The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (18 page)

Mike waited for Smith to unlock the door. Smith was in shirtsleeves, his collar undone and his tie loose.
Air conditioner must be acting up again
, Mike thought before he registered the
other man sitting at the transparent table.

‘What can I do for you, sir?’ He glanced at the stranger, apprais-ingly.
Red badge, purple stripe
. In the arcane color-coded NSA hierarchy Smith had imported, that meant a
visitor, but the kind of visitor who was allowed to ask pointed questions. ‘Good afternoon,’ Mike added, cautiously.

‘Have a seat.’ Smith dropped back into his own chair so Mike took his cue, settled at the other side of the table. The visitor was thin-faced, in his thirties or forties, and had a
receding hairline.
Like Hugo Weaving in The Matrix
, Mike realized. Right down to the tie clip. That
had
to be deliberate.
An asshole, but a high-clearance asshole
, he
thought irritably.

‘Mike, this is Dr. Andrew James, from Yale by way of the Agency and the Heritage Foundation. Andrew, this is Senior Agent Mike Fleming, DEA, on secondment to FTO. So you know where you
stand, Mike, Dr. James is our new Deputy Director of Operational Intelligence, which is to say, he’s going to be running our side of the show once we achieve some organizational focus.’
His cheek twitched. ‘Any questions?’

‘I’m very pleased to meet you, sir,’ Mike said politely, trying to keep his face impassive.
Another fucking spook
. ‘Spook’ spelled ‘cowboy’, as
far as Mike was concerned. They tended to know nothing about law enforcement, and care less. Which said something unpleasant about the direction this meeting was going to go in.

‘I’m sure you’re pleased.’ James had a dry, gravelly voice. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ He didn’t smile. He didn’t frown.
He looks
like a robot
, Mike thought. He rubbed his palms on his trousers, abruptly uneasy.

‘You’re dead right,’ James continued. ‘I
am
a political appointee. I’m here because certain parties in the administration want to keep a tight lock on the
operational cycle of the Family Trade Organization and ensure it doesn’t run wild. You’re currently stovepiped into NSA and DEA, but that’s got to change. We’re keeping the
DOJ connection, but it’s been decided that the operational emphasis in the organization is going to be moved toward the military side. So my public title is Deputy Director,
Political-Military Affairs, reporting to NSC. In reality, I’m going to be moving into your turf here as your DD/OI, liaising with NSC and the White House to keep them apprised of whatever you
HUMINT guys can get out of our assets, and also to keep Justice in the loop. Are we clear, yet?’ He cracked a wintry smile.

Mike glanced at Smith, registering his close-faced expression.
This is not good
. ‘Not entirely, sir,’ he said slowly, trying to get his thoughts in order. ‘I
understand the oversight aspect. But am I right in saying that you see this as primarily a national security problem, rather than a domestic policing one?’

‘Yes.’ James laid his hands flat on the tabletop, fingers spread wide across it. ‘We will be emphasizing national security approaches. These – this “Clan”
– is an external threat. They’ve got nuclear material, and the narcoterrorism angle is, in our view – that is, the strategic view received from the top down – of subsidiary
importance to the question of whether a hostile power is going to start blowing up our cities.’

‘Am I still needed?’ Mike asked bluntly, a disturbing sense of helpless anger stealing over him. ‘Or did you call me up here to reassign me?’

James smiled again, like a shark circling wounded prey in the water. ‘Not exactly. Colonel Smith tells me that in the eighty-one days since this organization got off the ground, the
organization has laid its hands on just one willing HUMINT asset, and he’s of questionable worth. You’ve been tasked with interrogating him, because you were his first contact. I find
that kind of hard to believe – can you summarize for me?’

Mike felt his pulse quicken.
Smith set me up
. He glanced at his boss, who narrowed his eyes and shook his head infinitesimally.
No?
Then it was James. Spook tactics.
Double-check everyone against everyone else, trust nobody, grab the situation by the throat –
hang on
. ‘Can you confirm your clearances for me? No offense, but so far all
I’ve got to go on is your word.’ He nodded at Smith. ‘Standard protocol.’ Standard protocol was trust nobody, accept nothing, and it was supposed to apply at all levels
– which was why Swann checked Mike’s ID and clearances every morning before giving him the keys to his own office. He tensed: if James wanted to make an issue of it –

But instead he nodded agreeably. ‘Very good, Mr. Fleming. Badge reader over there.’ He stood up and walked over to the machine. ‘Why don’t you clear yourself to me, at
the same time?’

‘I think that would be a very good idea, sir,’ Mike said carefully. They both ran their badges through the scanner, and Mike noted James’s list of clearances. It was about a
third longer than his own. ‘Great, I’m allowed to tell you that you exist.’ He smiled, experimentally, and James nodded as he returned to his seat.

Mike took a deep breath.
Okay, so he’s not a total jerk. I can live with that
. ‘We do indeed have a problem with intelligence assets,’ he began. ‘So far all
we’ve got is one willing defector and two prisoners. The defector, as usual, is willing to tell us one hundred and fifty percent of whatever he thinks we want to hear. And the prisoners not
only aren’t talking, I don’t think they
can
talk.’

James grunted as if he’d been punched in the gut. ‘Explain.’ He held up one hand: ‘I’ve read the backgrounder and played the debrief tapes from Matt. Color me an
interested ignoramus and give it to me straight, I don’t have time for excuses. Pretend I’m Daddy Warbucks, if you like. That’s where this buck stops.’

‘Uh, okay.’ Mike sat down again, head whirling.
The Office of the Vice President?
He’s
in charge, now?
Notoriously strong-willed, the VP in this
administration more than made up for any lack of experience in the Oval Office. But this was still news to Mike.
Later
.

He cleared his throat. ‘We got a windfall in the form of Matt. Without him, FTO wouldn’t exist. We’d still be looking at eight to ten gigabucks of H and C per annum
transshipping into the east coast with no clue how it was getting past the Coast Guard. We’re still probably looking at half that, but for now – ’ He shrugged. ‘First thing
first, Matt is probably the most valuable informer any American police or security department has acquired, ever.’

He swallowed. ‘But we hit a concrete wall in the follow-through stage.’

‘Concrete.’ James made a steeple of his fingers, elbows braced on the transparent tabletop. ‘What do you mean, concrete?’

‘Okay. In our first week, Pete and I holed up with Matt and milked him like crazy. Apart from the side trip to the black box down in Crypto City, of course.’ He nodded at Smith.
‘By day six on the timeline we were ready to move. Thanks to the courier snatch on day two, the other side already knew we were active, so it wasn’t much of a surprise when we rolled
eight empty nests in a row. The haul was pretty good but the assets had flown, money and bodies and drugs. If you’ve seen the details of what we found’ – James nodded –
‘you’ll know it was a very substantial operation. Disturbingly well structured. These guys are like a major espionage agency in their approach, sort of like the old-time KGB: organized
in teams with secure communications and safe houses and an org chart. This isn’t some street gang. But we didn’t catch anyone. There’s another raid going down today, as it
happens, but I expect that one to draw a blank too. These guys are way too professional.’

James nodded, his expression thoughtful. ‘Tell me about the two prisoners.’

‘Well. Pete and I went back to Matt, who filled us in on the other side’s security architecture. We put our heads together and took a stab, with Matt in the loop, at second-guessing
how the other side’s head, the Duke, would rearrange things in the light of Matt’s disappearance. Matt said he’d arranged a cover that would make it look like he’d died, so
we tried a few fallbacks on the working assumption that they hadn’t twigged that Matt was in our pocket. We also hit another nine that we knew would be evacuated, in case they put two and two
together about Matt. The decoys got the same treatment as the first wave of raids, but for the special targets we pulled strings to get some special assets in for the party.’

Mike leaned back.
Special assets
– the sort of people the CIA had been forbidden to deploy since the Church commission, the wake of Operation Phoenix, and the other deadly secrets
from the sixties and early seventies. Guys with plastic-surgery fingerprints and briefcases full of very expensive custom-built toys. ‘We drew a blank on one site, but number two had about
sixty kilos of uncut heroin, plus a bunch of documents in Code Gamma. The third site, we hit pay dirt and three couriers. One of them died in the extraction process’ – killed by
fentanyl fumes, brain-dead before the special assets could hook her up to a ventilator – ‘but the other two we bagged and tagged and shipped off to Facility Echo. Turns out
there’s no record of these guys anywhere – they’re ghosts, they don’t exist. Didn’t even have any fake ID on them. I liaised with Special Agent Herz and we arranged a
section 412 detention order. Because they’re of no known nationality there’s no one to deport them to, and once INS punches their ticket as illegal aliens we get to keep them out of the
court system. Better than Camp X-Ray. Shame we can’t get anything useful out of them,’ he added apologetically.

James frowned. ‘Why won’t they talk?’

‘Well, near as we can tell, they don’t speak English.’ Mike waited to see how James would react.

When it came, it was a minute nod. ‘What about Spanish?’

‘Nope.’ Mike watched him minutely. No grasping at straws, no accusations of leg-pulling.
He’s not so bad
, he thought grudgingly.
Not bad for a REMF spook
.
‘We know about the tattoos, so we took precautions. Courier Able had a mirror tattoo on his head, under the hairline, and Courier Bravo had one on the inside of his left wrist. We kept them
hooded and blindfolded until we had time to get a security-cleared cosmetologist with a laser in to erase them. But we’re pretty sure that these guys don’t speak English or Spanish
– or French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croat, Japanese, Latin, Korean, Mandarin, or Cantonese.’
And don’t ask how we know
–
the old fire drill trick could look very bad, very close to psychological torture, if a defense attorney dragged it up in front of a hostile jury. ‘They
do
speak something Germanic,
we got that much, and Matt checks out as a translator. They call it “Hochsprache”, and it sounds like it diverged from various proto-German dialects about sixteen hundred years ago
– it’s about as similar to German as modern Spanish is to classical Latin.’ He took another deep breath. ‘I’m trying to learn it, but there’s not much to go with
– I mean, neither of the detainees are willing to help, and Matthias isn’t exactly a foreign-language teacher. We’re working on a lexicon, and we’ve got a couple of research
linguists coming in as soon as we get their security clearances through, but it’s a big problem. I figure these guys were drafted in as mules, shuttling back and forth between buildings in
the same place in both worlds – what they call doppelgänger houses. To do that, they don’t need to pass as Americans. But getting information out of them is difficult.’

Which is an understatement and a half
, Mike added mentally. Matt was becoming a headache – increasingly demanding and suspicious, paranoid about the terms of his confinement and
the likelihood of his eventual release under a false identity. Sooner or later he’d stop cooperating, and then they’d be in big trouble.

‘Well, we are going to have a pressing need for that expertise in the near future.’ James sat up abruptly, as if he’d come to some decision. ‘Mr. Fleming, I have some
news for you which might sound negative at first, so I hope you’ll listen carefully and take it positively. We have no functioning human intelligence assets at all in the place they come
from. Just like the situation in Afghanistan back in 2001 – and we can’t afford to be flying blind. I’ve been reviewing your personnel file and, bluntly, you’re nothing
exceptional – except that you’ve got a three-month lead over everyone else in the field in this one area of expertise. So, with immediate effect I’m directing Colonel Smith here
to reassign you from Investigations Branch to a new core team – on-location HUMINT. And your prisoner is going to be reassigned to military custody, although for the time being he’ll
stay where he is.’

‘Military custody?’ Mike raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not sure that’s legal.’

‘It will be when the AG’s office delivers their ruling,’ James said dismissively. ‘As I was about to say, you will continue to work on language skills and continue
debriefing Matthias, and liaise with Investigations Branch as necessary – but you’re also going to go back to school. Field operations school, to be precise. You’re going to ride
shotgun on a code word operation you haven’t heard of before now, code word CLEANSWEEP, and you have BLUESKY clearance. Your primary job will be to learn who these people are and how they
think, and their language and customs, and anything else that lets us get a handle on their minds. And you’re going to learn them well enough to learn how to move among them undetected. Do
you understand me?’

‘Yes, I think I do.’ Mike’s mouth was dry.
So they’re taking this military?
‘You’re asking for a spy. Right?’
Can they do this?
Legally?
He had a feeling that any objections he raised would be steamrolled. And expressing them in the first place might be rather dangerous.