She picked up a glass and filled it from the jug on the table. Nobody spoke; curiosity was, it seemed, a more valuable currency than outrage. “A variety of strategies were discussed. Our predecessors’ reliance on access to the special files of the American investigator Hoover was clearly coming to an end—Hoover’s death, and the subsequent reorganization of the American secret police, along with their adoption of computerized files, rendered that particular channel obsolete. Computers in general have proven to be a major obstacle: We can’t just raid the locked filing cabinets at night. So a couple of new plans were set up.”
She saw a couple of heads nodding along at the far end of the table and tried to suppress a smile. “I believe Piotr has just put two and two together and worked out why the duke took it upon himself to issue certain career advice. Piotr spent six years in the USAF, not as an aerial knight but as a black-handed munitions officer. Unfortunately he did not enter precisely the speciality the duke had in mind . . . but others did.” More of her audience were clearly putting two and two together. Finally, Rudi raised a hand. “Yes?”
“I looked into this. Nukes—they’re not light! You couldn’t world-walk one across. At the least, you’d have to disassemble it first, wouldn’t you?”
“Normally, yes.” She nodded. “But. Back in the sixties, the Americans developed small demolition devices, the SADM, for engineers to use in demolishing bridges in enemy territory. Small is a figure of speech—a strong man could carry one on his back for short distances—but it was ideal for our purposes. Then, in the seventies, they created a storable type, the FADM, to leave in the custody of their allies, to use in resistance operations. The friends they picked were not trustworthy”—an understatement: The Italian fascists who’d blown up the Bologna railway station in the 1970s had nearly sparked a civil war—“and the FADMs were returned to their stores, but they weren’t all scrapped. A decade ago we finally placed a man in the nuclear inspectorate, with access. He surveyed the storage site, organized the doppelganger revetment, and we were in. Reverse-engineering the permissive action locks took less than two years. Then we had our own nuclear stockpile.”
She raised her glass, drank deeply. “The matter rested with his grace until the last year. It appears that the traitor Matthias had access to the procedures, and to his grace’s seal. He ordered one of the devices removed from storage and transported to Boston.” She waited as the shocked muttering subsided. “More recently, we learned that the Americans had learned of this weapon. Our traitor had apparently threatened them with it. They indicated their displeasure and demanded our cooperation in retrieving it. I think”—her gaze flickered towards Carl—“that most likely they found it and, by doing so, decided to send us a message. Either that, or our traitor has struck at us—but he is no world-walker. Meanwhile, we know the American secret police hold some of ours prisoner.”
“But how—”
“What are we going to—”
“Silence!” The word having had its desired effect, Riordan continued, quietly. “They can hurt us, as they’ve demonstrated. They could have picked the Summer Palace in Niejwein. They could have picked the Thorold castle. We know they’ve captured couriers and forced them to carry spies over, but this is a new threat. We don’t know what they can do. All we know for certain is that our strongholds are not only undoppelgangered, they may very well be traps.”
He fell silent. Carl cleared his throat. Deceptively mildly, he asked, “Can we get our hands on some more?”
Olga, who had been rolling the empty water glass between her hands, put it down. “That’s already taken care of,” she said.
“In any event, it’s not a solution,” Riordan said dismissively. “At best it’s a minimal deterrent. We can hurt them—we can kill tens of thousands—but you know how the Americans respond to an attack. They are relentless, and they will slaughter millions without remorse to avenge a pinprick, should it embarrass them. Worse, their councils and congresses are so contrived that they cannot surrender. Any leader who advocates surrender is ridiculed and risks removal from office. And this leader—” He shook his head. “They haven’t felt the tread of conquering boots on their land in more than a lifetime, and for most of a lifetime they have been an empire, mighty and powerful; there is a level at which they do not believe it is possible for them to be beaten. So if we’re going to confront them, the last thing we should do is fight them openly, on ground of their own choosing.”
“Such as the Gruinmarkt,” said one of the new faces at the table, who had been sitting quietly at the back of the room until now. Heads turned towards him. “My apologies, milady. But . . .” He shrugged, impatiently. “Someone needs to get to the point.”
“Quite right,” muttered Carl.
“Earl Wu.” Riordan looked at him. “You spoke out of turn.”
“Then I apologize.” Wu looked unrepentant.
The staring match threatened to escalate into outright acrimony. Olga took a deep breath. “I believe his lordship is referring to certain informed speculation circulating in the intelligence committee over the past couple of days,” she said. “Rumors.”
“What rumors?” Riordan looked at her.
“We take our ability for granted.” Olga raised a hand to her throat, to the thin gold chain from which hung a locket containing the Clan sigil. “And for a long time we’ve assumed that we were limited to the two worlds, to home and to here. But now we know there are at least two more worlds. How many more could there be? We didn’t know as much as we thought we did. Or rather, much of what we thought we knew of our own limits was a consequence of timidity and custom.” The muttering began again. “The Americans have told their scientists to find out how our talent works. They’ve actually told us this. Threatening us with it. They don’t believe in magic: If they can see something in front of their eyes, then they can work out how it happens. They’ve demanded our surrender.” She licked her lips. “We need contingency plans. Because they might be bluffing—but if they’re not, if they have found a way to send weapons and people between worlds by science, then we’re in horrible danger. The Council needs to answer the question, what is to be done? And if they won’t, someone’s going to have to do it for them. That someone being us.”
Getting to see the colonel was a nontrivial problem; he was a busy man, and Mike was on medical leave with a leg that wasn’t going to bear his weight any time soon and a wiretap on his phone line. But he needed to talk to the colonel. Colonel Smith was, if not a friend, then at least the kind of boss who gave a shit what happened to his subordinates. The kind who figured a chain of command ran in two directions, not one. Unlike Dr. James and his shadowy sponsors.
After James’s false flag ambulance had dropped him off at the hospital to be poked and prodded, Mike had caught a taxi home, lost in thought. A bomb in a mobile phone, to be handed out like candy and detonated at will, was a scary kind of message to send. It said, we have nothing to talk about. It said, we want you dead, and we don’t care how. We don’t even care much who you are. Mike shuddered slightly as he recalled how Olga’s cynicism had startled him: “How do we know there isn’t a bomb in the earpiece?” she’d asked. Well, he’d denied it indignantly enough—and now she’d think he was a liar. More importantly, Miriam’s Machiavellian mother, and whoever she was working with—would also be convinced that the diplomatic dickering the colonel had supposedly been trying to get off the ground was a sting. Dr. James has deliberately killed any chance we’ve got of negotiating a peaceful settlement, he realized. He’s burned any chance of me ever being seen as a trustworthy—honorable—negotiator. And he’s playing some kind of double game and going behind Smith’s back. What the hell is going on?
Mike’s total exposure on the other side of the wall of worlds was measured in days, but he’d seen enough (hell, he’d smelled, heard, and tasted enough) to suspect that Dr. James was working on very incomplete information—or his plans had very little to do with the reality on the ground of
the Gruinmarkt. Worse, he seemed to be just about ignoring the Clan, the enigmatic world-walkers who’d been a huge thorn in the DEA’s collective ass for the past thirty years or more; it was almost as if he figured that a sufficient display of shock and awe would make them fold without a fight. But in Mike’s experience, beating on somebody without giving them any way out was a great way to make them do their damnedest to kill you. Mike’s instinct for self-preservation told him that pursuing the matter was a bad idea, and normally he’d have listened to it, but he had an uneasy feeling that this situation broke all the rules. If Dr. James was really off the rails someone needed to call him on it—and the logical person wasn’t Mike but his boss.
It took Mike a day to nerve himself to make his move. He spent it at home, planning, running through all the outcomes he could imagine. “What can possibly go wrong?” he asked Oscar, while making a list of bullet points on a legal pad. The elderly tomcat paused from washing his paw to give him such a look of bleak suspicion that Mike had to smile. “It’s like that, huh?”
The next morning, he shoehorned himself into his car and drove carefully to a nearby strip mall, which had seen better days, and where, if he remembered correctly, there might still be some beaten-up pay phones tucked away in a corner. His memory turned out to be correct. Staking out a booth and using his mobile as an address book, he dialed a certain exdirectory number. Seven minutes, he told himself. Ten, max.
“Hello?” It wasn’t Colonel Smith, but the voice was familiar.
“Janice? It’s Mike Fleming here. Can I please have a word with the colonel?”
There was a pause. “Mike? You’re on an unsecured line, you know that?”
“I have a problem with my home phone. Can you put me through?”
A longer pause. “I—see. Please hold.” The hold music cut off after half a minute. “Okay, I’m transferring you now.”
“Mike?” It was Colonel Smith. He tensed. Until now, he hadn’t been entirely sure it was going to work, but now he was committed, upcoming security vetting or no. I could be throwing my career away, he thought, feeling mildly nauseous.
“Hi, boss.”
“Mike, you’re still signed off sick. What’s up?” Smith sounded concerned.
“Oh, nothing much. I was wondering, though, if you’d be free to do lunch sometime?”
“If I’d be—” There was a muffled sound, as of a hand covering a mic. “Lunch? Oh, right. Look, I’m tied up right now, but how about we brown bag it some time soon?”
Mike nodded to himself. Message received: The last time the colonel had dropped round with a brown bag there’d been a bomb and a gun in it. “Sure. It’s not urgent, I don’t want to drag you out of the office—how about next Wednesday?” It was one of the older field-expedient codes: ignore negatives, treat them as emphasis. Mike just hoped the colonel had been to the same school.
“Maybe sooner,” Smith reassured him. “I’ll see you around.”
When he hung up, Mike almost collapsed on the spot. He’d been on the phone for two minutes. His arms were aching and he could feel the sweat in the small of his back. Shit. He pulled out the antibacterial gel wipes and applied them vigorously to the mouthpiece of the phone—he’d held the receiver and dialed the numbers with a gloved hand, but there were bound to be residues, DNA sequences, whatever—then mentally crossed it off his list of untapped numbers, for good. That left the polygraph, but, he figured, raising chain-of-command concerns with one’s immediate superior isn’t normally a sacking offense. And Dr. James hadn’t told him not to, either.
He’d hoped the colonel would deduce the urgency in his invitation and he was right. Barely half an hour after he arrived home the doorbell rang. Too soon, way too soon! his nerves gibbered at him as he hobbled towards the entryphone, but the small monitor showed him a single figure on the front step. “Come on up,” he said, eyeballing the top of his boss’s head with trepidation. A moment later, he opened the door.
“This had better be good,” said Smith, standing on the front step with a bag that contained—if Mike was any kind of judge—something from Burger King.
Mike hung back. “To your knowledge, is this apartment bugged?”
“Is—” Smith raised an eyebrow, an expression of deep concern on his face: concern for Mike’s sanity, in all probability. “If I thought it was bugged, I wouldn’t be here. What’s up?”
“Maybe nothing. To your knowledge, was there anything hinky about the mobile phone you dropped off with me last time you visited.”
“Was there”—Mike had never really seen a man’s pupils dilate like that, up close—“what?” He could see irritation and curiosity fighting out in Smith’s face.
“Let me get my coat. You’re driving.”
“You bet.” Smith shook his head. “This had better be good.”
The colonel drove a Town Car—anonymous, not obviously government issue. He didn’t say a word until they were a mile down the road. “This car is not bugged. I swept it myself. Talk.”
Mike swallowed. “You’re my boss. In my chain of command. I’m talking to you because I’m not from the other side of the fence—Is it normal for someone higher up the chain of command to do a false-flag pickup and brief a subordinate against their line officer?”
Smith didn’t say anything, but Mike noticed his knuckles whiten against the leather steering wheel.
“Because if so,” Mike continued, “I’d really like to know, so I can claim my pension and get the hell out.”
Smith whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “You’re telling me someone’s been messing with you—Dr. James. Right?”
“That’s the one.”
“Shit!” Smith thumped the center of the steering wheel so hard Mike twitched. “Sorry. I thought I’d cured him of that.” He flicked a turn signal on, then peeled over onto an exit ramp. “What did he want you to do?”
“It’s what I’ve already done, as much as anything else—the mobile phone you gave me, to pass on to the other side? Did you know it had a bomb in the earpiece? At least, that’s what Dr. James told me. He also told me he was reassigning me to some kind of expeditionary force. Do you know anything about that?”
“You sure about the phone?” Smith sounded troubled.
“That’s what he said. It gets worse. When I handed the thing over, my contact actually came out and asked me to my face whether there was a bomb in it. I said no, of course, but it sounds like they’re about as paranoid as the doctor. If they check it and find there is a bomb in it . . .”
“That’s a matter for the policy folks to deliberate on,” Smith said as he changed lanes. “Mike, I know what you’re asking and why, and I’ve got to say, that’s not your question—or mine—to ask. Incidentally, you don’t need to worry about any fallout; we’ve got a signed executive order waiting to cover our asses. But let me spin you a scenario? Put yourself in the doctor’s shoes. He knew they had a stolen FADM and he wanted it back, and he had to send them a message that he meant business. You were talking to their, their liberals. But we don’t want to talk to their liberals. Liberals are predisposed to talk; the doctor wants to get the attention of their hard-liners, get them to fold. We’d already told them that we wanted the weapon back. Negotiation beyond that point was useless: They could hand it over and we’d think about talking, but if not, no deal. So . . . if you look at it from his angle, a phone bomb would underline the message that we were pissed and we wanted our toy back. To the doctor’s way of thinking, if they found it, no big deal: It underlines the message. If it worked, waxing one weak sister would send a message to their other faction that we mean business. At least, that’s how he works.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel air bag cover.
“With respect, sir, that’s crazy. The Clan doesn’t work that way; what might work with a criminal enterprise or a dictatorship is the wrong way to go about nudging a hereditary aristocracy. He’s talking about assassinating someone’s mother or brother. They’ll see it as caus
e for a blood feud!”
“Hmm. That’s another way of looking at things. Only it’s already out of date. Mike, you swore an oath. Can I rely on you to keep this to yourself?”
Fleming nodded, uncertain. “I guess so.” Part of him wanted to interrupt: But you’re wrong! He’d spent two stinking days running a fever in a horse-drawn carriage with Miriam’s mother and the Russian ice princess with the sniper’s rifle, and every instinct screamed that the colonel’s scenario setup was glaringly wrong—that to those folks, the political was personal, very personal indeed, and a phone bomb in the wrong ear wouldn’t be treated as a message but as grounds for a bloody feud played out by the assassination of public figures—but at the same time, the colonel obviously had something else on his mind. And he had a sick, sinking feeling that trying to bring conflicting facts to the colonel’s attention, much less Dr. James’s, would lead to dismissal of his concerns at best. At worst—don’t go there, he told himself.
“You didn’t hear this from me, and you will not repeat it, but a few days ago we did an audit. The bad guys didn’t stop at just one nuke. We’re fairly certain our quiver is missing six arrows—that’s how many are missing, including the one we recovered, and the MO was the same for each theft.”
“Six—shit! What happened?”
“Too much.” Smith paused for a few seconds, cutting in behind a tractor-trailer. “The doctor sent the one we found back to them: Another of his little messages. He has, it seems, got some special friends in Special Forces, and contacts all the way up to the National Command Authority. He’s gotten the right help to build his own stovepiped parallel command and control chain for these gadgets, and he’s gotten VPOTUS’s ear, and VPOTUS got the president to sign off on it. . . . Hopefully it killed a bunch of their troops. There’s been a determination that we are at war; this isn’t a counter-terrorism op anymore, nor a smuggling interdiction. They’ve even gone to the Supremes to get a secret ruling that Posse Comitatus doesn’t apply to parallel universes.
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