The Trade of Queens (16 page)

“In that case, I'll put the order out. By your leave.” Sir Alasdair beat a hasty retreat.

Miriam glanced at Brill, trying to gather her wits. “Come on, I want to find out what's happening.”

The card indexes, divided by faction members and known status, were growing in size and complexity—and a third list had joined the first two: known fatalities. Earl Riordan was deep in conversation with one of his lieutenants as Miriam approached him—“Then tomorrow morning, we shall relocate to Koudrivier House. Assign two lances to establish a security cordon and a third for courier and doppelganger duties. The rest of your men I want—my lady?” He straightened up. “What can I do for you?”

“My uncle is dead,” Miriam managed, the words feeling strange in her mouth.
The uncle I never had time to get to know has been murdered.
… “Is my mother accounted for? Or my grandmother?”

Earl Riordan looked irritated for a moment, then thoughtful. “Your grandam is unaccounted for. Along with several of her friends, who appear to be involved in the insurrection.” He turned to one of the clerks and asked a question in rapid hochsprache. “We shall find out about about her grace your mother shortly, I trust. Is there anything else?”

“Yes.” Miriam gripped her hands tightly behind her back. “The duke is dead. How fast can we get a quorum of the Clan Council together? Just enough to confirm”—she caught Olga's head turning towards her, the warning look too late—“you as official head of Clan Security,” she continued. “And an extraordinary meeting to discuss policy.”

“We'll do that as soon as—” Riordan glanced at the map table across the aisle from his clerks. “We have a cabal of insurrectionists to arrest first—”

“No.” The firmness in her voice surprised Miriam. Even though her guts were burning, acid bile and churning stress in her belly:
Can't stop now.
“I don't think you grasp how far this has gone. WARBUCKS has just been sworn in as president. You know he worked for the duke: This is a comprehensive clusterfuck. WARBUCKS wants to destroy us, destroy the evidence, and the fuckwit faction have just handed him the perfect excuse. The American military are going to find a way to come over here and they will kill
everybody
. You're thinking months or weeks. We probably don't have that long.” Miriam stared at Riordan. He was not entirely an enigma, but she couldn't say that she knew him well; another of the younger generation, like Roland, educated to college level or higher in the United States, but bound to serve in the traditional family trade. “We just nuked the White House,” she reminded him. “What would
you
do in their shoes?”

“I'd—” His expression would have been funny if the situation hadn't been so serious. “Oh.
Scheisse
.” A momentary expression of pure disgust flickered across his face. “What do you suggest?”

“We need to establish safe locations in New Britain right now, today. Get our people across there, start setting up an evacuation pipeline. You're right about suppressing the, the rebels—but we're not going back to business as usual over here. Never again. They won't give us time; if we want to survive we need to evacuate. There are folk I know who might be able to help us, if we can—”

Riordan raised a hand. “There will be no cutting and running,” he said firmly. “Your point is well taken, but if we ‘cut and run' while the houses are divided, our organization will … it won't remain viable. The rebels will harry us and our less loyal relatives will desert us, until there's nothing left. The Clan stands or dies as a group. But.” He looked at Brilliana. “My lady, this world is not safe for her royal highness, not now, and probably not for some time. And she is quite right about the need for us to prepare an evacuation pipeline, against the hazard she so vividly identifies. Can you take her to New Britain and see to her safety?”

“Now wait a—” Miriam began, but Brill cut in before she could get going.

“Yes, I can do that.” She nodded. “I'll need muscle. Sir Alasdair, her royal highness's household, a number of other people. And we'll need money.”

“You've got it.” Riordan took a deep breath. “My lady?” He looked back at Miriam. “The rebels want you under their thumb. If they have you, they hold the monarchy here. And they don't realize what they've unleashed in America. Your goal of preparing a, a fallback for us, in New Britain, is a worthy one, and my second-highest priority after rounding up the traitors. I see no reason for it not to be
your
highest priority. If nothing else, it puts you beyond the insurrectionists' easy reach—and the Americans', if your worries are realistic.” He glanced at Brilliana. “Look after her and see that her orders in this enterprise are carried out. Make sure to keep me informed of your location: We may need to move the Continuity Council there as well, or at least hold audiences. If anyone obstructs you, you have my authority on this matter, on the orders of the Clan Security executive.” To Miriam: “Is that what you desire, my lady?”

Miriam nodded, swallowed. The nausea was quite severe; she shoved it out of her mind. “I've got some plans already nailed down,” she said. “Come on, Brill. Let's find somewhere to work. There's a list of people and things we need.” She swallowed again, feeling a cramp in her belly. “Oh. Oh shit. I don't feel good.…”

(BEGIN RECORDING)

“Shalom, Mordechai.”

“And you, my friend. This must be a fraught time for you; I can't say how much these outrages pain me, I can barely imagine how much worse it must be for you.” (Pause.) “I assume this is not a casual visit?”

“No, I—I've been very busy, as you can imagine. I've got about an hour out of the office, though, and I think you need to know. First, tell me—the attacks. Who do you think carried them out?”

(Pause.) “If I tell you who I think did it, you'll assume it's inside information. And I can't give you inside information even if I have it to give, my friend. But I don't think it was the usual clowns, if that's what you're fishing for? Because they're simply incapable of pulling something like this off. Let me tell you, everyone in the Institute is doing their nut right now—”

“Oh
hell
. They haven't officially told your people, then? Who did it?”

“You
know
who did it? Who?”

(Slowly.) “You're going to think I'm nuts if you don't get this through official channels, I swear—they briefed everybody yesterday and this morning, half of us thought they were mad but they have evidence, Mordechai, hard evidence. It's a new threat, completely unlike anything we imagined.”

“Really? My money was on a false-flag operation by the Office of Special Programs.”

“No, no, it wasn't us. Well, the bombs were ours. They were stolen from the inactive inventory.”

“
Stolen?
Tell me it's not true, Jack! Nobody ‘just steals' special weapons like they're shoplifting a candy store—”

“Take a deep breath, man. There are other universes, parallel worlds, like ours but where things happened differently. Different people, different history. There's a secret project under Livermore building machines for transiting between parallel worlds: They've got the photographs to prove it. Way they briefed us—a bunch of, of drug lords from another dimension, can you believe it? Illegal aliens, emphasis on the alien, whatever. They stole half a dozen backpack nukes, they just
appeared inside
the secure storage cells and walked off with them! The White House has been studying the situation for a year now. Negotiations broke down, and this was their idea of a Dear John.”

“Oy. From anyone else I would not believe it, Jack, but from you, I take it as gospel. Tell me, have you been working too hard lately?”

“Fuck off, I'm not jerking your chain. Listen, this is all over the internal chain. I expect you'll hear about it officially through diplomatic channels. It's a huge mess—a whole fucking sewage farm has hit the windmill. D.C. was blowback, just like al-Qaeda, let's not kid ourselves—and the president means to put an end to it, and do it hard and fast.”

“What do you mean by hard and fast, in this context?”

“They've indented for a hundred and sixty B83s from Pantex, with an option on another two hundred in two weeks, that's what I mean. And the Fifth Bomb Wing have gone onto lockdown. I mean, everyone's on alert everywhere, but the Fifth have canceled all leave and there's a complete communications blackout. Half of them moved to Fairford in England for Iraq, and the grapevine says the rest are staging out there with B83s aboard, just to keep them out of enemy hands. I just saw orders reactivating the Seventy-second Bomb Squadron and pulling in ground staff.”

“Out of
enemy
—what the fuck is going on?”

“Like I said, it's a whole new ballgame. These fuckers can just appear out of thin air, anywhere! Inside your security perimeter! My guess is that the Fifth Bomb Wing is being readied for a counterstrike mission into a, a parallel universe, just as soon as they can load up with B83s, fit the transit machines, and as soon as the U2s deliver accurate target maps. Keeping them overseas in England is a security measure: They can move sideways between worlds, show up inside the perimeter of our bases—but if the bombers aren't home they can't touch them. Watch for the KC-10s moving too. I tell you, they're getting ready for an attack on North America—just not
our
North America.”

“Okay, Jack, I've got to hand it to you. You are either taking far more LSD than is good for you, or you have completely spoiled my afternoon, because you are just not imaginative enough to make up a story like that without chemical assistance. I say that as a compliment, by the way—an excessively active imagination is a liability in your line of work. I'm going to have to escalate this, and that's going to make my head hurt because my boss, it's going to make
his
head hurt. So I hope you won't take this the wrong way when I ask, what have you got for me? What concrete evidence have you got to back these claims up?”

(Rustling.) “It's classified, but not top-secret. I mean, this stuff is general dissemination for about a hundred thousand soldiers, as of this morning—it
was
top-secret, but they're realists, there's no way to keep a lid on something like this indefinitely. So I, uh, there's a classified briefing pack that I need to lock back in my office drawer tonight. I assume you've got a camera or something?”

“Of course. Jack, you're a mensch. Listen, I am just about to go to the toilet, I'll be back in a few minutes and your briefing pack can go right back to the office after lunch while I go find some headache pills before I call Tel Aviv. Are you sure this isn't just a prank to make Benny Netenyahu shit himself…? No? Too bad. Because I'd love to be there to see his face when this lands on his desk.”

(END RECORDING)

Oliver, Baron Hjorth—formerly Earl Hjorth, but the higher landed titles had been coming vacant with distressing frequency over the past year—had spent a sleepless night in a co-opted tax farmer's mansion in a country estate, near the site of Baltimore in the United States. Two stories up, under the eaves, the rooms were uncomfortably hot in the summer miasma; but they lent a good view of the approaches to the house, and more importantly, good radio reception for a location so far south of the Gruinmarkt.

In his opinion, it was only sensible to take precautions: He had played his part in the operation in good faith, but there was a significant risk that some ne'er-do-well or rakehell anarchist of the progressive creed might seek him out with murder in mind. So the baron sat in a sweltering servants' room, his head bowed beneath the roof beams, while next door his man Schuller poked at the scanner, waiting.

On the other side of the wall of worlds from this mansion there was a modest, suburban family home. In its car port waited a black Lincoln, fully fueled for the dash up I-95 to Boston. But once he took to the wide American highways he'd be trapped, in a manner of speaking; committed to Niejwein, by hook or by crook. He could be at the palace in a matter of hours, there to take charge of a troop of cavalry such as befitted a gentleman: but while he was on the road he'd be unable to listen in on the upstart Riordan's increasingly desperate messages.

Impatient and irritable with tiredness, Oliver stood—for perhaps the fifth time that morning—and walked to the window casement. Below him, a cleared slope ran downhill to the woodline: Nobody stirred on the dirt track leading to the house.
Good.
He glanced at the doorway. Schuller was a reliable man, one of the outer family world-walkers Riordan had sacked from Angbard's organization in the wake of the fiasco at the Hjalmar Palace.
Let's see what news
 … Oliver walked to the doorway and shoved the curtain aside. “How goes it?” he demanded.

Schuller glanced up, then nodded—overfamiliarly, in Oliver's opinion, but fatigue made churls of all men—and shoved one headphone away from an ear. “Nothing for the past fifteen minutes, my lord. Before that, something garbled from Lady Thorold's adjutant. A call for reinforcements from their Millgartfurt station, where they reported word of an attack—cut short. Orders from Major Riordan's command post, demanding that all units hold their station and report by numbers. There were three responses.”

“
Good.
” The baron laced his fingers together tightly. “What word from the Anglischprache?”

“Riordan told the post to keep reporting hourly on the attack; it is by all accounts chaos over there. All air flights are grounded, but the roads are open—outside of the capital, of course. They're clucking like headless chickens.” Schuller's expression was stony. “As well they might. Fools.”