The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (53 page)
Read The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) Online
Authors: Charles Stross
He took a deep breath.
It’s not your fault.
‘Certainly. I think I owe you that much.’
‘You owe –’ She shook her head. ‘Enough of that. What else have we got?’
‘Let’s see.’ The bag turned out to contain a suit of clothes, not new but more respectable than those they’d already given Miriam. ‘If we’re traveling
together, you’d probably better change into these first. We’ll look less conspicuous together.’
‘Okay.’ She paused. ‘Right here?’
‘I’ll wait outside.’
He stood with his back to the parlor door for a few scant minutes that felt like hours. He spent some of those hours fantasizing about wringing Ed’s neck – a necessary proxy, for the
thought of challenging Lady Bishop over the matter was insupportable, but damn them! Why did they have to do that, of all things?
Miriam was a sharp knife, too sharp for her own good – sharp enough to cut both ways. Dealing with her as a contact and a supplier of contraband had been dicey, but not impossible. Living
with her was an entirely different matter, but it wasn’t exactly feasible to stick her in a tenement apartment and leave her to her own devices.
She’ll figure everything out, sooner
rather than later. And then what?
The precious vase was back teetering on the edge of the precipice, with no hand in place to catch it this time. And it was full of ashes.
There was a knock at the door. A moment later it opened, as he turned round. ‘How do I look?’ She took a step back.
‘You look –’ he paused to collect himself, ‘fine.’ The black walking suit was a little severe, but it suited her. However . . . ‘Before we travel, I think
we’d better find you a hairdresser.’
‘Really?’ She frowned. ‘It’s not particularly long – ’
‘Or a wig maker,’ he explained. ‘You’re probably on the Polis watch list. But if you’ve got long blond or brown hair, a different name, and a husband, and the
informants are all looking for a single woman with short black hair, that’s a start. Details are cumulative: you can’t just change one thing and expect to go unnoticed, you’ve got
to change lots of different things about yourself simultaneously.’
‘Right. It’ll have to be blond. Damn it, I always get split ends.’ She ran one hand through her hair. It was longer than he remembered. ‘There’s other stuff I need
to do. When I can figure out what . . .’
A moment he’d been dreading: at least, a small one. She didn’t seem to be committed to killing herself just yet. ‘That will be a problem.’
‘Ah.’ She froze. ‘Yes, somehow I didn’t think it was going to be easy.’
‘The – situation – you drew our attention to is troublesome. For the time being, I think it would be a very bad idea indeed for you to try to make contact with your Clan. Or
with the other, ah, local faction. I can make inquiries on your behalf, discreet inquiries, if your relatives are still trying to run your company. But until we know how they will react to your
reappearance, it would be best not to reappear. Do you agree?’
Miriam looked baffled for a moment: an achingly familiar bewilderment, the first bright moment of incomprehension that everyone felt the first time, as the doors to the logging camp swung open
to offer a glimpse into a colder, harsher world. ‘All I want is to go home.’
He reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder, surprising himself: ‘Home is wherever you are. You’ve got to learn to accept that, to let go, or sooner or later you’re going
to kill yourself. Are you listening? Margaret told me your story. Do you want to go back to the situation you just escaped from? Or do you want the Polis to find you instead? I nearly killed myself
once, trying to go back. I don’t want you to make the same mistake. I think the best way forward would be for you to come with me. It’s not forever: it’ll last as long as, as long
as it needs to. Eventually, I’m sure, you’ll be able to go back. But don’t . . . don’t try to take on too much, Miriam. Not until you’re ready.’
‘I –’ She reached up and removed his hand from her shoulder, but she didn’t let go of it. ‘You’re too kind!’ Without warning she stepped right up to him
and put her arms around him, and hugged him. Too surprised to move, he stood rooted to the spot, at a loss for words: after a while she stepped away. ‘I’m ready now,’ she said
quietly. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
*
Everyone gets a run of bad news sooner or later,
thought Eric Smith,
but this is ridiculous.
‘This is not making my day any easier,’ murmured Dr. James, leaning back in his chair as the door closed behind Agent Herz. He glanced sidelong at Eric. ‘Got any bright ideas,
Colonel?’
Eric stared at the hard copy of Herz’s report, sitting on the blotter in its low-contrast anti-photocopying print and SECRET codewords, and resisted the impulse to pound his head on his
desk. It would look unprofessional – there were few stronger terms of opprobrium in Dr. Andrew James’s buttoned-down vocabulary – and more important, it wouldn’t achieve
anything. But on the other hand, banging his head on the desk would probably be less painful than trying to deal with the self-compounding clusterfuck-in-progress that was, of late, what passed for
the Family Trade Organization’s infant steps towards dealing with the transdimensionally mobile narcoterrorists they were hunting.
(And their goddamn stolen nukes.)
‘Come on. What am I going to tell the vice president tonight?’
Eric took a deep breath. ‘From the top?’
‘Whatever order you choose.’
‘Well, shall we get the small stuff out of the way first?’
‘Start.’
Eric shrugged. ‘I don’t like to admit this, but the current operations we’ve got in train are all hosed. CLEANSWEEP has driven into a ditch and we’re lucky we got anybody
back at all – going by Agent MacDonald’s observations, they got caught in the crossfire during some kind of red-on-red incident. We’re lucky Rich was able to exfiltrate in good
order, else we wouldn’t even know that much. I think we can write off the alpha team and Agent Fleming, they’re two days overdue and they’ve overrun their provisioning.
‘On the plus side, Rich got out. We’ve continued to monitor the CLEANSWEEP team’s dead letter drops from the OLIGARCH positions, and they look clean. The fact that
nobody’s visited or tried to stake them out suggests that the bad guys didn’t take any of our men alive. So CLEANSWEEP isn’t blown, and once we get more field-qualified linguists
prepped we should be able to reactivate it – possibly in as little as three weeks. The real problem we’ve got is that we’re multiply bottlenecked: bottlenecked on linguists,
bottlenecked on logistics, bottlenecked on general intelligence. If we could find one of their safe houses we’d be in place to run COLDPLAY against them, but the trail’s gone cold and
there’s a limit to how long I can hold on to an AFSOCOM team with no mission – they’re needed in the Middle East.’
‘Hmm.’ James rolled his pen between the finger and thumb of his left hand. His lips whitened, forming a tight, disapproving line. Agent Smith, with a small lapel-pin crucifix and a
Ph. D. from Harvard: ‘I might be able to shake something loose on one of those fronts presently. But Mr. Cheney isn’t going to be happy about the lack of progress.’
‘Well, I’m not happy either!’ Eric dug his fingers into the arms of his chair. His damaged carpal tunnels sent twinges of protest running up his arms. ‘If you think I
enjoy losing agents and trained special forces teams . . . hell.’ He raised a hand and ran numb, tingling fingertips through his thinning hair. ‘I’m sorry. But this failure mode
wasn’t anticipated. Nobody expected them to blow up the fucking palace and start a civil war in the garden. Maybe we should have anticipated it, if we’d been better informed about their
internal political situation, but they don’t exactly have newspapers over there and even if they did, we’d have trouble reading them. We’d have to have been fucking mind readers
to spot a bunch of plotters running a coup!’
‘Language, Colonel, please.’
‘Shi – sorry.’ Eric shook his head, angry at his own loss of control. ‘I’m upset. We’ve now lost two high-clearance, high-value agents and an AFSOCOM specops
team and we’ve only really been up and running for fourteen weeks.’
‘I feel your pain,’ James said dryly. Eric stared at him, taken aback. ‘But I’m going to have to brief the vice president tonight on all the progress we haven’t
been making, and believe me, chewing on ground glass would be less painful,’ he added. ‘Now. I’ve heard from Herz. How’s CLANCY going?’
‘Badly.’ CLANCY was the ongoing investigation into the nuclear device that Source GREENSLEEVES claimed he’d planted somewhere in the Boston/Cambridge area, before he’d so
inconveniently managed to get himself killed. ‘We hadn’t found anything really noteworthy – a couple of meth labs, a walled-up cellar full of moonshine left over from the nineteen
twenties, that sort of thing – until Judith turned up her anomaly yesterday. I was half-convinced GREENSLEEVES was lying to us, but now – well, I don’t think we can afford to take
that risk.’ He shivered. ‘Just who the he-heck stuck a B53 bomb on blocks in a warehouse and set it to go off on a ten-year timer?’
‘Is that a question?’ Dr. James leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingertips again, and the piranha-like set of his lips quirked slightly.
Is he trying to smile?
wondered Eric.
‘Only if I’m not treading on any classified toes,’ Smith said warily.
‘It’s not a healthy question to ask. So I suggest you don’t ask me about it. Then I won’t have to tell you any lies.’
‘Ah.’ Smith dry-swallowed.
‘Even if I did know anything about it. Which I don’t,’ James said, with a twitch of one eyebrow that spoke volumes.
‘Right. Right.’
Change the subject, quick.
The fact that they were sitting in a secure conference cell that was regularly swept for bugs didn’t mean that nobody was
listening in, or at least recording the session for posterity: all it meant was that nobody outside the charmed circle of the national security infrastructure was eavesdropping.
But what kind
of black operation would involve us nuking one of our own cities?
Smith filed the question away for later.
‘Well, we’re looking for a needle in a haystack. The original idea of taking the county planner’s database and data mining it for suspicious activities is sound in principle,
but it yields too many false positives in a city the size of this one. I mean, there are tens of thousands of business premises, many tens of thousands of homes with garages or large basements, and
if only one percent of them flag as positives for things like lack of visible tenants or occupants, zero phone use but basic utility draw for heating, and so on, we’re swamped. It might be a
bomb installation, or it could equally well be Uncle Alfred’s old house and he died six months ago and the estate’s still in probate or something. Or it could be an overenthusiastic
horticulturist trying to breed a better pot plant. On the other hand, hopefully the neutron scattering spectroscopes our NIRT liaisons are getting next week will allow us to make an exhaustive
roving search. And we can cover for it easily, by telling the truth – we’re testing a bomb detector for terrorist nukes. Everyone will assume we’re worried about al-Qaeda, and if
we actually do find GREENSLEEVES’s gadget . . . well, do you suppose the VP would like to make hay with that?’
The raised eyebrow was back. ‘I suppose you have a point.’ James nodded slowly. ‘Yes, that would kill two terrorist threats with one stone. What else do you have for
me?’
‘Well, I’m not saying we’re not going to get another break – I think it’s only a matter of time – but I can’t give you a time scale for quantum leaps. I
think if we can reactivate CLEANSWEEP, or figure out some way around the bottleneck in our logistics chain, we might be able to progress on CLANCY through other avenues. I mean, if we can get our
hands on some useful intelligence about the Clan’s nuclear capability, that might open up some avenues of inquiry about where GREENSLEEVES got his hands on a gadget, and where it might be
now. But for the time being, we’re not really pursuing a specifically intelligence-led investigation. Getting back into the Gruinmarkt is, in my opinion, vital – and the more force we
can project there, the better.’
‘I see.’ James made a brief note on his pad. ‘Well, I’m hoping we’ll have a solution to the logistics issues shortly.’
‘More couriers? A target for COLDPLAY?’
‘Something better.’ He looked smug.
Eric leaned forward. ‘Tell me. Whatever you can. Is this more of that harebrained physics stuff from Livermore?’
‘Of course.’ Then something terrifying happened: Dr. James actually smiled. ‘I think it’s time to bring you in the loop on the, as you put it, logistics side of things.
There’s a cross-disciplinary team under Professor Armstrong from UCSD who’ve been working on a subject under, um, closed conditions. They haven’t worked out everything
that’s going on yet, but they’ve made some fascinating progress that points to a physical explanation for their anomalous capability. I’m going to be flying out there tomorrow
morning, and I was hoping you could join me.’
Eric glanced at his desk. It’d mean another couple of nights away from Gillian and the boys, and more apologies and tense silences at home, but it needed to be done. ‘As long as I
can be back here by Friday – if nothing new comes up in the meantime – I should be able to fit it in.’ Briefly, he let his bitterness show: ‘It’s not as if I’m
needed for the post-CLEANSWEEP debrief, or to report CLANCY as closed out.’
‘Then you’ll accompany me.’ Dr. James rose abruptly, his expression as warm as a killer robot’s. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment it
wouldn’t do to be late to . . .’
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
‘You called for me, sir.’
‘Indeed I did, indeed I did. I trust you’ve been keeping well. Any trouble getting here?’
‘Only the – not really. Not given the prevailing afflictions. I was most surprised to be summoned, though. Under the circumstances.’
‘Well, you’re here now. Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable, this may take some time – I must apologize in advance for any interruptions, I am somewhat busy
at present.’
‘There is nothing to apologize for, sir.’
‘Ah, but there will be. I’m afraid I’ve got another delicate task for you. One that will require you to visit the new world and spend some considerable length
of time working there on your own initiative.’
‘But, the fighting! Surely I’m of use there?’
(
Clink of glassware
.) ‘Glass of wine?’
‘Ah – yes, thank you, sir.’
(
More clinking of glassware
.) ‘Your health, my lady.’
‘And yours, your grace. Sir, I don’t understand. Is this more urgent than dealing with the pretender? As a need of immediacy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’ (
Pause
.) ‘Then I’ll do it, of course. Whatever mysterious task you have in mind.’
‘I wouldn’t be so fast to accept. You may hear me out and deem it a conflict of loyalty.’
‘Conflict of –’ (
Pause
.) ‘Oh.’
‘Yes. I am afraid you’re not going to like this.’
‘It’s about her grace, isn’t it?’
‘Partly. No, let me be honest: mostly. But, hmm, let me think . . . how clear are you on her current circumstances?’
(
Tensely
.) ‘She didn’t tell me anything. Before – whatever.’
‘Indeed not, and I did not summon you to accuse you of any misdeeds. But. What is your understanding of what she did?’
(
Pause
.) ‘Lady Helge has many bad habits, but her incurable curiosity is by far the worst of them. I was led to believe that she stuck her nose into some business
or other of Henryk’s, and he slapped her down for it. Confinement to a supervised apartment under house arrest, no contact with anyone who might conspire with her, living on bread and
water, that kind of thing. Is there more to it?’
‘Yes, you could say that.’ (
Sigh
.) ‘You could hold me responsible, as well. I – placed certain evidence where I
expected
her to
encounter it. It was in the context of a larger operation which you are not privy to. I hoped she would rattle some cages and shake loose some useful fruit that was previously hanging out of
reach. She has a tendency to stir things up, you will agree?’
‘I’m afraid so . . .’
‘The trouble is, she – well, she used unacceptable methods of inquiry: and worse, she allowed herself to be caught. Which indeed drew out certain conspirators at
court, but not the ones I was looking for and not in the manner I had hoped. I trust this will go no further than your ears, but . . . she tampered with the Post.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘I wish I was.’
(
Pause
.) (
Muttered expletive
.)
‘I didn’t hear that, my lady.’
‘I’m sorry sir, my tongue must have stumbled . . . that’s terrible! I can see why she didn’t talk to me first, if that is what she was thinking of doing,
but how
could
she?’
‘I’m afraid that’s not the important question right now. Whyever and however, she did it – and was caught. Henryk had no option but to act fast to secure
her obedience, even though that cost us any use we could hope to have made of her in the original plan: as it is, he has been accused of undue leniency by certain elderly parties, and I have
had to call in many favors to placate the postal commission – or in some cases, to buy their silence. She has not been charged with the offense, and will not be: instead, Henryk offered
her a way out – if she would bring us a child in the direct line of succession. She was as reluctant as you can imagine, but agreed to his proposal in the end.’
‘I had no idea!’
‘You weren’t meant to: the groundwork was prepared in the deepest secrecy, and her marriage to Prince Creon announced – ’
‘Creon? The Idiot?’
‘Please – sit down! Sit down at once, I say! . . . I’m not going to repeat myself!’
(
Pause
.) ‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘No you’re not. You’re outraged, aren’t you? It offends you because like all young women who’ve spent overmuch time in the other world you have
absorbed some of their expectations, and the idea of an arranged marriage – no, let me be blunt, a forced marriage – is a personal affront to you. Am I right?’
(
Sullen
.) ‘Yes.’
‘Well, so it may be. And the idea of tampering with the Post does not also offend you?’
(
Pause
.) ‘But that’s – that’s – ’
‘Need I remind you of the normal punishment for tampering with the Post?’
‘No. I understand.’
‘Are you sure? Let me be blunt: the countess Helge committed a serious crime, for which she might have been executed. She could not be trusted with the corvée
anymore. Baron Henryk managed to make an alternative arrangement, by which the countess might be of sufficient use to us to justify sparing her, and might in time redeem the stain from her
honor. As a punishment, I will concede that it was severe. But she was given the choice: and she accepted it of her own free will, albeit without grace.’
‘Huh! I can’t imagine she’d have taken such an imposition lightly. But Creon of all people – ’
‘Creon’s grandmother, the queen mother, was one of us. Creon, unlike his brother the pretender, was outer family. The progeny of Creon and Helge would have been
outer family beyond doubt, and half likely world-walkers as well.’
‘But he’s defective! How do we know they wouldn’t have inherited the – ’
‘We know. We know why he was defective, too. He was poisoned as a child, not born that way. But it’s irrelevant now. Creon – and the queen mother – died
when the pretender made his move.
I believe they, and Helge, were in fact the real targets of the attack.’
‘Surely, he’s the legitimate heir in any case? He didn’t need to do that!’
‘You are too well meaning to make a politician, my lady. If Helge had borne children to Creon, Egon would have good reason to fear for his life. If Egon’s reading of
our consensus was that we wanted to place one of our own upon the throne, then his action was ruthless but entirely rational.’
‘So Creon is dead? And the queen mother? What about Helge?’
‘Ah. Well, you see, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. There are more important tasks for you to be about than preparing a doppelgängered ambush for the
pretender to the throne.’
(
Pause
.) ‘You’ve lost her. Haven’t you?’
‘I very much fear that you are right.’
‘Shit.’
‘I do not know that she is still alive. But she has not been confirmed dead; her body was not found in the wreckage. And there are other reasons to hope she survived. She
was reported to be speaking to James Lee, the hostage, shortly before the attack: he passed her something small.’
‘Oh. You think she’s in New Britain somewhere?’
‘That would be the logical deduction. And were circumstances different I would expect her to report in within a day or two. But right now – well. She was told, in
regrettably unequivocal terms, that if she world-walked without permission she would be killed. And we have systematically alienated her affections.’
‘Why, damn it, sir? I mean, what purpose did it serve?’
(
Pause
.) ‘As I indicated, I hoped she would – suitably motivated – lead me to something I wanted. But she is a dangerous weapon to wield, and in this
case, she misfired. Then circumstances spun out of my independent control, and . . . you see how things are?’
(
Long pause
.) ‘What do you want me to do?’ (
Pause
.) ‘I assume you want me to find her, wherever she’s gone to ground, and bring her
back?’
‘You are one of the few people she is likely to trust. So that would be a logical deduction, would it not?’
(
Suspiciously
.) ‘What else?’
(
Pause
.) ‘I trust that you will do everything within your ability to find her and bring her back into the fold. To convince her, you may convey to her my
assurances that she will face no retribution for having fled on this occasion – given the circumstances, it was entirely understandable. You may also remind her that Creon is dead, and
the arrangement made on his behalf is therefore terminated. The events of the past week are swept away as if they never transpired.’ (
Pause
.) ‘You may also want to tell her
that Baron Henryk was killed in the fighting. If she promises to cooperate fully, she has my personal guarantee of her safety.’
‘That’s not all, is it?’
(
Long pause
.) ‘No.’
‘Then . . . ?’
‘I very much fear that Helge will
not
return willingly. She may want to go to ground on her own – or she might make overtures to the lost cousins. Worse,
she might go back to her compulsive digging. She stumbled across a project that is not yet politically admissible: if she exposes it before the council, it could do immense damage. And worst of
all, she might seek to obtain a copy of the primary knot and use it to return to her own Boston, then contact the authorities. They will believe her if she goes to them, and she is in a
position to do even more damage than Matthias if she wants.’
‘You’re saying you want me to kill her if she’s turned traitor.’
‘I
don’t
want you to kill her. However, it is absolutely vital that she be prevented from defecting to the new agency the Americans have set up. She could
do us immense – immeasurable – damage if she did, and I would rather see her dead than turned into a weapon against us. Do you see now why I warned that you might see this as a
conflict of loyalty?’
(
Long pause
.) ‘Oh yes, indeed, sir.’ (
Pause
.) ‘If I say no, what happens?’
‘Then I will have to send someone else. I don’t know who, yet – we are grievously shorthanded in this task, are we not? Likely it will be someone who
doesn’t know her well, and doesn’t care whether she can be salvaged.’ (
Pause
.) ‘I am not sending you to kill her, I am sending you to salvage her if at all
possible. But I will not send you unless you are prepared to do your duty to the Clan, should it be necessary. Do you swear to me that you will do so?’
‘I – yes, your grace. My liege. I so swear: I will do everything in my power to return Lady Helge voh Thorold d’Hjorth to your custody, alive. And I will take
any measure necessary to prevent her adding her number to our enemies. Any –’ (
Pause
.) ‘– measure.’
‘Good. Your starting point is inconveniently located – she will have crossed over near the palace, from Niejwein – but I am sure you are equal to the task of
hunting her down. You may draw any necessary resources from second security directorate funds; talk to the desk officer. Harald is running things today. You’ll want a support team for the
insertion, and a disguise.’
‘I have a working cover identity on the other side already, sir. Was there anything else I should know?’
‘Oh yes, as a matter of fact there is. It nearly slipped my mind. Hmm.’
‘Sir?’ (
Pause
.) ‘Your grace?’
‘Ah. Definitely a problem.’ (
Pause
.) ‘The arrangement with Creon . . . before the betrothal, she was visited more than once by Dr. ven Hjalmar. At the
behest of Baron Henryk, I thought, but when I made inquiries I discovered it had been suggested by none other than Patricia.’
‘Patricia? What’s she doing suggesting – hey, isn’t Ven Hjalmar the fertility specialist?’
‘Yes, Brilliana, and the treatment he subjected the countess Helge to is absolutely unconscionable; but I believe it was intended as insurance against the Idiot being
unable to . . . you know. Be that as it may, he
did
it. Consequently, you have about twelve weeks to find Helge and bring her back. After that time . . . well, you know what happens to
women who world-walk while they’re pregnant, don’t you?’
END TRANSCRIPT