charge on the goggles yet?”
“They’re in the trunk. They’ll be fine.” Hulius pulled off a slice of orange and offered it to Huw. “you worry too much.”
“It’s your neck I’m worrying over. Would you rather I didn’t worry, bro?”
“If you put it that way…”
The last half hour of any journey was always the longest, but Huw caught the sign in time, and took the exit for Bel Air and parts east: then a couple more turns onto dusty roads linking faceless tracts of suburb with open countryside. The dots converged. Finally he reached a stretch of trees and a driveway led up to an unprepossessing house. He brought the truck to a halt in front of the day room windows and killed the engine.
“You’re sure this is the place?” Elena pushed herself upright then stretched, yawning.
“Got to be.” Huw rooted around in the dash for the bunch of house keys and the letter from the realtor. Then he opened the door and jumped out, taking a deep breath as the oppressive summer humidity washed over him. “Number 344. Yup, that’s right.”
Sneakers crunched on gravel as he walked towards the front door. Behind him, a clattering: Elena unloading the flat Pelikan case from the trunk. Huw glanced up at the peeling white paint under the guttering, the patina of dust. Then he rang the doorbell and waited for a long minute, until Elena, holding the case behind him as if it was a guitar, began tapping her toes and whistling a tuneless melody of impatience. “It pays to be cautious,” he finally explained, before he stuck the key in the lock. “People hereabouts take a dim view of unexpected visitors.”
The key turned. Inside, the hallway was hot and close, smelling of dust and old regrets. Huw breathed a sigh of relief. He’d set this up by remote control, one of ten test sites running down the coastline and across the continent all the way to the west coast, spaced five hundred kilometers apart. The Realtor had been only too glad to rent it to him for a year, money paid up front: it had been unsalable ever since its former owner, a retired widower, had died of a heart attack in the living room one bleak winter evening. You could remove the carpet and the furniture, and even do something about the smell, but you couldn’t remove the reputation.
Huw hunted around for the fuse board for a while, then flipped the circuit breaker. A distant whir spoke of long-dormant air-conditioning. He checked that the hall lights worked, then nodded to himself. “Okay, let’s get moved in.”
It took the three of them half an hour to unload the Hummer. Besides backpacks full of clothing, they brought in a number of wheeled equipment cases, a laptop computer, and couple of expensive digital camcorders. Finally, the air mattresses. “Elena? You take the back bedroom. Yul, you and I are roughing it up front in the master room.”
Huw dragged his mattress into the front room and plugged the electric pump in. Some of the houses were still furnished, but not this one.
“Works for me.” Hulius grimaced. “Where’s Lady Elena?”
“Here.” Elena leaned against the banister rail outside the door. “Food would be good.” She grinned impishly. “How about a couple of bottles of wine?” Like all Clan members, her attitude to wine was very un-American— tempered only by the duke’s iron rule about attracting unwanted attention in public.
Huw nodded—thoughtfully, for he was still getting used to playing the role of responsible adult around the other two. “We’ll pick something up if we pass a liquor store. But no drinking in public, okay?”
“Sure, dude.”
“Let’s go, then.”
An hour later they were back in the under-furnished living room with pizza boxes, a stack of six-packs of Pepsi, and a discreet brown paper bag. “Okay,” said Huw, licking his fingers. “Taken your pills yet?”
“Um, ’scuse me.” Elena darted upstairs, returning with a toilet bag. “Hate these things,” she mumbled resentfully. “Make me feel woozy.” She threw back her head when she swallowed.
“Where were we?” asked Hulius, pausing with a slice of Hawaiian halfway to his mouth.
Huw checked his wristwatch. “About an hour and a half short of time zero. You guys eat, I’ll repeat the plan, interrupt if you want me to explain anything.”
“Okay,” said Hulius. Elena nodded, rolling her eyes as she chewed.
“First, we assemble the stage one kit. Clothing, boots, cameras, guns, telemetry belts. We triple-test the belt batteries and set them running at five minutes to zero hour. There’s no post on this trip, even if we get some results. Elena piggybacks on Yul, on the first attempt. If you fail, we call it a wash today, switch off the telemetry, and break open the wine. If you succeed, you evaluate your surroundings and proceed to Plan Alpha or Plan Bravo, depending. Now.” He tore off a wedge of cooling pizza: “It’s your turn to tell me what you’re supposed to do as soon as you find yourself wherever the hell you’re going. Hoping to go. Plan Alpha first. Elena, describe your job…?”
The carvery in the hotel wasn’t anything Miriam would have described as a classy restaurant, but after being locked in the basement of a brothel for most of a week it felt like the Ritz. Miriam was ravenous from a day pounding the sidewalks: but Erasmus, she noticed over the soup, ate slowly but methodically, clearing his plate with grim determination. “Hungry?” she asked, lowering her spoon.
“I try never to leave my food.” He nodded, then tore off another piece of bread to mop his soup bowl clean. “Old habit. Bad manners, I’m afraid: I apologize.”
“No offense taken.” Miriam nodded. “You need to put on weight, anyway. I haven’t heard you coughing today, but you’re so thin!”
“Really?” He made as if to raise his napkin to cover his mouth, then grinned at her. “When you start you know about it, but when something goes away…it’s an unnoticed miracle.” A waiter arrived, silently, and removed their bowls. “I don’t feel ancient and drained anymore. But you’re right, I need to eat. I wasn’t always a sack of bones.” He shook his head, and the grin slipped into rueful oblivion.
“It was your time in the north, wasn’t it?” The statement slipped out before Miriam could stop it.
Erasmus stared at her. “Yes, it was,” he said quietly.
She licked her lips. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to say that.”
“Yes you did.” He glanced sidelong at the other occupants of the room: no one was paying them any obvious attention. “But it’s all right, I don’t mind.”
“I don’t mean to pry.” The waiter was returning, bearing two plates. She leaned back while he deftly slid her entree in front of her. When he’d gone, she looked back at Burgeson. “But I’d be crazy not to be curious. Months ago, when I said I didn’t care what your connections were…I didn’t expect things to go this way.”
He shrugged, then picked up his knife and fork. “Neither did I,” he said shortly. “You are curious as to the nature of what you’ve gotten yourself into?”
She took a sip of wine, then began to methodically slice into the overcooked lamb chops on her plate. “This probably isn’t the right place for this conversation.”
“I’m glad you agree.”
He wasn’t making this easy. “So. Tomorrow…train back home? Then what?”
“It’ll be a flying visit. Overnight, perhaps.” He shoveled a potato onto his fork, holding it in place with a fatty piece of mutton: “I need to pick up my post, make arrangements for the shop, and notify the Polis.” His cheek twitched. “I’ve reserved a suite on the night mail express, leaving tomorrow evening. It joins up with the Northern Continental at Dunedin, we won’t have to change carriages.”
“A suite?” She raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that expensive?”
Erasmus paused, another forkful of food halfway to his mouth: “Of course it is! But the extra expense, on top of a transcontinental ticket, is minor.” He grimaced. “You expect travel to be cheaper than it is. It can be—if you don’t mind sleeping on a blanket roll with the steerage for a week.”
“Yes, but…” Miriam paused for long enough to eat some more food: “I’m sorry. So we’re going straight through Dunedin and stopping in Fort Petrograd? How many days away?”
