The Trade of Queens

“Indispensable?”

“I’ve been doing some reading.” Miriam turned tired eyes on Alasdair. “Revolutions eat their young, especially as they build new power structures. But they don’t eat the institutions that prop them up. Secret police, bureaucrats, armies—that’s the rule. They may hang the men at the top, and go hard on their external enemies, but the majority of the rank and file keep their places. I think we can come up with a value proposition that they can’t ignore, one that would scare the crap out of them if we didn’t very obviously need their help.”

Sir Alasdair looked at Brill. “Do you understand her when she starts talking like this?” he grumbled.

“No. Isn’t it great?” Brill flashed him a grin. “You can see why the duke, may he rest peacefully, wanted her for a figurehead upon the throne. My lady. What do you propose to do? Let us say we get you to Boston to meet with your man. What do you need?”

“I’ve got a list,” said Miriam, picking up the laptop. “Let’s get started.…”

BEGIN RECORDING

“—Latest news coming in from Delhi, the Pakistani foreign minister has called off negotiations over the cease fire on the disputed Kashmir frontier—”

(

Fast forward

)

“—Artillery duels continuing, it looks like a long, tense night for the soldiers here on the border near Amritsar. Over to you in the studio, Dan.”

“Thank you, Bob Mancini, live from the India-Pakistan border region near the disputed Kashmir province, where the cold war between the Indian and Pakistani militaries has been running hot for the past month. A reminder that the catastrophic events of 7/16 didn’t stop the shooting; may in fact have aggravated it, with rumors flying that the quantum effect used by the attackers is being frantically investigated by military labs all over the world, we go to our military affairs expert, Erik Olsen. Hello, Erik.”

“Hello, Dan.”

“Briefly, what are the implications? Mr. Mukhtar’s accusation that the Indian secret service is sneaking saboteurs across the border via a parallel universe is pretty serious, but is it credible? What’s going on here?”

“Well, Dan, the hard fact is, nobody knows for sure who’s got this technique. We’ve seen it in action, it’s been used against us to great effect—and nobody knows who’s got it. As you can imagine, it’s spoiling a lot of military leaders’ sleep. If you can carry a nuclear weapon across time lines and have it materialize in a city, you can mount what’s called a first strike, a decapitation stroke: You can take out an enemy’s missiles and bombers on the ground before they can launch. Submarines are immune, luckily—”

“Why are submarines immune, Erik?”

“You’ve got to find them first, Dan, you can’t materialize a bomb inside a submarine that’s underwater unless you can find it. Bombers that are airborne are pretty much safe as well. But if they’re on the ground or in dry dock— it upsets the whole logic of nuclear deterrence. And India and Pakistan both have sizable nuclear arsenals, but no submarines, they’re all carried on bombers or ground-launched missiles. Into the middle of a hot war, the conflict over Kashmir with the artillery duels and machine gun attacks we’ve been hearing about these past weeks, it’s not new—they’ve fought four wars in the past thirty years—the news about this science-fictional new threat, it’s upset all the realities on the ground. India and Pakistan have both got to be afraid that the other side’s got a new tool that makes their nuclear arsenal obsolete, the capability to smuggle nukes through other worlds—and they’re already on three-minute warning, much like we were with the USSR in the fifties except that their capital cities are just five minutes apart as the missile flies.”

“But they wouldn’t be crazy enough to start a nuclear war over Kashmir, would they?”

“Nobody ever wants to be the first to start a nuclear war, Dan, that’s not in question. The trouble is, they may think the other side is starting one. Back in 1983, for example, a malfunctioning Russian radar computer told the Soviets that we’d launched on them. Luckily a Colonel Petrov kept his head and waited for more information to come in, but if he’d played by the rule book he’d have told Moscow they were under attack, and it’s anyone’s guess what could have happened. Petrov had fifteen minutes’ warning. Islamabad and New Delhi have got just three minutes to make up their minds, that’s why the Federation of American Scientists say they’re the greatest risk of nuclear war anywhere in the world today.”

“But that’s not going to happen—”

(

Fast forward

)

“Oh Jesus.” (

Bleeped mild expletive.

) “This can’t be—oh. I’m waiting for Bob, Bob Mancini on the India-Pakistan border. We’re going over live to Bob, as soon as we can raise him. Bob? Bob, can you hear me?… No? Bob? We seem to have lost Bob. Our hearts go out to him, to his family and loved ones, to everyone out there.…

“That was the emergency line from the Pentagon. America is not, repeat

not

, under attack. It’s not a repeat of 7/16, it’s … it appears that one of the Pakistani army or the Indian air force have gone—a nuclear bomb, a hydrogen bomb on Islamabad, other explosions in India. Amritsar, New Delhi, Lahore in Pakistan. I’m Dan Rather on CBS, keeping you posted on the latest developments in what are we calling this? World War Two-point-five? India and Pakistan. Five large nuclear explosions have been reported so far. We can’t get a telephone line to the subcontinent.

“Reports are coming in of airliners being diverted away from Indian and Pakistani airspace. The Pentagon has announced that America is not, repeat

not

, under attack, this is a purely local conflict between India and Pakistan. We’re going over live to Jim Patterson in Mumbai, India. Jim, what’s happening?”

“Hello Dan, it’s absolute chaos here, sirens going in the background, you can probably hear them. From here on the sixth floor of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel there’s traffic gridlocked throughout the city as people try to flee. In just a minute we’re going down into the basements where” (

Click.

)

“Jim? Jim? We seem to have lost Jim. Wait, we’re getting—oh no.

No.

”

END RECORDING

The View from Forty Thousand Feet

“I don’t know if this will work,” said Paulette. “I’ve never done it before.”

“Don’t worry, they’ll have set this up to be fail-safe. Believe me, we had enough trouble cracking their communication security—they know what they’re doing. You may not get an immediate answer, but they’ll know you paged them.”

“I don’t know how you can sit there and be so calm about it!”

Mike shrugged. “I’ve had a long time to get used to the idea,” he said. Not exactly true: He’d had a couple of weeks. But the stench of bureaucratic excess, the penumbra of the inquisition, had clouded his entire period of service at the Family Trade Organization. “Sometimes you can smell it when the place you work, when there’s a bad atmosphere? When people are doing stuff that isn’t quite right? But nobody says anything, so you think it’s just you, and you’re afraid to speak out.”

Paulie nodded. “Like Enron.”