Someone had threatened Miriam, right after she’d been fired for stumbling over something. Was it Clan-related? And was this Paulette woman involved? “There’s only one way to find out,” Mike told himself unhappily. His stomach rumbled. “Time to hit the road again.”
* * *
The coded electrogram from Springfield followed a circuitous course to Erasmus Burgeson’s desk.
Huw’s bluff had worked; the cadre at the post office were inexperienced and undisciplined, excited volunteers barely out of the first flush of revolutionary fervor, more enthusiastic than efficient. There was no command structure as such, no uniforms and no identity papers, and as yet very little paranoia: The threats they expected to defend the post office against were the crude and obvious violence of counterrevolutionary elements, fists and guns rather than the sly subtlety of wreckers and saboteurs from within. This was not—yet—a revolution that had begun to eat its offspring.
When Huw claimed to be part of a small reconnaissance cell in the countryside and asked to send a message to the stratospheric heights of the party organization, he was met at first with gape-jawed incomprehension and then an eagerness to oblige that was almost comically servile. It was only when he and Yul prepared to slip away that anyone questioned the wisdom of allowing strangers to transmit electrograms to New London without clearance, and by the time old Johnny Miller, former deputy postmaster of the imperial mail (now wearing his union hat openly), expressed the doubtful opinion that perhaps somebody ought to have detained the strangers pending the establishment of their bona fides, Huw and Yul were half a mile down the road.
Despite deputy postmaster Miller’s misgivings, the eighty-word electrogram Miriam had so carefully crafted arrived in the central monitoring and sorting hall at Breed’s Hill, whereupon an eagle-eyed (and probably bored) clerk recognized the office of the recipient and, for no very good reason, stamped it with a PARTY PRIORITY flag and sent it on its way.
From Breed’s Hill—where in Miriam’s world one of the key battles of the American War of Independence had been fought—the message was encrypted in a standard party cypher and flashed down cables to the Imperial Postal Headquarters building on Manhattan Island, and thence to the Ministry of Propaganda, where the commissioner on duty in the message room saw its high priority and swore, vilely. Erasmus was not in town that day; indeed, was not due back for some time. But it was a PARTY PRIORITY cable. What to do?
In the basement of the Ministry of Propaganda were numerous broadcasting rooms; and no fewer than six of these were given over to the letter talkers, who endlessly recited strings of words sapped of all meaning, words chosen for their clarity over the airwaves. So barely two hours after Huw and Yul had shown the cadre in Springfield two clean pairs of heels, a letter talker keyed his microphone and began to intone: “Libra, Opal, Furlong, Opal, Whisky, Trident”—over the air on a shortwave frequency given over to the encrypted electrospeak broadcasts of the party’s network, a frequency that would be echoed by transmitters all over both Western continents, flooding the airwaves until Burgeson’s radio operator could not help but receive it.
Which event happened in the operator’s room on board an armored war train fifty miles west of St. Anne, which stood not far from the site of Cincinatti in Miriam’s world. The operator, his ears encased in bulky headphones, handed the coded message with his header to the encryption sergeant, who typed it into his clacking, buzzing machine, and then folded the tape and handed it off to a messenger boy, who dashed from the compartment into the train’s main corridor and then along a treacherous, swaying armored tunnel to the command carriage where the commissioner of state propaganda sat slumped over a pile of newspapers, reading the day’s dispatches as he planned the next step in his media blitz.
“What is it now?” Erasmus asked, glancing up.
The messenger boy straightened. “Sor, a cript for thee?” He presented the roll of tape with both hands. “Came in over the airwaves, like.”
“I see.” The train clanked across a badly maintained crossing, swaying from side to side. Erasmus, unrolling the tape, drew the electric lamp down from overhead to illuminate the mechanical scratchings as he tried to focus on it. It had been under at least three pairs of eyeballs since arriving here; over the electrograph, that meant … He blinked.
Burgeson reached out with his left hand and yanked the bell rope, without taking his eyes off the message tape. A few seconds later Citizen Supervisor Philips stuck his head round the partition. “You called, citizen?”
“Yes.” Burgeson shoved the newspaper stack to one side, so that they overflowed the desk and drifted down across the empty rifle rack beside it. “Something urgent has come up back East. I need to be in Boston as soon as possible.”
“Boston?” Philips raised a thin eyebrow. “What about the campaign, citizen?”
“The campaign can continue without me for a couple of days.” Burgeson stared at Philips. Dried-out and etiolated, the officer resembled a praying mantis in a black uniform: but he was an efficient organizer, indeed had pulled together the staff and crew for this campaign train at short notice. “We’ve hit New Brentford and Jensenville in the past two days, you’ve seen how I want things done: Occupy the local paper’s offices, vet the correspondents, deal with any who are unreliable and promote our cadres in their place. Continue to monitor as you move on.” The two-thousand-ton armored war train, bristling with machine guns and black-clad Freedom Riders, was probably unique in history in having its own offset press and typesetting carriage; but as Erasmus had argued the point with Sir Adam, this was a war of public perception—and despite the technowizardry of the videography engineers, public perceptions were still shaped by hot metal type. “Keep moving, look for royal blue newspapers and insure that you leave only red freedom-lovers in your wake.”
“I think I can do that, sir.” Philips nodded. “Difficult cases…?”
“Use your discretion.”
“If it’s Boston you want, there’s an aerodrome near Raleigh that’s loyal,” Philips offered. “I’ll wire them to put a scout at your disposal?”
“Do that.” Burgeson winced. Flying tended to make him air-sick, even in the modern fully-enclosed mail planes that had been coming in recently. “I need to be there as soon as possible.”
“Absolutely, citizen. I’ll put the wheels in motion at once.” And, true to his word, almost as soon as Philips disappeared there came an almighty squeal of brakes from beneath the train.
* * *
The past week had been one long nightmare for Paulette Milan.
She’d been a fascinated observer of Miriam’s adventures, in the wake of the horrible morning a year ago when they’d both lost their jobs; and later, when Miriam had sucked her into running an office for her—funneling resources to an extradimensional business start-up—she’d been able to square it with her conscience because she agreed with Miriam’s goals. If the Clan, Miriam’s criminal extended family, could be diverted into some other line of business, that was cool. And if some of their money stuck to Paulie’s fingertips in the form of wages, well, as long as the wages weren’t coming in for anything illegal on her part, that was fine, too.
But things hadn’t worked out. First Miriam had vanished for nearly six months—a virtual prisoner, held under house arrest for much of that time. The money pipeline had slammed shut, leaving Paulie looking for a job in the middle of a recession. Then things got worse. About six weeks ago Miriam’s friends—or co-conspirators, or cousins, or whatever—Olga and Brill had turned up on her doorstep and made her the kind of offer you weren’t allowed to refuse if you knew what was good for you. There was a fat line of credit to sweeten the pill, but it left Paulie looking over her shoulder nervously. You didn’t hand out that kind of money just to open an office, in her experience. And there had been dark hints about internal politics within the Clan, a civil war, and the feds nosing around.
All of this was
