The Clan Corporate (ARC)

by Charles Stross

  "Yes." James laid his hands flat on the tabletop, fingers spread wide across it. "We will be emphasizing national security approaches. These-this 'Clan'-is an external threat. They've got nuclear material, and the narcoterrorism angle is, in our view-that is, the strategic view received from the top down-of subsidiary importance to the question of whether a hostile power is going to start blowing up our cities."

  "Am I still needed?" Mike asked bluntly, a disturbing sense of anger and helplessness stealing over him. "Or did you call me up here to reassign me?"

  James smiled again, like a shark circling wounded prey in the water. "Not exactly. Colonel Smith tells me that in the eighty-one days since this organization got off the ground, the organization has laid its hands on just one willing HUMINT asset, and he's of questionable worth. You've been tasked with interrogating him, because you were his first contact. I find that kind of hard to believe-can you summarize for me?"

  Mike felt his pulse quicken. Smith set me up. He glanced at his boss, who narrowed his eyes and shook his head infinitesimally. No? Then it was James. Spook tactics. Double-check everyone against everyone else, trust nobody, grab the situation by the throat-hang on. "Can you confirm your clearances for me? No offense, but so far all I've got to go on is your word." He nodded at Smith. "Standard protocol." Standard protocol was trust nobody, accept nothing, and it was supposed to apply at all levels-which was why Swann checked Mike's ID and clearances every morning before giving him the keys to his own office. He tensed: if James wanted to make an issue of it-

  But instead he nodded agreeably. "Very good, Mr. Fleming. Badge reader over there." He stood up and walked over to the machine. "Why don't you clear yourself to me, at the same time?"

  "I think that would be a very good idea, sir," Mike said carefully. They both ran their badges through the scanner, and Mike noted James's list of clearances. It was about a third longer than his own. "Great, I'm allowed to tell you that you exist." He smiled, experimentally, and James nodded as he returned to his seat.

  Mike took a deep breath. Okay, so he's not a total jerk. I can live with that. "We have a problem with intelligence assets," he began. "All we've got is one willing defector and two prisoners. The defector, as usual, is willing to tell us one hundred and fifty percent of whatever he thinks we want to hear. And the prisoners not only aren't talking, I don't think they can talk."

  James grunted as if he'd been punched in the gut. "Explain." He held up one hand: "I've read the backgrounder and played the debrief tapes from Matt. Color me an interested ignoramus and give it to me straight, I don't have time for excuses. Pretend I'm Daddy Warbucks, if you like. That's where this buck stops."

  "Uh, okay." Mike sat down again, head whirling. The Office of the Vice President? He's in charge, now? Notoriously strong-willed, the VP in this administration more than made up for any lack of experience in the Oval Office. But this was still news to Mike. Later.

  He cleared his throat. "We got a windfall in the form of Matt. Without him, FTO wouldn't exist. We'd still be looking at eight to ten gigabucks of H and C per annum transshipping into the east coast with no clue how it was getting past the Coast Guard. We're still probably looking at half that, but for now-" He shrugged. "First thing first, Matt is probably the most valuable informer any American police or security department has acquired, ever."

  He swallowed. "But we hit a concrete wall in the follow-through stage."

  "Concrete." James made a steeple of his fingers, elbows braced on the transparent tabletop. "What do you mean, concrete?"

  "Okay. In our first week, Pete and I holed up with Matt and milked him like crazy. Apart from the side trip to the black box down in Crypto City, of course." He nodded at Smith. "By day six on the timeline we were ready to move. Thanks to the courier snatch on day two, the other side already knew we were active, so it wasn't much of a surprise when we rolled eight empty nests in a row. The haul was pretty good but the assets had flown, money and bodies and drugs. If you've seen the details of what we found"-James nodded-"you'll know it was a very substantial operation. Disturbingly well structured. These guys are like a major espionage agency in their approach, sort of like the old-time KGB: organized in teams with secure communications and safe houses and an org chart. This isn't some street gang. But we didn't catch anyone. There's another raid going down today, as it happens, but I expect that one to draw a blank too. These guys are way too professional."

  James nodded, his expression thoughtful. "Tell me about the two prisoners."

  "Well. Pete and I went back to Matt, who filled us in on the other side's security architecture. We put our heads together and took a stab, with Matt in the loop, at second-guessing how the other side's head, the Duke, would rearrange things in the light of Matt's disappearance. Matt said he'd arranged a cover that would make it look like he'd died, so we tried a few fallbacks on the working assumption that they hadn't twigged that Matt was in our pocket. We also hit another nine that we knew would be evacuated, in case they put two and two together about Matt. The decoys got the same treatment as the first wave of raids, but for the special targets we pulled strings to get some special assets in for the party."

  Mike leaned back. Special assets-the sort of people the CIA had been forbidden ever since the Church commission, the wake of Operation Phoenix, and the other deadly secrets from the sixties and early seventies. Guys with plastic-surgery fingerprints and briefcases full of very expensive custom-built toys. "We drew a blank on one site, but number two had about sixty kilos of uncut heroin, plus a bunch of documents in Code Gamma. The third site, we hit pay dirt and three couriers. One of them died in the extraction process"-killed by fentanyl fumes, brain-dead before the special assets could hook her up to a ventilator-"but the other two we bagged and tagged and shipped off to Facility Echo. Turns out there's no record of these guys anywhere-they're ghosts, they don't exist. Didn't even have any fake ID on them. I liaised with Special Agent Herz and we arranged a section 412 detention order. Because they're of no known nationality there's no one to deport them to, and once INS punches their ticket as illegal aliens we get to keep them out of the court system. Better than Camp X-ray. Shame we can't get anything useful out of them," he added apologetically.

  James frowned. "Why won't they talk?"

  "Well, near as we can tell, they don't speak English." Mike waited to see how James would react.

  When it came, it was a minute nod. "What about Spanish?"

  "Nope." Mike watched him minutely. No grasping at straws, no accusations of leg-pulling. He's not so bad, he thought grudgingly. Not bad for a REMF spook. "We know about the tattoos, so we took precautions. Courier Able had a mirror tattoo on his head, under the hairline, and Courier Bravo had one on the inside of his left wrist. We kept them hooded and blindfolded until we had time to get a security-cleared cosmetologist with a laser in to erase them. But we're pretty sure that these guys don't speak English or Spanish-or French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croat, Japanese, Latin, Korean, Mandarin, or Cantonese." And don't ask how we know-the old fire drill trick could look very bad, very close to psychological torture, if a defense attorney dragged it up in front of a hostile jury. "They do speak something Germanic, we got that much, and Matt checks out as a translator. They call it hochsprache, and it sounds like it diverged from various proto-German dialects about sixteen hundred years ago-it's about as similar to German as modern Spanish is to classical Latin." He took another deep breath. "I'm trying to learn it, but there's not much to go with-I mean, neither of the detainees are willing to help, and Matthias isn't exactly a foreign-language teacher. We're working on a lexicon, and we've got a couple of research linguists coming in as soon as we get their security clearances through, but it's a big problem. I figure these guys were drafted in as mules, shuttling back and forth between buildings in the same place in both worlds-what they call doppelganger houses. To do that, they don't need to pass as Americans. But getting information out of the
m is difficult."

  Which is an understatement and a half, Mike added mentally. Matt was becoming a headache-increasingly demanding and suspicious, paranoid about the terms of his confinement and the likelihood of his eventual release under a false identity. Sooner or later he'd stop cooperating, and then they'd be in big trouble.

  "Well, we are going to have a pressing need for that expertise in the near future." James sat up abruptly, as if he'd come to some decision. "Mr. Fleming, I have some news for you which might sound negative at first, so I hope you'll listen carefully and take it positively. We have no functioning human intelligence assets at all in the place they come from. Just like the situation in Afghanistan back in 2001-and we can't afford to be flying blind. I've been reviewing your personnel file and, bluntly, you're nothing exceptional-except that you've got a three-month lead over everyone else in the field in this one area of expertise. So, with immediate effect I'm directing Colonel Smith here to reassign you from Investigations Branch to a new core team-on-location HUMINT. And your prisoner is going to be reassigned to military custody, although for the time being he'll stay where he is."

  "Military custody?" Mike raised an eyebrow. "I'm not sure that's legal."

  "It will be when the AG's office delivers their ruling," James said dismissively. "As I was about to say, you will continue to work on language skills and continue debriefing Matthias, and liaise with Investigations Branch as necessary-but you're also going to go back to school. Field operations school, to be precise. You're going to ride shotgun on a code word operation you haven't heard of before now, code word CLEANSWEEP, and you have BLUESKY clearance. Your primary job will be to learn who these people are and how they think, and their language and customs, and anything else that lets us get a handle on their minds. And you're going to learn them well enough to learn how to move among them undetected. Do you understand me?"

  "Yes, I think I do." Mike's mouth was dry. So they're taking this military? "You're asking for a spy. Right?" Can they do this? Legally? He had a feeling that any objections he raised would be steamrolled. And raising them in the first place might be rather more serious than a career-limiting move.

  "Not just a simple spy." James nodded thoughtfully. "You're going to be recruiting, training, and running other officers, in a way that we haven't really been good at since the Cold War. Over the past couple of decades we've come to rely too heavily on electronic intelligence sources-no offense," he added in Smith's direction, "and we just can't operate that way in fairyland. So you're going to go in and run our field operation. We're going in-we're going over there, carrying the war to the enemy. That is the mission we are tasked with, from the top down. Got that?"

  "It's a lot to take in," Mike said slowly. His head was spinning. What the hell? It sounds like he's planning an invasion! "You mentioned some kind of special clearances, projects? Uh, CLEANSWEEP? BLUESKY?"

  James nodded to Smith. "You tell him."

  Smith sat up. "The, uh, Clan pose a clear and present danger to the integrity of the United States of America," he said quietly. "In fact, it's not overdramatizing things too much to say that they're the ultimate rogue state. So word is that we're to prepare, if possible, for a situation in which we can go in to, ah, impose a change of regime. BLUESKY is the intelligence enabler and CLEANSWEEP is the project to conduct espionage operations in hostile territory."

  "All of this assumes we can reliably send spies into a parallel universe and bring them back again," Mike said quietly. "How would we do that?"

  Dr. James glanced at Colonel Smith. "You were right about him," he murmured. To Mike: "You aren't cleared for that yet. Let's just say that we've got some long-term ideas, research projects under way. But for the time being"-he smiled at Mike, a frighteningly intense expression that revealed more teeth than a human being ought by rights to have-"we've got two enemy couriers, and they will work for us, whether they want to or not. We'll use them to capture more. And then we'll make those fuckers sorry they ever messed with the United States."

  8

  Reproductive Politics

  It was a shaken, thoughtful Miriam who followed the coach attendant and the other passengers in her car up to the dining carriage. Some of the other passengers had dressed for dinner, but Miriam found she wasn't too out of place once she shed the jacket: probably a good thing, because she hadn't been paying enough attention to maintaining her cover. As with the Gruinmarkt, issues of public etiquette frequently baffled her-it was easy to get things wrong, especially when she was worrying about other matters. What on earth is going on with that report? What does it mean? she wondered as the attendant ushered her into a seat between a ruddy-faced grandmother and her bouncing ten-year-old charge, evidently out of some misplaced concern for her solitary status. I'm being trolled. That's the only explanation that makes sense. Someone expected me to look in the bag-

  "Marissa! Fold your hands and stop playing with your fork. I'm sorry, travel makes her unmanageable," the grandmother blasted in Miriam's ear. "Wouldn't you say so?"

  Miriam smiled faintly, keeping a tight lid on her irritation at the interruption. "I don't like to speak ill of people I hardly know."

  "That's all right, you know us now. Marissa, put that down! I'm Eleanor Crosby. You are . . . ?"

  Trapped. "I'm Gillian," said Miriam, rolling out the cover identity Clan logistics had prepared for her. They'd warned her it should be used as little as possible: it wouldn't stand up to serious scrutiny. The steward was walking the length of the table with a tureen of soup balanced on one arm, ladling spoonfuls into bowls in time with the sway of the carriage. I'm trying to think, so kindly shut up and stop bugging me.

  "Wonderful! You must be traveling to see your family? Where are you from, London or the south?"

  "London," said Miriam, tensing. As soon as the waiter was past her she picked up her spoon and started on her bowl. The onion soup might have tasted good if she hadn't burned her mouth on the first sip, but it was either tuck in now or put up with Mrs. Crosby's curiosity all the way to Dunedin. As it was, she had to remain alert for the entire meal, because little Marissa's every tic and twitch seemed to attract Eleanor's loud and very vocal ire. Her place setting was a battlefield, and Mrs. Crosby seemed unable to grasp the possibility that Miriam might not want to be induced to spill her life's story before a stranger. Which was doubly frustrating because right then Miriam would have been immensely grateful for someone to share her conundrum with-had it not been both a secret and a matter of life and death.

  After the ordeal of dinner, Miriam returned to her compartment to discover that someone had been there while she'd been eating. One of the bench seats had been converted into a compact bunk bed. For a moment her pulse raced and she came close to panic: but the carpetbag was untouched, still innocently stuffed into the luggage rack above the door. She bolted the door and carefully lifted the bag down, intending to continue her search.

  When she'd opened it before dinner, carefully checking the lock first, she'd discovered the bag didn't contain the cargo she'd expected: no neatly taped bags of white powder here. Instead, there was a layer of clothing-her clothing, a skirt and blouse and a change of underwear from her house in the Boston of this world. Bastards! She'd felt faint for a moment as she stared at it. They set me up! Then she calmed down slightly. What if the Constabulary pulled her in for questioning and looked in her bag? What would they find? Miriam puzzled for a while. Surely they wouldn't waste a precious cargo run just to test a cover identity? she asked herself. Which meant-ah. This is meant to survive a search, isn't it?

  There were more items that smacked of misdirection in the bag: a small pouch of gold coin muffled inside the newssheet wrapping of an antique vase. That would buy her a hefty fine or a month in prison if they found it (they being the hypothetical police agents, searching everybody as they came off the train) and it would more than suffice to explain her nervousness. What's going on here? Miriam puzzled. Then she'd come to the bottom of the bag and foun
d the battered manila envelope with its puzzling contents, which she'd just had time to glance through before the cabin attendant knocked to tell her it was time for dinner.

  Now she sat on the bunk, reopened the bag, and pulled out the envelope. It contained a manuscript, printed in blurry purplish ink on cheap paper in very small type, the pages torn and yellowed at the edges from too many fingers: The Tyranny of Reason by Jean-Paul Mavrides, whoever he was. It looked to her eyes like something smuggled out of the old Soviet Union-battered and beaten but blazingly angry, a condemnation of the divine right of kings and an assertion that only in a perfect democracy based on the common will of humanity could the common man free himself from his oppressors. "Well, I wanted something to read," she told herself mordantly, "even if I wasn't looking at a seven-year stretch for possession . . ."

  She began to flick through it rapidly, pausing when she came to the real meat, which was embedded in it in neatly laser-printed sheets interleaved every ten pages or so. Purloined letter. She could see the setup now, in her mind's eye, and it was less obviously a setup. They wouldn't be planning to shop her-not with a bunch of destroy before reading Clan security correspondence on her person. Even though it was likely that the arresting constables would simply log it as an item from the Banned List and pitch it straight into the station fireplace. So it was just a routine precaution, multiple layers of concealment for the letters. Which didn't help her much: with a few eye-catching exceptions they were mostly incomprehensible. She kept coming back to the letter from Dr. Darling to Angbard. What the hell is a W* heterozygote? she wondered. This is significant. What is Angbard doing, messing around with a fertility clinic? She could think of a number of explanations, none of them good-