“Yes, I guess I do,” she said regretfully. “And if that’s what he’s got in mind for you, what about me?”
* * *
They drove back to the house in the suburbs in companionable silence. From the outside, the doppelgängered mansion looked like a sedate business unit, possibly a software company or an accounting firm. As they rolled onto the down ramp, Roland cued the door remote, and the barrier rolled up into the ceiling. For the first time Miriam realized how thick it was. “That’s bombproof, isn’t it?”
“Yup.” He drove down the ramp without stopping and the shutters were already descending behind them. “We don’t have the luxury of a beaten fire zone on this side.”
“Oh.” She felt a chill. “The threats. It’s all real.”
“What were you expecting, lies?” He slid them nose-first into a parking spot next to the Jaguar, killed the engine, then systematically looked around before opening the door.
“I don’t know.” She got out and stretched, looking around. ‘The garage door. That’s what brought it home.”
“The only home for the likes of us is a fortress,” he said, not without bitterness. “Remember the Lindbergh baby? We’ve got it a hundred times worse. Never forget. Never relax. Never be normal.”
“I don’t—” she took a deep breath. “I don’t think I can learn to live like that.”
“Helge—Miriam—” he stopped and looked at her closely, concerned. “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
She shook her head wordlessly.
“Really.” He walked around the car to her. “Because you’re not alone. You’re not the only one going through this.”
“It’s—” She paused. “Claustrophobic.” He was standing close to her. She stepped close to him and he opened his arms and embraced her stiffly.
“I’ll help, any way I can,” he murmured. “Any way you want. Just ask, whatever you need.” She could feel his back muscles tense.
She hugged him. Wordless thoughts bubbled and seethed in her mind, seeking expression. “Thank you,” she whispered, “I needed that.” Letting go.
Roland stepped back promptly and turned to the car’s trunk as if nothing had happened. “It’ll all work out; we’ll make sure of it.” He opened the car’s trunk. “Meanwhile, can you help me with these? My, you’ve been busy.”
“I assume we can get it all back?”
“Whatever you can carry,” he said. “Even if it’s just for a minute.”
“Whatever,” she said, bending to take the strain of another of the ubiquitous silvery aluminium wheeled suitcases and her own big case stuffed with shopping.
“Downstairs and across?” he asked.
“Hmm.” She shrugged. “Does the duke expect us to dine with him tonight?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
Well, okay,
she mused. “Then we don’t need to go back immediately.”
“Mm.” He opened the lift gates. “I’m afraid we do; we’ve got to keep the post moving, you see. Two trips a day, five days on and five days off. It’s the rules.” He waved her into the lift and they stood together as it began to descend.
“Oh, well.” She nodded. “I suppose …”
“Would you mind very much if I invited you to dine with me?” he asked in a sudden rush. “Not a formal affair, not at all. If you want someone else around, I’m sure Vincenze is at a loose end …”
She smiled at him uncertainly, surprised at her own reaction. She bit her lip, trying not to seem overeager. “I’d love to dine with you,” she said. “But tonight I’m working. Tomorrow?”
“Okay. If you say so.”
At the bottom of the shaft he led her into the post room. “What’s here?” she asked.
“Well.” He pointed to a yellow square marked on the floor, about three feet by three feet. “Stand there, facing that wall.”
“Okay. What now?” she asked.
“Pick up the two cases—yes, I know they’re heavy, you only need to hold them clear of the floor for a minute. Do you think you can do that? And focus on that cupboard on the wall. I’ll look away and hit this button, and you do what comes natural, then step out of the square—fast. I’ll be through in a couple of minutes; got an errand to run first.”
“And—oh.”
She saw the motorized screen roll up; behind it was a backlit knot like symbol that made her eyes swim. It was
just like
the locket In fact, it was the
same
as the locket, and she felt as if she was falling into it. Then her head began to ache, viciously, and she slumped under the weight of the suitcases. Remembering Roland’s instructions, she rolled them forward, noting that the post room looked superficially the same but the screened cupboard on this side was closed and there were some scrapes on the wall.
“Hmm.” She glanced around. No Roland, as yet.
Well, well, well,
she thought.
She glanced down at the case she’d carried over, blinked thoughtfully, then walked over to the wall with the pigeonholes, where another case was waiting. One that hadn’t been prepared for her. She bent down and sprang the catch on it, laid it flat on its side and lifted the lid. Her breath caught in her throat. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. She’d been hoping for gold, jewels, scrolls, or maybe antibiotics and computers. This was what she’d been afraid of. She shut the case and stood it upright again, then walked back to the ones she’d brought over and concentrated on quieting her racing heartbeat and smoothing her face into a welcoming, slightly coy smile before Roland the brilliant reformer, Roland the sympathetic friend, Roland the lying bastard scumbag could bring his own suitcase through.
Who did you think you were kidding?
she wondered bitterly.
You knew it was too good to be true.
And indeed it had been clear from the start that there had to be a catch somewhere.
The nature of the catch was obvious and ironic with twenty-twenty hindsight, and when she thought about it she realized that Roland hadn’t actually lied to her. She just hadn’t asked the right questions.
What supplied the family’s vast wealth on her own, the other, the American side of the border? It sure wasn’t a fast postal service, not when it took six weeks to cross an untamed wilderness on pack mules beset by savage tribes. No, it was a different type of service—one intended for commodities of high value, low weight, and likely to be interrupted in transit through urban America. Something that the family could ship reliably through their own kingdoms and move back and forth to American soil at their leisure. In America they made their money by shipping goods across the Gruinmarkt fast; in the Gruinmarkt they made their money by moving goods across America slowly but reliably. The suitcase contained almost twenty kilograms of sealed polythene bags, and it didn’t take a genius with degrees in journalism and medicine to figure out that they’d be full of Bolivian nose candy.
She thought about the investigation she’d been running with Paulie, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead she began whistling a song by Brecht—
Supply and Demand
—as she picked up her own suitcase and headed for the elevator to her suite.
My long-lost medievalist world-walking family are drug import/export barons,
she realized.
What the hell does that make me?
In The Family Way
Alone in her apartment with the door locked, Miriam began to unpack her suitcase full of purchases. She’d arrived to find the maids in a state of near panic: “Mistress, the duke, he wants to see you tomorrow lunchtime!” In the end she’d dismissed them all except for Meg, the oldest, who she sat down with for a quiet talk.
“I’m not used to having you around all the time,” she said bluntly. “I know you’re not going to go away, but I want you to make yourselves scarce. Ask one of the electricians to put a bell in, so I can call you when I need you. I don’t mind people coming in to tidy up when I’m out of my rooms, but I don’t want to be surrounded all the time. Can you do that?” Meg had nodded, but looked puzzled. “Any questions?” Miriam asked. “No, ma’am,” Meg had replied. But her expression said that she thought Miriam’s behavior was distinctly strange.
Miriam sighed and pointed at the door.
Maybe if I act like they’re hotel staff…
“I’ll want someone to come up in about three hours with some food—a tray of cold stuff will do—and a pot of tea. Apart from that, I don’t expect to see anyone tonight and I don’t want to be disturbed. Is that okay?”
“Yes’m.” Meg ducked her head and fled. “Okay, so that works,” Miriam said thoughtfully. Which was good because now she had some space to work in, unobserved.
Fifteen minutes later the luggage was stowed where Miriam wanted it. Her new laptop was sitting on the dresser, plugged in to charge next to a stack of unopened software boxes. Her new wardrobe was hung up, awaiting the attentions of a seamstress whenever Miriam had time for a fitting. And the escape kit, as she was already thinking of it, was stashed in the suitcase at the back of the wardrobe.
“Memo.” She picked up her dictaphone and strolled through into the bathroom. It was the place she found it easiest to think. Cool white tiles, fine marble, nothing to aggravate the pounding headache she’d been plagued by for so much of the past week. Plus, it had a shower—which she turned on, just for the noise. “Need to look for a bug-sweeping kit next time I get time on the other side. Must try the beta-blockers too, once I’ve looked up their side effects. Wonder if they’ve got a trained doctor over here? Or a clinic of some kind? Anyway.”
She swallowed. “New memo. Must get the dictation software installed on the laptop, so I can transcribe this diary. Um. Roland and the family business bear some thought.”
That’s the understatement of the century,
she told herself. “They’re… oh hell. They’re not the Medelin cartel, but they probably ship a good quantity of their produce. It’s a family business, or rather a whole bunch of families who intermarry because of the hereditary factor, with the Clan as a business arrangement that organizes everything. I suppose they probably smuggled jewels or gold or something before the drugs thing. The whole nine yards about not marrying out—whether the ability is a recessive gene or not doesn’t matter—they’ve got
omerta,
the law of silence, as a side effect of their social setup. In this world, they’re upwardly mobile nobles, merchant-princes trying to marry into the royal family. In
my
world, they’re gangsters. Mafia families without the Sicilian in-laws.”
She hit the “pause” button for a moment.
“So I’m a Mafia princess. Talk about not getting involved with goodfellas! What do I make of it?”
She paused again and noticed that she was pacing back and forth distractedly. “It’s blood money. Or is it? If these people
are
the government here, and they say it’s legal to smuggle cocaine or heroin, does that make it okay? This is one huge can of worms. Even if you leave ethics out of the question, even if you think the whole war on drugs is a bad idea like prohibition in the twenties, it’s still a huge headache.” She massaged her throbbing forehead. “I really need to talk to Iris. She’d set me straight.”
She leaned her forehead against the cool tiles beside the mirror over the sink. “Problem is, I
can’t
walk away from them. I can’t just leave, walk out, and go back to life in Cambridge. It’s not just the government who’d want to bury me so deep the sun would never find me. The Clan can’t risk me talking. Now that I think about it, it’s weird that they let Roland get as far as he did. Only. If he’s telling the truth, Angbard is keeping him on a short leash. What does that suggest they’ve got in mind for me? A short leash and a choke collar?”
She could see it in her mind’s eye, the chain of events that would unfold if she were to walk into an FBI office and prove what she could do—maybe with the aid of a sack of cocaine, maybe not.
Maybe with Paulie’s CD full of research, too,
she realized, sitting up. “Shit.” A dawning supposition: Drug-smuggling rings needed to sanitize their revenue stream, didn’t they? And the business with Biphase and Proteome was in the right part of the world, and the Clan was certainly sophisticated enough… if her hunch was right, then it was, in fact, her long-lost family’s investments that Paulie was holding the key to.
In the FBI office first there’d be disbelief. Then the growing realization that a journalist was handing them the drugs case of the century. Followed by the hasty escalation, the witness protection program offers—then their reaction to her demonstrated ability to walk through walls. The secondary scenarios as the FBI realize that they can’t protect her, can’t even protect themselves against assassins from another world. Then blind panic and bad decisions.
“If the families decided to attack the United States at home, they could make al Qaida look like amateurs,” she muttered into her dictaphone, stricken. “They have the resources of a government at their disposal, because over here they’re running things. Does that make them a government? Or so close it makes no difference? They’re rich and powerful on the other side, too. Another generation and they’ll probably be getting their fingers into the pie in D.C. I wonder. They make their money from smuggling, and they’re personally immune to attempts to imprison them. The only thing that could hurt them would be if Congress decriminalized all drugs, so the price crashed and they could be shipped legally. Maybe the families are actually
pushing
the war on drugs? Paying politicians to call for tougher sanctions, border patrols against ordinary smugglers? Breaking the competition and driving the price up because of the law of supply and demand.
Damn.
”
She flicked the “stop” button on her dictaphone and put it down, shuddering. It made a frightening amount of sense.
I am sitting on a news story that makes the attack on the World Trade Centre look like a five-minute wonder,
she realized with a sinking feeling.
No, I am sitting in the
middle
of the story. What am I going to do?
At that exact moment the telephone out in her reception room rang.
Old habits died hard, and Miriam was out of the bathroom in seconds with the finely honed reflexes of a journalist with an editor on the line. She picked the phone up before she realized there were no buttons, nothing to indicate it could dial an outside line. “Yes?”
“Miriam?”
She froze, heart sinking. “Roland,” she said distantly.
“You locked your door and sent your maids away. I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
“ ‘All right.’” She considered her next words carefully. “I’m not all right, Roland. I looked in the suitcase. The other one, the one waiting in the post room.” Her chest felt tight. He’d lied to her: but on the other hand, she’d been holding more than a little back herself—
A pause. “I know. It was a test. The only question was which one you’d open. I don’t know if it makes any difference, but I was ordered to give you the opportunity. To figure it all out for yourself. ‘Give her enough rope’ were his exact words. So now you know.”
“Know what?” she said flatly. “That he’s an extremely devious conspirator or about the family’s dirty little secret?”
“Both.” Roland waited for her to reply.
“I feel used,” she said calmly. “I am also extremely pissed off. In fact, I’m still working out how I feel about everything. It’s not the drugs, exactly: I don’t think I’ve got any illusions about that side of things. I studied enough pharmacology to know the difference between propaganda and reality, and I saw enough shit in med school from ODs and drunk drivers and people coughing up lung cancers to know you get the same results whether the drug’s illegal or not. But the manipulative side of it—there’s a movie on the other side called
The Godfather
. Have you ever seen it?”
“Yes. That’s it, exactly.” He sounded dryly amused. “By the way, Don Corleone asked me to tell you that he expects to see you in his office tomorrow at ten o’clock sharp.” His voice changed, abruptly serious. “Please don’t shout at him. I think it’s another test, but I’m not sure what kind—whichever, it could be very dangerous. I don’t want to see you get hurt, Miriam. Or Helge, as he’ll call you. But you’re Miriam to me. Listen, for your own good, whatever he says,
don’t refuse a direct order
. He is
much
more dangerous than he looks, and if he thinks you’ll bite him, he may put family loyalty aside, because his
real
loyalty is to the Clan as a whole. You’re a close family member, but the Clan, by the law of families, comes first. Just sit tight and remember that you’ve got more leverage than you realize. He will want you to make a secure alliance, both to keep you safe—for the memory of his stepsister—and to shore up his own position. Failing that, he’ll be able to pretend to ignore you as long as you don’t disobey a direct order. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes.” Her heart pounded. “So it’s going to happen.”
“What?”
“Fucking Cinderella. Never mind. Roland, I am not stupid. I need some time to myself to think, that’s all. I’m angry with you in the abstract, not the particular. I don’t like being made to jump through hoops. I hear what you’re saying. Do you hear
me?
”
“Yes.” A pause. “I think I do. I’m angry too.”
“Oh, really?” she asked, half-sarcastically.
“Yes.” This time, a longer pause. “I like your sense of humour, but it’s going to get you into deep trouble if you don’t keep it under control. There are people here who will respond to sarcasm with a garrotte. Trying to change the way the Clan works from the inside is
hard
.”
“Good-bye.” She hung up hastily and stood next to the phone for a long minute, heart thudding at her ribs, head throbbing in time to it. The smell of leather car seats was strong in her nose, the echo of his smile over lunch fixed in her mind’s eye.
Duke’s orders,
she thought.
Well, he
would
say that, wouldn’t he?
She managed to pull herself away from the telephone and walked back into her bedroom, to the dresser with the tiny Picture book computer perched next to the stack of disks and the external DVD-ROM drive. She had software to install. She riffled through disks containing relief maps of North America, an electronic pharmacopoeia, and a multimedia history of the Medici families. She put them down next to the encyclopaedia of medieval history and other textbooks that had seemed relevant.
Once she’d made her first notes for the article Steve had commissioned, she’d start installing the software. Then she had a long night of cramming ahead, reading up on the great medieval merchant princes and their dynasties. The sooner she got a handle on this situation, the better …
* * *
Another morning dawned—a Sunday, bright and cold. Miriam blinked tiredly and threw back her bed clothes to let the cold air in.
I may be getting used to this,
she thought blearily.
Oh dear.
She looked at her watch and saw that the ten o’clock interview with Duke Angbard was worryingly close. “Shit,” she said aloud, but was gratified to note that the word brought no maidservants scurrying out of the woodwork. Even better, the outer suite was empty except for a steaming jug of strong coffee and a tray piled with croissants, just as she’d requested. “I could get used to this level of room service,” she muttered under her breath as she dashed into the bathroom. The computer was still running from last night, a Screensaver showing.
She laid out her clothes for the meeting with the duke. After a moment’s thought, she dressed conservatively, choosing a suit with a collarless jacket that buttoned to her throat. “Think medieval,” she told herself. “Think demure, feminine, unprovocative.” For a touch of colour, she tied a bright silk scarf round her throat. “Think camouflage.”
And remember what Roland said about not defying the old bastard openly. At least, not yet.
How and where to get the leverage was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, of course, to be followed by the bonus question of when and how to use it to shaft him, but she doubted she’d find such tools conveniently lying around while she lived as a guest—or valued prisoner—in his house. This whole business of being beholden to a powerful man left a nasty taste in her mouth.
However, there was one thing she could carry to even up the odds—a very potent equalizer. To complete her ensemble, Miriam chose a small black makeup bag, clearly too small to hold a gun or anything threatening. She didn’t load it down with much: just a tube of lipstick, some tissues, and a running dictaphone.
The door to her suite was cooperating today, she noted as she pushed into the corridor outside. She remembered the way to the duke’s suite and made her way quietly past a pair of diligent maidservants who were busy polishing the brass-work on one of the doors and a footman who appeared to be replacing the flowers on one of the ornamental side tables. They bowed out of her way and she nodded, passing them hastily. The whole palace appeared to be coming awake, as if occupants who had been sleeping were coming out of the woodwork to resume their life.
She reached the duke’s outer office door and paused. Big double doors, closed, with a room on the other side. She took a deep breath and pushed the button set beside the door.