James frowned. “Why won’t they talk?”
“Well, near as we can tell, they don’t speak English.” Mike waited to see how James would react.
When it came, it was a minute nod. “What about Spanish?”
“Nope.” Mike watched him minutely. No grasping at straws, no accusations of leg-pulling. He’s not so bad, he thought grudgingly. Not bad for a REMF spook. “We know about the tattoos, so we took precautions. Courier Able had a mirror tattoo on his head, under the hairline, and Courier Bravo had one on the inside of his left wrist. We kept them hooded and blindfolded until we had time to get a security-cleared cosmetologist with a laser in to erase them. But we’re pretty sure that these guys don’t speak English or Spanish—or French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Russian, Czech, Serbo-Croat, Japanese, Latin, Korean, Mandarin, or Cantonese.” And don’t ask how we know—the old fire drill trick could look very bad, very close to psychological torture, if a defense attorney dragged it up in front of a hostile jury. “They do speak something Germanic, we got that much, and Matt checks out as a translator. They call it hochsprache, and it sounds like it diverged from various proto-German dialects about sixteen hundred years ago—it’s about as similar to German as modern Spanish is to classical Latin.” He took another deep breath. “I’m trying to learn it, but there’s not much to go with—I mean, neither of the detainees are willing to help, and Matthias isn’t exactly a foreign-language teacher. We’re working on a lexicon, and we’ve got a couple of research linguists coming in as soon as we get their security clearances through, but it’s a big problem. I figure these guys were drafted in as mules, shuttling back and forth between buildings in the same place in both worlds—what they call doppelganger houses. To do that, they don’t need to pass as Americans. But getting information out of them is difficult.”
Which is an understatement and a half, Mike added mentally. Matt was becoming a headache—increasingly demanding and suspicious, paranoid about the terms of his confinement and the likelihood of his eventual release under a false identity. Sooner or later he’d stop cooperating, and then they’d be in big trouble.
“Well, we are going to have a pressing need for that expertise in the near future.” James sat up abruptly, as if he’d come to some decision. “Mr. Fleming, I have some news for you which might sound negative at first, so I hope you’ll listen carefully and take it positively. We have no functioning human intelligence assets at all in the place they come from. Just like the situation in Afghanistan back in 2001—and we can’t afford to be flying blind. I’ve been reviewing your personnel file and, bluntly, you’re nothing exceptional—except that you’ve got a three-month lead over everyone else in the field in this one area of expertise. So, with immediate effect I’m directing Colonel Smith here to reassign you from Investigations Branch to a new core team—on-location HUMINT. And your prisoner is going to be reassigned to military custody, although for the time being he’ll stay where he is.”
“Military custody?” Mike raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure that’s legal.”
“It will be when the AG’s office delivers their ruling,” James said dismissively. “As I was about to say, you will continue to work on language skills and continue debriefing Matthias, and liaise with Investigations Branch as necessary—but you’re also going to go back to school. Field operations school, to be precise. You’re going to ride shotgun on a code word operation you haven’t heard of before now, code word CLEANSWEEP, and you have BLUESKY clearance. Your primary job will be to learn who these people are and how they think, and their language and customs, and anything else that lets us get a handle on their minds. And you’re going to learn them well enough to learn how to move among them undetected. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, I think I do.” Mike’s mouth was dry. So they’re taking this military? “You’re asking for a spy. Right?” Can they do this? Legally? He had a feeling that any objections he raised would be steamrolled. And raising them in the first place might be rather more serious than a career-limiting move.
“Not just a simple spy.” James nodded thoughtfully. “You’re going to be recruiting, training, and running other officers, in a way that we haven’t really been good at since the Cold War. Over the past couple of decades we’ve come to rely too heavily on electronic intelligence sources—no offense,” he added in Smith’s direction, “and we just can’t operate that way in fairyland. So you’re going to go in and run our field operation. We’re going in—we’re going over there, carrying the war to the enemy. That is the mission we are tasked with, from the top down. Got that?”
“It’s a lot to take in,” Mike said slowly. His head was spinning. What the hell? It sounds like he’s planning an invasion! “You mentioned some kind of special clearances, projects? Uh, CLEANSWEEP? BLUESKY?”
James nodded to Smith. “You tell him.”
Smith sat up. “The, uh, Clan pose a clear and present danger to the integrity of the United States of America,” he said quietly. “In fact, it’s not overdramatizing things too much to say that they’re the ultimate rogue state. So word is that we’re to prepare, if possible, for a situation in which we can go in to, ah, impose a change of regime. BLUESKY is the intelligence enabler and CLEANSWEEP is the project to conduct espionage operations in hostile territory.”
“All of this assumes we can reliably send spies into a parallel universe and bring them back again,” Mike said quietly. “How would we do that?”
Dr. James glanced at Colonel Smith. “You were right about him,” he murmured. To Mike: “You aren’t cleared for that yet. Let’s just say that we’ve got some long-term ideas, research projects under way. But for the time being”—he smiled at Mike, a frighteningly intense expression that revealed more teeth than a human being ought by rights to have—“we’ve got two enemy couriers, and they will work for us, whether they want to or not. We’ll use them to capture more. And then we’ll make those fuckers sorry they ever messed with the United States.”
REPRODUCTIVE POLITICS
It was a shaken, thoughtful Miriam who followed the coach attendant and the other passengers in her car up to the dining carriage. Some of the other passengers had dressed for dinner, but Miriam found she wasn’t too out of place once she shed the jacket: probably a good thing, because she hadn’t been paying enough attention to maintaining her cover. As with the Gruinmarkt, issues of public etiquette frequently baffled her—it was easy to get things wrong, especially when she was worrying about other matters. What on earth is going on with that report? What does it mean? she wondered as the attendant ushered her into a seat between a ruddy-faced grandmother and her bouncing ten-year-old charge, evidently out of some misplaced concern for her solitary status. I’m being trolled. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. Someone expected me to look in the bag—