The Merchants' War (36 page)

* * *

After two days aboard the Northern Continental, Miriam was forced to reevaluate her opinion of railroad travel- even in luxury class. Back when she was newly married she and Ben had taken a week to go on a road trip, driving down into North Carolina and then turning west and north. They'd spent endless hours crawling across Illinois, the landscape barely changing, marking the distance they'd covered by the way they had to tune the radio to another station every couple of hours, the only marker of time the shifting patterns of the clouds overhead.

This was, in a way, worse: and in another way, much better. Travel via the Northern Continental was like being sentenced to an enforced vacation in a skinny luxury hotel room on wheels. Unfortunately, New British hotels didn't sport many of the necessities a motel back home would provide, such as air-conditioning and TV, much less luxuries like a health suite and privacy. Everything was kept running by a small army of liveried stewards, bustling in and out-and Miriam hated it. "I feel like I can't relax," she complained to Burgeson at one point: "I've got no space to myself!" And no space to plug her notebook computer in. for that matter.

He shrugged. "Hot and cold running service is half of what first-class travel is all about," he pointed out. "If the rich didn't surround themselves with armies of impoverished unfortunates, how would they know they were well off?"

"Yes, but that's not the point..." Back in Baron Henryk's medieval birdcage she'd at least been able to shunt the servants out of her rooms. Over here, such behavior would draw entirely the wrong kind of attention. She waved a hand in wide circles, spinning an imaginary hamster wheel. "I feel like I'm acting in a play with no script, on a stage in front of an audience I can't see. And if I step out of character-the character they want me to play-the reviewers will start snarking behind my back."

"Welcome to my world." He smiled lopsidedly. "It doesn't get any better after a decade, let me assure you."

"Yes, but-" Miriam stopped dead, a sarcastic response on the tip of her tongue, as the door at the carriage end opened and a bellboy came in, pushing a cart laden with clean towels for the airliner-toilet-sized bathroom. "You see what I mean?" she asked plaintively when he'd gone.

The train inched across the interior at a laborious sixty miles per hour, occasionally slowing as it rattled across cast-iron bridges, hauling its way up the long slope of the mountains. Three or four limes a day it wheezed to a temporary halt while oil and water hoses dropped their loads into the locomotive's bunkers, and passengers stretched their legs on the promenade platform. Once or twice a day it paused in a major station for half an hour. Often Miriam recognized the names, but as provincial capitals or historic towns, not as the grand cities they had become in this strange new world. But sometimes they were just new to her.

On the first full day of the voyage (it was hard to think of anything so protracted as a train journey) she left the train for long enough to buy a stack of newspapers and a couple of travel books from the stand at the end of the platform at Fort Kinnaird. The news was next to impenetrable without enlisting Erasmus as an interpreter, and some of the stuff she came across in the travel books made her skin crawl. Slavery was, it seemed, illegal throughout the empire largely because hereditary indentured servitude was so much more convenient; one particular account of the suppression of an uprising in South America by the Royal Nipponese Ronin Brigade left her staring out of the window in a bleak, reflective trance for almost an hour. She was not surprised by the brutality of the transplanted Japanese soldiers, raised in the samurai tradition and farmed out as mercenaries to the imperial dynasty by their daimyo; but the complacent attitude to their practices exhibited by the travel writer, a middle-aged Anglican parson's wife from Hanoveria, shocked her rigid. Crucifying serfs every twenty feet along the railway line from Manaus to Sao Paulo was simply a necessary reestablishment of the natural order, the correction of an intolerable upset by the ferocious but civilized and kindly police troops of the Brazilian Directorate. (All of whose souls were in any case bound for hell: the serfs because they were misguided papists and the samurai because they were animists and Buddhists, the author felt obliged to note.)

And then there was the
other
book, and the description of the French occupation of Mesopotamia, which made the New British Empire look like a bastion of liberal enlightenment...

What am I doing here?
she asked herself.
I can't live in this world! And is there any point even trying to make it a better place? I could be over in New York getting myself into the Witness Protection Program...

On the second day, she gave in to the inevitable. "What's this book you keep trying to get me to read?" she asked, after breakfast.

Erasmus gave her a long look. "Are you sure?" he asked. "If you're concerned about your privacy-"

"Give." She held out a hand. "You want me to read it, right?"

He looked at her for a while, then nodded and passed her a book that had been sitting on the writing desk in full view, all along. "I think you'll find it stimulating."

"Let's see." She turned to the flyleaf. "Animal husbandry?" She closed it and glared at him. "You're having me on!"

"Why don't you turn to page forty-six?" he asked mildly.

"Huh?" She swallowed acid: breakfast seemed to have disagreed with her. "But that's-"she opened it at the right page"-oh, I see." She shook her head. "What do I do if someone steals it?"

"Don't use a bookmark." He was serious. "And if someone
does
steal it, pray to the devil that they're a fellow traveler."

"Oh." She stared at the real title page, her brow furrowed:
The Ethical Foundations of Equality,
by Sir Adam Burroughs. "It's a philosophy textbook?"

"A bit more than that." Burgeson's cheek twitched. "More like four to ten years' hard labor for possession."

"Really..." She licked her lips. It was a hot day, the track was uneven, and between her clammy skin and her delicate stomach she was feeling mildly ill. "Can you give me a synopsis?"

"No." He grinned at her. "But I should like it very much if you would give
me
one."

"Whoa." She felt her ears flush. "And I thought you were being a perfect gentleman!"

He looked at her anxiously. "Did I say something offensive?"

"No," she said, as her guts twisted, "I'm just in a funny mood." Her hand went to her mouth. "And if you'll excuse me now, I'm feeling sick-"

* * *

Days turned into hours, and the minor nuisances of keeping a round-the-clock watch on a suburban house sank into the background. So when the call she'd been half-dreading finally came through, Judith Herz was sitting in the back of her team's control van, catching up on her nonclassified e-mail on a company-issue BlackBerry and trying not to think about lunch.

"Ma'am?" Agent Metcalf leaned over the back of the seat in front, offering her a handset tethered to the van's secure voice terminal: "It's for you."

She managed to muster a smile as she put down the BlackBerry and accepted the other phone: "Who is it?"

Metcalf didn't say anything, but his expression told her what she needed to know. "Okay. Give me some privacy." Metcalf ducked back into the front. A moment later, the door opened and he climbed out. She waited for it to close before she answered. "Herz here."

"Smith speaking. Authenticate." They exchanged passwords, then: "I've got an errand for you, Judith. Can you leave the watch team with Sam and Ian for a couple of hours?"

"A couple of-" She bit back her first response. "This had better be worth it, Eric. You're aware my watch team's shorthanded right now?"

"I think it's worth it," he said, and although the fuzz the secure channel imposed on the already-poor phone line made it hard to be sure, she got the impression that he meant it. "How far from the nearest MBTA station are you?"

Herz blinked, surprised. "About a twenty-minute walk, I figure," she said. "I could get one of the guys to drop me off, if you're willing to cut the front cover team to one man for a few minutes. Why, what's come up?"

"We've got a lead on your last job, and I thought you'd want to be in on the close-out. I'm out of town right now and I need a pair of eyes and ears I can trust on the ground. What do you say?"

"The last-" That was the search for the elusive nuke source GREENSLEEVES had claimed he'd planted. She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. "You found it?"

"It's not definite yet but it looks like it's at least a level two." They'd defined a ladder of threat levels at the beginning of the search, putting them into a proper framework suitable for reporting on performance indicators and success metrics. A level five was a rogue smoke detector or some other radiation source that tripped the NIRT crews' detectors-all the way up to a level one, a terrorist nuke in situ. The nightmare in the lockup in Cambridge was still unclassified-Judith had pegged it for a level one, and still didn't quite believe in it-but a level two was serious; gamma radiation at the right wavelength to suggest weapons-grade material, location confirmed.

"Okay. Where do you want me to go?"

"Blue Line, Government Center. It's the station itself. Go there and head for the Scollay Square exit. Rich will meet you there. He and Rand are organizing the site search. The cover story we're going with is that it's an exercise, training our guys for how to deal with a terrorist dirty bomb-so you can anticipate some press presence. You'll be wearing your old organization hat and you can tell them the truth, you're an agent liaising with the anti-terror guys."

Herz felt like wineing. Wheels within wheels-how better to disguise a bunch of guys in orange isolation suits trampling around a metro station in search of a terrorist nuke than by announcing to the public that a bunch of guys in isolation suits would be tramping around the station in search of a pretend-nuke? "What if they don't find Matt's gadget?" She asked.

"That's okay, they've got a mock-up in the van. You'll just have to run in with it and tell any reporters who get in your way that we forgot to install it earlier."

A dummy nuke, in cose we don't find a real one?
Herz shook her head. "When does it kick off?"

"Rich is shooting for fourteen hundred hours."

"Okay, I'm on my way." She hung up the phone and cracked the window. Metcalf was smoking a cigarette. "Hey, Ian."

He turned, looking surprised. "Yes, ma'am?"

"We've got a call. Time to roll."

Metcalf carefully stubbed the cigarette out on the underside of his shoe then climbed back into the driver's seat. "What's come up?"

"I need a lift to Alewife. Got a T to catch."

He shook his head. "You're being pulled off the site?"

"It's urgent." She put an edge in her voice.

"I'm on it." He slid the van into gear and pulled away. "How long are you going to be?"

"A couple of hours." She picked up her briefcase and zipped it shut to stop her hands trembling with nervous anticipation. "I'll make my own way back."

The train ride to Downtown Crossing went fast, as did her connection to Government Center. Early afternoon meant that there was plenty of space in the subway trains, but the offices in the center of town would be packed. Herz tried not to think about it. She'd had months to come to terms with the idea that there might be a ticking bomb in the heart of her city-or not, that it might simply be a vicious hoax perpetrated by a desperate criminal- and now was not the time to have second thoughts about it. Still. "Our man has a thing about trip wires and claymore mines," Mike Fleming had told her.
Right. Booby traps.
She resolved to keep it in mind. Not that it wasn't in the orchestral score everyone was fiddling along to, but if it slipped some other player's mind at the wrong moment...

On her way out of the station Herz had time to reflect on the location. The JFK Federal Building loomed on one side, a hulking great lump of concrete: around the corner in the opposite direction was the tourist district, Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market and a bunch of other attractions. The whole area was densely populated-not quite as bad as downtown Manhattan, but getting there. A small backpack nuke would cause far more devastation and more loss of life than a ten-megaton H-bomb out in the suburbs. But the search teams had already combed this district-it was one of the first places they'd looked.
So what's come up now?

Rich was waiting just inside the station exit, tapping his toes impatiently. "Glad you could make it," he said, leading her out onto the plaza. "We're ready to go."

Judith froze for a moment. There was an entire flying circus drawn up on the concrete: police cars with lights Hashing, two huge trucks with an inflatable tent between them, Lucius Rand and his team wandering around in bright orange suits, hoods thrown back, chatting to each other, the police. There was even a mobile burger van- someone's idea of lunch, it seemed. "What's this?" She asked quietly.

"This
is Operation Defend Our Rails," Rich announced portentiously. "In which we simulate a terrorist attack on a T station with weapons of mass destruction, and how we'd respond to it. Except," his voice dropped a dozen decibels, "it's not a simulation. But don't tell
them."
He nodded in the direction of a couple of bored-looking reporters with a TV camera who were filming the orange-suited team.

"What do the cops know?"

"They know nothing." Rich suddenly looked serious.

"Okay." Judith steered him towards what looked to be the control vehicle. "Tell me why we're here, then."

"Team Green rescanned the area with the new gamma spectroscope they just got hold of from Lockheed. The idea was to calibrate it against our old readings, but what they found-they thought it was an instrument error at first. Turns out that MBTA's civil engineers recently removed the false walls at the ends of the Blue Line platforms so they could run longer trains. That's when we began getting the emission spectra. More sensitive detectors, less concrete and junk in the way-that's how it works. There's an older platform behind the false walls, and it looks like there's something down there."