He took a deep breath. “The Clan. A bunch of medieval jerks, squatting on our territory—or a good cognate of it. What’s going down in Texas, Colonel Smith? Their version of Texas, not our Texas: what are they doing there? I’ll tell you what they’re doing: they’re sitting on twice as much oil as Saddam Hussein, and that’s what’s got Daddy Warbucks’s attention. Because, you see, if JAUNT BLUE delivers, eventually all that good black stuff is going to be ours…”
“Are we nearly there yet?”
Huw glanced in the driver’s mirror, taking his eyes off the interstate for a couple of seconds. Elena sprawled across one half of the back seat of the Hummer H2 truck, managing to look louche and bored simultaneously. Petulant, that was the word. A twenty-one-year-old Clan princess—no, merely a contessa in waiting, should she inherit—fresh from her Swiss finishing school and her first semester at college: out in the big bad world for the first time, with two brave knights to look after her. File off the serial numbers and you could mistake her for a spoiled preppy kitten. Of course, the jocks who’d be clustering around the latter type didn’t usually carry swords. Nor did normal preppies know how to handle the FN P90 in the trunk. Still, Huw let his eyes linger on her tight jeans and embroidered babydoll tee for a second longer than was strictly necessary, before he glanced back at the road and the GPS navigation screen.
“About twenty miles to go. Eighteen minutes. We turn off in ten.”
“Boring.” She faked a yawn at him, slim hand covering pink lip gloss.
“I’m bored too,” snarked Hulius, from his nest in the front passenger seat. He took an orange from the glove box and began to peel it with his dagger. Citrus droplets swirled in the aircon breeze.
“We’re all bored,” Huw said affably. “Are you suggesting I should break the speed limit?”
Hulius paled. “No—”
“Good.” Huw smiled. The white duke took a dim view of traffic infractions, and supplemented the official fines with additional punishments of his own choice: ten strokes of the lash for a first offense. Don’t ever, ever draw attention to yourselves was the first rule they drilled into everyone before letting them out the door. Which was why couriers on Post duty dressed like lawyers, and why the three of them were driving down the interstate at a sober two miles under the speed limit, in a shiny new Hummer, with every i dotted and t crossed on the paperwork that proved them to be a trio of MIT graduate students with rich parents, off on a field trip.
The green dot on the map inched south along Route 95, slowly converging on Baltimore and the afternoon traffic. The aircon fans hissed steadily, but Huw could still feel the heat beating down on the back of his hand through the tinted glass. Concrete rumbled under the magically smooth suspension of the truck. The scrubby grass outside was parched, burned almost brown by the summer heat. He’d made a journey part of the distance down this way once before on horseback, in a place with no air-conditioning or cars: it had been a fair approximation of hell. Doing the journey in a luxury SUV was heaven—albeit a particularly boring corner of it. “Have you checked the charge on the goggles yet?”
“They’re in the trunk. They’ll be fine.” Hulius pulled off a slice of orange and offered it to Huw. “you worry too much.”
“It’s your neck I’m worrying over. Would you rather I didn’t worry, bro?”
“If you put it that way…”
The last half hour of any journey was always the longest, but Huw caught the sign in time, and took the exit for Bel Air and parts east: then a couple more turns onto dusty roads linking faceless tracts of suburb with open countryside. The dots converged. Finally he reached a stretch of trees and a driveway led up to an unprepossessing house. He brought the truck to a halt in front of the day room windows and killed the engine.
“You’re sure this is the place?” Elena pushed herself upright then stretched, yawning.
“Got to be.” Huw rooted around in the dash for the bunch of house keys and the letter from the realtor. Then he opened the door and jumped out, taking a deep breath as the oppressive summer humidity washed over him. “Number 344. Yup, that’s right.”
Sneakers crunched on gravel as he walked towards the front door. Behind him, a clattering: Elena unloading the flat Pelikan case from the trunk. Huw glanced up at the peeling white paint under the guttering, the patina of dust. Then he rang the doorbell and waited for a long minute, until Elena, holding the case behind him as if it was a guitar, began tapping her toes and whistling a tuneless melody of impatience. “It pays to be cautious,” he finally explained, before he stuck the key in the lock. “People hereabouts take a dim view of unexpected visitors.”
The key turned. Inside, the hallway was hot and close, smelling of dust and old regrets. Huw breathed a sigh of relief. He’d set this up by remote control, one of ten test sites running down the coastline and across the continent all the way to the west coast, spaced five hundred kilometers apart. The Realtor had been only too glad to rent it to him for a year, money paid up front: it had been unsalable ever since its former owner, a retired widower, had died of a heart attack in the living room one bleak winter evening. You could remove the carpet and the furniture, and even do something about the smell, but you couldn’t remove the reputation.
Huw hunted around for the fuse board for a while, then flipped the circuit breaker. A distant whir spoke of long-dormant air-conditioning. He checked that the hall lights worked, then nodded to himself. “Okay, let’s get moved in.”
It took the three of them half an hour to unload the Hummer. Besides backpacks full of clothing, they brought in a number of wheeled equipment cases, a laptop computer, and couple of expensive digital camcorders. Finally, the air mattresses. “Elena? You take the back bedroom. Yul, you and I are roughing it up front in the master room.”
Huw dragged his mattress into the front room and plugged the electric pump in. Some of the houses were still furnished, but not this one. Be prepared wasn’t just for scouts. Her Grace Helge had done pretty much this same job, on a smaller, much less organized scale—but Huw had been thinking about it for the week since the white duke had called him in, and he thought he had some new twists on it. He mopped at his forehead. “Listen, we’re about done here and it’s half past lunchtime, so why don’t we head into town and grab a pizza while the air-conditioning makes this place habitable?”
“Works for me.” Hulius grimaced. “Where’s Lady Elena?”
“Here.” Elena leaned against the banister rail outside the door. “Food would be good.” She grinned impishly. “How about a couple of bottles of wine?” Like all Clan members, her attitude to wine was very un-American—tempered only by the duke’s iron rule about attracting unwanted attention in public.
Huw nodded—thoughtfully, for he was still getting used to playing the role of responsible adult around the other two. “We’ll pick something up if we pass a liquor store. But no drinking in public, okay?”