The Merchants' War (25 page)

"Hmm."
What have I gotten myself into here?
"I really ought to get the colonel to tell me whether I can fill you in on a couple of codewords."

Herz set the cruise control and glanced at him, sidelong. "He told me you'd been on something called CLEANSWEEP, and this is the follow-up."

Mike felt the tension ease out of his shoulders. "I hate

the fucking spook bullshit," he complained. "Okay, let me fill you in on CLEANSWEEP and how I got my leg busted up. Then maybe I can help you figure out a surveillance plan..."

* * *

Miriam watched from the back room while Erasmus systematically looted his own shop. "Go through the clothing and take anything you think you'll need," he told her. "There's a traveling case downstairs that you can use. We're going to be away for two weeks, and we'll not be able to purchase any necessities until we reach Fort Kinnaird."

"But I can't just-" Miriam shook her head. "Are you sure?"

"Whose shop is it?" He Hashed her a cadaverous grin. "I'll be upstairs. Got to fetch a book."

The traveling case in the cellar turned out to be a battered leather suitcase. Miriam hauled it up into the back mom and opened it, wrinkling her nose. It looked clean enough, although the stained silk lining, bunched at one side, made her wonder at its previous owner's habits. She stuffed the contents of her valise into it, then scoured the rails in the back for anything else appropriate. There wasn't much there: Erasmus had run down the stock of clothes since she'd last seen the inside of his shop. A search of the pigeonholes behind the counter yielded a line leather manicure case and a good pen. She was tucking them into the ease when Erasmus reappeared, carrying a couple of books and a leather jewelry case.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Stock I'm not leaving in an empty shop for two weeks." He pulled another suitcase out from a cubby behind his desk and opened it: "I'm also taking the books to prove I'm their rightful owner, just in ease." It all went in. Then lie opened the partition at the back of the counter and rummaged around inside. "You might want to take this..." He held a small leather box out to Miriam.

"What- " She flicked the catch open. The pistol was tiny, machined with the precision of a watch or a camera or a very expensive piece of jewelry. "Hey, I can't take-"

"You must," Burgeson said calmly. "Whether you ever need to use it is another matter, but I believe I can trust you not to shoot me by mistake, yes?"

She nodded, jerkily.

"Then put it away. I suggest in a pocket. The case and spare rounds can go-here." He picked out the pistol then slipped the case through a slit in the lining of the suitcase that Miriam hadn't even noticed. "It's loaded with three rounds in the cylinder, the hammer is on the empty fourth chamber. It's a self-arming rotary, when you pull the trigger it will cock the hammer-double action-do you see?" He offered it to her.

"I don't- " She nodded, then took the pistol. "You really think I'll need it?"

"I hope you won't." He glanced away, avoiding her gaze. "But these are dangerous limes."

He bustled off again, into the front of the shop, leaving Miriam to contemplate the pistol.
He's right,
she realized with a sinking heart. She double-checked that the hammer was, indeed, on the empty chamber, then slipped it into her coat pocket just as Erasmus returned, clutching a wad of envelopes.

"You have mail." He passed her a flimsy brown wrapper.

"I have- " She did a double take. "Right." There was no postage stamp; it had been hand-delivered. She opened it hastily. The neat copperplate handwriting she recognized as Roger's. The message was much less welcome:

Polis raided yr house, watching yr factory. Am being watched, can't help. Think yr stuff is still where it was, locked in the office.

"Shit!"

She sat down hard on the wooden stool Erasmus kept in the back office. "What troubles you?"

She waved the note at him. "I need to collect this stuff," she said.

"Yes, but-" he read the note rapidly, his face expressionless. "I see." He paused. "How badly do you need it?"

The moment she'd been half-dreading had arrived. How would Burgeson respond if she told him the unvarnished truth?

"Very." She meshed her lingers together to avoid fidgeting. "The machine I need to collect has... well, it's more than just useful to me. It stores pictures, and among them there's a copy of the original knotwork design I need if I'm going to get back to my own world by myself. If I've got it, I'm not stuck with a choice between permanent exile here and a, a feudal backwater. Or going back to the Clan. If I
do
decide to make contact with them and ask to be taken in, it's a bargaining lever that demonstrates my bona fides because I had a choice. And if I don't, it gives me access to my own, my original, world. Where it's possible to gel hold of things like the medicine I got you."

He waited for several seconds after she finished speaking. "That's not all, is it?" he said gently.

She swallowed. "Are you planning on keeping me a prisoner here?" She asked. "Because that's what denying me the ability to go back to the United States amounts to."

"I'm not!" He began explosively, then stopped to draw a deep breath: "I apologize. I did not mean to imply that I thought you were going to cut and run." He grimaced. "But there's more to this device of yours than a mere pictographic representation, isn't there?"

"Well, yes," she admitted. "For one thing, it contains a copy of every patent filed in my home country over more than a century." Erasmus gaped at her. "Why do you think I started out by setting up a research company?"

"But that must be-that's preposterous!" He struggled visibly to grapple with the idea. "Such a library would occupy many shelf-feet, surely?"

"It used to." Miriam felt a flash of hope. "But you saw the DVD player. Every second, that machine has to project thirty images on screen, to maintain the illusion of motion. How much storage do you think they take up? In my world, we have ways of storing huge amounts of data in very small spaces."

"And such a library would be expensive," he added speculatively.

"Not if it was old. And the cost of the storage medium was equivalent to, say, a reporter's notebook." Her patent database might not include anything filed in the past fifty years, but a full third of its contents were still novelties in New Britain.

"We must seem very primitive to you." He was scrutinizing her, Miriam realized, with a guarded expression that was new and unwelcome.

"In some ways, yes." She relaxed her hands. "In other ways-no, I don't think so. And anyway, there are probably any number of other worlds out there that are as far beyond this one, or the one I came from, as this is beyond the Gruinmarkt. Where the Clan come from," she clarified. "Bunch of medieval throwbacks."
Throwbacks who are your family,
she reminded herself. "Look, from my point of view, I need to make sure I've got something, anything, that'll stop them coming after me if they realize I survived the massacre."
Assuming they survived.
"If I've got the laptop I can threaten to throw myself on the mercy of the security agencies in the U.S., whoever Mike is working for. Or I can claim loyally and demonstrate that I didn't do that, even though I could have. And if I don't have anything to do with them I can use it to set up in business again, over here."

"Do you plan to throw yourself on the mercy of your friend's agency?" Erasmus asked, raising an eyebrow.

Miriam shuddered. "It's a last resort," she said slowly. "If the Clan come after me and try to kill me, they might be able to keep me alive."
But then again
-Mike's words came back to haunt her:
They're using world-walkers as mules, there's a turf war inside the bureaucracy.
Things might go really well. And then again, she might end up vanishing into some underground equivalent of Camp X-ray, into a nightmarish gulag that would make house arrest in Niejwein seem like paradise. "But I don't want to risk it unless I have to."

"So what are you going to do?" he asked gently. She blinked, and realized he was watching her hands. A double take:
He gave me a pistol,
she realized.

"I'm going to take back what's mine," she said calmly, "and I'm going to get clean away with it. Then we're going to go on a long rail trip while the fuss dies down." She stood up. "Do you mind if I go through your stock again? There's some stuff I need to borrow..."

* * *

Two hours later, a mousy-looking woman in black trudged slowly past a row of warehouses and business premises, pushing a handcart. Her back hunched beneath an invisible load of despair, she looked neither left nor right as she trailed past an ominously quiet light metal works and a boarded-up fabric warehouse. The handcart, loaded with a battered suitcase and a bulging sack, told its own story: another of the victims of the blockade and the fiscal crisis, out on her uppers and looking for work, or shelter, or a crust before nightfall.

The streets weren't deserted, but there was a lack of purposeful activity; no wagons loading and unloading bales of cloth or billets of mild steel, and a surfeit of skinny, down-at-heels men slouching, hands in pockets, from one works to another-or optimistically holding up crude signboards saying WILL WORK FOR FOOD. Some messages were universal, it seemed.

The woman with the handcart paused in the shadow of the textile mill, as if out of breath or out of energy on whatever meager rations she'd managed that morning. Her dull gaze drifted past a couple of idlers near the gates to a closed and barricaded glass factory: idlers a trifle better fed than the run of the mill, idlers wearing boots that-if she'd stopped to look-she might have noticed were suspiciously well-repaired.

A little further up the road, a shabby vendor with a baked potato stand was watching another boarded-up building. The woman's gaze slid past him, too. After a minute or so she began to put one weary foot in front of another, and pushed her cart along the sidewalk towards the boarded-up works.

As she hunched over the handles of her cart, Miriam rubbed her wrist and squinted at the small pocket watch she'd wound around it.
Any minute now,
she told herself, half-sick with worry. The last time she'd tried something like this she'd ended up in Baron Henryk's custody, guarded by cold-faced killers and under sentence of death. If she was wrong about the watchers, if there were more of them, this could end up just as badly.

From the alleyway running alongside the boarded-up workshop there was a crash and a tinkle of broken glass. Miriam shuffled slowly along, overtly oblivious as the potato-vendor left his stand and strolled towards the side of the building. Behind him the two idlers she'd tagged began to walk briskly in the opposite direction, setting up a pincer on the other end of the alley. She felt a Hash of triumph. Now all it would take was for the street kids Erasmus had paid to do their job...

The watchers were out of sight. Miriam dropped the handles of her cart, grabbed her suitcase, and darted towards the workshop's office doorway. A heavy seal and a length of rope held the splintered main door closed with the full majesty of the law, and not a lot besides: she grimaced and tugged hard at the seal, ducking inside as the door groaned and threatened to collapse on her.
One minute only,
she told herself. It might take them longer to work out that the urchins were a distraction, but she wasn't betting on it.

Inside the entrance the building was dark and still, and cold-at least, as cold as anything got at this time of year. Moving fast, with an assurance born of having worked here for months, Miriam darted round the side of the walled-off office and felt for the door handle. It had always been loose, and her personal bet-that the Polis wouldn't lock up inside a building they were keeping under surveillance-paid off. The door handle flexed as she stepped inside her former office, raising her suitcase as a barrier.

She needn't have bothered. There was nobody wailing for her: nothing but the dusty damp smell of an unoccupied building. The high wooden stools lay adrift on the floor under a humus of scattered papers and overturned drawers. A Hash of anger:
The bastards didn't need to do this, did they?
But in a way it made things easier for her. Dealing with a stakeout by the secret police hereabouts was trivially easy compared to sneaking her laptop out past Morgan and making a clean getaway.

Thirty seconds.
The nape of her neck was itching. Miriam stumbled across the overturned furniture, then bent down, fumbling in the leg well below one scribe's position. The hidden compartment under the desk was still there: her hands closed on the wooden handle and pulled down and forward to open it. It slid out reluctantly, scraping loudly. She tugged hard, almost stumbling as it came out and the full weight of its contents landed on her arms.

The suitcase was on the floor.
Forty-five seconds.
She fumbled with the buckles for a heart-stopping moment, but finally the lid opened. Scooping the contents out of the hidden drawer-the feel of cold plastic slick against her fingertips-she swept them into the pile of bundled clothing within, then grabbed the bag by its handles. There was no time to buckle it closed: she picked it up in one hand and scurried back into the body of the empty works.

One minute.
Was that a shout from outside? Miriam glanced briefly at the front door.
Doesn't matter,
she thought:
they'll work it out soon enough.
Moving by dead reckoning, her free hand stretched out to touch the wall beside her, she headed deeper into the building, following the deepening shadows. Another turn and the shadows began to lighten. At the end of the corridor she turned left and the grimy daylight lifted, showing her the dust and damage that had been brought to bear on her business, in the name of the law and by the neglect of her peers. It was heartbreaking, and she stopped, briefly unable to go on.
I'll rebuild it,
she told herself.
Somehow.
The most important tools were in her suitcase, after all.