The Traders' War (Merchant Princes Omnibus 2) by Stross Charles

Author:Stross, Charles [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780230771765
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2013-05-08T20:00:00+00:00

SECURITY BREACHES

Angbard’s bad day started out deceptively, with a phone call that he had taken for a positive development at first. It was not until later, when events began to spin out of control, that he recognized it for what it was – the very worst disaster to befall the Clan during his tenure as chief of external security.

This week his grace was staying on the other side, in a secluded mansion in upstate New York that he had acquired from the estate of a deceased record producer who had invested most of the money his bands had earned in building his own unobtrusive shrine to Brother Eater. (Not that they used the Hungry God’s true name in this benighted land, but the principle was the same.) The heavily wooded hundred-acre lot, discreet surveillance and security fittings, and the soundproofed basement rooms that had once served as a recording studio, all met with the duke’s approval. So did the building’s otherside location, a hilly bluff in the wilds of the Nordmarkt that had been effectively doppelgängered by a landslide until his men had tunneled into it to install the concealed exits, supply dumps, and booby-trapped passages that safety demanded.

Of course the location wasn’t perfect in all respects – in Nordmarkt it was a good ten miles from the nearest highway, itself little more than an unpaved track, and in its own world it was a good fifty-minute drive outside Rochester – but it met with most of his requirements, including the most important one of all: that nobody outside his immediate circle of retainers knew where it was.

These were desperate times. The defection of the duke’s former secretary, Matthias, had been a catastrophe for his personal security. He had been forced to immediately quarantine all his former possessions in the United States, the private jet along with the limousines and the houses: all out of reach for now, all contaminated by Matthias’s insidiously helpful management. He had holdouts, of course, the personal accounts held with offshore institutions that not even his secretary had known about – Duke Lofstrom had grown up during a time of bloody-handed paranoia, and never completely trusted anyone – but by his best estimate, it had cost him at least one hundred and twenty-six million dollars. And that was just how much it had cost him, as an individual. To the Clan as a whole, this disaster had cost upwards of two billion dollars. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that some of the more angry or desperate cousins might try to take their share out of his hide.

Events started with a phone call shortly after 11 p. m. Or rather, they started with what passed for a phone call where the duke was concerned: although he received it on an old-fashioned handset, it arrived at the safe house by a circuitous route involving a very off-the-books patch into the local phone company exchange, dark fiber connections between anonymous Internet hosts, and finally an encrypted data call to a stolen mobile phone handset.

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