“So?” Pete looked interested. “Somebody held onto a sample.”
“
Somebody
just sent us a fucking tip-off that there’s an address in Belmont that’s the local end of the distribution chain. Wholesale, Pete. Name, rank, and serial number. Dates—we need to check the goddamn dates. Pete, this is an
inside
job. Someone on the inside of the Phantom wants to come in from the cold and they’re establishing their bona fides.”
“We’ve had falsies before. Anonymous bastards.”
“Yeah, but this one’s got a sample, and a bunch of supplementaries. From memory, I think it checks out—at least, there’s not anything obviously wrong with it at first glance. I want it dusted for fingerprints and DNA samples before we go any further. What do you think?”
Pete whistled. “If it checks out, and the dates match, I figure we can get the boss to come along with us and go lean on Judge Judy. A break on the Phantom would be just too cool.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Mike grinned ferociously. “How well do you think we can resource this one?”
“If it’s the Phantom? Blank check time. Jesus, Mike, if this is the Phantom, I think we’ve just had the biggest break in this office in about the last twenty years. It’s going to be all over
Time Magazine
if this goes down!”
* * *
In the hallway outside the boardroom, the palace staff had busied themselves setting up a huge buffet. Cold cuts from a dozen game animals formed intricate sculptures of meat depicting their animate origins. Jellied larks vied with sugar-pickled fruit from the far reaches of the West Coast, and exotic delicacies imported at vast expense formed pyramids atop a row of silver platters the size of small dining tables. Hand-made Belgian truffles competed for the attention of the aristocracy with caviar-topped crackers and brightly colored packets of M&Ms.
Despite the huge expanse of food, most of the Clan shareholders had other things in mind. Though waiters with trays laden with wine glasses circulated freely—and with jugs of imported coffee and tea—the main appetite they exhibited seemed to be for speech. And speech with one or two people in particular.
“Just keep them away from me, please,” Miriam said plaintively, leaning close to Olga. “They’ll be all over me.”
“You can’t avoid them!” Olga insisted, taking her arm and steering her toward the open doors onto the reception area. “Do you want them to think you’re afraid?” she hissed in Miriam’s ear. “They’re like rats that eat their own young if they smell weakness in the litter.”
“It’s not that—I’ve got to go.” Miriam pulled back and steered Olga in turn, toward the door at the back of the boardroom where she’d seen Angbard pushing her mother’s wheelchair, ahead of the crush. Kara, her eyes wide, stuck close behind Miriam.
“Where are you going?” asked Olga.
“Follow.” Miriam pushed on.
“Eh, I say! Young woman!”
A man Miriam didn’t recognize, bulky and gray-haired, was blocking her way. Evidently he wanted to buttonhole her. She smiled blandly. “If you don’t mind, sir, there’ll be time to talk later. But I urgently need to have words with—” She gestured as she slid past him, leaving Kara to soothe ruffled feathers, and shoved the door open.
“Ma!”
It was a small side room, sparsely furnished by Clan standards. Iris looked around as she heard Miriam. Angbard looked round, too, as did a cadaverous-looking fellow with long white hair who had been hunched slightly, on the receiving end of some admonition.
“Helge,” Angbard began, in a warning tone of voice.
“Mother!” Miriam glared at Iris, momentarily oblivious.
“Hiya, kid.” Iris grinned tiredly. “Allow me to introduce you to another of your relatives. Henryk? I’d like to present my daughter.” Iris winked at Angbard: “Cut her a little slack, alright?”
The man who’d been listening to Angbard tilted his head on one shoulder. “Charmed,” he said politely.
The duke coughed into a handkerchief and cast Miriam a grim look. “You should be circulating,” he grumbled.
“Henryk was always my favorite uncle,” Iris said, glancing at the duke. “I mean, there had to be one of them, didn’t there?”
Miriam paused uncomfortably, unwilling to meet Angbard’s gaze. Meanwhile, Henryk looked her up and down. “I see,” she said after a moment. “Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?”
“Helge.” Angbard refused to be ignored. “You should be out front. Mixing with the guests.” He frowned at her. “You know how much stock they put in appearances.”
Harrumph.
“This is their first sight of you. Do you want them to think you’re a puppet? Conspiring with the bench?”
“I
am
conspiring with you,” she pointed out. “And anyway, they’d eat me alive. You obviously haven’t done enough press conferences. You don’t throw the bait in the water if you want to pull it out intact later, do you? You’ve got to keep these things under control.”
Angbard’s frown intensified. “This isn’t a press conference; this is a beauty show,” he said. “If you do not go out there and make the right moves they will assume that you cannot. And if you can’t, what are you good for? I arranged this session at your request. The least you can do is not make a mess of it.”
“There’s going to be a vote later on,” Iris commented. “Miriam, if they think you’re avoiding them it’ll give the reactionary bastards a chance to convince the others that you’re a fraud, and that won’t go in your favor, will it?”
Miriam sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Ma, family solidarity.”
“She’s right, you know,” Henryk spoke up. “Motions will go forward. They may accept your claim of title, but not your business proposals. Not if names they know and understand oppose it, and you are not seen to confront them.”
“But they’ll—” Miriam began.
“I have a better idea!” Olga announced brightly. “Why don’t you both go forth to charm the turbulent beast?” She beamed at them both. “That way they won’t know who to confront! Like the ass that starved between two overflowing mangers.”
Iris glanced sidelong at Miriam. Was it worry? Miriam couldn’t decide. “That would never do,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t—”
“Oh yes you can, Patricia,” Angbard said with a cold gleam in his eye.
“But if I go out there Mother will make a scene! And then—”
Miriam caught herself staring at Iris in exasperation, sensing an echo of a deeper family history she’d grown up shielded from. “The dowager will make a scene, will she?” Miriam asked, a dangerous note in her voice: “Why shouldn’t she? She hasn’t seen you for decades. Thought you were dead, probably. You didn’t get along with her when you were young, but so what? Maybe you’ll both find the anger doesn’t matter anymore. Why not try it?” She caught Angbard’s eye. Her uncle, normally stony-faced, looked positively anesthetized, as if to stifle an image-destroying outburst of laughter.
“You don’t know the old bat,” Iris warned grimly.
“She hasn’t changed,” Angbard commented. “If anything, she’s become even more set in her ways.”
Harrumph.
He hid his face in his handkerchief again.
“She’s been getting worse ever since she adopted that young whipper-snapper Oliver as her confidante,” Henryk mumbled vaguely. “Give me Alfredo any day, we’d have straightened him out in time—” He didn’t seem to notice Iris’s face tightening.
“Ma,” Miriam said warningly.
“Alright! That’s enough.” Iris pushed herself upright in her wheelchair, an expression of grim determination on her face. “Miriam, purely for the sake of family solidarity, you push. You, young lady, what’s your name—”
“Olga,” Miriam offered.
“—I know that, dammit! Olga, open the doors and keep the idiots from pushing me over and letting my darling daughter sneak away. Angbard—”
“I’ll start the session again in half an hour,” he said, shaking his head. “Just remember.” He turned a cool eye on Miriam, all trace of levity gone: “It cost me a lot to set this up for you. Don’t make a mess of it.”
Going Postal
Down in the post office in the basement of Fort Lofstrom, two men waited nervously for their superior to arrive. Both of them were young—one was barely out of his teens—and they dressed like law firm clerks or trainee accountants. “Is this for real?” the younger one kept asking, nervously. “I mean, has it really happened? Why does nobody tell us anything? Shit, this sucks!”
“Shut up and wait,” said the elder, leaning against a wall furnished with industrial shelving racks, holding a range of brightly colored plastic boxes labeled by destination. “Haven’t you learned anything?”
“But the meeting! I mean, what’s going on? Have the old guys finally decided to stop us going over—”
“I said, shut the fuck up.” The older courier glared at the kid with all the world-weary cynicism of his twenty-six years. Spots, tufts of straggly beard hair—
Sky Father, why do I get to nurse the babies?
“Listen, nothing is going to go wrong.”
He nudged the briefcase at his feet. Inside its very expensive aluminium shell was a layer of plastic foam. Inside the plastic foam nestled a bizarrely insectile-looking H&K submachine gun. The kid didn’t need to know that, though. “When the boss man gets here, we do a straight delivery run then lock down the house.
You
stay with the boss and do what he says.
I
get the fun job of telling the postmen to drop everything and yelling at the holiday heads to execute their cover plans. Then we arrest anyone who tries to drop by. Get it? The whole thing will be over in forty-eight hours, it’s just a routine security lockdown.”
“Yes, Martijn.” The kid shook his head, puzzled. “But there hasn’t been an extraordinary meeting in my lifetime! And this is an emergency lockdown, isn’t it? Shutting down everything, telling all our people on the other side to go hide, that sucks. What’s going on?”
The courier looked away.
Hurry up and get the nonsense out of your system,
he thought. “What do you think they’re doing?” he asked.
“It’s obvious: They envy us, don’t they? The old dudes. Staying over, fitting in. You know I’m going back to college in a couple of weeks, did I tell you about the shit my uncle Stani’s been handing out about that? I’ve got a girlfriend and a Miata and a place of my own and he’s giving me shit because he never had that stuff. What do you need to learn reading for if you’ve got scribes? he told me. And you know what? Some of them, if they could stop us going back—”
The door opened, stemming his tirade in full flood. The older courier straightened up; the young one just flushed, his mouth running down in a frightened stammer. “Uh, yessir, uh, going back, uh—”
“Shut up,” Matthias said coldly.
One more squeak and the kid fell silent. Matthias nodded at Martijn, the older one. “You ready?” he asked.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Very well.” Matthias didn’t smile, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders. He wore a leather flying jacket and jeans, with gloves on his hands and a day pack slung over one arm. “Kid. You are going to carry me across. Ready?”
“Uh.” Gulp. “Yessir. Yes. Sir.”
“Hah.” Matthias glanced at the older one. “Go on, then.” He advanced on the youth. “I’m heavier than any load you’re used to. You will need to have your key ready in one hand. When you are ready, speak, and I’ll climb on your back. Try not to break.”
“Yessir!”
A minute later they were in another post room. This one was slightly smaller, its shelves less full, and a row of wheeled suitcases were parked on the opposite wall inside an area painted with yellow stripes. The kid collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath while Matthias looked around for the older courier. “Martijn. You have your orders?”
“Yes. My lord.”
“Execute them.”
Matthias removed a briefcase from the rack on one wall then walked toward the exit from the room. He unlocked it then waved Martijn and the younger courier through. Once they were in me elevator to the upper floors, Matthias shut the door—then turned on his heel and headed for the emergency stairs to the garage.
The silver-blue BMW convertible was waiting for him, just as he’d ordered. Finally, Matthias cracked a smile, thin-lipped and humorless. There was barely room for the briefcase in the trunk, and his day pack went on the passenger seat. He fired up the engine as he hit the “door open” button on the dash, accelerating up the ramp and into the daylight beyond.
“Fifteen minutes,” he whispered to himself as he merged with the traffic on the Cambridge turnpike. “Give me fifteen minutes!”
The time passed rapidly. Waiting at an intersection, Matthias pulled out a cheap anonymous mobile phone and speed-dialed a number. It rang three times before the person at the other end answered.
“Who is this?” they asked.
“This is Judas. Listen, I will say this once. The address you want is …” he rattled through the details of the location he’d just left. “Got that?”
“Yes. Who are you and—”
Matthias casually flipped the phone out of the half-open window then accelerated away. Moments later, an eighteen-wheeler reduced it to plastic shrapnel.
“Fuck
you
very much,” he muttered, a savage joy in his eyes. “You can’t fire me: I quit!”
It wasn’t until he was nearly at the airport with his wallet full of bearer bonds and a briefcase full of Clan secrets that he began to think about what to do next.
* * *
A ghastly silence fell across the grand hall as Miriam stepped out of the doorway. She took a deep breath and smiled as brightly as she could. “Don’t mind me!” she said.
“That’s right,” Iris whispered, “mind
me,
you back-stabbing faux-aristocratic bastards!”
“Mother!” she hissed, keeping a straight face only with considerable effort.
“Oligarchic parasites. Hah.” Louder: “Steer
left,
if you please, can’t you tell left from right? That’s better. Now, who do I have to bribe to get a glass of Pinot Noir around here?”
Iris’s chatter seemed to break an invisible curtain of suspense. Conversations started up again around the room, and a pair of anxious liveried servants hurried forward, bearing trays with glasses.
Iris hooked a glass of red wine with a slightly wobbly hand and took a suspicious sniff. “It’ll pass,” she declared. “Help yourself while you’re at it,” she told Miriam. “Don’t just stand there like a rabbit in the headlights.”
“Um. Are you sure it’s wise to drink?”
“I’ve always had difficulty coping with my relatives sober. But yes, I take your point.” Iris took a moderate sip. “I won’t let the side down.”
“Okay, Mom.” Miriam took a glass. She looked up just in time to see Kara across the room, looking frightened, standing beside an unfamiliar man in late middle age. “Hmm. Looks like the rats are deserting or something. Olga?”
Beside her and following her gaze, Olga had tensed. “That’s Peffer Hjorth. What’s she doing talking to
him,
the minx?”
“Peffer Hjorth?”
“The baron’s uncle. Outer family, not a member.”
Iris whistled tunelessly. “Well, well, well. One of yours?” she asked Miriam.
“I thought so.” Miriam took a sip of wine. Her mouth felt bitter, ashy.
“Lady Helge, what a story! Fascinating! And your mother—why, Patricia? It’s been such a long time!”
She looked around, found Iris craning her neck, too. “Turn me, please, Miriam—” Iris was looking up and down: “Mors Hjalmar! Long time indeed. How are you doing?”
The plumpish man with a neatly trimmed beard and hair just covering his collar—like a middle-aged hippy uncomfortably squeezed into a dark suit for a funeral or court appearance—grinned happily. “I’m doing well, Patricia, well!” His expression sank slightly. “I was doing better before this blew up, I think. They mostly ignore me.” He rubbed his left cheek thoughtfully. “Which is no bad thing.” He looked at Olga, askance. “And who do I have the pleasure of meeting?”
“This is Lady Olga Thorold,” Iris offered.
“And you are of the same party as these, ah, elusive Thorold-Hjorths?”
“Indeed I am!” Olga said tightly.
“Oh. Well, then.” He shrugged. “I mean no offense, but it’s sometimes hard to tell who’s helping who, don’t you know?”
“Lady Olga has only our best interests at heart,” Miriam replied. “You knew my mother?”
Iris had been looking up at Mors all this time, her mouth open slightly, as if surprised to see him. Now she shook her head. “Thirty years,” she muttered darkly. “And they haven’t murdered you yet?” Suddenly she smiled. “Maybe there’s hope for me after all.”
“Do
you
know what she means?” Miriam asked Olga, puzzled.
“I, ahem, led an eccentric life many years ago,” said Mors.
Iris shook her head. “Mors was the first of our generation to actually demand—and get—a proper education. Yale Law School, but they made him sign away his right of seniority, if I remember rightly. Wasn’t that so?” she asked.
“Approximately.” Mors smiled slightly. “It took them a few years to realize that the Clan badly needed its own attorney on the other side.” His smile broadened by inches.
“What?”
Iris looked almost appalled. “No, I can’t see it.”
“So don’t.” He looked slightly uncomfortable. “Is it true?” His eyes were fixed on Iris.
“If she says it’s true, it’s true,” Iris insisted, jerking her head slightly in Miriam’s direction. “A credit to the family.” She pulled a face. “Not that that’s what I wanted, but—”
“—We don’t always get what we want,” Mors finished for her, nodding. “I think I see.” He looked thoughtful. Then he looked at Miriam. “If you need any legal advice, here’s my card,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Miriam, pocketing it. “But I think I may need a different kind of help right now.”
All too damned true,
she thought, seeing what was bearing down on them. Nemesis had two heads and four arms, and both heads wore haughty expressions of utmost disdain, carefully tempered for maximum intransigence.
“Well, if it isn’t the runaway,” snorted head number one, Baron Hjorth, with a negligent glance in Miriam’s direction.
“Imposter, you mean,” croaked head number two, glaring at her like a Valkyrie fingering her knife and wondering who to feed to the ravens next.
“Hello, mother.” Iris
smiled,
a peculiar expression that Miriam had seen only once or twice before and which filled her with an urgent desire to duck and cover. “Been keeping well, I see?”
“I’ll just be off,” Mors started nervously—then stopped as Iris clamped a hand on his wrist. In any case, the gathering cloud of onlookers made a discreet escape impossible. There was only one conversation worth eavesdropping in this reception, and this was it.
“I was just catching up on old times with Mors,” Iris cooed sweetly, her eyes never leaving the dowager’s face. “He was telling me all about your retirement.”
Ooh, nasty.
Miriam forced herself to smile, glanced sideways, and saw Olga glaring at head number one. The baron somehow failed to turn to stone, but his hauteur seemed to melt slightly. “Hello, Oliver,” said Miriam. “I’m glad to see you’re willing to talk to me instead of sneaking into my boudoir when I’m not about.”
“I have never—” he began pompously.
“—Stow it!” snapped Iris. “And
you,
mother—” she waved a finger at her mother, who was gathering herself up like a serpent readying to strike—”I gather you’ve been encouraging this odious person, have you?”
“Who I encourage or not is none of your business!” Hildegarde hissed. “You’re a disgrace to family and Clan, you whore. I should have turned you out the day I gave birth to you. As for your bastard—”
“—I believe I understand, now.” Miriam nodded, outwardly cordially, at Baron Hjorth. Startled, he pretended to ignore her words: “Your little plan to get back the Clan shares ceded to trust when my mother vanished—I got in the way, didn’t I? But not to worry. An insecure apartment, a fortune-seeking commoner turned rapist, and an unlocked door on the roof would see to that. Wouldn’t it?”
If not a couple of goons with automatic weapons,
she added mentally.
Just by way of insurance.
The duchess gasped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Quite possibly you don’t,” Miriam agreed. She jabbed a finger: “
He
does, don’t you, you vile little turd?”
Baron Oliver had turned beet-red with her first accusation. Now he began to shake. “I have
never
conspired to blemish the virtue of a Clan lady!” he insisted. The duchess glared at him. “And if you allege otherwise—”
“Put up or shut up, I’d say,” Iris said flatly. “Mors, wouldn’t you say that any accusations along those lines would require an indictment? Before the committee, perhaps?”
“Mmm, possibly.” Mors struck a thoughtful pose, seeming to forget his earlier enthusiasm to be elsewhere. “Were there witnesses? Unimpeachable ones?”
“I don’t think any charges against the baron could be made to stick,” Miriam said slowly, watching him. He watched her right back, unblinking. “And you will note that I made no allegation of involvement in a conspiracy to commit rape on your part,” she added to Hjorth.
Or to send gunmen round to Olga’s rooms.
“Although I might change my mind if you supplied the cause.” She smiled.
“You bitch,” he snarled.
“Just remember where I got it from.” She nodded at her grandmother, who, speechless with rage, hung on Hjorth’s arm like an overripe apple, ruddy-faced and swollen with wasps. “We really must get together for a family reunion one of these days,” she added. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of poison recipes to share with me.”
“I’d stop, if I were you,” Iris observed with clinical interest. “If you push her any further the only reunion you’ll get is over her coffin.”
“You treacherous little minx! …” Hildegarde was shaking with fury.
“So it’s treachery now, is it? Because I had higher standards than you and didn’t want to marry my way to the top of the dung heap?” Iris threw back at her.