THE JENNIFER MORGUE
By Charles Stross
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No book gets written in a vacuum, and this one is no exception.
I'd like to thank my editors, Marty Halpern at Golden Gryphon and Ginjer Buchanan at Ace, and my agent Caitlin Blasdell, all of whom helped make this book possible.
I'd also like to thank my hundreds of test readers — in no particular order: Simon Bradshaw, Dan Ritter, Nicholas Whyte, Elizabeth Bear, Brooks Moses, Mike Scott, Jack Foy, Luna Black, Harry Payne, Andreas Black, Marcus Rowland, Ken MacLeod, Peter Hollo, Andrew Wilson, Stefan Pearson, Gavin Inglis, Jack Deighton, John Scalzi, Anthony Quirke, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Andrew Ferguson, Martin Page, Robert Sneddon, and Steve Stirling.
I'd also like to thank Hugh Hancock, who valiantly helped me MST3K my way through the Bond canon.
CONTENTS
THE JENNIFER MORGUE
PIMPF
AFTERWORD: THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPYING
GLOSSARY OF ABBREVIATIONS, ACRONYMS AND ORGANIZATIONS
THE JENNIFER MORGUE
PROLOGUE: JENNIFER
August 25, 1975, 165°W, 30°N. The guys from the "A" and "B" crews have been sitting on their collective ass for five weeks, out in the middle of nowhere. They're not alone; there's the ship's crew, from the captain on down to the lowliest assistant cook, and the CIA spooks. But the other guys have at least got something to do.
The ship's crew has a vessel to run: an unholy huge behemoth, 66,000 tons of deep-ocean exploratory mining ship, 400 million bucks and seven years in the building. The CIA dudes are keeping a wary eye on the Russian trawler that's stooging around on the horizon. And as for the Texan wildcat drilling guys, for the past couple of days they've been working ceaselessly on the stabilized platform, bolting one sixty-foot steel pipe after another onto the top of the drill string and lowering it into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.