Clan Corporate (8 page)

Pete asked quietly. “Because if so, this is one hell of an odd way to go about it. My superior officer either didn’t know or didn’t tell. What’s going on?”

“He wasn’t cleared,” said the staffer-and without saying anything else, he left the room.

“What is this?” Frank demanded, looking upset. “I mean, what is this place?”

The lights dimmed. “Your attention, please.” The voice came from speakers around the room, slightly breathy as its owner leaned too close to the microphone. “The following videotape was shot by a closed-circuit surveillance camera yesterday, at a jail in upstate New York.”

Grainy gray-on-white video footage filled the front wall of the theater. It was shot from a camera concealed high up in one corner of the ceiling, with a fish-eye lens staring down at a cell maybe six feet by ten in size.

Mike leaned forward. He could almost smell the disinfectant. This wasn’t your ordinary drunk tank. It was a separate cell, with whitewashed cinderblock walls and no window-furnished with a bunk bolted to the floor, a metal toilet and sink bolted to the wall, and not a lot else. Single occupant, high security. This is important enough to drag me out of bed and fly me six hundred miles? he wondered.

There was a man in the cell. He was wearing dark pinstriped trousers and a dress shirt, no tie or jacket: he looked like a stockbroker or Wall Street lawyer who’d been picked up for brawling, hair mussed, expression wild. He kept looking at the door.

“This man was arrested yesterday at two-fifteen, stepping off the Acela from Boston with a suitcase that contained some rather interesting items. Agents Fleming and Garfinkle will be pleased to know that information they passed on from the preliminary debriefing of source Greensleeves directly contributed to the bust. Mr. Morgan here was charged with possession of five kilograms of better than ninety-five percent pure cocaine hydrochloride, which goes some way to explain his agitation. There were, ah, other items in the suitcase.

I’ll get to them later. For now, let’s just say that while none of them were contraband they are, if anything, much more worrying than the cocaine.”

Mike focused on the screen. The guy in the cell was clearly uneasy about something-but what? In solitary. Knowing he was under surveillance. After a while he stood up and paced back and forth, from the door to the far end of the cell. Occasionally he’d pause halfway, as if trying to remember something.

“Our target here has no previous police record, no convictions, no fingerprints, nothing to draw him to our attention. He hasn’t even registered to vote. He has a driving license and credit cards but, and here’s the interesting bit, some careful digging shows that the name belongs to a child who died thirty-one years ago, aged eleven months. He appears to be the product of a very successful identity theft that established him with a record going back at least a decade. This James Morgan, as opposed to the one who’s buried in a family plot near Buffalo, went to college in Minnesota and obtained average grades, majoring in business studies and economics before moving to New York, where he acquired a job with a small import-export company, Livingston and Marks, for whom he has worked for nine years and six months. According to our friends at the IRS, his entry-level salary was $39,605 a year, he takes exactly three days of sick leave every twelve months, and he hasn’t had a pay raise, a vacation, or a sabbatical since joining the firm.”

The man on the screen seemed to make up his mind about something. He ceased pacing and, rolling up his sleeve, thrust his left wrist under the hot water faucet on the sink. He seemed to be scrubbing at something-a patch or plaster, perhaps.

“James Morgan lives in an apartment that appears to be owned by a letting agency wholly owned by a subsidiary of Livingston and Marks,” the unseen commentator recited dryly, as if reading from a dossier. “He pays rent of $630

a month-and you guessed it, he hasn’t had a rent rise in nine years. And that’s not the only thing that’s missing. He isn’t a member of a gym or health club or a dating agency or a church or an HMO. He doesn’t own an automobile or a pet dog or a television, or subscribe to any newspapers or magazines. He uses his credit card to shop for groceries at the local Safeway twice a week, and here he screwed up-he has a loyalty card for the discounts. It turns out that he never buys toilet paper or light bulbs. However he does buy new movie releases on DVD, which is kind of odd for someone who doesn’t own a DVD player or a TV or a computer. Once a month, every month, as regular as clockwork, he makes an overnight out of state trip, flying Delta to Dallas-Fort Worth, and while he’s away he stays in the Hilton and makes a side trip to buy a Glock 20C, four spare magazines, and four two-hundred-round boxes of ammunition-although he never brings them home. Luckily for him, because he doesn’t have a firearms license valid for New York State.”

On the screen, something peeled off Morgan’s wrist. He rubbed it some more, then turned the faucet off, raised his arm, and peered at whatever the plaster was concealing.

“Checking our records, it appears that Mr. Morgan has purchased over sixty handguns this way, spending rather more on them than he pays in rent. That’s in addition to his other duties, which appear to include smuggling industrial quantities of pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. Now, this is where it gets interesting. Watch the screen.”

Mike blinked. One moment Morgan was standing in front of the washbasin, peering at the inside of his wrist. The next moment, he was nowhere to be seen. The cell was empty.

Off to one side, Frank from the Surveyor’s Office started to complain. “What is this? I don’t see what this has got to do with me. So you’ve got a guard taking kickbacks to fool with the videotape in the county jail-”

The lights came up and the door opened. “Nope.” The man standing in the doorway was slightly built, in his early forties, with receding brown hair cropped short. He smiled easily as he stepped into the room and stood in front of the screen. It’s him, Mike realized with interest. The commentator with the dry sense of humor. “That wasn’t something we pulled off a tape, that was a live feed. And I assure you, once those data packets arrived here nobody tampered with them.”

Mike licked his lips. “This links in with what Greensleeves was saying, doesn’t it?” he heard himself ask, as if from a distance.

“It does indeed.” The man at the front of the auditorium looked pleased. “And that’s why you’re here. All of you, you’ve been exposed in some way to this business.” He nodded at Mike. “Some of you more than others-if it wasn’t for your quick thinking and the way you escalated it via Boston Special Operations, it might have been another couple of days before we realized what kind of intelligence asset you were sitting on.”

“Greensleeves?” Pete asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You mean the kook?”

Mike shook his head. Source Greensleeves, who called himself Matthias, and who kept yammering on about hidden conspiracies and other worlds in between blowing wholesale rings like they were street-corner crack houses-

“Yes, and I’m afraid he isn’t a kook. Let me introduce myself. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Eric Smith, Air Force, on secondment to NSA/CSS, Office of Unconventional Programs. I work for the deputy director of technology. As of an hour ago, you guys are all on secondment from your usual assignments to a shiny new committee that doesn’t have a name yet, but that reports to the director of the National Security Council directly, via whoever he puts on top of me-hence all the melted stovepipes and joint action stuff. We’ve got to break across the usual departmental boundaries if we’re going to make this work. One reason you’re here is that you’ve all been vetted and had the security background checks in the course of your ordinary work. In fact, all but one of you are already federal employees working in the national security or crime prevention sectors. The letters have gone out to your managers and you should get independent confirmation when you get back home to Massachusetts and New York after this briefing round and tomorrow’s meetings and orientation lectures.” Smith leaned against the wall at the front of the room. “Any questions?”

The guy from the DOE, Bob, looked up. “What am I doing here?” he rumbled. “Is NIRT a stakeholder?”

Smith looked straight at him. “Yes,” he said softly. “The Nuclear Incident Response Teams are a stakeholder.”

There was a hissing intake of breath: Mike glanced round in time to see Judith Herz look shocked.

“We have reason to believe that fissionable materials are involved.”

The Countess Helge and her attendants traveled in convoy with other residents of Thorold Palace that evening, to the Östhalle at the east end of the royal run that formed the artery linking the great houses at the center of Niejwein.

Niejwein was the royal capital of the kingdom of Gruinmarkt, which occupied most of the territory of Massachusetts and chunks of New Jersey and New York, over here. As near as Miriam had been able to work out, the first Norse settlements on the eastern seaboard had died out in the eleventh or twelfth centuries, but their replacements-painstakingly carved out by the landless sons of the northern European nobility around the start of the sixteenth century-had flourished, albeit far less so than in her own world. They had no skyscrapers, spacecraft, or steam engines; no United States of America, no Declaration of Independence, no church or Reformation. Rome had fallen on schedule but the dark ages had been darker than in her world. With no Christianity, no Judaism, no Islam, and with no centers of scholarship to preserve the classics, the climb back up had been correspondingly more painful and protracted.

This was the world the Clan came from, descended from an itinerant tinker who had by accident discovered the ability to walk between worlds-to her own New England, land of dour puritan settlers, to the north of the iron triangle of the sugar and slave trade. He was lucky not to be hanged as a witch, Helge thought morosely as she stared out of her carriage window, shielding her face behind a lacquered fan as the contraption jolted along the cobblestone street.

Or institutionalized, like a Kaspar Hauser. Strange things happened to disoriented adults who appeared as if out of thin air, speaking no known language, bewildered and lost. It had nearly happened to Miriam, the first time she accidentally world-walked. But at least now I understand what I’m doing, she thought.

World-walking was a recessive gene-linked trait, one whose carriers far outnumbered those who had the ability. To have the ability in full both parents must at least be carriers: the three-generation long braids knotted the Clan’s six inner families together, keeping the bloodlines strong, while the outer families occasionally threw up a cluster of world-walking siblings.

In the past hundred and fifty years-since the world Helge had grown up in as Miriam had industrialized-the Clan had used their ability to claw their way up from poor merchants to the second seat of power in the kingdom. The ability to send messages from one side of the continent to another within a day gave their traders a decisive edge, as did the weapons and luxury goods they were able to import from America.

The maids squeezed into the bench seat opposite Helge giggled as one wheel clattered off a pothole. She glanced at them irritably from behind her fan, unsure what the joke was, her hochsprache inadequate to follow the conversation. The carriage stank of leather and a faint aroma of stale sweat beneath the cloying toilet waters of the ladies. Helge used no such scents (it was Miriam’s habit to bathe daily and wear as little makeup as possible), but Kara was sometimes overenthusiastic, the young Lady Souterne who traveled with them this evening seemed to think that smelling like a brothel would guarantee her a supply of suitors, and as for the last Clan notables to borrow this coach from the livery stable attached to the palace …

The four horses harnessed to the coach-not to mention the outriders and the carriages in front-kicked up a fine brown dust, dried out by the hot summer afternoon. It billowed so high that the occupants were forced to keep the windows of the carriage closed. They were thick slabs of rippled green glass, expensive as silver salvers but useful only insofar as they let beams of dusty evening sunlight into the oppressively hot interior. Helge could barely make out the buildings opposite behind their high stone walls, the shacks and lean-tos of the porters and costermongers and pamphleteers thronging the boulevard in front of them.

With a shout from the coachmen up top, the carriage turned off the boulevard and entered the drive up to the front of the Östhalle, passing cottages occupied by royal pensioners, galleries and temporary marquees for holding exhibitions of paintings and tapestries, the wooden fence of a bear pit, and the stone-built walls around the barracks of the Royal Life Guards. People thronged all around, the servants and soldiers and guards and bond-slaves of the noble visitors mingling with the royal household in residence and with hawkers and beggars and dipsters and chancers of every kind. A royal party could not but transpire without a penumbra of leaky festivities trickling down to the grounds outside.

The carriage stopped. A clatter of steps and the door opened: four brass horns cut through the racket. “Milady?” Kara asked. Helge rose first and clambered out onto the top step, blinking at the slanting orange sunlight coming over the trees. For a moment she was sure she’d caught her dress on something-a hinge, a protruding nail-and that presently it would tear; then she worried that a gust of wind would render her ridiculous on this exposed platform, until finally she recognized one of the faces looking up at her from below:

“Sieur Huw?” she asked hopefully.

“Milady? If it would please you to take my hand-” he answered in English, accented but comprehensible.

She made it down the steps without embarrassing herself. “Sieur Huw, how kind of you.” She managed to smile. Huw was another of those interchangeable youngbloods who infested Clan security, hot-headed adolescent duelists who would have been quite intolerable had Angbard not the means to tame them. When they grew up sufficiently to stop seeking any excuse for a brawl they could be useful: those who had two brain cells to rub together, doubly so. Huw was one of the latter, but Helge had only met him in passing and barely had his measure. Beanpole thin and tall, with brown hair falling freely below his shoulders and a receding chin to spoil what might otherwise have been rugged good looks, Huw moved with a dangerous economy of motion that suggested to those in his path that they had best find business elsewhere. But he wore neither sword nor gun at his belt today. Bearing arms in the presence of the king was a privilege reserved for the royal household and its guards. “Where’s everything happening?” she asked him out of the side of her mouth.