“He’s a theoretician, isn’t he?” she asked Erasmus, as their carriage slid through the wooded hills. “What’s Lady Bishop’s interest?”
He stared out of the window silently, until she thought he wasn’t going to reply. Then he cleared his throat. “Sir Adam has credibility. Old King George sought his counsel. Before Black Monday, he was a Member of Parliament, the first elected representative to openly declare for the radicals. And to be fair, the book—it’s his diagnosis of the ailment afflicting the body politic, not his prescription. He’s the chair of the central committee, Miriam. We need him in the capital—”
There was a sudden jerk, and Miriam was pushed forward in her seat. The train began to slow. “What’s going on?”
“Odd.” He frowned. “We’re still in open country.” The train continued to slow, brakes squealing below them. The window put the lie to Erasmus’s comment almost immediately, as a low row of wooden shacks slid past. Brakes still squealing, the long train drifted to a halt. Erasmus glanced at her, worried. “This can’t be good.”
“Maybe it’s just engine trouble? Or the track ahead?” That’s right, clutch at straws, she told herself. Her hand went to her throat, where she had taken to wearing James Lee’s locket on a ribbon: at a pinch she could lift Erasmus and land them both in the same world as the Gruinmarkt, but…“I can get us out of here, but I know nothing about where we’d end up.”
“We’ve got papers.” Now he sounded as if he was grasping at straws, and knew it.
“Don’t anticipate trouble.” She swallowed.
“Get your bag. If they want a bribe—”
“Who?”
“How should I know?” He pointed at the window: “Whoever’s stopped the train.”
The door at the end of the compartment opened abruptly, and a steward stepped inside. He puffed out his brass-buttoned chest like a randy pigeon: “Sorry to announce, but there’s been a delay. We should be moving soon, but—” A bell sounded, ringing like a telephone outside the compartment. “’Scuse me.” He ducked back out.
“What kind of delay?” Miriam asked.
“I don’t know.” Erasmus stood up. “Got everything in your bag?” He raised an eyebrow.
Miriam, thinking of the small pistol, swallowed, then nodded. “Yeah.” It was stuffy in the un–air-conditioned carriage, but she stood up and headed over to the coat rail by the door, to pick up her jacket and the bulging handbag she’d transferred the notebook computer into. “Thinking of getting off early?”
“If we have to.” He frowned. “If this is—”
Footsteps. Miriam paused, her coat over her left arm. “Yes?” she asked coolly as the door opened.
It was a middle-aged man, wearing the uniform of a railroad ticket inspector. He looked upset. “Sir? Ma’am? I’m sorry to disturb you, but would you mind stepping this way? I’m sure we can sort this out and be on our way soon.”
Erasmus glanced sideways at her. Miriam dry-swallowed, wishing her throat wasn’t dry. Bluff it out, or…? “Certainly,” he said smoothly: “Perhaps you can tell us what it’s about?”
“In the station, sir,” said the inspector, opening the door of the carriage. The steps were already lowered, meeting the packed earth of a rural platform with a weathered clapboard hut—more like a signal box than a station house—hunched beside it. Only the orange groves to either side suggested a reason for there to be a station here. The inspector hurried anxiously over towards the building, not looking back until he neared the door. Miriam caught Burgeson’s eye: he nodded, slowly. The Polis would just have come aboard and arrested us, wouldn’t they? she told herself. Probably…
As her companion approached the door, Miriam curled her fingers around the butt of her pistol. The inspector held the door open for them, his expression anxious. “The electrograph from your cousin requested a private meeting,” he said apologetically. “This was the best I could arrange—”
“My cousin?” Miriam asked, her voice rising as the door opened: “I don’t have a cousin—”
A whoosh of escaping steam dragged her attention up the line. Slowly and majestically, the huge locomotive was straining into motion, the train of passenger cars squealing and bumping behind it. Miriam spun round, far too late to make a run back for it. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath. A steam car was bumping along the rutted track that passed for a service road to the station. “Double shit.” Erasmus was frozen in the doorway, one hand seeming to rest lightly on the inspector’s shoulder. Another car came into view along the road, trailing the first one’s rooster-tail of dust.
“Please don’t!” The inspector was nearly hysterical.
“Who set this up?” Erasmus asked, his tone deceptively calm.
“I don’t know! I was only following orders!” Miriam ducked round the side of the station house again, glancing in through the windows. She saw an empty waiting room furnished only with a counter, beyond the transom of which was an evidently empty ticket office. It’s not the station, she realized, near-hysteria bubbling under.
“Into the waiting room,” she snapped, bringing the revolver out of her pocket. “Move!”
The inspector stared at her dumbly, as if she’d grown a second head, but Erasmus nodded: “Do as she says,” he told the man. The inspector shuffled into the waiting room. Erasmus followed, his movements almost bored, but his right hand never left the man’s shoulder.
“How long ’til they get here?” Miriam demanded.
“I don’t know!” He was nearly in tears. “They just said to make you wait!”
“They,” said Erasmus. “Who would they be?”
“Please don’t kill me!”
The door to the ticket office was ajar. Miriam kicked it open and went through it with her pistol out in front. The office was indeed empty. On the ticket clerk’s desk a message flimsy was waiting. Miriam peered at it in the gloom. DEAR CUZ SIT TIGHT STOP UNCLE A SENDS REGARDS STOP WILL MEET YOU SOONEST SIGNED BRILL.
Well, that settles it. Miriam lowered her gun to point at the floor and headed back to the waiting room.
“—The Polis!” moaned the inspector. “I’ve got three wee ones to feed! Please don’t—”
Shit, meet fan. Even so, it struck her as too big a coincidence to swallow. Maybe the Polis are tapping the wires? That would do it. Brilliana had figured out where she was, which train she was on, and signaled her to wait, not realizing someone else might rise to the bait.
Burgeson’s expression was grim. “Miriam, the door, please.”
“Let’s not do anything too hasty,” she said. “There’s an easy way out of this.”
“Oh please—”
“Shut up, you. What do you have in mind?”
Miriam waved at the ticket office. “He’s not lying about my cousin: she’s on her way. Trouble is, if we bug out before she gets here she’s going to walk into them. So I think we ought to sit tight.” She closed the door anyway, and glanced round, looking for something to bar it with. “I can get us both out of here in an emergency,” she said, a moment of doubt cutting in when she recalled the extreme nausea of her most recent attempts to world-walk.
The first car—more like a steam-powered minivan, Miriam noted—rounded the back of the station and disappeared from sight. Almost two minutes had passed since they reached the station. Miriam slid aside from the windows, while Burgeson did likewise. Boots thudded on the ground outside: the only sounds within the building were the pounding of blood in her ears and the quiet sobbing of the ticket inspector.
“Mr. Burgeson!” The voice behind the bullhorn sounded almost jovial: “And the mysterious Mrs. Fletcher! Or should I say, Beckstein?” He made it sound like an accusation. “Welcome to California! My colleague Inspector Smith has told me all about you both and I thought, why, we really ought to have a little chat. And I thought, why not have it somewhere quiet-like, and intimate, instead of in town where there are lots of flapping ears to take note of what we say?”
Across
the room, Burgeson was mouthing something at her. His face was in shadow, making it hard to interpret. The inspector knelt in the middle of the floor, in a square of sunlight, sobbing softly as he rocked from side to side wringing his hands. The appearance of the Polis had quite unmanned him.
“Like this: parlez vous Francoise, Madame Beckstein?”
Miriam felt faint. They think I’m a French spy? Either the heat or the tension or some other strain was plucking her nerves like guitar strings. Somehow Erasmus had fetched up almost as far away as it was possible to get, twelve feet away across open ground overlooked by a window. To get him out of here one or the other of them would need to cross that expanse of empty floor, in front of—
The ticket inspector snapped, flickering from broken passivity to panic in a fraction of a second. He lurched to his feet and ran at the window, screaming, “Don’t hurt me!”
Erasmus brought his right hand up, and Miriam saw the pistol in it. He hesitated for a long moment as the inspector fumbled with the window, throwing it wide and leaning out. “Let me—” he shouted: then a spatter of shots cracked through the glass, and any sense of what he had been trying to say.
The bullhorn blared, unattended, as the inspector’s body slumped through the half-open window and Miriam, seeing her chance, ducked and darted across the room, avoiding the lit spaces on the floor, to fetch up beside Burgeson.
“I think they want you alive,” he said, a death’s-head grin spreading across his gaunt cheekbones. “Can you get yourself out of here?”
“I can get us both out—” She fumbled with the top button of her blouse, hunting for the locket chain.
“After how you were last time?”
Miriam was still looking for a cutting reply when the bullhorn started up again. “If you come out with your hands up we won’t use you for target practice! That’s official, boys, don’t shoot them if they’ve got their hands up! We want to ask you some questions, and then it’s off to the Great Lakes with you if you cooperate. That’s also a promise. What it’s to be is up to you. Full cooperation and your lives! Hurry, folks, this is a bargain, never to be repeated. Because you’re on my manor, and Gentleman Jim Reese prides himself on his hospitality, I’ll give you a minute to think about it before we shoot you. Use it carefully.”
“Were you serious about waiting around for your friends?” Burgeson asked ironically. “Is a minute long enough?”
“But—” Miriam took a deep breath. “Brace yourself.” She put her arms around Erasmus, hugging him closely. His breath on her cheek smelled faintly stale. “Hang on.” She dug her heels into the floor and lifted, staring over his shoulder into the enigmatic depths of the open locket she had wrapped around her left wrist. The knot writhed like chain lightning, sucking her vision into its contortions—then it spat her out. She gasped involuntarily, her head pulsing with a terrible, sudden tension. She focused again, and her stomach clenched. Then she was dizzy, unsure where she was. I’m standing up, she realized. That’s funny. Her feet weren’t taking her weight. There was something propping her up. A shoulder. Erasmus’s shoulder. “Hey, it didn’t—”
She let go of him and slumped, doubling over at his feet as her stomach clenched painfully. “I know,” he said sadly, above her. “You’re having difficulty, aren’t you?”
The bullhorn: “Thirty seconds! Make ’em count!”
“Do you think you can escape on your own?” Burgeson asked.
“Don’t—know.” The nausea and the migraine were blocking out her vision, making thought impossible. “N-not.”
“Then I see no alternative to—” Erasmus laid one hand on the doorknob “—this.”
Miriam tried to roll over as he yanked, hard, raising the pistol in his right hand and ducking low. He squeezed off a shot just as Gentleman Jim, or one of his brute squad, opened fire: clearly the Polis did things differently here. Then there was a staccato burst of fire and Erasmus flopped over, like a discarded hand puppet.
Miriam screamed. A ghastly sense of déjà vu tugged at her: Erasmus, what have you done? She rose to her knees and began to raise her gun, black despairing fury tugging her forward.
There was another burp of fire, ominously rapid and regular, like a modern automatic weapon. That’s funny, she thought vacantly, tensing in anticipation. She managed to unkink her left hand, but even a brief glance at the locket told her that it was hopeless. The design swum in her vision like a poisonous toadstool, impossible to stomach.
Erasmus rolled over and squeezed off two more shots methodically. Miriam shook her head incredulously: You can’t do that, you’re dead! Someone screamed hoarsely, continuously, out behind the station. Shouts and curses battered at her ears. The hammering of the machine gun started up again. Someone else screamed, and the sound was cut short. What’s going on? she wondered, almost dazed.
The shots petered out with a final rattle from the machine gun. The silence rang in her ears like a tapped crystal wineglass. Her head ached and her stomach was a hot fist clenched below her ribs. “Erasmus,” she called hoarsely.
“Miriam. My lady, are you hurt?”
The familiar, crystal-clear voice shattered the bell of glass that surrounded her. “Brill!” she cried.
“My lady, are you alone in there?”
Urgency. Miriam tried to take stock. “I think so,” she managed. “I’m with Erasmus.”
“She’s not hurt, but she’s sick,” Burgeson called out. He shuffled backwards, into the shadowy interior of the waiting room, still clutching his pistol in his hand. He focused on Miriam. “It’s your girl, Brill, isn’t it?” he hissed.
“Yes,” she choked out, almost overwhelmed with emotion. He’s not dead! More than half a year had passed since that terrible moment in Fort Lofstrom, waiting beside Roland’s loose-limbed body, hoping against hope. And Brill—
“Then I suggest we move out of here at once!” Brilliana called. “I’m going to stand up. Hold your fire.”
“I’m holding,” Erasmus called hoarsely.
“Good. I’m coming in now.”
Another wild goose chase, Judith told herself gloomily. No sooner had she gotten back to the serious job of shadowing Mike Fleming like he was the president or something, no sooner had she managed to breathe a series of extended gasps of relief at the news—that Source GREENSLEEVES fingerprints had been all over the casing and it was missing from inventory and Dr. Rand had punched in the PAL code and switched it off without any drama, and all the other weapons in its class were present and accounted for—than the colonel came down with his tail on fire and a drop everything order of the day: absolutely typical. “Leave a skeleton team on site and get everyone else up here now,” he said, all trace of his usually friendly exterior gone. Crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there the week before. Something’s eating him, she’d realized, and left it to Rich Hall to ask what the rush job was and get his head bitten off.
Which was why, four hours later, she was sitting in the back seat of an unmarked police car behind officers O’Grady and Pike, keeping an eye on a strip mall and a field with a big top in it and a sign saying HISTORY FAIRE outside.
“What is it we’re supposed to be looking for, ma’am?” Pike asked, mildly enough.
“I’ll tell you when I see it.” The waiting was getting to her. She glanced once more at the laptop with the cellular modem and the GPS receiver sitting next to her. Seven red dots pocked the map of Concord like a disease. Updated in real time by the colonel’s spooky friends Bob and Alice, no less, the laptop could locate a phone to within a given GSM cell…but that took in the mall, the field, and a couple of streets on either side. “There are tricks we can play with differential signal strength analysis to pin down exactly where a phone is,” Smith had told her, “but it takes time. So go and sit there and keep your eyes peeled while we try to locate it.”
The mall was about as busy—or as quiet—as you’d expect on any weekday around noon. Cars came, cars went. A couple o
f trucks rumbled past, close enough to the parked police car to rock it gently on its suspension. O’Grady had parallel-parked in front of a hardware store just beside the highway, ready to move.
“We could be here a while,” she said quietly. “Just as long as it isn’t a wild goose chase.”
“I didn’t think you people went on wild goose chases,” said Pike. Then she caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He reddened.
“We try not to,” she said dryly, keeping her face still. Her FBI credentials were still valid, and if anyone checked them out they’d get something approximating the truth: on long-term assignment to Homeland Security, do not mess with this woman. “We’re expecting company.”
“Like that?” O’Grady gestured through the window. Herz tracked his finger, and stifled a curse. On the screen beside her, an eighth red dot had lit up in her cell.
“It’s possible.” She squinted at the coach. Men were coming out of the big top to open the gate, admitting it.
The Merchants' War: Book Four of the Merchant Princes Page 36