The Clan Corporate: Book Three of The Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “Oh.” Mike hunched his shoulders defensively. The spooks have legitimate fears, he told himself. But how do I know they’re legitimate? How do I know they’re not seeing things? Then: But what do we really know about the Clan? What makes them tick?

  “Some of those sneaky bastards we call allies would stab us in the back as soon as look at us,” said Smith, mistaking Mike’s thoughtful silence for complicity. “This isn’t the Cold War anymore, and we’re not up against godless communism, we’re up against drug smugglers sans frontiers. If you think the Dutch are going to be any use—”

  Mike, who had been to Amsterdam on business a couple of times, and had a pretty good idea what the Dutch authorities would think about drug smugglers with a plutonium supply, held his silence. Smith’s venting was just that—effusions born of the frustration of fighting an invisible foe with inadequate intelligence and insufficient reach. More to the point . . . They’ve dragged me into their covert ops world, he realized. If I make a fuss, will they let me out again?

  “Phase one,” Mike said when Smith ran down. “When does it kick off? What should I be doing?”

  Smith scribbled a note on his yellow legal pad. “I’ll e-mail you the details, securely. First briefing is Tuesday, kickoff should be week after next. You’d better keep your overnight bag by your desk, and be prepared to relocate on my word.” His grin widened. “In a couple of days you’re going back to school, like Dr. James said. You’ll be studying Spying 101. It’ll be fun . . .”

  Mike had been home for barely an hour when the phone rang.

  Home wasn’t somewhere he saw a lot of these days: since joining the magical mystery tour from spook central, his personal life had been patchy at best. From working the mostly regular hours of a cop—regular insofar as they varied wildly and he could be called out at odd times of day or night, but at least got shifts off to recover—he’d found himself putting in eighty- to hundred-hour weeks in one or another of the secure offices the Family Trade Organization had established. Helen the cleaner had taken Oscar in for a couple of weeks at one point, and the tomcat still hadn’t forgiven him. That hurt; he and Oscar went back a long way together. Oscar had been with him before he’d been married to his ex-wife. Oscar had watched girlfriends come and go, then mostly had the place to himself since 9/11. But everyone had to make sacrifices during wartime—even elderly tomcats.

  Mike had showered and unloaded the dishwasher and stuck a meal in the microwave, and he was working on a tin of pet food for Oscar (who was encouraging him by trying to get tangled up in his ankles) when the doorbell rang. “Shit.” Mike put the can down. Oscar yowled reproachfully as he fumbled the handset of the entryphone. “Yes?”

  “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 bowl 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 grinned. “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 things. 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 wail 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 w
e’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 poor fucks in Gitmo, trapped in Daddy Warbucks’s 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 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 right 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 back out. 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 Web sites 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, 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

  10

  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.

  “Ah. 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 o
n Sir Alfred Durant, her largest customer. Instead of which—

  “Morgan, isn’t it? Just who told you you were running the show?”

  Morgan leaned back in his swivel chair. “The thin white duke.” He smiled lazily. She’d met Morgan before: a strong right hand, basically, 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.” His smile faded. “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 said tensely. “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 stopped smiling and sat up.