The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  “Shit.” It was the shooter on the back seat, wrinkling his face in disgust. “I think that’s—” he paused “—no, they’re trying to follow us on foot.” The driver piled on the steam, then flung their carriage into a wide turn onto a public boulevard. The shooter sat down hard, holding his pistol below seat level, pointing at the floor. “Can you sit up?” he asked Miriam and Erasmus. “Look respectable fast, we’re hitting Ketch Street in a minute.”

  Erasmus picked himself up. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice shaky. Miriam waited for a moment as her stomach tried to lurch again. “Are you all right?”

  “Head hurts,” she managed. Arms around her shoulders lifted her to her knees. “My suitcase…”

  “On the parcel shelf.”

  More hands from the other side. Together they lifted her into position on the bench seat. The car was rattling and rocking from side to side, making a heady pace—almost forty miles per hour, if she was any judge of speed, but it felt more like ninety in this ragtop steamer. She gasped for air, chest heaving, trying to get back the wind she’d lost while she was throwing up. “Are you alright?” Burgeson asked again. He’d found a perch on the jump seat opposite, and was clutching a grab-strap behind the chauffeur’s station on the right of the cockpit.

  “I, it never hit me like that before,” she admitted. Amidst the cacophony in her skull she found a moment to be coldly terrified: world-walking usually caused a blood pressure spike and migraine-like symptoms, but nothing like this hellish nausea and pile-driver headache. “Something’s up with me.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?” he pressed her. “Was it worth it?”

  “Yeah, yes.” She glanced sideways, tiredly. “We haven’t been introduced.”

  “Indeed.” Erasmus sent her a narrow-eyed look. “This is Albert. Albert, meet Anne.”

  Gotcha. “Nice to meet you,” she said politely.

  “Albert” nodded affably, and palmed his revolver, sliding it into a pocket of his cutaway jacket. “Always nice to meet a fellow traveler,” he said.

  “Indeed.” Fellow traveler, is it? She fell silent. Burgeson’s political connections came with dangerous strings attached. “What’s with the car? And the rush?”

  “You didn’t hear them shooting at us?” Erasmus looked concerned, as if questioning her sanity.

  “I was busy throwing up. What happened?”

  “Stakeout,” he said. “About ten minutes after your break-in they surrounded the place. If you’d come out the front door—” The brisk two-fingered gesture across his throat made the message all too clear. “I don’t know what you’ve stirred up, but the Polis are very upset about something. So I decided to call in some favors and arrange a rescue chariot.”

  “Albert” nodded. “A good thing too,” he said darkly. “You’ll excuse me, ma’am.” He doffed his cap and began to knead it with his fingers, turning it inside out to reveal a differently patterned lining. “I’ll be off at the next crossroads.” Erasmus turned and knocked sharply on the wooden partition behind the chauffeur: the car began to slow from its headlong rush.

  “Where are we—” Miriam swallowed, then paused to avoid gagging on the taste of bile “—where are we going?”

  The car slowed to a near halt, just short of a streetcar stop. “Wait,” said Erasmus. To “Albert” he added: “The movement thanks you for your assistance today. Good luck.” “Albert” nodded, then stepped onto the sidewalk and marched briskly away without a backward glance. The car picked up speed again, then wheeled in a fast turn onto a twisting side street. “We’re going to make the train, I hope,” Erasmus said quietly. “The driver doesn’t know which one. Or even which station. I hope you can walk.”

  “My head’s sore. But my feet…” She tried to shrug, then winced. Only minutes had passed, but she was having difficulty coming to terms with the ambush. “They were trying to kill me. No warnings.”

  “Yes.” He raised one eyebrow. “Maybe your friend was under closer surveillance than he realized.”

  Miriam shuddered. “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.

  It took them a while to make their connection. The car dropped them off near a suburban railway platform, from which they made their way to a streetcar stop and then via a circuitous route Erasmus had evidently planned to throw off any curious followers. But an hour later they were waiting on a railway platform in downtown Boston, not too far from the site of Back Bay Station in Miriam’s home world. Geography dictates railroads, she told herself as another smoky locomotive wheezed and puffed through the station, belching steam towards the arched cast-iron ceiling trusses. I wonder what else it dictates? The answer wasn’t hard to guess: she’d seen the beggars waiting outside the ticket hall, hoping for a ride out west. Erasmus nodded to himself beside her, then tensed. “Look,” he said, “I do believe that’s ours.”

  Miriam glanced towards the end of the long, curving platform, through the thin haze of steam. “Really?” The long ant column of carriages approaching the platform seemed to vanish into the infinite distance. It was certainly long enough to be a transcontinental express train.

  “Carriage eleven, upper deck.” He squinted towards it. “We’ve got a bit of a walk…”

  The Northern Continental was a city on wheels—wheels six French feet apart, the track gauge nearly half as wide again as the ordinary trains. The huge double-deck carriages loomed overhead, brass handrails gleaming around the doors at either end. Burgeson’s expensive passes did more than open doors: uniformed porters took their suitcases and carried them upstairs, holding the second and third class passengers at bay while they boarded. Miriam looked around in astonishment. “This is ridiculous!”

  Erasmus smiled lopsidedly. “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s not that—” Miriam walked across to the sofa facing the wall of windows and sat down, bemused. The walls of the compartment were paneled in polished oak as good as anything Duke Angbard had in his aerie at Fort Lofstrom, and if the floor wasn’t carpeted in hand-woven Persian rugs, she was no judge of carpet. It reminded her of the expensive hotels she’d stayed at in Boston, when she’d been trying to set up a successful technology transfer business and impress the local captains of industry. “Does this convert into a bed, or…?”

  “The bedrooms are through there.” Erasmus pointed at the other end of the lounge. “The bathroom is just past the servants’ quarters—”

  “Servants’ quarters?”

  Erasmus looked at her oddly. “Yes, I keep forgetting. Labor is expensive where you come from, isn’t it?”

  Miriam looked around again. “Wow. We’re here for the next three or four days?”

  A distant whistle cut through the window glass, and with a nearly undetectable jerk the carriage began to move.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Plenty of time to take your shoes off.”

  “Okay.” She bent down automatically, then blinked stupidly. “This doesn’t come cheap, does it?”

  “No.” She heard a scrape of chair legs across carpet and looked up, catching Erasmus in the process of sitting down in a spindly Queen Anne reproduction. He watched her with his wide, dark, eyes, his bearing curiously bird like. Behind him, Empire Station slid past in ranks of cast-iron pillars. “But one tends to be interfered with less if one is seen to be able to support expensive tastes.”

  “Right…so you’re doing this, spending however much, just to go and see a man about a book?”

  A brief pause. “Yes.” Erasmus smiled faintly.

  Miriam stared at him. And you gave me a gun to carry? Either you’re mad, or you trust me, or… she couldn’t complete the sentence: it was too preposterous. “That must be some book.”

  “Yes, it is.” He nodded. “It has already shaken empires and slain princes.” His cheek twitched at some unspoken unpleasantness. “I have a copy of it in my luggage, if you’d like to read it.”

  “Huh?” She blinked, stupidly. “I thought you said you were going to see a man about a
book? As in, you were going to buy or sell one?”

  “Not exactly: perhaps I should have said, I’m going to see a man about his book. And if all goes well, he’s going to come back east with us.” He glanced down at his feet. “Does Sir Adam Burroughs mean anything to you?”

  Miriam shook her head.

  “Probably just as well,” Erasmus muttered to himself. “I think you ought to at least look at the book, after dinner. Just so you understand what you’re getting into.”

  “Alright.” She stood up. “Is there an electrical light in the bedroom? I need to plug my machine in to charge…”

  The fridge was half empty, the half-and-half was half past yogurt, and Oscar thought he was a burglar. That was the downside of coming home. On the upside: Mike could finally look forward to sleeping in his own bed without fear of disturbances, he had a crate of antibiotics to munch on, and Oscar hadn’t thrown up on the carpet again. Home. Funny place, where are the coworkers and security guards? Out on the street, obviously. Mike watched Herz drive off from the porch, then closed the door and went inside.

  The crutches got in the way, and the light bulb in the hallway had blown, but at least Oscar wasn’t trying to wrap his furry body around the fiberglass cast in a friendly feline attempt to trip up the food ape. Yet. Mike shuffled through into the living room and lowered himself into the sofa, struggled inconclusively with the one shoe he was wearing, and flicked on the TV. The comforting babble of CNN washed over him. I need some time out, he decided. This being hospitalized shit is hard work. Spending half an hour as a couch potato was a seductive prospect: a few minutes later, his eyelids were drooping shut.

  Perhaps it was the lack of hospital-supplied Valium, but Mike—who didn’t normally remember his dreams—found himself in a memorable but chaotic confabulatory realm. One moment he was running a three-legged race through a minefield, the sense of dread almost choking him as Sergeant Hastert’s corpse flopped drunkenly against him, one limp arm around his shoulders; the next, he was lying on a leather bench seat, unable to move, opposite Dr. James, the spook from head office. “It’s important that you find the bomb,” James was saying, but the cranky old lady on the limousine’s parcel shelf was pointing a pistol at the back of his head. “Matthias is a traitor; I want to know who he was working for.”

  He tried to open his mouth to warn the colonel about the old madwoman with the gun, but it was Miriam crouching on the shelf now, holding a dictaphone and making notes. “It’s all about manipulating the currency exchange rates,” she explained: then she launched into an enthusiastic description of an esoteric trading scam she was investigating, one that involved taking greenbacks into a parallel universe, swapping them for pieces of eight, and melting them down into Swiss watches. Mike tried to sit up and pull Pete out of the line of fire, but someone was holding him down. Then he woke up, and Oscar, who’d been sitting on his chest, head-butted him on the underside of his chin.

  “Thanks, buddy.” Oscar head-butted him again, then made a noise like a dying electric shaver. Mike figured his bowl was empty. He took stock: his head ached, he had pins and needles in one arm, the exposed toes of his left foot were cold to the point of numbness, and the daylight outside his window was in short supply. “Come here, you.” He reached up to stroke the tomcat, who was clearly intent on exercising his feline right to bear a grudge against his human whenever it suited him, and not a moment longer. For a moment he felt a bleak wave of depression. The TV was still on, quietly babbling inanities from the corner of the room. How long is this going to take? Mrs. Beckstein had said it could be weeks, and with Colonel Smith tasking him with being her contact, that could leave him stuck indoors here for the duration.

  He pushed himself upright and hobbled dizzily over to the kitchen phone—the cordless handset had succumbed to a flat battery—and dialed the local pizza delivery shop from memory. Working out what the hell to do with this surfeit of time (which he couldn’t even use for a fishing trip or a visit to his cousins) could wait ’til tomorrow.

  The next morning, the long habit of keeping office hours—despite a week of disrupted sleep patterns—dragged Mike into unwilling consciousness. He took his antibiotics, then spent a fruitless half-hour trying to figure out how to shower without getting water in his cast, which made his leg itch abominably. This is hopeless, he told himself, when the effort of trying to lift an old wooden stool into the shower left him so tired he had to sit down: I really am ill. The infection—thankfully under control—had taken out of him what little energy the torn-up and broken leg had left behind. The difficulty of accomplishing even minor tasks was galling, and sitting at home on full pay, knowing that serious, diligent people like Agent Herz were out there busting their guts to get the job done made it even worse. But there was just about nothing he could do that would contribute to the mission, beyond what he was already doing: sitting at ground zero of a stakeout.

  Mike had never been a loafer, and while he was used to taking vacations, enforced home rest was an unaccustomed and unwelcome imposition. For a while he thought about getting out and picking up some groceries, but the prospect of getting into the wagon and driving with his left leg embedded in a mass of blue fiberglass was just too daunting. Better wait for Helen, he decided. His regular cleaner would be in like clockwork tomorrow—he could work on a shopping list in the meantime. There’s got to be a better way. Then he shook his head. You’re sick, son. Take five.

  Just after lunchtime (a cardboard-tasting microwave lasagna that had spent too long at the bottom of the chest freezer), the front doorbell rang. Cursing, Mike stumbled into the hall, pushing off the walls in a hurry, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t get impatient and leave before he made it. He paused just inside the vestibule and checked the spy hole, then opened the door. “Come in!” He tried to take a step back and ended up leaning against the wall.

  “No need to put on a song and dance, Mike, I know you feel like shit.” Smith nodded stiffly. “Go on, take your time. I’ll shut the door. We need to talk about stuff.” He was carrying a pair of brown paper grocery bags.

  “Uh, okay.” Mike pushed himself off from the wall and half-hopped back towards the living room. The crutch would have come in handy, but he knew his way around well enough to use the furniture and door frames for support. “What brings you here?” He called over his shoulder. “I thought I was meant to be taking it easy.”

  “You…are.” Smith glanced around as he came into the main room. Not used to visiting employees at home, Mike realized. “But there’s some stuff we need to talk about.”

  I do not need this, Mike lowered himself onto the sofa. “You couldn’t tell me in the hospital?” he asked.

  “You were still kind of crinkle-cut, son. And there were medics about.”

  “Gotcha.” Mike waved at the door to the kitchen. “I’d offer you a coffee or something but I’m having a hard time getting about…”

  “That’s alright.” Smith put one of the grocery bags down on the side table, then walked over to the kitchen door and put the other on the worktop inside. Then he made a circuit of the living room. He held his hands tightly behind his back, as if forcibly restraining himself from checking for dust on top of the picture rail. “I won’t be long.”

  “Are we being monitored?”

  Smith glanced at him. “I sure hope so.” He gestured at the walls. “Not on audio, but there’s a real expensive infrared camera out there, son, and a couple of guys in a van just to keep an eye on you.”

  “There are?” Mike knew better than to get angry. “What are they expecting to see?”

  “Visitors who don’t arrive through the front door.” Smith slung one leg over the arm of the recliner and leaned on it, inspecting Mike pensively.

  “Oh, right.” For a second, Mike felt the urge to kick his earlier self for passing on absolutely everything he’d learned. The impulse passed: he’d been fever-ridden, and anyway it was what he was supposed to do. But still, if he hadn’t done so, he would
n’t be stuck out here under virtual house arrest. He might be back in hospital, with no worries about groceries. And besides, Smith had a point. “You might want to warn them I’m expecting a housekeeper to show tomorrow—she drops by a couple of times a week.”

  “I’ll tell them.” Smith paused. “As it happens, I know you’re not being listened in on, unless you lift the receiver on that phone—I signed the wiretap request myself. There’s stuff we need to talk about, and this place is more private than my office, if you follow my drift.”

  “I’m not being listened in on right now? Suits me.” Mike leaned back in the sofa. “Talk away. Sorry if I don’t, uh, if I’m not too focused: I feel like shit.”

  “Yes, well.” Smith glanced at him. “That’s why you’re on sick leave. You may be interested to know that your story checks out: that is, Beckstein’s mother disappeared six months ago. Her house is still there, the bills are being paid on time, but there’s nobody home. We haven’t gotten a trace on her income stream so far; her credit cards and bank account are ordinary enough, but the deposits are coming in from an offshore bank account in Liechtenstein and that’s turning out to be hard to trace. Anyway, I think we can confirm that she’s one of them.” He stood up again and paced over to the kitchen door then back, as if his legs were incapable of standing still. “This is a, a tactical mess. We’d hoped to get at least a few successful contacts in place before our ability to operate in fairyland was blown. What this means is that they, uh, Beckstein senior’s faction, are going to be alert for informants from now on. On the other hand, if they’re willing to talk we’ve got an—admittedly biased—HUMINT source to develop. Contacts, in other words.”

  Mike stared at him. Smith was just about sweating bullets. “Who do we talk to in the Middle East?” he asked. “I mean, when we want to know what al-Qaeda is planning?”

  “That’s a lot more accessible. This, these guys, it’s like China in the fifties or sixties.” Smith looked as if he was sucking on a lemon. “Look.” He picked up the second grocery bag and handed it to Mike. “This stuff is strictly off the books because, unfortunately, we’re off the map here, right outside the reservation.”