The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3)

by Charles Stross

  ‘A deal. What sort of deal? What do they want us to do?’ Lin stared at his elder brother.

  ‘Assassination. Spying. Smuggling. What do you think the Levelers’ secret Polis might want of us? And then they’ll own us, match, lock, and trigger. But more importantly – the cousins will be looking for sanctuary here, and this will put them at our throat, and we at theirs: The Polis won’t tolerate a different group of world-walkers beyond their control, once they learn of the cousins’ existence. We’ll be right back where we started, but this time under the thumb of the Polis – who despise us because we’re children of the Inner Kingdom.’

  ‘We could go back there – ’ Lin stopped.

  ‘Could we?’ It was James’s turn to raise an eyebrow. ‘Where would we be, if we couldn’t move freely through New Britain? How would we prosper? And that’s assuming we can go back there. What the cousins have stirred up – ’ He shook his head. ‘No, it wouldn’t work. That’s why I’m asking you: Which comes first, your honor or your filial loyalty?’

  Lin stared for a few seconds; then his shoulders slumped. He took a deep mouthful of beer. ‘I defer to your elder wisdom,’ he finally said. Another pause. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to watch.’ James whistled tunelessly between his front teeth. ‘Hopefully I won’t have to do anything. Hopefully Uncle is right and I am wrong. But if it turns out that Uncle Huan isn’t right . . . will you obey him to the end, or will you do what’s right for the family?’

  Lin looked away. Then he looked back and nodded: a minute inclination of the head, but a significant one – the precise degree of submission that he might otherwise give his father. ‘What are you considering?’

  ‘Nothing specific, as yet.’ James raised his tankard. ‘But if the elders’ plans go astray – we’ll see.’

  *

  As he turned in to Miriam Beckstein’s street, Mike Fleming felt an uncontrollable shudder ripple up the small of his back: an intense sensation of guilt, as if he’d done something unforgivable. Which was ridiculous. Why do I feel like a stalker? he wondered ironically. I’m not the guy who’s been lurking in the bushes with a phone and a camera for the past six months, hoping she’ll come home. He drove carefully up the road, not slowing and not staring at the houses, trying to tag the parked cars as memories battered for his attention.

  Mike had a history: not uncommon. Single cop, married to the job. He had another history, too: dates, girlfriends, brief excursions into the alien world of domesticity that never quite seemed to gain traction. Three or four years ago he’d met a woman journalist – how? he could remember the where, but not the why – and asked her out, or maybe she’d asked him to ask her out, or something. And they’d gotten to know each other and she’d asked him home and then it all seemed to cool off, over the space of a couple of months.

  Nothing new there; and he could easily have written it off. She’s a civilian, it wasn’t going to work. But for some reason, he hadn’t gotten over her as easily as all that. He’d thought about looking her up. Seeing if he could make her change her mind. Then he realized he was getting close to some creepy headspace, and asked himself if that was really who he wanted to be, took a vacation and went on a cruise, drank too much, and had a couple of one-night stands. Which seemed to fix things, but he’d teetered on the fine edge of obsession for a few weeks, and now here he was driving down her street, and it felt weird. Creepy. Blame FTO for sucking him in and Miriam for concealing her secret other life from him – assuming that was what she’d been doing? – but this felt wrong. And what he was going to do next was even more wrong.

  Burgling Ex-Girlfriend’s House 101: First make sure there’s nobody watching it, then make sure there’s nobody home. Mike took a long loop around the neighborhood, killing five minutes before he turned back and drove down the street in the opposite direction. One parked car had departed; of the remaining ones, two were occupied, but hadn’t been on his first pass. Ten minutes later, he made a third pass. A truck had parked up, with two workmen sitting inside, eating their lunch or something. Someone was messing with the trunk of another parked car. The two that had been occupied earlier were vacant. If there’s a watch, they’re using a house or a camera. But not sitting in a car, waiting to pounce.

  Mike pulled in, several doors down from Miriam’s. He’d stopped at a Kinko’s on his way. Now he hung a laminated badge around his neck, and stuck a fat day planner under his left arm. The badge bore a photograph but gave a false name and identified him as working for a fictional market research company, and the bulging day planner’s zipped compartment held tools rather than papers, but to a casual bystander . . . well.

  Now came the tricky part. He climbed out of his car and locked it; stretched; then walked up the street, trying not to hobble. He paused at the first door he came to, deliberately trying to look bored. There was a doorbell: J & P SUTHERLAND. He pushed it, waited, hoping nobody was in. If they were, he had a couple of spiels ready; but any exposure was a calculated risk. After a minute he pushed the buzzer again. The Sutherlands were obviously out; check one house off the list – he ritually made a note on the pad clipped to the back of his planner – and move on.

  As Mike moved up the road, ringing doorbells and waiting, he kept a weather eye open for twitching curtains, unexpected antennae. A bored Boston grandmother at one apartment threatened to take too much interest in him, but he managed to dissuade her with the number-two pitch: Was she satisfied with her current lawn-care company? (For telecommuting techies, the number-one pitch was a nonstick-bakeware multilevel marketing scheme. Anything to avoid having to actually interview anybody.) Finally he reached Miriam’s doorstep. The windows were grimy, and the mailbox was threatening to overflow: good. So nobody’s renting. He rang the doorbell, stood there for the requisite minute, and moved on.

  This was the moment of maximum danger, and his skin was crawling as he slowly walked to the next door. If FTO was watching the Beckstein house, they’d be all over him if they suspected he was trying to make contact. But they wouldn’t be all over a random street canvasser, and Mike had taken steps to not look like Mike Fleming, rogue agent and wanted man, from his cheap suit to the shaven scalp and false mustache. It wouldn’t fool a proper inspection, but if he had to do that he’d already lost; all he had to do was look like part of the street furniture.

  Three doors. Nobody coming out of the houses opposite, no sedan cruising slowly down the road towards him. His mind kept circling back to the ingrained grime on the windows, the crammed mailbox. Let them have dropped the watch, he prayed. A 24/7 watch on a person of interest was a costly affair: It took at least five agents working forty hours a week to minimally cover a target, and if the target was expecting it and taking evasive measures – jumping next door’s backyard fence, for example – you could double or triple that watch before you had a hope of keeping the cordon intact. Add management and headquarters staff and vacation and sick leave and a pair of tail cars in case the target went shopping and you could easily use up twenty personnel – call it a cool million and a half per year in payroll alone. And Miriam hadn’t been back, that much he was fairly sure of. Another sixty seconds passed. Mike made an executive decision: There’s no watch. Party time!

  The houses adjacent to the Beckstein residence were all vacant at this time of day. Mike turned and walked back to the next one over, then rang the doorbell again. When there was no response, he shrugged; then instead of going back to the sidewalk he walked around the building, slowly, looking up at the eaves. (Cover story number three: Would you like to buy some weatherproof gutter lining?)

  The fence between their yard and the next was head-high, but they weren’t tidy gardeners and there was no dog; once he was out of sight of the street it took Mike thirty seconds to shove an empty rainwater barrel against the wooden wall and climb over it, taking care to lower himself down on his good leg. The grass in Miriam’s yard was thigh-high, utterly unkempt and flopping over under its own wei
ght. Mike picked himself up and looked around. There was a wooden shed, and a glass sliding door into the living room – locked. Think like a cop.Where would she leave it? Mike turned to the shed immediately. It had seen better days: The concrete plinth was cracked, and the window hung loose. He carefully reached through the window opening, slowly feeling around the frame until his questing fingers touched a nail and something else. He stifled a grin as he inspected the keyring. This was almost too easy. What am I missing? he wondered. A momentary premonition tickled the edge of his consciousness. Miriam has enemies in the Clan, folks like Matthias. And Matthias had an extra-special calling card. Mike looked at the sliding door. So it wasn’t going to be easy, was it?

  The key turned in the lock. Mike opened his case and removed a can of WD-40, and sprayed it into the track at the bottom of the door. Then he took out another can, and a long screwdriver. First, he edged the door open a quarter of an inch. Then he slowly ran the screw-driver’s tip into the gap, and painstakingly lifted it from floor to ceiling. It met no resistance. Good. It was a warm day, and the cold sweat was clammy across his neck and shoulders and in the small of his back as he widened the entrance. Still nothing. Am I jumping at shadows? When the opening was eighteen inches wide, Mike gave the second spray can a brisk shake, then pointed it into the room, towards the ceiling, and held the nozzle down.

  Silly String – quick-setting plastic foam – squirted out and drifted towards the floor in loops and tangles. About six inches inside the doorway, at calf level to a careless boot, it hung in midair, draped over a fine wire. Mike crouched down and studied it, then looked inside. The tripwire – now he knew what to look for – ran to a hook in the opposite side of the doorframe, and then to a green box screwed to the wall.

  Mike stepped over the wire. Then he breathed out, and looked around.

  The lounge-cum-office was a mess. Some person or persons unknown had searched it, thoroughly, not taking pains to tidy up afterwards; then someone else had installed the booby box and trip-wire. It was dusty inside, and dark. Power’s probably out, he realized. A turf’n’trap sting gone to seed, long neglected by its intended victim: Better check for more wires. Before touching anything, he pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. A poke at a desk lamp confirmed that the power was out – no surprises there. Hunting around in the sea of papers that hands unseen had dumped on the office floor was going to take some time, but seemed unavoidable: Empty sockets in a main extension block under the desk, and an abandoned palmtop docking station, suggested the absence of a computer and other electronic devices. Mike checked the rest of the house briefly, squirting Silly String before going through each doorway: There was another wire just inside the front door, beyond a toppled-over bookcase, but there were no other traps as far as he could see.

  Getting down to work on the office, he wondered who’d turfed the scene. The missing computer was suggestive; going by the empty shelves and the boxes on the floor, it didn’t take long to notice that all the computer media – Zip disks, CD-ROMs, even dusty old floppy disks – were missing. ‘Huh,’ he said quietly. ‘So they were looking for files?’ Miriam was a journalist. It was carelessly done, as if they’d been looking for something specific – and the searchers weren’t cops or spooks. Cops searching a journalist’s office wouldn’t leave a scrap of paper behind, and spooks wouldn’t want the subject to know they were under surveillance. ‘Amateurs.’ Mike took heart: It made his job that bit easier, to know that the perps had been looking for something specific, not trying to deny information to someone coming after.

  Fumbling through the pile of papers, sorting them into separate blocks, Mike ran across a telephone cable. It was still plugged in, and tracing it back to the desk he discovered the handset, which had fallen down beside the wall. It was a fancy one, with a built-in answerphone and a cassette tape. Mike pocketed the tape, then went back to work on the papers. Lots of cuttings from newspapers and magazines, lots of scribbled notes about articles she’d been working on, a grocery bill, invoices from the gas and electric – nothing obviously significant. The books: there was a pile of software manuals, business books, some dog-eared crime thrillers and Harlequin romances, a Filofax –

  Mike flipped it open. ‘Bingo!’ It was full of handwritten names, numbers, and addresses, scribbled out and overwritten and annotated. Evidently Miriam didn’t trust computers for everything; either that, or he’d latched on to a years-out-of-date organizer. But a quick look in the front revealed a year planner that went as far forward as the previous year. Why the hell didn’t they take it? he wondered, looking around. ‘Huh.’ Assuming the searchers were from the Clan . . . would they even know what a Filofax was? It looked like a book, from a distance; perhaps someone had told the brute squad to grab computers, disks, and any loose files on her desk. They don’t think like cops or spooks. He looked round, at the green box on the wall above the door, and shuddered. Time to blow.

  Outside, with the glass door shut and the key back on its nail in the shed, he glanced at the fence. His leg twinged, reminding him that he wasn’t ready for climbing or running. There was a gap between the fence and the side of the house, shadowy; he slipped into it, his fat planner (now pregnant with Miriam’s Filofax) clutched before him.

  There was a wooden gate at the end of the alley, latched shut but not padlocked. He paused behind it to peer between the vertical slats. A police car cruised slowly along the street, two officers inside. Two? Mike swore under his breath and crouched down. The car seemed to take forever to drive out of sight. Heart pounding, Mike checked his watch. It was half past noon, near enough exactly. He straightened up slowly, then unlatched the gate and limped past the front of the house as fast as he could, then back onto the sidewalk outside. He fumbled the key to his rental car at first, sweat and tension and butterflies in his stomach making him uncharacteristically clumsy, but on the second try, the door swung open and he slumped down behind the steering wheel and pulled it to just as another police car – or perhaps the same one, returning – swung into the street.

  Mike ducked. They’re not running a stakeout but they’ve got police surveillance, he told himself. Adding the Beckstein residence to a regular patrol’s list of places of interest would cost FTO virtually nothing – and they’d missed spotting him by seconds. He stayed down, crouched over the passenger seat as the cruiser slowly drove past. They’d be counting heads, looking for the unexpected. His cover was good but it wouldn’t pass a police background check if they went to town on him – and they would, if they found Miriam’s purloined Filofax. Ten seconds passed, then twenty. Mike straightened up cautiously and glanced in the rearview mirror. The cops were nearing the end of the road. Thirty seconds; they paused briefly, then hung a left, and Mike breathed out. Okay, back to the motel, he told himself. Then we’ll see what we’ve got here . . .

  BEGIN RECORDING

  ‘My fellow Americans, good evening.

  ‘It pains me more than I can say to be speaking to you tonight as your president. There are no good situations in which a vice president can take the oath of office; we step into the boots of a fallen commander-in-chief, hoping we can fill them, hoping we can live up to what our dead predecessor would have expected of us. It is a heavy burden of responsibility and, God willing, I shall do my utmost to live up to it. I owe nothing less to you, to all our citizens and especially to the gallant men and women who serve the cause of freedom and democracy in our nation’s armed forces; and I say this – I shall not sleep until our enemies, the enemies who murderously attacked us a week ago, are hunted down wherever they hide and are destroyed.

  ‘In time of war – and this is nothing less – it is the job of the commander-in-chief to defend the republic, and it is the job of the vice president to stand ready to serve, which is why I have appointed to the vacant office of the vice president, as my replacement, a man well-qualified to fight for freedom: former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. I trust that his appointment to this post, vacated by my succession, will
be approved by the House. The future of the republic is safe in his hands.

  ‘But I can already hear you asking: Safe from whom?

  ‘In the turmoil and heroism and agony of the attacks, it was difficult at first for us to ascertain the identity of our enemies. We have many enemies in the Middle East, from al-Qaeda and the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the mullahs of Tehran, and naturally our suspicions first fell on those quarters. But they are not our only enemies; and the nature of the attack made it hard to be sure who was responsible. The two atomic bombs that exploded in our capital, and the third that misfired in the Pentagon visitors’ lot, were stolen from our own stockpile. This was not only a cowardly and heinous act of nuclear terrorism, but a carefully planned one. However, we have identified the attackers, and we are now preparing to deal with them as they have dealt with us.

  ‘There is no easy way for me to explain this because the reality lies far beyond our everyday experience, but the scientists of our national laboratories assure me that this is true: We live in what they call a multiverse, a many-branched tree of reality. Scientists at Los Alamos have for a year now been probing techniques for traveling to other universes – to other versions of this, our own Earth. They had hoped to use this technique for peaceful ends, to solve the environmental and climatic problems that may arise in future decades. But we have discovered, the hard way, that we are not alone.

  ‘Some of the alternate earths we have discovered are inhabited. And in at least one of these, the inhabitants are hostile. Worse: They, too, have the technological tools to travel to other universes. The enemy who attacked us is the government of a sovereign nation in another America, a Godless feudal despotism ruled by terror and the lash. They know no freedom and they hate our own, for we are a living refutation of everything they hold to be true. Agents of this enemy have moved unseen among us for a generation, and they have been instrumental in the narcotics trade, using it to fund their infiltration of our institutions, their theft of our technologies. They are followers of an alien ideology and they seek to bring us down, and it is to that end that they stole at least six atomic weapons from their storage cells on military bases – gaining access from another unseen universe even as our guards vigilantly defended the perimeter fences.