"Hey, you can't come in—"
"Cover," she said in hochsprache. "Hello, Griben. Sit down, please." The door clicked shut behind Mhara as she felt the weight of an empty leather shoulder bag land on one of her chair's handles.
Griben yen Hjalmar, plump and goateed, in a brown three-piece suit, sat down slowly, keeping his hands clearly visible. His face was expressionless. The other man sitting in the swivel chair behind the desk was frozen in surprise. "And Dr. Darling. What a pleasant surprise."
"Mrs. Beckstein? What's the"—Darling swallowed convulsively—"what's going on?"
Iris smiled crookedly. "Griben, what a coincidence. I was just thinking about looking you up. What brings you here? Thinking about cleaning up some loose ends?"
Dr. Darling—lean, middle-aged, the picture of a successful gynecologist—was looking between ven Hjalmar, Iris, and the muzzle of Mhara's silenced Glock in slack-jawed surmise. "You—you—"
"I'd like to thank you both for the little number you played on my daughter. It wasn't quite what I had in mind when I suggested the arrangement."
Ven Hjalmar flushed beneath the force of her glare. "What did you expect us to do?" he demanded. "She was under house arrest! With an execution warrant on her head! You wanted the leverage—"
"Nevertheless." Iris shifted uncomfortably in her wheelchair. "This is neither the time nor the place for this discussion."
"Excuse me?" Three heads turned to stare at Dr. Darling. "What are you—"
"Griben, do you mind?" Iris asked casually, speaking hochsprache.
"If you absolutely must. I'd finished with him, anyway."
"Did you get the disks from him?" she added.
"Of course."
"What do you want?" demanded Darling.
In hochsprache: "Mhara, now."
Outside the office, the two muffled shots would be mistaken for a door banging. Darling dropped forward across his desk, spilling blood and fatty tissue onto the keyboard of his PC.
Griben sighed. "Was that strictly necessary?"
"Yes," Iris said shortly. She glanced round. Mhara was standing, frozen, her pistol angled slightly upwards and a confused look in her eyes. "Mhara? Child?"
The young woman shook her head. "I'm sorry." She picked up the shoulder bag and carefully stowed her pistol inside, using hook-and-eye strips to secure it. "Never done that before."
"You've attended executions, surely. . . ."
"Yes, milady. But it's different when you do it yourself."
"You'll get used to it," Iris reassured her. "Griben, he knew too damned much. Family Trade are on our tail and he's not Outer Family or personal retainer. He had to go. You've got the disks. Mhara, the other device, please."
"Other—oh." Ven Hjalmar looked at the PC in distaste. "You don't expect me to"—
"I surely do." Iris held up a pair of latex gloves. "You'll want these."
None of them were particularly experienced at black-bag jobs; it took them nearly ten minutes to unscrew the casing of the PC and position the bulk eraser's electromagnet above the hard disk drive. Finally, Iris hit the power switch. "Ah, good," she said, as the disk error warning came up on the blood-specked screen. "Mhara, you see the filing cabinets yonder? You take the right one, Griben can take the middle, and I shall take the left. Start at the top and work down. You are looking for anything pertaining to Applied Genomics Corporation, the W-316 clinical trial, Angbard Lofstrom, Griben ven Hjalmar here, or adoption papers relating to children."
"Adoption papers?" Mhara sounded confused.
"Legal documents," Iris said blandly.
"Iris." Griben looked worried. "This is going to take some time. What if someone—"
Iris snorted. "You have your locket, yes? I had the site prepared."
"But we're on the fourth floor!"
"So there's a net. Try not to break your nose with your kneecaps. It'll be harder for me if we have to take it, so let us start searching right away, no?" She levered herself out of her wheelchair and shuffled cautiously towards the wall of cabinets.
The office was overheated, and the smells of burned powder and spilled blood hung over them as they pored over the file drawers. After ten minutes Griben finally hit pay dirt. "He had a file on Applied Genomics," he announced.
"Ah, excellent." Iris gestured at her wheelchair. "In there."
"Milady." Mhara gestured politely at another drawer. "Is this important?"
Iris leaned over to look. "Well, how interesting." She lifted the fat, spiral-bound document out of its hanger. "Names and addresses. It seems you're not the only doctor who doesn't trust computers to remember everything for you, Griben."
"Dash it! We specifically told him not to do that!"
Iris sighed. "I ordered someone to black-bag his house this morning. His divorce came through nine months ago, so I think there is no need to trouble his ex-wife and children." She frowned, pensive. "What have I forgotten?"
Griben nodded across the room. "I should check the bookcase. And the desk drawers. Just to be sure."
"An excellent idea. Perhaps you'd like to see me out, afterwards?"
Ven Hjalmar raised an eyebrow. "Why—"
Iris nodded at Mhara. "She has other tasks."
"Ah, jolly good." He nodded. Mhara picked up the files and waited attentively as he scoured the bookcases and finally the desk drawers—working carefully around Dr. Darling's body—then nodded again. "That's all," he announced. Darling's desk was mostly for show; beyond the usual collection of stationary items, the pedestal unit was empty.
Iris shuffled back to her wheelchair. "Good. Mhara?"
"Milady." She bobbed her head, holding the files two-handed. "I want these files burned before we leave the building. Afterwards, make your way back to the house when you are ready."
"Yes, milady." Mhara smiled, a brief flash of expression crossing her face. Then she tilted her left wrist to expose the face of a wristwatch, and vanished.
"You're sure about the net," Griben said reflectively.
"She's sure about it, and that's what matters." Iris lowered herself carefully into the wheelchair. "Mind you, she was there when I ordered its construction."
A thoughtful pause, then: "I think I can see where your daughter gets it from."
"Oh dear." Iris whirred towards the door, then glanced over her shoulder with a fey expression. "Come on, Griben! We have a conspiracy to conceal and if you keep thinking about it we'll be here until suppertime."
They left the room with the conviction of a job well done, and no inkling of the significance of the encrypted memory stick attached to the key ring in the corpse's coat pocket.
In a muddy field outside Concord, behind a sign declaring it to be a HISTORY FAIRE, the circus-sized tent was swarming with spooks.
Colonel Smith's driver stopped outside the gate. A pair of police cars, their lights strobing, blocked the entrance; beyond the uniformed officers Smith could see parked buses and the tents of the forensic crews. Serious-looking officers in black windbreakers bearing the letters DEA paced around under the watchful eyes of guards in body armor and helmets. Casual rubberneckers might mistake them for a police SWAT team, but Smith was under no such illusion.
"Give me that badge." Smith waited as the cop checked his name against a clipboard, carefully compared his face to the photograph, then nodded. "Go ahead, sir. HQ is the third tent on the left."
"You heard him." Smith leaned back and closed his eyes for a minute as his driver crept across the rutted ground. Too many vehicles had come this way too recently. A familiar drumming noise prompted him to open his eyes. Sure enough, a big helicopter was thuttering across the sky, descending towards the field. It's not black; just very, very, dark gray. Smith suppressed a grin. What had happened at this site was no laughing matter. How the hell did they manage it he asked himself as he opened the door and climbed out of the back of the car.
The mood in the headquarters tent was gray, too, as he discovered the moment he walked throu
gh the door. "Sir? How up to date are you?" Judith Herz, latterly of the FBI but currently answering to Smith, had been on-site when the shit hit the fan. Now she looked drained, hollows under her eyes from close to twenty-four hours supervising the site cleanup.
"I've been too busy fighting brushfires and keeping the press off your neck to track everything. Have you got time to give me a guided tour?"
Herz rubbed the side of her face then glanced at one of the men sitting in front of a rack of radios and laptop computers. "John, you want to take over for an hour? I need to bring the colonel up to speed."
"Okay, I'll do that." John—heavily built, wearing one of the ubiquitous DEA windbreakers, nodded briefly before turning back to his screen.
"This way, Colonel." Herz gestured back to the front awning of the tent. "Let me show you what we found."
Forensics had already finished with the big top before Herz beckoned Smith past the incident tape and into the open space within. Smith glanced around curiously. Like any big top, its roof was held up by a pair of huge posts. But the resemblance stopped at that point; there were no seats, no trapezes or safety nets, and nothing in this particular ring could be described as a laughing matter.
"It's a regular headquarters setup, we think," Herz commented as she walked towards a row of tables at one side of the huge tent. "Look." The tables showed every sign of having been abandoned in a hurry: folding chairs tipped over, equipment crates lying on their sides. One of the tables was covered completely by a large relief map, various implements strewn across it—notepads, pens, protractors, and folded pieces of card.
"Pay dirt," breathed Smith. He paused momentarily. "Has it been checked out?"
"Everything's been photographed in situ. I think they even dusted for fingerprints, just in case."
"Gotcha." Smith leaned over the map. It didn't take much to recognize the foothills, and the river valley forking downstream. But there was something odd about the map. He frowned. "Concord should be here, shouldn't it?"
Herz followed the direction of his finger. "I guess so."
"Hmm. Look." The moving finger trailed south. A much smaller clump of buildings perched beside the river, surrounded by a sharply incised wall. "This is printed. It's even got grid coordinates. Betcha they bought the map data from someone over here, in our world, then added their own survey points. Saves time, assuming the geography's the same, and I guess they would know about any major features like landslides."
Herz shook her head. "You mean this is a map of, of fairyland."
"It's not fairyland," Smith said sharply. "It's real enough that they can make a map of it like this, and plan . . ."
He paused, then peered back at the map. Hunting upstream of the small town, at the fork in the river, he found what he was looking for. "Go get one of our maps. I want to confirm that this is where we are," he said, moving one of the cardboard markers to sit atop the heptagonal feature he'd noticed. "They were here for a reason, and I want to know what they were doing that took nearly two hundred of the bastards."
He straightened up and looked around. There were more tables dotted around, and a stack of empty kit bags, but the center of the tent was dominated by a two-story-high aluminum scaffold with ramps and ladders leading up to platforms on both upper floors. Surveyor's posts and reflector disks fastened to the uprights, and a pair of theodolites at opposite sides of the tent, made it clear that whoever had built the scaffold had taken pains over its exact location. Smith frowned, thoughtful. Nearly two hundred of them and they vanished into thin air in less than three minutes. How did they avoid falling over each other? A precision operation, like paratroops jumping in quick succession from the back of a plane. And why did they do it out in public, risking detection? It had to be something to do with this location, and whatever it was collocated with in the other time line.
Herz was muttering into a walkie-talkie. "I need geographic input. Is Amanda—yes, I'll hold, over."
Smith walked partway round the scaffold. A faint memory began to surface, grade school on an Air Force base somewhere in Germany: knights in armor, huge creaking wooden contraptions grinding their way across a field of battle towards a walled castle. The whole mediaeval thing. It's a siege tower. A siege tower without wheels, because you could build it in a parallel universe, butting right up against wherever you were going to go in. A siege tower without armor, and made of aluminum scaffolding components because they were cheap and easier to use than logs.
Voices pulled him back to the present. He glanced round, annoyed, then frowned. It was his political supervisor, Dr. James, with the cadaverous face and the connections to the current occupant of Number One Observatory Circle, plotting and scheming inside the beltway. A couple of flunkies—administrative assistants, pasty-skinned managerial types from Crypto city, even a discreet Secret Service bodyguard doing the men-in-black thing—followed him. "Ah, Eric! Excellent, Martin, you can stop trying to reach him now. What's your analysis?"
Smith took a deep breath, held it for a moment. The smells of crushed grass and gun oil and desperate men filled his nostrils. "It's a siege tower. They weren't running away from us, they were breaking into something." He gestured at the theodolites and the scaffolding. "That's positioned with extreme care. I think it's a siege tower—they had a target in their own world and this took them to a precise location. The map"—Herz was waving at him—"excuse me." He walked over to the table. "Yes?"
"You were right," she said. "We're here." Her finger stabbed at the heptagonal structure. "This thing is about five hundred feet across, look, concentric rings—does that remind you of anything?"
Smith nodded and turned to Dr. James. "If their map's telling the truth, that structure is some kind of fortification. And we already know from CLEANSWEEP that some kind of internal struggle was going down fourteen to sixteen days ago. We could do a lot worse than send a couple of scouts across in the next valley over." He cracked his knuckles, first the right hand then his left. "It's a shame we don't have anything that can touch them, because they're probably still there, in strength."
James grinned like a skull. "Well, I have an update for you. Let's take a walk."
BEGIN TELEPHONE TRANSCRIPT:
(A telephone buzzes for attention.)
"Hello?"
"Ah, is that the Lee residence?"
(Pause.) "Who is this?"
"I'd like to speak to James Lee, please. It is dringenurgent."
(Pause.) "Please wait."
(Two minutes later.)
"Hello? Hello?"
"Who is this? Is—James? James, is that you?"
"Ah, yes— Who, urn—"
"Poul, Poul yen Wu. You may remember me, from my cousin Raph's wedding to Kara ven—"
"Ah, yes! I remember now! Yes, indeed. How good to hear from you. But surely this isn't just a social call?"
"I wish it were. Unfortunately a somewhat delicate situation has arisen at short notice, and I hoped you might be able to advise me on how it might be resolved without undue difficulty."
(Pause.) "Ah. I see, I think." (Pause.) "Would this situation have anything to do with the events at the Thorold palace earlier this month?"
"Mm . . . in a manner of speaking, yes. It's a delicate matter, as I said, and we're anxious to resolve it without violating the terms of the settlement between our families, but it's quite urgent and it appears to be becoming time-critical."
"Hmm. Can you be more specific? I think I can safely say that we would also like to remain within the conditions of the truce, but I cannot commit to anything without my elders' approval, and I am quite anxious to know what I shall be putting before them."
(Pause.) "We would like to arrange for the safe passage of a substantial group of our people, from a location near Irongate—near Wergatsfurt—across a distance of some three miles, on foot, at night."
"Passage. You mean, from Wergatsfurt, in Gruinmarkt, to somewhere about three miles away, also in Gruinmarkt, but through our world, I take it
?"
"Precisely." (Pause.) "In addition, the group is armed. Not civilian."
(Long pause.) "You're asking us to give safe passage to a small army."
(Hastily.) "Only for about three hours, at night! And there are only two hundred and eighteen of them. Eleven walking wounded, six stretcher cases. We don't want to attract attention—we want to keep it out of sight of the Polis, and everybody else. Can you—is it possible—to arrange this? I can supply details of the end-points of the sortie, and precise numbers—but what we would like, if it is possible, is not simply a dispensation within our agreement but active help. If you can organize covered trucks, and secure the destination, for example . . ."
"I can't agree to that, Poul. I don't have the authority to make agreements like that. I can tell you that my father can make a decision, but it would be better to petition him yourself—"
(Urgently) "It has to be done tonight!"
"I'm sure it does. And I can arrange for my father to see you within the hour—but the request must come directly from your lips to his ears." (Pause.) "You understand that he will expect some reward for this inconvenience."
"Of course." (Pause.) "We expect to pay for any assistance, and I am authorized to negotiate with you—or your father. Only understand that it is a matter of some urgency, and while we are prepared to be generous, we would take a very poor view of any attempt to exploit the situation to our detriment."
"Oh, that's understood. Give me an hour to prepare things and you will be welcome at my father's house. Do you need directions?"
[END TRANSCRIPT]
Erasmus Burgeson arrived in Fort Petrograd four days late, footsore and weary and out-of-pocket—but a free man, thanks to those extraordinary friends of Miriam Beckstein who had arrived just in time to stop the secret police from collaring the two of them.
After the shoot-out at the one-cow railroad station in the middle of nowhere, he'd taken up Miriam's invitation to help himself to the political officer's no-longer-needed steamer, and topped off both its tanks before cracking open the throttle and bumping across dirt tracks and paved military roads in the general direction of the southwest and the Bay Area. But the car had run out of steam ten miles before he reached Miwoc City, and he'd had second (and third) thoughts about the wisdom of paying a mechanic to come out and get her rolling again, in light of the car's bloodstained provenance. (Not to mention the bullet hole in the left, passenger side, door.)
The Revolution Business: Book Five of the Merchant Princes Page 7