Read Online Clan Corporate by Charles Stross - Free Book Online Page A

sometimes it made sense to turn a blind eye to human failings. About six years in, he’d gone through the not-unusual burnout period that afflicted most officers, sooner or later, if they had any imagination or empathy for their fellow citizens. Afterward, he’d clawed his way back to a precarious moral sense, an idea of what was wrong with the world that gave him something to work toward. And now there was only one type of drug addict that he could get worked up over-the kind of enemy that he wanted to lay his hands on so bad he could taste it. He wanted the money addicts; the ones who needed it so bad they’d kill, maim, and wreck numberless other lives to get their fix.
    Which was why, a decade after joining up, he was still a dedicated DEA Special Agent-rather than a burned-out GS-12 desk jockey with his third nervous breakdown and his second divorce ahead of him, freewheeling past road marks on the long run down to retirement and the end of days.

    When the doorbell chimed exactly twenty-two minutes after the phone rang, the Mike who answered it was dressed again and had even managed to put a comb through his lank blond hair and run an electric razor over his chin. The effect was patchy, though, and he still felt in need of a good night’s sleep.
    He glanced at the entry phone, then relaxed. It was Pete, his partner on the current case, looking tired but not much worse for wear. Mike picked up his briefcase and opened the door. “What’s the story?”
    “C’mon. You think they’ve bothered to tell me anything?” Mike revised his opinion. Pete didn’t simply look tired and overworked, he looked apprehensive.
    Which was kind of worrying, in view of Pete’s usual supreme self-confidence.
    “Okay.” Mike armed the burglar alarm and locked his front door. Then he followed Pete toward a big Dodge minivan, waiting at the curb with its engine idling. A woman and two guys were waiting in it, beside the driver, who made a big deal of checking his agency ID. He didn’t know any of them except one of the men, who vaguely rang a bell. FBI office, Mike realized as he climbed in and sat down next to Pete. “Where are we going?” he asked as the door closed.
    “Questions later,” said the woman sitting next to the driver. She was a no-nonsense type in a gray suit, the kind Mike associated with internal audits and inter-agency joint committees. Mike was about to ask again, when he noticed Pete shake his head very slightly. Oh, he thought, and shut up as the van headed for the freeway. I can take a hint.
    When he realized they were heading for the airport after about twenty minutes, Mike sat up and began to take notice. And when they pulled out of the main traffic stream into the public terminals at Logan and headed toward a gate with a checkpoint and barrier, the sleep seemed to fall away. “What is this?”
    he hissed at Pete.
    The van barely stopped moving as whatever magic charm the driver had got him waved straight through a series of checkpoints and onto the air side of the terminal. “Look, I don’t know either,” Pete whispered. “Tony said to go with these guys.” He sounded worried.
    “Not long now,” the woman in the front passenger seat said apologetically.
    They drove past a row of parked executive jets, then pulled in next to a big Gulfstream, painted Air Force gray. “Okay, change of transport,” called their shepherd. “Everybody out!”
    “Wow.” Mike looked up at the jet. “They’re serious.”
    “Whoever they are,” Pete said apprehensively. “Somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more, Toto.”
    A blue-suiter checked their ID cards again at the foot of the stairs and double-checked them using a sheet of photos. Mike climbed aboard warily. The government executive jet wasn’t anything like as luxuriously fitted as the ones you saw in the movies, but that was hardly a surprise-it was a working plane, used for shifting small teams about. Mike strapped himself into a window seat