The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  ‘They were called away.’ The visitor seemed amused. ‘Something to do with an emergency, I gather. Do you remember Plan Blue?’

  ‘Wha – ’

  The visitor watched as Angbard fumbled with the bed’s controller. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said, after a moment. Reaching out, he pulled the handset away from the duke’s weakened fingers. ‘Your aunt sends her regards, and to tell you that our long-standing arrangement is canceled,’ he said, and stood up. ‘That may be sufficient for her, but some of us have been waiting in line, and now it’s my turn.’

  ‘Scheisse!’

  The duke made a grab for the emergency cord, but it was futile; he was still deathly weak and uncontrolled on his left side, and his right hand clawed inches short of the pull. Then the visitor grabbed the pillow from behind his head and rammed it down onto his face. It was a very uneven struggle, but even so the old man didn’t go easily. ‘Fucking lie down and die,’ snarled the visitor, leaning on him as he tried to grab the duke’s flailing left hand. ‘Why can’t you do something right for once in your life?’

  He was answered by a buzzer sounding from the heart monitor.

  Breathing heavily he levered himself off the bed; then, lifting the pillow, he shoved it under the duke’s lolling head before turning to stare at the monitor. ‘Hmm, you do appear to have lost your sinus rhythm altogether! Time to leave, I think.’ He stared at the corpse in distaste. ‘That’s a better end than you deserved, old man. Better by far, compared to the normal punishment for betrayal . . .’

  He breathed deeply a few times, watching the buzzing heart monitor. Then Dr. ven Hjalmar opened the door, took a deep breath to fill his lungs, and shouted, ‘Crash cart, stat! Patient in cardiac arrest!’ before turning back to the bed to commence the motions of resuscitation.

  *

  Mike had been accumulating leave for too long; taking some of it now wouldn’t strike anyone in human resources as strange, although it was a fair bet that someone higher up the tree would start asking questions if he didn’t show up for work within a week.

  In the meantime he went home, still numb with shock from the disclosures buried on the cassette tapes. It was, he thought, time to make some hard choices: Collusion between officials and the bad guys was nothing particularly new, but for it to go so high up the ladder was unprecedented. And it would be extraordinarily dangerous for someone at his level to do anything about it. Or not – and that was even worse. Dr. James is in Mr. Cheney’s pocket, Mike reminded himself. And he gave me those tapes, not some other, more qualified analyst. If I’m lucky, he did it because he considers me trustworthy. More likely . . . A vision kept flickering in his mind’s eye, of Colonel Smith, in all candor, telling Dr. James, ‘Mike’s a bit squirrelly about you. Nothing to worry about, but you should keep an eye on him.’ And Dr. James, with that chilly reserved look in his eye, nodding and making a note by his name on the org chart: disposable resource.

  Mike was under no illusions about the taskmaster Dr. James worked for: a determined, driven, man – ruthless would not be an exaggeration. He had a fire in his belly and a desire to bend history to his will. With his doctrine of a unitary executive and his gradual arrogation of extraordinary powers granted by a weak presidency, he’d turned the office of vice president into the most powerful post in the government. And he had good reason to silence anyone who knew of his covert connection to the Clan: good reason, even, to silence the Clan themselves for good. He’s an oilman, and he knows they’re sitting on all the oil that was ever under Texas, untapped, Mike realized. And now he’s got a machine for getting there. It’s crude today, but who knows what it’ll be like tomorrow? He’s got to be thinking, who needs Iraq, anyway? Or Saudi Arabia?

  Mike wasn’t naïve: He knew that the most addictive drug, the deadliest one, the one that fucked people up beyond redemption every time, was money. And I’m between an addict and the most powerful fix in history . . .

  That afternoon and evening, he meticulously searched his apartment, starting by unplugging all the electrical appliances and checking sockets and power supplies for signs of tampering. Then he began to search the walls and floors, inch by inch, looking for bugs. And while he searched, he thought.

  The big picture looked grimmer the longer he pondered it. Thinking back, there’d been the horror-flick prop they’d found in a lockup in Cambridge, thick layers of dust covering the Strangelovian intrusion of a 1950s-era hydrogen bomb, propped up on two-by-fours and bricks with a broken timer plugged into its tail. Nobody ever said what it had been about, but the NIRT inspectors had tagged its date: early 1970s, Nixon administration. What kind of false-flag operation involves nuking one of your own cities? How about one designed to psyche your country up for a war with China? Except it hadn’t happened. But the Clan have a track record of stealing nukes from our inventory. Mike shuddered. And the VP had backed the plan to invade Iraq, even after Chemical Ali had offed his cousin Saddam and sued for peace on any terms. And according to some folks who Mike wasn’t yet prepared to write off as swivel-eyed loons, the oil had something to do with it.

  He slept uneasily that night, his dreams unusually vivid: an injured princess in a burning medieval palace, her face half-melted by the nuclear heat-flash, telling him, ‘I’ll call when I can’, as he tried to pull his leg from a mantrap and reached down to lever apart its jaws, only to find it was a skull, a skull biting his legs, Pete Garfinkle’s skull, horribly charred by the bomb that had set this off, and if he couldn’t get away the next nuke would fry him –

  The next morning he rose, late and groggy, and went back to work. Around ten o’clock he finally found what he’d been looking for: a pinhole in the living room wall that had been all but concealed by the frame of a cheap print that had come with the apartment. Mike passed it by, continuing his search. It would be perfectly obvious what he was doing, and there was no point in showing any sign of having discovered the camera. Either it was being monitored, in which case they’d simply replace it with another the next time he went out, or the survey had been terminated, in which case there was nothing to worry about. He leaned towards the latter case (keeping a watch on an apartment was an expensive business, requiring at least six full-time agents on rotation, even without the overheads of being ready to tail the occupant if they left), but he had to assume the former, especially if Dr. James considered him unsound. He could have farmed it out to Internal Affairs, told them I’m suspected of espionage, he thought bleakly. In which case, he was providing them with lots of circumstantial evidence that he was overdue for a vacation in Club Fed; but that couldn’t be avoided. Federal prison might actually be an improvement over the alternatives, if Dr. James decided Mike needed to be silenced.

  He’d finished the bug hunt – without finding any additional devices – and had moved into the washroom to process the pile of shirts and underwear that had been building up, when the phone rang.

  Swearing, he made a grab for the handset and caught it before the answering machine cut in. He was half-expecting a recorded telesales announcement for his pains, but years of fielding out-of-hours emergencies had made him wary of dropping messages. ‘Mike?’ asked a woman’s voice. ‘Are you there?’

  ‘Yes – ’ It took a moment for the voice to register. ‘Don’t say your name!’ he said hurriedly. ‘The line is probably being monitored.’

  ‘And this cell phone is going down a storm drain as soon as I end the call.’ She sounded nervous.

  ‘Is it about the talk we had? Because if so, there’ve been some changes – ’

  ‘No, it’s not about that. Listen, Olga told me what you told her.’

  ‘Olga told’ – he paused, his tenuous train of thought perilously close to derailment – ‘what’s your situation?’

  ‘I’m okay, my mom’s okay, and we know about the surprise in the cell phone your boss left for us.’ Cold sweat drenched Mike’s back as she continued relentlessly: ‘It’s about the nukes. Your boss didn’t stay on the line lon
g enough to let us pass on the news that all this send them a message shit has just blown up in a big way. The conservative faction are attempting to stage a coup and as part of their preparations they’ve stolen’ – a pause – ‘no, they’ve deployed at least three, possibly four, of the bombs in their possession. Hang on’ – the line went silent for a few seconds – ‘word is that they have decided to send you a message, the same type your people sent them, and you’ve probably got less than twenty-four hours to find it.’

  ‘If this is some kind of joke – ’

  ‘No, hang on, I’m relaying stuff. The target is probably Washington D.C., and the bombs only dial up to about one kiloton each. The bad guys are inside our chain of command; they activated a contingency plan and changed the targets. We’re currently trying to reestablish control and find out where the new target locations are, and as soon as we figure that out I will phone this landline number and pass the information on. I want you to know that we’re treating this as treason and it is not our intention to blow up any cities. Have you got that?’

  ‘Wait, listen! Did you try telling – did you talk to Dr. James? Did you talk to him – ’

  ‘Yes, that’s the name. Can you pass this – ’

  Mike tried to swallow, his mouth was dry and sticky, and his heart was hammering. ‘Dr. James works directly for the vice president. Mr. Cheney has been in collusion with someone in your inner families for a very long time – more than ten years – and he wants you all dead. There are tapes . . . I’m not trusted, I’m a disposable asset. Just saying. If what you’re telling me is true, Dr. James doesn’t care about losing a city block or two – it would make it easier to justify what’s coming down the line. Think of Pearl Harbor, think of 9/11. If I pass this up the line, they’ll bury it and I’ll show up in the morgue one morning.’

  ‘Shit.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Mike, I’m going to have to put the phone down in a minute, I’ve been on the line too long. What can we do?’

  ‘Find the bombs. Drag them back to the Gruinmarkt and dump them in a swamp or something.’ He stared bleakly at the kitchen sink. ‘I’m going to put the answering machine on now and go out. Got to go outside the chain of command and talk to some folks who might be able to do something useful.’

  ‘If there’s anything we can do – ’

  ‘Just find the fucking bombs!’ he snarled, and slammed the handset down on its charge point so hard that the battery cover pinged off.

  ‘Shit.’ He breathed deeply, staring at the phone. Coming from anyone else, he’d have questioned the sanity of the bearer of such news – but he knew Miriam. And he’d let his mouth run away with him, blabbing the truth about the tapes Dr. James had him listening in on. Never mind the pinhole camera: The phone line was bugged and even if nobody was monitoring it in real time, the word would be out soon.

  Mike went through into the living room, and then his bedroom, as fast as his cast would let him. (It was still itching, but nearly ready to come off; give it two weeks, said the doctor he’d seen the week before.) He collected his jacket and a small go-bag from under the bed, which held (among other things) a gun, a couple of fully charged and never-used cell phones, and a handwritten paper address book. ‘Who first?’ he asked the air as he headed for the front door. I could try the colonel again, he thought dismally. Or . . . Agent Herz. She might go for it. But whether she’d listen to him was another matter: They’ll put the word out on me within an hour. That left the usual channels – he could go talk to the FBI or his former boss at the DEA field office in town, but again: They’ll think I’m crazier than a fruitbat once Dr. James gets through with them. He opened the front door.

  I’m going to have to go to the press, he thought, and raised the remote on his car key chain, and had already begun to press the button just as a second thought crystallized in his mind: James is an old hand. What if he’s playing by pre-Church Commission rules –

  In the aftermath of the explosion, every car alarm within three blocks began to sound, accompanied by a chorus of panicking dogs and, soon enough, the rising and falling of sirens; but they were too late.

  NORTHWOODS

  Morning, July sixteenth.

  In a locked store room on the eighth – top – floor of a department store off Pennsylvania Avenue, a timer counted down towards zero.

  Another timer matched its progress – in a janitor’s store on the top floor of a museum building near the Mall, behind a door jammed by cyanoacrylate glue in the lock and hinges.

  And unfathomably far away, on a scaffold by the swampy banks of a slow-moving river, two men labored over a third timer, readying it for delivery to a target in the looking-glass world of the United States of America.

  Nobody understood yet, but the worlds were about to change.

  *

  ‘Duty Chief? This is the major. I have some orders for you. The day code is: Echo, Golf, Zulu, X-ray, five, nine, Bravo. Did you get that?’

  ‘Yes, my lord. One moment . . . yes, that is correct. What do you have for me?’

  ‘Flash priority message to all Internal Security posts. Message begins: Traitors to the Clan have activated Plan Blue without authorization. Any security officers in possession of special weapons are to secure and disarm them immediately. Anyone not in possession but with knowledge of the disposition of special weapons must report to me immediately. Use of lethal force to secure and disarm special weapons in the possession of unauthorized parties is approved.’ Riordan swallowed and shifted his grip on the cell phone. ‘Anyone who is unaware of Plan Blue or the nature of the special weapons – you should execute Plan Black immediately. I repeat, Plan Black, immediate effect. Order ends. Please copy.’

  The stunned silence at the other end of the connection lasted almost a second. ‘My lord. Plan Blue? Plan Black?’

  ‘Copy, damn your eyes!’

  ‘Sir.’ The duty officer pulled himself together: ‘I copy . . .’ He repeated Riordan’s orders. ‘I’ll put that out immediately, by your leave?’

  ‘Do it. Riordan out.’

  He closed the phone with a snap and glanced sidelong at Lady Olga. She was staring across her seat back at Miriam, who was talking intently into her own phone, her face a study in strain. He opened his mouth, but she raised a finger. Half a minute passed as their driver, Alasdair, carried them ever closer to the turnpike; then Miriam held the phone away from her face and shook her head. ‘Trash,’ she said, holding it out to Brill, who popped the battery before sliding it into a waste bag. ‘We are so fucked,’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘Plan Black?’ Olga asked.

  ‘What did Mr. Fleming say?’ asked Riordan, ignoring her to focus on Miriam.

  ‘It’s – ’ Miriam shook her head, punch-drunk. ‘Crazy talk. He says Dr. James works for the vice president! And he’s been in collusion with someone in the Clan for years! It’s insane! He said something about tapes, and about them wanting an excuse, a Pearl Harbor.’

  ‘Can Fleming do anything for us?’ Riordan stared at Miriam as she shook her head again. ‘Why not?’

  ‘He says he’s disposable. He’s going to try and find someone to talk to, but there’s no point going through the chain of command. We’re trying to negotiate with people who want us dead – tell me it’s not true?’

  ‘Figures,’ Olga said tartly. Everyone stared at her – even Sir Alasdair, by way of the rearview mirror.

  ‘What do you mean, my lady?’ Riordan’s return to exaggerated courtesy was a sign of stress, screamingly clear to Miriam even in her punch-drunk state.

  ‘We’ve been looking for a second mole, ever since Matthias went over the wall, nearly a year ago. But we haven’t been looking very hard, if you follow. And I heard rumors about there being a former politician, now retired, chief executive of a major logistics corporation, who was cooperating with us to provide doppelgängered locations and distribution hubs, back in the good years, in the late eighties and early nineties. The West Coast operation – back when he was out of politic
s. Before his comeback as VP. The crown fits, does it not?’

  ‘But why – ’ This from Brilliana, unable to contain her curiosity.

  ‘We don’t work with politicians,’ Riordan said tiredly. ‘It’s too hard to tell good from bad – the ones who stay bought from the ones who don’t. There’s too much potential for blowback, as the CIA can attest. But Mr. Cheney was out of politics, wasn’t he?’

  Miriam nodded, brooding. ‘He was in the wilderness until . . .’ Her eyes widened. ‘Oof. So, he got a second start in politics, and the duke would have pulled the plug. Am I right? But then Matthias went over the wall, and his report would have ended up where the VP – or one of his people in his intelligence operation – could read it, and he’d have to take out Matthias and then try to – oh no – ’

  ‘He’d have to try to kill us all,’ Olga finished the sentence, nodding, ‘or not even the president could keep him from impeachment, yes? Our mole, for whom we have not been looking with sufficient vigor, isn’t a low-level functionary; he’s the vice president of the United States. And now he fears exposure.’

  Riordan reached over to tap Sir Alasdair on the shoulder. ‘Do you know where your Plan Black site is?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ Alasdair nodded, checking his side mirror as he floored the accelerator to merge with the traffic on the interstate. ‘I’m taking us there.’

  ‘What’s Plan Black?’ Miriam tried to make eye contact with Olga.

  Riordan cleared his throat. ‘My lady, we need to get you to a place of safety. But it’s not just you; in light of the current situation we all need to get clear. Plan Black is a defensive measure, put in place by his grace after the mess last year. It’s a complete withdrawal – everyone in this world is to proceed to a safe site, collect essential equipment, and cross over.’

  ‘But that’s – ’ Miriam paused. ‘What about the conservative faction? Baron Hjorth, the duchess, whoever took the bombs and activated Plan Blue, will they – ’