The Merchant’s War

It was shaping up to be a good day, thought Eric, as he twisting his left wrist with increasing effort to get the gyroball up to speed. A good day in a good week. Judith's report from the scene under Scollay Square was the second bit of really good news after Mike Fleming's remarkable reappearance. Heads we win: Lucius punches in the PAL code and switches off the bomb. Tails we don't lose: we get to deal with a fizzle, but we keep Boston. There were cover stories available to deal with a fizzle, to sweep it under the rug-it would be messy, but a whole different matter from losing the core of a city. "I'm waiting on a definite match when they finish fuming for prints," Judith had told him from the scene, "but we got some good UV-fluorescence images of patent prints in the dirt around the lock, and it sure looks like GREENSLEEVES's prints." Eric gave the ball another flick of the wrist. Which means we can take the kid gloves off now, he thought, with a warm glow of satisfaction. Just as soon as we've confirmed no other stock is missing. And he went back to staring at his desk.

Back when telephone switchboards were simple looms of wires and plug boards, different networks needed different wires. You could judge how important an official was by how many phone handsets he had on his desk. Life had been a lot simpler in those days. Today, Eric had just the one handset-and it plugged into his computer instead of a hole in the wall. He glanced at the clock in his taskbar to confirm the call was late, just as the computer rang.

"Smith here." He leaned back.

"Eric? Mandy in two-zero-two."

"Hi Mandy, Jim here. Y'all had a good day so far?"

"I'll take roll call." Eric grinned humorously. The list of names on the conference call was marching down the side of his screen. "Looks like we're missing Alain and Sonya. I'd give them another five minutes, but I've got places to be and meetings to go to, so if we can get started?"

The field ops conference call was under way. Like any policing or intelligence-gathering operation, the hunt for the cxtradimensional narcoterrorists called for coordination and intelligence sharing: and with agents scattered across four time zones it couldn't be carried out by calling everyone into a briefing room. But unlike a policing job, some aspects of the task were extraordinarily sensitive and could not be discussed, and unlike a normal intelligence operation, things were loo fluid and unstable to leave to the usual bureaucratic channels of written reports and weekly bulletins. So the daily ops call had become a fixture within FTO, or at least within that part of FTO that was focused on hunting the bad guys within the Continental United States. Each field office delegated a staff intelligence officer who could be trusted to filter the information stream for useful material and refrain from mentioning in public those projects that not everyone was cleared for. Or so the post-hoc justification went. In practice, they gave Eric a chance to keep a finger on the pulse of his department at ground level without spending all his time bouncing around the airline map.

In practice, normally all it was usually good for was an hour's intensive wrist exercise with the gyroball and a frustrating ten minutes writing up a summary for Dr. James. But today, Eric could smell something different in the air.

"... Following up the mobile phone thing via Wal-Mart, we've made some progress over here."

Eric snapped to full alert, glancing at the screen. It was Mandy, from the team in Stony Brook. "How many phones?" He cut in.

"I was just getting to that." She sounded offended. "The suspects bought two hundred and forty-six over the past six months, all the same model, batches of ten at a time, right up until yesterday. Wal-Mart has been very cooperative, and we've been going over their videotapes- they think it's some kind of fraud ring-and it looks like a Clan operation for sure. It's the same two men each week: if they follow the usual pattern-"the Clan had a rigid approach to buying supplies, always paying cash for small quantities at regular intervals"-we could lift them next week. We've also got a list of phone IMEIs and SIM numbers they bought and we're about to go to Cingular to see if-"