Rule 34 hs-2

by Charles Stross

  You drag the suitcase behind you like a guilty conscience. Slouch along Princes Street, keeping to the garden side, oblivious to the rumble and skirr of the trams. Trudge past the Waverley Steps, past the shopping mall and the stony classical frontage of the art gallery, across the road, past the sunken gardens and the big Christian temple with the mossy graveyard below street level. Up Lothian Road towards the bus-stop. A police car whines past, and for a moment you are dizzy with terror. But it doesn’t stop, and your heartbeat slows in time with your steps. The clammy cold sweat in the small of your back slowly dries as you repeat to yourself, It’s only a fucking suitcase.

  You should have let the Gnome pick it up for you; he is entirely to blame for your being in this invidious position, after all. The injustice claws at your stomach. “The angle, dear boy, is money—and how you, and I, and a couple of friends, are going to make a great steaming pile of it.” May Allah, the compassionate, the merciful, have a special inferno set aside for the scheming bald arse-bandit and his great glistening pile of dosh. It’s not him who has to—

  The bus kneels and the glass doors slide apart like a mouth to swallow you down into hell.

  You’ve tried to avoid this ever happening, and for the most part you’ve been successful. You have rubbed shoulders with hard men, violent men, thugs: But you’ve always got a place to go where you can be free of them. You have indulged your base urges in public toilets and other men’s bedrooms, but never where you might be recognized and shamed by people who know you. You have done your absolute best to obey this single iron rule: Men’s laws mean less to you than those of Allah, but this solitary unwritten one you cleave to like a drowning sailor to his life-belt. Until now.

  You ride in a haze of misery, barely noticing your surroundings until it’s time to get off. The suitcase is a drag on your wrist, as intolerable as a screw’s handcuff, growing heavier with every step. You turn the corner, take the slope with ever-sinking heart, fumble in your pocket for the key, and carry the nightmare across the threshold and up the stairs to your den in the attic.

  For the first time ever, you have broken the one unbreakable rule: Never let work follow you home.

  Colonel Datka’s man didn’t give you a choice in the matter.

  “You have an envelope waiting for me. I believe you live at”—the bastard has your home address on the tip of his tongue—“is that correct? You will take my suitcase home with you and store it. I may need to stay in your spare room, from tomorrow, for a few days. I trust you will have a spare key waiting for me here.”

  His smile was insectile, twitching mouth parts flexing around immobile mandibles, coldly inhuman eyes watching you through the wraparound display screens of his eyeware.

  “If anybody enquires, you will tell them I am Peter Manuel, and I am a business representative.”

  “What kind . . . of . . . ?”

  The mandibles clattered and chomped like those of an angry hornet: “I am here to sell toys.”

  “But my wife and children—”

  “They will not be inconvenienced.” His gaze was as unseeing as a corpse. “It is a fall-back position. Hopefully it will not be needed.”

  “But I—”

  “Do you want more money?” He cocked his head to one side, scanning, sensing, focussing but not feeling. “Are we not paying you enough?”

  You hastened to reassure him that indeed you were being paid an adequate sufficiency.

  “Then what’s the problem?” His stare went through you, bulletblunt and tearing as it tumbled. “Remember the key. Tomorrow.”

  And he was gone like that: vanished, oblivious, leaving behind him the shattered and splintered wreckage of the invisible plate-glass window you had placed between your home life and your hustling.

  You’re going to have to tell Bibi something.

  But what?

  “You’ll tell her what you always tell her, lad.” The Gnome’s familiar tones, the rolling R’s and cut-glass sibilants of his currently adopted accent (upper-crust Morningside, posher than the King of England’s) pronounce his diagnosis with utter certainty. You hate him for it, briefly: for his self-assured confidence, his smugly dispassionate claim on your future. He’s like a spider, observing the world through the tiny tugs on the periphery of his web. “She expects the worst of you already; inviting some dodgy toy salesman to stay is nothing.”

  Actually it’s everything, but you can’t tell the Gnome this; there is no rupture in his world, no gap between the sacred and the profane. He lives his life entirely in the foreground, sly as a fox and just as shameful, and he wouldn’t understand what’s wrong even if you had the words and the will to tell him. Which you don’t. So you burrow your arse deeper into the decaying armchair and squint at the pint of beer before you on the table. “He’s a nut-case, though. Why me?”

  “Because you’re in the right place at the right time. Drink your beer, there’s a good chap.”

  “It’s not the right place. It’s a fucking dangerous place.” You obey his injunction and swallow another mouthful of sour fizz. “What’s the angle? Come on. Tell me.”

  “The angle is, we make lots of money—”

  You cross your arms. “Not fucking good enough, Adam.” Not lad, you notice absently. You don’t get to call him by any other kind of diminutive or belittling nickname. Professor, maybe. Come to think of it, that sort of sums up your relationship, doesn’t it? “What’s my angle? Why am I hanging my ass out here while foreigners use me as a distribution hub for bread mix and psychos invite themselves to stay with my wife and kids? What do I get from this?”

  You stop and stare at the Gnome, giving him your best crack at Cousin Tariq’s hard-sell hairy eye-ball.

  “Diplomatic immunity—”

  “That’s nonsense, and you know it. Honorary consuls don’t get immunity from parking tickets, let alone anything else. Especially not consuls working for a sock-puppet state that wouldn’t even exist if its parent government wasn’t so anxious to get rid of it that they rigged the independence referendum.”

  “Ah, that.”

  “Yes, that—I can read wikipedia, too! Seventy-two per cent voted against independence according to the UN exit polls, did you know that? Unemployment is running at 40 per cent. And Issyk-Kulistan, with about 20 per cent of Kyrgyzstan’s population, inherited 80 per cent of its national debt. What the fuck is that about?”

  The Gnome sits there listening to you rant, staring into the turbid depths of his half-drunk pint of 80/- and all the while swirling it gently, so that the suds form a slimy slick up the sides of the conic. He glances up at you with eyes as old as the hills. “So?”

  “I’ve been doing some thinking,” you tell him, and wait.

  “A dangerous habit to get into, Master Hussein.” His tone is light. “What precisely have you been thinking?”

  “I’ve been thinking that . . . this is a set-up, right? Some kind of scam to do with their national debt? And while they’ve got their hands off IRIK for a few years, organized crime moves in.”

  “Not exactly, but close.” The Gnome takes a long suck on his bevvy. “What it’s about is, a country like Kyrgyzstan can’t afford to fuck with its credit rating, can it? They ran up some big debts over the last twenty years, building gigantic presidential palaces and new airports and so on. The usual prestige shit, presided over by a series of authoritarian ass-hats, would-be dictators-for-life who only averaged eight years in the saddle between revolutions. The gas-fields are played-out, now, so they’re trying to restructure their debts, and finding it hard.

  “But they’re not fools.

  “Corporations can’t downsize and outsource the work overseas anymore—not like they could in the noughties—not without a hostile social-responsibility audit and crippling fines. But governments can. And they can get rid of the national debt by parcelling it up as, what’s the term, debt securities. They hand the debt securities over to some fictional entity like, oh, a breakaway republic, in return f
or buying its independence. Don’t look at me like that, there’s a long history of countries buying themselves out; Haiti did it with the French empire. Issyk-Kulistan is buying its independence by taking on most of the national debt of Kyrgyzstan. The current Kyrgyz president is a very interesting fellow, lad. A compromise candidate, one who didn’t offend any of the major power brokers—more importantly, before he was shoved into the hot seat, he was a professor of economics.”

  He holds up a hand. “Yes, I know what you’re going to say: They don’t want to be independent. Tough. Anyway, I suspect the angle they’re playing in Bishkek is that IRIK has been set up to fail, declare bankruptcy, and Bishkek is expected to ‘send in the army to re-establish order’ or some such bullshit. Meanwhile, they’ve sold—through cut-outs—a ton of credit default swaps hedged against ARIK’s national debt. In the short term, it looks like they’re selling insurance. What everyone is supposed to think is that they’re stupid-greedy, and when the IRIK collapses, the debt bomb will empty the Kyrgyz coffers.”

  “But that’s stupid—” You swallow. “They can’t do that! Can they? Isn’t that what made the banks collapse?”

  “Well spotted.” The Gnome grins humourlessly. “It’s not the only thing they might be doing, though. IRIK’s credit rating has got to be in the shitter, so betting they’ll collapse is a sucker bet. What I think Kyrgyzstan is doing is, they’re selling CDSs to foreigners who expect IRIK to collapse under the debt. And they’re over-selling, selling multiple CDSs leveraged against the same asset. Meanwhile they’re using the income from the CDSs to reduce the debt load—until they arrange for reunification, which, with 72 per cent in favour, isn’t going to be hard. The idiots who bet on IRIK collapsing will miss out on the fat payout they were expecting: Serves them right. What interests me is why the IMF and the credit-ratings agencies aren’t yelling about it. The Kyrgyz government must have figured out a way to buy off the regulators and oversight agencies. So what’s the angle? There’s one obvious one: inward investment.”

  “Inward—who’d want to invest in Issyk-Kulist . . .” You trail off. The answer stood staring you in the eye a few short hours ago. “Oh.”

  “Yes, indeed. Picking the pockets of honest bankers is frowned upon in polite company, but the same people would tend to turn a blind eye to a lawful government’s attempt to sting crime syndicates in the wallet by selling them junk credit default swaps leveraged on a sock-puppet’s debt. Think of it as an anti-money-laundering operation on an epic scale—the cops have laid a trap for the gangs using an entire country as bait. The real problem is avoiding being assassinated afterwards: The RBN and the cartels take a dim view of overly successful confiscatory policies, and they’re bigger than some governments.”

  The Gnome drains his glass then waggles it at you. “Will you stay for a refill? I think it’s about time we had a heart-to-heart talk about how to buy and sell derivatives . . .”

  When you finally go back to the house, you fail to work up the nerve to tell Bibi about your house guest. She’s home late from work, tired and silent from too many hours in the pharmacy, and lavishes all her warmth on Naseem and Farida, who’ve been staying round at Mrs. Uni’s house after school. The cone of silence she traps you in is poisonous and chilly; you know from bitter past experience that she will make you wait on the threshold for three days and nights before she relents.

  Three days is her usual sentence for drunkenness and foolery: not one minute more and not a second less. She has the measure of a judge and the restraint of a probation officer. You’ve been on the receiving end of this sanction before. Bibi can be a harsh woman, when she wishes to teach you a lesson. And so you take the spare key wordlessly when you leave for work the following morning. Let John Christie—no, Peter Manuel—explain himself to her when he arrives, if he arrives. After all, it might never happen.

  You sit behind your desk in a haze of mild dread for a couple of hours, a cup of tea cooling by your hand as you try to distract yourself by chasing naughty pictures on the Internet. But your heart isn’t in it, and in the end you give up and stand, meaning to go in search of water to pour on the endlessly dying rubber plant, when your mobile rings.

  Your heart sinks as you recognize Bibi’s face: It’s most unlike her to phone you from work. “Hello? What is it?”

  “Anwar? Praise Allah, it’s you! Please, can you go at once and look after my mother? She just called. I think she’s having another of her funny turns—”

  Sameena lives with her husband Taleb and Cousin Tariq and assorted grown-up children, their spouses and descendants in a stillslightly-ramshackle town house Ali bought back in the nineties. You weigh Bibi’s plea momentarily. It’s an imposition, and it means closing the office, but on the other hand, it means early release from the cone of silence. “All right, my love. Just for you I’ll close the office early and—”

  “Please, Anwar! Just go, right now. You might need to call in help—I can’t leave the shop, but—”

  Five minutes later, you’re on your way, heart singing and feet light. Bibi has not only forgiven but, in the urgency of her call, has forgotten to be angry at you.

  It doesn’t last. The hairs on the back of your neck begin to rise as you turn the corner on their cobbled side-street on the wrong side of Bruntsfield Place and see two—no, three—police cars sprawled across the parking bays. Coincidence, you tell yourself, and anyway, even if Tariq’s got himself into trouble, you’re here with the best of intentions, to give aid and comfort to his mother, who is doubtless—

  Their front door is ajar. As you approach it a fourth police car turns the corner, lights flashing, and double-parks a couple of doors along from you, and as you reach up and ring the doorbell, you hear sobbing from inside, the sound of your mother-in-law losing it wholesale in the kitchen.

  The cop who opens the door is instantly suspicious. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demands, scanning you with a small forest of cameras. His free hand twitches in the direction of a beltful of handcuffs. “You can’t come in.”

  Your shoulders slump. “My wife got a call from my mother-in-law,” you say. “Is she alright? Has there been an accident?”

  “What’s your name? What’s your mother-in-law’s name?” He looms over you, overbearing.

  “I, uh, I’m Anwar Hussein. My wife’s mother, Sameena Begum, is she alright?” You blink at him, trying not to cringe away. Your stomach is churning again. The rozzer’s eyes twitch behind his head-up shades, fingers twitching on some kind of air keyboard, then his shoulders relax slightly.

  “Who else lives here?” he demands. “Do you know them?”

  You blink rapidly. “My mother-in-law. And my wife’s brother and sisters. My father-in-law, Uncle Taleb—”

  He shakes his head. “Are you next of kin?”

  Ah. “Yes. What’s happened—”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Now that he’s pigeon-holed you he switches to the next-of-kin script; unfortunately it’s not the good-tidings one. He’s got that oh shit do I have to tell the family look on his face. Your knees go weak. “I’ll have to ask you to wait here for a few minutes while we finish securing the, the scene. Your mother-in-law is unhurt, but I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you.” So who . . . “My colleagues may need to ask you some questions.”

  Footsteps behind you. You look round and see a man and a woman, both in suits, with something about them that screams “cop.” And now it takes all your will-power to keep your knees from collapsing completely because you recognize the woman; you last saw her face over a video link to the sheriff’s court, laying a comprehensive smack-down on your sins in front of the beak.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hussein. What brings you here?”

  Her smile is bloodlessly professional.

  You have to fight your own tongue to avoid blurting out It wasn’t me, I didn’t do nothing. “My mother-in-law—is she okay? What’s happening?”

  She loses the smile, looks past you at the bastard in
black who opened the door. He obviously kens she’s with the filth: funny handshake, raised eyebrows, that kind of thing. “Mr. Hussein.” It’s the cop. “Please come in, no, into the living room, my friend.” It’s all my friend and come in now. He backs up a step to give you room. Looking past you: “Confirmed next of kin.”

  “Oh sh—dear. Where’s Sergeant MacBride? I’m here for his signoff, this is Inspector Aslan, on secondment from Europol—”

  You back into the cluttered living room, managing not to knock over a precariously positioned occasional table, and drop into the overstuffed sofa. You can hear muffled sobbing from the kitchen. The cop is swithering—head twitching from side to side like a hungry pigeon—between you, the bitch in the corridor, and the greetin’ from the kitchen, which is now rising into a high, keening noise not unlike a broken smoke alarm but maybe two or three times as annoying. After a minute, he gives up and stands in the doorway like a human roadblock, relying on his shouldercam to keep an eye on you while he burps heavily acronymic police-speak back and forth with Inspector Butthurt. The other cop, the Easterner from Europol, is clearly kibitzing. You pull out your mobie, discreetly rolling its protective sock back into your jacket pocket, and IM Bibi. AT TALEB’S. COPS HERE. WON’T LET ME SEE SAM. WHATʹS UP?

  The plod pile-up in the hall disintegrates: Inspector Butthurt and her trailer head for the kitchen, while Constable Bouncer stays on door duty. He glances in at you as the doorbell rings. “I’ll explain in a minute, sir. If you don’t mind staying right where you are.”

  The door opens. The pair of snowmen on the front step—that’s your first impression—resolve into cops in white crime-scene overalls, humping battered flight cases full of gear. You’ve seen this shit on telly enough times to know what it means, but seeing it in Uncle Taleb’s house lends it an air of unreality. The wailing continues until you’re digging your fingernails into the frayed fabric of the armrests. You can barely hold yourself down in the seat. It’s as bad as the other day, when she had that funny turn, finding that customer—