The Trade of Queens (24 page)

*   *   *

The coded electrogram from Springfield followed a circuitous course to Erasmus Burgeson's desk.

Huw's bluff had worked; the cadre at the post office were inexperienced and undisciplined, excited volunteers barely out of the first flush of revolutionary fervor, more enthusiastic than efficient. There was no command structure as such, no uniforms and no identity papers, and as yet very little paranoia: The threats they expected to defend the post office against were the crude and obvious violence of counterrevolutionary elements, fists and guns rather than the sly subtlety of wreckers and saboteurs from within. This was not—yet—a revolution that had begun to eat its offspring.

When Huw claimed to be part of a small reconnaissance cell in the countryside and asked to send a message to the stratospheric heights of the party organization, he was met at first with gape-jawed incomprehension and then an eagerness to oblige that was almost comically servile. It was only when he and Yul prepared to slip away that anyone questioned the wisdom of allowing strangers to transmit electrograms to New London without clearance, and by the time old Johnny Miller, former deputy postmaster of the imperial mail (now wearing his union hat openly), expressed the doubtful opinion that perhaps somebody ought to have detained the strangers pending the establishment of their bona fides, Huw and Yul were half a mile down the road.

Despite deputy postmaster Miller's misgivings, the eighty-word electrogram Miriam had so carefully crafted arrived in the central monitoring and sorting hall at Breed's Hill, whereupon an eagle-eyed (and probably bored) clerk recognized the office of the recipient and, for no very good reason, stamped it with a PARTY PRIORITY flag and sent it on its way.

From Breed's Hill—where in Miriam's world one of the key battles of the American War of Independence had been fought—the message was encrypted in a standard party cypher and flashed down cables to the Imperial Postal Headquarters building on Manhattan Island, and thence to the Ministry of Propaganda, where the commissioner on duty in the message room saw its high priority and swore, vilely. Erasmus was not in town that day; indeed, was not due back for some time. But it was a PARTY PRIORITY cable. What to do?

In the basement of the Ministry of Propaganda were numerous broadcasting rooms; and no fewer than six of these were given over to the letter talkers, who endlessly recited strings of words sapped of all meaning, words chosen for their clarity over the airwaves. So barely two hours after Huw and Yul had shown the cadre in Springfield two clean pairs of heels, a letter talker keyed his microphone and began to intone: “Libra, Opal, Furlong, Opal, Whisky, Trident”—over the air on a shortwave frequency given over to the encrypted electrospeak broadcasts of the party's network, a frequency that would be echoed by transmitters all over both Western continents, flooding the airwaves until Burgeson's radio operator could not help but receive it.

Which event happened in the operator's room on board an armored war train fifty miles west of St. Anne, which stood not far from the site of Cincinatti in Miriam's world. The operator, his ears encased in bulky headphones, handed the coded message with his header to the encryption sergeant, who typed it into his clacking, buzzing machine, and then folded the tape and handed it off to a messenger boy, who dashed from the compartment into the train's main corridor and then along a treacherous, swaying armored tunnel to the command carriage where the commissioner of state propaganda sat slumped over a pile of newspapers, reading the day's dispatches as he planned the next step in his media blitz.

“What is it now?” Erasmus asked, glancing up.

The messenger boy straightened. “Sor, a cript for thee?” He presented the roll of tape with both hands. “Came in over the airwaves, like.”

“I see.” The train clanked across a badly maintained crossing, swaying from side to side. Erasmus, unrolling the tape, drew the electric lamp down from overhead to illuminate the mechanical scratchings as he tried to focus on it. It had been under at least three pairs of eyeballs since arriving here; over the electrograph, that meant … He blinked.
Miriam? She's
here
? And she wants to talk?
He wound back to the header at the start of the message that identified the sending station.
Springfield.
Burgeson chuckled humorlessly for a moment. HAVE INTERESTING PROPOSAL FOR YOU RE TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER AND FAMILY BUSINESS. To put that much in an uncoded message was a giveaway: It reeked of near-panic. She'd said something about her relatives being caught up in a civil war, hadn't she?
Interesting.

Burgeson reached out with his left hand and yanked the bell rope, without taking his eyes off the message tape. A few seconds later Citizen Supervisor Philips stuck his head round the partition. “You called, citizen?”

“Yes.” Burgeson shoved the newspaper stack to one side, so that they overflowed the desk and drifted down across the empty rifle rack beside it. “Something urgent has come up back East. I need to be in Boston as soon as possible.”

“Boston?” Philips raised a thin eyebrow. “What about the campaign, citizen?”

“The campaign can continue without me for a couple of days.” Burgeson stared at Philips. Dried-out and etiolated, the officer resembled a praying mantis in a black uniform: but he was an efficient organizer, indeed had pulled together the staff and crew for this campaign train at short notice. “We've hit New Brentford and Jensenville in the past two days, you've seen how I want things done: Occupy the local paper's offices, vet the correspondents, deal with any who are unreliable and promote our cadres in their place. Continue to monitor as you move on.” The two-thousand-ton armored war train, bristling with machine guns and black-clad Freedom Riders, was probably unique in history in having its own offset press and typesetting carriage; but as Erasmus had argued the point with Sir Adam, this was a war of public perception—and despite the technowizardry of the videography engineers, public perceptions were still shaped by hot metal type. “Keep moving, look for royal blue newspapers and insure that you leave only red freedom-lovers in your wake.”

“I think I can do that, sir.” Philips nodded. “Difficult cases…?”

“Use your discretion.”
Here, have some rope; try not to hang yourself with it.
“I'll be back as soon as I can. Meanwhile, when's the next supply run back to Lynchburg departing?”

“If it's Boston you want, there's an aerodrome near Raleigh that's loyal,” Philips offered. “I'll wire them to put a scout at your disposal?”

“Do that.” Burgeson winced. Flying tended to make him air-sick, even in the modern fully-enclosed mail planes that had been coming in recently. “I need to be there as soon as possible.”

“Absolutely, citizen. I'll put the wheels in motion at once.” And, true to his word, almost as soon as Philips disappeared there came an almighty squeal of brakes from beneath the train.

*   *   *

The past week had been one long nightmare for Paulette Milan.

She'd been a fascinated observer of Miriam's adventures, in the wake of the horrible morning a year ago when they'd both lost their jobs; and later, when Miriam had sucked her into running an office for her—funneling resources to an extradimensional business start-up—she'd been able to square it with her conscience because she agreed with Miriam's goals. If the Clan, Miriam's criminal extended family, could be diverted into some other line of business, that was cool. And if some of their money stuck to Paulie's fingertips in the form of wages, well, as long as the wages weren't coming in for anything illegal on her part, that was fine, too.

But things hadn't worked out. First Miriam had vanished for nearly six months—a virtual prisoner, held under house arrest for much of that time. The money pipeline had slammed shut, leaving Paulie looking for a job in the middle of a recession. Then things got worse. About six weeks ago Miriam's friends—or co-conspirators, or cousins, or whatever—Olga and Brill had turned up on her doorstep and made her the kind of offer you weren't allowed to refuse if you knew what was good for you. There was a fat line of credit to sweeten the pill, but it left Paulie looking over her shoulder nervously. You didn't hand out that kind of money just to open an office, in her experience. And there had been dark hints about internal politics within the Clan, a civil war, and the feds nosing around.

All of this was
bad
. Capital-B bad. Paulie had grown up in a neighborhood where the hard men flashed too much cash around, sometimes checked into club fed for a few years at a time, and snitches tended to have accidents … she'd thought she had a good idea what was coming until she'd turned on the TV a few days ago and seen the rising mushroom clouds. Heard the new president's broadcast, glacial blue eyes twinkling as he came out with words that were still reverberating through the talk shows and news columns (“PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: PRESIDENT ‘NOT INSANE,'” as the
Globe
had put it).

It made her sick to her stomach. She'd spent the first two days in bed, crying and throwing up on trips to the bathroom, certain that the FBI were going to break down her door at any moment. The stakes she'd signed up for were far higher than she'd ever imagined, and she found she hated herself for it: hated her earlier moment of pecuniary weakness, her passive compliance in following Miriam down her path of good intentions, her willingness to make friends and let people influence her. She'd caught herself looking in the bathroom cabinet at one point, and hastily shut it: The temptation to take a sleeping pill, or two, or enough to shut it out forever, was a whispering demon on her shoulder for a few hours. “What the fuck can I
do
?” She'd asked the bourbon bottle on the kitchen table. “What the
fuck
can I do?”

Today … hadn't been better, exactly; but she'd awakened in a mildly depressive haze, rather than a blind panic, knowing that she had two options. She could go to the feds, spill her guts, and hope a jail cell for the rest of her life was better than whatever the Clan did to their snitches. Or she could keep calm and carry on—she'd seen a foreign wartime poster with that line, once—carry on doing what Miriam had asked of her: sit in an office, buy books and put them in boxes, buy
stuff
(surveying tools, precision atomic clocks, laboratory balances: What did she know?) and stash it in a self-storage locker ready for a courier collection that might never arrive.

Get up. Drink a mug of coffee, no food. Go to the office. Order supplies. Repackage them with an inventory sheet, to meet the following size and weight requirements. Drive them to the lockup. Consider eating lunch and feel revulsion at the idea so do some more work, then go home. Keep calm and carry on (it beats going to Gitmo). Try not to think …

Paulette drove home from the rented office suite in a haze of distraction, inattentive and absentminded. The level of boxes in the lockup had begun to go down again, she'd noticed: For the first time in a week there'd been a new manilla envelope with a handwritten shopping list inside. (She'd stuffed it in her handbag, purposely not reading it.) So someone was collecting the consignments. Her fingers were white on the steering wheel as she pulled up in the nearest parking space, half a block from her front door. She was running short on supplies, but the idea of going grocery shopping made her feel sick: Anything out of the routine scared her right now.

She unlocked the front door and went inside, switched the front hall light on, and dumped her handbag beside the answering machine. It was a warm enough summer's day that she hadn't bothered with a jacket. She walked through into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, purposely not thinking about how she was going to fill the evening—a phone call to Mother, perhaps, and a movie on DVD—and that was when the strange man stepped out behind her and held up a badge.

“Paulette Milan, I'm from the DEA and I'd—”

She was lying down, and dizzy. He was staring at her. Everything was gray. His mouth was moving, and so was the world. It was confusing for a moment, but then her head began to clear:
I fainted?
She was looking up at the living room ceiling, she realized. There was something soft under the back of her head.

“Can you hear me?” He looked concerned.

“I'm.” She took a couple of breaths. “I'm. Oh God.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you like that—are you all right? Listen, do you have a heart condition—”
No. No.
She must have shaken her head. “Do you know Miriam Beckstein?”

Paulie swallowed. “Shit.”

Everything, for an instant, was crystal clear.
I'm from the DEA. Do you know Miriam Beckstein?
The next logical words had to be,
You're under arrest.

“I need to talk to her; her life's in danger.”

Paulie blinked.
Does not compute.
“You're from the DEA,” she said hesitantly. Pushed against the carpet. “I fainted?”

“Uh, yes, in the kitchen. I never—I carried you in here. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. I wanted to talk, but I was afraid they might be watching.”

Watching?
“Who?” she asked.

“The FTO,” he said.
Who?
she wondered. “Or the Clan.”

The brittle crystal shell around her world shattered. “Oh, them,” she said carelessly, her tongue loosened by shock. “They ring the front doorbell. Like everyone else.” Bit by bit, awareness was starting to return. Chagrin—
I can't believe I fainted
—was followed by anxiety—
Who
is
this guy? How do I know he's DEA? Is he a burglar?
—and then fear:
Alone with a strange man.