The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (8 page)

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 and sour sweat. 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 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 asked.

‘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 the NIRT a stakeholder?’

Smith looked straight at him. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘The Nuclear Incident Response Teams are stakeholders.’

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

‘We have reason to believe that theft of fissionable material is involved.’

The Countess Helge and her attendants traveled in convoy with other residents of Thorold Palace that evening, to the Östhalle at the east end of the royal run that formed
the artery linking the great houses at the center of Niejwein. Niejwein was the royal capital of the kingdom of Gruinmarkt, which occupied most of the territory of Massachusetts and chunks of New
Jersey and New York, over here. As near as Miriam had been able to work out, the first Norse settlements on the eastern seaboard had died out in the eleventh or twelfth centuries, but their
replacements – painstakingly carved out by the landless sons of the northern European nobility around the start of the sixteenth century – had flourished, albeit far less so than in her
own world. They had no skyscrapers, spacecraft, or steam engines; no United States of America, no Declaration of Independence, no church or Reformation. Rome had fallen on schedule but the dark
ages had been darker than in her world. With no Christianity, no Judaism, no Islam, and with no centers of scholarship to preserve the Greek and Roman classics, the climb back up had been
correspondingly more painful and protracted.

This was the world the Clan came from, descended from an itinerant tinker who had by accident discovered the ability to walk between worlds – to her own New England, land of dour puritan
settlers, to the north of the iron triangle of the sugar and slave trade.
He was lucky not to be hanged as a witch
, Helge thought morosely as she stared out of her carriage window,
shielding her face behind a lacquered fan as the contraption jolted along the cobblestone street.
Or institutionalized, like a Kaspar Hauser
. Strange things happened to disoriented adults
who appeared as if out of thin air, speaking no known language, bewildered and lost. It had nearly happened to Miriam, the first time she accidentally world-walked.
But at least now I
understand what I’m doing
, she thought.