The Merchants' War by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online

while I do a preliminary site survey. Don't touch anything on your way out. I want you to know, you've done good." She realized she was shaking. Don't touch anything. Right. She clambered out through the hole in the wall, blinking against the daylight, and stood aside as two figures in bright orange isolation suits duckwalked past her. The cylinders hanging from their shoulders bounced under their rubber covers like hugely obese buttocks as they bent down to crawl through the hole. Two more suits waved her down with radiation detectors and stripped off her shoe protectors before pronouncing her clean and waving her into the truck.
    The back of the NIRT truck was crowded with eon-soles and flashing panels of blinkenlights, battered lap-lops plastered with security inventory stickers, and coat rails for the bulky orange suits. This was a NIRT survey wagon, not the defuse-and-disarm trailer-those guys would be along in a while, as soon as Dr. Rand confirmed he needed them. Too many NIRT vehicles in one parking lot might attract the wrong kind of attention, especially in these days of Total Information Awareness and paranoia about security, not to mention closed-circuit cameras everywhere and journalists with web access spreading rumors. And rumors that NIRT were breaking into a lockup in Boston would be just the icing on a fifty-ton cake of
    shit if Homeland Security had to take the fall for a botched Family Trade operation. Rumors of any kind about NIRT would likely trigger a public panic, a run on the Dow, and a plague of boils inside the Beltway.
    "Coffee?" asked Rich, picking up a vacuum flask. "Yes, please." Judith yawned, suddenly becoming aware that she felt tired. "I don't believe what I just saw. I just hope it turns out to be some kind of sick prank." Low-level lab samples of something radioactive stashed in an aluminum cylinder knocked together in an auto body shop, that would do it. But it can't be, she realized. Nobody would be that crazy, just for a joke. Charges of wasting police time didn't even begin to cover it. And it wasn't as if some prankster had tried to draw attention to the lockup: quite the opposite, in fact.
    "Like hell. That thing had fins like a fifty-six Caddy. I swear I was expecting to see Slim Pickens riding it down..." Don poured a dose of evil-looking coffee into a cup and passed it to her. "Think it'll go off?"
    "Not now," Judith said with a confidence she didn't feel. "Dr. Strangelove and his merry men are going over it with their stethoscopes." There was a chair in front of one of the panels of blinkenlights and she sat down on it. "But something about this whole setup feels wrong."
    Her earphone bleeped, breaking her out of the introspective haze. "Yes?" she asked, keying the throat pickup.
    "Judith, I think you'd better come back in. Don't bother suiting up, it's safe for now, but there's bad news along with the good."
    "On my way." She put her coffee down. "Wait here," she told Rich, who nodded gratefully and took her place in the swivel chair.
    When she straightened up inside the warehouse she found it bright and claustrophobic, the air heavy with masonry dirt and the dust of years of neglect. It reminded her of a raid on a house in Queens she'd been in on, years ago: one the mob had been using to store counterfeit memory chips. Someone here had found the long-dead light fitting and replaced the bulb. Seen in proper light, the finned cylinder looked more like a badly made movie prop than a bomb. Two figures in orange inflatable suits hunched over the open tail of the gadget, while another was busy taking a screwdriver to the fascia of the instrument cart that was wired into it. Dr. Rand stepped around the rounded front of the cylinder: "Ah, Agent Herz. As I said, I've got good news and bad news." There was an unhealthy note of relish in his voice.
    Judith gestured towards the far end of the lockup from the NIRT team operatives working on the ass-end of the bomb. "Tell me everything I need