Rule 34 (20 page)

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Authors: Charles Stross

BOOK: Rule 34
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Moxie is waiting for you in your office and, for a miracle, he’s brought you a mug of latte just the way you like it. He’s wearing an appropriately sheepish expression, which finally makes your mind up for you. “Chill, Moxie. I’m not happy, but it’s not your fault. Next time try to give me some more warning, okay?”
He looks relieved. “I wanted to, skipper, but Chief Inspector MacLeish scheduled you for the briefing before I could get to you.”
Before he could get to you through regular channels, he means, but you don’t pursue the point. “I’ve just had a little chat with Chief Inspector Dixon. He’s going to try and square things with the deputy superintendent to get some backup in here. But in the meantime, it looks like Dickie’s little empire-building gambit is working. I’m going to be very scarce around here for the rest of the month, or until Dickie gets his man. So how about we go over what you’ve got on your desk, what
I’ve
got on
mine
that’s going to be added to your case-load while I’m gone, and what extra resources you need to keep your head above water in the meantime. Yes?”
Dawning horror steals across Moxie’s face. “Whu—you’re leaving me in charge?”
“Up to a point. I’ll still be around, but only for about an hour a day.” (Rule #1: always budget 50 per cent more time for your people than you tell them you’ve got.) “Think hard before you escalate. Speedy’s off today: I’ll be repeating this chat with him when he’s back in. You’re going to have to co-ordinate with him directly, not through me. Meanwhile, your case-load: Show it to me.”
For about the next hour, Moxie subjects you to his team’s current case-load in all its mind-numbingly recondite, not to mention perverse, detail.
Publicity surrounding the Morningside Cannibals has led to a spate of copy-cat offences against sanity, some of them literally so (as in: There are folks dining on cloned haunch of pedigree Siamese tonight). There’s an anonymous perp randomly posting upskirt videos on neighbourhood blogs, captured by a microcam strapped to one of the too-tame squirrels in the Botanic Gardens. Moxie’s looking for the fabber source of some disturbingly simple meth-lab-in-a-brick chemistry kits that are circulating among the usual numpties in Lochend, and there’s the regular slew of urban-legend queries from the more gullible elements of CID to field. There’s the hentai fan base to keep an eye on, with their current interest in Hitler Yaoi and holocaust tentacle porn—still illegal in Germany, which is giving rise to cross-jurisdictional headaches—and their ongoing attempt to exhaustively explore the
M
girls
N
cups polynomial space in NP time, as a computer geek of your acquaintance once put it.
(You’re not quite sure what the
NP time
bit means, but the combination of cheap machinima tools and lots of unemployed games programmers have turned Edinburgh into a hot-bed of photorealistic fetish video production even though it’s technically illegal. The burden of evidence is higher under Scottish law, so despite having tougher porn laws than England, the smart shocksite developers have all moved north, while their development tools and websites have migrated into the Russian blacknet cloud. Fighting it is an unwinnable battle, so your job is merely to flag up anything involving real-live actors—especially minors—and try to avoid unwittingly popularizing the stuff via the Streisand Effect.)
At the end of the hour you’re just about reeling from the deluge, but you’ve given Moxie a framework for prioritizing his jobs over the next week, not to mention your home and personal mobile numbers and strict instructions to call you immediately if anything really fucked comes up. You can see he’s getting psyched up, ready and prepared to perform triage on Tubgirl should the need make itself known—right up until the moment your mobie rings.
You answer it. It’s Dodgy Dickie.
Shit.
“Wait one,” you mouth at Moxie. “Yes?”
MacLeish looks like his ulcer’s playing up again. “Inspector? Are you up to speed on the international angle yet?”
You bite back your instant reaction: “I’m in the process of clearing my desk and handing off all current ICIU operations to a subordinate. It’s going to take me another half-hour today, and a couple of hours tomorrow when my relief sergeant is in the shop. So your answer is a conditional ‘no,’ sir. Has something come up?”
“You bet it has, and it’s touching down at Turnhouse in an hour. We’ve got an investigator from Europol flying in to poke his nose where it doesn’t belong. I want you to meet him and keep him the hell off my back. Is that understood?”
Your instant impulse is to tell Dickie to fuck right off, but the prospect of subsequently explaining your language to a disciplinary tribunal is not attractive. “I understand you consider my management of a secure hand-off of my departmental responsibilities is less important than what is basically a baby-sitting job, sir. I’m going to comply with your request, but not at the cost of making a hash of a bunch of other, admittedly lower-priority, investigations that are already in progress. I’ll take care of the busybodies, but you
don’t
tell me how to run my unit. Am I clear?”
For a moment, Dickie looks as if he’s about to blow a gasket, but then he nods, jerkily. “Perfectly.”
“Good.” You hang up, and check your desktop. Sure enough, there’s a stack of busybody IMs that have come in while you were briefing Moxie, insistently asking for you and demanding that you do this, do that, hither and yon. Dickie’s management style is to shoot at the monkey’s feet, make the monkey dance. Especially when the monkey was, ten years ago, number one in his graduating class, and as recently as five years ago, the number-one candidate for the post he’s currently occupying. You rub your eyes. “I’m too old for this shit,” you hear yourself say.
“Skipper?” Moxie is looking at you. “Anything I can do to help?”
“No, just as long as you’re clear on where we’re going. I’ve got to go out to the airport to meet a flight in. Cover my back?”
He sketches a videogame rendition of a salute. “Yes, ma’am!”
“Cool.” You finish reading the IM stack, then your tenuous control fractures like a sheet of toughened glass held for too long over a naked flame of rage as you see your contact details.
“Shit.”
“Skipper?”
“That’s all I fucking need this morning.
All.
”
“What—”
“Nothing you can do, Moxie.” You get a handle on it fast, but for a moment you’re blurring with bloody-eyed rage. Because you recognize the name on the passenger manifest, the Eurocop who’s coming to visit and who Dodgy Dickie has detailed you to organize the disposition of. It’s the man who cost you your career, five years ago.
Kemal.
ANWAR: Cousin Tariq
 
Wednesday evening in the Hussein household.
You have retreated upstairs to your den because your mother-in-law has come round to visit Bibi (who is home early from work), and she’s in a state—utterly inconsolable, in fact. Most of the time Sameena is okay for an old bat, unless you happen to be single: She is afflicted with Bridezilla-by-proxy syndrome and is always in search of a wedding to organize. But tonight she’s wailing and pulling her hair, upset beyond all reason. She supplements Uncle Taleb’s income by housekeeping—to keep it respectable, she only works for gay men. Anyway, she found one of her clients dead on the bathroom floor this Tuesday, and it gave her a funny turn, and every evening since she’s come round to angst and wail like a one-woman banshee convention. You’d think she’d be getting over it by now, but no: If anything, it gets worse.
Right now, despite Bibi plying her with tea and sympathy, she’s so far out of her tree that the squirrels are sending out search parties: After half an hour of her wailing, you finally crack, climb the loft ladder, and pull it up behind you. Maybe you should tell Bibi to bring home some Valium from work? Nobody would miss it, and it’d be a small mercy for the old woman. But right now, her sobbing is getting on your tits mightily, so you stick your music library on random play, bury your phone under a cushion, and haul out Tariq’s spare pad from behind the slowly bubbling beer bucket with the vague idea of seeing if he’s got any work for you.
As soon as you open it up and get online via the dodgy directional aerial he set you up with, he calls you. “Anwar, my man! How are you hanging?”
Tariq has this annoying habit of trying to talk slang like the hep rappers and gangsta cats of previous generations. It’s annoying because he gets it badly wrong every time. He wears a two-sizes-too-small porkpie hat and dyes his moustache orange because he thinks it’s cool (plus, it annoys the fuck out of Imam Hafiz—not to mention his elder sister Bibi). He also takes the piss out of everybody. What’s really galling is that you’ve got a sneaky feeling that he might be onto something. Certainly, Tariq’s gone further and got more in twenty-four years than you have in nearly thirty; otherwise, why would you be working for him?
“I’m hanging fine, cuz, just fine. But your mother is another matter. She is down in the kitchen with Bibi, and I am up in the attic and close to jamming cotton wool in my ears, I can tell you. She’s fucking lost it, she’s lost the plot, cuz.”
“Did you know the stiff she found was murdered? It’s on the
Spurtle’s
newscrawl, the filth are all over it. That’s some heavy shit right there, my man—and that’s
before
you get into the juicier rumours about how he was whacked. Fucking chancer if you ask me, fucker deserved it. But it’s hard on Mom, walking in on him while she was about her scodgies . . . Listen, I’ve got a job on. Do you have time to look over some templates for me? I’m customizing a chat room for Ali, and I need someone to whack the scripts and try to make them fall over.”
“Which Ali are you working for—short, fat Ali, tall’n’bearded Ali, or psycho punk Ali?”
“You know fucking well I don’t work with Shorty McFatso, and Skinny McBeardy’s a fucking space cadet—got no money because he spends everything he can scrounge on maryjane.”
“What, he’s got a Scottish girl-friend now?”
Tariq rolls his eyes as if you’ve said something dumb, then changes the subject: “I’m putting this board together on behalf of our mutual friend Ali the Punk,
capisce
? I just need a unit tester to walk the scripts over it.
If
you can spare me a few hours from your critically important diplomatic duties—”
“If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.” It’s not as if you’re busy in the office. “I can start as soon as you like.” You don’t know much about Punk Ali, but you’re pretty sure you’d have heard if he was a waster.
Tariq tilts his head slightly, casting his eyes in shadow: You can see the organized firefly flicker of his oh-so-posh contact lenses, retinal-scanning displays for the plugged-in generation. “Can you get away for an hour or two?” he asks.
“Guess so.” Anything to get away from the fearful caterwauling downstairs. “Where do you want to meet?”
“You know the Halfway House, on Fleshmarket Close?”
Of course you know it; it’s one of the Gnome’s favoured hang-outs precisely because it’s half-underground, in a microwave shadow, where mobiles work erratically and GPS doesn’t reach. Stands to reason Tariq would know about it, too. “Sure. See you there in half an hour?”
Tariq cuts the connection. You switch off the pad and lay it aside, then peer at the beer bucket. The wee transparent plastic hingmy—
airlock
? But you thought only spaceships had them—farts at you. It smells of yeast and a faint tang of something metallic. You fight back the urge to lift the lid and sneak a look inside (the brewing FAQs were all very insistent that you shouldna do that). “Sleep tight,” you admonish it, then you drop the trap-door and scramble down the ladder and out into the night.

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