The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (52 page)

‘It’s not Iraq,’ said Steve. He swallowed. ‘It’s narcoterrorists, and the nukes were stolen from our own inventory.’

The boss was belting out orders to his mates and boatswains: ‘Bhaskar, I want an in-depth on the Iranian nuclear program, inside spread, you’ve got six pages – ’

Steve held up his dictaphone where Riccardo could see it. ‘Scoop, boss. Walked into my office an hour ago.’

‘A – what the fuck – ’ Riccardo grabbed his arm.

Nobody else had noticed; all eyes were focused on the Man, who was throwing a pocket tantrum in the direction of enemies both Middle Eastern and imaginary. ‘Let’s find a room,’
Steve suggested. ‘I’ve got my desk line patched through to my mobile. He’s going to call back.’

‘Who – ’

‘My source.’ Steve’s cheek twitched. ‘He told me this would happen. I thought he was crazy and kicked him out. He said he’d phone after it happened.’

‘Jesus.’ Riccardo stared at him for a moment. ‘Why
you
?’

‘Friend of a friend. She went missing six months ago investigating this, apparently.’

‘Jesus. Okay, let’s get a cube and see what you’ve got. Then if it checks out I’ll try and figure out how we can break it to Skippy without getting ourselves shitcanned
for making him look bad.’

*

The atmosphere in the situation room under Raven Rock was a toxic miasma of fury, loss, and anticipation: a sweaty, testosterone-breathing swamp of the will to triumph made
immanent. From the moment the PINNACLE NUCFLASH alert came in, the VP hunched over one end of the cramped conference table, growling out a torrent of unanswerable questions, demanding action on
HEAD CRASH and CLEANSWEEP and other more arcane Family Trade projects, issuing instructions to his staff, orders for the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate and other subagencies within
the sprawling DHS empire. ‘We’re still trying to raise the EOB, sir,’ said one particularly hapless staffer.

‘I don’t want to hear that word
trying
,’ he snarled. ‘I want
results
. Success or failure. Clear?’

The TV screens were clear enough. Andrew James couldn’t help staring at the hypnotic rewind footage from time to time, the sunny morning view of downtown D.C., the flash and static-riddled
flicker, the rolling, boiling cloud of chaotic darkness shot through with fire rising beyond the Capitol. The close-ups replaying every ten minutes of the Washington Monument blowdown, chunks of
rock knocked clear out of the base of the spire as the Mach wave bounced off the waters of the reflecting pool, cherry trees catching fire in a thousand inglorious blazing points of light.
Inarticulate anchormen and women, struggling with the enormity. Talking heads, eyes frozen in fear like deer in the headlights, struggling to pin the blame on Iraqi revenants, Iranian terrorists,
everyone and anyone.

‘Dr. James.’

He tore his eyes away from the screen. ‘Sir?’

The VP glared at him. ‘I want to know the status of SCOTUS as of this morning. I very much fear we’ll be needing their services later today and I want to know who’s
available.’

James nodded. ‘I can find out. Do you want me to expedite the draft order on Family Trade just yet?’

‘No, let’s wait for confirmation. George will want to pull the trigger himself once we brief him, assuming he survived, and if not, I need to be sworn in first. Otherwise those
bastards in Congress will – ’

‘Sir?’ Jack Shapiro, off the NSA desk just outside the conference room, stuck his head round the door. ‘We’ve got eyeballs overhead right now, do you want it on
screen?’

Cheney nodded. ‘Wait one, Andrew,’ he told Dr. James. ‘Put it on any damn screen but Fox News, okay?’

Two minutes later the center screen turned blue. Static replaced the CNN news crawl for a moment; then a grainy, gray, roiling turbulence filled the monitor from edge to edge. A flickering
head-up display scrawled barely readable numbers across the cloudscape. Shapiro grimaced, his face contorted by the telephone handset clamped between neck and shoulder. ‘That’s looking
down on the Ellipse,’ he confirmed. ‘The chopper’s standing off at six thousand feet, two thousand feet south of ground zero – it’s one of the VH-3s from HMX-1, it was
on station at Andrews AFB when . . .’ He trailed off. The VP was staring at the picture, face frozen.

‘Where’s the White House?’ he demanded hoarsely.

‘About’ – Shapiro approached the screen, pointed with a shaking finger – ‘there.’ The splash of gray across more gray was almost unrecognizable. ‘Less
than six hundred yards from ground zero, sir. There
might
be survivors – ’

Dr. James quietly pushed his chair back from the table, turned away from the screens, and stood up. A DISA staffer took over the chair even before he cleared the doorway. The corridor outside
was cramped and overfull with aides and officers busily waiting to see the Man. All of them showed signs of agitation: anger and fear and outrage vying for priority.
Patience,
James told
himself.
The end times haven’t begun – yet.
The VP would be a much better president than his predecessor; and in any case, a presidential martyrdom pardoned all political
sins.

Dr. James headed for the communications office. His mind, unlike almost everyone else’s, was calm: He knew exactly what he had to do. Find out where the surviving Supreme Court justices
were, locate the senior surviving judge, and get him here as fast as possible to swear in the new president.
Then we can clean house.
Both at home and in the other world God had provided for
America, as this one was filling up with heathens and atheists and wickedness.
There will be a reckoning,
he thought with quiet satisfaction.
And righteousness will prevail.

*

Steve Schroeder had barely been back at his desk for ten minutes when he received another visit. This time it was Riccardo, with two other men Steve didn’t recognize but
who exuded the unmistakable smell of cop. ‘Mr. Schroeder,’ said the tall, thin one. ‘Mr. Pirello here tells me you had a visitor this morning.’

Steve glanced at Riccardo. His boss’s forehead was gleaming under the fluorescent tubes. ‘Tell him, Steve.’

‘Yes,’ Steve admitted. ‘Do you have ID?’

The short fireplug in the double-breasted suit leaned towards him: ‘You don’t get to ask questions,’ he started, but the thin man raised a hand.

‘Not yet. Mr. Schroeder, we’re from the FBI. Agent Judt.’ He held an ID badge where Steve couldn’t help seeing it. ‘This is my colleague, Agent Fowler. It would
make things much easier if we could keep this cordial, and we understand your first instinct is to treat this as a news investigation, but right now we’re looking at an unprecedented crime
and you’re the first lead we’ve found. If you know anything,
anything
at all, then I’d be very grateful if you’d share it with us.’

‘If there’s another bomb out there and you don’t help us, you could be charged with conspiracy,’ Agent Fowler added in a low warning rumble. Then he shut up.

Steve took a deep breath. The explosions kept replaying behind his eyelids in slow motion. He breathed out slowly. ‘I’m a bit . . . freaked,’ he admitted. ‘This morning I
had a visit from a man who identified himself as a DEA agent, name of Fleming. He spun me a crazy yarn and I figured he was basically your usual run-of-the-mill paranoid schizophrenic. I
didn’t check his ID at the time – tell the truth, I wanted him out of here. He said there’d be nukes, and he’d call back later. I’ve got a recording’ – he
gestured to his dictaphone – ‘but that’s about it. All I can tell you is what he told me. And hope to hell he gets back in touch.’

Agent Fowler stared at him with an expression like a mastiff contemplating a marrowbone. ‘You sent him away.’

Fear and anger began to mix in the back of Steve’s mind. ‘No, what I sent away was a
fruitcake
,’ he insisted. ‘I write the information technology section. Put
yourself in my shoes – some guy you don’t know comes to visit and explains how a secret government agency to deal with time travelers from another universe has lost a bunch of atom
bombs accidentally-on-purpose because they want the time travelers to plant them in our cities – what would
you
do? Ask him when he last took his prescription?
Show him the
door
, by any chance?’

Fowler still stared at him, but after a second Agent Judt nodded. ‘Your point is taken,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless . . .’

‘You want to wait until he makes contact again, be my guest.’ Steve shivered. ‘He might be a fruitcake, or he might be the real thing; that’s not my call. I assume you
guys can tell the difference?’

‘We get fruitcakes too,’ Judt assured him. Riccardo was being no help: He just stood there in front of the beige partition, eyes vacant, nodding along like a pod person. ‘But
we don’t usually get them so close to an actual, uh,
incident
.’

‘Act of war,’ Fowler snarled quietly. ‘Or treason.’

Fleming didn’t ask for anonymity,
Steve reminded himself. Which left: handing a journalistic source over to the FBI. Normally that would be a huge no-no, utterly immoral and
unjustifiable, except . . . this wasn’t business as usual, was it? ‘I’ll help you,’ Steve said quietly. ‘I want to see you catch whoever did it. But I don’t
think it’s Fleming you want. He said he was trying to get the word out. If he planted the bombs, why spin that cock-and-bull story in the first place? And if he didn’t plant them, but
he knew where the bombs were, why
wouldn’t
he tell me?’

‘Leave the analysis to us,’ suggested Agent Judt. ‘It’s our specialty.’ He pointed at the dictaphone. ‘I need to take that, I’m afraid. Jack, if
you’d like to stay with Mr. Schroeder just in case the phone rings? I’m going to bring headquarters up to speed, get some backup in.’ He looked pointedly at Riccardo. ‘You
didn’t hear any of this, Mr. Pirello, but it would be very helpful to me if you could have someone in your building security department provide Agent Fowler and me with visitor badges, and
warn the front desk we’re expecting colleagues.’

Riccardo scuttled away as soon as Judt broke eye contact. Then he turned back to Steve. ‘Just wait here with Jack,’ he said reassuringly.

‘What if Fleming phones? What do I do?’ Steve demanded.

‘Answer it,’ said Fowler, in a much more human tone of voice. ‘Record it, and let me listen in. And if he wants to set up a meeting – go for it.’

*

In a cheap motel room on the outskirts of Providence, Mike Fleming sat on the edge of an overstuffed mattress and poured a stiff shot of bourbon into the glass from the
bathroom. His go bag sat on the luggage rack, leaking the dregs of his runaway life: a change of underwear, a set of false ID documents, the paperwork for the rental car in the parking lot –
hired under a false name, paid for with a credit card under that name. The TV on the chest of drawers blatted on in hypermanic shock, showing endless rolling reruns of a flash reflecting off the
Potomac, the collapsing monument – for some reason, the White House seemed to be taboo, too raw a nerve to touch in the bleeding subconscious of a national trauma. He needed the bourbon, as a
personal anesthetic: It was appallingly bad tradecraft, he knew, but right now he didn’t feel able to face reality without a haze of alcohol.

Mike wasn’t an amateur. He’d always known – always – that a job could blow up in his face. You didn’t expect that to happen, in the DEA, but you were an idiot if
you didn’t take precautions and make arrangements to look after your own skin. It was surprisingly easy to build up a false identity, and after one particular assignment in Central America
had gone bad on him with extreme prejudice (a local chief of police had turned out to be the brother-in-law of the local heroin wholesaler), he’d carefully considered his options. When Pete
Garfinkle had died, he’d activated them. It made as much sense as keeping his gun clean and loaded – especially after Dr. James had earmarked him for a one-way ticket into fairyland.
They weren’t forgeries, they were genuine, legal ID: He didn’t use the license to get off speeding tickets, and he paid the credit card bill in full every time he used it. They were
simply an insurance policy for dangerous times, and ever since he’d gotten back home after the disastrous expedition into Niejwein a couple of months ago, he’d been glad of the driving
license and credit card taped inside a video cassette’s sleeve in the living room.

From Steve Schroeder’s office he’d taken the elevator down to street level, caught a bus, switched to the Green Line, changed train and commuter line three times in thirty minutes,
then hopped a Chinatown bus to New York, exiting early and ultimately ending up in a motel in Providence with a new rental car and a deep sense of foreboding. Then, walking into the motel front
desk, he’d seen the endless looping scenes of disaster on CNN. It had taken three times as long as usual to check in. One of the two clerks on duty was weeping, her shoulders shaking; the
other was less demonstrative, but not one hundred percent functional. ‘Why do they
hate
us?’ the weeping one moaned during a break in her crying jag. ‘Why won’t they
leave us alone?’

‘Think Chemical Ali did it?’ Three months ago it would have been Saddam, before his cousin’s palace coup on the eve of the invasion.

‘Who cares?’

Mike had disentangled himself, carefully trying not to think too hard about the scenes on the TV. But once he got to his room, it hit him.

I tried to prevent it. But I failed.

A vast, seething sense of numbness threatened to swallow him.
This can’t be happening, there must be some way out of here, some way to get to where this didn’t happen.
But it
had
happened; for better or worse – almost certainly for worse – Miriam’s enemies had lashed out at the Family Trade Organization in the most brutal way imaginable. Not
one, but two bombs had gone off in D.C.: Atomic bombs, the all-time nightmare the DHS had been warning about, the things Mike had been having nightmares about for the year since Matthias walked
into a DEA office in downtown Boston with a stolen ingot of plutonium in his pocket.