The Trade of Queens

War Train Rolling

Holed up back in a motel room with a bottle of Pepsi and a box of graham crackers, Mike opened up his planner and spread his spoils on the comforter—room service had tidied the room while he’d been burglarizing Miriam’s booby-trapped home. He was still shaking with the aftermath of the adrenaline surge from the near-miss with the police watch team. Thirty seconds and they’d have made me. Thirty seconds and—Stop that, he scolded himself. You’ve got a job to do!

Two items sat on the bed: a cassette and a bulging organizer, its edges rounded and worn by daily use. He added the remaining contents of his shopping bag, spoils of a brief excursion into a Walgreens: a cheap Far Eastern walkman, and a box of batteries. “Let’s get you set up,” he muttered to the machine, then did a double take. Talking to myself. Huh. It wasn’t a terribly good sign. It had been a couple of days—since his abortive meeting with Steve Schroeder—since Mike had exchanged more words with anyone than it took to rent a car. It wasn’t as if he was a gregarious type, but hanging out here with his ass on the line had him feeling horribly exposed. And there were loose life-ends left untied, from Oscar the tomcat (who had probably moved in with the neighbors who kept overfeeding him by now) to his dad and his third wife (whom he didn’t dare call; even if they weren’t in custody, their line was almost certainly on a fully-staffed watch by now). “The time to throw in the towel is when you start talking back to yourself, right? Oh no it isn’t, Mike.…” The batteries were in, so he hit the playback button.

A beep, then a man’s voice: “Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn’t have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye.”

Mike paused, then rewound. Andy went on his notepad, along with freelance commissions. Probably nothing useful, but …

Click. “Hi? Paulette here, it’s seven-thirty, listen, I’ve been doing some thinking about what we dug up before they fired us. Miriam, honey, let’s talk. I don’t want to rake over dead shit, but there’s some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Can I come around?”

He sat up. Fired, he wrote on his pad, and underlined the word twice. This Paulette woman had said we. So Miriam had been fired. “When?” That was the trouble with answerphones; the new solid-state ones had timestamps, but the old cassette ones were less than useful in that department. On the other hand, she hadn’t wiped these messages. So they’d arrived pretty close to whatever had brought her into contact with the Clan.

Next message: a man’s voice, threatening. “Bitch. We know where you live. Heard about you from our mutual friend Joe. Keep your nose out of our business or you’ll be fucking sorry.”

Mike stopped dead, his shoulders tense. Joe, he wrote, then circled the name heavily and added a couple of question marks. Not Clan? he added. The Clan weren’t in the cold-call trade; concrete overcoats and car bombs were more their style. Still, coming on top of Paulette’s message this was … suggestive. Miriam had been fired from her job, along with this Paulette woman, for digging up something. “She’s a journalist, it’s what she does.” Next thing, there was a threatening phone call. Some time not long later, Miriam disappeared. Some time after that, her house was systematically searched for computers and electronic media, by someone who wasn’t interested in old paperwork. And then it was booby-trapped and staked out by the FTO.… “Stop right there!” Mike flipped the organizer open and turned to the address divider. “Paulet, Paulette, Powell-et? How do you spell it, it’s a first name.…”

He read for a long time, swearing occasionally at Miriam’s spidery handwriting and her copious list of contacts—She’s a journalist, it’s what she does—until he hit paydirt a third of the way through: Milan, Paulette. Business intelligence division, the Weatherman. That was where Miriam had worked, last time he looked. “Bingo,” Mike muttered. There was a cell number and a street address out in Somerville. He made a note of it; then, systematic to the end, he went back to the cassette tape.

The next message was a call from Steve Schroeder—his voice familiar—asking Miriam to get in touch. It was followed by an odd double beep: some kind of tape position marker, probably. Then the rest of the tape: a farrago of political polls, telesales contacts, and robocalls that took Mike almost an hour to skim. He took notes, hoping some sort of pattern would appear, but nothing jumped out at him. Probably the calls were exactly what they sounded like: junk. Which left him with a couple of names, one of which seemed promising, and a conundrum. Someone had threatened Miriam, right after she’d been fired for stumbling over something. Was it Clan-related? And was this Paulette woman involved? “There’s only one way to find out,” Mike told himself unhappily. His stomach rumbled. “Time to hit the road again.”

* * *

The coded electrogram from Springfield followed a circuitous course to Erasmus Burgeson’s desk.

Huw’s bluff had worked; the cadre at the post office were inexperienced and undisciplined, excited volunteers barely out of the first flush of revolutionary fervor, more enthusiastic than efficient. There was no command structure as such, no uniforms and no identity papers, and as yet very little paranoia: The threats they expected to defend the post office against were the crude and obvious violence of counterrevolutionary elements, fists and guns rather than the sly subtlety of wreckers and saboteurs from within. This was not—yet—a revolution that had begun to eat its offspring.

When Huw claimed to be part of a small reconnaissance cell in the countryside and asked to send a message to the stratospheric heights of the party organization, he was met at first with gape-jawed incomprehension and then an eagerness to oblige that was almost comically servile. It was only when he and Yul prepared to slip away that anyone questioned the wisdom of allowing strangers to transmit electrograms to New London without clearance, and by the time old Johnny Miller, former deputy postmaster of the imperial mail (now wearing his union hat openly), expressed the doubtful opinion that perhaps somebody ought to have detained the strangers pending the establishment of their bona fides, Huw and Yul were half a mile down the road.

Despite deputy postmaster Miller’s misgivings, the eighty-word electrogram Miriam had so carefully crafted arrived in the central monitoring and sorting hall at Breed’s Hill, whereupon an eagle-eyed (and probably bored) clerk recognized the office of the recipient and, for no very good reason, stamped it with a PARTY PRIORITY flag and sent it on its way.

From Breed’s Hill—where in Miriam’s world one of the key battles of the American War of Independence had been fought—the message was encrypted in a standard party cypher and flashed down cables to the Imperial Postal Headquarters building on Manhattan Island, and thence to the Ministry of Propaganda, where the commissioner on duty in the message room saw its high priority and swore, vilely. Erasmus was not in town that day; indeed, was not due back for some time. But it was a PARTY PRIORITY cable. What to do?

In the basement of the Ministry of Propaganda were numerous broadcasting rooms; and no fewer than six of these were given over to the letter talkers, who endlessly recited strings of words sapped of all meaning, words chosen for their clarity over the airwaves. So barely two hours after Huw and Yul had shown the cadre in Springfield two clean pairs of heels, a letter talker keyed his microphone and began to intone: “Libra, Opal, Furlong, Opal, Whisky, Trident”—over the air on a shortwave frequency given over to the encrypted electrospeak broadcasts of the party’s network, a frequency that would be echoed by transmitters all over both Western continents, flooding the airwaves until Burgeson’s radio operator could not help but receive it.

Which event happened in the operator’s room on board an armored war train fifty miles west of St. Anne, which stood not far from the site of Cincinatti in Miriam’s world. The operator, his ears encased in bulky headphones, handed the coded message with his header to the encryption sergeant, who typed it into his clacking, buzzing machine, and then folded the tape and handed it off to a messenger boy, who dashed from the compartment into the train’s main corridor and then along a treacherous, swaying armored tunnel to the command carriage where the commissioner of state propaganda sat slumped over a pile of newspapers, reading the day’s dispatches as he planned the next step in his media blitz.

“What is it now?” Erasmus asked, glancing up.

The messenger boy straightened. “Sor, a cript for thee?” He presented the roll of tape with both hands. “Came in over the airwaves, like.”

“I see.” The train clanked across a badly maintained crossing, swaying from side to side. Erasmus, unrolling the tape, drew the electric lamp down from overhead to illuminate the mechanical scratchings as he tried to focus on it. It had been under at least three pairs of eyeballs since arriving here; over the electrograph, that meant … He blinked. Miriam? She’s here? And she wants to talk? He wound back to the header at the start of the message that identified the sending station. Springfield. Burgeson chuckled humorlessly for a moment. HAVE INTERESTING PROPOSAL FOR YOU RE TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AND FAMILY BUSINESS. To put that much in an uncoded message was a giveaway: It reeked of near-panic. She’d said something about her relatives being caught up in a civil war, hadn’t she? Interesting.

Burgeson reached out with his left hand and yanked the bell rope, without taking his eyes off the message tape. A few seconds later Citizen Supervisor Philips stuck his head round the partition. “You called, citizen?”

“Yes.” Burgeson shoved the newspaper stack to one side, so that they overflowed the desk and drifted down across the empty rifle rack beside it. “Something urgent has come up back East. I need to be in Boston as soon as possible.”

“Boston?” Philips raised a thin eyebrow. “What about the campaign, citizen?”

“The campaign can continue without me for a couple of days.” Burgeson stared at Philips. Dried-out and etiolated, the officer resembled a praying mantis in a black uniform: but he was an efficient organizer, indeed had pulled together the staff and crew for this campaign train at short notice. “We’ve hit New Brentford and Jensenville in the past two days, you’ve seen how I want things done: Occupy the local paper’s offices, vet the correspondents, deal with any who are unreliable and promote our cadres in their place. Continue to monitor as you move on.” The two-thousand-ton armored war train, bristling with machine guns and black-clad Freedom Riders, was probably unique in history in having its own offset press and typesetting carriage; but as Erasmus had argued the point with Sir Adam, this was a war of public perception—and despite the technowizardry of the videography engineers, public perceptions were still shaped by hot metal type. “Keep moving, look for royal blue newspapers and insure that you leave only red freedom-lovers in your wake.”

“I think I can do that, sir.” Philips nodded. “Difficult cases…?”

“Use your discretion.” Here, have some rope; try not to hang yourself with it. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Meanwhile, when’s the next supply run back to Lynchburg departing?”

“If it’s Boston you want, there’s an aerodrome near Raleigh that’s loyal,” Philips offered. “I’ll wire them to put a scout at your disposal?”

“Do that.” Burgeson winced. Flying tended to make him air-sick, even in the modern fully-enclosed mail planes that had been coming in recently. “I need to be there as soon as possible.”

“Absolutely, citizen. I’ll put the wheels in motion at once.” And, true to his word, almost as soon as Philips disappeared there came an almighty squeal of brakes from beneath the train.

* * *

The past week had been one long nightmare for Paulette Milan.

She’d been a fascinated observer of Miriam’s adventures, in the wake of the horrible morning a year ago when they’d both lost their jobs; and later, when Miriam had sucked her into running an office for her—funneling resources to an extradimensional business start-up—she’d been able to square it with her conscience because she agreed with Miriam’s goals. If the Clan, Miriam’s criminal extended family, could be diverted into some other line of business, that was cool. And if some of their money stuck to Paulie’s fingertips in the form of wages, well, as long as the wages weren’t coming in for anything illegal on her part, that was fine, too.

But things hadn’t worked out. First Miriam had vanished for nearly six months—a virtual prisoner, held under house arrest for much of that time. The money pipeline had slammed shut, leaving Paulie looking for a job in the middle of a recession. Then things got worse. About six weeks ago Miriam’s friends—or co-conspirators, or cousins, or whatever—Olga and Brill had turned up on her doorstep and made her the kind of offer you weren’t allowed to refuse if you knew what was good for you. There was a fat line of credit to sweeten the pill, but it left Paulie looking over her shoulder nervously. You didn’t hand out that kind of money just to open an office, in her experience. And there had been dark hints about internal politics within the Clan, a civil war, and the feds nosing around.

All of this was bad. Capital-B bad. Paulie had grown up in a neighborhood where the hard men flashed too much cash around, sometimes checked into club fed for a few years at a time, and snitches tended to have accidents … she’d thought she had a good idea what was coming until she’d turned on the TV a few days ago and seen the rising mushroom clouds. Heard the new president’s broadcast, glacial blue eyes twinkling as he came out with words that were still reverberating through the talk shows and news columns (“PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: PRESIDENT ‘NOT INSANE,’” as the Globe had put it).

It made her sick to her stomach. She’d spent the first two days in bed, crying and throwing up on trips to the bathroom, certain that the FBI were going to break down her door at any moment. The stakes she’d signed up for were far higher than she’d ever imagined, and she found she hated herself for it: hated her earlier moment of pecuniary weakness, her passive compliance in following Miriam down her path of good intentions, her willingness to make friends and let people influence her. She’d caught herself looking in the bathroom cabinet at one point, and hastily shut it: The temptation to take a sleeping pill, or two, or enough to shut it out forever, was a whispering demon on her shoulder for a few hours. “What the fuck can I do?” She’d asked the bourbon bottle on the kitchen table. “What the fuck can I do?”

Today … hadn’t been better, exactly; but she’d awakened in a mildly depressive haze, rather than a blind panic, knowing that she had two options. She could go to the feds, spill her guts, and hope a jail cell for the rest of her life was better than whatever the Clan did to their snitches. Or she could keep calm and carry on—she’d seen a foreign wartime poster with that line, once—carry on doing what Miriam had asked of her: sit in an office, buy books and put them in boxes, buy stuff (surveying tools, precision atomic clocks, laboratory balances: What did she know?) and stash it in a self-storage locker ready for a courier collection that might never arrive.

Get up. Drink a mug of coffee, no food. Go to the office. Order supplies. Repackage them with an inventory sheet, to meet the following size and weight requirements. Drive them to the lockup. Consider eating lunch and feel revulsion at the idea so do some more work, then go home. Keep calm and carry on (it beats going to Gitmo). Try not to think …

Paulette drove home from the rented office suite in a haze of distraction, inattentive and absentminded. The level of boxes in the lockup had begun to go down again, she’d noticed: For the first time in a week there’d been a new manilla envelope with a handwritten shopping list inside. (She’d stuffed it in her handbag, purposely not reading it.) So someone was collecting the consignments. Her fingers were white on the steering wheel as she pulled up in the nearest parking space, half a block from her front door. She was running short on supplies, but the idea of going grocery shopping made her feel sick: Anything out of the routine scared her right now.

She unlocked the front door and went inside, switched the front hall light on, and dumped her handbag beside the answering machine. It was a warm enough summer’s day that she hadn’t bothered with a jacket. She walked through into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, purposely not thinking about how she was going to fill the evening—a phone call to Mother, perhaps, and a movie on DVD—and that was when the strange man stepped out behind her and held up a badge.

“Paulette Milan, I’m from the DEA and I’d—”

She was lying down, and dizzy. He was staring at her. Everything was gray. His mouth was moving, and so was the world. It was confusing for a moment, but then her head began to clear: I fainted? She was looking up at the living room ceiling, she realized. There was something soft under the back of her head.

“Can you hear me?” He looked concerned.

“I’m.” She took a couple of breaths. “I’m. Oh God.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you like that—are you all right? Listen, do you have a heart condition—” No. No. She must have shaken her head. “Do you know Miriam Beckstein?”

Paulie swallowed. “Shit.”

Everything, for an instant, was crystal clear. I’m from the DEA. Do you know Miriam Beckstein? The next logical words had to be, You’re under arrest.

“I need to talk to her; her life’s in danger.”

Paulie blinked. Does not compute. “You’re from the DEA,” she said hesitantly. Pushed against the carpet. “I fainted?”

“Uh, yes, in the kitchen. I never—I carried you in here. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I wanted to talk, but I was afraid they might be watching.”

Watching? “Who?” she asked.

“The FTO,” he said. Who? she wondered. “Or the Clan.”

The brittle crystal shell around her world shattered. “Oh, them,” she said carelessly, her tongue loosened by shock. “They ring the front doorbell. Like everyone else.” Bit by bit, awareness was starting to return. Chagrin—I can’t believe I fainted—was followed by anxiety—Who is this guy? How do I know he’s DEA? Is he a burglar?—and then fear: Alone with a strange man.

The strange man seemed to be going out of his way to be nonthreatening, though. “Do you want a hand up?” he asked. “Figure you might be more comfortable on the sofa—” She waved him away, then pushed herself upright, then nodded. Things went gray again for a moment. “Listen, I’m not, uh, here on official business, exactly. But I need to talk to Miriam—” She rose, took two steps backwards, and collapsed onto the sofa. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“No,” she heard herself say, very distinctly. “I’m not okay. Who are you, mister, and what are you doing in my house?”

He hunkered down on the balls of his feet so that he was at eye level to her. “Name’s Fleming, Mike Fleming. I used to know Miriam. She’s in a whole bunch of trouble; if you know what she’s been doing this past year, you’d know that—if you know about the Clan, you’re in trouble, too. That goes for me, also.” He paused. “Want me to go on?”

“You’re.” She stopped. “Why did you tell me you’re DEA?”

“I was, originally—still carry a badge they issued. I’d prefer you not to phone them just yet to verify that. See, I’m willing to put my neck on the line. But I want to get to the truth. You know about the Clan?”

Paulie shook her head. “If I say anything, you know what those people will do?” She was saying too much, she vaguely recognized, but something about this setup smelled wrong.

“Which people? The Clan, or the Family Trade Organization?” Fleming paused. “I’m not in a position to arrest you for anything—I’m not here on official business. I need to talk to Miriam—”

“Wait.” Paulette tried to pull herself together. “The what organization? You want to talk to her? About what?”

Fleming looked at her quizzically. “The FTO is a cross-agency operation to shut down the Clan. I was part of it until, uh, about a week ago. It was an attempt to get all the agencies whose lines the Clan crossed to sing from the same hymn book. I came in from the DEA side when source GREEN—a Clan defector called Matthias—walked in the door. I’ve seen Miriam, about three months ago, in a palace in a place called Niejwein—want me to go on?”

Oh Jesus, save me—he’s the real thing. She shook her head numbly. “What do you want?”

“Like I said, I need to talk to Miriam. She’s in terrible danger—FTO has been penetrated. The president used to work with the Clan, back in the eighties and early nineties. He’s the one behind this mess, he deliberately goaded them into using those nukes, and there’s worse to come. He’s running FTO. All the oil in Texas—every version of Texas—that’s what he’s after, that and a state of emergency at home to give him carte blanche to do whatever the hell he likes. I’ve tried to put out a warning via the press, but my contact didn’t believe me until the attacks, and now—”

“You went to the press?” Paulette stared at him as if he’d grown a second head. “What did you have?”

“Nothing!” His frustration was visible.

“But you found me,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, after I turfed her house. Which is under police watch and booby-trapped; I found an old planner of hers, played back the answering-machine tape—”

“Shit.” She tried to stand, failed for a moment, then got her suddenly shaky knees to behave. “There was a tape?” If you found me, they could find me.

“Relax. Those agencies you’re thinking about don’t talk to each other at that level. You’re probably safe, for now.”

Probably safe and her cousin Don’t worry had helped many a girl get pregnant, in Paulie’s opinion, and when the canoodling in question might lead to the queue for the execution chamber at Gitmo rather than a hospital delivery room, chancing it was not on her roadmap. “No, forget that: If they catch you they’ll backtrack to me. Thanks a million, Mr. Fleming, you just doubled my chances of not getting out of this alive. I didn’t ask for this shit! It just landed on my lap!” Her heart was hammering, she could feel her face flushing: Fleming was leaning away from her sudden vehemence. “Fucking goodfellas, I grew up in their backyard, you know what I’m saying? The old generation. You kept your nose out of their business and didn’t do nothing and they’d mostly leave you alone, especially if you knew their cousin’s wife or walked their sister’s dogs or something. But if you crossed them it wouldn’t be any fucking horse’s head at the end of your bed, no fucking wreath at your funeral; you wouldn’t have a funeral, there wouldn’t be anything to bury. There were rumors about the meat-packing plant, about the cat and dog food. And the cops weren’t much better. Shakedown money every Tuesday, free coffee and bagels at the corner, and you better hope they liked your face. And that was the local cops, and the old-time local hoods, who didn’t shit in their backyard ’case someone took exception, you know where I’m coming from?”

Fleming just squatted on his heels and took it, like a giant inflatable target for all her frustration. “Yes, I know where you’re from,” he said quietly when she ran down. “Keep a low profile and don’t rock the boat and you think maybe you can get by without anyone hurting you. But where I’m coming from—that’s not an option anymore. It’s not Miriam’s fault that she’s descended from them and has their ability, not her fault about those bombs—she tried to warn me. There are back channels between governments: That was before my boss’s boss decided to burn me. No; what I’m telling you is that we’re caught in the middle of a fight that’s been fixed, and if I don’t get to talk to Miriam, a lot of people are going to die. The new president wants the Clan dead, because it’s a necessary condition to cover up his own past connection with them: He ran their West Coast heroin-distribution arm for about seven years. He’s had his fingers deep into their business since then, he’s the one who nudged them into acquiring nukes and then prodded them into using them, and he’s just been sworn in—we probably don’t have much time to get the warning out. So are you going to help me? Or are you going to sit in your foxhole and stick your fingers in your ears and sing ‘La la la, I can’t hear you’?”

“You’re telling me it’s the president’s fault?” She stared. Fleming didn’t look mad—

“Yes. I know where too many bodies are buried, that’s why they tried to car bomb me four days ago. FTO itself is still secret: I know enough to blow the operation sky high. Black underground prisons on US soil, captured Clan members being forced to act as mules with bombs strapped to their necks, vivisection on subjects to find out what makes them tick, helicopters with black boxes containing bits of brain tissue—don’t ask me how they got them—that can travel to the Gruinmarkt. There’s an invasion coming, Ms. Milan, and they’ve been gearing up to attack the Clan in their own world for at least six months.”

“Call me Paulie,” she said automatically.

“It’s not even the first time our government’s considered setting off nukes on our own territory to justify an attack on someone else. Back in the early seventies, we figure Nixon—there was a bomb in Boston, you see, GREENSLEEVES planted it as a blackmail backup before he defected, and we ran across an older device while we were looking for his: a big one, the kind you air-dropped from a B52 when you wanted to flatten Moscow. It dated to 1972, just before Nixon showed up in Beijing to make nice. Turns out it was his Plan B: Get rid of a bunch of useless liberals and wave the bloody flag at the Commies. They didn’t do it then, but they’ve gone and done it now, with the fall guy’s fingerprints all over the throwdown.”

Paulie opened her mouth, then shut it again.

Fleming sighed. “I can see we’re going to be here some time,” he said. “Any chance of a coffee?”

* * *

Two days after Huw and Yul hiked into Springfield to post a letter at great personal peril (two days in which six more ClanSec world-walkers and a full half-ton of requisitioned supplies reached the safe house, two days during which the neighbors kept a remarkably low profile), Miriam was sitting in the makeshift living room, single-mindedly typing up her to-do list, when something strange happened.

With no warning, the bulky wooden cabinet in the corner of the room crackled into life. “This is the emergency widecast network. Repeat, this is the emergency widecast network. The following message is for Miss Beckstein, last known in Springfield. Will Miss Beckstein please go to the shop in Boston where her sick friend is waiting for her. Repeat—”

The repetition of the message was lost in a clatter. “Shit!” Miriam applied some other choice words as she bent to pick up the dropped laptop and check it for damage.

“What’s happened?” Brill called from the direction of the kitchen.

“Dropped my—we’ve got contact!”

“What?” A second later Brill pushed the door wide open.

“The radio.” Miriam pointed at it. “Huw didn’t say there’s an emergency station! Erasmus wants to see me. In Boston.”

Brill looked at her oddly. Miriam realized she was cradling the laptop as if it were cut-glass. “Are you sure—”

“This is the emergency widecast network. Repeat—”

“I told you!”

“Okay.” Brill nodded, then paused to listen. Her face tightened as she unconsciously clenched her jaw. “Oh yes. It worked. Well, my lady, you got what you wanted. What do we do now?”

“I’d think it was obvious—”

The other door opened; it was Sir Alasdair. “Hello? I heard shouting?”

Miriam stood up, shut the laptop’s lid, and placed it carefully on the side table. “We’re going to Boston,” she announced. “Erasmus has made contact—”

Alasdair cleared his throat. “Made contact how—”

“Now look here!” Miriam and Huw both stopped dead. “Have I your full attention?” Brilliana demanded. “Because as your loyal retainer I think we should consider this with care. My lady, what do you intend to do? Need I remind you these are dangerous times?”

“No.” Miriam looked at Sir Alasdair, who was watching Brilliana with the patience of a hound. “But this is exactly what we should have expected, isn’t it? Erasmus is high in their ministry of propaganda, and we didn’t tell him where I was. How else would he contact me, but a broadcast? So now the ball’s back on our side of the court. I need to go visit him at the shop, because that’s where he’ll be. Unless you’ve got any better ideas?” Alasdair cleared his throat again. “Yes?” she asked.

“My lady d’Ost.” He glanced at Brill. “What is your threat assessment?”

“Hard to say. Getting there—dangerous because all travel in this land is risky in the season of civil war. Once there … I do not believe Burgeson means ill of my lady; he is as close to a friend, in fact, as any in the world.”

“But?” His word hung in the air for a few short seconds.

“Assuming the message is from Burgeson,” Brilliana said reluctantly. “There is no word of his disposition. Should he be the victim of an internal plot, this might be a trap. I’d think it unlikely, but stranger things happen. And then, should he in fact be the speaker—what then?”

“Wait a minute.” Miriam raised a hand. “The idea is to make contact. Then put my proposal to him and see what he thinks is achievable. At that point, once we’ve got a channel, it’s down to diplomacy.”

“And capabilities.” Alasdair lowered himself onto one of the wooden dining chairs Huw and Yul had scared up in the furniture-hunting expedition. “Their expectation of our abilities must view us as a potential threat, just as the Americans do. They will want to know why we seek refuge here. If we tell them the unvarnished truth—”

“We must.” Miriam was forceful. “Yeah, we may have to admit the Clan fucked up royally in the United States. But you know something? It’s nothing but the truth. If we tell them we fucked up and we want to start afresh and turn over a new leaf, it’s not only believable—it’s true, and they’ll get the same story from everyone they ask. If we start telling white lies or trying to bamboozle them … how many of our people have to remember to tell the same lie? Someone will get confused and let something slip over a glass of wine, and then Erasmus’s people get to let their suspicions run riot. And let me remind you this country is in the middle of a revolution? Maybe they’re going to come out of it peacefully, but most revolutions don’t—we have a chance to try and influence that if we’re on the inside, but we won’t have a leg to stand on unless we’re like Caesar’s wife, above reproach. So my goal is simple: get us in with the temporal authorities, so deeply embedded that we’re indispensable within months.”

“Indispensable?”

“I’ve been doing some reading.” Miriam turned tired eyes on Alasdair. “Revolutions eat their young, especially as they build new power structures. But they don’t eat the institutions that prop them up. Secret police, bureaucrats, armies—that’s the rule. They may hang the men at the top, and go hard on their external enemies, but the majority of the rank and file keep their places. I think we can come up with a value proposition that they can’t ignore, one that would scare the crap out of them if we didn’t very obviously need their help.”

Sir Alasdair looked at Brill. “Do you understand her when she starts talking like this?” he grumbled.

“No. Isn’t it great?” Brill flashed him a grin. “You can see why the duke, may he rest peacefully, wanted her for a figurehead upon the throne. My lady. What do you propose to do? Let us say we get you to Boston to meet with your man. What do you need?”

“I’ve got a list,” said Miriam, picking up the laptop. “Let’s get started.…”

BEGIN RECORDING

“—Latest news coming in from Delhi, the Pakistani foreign minister has called off negotiations over the cease fire on the disputed Kashmir frontier—”

(

Fast forward

)

“—Artillery duels continuing, it looks like a long, tense night for the soldiers here on the border near Amritsar. Over to you in the studio, Dan.”

“Thank you, Bob Mancini, live from the India-Pakistan border region near the disputed Kashmir province, where the cold war between the Indian and Pakistani militaries has been running hot for the past month. A reminder that the catastrophic events of 7/16 didn’t stop the shooting; may in fact have aggravated it, with rumors flying that the quantum effect used by the attackers is being frantically investigated by military labs all over the world, we go to our military affairs expert, Erik Olsen. Hello, Erik.”

“Hello, Dan.”

“Briefly, what are the implications? Mr. Mukhtar’s accusation that the Indian secret service is sneaking saboteurs across the border via a parallel universe is pretty serious, but is it credible? What’s going on here?”

“Well, Dan, the hard fact is, nobody knows for sure who’s got this technique. We’ve seen it in action, it’s been used against us to great effect—and nobody knows who’s got it. As you can imagine, it’s spoiling a lot of military leaders’ sleep. If you can carry a nuclear weapon across time lines and have it materialize in a city, you can mount what’s called a first strike, a decapitation stroke: You can take out an enemy’s missiles and bombers on the ground before they can launch. Submarines are immune, luckily—”

“Why are submarines immune, Erik?”

“You’ve got to find them first, Dan, you can’t materialize a bomb inside a submarine that’s underwater unless you can find it. Bombers that are airborne are pretty much safe as well. But if they’re on the ground or in dry dock—it upsets the whole logic of nuclear deterrence. And India and Pakistan both have sizable nuclear arsenals, but no submarines, they’re all carried on bombers or ground-launched missiles. Into the middle of a hot war, the conflict over Kashmir with the artillery duels and machine gun attacks we’ve been hearing about these past weeks, it’s not new—they’ve fought four wars in the past thirty years—the news about this science-fictional new threat, it’s upset all the realities on the ground. India and Pakistan have both got to be afraid that the other side’s got a new tool that makes their nuclear arsenal obsolete, the capability to smuggle nukes through other worlds—and they’re already on three-minute warning, much like we were with the USSR in the fifties except that their capital cities are just five minutes apart as the missile flies.”

“But they wouldn’t be crazy enough to start a nuclear war over Kashmir, would they?”

“Nobody ever wants to be the first to start a nuclear war, Dan, that’s not in question. The trouble is, they may think the other side is starting one. Back in 1983, for example, a malfunctioning Russian radar computer told the Soviets that we’d launched on them. Luckily a Colonel Petrov kept his head and waited for more information to come in, but if he’d played by the rule book he’d have told Moscow they were under attack, and it’s anyone’s guess what could have happened. Petrov had fifteen minutes’ warning. Islamabad and New Delhi have got just three minutes to make up their minds, that’s why the Federation of American Scientists say they’re the greatest risk of nuclear war anywhere in the world today.”

“But that’s not going to happen—”

(

Fast forward

)

“Oh Jesus.” (

Bleeped mild expletive.

) “This can’t be—oh. I’m waiting for Bob, Bob Mancini on the India-Pakistan border. We’re going over live to Bob, as soon as we can raise him. Bob? Bob, can you hear me?… No? Bob? We seem to have lost Bob. Our hearts go out to him, to his family and loved ones, to everyone out there.…

“That was the emergency line from the Pentagon. America is not, repeat

not

, under attack. It’s not a repeat of 7/16, it’s … it appears that one of the Pakistani army or the Indian air force have gone—a nuclear bomb, a hydrogen bomb on Islamabad, other explosions in India. Amritsar, New Delhi, Lahore in Pakistan. I’m Dan Rather on CBS, keeping you posted on the latest developments in what are we calling this? World War Two-point-five? India and Pakistan. Five large nuclear explosions have been reported so far. We can’t get a telephone line to the subcontinent.

“Reports are coming in of airliners being diverted away from Indian and Pakistani airspace. The Pentagon has announced that America is not, repeat

not

, under attack, this is a purely local conflict between India and Pakistan. We’re going over live to Jim Patterson in Mumbai, India. Jim, what’s happening?”

“Hello Dan, it’s absolute chaos here, sirens going in the background, you can probably hear them. From here on the sixth floor of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel there’s traffic gridlocked throughout the city as people try to flee. In just a minute we’re going down into the basements where” (

Click.

)

“Jim? Jim? We seem to have lost Jim. Wait, we’re getting—oh no.

No.

”

END RECORDING