The Trade of Queens (35 page)

Miriam took a sip from her glass. Now Erasmus knew, she felt unaccountably free. “I met him while I was being held prisoner. He was a hostage against his parents' behavior after the truce—yes, that's how the noble families in the Gruinmarkt do business. He helped me get away. I think he's hoping I can save his people from what he sees as a big mistake.”

“Yes, well.” He took his hand away: She felt a momentary flash of disappointment. “I'm sorry. He was right to be afraid. Reynolds is not someone I would want to put any great faith in. Do you know what the Lee elders have in mind?”

“Spying. People who can vanish from one place and reappear in another.” Miriam shrugged. “They don't have access to the United States, at least not yet, not without the doctor—they don't have the technology transfer capability I can give you, and they don't have the numbers yet. But they
do
have a track record as invisible assassins.” She shivered and put the glass down on the floor. “How afraid should I be?”

“Very.” He took her hand as she straightened up, leaning close; his expression was foreboding. “He's having me followed, you know.”

“What, he—”

“Listen.” He leaned closer, pitching his voice low: “I've met men like Reynolds before. As long as he thinks I'm in town to see my mistress he'll be happy—he thinks he's got a hand on my neck. But you're right, he's dangerous, he's an empire-builder. He's got a power base in Justice and Prisons and he's purging his own department and, hmm, the books you lent me—made me think of Felix Dzerzhinsky or Heinrich, um, Hitler? Himmler. Expert bureaucrats who build machineries of terror inside a revolutionary movement. But he doesn't have absolute power yet. He may not even have realized how much power he has at his fingertips. Sir Adam doesn't realize, either—but I'm in a position to tell him. Reynolds isn't invulnerable but he
is
dangerous, and you have just given me a huge problem, because he is already watching me.”

“You think he's going to use me as a lever against you?”

“It's gone too far for that, I'm afraid. If he knows about your relatives and knows about our arrangement, he will see me as a direct threat. He'll have to move fast, within the next hours or days. Your household is almost certainly under surveillance as an anomaly, possibly suspected of being a group of monarchists. Damn.” He looked at her. “I really should inform Sir Adam immediately—if Stephen has acquired a secret cell of world-walking assassins, he needs to know. I wouldn't put a coup attempt beyond him. Normally we should stay here for two or three hours at least, as if we were having a liaison. If I leave too soon, that would cause alarm. But if he's moving against your people right now—”

“Wait.” Miriam took his arm. “You're forgetting we have radios.…”

*   *   *

The morning had dawned bright with a thin cloudy overcast, humid and warm with a threat of summer evening storms to follow. Brilliana, her morning check on the security points complete, placed the go-bag she'd prepared for Helge on the table in the front guard room; then she went in search of Huw.

She found him in one of the garden sheds behind a row of tomato vines, wiring up a row of instruments on a rough-topped table from which the plant pots had only just been removed. He didn't notice her at first, and she stood in the doorway for a minute, watching his hands, content. “Good morning,” she said eventually.

He looked up then, smiling luminously. “My lady. What can I do for you?”

She looked at the row of electronics. “It's a nice day for a walk into town. Will your equipment suffer if you leave it for a few hours?”

Obviously conflicted, Huw glanced at his makeshift workbench, then back at her. “I suppose—” He shook his head. Then he smiled again. “Yeah, I can leave it for a while.” He rummaged in one of the equipment boxes by the foot of the table, then pulled a plastic sheet out and began to unfold it. “If you wouldn't mind taking that corner?”

They covered the electronics—Brilliana was fairly certain she recognized a regulated power supply and a radio transceiver—and weighted the sheet down with potsherds in case of rain and a leaky roof. Then Huw wiped his hands on a swatch of toweling. “This isn't a casual stroll, is it?” he asked quietly.

“No, but it needs to look like one.” She eyed him up, evidently disapproving of his choice of jeans and a college sweatshirt. “You'll need to get changed first. Background story: You're a coachman, I'm a lady's maid, and we're on a morning off work. He's courting her and she's agreed to see the sights with him. I'll meet you by the trades' door in twenty minutes.”

“Are you expecting trouble?” He looked at her sharply.

“I'm not expecting it, but I don't want to be taken by surprise.” She grinned at him. “Go!”

(An observer keeping an eye on the Beckstein household that morning would have seen little to report. A pair of servants—he in a suit, worn but in good repair, and she in a black dress, clutch bag tightly gripped under her left elbow—departed in the direction of the streetcar stop. A door-to-door seller visited the rear entrance, was rebuffed. Two hours later, a black steamer—two men in the open-topped front, the passenger compartment hooded and dark—rumbled out of the garage and turned towards the main road. With these exceptions, the household carried on much as it had the day before.)

“Where are we going?” Huw asked Brilliana as they waited at the streetcar stop.

“Downtown.” She narrowed her eyes, gazing along the tracks. “Boston is safer than Springfield, but still … I want to take a look at the docks. And then the railway stations, north and south both. It's best to have a man at my side: less risk of unwelcome misunderstandings.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “What else?”

She unwound slightly; a moment later she slid her fingers through his waiting hand. “I thought if there is enough time after that, we could visit the fair on the common.”

“That's more like it.”

“It'll look good to the watchers.” She squeezed his thumb, then leaned sideways, against his shoulder. “Assuming there are any. If there aren't—by then we should know.”

“Indeed.” He paused. “I'm carrying, in case you were wondering.”

“Good.” With her free hand she shifted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. “Your knot…?”

“On my wrist-ribbon.”

“That too.” She relaxed slightly. “Oh look, a streetcar.”

They rode together in silence on the open upper deck, she sitting primly upright, he discreetly attentive to her occasional remarks. There were few other passengers on the upper level this morning, and none who might be agents or Freedom Riders; the tracks were in poor repair and the car swayed like a drunk, shrieking and grating round corners. They changed streetcars near Haymarket Square, again taking the upper deck as the tram rattled its way towards the back bay.

“What are we looking for?” asked Huw.

“Doppelganger prisons.” Brill looked away for a moment, checking the stairs at the rear of the car. “They use prison ships here. If you were a bad guy and were about to arrest a bunch of world-walkers, what would you—”

Rounding the corner of a block of bonded warehouses, the streetcar briefly came in sight of the open water, and then the piers and cranes of the docks. A row of smaller ships lay tied up inside the harbor, their funnels clear of smoke or steam: In the water beyond, larger vessels lay at anchor. The economic crash, and latterly the state of emergency and the new government, had wreaked havoc with trade, and behind fences great pyramids and piles of break-bulk goods had grown, waiting for the flow of shipping to resume. Today there was some activity—a gang of stevedores was busy with one of the nearer ships, loading cartloads of sacks out of one of the warehouses—but still far less than on a normal day.

“What's that?” asked Brill, pointing at a ship moored out in the open water, past the mole.

“I'm not sure”—Huw followed her direction—“a warship?” It was large, painted in the gray blue favored by the navy, but it lacked the turrets and rangefinders of a ship of the line; more to the point, it looked poorly maintained, streaks of red staining its flanks below the anchor chains that dipped into the water. Large, boxy superstructures had been added fore and aft. “That's an odd one.”

“Can you read its name?”

“Give me a moment.” Huw glanced around quickly, then pulled out a compact monocular. “HMS
Burke
. Yup, it's the navy.” He shoved the scope away quickly as the streetcar rounded a street corner and began to slow.

“Delta Charlie, please copy.” Brill had her radio out. “I need a ship class identifying. HMS
Burke
, Bravo Uniform Romeo—” She finished, waited briefly for a reply, then slid the device away, switching it to silent as the streetcar stopped, swaying slightly as passengers boarded and alighted.

“Was that entirely safe?”

“No, but it's a calculated risk. We're right next to the harbor and if anyone's RDFing for spies they'll probably raid the ships' radio rooms first; they don't have pocket-sized transmitters around here. I set Sven up with a copy of the shipping register. He says it's a prison ship. Currently operated by the Directorate of Reeducation. That would be prisons.” She frowned.

“You don't know that it's here for us.” Huw glanced at the staircase again as the streetcar began to move.

“Would you like to bet on it?”

“No. I think we ought to head back.” Huw reached out and took her hand, squeezed it gently.

She squeezed back, then pulled it away. “I think we ought to make sure nobody's following us first.”

“You think they might try to pick us up…?”

“Probably not—this sort of action is best conducted at night—but you can never be sure. I think we should be on guard. Let's head back and tell Helge. It's her call—whether we have to withdraw or not, whether Burgeson can come up with a security cordon for us—but I don't like the smell of that ship.”

*   *   *

Brilliana and Huw had been away from Miriam's house for almost an hour. Miriam herself had left half an hour afterwards. An observer—like the door-to-door salesman who had importuned the scullery maid to buy his brushes, or the ticket inspector stepping repeatedly on and off the streetcars running up and down the main road and curiously not checking any tickets—would have confirmed the presence of residents, and a lack of activity on their part. Which would be an anomaly, worthy of investigation in its own right: A household of that size would require the regular purchase of provisions, meat and milk and other perishables, for the city's electrical supply was prone to brownouts in the summer heat, rendering household food chillers unreliable.

An observer other than the ticket inspector and the salesman might have been puzzled when, shortly before noon, they disappeared into the grounds of a large abandoned house, its windows boarded and its gates barred, three blocks up the street and a block over—but there were no other observers, for Sir Alasdair's men were patrolling the overgrown acre of Miriam's house and garden and keeping an external watch only on the approaches to the front and rear. “If you go outside you run an increased risk of attracting attention,” Miriam had pointed out, days earlier. “Your job is to keep intruders out long enough for us to escape into the doppelganger compound, right?” (Which was fenced in with barbed wire and patrolled by two of Alasdair's men at all times, even though it was little more than a clearing in the back woods near the thin white duke's country retreat.)

Sir Alasdair's men were especially not patrolling the city around them. And so they were unaware of the assembly of a battalion of Internal Security troops, of the requisition of a barracks and an adjacent bonded warehouse in Saltonstall, or the arrival on railroad flatcars of a squadron of machine-gun carriers and their blackcoat crew. Lady d'Ost's brief radio call-in from the docks was received by Sven, but although he went in search of Sir Alasdair to give him the news, its significance was not appreciated: Shipping in the marcher kingdoms of the Clan's world was primitive and risky, and the significance of prison ships was not something Sir Alasdair had given much thought to.

So when four machine-gun-equipped armored steamers pulled up outside each side of the grounds, along with eight trucks—from which poured over a hundred black-clad IS militia equipped with clubs, riot shields, and shotguns—this came as something of a surprise.

Similar surprise was being felt by the maintenance crew at the farm near Framingham, as the Internal Security troops rushed the farmyard and threw tear-gas grenades through the kitchen windows; and in a block of dilapidated-looking shops fronting an immigrant rookery in Irongate—perhaps more there than elsewhere, for Uncle Huan had until this morning had every reason to believe that Citizen Reynolds was his protector—and at various other sites. But the commissioner for internal security had his own idea of what constituted protection, and he'd briefed his troops accordingly. “It is essential that all the prisoners be handcuffed and hooded during transport,” he'd explained in the briefing room the previous evening. “Disorientation and surprise are essential components of this operation—they're tricky characters, and if you don't do this, some of them will escape. You will take them to the designated drop-off sites and hand them over to the Reeducation Department staff for transport to the prison ship. I mentioned escape attempts. The element of surprise is essential; in order to prevent the targets from raising the alarm, if any of them try to escape you should shoot them.”

Reynolds himself left the briefing satisfied that his enthusiastic and professional team of Polis troops would conduct themselves appropriately. Then he retired to the office of the chief of polis, to share a lunch of cold cuts delivered from the commissary (along with a passable bottle of Chablis—which had somehow bypassed the blockade to end in the polis commissioner's private cellar) and discuss what to do next with the doctor.