Right. I’ve got to get away for a bit. How? Where? Miriam glanced at the bedside table and saw temporary escape sitting there, next to her dictaphone. Ah. A plan! She approached the huge chest of drawers and rummaged through it, hunting clothes. Ten minutes later she was dressed in urban casual-jeans, sneakers, sweater, leather jacket. Someone had helpfully installed some of her bags in the bottom of a cavernous wardrobe, and her small reporter’s briefcase was among them, preloaded with a yellow pad, pens, and some spare tapes and batteries.
She poked her nose around the bedroom door cautiously. No, there was nobody lurking in ambush. It worked! She told herself. A quick dash to the bathroom and she was ready to activate her plan. Ready, apart from a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, anyway. “Damn. I’ll need money.” She ransacked the reception room in haste, hunting for her personal effects, and found them in a closed bureau of exquisite workmanship-her wallet, driving license, credit cards, and house keys. Either the servants didn’t dare tamper with the private possessions of a relative of the duke-or they didn’t know what they were. She found some other items in the bureau that shook her- her snub-nosed pistol and a box of ammunition that she didn’t remember buying. “What is this?” she asked herself before putting the gun in her jacket pocket. She kept her hand around it. If what she was planning didn’t work… well, she’d jump that hurdle when she reached it.
They’re treating me as family, she realized. Adult, mature, sensible family, not like Olga the ditz. Servants and assassins crawling out of the woodwork, it’s a whole different world. Oh my.
Carefully not thinking too hard about the likely consequences of her actions, Miriam walked to the centre of the reception room between sofa and fireplace, snapped open her locket with her left hand, and focused on the design inside.
“Owww!” She stumbled slightly and cradled her forehead. Vision blurred, and everything throbbed. “Shit!” She blinked furiously through the pounding of her abruptly upgraded headache. The room was still there: bureau, chairs, fireplace-
“I wondered how long you’d take,” Roland said from behind her.
She whirled, bringing her gun to bear, then stopped. “Jesus, don’t do that!”
Roland watched her from the sofa, one hand holding a pocket watch, the other stretched out along the cushioned back. He was wearing a sports jacket and chinos with an open-necked shirt, like a stockbroker on casual Friday.
The sofa was identical to the unoccupied one in the suite she’d just left-or so close as to be its twin. But Roland wasn’t the only different feature of the room. The quality of light coming in through the window was subtly altered, and some items had appeared on the side table, and the bedroom door was shut. “This isn’t the same apartment,” she said slowly, past the fog of headache. “It’s a doppelganger, right? And we’re on the other side. My side.”
Roland nodded. “Are you going to shoot me or not?” he asked. “Because if you aren’t, you ought to put that away.”
“Oops. Sorry.” She lowered the pistol carefully and pointed it at the floor. “You startled me.”
Roland relaxed visibly. “I think it’s safe to say that you startled me, too. Do you always carry a gun when you explore your house?”
“I hope you’ll excuse me,” she said carefully, “but after waking up in bed with a stranger leaning over me for the second time in as many days, I tend to overreact a little. And I wasn’t sure how the duke would respond to me going walkabout.”
“Really?” He raised an eyebrow.
“No shit.” She glanced around. The bathroom door was closed-she needed some Tylenol or some other painkiller bad. “Do you keep hot and cold running servants on this side, too?”
“Not many; there’s a cook and some occasional cleaning staff, but mostly this is reserved for Covert Operations, and we pay much more attention to secrecy. Over here it’s a… a safe house, I guess you’d call it, not a palace. I take it you haven’t eaten-can I invite you to join me downstairs for breakfast?”
“As long as I don’t have to dress for it,” she said, checking then pocketing her gun. She picked up her briefcase. “I dug the lecture about not being able to hide, I don’t want you to misunderstand me. But there are some things I really need to do around town today. Assuming I’m not under house arrest?”
Roland shrugged. “I don’t see why not,” he said. “I can answer for your security, in any case. Will you be able to do your stuff if I come along?”
Miriam looked out of the window and took a deep breath. “Well.” She looked at him again. “I guess so.” Damn, there goes my chance to warn Paulie. “Is it really that risky?”
“Breakfast first.” He was already heading for the door. He added, over his shoulder, “By now news of your arrival will have leaked out and junior members of at least two of the other families will be desperate, absolutely desperate. But they don’t know what you look like so you probably don’t need a permanent bodyguard yet. And once your position is secure, they won’t be able to touch you.”
“ ‘Breakfast,’” she said, “ ‘first.’”
There was a kitchen on the ground floor, but there was nothing medieval about it. With its stainless-steel surfaces, huge chest freezer, microwave ovens, and gas range, it could have been the back of a restaurant. The dining room attached to it didn’t look anything like Angbard’s private apartment, either. It reminded Miriam more of a staff room at an upmarket consultant’s office. A couple of guys in dark suits nodded at Roland from a table, but they were finishing up cups of coffee and they cleared out as soon as he offered her a seat. “Tell me, what did you think of, uh, Olga?”
While she tried to puzzle out what he meant by that question, a waitress appeared, notepad poised. “What’s on the menu this morning?” Miriam asked.
“Oh, anything you’d like.” She smiled breezily. “Coffee, we have a whole range of different types at present. Eggs, bacon, sausages, granola, breakfast cereal, juice-whatever.”
“Double espresso for me,” said Roland. “ Rye sourdough toast, extra-mature thick-peel marmalade, unsalted butter. Two fried eggs, sunny-side up.”
“Hmm. A large cappuccino for me, I think,” said Miriam. “Can you manage a Spanish omelette?”
“Sure!” Miss Breezy grinned at her. “With you in five minutes.”
Miriam blinked at her receding back. “Now that is what I call service.”
“We take it seriously around here,” Roland said dryly. “That’s why we go through a Human Resources department.”
“You run this household like a company.” Miriam frowned. “In fact, this is a family business, isn’t it? That’s what you’re in.” She paused. “Interuniversal import/export. Right?”
“Right.” He nodded.
“And you’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.”
“Right you are,” he said encouragingly. “You’re figuring it out for yourself.”
“It’s not that hard.” The distinctive noise of a coffee percolator made her raise her head. “How do you think last night went?”
“I think-” he watched her examining him. “Do you know you’ve got a very disquieting stare?”
“Yes.” She grinned at him. “I practice in the mirror before I go in to an interview. Sometimes it makes my victims give away more than they intended to. And sometimes it just gives them bad dreams afterward.”
“Eeh. I can see you’d be a bad enemy, Miss Beckstein.”
“Miz, to you.” She paused.
The waitress was back, bearing a tray laden with coffee, milk, and a sugar bowl. “Call if you need anything more,” she reassured them, then disappeared again.
Roland’s eyes narrowed at he looked at her. “You remind me of when I was at college,” he said.
“You were at college?” she asked. “Over here, I mean?”
“Oh, yes.” He picked up his espresso and spooned a small quantity of brown sugar crystals into it.
“The girls don’t seem to get that treatment,” she pointed out sharply.
“Oh, but some of them do,” he replied, blowing on his coffee. “At least, these days, this generation. Olga is a throwback-or, rather, her father is. I’m not sure quite what the duke was trying to prove, inviting you to dine with us, but he said something about culture shock earlier. He’s a perceptive old coot, gets hold of some very unexpected ideas and refuses to let them go. I’m half-wondering if he was testing you. Seeing if you’d break cover under stress or how you’d hold up in public by using an audience he could silence if the need arose.”
“A-ha.” She took a first sip of her coffee. “So what did you study?”
