There was real anger behind the words. Kemp wasn’t entirely the amiable mannequin he appeared to be. “Which greedy asshole are we taking into custody?”
“Well, I’m not going to point at him. You see the forklift parked by the cargo elevators? He’s the guy tying down a palette of boxes.”
Jesse identified the slablike white doors of the cargo elevators. It was hard to make any reliable judgment from this distance, but the smuggler was obviously a large man.
“We have a security detail standing by on the second tier if anything goes wrong. But I thought you two might like to do the honors.”
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said, sounding genuinely pleased.
“We just need to escort him upstairs for interrogation. No big deal. But you might want to keep your flex cuffs handy. All right? Let’s do it.”
Kemp strode across the floor with Barton beside him and Jesse and Elizabeth hurrying after. Jesse was careful to keep his eye on the smuggler, who went on loading cartons onto an aluminum skid until Kemp was within thirty feet of him. Then he looked up and froze in place.
“He’s made us,” Elizabeth said.
So he’ll stand or he’ll run, Jesse thought. Not that there was anywhere to run to.
The gap closed to twenty feet. The smuggler stood upright, watching them approach. Then his eyes narrowed. Jesse saw it coming. The smuggler broke and ran. But he didn’t run away—he came at August Kemp, and he came at him head-on.
Jesse and Elizabeth sprinted forward, trying to put themselves between Kemp and the smuggler. There wasn’t time for anything subtle. Jesse threw his body into the smuggler’s path, and the smuggler’s own momentum did the rest of the work—he tumbled headlong over Jesse, though not before planting a knee in Jesse’s ribs. Jesse rolled and managed to pin the man under him long enough for Elizabeth to lean in with her plastic cuffs and secure his hands behind his back.
The smuggler’s attention remained focused entirely on Kemp. “Fuck you,” he said. Jesse stood and hauled the man to his feet as Kemp’s standby security detail came hustling down the stairs from the second tier, a belated thunder of booted feet on metal treads.
Jesse brushed himself off and took stock. No harm done. He might have bruised a rib, but nothing was broken. “Good work,” Elizabeth said.
“All I did was get in the way.”
“No, you were great,” Kemp said, only slightly shaken. “Thank you, Jesse. One of the best hires we ever made. You too, Elizabeth.”
Which was fine, but it left Jesse with an unanswered question. The smuggler had come at Kemp as if he hated him and no longer needed to conceal it—more like a partisan with a grievance than a guilty grifter. What had Kemp done to make an enemy of a man whose name he barely knew?
He took a last look at the Mirror as they moved toward the elevators. All of the chamber was duplicated in that vast mirage, and his own reflection was part of the minutiae of it, a tiny figure in a cavernous space. Then a Klaxon sounded, and the workers in white suits began to clear the floor—preparing for a fresh shipment to come through, Kemp said. Jesse hoped to see the Mirror open onto the world beyond it: the fabled future. But the elevator door slid shut before that happened.
* * *
The investigation was over, Barton had said, nothing left but the tidying up. But some of that tidying had to be done at Futurity Station, and he wanted Jesse and Elizabeth to do it.
So they traveled to the rail town with a convoy of departing guests late on a Wednesday afternoon. The crowds that had been drawn by Grant’s visit were gone now, which meant they could book adjoining rooms at the Excelsior. Elizabeth will have her privacy, Jesse thought as they checked in, and I’ll have mine. Come morning they would talk to the town’s druggist about reporting any future spike in the sale of coca or opiate compounds, and then they would attempt to recover any contraband that remained in Onslow’s back room.
They arrived in time for a meal. The light of sunset through the curtained windows of the hotel’s dining room added a roseate glow to the gaslight, but Elizabeth seemed broody and distant over supper. Jesse guessed she was thinking about her home, and he tried to distract her. “August Kemp seems pleased with us.”
“Good for August Kemp.”
“So you don’t worship at his altar? Everyone else seems to.”
“It’s not Kemp they worship, Jesse. It’s his bank account.”
“I’m sure he’s a wealthy man.”
“Multibillionaire, according to Forbes.”
Jesse tried to imagine what that could possibly mean. What did a billionaire buy with his money, up there in the twenty-first century? Airplanes? Spaceships? Entire planets? “How did he make his fortune? Not exclusively from the City, I imagine.”
“By inheriting a family business, first of all. Big holdings in the hospitality industry, high-end resorts and cruise ships mainly. But Kemp wasn’t some kind of trust-fund baby. His father groomed him to take control of the business, and he turned out to have a talent for it. He expanded into some really difficult markets, shouldered out some high-powered competition. There’s Kemp money in that orbital hotel they’re building, for instance. But the City is his personal obsession.”
“Men such as that tend to make enemies.”
“What he went through to build the City, of course he made enemies.”
“What do you mean? What did he go through?”
“There were all kinds of legal and regulatory obstacles he had to deal with. The safety of the Mirror. The whole question of people carrying things through and bringing things back. What Kemp brings back is mainly gold, so how is that regulated? From the legal point of view, is Kemp importing gold? Not from any recognized foreign country, no. So is Kemp pulling gold out of a hole in the ground—is the Mirror a kind of gold mine? None of the written regulations apply, and Kemp had to lobby hard for laws that would work to his advantage. And you can’t imagine the number of interest groups who want to piss in the pot, even over trivialities. Antique dealers, for instance—they didn’t want a flood of Duncan Phyfe sideboards and Currier and Ives prints driving down the market. That’s why anything a tourist brings back from 1876 gets an indelible stamp and a registry number. There are layers and layers of this bureaucratic stuff. Labor laws—Kemp hires a certain number of locals, like you, but does he pay them minimum wage? And is that calculated in our currency or yours? What’s the exchange rate? A fair wage by 1876 standards looks like a slave’s wage in twenty-first-century dollars.”
“I guess all that kept him busy,” Jesse said.
“That isn’t the half of it. Medical considerations. No offense, but you can’t visit 1876 without a shitload of vaccinations. The CDC argued for an enforced quarantine on anyone coming back through the Mirror. Kemp dodged that one, but we still have to be careful—even a single case of smallpox or yellow fever would be enough to shut us down. One of the first things Kemp’s people did, even before the foundation of the City was laid down, was to send over an epidemiological team to sequence influenza viruses and prepare vaccines.”
“I apologize for our diseases. We’d do without them if we could.”