The Trade of Queens (5 page)

The stranger wore a visitor's badge, and there was something odd about him. Not the casual Friday clothes; it took Steve a moment to spot the cast on his leg. “You're Steve Schroeder?”

“Who wants to know?”

The stranger shrugged. “You don't know me.” He produced a police ID card. Steve sat up, squinting at the badge.
Drug Enforcement Agency
?
Mike Fleming
?

“Not my department; Crime's upstairs on—”

“No, I think I need to talk to you. You commissioned a bunch of articles by Miriam Beckstein a couple of years ago, didn't you?”

Huh?
“What's this about?” Steve asked cautiously.

“Haven't heard from her for a while, have you?”

Alarm bells were going off in his head. “Has she been arrested? I don't know anything; we had a strictly business relationship—”

“She hasn't been arrested.” Fleming's gaze flickered sidelong; if Steve hadn't been staring at him he might not have noticed. “She mentioned you, actually, a couple of years ago. Listen, I don't know anyone here, and I've got very limited time, so I thought I'd try you and see if you could direct me to the right people.” He swallowed. “She pointed me at a story, kind of, before she disappeared. I need to see it breaks, and breaks publicly, or
I'm
going to disappear too. I'm sorry if that sounds overdramatic—”

“No, that's all right.”
Jesus, why me? Why now?
Steve glanced at his workstation for long enough to save the file he was reading.
Do I need this shit?
Building security mostly kept the nuts out with admirable efficiency; and paranoids invariably headed for Crime and Current Affairs. If this guy
was
a nut … “Mind if I look at that?” Fleming handed him the badge. Steve blinked, peering at it.
Certainly
looks
real enough.
… He handed it back. “Why me?”

“Because—” Fleming was looking around. “Mind if I sit down?”

Steve took a deep breath and gestured at the visitor's chair by his desk. “Go ahead. In your own time.”

“Last year Miriam Beckstein lost her job. You know about that?”

Steve nodded, guardedly. “You want to tell me about it?”

“It wasn't the regular post-9/11 slowdown; she was fired because she stumbled across a highly sophisticated money-laundering operation. Drug money, and lots of it.”

Steve nodded again. Trying to remember: What had Miriam said? She'd been working for the
Industry Weatherman
back then, hadn't she? Something wild about them canning her for uncovering—
Jesus
, he thought. “Mind if I record this?” he asked.

“Sure. Be my guest.” Fleming laughed as Steve activated his recorder. It was a hoarse bark, too much stress bottled up behind it. “Listen, this isn't just about drugs, and I know it's going to sound nuts, so let me start with some supporting evidence. An hour ago, my car was blown up. The news desk will probably have a report on it, incident in Braintree—” He proceeded to give an address. “I'm being targeted because I'm considered unreliable by the organization I've been working for on secondment. You can check on that bombing. If you wait until this afternoon, I'm afraid—shit. There's going to be a terrorist strike this afternoon in D.C., and it's bigger than 9/11. That's why I'm here. There's a faction in the government who have decided to run an updated version of Operation Northwoods, and they've maneuvered a narcoterrorist group into taking the fall for it. I'm—I was—attached to a special cross-agency task force working on the narcoterrorist ring in question. They're the folks Miriam stumbled across—and it turns out that they're big, bigger than the Medellín Cartel, and they've got contacts all the way to the top.”

“Operation—what was that operation you mentioned?” Steve stared at his visitor.
Jesus. Why do I always get the cranks?

“Operation Northwoods. Back in 1962, during the Cold War, the Chiefs of Staff came up with a false flag project to justify an invasion of Cuba. The idea was that the CIA would fake up terrorist attacks on American cities, and plant evidence pointing at Castro. They were going to include hijackings, bombings, the lot—the most extreme scenarios included small nukes, or attacks on the capitol; it was all ‘Remember the
Maine
' stuff. Northwoods wasn't activated, but during the early seventies the Nixon administration put in place the equipment for the same, on a bigger scale—there was a serious proposal to nuke Boston in order to justify a preemptive attack on China. This stuff keeps coming up again, and I'd like to remind you that our current vice president and the secretary for defense got their first policy chops under Nixon and Ford.”

“But they can't—” Steve stopped. “They've just invaded Iraq! Why would they want to do this now? If they were going to—”

“Iraq was the president's hobbyhorse. And no, I'm not saying that 9/11 was stage-managed to drag us into that war; that would be paranoid. But there's a whole new enemy on hand, and a black cross-agency program to deal with them called Family Trade, and some of us aren't too happy about the way things are being run. Let me fill you in on what's been going on.…”

Evacuation

The marcher kingdoms of the East Coast, from the Nordtmarkt south, were scantily populated by American standards: The Gruinmarkt's three to four million—there was no exact census—could handily live in New York City with room to spare. The Clan and their outer families (related by blood, but not for the most part gifted with the world-walking talent) were at their most numerous in the Gruinmarkt, but even there their total extended families barely reached ten thousand souls. The five inner families had, between them, a couple of thousand adult world-walkers and perhaps twice that many children (and some seniors and pregnant women for whom world-walking would be a hazardous, if not lethal, experience).

At one point in the 1930s, American style, the inner families alone had counted ten thousand adult world-walkers; but the Clan's long, festering civil war had been a demographic disaster. To an organization that relied for its viability on a carefully husbanded recessive gene, walking the line between inbreeding and extinction, a series of blood feuds between families had sown the seeds of collapse.

Nearly twenty years ago, Angbard, Duke Lofstrom, the chief of the Clan's collective security agency, had started a program to prevent such a collapse from ever again threatening the Clan. He'd poured huge amounts of money into funding a network of fertility clinics in the United States, and the children of that initiative were now growing to adulthood, ignorant of the genes (and other, more exotic intracellular machinery) for which they were carriers. Angbard's plan had been simple and direct: to approach young female carriers selected from the clinics' records, and pay them to act as host mothers for fictional infertile couples. The result was to be a steady stream of world-walkers, raised in the United States and not loyal to the quarreling families, who could be recruited in due course. Miriam, Helge, had been raised in Boston by Angbard's sister as an experiment in cultural assimilation, not to mention a political insurance policy: Other children of the Clan had been schooled and trained in the ways and knowledge of the exotic West.

But Angbard had planned on being around to coordinate the recruitment of the new world-walkers. He hadn't expected Matthias's defection, or the exposure of the clinics to hostile inspection, and he hadn't anticipated the reaction of the Auld Bitches, the gaggle of grandmothers whose carefully arranged marriages kept the traditional Clan structure afloat. Their tame gynecologist, Dr. ven Hjalmar, was a stalwart of the conservative club. He'd been the one who, at Baron Henryk's bidding, had arranged for Helge's involuntary pregnancy. He'd also acquired the breeding program records for his faction and, most recently, taken pains to ensure that Angbard would never again threaten their prestige as gatekeepers of the family trade. And now the surviving members of the Clan's conservative clique—the ones who hadn't been massacred by Prince Egon at the ill-fated betrothal feast—were cleaning up.

On that July morning, approximately one in every hundred world-walkers died.

In his private chambers in the Ostrood House, Baron Julius Arnesen was shot dead by Sir Gavaign Thorold.

Lord Mors Hjalmar, his eldest son Euen, and wife Gretyl were blown up by a satchel charge of PETN delivered by a courier who, not being a member of the clique responsible, also died in the blast—neither the first nor the last collateral casualty.

There were other, less successful assassination attempts. The young soldier detailed to slay Sir Helmut Anders had second thoughts and, rather than carrying out his orders, broke down and confessed them to his commander. The assault team targeting Earl-Major Riordan arrived at the wrong safe house owing to faulty intelligence, and by the time they located the correct headquarters building it had already been evacuated. And the poison-pen letter addressed to Lady Patricia Thorold-Hjorth—lightly spritzed in dimethyl mercury, a potent neurotoxin—never left the postal office, owing to an unusual shortage of world-walkers arriving to discharge their corvée duties that day.

In fact, nearly two-thirds of those targeted for assassination survived, and nearly a third of the would-be assassins were captured, were killed, or failed to carry out their missions. As coup d'état attempts went, this one might best be described as a halfhearted clusterfuck. The conservative faction had been on the back foot since the betrothal-night massacre, many of their most effective members slain; what remained was the rump of the postal committee (cleaving to the last to the trade that had brought them wealth and power), the scheming grandmothers and their young cat's-paws, and a bedraggled handful who had fallen upon hard times or whose status was in some other way threatened by the new order.

Only one element of the conspiracy ran reliably to completion. Unfortunately, it was Plan Blue.

*   *   *

In a humid marsh on the banks of a broad river, there stood a scaffold by the grace of the earl of Dankfurt. The scaffold lacked many of the appurtenances of such—no dangling carrion or cast-iron basket of bones to add to the not inconsiderable stench of the swamp—but it provided a stout and very carefully surveyed platform. Here in the Sudtmarkt most maps were hand-scribed in ink on vellum, and accurate to the nearest league. But this platform bore stripe-painted measuring sticks at each corner, and had been carefully pinned down by theodolites borne by world-walkers. Its position and altitude were known to within a foot, making it the most accurately placed location in the entire kingdom.

Five men stood on the scaffold beside a cheap wheelbarrow that held an olive-drab cylinder the size of a beer keg. Two of them wore US army fatigues, in the new desert pattern that had come in with the Iraq war: outer-family world-walkers both, young and more tenuously attached to the Clan than most. The other three were clad in fashions that had never been a feature of that time line. “Are you clear on the schedule?” demanded one fellow, a thin-haired, thin-faced man whom Miriam had once likened to a ferret.

“Sir.” The shorter of the two uniformed men bowed his neck formally.

“Tell us, please,” said one of the other fellows, resting his hand on the pommel of his small-sword.

“At T minus eight minutes, Erik takes his place on the barrow. I then cross over. Emergence is scheduled for level two, visitors' car park block delta three. There will be cameras but no internal guard patrols inside the car park—active security is on the perimeter and at the doors.”

The ferret-faced man nodded. “Kurt?”

The tall, sandy-haired soldier nodded. “I dismount. We have sixty seconds to clear down any witnesses. Then we wheel the barrow to the stairwell. By T minus six the payload is to be emplaced in the place of the red fire extinguisher, which we will place in the barrow. We are then to proceed back to our arrival point, whereupon Jurgen will take his place in the barrow and I will bring us home no later than T minus five.”

“What provisions for failure have you made?” asked the fellow with the small-sword.

“Not much,” the Ferret admitted. “Jurgen?”

Jurgen shrugged. “We shoot any witnesses, of course.” He tapped one trouser pocket, which was cut away to reveal the butt of a silenced pistol peeping out of a leg holster. The uniforms weren't very authentic—but then, they only had to mislead witnesses for a few seconds. “If we can't cross back because of a surveyor's error, we turn the barrow upside down and Kurt stands on it. I ride him. Yes?”

The Ferret nodded to his companion. “My lord earl, there we are. Simple, sweet, with minimal room for things to go wrong.”

The earl nodded thoughtfully. His eyes flickered between the two soldiers. Did they suspect that the thumbwheel on the payload's timer-controller had been modified to detonate six minutes earlier than the indicated time? Probably not, else they wouldn't be standing here. “If we'd been able to survey inside this, this five-sided structure…”

“Indeed. Unfortunately, my lord Hjorth, it is the most important administrative headquarters of their military, and it was attacked by their enemies only two years ago. The visitors' car park is as close as we could get. The payload”—the Ferret patted the stubby metal cylinder—“is sufficient to the job.”

“Well, then.” Earl Oliver Hjorth managed a strained smile. “I salute your bravery. Good men!”

Jurgen's cheek quirked. “I'm certain that there will be no trouble, my lord.”

“Everyone in the witch-kingdom expects to see fire extinguishers in stairwells,” added the Ferret, not bothering to explain that the keg-sized payload looked utterly unlike a fire extinguisher. “And it won't be there long enough for anyone to tamper with it.” Strapped to the detonation controller, it weighed nearly ninety kilos; there was a reason for the carefully surveyed crossing point, the wheelbarrow, and the two strong-backed and incurious couriers.