The Revolution Business

Party to Conspiracy

Throwing a party and inviting all your friends and family was not, Miriam reminded herself ruefully, a skill that she’d made much use of over the past few years—especially on the scale that was called for now.

For one thing, she had status; as a member of the council of regents that had assembled itself from the wreckage of the Clan Council’s progressive faction, and as a countess in her own right, she wasn’t allowed to do things by half. A low-key get-together in the living room with finger food and quiet music and a bring-your-own-bottle policy was right out, apparently. If a countess—much less a queen-widow—threw a party, arrangements must be made for feeding and irrigating not only the guests, but: their coachmen, arms-men, and servants; their horses; their hangers-on, courtiers, cousins, and children in the process of being introduced to polite society; her own arms-men and servants; and the additional kitchen and carrying staff who it would be necessary to beg, borrow, or kidnap in order to feed all of the above. Just the quantity of wine that must be brought in beggared the imagination.

“Old King Harald, he had a reputation for bankrupting any lord who made trouble for him. He used to invite himself and his court to stay for a couple of weeks, paying a house call—with six hundred mouths to feed.” Brill grinned at Miriam over the clipboard she was going through. “Two thousand three hundred bottles of spiced wine and eighty casks of small beer is nothing for a weekend retreat, my lady.”

“Oh god. Am I going to bankrupt myself if I make a habit of this?”

“Potentially, yes.” Brill lowered her clipboard. “You must know, a third of the royal budget was spent on food and drink for the court. I know this sounds insane to you, but this is the reality of our economy—peasants produce little surplus, knowing that it can be taken from them in taxes. However.” She made a note on her checklist: “Four oxen, two hundred turkey-fowl, twelve pigs, a quarter-ton of fresh-caught cod, six barrels of salted butter, two tons of wheat . . . yes, you can afford this from your household funds. Monthly, even. It increases your outgoings tenfold, but only for three days. And once you have demonstrated your hospitality, there is no reason to hold such entertainments merely for your courtiers: Say the word and those you wish to see will visit to pay their respects. Next week’s festivity demonstrates your wealth and power and establishes you on the social circuit.”

“You make that sound as if it’s something I’m going to have to repeat.”

“My lady.” Brilliana’s tone was patient rather than patronizing: “Nothing you do now can divert you from your destiny to become a shining star in the social firmament—well, nothing short of raving at the moon—but how seriously the other stars of the stratum take you depends on how you comport yourself in this affair. Many of your peers are shallow, vapid, prone to superficial gossip, and extremely malicious. Yet you—or I—cannot live without their sanction. Your status as queen-widow depends on their consent and their consent is contingent on you being the queen-widow they expect—in public.”

“Huh. By throwing a huge party I give them lots of stuff to gossip about, though.” Miriam frowned. “But if I don’t throw a huge party they’ll gossip anyway, with even less substance and possibly more malice because I haven’t stuffed their stomachs with good food. I can’t win, can I?”

Brill nodded. “My humble advice is to treat it as a matter of gravest business, and to attend to every plaint and whine that your supplicants—and you will have many—bring to your attention. Then ignore them, as is your wish, but at least let them talk at you.”

“I’m not going to ignore them.” Miriam picked moodily at a loose thread on the left sleeve of her day-dress. “Damn it. You remember my Dictaphone? I need it, or one like it. Make it one that runs on microcassettes, and make sure there’s a spare set of batteries and spare tapes for, oh, let’s go mad and say twenty-four hours. Add a pair of desktop recorders with on/off pedals to the shopping list, and another laptop, and some kind of printer. We’ve got the generator, right? Let’s use it. Can you find me a couple of people who know how to use a keyboard and speak both English and hochsprache who we can trust? I need an office staff for this job. . . .”

Brill closed her mouth with a snap. “Uh. An office?”

“Yeah.” Miriam’s smile flickered on for a moment. “You’ve framed it for me: This is a political do, isn’t it? And I’m a politician. So I’m going to listen to everybody, and because I can’t take it all in, I’m going to record what they say and respond later, off-line. But somebody’s got to type up all those petitions and turn them into stuff I can deal with.”

“You need secretaries.” Brill picked up her clipboard, flipped over a page, and began making notes. “Trustworthy—I know. Second sons or daughters of allies? To assist the queen-widow’s household? I believe . . . yes, I can do that. Anything else?”

“Yes. I want a photographer.”

“A photographer.” Brill frowned. “That is very unusual? . . .”

“Yes, well. If anyone makes trouble, tell the truth: I need to learn to recognize people, and because I’m new around here and don’t want to give offense by not recognizing people the second time I see them, I want photographs with names attached. But otherwise—hmm. It’s a party. People are on display, right? So have a photo printer to hand, and offer to take portraits. Do you think that would work?”

“We don’t have a photo printer. . . .” Brill trailed off. She blinked, surprised. “You offer portraits, while you compile mug shots? . . .”

“Old political campaign trick, kid, Mom told me about it. She did some campaigning back in the eighties when she was married to—” Miriam stopped, her throat closing involuntarily. Dad, she thought, a black sense of despair suffocating her for a moment. “Shit.”

Brill stared at her. “Helge?”

Miriam shook her head.

“Hara!” Brill snapped her fingers. “A cup of the slack for my lady, at once.” The maidservant, who had been hiding in some dark recess, darted away with a duck of her head that might have been a bow. “Helge?” Brill repeated gently.

“A memory.” Miriam stared at the backs of her hands. Smooth skin, unpainted nails—nail paint was an alien innovation here—and she remembered holding her father’s hands, years ago; it seemed like an eternity ago. A happier, more innocent lifetime that belonged to someone else. “You know how it is. You’re thinking about something completely different and then—bang.”

“Your father.” Brill cleared her throat. “You do not speak of Lord Alfredo, do you.”

Miriam sighed. “The man is dead, and besides, it was in another country a long time ago.” She glanced at Brill. “He died nearly ten years ago. He was a good man.” She tried to swallow. “It seems so long ago. I’m being silly! . . .”

“No you’re not.” Brill laid her clipboard down as the door opened. It was the maid, bearing a tray with a bottle and two cups on it. “You’ve been driving yourself hard today, my lady; a cup and a pause to refresh your nerves will not delay you any more than overtiring yourself would do.”

“A cup.” Miriam focused on the tray as Hara placed it on the table and retreated, bowing. Over the weeks she’d been working on her ability to ignore the omnipresent servants; or rather, to avoid embarrassing anyone—herself or them—by recognizing them as social individuals. Long habit of politeness vied with newly learned behavior as she held herself back from thanking the woman (which would only commence both of them on a possibly disastrous social minuet of interaction that might result in the maid losing her job or being flogged for insolence if she misspoke). “Pour one for yourself, Brill. I’m—you’re right. Anyway, what am I meant to be doing next?”

Brilliana produced a pocketwatch from her sleeve. “Hmm. You were due for a fitting half an hour ago, but that doesn’t matter. The seamstresses already have all the toiles they need, they can embroider while they wait. Hmm again. There is the menu to consider, and your household’s clothing, and the fireworks, and small gifts and largesse, but”—her gaze flickered to Miriam’s face—“we can do that tomorrow. Milady? Right now, you’re going to take a break. Please?”

Ding-dong.

The doorbell chime died away. The short dark-haired woman swore quietly and put down the vegetable knife she’d been using on a handful of onions. “What now?” she asked herself rhetorically, wiping her hands on a towel as she walked towards the front door. Last week it had been the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the week before . . . well, at least it won’t be them. They never ring. They just appeared in her living room, disturbingly self-possessed and always armed.

“Yes?” she said, opening the door.

“Hi, Paulie,” said Brilliana, smiling hesitantly.

Paulette gaped for a moment. “You’d better come in.” She took in Brill’s companion: “You, too?”

“Thank you,” said Olga, as they retreated into the front hall. She closed the door carefully. “Miriam sent us.”

“Looks nice,” Brill added offhand as she looked around. “That wallpaper, is it new?”

“I put it up six months ago!” Paulette stared at her in exasperation and muted fear. At her last visit, Brill had hinted darkly about the extremes the Clan would go to in order to preserve their secrecy. “How is she? Did you find her?”

“Yes.” Brilliana grimaced. “Luckily I found her before things went too badly awry. And there is gold at the end of this tunnel.”

“Politics! Who needs it?” Olga chirped brightly, momentarily slipping into her well-practiced airhead role. “One needs must be patient while these things work themselves out. But in any case, we thought we ought to visit. It’s well past time we had a talk.”

“Um.” Paulette backed towards the kitchen. “Sure. How would you like to do it over an iced tea?”

“I’d like that just fine.”

Ten minutes later, with mugs in hand, they were seated around the coffee table in the lounge. “Have you had any official visits?” asked Brill. “Men in black, that sort of thing?” She said it lightly, as if half-joking, but Paulette knew how serious it was.

“No, nothing I’ve noticed. No visits, no strange mini-vans, none of that sort of thing.”

“Fine.” Brill sounded reassured. Olga, however, looked thoughtful.

“Don’t you want to check the phone lines?” she asked, unable to help herself.

“Already done.” Brill’s smile was unsettling. “I left a device behind on my last visit. It would have told me if there was any sign of tampering.”

“We hope,” Olga added, with a disturbing smile.

“Oh.” Paulette took a mouthful of her drink to stop herself saying anything she might regret later. “Well that’s alright then.” Brill showed no sign of noticing any irony. “So you came to have a little chat. After nearly six months of nothing at all.” She squinted at Brill. “And you brought Olga. How nice.” Sarcasm was risky, but Paulette was a realist: If the news was really bad, these two wouldn’t have invited themselves in for a social. There had to be a value proposition in play here, an offer too good to refuse. But at least they were here to make an offer, not to simply shoot her out of hand. The Clan were comparatively civilized, for a bunch of barely postmedieval gangsters.

“She sent us,” said Olga. “She told us to tell you, you were right. But that is not why we are here. It appears the US government has noticed us.”

“Oh.” Paulette put her glass down. “Shit.”

There was a moment’s heartfelt silence.

“Just how much have the feds noticed you guys?” Paulette asked carefully, meaning: Am I likely to get any of that attention?

“Thoroughly.” Olga looked tired for a moment. “Brill?”

“There’s an entire new federal agency devoted to us.” Brill took a mouthful of tea, frowned. “Super-black, off the books, siphoning money off the war appropriations and the NSA and the CIA, as far as we can tell. They’ve captured couriers and used them as mules to get into our world. Most recently they”—she swallowed—“used a backpack nuke to send us a message.”

“Oh Jesus.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say to that. “That’s not policing, that’s war.”

“Exactly,” Brilliana said heavily.

“Which leaves us with problems.” Olga picked up the thread. “We can no longer do business over here as usual”—business being the somewhat less legal side of the import-export trade—“and furthermore, this mess coincided with a political upset back home. Everything’s up in the air.”

“And you’re off the reservation,” Paulette said drily.

“Yes, there is that.” Olga glanced sidelong at Brill. “There’s no telling how long it’ll last.” Brill shook her head slightly. “But anyway . . . we came to apologize for dragging you into this mess.”

“Isn’t it a bit late for that?”

“Not necessarily. We can cut you loose. You were never directly involved in our principal business operations. There’s no record of you outside of a few handwritten ledgers in Niejwein, and the office Hel-Miriam bought, and there’s no sign that the feds are aware of what she was up to on her own behalf. I think if we cover your tracks we can be confident that they won’t stumble across you.” She halted awkwardly for a moment. “The flip side is, if they identify you as a person of interest, we won’t be able to do anything to protect you. We won’t even know.”

“Ah.” Paulette contemplated screaming, but it didn’t seem like it would do any good. “What could you do to help?”

“Well, that depends.” Olga put her hands between her knees, clearly uneasy. “Whatever happens next, the Clan will no longer be acting as, as an extradimensional drugs cartel anymore. The feds consider us to be a hostile government: Should we not act upon our status? Furthermore, the changes among the all-highest mean that they are not entirely wrong. Anyway, I didn’t come here merely to say we are cutting you loose.”

Here it comes. “What have you got in mind?” Paulette asked wearily. “And is it going to just evaporate under me again, three months down the line? . . .”

“That wasn’t Miriam’s doing.” Olga grimaced. “You should not underestimate the power of the enemies she made. She spent months under house arrest. Later, you can ask her yourself if you are so inclined. But this is different.”

“In what way is it different?” Why am I doing this? Paulette asked herself. Am I trying to get myself sucked in again? It was true, the money had been good—and Miriam was a friend, and it beat the ordinary daily grind she’d had before, and the tedious admin job she’d had to take up since; but the downside, attracting the attention of the government, and not in a good way, was almost enough to make her short-circuit the process and say “no” immediately. Only residual curiosity was keeping her going.

“Miriam has both a secure position and a plan,” said Olga. “She is in a position where, if she plays her hand correctly, she can set policy for the whole Clan. I am not entirely clear on her design, but she said I should tell you that unlike the old trade, this one is both legal and ethically sound. She said it would also need a lot of organizing at this end, materials and books and journals and specialist expertise to buy in . . . and to be firewalled completely from the Clan’s historic operations. Is that of interest to you?”

Paulette nodded. She’d visited New Britain once at Miriam’s behest, found it a strange and disorienting experience, like a trip to another century. “Well, it’s a plan. But what makes this time different?”

Olga glanced at Brill, as if for support. “She’s the queen,” she said.

Paulette blinked. “Queen,” she repeated. It was the last thing she’d have expected to hear.

“Yes. You know, woman who sits on a throne? Sometimes wears a crown?”

“Eh.” Paulette blinked again, then looked at Brilliana. Who was watching her, a flicker of tightly controlled amusement twitching her lips. “She’s not joking, is she?”

“Power is no joking matter.” The younger woman’s eyes were cold. “We’ve just fought a civil war over it. And now Helge is carrying the heir to the throne—long story, you do not need to look shocked—we would be fools not to seize the moment. And we need a new world to exploit, now that this one has shown itself hostile. That much has now become glaringly clear even to the most reactionary of the conservative wing.”

“Okay.” Paulette licked suddenly dry lips. She could feel her heartbeat. “So what’s in it for me?” If you say old time’s sake I may just punch you . . . this was the proverbial offer too good to refuse. No way will they just let me go now.

“A tenth of a point of gross,” said Olga. “But you don’t have to say yes now. Miriam is holding a meeting in a few days of her accomplices and confidantes. If you are interested, you may attend.” She slid a business card across the table. “Phone this number no later than four o’clock tomorrow afternoon and say yes or no, then follow the post officer’s instructions; they will see you across. The nature of the business, and your role in it, is such that if you choose to decline the offer, you have nothing to fear—you could spill everything you know, and the US government would learn nothing of use. Oh, and she sends you this. You can treat it as a nonreturnable advance against wages.” She slid a checkbook across the table to rest atop the card. “Half a million bucks in the account, Paulie. Try not to spend it all at once.”

It was just another summer party, held on the afternoon of a muggy, humid summer day twelve miles outside of Niejwein, in the grounds of a fortified mansion out near what would—in another world—be Lincoln, Massachusetts. Summer parties were a seasonal fixture among the aristocracy of Niejwein, required to live in proximity to their ruler and lacking in any kind of civil society that might host more public entertainments; but this was also the first Miriam had ever held. Just a summer party, Miriam reminded herself, glassy-eyed, as yet more carriages and their obligatory escorts of footmen and mounted guards drew up, disgorging men and women in the peacock finery of the nobility: It was more like the Academy Awards, minus the onlookers and the network television presence, but with added cockfighting behind the woodshed.

Sir Alasdair had a third of his men dispersed around the perimeter of her commandeered residence, another third staking out the doppelganger house in Lincoln, and the remaining cadre of guards on alert downstairs. Brilliana had the receiving line under control, looking for all the world like the lady of the house herself—and leaving Miriam (again wearing the persona of Helge, Prince Creon’s putative widow) free to focus on those she wished to talk to. Two teenage scions of the inner family lines, Barbara and Magraet, had been introduced into the household for transcription and translation and ensconced in a back room with a bottle of wine and a supply of spare batteries and Dictaphone tapes. And Earl Riordan—no, Baron Riordan, a reward by order in council for his support, paid out of the estates of several drastically pruned noble family trees—had sent her a dozen hard-eyed Security agents in the livery of waiters and other domestics. There’d be no trouble here, clearly. “It’s all under control,” Brill had assured her that morning. “Just relax and enjoy the affair.”

“Relax? In the middle of this?” Miriam had taken in the organized chaos.

“Yes, Helge, it’s your job to be serene. Leave the panicking to me.” And Brill had left her to the mercy of her wardrobe staff, who had spent weeks preparing their idea of a party dress for her, and who had never heard of the word excess.

Which left her standing still in an attempt not to perspire in the stuffy warmth of the blue receiving room, trying to smile and make small talk and juggle a glass of wine and a peacock-feather fan that barely stirred the air in front of her. She was surrounded: With Sir Alasdair standing discreetly to one side, and a permanent floating mob of relatives and hangers-on trying to approach her from the front, she was unable to move, reliant on the two ladies-in-waiting hovering nearby.

“—The effect on the harvest will, unfortunately, be bad, your highness, with so many destitute; the pretender’s army ate what they could and burned the rest, and banditry and famine follow such as night follows day.”

Miriam—no, Helge—smiled politely as Lord Ragnr and Styl droned on, talking at her rather than to her, but most accurately delivering his report to the small condenser mic hidden in her corsage. “And how much has been lost, exactly?” she nudged, shaking her head minutely as Sir Alasdair raised an eyebrow and mimed a shoving motion.

“Oh, lots! I myself counted—” That was Lord Ragnr and Styl’s vice, Miriam remembered. In another world he’d have been an adornment to a major accountancy firm’s boardroom. In this one, he was a liability to his profession (lord oath-sworn to Duke Lofstrom and ruler of some boring fishing villages, a small chunk of forest, and a bunch of peasant hamlets; performance appraisal based on ability to hunt, drink, and kill the duke’s enemies). But she’d listened to him before, and he seemed to think this gave him license to bend her ear in future, and what he had to say was deeply tedious but clearly a matter of profound importance for the business of future good governance. And so, she stood and smiled, and listened to the man.

“—By your leave, my lord?” Miriam blinked back to the present as Sir Alasdair gently interrupted. “My liege, your grandam is about to be announced.”

“She is?” Miriam felt the color draining from her cheeks. Well shit! “You’re certain about that?” I thought she was dead!

“Absolutely.” Sir Alasdair’s expression was imperturbable: She noted the colorless wire coiling from his left ear to the collar of his tunic.

“Oh. Well.” She took a breath of musty, overheated air. “My lord, you must, please, forgive me? But I have not seen my grandmother since before the insurrection, and”—if I clap eyes on her before I die of old age it’s too soon—“I really must pay my respects.” I’d rather piss on her grave, but I suppose I’d better find out why she’s here.

Ragnr and Styl seemed disappointed for some reason, but took it in good spirit, and after much backing and flowery commiseration she was free. More backing and sidling and some whispered instructions and her ladies-in-waiting formed a flying wedge, or at any rate a creeping one. As they moved towards the door with Miriam in their wake she recognized a gaggle of familiar faces. “Sir Huw?” she called.

“Milady!”

She smiled, unforced: “Did you bring your results?”

Huw nodded. “I’m ready to speak. Whenever you want me to.”

“Good. Upstairs, half an hour?”

Huw ducked his head and vanished into a knot of younger Clan members. Miriam blinked as she noticed Elena, almost unrecognizable in a red gown with a long train. Are they an item? Miriam wondered, before dismissing the question. Where’s Mom? I need her advice before I confront Hildegarde.

“Milady?” It was Gerta, pressed into service as an attendant. “If it please you . . .”

“I need to circulate,” she mouthed over her shoulder. “Sir Alasdair? . . .”

The press around her began to give way as she made progress towards the main hall. Despite the open doors and windows the air was no less close, thanks to the milling clusters of visitors and their attendants, and the copious quantities of rose water and other perfumes with which they attended to their toilet. Out here in the countryside, the humidity and stink of summer was a mere echo of conditions in the capital; though the gods had little to say against bathing (unlike the early Christians), the smell of old sweat and unwashed clothing was unpleasantly noticeable.

“Make way for her grace!” called one of her servants. “Make—”

“So the rumors were accurate. You did survive.”

Miriam turned to face the speaker. “I could say the same of you. Grandmother.”

The grand dowager Duchess Hildegarde was in her eighties, one of those octogenarians who seemed to persist through a process of mummification. She stared at Miriam, her eyelids drooping as if in disinterest. “I find that interesting,” she said flatly. “The odds were not in your favor.”

For a moment Miriam flickered back to that bewildering and fearful night, remembering James Lee’s evident flattery—and offer of a locket bearing the Lee clan’s deviant knotwork: In retrospect an incitement to defect. She managed a polite smile. “I try to make a habit of beating bad odds.”

“Hah. You’ll continue to face them, girl, as long as you keep playing your fancy games. You ignore the old ways at your peril; others cleave to them, and your fingers can be burned just as easily by the fire you didn’t light. Although you do seem to have a fine talent for getting others to rescue you from situations of your own devising. But on another matter, have you seen your dam? I must have words with her. We need to clear the air.”

Her grandmother’s offhanded condescension didn’t surprise Miriam; but the suggestion that the air needed clearing was something else. “What’s there to talk about? I thought you’d disowned her!”

“Well.” Hildegarde’s cheek twitched into something that might have been a grimace. “That was then; this is politics, after all.”

“On the contrary, this is my party, and I’m shocked, absolutely shocked, that anybody might want to discuss matters of politics here.” Miriam glared at her grandmother. “Or haven’t you worked it out yet?”

Hildegarde looked her up and down. “Oh, Patricia raised you well,” she breathed. “And I could ask exactly the same of you, but you wouldn’t listen. Best save my breath. You’ll understand eventually.” Then, before Miriam could think of a suitable response, she turned and shuffled aside.

“What was that about?” asked Brill, materializing at her elbow: “I could have sworn—”

“I wish I knew.” Miriam stared after the dowager, perturbed. “I have the strangest feeling that she was trying to send me some sort of message I’m meant to understand. Only somebody forgot to tell me how to mind read.”

“She is”—Brill stared at the broad shoulders of the dowager’s arms-men—”a most powerful and dangerous lady.”

“And what makes it worse is the fact that she thinks I ought to be on her side.” Miriam curled her lower lip.

“Really?” Brill glanced sidelong at her. “I was going to say, I believe she thinks she is looking out for your best interests. Being your grandam, after all.”

Miriam shrugged uncomfortably. “Save me from people acting in my best interests. Without asking first,” she added.

“I wouldn’t—” Brill paused and cupped a hand to her left ear. Like Sir Alasdair, she was wearing a wire. “Ah, Baron Isserlis is soon to arrive, my lady. I must leave you for a while. Where should I tell him you want to meet, again?”

“With the others: in the red room, upstairs, at six o’clock. That’s where I told Laurens to put the projection screen and laptop, anyway.”

“If that goes for all of them? . . .”

“It does. Except for the obvious exceptions.”

“The B-list.”

“Wine ’em, dine ’em, and keep ’em out of my hair while I’m making the pitch.” Miriam fanned herself. “Can you do that?”

Brill smiled. “Watch me,” she said. “It’s your job to relax and enjoy yourself. Then give a good presentation!”

In a mosquito-infested marsh on the banks of a sluggish river, a draft of peasants from the estates of the Earl of Dankfurt had assembled a scaffold. The scaffold, of stout timber with a surface of planking, bore a winch and some additional contrivances, and despite its crude appearance it had been positioned very carefully indeed. Blood and sweat had gone into its location, and the use of imported surveying tools to measure very precisely indeed its distance and altitude relative to the four reference points where Clan couriers had established accurate GPS locations before crossing over from Washington D.C.

(Accurately locating anything in the Sudtmarkt was problematic, but where there was a need—and urgency—there was a way: and with four reference points, theodolites, and standardized lengths of chain, positioning to within a couple of inches at a distance of up to a mile was perfectly achievable. Besides, Gunnar had insisted on three-inch accuracy with the icy certainty of punishment from above to back him up. And so it was done.)

“This is the entry point?” asked the visitor.

“Yes, my lord.” Gunnar turned and gestured towards a nearby copse of trees, climbing the gentle slope. “And right over—there, past the tree line—you should just be able to see the tower for the department store on Pennsylvania Avenue. Site three is, I’m afraid, not visible from here, being on the other side of the river, but construction is complete. We carried out our intrusion tests yesterday shortly after closing time and everything worked perfectly.”

“Intrusion tests?”

“A courier, outfitted with cover as a tourist, to make sure our proposed sites were workable. They crossed over ten minutes after the museum closed, to ensure there were no human witnesses, then made their way out when the alarm system went off. Their story was that they’d been in the rest room and hadn’t noticed the time. Along the way, they check for motion detectors in the rest rooms, that sort of thing, to ensure a witness-free transit point.”

“Excellent. And the others?”

“Shops are a little bit harder to probe, so I checked the store in reverse, myself—I crossed over from the other side. Found we were three inches too low on this side, so I raised the platform accordingly. We will have to risk their store security noticing that they lost a shopper, but they are most likely to assume that I was simply an artful thief.”

One of the visiting lord’s companions was making notes in a planner; another of them held a large parasol above his lordship’s head. His lordship looked thoughtful for a few seconds. “And how do you probe the third site?”

“Ah, well.” Gunnar froze for a few seconds. “That one we can’t send a world-walker into. We can fool store security guards who are looking for shoplifters, but soldiers with machine guns are another matter. We will just have to do it blind and get it right first time. On the other hand, I managed to get a verified GPS reading and a distance estimate to the façade from the car park by pretending to be lost tourists, and the outer dimensions of the building itself are well-known. I am certain—I place my honor on it—that site three is within four or five feet of the geometric center of the complex, at ground level.”

“What about the subway station?”

“It’s been closed since 9/11, unfortunately, otherwise that would be ideal. Damned amateurs with their box-cutters . . .”

“Leave me. Not you, Gunnar.”

Gunnar stared at his visitor. “My lord?”

The parasol- and planner-bearers and the bodyguards were also staring at his lordship. “All of you, go and wait with the carriage a while. I must talk with Sir Gunnar in confidence.”

Heads ducked; without further ado, the servants and guards backed away then turned and filed towards the edge of the clearing. His lordship watched with ill-concealed impatience until the last of them was out of easy earshot, before turning to Gunnar.

“You must tell me the truth, sir. I’m informed that our superiors have a definite goal in mind, for which they require certain assurances. Both our necks—and those of others—are at risk should this scheme fail. If, in your estimate, it is doomed, please say so now. There will be censure, certainly, but it will be nothing compared to the punishment that will fall on both of us should we make the attempt and fail.”

Gunnar nodded thoughtfully. “Your staff, how many of them? . . .”

“At least two spies, for opposing factions.”

“Ah, well that makes it clear, then.” Gunnar took a deep breath. “This is a huge risk we’re taking. And you just revealed your internal security coverage. You know that, don’t you?”

“The spies in question will have a boating accident involving alligators around sunset this evening.” His lordship smiled humorlessly. “We—my superiors—have chewed the plan to pieces. Our other choices are no better. The pretender saw to that with his betrothal-day massacre and the radicals have been happy to complete his work. But. My question. Can you make it work?”

“Well.” Gunnar raised his hat to run fingers through his hair. “I believe so, given the men and the machines. Sites one and two are not professionally secured. The Anglischprache, they rely too much on machines to do the work of men. I will need a team of four world-walkers for each of those two sites, including two Security men who can kill without hesitation if necessary. And the, ah, janitor’s carts we discussed. They will need to synchronize their time in advance, and if anyone is out of position it will fail. And you will need to supply the devices and they must work, and at least one man on each team must be trained in setting their timers. But I am, um . . . I believe we have a one in fifty chance of failure for sites one and two. It’s a solid plan.”

“And site three?”

Gunnar wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Site three is the tricky one. Unlike one and two, it’s going to happen in full view of a whole bunch of soldiers who have been on the alert for terrorist attackers for the past two years, ever since a couple of hundred of their comrades were slain. We need two world-walkers—one to get them in, and one to get himself and his partner out—and the device must be pre-set with a very short timer, no more than one minute. And even then, I would only give the insertion team a fifty-fifty chance of getting out in one piece. The only thing in its favor is surprise.”

“Hmm.”

“What about team four?” Gunnar asked slyly.

“Team four?” His lordship raised one sculpted eyebrow. “There is no team four.”

“Really?” Gunnar fanned himself with his hat. “I find that hard to believe, my lord. Or perhaps our superiors are holding something in reserve? . . .”

His lordship snorted. “They’re targeting the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon—what more do you want?”

“That bitch in Niejwein.”

His lordship winked. “Already taken care of, Sir Gunnar. But I advise you to forget I told you so. Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing.”

Room 4117 was scaring Mike. Not the room itself, but what its contents implied.

Matthias’s—source GREENSLEEVES’s—voice featured prominently in his dreams as he doggedly plowed through the box of cassette tapes, transcribing and backing up, listening and rewinding, making notes and cross-checking the dictionaries and lexicons that other, more skilled linguists were working on with the detainees FTO had squirreled away in an underground dungeon somewhere. FTO had access to some of the NSA’s most skilled linguists, and they were making progress, more progress in weeks than Mike had made in months. Which realization did not fill him with joy; rather, it made him ask, why has Dr. James stuck me in here to do this job when there are any number of better translators available?

There were any number of answers to that question, but only the most paranoid one stood up to scrutiny: that this material was toxic or contagious, and only a translator who was already hopelessly compromised by exposure to secrets and lies should be given access to it. Mike had worked with source GREENSLEEVES in person, had been infiltrated into a Clan palace in the Gruinmarkt, and knew some of the ugly little truths about Dr. James and his plans. James wants me here so he can keep an eye on me, Mike realized, staring at the calendar behind his monitor one afternoon. He gets some use out of me and meanwhile I’m locked down as thoroughly as if he’d stuck me in one of those holding cells. He shivered slightly, despite the humid warmth that the air conditioning was fighting a losing battle to keep at bay.

The further into the tapes he got, the dirtier he felt. Someone—probably Matt, but he had an uneasy feeling that there was someone else in the loop—had wired a number of offices, both in the Gruinmarkt and, it appeared, in locations around the US. And they’d recorded a whole bunch of meetings in which various deeply scary old men had talked business. Much of it was innocent enough, by the standards of your everyday extradimensional narcoterrorists—move shipment X to port Y, bribe such a local nobleman to raise a peasant levy to carry it, how many knights shall we send, sir?—but every so often Mike ran across a segment that made him sit bolt upright in alarm, doubting the evidence of his own ears. And some of this stuff went back years. These recordings were anything but new. And bits of them, mixing broken English with hochsprache, were unambiguous and chilling in their significance:

“Another five hundred thousand to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America,” said the old guy with the chilly voice and the accent like a fake Nazi general in a 50’s war movie. “Feed it through the top four pressure trusts.”

“What about the other items? . . .”

“Commission those, too. I believe we can stretch to sixty thousand to fund the additional studies, and they will provide valuable marketing material. Nobody looks at the source of this funding too closely, the police and prisons lobby discourage it.” A dry chuckle. “The proposal on drug-screening prisons will be helpful, too. I think we should encourage it.”

Mike paused the tape again and sat, staring at the computer screen for a while. The skin in the small of his back felt as if it was crawling off his spine. Did I just hear that? He wondered bleakly. Did I just hear one of the biggest cocaine smugglers in North America ordering his accountant to donate half a million dollars to a zero-tolerance pressure group? Jesus, what is the world coming to?

It made economic sense, if you looked at it from the right angle; it was not in the Clan’s interest for the price of the commodity they shifted to drop—and drop it surely would, if it was legalized or if the pressure to keep up the war on drugs ever slackened. But for Mike Fleming, who’d willingly given the best years of his life to the DEA, it was a deeply unsettling idea; nauseating, even. Bought and sold: We’re doing the dealers’ work for them, keeping prices high.

His fingers hunted over the keyboard blindly, stabbing for letters as he stared through the glass screen, eyes unfocused. Eventually he stopped and pressed PLAY again.

“—Tell them first, though: They’ll need to make suitable accounting arrangements so that it doesn’t show up in the PAC’s cash flow if they’re audited.”

A grunt of assent and the conversation switched track to inconsequentialities, something about one of the attendees’—a count’s—daughter’s impending wedding, gossip about someone else’s urgent desire to obtain the current season of Friends on tape or DVD. And then the meeting broke up.

Mike hit the PAUSE button again and massaged his forehead. Then, glancing mistrustfully at the screen, he scribbled a note to himself on the legal pad next to the mouse mat: LOOK INTO CREATIVE ACCT. RE. PAC PAY-OFFS? And: COUNT INSMANN’S DAUGHTER’S MARRIAGE -> POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS. It was a tenuous enough lead to go on, but the Clan’s political entanglements were sufficiently personal that it might be—he was willing to concede to himself—that the wedding gossip was actually the most important news on this tape.

Then he pressed PLAY again.

Whatever device Dr. James’s mole had been using to bug these meetings seemed to be sound-triggered, with about a thirty-second delay. Mike waited for the beep as the machine rolled on to the next recording, ready to laboriously translate and transcribe what he could. It was the old man, the duke, again, talking to a woman—younger, if Mike was any judge of such things, but . . .

“I’m not happy about the situation in D.C., my lady.”

“Is there ever anything to be happy about in that town, your grace?”

“Sometimes. The trouble is, the people with whom we do business change too fast, and this new gang—this old gang, rather, in new office—they get above themselves.”

“Can you blame them? They are fresh in the power and glory of the new administration. ‘The adults are back in charge.’ ” (A snort.) “Once they calm down and finish feeling their oats they will come back to us.”

“I wish I could share your optimism.”

“You have reason to believe they’ll be any different, this time?”

(Pause.) “Yes. We have worked with them before, it’s true, and most of the team they have picked works well to protect our interests. For example, this attorney-general, John Ashcroft, we know him well. He’s sound on the right issues, a zealot—but unlikely to become dangerously creative. He knows better than to rock the boat. An arms-length relationship is sufficient for this term, no need to get too close . . . our friends will keep him in line. But what concerns me is that some of the other positions are occupied by those of a less predictable disposition. These Nixon-era underlings, seeking to prove that they could have—yes, like the vice president, yes, exactly.”

“You don’t like the current vice president? You think he is unfit?”

“It’s not that. You know about the West Coast operation, though—”

“Yes? I thought we terminated it years ago?”

“We did. My point is, WARBUCKS was our partner in that venture.”

(Long pause.) “You’re joking.”

“I’m afraid not. He’s one of our inner circle.”

“But how—it’s against policy! To involve politicians, I mean.”

(Sigh.) “At the time, he was out of office. Swore blind he was going to stay out, too—that’s when he began developing his business seriously. The complaints of financial opacity in Halliburton that came out during the Dresser Industries takeover—whose interests do you think those accounting arrangements served? And you must understand that from our point of view he looked like the perfect cutout. Respectable businessman, former defense secretary with heavy political and business contacts—who’d suspect him?”

“Crone Mother’s tears! This should not have been allowed.”

“May I remind you again that nobody saw it coming? That if we had, it wouldn’t have happened?”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“What we always do, when they’re too big to take down: I’m afraid we’re going to have to pay him tribute.”

“It’s going to be expensive, Angbard. He’s their king-in-waiting—indeed, he may actually be their king-emperor in all but name. The idiot child they’ve placed on the throne does not impress with his acumen. Someone must be issuing the orders in his stead.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure, my lady; he’s strong-willed and I’m told he’s not as stupid as he looks when the glare of the public gaze is shuttered. And I am not certain you’re right about the cost of tribute, either. WARBUCKS is as rich as one of our first circle, and from his office in the Old Executive Office Building he has more power than many of our relatives can even conceive of. So we cannot buy him with money or cow him with threats—but there is a currency a man of his type craves, and he knows we can pay in it.”

“What—oh. I see.”

“He is, it seems, setting up his own private intelligence group—by proxy, through Defense—this Office of Special Plans. He is one of those seekers for power who have a compulsive need for secrecy and hidden knowledge. We know exactly how to handle such men, do we not?”

“As long as you’re cautious, Angbard. He knows too much already.”

“About us? We won’t be feeding him tidbits about us. But the fellow has enemies, and he knows it, and as long as we make ourselves discreetly indispensable we’ll be safe from investigation by any agency he can touch. We’ve never had a vice president before, my lady; I hope to make it a mutually profitable arrangement.”

(Pause.) “As long as he doesn’t turn on us, your grace. Mark my words. As long as he doesn’t turn on us. . . .”

The tape clicked to an end. Mike stared at the poisonous thing, unwilling to rewind it and listen again. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had his suspicions, but . . . this is Art Bell Show material, he told himself. The vice president is in cahoots with the Clan?

Slowly a new and even more unwelcome supposition inserted itself into his mind. No. The vice president was in cahoots with the Clan. Now he’s—Mike flashed over on a vision of Dr. James, in a meeting with WARBUCKS himself, giving orders from his shadowy web—now he’s set on destroying them. When Matthias defected he didn’t realize the reports would end on WARBUCKS desk and WARBUCKS would have to kill him and turn on the Clan to destroy the evidence of his collusion—

The thoughts were coming too fast. Mike stood up tiredly, stretched the kinks out of his shoulders, glanced at the clock. It was four in the afternoon: a little early to go home, normally, but . . .

Shit. The Clan take politics personally—when they figure out what’s happened they’ll treat it as treachery. And if I even hint that I know this shit, the vice president will try and have me rubbed out. What the hell am I going to do?

Buy time. Sign myself out as sick. And hope something turns up. . . .