The Merchants' War: Book Four of the Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  “Nearly there.” There was a clicking, rattling noise from the kitchen. Elena was tweaking her vicious little toy again. (“You’re exploring: your job is to take measurements, look around, avoid being seen, and come right back. But if the worst happens, you aren’t going to let anyone stop you coming back. Or leave any witnesses.”)

  “Ready.” Hulius came in the door, combat boots thudding.

  Huw glanced up. In his field camouflage, body armor, and helmet Hulius loomed like a rich survivalist who’d been turned loose in an army surplus store. “where’s your telemetry pack?”

  “In the kitchen. Where’s your medical kit?”

  Huw gestured at the side of the room. “Back porch.” He slid the laptop aside carefully and stood up. “How’s your blood pressure?”

  “No problems with it, I’m not dizzy or anything.”

  “Good. Okay, so let’s go…”

  Huw found Elena in the kitchen at the back of the rental house. She had her telemetry belt on, and the headset, and had rigged the P90 in a tactical sling across her chest. “Ready?” he asked.

  “I can’t wait!” She bounced excitedly on her toes.

  “Let me check your equipment first.” She surrendered with ill grace to Huw’s examination. “Okay, I’m switching it on now.” He poked at the ruggedized PDA, then waited until the screen showed an off-kilter view of the back of his head. “Good, camera’s working.” He turned to Hulius. Gruffly: “Your turn now.”

  “Sure, dude.” Hulius stood patiently while Huw hung the telemetry pack off his belt, under the big fanny pack of ration packs, drink cans, and survival tools. Hulius’s was heavier, and included a Toughbook PC and a short-wave radio—unlike Elena he might be sticking around for a while.

  “Got signal.”

  “Cool. I’m ready whenever you are.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you out back.”

  Huw headed for the front room to collect the big aid kit and the artist’s portfolio, his head spinning. Demo time. Right? Nobody had done this before; not this well-or ganized, anyway. He felt a momentary stab of anxiety. If we’d done this right, we’d have two evenly matched world-walkers, able to lift each other, not a line backer and a princess. The failure modes scared him shitless if he stopped to think about them. Still, Yul and ’Lena were eager volunteers. That counted for something, didn’t it?

  The back door, opening off the kitchen, stood open, letting in a wave of humidity. Hulius and Elena stood in the overgrown yard, Elena facing Yul’s back as he crouched down. “Ready?” called Huw.

  “Yo!”

  Huw placed the first aid kit carefully on the deck beside him, then unzipped the art portfolio. “Elena, you ready?”

  “Whenever big boy here gets down on his knees.”

  “I didn’t know you cared, babe—”

  Huw stifled a tense grin. “You heard her. Piggyback up, I’m going to uncover in ten. Good luck, guys.”

  Hulius crouched down and Elena wrapped her arms around his chest from behind. He held his hands out and she carefully placed her feet in them. With a grunt of strain, he rose to his feet as Huw dropped the front cover of the folio, revealing the print within—carefully keeping it facing away from himself. “Go!”

  He tripped the stopwatch, then put the folio down, closing it. Heart hammering, he watched the yard, stopwatch in hand. Five seconds. Elena would be down and looking around, a long, slow, scan, her headset capturing the view. Ten seconds. The weather station on her belt should be stabilizing, reading out the ambient temperature, pressure, and humidity. Fifteen seconds. Her first scan ought to be complete, and the smart radio scanner ought to be logging megabits of data per second, searching for signs of technology. If there were no immediate threats she should be taking stock of Yul, making sure his blood pressure was stable from the ’walk. Thirty seconds. Huw began to feel a chilly sweat in the small of his back. By now, Hulius should have planted a marker and be on his way to the nearest cover, or would be digging in to wait out the one-hour minimum period before he could return. He’d have a bad headache right now—if he used the one-hour waypoint he’d be in bed for twenty hour hours afterwards, if not puking his guts up. Otherwise he’d stay a while longer…

  Fifty-five. Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty. Oh shit. Sixty one. Sixty-two.

  The scenery changed. Huw’s heart was in his mouth for a moment: then he managed to focus on Elena. She was holding her hands out, thumbs-up in jubilation. “Case green! Case green!”

  Huw sat down heavily. I think I’m going to be sick. It had been the longest minute of his life. “What happened?” he asked, his voice thick with tension: “Which schedule is Yul running to?”

  She climbed the steps to the rear stoop. Her submachine gun was missing. “Let’s go inside, I need to take some of this stuff off before I melt.”

  Huw held the door open for her with barely controlled impatience. “What happened?” He demanded.

  “Relax, it’s all right, really.” She began to unfasten her helmet and Huw moved in hastily to unplug the camera. It was beaded with moisture and he swore quietly when he saw that the lens was fogged over.

  “You need to remove the telemetry pack first, I need to get this downloaded.”

  “Oh all right then! Here’s your blasted toy.” For a moment she worked on her equipment belt fastenings, then held it up at arm’s length with an expression of distaste. Huw grabbed it before she let it drop. “It’s perfectly safe over there. A lot cooler than it is here, and there are trees everywhere—”

  “What kind of trees?”

  She shrugged vaguely. “Trees. Like in the Alps. Dark green, spiny things. Christmas tree trees. You want to know about trees? Send a tree professor.”

  “Okay. So it’s cold and there are coniferous trees. Anything else?”

  Elena laid her helmet on the kitchen worktop and began to unfasten her body armor. “It was raining and the rain was cold. We couldn’t see very far, but it was quiet—not like over here.”

  Huw shook his head: City girl.

  “Anyway, I checked over Yul and he said he felt fine and there was no sign of anybody, so I gave him the P90 and tripped back over. Whee!”

  Huw managed to confine his response to a nod. “When is he coming back?”

  “Uh, we agreed on case green. That means four hours, right?”

  “Four hours.” Elena laid her armor out on the kitchen table then began to unlace her combat boots. “Then we can break out the wine, yay!”

  “I’ll be in the front room,” Huw muttered, cradling the telemetry belt. “Would you mind staying here and watching the back window for a few minutes? If you see anything at all, call me.”

  In the front room, Huw poked at the ruggedized PDA, switching off the logging program. He plugged it into the laptop to recharge and hotsync, then sighed. The video take would be a while downloading, but the portable weather station had its own display. He unplugged it from the PDA, flicked it on, and looked at the last reading. Temperature: 16 Celsius. Pressure: 1026 millibars. Relative humidity: 65%. “What the fuck?” He muttered to himself. Sixteen Celsius—sixty Fahrenheit—in Maryland, in August? With high pressure? That was the bit that didn’t make sense. It was over ninety outside, with 1020 millibars. “It’s twenty Celsius degrees colder over there? And the trees are conifers?”

  The penny dropped. “No wonder nobody could use the Wu family knotwork up in Massachusetts—it’s probably under half a mile of ice!”

  “Hey, you talking to me?” Elena called from the kitchen.

  Huw glanced at the laptop. “Be right back, buddy,” he told it, then carefully put it down on the battered cargo case, picked up the brown paper bag with the wine, and walked back towards Elena to wait for Hulius’s return.

  It was afternoon, according to the baleful red lights on the small TV opposite Mike’s bed. He blinked at it sleepily, feeling no particular inclination to reach out for the remote control that sat on the trolley beside his bed. The curtains were drawn a
cross what he took for a window niche, and he was alone in the small hospital room with nothing for company but the TV, the usual clutter of spotlights and strange valves and switches on the wall behind his bed, and the plastic cocoon they’d wrapped his leg in. The cocoon—it’s like something out of Alien, he thought dreamily. Drainage tubes ran from it to the side of the bed, and there was a trolley with some kind of gadget next to him, and a hose leading to his left wrist. A drip. That was it. I’m on a drip. Therefore, I must be home. I drip, therefore I am. The thought was preposterously funny in a distant, swirly kind of way. Come to think of it, all his thoughts seemed to be leaving vapor trails, bouncing off the inside of his skull in slow motion. His leg ached, distantly, but it was nothing important. I’m home. Phone home. Maybe I should phone Mom and Pop? Let them know I’m all right. No, that wouldn’t work—Mom and Pop died years ago, in the car crash with Sue. Forget it. He managed to roll his eyes towards the table the TV stood on. There was no telephone. Some hospital bedroom this is…

  He was too hot. Much too hot. He was wearing pajamas: that was it. Fumbling for the buttons with his right hand, he realized he was fatigued. It felt as if his arm was weak, a long way away. He managed to get a couple of buttons undone, just as the door opened.

  “As you can see he’s, oh my—”

  “Mike? Can he hear me?”

  “I’m too hot.” It came out funny.

  “I’m real sorry, Mr. Smith, but he’s running a fever. We’ve got him on IV penicillin for the infection, and morphine—”

  “Penicillin? Isn’t that old-fashioned; I mean, aren’t most bacteria resistant to it these days?”

  “That’s not what the path lab report says about this one, thank Jesus; you’re right, most infections are resistant, but he’s had the good fortune to pick up an old-fashioned one. So, like I was saying, he’s on morphine, his leg’s an almighty mess, and they used a whole lot of Valium on him last night so he wouldn’t pull out his tubes.”

  “Mike?”

  The voice was familiar, conjuring up images of a whirring hand exerciser, a tense expression. “Boss?”

  “Mike? Did you try to say something?”

  Lips are dry. He tried to nod.

  “Ah, h—heck. Is it the Valium? Or the morphine?”

  “He ought to be better in a couple of hours, Mr. Smith.”

  “Okay. You hang in there, Mike. I’ll be right back.”

  The door closed on discussion, and the sound of footsteps walking away. Mike closed his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts. In the hospital. Doped up. Leg hurts a little. Morphine? Colonel Smith. Got to talk to the colonel…

  An indefinite time later, Mike was awakened by the rattle of the door opening.

  “Huh—hi, boss.” The cotton wool wrapping seemed to have gone away: he was still tired and a little fuzzy, but thinking didn’t feel like wading through warm mud anymore. He struggled, trying to sit up. “Huh. Water.”

  There was a jug of water sitting on the bedside trolley, and a couple of disposable cups. Eric sat down on the side of the bed and filled a cup, then passed it to him carefully. “Can you manage that? Good.”

  “’S better.” What’s the colonel wanting? Must be really anxious for news to be here himself… He cleared his throat experimentally. “How…how long?”

  “It’s Sunday afternoon. You were dumped on our doorstep on Friday evening, two and a half days past your due date. Do you feel like talking, or do you need a bit more time?”

  “More water. I’ll talk. Is…is official debrief?”

  “Yes, Mike. Fill me in and I promise to leave you alone to recover.” Eric smiled tightly. “If you need anything, I’ll see what I can sort out. Guess you’re not going to be in the office for a while.” He passed the refilled cup over and Mike drained it, then struggled to sit up.

  “Here, let me—gotcha.” The motorized bed whined. Colonel Smith placed a small voice recorder on the bedside table, the tape spool visibly rotating inside it. “That comfortable?”

  “Y-yeah. You want to know what happened? Everything was on track until I got into the palace grounds. Then everything went to hell…”

  For the next hour Mike described the events of the past week in minute detail, racking his brains for anything remotely relevant. Eric stopped him periodically to flip tape cassettes, then began to supply questions as Mike ran down. Mike held nothing back, his own ambiguous responses to Miriam notwithstanding. Finally, Eric switched the recorder off. “Off the record. Why did you tell her we’d play hardball? Did you think we were going to burn her? How did you think it’s going to sound if we have to go to bat with an oversight committee to keep your ass out of jail?”

  Mike reached towards the water again. He swallowed, his throat sore. “You should know: if you want to run HUMINT assets, you can’t treat them like machines. They have to trust you—they absolutely have to trust you. So I gave her the unvarnished truth. If I’d spun her a line of bullshit, do you really think she’d have believed me? She knows me well enough to know when I’m lying.”

  Smith nodded. “Go on.”

  “Her situation is shitty enough that—hell, her mom said she’s on the run—she’s short on options. If I’d told her we’d welcome her with open arms she’d have smelled a rat, but this way she’s going to carry on thinking about it, and then eventually start sniffing the bait. At which point, we can afford to play her straight, and she’s starting with low expectations. Offer her a deal—she cooperates with us fully, we look after her—and you’ll get her on board willingly. You’ll also get leverage over her mother, who is still in place and in a position to tell us what the leadership is up to. But I think the most important thing is, you’ll have a willing world-walker who will do what we want, and—I figure this is important—try to be helpful. I can’t quantify that, but I figure there’s probably stuff we don’t know that a willing collaborator can call out for us, stuff a coerced subject or a non–world-walker would be useless for. If Doc James gets some crazy idea about turning her into a ghost detainee, we’re not going to be able to do that, so I figured I’d start by lowering her expectations, then raise the temperature at the next contact.”

  “Plausible.” Eric nodded again. “It’s a plausible excuse.”

  Mike put the cup down. His throat felt sore. “Is this going to go to oversight?”

  Eric was watching him guardedly. “Not unless we fuck up.”

  “Thought so.” Get your cynical head on, Mike. “How do you meant to handle her, then?”

  “We go on as planned.” Eric looked thoughtful. “For what it’s worth I agree with you. I had a run-in with James over how we deal with contacts, and while he’s a whole lot more political than I thought, he’s also a realist. Beckstein isn’t a career criminal, you’re right about that side of things. Not that it’d be a problem to nail her on conspiracy charges, or even treason—the DoJ has a hard-on for anyone it can label as a terrorist, especially if they’re collaborating with enemy governments to make war on the United States—but there’s no need to bring out the big stick if we don’t need it. If you can coax her into coming in willingly, I’ll do my best to persuade James to reactivate one of the old Cold War defector programs. You can tell her that, next time you see her.”

  “Cold War defector program?”

  “How do you think we used to handle KGB agents who wanted to come over? They’d worked for an enemy power, maybe did us serious damage, but you don’t see many of them doing time in Club Fed, do you? You don’t burn willing defectors, not if you want there to be more defectors in future. There were a couple of Eisenhower-era presidential directives to handle this kind of shit, and I think they’re still in force. It’s just a matter of working on James and figuring out what the correct protocol is.”

  “Okay, I think I see what you’re getting at.” Mike eased back against the pillows. “It fits with the timetable. The only problem is, she hasn’t gotten back in touch this week, has she? Are you tapping my home teleph
one?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.” Eric looked irritated. “I’m not aware of any contact attempts, but I’ll make inquiries. I’d be surprised if nobody was watching your apartment—or mine, for that matter—but that’s not my call to make.”

  “Okay. Then can you tell me where I am? Or when I’m going to be let out of this place, or what the hell is happening to my leg in there?” Mike gestured loosely at the bulky plastic brace and the cocoon of dressings. “It’s kind of disturbing…”

  “Shit.” Eric glanced away. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ll ask one of the medics to tell you. They told me was your leg was broken, got chewed up pretty badly—who the hell expected them to be using mantraps in this day and age?”

  “It’s not this day and age over there,” Mike offered dryly.

  Eric laughed, a brief bark: “Okay, you got me! Listen, I figure the medics should give you the full rundown. What they told me is that you’ll be off your legs for a few weeks and you won’t be running any marathons for the rest of this year, but you should make a full recovery. They were more worried about the infection you brought home, except it responds well to penicillin, of all things. Something about there being no antibiotic resistance in the sample they cultured…anyway. You’re in a private wing of Northern Westchester. We’ve closed it off to make it look like it’s under maintenance, the folks who’re seeing you are all cleared, there are guards on the front desk, and as soon as you’re ready to move we’re going to send you home. Officially you’re on medical leave for the next month, renewed as long as the doctors think necessary. Unofficially, once I confirm this with Dr. James, you’re going to be on station waiting for Iris Beckstein to get in touch. You can call in backup if you see fit—even a full surveillance team and SWAT backup—but from what you’re telling me, she’s got tradecraft, which would make that a high-risk strategy. Think you’re up to it?”