The Merchants’ War

by Stross, Charles

  It was shaping up to be a good day, thought Eric, as he twisting his left wrist with increasing effort to get the gyroball up to speed. A good day in a good week. Judith’s report from the scene under Scollay Square was the second bit of really good news after Mike Fleming’s remarkable reappearance. Heads we win: Lucius punches in the PAL code and switches off the bomb. Tails we don’t lose: we get to deal with a fizzle, but we keep Boston. There were cover stories available to deal with a fizzle, to sweep it under the rug—it would be messy, but a whole different matter from losing the core of a city. “I’m waiting on a definite match when they finish fuming for prints,” Judith had told him from the scene, “but we got some good UV-fluorescence images of patent prints in the dirt around the lock, and it sure looks like GREENSLEEVES’s prints.” Eric gave the ball another flick of the wrist. Which means we can take the kid gloves off now, he thought, with a warm glow of satisfaction. Just as soon as we’ve confirmed no other stock is missing. And he went back to staring at his desk.

  Back when telephone switchboards were simple looms of wires and plug boards, different networks needed different wires. You could judge how important an official was by how many phone handsets he had on his desk. Life had been a lot simpler in those days. Today, Eric had just the one handset—and it plugged into his computer instead of a hole in the wall. He glanced at the clock in his taskbar to confirm the call was late, just as the computer rang.

  “Smith here.” He leaned back.

  “Eric? Mandy in two-zero-two.”

  “Hi Mandy, Jim here. Y’all had a good day so far?”

  “I’ll take roll call.” Eric grinned humorously. The list of names on the conference call was marching down the side of his screen. “Looks like we’re missing Alain and Sonya. I’d give them another five minutes, but I’ve got places to be and meetings to go to, so if we can get started?”

  The field ops conference call was under way. Like any policing or intelligence-gathering operation, the hunt for the extradimensional narcoterrorists called for coordination and intelligence sharing: and with agents scattered across four time zones it couldn’t be carried out by calling everyone into a briefing room. But unlike a policing job, some aspects of the task were extraordinarily sensitive and could not be discussed, and unlike a normal intelligence operation, things were too fluid and unstable to leave to the usual bureaucratic channels of written reports and weekly bulletins. So the daily ops call had become a fixture within FTO, or at least within that part of FTO that was focused on hunting the bad guys within the Continental United States. Each field office delegated a staff intelligence officer who could be trusted to filter the information stream for useful material and refrain from mentioning in public those projects that not everyone was cleared for. Or so the post-hoc justification went. In practice, they gave Eric a chance to keep a finger on the pulse of his department at ground level without spending all his time bouncing around the airline map.

  In practice, normally all it was usually good for was an hour’s intensive wrist exercise with the gyroball and a frustrating ten minutes writing up a summary for Dr. James. But today, Eric could smell something different in the air.

  “…Following up the mobile phone thing via Wal-Mart, we’ve made some progress over here.”

  Eric snapped to full alert, glancing at the screen. It was Mandy, from the team in Stony Brook. “How many phones?” He cut in.

  “I was just getting to that.” She sounded offended. “The suspects bought two hundred and forty-six over the past six months, all the same model, batches of ten at a time, right up until yesterday. Wal-Mart has been very cooperative, and we’ve been going over their videotapes—they think it’s some kind of fraud ring—and it looks like a Clan operation for sure. It’s the same two men each week: if they follow the usual pattern—” the Clan had a rigid approach to buying supplies, always paying cash for small quantities at regular intervals “—we could lift them next week. We’ve also got a list of phone IMEIs and SIM numbers they bought and we’re about to go to Cingular to see if—”

  “Don’t do that,” Eric interrupted again. He glanced around frantically, looking for a pen and a Post-it: he hadn’t expected this much information, so soon. “We have other resources to call on who are better at dealing with this angle.” To be precise, Bob and Alice at No Such Agency, who—given a mobile phone’s identifying fingerprints—could tell you everything about them. This was the trouble with ex-FBI staff: they did great investigative work, but they didn’t know what external strings they could pull with Defense. “E-mail me the list immediately,” he ordered. “I’ll take it from there.”

  “Certainly, I’ll send them right after—”

  “No, I meant now.” The gyroball, unnoticed, wound down. “If any of those phones are switched on, we can get more than a trace.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going offline now, waiting on that e-mail, Mandy.” He hit the hangup button and shook his head, then speed-dialed a different number.

  The phone picked up immediately. “James here.”

  “It’s me. I assume you’re in the loop over Lucius’s little project? Well, Stony Brook has just hit the mother-lode, too. Mobiles, numbers. I’m forwarding everything to EARDROP. If any of them turn out to be live I intend to put some assets on the ground and tag them—then it’s time to turn up the heat. If Herz confirms that the gadget under Government Center was planted by GREENSLEEVES, and Dr. Rand’s friends confirm that no other weapons of the same class are missing, I propose to activate COLDPLAY.”

  “Excellent,” said James. “Get started, then get back to me. It’s time to hurt these bastards.”

  Three coaches full of medieval weekend warriors drove in convoy through the Massachusetts countryside, heading towards Concord.

  The coaches were on lease from a small private hire firm, and someone had inexpertly covered their sides with decals reading HISTORY FAIRE TOURING COMPANY. The passengers, mostly male but with some women among them, wore surcoats over chain mail, and the luggage racks overhead were all but rattling with swords and scabbards: the air conditioners wheezed as they fought a losing battle with the summer heat. They looked like nothing so much as the away team for the Knights of the Round Table, on their way to a joust.

  The atmosphere in the coach was tense, and some of the passengers were dealing with it by focusing on irrelevancies. “Why do we have to wear all this crap?” complained Martyn, running his thumb round the neckline of his surcoat. “It’s about as authentic as a jet fighter at the battle of Gettysburg.”

  “You’ll grin and bear it,” grunted Helmut. “It’s cover, is what it is. You can swap it for camo when we link up with the wardrobe department. And it’ll do in a hurry, if it comes to it…”

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Irma muttered darkly. “Ever tried to fight in a bodice?”

  Martyn blew a raspberry. “Are we there yet?”

  Helmut checked the display on his GPS unit. “Fifteen miles. Hurry up and wait.” Someone down the aisle groaned theatrically. Helmut turned, his expression savage: “Shut the fuck up, Sven! When I want your opinion I’ll ask for it.”

  The medieval knight at the wheel drove on, his shoulders slightly hunched, his face red and sweating. The lance members wore full plate over their machine-woven chain vests and Camelbak hydration systems—it was much lighter than it looked, but it was hellishly hot in the sunlight streaming through the coach windows. Heat prostration, Helmut reminded himself, was the reason heavy armor had gone out of fashion in this world—that, and its declining utility against massed gunfire. “Hydration time, guys, everyone check your buddies. Top off now. Victor, make with the water cart.”

  A police cruiser pulled out to overtake the coach and Helmut tensed, in spite of himself. Thirty assorted knights and maids on their way to a joust and a medieval faire shouldn’t set the traffic cop’s alarm bells ringing the way that thirty soldiers in American-style body armor would, but there was a limit to how much inspection their cover could
handle. If the police officer pulled them over to search the baggage compartment he’d be signing his own death warrant: Helmut and his platoon of Clan Security soldiers were sitting on top of enough firepower to reenact a much more modern conflict.

  “Keep going.” The police car swept past and Helmut sent Martyn a fishy stare. “Mine’s a Diet Pepsi,” Martyn said, oblivious. Helmut shook his head and settled back to wait.

  Some time later, the driver braked and swung the coach into a wide turn. “Coming up on the destination,” he remarked loudly.

  Helmut sat up and leaned forward. “The others?”

  “Braun is right behind me. Can’t see Stefan but I’d be surprised if—”

  Helmut’s phone rang. Gritting his teeth, Helmut answered it. “Yes?”

  “We see you. Just to say, the park’s clear and we’re keeping the bystanders out of things.”

  “Bystanders?”

  The voice at the other end of the connection was laconic: “You throw a Renaissance Faire, you get spectators. Ysolde’s telling them it’s a closed rehearsal and they should come back tomorrow.”

  Helmut buried his fingertips in his beard and scratched his chin. “Good call. What about the—” he checked his little black book “—ticket seats?”

  “They’re going up. A couple of problems with the GPS but we should be ready for the curtain-raiser in about an hour.”

  Helmut glanced at his book again to confirm that curtain-raiser was today’s code word for assault team insertion. One of the constraints they’d been working under ever since the big DEA bust six months ago was the assumption that at any time their cellular phones (carefully sanitized, stolen, or anonymously purchased for cash) might be monitored or tracked by hostile agencies. Clan Security—in addition to fighting a civil war in the Gruinmarkt—had been forced to rediscover a whole bunch of 1940s-era communication security procedures.

  “Call me if there’s a change in status before we arrive,” Helmut ordered, then ended the call. “Showtime,” he added, for the benefit of the audience seated behind him.

  “It’s not over until the fat lady sings,” Martyn snarked in Irma’s direction: she glared at him, then drew her dagger and began to ostentatiously clean her already-spotless nails.

  The coach turned through a wide gateway flanked by signs advertising the faire, bumped across loose gravel and ruts in the ground, then came to a halt in a packed-earth car park at one end of a small open field. A couple of big top circus tents dominated it, and a group of men with a truck and a stack of scaffolding were busy erecting a raised seating area. To an untrained eye it might easily be mistaken for a public open-air event, close by Concord: that was the whole idea. Real SCA members or habitual RenFaire goers weren’t that common, and those that might notice this event would probably write it off as some kind of commercial rip-off, aimed at the paying public. Meanwhile, the general reaction of that public to a bunch of people in inaccurate historical costume was more likely to be one of amusement than fear. Which was exactly what Riordan had proposed and Angbard had accepted.

  In fact, the strip mall on the far side of the open space was owned by a shell company that answered to a Clan council director—because it was doppelgangered, located on the identical spot occupied by a Clan property in the other world. And the supposed historical faire was one of several ClanSec contingency plans designed to cover the rapid deployment of military units up to battalion size into the Gruinmarkt.

  “Let’s move those kit bags out,” Helmut barked over his shoulder as the driver scrambled to open the baggage doors on the side of the coach. “I’ll have the guts of any man who opens his kit before he gets it inside the assembly tent.” His troopers scrambled to drag their heavy sports bags towards the nearer big top: he’d checked that they’d been properly packed, and while any hypothetical witnesses would see plenty of swords and “historical shit” as Erik called it, they wouldn’t get even a hint of the SAWs and M16s that were the real point of this masquerade—much less the M47 Dragon that Stefan’s fire support platoon were bringing to the party.

  The setup in the tent would have surprised anyone expecting a show. Half a dozen men and women—officers in Clan security, comptrollers of the postal service, and a willowy blonde in a business suit who Helmut was certain was one of the duke’s harem of assassin-princesses—were gathered around a table covered with detailed floor plans: three more, armed with theodolites, laser range finders, and an elaborate GPS unit were carefully planting markers around the bare earth floor. At the far side, a work crew was unloading aluminum scaffolding and planks from the back of a truck, while another gang was frantically bolting them together at locations indicated by the survey team. Helmut left his soldiers scrambling to pull camouflage surcoats and helmets on over their armor, and headed straight for the group at the table, halting two meters short of it.

  The duke glanced up from the map. As usual, he was impeccably tailored, dressed for the boardroom: a sixty-something executive, perhaps, or a mid-level politician. But there was a feral anger burning in his eyes that was normally kept carefully banked: Helmut suppressed a shudder. “Third platoon is dismounting and will be ready to go in the next ten minutes,” he said as calmly as he could.

  The duke stared at him for a moment. “Good enough,” he rasped, then glanced sideways at his neighbor, whom Helmut recognized—with a surprised double-take—as Earl Oliver Hjorth, an unregenerate supporter of the backwoods conservative cabal and the last man he’d have expected to see in the duke’s confidences. “I told you so.”

  The earl nodded, looking thoughtful.

  “Is there any word from Earl Riordan?” The duke turned his attention towards a plump fellow at the far side of the table.

  “Last contact was fifty-two minutes ago, sir,” he said, without even bothering to check the laptop in front of him. “Coming up in eight. I can expedite that if you want…”

  “Not necessary.” The duke shook his head, then looked back at Helmut. “Tell me what you know.”

  Helmut shrugged. Despite the full suit of armor, the gesture was virtually silent—there was neoprene in all the right places, another of the little improvements ClanSec had made to their equipment over the years. World-walkers were valuable enough to be worth the cost of custom-fitted armor, and they hadn’t been idle in applying new ideas and materials to the classic patterns. “Stands to reason, he’s hit the Hjalmar Palace, or you wouldn’t have called us out. Is there any word from Wergatsfurt or Ostgat?”

  The duke inclined his head. “Wergatsfurt is taken. Ostgat hasn’t heard a whisper, as of—” He snapped his fingers.

  “Thirty-seven minutes ago,” said the ice blonde. She sounded almost bored.

  “So we were strung out with a feint at Castle Hjorth and the Rurval estates, but instead he’s concentrated eighty miles away and hit the Hjalmar Palace,” summarized Helmut. He glanced around at the scaffolding that was going up. “It’s fallen?”

  “Within minutes,” Angbard confirmed. He was visibly fuming, but keeping a tight rein on his anger.

  “Treachery?”

  “That’s my concern,” said the duke, with such icy restraint that Helmut backed off immediately. The blonde, however, showed no sign of surprise: she studied Helmut with such bland disinterest that he had to suppress a shudder.

  So we’ve got a leak, he realized with a sinking feeling. It didn’t stop with Matthias, did it? “Should I assume that the intruders know about doppelganger defenses?” He glanced round. “Should I assume they have world-walkers of their own?”

  “Not the latter, Gray Witch be thanked.” Angbard hesitated. “But it would be unwise to assume that they don’t know how to defend against us, so every minute delayed increases the hazard.” He reached a decision. “We can’t afford to leave it in their hands, any more than we can afford to demolish it completely. Our options are therefore to go in immediately with everything we’ve got to hand, or to wait until we have more forces available and the enemy has had
more time to prepare for us. My inclination is towards the immediate attack, but as you will be leading it, I will heed your advice.”

  Helmut grimaced. “Give me enough rope, eh? As it happens, I agree with you. Especially if they have an informant, we need to get in there as fast as possible. Do we know if they are aware of the treason room?”

  “No, we don’t.” Angbard’s expression was thunderous. “If you wish to use it, you will have to scout it out.”

  “Aye, well, there are worse prospects.” Helmut turned on his heel and raised his voice. “Martyn! Ryk! To me. I’ve got a job for you!” Turning back to the duke, he added: “If the treason room is clear, we’ll go in that way, with diversions in the north guard room and the grand hall. Otherwise, my thinking is to assault directly through the grand hall, in force. The higher we go in—” he glanced up at the scaffolding, then over to the hydraulic lift that two guards were bringing in through the front of the tent “—the better I’ll like it.”

  Motion sickness was a new and unpleasant experience to Miriam, but she figured it was a side effect of spending days on end aboard a swaying express train. Certainly it was the most plausible explanation for her delicate stomach. She couldn’t wait to get solid ground under her feet again. She’d plowed through about half the book by Burroughs, but it was heavy going; where some of the other Leveler tracts she’d read had been emotionally driven punch-in-the-gut diatribes against the hereditary dictators, Burroughs took a far drier, theoretical approach. He’d taken up an ideological stance with roots Miriam half-recognized—full of respectful references to Voltaire, for example, and an early post-settlement legislator called Franklin, who had turned to the vexatious question of the rights of man in his later years—and had teased out a consistent strand of political thought that held the dictatorship of the hereditary aristocracy to be the true enemy of the people. Certainly she could see why Burroughs might have been exiled, and his books banned, by the Hanoverian government. But the idea that he might be relevant to the underground still struck her as peculiar. Do I really want to get involved in this? she asked herself. It was all very well tagging along with Erasmus until she could get her hands on her laptop again and zip back to the United States, but the idea of getting involved in politics made her itch. Especially the kind of politics they had here.