The Merchants' War: Book Four of the Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “It’s the way it’s got to be,” Eric shot back. “It’s not just me who’s got to trust you, it’s the whole goddamn chain of command, all the way down.” Which right now consists of one guy in a hospital bed, but let’s not remind him of that. “—History says that the smart money is on this coming out, if not now, then in twenty years’ time. This administration will be fodder for the history books by then—hell, with his heart condition, Daddy Warbucks will probably be sleeping with the fishes—but I’m a career officer, and so are the folks in my outfit. If you don’t give us a fig leaf, you’re asking us to suck up time in Leavenworth. And we don’t get to go on to a juicy research contract with the Heritage Institute, or a part-time boardroom post with some defense contractor when this is over.”

  “What do you want?” James’s intonation was precise and his voice even, but Eric didn’t let it fool him.

  “Something vague, but in writing. The vaguer the better. Something like, ‘In the interests of operational security and in view of the threat of enemy intelligence-gathering attempts aimed at compromising our integrity, all investigations are to be restricted to those with a need to know, and normal committee oversight will be suspended until such time as the immediate threat recedes.’ Just keep it vague. Then if I have to take the stand, I’ve simply misunderstood your intent. I’m obeying an order by a superior, you didn’t intend your orders to breach the law. Nobody needs to get burned.”

  James snorted abruptly, startling Eric. “Is that all?”

  Eric shrugged. “That’s how it’s done. That’s what kept the shit in check during Iran-Contra. Or did you expect me to fall on my sword when all I need is a note signed by teacher to say I’m an overachiever?”

  “Bah.” James glanced away, but not before Eric noticed a twinkle of crocodilian amusement in his eye. “I thought you were an Air Force officer, not a politician.”

  “You don’t get above captain if you’re politically challenged, sir. With all due respect, it makes life easier for me if I can advise you—where appropriate—of steps I can take to do my job better. That’s one of them. Off the record, of course.”

  “I’ll get you your fig leaf, then. Signed on the Oval Office blotter, if that makes you feel better. Now, talk to me.” James leaned back, making a steeple of his fingertips.

  Eric relaxed infinitesimally. “Someone sent Mike back to us. He didn’t come by himself; his leg’s busted up. That tells us something about what sort of operation we’re fighting.”

  “Go on…”

  “I haven’t debriefed him yet. But at a guess, what we’ve already done has hurt their operations on the east coast, and sending agents through after them is going to scare the shit out of them. They’re going to have to negotiate or escalate. Leaving aside the business with GREENSLEEVES and the nuke, we’re going to have to negotiate or escalate, too. Now, it’s not for me to advise on policy, but I suspect we’re going to find that Mike was sent back by someone who stands to gain from negotiating with us. Call them faction ‘A’. The red-on-red action suggests there’s a rival faction, call them ‘B’. So we really need to keep a lid on this, because if the ‘B’ faction figures that the ‘A’ faction want to negotiate, they may try to torpedo things by escalating. And if GREENSLEEVES wasn’t bluffing about the nuke, we could be in a world of hurt.”

  Dr. James nodded minutely. “Your advice?”

  “We have to find that nuke, or rule it out. And we have to keep them talking while JAUNT BLUE get their shit together. Right now, we’re fumbling around in the dark—but so are they. All they know is, we’ve whacked a bunch of their operations and figured out how to get an agent across. And if they’re in trouble internally, presumably they’d love to get us off their backs while they clean up their own mess. They probably think we don’t know about the nukes, and we can be pretty sure that they don’t know about JAUNT BLUE. Everything we know about them suggests they just don’t think in those terms, otherwise they’d be crawling all over us.”

  “So. You propose that we debrief Agent Fleming, then use him to establish a back channel to the leadership of Group ‘A,’ with the goal of stalling them with the promise of negotiations while we clean up the missing nuke and get some results from JAUNT BLUE. Is that a fair summary?”

  Eric blinked, then rubbed his forehead. “You put it better than I did,” he said ruefully. “Long day.”

  “Going to be longer,” James said laconically. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling air vents for a while, until Eric began to think he was planning on taking a nap: but just as he was about to stand up and leave, James sat up abruptly and looked at him. “Your analysis is valid, but incomplete because there are some facts you are unaware of.”

  Uh? “Obviously,” Eric said cautiously. “Should I be?”

  “I think so.” James stared at him, his expression deceptively mild. “Same rules as the Fleming debriefing. This goes nowhere near a computer or a telephone. You follow?”

  Eric nodded.

  “Number one. Obviously, I do not want—nobody wants—to see a terrorist nuke detonated in an American city. Even if it’s in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, that would be very bad. But you need to understand this: if the worst happens, if that bomb goes off, a use will be found for it. The bloody shirt will be waved. Do you understand?”

  Eric licked his suddenly dry lips. “Who’s the fall guy?”

  “The Boy Wonder’s got a hard-on for Mr. Hussein, and PNAC will fall in line, but—” Dr. James shook his head. “I’m not sure who, Colonel. All I can tell you is, it will be someone who we can hammer for it. The hammer is ready, and if the United States doesn’t wield it from time to time the other players may begin to wonder if we’re still willing. So if JAUNT BLUE is ready, the target might be the Clan. And if JAUNT BLUE isn’t ready, we’ll hit someone else, someone we can reach and need to nail flat. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, whoever. But. Whatever else happens, if there’s a hard outcome, it will be used to strengthen our hand. We’ll have carte blanche.” He stared at Eric. “The code name for this plan—and I stress, it’s a contingency plan, a political spin to put on a disaster—is MARINUS BERLIN.”

  “Jesus.” Eric looked away. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Yes. I know. But what else can we do?”

  “Find the bomb.”

  “Yes!” James’s frustration boiled over in Eric’s: “If you’ve got some kind of magic superpowers that let you stare through concrete walls and pinpoint missing nukes, then I’d like to hear about them, Colonel. Failing that, if you have any better ideas, I’m sure Daddy Warbucks would like to know what else to fricking do if terrorists nuke one of our cities?”

  Shit. “I’m sorry. Like I said, we’re looking. I’ll see if I can scare up some backup when we get back, okay?”

  “You’d better. Because falling on our swords is not on the agenda for this administration, son. We’re not going to hand the country to the other team just because some assholes from another dimension fuck with us, any more than we did when bin Laden got uppity and bit the feeding hand.” James paused. “I shouldn’t have blown up then. Forget I said anything, it’s not your fault. There’s a lot at stake here that you aren’t in on: the big picture is really scary. All the oil in fairyland, for starters.”

  “All the what?”

  Dr. James looked as if he’d bitten a lemon while expecting an orange. “Oil, son. Makes the world go round. You know what the business with al-Qaeda is about? Oil. We’re in Saudi Arabia because of the oil: bin Laden wants us out of Saudi. We’re going to go into Iraq because of the oil. Oil is leverage. Oil lets us put the Chinks and Europeans in their place. And we’re running short of it, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s this thing called peak oil coming and we’ve got analysts scratching their heads to figure out how we’re going to field it. We’re not going to run out, but demand is going to exceed supply and the price is going to start climbing in a few years. Our planetary preeminence relies on us having cheap oil
for our industries, while everyone else pays through the nose for it. But we can’t guarantee to keep prices low if we’re having to send our boys out to sit in the desert and keep the wells pumping. So it was looking bad until six months ago, but now there’s a new factor in the equation…”

  He took a deep breath. “The Clan. A bunch of medieval jerks, squatting on our territory—or a good cognate of it. What’s going down in Texas, Colonel Smith? Their version of Texas, not our Texas: what are they doing there? I’ll tell you what they’re doing: they’re sitting on twice as much oil as Saddam Hussein, and that’s what’s got Daddy Warbucks’s attention. Because, you see, if JAUNT BLUE delivers, eventually all that good black stuff is going to be ours…”

  “Are we nearly there yet?”

  Huw glanced in the driver’s mirror, taking his eyes off the interstate for a couple of seconds. Elena sprawled across one half of the back seat of the Hummer H2 truck, managing to look louche and bored simultaneously. Petulant, that was the word. A twenty-one-year-old Clan princess—no, merely a contessa in waiting, should she inherit—fresh from her Swiss finishing school and her first semester at college: out in the big bad world for the first time, with two brave knights to look after her. File off the serial numbers and you could mistake her for a spoiled preppy kitten. Of course, the jocks who’d be clustering around the latter type didn’t usually carry swords. Nor did normal preppies know how to handle the FN P90 in the trunk. Still, Huw let his eyes linger on her tight jeans and embroidered babydoll tee for a second longer than was strictly necessary, before he glanced back at the road and the GPS navigation screen.

  “About twenty miles to go. Eighteen minutes. We turn off in ten.”

  “Boring.” She faked a yawn at him, slim hand covering pink lip gloss.

  “I’m bored too,” snarked Hulius, from his nest in the front passenger seat. He took an orange from the glove box and began to peel it with his dagger. Citrus droplets swirled in the aircon breeze.

  “We’re all bored,” Huw said affably. “Are you suggesting I should break the speed limit?”

  Hulius paled. “No—”

  “Good.” Huw smiled. The white duke took a dim view of traffic infractions, and supplemented the official fines with additional punishments of his own choice: ten strokes of the lash for a first offense. Don’t ever, ever draw attention to yourselves was the first rule they drilled into everyone before letting them out the door. Which was why couriers on Post duty dressed like lawyers, and why the three of them were driving down the interstate at a sober two miles under the speed limit, in a shiny new Hummer, with every i dotted and t crossed on the paperwork that proved them to be a trio of MIT graduate students with rich parents, off on a field trip.

  The green dot on the map inched south along Route 95, slowly converging on Baltimore and the afternoon traffic. The aircon fans hissed steadily, but Huw could still feel the heat beating down on the back of his hand through the tinted glass. Concrete rumbled under the magically smooth suspension of the truck. The scrubby grass outside was parched, burned almost brown by the summer heat. He’d made a journey part of the distance down this way once before on horseback, in a place with no air-conditioning or cars: it had been a fair approximation of hell. Doing the journey in a luxury SUV was heaven—albeit a particularly boring corner of it. “Have you checked the charge on the goggles yet?”

  “They’re in the trunk. They’ll be fine.” Hulius pulled off a slice of orange and offered it to Huw. “you worry too much.”

  “It’s your neck I’m worrying over. Would you rather I didn’t worry, bro?”

  “If you put it that way…”

  The last half hour of any journey was always the longest, but Huw caught the sign in time, and took the exit for Bel Air and parts east: then a couple more turns onto dusty roads linking faceless tracts of suburb with open countryside. The dots converged. Finally he reached a stretch of trees and a driveway led up to an unprepossessing house. He brought the truck to a halt in front of the day room windows and killed the engine.

  “You’re sure this is the place?” Elena pushed herself upright then stretched, yawning.

  “Got to be.” Huw rooted around in the dash for the bunch of house keys and the letter from the realtor. Then he opened the door and jumped out, taking a deep breath as the oppressive summer humidity washed over him. “Number 344. Yup, that’s right.”

  Sneakers crunched on gravel as he walked towards the front door. Behind him, a clattering: Elena unloading the flat Pelikan case from the trunk. Huw glanced up at the peeling white paint under the guttering, the patina of dust. Then he rang the doorbell and waited for a long minute, until Elena, holding the case behind him as if it was a guitar, began tapping her toes and whistling a tuneless melody of impatience. “It pays to be cautious,” he finally explained, before he stuck the key in the lock. “People hereabouts take a dim view of unexpected visitors.”

  The key turned. Inside, the hallway was hot and close, smelling of dust and old regrets. Huw breathed a sigh of relief. He’d set this up by remote control, one of ten test sites running down the coastline and across the continent all the way to the west coast, spaced five hundred kilometers apart. The Realtor had been only too glad to rent it to him for a year, money paid up front: it had been unsalable ever since its former owner, a retired widower, had died of a heart attack in the living room one bleak winter evening. You could remove the carpet and the furniture, and even do something about the smell, but you couldn’t remove the reputation.

  Huw hunted around for the fuse board for a while, then flipped the circuit breaker. A distant whir spoke of long-dormant air-conditioning. He checked that the hall lights worked, then nodded to himself. “Okay, let’s get moved in.”

  It took the three of them half an hour to unload the Hummer. Besides backpacks full of clothing, they brought in a number of wheeled equipment cases, a laptop computer, and couple of expensive digital camcorders. Finally, the air mattresses. “Elena? You take the back bedroom. Yul, you and I are roughing it up front in the master room.”

  Huw dragged his mattress into the front room and plugged the electric pump in. Some of the houses were still furnished, but not this one. Be prepared wasn’t just for scouts. Her Grace Helge had done pretty much this same job, on a smaller, much less organized scale—but Huw had been thinking about it for the week since the white duke had called him in, and he thought he had some new twists on it. He mopped at his forehead. “Listen, we’re about done here and it’s half past lunchtime, so why don’t we head into town and grab a pizza while the air-conditioning makes this place habitable?”

  “Works for me.” Hulius grimaced. “Where’s Lady Elena?”

  “Here.” Elena leaned against the banister rail outside the door. “Food would be good.” She grinned impishly. “How about a couple of bottles of wine?” Like all Clan members, her attitude to wine was very un-American—tempered only by the duke’s iron rule about attracting unwanted attention in public.

  Huw nodded—thoughtfully, for he was still getting used to playing the role of responsible adult around the other two. “We’ll pick something up if we pass a liquor store. But no drinking in public, okay?”

  “Sure, dude.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  An hour later they were back in the under-furnished living room with pizza boxes, a stack of six-packs of Pepsi, and a discreet brown paper bag. “Okay,” said Huw, licking his fingers. “Taken your pills yet?”

  “Um, ’scuse me.” Elena darted upstairs, returning with a toilet bag. “Hate these things,” she mumbled resentfully. “Make me feel woozy.” She threw back her head when she swallowed. What fine bones she has, thought Huw, watching her with unprofessional enthusiasm. That was one of the reasons she was along on this trip: because she was sixty kilograms, the stocky Hulius could carry her piggyback if necessary.

  “Where were we?” asked Hulius, pausing with a slice of Hawaiian halfway to his mouth.

  Huw checked his
wristwatch. “About an hour and a half short of time zero. You guys eat, I’ll repeat the plan, interrupt if you want me to explain anything.”

  “Okay,” said Hulius. Elena nodded, rolling her eyes as she chewed.

  “First, we assemble the stage one kit. Clothing, boots, cameras, guns, telemetry belts. We triple-test the belt batteries and set them running at five minutes to zero hour. There’s no post on this trip, even if we get some results. Elena piggybacks on Yul, on the first attempt. If you fail, we call it a wash today, switch off the telemetry, and break open the wine. If you succeed, you evaluate your surroundings and proceed to Plan Alpha or Plan Bravo, depending. Now.” He tore off a wedge of cooling pizza: “It’s your turn to tell me what you’re supposed to do as soon as you find yourself wherever the hell you’re going. Hoping to go. Plan Alpha first. Elena, describe your job…?”

  The carvery in the hotel wasn’t anything Miriam would have described as a classy restaurant, but after being locked in the basement of a brothel for most of a week it felt like the Ritz. Miriam was ravenous from a day pounding the sidewalks: but Erasmus, she noticed over the soup, ate slowly but methodically, clearing his plate with grim determination. “Hungry?” she asked, lowering her spoon.

  “I try never to leave my food.” He nodded, then tore off another piece of bread to mop his soup bowl clean. “Old habit. Bad manners, I’m afraid: I apologize.”

  “No offense taken.” Miriam nodded. “You need to put on weight, anyway. I haven’t heard you coughing today, but you’re so thin!”

  “Really?” He made as if to raise his napkin to cover his mouth, then grinned at her. “When you start you know about it, but when something goes away…it’s an unnoticed miracle.” A waiter arrived, silently, and removed their bowls. “I don’t feel ancient and drained anymore. But you’re right, I need to eat. I wasn’t always a sack of bones.” He shook his head, and the grin slipped into rueful oblivion.