The Trade of Queens by Charles Stross

I—”
    â€œTurn on your TV,” Tony interrupted. Something in his tone made Steve’s scalp crawl.
    â€œWhat channel?” he demanded.
    â€œAny of them.” Tony hung up. All around the office, the phones were going mad. No, it can’t be, Steve thought, dry-swallowing. He moused over to the TV tuner icon on his desktop and double-clicked to open it. And saw:
    *   *   *
    Two lopsided mushroom clouds roiling against the clear blue sky before a camera view flecked with static, both leaning towards the north in the grip of a light breeze—
    â€œVehicles are being turned back at police checkpoints. Meanwhile, National Guard units—”
    A roiling storm of dust and gravel like the aftermath of the collapse of the Twin Towers—
    â€œVice president, at an undisclosed location, will address the nation—”
    A brown-haired woman on CNN, her normal smile replaced by a rictus of shock, asking someone on the ground questions they couldn’t answer—
    People, walking, from their offices. Dirty and shocked, some of them carrying their shoes, briefcases, helping their neighbors—
    â€œReports that the White House was affected by the attack cannot be confirmed yet, but surviving eyewitnesses say—”
    A flashback view from a surveillance camera somewhere looking out across the Potomac, flash and it’s gone, blink and you’ve missed it—
    â€œResidents warned to stay indoors, keep doors and windows closed, and to drink only bottled—”
    *   *   *
    Minutes later Steve stared into the toilet bowl, waiting for his stomach to finish twisting as he ejected the morning’s coffee grounds and bile. I had him in my office, he thought. Oh Jesus. It wasn’t the thought that he’d turned down the scoop of a lifetime that hurt like a knife in the guts: What if I’d listened to him? Probably it had been too late already. Probably nothing could have been done. But the possibility that he’d had the key to averting this situation sitting in his cubicle, trying to explain everything with that slightly flaky twitch—the man who knew too much—that was too much to bear. Assuming, of course, that Fleming was telling the truth when he said he wasn’t the guy behind the bombs. That needed checking out, for sure.
    When he finally had the dry heaves under control he straightened up and, still somewhat shaky, walked over to the washbasins to clean himself up. The face that stared at him, bleary-eyed above the taps, looked years older than the face he’d shaved in the bathroom mirror at home that morning. What have we done? he wondered. The details were in the dictaphone; he’d zoned out during parts of Fleming’s spiel, particularly when it had been getting positively otherworldly. He remembered bits—something about mediaeval antipersonnel mines, crazy stuff about prisoners with bombs strapped to their necks—but the big picture evaded him, like a slippery mass of jelly that refused to be nailed down, like an untangled ball of string. Steve took a deep breath. I’ve got to get Fleming to call in, he realized. A faint journalistic reflex raised its head: It’s the story of a lifetime. Or the citizen’s arrest of a lifetime. Is a nuclear unabomber even possible?
    J. Barrett Armstrong’s office on the tenth floor was larger than Steve Schroeder’s beige cubicle on the eighth. It had a corner of the building to itself, with a view of Faneuil Hall off to one side and a mahogany conference table the size of a Marine Corps helicopter carrier tucked away near the inner wall of the suite. It was the very image of a modern news magnate’s poop deck, shipshape and shining with the gleaming elbow grease of a dozen minimum-wage cleaners; the captain’s quarters of a vessel in the great fleet commanded by an Australian news magnate of some note. In the grand scheme of the