The Merchant’s War

"Well, I'm not happy either!" Eric dug his fingers into the arms of his chair. His damaged carpal tunnels sent twinges of protest running up his arms. "If you think I enjoy losing agents and trained special forces teams... hell." He raised a hand and ran fingertips through his thinning hair. "I'm sorry. But this failure mode wasn't anticipated. Nobody expected them to blow up the fucking palace and start a civil war in the garden. Maybe we should have anticipated it, if we'd been better informed about their internal political situation, but they don't exactly have newspapers over there and even if they did, we'd have trouble reading them. We'd have to have been fucking mind readers to spot a bunch of plotters running a coup!"

"Language, Colonel, please."

"Shi- sorry." Eric shook his head, angry at his own loss of control. "I'm upset. We've now lost two high-clearance, high-value agents and an AFSOCCOM specops team and we've only really been up and running for fourteen weeks."

"I feel your pain," James said dryly. Eric stared at him, taken aback. "But I'm going to have to brief the vice president tonight on all the progress we haven't been making, and believe me, chewing on ground glass would be less painful," he added. "Now. I've heard from Herz. How's CLANCY going?"

"Badly." CLANCY was the ongoing investigation into the nuclear device that Source GREENSLEEVES claimed was planted somewhere in the Boston/Cambridge area, before he'd so inconveniently managed to get himself killed. "We hadn't found anything really noteworthy-a couple of meth labs, a walled-up cellar full of moonshine left over from the nineteen twenties, that sort of thing-until Judith turned up her anomaly yesterday. I was half-convinced GREENSLEEVES was lying to us, but now-well, I don't think we can afford to take that risk." He shivered. "Just who the he-heck stuck a B-53 bomb on blocks in a warehouse and set it to go off on a ten-year timer?"

"Is that a question?" Doctor James leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingertips again, and the piranha-like set of his lips quirked slightly. Is he trying to smile? wondered Eric.

"Only if I'm not treading on any classified toes," Smith said warily.

"It's not a healthy question to ask. So I suggest you don't ask me about it. Then I won't have to tell you any lies."

"Ah." Smith dry-swallowed.

"Even if I did know anything about it. Which I don't," James said, with a twitch of one eyebrow that spoke volumes.

"Right. Right." Change the subject, quick. The fact that they were silting in a secure conference cell that was regularly swept for bugs didn't mean that nobody was listening in, or at least recording the session for posterity: all it meant was that nobody outside the charmed circle of the National Security infrastructure was eavesdropping. But what kind of black operation would involve us nuking one of our own cities? Smith filed the question away for later.

"Well, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. The original idea of taking the county planner's database and data mining it for suspicious activities is sound in principle, but it yields too many false positives in a city the size of this one. I mean, there are tens of thousands of business premises, many tens of thousands of homes with garages or large basements, and if only one percent of them flag as positives for things like lack of visible tenants or occupants, zero phone use but basic utility draw for heating, and so on, we're swamped. It might be a bomb installation, or it could equally well be Uncle Alfred's old house and he died six months ago and the estate's still in probate or something. Or it could be an overenthusiastic horticulturist trying to breed a better pot plant. On the other hand, hopefully the neutron scattering spectroscopes our NIRT liaisons are getting next week will allow us to make an exhaustive roving search. And we can cover for it easily, by telling the truth-we're testing a bomb detector for terrorist nukes. Everyone will assume we're worried about al-Qaeda, and if we actually do find GREENSLEEVES's gadget... well, do you suppose the VP would like to make hay with that?"

The raised eyebrow was back. "I suppose you have a point." James nodded slowly. "Yes, that would kill two terrorist threats with one stone." Eric relaxed slightly. "What else do you have for me?"