The Clan Corporate: Book Three of The Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “Listen, I’d like to get you somewhere better to live, a bit more freedom. A chance to get out and move about. But we’re really up in the air here. We don’t have closure; we need to be able to question any Clan members we get our hands on ourselves. So my boss is on me to keep pumping you until we’ve got a basic grammar and lexicon so if anything happens to you—say you had a heart attack tomorrow—we wouldn’t be up shit creek.”

  “Stop bullshitting me.” Matthias had been staring at the fake window in the corner of the room. (Curtains covering a sheet of glass in front of a photograph of the cityscape outside.) Now he turned back to Mike, clearly annoyed. “You do not trust me to act as interpreter, is all. Am I right?”

  Mike took a deep breath, nodded. “My boss,” he said, almost apologetically. And to some extent it was true; never mind Colonel Smith, the REMF—James—acted like he didn’t trust his own left hand to give him the time of day. And he reported to Daddy Warbucks by way of the NSC—and Mike had heard all about that guy. Read about him. “Using you as an interpreter would risk exposing you to classified information. He’s very security-conscious.”

  “As he should be.” Matthias snorted exasperatedly. “All right, I’ll work on your stupid dictionary. When are we going to start creating my new identity?”

  “New identity?” Mike did a double take.

  “Yah, the Witness Protection Scheme does try to provide the new identity, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh.” Mike stared at him. “The Witness Protection Program is administered by the Department of Justice. This isn’t a DOJ operation anymore, it got taken off us—I was seconded because I was already involved. Didn’t you know?

  Matthias frowned. “Who owns it?” he demanded. “The military?” Mike forced himself not to reply. After a moment Matt inclined his head fractionally. “I see,” he murmured.

  Mike licked his suddenly dry lips. Did I just make a mistake? he wondered. “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”

  “All right.” Matt sat down again. He sent Mike a look that clearly said, I don’t believe you.

  Mike rubbed his hands together and tried to change the subject. “What would happen if—say—you were a world-walker, and you tried to cross over while you were up here?” he asked.

  “I’d fall.” Matt glanced at the floor. “How high . . . ?”

  “Twenty-fourth floor.” The set of Matt’s shoulders relaxed imperceptibly. Mike had no problem reading the gesture: I’m safe from them, here.

  “Would you always fall?” Mike persisted.

  “Well—not if there was a mountain on the other side.” Matt nodded thoughtfully. “Might be doppelgangered with a tower, in which case he’d get a bad headache and go nowhere. Or the world-walker might be lying down, in contact with solid object—go nowhere then, too.”

  “Do you know if anyone has ever tried to world-walk from inside an aircraft?” Mike asked.

  Matt laughed raucously.

  “What’s so funny?” Mike demanded.

  “You Americans! You’re so crazy!” Matthias rubbed his eyes. “Listen. The Clan, they know if you world-walk from high up you fall down, yes? Planes are no different. Now, a parachute—you could live, true. But where would you land? In the Gruinmarkt or Nordmarkt or the Debatable Lands, hundreds of miles away! The world is a dangerous place, when you have to walk everywhere.”

  “Ah.” Mike nodded. “Has anyone ever world-walked from inside a moving automobile?” he asked.

  “That would be suicidal.”

  “Even if the person were wearing chain mail? Metal armor?” Mike persisted.

  “Well, maybe they’d survive . . .” Matt stared at him. “So what?”

  “Hmm.” Mike made a mental note. Okay, that was two more of the checklist items checked off. He had a long list of queries to raise with Matt, questions about field effects and conductive boundaries and just about anything else that might be useful to the geeks who were busting their brains to figure out how world-walking worked. Now to change the subject before he figures out what I’m looking for. “What happens if someone world-walks while holding a hand cart?”

  “Hand carts don’t work,” Matt said dismissively.

  “Okay. So it really is down to whatever a world-walker can carry, then? How many trips per day?”

  “Well.” Matt paused. “The standard corvée duty owed to the Clan by adult world-walkers requires ten trips in five days, then two days off, and is repeated for a whole month, then a month off. So that would be one hundred and twenty return trips per year, carrying perhaps fifty kilograms for a woman, eighty to a hundred for a man. More trips for professional couriers, time off for pregnant women, but it averages out.”

  “There’s an implicit ‘but’ there,” Mike prodded.

  “Yes. Women in late pregnancy with a child that will itself be a world-walker cannot world-walk at all. Or if they try, the consequences are not pretty. But I digress. The corvée is negotiated. To a Clan member, the act of world-walking is painful. Do it once, they suffer a headache; twice in rapid succession and a hangover with vomiting is not unusual. Thrice—they won’t do it three times, unless in fear of life and limb. There are drugs they can take, to reduce the blood pressure and swaddle the pain, but they are of limited effectiveness. Four trips in eight hours, with drugs, is punishing. I have seen it myself, strong couriers reduced to cripples. If used to destruction, you might force as many as ten crossings in a period of twenty-four hours; but likely you would kill the world-walker, or put them in bed for a month.”

  “So.” Mike doodled a note on his paper pad. “It might be possible for a strong male courier, with meds, to move, say, five hundred kilograms in a day. But a more reasonable upper limit is two hundred kilograms. And the load must be divided evenly into sections that one person can carry.”

  Matthias nodded. “That’s it.”

  “Hmm.” An SADM demolition nuke weighs about fifty kilos, but no way has the Clan got one of them, Mike told himself, mentally crossing his fingers. They’d all been retired years ago. If the thin white duke was going to do anything with his nuclear stockpile, it would probably be a crude bomb, one that would weigh half a ton or more and require considerable assembly on site. There was no risk of a backpack nuclear raid on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then. Good. Still, if James’s mules are limited like that, we won’t be able to do much more than send a couple of spies over, will we?

  “Okay, so no pregnant couriers, eh? What do the Clan’s women do when they’re pregnant? I gather things are a bit basic over there; if they can’t world-walk, does that mean you have doctors—” Mike’s pager buzzed. “Hang on a minute.” He stood up. There was an access point in the EMCON insulated room. He read the pager’s display, frowning. “I’ve got to go. Back soon.”

  “About the military—” Matthias was on his feet.

  “I said I’ll be back,” Mike snapped, hurrying toward the vestibule. “Just got to take a call.” He paused in front of the camera as the inner door slid shut, so the guard could get a good look at him. “Why don’t you work on the dictionary for a bit? I’ll be back soon as I can.”

  One of the guards outside Matt’s room had a Secure Field Voice Terminal. Mike took it, ducked into the Post-Debriefing Office, plugged it into one of the red-painted wall sockets, and signed on to his voice mail. The joy of working for spooks, he thought gloomily. Back at DEA Boston, he’d just have picked up the phone and asked Irene, the senior receptionist, to put him through. No pissing around with encrypted Internet telephony and firewalls and paranoid INFOSEC audits in case the freakazoid hackers had figured out a way to hack in. Sometimes he wondered what he’d done to deserve being forced to work with these guys. Obviously I must have done something really bad in an earlier life. “Mike here. What is it?”

  “We got the thumbs-up.” No preamble: it was Colonel Smith. “BLUESKY has emplaced the cache and on that basis our NSC cutout has approved CLEANSWEEP and you are go for action.”


  “Whoops.” Mike swallowed, his heart giving a lurch. “What now?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on the twenty-fourth—sorry, I’m in Facility Lambda. Just been talking to Client Zero.” More time-wasting code words to remember for something that was really quite straightforward.

  “Well, that’s nice to hear. Listen, I want you in my office soonest. We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

  “Okay, will comply. See you soon.”

  Smith hung up, and Mike shut down the SFVT carefully, going through the post-call sanitary checklist for practice. (A radiation-hardened pocket PC running some exotic NSA-written software, the SFVT could make secure voice calls anywhere with a broadband Internet connection—as long as you scrubbed its little brains clean afterward to make sure it didn’t remember any classified gossip, a chore that made Mike wish for the days of carrier pigeons. And as long as the software didn’t crash.) “Got to go,” he told the guard. “If Matt asks, I got called away by my boss and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He signed out through the retinal scanners by the door, then waited for the armed guard in front of the elevator bank. Mike gestured at one of the doors. “Get me the twenty-second.” The guard nodded and pushed the call button. He’d already signed Mike in, knew his clearances, and knew what floors he was allowed to visit. A minute later the elevator car arrived and Mike went inside. It could have been the elevator in any other office block, except for the cameras in each corner, the call buttons covered by a crudely welded metal sheet, and the emergency hatch that was padlocked shut on the outside. No escape, that was the message it was meant to send. No entry. High security. No alternative points of view.

  Mike found Smith in his office, a cramped cubbyhole dominated by an unfeasibly large safe. Smith looked tired and aggravated and energized all at once. “Mike! Grab a seat.” He was busy with something on his Secure Data Terminal—a desktop computer by any other name—and turned the screen so that Mike couldn’t see it from the visitor’s chair. “Help yourself to a Diet Coke.” There was a pallet-load of two-liter plastic bottles of pop just inside the door—it was Smith’s major personal vice, and he swore it helped him think more clearly. “I’m just finishing . . . up . . . this!” He switched the monitor off and shoved the keyboard away from him, then grinned, frighteningly. “We’ve got the green light.”

  Mike nodded, trying to look duly appreciative. “That’s a big deal.” How big? Sometimes it was hard to be sure. Green light, red light—when the whole program was black, unaccountable, and off the books, who knew what anything meant? “Where do I come into it?” I’m a cop, damnit, not some kind of spook.

  Smith leaned back in his chair. With one hand he picked up an odd, knobby plastic gadget; with the other he pulled a string that seemed to vanish into its guts. It began to whirr as he rotated his wrist. “You’re going into fairyland.”

  “Fairyland.”

  “Where the bad guys come from. Official code name for Niejwein, as of now. The doc’s little joke.” Whirr, whirr. “How’s the grammar?”

  “I’m—” Mike licked his lips. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I try to talk to Matt in hochsprache, and I’ve got some grasp of the basics, but I have no idea how well I’ll do over there until—” He shrugged. “We need more people to talk to. When can I have access to the other prisoners?”

  “Later.” Whirr, whirr. “Thing is, right now they’re our only transport system. Research has got some ideas, but there’s a long way to go.”

  “You’re using them for transport? How?” Mike frowned.

  Smith smiled faintly. “You’re a cop. You wouldn’t approve.”

  I’m not going to like this. “Why not?”

  “The first army lawyers we tried had a nervous breakdown as soon as we got to the world-walking bit—does posse comitatus apply if it’s geographically collocated with the continental USA?—but I figure the AG’s office will get that straightened out soon enough. In the meantime, we got a temporary waiver. These guys want to act like a hostile foreign government, they can be one—it makes life easier all round. They’re illegal combatants, and we can do what we like with them. There’s even some question over whether they’re human—being able to cross their eyes and think themselves into another universe is kind of unusual—but they’re still working on that case. Meanwhile, we’ve found a way to make them cooperate. Battle Royale.”

  “Tell me.” Mike sat up.

  Smith reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled something out. It looked like a giant padlock, big enough to go round a man’s neck. “Ever seen one of these?”

  “Oh shit.” Mike stared, sick to his stomach. “Shining Path used them . . .”

  “Yeah, well, it works for our purposes.” Smith put the collar-bomb down. “We put one on a prisoner. Set it for three hours, give him a backpack and a camera, and tell him to bury the backpack in the other world, photograph the location, then come back so we can take the collar off. We’re careful to use a location at least five miles from the nearest habitation in fairyland, to stop ’em finding a tool shop. So far they’ve both come back.”

  “That’s—” Mike shook his head, at a loss for words. Ruthless sprang to mind. Abuse of prisoners was another unwelcome thought. Something about it crossed the line that divided business as usual from savagery. Fucking spooks!

  Smith grinned at him. “Before we sent them the first time, we showed them what happened when one of these suckers counts down. Trust me, we’ve got no intention of killing them unless they try to escape.” Whirr, whirr. “But we can’t risk them getting loose and telling the Clan what we’re doing, can we?”

  “Crazy.” Mike shook his head again. “So you’ve got two tame couriers.”

  “For very limited values of tame.”

  “So.” Mike licked his dry lips.

  The thing in Smith’s rapidly swiveling hand was now making a high-pitched whine. He caught Mike staring at it. “Gyroball exerciser. You should try it, Mike. They’re really good. I’m spending too much time with this damn mouse, if I don’t exercise my wrist seizes up.”

  Mike nodded jerkily. What’s going on? Smith was serious-minded, committed, highly professional, and just a bit more paranoid than was good for anyone. The collar-bomb thing had to be a need-to-know secret. “So why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because you’re going to cross over piggyback on one of our mules before the end of the month, and once there you’ll be staying for at least two weeks,” Smith said, so casually that Mike nearly started coughing.

  “Jesus, Eric, don’t you think you could give me some warning when you’re going to spring something like that?” Mike paused. He’d tried to keep a sharp note out of his voice, not entirely successfully. Since Dr. James’s visit he’d known this was coming, sooner or later—but he’d been expecting more time. “Look, the lexicon and dictionary aren’t done yet, our linguists aren’t through their in-processing, and Matt’s not competent to work on it on his own. If something goes wrong while I’m on the other side and you lose Matt’s cooperation as well, it’ll seriously jeopardize my successor’s ability to pick up the pieces. Anyway, don’t I know too much? Last week I had a GS-12 telling me I’m not allowed to leave the country on vacation, I can’t even go to fricken’ Tijuana, and now you’re talking about a hostile insertion and a theater assignment? I’m a cop, not James Bond!”

  “Relax, Mike, it’s all in hand. We’ve cut orders for some army linguists, they’re already cleared. You don’t need to know everything about the contingency planning that’s going into this. More to the point, by the time you go out into the field you’ll be far enough out of the core decision loop that even if the bad guys capture you, you won’t be able to give our strategic goals away.” Smith’s smile was unreassuring.

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” Mike stared. “Listen, this is all ass-backward. We ought to be trying to arrest more couriers on this side before we even think about
going over there. We can secure our own soil without engaging in some kind of insane adventure, surely?”

  Smith snorted. “You’re still thinking like a cop. I’d be right with you, except we’ve got a big tactical security problem, son. We’re not dealing with some Trashcanistan where the State Department can make the local kleptocrats shit themselves just by sneezing: we’re in the dark. We have zero assets, SIGINT is useless when the other guy’s infrastructure is pony express . . . We’re going to need to get intelligence on the ground, not to mention establishing a network of informers. We don’t even know what local political tensions we can leverage. So we’ve got to put someone in charge on the ground with enough of an overview to know what’s important—and the hat fits you.”

  “You’re talking about making me semi-autonomous,” Mike said, then licked his suddenly dry lips. “What is this, back to the OSS?” He was referring to the almost legendary Second World War agency—the predecessor to the CIA—and the cowboy stunts that had led to its postwar shutdown.

  “Not entirely.” Smith looked serious. “And yes, you’re right. Normally we wouldn’t let someone like you loose in the field. But you’re on the inside, you’re one of our local language and custom experts, and you can hand Matt over to someone else—”

  “But I can’t! Not if we want to preserve his cooperation and keep getting useful stuff out of him. He’s a key witness—”

  “He’s not a witness,” Smith said quietly. “You forget he’s an unlawful combatant. He’s just one who’s chosen to cooperate with us, and we’re giving him the kid-glove treatment because of that. For now.”

  “He’s enrolled in the Witness Protection Scheme,” Mike persisted. “Meaning he’s on the books, unlike your two mules. There’s no need to treat this like Afghanistan; we can crack the Clan over here by handling it as an enforcement problem.”

  “Wrong.” Smith shook his head. “And if you went digging you’d find that Source Greensleeves has vanished from the DEA evidence trail and the WPS. Look, you’re looking at this with your cop head on, not your national security head. The Clan are a geopolitical nightmare. All our conventional bases are insecure: they’re designed to a doctrine that says security is about keeping bad guys at arm’s length—except now we’re facing a threat that can close the distance undetected. It’s like a human stealth technology. Nor are our traditional allies going to be worth a warm bucket of spit. Firstly, they don’t know what we’re up against, and if they did, they’d be up against their own private insurgencies as well. Secondly, they’re positioned badly—we can’t use ’em for basing, they can’t use us, the normal rules don’t apply. And then it gets worse. Imagine what Al-Qaida could do to us if they could hire these freaks for transport. Or North Korea?”