The Revolution Business

Oath of Fealty

After they left the clinic, Brill drove Miriam back to the motel. Miriam could hear the questions tumbling over and over in her head: The silence was so loud that it roared. And now, the talk, Miriam thought, keyed up and tense. It had to come to this sooner or later. . . .

“You said you wanted to talk,” Brill said into the abrupt emptiness that flooded the car’s interior as she turned off the ignition. She studied Miriam in her mirror, carefully avoiding eye contact.

“Yes, yes I did.” Miriam opened her door. “Do you have time to come in?”

“Of course.” Brilliana looked as if she were walking on eggshells. “I imagine this must be hard to adjust to.”

“That’s the least of it.” Miriam held her tongue as they entered the lobby and walked to her door. “Come in.”

Brill had rented a suite for her; Miriam took the sofa, and the younger woman perched on the armchair opposite. For a few seconds they stared at each other in silence. Finally, Brill cracked. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Miriam kept her eyes on her. “I have three questions, Brill.”

“Three? Is that all?”

“I think so.” Because if you can’t convince me I can trust you, then . . . well, that was an interesting question, and not one Miriam wanted to consider just yet. “You work directly for Angbard, don’t you? Tell me, are you sworn to him personally? A vassal under his patronage?”

Brilliana looked at her warily. “You never asked before.” She rubbed her cheek thoughtfully. “What makes you ask?”

Miriam licked her lips. “I’d like a straight answer. Please.”

Suddenly Brill’s expression cleared. “Oh!” The penny had clearly dropped. “I am ranked as a sergeant in the Clan’s Security, that is clear enough. But you have the rest of it, too: His grace swore me to his personal service.” She looked Miriam in the eye. “To be discharged by death, or his word.”

“Ah.” Miriam nodded, very slightly. So Mom was telling the truth. A tension in her chest began to unclench.

“Why do you ask?” Brill repeated.

Miriam took a deep breath. “You—you, and Huw, and my mother, and the tooth fairy, for all I know—say you want me to trust you. Well, right now I find I’m very short on trust. I’ve been locked up, beaten, I’ve been impregnated”—she paused to breathe again—“then suddenly a couple of weeks later it’s all ‘trust us, we want you to lead us’! And—factional differences or not—I’m having a hard time buying it. So. Second question. Why did Angbard sic you onto me?”

Brill closed her eyes, startling Miriam. “Crone give me patience”—she opened her eyes again—“Helge, he’s your uncle. He married but his wife died years ago and they produced no offspring—don’t you get it?”

“But surely—”

“Surely nothing! Have you no idea how violent the civil war was? His line were targets! Your mother was targeted, her husband killed! The whole reason for Clan Security is to prevent anything like that happening ever again! Meanwhile, you, you—” Brill’s shoulders were shaking. “Please!”

“Please, what?” Miriam stared, bewildered. “It’s this social thing again, isn’t it? What am I doing wrong this time?”

With a visible effort, Brilliana collected herself. “You’re your mother’s heir,” she said quietly. “How hard is it to see that you’re also your uncle’s heir? Or at least his closest surviving descendant by distaff—you’re a woman, so you won’t inherit everything, but you’re attached to the title to a whole damned duchy. God-on-a-stick, Helge, don’t you get it? Henryk wanted you under his thumb because it gave him a weapon against his grace! And it shut you up, but they’ve always had a casual way with their women,” she added with offhand venom. Then she looked back at Miriam. “I am a sworn vassal of your uncle, Helge. Sworn to protect his interests. You are his next of kin. Need I to draw you a diagram?”

“Uh.” Oh boy. Miriam turned it all over in her mind. Damn, I’m really going to have to work on figuring out how these extended family links work! “But your direct loyalty is to him, not to me. Right?”

“That’s the picture,” Brilliana said sharply. “I love you like a sister, but you can be so slow at times!”

“Well, then.” Miriam glanced at the window. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing the wrong card game all along,” she said slowly. Then she looked back at Brill. “I’ve been here a year and I haven’t so much as sworn a swineherd to my service. Right?”

Brill’s eyes widened. “You can’t. I’m sworn to his grace, unto the death—his or mine.”

Miriam nodded, satisfied. Thanks, Mom. “I understand. But his grace is clearly ill—possibly on his deathbed?”

Brill nodded jerkily.

“Well, then. I believe there is a thing called an oath contingent, yes?”

“Who told you about that?”

“Look.” Miriam leaned forward. “What are you going to do if—when—my uncle dies?”

“But that’s different!” It came out almost as a wail.

“Not according to my mother.” Miriam pinned her in place with a stare. “In the old days, oaths contingent were quite common—to ensure a secure succession in event of an assassination. The contingent liege’s orders are overridden by those of the first lord living. Yes?”

“I suppose so. But—”

“Brill.” Miriam paused. “This is my third question. Did his grace give you any orders that would bring you into a conflict of loyalty if you were sworn to me by an oath contingent?”

The younger woman looked at her, wide-eyed as a doe in the headlights of a truck. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Uh-oh.” Miriam flopped back on the sofa. She rubbed her forehead. “Well, there goes that good—”

“Wait.” Brill raised a hand. “You would not have raised the oath contingent unless you planned to live among us, would you?”

Miriam steeled herself. “I need sworn vassals to defend me if I’m going to live in the Gruinmarkt. I was hoping—”

“Well.” Brill took a deep breath. “Then the conflict of interests does not arise.” She grimaced. “His grace directed me—while you were in New Britain—to bring you back, alive or dead. Preferably alive, but—”

“Whoa.” Miriam stared at her. “Do I want to hear this?”

Brill shuffled, uncomfortable. “You are not planning to offer your services to the American government. Are you?”

“I—” Miriam flashed back to what Mike had told her in the walls of a smoldering palace. “No. No way.”

“Well.” Brill held out her hands across the coffee table. “In that case, I can swear to you. If”—she made eye contact—“you still want me?”

Miriam swallowed. (“It’s a bit like a marriage,” Iris had told her. “A big, rowdy, polygamous one, arguments and all. Minus the sex.”) “This means you’re going to be part of my household and responsibilities for life, doesn’t it?”

“Once his grace dies or otherwise discharges me.” Brill ducked her head.

“Then”—Miriam reached out and caught her hands—”I accept. Your oath of loyalty, contingent on the word of your first liege.” She stood, slowly, pulling Brill with her. “We can swear to each other in front of witnesses later, can’t we?”

“Whenever you ask, milady.” Brilliana bowed low and kissed the backs of both her hands. “There, that is the minimal form. It is done.” Then she smiled happily.

“Tell me,” said Miriam. “I was a real idiot not to do this when I first arrived, wasn’t I? There are other people I should be swearing, aren’t there?”

“Yes, milady.” Brill straightened up, her eyes glistening. Then she leaned forward and, surprising Miriam, kissed her on the mouth. Before Miriam could recoil or respond she took a step away. “It’s going to be so much fun working for you! I can tell.”

Barely a week had passed, but the atmosphere in this meeting was darker by far than its predecessor. The venue was the same—an air-conditioned conference room in a Sheraton hotel adjoining a conference center in the middle of downtown Boston, with heavily padded leather chairs arranged around a boardroom table. And now as then, the attendees were dressed as conservatively as a party of merchant bankers. But there were fewer of them today, barely a round dozen; some of the faces had changed, and two of the newcomers were women. It was, however, none of his business, decided the hotel facilities manager who was seeing to their needs; they were good customers—quiet, serious, utterly unlikely to start shooting each other or snorting crank in the rest room.

Which just went to show how misleading appearances could be.

There were thirteen seats at the table today, but one of them—at its head—was vacant. The broad-shouldered man sitting to its left nodded to a younger fellow at the far end. “Rudi, please shut the door. If you would pay attention, please?”

The quiet conversation ebbed as Rudi sat down again, the door securely locked behind him. “I think we’ll begin with a situation report,” Riordan said quietly. “Lady Thorold, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Of course.” Olga opened the leather conference folder she’d brought to the meeting; in a severe black suit, with her long blond hair tied back, she resembled a trial lawyer rather than an intelligence officer. “The duke’s medical condition is stable. That’s the good news.”

Olga read from her notes: “The average thirty-day survival figures for subarachnoid hemorrhage are around sixtenths. His grace has already come through the main danger period, but the doctors agree his chances of full recovery are slight. He’s paralyzed on the left side, and his speech is impaired. They can’t evaluate his mental functioning yet. He may recover some of his faculties, but he’s likely to be mobility-challenged—probably wheelchair-bound, possibly bedridden—for life. They’ve scheduled a second MRI for him tomorrow to track the reduction of the thrombosis, and they should have more to report on Friday.” She managed the medical terms with an ease that might have surprised Miriam, had she been present; but then, she’d checked her carefully cultivated airhead persona at the door. “The balance of medical opinion is that his grace will definitely not be able to resume even light duties for at least thirty days. Even if he makes a significant recovery, he is unlikely to be back in the chair”—her eyes tracked to the empty seat at the head of the table—“for half a year.”

The attentive silence she’d been speaking into dissolved in a buzz of expressions of shock and sharply indrawn breath. Earl Riordan brought his hand down on the edge of the table. “Silence!” he barked. “We knew it was going to be bad. Thank you, milady.” He grimaced. “We have a chain of command here. I recognize that I am not equipped to replace his grace in his capacity of director of security policy, or in his management of the intelligence apparatus, but for the former we have the Council of Lords, and for the latter”—he glanced sideways: Olga inclined her head—“there is a parallel line of authority. For the time being I will assume operational command, until his grace resumes his duties or I am removed by order of the Council. Is that clear?”

There was a vigorous outbreak of nodding. “Have you met with the Council yet?” asked Carl, with uncharacteristic hesitancy.

“That’s where I’m going as soon as we conclude this meeting.” Riordan leaned back. “Does anyone else wish to comment? On the record?”

“You’re going to find it hard to convince the stick-in-the-muds to accept Lady Thorold as acting director of intelligence,” remarked Carl, his arms crossed.

“They’ll like my second-choice candidate even less.” Riordan bared his teeth. “Are you questioning her fitness for the role, or merely her sex?”

Carl shook his head, his expression shuttered. “Just saying,” he muttered.

Riordan glanced round the table as Olga closed her file and leaned back, trying to keep all expression off her face.

“I’ve worked with her for the past six years and I would not propose her for this position if I doubted her capability,” Riordan said sharply. “The empty pots in the conservative club can rattle as much as they please; it’s as good an issue as any to remind them that this is not business as usual.”

There was a general rumble of agreement. “You’re in the saddle now,” Olga murmured in Riordan’s ear. “Just try not to fall off.”

Riordan flushed slightly. “Right. Next item.” He glanced up. “Rudi. Your flying machine. You are hereby ordered to prepare a report on the feasibility of equipping, supplying, training, and operating a squadron of no fewer than six and no more than twelve aircraft, within the Gruinmarkt. Tasks will be scouting and surveillance, and—if you can work out how to do it—medical evacuation. Your initial corvée budget is twelve tons. I want it on my desk, with costing, in three days’ time. I understand that training pilots and observers takes time, so I want a list of candidate names—outer families for preference, we can’t routinely divert world-walkers to a hazardous auxiliary duty. Any problems?”

Rudi looked awestruck. “I can do it! Sir.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” Riordan didn’t smile. “Kiril, Rudi’s got priority over everything except first-class post; even ammunition resupply. We need an airborne capability; I’ve discussed it with Count Julius already, and it’s going to happen. So. Next item, the Hjalmar Palace. Carl. What can you tell us?”

The heavyset man shrugged lazily, almost indolently. Riordan took no offense; he’d worked with him long enough to know better than to think it an insult. “The palace is gone. Sorry, but that’s all there is to say about it. Snurri and Ray took samples and we had them analyzed, and they found fallout. Cesium-131, strontium-90, lots of carbon-14. Snurri and Ray indented for new boots and fatigues and I’ve sent them to the clinic, just in case.”

“Scheisse.” Nobody but Olga really noticed Riordan’s one-word curse, because nobody but Olga was listening to anything but the sound of their own voices. Clan Security, though a highly disciplined organization in the field, tended to operate more like a bickering extended family behind closed doors. “Silence!” Riordan whacked the tabletop. “Let him finish, damn you!”

“Thank you, cuz.” Carl’s face twisted in something horribly close to a smile. “They couldn’t measure the crater because there isn’t one. The keep was blown out, completely shattered, but the inner walls of the sunken moat caught the blast, and the foundations are solid stone, all the way down. But we got a good estimate of how big it was from the remains the pretender’s men left on the field. Half a kiloton, and it probably went off in the vicinity of the treason room we used for the assault. Sir, do you know what’s going on? Because if so, an announcement might quell some of the crazier rumors that are floating around. . . .”

Riordan sighed. “Unfortunately, the rumors hold more than a grain of truth.” This time around he didn’t try to maintain order. Instead, he leaned back and waited, arms crossed, for the inevitable flood of questions to die down to a trickle. “Are we ready now?” His cheek twitched. “Milady, I believe you have a summary.”

Olga glanced around the table. Twelve pairs of eyes looked back at her with expressions ranging from disbelief to disgust. “Eighteen years ago the Council, sitting in camera with the duke present, discussed the question of our long-term relationship with the United States. Of particular concern was the matter of leverage, if and when the American rulers discovered us.”

She picked up a glass and filled it from the jug on the table. Nobody spoke; curiosity was, it seemed, a more valuable currency than outrage. “A variety of strategies were discussed. Our predecessors’ reliance on access to the special files of the American investigator Hoover was clearly coming to an end—Hoover’s death, and the subsequent reorganization of the American secret police, along with their adoption of computerized files, rendered that particular channel obsolete. Computers in general have proven to be a major obstacle: We can’t just raid the locked filing cabinets at night. So a couple of new plans were set up.”

She saw a couple of heads nodding along at the far end of the table and tried to suppress a smile. “I believe Piotr has just put two and two together and worked out why the duke took it upon himself to issue certain career advice. Piotr spent six years in the USAF, not as an aerial knight but as a black-handed munitions officer. Unfortunately he did not enter precisely the speciality the duke had in mind . . . but others did.” More of her audience were clearly putting two and two together. Finally, Rudi raised a hand. “Yes?”

“I looked into this. Nukes—they’re not light! You couldn’t world-walk one across. At the least, you’d have to disassemble it first, wouldn’t you?”

“Normally, yes.” She nodded. “But. Back in the sixties, the Americans developed small demolition devices, the SADM, for engineers to use in demolishing bridges in enemy territory. Small is a figure of speech—a strong man could carry one on his back for short distances—but it was ideal for our purposes. Then, in the seventies, they created a storable type, the FADM, to leave in the custody of their allies, to use in resistance operations. The friends they picked were not trustworthy”—an understatement: The Italian fascists who’d blown up the Bologna railway station in the 1970s had nearly sparked a civil war—“and the FADMs were returned to their stores, but they weren’t all scrapped. A decade ago we finally placed a man in the nuclear inspectorate, with access. He surveyed the storage site, organized the doppelganger revetment, and we were in. Reverse-engineering the permissive action locks took less than two years. Then we had our own nuclear stockpile.”

She raised her glass, drank deeply. “The matter rested with his grace until the last year. It appears that the traitor Matthias had access to the procedures, and to his grace’s seal. He ordered one of the devices removed from storage and transported to Boston.” She waited as the shocked muttering subsided. “More recently, we learned that the Americans had learned of this weapon. Our traitor had apparently threatened them with it. They indicated their displeasure and demanded our cooperation in retrieving it. I think”—her gaze flickered towards Carl—“that most likely they found it and, by doing so, decided to send us a message. Either that, or our traitor has struck at us—but he is no world-walker. Meanwhile, we know the American secret police hold some of ours prisoner.”

“But how—”

“What are we going to—”

“Silence!” The word having had its desired effect, Riordan continued, quietly. “They can hurt us, as they’ve demonstrated. They could have picked the Summer Palace in Niejwein. They could have picked the Thorold castle. We know they’ve captured couriers and forced them to carry spies over, but this is a new threat. We don’t know what they can do. All we know for certain is that our strongholds are not only undoppelgangered, they may very well be traps.”

He fell silent. Carl cleared his throat. Deceptively mildly, he asked, “Can we get our hands on some more?”

Olga, who had been rolling the empty water glass between her hands, put it down. “That’s already taken care of,” she said.

“In any event, it’s not a solution,” Riordan said dismissively. “At best it’s a minimal deterrent. We can hurt them—we can kill tens of thousands—but you know how the Americans respond to an attack. They are relentless, and they will slaughter millions without remorse to avenge a pinprick, should it embarrass them. Worse, their councils and congresses are so contrived that they cannot surrender. Any leader who advocates surrender is ridiculed and risks removal from office. And this leader—” He shook his head. “They haven’t felt the tread of conquering boots on their land in more than a lifetime, and for most of a lifetime they have been an empire, mighty and powerful; there is a level at which they do not believe it is possible for them to be beaten. So if we’re going to confront them, the last thing we should do is fight them openly, on ground of their own choosing.”

“Such as the Gruinmarkt,” said one of the new faces at the table, who had been sitting quietly at the back of the room until now. Heads turned towards him. “My apologies, milady. But . . .” He shrugged, impatiently. “Someone needs to get to the point.”

“Quite right,” muttered Carl.

“Earl Wu.” Riordan looked at him. “You spoke out of turn.”

“Then I apologize.” Wu looked unrepentant.

The staring match threatened to escalate into outright acrimony. Olga took a deep breath. “I believe his lordship is referring to certain informed speculation circulating in the intelligence committee over the past couple of days,” she said. “Rumors.”

“What rumors?” Riordan looked at her.

“We take our ability for granted.” Olga raised a hand to her throat, to the thin gold chain from which hung a locket containing the Clan sigil. “And for a long time we’ve assumed that we were limited to the two worlds, to home and to here. But now we know there are at least two more worlds. How many more could there be? We didn’t know as much as we thought we did. Or rather, much of what we thought we knew of our own limits was a consequence of timidity and custom.” The muttering began again. “The Americans have told their scientists to find out how our talent works. They’ve actually told us this. Threatening us with it. They don’t believe in magic: If they can see something in front of their eyes, then they can work out how it happens. They’ve demanded our surrender.” She licked her lips. “We need contingency plans. Because they might be bluffing—but if they’re not, if they have found a way to send weapons and people between worlds by science, then we’re in horrible danger. The Council needs to answer the question, what is to be done? And if they won’t, someone’s going to have to do it for them. That someone being us.”

Getting to see the colonel was a nontrivial problem; he was a busy man, and Mike was on medical leave with a leg that wasn’t going to bear his weight any time soon and a wiretap on his phone line. But he needed to talk to the colonel. Colonel Smith was, if not a friend, then at least the kind of boss who gave a shit what happened to his subordinates. The kind who figured a chain of command ran in two directions, not one. Unlike Dr. James and his shadowy sponsors.

After James’s false flag ambulance had dropped him off at the hospital to be poked and prodded, Mike had caught a taxi home, lost in thought. A bomb in a mobile phone, to be handed out like candy and detonated at will, was a scary kind of message to send. It said, we have nothing to talk about. It said, we want you dead, and we don’t care how. We don’t even care much who you are. Mike shuddered slightly as he recalled how Olga’s cynicism had startled him: “How do we know there isn’t a bomb in the earpiece?” she’d asked. Well, he’d denied it indignantly enough—and now she’d think he was a liar. More importantly, Miriam’s Machiavellian mother, and whoever she was working with—would also be convinced that the diplomatic dickering the colonel had supposedly been trying to get off the ground was a sting. Dr. James has deliberately killed any chance we’ve got of negotiating a peaceful settlement, he realized. He’s burned any chance of me ever being seen as a trustworthy—honorable—negotiator. And he’s playing some kind of double game and going behind Smith’s back. What the hell is going on?

Mike’s total exposure on the other side of the wall of worlds was measured in days, but he’d seen enough (hell, he’d smelled, heard, and tasted enough) to suspect that Dr. James was working on very incomplete information—or his plans had very little to do with the reality on the ground of the Gruinmarkt. Worse, he seemed to be just about ignoring the Clan, the enigmatic world-walkers who’d been a huge thorn in the DEA’s collective ass for the past thirty years or more; it was almost as if he figured that a sufficient display of shock and awe would make them fold without a fight. But in Mike’s experience, beating on somebody without giving them any way out was a great way to make them do their damnedest to kill you. Mike’s instinct for self-preservation told him that pursuing the matter was a bad idea, and normally he’d have listened to it, but he had an uneasy feeling that this situation broke all the rules. If Dr. James was really off the rails someone needed to call him on it—and the logical person wasn’t Mike but his boss.

It took Mike a day to nerve himself to make his move. He spent it at home, planning, running through all the outcomes he could imagine. “What can possibly go wrong?” he asked Oscar, while making a list of bullet points on a legal pad. The elderly tomcat paused from washing his paw to give him such a look of bleak suspicion that Mike had to smile. “It’s like that, huh?”

The next morning, he shoehorned himself into his car and drove carefully to a nearby strip mall, which had seen better days, and where, if he remembered correctly, there might still be some beaten-up pay phones tucked away in a corner. His memory turned out to be correct. Staking out a booth and using his mobile as an address book, he dialed a certain exdirectory number. Seven minutes, he told himself. Ten, max.

“Hello?” It wasn’t Colonel Smith, but the voice was familiar.

“Janice? It’s Mike Fleming here. Can I please have a word with the colonel?”

There was a pause. “Mike? You’re on an unsecured line, you know that?”

“I have a problem with my home phone. Can you put me through?”

A longer pause. “I—see. Please hold.” The hold music cut off after half a minute. “Okay, I’m transferring you now.”

“Mike?” It was Colonel Smith. He tensed. Until now, he hadn’t been entirely sure it was going to work, but now he was committed, upcoming security vetting or no. I could be throwing my career away, he thought, feeling mildly nauseous.

“Hi, boss.”

“Mike, you’re still signed off sick. What’s up?” Smith sounded concerned.

“Oh, nothing much. I was wondering, though, if you’d be free to do lunch sometime?”

“If I’d be—” There was a muffled sound, as of a hand covering a mic. “Lunch? Oh, right. Look, I’m tied up right now, but how about we brown bag it some time soon?”

Mike nodded to himself. Message received: The last time the colonel had dropped round with a brown bag there’d been a bomb and a gun in it. “Sure. It’s not urgent, I don’t want to drag you out of the office—how about next Wednesday?” It was one of the older field-expedient codes: ignore negatives, treat them as emphasis. Mike just hoped the colonel had been to the same school.

“Maybe sooner,” Smith reassured him. “I’ll see you around.”

When he hung up, Mike almost collapsed on the spot. He’d been on the phone for two minutes. His arms were aching and he could feel the sweat in the small of his back. Shit. He pulled out the antibacterial gel wipes and applied them vigorously to the mouthpiece of the phone—he’d held the receiver and dialed the numbers with a gloved hand, but there were bound to be residues, DNA sequences, whatever—then mentally crossed it off his list of untapped numbers, for good. That left the polygraph, but, he figured, raising chain-of-command concerns with one’s immediate superior isn’t normally a sacking offense. And Dr. James hadn’t told him not to, either.

He’d hoped the colonel would deduce the urgency in his invitation and he was right. Barely half an hour after he arrived home the doorbell rang. Too soon, way too soon! his nerves gibbered at him as he hobbled towards the entryphone, but the small monitor showed him a single figure on the front step. “Come on up,” he said, eyeballing the top of his boss’s head with trepidation. A moment later, he opened the door.

“This had better be good,” said Smith, standing on the front step with a bag that contained—if Mike was any kind of judge—something from Burger King.

Mike hung back. “To your knowledge, is this apartment bugged?”

“Is—” Smith raised an eyebrow, an expression of deep concern on his face: concern for Mike’s sanity, in all probability. “If I thought it was bugged, I wouldn’t be here. What’s up?”

“Maybe nothing. To your knowledge, was there anything hinky about the mobile phone you dropped off with me last time you visited.”

“Was there”—Mike had never really seen a man’s pupils dilate like that, up close—“what?” He could see irritation and curiosity fighting out in Smith’s face.

“Let me get my coat. You’re driving.”

“You bet.” Smith shook his head. “This had better be good.”

The colonel drove a Town Car—anonymous, not obviously government issue. He didn’t say a word until they were a mile down the road. “This car is not bugged. I swept it myself. Talk.”

Mike swallowed. “You’re my boss. In my chain of command. I’m talking to you because I’m not from the other side of the fence—Is it normal for someone higher up the chain of command to do a false-flag pickup and brief a subordinate against their line officer?”

Smith didn’t say anything, but Mike noticed his knuckles whiten against the leather steering wheel.

“Because if so,” Mike continued, “I’d really like to know, so I can claim my pension and get the hell out.”

Smith whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “You’re telling me someone’s been messing with you—Dr. James. Right?”

“That’s the one.”

“Shit!” Smith thumped the center of the steering wheel so hard Mike twitched. “Sorry. I thought I’d cured him of that.” He flicked a turn signal on, then peeled over onto an exit ramp. “What did he want you to do?”

“It’s what I’ve already done, as much as anything else—the mobile phone you gave me, to pass on to the other side? Did you know it had a bomb in the earpiece? At least, that’s what Dr. James told me. He also told me he was reassigning me to some kind of expeditionary force. Do you know anything about that?”

“You sure about the phone?” Smith sounded troubled.

“That’s what he said. It gets worse. When I handed the thing over, my contact actually came out and asked me to my face whether there was a bomb in it. I said no, of course, but it sounds like they’re about as paranoid as the doctor. If they check it and find there is a bomb in it . . .”

“That’s a matter for the policy folks to deliberate on,” Smith said as he changed lanes. “Mike, I know what you’re asking and why, and I’ve got to say, that’s not your question—or mine—to ask. Incidentally, you don’t need to worry about any fallout; we’ve got a signed executive order waiting to cover our asses. But let me spin you a scenario? Put yourself in the doctor’s shoes. He knew they had a stolen FADM and he wanted it back, and he had to send them a message that he meant business. You were talking to their, their liberals. But we don’t want to talk to their liberals. Liberals are predisposed to talk; the doctor wants to get the attention of their hard-liners, get them to fold. We’d already told them that we wanted the weapon back. Negotiation beyond that point was useless: They could hand it over and we’d think about talking, but if not, no deal. So . . . if you look at it from his angle, a phone bomb would underline the message that we were pissed and we wanted our toy back. To the doctor’s way of thinking, if they found it, no big deal: It underlines the message. If it worked, waxing one weak sister would send a message to their other faction that we mean business. At least, that’s how he works.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel air bag cover.

“With respect, sir, that’s crazy. The Clan doesn’t work that way; what might work with a criminal enterprise or a dictatorship is the wrong way to go about nudging a hereditary aristocracy. He’s talking about assassinating someone’s mother or brother. They’ll see it as cause for a blood feud!”

“Hmm. That’s another way of looking at things. Only it’s already out of date. Mike, you swore an oath. Can I rely on you to keep this to yourself?”

Fleming nodded, uncertain. “I guess so.” Part of him wanted to interrupt: But you’re wrong! He’d spent two stinking days running a fever in a horse-drawn carriage with Miriam’s mother and the Russian ice princess with the sniper’s rifle, and every instinct screamed that the colonel’s scenario setup was glaringly wrong—that to those folks, the political was personal, very personal indeed, and a phone bomb in the wrong ear wouldn’t be treated as a message but as grounds for a bloody feud played out by the assassination of public figures—but at the same time, the colonel obviously had something else on his mind. And he had a sick, sinking feeling that trying to bring conflicting facts to the colonel’s attention, much less Dr. James’s, would lead to dismissal of his concerns at best. At worst—don’t go there, he told himself.

“You didn’t hear this from me, and you will not repeat it, but a few days ago we did an audit. The bad guys didn’t stop at just one nuke. We’re fairly certain our quiver is missing six arrows—that’s how many are missing, including the one we recovered, and the MO was the same for each theft.”

“Six—shit! What happened?”

“Too much.” Smith paused for a few seconds, cutting in behind a tractor-trailer. “The doctor sent the one we found back to them: Another of his little messages. He has, it seems, got some special friends in Special Forces, and contacts all the way up to the National Command Authority. He’s gotten the right help to build his own stovepiped parallel command and control chain for these gadgets, and he’s gotten VPOTUS’s ear, and VPOTUS got the president to sign off on it. . . . Hopefully it killed a bunch of their troops. There’s been a determination that we are at war; this isn’t a counter-terrorism op anymore, nor a smuggling interdiction. They’ve even gone to the Supremes to get a secret ruling that Posse Comitatus doesn’t apply to parallel universes.

“To VPOTUS’s way of thinking, these guys are as much a threat to us as Chemical Ali was—hell, even more of a threat. The closest thing to a weapon of mass destruction he had was Saddam’s head on a stick, but he had to go, visibly and publicly, and these guys have to go, too. Even when it was just one nuke, if they’d given it back to us when we asked nicely, and sued for terms . . . it was going to be difficult. Anyway, there’s no use crying over spilt milk. The five remaining bombs aren’t enough to hurt us significantly—but they’re more than enough justification for what’s coming next. There’s a lab out west that’s been making progress on a gizmo for moving stuff between, uh, parallel universes. And you know what the price of gas is. If we can make it work, it’ll be a lot easier to get at the oil under their version of Texas than to deal with the Saudis. That’ll be what WARBUCKS is thinking, and it’s going to be what he’s telling James to expedite. When Wolfowitz gets through fixing up Iraq . . . do I need to draw you a diagram?”

At war. Mike shook his head. “So you’re telling me this is just another oil war? Has anyone told Congress that they’re supposed to have authorized this?”

“You know as well as I do that that’s not how things happen in this administration. They’re looking to our national security in the broadest terms, and when they’ve got their ducks lined up in a row, well: They’ve got a majority in Congress, they’re even in the Senate, and the other side have given them the most pliable minority leader in decades. Lieberman’s terrified of not looking tough on security issues, and lets WARBUCKS play him like a piano. That’s why the president’s style of leadership works: He decides, and then WARBUCKS gives him the leverage.”

“Not, he decides whatever WARBUCKS wants him to?”

Smith gave him an old-fashioned look. “That’s not for you or me to comment on, Mister Fleming. Either way, though, the narcoterrorism angle and the stolen nukes will make great headline copy if—when—it leaks out in public. We can call them Taliban 2.0, now with nukes: It’ll play well in Peoria, and the paranoia aspect—bad guys who can click their heels and vanish into thin air—is going to keep everyone on their toes. Bottom line is, those guys picked the wrong administration to mess with.” Smith glanced sidelong at Mike. “But I’m a lot less happy about Dr. James’s habit of going outside the chain of command.”

Mike nerved himself. “Aren’t you a bit worried that the doctor may be completely misreading how these people will react? They’re not narcoterrorists and they’re not hicks, they’ve got their own way of doing things—”

“It doesn’t matter how they respond,” said the colonel. “They’re roadkill, son. A decision has been made, at the highest level. We don’t negotiate in good faith with nuclear terrorists: We lie to them and then we kill them. The oil is a side issue. If you’ve got a problem with that, tell me now; I’ll find you a desk to fly where I can keep an eye on you and you don’t have to do anything objectionable.” The final word came out with an ironic drawl and a raised eyebrow.

For a bleak, clear moment Mike could see it all bearing down on him: a continent of lies and weasel-worded justifications, lies on both sides—Olga couldn’t have been as ignorant as she’d professed, not if six of the things were missing—and onrushing bloody-handed strife. From the administration on down, policy set by the realpolitik dictates of securing the nation’s borders and energy supplies . . . up against an adversary who had stolen nuclear weapons and dealt with enemies by tit-for-tat revenge slaying.

“I’m on board,” he said, holding his misgivings close to his chest. “I just hope those missing nukes show up.”

“So do I.” The colonel grimaced. “And so do the people we’ve got looking for them.”

BEGIN RECORDING:

“My lord Gruen, his lordship Oliver, Earl Hjorth.”

(Sound of door closing.)

“Ah, Oliver.”

My lord Baron! If you would care to take a seat? . . . We are awaiting her grace, and Baron Schwartzwasser. I think then we may proceed. . . .”

(Eighteen minutes pass. More people arrive.)

“. . . Let us begin.” (Clears throat.) “I declare this session open. My lord Gruen, you requested this meeting, I believe to discuss the recent incident in the northwest?”

“Yes, yes I did! Thank you, my lord. I have reports—”

“—It’s insupportable!”

“My lady? Do you have something you feel you must contribute, or can we hear Lord Gruen’s report first?”

“It’s insupportable!” (Vile muttered imprecations.) “Ignore me. I am just an old grandmother. . . .”

“Hardly that, my lady. Lord Gruen?”

“I am inclined to agree with her grace, as it happens: Her description of it is succinct. Here are the facts of the matter. The Pervert’s army split into three columns, which dispersed and harried our estates grievously. His grace Duke Lofstrom responded by dispersing small defensive forces among the noble households, but concentrating the main body of our Security corvée in the Anglische world as a flying column. He was most insistent that at some point the Pervert would bring his arms together to invest one of our great estates, in the hope of drawing us into a battle in which, outnumbered, we would fall.

“Despite our entreaties to defend our estates adequately and wipe out the attacking columns, he deliberately starved us of troops, claiming that he must needs give the Pervert a false, weak, picture of our strength of arms, and that in any case there were insufficient soldiers to defend all our households.”

(Sound of paper shuffling.)

“Despite one’s worst fears as to his motivation, I must concede that Isjlmeer and Nordtsman received no more succor than did Giraunt Dire and Hjalmar; the duke applied his neglect evenhandedly, failing to relieve his own party inasmuch as he also neglected our own. I do not, therefore, believe that there would be support for a move to relieve him in Committee, especially in view of the accuracy of his prediction. The Pervert

did

concentrate his forces to attack the Hjalmar Palace, evidently with treachery in mind, and in doing so he placed his army within reach of the duke’s flying column. Unimpeachable sources tell me that the Pervert’s forces had stolen machine guns, but were inadequately supplied and poorly deployed to resist the attack that Earl Riordan was preparing.”

(Throat clearing.)

“Yes, my lord?”

“Are you then confirming that, that Angbard’s strategy was

sound?

”

(Pause.)

“I would prefer to say that it wasn’t obviously

un

sound, my lord. Clearly, his parsimony in the defense of our estates bled us grievously. But equally clearly, if he

had

committed troops to our defense, he would have been unable to concentrate the forces he needed for a counterattack, and he would have ceded the initiative to the Pervert. It is possible that a more aggressive strategy of engagement would have borne fruit earlier, but one cannot be certain.”

“Oh.” (Disappointed.)

“Indeed.” (Drily.) “I am much more concerned by the unexpected outcome of the events at the fork in the Wergat. There is considerable confusion—the Anglischprache attack on the duke’s forces, the duke’s ictus, the exfiltration through the

other

Anglische realm with the connivance of the traitor family—and lastly, the, the

atomic bomb

. I was hoping my lord Hjorth might shed some light on that latter.”

(Muttering.) “My lords, my lady. If I may speak?”

Her grace: “You may speak until the cows come home, and convince no one.”

“Nevertheless, if I may speak? . . .”

(Conversation dies down.)

“Thank you. Of the duke’s condition, I shall speak later: As your representative on the security committee I believe I may brief you on the subject. But to get back to the matter in hand, my sources tell me that when the traitor Matthias fled to the Anglischprache king-president’s party nine months ago, he clearly gave them much more than anyone anticipated. Previous fugitives have been taken for madmen and incarcerated, or we have been able to hunt them down and deal with them—but Matthias appeared to vanish from the face of the earth. We now know that he flung himself on the mercy of the

Drug Enforcement Agency

, and by their offices, on a dark and sinister conspiracy of spies.”

(Shocked muttering.)

“There is worse. As you know, with the aid of those of our younger generation who have enlisted and served in the American armies, we have gained some knowledge of, and eventually access to, their atomic bombs. The weight and complexity of these devices, and the secrecy that surrounds their activation, transport, and use, defied us for many years, but in the second year of Alexis’s reign we finally infiltrated”—(muttering)—“a master sergeant in the Marine Corps, yes—enlisted and received special training—man-portable devices, designed for smuggling, with which to sabotage the enemies of the Anglischprache empire overseas in time of war—the, ah, Soviet Union. And these devices were stored securely, they thought, but without doppelgangering, as is to be expected of the ignorant. It was a delicate but straightforward task to build a bunker from which a world-walker could enter the storage cells—the hardest part was obtaining a treaty right to the land from the Teppeheuan, and the maintenance schedule for the bombs. From then on, of the twelve weapons, we ensured that six were stored on our side at all times, and rotated back into the Pantex store when they were due to be repaired.

“Then Matthias stole one of them.”

(More shocked muttering.)

“Order! Order, I say!”

“Thank you, my lord. If I may continue?”

(Pause.)

“Matthias ven Holtzbrinck was

trusted

. Nobody suspected him! He was Duke Lofstrom’s keeper of secrets. I must confess that in all fairness

I

thought him a man of the utmost probity. Be that as it may, Matthias ordered the removal of one of the weapons, and then hid it somewhere. We don’t know where because he covered his tracks exceedingly well: Perhaps one of the dead could tell us, but . . . anyway. Need I explain what the king-president’s men thought of their ultimate witch-weapon being stolen? I think we can guess. My sources tell me that they began negotiations with the duke with a threat, and that their spies have already been apprehended in the Gruinmarkt. Don’t look so shocked. Did you think our missing soldiers had betrayed us and sought refuge? Captivity and slavery—they have ways of compelling a world-walker”—(muttering)—“We face a determined enemy, and they showed just

how

determined they were at the Hjalmar Palace.”

“Then it was an atomic bomb?”

“Yes.”

(Uproar. Three minutes . . .)

“Order! Order, I say!”

“My lady? You have the floor.”

“This is insupportable! Gentlemen, we have known for many years that one day the Anglischprache would learn of our existence. But we cannot allow them to, to think they can tamper at will in our affairs! Sending, without warning, an atomic bomb, into a castle invested only hours earlier by the pride of our army, is a base and ignoble act. It is dishonorable! To live with this threat hanging over us is intolerable, and I submit that it is unthinkable to negotiate as one ruler to another with a king-president who would deliver such a stab in the back. If negotiations were in hand then they acted with base treachery. We act, now, as the largest faction of the Clan, and as rulers of the kingdom of Gruinmarkt, though the peace is not yet settled. We must secure our kingdom from this threat; if there is one thing I have learned in more than sixty years of politics and thirty years of war, it is that you cannot sleep peacefully unless your neighbor can be relied on to obey the same law as you do. The Americans are now, like it or not, our neighbors. We must therefore compel them to obey the law of kings.”

“My lady. What are you suggesting?”

(Coldly.) “One act of treachery deserves another. Do we not have arms? Do we not have a kingdom to defend? The American king-president—or rather, the power behind his throne—has declared war upon us and through us upon our domain and all those who live in it. We must make it clear that we will not be trifled with. The time for petty affairs of finance and customs is over. We must hurt the Americans, and hurt them so badly that their next king will not meddle lightly in our affairs.

“My lords. We have, in the course of this civil war, already found it necessary to kill one self-proclaimed king: even, one who would have reigned by blessing of the Sky Father. We must not, now, balk at the death of another lord who is an even greater danger to us than the Pervert. We must settle this matter with the Americans before they think to send their atomic bombs into the heart of Niejwein, aye, and every stronghold and palace in the land. And the best way to compel their rulers to negotiate in good faith is to demonstrate our strength with utmost clarity. My lords, you must decapitate the enemy. There is no alternative. . . .”

(Uproar.)

END RECORDING