Authors: Charles Stross
Kavanaugh raises her eyebrow higher. You make eye contact. She’s smiling, but there’s no humour in it. “He’s sharp,” she remarks to nobody in particular. “That’s a distinct possibility. Put your box to sleep. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
Jim looks up at the ductwork where the electricity and gas pipes enter the flat. “Shite,” he says succinctly.
“Constable Rogers,” Gavaghan mutters, “the rams, please. Over-alls, everyone.” He turns away and starts talking to dispatch, asking them to find out who owns the utility feeds and get them shut off.
Rogers—and Jim—hand you a disposable overall, then get the door jacks and battering ram assembled. The latter is about a metre and a half long, and has a transparent face shield and sixteen evidence cameras hanging off it. While they’re doing that, Gavaghan drafts you to help with the duct tape and nylon sheeting, improvising a loose tent to cover the front door and keep particulates from escaping.
“Everyone record full lifelog, please,” says Kavanaugh, standing at the back of the cocoonlike white tunnel. Even wearing a blue polythene bag, she manages to look coolly managerial.
Jim glances at you as Rogers makes busy with the horizontal ram, jacking the uprights of the door-frame apart to help pop the lock’s tongue out of its groove. “You got your Girl Guides’ badge in battering rams?” he asks.
Are you going to get in the way?
“Nah.” You shrug. “What you want me to do?”
“Get back and stand oot the way. We’ll take two practice swings first. Don’t get too close, I wouldna want to put you in hospital.”
“Okay.” You line up behind his back, looking at the door over his shoulder, through the thick Lexan shield.
“One—two—three!” The impact is jarring, but the door takes it. “Jesus,” Rogers mutters disgustedly. “Again! One—two—”
The door topples inwards with a loud crash. It’s one of those flats that has a windowless room for a hall, everything else opening off doorways to either side. This being the top floor, it has a skylight, and what light there is comes streaming through the open Varilux window and the door to the living room, which is ajar. The floor’s bare, and the walls are an odd golden colour, papered with a curious design.
For a moment you fixate on the step-ladder and the rope dangling through the skylight and think,
Oh shit, he’s hanged hisself.
Then you blink it into perspective as you follow the ram crew onto the top of the fallen door, and you realize there’s no body, and the rope is a bundle of cables that reach the floor, then trail into the living room. It’s a suicide scene without a suicide.
Aw fuck, I should’ha gone up the roof after all,
you think. You sniff suspiciously. The air smells musty, and there’s an unpleasantly familiar undernote to it.
“Samples!” calls Constable Rogers, and there’s a clicking noise up and down the ram as its forensic air samplers snap closed on a million microscopic dust particles floating in the air. Some of them are hooked up to the sniffer on his belt, and if anyone’s been smoking the whacky baccy, you’ll hear about it in a minute: others go to the real-time LCN profiler and its online link to the national DNA database. “Down ram!”
You step around the guys as they lower the heavy ram. Ahead of you, Gavaghan and his crew are opening doors and glancing inside. The inspector’s busy with a tripod and some kind of laser surveying tool. You put your best foot forward and shove the living-room door open, camera first.
It’s your typical tenement living room. Three-metre-high ceiling, fireplace, and a huge bay window with wooden shutters, from back when daylight was cheap and electric lights were unheard of. Some of these buildings are older than Texas. There’s a cheap sofa with too many cushions, and a big recliner, but that’s where the normality ends. Because what kind of weirdo fills their living room with office equipment, then trashes the place?
“Sue.” You nearly jump out of your skin at the inspector’s tone of voice: “
If
you don’t mind?”
“Sorry, I was just capturing the scene…”
She slides past you, shaking her head. “Spare me.” Then she gets an eyeball of the big office desk lying on its side and the PC with its guts spilled across the floor. “Log this to evidence,
don’t
touch anything—”
“Skipper?” It’s Gavaghan, calling through the hall, his voice hollow. “You’ll want to see this.”
“What. Now?” She’s out of the living room like a cat after a moth, and you trail along in her wake, cams still chowing down on every stray photon around you.
“Kitchen,” he calls. Flags are going up everywhere, ghostly signs tagged to doorways like
BATHROOM
and
BEDROOM
2, and Liz dives towards
KITCHEN
. “Hold it!” There’s something in his voice that brings the inspector up sharply.
“How bad is it?”
“Need SOCO to tell us, skipper. It’s not like there’s a body or anything—”
“Then why are you—”
“We’re too late: It’s already been sanitized.”
Saturday morning finds you rolling out of a sleeper train berth bright and early, in Edinburgh. Capital of the People’s Republic of Scotland, jewel of the north, biggest tourist trap in Europe, and a whole bunch of other things. The first not-so-subtle hint you’re not in England is the row of flags flying over the railway station concourse—pale blue background, white diagonal cross. They’re feeling their new EU-regional
cojones
, the Scots. It’s a puzzler, but at least they’re not insisting you clear customs and immigration: Thank Brussels for something.
The taxi ride to your hotel rubs in the fact that you’ve come to another country. It’s the old-fashioned kind of black cab, with a real human being behind the wheel instead of a webcam and a drone jockey in a call centre. Your driver manages to detour past a weird building, all non-Euclidean swoops and curves (he proudly declares it to be a parliament, even though it looks like it just arrived from Mars, then confides that it cost a science-fictional amount, confirming the Martian origins of its budget oversight process). Then he takes a hyperspace detour round the back of a bunch of office blocks and into a rural wilderness, around the grassy flank of an extinct volcano so pristine that you half expect to see a pitched battle in progress between ghostly armies in kilts. Finally, you pop back out into a stonily pompous Victorian satellite town centre: except that back home, buildings don’t usually have battlements with cannons carved into them.
Okay, so maybe they’re feeling their
cojones
because they’ve invented hyperspace travel. You ease your death grip on the black cab’s grab rail and twitch your map overlay into life. “Malmaison,” says the driver.
“Uh…” You blink. The hotel does indeed appear to have gun turrets. And gargoyles. Then your tourist map twitches and rearranges itself in front of your eyes as the overloaded Galileo service catches up with you. “This is the, uh, Niddrie Malmaison. I wanted the West End one?”
“Oh,
reet
. Ahcannaebemissingthe—” You blink at the subsequent stream of consonants interspersed with vowels that sound subtly wrong. Maybe you’d have been better off waiting for a call-centre–controlled limo. But evidently no reply is expected: The driver hits the pause button on his meter and engages the mysterious fifth wheel that allows taxis everywhere to turn on the spot. And you’re off again, into a bizarre grey maze of steep streets and steeper buildings, with or without battlements. Eventually you find yourself in front of what your map overlay insists is the right hotel, and you can relax and bill it to the company account. The frightening numbers suddenly feel a lot less threatening when you remember you’re being billed in euros, not pounds.
This hotel also has crenulations, towers, and flagpoles, but they seem to have missed out on the more alarming architectural excursions and the lobby has a reassuringly familiar interior, furnished in international hotel-chain glass and chrome.
Negotiating the front desk isn’t hard, and once you’ve installed the contents of your suit carrier in the bijou closet and parked your laptop on the beautifully arranged desk, you suddenly realize that it is barely nine o’clock in the morning: You’re in a foreign capital city, you don’t actually have to check your work email until tomorrow, and once you’ve showered the sleeper-induced kinks out of your neck and shoulders, you’ve got an entire day in which to do touristy things. The prospect is inexplicably frightening and alluring. So, of course, you do it.
On Sunday you deal with a mild hang-over, a business-planning facial in the conference suite that staggers on for six and a half hours, and the inexplicable realization that the previous day you purchased a five-foot-long claymore from a dodgy pawnshop on North Bridge, and you have
no idea
how to get the thing home through the metal detectors at Euston without being arrested for carrying an offensive weapon, viz., a two-handed sword.
It must be something in the water.
On Monday morning you awake with the dawn, a mild sense of dread gnawing at your stomach. It’s performance anxiety, the kind you get when you’re about to be plunged into an unpredictable situation. So you dress, grab a light breakfast in the hotel restaurant, then collect your briefcase and go down to the lobby to meet up with Chris and Brendan and the others at nine thirty sharp.
“’Lo, ’Laine,” says Mohammed, grinning behind his glasses: He’s got them dialled all the way to opaque, and with his dark suit, he looks more like a historic mob hit-man than an accountant. “Are we ready to rock?”
“Speak for yourself,” snorts Maggie, making him jump. “Elaine, have you heard from—”
You spot the unopened email, hovering in your peripheral vision like a discreet butler. “Not before breakfast,” you say. Flicking a finger, you open it. It’s from CapG, and they’ve found a native guide for you. “Yes, thanks.” You skim the message. “That looks okay,” you concede.
“He’ll be over here after lunchtime,” Maggie adds, proving she’s more networked than you are. “If I were you, I’d take him off-site for orientation before you move in.”
“Well, yes.” Does she think you were born yesterday?
Or,
your sneaky bone prods you,
is she trying to keep you out of the loop for some reason?
“Mohammed, you and I are going to have a little chat with Mr. Michaels and Mr. Hackman.”
“Have you brought your garlic and holy water?” asks Chris, kibitzing from the side-line.
“Ha-ha, very droll.” Maggie gives him a long stare.
“I’m not kidding. If you haven’t met Hackman…he’s like Lamb, John Lamb. From HSBC.”
Maggie shudders. “Really.”
The Silence of the Lambs
is a company in-joke around the coffee station.
“Yes.” Chris claps her on the shoulder, lightly. “If that’s our first taxi…”
A couple of minutes later you find yourself knee to knee with Faye and Brendan in a driverless black cab, hurtling around cobblestoned mews like a one-half-scale model of Knightsbridge. It’s raining, and condensation from your breath coats the taxi window beside your head. Faye is busy with a spreadsheet, you see from her glasses and the keyboard laser-projected across the conference folder on her lap. “Have you ever been in on a search order before?” asks Brendan.
You shake your head. “Not much to it,” he says cheerily. Tapping the side of his glasses: “We serve the court order on the defendant and go in. The law’s near enough the same, it dates to the eighties and nineties, back before the locals got uppity. If they try to stop us, we find the nearest police officer and point out that they’re disobeying a court order to prevent the destruction of evidence. A little bird tells me the cops are already camping out on the door-step, so we won’t have far to go. Meanwhile, I’ve got a second order ready to go in on their telco—Fred’s handling it—to cut off all their communications if they don’t play ball.”
You shake your head. “They’re a net company. That’ll leave them dead in the water.”
“Oh yes.” He nods cheerfully: “Take them down for two working days, and they’ll probably go out of business. They’re on the sharp end of quality of service guarantees with teeth. It’s our nuclear option.” From the way he’s stroking his briefcase you have an uncomfortable feeling that he hopes he’s going to get to push the button.
“Brendan—” Faye warns, fingers tap-tapping at her lap.
“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound it. You smear the condensation with your sleeve and look out at the traffic. Four euros a litre for diesel up here, and the road’s still jammed.
An uncomfortable minute of stop-go traffic later, the taxi takes an abrupt left, then left again, and grinds to a halt. All you can see out of the window is a muddy car-park surrounded by dripping trees, but when you call up your overlay, you see that this is it: Unless the address is wrong, you’re in the right place. Brendan waves his company card at the scanner, the doors spring open, and you immediately put both your feet in an ankle-deep icy puddle. “Shit.” You bite back on your anger as you hop forwards, hoping your shoes aren’t ruined.
Louder swearing from the other side of the taxi tells you that the whole car-park is a mud-bath. You reach dry land and see a building ahead, two police cars drawn up in front of it—
that’s the offices of Hayek Associates?
It looks more like a brightly coloured garden shed. Raised voices: “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t come in unless the inspector says—”
There’s a thicket of twirling tags above the entrance: Chris, Maggie, Mohammed, and a blue diamond marker blinking blues and twos. Your heart sinks as you hurry towards the shed, hoping to get out of the rain. Inside the entrance you find a strange little scene. The shed is tricked out like the lobby of a corporate office, but there’s no office building attached, just a bank of lifts. Which are being guarded by a very bored-looking policeman, who is giving Chris and Mo the I’m-sorry-sir-you’ll-have-to-come-back-another-day story while scanning your face with his evidence-locked life recorder’s camera.
“We’ve got a court order,” says Chris. “Mr. Kadir, if you’d care to show the gentleman…” He’s using the stilted, formal language smart people use when talking to police with evidence cams.
“Sure.” Mohammed opens his conference folder and pulls out a document. “This is a compulsory search order, served by—”
“I’m sure it is, sir, but you’ll have to stop right there.” The cop looks flustered. “This is a criminal investigation. I’ll call the inspector immediately, and she’ll sort you out as soon as—” He stops, then fidgets with his earpiece. “Oh.” He nods to himself. “Uh, Sarge? If I can…? I’ve got a group of visitors here with a solicitor and a compulsory search order demanding immediate access. What should I…okay, I see, right, I’ll do that…It’s what? Aw, no! Right, right. I’ll do that, sir.” Behind the CopSpace glasses and the flickering pixelated reflections off his eyelids, his face tells its own story.
Grim news.
He shakes his head and takes the court order from Mohammed. “I’m sorry to break it to you gentlefolk, but I’m going to have to take your identity cards. Then you can go in an’ do what you must, but before you leave the site, I must take DNA samples and verify your identity.”
“DNA
what
?” Maggie squawks indignantly, and you are inclined to agree: Being photographed and fingerprinted for the ID card is all very well, but this isn’t normal.
The cop sighs. “Orders,” he says. “So we can exclude you from our enquiries.”
“But it’s a fraud case. What use is DNA evidence?”
“Not
those
enquiries.” He furrows his brows at Harrison. “The missing person investigation.”