She gave him an old-fashioned look as he sat down beside her. “Afraid of eavesdroppers?” she muttered.
“Yes,” he whispered, almost too quietly to hear.
Whoops. Miriam shut up and stared out the window as the city unrolled to either side. This city might be called New York, but the layout was bewildering; from the citadel and palaces of Manhattan Island—here called New London—to the suburbs sprawling across the mainland around it, Jersey City to Brookhaven, everything was different. There was no orderly grid, but an insane mish-mash of looping and forking curlicues, as if village paths laid out by drunkards had grown together, merging at the edges: high streets and traffic circles and weird viaducts with houses built on top of them. Tenement blocks made of soot-stained brick, with not a single fire escape in sight. In the distance, blocky skyscrapers on the edge of the administrative district around the palace loomed on the skyline, but they weren’t a patch on her New York, the New York of the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings and, not long ago, the twin towers. High above them a propeller aircraft droned slowly across the underside of the clouds, trailing a thin brown smear of exhaust. For a moment she felt very alone: a tourist in the third world who’d been told her ticket home was invalid. I wanted to escape, didn’t I? To cut loose and go where the Clan can’t find me. She pondered the irony of the change in her circumstances: it all seemed so long ago, now.
“Nearly there,” remarked Burgeson, and she noticed his hand tightening on the back of the chair in front of them.
“Nearly where?”
“New Line crossing. Come on.” He unfolded from the seat and rolled towards the staircase, pulling the bell chain on his way. Miriam scrambled to follow him.
There were more people here, and the buildings were higher, and the air smelled of coal smoke and damp even in the summer heat. Miriam followed Burgeson across the street, dodging a horse-drawn cart piled high with garbage and a chuffing steam taxi. A lot of the people hereabouts were badly dressed, their clothing worn and threadbare and their cheeks gaunt: a wheeled stall at one corner was doing a brisk trade, doling out cupfuls of stew or soup to a long queue of shuffling men and women. She hurried to keep up with Erasmus as he walked past the soup kitchen. Stagflation, that’s it, she remembered vaguely. The treasury’s rolling the presses to print their way out of the fiscal crisis triggered by the war and the crop failure, but the real dynamic is deflationary, so wages and jobs are being squeezed even as prices are going up because the currency is devaluing…she remembered the alleyway three nights before, the beggar threatening her with a knife, and abruptly felt sick at the implications. They were starving, she realized. This is the capital. What’s going on, out in the boonies?
Erasmus stopped so suddenly that she nearly ran into his back. “Follow me,” he muttered, then lurched into the road and stuck an arm out. “Cab!” he called, then stepped back sharply to avoid being run over by a steamer. “Get in,” he told her, then climbed in behind. “St. Peter’s Cross,” he called forward to the driver: “An extra shilling if you can get us there fast!”
“Aye, well.”
The driver nodded at him and kicked the throttle open. The cab lurched forward with a loud chuffing noise and a trail of steam as it accelerated, throwing Miriam backwards into the padded seat. Erasmus landed at the other side from her, facing. She grinned at him experimentally. “What’s the hurry?”
“Company.” Burgeson jerked his chin sideways. A strip of cobbled street rattled beneath the cab’s wheels. “We’re best off without them.”
“We were followed?” A sudden sense of dread twisted her stomach. “Who by?”
“Can’t tell.” He reached out and slid the window behind the driver’s head closed. “Probably just a double-cross boy or a thugster, but you can’t be too sure. Worst case, a freelance thief taker trying to make his quota. Nobody you’d want to be nabbed by, that’s for sure.”
“In broad daylight?” she demanded.
He shrugged. “Times are hard.”
Shit. She stared at him. His closed expression spoke volumes. “What am I going to do?” she asked. “My business. My house. They’ll be under surveillance.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure they will be.”
“But what can I—”
“You can start by relaxing,” he said. “And letting the salon dye your hair.” His lips twitched in a brief smile. “Then, once we have checked into the hotel, if you’d honor me with your presence at dinner, you can tell me all about your recent travails. How does that sound?”
“That sounds—” This is going to be tougher than I realized, she thought faintly, as the cab lurched around a corner and pulled in opposite an imposing row of store windows near the base of a large stone building. “—acceptable.”
Late afternoon in NYC, mid-morning in San Francisco. Colonel Smith had brought a laptop and a briefcase full of work with him on the Air Force Gulfstream, holing up at the back of the cabin while Dr. James worked the phones continuously up front. Dr. James had brought along a small coterie of administrative gofers from NSC, and two Secret Service bodyguards: the latter had sized Smith up immediately and, after confirming he was on their watch list, politely asked him to stay where they could keep their eyes on him. Which was fine by Eric. Every time he ventured down from one of the FTO aeries he got a sensation between his shoulder blades as if a sniper’s crosshairs were crawling around there. Even Gillian had noticed him getting jumpy, staring at passing cars when they went places together—in the few snatched hours of domesticity that were all this job was leaving him. Bastards, he thought absently as he paged through the daily briefing roundup, looking for any sign that things weren’t going as badly as he feared. I hope this isn’t a waste of time…
Dr. James had been as infuriatingly unreadable as usual, saying nothing beyond the cryptic hints about some project at UC Berkeley. Lawrence Livermore Labs weren’t exactly on campus in Berkeley—it wasn’t even a daily commute—but that seemed to be where they were going. The gray Gulfstream executive jet touched down at San Francisco International and taxied towards a fenced-in compound where a couple of limos and two SUVs full of security contractors were waiting for them. “Take the second car,” James had told Eric: “The driver will take you to Westgate badge office to check you in before bringing you to JAUNT BLUE.” He nodded. “I’ve got prior clearance and an appointment before I join you.”
“Okay.” Eric swung his briefcase into the back of the Lincoln. “See you there,” he added, but James had already turned on his heel and was heading for the other car.
It took more than an hour to drive out to the laboratory complex, during which time Eric ran and reran his best scenarios for the coming meeting, absent-mindedly working his gyroball exerciser. James wouldn’t be visiting in person if he didn’t think it was important, which means he’ll be reporting to the vice president. Progress. But what are they doing here? He’d pulled the files on the only professor called Armstrong who was currently on faculty at UCSD: some kind of expert on quantum computing. Then he’d had Agent Delaney do a quick academic literature search. A year ago, Armstrong had coauthored a paper with a neurobiologist, conclusively demolishing the Penrose microtubule hypothesis, coming up with a proof that quantum noise would cause decoherence in any circuit relying on tubulin-bound GTP, whatever the hell that was. Then he’d written another paper, about quantum states in large protein molecules, before falling mysteriously silent—along with his research assistants and postdocs. The previous year they’d put their names on eighteen papers: this year, the total was just three, and those were merely citations as co-authors with other research groups.