The Clan Corporate

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 perso

"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 ru

"It's a lot to take in," Mike said slowly. His head was spi

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 di

"Marissa! Fold your hands and stop playing with your fork. I'm sorry, travel makes her unmanageable," the grandmother blasted in Miriam's ear. "Wouldn't you say so?"

Miriam smiled faintly, keeping a tight lid on her irritation at the interruption. "I don't like to speak ill of people I hardly know."

"That's all right, you know us now. Marissa, put that down! I'm Eleanor Crosby. You are…?"

Trapped. "I'm Gillian," said Miriam, rolling out the cover identity Clan logistics had prepared for her. They'd warned her it should be used as little as possible: it wouldn't stand up to serious scrutiny. The steward was walking the length of the table with a tureen of soup balanced on one arm, ladling spoonfuls into bowls in time with the sway of the carriage. I'm trying to think, so kindly shut up and stop bugging me.