“Scheiss—one minute. I’ll take it in the office.” She hit the button to raise her chair then stood up and walked back towards the door at the rear of the first-class cabin. Rather than a cramped galley or a toilet, it opened onto a compact boardroom. As the only passenger on the luxury jet she had it all to herself except for the cabin attendants, but she still preferred to have a locked door between herself and any flapping ears. “Okay, Olga. What ails you?”
“Are you secure?”
Brill yawned, then sat down. Beyond the windows, twilight had settled over the plains. It was stubbornly refusing to lift, despite the jet’s westward dash. “I’m on the BBJ, arriving at SFO in about three hours. I was trying to get some sleep. Yes, I’m secure.”
“I’ve got to report to Angbard, so I’d better keep this brief. I went to see Fleming today. You know what that little shit Matthias did? He convinced the DEA, this new FTO outfit, everybody who matters, that he’d planted a gadget in downtown Boston. Then he managed to get himself killed before he could tell them where it was. So now they’re blaming us, and they want it handed over.”
“He what?” Brill blinked and tried to rub her eyes, one-handed.
“I’m not kidding. Fleming wasn’t kidding either—at least, he believed what he’d been told. I played dumb with him, pretending not to know what he was talking about, but afterwards I went and told Manfred and he ran an audit. The little shit was telling the truth. One of our nukes is missing.”
“God on a stick! If the Council finds out—”
“It gets worse. Turns out it’s one of our FADMs. Long-term storable, in other words, and there’s a long-life detonation controller that’s also turned up missing. The implosion charges were remanufactured eighteen months ago, so it’s probably nearing a service interval, but those charges were modified to survive storage under adverse conditions for up to a decade. If we don’t find it, we’re in a world of hurt—what do you think they’ll do if Boston or Cambridge goes up?—and if we do find it and hand it over as a sign of our commitment to negotiate, it’ll take them all of about ten seconds to figure out where it came from.”
Brilliana closed her eyes and swore, silently for a few seconds. She’d known about the Clan’s nuclear capability; she and Olga were among the handful of agents whose job would be to emplace the weapons, if and when the shit ever truly hit the fan. But the nukes weren’t supposed to go walkies. They were supposed to sit on their shelves in the anonymous warehouse, maintained regularly by the engineers from Pantex while U.S. Marine Corps guards patrolled the site overhead.
Based on a modified W54 warhead pattern, the FADMs were a highly classified derivative of the MADM atomic demolition device. They’d been built during the mid-1970s as backup for the CIA’s Operation Gladio, to equip NATO’s “stay behind” forces in Europe—after a Soviet invasion—with a storable, compact, tactical nuclear weapon. Most nukes required regular servicing to replace their neutron-emitting initiators and the plastic explosive implosion charges. The FADM had been tweaked to have a reasonable chance of detonation even after several years of unmaintained storage; the designers had replaced the usual polonium initiator with an electrically powered neutron source, and adding shields to protect the explosive lenses from radiation-induced degradation. The wisdom of supplying underground cells with what was basically a U.S. inventory–derived terrorist nuke had been revisited during the Reagan administration, and the weapons returned to the continental USA for storage—but they’d been retained long after the other man-portable demolition nukes had been destroyed, because the advantages they offered had been too good for certain spook agencies to ignore. More recently, the current administration—pathologically secretive and dealing with the aftermath of 9/11—had wanted every available arrow in their quiver, even if they were broken by design.
And they were. Because the Clan, with their ability to get into places that were flat-out impossible for home-grown intruders, had been treating them as their own personal nuclear stockpile for the past two decades.
“Listen, why are you telling me this? Why haven’t you briefed Uncle A? It’s his headache—”
“Uncle A is fielding another problem right now: the pretender’s just rolled over the Hjalmar Palace and there’s a three-ring, full-dress panic going down in Concord. He’s pulling me in—I’m supposed to be looking for a thrice-damned mole, who everybody tells me is probably a disgruntled outer family climber, and in case you’d missed it, we’ve got a civil war on. The bomb’s been missing for months, it’ll wait a couple of hours more. But I think when you get back from the west coast you’re going to find that finding it is suddenly everyone’s highest priority. And I’ve got a feeling that the spy who’s feeding Egon and the nuclear blackmail thing are connected. Matt wasn’t working alone, and I smell a world-walker in the picture. So I figure you and I, we should do some snooping together.” She paused. “Just what are you doing out in California, anyway? Is it something to do with the Wu clan?”
Brill sighed. “No, it’s Helge. We’ve located her. While I was flailing around in Boston doing the breaking and entering bit, she mailed me a letter via the New Britain office at Dunedin. The duty clerk caught it in time, opened it, and faxed the contents on: meanwhile we identified her aboard a westbound train that’s en route for Northern California. I need to find her before the New Britain secret police arrest her. So I’m taking a shortcut.”
“Huh. Much as I like her, isn’t finding Matt’s plaything a slightly higher priority?”
“Not when she’s carrying the heir to the throne, Olga.” She waited for the explosion of spluttering to die down. “Yes, I agree completely. You and I can have a little talk about professional ethics with Dr. ven Hjalmar later, perhaps? Assuming he survives the current unpleasantness, I’d like to make sure that he needs a new pair of kneecaps. But you’ve got to admit that we’ll need a king—or queen—after we nail Egon, won’t we? And if he really did artificially impregnate her with Creon’s seed, and if we have witnesses to the handfasting, then it seems to me that…well, which would you rather deal with? Egon trying to have us all hanged as witches, or Miriam as queen regent with Uncle A pulling the strings?”
“I’m not sure,” Olga said grimly. “She’ll be furious.” She paused. “Gods, that’s why he sent you, isn’t it? She trusts you. If anyone can get her calmed down and convince her to play along, it’d be you. But if not…”
“Uncle A wants her back in play,” Brill said, mustering up what calm she could. “But if she’s left loose, she’s as dangerous as that time bomb you’re hunting. Isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Olga said, sounding doubtful.
“She was getting too close to James Lee, the hostage,” Brill added.
Olga’s voice went flat. “She was?”
“We don’t need another faction on the board,” Brill said.
“No. I can see that.” Olga paused. “You’ll just have to charm her, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Brill agreed. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going back to sleep. Give my regards to Uncle.”
“I’ll tell him. Bye…”
Quietly closing the boardroom door behind her, Brill padded back to her first-class chair. She paused at the storage locker next to it, and opened it briefly: the specialized equipment was undisturbed, and she nodded, satisfied. It was the biggest single advantage of flying on the Clan Committee executive jet, in her opinion—in the course of her business she often required access to certain specialized items, and commercial airlines tended to take a dim view of her carrying her sniper kit as hand luggage. She sat down and strapped herself in, then tilted her chair back and dimmed the overhead lights. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, starting with arranging a reception for a train at a station she didn’t even know the precise location of, and trying to make contact with Miriam one jump ahead of the Homeland Security Directorate goon squad who’d surely be waiting for her when the train arrived.
Bombardiers
It w
as a good morning for flying, thought Rudi, as he checked the weather station on the north tower wall. No, make that a great morning. After all, he’d never flown over his homeland before. It would be a personal first, not to mention one in the eye for the stick-in-the-muds. Visibility was clear, with a breeze from the southwest and low pressure, rising slowly. He bent over the anemometer, jotting down readings in the logbook by the dawn light. “Hans? I’ll be needing the contents of both crates. Get them moved into the outer courtyard. I’ll need two pairs of hands to help with the trike—make sure they’re not clumsy. I’ll be down in ten minutes.”
“Aye, sir.” His footman, Hans, gave him an odd look, but hurried down off the battlements all the same. He clearly thought his master was somewhat cracked. Well, he’ll change his mind before the day is out, Rudi told himself. Along with everyone else. Just as long as nothing goes wrong. He was acutely aware that he hadn’t kept his flying hours up since the emergency began, and there were no luxuries (or necessities) like air traffic control or meteorology services over here.
In fact, he didn’t even have as much fuel as he’d have liked: he’d managed to squirrel away nearly twenty gallons of gas before some killjoy or other—he harbored dark suspicions about Erik—had ratted out his scheme to Riordan, who’d had no option but to shout a lot and notify the duke. Who in turn had threatened to have him flogged, and lectured him coldly for almost half an hour about the idiocy of not complying with long-standing orders…
Rudi had bitten his tongue while the duke threatened to burn the trike, but in the end the old man had relented just a little. “You will maintain it in working order, and continue to practice your skills in America, but you will not fly that thing over our lands without my explicit orders, delivered in person.” Eorl Riordan wasn’t the duke, but on the other hand, he was in the chain of command: and that was enough for Rudi. Flying today.
It took him closer to half an hour to make his way down to the courtyard, by way of his room—his flying jacket and helmet were buried deeper than he’d remembered, and he took his time assembling a small survival kit. Then he had to divert via the guardhouse to check out a two-way radio and a spare battery. “Where do you think you’re going, cuz?” asked Vincenze, looking up from the girlie magazine he was reading: “A fancy dress party?”
Rudi grinned at him. “Got a date with an angel,” he said. “See you later.”
“Heh. I’ll believe it when I see it—” But he was talking to Rudi’s back.
Down in the courtyard next to the stables, he found that Hans had enlisted a couple of guards to move the crates, but hadn’t thought to bring the long tubular sack or the trike itself. “Come on, do I have to do everything myself?” he demanded.
“I didn’t know what you wanted, sir,” Hans said apologetically. “You said it was delicate…”
“Huh. Okay. Come here. Take this end of the bag. I’ll take the other. It’s heavy. Now! The courtyard!”
Half an hour later, performing in front of an audience of mostly useless gawpers (occasionally he’d need one of them to hold a spar in position while he tightened a guy wire), Rudi had the wing unpacked and tensioned. At eight meters long and weighing fifty kilos the Sabre 16 had been murder to world-walk across—it was too long to fit in the Post Office room—but it was about the smallest high performance trike wing he’d been able to find. At least he’d been able to unbolt the engine from the trike body. “Go get the trike,” he told Hans and the guards. “Push it gently, it’ll roll easily enough once you get it off the straw.”
Another half hour passed by in what felt like seconds. By then he’d gotten the wing mounted on top of the trike’s mast and bolted together. The odd machine—a tricycle with a pair of bucket seats and a petrol engine with a propeller mounted on the back—was beginning to resemble a real, flyable ultralight. He was double-checking his work, making sure there was no sign of wear on any of the cables and that everything was secure, when someone cleared his throat behind him. He glanced round: it was Eorl Riordan, along with a couple of sergeants he didn’t recognize. “How’s it going?” asked Riordan, his tone deceptively casual.
“It’s going all right, for now.” Rudi glanced up at the sky. Partial cloud cover, at least five thousand feet up—no problem for the time being. “Thing is, I’m about to trust my neck to this machine. There’s no backup and no air traffic control and no help if something goes wrong. So I want to make sure everything is perfect before I take her up.”
“Good.” Riordan paused. “You’ve got a radio.”
“Yeah. And binoculars.” He gestured to the small pile sitting beside the fuel drum. “If you need it, I can take a camera. But right now, this is going to be pretty crude, visual flying only in good weather, staying below two thousand feet, and if I see anything I’ll probably only be able to pinpoint it to within a mile or so. I max out at about fifty-five miles per hour, so that’s not going to take me far from here, and I’ve got enough fuel for a couple of three-hour-long flights, but I’d prefer not to go up twice in one day. It’s pretty physical.”
“Three hours and a hundred and fifty miles ought to be enough.” Riordan nodded to himself. “What I wanted to say—I’d like you to do a circuit of the immediate area. If there’s any sign of troops on the ground within thirty miles, I’d like to know about it. We’re expecting a move from the southeast, and I know it’s well forested down there so I don’t expect miracles, but if you do see anything, it’s probably important. Also, I’d like you to take a look at Wergatfurt. We got an odd call half an hour ago, there’s something going on down there. Can you do that?”
“Probably, yes.” Rudi patted his pocket. “I’m using relief maps from the other side for navigation, it’s close enough to mostly work, and the Wergat’s pretty hard to miss. The only thing I will say is, if the weather starts closing in I need to get down on the ground fast. The Hjalmar palace is about an hour, hour and ten minutes away from here, as the trike flies—it’ll cut into my ability to do a sweep around to the north. Are you sure you want that?”
Riordan rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully. “I think…if you don’t see signs of soldiers southeast of here within thirty miles, then I definitely want to know what’s going on down along the Wergat. If you see those soldiers, call me up and we’ll discuss it.” He nodded to himself. Then he pointed at Rudi’s survival kit. “Why the gun? Can you shoot from a moving aircraft?”
“It’s not for when the trike’s flying: but if anything goes wrong while I’m forty miles out, over open forest…”
Riordan nodded. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll try not to need it.”
In the end, what saved them was Huw’s nose hair.
It was, Huw sometimes reflected, one of those fine ironies of life that despite being unable to grow a proper beard, he suffered inordinately from the fine hairs that clogged his nostrils. Nostril hair was neither sexy nor obviously problematic to people who didn’t have to put up with it: it was just…icky. That was the word Elena had used when she caught him in the bathroom with an open jar of Vaseline and one finger up a nostril. Yet it played seven shades of hell with his sense of smell, and had driven his teenage self into an orgy of nose-picking that resulted in a series of nosebleeds before he’d figured out what to do about it. And now…
In the flashlight-lit wreckage of a building inside a shattered dome, standing before a wall with a tightly sealed doorway in it, his kid brother raised a fire ax and swung it down hard towards the left side of the door.
As the ax struck the door, Huw, who was standing a good two meters behind and to the left of him, sneezed. The sneeze had been building up for some time, aggravated by the cold, damp air in this new world and the low priority Huw had attached to his manicure in the face of the mission of exploration. Nevertheless, the eruption took Huw by surprise, forcing him to screw his eyes shut and hunch his shoulders, turning his face towards the floor. The noise startled Yul, who began to turn to his right, to
wards Huw. The movement took him out of the direct line of the door. And it also surprised Elena, who was standing off to the right near the entrance to the building with her vicious little machine pistol at the ready. She ducked, and this took her out of the direct line of sight on the portal.
Which was why they survived.
As the ax blade bit into the edge of the door, there was a brilliant flash of violet-tinted light. Huw registered it as as flicker of red behind his closed eyelids and might have ignored it—but the rising noise that followed it was impossible to write off.
“Ouch! What’s that—” Yul began.
Huw, opening his eyes and straightening up, grabbed his brother’s arm, and yanked. “Run!”
The hissing sound from the edge of the door grew louder; the center of the door bowed inward slightly, as if under the pressure of a giant fist from their side. Yul barely spared it a glance before he dropped the axe and took to his heels. Huw was a stride behind him. Two seconds brought them to the twilit entrance to the room. “Hit the ground!” yelled Huw, catching one glimpse of Elena’s uncomprehending face as he threw himself forward and rolled sideways, away from the open doorway.
Behind them, the creaking door—far thinner than Huw had realized—creaked once more, and gave way. All hell broke loose.
The hissing and whistling gave way to a deep roaring, and the breeze in Huw’s face began to strengthen. Huw glanced over his shoulder once, straining to look over the length of his body towards the inner chamber. A strange mist curdled out of the air, obscuring whatever process was at work there. The wind was still strengthening. “Take cover!” he called out. “There’s hard vacuum on the other side of that—thing—watch out for flying debris!” It’ll blow itself out soon, he told himself. Won’t it? A sudden frisson of fear raised the hair on the back of his neck: That skeleton was old, the door can’t have held in a vacuum that long. So something’s pumping the air on the other side out, something that’s still working…
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