Charles Stross by The Merchant Princes 3 The Clan Corporate

Author:The Merchant Princes 3, The Clan Corporate
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-07-09T15:29:15+00:00

One of the guards outside Matt’s room had a Secure Field Voice Terminal. Mike took it, ducked into the Post-Debriefing Office, plugged it into one of the red-painted wall sockets, and signed on to his voice mail. The joy of working for spooks, he thought gloomily. Back at DEA Boston, he’d just have picked up the phone and asked Irene, the senior receptionist, to put him through. No pissing around with encrypted Internet telephony and firewalls and paranoid INFOSEC audits in case the freakazoid hackers had figured out a way to hack in. Sometimes he wondered what he’d done to deserve being forced to work with these guys. Obviously I must have done something really bad in an earlier life. “Mike here. What is it?”

“We got the thumbs-up.” No preamble: it was Colonel Smith. “BLUESKY has emplaced the cache and on that basis our NSC cutout has approved CLEANSWEEP

and you are go for action.”

“Whoops.” Mike swallowed, his heart giving a lurch. “What now?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the twenty-fourth-sorry, I’m in Facility Lambda. Just been talking to Client Zero.” More time-wasting code words to remember for something that was really quite straightforward.

“Well, that’s nice to hear. Listen, I want you in my office soonest. We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

“Okay, will comply. See you soon.”

Smith hung up, and Mike shut down the SFVT carefully, going through the post-call sanitary checklist for practice. (A radiation-hardened pocket PC

running some exotic NSA-written software, the SFVT could make secure voice calls anywhere with a broadband Internet connection-as long as you scrubbed its little brains clean afterward to make sure it didn’t remember any classified gossip, a chore that made Mike wish for the days of carrier pigeons. And as long as the software didn’t crash.) “Got to go,” he told the guard. “If Matt asks, I got called away by my boss and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He signed out through the retinal scanners by the door, then waited for the armed guard in front of the elevator bank. Mike gestured at one of the doors.

“Get me the twenty-second.” The guard nodded and pushed the call button. He’d already signed Mike in, knew his clearances, and knew what floors he was allowed to visit. A minute later the elevator car arrived and Mike went inside. It could have been the elevator in any other office block, except for the cameras in each corner, the call buttons covered by a crudely welded metal sheet, and the emergency hatch that was padlocked shut on the outside. No escape, that was the message it was meant to send. No entry. High security. No alternative points of view.

Mike found Smith in his office, a cramped cubbyhole dominated by an unfeasibly large safe. Smith looked tired and aggravated and energized all at once.

“Mike! Grab a seat.” He was busy with something on his Secure Data Terminal-a desktop computer by any other name-and turned the screen so that Mike couldn’t see it from the visitor’s chair. “Help yourself to a Diet Coke.

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