The Trade of Queens

“Yes,” Steve admitted. “Do you have ID?”

The short fireplug in the double-breasted suit leaned towards him: “You don’t get to ask questions,” he started, but the thin man raised a hand.

“Not yet. Mr. Schroeder, we’re from the FBI. Agent Judt.” He held an ID badge where Steve couldn’t help seeing it. “This is my colleague, Agent Fowler. It would make things much easier if we could keep this cordial, and we understand your first instinct is to treat this as a news investigation, but right now we’re looking at an unprecedented crime and you’re the first lead we’ve found. If you know anything, anything at all, then I’d be very grateful if you’d share it with us.”

“If there’s another bomb out there and you don’t help us, you could be charged with conspiracy,” Agent Fowler added in a low warning rumble. Then he shut up.

Steve took a deep breath. The explosions kept replaying behind his eyelids in slow motion. He breathed out slowly. “I’m a bit … freaked,” he admitted. “This morning I had a visit from a man who identified himself as a DEA agent, name of Fleming. He spun me a crazy yarn and I figured he was basically your usual run-of-the-mill paranoid schizophrenic. I didn’t check his ID at the time—tell the truth, I wanted him out of here. He said there’d be nukes, and he’d call back later. I’ve got a recording”—he gestured to his dictaphone—“but that’s about it. All I can tell you is what he told me. And hope to hell he gets back in touch.”

Agent Fowler stared at him with an expression like a mastiff contemplating a marrowbone. “You sent him away.”

Fear and anger began to mix in the back of Steve’s mind. “No, what I sent away was a fruitcake,” he insisted. “I write the information technology section. Put yourself in my shoes—some guy you don’t know comes to visit and explains how a secret government agency to deal with time travelers from another universe has lost a bunch of atom bombs accidentally-on-purpose because they want the time travelers to plant them in our cities—what would you do? Ask him when he last took his prescription? Show him the door, by any chance?”

Fowler still stared at him, but after a second Agent Judt nodded. “Your point is taken,” he said softly. “Nevertheless…”

“You want to wait until he makes contact again, be my guest.” Steve shuddered. “He might be a fruitcake, or he might be the real thing; that’s not my call. I assume you guys can tell the difference?”

“We get fruitcakes too,” Judt assured him. Riccardo was being no help: He just stood there in front of the beige partition, eyes vacant, nodding along like a pod person. “But we don’t usually get them so close to an actual, uh, incident.”

“Act of war,” Fowler snarled quietly. “Or treason.”

Fleming didn’t ask for anonymity, Steve reminded himself. Which left: handing a journalistic source over to the FBI. Normally a huge no-no, utterly immoral and unjustifiable, except … this wasn’t business as usual, was it? “I’ll help you,” Steve said quietly. “I want to see you catch whoever did it. But I don’t think it’s Fleming you want. He said he was trying to get the word out. If he planted the bombs, why spin that cock-and-bull story in the first place? And if he didn’t plant them, but he knew where the bombs were, why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“Leave the analysis to us,” suggested Agent Judt. “It’s our speciality.” He pointed at the dictaphone. “I need to take that, I’m afraid. Jack, if you’d like to stay with Mr. Schroeder just in case the phone rings? I’m going to bring headquarters up to speed, get some backup in.” He looked pointedly at Riccardo. “You didn’t hear any of this, Mr. Pirello, but it would be very helpful to me if you could have someone in your building security department provide Agent Fowler and me with visitor badges, and warn the front desk we’re expecting colleagues.”

Riccardo scuttled away as soon as Judt broke eye contact. Then he turned back to Steve. “Just wait here with Jack,” he said reassuringly.

“What if Fleming phones? What do I do?” Steve demanded.

“Answer it,” said Fowler, in a much more human tone of voice. “Record it, and let me listen in. And if he wants to set up a meet—go for it.”

*   *   *

In a cheap motel room on the outskirts of Providence, Mike Fleming sat on the edge of an overstuffed mattress and poured a stiff shot of bourbon into the glass from the bathroom. His go bag sat on the luggage rack, leaking the dregs of his runaway life: a change of underwear, a set of false ID documents, the paperwork for the rental car in the parking lot—hired under a false name, paid for with a credit card under that name. The TV on the chest of drawers blatted on in hypermanic shock, endless rolling reruns of a flash reflecting off the Potomac, the collapsing monument—for some reason, the White House seemed to be taboo, too raw a nerve to touch in the bleeding subconscious of a national trauma. He needed the bourbon, as a personal anesthetic: It was appallingly bad tradecraft, he knew, but right now he didn’t feel able to face reality without a haze of alcohol.

Mike wasn’t an amateur. He’d always known—always—that a job could blow up in his face. You didn’t expect that to happen, in the DEA, but you were an idiot if you didn’t take precautions and make arrangements to look after your own skin. It was surprisingly easy to build up a false identity, and after one particular assignment in Central America had gone bad on him with extreme prejudice (a local chief of police had turned out to be the brother-in-law of the local heroin wholesaler) he’d carefully considered his options. When Pete Garfinkle had died, he’d activated them. It made as much sense as keeping his gun clean and loaded—especially after Dr. James had earmarked him for a one-way ticket into fairyland. They weren’t forgeries, they were genuine, legal ID: He didn’t use the license to get off speeding tickets, and he paid the credit card bill in full every time he used it. They were simply an insurance policy for dangerous times, and ever since he’d gotten back home after the disastrous expedition into Niejwein a couple of months ago, he’d been glad of the driving license and credit card taped inside a video cassette’s sleeve in the living room.

From Steve Schroeder’s office he’d taken the elevator down to street level, caught a bus, switched to the Green Line, changed train and commuter line three times in thirty minutes, then hopped a Chinatown bus to New York, exiting early and ultimately ending up in a motel in Providence with a new rental car and a deep sense of foreboding. Then, walking into the motel front desk, he’d seen the endless looping scenes of disaster on CNN. It had taken three times as long as usual to check in. One of the two clerks on duty was weeping, her shoulders shaking; the other was less demonstrative, but not one hundred percent functional. “Why do they hate us?” the weeping one moaned during a break in her crying jag. “Why won’t they leave us alone?”

“Think Chemical Ali did it?” Three months ago it would have been Saddam, before his cousin’s palace coup on the eve of the invasion.

“Who cares?”

Mike had disentangled himself, carefully trying not to think too hard about the scenes on the TV. But once he got to his room, it hit him.

I tried to do something. But I failed.

A vast, seething sense of numbness threatened to swallow him. This can’t be happening, there must be some way out of here, some way to get to where this didn’t happen. But it had happened; for better or worse—almost certainly for worse—Miriam’s enemies had lashed out at the Family Trade Organization in the most brutal way imaginable. Not one, but two bombs had gone off in D.C. Atomic bombs, the all-time nightmare the DHS had been warning about, the things Mike had been having nightmares about for the year since Matthias walked into a DEA office in downtown Boston with a stolen ingot of plutonium in his pocket.

No way of knowing if Schroeder had taken him seriously. He’d felt the argument slipping away, Schroeder’s impatience visibly growing as he tried to explain about the Clan, and about the FTO project to wrap them up and then to infiltrate and attack their home bases. He hadn’t even gotten as far as his contact with Miriam’s mother, Olga the ice princess, the business about negotiation. He could see Schroeder’s attention drifting. And if he couldn’t convince one man who’d known Miriam and wondered where she’d gotten to, what hope was there?

Maybe if I hadn’t asked the colonel, weeks ago, he speculated. Colonel Smith was Air Force, on secondment to FTO by way of a posting with NSA. He understood chains of command and accountability and what to do about illegal orders. Not like that shadowy spook-fucker, Dr. James. But they blew up my car. They’d expected him to run somewhere. Smith might already be dead. If I’d smuggled some of the tapes out—tapes of conversations in