The Family Trade tmp-1

by Charles Stross

  Carefully, very slowly, she inched forward over the edge of the mezzanine floor and looked down. The ground floor of the warehouse was a maze of wooden cases and boxes. The mobile home that constituted the site office was blocked up in the middle of it. There was no sign of anybody about, none of the comforting noises of habitation.

  Miriam rose to a crouch and scurried down the stairs as quietly as she could. She ducked below the stairs, then from shadow to shadow toward the door.

  There was a final open stretch between the site office and the exit. Instead of crossing it, Miriam tiptoed around the wall of the parked trailer, wrinkling her nose at a faint, foul smell.

  The site office door was open and the light inside was on. Holding her gun behind her, she stood up rapidly and climbed the three steps to the door of the trailer. Then she looked inside.

  “Fuck!”

  The stench was far worse in here, and the watchman seemed to be smiling at her. Smiling? She turned away blindly, sticking her head out of the door, and took deep breaths, desperately trying to get her stomach back under control. Cultivate your professional detachment, she told herself, echoing a half-forgotten professor’s admonition from med school. Reflexes left over from anatomy classes kicked in. She turned back to the thing that had surprised her and began to make observations, rattled to her core but still able to function. She’d seen worse in emergency rooms, after all.

  It was the old guy she’d met with the clipboard, and he was past any resuscitation attempt. Someone had used an extremely sharp knife to sever his carotid artery and trachea, and continued to slice halfway through his spine from behind. There was dried blood everywhere, huge black puddles of it splashed over walls and floor and the paper-strewn desk, curdling in great thick viscous lumps-the source of only some of the smell, for he’d voided his bowels at the same time. He was still lying on top of his tumbled chair, his skin waxy and-she reached out to touch-cold. At least twelve hours, she thought, gingerly trying to lift an arm still locked in rigor mortis, but probably no longer. Would the intense cold retard the processes of decay? Yes, a little bit. That would put it before my last trip over here, but after I saw Paulette.

  “Goodfellas,” she whispered under her breath: It came out as an angry curse. During her night with Roland, someone had entered the warehouse, casually murdered the old man, climbed the stairs-breaking the hair-and then, what?

  Brought the attacker who’d gone up on the roof and tried to attack Olga? Then he came back later, crossed over to the other side, and emptied a pistol into the dummy made of pillows lying in her bed? Gone away? Correlation does not imply causality, she reminded herself and giggled, shocked at herself and increasingly angry.

  “What to do?” Well, the obvious thing was to use her most dangerous weapon. So she pulled out her phone and speed-dialled Roland.

  “Yeah?” He picked up at the fourth ring.

  “Roland, there’s a problem.” She realized that she was panting, breathing way too fast. “Let me catch my breath.” She slowed down. “I’m in the warehouse on the doppelganger side of my rooms. The night watchman’s had his throat cut. He’s been dead for between twelve and thirty-six hours. And someone-did you send me a note by way of the reception on the other side, saying to meet you in the orangery at Palace Thorold?”

  “No!” He sounded shocked. “Where are you?” She gave him the address. “Right, I’ll tell someone to get a team of cleaners around immediately. Listen, we’re wrestling alligators over here tonight. It looks like the Department of Homeland Security has been running some traffic analysis on frequent fliers looking for terrorists and uncovered one of our-”

  “I get the message,” she interrupted. “Look, my headache is that I planted a hair across the top step when I came through last night, and it was broken when I went back over this morning. I’m fairly sure someone from the Clan came here, killed the watchman, headed up to the mezzanine that’s on the other side of my suite-breaking the hair-and crossed over. There was another attempt to kill me in my suite last night, Roland. They want me dead, and there’s something going down in the palace.”

  “Wait there. I’ll be around in person as soon as I can get unstuck from this mess.”

  Miriam stared at the phone that had gone dead in her hand, paranoid fantasies playing through her head.

  “Angbard set me up,” she muttered to herself. “What if Roland’s in on it?” It was bizarre. The only way to be sure would be to go to the rendezvous, surprise the assassin. Who had come over from this side. Yes, but if they could get into her apartment, why bother with the silly lure?

  “What if there are two groups sending assassins?” she asked the night watchman. He grinned at her twice over. “The obvious one who is clearly a Clan member, and, and the subtle one-”

  She racked her brains for the precise number of paces from the stairs up to her room to the back door opening into the grounds of the palace. Then she remembered the crates laid out below. The entrance will be next door, she realized. She jumped out of the trailer with its reek of icy death and dashed across to the far wall of the warehouse-the one corresponding to the main entrance vestibule of the palace. It was solid brick, with no doors. “Damn!” She slipped around to the front door and out into the alley, then paced out the fifty feet it would take. Then she carefully examined the next frontage.

  It was a bonded warehouse. Iron bars fronted all the dust-smeared windows, and metal shutters hid everything within from view. The front door was padlocked heavily and looked as if nobody had opened it in years. ‘This has got to be it,” she muttered, looking up at the forbidding facade. What better way to block off the entrance to a palace on the other side? Probably most of the rooms behind the windows were bricked off or even filled with concrete, corresponding to the positions of the secure spaces on the other side. But there had to be some kind of access to the public reception area, didn’t there?

  Miriam moved her locket to her left hand and pulled out her pistol. “How the hell do they do this in the movies?” she asked herself as she probed around the chain. “Oh well.” She carefully aimed the gun away from her, at the hasp of the padlock. Then she pulled the trigger.

  The crack of the gun was deafeningly loud in the night time quiet, but the lock parted satisfyingly easily. Miriam yanked it away, opened the bolt, and pushed the door in.

  An alarm began to jangle somewhere inside the building. She jumped, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it She was standing at one end of a dusty linoleum-floored corridor. A flick of a switch and the dim lights came on, lighting a path into the gloom past metal gates like jail cell doors that blocked access to rooms piled ceiling-high with large barrels. Miriam closed the door behind her and strode down the corridor as fast as she dared, hoping desperately that she was right about where it led. There was a reception room at the end: cheap desks and chairs covered in dust sheets and a locked and bolted back door. It was about the right distance, she decided. Taking a deep breath, she raised her locket and focused on the symbol engraved inside it-

  – And she was cold, and the lights were out, and her skull felt as if she’d run headfirst into a brick wall. Snowflakes fell on her as she doubled over, trying to prevent the intense nausea from turning into vomiting. I did that too fast, she thought vaguely between waves of pain. Even with the beta-blockers. The process of world-walking seemed to do horrible things to her blood pressure. Good thing I’m not on antidepressants, she thought grimly. She forced herself to stand up and saw that she was just in the garden behind the palace-outdoors. Anyone trying to invade the palace by way of the doppelganger warehouse on the other side would find themselves under the guns of the tower above-if the defences were manned. But it was snowing tonight, and someone obviously wanted as few witnesses around as possible…

  An iron gate in the wall behind her was the mirror image of the door to the warehouse office. “Orangery,” she muttered through gritted teeth. She slid along the wall like a shadow, letting her eyes grow
accustomed to the night. The orangery was a familiar hump in the snow, but something was wrong. The door was ajar, letting the precious heat (and how many servants did it take to keep that boiler fed?) escape into the winter air.

  “Well, isn’t that just too cute,” she whispered, tightening her grip on her pistol.’ Welcome to my parlor said the spider to the fly, she thought. The style is all wrong. Assassin #1 breaks into my mom and shoots up the bedding. Twice. Assassin #2 tries to bounce Olga into shooting me for him, then sends an RSVP on an engraved card. Assassin #3 shows me an open door. Which of these things is not like the other? She shivered-and not from the cold: the hot rage she’d been holding back ever since she’d first been abducted was taking hold.

  The wall at this end of the orangery was of brick, and the glassy arch of the ceiling was low, beginning only about ten feet up. Miriam gritted her teeth and fumbled for finger and toe holds. Then she realized there was a cast-iron drain pipe, half-buried under the snow where the wall of the orangery met the corner of the inner garden wall. Aha. She put the pistol in her pocket and began to climb, this time with more confidence.

  On top of the wall she could look out across a corrugated sheet of whiteness-the snow was settling on the orangery faster than the heat from below could melt it. Leaning forward, she used her sleeve to rub a clear swathe in the glass. Paraffin lamps shed a thin glow through the orangery, helping with the warmth and providing enough light to see by. To Miriam’s night-adapted vision it was like a glimpse into a dim subterranean hell. She hunted around and saw, just behind the door, a hunched shadow. And after a minute of watching-during which time her hands began to grow numb-she saw the shadow move, shifting in position just like a man shuffling his feet in the cold draft from outside.

  “Right,” she whispered tensely, feeling an intense, burning sense of hatred for the figure on the other side, just as the door opened further and someone else came in.

  What happened then happened almost too fast to see-Miriam froze atop the window, unable to breathe in the cold air, her head throbbing until she wondered if she was coming down with a full-blown migraine. The shadow flowed forward behind the person who’d entered the orangery. There was a flurry of activity, then a body collapsed on the floor in a spreading pool of… of-Holy shit, thought Miriam, he’s killed him!

  Shocked out of her angry reverie, she slid back down the drainpipe, scraping hands and cheek on the rough stonework, and landed in a snowdrift hard enough that it nearly knocked the breath out of her. Quick! Fumbling for her pistol, she skidded toward the door and yanked it open. She brought the gun up in time to see a man turning toward her. He was dressed all in black, his face covered by a ski mask or something similar: The long knife in his hand was red with blood as he straightened up from the body at his feet. “Stop-” Miriam called. He didn’t stop, and time telescoped in on her. Two shots in the torso, two more-then the dry click of a hammer on a spent cartridge. The killer collapsed toward her and Miriam shook her head and took a step back, wishing she hadn’t heard the sound of bullets striking flesh.

  Time caught up with her again. “Shit!” She called out, heart lurching between her ribs like a frightened animal. A sense of gathering wrongness overcame her, as if what had just happened was impossible. Another old reflex caught up, and she stepped forward. “Gurney-” she bit her tongue. There were no gurneys here, no haemostats, no competent nurses to get the bleeding staunched and no defibrillators-and especially no packets of plasma and operating theatres in which to struggle for the victim’s life.

  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-“Mar-git!” 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 investigative exposé-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 4

  Runaway

  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-