The Trade of Queens tmp-6

by Charles Stross

  “Any of them.” Tony hung up. All around the office, the phones were going mad. No, it can’t be, Steve thought, dry-swallowing. He moused over to the TV tuner icon on his desktop and double-clicked to open it. And saw:

  * * *

  Two lopsided mushroom clouds roiling against the clear blue sky before a camera view flecked with static, both leaning towards the north in the grip of a light breeze—

  “Vehicles are being turned back at police checkpoints. Meanwhile, National Guard units—”

  A roiling storm of dust and gravel like the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers—

  “Vice president, at an undisclosed location, will address the nation—”

  A brown-haired woman on CNN, her normal smile replaced by a rictus of shock, asking someone on the ground questions they couldn’t answer—

  People, walking, from their offices. Dirty and shocked, some of them carrying their shoes, briefcases, helping their neighbors—

  “Reports that the White House was affected by the attack cannot be confirmed yet, but surviving eyewitnesses say—”

  A flashback view from a surveillance camera somewhere looking out across the Potomac, flash and it’s gone, blink and you’ve missed it—

  “Residents warned to stay indoors, keep doors and windows closed, and to drink only bottled—”

  * * *

  Minutes later Steve stared into the toilet bowl, waiting for his stomach to finish twisting as he ejected the morning’s coffee grounds and bile. I had him in my office, he thought. Oh Jesus. It wasn’t the thought that he’d turned down the scoop of a lifetime that hurt like a knife in the guts: What if I’d listened to him? Probably it had been too late already. Probably nothing could have been done. But the possibility that he’d had the key to averting this situation sitting in his cubicle, trying to explain everything with that slightly flaky twitch—the man who knew too much—that was too much to bear. Assuming, of course, that Fleming was telling the truth when he said he wasn’t the guy behind the bombs. That needed checking out, for sure.

  When he finally had the dry heaves under control he straightened up and, still somewhat shaky, walked over to the washbasins to clean himself up. The face that stared at him, bleary-eyed above the taps, looked years older than the face he’d shaved in the bathroom mirror at home that morning. What have we done? he wondered. The details were in the dictaphone; he’d zoned out during parts of Fleming’s spiel, particularly when it had been getting positively otherworldly. He remembered bits—something about mediaeval antipersonnel mines, crazy stuff about prisoners with bombs strapped to their necks—but the big picture evaded him, like a slippery mass of jelly that refused to be nailed down, like an untangled ball of string. Steve took a deep breath. I’ve got to get Fleming to call in, he realized. A faint journalistic reflex raised its head: It’s the story of a lifetime. Or the citizen’s arrest of a lifetime. Is a nuclear unabomber even possible?

  J. Barrett Armstrong’s office on the tenth floor was larger than Steve Schroeder’s beige cubicle on the eighth. It had a corner of the building to itself, with a view of Faneuil Hall off to one side and a mahogany conference table the size of a Marine Corps helicopter carrier tucked away near the inner wall of the suite. It was the very image of a modern news magnate’s poop deck, shipshape and shining with the gleaming elbow grease of a dozen minimum-wage cleaners; the captain’s quarters of a vessel in the great fleet commanded by an Australian news magnate of some note. In the grand scheme of the mainstream media J. Barrett Armstrong wasn’t so high up the totem pole, but in the grand scheme of the folks who signed Steve’s paychecks he was right at the top, Thunderbird-in-chief.

  Right now, J. Barrett Armstrong’s office was crowded with managers and senior editors, all of whom were getting a piece of the proprietor’s ear as he vented his frustration. “The fucking war’s over,” he shouted, wadding up a printout from the machine in the corner and throwing it at the wall. “Who did Ali get the bomb from? There’s the fricking story!” A bank of monitors on a stand showed the story unfolding in repeated silent flashbacks. “How did they smuggle them in? Go on, get digging!”

  Nobody noticed Steve sneaking in until he tapped his boss, Riccardo Pirello, on the shoulder. Rick turned, distractedly: “What is it?”

  “It’s not Iraq,” said Steve. He swallowed. “It’s narcoterrorists, and the nukes were stolen from our own inventory.”

  The boss was belting out orders to his mates and boatswains: “Bhaskar, I want an in-depth on the Iranian nuclear program, inside spread, you’ve got six pages—”

  Steve held up his dictaphone where Riccardo could see it. “Scoop, boss. Walked into my office an hour ago.”

  “A—what the fuck—” Riccardo grabbed his arm.

  Nobody else had noticed; all eyes were focussed on the Man, who was throwing a pocket tantrum in the direction of enemies both Middle Eastern and imaginary. “Let’s find a room,” Steve suggested. “I’ve got my desk line patched through to my mobile. He’s going to call back.”

  “Who—”

  “My source.” Steve’s cheek twitched. “He told me this would happen. I thought he was crazy and kicked him out. He said he’d phone after it happened.”

  “Jesus.” Riccardo stared at him for a moment. “Why you?”

  “Friend of a friend. She went missing six months ago, investigating this, apparently.”

  “Jesus. Okay, let’s get a cube and see what you’ve got. Then if it checks out I’ll try and figure out how we can break it to Skippy without getting ourselves shitcanned for making him look bad.”

  * * *

  The atmosphere in the situation room under Raven Rock was a toxic miasma of fury, loss, and anticipation: a sweaty, testosterone-breathing swamp of the will to triumph made immanent. From the moment the PINNACLE NUCFLASH alert came in, WARBUCKS hunched over one end of the cramped conference table, growling out a torrent of unanswerable questions, demanding action on HEAD CRASH and CLEANSWEEP and other more arcane Family Trade projects, issuing instructions to his staff, orders for the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate and other subagencies within the sprawling DHS empire. “We’re still trying to raise the EOB, sir,” said one particularly hapless staffer.

  “I don’t want to hear that word trying,” snarled WARBUCKS. “I want results. Success or failure. Clear?”

  The TV screens were clear enough. Andrew James couldn’t help staring at the hypnotic rewind footage from time to time, the sunny morning view of downtown D.C., the flash and static-riddled flicker, the rolling, boiling cloud of chaotic darkness shot through with fire rising beyond the Capitol. The close-ups replaying every ten minutes of the Washington Monument blowdown, chunks of rock knocked clear out of the base of the spire as the Mach wave bounced off the waters of the reflecting pool, cherry trees catching fire in a thousand inglorious blazing points of light. Inarticulate anchormen and women, struggling with the enormity. Talking heads, eyes frozen in fear like deer in the headlights, struggling to pin the blame on Iraqi revenants, Iranian terrorists, everyone and anyone. Northwoods, he thought. He made it work. Nobody else in the national command structure had ever had the sheer brass balls to pull that particular trigger, to play power chords in the key of the Reichstag Fire on the instrument of state—

  “Dr. James.”

  He tore his eyes away from the screen. “Sir?”

  WARBUCKS grinned humorlessly. “I want to know the status of SCOTUS as of this morning. I very much fear we’ll be needing their services later today and I want to know who’s available.”

  James nodded. “I can find out. Do you want me to expedite the draft order on Family Trade just yet?”

  “No, let’s wait for confirmation. BOY WONDER will want to pull the trigger himself once we brief him, assuming he survived, and if not, I need to be sworn in first. Otherwise those bastards in Congress will—”

  “Sir?” Jack Shapiro, off the NSA desk just outside the conference room, stuck his head round
the door. “We’ve got eyeballs overhead right now, do you want it on screen?”

  WARBUCKS nodded. “Wait one, Andrew,” he told Dr. James. “Put it on any damn screen but Fox News, okay?”

  Two minutes later the center screen turned blue. Static replaced the CNN news crawl for a moment; then a grainy, gray, roiling turbulence filled the monitor from edge to edge. A flickery head-up display scrawled barely readable numbers across the cloudscape. Shapiro grimaced, his face contorted by the telephone handset clamped between neck and shoulder. “That’s looking down on the Ellipse,” he confirmed. “The chopper’s standing off at six thousand feet, two thousand feet south of ground zero—it’s one of the VH-3s from HMX-1, it was on station at Andrews AFB when…” He trailed off. WARBUCKS was staring at the picture, face frozen.

  “Where’s the White House?” he demanded hoarsely.

  “About”—Shapiro approached the screen, pointed with a shaking finger—“there.” The splash of gray across more gray was almost unrecognizable. “Less than six hundred yards from ground zero, sir. There might be survivors—”

  Dr. James quietly pushed his chair back from the table, turned away from the screens, and stood up. A DISA staffer took over the chair even before he cleared the doorway. The corridor outside was cramped and overfull with aides and officers busily waiting to see the Man. All of them showed signs of agitation: anger and fear and outrage vying for priority. Patience, James told himself. The end times haven’t begun—yet. WARBUCKS would be a much better president than BOY WONDER (the bumbling dry-drunk scion of a political dynasty had inherited his dad’s presidential mantle but not his acumen); and in any case, a presidential martyrdom pardoned all political sins.

  Dr. James headed for the communications office. His mind, unlike almost everyone else’s, was calm: He knew exactly what he had to do. Find out where the surviving Supreme Court Justices were, locate the senior surviving judge, and get him here as fast as possible to swear in the new president. Then we can clean house. Both at home and in the other world God had provided for America, as this one was filling up with heathens and atheists and wickedness. There will be a reckoning, he thought with quiet satisfaction. And righteousness will prevail.

  * * *

  Steve Schroeder had barely been back at his desk for ten minutes when he received another visit. This time it was Riccardo, with two other men Steve didn’t recognize but who exuded the unmistakable smell of cop. “Mr. Schroeder,” said the tall, thin one. “Mr. Pirello here tells me you had a visitor this morning.”

  Steve glanced at Riccardo. His boss’s forehead was gleaming under the fluorescent tubes. “Tell him, Steve.”

  “Yes,” Steve admitted. “Do you have ID?”

  The short fireplug in the double-breasted suit leaned towards him: “You don’t get to ask questions,” he started, but the thin man raised a hand.

  “Not yet. Mr. Schroeder, we’re from the FBI. Agent Judt.” He held an ID badge where Steve couldn’t help seeing it. “This is my colleague, Agent Fowler. It would make things much easier if we could keep this cordial, and we understand your first instinct is to treat this as a news investigation, but right now we’re looking at an unprecedented crime and you’re the first lead we’ve found. If you know anything, anything at all, then I’d be very grateful if you’d share it with us.”

  “If there’s another bomb out there and you don’t help us, you could be charged with conspiracy,” Agent Fowler added in a low warning rumble. Then he shut up.

  Steve took a deep breath. The explosions kept replaying behind his eyelids in slow motion. He breathed out slowly. “I’m a bit … freaked,” he admitted. “This morning I had a visit from a man who identified himself as a DEA agent, name of Fleming. He spun me a crazy yarn and I figured he was basically your usual run-of-the-mill paranoid schizophrenic. I didn’t check his ID at the time—tell the truth, I wanted him out of here. He said there’d be nukes, and he’d call back later. I’ve got a recording”—he gestured to his dictaphone—“but that’s about it. All I can tell you is what he told me. And hope to hell he gets back in touch.”

  Agent Fowler stared at him with an expression like a mastiff contemplating a marrowbone. “You sent him away.”

  Fear and anger began to mix in the back of Steve’s mind. “No, what I sent away was a fruitcake,” he insisted. “I write the information technology section. Put yourself in my shoes—some guy you don’t know comes to visit and explains how a secret government agency to deal with time travelers from another universe has lost a bunch of atom bombs accidentally-on-purpose because they want the time travelers to plant them in our cities—what would you do? Ask him when he last took his prescription? Show him the door, by any chance?”

  Fowler still stared at him, but after a second Agent Judt nodded. “Your point is taken,” he said softly. “Nevertheless…”

  “You want to wait until he makes contact again, be my guest.” Steve shuddered. “He might be a fruitcake, or he might be the real thing; that’s not my call. I assume you guys can tell the difference?”

  “We get fruitcakes too,” Judt assured him. Riccardo was being no help: He just stood there in front of the beige partition, eyes vacant, nodding along like a pod person. “But we don’t usually get them so close to an actual, uh, incident.”

  “Act of war,” Fowler snarled quietly. “Or treason.”

  Fleming didn’t ask for anonymity, Steve reminded himself. Which left: handing a journalistic source over to the FBI. Normally a huge no-no, utterly immoral and unjustifiable, except … this wasn’t business as usual, was it? “I’ll help you,” Steve said quietly. “I want to see you catch whoever did it. But I don’t think it’s Fleming you want. He said he was trying to get the word out. If he planted the bombs, why spin that cock-and-bull story in the first place? And if he didn’t plant them, but he knew where the bombs were, why wouldn’t he tell me?”

  “Leave the analysis to us,” suggested Agent Judt. “It’s our speciality.” He pointed at the dictaphone. “I need to take that, I’m afraid. Jack, if you’d like to stay with Mr. Schroeder just in case the phone rings? I’m going to bring headquarters up to speed, get some backup in.” He looked pointedly at Riccardo. “You didn’t hear any of this, Mr. Pirello, but it would be very helpful to me if you could have someone in your building security department provide Agent Fowler and me with visitor badges, and warn the front desk we’re expecting colleagues.”

  Riccardo scuttled away as soon as Judt broke eye contact. Then he turned back to Steve. “Just wait here with Jack,” he said reassuringly.

  “What if Fleming phones? What do I do?” Steve demanded.

  “Answer it,” said Fowler, in a much more human tone of voice. “Record it, and let me listen in. And if he wants to set up a meet—go for it.”

  * * *

  In a cheap motel room on the outskirts of Providence, Mike Fleming sat on the edge of an overstuffed mattress and poured a stiff shot of bourbon into the glass from the bathroom. His go bag sat on the luggage rack, leaking the dregs of his runaway life: a change of underwear, a set of false ID documents, the paperwork for the rental car in the parking lot—hired under a false name, paid for with a credit card under that name. The TV on the chest of drawers blatted on in hypermanic shock, endless rolling reruns of a flash reflecting off the Potomac, the collapsing monument—for some reason, the White House seemed to be taboo, too raw a nerve to touch in the bleeding subconscious of a national trauma. He needed the bourbon, as a personal anesthetic: It was appallingly bad tradecraft, he knew, but right now he didn’t feel able to face reality without a haze of alcohol.

  Mike wasn’t an amateur. He’d always known—always—that a job could blow up in his face. You didn’t expect that to happen, in the DEA, but you were an idiot if you didn’t take precautions and make arrangements to look after your own skin. It was surprisingly easy to build up a false identity, and after one particular assignment in Central America had gone bad on him with extreme prejudice (a
local chief of police had turned out to be the brother-in-law of the local heroin wholesaler) he’d carefully considered his options. When Pete Garfinkle had died, he’d activated them. It made as much sense as keeping his gun clean and loaded—especially after Dr. James had earmarked him for a one-way ticket into fairyland. They weren’t forgeries, they were genuine, legal ID: He didn’t use the license to get off speeding tickets, and he paid the credit card bill in full every time he used it. They were simply an insurance policy for dangerous times, and ever since he’d gotten back home after the disastrous expedition into Niejwein a couple of months ago, he’d been glad of the driving license and credit card taped inside a video cassette’s sleeve in the living room.

  From Steve Schroeder’s office he’d taken the elevator down to street level, caught a bus, switched to the Green Line, changed train and commuter line three times in thirty minutes, then hopped a Chinatown bus to New York, exiting early and ultimately ending up in a motel in Providence with a new rental car and a deep sense of foreboding. Then, walking into the motel front desk, he’d seen the endless looping scenes of disaster on CNN. It had taken three times as long as usual to check in. One of the two clerks on duty was weeping, her shoulders shaking; the other was less demonstrative, but not one hundred percent functional. “Why do they hate us?” the weeping one moaned during a break in her crying jag. “Why won’t they leave us alone?”

  “Think Chemical Ali did it?” Three months ago it would have been Saddam, before his cousin’s palace coup on the eve of the invasion.

  “Who cares?”

  Mike had disentangled himself, carefully trying not to think too hard about the scenes on the TV. But once he got to his room, it hit him.

  I tried to do something. But I failed.

  A vast, seething sense of numbness threatened to swallow him. This can’t be happening, there must be some way out of here, some way to get to where this didn’t happen. But it had happened; for better or worse—almost certainly for worse—Miriam’s enemies had lashed out at the Family Trade Organization in the most brutal way imaginable. Not one, but two bombs had gone off in D.C. Atomic bombs, the all-time nightmare the DHS had been warning about, the things Mike had been having nightmares about for the year since Matthias walked into a DEA office in downtown Boston with a stolen ingot of plutonium in his pocket.