The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (38 page)

*

In a mosquito-infested marsh on the banks of a sluggish river, a draft of peasants from the estates of the Earl of Dankfurt had assembled a scaffold. The framework of stout
timber and planking bore a winch and some additional contrivances, and despite its crude appearance it had been positioned very carefully indeed. Blood and sweat had gone into its location, and the
use of imported surveying tools to measure very precisely indeed its distance and altitude relative to the four reference points where Clan couriers had established accurate GPS locations before
crossing over from Washington D.C.

(Accurately locating anything in the Sudtmarkt was problematic, but where there was a need – and urgency – there was a way: and with four reference points, theodolites, and
standardized lengths of chain, positioning to within a couple of inches at a distance of up to a mile was perfectly achievable. Besides, Gunnar had insisted on three-inch precision with the icy
certainty of punishment from above to back him up. And so it was done.)

‘This is the entry point?’ asked the visitor.

‘Yes, my lord.’ Gunnar turned and gestured towards a nearby copse of trees, climbing the gentle slope. ‘And right over – there, past the tree line – you should just
be able to see the tower for the department store on Pennsylvania Avenue. Site three is, I’m afraid, not visible from here, being on the other side of the river, but construction is complete.
We carried out our intrusion tests yesterday shortly after closing time and everything worked perfectly.’

‘Intrusion tests?’

‘A courier, outfitted with cover as a tourist, to make sure our proposed sites were workable. He crossed over ten minutes after the museum closed, to ensure there were no human witnesses,
then made his way out when the alarm system went off. His story was that he’d been in the rest room and hadn’t noticed the time. Along the way, he checked for motion detectors in the
rest rooms, that sort of thing, to ensure a witness-free transit point.’

‘Excellent. And the others?’

‘Shops are a little bit harder to probe, so I checked the store in reverse, myself – I crossed over from the other side. Found we were three inches too low on this side, so I raised
the platform accordingly. We will have to risk their store security noticing that they lost a shopper, but they are most likely to assume that I was simply an artful thief.’

One of the visiting lord’s companions was making notes in a planner; another of them held a large parasol above his lordship’s head. His lordship looked thoughtful for a few seconds.
‘And how do you probe the third site?’

‘Ah, well.’ Gunnar froze for a few seconds. ‘
That
one we can’t send a world-walker into. We can fool store security guards who are looking for shoplifters, but
soldiers with machine guns are another matter. We will just have to do it blind and get it right first time. On the other hand, I managed to get a verified GPS reading and a distance estimate to
the facade from the car park by pretending to be lost tourists, and the outer dimensions of the building itself are well-known. I am certain – I place my honor on it – that site three
is within four or five feet of the geometric center of the complex, at ground level.’

‘What about the subway station?’

‘It’s been closed since 9/11, unfortunately, otherwise that would be ideal. Damned amateurs with their box-cutters . . .’

‘Leave me. Not you, Gunnar.’

Gunnar stared at his visitor. ‘My lord?’

The parasol- and planner-bearers and the bodyguards were also staring at his lordship. ‘All of you, go and wait with the carriage a while. I must talk with Sir Gunnar in
confidence.’

Heads ducked; without further ado, the servants and guards backed away then turned and filed towards the edge of the clearing. His lordship watched with ill-concealed impatience until the last
of them was out of easy earshot, before turning to Gunnar.

‘You must tell me the truth, sir. I’m informed that our superiors have a definite goal in mind, for which they require certain assurances.
Both
our necks – and those of
others – are at risk should this scheme fail. If, in your estimate, it is doomed, please say so now. There will be censure, certainly, but it will be nothing compared to the punishment that
will fall on both of us should we make the attempt and fail.’

Gunnar nodded thoughtfully. ‘Your staff, how many of them . . . ?’

‘At least two spies, for opposing factions.’

‘Ah, well that makes it clear, then.’ Gunnar took a deep breath. ‘This is a huge risk we’re taking. And you just revealed your internal security coverage. You know that,
don’t you?’

‘The spies in question will have a boating accident involving alligators around sunset this evening.’ His lordship smiled humorlessly. ‘We – my superiors – have
chewed the plan to pieces. Our other choices are no better. The pretender saw to that with his betrothalday massacre and the radicals have been happy to complete his work. But. My question. Can you
make it work?’

‘Well.’ Gunnar raised his hat to run fingers through his hair. ‘I believe so, given the men and the machines. Sites one and two are not professionally secured. The
Anglischprache, they rely too much on machines to do the work of men. I will need a team of four world-walkers for each of those two sites, including two Security men who can kill without
hesitation if necessary. And the, ah, janitor’s carts we discussed. They will need to synchronize their time in advance, and if anyone is out of position it will fail. And you will need to
supply the devices and they must work, and at least one man on each team must be trained in setting their timers. But I am, um . . . I believe we have a one-in-fifty chance of failure for sites one
and two. It’s a solid plan.’

‘And site three?’

Gunnar wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘Site three is the tricky one. Unlike one and two, it’s going to happen in full view of a whole bunch of soldiers who have been on the alert
for terrorist attackers for the past two years, ever since a couple of hundred of their comrades were slain. We need two world-walkers – one to get them in, and one to get himself and his
partner out – and the device must be pre-set with a very short timer, no more than one minute. And even then, I would only give the insertion team a fifty-fifty chance of getting out in one
piece. The only thing in its favor is surprise.’

‘Hmm.’

‘What about team four?’ Gunnar asked slyly.

‘Team four?’ His lordship raised one sculpted eyebrow. ‘There is no team four.’

‘Really?’ Gunnar fanned himself with his hat. ‘I find that hard to believe, my lord. Or perhaps our superiors are holding something in reserve . . . ?’

His lordship snorted. ‘They’re targeting the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon – what more do you want?’

‘That bitch in Niejwein.’

His lordship winked. ‘Already taken care of, Sir Gunnar. But I advise you to forget I told you so. Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing.’

*

Room 4117 was scaring Mike. Not the room itself, but what its contents implied.

Matthias’s – source GREENSLEEVES’s – voice featured prominently in his dreams as he doggedly plowed through the box of cassette tapes, transcribing and backing up,
listening and rewinding, making notes and cross-checking the dictionaries and lexicons that other, more skilled linguists were working on with the detainees FTO had squirreled away in an
underground dungeon somewhere. FTO had access to some of the NSA’s most skilled linguists, and they were making progress, more progress in weeks than Mike had made in months. Which
realization did not fill him with joy; rather, it made him ask:
Why has Dr. James stuck me in here to do this job when there are any number of better translators available?

There were any number of answers to that question, but only the most paranoid one stood up to scrutiny: that this material was toxic or contagious, and only a translator who was already
hopelessly compromised by exposure to secrets and lies should be given access to it. Mike had worked with source GREENSLEEVES in person, had been infiltrated into a Clan palace in the Gruinmarkt,
and knew some of the ugly little truths about Dr. James and his plans.
James wants me here so he can keep an eye on me
, Mike realized, staring at the calendar behind his monitor one
afternoon.
He gets some use out of me and meanwhile I’m locked down as thoroughly as if he’d stuck me in one of those holding cells
. He shivered slightly, despite the humid
warmth that the air conditioning was fighting a losing battle to keep at bay.

The further into the tapes he got, the dirtier he felt. Someone – probably Matt, but he had an uneasy feeling that there was someone else in the loop – had wired a number of offices,
both in the Gruinmarkt and, it appeared, in locations around the US. And they’d recorded a whole bunch of meetings in which various deeply scary old men had talked business. Much of it was
innocent enough, by the standards of your everyday extradimensional narcoterrorist ring – move shipment X to port Y, bribe such a local nobleman to raise a peasant levy to carry it, how many
knights shall we send, sir? – but every so often Mike ran across a segment that made him sit bolt upright in alarm, doubting the evidence of his own ears. And some of this stuff went back
years
. These recordings were anything but new. And bits of them, mixing broken English with Hochsprache, were unambiguous and chilling in their significance:

‘Another five hundred thousand to the Partnership for a Drug-Free America,’ said the old guy with the chilly voice and the accent like a fake Nazi general in a 50’s war movie.
‘Feed it through the top four pressure trusts.’

‘What about the other items . . . ?’

‘Commission those, too. I believe we can stretch to sixty thousand to fund the additional studies, and they will provide valuable marketing material. Nobody looks at the source of this
funding too closely, the police and prisons lobby discourage it.’ A dry chuckle. ‘The proposal on drug-screening prisons will be helpful, too. I think we should encourage it.’

Mike paused the tape again and sat, staring at the computer screen for a while. The skin in the small of his back felt as if it was crawling off his spine.
Did I just hear that?
He
wondered.
Did I just hear one of the biggest cocaine smugglers in North America ordering his accountant to donate half a million dollars to a zero-tolerance pressure group? Jesus, what is the
world coming to?

It made economic sense, if you looked at it from a sufficiently cynical perspective; it was not in the Clan’s interest for the price of the commodity they shifted to drop – and drop
it surely would, if it was legalized or if the pressure to keep up the war on drugs ever slackened. But for Mike Fleming, who’d willingly given the best years of his life to the DEA, it was a
deeply unsettling idea; nauseating, even.
Bought and sold: We’re doing the dealers’ work for them, keeping prices high
.

His fingers hunted over the keyboard blindly, stabbing for letters as he stared through the glass screen, eyes unfocused. Eventually he stopped and pressed PLAY again.

‘ – Tell them first, though: They’ll need to make suitable accounting arrangements so that it doesn’t show up in the PAC’s cash flow if they’re
audited.’

A grunt of assent and the conversation switched track to inconsequentialities, something about one of the attendees’ – a count’s – daughter’s impending wedding,
gossip about someone else’s urgent desire to obtain the current season of
Friends
on tape or DVD. And then the meeting broke up.

Mike hit the PAUSE button again and massaged his forehead. Then, glancing mistrustfully at the screen, he scribbled a note to himself on the legal pad next to the mouse mat: LOOK INTO CREATIVE
ACCT. RE. PAC PAY-OFFS? And: COUNT INSMANN’S DAUGHTER’S MARRIAGE -> POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS. It was a tenuous enough lead to go on, but the Clan’s political entanglements were
sufficiently personal that the wedding gossip might actually be the most important news on this tape.

Then he pressed PLAY again.

Whatever device Dr. James’s mole had been using to bug these meetings seemed to be sound-triggered, with about a thirty-second delay. Mike waited for the beep as the machine rolled on to
the next recording, ready to laboriously translate and transcribe what he could. It was the old man, the duke, again, talking to a woman – younger, if Mike was any judge of such things, but .
. . ‘I’m not happy about the situation in D.C., my lady.’ ‘Is there ever anything to be happy about in that town, your grace?’

‘Sometimes. The trouble is, the people with whom we do business change too fast, and this new gang – this
old
gang, rather, in new office – they get above
themselves.’

‘Can you blame them? They are fresh in the power and glory of the new administration. “The adults are back in charge.”’ (A snort.) ‘Once they calm down and finish
feeling their oats they will come back to us.’

‘I wish I could share your optimism.’

‘You have reason to believe they’ll be any different, this time?’ (Pause.) ‘Yes. We have worked with them before, it’s true, and most of the team they have picked
works well to protect our interests. For example, this attorney general, John Ashcroft, we know him well. He’s sound on the right issues, a zealot – but unlikely to become dangerously
creative. He knows better than to rock the boat. An arm’s-length relationship is sufficient for this term, no need to get too close . . . our friends will keep him in line. But what concerns
me is that some of the other positions are occupied by those of a less predictable disposition. These Nixon-era underlings, seeking to prove that they could have – yes, like the vice
president, yes, exactly.’ ‘You don’t like the current vice president? You think he is unfit?’ ‘It’s not
that
. You know about the West Coast operation,
though – ’ ‘Yes? I thought we terminated it years ago?’ ‘We did. My point is, he was our partner in that venture.’ (Long pause.) ‘You’re
joking.’ ‘I’m afraid not. He’s one of our inner circle.’ ‘But how – it’s against policy! To involve politicians, I mean.’ (Sigh.) ‘At the
time, he was out of office. Swore blind he was going to stay out, too – that’s when he began developing his business seriously. The complaints of financial opacity in Halliburton that
came out during the Dresser Industries takeover – whose interests do you think those accounting arrangements served? And you must understand that from our point of view he looked like the
perfect cutout. A respectable businessman, former defense secretary with heavy political and business contacts – who’d suspect him?’