Read The Trade of Queens for Free Online Page A

the file he was reading. Do I need this shit? Building security mostly kept the nuts out with admirable efficiency; and paranoids invariably headed for Crime and Current Affairs. If this guy was a nut … “Mind if I look at that?” Fleming handed him the badge. Steve blinked, peering at it. Certainly looks real enough. … He handed it back. “Why me?”
    â€œBecause—” Fleming was looking around. “Mind if I sit down?”
    Steve took a deep breath and gestured at the visitor’s chair by his desk. “Go ahead. In your own time.”
    â€œLast year Miriam Beckstein lost her job. You know about that?”
    Steve nodded, guardedly. “You want to tell me about it?”
    â€œIt wasn’t the regular post-9/11 slowdown; she was fired because she stumbled across a highly sophisticated money-laundering operation. Drug money, and lots of it.”
    Steve nodded again. Trying to remember: What had Miriam said? She’d been working for the Industry Weatherman back then, hadn’t she? Something wild about them canning her for uncovering— Jesus , he thought. “Mind if I record this?” he asked.
    â€œSure. Be my guest.” Fleming laughed as Steve activated his recorder. It was a hoarse bark, too much stress bottled up behind it. “Listen, this isn’t just about drugs, and I know it’s going to sound nuts, so let me start with some supporting evidence. An hour ago, my car was blown up. The news desk will probably have a report on it, incident in Braintree—” He proceeded to give an address. “I’m being targeted because I’m considered unreliable by the organization I’ve been working for on secondment. You can check on that bombing. If you wait until this afternoon, I’m afraid—shit. There’s going to be a terrorist strike this afternoon in D.C., and it’s bigger than 9/11. That’s why I’m here. There’s a faction in the government who have decided to run an updated version of Operation Northwoods, and they’ve maneuvered a narcoterrorist group into taking the fall for it. I’m—I was—attached to a special cross-agency task force working on the narcoterrorist ring in question. They’re the folks Miriam stumbled across—and it turns out that they’re big, bigger than the Medellín Cartel, and they’ve got contacts all the way to the top.”
    â€œOperation—what was that operation you mentioned?” Steve stared at his visitor. Jesus. Why do I always get the cranks?
    â€œOperation Northwoods. Back in 1962, during the Cold War, the Chiefs of Staff came up with a false flag project to justify an invasion of Cuba. The idea was that the CIA would fake up terrorist attacks on American cities, and plant evidence pointing at Castro. They were going to include hijackings, bombings, the lot—the most extreme scenarios included small nukes, or attacks on the capitol; it was all ‘Remember the Maine ’ stuff. Northwoods wasn’t activated, but during the early seventies the Nixon administration put in place the equipment for the same, on a bigger scale—there was a serious proposal to nuke Boston in order to justify a preemptive attack on China. This stuff keeps coming up again, and I’d like to remind you that our current vice president and the secretary for defense got their first policy chops under Nixon and Ford.”
    â€œBut they can’t—” Steve stopped. “They’ve just invaded Iraq! Why would they want to do this now? If they were going to—”
    â€œIraq was the president’s hobbyhorse. And no, I’m not saying that 9/11 was stage-managed to drag us into that war; that would be paranoid. But there’s a whole new enemy on hand, and a black cross-agency program to deal with them called Family Trade, and some of us aren’t too happy about the way things are being run. Let me fill