The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  Lady Bishop considered feigning ignorance for a moment. “He said something about a different version of our world. Sounded like nonsense at first, but then the trinkets started showing up.” Her expression hardened. “If you think we can be bought and sold for glass beads—”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it!” Beckstein paused. “But, uh, I needed to know. What he’d told you. The thing is, I ran into some trouble. I was able to escape, but I came here because it was all I could do—I got away with only the clothes on my back. I need to get back to Boston and contact some people to let them know I’m alright before they, before I can get everything back under control. I was hoping…” She ran out of words.

  Lady Bishop watched her intently. Do you really think I’m that naive? she asked silently, permitting herself a moment’s cold anger. Did you really think you could simply march in and demand assistance? Then a second thought struck her: or maybe you don’t know who you’re dealing with…?

  “Did Erasmus tell you anything about me? Or who I am associated with?” she asked.

  Beckstein blinked. “He implied—oh.” Her eyes widened. “Oh shit.”

  Lady Bishop stifled a sigh of exasperation. Indelicacy on top of naivety? A very odd mixture indeed.

  The Beckstein woman stared at her. “Erasmus didn’t tell me enough…”

  Margaret made up her mind. “I can see that,” she said, which was true enough—just not the absolution it might be mistaken for. Either you’re really down on your luck and you thought I might be an easy touch, or perhaps you’re really ignorant and in trouble. Which is it? “Tell me who you think I am,” she coaxed, “and I’ll tell you if you’re right or wrong.”

  “Okay,” said Beckstein. Margaret made a mental note—what does that word mean?—then nodded encouragement. “I think you’re a member of the Levelers’ first circle. Probably involved in strategy and planning. And Erasmus was thinking about brokering a much higher-level arrangement between you and my, my, the people I represent. Represented.” She swallowed. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked, only a faint quaver in her voice.

  “If you were entirely right in every particular, then I would absolutely have to kill you.” Margaret smiled to take the sting out of her words before she continued. “Luckily you’re just wrong enough to be safe. But,” she paused, to give herself time to prepare her next words carefully: “I don’t think you’re telling me the entire truth. And given your suspicions about my vocation, don’t you think that might not be very clever? I want the truth, Miss Beckstein. And nothing but the truth.”

  “I”—Beckstein swallowed. Her eyes flickered from side to side, as if seeking a way out: Margaret realized that she was shaking. “I’m not sure. Whether you’d believe me, and whether it would be a good thing if you did.”

  This was getting harder to deal with by the minute, Margaret realized. The woman was clearly close to the end of her tether. She’d put a good face on things at first, but there was more to this than met the eye. “I’ve seen Erasmus,” said Margaret. “He told me about the medicine you procured for him.” She watched the Beckstein woman closely: “and he showed me the disc-playing machine. The, ah, DVD player. One miracle might be an accident, but two suggest an interesting pattern. You needn’t worry about me mistaking you for a madwoman.

  “But you must tell me exactly what has happened to you. Right now, at once, with no dissembling. Otherwise I will not be able to save you…”

  BAM.

  Judith Herz tensed unconsciously, steeling herself for the explosion, and crossed her fingers as the four SWAT team officers swung the battering ram back for a second knock. Not that tensing would do any good if there was a bomb in the self-storage room…

  “Are you sure this is safe?” asked Rich Wall, fingering his mobile phone like it was a lucky charm.

  Herz took a deep breath. “No,” she snapped. What do you expect me to say? “According to Mike Fleming, the asshole who sent us on this wild goose chase has a hard-on for claymore mines. That’s why—” she gestured at the chalk marks on the cinder block wall the officers were attacking, the heaps of dust from the drills, the fiber-optic camera on its dolly off to one side “—we’re going in through the wall.”

  BAM.

  A cloud of dust billowed out. There was a rattle of debris falling from the impact site on the wall. They’d started by drilling a quarter-inch hole, then sent a fiber-optic scope through with the delicacy of doctors conducting keyhole cardiac bypass surgery. The black plastic-coated hose had snaked around, bringing grainy gray images to the monitor screen on the console like images from a long-sealed Egyptian royal tomb. The dust lay heavy in the lockup room, as if it hadn’t been visited for months or years. Something indistinct and bulky, probably a large oil tank, hulked a couple of feet beyond the hole, blocking the line of sight to the door to the lockup. The caretaker had kicked up a fuss when she’d told him they were going to punch through the wall from the other side—after unceremoniously ejecting the occupants’ property—until she’d shown him her FBI card and the warrant the FEMA Sixth Circuit court had signed in their emergency in camera session. (Which the court had granted in a shot, the moment the bench saw the gamma ray spike the roving search truck had registered as it quartered the city, looking for a sleeping horror.) Then he’d clammed up and gone into his cubicle to phone the landlord.

  “I think we’re gonna need that jack,” called one of the cops with the ram. His colleagues laid the heavy metal shaft down while two more cops in orange high-visibility jackets and respirators moved to shovel the rubble aside. “Should be through in a couple more minutes.”

  Judith glanced at Rich, who grinned humorlessly. “This is your last chance to take a hike,” she suggested.

  “Naah.” Rich glanced down. He was fidgeting with his phone, as if it was a lucky charm. “Let’s face it, I wouldn’t get far enough to clear the blast zone, would I?”

  Judith suppressed a smile: “That’s true.” Go on, whistle in the dark. She shivered involuntarily. The guys with the battering ram didn’t know what they were here for: all they knew was that the woman from the FBI headquarters staff wanted into the storage room, and wanted in bad. She’d done the old stony stare and dropped an elliptical hint about Mideast terrorists and fertilizer bombs, enough to keep them on their toes but not enough to make them phone their families and tell them to leave town now. But Rich knew what they were looking for, and so did Bob, who was suiting up in the NIRT truck in the back parking lot along with the rest of his team, and Eric Smith, back in Maryland in a meeting room in Crypto City. “You could always step outside for a last cigarette.”

  “I’m trying to give up. Last cigarettes, that is.” Rich shuffled from foot to foot as two of the cops grunted and manhandled a construction site jack into place beside the blue chalk X on the wall, where it was buckling ominously outwards.

  “Okay, one more try,” called one of the cops—Sergeant McSweeny, Herz thought—as the ram team picked up their pole and began to work up their momentum.

  BAM. This time there was a clatter of rubble falling as overstressed bricks gave way. The dust cleared and she saw there was a hole in the wall where the ram had struck, an opening into the heart of darkness. The battering ram team shuffled backwards out of the way of the two guys with shovels, who now hefted sledgehammers and went to work on the edges of the hole, widening it. “There’s your new doorway,” said one of the ram crew, wincing and rubbing his upper arm: “kinda short on brass fittings and hinges, but we can do you a deal on gravel for your yard.”

  “Ri-ight,” drawled Rich. Judith glared at him, keeping her face frozen. That’s right, I’m a woman in black from a secret government agency, she thought. I’ve got no sense of humor and you better not get in my way. Even if the black outfit was a wind cheater with a big FBI logo, and a pair of 501s.

  The cop recoiled slightly. “Hey, what’s up with you guys?”

  “You have no need to know.” Judith relented slightly. “Se
riously. You won’t read about this in the newspapers, but you’ve done a good job here today.” She winced slightly as another sledgehammer blow spalled chips off the edge of the hole in the wall. Which was growing now, to the point where a greased anorexic supermodel might be able to wriggle through. A large slab of wall fell inward, doubling the size of the hole. “Ah, showtime. If you guys could get the jack into position and then clear the area I think we will take it from here.” If only Mike Fleming was about. This is his fault, she thought venomously.

  Ten minutes later the big orange jack was screwed tight against the top of the opening, keeping the cinder blocks above the hole from collapsing. The SWAT team was outside in the parking lot, packing their kit up and shooting random wild-assed guesses about what the hell it was they’d been called in to do, and why: Judith glanced at the wristwatch-shaped gadget strapped to her left wrist and nodded. It was still clean, showing background count of about thirty becquerels per second. A tad high for suburban Boston, but nothing that couldn’t be accounted for by the fly ash mixed into the cinder blocks. The idea of wearing a Geiger counter like a wristwatch still gave her the cold shudders when she thought about it, but that wasn’t so often these days, not after three weeks of it—and besides, it was better than the alternative.

  A big gray truck was backing in to the lot tail-first. Rich waved directions to the driver, as if he needed them: the truck halted with a chuff of air brakes, five feet short of the open door to the small warehouse unit. The tailgate rattled up to reveal a scene right out of The X-Files—half a dozen men and women in bright orange inflatable space suits with oxygen tanks and black rubber gloves, wheeling carts loaded with laboratory instruments. They queued up in front of the tail lift. “Is the area clear?” Judith’s ear-pieces crackled.

  She glanced around. “Witnesses out.” The SWAT team was already rolling up the highway a quarter of a mile away. They were far enough away that if things went really badly they might even survive.

  “Okay, we’re coming in.” That was Dr. Lucius Rand, tall and thin, graying at the temples, seconded to the Family Trade Organization from his parent organization. Just like Judith, like Mike Fleming, like everyone else in FTO—only in his case, the parent organization was Pantex. He was in his late fifties. Rumor had it he’d studied at Ted Taylor’s knee; Edward Teller had supervised his Ph.D. The tailgate lift ground into operation, space-suited figures descending to planet Earth.

  “We haven’t checked for booby traps yet,” she warned.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Rand sounded impatient.

  Judith nodded to Rich as she pulled on a pair of disposable plastic shoe protectors: “Let’s go inside.”

  The hole in the wall was about two feet wide and three feet high, a jagged gash. She switched on her torch—a tiny pocket LED lantern, more powerful than a big cop-style Maglite—and swept the floor. There were no wires. Good. She ducked through the hole, coughing slightly. Her Geiger watch still ticked over normally. Better. She stood up and looked around.

  The room was maybe twenty feet long and eight feet wide, with a ten-foot ceiling. Naked unpainted cinder block walls, a galvanized tin ceiling, and a concrete floor completed the scene. There was a big rolling door at one end and dust everywhere. But what caught her attention was the sheer size of the cylinder that, standing on concrete blocks, dominated the room. “Sweet baby Jesus,” she whispered. It was at least ten feet long, and had to be a good four feet in diameter. There was barely room to walk around the behemoth. She shone her torch along the cylinder, expecting to see—“what the hell?”

  “Herz, report! What have you seen?”

  “It’s a cylinder,” she said slowly. “About ten, twelve feet long, four, five feet in diameter. Supported on concrete blocks. One end is rounded; there’s some kind of collar about three feet from the other end and four vanes sticking out, sort of like the fins on a bomb…” She trailed off. Like the fins on a bomb, she thought, dazed. Jesus, this can’t be here! She shook herself and continued, “there’s some kind of equipment trolley near the back end, and some wires going into the, the back of the bomb.” She glanced down at her watch. The second hand was spinning round. It was a logarithmic counter, and it had jumped from tens of becquerels per second to tens of thousands as she crossed the threshold. Gamma emission from secondary activation isotopes created by neutron absorption, she heard the lecture replay in her mind’s eye; Geiger counters can’t detect neutrons until the flux is way too high for safety, but over time a neutron source will tend to activate surrounding materials. “I’m reading secondaries. I think we’ve got a hot one. I’m coming out now.” A quick sweep across the screen door in front of the gadget’s nose revealed no telltale trip wires. “No sign of booby traps.”

  “Acknowledged. Judith, I want you and Rich to go back into the van and wait while I do a preliminary site survey. Don’t touch anything on your way out. I want you to know, you’ve done good.” She realized she was shaking. Don’t touch anything. Right. She clambered out through the hole in the wall, blinking against the daylight, and stood aside as two figures in bright orange isolation suits duckwalked past her. The cylinders hanging from their shoulders bounced under their rubber covers like hugely obese buttocks as they bent down to crawl through the hole. Two more suits waved her down with radiation detectors and stripped off her shoe protectors before pronouncing her clean and waving her into the truck.

  The back of the NIRT truck was crowded with consoles and flashing panels of blinkenlights, battered laptops plastered with security inventory stickers, and coat rails for the bulky orange suits. This was a NIRT survey wagon, not the defuse-and-disarm trailer—those guys would be along in a while, as soon as Dr. Rand confirmed he needed them. Too many NIRT vehicles in one parking lot might attract the wrong kind of attention, especially in these days of Total Information Awareness and paranoia about security, not to mention closed-circuit cameras everywhere and journalists with web access spreading rumors. And rumors that NIRT were breaking into a lockup in Boston would be just the icing on a fifty-ton cake of shit if Homeland Security had to take the fall for a botched Family Trade operation. Rumors of any kind about NIRT would likely trigger a public panic, a run on the Dow, and a plague of boils inside the Beltway.

  “Coffee?” asked Rich, picking up a vacuum flask.

  “Yes, please.” Judith yawned, suddenly becoming aware that she felt tired. “I don’t believe what I just saw. I just hope it turns out to be some kind of sick prank.” Low-level lab samples of something radioactive stashed in an aluminum cylinder knocked together in an auto body shop, that would do it. But it can’t be, she realized. Nobody would be that crazy, just for a joke. Charges of wasting police time didn’t even begin to cover it. And it wasn’t as if some prankster had tried to draw attention to the lockup: quite the opposite, in fact.

  “Like hell. That thing had fins like a fifty-six Caddy. I swear I was expecting to see Slim Pickens riding it down…” Don poured a dose of evil-looking coffee into a cup and passed it to her. “Think it’ll go off?”

  “Not now,” Judith said with a confidence she didn’t feel. “Dr. Strangelove and his merry men are going over it with their stethoscopes.” There was a chair in front of one of the panels of blinkenlights and she sat down on it. “But something about this whole setup feels wrong.”

  Her earphone bleeped, breaking her out of the introspective haze. “Yes?” she asked, keying the throat pickup.

  “Judith, I think you’d better come back in. Don’t bother suiting up, it’s safe for now, but there’s bad news along with the good.”

  “On my way.” She put her coffee down. “Wait here,” she told Rich, who nodded gratefully and took her place in the swivel chair.

  When she straightened up inside the warehouse she found it bright and claustrophobic, the air heavy with masonry dirt and the dust of years of neglect. It reminded her of a raid on a house in Queens she’d been in on, years ago: one the mob had been using to store counter
feit memory chips. Someone here had found the long-dead light fitting and replaced the bulb. Seen in proper light, the finned cylinder looked more like a badly made movie prop than a bomb. Two figures in orange inflatable suits hunched over the open tail of the gadget, while another was busy taking a screwdriver to the fascia of the instrument cart that was wired into it. Dr. Rand stepped around the rounded front of the cylinder: “Ah, Agent Herz. As I said, I’ve got good news and bad news.” There was an unhealthy note of relish in his voice.

  Judith gestured towards the far end of the lockup from the NIRT team operatives working on the ass-end of the bomb. “Tell me everything I need to know.”

  Rand followed her then surprised Judith by unzipping his hood and throwing it back across his shoulders. He reached down to his waist and turned off the hissing air supply. His face was flushed and what there was of his hair hung in damp locks alongside his face. “Hate these things,” he said conversationally. “It’s not going to go off,” he added.

  “Well, that’s a relief.” She raised an eyebrow. “So, is this the one?”

  “That would be the bad news.” Rand frowned. “Let me give it to you from the top.”

  “Be my guest.” Sarcasm was inappropriate, she realized, but the relief—

  “I’ve met this puppy before,” said Rand. “It’s a B53-Y2. We built a bunch of them in the sixties. It’s a free-fall bomb, designed to be hauled around by strategic bomber, and it’s not small—the physics package weighs about six thousand pounds. It’s an oralloy core, high-purity weapons-grade uranium rather than plutonium, uses lithium deuteride to supply the big bang. We originally made a few hundred, but all but twenty-five were dismantled decades ago. It’s basically the same as the warhead on the old Titan-II, designed to level Leningrad in one go. The good news is, it won’t go off. The tritium booster looks to be well past its sell-by date and the RDX is thoroughly poisoned by neutron bombardment, so the best you’d get would be a fizzle.” He looked pensive. “Of course, what I mean by a fizzle is relative. A B53 that’s been properly maintained is good for about nine megatons—this one would probably top off at no more than a quarter megaton or so, maybe half a megaton.”