The Family Trade tmp-1

by Charles Stross

  “Oh dear,” he said. She stared up at him through a haze of pain. “I’ll bring a wheelchair for you. Please don’t try to move.”

  The ceiling pancaked lazily above her head. Miriam felt sick and a little bit drowsy. Her head was splitting. Migraine or anaesthesia hangover? she wondered. The well-dressed man with the sword sticking incongruously out from under his suit coat was back, with a wheelchair and another man wearing a green medical smock. Together they picked her up and planted her in the chair, loose as a sack of potatoes. “Oww,” she moaned softly.

  “That was a nasty bash,” said her visitor. He walked beside the chair. Lighting strips rolled by overhead, closed doorways to either side. “How do you feel?”

  “Lousy,” she managed. Her right arm had come out in sympathy with her skull. “Who’re you?”

  “You don’t give up, do you?” he observed. The chair turned a corner: More corridor stretched ahead. “I’m Roland, Earl Lofstrom. Your welfare is my responsibility for now.” The chair stopped in front of burnished stainless-steel panels-an elevator. Mechanisms grumbled behind the door. “You shouldn’t have awakened in that isolation cell. You were only there due to an administrative error. The individual responsible has been disciplined.”

  A cold chill washed down Miriam’s spine, cutting through the haze of pain. “Don’t want your name,” she muttered. “Want to know who you people are. My rights, dammit.”

  The elevator doors opened and the attendant pushed her inside. Roland stepped in beside her, then waved the attendant away. Then he pushed a button out of sight behind her head. The doors closed and the elevator began to rise, but stopped only a few seconds later. “You appear to be under a misapprehension,” he repeated. “You’re asking for your rights. The, uh, Miranda declaration, yes?”

  She tried to look up at him. “Huh?”

  “That doesn’t apply here. Different jurisdiction, you know.” His accompanying smile left Miriam deeply unnerved.

  The elevator doors opened and he wheeled her into a silent, carpeted corridor with no windows-just widely spaced doors to either side, like an expensive hotel. He stopped at the third door along on the left and pushed it open, then turned her chair and rolled it forward into the room within. “There. Isn’t this an improvement over the other room?”

  Miriam pushed down on the wheelchair arms with both hands, wincing at a stab of pain in her right forearm. “Shit.” She looked around. “This isn’t federal.”

  “If you don’t mind.” He took her elbow, and this time she couldn’t dodge. His grip was firm but not painful. “This is the main reception room of your suite. You’ll note the windows don’t actually open, and they’re made of toughened glass for your safety. The bathroom is through that door, and the bedroom is over there.” He pointed. “If you want anything, lift the white courtesy phone. If you need a doctor, there is one on call. I suggest you take an hour to recover, then freshen up and get dressed. There will be an interview in due course.”

  “What is this place? Who are you people?” Finally Roland frowned at her. “You can stop pretending you don’t know,” he said. “You aren’t going to convince anyone.” Pausing in the doorway, he added, “The war’s over, you know. We won twenty years ago.” The door closed behind him with a solid-sounding click, and Miriam was unsurprised to discover that the door handle flopped limply in her hand when she tried it. She was locked in.

  Miriam shuffled into the white-tiled bathroom, blinked in the lights, then sat down heavily on the toilet. “Holy shit,” she mumbled in disbelief. It was like an expensive hotel-a fiendishly expensive one, aimed at sheikhs and diplomats and billionaires. The floor was smooth, a very high grade of Italian marble if she was any judge of stonework. The sink was a moulded slab of thick green glass and the taps glowed with a deep lustre that went deeper than mere gilding could reach. The bath was a huge scalloped shell sunk into the floor, white and polished, with blue and green lights set into it amid the chromed water jets. An acre of fluffy white towels and a matching bathrobe awaited her, hanging above a basket of toiletries. She knew some of those brand names; she’d even tried their samplers when she was feeling extravagant. The shampoo alone was a hundred dollars a bottle.

  This definitely isn’t anything to do with the government, she realized. I know people who’d pay good money to be locked up in here!

  She sat down on the edge of the bathtub, slid into one of the seats around its rim, and spent a couple of minutes puzzling out the control panel. Eventually she managed to coax half a dozen jets of aerated water into life. This is a prison, she kept reminding herself. Roland’s words haunted her: ‘Different jurisdiction, you know.’ Where was she? They’d taken the locket. That implied that they knew about it-and about her. But there was absolutely no way to square this experience with what she’d seen in the forest: the pristine wilderness, the peasant village.

  The bedroom was as utterly over the top as the bathroom, dominated by a huge oak sleigh-bed in a traditional Scandinavian style, with masses of down comforters and pillows. Rather than fitted furniture there were a pair of huge oak wardrobes and a chest of drawers and other, smaller, furniture-a dressing table with mirror, an armchair, something that looked like an old linen press. Every piece of furniture in the bedroom looked to be an antique. The combined effect was overwhelming, like being expected to sleep in an auction house’s display room.

  “Oh wow.” She looked around and spotted the windows, then walked over to them. A balcony outside blocked the view of whatever was immediately below. Beyond it she had a breathtaking view of a sweep of forested land dropping away toward a shallow valley with a rocky crag, standing proud and bald on the other side. It was as untainted by civilization as the site of her camping expedition. She turned away, disquieted. Something about this whole picture screamed: Wrong! at her, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  The chest of drawers held an unpleasant surprise. She pulled the top drawer open, half-expecting it to be empty. Instead, it contained underwear. Her underwear. She recognized the holes in one or two socks that she hadn’t gotten around to throwing away.

  “Bastards.” She focused on the clothing, mind spinning furiously. They’re thorough, whoever they are. She looked closer at the furniture. The writing desk appeared to be an original Georgian piece, or even older, a monstrously valuable antique. And the chairs, Queen Anne or a good replica-disturbingly expensive. A hotel would be content with reproductions, she reasoned. The emphasis would be on utility and comfort, not authenticity. If there were originals anywhere, they’d be on display in the foyer. It reminded her of something that she’d seen somewhere, something that nagged at the back of her mind but stubbornly refused to come to the foreground.

  She stood up and confirmed her suspicion that the wardrobes held her entire range of clothing. More words came back to haunt her: ‘There will be an interview in due course.’ “I’m not in a cell,” she told herself, “but I could be. They showed me that much. So they’re playing head games. They want to play the stick-and-carrot game. That means I’ve got some kind of leverage. Doesn’t it?” Find out what they want, then get out of here fast, she decided.

  Half an hour later she was ready. She’d chosen a blouse the colour of fresh blood, her black interview suit, lip gloss to match, and heels. Miriam didn’t normally hold with makeup, but this time she went the whole hog. She didn’t normally hold with power dressing either, but something about Roland and this setup suggested that his people were much more obsessed with appearances than the dot-com entrepreneurs and Masspike corridor startup monkeys she usually dealt with. Any edge she could get…

  A bell chimed discreetly. She straightened up and turned to look at the door as it opened. Here it comes, she thought nervously.

  It was Roland, who’d brought her up here from the cell. Now that she saw him in the daylight from the windows with a clear head, her confusion deepened. He looks like a secret service agent, she thought. Something about that indefinably mi
litary posture and the short hair suggested he’d been ordered into that suit in place of combat fatigues.

  “Ah. You’ve found the facilities.” He nodded. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she said. “I see you ransacked my house.”

  “You will find that everything has been accounted for,” he said, slightly defensively. “Would you rather we’d given you a prison uniform? No?” He sized her up with a glance. “Well, there’s someone I have to take you to see now.”

  “Oh, goody It slipped out before she could clamp down on the sarcasm. “The chief of secret police, I assume?”

  His eyes widened slightly. “Don’t joke about it,” he muttered.

  “Oh.” Miriam dry-swallowed. “Right, well, we wouldn’t want to keep him waiting, would we?”

  “Absolutely not,” Roland said seriously. He held the door open, then paused for a moment. “By the way, I really wouldn’t want you to embarrass yourself trying to escape. This is a secure facility.”

  “I see,” said Miriam, who didn’t-but had made her mind up already that it would be a mistake to simply cut and run. These people had snatched her from her own bed. That suggested a frightening level of-competence.

  She approached the door warily, keeping as far away from Roland as she could. “Which way?”

  “Along the passage.”

  He headed off at a brisk march and she followed him, heels sinking into the sound-deadening carpet. She had to hurry to keep up. When I get out of this mess, I’m buying a new interview outfit-one I can run in, she promised herself.

  “Wait one moment, please.”

  She found herself fetched up behind Roland’s broad back, before a pair of double doors that were exquisitely panelled and polished. Odd, she wondered. Where is everybody? She glanced over her shoulder, and spotted a discreet video camera watching her back. They’d come around two corners, as if the corridor followed a rectangle: They’d passed a broad staircase leading down, and the elevator-there ought to be more people about, surely?

  “Who am I-”

  Roland turned around. “Look, just wait,” he said. “Security calls.” She noticed for the first time that he had the inside of his wrist pressed against an unobtrusive box in the wall.

  “Security?”

  “Biometrics, I think it’s called,” he said. There was a click from the door and he opened it slowly. “Matthias? Ish hafe gefauft des’usher des Angbard.”

  Miriam blinked-she didn’t recognize the language. It sounded a bit like German, but not enough to make anything out; and her high school German was rusty, anyway.

  “Innen gekomm’, denn.”

  The door opened and Roland caught her right arm, tugged her into the room after him, and let the door close. She pulled her arm back and rubbed the sore spot as she glanced around.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” she said. Thick draped curtains surrounded the window. The walls were panelled richly in dark wood: The main piece of furniture was a desk beside an inner office door. A broad-shouldered man in a black suit, white shirt, and red tie waited behind the desk. The only thing to distinguish the scene from a high-class legal practice was the submachine gun resting by his right hand.

  “Spresh’she de hoh’sprashe?”

  “No,” said Roland. “Use English, please.”

  “Okay,” said the man with the gun. He looked at Miriam, and she had the disquieting sense that he was photographing her, storing her face in his memory. He had frizzy black hair, swept back from high temples, combined with a nose like a hatchet and a glare like a caged hawk. “I am Matthias. I am the Boss’s secretary, which is, his keeper of secrets. That is his office door. You go in there without permission over my dead body. This is not an, um, how would you say it?” He glanced at Roland.

  “Metaphor,” Roland offered.

  “Metaphor.” Matthias looked at her again. He wasn’t smiling. “The Boss is expecting you. You may enter now.”

  Miriam looked sidelong at him as Roland marched over to the door and opened it, then waved her forward. Matthias kept his eyes on her-and one hand close to the gun. She found herself involuntarily giving him a wide berth, as she would a rattlesnake. Not that he looked particularly venomous-a polite, clean-shaven man in a pin-striped suit-but there was something about his manner… she’d seen it before, in a young DEA agent she had dated for a couple of months before learning better. Mike Fleming had been quietly, calmly, crazy, in a way that made her cut and run before she got dragged too far in with him. He’d been quite prepared to give his life for the cause he believed in-or to make any other sacrifice for that matter: He was utterly unable to see the walls of the box he’d locked himself in. The kind of guy who’d arrest a cripple with multiple sclerosis for smoking a joint to deaden the pain. She suppressed a shudder as she entered the inner office.

  The inner office was as excessive as the suite they’d given her, the Mafia special with the locked door and the auction house’s ransom in antiques. The floor was tiled in hand-polished hardwood, partially covered by a carpet that was probably worth as much as her house. The walls were panelled in wood blackened with age. There were a couple of discreet oil paintings of big red-faced men in medieval-looking armour or classical robes posed before a castle, and a pair of swords rested on pegs in the wall above the desk. There was a huge walnut desk positioned beside the window bay and two chairs were drawn up before it, positioned so that the owner of the office would be all but invisible from the window.

  Roland stopped before the desk, drew himself up to attention, and saluted. “My lord, I have the pleasure of presenting to you… Miriam Beckstein.”

  The presence in the chair inclined his head in acknowledgment. “That is not her real name, but her presence is sufficient. You may be at ease.” Miriam squinted, trying to make out his features against the glare. He must have taken her expression for hostility, for he waved a hand: “Please be seated, the both of you. I have no argument with you, ah, Miriam, if that is the name you wish to be known by.”

  Roland surprised her by pulling a chair out and offering it to her. She startled herself in turn by sitting down, albeit nervously, knees clenched together and back stiffly erect “Who are you people?” she whispered.

  Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the light: She could see the man in the high-backed chair smile faintly. He was in late middle age, possibly as old as Morris Beckstein would have been, had he lived. His suit was sober-these people dressed like a company of undertakers-but so well cut that it had to be hand-tailored. His hair was graying, and his face was undistinguished, except for a long scar running up his left cheek.

  “I might ask the same question,” he murmured. “Roland, be seated, I say!” His tone of voice said he was used to being obeyed. “I am the high Duke Angbard of house Lofstrom, third of that name, trustee of the crown of guilds, defender of the king’s honour, freeman of the city of Niejwein, head of security of the Clan Reunified, prince of merchant-princes, owner of this demesne, and holder of many more titles than that-but those are the principal ones.” His eyes were the colour of lead, a blue so pale she found them hard to see, even when they were focused directly on her. “Also, if I am not very much mistaken, I am your uncle.”

  Miriam recoiled in shock. “What?” Another voice echoed her. She glanced sideways to see Roland staring at her in astonishment. His cool exterior began to crack.

  “My father would never-” Roland began.

  “Shut up,” said Angbard, cold steel in his voice. “I was not referring to your father, young man, but to your aunt once removed: Patricia.”

  “Would you mind explaining just what you’re talking about?” Miriam demanded, anger finally getting the better of her. She leaned forward. “Your people have abducted me, ransacked my house, and kidnapped me, just because you think I’m some kind of long-lost relative?”

  Angbard nodded thoughtfully. “No. We are absolutely certain you’re a long-lost relative.” He glanced at his nephew. “T
here is solid evidence.”

  Roland leaned back in his chair, whistled tunelessly, all military pretence fled. He stared at her out of wide eyes, as if he was seeing a ghost.

  “What have you got to whistle about?” she demanded.

  “You asked for an explanation,” Angbard reminded her. “The arrival of an unknown world-walker is always grounds for concern. Since the war… suffice to say, your appearance would have been treated drastically in those days. When you stumbled across the old coast trail a week ago, and the patrol shot at you, they had no way of knowing who you were. That became evident only later-I believe you left a pair of pink house-shoes behind?-and triggered an extensive manhunt. However, you are clearly not connected to a traitorous faction, and closer research revealed some interesting facts about you. I believe you were adopted?”

  “That’s right.” Miriam’s heart was fluttering in her ribs, shock and unpleasant realization merging. “Are you saying you’re my long-lost relatives?”

  “Yes.” Angbard waited a moment, then slid open one of the drawers in his desk. “This is yours, I believe.”

  Miriam reached out and picked up the locket. Tarnished with age, slightly battered-an island of familiarity. “Yes.”

  “But not this.” Angbard palmed something else, then pushed it across the desk toward her.

  “Oh my.” Miriam was lost for words. It was the identical twin to her locket, only brightly shining and lacking some scratches. She took it and sprang the catch-

  “Ouch!” She glared at Roland, who had knocked it out of her hand. But he was bending down, and after a moment she realized that he was picking it up, very carefully, keeping the open halves facedown until it was upon the duke’s blotter.

  “We will have to teach you how to handle these things safely,” Angbard said mildly. “In the meantime, my sister’s is yours to keep.”

  “Your sister’s,” she echoed stupidly, wrapping her fingers around the locket.

  “My sister went missing thirty-two years ago,” Angbard said with careful lack of emphasis. “Her caravan was attacked, her husband slain, and her guard massacred, but her body was never found. Nor was that of her six-week-old daughter. She was on her way to pay attendance to the court of the high king, taking her turn as the Clan’s hostage. The wilds around Chesapeake Bay, as it is called on your side, are not heavily populated in this world. We searched for months, but obviously to little effect.”