The Clan Corporate

INTERNMENT

It had been twelve weeks, and Matt was already getting stir-crazy.

“I’m bored,” he announced from the sofa at the far side of the room. He looked moody, as well he might. “You keep me down here for weeks, months—no news! I hear no things about how my case is progressing, just endless questions, ‘what is this’ and ‘what is that.’ And now this dictionary! What is a man to do?”

“I feel your pain.” Mike frowned. Has it only been twelve weeks? That was how long they’d been holding Matt. For the first couple of weeks they’d kept him in a DEA safe house, but then they’d transferred him here—to a windowless apartment hastily assembled in the middle of an EMCON cell occupying the top floor of a rented office block. Matt’s world had narrowed until it consisted of an efficiency filled with blandly corporate Sears-catalog furniture, home electronics from Costco, and soft furnishings and kitchenware from IKEA. A prison cell, in other words, but a comfortably furnished one.

Smith had been quite insistent on the prisoner’s isolation; there wasn’t even a television in the apartment, just a flat-screen DVD player and a library of disks. A team of decorators from spook central had wallpapered the rooms outside the apartment with fine copper mesh: there were guards on the elevator bank. The kitchenette had a microwave oven, a freezer with a dozen flavors of ready meal, and plastic cutlery in case the prisoner tried to kill himself. Nobody wanted to take any chances with losing Matthias.

Not that he was being treated like a prisoner—not like the two couriers in the deep sub-basement cell who lived like moles, seeing daylight only when Dr. James’s BLUESKY spooks needed them for their experiments. But Matt wasn’t a world-walker. Matt could tell Mike everything Mike wanted to know, but he couldn’t take him there. As Pete Garfinkle had so crudely put it, it was like the difference between a pre-op transsexual and a ten-buck crack whore: Matt just didn’t have the equipment to give FTO what they wanted.

“Listen, I’d like to get you somewhere better to live, a bit more freedom. A chance to get out and move about. But we’re really up in the air here. We don’t have closure; we need to be able to question any Clan members we get our hands on ourselves. So my boss is on me to keep pumping you until we’ve got a basic grammar and lexicon so if anything happens to you—say you had a heart attack tomorrow—we wouldn’t be up shit creek.”

“Stop bullshitting me.” Matthias had been staring at the fake window in the corner of the room. (Curtains covering a sheet of glass in front of a photograph of the cityscape outside.) Now he turned back to Mike, clearly annoyed. “You do not trust me to act as interpreter, is all. Am I right?”

Mike took a deep breath, nodded. “My boss,” he said, almost apologetically. And to some extent it was true; never mind Colonel Smith, the REMF—James—acted like he didn’t trust his own left hand to give him the time of day. And he reported to Daddy Warbucks by way of the NSC—and Mike had heard all about that guy. Read about him. “Using you as an interpreter would risk exposing you to classified information. He’s very security-conscious.”

“As he should be.” Matthias snorted exasperatedly. “All right, I’ll work on your stupid dictionary. When are we going to start creating my new identity?”

“New identity?” Mike did a double take.

“Yah, the Witness Protection Scheme does try to provide the new identity, doesn’t it?”

“Oh.” Mike stared at him. “The Witness Protection Program is administered by the Department of Justice. This isn’t a DOJ operation anymore, it got taken off us—I was seconded because I was already involved. Didn’t you know?

Matthias frowned. “Who owns it?” he demanded. “The military?” Mike forced himself not to reply. After a moment Matt inclined his head fractionally. “I see,” he murmured.

Mike licked his suddenly dry lips. Did I just make a mistake? he wondered. “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”

“All right.” Matt sat down again. He sent Mike a look that clearly said, I don’t believe you.

Mike rubbed his hands together and tried to change the subject. “What would happen if—say—you were a world-walker, and you tried to cross over while you were up here?” he asked.

“I’d fall.” Matt glanced at the floor. “How high . . . ?”

“Twenty-fourth floor.” The set of Matt’s shoulders relaxed imperceptibly. Mike had no problem reading the gesture: I’m safe from them, here.

“Would you always fall?” Mike persisted.

“Well—not if there was a mountain on the other side.” Matt nodded thoughtfully. “Might be doppelgangered with a tower, in which case he’d get a bad headache and go nowhere. Or the world-walker might be lying down, in contact with solid object—go nowhere then, too.”

“Do you know if anyone has ever tried to world-walk from inside an aircraft?” Mike asked.

Matt laughed raucously.

“What’s so funny?” Mike demanded.

“You Americans! You’re so crazy!” Matthias rubbed his eyes. “Listen. The Clan, they know if you world-walk from high up you fall down, yes? Planes are no different. Now, a parachute—you could live, true. But where would you land? In the Gruinmarkt or Nordmarkt or the Debatable Lands, hundreds of miles away! The world is a dangerous place, when you have to walk everywhere.”

“Ah.” Mike nodded. “Has anyone ever world-walked from inside a moving automobile?” he asked.

“That would be suicidal.”

“Even if the person were wearing chain mail? Metal armor?” Mike persisted.

“Well, maybe they’d survive . . .” Matt stared at him. “So what?”

“Hmm.” Mike made a mental note. Okay, that was two more of the checklist items checked off. He had a long list of queries to raise with Matt, questions about field effects and conductive boundaries and just about anything else that might be useful to the geeks who were busting their brains to figure out how world-walking worked. Now to change the subject before he figures out what I’m looking for. “What happens if someone world-walks while holding a hand cart?”

“Hand carts don’t work,” Matt said dismissively.

“Okay. So it really is down to whatever a world-walker can carry, then? How many trips per day?”

“Well.” Matt paused. “The standard corvée duty owed to the Clan by adult world-walkers requires ten trips in five days, then two days off, and is repeated for a whole month, then a month off. So that would be one hundred and twenty return trips per year, carrying perhaps fifty kilograms for a woman, eighty to a hundred for a man. More trips for professional couriers, time off for pregnant women, but it averages out.”

“There’s an implicit ‘but’ there,” Mike prodded.

“Yes. Women in late pregnancy with a child that will itself be a world-walker cannot world-walk at all. Or if they try, the consequences are not pretty. But I digress. The corvée is negotiated. To a Clan member, the act of world-walking is painful. Do it once, they suffer a headache; twice in rapid succession and a hangover with vomiting is not unusual. Thrice—they won’t do it three times, unless in fear of life and limb. There are drugs they can take, to reduce the blood pressure and swaddle the pain, but they are of limited effectiveness. Four trips in eight hours, with drugs, is punishing. I have seen it myself, strong couriers reduced to cripples. If used to destruction, you might force as many as ten crossings in a period of twenty-four hours; but likely you would kill the world-walker, or put them in bed for a month.”

“So.” Mike doodled a note on his paper pad. “It might be possible for a strong male courier, with meds, to move, say, five hundred kilograms in a day. But a more reasonable upper limit is two hundred kilograms. And the load must be divided evenly into sections that one person can carry.”

Matthias nodded. “That’s it.”

“Hmm.” An SADM demolition nuke weighs about fifty kilos, but no way has the Clan got one of them, Mike told himself, mentally crossing his fingers. They’d all been retired years ago. If the thin white duke was going to do anything with his nuclear stockpile, it would probably be a crude bomb, one that would weigh half a ton or more and require considerable assembly on site. There was no risk of a backpack nuclear raid on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, then. Good. Still, if James’s mules are limited like that, we won’t be able to do much more than send a couple of spies over, will we?

“Okay, so no pregnant couriers, eh? What do the Clan’s women do when they’re pregnant? I gather things are a bit basic over there; if they can’t world-walk, does that mean you have doctors—” Mike’s pager buzzed. “Hang on a minute.” He stood up. There was an access point in the EMCON insulated room. He read the pager’s display, frowning. “I’ve got to go. Back soon.”

“About the military—” Matthias was on his feet.

“I said I’ll be back,” Mike snapped, hurrying toward the vestibule. “Just got to take a call.” He paused in front of the camera as the inner door slid shut, so the guard could get a good look at him. “Why don’t you work on the dictionary for a bit? I’ll be back soon as I can.”

One of the guards outside Matt’s room had a Secure Field Voice Terminal. Mike took it, ducked into the Post-Debriefing Office, plugged it into one of the red-painted wall sockets, and signed on to his voice mail. The joy of working for spooks, he thought gloomily. Back at DEA Boston, he’d just have picked up the phone and asked Irene, the senior receptionist, to put him through. No pissing around with encrypted Internet telephony and firewalls and paranoid INFOSEC audits in case the freakazoid hackers had figured out a way to hack in. Sometimes he wondered what he’d done to deserve being forced to work with these guys. Obviously I must have done something really bad in an earlier life. “Mike here. What is it?”

“We got the thumbs-up.” No preamble: it was Colonel Smith. “BLUESKY has emplaced the cache and on that basis our NSC cutout has approved CLEANSWEEP and you are go for action.”

“Whoops.” Mike swallowed, his heart giving a lurch. “What now?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the twenty-fourth—sorry, I’m in Facility Lambda. Just been talking to Client Zero.” More time-wasting code words to remember for something that was really quite straightforward.

“Well, that’s nice to hear. Listen, I want you in my office soonest. We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

“Okay, will comply. See you soon.”

Smith hung up, and Mike shut down the SFVT carefully, going through the post-call sanitary checklist for practice. (A radiation-hardened pocket PC running some exotic NSA-written software, the SFVT could make secure voice calls anywhere with a broadband Internet connection—as long as you scrubbed its little brains clean afterward to make sure it didn’t remember any classified gossip, a chore that made Mike wish for the days of carrier pigeons. And as long as the software didn’t crash.) “Got to go,” he told the guard. “If Matt asks, I got called away by my boss and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He signed out through the retinal scanners by the door, then waited for the armed guard in front of the elevator bank. Mike gestured at one of the doors. “Get me the twenty-second.” The guard nodded and pushed the call button. He’d already signed Mike in, knew his clearances, and knew what floors he was allowed to visit. A minute later the elevator car arrived and Mike went inside. It could have been the elevator in any other office block, except for the cameras in each corner, the call buttons covered by a crudely welded metal sheet, and the emergency hatch that was padlocked shut on the outside. No escape, that was the message it was meant to send. No entry. High security. No alternative points of view.

Mike found Smith in his office, a cramped cubbyhole dominated by an unfeasibly large safe. Smith looked tired and aggravated and energized all at once. “Mike! Grab a seat.” He was busy with something on his Secure Data Terminal—a desktop computer by any other name—and turned the screen so that Mike couldn’t see it from the visitor’s chair. “Help yourself to a Diet Coke.” There was a pallet-load of two-liter plastic bottles of pop just inside the door—it was Smith’s major personal vice, and he swore it helped him think more clearly. “I’m just finishing . . . up . . . this!” He switched the monitor off and shoved the keyboard away from him, then grinned, frighteningly. “We’ve got the green light.”

Mike nodded, trying to look duly appreciative. “That’s a big deal.” How big? Sometimes it was hard to be sure. Green light, red light—when the whole program was black, unaccountable, and off the books, who knew what anything meant? “Where do I come into it?” I’m a cop, damnit, not some kind of spook.

Smith leaned back in his chair. With one hand he picked up an odd, knobby plastic gadget; with the other he pulled a string that seemed to vanish into its guts. It began to whirr as he rotated his wrist. “You’re going into fairyland.”

“Fairyland.”

“Where the bad guys come from. Official code name for Niejwein, as of now. The doc’s little joke.” Whirr, whirr. “How’s the grammar?”

“I’m—” Mike licked his lips. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I try to talk to Matt in hochsprache, and I’ve got some grasp of the basics, but I have no idea how well I’ll do over there until—” He shrugged. “We need more people to talk to. When can I have access to the other prisoners?”

“Later.” Whirr, whirr. “Thing is, right now they’re our only transport system. Research has got some ideas, but there’s a long way to go.”

“You’re using them for transport? How?” Mike frowned.

Smith smiled faintly. “You’re a cop. You wouldn’t approve.”

I’m not going to like this. “Why not?”

“The first army lawyers we tried had a nervous breakdown as soon as we got to the world-walking bit—does posse comitatus apply if it’s geographically collocated with the continental USA?—but I figure the AG’s office will get that straightened out soon enough. In the meantime, we got a temporary waiver. These guys want to act like a hostile foreign government, they can be one—it makes life easier all round. They’re illegal combatants, and we can do what we like with them. There’s even some question over whether they’re human—being able to cross their eyes and think themselves into another universe is kind of unusual—but they’re still working on that case. Meanwhile, we’ve found a way to make them cooperate. Battle Royale.”

“Tell me.” Mike sat up.

Smith reached into one of his desk drawers and pulled something out. It looked like a giant padlock, big enough to go round a man’s neck. “Ever seen one of these?”

“Oh shit.” Mike stared, sick to his stomach. “Shining Path used them . . .”

“Yeah, well, it works for our purposes.” Smith put the collar-bomb down. “We put one on a prisoner. Set it for three hours, give him a backpack and a camera, and tell him to bury the backpack in the other world, photograph the location, then come back so we can take the collar off. We’re careful to use a location at least five miles from the nearest habitation in fairyland, to stop ’em finding a tool shop. So far they’ve both come back.”

“That’s—” Mike shook his head, at a loss for words. Ruthless sprang to mind. Abuse of prisoners was another unwelcome thought. Something about it crossed the line that divided business as usual from savagery. Fucking spooks!

Smith grinned at him. “Before we sent them the first time, we showed them what happened when one of these suckers counts down. Trust me, we’ve got no intention of killing them unless they try to escape.” Whirr, whirr. “But we can’t risk them getting loose and telling the Clan what we’re doing, can we?”

“Crazy.” Mike shook his head again. “So you’ve got two tame couriers.”

“For very limited values of tame.”

“So.” Mike licked his dry lips.

The thing in Smith’s rapidly swiveling hand was now making a high-pitched whine. He caught Mike staring at it. “Gyroball exerciser. You should try it, Mike. They’re really good. I’m spending too much time with this damn mouse, if I don’t exercise my wrist seizes up.”

Mike nodded jerkily. What’s going on? Smith was serious-minded, committed, highly professional, and just a bit more paranoid than was good for anyone. The collar-bomb thing had to be a need-to-know secret. “So why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you’re going to cross over piggyback on one of our mules before the end of the month, and once there you’ll be staying for at least two weeks,” Smith said, so casually that Mike nearly started coughing.

“Jesus, Eric, don’t you think you could give me some warning when you’re going to spring something like that?” Mike paused. He’d tried to keep a sharp note out of his voice, not entirely successfully. Since Dr. James’s visit he’d known this was coming, sooner or later—but he’d been expecting more time. “Look, the lexicon and dictionary aren’t done yet, our linguists aren’t through their in-processing, and Matt’s not competent to work on it on his own. If something goes wrong while I’m on the other side and you lose Matt’s cooperation as well, it’ll seriously jeopardize my successor’s ability to pick up the pieces. Anyway, don’t I know too much? Last week I had a GS-12 telling me I’m not allowed to leave the country on vacation, I can’t even go to fricken’ Tijuana, and now you’re talking about a hostile insertion and a theater assignment? I’m a cop, not James Bond!”

“Relax, Mike, it’s all in hand. We’ve cut orders for some army linguists, they’re already cleared. You don’t need to know everything about the contingency planning that’s going into this. More to the point, by the time you go out into the field you’ll be far enough out of the core decision loop that even if the bad guys capture you, you won’t be able to give our strategic goals away.” Smith’s smile was unreassuring.

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” Mike stared. “Listen, this is all ass-backward. We ought to be trying to arrest more couriers on this side before we even think about going over there. We can secure our own soil without engaging in some kind of insane adventure, surely?”

Smith snorted. “You’re still thinking like a cop. I’d be right with you, except we’ve got a big tactical security problem, son. We’re not dealing with some Trashcanistan where the State Department can make the local kleptocrats shit themselves just by sneezing: we’re in the dark. We have zero assets, SIGINT is useless when the other guy’s infrastructure is pony express . . . We’re going to need to get intelligence on the ground, not to mention establishing a network of informers. We don’t even know what local political tensions we can leverage. So we’ve got to put someone in charge on the ground with enough of an overview to know what’s important—and the hat fits you.”

“You’re talking about making me semi-autonomous,” Mike said, then licked his suddenly dry lips. “What is this, back to the OSS?” He was referring to the almost legendary Second World War agency—the predecessor to the CIA—and the cowboy stunts that had led to its postwar shutdown.

“Not entirely.” Smith looked serious. “And yes, you’re right. Normally we wouldn’t let someone like you loose in the field. But you’re on the inside, you’re one of our local language and custom experts, and you can hand Matt over to someone else—”

“But I can’t! Not if we want to preserve his cooperation and keep getting useful stuff out of him. He’s a key witness—”

“He’s not a witness,” Smith said quietly. “You forget he’s an unlawful combatant. He’s just one who’s chosen to cooperate with us, and we’re giving him the kid-glove treatment because of that. For now.”

“He’s enrolled in the Witness Protection Scheme,” Mike persisted. “Meaning he’s on the books, unlike your two mules. There’s no need to treat this like Afghanistan; we can crack the Clan over here by handling it as an enforcement problem.”

“Wrong.” Smith shook his head. “And if you went digging you’d find that Source Greensleeves has vanished from the DEA evidence trail and the WPS. Look, you’re looking at this with your cop head on, not your national security head. The Clan are a geopolitical nightmare. All our conventional bases are insecure: they’re designed to a doctrine that says security is about keeping bad guys at arm’s length—except now we’re facing a threat that can close the distance undetected. It’s like a human stealth technology. Nor are our traditional allies going to be worth a warm bucket of spit. Firstly, they don’t know what we’re up against, and if they did, they’d be up against their own private insurgencies as well. Secondly, they’re positioned badly—we can’t use ’em for basing, they can’t use us, the normal rules don’t apply. And then it gets worse. Imagine what Al-Qaida could do to us if they could hire these freaks for transport. Or North Korea?”

“Oh.” Mike hunched his shoulders defensively. The spooks have legitimate fears, he told himself. But how do I know they’re legitimate? How do I know they’re not seeing things? Then: But what do we really know about the Clan? What makes them tick?

“Some of those sneaky bastards we call allies would stab us in the back as soon as look at us,” said Smith, mistaking Mike’s thoughtful silence for complicity. “This isn’t the Cold War anymore, and we’re not up against godless communism, we’re up against drug smugglers sans frontiers. If you think the Dutch are going to be any use—”

Mike, who had been to Amsterdam on business a couple of times, and had a pretty good idea what the Dutch authorities would think about drug smugglers with a plutonium supply, held his silence. Smith’s venting was just that—effusions born of the frustration of fighting an invisible foe with inadequate intelligence and insufficient reach. More to the point . . . They’ve dragged me into their covert ops world, he realized. If I make a fuss, will they let me out again?

“Phase one,” Mike said when Smith ran down. “When does it kick off? What should I be doing?”

Smith scribbled a note on his yellow legal pad. “I’ll e-mail you the details, securely. First briefing is Tuesday, kickoff should be week after next. You’d better keep your overnight bag by your desk, and be prepared to relocate on my word.” His grin widened. “In a couple of days you’re going back to school, like Dr. James said. You’ll be studying Spying 101. It’ll be fun . . .”

Mike had been home for barely an hour when the phone rang.

Home wasn’t somewhere he saw a lot of these days: since joining the magical mystery tour from spook central, his personal life had been patchy at best. From working the mostly regular hours of a cop—regular insofar as they varied wildly and he could be called out at odd times of day or night, but at least got shifts off to recover—he’d found himself putting in eighty- to hundred-hour weeks in one or another of the secure offices the Family Trade Organization had established. Helen the cleaner had taken Oscar in for a couple of weeks at one point, and the tomcat still hadn’t forgiven him. That hurt; he and Oscar went back a long way together. Oscar had been with him before he’d been married to his ex-wife. Oscar had watched girlfriends come and go, then mostly had the place to himself since 9/11. But everyone had to make sacrifices during wartime—even elderly tomcats.

Mike had showered and unloaded the dishwasher and stuck a meal in the microwave, and he was working on a tin of pet food for Oscar (who was encouraging him by trying to get tangled up in his ankles) when the doorbell rang. “Shit.” Mike put the can down. Oscar yowled reproachfully as he fumbled the handset of the entryphone. “Yes?”

“Mike?” It was Pete Garfinkle. Pete had moved sideways into Monitoring and Surveillance lately. “Mind if I come up?”

“Sure, be my guest.”

By the time Pete knocked on the apartment door, Oscar was head down in the chow bowl and Mike was well into second thoughts. The microwave oven buzzed for attention just as the door rattled. “Come on in. I was just about to eat—”

“S’okay.” Pete held up a plastic bag. “I figured you wouldn’t turn away a six-pack, and I hit Taco Bell on the way over.” The bag clinked as he planted it on the kitchen table.

Mike grinned. “Grab a chair. Glasses in the top cupboard.”

“Glasses? We don’t need no steenkin’ glasses!”

Mike planted his dinner on a plate, still in the plastic container, and grabbed a fork and two glasses. “Mm. Smells like . . . chicken.” He pulled a face. “I’ve got a freezer-load of sweet ’n’ sour chicken balls, can you believe it? The job lot was going cheap at Costco.”

“Lovely.” Pete eyed Mike’s food warily, then twisted the cap off a bottle. “Sam Adams good enough?”

“It’ll go down nicely.” Mike started on his rice and chicken as Pete poured two bottles into their respective glasses. “What’s with the Taco Bell thing? I thought Nikki liked to cook.”

Pete shrugged sheepishly. “Nikki likes to cook,” he said. “Healthy things. Y’know? Once in a while a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, ’specially if it involves a barbecue and a slab of dead meat. And when it’s not barbecue season, a dose of White Castle, or maybe Taco Bell . . .”

“I see.” Mike ate junk food out of necessity born of eighty-hour working weeks: Pete ate junk food because he needed a furtive vice and most of the ordinary ones would cost him his job. “What’s she doing?”

“It’s her yoga class tonight.” Pete took a long mouthful of beer. “Figured I’d come by and cheer you up. Chat about a little personal problem I’ve been having.”

Mike looked at him sharply. “Beer first,” he suggested. “Then let’s take a hike.” Pete didn’t do personal problems: he had what by Mike’s envious standards looked like an ideal marriage. He especially didn’t drop around co-workers’ apartments to wail about things, which meant . . . “Is it that thing we were talking about over lunch the other day?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.” Pete managed to look furtive and scared over his beer glass, which put the wind up Mike even more. “How’s the beer?”

“Beer’s fine.” Mike shunted his dinner aside and stood up. “C’mon, let’s go down the backyard and sit out. There’s a couple of chairs down there.”

Outside, the air hit him like a freshly washed towel, heavy and hot and damp enough to make breathing hard for a moment. Mike waited until Pete cleared the doorway, bag of bottles in hand. “Spill it.”

“Chairs first. You’d better be sitting down for this.”

Mike gestured at the tatty deck chairs on the rear stoop. “How bad is it?”

“Bad enough.” Pete dropped into one of the chairs and handed Mike a bottle. “Go on, sit down.”

Mike sat. “I don’t think anyone’s listening here.”

“Indoors.” It was a statement, not a question.

“They lock everything down.” Mike popped the lid off the beer. “Can’t blame them for being suspicious of cops—we don’t have that kind of home life.”

“Yeah, well.” Pete glanced up at the roof suspiciously, then shrugged. The rumble of traffic and the scritching of cicadas would make life hard for any eavesdroppers. “I called Tony Vecchio up today.”

Mike sat bolt upright. “Shit, man! Not from work—”

“Relax, I’m not that stupid.” Pete took another swig from his bottle.

Mike peered at him. He was obviously rattled. Maybe even as badly rattled as Mike was, in the wake of his little chat with Smith. Explosive collars. What else is going on? “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“I needed to ask some questions.” Pete looked uncomfortable. “We’ve gone native, you know? Inside FTO, surrounded by the military and their national security obsession, we’ve stopped trying to do our jobs properly. I don’t know about you, but I swore an oath to uphold the law—remember that? Anyway, I wanted to get some perspective. Tony knew about Matt because he was there when Matt came in, so I figured he’d help.”

“You wanted a priest to hear your confession.”

“Exactly.”

Mike sighed. “Okay, so spill it.”

“Tony stonewalled!” Pete looked angry for a moment. “First he said he didn’t know anything. Then he told me that he’d never heard of Matt, that nobody of that name had come in, there were no WPP admissions this year. Then he told me I’d been suspended on full pay, medical disability in the line of work, for the past ten weeks, and he appreciated how I must feel! I mean, what the fuck?”

“Shit.” Mike tipped the last of his bottle down his throat, then leaned forward. “You want to know what I think.”

“Yes?”

“Close call.” He wiped his forehead. “Listen, what you did was amazingly stupid. If you’d asked me . . . shit. They’ve farmed us out to the military. We belong to Defense right now, we don’t exist on personnel’s books—I mean, I’ll bet if you went digging you’d find that we’ve both been listed on medical leave ever since this thing started. And the paperwork on Matt will be a whitewash. He’s a ghost, Pete, like the poor fucks in Gitmo, trapped in Daddy Warbucks’s machine. Have you met Dr. James yet?”

“James? Isn’t he Smith’s boss? The political one?”

“Yeah, him. I take it you haven’t met . . . James is a Company man, all the way through. Works for the NSC, runs covert ops, the whole lot. That’s who we’re working for. And you know what happens to people who go outside official channels in CIA land? You just don’t do that. I’ve been doing some reading in my copious spare time. You, me, we got sucked in because we were already on the edge of something very big and very classified and very black. Eric told me some, some stuff. About how the military perceive the national security implications of what we’re up against. It made my hair stand on end. I think he’s wrong about some—maybe most—of this, but I couldn’t tell him that to his face. Now, I happen to think we ought to be treating this more like a policing problem, ought to be enforcing the law—but doesn’t that sort of presuppose that we’re dealing with criminals? What I’m hearing is that like Matt, they think we’re dealing with another government, a rogue state, like North Korea or Cuba or something. And right now, they’ve won the argument. I don’t see us getting any backup from Justice, Pete. If you start going behind their backs without evidence, they will stick it to you hard. But if we don’t, who knows what kind of mess they’re going to get us into?”

“Shit.” Pete stared at him.

“Drink.” Mike reached into the bag, thrust another bottle at Pete. “Listen, we’ll work on this together. Just keep an eye on what’s going on, okay? Compare notes. Try to remember who we are and what kind of job we’re supposed to be doing, so that if the spooks fuck up we’ll be in the clear and able to carry on. Maybe talk to Judith, she’s FBI, I think she’ll see it our way. Form a, I guess, a Justice Department network.” He found he was waving his hands around helplessly. “We’re the underdogs right now. Defense grabbed the ball while our team’s back was turned. But it’s not going to last forever. And when we get an opportunity to make our case we need to be ready . . .”

TELEPHONY INTERCEPT TRANSCRIPT

LOGGED 18:47 04/06

“Hello, who’s this?”

“Paulie?”

“Miriam—I mean, hi babe! Wow! It’s been ages, I’ve been worrying about you—”

“Yeah, well, there’s been some heavy stuff going down. I take it you heard—”

“How could I not? I’m, like, this side of things is completely firewalled from, you know, your uncle’s other business interests, but I’ve been catching it from all sides. You were right about the shit hitting the fan, then Brill turned up with her usual calm head on and sorted most of it out, but they’ve been running me ragged and I haven’t heard anything from you, you could have written! So what’s going on in fairyland?”

“Politics, I think. First they dragged me over there full time, then they wouldn’t let me back out. I’ve been out of the loop so long: I mean, I’m frightened. Anyway, now I’m running some errands for them in New Britain they’ve eased up a bit. I get to cross over here and make phone calls, y’know, like prisoner’s privileges? But that’s all I can do right now, until they’re sure nobody’s made me. I’m officially in France, at least that’s what the INS think. Anyway, I am going to get them to clear me so we can do lunch and start putting things back together, soon. Trust me on this, right? Tomorrow I’ve, well, I’ve managed to wangle a week in New London. I’m supposed to be moving carpetbags of confidential letters about, but I’ve figured out a better way. So I get to drop by the works and see who’s holding it together, or not as the case may be, bang heads and kick ass, that kind of thing. Then let’s do lunch, hey?”

“Sounds like a plan, babe.”

“Well, that’s most of the plan, anyway. There is something else. Two somethings, actually. Tell me no if you don’t want to get involved, okay?”

“Miriam, would I?”

“Just saying. Look, one of them’s probably not an issue. I want you to round me up a prescription for a friend. Nothing illegal but he can’t get to see a doctor—he’s out of the country—so if you could order it from one of those dodgy Mexican Web sites and mail it to me I’d be ever so grateful.”

“Um, okay. If you say so. What’s it you’re wanting?”

“Um. Two packs of RIFINAH-300 antibiotic tablets, one hundred tabs per pack, not the small twenty-tablet bottles. They should only set you back a few bucks—it’s dirt cheap, they use it all over the third world. As soon as you’ve got it, mail it to me via your, uh, contact. Family postal service should reach me soon enough.”

“Okay, I think I’ve got that, RIFINAH-300, a hundred tablets per pack, two packs. That it?”

“Well, there’s the other thing. But that’s the one I think you might want to punt on.”

“Hmm. Tell me, Miriam, okay? Let me make my own mind up?”

“Okay, it’s this: I want all the information you can find—public stuff, company financials, profiles of directors, that sort of thing—on two companies. The first is the Gerstein Center for Reproductive Medicine, in Stony Brook. The second is an outfit called Applied Genomics Corporation. In particular I’m interested in any details you can find about financial transfers from Applied Genomics Corporation to the Gerstein Center—and especially about when they started.”

“Applied Genomics, eh? Is this—is this like our old friends at Proteome?”

“Yes, Paulie. That’s why I said you could say no. Just walk away from it and pretend you never heard from me.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Yeah, well, couldn’t and should are—look, Paulie, I’m sticking my nose into something it’s not supposed to be in, and I don’t want to get you burned. So the first order of the day is cover your ass. Don’t do anything that might draw attention to yourself. Don’t post the stuff to me or call me about it, that’s why I’m using a pay phone. I’ll come collect when we do lunch, and I don’t mind if all you’ve got is their annual filings and disclosures.”

“What are they doing?”

“I—I’m not sure. But, uh, sometime in the past year my relatives have come up with a genetic test for, uh, the family headache. And I was wondering how they did that when this other thing, the connection with this fertility clinic, crawled out of the woodwork and bit me. Paulie, there’s something—stuff about some kind of W-star genetic trait—that gives me an itchy feeling. The same itch I got when we were investigating that money-laundering scam that turned out to be—well. I think it might have something to do with why they’re giving me the runaround, why I’m being pressured to . . .”

“Pressured to what?”

“Never mind. One thing at a time, huh? Look, I’ve got to go soon. And then I’m going to be on the other side for a week. Let’s do lunch, okay?”

“Okay, kid! See you around. Take care and give my best to Brill and Olga.”

“Will do. You take care too. Especially around, uh, the second job. I mean that, I want you to be around so I can buy you lunch. It’s been too long, okay?”

“Yeah. Nice to hear from you!”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

TRANSCRIPT ENDS—DURATION 00:06:42