The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  ‘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?’

  ‘Crone Mother’s tears! This should not have been allowed.’

  ‘May I remind you again that nobody saw it coming? That if we had, it wouldn’t have happened?’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘What we always do, when they’re too big to take down: I’m afraid we’re going to have to pay him tribute.’

  ‘It’s going to be expensive, Angbard. He’s their king-in-waiting – indeed, he may actually be their king-emperor in all but name. The dynastic child they’ve placed on the throne does not impress with his acumen. Someone must be issuing the orders in his stead.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure, my lady; he’s strong-willed and I’m told he’s brighter than he looks when the glare of the public gaze is shuttered. And I am not certain you’re right about the cost of tribute, either. But Mr. Cheney is as rich as one of our first circle, and from his office in the Old Executive Office Building he has more power than many of our relatives can even conceive of. So we cannot buy him with money or cow him with threats. However, there is a currency a man of his type craves, and he knows we can pay in it.’

  ‘What – oh, I see.’

  ‘He is, it seems, setting up his own private intelligence group – by proxy, through Defense – this Office of Special Plans. He is one of those seekers for power who have a compulsive need for secrecy and hidden knowledge. We know exactly how to handle such men, do we not?’

  ‘As long as you’re cautious, Angbard. He knows too much already.’

  ‘About us? We won’t be feeding him tidbits about us. But the fellow has enemies, and he knows it, and as long as we make ourselves discreetly indispensable we’ll be safe from investigation by any agency he can touch. That’s how it worked with Hoover. We’ve never had a vice president before, my lady; I hope to make it a mutually profitable arrangement.’

  (Pause.) ‘As long as he doesn’t turn on us, your grace. Mark my words. As long as he doesn’t turn on us . . .’

  The tape clicked to an end. Mike stared at the poisonous thing, unwilling to rewind it and listen again. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t had his suspicions, but . . . This is Art Bell Show material, he told himself. The vice president is in cahoots with the Clan?

  Slowly a new and even more unwelcome supposition inserted itself into his mind. No. The vice president was in cahoots with the Clan. Now he’s – Mike flashed over on a vision of Dr. James, in a meeting with the VPOTUS himself, giving orders from his shadowy web – now he’s set on destroying them. When Matthias defected, he didn’t realize the reports would end on Mr. Cheney’s desk and the VP would have to kill him and turn on the Clan to destroy the evidence of his collusion –

  The thoughts were coming too fast. Mike stood up tiredly, stretched the kinks out of his shoulders, glanced at the clock. It was four in the afternoon: a little early to go home, normally, but . . .

  The Clan take politics personally – when they figure out what’s happened they’ll treat it as a personal betrayal. But if I even hint that I know this shit, Dr. James will have me rubbed out. What the hell am I going to do?

  Buy time. Sign myself out as sick. And hope something turns up . . .

  COUP

  Miriam cleared her throat. Begin with a cliche: This was the part she was edgy about. ‘I expect you’re all wondering why I asked you here,’ she said, and smiled. Deathly silence. She studied her audience: forty or so of the most important movers and shakers of the inner families, mostly allies of the progressive faction. They were rapt, waiting for her explanation and uninclined to social chatter. Oh well, moving swiftly on . . . ‘It’s been a year since I turned up with a plan and a business and asked my
uncle to call a meeting of the Clan Council.’

  Heads nodded. Many of them had been at that particular meeting.

  ‘You probably think I asked you here today because a lot has happened in the past year. In particular, that plan is dead in the water. I’m not going to assign blame or complain about it. Rather, I’d like to describe the situation we face right now, and propose a new plan. It’s drastic, because we’re in a bad position, but I think we can make it work. It’ll mean major changes to the way we live, but if we go through with it’ – she shrugged – ‘we’ll be in a better position, going forward.’ Too much padding, she thought nervously.

  She leaned over the laptop – sitting on a lectern borrowed from the shrine to the household deities – and tapped the space bar. PowerPoint was running, but the projector – ‘Someone check that – ’

  Huw poked at the projector. ‘It’s on,’ he confirmed. A moment later the screen beside her (a bleached, lime-washed canvas stretched flat within a monstrously baroque gilt picture frame) flickered to life.

  ‘Okay.’ Miriam focused on her notes. She’d spent almost twelve hours working on this presentation, far less than the subject deserved but as much as she’d been able to steal between her other duties over the past week. ‘Here’s what we know for sure: Almost ten months ago, Sir Matthias, who had been participating in at least one little conspiracy against his grace the duke, vanished. We’ve subsequently learned that he handed himself in to the DEA in return for immunity’ – shocked muttering from the back of the room told her that not everybody present had known even that much – ‘and the DEA handed him on to some kind of black intelligence team called the Family Trade Organization. They’re the folks behind the series of raids that shut down the east coast network. A number of us have been compromised, including myself and her grace my mother. FTO subsequently captured at least two of our number and coerced them to act as mules, and at least one of their agents was in the grounds of the Summer Palace earlier this year when the pretender made his bid for the succession.’