Dark State--A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse

by Charles Stross

  Greta’s resting place resembled an arboretum rather than a cemetery. Tranquil and wooded, the discreet headstones and memorials of those buried here were set back from footpaths, beneath the shade of neatly manicured trees. It could almost pass for a public park, but for the scarcity of surveillance cameras. The dead were no longer under suspicion, sleeping beyond the reach of politics and intrigue. All but one …

  He found her grave eventually. Greta’s remains lay beneath a simple stone, with no religious motif—she had detested all such, denouncing them irritably as superstition—but with a marble flowerpot for decoration. Someone had recently mowed the grass around it, and a handful of lilies, only just beginning to wilt, suggested that the grave had been visited recently.

  Kurt lowered himself to his aching knees, leaning one hand on the headstone. It seemed to him sometimes that the better half of his life lay buried here. After so many years his grief was worn as smooth as a pebble on a rocky lee shore. Without her acerbic humor at his side, he felt like a pallid ghost fluttering through a future he was neither trained nor briefed for. A future which had no need for his kind.

  Until now.

  He paused for long enough to compose himself, then carefully unwrapped the bouquet of red roses he had brought. Fumbling with the flowerpot, he removed the lilies and set them to one side. They lay like the dead, a limp bundle gathered together by a rubber band. He arranged the roses at the foot of the stone, one by one. Then he carefully rolled up the wilted lilies in the sheet of paper he’d carried the roses in. Finally he heaved himself upright and went in search of a trash can.

  The finger-sized aluminum cigar tube he’d found among the lilies felt like a lead brick in his pocket, full of dangerous secrets. Greta would have appreciated the irony. But then, she always had been a truer believer and a more dedicated player of the Great Game than he. She’d urged him to maintain the old disciplines, to keep the members of the spy ring they jointly controlled aware that they served a great purpose and had not been forgotten. To maintain the Wolf Orchestra against a time of need.

  She would have wheezed herself sick with laughter at the sight of him using her grave as a dead letter drop. And he was certain she would have approved of the use to which he was about to put the Orchestra—even though it was purely by accident that they’d finally penetrated a first-rank target organization, a third of a century after the state they had served was absorbed by its enemies.

  His granddaughter Rita was in trouble and he intended to defend her. And when Kurt rose and walked away from his wife’s grave, he bore in his pocket a shield and sword: the last legacy of a nation that no longer existed.

  CAMBRIDGE, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  Kurt’s first port of call after the grave of his wife was a car pound in the suburbs of Cambridge, to see a woman about a car. Buses and subway trains and trams were all surveilled these days, so out of a general state of cussedness he walked nearly four miles through the light autumnal rain to get there. The cigar tube rode in his jacket pocket, unseen but always felt, a focus for heightened awareness and curiosity. It was a familiar irritant of a kind he understood well, and he would resist the temptation to examine its contents until he could guarantee total privacy.

  He was more curious about the woman he was on his way to meet. He was already aware of her as the granddaughter of an old comrade who had died some years ago, one of the tribe of true believers the Orchestra had been tasked with raising on this foreign shore. His adoptive granddaughter held the woman in some esteem, and Rita’s judgment in friendship had never given him cause for concern yet. That Rita was now holding him at arm’s reach was worrying, even in light of the identity of her employers. And that her (he hesitated to make assumptions, but the label appeared to fit) girlfriend was reaching out to him for help on her behalf, using the old contact protocols, was even more worrying: so Kurt answered the call promptly.

  The mission planners of the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung had carefully studied the followers of secret faiths in order to replicate the feat among the offspring of their agents on foreign soil. Marranos in Spain, vodoun in Haiti, thuggee in India: all groups who lived among their enemies while remaining loyal to a forbidden doctrine, passing their faith down the generations in secret. The HVA’s objective had been to raise a crop of East Germans in exile in America, able to pass the most stringent background checks with flying colors while remaining loyal to the cause. The mission had been rendered pointless by the end of the cold war and the absorption of the GDR by West Germany, but the training and the tribal loyalties had lingered. Kurt had taught Franz, and then Rita. His colleague Willy had passed on the hidden knowledge to his granddaughter Angela by way of his son, her father. There were other children and grandchildren. Their parents took care to arrange introductions and many of them became more than friends, marrying within the group: for this was how a persecuted religion persisted in the face of adversity. And so the last true believers of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany practiced their faith behind closed doors, a secret religious cult embedded within the United States of America.

  There was a diner on a street corner in Belmont, sharing the block with a burger joint and a sandwich shop. Kurt arrived around two thirty in the afternoon, during the slack hours between the end of the lunchtime rush and the first trickle of commuters grabbing a bag for the drive or train ride home. He ordered a coffee and a chicken sub, then slid into a booth with a view of the window and pulled out the burner phone he’d bought that morning in a CVS. Making a note of its number, he turned it on, placed a call to a voicemail address, listened briefly, then turned it off again. Content with what he had heard, he slid it back into his pocket and turned his attention to his lunch.

  As he was approaching satiety (half the sub remained uneaten: age was slowly killing his appetite) a young woman with green-streaked blue hair opened the door and glanced around. He waved: she came over. “Are you Kurt?” she demanded.

  He put the sub down and carefully wiped his fingers. “You must be Angela,” he said, standing and offering a hand. She shook, grip firm and emphatic.

  “Angie,” she corrected, defusing it with a smile.

  Kurt couldn’t help noticing there was meat on her bones. Black leather jacket, jeans, chunky emerald sweater and chunky silver jewelry: short hair, squared-off unvarnished fingernails, a half-healed scratch on one knuckle. “Angie, then. You are an electrician, I understand?”

  “Yeah.” She sat down, unslinging a bulging messenger bag. He followed suit. “Rita asked me to get her car out of the pound, and I kind of hoped you might be up to ferry-driving it down to Philly with me tomorrow.”

  “I can do that,” Kurt said. “It’s the Acura, yes? Franz’s old car?”

  “Her dad’s? Yep. I’ve got the paperwork to spring it from the pound where it’s been parked up for six months, but I thought I should get it checked over before we bring it to her, and I need someone to drive in convoy with me in case it breaks down. I’ve got a hitch on the truck but I don’t want to tow it three hundred miles if I can avoid it.”

  “Well”—Kurt gestured at his unfinished meal—“perhaps we can do that after lunch? I have a room in a motel, I’m sure we can park it nearby, and then we can start off early tomorrow.” He paused. “I will need to catch a train back to Boston.”

  “I can give you a ride afterwards,” Angie offered. “My truck’s got an autopilot mode so I can sleep on the return leg. It’ll give us a chance to catch up.”

  She had a smile like an arc-welder. Yes, I think I know what she sees in you, Kurt decided. He was too old and too honest with himself to run after pretty women, but it warmed his heart to see Rita doing well for herself. “I would like that,” he said gravely. “You and Rita met in the Girl Scouts, yes?”

  “Yeah. Long story. Guess I should save it for the drive back, huh?” She gestured at his meal: “I need to get some food. Be right back.”

  Kurt worked on his chicken sub while she ordered, silent
ly contemplating her proposed course of action. Yes, it was plausible from an outsider’s perspective: a solid cover story. Grandfather helps girlfriend drive granddaughter’s car home for her, girlfriend gives Gramps a ride back to his hotel afterward and deadheads home. If anyone asked, of course Angie would want to get to know her partner’s favorite relative. And with gas under a dollar a gallon, it made sense to drive. A security officer paying attention to Rita’s social graph wouldn’t even blink. If Kurt wanted to visit Rita and sniff around her contacts, it was a perfect pretext: your parents asked me to check out your new friend …

  He glanced at Angie as she paid for her food. The wolf cub had grown up into a fine specimen. I wonder how much operational doctrine your parents passed on to you? If she was a full initiate of the Wolf Orchestra, rescuing Rita would be much easier.

  PHILADELPHIA, TIME LINE TWO, AUGUST 2020

  The mission to spring Rita’s wheels from automobile jail went smoothly enough. The guard at the pound was expecting Angie, the storage fees were all billed to Rita’s employers, and the Acura had been stored under a tarp. When Angie checked it over, the tires were low, but the self-inflation system worked, and after running the engine for five minutes they were all showing the correct pressure. “It’s probably going to fail its next emissions test,” Angie said, listening to the engine, “but I know a shop that’ll fix it cheap. Are you up to driving three hundred miles tomorrow, Mr. Douglas?”

  “Of course. I need more rest stops than you youngsters, so you should allow five hours for driving and two more on top, but I can do that.”

  “Great! Well, how about you take her car to your hotel overnight, then phone me when you’re ready to set off tomorrow morning?”

  They parted company outside the pound. Kurt braved the Boston afternoon traffic with quiet stoicism. When he pulled up behind the hotel he was staying in, he rested his head on the steering wheel for a couple of minutes. Then, as calm returned, he climbed wearily out and went to his room.

  Before he showered, Kurt closed the curtains then retrieved the cigar tube from his jacket pocket. Unscrewing it, he looked inside. A tightly-curled sheet of paper met his gaze. It was covered in a grid of hand-written letters, seemingly random. Attached to the bottom with Scotch tape was a neat row of chips: a tiny memory card, and no less than five phone SIMs. Kurt whistled quietly through his teeth, impressed despite himself. The FLASH request he’d sent out, asking the Boston Resident to conduct a roll call, had delivered far more than he’d expected. Neglected sleeper rings tended to decay over the years as agents became ill or infirm, died, or went feral. But of the eight families in this part of the United States, five had answered the call. Most of them were undoubtedly second or third generation descendants: it was possible some of them didn’t even know what the Orchestra was, or the purpose it served. But they’d each sent the number of a burner phone and a code word, and the Resident had set up a SIM for each of them. They’d only answer a call from a phone using the correct SIM, and would only respond to the correct code word, but Kurt now held in his hands the key to a ring of sleeper agents, all unknown to one another and (hopefully) the authorities.

  Deciding what to do with it—or whether to use it at all—would have to wait until he’d spoken to Angie in private.

  Kurt folded the paper and its precious cargo and inserted them in the middle of a paperback he was slowly reading and annotating—Judt on the history of Europe since 1945—then stashed his toothbrush in the cigar tube, placing it in turn in his toilet bag, where it would be just another old man’s foible if anyone searched for it. (Decrypting the message was best left until after his return to Philadelphia, indeed for as long as possible. The last thing he needed to be in possession of at an airport checkpoint was an incriminating plaintext message.) Then, for want of anything better to do with his evening, he ordered in a pizza, watched a comedy movie, then went to bed early.

  The drive down to Angie’s apartment in the suburbs near Philadelphia went smoothly but boringly. Nevertheless, Kurt was light-headed and slightly shaky by the time he pulled into the lot and parked up beside Angie’s crimson pickup. He was old and no longer accustomed to driving such distances in a day, and although Rita’s Acura had once been comfortable it was now entering its twilight years, with well-pummeled seats, poor shock absorbers, and a collection of arthritic squeaks and rattles to rival his own. Angie materialized from the apartment doorway as he eased himself out of the driver’s seat. She looked concerned. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be once I stretch these bones.” Kurt waved her away tiredly. “And then I must sit down for a few minutes.”

  “We should go get some dinner. Then I can run you back up to Boston?”

  Six hundred and fifty miles in a day. Kurt gritted his teeth: Don’t say you didn’t know what you were doing. “Dinner would be good,” he admitted. “Then we can talk.”

  “I checked my truck when I stopped for gas. Didn’t find any new trackers.”

  “They don’t need trackers to follow you unless you go off-grid. The truck itself reports—”

  “I know. But mine only tells them what I want it to: I was looking for new passengers.”

  Kurt sighed. “You won’t find them. They are subtle. The hands-free kit and in-cab entertainment system, they are all rooted these days. I could show you pictures from the old days, what passed for bugs in the GDR—they’re on the web—it is to weep! I knew technical guys, nerds you would call them, who must be rolling in their graves, green with envy for the shinies of the NSA. But all this is nonsense. We should check Rita’s car before we go—that is where you will find the extra bugs. There is a reason I had my son give her an old sedan, its systems lack the native intelligence to make a good informer.”

  Angie frowned. “You really think they’ll be monitoring me proactively?”

  “Yes, because you’re a known associate of one of their agents, and servers that can process speech to text are cheap. But you are probably safe, unless they know of the Orchestra, in which case we are both in hot water already.” He laid a finger on the truck’s passenger door handle. “Shall we eat?”

  NEW LONDON, TIME LINE THREE, AUGUST 2020

  The Party headquarters within the walled royal capital of New London occupied the former Crown Prince’s palace on Central Avenue, which bisected the lower quarter of Manhattan Island. The chaotic maze of offices and departments (many of them organized after the new open plan mode, with fabric-covered partitions dividing up the floors of former ballrooms and state receiving suites like cells in a very busy beehive) provided accommodation to the heads of the apparatus of the Deep State. These were the bureaucratic structures created by the Radical Party during the revolution, to provide a supportive framework within which democracy was to take root and thrive. Naturally there were times when it seemed anything but democratic. And that afternoon, Erasmus Burgeson, the Minister of Propaganda and Communications, was running up against it in the person of some of his more obstructive colleagues.

  “We have to face facts,” Commissioner Jarvis said mildly as he polished his spectacles on one end of his neck-cloth. “Adam is terminally ill, and when he dies the enemy—both without and within—will push as hard as they can to overturn the Party.” He referred to Adam Burroughs, the First Man and leader of the revolution seventeen years before that had toppled the monarchy and installed this time line’s first democracy, in the former New British Empire.

  “Of course the reactionaries will come out of the woodwork!” Erasmus agreed vehemently. “Which is why, from a propaganda viewpoint, the course of action you’re proposing is a bad idea: it will play right into their hands. Everyone will expect a, a ham-fisted crackdown on dissent. It won’t win friends. In fact, purges are often interpreted as a sign of weakness. Consider the outcome of John Frederick’s disastrous crackdown in ’86 after his father’s assassination … All the polling my research department has done points to the inexorable conclusion that one conveys the appearance of
strength best by acting as if one is already secure, rather than by issuing threats that invite defiance. The First Citizen secured the revolution when he allowed the Emperor to leave peacefully. Doing so was an assertion of power, not an admission of weakness. Similarly, so was his delegation of most of the powers formerly wielded by the Crown to the apparatus of the Party. If we clamp down in the wake of his death, we run the risk of making the Party look as if it has something to fear once the First Man is gone—”

  “You are talking about appearances.” Commissioner Buccleugh’s diction was as sharp as ever, even though Erasmus harbored doubts about his mind—now more than ever, for the man was in his dotage. “But as Albert says we must face facts. Have you seen the foreign intelligence briefings? The Young Pretender is clearly cozying up to the Dauphin, and there has been an upswing in activity at home by the Patriot Societies, the so-called Royalist Party loons who would welcome the return of the jackboot and fetters in an instant—”

  An extremely modern woman, one of the new generation of Party bureaucrats, approached their little circle of armchairs. They were off to one side of the cold fireplace in the Commissioners’ Dining Room, and so Erasmus was the first to see her approach. “Gentlemen, please?”

  “Ah, a message for Commissioner Burgeson?” The staffer extended one gloved hand, bearing a sealed envelope. “Sir, if you need to reply—”

  “A moment.” Erasmus slit the envelope open with the edge of one fingernail. He scanned quickly, then folded the letter away. “Gentlemen, I’m being called away. Fascinating as this discussion has been, I think we are going to have to agree to disagree—at least until we can put our heads together again for long enough to reach a consensus.” He eased himself out of the chair with a moue of pain. “After you, my dear,” he told the staffer.