She glanced at him. “I could be your long-lost sister or something if you’ve got trouble with the married couple idea.”
He shrugged.
She looked thoughtful. “Is Erasmus Burgeson a cover identity, too?”
“You’d tell your wife,” she said, teasingly—then immediately looked stricken. “Shit! I’m sorry, Erasmus! I’d—it completely slipped my mind. I’m sorry…”
“Don’t be,” he said tightly. “Not your fault.”
“No, me and my—” She took his hand impulsively. “I tend to dig, by instinct. Listen, if you catch me doing it again and it’s sensitive, just tell me to back off, all right?”
He took a deep breath.
“You owe—” She shook her head. “Enough of that. What else have we got?”
“Let’s see.” The bag turned out to contain a suit of clothes, not new but more respectable than those they’d already given Miriam. “If we’re traveling together, you’d probably better change into these first. We’ll look less conspicuous together.”
“Okay.” She paused. “Right here?”
“I’ll wait outside.”
He stood with his back to the parlor door for a few scant minutes that felt like hours. He spent some of those hours fantasizing about wringing Ed’s neck—a necessary proxy, for the thought of challenging Lady Bishop over the matter was insupportable, but damn them! Why did they have to do that, of all things?
Miriam was a sharp knife, too sharp for her own good—sharp enough to cut both ways. Dealing with her as a contact and a supplier of contraband had been dicey, but not impossible. Living with her was an entirely different matter, but it wasn’t exactly feasible to stick her in a tenement apartment and leave her to her own devices.
There was a knock at the door. A moment later it opened, as he turned round. “How do I look?” She took a step back.
“You look—” he paused to collect himself, “fine.” The black walking suit was a little severe, but it suited her. However…“before we travel, I think we’d better find you a hairdresser.”
“Really?” She frowned. “It’s not particularly long—”
“Or a wig maker,” he explained. “You’re probably on the Polis watch list. But if you’ve got long blond or brown hair, a different name, and a husband, and the informants are all looking for a single woman with short black hair, that’s a start. Details are cumulative: you can’t just change one thing and expect to go unnoticed, you’ve got to change lots of different things about yourself simultaneously.”
“Right. It’ll have to be blond. Damn it, I always get split ends.” She ran one hand through her hair. It was longer than he remembered. “There’s other stuff I need to do. When I can figure out what…”
A moment he’d been dreading: at least, a small one. She didn’t seem to be committed to killing herself just yet. “That will be a problem.”
“Ah.” She froze. “Yes, somehow I didn’t think it was going to be easy.”
“The—situation—you drew our attention to is troublesome. For the time being, I think it would be a very bad idea indeed for you to try to make contact with your Clan. Or with the other, ah, local faction. I can make inquiries on your behalf, discreet inquiries, if your relatives are still trying to run your company. But until we know how they will react to your reappearance, it would be best not to reappear. Do you agree?”
Miriam looked baffled for a moment: an achingly familiar bewilderment, the first bright moment of incomprehension that everyone felt the first time, as the doors to the logging camp swung to offer a glimpse into a colder, harsher world. “All I want is to go home.”
He reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder, surprising himself: “Listen, home is wherever you are. You’ve got to learn to accept that, to let go, or sooner or later you’re going to kill yourself. Are you listening? Margaret told me your story. Do you want to go back to the situation you just escaped from? Or do you want the Polis to find you instead? I nearly killed myself once, trying to go back. I don’t want you to make the same mistake. I think the best way forward would be for you to come with me. It’s not forever: it’ll last as long as, as long as it needs to. Eventually, I’m sure, you’ll be able to go back. But don’t…don’t try to take on too much, Miriam. Not until you’re ready.”
“I—” She reached up and removed his hand from her shoulder, but she didn’t let go of it. “You’re too kind!” Without warning she stepped right up to him and put her arms around him, and hugged him. Too surprised to move, he stood rooted to the spot, at a loss for words: after a while she stepped away. “I’m ready now,” she said quietly. “Let’s get out of here.”
“This is not making my day any easier,” murmured Dr. James, leaning back in his chair as the door closed behind Agent Herz. He glanced sidelong at Eric. “Got any bright ideas, Colonel?”
Eric stared at the hard copy of Herz’s report, sitting on the blotter in its low-contrast anti-photocopying print and SECRET codewords, and resisted the impulse to pound his head on his desk. It would look unprofessional— there were few stronger terms of opprobrium in Dr. Andrew James’s buttoned-down vocabulary—and more important, it wouldn’t achieve anything. But on the other hand, banging his head on the desk would probably be less painful than trying to deal with the self-compounding clusterfuck-in-progress that was, of late, what passed for the Family Trade Organization’s infant steps towards dealing with the transdimensionally mobile narcoterrorists they were hunting.
(And their goddamn stolen nukes.)
“Come on. What am I going to tell the vice president tonight?”
Eric took a deep breath. “From the top?”
“Whatever order you choose.”
“Well, shall we get the small stuff out of the way first?”
“Start.”
Eric shrugged. “I don’t like to admit this, but the current operations we’ve got in train are all hosed. CLEANSWEEP has driven into a ditch and we’re lucky we got anybody back at all—going by Agent Wall’s observations, they got caught in the crossfire during some kind of red-on-red incident. We’re lucky Rich was able to exfiltrate in good order, else we wouldn’t even know that much. I think we can write off the alpha team and Agent Fleming, they’re two days overdue and they’ve overrun their provisioning.
“On the plus side, Rich got out. We’ve continued to monitor the CLEANSWEEP team’s dead letter drops from the OLIGARCH positions, and they look clean. The fact that nobody’s visited or tried to stake them out suggests that the bad guys didn’t take any of our men alive. So CLEANSWEEP isn’t blown, and once we get more field- qualified linguists prepped we should be able to reactivate it—possibly in as little as three weeks. The real problem we’ve got is that we’re multiply bottlenecked: bottlenecked on linguists, bottlenecked on logistics, bottlenecked on general intelligence. If we could find one of their safe houses we’d be in place to run COLDPLAY against them, but the trail’s gone cold and there’s a limit to how long I can hold on to an AFSOCOM team with no mission—they’re needed in the middle east.”
“Hmm.” James rolled his pen between the finger and thumb of his left hand. His lips whitened, forming a tight, disapproving line that made the resemblance to Hugo Weaving in
“Well, I’m not happy either!” Eric dug his fingers into the arms of his chair. His damaged carpal tunnels sent twinges of protest running up his arms. “If you think I enjoy losing agents and trained special forces teams…hell.” He raised a hand and ran fingertips through his thinning hair. “I’m sorry. But this failure mode wasn’t anticipated. Nobody expected them to blow up the fucking palace and start a civil war in the garden. Maybe we should have anticipated it, if we’d been better informed about their internal political situation, but they don’t exactly have newspapers over there and even if they did, we’d have trouble reading them. We’d have to have been fucking mind
