Rule 34

LIZ: Mote, Eye, Redux

There is one good thing about being seconded to run interference for Dodgy Dickie’s murder investigation, and it is this: CID always get allocated the best cars, right after Traffic. They get the same priority as the regular community patrols, and that’s a hell of a long way up the pecking order from ICIU.

When you show up at the transport desk this time, you don’t have to grovel for a segway: Instead there’s an unmarked Chinese Volvo waiting for you, silver-grey luxury on wheels. As you slide behind the wheel and orient yourself with the controls, you see it’s got a console full of extras on the passenger side—traffic data terminal, ANPR cameras, external laser projector, the works. So this is how the other half drive, you think enviously as you thumb the airport short-stay car-park into the autopilot and hit the GO button. A moment later, the car reverses out into the station yard and turns towards Queensferry Road in eerie silence: You’re halfway to Turnhouse before it fires up the diesel generator under the bonnet.

Self-driving cars are a mixed blessing. Right now, you miss the bad old days when you needed to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road: It’d be a welcome distraction. But current health and safety regulations say that only officers assigned to ongoing pursuit and patrol driving duties—and the training that goes with them—are allowed to actually operate vehicles. It’s something to do with the force being liable for damages if you run over any civilians. So you use the spare quarter hour to dig into the CopSpace image of Dickie’s incident room and try to familiarize yourself with who’s doing what (and how far they’ve got so far).

The car parks itself in a police-only bay near domestic/EU arrivals, at Terminal One. You head for the meeting point adjacent to Customs with a sinking heart. CopSpace at the airport is congested, full of security warnings and immigration tags as well as the usual detritus: criminals on probation, minicab drivers with unpaid licenses, and the like. But after a minute, your specs lock onto someone and flicker for attention. You see a vaguely familiar face in the crowd, towing a neat carry-on bag as he stands in front of the exit, scanning—

Yes, that’s him. You start forward. Medium height, dark eyes, Middle Eastern skin, sharp suit. He’s looking around, but he hasn’t clocked you yet. He’s alone this time, no mob of super-cop extras in tow. His head turns. “Kemal Aslan, I presume,” you say, pre-empting him. “Welcome back to Scotland.”

His expression of annoyance is so quickly masked you can’t be sure it even exists—is it your imagination?—and he extends a hand. “Ah, Inspector Kavanaugh.” You take it and shake. His palm is cool and dry. “I hope you’re well.” He ducks his head. It’s a long way from the arrogant confidence he exuded the first time you saw him, five years ago.

“Well enough.” You gesture towards the exit: “I’ve got a car. How long are you here for?”

“As long as it takes.” You head for the doors; he follows. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping en route, I need to check in at my hotel? Then we should talk.”

You stop. “I’m not entirely clear on what you think there is to talk about,” you snap, and he recoils as if you’ve just bared your teeth at him. “We’ve got a sensitive time-critical investigation to run, and unless you’ve got some insight to contribute, something that we should know, you’re just not that high a priority.”

To your surprise he nods. “I appreciate that,” he says softly. “But it is not the only investigation in progress. I am here to help—all of them. On my previous visit, we started out badly. I will apologize, if that is what you desire. But afterwards, we must work together. It is very important.”

You manage not to gape at him, but you’re momentarily at a loss: He delivers his spiel with a dead-pan sincerity that leaves you scrabbling for a handle to hang your anger on. Finally, you manage to say: “In the car. We can discuss this later.” Then you start walking again, so wound-up that you’re as jerky as a marionette.

The car is halfway to his hotel—a boutique establishment in Haymarket—before he speaks again. “Has there been any progress in your investigation?”

“I need to get you signed on and authorized before I can disclose intelligence material.” You’re already working out a shortest path in your head, a circuit of the necessary offices: You need to drag Kemal past the super’s office door for pro forma approval, then your own desk to verify that authentication of his credentials is already in the channel via Europol, then up to Doc, who can tell one of his sergeants to give him external consulting access to the virtual incident room. His eagerness to get started ahead of the formalities is grating and borderline-toxic. (But then, you ask yourself, What would you do in his shoes?) “Can you tell me what’s going on from your end of things?”

“It is a massacre,” he says simply.

For a moment you think you misheard. “A what?”

“A massacre.” He stares out through the ghost of the head-up display as the tidy shop-fronts of Corstorphine slide past. “We have linked eight deaths to the, the atrocity, already. They all occurred within a six-hour period. But the incident is ongoing: I expect more to come to light.”

It’s a really good thing the car’s driving itself; otherwise, the force would probably be looking at an out-of-court settlement, and you’d be looking at the inside of an ambulance. “What? Where’s this coming from?”

“The victims all died within the same period. They died at home, in circumstances superficially resembling domestic accidents. They were all—all—involved in online marketing activities of questionable legality. Some of them were found immediately, others took time to be discovered. We are currently examining a number of other deaths over the same period. I expect the number to rise, sharply.”

Eight murders? You find the figure implausible, comically ludicrous. That’s more murders than Edinburgh gets in a year—a really bad year at that. It puts you in mind of stories you heard at Uncle Bert’s knee, from his time in the RUC during the Troubles. A faint inkling begins to dawn on you. “Tell me this isn’t political? More of that shit, like five years ago—”

Kemal is shaking his head emphatically. “It’s not political.” That’s hard to argue with. What kind of regular terrorist would target spammers?

The car cruises past a gaggle of uniformed school-children on the pavement: That’s an extra half million in damages in the parallel universe where you’re supposed to have your hands on the wheel. “So who do you think it is?” you ask him.

“Not who but what.” He clams up, jaw shut.

“Uh-huh.” Does not compute. “In my experience, crimes usually have perpetrators.”

“But this is not a normal crime,” asserts Kemal. “It is a cluster of anomalous deaths, distributed geographically but sharing a common je ne sais quoi, and occurring nearly simultaneously. This is not the, the symptom of normal criminal activity, no?”

“Oh, bullshit. Next thing you’ll be telling me, it’s aliens or artificial intelligence or some other science-fictional nonsense.”

He’s looking at you intently. “It all depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”

You blink rapidly. “How many kinds could there be?” The ocular tic sets CopSpace in a tizzy, flashing through stacks of overlays that flicker across the staid stone-fronted houses: prevalence of porn downloads, undischarged ASBOs, unclosed burglary tickets. “Has someone been building HAL 9000 in their basement, then?”

The car slows, then turns into a side-street. “Not to the best of my knowledge.” Kemal looks unhappy. “But I have been spending too much time tracking fraudsters on the Internet,” he adds elliptically. “The spammers, they are ingenious. The programmers have a saying, you know? ‘If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore.’ Playing chess, driving cars, generating conversational text that can convince humans it’s an old friend and please to click on this download link.” He clears his throat. “You use Internet search engines, don’t you?”

“What, like Google?”

“The programmers have another saying: ‘The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.’ The search engines, they are not artificial intelligences, synthetic consciousnesses. They don’t need to be. Perhaps we overestimate consciousness? After all, the spam filters everyone uses—you may not think you’re using one, but your service providers handle the job on your behalf—are very good at telling human beings from bots. And the bots are good, too: They get better and better at emulating human communication, insinuating themselves into our conversations, all the time. For the past three years, they have been able to pass a noniterative Turing Test administered by human beings more often than real human controls. We can’t distinguish spam from ham—not as reliably as our filters. And the filters are still fallible even though they are learning all the time.”

You’ve had enough of this bullshit. “With respect, Inspector Aslan, I don’t see what this has to do with our culpable homicide investigation. Spam fil—software didn’t reach out of the net and spike Mr. Blair’s enema fluid: There’s a human agency involved at some level, and that’s what we’re going to find. Now I will grant you”—you catch yourself on the edge of finger-wagging, and issue yourself a cease and desist (just like the persuasion counsellor warned you to)—“someone may be using spam filters to track and to trace criminals involved in the bulk advertising industry, but you’re not going to convince me that there’s some, some murderous piece of software that’s out to kill—” You’re almost spluttering, and that’s even more of a C&D situation when it comes to influencing people: So you make yourself stop.

Kemal is looking at you with a heavy-lidded expression that gives you a weird shiver of déjà vu.

“You are correct: Spam filters do not kill,” he says calmly. “But people using spam filters to backtrace and select their targets are another matter.”

“But why?” You shake your head. “It doesn’t make sense!”

“I agree with you,” he says with exaggerated, acidic dignity. “But somebody is killing them. Our task is to discover who, is it not?”

The car slows, then noses into a hotel car-park, while you’re trying to come up with a sufficiently scathing rejoinder. Then you suddenly remember where you’ve seen his expression before: in the bathroom mirror, this very morning, while you were choking on the sure knowledge that you knew something important about the Blair investigation, but that Dodgy Dickie was certain not to give you the time of day.

Mote, eye, redux.

Kemal doesn’t say another word as the car parks itself, but his expression says it all for him. “I need ten minutes to drop my bag,” he says, opening the car door.

“Of course.” You climb out of the Volvo and collect his wheelie-bag from the boot. The car beeps and shuts down behind you as you take the escalator up to the lobby. You install yourself in an understuffed leather sofa at one side as Kemal does his business with the self-service check-in, picks up a keycard, and is whisked upstairs to salaryman limbo.

Kemal gives you just enough time to do the necessary one-eighty reorientation and get your shit squared away. You’re just finishing up a memo to Doc—necessary clearances for Kemal—when he reappears. “That was fast.”

“I said I only needed time to drop my bag.” You could swear he looks wounded, but those big brown eyes of his make it his default state. “Are we going now?”

“In a moment.” You fold your desktop away into a corner of your left eye and lever yourself ungracefully out of the sofa. Then you dust yourself down. “There’s a passable coffee shop round the corner,” you tell him. “I think you and I ought to go there and discuss the, the spam thing over a latte. Before I take you round the shop and get you into the system.”

He gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What is there to discuss.” It’s not inflected as a question.

“We started out on the wrong foot.” You take a deep breath. “I apologize, for what it’s worth. I’ll give you a fair hearing. But you need to know what you’re walking into before you stick your nose round the incident-room door.”

Kemal exhales. “Politics?”

“You could say that.”

“I think a small espresso would be a good idea,” he concedes.

“In that case…”

You’re not entirely sure why the sudden turnaround with respect to Kemal, but there are several factors feeding in to it. It’s hard to stay furious at an abstract, and meeting him face-to-face you recognize only too clearly the stink of failure to launch. You may have been treading water for five years, but Kemal’s spent them sliding down the greasy pole. Stripped of the Eurocop arrogance and the entourage of Men in Black, he’s just a sad-faced little cop with a brief-case full of nightmares. And then there’s the matter in hand: Eight deaths.

You don’t owe Kemal the time of day, but it’d be grossly, unforgivably unprofessional to let your personal dislike get in the way of his investigation.

Sitting in the fake-eighties bachelor-pad bistro-hell coffee shop, you lay it all out for him. “You’re walking in on a high-profile murder investigation. Lead investigator is Detective Chief Inspector Dickie MacLeish; he and I have a history, and it’s not a good one. To be fair, he has a headache because firstly, Edinburgh usually gets maybe one murder a month, and secondly, the victim in this investigation had money and connections. He’s under the spotlight already, and adding a foreign connection is—”

CopSpace clears its throat discreetly. You hold up a cautioning hand to Kemal and glance at the incoming. It takes a second or two to make sense of it, then you swear under your breath. It’s a FLASH broadcast from the virtual situation room, which is exceptional in its own right—they’d usually only do that to alert everyone to an arrest warrant for a dangerous fugitive. This one is even more unusual. “Nine,” you tell Kemal.

His face, glimpsed through a slew of rapidly accreting wikinotes, doesn’t look remotely surprised. “Who?” he asks.

“One Vivian Crolla, accountant by trade.” You read swiftly, then take in the preliminary crime-scene scans. “Jesus.” You can’t help yourself: “Somebody shrink-wrapped her to a mattress full of banknotes—”

“They what?” Now he raises an eyebrow.

You blink the overlay aside. “We should go and get you signed in,” you suggest. How should I know who they are? you wonder defensively. What kind of lunatic goes around shrink-wrapping people to bales of bank-notes? “Michael Blair was one of her customers.”

“Ah.” Kemal raises his tiny cup, pulls a face, and knocks back his ristretto in one. You eye your own cup: It’s half-full. Regretfully, you stand and turn your back on it. “Lead on,” he says.

Back at HQ, it’s as if a giant virtual boot has kicked over the anthill. You normally get plenty of passing trade at the station, but it’s mostly beat cops checking in petty shoplifters and such-like at this time of day. Two Bizarro-world murders in rapid succession—with rumours of a Eurotrash gangland connection—have got folks nervous. They remember the hideous mess five years ago when everything fell over, back to manual typewriters and anonymous prepay mobiles while the spooks ran around upgrading the security keys on all the nation’s key routers and praying that the hackers responsible weren’t fucking with the air traffic control system or the reactor complex at Torness. The atmosphere today’s a lot like that: Word has got around the canteen grape-vine that something really out of order is going on. And you’re getting the hairy eye-ball from all sides as soon as you walk up to the desk in reception and sign a visitor’s badge for Kemal.

You run him straight upstairs to CI Dixon’s office, where Doc’s secretary casually signs his ID onto the system—logging his biometrics solely on your say-so (talk about being granted a sufficiency of rope for a career asphyxiation!)—then you herd him along the corridor to IT Support, where a pathologically detached civilian contractor registers his phone and gets him logged into CopSpace. You’ve just short-circuited about two days of procedures specifically designed to prevent J. Random Unauthorized Person from getting into IT Support’s hair, but you’re in no mood to take shit right now. If Kemal’s right about the scale of what’s going on, Dickie needs to know the shape of the tiger he’s got by the tail. And so, less than two hours after you picked him up, you’re back in front of the door to briefing room D31.

“Inspector Kavanaugh.” Dickie looks up from the surface in the middle of the room. It’s displaying a 3D cutaway of a typical Edinburgh tenement, one-sixth of life-size, with SOCO annotations hazing the air above it as thickly as the cigarette smoke of an earlier generation. “This would be…”

“Inspector Kemal Aslan, on assignment to Europol Business Affairs in Brussels from Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü in Ankara.”

Kemal clears his throat. “We have been monitoring an upswing in violent deaths of individuals engaged in the Internet fraud sector.” He meets Dickie MacLeish’s fiercely sceptical gaze: “Eight so far, across Europe, all within forty-eight hours. Nine, now.”

You tag-team with him, piling it up on MacLeish: “Inspector Aslan is ready to give you an overview of the larger picture whenever you’re ready. I checked him in with IT, he’s on the system. His auths from Europol check out.” (Which is an important point, as it’s not so long ago that a nutter with a cop fetish managed to fast-talk his way onto a prostitution sweep in Portobello.)

Kemal doesn’t switch target. “We believe there is a common mechanism behind the killings, although proving a culpable human perpetrator may be—”

He’s about to get stuck into his spiel when a uniform from CID shoulders his way into your circle and clears his throat apologetically. “Inspectors.” He nods at Dickie. “Skipper? Got a moment?”

“Aye?” Dickie cuts you dead of an instant. Kemal’s neck muscles tense at that, but he bites his tongue like he’s had lots of practice lately. You peer closer at the crime scene on the virtual dissecting table. It’s one of those upper stairwell flats with a windowless hall and rooms branching off it on all sides. There’s something in the living room, like a discarded square-cut sandwich—

“—The Blair scene yesterday, his ID was in the name of John, uh, Christie. It’s just that it rang a bell with Mary as she was compiling the daily for Oversight. She’s got a true-crime reading habit, and she looked him up online, and he’s a ringer, sir.”

“What kind of ringer?” Dickie’s diction is clipped. He looks like he’s going to blow a gasket: not unusual for him, but even so…

“John Reginald Halliday Christie—just like we logged on this guy’s driving license—was a serial killer, sir, the Notting Hill Strangler. Hanged for murder in 1953.” He pronounces that last with relish. (There are quite a few in this building who’d like to see those days of rope-burn closure back again.) “After he’d set up his neighbour, Timothy Evans, to take the drop for him.”

Dickie’s left eyelid is twitching: Your cheek is threatening to come out in sympathy. “You’re telling me that the civilian capture and release contact on the Blair house was using false ID in the name of a serial killer, and nobody clocked it?”

Constable Ballantyne shakes his head. “Constable Brown logged his ID and took a swab, sir—the driving license checked out with DVLA and the mug shot matched. It wasn’t false at that level—”

Now your cheek does twitch because this is the kind of shit that isn’t supposed to happen. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database backs onto the Identity and Passport Service’s database, and you can’t get a driving license without authenticating. Which means the joker who just horned in on your crime scene is walking around with a genuine identity record on the national system in the name of a long-ago-executed serial killer.

“—The birth date on his driving license, uh, Constable Brown didn’t clock it at the time: He was just checking that the name and face were valid. But in the database, it’s given as 15 July 1953—the day the real Christie was executed. I reviewed Ed’s helmet video, and the fly bastard sure doesn’t look seventy.”

He’s been rattling on into a growing circle of silence for almost thirty seconds, oblivious to the gigantic loaf he’s pinched in the middle of the investigation. It is becoming glaringly obvious that someone is deliberately fucking with the brains of Edinburgh’s finest, and wants you to know it. Dickie, no cool cucumber at the best of times, is giving you serious concern for his ticker. Half the uniforms in the room are desperately trying not to boggle (and failing). The other half aren’t even trying. A vein pulses weirdly in MacLeish’s forehead: Then a curious ripple in the hairy salt-and-pepper caterpillar that passes for his moustache presages six urgently grunted words, pulled from so deep in his abdomen that you’d think DC Ballantyne had just kneed him in the nuts:

“Whoever this fucker is, pull him.”

Then, as an aside, Dickie adds: “Find that swab and run it on the—no.” He nods formally at Kemal. “Put it on the wire to Europol and flag it as a suspect implicated in Inspector Aslan’s investigation. And run it on NDNAD. Then backtrace the driving license, find out who issued it, and open a new investigation: how this ringer got onto the IPS database. There’ll be a counterfeiting offence in there, probably more than one.” He knuckles his forehead as if squeezing out more charges, then glances at you and Kemal. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to update the super now.” His banked anger is still there: But it’s not pointed your way anymore. “What a pile of”—he claws at an invisible target—“shit.”

The silence dissolves in a buzz of crosstalk. Kicked anthills, indeed. This might be a breakthrough in the long run, but in the short term, it’s every case manager’s nightmare: to have a suspect walk right into the middle of the crime scene, bare their arse at the officers on the spot, and waltz out again. The prurient eyes of Edinburgh are upon you, and this is juicy enough that it’s not going to stay under wraps for long—it’s going to be top of every newscrawl within hours, and Dickie’s the one who’ll bear the brunt of the jokes and finger-pointing.

Deprived of responsibility for the moment, you take the opportunity to walk around the table, showing Kemal how the investigation is set up—every police force does things differently. He nods appreciatively and asks sensible questions as you discreetly bring yourself up to speed. The Crolla scene is just as bizarre as the Blair bathroom. Here: a mattress stuffed with long-withdrawn one-pound notes that were cancelled more than a decade ago, even before the Euro switch-over. There: a woman’s body, still wearing a business suit, shrink-wrapped onto the mattress with industrial-strength plastic sheeting. Preliminary pathology report: cause of death, anaphylactic shock—victim unconscious prior to death. The occlusive layer alone wasn’t fatal, and there’s no bruising or signs suggestive of forcible immobilization.

“There is something wrong about this,” Kemal tells you, just as one of the uniforms walks over. “It’s more recent, and besides, there is violent human agency—”

“Inspector?”

You squint at the constable. It’s Mary Maguire, with the real-lifecrime hobby: She’s looking worried about something. “Yes?”

“I’ve got a call from the West End control desk: Someone wants an inspector on scene, and for some reason they put it through here and, uh, Inspector Mac’s up to his eye-balls, can you take it?”

Several thoughts come to mind, the first of which is You have got to be kidding, but it would never do to say that. It would put you firmly in not-a-team-player territory, which is not what you want to do if you aspire to ever go back to CID work. And precisely who do you think you are kidding about that? So you bite everything back and nod. “Transfer it.”

A moment later, you hear a still, small voice (with a pronounced Ayreshire accent) in your right ear. “Inspector? Control room here. We have a call from Sergeant MacBride for a DI to provide oversight on a scene in Polwarth, and the house is flagged in CopSpace with a prior you were involved with. BOOTS pulled your name out of the hat with a flag for another suspicious death that might bear on Operation Babylon.”

Your eye-balls track to the translucent sign hovering above the investigation wiki: Oh Jesus, not again. “I’ll be right over, send me the case work flow,” you say. Then you catch Kemal’s eye. “Come along. Apparently we’ve got another one.”

ANWAR: Running Scared

It’s going to be alright; it is not the time for you to meet your Maker yet.

The dead-eyed man with the American accent has gone away, leaving you shaking and throwing up in the toilet. You should have expected this, you tell yourself, as your stomach clenches with the aftershocks of icy terror: It was too good to be true. He has placed his mark on you. You have an inkling that no amount of soap and water will wash this stain from your soul, the knowledge that you are taking Colonel Datka’s money on behalf of men like this.

Hard men you can deal with. You met plenty of them in Saughton and learned to hide your contempt. Underneath it all they were pitiable, as Imam Hafiz would put it: stupid, ignorant, and prejudiced, unable to use the brains that Allah, the merciful, the compassionate, gave them. Prone to fits of rage and frustration at the cards fate had dealt them, rather than holding them close and working out how best to play their hand. There were the violent cases, and the idiot drug users, and the ones who sat in their cells all day rocking from side to side as they listened to invisible voices—and while you hated and feared them for what they might do to you, you could also bring yourself to look down on them. You were only inside because of a spot of bad luck, and once you got out again, you’d be able to pick yourself up and get back on your feet. They had no legs to stand on, no foundation of support in society—

Colonel Datka’s man is not one of their kind.

After his departure, after you finish throwing up, you go back to your cosy little office niche. But it’s not so cosy now that the outside world has smashed the window and climbed in, ransacked the drawers and stirred everything around like a burglar. So you step outside for a few minutes, hands shaking, and look at the clouds scudding past overhead like the ghostly shadows of highland sheep. The sunlight on your hands and face is warming, but it doesn’t melt the frost coating your heart. What is the tariff for aiding and abetting, anyway? Ownership of material likely to be of use in the commission of certain offences…

It could be worse. Could be fucking Al-Muhajiroun, revenant Talib headcases or something. (No, that would be easy—pick up the phone, you know exactly who to call, all the wise heads at the mosque would say you did the right thing.) This is different, but—

Pull yourself together; it’s only a fucking suitcase.

(Yes, but there could be anything in it! You saw his eyes! Body parts, heroin… it’s locked, of course. And it’s not one of those dualkey jobs. There’s no undetectable way of looking inside short of running it through the left-luggage X-ray machine at Waverley, and you’re not about to do that.)

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 for 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—

Sweat like ice trickles down your back. “Who’s dead?” you demand, standing up.

“Sit down, my friend. Take it easy.” PC Bouncer lays a meaty hand on your shoulder. You tense, but you know better than to struggle. They’re trained like guard dogs, to react instinctively to challenges.

“I want to help,” you say. “That’s my wife’s mother in there.”

He shoves you back towards the armchair, gently but forcefully. “Who else might be here?” he asks, glancing over his shoulder to confirm that the bods in the bunny suits haven’t left the front door open.

“Her husband Taleb, Tariq, Parveen, and Fara—they’re my cousins—grandma, and if they’re visiting, there’s Uncle Akbar and his family—”

PC Bouncer is beginning to go as glassy-eyed as his portable panopticon of cameras and data specs. (White, Scottish: He probably counts his relatives on the fingers of one hand.) “Who would be at home during the day, my friend?”

He’s getting on your nerves. “You’re not my friend,” you say before you can stop yourself. “I’m sorry,” you add sullenly. “She needs help, listen to her…”

He began winding up when you snapped at him but makes a visible effort to keep his lid on. “Let’s try and keep this polite, shall we, sir. Deep breath, now. I’m going to ask you again: Who should we expect to find here during the daytime?”

Your mobie vibrates. It’s Bibi’s signature waggle. You keep a tight grip on it as you answer: “Sameena, sure. Taleb if it’s a Friday.” (Today is not a Friday.) “Tariq, he works from his lappie, so he’s home a lot—”

What emotional defences you managed to reassemble in the wake of the Toymaker’s visit collapse around you.

No point hiding: He saw your face. “Is it Tariq?” you ask, your voice going all wobbly. “Is he alright?”

You see at once from his face that your brother-in-law isn’t alright.

Nor will he be alright ever again.

Nor can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Tariq together again.

It’s very strange to be sitting side by side with Inspector Butthurt in your father-in-law’s chintz-infested living room, chatting over cups of knee-cap-balanced tea (brought for you, incongruously, by a crime-scene cop dressed from head to foot in white plastic).

“I’m sorry we keep running into each other under such unfortunate circumstances, Mr. Hussein. By the way, is that your official registered phone?”

“Yes—” You watch nervelessly as she touches it, blinks a virtual fly away from the corner of her eye, and nods confirmation of some arcane suspicion to herself. Her movements are swift and precise. She’s a tall woman; if she were a man, built to proportion, she’d be about the same height as Constable Bouncer (who is waiting outside)—a terrifying tower of muscular poise. Far scarier than the weedy Eurocop she came with, who is presumably in the kitchen right now, trying to get some sense out of Auntie.

“Well, that’s a relief. You came here directly from the East End, I see. I’m going to have to image your phone and follow up your cellproximity record to confirm what it says, but unless you’ve turned into some kind of criminal hacker master-mind in the last year it looks like you’ve got a watertight alibi.” The dryness of her tone gets your hackles halfway up before you manage to remind yourself what she is.

“Alibi for what?”

“For—” For the first time she looks discommoded. Blinks again, evidently looking something up. “Sorry. Nobody told you?”

“Told me—”

“It’s your cousin, Tariq Shaikh Mohammed. He’s dead, I’m afraid.” She’s watching you. You nod, still not quite believing it. “We received a call from Sameena Begum—”

“My mother-in-law. His mother.”

“Oh dear.” She glances away. The wailing has gone, replaced by occasional sobbing. And tea, probably. They’ll have her in another room, you realize. To get her story, and mine. Before we talk.

“What happened? Was it an accident? Did somebody kill him?”

“Why do you suppose someone might have killed him?” She leans forward, and for a moment Inspector Butthurt is on your case, mercilessly digging. Your blood runs cold.

“I don’t suppose,” you tell her. “I have no fucking idea, sorry, I don’t know. Young healthy man though, what’s going to happen to him? Tariq’s a—” You stop. “Did someone kill him?”

Inspector Kavanaugh looks at you for a while. “It’s too early to say,” she says reluctantly. “Investigations are proceeding.”

And what the fuck does that mean? She’s talking in cop-speak, the mysterious language the filth use to smear their own version of events over the true story. Familiar from a thousand blog bulletins. You shake your head. “What does that mean? Is he dead, or not?”

She makes a small noise at the back of her throat. Muted impatience or the beginning of a chest infection. “A couple of questions if you don’t mind. By the way, did your cousin do any house-work? Cleaning, for instance?”

You stare at her in mute incomprehension. “House-work?”

“Dusting, washing up, vacuuming? That sort of thing?”

“Vacuuming?” You shake your head. “No, he’s not the kind. Well, he gets stuff fixed when it’s broken—I was going to ask him to sort out my wife’s onion chopper, she dropped it the other day—” You realize you’re rambling. So does Inspector Butthurt. She makes some kind of notation in her head-up memo, then changes the subject.

“Mr. Hussein, can you think of anyone who might have wanted your cousin dead?”

“I’m not sure,” you say numbly. “It’s not impossible. But Tariq was involved in stuff I don’t know about.” You take a deep breath, then hold up your mobie: “On probation, me. Keeping my nose clean. He knows it. Knew it. If he’s doing anything dodgy, he doesn’t want my snitchware anywhere near it.”

Which is one hundred–per cent true and will show up as such when the police evidence room speech-stress analysers comb over this part of Inspector Butthurt’s on-duty lifelog.

That’s the thing about talking to the police: You’ve got to tell them the truth, and nothing but the truth—just don’t tell them all of it. They’ve got speech-to-text software and natural language analysers, proximity- and probability-matching tools controlled by teleworkers in off-shore networks—a mechanical turk—to make tag clouds out of everything you say within earshot of one of their mikes. It may not be true AI, but it can flag up inconsistencies if you’re lying. They don’t need that shit for 90 per cent of the job, the routine public-order offences, drunk and disorderly, but you can bet your shirt that everything said within a hundred metres of a suspicious death gets chewed up by the mechanical turk…

“Go on,” she prompts.

“Tariq’s a smart boy. Runs a dating website: The spin for the old folks is that it’s a virtual dhallal, a marriage brokerage, with chat rooms so the boys and girls can get to talk to each other safely—but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it’s a knocking shop as well. The parents can register user IDs and track their kids’ conversations, but there are some areas of the site that, well, they’re age-filtered: It’s the twenty-first century, innit? Oh, by ‘kids’ I mean it’s strictly over-eighteens only. Because it’s supposed to be about finding suitable partners for marriage, not one-night stands.”

You run down. Not that you’re giving her more than the most superficial gloss on how Tariq set up the tagging system and real-time chat to show the old farts a very skewed view of the system; or the block-booked hotel rooms that users can sublet by the hour (at a 500–per cent mark-up for Tariq), or the proximity-matching service for halal doggers—pay your money, enter your preferences, go to this hotel room at that time and a suitable partner will be waiting for you—but Inspector Butthurt isn’t an idiot.

She nods thoughtfully. “Nobody gets killed because of a dating website. What do you suspect, my friend?”

She’s pushing your buttons but letting some morsels slip. The deadening fear is back: The man with the empty eyes, his luggage in your attic. The Gnome’s outrageous proposition. Tariq’s memory stick. “I suspect—I don’t know anything for a fact—Tariq was into other stuff, too.”

“Other stuff? Like what you were arrested for last time?”

Your mouth is dry. You nod. “I’m out of that, I swear. I’ve got a wife and kids to look after. And this.” You twitch your phone, which chooses that moment to vibrate again. It’s less intrusive than the old leg-tags, but no less an imposition. “And a respectable job.”

“A job?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Yes.” You need to rub her nose in it, make her recognize that you’re a man of consequence these days. “I handle the consular affairs in Scotland of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. I have diplomatic connections now, you know! I am required to be a man of utmost respect. And so Tariq knows he must leave me out of his madcap schemes.”

“Wow.” It’s the nearest thing to an admission of surprise you’ve ever heard from Inspector Butthurt. So worldly cynical is she (from dealing with the scum of the earth on a shift-work basis) that it is clearly a test of her self-control. A lesser inspector would be shouting their disbelief in your ear. “Does your probation officer know about this?”

“Of course he does!” you splutter. She shakes her head, and a very curious expression steals across her face. Respect or what? “You can confirm my credentials with the Foreign Office,” you add haughtily.

“Ah, that won’t be necessary.” It’s glassy-eyed disbelief, you decide, twitching your security blanket of smugness closer. At last you’ve broken through her shell of assumed white English privilege. But she doesn’t let the moment last. “Back to Tariq. What else can you tell me about him?”

“He was always too smart for his own good.” You realize abruptly that you’re never going to see him again, never engage in his line of crazy banter, never have to shrug off his sly importuning to get you on board one of his scams. The icy lid on your bottomless well of grief shatters, and you sniff, blinking back tears. You’re unsure whether you cry for Tariq or yourself.

Kavanaugh touches your shoulder: You flinch. “Better answer your call,” she says, rising. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t go away.” And she leaves you alone to face Bibi, who is making urgent demands for reassurance you can’t deliver.

TOYMAKER: Fucktoy

Snug as a sphex wasp larva in the belly of a paralysed katydid, you bed down in the Peter Manuel identity. You rent a room in a West End hotel to shower and change your clothes. One brief online session later, you’ve ordered a couple of shirts, a week’s supply of socks and underwear, and a new shaver. Delivery post restante. Over in the Hilton, John Christie’s room lies hollow and empty as a condemned cell. It may already be under active monitoring by the police, but you doubt they’ll put a human-surveillance team on the case—human eye-balls are expensive—and if you don’t interact with the hotel’s digital nervous system they’ll have no way of telling you’re around. But they’re not yet looking for Peter Manuel, and the cost of ambient DNA sequencers is high enough that they’re not yet deployed outside of airports and other class-one security hot spots, and reliable automatic face recognition is right around the corner next week, next year, next decade, just like it’s always been.

Standing under the monsoon shower, you review the afternoon’s work. Parking your luggage with the dithering Indian guy was a bythe-book move, but maybe not such a bright one. It’s always good practice to have a secondary safe house prepped and ready when things turn to shit, and you needed to get your commercial sample out of your immediate proximity lest the police decide to pull in “John Christie” for a grilling, but you can’t count on him for more than documents and a mattress, and even that may be pushing a bit too far. He’s a classic mark, easy to dominate but too fragile for heavy-duty work.

Something about his face brought out the long-forgotten old school bully in you: You wonder what it would be like to punch him until he pleads for mercy, then keep going. Battered, blood dripping down her nose… You’re sprouting wood, you realize, but you’ve got a date for the evening and judging by this morning’s chat-up, she’s aiming for the same goal, so instead of reaching for the soap, you step out of the cubicle and towel yourself dry, then pad through into the bedroom and inspect your clothing options.

Building the new start-up can wait—anything you arrange in the current circumstances will just give the enemy a target. (You pick up a clean pair of boxers, hold them at arm’s length.) On second thoughts, wouldn’t it be a good idea? Draw out the bad guys by giving them a target? (The Straight woman’s a hot dresser. You want to be clubbable, smart casual at least. Flash a bit of class along with the cash.)

Maybe you should set up a front, let the adversaries home in on it, then capture their assassin and pump them for information. (Suit and tee shirt? Or jeans and a jacket? The former. Armani tee. The Fabrice Gonet watch and the Edwardian silver snuff-box.) Set up a target, to draw their fire. (Hit the drug store for some meow-meow. Or better make that premium coke: She looks old-school.) Who could possibly fill those scapegoat shoes for you?

Hmm. Maybe you will move in with Mr. Hussein and his family tomorrow. See if he makes a suitable target: If not, that can be fixed.

(But first, you’re going to make friends with Dorothy.)

DOROTHY: Safeword

As you spot him from across the bar, you’ve got to admit John Christie cleans up well.

One good thing about these on-site assignments with the bank is that nobody’s ever sorry to see you leave on the dot. Nobody likes the inquisition. So as soon as it hits five, you make your brief apologies—little white lies, special pleading about having a life, they love these signs of human frailty—and catch the rush-hour tram back into town. There’s still no word on the other, mystery job—the no-knock ethics audit you’re meant to do on some NDA’d client’s local management sometime next week—but that’s no bad thing. You’ve got enough on your plate right now.

There’s safety in numbers, up to a point. Liz has got your name on some kind of watch list, bless her, but that’s a fat lot of use if your mystery stalker decides to jump you in the bushes while you’re stranded between half-hour buses on a deserted industrial estate due to working late. Or if they decide to have a little tête-à-tête in your hotel room, just them and you and Mister Rubber Hose. But you’re damned if you’re going to turn up on her door-step, shivering and small. Liz is desperately, blatantly monogamous, and if she clocks that Julian isn’t your primary anymore… let’s just say you need a wife like a fish needs a bicycle.

Speaking of bicycles, since you and he decided to plough your different respective fields, you’ve not dated a man. Much less ridden one. It’s turning into a still, small irritant at the back of your head: Am I losing it? Turning into a hairy-legged man-hater… Well no: But there’s been a distinct shortage of cock-meat on the buffet lately, and it’s leaving you feeling a bit unbalanced. If nothing else, dinner with John should beat room service for amusement value. And if he’s thinking along the lines you think he’s thinking along, maybe he’s good for dessert, too. Subject to certain reservations—

“Hi.”

“Hi yourself. Can I buy you a drink?”

He offers you a chair.

“Sure. White wine spritzer. How about you?”

“I’ve already ordered. I wasn’t sure you were going to show,” he says disarmingly, tapping on the menu. “Agree on impulse, regret at leisure.”

“Oh really?” You raise an eyebrow. “You’re absolutely right: I nearly didn’t. On the other hand, mysterious strangers have a draw of their own. How does it work for you?”

He’s stealthed, and you’re letting him know you know. He doesn’t have a Facebook page. He’s not on LinkedIn, or Netwerked, or any of the others. The only match your agents could find was a local listing on DoggerBank, but it didn’t come with a headshot. On the other hand, he’s not in the public sex-offenders register either.

“Sometimes well, sometimes badly,” he admits. “I value my privacy, but sometimes it gets a bit lonely.” He looks at you, and you think, My, what big eyes you have, Mister Wolf.

“So tell me, Mr. Christie, where do I go to find out more about you?” you ask teasingly. “Besides the personals on DoggerBank? Wikipedia?”

He flushes slightly but doesn’t deny anything. “I got a lot of shit about my name in high school. When they found out about him.” He means the other John Christie, the one they hanged seventy years ago.

“No relative, I assume.”

“None whatsoever.” He waves a hand dismissively. One of the waiters is coming, starched apron and silver tray loaded with a tulipshaped glass and a whisky tumbler. You wait for them to depart.

You lick your lips from behind the cover of your glass. “So, do you post to DoggerBank often?”

“I wouldn’t know. Do you often read personals on DoggerBank?” He’s echoing your posture, you think. To test it you rub one finger on the side of your nose. Sure enough, five seconds later he raises a hand. “I might,” he says coyly. “If you want me to.”

Well, it wasn’t an off-puttingly bad ad. (SWM seeks SWF for edge-play, penetration-OK, RF, safeword-OK.) You sip your spritzer and breathe in, pushing your breasts up a little. “Do you want to fuck me, Mr. Christie?” His pupils dilate. Clearly, the answer is yes. But he’s well-trained enough to say nothing, waiting: like a wolf, intent but distant. You feel a wave of heat, nipples tightening. “The safeword is fish, Mr. Christie. Can you live with that?”

“Fish.” He nods. “Yeah.” His close-cropped scalp shines slightly under the overhead spotlights. There’s a moment of glassy-eyed focus, then he blinks, breaking the slightly creepy stare. “Sorry.” He smiles shyly, losing ten years of age, suddenly cute. “I wasn’t—I really was inviting you to dinner. The invitation stands, by the way. Do you always do a background check on dates?”

You smile and nod, let him see your teeth, let him know who’s in control here. It took you a long time to train yourself to be this assertive, but it pays dividends. “Goes with the job.”

“Really? What do you do?”

“I’m an auditor. Ethics compliance. It’s not just a country next door to Sussex.” You pull a self-deprecating face, but it’s okay, he’s nodding sympathetically. “I’m in town to check a bank—” You natter for a while, reassuring him you’re a normal person when you’re not answering DoggerBank personals, then he natters for a bit, ditto. He’s in intellectual property, 3D extrusions, rapid manufacturing franchisees, and neighbourhood workshops making bespoke toys. It sounds pretty tedious, a needle-stick puncture to your fantasy of a dangerous but controllable stranger—

—You’re sharing a bowl of organic-farmed oysters with him, he’s laughing as you pour one down your throat, lip-smacking suggestively, then he’s—

You’re rubbing your ankle against him under the table. His breath catches, and you’ve got him in sharp focus. Your mouths are flapping, but the words are unimportant. Half-eaten salad in front of you, unappealing. You don’t want to overfill yourself. His gaze has caught you: You’re the focus of his world right now. Totally centered in his gunsights. Funny, the idea of a toy salesman who reeks of danger and makes your heart pound is ridiculous on the face of it. But it’s not going to stop you playing footsie with the devil.

“Your room,” you tell him, mindful of the listeners in your own.

You know what you want for dessert, and you’re not going to find it on the hotel menu. So you lead him to the lifts and let him show you the way to the buffet, and then he feeds it to you hard and fast. Total abandon, clothes everywhere, barely time to roll on a condom before he pushes you down on the real bed. He’s very dominant, not trying to hurt you but not asking for a lead, either. No ropes or toys, but he’s somehow managed to immobilize you—not painfully, but. But. (SWM seeks SWF for edge-play…) He’s frighteningly focussed when he enters you: For a moment you have second thoughts, wonder if he’d hear you if you said anything, but he’s using his mouth and working a finger up your ass with a skill that is so exactly what you need that you grind back against him and begin to let go and flail around wildly as he pins you down and fucks you hard enough you’re going to have bruises. You’re close to coming when he stops: pulls out, rolls you face-down on the bed, and shoves himself up your anus. It’s shocking, and you’re trying to muster a protest—having difficulty getting enough air—then you feel him tense and shoot his load. And a few seconds later he rolls off you.

You’re lying there in frustrated confusion. Your left wrist aches where he gripped it with fingers like handcuffs, and your backside is sore. He’s in the en suite, you can hear by the splashing. What the fuck? He didn’t even stay around to use his fingers. So much for the evening—it’s not yet ten, and it’s a fucking disaster. One star review: Could screw better.

You lever yourself up on your elbows. “You going to be long?” you ask.

The toilet flushes in reply. Christie comes out, wearing a hotel bath-robe. “You can go now,” he says.

That wasn’t what you were asking about, but you could do with the loo, so you nod gratefully and dash for the bathroom. Your make-up is mostly beyond repair, but you can manage a hasty wipe-down, then back on with panties, bra, leggings, and top. You flush the toilet. You’re still trying to figure out what happens next when he calls again, “You can go now.”

What the fuck? You step back out into the bedroom. He’s sitting at the desk, back to you, focussing on a pad with the exact same degree of obsessive focus he was deploying on your tits an hour ago.

“Excuse me?” you ask, picking up your shoes and handbag.

“You can go now,” he says for a third time, his voice empty of expression. “I have work to do.”

The words sting you into anger: What does he think you are? But the lack of affect behind them suddenly chills you. It’s as if there’s something missing, something that was missing all along but you made yourself ignore.

“Was that all you wanted?” you ask him, trying to keep your voice from wobbling.

“I have to work now.” He turns to look at you irritably. “Don’t you have a room to go to?”

“Fish,” you say. Then, uncertainly: “Safeword.”

“Go away.” He turns back to the screen.

Next.

You’re standing with your back to the closing door, in the corridor. You slide your feet into your heels and shudder with an emotion you can’t name: Then you turn and walk with exaggerated self-control towards the lifts. Bastard. Try not to think about him. What might have happened in there. The afterglow is shredded and faded to rancid rags that smear a greasy patina across the memory of pleasure. You have a nauseating awareness that you’ve been used: But you went in there meaning to use him for your own ends in turn. It’s not as if you’re a stranger to ass-play. So why do you feel so wrong? As you go back to your room and deadbolt the door behind you and run a long, hot bath, you’re haunted by a simple question.

If you’d used the safeword on him, would he have stopped?

TOYMAKER: Abused

After you get rid of the bitch, you take half an hour to catch up on some admin work. You left the pad in here just in case: You pull your VM down from the cloud and write up a brief summary of your thoughts about what’s going on and your revised business plan, and send it back to the Operation’s servers. Doubtless next time you check in, there’ll be some helpful notes from Control.

Factory-wiping the pad, you shove it back in the hotel safe and pull your clothes on again. You weren’t planning to stay the night here anyway, and the Straight woman’s presence makes it all the more important to move out. So you leave the room, walk to the fire stairs, and descend to the ground floor.

It’s still daylight outside—the sun never seems to set on this fucking city—but you feel drained. It’s some combination of the dour stone architecture, the weird Scottish people, a smidgen of your own paranoia, and the fact that a fucking murderer is stalking your start-up: It’s getting you down. Perhaps you should’ve hit the meow-meow and taken the bitch clubbing first, taken the time to relax: But you’re not planning on hanging around, and anyway, she was tedious. You’ve met her type before, needy thirtysomething singles: Thinks she’s a swinger, but if you take the effort to keep her hot, the next thing you know she’ll be making cow eyes at you and expecting an engagement ring. They get desperately serious when all you want is a fuck (and why are all these Anglo hotels so uptight about room service?). The hell with that.

You walk across the plaza in front of the hotel—a barren flagstoned plinth—towards the round theatre on the other side of the road. There are some bars clustered behind it: In your Rough Guide overlay, they’re helpfully tagged as “the pubic triangle.” Maybe you should have gone there instead of scouring the hotel for desperate would-be housewives.

Five minutes’ walking brings you to a corner where yet more of the desperately grey stone shit looms over you—they have houses with fucking battlements here, stone cannons carved into the eaves—haven’t these people heard of earthquakes? You’re still a bit nervy-scratchy from the day’s events, so rather than piss around outside, you nod amiably at the bouncer and duck through a brass-trimmed door into a venue that promises two hundred kinds of whisky and beer besides.

You order an Irish and Coke, then look around for the darkest corner you can see and go hide in it. There’s a secure note-pad app on your skullphone, works with your shades. You fingertwitch under the table, working out your priorities:

The latter… you’d bet good money that there’s a leak inside the Operation. Otherwise, how else do they know who you’re targeting? So you’re going to set up a target. Mister family man diplomat seems like a suitable option; fat, happy, and dumb. (Move in with him, put word up the line that he’s your new COO, wait for someone to try to whack him, grab the killer, and extract names.) You do not commit this latter plan to your note-pad. You’ve got to assume that anything in your skullphone is being monitored by Control, and that Control is leaking information to the—no, they don’t exist. There are no killer lizards bleeding through from the other side of reality, the side that’s all washed-out and grainy gray and suicidal. That’s just a delusional fantasy, a side-effect of bad headmeat. And you’re not delusional, are you?

Halfway down your drink, you notice a couple of low-lifes giving you the eye-ball from across the bar. You don’t move your head, but you study them back from behind your glasses. Skinny, short hair, bad skin, track-suit-and-hoodie stereotypes: One of them’s staring and muttering to his mate, who’s nodding and not looking at you. You’re acutely aware, of an instant, that you’re wearing the Gonet on your wrist. Conspicuous consumption indeed. Shit, part of you registers, the part of you that remembers your time at school and the special education your uncle Al gave you: The rest of you feels a pulse or squeeze of momentary happy anticipation of release, not unlike what you felt with the woman. Sex and violence are all cross-wired at a low level in the brain, anyway. That’s what they say.

You finish your glass, stand, and walk out of the bar with your back straight, not looking back. You slide the glasses into their case and pocket them. There’s some movement behind you. You turn a corner and cut uphill through a grey stone canyon between windowless buildings. It’s twilight now, and there’s movement behind you, a scuffing noise like a rat in a hurry and a breath of air as you spin round.

There’s only one of them and it’s Sweaty McTracksuit, and the back of your head is no longer in front of his fist when he tries to deck you. Instead, your left heel is stamping on his right instep, you’ve got a lock on his arm, and you’re twisting as he drops the home-fabbed knuckle-duster that probably came off one of your clients’ machines and claws at your eyes with his left hand.

A second later, you’ve faceplanted him on a paving stone. Quick scan: Two’s company. For a moment, you wonder if the enemy sent him, but no—he’s just a fucking low-life mugger who’s taken you for a tourist, gone after your watch and your wallet. You can’t be having that. So you kick him sharply in the ribs, pick up the ultrahard plastic knuckles while he’s struggling to draw breath, hold down his right hand against the concrete, and use them to ensure he’ll never play Guitar Hero again.

Ants. I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right? Even a fucking mugging?

Evidently not. It looks like Peter Manuel will have to teach the burghers of Edinburgh a lesson.

A lesson they won’t soon forget.

LIZ: Bereavement Counselling

Mr. Hussein is pretty much right at the bottom of the list of all the people you ever expected to be doing the Victim Response Officer tap-dance for. It is, in fact, typical of how fucked-up this week has become that you find yourself sitting knee to knee with him over a cup of tea, commiserating (for tenuous values of commiseration).

Anwar is as bent as a three-euro note: just bright enough to think he’s smarter than everyone around him, just stupid enough not to realize that they’ve got his number. He’s a walking poster-boy for the Dunning-Kruger Effect: If he says he’s going straight, it probably means one of his idiot friends told him shoplifting is legal. However, his lack of insight is a two-edged sword; it’s glaringly obvious that he’s worried sick about his cousin, who is lying dead in an upstairs bedroom while the SOCO team pin down the scene, but he’s too dumb to actually help you. So you’re supposed to treat him like any other victim… or potential source of material evidence in what is rapidly shaping up to be the mass-murder enquiry of the century. Hence the house-work questions.

It only takes you five minutes to figure out that he is not, in fact, a killer. You don’t even need the speech-stress analyser; he’s not dissembling, his story lines up, and his probationware-riddled phone places him on the far side of town at the time. Everything so far checks out, and if the public CCTV confirms his movements, he’s definitely off the hook. Anyway, he’s not smart enough to have done something like this.

Right now he’s a bit of a mess: not quite a blubbery mass, but obviously very upset. And he’s beginning to push you for details. “I don’t understand. What has happened to my cousin? Why are you here? Who did it? What did they do? Have you arrested anyone?”

“I don’t know,” you tell him, honestly enough. It’s not as if you can give him information that might compromise an ongoing investigation, but even if that was not the case, the scene upstairs is more than slightly mad. “Listen, I’m going to check with my colleagues. I don’t want to say anything until I know what I’m allowed to say, but I’ll be right back. Drink your tea—I won’t be five minutes.”

You rise and step out into the hall, pull the door closed, and nod at the PC on duty, who steps sideways to cover the door.

You go upstairs. Kemal is standing on the landing outside the bathroom—why is it the fucking bathroom again?—airboarding notes. He shakes his head when he sees you. “You’ve seen it. What do you think?” you ask him.

Behind his Eurocop-standard specs, Kemal’s eyes are tired. “Was the Blair murder scene like this?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Haven’t examined this one yet.” But you’ve got a good idea what to expect. Otherwise, why the IM asking you to ask Mr. Hussein about domestic appliances?

You knock on the bathroom door, ignoring the yellow warning icons buzzing around it like angry hornets. “Hello inside?”

The door doesn’t open, but a chat window drops front and centre. SGT MADDOX, SOC: WHATSUP?

“Sitrep,” you call.

You hear a muffled voice: “Just a mo.” Then a huge and grisly multimedia dump with about six gigabytes of metadata hanging off it drops across your view like a luminous crime-fighting jellyfish. In the middle there’s a doorway-framed view of the bathroom. You zoom on it: It’s live; someone’s had the good taste to hang a webcam from the hook on the back of the door, so you’ve got the equivalent of X-ray specs.

Your view is partially obstructed by Maddox and her co-workers, who are dancing the dance of the forensic bunnymen within a much smaller stage than that afforded by the bad-taste palace of the late Michael Blair—but the focus of their attention is broadly similar. No dead Warsaw Pact dictator’s colonic irrigation machine here, just a vacant-eyed skinny guy slumped half-out of the bath… but what in James Dyson’s name is the vacuum bot doing?

You don’t have one of the things—your wee flat’s too small to need it—but you get the picture: It’s supposed to bumble around the house sucking on the rugs and scaring the cat, periodically retreating to its wall wart to recharge and hork up a cricket-ball-sized sphere of compacted fluff and household dirt. This is an upmarket jobbie, with two sets of wheels so it can walk up stairs and a couple of extension hoses so it can stick its knobbly nose into crevices where the sun don’t shine. It features an especially big battery—which is currently one hundred–per cent discharged, having shorted out through the bathwater in which the very dead Tariq is marinating.

There’s a big evidence bag laid out beside the robot. And you don’t need to be a technical genius to figure that cracking this case hinges on fingering whoever fitted a live wire down its snout and programmed it to go drinkies while Tariq was in the tub.

If someone’s tampering with domestic appliances with murder in mind, the blogosphere is going to have a cow and a half. But that’s the least of your worries right now.

You turn to Kemal. “You got that?” you ask redundantly.

“Was the other case like this?” he repeats.

“A bit.” Shit, who are you trying to kid? You surrender to the inevitable and place the call. “Chief Inspector?”

Dodgy Dickie grunts. “What’s up?”

“I’m afraid we’ve definitely got another one.” You’re registered on scene here, so you can add him to the access list. “Moderately bent business man in Bruntsfield, dead in the bathtub where his vacuum cleaner decided to electrocute him. I’ve got his cousin downstairs—former client of mine, not currently under suspicion—sweating bullets and trying not to incriminate the deceased. The MO is a dead ringer for Babylon.” That the deceased was in the loop on repairing broken appliances—see also: back-street fabbers—you leave for later. It’s certainly a suggestive avenue for enquiries.

Mac’s initial response is unprintable. Then, “Hold the fort, I’ll be reet round. This client of yours—dinna let him leave.” He hangs up immediately, and his contact status, hanging in the corner of your vision, changes to mobile.

Dickie is showing worrying signs of succumbing to hands-on mode, the besetting cognitive error of any senior officer confronted by too much data—the illusion that if they just take hands-on control in the field, they can make everything come up roses. It leads to brigadiers focussing on a single infantry squad, and chief inspectors interviewing suspects instead of concentrating on running the hundred-headed murder team. (And, of course, if you try to point this out to him… just don’t go there.)

You hot-shoe it downstairs and back to the living room, which is becoming hard to get to—the hall is filling up with uniforms, stomping on each other’s German-Army-surplus paratroop boots and trying to make themselves useful. You really want an opportunity to get Kemal alone and pump him, or failing that, to get Mr. Hussein to spill the beans on his cousin (assuming there are any beans to spill). But once Dickie arrives…

“Anwar.”

He’s sitting in the armchair, shoulders slumped beneath the weight of an invisible storm-cloud. And he looks guilty, which will never do.

“In a few minutes, my boss on this investigation is going to arrive. He’ll want to ask you a few questions.”

Dickie is very old-school, inclined to go off like a shaped charge in the direction of the first plausible suspect who comes to his attention. This is not unreasonable: 90 per cent of the time, it’s the right thing to do in an investigation, because 90 per cent of the time, the first plausible suspect is the right one. But you will eat your warrant card if Anwar is smart enough to arrange a scene like the one in the bathroom upstairs—much less to have orchestrated Mikey Blair’s demise.

In the absence of a better target, Dickie’s nostrils will start twitching in exactly the wrong direction, and he’ll get all distracted and focussed on the nearest Saughton graduate because it’s easier than acknowledging how non-linear this investigation is going. And you don’t want him to do that because, despite the ongoing bad blood between you, you are horribly aware that there’s a repeat killer at large, and it would really suck if Dickie got hung up on Anwar, leaving the killer free to strike again.

“I am not officially cautioning you, and you are not under arrest, my friend. But it would be really helpful if you could tell me anything you know about any criminal activities your cousin was engaged in.”

The slumped shoulders rise infinitesimally, then fall again. Oh, it’s like that, is it?

You take your glasses off and, very deliberately, slide them into your pocket. “Anwar.” You pause. (What you’re about to say might break your career, if it comes out in the wash. If you’ve got any career left to break, that is.) “This is a murder investigation. Intelligence goes in, it doesn’t come out. As long as you don’t cough to any arrestable offences, we have no reason to lay a finger on you. And I can guarantee that anything you say that isn’t a confession about an arrestable offence won’t reach your probation officer’s ears if that’s what you’re worried about. Maintaining security on a murder investigation is much more important to us than telling your social worker whether you’ve been saying your prayers before bed. So I’m going to ask you again: Do you know anything that we should know, to help us find your cousin’s killer?”

You put your glasses back on. And while your head’s bowed, and you’re looking elsewhere, Anwar opens up.

Two hours later you’re missing your lunch break for the sake of clogging up the meatspace incident room, laying it on the line for the peanut gallery.

“Here’s our Anwar Hussein. On probation, done time for identity theft and fraud—not very smart. He’s a foot-soldier, not a general: retired foot-soldier at that, or so he says. He gets a call from his wife, who got it from the first bystander, Mrs. Begum, to go visit Mrs. Begum and her son, the victim. He arrived on the scene after our first responder and Sergeant MacBride. Because he’s on release, we have his probationware record, and I can confirm that he’s been nowhere near the scene of crime for two days. Subject to confirmation by municipal CCTV, but it really doesn’t look like he did it.

“However. Our Anwar is a bit of a wide boy, and his first reaction was to clam up. I was eventually able to determine that he’s got a guilty conscience over some work the victim had asked him to do. There might be an issue of possible violation of probation terms here, but Mr. Hussein is eager to assure us that he hadn’t actually got round to doing anything illegal as yet.”

There is much rolling of eyes from the peanut gallery at this point, which you deliver with ironic lack of emphasis—I didn’a mean to put me hand through tha winda an’ take tha wallet, it just sort of happened—so you feel the need to clear your throat. “He coughed to it voluntarily, and more to the point, he handed over the material which he claims his cousin Tariq gave him to work on, along with the device. It’s downstairs in Forensics being imaged right now. If he hasn’t touched it, then it may give us some insight into the murderer’s motivation.” Assuming there is a murderer, something in the back of your mind nudges. Because if you were wrong about there being no such thing as an artificial intelligence, things could get really embarrassing, couldn’t they?

DCI MacLeish—for he is back from the Hussein residence—gives you the hairy eye-ball. “What sort of business was Mr. Hussein involved in, do you know?”

You stare right back at him: “I arrested him three years ago in the course of an ongoing investigation into an identity-fraud ring. He coughed to a variety of charges, including spear phishing, ownership of stolen authentication credentials, unauthorized access to personal account details, and Internet-banking fraud. Came to court, entered a guilty plea, two years in Saughton, cut on appeal to one plus one. Interestingly , Anwar was the only body we bagged on that case; I’m certain he wasn’t working alone, but you know how these Internet cases are.” You tap your forehead.

Dickie’s eyebrows waggle, then he nods deeply, satisfied. (There is stuff you can say and stuff you can’t say on the record—and everything that’s said anywhere in a police station is recorded under rules of evidence these days—but waggling eyebrows and forehead tapping don’t show up in the automatic speech-to-text transcripts. What you just sent via monkeyspace, bypassing CopSpace entirely, is that you know stuff but you don’t want to contaminate the investigation by introducing hearsay or out-of-band intelligence. And Dickie, for once, agrees with you: He doesn’t want you screwing up his investigation either.)

“Three victims so far,” he rumbles. “Inspector Aslan, you have some input?”

Kemal is fidgeting with his glasses. “We have two more,” he says diffidently. “One in Sofia, one in Trieste. That’s all in the past hour. Bringing the running total to eleven.”

Dickie looks simultaneously aghast and almost, in an odd way, hopeful: It’s a clusterfuck, but it’s not his clusterfuck, he’s merely holding up a small corner, a few fragments of fatal fuckuppery. “Evidence.”

A uniform at the back sticks up her hand. “Got one on the Crolla case,” she offers.

“Go ahead.”

“The warrant trawl of the national network monitoring database flagged up some chat-room transcripts. They match input from an avatar associated with an IP address allocated to Vivian Crolla’s broadband connection. Assuming it’s her, she had an, um, vivid fantasy life.”

Ears prick up all round: Nothing gets your attention in a briefing like a drop of special sauce on the great and the good. (Hot sauce, even.)

“A number of enquiries about, uh, bondage practices involving plastic wrap and mattresses full of bank-notes.” Bless her, the freshfaced constable is looking even more rosy-cheeked than usual. “The aforementioned user posted a number of scenarios and, uh, there are some downloads, too. Stories centred on being immobilized and restrained while fully clothed, in proximity to large amounts of money. We’re currently trying to track down some chat-room contacts…”

It’s too much. You hear whackier stories from the twinks at CC’s every Saturday night you go clubbing, but a fair proportion of the assembled officers are of a, shall we say, small-c conservative upbringing. As for the rest, some of them aren’t as hard-boiled as they’d like to think. Muttered disbelief and the odd titter sweep the room.

“Silence!” roars Dodgy Dickie, the veins on the side of his neck standing out. “Ahem.” He sounds surprised at himself. “Sarah, if you’d like to continue?”

“Uh, that’s all I’ve really got right now, sir, until we question her known contacts. Details in the case file…” She flips a reference into the investigation space hovering above the big conference-table.

“The Crolla post-mortem examination report won’t be available until tomorrow,” Dickie announces, “but we have a preliminary. According to the pathologist, it looks like a massive allergic reaction while the subject was restrained. Anaphylactic shock. They’re still looking for the cause—whatever she was allergic to—but suggest it’s something that was introduced into her apartment’s atmosphere while she was immobilized: I gather Iain’s sent the empty air-freshener cartridge in the bathroom for analysis…”

You tap Kemal on the shoulder and jerk your head in the direction of the door. He blinks at you, then nods.

Outside, you march directly—or rather, via a bunch of scuffed and flicker-lit corridors and stairs that resemble a giant hamster maze that’s gone to seed—to your own office in the ICIU. Kemal tags along like your guilty shadow.

“I seem to recall there was a book about it, years ago,” you tell him as you take the fire door into the car-park, then the back corridor past the Air Farce control room—where the pilots sit in their twilit virtual cockpits, alert and ready to dive their stealthed carbon-fibre drones on the heads of any hapless dog-walker who forgets to scoop up the poop their mutt’s just dropped on the Meadows—down past the flammables store, and along the side of the old stables. “About a guy who was into wrapping Roy Orbison in cling-film, uh, Saran Wrap. My mum used it to show me why I should never go with strangers. I had nightmares about kitchenware for years.”

“You think… the accountant…”

You pause on the threshold of the ICIU suite. “I refuse to speculate: It’s unprofessional, and besides, she might have had a perfectly innocent reason for owning a metric shitload of cancelled bank-notes in an obsolete currency. Not that you’d catch me shrink-wrapping myself to a pile of used bank-notes: The stuff’s lousy with germs. People sneeze on it.”

You take a tiny pleasure from Kemal’s expression of cumulatively deepening distaste.

“This is my office, the ICIU. And here’s Detective Sergeant Cunningham. Moxie, this is DI Aslan from Europol. He’s here to help us.” Kemal probably won’t spot the slight emphasis on the penultimate word, but you can be sure Moxie will—and the warning eye-flicker. Your attitude to Kemal has changed somewhat since you departed to collect him this morning (was it only five hours ago?), but Moxie isn’t Mr. Sensitive McNewage and can’t be guaranteed to pick that up. You can quite easily live without him unintentionally reopening hostilities.

“Great, skipper, I could use some help. It’s been one damn thing after another this morning. I’ve got six pending RFIs from some big intelligence investigation CID are running—”

Your heart sinks. “Is it Operation Babylon?” you ask.

“How did you know?” Moxie does his best hamster nose-rubbing imitation at you.

“Meet Operation Babylon’s Europol liaison.” You point at Kemal, who is looking around with an expression that speaks volumes in monosyllables. His gizz turns especially glassy as he spots Moxie’s animated Goatsedance digiframe. (For which you make a mental note to bollock him later: Visiting brass could get entirely the wrong idea.) “It’s a black hole, Moxie, coming to swallow us. What have you got in your queue?”

You settle Kemal down with a seat and a pad, then spend the next ten minutes with Moxie dissecting: a request for information about shrink-wrap fetish clubs in Midlothian; demands that someone in IT Support decode the charge sheet you filed against one Mr. Hussein, A., back in the day (“Conspiracy to Bamboozle the Police,” suggests Moxie, identity-theft charges being confusing to officers more normally accustomed to breach-of-the-peace and public-order offences); an urgent enquiry for a backgrounder on spam filters (you boost that one to Priority A and sling it at your own job queue); a query from the desk sergeant at Gayfield Square as to whether he can arrest someone for running a home-brew fabricator (that’ll be a “no,” then—not without probable cause, and fuck knows how that one slipped into the Babylon queue); and a query about identity theft and a person of interest claiming to be Mikey Blair’s boy-friend who left a DNA sample and a junk identity trail.

(Which is just peachy, because if you dig anything up on the random Mr. Christie and present it to Dickie, he really will have a coronary on the briefing-room floor.)

Kemal clears his throat.

“Yes?”

“I have an update from the office. They have a causal chain for one of our fatalities.”

You would expect the man to look smug at this point, but he doesn’t: haunted, more like. “What?”

Kemal shakes his head. “Vito Morricone. Dead in Palermo. A yahoo-yahoo boy. He died in a kitchen accident.”

Moxie shakes his head. “A kitchen accident?”

“Yes. He was electrocuted by a deliberately miswired food processor.” (You wince: You’ve had cooking incidents like that.) Kemal continues: “It was a high-end machine, able to heat or chill as well as mincing and mixing. Programmable, networked, you can leave cold ingredients in it and switch it on before you leave work, even change recipes remotely. His partner says that it broke eight months ago, and Morricone took it to a back-street repair shop, where they fixed it for him. The case is stainless steel. A replacement part—” He shakes his head.

“What kind of replacement?”

“The report does not explain this thing. But the local investigators report that the fixer bought the replacement-part design online from a cheap pirate shop, not from the manufacturer’s website. It came with installation instructions, which he followed. Once installed, the machine could be remotely induced to short its input power supply through the case.”

You give a low whistle of appreciation: Moxie claps, slowly. “Murder. Smoking gun.”

“Yes, but.” Kemal looks troubled. “The fixer does not appear to know anything. Who supplied the sabotaged component design? And why? The investigating magistrate connected to the same pirate design site and bought the same part: It is apparently harmless. And who sent the signal to activate it? We don’t know yet.”

“But it’s an assassination? A well-planned one.” You snap your fingers. “Tariq Hussein. The vacuum robot.” The IM you got while you were talking to Anwar rises to the top of your mind. “Tariq got things fixed. Anwar said something about a kitchen appliance that’d broken. Huh.” You pull up a memo window. “I want to know who fixed Tariq’s vacuum cleaner and when. Ask Mrs. Hussein about it. And”—the penny drops—“Mr. Blair’s enema machine. Who repaired it last?”

“Minute those to BABYLON,” you tell Moxie. He nods and keyboards it into the intelligence wiki, where some poor grunt will funnel it into Mac’s inbound workstream and Mac (or one of his assistant managers) will assign it a priority level and add it to some other detective’s to-do list. Policing, as with all procedural jobs, expands to fill all the time and consume all the resources available for it. And a job like this one is too big to handle in a half-assed manner.

It’s a point of pride among the former nations of the United Kingdom that the murder clear-up rate is in three sigmas territory, somewhere over 92 per cent; but it takes bucketloads of manpower to get there, and process-oriented management and intelligence-supported work flow and human-resources tracking to keep the minimum investigative team of fifty-plus detectives properly coordinated. Most of the public still believe in Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Rebus, the lone genius with an eye for clues: And it suits the brass to maintain the illusion of inscrutable detective insight for political reasons.

But the reality is that behind the magic curtain, there’s a bunch of uniformed desk pilots frantically shuffling terabytes of information, forensic reports and mobile-phone-traffic metadata and public-webcam streams and directed interviews, looking for patterns in the data deluge spewing from the fire-hose. Indeed, a murder investigation is a lot like a mechanical turk: a machine that resembles a marvellous piece of artificial-intelligence software, oracular in its acuity, but that under the hood turns out to be the work of huge numbers of human piece-workers coordinating via network. Crowdsourcing by cop, in other words.

(If you’re one of the piece-workers in a mechanical turk—or one of the rewrite rules inside Searle’s Chinese room—the overall pattern of the job may be indiscernible, lost in an opaque blur of seemingly random subtasks. And if you’re one of the detectives on a murder case, your immediate job—determining who last repaired a defective vacuum cleaner—may seem equally inexplicable. But there’s method in my motion, as you’ll learn for yourself.)

You spend the next two hours with Moxie, churning through queries from Operation Babylon. Part-way through, Kemal disappears (to the toilet, you think at first: then to the briefing room, you decide), returning towards the end. You do lunch in the on-site canteen, communicating in defensive monosyllables: After his contribution from Palermo, he has nothing more to offer you. After lunch, you both attend the afternoon briefing in D31; then you sort Kemal out with a tablet, and he turns out to be surprisingly useful at handling those low-level queries you delegate to him. You update the ICIU shift roster for the next week and attend to another heap of inbound administrivia, before finally clocking off your shift and going home via the hair salon.

Home in your wee flat, you kick your shoes off and hang your jacket, visit the bathroom, and take a good close look at your new hair-do.

It’s always hard to tell for sure at the hairdresser’s, but here you can take your time and not worry about being unduly critical in front of the perfectly coiffured girl with the scissors and the long memory for casual insults from clients. You tilt your head and narrow your eyes and after a minute, you decide that, yes, you can live with it. It’s shorter, but more importantly, it’s regular. As business-like as your choice of footwear. Rest easy: Nobody’s going to be passing sly remarks about your hair-do or your sensible shoes in the canteen behind your back. (Locker-room culture will never die: It just goes underground, as you know to your cost.)

You have plenty of time for a long comfortable lie in the bath followed by a TV dinner. You plant yourself on the sofa under your tablet, surfing the web while the vacuum sniffs and nudges around the corners of the living-room carpet, as the evening grows old along with your thoughts. Which, as usual, are increasingly bored and lonely. Burn-out is such an ugly turn of phrase, and in any case, it doesn’t quite fit; it’s more like you ran out of fuel halfway across the ocean, and you’re gliding now, the site of your crash landing approaching implacably but still hidden from you by the horizon of your retirement. That’s you in a nutshell, drifting slowly down towards lonely old age, the fires of ambition having flamed out years ago.

There was a time when, after working hours, you’d be off to the gym or auditing a distance-learning course or some other worthy pursuit. But these days, it’s hard to see the point anymore.

The sad truth, which only dawned on you after you were fifteen years down this path, is that it doesn’t mean anything. Your job, your vocation, your life’s calling—you’re like a priest who awakens one day and realizes that his god has been replaced by a cardboard cut-out, and he’s no longer able to ignore his own disbelief. And, like the priest, you’ve sacrificed all hope of a normal life on the altar of something you no longer believe in.

Heaven knows, it’s not as if the job doesn’t need doing. Fifteen years in the force has taught you more about the stupid, petty, vicious idiocy of your fellow humans than you ever wanted to know. (It’s also startled you—very occasionally—with their generosity, intelligence, and altruism. Very occasionally.)

But policing, crime prevention and detection, is a Red Queen’s race: You have to run as fast as you possibly can just to stand still. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there’ll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers. It’s like there’s a law of nature: Not only is the job never done, the job can never be done.

And then you hit your career derailment, passed over for promotion and sidelined into running the ICIU. And that’s even worse. The movies playing inside people’s heads every day are a million times nastier than what’s out on the streets. Your colleagues have got no fucking idea what people day-dream and fantasize about: It’s some kind of miracle you’re not dealing with a thousand Hungerford massacres a day, going by what ICIU shows you. The sad fact is, the actual crimes that are committed are a pale shadow of the things people fantasize about. Even the poor-impulse-control cases who clog up the holding cells at the sheriff’s court mostly have some rudimentary inhibitions that hold chaos at bay, most of the time.

But for the past couple of years, it’s been sapping your will to live, never mind your ability to believe in the job.

You’re just about thinking about retreating to the bedroom—a lonely end to a boring evening—when you get a text. It’s from Dorothy. How old-school, you think.

YOU HOME? she asks.

YES.

CAN I COME ROUND? She capitalizes and uses correct written grammar, as formal as the way she dresses. NEED COMPANY.

Your heart flip-flops at the promise of company. SURE, you send, trying not to sound over-excitable, and tag it with your address and directions. Check the time: It’s ten thirty, for heaven’s sake. Doesn’t she have to go to work tomorrow? Don’t you have to go to work tomorrow? Your heart flip-flops again, and suddenly you feel hot and bothered; but a cool, collected part of you asks, Didn’t you have a date for Saturday? Dorothy’s the planning kind. Why so sudden?

BE RIGHT ROUND, she texts again. NEED TO TALK.

You shove your tablet away hurriedly, start to run fingers through your hair, then stop. You’re a mess, and there’s no time to do anything about it. “Shit.”

Precisely eight minutes and forty-two seconds later, the doorbell rings. It’s her, as you knew it would be. Swearing quietly, you buzz her up. The bed’s made, the sofa cushions are plumped, there’s coffee waiting in the cafetière in the kitchen if you need it, fuck knows what this is about but…

You open the door. It’s Dorothy. She looks at you with red-rimmed eyes, steps forward into your open arms—and begins to weep.

ANWAR: Sleep-walk

The cops don’t so much let you go as politely direct you to the door with a stern admonition to keep out of their hair. There’s a crossed wire somewhere; they don’t seem to know whether to treat you as a victim of crime (Subtype: next of kin) or person of interest in ongoing investigation (Subtype: old lag).

You’re numb inside by the time Inspector Butthurt finishes dragging the sorry story of Tariq’s business out of you. You ken you probably didn’t incriminate yourself overmuch, and as she pointed out, it’s a murder investigation—they don’t care about your probation as long as you’re not plotting any bank robberies—but after you finished spilling in her lap, she wheeled in her colleague, Chief Inspector McHaggis, who is an entirely different species of arsehole, with his radge attitude and aggressively bristling moustache. He glared at you like he’d found you stuck to the bottom of his size-twelve para boots and curtly told you that he’d be in touch and in the meantime please do something about your mother-in-law (who is still wailing up a storm in the kitchen whenever she remembers).

Speaking of remembering, you remember phoning Bibi, who tells you to phone Imam Hafiz, so you phone the imam, who agrees to call your father-in-law, then come right round, and you wait on the street-corner for him to show up as, meanwhile, everyone in the local community wanders by, casually checking out the scene with their phonecams and occasionally pausing to tut-tut and share furtive condolences with you, all the time wondering if you are in fact some kind of serial killer and waiting for the police to come and arrest you. It is truly mortifying. And so, some hours later—when Bibi has efficiently squirreled numb-faced Taleb and his grieving bride away in one of the hotels on Lothian Road and organized a rota of hot-and-cold-running daughters-in-law and nieces to sit and keep them company through the long night—you tiptoe away to a certain pub on the far side of Calton Hill, where the Gnome is waiting for you with a warm pint and a quizzical stare.

He glances at your face and shoves the beer in front of you. You take it wordlessly and chug most of it straight back. The Gnome looks concerned. “What kind of way is that to treat a pint?” he asks, then pauses, laboriously taking note of your face. “Ah, I see. Would you be in need of another?”

You nod. He makes himself scarce in the direction of the bar (despite those stumpy legs, he can shift when he needs to) and you put the remains of your first pint down on the table and try to shove away the enormous hollowness behind your breastbone. It won’t budge. You glare at the pint. There’s maybe an answer of sorts to your dilemma hidden in the glass, but you’re not sure how to frame the question. To get blootered, or not to get blootered? (Bibi’ll scream at you if you come to bed legless and stinking of alcohol, but right now you don’t really care about that: plenty of time to shrug it off as an aberration later.) The real question is—why?

A new glass, clone of the old one, appears under your nose. You nod. “Thank you.”

“What’s the story?” the Gnome asks, not ungently.

“My cousin Tariq’s dead,” you tell him, wanting the words to sting.

Instead, the Gnome perks up. “Was it you who killed him?” he asks with pseudoprofessional cheer.

“The Polis think it was murder.” You finish the first pint. The Gnome deflates, humour hissing away.

“Oh, lad…”

“I had a visit from one of Colonel Datka’s people this afternoon. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”

“Shite.” The brass-necked gears are turning behind his eyes. “What makes you say that?”

“Tariq gave me a little job yesterday.” You take a first mouthful of the second pint. Your lips feel comfortably numb. “Testing a chunk of a web app, off-line.”

“That’s no kind of connection, lad.” He pauses. “Coincidences happen.”

You feel like punching him for a moment: “Coincidences like someone murdered him? Right after he gave me a wee job? While I have the attention of our friends from Bishkek?”

You have the distinct sensation that Adam is giving you the hairy eye-ball. Wondering if you’re reliable. “What do you think the web app’s part of?”

“Honey trap, front end for a botnet, something like that.” You take another sip. “Grow your penis, cheap off-license gene therapies for that annoying melanoma, holidays in the sun with added drivethru liver transplants, the usual.” In other words, it’s the same the usual that put you inside Saughton for a year.

“And now Tariq’s dead? What happened?”

“I don’t know. Got a call from Bibi, who heard it from Aunt Sammy, who found him. When I went round, I walked into a cop convention. They figured out soon enough it wasna me what did it.” You ken where this is going. “Don’t worry, I didn’t breathe your name. I had to cough to working on the side for Tariq, but I figure what he gave me isn’t majorly incriminating, and anyway, it’s a murder investigation. They won’t be blabbing to Mr. Webber.”

The Gnome turns an even whiter shade of fish-belly pink than is his wont. “I’ll thank you for doing that much.” He raises his glass and drinks deeply. “Do you know how Tariq died?”

“No.” The ignorance burns your throat. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, except that—except—” You can’t bring yourself to finish it.

He leans forward. “Tell me about Colonel Datka’s man.”

Adam is treating the shrapnel of your life like some kind of puzzle game, you realize, just like Inspector Butthurt. The momentary flash and sizzle of resentment nearly throws what’s left of your beer in his face. But what stills your hand is knowing that he’s trying to help, in his slightly askew borderline aspie way. Help: You need it. So you tell him.

“He scared the shit out of me—even though he was polite. Eyes like a detective, you know? Only with a drum of unset concrete instead of handcuffs if you fucked him off.”

“I do believe fear reveals your hitherto-unplumbed poetic depths.” The Gnome is scrutinizing you like he’s got you under a microscope. “What did he want?”

“A padded envelope from the office safe. And a bag of bread mix.” You shiver. “He opened the envelope—there was a baggie in it, with a passport. Other papers. And he gave me a suitcase to take home. It’s got a combination lock. Said he may need to stay with me for a couple of days from tomorrow.” You shudder again. Those eyes.

“Well, you’re in it now,” the Gnome observes calmly.

“In what?”

“That remains to be seen.” He leans forward. “But I’ve got a fair idea it means the end game is in train. Listen, can you lay your hands on five grand? Put it on credit if you have to, but you won’t be able to pay it back for a month.”

“What has that got—”

“It’s time to cash out.”

“Eh?” You think fast. There’s the two grand you staked Uncle Hassan a couple of years ago, back before everything caught up with you—he’s probably good for at least one. Maybe more. You’ve still got your credit card, but in these deflationary times, you can only draw five hundred in cash against it. You could pawn some of Bibi’s jewellery to cover the rest, but she’s bound to notice, and she’ll want to know what you’re doing with the money. And hurrying right behind the hamster wheel spin of your financial calculations is your native suspicion of anyone asking you to cough up cash on the barrel for something too good to be true. “Why now, Adam? What’s the sudden hurry?”

“The sudden hurry, dear boy, is that your employers didn’t go out looking to hire honorary consuls at not-inconsiderable cost on a whim; they obviously had a purpose in mind, and with a purpose goes a plan, and with a plan goes a time-table. I’ve been waiting for a sign that they were getting ready to go to the end game, and the arrival of your colonel’s man means things are about to get too hot for you to stay in the bathtub—you’ll be wanting out while the water’s still clean enough that the Polis aren’t taking an interest. So it’s time to cash out.”

“And how precisely am I going to do that?”

Adam bares his teeth at you. “You’re going to do as I tell you and short a particular national bank’s bonds. Trust me, you’ll make a killing…”

There is no solace to be had in getting stinking drunk with the Gnome. So you take your less usual route home, up the hill and through the graveyard in search of a casual shag.

There is a younger man up there, short-haired and heavily accented: a small-town incomer, escaping from the usual, but with his feet under him enough to know the places to haunt. You make brief small-talk before he leads you round the back of an overgrown crypt, then it’s hard up against the lichen-encrusted stone, tongues grappling hungrily and his hand down your trousers, squeezing your cock. He tastes of stale roll-ups and sweat, and when you go down on him, he washes away the memory of the day’s horror with furtive joy.

After he sucks you off in turn, you stumble away in disarray, drained and feeling curiously vacant. You’re late, and you feel like a complete fraud. Some family man you are, with the touch of another’s lips on your bell-end. But at least Bibi isn’t there to stare at you in silent irritation or chide you for drinking again.

When you get home, it’s quiet and empty. Your wife is off auntsitting and has taken the kids to run errands or something. There’s an uneaten portion of rice sitting in her fancy rice-cooker, and she’s left some daal in the karai, to go cold for you in silent reproach. You fumble through the kitchen drawers until you find what you’re looking for—a pair of plastic chopsticks (Bibi likes a Cantonese take-away once in a while)—then climb the stairs with heavy tread, pull down the attic hatch, and ascend, wondering what you’re going to find.

Adam’s slid a dagger of curiosity between the slats of your misery and paranoia. Investment opportunities aside, it’s time to find out what the little fuck’s playing with.

Your den is suffocatingly over-warm from the summer evening sun, and you feel ill at ease, as if your personal space is under siege. The stranger’s suitcase squats in the corner like an enemy garrison, a forbidding reminder of ill-advised treaties. Tariq’s old pad sprawls out from behind the fridge. You stretch the metaphor until you see the fallen tombstone of a forgotten soldier and shiver despite the heat. The brewing bucket lies where you left it, under the beam of early-evening sunlight sluicing through the Velux: There’s a yeasty smell in the air like rising bread dough, and the wee airlock thingy sticking up from the lid burps an alien curse as you stare at it.

It’s a fab of sorts, the Gnome told you. A new kind of fab, or a really old one, depending on your perspective. Transmutation, liquid bread, water of life, al-kuhl. Not like the desktop fabs Tariq and his mates are using to run off air-guns and sex toys these days.

This is about using yeast cells as a platform for synthetic biology. As the Gnome explained it to you at great length—there will be an exam later, Anwar—in normal cells there’s DNA, which is transcribed into RNA, which in turn is used as a punched-card template by protein-manufacturing machines called ribosomes. Each three words of DNA data—codons—correspond to a single amino acid out of a palette of twenty-one; the ribosomes read the codons, grab amino acids bound to carrier molecules out of the soupy intracellular medium, and glue them together to form new proteins or enzymes.

But in these cells there’s a whole new biology. It uses four codons to represent a much wider range of amino acids, many of which are entirely artificial. Some of them code for the protein components of the molecular assembly line that replaces the boring Nature 1.0 ribosomes in the mechanosystem; others code for enzymes that synthesize the exotic new amino acids the synthetic biochemistry runs on. There’s bootstrap code written for old-style ribosomes to get the new system up and running: That’s what the health-food supplement switched on. Once it’s running, the yeast cells are redundant, just a convenient platform for servicing the nanosystem.

Not that this is about shiny Star Trek nanites. Oh no, we’re not that advanced. Nanotechnology is the shiny new magic dessert topping /floor wax/pixie dust of tomorrow, and always will be. This stuff is just synthetic biochemistry, with some funky new tools for handling buckytubes and exotic amino acids. Nothing strange about it at all, except that it’s bubbling away in the bucket in the corner of your den and it smells like money, which is always enough to secure your exclusive attention.

What’s in the bucket, Anwar?

Adam gave you some helpful pointers. If it’s full of yellow crystalline sediment, back away slowly—but no, that’s not so likely. You glance over your shoulder at the intruder’s suitcase, but it just sits there, eyeless and unspeaking. Too many ideas are jostling in your head, seeking attention. Bread Mix. Colonel Datka’s man. Tariq’s chat room. The stuff you didn’t tell Inspector Butthurt about: Tariq’s unhealthy interest in making sure his chat-room environment wasn’t as well guarded against malware as it looked, his secret VPN access to the webcrime bulletin boards, plausible deniability. And then there are the dark suspicions you don’t dare voice even to yourself as yet: How accidental is all this? Where did Adam hear about the Issyk-Kulistan gig?

Thoughts fermenting in your head, you lever up the rim of the bucket lid and look inside.

The bucket smells of old socks and the broken promises of a hostile future, musty and somehow warm. You peer in and see only dirty greybrown water, a scum adhering to its surface, bubbles forming at the edges: It’s slightly iridescent, as if you’d spilled a drop of diesel oil on top. Is that all? you think, disappointed, and dip the chopsticks in it.

The kitchen utensils don’t spontaneously catch fire, or dissolve, or morph into brightly coloured machine parts. You stir the scum on the surface around a bit, and it crinkles and crumples against them; then you pull them out again. A rope of congealed filmy scum sticks to the chopsticks, dribbling water back into the bucket.

“Yuck.” You raise the chopsticks, and the floating sheet dangles from them, mucilaginous, like an elephant-sized snotter. You cast them aside, and they curl together, landing on the carpet in a stringy mass under the window. You clamp the lid down on the bucket of spoiled whatever-it-is and shake your head. Probably you’ll have to take it downstairs, pour it down the toilet—hope the Environmental Health wardens don’t have surveillance robots lurking in the sewers. It’d be just your luck to be busted for possession of an illegal chemical factory. Assuming the thing hasn’t died or been infected by sixty kinds of bacteria.

You climb downstairs wearily and head for the bedroom. It’s been a long day, what with the visit from Colonel Datka’s man and the unspeakable event at Taleb’s. At least Bibi’s taking care of the kids, you think.

Interlude 2 TOYMAKER: Happy Families

When you were eight, your dad taught you the correct way to peel a live frog.

You seem to recall him teaching you lots of things, but mostly he succeeded in annoying the hell out of you. It wasn’t his fault: He was in therapy for most of your childhood, and it damaged him. Then you were in therapy, and it gets vague real fast.

One of the things he taught you early is that ants can recognize an intruder from another colony; they smell the strangeness and respond by chewing its legs off, immobilizing it until the soldiers come with jaws the size of legs and bite through its neck.

Humans are not dissimilar.

Dad was diagnosed, but never let it get in his way. He learned to cover up by copying, passing for another worker ant. But he wasn’t very good at it.

“Look,” said Dad, holding down the slimy, frantically gulping bull-frog, “it’s simple. Just one cut here and—” He demonstrated. A flip of the fingers and inside out it goes. You laughed excitedly as the skinless amphibian flailed away at the bleeding air. “Looks real funny, doesn’t he? Just like a little man. Now you try.” And he handed you a frog and a knife.

In retrospect, you know exactly what Dad was doing: He was testing you to see if you were like him. Mom or Alice would puke their guts up if he did something like this in front of them, but Dad was curious. Did you share his unusual quirk, or were you doomed to go through life as just another soft-headed mark? So you got to peel frogs one happy summer afternoon with Dad, and it was true: They looked just like little skinned-alive men.

Father-son bonding experiences among the neurotypically diverse: putting the “fun” into “dysfunctional.” You didn’t realize it at the time, but Dad was teaching you stuff you weren’t going to learn anywhere else: stuff like what you were, how to look “normal,” how to pass among the ants, how not to get found out. All Mom gave you was your looks and good manners. (She had a great ass, though: Dad had good taste.)

You cling to the memory of that afternoon: Unlike most of your history, it remains vivid and fresh, not fading into the cloud-banks of the imagination. You didn’t have many afternoons like that: Dad was always busy at work, buying and selling shit. He did it from an office suite just off Wall Street, and you and he and Mom and Sis lived in a fancy uptown condo overlooking Ninth Avenue when you were in Manhattan. Or maybe he had a room above a shop on Threadneedle Street and the maisonette was in Docklands? It’s hard to be sure. You do remember there being a nice beachfront when you were vacationing on the West Coast, and a house on Long Island for weekends, and lots of plane trips. Mom did the stay-at-home thing and looked after you and Alice; and there was an old woman who kept the condo clean when you weren’t there, and an ever-changing supply of kindergarten friends to torment experimentally. And Bozo the Cat (until he went away).

But that was before the car crash turned everything to shit.

You were nine. One day a year earlier, Dad came home early and pulled your mom into the kitchen and shut the door. There were words, loud words. Later, your mom came out to talk to you. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her make-up was smeary. “Your daddy and I have agreed,” she said, with a funny little twitch. “We’re moving to California, to Palo Alto. He needs to be nearer where the money comes from.”

This was cool with you, as long as there was beachfront and sun and other kids to score off. Mom didn’t seem too happy when you said so. She got a bit too excited and shouted at you and cried because she liked the big city, Singapore or Hong Kong or wherever it was. Well, silly her.

What you only figured out much later was that it was February, Y2K+1. Dad’s dotcom portfolio had vaped, and he had to steal some more money. And this being Y2K+1, there wasn’t a lot of money in circulation to steal—at least, not from Dad’s friendly circle of day traders and stock-jobbers. So he’d been forced to diversify and got fucked over when someone’s Customs agency intercepted one of the consignments. They didn’t know it was him, but someone in town knew his face, and he wanted some distance. And there may have been something to do with the phone calls at odd times of day and night, and the threatening letters, but that didn’t really signify at the time.

(Or maybe it was the old enemy, even then, plotting their takeover. Spying and hounding your father because they knew they had to yank him out of the picture if they were going to get to you.)

Dad wasn’t stupid: He had a plan. He figured there’d be a lot of infrastructure left over from the dotcom crash, and all he needed to do was stake out some vacant office suite and sooner or later a team of double-domed nerds would show up to refill it (and, by and by, his wallet).

Well, Mom and Alice did the weak-sister thing and cried all the way to the beachfront house, but you were happy enough. School in the big town was boring, and anyway, a bunch of the other kids refused to play with you. The losers said you cheated. So you got to live in the sun-drenched sprawl off El Camino Reale and meet a whole new supply of interesting playmates, and Dad had a bit more time to play ball or take you hiking and do other dad things.

(But then there was the car crash.)

You were away at summer camp at the time. The camp counsellors came and took you aside and watched anxiously as you bawled your eyes out—not that stupid grief shit, but frustration: Who was going to come pick you up from camp now? Camp was getting tiresome. They were big on cooperative activities, nothing where you could score points off the other kids without being too obvious. The threat of being stuck there forever was very real in your going-on-nine mind.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, the next day, a battered SUV pulled up outside the camp office. Half an hour later, the youngest counsellor came for you. “Your uncle Albert’s offered to take you in while your father’s in the hospital,” she explained.

Albert? You’d never met him, although Dad had mentioned his elder brother’s name once. And besides, you were bored with the camp. “Great!” you piped up.

If only you’d known…

You walk home to your snug wee hotel room, whistling happily to yourself. You lock the door, sniff, step out of your clothes and shower vigorously: yawn and crawl naked between the crisp cotton sheets to sleep the sleep of the righteously zoned out.

You wake early and amuse yourself for a while surfing on the hotel’s in-room cable service. News streams bombard you with trivia; unemployment’s up again, projects to retrain service-industry workers aren’t delivering: Sow’s ear into silk-purse futures are tanking. Another large vertical farm is under construction in Livingstone: The planning enquiry into the Torness “E” reactor unexpectedly drags on into a second month. The Scottish Parliament is discussing a bill banning factory farming of pigs on hygienic grounds and cattle on emissions: Farmers are protesting that they can repopulate bovine gut flora with kangaroo-derived acetogen cultures, dealing with the methane menace at source, and that the bill is pandering to vegetarian green voters in the run-up to the election next year…

You make a note. Research current steak consumption and supply-chain issues for black-market meat imports in event of ban. (Prohibition is always good for business, and vat-grown tissue won’t satisfy the more ruthless palate: Stress hormones are excellent tenderizers.) Then you channel-hop while you wait for room service to deliver your continental, surfing past the talking-head Jeezebot prayer breakfast and the traffic accident channel, pausing briefly at the Hitler network before you get to the baroque humiliations of the “So You Think You Want a Job” reality shows.

Job scams: Those are a perennial favourite, just like work-fromhome and you-can-be-rich-too. But they’re not only unoriginal, they’re so old they can vote. Some of the scams are so well-known that the cops have bots looking for them—the half-life to detection is measured in double-digit hours.

Fuck. It was looking so easy when you came here. Commission the illegal breweries to manufacture the feedstock, the back-street fabbers to make the goods, the sweat-shop kids in the Middle Eastern call centres to operate them, the clerks to count the cash, and the footsoldiers to keep the sales flowing—maintain tight communications discipline so that none of them can run the business without you, then find a franchisee and cash out. That’s the basic iMob value proposition, isn’t it? Gangster 2.0 is as much about searching for an IPO and an exit strategy as any other tech start-up business.

But this is semi-independent Scotland (a country with its own parliament, flag, tax law, and passports, but a military and foreign policy wing outsourced to Westminster). On the basis of your experience so far, it’s also the land of the deep-fried battered Mars bar, remotely piloted airborne dogshit patrols, and accountants shrink-wrapped to mattresses. The latter is particularly disturbing insofar as it blows a honking great hole in your original business plan. But needs must. And Scotland has other assets, like Mr. Placeholder Hussein, who you intend to drop into the hot seat and stick in front of a fake organization to attract the attention of the adversaries.

You whip out your disposable pad, haul down your desktop from the botnet-hosted cloud once again, fire up the amusing little VoIP gateway app disguised as a board-game, work your jaw to wake your skullphone, and subvocalize. “Hello, Able November here.”

“Just a second.” (Pause.) “Oh, hello again. Sorry about the delay, sir. Are your medicines helping today?”

What is this, fucking Kaiser? “Yes, I’m much better now, thanks. And I’m using the new identity.” Beast of Birkenshaw my ass: another psychopathic serial killer? Mother-fuckers! What the fuck do they think they’re doing, giving me these names? “I’m calling because I need another minion; the first two broke. Is the denial-of-service situation any better today?”

“I can’t discuss the situation at head office.” She sounds a bit snippy. Then you realize; it’s about two o’clock in the morning back in California. (Assuming that’s where the Operation runs its call centre from.) And she’s the same operator you spoke to yesterday daytime (assuming they’re not using real-time speech filtering). “What do you want, Able November?”

“Like I said, I need a new gofer.” Briefly you outline what you’ve got in mind. “And a new handle—some clever fucker thinks it’s funny to keep giving me serial-killer names. I want that to stop.”

“Please hold. This could take some time.”

You’re on hold for nearly fifteen minutes, as it happens: You amuse yourself with the pad, playing a couple of levels of Jack Ketch while you wait for the callback. Finally, your left ear vibrates. “Hi, Able November. What have you got for me?”

The operator is different this time, male with a Midwestern drawl. “Lemme see if I’ve got this right? Your last two recruits are dead? And you’re still in the field? Why?”

It’s time to poke the bear and see if it snarls, so you extemporize. “The cops got a DNA sample when I looked in on the first investigation. So the John Christie identity is pinned. And, incidentally, that name belongs to a dead serial killer, and so does Peter Manuel—someone’s sticking ringers in your identity portfolio, and it’s not fucking funny. I have to wait while Legal serve an injunction to get my sample destroyed when the investigation winds down—you know and I know that I didn’t kill Blair. The original plan won’t fly, but I figure I can salvage something from the wreckage. It was your Issyk-Kulistan scam that gave me the idea.”

One of the annoying things about VoIP codecs is that they filter out nonvoice traffic. You can’t hear the pursed lips of a huff of annoyance; the tells of a tense boiler-room background are silenced by digital audio filtering. So you have to wait three or four seconds, half of which is spent by the signal path as your words go wandering up to geosynchronous orbit and wobble back down to a ground station in the Sierra Nevada, out along a fat pipe, into vibrations in the air hitting the operator’s ear-drum, and the return path therefrom. And then:

“The BZZT fuck?” (Cheap piece-of-shit throat mikes max out easily and start to clip when a pissed-off operator shouts into them.) “Wendy got me out of bed so—this—” (Ooh, lots of big tells! You hang on his loss of control, fascinated by the unintentional data leak dripping from the glass ceiling high above.) “—The fuck told you about IRIK?”

“Control sent me to the consulate here for new papers yesterday. They were probably panicking, or didn’t get the memo about how secret it is. Don’t worry, it’s all under wraps. Nobody else knows. It’s probably just a side-effect of the chaos caused by the, the attacks.” So the Issyk-Kulistan connection is another stove-pipe they’re running? Juicy! You allow a little wavery plaint to creep into your voice. “Is there anything I can do to help out… ?”

“You goddamn bet there is!” There’s a heart-felt emphasis on the words. “Stupid dumb fucks are misusing the diplomatic channel for fucking stupid dumb-ass smuggling, would you believe it? Penny-ante shit. But that’s neither here nor there. Son, you’re in the field. You’ve seen what those mother-fuckers are doing to our proxies.”

“The”—rape machine lizard shapeshifters—“adversaries, yes.”

“Yeah, them. It’s a network attack, we know that much. We even know what tools they’re using. Anyway, I want you to go meet a man down at the university there in Edin-burg. A double-domed doctor of artificial intelligence. He knows about this stuff.”

Huh? “What has artificial intelligence got to do with the adversaries?”

“Target acquisition, son. Do try and follow the plot: The victims are all involved in customer-relationship management. That, and the attack vector relies on combinatorial enhancement of precursor situations to domestic accidents. There’s some network analysis voodoo as well, but I never got my head properly around that neo-Bayesian queuing-theory shit.”

“But this academic”—you wince—“how’s he going to help m—us take down the adversaries?”

“He’s not. What he did was, he worked on the project that developed the tools our adversaries are using. Not deliberately—we don’t think he’s responsible; we’re kind of in bed with him on another deal. What you’re going to do is impress upon him the importance of sticking with his business partners. And just in case he doesn’t get the message, you’re going to persuade him to give you his source code, and you’re going to upload it for us to do a walk-through. Fingerprinting. Just in case.”

“Their source code? What, you’re saying we’re being attacked by some kind of bot?”

“Yep. Although the folks who designed it—along with Mac-Donald—may not even know what it’s doing: Best if you don’t know too much, either. We’ll get you an appointment with Dr. MacDonald: When you go in, just tell him we want ATHENA.”

“What about these dumb-shit identity packages?” you demand.

“We buy them from a reliable source, son.” There’s a pause. “I’ll look into it. We’ll get you a new face just as soon as we figure out what’s going on. Don’t you worry about that. In fact”—there’s a longer pause—“you’re a serial killer right now? I like that, son. Let’s see if we can find you a job to go with it…”

You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.

Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.

Albert and Eileen and the three girls lived in a paint-peeling house beside a dry creek in the ass-end of nowhere, about eight miles outside Lovelock, Nevada. Or maybe it was a croft in the highlands, ten miles from the nearest wee free kirk. When you arrived, there were five books in the house: a Bible, a copy of To Train Up a Child from the No Greater Joy ministry, and three textbooks borrowed, on a rotating basis, from the county library.

The Bible in question was not the King James edition; nor did it include testaments ancient or modern, commandments (other than “keep your gun clean and loaded and your ammunition dry”), or advice about not wearing mixed-fibre fabric and eating shell-fish. It was, nevertheless, adhered to as rigorously as any religious text, within the homeschooled homesteaded ranch of Albert and Eileen: And so you learned to live by the rules of The End of America: How the Federal Government, the IRS and the Insurance Industry plan to use the UN to Destroy America, and how you can resist.

You remember your first night at the ranch vividly—lying on the lumpy mattress on your stomach and trying not to cry with pain, terrified that if you made a noise, he’d come back—lying in the darkness and the stifling heat, listening to the crickets through the rotten, dry slats of the shuttered window, your entire back a mass of welts and bruises from your first real beating. You remember the taste of tears and blood, the sound of Uncle Al’s rasping, tobacco-roughened breath as he raised the hose again—“Discipline, boy! Lack of discipline gets soldiers killed!”—and the stunning thud it made as it drove the breath from your body.

Albert and Eileen lived in a bunker at the wrong end of a very strange reality tunnel, in a world dominated by the spectre of the CIAFUNDED Jew-banker spooks who faked crashing the airliners into the Pentagon and the WTC to cover up how they’d bankrupted the nation by stealing all the gold from the Federal Reserve and used it to fund their evil scheme for vaccinating the children of dissidents with an autism-causing virus. (Lyndon LaRouche, in their recondite eschatology, was a Communist Sleeper Agent from North Korea.) Weirdly, they didn’t seem to know about the lizards or the British royal family; an inexplicable omission in hindsight.

Less reclusive than some, Al and Eileen sent the kids to school, dealt with the devil under duress—Al did gun shows, trading and fixing partially deactivated weapons: He even filed tax returns now and then—meanwhile they hunkered down, waiting for the storm. There was no Internet and no television in the bunker. There was always plenty of work to fill idle hands, and a beating as final punctuation for insolent questions.

You learned what was expected of you very quickly after the first day. No back-chat, a “yessir” or “yes, ma’am” to Uncle Al or Aunt Eileen’s orders, and keep your thoughts to yourself. The beatings fell off, became a random threat, a necessary dominance ritual. Al and Eileen treated their girls no less harshly, and Sara for one was always in trouble, unable to keep her yap shut: You remember the time Al broke her arm, and went on whacking her while she hollered with pain until Eileen realized what was wrong and scolded him into splinting it. Elizabeth, older and sneakier, was the snitch: You learned that fast.

And then there was Kitty, the youngest, aged six. You figured out how to use little Kitty to get what you wanted: Al and Eileen seemed to approve of their girls helping you out, helping you fit in, never quite realizing that their training cut both ways—they’d taught the girls to obey, out of fear, anyone stronger than they were. Including you.

You learned other things. Learned how to darn socks, shoot and strip an AR-15, identify a helicopter, plant a trip-wire. After a year, they enrolled you in school, ferried you to the bus-stop daily with the girls. It was impressed upon you that book larnin’ was a privilege which could be withdrawn for any perceived deficiency: And what happened in the compound stayed in the compound, on pain of… pain.

Uncle Albert probably thought he was doing a good job, beating the devilish inheritance of his jail-bird brother out of you. He had no idea how close to death’s jagged edge he stood, how you’d memorized every step between your room and the kitchen, which floorboards squeaked when you stood on them: committed to memory exactly where the hurricane lantern and the kerosene were stored, the matches, the doorway, and the peg to lock their bedroom window shutters from the outside.

The rest is largely a blur: Even this much is reconstructed laboriously and painstakingly from the wreckage piled inside your skull.

What stopped you from doing the deed, even then, was a rudimentary cost/benefit analysis. You couldn’t drive, and even if you could, you’d have had nowhere obvious to go—not with Mom dead and Dad in the big house for the foreseeable future for cutting the brake pipes. (The significant absence of Grandma and Grandpa on your paternal side did not escape you: Perforce, the family that preys together stays together.) And so you decided to bide your time until a suitable exit strategy presented itself.

As it turned out, you didn’t have to wait all that long. Three years after you arrived, Uncle Al finally succumbed to The Lure of the Internet and traded an elderly shotgun and a gallon of white lightning for a hot (in more senses than one) laptop with a modem. He’d been hearing about these BBS things for years from his pals on the militia circuit, and figured he ought to take a look-see. You and the girls didn’t get anywhere near Al’s PC—for Internet access you were restricted to the school’s rickety roomful of 486s, forced to expend tedious amounts of energy circumventing the district’s brain-dead net nanny—but from afar you watched as Al made quite a stink, talking somewhat more freely than he should have. Scratch that: With online friends like Jim Bell and his assassination politics shtick, Al clearly didn’t realize that he was breaking cover in a big way. But he lost interest rapidly and gave up dialling into AOL after a few months. And he probably thought that was that.

You were in school the day the Men in Black finally descended on the fuhrerbunker with a search warrant and the county sheriff’s deputy in tow. (Surprise: The county wasn’t on Al’s side against the perfidious feds—perhaps if he’d paid his property taxes a little more promptly, things could have turned out differently.)

They called you into the principal’s office while it was happening, and you sat there obediently, just like a serious and sober kid—the kind who would never dream of figuring out his guardian’s password, logging in, and emailing ranting threats of physical mayhem to the IRS agents who were threatening Al with an audit because he’d declared an income of under five hundred bucks for the third year running.

The raid was inevitably followed by a brisk exchange of opinions— 9mm for .357—followed by the arrival of a disappointingly non-black helicopter to evacuate Uncle Albert to the nearest trauma unit, where he was declared dead three hours later. But even in dying, Uncle Al tried to fuck you up. The coroner’s verdict wasn’t even suicide by cop: The last, most unforgivable insult Uncle Al heaped on you was to shoot off the top of his own brain-pan, thus neatly side-stepping the embarrassment of actually leaving Eileen, you, and the girls anything by way of his cheap life-insurance policy. (Even if Eileen hadn’t been on her way to jail on her own behalf for greeting the sheriff’s man with a .22 rifle.)

Anyway, you ended up in the children’s home for a while, and that’s when they discovered the bruises. You put on a good show, wailed the walls down describing precisely how you’d been beaten, and they listened to you. Then they decided to put you on antipsychotic medication and anti-depressants, because obviously what you were describing made no sense, and you were disturbed and clearly at risk of self-harm. Between the cuts to the children’s home budget and the second-rate quacks at the hospital, there was no budget for proper neurological screening or consultation. So there was no oversight when Dr. Hobbes signed you up for a clinical trial of a new high-specificity D2 blocker being pushed by his favourite supplier of gold-plated fountain pens. And you learned to keep taking the pills, because after a month on AL93560, if you stopped taking them the rape machines hiding in the bushes outside your window would whisper unspeakable propositions to you by dead of night.

But then your luck changed, in an unbelievable and positive direction.

Who knew people had two sets of grandparents? Not you, that was for sure!

Dad’s parents were safely dead, and Mom had never mentioned whose crotchfruit she was in your presence—leaving you with a blind spot so fundamental that you’d never even noticed it until they turned up at the supervisor’s office one morning and asked for you.

“He poisoned your ma against us,” Grandma Jane said sadly, when you asked her about it—much later, of course. “I knew from the first that he wasn’t right in the head, and I tried to tell her, but she wouldn’t listen. And he frightened her! He wouldn’t even let her email. God knows what he did to make her put up with him—brainwashing, probably. But we found you in the end. Found you in time to rescue you. Praise the Lord.”

Jane and Frank were retirees, but only just (still in their sixties) when they found you, much as they’d found Jesus in the traumatic aftermath of losing their daughter to Satan’s godson two decades ago. They weren’t rich enough to travel widely, but they’d planned their retirement with care, and they had a decent home and two big cars to park outside it. Too bad that in the gaps between her church activities and his golfing afternoons, they were looking for something to patch the hole in their hearts—a hole just exactly the right size for a cuckoo.

Having just had your second family disintegrate under you, you weren’t about to let this particular gift horse get away. Jane and Frank had driven cross-country to rescue you from the paint-peeling orphanage in Lovelock, planning to whisk you away to suburban Phoenix. It was the least you could do to be their duly grateful grandson. No need to mention Elizabeth, Sara, and Kitty, all in similar straits: You couldn’t possibly impose on Jane and Frank’s generosity on their behalf.

And so you arrived in Phoenix in the company of grandparents 2.0. And you were duly appreciative of this third chance at a stable family life that fate had handed you, and you resolved not to break it by accident.

It is now late morning, the day after. You’re still waiting for the fucktards at head office to get you an appointment with the mad professor, and there’s no point bugging the Hussein mark while he’s at work. So it looks like you have a few hours off. Might as well go tour the city centre, hit a cafe, have a latte, sketch out your plan for world domination. Stalking-horse, of course, but if it suckers the enemy in, who cares?

The weather’s good as you walk along Princes Street; shame about all the shuttered shop-fronts and the builders everywhere, stripping away the mother-of-pearl accretions of architectural history to reveal the Georgian skeleton of the road. With most of the surviving shop chains moving to out-of-city retail parks—those that haven’t succumbed to online stores and custom fabrications—the once-vibrant commercial high street is being flensed of commerce and turned back into an aspic-preserved tourist draw, a false-colour reconstruction of its late-eighteenth-century youth.

That’s all it’s good for, of course: If it was up to you, you’d bulldoze the lot of it, stick in a link road between the M8 and the A1(M), and a shopping mall featuring a thirty-metre-high pink marble statue of yours truly buggering a lizard. But these effete pseudo-Brits have never been too clear on the importance of thinking big, or the grand gesture for that matter. There’s that bloody stone-spike memorial to a writer, of all things—and the statues of philosophers! What the fuck is all that about?

You people-watch as you walk, ever alert for the alien menace. A police drone buzzes dismally above the high-speed rail terminal below the castle; closer to home, an arsehole in a kilt makes cat-strangling noises with the aid of a sack of pipes, squawking every time he changes note. These are street performers, constructing the dialectic of urban civilization—the watcher and the self-consciously watched. Here’s a human robot in silver spray paint and make-up, twitching to archaic German synthrock. There’s a white-faced girl in a pouffed-up wedding dress standing on a plinth, pretending to be a statue because if you can’t dance and can’t sing, what fucking use are you? If they had any kind of audience, you’d be tempted to practice the lightfinger tricks you taught yourself at high school, but alas, the crowd’s not thick enough—and anyway, you’ve got bigger targets in mind than a careless tourist’s wallet.

You stick to the shuttered shops on the built-up side of the street, keeping to the far side of the tram tracks from the gardens—too many bushes, hiding-places for the enemy abduction machines. The battlements of the castle loom blindly above the seething insectile urban hive, the sash-windows and solar-powered street-lamps, the slippery slate roofs and the sandstone bricks of the eighteenth-century town houses creeping back into view as the ants scurry and chop away at the retail-age encrustation.

You’ve come a long way from Phoenix, from the dying suburbs and the empty houses, gouged-out windows staring like eye-sockets across the Astroturf lawns the despairing Realtors laid before them: well-dressed corpses awaiting resurrection, secure in their faith in cheap gas and a Horatio Alger-esque resurgence in global competitiveness.

You didn’t realize at first that Jane and Frank were rescuing you for a castaway adolescence in a city where the price of housing had crashed 70 per cent in ten years. Phoenix wasn’t dead like Detroit; the climate made it a natural for snowbirds, put a floor under the ailing economy. Geography made it a natural for immigrants from the south. But white-middle-class flight driven by the soaring price of gas and power left the schools half-shuttered and decaying, the malls semiempty and desolate. Your pallid skin marked you out as alien, so after a few unfortunate early incidents, Jane and Frank plugged you into the homeschooling network. It was safer than entrusting your lily-white ass to the razor wire and watch-towers, metal detectors and Taserarmed guards on all the schoolrooms; the school board were determined to train the children of the future majority appropriately for a lifetime of providing gainful employment for jail guards. So you spent half your life in hikikomori retreat with your computer and distance-learning coursework, and the other half running wild. Jane and Frank didn’t much mind. As long as you kept your room clean and called them sir and ma’am, they thought the world of you.

At night you flensed lizards and pinned the twitching bodies out on posts to warn the rape machines off. Some afternoons, you’d take off on your bike, pedalling out past the empty suburbs into the graves of aborted communities, where the dirt was gridded out for houses that never came. Beneath the summer sun, you’d shoot imaginary schoolmates with your BB gun, and later with Frank’s old .22 rifle. You had to be careful with the latter: Once or twice the noise attracted cops, like a swarm of flashing blue and red hornets converging on a dropped sandwich. But they never caught you: You were wary, and Uncle Al’s training stood you in good stead.

You made up for the lack of schoolyard socialization in other, darker ways. There were squatters in some of the half-abandoned suburbs, embryonic favelas and hippy communes growing like mushrooms on the corpse of the middle-class dream. The ones that survived more than a few weeks or a single visit from the Border Patrol were on the net and wired to the future: There were business opportunities here, an informal economy to raise money for bribes. Invisibility was expensive. And that in turn meant business opportunities for kids like you. Your peers were mostly dumb, ignorant fucks who didn’t understand the risks and couldn’t imagine what could go wrong. You? Not so dumb, alarmingly precocious in your ability to take on responsible tasks—and utterly conscienceless. It was a combination that appealed to Riccardo, with his regular consignments of cocaine: And later on it appealed to Ortiz, with his far-more-valuable incubators full of unregulated A-life cultures, and Jerome, with the botnet and the fast-switching domains and the kidsnuff websites starring dumb, ignorant drifters whose luck had run out.

Over the course of another three years you came to the attention of the Operation, who offered you a scholarship and a signing bonus and, best of all, co-founder equity if you’d let them guide your talents and find you a suitable start-up to run.

Which brings you back to Edinburgh, and a sunlit morning in the New Town, and the phone in your head buzzing for attention.

“Yo.” You lick your lips as your eyes drift past a couple of cottontops to strip-search a MILF: “Able November.” It’s about 4:00 A.M. in California. This ought to be good.

“Afternoon, son. This is Control. Listen, I got the memo. I like the way you think, and if things were different, I’d say go for it. But right now our top priority is this MacDonald dude. We thought we had an arrangement, but we have some fresh intel this morning about what else he’s doing with his ATHENA project, and it is disturbing. We think he is shorting us. So I’m going to IM you his address, and I want you to go there right now. I’ve got a list of questions we want answers to and, and then you need to, uh, downsize him.”

You nearly trip over a loose paving slab. “I’m already on a police investigation’s radar! Are you trying to burn me?”

“Uh, no—” Control, Wendy’s boss, splutters for a moment. “We’re gonna hang the frame on the bad guys who are attacking us. After downsizing, I want you to go to your fall-back position—you got one, aintcha?—go to that mattress. They’re spreading so much shit that nobody’s going to notice another body when this goes down. We’ll get you out of Scotland in the back of a truck or a boat if we have to. Your DNA sample—there are ways of getting it cross-linked to another record, muddy the waters. Listen, I appreciate this sucks. It’s your operation, the business reboot, and it’s fucked before it got started, but, listen to this, if you do what we need here with MacDonald, we’ll make it worth your while. We gotta hold off ATHENA while the Issyk-Kulistan op winds down and you, you’re inside I.K. now, like it or not. We want you to tie up the loose ends in Edin-burg. Which means talking to Dr. MacDonald, then paying off that consul guy.”

“The honourary consul?” You inadvertently make eye contact with a small child: It cringes away, grabbing onto its oblivious mother’s hand for dear life. You hadn’t mentioned the mark in your report: It’s always best to keep your bolt-holes private. “What does he have to do with it?”

“Mid-tier distribution hub, son. He’s seen too much—the footsoldiers and the general both. He may not know what he’s seen, but if he spills his guts, someone else might put it all together. Plus, MacDonald recruited him.”

“MacDonald—” You stop yourself. Bits of the jigsaw are slotting together, and you don’t like the pattern they’re making. The earlier plan, to stick Hussein’s head above the parapet to attract enemy fire—sounds like he is the enemy. Or part of it. Working for the enemy. Who have infiltrated the Operation more deeply than you had imagined. “Okay, you want me to give MacDonald an exit interview, then downsize the consul.” Anwar, isn’t it?

“Exactly, son.” Control sounds warmly approving. “You can do that? Afterwards, the world is your oyster. Just saying.”

“I can do that,” you assure him. It’ll be a pleasure. It’s been a long time since you last peeled a frog.

FELIX: E-commerce

Bhaskar may have his high-rise presidential pleasure dome to squat and gibber in, but it is beholden to you—both in your capacity as chief of overseas military intelligence, and the other hat that you wear—to run your operations from a hole in the ground.

This particular hole in the ground is operated by the headquarters of the Twenty-second Guards Cyberwar Shock Battalion, who inherited it by way of a long and convoluted history of turf warfare and empire building from the former Soviet RSVN, who built it as part of their strategic nuclear dead man’s handle system. It’s buried two hundred metres under a mountain, in a series of rusting, dank, metal-lined tunnels that have long since outlived their original function. Ten years ago, funded by the last gasp of the oil money, your last-but-one predecessor had the nuclear command centre gutted and flood-filled with the latest high-bandwidth laser networking: Today its cheap-ass Malaysian Cisco knockoffs pack a trillion times the bandwidth of the entire Soviet Union at its height, which is to say about as much as a single MIT freshman’s dorm room. Getting that bandwidth hooked up to the public networks on the surface was a herculean task, and has permanently rendered the nuclear bunker unfit for its original purpose—but, as Kyrgyzstan had shipped all its warheads back to Russia three decades ago, you’re not too concerned. You’ve got a nuclearwar command bunker with Herman Miller conference chairs, Mountain Dew vending machines for your tame geeks, armed guards on the airlocks up top, and secure Internet access. A fair definition of heaven, to some.

(Although describing what you’ve got here as “Internet access” is a bit like calling a Bosnian War rape camp a “dating agency.”)

Here is your office: heart of a spider-web, wrapped around a hardused Eames recliner, keyboard sitting on an articulated arm to one side, headset to the other. All the walls are covered in 3D screens except for one, a bare metal surface studded with radiation sensors, air vents, and crossed by exposed pipes and cable trays. There’s a tatty epaper poster gummed across it, sagging in the middle: It shows a constantly updated viewgraph schematic of global bandwidth consumption, fat pipes sprawling multi-hued across a dymaxion projection of the planet, pulsing and rippling with the systolic ebb and flow of data. The screens on the other walls all contain heads, perspectives shockingly preserved as if they are actually there in the flesh, freshly severed.

Teleconferencing, actually.

“How much longer do you propose to keep on stringing them along?” asks the delegate from Maryland. (She’s blonde and thin as a rake and clearly addicted to amphetamines or emetics or both: You wouldn’t fuck her at gun-point.)

“They already realize what is going on!” The delegate from Brussels is clearly irritated by her naïveté. The lip-sync in the teleconference loop is borked: The real-time interpreter net is clearly not keeping up with his waspish tirade. “It is inconceivable that they don’t. Perhaps they use this as an opportunity to diminish their headcount. Or perhaps the short-term financial gain really is worth it to them—”

“Twenty-four hours.” You cut in before his Belgian counterpart manages to crash the software. “That’s all we need for the wrap.”

“Twenty-four hours is too long!” insists the Europol delegate. “We are already have trouble securing for the operation. And these ‘accidents,’ they attract attention. I am hearing reports that are mortifying. What are you doing? We did not agree to this!”

“What precisely didn’t you consent to?” You raise one bushy eyebrow. “I seem to recall the negotiations over the concordat were exhaustive.”

“This!” A wild hand gesture sweeps into view briefly, providing insight. (The American or Japanese programmers who designed the auto-track for this conference system clearly weren’t thinking in terms of cultures that are big on semaphore.) “The agents your associates have deployed are killing people! That was not part of our agreement. This arrangement was to suck in the assets of organized netcrime for civil confiscation, leaving an audit trail to facilitate prosecution of the perpetrators. Extralegal assassination is, is unacceptable! What are you doing?”

It’s clearly running out of control, and you try not to sigh. “I am not doing anything: I’m not responsible for these deaths.” You shrug, then lean back in your well-upholstered command chair. “I assure you, they are nothing to do with me.” You look at Maryland. “Is your government… ?”

Maryland looks as if she’s swallowed a live toad. “We’re not in the remote-kill business these days. This isn’t the noughties: Congress would never stand for it.” Ever since Filipino Jemaah Islamiyah hackers pwned an MQ-9 Reaper and zapped the governor of Palawan with USAF-owned Hellfire missiles, the Americans have gone back to keeping a human finger on the trigger: not because a state governor from a foreign country was killed, but because of who was in the armoured limousine right behind him. (The prospect of having to utter the term collateral damage in the same sentence as President of the United States before a congressional enquiry had focussed a few minds.) “Where’s the attack coming from?”

“It’s not part of the original picture.” It’s uncomfortable to talk about. “To make IRIK look plausible, it was necessary to provide a haven for certain undesirable elements. They run botnets, of course, but their customers are… unclear. We had assumed the traditional, of course: spammers, malware vendors, child-labour sweat-shops providing teleoperator control of animatronic sex toys for paedophiles.” You clear your throat. “What we weren’t expecting: cheap grid computing for pharmaceutical companies solving protein-folding problems. A Chinese automobile company using a botnet to evolve the design of their latest car using genetic algorithms fed with data from consumer surveys. Artificial-intelligence researchers renting the same botnets that spammers rely on to train their spam filters. Who knew? It is a, a soup of virtual machines boiling out on the darknet, coordinated through channels that our targets operate from corrupted routers in the State Telephone Company hosting centres in Karakol. I don’t have the resources to trace them, in any event. We will shut them down when we spring the trap and snap their worthless necks, but until we are ready to close the honeypot, I cannot stop the attacks.”

“Twenty-four hours.” This from the delegate from Beijing, whose screen is an opaque black cube. “That is unacceptable.”

“I fail to see why. The operation is proceeding nominally.”

“The operation is out of control, Colonel. Sequestrating the assets of organized crime is acceptable. Creating a honeypot for international cybercrime in order to shut them down is acceptable. But sheltering murderers is not. There have been regrettable excesses. The younger brother of the chairman of a state party branch that I shall not trouble you with. The aunt of a Central Committee member. You must shut it down now—or we will.”

You grit your teeth. Your stomach churns: “It continues for twenty-four hours, and no more. The operation will conclude tomorrow, at twelve hundred hours, universal time, and not a second earlier.” Maryland and Brussels are opening their mouths: “We’ve got to let it run its course! If we don’t, the CDOs won’t be fully vested—the targets will not be bankrupted, but they will be annoyed with us.”

“They’ll be annoyed with you.” Brussels looks smug.

“Ah, no, I can see you misunderstand me. They’ll certainly be annoyed with me, but also with you, François, and you, Lorna, and you Li”—you stab a finger at Beijing—“because if any of you pull out of your side of the agreement prematurely, I will see to it that full details of this operation are published on the Internet, with all identifying names attached.” Your smile tightens. “Thank you for your help.” You stab a finger hard on the CALL TERMINATE icon before any of them have time to frame a reply, then curse them all for a donkey’s illegitimate get. “Fuck me, when will they learn?” You roll your eyes. “Fucking amateurs.” Jumped-up crime-control bureaucrats with delusions of special-operations grandeur.

You glance at your clock. It’s almost four in the afternoon, and the latest auction of national-debt futures leveraged against Issyk-Kulistan are due to close in an hour. The inflow is tapering off, as expected, but as long as the gangsters keep paying, there’s no reason to weld your wallet shut and go to the end game.

Eagle’s Nest had fucking better be pleased with this day’s work. You’re not sure how much more bullshit you can take.

ADAM: LOLspammers

You should have known it was too good to be true.

With twenty/twenty hindsight, the alarm bells should have started ringing three years ago, when Larry gave his presentation during that BOF breakout session on Network Assisted Crime Prevention at the Fourth International Conference on Emergent Metacognition. You can see him now if you put on your specs and tell your lifelog to retrieve him: enthusiastic, lanky, Midwestern.

“Realistically, we’re trapped between a rock and a hard place,” he explained to the room, hands moving incessantly as he spoke: “The trouble is, there are too many crimes. Three and a half thousand new offences were created in just ten years under one British government. The US Code is even worse—something like a third of a million distinct activities can lead to felony charges by some estimates. Nobody can be expected to keep track of that; it’s inhuman. But with the kind of filtering we’re having to apply to keep the communication channels open and relatively spam-free, it’s more than possible to envisage agent-based monitoring for signs of criminal intent.”

They’ve been keyword-filtering email for decades, looking for terrorist needles in a haystack. But what Larry proposed was different: trawling for patterns of suspicious behaviour online. Take, say, a disgruntled employee bitching about how they hate their boss online. That’s one thing. But if they start hunting the blacknets for templates for machine pistols and downloading VR training materials, that’s another.

“But what if we go a step further?” asked Larry. “Subjects who exhibit signature behaviours online pointing to potentially violent outbursts may not provide law enforcement with sufficient evidence to justify an arrest. But that’s no reason not to provide an agent-based intervention in the online space. Once ATHENA has a sufficiently large corpus of interaction patterns, we can use it to do behavioural targeting and apply inputs weighted to divert high-risk subjects towards less damaging outcomes. Or to indirectly flag them for police attention.”

Your typical disgruntled employee is a fizzing human bomb for some time before they go postal. Their social contacts are fraying, inhibitions against violence decaying: They’re muttering to strangers in bars, reading about serial killers and fantasizing bloody revenge by night. The police will never know until they explode with murderous intent. But the spam filters monitoring their communication channels will have everything they need to diagnose the downward spiral: From their increasingly disjointed mutterings to the logs of their incoming web surfing, the pattern’s all there. And with enough data, all correlations become obvious. But what Larry was proposing…

“We’ve had behavioural targeting ever since the nineties: ‘If you like product X, you’ll love product Y,’ because that’s what everyone else with tastes like you bought. We can configure ATHENA to apply the same sort of recommendation nudge to behaviour to bring the subject’s outputs back towards baseline. ATHENA’s already pretty good at discriminating human-content communications from non-metacognitive signals; can we take the discrimination further, reliably, and derive objective data about internal emotional states?”

You lean back in your office chair—it squeaks angrily under your weight—and stare at the dusty display case on the opposite wall.

“Say that again,” you say.

“I’m sorry, Dr. MacDonald; it’s been a big shock to all of us here… can’t quite believe it. The funeral’s going to be held next Thursday morning. I’m sure everyone will understand if you can’t make it—it’s a long way to come—”

Your fingers move, eyes unseeing, to open the log of your last discussion.

He’s dead now, and it’s not fucking funny anymore. “How did it happen, do you know?” you ask aloud.

“The police are still crawling all over us, and the FBI are involved, too. They won’t say much, but rumour is, the package was misdirected. It was meant for someone in the applied proteomics group—looks like some animal-liberationist crazy sent it in and it ended up in Larry’s office. It’s all a horrible mistake—”

There is a chill in your blood and ice in your bladder as you make yourself reply carefully, lying: “I agree: Of course it’s a horrible mistake. I hope the FBI catch whoever did it quickly before they”—are duped by ATHENA into sending more packages by whatever stimulus/response tuple the weighted network has identified as most efficient in returning Larry’s communication outputs back towards baseline—“kill or hurt anyone else.”

Sally stays on the call a while longer, seeking reassurance: When you end the connection, you sit and stare at the pulsing green icon with the silhouette of an old-style rotary-dial telephone for several minutes, shaken and unsure whether you trust your own instincts.

Poor fucking Larry. You don’t know for sure, but you don’t need to know for an absolute fact when inference is enough: Three days ago he was getting alarmed at the rate of creep in ATHENA’s morality tables, and now he’s dead, courtesy of a misdelivered letter bomb.

Poor fucking Anwar. It begins to make a bit more sense, and you don’t like it one little bit. His dodgy cousin—now deceased—and his phishing sideline: He’d have been planning on hosting his phishing website on a bunch of rented zombie smartphones, wouldn’t he? Leaving exactly the kind of spoor in his communications that ATHENA would be looking for, with drastically re-weighted tit-for-tat metrics in the morality code…

You’re on Larry’s contact list, and Anwar’s. From Anwar to what’s-his-name, the dead cousin, is another hop. Three degrees of separation. From ATHENA’s perspective, $DEAD_COUSIN might as well be a research affiliate. Or worse: Larry—and you—might be suspected of affiliation to the botnet herders $DEAD_COUSIN was paying.

You stand up, unsteadily, and go through to Reception. “I’m going out for a walk,” you hear yourself telling Laura, as you pass her desk: “I may not be back for some time.”

Then you go downstairs, out into the bright cold daylight, to try and convince yourself that you’re jumping at shadows and the panopticon singularity does not exist.