instinctively at the stranger standing in the entrance to his cubicle. “Yes?”
The stranger wore a visitor’s badge, and there was something odd about him. Not the casual Friday clothes; it took Steve a moment to spot the cast on his leg. “You’re Steve Schroeder?”
“Who wants to know?”
The stranger shrugged. “You don’t know me.” He produced a police ID card. Steve sat up, squinting at the badge.
“Not my department; Crime’s upstairs on—”
“No, I think I need to talk to you. You commissioned a bunch of articles by Miriam Beckstein a couple of years ago, didn’t you?”
“Haven’t heard from her for a while, have you?”
Alarm bells were going off in his head. “Has she been arrested? I don’t know anything; we had a strictly business relationship—”
“She hasn’t been arrested.” Fleming’s gaze flickered sidelong; if Steve hadn’t been staring at him he might not have noticed. “She mentioned you, actually, a couple of years ago. Listen, I don’t know anyone here, and I’ve got very limited time, so I thought I’d try you and see if you could direct me to the right people.” He swallowed. “She pointed me at a story, kind of, before she disappeared. I need to see it breaks, and breaks publicly, or
“No, that’s all right.”
“Because—” Fleming was looking around. “Mind if I sit down?”
Steve took a deep breath and gestured at the visitor’s chair by his desk. “Go ahead. In your own time.”
“Last year Miriam Beckstein lost her job. You know about that?”
Steve nodded, guardedly. “You want to tell me about it?”
“It wasn’t the regular post-9/11 slowdown; she was fired because she stumbled across a highly sophisticated money-laundering operation. Drug money, and lots of it.”
Steve nodded again. Trying to remember: What had Miriam said? She’d been working for the
“Sure. Be my guest.” Fleming laughed as Steve activated his recorder. It was a hoarse bark, too much stress bottled up behind it. “Listen, this isn’t just about drugs, and I know it’s going to sound nuts, so let me start with some supporting evidence. An hour ago, my car was blown up. The news desk will probably have a report on it, incident in Braintree—” He proceeded to give an address. “I’m being targeted because I’m considered unreliable by the organization I’ve been working for on secondment. You can check on that bombing. If you wait until this afternoon, I’m afraid—shit. There’s going to be a terrorist strike this afternoon in D.C., and it’s bigger than 9/11. That’s why I’m here. There’s a faction in the government who have decided to run an updated version of Operation Northwoods, and they’ve maneuvered a narcoterrorist group into taking the fall for it. I’m—I was—attached to a special cross-agency task force working on the narcoterrorist ring in question. They’re the folks Miriam stumbled across—and it turns out that they’re big, bigger than the Medellin Cartel, and they’ve got contacts all the way to the top.”
“Operation—what was that operation you mentioned?” Steve stared at his visitor.
“Operation Northwoods. Back in 1962, during the Cold War, the Chiefs of Staff came up with a false flag project to justify an invasion of Cuba. The idea was that the CIA would fake up terrorist attacks on American cities, and plant evidence pointing at Castro. They were going to include hijackings, bombings, the lot—the most extreme scenarios included small nukes, or attacks on the capitol; it was all ‘Remember the
“But they can’t—” Steve stopped. “They’ve just invaded Iraq! Why would they want to do this now? If they were going to—”
“Iraq was the president’s hobbyhorse. And no, I’m not saying that 9/11 was stage-managed to drag us into that war; that would be paranoid. But there’s a whole new enemy on hand, and a black cross-agency program to deal with them called Family Trade, and some of us aren’t too happy about the way things are being run. Let me fill you in on what’s been going on.…”
Evacuation
The marcher kingdoms of the East Coast, from the Nordtmarkt south, were scantily populated by American standards: The Gruinmarkt’s three to four million—there was no exact census—could handily live in New York City with room to spare. The Clan and their outer families (related by blood, but not for the most part gifted with the world-walking talent) were at their most numerous in the Gruinmarkt, but even there their total extended families barely reached ten thousand souls. The five inner families had, between them, a couple of thousand adult world- walkers and perhaps twice that many children (and some seniors and pregnant women for whom world-walking would be a hazardous, if not lethal, experience).
At one point in the 1930s, American style, the inner families alone had counted ten thousand adult world- walkers; but the Clan’s long, festering civil war had been a demographic disaster. To an organization that relied for its viability on a carefully husbanded recessive gene, walking the line between inbreeding and extinction, a series of blood feuds between families had sown the seeds of collapse.
Nearly twenty years ago, Angbard, Duke Lofstrom, the chief of the Clan’s collective security agency, had started a program to prevent such a collapse from ever again threatening the Clan. He’d poured huge amounts of money into funding a network of fertility clinics in the United States, and the children of that initiative were now growing to adulthood, ignorant of the genes (and other, more exotic intracellular machinery) for which they were carriers. Angbard’s plan had been simple and direct: to approach young female carriers selected from the clinics’ records, and pay them to act as host mothers for fictional infertile couples. The result was to be a steady stream of world-walkers, raised in the United States and not loyal to the quarreling families, who could be recruited in due course. Miriam, Helge, had been raised in Boston by Angbard’s sister as an experiment in cultural assimilation, not to mention a political insurance policy: Other children of the Clan had been schooled and trained in the ways and knowledge of the exotic West.
But Angbard had planned on being around to coordinate the recruitment of the new world-walkers. He hadn’t expected Matthias’s defection, or the exposure of the clinics to hostile inspection, and he hadn’t anticipated the reaction of the Auld Bitches, the gaggle of grandmothers whose carefully arranged marriages kept the traditional Clan structure afloat. Their tame gynecologist, Dr. ven Hjalmar, was a stalwart of the conservative club. He’d been the one who, at Baron Henryk’s bidding, had arranged for Helge’s involuntary pregnancy. He’d also acquired the breeding program records for his faction and, most recently, taken pains to ensure that Angbard would never again threaten their prestige as gatekeepers of the family trade. And now the surviving members of the Clan’s conservative clique—the ones who hadn’t been massacred by Prince Egon at the ill-fated betrothal feast—were cleaning up.
On that July morning, approximately one in every hundred world-walkers died.
In his private chambers in the Ostrood House, Baron Julius Arnesen was shot dead by Sir Gavaign Thorold.
Lord Mors Hjalmar, his eldest son Euen, and wife Gretyl were blown up by a satchel charge of PETN delivered
