The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (29 page)

She glanced around the table. Riordan nodded. ‘Votes, please. Non-binding, subject to further negotiation on the details,’ he added, heavily. ‘So we know whether it is worth
our while to continue with this meeting.’

Hands began to go up. Iris raised hers; a moment later, Oliver Hjorth grimaced and raised his.

‘I see nobody objects.’ Riordan nodded. ‘In that case, let us start on the, ah, small print. I believe you submitted a draft list of actions, my lord Julius . . . ?’

It had been a busy three weeks for Mike Fleming. An enforced week of idleness at home – idleness that was curiously unrestful, punctuated by cold-sweat fear-awakenings at
dead of night when something creaked or rattled in the elderly apartment – was followed by a week of presenteeism in the office, hobbling around with a lightweight cast on his foot and a
walking stick in his hand, doing make-work to ease him back into the establishment. Then one morning they’d come for him: two unsmiling internal affairs officers with handcuff eyes, who told
him that his security clearance was being revalidated and escorted him to an interview suite on the thirteenth floor of an FTO-rented office building.

The polygraph test itself was almost anticlimactic. It wasn’t the first time that Mike had been through one;
and I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of
, he reminded himself as
they hooked him up. He focused on the self-righteous truth: Unless the system was so corrupted that sharing honest concerns with his superior officer was now an offense, he was in the clear.

So the questions about his alcohol consumption, political leanings, and TV viewing habits came as something of an anticlimax.

They sent him home afterwards, but early the next day a courier dropped by with a priority letter and a new identity badge, clearing him to return to duty. So Mike hobbled out to his car again
and drove to work, arriving late, to find he’d missed a scheduled meeting with Dr. James and that there was a secret memo – one he wouldn’t have been allowed to set eyes on two
days earlier – waiting for him to arrive at his desk.

‘I’m supposed to give you access to the GREEN SKY files,’ Marilyn Shipman said, her lips pursed in prim disapproval. Mike couldn’t tell whether it was him she disapproved
of, or merely the general idea of giving someone, anyone, access to the files. ‘For transcription purposes only. Room 4117 is set up with a stand-alone PC for you to use, and I can bring the
files to you there one at a time.’

‘Ah, right.’ Mike gestured at his desk. ‘I’ve got a lexicon and some other research materials. Can I bring them along?’

‘Only if you don’t mind leaving them there.’ Shipman paused. ‘Paper goes into the room but
nothing
comes out until it’s been approved by the classification
committee. Depending on their classification, I could make an authorized copy and have it added to the room’s permanent inventory. But if they’re another codeword project . .
.’

‘I don’t think so, but I’ll have to check.’ Mike suppressed a momentary smile at her expression of shock. Some of the spooks who’d ended up in FTO were halfway
human, but others seemed to take the form of their procedures more seriously than the actual substance. Like Ms. Shipman, who – he had a mental bet going with his evil twin self – would
probably be less offended if he exposed himself to her than by his momentary forgetfulness about the classification level of his own notebook.

An entire working day (and three meetings) later, Mike finally got the keys to Room 4117 and its contents, including his carefully photocopied lexicon and handwritten notes on Hochsprache. There
was other material, too: an intimidating row of nonclassified but obscure works on proto-Germanic and Norse linguistics. The room itself was sparsely furnished and windowless, half filled by the
single desk. The PC, and an audio-typist’s tape deck, were fastened to it by steel cables, and as if to drive home the point, a framed print on the wall behind the PC reproached him:
SECURITY, IT’S MORE THAN YOUR JOB THAT’S AT STAKE.

Then Marilyn brought him the box of material he was supposed to be working with.

‘You’re kidding me. I’ve got to sign for a bunch of
cassette tapes
?’

‘You got it. Here and here.’ She pointed to the relevant lines on the form.

‘Some of these look like they’ve been chewed by a dog.’

‘You’re working with primary source material now. You’d be amazed at some of the stuff we get coming in from Pakistan and the Middle East.’ She paused while he signed the
clipboard. ‘These are originals, Mr. Fleming. They’ve been backed up – they’re in the library if anything goes wrong – but most of our analysts work with primary
recordings wherever possible. Just in case anything’s missing from the backup copy. There shouldn’t be any problems of that kind, but you can never be quite sure. As to why it’s
on cassette tape, I couldn’t possibly say. Perhaps that’s all the field officer had to hand. They’re still common in some parts of the world.’ She smiled tightly and tapped
the yellowing plastic lid on the secretarial recorder with a fingertip. ‘Do you remember how to use one of these?’

‘I think I can cope.’ Mike looked at the headset doubtfully. ‘What’s that?’ He pointed at a hole that had been drilled through a red button on the machine’s
control panel.

‘That was the record button. They disconnect the erase head, too, just in case; this one’s for playback only.’

‘What, in case I slip and accidentally delete something?’

‘No, it’s in case you try to record a message for the accomplice you’ve got working down in library services to smuggle out of the establishment, Mr. Fleming. That should have
been in your security briefing materials. We are very methodical here.’

‘I can see that.’ Mike picked up the first of the cassettes; a thin patina of dust grayed the hand-scribbled label. ‘Has this been in your archives for long?’

‘I don’t know and I couldn’t say.’

After Marilyn left, Mike sorted through the box. There were ten cassettes in all, and some of them were clearly years old. Most were identified only by a serial number scribbled on one side; a
couple of them showed signs of the tape having been crumpled, as if they had unspooled and been painstakingly reassembled from a tangle of twisted Mylar. It had been years since Mike had last
bothered with a cassette in everyday life; his last two automobiles had come with CD players. They were an obsolete technology, analog recordings on thin ribbons of tape. It seemed very strange to
be working with them again, inside a windowless cell in a huge concrete office block in Maryland. But then again, a little voice reminded him:
They’re robust. The equipment’s cheap,
and doesn’t have to look like a spy tool. And you can replace them easily. Why fix something if it isn’t broken?

And so he slotted the first tape into the player, donned the headset, and pressed the PLAY button.

And it made very little sense whatsoever, even on the third replay.

By the third day, Mike had just about worked out what his problem was. It wasn’t just his grasp of the language, poor as it was. It wasn’t the clarity of the recordings, either
– the microphone had been reasonably well placed, and it was of adequate sensitivity. The men (and occasional women) he heard discussing things in what sounded like an office suite –
these were regular business meetings, as far as he could tell – were audible enough, and he could make out most of their words with a little effort. Many of their terms were unfamiliar, but
as if to balance things out, the speakers used familiar English words quite often, albeit with an accent that gave Mike some trouble at first.

‘It’s the context,’ he told the security awareness poster. ‘Knowing what they’re talking about is as important as knowing what they’re saying.’ He waved
his hands widely, taking in the expanse of his empire – the desk, the chair, the walls – and declaimed, ‘Half of what gets said in any committee meeting doesn’t get
expressed verbally, it’s all body language and gestures and who’s making eye contact with whom. Jesus.’ He looked at the box of tapes disgustedly. ‘Maybe these would be some
use to a secretary who sat in on the meeting, fodder for the minutes . . .’

His eyes widened as he remembered lying on the floor in an empty office, Matthias – source GREENSLEEVES – standing over him with a gun: ‘If you’d gone after the Clan as a
police operation, that would have given the thin white duke something more urgent to worry about than a missing secretary, no?’

Jesus
. He stared at the tapes in surprise.
Matthias was their boss man’s – the thin white duke’s – secretary, wasn’t he? These are probably
his
transcripts
. Not that he’d recognized the defector’s voice – it had been months since he’d died, and Matt’s voice wasn’t distinctive enough to draw his
attention, not on an elderly tape recording of a meeting – but the implications . . .
GREENSLEEVES didn’t bring any tapes with him when he defected, so how did these get here? We
have a spy in the Clan’s security apparatus, high enough up to get us these tapes. I wonder who they are? And what else they’ve brought over . . . ?

*

In a shack attached to the stables at the back of Helge’s temporary palace, a man in combat fatigues sat on a swivel chair and contemplated failure.

‘It’s not working,’ he complained, and rubbed his aching forehead. ‘What am I doing wrong, bro?’

‘Patience.’ Huw carried on typing notes on a laptop perched pre-cariously on one knee.

This experiment was Helge’s idea. ‘The first time I world-walked I was
sitting down
,’ she’d told him. ‘That’s not supposed to be possible, is it? And
then, later, I’ – a shadow crossed her face – ‘I was brought across. In a wheelchair.’ Her frown deepened. ‘There’s stuff we’ve been lied to about,
Huw. I don’t know whether it’s from ignorance or deliberate, but we ought to find out, don’t you think?’

Angbard had said
get to the bottom of it
, and while the duke was hors de combat, Huw was more than happy to keep on following the same line of inquiry for Helge. ‘Okay, that’s
test number four. Let’s try out the next set of casters. You want to stand up while I fit them?’

‘Yah.’ Yul stood, then picked up the chair, inverted it, and planted it on the workbench.

Huw put down the laptop then went to work on the upturned chair’s wheels with a multi-tool, worrying them until they came loose. He pulled another set of feet from a box and began
installing them. ‘This set should work better, if I’m right,’ he explained as he worked. ‘High density polyethylene is a very good insulator, and they’re hard –
reducing the contact area with the ground.’

‘What about the mat?’ asked Yul.

‘That, too. We’ll try that first: you, me, then Elena. Then without the mat.’

‘You think the mat has something to do with it?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Huw straightened up. ‘She world-walked in an office chair. We don’t do that because it never occurred to anyone. They tried wheelbarrows, and on
horseback, back in the day. Even a carriage plus four. All we know is that nobody world-walks in a vehicle, because when they tried to do it, it didn’t work. But we do it on foot, wearing
shoes or boots. So what’s going on? What’s different about boots and wheels?’

‘Horses weigh a lot,’ Yul pointed out. ‘So do wooden barrows, or carriages.’

‘Yes, but.’ Huw reached for a mallet and a wooden dowel, lined them up carefully, and gave a recalcitrant caster a whack. ‘We don’t
know
. There are other
explanations, like: Most shoes are made to be waterproof, yes? Which makes them nonconductive. Whereas anyone who tried horses would have used one that was properly shod, with cold iron . . . I
just want to try again, from first principles.’

‘Why not get Rudi to try it in midair?’ asked Yul.

Huw snorted. ‘Would you like to give yourself a world-walker’s head in midair, while trying to fly a plane? And what if it works but doesn’t take the plane with the
pilot?’

‘Oh.’ Yul looked thoughtful. ‘Could he try it in a balloon? With a parachute, set up to unfold immediately if he fell? Or maybe a passenger to do the world-walking?’

Huw stopped dead. ‘That’s a
good
idea. Hold this.’ He passed the chair to his brother while he opened up the laptop again and hastily tapped out a note. ‘You
volunteering?’

‘What, me? No! I can’t skydive! I get dizzy wearing platform soles!’

‘Just asking.’ Huw shut the laptop again. ‘Whoever does it, that intrepid adventurer, they’ll get lots of attention from the ladies.’

‘You think?’ Yul brightened slightly.

‘Absolutely,’ Huw said blandly.
Especially from her majesty
, but best not to swell Yul’s head. ‘Hand me that test meter then get the carpet protector . .
.’

It was, he figured, a matter of getting the conditions right.

‘There are a couple of possibilities,’ he’d told Helge earlier in the morning, when she’d appeared in the stables, unannounced and unexpected, just like any other country
squire’s wife making her daily rounds of the estate. ‘It could be the exclusion effect.’ It was well known that you couldn’t world-walk if there was a solid object in the
way in the destination world. ‘What if the ground pressure of feet or shoes doesn’t set up a potential interpenetration, but wheels do? There’s a smaller contact area, after
all.’

‘Can women world-walk in stiletto heels?’ Helge had thrown back at him, looking half-amused.

‘What? Have you – ’

‘I’ve never tried. I’m not good in heels, and world-walking in them isn’t something I’d do deliberately.’ She paused. ‘But it’s one for your list,
isn’t it?’

‘I’ll do that,’ he agreed. ‘Would you like to sit in on the experiment today? You might spot something I wouldn’t . . .’

‘I wish I could.’ A pained expression crept across her face. ‘They’re keeping me busy, Huw, lots of protocol lessons and meetings with tedious fools I can’t afford
not to be nice to. In fact, I’d better be going now – otherwise I’ll be late for this morning’s first appointment. I think I’ve got an hour free before dinner, maybe
you could fill me in on the day’s progress then?’