The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2)

by Charles Stross

  ‘Mike?’ It was Pete Garfinkle. Pete had moved sideways into Monitoring and Surveillance lately. ‘Mind if I come up?’

  ‘Sure, be my guest.’

  By the time Pete knocked on the apartment door, Oscar was head down in the chow and Mike was well into second thoughts. The microwave oven buzzed for attention just as the door rattled. ‘Come on in. I was just about to eat – ’

  ‘S’okay.’ Pete held up a plastic bag. ‘I figured you wouldn’t turn away a six-pack, and I hit Taco Bell on the way over.’ The bag clinked as he planted it on the kitchen table.

  Mike nodded. ‘Grab a chair. Glasses in the top cupboard.’

  ‘Glasses? We don’t need no steenkin’ glasses!’

  Mike planted his dinner on a plate, still in the plastic container, and grabbed a fork and two glasses. ‘Mm. Smells like . . . chicken.’ He pulled a face. ‘I’ve got a freezer-load of sweet ’n’ sour chicken balls, can you believe it? The job lot was going cheap at Costco.’

  ‘Lovely.’ Pete eyed Mike’s food warily, then twisted the cap off a bottle. ‘Sam Adams good enough?’

  ‘It’ll go down nicely.’ Mike started on his rice and chicken as Pete poured two bottles into their respective glasses. ‘What’s with the Taco Bell thing? I thought Nikki liked to cook.’

  Pete shrugged sheepishly. ‘Nikki likes to cook,’ he said. ‘Healthy thing, y’know? Once in a while a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, ’specially if it involves a barbecue and a slab of dead meat. And when it’s not barbecue season, a dose of White Castle, or maybe Taco Bell . . .’

  ‘I see.’ Mike ate junk food out of necessity born of eighty-hour working weeks: Pete ate junk food because he needed a furtive vice and most of the ordinary ones would cost him his job. ‘What’s she doing?’

  ‘It’s her yoga class tonight.’ Pete took a long mouthful of beer. ‘Figured I’d come by and cheer you up. Chat about a little personal problem I’ve been having.’

  Mike looked at him sharply. ‘Beer first,’ he suggested. ‘Then let’s take a hike.’ Pete didn’t do personal problems: he had what by Mike’s envious standards looked like an ideal marriage. He especially didn’t drop around co-workers’ apartments to vent about things, which meant . . . ‘Is it that thing we were talking about over lunch the other day?’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.’ Pete managed to look furtive and scared over his beer glass, which put the wind up Mike even more. ‘How’s the beer?’

  ‘Beer’s fine.’ Mike shunted his dinner aside and stood up. ‘C’mon, let’s go down the backyard and sit out. There’s a couple of chairs down there.’

  Outside, the air hit him like a freshly washed towel, heavy and hot and damp enough to make breathing hard for a moment. Mike waited until Pete cleared the doorway, bag of bottles in hand. ‘Spill it.’

  ‘Chairs first. You’d better be sitting down for this.’

  Mike gestured at the tatty deck chairs on the rear stoop. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Bad enough.’ Pete dropped into one of the chairs and handed Mike a bottle. ‘Go on, sit down.’

  Mike sat. ‘I don’t think anyone’s listening here.’

  ‘Indoors.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘They lock everything down.’ Mike popped the lid off the beer. ‘Can’t blame them for being suspicious of cops – we don’t have that kind of home life.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ Pete glanced up at the roof suspiciously, then shrugged. The rumble of traffic and the scritching of cicadas would make life hard for any eavesdroppers. ‘I called Tony Vecchio up today.’

  Mike sat bolt upright. ‘Shit, man! Not from work – ’

  ‘Relax, I’m not that stupid.’ Pete took another swig from his bottle.

  Mike peered at him. He was obviously rattled. Maybe even as badly rattled as Mike was, in the wake of his little chat with Smith. Explosive collars. What else is going on? ‘I’m not going to like this, am I?’

  ‘I needed to ask some questions.’ Pete looked uncomfortable. ‘We’ve gone native, you know? Inside FTO, surrounded by the military and their national security obsession, we’ve stopped trying to do our jobs properly. I don’t know about you, but I swore an oath to uphold the law – remember that? Anyway, I wanted to get some perspective. Tony knew about Matt because he was there when Matt came in, so I figured he’d help.’

  ‘You wanted a priest to hear your confession.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Mike sighed. ‘Okay, so spill it.’

  ‘Tony stonewalled!’ Pete looked angry for a moment. ‘First he said he didn’t know anything. Then he told me that he’d never heard of Matt, that nobody of that name had come in, there were no WPP admissions this year. Then he told me I’d been suspended on full pay, medical disability in the line of work, for the past ten weeks, and he appreciated how I must feel! I mean, what the fuck?’

  ‘Shit.’ Mike tipped the last of his bottle down his throat, then leaned forward. ‘You want to know what I think.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Close call.’ He wiped his forehead. ‘Listen, what you did was amazingly stupid. If you’d asked me . . . shit. They’ve farmed us out to the military. We belong to Defense right now, we don’t exist on personnel’s books – I mean, I’ll bet if you went digging you’d find that we’ve both been listed on medical leave ever since this thing started. And the paperwork on Matt will be a whitewash. He’s a ghost, Pete, like the fuckers in Gitmo, bugs trapped in the machine. Have you met Dr. James yet?’

  ‘James? Isn’t he Smith’s boss? The political one?’

  ‘Yeah, him. I take it you haven’t met . . . James is a Company man, all the way through. Works for the NSC, runs covert ops, the whole lot. That’s who we’re working for. And you know what happens to people who go outside official channels in CIA land? You just don’t do that. I’ve been doing some reading in my copious spare time. You, me, we got sucked in because we were already on the edge of something very big and very classified and very black. Eric told me some, some stuff. About how the military perceive the national security implications of what we’re up against. It made my hair stand on end. I think he’s wrong about some – maybe most – of this, but I couldn’t tell him that to his face. Now, I happen to think we ought to be treating this more like a policing problem, ought to be enforcing the law – but doesn’t that sort of presuppose that we’re dealing with criminals? What I’m hearing is that like Matt, they think we’re dealing with another government, a rogue state, like North Korea or Cuba in the fifth dimension or something. And right now, they’ve won the argument. I don’t see us getting any backup from Justice, Pete. If you start going behind their backs without evidence, they will stick it to you hard. But if we don’t, who knows what kind of mess they’re going to get us into?’

  ‘Shit.’ Pete stared at him.

  ‘Drink.’ Mike reached into the bag, thrust another bottle at Pete. ‘Listen, we’ll work on this together. Just keep an eye on what’s going on, okay? Compare notes. Try to remember who we are and what kind of job we’re supposed to be doing, so that if the spooks fuck up we’ll be in the clear and able to carry on. Maybe talk to Judith, she’s FBI, I think she’ll see it our way. Form a, I guess, a Justice Department network.’ He found he was waving his hands around helplessly. ‘We’re the underdogs right now. Defense grabbed the ball while our team’s back was turned. But it’s not going to last forever. And when we get an opportunity to make our case we need to be ready . . .’

  TELEPHONY INTERCEPT TRANSCRIPT LOGGED 18:47 04/06

  ‘Hello, who’s this?’

  ‘Paulie?’

  ‘Miriam – I mean, hi babe! Wow! It’s been ages, I’ve been worrying about you – ’

  ‘Yeah, well, there’s been some heavy stuff going down. I take it you heard – ’

  ‘How could I not? I’m, like, this side of things is completely firewalled from, you know, your uncle’s other business interests, but I’ve been catching it from all sides. You were r
ight about the shit hitting the fan, then Brill turned up with her usual calm head on and sorted most of it out, but they’ve been running me ragged and I haven’t heard anything from you, you could have written! So what’s going on in fairyland?’

  ‘Politics, I think. First they dragged me over there full time, then they wouldn’t let me out of the gilded cage. I’ve been out of the loop so long: I mean, I’m frightened. Anyway, now I’m running some errands for them in New Britain they’ve eased up a bit. I get to cross over here and make phone calls, y’know, like prisoner’s privileges? But that’s all I can do right now, until they’re sure nobody’s made me. I’m officially in France, at least that’s what the INS think. Anyway, I am going to get them to clear me so we can do lunch and start putting things back together, soon. Trust me on this, right? Tomorrow I’ve, well, I’ve managed to wangle a week in New London. I’m supposed to be moving carpetbags of confidential letters about, but I’ve figured out a better way. So I get to drop by the works and see who’s holding it together, or not as the case may be, bang heads and kick ass, that kind of thing. Then let’s do lunch, hey?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan, babe.’

  ‘Well, that’s most of the plan, anyway. There is something else. Two somethings, actually. Tell me no if you don’t want to get involved, okay?’

  ‘Miriam, would I?’

  ‘Just saying. Look, one of them’s probably not an issue. I want you to round me up a prescription for a friend. Nothing illegal but he can’t get to see a doctor – he’s out of the country – so if you could order it from one of those dodgy Mexican websites and mail it to me I’d be ever so grateful.’

  ‘Um, okay. If you say so. What’s it you’re wanting?’

  ‘Um. Two packs of RIFINAH-300 antibiotic tablets, one hundred tabs per pack, not the small twenty-tablet bottles. They should only set you back a few bucks – it’s dirt cheap, they use it all over the third world. As soon as you’ve got it, mail it to me via your, uh, contact. Family postal service should reach me soon enough.’

  ‘Okay, I think I’ve got that, RIFINAH-300, a hundred tablets per pack, two packs. That it?’

  ‘Well, there’s the other thing. But that’s the one I think you might want to punt on.’

  ‘Hmm. Tell me, Miriam, okay? Let me make my own mind up?’

  ‘Okay, it’s this: I want all the information you can find – public stuff, company financials, profiles of directors, that sort of thing – on two companies. The first is the Gerstein Center for Reproductive Medicine, in Stony Brook. The second is an outfit called Applied Genomics Corporation. In particular I’m interested in any details you can find about financial transfers from Applied Genomics Corporation to the Gerstein Center – and especially about when they started.’

  ‘Applied Genomics, eh? Is this – is this like our old friends at Proteome?’

  ‘Yes, Paulie. That’s why I said you could say no. Just walk away from it and pretend you never heard from me.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘Yeah, well, couldn’t and should are – look, Paulie, I’m sticking my nose into something it’s not supposed to be in again, and I don’t want to get you burned. So the first order of the day is cover your ass. Don’t do anything that might draw attention to yourself. Don’t post the stuff to me or call me about it, that’s why I’m using a pay phone. I’ll come collect when we do lunch, and I don’t mind if all you’ve got is their annual filings and disclosures.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘I – I’m not sure. But, uh, sometime in the past year my relatives have come up with a genetic test for, uh, the family headache. And I was wondering how they did that when this other thing, the connection with this fertility clinic, crawled out of the woodwork and bit me. Paulie, there’s something – stuff about some kind of W-star genetic trait – that gives me an itchy feeling. The same itch I got when we were investigating that money-laundering scam that turned out to be – well. I think it might have something to do with why they’re giving me the runaround, why I’m being pressured to . . .’

  ‘Pressured to what?’

  ‘Never mind. One thing at a time, huh? Look, I’ve got to go soon. And then I’m going to be on the other side for a week. Let’s do lunch, okay?’

  ‘Okay, kid! See you around. Take care and give my best to Brill and Olga.’

  ‘Will do. You take care too. Especially around, uh, the second job. I mean that, I want you to be around so I can buy you lunch. It’s been too long, okay?’

  ‘Yeah. Nice to hear from you!’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  TRANSCRIPT ENDS – DURATION 00:06:42

  DIFFERENCES OF OPINION

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing in my office?’ Miriam asked in a dangerous voice.

  The man in the swivel chair turned round slowly and stared at her with expressionless eyes. ‘Running it,’ he said slowly.

  ‘I see.’

  The office was cramped, a row of high stools perched in front of the wooden angled desks that formed one wall; they were the only occupants. Miriam had just stepped through the front door, not even bothering to go check on the lab. She’d meant to hang her coat up first, then go find Roger or the rest of the lab team before chasing up the paperwork and calling on her solicitor and then on Sir Alfred Durant, her largest customer. Instead of which –

  ‘Morgan, just who told you that you were running the show?’

  Morgan leaned back in his swivel chair. ‘The duke.’ He smiled lazily. She’d met Morgan before: a strong right hand, but not the sharpest tool in the box when it came to general management. ‘Angbard. He sent me over here after the takedown in Boston. Said I was too hot to stay over there, and he needed someone to keep an eye on things here. Anyway, it’s on autopilot, just ticking over. Every week I get a set of instructions, and execute them.’ He stared at her. ‘I don’t recall being notified that you had permission to be here.’

  ‘I don’t recall having given Angbard permission to manage my company,’ Miriam replied. ‘Never mind the fact that he knows as much about running a tech R&D bureau as I know about fly-fishing. Neither do you, is my guess. What have you been up to while I was in Niejwein?’ It was a none-too-subtle jab, to tell Morgan that she had the ear of important people. Maybe it worked: he sat up.

  ‘Expansion plans – the new works – are on hold. I had to let two of your workmen go, they were insubordinate – ’

  ‘Workmen?’ She leaned across the desk toward him. ‘Which workmen?’

  ‘I’d have to look their names up. Some dirty-fingered fellow from the furnace room, spent all his time playing with rubber – ’

  ‘Jesus. Christ.’ Miriam stared at him with thinly concealed contempt. ‘You fired Roger, you mean.’

  ‘Roger? Hmm, that may have been him.’

  ‘Well, well, well.’ Miriam breathed deeply, flexing her fingertips, trying to retain control. Give me strength! ‘You know what this company makes, don’t you?’

  ‘Brake pads?’ Morgan sniffed dismissively. Like most of the Clan’s sharp young security men, he didn’t have much time for the plebian pursuits of industrial development.

  ‘No.’ Miriam took another deep breath. ‘We’re a design bureau. We design brakes – better brakes than anyone else in New Britain, because we’ve got a forty- to fifty-year lead in materials science thanks to our presence in the United States – and sell licenses to manufacture our designs. So. Did it occur to you that it might just be a bad idea to fire our senior materials scientist?’

  Morgan’s eyes narrowed. ‘That was a scientist?’

  I’m going to strangle him, Miriam thought faintly, so help me I am. ‘Yes, Morgan, Roger is a real live scientist. They don’t wear white coats here, you see, nor do they live in drafty castles in Bavaria and carry around racks of smoking test tubes. Nor do they wear placards round their necks that say SCIENTIST. They actually work for a living. I spent five months getting Roger up to spee
d on some of the new materials we were introducing – I was going to get him started on productizing cyanoacrylate adhesives, next! – and you went and, and sacked him – ’

  She stopped. She was, she realized, breathing too fast. Morgan was leaning backward again, trying to get away from her. ‘I didn’t know!’ he protested. ‘I was just doing what Angbard told me. Angbard said no, don’t buy the new works, and this artisan told me I was a fool to my face! What was I meant to do?’

  Miriam came back down to earth. ‘You’ve got a point about Angbard,’ she admitted. ‘Leave him to me, I’ll deal with him when I can get through to him.’ Morgan nodded rapidly. ‘Did he tell you to shut down the business? Or just put the expansion on hold?’

  ‘The latter. I don’t think he’s paying much attention to what goes on here. He’s fighting fires constantly at present.’

  ‘Well, he could have avoided adding to them right here if he’d left me in charge; the one thing you can’t afford to do with a business like this is ignore it. How many points are you on?’

  Morgan hesitated for a moment. ‘Five.’ Five thousandths of the gross take, in mob-speak.

  Ten, or I’m a monkey’s aunt. ‘Okay, it’s like this. Angbard wants a quiet life. Angbard doesn’t need to hear bad news. But if you let this company drift it will be an ex-company very fast – it’s a start-up, do you know what that means? It’s got just one major product and one major customer, and if Sir Alfred realizes we’re drifting he’ll cut us loose. He can afford to tie us up in court until we go bust or until Angbard has to bail us out, and he’ll do that if we don’t show signs of delivering new products he can use. I think you can see that going bust would be bad, wouldn’t it? Especially for your points.’

  Morgan was watching her with ill-concealed fear now. ‘So what do you think I should do?’