The Trade of Queens tmp-6

by Charles Stross

  Attending the meeting was also easier, second time round. The morning after James Lee’s visit, Miriam rose early and dressed for a public excursion. She took care to look as nondescript as possible; to be mistaken for a woman of particular wealth could be as dangerous here as to look impoverished, and the sartorial class indicators were much more sharply defined than back in the United States. “I’m ready to go whenever you’ve got cover for me,” she told Sir Alasdair, as she entered the front parlor. “Two guards, one car, and a walkie-talkie.”

  “Emil and Klaus are waiting.” Sir Alasdair didn’t smile. “They’ll park two streets away and remain on call.” He gestured at the side table: “Lady d’Ost prepared a handbag for you before she went out.”

  “There’s no—” Miriam paused. “You think I’ll need this?” She lifted the bag, feeling the drag of its contents—a two-way radio and the dense metallic weight of a pistol.

  “I hope you won’t.” He didn’t smile. “Better safe than unsafe.”

  The steamer drove slowly through the streets and neighborhoods of a dense, urban Boston quite unlike the city Miriam had known; different architecture, different street names, different shops and businesses. There were a few more vehicles on the roads today, and fewer groups of men loitering on street corners; they passed two patrols of green-clad Freedom Rider militiamen, red armbands and shoulder-slung shotguns matching their arrogant stride. Policing and public order were beginning to return to the city, albeit in a very different shape. Posters had gone up on some of the high brick walls: the stern-jawed face of a balding, white-haired man. CITIZEN BURROUGHS SAYS: WE WORK FOR FREEDOM! Miriam hunched her shoulders against an imperceptible chill, pushing back against the bench seat. Erasmus had spoken glowingly of Citizen Burroughs. She found herself wishing fervently for him to be right, despite her better judgment.

  Miriam covered the last hundred yards, from the deceptive safety of the car to the door of Burgeson’s tenement building, feeling naked despite the contents of her bag and the presence of her backup team. It was odd: She couldn’t see any bodyguards or observers, but just knowing Erasmus wouldn’t be able to travel alone left her feeling watched. This time, however, she had a key. After turning it in the lock, she hastily closed the door behind her and climbed the stairwell Burgeson’s apartment shared with half a dozen other dwellings.

  His front door was locked. Miriam examined it carefully—it had become a habit, a kind of neurotic tic she’d picked up in the year-plus since she’d discovered her distinctly paranoid heritage—then opened it. The flat was much as it had been on her last visit; dustier, if anything, sheets covering most of the furniture. Erasmus wasn’t here yet. For no reason she cared to examine too closely, Miriam walked from room to room, carefully opening doors and looking within. The bedroom: dominated by a sheeted bed, walled with bookcases, a fireplace still unraked with spring’s white ash caked and crumbling behind the grate. A former closet, a crude bolt added inside the door to afford a moment’s privacy to those who might use the flushing toilet. The kitchen was big and empty, a tin bath sitting in one corner next to the cold coal-fired cooking range. There wasn’t much here to hang a personality on, aside from the books: Burgeson kept his most valued possessions inside his head. The flat was a large one by local standards—family-sized, suitable for a prosperous shopkeeper and his wife and offspring. He must have rattled around in it like a solitary pea in a pod. Odd, she thought. But then, he was married. Before the last clampdown. The lack of personal touches … How badly did it damage him? She shivered, then went back to the living room, which with its battered piano and beaten-up furniture gave at least a semblance of domestic clutter.

  It was distinctly unsettling to her to realize how much she didn’t know. Before, when she’d been an unwilling visitor in the Gruinmarkt and an adventurer exploring this strange other-Boston in New Britain, she’d not looked too deep beneath surface appearances. But now—now she was probably going to end her days living in this nation on the other side of time—and the thought of how little she knew about the people around her troubled her.

  Who are you dealing with and how do you know whether you can trust them? It seemed to be the defining paradox of her life for the past year or so. They said that blood was thicker than water, but in her experience her relatives were most likely to define themselves as enemies; meanwhile, some who were clearly supposed to be her enemies weren’t. Mike Fleming should have shanghaied her to an interrogation cell; instead, he’d warned her off. Erasmus—she’d originally trusted him as far as she could throw him; now here she was, waiting for him anxiously in an empty apartment. And she’d wanted to trust Roland, but he’d been badly, possibly irreparably, broken. She sniffed, wrinkling her nose, eyes itching—whether from a momentary twist of sorrow or a whiff of dust rising from the sofa, she couldn’t say.

  The street door banged, the sound reverberating distantly up the stairwell. Miriam stood, moving her hand to the top of her handbag, just in case. She heard footsteps, the front door opening, familiar sounds—Burgeson breathed heavily, moved just so—and she stood up, just in time to meet him in the living-room doorway.

  “You came,” she said, slightly awkwardly.

  “You called.” He looked at her, head tilted sidelong. “I could hardly ignore you and maintain that cover story?”

  “Yes, well—” She caught her lower lip between her teeth: What will the neighbors say? “The commissioner is visiting his mistress again”?—“I couldn’t exactly come and fetch you, could I? Hey, get your breath back. Do you have time to stay?”

  “I can spare a few hours.” He walked past her and dragged a dust sheet off the battered sofa. “I really need to sell up. I’m needed in the capital almost all the time; can’t stay here, can’t run the shop from two hundred miles away.” He sounded almost amused. “Can I interest you in a sherry?”

  “You can.” The thought of Erasmus moving out, moving away, disturbed her unaccountably. As he rummaged around the sideboard, she sat down again. “A sherry would be nice. But I didn’t rattle your cage just for a drink.”

  “I didn’t imagine you would.” He found a bottle, splashed generous measures into two mismatched wineglasses, and brought one over to her. He seemed to be in high spirits, or at least energized. “Your health?” He sat down beside her and she raised her glass to bump against his. “Now, what motivated you to bring me to town?”

  They were sitting knee-to-knee. It was distracting. “I had a visitor yesterday,” she said carefully. “One of the, the other family. The Lees. He had some disturbing news that I thought you needed to know about.”

  “Could you have wired it?” He smiled to take the sting out of the question.

  “I don’t think so. Um. Do you know a Commissioner Reynolds? In Internal Security?” Nothing in his facial expression changed, but the set of his shoulders told her all she needed to know. “James Lee came to me because, uh, he’s very concerned that his uncle, the Lee family’s elder, is cutting a deal with Reynolds.”

  Now Burgeson’s expression changed: He was visibly struggling for calm. He placed a hand on her knee. “Please, do carry on.”

  Miriam tried to gather her thoughts, scattered by the unexpected contact. “The Lees have had a defector, a renegade from our people. One with a price on his head, Dr. ven Hjalmar. Ven Hjalmar has stolen a list of—look, this is going to take a long time to explain, just take it from me, it’s bad. If the Lees can get the breeding program database out of him, they can potentially give Reynolds a couple of thousand young world-walkers within the next twenty years. There are only about a hundred of them right now. I don’t like the sound of Reynolds, he’s the successor to the old Polis, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Burgeson took a deep breath. “It’s a very good thing you didn’t wire me. Damn.” He took another breath, visibly rattled. “How much do the Lees know? About your people?”

  “Too much for comfort.” Despite the summer humidity, Miriam shivered. “More to the point, v
en Hjalmar is a murderous bastard who picked the losing side in an internal fight. I told you about what happened to, to me before I escaped—”

  “He’s the doctor you mentioned. Yes?” She felt him go tense.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that tells me all I need to know just now. You say he’s met Stephen Reynolds?”

  “That’s what James Lee says. Listen, I’m not a reliable source; I don’t usually bear grudges but if I run into the doctor again … and then there’s the question of whether James was telling the—”

  “Did he have any obvious reason to lie to you?” Burgeson looked her in the eye. “Or to betray confidences?”

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

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

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

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

  “What, he—”

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s more like it.”

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

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

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

  “On my wrist-ribbon.”

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

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

  “What are we looking for?” asked Huw.

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

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

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

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

  “Can you read its name?”

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