“I think I can cope.” Mike looked at the headset doubtfully. “What’s that?” He pointed at a hole that had been drilled through a red button on the machine’s control panel.
“That was the record button. They disconnect the erase head, too, just in case; this one’s strictly playback only.”
“What, in case I slip and accidentally delete something?”
“No, it’s in case you try to record a message for the accomplice you’ve got working down in library services to smuggle out of the establishment, Mr. Fleming. That should have been in your security briefing materials. We are very methodical here.”
“I can see that.” Mike picked up the first of the cassettes; a thin patina of dust grayed the hand-scribbled label. “Has this been in your archives for long?”
“I don’t know and I couldn’t say.”
After Marilyn left, Mike sorted through the box. There were ten cassettes in all, and some of them were clearly years old. Most were identified only by a serial number scribbled on one side; a couple of them showed signs of the tape having been crumpled, as if they had unspooled and been painstakingly reassembled from a tangle of twisted Mylar. It had been years since Mike had last bothered with a cassette tape in everyday life; his last two automobiles had come with CD players. They were an obsolete technology, analog recordings on thin ribbons of Mylar tape. It seemed very strange to be working with them again, inside a windowless cell in a huge concrete office block in Maryland. But then again, a little voice reminded him: They’re robust. The equipment’s cheap, and doesn’t have to look like a spy tool. And you can replace them easily. Why fix something if it isn’t broken?
And so he slotted the first tape into the player, donned the headset, and pressed the PLAY button.
And it made very little sense whatsoever, even on the third replay.
By the third day, Mike had just about worked out what his problem was. It wasn’t just his grasp of the language, poor as it was. It wasn’t the clarity of the recordings, either—the microphone had been reasonably well placed, and it was of adequate sensitivity. The men (and occasional women) he heard discussing things in what sounded like an office suite—these were regular business meetings, as far as he could tell—were audible enough, and he could make out most of their words with a little effort. Many of their terms were unfamiliar, but as if to balance things out, the speakers used familiar English words quite often, albeit with an accent that gave Mike some trouble at first.
“It’s the context,” he told the security awareness poster. “Knowing what they’re talking about is as important as knowing what they’re saying.” He waved his hands widely, taking in the expanse of his empire—the desk, the chair, the walls—and declaimed, “Half of what gets said in any committee meeting doesn’t get expressed verbally, it’s all body language and gestures and who’s making eye contact with whom. Jesus.” He looked at the box of tapes disgustedly. “Maybe these would be some use to a secretary who sat in on the meeting, fodder for the minutes. . . .”
His eyes widened as he remembered lying on the floor in an empty office, Matthias—source GREENSLEEVES—standing over him with a gun: “If you’d gone after the Clan as a police operation, that would have given the thin white duke something more urgent to worry about than a missing secretary, no?”
Jesus. He stared at the tapes in surprise. Matthias was their boss man’s—the thin white duke’s—secretary, wasn’t he? These are probably his transcripts. Not that he’d recognized the defector’s voice—it had been months since he’d died, and Matt’s voice wasn’t distinctive enough to draw his attention, not on an elderly tape recording of a meeting—but the implications . . . GREENSLEEVES didn’t bring any tapes with him when he defected, so how did these get here? We have a spy in the Clan’s security apparatus, high enough up to get us these tapes. I wonder who they are? And what else they’ve brought over? . . .
In a shack attached to the stables at the back of Helge’s temporary palace, a man in combat fatigues sat on a swivel chair and contemplated failure.
“It’s not working,” he complained, and rubbed his aching forehead. “What am I doing wrong, bro?”
“Patience.” Huw carried on typing notes on a laptop perched precariously on one knee.
This experiment was Helge’s idea. “The first time I world-walked I was sitting down,” she’d told him. “That’s not supposed to be possible, is it? And then, later, I”—a shadow crossed her face—“I was brought across. In a wheelchair.” Her frown deepened. “There’s stuff we’ve been lied to about, Huw. I don’t know whether it’s from ignorance or deliberate, but we ought to find out, don’t you think?”
Angbard had said get to the bottom of it, and while the duke was hors de combat, Huw was more than happy to keep on following the same line of inquiry for Helge. “Okay, that’s test number four. Let’s try out the next set of casters. You want to stand up while I fit them?”
“Yah.” Yul stood, then picked up the chair, inverted it, and planted it on the workbench.
Huw put down the laptop then went to work on the upturned chair’s wheels with a multi-tool, worrying them until they came loose. He pulled another set of feet from a box and began installing them. “This set should work better, if I’m right,” he explained as he worked. “High density polyethylene is a very good insulator, and they’re hard—reducing the contact area with the ground.”
“What about the mat?” asked Yul.
“That, too. We’ll try that first: you, me, then Elena. Then without the mat.”
“You think the mat has something to do with it?”
“I’m not sure.” Huw straightened up. “She world-walked in an office chair. We don’t do that because it never occurred to anyone. They tried wheelbarrows, and on horseback, back in the day. Even a carriage plus four. All we know is that nobody world-walks in a vehicle, because when they tried to do it, it didn’t work. But we do it on foot, wearing shoes or boots. So what’s going on? What’s different about boots and wheels?”
“Horses weigh a lot,” Yul pointed out. “So do wooden barrows, or carriages.”
“Yes, but.” Huw reached for a mallet and a wooden dowel, lined them up carefully, and gave a recalcitrant caster a whack. “We don’t know. There are other explanations, like: Most shoes are made to be waterproof, yes? Which makes them nonconductive. Whereas anyone who tried horses would have used one that was properly shod. . . . I just want to try again, from first principles.”
“Why not get Rudi to try it in midair?” asked Yul.
Huw snorted. “Would you like to give yourself a world-walker’s head in midair, while trying to fly a plane? And what if it works but doesn’t take the plane with the pilot?”
“Oh.” Yul looked thoughtful. “Could he try it in a balloon? With a parachute, set up to unfold immediately if he fell? Or maybe a passenger to do the world-walking?”