The Clan Corporate

Farnsworth shook his head. "All hell's broken loose, the seventh seal has sounded, and I very much fear that we are about to be bathed in the blood of ten million lambs-conscripted into a war started as a distraction from the empty larders of the provinces, a matter which has most exercised the prime minister these past weeks." He grabbed Burgeson's hand. "You've got to do something! Make your friends listen! It's the outside threat to distract and befuddle us, the oldest trick in the library. A brief successful war to wrap themselves in the glory of the flag and justify calls for austerity and belt-tightening, and to distract attention from the empty coffers and supply a pretext to issue war bonds. Only this time, we know the Frogs have got corpses. And so have we. So it's going to be an unusually violent war. And of course they'll clamp down on dissenters and Ranters. They'll implement French rule here, if you give them the chance." French rule-summary justice, the martial law of the Duc du Muscovy. The Stolypin necktie as an answer to all arguments, as that strange otherworld history book Miriam had given him had put it. Erasmus felt cold sweat spring out at the back of his neck.

"I'll tell them immediately," he said, rising.

"Your drink-"

"You finish it. You look as if you need it more than I do. I've got a job to do."

"Good luck."

Erasmus dived into the throng of agitated, wildly speculating men filling the bar and worked his way outside. A street hawker was selling the last of the evening edition: he snagged a copy and stared at the headlines. arab terror screamed the masthead in dripping red letters above an engravature of the boy prince lying on the ground, his eyes open. "Shit." Erasmus looked around, searching for a cab. I'll have to notify Lady Bishop, he thought, and Iron John. Find out what the Central Committees want to do about the situation. Another thought struck him. I must talk to Miriam; she knows of other worlds more advanced than this. They're ruled by republics, they must have corpuscular weapons-I wonder what she knows about them? A cab pulled up and he climbed in. Perhaps we could achieve a better negotiating position if the movement had some…

Breakout

Mike realized something was wrong the moment he passed the checkpoint on the fourteenth floor and found Pete Garfinkle and Colonel Smith waiting for him, with a blue-suiter behind them. The guard was carrying a gun and trying to look in six different directions simultaneously. This worried Mike. Armed guards were a normal fact of life in the FTO, but nervous ones were something new.

"What's up?" he asked.

"We have a problem," said Smith.

"Matt went for a walk about two hours ago," said Pete, nervously fingering his document folder.

"Went for a-"

"Down the express elevator from the twenty-third floor, or so it would appear judging from the elevator logs," Smith added. "Although there's no evidence he was actually in the elevator car except for the RFID tags concealed in his underwear. Which he is no longer wearing. And there's a missing window on the twenty-third floor. Shall we talk about it?"

They went up to the newly installed Vault Type Room on the nineteenth floor and Smith signed them in. Then they authenticated each other and locked the door. The blue-suiter waited outside, which was a relief to Mike-but only a temporary one. "Do we know where he went?" he asked as soon as they were seated around the transparent conference table.

"Not a clue." Smith inclined his head toward Pete. "Dr. James is going to shit a brick the size of the World Trade Center as soon as he finds out, which is"-he glanced at his wrist-watch-"going to happen in about thirty minutes, so it is important that we are singing from the same hymn book before he drops in. Unless we can find our runaway first." The colonel gri

I'm not on the spot, Mike realized with an enormous sense of guilt-tinged relief-because it meant someone else was going to catch it in the neck. "He seemed perfectly fine, to be honest. A bit stir-crazy, but that's not unexpected. He wasn't depressed or suicidal or excessively edgy, if that's what you're looking for. Why? What happened?"

Colonel Smith shook his head and shoved his voice recorder closer to Mike's side of the table. "Summarize first. Then we'll go round the circle. Treat this as a legal deposition. Afterward I'll fill you in."

"Okay." Mike recounted his last meeting with Matthias. "He was asking about his Witness Protection Program status, but-" Mike stopped dead. "You said he took a lift down from the twenty-third-floor window. He was on the twenty-fourth floor. With no direct elevator between them. How'd he get downstairs?" Through two security checkpoints and four locked doors and then downstairs in an elevator car with a webcam and a security guard?

"Later," Smith said firmly.

"Uh, I'd like to register a note of caution here. Did anyone see Client Zero move between floors twenty-four and twenty-three? And was there any evidence that he left the building by one of the ground-level doors?"

There was a pregnant pause.

"I'd have to say that we don't know that," said Smith. His eyes tracked, almost imperceptibly, toward the door outside which the blue-suiter with the gun would be standing guard.

"Oh." Oh shit, thought Mike.

"I'm betting he got riled up and broke out," said Smith, his voice even. "How he managed that is a troubling question, as is why he chose to do it right at this moment. But he's a smart cookie, is Client Zero. Just in case he had outside help, we're going to full Case Red lockdown. Nobody goes below the tenth floor without an armed escort until we've clarified the situation."

"He can't have evaded our monitoring completely, even if he managed to bypass the guards."

Smith's pager beeped for attention. He glanced at it, then stood up: "I'm going to deposit this, then take a call. Back in ten minutes." He disappeared through the door, taking the voice recorder and leaving Mike and Pete alone in the windowless room with the glass furniture and the vault fittings.

"He got stir-crazy," said Mike.

Pete looked at him.

"What am I not hearing?" asked Mike.

Pete coughed. "After your last meeting I dropped in on him. He was pissed-you said you'd been called away-"

"By Eric, he can confirm it-"

"Well sure, but Matt didn't see it that way, he thought you were bullshitting. He was worried. So to get him calmed down I tried to draw him out a bit about why he came over to us. I mean, you've been doing all those grammar sessions and he was getting bored, you know?"

"Okay." Mike leaned back to listen.

Pete got into the flow of things. "He had this crazy paranoid-sounding rant about how he was a second-class citizen as far as the bad guys are concerned, on account of how he can't do the magic disappearing trick-well, I'll buy that. And then something about a long-lost cousin turning up and destabilizing some plans of his. Seems she grew up on our side of the fence, worked in Cambridge as some kind of tech journalist. They rediscovered her by accident and she made the wheels fall off Matt's little red wagon by snooping around and stirring up shit. So Matt tried to persuade this Helga woman to get off his case and she-she's called Miriam something here, something Jewish-sounding-"

Can't be, thought Mike. She can't be the same woman. The idea was too preposterous for words.

Pete stopped. "What is it?" he asked.

"Nothing. So what happened? What went wrong with Matt's plans?"

"She wouldn't blackmail-he said she wouldn't play ball, but that's my reading-and there's some stuff about her discovering a whole other world where the Clan guys have got a bunch of relatives who don't like them and who were paying Matt to look after their interests-he's always been a bit of a moonlighter-and the upshot is, he had to cut and run. He's still pissed at her. He came to us because he figured we'd protect him from his former associates."