The Merchants' War: Book Four of the Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “Miriam.” He waited almost a minute before continuing, his voice gentle. “Your relatives know where you’d go. They might have established a trap there. Can you think of another way to get what you need?”

  “Huh?” She took a deep breath. “Yes. Roger!”

  “Roger?”

  She leaned across the table and took Burgeson’s hand: “I need to write him a letter. If the business is still running, he’ll be working there. He’s reliable—he’s the one I used to send you messages—I can ask him to take the items whenever it’s safe for him, and have a cousin deliver them to your shop when we get back.” Erasmus pulled back slightly: she realized she was gripping his hand too hard. “Can I do that?”

  He smiled ruefully as he shook some life back into his fingers. “Are they small and concealable?”

  “About so big—” she indicated “—and about ten pounds in weight. They’re delicate instruments, they need to be kept dry and handled carefully.”

  “Then we’ll get you some writing paper and a pen before we board the train.” He nodded thoughtfully. “And you’ll tell him not to take the items for at least a week, and to have his cousin deliver them to somewhere else, a different address I can give you. A sympathizer. In the very worst possible circumstances they will know that you’ve visited Boston, my Boston, in the past week.”

  “Thank you.” The knot of anxiety in her chest relaxed.

  He stood up, pushing his chair back. “It’s getting on. Would you care to accompany me to dinner? No need to change—the carvery downstairs has no code.”

  “Food would be good, once I get my shoes back on,” she said ruefully. “If we’ve got that much travel ahead of us I’m going to have to break them in—what are you going to Fort Petrograd for?”

  “I have to see a man about a rare book,” he said flippantly, offering Miriam her jacket. “And then I think I should like to take a stroll along a beach and dip my toes in the Pacific Ocean…”

  More wrecked buildings, another foggy morning.

  Otto, Baron Neuhalle, had seen these sights twice already in the past week. His majesty had been most explicit: “We desire you to employ no more than a single battalion in any location. The witches have uncanny means of communication, as well as better guns than anything our artificers can make, and if the entire army is concentrated to take a single keep, it will be ambushed. To defeat this pestilence, it will first be necessary to force them to defend their lands. So you will avoid the castles and strong places, and instead fall upon their weaker houses and holdings. You will grant no quarter and take no prisoners of the witches, save that you put out their eyes as soon as you take them into captivity, that they may work no magic. Some of the witches make their peasants grow weeds and herbs in their fields, instead of food. You will fire these fields and slay the witches, but you will not kill their peasants—it is our wish that they be fed from the stores of their former lords and masters. The witches seem to value these crops, so they are as much a target as their owners.”

  His horse snorted, pawing the ground nervously at the smells and shouts from the house ahead. Neuhalle glanced at the two hand-men waiting behind him, their heavy horse-pistols resting across their saddles. “Follow,” he ordered, then nudged his mount forward.

  Before the first and fourth platoons had arrived, this had been a large village, dominated by the dome of a temple and the steeply pitched roof of a landholder’s house—one of the Hjorth family, a poor rural hanger-on of the tinker clan. Upper Innmarch hadn’t been much by the standards of the aristocracy, but it was still a substantial two-story building, wings extending behind it to form a horseshoe around a cobbled yard, with stables and outbuildings. Now, half of the house lay in ruins and smoke and flames belched from the roof of the other half. Bodies lay in the dirt track that passed for a high street, soldiers moving among them. Shouts and screams from up the lane, and a rhythmic thudding noise: one of his lances was battering on the door of a suspiciously well-maintained cottage, while others moved in and out of the dark openings of round-roofed hovels, like killer hornets buzzing around the entrances of a defeated beehive. More moans and screams split the air.

  “Sir! Beg permission to report!”

  Neuhalle reined his horse in as he approached the sergeant—distinguished by the red scarf he wore—and leaned towards the man. “Go ahead,” he rasped.

  “As ordered, I deployed around the house at dawn and waited for Morgan’s artillery. There was no sign of a guard on duty. The occupants noticed around the time the cannon arrived: we had hot grapeshot waiting, and Morgan put it through the windows yonder. The place caught readily—too readily, like they was waiting for us. Fired a few shots, then nothing. A group of six attempted to flee from the stables on horseback as we approached, but were brought down by Heidlor’s team. The villagers either ran for the forest or barricaded themselves in, Joachim is seeing to them now.” He looked almost disappointed; compared to the first tinker’s nest they’d fired, this one had been a pushover.

  “I think you’re right: the important cuckoos had already fled the nest.” Neuhalle scratched at his scrubby beard. “What’s in the fields?”

  “Rye and wheat, sir.”

  “Right.” Neuhalle straightened his back: “Let the men have their way with the villagers.” These peasants had been given no cause to resent the witches: so let them fear the king instead. “Any prisoners from the house?”

  “A couple of serving maids tried to run, sir. And an older woman, possibly a tinker though she didn’t have a witch sign on her.”

  “Then give them the special treatment. No, wait. Maids? An older woman? Let the soldiers use them first, then the special treatment.”

  His sergeant looked doubtful. “Haven’t found the smithy yet, sir. Might be a while before we have hot irons.”

  Neuhalle waved dismissively. “Then hang them instead. Just make sure they’re dead before we move on, that will be sufficient. If you find any unburned bodies in the house, hang them up as well: we have a reputation to build.”

  “The peasants, sir?”

  “I don’t care, as long as there are survivors to bear witness.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “That will be all, Sergeant Shutz.”

  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…”

  7

  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.”