Charles Stross - The Family Trade

“I understand.” Brill stood up. “Good luck,” she said.

“Luck has nothing to do with it.” Miriam took two steps toward the door, then pulled out her locket.

Dizziness, mild nausea, a headache that clamped around her head like a vice. She looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed in the warehouse attic, other than the dim light getting dimmer and the bad smell from somewhere nearby. It was getting worse, and it reminded her of something. “Hmm.”

Miriam ducked behind a wall of wooden crates, her head pounding. She pulled the pistol out, slightly nervous at first. It was a self-cocking revolver, reliable and infinitely reassuring in the gloom. Stay away from guns, the training course had emphasized. But that was then, back where she was a journalist and the world made sense to rational people. But if they’re trying to kill you, you have to kill them first, was another, older lesson from the firearms instructor her father had sent her to. And here and now, it seemed to make more sense.

Carefully, very slowly, she inched forward over the edge of the mezzanine floor and looked down. The ground floor of the warehouse was a maze of wooden cases and boxes. The mobile home that constituted the site office was blocked up in the middle of it. There was no sign of anybody about, none of the comforting noises of habitation.

Miriam rose to a crouch and scurried down the stairs as quietly as she could. She ducked below the stairs, then from shadow to shadow toward the door.

There was a final open stretch between the site office and the exit. Instead of crossing it, Miriam tiptoed around the wall of the parked trailer, wrinkling her nose at a faint, foul smell.

The site office door was open and the light inside was on. Holding her gun behind her, she stood up rapidly and climbed the three steps to the door of the trailer. Then she looked inside.

“Fuck!”

The stench was far worse in here, and the watchman seemed to be smiling at her. Smiling? She turned away blindly, sticking her head out of the door, and took deep breaths, desperately trying to get her stomach back under control. Cultivate your professional detachment, she told herself, echoing a half-forgotten professor’s admonition from med school. Reflexes left over from anatomy classes kicked in. She turned back to the thing that had surprised her and began to make observations, rattled to her core but still able to function. She’d seen worse in emergency rooms, after all.

It was the old guy she’d met with the clipboard, and he was past any resuscitation attempt. Someone had used an extremely sharp knife to sever his carotid artery and trachea, and continued to slice halfway through his spine from behind. There was dried blood everywhere, huge black puddles of it splashed over walls and floor and the paper-strewn desk, curdling in great thick viscous lumps-the source of only some of the smell, for he’d voided his bowels at the same time. He was still lying on top of his tumbled chair, his skin waxy and-she reached out to touch-cold. At least twelve hours, she thought, gingerly trying to lift an arm still locked in rigor mortis, but probably no longer. Would the intense cold retard the processes of decay? Yes, a little bit. That would put it before my last trip over here, but after I saw Paulette.

“Goodfellas,” she whispered under her breath: It came out as an angry curse. During her night with Roland, someone had entered the warehouse, casually murdered the old man, climbed the stairs-breaking the hair-and then, what?

Brought the attacker who’d gone up on the roof and tried to attack Olga? Then he came back later, crossed over to the other side, and emptied a pistol into the dummy made of pillows lying in her bed? Gone away? Correlation does not imply causality, she reminded herself and giggled, shocked at herself and increasingly angry.

“What to do?” Well, the obvious thing was to use her most dangerous weapon. So she pulled out her phone and speed-dialled Roland.

“Yeah?” He picked up at the fourth ring.

“Roland, there’s a problem.” She realized that she was panting, breathing way too fast. “Let me catch my breath.” She slowed down. “I’m in the warehouse on the doppelganger side of my rooms. The night watchman’s had his throat cut. He’s been dead for between twelve and thirty-six hours. And someone-did you send me a note by way of the reception on the other side, saying to meet you in the orangery at Palace Thorold?”

“No!” He sounded shocked. “Where are you?” She gave him the address. “Right, I’ll tell someone to get a team of cleaners around immediately. Listen, we’re wrestling alligators over here tonight. It looks like the Department of Homeland Security has been running some traffic analysis on frequent fliers looking for terrorists and uncovered one of our-”

“I get the message,” she interrupted. “Look, my headache is that I planted a hair across the top step when I came through last night, and it was broken when I went back over this morning. I’m fairly sure someone from the Clan came here, killed the watchman, headed up to the mezzanine that’s on the other side of my suite-breaking the hair-and crossed over. There was another attempt to kill me in my suite last night, Roland. They want me dead, and there’s something going down in the palace.”

“Wait there. I’ll be around in person as soon as I can get unstuck from this mess.”

Miriam stared at the phone that had gone dead in her hand, paranoid fantasies playing through her head.

“Angbard set me up,” she muttered to herself. “What if Roland’s in on it?” It was bizarre. The only way to be sure would be to go to the rendezvous, surprise the assassin. Who had come over from this side. Yes, but if they could get into her apartment, why bother with the silly lure?

“What if there are two groups sending assassins?” she asked the night watchman. He grinned at her twice over. “The obvious one who is clearly a Clan member, and, and the subtle one-”

She racked her brains for the precise number of paces from the stairs up to her room to the back door opening into the grounds of the palace. Then she remembered the crates laid out below. The entrance will be next door, she realized. She jumped out of the trailer with its reek of icy death and dashed across to the far wall of the warehouse-the one corresponding to the main entrance vestibule of the palace. It was solid brick, with no doors. “Damn!” She slipped around to the front door and out into the alley, then paced out the fifty feet it would take. Then she carefully examined the next frontage.

It was a bonded warehouse. Iron bars fronted all the dust-smeared windows, and metal shutters hid everything within from view. The front door was padlocked heavily and looked as if nobody had opened it in years. ‘This has got to be it,” she muttered, looking up at the forbidding facade. What better way to block off the entrance to a palace on the other side? Probably most of the rooms behind the windows were bricked off or even filled with concrete, corresponding to the positions of the secure spaces on the other side. But there had to be some kind of access to the public reception area, didn’t there?

Miriam moved her locket to her left hand and pulled out her pistol. “How the hell do they do this in the movies?” she asked herself as she probed around the chain. “Oh well.” She carefully aimed the gun away from her, at the hasp of the padlock. Then she pulled the trigger.

The crack of the gun was deafeningly loud in the night time quiet, but the lock parted satisfyingly easily. Miriam yanked it away, opened the bolt, and pushed the door in.

An alarm began to jangle somewhere inside the building. She jumped, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it She was standing at one end of a dusty linoleum-floored corridor. A flick of a switch and the dim lights came on, lighting a path into the gloom past metal gates like jail cell doors that blocked access to rooms piled ceiling-high with large barrels. Miriam closed the door behind her and strode down the corridor as fast as she dared, hoping desperately that she was right about where it led. There was a reception room at the end: cheap desks and chairs covered in dust sheets and a locked and bolted back door. It was about the right distance, she decided. Taking a deep breath, she raised her locket and focused on the symbol engraved inside it-