Charles Stross - The Family Trade

“What am I going to do?” Miriam asked. She felt dizzy and sick, the room spinning around her head. There was a stool near the fireplace: She stumbled toward it tiredly and sat down. “Who sent them?”

“I don’t know,” Olga said thoughtfully.

A door in the opposite wall opened and Kara rushed in. “My lady! You’re hurt?”

“Not yet,” Miriam said, waving her away tiredly. “The killer in the orangery was of the Clan, he had a locket,” she said.

“That could tell us which braid he came from,” Olga said. “Have you got it?”

“I think-yes.” Miriam pulled it out and opened it. “Shit.”

“What is it?” asked Olga, leaning close. “Oh my.”

Miriam stared at the locket. Inside it was a design like the knotwork pattern she was learning to loathe-but this one was subtly wrong. Different. A couplet with a different rhyme. One that she knew, instinctively, at a gut level, would take her somewhere else if she stared at it too long and hard. Not to mention making her blood pressure spike so high it would give her an aneurism-if she tried it in the next few hours.

She snapped it shut again and looked up at Olga. “Do you know what this means?” she asked.

Olga nodded very seriously. “It means you and Brilliana will have to disappear,” she said. “These two-” a sniff and a nod at the barricaded doorway-“are of no account, but this-” a glance at the locket-“might be the gravest threat to the Clan in living memory.” She frowned uncertainly. “I had not imagined that such a thing might exist. But if it does-”

“-They must stop at nothing to kill anyone who knows they exist,” said Brill, completing the thought for her. She looked at Miriam with bright eyes. “Will you take me with you wherever you go, mistress? You’ll need someone to guard your back…”

Painkillers and beta-blockers are wonderful things, Miriam reflected as she glanced over her shoulder at Brill. She’d managed to relax slightly as Olga organized a cleanup, marshalling a barricade inside the doorway and chivvying Kara and the servants into making themselves useful. Then Olga had pointed out in words of one syllable what this meant: that two factions, at least one of them hitherto unknown, were after her and it would be a good idea to make herself scarce. Finally, still feeling fragile but now accommodating herself to the idea, Miriam had crossed over. With her passenger. Who wore a smart business suit and an expression of mild bemusement. “Where are we?” asked Brill.

“The doppelganger warehouse.” Miriam frowned as she transferred her locket to her left hip pocket “Other side from my own chambers. Someone should have cleaned up by now.”

Fidgeting in her pocket, she pulled out some cartridges. She shuffled quietly closer to the edge of the mezzanine and looked over the side as she reloaded her pistol.

“This wasn’t what I expected,” the younger woman said in hushed tones, staring up at the dim warehouse lights.

“Stay quiet until I’ve checked it out.” She let a sharp note creep into her voice. “We may not be alone here.”

“Oh.”

Miriam crept to the edge of the platform and looked down. There was no sign of movement below, and the front door of the warehouse-past the dismounted trailer that served as a site office-was shut. “Wait here. I’ll call you down when it’s safe,” she said.

“Yes, Miriam.”

She took a deep breath, then darted down the stairs lightly, her gun raised. Nobody shot at her from concealment. She reached the bottom step and paused for a couple of seconds before stepping off the metal staircase onto dusty wooden floorboards, then duck-walked over to the side of the site office, out of sight from its windows and the door. Creeping again, she sidled around the wall of the trailer and crouched next to the short flight of steps leading in to it. She spent about a minute staring at the threshold, then stood up slowly, lowered her gun, and carefully returned it to her jacket pocket. She rubbed her forehead, then turned. “You can come down now, as long as you come right over here. Don’t touch anything with your hands!”

Brilliana stood up and dusted herself off, lips wrinkling in distaste as she tried to shake the warehouse cobwebs from the sleeve of her Chanel suit. Then she walked down the stairs slowly, not touching the guard rail. Her back was straight, as if she was making a grand entrance rather than a low-life departure.

Miriam pointed at the steps to the trailer. “Don’t, whatever you do, even think about going in there,” she warned. Her expression was drawn. Brill sniffed, conspicuously, then pulled a face in disgust.

“What happened there?”

“Someone was killed,” Miriam said quietly. Then she bent down and pointed to something in the threshold. “Look. See that wire? It’s hair-thin. Don’t touch it!”

“What wire-oh.”

A fine wire was stretched across the threshold, twelve inches above the floor.

“That wasn’t here when I came this way three hours ago,” Miriam said tonelessly. “And nobody’s been to clear up what’s inside. Going from what Roland was telling me, that means that first, this is a trap, and second, it’s not the kind where someone’s going to jump out and start shooting at us, and third, if you touch that wire, we probably both die. Wait here and don’t move or touch anything. I’m going to see if they’re belt-and-suspenders people.”

Miriam shuffled gingerly over toward the big wooden doors of the warehouse-there was a smaller access door set in the side of one of them-with her eyes focused on the ground in front of her, every step of the way. Brill stayed where she was obediently, but when Miriam glanced at her, she was staring up at the lights, an odd expression on her face. “I’m over here,” she said. “I’m really on the other side!”

Miriam reached the inner door, bent low, looked up, and made a hissing noise through her teeth. “Shit!”

“What is it?” called Brill, shaking herself.

“Another one,” Miriam replied. Her face was ghost-white. “You can come over here and look. This is the way out.”

“Oh.” Brill walked over to the door, stopping short at Miriam’s warning hand gesture. She followed Miriam’s pointing finger, up at something in the shadows above the door. “What’s that?” she asked.

“At a guess, it’s a bomb,” said Miriam. “Probably a… what do you call it? A Claymore mine.” The green package was securely fastened to two nails driven into the huge main warehouse door directly above the access door cut in it. Miriam’s compact flashlight cut through the twilight, tracing a fine wire as it looped around three or four nails. It came back to anchor to the access door at foot level, in such a way that any attempt to open the door would tug on it. Miriam whistled tunelessly. “Careless, very careless.”

Brill stared at the booby trap in horror. “Are you just going to leave it?” she asked.

Miriam glanced at her. “What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “I’m not a bomb disposal expert, I’m a journalist! I just learned a bit about this stuff doing a feature on Northern Ireland a couple of years ago.” For a moment, an expression of helpless anger flashed across her face. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “I know somewhere safe, but ‘safe’ is relative. We need to hole up where nobody is going to ask questions you can’t answer, assassins can’t find us, and I can do some thinking.” She glanced at the Claymore mine. “Once I figure out a way to open this door without killing us both.”

“That was another, in the office?” asked Brill.

“Yes.” Miriam shrugged. “I figure the idea was to kill anyone who comes sniffing. But the only people who know what’s in there are me and whoever… whoever murdered the night watchman.”