, well, you know this didn’t come out of nowhere, did it?” Mike decided to take a calculated risk. “The folks who live over there found us first. And they’re not friendly.”

“No shit? I’d never have guessed.”

“Well, that’s the punch line. Because the target where they live—it’s another version of North America, only wild and not particularly civilized. I’ve been over there on foot and, hell, we’re not getting very far if we get stuck down there. So I would guess that’s where you guys come in. But I don’t know for sure because nobody’s told me”—He shrugged—“but I think we’re about to find out. Maybe we should go find that office now. Find out what the official line is.”