The Merchants' War (3 page)

"I need to see Lady Bishop," Miriam repeated, trying to keep a deadly quaver out of her voice. "I have no money and it's urgent," she hissed. "I was told she was here."

"I see." Bullet-eyes tracked upwards towards the cabbie. "How much?"

"Sixpence, guv, that's all I need," the cabbie whined.

Bullet- eyes considered for a moment. Then a hand with lingers as thick as a baby's forearm extended upwards. A flash of silver. "You. Come with me."

The weather screen was yanked upwards: Miriam lost no time clambering down hastily. Bullet-eyes gestured towards a set of steps leading down one side of the nearest town house. "That way."

"That- " Miriam was already halfway to the steps before several other details of the row of houses sank in. Lights on and laughter and music coming from the ground-floor windows: lights out and nothing audible coming from upstairs. The front doors gaped wide open. Men on the pavement outside, dressed for a good time by New London styles. Women visible through the open French doors in outfits that bared their knees-
oh,
she thought, feeling herself flush.
So that's what's going on. Damn Erasmus for not telling me!
Halfway down the steps, which led to a cellar window and a narrower, grubbier, doorway, another thought struck her: a brothel would be a good place for Erasmus's friends to meet up. Lots of people could come and go at all hours and nobody would think it strange if they took measures to avoid being identified.

Even her current fancy dress probably wasn't exceptional. Erasmus Burgcson, almost the first person she'd met on her arrival in New Britain, was connected to the Leveler underground, radical democrats in a country that had never had an American revolution, where the divine right of kings was still the unquestionable way the world was run. Which meant-

The door was snatched open in front of her. Miriam looked round. Bullet-eyes was right behind her, not threatening, but impossible to avoid. "I need to see-"

"Shut it." He was implacable. "Go in." It was a scullery, stone sinks full of dishwater and a couple of maids up to their elbows in it, a primitive clanking dishwasher hissing ominously and belching steam in the background: "through there, that way." He steered her towards a door at the back that opened onto a narrow, gloomy servant's corridor and a spiral staircase. "Upstairs."

Another passage. Miriam registered the distant sound of creaking bedsprings and groaning, chatter and laughter and a piano banging away on the other side of a thin plasterboard wall. Her chest was tight: it felt hard to breathe in here. "Is it much further?" she asked.

"Stop." Bullet-eyes grabbed a door handle and shoved, glanced inside. "You can wait here. Tell me again what you came for."

Miriam tensed and looked at him. She'd seen dozens of men like this before, hard men, self-disciplined, capable of just about anything-her heart sagged. "Erasmus Burgeson told me I should come here and talk to Lady Bishop next time I was in town," she managed to explain. "I wasn't planning on being here quite this early, without warning." She sagged against the door-frame, abruptly exhausted. "I'm in trouble."

"Has it followed you?" His voice was even, quiet, and it made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end as if someone had stepped over her open grave.

"No," she managed, "not here. I lost it on the way."

"Inside. I'll be back." She stumbled into the room. He flicked a switch and a dim incandescent bulb glimmered into light. "I may be some time." The door closed behind her. The room was a servant's bedroom, barely longer than the narrow bed that occupied half of it. There was a window, but it opened onto a shaft of brickwork, another darkened window barely visible opposite.
Click.
Miriam spun round, a fraction of a second too late to see the lock mechanism latch home.

"Shit," she moaned quietly, "shit!" She sat down on the bed and rested her head in her hands, her energy and will to resist fading frighteningly fast. It had been a long and terrible day, and even standing up felt like a battle.
What have I done?
Erasmus was nuts, or playing a sick joke on her, sending her to a brothel to talk to the madam: although, on further thought, it didn't seem particularly strange compared to the rest of this eventful day. She'd been dragged out of her house arrest, shanghaied into a forced wedding, just missed being blown up by a bomb, seen the king and the prince she'd been engaged to gunned down (and who knew what the hell was going to happen in the Gruinmarkt now?) and run into an old heartthrob (and what the hell was he doing there, working for the DEA?). Then she'd lied for her life, been attacked by muggers, menaced by a cabbie who thought she was a prostitute, and finally locked up in another goddamned prison cell, this time in a brothel.
I'm going to go mad,
she thought dizzily, lying down on the lumpy mattress. I can't
take much more of this.
But instead, she fell asleep. And that was how they found her when they came for her, an hour after midnight.

* * *

It was shaping up to be a night to remember for all the wrong reasons, Mike decided. The flat metallic banging of musketry outside blended with the screams of wounded men and the sullen roar of the burning palace to form a hideous cacophony, punctuated by the occasional crack of modern smokeless-powder firearms and shouted orders.
This is worse than that mess down in Colombia, that mountain village. What was it called?

He inched carefully out from behind the broken wall. The stench of burnt gunpowder and charred wood lent an acrid taste to the nighttime air. About four meters from the wall, the indistinct shapes of a row of trees loomed out of the darkness. He turned his head, looking around cautiously.

That nameless village on a forested mountainside in Colombia: he'd been there as part of a DEA training team, working with the Colombian army to weed out cocaine plantations in the hilly back country. What he hadn't realized at first was that the cocaine plantations belonged to the other government-the Maoist guerrillas working to overthrow the authorities controlled vast swathes of territory, had battalions of expressionless men in green with machine guns and rifles. It wasn't a police raid, it was more like an army spearhead advancing into hostile territory. And then the shooting started...

He twitched back into focus, scanning the area for threats. The palace behind him was burning merrily, flames reaching through holes in the steeply pitched roof. Doors and windows had been blown out: some were half-blocked by improvised barricades where the defenders were trying to hold out. It was full dark, and they were trying to fight a battle against attackers who were shooting from outside the circle of light. The noises were getting louder, Mike noted. More banging of muskets, the hollow shotgun-like thump of a blunderbuss, then yells and a distant drumming of hooves, the sound of many horses running. He turned to face the darkness, closed his eyes for ten long seconds to let them adjust, then rose to a crouch and dashed towards the tree line, zigzagging madly and praying he'd make it without putting a foot in a rabbit hole or catching a tree root.

At least I got Miriam out of there.
He dived past a tree, ducked under a low branch, and crouched down again to scan for watchers.
Wonder if she'll call.
It was just too

weird; he'd known she'd be here, hell, that was the whole reason they'd inserted him, to see if he could make contact-but actually seeing her in the midst of all this weird medieval squalor, dolled up like an extra from a historical drama, brought it all home to him. She was part of the Clan: she was a world-walker, one of the narcoterrorist dynasty that was running drugs up and down the eastern seaboard. And she wanted out!

But he'd blown it.
You're going to make her an offer she can't refuse,
said the colonel, and instead he'd come [nut with the truth, limp-dicked and apologetic, and as good as told her to go to ground.
Phone me in a week or to,
he'd told her.
Yeah, right.
And all because he'd seen it coming, like a slow-motion train wreck: Miriam was about as unlikely to cooperate with Smith as anyone he could imagine. And he couldn't stomach the idea of them turning her into a mule, like the guy in the cellar with the collar-bomb and the handcuffs, terrified that Mike was going to execute him.

Something moved in the brush behind him. Mike spun round, gun raised.

"Sir!" The hissed voice was familiar: Mike lowered his pistol immediately.

"That you, Hastert?"

The shadow in front of him nodded. "O'Neil's twenty yards that way. Go to him now." Bulky night-vision goggles half-covered Hastert's face, in surreal contrast to his baggy trousers and chain mail vest. He'd acquired a gun from somewhere, some kind of machine pistol with a bulky silencer attached.

"Okay, I'm going, I'm going." Mike scuttled away, his pulse hammering with the adrenaline aftershock. Hastert and O'Neil were part of the forward support team in Zone Blue, specialists yanked out of Delta Force to handle the sharp end of the Family Trade Organization's intel operation on the ground in the parallel universe the criminals came from. Dangerous men, but it was their job to get him out of this alive.
I could have told her to come with me,
he told himself. Could have lied, offered her witness protection.
Hell, she asked for it! We could have gotten her out.

But Miriam's potential value to Colonel Smith lay in her connection to the Clan hierarchy; and everything had gone to pieces. "They've got my mom," she'd said conversationally, right after he'd shot the soldier who was trying to murder her. And the royal they'd been trying to marry her off to against her wishes was dead-what the hell was going on? "O'Neil?" he whispered.

"Over here, sir. Keep down."

O'Neil was crouched behind a deadfall. "What's going on?"

"Looks like they're making whoopee." His grin was a ghostly crescent in the darkness. "Don't you worry, we'll get you out of here."

A moment of rustling and crunching, and Sergeant Hastert appeared. "Sitrep, Pete."

"Sam's on point." O'Neil gestured farther into the trees, where the ground fell away from the low hill on which the palace had stood. "He's seen no sign of anybody in the woods. Bad news is, the aggressor faction have got sentries out and they're covering the approaches from the road. There's maybe thirty of them and they've got riders-we're cut off."

"Get him back here, then."

O'Neil vanished into the darkness. "How bad is it?"; asked Mike.

"Could be worse: nobody's shooting at us." Hastert turned to look at him. "But we'd better be out of here by dawn. Did you get what you wanted?"

"Yes and no." Mike hunkered down. "Everything we thought we knew about what was going on here is out of date. I got to talk to my contact, bur* she's in deep shit herself-didn't have much time, they were trying to kill her-"

A noise like a door the size of a mountain slamming shut a hundred meters away rocked Mike back on his heels.

"Down!" Hastert lurched against him, shoving Mike's face down on a matted bed of branches. Moments later, debris thudded off the branches above their heads, spattering down on the summer-dry soil. "Get moving, we're too close."

The next hour passed in a nightmarish crawl through the dark forest, heading always away from the boom and crash of gunfire and the shouts of the combatants. The

royal palace, although nominally within the city of Niejwein, was surrounded by a walled garden the size of a huge park-large enough that the palace itself was out of easy gunshot range of its neighbors. But in the chaos of the apparent coup, the shooters seemed to be inside the compound. Stray shots periodically came tearing through the treetops so that Mike needed no urging to keep his head close to the dirt.

After an interminable crawl, Hastert tapped him on the shoulder. "Stop here, wail till I get back." He vanished into the darkness as silently as a ghost. Mike shivered violently.
Trouble?
he wondered. There was nothing he could do; on this part of the mission he was baggage, as much as Miriam would have been if he'd tried to extract her from whatever the hell that weird scene back at the palace had been about.
I can't believe I shot that guy without warning.

Mike reran the scene in his mind's eye; the perp-even now, he couldn't drop the law enforcement outlook-with thee knife, trying to stab the woman in the black gown, the Mink of burning wood, snarling fear, taking the time to aim carefully, waiting for a clear shot as the woman shoved hack hard against her assailant... then the shock of recognition.
It's her!
Despite the longer, intricately coiled hair, the drawn expression, the bruise on her cheek, and the rich Victorian widow's weeds, it was like nothing had changed since that ambiguous last dinner at Wang's, just off Kendall Square. The shock of recognition was still with him: the realization that, all along, the world he moved in was smaller than he'd realized, that during the whole fruitless search for the east coast phantom network he'd been dating a woman who could have-if she herself had known what she was-put him right on top of it.
If.
Getting involved hadn't been good for her.
They've got Mom.
And something about an arranged marriage. The smell of raw sewage running through the gutters in the middle of the unpaved road-

"Wake up." A hand touched his shoulder.

"I'm awake." Mike looked round. Hastert crouched beside him.

"There's an open area about fifty yards wide before the wall, which is eight feet high. Just the other side of the wall there's a road. O'Neil's setting up a distraction. We have"-Hastert glanced at his watch-"six minutes to get to the edge of the apron and wait. Then we have thirty seconds to get over the wall and across the road. Take the second alley on the left, proceed down it for twenty yards then take the right turn, fourth door on the left is transit house gamma. You ready?"

Mike nodded. "Guess so."

"Then let's get going."