Charles Stross - MP 6 -The Trade of Queens

Getting down to work on the office, he wondered who'd turfed the scene. The missing computer was suggestive; going by the empty shelves and the boxes on the floor, it didn't take long to notice that all the computer media—Zip disks, CD-ROMs, even dusty old floppy disks—were missing. "Huh," he said quietly. "So they were looking for files?" Miriam was a journalist. It was carelessly done, as if they'd been looking for something specific—and the searchers weren't cops or spooks. Cops searching a journalist's office wouldn't leave a scrap of paper behind, and spooks wouldn't want the subject to know they were under surveillance. "Fucking amateurs." Mike took heart: It made his job that bit easier, to know that the perps had been looking for something specific, not trying to deny information to someone coming after.

Fumbling through the pile of papers, sorting them into separate blocks, Mike ran across a telephone cable. It was still plugged in, and tracing it back to the desk he discovered the handset, which had fallen down beside the wall. It was a fancy one, with a built-in answerphone and a cassette tape. Mike pocketed the tape, then went back to work on the papers. Lots of cuttings from newspapers and magazines, lots of scribbled notes about articles she'd been working on, a grocery bill, invoices from the gas and electric—nothing obviously significant. The books: There was a pile of software manuals, business books, some dog-eared crime thrillers and Harlequin romances, a Filofax—

Mike flipped it open. "Bingo!" It was full of handwritten names, numbers, and addresses, scribbled out and overwritten and annotated. Evidently Miriam didn't trust computers for everything; either that, or he'd latched on to a years-out-of-date organizer. But a quick look in the front revealed a year planner that went as far forward as the current year. Why

the hell didn't they take it?

he wondered, looking around. "Huh." Assuming the searchers were from the Clan . . . would they even know what a Filofax

was?

It looked like a book, from a distance; perhaps someone had told the brute squad to grab computers, disks, and any loose files on her desk.

They don't think like cops

or

spooks.

He looked round, at the green box on the wall above the door, and shuddered.

Time to blow.

Outside, with the glass door shut and the key back on its nail in the shed, he glanced at the fence. His leg twinged, reminding him that he wasn't ready for climbing or running. There was a gap between the fence and the side of the house, shadowy; he slipped into it, his fat planner (now pregnant with Miriam's Filofax) clutched before him.

There was a wooden gate at the end of the alley, latched shut but not padlocked. He paused behind it to peer between the vertical slats. A police car cruised slowly along the street, two officers inside. Two? Mike swore under his breath and crouched down. The car seemed to take forever to drive out of sight. Heart pounding, Mike checked his watch. It was half past noon, near enough exactly. He straightened up slowly, then unlatched the gate and limped past the front of the house as fast as he could, then back onto the sidewalk outside. He fumbled the key to his rental car at first, sweat and tension and butterflies in his stomach making him uncharacteristically clumsy, but on the second try, the door swung open and he slumped down behind the steering wheel and pulled it to just as another police car—or perhaps the same one, returning—swung into the street.

Mike ducked.

They're not running a stakeout but they've got regular surveillance,

he told himself.

Believe it, man.

Adding the Beckstein residence to a regular patrol's list of places of interest would cost FTO virtually nothing—and they'd missed spotting him by seconds. He stayed down, crouched over the passenger seat as the cruiser slowly drove past. They'd be counting heads, looking for the unexpected. His cover was good but it wouldn't pass a police background check if they went to town on him—and they would, if they found Miriam's purloined Filofax. Ten seconds passed, then twenty. Mike straightened up cautiously and glanced in the rearview mirror. The cops were nearing the end of the road. Thirty seconds; they paused briefly, then hung a left, and Mike breathed out.

Okay, back to the motel,

he told himself.

Then we'll see what we've got here. . . . . .

BEGIN RECORDING

"My fellow Americans, good evening.

"It pains me more than I can say to be speaking to you tonight as your president. There are no good situations in which a vice president can take the oath of office; we step into the boots of a fallen commander in chief, hoping we can fill them, hoping we can live up to what our dead predecessor would have expected of us. It is a heavy burden of responsibility and, God willing, I shall do my utmost to live up to it. I owe nothing less to you, to all our citizens and especially to the gallant men and women who serve the cause of freedom and democracy in our nations armed forces; and I say this—I shall not sleep until our enemies, the enemies who murderously attacked us a week ago, are hunted down wherever they hide and are destroyed.

"In time of war—and this is nothing less—it is the job of the commander in chief to defend the republic, and it is the job of the vice president to stand ready to serve, which is why I have nominated as my replacement a man well-qualified to fight for freedom: former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. I trust that his appointment to this post, vacated by my succession, will be approved by the house. The future of the republic is safe in his hands.

"But I can already hear you asking: Safe from whom?

"In the turmoil and heroism and agony of the attacks, it was difficult at first for us to ascertain the identity of our enemies. We have many enemies in the Middle East, from alQaeda and the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the mullahs of Tehran, and naturally our suspicions first fell in those quarters. But they are not our only enemies; and the nature of the attack made it hard to be sure who was responsible. The two atomic bombs that exploded in our capital, and the third that misfired in the Pentagon visitors lot, were stolen from our own stockpile. This was not only a cowardly and heinous act of nuclear terrorism, but a carefully planned one. However, we have identified the attackers, and we are now preparing to deal with them as they have dealt with us.

"There is no easy way for me to explain this because the reality lies far beyond our everyday experience, but the scientists of our national laboratories assure me that this is true: We live in what they call a multiverse, a many-branched tree of reality. Scientists at Los Alamos have for a year now been probing techniques for traveling to other universes—to other versions of this, our own Earth. They had hoped to use this technique for peaceful ends, to solve the environmental and climatic problems that may arise in future decades. But we have discovered, the hard way, that we are not alone.

"Some of the alternate earths we have discovered are inhabited. And in one of these, at least, the inhabitants are hostile. Worse: They, too, have the technological tools to travel to other universes. The enemy who attacked us is the government of a sovereign nation in another America, a Godless feudal despotism ruled by terror and the lash. They know no freedom and they hate our own, for we are a living refutation of everything they hold to be true. Agents of this enemy have moved unseen among us for a generation, and indeed they have been active in the narcotics trade, using it to fund their infiltration of our institutions, their theft of our technologies. They are followers of an alien ideology and they seek to bring us down, and it is to that end that they stole at least six atomic weapons from their storage cells on military bases—gaining access from another unseen universe even as our guards vigilantly defended the perimeter fences.