can't believe I fainted—was
followed by anxiety—Who is
this guy? How do I know he's DEA? Is he a burglar?—and
then fear:
Alone with a strange man.
The strange man seemed to be going out of his way to be nonthreatening, though. "Do you want a hand up?" he asked. "Figure you might be more comfortable on the sofa—" She waved him away, then pushed herself upright, then nodded. Things went gray again for a moment. "Listen, I'm not, uh, here on official business, exactly. But I need to talk to Miriam—" She rose, took two steps backwards, and collapsed onto the sofa. "Are you sure you're okay?"
"No," she heard herself say, very distinctly. "I'm
not
okay. Who are you, mister, and what are you doing in my house?"
He hunkered down on the balls of his feet so that he was at eye level to her. "Name's Fleming, Mike Fleming. I used to know Miriam. She's in a whole bunch of trouble; if you know what she's been doing this past year, you'd know that—if you know about the Clan, you're in trouble, too. That goes for me, also." He paused. "Want me to go on?"
"You're." She stopped. "Why did you tell me you're DEA?"
"I was, originally—still carry a badge they issued. I'd prefer you not to phone them just yet to verify that. See, I'm willing to put my neck on the line. But I want to get to the truth. You know about the Clan?"
Paulie shook her head. "If I say anything, you know what those people will do?" She was saying too much, she vaguely recognized, but something about this setup smelled wrong.
"Which people? The Clan, or the Family Trade Organization?" Fleming paused. "I'm not in a position to arrest you for anything—I'm not here on official business. I need to talk to Miriam—"
"Wait." Paulette tried to pull herself together. "The
what
organization? You want to talk to her? About what?"
Fleming looked at her quizzically. "The FTO is a cross-agency operation to shut down the Clan. I was part of it until, uh, about a week ago. It was an attempt to get all the agencies whose lines the Clan crossed to sing from the same hymn book. I came in from the DEA side when source GREEN—a Clan defector called Matthias—walked in the door. I've seen Miriam, about three months ago, in a palace in a place called Niejwein want me to go on?"
Oh
Jesus, save me—he's the real thing.
She shook her head numbly. "What do you want?"
"Like I said, I need to talk to Miriam. She's in terrible danger—FTO has been penetrated. The president used to work with the Clan, back in the eighties and early nineties. He's the one behind this mess, he deliberately goaded them into using those nukes, and there's worse to come. He's running FTO. All the oil in Texas—every version of Texas—that's what he's after, that and a state of emergency at home to give him carte blanche to do whatever the hell he likes. I've tried to put out a warning via the press, but my contact didn't believe me until the attacks, and now—"
"You went to the press?" Paulette stared at him as if he'd grown a second head. "What did you have?"
"Nothing!" His frustration was visible.
"But you found me," she pointed out.
"Yeah, after I turfed her house. Which is under police watch
and
booby-trapped; I found an old planner of hers, played back the answering-machine tape—"
"Shit." She tried to stand, failed for a moment, then got her suddenly shaky knees to behave. "There was a tape?"
If
you
found me,
they
could find me.
"Relax. Those agencies you're thinking about don't talk to each other at that level. You're probably safe, for now."
Probably safe
and her cousin
Don't worry
had helped many a girl get pregnant, in Paulie's opinion, and when the canoodling in question might lead to the queue for the execution chamber at Gitmo rather than a hospital delivery room, chancing it was not on her roadmap. "No, forget that: If they catch you they'll backtrack to me. Thanks a million, Mr. Fleming, you just doubled my chances of not getting out of this alive. I didn't ask for this shit! It just landed on my lap!" Her heart was hammering, she could feel her face flushing: Fleming was leaning away from her sudden vehemence. "Fucking goodfellas, I grew up in their backyard, you know what I'm saying? The old generation. You kept your nose out of their business and didn't do nothing and they'd mostly leave you alone, especially if you knew their cousin's wife or walked their sister's dogs or something. But if you crossed them it wouldn't be any fucking horse's head at the end of your bed, no fucking wreath at your funeral; you wouldn't
have
a funeral, there wouldn't be anything to bury. There were rumors about the meat-packing plant, about the cat and dog food. And the cops weren't much better. Shakedown money every Tuesday, free coffee and bagels at the corner, and you better hope they liked your face. And that was the
local
cops, and the old-time
local
hoods, who didn't shit in their backyard 'case someone took exception, you know where I'm coming from?"
Fleming just squatted on his heels and took it, like a giant inflatable target for all her frustration. "Yes, I know where you're from," he said quietly when she ran down. "Keep a low profile and don't rock the boat and you think maybe you can get by without anyone hurting you. But where
I'm
coming from—that's not an option anymore. It's not Miriam's fault that she's descended from them and has their ability, not her fault about those bombs—she tried to warn me. There are back channels between governments: That was before my boss's boss decided to burn me. No; what
I'm
telling you is that we're caught in the middle of a fight that's been fixed, and if I don't get to talk to Miriam, a lot of people are going to die. The new president wants the Clan dead, because it's a necessary condition to cover up his own past connection with them: He ran their West Coast heroin-distribution arm for about seven years. He's had his fingers deep into their business since then, he's the one who nudged them into acquiring nukes and then prodded them into using them, and he's just been sworn in—we probably don't have much time to get the warning out. So are you going to help me? Or are you going to sit in your foxhole and stick your fingers in your ears and sing `La la la, I can't
hear
you'?"
"You're telling me it's the
president's
fault?" She stared. Fleming didn't
look
mad—
"Yes. I know where too many bodies are buried, that's why they tried to car bomb me four days ago. FTO itself is still secret: I know enough to blow the operation sky high. Black underground prisons on US soil, captured Clan members being forced to act as mules with bombs strapped to their necks, vivisection on subjects to find out what makes them tick, helicopters with black boxes containing bits of brain tissue—don't ask me how they got them—that can travel to the Gruinmarkt. There's an invasion coming, Ms. Milan, and they've been gearing up to attack the Clan in their own world for at least six months."
"Call me Paulie," she said automatically.
"It's not even the first time our government's considered setting off nukes on our own territory to justify an attack on someone else. Back in the early seventies, we figure Nixon—there was a bomb in Boston, you see, GREENSLEEVES planted it as a blackmail backup before he defected, and we ran across an older device while we were looking for his: a big one, the kind you airdropped from a B52 when you wanted to flatten Moscow. It dated to 1972, just before Nixon showed up in Beijing to make nice. Turns out it was his Plan B: Get rid of a bunch of useless liberals and wave the bloody flag at the Commies. They didn't do it then, but they've gone and done it now, with the fall guy's fingerprints all over the throwdown."