The Ultimate Secret (10 page)

Kim just stared at him, wide-eyed and silent, mouth open and panting. Inside, she was concentrating on slowing her heartbeat, the way her grandfather taught her, and emptying her mind. Another footfall behind her. Nearly...

The Chinese agent swore and turned to his partner. “Do you speak Hindi?”

The second man shrugged and said something brief in Mandarin. Another footfall from the figures behind her.

Now.

She abruptly ducked, paused for a fraction of a second –
tick-tick-tick-tick-tick
– then rolled backwards between the two manlike hulks behind her. As she did so, she got her first clear look at them. The reaching hands, as she passed beneath their fingers, were hinged steel; the faces, polished brass, sculpted into idealised Han Chinese forms, with fixed, determined expressions. Under the chins, coils, springs and gears at the top of the necks, rattling and spinning.

Clearing the space between the machines, she twisted and came to her feet with her back to them and sprinted back to the fish market, to lose herself in the crowd again.

“Y
ES...
”
SAID
S
MITH,
reading the decrypted message. He nodded to himself once and tucked the sheet away in a folder on his desk. “Just so.” He looked up again at Kim, who stood before the desk as before, hands held behind her. “You’ve done well, Kim.”

“Thank you, Smith.” She was hot and sweaty, had only just caught her breath again, but she felt much more sure of herself than she had the first time she had stood here. “Smith?”

He tilted his head slightly. “Yes, Kim?”

“Who were they, Smith? The Chinese men following me?”

Smith heaved himself ponderously out of his seat and moved over to a sideboard, where a tea set had been laid out. “Chinese, was it? It could have gone either way. Tea?”

“No, thank you. What do you mean, either way?”

“Them or the Russians,” he replied over his shoulder, fussing over cup, saucer, spoon. “Did you encounter one of their automatons? Did it cause you any trouble?”

“Two of them.” Kim realised she was swaying slightly on her feet. She’d barely slept since the morning before, or eaten. “Not too much. I noticed that they had to stop whenever anything caught them by surprise. Like they had enough power to react to things, or to move, but not for both. Once I saw that, it was just a matter of timing.”

Smith turned back, a saucer on his hand, a smile lifting his moustache. “Very clever. They’re clockwork. Very, very good clockwork – the best in the world, really – but still just clockwork. The best of the Chinese automatons are slower and less reliable than any Britannian automaton patrolling the streets of this city.”

He made his way back to his seat and eased himself into it, setting the saucer on the faded green leather of his desk. “They were agents of the Imperial Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Their own signalmen no doubt saw an intercepted signal bound for Afghanistan, and thought it would benefit their cause if they got their hands on it.”

“Would it?” Kim blinked; in the heat and stillness of Smith’s office, she was starting to feel sleepy. “Actually, may I have that tea?”

Smith waved to the tea set. “Undoubtedly, if not in the way they imagined. The information these details will – I hope – lead me to will be extremely valuable to
anyone
involved in politics, but they are nothing to do with Afghanistan.”

Kim made herself a tea – black, sweet, with a slice of lemon – and sat at the seat in front of Smith’s desk. “And China wants Afghanistan.”

Smith leaned back in his seat, lacing his hands across his belly as he’d done before. “
Everyone
wants Afghanistan. It’s the high ground of the east; if you hold the Pamir Mountains, you’ve got India by the throat. Most of the rest of the continent, for that matter. At the moment, it’s Britannian, but if China takes it, or Russia, Britannia’s claim on India will waver.”

Kim nodded, then sipped her tea, reflecting. “Smith?”

“Yes, Kim?”

“You work for the East India Company, don’t you? You do things they need to do without having to admit they’re doing them?”

“That’s right, Kim.”

“But you said you and my father, and your teacher... you wanted a free India. Why work for them?”

“Ah, yes.” Smith pushed his seat back, regarded Kim for a moment. “In answer to your question, a question. Which would you prefer rule India: Britannia, Russia or China?”

Kim set her cup back down. “None of them, of course! I want a free India, like you.”

Smith smiled broadly. “That wasn’t one of your options, Kim.” He sighed. “And that’s the problem. One day it will be, but until then, I much prefer Victoria to Hongxian or the Romanovs.”

He reached for an envelope on his desk. “Here is your payment. You’ll want some time to recover, and to spend with your family.

“Your next job will be abroad...”

THE GRAVEYARD OF SECRETS

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not plan to keep them.

– Charles Caleb Colton (1780 – 1832)

S
INGAPORE,
S
TRAITS
S
ETTLEMENT,
1999

S
INGAPORE WAS A
riot of people and noise even at the quietest of times. Their airship had docked at quarter past two in the morning, but even at that hour the streets had been thronging with people, all the way from the airfield to the smoky back room at Lazy Suzie’s in Newton, near the hawker centre. A million people out in the night air, talking, dealing and shouting in Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English; banners, bunting, flowers and ribbons in green, gold, blue, black and lucky red, bearing slogans and phrases in every language, scattered on the ground or hanging limply in the sultry air; a clash of drums and cymbals every hundred yards as street entertainers and dancers paraded through the streets, begging or simply playing for the crowds. Good Britannian steam cars shared the roads with an endless stream of bicycles and rickshaws and a great tide of humanity, blithely ignoring the boundary between the pedestrian footpaths and Her Majesty’s Highways. Anyone might think there was some sort of festival or holiday in progress, as the city played host to dozens of times throughout the year, but the grim-faced pair who limped their way into the former opium den that morning knew that this was as peaceful as the boisterous city ever got.

Britannia had made her stamp here as well: telephone and telegraph lines hung everywhere, a great web in the sky; an Overground train system, echoing the network that spanned London, rattled between the towering blocks that held the city’s heaving millions. Robo-bobbies clanked and wheezed as they patrolled the streets, clattering on the cobbled roads near the town centre, pounding the dusty dirt streets in the poor districts, a constant presence, the dull red glow of their eyes sweeping the crowds with their impassive gazes. Many of them were draped in flowers or lucky charms, a gesture of gratitude from the people of the city to the protectors of the peace, although anyone who knew the strange, mixed, fiercely independent people of the city at all could sense the resentment simmering under the surface. Victoria would have a challenge to her hold over the city, and it would not be long.

As the two entered Suzie’s, shouldering through the narrow curtained doorway, they paused to take stock. It wasn’t the sort of bar one entered lightly, or without caution. The doorman, a vast, shaven-headed Han whose name they had never managed to learn, had nodded them in without comment, but that didn’t mean there were no surprises waiting.

The place seemed peaceful, with no obvious source of tension. Satisfied at the mood of the room, the woman – slight, her long brown hair tied up in two plaits, her dark, practical trousers and pullover attracting rather less attention here than they had in the crowded streets – nodded to her partner and to an empty table, then made her way to the bar. The man – rangy, well over six feet tall, dressed in much the same way as his companion – returned the nod, wincing only slightly, and eased himself towards the table, favouring his right arm and shoulder, before gingerly lowering himself into a seat.

Three or four other patrons glanced at him before returning to their conversations – it didn’t pay to be too curious, at Suzie’s – but he otherwise went unremarked. He calmly regarded the room. It was about half-full, mostly with Chinese, although there were a fair number of whites – Britannians, a few Australians, judging by the accents, and one overly loud American in the far corner – and a smattering of Indians and Thais. Two Cossacks sat near the back, sipping vodka and scowling at the room. In perhaps a third of the patrons, he could make out tell-tale signs of concealed weapons – a bulge under the shoulder or in the small of the back, a tailored jacket designed so as to prevent such a bulge, even as little as a stance that gives easy access to an appropriate pocket – but in truth, there would be no-one here, or no-one who
belonged
here, who would not be armed, or at least deadly in one way or another.

Officially, Magna Britannia disapproved of mercenaries. In an age of automaton-soldiers, she had little need of them as infantry, and the kinds of warfare where they were most useful – assassination, sabotage, espionage – were publicly frowned upon. The British East India Company, however, was (unofficially and strictly off the record) by a long margin the world’s biggest employer of mercenaries, and so Singapore was one of the places where their presence was tolerated, even indulged. And Lazy Suzie’s was one of the places that mercenaries went to look for work. Sometimes just for a drink, or to catch up with their peers in a context where they weren’t trying to kill each other; but usually to look for work.

His partner returned from the bar, with a gin and tonic for herself and a pint of beer for him. “He’s in. He’ll be with us in a moment.” She slid his drink across the table. “Although why you insist on drinking lager all the way out here, I’ll never know,” she said. “You always complain that it doesn’t taste right.”

“It doesn’t keep well in the heat,” he grumbled, and a close observer might have detected the slightest hint of a Welsh accent to his voice. “But I’d rather drink tea out of a tramp’s gusset than gin.” He laughed, which turned into a groan, and he raised his left hand to his right shoulder.

“You’ll want to be careful with that, as well,” the woman said. “We’ve only just got you patched up. I’d suggest we take a holiday so you can heal up properly, but we’re out of cash. But Jen says he’s got a cushy job for us, no fighting, in and out. It’s about the best we can do right now.”

Hsiao Jen –
Little Man
, in Cantonese, although apparently the name was some sort of subtle joke about the Imperial Bureaucracy – was why mercenaries came to Lazy Suzie’s. Jen was Suzie’s common-law husband of the last ten years, and was a notorious fixer, doling out work from the East India Company, the Chinese government, even the Americans. He had a hard-won reputation for honesty and fair dealings.

“As long as they haven’t got any dogs,” the man said, shifting painfully in his seat. “Give me guns, knives, even some kung fu killer trained in martial arts. But not another dog. That last one nearly had my bloody arm off. And you always feel a total shit, killing a dog.”

“No dogs.” His partner grinned. “We’ll make that a rule.”

“Hello, Jamie, Tinks.” Their contact joined them at the table, sliding into a seat next to the woman. Hsiao Jen was, in spite of the name, tall for his race, at nearly five feet ten. The back and sides of his head were shaven clean, and the hair at the top of his head was cropped short; rumour had it he had once worn a queue, but that it had been cut off as a punishment when he’d been ejected from the Imperial Bureaucracy, and that he wore his hair like this as a reminder. If true, it meant he had been extremely highly-ranked in China. He wore a plain white collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a simple black waistcoat left unbuttoned. He had a large envelope in his hand.