She found herself an indefinite time later—probably only seconds had passed, although it felt like hours—staring down at a spreading pool of blood around her feet. Blood, and the body of a man, dressed from head to foot in black. A long curve-bladed knife lay beside him. Behind him—“Margit!” It was Lady Margit, Olga’s chaperone. The fat lady had sung her last: There was nothing to be done. She still twitched, and maybe a modern ER room could have done something for her—but not here, not with a massive exsanguinating chest wound that had already stopped pumping. Probably the dorsal aorta or a ventricle, she realized. Oh hell. What was she doing here? For a moment, Miriam wished she believed in something—someone—who’d look after Margit. But there wasn’t time for that now.
She turned back to the assassin. He was alive—but no, that was just residual twitching, too. She’d actually nailed him through the heart with her first two shots, the second double-tap turning his chest into a bloody mess. There was already a stench of excrement in the air as his bowels relaxed. She pulled back his hood. The assassin was shaven-headed and flat-faced: He looks Chinese, she realized with a mixture of astonishment and regret. She’d just killed a man, but—there was a chain around his neck.
“What the fuck?” she asked through the haze of her headache and anxiety, then she pulled out a round sealed locket, utterly unadorned and plain. “Clan.” She put it in her pocket and glanced at Margit’s cooling body. “What on earth possessed you to come down here at midnight?” she asked aloud. “Was it a message for—” she trailed off.
They’re after Olga, too, she realized, and with that realization came both a sick fear. I have to warn Olga!
Miriam left the orangery and headed toward the palace, half-empty for the evening with its noble residents enjoying the king’s hospitality. She wouldn’t be able to world-walk from her own rooms any more, but if Brilliana was in, they’d have a little chat. She knows more than she’s saying, Miriam realized. Slowing. What a mess! The implication was just beginning to sink in. “Wheels within wheels,” she muttered. Her hands were shaking violently and the small of her back was icy cold with sweat from the adrenaline surge when she’d shot the assassin. She paused, leaning against the cold outside wall of the orangery while she tried to gather her composure. “He was here to kill me.” The chill from the wall was beginning to penetrate her jacket. She dug around in her pocket for spare cartridges, fumbling as she reloaded the revolver. Got to find Olga. And Brill.
And then she’d have to go undercover.
One way of looking at it was that there was a story to dig up, a story about her long-dead mother, blood feuds, and civil war, a tale of assassins who came in the night and drug-dealing aristocrats who would brook no rival. Just like any other undercover investigativeexpose—not that Miriam was used to undercover jobs, but she’d be damned if she’d surrender to the editorial whims of family politics before she broke that story all over them—at the Clan gathering on Beltaigne night.
“Get moving, girl,” she told herself as she pushed off the wall and headed back toward the palace. “There’s no time to lose…”
Part 5
Runaway
Encounter
The snow was falling thickly when Miriam reached the wall of the orangery, and she was shivering despite her leather jacket. It was dark, too, in a way that no modern city ever was—No streetlights to reflect off the clouds, she realized, fumbling with her pocket torch. The gate was shut, and she had to tug hard to open it. Beyond the gate, the vast width of the palace loomed out of the snow, row upon row of shuttered windows at ground level.
“Shit,” Miriam muttered in the wind. No guards, she realized. Wasn’t this the east wing, under the Thorold tower, where Olga was living? She glanced up at the towering mass of stonework. The entrances were all round the front, but she’d attract unwelcome attention going in. Instead she trudged over to the nearest window casement. “Hey—”
It wasn’t a shuttered window: It was a doorway, designed to blend in with the building’s rear aspect. There was a handle and a discreet bell-pull beside it. Cursing the architectural pretensions of whoever had designed this pile, Miriam tugged the rope. Something clanged distantly, behind the door. She stepped sideways and steeled herself, raising her pistol with a sick sense of anticipation in her stomach.
Rattling and creaking. A slot in the door, near eye level, squeaked as it moved aside. “Wehr ish—” quavered a hoarse voice.
“Unlock the door and step back now,” Miriam said, aiming through the slot.
“Sisch!”
“Now.” A click. Two terrified eyes stared at her for a moment, then dropped from view. Miriam kicked the door hard, feeling the impact jar through her foot. For a miracle, the elderly caretaker had dropped the latch rather than shooting the bolt before he ran: Instead of falling flat on her ass with a sore ankle, Miriam found herself standing in a dark hallway facing a door opposite. Did he understand me? She wondered. No time for that now. She darted forward, pulling the door closed behind her as she headed for the other end of the short hall. Then she paused. There was a narrow staircase beside her, heading up into the recesses of the servants’ side of the wing, but the old guy who’d let her in—gardener or caretaker?—had vanished through the door into the reception room off to one side. Right. Miriam took the stairs two at a time, rushed past the shut doors on the first landing as lightly as she could and only paused on the second landing.
“Where is everybody?” she whispered aloud. There should be guards, bells ringing, whatever—she’d just barged in and instead of security all she’d encountered was a frightened groundskeeper. The butterflies in her stomach hadn’t gone away, if anything they were stronger. Either her imagination was working overtime or something was very wrong.
There were doors up here, doors onto cramped rooms used by the servants, but also a side door onto the main staircase that crawled around the walls of the tower’s core, linking the suites of the noble residents. It was chilly, and the oil lamp mounted in a wall bracket hardly lightened the shadows, but it was enough to show Miriam which way to go. She pushed the side door open and stepped out onto the staircase to get her bearings. It was no brighter in the main hall: The great chandelier was unlit and the oil lamps on each landing had been turned right down. Still, she was just one flight of stairs below the door to Olga’s chambers. She was halfway to the landing before she noticed something wrong with the shadows outside the entrance. The door was open. Which meant, if Brill had gotten through in time—
Miriam crept forward. The door was ajar, and something bulky lay motionless in the shadows behind it. The reception room it opened onto was completely dark, but something told her it wasn’t empty. She paused beside the entrance, her heart hammering as she waited for her eyes to adjust. If it’s another hit, that would explain the lack of guards, she thought. Memories of a stupid corporate junket—a “team building” paintball tournament in a deserted office building that someone in HR thought sounded like fun—welled up, threatening her with a sense of déjà vu. Very slowly, she looked round the edge of the door frame.
Something or someone clad in light-absorbing clothes was kneeling in front of the door at the far end of the room. Another figure stood to one side, the unmistakable outline of some kind of submachine gun raised to cover the door. They had their backs to her. Sloppy, very sloppy, she thought tensely. Unless they knew there was nobody else in this wing because they’d all been sent away.
The inner door creaked and the kneeling figure stood up and flowed to one side. Now there was another gun. This is so not good, Miriam realized sickly. She was going to have to do something. Visions of the assassin in the orangery raising his knife and moving toward her—the two before her were completely focused on the door, preparing to make their move.
Then one of them looked around.
Afterward, Miriam wasn’t completely sure what had happened. Certainly she remembered squeezing the trigger repeatedly. The evil sewing-machine chatter of
automatic fire wasn’t hers, as it stitched a neat line of holes across the ceiling. She’d flinched, dazzled and deafened by the sudden noise, and there’d been more hammering and she’d fallen over, rolling aside as fast as she could, then what sounded like a different gun. And silence, once she discounted the ringing in her ears.
“Miriam?” called Olga, “is that you?”
I’m still alive, she realized, wondering. Taking stock: If she was still alive, that meant the intruders weren’t. “Yes,” she called faintly. “I’m out here. Where are you?”
“Get in here. Quickly.”
She took no second warning. Brill crouched beside the splintered wreckage of the door, a brilliant electric lamp held in one hand, while Olga stood to the other side. Her face cast sharp shadows that flickered across the walls as she scanned the room, gun raised. “I am going to have harsh words with the Baron,” she said calmly as Miriam scuttled toward them. “The guards he assigned me appear to have taken their leave for the evening. Perhaps if I a flog a few until the ivory shows, it will convince him of my displeasure.”
“They’re not to blame,” Miriam said hoarsely, feeling her stomach rise. The smell of burned cordite and blood hung in the air. “Brill?”
“I bought Kara hither, my lady. I did as you told me.”
“She did.” Olga nodded. “To be truthful, we did not need your help with such as these.” She jerked a thumb at the darkened corner of the room. “There’s an alarm that Oliver does not know of, the duke insisted I bring it.” The red eye of an infrared motion sensor winked at Miriam. “But I am grateful for the warning,” she added graciously.
“I—” Miriam shuddered. “In the orangery. An assassin.”
“What?” Olga looked at her sharply. “Who—”
“They killed Margit. Sent a note to lure me there, but I was expecting trouble.”
“That’s terrible!” Brill looked appalled: The light swayed. “What are we going to—”
“Inside,” Olga commanded. Brill retreated, and after a moment Miriam followed her. “Close the door, damn you!” Olga called, and after a moment a timid serving maid scurried forward and began to yank on it. “When it’s shut, bar it. Then get that chest braced across it,” Olga added, pointing to a wardrobe that looked to Miriam’s eyes to be built from most of an oak tree. She stopped and turned to Miriam. “This was aimed at you, not me,” she said calmly, lowering her machine pistol to point at the floor. “They’re getting overconfident. Margit—” she shook her head—“Brilliana told me of the note, you are lucky to have escaped.”
“What am I going to do?” Miriam asked. She felt dizzy and sick, the room spinning around her head. There was a stool near the fireplace: She stumbled toward it tiredly and sat down. “Who sent them?”
“I don’t know,” Olga said thoughtfully.
A door in the opposite wall opened and Kara rushed in. “My lady! You’re hurt?”
“Not yet,” Miriam said, waving her away tiredly. “The killer in the orangery was of the Clan, he had a locket,” she said.
“That could tell us which braid he came from,” Olga said. “Have you got it?”
“I think—yes.” Miriam pulled it out and opened it. “Shit.”
“What is it?” asked Olga, leaning close. “Oh my.”
Miriam stared at the locket. Inside it was a design like the knotwork pattern she was learning to loathe—but this one was subtly wrong. Different. A couplet with a different rhyme. One that she knew, instinctively, at a gut level, would take her somewhere else if she stared at it too long and hard. Not to mention making her blood pressure spike so high it would give her an aneurism—if she tried it in the next few hours.
She snapped it shut again and looked up at Olga. “Do you know what this means?” she asked.
Olga nodded very seriously. “It means you and Brilliana will have to disappear,” she said. “These two—” a sniff and a nod at the barricaded doorway—“are of no account, but this—” a glance at the locket—“might be the gravest threat to the Clan in living memory.” She frowned uncertainly. “I had not imagined that such a thing might exist. But if it does—”
“—They must stop at nothing to kill anyone who knows they exist,” said Brill, completing the thought for her. She looked at Miriam with bright eyes. “Will you take me with you wherever you go, mistress? You’ll need someone to guard your back…”
Two hours later.
Painkillers and beta-blockers are wonderful things, Miriam reflected as she glanced over her shoulder at Brill. She’d managed to relax slightly as Olga organized a cleanup, marshaling a barricade inside the doorway and chivying Kara and the servants into making themselves useful. Then Olga had pointed out in words of one syllable what this meant: that two factions, at least one of them hitherto unknown, were after her and it would be a good idea to make herself scarce. Finally, still feeling fragile but now accommodating herself to the idea, Miriam had crossed over. With her passenger. Who wore a smart business suit and an expression of mild bemusement. “Where are we?” asked Brill.
“The doppelgänger warehouse.” Miriam frowned as she transferred her locket to her left hip pocket. “Other side from my own chambers. Someone should have cleaned up by now.”
Fidgeting in her pocket, she pulled out some cartridges. She shuffled quietly closer to the edge of the mezzanine and looked over the side as she reloaded her pistol.
“This wasn’t what I expected,” the younger woman said in hushed tones, staring up at the dim warehouse lights.
“Stay quiet until I’ve checked it out.” She let a sharp note creep into her voice. “We may not be alone here.”
“Oh.”
Miriam crept to the edge of the platform and looked down. There was no sign of movement below, and the front door of the warehouse—past the dismounted trailer that served as a site office—was shut. “Wait here. I’ll call you down when it’s safe,” she said.
“Yes, Miriam.”
She took a deep breath, then darted down the stairs lightly, her gun raised. Nobody shot at her from concealment. She reached the bottom step and paused for a couple of seconds before stepping off the metal staircase onto dusty wooden floorboards, then duck-walked over to the side of the site office, out of sight from its windows and the door. Creeping again, she sidled around the wall of the trailer and crouched next to the short flight of steps leading in to it. She spent about a minute staring at the threshold, then stood up slowly, lowered her gun, and carefully returned it to her jacket pocket. She rubbed her forehead, then turned. “You can come down now, as long as you come right over here. Don’t touch anything with your hands!”
Brilliana stood up and dusted herself off, lips wrinkling in distaste as she tried to shake the warehouse cobwebs from the sleeve of her Chanel suit. Then she walked down the stairs slowly, not touching the guard rail. Her back was straight, as if she was making a grand entrance rather than a low-life departure.
Miriam pointed at the steps to the trailer. “Don’t, whatever you do, even think about going in there,” she warned. Her expression was drawn. Brill sniffed, conspicuously, then pulled a face in disgust.
“What happened there?”
“Someone was killed,” Miriam said quietly. Then she bent down and pointed to something in the threshold. “Look. See that wire? It’s hair-thin. Don’t touch it!”
“What wire—oh.”
A fine wire was stretched across the threshold, twelve inches above the floor.
“That wasn’t here when I came this way three hours ago,” Miriam said tonelessly. “And nobody’s been to clear up what’s inside. Going from what Roland was telling me, that means that first, this is a trap, and second, it’s not the kind where someone’s going to jump out and start shooting at us, and third, if you touch that wire, we probably both die. Wait here and don’t move or touch anything. I’m going to see if they’re belt-and-suspenders people.”
Miriam shuffled gingerly over toward the big wooden doors of the
warehouse—there was a smaller access door set in the side of one of them—with her eyes focused on the ground in front of her, every step of the way. Brill stayed where she was obediently, but when Miriam glanced at her, she was staring up at the lights, an odd expression on her face. “I’m over here,” she said. “I’m really on the other side!”
Miriam reached the inner door, bent low, looked up, and made a hissing noise through her teeth. “Shit!”
“What is it?” called Brill, shaking herself.
“Another one,” Miriam replied. Her face was ghost-white. “You can come over here and look. This is the way out.”
“Oh.” Brill walked over to the door, stopping short at Miriam’s warning hand gesture. She followed Miriam’s pointing finger, up at something in the shadows above the door. “What’s that?” she asked.
“At a guess, it’s a bomb,” said Miriam. “Probably a…what do you call it? A Claymore mine.” The green package was securely fastened to two nails driven into the huge main warehouse door directly above the access door cut in it. Miriam’s compact flashlight cut through the twilight, tracing a fine wire as it looped around three or four nails. It came back to anchor to the access door at foot level, in such a way that any attempt to open the door would tug on it. Miriam whistled tunelessly. “Careless, very careless.”
Brill stared at the booby trap in horror. “Are you just going to leave it?” she asked.
Miriam glanced at her. “What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “I’m not a bomb disposal expert, I’m a journalist! I just learned a bit about this stuff doing a feature on Northern Ireland a couple of years ago.” For a moment, an expression of helpless anger flashed across her face. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I know somewhere safe, but ‘safe’ is relative. We need to hole up where nobody is going to ask questions you can’t answer, assassins can’t find us, and I can do some thinking.” She glanced at the Claymore mine. “Once I figure out a way to open this door without killing us both.”
The Family Trade Page 29