The Family Trade tmp-1

by Charles Stross

  It was snowing in New York, too, but nothing like the blizzard that had dumped two feet of snow on Neijwein in a day. Miriam met nobody in the warehouse. At the top of the stairs she paused. What was that trick? She wondered, racking her brains. A flashback to the training course, years ago: It had been a giggle at the time, spy tradecraft stuff for journalists who were afraid of having their hotel rooms burgled in Krygistan or wherever. But now it came back to her. Kneeling, she tied a piece of black cotton sewing thread from the wall to the handrail, secured with a needle. It was invisible in the twilight. If it was gone when she returned, that would tell her something.

  On this trip, she wore her hiking gear and towed her suitcase. With street map in hand, she wanted to give the impression of being a tourist from out of state who’d wandered into the wrong part of town. Maybe that was why a taxi pulled up almost as soon as she emerged from the back street, while her phone was still chirping its voice mail alert.

  “The Marriott Marquis, Times Square,” she told the driver. Head pounding, she hit the “mail” button and clamped the phone to her ear.

  “Marriott Marquis, room 2412, continuously booked for the whole week in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Roland Dorchester. Just ask at the front desk and they’ll give you a key.”

  Thank you, she thought, pocketing the phone and blinking back tears of relief.

  The taxi took her straight to the main entrance and a bellboy was on hand to help her with her suitcase. She headed straight to the front desk.

  “Mrs. Dorchester? Yes, ma’am, I have your card-key here, [f you’d like to sign…”

  Miriam did a little double-take, then scrawled something that she hoped she’d be able to replicate on demand. Then she took the keys and headed for the elevator bank.

  She was inside the glass-walled express elevator, and it was surging up from the third floor in a long glide toward the top, when a horrible thought occurred to her. What if they’ve got to Roland? she wondered. After he booked the hotel. They could be waiting for me.

  It was a frightening thought, and Miriam instinctively reached toward her pocket. How the hell do you do this? Suddenly it occurred to her that the little revolver was as much of a threat as an asset in this kind of situation. If she went through the door and some bad guy was just inside, he could grab her before she had a chance to use it. Or grab the gun. And she was more than twenty stories up, high enough that-she looked out and down through the glass wall of the lift and took a deep breath of relief. “Oh, that’s okay,” she muttered, as the obvious explanation occurred to her just before the lift bell dinged for attention: Skyscrapers didn’t need doppelgangering against attack from another world where concrete and structural steel were barely known.

  Miriam stepped out into the thickly carpeted hallway and stopped. Pulling out her mobile phone, she dialled Roland’s number. It rang three times.

  “Hello?”

  “Roland, what happens if you’re on the twenty-fourth floor of a tall building, say a hotel, and-” quick glance in either direction-“you try to world-walk?”

  “You don’t do that.” He chucked dryly. “That’s why I chose it. I wasn’t expecting you so soon. Come right on up?”

  “Sure,” she said and rang off, abruptly dizzy with relief and anticipation.

  I hope this works out, she thought, dry-swallowing as she walked down the corridor, hunting for room 2412. Hell, we hardly know each other-

  She reached the door. All her other options had run out. She put the card in the slot and turned the handle.

  Three hours later they came up for air. The bedding was a tangled mess, half the fluffy white towels were on the bathroom floor and the carpet was a wasteland of discarded clothing-but it had worked out.

  “I have missed you so much,” she murmured in his ear, then leaned close to nibble at his lobe.

  “That makes two of us.” He heaved up a little, bracing against the bed head, turning to look at her. “You’re beautiful.”

  “I bet you say that to every naked woman you wake up in bed with,” she replied, laughing.

  “No,” he said, in all seriousness, before he realized what he’d done. Then he turned bright red. “I mean-”

  He was too late. Miriam pounced. “Got you,” she giggled, holding him down. Then she subsided on top of him. “Like that?” she asked. “Or this?”

  “Oh.” He rolled his eyes. “Please. A few minutes?”

  “Frail male reed!”

  “Guilty, I’m afraid.” He wrapped an arm around her. “What’s with the early appearance? I thought there was supposed to be a reception this evening?”

  “There was, past tense.” Miriam explained about the cancellation.

  “So you came over early, just in case I was here?”

  “No.” She felt very sober, all of a sudden, even though they hadn’t been drinking-and felt the need to remedy the condition, too.

  “Why, then? I thought you were sticking with the program?”

  “Not when people try to kill me twice in one day.”

  “What?” His arms tensed and he began to sit up.

  “No, no-lie down. Relax. They can’t come through here and I took steps to throw off the trail.” She kissed him, again, tasted the sweat of their lovemaking. “Wow. What did I do to deserve someone like you?”

  “You were really, really wicked in a previous life?”

  “Nonsense!”

  “The killers.” She’d broken the magic, she realized with a sense of desolation.

  “They won’t follow us here, but there’s a lot to tell,” she said. “How about we dig a bottle out of the minibar and have a bath or something while I tell you?”

  “I think we can do better than that,” he said with a glint in his eye. He reached for the bedside phone. “Room service, please. Yes? It’s room 2412. Can you send up the item I ordered earlier? Leave it outside.”

  “Huh?” She raised her eyebrows.

  “My surprise.” He looked smug.

  “I thought I was your surprise.” He’d been surprised enough when she came through the door-but he’d kissed her, and one thing led to another, and they hadn’t even made it as far as the bed the first time. Now she sat up on the rumpled sheets, brushing one hand up and down his thigh and watching his face. “About your uncle’s plans. What do you think Olga makes of them?”

  Roland looked pained. “She doesn’t get a say in it. She’s a naive little dutiful contessa who’ll do as Angbard tells her parents to tell her.”

  “If that’s what you and Angbard think, you may be in for a nasty surprise.” Miriam watched him carefully. “You don’t know her very well, do you?”

  “I’ve met her a time or two,” he said, slightly puzzled.

  “Well, I have just spent several days in her company and that little minx may be young and naive, but she isn’t dumb. In fact, it’s lucky for me she’s smart and doesn’t want to marry you any more than you want her-otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.”

  “What-”

  “She nearly shot me.”

  “Holy Crone Wife! What happened!!”

  “Let go! You’re hurting-”

  “Sorry.” He sat up and gently put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. You caught me by surprise. Tell me all about it. Everything. Don’t leave anything out. My gods-I am so glad you’re here and safe now.” He hugged her. “Tell me everything. In your own time.”

  ‘Time is the one thing I don’t think we’ve got.” She leaned against him. “Someone sent Olga an unwelcome gift-a rape-o-gram. Luckily for me, but unluckily for the thug concerned, Olga’s childlike enthusiasms include embroidery, violins, haute couture, and semiautomatic weapons. She found a commission in his back pocket, with my seal on it and a purse of coin sufficient to pay the kind of maidenprice Oliver might ask for someone he really didn’t like much. Roland, I didn’t even know I had a seal.”

  “ ‘A seal.’” He looked away just as someone knocked on the door. Miriam jumped. “I’ll g
et it-”

  “No! Wait!” Miriam scrabbled for her jacket, fumbled in its pockets. “Okay, now you can open the door. When I’m out of sight.”

  Roland glanced at her as he tied his bathrobe. “It’s only room service, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not taking any chances.” She crouched against the wall around the corner from the door, pistol cradled in both hands.

  “Will you give that up? If it’s the DEA, we have very expensive lawyers who’ll have us both out on bail in about thirty microseconds.”

  “It’s not the DEA I’m worried about,” she said through gritted teeth. “It’s my long-lost family.”

  “Well, if you put it that way…” Roland opened the door. Miriam tensed. “Thank you,” she heard him tell someone. “That’s great, if you could leave it just here.” A moment later, she heard the door close, then a squeaking of wheels. Roland appeared, pushing a trolley upon which sat an ice bucket with a bottle of something poking out of it.

  “This is your surprise?” she asked, lowering the gun.

  He nodded. “You are on edge,” he observed. “Listen, do you want me to chain the door and hang out a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign?”

  “I think that would be a good start.” She was shivering. Worse, she had no idea where it had come from. “I’m not used to people trying to shoot me, love. It’s not the kind of thing that normally happens to a journalist, unless you’re a war correspondent.”

  She put the gun down on the bedside table.

  “Listen, Chateau Rothschild ‘98. Sound all right to you?” He brandished the bottle.

  “Sounds perfect. Open it now, dammit, I need a drink!”

  He peered at her. “You do, at that,” he said. “One moment…” He popped the cork carefully, then slowly filled two fluted glasses, taking care not to spray the champagne everywhere. He passed her a glass, then raised his own. ‘To your very good health.”

  ‘To us-and the future.” She took a sip. “Whatever the hell that means.”

  “You were telling me about Olga.”

  “Olga and I had a little conversation at cross-purposes. She was raised to never unintentionally cause offence, so she gave me time to confess before she shot me. Luckily, I confessed to the wrong crime. Did you know that you’re an, uh, ‘dried-up prematurely middle-aged sack of mannered stupidity’? She doesn’t want to marry you-trust me on this.”

  “Well, it’s mutual.” Roland sat in the chair opposite the end of the bed, looking disturbed. “Have you any idea how the man got into her apartments?”

  “Yup. Through my own, by way of the roof. Turns out that the rooms Baron Oliver assigned me aren’t doppelgangered-or rather they are, but the location on this side is unprotected. And aren’t I supposed to have bodyguards or something? Anyway, that’s why I came here. I figured it was safer than spending the night in an apartment that has a neon sign on the door saying assassins this way, with cousins next door who seem to have opened a betting pool on my life expectancy.”

  “Someone tried to rape Olga?” Roland shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “It does if I was their first target and they meant to kill me, but couldn’t get at me directly: it was a contingency plan, to set up a blood feud between us.” Briefly, she told him about the open staircase, and her instructions to lock and bolt all the doors on the inside. “I don’t feel safe there, I really don’t.”

  “Hmm.” He took a mouthful of wine. “I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful rather than shocked. “I can eliminate some suspects, but not everybody.” He glanced up at her, worry writ large across his face. “First, it’s not official. It’s family, not Clan business. If it was the Clan, they’d have sent soldiers. You’ve seen what we’ve got over here.” She nodded. “Our enforcement teams-you don’t bother resisting.

  They’re better armed, better trained, and better paid than the FBI’s own specialist counterterrorism units.”

  “Well, I guessed that much,” she said.

  “Yes. Anyway, for seconds it’s too damned blatant-and that’s worrying. Whoever did it is out of control. Oliver Hjorth might dislike you and feel threatened, but he wouldn’t try to kill you in his own house. Not offering you a guard of honour is another matter, but to be implicated-no.” He shook his head. “As for Olga, that’s very disturbing. It sounds as if someone set her up to kill you or cause a scandal that would isolate you-one or the other. And you are probably right about being the intruder’s first target. That means it’s an insider-and that’s the frightening part. Someone who knows that you don’t know the families well, that you can be cut apart from the pack and isolated, that you are unguarded. Someone like that, who is acting like they’re out of control. A rogue, in other words.”

  “Well, no shit, Sherlock.” She drained her glass and refilled it. “Y’know something? One of these days we may eventually make an investigative journalist out of you.”

  “In your dreams-I’m a development economist.” He frowned at the floor in front of her feet, as if it concealed an answer. “Let’s start from where we are. You’ve told Olga about us. That means if we’re lucky she doesn’t tell Angbard. If she does, if Olga tells him about us, he could-do you have any idea what he could do?”

  “What?” She shook her head. “Listen, Roland, I didn’t grow up under the Clan’s thumb. Thinking this way is alien to me. I don’t really give a flying fuck what Angbard thinks. If I behave the way they seem to expect me to, I will be dead before the week is out. And if I survive, things won’t be much better for me. The Clan is way out of date and overdue for a dose of compulsory modernization, both at the business level and the personal. If the masked maniac doesn’t succeed in murdering me, the Clan will expect me to go live like a medieval noble lady-fuck that! I’m not going to do it. I’ll live with the consequences later.”

  “You’re-” he swallowed. “Miriam.” He held out his arms to her. “You’re strong, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been trying to resist the pressure for years. It doesn’t work. The Clan will get you to do what they want you to do in the end. I spent years trying to get them to do something-land reform on their estates, educating the peasants, laying the groundwork for industrialization. All I got was shit. There are deeply entrenched political groupings within the Clan who don’t want to see any modernization, because it threatens their own source of power-access to imported goods. And outside the Clan, there are the traditional nobility, not to mention the Crown, who are just waiting for the Clan nobility to make a misstep. Jealousy is a strong motivating force, especially among the recently rich. If Angbard hadn’t stood up for me, I’d have had my estate forfeited. I might even have been declared outlaw-don’t you see?” There was anguish in his eyes.

  “Frankly, no. What I see is a lot of frightened people, none of whom particularly like the way things work, but all of whom think they’ll lose out if anyone else disrupts it. And you know something? They’re wrong and I don’t want to be part of that. You’ve been telling me that I can’t escape the Clan, and I’m afraid you’re right-you’ve convinced me-but that only means I’ve got to change things. To carve out a niche I can live with.” She stood up and walked toward him. “I don’t like the way the families live like royalty in a squalid mess that doesn’t even have indoor plumbing. I don’t like the way their law values people by how they can breed and treats women like chattels. I don’t like the way the outer family feel the need to defend the status quo in order to keep from being kicked in the teeth by the inner families. The whole country is ripe for modernization on a massive scale, and the Clan actually has the muscle to do that, if they’d just realize it. I don’t like the dehumanizing poverty the ordinary people have to live with, and I don’t like the way the crazy fucked-up feudal inheritance laws turn an accident of birth into an excuse for rape and murder. But most of all, I don’t like what they’ve done to you.”

  She leaned down and pulled him up by the shoulders, forcing him to stand in front of h
er. “Look at me,” she insisted. “What do you see?”

  Roland looked up at her sceptically. “Do you really think you can take them all on?”

  “On my own?” She snorted. “I know I can,” she said fiercely. “All it takes is a handful of people who believe that things can change to start the ball rolling. And that handful has to start somewhere! Now are you with me or against me?”

  He hugged her right back, and she felt another response: He was stiffening against her, through his robe. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years. If ever. I don’t want to lose you.”^

  “Me too, love.”

  “But how do you think you’re going to make it work?” he asked. “And stop whoever’s trying to kill you.”

  “Oh, that.” She leaned into his arms, letting him pull her back in the direction of the bed. “That’s going to be easy. When you strip away the breeding program, the Clan is a business, right? Family-owned partnership, private shareholdings. Policy is set at annual meetings twice a year, next one at Beltaigne, that sort of thing.”

  “So?” He looked distracted, so she stopped fumbling at his belt for a moment.

  “Well.” She leaned her chin against the hollow of his neck, licked his pulse spot slowly. “It may have escaped your attention, but I am an expert in one particular field-I’ve spent years studying it, and I think I probably know more about it than anyone else in the family. The Clan is an old-fashioned unlimited-liability partnership, with a dose of family politics thrown in. The business structure itself is a classic variation on import/export trade, but it’s cash-rich enough to support a transition to some other model. All I need is a lever and an appropriate fulcrum and then a direction to make them move in. Business restructuring, baby, that’s where it’s at. A whole new business model. The lever we need is one that will convince them that they have more to lose by not changing than by sticking with the status quo.