“But they’ll—” Miriam began.
“I have a better idea!” Olga announced brightly. “Why don’t you both go forth to charm the turbulent beast?” She beamed at them both. “That way they won’t know who to confront! Like the ass that starved between two overflowing mangers.”
Iris glanced sidelong at Miriam. Was it worry? Miriam couldn’t decide. “That would never do,” she said apologetically. “I couldn’t—”
“Oh yes you can, Patricia,” Angbard said with a cold gleam in his eye.
“But if I go out there Mother will make a scene! And then—”
Miriam caught herself staring at Iris in exasperation, sensing an echo of a deeper family history she’d grown up shielded from. “The dowager will make a scene, will she?” Miriam asked, a dangerous note in her voice: “Why shouldn’t she? She hasn’t seen you for decades. Thought you were dead, probably. You didn’t get along with her when you were young, but so what? Maybe you’ll both find the anger doesn’t matter anymore. Why not try it?” She caught Angbard’s eye. Her uncle, normally stony-faced, looked positively anesthetized, as if to stifle an image-destroying outburst of laughter.
“You don’t know the old bat,” Iris warned grimly.
“She hasn’t changed,” Angbard commented. “If anything, she’s become even more set in her ways.” Harrumph. He hid his face in his handkerchief again.
“She’s been getting worse ever since she adopted that young whipper-snapper Oliver as her confidante,” Henryk mumbled vaguely. “Give me Alfredo any day, we’d have straightened him out in time—” He didn’t seem to notice Iris’s face tightening.
“Ma,” Miriam said warningly.
“Alright! That’s enough.” Iris pushed herself upright in her wheelchair, an expression of grim determination on her face. “Miriam, purely for the sake of family solidarity, you push. You, young lady, what’s your name—”
“Olga,” Miriam offered.
“—I know that, dammit! Olga, open the doors and keep the idiots from pushing me over and letting my darling daughter sneak away. Angbard—”
“I’ll start the session again in half an hour,” he said, shaking his head.
“Just remember.” He turned a cool eye on Miriam, all trace of levity gone: “It cost me a lot to set this up for you. Don’t make a mess of it.”
Going Postal
Down in the post office in the basement of Fort Lofstrom, two men waited nervously for their superior to arrive. Both of them were young—one was barely out of his teens—and they dressed like law firm clerks or trainee accountants. “Is this for real?” the younger one kept asking, nervously. “I mean, has it really happened? Why does nobody tell us anything? Shit, this sucks!”
“Shut up and wait,” said the elder, leaning against a wall furnished with industrial shelving racks, holding a range of brightly colored plastic boxes labeled by destination. “Haven’t you learned anything?”
“But the meeting! I mean, what’s going on? Have the old guys finally decided to stop us going over—”
“I said, shut the fuck up.” The older courier glared at the kid with all the world-weary cynicism of his twenty-six years. Spots, tufts of straggly beard hair—Sky Father, why do I get to nurse the babies? “Listen, nothing is going to go wrong.”
He nudged the briefcase at his feet. Inside its very expensive aluminium shell was a layer of plastic foam. Inside the plastic foam nestled a bizarrely insectile-looking H&K submachine gun. The kid didn’t need to know that, though. “When the boss man gets here, we do a straight delivery run then lock down the house. You stay with the boss and do what he says. I get the fun job of telling the postmen to drop everything and yelling at the holiday heads to execute their cover plans. Then we arrest anyone who tries to drop by. Get it? The whole thing will be over in forty-eight hours, it’s just a routine security lockdown.”
“Yes, Martijn.” The kid shook his head, puzzled. “But there hasn’t been an extraordinary meeting in my lifetime! And this is an emergency lockdown, isn’t it? Shutting down everything, telling all our people on the other side to go hide, that sucks. What’s going on?”
The courier looked away. Hurry up and get the nonsense out of your system, he thought. “What do you think they’re doing?” he asked.
“It’s obvious: They envy us, don’t they? The old dudes. Staying over, fitting in. You know I’m going back to college in a couple of weeks, did I tell you about the shit my uncle Stani’s been handing out about that? I’ve got a girlfriend and a Miata and a place of my own and he’s giving me shit because he never had that stuff. What do you need to learn reading for if you’ve got scribes? he told me. And you know what? Some of them, if they could stop us going back—”
The door opened, stemming his tirade in full flood. The older courier straightened up; the young one just flushed, his mouth running down in a frightened stammer. “Uh, yessir, uh, going back, uh—”
“Shut up,” Matthias said coldly.
One more squeak and the kid fell silent. Matthias nodded at Martijn, the older one. “You ready?” he asked.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Very well.” Matthias didn’t smile, but some of the tension went out of his shoulders. He wore a leather flying jacket and jeans, with gloves on his hands and a day pack slung over one arm. “Kid. You are going to carry me across. Ready?”
“Uh.” Gulp. “Yessir. Yes. Sir.”
“Hah.” Matthias glanced at the older one. “Go on, then.” He advanced on the youth. “I’m heavier than any load you’re used to. You will need to have your key ready in one hand. When you are ready, speak, and I’ll climb on your back. Try not to break.”
“Yessir!”
A minute later they were in another post room. This one was slightly smaller, its shelves less full, and a row of wheeled suitcases were parked on the opposite wall inside an area painted with yellow stripes. The kid collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath while Matthias looked around for the older courier. “Martijn. You have your orders?”
“Yes. My lord.”
“Execute them.”
Matthias removed a briefcase from the rack on one wall then walked toward the exit from the room. He unlocked it then waved Martijn and the younger courier through. Once they were in the elevator to the upper floors, Matthias shut the door—then turned on his heel and headed for the emergency stairs to the garage.
The silver-blue BMW convertible was waiting for him, just as he’d ordered. Finally, Matthias cracked a smile, thin-lipped and humorless. There was barely room for the briefcase in the trunk, and his day pack went on the passenger seat. He fired up the engine as he hit the “door open” button on the dash, accelerating up the ramp and into the daylight beyond.
“Fifteen minutes,” he whispered to himself as he merged with the traffic on the Cambridge turnpike. “Give me fifteen minutes!”
The time passed rapidly. Waiting at an intersection, Matthias pulled out a cheap anonymous mobile phone and speed-dialed a number. It rang three times before the person at the other end answered.
“Who is this?” they asked.
“This is Judas. Listen, I will say this once. The address you want is…” he rattled through the details of the location he’d just left. “Got that?”
“Yes. Who are you and—”
Matthias casually flipped the phone out of the half-open window then accelerated away. Moments later, an eighteen-wheeler reduced it to plastic shrapnel.