The Family Trade tmp-1

by Charles Stross

  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 deja 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, marshalling a barricade inside the doorway and chivvying 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 doppelganger 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 tu
rned. “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.”

  “That was another, in the office?” asked Brill.

  “Yes.” Miriam shrugged. “I figure the idea was to kill anyone who comes sniffing. But the only people who know what’s in there are me and whoever… whoever murdered the night watchman.”

  “What about Roland?”

  “Oh, yes. I told Roland. And he could have told-” for a moment Miriam looked wistful. “Damn, this means I can’t trust anyone who works for Angbard, can I?” She glanced obliquely at Brill.

  “I don’t work for Angbard,” Brill said slowly. “I work for you.”

  “Well, that’s nice to know.” Miriam gave her a lopsided grin. “I hope it doesn’t get you into trouble. Worse trouble,” she corrected.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Brill, frowning as only a twenty-something confronted by fate can frown.

  “Hmm. Well, I’m going to open this door.” Miriam gestured. “Somehow or other. Then… there’s a lot you don’t know, isn’t there? The door opens on an alley in a place called New York. It’s a big city and it’s after dark. I’m going to call a car service, and you’re going to do what I do-get in after me, ride with me to where we’re going, wait while I pay the driver, and go inside. I’ll do all the talking. You should concentrate on taking in whatever you can without looking like a yokel. Once we’re in private, you can talk all you want. All right? Think you can do that?”

  Brill nodded seriously. “It’ll be for me like when you first arrived? On the other side?” she asked.

  “Good analogy.” Miriam nodded. “No, it’ll be worse, much worse.” She grinned again. “I had an introduction; the whole world didn’t all get thrown at me all at once. Just try not to get yourself killed crossing the road, okay?” Then she glanced around. “Look, over there below the mezzanine, see those crates? I want you to go and sit down on the other side of them. Shield your head with your arms, yes, like they’re about to fall on you. And keep your mouth open. I’m going to try and get this door open without blowing us to pieces. I figure it should be possible because they were expecting people to come in from outside, not to materialize right inside the warehouse.”

  “We’re already supposed to be dead, aren’t we?”

  Miriam nodded. “Go,” she said.

  Brill headed off toward the stack of tea chests. Miriam bent down and followed the near-invisible wire off to one side. I really don’t like the look of this, she thought, her heart hammering at her ribs. She glanced up at the green casing, ominous as a hornet’s nest suspended overhead. “Let’s see,” she mumbled. “The door opens inward, pulls on the wire… or the warehouse door opens inward, also pulls on the wire. But if it’s spring-loaded, releasing it could also set the fucking thing off. Hmm.”

  She examined the wire as it ran around a rusting nail pounded into the wall beside the door. “Right.” She stood up and walked back across to the trailer with its own booby trap and its cargo of death. Climbing the steps, she paused for a moment, took a deep breath, and stepped over the wire.

  Nothing happened. I’m still here, she told herself. She took another deep breath, this time to avoid having to breathe in too close to the thing sprawled across the fallen office chair at the far side of the office. She’d called Roland, told him to send cleaners-instead, these booby traps had materialized. When the Clan wants you dead, you die, she realized bleakly. If indeed it is the Clan…

  There, on a rusting tool chest propped against the other wall, was exactly what she was looking for. She picked up the heavy-duty staple gun and checked that it was loaded. “Yup.” She hefted it one-handed, then mustered up a smile and picked up a pair of rusty pliers and stepped back out of the trailer.

  Two minutes later, she had the door open. The wire, firmly stapled to the door frame, was severed: The mine was still armed, but the trigger wire led nowhere. “Come on,” she called to Brilliana. “It’s safe now! We can leave!” Brill hurried over. As she did so, Miriam glanced up and shuddered once more. What if they’d heard of infrared motion detectors? Well, that was the Clan all over.

  It was snowing lightly, and Miriam phoned for a taxi when they reached the main road. Brill kept quiet, but her eyes grew wide when she saw Miriam talking into a small gray box-and wider still as she took in the cars that rumbled past in the gloom. She glanced from side to side like a caged cat in a strange, threatening environment. “I didn’t know it would be like this!” she whispered to Miriam. Then she shivered. “It’s really cold.”

  “It’s winter, kid. Get used to it.” Miriam grinned, slightly manic from her
success with the bomb.

  “It’s colder on the other side, isn’t it?”

  A cab pulled alongside, its light turned off. Miriam walked over. “Cab for Beckstein?” she asked. The driver nodded. She held open the rear door. “Get in and slide across,” she told Brill. Then she gave directions and got inside, shutting the door.

  The cab moved off. Brill looked around in fascination, then reached down toward her ankles. “It’s heated” she said quietly.

  “Of course it’s heated,” said the driver in a Pakistani accent. “You think I let my passengers freeze to death before they pay me?”

  “Excuse my friend,” Miriam told him, casting a warning glance at Brill. “She’s from Russia. Just arrived.”

  “Oh,” said the driver, as if that explained everything. “Yes, very good, that.”

  Brill kept her eyes wide but her mouth closed the rest of the way to the Marriott Marquis, but watched carefully as Miriam paid off the cabbie using pieces of green paper she pulled from a billfold. “Come on, follow me,” said Miriam.

  Miriam felt Brill tense as the glass doors opened automatically ahead of them, but she kept up with her as she headed for the express elevator. “One moment,” Miriam muttered to her, pushing the button. “This is an elevator. It’s a room, suspended on wires, in a vertical shaft. We use it instead of the stairs.”

  “Why?” Brill looked puzzled.

  “Have you ever tried to climb forty flights of stairs?” Miriam shut up as another elevator arrived, disgorging a couple of septuagenarians. Then the express doors opened, and she waved Brill inside. “This is easier,” she said, hitting the second from top button. The younger woman lurched against the wall as the elevator began to rise. “We’ll be there in no time.”