The Revolution Trade (Merchant Princes Omnibus 3) (79 page)

One day, after a couple of apocalyptic weeks, Agent Judt wasn’t there anymore. And when a couple of days later the president had his third and fatal heart attack and there was a
new
president, one who spoke of
known unknowns
and
unknown unknowns
and seemed to think Dr. Strangelove was an aspirational role model, there was a new reality on the ground. The country
had gone mad, Steve thought, traumatized and whiplashed by meaningless attacks: 9/11 and strange religious fanatics in the Middle East had been bad enough, but what was coming next? Flying saucers
on the White House lawn? Not that there was any White House lawn for them to land on, anymore. (President Cheney had promised to rebuild, once the radiation died down, but that would take months or
years.)

Two weeks after the attack, Steve went to see his HMO and came away with a prescription for Seroxat. It helped, a bit; which was why, on his way home from a day shift one evening, he was alert
enough to realize he was being followed.

Downtown Boston was no place to commute on wheels. Like most locals, Steve relied on the T to get him in and out, leaving his truck in a car park beside a station. He didn’t usually pay
much attention to his fellow passengers – no more than enough to spot a seat and keep a weather eye open for rare-to-nonexistent muggers – but as he got off a Green Line streetcar at
Kenmore to change lines something drew his attention to a man stepping off the carriage behind him. Something familiar about the figure, glimpsed briefly through the crowd of bodies, triggered a
rush of unease. Steve shivered despite the muggy heat and hurried across the tracks behind the streetcar, heading for his own platform.
It can’t be him,
he told himself.
He spooked
and ran.
He looked around behind him, but the half-recognized man wasn’t there anymore.

What to do? Steve shook his head and hunkered down, waiting for the C Line train to North Station.

He knew something was wrong about five seconds after his train began to squeal and shudder away from the platform; knew it from the hairs on the back of his neck and the slight dip of his seat
as the man behind him leaned forward, putting his weight on the seat back. ‘Hello, Steve.’

He tensed. ‘What do you want?’ It was hot in the streetcar, but the skin in the small of his back felt icy cold.

‘I’m getting off at the next stop; don’t try to follow me. I think you might like to have a look at these files. There’s an e-mail address; mail me when you want to talk
again.’ A cheap plastic folder bulging with papers thrust over the seat back beside him like an accusing affidavit. He caught it before it spilled to the floor.

‘What if I don’t want to talk to you?’ he asked.

The man behind him laughed quietly. ‘Give it to your FBI handler. He’ll shit a brick.’

The streetcar slowed; Steve, too frightened to look round as the man behind him stood up, clutched the folio to his chest.
Jesus, I can’t just let him get away
–

The doors opened with a hiss of compressed air. Steve began to turn, caution chiding him –
He might be armed
– but he was too late. Mike Fleming, Beckstein’s friend, had
disappeared again. Steve subsided with another shudder.
Fleming knows too damn much,
he thought. He’d known about 7/16 before it happened.
What if he was telling the truth? What if
it’s an inside job?
The prospect was unutterably terrifying. The looking-glass world news nightmare that had engulfed everything around him a month ago was bad enough; the idea that there
really was a conspiracy behind it, and his own government shared responsibility for it, left Steve feeling sick. This was a job for Woodward and Bernstein, not him. But Bob Woodward was dead
– one of the casualties of 7/16 – and as for the rest of it, there was no one else to do whatever needed doing.
I could phone Agent Judt,
he told himself.
I could.

A week or two ago, before the latest wave of chaos, he’d probably have done so immediately. But the end-times chaos of the past month had unhinged his reflexive loyalty to authority just
as surely as it had reinforced that of millions of others. He unzipped the folio and glanced inside quickly. There was a cover sheet, laser-printed; he began reading.

It is a little-known fact that, contrary to public mythology, the president of the United States of America lacks the authority to order a strategic nuclear attack. Ever since
the dog days of the Nixon administration, when the drunken president periodically phoned his diminishing circle of friends at 3:00 A.M. to rail incoherently about the urgent need to nuke North
Vietnam, the executive branch has made every effort to ensure that any such decision can only be made stone-cold sober and after a lengthy period of soul-searching contemplation. An elaborate
protocol exists: A series of cabinet meetings, consultations with the Joint Chiefs, discussions with the Senate Armed Services Committee, and quite possibly divine intervention, a UN Security
Council Resolution, and the sacrifice of a black goat in the Oval Office at midnight are required before such a grave step can even be placed on the table for discussion.

However . . .

Retaliation after an attack is
much
easier.

If the former vice president put the plan in motion, diverted superblack off-budget funds to the Family Trade Organization, jogged Mr. Bush’s elbow to sign the presidential orders setting
in motion the research program to build machines around slivers of vivisected neural tissue extracted from the brains of captured Clan world-walkers, then perhaps the blame might be laid at his
door. But it was his successor in the undisclosed location, former mentor and then vice president by appointment, who organized the details of the strike and bullied the Joint Chiefs into drafting
new orders for USSTRATCOM tasking them with a mission enabled by the new ARMBAND technology. And it was the Office of the White House Counsel who drafted legal opinions approving the use of nuclear
weapons in strict retaliation against an extradimensional threat, confirming that domestic law did not apply to parallel instances of North American geography, and that the two still-missing SADM
demolition devices were necessary and sufficient justification: that such an operation constituted a due and proportionate response in accordance with international law, and that the Geneva
Conventions did not apply beyond the ends of the Earth.

Complicity spread like a brown, stinking cloud through the traumatized rump of a Congress and Senate who were themselves the survivors of a lethal attack on the Capitol. President Cheney had
ensured that the opposition would vote the way they were told; the PAPUA bill was as efficient an enabling act as had been seen anywhere in the world since 1933. A few dissenters – pacifists
and peaceniks mostly – spoke out against the far-reaching surveillance and monitoring regime, but the press and the public were in no mood to put up with their rubbish about the First,
Second, and Fourth Amendments; with the nation clearly under attack, who cared if a few whining hippie rejects talked themselves into a holiday in Club Fed? Better that than risk them giving aid
and comfort to enemy infiltrators with stolen nukes. Rolling out the new identity-card system and national DNA database would take a couple of years, and until it was in place there’d always
be the risk that the person walking past you in the street was a soldier of the invisible enemy. An eager Congress voted an ever-increasing laundry list of surveillance and control orders through
with unanimous consent, each representative terrified of being seen to be weak on security.

And when the president went before the House Armed Services Committee in secret session to present certain legal opinions and request their imprimatur upon his war plans – the full House
having already voted to declare war on whoever had attacked the capital city – nobody dared argue that they were excessive.

*

Midmorning in Gloucestershire, England. It was a bright day at Fairford, and behind the high barbed-wire-topped fence the air base was a seething hive of activity. Officially a
British Royal Air Force base, Fairford had for decades now provided a secure forward operating base for USAF aircraft staging out to the Arabian Gulf. Newly upgraded to provide a jumping-off point
for operations in Iraq, boasting recently improved fuel bunkers and a runway so long that it was designated as a Space Shuttle transatlantic abort landing strip, for three weeks Fairford had been
playing host to the B-52s of the Fifth Bomb Wing, USAF.

The Clan couldn’t reach them in England, ran the official thinking. Not without international travel on forged documents.

Now they were queueing up on the taxiways: The aircraft of the Fifth Bomb Wing had been ordered to fly home. But first they were going to make a little detour.

For the past week, C-17s had been flying in nightly from Stateside, carrying anonymous-looking low-loaders, which were driven to the bomb storage cells and unloaded under the guns of twitchy
guards. And for the past two days technicians had been double- and triple-checking the weapons, nervously working through the ringbound manuals. Yesterday there’d been a hiatus; but in the
evening the ordnance crews had turned out again, and this time they were moving the bombs out to the dispersal bays, under guard. Finally, around midnight, a last C-17 arrived, carrying a group of
specialists and a trailer that, over the following hours, made the rounds of the readying air wing.

Nobody outside the base saw a thing. The British authorities could take a hint; the small and dispirited huddle of protesters, camped by the front gate to denounce the carpet-bombers of Baghdad,
had been rounded up in a midnight raid and hauled off to police cells under the Terrorism Act, to be held for weeks without counsel or charge. The village nearby was cowed by a military police
presence that hadn’t been seen since the height of the Troubles: Newspaper editors received discreet visits from senior police officers that left them tight-lipped and shaken. Fairford, to
all intents and purposes, had vanished from the map.

At 11:00 A.M. Zulu time, the first of thirty-six B-52H Stratofortresses ran its engines up to full throttle and began its takeoff roll. It was a hot day, and the huge plane’s wing tanks
were gravid with jet fuel; it climbed slowly away, shaking the ground with a bellowing thunder like the onrushing end of the world.

*

The Atlantic Ocean was wide, and the jet streams blowing west-to-east over Ireland slowed the bombers as they climbed towards their cruising altitude of forty-eight thousand
feet, miles above the air corridors used by the regular midmorning stream of airliners heading west from the major European and Asian hubs. The operations planners had seen no reason to warn or
divert those airliners; when CARTHAGE was complete they would, if anything, be safer.

Over the next seven hours the BUFFs shadowed the daily commuter herd, tracking along the great circle route that took them just south of Greenland’s icy hinterlands before turning south
towards Newfoundland and then on towards Maine. As they neared the coast, the bombers diverged briefly from the civil aviation corridor, skirting around Canadian airspace and then flying parallel
to the regular traffic, but farther east, staying over deep water for as long as possible. It was more than just the diplomatic nicety of keeping aircraft engaged on this mission out of foreign
airspace: If anything should go catastrophically wrong, better that the cargo should ditch in the Atlantic waters than come down over land.

As they passed the southernmost end of Nova Scotia, the bombers finally turned west. The final encrypted transmission came in: Meteorological conditions over the target were perfect. Downstairs
from the pilot and copilot, the defensive-systems operators were busy at last, running the activation checklist on their ARMBAND units – gray boxes, bolted hastily to the equipment racks
lining the dark cave of the bomber’s lower deck – and the differential GPS receivers to which they were connected by raw, hand-soldered wiring looms. Meanwhile, their offensive systems
operators were running checklists of their own; checklists that required the pilot and copilot’s cooperation, reading out numbers from sealed envelopes held in a safe on the flight deck.

*

A hundred miles due east of Portland, the bomber crews completed their checklists. It was nearing three o’clock in the afternoon on the eastern seaboard when they lined
up. At a range of fifty miles, the largest city in Maine was spread out before them, glittering beneath the cloudless summer sky. An observer on the ground who knew what they were looking at
– one with very sharp eyes, or a pair of binoculars – would have seen a loosely spaced queue of aircraft, cruising in echelon far higher than normal airliners. But there were no such
observers. Nor did the civilian air traffic control have anything to say in the presence of the FBI agents who had dropped in on them an hour ago.

Overhead, without any fuss, the bombers were going out.

*

Another day, another world.

In the marcher kingdoms of the North American eastern seaboard, life went on. A frontal system moving in from the north was bringing cooler, denser air southeast from Lake Ontario, and a
scattering of high cloud cover warned of rainfall by evening. The daily U-2 reconnaissance overflight had reported a strong offshore breeze blowing, carrying dust and smoke out to sea; it was
expected to continue for at least twenty-four hours.

The wheat harvest was all but over, and rye, too; the peasants were still laboring with sickle and adze in their strip fields, and the granaries were filling, but an end to toil was in sight.
Their lords and masters busied themselves with the summer hunt, wild boar and deer fat and heavy; the season of late-summer parties was in swing, as eligible daughters were paraded around before
their fathers’ friends’ sons, and barons and dukes sought surcease from the stink of the cities by touring their estates and the houses of their vassals.