The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (43 page)

‘Do it. Riordan out.’

He closed the phone with a snap and glanced sidelong at Lady Olga. She was staring across her seat back at Miriam, who was talking intently into her own phone, her face a study in strain. He
opened his mouth, but she raised a finger. Half a minute passed as their driver, Alasdair, carried them ever closer to the turnpike; then Miriam held the phone away from her face and shook her
head. ‘Trash,’ she said, holding it out to Brill, who popped the battery before sliding it into a waste bag. ‘We are so fucked,’ she said tonelessly.

‘Plan Black?’ Olga asked.

‘What did Mr. Fleming say?’ asked Riordan, ignoring her to focus on Miriam.

‘It’s – ’ Miriam shook her head, punch-drunk. ‘Crazy talk. He says Dr. James works for the vice president! And
he’s
been in collusion with someone in
the Clan for years! It’s insane! He said something about tapes, and about them
wanting
an excuse, a Pearl Harbor.’

‘Can Fleming do anything for us?’ Riordan stared at Miriam as she shook her head again. ‘Why not?’

‘He says he’s disposable. He’s going to try and find someone to talk to, but there’s no point going through the chain of command. We’re trying to negotiate with
people who want us dead – tell me it’s not true?’

‘Figures,’ Olga said tartly. Everyone stared at her – even Sir Alasdair, by way of the rearview mirror.

‘What do you mean, my lady?’ Riordan’s return to exaggerated courtesy was a sign of stress, screamingly clear to Miriam even in her punch-drunk state.

‘We’ve been looking for a second mole, ever since Matthias went over the wall, nearly a year ago. But we haven’t been looking very
hard
, if you follow. And I heard
rumors about there being a former politician, now retired, chief executive of a major logistics corporation, who was cooperating with us to provide doppelgängered locations and distribution
hubs, back in the good years, in the late eighties and early nineties. The West Coast operation – back when he was out of politics. Before his comeback as VP. The crown fits, does it
not?’

‘But why – ’ This from Brilliana, unable to contain her curiosity.

‘We don’t work with politicians,’ Riordan said tiredly. ‘It’s too hard to tell good from bad – the ones who stay bought from the ones who don’t.
There’s too much potential for blowback, as the CIA can attest. But Mr. Cheney was out of politics, wasn’t he?’

Miriam nodded, brooding. ‘He was in the wilderness until . . .’ Her eyes widened. ‘Oof. So, he got a second start in politics, and the duke would have pulled the plug. Am I
right? But then Matthias went over the wall, and his report would have ended up where the VP – or one of his people in his intelligence operation – could read it, and he’d have to
take out Matthias and then try to – oh
no
– ’

‘He’d have to try to kill us all,’ Olga finished the sentence, nodding, ‘or not even the president could keep him from impeachment, yes? Our mole, for whom we have not
been looking with sufficient vigor, isn’t a low-level functionary; he’s the vice president of the United States. And now he fears exposure.’

Riordan reached over to tap Sir Alasdair on the shoulder. ‘Do you know where your Plan Black site is?’ he asked.

‘Yes, my lord.’ Alasdair nodded, checking his side mirror as he floored the accelerator to merge with the traffic on the interstate. ‘I’m taking us there.’

‘What’s Plan Black?’ Miriam tried to make eye contact with Olga.

Riordan cleared his throat. ‘My lady, we need to get you to a place of safety. But it’s not just you; in light of the current situation we
all
need to get clear. Plan Black is
a defensive measure, put in place by his grace after the mess last year. It’s a complete withdrawal – everyone in this world is to proceed to a safe site, collect essential equipment,
and cross over.’

‘But that’s – ’ Miriam paused. ‘What about the conservative faction? Baron Hjorth, the duchess, whoever took the bombs and activated Plan Blue, will they –
’

‘No.’ Riordan bared his teeth. ‘And I’m counting on it. Because if they disobey a directive from the acting head of Clan Security in the middle of an emergency,
that’s all I need to shoot them.’

‘It’s the civil war, my lady, all over again.’ Olga whistled tunelessly. ‘They’ve been begging for it – and now they’re going to get it.’

*

Four hundred miles from D.C., in a quiet residential street in Boston, the first bomb of the day detonated.

It wasn’t a very large bomb – just a repurposed concussion grenade – but it was right under the driver’s seat of the parked Saturn it was attached to. There was a bright
flash; every window shattered as the car heaved on its suspension. Mike Fleming, standing in his doorway with key-fob remote raised, had no time to blink; the pressure wave shoved him backward and
he stumbled, falling against the doorframe. In the ringing moment of silence after the blast, car alarms went off up and down the street and panicking dogs added their voices to the chorus. The hot
yellow light of burning plastic and seat cushions filtered through the empty windows of the car, warmth beating on Mike’s face as he struggled to work out why he was sitting down with his
legs askew, why the back of his head hurt –

They want me dead,
he realized, coldly. And then:
Dr. James screwed up.

It was an easy mistake to make. The technician who’d planted the bomb had meant to wire it to the ignition circuit, but they’d got the central locking instead. The fine art of car
bombing had gotten positively esoteric in the past few years, with the proliferation of in-car electronics, remote-control engine starters, and other bells and whistles; and US government agents
were more used to defusing the things than planting them. Then:
But that means they’re complicit for sure.
The thought was shocking.
It’s like Operation Northwoods! Only this
time they’re going through with it for real.

Mike reached up gingerly and felt the back of his head. There was going to be a nasty lump in a few hours, but his fingers came away dry. No bleeding. Taking stock, limb by limb, he took deep
breaths, pushing down the wave of impending panic.
I’m alive,
he told himself.
Shaken but intact
. He’d been lucky; if he hadn’t changed the batteries in his key-fob
remote three months ago he might have been closer to the car, or even reduced to using the door key, with fatal results. As he stood up, something crunched underfoot. Fragments from the rear
window, pea-sized pellets of safety glass. Bending down stiffly, he picked up his go-bag. His leg twinged hard inside its cast. What now?
Clear the killing zone,
the instructors had
insisted, years before. But they’d been talking about a different kind of ambush – a car bomb was a passive trap.
Probably they were relying on it. Probably
. . . Mike pulled his
pistol from the bag and duck-walked towards the street, edging around the burning car as he scanned for threats. In the distance, a siren began to scream.

Less than twenty seconds had elapsed.

*

In another world, in a mansion overlooking a lawn that swept downhill to the banks of a small river, an elderly man sat at a writing desk in a room off to one side of the great
hall. It was a small room, walled in bare stone and floored with planks, which the tapestries and rugs failed to conceal; the large window casements, built for light but featuring heavy oak
shutters with peepholes and iron bolts, suggested the architect had been more concerned with security than comfort. Despite the summer heat he held his robes of office tight about his shoulders,
shivering as he stared at the ledger before him with tired eyes. It was a balance sheet of sorts, but the items tallied in its columns were not quantities of coin but the living and the dead. And
from time to time, with the slow, considered strokes of his pen, Baron Julius Arnesen moved names from one column to the other.

Arnesen was a survivor of seventy-some years, most of which he had experienced in a state of barely suppressed existential terror. Even now, in a house his security chief assured him was
securely doppelgängered from both the known alternate worlds (in the United States by a convenient interstate off-ramp, and in New Britain by a recently acquired derelict warehouse), and at
the tail end of his years, he could not bring himself to sit with his back to door or window. Besides, an instinct for trouble that had served him well over the decades whispered warnings in his
ears: Not all was right in the Gruinmarkt, or within the uneasy coalition of Clan radicals and conservatives who had agreed to back the Baroness Helge Thorold-Hjorth and her claim to bear the heir
to the throne.
It’s all going to come apart again, sooner or later,
he told himself gloomily, as he examined the next name in the ledger.
There are too many of them
. . .

Egon was dead, blown to bits along with most of his army, and Helge – pregnant as a result of the gynecological skullduggery of one of the Clan’s own doctors – was acknowledged
as the dead Prince Creon’s widow. But a goodly chunk of the backwoods nobility wouldn’t believe a word of it, even if she presented them with a baby who was the very spitting image of
Creon in six months’ time. To them, Helge was simply an impostor, a willing puppet for the Clan’s avarice and ambition. They were keeping their mouths shut right now, out of fear, but
that wouldn’t last forever; and weeding out the goats from the sheep was proving to be a well nigh impossible task. As magister of the royal assizes, Julius had considerable freedom to
arraign and try hedge-lords whom he might suspect of treasonous intent; but he also had to walk a fine line between rooting out threats and conducting a witch hunt that might itself provoke another
uprising.

Here in the countryside eight miles outside the capital Niejwein, in a house seized from the estate of the lord of Ostrood – conveniently missing with his sons since the destruction of the
royal army at the Hjalmar Palace – Julius had established a crown court to supervise the necessary unpleasantness. To arraign and execute nobles in the capital would be inflammatory; better
by far to conduct the grim job beyond the city walls, not so far out of sight as to invite accusations of secrecy, but remote enough to deter casual rubbernecking. With selected witnesses to
testify to the fairness of the proceedings, and a cordon secured by imported American security devices as well as armed guards, he could proceed at his leisure without fear of the leading cause of
death among judges in the Gruinmarkt – assassination by an angry relative.

Take the current case in hand, for example. Sir Euaunt ven Pridmann was a hedge-knight, titular liege lord to a village of some ninety souls, a house with a roof that leaked, three daughters
with dowries to pay, one son, and a debt run up by his wastrel grandfather that exceeded the village’s annual surplus by a factor of fifteen. Only a writ of relief from usury signed by the
previous king’s brother had spared him the indignity of being turfed out of his own home.

For such a man to show up in the army of the late pretender to the throne might be nothing more than simple desperation, for Egon had promised his followers a half-share in the Clan lands that
they took for him – not that ven Pridmann had done much looting and pillaging. With gout and poor eyesight he’d spent three-quarters of the war in his sickbed, and another fourth
groaning with dysentery. That was why he hadn’t been present at the destruction of the Hjalmar Palace by the god-cursed ‘special weapon’ Clan Security had apparently detonated
there, and his subsequent surrender and protestations of loyalty to the true heir were just another footnote to the whole sordid affair. But.
But.
Julius squinted at the ledger: How could
you be
sure
? Could ven Pridmann be what the otherworld Americans called a
werewolf
, one who stayed behind to fight on in secret, after the war? Or might he have lied about his
culpability, claiming innocence of very real crimes?

Julius sighed and laid his pen down beside the ledger. You couldn’t be sure; and speculation about intangibles like loyalty in the absence of prior evidence was a good way to develop a
raging case of paranoia. You could end up hanging thousands, as a preventative measure or in the hope of instilling a healthy fear in the survivors – but in the end, would it work? Would fear
make them keep their heads down, or provoke a further uprising?
He’s got gout,
Julius reasoned.
And he’s too poor to buy a gun or pay a lance of infantry. Low risk.
And
reasoning thus, he crossed ven Pridmann off the death list.

There was a knock.

‘Yes? Yes?’ Julius said querulously, looking up.

An apologetic face peeped round the door. ‘Sorry to bother you, my lord, but you have a visitor? Philip ven Holtz-Hjalmar from the Office of the Post, with dispatches from the
Crown.’

‘Tell him to leave them – ’ Julius paused.
That’s funny, I wonder what it is?
The post office in question was the Clan’s courier service, manned by members
of the six families and their close relatives who held in common the talent of walking between worlds. Normally he could expect at most one courier delivery a day, and today’s had arrived
some hours ago. ‘Show him in.’

‘At once, my lord.’

The manservant withdrew. After a moment’s muted conversation, the door opened again.

‘My lord Arnesen.’ Julius didn’t recognize the courier. The briefcase he held was expensive and flashy: brushed aluminum with a combination lock and other less obvious security
measures. ‘May we speak in private?’

‘Of course.’ Julius waved at his servant: ‘Be off, and keep everyone away from the door.’

‘Thank you, my lord.’ The courier didn’t smile.

‘Well? What is it?’ Julius strained to sit up, pushing back against the weight of his years.

‘Special message, for your eyes only, from Her Grace the Dowager Thorold-Hjorth.’ He put the briefcase down on the side table.

This should be good,
Julius thought. The Duchess Hildegarde hadn’t had the time of day for him since the disaster at the Summer Palace three months ago.
If she’s decided to
kiss and make up now it must mean
–