The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) (23 page)

‘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 fuckers in Gitmo, bugs trapped in the 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 in the fifth dimension 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 . . .’

‘What the
hell
do you think you’re doing in my office?’ Miriam asked in a dangerous voice.

The man in the swivel chair turned round slowly and stared at her with expressionless eyes. ‘Running it,’ he said slowly.

‘I see.’

The office was cramped, a row of high stools perched in front of the wooden angled desks that formed one wall; they were the only occupants. Miriam had just stepped through the front door, not
even bothering to go check on the lab. She’d meant to hang her coat up first, then go find Roger or the rest of the lab team before chasing up the paperwork and calling on her solicitor and
then on Sir Alfred Durant, her largest customer. Instead of which –

‘Morgan, just who told you that you were running the show?’

Morgan leaned back in his swivel chair. ‘The duke.’ He smiled lazily. She’d met Morgan before: a strong right hand, but not the sharpest tool in the box when it came to general
management. ‘Angbard. He sent me over here after the takedown in Boston. Said I was too hot to stay over there, and he needed someone to keep an eye on things here. Anyway, it’s on
autopilot, just ticking over. Every week I get a set of instructions, and execute them.’ He stared at her. ‘I don’t recall being notified that you had
permission
to be
here.’

‘I don’t recall having given Angbard permission to manage
my
company,’ Miriam replied. ‘Never mind the fact that he knows as much about running a tech R&D
bureau as I know about fly-fishing. Neither do you, is my guess. What have you been up to while I was in Niejwein?’ It was a none-too-subtle jab, to tell Morgan that she had the ear of
important people. Maybe it worked: he sat up.

‘Expansion plans – the new works – are on hold. I had to let two of your workmen go, they were insubordinate – ’

‘Workmen?’ She leaned across the desk toward him. ‘
Which
workmen?’

‘I’d have to look their names up. Some dirty-fingered fellow from the furnace room, spent all his time playing with rubber – ’

‘Jesus. Christ.’ Miriam stared at him with thinly concealed contempt. ‘You fired Roger, you mean.’

‘Roger? Hmm, that may have been him.’

‘Well, well, well.’ Miriam breathed deeply, flexing her fingertips, trying to retain control.
Give me strength!
‘You know what this company makes, don’t
you?’

‘Brake pads?’ Morgan sniffed dismissively. Like most of the Clan’s sharp young security men, he didn’t have much time for the plebian pursuits of industrial
development.

‘No.’ Miriam took another deep breath. ‘We’re a design bureau. We
design
brakes – better brakes than anyone else in New Britain, because we’ve got a
forty- to fifty-year lead in materials science thanks to our presence in the United States – and sell licenses to manufacture our
designs
. So. Did it occur to you that it might just
be a
bad idea
to fire our senior materials scientist?’

Morgan’s eyes narrowed. ‘That was a
scientist
?’

I’m going to strangle him
, Miriam thought faintly,
so help me I am
. ‘Yes, Morgan, Roger is a real live scientist. They don’t wear white coats here, you see,
nor do they live in drafty castles in Bavaria and carry around racks of smoking test tubes. Nor do they wear placards round their necks that say SCIENTIST. They actually
work for a living
.
I spent five months getting Roger up to speed on some of the new materials we were introducing – I was going to get him started on productizing cyanoacrylate adhesives, next! – and you
went and, and
sacked
him – ’