The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (2 page)

The two army officers placed their equipment case on the floor, knelt by the side of the crypt, and peered at the objects within. ‘Storage cell one appears to contain an H-912 transport
container and a D-902 detonation sequencer,’ Alvarez reported. ‘Released for active inventory under special executive privilege as per Executive Order 13223, secret codicil
A.’

‘I concur,’ agreed Hu.

Hang on
, Rich thought, ‘
Released for active inventory’? What the hell . . . ?

‘Please determine whether the H-912 is active.’

‘We’ll need to enter the storage cell.’ Alvarez’s tone was matter-of-fact, almost bored.

‘You may enter when ready,’ said the lead NNSA inspector.

One of the guards tensed.

‘You may enter,’ repeated the inspector; the chief administrator cleared his throat.

‘Sergeant Jackson? If these inspectors’ authorization isn’t good enough for you, then put it on
my
tab.’

‘Sir, I – ’ The guard subsided, clearly unhappy.

‘Thank you, Mr. Ellis.’ The NNSA inspector raised an eyebrow at the chief administrator.

‘We’ve all got our jobs to do,’ Ellis grunted. ‘And unauthorized access
is
an issue here.’ He fell silent as Alvarez and Hu climbed down into the crypt and
bent over the cylinder, their heads nearly touching.

As with all nuclear weapons procedures, two commissioned officers were called for. There was a small inspection window on the top of the cylinder; if an actual core was installed, a colored
reflector would be positioned right behind it. ‘I can confirm that the H-912 inspection window is showing code orange,’ said Alvarez. ‘Captain?’

Hu echoed him: ‘I concur with the major.’

The minder of the checklists ticked off another box.

‘Next, uh, if you could verify that your instrument is working using the test sample, we can proceed to step six – ’

More to-ing and fro-ing as Alvarez and Hu proceeded to calibrate their portable detector. ‘It’s working all right,’ Alvarez confirmed. ‘We’re going to check the
H-912 now.’ More to-ing and fro-ing as he fastened a stubby cylinder to the top of the olive-drab container and pushed buttons. A minute passed. ‘I’m not getting
anything.’

‘Agreed. Something isn’t right here . . .’

Someone swore. ‘Agent Moran, if you’d like to try your instrument now?’

Rich felt an unpleasant numbness creep over him, a resignation to the unfolding process of discovery and the horrors that it promised to reveal. Everything that had happened to bring them to
this situation had taken place weeks, months, or even years ago; nor was he implicated in it. Other people would have to defend their actions, possibly in court – not Rich. But that
didn’t make things better.
Nothing
made things better, not when they were the kind of things that were the bread and butter of his occupation. Agent Moran unpacked his detector as
carefully as a forensic tech attending a particularly gruesome murder scene. ‘Nothing,’ he announced.

‘Right.’ The NNSA inspector sounded as unhappy as Rich felt. ‘Mr. Ellis, with your permission, I think we ought to proceed to open the H-912 and see what’s really in
there.’

‘You’re sure those detectors’ – Ellis nudged forward – ‘let me see that. McDonnell, if you could check this reference sample – ’

More to-ing and fro-ing as Ellis and his staff confirmed (not to anyone’s relief) that the reference samples the inspectors were using were, indeed, the real deal – ‘All right,
on my authority, Willis? Unseal this carrier for internal visual inspection.’

‘Sir.’ The senior guard made it sound like a cough. ‘Opening a device on inactive inventory is a security – ’

‘Sergeant, I am very much afraid that this is not, in fact, a device on inactive inventory. It’s something else. In which case, the regulation you’re about to quote at me
doesn’t apply, does it?’

‘Right.’ The guard looked unhappy. ‘Will you put that in writing, sir? Because if not, I’ll have to . . .’

Ellis took a deep breath. ‘Yes, I will put it in writing for you. Witnessed by everybody here.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Now, are we going to keep these people
waiting?’

Rich felt an elbow in his ribs. ‘Have to
what?’
whispered Chavez.

‘Shoot somebody,’ Rich grunted. ‘Probably us.’

‘Captain Hu . . .’

‘I’m on it.’

The audience in the storage room fell silent as Captain Hu set to work, unfastening catches and then going to work with a torque wrench under Alvarez’s gaze. He took barely five minutes,
but to Rich it felt closer to five hours. Finally, the lid of the carrier came free.

‘Well?’ asked Ellis.

Hu held the carrier open as Alvarez reached down and pulled. ‘We’ve got an empty quiver,’ he said laconically, and held up his catch: an object which, from the way he held it,
had to be unusually heavy. ‘Unless we’ve taken to storing lead bricks in nuclear weapon carriers . . .’

*

The transportation of cell phones – let alone camera phones – into the secure areas of Pantex was more than slightly discouraged. Rich stayed with the crowd scene
for the next two hours, as the inspectors ripped through the other eleven storage cells in the facility with increasing desperation. Then, with the final tally – six H-912s filled with the
sleeping FADM lightweight nukes, six H-912s empty but for lead bricks and a slip of red paper taped inside the inspection window – he slipped outside.

Chavez followed him. ‘The colonel will want to know,’ she said as the door closed behind them.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed. He nodded to the guard on duty outside, then presented his badge. ‘We have to make a call. Where can I find a phone?’

The cop looked at him with barely concealed suspicion. ‘You don’t get to go anywhere until I confirm you’re free to leave the area, sir.’

Chavez snorted. ‘You have no legal authority over us, soldier.’ She held up her warrant card. ‘C’mon, Rich, we’re – ’

The guard tensed. ‘You’re not leaving!’ he repeated, louder.

Rich spread his hands. ‘Whoa! We don’t need an argument and we don’t need to leave the area, we just need to make a phone call. Is there a voice terminal we can use nearby?
Preferably secure?’

‘You want an outside line?’ The guard looked aghast.

‘No, just one that can put me through to Operations Control. Operations Control? Come on, there must be one – ’

‘Internal phone’s over there.’ The cop pointed at a box on the wall. ‘Just don’t try to leave the area until you’ve been cleared, sir, ma’am. I
don’t know what’s going on in there, but nobody’s to leave. And I don’t care what your badges say, I’ve got my orders and I’m sticking to ’em. Don’t
put me in a position where I’ve gotta do something we’ll all regret.’

‘I don’t intend to.’ Rich tried to look as unthreatening as possible. ‘I just need to talk to someone in Operations Control. We’re not going to be any
trouble.’

He could feel Chavez’s eyes drilling a hole in his back. He glanced round. ‘You want to make this one?’

‘No, you go first. I’ll just watch your back.’

‘Right.’ Rich picked up the handset and dialed a four-digit number. ‘Ops? This is a call for SERENE AMBLER. Yeah, that’s SERENE AMBLER. They’re expecting you to
connect me immediately . . . good. Colonel? Rich here.’

‘What’s the news?’ Colonel Smith sounded bone-tired: two time zones east, he’d probably been awake all night waiting for this call.

‘Our FADM inventory is fucked, and it’s worse than we feared. We’re out by another five, in addition to the one we found in Boston. That one was on forward deployment when it
went walkabout, but the ones we’re missing here were supposed to be in secure storage. Turns out they’ve been tampered with – someone has gotten inside the storage cells. I
slipped out while they were declaring an official Pinnacle Empty Quiver so I could warn you; the missing items are all from the covert resource allocated to SECDEF and VPOTUS back in 2001, so
somebody needs to brief Mr. Cheney urgently to head it off at the pass before the shitstorm hits the National Command Authority and confuses the president.’

‘I see.’ The colonel fell uncharacteristically silent for a few seconds. ‘And what does the scene look like to you, right now?’

Rich paused, glancing at the guard, who was pointedly not listening – too pointedly, he thought. ‘The area’s secured against normal threats, so your guess is as good as mine as
to how they got in.’ Which was to say, not a guess at all – they both knew perfectly well how these particular bad guys might sneak into a secure area. ‘The building’s
surrounded by a – the usual kind of security you’d expect – but it’s AGL. The guards seem alert enough to’ – yes, the guard was
very pointedly
not
listening – ‘intruders. I’m not making any guesses how they managed to make the substitution, but the H-912 cases were full of ballast. Which suggests whoever took them knows
exactly what they’re doing with the contents.’

Another pause. ‘Can you confirm six missing, and no more?’

That was an easy one to answer: ‘No, sir. I can confirm six empty quivers and six full ones, but I can
not
rule out the possibility that there are more missing.’ He licked his
dry lips. ‘I would be astonished if the site authority doesn’t order a full lockdown immediately and commence an audit within the next hour or two, in anticipation of NCA’s likely
orders. Meanwhile, it looks like we’ll be stuck here for a few hours, if not days. What do you want us to do?’

Silence. ‘Leave it to the NNSA,’ the colonel finally said. ‘I’ll escalate it for WARBUCKS’s attention immediately. Meanwhile, as soon as you can disengage I want
you back in Boston. There’s a problem with COLDPLAY . . .’

I am not hearing this
, Miriam Beckstein told herself. The temptation to giggle, to laugh it all off as a bizarre joke, was enormous.
Pretend it isn’t happening;
yeah, right. Story of my life
. She tightened her grip on the valise holding her notebook PC and its precious CD-ROMs. Except that for the past six months, the mad stuff had made a habit of
punching her in the guts whenever she least expected it. ‘Run that by me again,’ she said.

‘It’s quite simple,’ said the hard-eyed young debutante with the machine pistol. ‘Your mother wants to use you to consolidate power.’ She kept her eyes focused on
Miriam as she twisted the magazine free of the gun, worked a slide to eject a cartridge, and swapped another magazine into place. ‘The duke agrees with her. And
we
’ – the
eloquent roll of her shoulder took in their companions, a cohort of young and alarmingly heavily armed Clan world-walkers – ‘intend to make sure you’re not just there for
show.’

They look like students
, thought Miriam. Students outfitted by The North Face for a weekend hike; accessories by Fabrique Nationale and Heckler & Koch. Of course they were nothing of
the kind. Young aristocrats of the Clan nobility – born in the curious quasi-medieval kingdom of Gruinmarkt, and able to travel to other worlds at will – they might look like ordinary
American undergrads, but the mindset behind those fresh young faces was very different.

‘Oh, really?’ she managed. The idea of her mother – and the duke – plotting to put her on the throne of the Gruinmarkt was pretty preposterous, on the face of it –
but then, so were so many of the other intrigues the Clan seemed to generate. Then another thought struck her:
You said ‘we’, didn’t you?
So Brill had an agenda of her own,
over and above her loyalty to the duke – or Miriam, for that matter? Time to probe . . .

‘Was this’ – she pointed at her belly, quiet anger in her voice – ‘part of their plan?’

‘Milady’ Brill – Lady Brilliana d’Ost, a mere twenty-something – furrowed her brow. ‘With all due respect, if you think
that
, you’re paranoid. Do
you really think the duke – or your mother – know you so poorly as to think you a suitable mother for the heir to the throne? Much less, under duress? Henryk and your – his backer
– were fools for thinking they could manipulate you that way, and now they are dead fools. The rest of us are just trying to make the best of a bad deal. And if you want to talk politics,
would you mind leaving it until later? I’ve got a splitting headache and it’s about to get worse.’

Miriam winced in unconscious sympathy. World-walking took it out of a member of the Clan’s inner families, those with the ability: Doing it more than once in a day risked migrainelike
symptoms and a blood pressure spike. There were other symptoms, too: pregnancy, she’d learned the hard way, made world-walking under your own power impossible. But they’d come here from
New Britain, escaping after the abortive ambush at a provincial railway station in that world’s version of California, immediately after picking her up.

One of the young men pacing the perimeter of the clearing raised a hand, twirled it in a warning circle. ‘One hour to go.’

‘Yah.’ Brill glanced round again. The forest clearing was peaceful, unoccupied but for Miriam, Brill, and her three young bloods, but she never stopped scanning.

‘Are we in any immediate danger?’ Miriam asked, shifting her balance on the fallen tree trunk.

‘Probably not right now.’ Brill paused to continue her inspection. ‘The Kao’s patrols don’t usually sweep this far northeast. Better not linger, though. We’ll
be ready to move in another hour.’

‘The Kao?’

‘The Favored of Heaven’s border troops. Most of the local tribes give them a wide berth. We should, too.’ A warning look in her eyes gave Miriam a cold shiver; if Brill was
scared of them, that was enough for her.

‘What are you planning on doing once we cross over?’

‘We’ve got a hotel suite in San Jose. I plan to get us over there, then make contact with the duke and ask for further instructions. I imagine he’ll want us back on the east
coast immediately – we’ve got a bizjet standing by. Otherwise, we’ll do what Security tells us to do. Unless you have other plans?’ Brill raised a carefully shaped eyebrow.
Even though she’d started the day with a brisk firefight, then a forced crossing into wilderness, she’d taken pains with her makeup.