The Trade of Queens (23 page)

“In strategic terms, the technical term for our predicament is:
fucked
.

“The only ray of hope is the possibility that their new king-emperor is bluffing about their ability to visit destruction upon our heads. But our analysis is that there is no way that he could afford to threaten us politically unless he has the capability to follow through, so the Anglischprache probably
do
have a world-walking ability. It might be a matter of captured cousins, but I doubt it. There's the destruction of the Hjalmar Palace to consider, and they had Special Forces soldiers scouting around Niejwein as long ago as the betrothal feast between Prince Creon and Her Majesty. We know therefore that they had the ability to maintain a small scouting force over here four months ago. That implies they could not, back then, send a major expeditionary force across at that time. What they can do now—”

A hand went up in the front row. Riordan stopped. “Your grace,” he said, with labored and pointed patience.

“Believe them,” Patricia Thorold-Hjorth called tiredly from her wheelchair. She clasped her hands on top of her walking stick and frowned, her face still haggard. The medic's intervention had kept her breathing, but the poisoning had taken its toll. “During the late civil war, I was—with the express consent of my late brother—negotiating with the current president. His agent broke off communications with a sudden ultimatum: our immediate surrender in return for our lives. He spoke of a mechanical contrivance for world-walking, for moving vehicles. One of my daughter's protégés was tasked by my brother with investigating the nature and limitations of world-walking, and has made a number of discoveries; in particular, some wheeled contrivances can—under some circumstances—be carried along.” A muttering spread through her audience. “And to this date, four more worlds have been discovered, and two new knots.” The muttering grew louder.

“Silence!” shouted Riordan. “Damn you, I will hear one speaker at a time!” He looked at the dowager. “You have more?”

“Not much.” She looked pensive. “Wheelbarrows—it was suppressed by the lords of the post, I presume, during the civil war. Too much risk of a few young things going over the wall, if they realized how few bodies it would take to start a rival operation; we would have faced dissolution within months. But there is no obvious size limit; the limit was imposed by the exclusion problem, the risk of wheels intersecting with matter in the other world. Given a suitably prepared staging area, machined to high precision, who knows what they could send. Tanks? Helicopters? And we are on their doorstep. These people sent a hundred thousand soldiers halfway around the world. What can they send an hour's drive down the road?”

“I don't think we need worry about that just yet,” Riordan declared, trying to regain control of the briefing. “But.” He paused a moment, looking around the anxious faces before him. “At a minimum, we face teams of special forces and possibly backpack atomic bombs, like the ones that have already been used. At worst, if they have truly worked out how to travel between worlds, we may see a full-scale invasion. I think the latter is a very real threat, and we have the example of their recent adventure in the distant land of Iraq to learn from. If we sit and wait for them to come to us, we will be defeated—they outnumber all the Eastern kingdoms, not just the Gruinmarkt, by thirty bodies to one, and look what they did to Iraq. This is not a matter for chivalrous denial; it is a fight
we cannot win
.”

He gestured in the direction of Baron Horst of Lorsburg, one of the few conservatives to have been conclusively proven to have been on the outside of the coup attempt—a tiresomely business-minded fellow, fussy and narrowly legalistic. “Sir, I believe you wish to express an opinion?”

Lorsburg removed his bifocals and nervously rubbed them on his shirt sleeve. “You appear to be saying that Clan Security can't protect us. Is that right?”

“Clan Security can't take on the United States government, no, not if they develop world-walking machines.” Riordan nodded patiently. “Do you have something more to say?”

Lorsburg hunkered down in his seat. “If you can't save us, what good
are
you?” he asked querulously.

“There's a difference between saying we can't win a direct fight, and not being able to save you. We probably
can
save the Clan—but not if we sit and wait for the Anglischprache to come calling. What we can't save are the fixed assets: our estates and vassals. Anything we can't carry. We are descended from migrant tinkers and traders, and I am afraid that we will have to become such again, at least for a while. Those of you who think the American army will not come here are welcome to go back to your palaces and great houses and pretend we can continue to do business as usual. You might be right—in which case, the rest of us will rejoin you in due course. But for the time being, I submit that our best hope lies elsewhere.

“We could cross over to America, and live in hiding among a people who hate and fear us. The Clan has some small accumulated capital; the banking committee has invested heavily in real estate, investment banks, and big corporations over the past fifty years. We would be modestly wealthy, but no longer the rulers and lords of all we survey, as we are here; and we would live in fear of a single loose-tongued cousin unraveling our network, by accident or malice. Our modest wealthy existence could only survive if all of us took a vow of silence and held to it. And I leave to your imagination the difficulty of maintaining our continuity, the braids—

“But there is a better alternative. My lady voh Thorold?”

Olga stood up. “I speak not as the director of intelligence operations, but as a confidant of the queen-widow,” she said, turning to face the room. “As we have known for some time, there are other worlds than just this one and that of the Anglischprache. Before his illness, Duke Lofstrom detailed a protégé of Helge's to conduct a survey. Helge has continued to press for these activities—we now know of four other worlds beyond the initial three, but they are not considered suitable for exploitation. If you desire the details, I will be happy to describe them later. For the time being, our best hope lies in New Britain, where Her Majesty is attempting to establish negotiations with the new revolutionary government—” Uproar.

“I say!
Silence!
” Riordan's bellow cut through the shouting. “I'll drag the next man who interrupts out and horse-whip him around the walls! Show some respect, damn you!”

The hubbub subsided. Olga waited for the earl to nod at her, then continued. “
Unlike
the Anglischprache of America, we have
good contacts
with the revolutionaries who have formed the provisional government of New Britain. We have, if nothing else, a negotiable arrangement with our relatives there; I'm sure a diplomatic accommodation can be reached.” She stared at Lorsburg, who was looking mulishly unconvinced. “Her Majesty is a
personal friend
of the minister of propaganda. We supplied their cells in Boston with material and aid prior to the abdication and uprising. Unlike the situation in the United States, we have no history of large-scale law-breaking to prejudice them against us; nothing but our aristocratic rank in the Gruinmarkt, which we must perforce shed in any case if we abandon our way of life here and move to a new world.” She paused, voluntarily this time: Lorsburg had raised a hand. “Yes? What is it?”

“This is well and good, and perhaps we would be safe from the Americans there—for a while. But you're asking us to abandon everything, to take to the roads and live like vagabonds, or throw ourselves on the mercy of a dubious cabal of regicidal peasants! How do you expect us to subsist in this new world? What shall we do?”

“We will have to work.” Olga smiled tightly. “You are quite right; it's not going to be easy. We will have to give up much that we have become accustomed to. On the other hand, we will be alive, we will be able to sleep without worrying that the next knock on the door may be agents of the state come to arrest us, and, as I said, there is a
business plan
. Nobody will hold a gun to your heads and force you to join those of us who intend to establish first a refuge and then a new trade and source of wealth in New Britain—if you wish to wait here and guard your estates, then I believe the Council will be happy to accede to your desires. But there is one condition:
If
the Americans come, we don't want you spilling our plans to their interrogators. So I am going to ask everyone to leave the room now. Those of you who wish to join our plan, may come back in; those who want no truck with it should go home. If you change your minds later, you can petition my lord the earl for a place. But if you stay for the next stage of this briefing you are committing yourselves to join us in New Britain—or to the silence of the grave.”

War Train Rolling

Holed up back in a motel room with a bottle of Pepsi and a box of graham crackers, Mike opened up his planner and spread his spoils on the comforter—room service had tidied the room while he'd been burglarizing Miriam's booby-trapped home. He was still shaking with the aftermath of the adrenaline surge from the near-miss with the police watch team.
Thirty seconds and they'd have made me.
Thirty seconds and—
Stop that,
he scolded himself.
You've got a job to do!

Two items sat on the bed: a cassette and a bulging organizer, its edges rounded and worn by daily use. He added the remaining contents of his shopping bag, spoils of a brief excursion into a Walgreens: a cheap Far Eastern walkman, and a box of batteries. “Let's get you set up,” he muttered to the machine, then did a double take.
Talking to myself. Huh.
It wasn't a terribly good sign. It had been a couple of days—since his abortive meeting with Steve Schroeder—since Mike had exchanged more words with anyone than it took to rent a car. It wasn't as if he was a gregarious type, but hanging out here with his ass on the line had him feeling horribly exposed. And there were loose life-ends left untied, from Oscar the tomcat (who had probably moved in with the neighbors who kept overfeeding him by now) to his dad and his third wife (whom he didn't dare call; even if they weren't in custody, their line was almost certainly on a fully-staffed watch by now). “The time to throw in the towel is when you start talking back to yourself, right? Oh no it isn't, Mike.…” The batteries were in, so he hit the playback button.

A beep, then a man's voice: “Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn't have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye.”

Mike paused, then rewound.
Andy
went on his notepad, along with
freelance commissions
. Probably nothing useful, but …

Click.
“Hi? Paulette here, it's seven-thirty, listen, I've been doing some thinking about what we dug up before they fired us. Miriam, honey, let's talk. I don't want to rake over dead shit, but there's some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Can I come around?”

He sat up.
Fired
, he wrote on his pad, and underlined the word twice. This Paulette woman had said
we
. So Miriam had been fired. “When?” That was the trouble with answerphones; the new solid-state ones had timestamps, but the old cassette ones were less than useful in that department. On the other hand, she hadn't wiped these messages. So they'd arrived pretty close to whatever had brought her into contact with the Clan.

Next message
: a man's voice, threatening. “Bitch. We know where you live. Heard about you from our mutual friend Joe. Keep your nose out of our business or you'll be fucking sorry.”

Mike stopped dead, his shoulders tense.
Joe
, he wrote, then circled the name heavily and added a couple of question marks.
Not Clan?
he added. The Clan weren't in the cold-call trade; concrete overcoats and car bombs were more their style. Still, coming on top of Paulette's message this was … suggestive. Miriam had been fired from her job, along with this Paulette woman, for digging up something. “She's a journalist, it's what she does.” Next thing, there was a threatening phone call. Some time not long later, Miriam disappeared. Some time after that, her house was systematically searched for computers and electronic media, by someone who wasn't interested in old paperwork. And then it was booby-trapped and staked out by the FTO.… “Stop right there!” Mike flipped the organizer open and turned to the address divider. “Paulet, Paulette, Powell-et? How do you spell it, it's a first name.…”

He read for a long time, swearing occasionally at Miriam's spidery handwriting and her copious list of contacts—
She's a journalist, it's what she does
—until he hit paydirt a third of the way through:
Milan, Paulette. Business intelligence division, the Weatherman.
That was where Miriam had worked, last time he looked. “Bingo,” Mike muttered. There was a cell number
and
a street address out in Somerville. He made a note of it; then, systematic to the end, he went back to the cassette tape.

The next message was a call from Steve Schroeder—his voice familiar—asking Miriam to get in touch. It was followed by an odd double beep: some kind of tape position marker, probably. Then the rest of the tape: a farrago of political polls, telesales contacts, and robocalls that took Mike almost an hour to skim. He took notes, hoping some sort of pattern would appear, but nothing jumped out at him. Probably the calls were exactly what they sounded like: junk. Which left him with a couple of names, one of which seemed promising, and a conundrum. Someone had threatened Miriam, right after she'd been fired for stumbling over something. Was it Clan-related? And was this Paulette woman involved? “There's only one way to find out,” Mike told himself unhappily. His stomach rumbled. “Time to hit the road again.”