The Merchants’ War tmp-4

by Charles Stross

  Neuhalle nudged his horse forward, around the burning country house. He had a list of a dozen to visit, strung out through the countryside in a broad loop around Niejwein. The four companies under his command were operating semi-independently, his two captains each tackling different targets: it would probably take another week to complete the scourging of the near countryside, even though at the outset his majesty had barely three battalions ready for service. It won’t be a long war, he hoped. It mustn’t be. Just a series of terror raids on the Clan’s properties, to force them to focus on the royal army—and then what? Whatever Egon is planning, Neuhalle supposed. Nobody could accuse the young monarch of being indecisive—he was as sharp as his father, untempered by self-doubt, and deeply committed to this purge. Neuhalle’s hand-men rode past him, guns at the ready: It had better work, he hoped. If Egon loses, Niejwein will belong to the witches forever.

  The courtyard at the back of the house stank of manure and blood, and burning timber. A carriage leaned drunkenly outside the empty stable doors, one wheel shattered.

  “Sir, if it please you, we should—” The hand-man gestured.

  “Go ahead.” Neuhalle smiled faintly, and unholstered the oddly small black pistol he carried on his belt: a present from one of the witch lords, in better times. He racked the slide, chambering a cartridge. “I don’t think they’ll be interested in fighting. Promise them quarter, then hang them as usual once you’ve disarmed them.” Just as his majesty desires. His eyes turned towards the wreckage. “Let’s look this over.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  They’d cut the horses free and abandoned the carriage, but there was still a strong-box lashed to the roof, and an open door gaping wide. Otto dismounted carefully, keeping his horse between himself and the upper floor windows dribbling smoke—no point not being careful—and walked over to the vehicle. There was nobody inside, of course. Then the roof. The box wasn’t large, but it looked heavy. Neuhalle’s grin widened. “You, fetch four troopers and have them take this down. Place a guard on it.”

  “Aye sir!” His hand-man nodded enthusiastically: Neuhalle had promised his retainers a tithe of his spoils.

  “There’ll be more just like it tomorrow.” There was a loud crack, and Neuhalle looked round just in time to see the roof line of the west wing collapse with a shower of sparks and a gout of flames. “And tomorrow…”

  Oil Talk

  Just as the guard handed Eric back his mobile phone, it rang.

  “Hey, good timing!” The cop chuckled.

  Eric flipped it open, ignoring the man. It had already been a long day: back home it was about six in the evening, and he still had to fly back. “Smith here.”

  “Boss?” It was Deirdre, his secretary: “I’m aware this is an insecure line, but I thought you might want to know that Mike is back from his sales trip, and he says he’s got a buyer.”

  “Jesus!” Eric stood bolt-upright. “Are you sure? That’s amazing!” The sense of gloom that had been hanging over him for days lifted. He checked his watch: “Listen, I’ll be back in town late tonight—can you get him into the office for an early morning debrief? Around six hundred hours?” I’ll have to tell Gillian something, he realized. Not just an apology. Take her somewhere nice?

  “I, I don’t think that will be possible,” Deirdre said, sounding distracted.

  “Why not?” It came out too sharply: “Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. What’s the problem?”

  “He’s, um, he had a traffic accident. He’s taken a beating, but he’ll be all right once he’s out of hospital. Judith Herz is with him.”

  “Whoa!” Eric blinked furiously. He glanced round the guardroom, noticing the cop sitting patiently behind the counter, the polite SS agent with the car keys. “—Listen, I’ll call you back from a secure terminal once I’m under way. Should be about an hour. I’ll be expecting the best report you can pull together. If possible get Judith on the line for me, if she’s spoken to him in person.”

  He could just about see Deirdre’s eye-rolling nod: “That’s about what I expected, boss. I’ll be ready for you.”

  “Okay, bye.”

  He closed the phone with a snap and turned to Agent Simms: “Come on, we’ve got a plane to catch!”

  There was a secure terminal aboard the Gulfstream, and Eric wasted no time in getting to it as soon as they were airborne. But what Judith Herz had for him wasn’t encouraging.

  “He got chewed up—one leg is badly broken with surface lacerations, he’s got bruising and soft tissue injuries consistent with being in a fight, and he’s got a nasty infected wound. I got him checked in to the nearest trauma unit and it looks like he’ll pull through and keep the leg, but he’s not going to be up and about any time soon. Someone stuck a syringe full of morphine in him and dumped him at a roadside in upstate New York. They called an ambulance using a stolen mobile phone, and no, we didn’t get a trace on it—they turned it on just before they called and switched off immediately after. He was still wearing his cover gear, but they’d disarmed him.”

  “Shit. Excuse me.” Eric took a few moments to gather his scattered thoughts. Too many things were going on at once. His head was still spinning from the stuff in the buried laboratory under Building Forty-seven. He’d just about gotten used to the idea that Mike had made it home alive—and that was really good news—but this latest tidbit was a little hard to take. “Okay. So someone sent him back to us? Any sign of Sergeant Hastert and his team?”

  “Mike was awake when I saw him, sir.” He stiffened at her tone of voice, anticipating the bad news to come: “He wasn’t very lucid, but he said Hastert and O’Neil were killed. They walked in on some kind of war and they got caught in the crossfire. I’m sorry, sir: he wasn’t very clear, but he wanted you to know they died trying to get him out.”

  “Shit.” Eric rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Any good news? Or was that the good news?”

  “He says he made contact with the target briefly, but there were problems. And something about her mother.”

  “What’s her mother got to do with things?”

  “We didn’t get that far, sir. Like I said, he’s been chewed up badly. I mean, it looks like someone took a whack at his left leg with a chain saw then left it to fester for a couple of days. That’s on top of the bruising and a cracked rib. The medics shoved me out of the room just as he was getting to the good stuff—he’s out of the operating theater now but he won’t be talking for a while. But I’m pretty sure he was trying to say something about the target’s mother saving him. I don’t know what he meant by that, he was medicated and being prepped for surgery at the time, but I figure you’ll want to follow it up.”

  “Dead right I will.” Eric took a deep breath. “Alright. So he’s out of the operating theater now. As soon as he’s safe to move, I want him in a military hospital with an armed guard in the room with him at all times—for his own protection. If they can find an underground room to put him in, so much the better. If possible, move him tonight—I want him safe, right now his brains are our crown jewels. Tell Deirdre to get John from OPFAC Four to coordinate with Milton and Sarah on setting it up. Page them if they’ve gone home, this is important. Got that?”

  “I’m on it. Anything else? Will you be coming in tonight?”

  Eric shook his head tiredly. “I’m touching down around half past midnight. If you get any pushback between now and then, call me and I’ll come in. If it goes smoothly, I might as well get some sleep before I debrief him.” A thought struck him. “Another thing. I want a guard with him at all times, with a voice recorder in case he says anything. And I don’t want random doctors or nurses eavesdropping.”

  “Already taken care of.” Herz’s laconic response made him want to kick himself. Of course it was taken care of: Herz was terrifyingly efficient when it came to police work like handling witnesses.

  “Good. Good work, I mean, really good.” I’m babbling. Stop it. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer. If you need
backup, call me. Bye.”

  The seatbelt light was off, the plane boring a hole in the sky towards the darkening eastern horizon. Eric unfastened his belt and stood up, then went forward to the desk where Dr. James was poring over a pile of printouts.

  “What is it?” No polite small-talk from James: he was almost robotic in his focus.

  “It’s CLEANSWEEP. I just got confirmation that we’ve had a positive outcome.”

  It was Dr. James’s turn to do a double take—or punch the air, if so inclined—and Eric was curious to see how he’d jump. Dr. James was not, it seemed, one for demonstrative gestures: he simply put his papers down, removed his spectacles, and said, mildly, “Explain.”

  “Agent Fleming is back. He’s alive, but has injuries. His condition is stable and I’ve ordered him transferred to a secure facility pending debriefing. The preliminary report is that the specops team walked into a red-on-red crossfire of some sort, but Fleming was returned to us by someone who presumably wants to talk. There appears to be a factional split in fairyland. I’ll know more tomorrow, when I’ve begun his debriefing: for now, I gather his injuries required operating theater time so we won’t get much more out of him just yet.”

  James began to polish his bifocals with a scrap of tissue. “Good.” His fingertips moved in tiny circles, pinching the lens like a crab worrying at a fragment of decaying flesh. “You’ll debrief him without witnesses. Record onto a sealed medium and type up the report yourself. Use a typewriter, not a word processor.” He looked up at Eric with dead-fish eyes: “the fewer witnesses the better.”

  Eric cleared his throat. “You know that’s in direct contravention of our operational doctrine?”

  James nodded. “Sit down.” Eric sat opposite him. James glanced round, to make sure there were no open ears nearby, then carefully balanced the bifocals on the bridge of his nose. “Off the record.”

  “Yes?” Eric did his best to conceal the sinking feeling those words gave him.

  “You’re a professional, and you’re used to playing by the rules. That’s all very well. The reason that rule book exists is to prevent loose cannons from rolling around the deck, knocking things over and making a mess. We designed the policy on debriefing to ensure that no asshole can piss in the coffeepot and embarrass the owners. However, right now, you’re working directly for the owners. Standard policy wasn’t designed for this type of war and therefore we have to make a new rule book up as we go along—where it’s necessary. Your job is to build up a HUMINT resource, taking us back into a kind of operational model we haven’t ever been really good at, and last tried in the sixties and seventies. But the flip side of HUMINT is COINTEL, and if we can spy on them, they can spy on us. So the zeroth rule of this operation is, minimize the eyeballs—minimize the risk of leaks. Clear?”

  Eric nodded, involuntarily. Then a late-acting bureaucratic reflex prompted him to protest: “That’s all very well, and I agree with your reasoning, but it doesn’t help me out if they come after me with an audit.”

  James stared at him coldly. “Where’s your loyalty, boy?”

  “You’re asking me to commit a federal felony, on your word. If you want to run HUMINT assets on the ground, their rule number one is that they’ve got to be able to trust their controllers. You’re my controller.” He crossed his arms, hoping his anger wasn’t immediately obvious to the other man.

  James stared at him a moment longer, then nodded minutely. “So that’s the way it is.”

  “It’s the way it’s got to be,” Eric shot back. “It’s not just me who’s got to trust you, it’s the whole goddamn chain of command, all the way down.” Which right now consists of one guy in a hospital bed, but let’s not remind him of that. “—History says that the smart money is on this coming out, if not now, then in twenty years’ time. This administration will be fodder for the history books by then—hell, with his heart condition, Daddy Warbucks will probably be sleeping with the fishes—but I’m a career officer, and so are the folks in my outfit. If you don’t give us a fig leaf, you’re asking us to suck up time in Leavenworth. And we don’t get to go on to a juicy research contract with the Heritage Institute, or a part-time boardroom post with some defense contractor when this is over.”

  “What do you want?” James’s intonation was precise and his voice even, but Eric didn’t let it fool him.

  “Something vague, but in writing. The vaguer the better. Something like, ‘In the interests of operational security and in view of the threat of enemy intelligence-gathering attempts aimed at compromising our integrity, all investigations are to be restricted to those with a need to know, and normal committee oversight will be suspended until such time as the immediate threat recedes.’ Just keep it vague. Then if I have to take the stand, I’ve simply misunderstood your intent. I’m obeying an order by a superior, you didn’t intend your orders to breach the law. Nobody needs to get burned.”

  James snorted abruptly, startling Eric. “Is that all?”

  Eric shrugged. “That’s how it’s done. That’s what kept the shit in check during Iran-Contra. Or did you expect me to fall on my sword when all I need is a note signed by teacher to say I’m an overachiever?”

  “Bah.” James glanced away, but not before Eric noticed a twinkle of crocodilian amusement in his eye. “I thought you were an Air Force officer, not a politician.”

  “You don’t get above captain if you’re politically challenged, sir. With all due respect, it makes life easier for me if I can advise you—where appropriate—of steps I can take to do my job better. That’s one of them. Off the record, of course.”

  “I’ll get you your fig leaf, then. Signed on the Oval Office blotter, if that makes you feel better. Now, talk to me.” James leaned back, making a steeple of his fingertips.

  Eric relaxed infinitesimally. “Someone sent Mike back to us. He didn’t come by himself; his leg’s busted up. That tells us something about what sort of operation we’re fighting.”

  “Go on…”

  “I haven’t debriefed him yet. But at a guess, what we’ve already done has hurt their operations on the east coast, and sending agents through after them is going to scare the shit out of them. They’re going to have to negotiate or escalate. Leaving aside the business with GREENSLEEVES and the nuke, we’re going to have to negotiate or escalate, too. Now, it’s not for me to advise on policy, but I suspect we’re going to find that Mike was sent back by someone who stands to gain from negotiating with us. Call them faction ‘A’. The red-on-red action suggests there’s a rival faction, call them ‘B’. So we really need to keep a lid on this, because if the ‘B’ faction figures that the ‘A’ faction want to negotiate, they may try to torpedo things by escalating. And if GREENSLEEVES wasn’t bluffing about the nuke, we could be in a world of hurt.”

  Dr. James nodded minutely. “Your advice?”

  “We have to find that nuke, or rule it out. And we have to keep them talking while JAUNT BLUE get their shit together. Right now, we’re fumbling around in the dark—but so are they. All they know is, we’ve whacked a bunch of their operations and figured out how to get an agent across. And if they’re in trouble internally, presumably they’d love to get us off their backs while they clean up their own mess. They probably think we don’t know about the nukes, and we can be pretty sure that they don’t know about JAUNT BLUE. Everything we know about them suggests they just don’t think in those terms, otherwise they’d be crawling all over us.”

  “So. You propose that we debrief Agent Fleming, then use him to establish a back channel to the leadership of Group ‘A,’ with the goal of stalling them with the promise of negotiations while we clean up the missing nuke and get some results from JAUNT BLUE. Is that a fair summary?”

  Eric blinked, then rubbed his forehead. “You put it better than I did,” he said ruefully. “Long day.”

  “Going to be longer,” James said laconically. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling air vents for a while, until Eric began to t
hink he was planning on taking a nap: but just as he was about to stand up and leave, James sat up abruptly and looked at him. “Your analysis is valid, but incomplete because there are some facts you are unaware of.”

  Uh? “Obviously,” Eric said cautiously. “Should I be?”

  “I think so.” James stared at him, his expression deceptively mild. “Same rules as the Fleming debriefing. This goes nowhere near a computer or a telephone. You follow?”

  Eric nodded.

  “Number one. Obviously, I do not want—nobody wants—to see a terrorist nuke detonated in an American city. Even if it’s in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, that would be very bad. But you need to understand this: if the worst happens, if that bomb goes off, a use will be found for it. The bloody shirt will be waved. Do you understand?”

  Eric licked his suddenly dry lips. “Who’s the fall guy?”

  “The Boy Wonder’s got a hard-on for Mr. Hussein, and PNAC will fall in line, but—” Dr. James shook his head. “I’m not sure who, Colonel. All I can tell you is, it will be someone who we can hammer for it. The hammer is ready, and if the United States doesn’t wield it from time to time the other players may begin to wonder if we’re still willing. So if JAUNT BLUE is ready, the target might be the Clan. And if JAUNT BLUE isn’t ready, we’ll hit someone else, someone we can reach and need to nail flat. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, whoever. But. Whatever else happens, if there’s a hard outcome, it will be used to strengthen our hand. We’ll have carte blanche.” He stared at Eric. “The code name for this plan—and I stress, it’s a contingency plan, a political spin to put on a disaster—is MARINUS BERLIN.”

  “Jesus.” Eric looked away. “That’s disgusting.”

  “Yes. I know. But what else can we do?”

  “Find the bomb.”

  “Yes!” James’s frustration boiled over in Eric’s: “If you’ve got some kind of magic superpowers that let you stare through concrete walls and pinpoint missing nukes, then I’d like to hear about them, Colonel. Failing that, if you have any better ideas, I’m sure Daddy Warbucks would like to know what else to fricking do if terrorists nuke one of our cities?”