Chapter 12

Despite the summer heat, the grand dining hall in the castle harbored something of a damp chill. Perhaps it was the memory of all the spilled blood that had run like water down the years: despite the eighty-degree afternoon outside, the atmosphere in the hall made Eorl Riordan shiver.

"Erik, Carl, Rudi. Your thoughts?"

Carl cleared his throat. Unlike the other two, he was attired in local style, although his chain shirt would have won few plaudits at a Renaissance Faire on the other side. Machine-woven titanium links backing a Kevlar breastplate and U.S. Army-pattern helmet-the whole ensemble painted in something not unlike urban camo pattern- would send entirely the wrong, functional message. Even without the P90 submachine gun strapped to his chest, and the sword at his hip.

"I think he'd be stupid to invest us. The fort's built well, nobody's ever taken it in the past three hundred years, and it has a commanding view of the river and land approaches. Even with cannon, it'll take him a while to breach the outer curtains. I've inspected the outer works and Villem was right-we've got a clear field of beaten (ire over the six hundred yards around the apron. If he had American artillery, maybe, or if we give him time to emplace bombards behind the ridge line-but a frontal investment would be a fruitless waste of lives. And the pretender may be many things, but I will not insult his victims by calling him stupid."

"What about treachery?" asked Erik. A younger ClanSec courtier of the goatee-and-dreadlocks variety, his dress was GAP-casual except for the Glock, the saber, and the bulky walkie-talkie hanging from his belt.

Eorl Riordan looked disapproving. "That's only one of the possibilities." He held up a hand and began counting off fingers. "One, the pretender really is stupid, or has taken leave of his senses. Two, it's a tactical diversion, planned to lie us up defending a strategic necessity while he does something else. Three, treachery. Four, weapons or tactics we haven't anticipated. Five... two or more of the above. My assessment of the Pretender is the same as yours, Sieur Carl: He's crazy like a rat. I forgot to bring a sixth linger, so kindly use your imaginations-but I think he is playing a game with the duke's intelligence, and he wants us here for some reason that will not rebound to our benefit. So. Let's set up a surprise, shall we? Rudi, how are the scouts doing?"

"Nothing to report." Rudi was another of the younger generation, wiry and gangling in hoodie and cutoffs. "They're checking in regularly but we've only got twelve of them between here and Isjlemeer: he could march an army between them and we might never know. I can't give you what you want unless you let me use Butterfly, whatever the duke thinks of it." He grinned, knowingly.

Riordan snorted. "You and your kite. You know about the duke's... feelings?"

"Yep." Rudi just stood there, hands in pockets. Riordan, about to take him to task, noticed the oversized watch on Rudi's skinny left arm and paused. "It's too late to get started today but, weather permitting, I could give you what you want tomorrow."

It was a tempting offer. Riordan considered it. Normally he'd have been down on the ass of a junior officer who suggested such a thing like a mountain lion, but he'd been given a very specific job to get done, and Rudi wasn't wrong. He made a quick executive decision. "You can do your thing tomorrow on my authority, if we haven't made contact first. The duke will forget to be angry if you get results. But." He shook a finger at Rudi: "There will be consequences if you make an exhibition of your craft. Do you understand?"

"Uh, yes, sir. There won't be any problems. Apart from the weather, and, worst case, we've still got the scouts."

"Go get it ready," Riordan said tersely. Rudi nodded, almost bowing, and scurried out of the room in the direction of the stables. Riordan didn't need telepathy to know what was going through his mind: the duke had almost hit the roof back when Rudi had first admitted to smuggling his obsession across, one component at a time, and it had been all Riordan and Roland had been able to do to talk Angbard out of burning the machine and giving the lad a severe flogging. It wasn't Rudi's fault that forty years ago a premature attempt to introduce aviation to the Gruin-markt had triggered a witchcraft panic-superstitious peasants and "dragons" were a volatile combination-but his pigheaded persistence in trying to get his ultralight off the ground flew in the face of established security doctrine. Riordan glanced at Carl. "Yes, I know. But I don't think it can make the situation any worse at this point, and it might do some good. Now, the defensive works. We've got a couple of hours to go until sunset. Think your men will be expecting a surprise inspection...?"

Brill realized she was being watched as soon as she turned to lock the front door of the shop behind her.

She'd spent a frustrating hour in Burgeson's establishment. The monitor on the door was working exactly as intended-she couldn't fault Morgan for that-but the fact remained, it hadn't been triggered. And it didn't take her long to figure out that somebody had been in the shop recently. The drawers in the desk in the back office were open, someone had been rummaging through the stock, and the dust at the top of the cellar stairs was disturbed. She'd looked down the steps into the darkness and cursed, realizing exactly what had happened. Morgan had secured the front door, and even the back door onto the yard behind the shop, but it hadn't occurred to him that a slippery customer like Burgeson might have a rat run out through the cellar. Belter check it out, she thought grimly, extracting a pocket flashlight from her handbag.

The cellar showed more signs of recent visitors: disturbed dust, a suspicious freshness to the air. She glanced around tensely, aiming the flashlight left-handed at the nooks and crannies of the cellar. The floor... she focused the beam, following a scuffed trail in the dust. Right. The trail led through a side door into another cellar room full of furniture, and dead-ended against a wooden cabinet full of labeled cloth bundles. Brill walked towards it, staring. The back of the cabinet was dark, too dark. "Clever," she muttered, peering past a bundle: there was a gap between the cabinet and the side wall, and behind it, she saw another wall-two feet farther in. The smell of dust, and damp, and something else-something oily and aromatic, naggingly familiar-tugged at her nostrils. She took a sharp breath, then slipped behind the cabinet and edged along it, through the hole in the bricks at the other end of the cellar, into the tunnel. There was a side door into another, hidden back room: the smell was stronger here. Tarpaulins covered wooden barrels, a thin layer of dust caking them. She raised a cover, glanced inside, and nodded to herself. If someone-Burgeson?

Miriam?- hadn't left the back door open, the smell wouldn't have given it away, but down here the stink of oiled metal was almost overpowering. She let the tarp fall, then slid back out of the concealed storeroom. So Miriam keeps dangerous company, she reminded herself, her lips quirking in a faint smile. Maybe that's no bad thing right now.

But it certainly wasn't a good thing, and as she turned to lock the front door she paid careful attention to the reflections in the window panes in front of her. Maybe it was pure coincidence that a fellow in a threadbare suit was lounging at the corner of the alley, and maybe it wasn't, but with at least twenty rifles stashed in that one barrel alone, Brill wasn't about to place any bets. She walked away briskly, whistling quietly to herself-let any watchers hurry to keep up-and turned left into the high street. There were more people here, mostly threadbare men hanging around the street corners in dispirited knots, some of them holding out hats or crudely lettered signs. She paused a couple of doors down the street to glance in a shop window, checking for movement behind her. Alley Rat was trying to look inconspicuous about fifty feet behind her, standing face-to-cheek with one of the beggars who wore a shapeless cloth hat and frayed fingerless gloves as gray as his face.

Tail. Brill tensed, glancing up the street. "How annoying," she murmured aloud. There were no streetcars in sight, but plenty of alleyways. Worse than annoying, she added to herself as she thrust her right hand into her bag. Try to shed him, first...

She started moving again, hurrying, letting her stride lengthen. She glanced over her shoulder-no advantage to be gained in hiding her awareness now, if she needed cover from civilians she could just say she was being chased- and spotted Mr. Threadbare and Mr. Hat blundering towards her, splitting in a classic pincer. Most of the bystanders had evaporated or were feigning inattention- nobody wanted to be an audience for this kind of street theater. Brill took a deep breath, stepped backwards until she came up against the brick wall of a shop, then held her handbag out towards Mr. Hat, who was now less than twenty feet away. "Stop right there," she said pleasantly, and when he didn't, she shot him twice. The hand bag jerked, but the suppressor and the padding kept the noise down to the level of an enthusiastic hand clap. She winced slightly and shook her wrist to dislodge a hot cartridge as Mr. Hat went to one knee, a look of utter surprise on his face, and she spun sideways to bear on Mr. Threadbare. "Stop, I said."

Mr. Threadbare stopped. He began to draw breath. She focused on him, noting absently that Mr. Hat was whimpering quietly and slumping sideways against a shop front, moving one hand to his right thigh. "Who do you think-"

Brill jerked her hand sideways and shot Mr. Hat again. He jerked and dropped the stubby pistol he'd been drawing, and she had her bag back on Mr. Threadbare before he could reach inside his jacket. "If you want to live, you will walk ten feet ahead of me," she said, fighting for calm, nerves screaming: Where's their backup? Clear the zone! "Move."

Mr. Threadbare twitched at Mr. Hat: "But he's-"

An amateur. Brill tensed up even more: amateurs were unpredictable. "Move!"

Mr. Threadbare moved jerkily, like a puppet in the hands of a trainee. He couldn't take his eyes off Mr. Hat, who was bleeding quite copiously. Brill circled round the target and toed the gun away from him, in the direction of the gutter. Then she gestured Mr. Threadbare ahead of her, along the sidewalk. For a miracle, nobody seemed to have noticed the noise. Mr. Threadbare shuffled slowly: Brill glanced round quickly, then nodded to herself. "Left into the next alleyway."

"But you- "

She closed the gap between them and pushed the gun up against the small of his back. "Don't turn. Keep walking." He was shaking, she noticed, and his voice was

weak. "Left here. Stop. Face the wall. Closer. That's right. Raise your right hand above your head. Now raise your left." Nobody in the alley, no immediate witnesses if she had to world-walk. "Who do you work for?"

"But I- " He flinched as brick dust showered his face.

"That's your last warning. Tell me who you work for."

"Red Hand thief-taker's company. You're in big trouble, miss, Andrew was a good man and if you've killed-"

"Be quiet." He shut up. "You tailed me. Why?"

"You burgled the pawnbroker's-"

"You were watching it. Why?"

"We got orders. The Polis-"

Thief- takers-civilian crime prevention, mostly private enterprise-working for the polis-government security? "What were you watching for?" She asked.

"Cove called Burgeson, and some dolly he's traveling with. He's Wanted, under the Sedition Act. Fifty pounds on his head and the old firm's taking an interest, isn't it?"

"Is it now?" Brill found herself grinning, teeth bared. In the distance, a streetcar bell clanged. "Kneel."

"But I told you-"

"I said, kneel. Keep your hands above your head. Look away, dammit, that way, yes, over there. I want you to close your eyes and count to a hundred, slowly. One, two, like that, I'll be counting too. If you leave this alley before I reach a hundred, I may shoot you. If you open your eyes before I reach a hundred, I may shoot you. Do you understand?"

"Yes, but-"

"Start counting. Aloud."

On the count of ten, Brill backed away towards the high street. Seeing Mr. Threadbare still counting as fervently as a priest telling his rosary, she turned, lowered her handbag, and darted out into the open. The streetcar was approaching: Mr. Hat lolled against a wall like an early drunk. She held her arm out for the car, forcing her cheeks into an aching smile. Miriam, what have you gotten yourself into this time?

The Hjalmar Palace fell, as was so often the case, to a combination of obsolescent design, treachery, and the incompetence of its defenders. And, Otto ven Neuhalle congratulated himself, only a little bit of torture.

About three hundred years ago, the first lord of Olthalle had built a stone round tower on this site, a bluff overlooking the meeting of two rivers-known in another world as the Assabet and Sudbury-that combined to feed the Wergat, gateway to the western mountains. Over the course of the subsequent decades he and his sons had fought a bitter grudge war, eventually driving the Musketaquid wanderers west, deeper into the hills and forests of the new lands where they'd not trouble the ostvolk. But then there'd been a falling out in the east, among the coastal settlements. An army had marched up the river and burned out the keep and its defenders, leaving smoking ruins and a new lentgrave to raise the walls afresh. He learned from his predecessor's mistake, and built his walls thick and high.

More years passed. The Olthalle tower sprouted a curtain wall with five fine round bastion towers and a gatehouse larger than the original keep. Within the grounds, airy palace wings afforded the baron's family a measure more comfort than the heavily fortified castle. The barons of Olthalle fell on hard times, and seventy years earlier the Hjalmars had married into the castle, turning it into a gathering place for the clan of recently ennobled tinker families. They'd bridged the Wergat, levying tolls, then they'd driven a road into the hills to the west and wrestled another fortune from the forests. The town of Wergatfurt had grown up a couple of miles downstream, a thriving regional market center known for its timber yards and smithies. His majesty had been unable to leave such a vital asset in the hands of the witches-the Hjalmar estates were a dagger aimed at the heart of the kingdom. And so, it had come to this...

The festivities had started at dawn, when Sir Markus, beater for the royal hunt, had led his levies up to the gates of Wergatfurt and laid his demand before the burghers of the town. Open the gates to the royal army, accept the Thorold Palace edicts, surrender any witches and their get, and be at peace-or defy the king, and suffer the consequences. He had put on a brave show, but (at Otto's urging) had carefully not placed troops on the town's south-western, upstream, side. And he'd given them until noon to answer his demands.

Of course, Otto's men were already in position in the woods, half a kilometer short of the palace itself. And when they brought the first of the captives to him in early afternoon, bound so tight that the fellow could barely move, he had found Otto in an uncharacteristically good humor. "You're Griben's other boy, aren't you? What a surprising coincidence."

"You- " The lad swallowed his words. Barely old enough to be sprouting his first whiskers, barely old enough to know enough to be afraid: "What do you want?"

Otto smiled. "An excuse not to hang you."

"I don't know-" The boy's brow furrowed, then the meaning of Otto's words sank in. "Lightning's blood, you're just going to burn me anyway, aren't you?" He glared at Otto with all the hollow bravado he could muster. "I'm no traitor!"

"Perhaps." Otto glanced towards the stand of trees that concealed his position from the castle's outermost watch-towers. "But you're not one of them, either. You don't have their blood-spell, you'd never have inherited their wealth, all you are to them is a servant. A dead, loyal servant-the moment my men find another straggler who's willing to listen to reason." He turned back to the prisoner. "It's quite simple. Show me the way in and I'll have Magar here turn you loose in the woods, a mile downstream of here. We never met, and nobody saw you. Or." He shrugged: "We hold you for the king. I hear he's a traditionalist; takes a personal interest in the old folkways. And he doesn't approve of people who put his arms-men to the trouble of laying siege to a castle. If you're lucky he'll hang you." Otto paused for effect. "I hear he holds with the Blood Eagle for traitors." His nose wrinkled: the kid had pissed himself. And fainted.

"You mean to scare him to death, sir?" asked Magar, toeing the prone prisoner with professional disdain: "Because if so, I can go fetch a burial detail..."

"I don't think that'll be necessary." Otto peered at the unconscious boy. The Pervert's carefully cultivated reputation for perpetrating unspeakable horrors on people who crossed him had certainly come in useful on this campaign, he reflected: All I have to do is hint about his majesty and they just fall apart on me. It was an interesting lesson. "You understand that when I said you'd turn him loose in the woods, I didn't promise that you wouldn't kill him."

"Aye, I got that much, sir." The boy was twitching. Magar kicked him lightly in the ribs. "You, wake up."

Otto bent over the prisoner, so that when the lad opened his eyes there'd be no escape. "What's it to be?" Otto asked, not unkindly. "Do you want to-" He straightened up and looked over the boy's head. "-time's up, looks like we've got another prisoner coming in-"

"I'll show you! I'll show you!" The boy was almost hysterical, tears of terror flowing down his cheeks.

"Really?" Otto smiled at him. "Thank you. That wasn't so hard now, was it?"

The problem with castles was not that they were hard to get into, but that they tended to be equally hard to get out of. And people take shortcuts.

To enter the Hjalmar Palace by road, a polite visitor would ride across the well-manicured apron in front of the walls, itself a killing zone two hundred meters across, then up the path to the gatehouse. There was a moat, of course, a ten-meter-wide ditch full of water diverted from the river (and, during particularly hot moments of a siege, layered in burning oil). A stone bridge spanned half the width of the moat. The gatehouse was a small castle in its own right, four round towers connected by stone walls a meter thick, and its wooden drawbridge was a welcome mat that could be withdrawn back to the castle side of the moat if the occupants weren't keen on entertaining visitors. In case that wasn't a sufficiently pointed deterrent to intruders, the bridge towers were lopped by steel shields and the ominous muzzles of belt-fed machine guns, and the drawbridge itself opened into a zigzagging stony tunnel blocked at several choke points by metal grilles, and covered from above by a killing platform from which the defenders could rain molten lead.

And that was before the visitors reached the outer walls, which in addition to the usual glacis and arrow slits, had acquired (under the custody of the Hjalmar branch of the Clan) such luxuries as imported razor wire, claymore mines, and defenders with automatic weapons.

But such defenses are inconvenient. To leave the central keep by the front door required a descent down a steep flight of steps, a march around half the circumference of the tower, then the traversal of a murder tunnel through the foundations of one of the inner bastions, then a ride halfway along the circular road that lined the inner wall, then another murder tunnel, then the gatehouse, four portcullises, and the drawbridge-it could take half an hour on foot. And so, successive generations of defenders had come up with shortcuts. They'd installed sally ports in the bases of bastions to allow raiding parties to enter and leave. Toilet outfalls venting over the moat could, at a pinch (and with nose held tight) serve for a hasty exit. A peacetime road battered through the wall, straight into the stable yard, ready to be blocked by a deadfall of boulders at the first alarm. And then there were the usual over-the-wall quick routes out for soldiers and servants in search of an evening's drinking and fucking in the beer cellars of Wergatfurt.

In the case of the Hjalmar Palace, the weak point in its defenses was the water supply. The water supply had to feed the moat, if attackers tried to dam it off from the river: it also had to keep the defenders in drinking water. Some tactical genius a century or two earlier had dug a trench nearly two hundred meters long, under the curtain wall to the river. He'd lined it with stone, floored it with fired clay pipe, then roofed it over and buried it. It wasn't just a backup water supply: it was a tactical back door for raiding parties and scouts, a fire escape for the terminally paranoid. The stone blockhouse on the upstream slope of the hill was overgrown with bushes and trees, nearly invisible unless you knew what you were looking for, and when properly maintained-as it was, now-it was guarded by sentries and booby traps. An intruder who didn't know the word of the day, or the positioning of the trip wires for the mines embedded in the walls of the tunnel, or the different code word for the guards in the water-house attached to the walls of the inner keep, would almost certainly die.

Unfortunately for the roughly one hundred guards, stable hands, cooks, smiths, carpenters, dog handlers, lamplighters, servants, and outer family members sheltering behind those walls, Baron Otto ven Neuhalle knew all of these things, and more.

Even more unfortunately for the defenders, one of the unpalatable facts of life is that in close quarters-at ranges of less than three meters-firearms were generally less useful than swords, of which Neuhalle's troop had many. Nor were they expecting an attacking force armed with machine guns of their own to appear on the walls of the keep itself.

By the time night fell, his troops were still winkling Ihe last few stubborn holdouts out of their stony shells, but the Hjalmar Palace was in his hands.

And now to start building the trap, Otto told himself, as he summoned his hand-men to him and told them exactly what was needed.

The first day at home was the worst. Mike was still getting used to the plastic cocoon on his leg, not to mention being short on clean clothes, tired, and gobbling antibiotics and painkillers by the double handful. But a second night in his own bed put a different complexion on things. He awakened luxuriously late, to find Oscar curled up on the pillow beside him, purring.

The fridge was no more full than it had been the day before, but the grocery bag Smith had dumped in the kitchen turned out to be full of honest-to-god groceries, a considerate touch that startled Mike when he discovered it. He might be a hyperactive hard-ass, but at least he cares about his people, Mike decided. He fixed himself a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese and black coffee, then tried to catch up on the lighter housework, running some clothes through the washing machine and doing battle with the shower again-this time more successfully. I must be getting better, he told himself optimistically.

Around noon, he got out of the house for a couple of hours, driven stir-crazy by the daytime TV. It took him nearly ten minutes to get the car seat adjusted, and an hour of hobbling around Barnes and Noble and a couple of grocery stores left him feeling like he'd run a marathon, but he made it home uneventfully. Then he discovered that he hadn't figured on carrying the grocery sacks and bag of books and magazines up the front steps. He ended up so exhausted that by the time he got the last bag in and closed the door he was about ready to drop. He hobbled into the lounge clutching the bookbag, and lowered the bag onto the coffee table before he realized the lounger was already occupied.

"So, Mr. Fleming! We meet again." She giggled, ruining the effect. It was unnecessary, in any case: the pistol in her lap more than made up for her lack of menace.

"Jesus!" He staggered, nearly losing his balance.

"Relax. I do not intend to shoot you. Are you well?"

"I'm- " He bit back his first angry response. What are you doing in my house? That question was the elephant in the living room: but it wasn't one he felt like asking the Russian princess directly, not while she was holding a gun on him. "No, not very." He shuffled towards the sofa and lowered himself down into it. "I'm tired. Been shopping," he added, redundantly. And how did you get past Judith's watch team? "What brings you here?"

"Patricia sent me to see how you were," she explained, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for killer grannies from another dimension to send their ice-blonde hit-woman bodyguards to check up on him. "She was concerned that you might be unwell-your leg was hard to keep clean in the carriage."

"Yeah, right." Mike snorted. "She's got nothing but my best interests at heart."

Olga leaned forward, her eyes wide: "It is the truth, you know! You will be of little use to us if you die of battle fever. Are you well?"

"I'm as well as-"he bit back the words, any man facing an armed home intruder -"can be expected. Spent a couple of days in hospital. Off work for the next several weeks." He paused. "Getting about. A bit."

"Good." Olga sat back, then made the pistol disappear: "Excuse me." She looked apologetic. "Until I was sure it was you..."

"Thai's alright," Mike assured her gravely. "I quite understand. We're all paranoids together here." A thought struck him. "How did you get in?"

She smiled. "Your housekeeper is taking the day off."

"Ah." Shit. Mike had a sharp urge to bang his head on the wall. Who's staking who out? Of course, she'd had time to set everything up while he was in hospital; possibly even before they'd dropped him back in the right universe. The Russian princess and her world-walking friends could have been watching his apartment for days before Herz and her team moved in to set up their own surveillance op. They don't work like the Mafia, they work like a government, he recalled. A feudal government. "So Pat-what did you call her? Sent you to check up on me. I thought she was going to mail me instead?"

"Your mail is being intercepted," Olga pointed out. "Consequently, we felt it besl to talk to you in person. There is mail, too, and you can respond to it if you wish. Have you reported to your liege yet?"

"Have I?" The sense of grinding gears was back: Mike forced himself to translate. "Uh, yes." He nodded, stupidly. "I have a cellular phone for you. It's off the official record. There's a preprogrammed number in if that goes direct to my boss's boss. He's authorized to negotiate, and if necessary he can talk to the top. Office of the Vice President. But it's all deniable, as I understand things." He pointed at the paper bag on the side table. "It's in there."

Olga didn't move. "What guarantee have we that as soon as we dial the number, you assassins won't locate the caller? Or that there isn't a bomb in the earpiece?"

"That's- " Mike swallowed. "Don't be silly."

"I'm not being silly. Just prudent." She reached out and took the bag, removed the phone, and started to fiddle with the case. "We'll be in touch. Probably not with this telephone, however."

"There are certain requirements," Mike added.

"What?" She froze, holding the battery cover in one hand.

"The sample that Matthias provided." He watched her minutely. "I'm told they're willing to negotiate with you. But there's an absolute precondition. Matt told us he'd planted a bomb, on a timer. We want it disarmed, and we want the pit. If it goes off, there's no deal-not now, not ever."

Olga's expression shifted slightly. Ship's not a poker player, Mike realized. "A time bomb? I understand that is not good, but what do your lords think we can do about such a thing? Surely it's no more than a minor..." She trailed off. "What kind of bomb?"

Mike said nothing, but raised an eyebrow.

"Why would he plant a bomb?" she persisted. "I don't see what he could possibly hope to achieve."

Too much subtlety, maybe. "He brought a sample of plutonium with him when he wanted to get our attention. It worked."

"A sample of ploo-what?" Her expression of polite incomprehension would have been hilarious in any other context.

"Oh, come on! What world did you-" Mike slopped dead. Whoops. "You're serious, aren't you?"

"I don't understand what you're talking about," she said coolly.

He boggled for a moment, as understanding sank in. She's not from around these parts, is she? "Do you know what an atom bomb is?"

"An atom bomb?" She looked interested. "I've seen them in films. An ingenious fiction, I thought." Pause. "Are you telling me they're real?"

"Uh." You're really not from around here, are you? On the other hand, if you stopped a random person in a random third-world country and asked them about atom bombs and how they worked, what kind of answer would you get? He licked his lips. "They're real, all right. Matthias had a sample of plutonium." No sign of recognition. "That's the, the explosive they run on. It's very tightly controlled. Even though the amount he had is nothing like enough to make a bomb, it caused a major panic. Then he claimed to actually have a bomb. We want it. Or we want the rest of your plutonium, and we want to know exactly how and where you got it so that we can verify there's no more missing. That's a nonnegotiable precondition for any further talks."

"Huh." She frowned. "You are serious about this. How bad could such a bomb really be? I saw The Sum of All Fears but that bomb was so magically powerful-"

"The real thing is worse than that." Mike swallowed. He'd spent the past couple of weeks deliberately not thinking about Mall's threat, trying to convince himself it was a bluff: but Judith had told him about the broken nightmare they'd found in the abandoned warehouse, and it wasn't helping him get to sleep.

"Assuming Matthias wasn't bluffing, and planted a real atom bomb near Faneuil Hall. Make it a small one. Imagine it goes off right now." He gestured at the window. "It's miles away, but it'd still blow the glass in, and if you were looking at it directly, it would burn your eyes out. You'd feel the heal on your skin, like sticking your head into an open oven door. And that's all the way out here." If it was the size of the one Judith found, Boston and Cambridge would be a smoking hole in the coastline-but multi-megaton H-bombs weren't likely to go world-walking and were in any ease unlikely to explode if they weren't maintained properly. "We don't want to lose Boston. More importantly, you don't want us to lose Boston. Because if we do -"he noticed that she was looking pale "-you saw the reaction to 9/11, didn't you? I guarantee you that if someone nukes one of our cities, the response will be a thousand times worse."

"I- I don't know." The Russian princess was clearly rattled: "I was not aware of this. This bomb that Matthias claimed to-I don't know about it." She shook her head. "I will have to tell Patricia. We'll have to investigate."

"You will? No shit." Mike didn't even try to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. "This other faction in your clan-if it's theirs, they're playing with lire. Maybe they don't understand that."

She finished extracting the battery from the mobile phone. "You said that this, it goes to the vice president?" "To one of his staff," Mike corrected her. "We'll be in touch." She slid it into a pocket gingerly, as if it might explode. "I will see you later." She stood up briskly and walked into the front hall, and between one footstep and the next she vanished.

Mike stared at the empty passage for a moment, then shook his head. The shakes would cut in soon, but for now all he could feel was a monstrous sense of irony. "What a mess," he muttered. Then he reached for the phone and dialed Colonel Smith's number.

The dome was huge, arching overhead like the wall of a sports stadium or the hull of a grounded Zeppelin. Small, stunted trees grew in the gap in its wall, their trunks narrow and tilted towards the thin light. Mud and rubble had drifted into the opening over the years, and the dripping trickle of water suggested more damage deep inside. Huw shuffled forward with arthritic caution, poking his Geiger counter at the ground, the rocks, the etiolated trees-treating everything as if it might be explosive, or poisonous, or both. The results were reassuring, a menacing crackle that rarely reached the level of a sixty-cycle hum, much less the whining squeal of real danger.

As he neared the dribble of water, Huw knelt and held the counter just above its surface. The snap and pop of stray radiation events stayed low. "The pool outside the dome is hot, and the edges of the dome are nasty, but the stream inside isn't too bad," be explained to his microphone. "If the dome's leaky, the stream probably washed most of the hot stuff out of it ages ago." He looked up. "This place feels old"

Old, but still radioactive? He felt like scratching his head. Really dangerous fallout was mostly dangerous precisely because it decayed very rapidly. If what had happened here was as old as it felt, then most of the stuff should have decayed long ago. The activity in the dome's edge was perplexing.

"You want a light, bro?"

Huw glanced over his shoulder. Yul was holding out the end of a huge, club-like Maglite. "Thanks," he said, shuffling the Geiger counter around so that he could heft the flashlight in his right hand. He pressed the button just as a cold flake of snow drifted onto his left cheek. "We don't have long."

"It's creepy in here," Elena commented as he swung the light around. For once, Huw found nothing to disagree with in her opinion. The structures the dome had protected were in ruins. A flat apron of magic concrete peeped through the dirt in places, but the buildings- rectangular or cylindrical structures, rarely more than two or three stories high-were mostly shattered, roofs torn off, walls punched down. Their builders hadn't been big on windows (although several of them sported gaping doorways). The skeletal wreckage of metal gantries and complex machinery lay around the buildings. Some of them had been connected by overhead pipes, and long runs of rust-colored ductwork wrapped around some of the buildings like giant snakes. "It looks like a chemical works that's been bombed."

Huw blinked. "You know, you might be right," he admitted. He walked towards the nearest semi-intact building, a three-story high cylindrical structure that was sheltered from the crack in the dome by a mass of twisted rubble and a collapsed walkway. "Let's see, shall we?"

The Geiger counter calmed down the farther from the entrance they progressed, to Huw's profound relief. He picked his way carefully over a low berm of crumbled concrete-like stuff, then reached the nearest gantry. It looked familiar enough-a metal grid for flooring, the wreckage of handrails sprouting from it on a triangular truss of tubes-but something about its proportions was subtly wrong. The counter was content to make the odd click. Huw whacked the handrail with his torch: it rang like metal. Then he took hold of it and tried to move it, lifting and shoving. "That's odd." He squinted in the twilight. A thin crust of flaky ash covered the metal core. Paint, or something like it. That was comfortingly familiar-but the metal was too light. Yet it hadn't melted. "Got your hammer?" He asked Yul, who was looking around, gaping like a tourist.

"Here."

He took the hammer and whacked the rail, hard. "It's

not soft like aluminum. Doesn't melt easily." He lugged it, and it creaked slightly as it shifted. "You have got to be kidding me."

"What's wrong?" Hulius asked quickly.

"This railing. It's too light to be steel, it's not aluminum, but who the fuck would make a handrail out of titanium?"

"I don't know. Someone with a lot of titanium? Are you sure it's titanium? Whatever that is."

"Fairly sure," Huw said absently. "I don't have any way to test it, but it's light enough, and hard, and whatever Hash-fried the shit in here didn't touch it. But titanium's expensive! You'd have to know how to make lots of it really cheap before you got anywhere near to making walkways with it..." He trailed off. glancing up at the twilight recesses of the dome overhead. "Let's get on with this."

The black rectangle, set in the cylindrical structure at ground level, looked like a doorway to Huw. It was high enough, for sure, but there were no windows and no sign of an actual door. He waited for Yul and Elena to close up behind him, then walked towards it. The counter was quiet. There was a pile of debris just inside the opening, and he approached it cautiously, sniffing at the air: there was no telling what might have made its lair in here. Thinking about the chill outside reminded him of wolves, of saber-toothed tigers and worse things. He shivered, and pointed the torch into the gloom.

"Over there." Elena scuttled sideways, her gun at her shoulder, pointing inside.

"Where- " Huw blinked as she flicked on the torch bolted beneath her barrel. "Oh." The thing she was pointing at might have been a door once, but now it lay tumbled on the floor across a heap of junk: crumbled boxes, bits of plastic, pieces of scaffolding. And some more identifiable human remains, although wild animals had scattered the bones around. "Good, that's helpful." He stepped across the threshold, noting in the process that the wall was about ten centimeters thick-too thin for brick or concrete-and the inner wall was flat, with another sealed door set in it.

A skull leered at him from the far corner of the room, and as the shadows flickered across the pile of crap inside the doorway he saw what looked like a stained, collapsed one-piece overall. The overall glowed orange in the light, slightly iridescent, then darkened to black where ancient blood had saturated the abdominal area. Huw held his breath, twisting the flashlight to focus on the shoulder, where some kind of patch was embossed on the fabric. He squinted. "Yul, can you get a photograph of that?" he said, pointing.

"What's it say-" Yul closed in. "That's not Anglischesprach. Or... Huh, I don't recognize it, whatever it is."

"Dead right." Huw held the light on the remains while Yul pulled out his camera and flashgunncd it into solid state memory. "What do you think it means?"

"Why would you expect Anglische here?" Elena asked archly.

"No reason, I guess," Huw said, trying to conceal how shaken he was. He pointed the torch back at the skull sitting on the floor. "Hang on." He peered closer. "The teeth. Shit, the teeth!"

"What?" Elena's flashlight swung around wildly for a moment.

"Point that away from me if you're going to be twitchy-"

"It's okay, little brother. I've got it." Yul hooked a finger into each eye socket and spun the skull upside down for Huw to examine. It had been picked clean long ago arid had aged to a sallow dark yellow-brown, but the teeth were all there.

"Look." Huw pointed at the upper jaw. "Bony here has all his dentition. And." He peered at them. "There are no fillings. It's like a plastic model of what a jawbone ought to be. Except for this chipped one here, this incisor."

"Whoa!" Hulius lowered the skull reverently. "That's some orthodontist."

"Don't you get it?" Huw asked impatiently.

"Get what?" Yull asked flippantly.

"That's not dentistry," Huw said, gritting his teeth. "You know what it's like back home! The Americans, they're good at faking it, but they're not this good." He glanced at the door on the inner wall. No obvious hinges, he realized. Fits beautifully. "Domes the size of a sports stadium that try to heal themselves even when you crack them open with a nuke. Metal walkways made out of titanium. Perfect dentistry." He snapped his fingers. "You got the ax?"

"Sure." Yul nodded. "What do you want me to hit?"

"Let's see what's inside that door," Huw decided. "But then we leave. Magic wands? Dentistry."

"They're more advanced than the Americans," Elena commented. "Is that what you're saying?"

"Yes," Huw said tensely. "I'm not quite sure what it means, though..."

"What about their burglar alarms?"

"After all this time?" Huw snorted. "Let's see what else is in here. Yul?"

"I'm with you, bro." He winked at Elena. "This is a real gas!"

And with that, he swung the fire ax at the edge of the door.

The Boeing Business Jet had reached cruising altitude and was somewhere over the Midwest, and Brill had just about managed to doze off, when her satellite phone rang.

"Who's speaking?" She cleared her throat, trying to shake cobwebs free. The delay and the echo on the line made it sound like she was yelling down a drainpipe.

"It's me, Brill. Update time."

"Scheiss -one minute. I'll take it in the office." She hit the button to raise her chair then stood up and walked

back towards the door at the rear of the first-class cabin. Rather than a cramped galley or a toilet, it opened onto a compact boardroom. As the only passenger on the luxury jet she had it all to herself except for the cabin attendants, but she still preferred to have a locked door between herself and any flapping ears. "Okay, Olga. What ails you?" "Are you secure?"

Brill yawned, then sat down. Beyond the windows, twilight had settled over the plains. It was stubbornly refusing to lift, despite the jet's westward dash. "I'm on the BBJ, arriving at SFO in about three hours. I was trying to get some sleep. Yes, I'm secure."

"I've got to report to Angbard, so I'd better keep this brief. I went to see Fleming today. You know what that little shit Matthias did? He convinced the DEA, this new FTO outfit, everybody who matters, that he'd planted a gadget in downtown Boston. Then he managed to get himself killed before he could tell them where it was. So now they're blaming us, and they want it handed over."

"He what?" Brill blinked and tried to rub her eyes, one-handed.

"I'm not kidding. Fleming wasn't kidding either-at least, he believed what he'd been told. I played dumb with him, pretending not to know what he was talking about, but afterwards I went and told Manfred and he ran an audit. The little shit was telling the truth. One of our nukes is missing."

"God on a stick! If the Council finds out-" "It gets worse. Turns out it's one of our FADMs. Long-term storable, in other words, and there's a long-life detonation controller that's also turned up missing. The implosion charges were remanufactured eighteen months ago, so it's probably nearing a service interval, but those charges were modified to survive storage under adverse conditions for up to a decade. If we don't find it, we're in a world of hurt-what do you think they'll do if Boston or Cambridge goes up?-and if we do find it and hand it over as a sign of our commitment to negotiate, it'll take

them all of about ten seconds to figure out where it came from."

Brilliana closed her eyes and swore, silently for a few seconds. She'd known about the Clan's nuclear capability; she and Olga were among the handful of agents whose job would be to emplace the weapons, if and when the shit ever truly hit the fan. But the nukes weren't supposed to go walkies. They were supposed to sit on their shelves in the anonymous warehouse, maintained regularly by the engineers from Pantex while U.S. Marine Corps guards patrolled the site overhead.

Based on a modified W54 warhead pattern, the FADMs were a highly classified derivative of the MADM atomic demolition device. They'd been built during the mid-1970s as backup for the CIA's Operation Gladio, to equip NATO's "stay behind" forces in Europe-after a Soviet invasion-with a storable, compact, tactical nuclear weapon. Most nukes required regular servicing to replace their neutron-emitting initiators and the plastic explosive implosion charges. The FADM had been tweaked to have a reasonable chance of detonation even after several years of unmaintained storage; the designers had replaced the usual polonium initiator with an electrically powered neutron source, and adding shields to protect the explosive lenses from radiation-induced degradation. The wisdom of supplying underground cells with what was basically a U.S. inventory-derived terrorist nuke had been revisited during the Reagan administration, and the weapons returned to the continental USA for storage-but they'd been retained long after the other man-portable demolition nukes had been destroyed, because the advantages they offered had been too good for certain spook agencies to ignore. More recently, the current administration-pathologically secretive and dealing with the aftermath of 9/11-had wanted every available arrow in their quiver, even if they were broken by design.

And they were. Because the Clan, with their ability to get into places that were flat-out impossible for homegrown intruders, had been treating them as their own personal nuclear stockpile for the past two decades.

"Listen, why are you telling me this? Why haven't you briefed Uncle A? It's his headache-"

"Uncle A is fielding another problem right now: the pretender's just rolled over the Hjalmar Palace and there's a three-ring, full-dress panic going down in Concord. He's pulling me in-I'm supposed to be looking for a thrice-damned mole, who everybody tells me is probably a disgruntled outer family climber, and in case you'd missed it, we've got a civil war on. The bomb's been missing for months, it'll wait a couple of hours more. But I think when you get back from the west coast you're going to find that finding it is suddenly everyone's highest priority. And I've got a feeling that the spy who's feeding Egon and the nuclear blackmail thing are connected. Matt wasn't working alone, and I smell a world-walker in the picture. So I figure you and I, we should do some snooping together." She paused. "Just what are you doing out in California, anyway? Is it something to do with the Wu clan?"

Brill sighed. "No, it's Helge. We've located her. While I was flailing around in Boston doing the breaking and entering bit, she mailed me a letter via the New Britain office at Dunedin. The duty clerk caught it in time, opened it, and faxed the contents on: meanwhile we identified her aboard a westbound train that's en route for Northern California. I need to find her before the New Britain secret police arrest her. So I'm taking a shortcut."

"Huh. Much as I like her, isn't finding Matt's plaything a slightly higher priority?"

"Not when she's carrying the heir to the throne, Olga." She waited for the explosion of spluttering to die down. "Yes, I agree completely. You and I can have a little talk about professional ethics with Dr. ven Hjalmar later, perhaps? Assuming he survives the current unpleasantness, I'd like to make sure that he needs a new pair of kneecaps. But you've got to admit that we'll need a king-or queen-after we nail Egon, won't we? And if he really did artificially impregnate her with Creon's seed, and if we have witnesses to the handfasting, then it seems to me that... well, which would you rather deal with? Egon trying to have us all hanged as witches, or Miriam as queen regent with Uncle A pulling the strings?"

"I'm not sure," Olga said grimly. "She'll be furious." She paused. "Gods, that's why he sent you, isn't it? She trusts you. If anyone can get her calmed down and convince her to play along, it'd be you. But if not..."

"Uncle A wants her back in play," Brill said, mustering up what calm she could. "But if she's left loose, she's as dangerous as that lime bomb you're hunting. Isn't she?"

"Yes," Olga said, sounding doubtful.

"She was getting too close to James Lee, the hostage," Brill added.

Olga's voice went flat. "She was?"

"We don't need another faction on the board," Brill said.

"No. I can see that." Olga paused. "You'll just have to charm her, won't you?"

"Yes," Brill agreed. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm going back to sleep. Give my regards to Uncle."

"I'll tell him. Bye..."

Quietly closing the boardroom door behind her, Brill padded back to her first-class chair. She paused at the storage locker next to it, and opened it briefly: the specialized equipment was undisturbed, and she nodded, satisfied. It was the biggest single advantage of flying on the Clan Committee executive jet, in her opinion-in the course of her business she often required access to certain specialized items, and commercial airlines tended to take a dim view of her carrying her sniper kit as hand luggage. She sat down and strapped herself in, then tilted her chair back and dimmed the overhead lights. Tomorrow was going to be a long day, starting with arranging a reception for a train at a station she didn't even know the precise location of, and trying to make contact with Miriam one jump ahead of the Homeland Security Directorate goon squad who'd surely be waiting for her when the train arrived.