Theater of Spies Read online

  PRAISE FOR BLACK CHAMBER

  “As always, [Stirling] comes up with inventive twists that keep your mind racing and the pages turning. Bravo!”

  —Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award–winning author of Quantum Night

  “The nice thing about getting a Steve Stirling book in the mail is that you know for a few hours you can fly on dreams of wonder, traveling to a world so much more than this angry reality.”

  —John Ringo, author of Under a Graveyard Sky

  “It’s a great feeling being in the hands of an alternate history master, who knows his material and crafts an utterly plausible world. Stirling gives us Teddy Roosevelt’s USA and a Cuban-Irish-American secret agent who’s more than a match for an airship full of James Bonds.”

  —Django Wexler, author of The Infernal Battalion

  “Imagine that World War One began in Europe with the activist Teddy Roosevelt in the White House instead of the academic Woodrow Wilson. You’ve got a dandy steampunk setting for a slam-bang spy thriller with an engaging female protagonist.”

  —David Drake, author of Death’s Bright Day

  “One of the most intriguing and entertaining adventures to come along in years.”

  —Diana L. Paxson, author of Sword of Avalon

  “Serves us a World War One America under a Theodore Roosevelt presidency, spiced with all the possibilities, good and bad, that Stirling’s ever-ambitious imagination and meticulous approach to historical can cook up.”

  —A. M. Dellamonica, author of The Nature of a Pirate

  “This is a sheer joy of an alternative history. . . . If you can put this book down once you’ve picked it up, I’ll eat my bowler hat.”

  —Patricia Finney, author of Gloriana’s Torch

  “One mighty fine read—sexy, action-filled adventure in a thoughtful alternate history.”

  —Lawrence Watt-Evans, author of the Obsidian Chronicles

  “This novel provides a desperately needed infusion of courage and originality. How appropriate that Penguin, publisher of the James Bond novels, launches a hard-edged new spy series with Stirling. How appropriate that Ace, famous for classic science fiction, is on board for the adventure.”

  —Brad Linaweaver, Prometheus Award–winning author of Moon of Ice

  TITLES BY S. M. STIRLING

  Novels of an Alternate World War I

  Black Chamber

  Theater of Spies

  Novels of the Change

  Island in the Sea of Time

  Against the Tide of Years

  On the Oceans of Eternity

  Dies the Fire

  The Protector’s War

  A Meeting at Corvallis

  The Sunrise Lands

  The Scourge of God

  The Sword of the Lady

  The High King of Montival

  The Tears of the Sun

  Lord of Mountains

  The Given Sacrifice

  The Golden Princess

  The Desert and the Blade

  Prince of Outcasts

  The Sea Peoples

  Novels of the Shadowspawn

  A Taint in the Blood

  The Council of Shadows

  Shadows of Falling Night

  Other Novels by S. M. Stirling

  The Peshawar Lancers

  Conquistador

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by S. M. Stirling

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Stirling, S. M., author.

  Title: Theater of spies / S.M. Stirling.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Ace, 2019. | Series: A novel of an alternate world war; 2

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018045381| ISBN 9780399586255 (paperback) | ISBN 9780399586262 (ebook)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Alternative History. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Espionage. | GSAFD: Alternative histories (Fiction) | Spy stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3569.T543 T48 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045381

  First Edition: May 2019

  Cover art by Shutterstock

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To Victor Milán, good writer and good friend.

  We’ll miss you, dammit, Vic.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Kier Salmon, longtime close friend and valued advisor, whose help with things in Spanish and about Mexico—she lived there into adulthood—has been very, very helpful with this series, as well as her general advice to which I have always listened carefully. My mother grew up speaking Spanish too (in Lima, Peru), but alas she and my aunt used it as a secret code the children couldn’t understand, and Kier has been invaluable to fill in those lacunae, as well as being a fine editor (and promising writer) in her own right.

  To Markus Baur, for help with the German language and as a first reader.

  To Dave Drake, for help with the Latin bits and a deep knowledge of firearms acquired in several different ways. Also, collaborating with him taught me how to outline.

  To Alyx Dellamonica, for advice, native-guide work, and just generally being cool. Her wife, Kelly Robson, is cool too and an extremely talented writer now winning implausible numbers of awards. An asteroid would have to strike Toronto to seriously dent the awesomeness of this pair. Soon Alyx will have another book out and it is great; I say this with smug certainty, since I got to read it in manuscript. Fortunately, writing is one of those fields where you have colleagues, not competitors.

  To my first readers: Steve Brady, Pete Sartucci, Brenda Sutton, Lucienne Brown, Markus Baur, Ara Ogle, and Scott Palter.

  To Patricia Finney (aka P. F. Chisholm), for friendship and her own wonderful books, starting with A Shadow of Gulls (which she wrote when she was in her teens, at which point I was still doing Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche fanfic) and going on from there. One of the best historical novelists of our generation!

  And to: Walter Jon Williams, Emily Mah, John Miller, Vic Milán (still present in spirit), Jan Stirling, Matt Reiten, Lauren Teffeau, S. E. Burr, Sarena Ulibarri, and Rebecca Roanhorse of Critical Mass, our writer’s group, for constant help and advice.

  And to Joe’s Diner (joesdining.com) and Ecco Gelato & Espresso (eccogelato.com) here in Santa Fe, for putting up with my interminable presence and my habit of making faces and muttering dialogue as I write.

  CONTENTS

  Praise for Black Chamber

  Titles by S. M. Stirling

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

 
Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Epilogue I

  Epilogue II

  About the Author

  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

  —THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  PROLOGUE

  Washington, D.C.

  Iron House

  (Consolidated War Department–Navy Department Headquarters)

  Situation and Maps Room

  NOVEMBER 6TH, AD 1916, 1916(B)

  Point of Departure plus 4 Years

  President Theodore Roosevelt stood with his feet braced and one hand gripping the lapel of his morning jacket, the other thrust into a pocket and clenched into a fist, looking at the maps that showed the Great War’s fronts and alliances and disasters, scowling through his pince-nez with his mustache bristling. It was an expression as formidable as his more famous tooth-baring fighting grin. Officers of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps—and a few from the Coast Guard—bustled quietly amid a clack of keys and murmur of telephones, updating the maps on the walls or directing the WAC girls in their crisp uniforms who used long pool-cue-like sticks to push markers on the big horizontal map-tables that showed the movements of friendly and enemy units and who manned . . .

  Or perhaps staffed is the right word, he thought.

  . . . the coding machines and Teletypes that linked the room to the far-flung legions of the Republic.

  The thought came with the relief of a brief moment’s whimsy as he gave a fond, proud glance at their patriotic youthful earnestness. And if they were doing soldiers’ work, why shouldn’t they be in uniform—albeit with skirts a mildly shocking three inches above the ankle—and get the same pay and ranks? He’d plucked Helen Varick Boswell from the Women’s Bureau of the Party to organize the Women’s Auxiliary Corps for the Army . . . and anyone who didn’t like her being General Boswell now could just go and do that other thing.

  Roosevelt and his aides and personal secretary and Secret Service bodyguards attracted a few glances, despite the disciplined intensity of the work. It suddenly occurred to him that the national vote would be tomorrow . . . and that he hadn’t thought about it in days . . . which must be a first for a president standing for reelection, much less for a unique fourth term.

  Fourth if you count taking over for McKinley after the assassination in ’01, which I do, since the amiable old duffer had all the backbone of a chocolate éclair and never actually did anything in all his born days, bless him. Not without a push, usually from me.

  Against his usual custom, this time he hadn’t even ridden a special train from city to city and town to town, giving whistle-stop speeches to impromptu crowds; events had kept him pinned to Washington.

  Not that it matters, the result’s even more of a foregone conclusion than it was in 1912, and that was never in doubt after poor Taft’s heart attack. How long ago that seems!

  A horrible thought occurred to him: God have mercy on us, if Taft had lived Woodrow Woodenhead Wilson might be president now and facing this!

  He shook his head as if to shed the image, though the news was bad enough to inspire any number of morbid fantasies. God or fate or destiny had spared the United States that at least. He’d swept back into office on an unprecedented wave of support, the strongest mandate since George Washington’s, a vote for his plans to seize the dawning century for America and the New Nationalism.

  One of the things he’d done since was take the nation by the scruff and make it face up to the fact that it was a dangerous world now and that you had to be prepared.

  Getting elected is only important because of what you do once you are. These maps are more important than electioneering.

  There were three on the section of wall he was staring at, showing Paris, London, and Bordeaux—where the top echelon of the French government had retreated after the first airborne gas attack on Paris in May, which had seemed so terrible at the time but had only contained conventional phosgene and only killed thousands.

  All three maps had broad, shaded marks on them, shaped roughly like an overlapping series of blobby elongated teardrops. That showed where the German super-Zeppelin bombers had dropped fifty to a hundred tons of the Vernichtungsgas on each city.

  The enemy were calling it that, Annihilation Gas, though he preferred the popular coinage of horror-gas. The scientists termed it organo-methylphosphonothioate nerve agent X and claimed it wasn’t even a gas at normal temperatures, strictly speaking, and more importantly they’d found that a single liter of it—two pints—held a hundred thousand lethal doses if perfectly distributed. The half-ton canisters of horror-gas had burst at a thousand feet, or sometimes wherever burning airships had exploded under attack by fighting-scout aeroplanes. Then the winds had carried the finely divided aerosol of drops over square miles of city as they settled. Most of the zeppelins had died over their targets or crashed on their way back, but they had taken three cities with them.

  Below the maps were slots where estimates from Military Intelligence and the Black Chamber—and the allied governments, or what was left of them—were updated daily. Paris and London each showed over six hundred thousand dead and climbing fast; Bordeaux much less, but if anything a higher proportion of its smaller population. Nobody had any idea how many more civilians had been crippled or driven mad by marginal doses on the fringes of the killing zones; the gas was so persistent, especially in cold weather or sheltered spots or soaked into skin and cloth and hair and wood, that you couldn’t go near the contaminated areas except in something like a deep-sea diver’s rubber suit.

  And nobody has any idea of how many have just run for their lives and are starving in ditches. The Kaiser’s plot . . . or Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s plot . . . cut the heads off two great nations at a stroke, he thought with throttled rage. And came within a hair of wrecking us, if the Chamber hadn’t stopped it. When we win this war, everyone involved will hang.

  One of his military aides cleared his throat and took a brief glance at his newfangled wristwatch. Roosevelt nodded brusquely and followed horse-faced young Bradley’s jug ears down an arch-roofed corridor toward the meeting room. Two motionless Marine guards with Thompson guns on assault slings across their bellies and faces like carved wood under their turtle-shaped steel helmets flanked the door, snappi
ng to attention for an instant and then returning to their watchfulness.

  The president walked past them and sat at the head of the big oval table, nodding to the respectful greetings and salutes. There was a general rustle as files were opened and pads made ready. There were maps here too, set up on easels or hanging before the walls, mostly of Europe and North Africa, some of Asia.

  And none showing things I wanted to see.

  With the Chiefs of Staff was Director Wilkie, head of the Secret Service and more importantly of the—until recently—officially nonexistent subsection that had grown to utterly overshadow it, the Black Chamber. Whose motto was Ex umbris, acies: From the shadows, steel.

  Though they think I don’t know that the unofficial Chamber motto is Non Theodorum parvis concitares ne perturbatus sit, which means “Don’t bother Teddy with the details, it’ll just upset him”!

  “Right, gentlemen. We’re here to appraise the general situation and make sure we’re all . . . reading from the same page, as it were.”

  That phrase was his own coinage, and he thought it was rather pithy.

  “And there are some political developments . . . integrating Canada, for instance . . . that will give you enough extra work to keep you from the temptations of idleness and dissipation.”

  He grinned at that, and there were tired chuckles; none of the men in the room looked as if they were getting enough sleep, and he knew he wasn’t. He could barely squeeze in an hour or two a day swimming and wrestling and working the punching bag.

  “Tell me some bad news, Leonard,” Roosevelt said to the head of the General Staff. “Start with the bad, at least, and work your way up to the unthinkably terrible. We can do a world tour; it’s a world war now that we’re officially in it at last.”

  “Mr. President, other resources may be short, but of bad news in all flavors we can give you any amount,” Leonard Wood said in his soft New England accent.

  His long craggy Yankee face was professionally impassive and his voice calm, but they’d been friends for decades and had commanded the Rough Riders together. Roosevelt could tell grimness when it spoke.