She raised her glass, drank deeply. “The matter rested with his grace until the last year. It appears that the traitor Matthias had access to the procedures, and to his grace’s seal. He ordered one of the devices removed from storage and transported to Boston.” She waited as the shocked muttering subsided. “More recently, we learned that the Americans had learned of this weapon. Our traitor had apparently threatened them with it. They indicated their displeasure and demanded our cooperation in retrieving it. I think”—her gaze flickered towards Carl—“that most likely they found it and, by doing so, decided to send us a message. Either that, or our traitor has struck at us—but he is no world-walker. Meanwhile, we know the American secret police hold some of ours prisoner.”
“But how—”
“What are we going to—”
“Silence!” The word having had its desired effect, Riordan continued, quietly. “They can hurt us, as they’ve demonstrated. They could have picked the Summer Palace in Niejwein. They could have picked the Thorold castle. We know they’ve captured couriers and forced them to carry spies over, but this is a new threat. We don’t know what they can do. All we know for certain is that our strongholds are not only undoppelgangered, they may very well be traps.”
He fell silent. Carl cleared his throat. Deceptively mildly, he asked, “Can we get our hands on some more?”
Olga, who had been rolling the empty water glass between her hands, put it down. “That’s already taken care of,” she said.
“In any event, it’s not a solution,” Riordan said dismissively. “At best it’s a minimal deterrent. We can hurt them—we can kill tens of thousands—but you know how the Americans respond to an attack. They are relentless, and they will slaughter millions without remorse to avenge a pinprick, should it embarrass them. Worse, their councils and congresses are so contrived that they cannot surrender. Any leader who advocates surrender is ridiculed and risks removal from office. And this leader—” He shook his head. “They haven’t felt the tread of conquering boots on their land in more than a lifetime, and for most of a lifetime they have been an empire, mighty and powerful; there is a level at which they do not believe it is possible for them to be beaten. So if we’re going to confront them, the last thing we should do is fight them openly, on ground of their own choosing.”
“Such as the Gruinmarkt,” said one of the new faces at the table, who had been sitting quietly at the back of the room until now. Heads turned towards him. “My apologies, milady. But . . .” He shrugged, impatiently. “Someone needs to get to the point.”
“Quite right,” muttered Carl.
“Earl Wu.” Riordan looked at him. “You spoke out of turn.”
“Then I apologize.” Wu looked unrepentant.
The staring match threatened to escalate into outright acrimony. Olga took a deep breath. “I believe his lordship is referring to certain informed speculation circulating in the intelligence committee over the past couple of days,” she said. “Rumors.”
“What rumors?” Riordan looked at her.
“We take our ability for granted.” Olga raised a hand to her throat, to the thin gold chain from which hung a locket containing the Clan sigil. “And for a long time we’ve assumed that we were limited to the two worlds, to home and to here. But now we know there are at least two more worlds. How many more could there be? We didn’t know as much as we thought we did. Or rather, much of what we thought we knew of our own limits was a consequence of timidity and custom.” The muttering began again. “The Americans have told their scientists to find out how our talent works. They’ve actually told us this. Threatening us with it. They don’t believe in magic: If they can see something in front of their eyes, then they can work out how it happens. They’ve demanded our surrender.” She licked her lips. “We need contingency plans. Because they might be bluffing—but if they’re not, if they have found a way to send weapons and people between worlds by science, then we’re in horrible danger. The Council needs to answer the question, what is to be done? And if they won’t, someone’s going to have to do it for them. That someone being us.”
Getting to see the colonel was a nontrivial problem; he was a busy man, and Mike was on medical leave with a leg that wasn’t going to bear his weight any time soon and a wiretap on his phone line. But he needed to talk to the colonel. Colonel Smith was, if not a friend, then at least the kind of boss who gave a shit what happened to his subordinates. The kind who figured a chain of command ran in two directions, not one. Unlike Dr. James and his shadowy sponsors.
After James’s false flag ambulance had dropped him off at the hospital to be poked and prodded, Mike had caught a taxi home, lost in thought. A bomb in a mobile phone, to be handed out like candy and detonated at will, was a scary kind of message to send. It said, we have nothing to talk about. It said, we want you dead, and we don’t care how. We don’t even care much who you are. Mike shuddered slightly as he recalled how Olga’s cynicism had startled him: “How do we know there isn’t a bomb in the earpiece?” she’d asked. Well, he’d denied it indignantly enough—and now she’d think he was a liar. More importantly, Miriam’s Machiavellian mother, and whoever she was working with—would also be convinced that the diplomatic dickering the colonel had supposedly been trying to get off the ground was a sting. Dr. James has deliberately killed any chance we’ve got of negotiating a peaceful settlement, he realized. He’s burned any chance of me ever being seen as a trustworthy—honorable—negotiator. And he’s playing some kind of double game and going behind Smith’s back. What the hell is going on?
Mike’s total exposure on the other side of the wall of worlds was measured in days, but he’d seen enough (hell, he’d smelled, heard, and tasted enough) to suspect that Dr. James was working on very incomplete information—or his plans had very little to do with the reality on the ground of the Gruinmarkt. Worse, he seemed to be just about ignoring the Clan, the enigmatic world-walkers who’d been a huge thorn in the DEA’s collective ass for the past thirty years or more; it was almost as if he figured that a sufficient display of shock and awe would make them fold without a fight. But in Mike’s experience, beating on somebody without giving them any way out was a great way to make them do their damnedest to kill you. Mike’s instinct for self-preservation told him that pursuing the matter was a bad idea, and normally he’d have listened to it, but he had an uneasy feeling that this situation broke all the rules. If Dr. James was really off the rails someone needed to call him on it—and the logical person wasn’t Mike but his boss.
It took Mike a day to nerve himself to make his move. He spent it at home, planning, running through all the outcomes he could imagine. “What can possibly go wrong?” he asked Oscar, while making a list of bullet points on a legal pad. The elderly tomcat paused from washing his paw to give him such a look of bleak suspicion that Mike had to smile. “It’s like that, huh?”