Charles Stross - The Family Trade

“I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there’s no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I’d work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD’d on heroin. It wasn’t an accident-it was the day after they told him he’d never walk again.” She said it with the callous disregard of long-dead news, but Miriam noticed her knuckles tighten on her glass. “That’s why I figure you don’t want to ever let those guys notice you. But if they do, you don’t ever back off.”

“That’s-I’m really sorry. I had no idea.”

“Don’t blame yourself.” Paulette managed an ironic smile. “I, uh, took a liberty with the files before I printed them.” She reached inside her handbag and flipped a CD-ROM at Miriam.

“Hey, what’s this?” Miriam peered at the greenish silver surface.

“It’s the investigation.” Paulie grinned at her. “I got everything before you decided to jump Sandy ’s desk and get Joe to take an unhealthy interest in us.”

“But that’s stealing!” Miriam ended on a squeak.

“And what do you call what they did to your job?” Paulette asked dryly. “I call this insurance.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. I don’t think they know about it-otherwise we’d be in way deeper shit already. Still, you should find somewhere to hide it until we need it.”

Miriam looked at the disk as if it had turned into a snake. “Yeah, I can do that.” She drained her glass, then picked up the disk and carried it over to the stereo. “Gotcha.” She pulled a multidisk CD case from the shelf, opened it, and slid the extra disk inside. “The Beggar’s Opera. Think you can remember that?”

“Oh! Why didn’t I think of doing that?”

“Because.” Miriam grinned at her. “Why didn’t I think of burning that disk in the first place?”

“We each need a spare brain.” Paulette stared at her. “Listen, that’s problem number one. What about problem number two? This crazy shit from another world. What were you messing around with it for?”

Miriam shrugged. “I had some idea that I could hide from the money laundry over there,” she said slowly. “Also, to tell the truth, I wanted someone else to tell me I wasn’t going crazy. But going totally medieval isn’t going to answer my problem, is it?”

“I wouldn’t say so.” Paulette put her glass down, half-empty. “Where were we? Oh yeah. You cross over to the other side, wherever that is, and you wander over to where your bank’s basement is, then you cross back again. What do you think happens?”

“I come out in a bank vault.” Miriam pondered. “They’re wired inside, aren’t they? After my first trip I was a total casualty, babe. I mean, projectile vomiting-” she paused, embarrassed. “A fine bank robber I’d make!”

“There is that,” said Paulette. “But you’re not thinking it through. What happens when the alarm goes off?”

“Well. Either I go back out again too fast and risk an aneurism or…” Miriam trailed off. “The cops show and arrest me.”

“And what happens after they arrest you?”

“Well, assuming they don’t shoot first and ask questions later, they cuff me, read me my rights, and haul me off to the station. Then book me in and stick me in a cell.”

“And then?” Paulette rolled her eyes at Miriam’s slow uptake.

“Why, I call my lawyer-” Miriam stopped, eyes unfocused. “No, they’d take my locket,” she said slowly.

“Sure. Now, tell me. Is it your locket or is it the pattern in your locket? Have you tested it? If it’s the design, what if you’ve had it tattooed on the back of your arm in the meantime?” Paulette asked.

“That’s-” Miriam shook her head. “Tell me there’s a flaw in the logic.”

“I’m not going to do that.” Paulette picked up the bottle and waved it over Miriam’s glass in alcoholic benediction. “I think you’re going to have to test it tomorrow to find out. And I’m going to have to test it, to see if it works for me-if that’s okay by you,” she added hastily. “If it’s the design, you just got your very own ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Doesn’t matter if you can’t use it to rob bank vaults, there’s any number of other scams you can run if you can get out of the fix instantaneously. Say, uh, you walk into a bank and pull a holdup. No need for a gun, just pass over a note saying you’ve got a bomb and they should give you all the money. Then, instead of running away, you head for the staff rest room and just vanish into thin air.”

“You have got a larcenous mind, Paulie.” Miriam shook her head in awe. “You’re wasted in publishing.”

“No, I’m not.” Paulette frowned seriously. “Y’see, you haven’t thought this through. S’pose you’ve got this super power. Suppose nobody else can use it-we can try me out tomorrow, huh? Do the experiment with the photocopy of the locket on you, then try me. See if I can do it. I figure it’s going to be you, and not me, because if just anybody could do it it would be common knowledge, huh? Or your mother would have done it. For some reason somebody stabbed your mother and she didn’t do it. So these must be some kind of gotcha. But anyway. What do you think the cops would make of it if instead of robbing banks or photographing peasant villagers you, uh, donated your powers to the forces of law and order?”

“Law and order consists of bureaucracies,” Miriam said with a brisk shake of her head. “You’ve seen all those tedious FBI press conferences I sat in on when they were lobbying for carnivore and crypto export controls, huh?” A vision unfolded behind her eyes, the poisonous fire blossom of an airliner striking an undefended skyscraper. “Jesus, Paulie, imagine if Al Qaida could do this!”

“They don’t need it: They’ve got suicide volunteers. But yeah, there are other bad guys who… if you can see it, so can the feds. Remember that feature about nuclear terrorism that Zeb ran last year? How the NIRT units and FEMA were able to track bombs as they come in across the frontier if there’s an alert on?”

“I don’t want to go there.” The thought made Miriam feel physically ill. “There is no way in hell I’d smuggle a nuclear weapon across a frontier.”

“No.” Paulette leaned forward, her eyes serious: “But if you have this ability, who else might have it? And what could they do with it? There are some very scary, dangerous national security implications here, and if you go public the feds will bury you so deep-”

“I said I don’t want to go there,” Miriam repeated. “Listen, this is getting deeply unfunny. You’re frightening me, Paulie, more than those assholes with their phone calls and their handle on the pharmaceutical industry. I’m wondering if maybe I should sleep with a gun under my pillow.”

“Get frightened fast, babe; it’s your ass we’re talking about. I’ve had two days to think about your vanishing trick and our goodfella problem, and I tell you, you’re still thinking like an honest journalist, not a paranoid. Listen, if you want to clean up, how about the crack trade? Or heroin? Go down to Florida, get the right connections, you could bring a small dinghy over and stash it on the other side, no problems-it’d just take you a while, a few trips maybe. Then you could carry fifty, a hundred kilos of coke. Sail it up the coast, then up the Charles. Bring it back over right in the middle of Cambridge, out of fucking nowhere without the DEA or the cops noticing. They say one in four big shipments gets intercepted-that’s bullshit-but maybe one in five, one in eight… you could smuggle the stuff right under their noses in the middle of a terrorist scare. And I don’t know whether you’d do that or not-my guess is not, you’ve got capital-P principles-but that is the first thing the cops will think of.”