The Merchants’ War

Oil Talk

Just as the guard handed Eric back his mobile phone, it rang.

“Hey, good timing!” The cop chuckled.

Eric flipped it open, ignoring the man. It had already been a long day: back home it was about six in the evening, and he still had to fly back. “Smith here.”

“Boss?” It was Deirdre, his secretary: “I’m aware this is an insecure line, but I thought you might want to know that Mike is back from his sales trip, and he says he’s got a buyer.”

“Jesus!” Eric stood bolt-upright. “Are you sure? That’s amazing!” The sense of gloom that had been hanging over him for days lifted. He checked his watch: “Listen, I’ll be back in town late tonight—can you get him into the office for an early morning debrief? Around six hundred hours?” I’ll have to tell Gillian something, he realized. Not just an apology. Take her somewhere nice?

“I, I don’t think that will be possible,” Deirdre said, sounding distracted.

“Why not?” It came out too sharply: “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. What’s the problem?”

“He’s, um, he had a traffic accident. He’s taken a beating, but he’ll be all right once he’s out of hospital. Judith Herz is with him.”

“Whoa!” Eric blinked furiously. He glanced round the guardroom, noticing the cop sitting patiently behind the counter, the polite SS agent with the car keys. “—Listen, I’ll call you back from a secure terminal once I’m under way. Should be about an hour. I’ll be expecting the best report you can pull together. If possible get Judith on the line for me, if she’s spoken to him in person.”

He could just about see Deirdre’s eye-rolling nod: “That’s about what I expected, boss. I’ll be ready for you.”

“Okay, bye.”

He closed the phone with a snap and turned to Agent Simms: “Come on, we’ve got a plane to catch!”

There was a secure terminal aboard the Gulfstream, and Eric wasted no time in getting to it as soon as they were airborne. But what Judith Herz had for him wasn’t encouraging.

“He got chewed up—one leg is badly broken with surface lacerations, he’s got bruising and soft tissue injuries consistent with being in a fight, and he’s got a nasty infected wound. I got him checked in to the nearest trauma unit and it looks like he’ll pull through and keep the leg, but he’s not going to be up and about any time soon. Someone stuck a syringe full of morphine in him and dumped him at a roadside in upstate New York. They called an ambulance using a stolen mobile phone, and no, we didn’t get a trace on it—they turned it on just before they called and switched off immediately after. He was still wearing his cover gear, but they’d disarmed him.”

“Shit. Excuse me.” Eric took a few moments to gather his scattered thoughts. Too many things were going on at once. His head was still spinning from the stuff in the buried laboratory under Building Forty-seven. He’d just about gotten used to the idea that Mike had made it home alive—and that was really good news—but this latest tidbit was a little hard to take. “Okay. So someone sent him back to us? Any sign of Sergeant Hastert and his team?”

“Mike was awake when I saw him, sir.” He stiffened at her tone of voice, anticipating the bad news to come: “He wasn’t very lucid, but he said Hastert and O’Neil were killed. They walked in on some kind of war and they got caught in the crossfire. I’m sorry, sir: he wasn’t very clear, but he wanted you to know they died trying to get him out.”

“Shit.” Eric rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Any good news? Or was that the good news?”

“He says he made contact with the target briefly, but there were problems. And something about her mother.”

“What’s her mother got to do with things?”

“We didn’t get that far, sir. Like I said, he’s been chewed up badly. I mean, it looks like someone took a whack at his left leg with a chain saw then left it to fester for a couple of days. That’s on top of the bruising and a cracked rib. The medics shoved me out of the room just as he was getting to the good stuff—he’s out of the operating theater now but he won’t be talking for a while. But I’m pretty sure he was trying to say something about the target’s mother saving him. I don’t know what he meant by that, he was medicated and being prepped for surgery at the time, but I figure you’ll want to follow it up.”

“Dead right I will.” Eric took a deep breath. “Alright. So he’s out of the operating theater now. As soon as he’s safe to move, I want him in a military hospital with an armed guard in the room with him at all times—for his own protection. If they can find an underground room to put him in, so much the better. If possible, move him tonight—I want him safe, right now his brains are our crown jewels. Tell Deirdre to get John from OPFAC Four to coordinate with Milton and Sarah on setting it up. Page them if they’ve gone home, this is important. Got that?”

“I’m on it. Anything else? Will you be coming in tonight?”

Eric shook his head tiredly. “I’m touching down around half past midnight. If you get any pushback between now and then, call me and I’ll come in. If it goes smoothly, I might as well get some sleep before I debrief him.” A thought struck him. “Another thing. I want a guard with him at all times, with a voice recorder in case he says anything. And I don’t want random doctors or nurses eavesdropping.”

“Already taken care of.” Herz’s laconic response made him want to kick himself. Of course it was taken care of: Herz was terrifyingly efficient when it came to police work like handling witnesses.

“Good. Good work, I mean, really good.” I’m babbling. Stop it. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer. If you need backup, call me. Bye.”

The seatbelt light was off, the plane boring a hole in the sky towards the darkening eastern horizon. Eric unfastened his belt and stood up, then went forward to the desk where Dr. James was poring over a pile of printouts.

“What is it?” No polite small-talk from James: he was almost robotic in his focus.

“It’s CLEANSWEEP. I just got confirmation that we’ve had a positive outcome.”

It was Dr. James’s turn to do a double take—or punch the air, if so inclined—and Eric was curious to see how he’d jump. Dr. James was not, it seemed, one for demonstrative gestures: he simply put his papers down, removed his spectacles, and said, mildly, “Explain.”

“Agent Fleming is back. He’s alive, but has injuries. His condition is stable and I’ve ordered him transferred to a secure facility pending debriefing. The preliminary report is that the specops team walked into a red-on-red crossfire of some sort, but Fleming was returned to us by someone who presumably wants to talk. There appears to be a factional split in fairyland. I’ll know more tomorrow, when I’ve begun his debriefing: for now, I gather his injuries required operating theater time so we won’t get much more out of him just yet.”

James began to polish his bifocals with a scrap of tissue. “Good.” His fingertips moved in tiny circles, pinching the lens like a crab worrying at a fragment of decaying flesh. “You’ll debrief him without witnesses. Record onto a sealed medium and type up the report yourself. Use a typewriter, not a word processor.” He looked up at Eric with dead-fish eyes: “the fewer witnesses the better.”

Eric cleared his throat. “You know that’s in direct contravention of our operational doctrine?”

James nodded. “Sit down.” Eric sat opposite him. James glanced round, to make sure there were no open ears nearby, then carefully balanced the bifocals on the bridge of his nose. “Off the record.”

“Yes?” Eric did his best to conceal the sinking feeling those words gave him.

“You’re a professional, and you’re used to playing by the rules. That’s all very well. The reason that rule book exists is to prevent loose cannons from rolling around the deck, knocking things over and making a mess. We designed the policy on debriefing to ensure that no asshole can piss in the coffeepot and embarrass the owners. However, right now, you’re working directly for the owners. Standard policy wasn’t designed for this type of war and therefore we have to make a new rule book up as we go along—where it’s necessary. Your job is to build up a HUMINT resource, taking us back into a kind of operational model we haven’t ever been really good at, and last tried in the sixties and seventies. But the flip side of HUMINT is COINTEL, and if we can spy on them, they can spy on us. So the zeroth rule of this operation is, minimize the eyeballs—minimize the risk of leaks. Clear?”

Eric nodded, involuntarily. Then a late-acting bureaucratic reflex prompted him to protest: “That’s all very well, and I agree with your reasoning, but it doesn’t help me out if they come after me with an audit.”

James stared at him coldly. “Where’s your loyalty, boy?”

“You’re asking me to commit a federal felony, on your word. If you want to run HUMINT assets on the ground, their rule number one is that they’ve got to be able to trust their controllers. You’re my controller.” He crossed his arms, hoping his anger wasn’t immediately obvious to the other man.

James stared at him a moment longer, then nodded minutely. “So that’s the way it is.”

“It’s the way it’s got to be,” Eric shot back. “It’s not just me who’s got to trust you, it’s the whole goddamn chain of command, all the way down.” Which right now consists of one guy in a hospital bed, but let’s not remind him of that. “—History says that the smart money is on this coming out, if not now, then in twenty years’ time. This administration will be fodder for the history books by then—hell, with his heart condition, Daddy Warbucks will probably be sleeping with the fishes—but I’m a career officer, and so are the folks in my outfit. If you don’t give us a fig leaf, you’re asking us to suck up time in Leavenworth. And we don’t get to go on to a juicy research contract with the Heritage Institute, or a part-time boardroom post with some defense contractor when this is over.”

“What do you want?” James’s intonation was precise and his voice even, but Eric didn’t let it fool him.

“Something vague, but in writing. The vaguer the better. Something like, ‘In the interests of operational security and in view of the threat of enemy intelligence-gathering attempts aimed at compromising our integrity, all investigations are to be restricted to those with a need to know, and normal committee oversight will be suspended until such time as the immediate threat recedes.’ Just keep it vague. Then if I have to take the stand, I’ve simply misunderstood your intent. I’m obeying an order by a superior, you didn’t intend your orders to breach the law. Nobody needs to get burned.”

James snorted abruptly, startling Eric. “Is that all?”

Eric shrugged. “That’s how it’s done. That’s what kept the shit in check during Iran-Contra. Or did you expect me to fall on my sword when all I need is a note signed by teacher to say I’m an overachiever?”

“Bah.” James glanced away, but not before Eric noticed a twinkle of crocodilian amusement in his eye. “I thought you were an Air Force officer, not a politician.”

“You don’t get above captain if you’re politically challenged, sir. With all due respect, it makes life easier for me if I can advise you—where appropriate—of steps I can take to do my job better. That’s one of them. Off the record, of course.”

“I’ll get you your fig leaf, then. Signed on the Oval Office blotter, if that makes you feel better. Now, talk to me.” James leaned back, making a steeple of his fingertips.

Eric relaxed infinitesimally. “Someone sent Mike back to us. He didn’t come by himself; his leg’s busted up. That tells us something about what sort of operation we’re fighting.”

“Go on…”

“I haven’t debriefed him yet. But at a guess, what we’ve already done has hurt their operations on the east coast, and sending agents through after them is going to scare the shit out of them. They’re going to have to negotiate or escalate. Leaving aside the business with GREENSLEEVES and the nuke, we’re going to have to negotiate or escalate, too. Now, it’s not for me to advise on policy, but I suspect we’re going to find that Mike was sent back by someone who stands to gain from negotiating with us. Call them faction ‘A’. The red-on-red action suggests there’s a rival faction, call them ‘B’. So we really need to keep a lid on this, because if the ‘B’ faction figures that the ‘A’ faction want to negotiate, they may try to torpedo things by escalating. And if GREENSLEEVES wasn’t bluffing about the nuke, we could be in a world of hurt.”

Dr. James nodded minutely. “Your advice?”

“We have to find that nuke, or rule it out. And we have to keep them talking while JAUNT BLUE get their shit together. Right now, we’re fumbling around in the dark—but so are they. All they know is, we’ve whacked a bunch of their operations and figured out how to get an agent across. And if they’re in trouble internally, presumably they’d love to get us off their backs while they clean up their own mess. They probably think we don’t know about the nukes, and we can be pretty sure that they don’t know about JAUNT BLUE. Everything we know about them suggests they just don’t think in those terms, otherwise they’d be crawling all over us.”

“So. You propose that we debrief Agent Fleming, then use him to establish a back channel to the leadership of Group ‘A,’ with the goal of stalling them with the promise of negotiations while we clean up the missing nuke and get some results from JAUNT BLUE. Is that a fair summary?”

Eric blinked, then rubbed his forehead. “You put it better than I did,” he said ruefully. “Long day.”

“Going to be longer,” James said laconically. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling air vents for a while, until Eric began to think he was planning on taking a nap: but just as he was about to stand up and leave, James sat up abruptly and looked at him. “Your analysis is valid, but incomplete because there are some facts you are unaware of.”

Uh? “Obviously,” Eric said cautiously. “Should I be?”

“I think so.” James stared at him, his expression deceptively mild. “Same rules as the Fleming debriefing. This goes nowhere near a computer or a telephone. You follow?”

Eric nodded.

“Number one. Obviously, I do not want—nobody wants—to see a terrorist nuke detonated in an American city. Even if it’s in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, that would be very bad. But you need to understand this: if the worst happens, if that bomb goes off, a use will be found for it. The bloody shirt will be waved. Do you understand?”

Eric licked his suddenly dry lips. “Who’s the fall guy?”

“The Boy Wonder’s got a hard-on for Mr. Hussein, and PNAC will fall in line, but—” Dr. James shook his head. “I’m not sure who, Colonel. All I can tell you is, it will be someone who we can hammer for it. The hammer is ready, and if the United States doesn’t wield it from time to time the other players may begin to wonder if we’re still willing. So if JAUNT BLUE is ready, the target might be the Clan. And if JAUNT BLUE isn’t ready, we’ll hit someone else, someone we can reach and need to nail flat. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, whoever. But. Whatever else happens, if there’s a hard outcome, it will be used to strengthen our hand. We’ll have carte blanche.” He stared at Eric. “The code name for this plan—and I stress, it’s a contingency plan, a political spin to put on a disaster—is MARINUS BERLIN.”

“Jesus.” Eric looked away. “That’s disgusting.”

“Yes. I know. But what else can we do?”

“Find the bomb.”

“Yes!” James’s frustration boiled over in Eric’s: “If you’ve got some kind of magic superpowers that let you stare through concrete walls and pinpoint missing nukes, then I’d like to hear about them, Colonel. Failing that, if you have any better ideas, I’m sure Daddy Warbucks would like to know what else to fricking do if terrorists nuke one of our cities?”

Shit. “I’m sorry. Like I said, we’re looking. I’ll see if I can scare up some backup when we get back, okay?”

“You’d better. Because falling on our swords is not on the agenda for this administration, son. We’re not going to hand the country to the other team just because some assholes from another dimension fuck with us, any more than we did when bin Laden got uppity and bit the feeding hand.” James paused. “I shouldn’t have blown up then. Forget I said anything, it’s not your fault. There’s a lot at stake here that you aren’t in on: the big picture is really scary. All the oil in fairyland, for starters.”

“All the what?”

Dr. James looked as if he’d bitten a lemon while expecting an orange. “Oil, son. Makes the world go round. You know what the business with al-Qaeda is about? Oil. We’re in Saudi Arabia because of the oil: bin Laden wants us out of Saudi. We’re going to go into Iraq because of the oil. Oil is leverage. Oil lets us put the Chinks and Europeans in their place. And we’re running short of it, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s this thing called peak oil coming and we’ve got analysts scratching their heads to figure out how we’re going to field it. We’re not going to run out, but demand is going to exceed supply and the price is going to start climbing in a few years. Our planetary preeminence relies on us having cheap oil for our industries, while everyone else pays through the nose for it. But we can’t guarantee to keep prices low if we’re having to send our boys out to sit in the desert and keep the wells pumping. So it was looking bad until six months ago, but now there’s a new factor in the equation…”

He took a deep breath. “The Clan. A bunch of medieval jerks, squatting on our territory—or a good cognate of it. What’s going down in Texas, Colonel Smith? Their version of Texas, not our Texas: what are they doing there? I’ll tell you what they’re doing: they’re sitting on twice as much oil as Saddam Hussein, and that’s what’s got Daddy Warbucks’s attention. Because, you see, if JAUNT BLUE delivers, eventually all that good black stuff is going to be ours…”

“Are we nearly there yet?”

Huw glanced in the driver’s mirror, taking his eyes off the interstate for a couple of seconds. Elena sprawled across one half of the back seat of the Hummer H2 truck, managing to look louche and bored simultaneously. Petulant, that was the word. A twenty-one-year-old Clan princess—no, merely a contessa in waiting, should she inherit—fresh from her Swiss finishing school and her first semester at college: out in the big bad world for the first time, with two brave knights to look after her. File off the serial numbers and you could mistake her for a spoiled preppy kitten. Of course, the jocks who’d be clustering around the latter type didn’t usually carry swords. Nor did normal preppies know how to handle the FN P90 in the trunk. Still, Huw let his eyes linger on her tight jeans and embroidered babydoll tee for a second longer than was strictly necessary, before he glanced back at the road and the GPS navigation screen.

“About twenty miles to go. Eighteen minutes. We turn off in ten.”

“Boring.” She faked a yawn at him, slim hand covering pink lip gloss.

“I’m bored too,” snarked Hulius, from his nest in the front passenger seat. He took an orange from the glove box and began to peel it with his dagger. Citrus droplets swirled in the aircon breeze.

“We’re all bored,” Huw said affably. “Are you suggesting I should break the speed limit?”

Hulius paled. “No—”

“Good.” Huw smiled. The white duke took a dim view of traffic infractions, and supplemented the official fines with additional punishments of his own choice: ten strokes of the lash for a first offense. Don’t ever, ever draw attention to yourselves was the first rule they drilled into everyone before letting them out the door. Which was why couriers on Post duty dressed like lawyers, and why the three of them were driving down the interstate at a sober two miles under the speed limit, in a shiny new Hummer, with every i dotted and t crossed on the paperwork that proved them to be a trio of MIT graduate students with rich parents, off on a field trip.

The green dot on the map inched south along Route 95, slowly converging on Baltimore and the afternoon traffic. The aircon fans hissed steadily, but Huw could still feel the heat beating down on the back of his hand through the tinted glass. Concrete rumbled under the magically smooth suspension of the truck. The scrubby grass outside was parched, burned almost brown by the summer heat. He’d made a journey part of the distance down this way once before on horseback, in a place with no air-conditioning or cars: it had been a fair approximation of hell. Doing the journey in a luxury SUV was heaven—albeit a particularly boring corner of it. “Have you checked the charge on the goggles yet?”

“They’re in the trunk. They’ll be fine.” Hulius pulled off a slice of orange and offered it to Huw. “you worry too much.”

“It’s your neck I’m worrying over. Would you rather I didn’t worry, bro?”

“If you put it that way…”

The last half hour of any journey was always the longest, but Huw caught the sign in time, and took the exit for Bel Air and parts east: then a couple more turns onto dusty roads linking faceless tracts of suburb with open countryside. The dots converged. Finally he reached a stretch of trees and a driveway led up to an unprepossessing house. He brought the truck to a halt in front of the day room windows and killed the engine.

“You’re sure this is the place?” Elena pushed herself upright then stretched, yawning.

“Got to be.” Huw rooted around in the dash for the bunch of house keys and the letter from the realtor. Then he opened the door and jumped out, taking a deep breath as the oppressive summer humidity washed over him. “Number 344. Yup, that’s right.”

Sneakers crunched on gravel as he walked towards the front door. Behind him, a clattering: Elena unloading the flat Pelikan case from the trunk. Huw glanced up at the peeling white paint under the guttering, the patina of dust. Then he rang the doorbell and waited for a long minute, until Elena, holding the case behind him as if it was a guitar, began tapping her toes and whistling a tuneless melody of impatience. “It pays to be cautious,” he finally explained, before he stuck the key in the lock. “People hereabouts take a dim view of unexpected visitors.”

The key turned. Inside, the hallway was hot and close, smelling of dust and old regrets. Huw breathed a sigh of relief. He’d set this up by remote control, one of ten test sites running down the coastline and across the continent all the way to the west coast, spaced five hundred kilometers apart. The Realtor had been only too glad to rent it to him for a year, money paid up front: it had been unsalable ever since its former owner, a retired widower, had died of a heart attack in the living room one bleak winter evening. You could remove the carpet and the furniture, and even do something about the smell, but you couldn’t remove the reputation.

Huw hunted around for the fuse board for a while, then flipped the circuit breaker. A distant whir spoke of long-dormant air-conditioning. He checked that the hall lights worked, then nodded to himself. “Okay, let’s get moved in.”

It took the three of them half an hour to unload the Hummer. Besides backpacks full of clothing, they brought in a number of wheeled equipment cases, a laptop computer, and couple of expensive digital camcorders. Finally, the air mattresses. “Elena? You take the back bedroom. Yul, you and I are roughing it up front in the master room.”

Huw dragged his mattress into the front room and plugged the electric pump in. Some of the houses were still furnished, but not this one. Be prepared wasn’t just for scouts. Her Grace Helge had done pretty much this same job, on a smaller, much less organized scale—but Huw had been thinking about it for the week since the white duke had called him in, and he thought he had some new twists on it. He mopped at his forehead. “Listen, we’re about done here and it’s half past lunchtime, so why don’t we head into town and grab a pizza while the air-conditioning makes this place habitable?”

“Works for me.” Hulius grimaced. “Where’s Lady Elena?”

“Here.” Elena leaned against the banister rail outside the door. “Food would be good.” She grinned impishly. “How about a couple of bottles of wine?” Like all Clan members, her attitude to wine was very un-American—tempered only by the duke’s iron rule about attracting unwanted attention in public.

Huw nodded—thoughtfully, for he was still getting used to playing the role of responsible adult around the other two. “We’ll pick something up if we pass a liquor store. But no drinking in public, okay?”

“Sure, dude.”

“Let’s go, then.”

An hour later they were back in the under-furnished living room with pizza boxes, a stack of six-packs of Pepsi, and a discreet brown paper bag. “Okay,” said Huw, licking his fingers. “Taken your pills yet?”

“Um, ’scuse me.” Elena darted upstairs, returning with a toilet bag. “Hate these things,” she mumbled resentfully. “Make me feel woozy.” She threw back her head when she swallowed. What fine bones she has, thought Huw, watching her with unprofessional enthusiasm. That was one of the reasons she was along on this trip: because she was sixty kilograms, the stocky Hulius could carry her piggyback if necessary.

“Where were we?” asked Hulius, pausing with a slice of Hawaiian halfway to his mouth.

Huw checked his wristwatch. “About an hour and a half short of time zero. You guys eat, I’ll repeat the plan, interrupt if you want me to explain anything.”

“Okay,” said Hulius. Elena nodded, rolling her eyes as she chewed.

“First, we assemble the stage one kit. Clothing, boots, cameras, guns, telemetry belts. We triple-test the belt batteries and set them running at five minutes to zero hour. There’s no post on this trip, even if we get some results. Elena piggybacks on Yul, on the first attempt. If you fail, we call it a wash today, switch off the telemetry, and break open the wine. If you succeed, you evaluate your surroundings and proceed to Plan Alpha or Plan Bravo, depending. Now.” He tore off a wedge of cooling pizza: “It’s your turn to tell me what you’re supposed to do as soon as you find yourself wherever the hell you’re going. Hoping to go. Plan Alpha first. Elena, describe your job…?”

The carvery in the hotel wasn’t anything Miriam would have described as a classy restaurant, but after being locked in the basement of a brothel for most of a week it felt like the Ritz. Miriam was ravenous from a day pounding the sidewalks: but Erasmus, she noticed over the soup, ate slowly but methodically, clearing his plate with grim determination. “Hungry?” she asked, lowering her spoon.

“I try never to leave my food.” He nodded, then tore off another piece of bread to mop his soup bowl clean. “Old habit. Bad manners, I’m afraid: I apologize.”

“No offense taken.” Miriam nodded. “You need to put on weight, anyway. I haven’t heard you coughing today, but you’re so thin!”

“Really?” He made as if to raise his napkin to cover his mouth, then grinned at her. “When you start you know about it, but when something goes away…it’s an unnoticed miracle.” A waiter arrived, silently, and removed their bowls. “I don’t feel ancient and drained anymore. But you’re right, I need to eat. I wasn’t always a sack of bones.” He shook his head, and the grin slipped into rueful oblivion.

“It was your time in the north, wasn’t it?” The statement slipped out before Miriam could stop it.

Erasmus stared at her. “Yes, it was,” he said quietly.

She licked her lips. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to say that.”

“Yes you did.” He glanced sidelong at the other occupants of the room: no one was paying them any obvious attention. “But it’s all right, I don’t mind.”

“I don’t mean to pry.” The waiter was returning, bearing two plates. She leaned back while he deftly slid her entree in front of her. When he’d gone, she looked back at Burgeson. “But I’d be crazy not to be curious. Months ago, when I said I didn’t care what your connections were…I didn’t expect things to go this way.”

He shrugged, then picked up his knife and fork. “Neither did I,” he said shortly. “You are curious as to the nature of what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

She took a sip of wine, then began to methodically slice into the overcooked lamb chops on her plate. “This probably isn’t the right place for this conversation.”

“I’m glad you agree.”

He wasn’t making this easy. “So. Tomorrow…train back home? Then what?”

“It’ll be a flying visit. Overnight, perhaps.” He shoveled a potato onto his fork, holding it in place with a fatty piece of mutton: “I need to pick up my post, make arrangements for the shop, and notify the Polis.” His cheek twitched. “I’ve reserved a suite on the night mail express, leaving tomorrow evening. It joins up with the Northern Continental at Dunedin, we won’t have to change carriages.”

“A suite?” She raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that expensive?”

Erasmus paused, another forkful of food halfway to his mouth: “Of course it is! But the extra expense, on top of a transcontinental ticket, is minor.” He grimaced. “You expect travel to be cheaper than it is. It can be—if you don’t mind sleeping on a blanket roll with the steerage for a week.”

“Yes, but…” Miriam paused for long enough to eat some more food: “I’m sorry. So we’re going straight through Dunedin and stopping in Fort Petrograd? How many days away?”

“We’ll stop halfway for a few hours. The Northern Continental runs from Florida up to New London, cuts northwest to Dunedin, stops to take on extra carriages, nonstop to New Glasgow where it stops to split up, then down the coast to Fort Petrograd. We should arrive in just under four days. If we were really going the long way, we could change onto the Southern Continental at Western Station, keep going south to Mexico City, then cross the Isthmus of Panama and keep going all the way to Land’s End on the Cape. But that’s a horrendous journey, seven thousand miles or more, and the lines aren’t fast—it takes nearly three weeks.”

“Hang on. The Cape—you mean, you have trains that run all the way to the bottom of South America?”

“Of course. Don’t your people, where you come from?”

They ate in silence for a few minutes. “I’d better write that letter to Roger right now and mail it this evening.”

“That would be prudent.” Burgeson lowered his knife and fork, having swept his plate clean. “You’ll probably want to go through my bookcases before we embark, too—it’s going to be a long ride.”

After the final cup of coffee, Burgeson sighed. “Let us go upstairs,” he suggested.

“Okay—yes.” Miriam managed to stand up. She was, she realized, exhausted, even though the night was still young. “I’m tired.”

“Really?” Erasmus led the way to the elevator. “Maybe you should avail yourself of the bathroom, then catch an early night. I have some business to attend to in town. I promise to let myself in quietly.”

He slid the elevator gate open and as she stepped inside she noticed the heavily built doorman just inside the entrance. “If it’s safe, that works for me.”

“Why would it be unsafe? To a hotel like this, any whiff of insecurity for the guests is pure poison.”

“Good.”

Back in the room, Miriam jotted down a quick note to her sometime chief research assistant, using hotel stationery. “Can you get this posted tonight?” she asked Erasmus. “I’m going to have that bath now…”

The bathroom turned out to be down the corridor from the bedroom, the bath a contraption of cold porcelain fed by gleaming copper pipework. There was, however, hot water in unlimited quantities—something that Miriam had missed for so long that its availability came as an almost incomprehensible luxury.

The things we take for granted, she thought, relaxing into the tub: the comforts of a middle-class existence in New Britain seemed exotic and advanced after months of detention in a Clan holding in Niejwein. I could fit in here. She tried the thought on for size. Okay, so domestic radios are the size of a photocopier, and there’s no Internet, and they use trains where we’d use airliners. So what? They’ve got hot and cold running water, and gas and electricity. Indoor plumbing. The chambers Baron Henryk had confined her to had a closet with a drafty hole in a wooden seat. I could live here. The thought was tempting for a moment—until she remembered the thin, pinched faces in the soup queue, the outstretched upturned hats. Erasmus’s hacking cough, now banished by medicines that she’d brought over from Boston—her own Boston. No antibiotics: back before they’d been discovered, a quarter to a third of the population had died of bacterial diseases. She sighed, lying back carefully to avoid soaking her brittle-bleached hair. It’s better than the Clan, but still…

She tried to gather her scattered thoughts. New Britain wasn’t some kind of nostalgic throwback to a gaslight age: it was dirty, smelly, polluted, and intermittently dangerous. Clothing was expensive and conservative because foreign sweatshops weren’t readily available: the cost of transporting their produce was too high even in peacetime—and with a war time blockade in force, things were even worse. Politics was dangerous, in ways she’d barely begun to understand: there was participatory democracy for a price, for a very limited franchise of rich land-owning men who thought themselves the guardians of the people and the rulers of the populace, shepherding the masses they did not consider to be responsible enough for self-determination.

It wasn’t only women’s rights that were a problem here—and that was bad enough, as she’d discovered: women here had fewer civil rights than they had in Iran, in her own world; at least in Iran women could vote—but here, anyone who wasn’t a member of the first thousand families was second-class, unable to move to a new city without a permit from the Polis, a subject rather than a citizen. “Fomenting democratic agitation” was an actual on-the-books felony that could get you sent to a labor camp in the far north. Outright chattel slavery might not be a problem—it seemed to have fizzled away in the late nineteenth century—but the level of casual racism she’d witnessed was jarring and unpleasant.

I just want to go home. If only I knew where home is!

The water was growing cold. Miriam finished her ablutions, then returned to the hotel room. It was close and humid in the summer heat, so she raised the sash window, dropping the gauze insect screen behind it. Erasmus can let himself in, she thought, crawling between the sheets. How late will he—she dozed off.

She awakened to daylight, and Erasmus’s voice, sounding heartlessly cheerful as he opened the shutters: “Rise and shine! And good morning to you, Miriam! I hope you slept well. You’ll be pleased to know that your letter made the final collection: it’ll have been delivered already. I’ll be about my business up the corridor while you make yourself decent. How about some breakfast before we travel?”

“Ow, you cruel, heartless man!” She struggled to sit up, covering her eyes. “What time is it?”

“It’s half-past six, and we need to be on the train at ten to eight.”

“Ouch. Okay, I’m awake already!” She squinted into the light. Burgeson was fully dressed, if a bit rumpled-looking. “The chaise was a bit cramped?”

“I’ve slept worse.” He picked up a leather toilet bag. “If you’ll excuse me? I’ll knock before I come in.”

He disappeared into the corridor, leaving Miriam feeling unaccountably disappointed. Damn it, it’s unnatural to be that cheerful in the morning! Still, she was thoroughly awake. Kicking the covers back, she sat up and stretched. Her clothing lay where she’d left it the evening before. By the time Erasmus knocked again she was prodding her hair back into shape in front of the dressing-table mirror. “Come in,” she called.

“Oh good.” Erasmus nodded approvingly. “I’ve changed my mind about breakfast: I think we ought to catch the morning express. How does that sound to you? I’m sure we can eat perfectly well in the dining car.”

She turned to stare at him. “I’d rather not hurry,” she began, then thought better of it. “Is there a problem?” Her pulse accelerated.

“Possibly.” He didn’t look unduly worried, but Miriam was not reassured. “I’d rather not stay around to find out.”

“In that case.” Miriam picked up the valise and began stuffing sundries into it. “Let’s get moving.” The skin in the small of her back itched. “Are we being watched?”

“Possibly. And then again, it might just be routine. Let me help you.” Erasmus passed her hat down from the coat rack, then gathered up her two shopping bags. “The sooner we’re out of town the better. There’s a train at ten to seven, and we can just catch it if we make haste.”

Downstairs, the hotel was already moving. “Room ninety-two,” Erasmus muttered to the clerk on the desk, sliding a banknote across: “I’m in a hurry.”

The clerk peered at the note then nodded. “That will be fine, sir.” Without waiting, Erasmus made for the front door, forcing Miriam to take quick steps to keep up with him. “Quickly,” he muttered from the side of his mouth. “Keep your eyes open.”

The sidewalk in front of the hotel was merely warm, this early in the morning. A newspaper boy loitered opposite, by the Post Office: early-morning commuters were about. Miriam glanced in the hotel windows as she followed Erasmus along the dusty pavement. A flicker of a newspaper caught her eye, and she looked ahead in time to see a man in a peak-brimmed hat crossing the road, looking back towards them. Shit. She’d seen this pattern before—a front and back tail, boxing in a surveillance subject. “Are we likely to be robbed in the street?” she asked Erasmus’s retreating back.

He stopped dead, and she nearly ran into him: “No, of course not.” He didn’t meet her eyes, looking past her. “I see what you see,” he added in a low, conversational tone. “So. Change of plan—again.” He offered her his arm. “Let’s take this nice and easy.”

Miriam took his arm, holding him close to her side. “What are we going to do?” she muttered.

“We’re going to deliberately get on the wrong train.” He steered her around a pillar box, then into the entrance to the station concourse, and simultaneously passed her a stubby cardboard ticket. “We want to be on the ten to seven for Boston, on platform six. But we’re going to get on the eight o’clock to Newport, on platform eight, opposite platform six, and we’re going to get on right at the front.”

Miriam nodded. “Then what?”

“It’s sixteen minutes to seven.” He smiled and waved his ticket at the uniformed fellow at the end of the platform: Miriam followed his example. “At twelve minutes to the hour, we cross over to the right train. If we’re stopped or if you miss it, remember your cover, we just got on the wrong train by mistake. All right? Let’s go…”

Miriam took a deep breath. This doesn’t sound good, she realized, her pulse pounding in her ears as an irrational fear made her guts clench. She resisted the urge to look over her shoulder, instead keeping hold of Burgeson’s arm until he steered her towards a railway carriage that seemed to consist of a row of small compartments, each with its own doors and a running-board to allow access to the platform. As she reached the train, she glanced sideways along the platform. The same two men she’d seen on the street were walking towards her: as she watched, one of them peeled off toward the carriage behind. It’s a box tail all right. She forced herself to unfreeze and climbed into the empty eight-seat compartment, and Erasmus’s arms.

“Hey!”

“This is the hard bit.” He steered her behind him, then pulled the door to and swiftly dropped the heavy leather shutters across the windows of the small compartment. Then he walked to the door on the other side of the carriage and opened it. “I’ll lower you.”

“I can climb down myself, thanks.” Miriam looked over the edge. It was a good five feet down to the track bed. “Damn.” She lowered herself over the dusty footplate. “Got the bags?”

“Right behind you.”

The track bed was covered in cinders and damp, unpleasant patches. She patted her clothes down and reached up to take the luggage Erasmus passed her. A second later he stood beside her, breathing hard. “Are you all right?”

“A touch of—of—you know.” He wheezed twice, then coughed, horribly. “All right now. Move.” He pointed her across the empty tracks, towards a flight of crumbling brick steps leading up the side of the platform. “Go on.”

She hurried across the tracks then up the steps. She glanced back at Erasmus: he seemed to be in no hurry, but at least he was moving. Shit, why now? This was about the worst possible moment for his chest to start causing trouble. She looked round, taking stock of the situation. The crowd on the platform was thinning, people bustling towards open doors as if in a hurry to avoid a rain storm. A plump man in a tricorn hat was marching up the platform, brandishing a red flag. Nobody was watching her climb the steps from the empty track bed. Come on, Erasmus! She took a step towards the train, then another, and picked up her pace. A few seconds later, an open door loomed before her. She pulled herself up and over the threshold. “Is this compartment reserved?” she asked, flustered: “My husband—”

A whistle shrilled. She looked round, and down. Erasmus stood on the platform below her, panting, clearly out of breath. “No reservations,” grumbled a fat man in a violently clashing check jacket. He shook his newspaper ostentatiously and made a great show of shifting over a couple of inches.

Miriam reached down and took Erasmus’s hand. It felt like twigs bound in leather, light enough that her heave carried him halfway up the steps in one fluid movement. She stepped backwards and sat down, and he smiled at her briefly then tugged the door closed. The whistle shrilled again as the train lurched and began to pull away. “I didn’t think we were going to make it,” she said.

Burgeson took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds. “Neither did I,” he admitted wheezily, glancing back along the platform towards the two running figures that had just lurched into view. “Neither did I…”