The Trade of Queens

Damage Control

It had taken Steve nearly an hour to get Fleming out of his office, during which time he’d gotten increasingly irritated with the skinny, intense agent’s insistence that some insane conspiracy of interdimensional nuclear narcoterrorists was about to blow up the Capitol. Why do the fruitcakes always pick on me? he kept wondering.

Of course the explosion in Braintree checked out—gas mains, according to the wire feed. But that was no surprise: It was the sort of detail a paranoid would glom onto and integrate into their confabulation, especially if it happened close to their front door. One of the first warning signs of any delusional system was the conviction that the victim was at the center of events. Tom Brokaw wasn’t reading the news, he was sending you a personal message, encrypted in the twitches of his left eyebrow.

Sure Fleming didn’t seem particularly unhinged—other than insofar as his story was completely bugfuck insane and required the listener to suspend their belief in the laws of physics and replace it with the belief that the government was waging a secret war against drug dealers from another dimension—but that meant nothing. Steve had been a beat journalist for years before he found his niche on the tech desk. Journalists attract lunatics like dog turds attract flies, and he’d listened to enough vision statements by dot-com CEOs to recognize the signs of a sharp mind that had begun to veer down a reality tunnel lined with flashing lights and industrial espionage. So he’d finally cut Fleming off, halfway down a long, convoluted monologue that seemed to be an attempt to explain how Beckstein had got his attention—not without qualms, because Fleming sounded halfway to stalkerdom when he got onto the subject of rescuing her from some kind of arranged marriage—and raised his hand. “Look,” he said wearily, “this is a bit much. You said they made you translate tapes. And there are these lockets they use for, what did you call it, world-walking. Do you have any kind of, you know, physical evidence? Because you can appreciate this is kind of a complex story and we can’t run it without fact-checking, and—”

Fleming stood up. “Okay.” He looked exasperated. “I got it.”

Steve peered up at him owlishly. “I don’t want to blow you off. But you’ve got to see—they’ll laugh me out of the meeting if I can’t back this up with something physical. And this isn’t my department. I’m not the desk editor you’re looking for—”

Fleming nodded again, surprising him. “Okay. Look,” he glanced at his watch, “I’ll phone you again after they make their move. I don’t think we’ll have long to wait. Remember what I said?”

Steve nodded back at him, deadpan. “Atom bombs.”

“You think I’m nuts. Well, I’m not. At least I don’t think I am. But I can’t afford to stick around right now. Let’s just say, if a terrorist nuke goes off in one of our cities in the next week, I’ll be in touch and we can talk again. Okay?”

“You got it.” Steve clicked his recorder off. “Where are you going?”

“That would be telling.” Fleming flashed him a feral grin, then ducked out of the cubicle. By the time Steve levered himself out of his chair and poked his head around the partition, he was gone.

“Who was that?” asked Lena from real estate, who was just passing with a coffee.

“J. Random Crank. Probably not worth worrying about—he seemed harmless.”

“You’ve got to watch them,” she said worriedly. “Sometimes they come back. Why didn’t you call security?”

“I wish I knew.” Steve rubbed his forehead. The shrill buzz of his phone dragged him back inside the cubicle. He picked up the receiver, checking the caller ID: It was Tony in editorial. “Steve speaking, can I—”

“Turn on your TV,” Tony interrupted. Something in his tone made Steve’s scalp crawl.

“What channel?” he demanded.

“Any of them.” Tony hung up. All around the office, the phones were going mad. No, it can’t be, Steve thought, dry-swallowing. He moused over to the TV tuner icon on his desktop and double-clicked to open it. And saw:

* * *

Two lopsided mushroom clouds roiling against the clear blue sky before a camera view flecked with static, both leaning towards the north in the grip of a light breeze—

“Vehicles are being turned back at police checkpoints. Meanwhile, National Guard units—”

A roiling storm of dust and gravel like the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers—

“Vice president, at an undisclosed location, will address the nation—”

A brown-haired woman on CNN, her normal smile replaced by a rictus of shock, asking someone on the ground questions they couldn’t answer—

People, walking, from their offices. Dirty and shocked, some of them carrying their shoes, briefcases, helping their neighbors—

“Reports that the White House was affected by the attack cannot be confirmed yet, but surviving eyewitnesses say—”

A flashback view from a surveillance camera somewhere looking out across the Potomac, flash and it’s gone, blink and you’ve missed it—

“Residents warned to stay indoors, keep doors and windows closed, and to drink only bottled—”

* * *

Minutes later Steve stared into the toilet bowl, waiting for his stomach to finish twisting as he ejected the morning’s coffee grounds and bile. I had him in my office, he thought. Oh Jesus. It wasn’t the thought that he’d turned down the scoop of a lifetime that hurt like a knife in the guts: What if I’d listened to him? Probably it had been too late already. Probably nothing could have been done. But the possibility that he’d had the key to averting this situation sitting in his cubicle, trying to explain everything with that slightly flaky twitch—the man who knew too much—that was too much to bear. Assuming, of course, that Fleming was telling the truth when he said he wasn’t the guy behind the bombs. That needed checking out, for sure.

When he finally had the dry heaves under control he straightened up and, still somewhat shaky, walked over to the washbasins to clean himself up. The face that stared at him, bleary-eyed above the taps, looked years older than the face he’d shaved in the bathroom mirror at home that morning. What have we done? he wondered. The details were in the dictaphone; he’d zoned out during parts of Fleming’s spiel, particularly when it had been getting positively otherworldly. He remembered bits—something about mediaeval antipersonnel mines, crazy stuff about prisoners with bombs strapped to their necks—but the big picture evaded him, like a slippery mass of jelly that refused to be nailed down, like an untangled ball of string. Steve took a deep breath. I’ve got to get Fleming to call in, he realized. A faint journalistic reflex raised its head: It’s the story of a lifetime. Or the citizen’s arrest of a lifetime. Is a nuclear unabomber even possible?

J. Barrett Armstrong’s office on the tenth floor was larger than Steve Schroeder’s beige cubicle on the eighth. It had a corner of the building to itself, with a view of Faneuil Hall off to one side and a mahogany conference table the size of a Marine Corps helicopter carrier tucked away near the inner wall of the suite. It was the very image of a modern news magnate’s poop deck, shipshape and shining with the gleaming elbow grease of a dozen minimum-wage cleaners; the captain’s quarters of a vessel in the great fleet commanded by an Australian news magnate of some note. In the grand scheme of the mainstream media J. Barrett Armstrong wasn’t so high up the totem pole, but in the grand scheme of the folks who signed Steve’s paychecks he was right at the top, Thunderbird-in-chief.

Right now, J. Barrett Armstrong’s office was crowded with managers and senior editors, all of whom were getting a piece of the proprietor’s ear as he vented his frustration. “The fucking war’s over,” he shouted, wadding up a printout from the machine in the corner and throwing it at the wall. “Who did Ali get the bomb from? There’s the fricking story!” A bank of monitors on a stand showed the story unfolding in repeated silent flashbacks. “How did they smuggle them in? Go on, get digging!”

Nobody noticed Steve sneaking in until he tapped his boss, Riccardo Pirello, on the shoulder. Rick turned, distractedly: “What is it?”

“It’s not Iraq,” said Steve. He swallowed. “It’s narcoterrorists, and the nukes were stolen from our own inventory.”

The boss was belting out orders to his mates and boatswains: “Bhaskar, I want an in-depth on the Iranian nuclear program, inside spread, you’ve got six pages—”

Steve held up his dictaphone where Riccardo could see it. “Scoop, boss. Walked into my office an hour ago.”

“A—what the fuck—” Riccardo grabbed his arm.

Nobody else had noticed; all eyes were focussed on the Man, who was throwing a pocket tantrum in the direction of enemies both Middle Eastern and imaginary. “Let’s find a room,” Steve suggested. “I’ve got my desk line patched through to my mobile. He’s going to call back.”

“Who—”

“My source.” Steve’s cheek twitched. “He told me this would happen. I thought he was crazy and kicked him out. He said he’d phone after it happened.”

“Jesus.” Riccardo stared at him for a moment. “Why you?”

“Friend of a friend. She went missing six months ago, investigating this, apparently.”

“Jesus. Okay, let’s get a cube and see what you’ve got. Then if it checks out I’ll try and figure out how we can break it to Skippy without getting ourselves shitcanned for making him look bad.”

* * *

The atmosphere in the situation room under Raven Rock was a toxic miasma of fury, loss, and anticipation: a sweaty, testosterone-breathing swamp of the will to triumph made immanent. From the moment the PINNACLE NUCFLASH alert came in, WARBUCKS hunched over one end of the cramped conference table, growling out a torrent of unanswerable questions, demanding action on HEAD CRASH and CLEANSWEEP and other more arcane Family Trade projects, issuing instructions to his staff, orders for the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate and other subagencies within the sprawling DHS empire. “We’re still trying to raise the EOB, sir,” said one particularly hapless staffer.

“I don’t want to hear that word trying,” snarled WARBUCKS. “I want results. Success or failure. Clear?”

The TV screens were clear enough. Andrew James couldn’t help staring at the hypnotic rewind footage from time to time, the sunny morning view of downtown D.C., the flash and static-riddled flicker, the rolling, boiling cloud of chaotic darkness shot through with fire rising beyond the Capitol. The close-ups replaying every ten minutes of the Washington Monument blowdown, chunks of rock knocked clear out of the base of the spire as the Mach wave bounced off the waters of the reflecting pool, cherry trees catching fire in a thousand inglorious blazing points of light. Inarticulate anchormen and women, struggling with the enormity. Talking heads, eyes frozen in fear like deer in the headlights, struggling to pin the blame on Iraqi revenants, Iranian terrorists, everyone and anyone. Northwoods, he thought. He made it work. Nobody else in the national command structure had ever had the sheer brass balls to pull that particular trigger, to play power chords in the key of the Reichstag Fire on the instrument of state—

“Dr. James.”

He tore his eyes away from the screen. “Sir?”

WARBUCKS grinned humorlessly. “I want to know the status of SCOTUS as of this morning. I very much fear we’ll be needing their services later today and I want to know who’s available.”

James nodded. “I can find out. Do you want me to expedite the draft order on Family Trade just yet?”

“No, let’s wait for confirmation. BOY WONDER will want to pull the trigger himself once we brief him, assuming he survived, and if not, I need to be sworn in first. Otherwise those bastards in Congress will—”

“Sir?” Jack Shapiro, off the NSA desk just outside the conference room, stuck his head round the door. “We’ve got eyeballs overhead right now, do you want it on screen?”

WARBUCKS nodded. “Wait one, Andrew,” he told Dr. James. “Put it on any damn screen but Fox News, okay?”

Two minutes later the center screen turned blue. Static replaced the CNN news crawl for a moment; then a grainy, gray, roiling turbulence filled the monitor from edge to edge. A flickery head-up display scrawled barely readable numbers across the cloudscape. Shapiro grimaced, his face contorted by the telephone handset clamped between neck and shoulder. “That’s looking down on the Ellipse,” he confirmed. “The chopper’s standing off at six thousand feet, two thousand feet south of ground zero—it’s one of the VH-3s from HMX-1, it was on station at Andrews AFB when…” He trailed off. WARBUCKS was staring at the picture, face frozen.

“Where’s the White House?” he demanded hoarsely.

“About”—Shapiro approached the screen, pointed with a shaking finger—“there.” The splash of gray across more gray was almost unrecognizable. “Less than six hundred yards from ground zero, sir. There might be survivors—”

Dr. James quietly pushed his chair back from the table, turned away from the screens, and stood up. A DISA staffer took over the chair even before he cleared the doorway. The corridor outside was cramped and overfull with aides and officers busily waiting to see the Man. All of them showed signs of agitation: anger and fear and outrage vying for priority. Patience, James told himself. The end times haven’t begun—yet. WARBUCKS would be a much better president than BOY WONDER (the bumbling dry-drunk scion of a political dynasty had inherited his dad’s presidential mantle but not his acumen); and in any case, a presidential martyrdom pardoned all political sins.

Dr. James headed for the communications office. His mind, unlike almost everyone else’s, was calm: He knew exactly what he had to do. Find out where the surviving Supreme Court Justices were, locate the senior surviving judge, and get him here as fast as possible to swear in the new president. Then we can clean house. Both at home and in the other world God had provided for America, as this one was filling up with heathens and atheists and wickedness. There will be a reckoning, he thought with quiet satisfaction. And righteousness will prevail.

* * *

Steve Schroeder had barely been back at his desk for ten minutes when he received another visit. This time it was Riccardo, with two other men Steve didn’t recognize but who exuded the unmistakable smell of cop. “Mr. Schroeder,” said the tall, thin one. “Mr. Pirello here tells me you had a visitor this morning.”

Steve glanced at Riccardo. His boss’s forehead was gleaming under the fluorescent tubes. “Tell him, Steve.”

“Yes,” Steve admitted. “Do you have ID?”

The short fireplug in the double-breasted suit leaned towards him: “You don’t get to ask questions,” he started, but the thin man raised a hand.

“Not yet. Mr. Schroeder, we’re from the FBI. Agent Judt.” He held an ID badge where Steve couldn’t help seeing it. “This is my colleague, Agent Fowler. It would make things much easier if we could keep this cordial, and we understand your first instinct is to treat this as a news investigation, but right now we’re looking at an unprecedented crime and you’re the first lead we’ve found. If you know anything, anything at all, then I’d be very grateful if you’d share it with us.”

“If there’s another bomb out there and you don’t help us, you could be charged with conspiracy,” Agent Fowler added in a low warning rumble. Then he shut up.

Steve took a deep breath. The explosions kept replaying behind his eyelids in slow motion. He breathed out slowly. “I’m a bit … freaked,” he admitted. “This morning I had a visit from a man who identified himself as a DEA agent, name of Fleming. He spun me a crazy yarn and I figured he was basically your usual run-of-the-mill paranoid schizophrenic. I didn’t check his ID at the time—tell the truth, I wanted him out of here. He said there’d be nukes, and he’d call back later. I’ve got a recording”—he gestured to his dictaphone—“but that’s about it. All I can tell you is what he told me. And hope to hell he gets back in touch.”

Agent Fowler stared at him with an expression like a mastiff contemplating a marrowbone. “You sent him away.”

Fear and anger began to mix in the back of Steve’s mind. “No, what I sent away was a fruitcake,” he insisted. “I write the information technology section. Put yourself in my shoes—some guy you don’t know comes to visit and explains how a secret government agency to deal with time travelers from another universe has lost a bunch of atom bombs accidentally-on-purpose because they want the time travelers to plant them in our cities—what would you do? Ask him when he last took his prescription? Show him the door, by any chance?”

Fowler still stared at him, but after a second Agent Judt nodded. “Your point is taken,” he said softly. “Nevertheless…”

“You want to wait until he makes contact again, be my guest.” Steve shuddered. “He might be a fruitcake, or he might be the real thing; that’s not my call. I assume you guys can tell the difference?”

“We get fruitcakes too,” Judt assured him. Riccardo was being no help: He just stood there in front of the beige partition, eyes vacant, nodding along like a pod person. “But we don’t usually get them so close to an actual, uh, incident.”

“Act of war,” Fowler snarled quietly. “Or treason.”

Fleming didn’t ask for anonymity, Steve reminded himself. Which left: handing a journalistic source over to the FBI. Normally a huge no-no, utterly immoral and unjustifiable, except … this wasn’t business as usual, was it? “I’ll help you,” Steve said quietly. “I want to see you catch whoever did it. But I don’t think it’s Fleming you want. He said he was trying to get the word out. If he planted the bombs, why spin that cock-and-bull story in the first place? And if he didn’t plant them, but he knew where the bombs were, why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“Leave the analysis to us,” suggested Agent Judt. “It’s our speciality.” He pointed at the dictaphone. “I need to take that, I’m afraid. Jack, if you’d like to stay with Mr. Schroeder just in case the phone rings? I’m going to bring headquarters up to speed, get some backup in.” He looked pointedly at Riccardo. “You didn’t hear any of this, Mr. Pirello, but it would be very helpful to me if you could have someone in your building security department provide Agent Fowler and me with visitor badges, and warn the front desk we’re expecting colleagues.”

Riccardo scuttled away as soon as Judt broke eye contact. Then he turned back to Steve. “Just wait here with Jack,” he said reassuringly.

“What if Fleming phones? What do I do?” Steve demanded.

“Answer it,” said Fowler, in a much more human tone of voice. “Record it, and let me listen in. And if he wants to set up a meet—go for it.”

* * *

In a cheap motel room on the outskirts of Providence, Mike Fleming sat on the edge of an overstuffed mattress and poured a stiff shot of bourbon into the glass from the bathroom. His go bag sat on the luggage rack, leaking the dregs of his runaway life: a change of underwear, a set of false ID documents, the paperwork for the rental car in the parking lot—hired under a false name, paid for with a credit card under that name. The TV on the chest of drawers blatted on in hypermanic shock, endless rolling reruns of a flash reflecting off the Potomac, the collapsing monument—for some reason, the White House seemed to be taboo, too raw a nerve to touch in the bleeding subconscious of a national trauma. He needed the bourbon, as a personal anesthetic: It was appallingly bad tradecraft, he knew, but right now he didn’t feel able to face reality without a haze of alcohol.

Mike wasn’t an amateur. He’d always known—always—that a job could blow up in his face. You didn’t expect that to happen, in the DEA, but you were an idiot if you didn’t take precautions and make arrangements to look after your own skin. It was surprisingly easy to build up a false identity, and after one particular assignment in Central America had gone bad on him with extreme prejudice (a local chief of police had turned out to be the brother-in-law of the local heroin wholesaler) he’d carefully considered his options. When Pete Garfinkle had died, he’d activated them. It made as much sense as keeping his gun clean and loaded—especially after Dr. James had earmarked him for a one-way ticket into fairyland. They weren’t forgeries, they were genuine, legal ID: He didn’t use the license to get off speeding tickets, and he paid the credit card bill in full every time he used it. They were simply an insurance policy for dangerous times, and ever since he’d gotten back home after the disastrous expedition into Niejwein a couple of months ago, he’d been glad of the driving license and credit card taped inside a video cassette’s sleeve in the living room.

From Steve Schroeder’s office he’d taken the elevator down to street level, caught a bus, switched to the Green Line, changed train and commuter line three times in thirty minutes, then hopped a Chinatown bus to New York, exiting early and ultimately ending up in a motel in Providence with a new rental car and a deep sense of foreboding. Then, walking into the motel front desk, he’d seen the endless looping scenes of disaster on CNN. It had taken three times as long as usual to check in. One of the two clerks on duty was weeping, her shoulders shaking; the other was less demonstrative, but not one hundred percent functional. “Why do they hate us?” the weeping one moaned during a break in her crying jag. “Why won’t they leave us alone?”

“Think Chemical Ali did it?” Three months ago it would have been Saddam, before his cousin’s palace coup on the eve of the invasion.

“Who cares?”

Mike had disentangled himself, carefully trying not to think too hard about the scenes on the TV. But once he got to his room, it hit him.

I tried to do something. But I failed.

A vast, seething sense of numbness threatened to swallow him. This can’t be happening, there must be some way out of here, some way to get to where this didn’t happen. But it had happened; for better or worse—almost certainly for worse—Miriam’s enemies had lashed out at the Family Trade Organization in the most brutal way imaginable. Not one, but two bombs had gone off in D.C. Atomic bombs, the all-time nightmare the DHS had been warning about, the things Mike had been having nightmares about for the year since Matthias walked into a DEA office in downtown Boston with a stolen ingot of plutonium in his pocket.

No way of knowing if Schroeder had taken him seriously. He’d felt the argument slipping away, Schroeder’s impatience visibly growing as he tried to explain about the Clan, and about the FTO project to wrap them up and then to infiltrate and attack their home bases. He hadn’t even gotten as far as his contact with Miriam’s mother, Olga the ice princess, the business about negotiation. He could see Schroeder’s attention drifting. And if he couldn’t convince one man who’d known Miriam and wondered where she’d gotten to, what hope was there?

Maybe if I hadn’t asked the colonel, weeks ago, he speculated. Colonel Smith was Air Force, on secondment to FTO by way of a posting with NSA. He understood chains of command and accountability and what to do about illegal orders. Not like that shadowy spook-fucker, Dr. James. But they blew up my car. They’d expected him to run somewhere. Smith might already be dead. If I’d smuggled some of the tapes out—tapes of conversations in hochsprache, recorded by someone with access to the Clan’s innermost counsels—but that was nuts, too. The whole setup in that office was designed to prevent classified materials from going AWOL.

Where do I go, now?

Tired and sweaty and stressed and just a little bit numb from the bourbon, Mike sank back against the headboard and stared at the TV screen. Two diagonal columns of smoke, one of them almost forming the classic mushroom, the other bent and twisted out of recognizable shape. Again and again, the Washington Monument’s base blasted sideways out from under it, the peak falling. Helicopter footage of the rubble, now, eight- and nine-story office blocks stomped flat as if by a giant’s foot. Preliminary estimates of the death toll already saying it was worse than 9/11, much worse. Anchormen and women looking shocked and almost human under their makeup, idiotically repeating questions and answers, hunting for meaning in the meaningless. Interviews with a survivor on a gurney, bandaged around one side of their head, medevac’d to a hospital in Baltimore.

What’s left that I can do?

The vice president, somber in a black suit—someone had found a mourning armband for him somewhere—mounting a stage and standing behind a lectern. Balding, jowly, face like thunder as he answered questions in a near-constant waterfall of flashbulb flickering. Promising to find the culprits and punish them. Make them pay. This man whom the Clan’s consigliere had named as their West Coast connection. A whey-faced Justice Scalia stepping forward to administer the oath of office. President WARBUCKS. Dire warnings about the Middle East. Appeals for national unity in the face of this terrorist threat. Promises of further legislation to secure the border. State of emergency. State of complicity.

Where can I run?

Mike lifted his glass and took another mouthful. Knowing too much about the Family Trade Operation was bad enough; knowing too much about the new president’s darker secrets was a one-way ticket to an unmarked roadside grave, sure enough. And the hell of it was, there was probably no price he could pay that would buy his way back in, even if he wanted in on what looked like the most monstrously cynical false-flag job since Hitler faked a Polish army attack on his own troops in order to justify the kickoff for the Second World War. I need to be out of this game, he realized blearily. Preferably in some way that would defuse the whole thing, reduce the risk of escalation. Stop them killing each other, somehow. It seemed absurdly, impossibly utopian, as far beyond his grasp as a mission to Mars. So he took another sip of bourbon. He had a lot of driving to do tomorrow, and he needed a good night’s sleep beforehand, and after what he’d seen today … it was almost enough to make him wish he smoked marijuana.

* * *

Even revolutions need administration: And so the cabinet meeting rooms in the Brunswick Palace in New London played host to a very different committee from the nest of landowning aristocrats and deadwood who’d cluttered John Frederick’s court just three months earlier. They’d replaced the long, polished mahogany table in the Green Receiving Room with a circular one, the better to disguise any irregularities of status, and they’d done away with the ornate seat with the royal coat of arms; but it was still a committee. Sir Adam Burroughs presided, in his role as First Citizen and Pastor of the Revolution; as for the rest of them …

Erasmus arrived late, nearly stepping on the heels of Jean-Paul Dax, the maritime and fisheries commissioner. “My apologies,” he wheezed. “Is there a holdup?”

“Not really.” Dax stepped aside, giving him a sharp glance. “I see your place has moved.”

“Hmm.” Burgeson had headed towards his place at the right of Sir Adam’s hand, but now that he noticed, the engraved nameplates on the table had been shuffled, moving him three seats farther to the right. “A mere protocol lapse, nothing important.” He shook his head, stepping over towards his new neighbors: Maurits Blanc, commissioner of forestry, and David McLellan, first industrial whip. “Hello, David, and good day to you.”

“Not such a good day.…” McLellan seemed slightly subdued as Erasmus sat down. He directed his gaze at the opposite side of the round table, and Erasmus followed: Not much chivalry on display there, he noticed. A tight clump of uniforms sat to the left of Sir Adam: Reynolds, along with Jennings from the Justice Directorate, Fowler from Prisons and Reeducation, and a thin-faced fellow he didn’t recognize—who, from his attitude, looked to be a crony of Reynolds’s. A murder of crows, seated shoulder-to-shoulder: What kind of message was that?

“Is Stephen feeling his oats?” Erasmus murmured, for McLellan’s ears only.

“I have no idea.” Burgeson glanced at him sharply: McLellan’s expression was fixed, almost ghostly. Erasmus would have said more, but at that precise moment Sir Adam cleared his throat.

“Good morning, and welcome. I declare this session open. I would like to note apologies for absence from the following commissioners: John Wilson, Electricity, Daniel Graves, Munitions—” The list went on. Erasmus glanced around the table. There were, indeed, fewer seats than usual—a surprise, but not necessarily an unwelcome one: the cumbersome size of the revolutionary cabinet had sometimes driven him to despair.

“Now, to the agenda. First, a report on the rationing program. Citizen Brooks—”

Erasmus was barely listening—making notes, verging on doodles, on his pad—as the discussion wandered, seemingly at random, from department to department. He knew it was intentional, that Sir Adam’s goal to was to insure that everyone had some degree of insight into everyone else’s business—transparency, he called it—but sometimes the minutiae of government were deathly boring; he had newspapers and widecasters to run, a nagging itch to get out in front and cultivate his own garden. Nevertheless he sat at ease, cultivating stillness, and trying to keep at least the bare minimum of attention on the reports. Tone was as important as content, he often felt: You could often tell fairly rapidly if someone was trying to pull the wool over your eyes, simply by the way they spun out their words.

It was halfway through Fowler’s report that Erasmus began to feel the first stirrings of disquiet. “Construction of new reeducation centers is proceeding apace”—Fowler droned portentously, like a well-fed vicar delivering a slow afternoon sermon—“on course to meet the goal of one center per township with a population in excess of ten thousand. And I confidently expect my department to be able to meet our labor obligation to the Forestry Commission and the Departments of Mines and Transport—”

Did I just hear that? Burgeson blinked, staring at Fowler and his neighbors. Did I just hear the minister for prisons boast that he was supplying labor quotas to mines and road-building units? The skin on the back of his neck crawled. Yes, there were a lot of soldiers in the royalist camp, and many prisoners of war—and yes, there was a depression-spawned crime wave—but handing a profit motive to the screws stuck in his throat. He glanced around the table. At least a third of the commissioners he recognized had done hard time in the royal labor camps. Yet they just sat there while Fowler regurgitated his self-congratulatory litany of manacles refastened and windows barred. That can’t be what’s going on, he decided. I must have misheard.

Next on the agenda was Citizen Commissioner Reynolds’s report—and for this, Erasmus regained his focus and listened attentively. Reynolds wasn’t exactly a rabble-rousing firebrand, but unlike Fowler he had some idea about pacing and delivery and the need to keep his audience’s attention. “Thank you, citizens. The struggle for hearts and minds continues”—he nodded at Erasmus, guilelessly collegiate—“and I would like to congratulate our colleagues in propaganda and education for their sterling work in bringing enlightenment to the public. However, there remains a hard core of wreckers and traitors—I’d place it at between two and eight percent—who cleave to the discredited doctrine of the divine right of kingship, and who work tirelessly and in secret to undermine our good works. The vast majority of these enemies work outside our ranks, in open opposition—but as the party has grown a hundredfold in the past three months, inevitably some of them have slipped in among us, stealthy worms crawling within to undermine and discredit us.

“A week ago, Citizens Fowler, Petersen, and I convened an extraordinary meeting of the Peace and Justice Subcommittee. We agreed that it was essential to identify the disloyal minority and restrain them before they do any more damage. To that end, we have begun a veterinarian process within our own departments. Security is particularly vulnerable to infiltration by saboteurs and former revenants of the Crown Polis, as you know, and I am pleased to say that we have identified and arrested no fewer than one hundred and fifty-six royalist traitors in the past three days. These individuals are now being processed by tribunals of people’s legates appointed by the Department of Law. I hope to report at the next cabinet meeting that the trials have been concluded and my department purged of traitors; when I can make such an announcement, it will be time to start looking for opportunities to carry the fight to the enemy.” Reynolds smiled warmly, nodding and making eye contact around the table; there was a brief rumble of agreement from all sides.

Erasmus bobbed his head: but unlike his neighbors, he was aghast. Among the books Miriam Beckstein had lent him the year before, he had been quite taken aback by one in particular: a history of revolution in the East, not in the French Empire-in-being in the Russias, but in a strange, rustic nation ruled by descendants of Peter the Great. The picture it painted, of purges and show trials followed by a lowering veil of terror, was one of utmost horror; he’d taken some comfort from the realization that it couldn’t happen here, that the bizarre ideology of the Leninists was nothing like the egalitarian and democratic creed of the Levelers. Was I wrong? he wondered, watching Citizen Commissioner Reynolds smiling and acknowledging the congratulations of his fellow commissioners with a sense of sickness growing in his belly: Is corruption and purgation a natural product of revolutions? Or is there something else going on here?

His eyes narrowing, Erasmus Burgeson resolved to order some discreet research.

* * *

It wasn’t a regular briefing room: They’d had to commandeer the biggest lecture theater in the complex and it was still packed, shoulder-to-shoulder with blue and brown uniforms. Security was tight, from the Bradleys and twitchy-fingered National Guard units out on the freeway to the military police patrols on the way in. Everyone knew about the lucky escape the Pentagon had had, if only via the grapevine. The word on the floor was that the bad guys were aiming for a trifecta, but missed one—well, they mostly missed: Half a dozen guards and unlucky commuters were still awaiting burial in a concrete vault with discreet radiation trefoils once Arlington got back to normal. But nobody in the lecture theater was inclined to cut them any slack. The mood, Colonel Smith reflected, was hungry. He tried to put it out of his mind as he walked to the podium and tapped the mike.

“Good morning, everyone. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Eric Smith, lately of the air force, seconded to NSA/CSS Office of Unconventional Programs, and from there to an organization you haven’t heard of until now. I’ve been instructed to bring you up to speed on our existence, mission, and progress to date. I’ll be happy to take your questions at the end, but I’d be grateful if you could hold on to them for the time being. Just so you know where we’re going, this is about the attack yesterday, and what we—all of us—are going to be dealing with over the next months and years.”

He hit the remote button to bring up the first slide. The silence was broken by a cough from the audience; otherwise, it was total.

“For the past year I’ve been seconded to a black ops group called the Family Trade Organization, FTO. FTO is unlisted and draws on assets from Air Force, NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA, NRO, and the national laboratories. We’re tasked with responding to a threat which was only identified thirteen months ago. That’s when this man walked into a DEA office in Boston and asked for witness protection.”

Click. A new slide, showing a polyethylene-wrapped brick of white powder, and a small metal ingot, side by side on a worktop. “He was carrying a kilogram of China White and a hundred-gram lump of plutonium 239, which we subsequently confirmed had been produced in one of our own breeders. This got our attention, but his story was so crazy that DEA nearly wrote him off as a kook—they didn’t take the plutonium brick seriously at first. However, it checked out.”

Click. Surveillance video, grainy black-and-white, showing a view of a jail cell. A prisoner is sitting on the edge of a plastic bench, alone. He glances around. Then, after a few seconds, he rolls back his left sleeve to reveal some kind of tattoo on his wrist. He raises it in front of his face. Abruptly, the cell is empty.

“Our witness claimed to be a member of a group or tribe of illegal aliens with the ability to travel between worlds. The place of origin of these aliens was initially unknown, but backward. They can will themselves between their own world—or location—and ours, by staring at a special knotwork design. They speak a language not familiar to anyone in the linguistics department at NSA, but related to low German. And they use this ability to smuggle narcotics.”

Click. A slide showing an odd, crude knotwork design.

“DEA would have written source GREENSLEEVES off as a nut, but they raided one of his suggested locations and hit paydirt—a major transfer location for a cocaine distribution ring they’d been hunting for two years. At this point they began following up his leads and arrested a number of couriers. One of whom you just saw pulling a vanishing trick in front of a spy camera in a locked cell.”

Click. A windowless laboratory, white glove boxes and racks of electronics bulking beside workbenches.

“The initiative came from DEA but was escalated rapidly with the backing of OSP and NSA, to establish a cross-disciplinary investigative unit. About five months ago our collaborations at Livermore confirmed that there is indeed a physical mechanism at work here. What we’re looking at is not teleportation, but some sort of quantum tunneling effect between our world and a world very much like our own—a parallel universe. Other worlds are also believed to exist—many of them.”

Click. Video from a camera bolted to the rear bulkhead of a helicopter’s flight deck, grainy and washed out from beneath by the low light level radiance spilled from the instrument consoles: a view of darkened ridgelines.

“Project ARMBAND is now delivering prototype transfer units that can displace aircraft—or limited-scale ground forces—to what we have confirmed is this other world. There’s virtually no radio traffic or sign of advanced civilization other than stuff that these—the hostiles call themselves the Clan—have stolen from us. Our intelligence take is that this is a primitive version of our own world, one where the dark ages were very dark. The Clan, people with a biologically mediated ability to tunnel through into our world and back again—we don’t know where they came from, and neither do the prisoners we’ve been able to question. But they exist within a high mediaeval civilization along the east coast of North America, former Viking colonies. They’re not Christian: Christianity and Islam are unknown in their world. They’ve been using their access to us to build up their own power back home.”

Click. Aerial photographs of a small city. Forests loom in an untamed blanket beyond the edge of town. Only a couple of narrow roads wind between the trees. Smoke rises from chimneys. There are walls, meandering along the hilltops around the center. Some way outside them, there is a small harbor.

“This is the capital city of the local power where the Clan holds most authority, a small state called Niejwein, located roughly where downtown Boston is. Four months ago we were able to use our captured prisoners to transport a SPECOPS forward recon team into position. We’ve confirmed this story six ways: I’d like to emphasize this, we have an intelligence briefing on the enemy culture and you’ll find it in your in-tray when you check your email. What we’re dealing with is a hostile power considerably more primitive and less well organized than Afghanistan, but sitting physically right on our doorstep—collocated with us geographically, but accessible only by means of ARMBAND devices or at will to the Clan’s members.”

Click. An olive-drab cylinder approximately the size of a beer keg, with a green box strapped to it and connected by fat wires.

“This is an FADM, field atomic demolition munition. Third-generation descendant of the W53 tactical weapon. Twelve of them were supposed to be in storage in Pantex. Source GREENSLEEVES claimed to have stolen and emplaced one in downtown Boston as insurance when he walked in and asked for witness protection—” Smith paused. “May I continue?” He leaned close to the mike but kept his tone mild: Most of the audience outranked him considerably.

“Thank you. There was an accident subsequently when GREENSLEEVES panicked and tried to escape custody, and GREENSLEEVES was killed; and there was some question over whether he was in fact lying. A routine inventory check reported that all the FADMs were present and accounted for. However, a month ago FTO personnel located and subsequently disarmed a device in downtown Boston, confirming that the FADM audit report was faulty. This triggered a PINNACLE EMPTY QUIVER and a full-up inspection, in the course of which it became apparent that no less than six FADMs had been stolen from Pantex at some time in the preceding three years. FADMs are on the inactive inventory and the plant was following standard asset risk management procedures for the weapon storage areas, with layered security, patrols and sensors, and secure vaults. Unfortunately our existing ARM failed to take into account the possibility that extradimensional narcoterrorists might appear inside the storage vaults, remove the weapon assemblies from their carriers, and replace them with dummies.”

Smith paused. There was no point continuing right now—not with the muttering wave of disbelief and outrage—and besides, his throat was becoming sore. He raised his water bottle, then tapped the mike again.

“If I may continue? Thank you. Those of you tasked with nuclear weapons security know more about the consequences of that particular event than I do; to those who aren’t, we’re in the process of upgrading our risk management model and temporarily escalated security is already in place for those parts of the inventory which suffer from compromised ARM. We’re not going to lose any more nukes, period.

“Meanwhile, the background to this particular empty quiver event is that DEA’s initial approach to the Clan was that they were a major narcotics ring—narcoterrorists on the same scale as the Medellín Cartel, with an additional twist. Estimates of their turnover are in the four-to-six-billion-dollar-per-year range, and a membership in excess of a thousand individuals—and should be dealt with accordingly. What became apparent only later was that the scope of the threat, intrusions from another world, a parallel universe, is unprecedented and carries with it many unknown unknowns, if I may steal a phrase from the top. What we failed to appreciate at first was that the Clan were effectively a parallel government within their own nation, but not the government—an analogy with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan is apposite—and that the local authorities wanted rid of them. The situation was highly unstable. I am informed that negotiations with the Clan for return of the stolen weapons were conducted, but internal factional disputes resulted in the, the consequences we’ve all witnessed this week.”

Which was flat-out half-truths and lies, but the real story wasn’t something it was safe to talk about even behind locked doors in Crypto City: Smith’s boss, Dr. James, had anticipated a response, but not on this scale. Calculations had been botched, as badly as the decision in early 2001 to ignore the festering hatred in the hills around Kabul. “We need to get the hard-liners to talk to us, not the liberals,” Dr. James had explained. Nobody had anticipated that the hard-liners’ idea of a gambit would be a full-dress onslaught—or if they had, they were burying the evidence so deep that even thinking that thing was a life expectancy-limiting move.

“I can’t discuss the political response to the current situation,” Smith continued, speaking into a hair-raising silence, “but I’ve been told I can mention the legal dimension. Other FTO officials are briefing their respective departments today. As of now, FTO and the existence of the extradimensional threat are no longer super-black, although the content of this briefing remains classified. The briefing process is intended to bring everyone up to speed before the orders start coming down. I’ve been told to alert you that a military response is inevitable—the president is meeting with the survivors of the House of Representatives and there is a briefing going on behind closed doors right now—and the War Powers Act has been invoked. White House counsel and the attorney general’s office agree that the usual treaty obligations requiring a UN mandate for a declaration of war do not apply to territory physically located within our own national borders, and posse comitatus does not apply to parallel universes—this remains to be confirmed by the Supreme Court, but we anticipate a favorable outcome.”

As three of the four Justices who died in the attack were from the liberal side of the bench—by sheer bad luck, they’d been attending an event at GWU that morning—this was an extreme understatement: The new Supreme Court, when it could be sworn in, would be handpicked to make Chief Justice Scalia happy.

Smith took a deep breath. “So, to summarize: We have been attacked by a new kind of enemy, using our own stolen weapons. But we’ve been studying them covertly, and we’ve got the tools to reach out and touch them. And we’re going to show them exactly what happens when you mess with the United States.” He stared straight at one of the generals in the front row, who had been visibly containing himself for several minutes. “Thank you for your patience. Now are there any questions?”

The floodgates opened.

* * *

The day after his failed attempt to leak all over Steve Schroeder’s news desk, Mike Fleming deliberately set out to tickle the dragon’s tail. He did so in the full, cold foreknowledge that he was taking a huge personal risk, but he was running short on alternatives.

Driving from motel to strip mall and around and about by way of just about any second-rate road he could find that wasn’t an interstate or turnpike, Mike watched the news unfold. The sky was blue and empty, contrail-free except for the occasional track of a patrolling F-15; as on 9/11, they’d shut down all civilian aviation. The fire this time had not come from above, but few people knew that so far and as gestures went, grounding the airliners was a trivially easy way to signal that something was being done to protect the nation. It was the old security syllogism: Something must be done, this is something, ergo this must be done. Mike drove slowly, listening to the radio. There were police checkpoints on roads in and out of D.C.; the tattered remnants of Congress and Supreme Court were gathering at an Undisclosed Location to mourn their dead and witness the somber inauguration of the new president, a sixty-something former business tycoon from Wyoming. A presidential address to the nation scheduled for the evening: unreassuring negatives leaking from the Pentagon, This isn’t al-Qaeda, this isn’t the Iranians, this is something new. The pro-forma groundswell rumble of rage and fury at yet another unheralded and unannounced cowardly attack on the sleeping giant. The nation was on the edge of its nerves, terrified and angry. Muslim-Americans: scared. Continuity of Government legislation was being overhauled, FEMA managers stumbling bleary-eyed to the realization that the job they’d been hired for was now necessary—

At a pay phone in the back of a 7-Eleven, Mike pulled out a calling card and began to dial, keeping a nervous eye on his wristwatch. He listened briefly, then dialed a PIN. “Hello. You have no new messages.”

He hung up. “Shit,” he muttered, trudging back towards the front of the shop, trying hard not to think of the implications, not hurrying, not dawdling, but conserving the energy he’d need to carry him through the next day. He was already two miles away as the first police cruiser pulled up outside with its lights flashing, ten minutes too late: driving slowly, mind spinning as he tried to come up with a fallback plan that didn’t end with his death.

If only Miriam’s mother had left a message, or Olga the ice princess, he’d have more options open—but they hadn’t, and without a contact number he was out in the cold. The only lines he could follow led back into an organization answering to a new president who had been in cahoots with the Clan’s worst elements and wanted the evidence buried, or to a news editor who hadn’t believed him the first time round—and who knew what Steve would think, now that the White House was a smoking ruin?

I blew it, he thought bleakly. Dr. James has likely declared me a rogue asset already. Which was technically correct—as long as one was unaware that James himself was in it up to his eyes. The temptation to simply drive away, to take his papers and find a new life in a small town and forget he’d ever been Mike Fleming, was intense. But it wouldn’t work in the long term, he realized. The emergency administration would bring in the kind of internal ID checks that people used to point to when they wanted to denounce the Soviets. They’d have to: It wasn’t as if they could keep world-walkers out by ramping up the immigration service. What can I do?

His options seemed to be narrowing down. Work within the organization had gone out the window with that car bomb: The organization wanted him gone. Talk to Iris Beckstein—about what? Talk to the press—no, that had seemed like a good idea yesterday: funny how rapidly things changed. He could guess what would happen if he fixed up another meeting with Steve Schroeder any time soon. Steve would try to verify his source, be coopted, spun some line about Mike being a conspirator, and reel him in willingly; and Mike had no tangible evidence to back up his claims. Try to turn a coworker—look how well that had worked for Pete Garfinkle. Pete had confessed misgivings to Mike; shortly thereafter he’d been put in a situation that killed him. Mike had confessed misgivings to Colonel Smith; shortly thereafter—join up the dots. The whole organization was corrupt, from the top down. For all he knew, the bombs—his knuckles whitened upon the steering wheel—did WARBUCKS have big enough balls to deliberately maneuver the Clan into giving him everything he wanted, on a plate? To have helped them get their hands on the bombs, and then to have provoked them into attacking the United States? Not a crippling attack, but a beheading one, laying the groundwork for a coup d’état?

The scale of his paranoia was giving Mike a very strange sensation, the cold detachment of a head trip into a darkened wilderness of mirrors: the occupational disease of spies. If you can’t trust your friends, the only people left to trust are your enemies, he reminded himself. Miriam had tried to warn him; that suggested, at a minimum, something to hope for. But FTO’ll be watching her house. And her mother’s. In case anyone shows. He forced himself to relax his grip on the wheel and pay attention to his surroundings as a pickup weaved past him, horn blaring. How many watchers? Maintaining full surveillance on a building was extremely expensive—especially if nobody had bothered to look in on it for months.

An ephemeral flash of hope lit up the world around him. If FTO had been watching Miriam’s house before, they might well have pulled out already—and yesterday’s events would have shaken things up even more. But what if they’re wrong? He remembered Matthias’s advice, from months ago: They think like a government. And Miriam’s important to them. She’s an insider—otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to warn me. Would we put a watch on a cabinet official’s house if we knew enemies had it under surveillance? Even if we were under attack? Trying to work through that line of thought threatened to give him a headache, but it seemed to be worth checking out. Best case, there’d be a Clan security post discreetly watching her place, and nobody else. Worst case, an FTO surveillance team—but knowing how FTO worked in the field, he’d have a good chance of spotting them. Find Miriam. Try to cut a deal: Warn her faction about the spy, about WARBUCKS’s plans—in return, try to get them to hand over the murderers. Maybe find some way to cut a deal.

I just hope I’m not too late.