Empire Games Series, Book 1(104)
LIAISON, STATE DEPT: Oh no, please don’t—
COL. SMITH: No interruptions, please. Ma’am, if you’d continue?
DR. SCRANTON: Thank you. Our threat posture for the past seventeen years has been based on the assumption that, although we whacked the Clan hard, we had no conclusive proof that we got them all. And we’ve had indications of anomalous false positives in the national surveillance infrastructure that might be caused by visiting world-walkers. Not to mention recent evidence of a world-walker-assisted espionage operation in a major city. So the precautionary principle dictated that we conduct operations as if they were out there. Hence Rita, hence DRAGON’S TEETH, and hence a bunch of other contingency plans you don’t need to know about.
I think we have to assume that the Clan—or other world-walkers—are definitely known to the Commonwealth, and that the authorities there know exactly what they’re looking at when they see signs of world-walking. Just like us, in other words. The worst-case scenario is that the surviving world-walkers from the Clan are working for the Commonwealth. By repeatedly trialing a JAUNT BLUE asset at the same location we inadvertently alerted them to the presence of a world-walker, and they saturated the area with bodies who knew what to expect. We’ve gotten inexcusably sloppy: we need to relearn all the tradecraft we’ve forgotten since the Berlin Wall came down. And unless Rita shows up in the next couple of days we must assume the worst—that she’s been captured and is being interrogated by people who know what she is. At which point I’ve got to have a revised plan ready for briefing that takes into account—Colonel?
COL. SMITH: There’s a worse-than-worst-case scenario, I’m afraid.
DR. SCRANTON: What?
COL. SMITH: You asked, what if world-walkers from the Clan are working for the Commonwealth. But turn it on its head. What if they’ve got Rita and know everything she knows—and the Commonwealth are working for the Clan?
END TRANSCRIPT
IRONGATE CENTRAL POLICE STATION, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020
Even though Rita was cooperating fully with the inspector’s line of questioning, it was clear that her answers weren’t satisfactory. After a couple of hours, Inspector Morgan called a toilet break. But Rita’s respite was short-lived. The inspector grilled her until late in the evening, then consigned her to a top-floor cell. She spent a bad night on a hard bunk, trying not to notice the periodic rattling of the inspection hatch. The next morning, everything started up again.
“So, let me see if I have this straight. You are Rita Douglas, age twenty-six. Previous occupation: thespian.” (The inspector’s language was weird—English, but with enough variant usage thrown in to suggest centuries of divergent evolution.) “You were inducted by an autonomous group within the Department of Homeland Security, in the wake of a kidnapping attempt by your long-lost world-walking relatives. The Unit is headed by a Colonel Smith, who reports to a Dr. Scranton.” She paused. “What is a medical practitioner doing in this Unit, Rita? Do you have an explanation?”
“I don’t think she’s an MD. Nobody told me what her doctorate was in.”
“Yet she uses the honorific—”
“That’s not uncommon for people with higher degrees, is it?”
“I see.” Inspector Morgan frowned, then stared at her with narrowed eyes, as if trying to recall the precise offense that applied. “Forget it.” Morgan’s lips thinned as she added another note to the book before her. The pen she used seemed to be a ballpoint of some kind, Rita saw, but everything here was a subtly different shape. “Back to the kidnapping. When and where exactly did it happen? Do you remember the date and time? I’d like you to walk me through it in detail.”
“Um, yeah. Uh, it was March the twenty-first, a Friday evening in Boston. I’d just flown back from Seattle—”
“‘Sea-attle’? Is that a city? Where is it?”
Oh God. “Um, it’s on the West Coast? Between Vancouver and Portland—”
“How do you spell ‘Vancouver’? Is that another city?”
“Yes.” Rita spelled it, then spelled “Seattle.” “It’s on Puget Sound, a deep bay way up the coast near the border with Canada.”
“‘Can-ada’? What is ‘Canada’?” A five-minute detour taxed Rita’s knowledge of eighteenth-century history to the utmost, before the inspector caught herself. “Let us pass over this for a while—it is of low significance. You were on the ‘west coast,’ and you flew to the ‘east coast.’” The inspector sounded skeptical, as if flying was something too exotic to associate with the woman before her. “What happened then?”
“Oh, I caught the T—sorry, the commuter train—to the garage where I’d left my car. It was about eleven o’clock at night when I got there, and the place was nearly deserted, so I paid my parking ticket and went to my car when some guy tased me—”
“‘Tased’?”
“A taser is, uh, an electric dart gun. Hurts like f—like a snakebite. Worse. It paralyzed me and I fell over and two men picked me up and rolled me into the trunk of my car and—”
“A trunk is a baggage compartment, isn’t it?”
A buzzer sounded from deep in the guts of the odd-looking desk telephone, rescuing Rita from a hellish spiral of ever-converging footnotes that served only to make her dizzy and irritable, highlighting the conceptual gulf separating this world from her own.