The Merchants’ War

“Go on…”

“I haven’t debriefed him yet. But at a guess, what we’ve already done has hurt their operations on the east coast, and sending agents through after them is going to scare the shit out of them. They’re going to have to negotiate or escalate. Leaving aside the business with GREENSLEEVES and the nuke, we’re going to have to negotiate or escalate, too. Now, it’s not for me to advise on policy, but I suspect we’re going to find that Mike was sent back by someone who stands to gain from negotiating with us. Call them faction ‘A’. The red-on-red action suggests there’s a rival faction, call them ‘B’. So we really need to keep a lid on this, because if the ‘B’ faction figures that the ‘A’ faction want to negotiate, they may try to torpedo things by escalating. And if GREENSLEEVES wasn’t bluffing about the nuke, we could be in a world of hurt.”

Dr. James nodded minutely. “Your advice?”

“We have to find that nuke, or rule it out. And we have to keep them talking while JAUNT BLUE get their shit together. Right now, we’re fumbling around in the dark—but so are they. All they know is, we’ve whacked a bunch of their operations and figured out how to get an agent across. And if they’re in trouble internally, presumably they’d love to get us off their backs while they clean up their own mess. They probably think we don’t know about the nukes, and we can be pretty sure that they don’t know about JAUNT BLUE. Everything we know about them suggests they just don’t think in those terms, otherwise they’d be crawling all over us.”

“So. You propose that we debrief Agent Fleming, then use him to establish a back channel to the leadership of Group ‘A,’ with the goal of stalling them with the promise of negotiations while we clean up the missing nuke and get some results from JAUNT BLUE. Is that a fair summary?”

Eric blinked, then rubbed his forehead. “You put it better than I did,” he said ruefully. “Long day.”

“Going to be longer,” James said laconically. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling air vents for a while, until Eric began to think he was planning on taking a nap: but just as he was about to stand up and leave, James sat up abruptly and looked at him. “Your analysis is valid, but incomplete because there are some facts you are unaware of.”

Uh? “Obviously,” Eric said cautiously. “Should I be?”

“I think so.” James stared at him, his expression deceptively mild. “Same rules as the Fleming debriefing. This goes nowhere near a computer or a telephone. You follow?”

Eric nodded.

“Number one. Obviously, I do not want—nobody wants—to see a terrorist nuke detonated in an American city. Even if it’s in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, that would be very bad. But you need to understand this: if the worst happens, if that bomb goes off, a use will be found for it. The bloody shirt will be waved. Do you understand?”

Eric licked his suddenly dry lips. “Who’s the fall guy?”

“The Boy Wonder’s got a hard-on for Mr. Hussein, and PNAC will fall in line, but—” Dr. James shook his head. “I’m not sure who, Colonel. All I can tell you is, it will be someone who we can hammer for it. The hammer is ready, and if the United States doesn’t wield it from time to time the other players may begin to wonder if we’re still willing. So if JAUNT BLUE is ready, the target might be the Clan. And if JAUNT BLUE isn’t ready, we’ll hit someone else, someone we can reach and need to nail flat. North Korea, Iraq, Iran, whoever. But. Whatever else happens, if there’s a hard outcome, it will be used to strengthen our hand. We’ll have carte blanche.” He stared at Eric. “The code name for this plan—and I stress, it’s a contingency plan, a political spin to put on a disaster—is MARINUS BERLIN.”

“Jesus.” Eric looked away. “That’s disgusting.”

“Yes. I know. But what else can we do?”

“Find the bomb.”

“Yes!” James’s frustration boiled over in Eric’s: “If you’ve got some kind of magic superpowers that let you stare through concrete walls and pinpoint missing nukes, then I’d like to hear about them, Colonel. Failing that, if you have any better ideas, I’m sure Daddy Warbucks would like to know what else to fricking do if terrorists nuke one of our cities?”

Shit. “I’m sorry. Like I said, we’re looking. I’ll see if I can scare up some backup when we get back, okay?”

“You’d better. Because falling on our swords is not on the agenda for this administration, son. We’re not going to hand the country to the other team just because some assholes from another dimension fuck with us, any more than we did when bin Laden got uppity and bit the feeding hand.” James paused. “I shouldn’t have blown up then. Forget I said anything, it’s not your fault. There’s a lot at stake here that you aren’t in on: the big picture is really scary. All the oil in fairyland, for starters.”

“All the what?”

Dr. James looked as if he’d bitten a lemon while expecting an orange. “Oil, son. Makes the world go round. You know what the business with al-Qaeda is about? Oil. We’re in Saudi Arabia because of the oil: bin Laden wants us out of Saudi. We’re going to go into Iraq because of the oil. Oil is leverage. Oil lets us put the Chinks and Europeans in their place. And we’re running short of it, in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s this thing called peak oil coming and we’ve got analysts scratching their heads to figure out how we’re going to field it. We’re not going to run out, but demand is going to exceed supply and the price is going to start climbing in a few years. Our planetary preeminence relies on us having cheap oil for our industries, while everyone else pays through the nose for it. But we can’t guarantee to keep prices low if we’re having to send our boys out to sit in the desert and keep the wells pumping. So it was looking bad until six months ago, but now there’s a new factor in the equation…”

He took a deep breath. “The Clan. A bunch of medieval jerks, squatting on our territory—or a good cognate of it. What’s going down in Texas, Colonel Smith? Their version of Texas, not our Texas: what are they doing there? I’ll tell you what they’re doing: they’re sitting on twice as much oil as Saddam Hussein, and that’s what’s got Daddy Warbucks’s attention. Because, you see, if JAUNT BLUE delivers, eventually all that good black stuff is going to be ours…”

“Are we nearly there yet?”

Huw glanced in the driver’s mirror, taking his eyes off the interstate for a couple of seconds. Elena sprawled across one half of the back seat of the Hummer H2 truck, managing to look louche and bored simultaneously. Petulant, that was the word. A twenty-one-year-old Clan princess—no, merely a contessa in waiting, should she inherit—fresh from her Swiss finishing school and her first semester at college: out in the big bad world for the first time, with two brave knights to look after her. File off the serial numbers and you could mistake her for a spoiled preppy kitten. Of course, the jocks who’d be clustering around the latter type didn’t usually carry swords. Nor did normal preppies know how to handle the FN P90 in the trunk. Still, Huw let his eyes linger on her tight jeans and embroidered babydoll tee for a second longer than was strictly necessary, before he glanced back at the road and the GPS navigation screen.

“About twenty miles to go. Eighteen minutes. We turn off in ten.”

“Boring.” She faked a yawn at him, slim hand covering pink lip gloss.

“I’m bored too,” snarked Hulius, from his nest in the front passenger seat. He took an orange from the glove box and began to peel it with his dagger. Citrus droplets swirled in the aircon breeze.

“We’re all bored,” Huw said affably. “Are you suggesting I should break the speed limit?”

Hulius paled. “No—”

“Good.” Huw smiled. The white duke took a dim view of traffic infractions, and supplemented the official fines with additional punishments of his own choice: ten strokes of the lash for a first offense. Don’t ever, ever draw attention to yourselves was the first rule they drilled into everyone before letting them out the door. Which was why couriers on Post duty dressed like lawyers, and why the three of them were driving down the interstate at a sober two miles under the speed limit, in a shiny new Hummer, with every i dotted and t crossed on the paperwork that proved them to be a trio of MIT graduate students with rich parents, off on a field trip.

The green dot on the map inched south along Route 95, slowly converging on Baltimore and the afternoon traffic. The aircon fans hissed steadily, but Huw could still feel the heat beating down on the back of his hand through the tinted glass. Concrete rumbled under the magically smooth suspension of the truck. The scrubby grass outside was parched, burned almost brown by the summer heat. He’d made a journey part of the distance down this way once before on horseback, in a place with no air-conditioning or cars: it had been a fair approximation of hell. Doing the journey in a luxury SUV was heaven—albeit a particularly boring corner of it. “Have you checked the