The Clan Corporate: Book Three of The Merchant Princes

by Charles Stross

  Which was why, a decade after joining up, he was still a dedicated DEA Special Agent—rather than a burned-out GS-12 desk jockey with his third nervous breakdown and his second divorce ahead of him, freewheeling past road marks on the long run down to retirement and the end of days.

  When the doorbell chimed exactly twenty-two minutes after the phone rang, the Mike who answered it was dressed again and had even managed to put a comb through his lank blond hair and run an electric razor over his chin. The effect was patchy, though, and he still felt in need of a good night’s sleep. He glanced at the entry phone, then relaxed. It was Pete, his partner on the current case, looking tired but not much worse for wear. Mike picked up his briefcase and opened the door. “What’s the story?”

  “C’mon. You think they’ve bothered to tell me anything?” Mike revised his opinion. Pete didn’t simply look tired and overworked, he looked apprehensive. Which was kind of worrying, in view of Pete’s usual supreme self-confidence.

  “Okay.” Mike armed the burglar alarm and locked his front door. Then he followed Pete toward a big Dodge minivan, waiting at the curb with its engine idling. A woman and two guys were waiting in it, beside the driver, who made a big deal of checking his agency ID. He didn’t know any of them except one of the men, who vaguely rang a bell. FBI office, Mike realized as he climbed in and sat down next to Pete. “Where are we going?” he asked as the door closed.

  “Questions later,” said the woman sitting next to the driver. She was a no-nonsense type in a gray suit, the kind Mike associated with internal audits and inter-agency joint committees. Mike was about to ask again, when he noticed Pete shake his head very slightly. Oh, he thought, and shut up as the van headed for the freeway. I can take a hint.

  When he realized they were heading for the airport after about twenty minutes, Mike sat up and began to take notice. And when they pulled out of the main traffic stream into the public terminals at Logan and headed toward a gate with a checkpoint and barrier, the sleep seemed to fall away. “What is this?” he hissed at Pete.

  The van barely stopped moving as whatever magic charm the driver had got him waved straight through a series of checkpoints and onto the air side of the terminal. “Look, I don’t know either,” Pete whispered. “Tony said to go with these guys.” He sounded worried.

  “Not long now,” the woman in the front passenger seat said apologetically.

  They drove past a row of parked executive jets, then pulled in next to a big Gulfstream, painted Air Force gray. “Okay, change of transport,” called their shepherd. “Everybody out!”

  “Wow.” Mike looked up at the jet. “They’re serious.”

  “Whoever they are,” Pete said apprehensively. “Somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.”

  A blue-suiter checked their ID cards again at the foot of the stairs and double-checked them using a sheet of photos. Mike climbed aboard warily. The government executive jet wasn’t anything like as luxuriously fitted as the ones you saw in the movies, but that was hardly a surprise—it was a working plane, used for shifting small teams about. Mike strapped himself into a window seat and lay back as the attendant closed the door, checked to see that everyone was strapped in, and ducked inside the cockpit for a quiet conference. The plane began to taxi, louder than any airliner he’d been on in years. Minutes later they were airborne, climbing steeply into the evening sky. In all, just over an hour had elapsed since he answered the phone.

  The seat belt lights barely had time to blink out before the woman was on her feet, her back to the cockpit door, facing Mike and Pete. (A couple of the other guys had to crane their heads round to see her.) “Okay, you’re wondering where you’re going and why,” she said matter-of-factly. “We’re going to a small field in Maryland. From there you’re going by bus to a secure office in Fort Meade where we wait for another planeload of agents to converge from the left coast. Refreshments will be served,” she added dryly, “although I can’t tell you just why you’re needed at this meeting because our hosts haven’t told me.”

  One of the other passengers, a black man with the build of a middleweight boxer, frowned. “Can you tell us who you are?” he asked in a deep voice. “Or is that secret, too?”

  “Sure. I’m Judith Herz. Boston headquarters staff, FBI, agent responsible for ANSIR coordination. If you guys want to identify yourselves, be my guest.”

  “I’m Bob Patterson,” said the black man, after a momentary pause. “I work for DOE,” he added, in tones that said and I can’t tell you any more than that.

  “Rich Wall, FBI.” The thin guy with curly brown hair and a neat goatee flashed a brief grin at Herz. Undercover? Mike wondered. Or specialist? He didn’t look like a special agent, that was for sure, not wearing combat pants and a nose-stud.

  “Mike Fleming and Pete Garfinkle, Drug Enforcement Agency, Boston SpecOps division,” Mike volunteered.

  They all turned to face the last passenger, a portly middle-aged guy with a bushy beard and a florid complexion who wore a pin-striped suit. “Hey, don’t all look at me!” he protested. “Name’s Frank Milford, County Surveyor’s Office.” A worried frown crossed his face. “Just what is this, anyway? There’s got to be some mistake, here. I don’t belong—”

  “We’ll see,” said Herz. Mike looked at her sharply. Five assorted cops and spooks, and a guy from the County Surveyor’s Office? What in hell’s name is going on here? “I’m sure all will be revealed when we arrive.”

  A minivan with a close-lipped driver met them at the airport. At first it had looked as if he was heading for Baltimore, but then they turned off the parkway, taking an unmarked feeder road that twisted behind a wooded berm and around a slalom course of huge stone blocks, razor-wire fences, and a gauntlet of surveillance cameras on masts. They came to a halt in front of a gatehouse set in a high fence surrounding a complex so vast that Mike couldn’t take it in. Members of a municipal police force he’d never heard of carefully checked everyone’s ID against a prepared list, then issued red-bordered ID badges with the letters PV emblazoned on them. Then the van drove on. The compound was so big there were road signs inside it—and three more checkpoints to stop and present ID at before they finally drew up outside an enormous black glass tower block. “Follow me, and do exactly as I say,” their driver told them. The entrance was a separate building, with secured turnstiles and guards who watched inscrutably as Mike followed his temporary companions along a passageway and then out into a huge atrium, dominated by a black marble slab bearing a coat of arms in a golden triangle.

  “I’ve read about this place,” Pete muttered in a slightly overawed tone.

  “So when do you think they bring out the dancing girls?” Mike replied.

  “When—” Lift doors opened and closed. Pete caught Herz watching him and clammed up.

  “Rule one: no questions,” Herz told him, when she was sure she’d got his attention. She glanced at Mike as well. “Yes?”

  “Rule two: no turf wars.” Mike crossed his arms, trying to look self-confident. You worked for the DOJ for years, mucking out the public stables, then suddenly someone sent a car for you and drove you round to the grand palace entrance . . .

  “No turf wars.” Herz nodded at him with weary irony. Suddenly he got the picture.

  “Whose rules are we playing by?” he asked.

  “Probably these guys, NSA. At least for now.” Her eyes flickered at one corner of the ceiling as the elevator came to a halt on the eighth floor. “I assure you, this is as new to me as it is to you.”

  Their escort led them along a carpeted, sound-deadening corridor, through fire doors and then into a reception room. “Wait here,” he said, and left them under the gaze of a secretary and a security guard. Mike blinked at the huge framed photographs on the walls. What are they doing, trying to grow the world’s biggest puffball mushroom? All the buildings seemed to have razor-wire fences around them and gigantic white domes sprouting from their roofs.

  A head
popped out from around a corner. “This way, please.” Herz led the group as they filed through the door, informatively labeled ROOM 2B8020. Behind the door, Mike blinked with a moment of déjà vu, a flashback to the movie Dr. Strangelove. A doughnut-shaped conference table surrounded by rose-colored chairs filled the floor at the near end of the room, but at the other end a series of raised platforms supported a small lecture theater of seats for an audience. Large multimedia screens filled the wall opposite. “If you’d all take seats in the auditorium, please?” called their guide.

  “The film you’re about to see is classified. You’re not to make notes, or talk about it outside your group. After it’s been screened, an officer will brief you in person then take you through a team setup exercise so that you know why you’re all here and what’s expected of you.”

  Pete stuck his hand in the air.

  “Yes?” asked the staffer.

  “Should I understand that I’m being seconded to some kind of joint operation?” Pete asked quietly. “Because if so, this is one hell of an odd way to go about it. My superior officer either didn’t know or didn’t tell. What’s going on?”

  “He wasn’t cleared,” said the staffer—and without saying anything else, he left the room.

  “What is this?” Frank demanded, looking upset. “I mean, what is this place?”

  The lights dimmed. “Your attention, please.” The voice came from speakers around the room, slightly breathy as its owner leaned too close to the microphone. “The following videotape was shot by a closed-circuit surveillance camera yesterday, at a jail in upstate New York.”

  Grainy gray-on-white video footage filled the front wall of the theater. It was shot from a camera concealed high up in one corner of the ceiling, with a fish-eye lens staring down at a cell maybe six feet by ten in size.

  Mike leaned forward. He could almost smell the disinfectant. This wasn’t your ordinary drunk tank. It was a separate cell, with whitewashed cinderblock walls and no window—furnished with a bunk bolted to the floor, a metal toilet and sink bolted to the wall, and not a lot else. Single occupant, high security. This is important enough to drag me out of bed and fly me six hundred miles? he wondered.

  There was a man in the cell. He was wearing dark pin-striped trousers and a dress shirt, no tie or jacket: he looked like a stockbroker or Wall Street lawyer who’d been picked up for brawling, hair mussed, expression wild. He kept looking at the door.

  “This man was arrested yesterday at two-fifteen, stepping off the Acela from Boston with a suitcase that contained some rather interesting items. Agents Fleming and Garfinkle will be pleased to know that information they passed on from the preliminary debriefing of source Greensleeves directly contributed to the bust. Mr. Morgan here was charged with possession of five kilograms of better than ninety-five percent pure cocaine hydrochloride, which goes some way to explain his agitation. There were, ah, other items in the suitcase. I’ll get to them later. For now, let’s just say that while none of them were contraband they are, if anything, much more worrying than the cocaine.”

  Mike focused on the screen. The guy in the cell was clearly uneasy about something—but what? In solitary. Knowing he was under surveillance. After a while he stood up and paced back and forth, from the door to the far end of the cell. Occasionally he’d pause halfway, as if trying to remember something.

  “Our target here has no previous police record, no convictions, no fingerprints, nothing to draw him to our attention. He hasn’t even registered to vote. He has a driving license and credit cards but, and here’s the interesting bit, some careful digging shows that the name belongs to a child who died thirty-one years ago, aged eleven months. He appears to be the product of a very successful identity theft that established him with a record going back at least a decade. This James Morgan, as opposed to the one who’s buried in a family plot near Buffalo, went to college in Minnesota and obtained average grades, majoring in business studies and economics before moving to New York, where he acquired a job with a small import-export company, Livingston and Marks, for whom he has worked for nine years and six months. According to our friends at the IRS, his entry-level salary was $39,605 a year, he takes exactly three days of sick leave every twelve months, and he hasn’t had a pay raise, a vacation, or a sabbatical since joining the firm.”

  The man on the screen seemed to make up his mind about something. He ceased pacing and, rolling up his sleeve, thrust his left wrist under the hot water faucet on the sink. He seemed to be scrubbing at something—a patch or plaster, perhaps.

  “James Morgan lives in an apartment that appears to be owned by a letting agency wholly owned by a subsidiary of Livingston and Marks,” the unseen commentator recited dryly, as if reading from a dossier. “He pays rent of $630 a month—and you guessed it, he hasn’t had a rent rise in nine years. And that’s not the only thing that’s missing. He isn’t a member of a gym or health club or a dating agency or a church or an HMO. He doesn’t own an automobile or a pet dog or a television, or subscribe to any newspapers or magazines. He uses his credit card to shop for groceries at the local Safeway twice a week, and here he screwed up—he has a loyalty card for the discounts. It turns out that he never buys toilet paper or light bulbs. However he does buy new movie releases on DVD, which is kind of odd for someone who doesn’t own a DVD player or a TV or a computer. Once a month, every month, as regular as clockwork, he makes an overnight out of state trip, flying Delta to Dallas–Fort Worth, and while he’s away he stays in the Hilton and makes a side trip to buy a Glock 20C, four spare magazines, and four two-hundred-round boxes of ammunition—although he never brings them home. Luckily for him, because he doesn’t have a firearms license valid for New York State.”

  On the screen, something peeled off Morgan’s wrist. He rubbed it some more, then turned the faucet off, raised his arm, and peered at whatever the plaster was concealing.

  “Checking our records, it appears that Mr. Morgan has purchased over sixty handguns this way, spending rather more on them than he pays in rent. That’s in addition to his other duties, which appear to include smuggling industrial quantities of pharmaceutical-grade narcotics. Now, this is where it gets interesting. Watch the screen.”

  Mike blinked. One moment Morgan was standing in front of the washbasin, peering at the inside of his wrist. The next moment, he was nowhere to be seen. The cell was empty.

  Off to one side, Frank from the Surveyor’s Office started to complain. “What is this? I don’t see what this has got to do with me. So you’ve got a guard taking kickbacks to fool with the videotape in the county jail—”

  The lights came up and the door opened. “Nope.” The man standing in the doorway was slightly built, in his early forties, with receding brown hair cropped short. He smiled easily as he stepped into the room and stood in front of the screen. It’s him, Mike realized with interest. The commentator with the dry sense of humor. “That wasn’t something we pulled off a tape, that was a live feed. And I assure you, once those data packets arrived here nobody tampered with them.”

  Mike licked his lips. “This links in with what Greensleeves was saying, doesn’t it?” he heard himself ask, as if from a distance.

  “It does indeed.” The man at the front of the auditorium looked pleased. “And that’s why you’re here. All of you, you’ve been exposed in some way to this business.” He nodded at Mike. “Some of you more than others—if it wasn’t for your quick thinking and the way you escalated it via Boston Special Operations, it might have been another couple of days before we realized what kind of intelligence asset you were sitting on.”

  “Greensleeves?” Pete asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You mean the kook?”

  Mike shook his head. Source Greensleeves, who called himself Matthias, and who kept yammering on about hidden conspiracies and other worlds in between blowing wholesale rings like they were street-corner crack houses—

  “Yes, and I’m afraid he isn’t a kook. Let me introduce myself. I�
��m Lieutenant Colonel Eric Smith, Air Force, on secondment to NSA/CSS, Office of Unconventional Programs. I work for the deputy director of technology. As of an hour ago, you guys are all on secondment from your usual assignments to a shiny new committee that doesn’t have a name yet, but that reports to the director of the National Security Council directly, via whoever he puts on top of me—hence all the melted stovepipes and joint action stuff. We’ve got to break across the usual departmental boundaries if we’re going to make this work. One reason you’re here is that you’ve all been vetted and had the security background checks in the course of your ordinary work. In fact, all but one of you are already federal employees working in the national security or crime prevention sectors. The letters have gone out to your managers and you should get independent confirmation when you get back home to Massachusetts and New York after this briefing round and tomorrow’s meetings and orientation lectures.” Smith leaned against the wall at the front of the room. “Any questions?”

  The guy from the DOE, Bob, looked up. “What am I doing here?” he rumbled. “Is NIRT a stakeholder?”

  Smith looked straight at him. “Yes,” he said softly. “The Nuclear Incident Response Teams are a stakeholder.”

  There was a hissing intake of breath: Mike glanced round in time to see Judith Herz look shocked.