The Family Trade

“What if there are two groups sending assassins?” she asked the night watchman. He gri

She racked her brains for the precise number of paces from the stairs up to her room to the back door opening into the grounds of the palace. Then she remembered the crates laid out below. The entrance will be next door, she realized. She jumped out of the trailer with its reek of icy death and dashed across to the far wall of the warehouse—the one corresponding to the main entrance vestibule of the palace. It was solid brick, with no doors. “Damn!” She slipped around to the front door and out into the alley, then paced out the fifty feet it would take. Then she carefully examined the next frontage.

It was a bonded warehouse. Iron bars fronted all the dust-smeared windows, and metal shutters hid everything within from view. The front door was padlocked heavily and looked as if nobody had opened it in years. ‘This has got to be it,” she muttered, looking up at the forbidding façade. What better way to block off the entrance to a palace on the other side? Probably most of the rooms behind the windows were bricked off or even filled with concrete, corresponding to the positions of the secure spaces on the other side. But there had to be some kind of access to the public reception area, didn’t there?

Miriam moved her locket to her left hand and pulled out her pistol. “How the hell do they do this in the movies?” she asked herself as she probed around the chain. “Oh well.” She carefully aimed the gun away from her, at the hasp of the padlock. Then she pulled the trigger.

The crack of the gun was deafeningly loud in the night time quiet, but the lock parted satisfyingly easily. Miriam yanked it away, opened the bolt, and pushed the door in.

An alarm began to jangle somewhere inside the building. She jumped, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it She was standing at one end of a dusty linoleum-floored corridor. A flick of a switch and the dim lights came on, lighting a path into the gloom past metal gates like jail cell doors that blocked access to rooms piled ceiling-high with large barrels. Miriam closed the door behind her and strode down the corridor as fast as she dared, hoping desperately that she was right about where it led. There was a reception room at the end: cheap desks and chairs covered in dust sheets and a locked and bolted back door. It was about the right distance, she decided. Taking a deep breath, she raised her locket and focused on the symbol engraved inside it—

—And she was cold, and the lights were out, and her skull felt as if she’d run headfirst into a brick wall. Snowflakes fell on her as she doubled over, trying to prevent the intense nausea from turning into vomiting. I did that too fast, she thought vaguely between waves of pain. Even with the beta-blockers. The process of world-walking seemed to do horrible things to her blood pressure. Good thing I’m not on antidepressants, she thought grimly. She forced herself to stand up and saw that she was just in the garden behind the palace—outdoors. Anyone trying to invade the palace by way of the doppelgänger warehouse on the other side would find themselves under the guns of the tower above—if the defences were ma

An iron gate in the wall behind her was the mirror image of the door to the warehouse office. “Orangery,” she muttered through gritted teeth. She slid along the wall like a shadow, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the night. The orangery was a familiar hump in the snow, but something was wrong. The door was ajar, letting the precious heat (and how many servants did it take to keep that boiler fed?) escape into the winter air.

“Well, isn’t that just too cute,” she whispered, tightening her grip on her pistol. ‘Welcome to my parlor’ said the spider to the fly, she thought. The style is all wrong. Assassin #1 breaks into my mom and shoots up the bedding. Twice. Assassin #2 tries to bounce Olga into shooting me for him, then sends an RSVP on an engraved card. Assassin #3 shows me an open door. Which of these things is not like the other? She shivered—and not from the cold: the hot rage she’d been holding back ever since she’d first been abducted was taking hold.

The wall at this end of the orangery was of brick, and the glassy arch of the ceiling was low, begi

On top of the wall she could look out across a corrugated sheet of whiteness—the snow was settling on the orangery faster than the heat from below could melt it. Leaning forward, she used her sleeve to rub a clear swathe in the glass. Paraffin lamps shed a thin glow through the orangery, helping with the warmth and providing enough light to see by. To Miriam’s night-adapted vision it was like a glimpse into a dim subterranean hell. She hunted around and saw, just behind the door, a hunched shadow. And after a minute of watching—during which time her hands began to grow numb—she saw the shadow move, shifting in position just like a man shuffling his feet in the cold draft from outside.

“Right,” she whispered tensely, feeling an intense, burning sense of hatred for the figure on the other side, just as the door opened further and someone else came in.

What happened then happened almost too fast to see—Miriam froze atop the window, unable to breathe in the cold air, her head throbbing until she wondered if she was coming down with a full-blown migraine. The shadow flowed forward behind the person who’d entered the orangery. There was a flurry of activity, then a body collapsed on the floor in a spreading pool of… of—Holy shit, thought Miriam, he’s killed him!

Shocked out of her angry reverie, she slid back down the drainpipe, scraping hands and cheek on the rough stonework, and landed in a snowdrift hard enough that it nearly knocked the breath out of her. Quick! Fumbling for her pistol, she skidded toward the door and yanked it open. She brought the gun up in time to see a man turning toward her. He was dressed all in black, his face covered by a ski mask or something similar: The long knife in his hand was red with blood as he straightened up from the body at his feet. “Stop—” Miriam called. He didn’t stop, and time telescoped in on her. Two shots in the torso, two more—then the dry click of a hammer on a spent cartridge. The killer collapsed toward her and Miriam shook her head and took a step back, wishing she hadn’t heard the sound of bullets striking flesh.

Time caught up with her again. “Shit!” She called out, heart lurching between her ribs like a frightened animal. A sense of gathering wrongness overcame her, as if what had just happened was impossible. Another old reflex caught up, and she stepped forward. “Gurney—” she bit her tongue. There were no gurneys here, no haemostats, no competent nurses to get the bleeding staunched and no defibrillators—and especially no packets of plasma and operating theatres in which to struggle for the victim’s life.

She found herself an indefinite time later—probably only seconds had passed, although it felt like hours—staring down at a spreading pool of blood around her feet. Blood, and the body of a man, dressed from head to foot in black. A long curve-bladed knife lay beside him. Behind him—“Mar-git!” It was Lady Margit, Olga’s chaperone. The fat lady had sung her last: There was nothing to be done. She still twitched, and maybe a modern ER room could have done something for her—but not here, not with a massive exsanguinating chest wound that had already stopped pumping. Probably the dorsal aorta or a ventricle, she realized. Oh hell. What was she doing here! For a moment, Miriam wished she believed in something—someone—who’d look after Margit. But there wasn’t time for that now.