Free Clan Corporate by Charles Stross Page B

from the Surveyor’s Office started to complain. “What is this? I don’t see what this has got to do with me. So you’ve got a guard taking kickbacks to fool with the videotape in the county jail-”
    The lights came up and the door opened. “Nope.” The man standing in the doorway was slightly built, in his early forties, with receding brown hair cropped short. He smiled easily as he stepped into the room and stood in front of the screen. It’s him, Mike realized with interest. The commentator with the dry sense of humor. “That wasn’t something we pulled off a tape, that was a live feed. And I assure you, once those data packets arrived here nobody tampered with them.”
    Mike licked his lips. “This links in with what Greensleeves was saying, doesn’t it?” he heard himself ask, as if from a distance.
    “It does indeed.” The man at the front of the auditorium looked pleased. “And that’s why you’re here. All of you, you’ve been exposed in some way to this business.” He nodded at Mike. “Some of you more than others-if it wasn’t for your quick thinking and the way you escalated it via Boston Special Operations, it might have been another couple of days before we realized what kind of intelligence asset you were sitting on.”
    “Greensleeves?” Pete asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You mean the kook?”
    Mike shook his head. Source Greensleeves, who called himself Matthias, and who kept yammering on about hidden conspiracies and other worlds in between blowing wholesale rings like they were street-corner crack houses-
    “Yes, and I’m afraid he isn’t a kook. Let me introduce myself. I’m Lieutenant Colonel Eric Smith, Air Force, on secondment to NSA/CSS, Office of Unconventional Programs. I work for the deputy director of technology. As of an hour ago, you guys are all on secondment from your usual assignments to a shiny new committee that doesn’t have a name yet, but that reports to the director of the National Security Council directly, via whoever he puts on top of me-hence all the melted stovepipes and joint action stuff. We’ve got to break across the usual departmental boundaries if we’re going to make this work. One reason you’re here is that you’ve all been vetted and had the security background checks in the course of your ordinary work. In fact, all but one of you are already federal employees working in the national security or crime prevention sectors. The letters have gone out to your managers and you should get independent confirmation when you get back home to Massachusetts and New York after this briefing round and tomorrow’s meetings and orientation lectures.” Smith leaned against the wall at the front of the room. “Any questions?”
    The guy from the DOE, Bob, looked up. “What am I doing here?” he rumbled. “Is NIRT a stakeholder?”
    Smith looked straight at him. “Yes,” he said softly. “The Nuclear Incident Response Teams are a stakeholder.”
    There was a hissing intake of breath: Mike glanced round in time to see Judith Herz look shocked.
    “We have reason to believe that fissionable materials are involved.”

4: Fertile Discussions
    The Countess Helge and her attendants traveled in convoy with other residents of Thorold Palace that evening, to the Östhalle at the east end of the royal run that formed the artery linking the great houses at the center of Niejwein.
    Niejwein was the royal capital of the kingdom of Gruinmarkt, which occupied most of the territory of Massachusetts and chunks of New Jersey and New York, over here. As near as Miriam had been able to work out, the first Norse settlements on the eastern seaboard had died out in the eleventh or twelfth centuries, but their replacements-painstakingly carved out by the landless sons of the northern European nobility around the start of the sixteenth century-had flourished, albeit far less so than in her own world. They had no skyscrapers, spacecraft, or steam engines; no United