The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (19 page)

‘Not just a simple spy.’ James nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re going to be recruiting, training, and running other officers, in a way that we haven’t really been good
at since the Cold War. Over the past couple of decades we’ve come to rely too heavily on electronic intelligence sources – no offense,’ he added in Smith’s direction,
‘and we just can’t operate that way in fairyland. So you’re going to go in and run our field operation. We’re going in – we’re going over
there
,
carrying the war to the enemy. That is the mission we are tasked with, from the top down. Got that?’

‘It’s a lot to take in,’ Mike said slowly. His head was spinning.
What the hell? It sounds like he’s planning an invasion!
‘You mentioned some kind of
special clearances, projects? Uh, CLEANSWEEP? BLUESKY?’

James nodded to Smith. ‘You tell him.’

Smith sat up. ‘The, uh, Clan pose a clear and present danger to the integrity of the United States of America,’ he said quietly. ‘In fact, it’s not overdramatizing things
too much to say that they’re a rogue state. So word is that we’re to prepare, if possible, for a situation in which we can go in to, ah, impose a change of regime. BLUESKY is the
intelligence enabler and CLEANSWEEP is the project to conduct espionage operations in hostile territory.’

‘All of this assumes we can reliably send spies into a parallel universe and bring them back again,’ Mike said quietly. ‘How would we do that?’

Dr. James glanced at Colonel Smith. ‘You were right about him,’ he murmured. To Mike: ‘You aren’t cleared for that yet. Let’s just say that we’ve got some
long-term ideas, research projects under way. But for the time being’ – he smiled at Mike, a frighteningly intense expression that revealed more teeth than a human being ought by rights
to have – ‘we’ve got two enemy couriers, and they
will
work for us, whether they want to or not. We’ll use them to capture more. And then we’ll make those
fuckers sorry they ever messed with the United States.’

It was a shaken, thoughtful Miriam who followed the coach attendant and the other passengers in her car up to the dining carriage. Some of them had dressed for dinner, but
Miriam found she wasn’t too out of place once she shed the jacket: a lucky break, for she hadn’t been paying enough attention to maintaining her cover. As with the Gruinmarkt, issues of
public etiquette frequently baffled her – it was easy to get things wrong, especially when she was worrying about other matters.
What on earth is going on with that report? What does it
mean?
she wondered as the attendant ushered her into a seat between a ruddy-faced grandmother and her bouncing ten-year-old charge, evidently out of some misplaced concern for her solitary
status.
I’m being trolled. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. Someone
expected
me to look in the bag –

‘Marissa! Fold your hands and stop playing with your fork. I’m sorry, travel makes her unmanageable,’ the grandmother blared at Miriam. ‘Wouldn’t you say
so?’

Miriam smiled faintly, keeping a tight lid on her irritation at the interruption. ‘I don’t like to speak ill of people I hardly know.’

‘That’s all right, you know us now. Marissa, put that
down
! I’m Eleanor Crosby. You are . . . ?’

Trapped
. ‘I’m Gillian,’ said Miriam, rolling out the cover identity Clan logistics had prepared for her. They’d warned her it should be used as little as
possible: it wouldn’t stand up to serious scrutiny. The steward was walking the length of the table with a tureen of soup balanced on one arm, ladling spoonfuls into bowls in time with the
sway of the carriage.
I’m trying to think, so kindly shut up and stop bugging me
.

‘Wonderful! You must be traveling to see your family? Where are you from, London or the south?’

‘London,’ said Miriam. As soon as the waiter was past her she picked up her spoon and started on her bowl. The onion soup might have tasted good if she hadn’t burned her mouth
on the first sip, but it was either tuck in now or deal with Mrs. Crosby’s curiosity all the way to Dunedin. As it was, she had to remain alert for the entire meal, because little
Marissa’s every tic and twitch seemed to attract Eleanor’s loud and very vocal ire. Her place setting was a battlefield, and Mrs. Crosby seemed unable to grasp the possibility that
Miriam might not want to be induced to spill her life’s story before a stranger. Which was doubly frustrating because right then Miriam would have been immensely grateful for someone to share
her conundrum with – had it not been both a secret and a matter of life and death.

After the ordeal of dinner, Miriam returned to her compartment to discover that someone had been there while she’d been eating. One of the bench seats had been converted into a compact
bunk bed. For a moment her pulse raced and she came close to panic, but the carpetbag was untouched, still innocently stuffed into the luggage rack above the door. She bolted the door and carefully
lifted the bag down, intending to continue her search.

When she’d opened it before dinner, carefully checking the lock first, she’d discovered the bag didn’t contain the cargo she’d expected: no neatly taped bags of white
powder here. Instead, there was a layer of clothing –
her
clothing, a skirt and blouse and a change of underwear from her house in the Boston of this world.
Bastards!
She’d felt faint for a moment as she stared at it.
They set me up!
Then she calmed down slightly. What if the Constabulary pulled her in for questioning and looked in her bag? What
would they find? Miriam puzzled for a while.
Surely they wouldn’t waste a precious cargo run just to test a cover identity?
she asked herself. Which meant – ah.
This is
meant to survive a search, isn’t it?

There were more items that smacked of misdirection in the bag: a small pouch of gold coin muffled inside the newssheet wrapping of an antique vase. That would buy her a hefty fine or a month in
prison if they found it (
they
being the hypothetical police agents, searching everybody as they came off the train) and it would more than suffice to explain her nervousness. Then
she’d come to the bottom of the bag and found the battered manila envelope with its puzzling contents, which she’d just had time to glance through before the cabin attendant knocked to
tell her it was time for dinner.

Now she sat on the bunk, reopened the bag, and pulled out the envelope. It contained a manuscript, printed in blurry purplish ink on cheap paper in very small type, the pages torn and yellowed
at the edges from too many fingers:
The Tyranny of Reason
by Jean-Paul Mavrides, whoever he was. It looked to her eyes like something smuggled out of the old Soviet Union – battered
and beaten but blazingly angry, a condemnation of the divine right of kings and an assertion that only in a perfect democracy based on the common will of humanity could the common man free himself
from his oppressors. ‘Well, I wanted something to read,’ she told herself mordantly, ‘even if I wasn’t looking at a seven-year stretch for possession of republican
propaganda . . .’

She began to flick through it rapidly, pausing when she came to the real meat, which was embedded in it in neatly laser-printed sheets interleaved every ten pages or so.
Purloined
letter
. She could see the setup now, in her mind’s eye, and it was less obviously a setup. They wouldn’t be planning to shop her – not with a bunch of DESTROY BEFORE READING
Clan security correspondence on her person. Even though it was likely that the arresting constables would simply log it as an item from the Banned List and pitch it straight into the station
fireplace. So it
was
just a routine precaution, multiple layers of concealment for the letters. Which didn’t help her much: with a few eye-catching exceptions they were mostly
incomprehensible. She kept coming back to the letter from Dr. Darling to Angbard.
What the hell is a W* heterozygote?
she wondered.
This is significant. What is Angbard doing, messing
around with a fertility clinic?
She could think of a number of explanations, none of them good –

There was a knock at the door.

Sudden panic gripped her. She shuddered and shoved the incriminating samizdat into the bag, her palms slippery with sweat. The train was moving.
If I have to try to get away –

Another knock, this time quieter. Miriam paused, then let go of her left sleeve cuff with her right hand. The panic faded, but the adrenaline shock was still with her. She forced herself to take
a deep breath and stand up, then shot the bolt back on the door. ‘Yes?’ she demanded.

‘Are you a constabule?’ asked the girl Marissa, staring up at her with wide eyes. ‘Coz if so, I wants to know, when’s you going to arrest my mam?’

‘I am
not
–’ Miriam stopped. ‘Come in here.’ The little girl moved as if to step back, but Miriam caught her wrist and tugged lightly. She didn’t
resist but came quietly, as if sleepwalking. She didn’t seem to weigh anything. ‘Sit down,’ Miriam said, pointing at the bench seat opposite her bunk. She slid the door shut.
‘Why do you think I’m going to arrest your mam?’
Her
mother? Miriam thought, aghast: she’d taken Mrs. Crosby for sixty, but she couldn’t be much older than
Miriam herself. She suddenly realized she was looming over the kid.
This can’t be good
. She sat down on the bunk and tried to compose her features. ‘I’m not going to
arrest anyone, Marissa. Why, did you think I was a constable?’

Marissa nodded at her, looking slightly less frightened. ‘You’s look like the one as nicked my nuncle? You talk all posh-like, an’ dress like a rozzer. An’ you got that
way of looking aroun’ at people, like you’s sizing them for a cage.’

Am I frightening the little children now?
Miriam laughed nervously. ‘I’m not a, a rozzer, girl.’
And what’s her mother afraid of ? Is that why she was
grilling me over dinner?
‘But listen, it’s not safe to go asking people if they’re Polis. I mean, if they aren’t it’s rude, and if they are, you’re telling
them you’re afraid. If you tell them you’re frightened they’ll ask
why
you’re frightened, understand? So you don’t do that, you just ignore them. Besides, if
I was with the Polis, why would I tell you the truth?’

Miriam paused, aware she’d sawn off the logical branch her argument was sitting on:
Hope she doesn’t spot it
. She stared at Marissa. Marissa had long, stringy hair lying
heavy down her back and wore a smock that hadn’t been laundered too recently. When she was older she’d probably have cheekbones to kill for, but right now she just looked starved and
frightened.
She’s about the age Rita would be – stop that
. Miriam hadn’t seen Rita, her daughter, since she gave her up for adoption at the age of two days: Rita had been
a minor personal disaster, an unplanned intrusion while Miriam was in med school, and the less remembered the better. ‘Listen. I think you should go back to your mother – you
didn’t tell her you were coming here, did you?’ A vigorously shaken head. ‘Good. You don’t tell her you came to see me because she’ll worry. And she’s got enough
to worry about already, hasn’t she?’
Traveling first-class, but her kid hasn’t eaten much recently and her brother’s been arrested?
Similarly vigorous nodding
confirmed Miriam’s suspicions. ‘What did they arrest your uncle for?’

‘Sedition,’ Marissa said shyly.

For a moment Miriam felt light-headed with anger. ‘Well.’ She reached down into the bag and fumbled around, finding the vase and its decoy contents. She fumbled in it with clumsy
fingers then brought out a small coin. ‘Here, do you have somewhere to hide this?’

The kid looked baffled for a moment, made as if to push it away.

‘What is it?’

‘Mam said not to – ’

‘Ah.’ Miriam paused for a moment. Take, and double-take: ‘Marissa, what will your mam do if she finds out you’ve been to see me?’

The kid looked frightened. ‘You wouldn’t!’

‘Take. This.’ She pushed the coin into the girl’s hand, folding the fingers around the buttery gleam of the royal groat – withdrawn from circulation a decade since to
offset the liquidity crisis following the Persian war, now worth a hundred times its face value. ‘Give it to your mam. Tell her the
truth
. You came to see me, to ask. I told you, you
were silly and shouldn’t ask those questions. Then I gave you this.’ Marissa looked puzzled. ‘Go on. Your mam won’t thump you, not if you give her this. She’ll sleep
better, because a constable wouldn’t do that.’
And maybe she’ll be able to buy you some more meals
, Miriam added silently.

Marissa jerked, as if she’d suddenly awakened from a bad dream. ‘Thank’y,’ she gasped, then turned and scrabbled at the door. A moment later she was gone, darting off
down the corridor.

Miriam shut and bolted the door again, then rubbed her forehead. ‘Bastards,’ she muttered. There was an unhappy picture here: she could put any number of interpretations to it, a
countless multitude of sad little just-so stories to explain the desperate women in the frame. A mother and her kid selling the house, selling the furniture, using their savings to get away by the
first train available. The uncle on his way to a work camp – whether he was a real uncle or a live-in companion made no odds, such things were winked at but not admitted publicly – by
way of a beating and interrogation in the cells.
Sedition
. It was a movable feast. It could mean reading the wrong books (like the one in her bag, Miriam realized uncomfortably), attending
the wrong meetings, even being seen in the same bars as campaigners for a universal franchise. (They campaigned for the universal
male
franchise, mostly – votes for women or
nonwhites were the province of wild-eyed dreamers.)
This is a police state, after all
, Miriam reminded herself. Back home in the United States, most people had an overly romantic view of
what a monarchy – not the toothless, modern constitutional monarchies of Europe, but the original
l’état c’est moi
variety – was like. In reality, a monarchy
was just a fancy name for a hereditary dictatorship, Miriam decided.