The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  The pub was a theater: Reynolds and Huan had both prepared scripts for the other’s benefit. The only question remaining to be answered was whose review would be more favorable.

  *

  Eight o’clock; the sky was still bright, but the shops were mostly shuttered, the costermongers and peddlers and rag-and-bone men and beggars had mostly slunk away, and the front windows of the pub were dark. Reynolds surveyed it professionally as he approached along the pavement. He’d swapped his uniform for a suit of clothes as ill-fitting – even moth-nibbled – as any he had worn during the long desperate years on the run. On the far side of the road, a couple of dusty idlers clustered near a corner; he glanced away. Down the street, a steamer sat by the curb, curtains drawn in its passenger compartment. All was as it should be. He nodded, then turned back towards the door and rapped the head of his cane on it twice.

  A spy-slot slid aside. ‘We’re shut.’

  ‘Tell your master an old friend calls.’ Reynolds kept his voice low. ‘Remember New Catford to him.’

  The spy-slot closed. A moment later, the door opened. Reynolds slid inside.

  The pub was indeed short on customers, but as the barman shot the bolts and returned to his place, Reynolds was intrigued by the appearance of the couple sitting at the one sound table, each with a glass of beer to hand. The old Chinaman he recognized, after a pause: It was indeed the gangmaster and smuggler from New Catford who had called himself Cheung. But who was the middle-aged white man? Questions, questions. Reynolds smiled broadly as he approached the table and Cheung stood.

  ‘Ah, Citizen Reynolds!’ cried Cheung – Reynolds suppressed a wince – and the other fellow stood, somewhat slowly. ‘How wonderful to see you prospering so in these harsh times. Please, this is my associate Dr. ven Hjalmar, a physician. Please have a seat. Beer? Spirits? Have you eaten?’

  Reynolds negotiated the social minefield and sat, without glancing at the bartender – whose impassivity told him more than he needed to know about his loyalties. Most professional, he decided: Cheung clearly knew what he was about. Which suggested a simple wrap-up might be difficult – but then, the presence of the doctor implied that this might be rather more complex than the usual pathetic blackmail attempt. ‘A beer would be welcome. I gather you had a business proposal you wanted to bring to my attention?’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed.’ Cheung smiled happily. ‘To your very good health!’ He raised his glass. Reynolds perforce followed suit and submitted to another five minutes of trivial niceties. ‘We considered putting some elements of this proposal to you all those years ago, in Catford, but the unfortunate excess of zeal displayed by the Polis at that time impressed upon us the need for discretion. Now, however, anything we choose to confide in you is unlikely to be beaten out of you by the royalist inquisitors. So: another toast, to our future business success!’

  Reynolds blinked as he answered the toast: This was very much not what he’d been expecting. ‘I’m afraid you have the better of me,’ he admitted. ‘What business do you have in mind?’

  Cheung glanced around before he replied. ‘You must have realized that I had a most effective way of moving dispatches and contraband between locations, without fear of interception.’ Reynolds nodded guardedly. ‘Well, that . . . mechanism . . . is still available. And I believe that, given the nature of your current engagement, you might very well find a use for it.’ Reynolds nodded again, slightly perturbed. What’s he on about? he wondered. Cheung beckoned at the bartender. ‘Scott. Please come and stand in front of Citizen Reynolds, then make yourself scarce. Have Ang report to me in five minutes.’

  The bartender – Scott – bowed slightly, then stepped in front of the table. ‘Observe,’ he told Reynolds. He looked away, in the direction of the archway leading to the kitchen. Then he vanished.

  ‘This is our family secret,’ Reynolds heard Cheung saying behind him as he waved his arms through the thin air where Scott had stood: ‘We can walk between worlds. We have had to hold this to ourselves, in utter confidence, for generations; I’m sure you can imagine the consequences if word were to leak out in public. However, I know you to be a man of utmost probity and integrity, and in your new and elevated rank, I am certain you will recognize the desirability to keep this a secret as close to your chest as any matter of state. I brought the doctor along because he can explain to you the origins, transmission, and limits of our family talent better than I; it is hereditary, and we have never met any people to whom we are not blood kin who can do it . . .’

  Reynolds swallowed: His heart was hammering. ‘Business,’ he said hollowly. ‘What business?’ He turned round slowly. Where had Scott gone? Was he behind him? Waiting with an axe –

  ‘I want to put my family at your service,’ said Cheung. His expression was bland. ‘I am certain you will find our unique talent very valuable indeed. These are dangerous times; the party has many enemies. I hope that you – we – will better be able to defend it if we can come to a working agreement?’

  Reynolds licked suddenly dry lips. ‘How many of you are there?’ he asked.

  ‘Seventy adults, able to perform at will, and their children. Two hundred other relatives, some of whose offspring may be able to do so. And Dr. ven Hjalmar has a proposal that will, I am sorry to say, strike you as something out of a philosophical romance, but which may revolutionize our capacity in the longer term, ten years or more.’

  Reynolds glanced round again, just as a young man – half a head shorter than the absent Scott – appeared out of thin air, bowed deeply to him, and moved to take up his station behind the bar. He swallowed again, mind churning like a millrace. ‘How much do you want?’ he asked.

  Cheung smiled again. ‘Perhaps Dr. ven Hjalmar should start by telling you exactly what is on sale. We can discuss the price later . . .’

  7/16

  On the eighth floor of a department store just off Eighteenth Street NW in Washington, D.C., there was a locked janitor’s closet. Earlier that morning the police had been busy downstairs. A security guard had been found dead in a customer restroom, evidently the victim of an accidental heroin overdose. Nobody, in the ensuing fuss, had felt any need to fetch cleaning supplies from this particular closet, and so nobody had discovered that the door was not only locked but the lock was jammed, so that the key wouldn’t turn.

  Because nobody had visited the room, nobody had called a locksmith. And because the door remained locked, nobody had noticed the presence of an abandoned janitor’s trolley, its cylindrical plastic trash can weighted down by something heavy. Nor had anyone, in an attempt to move the trolley, discovered that its wheels were jammed as thoroughly as the lock on the door. And nobody had raised the lid on the trash can and, staring inside, recognized the olive-drab cylinder for what it was: a SADM – storable atomic demolition munition – in its field carrier, connected to a live detonation sequencer (its cover similarly glued shut), a very long way indeed from its designated storage cell in a bunker at the Pantex plant in West Texas.

  The janitor’s store was approximately 450 meters – two blocks – away from Lafayette Square and, opposite it, the White House; and it was about ten meters above the roofline of that building.

  The detonation sequencer was little more than a countdown timer – a milspec timer, with a set of thumbwheels to enter the permissive action codes, and more thumbwheels to enter the countdown time and desired yield. Beneath the glued-down cover were additional test and fault lights and switches. From the timer emerged a fat cable that screwed onto a multi-pin socket on the outside of the bomb carrier. Inside the carrier nestled one of the smallest atomic bombs ever assembled, so compact that a strong man with a suitable backpack frame could actually carry it. But not for long, and not for much longer.

  Eleven-sixteen and twelve seconds, on the morning of July 16, 2003.

  Stop all the clocks. All of them.

  *

  It was a regular summer day in Washington, D.C. Open-topped tourist buses carried their came
ra-snapping cargo around the sights on Capitol Hill – itself something of a misnomer, for the gentle slope of the Mall was anything but mountainous – past the reflecting pool, the Washington Monument, the museums and administrative buildings and white stone-clad porticoes of power. In hundreds of offices, stores, restaurants, and businesses around the center ordinary people were at work.

  Like Nazma Hussein, aged twenty-six, daughter of Yemeni immigrants, married to Ali the cook, cleaning and setting out tables in the front of her family’s small lunch diner on K Street NW, worrying about her younger sister Ayesha who is having trouble at school: Papa wants her to come and work in the restaurant until he and Baba can find her a suitable husband, but Nazma thinks she can do better –

  Like Ryan Baylor, aged twenty-three, a law student at GWU, hurrying along H Street to get to the Burns Law Library and swearing quietly under his breath – overslept, forgot to set his alarm, got a reading list as long as his arm and a hangover beating a brazen kettledrum counterpoint to the traffic noise as he wonders if those cans of Coors were really a good idea the evening before a test –

  Like Ashanda Roe, aged twenty-eight, working a dead-end shelf-stacking job in a 7-Eleven on D Street NW, sweating as she tears open boxes of Depends and shoves them into position on an end galley, tossing the packaging into a wheeled cage and whistling under her breath. She’s worrying because her son Darrick, who is only seven, is spending too much time with a bunch of no-good kids who hang out with –

  Six thousand, two hundred and eighty-six other people, ordinary people, men and women and children, tourists and natives, illegal immigrants and blue bloods, homeless vagrants and ambassadors –

  Stop all the clocks.

  *

  In the grand scheme of things, in the recondite world of nuclear war planning, a one-kiloton atomic bomb doesn’t sound like much. It’s less than a tenth of the yield of the weapon that leveled the heart of Hiroshima, a two-hundredth the power of a single warhead from a Minuteman or Trident missile. But the destructive force of a nuclear weapon doesn’t correspond directly to its nominal yield; a bomb with ten times the explosive power causes rather less than ten times as much destruction as a smaller one.

  Oliver Hjorth’s first bomb detonated at twelve seconds past eleven-sixteen, on the eighth floor of a steel-framed concrete department store about a third of a mile from the White House.

  Within a hundredth of a second, the department store building and everything else on its block vanished (along with fifty-seven staff and one hundred and fourteen shoppers), swallowed by a white-hot sphere of superheated gas and molten dust. The department store’s neighbors, out to a radius of a block, survived a fraction of a second longer, their stone and concrete facades scorching and beginning to smoke until the expanding shock wave, air compressed and flash-heated to thousands of degrees, rammed into them like a runaway train.

  Beyond the immediate neighborhood, the shock wave dissipated rapidly, reflecting off concrete and asphalt and thundering skywards in a bellowing roar that would, a little over a minute later, be audible in Baltimore. And beyond a couple of blocks’ radius, only the most unlucky bystanders – those standing in the open with a direct line of sight down Seventeenth Street or H Street – would be exposed to the heat pulse, their skin charring and their eyes burned out by the flash.

  But within a third of a mile, the destruction was horrendous.

  Nazma Hussein saw a flash out of the corner of her eye, like a reflection from the noonday sun, only more brilliant. Looking up, she glanced at the window: But it was nothing, and she looked back at the table she was laying out cutlery on, and deposited another fork on the place mat just as the shock wave arrived to throw a thousand glittering plate-glass knives through her face and abdomen.

  Ryan saw a flash on the ground in front of him, and winced, closing his eyes as a wave of prickly heat washed over the back of his head and neck. He inhaled, his nostrils flaring. Flashes sparkled inside his eyelids as he smelled burning hair. His scalp ablaze, he drew breath to scream at the excruciating pain. But then the wind caught him with one hand, and the law library building with another, and clapped them together. And that was all he knew. A small mercy: He would not live to suffer the slow death of a thousand REMs that he had been exposed to, or the fourth-degree burns from the heat flash.

  Ashanda was lucky. Working in the back of the store, she saw no flash of light, but heard a roar like a truck piling into the front of the building. The ground shook as the lights failed, and she fell to the floor, screaming in alarm. The rumbling went on for much too long, and she closed her eyes and prayed that it wasn’t an earthquake; but who in D.C. had ever imagined an earthquake striking here? As the vibration faded, she pulled herself to her knees, then up to her feet. People were moaning in the front of the shop, but without lights she might as well be blind. She began to fumble her way back to the stockroom door, still shaky, praying that Darrick was all right.

  *

  The White House, although originally built in the late eighteenth century, had been reconstructed in the mid-twentieth around a steel load-bearing frame. With stone walls and a steel skeleton, it was by no means as fragile as its age might suggest; but the Truman-era structure wasn’t designed to withstand a nuclear blast at close range, and in time of war the president was supposed to be elsewhere.

  The White House survived the heat flash, but the shock wave took barely a second to surge down the street. By the time it hit the West Wing it was traveling at just over three hundred miles per hour, with an overpressure slightly over six pounds per square inch – funneled by the broad boulevard – and an impact to rival an F5 tornado.

  The forty-third president of the United States was chatting informally with his deputy chief of staff and special assistant (whose windowless office in the middle of the first floor of the West Wing was perhaps the most eavesdropper-proof location in the entire federal government) when the shock wave hit.

  It would never be determined precisely why the president was visiting his campaign manager, chief political strategist, and senior advisor, rather than vice versa; it was perhaps a reflection of the importance of this secretive political operative to the administration. But the location of this lair, in the middle of a warren of offices on the first floor, meant that none of its occupants could have had any warning of the catastrophe. Perhaps the lights flickered and dimmed as the White House’s backup power supply kicked in, and perhaps they stared in annoyance at the dead phones in their hands; but before anyone had time to walk as far as the office door, the masonry, concrete, and stone of the West Wing was struck by a pile driver of compressed air. Just over six pounds per square inch sounds far less impressive than nine hundred pounds per square foot, but they are the same thing. Worse: The compressed air in the wave had to come from somewhere. As the shock wave passed, it left behind an evacuated zone, where the air pressure had dropped precipitously, swinging the strain on the building’s structure from positive pounds to negative. It was a lethal whiplash of pressure, far worse than even a direct strike by a tornado.

  Had the West Wing been built of modern reinforced structural concrete it might have survived, albeit with severe damage. But it wasn’t, and the falling ceiling respected neither rank nor titles of nobility.

  *

  Eleven seconds later, the second bomb detonated.

  This one had been planted on the top floor of the Holocaust Museum on Fourteenth Street SW, just off Independence Avenue and two blocks away from the Mall.

  Perhaps Baron Hjorth had meant to target Congress; if so, he’d been overoptimistic – situated more than a mile away, the Capitol suffered external blast damage and many of its windows were blown in, but aside from shrapnel injuries, a number of flash fires ignited by the detonation, and severe damage to the outside of the dome, the Capitol was not seriously affected.

  Not so the cluster of federal agencies around the Mall. FEMA and the FBI were both less than three thousand feet from ground zero; and
pity the employees of the Department of Agriculture, across the road from the museum. More than eleven thousand people, mostly government employees and tourists, were directly affected by the second bomb, half of them killed by heat flash or shock wave as the rippling blast tore the heart out of the federal government.

  And then there was the third device.

  *

  Eleven-sixteen and thirty-eight seconds. Two figures in desert fatigues bearing sergeant’s stripes – Kurt and Jurgen, who were in fact, by grace of his lordship Baron Griben ven Hjalmar, sergeants-at-arms of the post – appeared out of nowhere on the second floor of a car park adjacent to the Pentagon, one of them standing and the other sprawling atop a wheelbarrow that also contained an olive-drab cylinder.

  ‘Scheisse,’ said Jurgen, as Kurt swung his feet over the side of the barrow and stood up. Beneath the low concrete roof half the theft alarms of half the vehicles in the park were shrilling in an earsplitting cacophony that filled his head and threatened to overflow when he opened his mouth, a profoundly unnatural counterpoint to the low rumbling from outside.

  ‘This way.’ Kurt, eyes flickering side-to-side, pointed along a line of parked trucks and SUVs towards a bare concrete wall with a fire door. Jurgen swallowed bile, picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow, tried to ignore the nausea in his stomach. His feet lurched side-to-side as he shoved the heavy load towards the stairwell. ‘Two minutes.’

  ‘Two? Okay.’ Jurgen nodded. Everything was crystal clear, suffused with a luminosity of migraine. The Boss couldn’t be blamed for taking these little precautions, he could see that. ‘How about here – ’