“We haven’t seen ear nor tail of them since they crossed over yesterday.” The guard’s eyes widened as he looked at Miriam: “Is this—”
“Yes, and you don’t need to make a scene over me,” she said hastily. Turning to Olga: “The other two—they’re your missing guards?”
“Let us discuss that indoors.” Olga nodded at the farmstead’s front door, which stood ajar. Thom followed behind like an overeager dog, happy his mistress was home. “I think Knuth and Thorson are probably dead,” she said quietly. “The two who were waiting for us definitely weren’t them.”
Miriam nodded, jerkily. “So they were assassins? Just there to kill whoever turned up?”
“Whoever turned up at the duty staff officer’s primary evacuation point, yes.” The picture was clear enough. The evac point had been guarded by a lance of soldiers, two on the American side and six in the Gruinmarkt. The assassins had murdered the two guards in the state park, then planned on catching Earl Riordan and his colleagues as they arrived, one by one. They hadn’t anticipated a group who, forewarned, arrived expecting skullduggery. “I expect Lady d’Ost will try and find where they hid the bodies before she comes hither to report. Come on inside, my lady.”
The farmstead was a wreck. The guards had made a gesture towards clearing up, pushing the worst of the trashed furniture and shattered kitchenware up against one wall and sweeping the floor—the pretender’s cavalry had briefly used it as a stable—but the scorch marks of a fire that had failed to take hold still streaked the walls, and there was a persistent, faint aroma of rotting meat. The guards had brought out camp chairs and a folding table, and Riordan had set up his headquarters there, organizing the guards to man a shortwave radio and track unfolding events on a large map. He looked up as Miriam arrived. “Welcome, Your Majesty.”
“How bad is it?” Miriam asked.
“We’re getting reports.” He grimaced. “The evac plan is running smoothly and I’ve ordered all stations to check out the other side for unwelcome visitors. Didn’t want to say why—things will be chaotic enough without setting off a panic about a civil war. The trouble is, we’re fifteen miles out of Niejwein—the eye of the storm—half a day’s ride; and I’m not happy about disclosing your location. In the worst case our enemies may have direction-finding equipment, and if they’ve got their hands on Rudy’s ultralight … we’ve got to sit tight as long as possible. I’ve ordered Helmut to bring a couple of lances here as soon as he’s nailed down the Summer Palace and I’ve put orders out for the arrest of the entire postal committee and, I regret to say, your grandmother. We can weed that garden at our leisure once we’ve got it fenced in. Unless you have any other suggestions?”
“Yes.” Miriam swallowed. “Is there any word of my mother? Or, or Dr. Griben ven Hjalmar? I think they’re in cahoots.…”
Riordan glanced at one of his men and barked a question in hochsprache too fast for Miriam to follow. The reply was hesitant. “No reports,” he said, turning to Miriam. “I’ll let you know if anything turns up. I assume you’re talking about the duke’s special, ah, medical program?” Miriam nodded. “I’m on it. Now, if you wouldn’t mind—” He looked pointedly at the security guard with the radio headset, who was waving urgently for attention.
“Go to it.” Miriam shuffled awkwardly aside, towards the doorway into the burned-out wing of the farmhouse. “What do we do now?” she asked Olga.
Olga grimaced. “We wait, my lady. And we learn. Or you wait, I have orders to send. Please.” She gestured at the bedrolls on the hard-packed floor. “Make yourself comfortable. We may be here some time.”
* * *
Twenty years ago, in the rookeries of a town called New Catford, Elder Huan had known a young and dangerous radical—a Leveler and ranter called Stephen Reynolds.
In those days, Huan had been the public face of the family’s business involvements—a discreet railroad for money and dispatches that the underground made use of from time to time. Reynolds had been Huan Lee’s contact, and for a while things had gone swimmingly. Few organizations had as great a need for secrecy as the Leveler command, and indeed Huan had toyed with the idea of disclosing the family’s secret to him—for the family’s singular talent and the needs of the terrorists and bomb-throwers and other idealists were perfectly aligned, and the pogroms and lynchings of the English, tacitly encouraged by the government (who knew a good target for the mob’s ire when they saw it—and skin of the wrong color had always been one such), did nothing to endear the authorities to him. At least the revolutionaries preached equality and fraternity, an end to the oppression of all races.
A series of unfortunate events had closed off that avenue before Huan started down it; raids, arrests, and executions of Leveler cells clear across the country. He, himself, had been forced to world-walk in a hurry, one jump ahead of the jackboots of the Polis troopers. And that had been the end of that. The first duty of the family was survival, then profit—martyrdom in the name of revolutionary fraternity wasn’t part of the package. In the wake of the raids he’d thought Stephen Reynolds dead—until he heard the name again, in a broadcast by the revolutionary propaganda ministry. Reynolds had survived and, it seemed, prospered in the council of the Radical Party.
This didn’t entirely surprise Elder Huan. As he had described it to his brothers, some time later, “The man is a rat—sharp as a wire, personally courageous, and curious. The Polis will have a hard time taking him.” And now the fox was in charge of a hen coop of no small size, having emerged in charge of the Annapolis Freedom Riders, then promoted to organize the Bureau of Internal Security that the party had formed to replace the reactionary and untrustworthy Crown Polis.
Now Elder Huan—through conduits and contacts both esoteric and obscure—had arranged for a meeting with the man himself. The agenda of the meeting was to be the renewal of an old alliance. And Elder Huan intended to make Reynolds an offer that would secure the safety of the family throughout the current crisis.
* * *
For his part, Reynolds—a thickset fellow with brown hair, thinning at the crown, and half-moon pince-nez that gave him an avuncular appearance even when supervising interrogations—was looking forward to the meeting for entirely the wrong reasons.
“I want you and two squads to be ready outside the front door. Place another squad round the back. Plain clothes, two steamers ready for backup.” He smiled, not warmly. Brentford, his secretary, nodded and scribbled in his notebook. “You should arrest everyone in the building or leaving it after my departure, unless I indicate otherwise by displaying a red kerchief in my breast pocket. Special Regime Blue, with added attention. The charges will be resisting arrest, treason, membership of a proscribed organization, and anything else that occurs to you. Have the Star Tribunal ready to sit on them and I’ll sign off on the execution warrants immediately. Do you have that?”
Brentford nodded, impassive. These were not unusual orders; Citizen Reynolds took a very robust approach to dealing with subversives. “The, ah, exception, sir? Do you have any other instructions to deal with that case?”
“No.” Reynolds made a fist, squeezing. “If anything comes up I’ll handle it myself.”
“The danger, sir—”
“They’re petty smugglers and racketeers, citizen. I dealt with them before, during the Long Emergency; it’s almost a certainty that they want to deal themselves a hand at the table, in which case they’re in for a short, sharp surprise. I merely reserve the final judgment in case there’s something more serious at hand.” He stood, behind his desk, and straightened his uniform tunic, flicking invisible dust motes from one black lapel. “Plain clothes, I say again. I’ll see you at eight.”