Griben ven Hjalmar was not a soldier; he had no more (and no less) knowledge of the defensive techniques evolved by the Clan’s men of arms over half a century of bloody internicine feuding than any other civilian. Stephen Reynolds was not a civilian, but had only an outsider’s insight into the world-walkers. Both of them knew, in principle, of the importance of doppelgängering their safe houses – of protecting them against infiltration by enemy attackers capable of bypassing doors and walls by entering from the world next door.
However, both of them had independently made different – and fatal – risk assessments. Reynolds had assumed that because Elder Huan’s ‘Eastern cousins’ came from a supposedly primitive world, and had demonstrated no particular talent for mayhem within his ambit, the most serious risk they presented was the piecemeal violence of the gun and the knife. And ven Hjalmar had assumed that the presence of armed guards downstairs (some of them briefed and alert to the risk of attackers appearing out of nowhere in their midst) would be sufficient.
What neither of them had anticipated was a systematic assault on the lobby of the headquarters building, conducted by a lance of Clan Security troops under the command of Sir Alasdair ven Hjorth-Wasser – who had been known as Sergeant Al ‘Tiny’ Schroder, towards the end of his five years in the USMC – troops in body armor, with grenades and automatic weapons, who had spent long years honing their expertise in storming defended buildings, in other worlds. Nor had they anticipated Sir Alasdair’s objective: to suppress the defenders for long enough to deliver a wheelbarrow load of ANNM charges, emplace them around the load-bearing walls, and world-walk back to safety. Two hundred kilograms of ammonium nitrate/nitromethane explosives, inside the six-story brick and stone structure, would be more than enough to blow out the load-bearing walls and drop the upper floors; building codes and construction technologies in New Britain lagged behind the United States by almost a century.
It was an anonymous and brutal counterattack, and left Sir Alasdair (and Commissioner Burgeson) with acid indigestion and disrupted sleep for some days, until the last of the bodies pulled from the rubble could finally be identified. If either ven Hjalmar or Reynolds had realized in time that their location had been betrayed, the operation might have failed, as would the cover story: a despicable royalist cell’s attack on the Peace and Justice Subcommittee’s leading light, the heroic death of Commissioner Reynolds as he led the blackcoats in a spirited defense of the People’s Revolution, and the destruction of the dastardly terrorists by their own bombs. But it was a success. And as the cover-up operation proceeded – starting with the delivery of the captives held on board the Burke to a rather different holding area ashore, under the control of guards outside the chain of command of the Directorate of Internal Security – the parties to the fragile conspiracy were able to breathe their respective sighs of relief.
The worst was over; but now the long haul was just beginning.
*
It was a humid morning near Boston; with a blustery breeze blowing, and cloud cover lowering across the sky, fat drops of rain spattered across the sidewalk and speckled the gray wooden wall of the compound.
The wall around the compound had sprung up almost overnight, enclosing a chunk of land on the green outskirts of Wellesley – land which included a former Royal Ordnance artillery works, and a wedge of rickety brick row houses trapped between the works and the railroad line. One day, a detachment of Freedom Guards had showed up and gone door to door, telling the inhabitants that they were being moved west with their factory, moving inland towards the heart of the empire, away from threat of coastal invasion. There had been no work, and no money to pay the workers, for five months; the managers had bartered steel fabrications and stockpiled gun barrels for food to keep their men from starvation. Word that the revolutionary government did indeed want them to resume production, and had prepared a new home for them and would in due course feed and pay them, overcame much resistance. Within two days the district’s life had drained away on flatbeds and boxcars, rolling west towards a questionable future. The last laborers to leave had pegged out the line of the perimeter; the first to arrive unloaded timber from the sidings by the arsenal and began to build the wall and watch-towers. They did so under the guns of their camp guards, for these men were prisoners, captured royalist soldiers taken by the provisional government.
After they’d built the walls of the prison they’d occupy, and the watchtowers and guardhouses for their captors, the prisoners were set to work building their own cabins on the empty ground between two converging railroad tracks. These, too, they built walls around. They built lots of walls; and while they labored, they speculated quietly among themselves about who would get the vacant row houses.
They did not have long to wait to find out.
Family groups of oddly dressed folk, who spoke haltingly or with a strong Germanic accent, began to arrive one morning. The guards were not obsequious towards them, exactly, but it was clear that their position was one of relative privilege. They had the haunted expressions of refugees, uprooted from home and hearth forever. Some of them seemed resentful and slightly angry about their quarters, which was inexplicable: The houses were not the mansions of rich merchants or professionals, but they were habitable, and had sound roofs and foundations. Where had they come from? Nobody seemed to know, and speculation was severely discouraged. After a couple of prisoners disappeared – one of them evidently an informer, the other just plain unlucky – the others learned to keep their mouths shut.
The prisoners were kept busy. After a few more carriageloads of displaced persons arrived, some of the inmates were assigned to new building work, this time large, well-lit drafting offices illuminated by overhead skylights. Another gang found themselves unloading wagonloads of machine tools, lightweight precision-engineering equipment to stand beside the forges and heavy presses left behind by the artillery works. Something important was coming, that much was clear. But what?
*
‘What is this – hovel?’ demanded the tall woman with the babe in arms, pausing on the threshold. She spoke Hochsprache, with an aristocratic Northern accent; the politicals in their striped shirts, burdened beneath her trunk, didn’t understand her.
Heyne shrugged, then turned to the convicts. ‘Leave it here and report back to barracks,’ he told them, speaking English. He watched as they deposited the trunk, none too softly, and shuffled away with downturned faces. Then he gestured back into the open doorway. ‘It’s where you’re going to live for a while,’ he told her bluntly. ‘Be thankful; this nation’s in the grip of revolt, but you’ve got a roof over your head and food on the table, and guards to keep you safe.’
‘But I – ’ Helena voh Wu stepped inside and looked around. Raw brick faced with patches of crumbling plaster stared back at her; bare boards creaked underfoot.
The other woman was more practical. ‘Help me move this inside?’ she said, looking up at him as she bent over one end of the trunk. The boy, free of her hand, dashed inside and thundered up the stairs, shouting excitedly.
‘Certainly, my lady.’ Heyne picked up the other end of the trunk and helped her maneuver it past the other woman. It gave them both a polite excuse to ignore her hand-wringing dismay.
‘Is there any bedding? Or furniture?’ she asked.
‘Probably not.’ They finished shoving the trunk against the inner wall of the front room, and Heyne straightened up. ‘The previous tenants shipped out a week since, and stripped their houses of anything worth taking. The matter’s in hand, though. We’ve got plenty of labor from the politicals in the workshop. Tell me the basics you need and I’ll put in an order for it.’ He looked around. ‘Hmm. They really stripped this one.’ Walking through into the kitchen, he tutted. ‘Needs plaster and paint, then a complete kitchen set, table and chairs, pots, a stove if we can find one. Beds’ – he glanced over his shoulder – ‘for three of you.’ Walking to the back, he stared through the grimy window into the yard. ‘Chamber
pots. Let’s check the outhouse.’
Outside in the sunlight, Kara spoke quietly. ‘I know we’re refugees, dependent on the generosity of strangers. But Helena can’t be the first like this . . . ?’
Heyne glanced back at the terraced house and shook his head. ‘No, she isn’t. Most people go through something like it, sooner or later; but they get over it eventually.’ He looked back at the outhouse. ‘Good, they left the toilet seat. My lady, I know this accommodation is not up to your normal standards, but the fact is, we’re beginning again from scratch, with barely any resources. We’re lucky enough that Her Majesty negotiated a settlement with the revolutionaries that gives us this compound, and resources to . . . well, I’m not sure I can talk about that yet. But we’re welcome here for now, anyway, and we’re not going to starve.’ He turned and headed back through the kitchen door, glanced through into the front room – where Helena was sitting on the trunk, rocking slowly from side to side – and then climbed the creaking staircase to the top floor and the two cramped bedrooms below the attic.
The young boy was still crawling around the empty south-facing bedroom, jumping up and down and making believe in some exciting adventure. Heyne tested the windows. ‘The glass is all here and the windows open. Good.’
‘How long will we be here?’ Kara asked bluntly.
‘As long as they want to keep us.’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t want to go back home, my lady.’ His eyes lingered a moment too long on her stomach. ‘Not now, maybe not ever.’
‘But my husband – ’
‘He’ll follow us over here.’ Heyne’s tone brooked no argument, even though his words were spoken with the voice of optimism rather than out of any genuine certainty. ‘Don’t ever doubt it.’
‘But if we can’t go back’ – she frowned – ‘what use are we to them?’
Heyne shook his head. ‘Nobody’s told me yet. But you can be sure Her Majesty has something in mind.’
*
Stumbling through workdays like nothing he’d ever seen before, walking in a numb haze of dread, Steve Schroeder had spent the weeks since 7/16 waiting for the other shoe to fall.
There was the horror of the day’s events, of course, and then the following momentous changes. Agent Judt sitting in one corner of the office for the first week, a personal and very pointed reminder that he’d accidentally turned down the kind of scoop that came along once in a lifetime – a chance to interview Osama bin Laden on September the twelfth – and then the consequences as the scale of the atrocity grew clearer. Then the surreal speech by the new president, preposterous claims that had no place in a real-world briefing; he’d thought Mr. Cheney was mad for half an hour, until the chairman of the Joint Chiefs came on-screen on CNN, gloomily confirming that the rabbit hole the new president had jumped down was in fact not a rabbit hole at all, but a giant looming cypher like an alien black monolith suddenly arrived in the middle of the national landscape –
And then the India–Pakistan war, and its attendant horrors, and the other lesser reality excursions – the Israeli nuclear strike on Bushehr, the riots and massacres in Iraq, China’s ballistic nuclear submarine putting to sea with warheads loaded and the tense stand-off in the Formosa Strait – and then the looking-glass world had shattered, breaking out of its frame: the PAPUA Act, arrests of radicals and cells of suspected parallel-universe sympathizers, slower initiatives to bring forward a national biometric identity database, frightening rumors about the military tribunals at Guantánamo that had so abruptly dropped out of the headlines –
One day, after a couple of apocalyptic weeks, Agent Judt wasn’t there anymore. And when a couple of days later the president had his third and fatal heart attack and there was a new president, one who spoke of known unknowns and unknown unknowns and seemed to think Dr. Strangelove was an aspirational role model, there was a new reality on the ground. The country had gone mad, Steve thought, traumatized and whiplashed by meaningless attacks: 9/11 and strange religious fanatics in the Middle East had been bad enough, but what was coming next? Flying saucers on the White House lawn? Not that there was any White House lawn for them to land on, anymore. (President Cheney had promised to rebuild, once the radiation died down, but that would take months or years.)
Two weeks after the attack, Steve went to see his HMO and came away with a prescription for Seroxat. It helped, a bit; which was why, on his way home from a day shift one evening, he was alert enough to realize he was being followed.
Downtown Boston was no place to commute on wheels. Like most locals, Steve relied on the T to get him in and out, leaving his truck in a car park beside a station. He didn’t usually pay much attention to his fellow passengers – no more than enough to spot a seat and keep a weather eye open for rare-to-nonexistent muggers – but as he got off a Green Line streetcar at Kenmore to change lines something drew his attention to a man stepping off the carriage behind him. Something familiar about the figure, glimpsed briefly through the crowd of bodies, triggered a rush of unease. Steve shivered despite the muggy heat and hurried across the tracks behind the streetcar, heading for his own platform. It can’t be him, he told himself. He spooked and ran. He looked around behind him, but the half-recognized man wasn’t there anymore.
What to do? Steve shook his head and hunkered down, waiting for the C Line train to North Station.
He knew something was wrong about five seconds after his train began to squeal and shudder away from the platform; knew it from the hairs on the back of his neck and the slight dip of his seat as the man behind him leaned forward, putting his weight on the seat back. ‘Hello, Steve.’
He tensed. ‘What do you want?’ It was hot in the streetcar, but the skin in the small of his back felt icy cold.
‘I’m getting off at the next stop; don’t try to follow me. I think you might like to have a look at these files. There’s an e-mail address; mail me when you want to talk again.’ A cheap plastic folder bulging with papers thrust over the seat back beside him like an accusing affidavit. He caught it before it spilled to the floor.
‘What if I don’t want to talk to you?’ he asked.
The man behind him laughed quietly. ‘Give it to your FBI handler. He’ll shit a brick.’
The streetcar slowed; Steve, too frightened to look round as the man behind him stood up, clutched the folio to his chest. Jesus, I can’t just let him get away –
The doors opened with a hiss of compressed air. Steve began to turn, caution chiding him – He might be armed – but he was too late. Mike Fleming, Beckstein’s friend, had disappeared again. Steve subsided with another shudder. Fleming knows too damn much, he thought. He’d known about 7/16 before it happened. What if he was telling the truth? What if it’s an inside job? The prospect was unutterably terrifying. The looking-glass world news nightmare that had engulfed everything around him a month ago was bad enough; the idea that there really was a conspiracy behind it, and his own government shared responsibility for it, left Steve feeling sick. This was a job for Woodward and Bernstein, not him. But Bob Woodward was dead – one of the casualties of 7/16 – and as for the rest of it, there was no one else to do whatever needed doing. I could phone Agent Judt, he told himself. I could.
A week or two ago, before the latest wave of chaos, he’d probably have done so immediately. But the end-times chaos of the past month had unhinged his reflexive loyalty to authority just as surely as it had reinforced that of millions of others. He unzipped the folio and glanced inside quickly. There was a cover sheet, laser-printed; he began reading.
8/18
It is a little-known fact that, contrary to public mythology, the president of the United States of America lacks the authority to order a strategic nuclear attack. Ever since the dog days of the Nixon administration, when the drunken president periodically phoned his diminishing circle of friends at 3:00 A.M. to rail incoherently about the urgent need to nuke North Vietnam, the executive branch has made every effort to ensure that any such decision can only be made
stone-cold sober and after a lengthy period of soul-searching contemplation. An elaborate protocol exists: A series of cabinet meetings, consultations with the Joint Chiefs, discussions with the Senate Armed Services Committee, and quite possibly divine intervention, a UN Security Council Resolution, and the sacrifice of a black goat in the Oval Office at midnight are required before such a grave step can even be placed on the table for discussion.
However . . .
Retaliation after an attack is much easier.
If the former vice president put the plan in motion, diverted superblack off-budget funds to the Family Trade Organization, jogged Mr. Bush’s elbow to sign the presidential orders setting in motion the research program to build machines around slivers of vivisected neural tissue extracted from the brains of captured Clan world-walkers, then perhaps the blame might be laid at his door. But it was his successor in the undisclosed location, former mentor and then vice president by appointment, who organized the details of the strike and bullied the Joint Chiefs into drafting new orders for USSTRATCOM tasking them with a mission enabled by the new ARMBAND technology. And it was the Office of the White House Counsel who drafted legal opinions approving the use of nuclear weapons in strict retaliation against an extradimensional threat, confirming that domestic law did not apply to parallel instances of North American geography, and that the two still-missing SADM demolition devices were necessary and sufficient justification: that such an operation constituted a due and proportionate response in accordance with international law, and that the Geneva Conventions did not apply beyond the ends of the Earth.
Complicity spread like a brown, stinking cloud through the traumatized rump of a Congress and Senate who were themselves the survivors of a lethal attack on the Capitol. President Cheney had ensured that the opposition would vote the way they were told; the PAPUA bill was as efficient an enabling act as had been seen anywhere in the world since 1933. A few dissenters – pacifists and peaceniks mostly – spoke out against the far-reaching surveillance and monitoring regime, but the press and the public were in no mood to put up with their rubbish about the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments; with the nation clearly under attack, who cared if a few whining hippie rejects talked themselves into a holiday in Club Fed? Better that than risk them giving aid and comfort to enemy infiltrators with stolen nukes. Rolling out the new identity-card system and national DNA database would take a couple of years, and until it was in place there’d always be the risk that the person walking past you in the street was a soldier of the invisible enemy. An eager Congress voted an ever-increasing laundry list of surveillance and control orders through with unanimous consent, each representative terrified of being seen to be weak on security.
The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) Page 61
