The Family Trade

“Huh?” She raised her eyebrows.

“My surprise.” He looked smug.

“I thought I was your surprise.” He’d been surprised enough when she came through the door—but he’d kissed her, and one thing led to another, and they hadn’t even made it as far as the bed the first time. Now she sat up on the rumpled sheets, brushing one hand up and down his thigh and watching his face. “About your uncle’s plans. What do you think Olga makes of them?”

Roland looked pained. “She doesn’t get a say in it. She’s a naive little dutiful contessa who’ll do as Angbard tells her parents to tell her.”

“If that’s what you and Angbard think, you may be in for a nasty surprise.” Miriam watched him carefully. “You don’t know her very well, do you?”

“I’ve met her a time or two,” he said, slightly puzzled.

“Well, I have just spent several days in her company and that little minx may be young and naive, but she isn’t dumb. In fact, it’s lucky for me she’s smart and doesn’t want to marry you any more than you want her—otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.”

“What—”

“She nearly shot me.”

“Holy Crone Wife! What happened?”

“Let go! You’re hurting—”

“Sorry.” He sat up and gently put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. You caught me by surprise. Tell me all about it. Everything. Don’t leave anything out. My gods—I am so glad you’re here and safe now.” He hugged her. “Tell me everything. In your own time.”

‘Time is the one thing I don’t think we’ve got.” She leaned against him. “Someone sent Olga an unwelcome gift—a rape-o-gram. Luckily for me, but unluckily for the thug concerned, Olga’s childlike enthusiasms include embroidery, violins, haute couture, and semiautomatic weapons. She found a commission in his back pocket, with my seal on it and a purse of coin sufficient to pay the kind of maidenprice Oliver might ask for someone he really didn’t like much. Roland, I didn’t even know I had a seal.”

“ ‘A seal.’” He looked away just as someone knocked on the door. Miriam jumped. “I’ll get it—”

“No! Wait!” Miriam scrabbled for her jacket, fumbled in its pockets. “Okay, now you can open the door. When I’m out of sight.”

Roland glanced at her as he tied his bathrobe. “It’s only room service, isn’t it?”

“I’m not taking any chances.” She crouched against the wall around the corner from the door, pistol cradled in both hands.

“Will you give that up? If it’s the DEA, we have very expensive lawyers who’ll have us both out on bail in about thirty microseconds.”

“It’s not the DEA I’m worried about,” she said through gritted teeth. “It’s my long-lost family.”

“Well, if you put it that way …” Roland opened the door. Miriam tensed. “Thank you,” she heard him tell someone. “That’s great, if you could leave it just here.” A moment later, she heard the door close, then a squeaking of wheels. Roland appeared, pushing a trolley upon which sat an ice bucket with a bottle of something poking out of it.

“This is your surprise?” she asked, lowering the gun.

He nodded. “You are on edge,” he observed. “Listen, do you want me to chain the door and hang out a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign?”

“I think that would be a good start.” She was shivering. Worse, she had no idea where it had come from. “I’m not used to people trying to shoot me, love. It’s not the kind of thing that normally happens to a journalist, unless you’re a war correspondent.”

She put the gun down on the bedside table.

“Listen, Château Rothschild ’98. Sound all right to you?” He brandished the bottle.

“Sounds perfect. Open it now, dammit, I need a drink!”

He peered at her. “You do, at that,” he said. “One moment…”  He popped the cork carefully, then slowly filled two fluted glasses, taking care not to spray the champagne everywhere. He passed her a glass, then raised his own. ‘To your very good health.”

‘To us—and the future.” She took a sip. “Whatever the hell that means.”

“You were telling me about Olga.”

“Olga and I had a little conversation at cross-purposes. She was raised to never unintentionally cause offence, so she gave me time to confess before she shot me. Luckily, I confessed to the wrong crime. Did you know that you’re an, uh, ‘dried-up prematurely middle-aged sack of ma

“Well, it’s mutual.” Roland sat in the chair opposite the end of the bed, looking disturbed. “Have you any idea how the man got into her apartments?”

“Yup. Through my own, by way of the roof. Turns out that the rooms Baron Oliver assigned me aren’t doppelgängered—or rather they are, but the location on this side is unprotected. And aren’t I supposed to have bodyguards or something? Anyway, that’s why I came here. I figured it was safer than spending the night in an apartment that has a neon sign on the door saying ASSASSINS THIS WAY, with cousins next door who seem to have opened a betting pool on my life expectancy.”

“Someone tried to rape Olga?” Roland shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It does if I was their first target and they meant to kill me, but couldn’t get at me directly: it was a contingency plan, to set up a blood feud between us.” Briefly, she told him about the open staircase, and her instructions to lock and bolt all the doors on the inside. “I don’t feel safe there, I really don’t.”

“Hmm.” He took a mouthful of wine. “I don’t know.” He looked thoughtful rather than shocked. “I can eliminate some suspects, but not everybody.” He glanced up at her, worry writ large across his face. “First, it’s not official. It’s family, not Clan business. If it was the Clan, they’d have sent soldiers. You’ve seen what we’ve got over here.” She nodded. “Our enforcement teams—you don’t bother resisting.

They’re better armed, better trained, and better paid than the FBI’s own specialist counterterrorism units.”

“Well, I guessed that much,” she said.

“Yes. Anyway, for seconds it’s too damned blatant—and that’s worrying. Whoever did it is out of control. Oliver Hjorth might dislike you and feel threatened, but he wouldn’t try to kill you in his own house. Not offering you a guard of honour is another matter, but to be implicated—no.” He shook his head. “As for Olga, that’s very disturbing. It sounds as if someone set her up to kill you or cause a scandal that would isolate you—one or the other. And you are probably right about being the intruder’s first target. That means it’s an insider—and that’s the frightening part. Someone who knows that you don’t know the families well, that you can be cut apart from the pack and isolated, that you are unguarded. Someone like that, who is acting like they’re out of control. A rogue, in other words.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock.” She drained her glass and refilled it. “Y’know something? One of these days we may eventually make an investigative journalist out of you.”

“In your dreams—I’m a development economist.” He frowned at the floor in front of her feet, as if it concealed an answer. “Let’s start from where we are. You’ve told Olga about us. That means if we’re lucky she doesn’t tell Angbard. If she does, if Olga tells him about us, he could—do you have any idea what he could do?”

“What?” She shook her head. “Listen, Roland, I didn’t grow up under the Clan’s thumb. Thinking this way is alien to me. I don’t really give a flying fuck what Angbard thinks. If I behave the way they seem to expect me to, I will be dead before the week is out. And if I survive, things won’t be much better for me. The Clan is way out of date and overdue for a dose of compulsory modernization, both at the business level and the personal. If the masked maniac doesn’t succeed in murdering me, the Clan will expect me to go live like a medieval noble lady—fuck that! I’m not going to do it. I’ll live with the consequences later.”