Black Chamber

by S. M. Stirling

  Luz sighed. She missed him and Aunt Edith and Ted and Ethel and the rest, but she hadn’t been to the White House or Sagamore Hill lately. Partly because it wasn’t easy to do that without being photographed these days, which wouldn’t be professional in her line of work, and partly because he was letting his eugenics bee buzz out of his bonnet lately and kept having Aunt Edith introduce Luz to stalwart young officers he thought would be good breeding stock while dropping hints about the joys of enormous litters. And because Uncle Teddy had been born before the Civil War and was—by her standards—a bit of a prude. She wouldn’t lie to someone who’d done so much for her, but she preferred not to hurt him with irrelevant details about her private life.

  The official motto of the officially nonexistent Black Chamber was Ex umbris, acies. Which meant From the shadows, steel.

  The unofficial motto, coined in 1913 by a Harvard wit among the original recruits and used much more frequently, was: Non Theodorum parvis concitares ne perturbatus sit, often shortened to NTPC. Which translated freely as: Don’t bother Teddy with the details, it’ll just upset him. That was a good rule all ’round.

  The Times’ other main stories were Japan biting off chunks of China for what it swore was China’s own good (with Uncle Teddy giving them a warning glare they would be well-advised to heed) and whether the Philippines and Puerto Rico should be put on the road to statehood. Which was starting to look somewhat possible—someday, maybe—for Puerto Rico at least, given the way Hawaii had added a forty-ninth star just this year. You could be absolutely sure neither was going to vote for the Bourbon Democrats, which was a powerful antidote to whatever qualms the Party’s membership had about letting so many suspiciously swarthy people into their tent.

  Speaking of voting . . .

  There wasn’t much comment on November’s elections, since everyone knew that the Democrats weren’t going to carry any state that hadn’t been part of the Confederacy, and might well lose Texas too. Luz couldn’t even remember offhand who the Democrats had nominated, except that it was some judge from Connecticut. Teddy had been president for twelve of this century’s sixteen years, and he’d go right on being president as long as he wanted, or more likely until he died in office. Since he was still in his fifties, robustly healthy, and showed no loss of interest in the game, that might not be for decades; she’d heard him say the worst mistake he’d ever made was promising not to run for a third consecutive term back in 1904.

  She glanced over the top of the paper occasionally while she sipped her soda water, apparently with casual boredom. Some curiosity was natural for a traveler, and the faces were more interesting than the news anyway.

  Let’s do some analysis.

  The passengers included quite a few assorted industrialists and bankers and their emissaries, as you’d expect when each ticket cost twice what a coal miner made in a year even in these times of rising prices and wages. They were from both sides of the Atlantic—she thought two were Japanese, come to that—and a dozen countries but might have come off Ford’s new assembly lines at Highland Park otherwise, plump men with cold cash-register eyes or thin wolfish ones with a hungry gaze, in neutral suits with the occasional pinkie ring for the more raffish. The neutrals . . . other neutrals, for now . . . and the Entente powers were both buying everything America could mine, pump out of the ground, grow, or make. And doing it with money borrowed right here in New York; the City of London’s position was never going to be the same again.

  There were a few Americans who she thought from their expressions of painful middle-class earnestness and dowdy clothes were members of Hoover’s Belgian Relief Commission, which was currently feeding millions in occupied Belgium and France and could afford the passage. Several of them were women who looked to be the type she’d seen so often at Bryn Mawr: ones who weren’t content unless they were doing someone good whether the someone liked it or not, at loose ends since the suffrage struggle ended with the bang of the Sixteenth Amendment and fanning out to find other causes. Now that Mexico was more or less safe for American civilians away from the real backcountry, you met a fair number down in the Protectorate running schools or sanitary childbirth classes or in doomed attempts to convince the locals that bland crème of celery soup was better for you than tripe menudo with red chilies.

  The Chamber had also found the commission useful as a cover for getting agents into Europe, but if any of these were, she didn’t even try to pick them out because she didn’t need to know.

  There was a clutch of so-called gentlemen of the press, most of whom had perked up at the sight of her as they would have for any pretty unaccompanied young woman. She knew that seedy breed, and would probably have to administer a few crushing setdowns to those who thought it was flattering to be treated like a piece of steak dangled over a kennel. Journalism was also a useful cover, but thankfully not one she’d ever had to use.

  It would be like impersonating a leper.

  Then there was an obvious Englishman who was also obviously a soldier despite his slightly threadbare Savile Row suit, a rangy auburn-haired man with a military mustache and face burned brick-red by years of tropical suns and expressionless blue eyes.

  Marksman’s eyes, she thought; the name on the passenger list was Arbuthnot.

  His companion might have been a twin brother except for his coloring, turban, and beard; undoubtedly Indian and probably a princeling of some sort, named Singh on the manifest, which was the Indian equivalent of Smith. You saw more turbans these days where the British were involved, since Indian troops were all that had kept the Channel ports from falling after the Germans broke the front at Ypres wide open with their massive surprise gas attack early last year.

  Here to talk with the War Department in Washington, she thought. And going home with encouraging news.

  There had already been clashes between U.S. Navy airship and destroyer squadrons escorting American merchantmen and the U-boats of the Kaiserliche Marine all over the western Atlantic. At a second guess they were probably also both attached to the British secret service, either from London or more likely the Raj’s older and rather more professional version operating out of Delhi and Simla. Luz had admired the neat way they’d scooped up the German-backed Ghadar Conspiracy in ’14, having infiltrated it to a fare-thee-well, and she had been involved in helping collar the California branch of that movement for what the Federal Bureau of Security called reform through corrective labor. Something that did indeed involve a lot of labor, bad food, barbed wire, and profoundly unsympathetic guards.

  And as for the players from the Central Powers . . . the Chamber had known there would be at least one agent on the airship, but it was standard practice to have one operative buy the ticket and another show up with it at the last minute just as she’d done, so she was going in blind on his appearance. She’d have to spot him on her own, and so . . .

  Surely it can’t be that easy?

  All she knew definitely was the code name the real Elisa Carmody had been given: Reichsschwert, Imperial Sword. There were a dozen Germans among the passengers, most trying to get home before the eventual declaration of war trapped them behind the wire of an enemy-alien camp. Only three couldn’t be positively judged harmless from regular background checks. An obvious white-haired Herr Doktor Professor type with a goatee and pince-nez, deep in a book, Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift, and probably misunderstanding it.

  In her experience Germans usually did misunderstand Nietzsche, often willfully, starting with his sister-editor’s grotesque redactions.

  The next was an obvious businessman, a squat bulging mound of bad manners in an expensively ill-fitting suit, sweating and shoveling vol-au-vents from the canapés trolley into his mouth and washing them down by guzzling beer like the Westphalian hog whose cured ham his flushed red face resembled.

  According to reports the British blockade has Germany eating turnips by now, she thought. N
ot this German, though, ¡por Dios! Not when he’s back in Essen or Dusseldorf, either.

  Her guess was that his background looked suspicious because he was doing something deeply shady, but commercially shady.

  The third was the one she instantly suspected; for starters, you could imagine him answering to “Imperial Sword” without your brain undergoing spontaneous combustion and then exploding. He was about six feet tall, hard and fit, and sitting with a leopard’s long-limbed ease that held a military erectness as well. Bristle-cropped ash-blond hair, broad shoulders, narrow waist, shapely but large hands, and a square sculpted cleft-chin face that looked very like Manfred von Richthofen’s, or possibly the daring Red Baron’s slightly older brother. He didn’t have a monocle and wasn’t brandishing a riding crop, but . . .

  ¡Qué delicioso! That’s a dueling scar on his left cheekbone, a sip from the soup plate of honor! Yes, Colonel Nicolai, you have sent us a pantomime Prussian Junker as a spy!

  The man’s name on the passenger manifest was Herr Hans Krämer, commercial agent, which was not only false but transparently so. Krämer literally meant “shopkeeper,” and apart from the fact that a fit young German would be in field gray now rather than peddling samples, a thousand clues of posture and expression shouted nobleman and soldier. If this man didn’t have a von tucked away somewhere, and probably a Freiherr or better, she’d give up chocolate and all carnal pleasures and become a Carmelite nun.

  Why not a spiked helmet? Or one of those new coal-scuttle steel ones? Unless he’s supposed to distract me from someone else? But no. Germans like to think of themselves as cold and rational, but that’s only true when they’re designing engines. In human matters they’re often childlike and romantic . . . childlike and romantic and brutal, but even so.

  Click-click the camera went as she rearranged the handbag and raised the glass of soda water to bring a steward with a refill. The Junker’s eyes met hers for a moment, pale as Baltic ice, and he surprised her a little by smiling and suddenly looking like someone with a sense of humor.

  Well, he is a man as well as a spy.

  Men smiled at her quite often, which could be amusing or annoying depending on the circumstances, and they didn’t need ulterior motives to do so. Beyond the obvious one.

  Quite a handsome man too, if you like the blond beast look, which is very nice now and then. Now, what sort of approach from a beautiful lady spy would appeal to a childlike sense of romanticism and convince him she’s the friendly anti-American Mexican revolutionary spy he was warned to expect and not a wicked ringer slipped in by the sinister cunning of diabolical Black Chamber masterminds?

  She let her features soften just a bit, not quite a smile of her own, then ostentatiously looked away, as if interested only in what was going on outside. Luz was perfectly willing to use seduction as a professional technique, provided it was someone she’d at least have considered seducing on her own time.

  Even as a spy, one must have some standards.

  The light through the windows brightened as the huge clamshell doors of the hangar finished opening, revealing the blue sky and drifting white clouds of a summer’s afternoon. The great floating building had already been turned so that the blunt bow of the San Juan Hill pointed into the wind. The engines—ten big Curtis-Martin radials, mounted five to a side in a row of pods along hull corridors well above the passenger section—were already turning over. Now they growled louder and a slight subliminal vibration went through the airship’s fabric. There was a bobbing jolt as the tugboats gently took up the slack and pulled it free of the building, and then a rumble as water ballast poured from the keel tanks, and a double chunk as the towing cables released.

  She closed her eyes for a moment to pay closest attention to her own sensations. And then . . .

  “¡Que maravilloso!” she murmured to herself with delight, in the language of her mother, the tongue of strong feeling and unguarded truth. “We’re floating!”

  Floating upward, so gently that she could barely detect the elevator motion. The engines were there, but no louder than a motorcar, perhaps even a little less. Behind their throbbing was a profound stillness, like a slow-moving breeze on a spring day. And a creaking and flexing sound, like but utterly unlike that of a wooden ship under sail.

  She opened her eyes, looking out eagerly. The airship was rising in a smooth clockwise circle miles in circumference, the chair beneath her feeling as solid as if it had been her study at university. That path was ANA policy, to give their new craft the maximum possible exposure to the public. It also put the tip of Manhattan below as they swept by at sixty-five miles an hour and rose to their cruising altitude of twelve hundred feet.

  The great city spread out below her, with the green rectangle of Central Park surrounded by towering apartment blocks, and people and automobiles and carriages doll-tiny on the streets below. New Yorkers were jaded enough, or prickly enough about their reputation for being elaborately unimpressed, that few could be seen to stop and look at the seventy-first flight. The skyscrapers slid by; the Woolworth Building looked like a model in colored terra-cotta, despite being nearly eight hundred feet high and the tallest solid structure in the world.

  Luz felt herself laugh in sheer pleasure. It was a marvelous age to be alive, and young, and a woman, and an American.

  They turned northeast, and the city fell behind them with startling speed, and the land turned to a distant line of blue. The waters below were thick with shipping. That ranged from fishing smacks to windjammers with sails like poems written in geometry to the usual dingy smoke-belching tramp steamers, the elegant greyhound shapes of liners, and the hulking-sleek menace of a squadron of New Mexico–class battleships bristling with fourteen-inch guns and anti-air batteries. A murmur and pointing brought her eyes around; a wing of aeroplanes was passing the San Juan Hill in two loose gaggles of four.

  They started as dots and then flashed by the airship with a combined speed well over a hundred miles an hour, banking into a curve; twin-engine biplane Curtiss Falcons with their sharkish look brought out by the fanged mouth painted below the sharp noses. Two Browning machine guns pointed forward before the pilot, and there was another on a ring mount for the observer in his rear-facing seat. A pilot waved, close enough for his teeth to show in a smile beneath the goggles and leather helmet, trailed by a fluttering red scarf.

  She glanced aside. The Westphalian Hog was among the passengers who studiously avoided looking out the windows; in fact, he’d turned his broad back on them and was clutching the table, looking as if he regretted the vol-au-vents. The Herr Doktor glanced up from his book and returned to wrestling with the conflict between master and slave morality, writing in a notebook now and then. Handsome Not-Really-Hans, on the other hand, was leaning over and following the fighting scouts with keenly intent eyes.

  And knowledgeable ones, por Dios. So, he’s one of Colonel Nicolai’s boys; but is he the one expecting to make contact with Elisa Carmody de Soto-Dominguez, that belle of the Irish Republican Brotherhood-Partido Nacional Revolucionario alliance, now looking for the Kaiser’s help to resuscitate their respective lost causes?

  Elisa had talked; everyone did, in the end. But the eternal question with what Room 101—named after a chamber in Lecumberri—pulled out of resisting subjects was how reliable the information was, and how complete and whether it was out of date. Parts had been corroborated from other sources; parts had not; some had contradicted other things they thought they knew and put those in doubt.

  About par for the course, Luz thought.

  A really hostile subject wasn’t going to tell you anything at all without severe pressure, and they’d lie truth out of creation as long as they could, whatever you did. Anyone still active underground in the Protectorate was probably very tough and determined. On yet another hand . . .

  Room 101 works. But you can never be sure how well it works.

  Some
of what they’d gotten had enabled them to roll up most of what remained of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario in central Mexico in a flurry of surprise shoot-outs, midnight arrests, and interrogations, which led to more arrests and so on, but you never got absolutely everyone. They had no idea if the remnants of those rolled-up networks had managed to pass on the information that Elisa and her luggage had simply disappeared from her rooming house one dark night, with the rent money slipped under the landlady’s door. Or if they’d linked her disappearance to the bad things that started a few days later; enough bad things were happening to them anyway that they might not have, and simply thought she’d gotten tired of it all and done a bunk for parts unknown.

  She and Luz looked alike in a general sort of way, enough to fool anyone who didn’t actually know the revolutionary and was expecting to see her, and Luz knew everything the Chamber had managed to find out about her, which was a fair bit. But if any of a dozen things had slipped up, Luz would be walking into a trap the minute she tried to convince someone on the other side that she was Elisa. That made memories of strolling down Anacapa Street to the ocean and sitting and watching the sunset over the Pacific rather more alluring. Of course, after a while doing that she was terminally bored . . .

  Not-Really-Hans walked casually nearer and leaned on the railing, looking after the aeroplanes.

  “Formidable machines,” he said in good but accented English, not exactly presuming to talk to her without an introduction. “They are as formidable as anything on the Western Front are.”

  “President Roosevelt is determined that his Air Corps should be second to none, regardless of expense,” Luz said.

  She was also not quite talking to him; etiquette could be awkward in an age of transition. And she used her perfect German. Elisa had spoken the language too; ironically that was because she’d attended the same finishing school near München that Luz had, though their time there hadn’t overlapped.