Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  “I’d have—fuck.” You restrain the urge to punch the corridor wall and draw a deep breath instead. The trouble is, Moxie isn’t wrong. “Who was on the duty desk?”

  “It was Inspector Rodney, ma’am.” Sheila Rodney. Who doesn’t, as far as you know, carry a knife for your back. But who knows well enough to forward a lead to the Blair murder investigation.

  “Fuck.” You take another deep breath. “Grab yourself a coffee, then see me in my office in fifteen minutes. You heard what Dickie said? That means your work-load just doubled for the rest of the week, so let’s go run through it before I have to go talk to the Europol investigators.”

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  “If I’m being pulled off ICIU for the duration, I’ve got to brief Doc Green.”

  Moxie looks at you as if your dog just died, and you don’t have the heart to stay angry. You give him a gentle shove on the shoulder. “Get going, Sergeant. There’s more than enough shit to go round, this time.”

  And then you head upstairs, across the walkway, into the adjacent block, and around the corner to Chief Inspector Dixon’s wee office.

  George “Doc Green” Dixon is (a) your nominal superior, and (b) not interested in the day-to-day running of ICIU, outwith its potential to dump embarrassing shit in his lap without warning. George is old-school, trained up via computer forensics to occupy a trusted niche in CID (trawling paedophiles’ phones for evidence of thoughtcrime) while keeping one foot in the stirrup of the runaway horse that is Infrastructure IT.

  He doesn’t have much time for ICIU—especially after the time he dropped round when you weren’t in, and Moxie showed him the Goatsedance video followed by a brisk webtour of the shocksites of Lothian and Borders, culminating in the infamous penile degloving accident fansite (which apparently left him with PTSD and permanent scarring on the insides of his eyelids). Ever since, he’s been more than happy to leave you alone to run your little fiefdom as you see fit.

  George is a verra verra busy man, as he never tires of reminding you from behind the cover of his salt-and-pepper moustache. He probably thinks his manner is avuncular: You think it’s patronizing, but it’s not your job to pass comment. In any case, he’s effective. Before Dodgy Dickie dissolved the morning briefing, you’d already emailed Doc to beg a minute of his time, so you have no compunction about going straight round to IIT and hammering on his battered office door.

  “Enter.” Doc looks up as you open the door. For a moment you think he’s playing a Sims game on his desk: Then you recognize the new annexe over the road. Sims, yes, but it’s some kind of architectural model—he’s probably looking for a way to shoe-horn more bandwidth through the crumbling concrete walls. “Have a seat. What’s come up this time, Liz?”

  You can’t help yourself: You pull a face. “Have you been following Dickie MacLeish’s murder investigation, sir?”

  “No.” He raises an eyebrow that looks like it’s got a sleeping caterpillar glued to it. “Should I have?”

  “It’s a crawling horror. First, it’s gone political. Secondly, it looks like it’s not a one off. We’ve had contacts from Europol about similar killings in Germany and possibly Italy. It’s a three-sigma match or better—if they hadn’t happened simultaneously, we’d be looking for a serial killer. Anyway, the initial lead-in came via ICIU, and there’s an input angle from one of my current cases, so Dickie just upped and announced that he’s drafting me to coordinate with the foreign investigators, without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  “Well, that’s nice to know,” George says heavily. “Did he ask you first?”

  You shake your head. “I’m not happy, sir. But it’s a murder case, and a high-profile one. It’d look bad if I kicked up a fuss.”

  “Huh.” A long pause. “What do you want to do?”

  You do not fail to spot the emphasis. “What I’d like to do is to get on with running my unit, sir. It’s not as if we’re short of work right now. Trouble is, he framed it as a fait accompli. If you want me to hold the fort, I’m going to need some backup.”

  “Huh.” Another pause. “What are your alternative options?”

  You hunch your shoulders uncomfortably. “I can shovel a bunch of routine stuff off onto Moxie and Speedy. If I hold back about eight hours a week for ICIU, shelve my skills-matrix update sessions indefinitely, and bail on as much paper-work as possible, then I can probably give Dickie and the investigation three and a half out of five shifts a week for the rest of the month. I think the unit can function without my hands on the tiller for that long, assuming nothing unusual pops out of the woodwork. But it’s going to be touch and go: All it would take would be one of my sergeants being off sick for a week, or another case like the Morningside Cannibals coming out of left field . . .”

  (The Morningside Cannibals: a circle of polite middle-class people who dined out on each other, with the aid of a medical tissue incubator tank. Figuring out what on earth to charge them with—cannibalism not being illegal in Scotland—was the least of your worries when the blogs moved in. In the end, they were reported to the Procurator Fiscal for outraging public decency and corpse desecration: a flimsy case, as the defence barristers pointed out in court, given that the dinner parties in question were strictly private affairs, and the human flesh on the plates had been cloned from ladies who were not only still alive but willing to testify that their own cultured meat tasted nothing like chicken. In the end, the case had collapsed amidst recriminations and calls for a change in the law.)

  Mention of the Morningside Cannibals has the desired effect: Doc winces visibly. “Aye well, Liz, that’s as may be, but let’s not pile up speculative obstacles before we get to them?” He leans forward. “It sounds to me like Dodgy Dickie has got your number: Best not fight him in public. Leave him to me. I’ll have a wee chat with Jackie Somerville and shake some resources loose from her department in return for your loan.” He fixes you with a gimlet stare. “Just promise me you didna fix this up to weasel your way back onto a CID case?”

  You shake your head vigorously. “Boss, would I do a thing like that?” You catch his expression: “That’s live-rail territory. With respect, sir, if I wanted to apply for a transfer back to CID, you’d hear about it before it happened, and I’d be doing it with your say-so or not at all. Anything else would be grossly unprofessional conduct detrimental to the smooth running of the chain of command. Not to mention a real own-goal, career-wise. Right?”

  A long pause, then Doc nods. “Exactly so, Inspector. I’m glad we understand each other.”

  “So am I. Sir.”

  “Get out of my office.” He waves genially to defuse the curt dismissal. “Leave Dickie to me; just be sure to set your house in order before you go haring off in all directions, and keep me fully informed. Dismissed.”

  You get the hell out of Doc’s office, and you’re halfway back to the ICIU before you pause to wonder whether you’re being set up, or whether this really is your route back into CID after your long exile on the Rule 34 Squad.

  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. S
he’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?”