The Revolution Business

Coup

Miriam cleared her throat. Begin with a cliche: This was the part she was edgy about. “I expect you’re all wondering why I asked you here,” she said, and smiled. Deathly silence. She studied her audience: forty or so of the most important movers and shakers of the inner families, mostly allies of the progressive faction. They were rapt, waiting for her explanation and uninclined to social chatter. Oh well, moving swiftly on . . . “It’s been a year since I turned up with a plan and a business and asked my uncle to call a meeting of the Clan Council.”

Heads nodded. Many of them had been at that particular meeting.

“You probably think I asked you here today because a lot has happened in the past year. In particular, that plan is dead in the water. I’m not going to assign blame or complain about it. Rather, I’d like to describe the situation we face right now, and propose a new plan. It’s drastic, because we’re in a bad position, but I think we can make it work. It’ll mean major changes to the way we live, but if we go through with it”—she shrugged—“we’ll be in a better position, going forward.” Too much padding, she thought nervously.

She leaned over the laptop—sitting on a lectern borrowed from the shrine to the household deities—and tapped the space bar. PowerPoint was running, but the projector—“Someone check that—”

Huw poked at the projector. “It’s on,” he confirmed. A moment later the screen beside her (a bleached, lime-washed canvas stretched flat within a monstrously baroque gilt picture frame) flickered to life.

“Okay.” Miriam focused on her notes. She’d spent almost twelve hours working on this presentation, far less than the subject deserved but as much as she’d been able to steal between her other duties over the past week. “Here’s what we know for sure: Almost ten months ago, Sir Matthias, who had been participating in at least one little conspiracy against his grace the duke, vanished. We’ve subsequently learned that he handed himself in to the DEA in return for immunity”—shocked muttering from the back of the room told her that not everybody present had known even that much—“and the DEA handed him on to some kind of black intelligence team called the Family Trade Organization. They’re the folks behind the series of raids that shut down the east coast network. A number of us have been compromised, including myself and her grace my mother. FTO subsequently captured at least two of our number and coerced them to act as mules, and at least one of their agents was in the grounds of the Summer Palace earlier this year when the pretender made his bid for the succession.”

She paused. The muttering hadn’t died down. “Can you save it for later?” she called.

“Silence!” This a deep bellow from Sir Alasdair, at the back corner of the room. “Pray continue, milady.”

“Thank you. . . . As I was about to say, anything we decide to do now has to take account of the facts that the US government is aware of us; considers us to be a threat; has developed at the very least a minimal capability to send operatives over here; and we can presume that the explosion at the Hjalmar Palace was also their work. And the news doesn’t get any better from there. Um.”

Next slide. “Now, I’m going to assume that we are all familiar with the long-lost cousins and the rediscovery of their, ah, home world. Before his illness, his grace the duke observed that one extra world might be an accident, but two were unlikely to be a coincidence; accordingly, he tasked Sir Huw here with conducting some preliminary research into the matter. What Sir Huw established, very rapidly, was that our early attempts to use the cousins’ variant knotwork design on the east coast in the United States had failed because of a doppelgangering effect of some kind. The cousins’ knot-work does, in fact, work, if you go far enough south and west. The world Sir Huw and his fellows discovered was—well, we don’t know that it’s uninhabited, but the presence of ruined buildings suggests that it used to be inhabited. Now it’s cold; Maryland is sub-arctic, with pine forests, and there’s residual radioactivity around the ruins—” She paused again, as the chatter peaked briefly. “Yes, this is, was, a high-tech world. Very high-tech.”

She ran the next slide. A photograph of a shattered white dome on a forested hillside. Fast forward again: structures inside the dome, indistinct in the gloom but clearly showing how enormous it was. Next slide: a sealed metal door set in a concrete wall. “On the other side of this door, Sir Huw discovered hard vacuum.” Next slide: a view down into the valley, thick mist swirling around the crack in the dome’s side. “A door into an apparently endless vacuum. The cloud you’re looking at is condensation where the air pressure around the dome drops. It’s too dangerous to approach closer, or we’d have gone back to try and seal it—our people were lucky to get away alive—but it’s not any kind of vacuum pump I’ve heard of. Our best guess is that it’s a gate that maintains a permanent connection between two worlds, rather than the transient connection we make when we world-walk. But we have no idea how it works or why there’s no, uh, world there. Maybe there used to be and the gate needs to be anchored in some way? We don’t know.”

The chatter had subsided into a stunned silence. Miriam glanced round the shocked faces in front of her. “Sir Huw has also conducted some topological analysis on the family knotworks,” she said forcefully. “He generated a series of variants and checked them—not to world-walk, but to see if he could feel them. He generated them using Mathematica. It turns out that the family knots can be derived by following a fairly simple formula, and there are three constants that, if you vary them, give rise to different knots that give him the family headache.” Next slide: a polynomial equation. “Apparently, this is the key to our ability—it’s the Alexander polynomial describing the class of knots to which ours belong. No, I don’t understand it either, but it turns out that by tweaking some of these coefficients we get different knots that include the two we already know of.

“Any given knot, starting in any given world, seems to act as a binary switch: Focus on it and you can walk from your starting world into a single destination determined by the knot you use.”

Someone had thoughtfully placed a wine goblet by her laptop. Miriam paused to take a sip.

“There’s more. The conventional wisdom about how much we can carry, about the impossibility of moving goods using a carriage or a wheelbarrow? It’s somewhat . . . wrong. It’s true that you can’t easily carry a larger payload, but with careful prior arrangement and some attention to insulators and reducing contact area you can move about a quarter of a ton. Possibly more, we haven’t really pushed the limits yet. I suspect that this was known to the postal service but carefully kept quiet prior to the civil war; the number of world-walkers who’d have to cooperate to establish a rival corvée, independent of our Clan authorities, is much smaller than the conventional wisdom would have it. If this was widely known it would have made it harder to control the young and adventurous, and consequently harder to retain a breeding population. So the knowledge was actually suppressed, and experimentation discouraged, and during the chaos of the civil war everyone who knew the truth was murdered. Maybe it was a deliberate strategy—knowledge is power—or just coincidence, or accident. It doesn’t matter; what I want to impress on you is that there are big gaps in our knowledge, and some of them appear to have been placed there deliberately. Only we’ve begun to piece things together, thanks to the recent destabilization. And the picture I’m building isn’t pretty.”

She hit the key for the next slide. “You heard—a year ago you heard—my views on the Clan’s business and its long-term viability. Smuggling drugs only works as long as they stay expensive, and as long as the people you’re smuggling them past don’t know what’s going on. We’ve seen evidence of a technology to build gates between worlds, and if there’s one thing the US government is good at, it’s throwing money at scientific research and making it stick. They know we’re here, and I promise you that right now there is a national laboratory—hell, there are probably ten—trying to work out how world-walking works. Worst case, they’ve already cracked the problem; best case . . . we may have years rather than months. But once they crack it, we, here in the Gruinmarkt, we’re finished. Those people can send two million tons of heavy metal halfway around the world to kick in doors in Baghdad, and we’re right on their doorstep.”

She paused to scan the room again. Forty pairs of eyes were staring at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. Her stomach knotted queasily. “I think we need to get used to the idea that it’s over. We can’t stay here indefinitely; we don’t have the leverage. Even if we can negotiate some kind of peaceful settlement with them—and looking at the current administration I’m not optimistic—it’d be like sleeping with an elephant. If it rolls over in its sleep . . . well. We need some ideas about what we can do. New Britain is a first approximation of an answer: It’s got vastly more resources than the Gruinmarkt, Nordmarkt coastline, and we’ve got contacts there. I propose that we should collectively go into the technology-transfer business. We’ve got access to American libraries and know-how, and if we put our muscle into it we can jump-start a technological revolution in New Britain. Operating under cover in the United States has brought very mixed results—it’s encouraged us to act like criminals, like gangsters. I propose that our new venture should be conducted openly, at least in New Britain. We should contact their authorities and ask for asylum. We could do it quietly, trying to set up cover identities and sneak in—but it would be much harder now that they’re in the middle of a war and a major political upheaval. If we were exposed by accident, the first response would likely be harsh, just as it has been in the United States.

“But anyway. That’s why I invited you here today. Last year I told you that I thought the Clan’s business was unsustainable in the long term. Today, I’m telling you that it has become a lethal liability in the present—and to explore an alternative model. I can’t do this on my own. It’s up to you to help make this work. But if it doesn’t, if we don’t pull ourselves together and rapidly start up a new operation, we’re going to be crushed like bugs. Probably within a matter of months.”

She took another sip from her wineglass. “Any questions?” A hand waved at the back, then another. The first, Huw, was one of her plants, but the other . . . “Earl Wu? You have something to say?”

“Yes,” rumbled the Security heavy. “You are an optimist. You think we can change our ways, yes? We will either have to run from the Americans, or negotiate with them.”

Miriam frowned. “Isn’t that obvious? There’s nothing else—”

“—They will want to strike back,” Carl interrupted. “Our backwoods hotheads. They are used to power and they do not spend enough time in America to understand how large the dragon is that they think they have cornered.” He tapped his forehead. “I got my education in the US Marine Corps. And I know these idiots, the ones who stayed home.”

“But how can they strike back?” Miriam stared at him. Brooding and grim as a warrior out of a Viking saga, Carl exuded absolute certainty and bleakly pessimistic skepticism.

“They can aim a sniper’s rifle as well as anyone. And there are always the Clan’s special weapons.” A ripple of muttering spiraled the room, rapidly ascending in volume. “Whose principle military value lies in not using them, but the conservatives have never been good at subtle thinking.”

“The Clan’s—” Miriam bit her tongue. “You’ve got to be joking. They wouldn’t dare use them. Would they?”

“You need to talk to Baron Riordan,” said Carl. “I can say no more than that. But I’d speak to him soon, your majesty. For all I know, the orders might already have been signed.”

It was early evening; the store had closed to the public two hours ago, and most of the employees had long since checked out and gone to do battle with the rush hour traffic or the crowds on the subway. The contract cleaners and stock fillers had moved in for the duration, wheeling their handcarts through the aisles and racks of clothing, polishing the display cases, vacuuming the back offices and storerooms. They had a long, patient night’s work ahead of them, as did the twoman security team who walked the shop floor as infrequently as they could. “It creeps me out, man,” Ricardo had explained once when Frank asked him. “You know about the broad who killed herself in the third floor john ten years ago? This is one creepy store.”

“You been drinking too much, man,” Frank told him, with a snort. “You been listenin’ to too many ghost stories, they ain’t none of your business. Burglars, that’s your business.”

“Not slipping and breaking my fool neck on all that marble, that’s my business,” Ricardo grumbled. But he tried to follow Frank’s advice all the same. Which was why he wasn’t looking at the walls as he slouched, face downturned, past the rest rooms on the third floor, just as the door to the men’s room gaped silently open.

D.C. played host to a whole raft of police forces, from embassy guards to the Metro Police to the secret service, and all of them liked to play dress-up from time to time. If Ricardo had noticed the ghost who glided from the rest room doorway on the balls of his feet, his first reaction might have been alarm—followed by a flood of adrenaline-driven weak-kneed shock as he registered the look: the black balaclava helmet concealing the face, the black fatigues, and the silenced pistol in a military holster.

But Ricardo did not notice the mall ninja stepping out into the gallery behind him. Nor did he notice the second man in SWAT-team black slide out of the toilet door, scanning the other way down the aisle between knitware and ladies’ formals with his pistol. Ricardo remained oblivious—for the rest of his life.

The first intruder had frozen momentarily in Ricardo’s shadow. But now he took two steps forward, drawing a compact cylinder from his belt. One more step, and Ricardo might have noticed something for he tensed and began to turn; but the intruder was already behind him, thrusting hard.

The security guard dropped like a sack of potatoes, twitching as the illegally overcharged stunner pumped electricity through him. At the thud, the second intruder twitched round hastily; but Ricardo’s assailant was quick with a hand signal, and then a compact Syrette. He bent over the fallen guard and picked up his left hand, then slid the needle into a vein on the inside of the man’s wrist and squeezed the tube. Finally he looked round.

“Clear,” said his companion.

“Help me get this into the stalls and position him.”

Together they towed Ricardo—eyes closed, breathing slowly, seemingly completely relaxed—back into the men’s room. A quick crisis conference ensued.

“You sure about this?”

“Yes. Can’t risk him coming round.”

“Shit. Okay, let’s get him on the seat and make this look good. On my word—”

“God-on-a-stick, he’s heavy.”

“Roll his sleeve up, above the elbow, while I find the kit.”

“You’re really going to do this.”

“You want to explain to the earl why we didn’t?”

“Good point. . . .”

There was a janitor’s trolley in front of the row of washbasins, with a large trash bin and storage for cleaning sundries. Drawing on a pair of disposable gloves, the second intruder retrieved some items from one of the compartments: a tarnished Zippo lighter, a heat-blackened steel spoon, a syringe (already loaded with clear liquid), and a rubber hose.

“Right, let’s do this.”

Ricardo twitched slightly and sniffed in his sleep as the men in black set up the scene. Then the syringe bit cold into his inner arm. “Wuh,” he said, dozily.

“Hold him!”

The first intruder clamped his hands around Ricardo’s shoulders; but the guard wasn’t awake enough to put up any kind of struggle. And after drawing blood, his executioner was finished. The intruders stepped back to examine their handiwork: the ligature around the upper arm, the empty syringe, the addict’s works on the floor by his feet.

“Shit. Never had to do that before.”

“Neither have I. Easier than a hanging, isn’t it?”

“Uglier, maybe. Let’s get this shit over with.”

Leaving the cubicle and its mute witness behind, the two men removed their masks and gloves and unhooked their holsters, stowing them in the janitor’s cart. “Okay, we’ve got six minutes before his number two notices that he hasn’t finished his round—if we’re unlucky. Let’s go find the freight elevator and get out of here.”

Intruder number one wheeled the heavy janitor’s cart out of the toilet block while his partner stood watch. This was the riskiest part of the procedure: The security guard was a known quantity, and one they’d been prepared for, but if they ran into a real cleaner they’d have to play things by ear. Too many disappearances in one night and someone, in the morning, might think to ask urgent questions. But they didn’t run into anyone as they wheeled the cart over to the unmarked door leading to the service passages behind the shop floor, and the battered and scraped freight elevator arrived without undue fuss.

The sales floors—the sections of the store open to the public—occupied the first through fifth floors, but it was an eight-story building. The upper levels housed a restaurant, then administrative offices and storage rooms for stock and old documents. When the elevator stopped on the eighth floor, intruder number one was the first to exit. He glanced both ways along the empty corridor. “Clear.”

“Alright, let’s shift this.”

Together they wheeled the cart along the corridor towards the building’s northeast edge. Most of the rooms on this level were offices, prized by the store managers for their view of Penn Avenue; none of these would do. But where there are offices there are also facilities—mail rooms, sluices for the janitors, storerooms. And presently the intruders found what they were looking for: a locked door which, once they opened it using the guard’s master key, proved to conceal a small, cluttered closet stacked with anonymous brown cardboard boxes. The odor of neglect hung over them like a mildewed blanket. “This one’s perfect—hasn’t been cleaned in weeks.”

“Good, let’s get this thing in here. . . .”

Together they manhandled the cart into the room, then busied themselves moving and restacking the boxes, which proved to be full of yellowing paper files. By the time they finished, the cart was nearly invisible from the doorway, concealed behind a stack of archives. “Okay, setup time. Let’s see. Epoxy glue first . . .”

Intruder number one busied himself applying fat sticks of epoxy putty to the wheels of the cart. By the time he finished, anyone attempting to remove it would find the wheels more than reluctant to budge, another mild deterrent to anyone wondering what an abandoned janitor’s cart was doing in the back of a storeroom. Then intruder number two went to work on the contents of the trash can, with a pen-sized flashlight and a checklist with an olive drab cover bearing the words TOP SECRET.

“Power lead one, positive . . . safety to ‘armed.’ Countdown, see table three. Yes. Yes, that’s right. Power lead three to input four. Armed. Timer self-test—green. PAL code is the default, eight zeroes. Let’s see if that works. Okay, that works. Timer master key to ‘set.’ Here goes . . .” The intruder carefully twisted a butterfly nut, unscrewing a small cover that concealed a thumbwheel. The detonation controller on the device predated LEDs: no bright lights and digital countdown here, just six plastic dials and a push button to latch the timer into place. Finally, after checking his wristwatch and double-checking his calculation he replaced the cover. “Okay, switching safety to ‘live.’ ” He winced slightly as he twisted the switch, but the only thing that happened was that a dull red pilot lamp next to the main power switch went out. “That looks okay. You got the putty?”

“Here.”

He took the tube of epoxy putty, squeezed a strip out, and kneaded it into place over the thumbwheel securing the timer wheels, then under and around the safety switch. Once the putty hardened, it would take a hammer and chisel to free up the controls—and the device itself was tamper-resistant: pulling out wires or cracking the case would trigger it.

Intruder number one looked at him with wide, spooked eyes. “You realize what we’ve just done, cuz?”

“Yeah. Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Methodical as always, his last action before they caught the elevator back down to the toilet—and thence to the wooden scaffold in a swamp in the Sudtmarkt—was to lock the door, and then empty half a tube of Krazy glue into the keyhole.

The guard would, of course, be discovered, but the body of a junkie was unlikely to trigger a tear-down search throughout an entire department store. The locked door might be noticed, but if so, would either be ignored or generate a low-priority call to Facilities, that might or might not be responded to the same day. The rearranged boxes might be noticed, but probably wouldn’t be—nobody cleaned inside that room on a regular basis. And the out-of-place janitor’s cart might irritate someone into trying to move it, but in that case they’d discover its wheels were stuck and its contents were inconveniently heavy. True stealth, intruder number one’s superior had explained, is made of lots of little barriers that are not apparent to the enemy.

If anyone penetrated the final barrier and actually looked inside the waste bin in a janitor’s cart in a locked room on the top floor of a department store, they might discover a sleeping horror.

But they’d have to do it fast: The timer would count down to zero in less than eighteen hours.

“What have you not been telling me?”

Miriam leaned on the back of the visitor’s chair in the wood-paneled office, unwilling to sit down or comply with the usual polite rituals of an office visit. For his part, the office’s owner looked equally unhappy. Miriam’s arrival (accompanied by a squad of personal retainers, including both Brilliana and Sir Alasdair) had clearly disrupted his plans for the day.

“Lots,” Riordan snapped. Then he paused to visibly gather his wits. “Please excuse me, this is not a good time. . . .”

“It never is.” Miriam’s stomach churned. Dyspepsia was a constant companion right now, along with weird aches and odd food cravings. And she’d had to ride piggyback on one of her guards to get here, which indignity didn’t improve her mood. “I’m talking about the special weapons. I gather there are complications.”

Behind her, Brilliana shifted from foot to foot; Riordan leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and stared at her. It was a mannerism blatantly modeled on Angbard’s style. The poor bastard’s as out of his depth as I am, she realized. We’re both aping the absent experts.

“Someone blabbed,” he said flatly. “Tell me. I need to know.”

“It was—” Brill stopped abruptly at Miriam’s look.

“You don’t need to answer him,” Miriam told her. “Baron.” She fixed him with a stare of her own—this one not modeled on anyone, even her mother. “Here are the facts as I know them. Some idiot a generation ago sneaked a couple of our people through an Army or Air Force technical school and got them qualified in the care and handling of special weapons. More recently, someone else, also an idiot, decided that having a brace of special weapons to hand was a good idea; just knowing where to steal them in a hurry wasn’t good enough. Angbard trusted Matthias, Matthias had the keys to the kingdom, and when he defected he took at least one of the weapons as a fallback insurance policy. The Family Trade Organization sent it back to us, up near Concord. But it wasn’t the only weapon we’d stolen, and they want the others back. So where are they? You know who’s supposed to be in charge of them. What’s going on?”

Riordan wilted suddenly. “My lady. Please. Have a seat.”

“You’ve lost them, haven’t you?”

“Scheisse,” murmured Sir Alasdair. “Sorry.”

Riordan glanced at her bodyguard, then back at Miriam. “Not . . . exactly. I’m not in charge of them. The Clan Council entrusted them to someone else.”

“Oh.” Miriam rolled her eyes. “You’re going to tell me that after Angbard’s fuck up and in the absence of a track record showing where you stood they didn’t see fit to entrust you with them. So they gave them to that fuckup Oliver Hjorth to sit on.”

“Oliver’s not a fuckup.” Riordan’s tone was distinctly defensive. “I appreciate that you and he got off to a very bad start, that he’s seen fit to align himself with a faction that you have a predisposition against, and all the rest of it. But he is neither stupid or lazy, much less unreliable. Usually.”

“Usually.”

It hung in the air for a moment, before Riordan replied. “Nobody has seen him for two days.”

“Nobody has—” Miriam blinked. “You’re kidding. You’re Clan Security. You’re telling me you’ve lost track of the official the Council put in charge of half a dozen atom bombs?”

“Milady—” It was Brill.

“What is it?”

“He can’t—” Her eyes were pleading.

“Nobody can keep track of every member of the inner families,” rumbled Alasdair. “We don’t have the manpower.” Miriam looked round, to see him watching Riordan. “Nevertheless . . . something happened, did it not?”

“I was awaiting a report,” Riordan said reluctantly, “before calling a meeting of the Committee of Regents. And the full Council, if necessary. It is not just his lordship who is proving hard to contact.”

“Who’s missing?”

“Oliver, Earl Hjorth. Baron Schwartzwasser. His lordship of Gruen, Baron ven Hjalmar. About half a dozen past and present soldiers of this very office who are absent without leave, two-thirds of the Postal Committee, various others—don’t look so shocked; it’s a goodly cross section of the conservative faction, but not all of them. I happen to know that Baron Julius is sitting on the bench in the royal assizes today, and when I raised the matter he professed ignorance convincingly. My lady, they might be attending a private party, for all I know. Their political views are not a sufficient reason to condemn them, in the absence of any other evidence.”

“But you don’t know where the bombs are.” Riordan looked pained. Miriam leaned towards him. “And there are rumors,” she hissed. “A lot of whispering about revenge and honor. I’m not deaf, I’ve got ears to hear this stuff with. What do you think is going on?”

Riordan tensed, and she thought for a moment that he was about to reply, but at that moment the door opened. “I said we weren’t to be—oh. My lady.” He rose to his feet as Miriam turned.

“Helge? What are you doing here?” Olga glanced round angrily as she closed the door. “I see.” She focused on the office’s owner. “My lord, we need to talk about Plan Blue, right now. Helge, I beg of you, please excuse us—”

“It’s too late for that.” Riordan frowned. “Helge was just asking me about—about Plan Blue.”

“Plan Blue?” Miriam echoed.

Alasdair cleared his throat. “Is that the contingency plan for—” He cleared his throat again, and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh scheisse,” said Brill, despair in her voice.

“The bastards have activated it,” said Olga, her voice tightly controlled. “And I do not recall being invited to a plenary session to approve such action. Do you? It’s unforgivable!”

“Plan Blue?” Miriam repeated.

“Excuse me.” Riordan nodded at her. “My apologies, my lady, but I must make a call.” He lifted the telephone handset and began to dial, then paused. “That’s funny. There’s no tone.”

“Give that to me.” Miriam reached for it. The handset was dead, mocking her. “Um, you’ve got a dead line. Could you have been cut off by accident, or is that too improbable?”

“Enemy action,” said Sir Alasdair. “My lady, over here.” He moved swiftly, gesturing Miriam away from the window and moving to stand where she’d been a moment before.

“Otto Schenck admitted it to, to one of my sources,” Olga added as Riordan poked at his desktop computer, a frown spreading on his face. “Boasted, belike, he said they’re going to send the enemy their king’s head on a plate—”

“It’s not going to work,” Brill whispered.

“What’s not going to work?” Miriam rounded on her tensely. “What are you talking about?”

“Why now?” Brill frowned. “Why are they doing this now?” She looked at Miriam. “It’s something to do with your grandmother, my lady. Her visit the other day. That was no coincidence!”

“What do you—”

“We need to get out of here!” Brill raised her voice, piercing and urgent. “Listen, everybody! This is a setup! We need to leave the building right now!”

“Why—” Riordan was standing up.

“She’s right, go, now!” Olga grabbed his arm.

“My lady. This way.” Alasdair yanked the door open and pulled Miriam along behind him.

“But where are we—” Miriam stopped arguing and concentrated on not stumbling as he powered along the corridor towards a fire door. “Alasdair! No!” Visions of claymore mines flashed through her mind as he stopped dead.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he assured her with a sharkish grin. “I checked this one before you arrived. Besides, I don’t think they want to kill us. Immobilize us and send us a message, perhaps, but they’re not going to risk killing the heir.” He shoved down on the emergency bar and pushed the door open. In the distance behind them, a tinny siren began to wail. “After me, if you please.”

Sir Alasdair ducked round the door, then pronounced the area clear. They piled down the fire escape to the car park at the back of the small office building, Brill and Olga trailing behind. “What exactly is Plan Blue?” Miriam demanded breathlessly. “Where’s Riordan?”

“He’s got other things to do,” said Olga. “My lady Brilliana, please take your mistress somewhere safe.”

“Where—”

“—Plan Blue?”

“Plan Blue is the usage case for the Clan deterrent,” Brill explained as they climbed into Sir Alasdair’s Explorer. “A decapitation strike at the enemy.”

“Oh Jesus. Tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means.”

“I fear I cannot.”

“Olga, what is Riordan doing?”

“He’s going to find a phone.” She grinned, humorlessly. “Oh, there he is now. . . .”

Miriam turned her head to see Riordan round the side of the building, holding a briefcase. He was walking towards them. Olga popped the door.

“Drive,” he said, climbing in. “I’ve got to make a call. Once it connects, they’ll be trying to trace us, so on my word pull into a car park so I can ditch this thing.”

Brill stared at the case as if it contained a poisonous reptile. “Is this safe?” she asked.

“No.” Riordan didn’t smile. “You were right about it, Olga.”

The truck was already moving as Riordan opened the briefcase. “What’s that?” asked Miriam.

“A special phone.” Brill pulled a face. “Not safe.”

“Indeed.” There was a tray in the case, with a cell phone—in several pieces—nested in separate pockets. One of them contained a small, crude-looking circuit board with a diode soldered to it; another contained a compact handset.

“Why did we leave the office?” asked Miriam.

“Can’t use this phone while stationary,” Riordan grunted. “And the opposition cut our lines. A nuisance measure, I think, but the timing is worrying; I think they were watching you to see if you would take their bait. And you did.”

“Bait?” She shook her head, bewildered.

“You came to see me, about Plan Blue. I do not believe that is an accident.”

“Bastards,” she mumbled under her breath. Louder: “It was your man Carl.”

“Thank you,” Riordan said gravely. “Alright, I am going to talk to the enemy now.” He picked up the handset, flicked a switch on the small circuit board, and poked at the exposed keypad of the vivisected phone. “Dialing . . .” The sound of a ringing phone filled the truck’s cab, coming from a speaker in the briefcase.

“Hello?” The voice answering the phone was cold.

“I was told that you can send a message to the White House,” said Riordan. “Is that correct?”

Miriam’s skin crawled as she waited for the reply.

“Correct,” the voice said drily. “To whom am I speaking?”

“You can call me the Chief of Security.”

“And you may call me Dr. James. Are you calling to surrender?”

“No, I’m calling to warn you that your meddling has produced an overreaction from our conservative faction. They’ve activated a plan which—fuck.”

The line had gone dead; simultaneously, the LED on the circuit board had lit up, burning red.

“They did it,” Brill said, fascinated. “The bastards.” Her actual word, in hochsprache, was considerably stronger.

“Next drive-through, please,” Riordan called to Sir Alasdair. “I am afraid you are right, milady.”

“What was that?” Miriam asked, staring at the LED.

“Something one of our artificers put in to replace the ten grams of C4 wired across the earpiece,” said Olga. “Is it not an ingenious little assassination weapon?”

“But we”—Miriam stared in horror—”we were going to warn them!”

“Maybe they don’t want warning?” Sir Alasdair commented.

“But we—” Miriam stopped. “We’ve got to do something! Do you know where the bombs are?”

“No,” said Olga.

“That’s the whole point of Plan Blue,” Riordan added. “It’s a procedure for deployment. Nobody knows everything about it; for example, I don’t know the precise target locations. It was designed so that it can’t be disrupted if the commanders are captured, or if one of the bomb emplacement teams is captured.”

“But that’s insane! Isn’t there any way of stopping it?”

“Normally, yes, if the chain of command was operating. But someone appears to have decided to cut us out of the loop. I fear we are facing a coup assisted by people inside Security, my lady. I have some calls to make. . . .”

“We can warn them,” said Olga, causing at least three people to ask, “how?” simultaneously.

“Your friend, Mr. Fleming,” she added, glancing sidelong at Miriam. “He is inside their security apparat.”

“So was that, that man. On the phone.” Miriam stared at Riordan, who was busily unplugging components in the briefcase and fiddling with something that looked alarmingly like a pyrotechnic flare.

“Yes, but Fleming will know how to bypass him,” Brill said thoughtfully. “He will know how to escalate a bomb threat and sound a general alert. His superior may be playing insane games, but I believe he is still trustworthy.”

The Explorer turned a corner. “Stopping in a minute,” called Sir Alasdair. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” said Riordan, depressing a button on the flare and closing the briefcase. He latched it shut, then spun the combination wheels. “We have two minutes until we require a fire extinguisher.”

“You won’t need them.” Alasdair was already slowing, his turn signal flashing. “Okay, go.” The car park outside a 7-Eleven was deserted.

Riordan popped the door, lowered the briefcase, and then kicked it away from the truck. “Go yourself,” he said. He was already opening another mobile phone, this one reassuringly unmodified. “Duty chief? This is the major. I have some orders for you. The day codes are—”

Miriam rubbed her temples. “Anyone got a cell phone?” she asked.

“I have,” said Olga. “Why?”

“Unless you can’t live without it, I want to call Mike.”

“But we can—”

“I said I want to call Mike!” Miriam snarled. “When I’ve spoken to him you can put me back in my padded box to gestate while you get down to finding those fucking bombs and arresting or shooting whoever stole them, but I should be the one who talks to Mike.”

“Why—”

“Because I’m the only one of us he’s got any reason to trust,” she said bleakly, “and I’m afraid I’m going to burn him.”

The clinic room could have been a bedroom in a chain hotel, if not for the row of sockets on the wall behind the bed—piping in oxygen, vacuum, and other, less common utilities—and for the cardiac monitor on a stand beside it, spreading leads like creepers to each of the occupant’s withered branchlike limbs. Outside the sealed window unit, the late afternoon sunshine parched the manicured strip of grass that bordered this side of the clinic; beyond it, a thin rind of trees dappled the discreet brick wall with green shadows.

The man in the bed dozed lightly. He’d been awake earlier in the day, shaking in frustration as the speech therapist tried to coax words out of his larynx, and the effort—followed by an hour with the physiotherapist, working on the muscles in his damaged left arm, and then a light lunch served by a care assistant who carefully spooned each mouthful into his mouth—had tired him out. He’d been in his late sixties even before the stroke, his stamina reduced and his aches more noticeable with every morning. Since the stroke, things had only gotten worse. Afternoon naps, which he’d once disdained as suitable only for kindergartners, had become a regular daily fixture for him.

Something—a small movement, or an out-of-place noise—brought him to consciousness, though he could not say why. Perhaps the shadow of a bird fluttering before the window glass disturbed him, or footsteps in the corridor outside: In any case, his eyelids flickered open, staring at the ceiling overhead. “Urrr.” He closed his mouth, which had fallen open as he slept, and reached for the bed’s motor controller with his left hand. His eyes twitched from side to side, scanning the angles and planes of the space surrounding him, looking for intrusions. His thumb twitched, pushing the headboard motor control, and the bed began to whine, raising him towards a sitting position.

“Good afternoon, old man.” The visitor closed the clinic room door carefully, then approached the bed, standing where its occupant could see him.

“Urr . . . doc.” Surprise and doubt sparked in the old man’s eyes. “Doc-tor!”

“I wanted to take a last look at you. You know, before the end.”

“You. End?” The visitor had to lean close to make out the words, for Angbard’s speech was garbled, the muscles of his lips and tongue cut loose by the death of nerves in his brain. “Wher’ guards?”

“They were called away.” The visitor seemed amused. “Something to do with an emergency, I gather. Do you remember Plan Blue?”

“Wha—”

The visitor watched as Angbard fumbled with the bed’s controller. “No, I don’t think so,” he said, after a moment. Reaching out, he pulled the handset away from the duke’s weakened fingers. “Your aunt sends her regards, and to tell you that our long-standing arrangement is canceled,” he said, and stood up. “That may be sufficient for her, but some of us have been waiting in line, and now it’s my turn.”

“Scheisse!”

The duke made a grab for the emergency cord, but it was futile; he was still deathly weak and uncontrolled on his left side, and his right hand clawed inches short of the pull. Then the visitor grabbed the pillow from behind his head and rammed it down onto his face. It was a very uneven struggle, but even so the old man didn’t go easily. “Fucking lie down and die,” snarled the visitor, leaning on him as he tried to grab the duke’s flailing left hand. “Why can’t you do something right for once in your life?”

He was answered by a buzzer sounding from the heart monitor.

Breathing heavily he levered himself off the bed; then, lifting the pillow, he shoved it under the duke’s lolling head before turning to stare at the monitor. “Hmm, you do appear to have lost your sinus rhythm altogether! Time to leave, I think.” He stared at the corpse in distaste. “That’s a better end than you deserved, old man. Better by far, compared to the normal punishment for betrayal. . . .”

He breathed deeply a few times, watching the buzzing heart monitor. Then Dr. ven Hjalmar opened the door, took a deep breath to fill his lungs, and shouted, “Crash cart, stat! Patient in cardiac arrest!” before turning back to the bed to commence the motions of resuscitation.

Mike had been accumulating leave for too long; taking some of it now wouldn’t strike anyone in human resources as strange, although it was a fair bet that someone higher up the tree would start asking questions if he didn’t show up for work within a week.

In the meantime he went home, still numb with shock from the disclosures buried on the cassette tapes. It was, he thought, time to make some hard choices: Collusion between officials and the bad guys was nothing particularly new, but for it to go so high up the ladder was unprecedented. And it would be extraordinarily dangerous for someone at his level to do anything about it. Or not—and that was even worse. Dr. James is in WARBUCKS’s pocket, Mike reminded himself. And he gave me those tapes, not some other, more qualified analyst. If I’m lucky he did it because he considers me trustworthy. More likely . . . A vision kept flickering in his mind’s eye, of Colonel Smith, in all candor, telling Dr. James, “Mike’s a bit squirrelly about you. Nothing to worry about, but you should keep an eye on him.” And Dr. James, with that chilly reserved look in his eye, nodding and making a note by his name on the org chart: disposable resource.

Mike was under no illusions about the taskmaster Dr. James worked for: a determined, driven, man—ruthless would not be an exaggeration. He had a fire in his belly and a desire to bend history to his will. With his doctrine of a unitary executive and his gradual arrogation of extraordinary powers granted by a weak presidency, he’d turned the office of vice president into the most powerful post in the government. And he had good reason to silence anyone who knew of his covert connection to the Clan: good reason, even, to silence the Clan themselves for good. He’s an oilman, and he knows they’re sitting on all the oil that was ever under Texas, untapped, Mike realized. And now he’s got a machine for getting there. It’s crude today, but who knows what it’ll be like tomorrow? He’s got to be thinking, who needs Iraq, anyway? Or Saudi Arabia?

Mike wasn’t naïve: He knew that the most addictive drug, the deadliest one, the one that fucked people up beyond redemption every time, was money. And I’m between an addict and the most powerful fix in history. . . .

That afternoon and evening, he meticulously searched his apartment, starting by unplugging all the electrical appliances and checking sockets and power supplies for signs of tampering. Then he began to search the walls and floors, inch by inch, looking for bugs. And while he searched, he thought.

The picture looked grimmer the longer he looked at it. Thinking back, there’d been the horror-flick prop they’d found in a lockup in Cambridge, thick layers of dust covering the Strangelovian intrusion of a 1950s-era hydrogen bomb, propped up on two-by-fours and bricks with a broken timer plugged into its tail. Nobody ever said what it had been about, but the NIRT inspectors had tagged its date: early 1970s, Nixon administration. What kind of false-flag operation involves nuking one of your own cities? How about one designed to psyche your country up for a nuclear war with China? Except it hadn’t happened. But the Clan have a track record of stealing nukes from our inventory. Mike shuddered. And WARBUCKS had backed BOY WONDER’s plan to invade Iraq, even after Chemical Ali had offed his cousin Saddam and sued for peace on any terms. And according to some folks who Mike wasn’t yet prepared to write off as swivel-eyed loons, the oil had something to do with it.

He slept uneasily that night, his dreams unusually vivid: an injured princess in a burning medieval palace, her face half-melted by the nuclear heat-flash, telling him, “I’ll call when I can,” as he tried to pull his leg from a man-trap and reached down to lever apart its jaws, only to find it was a skull, a skull biting his legs, Pete Garfinkle’s skull, horribly charred by the bomb that had set this off, and if he couldn’t get away the next nuke would fry him—

The next morning he rose, late and groggy, and went back to work. Around ten o’clock he finally found what he’d been looking for: a pinhole in the living room wall that had been all but concealed by the frame of a cheap print that had come with the apartment. Mike passed it by, continuing his search. It would be perfectly obvious what he was doing, and there was no point in showing any sign of having discovered the camera. Either it was being monitored, in which case they’d simply replace it with another the next time he went out, or the survey had been terminated, in which case there was nothing to worry about. He leaned towards the latter case (keeping a watch on an apartment was an expensive business, requiring at least six full-time agents on rotation) but he had to assume the former, especially if Dr. James considered him unsound. He could have farmed it out to Internal Affairs, told them I’m suspected of espionage, he thought bleakly. In which case, he was providing them with lots of circumstantial evidence that he was overdue for a vacation in Club Fed; but that couldn’t be avoided. Federal prison might actually be an improvement over the alternatives, if WARBUCKS decided Mike needed to be silenced.

He’d finished the bug hunt—without finding any additional devices—and had moved into the washroom to process the pile of shirts and underwear that had been building up, when the phone rang.

Swearing, he made a grab for the handset and caught it before the answering machine cut in. He was half-expecting a recorded telesales announcement for his pains, but years of fielding out-of-hours emergencies had made him wary of dropping messages. “Mike?” asked a woman’s voice. “Are you there?”

“Yes”—it took a moment for the voice to register. “Don’t say your name!” he said hurriedly. “The line is probably being monitored.”

“And this cell phone is going down a storm drain as soon as I end the call.” She sounded nervous.

“Is it about the talk we had? Because if so, there’ve been some changes—”

“No, it’s not about that. Listen, Olga told me what you told her.”

“Olga told”—he paused, his tenuous train of thought perilously close to derailment—”what’s your situation?”

“I’m okay, my mom’s okay, and we know about the surprise in the cell phone your boss left for us.” Cold sweat drenched Mike’s back as she continued relentlessly: “It’s about the nukes. Your boss didn’t stay on the line long enough to let us pass on the news that all this send them a message shit has just blown up in a big way. The conservative faction are attempting to stage a coup and as part of their preparations they’ve stolen”—a pause—“no, they’ve deployed at least three, possibly four, of the bombs in their possession. Hang on“—the line went silent for a few seconds—”word is that they have decided to send you a message, and you’ve probably got less than twenty-four hours to find it.”

“If this is some kind of joke—”

“No, hang on, I’m relaying stuff. The target is probably Washington D.C., and the bombs only dial up to about one kiloton each. The bad guys are inside our chain of command; they activated a contingency plan and changed the targets. We’re currently trying to reestablish control and find out where the new target locations are, and as soon as we figure that out I will phone this land line number and pass the information on. I want you to know that we’re treating this as treason and it is not our intention to blow up any cities. Have you got that?”

“Wait, listen! Did you try telling—did you talk to Dr. James? Did you talk to him—”

“Yes, that’s the name. Can you pass this—”

Mike tried to swallow, his mouth was dry and sticky, and his heart was hammering. “Dr. James works directly for the vice president. WARBUCKS has been in collusion with someone in your inner families for a very long time—more than ten years—and he wants you all dead. There are tapes . . . I’m not trusted, I’m a disposable asset. Just saying. If what you’re telling me is true, Dr. James doesn’t care about losing a city block or two—it would make it easier to justify what’s coming down the line. Think of Pearl Harbor, think of 9/11. If I pass this up the line, they’ll bury it and I’ll show up in the morgue one morning.”

“Shit.” Her voice cracked. “Mike, I’m going to have to put the phone down in a minute, I’ve been on the line too long. What can we do?”

“Find the bombs. Drag them back to the Gruinmarkt and dump them in a swamp or something.” He stared bleakly at the kitchen sink. “I’m going to put the answering machine on now and go out. Got to go outside the chain of command and talk to some folks who might be able to do something useful.”

“If there’s anything we can do—”

“Just find the fucking bombs!” he snarled, and slammed the handset down on its charge point so hard that the battery cover pinged off.

“Shit.” He breathed deeply, staring at the phone. Coming from anyone else, he’d have questioned the sanity of the bearer of such news—but he knew Miriam. And he’d let his mouth run away with him, blabbing the truth about the tapes Dr. James had him listening in on. Never mind the pinhole camera: The phone line was bugged and even if nobody was monitoring it in realtime, the word would be out soon.

Mike went through into the living room, and then his bedroom, as fast as his cast would let him. (It was still itching, but nearly ready to come off; give it two weeks, said the doctor he’d seen the week before.) He collected his jacket and a small go-bag from under the bed, which held (among other things) a gun, a couple of fully charged and never-used cell phones, and a handwritten paper address book. “Who first?” he asked the air as he headed for the front door. I could try the colonel again, he thought dismally. Or . . . Agent Herz. She might go for it. But whether she’d listen to him was another matter: They’ll put the word out on me within an hour. That left the usual channels—he could go talk to the FBI or his former boss at the DEA field office in town, but again: They’ll think I’m crazier than a fruitbat once Dr. James gets through with my rep. He opened the front door.

I’m going to have to go to the press, he thought, and raised the remote on his car key chain, and had already begun to press the button just as a second thought crystallized in his mind: James is an old hand. What if he’s playing by the pre-Church Commission rules—

In the aftermath of the explosion, every car alarm within three blocks began to sound, accompanied by a chorus of panicking dogs and, soon enough, the rising and falling of sirens; but they were too late.

And two hours and fourteen minutes later, in a locked storeroom on the top floor of a department store on Pennsylvania Avenue, a timer counted down to zero. . . .