Charles Stross - The Merchant’s War

There was a knock at the door. A moment later it opened, as he turned round. "How do I look?" She took a step back.

"You look-" he paused to collect himself, "fine." The black walking suit was a little severe, but it suited her. However... "before we travel, I think we'd better find you a hairdresser."

"Really?" She frowned. "It's not particularly long-" "Or a wig maker," he explained. "You're probably on the Polis watch list. But if you've got long blond or brown hair, a different name, and a husband, and the informants are all looking for a single woman with short black hair, that's a start. Details are cumulative: you can't just change one thing and expect to go unnoticed, you've got to change lots of different things about yourself simultaneously."

"Right. It'll have to be blond. Damn it, I always get split ends." She ran one hand through her hair. It was longer than he remembered. "There's other stuff I need to do. When I can figure out what..."

A moment he'd been dreading: at least, a small one. She didn't seem to be committed to killing herself just yet. "That will be a problem."

"Ah." She froze. "Yes, somehow I didn't think it was going to be easy."

"The- situation-you drew our attention to is troublesome. For the time being, I think it would be a very bad idea indeed for you to try to make contact with your Clan. Or with the other, ah, local faction. I can make inquiries on your behalf, discreet inquiries, if your relatives are still trying to run your company. But until we know how they will react to your reappearance, it would be best not to reappear. Do you agree?"

Miriam looked baffled for a moment: an achingly familiar bewilderment, the first bright moment of incomprehension that everyone felt the first time, as the doors to the logging camp swung to offer a glimpse into a colder, harsher world. "All I want is to go home."

He reached out and rested a hand on her shoulder, surprising himself: "Listen, home is wherever you are. You've got to learn to accept that, to let go, or sooner or later you're going to kill yourself. Are you listening? Margaret told me your story. Do you want to go back to the situation you just escaped from? Or do you want the Polis to find you instead? I nearly killed myself once, trying to go back. I don't want you to make the same mistake. I think the best way forward would be for you to come with me. It's not forever: it'll last as long as, as long as it needs to. Eventually, I'm sure, you'll be able to go back. But don't... don't try to take on too much, Miriam. Not until you're ready."

"I- " She reached up and removed his hand from her shoulder, but she didn't let go of it. "You're too kind!" Without warning she stepped right up to him and put her arms around him, and hugged him. Too surprised to move, he stood rooted to the spot, at a loss for words: after a while she stepped away. "I'm ready now," she said quietly. "Let's get out of here."

Everyone gets a run of bad news sooner or later, thought Eric Smith, but this is ridiculous.

"This is not making my day any easier," murmured Dr. James, leaning back in his chair as the door closed behind Agent Herz. He glanced sidelong at Eric. "Got any bright ideas, Colonel?"

Eric stared at the hard copy of Herz's report, sitting on the blotter in its low-contrast anti-photocopying print and SECRET codewords, and resisted the impulse to pound his head on his desk. It would look unprofessional-there were few stronger terms of opprobrium in Dr. Andrew James's buttoned-down vocabulary-and more important, it wouldn't achieve anything. But on the other hand, banging his head on the desk would probably be less painful than trying to deal with the self-compounding clusterfuck-in-progress that was, of late, what passed for the Family

Trade Organization's infant steps towards dealing with the transdimensionally mobile narcoterrorists they were hunting.

(And their goddamn stolen nukes.) "Come on. What am I going to tell the vice president tonight?"

Eric took a deep breath. "From the top?" "Whatever order you choose."

"Well, shall we get the small stuff out of the way first?" "Start."

Eric shrugged. "I don't like to admit this, but the current operations we've got in train are all hosed. CLEAN-SWEEP has driven into a ditch and we're lucky we got anybody back at all-going by Agent Wall's observations, they got caught in the crossfire during some kind of red-on-red incident. We're lucky Rich was able to exfiltrate in good order, else we wouldn't even know that much. I think we can write off the alpha team and Agent Fleming, they're two days overdue and they've overrun their provisioning.

"On the plus side, Rich got out. We've continued to monitor the CLEANSWEEP team's dead letter drops from the OLIGARCH positions, and they look clean. The fact that nobody's visited or tried to stake them out suggests that the bad guys didn't take any of our men alive. So CLEANSWEEP isn't blown, and once we get more field-qualified linguists prepped we should be able to reactivate it-possibly in as little as three weeks. The real problem we've got is that we're multiply bottlenecked: bottlenecked on linguists, bottlenecked on logistics, bottlenecked on general intelligence. If we could find one of their safe houses we'd be in place to run COLDPLAY against them, but the trail's gone cold and there's a limit to how long I can hold on to an AFSOCOM team with no mission-they're needed in the middle east."

"Hmm." James rolled his pen between the finger and thumb of his left hand. His lips whitened, forming a tight, disapproving line that made the resemblance to Hugo

Weaving in The Matrix even stronger. Agent Smith, with a small lapel-pin crucifix and a Ph.D. from Harvard: "I might be able to shake something loose on one of those fronts presently. But VPOTUS isn't going to be happy about the lack of progress."

"Well, I'm not happy either!" Eric dug his fingers into the arms of his chair. His damaged carpal tunnels sent twinges of protest running up his arms. "If you think I enjoy losing agents and trained special forces teams... hell." He raised a hand and ran fingertips through his thinning hair. "I'm sorry. But this failure mode wasn't anticipated. Nobody expected them to blow up the fucking palace and start a civil war in the garden. Maybe we should have anticipated it, if we'd been better informed about their internal political situation, but they don't exactly have newspapers over there and even if they did, we'd have trouble reading them. We'd have to have been fucking mind readers to spot a bunch of plotters running a coup!"

"Language, Colonel, please."

"Shi- sorry." Eric shook his head, angry at his own loss of control. "I'm upset. We've now lost two high-clearance, high-value agents and an AFSOCCOM specops team and we've only really been up and running for fourteen weeks."

"I feel your pain," James said dryly. Eric stared at him, taken aback. "But I'm going to have to brief the vice president tonight on all the progress we haven't been making, and believe me, chewing on ground glass would be less painful," he added. "Now. I've heard from Herz. How's CLANCY going?"

"Badly." CLANCY was the ongoing investigation into the nuclear device that Source GREENSLEEVES claimed was planted somewhere in the Boston/Cambridge area, before he'd so inconveniently managed to get himself killed. "We hadn't found anything really noteworthy-a couple of meth labs, a walled-up cellar full of moonshine left over from the nineteen twenties, that sort of thing-until Judith turned up her anomaly yesterday. I was half-convinced GREENSLEEVES was lying to us, but now-well, I don't think we can afford to take that risk." He shivered. "Just who the he-heck stuck a B-53 bomb on blocks in a warehouse and set it to go off on a ten-year timer?"

"Is that a question?" Doctor James leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingertips again, and the piranha-like set of his lips quirked slightly. Is he trying to smile? wondered Eric.

"Only if I'm not treading on any classified toes," Smith said warily.

"It's not a healthy question to ask. So I suggest you don't ask me about it. Then I won't have to tell you any lies."

"Ah." Smith dry-swallowed.

"Even if I did know anything about it. Which I don't," James said, with a twitch of one eyebrow that spoke volumes.

"Right. Right." Change the subject, quick. The fact that they were silting in a secure conference cell that was regularly swept for bugs didn't mean that nobody was listening in, or at least recording the session for posterity: all it meant was that nobody outside the charmed circle of the National Security infrastructure was eavesdropping. But what kind of black operation would involve us nuking one of our own cities? Smith filed the question away for later.

"Well, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. The original idea of taking the county planner's database and data mining it for suspicious activities is sound in principle, but it yields too many false positives in a city the size of this one. I mean, there are tens of thousands of business premises, many tens of thousands of homes with garages or large basements, and if only one percent of them flag as positives for things like lack of visible tenants or occupants, zero phone use but basic utility draw for heating, and so on, we're swamped. It might be a bomb installation, or it could equally well be Uncle Alfred's old house and he died six months ago and the estate's still in probate or something. Or it could be an overenthusiastic horticulturist trying to breed a better pot plant. On the other hand, hopefully the neutron scattering spectroscopes our NIRT liaisons are getting next week will allow us to make an exhaustive roving search. And we can cover for it easily, by telling the truth-we're testing a bomb detector for terrorist nukes. Everyone will assume we're worried about al-Qaeda, and if we actually do find GREENSLEEVES's gadget... well, do you suppose the VP would like to make hay with that?"

The raised eyebrow was back. "I suppose you have a point." James nodded slowly. "Yes, that would kill two terrorist threats with one stone." Eric relaxed slightly. "What else do you have for me?"

"Well, I'm not saying we're not going to get another break-I think it's only a matter of time-but I can't give you a time scale for quantum leaps. I think if we can reactivate CLEANSWEEP, or figure out some way around the bottleneck in our logistics chain we might be able to progress on CLANCY through other avenues. I mean, if we can get our hands on some useful intelligence about the Clan's nuclear capability that could open up some avenues of inquiry about where GREENSLEEVES got his hands on a gadget, and where it might be now. But for the time being, we're not really pursuing a specifically intelligence-led investigation. Getting back into the Gruinmarkt is, in my opinion, vital-and the more force we can project there, the better."

"I see." James made a brief note on his pad. "Well. I'm hoping we'll have a solution to the logistics issues shortly."

"More couriers? A target for COLDPLAY?"

"Something better." He looked smug.

Eric leaned forward. "Tell me. Whatever you can. Is this more of that harebrained physics stuff from Livermore?"

"Of course." Then something terrifying happened: Doctor James actually smiled. "I think it's time to bring you in the loop on the, as you put it, logistics side of things.

There's a cross-disciplinary team under Professor Armstrong from UCSD who've been working on a subject under, um, closed conditions. They haven't worked out everything that's going on yet, but they've made some fascinating progress that points to a physical explanation for their anomalous capability. I'm going to be flying out there tomorrow morning, and I was hoping you could join me."