The Merchants’ War

Geraunt!” Otto boomed over the balcony: “Will you join me up here directly?”

A pale face turned up towards him in surprise. “Sir, I would be delighted to do so, but this cat’s cradle your artisans are weaving is in my way. If you would permit me to cut the knot—”

“No sir, you may not. But if you proceed through the door to your left, you will find the stairway accessible— for now.”

A minute later Sir Geraunt emerged onto the balcony, shaking his head. A couple of weavers also emerged, lugging a roll of netting between them, but Otto sent them a wave of dismissal. “We are in less danger from the witches the higher we go, but the balcony must be netted in due course,” he explained, for the younger man was still staring at the work in the room below with an expression of profound bafflement.

“My lord, I fail to understand what you are doing here. Is it some ritual?”

“In a way,” Otto said easily. He walked to the edge of the balcony, and pointed down. “What do you see there?”

“A mess—” Sir Geraunt visibly forced himself to focus. “Nets strung across the floor, and walkways for your men. The witches appear from the land of shadows, do they not? Is this some kind of snare?”

“Yes.” Otto nodded. It wouldn’t do to let the witches retake the castle too easily—his majesty’s little plan wasn’t the kind of trick you could play twice. “Observe the open area, and the position of the guards—who are free to move where they will. I am informed by an unimpeachable source that the witches cannot arrive inside another object: that is, they may be able to appear within the building, but if the exact spot they desire to occupy is filled by a piece of furniture or a tree or another body, they are blocked. The netting is close enough to prevent them arriving anywhere on the covered floor. Thus, if they wish to pay us a visit, they must do so on the ground I leave to them. Where, you will note, my soldiers are awaiting them.”

Sir Geraunt’s eyes widened. “Truly, his majesty chose wisely in placing his faith in you!”

“Perhaps. We’ll see when the foe arrive. That was why I called for you, as a matter of fact: the witches have unforeseen resources. A most peculiar carriage just overflew us, carrying a man who is now, without a doubt, hastening to their headquarters with word of our presence. I had counted on having an entire day to prepare the defenses here, and the surprise outside. To make matters worse, my guards fired on the intruder—and missed. His majesty is still a day away. I therefore expect the witches to attack within a matter of hours.”

The knight’s reaction was predictable: “I stand before you. What can I do on your behalf?”

Otto managed to produce a thin smile. “I expect to kill a fair number of witches, but they have better guns than my men, and probably other surprises beside. So I am moving things forward. A reinforced company will stay here to take the first attack. The survivors will fall back through the tunnel to the river. Hopefully the resistance will force them to concentrate in the castle, but our witch-guns on the curtain walls, pointing inwards, will bottle them up for long enough to execute his majesty’s plan…”

It was shaping up to be a good day, thought Eric, as he twisting his left wrist with increasing effort to get the gyroball up to speed. A good day in a good week. Judith’s report from the scene under Scollay Square was the second bit of really good news after Mike Fleming’s remarkable reappearance. Heads we win: Lucius punches in the PAL code and switches off the bomb. Tails we don’t lose: we get to deal with a fizzle, but we keep Boston. There were cover stories available to deal with a fizzle, to sweep it under the rug—it would be messy, but a whole different matter from losing the core of a city. “I’m waiting on a definite match when they finish fuming for prints,” Judith had told him from the scene, “but we got some good UV-fluorescence images of patent prints in the dirt around the lock, and it sure looks like GREENSLEEVES’s prints.” Eric gave the ball another flick of the wrist. Which means we can take the kid gloves off now, he thought, with a warm glow of satisfaction. Just as soon as we’ve confirmed no other stock is missing. And he went back to staring at his desk.

Back when telephone switchboards were simple looms of wires and plug boards, different networks needed different wires. You could judge how important an official was by how many phone handsets he had on his desk. Life had been a lot simpler in those days. Today, Eric had just the one handset—and it plugged into his computer instead of a hole in the wall. He glanced at the clock in his taskbar to confirm the call was late, just as the computer rang.

“Smith here.” He leaned back.

“Eric? Mandy in two-zero-two.”

“Hi Mandy, Jim here. Y’all had a good day so far?”

“I’ll take roll call.” Eric grinned humorously. The list of names on the conference call was marching down the side of his screen. “Looks like we’re missing Alain and Sonya. I’d give them another five minutes, but I’ve got places to be and meetings to go to, so if we can get started?”

The field ops conference call was under way. Like any policing or intelligence-gathering operation, the hunt for the extradimensional narcoterrorists called for coordination and intelligence sharing: and with agents scattered across four time zones it couldn’t be carried out by calling everyone into a briefing room. But unlike a policing job, some aspects of the task were extraordinarily sensitive and could not be discussed, and unlike a normal intelligence operation, things were too fluid and unstable to leave to the usual bureaucratic channels of written reports and weekly bulletins. So the daily ops call had become a fixture within FTO, or at least within that part of FTO that was focused on hunting the bad guys within the Continental United States. Each field office delegated a staff intelligence officer who could be trusted to filter the information stream for useful material and refrain from mentioning in public those projects that not everyone was cleared for. Or so the post-hoc justification went. In practice, they gave Eric a chance to keep a finger on the pulse of his department at ground level without spending all his time bouncing around the airline map.

In practice, normally all it was usually good for was an hour’s intensive wrist exercise with the gyroball and a frustrating ten minutes writing up a summary for Dr. James. But today, Eric could smell something different in the air.

“…Following up the mobile phone thing via Wal-Mart, we’ve made some progress over here.”

Eric snapped to full alert, glancing at the screen. It was Mandy, from the team in Stony Brook. “How many phones?” He cut in.

“I was just getting to that.” She sounded offended. “The suspects bought two hundred and forty-six over the past six months, all the same model, batches of ten at a time, right up until yesterday. Wal-Mart has been very cooperative, and we’ve been going over their videotapes—they think it’s some kind of fraud ring—and it looks like a Clan operation for sure. It’s the same two men each week: if they follow the usual pattern—” the Clan had a rigid approach to buying supplies, always paying cash for small quantities at regular intervals “—we could lift them next week. We’ve also got a list of phone IMEIs and SIM numbers they bought and we’re about to go to Cingular to see if—”

“Don’t do that,” Eric interrupted again. He glanced around frantically, looking for a pen and a Post-it: he hadn’t expected this much information, so soon. “We have other resources to call on who are better at dealing with this angle.” To be precise, Bob and Alice at No Such Agency, who—given a mobile phone’s identifying fingerprints— could tell you everything about them. This was the trouble with ex-FBI staff: they did great investigative work, but they didn’t know what external strings they could pull with Defense. “E-mail me the list immediately,” he ordered. “I’ll take it from there.”

“Certainly, I’ll send them right after—”

“No, I meant now.” The gyroball, unnoticed, wound down. “If any of those phones are switched on, we can get more than a trace.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going offline now, waiting on that e- mail, Mandy.” He hit the hangup button and shook his head, then speed-dialed a different number.

The phone picked up immediately. “James here.”

“It’s me. I assume you’re in the loop over Lucius’s little project? Well, Stony Brook has just hit the mother- lode, too. Mobiles, numbers. I’m forwarding everything to EARDROP. If any of them turn out to be live I intend to put some assets on the ground and tag them—then it’s time to turn up the heat. If Herz confirms that the gadget under Government Center was planted by GREENSLEEVES, and Dr. Rand’s friends confirm that no other weapons of the same class are missing, I propose to activate COLDPLAY.”

“Excellent,” said James. “Get started, then get back to me. It’s time to hurt these bastards.”

Three coaches full of medieval weekend warriors drove in convoy through the Massachusetts countryside, heading towards Concord.

The coaches were on lease from a small private hire firm, and someone had inexpertly covered their sides