Empire Games Series, Book 1

by Charles Stross

  He raised his stein. Hesitantly, Rita raised hers in return. They’d been doing this since she was fourteen, although he’d had the sense to start her on the alkoholfrei. This wasn’t Germany, after all.

  “Of course, these days they don’t need informers—your phone does it for you. So no need for nice Herr Staatssicherheit to buy you a beer, make you feel good, and offer you the life of adventure and secrecy and free goodies in return for playing spy-on-my-neighbor.” Her grandfather raised an eyebrow at her. “That’s not what happened to you, is it?” She shook her head. “Good. When they asked me to spy for them—I was your age—I was young and foolish, but not that foolish. I was listening to Feindsender and reading stuff I really shouldn’t be caught with when I was in the factory. So maybe they thought, ach, I was a young tearaway but not so crazy I didn’t fit in during my time in the Army, so they could use me: tell me to go to music clubs and listen to people who talk too much to people they really should not trust. And you know, in those days, if you do as they tell you and tell stories, you maybe get ahead, get promoted faster? That sort of thing.”

  “They asked you?” Rita goggled at him.

  “Yes, the Stasi asked me.” Kurt’s face crinkled into a grin. “Them, asking me, made me ask some questions of myself, I can tell you. I didn’t much like the answers. But as we used to say, the opposite of ‘well done’ is ‘well meant.’ I devised a way out, and the next evening I went to my local bar and got drunk. I told anybody who listened how the Stasi asked me to spy for them. And they never asked me again.” He took a gulp of wheat beer and sighed happily.

  “I’m not an informer,” Rita said hesitantly. “But they made me a job offer. I wasn’t allowed to refuse it.” So far so good. “I think they want to keep an eye on me. A close eye.”

  “They can arrest you,” Kurt said dismissively. “Why do you think they want you?”

  Rita sat down on the edge of the sofa, opposite Kurt’s recliner. “Tell me about my, my birth mother…”

  “I never met her.” Kurt sniffed. “Her mother, though, I knew her kind. An illegal, living under a false identity. I guessed she was on the run, had been involved with the Weather Underground or something like that. Wanted by the FBI. Anyway, she did not fit in on her own. Turned up in Boston and hooked up with a Jewish bookstore clerk, man called Beckstein. That was in ’72…’73? I met her later, in ’91, through your grandmother. She was with a group of counterculture dissidents, optimists who didn’t believe it was just the same shit on either side of the Wall. Anyway, in ’94 her daughter gets in trouble at med school. Has to choose, career or Kinder. And Mrs. Beckstein asks me, your fine daughter-in-law and her fertility problem, does she still want a baby?”

  Rita licked her lips. “Mom’s problem was that early?” “Problem” was the family euphemism for uterine cancer. The ob-gyn had spotted it soon enough that the surgery was a complete success, but it had put an end to Emily’s baby-making plans before she even got started.

  “Yes.” Kurt nodded. “So we talk it over, Mrs. Beckstein and your mother and me and your father, and we agree to work it out. Which is where you come from.”

  “Tell me about Mrs. Beckstein…?”

  “Why?” He looked at her sharply. “What do you know about her?”

  Rita licked her suddenly dry lips. “She’s one of the, the world-walkers.”

  “Right.” Kurt nodded. No attempt at dissembling: You knew, she thought. “The FBI came calling when you were eight. You don’t remember, of course; they are not idiots to arrest small children.”

  “But you, aren’t you—”

  “Appalled? That she’s one of the people who blowed—blew—up the White House? Rita, she was a runaway! A refusenik. One who walked away, taking her daughter. You might as well blame me for the shootings at the Berlin Wall.” Kurt sat up straighter. “You listen to me, girl: you must not be ashamed of her. All groups have dissidents. All groups have those who reject them, change their names—just like me, your grandfather Douglas: a good American name, no? I change my name because even after I come over here I do not want to make it easy for the GDR embassy to write to me. Now you … tell me. What do the DHS really want with you?”

  “I—” Rita froze. “I’m not supposed to tell you. I’m supposed to spin a story about how they were following up records and ran across my, my birth mother. And offered me an office job where they can keep an eye on me in case the world-walkers come looking for me.”

  Kurt nodded encouragement. “Yes?”

  “Well, I—” She licked her lips again, then abruptly took a mouthful of beer and put her stein down on the coffee table. “The world-walkers came looking. Kidnapped me and stuffed me in my car trunk. Luckily the DHS were there, and—” Kurt was shaking his head. “What?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “I’m not a world-walker,” she said, crossing her arms defensively. “But they said the world-walkers appear to think…” She trailed off.

  “Rita.” Kurt peered at his stein, then shook his head: “They always lie to you. Always. It’s the first law of Staatssicherheit. The American Heimatschutzministerium is no different from the Stasi in the old days, except they have more money.”

  “If you think it’s so bad, why did you come here?” she demanded, hating her words the moment she heard them.

  “Because”—for a moment he looked every one of his seventy-seven years—“we knew our government was lying to us about our glorious socialist system: so we thought they were lying about the evils of capitalism, too! Also, everything here was good at first. It was only later”—he looked wistful, or frustrated, or both—“it was only after the failure of actually existing socialism to deliver the goods that we learned they’d been telling the truth some of the time. Whenever it was convenient for them. And that the other side had been lying too, whenever it was convenient for them. The best kind of lie is one that is a selective version of the truth, leaving out the messy, sticky, embarrassing bits. They all lie—the difficult part is telling when they aren’t. And even so, many things are still better here.”

  He looked round, miming confusion, at the shag pile carpet and the 72-inch TV. “Big houses, big cars, big steaks, big government. It’s true: capitalism delivers the goods. It also delivers big police, the Internet Rasterfahndung…” He sighed. “They don’t talk about that, though, any more than the Communists liked to admit that their less-unequal society was also poorer. For people so obsessed with freedom, they have a surprising number of police. But this is my home now, and I am too old to start over, and besides, Germany is not so different today. Unless you are a woman of a certain type, of course, in which case perhaps Germany is more welcoming.”

  He gave Rita a knowing look, then picked up his stein and took another mouthful. (Chugging the German import wheat beers in one gulp was inadvisable, as Rita had discovered the hard way some years ago.) “Remember this, Granddaughter: they lie to you, but you can learn the truth if you look for the silence between the lies.” He paused for a moment. “If you were useless to them, they would ignore you. If you were a threat to them, they would put you in prison. So they must think you are useful to them.”

  “I told you, the world-walkers tried to—”

  He cut her off with a gesture. “This happened right after the DHS spoke to you? How convenient!”

  “But they tried to kidnap me—”

  “Did you see them world-walk? No? Then how do you know they were world-walkers?”

  “But one of them was shot by the police! I saw it happen!”

  “So?” Kurt snorted. “A local lowlife is hired to abduct a woman—who cares what happens to him?”

  “You’re saying the DHS kidnapped me? And told me it was world-walkers? Why?” She was mustering her objections one by one, and Kurt was knocking them down, just as she’d been afraid he would.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know that that happened. And you don’t know that it didn’t, do you? It could be a way of making you say
‘yes’ to their job offer, couldn’t it? Like the beer in that bar in Dresden that time, and the promises of adventure to a young man. Do you know why they want you?”

  Rita shook her head, acutely aware as she did so of a growing sense of self-betrayal. “I have no idea,” she lied, for in truth she did know: but she couldn’t tell Kurt They plan to make a world-walker of me in a room that might be wired. “I need to find out, though, don’t I?”

  “Yes, you do. They will of course have told you not to discuss this matter with anyone. Especially your grandfather. So we have not had this conversation!” Kurt announced to the room. He emptied his stein. “Well, that’s it for me for this evening,” he said thoughtfully.

  Rita set her own tankard down. It was still a quarter full. “I’d better get back home.”

  “You do that.” Was that disappointment in his voice? Or just her guilty imagination?

  “I’ll see myself out,” she said.

  “Of course.” As she walked to the door, he added, “if you ever decide to tell me the rest of your story, I’ll be here. I’ll trade you for more about your third grandmother.”

  He wasn’t disappointed: he was amused. But of course, he could read her like a book. Rita slammed the door on her way out and stomped back to her parents’ house in a foul mood. They, at least, seemed to believe what she told them. But then, they’d never played footsie with the Stasi. Whereas Grandpa Kurt—

  —had taught her everything she knew.

  * * *

  On Saturday, Rita went to a ball game with Dad and River. On Sunday morning, she declined an invitation to go to church with her mom. Instead she went for a long walk with her fatphone and a geocaching Web site for company. She found and logged two caches, collected a travel bug from one of them (“Help me get to New Zealand!” it declared: having started in Anchorage, she figured a ride to Maryland wouldn’t hurt), reported another cache as muggled (removed by noncachers), and went home. In the afternoon she hung out with Kurt at the thrift store he volunteered at, which was hosting some kind of local artists’ event in support of their mission. She didn’t apologize for lying to him and he didn’t let her off the hook, but by tacit assent they avoided the subject and instead kept the conversation to anodyne matters like the game, a dumb sitcom, and Dad’s work. It kicked the ball down the road a way, but it wasn’t like she had to tell Kurt anything, was it?

  The art display struck her as naive and a bit tacky, but the thrift store had a bunch of other stuff, ranging from ancient laptops and tablets through souvenirs and a couple of bookcases stuffed with musty-smelling old paper books. Kurt paused beside one, ran his hand along a shelf, then presented her with a dog-eared paperback, its cover missing. “You should read this,” he said, handing it to her.

  Rita held it between finger and thumb. “It’s probably moldy,” she said, nose wrinkling. “Why should I? What’s so special about”—she checked the title page—“The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by, uh—”

  “It’s out of print; you won’t find it on Amazon,” said Kurt. “Which is odd, because the author also wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book behind Blade Runner. You have seen Blade Runner?” He sighed when she shook her head. “Read this anyway—it is an excellent allegory for the totalitarian mind, and also nobody can examine your online annotations or page-turning habits on paper.”

  “Gramps, you’re being paranoid! Anyway, it can’t be any good if it’s gone out of print, can it?”

  Kurt merely turned away, his sardonic smile fading. Stung, Rita hovered for a moment, then took the yellowing block of paper to the front desk. “Oh, just take it,” Allie the clerk told her. “They’ve been clogging up the back for years. Nobody buys those things anymore.”

  After lunch, Rita loaded up her rental and said her goodbyes, hugging Mom and Dad and promising to write more often. Kurt saw her out to the car. “Your birth mother’s mother was a good woman,” he said gravely. “Not one of the mad bombers. Remember that. Remember, too, you may work for the Stasi, but you do not need to be of the Stasi.”

  “Oh, Gramps.” Rita shook her head. “Spare me the riddles?” She hugged him, but his attention seemed to be focused elsewhere, inward. So she closed her car door and became Anna Mittal again for the drive back to the airport, and the DHS highway checkpoint that nearly made her miss her flight.

  CAMP GRACELAND, TIME LINE FOUR; QUANTICO, TIME LINE TWO, MAY-JULY 2020

  The next ten weeks passed too fast for Rita to write to her folks, let alone take another weekend off work. The National Academy course was physically exhausting. While the Department of Homeland Security trainers at Camp Graceland had put her in the gym daily and begun working on her self-defense, most of the people attending the FBI course had military or police backgrounds, and everyone was expected to keep up. It was also mentally grueling, if not demoralizing. Some of her classmates had antediluvian attitudes toward women and people of Indian appearance, especially slightly built women of Indian appearance. It wasn’t what they said to her, exactly, but what they didn’t say.

  She was on her own, without any of the peer support her classmates gave each other. There were lectures on law, behavioral science, forensics, and terrorism and terrorist mind-sets. The stuff about leadership development made her head spin. Rita did not do well in these classes, especially the areas that emphasized policing skills. “Not to worry about it,” Patrick told her when he visited during week three: “You’re not going to be a cop, and even if you were, this stuff isn’t about basic entry-level police work that you could expect to pick up. Just go with the flow and try to get a handle on how senior cops think, because if you get to go out in the field these are the people who’ll be looking for you.”

  “I guess.” Her eyes narrowed involuntarily. “But about that: I don’t think my cover’s holding.”

  “What, has anyone accused you of being an impostor?”

  “No, it’s just that—I can tell—they know I’m not really one of them. Some of them are playing along deliberately, and a couple have cut me dead, but I’m really not fitting in. Not sure whether I’m being given the cold shoulder because I’m not a … not a typical cop,” she said weakly.

  Patrick’s face hardened. “Any overt racism?”

  “No, but—”

  “Has anybody called you out, to your face…?”

  “No, I think it’s more that they think I’m some kind of fake.”

  “Then it’s not a problem. Drop it.” O’Neill’s tone was hard. “You’re not expected to graduate top of your course. Or even in the upper half. You’re here to learn how detectives think, what makes them tick.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll give you a second-level story. They already know you’re DHS. If anyone challenges you, tell them the truth: you’re undergoing deep-cover training. The spin is that you’ll be infiltrating activist groups as a long-term informer. If you don’t mention the world-walkers, nobody’s going to look for that angle; it’s too weird. If they think the DHS is running spies into activist groups, that’ll keep them happy.” He paused. “Racism is another thing. Official policy is zero tolerance, but you know what that’s worth. If you get any trouble, call me and I’ll get the Colonel to drop the hammer on them. That is all.”

  “What’s…?” Rita paused. “Yeah, I can do that.” Pretend to be exactly what I am. Tell Patrick if I get any of the other shit. Maybe they’re not all assholes. Maybe that’s why I got a non-Anglo supervisor.

  “Just don’t volunteer any information unless you’re directly challenged and you’ll be fine.”

  “Apart from the bruises and the Marine assault course they expect me to pass!”

  Patrick snorted.

  As it happened, nobody challenged Rita to her face. So after another week she deliberately slipped some tells into her classwork—showing more interest than was strictly necessary in the law surrounding undercover informers, or in evasion techniques used by terrorists. After that, a couple of the guys who had been avoiding her start
ed to nod in passing. There were even some brief, guarded conversations in the canteen. They thought they had her pigeonholed. It made life a little more bearable, which she came to appreciate as the physical regime and long classroom hours ground down on her. It didn’t break the ice all around: for some people her skin would always mark her out as other. But it wasn’t only her skin that was the problem—simple racism would have been stamped on, hard, by the instructors. By week six she was coming to suspect that the real problem was in her head.

  Rita was lonely, an introvert exposed to an extrovert culture. She could fake it in the classroom and exercises by putting on a front, just like she could act on stage. But the continual effort over a period of weeks left her scant energy for socializing in the evenings; nor was the prospect of barroom bonding with sheriffs from small towns and lieutenants from big-city forces remotely appealing to her. The cultural chasm she perceived when she looked at her classmates was dizzying. They’d chosen a career in law enforcement. She was something else, so different that she felt like a fraud—not through any kind of criminal inclination, but because where they saw things in red and blue she saw an infinite range of purples.

  The graduate-level coursework she could focus on; the fitness regime was a weak point. But if she failed at anything, it was the networking and team building.

  Finally, after ten weeks, the ordeal was over. She said her abbreviated goodbyes to classmates who had remained strangers throughout, and slunk back to Camp Graceland with her tail between her legs.

  “Good luck with your Mission: Impossible assignment, wherever they send you,” said Martina, her course director, a grizzled FBI senior agent turned teacher. “You didn’t fool anybody, by the way,” she added with a smile. “But we don’t mind. I just hope you got whatever your handlers sent you here for.”

  Surgical Intervention

  BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, MAY 2020

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