Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

(Pause.) "Who?"

Miriam found the journey uncomfortable. It wasn't the compartment, for the seats were padded and the facilities adequate, but the lack of privacy. Of the eight places- there were two bench seats that faced each other across (he compartment-she and Erasmus occupied one side. The other was taken by the plump man in the loud coat, sitting beside the window, and a pinch-faced woman of uncertain years who clutched her valise to her lap, her long fingers as double-jointed as the legs of a crane fly. When she wasn't flickering suspicious glances at the fellow in the check jacket, she parked her watery gaze on a spot fifteen centimeters behind Miriam's head. Whenever the discomfort of being stared at got the better of her, Miriam tried to stare right back-but the sight of the woman's stringy, gray hair sticking out from under the rim of her bonnet made her feel queasy.

It was also hot. Air-conditioning was an exotic, ammonia-powered rarity, as likely to poison you as to quell the heat. A vent on the ceiling channeled fresh air down through the compartment while the train was moving, but it was a muggy, humid day and before long she felt sticky and uncomfortable. "We should have waited for the express," she murmured to Erasmus, provoking a glare from Crane Fly Woman.

"It arrives a few minutes later." He sighed. "Can't be late for work, can I?" He put a slight edge on his voice, a grating whine, and caught her eye with a sidelong glance. The fat man rattled his newspaper again. He seemed to be concentrating on a word puzzle distantly related to a crossword, making notes in the margin with a pencil.

"Never late for work, you." She tried to sound disapproving, to provide the shrewish counterpart to his henpecked act. What's going on? She sniffed, and glanced out of the window at the passing countryside. Where did Erasmus go last night? Why were those guys tailing us? Was it him or me they were after? The urge to ask him about the incident was a near-irresistible itch, but one glance at the fellow travelers told her that any words they exchanged would be eavesdropped on and analyzed with vindictive, exhaustive curiosity.

Luckily, things improved after an hour. The train stopped at Bridgeport for ten minutes-a necessity, for only the first-class carriages had toilets-and as she stretched her legs on the platform, Erasmus murmured: "The next compartment along is unoccupied. Shall we move?"

As the train moved off, Miriam kicked back at last, leaning against the wooden paneling beside the window. "What was that about? At the station." She prodded idly at an abandoned newspaper on the bench seat opposite.

Erasmus looked at her from across the compartment. "I had to see a man last night. It seems somebody wanted to know who he was talking to, badly enough to set up a watch on the hotel and tail all his contacts. They got slack: I spotted a watcher when I opened the curtains."

"Why didn't they just move in and arrest you?"

"You ask excellent questions." Erasmus looked worried. "It might be that if they were Polis, they didn't want to risk a poison pill. You can interrogate people, but they won't always tell you what you want to know, and if they do, it may come too late. If you take six hours out to break a man, by the time you get him to spill his guts his own people will have worked out that he's been taken, and they won't be home when you go looking for them."

"Oh." Her voice was very small. Shouldn't you have been expecting this? She asked herself. Then she looked back at his eyes. "There's more, isn't there?"

He nodded, reluctantly. "They didn't smell like Polis." His expression was troubled. "There was something wrong about them. They looked like street thugs, backstairs men, the kind your, ah, business rivals employed." The Wu family's street fixers, in other words. "The Polis aren't afraid to raise a hue and cry when their quarry breaks cover. And the way they covered us was odd."

She glanced down at the floor. "It's possible it's not you they're looking for," she murmured. I should have thought of this earlier: they know Erasmus is my friend, why wouldn't they he watching him? They're probably watching Paillette, too -her business agent in Boston, back home in the world of airliners and antibiotics- I'm a trouble magnet. "Hair dye and a cover identity may not be enough."

"Explain." He leaned forward.

"Suppose someone in Boston spotted you leaving in a hurry, a day or two after I'd disappeared. They handed off to associates in New London. Either they followed you to your hotel, or they figured you'd pay for a room under your own name. They missed a trick; they probably thought you were visiting a brothel for the usual reason-" Were his ears turning red? "-but when you reappeared with a woman they knew they'd found the trail. We threw them with the streetcar, and then I turned up at the hotel separately and in disguise, but they picked us up again on the way into the station and if we hadn't done the track side scramble they'd be-" Her eyes widened.

"What is it?"

"We'll have to be really careful if we go back to Boston."

"You think they're looking for you, yes?"

"Well- " Miriam paused. "I'm not sure. It could be the Polis tailing you. But if they were doing that, why wouldn't they turn over Lady Bishop's operation? I think it's more likely someone who decided you might lead them to me. In which case it could be nearly anyone. The cousins in this world, maybe. Or it could be the Polis looking for me, although I figure that's unlikely. Or it could be the Clan, in which case the question is, which faction is it? It's not as if-"

"The Clan factions would be a problem?"

"Yes." She nodded. "I've been thinking about it. Even if, if , I wanted to go back, I'd have to approach it really carefully. A random pickup could be disastrous. I need to get in touch with them or they'll think I've gone over the wall, and that's-I don't want to spend the rest of my life hiding from assassins. But I've got to get in touch with the right people there, see if I can cut some kind of deal. I've got information they need, so I might be able to work something out-but I don't trust that slimy shit Morgan who they put in charge of the Boston office."

Erasmus shrugged. "But they've lost us, haven't they? They can't possibly overtake us before-"

"You're wrong. They've got two-way radios better than anything the Royal Post can build. If it is Clan security, they'll have us in the Gruinmarkt before we get off the platform."

Erasmus nodded thoughtfully. "Then we won't be on this train when it arrives, will we?" He reached into his valise and pulled out a dog-eared gazetteer. "Let's sec. If we get off at Hartford, the next stopping train is forty-two minutes behind us. If we catch that one, we can get off at Framingham and take the milk train into Cambridge, then hail a cab. We'll be a couple of hours later getting home, but if we do our business fast we can make the express, and we won't be going through the city station. You know about the back route into the cellar. Do you think your stalkers know about it?"

Miriam blotted at her forehead. "Olga would. But she's not who I'm worried about. You're right, if we do it your way, we can probably get around them." She managed a strained smile. "I really don't need this. I don't like being chased."

"It won't be for long. Once we're on the transcontinental, there's no way they'll be able to trace us."

The shadows were lengthening and deepening, and the omnipresent creaking of cicadas provided an alien chorus as Huw sat in the folding chair on the back stoop, waiting for Hulius. Elena had installed her boom box in the kitchen, and it was pumping out plastic girl-band pop from the window ledge. But she'd gone upstairs to powder her nose, leaving Huw alone with the anxiety gnawing at his guts like a family of hungry rats. For the first hour or so he'd tried working on the laptop, chewing away at the report on research methodologies he was writing for his grace, but it was hard to concentrate while he couldn't stop imagining Yul out there in the chilly twilit pine forest, alone and in every imaginable permutation of jeopardy. You put him there, Huw's conscience kept reminding him: You ought to be there instead.