The Clan Corporate tmp-3

by Charles Stross

  “I still don’t like it.” Paulette frowned. “I mean that. I think you’re misreading them. Just because you’re little miss heiress, it doesn’t make you exempt. They’ve got their code: item number two on it, after ‘don’t talk to the cops,’ is ‘don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.’ And this sounds like exactly the sort of business people wake up dead for sticking their nose into.”

  Miriam shrugged. “Paulie, I’ve got status among them. I couldn’t just vanish. Too many people would ask questions.”

  “Like they did when you appeared out of nowhere?” Paulette stared at her cynically. “Miriam. Seriously, one last time, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Please, just for me, will you drop it?”

  Miriam crossed her arms, irritated. “Who’s paying your wages?”

  The main course appeared, savory meatballs in a hot, sweet tomato sauce. Paulie nodded, her face frozen. “Okay, if that’s how you want to do it,” she said quietly. “You’re the boss, you know best. Okay?”

  “Oh . . . okay.” I went too far, Miriam realized. Shit. How do I apologize for that? She glanced down at her plate. “Yeah, that’s how I want to play it,” she said. Play it all the way, then apologize. Paulie was a mensch, she’d come round.

  “First I have to figure out if it really is what it seems to be. Although given that stuff about W-star heterozygotes, I can’t see what else it might be. Then if I’m right, I have to figure out how to use it. At best”—she bit into a meatball—“it could give me all the leverage I need. They couldn’t touch me, not even my psycho grandmother could. Hmm, great meatballs. So yeah, I think I need to go pay the clinic an anonymous visit.” She flashed Paulette a tentative smile. “Know where I can buy a stethoscope around here?”

  ARRESTED

  The auditor smiled as she walked in the door. “I’ve come to see Dr. Darling,” she announced, parking her briefcase beside the desk. Her expression was disturbingly cheery as she raised an ID card: “FDA, clinical audit division. I don’t have an appointment.”

  The receptionist visibly teetered on the edge of a panic attack for a few seconds. “I’m afraid Dr. Darling isn’t—” She lost her thread. The auditor didn’t look particularly threatening: just another office worker in a conservative suit, shoulder-length black hair, severe spectacles. But she was from the FDA. And unannounced! “I’ll just see if I can get him? Wait right here . . .”

  The auditor tapped her toe a trifle impatiently as the receptionist fielded two incoming calls and paged Dr. Darling. Glancing round, the auditor took in the waiting area, from the bleached pine curves of the desk to the powder-blue modular sofa for visitors to sit on. The walls were hung with anodyne still-life paintings of fruit baskets, alternating with certificates testifying that this HMO or that insurance company had voted the clinic an award for excellence in some obscure field. It was all very professional, nothing that could possibly offend anyone. A classic medical industry head office, all promises and no downside. Not a hint that it might be the front end for a slave factory, or dabbling in eugenics. “Excuse me?” She looked up. “Dr. Darling will be right with you.”

  The door opened. Dr. Andrew Darling was forty-something, excessively coiffed and sporting a thousand-dollar smile. “Good morning! You must be from the FDA, Dr., ah . . . ?”

  “Anderson,” said Miriam, holding up the ID card and mentally crossing her fingers. Get me a fake ID, she’d told Brill. Not police or DEA or anything like that, but I want to be able to walk into any restaurant or drugstore and scare the living daylights out of the manager. And Brill had just narrowed her eyes and looked at Miriam thoughtfully and nodded, and all of a sudden Miriam was an FDA standards compliance officer called Julie Anderson.

  It was, she reflected, a bit like magic. The Clan could—of necessity—do things with false ID that beggared the imagination, far better than anything she’d had to work with on undercover investigations for The Industry Weatherman. It was funny what a few million dollars a year in the right pockets could buy you. As long as you had the brass neck—the sense of personal invulnerability—to make effective use of it. Miriam’s wrist itched under the temporary tattoo. Yes, she thought.

  “Ah, Dr. Anderson.” Darling barely examined her card. “If you’d care to follow me?”

  Darling turned and led her through a maze of cubicles and corridors lined with the usual water coolers, photocopiers, and wilting rubber plants, to an office that seemed too cluttered and compact to be that of an executive. There were files of hardcopy case notes on his desk and a subsiding heap of medical journals behind the glass front of a very used-looking bookcase. “I wasn’t expecting a compliance audit this month,” he said.

  “I know. You should have received a preliminary e-mail by now, though. This isn’t the start of a full investigation, I hope; more of a precautionary check, I didn’t bring a full team with me. To be frank, I’m hoping you can just clarify a few points for me and we can leave it at that?”

  “That’s very irregular.” Darling looked slightly puzzled.

  Another false note and he’ll see through me, Miriam realized edgily. But it was too late for second thoughts now. She stared at him through the lenses of her false spectacles and concentrated on playing her role to perfection. “We’ve been asked to investigate quietly. By another government agency.” She tapped her briefcase. “You’ve been dealing with Applied Genomics via a cutout trust. All perfectly aboveboard.” She smiled. “Don’t tell me this is the first time anyone’s asked you about it?”

  She’d struck pay dirt: Darling’s face turned gray. “Who sent you here?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.” Miriam did her best to look irritated but patient. “It’s the Reproductive Assistance Foundation children, the W-star heterozygotes. I’ve been asked some inconvenient questions by our sister agency. What are your postnatal follow-up protocols? What process did you subject your study guidelines to for ethical clearance, and what facilities do you have in place to recall patients in the event that it turns out that there are complications—if, just for the sake of argument, the W-star trait is associated with inborn errors of metabolism such as a hyperlipidemia or phenylketonuria? I am—surprised—Dr. Darling, to put it mildly, that there doesn’t seem to be any mention of this trait in the approvals filing for your clinic. And I was hoping you could offer me an explanation that doesn’t necessitate further investigation.”

  Darling blinked rapidly. “I—the W-star trait, where did you hear about that? Nobody’s supposed to—” He stood up hastily and walked over to the office door, pushed it shut.

  “I can’t disclose my sources.” Miriam stared at him coolly.

  “Was it Homeland Security?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

  “Why are you here on your own?” There was a nasty edge to his voice.

  Here comes the hard sell. “Because this is best dealt with quietly.” She concentrated on thinking herself into the skin of the person who was using Julie Anderson, compliance inspector, FDA, as a convenient cover identity. “I repeat, I can’t tell you who I am. I wasn’t here, I don’t exist. We know about your relationship with Applied Genomics. Mr. Angbard is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation. I’m here to follow up a loose end and make sure nothing unravels when I pull on it, if you follow me. This is all going to be swept under the rug so tightly that it didn’t happen, it never existed, nobody’s going to admit anything, and there won’t be any prosecutions—at least not in public. Are you with me so far? We do not need any scandals. But we need to know several things. We need to know how many, and when they were born, and where they live. And then we’re going to make sure that when Mr. Angbard and his interesting supply of money vanishes quietly—no, don’t ask—your problem goes away too. Did you ever see the Indiana Jones movies, Dr. Darling? If you like, I’m from the Federal Warehouse. I’m one of the curators. And I want your address list, in hard copy, before I walk out of this building. Do you understand me?”


  Darling swallowed. “What you’re asking for is unethical as hell, not to mention illegal,” he said. “Doesn’t medical confidentiality mean anything to you people?”

  Miriam smiled humorlessly. She was really getting into this, she decided: being a spook was fun. “I’m sure using substituted semen for in-vitro fertilization is also unethical and illegal. Now are we going to do this quietly, or am I going to have to go away and come back with a FEMA emergency court order and an arrest warrant?”

  “Shit.” It was the sweet sound of surrender. “Are you going to indemnify me? Or entertain a plea bargain? If you get this stuff, I want immunity from prosecution arising from it.”

  “You are not the target of this investigation,” Miriam stonewalled. If he expects paperwork . . . “And this isn’t prosecution territory in any event, as I believe I already said. I was never here, you didn’t give me any files, there’s not going to be any fallout or any collateral damage. We don’t want a paper trail. Do you follow?”

  “I—oh hell.” Darling shuffled. “Okay, I’ll get you the files.” He glanced at the door. “Will hard copy do? We don’t keep this stuff on a networked server.”

  “Paper will be fine,” Miriam nodded. “In the first instance, we’re just after a contact sheet for the W-star subjects. I can come back for their full medical records later.” Not that I’m going to, because they won’t be worth a three-dollar bill.

  “Okay. Wait here.” Darling stood up and left the office, closing the door quietly.

  Miriam shut her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. Okay, he’s doing it, she decided. He’s bought the story. Right? This was always the hardest part of an investigation, getting the target’s trust. But after about thirty seconds she opened her eyes again. Am I missing something? She rubbed her palms on her knees: they were damp. She hadn’t been on this end of an investigation for more than a year, and it made her as nervous as a cat passing the back fence of a boarding kennel. She thought she’d laid the groundwork adequately, but . . . Darling’s been falsifying IVF donor records for Angbard by way of this nonprofit trust. I’ve just dropped the hammer on him. What could go wrong at this stage?

  Well, in the worst case scenario Darling could just pick up the phone and call Angbard, tell him someone from the FDA was sniffing around the operation. But that wasn’t very likely, and in any case it would take time for Angbard to send Clan security round to deal with her, time in which she could simply vanish from the scene. (She resisted the urge to push back her left sleeve and glance at the temporary tattoo: if she bugged out now she’d probably end up somewhere in the wild woods, over on the other side, with a splitting headache.) Next worst scenario: Darling was going to phone the FDA, and would discover pretty quickly that there was no field inspector called Anderson. At which point she could either run away or pull the full black-helicopters tinfoil-hat spook thing. This being a deeply paranoid decade, the odds were that he’d believe her—and if not, she could still bug out. But the third worst case—

  Miriam stood up as the door opened. It was Darling, and there was a security guard with him. “That’s her,” he said. The guard took a step forward and Miriam flicked her sleeve back to stare at the knotwork design in brown henna that writhed on the back of her wrist like a snake endlessly swallowing its own tail, inducing feelings of nausea. “Arrest her.”

  The guard reached out to grab Miriam as she brought the knot into focus, putting her mind into the state in which she could world-walk with the ease of long practice. Hands closed around her right arm as lightning stabbed at the base of her skull. “Ow!” She winced, vision flickering, and tried again. Nothing. Her stomach twisted and she began to double over, head a throbbing wall of pain. What the hell—

  “On the ground!” said the guard. “Lie down!” Something hard shoved into the base of her skull. “Okay, I don’t think she’s armed, sir. If you can help me with these—”

  Handcuffs. Miriam tried to move her wrists but they didn’t want to respond, flopping around behind her as the guard pinioned them. The building must be doppelgangered, she realized through the crippling headache. Which means the whole clinic is a Clan front—that’s impossible!

  Her stomach flip-flopped. Hands were lifting her: something sharp pressed against the side of her neck. “Okay, that’s ten mills of valium. Wait two minutes, then get the cuffs off her and take her down to recovery ward B, there’s a spare room off the main bay. I’ll meet you down there.”

  “Going . . . be sick . . .” She’d spoken aloud, she thought. But there was a great empty hollow space inside her, and everything felt warm and wet, as if she were dissolving in a vast salty ocean of comfort and sleep. Valium? she thought. What went wrong? It was the last thing she thought for a long time.

  It was dark, and her head hurt. Miriam tried to stretch and found she couldn’t move. That’s odd, she thought fuzzily, I don’t remember going to bed. She tried to stretch again, but her head was spinning and her knees ached and she felt a sudden urge to urinate. She was lying on her back. Why am I on my back? The urge was irresistible and for some reason she couldn’t fight it. But that was okay. If it wasn’t for the headache and the knee thing she could fall asleep again; she felt warm and comfortable, as if a hot pillow was pressing down on her. Drugs, she thought vaguely, I’m sedated. It was so funny she felt like giggling, but laughter was too much like hard work.

  “—sample bottle please, and get her a new catheter bag—” The words made no sense.

  Miriam tried to ask, “What’s going on?” but nothing came out. There was an unpleasant pressure between her legs and a sensation of cold, uncomfortable and intimate. Not due for a smear test, she thought irrelevantly, and managed to make an indignant grunt.

  “She’s too light, give me another five mikes,” said the same voice. Then there was a prickling at her wrist and the world went away for a while.

  The next time she woke up was both better and worse. She had a pounding headache and her mouth felt as if a family of small rodents had set up home on her tongue—but she was in a bed, and fully conscious, the soft valium blanket no longer pressing down on her. Instead, she was alert—and completely aware of just how stunningly stupid she’d been.

  In her careful list of what might have gone wrong, she’d overlooked option three: the entire clinic was a front for Angbard’s organization, in which case it was no surprise at all that it was doppelgangered. And Darling had known she was a hoaxer as soon as she opened her mouth, because none of the IVF scheme details had been registered with the relevant FDA supervisory committees. Nobody outside the clan had ever heard of W* heterozygotes. So . . .

  She groaned and tried to roll over, away from the too-bright sunlight that was hurting her eyelids, only to be brought up short by a metal bracelet locked around her left wrist. Shit. She opened her eyes to see a whitewashed concrete wall inches away from her nose. I’m a prisoner.

  The realization was crushing, and with it came a sense of total despair at her own stupidity. I told Paulie to take care and not go barging in, why couldn’t I listen to my own advice? She pushed herself upright and looked around, taking stock of her situation.

  She was lying on a narrow cot in a room about five feet wide and maybe eight feet long. Next to the end of the bed, a stainless-steel sink was bolted to the wall. At the foot of the bed she could see a similarly grim-looking commode next to the door. The bed had a foam pillow and a sheet, and that was it. They’d dressed her in a hospital gown, taken her clothes, and handcuffed her to a ring in the wall by a length of chain. There was a window set high up in one wall, through which the morning—or afternoon—sunlight slid, and a naked bulb recessed in the ceiling, but she couldn’t see a light switch. There was no mirror over the washbasin, no handle on the inside of the door, and absolutely no sign to betray where she was. But she already knew roughly what this place had to be, and where. It was a doppelganger cell in one of the Clan’s surviving safe houses. An oubliette. People could vanish in here
, never be seen again. For all she knew, maybe that was the idea—there’d be a sealed room on the other side, air full of carbon monoxide or some other silent killer so that if she somehow unchained herself and tried to world-walk . . .

  Miriam shook her head, desperately trying to dispel the bubbling panic. I do not need this now, she told herself faintly. I mustn’t go to pieces. But telling herself didn’t help much. In fact, it seemed to make things worse. She’d stuck her nose into Angbard’s business, and she’d have to be a blind fool to imagine that Angbard would just slap her lightly across the wrist and say “Don’t do it again.” Angbard’s authority was based on the simple, drastic fact that everybody knew that you didn’t cross the duke. Roland had been terrified of him, Baron Oliver and her grandmother the dowager had given Angbard a wide berth, focusing instead on weaklings among his associates—the only person she’d known to openly cross Angbard was Matthias, and he’d just vanished. Quite possibly she was going to find out where he’d gone. If not—she cringed. It wasn’t as if she could try to bluff that it was just a stupid, sophomoric prank, an attempt to get his attention. Angbard wasn’t an idiot, and more important, he didn’t think she was. Which meant that he was bound to take her seriously. And the last thing she wanted was for Angbard to get it into his head that she was looking for—not to use any euphemisms—blackmail material. She glanced at her wrist, halfway desperate enough to try and world-walk anyway, risking the doppelganger room. Then she gave an involuntary moan of despair. Her temporary tattoo was gone.

  There must have been a hidden camera or spy hole somewhere in the walls, because she didn’t have to wait long. Maybe half an hour after she awakened, the door rattled and slammed open. Miriam flinched away but was brought up short by the chain. Two guys in business suits stared at her from the doorway like leashed hounds watching a rabbit. Behind them stood an older man with a dry, sallow face and an expression like a hungry ferret: “We can do this two ways, easy or hard. Easy is, you sit in this wheelchair and don’t say nothing. You don’t want hard.”