"What, he—"
"Listen." He leaned closer, pitching his voice low: "I've met men like Reynolds before. As long as he thinks I'm in town to see my mistress he'll be happy—he thinks he's got a hand on my neck. But you're right, he's dangerous, he's an empire-builder. He's got a power base in Justice and Prisons and he's purging his own department and, hmm, the books you lent me—made me think of Felix Dzerzhinsky or Heinrich, urn, Hitler? Himmler. Expert bureaucrats who build machineries of terror inside a revolutionary movement. But he doesn't have absolute power yet. He may not even have realized how much power he has at his fingertips. Sir Adam doesn't realize, either—but I'm in a position to tell him. Reynolds isn't invulnerable but he
is
dangerous, and you have just given me a huge problem, because he is already watching me."
"You think he's going to use me as a lever against you?"
"It's gone too far for that, I'm afraid. If he knows about your relatives and knows about our arrangement, he will see me as a direct threat. He'll have to move fast, within the next hours or days. Your household is almost certainly under surveillance as an anomaly, possibly suspected of being a group of monarchists. Damn." He looked at her. "I really should inform Sir Adam immediately—if Stephen has acquired a secret cell of world-walking assassins, he needs to know. I wouldn't put a coup attempt beyond him. Normally we should stay here for two or three hours at least, as if we were having a liaison. If I leave too soon, that would cause alarm. But if he's moving against your people right now—"
"Wait." Miriam took his arm. "You're forgetting we have radios. . ."
The morning had dawned bright with a thin cloudy overcast, humid and warm with a threat of summer evening storms to follow. Brilliana, her morning check on the security points complete, placed the go-bag she'd prepared for Helge on the table in the front guard room; then she went in search of Huw.
She found him in one of the garden sheds behind a row of tomato vines, wiring up a row of instruments on a rough-topped table from which the plant pots had only just been removed. He didn't notice her at first, and she stood in the doorway for a minute, watching his hands, content. "Good morning," she said eventually.
He looked up then, smiling luminously. "My lady. What can I do for you?"
She looked at the row of electronics. "It's a nice day for a walk into town. Will your equipment suffer if you leave it for a few hours?"
Obviously conflicted, Huw glanced at his makeshift workbench, then back at her. "I suppose—" He shook his head. Then he smiled again. "Yeah, I can leave it for a while." He rummaged in one of the equipment boxes by the foot of the table, then pulled a plastic sheet out and began to unfold it. "If you wouldn't mind taking that corner?"
They covered the electronics—Brilliana was fairly certain she recognized a regulated power supply and a radio transceiver—and weighted the sheet down with potsherds in case of rain and a leaky roof. Then Huw wiped his hands on a swatch of toweling. "This isn't a casual stroll, is it?" he asked quietly.
"No, but it needs to look like one." She eyed him up, evidently disapproving of his choice of jeans and a college sweatshirt. "You'll need to get changed first. Background story: You're a coachman, I'm a lady's maid, and we're on a morning off work. He's courting her and she's agreed to see the sights with him. I'll meet you by the trades' door in twenty minutes."
"Are you expecting trouble?" He looked at her sharply.
"I'm not expecting it, but I don't want to be taken by surprise." She grinned at him. "Go!"
(An observer keeping an eye on the Beckstein household that morning would have seen little to report. A pair of servants—he in a suit, worn but in good repair, and she in a black dress, clutch bag tightly gripped under her left elbow—departed in the direction of the streetcar stop. A door-to-door seller visited the rear entrance, was rebuffed. Two hours later, a black steamer—two men in the open-topped front, the passenger compartment hooded and dark—rumbled out of the garage and turned towards the main road. With these exceptions, the household carried on much as it had the day before.)
"Where are we going?" Huw asked Brilliana as they waited at the streetcar stop.
"Downtown." She narrowed her eyes, gazing along the tracks. "Boston is safer than Springfield, but still . . . I want to take a look at the docks. And then the railway stations, north and south both. It's best to have a man at my side: less risk of unwelcome misunderstandings."
"Oh." He sounded disappointed. "What else?"
She unwound slightly; a moment later she slid her fingers through his waiting hand. "I thought if there is enough time after that, we could visit the fair on the common."
"That's more like it."
"It'll look good to the watchers." She squeezed his thumb, then leaned sideways, against his shoulder. "Assuming there are any. If there aren't—by then we should know."
"Indeed." He paused. "I'm carrying, in case you were wondering."
"Good." With her free hand she shifted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. "Your knot . . . ?"
"On my wrist-ribbon."
"That too." She relaxed slightly. "Oh look, a streetcar."
They rode together in silence on the open upper deck, she sitting primly upright, he discreetly attentive to her occasional remarks. There were few other passengers on the upper level this morning, and none who might be agents or Freedom Riders; the tracks were in poor repair and the car swayed like a drunk, shrieking and grating round corners. They changed streetcars near Haymarket Square, again taking the upper deck as the tram rattled its way towards the back bay.
"What are we looking for?" asked Huw.
"Doppelganger prisons." Brill looked away for a moment, checking the stairs at the rear of the car. "They use prison ships here. If you were a bad guy and were about to arrest a bunch of world-walkers, what would you—"
Rounding the corner of a block of bonded warehouses, the streetcar briefly came in sight of the open water, and then the piers and cranes of the docks. A row of smaller ships lay tied up inside the harbor, their funnels clear of smoke or steam: In the water beyond, larger vessels lay at anchor. The economic crash, and latterly the state of emergency and the new government, had wreaked havoc with trade, and behind fences great pyramids and piles of break-bulk goods had grown, waiting for the flow of shipping to resume. Today there was some activity—a gang of stevedores was busy with one of the nearer ships, loading cartloads of sacks out of one of the warehouses—but still far less than on a normal day.
"What's that?" asked Brill, pointing at a ship moored out in the open water, past the mole.
"I'm not sure"—Huw followed her direction—"a warship?"
It was large, painted in the gray blue favored by the navy, but it lacked the turrets and rangefinders of a ship of the line; more to the point, it looked poorly maintained, streaks of red staining its flanks below the anchor chains that dipped into the water. Large, boxy superstructures had been added fore and aft. "That's an odd one."
"Can you read its name?"
"Give me a moment." Huw glanced around quickly, then pulled out a compact monocular. "HMS
Burke.
Yup, it's the navy." He shoved the scope away quickly as the streetcar rounded a street corner and began to slow.
"Delta Charlie, please copy." Brill had her radio out. "I need a ship class identifying. HMS
Burke,
Bravo Uniform Romeo—" She finished, waited briefly for a reply, then slid the device away, switching it to silent as the streetcar stopped, swaying slightly as passengers boarded and alighted.
"Was that entirely safe?"
"No, but it's a calculated risk. We're right next to the harbor and if anyone's RDFing for spies they'll probably raid the ships' radio rooms first; they don't have pocket-sized transmitters around here. I set Sven up with a copy of the shipping register. He says it's a prison ship. Currently operated by the Directorate of Reeducation. That would be prisons." She frowned.