"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 trustworthyhonorable-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?"
The next morning, he shoehorned himself into his car and drove carefully to a nearby strip mall, which had seen better days, and where, if he remembered correctly, there might still be some beaten-up pay phones tucked away in a corner. His memory turned out to be correct. Staking out a booth and using his mobile as an address book, he dialed a certain exdirectory number. Seven minutes, he told himself. Ten, max.
"Hello?" It wasn't Colonel Smith, but the voice was familiar. "Janice? It's Mike Fleming here. Can I please have a word with the colonel?"
There was a pause. "Mike? You're on an unsecured line, you know that?"
"I have a problem with my home phone. Can you put me through?"
A longer pause. "I-see. Please hold." The hold music cut off after half a minute. "Okay, I'm transferring you now."
"Mike?" It was Colonel Smith. He tensed. Until now, he hadn't been entirely sure it was going to work, but now he was committed, upcoming security vetting or no. I could be throwing my career away, he thought, feeling mildly nauseous.
"Hi, boss."
"Mike, you're still signed off sick. What's up?" Smith sounded concerned.
"Oh, nothing much. I was wondering, though, if you'd be free to do lunch sometime?"
"If I'd be-" There was a muffled sound, as of a hand covering a mic. "Lunch? Oh, right. Look, I'm tied up right now, but how about we brown bag it some time soon?"
Mike nodded to himself. Message received: The last time the colonel had dropped round with a brown bag there'd been a bomb and a gun in it. "Sure. It's not urgent, I don't want to drag you out of the office-how about next Wednesday?" It was one of the older field-expedient codes: ignore negatives, treat them as emphasis. Mike just hoped the colonel had been to the same school.
"Maybe sooner," Smith reassured him. "I'll see you around."
When he hung up, Mike almost collapsed on the spot. He'd been on the phone for two minutes. His arms were aching and he could feel the sweat in the small of his back. Shit. He
pulled out the antibacterial gel wipes and applied them vigorously to the mouthpiece of the phone-he'd held the receiver and dialed the numbers with a gloved hand, but there were
bound to be residues, DNA sequences, whatever-then mentally crossed it off his list of untapped numbers, for good. That left the polygraph, but, he figured, raising chain-of-command concerns with one's immediate superior isn't normally a sacking offense. And Dr. James hadn't told him not to, either.