Rule 34

LIZ: Red Pill, Blue Pill

It’s a slow Tuesday afternoon, and you’re coming to the end of your shift on the West End control desk when Sergeant McDougall IMs you: INSPECTOR WANTED ON FATACC SCENE.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” you subvocalize, careful not to let it out aloud—the transcription software responds erratically to scatology, never mind eschatology—and wave two fingers at Mac’s icon. You can’t think of a reasonable excuse to dump it on D. I. Chu’s shoulders when he comes on shift, so that’s you on the spot: you with your shift-end paper-work looming, an evening’s appointment with the hair salon, and your dodgy gastric reflux.

You push back your chair, stretch, and wait while Mac’s icon pulses, then expands. “Jase. Talk to me.”

“Aye, mam. I’m on Dean Park Mews, attendin’ an accidental death, no witnesses. Constable Berman was first responder, an’ she called me in.” Jase pauses for a moment. There’s something odd about his voice, and there’s no video. “Victim’s cleaner was first on the scene, she had a wee panic, then called 112. Berman’s got her sittin’ doon with a cuppa in the living room while I log the scene.”

What he isn’t saying is probably more important than what he is, but in these goldfish-bowl days, no cop in their right mind is going to say anything prejudicial over an evidence channel. “No ambulance?” You prod. “Have you opened an HSE ticket already?”

“Ye ken a goner when ye see wan.” McDougall’s Loanhead accent comes out to play when he’s a tad stressed. “I didna want to spread this’un around, skipper, but it’s a two-wetsuit job. I don’ like to bug you, but I need a second opinion…”

Wow, that’s something out of the ordinary. A two-wetsuit job means kinky beyond the call of duty. You look at the map and see his push-pin. It’s easy walking distance, but you might as well bag a ride if there’s one in the shed. “I was about to go off shift. If you can hold it together for ten minutes, I’ll be along.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

You glance sideways across the desk. Sergeant Elvis—not his name, but the duck’s arse fits his hair-style—is either grooving to his iPod or he’s really customized his haptic interface. You wave at him, and he looks up. “I’ve got to head out, got a call,” you say, poking the red-glowing hover-fly case number across the desktop in his direction. He nods, catches it, and drags it down to his dock. “I’m off duty in ten, so you’re holding the fort. Ping me if anything comes up.”

Elvis bobs his head, then does something complex with his hands. “Yessir, ma’am. I’ll take care of things, you watch me.” Then he drops back into his cocoon of augmented reality. You can see him muttering under his breath, crooning lyrics to a musically themed interface. You sigh, then reach up, tear down the control room, wad it up into a ball of imaginary paper, and shove it across to sit in his desk. There’s a whole lot more to shift-end handover than that, but something tells you that McDougall’s case is going to take priority. And it’s down to the front desk to cadge a ride.

It’s an accident of fate that put you on the spot when Mac’s call came in; fate and personnel allocation policy, actually: all that, and politics beside.

You don’t usually sit in on the West End control centre, directing constables to shoplifting scenes and chasing hit-and-run cyclists. Nominally you’re in charge of the Rule 34 Squad: the booby-prize they gave you for backing the wrong side in a political bun-fight five years ago.

But policing is just as prone to management fads as any other profession, and it’s Policy this decade that all officers below the rank of chief inspector must put in a certain number of Core Community Policing hours on an annual basis, just to keep them in touch with Social Standards (whatever they are) and Mission-Oriented Focus Retention (whatever that is). Detective inspector is, as far as Policy is concerned, still a line rank rather than management.

And so you have to drag yourself away from your office for eight hours a month to supervise the kicking of litter-lout ass from the airconditioned comfort of a control room on the third floor of Fettes Avenue Police HQ. It could be worse: At least they don’t expect you to pound the pavement in person. Except Jason McDougall has called you out to do some rare on-site supervision on—

A two-wetsuit job.

Back in the naughty noughties a fifty-one-year-old Baptist minister was found dead in his Alabama home wearing not one but two wet suits and sundry bits of exotic rubber underwear, with a dildo up his arse. (The cover-up of the doubly-covered-up deceased finally fell before a Freedom of Information Act request.)

It’s not as if its like isnae well-known in Edinburgh, city of grey stone propriety and ministers stern and saturnine (with the most surprising personal habits). But propriety—and the exigencies of service under the mob of puritanical arseholes currently in the ascendant in Holyrood—dictates discretion. If Jase is calling it openly, it’s got to be pretty blatant. Excessively blatant. Tabloid grade, even.

Which means—

Enough of that. Let’s see if we can blag a ride, shall we?

“Afternoon, Inspector. What can I do for ye?”

You smile stiffly at the auxiliary behind the transport desk: “I’m looking for a ride. What have you got?”

He thinks for a moment. “Two wheels, or four?”

“Two will do. Not a bike, though.” You’re wearing a charcoal grey skirt suit and the police bikes are all standard hybrids, no step-through frames. It’s not dignified, and in these straitened times, your career needs all the dignity it can get. “Any segways?”

“Oh aye, mam, I can certainly do one of those for ye!” His face clears, and he beckons you round the counter and into the shed.

A couple of minutes later you’re standing on top of a Lothian and Borders Police segway, the breeze blowing your hair back as you dodge the decaying speed pillows on the driveway leading past the stables to the main road. You’d prefer a car, but your team’s carbon quota is low, and you’d rather save it for real emergencies. Meanwhile, you take the path at a walk, trying not to lean forward too far.

Police segways come with blues and twos, Taser racks and overdrive: But if you go above walking pace, they invariably lean forward until you resemble a character in an old Roadrunner cartoon. Looking like Wile E. Coyote is undignified, which is not a good way to impress the senior management whether or not you’re angling for promotion, especially in the current political climate. (Not that you are angling for promotion, but… politics.) So you ride sedately towards Comely Bank Road, and the twitching curtains and discreet perversions of Stockbridge.

Crime and architecture are intimately related. In the case of the red stone tenements and Victorian villas of Morningside, it’s mostly theft from cars and burglary from the aforementioned posh digs. You’re still logged in as you ride past the permanent log-jam of residents’ Chelsea Tractors—those such as live here can afford to fill up their hybrid SUVs, despite the ongoing fuel crunch—and the eccentric and colourful boutique shops. You roll round a tight corner and up an avenue of big stone houses with tiny wee gardens fronting the road until you reach the address Sergeant McDougall gave you.

Here’s your first surprise: It’s not a tenement or a villa—it’s a whole town house, three stories high and not split for multiple occupancy. It’s got to be worth something north of half a million, which in these deflationary times is more than you’ll likely earn in the rest of your working life. And then there’s your next surprise: When you glance at it in CopSpace, there’s a big twirling red flag over it, and you recognize the name of the owner. Shit.

CopSpace—the augmented-reality interface to all the accumulated policing and intelligence databases around which your job revolves—rots the brain, corroding the ability to rote-memorize every villain’s face and backstory. But you know this guy of old: He’s one of the rare memorable cases.

You ride up to the front door-step and park. The door is standing ajar—Jase is clearly expecting company. “Police,” you call inside, scanning the scene. High hall ceiling, solid oak doors to either side, traditional whitewashed walls and cornice-work and maroon ceiling. Someone’s restored this town house to its early-nineteenth-century splendour, leaving only a handful of recessed LED spots and covered mains sockets to remind you which century you’re standing in.

A constable sticks her head around the door at the end of the hall. “Ma’am?” CopSpace overlays her with a name and number: BERMAN, MARGARET, PC 1022. Medium build, blond highlights, and hazel-nut eyes behind her specs. “Sergeant McDougall’s in the bathroom upstairs: I’m taking a statement from the witness. Are you here to take over?” She sounds anxious, which is never a good sign in Lothian and Borders’ finest.

You do a three-sixty as Sergeant McDougall comes to the top of the stairs: “Aye, skipper?” He leans over the banister. “You’ll be wanting to see what’s up here…”

“Wait one,” you tell Berman. Then you take the stairs as fast as you can.

Little details stick in your mind. The picture rails in the hall (from which hang boringly framed prints depicting the city as it might once have looked), the discreet motion detectors and camera nodes in the corners of the hall ceiling. The house smells clean, sterile, as if it’s been mothballed and bubble-wrapped. Jase takes a step back and gestures across the landing at an open door through which enough afternoon daylight filters that you can see his expression. You whip your specs off, and after a momentary pause, he follows suit. “Give me just the executive summary,” you tell him.

McDougall nods tiredly. Thirtyish, sandy-haired, and built like a rugby prop, he could be your classic recruiter’s model for community policing. “Off the record,” he says—on the record, in the event one of your head cams is still snooping, or the householder’s ambient lifelogging, or a passing newsrag surveillance drone, or God: But at least it serves notice of intent to invoke the Privacy Act—“This’n’s a stoater, boss. But it looks like ’e did it to ’isself, to a first approximation.”

You take a deep breath and nod. “Okay, let’s take a look.” You clip your specs back on and follow Jase into the bathroom of the late Michael Blair, esq., also known as Prisoner 972284.

The first thing you clock is that the bathroom’s about the size of an aircraft hangar. Slate tile floor, chrome fittings and fixtures, expensive curved-glass shower with a bar-stool and some kind of funky robot arm to scoosh the water-jet right up your fanny—like an expensive private surgery rather than a temple of hygiene. About the stainless steel manacles bolted to the wall and floor inside the shower cubicle we’ll say no more. It is apparent that for every euro the late Michael Blair, esq., spent on his front hall, he spent ten on the bathroom. But that’s just the beginning, because beyond the shower and the imported Japanese toilet seat with the control panel and heated bumrest, there stands a splendid ceramic pedestal of a sink—one could reasonably accuse the late Mr. Blair of mistaking overblown excess for good taste—and then a steep descent into lunacy.

Mikey, as you knew him before he became (the former) Prisoner 972284, is lying foetal on the floor in front of some kind of antique machine the size of a washer/dryer. It’s clearly a plumbing appliance of some kind, enamelled in pale green trimmed with chrome, sprouting pipes capped with metal gauges and thumb-wheels that are tarnished down to their brass cores, the metal flowers of a modernist ecosystem. The letters CCCP and a red enamel star feature prominently on what passes for a control panel. Mikey is connected to the aforementioned plumbing appliance by a sinuous, braided-metal pipe leading to a chromed tube, which is plugged straight into his—

Jesus. It is a two-wetsuit job.

You glance at Jase. “Tell me you haven’t touched anything?”

He nods, then adds, “I canna speak for the cleaner, ma’am.”

“Okay, logged.”

You walk around the corpse carefully, scanning with your specs and muttering a continuous commentary of voice tags for the scene stream. Michael Blair, esq.—age 49, weight 98 kilos, height 182 centimetres, brown hair (thinning on top, number two cut rather than comb-over)—has clearly been dead for a few hours, going by his body temperature. Middle-aged man, dead on bathroom floor: face bluish, eyes bulging like he’s had an aortic aneurysm. That stuff’s modal for Morningside. It’s the other circumstances that are the issue.

Mikey is mostly naked. You suppose “mostly” is the most appropriate term, because he is wearing certain items that could pass for “clothed” in an SM club with a really strict dress code: black bondage tape around wrists and ankles, suspender belt and fishnets, and a ball gag. His veined cock is purple and engorged, as hard as a truncheon. That, and the hose up his arse and the puddle of ming he’s leaking, tell you all you need to know. Which is this: You’re going to miss your after-work hairdresser’s appointment.

“Call SOC. I want a full scene work-up. I want that thing”—you gesture at the Cold-War-era bathroom nightmare—“taken in as evidence. The fluid, whatever, get it to forensics for a full report: Ten to one there’s something dodgy in it.” You look him in the eye. “Sorry, Jase, but we’re gannae be working late on this.”

“Aw shite, Liz.”

Aw shite indeed: With a sinking feeling, you realize what’s up. Jase was hoping you’d take it off his plate, eager-beaver ready to grab an opportunity to prove your chops in front of head office so he can go home to his end-of-shift paper-work and wind down. Well, it’s not going to happen quite like that. You are going to take it off his plate—as duty DI, it’s your job. But that’s not the end of the game.

“You’ve got to ask where all this”—your gesture takes in the town house around you—“came from. And I find the circumstances of his death highly suggestive. Until we can rule out foul play, I’m tagging this as probable culpable homicide, and until CID move in and take over, you’re on the team. At least one other person was involved—unless you think he trussed himself up then slipped and fell on that gadget—and I want to ask them some questions.”

“Reet, reet.” He takes your point. Sighing lugubriously, he pulls out his phone and prepares to take notes. “You said he’s got form?”

You nod. “The conviction’s spent: You won’t see it in CopSpace without criminal intelligence permissions. He did five years in Bar-L and forfeiture of proceeds of crime to the tune of 2 million euros, if I remember the facts correctly. Illegal online advertising and sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals. That was about six years ago, and he went down for non-violent, and I don’t think he’s currently a person of interest.” You pause. “The housekeeper found him, right? And the security contractors—”

“’ E’s with Group Four. I served ’em a disclosure notice, and they coughed to one visitor in the past two hours—the cleaner.”

“Two hours?”

“Aye, they was swithering on aboot privacy and confidentiality an’ swore blind they couldna give me oot more’n that.” He looks at you hopefully. “Unless you want to escalate… ?”

“You bet I will.” Getting data out of sources like home-monitoring services gets easier with seniority: The quid pro quo is that you need to show reasonable cause. Luckily cause doesn’t get much more reasonable than a culpable homicide investigation. You glance at Mikey again. Poor bastard. Well, maybe not. He went down as a non-violent offender but did his time under Rule 45, like he was a kiddie-fiddler or a snitch or something similar. For good reason: Something similar is exactly what he was.

You walk towards the door, talking. “Let’s seal the room. Jase, I want you to call Sergeant”—Elvis, your memory prompts—“Sorensen, and tell him we’ve got a probable culpable homicide I want to hand off to the X Division duty officer. Next, call SOC, and tell them we’ve got a job. I’m going downstairs to talk to Mags and the witness. If you get any serious pushback or queries from up the greasy pole, point them at me, but for the next fifteen minutes, I want you to run interference.”

The next fifteen minutes is likely to be your entire quota of face time with the witness before a blizzard of virtual paper-work descends on your head—that’s why you’re leaning on Jase. And you really want a chance to get your head around what’s going on here, before the regulars from X Division—the Criminal Investigation Department, as opposed to your own toytown fiefdom (which is laughably a subsidiary of theirs, hence the “D” in front of your “I”)—take the stiff with the stiffy off your plate.

It’s a dead certainty that when the shit hits the fan, this case is going to go political. You’re going to have Press Relations and Health and Safety crawling all over you simply because it happened on your watch, and you were the up-and-coming officer who put Mikey in pokey back when you had a career ladder to climb. Not to mention the fact that something has twitched your non-legally-admissible sixth sense about this whole scene: You’ve got a nasty feeling that this might go beyond a mere manslaughter charge.

Mikey was a spammer with a specialty in off-licence medication. And right now you’d bet your cold overdue dinner that, when Forensics return that work-up on the enema fluid from the colonic irrigation machine, it’ll turn out to be laced with something like Viagra.

Shock, disgust, and depression.

You are indeed late home for your tea, as it happens—and never mind the other appointment. Michael Blair, esq., has shafted you from beyond the—well, not the grave, at least not yet: But you don’t need to mix the metaphor to drink the cocktail, however bitter. So you’re having a bad hair day at the office tomorrow, and never mind the overtime.

Doubtless Jase is going home to his wife and the bairns, muttering under his breath about yet another overtime claim thanks to the ballbreaking politically oriented inspector who disnae ken her career’s over yet; or maybe not. (He’s still young: born to a couple of ravers after the summer of love, come of age just in time to meet Depression 2.0 head-on. They’re a very different breed from the old-timers.) And on second thoughts, maybe he’s a wee bit smug as well—being first on scene at a job like this will probably keep him in free drinks for years to come.

But in the final analysis your hair-do and his dinner don’t signify. They’re unimportant compared to the business at hand, a suspicious death that’s going to make newsfeeds all over the blogosphere. Your job right now is to nail down the scene ready for CID to take over. There’s a lot to do, starting with initializing the various databases and expert systems that will track and guide the investigation—HOLMES for evidence and case management, BOOTS for personnel assignment, VICTOR for intelligence oversight—calling in the support units, preventing further contamination of the evidence, and acting as firstresponse supervisor. And so you do that.

You go down to the kitchen—sterile, ultra-modern, overflowing with gizmos from the very expensive bread-maker (beeping forlornly for attention) to the cultured meat extruder (currently manufacturing chicken sans egg)—where you listen to the housekeeper; Mrs. Sameena Begum, middle-aged and plump and very upset, wringing her hands in the well-appointed kitchen: In all my years I have never seen anything like it. You nod sympathetically and try to draw out useful observations, but alas, she isn’t exactly CID material.

After ten minutes and fifty seconds, Jase can no longer draw off the incoming flak and begins forwarding incoming calls. You make your excuses, send PC Berman to sit with her, then go outside and start processing a seemingly endless series of sitrep requests from up and down the food-chain.

An eternity later, Detective Chief Inspector MacLeish from CID turns up. Dickie’s followed by a vanload of blue-overalled SOCOs and a couple of freelance video bloggers. After another half-hour of debriefing, you finally get to dump your lifelog to the evidence servers, hand over the first-responder baton, finish your end-of-shift wiki updates and hand-offs, and head for home. (The segway, released from duty, will trundle back to the station on its own.)

The pavement smells of feral honeysuckle, grass, and illegal dog shit. You notice cracked concrete slabs underfoot, stone walls to either side. Traffic is light this evening, but you have to step aside a couple of times to dodge kamikaze Edinburgh cyclists on the pavement—no lights, helmets, or heed for pedestrians. It’s almost enough to make you pull your specs on and tag them for Traffic—almost. But you’re off duty, and there’s a rule for that: a sanity clause they added to Best Practice guidelines some years ago that says you’re encouraged to stop being a cop the moment you log out.

They brought that particular guide-line in to try and do something about the alarming rise in burn-out cases that came with CopSpace and the other reality-augmentation initiatives of the Revolution in Policing Affairs that they declared a decade ago. It doesn’t always work—didn’t save your civil partnership in the end—but you’ve seen what happens to your colleagues who fail to ring-fence their professional lives. That way lies madness.

(Besides, it’s one of the ticky-boxes they grade you on in Learning and Development/Personal Welfare/Information Trauma Avoidance. How well you let go and connect back with what the folks writing the exams laughably call the real world. And if you fail, they’ll downgrade you on Emotional Intelligence or some other bullshit non-performance metric, and make you jump through some more training hoops. The beatings will continue until morale improves.)

It hasn’t always been thus. Back before the 1990s, policing used to be an art, not a science, floundering around in the opaque darkness of the pre-networked world. Police officers were a breed apart—the few, the proud, defenders of law and order fighting vainly to hold back a sea of filth lapping at the feet of a blind society. Or so the consensus ran in the cosy after-hours pub lock-in, as the old guard reinforced their paranoid outlook with a pie and a pint and stories of the good old days. As often as not a career on the beat was the postscript to a career in the army, numbing the old combat nerves… them and us with a vengeance, and devil take the hindmost.

It all changed around the time you were in secondary school; a deluge of new legislation, public enquiries, overturned convictions, and ugly miscarriages of justice exposed the inadequacies of the old system. A new government and then a new culture of intelligence-driven policing, health and safety guide-lines, and process quality assurance arrived, promising to turn the police into a shiny new engine of social cohesion. That was the police force you’d studied for and then signed up to join—modern, rational, planned, there to provide benign oversight of an informed and enabled citizenry rather than a pasture for old war-horses.

And then the Internet happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and greedily indexing your every spoken word on duty. Globalization and EU harmonization and Depression 2.0 and Policing 3.0 and another huge change of government; then semi-independence and another change of government, slogans like Reality-Based Policing gaining traction, and then Standards-Based Autonomous Policing—back to the few, the proud, doing it their own way (with permanent surveillance to log their actions, just in case some jakey on the receiving end of an informal gubbing is also lifelogging on his mobie, and runs screeching about police brutality to the nearest ambulance chaser).

Sometime in the past few years you learned a dirty little secret about yourself: that the too-tight spring that powered your climb through the ranks has broken, and you just don’t care anymore.

Let’s have a look at you, shall we? Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, age 38. Born in Newcastle, went to a decent state grammar school: university for a BSc in Crime and Criminology in Portsmouth, then graduate entry into Lothian and Borders Police on Accelerated Promotion Scheme for Graduates, aged 22. Passed your Diploma in Police Service Leadership and Management, aged 25. Passed sergeant’s exam, aged 27. MSc in Policing, Policy, and Leadership, aged 29. Moved sideways into X Division, Criminal Investigations, as detective sergeant, aged 29. Aged 31: passed inspector’s exam, promotion to Detective Inspector. Clearly a high-flyer! And then…

If it had all gone according to your career plan—the Gantt chart you drew by hand and taped to your bedroom wall back when you were nineteen and burning to escape—you’d be a chief inspector by now, raising your game to aim for the heady heights of superintendent and the sunlit uplands of deputy chief constable beyond. But no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, and time is the ultimate opponent. In the case of your career, two decades have conducted as efficient a demolition of your youthful goals as any artillery barrage.

It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there’s no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE—TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it.

Which is why you’re walking to the main road where you will bid for a microbus to carry you to the wee flat in Clermiston which you and Babs bought on your Key Worker Mortgage… where you can hole up for the evening, eat a microwave meal, and stare at the walls until you fall asleep. And tomorrow you’ll do it all over again.

Keep taking the happy pills, Liz. It’s better than the alternative.

ANWAR: Job Interview

Four weeks earlier:

In the end, it all boils down to this: You’d do anything for your kids. Anything. So: Does this make you a bad da?

That’s what Mr. Webber just pointed out to you—rubbed your nose in, more like—leaning forward in his squeaky office chair and wagging the crooked index finger of righteousness.

“I say this more in sorrow than in anger, Anwar”—that’s how he eases himself into one of the little sermons he seems to get his jollies from. You’re the odd one out in his regular client case-load, coming from what they laughably mistake for a stable family background: You’re not exactly Normal for Neds. So he harbours high hopes of adding you to the twelve-month did-not-reoffend column on his departmental report, and consequently preaches at you during these regular scheduled self-criticism sessions. As if you didn’t get enough of that shite from Aunt Sameena already: You’ve already got it off by heart. So you nod apologetically, duck your head, and remember to make eye contact just like the NLP book says, exuding apologetic contrition and remorse until your probation officer drowns in it.

But Mr. Webber—fat, fiftyish, with a framed row of sheepskins proclaiming his expertise in social work lined up on the wall behind him—might just have got your number down with a few digits more precision than you’d like to admit. And when he said, I know you want to give Naseem and Farida the best start in life you can afford, but have you thought about the kind of example you’re setting them?—it was a palpable strike, although the target it struck wasn’t perhaps quite the one Mr. Webber had in mind.

He must have seen something in your expression that made him think he’d got through to you, so rather than flogging the dead horse some more, he shovelled you out of his office, with a stern admonition to send out more job applications and email a progress report to him next Thursday. He didn’t bother giving you the usual social-worker crap about seeking a stable life-style—he’s already clocked that you’ve got one, if not that it’s so stable you’re asphyxiating under the weight of it. (See: Not Normal for Neds, above.)

And so you duck your head and tug your non-existent forelock and shuffle the hell out of the interview suite and away from the probation service’s sticky clutches—until your next appointment.

It is three on a Thursday afternoon, and you’re out of your weekly probation interview early. You’ve got no job to go to, unless you count the skooshy piecework you’ve been doing on your cousin Tariq’s dating website—using his spare pad and paid for in cash, which you are careful to forget about when discussing income opportunities with Mr. Webber and his colleagues—and you’ve not got the guts to go home to Bibi and the weans in midafternoon and hang around while she cooks dinner in that eloquently expressive silence she’s so good at, which translates as When are you going to get a real job? It’s not like you’ve been out of Saughton long enough to get your legs back under the table anyway; and on top of that, you’re not supposed to use a network device without filling out a bunch of forms and letting Mr. Webber’s nice technical-support people bug it (which would tend to rule out your usual forms of employment, at least for the nonce).

Which can mean only one thing: It’s pub time.

To be a Muslim living in Scotland is to be confronted by an existential paradox, insofar as Scotland has pubs the way Alabama has Baptist churches. Everyone worships at the house of the tall fount, and it’s not just about drinking (although a lot of that goes on). Most of the best jobs you’ve ever had came from a late-night encounter at the pub—and paid work, too, for that matter. You’re not a good Muslim—in fact you’re a piss-poor one, as your criminal record can attest—but some residual sense of shame prompts you to try to keep the bad bits of your life well away from the family home. Compartmentalization, Mr. Webber would call it. Anyway, you figure that as long as you avoid the fermented fruit of the vine, you’re not entirely doing it wrong: The Prophet said nothing against Deuchars IPA, did he?

The more devout and twitchy-curtained neighbours don’t know anything about your private life, and you want to keep it that way: Our neighbour Anwar, he’s a good family man, they say. And if you want the free baby-sitters and community bennies, you’d better keep it that way. So you are discreet: You avoid the local boozers and are at pains never to go home with beer or worse on your breath. Which is why you go about your business in a snug little pub that sits uphill from the top of Easter Road, close by the Royal Terrace Gardens, for a wee outing afterwards.

Of course, going to the pub is not wholly risk-free. For starters there’s your phone, set to snitch on your location to the Polis—and if they call, you’d better be there to give them a voiceprint. (It’s not like you can leave it at home: You’ve done the custodial part of your sentence, but you’re still under a supervision order, and carrying a phone is part of the terms and conditions, just like wearing a leg tag used to be.)

Your phone copies them on everything you text or read online, and you heard rumours when you were inside—that the Polis spyware could recognize keywords like “hash” or “dosh.” You figure that’s just the kind of stupid shite paranoid jakies make up to explain why they got huckled for shoplifting on their second day out of prison—but you can’t prove it isn’t so, which is why you keep a dirty sock rolled over the phone’s lower half. (And your real phone is a pay-as-you-go you got Bibi to buy you “for the job hunting.”)

But anyway: pub time.

You’re in the back room, surfing on a pad borrowed from the bar as you work your way down your second pint, when the Gnome materializes at your left elbow with a pot of wheat beer and a gleam in his eye. “Good afternoon to you, Master Hussein! Mind if I join you?” The Gnome is a vernacular chameleon: Going by his current assumed accent—plummy upper-class twit—you figure he’s in an expansive mood.

You nod warily. The Gnome is not your friend—he’s nobody’s friend but his own—but you understand him well enough, and he’s interesting company. You’ve even spent a couple of relaxing afternoons in his bed, although he’s not really your type. “Bent as a seven-bob note,” the Cardinal pronounced him when the subject of trust came up in conversation: “Yes, but he disnae get caught,” you pointed out. On paper, he’s a fine, upstanding member of the community; despite looking like the personification of Uncle Fester cosplay fandom, he even managed to get himself elected as town councillor in some deityforsaken hole in Galashiels. (Probably on the Hairy Twat vote. You can persuade the remaining students at Herriot-Watt’s out-of-town campus to vote for anything if you get them drunk enough, and there’s precious little else to do out there but drink.) “Have a seat.”

The Gnome sighs appreciatively and smacks his lips, then sits in contemplation of his beer for a minute or two. “What brings you to my office today?”

“The usual.” You frown. The Gnome claims to work for the university computer-science department, on some big make-work scheme called ATHENA, but he seems to spend most of his time in the back rooms of pubs: You figure he’s most likely working on his own side projects. (He maintains that nobody can earn a full-time living in academia anymore, and who’s to say he’s wrong?) “I’ve just had my weekly sermon, and I don’t need a second serving right now.”

The Gnome chuckles, a quiet hiccuping noise like a vomiting cat. “I take your point.” He necks another mouthful of beer. “And is business good?”

“Don’t be daft, Adam.” You switch off the pad. “I’ve only been out two months; my mobie’s running six different kinds of Polis spyware, and I can’t even surf for porn without official permission. What do you think business is like?”

The Gnome looks duly thoughtful. “What you need is a line of work that is above reproach,” he declares after a while. “A business that you can conduct from a cosy wee office, that is of such utter respectability that if they’re getting on your tits, you can complain about how shocked, shocked! you are, and they’ll back off.”

“I couldna hack the law courseware you pointed me at,” you remind him. “And besides, I’ve got a record now.”

He’s shaking his head. “No. No-no-no. I was thinking…” He cocks his head on one side, as he does when he’s hatching one of his malicious little schemes. “I was thinking, how would you like to be an honorary consul?”

“A what?” Visions of a residence on Calton Road and a shiny black BMW hybrid with diplomatic plates clash confusingly with your gut-deep sense that such a scam is beyond even the admittedly impressive grifting capabilities of the Gnome. “Don’t be silly, I was born over here, I don’t even hold dual Pakistani citizenship—”

“You don’t understand.” He takes your wrist. His fingers are clammy from his beer glass: “Let me explain. You don’t need to be a native. You just need to be a fine upstanding citizen with an office and enough time to attend to the needs of visiting nationals. The high heid yins all have proper embassies staffed by real diplomats, but there are plenty of small players… play-states, just like Scotland’s a play-state, hived off the old Union for the extra vote in the council of ministers in Brussels and some plausible deniability in the budget. The deal is, we find some nowhere country that can only afford a proper embassy in London or Brussels, if that. They issue you with a bunch of papers and an official phone, and you’re on call to help out when one of their people gets into a spot of bother over here. If you’re really lucky, they’ll pay you an honorarium and the office rent.” He winks; the effect is inexpressibly horrifying.

“Get away with you!” You take another mouthful of beer. “You’re winding me up.”

“No, lad, I’m serious.”

“Serious?”

He chugs his pint and smacks his lips. You roll your eyes: You recognize a shakedown when you see one. “Mine’s a Hoegaarden,” he says, utterly unapologetic.

Five minutes later, you get back from the bar and plant his new pint in front of him. “Spill it.”

“What, the beer”—he kens you’re not amused and shrugs, then takes an exploratory sip. “All right, the job. I have a mutual acquaintance who happens to work for a, shall we say, small player’s diplomatic service as a freelance contractor. They’re a very new small player, and they’re hiring honorary consuls for the various Euro sub-states—”

You’ve had enough of this bullshit. “Do I look like I was born yesterday?”

“No.” His brow wrinkles. “Here’s the thing: Issyk-Kulistan is a very new state. It used to be part of Kyrgyzstan, but five months ago there was a vote on independence, and they seceded, with official recognition…” You stare at him. The Gnome has a warped sense of humour, but he’s not crazy. He’s got dozens of fingers in scores of pies, some of them seasoned with very exotic spices. And right now he’s got that intense brow-wrinkling expression he gets on his gizz when he’s desperately serious, or trying to pinch a jobbie in the lav. He’s droning on: “No budget to speak of, but they’re soliciting recommendations. The angle is, they’re dirt-poor—all they’ve got is a played-out gas field and a bunch of collective farms. Their capital city’s smaller than Stirling; in fact, the whole country’s got the same population as Edinburgh. I believe the real story is that Issyk-Kulistan was let go by Kyrgyzstan because unemployment’s around 40 per cent and the big man in Bishkek wanted an excuse to cut their bennies. Think of it as national downsizing, Anwar—Kyrgyzstan’s got a budget deficit, so what are they going to do? Cut overheads! Anyway, the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan can’t afford a real diplomatic corps. Indeed, there’s probably nae cunt from Karakol in the whole of Scotland. Or Latvia, Iceland, or Moldova, for that matter. Which is the reason—”

You look the Gnome in the eye and utter three fateful words: “Adam: Why. Me?”

What follows is blether: masterful blether, erudite and learned blether, but blether nonetheless. You swallow his flannelling. It’s all sound and fury, signifying naught; but you’ve got a scooby that there’s more to this than reaches the eye. The Gnome knows you, and he wants someone he knows in that shiny black diplomatic limo with the IRIK plates, which means he’s got some kind of caper in mind. And you know Adam, and you know this about him: He may be bent as a seven-euro note, but he disnae get caught. Ever.

Which is why…

Three days later, you are certain you’re about to die.

You are twenty-eight years old and a miserable sinner who has been a bad husband to his long-suffering wife and a terrible father to his two children. (To say nothing of having failed to even think about making the hajj, liking beer and other alcoholic beverages altogether too much, and indulging in such unspeakable perversions with other men that Imam Hafiz would swallow his beard and die of shame if he heard about them). You deserve to die, possibly, probably—for God is Great and he knows exactly what you’re thinking—which is probably why he has seen fit to inflict this destiny upon you, seeing you strapped into a business-class seat in an elderly Antonov that rattles and groans as it caroms between clouds like a pinball in the guts of the ultimate high-score game.

The Antonov’s cabin is musty and smells of boiled cabbage despite the best efforts of the wheezing air-conditioning pack. Here, up front in business class, the seats are tidy and come with faded antimacassars bearing Aeroflot’s livery: But behind your uneasy shoulders sways a curtain, and on the other side of the curtain you swear there is an old lady, headscarf knotted tightly under her chin, clutching a cage full of live chickens. The fowl, being beasts of the air, know exactly what’s in store for them—they squawk and cackle like nuns at a wife-swapping party.

The plane drops sickeningly, then stabilizes. There’s a crackle from the intercom, then something terse and glottal in Russian. Your phone translates the word from the cockpit: “impact in ten minutes.” You’re almost certain you can hear the chink of vodka glasses from up front. (The stewardesses haven’t shown themselves in hours; they’re probably crashed out in the galley, anaesthetized on cheap Afghani heroin.) You yank your seat belt tight, adjust the knot of your tie, and begin to pray. Save me, you think: Just let me walk away from this landing, and I’ll give up alcohol for a year! I’ll even give up cock, for, for… As long as I can. Please don’t let the pilots be drunk—

There is a sudden downward lurch, a jolt that rattles the teeth in your head, a loud bang, and a screech of tyres. One of the overhead luggage bins has sprung open, and there is an outbreak of outraged clucking from the economy-class area behind the curtain as a small, terrified pig hurtles up the aisle towards the cockpit. Now you see one of the cabin crew, her beret askew as she makes a grab for the unclean animal—she wrinkles her nose, and a moment later a horrible stench informs you that the animal has voided its bowels right in front of the cabin door.

“Bzzzt.” Your phone helpfully fails to translate the electronic throat-clearing noise. “Welcome to Issyk-Kul Airport, gateway to the capital of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. This concludes today’s Aeroflot flight from Manas International Airport, Bishkek. Adhere to your seats until she reaches the terminal building. Temperature on the ground is twenty-nine degrees, relative humidity is 80 per cent, and it is raining.”

The Antonov grumbles and jolts across cracked ex-military tarmac, its turboprops snarling rhythmically at the sodden atmosphere. At least it’s Aeroflot. You’re not a total numpty: You did your leg work before you came here and you know that the local airlines are all banned from European airspace on grounds of safety (or rather, the lack of it). And you’re up to date on your shots, thanks to Auntie Sam’s abortive attempt to arrange a family reunion in Lahore last year. You also know that the unit of local currency is the som, that it is unsafe to wander round the capital at night, and that your hosts have booked you a room in the Amir Hotel.

The only important bit of local nous you’ve not got straight is what the capital’s called—is it Karakol, or Przewalsk? They change the name whenever there’s a coup d’état, as long as there’s an “r” in the month. It should be Przewalsk—but how do you pronounce Przewalsk, anyway?

As the airliner taxis the short distance to the stand, you take enough shuddering breaths to get over your conviction that you are about to die—but now a new anxiety takes hold. You’ve been told you’ll be met at the airport, but… What do you really know? A dodgy Skype connection and the promise of a car ride: that and five euros will buy you a Mocha Frescato with shaved glacier ice and organic cream to go. For all you know, the Gnome’s idea of an amusing jape is to ship your sorry ass to an ex-boy-friend of his who runs a leather bar in Almaty frequented by former US Marines, where they’ll steal your passport and tie you face-down to a pommel horse—

You’re walking through the humid rain-spattered air towards a terminal building, your shirt sticking to the small of your back. I must have zoned out, you realize nervously. You can’t afford to do that: not here, not with the job interview that’s coming up. Ahead of you the doors are flung open on a dusty arrivals hall. A porter shuffles past you, leading a motorized baggage trolley out towards the small Antonov. There’s a bored-looking crowd just beyond a rope barrier at the far side of the hall, and among them you see a man with an upraised sign: ANWAR HUSSEIN.

“Mr. Hussein?” A broad grin and a bushy salt-and-pepper moustache: firm handshake pumping up and down. “I am Felix Datka.” He speaks English with a heavy Russian accent. “Welcome to Przewalsk!” So that’s how you pronounce it. “Have you had a good journey from Scotland? Please, let’s fetch your suitcase, and I will drive you to your hotel.”

You have arrived in the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. And you relax: Because now you know you are among friends.

“And that was the worst part of it,” you tell him, wiping your moustache on the back of your wrist.

“It was?” The Gnome blinks rapidly, as if there’s a mote in his eye.

“Yes. Once he told the porter to give my suitcase back and we escaped from the pickpockets, or the police—I’m not sure who were which—he had a black Mercedes SUV! Well, it was mostly a Mercedes and mostly black—bits of it were made locally in this car factory they’ve got that runs on chicken feathers and corn husks or something, and the paint didn’t match”—just like the shite your supplier Jaxxie runs up on the DRM-hacked fab in his garage—“but from there it was an hour’s drive into town, and then dinner in a traditional Kyrgyz restaurant”—actually a McDonald’s, after Mr. Datka tipped you the wink that most of the posh restaurants in town were Russian-owned and not halal: But you don’t want the Gnome’s pity—“the next morning, he picked me up and drove me to the Ministry building. Big concrete slab full of bureaucrats with boxy old computers, sitting around smoking.” Your nose wrinkles at the memory.

“The Ministry.” The Gnome hums and strokes his chin. “Hmm. Indeed. And how did it go, then?”

“It was a job interview.” You shrug. Back in your normal drag, jeans and a sweat-shirt and your favourite Miami Dolphins jacket, it’s all mercifully fading into a blur: the stiflingly close air in the airconless conference room, you in the monkey suit your cousin Tariq sourced for you from an Indonesian tailoring dotcom, sweating bullets as you tried to answer questions asked in broken English by the bored bureaucrats on the other side of the table. “They asked me lots of questions. How long I’d lived in Embra, what was my citizenship status, what I did, did I have a criminal record, that sort of thing.”

“Did you tell them the truth?” The Gnome lays his hand on your knee, very solemnly.

“I lied like a rug.” You weren’t sweating bullets because of the questions (you realized it was a shoo-in when you clocked you were the only candidate they’d bothered to fly out for the interview): You were sweating bullets because it was hot. Even the criminal-background question was meaningless. If they didn’t already know the answer to the question, they weren’t networked well enough to spot a ringer.

You shrug again: “Who’re they going to call, Europol?” You let his hand lie: This is safe space, as safe as it comes, and you’re still wound up from the nervous tension of a flight into the unknown. “They flew me to Moscow, economy class! Look, you said they’ve got no money. So what’s your angle?”

You don’t bother with what’s in it for me? because that much is clear. You have got: a bunch of blank passports and a toytown rubber stamp set; a steel-jacketed data key locked to your thumbprint and loaded with encryption certificates; documents telling the government of Scotland that you are hereby authorized to act as the legally responsible consul on behalf of the embassy of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan to the EU in Brussels; and a corporate credit card. Yes, you’ve come up in the world. But as you feel the warm weight of the Gnome’s hand on your thigh, you can’t shift the feeling that there’s more to this than him doing one of his on/off boy-friends a favour. You try again. “What’s your angle?”

The Gnome sighs. “I wish you wouldn’t ask awkward questions,” he says, a trifle querulously. “But if you must know, I’ll tell you.” He leans across the table, and you instinctively lean towards him, until his lips brush your ear. “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. Legally come by, no more and no less—and there’ll be nobody to say otherwise.” You can feel the heat of his Cheshire-cat grin on your cheek: You can smell his yeasty breath. You lean a bit closer, tensing expectantly. “The pen-pushers in Przewalsk want you for a sparkly consular unicorn. I think that’s a grand idea. And I think it would be especially grand if you’d keep me informed of developments, as and when they happen…”

TOYMAKER: The Leith Police Dismisseth Us

It’s four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon: Have you got somewhere safe to hide?

You’re in the shed, guts churning and palms sweating as you set up the run that Gav’s put on you for tomorrow.

It’s a’ the fault of that fucking cunt down at the Cash-For-No-Questions shop on Leith Walk. He wouldn’t offer you more than fifty euros for the telly even though you could show him a receipt all legallike to prove it wisnae hot. And he wouldna even look at your mobie. Or your bike. And the thing is, unless you get your hands on three large by Tuesday, you’re getting malkied.

You owe the Operation’s tax farmer three hundred euros for Services Rendered: and the Operation disnae take “Noo, ye ken I got knocked back by thi’ bastid wot bought it” for an answer. Nor does the Operation play well with “A big boy did it an’ ran away,” “The dug ate ma hamewurk,” or “Pay you next Tuesday?” The Operation’s approach to dealing with Intellectual Property Violations is drastic and memorable—you’ve seen the vid of that yin from Birmingham what crossed them, even signed a fucking contract on paper to say ye kenn’t what ye was getting intae. Fact is, you’re their fabber franchisee for Pilrig, and if ye couldna keep a float to cover your credit, you shouldna have fucking signed the piece of paper, ye ken?

It’s nae your fault you’re hard up. There’s a recession on, you’re long on feedstock, and your car got crushed cos ye couldna afford the insurance after that eppy bastid Tony and his fucking jakey friend ripped off your stash reet after you paid the overdue council tax (it was that or they were gonnae send the sheriff’s court officers round; that would never do if them cunts keeked whit you’d hid in the shed). And then fucking Big Malc gouged you for three days’ fab time an’ gave you a gubbing when you asked to be paid—

None of which matters, likesay? The Operation’s gonnae have their half kilo of flesh.

The shed at the back of your mum’s hoose is cramped, dark, and dingy, surrounded by thigh-high grass and weeds land-mined with cat shit from the feral tom what lives next door. You took it over after your old man died, chucked the rusting lawn-mower and ran a mains extension oot the kitchen window—that, an’ drilled through the brickwork under the sink and plumbed in a water hose. The fab needs water and power and special feedstock, and lots of ’em; like an old-time cannabis farm, back before they decriminalized it. You tiled the shed roof with stolen polymer PV slates (not that they’re good for much this far north of Moscow) and installed shelves to hold your feedstock supplies and spares. It took you a year to scrimp and cadge and steal the parts you needed to bootstrap the hingmy. You could have saved for half that long and bought a shiny wee one in John Lewis, with the DRM and the spyware to stop you making what you will; but if you’d gone down that road, no way would the Toymaker take you on.

Which leaves you needing three big in four days, and nowhere to turn but Gav.

Not that there’s aught wrong with the colour of Gav’s money, but he’s of a kind with Big Malc; a local business man, higher up the food-chain than most of the neds round these parts. There’s something of the night about him, and the way he fucking girns without showing his teeth creeps you out, like he’s fucking Dracula, likesay? And what Gav wants you to make for him, you really didna wanna get dragged inter that stuff. You could get lifted for this shit, eat some serious prison time, and all for three big? The fucking fuck.

There’s a dump down in Seafield with a side-line in homogeneous graded sinter process metal powders; a grocery store that sells interesting polymers disguised as bags of bread flour. Cheap no-name pay-as-you-go data sticks and VPN software that disguises the traffic as noise overlaid on fake voice channels… This stuff isn’t rocket science anymore, it’s not hacking anymore, it’s just illegal as hell because it pisses off the Money. The law disnae appreciate the likes of you schemie scum, like the nice security man called you between the second and third drive-tasing, that time they caught you shoplifting in the St. James Quarter. The law especially disna like your kind owning 3D printers, fabbers capable of taking a design template off a pirate website somewhere and extruding it into the real world to an accuracy of a few microns. The good law-abiding folks—they’re welcome to run off Rawlplugs and coffee coasters and plastic Nessie tat for their weans. But the Polis don’t like unmonitored fabs. They could be making anything: plastic chibs that dinna show up on metal detectors, meth-lab-in-a-brick solid-state drug labs, home-brew handguns—or what Gav is buying.

“Here’s the photies,” Gav told you in his flat English accent. He seemed to savour the words: “Fifteen shots each of the subject.” He slid an ancient memory stick across the table-top towards you, its surface rubbed down to anonymous white plastic by age. You made it disappear hastily. “Stitch ’em up and render the parts to scale—there’s a model there. It needs to be ready by Sunday night. Mozzy will pick it up and pay you at six sharp.”

“Eh, but ye ken it’s a big load of work? It’ll take twenty-four hours to fab ’em, likesay?”

“So? You’d better get started. Likesay.”

You bite your tongue. He’s takin’ the pish, but the way he smiles tells you he kens he’s got your number. Cunt.

Gav’s buying on behalf of someone who’ll be really embarrassed if his habit comes out, that you can tell. The stick feels like it’s burning a hole in your pocket as you walk home from the pub. The job’s simple enough, but if they catch you with it…

Someone’s been naughty with their phone. They’ve been taking pictures. Innocent enough, and they’ve been careful, no upskirt perv service shots that might tip the Polis off; but once they’ve got enough angles it’s over to you (via Gav). There’s software that’ll stitch together a polygon map from a bunch of images, working out the perspectives and textures from all the angles. And once you’ve got the skin, you can drop it over a model of a doll and send it to the printer. Which will generate the pieces of a hard plastic skeleton surrounded by textured, colourized, soft plastic skin that the customer can squeeze and suck without any risk of screaming or telling, ready to clip together around servo motors to animate and sensors to react: and the beauty of it is that she’ll never know, this four-year-old whose animatronic double is going to star in some paedo’s sex life.

Well, it’s no’ like you can ask Gav: and anyway, you need his money. Otherwise, you won’t be able to pay off the Operation.

The fab’s still warm from that bampot Malc’s job, so you start by stuffing fresh cans of feedstock up its arse—this job’s a hybrid, multiple plastics in the same structure and a skeleton made using the special brew that’s been doing the rounds these past couple of months. The work-space is clean, and there’s no crap lying around from the last run, which is good, and it’s big enough that if you twist the model just so, you can make it in one run.

So you cable your laptop up to the fab, stick your special dongle in its side, swipe your thumb print across it for access, and log in to Evil Santa’s workshop to download the templates for a bad night out in toytown.

Early afternoon.

You blink yourself awake in gritty-eyed confusion, stirring from sleep on the living-room sofa. You’re surrounded by the detritus of a chaotic Saturday night; greasy pizza box upside doon on the carpet, empty tinnies of Zywiek Super rolled under the TV console, game controller dumped in the ash-tray in a confusion of dowts—you swear under your breath: “Jesus Fuck.”

Ye didna get to bed in the end; microwave pizza and cheap Polish beer fuelled you on an epic raid in Axe Cop 14. You and the Grief Street Gang tooled up on what’s left of your stash of Provigil and chopped seven shades of shit out of the Baby Panda Squad in return for—

For—

Shite. It’s three o’fucking clock in the afternoon! Yon cunt Mozzy’s gonnae be round in a couple of hours. The fucking fab’s gonna be chirping its heart out, feed me, clean me, the usual after job shoe-shaggy it insists on. You gotta get the cargo bagged up and the hell out of your hoose in case that fat twat Mozzy skelps you. You’re gonnae plant them underneath an abandoned car in a back alley somewhere, demand the money up front in return for directions, likesay? Not good to be caught out the same way twice.

You roll off the soiled sofa, gurning, and stagger out to the lavvie. The keekin-glass shows you an orc with eyes like red-rimmed pissholes in a block of lard. Jaxxie, this is your life! Loser, tosser, fabmonkey to the gentry of the night—it’s a’ there. You look away hastily, stumble out and through the grimy kitchen to the backdoor and the shed.

The shed. You open the door and step inside. First up, you ken it smells wrong. Fabbers have their ain smell; not humming, like, but a goosh of hot plastic and metal. When it’s working hard plastic, there’s a lot of hot metal, and steam from the chiller circuit. This is like all soft placky. Which is wrong. So you hit the light switch.

Something’s gone very wrong with your fabber.

The red supply blinkenlights are pulsing manically across its front, and the lid’s come open. Not only that; it’s rising on a fucking pillar of multicoloured hingmies pushing their way out of the extrusion cell like a loaf of bread that’s risen too far. Fuck, the fucking fucker’s fucked! You grab the handle on the lid. A lime green hingmy pops up at you and you clock what it is, and that’s when you realize that no, the fucking fucker isnae fucked, it’s you what’s fucked.

The evidence is all over the screen of your lappie, which, fucking eejit that you are, you left online when you went inside last night.

You grab the lime green plastic dildo. It’s an anatomically correct cock, but it’s the wrong colour, only about eight centimetres long, and there’s something embossed on it—a URL. As you squint at it, another wee plastic cock—this one cherry red—topples off the mound that’s rising from the fabber’s guts and bounces across the floor. “Jesus fuck.” You stare at the lappie in horror. About sixty dozen overlapping windows are warning you that spyware has been detected, inviting you to download an antivirus package from the app store of a fly-bynight scamware vendor in Hainan. You ken it’s the same site as the URL on the dildo. “Jesus fuck,” you repeat.

It’s ransomware, pure and simple.

“Tha’ dug ate ma’ hamewurk.”

Never mind Gav and his minions. Tomorrow you’re gonnae meet the Operation’s tax farmer, who expects you to pay up for your key to the dark gates of toyland.

Twenty-seven hours to lay your hands on three large. You are so fucked.

Hello.

We interrupt your scheduled browsing to bring you news of an unfortunate incident.

Stuart Jackson, aged twenty-two, a resident of Hamilton Wynd, Leith, has just visited our local business-development executive, the Toymaker—that would be me—to plead for assistance in restructuring his debt.

Perhaps you are thinking that the Operation is unduly harsh in its treatment of defaulters. And it’s possible you have some sneaking sympathy for Jaxxie, a secondary-school drop-out struggling to make his way in a cruel and bewildering world that has written him off as being of no conceivable value.

Well, you’d be wrong.

This vale of tears we live in holds a virtually unending supply of Jaxxies, eager neds ready and willing to sell crack to their grannies and jack their neighbours’ laptops to pay for the next bottle of Bucky. Jaxxie is distinguished from the rest of them solely by a modicum of low cunning, a propensity for graft, and a minor eye for space-filling structure that—if he had applied himself to his Standards and Baccalaureate—might have found him a place on the rolls of a distance-learning institution and ultimately a ladder up to what passes for a respectable middle-class profession in this degraded age of outsourcing.

But Jaxxie is lazy. Jaxxie disnae enjoy the learnin’. Jaxxie is a petty criminal who pays his way by acting as an outlet for the Toymaker’s bottom-tier products. And Jaxxie slept through his Economics classes in school.

As you have doubtless realized by now, the Operation’s products are all illegal; this imposes certain regrettable cost externalities on us—you can’t buy insurance and police protection for your business if what you manufacture ranges from MDMA labs to clitoridectomy kits.

We have learned over the years that it is necessary to take a stern but honest line with junior franchisees who ask for business-development capital loans, then default on their line of credit. In our world of unregulated free-market enterprise there is no “society” to off-load business externalities like insurance onto, no courts to settle disputes equitably, and no presumption of goodwill.

We have given Jaxxie every opportunity to pay off his debt on time. We even steered business his way—when he was too lazy to get on his bike and look for work—by way of our local salesman, Gav. Despite having a suitable contract dropped in his lap, Jaxxie still managed to drag defeat from the jaws of victory. This is the point at which our patience would normally be exhausted: We are not a welfare scheme, and we cannot afford to continually make allowances for incompetence when it impacts the bottom-line.

But Jaxxie’s debt is not substantial. Furthermore, we are aware that he is willing and eager to repay it, and would certainly have done so on time had not “the dug ate ma hamewurk.” We are therefore pleased to announce that we are going to exercise the prerogative of mercy on this occasion.

Jaxxie: We hope you will take this punishment, which is intended to teach you a valuable lesson, in the spirit in which it is intended. It may strike you as unpleasant and draconian—but consider the alternatives! We have a franchise relationship model to defend. As it is, your punishment will not hurt much. You’ll make a full recovery. And it won’t even impair your ability to continue in your chosen profession.

Just don’t fuck up and make us come for your other kidney.

LIZ: Morning After

Wednesday morning starts out moist and grey in that way Edinburgh gets in summer, when the haar comes boiling up from the Firth and fills the streets with a humid Whitechapel haze, misting your specs and clogging your lungs like a stifling blanket.

You find yourself thinking about work over breakfast (a couple of cereal bars and a half litre of apple juice). Work is both a relief and a distraction; it beats sitting and staring at the walls, aimlessly surfing the net, or grocery shopping (all activities that leave you twitchy and numb, vulnerable to the little existential doubts that nibble at your will-power when you don’t have a focus). Besides, you’ve got a nice little bundle of puzzles on your desktop: your own investigation case-load plus trouble tickets escalated by your team because they’re not amenable to a five-minute clean-up. If you lose yourself in the in-tray, time passes that bit more quickly.

So it is that after breakfast you pull on a clean suit, grab your bag, and head for the gym; and after a brisk half-hour work-out and a shower, you catch a microbus to the station. While you’re waiting at the bus-stop (expect five minutes between vehicles, according to the flickering sign—more like ten if you account for traffic jams) you put on your specs and log in to the daily news flow. Surprise—Dodgy Dickie MacLeish has got an ops room up and running for last night’s case, and he wants you to check in.

Kibitzing on a Charlie Hotel investigation (Culpable Homicide, CH to its friends) is not exactly going to contribute to your own team-performance metrics, but it’s a higher-priority job than most, and it’s a whiff of the unusual: So you hurry on down to briefing room D31, grabbing a coffee on the way.

Police briefing rooms haven’t changed much over the years. They retain the same scuffed white paint, checkerboard-fading LED panel lighting, and cheap furniture: the spoor of an institution focussed on results, not appearances. The centre of the room is dominated by a horseshoe of battered active surfaces for the collaborative push-pull noodling. CopSpace is crammed full of Post-its, work flows, time-line charts, and urgentproject waves. When you arrive, Dickie’s chatting to a knot of suits, but he clocks your availability sharpish and breaks off. “DI Kavanaugh.” He nods. “In bright and early, I see.” You register his glower but cut him some slack: File it under up all night with no sleep. The first law of detection is the longer you leave it, the harder it is to collar the culprit; 80 per cent of cases are solved within forty-eight hours, after which the probability of a clear-up drops drastically—and Mac is well aware of this.

“I was already past shift end when the call came in,” you reply automatically. “What’s turned up?”

“I was hoping you could shed some light on the initial contact.” His manner’s abrupt. “The log here says first contact was Jase McDougall and PC Berman, sent to a priority 3 by Control responding to a call from a MOP, Mrs. Begum. The home help. You were in Control when the call came in—what did they tell you?”

That one’s easy. “Nothing.” You take a cautious sip of your coffee and wince: It’s bogging. “That is, I didn’t take the call—I think you’ll find it was Sergeant”—Elvis—“Sorensen? When Jase called for supervision, I was coming to the end of my shift, so I decided to visit the site in person before heading home. When I got there, Jase told me that PC Berman took the initial contact and yanked his chain. When he got to the scene, he pulled me in. So I was the third on scene.”

“And then you called me immediately.” Dickie nods, his expression grim. “May I ask why you didn’t file it as an accident?”

“Sure.” Your cheek twitches: You take another mouthful of the bitter gunk from the bottom of the cafetière. “I’ve had dealings with Mr. Blair before—in fact, we go back a way. He’s a fine upstanding pillar of the underworld. If he’d fallen downstairs and clouted his head, I probably wouldn’t have rattled your cage, but the manner of his passing was such poetic justice, so to speak…”

“You think it’s a hit.”

This is treading close to dangerous ground. Change the subject. “Let’s just say, if this was my investigation, I’d want to rule that out. Did SOC do a work-up on the, er, fluid? Like I suggested?”

He glares at you. “How did you know?”

“Know what?” you ask. Then you cotton to the work flow he’s fingering in CopSpace, and grab hold of it for yourself. It flips open in all its wikified hypertextual glory, full of long medical terms that fail to signify, beyond the words “Sildenafil” and “Ritonavir.” “Um. Bear with me a moment while I come up to speed? I need to look this up—”

Dickie snorts. “Don’t bother. Sildenafil’s better known as Viagra. That’s nae going to do for anyone on its lonesome, but Ritonavir—that’s an old HIV anti-viral drug—apparently it messes up Viagra when you mix them, makes it ten times as strong or something. And enema fluid. Apparently it’s all the rage.”

You’ve run across the enema thing before, for alcohol and other drugs, but this is a new one on you. “Did he add the drugs himself, or is it a set-up?”

“He’s HIV-positive, and had blood-pressure issues on top. He’s on Ritonavir and a bunch of blood-pressure meds. There’s a bunch of open packets of capsules in the bathroom cabinet; but they’re none of them administered by enema. The patient information for the HIV drug is full of warnings about Viagra, not that most eejits bother reading the leaflet. And there’s a bunch of empty capsule shells in the bathroom bin.” And there, in a nutshell, is the veiled accusation: murder most foul. “We got a core temperature reading that suggests he was lying there since midnight the day before. I’m still waiting on the post-mortem report, but my money’s on the first option—someone who knew about Laughing Boy’s dangerous habit spiked the cocktail. That machine…” He points at a 3D projection of the death scene, floating atop one of the surfaces. “It’s a collector’s piece.”

You zoom on the thing, click through to its notes, and boggle slightly. “It belonged to who?” Who is apparently some VIP called Nicolae Ceauşescu, who was… Dictator of Romania prior to the revolution and his subsequent execution in 1989… “That’s crazy!” The wiki goes on to say that the President for Life acquired a deathly fear of germs while in prison during the Second World War, and consequently never wore the same clothes twice. He started every day with an enema. Hence the Soviet spa equipment, which your friend Mikey subsequently acquired at auction and used for… “Oh my. Talk about your hidden depths.”

Dickie remains dour. “I ken this is new to you, but when ye’ve finished giggling, we have a job tae do?”

You wave it off. “No, it’s alright. I’m done now.” You take a deep breath. “Oh my. Yes, you’ve… You’ve messaged Sally in Press Relations, haven’t you?”

He nods lugubriously. “It’s all in process, and as soon as the post-mortem’s in, I’m escalating. Liz—ye kenn’t the subject. Care to venture any speculation?”

What he’s asking you for is strictly against the spirit of intelligence-led policing, but you’re willing to cut him a lot of slack; he’s thirty-six hours into a solid candidate for fucked-up homicide of the year, and he wouldn’t be shooting the breeze with you if he had any leads. “Sorry; it’s all ancient history. I haven’t had anything to do with Mikey since we put him away, and I don’t know who his current contacts are. Have you pinged Probation yet? Is—was—he under any supervision orders? Do we have a handle on his social networks?”

“Yes, no, and no, Liz. Well, it was worth the ask. I’ll be thanking you for dropping by, and feel free to look in if you remember anything.” He steers you doorwards, and you go gracefully. It wouldn’t do to be cluttering up the ops room when he nails down the probable cause of death and officially escalates the investigation to Murder One. And so you proceed in the general direction of your team’s office, almost regretting that this is the last you’ll have to do with the case.

Famous last wishes…

Welcome to exile.

You get to your team’s office through a maze of twisty passageways and a short-cut across one corner of a car-park, then in through a wooden gate set in the stone wall of what used to be the police stables. Lothian and Borders maintained a mounted unit right up until independence—at which point, the drop in demand for royal escorts sent the nags to the knackers and the budget to the UAV squadron. At which point the old stables were refurbished as accommodation for whoever lost the toss-up, meaning you and yours.

The former stables are picturesque but not really fit for office work. There are no windows (except those in walls that face in on the grassy courtyard), they’re cold in winter and stifling in summer, and the stone walls are a royal pain in the ass for wireless and cable ducting. On the other hand, you’ve got esprit up to here—everybody’s got something in common to grumble about.

Rather than a big, open-plan briefing room with surfaces and signal strength up to five bars, you’ve got a confusing, pokey maze of thick-walled rooms lit by LED down-lighters hanging from the overhead beams. And you’ve got a confusing, pokey maze of misfits to work with. Your department, the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit, has four permanent staff and another eight part-time bodies. For your sins in a previous life you’re the inspector in charge, reporting to Chief Inspector Dixon, who wears two hats—CID and U Division, IT. It’s not your only job, but it occupies a good 80 per cent of your working hours. Working under you are Sergeants Cunningham and Patel, aka Moxie and Speedy, and Constable Squeaky: And they in turn train and supervise an indeterminate and ever-changing population of porn monkeys in uniform.

Welcome to the Rule 34 Squad.

“Morning, skipper.” It’s Moxie, squirreled away in the centre of a nest of archaic flat-panel displays, nursing a blueberry-and-mint latte and a ring Danish as he twitches at the incoming feeds and waves rolling up his screens. “ ’Ad a good holiday?”

“Not really.” It’s your turn to suppress a twitch. “Seen Speedy today?”

“Rest break.” A stream in one window freezes and zooms front and centre for his attention. “Uh.” He forces his attention back to you, and you stifle your exasperation: “What was the question?”

The rest of the force uses ICIU as a dumping ground for the weird ones. It’s always like this with your team of crack ADHD poster children and borderline aspies.

“Meeting. My office, ten thirty. I haven’t scheduled it yet, so consider this your one-hour reminder.”

“Okay!” He frowns slightly, eyes flickering as he saccades between your face and the conflicting priority interrupt on screen two. “Um. I think.” Whatever he thinks, he thinks better of it and stops. You lean past his shoulder and glance at his screen.

“This is about the anomalous short-tandem repeat hits on the used cartridges in the Stockbridge recycling bins, right? You think you’ve found something?”

He makes up his mind. “Mebbe, skipper, but it’s really fucking out there, know what I mean?”

Now you let out your exasperated sigh. “Meeting, ten thirty, remember? Have an informal report ready for me.” You straighten up. “Be seeing you.” And you beat a retreat to your office (for unlike the sergeants and constables in their cubes, you rate a solid wall of your own to bang your head against).

Rule 34: If you can imagine it, there’s pornography about it on the Internet. “It” is the generic “it”—cars, mobile phones, two girls/one cup—grotesquery knows no limit. Originally a throw-away gag in a web comic, popularized by the denizens of 4chan, Rule 34 has come to dominate your life: Because if you turn it on its head and start looking at the net.porn, sooner or later you have to ask, Is whatever is depicted here happening on my beat?

ICIU isn’t about porn (the war on porn is long since lost, though none dare admit it) so much as it’s about Internet memes—random clumps of bad headmeat that have climbed out of their skulls to go walkabout on the web. Often they’re harmless—a craze for silly captions on cute cat photographs—but sometimes they’re horrendous: And fuckwits see this stuff and think it’s cool, so they imitate it. It was bad enough back in the noughties when it was just happy slappers posting videos of muggings on YouTube; these days a meme can migrate from some cam-wearing pervert’s head in the Philippines and have local copy-cats slashing prostitutes in Leith and Detroit and Yokohama the same day.

And when you mix memes with maker culture, you have something even weirder: everything from counterfeit pharmaceuticals through to design patterns for nightmares. Things that escape from the darker reaches of cyberspace and show up in suburban dungeons, eldritch fads and niche cultures that have zero local history until they detonate suddenly, leaving a pile of traumatized and bleeding civilians on your door-step.

Your job is to police all this stuff, to chase it down from both ends—the online supply of designs and the meatspace supply of materials that turn those designs into physical artefacts. Because of resourcing constraints, you mostly focus on the former. But it’s the latter that worries you most.

You log in to your surface, send out the short-notice meeting reminder to all concerned, and splat up the conference flows on all three walls around you. Then you lean back in your chair and speed-read as you try to catch up with a day out of the blogosphere.

A decade and a half ago, blogging—whether writing your own or reading them on the job—would pull you a formal disciplinary hearing. Now it’s part of the work-load, and they grade you according to how many comments your postings get. You—and about three thousand senior ICIS professionals in other jurisdictions around the planet—share the work of monitoring the net and tracking the spread of disturbing new trends. You pool the stuff your tame porn monkeys throw up, and they do likewise. There are mailing lists and chat rooms and regular face-to-face international conferences for meme cops to attend. Every week—or more frequently, if necessary—you send out a bulletin for CID and U Division and everyone who needs to be aware of the latest nasty surprises. Several times a day you field puzzled enquiries from officers trying to get their heads around something that just disnae make sense; and you’ve got your own investigations to run, nosing into anything ICIS dredges up that looks like it originated in your town.

CopSpace is all-encompassing these days, with gateways into the sprawling Interpol and Europol franchises. And your occupation is very atemporal, very post-post-modern. So your first real job of the day is to set up a query agent to look for case files containing Viagra, spammers, homicide, and enemas in close proximity. Then you add a personal note to a co-ordination wave, asking if anyone else has seen anything relevant; tweedle a brief announcement of the facts of the case (suitably blinded) in case any of your colleagues in other jurisdictions have useful suggestions: and on your public blog, ask if any MOPs who were in the vicinity of Mikey Blair’s demesne would like to drop by for tea and a chat. Only then do you get to start sifting through your regular inbox and prioritizing the day’s routine work-load.

Item: There’s a Person of Repeated Interest in Pilton who’s just turned up at the Royal Infirmary with forty sutures in his lower back, a nasty case of MRSA, and a missing kidney. Question from CID, Do we have an organlegging problem or is this just punishment surgery?

Item: a Person of Repeated Interest in Cramond has been found unconscious in a gutter, sporting unusual leg injuries. Recovering in hospital, officers called to deal with the reported shooting incident took possession of the recovered projectiles—ultrahard plastic spheres about a centimetre in diameter that show signs of having been produced on an unregistered fabber, invisible on X-ray, which had been fired into the meniscal cartilage of each knee at point-blank range. PORI is being uncooperative: Are there reports of kneecapping using this MO elsewhere on the net?

Item: We recently lifted another PORI in Craigmillar on a public-order charge. IT Forensics found his phone contained numerous videos which we are treating as Extreme Pornography as per CJ&L(S) (2009). A query with cause on the NPFIT database failed to identify where he downloaded this material—it certainly wasn’t logged over the public Internet. Query: What should we be looking for? Blacknet, sneakernet, or some other option?

This is the problem with being on the Rule 34 Squad: You get to wade through everyone else’s shit, but your own case resolution metric is in the tank. For example, if you could get the resources to track down where the feedstock for that metal-hard polymer the black hats are putting through their fabbers is coming into the city from, you could follow it to the customers and shut the bastards down for a very long time indeed (Firearms Act, 1968, as amended). If ICIU was classified as a support unit rather than a bastard offshoot of CID you’d be in the clover. But it isn’t, so you’re expected to spend your time running dumb-ass web searches on behalf of the real detectives—support unit stuff—while trying to meet utterly inappropriate performance metrics for arrests and convictions. No gold star for you.

On the other hand, CID can’t do without the Rule 34 squad these days, doing the stuff nobody else wants to take on. So you get to keep this job so that they don’t need to sit in ancient Aeron chairs all day, drinking bad coffee and staring up the Goatse-shaped ring-piece of the prolapsed, ulcerous arse-meat of the Internet until their eye-balls melt.

The members of your constantly rotating pool of Internet porn monkeys typically last three months on the team; then they flee screaming back to the blessed relief of patrolling the sinkhole estates and vomit-splattered pub doorways of the wrong side of town. Most of them are volunteers—officers who figure a few months off their feet in a nice warm office with a nanny-free net feed is a soft touch next to collaring neds in Craigmillar or public-order headcases off Lothian Road. Oddly, they don’t often come back for a second tour of duty in bad head park. A small subset are here reluctantly: You figure some of the more unscrupulous brass in E Division may be using ICIU as a punishment posting.

But for you, there’s no escape. The Internet amplifies everything. You’d thought you’d seen the lot, you with your background in homicide and computer crime and years on the beat. You’ve seen rape and murder and the vileness that men and women do to one another. But the horror of their actions pales into insignificance compared to what they fantasize about. And on that note, it’s just you, Moxie, Speedy, and Squeaky against the scum of the Internet: So it’s a blessed relief when you get to spend a day on the control centre desk and an evening mopping up after a guy in a gimp suit who autodarwinates with extreme prejudice.

Keep taking the happy pills, Liz. It’s better than the alternative.

(Didn’t you have a meeting to be going to?)

Your meeting rolls round, and then a lengthy chat with Chief Inspector Dixon, your boss (who mostly seems to want to catch up with the latest scuttlebutt about Dickie’s dastardly deviant’s demise—prurient curiosity never goes out of fashion, even among those who ought to know better), then an hour-long mentoring session with Speedy (who is arsing around trying to make up his mind whether to go for his PIP entry exams with an eye to making inspector some year or other—not totally impossible, you will concede, but he’ll have to get his shit together and focus if he’s to have a hope).

You attempt to put in half an hour collating the paper-work on the DNA tests on those black-market feedstock canisters that have been turning up fly-tipped in residents’ recycling bins, but there’s nothing conclusive; it’s one of those hundred–per cent under-resourced investigations that’s going to go nowhere until you find something concrete to justify the resourcing without which—

Lunch is a speedy bowl of microwave seitan bulgogi noodles slurped down at your desk with the door shut: Then it’s on to the afternoon. First you have a dedicated off-the-hook hour for training courseware; then it’s over to room D31 to give Dickie’s DCs an off-the-cuff (and off-the-record) briefing on Michael Blair’s colourful pre-mortem history. After which it’s back to ICIU and a half-hour mentoring Constables Janie Jones and Baz MacIntyre on the banality of evil, the evil of banality, how to tell the difference between faked videos and the real thing, and the best way to keep a sense of perspective while watching vids of kittens being dropped into food processors in slomo (or whatever else the griefers are amusing themselves with today).

Sometime during the afternoon, your phone begins to shake, rattle, and roll for your attention, requesting a personality change. At least, you think it began during midafternoon—you tend to ignore it while you’re busy. When you finally get annoyed at the desperate armwaving, you swipe the screen: It does a Jekyll-and-Hyde swap from its officious duty VM to your home phone’s personality.

You have face-mail. “Liz?” It’s Dorothy. You startle and guiltily look over your shoulder, but the door’s shut. “Long time no see. Uh… I’m in town again? And I was wondering if, if you’d like to meet up? I’m free tonight, if that’s convenient, or we could talk?”

Well, that’s a turn-up. But it also up-ends all your carefully controlled tranquillity. You and Dorothy have history. (Or herstory.) Your heart beats faster for a moment, the phone clammy in your palm. “I—” You stop. Talking to voice mail: ungood. You text her back, quickly, suggesting meeting up in a friendly wine bar in the new town. Then you take a deep breath and swipe your phone back to its on-duty persona. You take another deep breath as you try to gather your scattered thoughts. You’re not sure how you feel about this; it’s been months, hasn’t it? But suddenly you feel almost hopeful. Which is bad, because you’re meant to be on duty. So you turn back to the waves and streams of ICIS chatter, and see—

You’re not sure just what it is that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, but you sit there and stare at the transcript for a long moment, then air-type:

It’s a minute or so before Karl spots your addition and replies, during which time you’re perusing a report on trends in toxicant inhalation among youth in the seedier Parisian banlieues, then:

Your fingers shaking, you reply:

More waiting:

At this point you pause to authenticate Karl’s identity credentials. Karl Heyne is indeed an officer of some kind in the Kriminalpolizei in Dresden, according to your departmental authentication server. He is, in the loosest possible sense, one of your colleagues. But on the other hand—you check the department newsfeed for confirmation—Dickie has indeed escalated the case of the late Mr. Blair to Murder in the First Degree as of lunch-time, and the ironclad rule of criminal intelligence is: assimilate everything, disclose nothing. You think for another minute, then:

At which point you could wash your hands of the whole affair and consider your duty done—but that’s not enough, is it? You stare at Karl’s note for a full minute, letting it all percolate together, trying to quantify your sense of déjà vu.

Item: $PERP is a spammer.

Item: $PERP is found dead, in a weird and improbable accident, at home.

Item: rogue domestic appliances are implicated.

Item: so are inappropriate intoxicating substances.

Naah, that never happens, not in real life, outside of the movies. Does it?

“Dickie will think I’m off my trolley,” you mutter to yourself. Then you pick up your phone, shake it, and speed-dial.

“Chief Inspector? If I can have a moment… ? Really? That’s too bad… Listen, I don’t want to add to your work-load, but I have a possible lead from—it’s a long shot—Germany. Yes, it’s intelligence-led. They’ve got a circumstantially similar case on their hands in the past twenty-four hours. No… Not exactly the same, but I spotted at least four points of similarity. So far, no, no, they’re still treating it as accidental-but-weird. No, I know. I told him I’m not the lead, gave him your details. Yes, I—I’m sorry, but in my judgement there’s something very fishy about it, and I think you need to talk to the man. No I—no. Look, you know what I do, don’t you? I’m here to watch for—well shit.”

You put the phone down carefully, in case it explodes. Or maybe in case you explode. Anger management is one of those compulsory people-skills hingmies they put you through on a regular basis; clearly Dickie’s overdue for his next refresher.

You can fully appreciate how busy he is, and how he’s got the brass breathing down his neck—Scotland as a nation gets about a hundred murders a year, but Edinburgh accounts for less than a tenth of that—and you know this is but a circumstantial what-the-fuck? indicator, most likely a coincidence. But there’s no call to bite your head off. If Dickie disnae want to carry it, he can always fob you off on one of his minions. There is absolutely no fucking call to swear at a fellow officer like that, much less a sometime classmate, and it is indicative of a distinct lack of respect and professionalism, and you have half a mind to—

No, scratch that. Leave the formal complaint for some other time, when he isn’t being shat on from above and trying to juggle a murder investigation and his regular case-load. Now is not the time to go nuclear, whether or not Dickie deserves it. You’ve had years of practice at swallowing this shit. Often as not, they don’t even realize they’re dishing it out: coming from a macho subculture, gobbling pints and proton-pump inhibitors to keep their stomachs from exploding with all the bile and suppressed rage that goes with the job—no. Just no. Bottle it up for later.

And speaking of bottling it, you put in three and a half hours of overtime yesterday, it’s forty minutes to end of shift right now, and if you don’t claw back some personal space, HR will notice and send you on a mandatory work/rest chakra-rebalancing course again (because the new-age hippie counselling shit is cheaper than paying for stress-related sick-leave).

Anyway, haven’t you got a date?

It’s time to go home and shower, then off to the wine bar to see what Dorothy wants—whether it’s you, or just a familiar face in a strange town. And to maybe bring down the wall and get comfortably numb for a few hours before you climb back into the broken hamster wheel of your career and scamper round again and again…

Maybe you didn’t know it at the time, but you and Dorothy have been friends for, oh, ever so long. Since maybe back before you were in primary two and Miss Simpson started in on the utterly bowdlerized sexed coursework, which was all they were allowed to hand out back then. Back in the early nineties, in the dog days of Section 28—the part of the Local Government Act that banned local councils and education authorities from admitting that homosexuality even existed, much less allowing teachers to tell isolated kids that being destined for the Adam and Steve alternative didn’t mean they were pariahs or perverts—back then, even aged eight, you’d figured out for yourself that this stuff was all wrong. You’ll never get me to do that with a boy. Well, maybe—but why bother? It’s an awful lot of hard work—and no little mess—for something that doesn’t look much like anything you’d call fun.

On the other hand, that was before you hit your teens—and ran into crushes and BFFs and all the weirdly incomprehensible playground politics that never really made sense to you. Because your crushes were all wrong, and you were afraid to talk about them: Is she a lesbo? was about the second worst thing they could say about anyone, and you knew that if you gave them even a hint about what you dreamed about, about what made you wake flushed and sweating in the small hours, it’d be the absolute end, utter humiliation for the rest of your life.

So you giggled along with them, and learned to lie, didn’t admit to watching and rewatching Xena on video until the tapes chewed themselves up, and made a point of going to church so that when you said you believed in no-sex-before-marriage, they believed you and forgot to ask the obvious follow-on question: So who’s the lucky boy, then? You even did the Alpha course when you were eighteen, and lied enthusiastically right up until the speaking in tongues bit (which caught in your throat).

But then it was time for university. Where you met your inner Dorothy and got to know her… quite well.

Learning who you are is something every teenager goes through: But if your identity isn’t an identikit match for any of the role models on offer, it can take quite a while and take you up some strange paths on the way. You figured out you wanted to be a cop quite early—maybe it was Uncle Bert’s fault (even though he never bothered taking the sergeant’s exam), and maybe it was connected to the hard-shell uniformed image: self-sufficient, justified, not taking shit from ignorant assholes. You wanted that, you wanted it badly, and you believed in rules and telling the truth and punishing bullies. But maybe there was something else going on as well, something you didn’t understand at the time.

When you got your A-level grades and that place at university and broke away from the home-town claustrophobia for the first time, you didn’t bother joining any wishy-washy clubs and societies: You signed up for Archery and SCUBA Diving rather than the Feminists Society or LGBT Soc. You did your drinking in a pub on the wrong side of the tracks, where you unconsciously felt safe, not realizing that you were missing out on all the torrid flesh-pots of academia; and it was from the local bears that you learned about gay culture at second hand. Learned their jokes, learned their slang, learned “friends of Dorothy” as archaic code for the love that dared not speak its name (once upon a time).

You never realized that the Feminists Society was the bed-hopping club of your dreams; or that if you’d hung out in the Student’s Union on campus, you could have had your pick from the conveyor-belt sushi buffet of dungaree-wearing baby dykes in LGBT Soc.

(At least, until they learned you were studying to be a cop.)

Mary was the turning point. Portsmouth, Pompey: a naval town, going back hundreds of years—and where you get warships, you get sailors. Some of whom—you can imagine Kylie in Lower Sixth hissing it in disbelief—were lesbians. Who did not hang out around the university campus but were certainly willing to take a gawky post-teen with aspirations towards a uniformed service under their wings and teach her stuff about herself that would be a source of nostalgia many years later. Mary was blonde and friendly and brisk, and for a while you’d been her girl in port: which was good while it lasted (Twelve months? Eighteen?) and left you on a tide of tears, clutching a much better understanding of who you were going to be when you grew up.

All of which is fifteen years and more in your past, but goes some way towards explaining how you got a bona grip on Polari before anybody told you that you were the wrong kind of feminist; why you sigh whenever you see a navy ship in the waters of the Firth; and how come you think it’s hilarious that your on-again off-again will-she-orwon’t-she nuisance lover is called Dorothy Straight.

ANWAR: Office Worker

You smell hot oil and cardamom as you walk through the front door: “Hi, Bibi, I’m home!”

She’s in the kitchen. “Yes, dear,” she calls distractedly. “Have you seen Naseem? I sent him round to Uncle Lal’s for a bunch of methi, and he’s not come back. I think he’s playing with his English friends again”—in Bibi’s world English is a wild-card ethnicity: It could equally mean Scottish or Lithuanian—“and he’s forgotten, the little scamp…”

“No, haven’t seen him.” You suppress the urge to grump at her (What am I, his nursemaid?) as you close the front door and hang your jacket up. The boy will be fine; you can locate him on GPS just as soon as you take the sock off your phone… “I’ve been looking for an office. I think I’ve found one.”

“Oh, good! Hey, come and be a dear and help peel these onions? You know they make me…” cry, you mentally autocomplete, suppressing a snort and heading into the kitchen. It’s one of Bibi’s stranger foibles: Despite the day job, she insists on cooking, but she can’t, absolutely can’t, peel and chop onions. (You said “no” and watched her try, just the once, years ago: The memory of what it did to her eyes is still enough to make you wince. Now she’s got a German gadget to chop them up, but getting the outer skin off first is a man’s job… where is that boy?)

You join Bibi in the kitchen, where she’s frying up spices, and take a knife to the offending onions. (It’s probably her contact lenses. Why can’t she just wear spectacles while she’s cooking?) “Your auntie Sameena called round earlier, you know? She was wanting to know all about this mystery job of yours, but I told her it was none of her business until you are good and ready to tell everyone. Trade secrets. That hushed her up, I can tell you. She watches too many trashy spy soaps from Karachi; she thinks you’re still secretly a black-hat hacker…”

You wordlessly pass her the bowl of onions. She stuffs them into the German gadget, closes the lid, and stares at you significantly as she puts some serious arm action into the handle. It’s a sign that she expects you to read her mind—she’s a firm believer in male telepathy, and you’ve never quite had the nuts to break it to her that she’d do much better at silent communication if she simply stuck to jerking your dick in Morse code. You waggle your eyebrows at her. “What is it?”

She pauses, then looks up at you. “What is this mysterious job that you need to rent an office for, oh my husband?” She’s using this oddly stilted excuse for a private language she picked up from fuck-knows-where—some Bollywood musical version of domestic married bliss perhaps—she’s even batting her eyelashes. You may be telepathically deaf, but even you can figure out that this is the feminine equivalent of boldface and double-underlined capitals.

You lean close, put an arm around her shoulder, and ask her: “Can you keep a secret, oh my wife?”

She leans against you, seeking contact, which is nice (for once, there are no kids present). “If you ask me to, nicely…”

You kiss the top of her head. “Alright. But please don’t tell your mother; she’ll get too excited.

“It’s all to do with that job interview I had last week. The one the Gnome sent my way—”

“I knew it!” She tenses angrily. “That rat!” She doesn’t pull away, but you can feel her quiver with indignation, and something inside you locks up tight.

Bibi doesn’t know your exact relationship with Adam, but he’s been around occasionally, and she doesn’t like or trust him: She knows he’s a business associate, and that’s bad enough for her—the kind of business associate whose company landed you in Saughton, she thinks. Nonsense: It was just a spot of bad luck. But needs must, and ruffled feathers need smoothing: “No, love, it’s not something I’m doing for him; it’s just something he was able to point my way. It’s not big, but it’s useful, and there’s money in it, and more importantly, it’ll convince the social workers that I’m getting my life straightened out.”

“Is it legal?” she asks, pointedly.

“It’s more than legal: It’s for a government.”

“Well then.” That shuts her up for a moment, but not for two: She’s not stupid. “What government? The Scottish—”

“Hsst, no.” The current administration is a hive of snake-fondling Christians, in league with the Wee Frees; luckily it looks as if they’re going to go down hard at the next election. “You see, the job interview wasn’t in London, and I didn’t get the sleeper train: I had to fly all the way to Przewalsk! And I got the job. I’m going to be”—you savour the moment as you prepare to tell her—“the honorary consul in Edinburgh for the Independent Republic of Issyk-ouch!”

You were about to say Kulistan when your loving, obedient wife dropped the German gadget on your foot. “Oh!” She ignores your injury and scrabbles around on the floor in pursuit of the onion compartment, which has taken on a life of its own and is rolling enthusiastically towards the table. You stifle a rude word—being German, the gadget is over-engineered and surprisingly heavy—and instead bend over and pick up the detachable handle. The plastic collar where it fits onto the onion eviscerator (or whatever it is called) has broken, and there is a smell of burning—worse, of hot metal—from the frying pan.

Bibi stands up, snorting deeply like an angry heifer as she clutches a clear plastic tub of finely chopped onions: Her chest rises and falls fetchingly under her blouse as she stares at you in disbelief. “Honorary what? You’re making shit up again, you worthless sack of—” Then she blinks and lunges past you in the direction of the cooker: “Oh, my pan! Oh no! This is a disaster!”

Right at that moment the front door opens with a fanfare of brassy pre-teen boys’ voices, and everything gets a little vague. You are not sure how the plastic-collared German onion-destroying gadget’s handle ends up in the frying pan, or why the turmeric ends up in the bowl of gram flour and the whole mess ends up on the floor, or where the smell of burning plastic is coming from, because the smoke detector has gone off its little electronic trolley and is screeching loud enough to wake the dead: But you beat a hasty retreat from the self-deconstructing kitchen.

“Go and help your mother,” you sternly tell your son, who is clutching a paper bag and chattering excitedly about something football-related that he and his friend Mo have done. Then you tiptoe away with a sinking heart. Bibi will blame you for setting the kitchen on fire, and she’ll make you go chase after a template for the broken part of the German gadget and repair the thing. Why do your attempts to do good for her always seem to end up this way?

Your hard work has paid off. In the process of examining commercial properties you stumbled upon some most remarkably posh digs at a knock-down price for your consular mission. It’s in one corner of a modernist glass cube that is embedded like a gestating alien larva within the bowels of the former post office headquarters on North Bridge. The Gothic architraves of Scottish Baronial limestone pulse with an eerie green radiance after dusk; passers-by who peer between the sandstone window casements can see the cleaning robots casting long shadows across the cube’s windows as they skitter hither and yon. It’s supposedly haunted by the ghost of a Microsoft sales rep who hanged herself in the central atrium a couple of decades ago. Some of the Ghost Tours from the Royal Mile have taken to stopping by late at night.

Admittedly, your stipend does not stretch to anything particularly plush: Your wee niche in the former Microsoft HQ is a three-metre-by-four room in a shared office suite. It’s half-filled by a scratched-up pine desk and a pre-owned Aeron chair the management threw in as a sweetener. The rest of the suite is overrun by programmers from a local gaming corporation who rent two entire floors above you. They’re working on some kind of Artificial Reality project—you made the fatal mistake of asking one of them, and your eyes glazed over before he reached the fourth paragraph of nerdspeak without stopping to draw breath. But at least you’re not hot-desking, or hanging out your shingle above Rafi’s phone-unlocking and discount-print shop on Easter Road. No, indeed. You’ve come up in the world, you have an office of your own, you wear a suit and tie to work, and people respect you.

(Well, we’ll soon see about that.)

Mr. Webber was certainly taken aback at your last interview. “Representing a consortium of central Asian commercial interests in the Midlothian region?” He doodled a note on his tablet. “Well, Anwar, you never cease to surprise me. A family connection, I assume?” You grinned and refrained from blabbing, but produced the documentation when he asked to see it. The smug bastard really raised an eyebrow when you showed him the letterhead. He’s going to check it out, but the beauty is that it will check out. Which means your future sessions with him will be reduced to thirty-second ticky-boxes rather than real probation interviews. Going straight doesn’t get much straighter than wearing a suit and working for a foreign government.

Actually, there’s fuck-all work in it. You’ve set up your office and your desk just so, and you’ve skimmed the helpful handbook they’ve prepared for honorary consuls. The first IBAN draft hits your bank account with a thud, and now you’re sitting pretty. Cousin Shani’s handling your tax—she’s an accountant—and you’re in credit and in employment. But after the first few days of scurrying around filling out online forms, it’s a bit boring. As the Gnome surmised, few natives of Issyk-Kulistan pass through Scotland. In fact, it’s a lot boring. There isn’t even any email to answer.

Alas, you’ve got to be behind the desk during core hours, all twenty of them a week. After a bit, you ask Tariq if you can borrow a pad so you can work on his dating website while you’re holding the fort: Nobody who walks in will know it from what you’re supposed to be doing, and you can do with the cash.

So you’re there one midafternoon, grinding your teeth over a broken style sheet, when the doorbell chimes. At first you mistake it for your IDE complaining about a syntax error, but then it rings again, and you see the desk set blinking its light at you. You’ve got company.

“Hello? Uh, consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan?”

The desk set clears its throat. “Hello, the consulate? Please to be letting us in?”

You stare for a couple of seconds, then figure out which button to push on the antique console. You hear the front door open and hide Tariq’s pad before you stand up and go to see who it is.

Two men are peering twitchily around the lobby area of the shared offices. One’s in his late twenties, and the other is considerably older. They’ve both got close-cropped hair, bushy moustaches, and an indefinable air of perplexity that screams foreigner at you. The younger one is clutching the handle of a gigantic rolling case. “Hello? Can I help you?” you ask, politely enough, and the young guy nearly jumps out of his skin.

“Er, hello, this is consulate of… Przewalsk?” The younger guy’s English is clearly a second language—or third. “Hussein Anwar?”

“That’s me,” you say, nodding. “Can I ask what your business is, sir?” You really want to get back to fixing Tariq’s botched style sheet, and you haven’t snapped into the right head space, but it comes out sounding patronizing and officious.

The old guy turns to his young companion and rattles something off. The young guy replies, then turns to you. “He says we need to speak in your office. We are visiting trade delegation. Felix Datka sends us to you.”

Oh. Well that puts a different face on things! “Certainly, if you’d like to follow me?”

Your office is equipped with two plastic visitors chairs and a regrettably non-plastic rubber plant, which has hideous yellow-rimmed holes in its leaves but refuses to die despite your daily libation of coffee grounds. You usher the trade delegation past the plant and wave them into the seats. “What brings you to Edinburgh?” you ask.

“Emails are you has read, the?” begins the old guy before his young companion takes over: “My friend here, he is being lead trade mission to sell produce of our factories to foreign markets. There should an email be. We bring here for you a consignment of trade samples, to be distributed to visitors.”

The old guy nods emphatically. “You give we.” He waves at the huge and villainous suitcase, which is already settling into the carpet. “Samples.”

“Uh, yes. I see. What kind of samples?”

You watch, fascinated, as the young guy fiddles with the substantial locks on the case. He opens the lid with a flourish, not unlike a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. “Look!” he announces.

The suitcase is full of white paper bags. He pulls one out and hands it to you. The label reads: INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE. “For Western home bread-maker machine,” says the young guy, as the old guy grins broadly and nods. “Is produced by People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan! Taste very good, no grit, batteries included, just add water.”

“Batteries?” You shake your head.

“Yeast,” he says hastily. “You give. Visitors.”

You eye up the enormous suitcase. “You want me to give visitors bags of bread mix?” you ask him. “But I don’t have room here—”

The old guy nods again. “Give he you visitors bread.” He looks at you, and suddenly you recognize his expression and you just about shit yourself. “Is visitors, yes? Email, is.”

“The instructions are for you in the email,” the young guy adds helpfully. He stands up. “We go, now. Other consuls, more trade!” He grins alarmingly widely and reaches out to shake your hand. His skin is dry and hot, his grip tight as a handcuff. “Am thanking you. You are good man, says Colonel Datka.”

After the “trade delegation” leaves, you sit behind your desk breathing heavily for a couple of minutes. The suitcase crouches behind the dying rubber plant, like a snooping secret policeman intent on exposing your guilt. Who do they think I am? Does Datka think I’m stupid, or something? You glare at the case. It’s obviously drugs. That’s what this is all about. They’ve figured out how to use diplomatic bags and “trade delegations” to smuggle heroin out of Abkhazia or Ruritania or somewhere, and now you’re expected to play host to an endless revolving-door parade of dealers. Well, it won’t do! You weren’t born yesterday. If they think you’re going to tamely take the fall, for a mere thousand euros a month—

You’ve got a wife and kids to look after. And you’ve met Datka. Colonel Datka. Spoken to him. He’s not stupid, he’s got to know this is shit.

Curiosity gets the better of you, and you reach for the white paper bag on the edge of your desk. It weighs about a kilogram. You close your eyes, hefting it. The suitcase has got to hold at least fifty more of them, from the way it’s digging in the carpet. If this is heroin, it’s got to be worth half a million on the street. Datka’s met you. Would you leave yourself in possession of half a million in heroin, sight unseen?

Holy Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, peace be unto him: No, you wouldn’t. But Datka knows where you live, he knows where Bibi and Naseem and Farida and everything you hold precious can be found, and you’ve met plenty of cheerfully ruthless men who wouldn’t hesitate to use—

Your hands are sweating, and you feel yourself shaking as you tear open the flap on the bag of INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE, Produce of People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan, and jam your thumb inside, crush the coarse flour against the paper, raise it to your mouth, and suck.

It’s just flour.

Your shuddering gasp of relief is that of a condemned man receiving his pardon on the steps of the gallows; it’s no less heart-felt. You lean back in your chair, eyes screwed shut. You’ve never been much of one for your daily observations, but right now you make a mental note to lay in a prayer rug against the prospect of future roving visits by feral international trade delegations. God is indeed great: He’s sent you organic stone-ground bread mix instead of heroin.

The only question is, why? And so at four o’clock you switch on call divert, lock the office behind you, and go in search of the Gnome.

This afternoon, Adam is holding court in the back of the Halfway House, a wee nook alongside Fleshmarket Close, an improbably stepped thoroughfare that runs up the arse crack from the City Art Gallery to Cockburn Street. (You know you’re in the Old Town when the street’s so steep they’ve been talking about fitting an escalator for the tourists.) You take a short-cut through the upper retail deck of Waverley Station, dodging the commuter crowds, and reach the front door with only a slight shortness of breath. “Ah, Anwar,” calls the Gnome: “Mine’s a pint of sixty bob.”

Bloody typical. You sidle up to the bar and smile ingratiatingly until the wee lassie deigns to notice you and pours your pints—your IPA and the aforementioned sticky black treacle syrup for the Gnome. You carry it to the back. The Gnome smacks his lips and slides his pad away. “I didn’t think there was any signal down here,” you say.

“There isn’t usually.” The Gnome looks pleased with his pint of mild. “Mm, it’s in fine form today. Chewy, with a fine malt aftertaste and some interesting hops.”

You open your messenger bag, extricate the (slightly leaky) sack of bread mix, and plop it on the table in front of him. “Would it go with this?”

The Gnome stares at it for a moment, then picks it up. “You scanned it,” he says tersely. “Where did you get it?”

“No RFIDs,” you tell him. “Only the best organic ingredients, said the visiting trade delegation. I’m to hand them out to visitors, according to Colonel Datka.” You chug half your pint in a single panicky sharp-edged gulp. “What have you got me into?”

The Gnome, for once, is at a loss for words. “I dinna ken, sonny,” he says, lapsing into a self-parody of his ancestral Ayrshire accent. “Sorry. It appears to be… Bread mix.” He peers at the label. “Lots of malted barley: I suppose you could use it for home brewing. Some hops, a couple of demijohns, the yeast’s probably not ideal…” He trails off thoughtfully. Then he looks up at you. “It’s bread mix,” he says crisply. “Tell yourself it’s just bread mix. Give it to anyone who stops by. Tell them it’s bread mix. If by some chance the police pay you a visit? It’s just bread mix.”

You’ve got that frozen feeling again. “Fucking fuck, are you telling me—”

The Gnome reaches out and grabs your wrist. “It’s just bread mix,” he hisses. He stabs at the bag with one index finger: “If you put that in your bread-maker—if you’ve got one—it will make bread. End of story. That’s all you need to know.”

You pull your hand back. “No it isn’t.”

“Believe me,” he says slowly.

You cross your arms, mulish. “Tell me. Or it’s all going down the shitter tonight.”

He begins to smile. “I wouldn’t do that. Dough tends to clog the pipes. Just think of the plumber’s face…”

Despite yourself, you begin to relax. “What is it, really?”

The Gnome fidgets with his drink for a few seconds, then takes a mouthful and wipes his lips dry with the back of a grubby sleeve whose self-cleaning fabric he’s long since overloaded. “It’s bread mix. What you mean is, what else is it.”

“What? What else can it be?”

“Keep thinking that thought.” He smiles disquietingly. “Probably nothing, without Secret Ingredient X.” He whistles between his teeth. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”

“Secret Ingredient X?”

“You read about so much stuff in the science blogs these days.” The Gnome holds up his pint. “Zymurgy: the oldest human science.”

“Zy—”

“Fermentation. Brewing. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, brewer’s yeast. It was one of the first organisms to have its genome sequenced, you know that? It’s used in baking as well; it’s what makes the bread rise.” He picks up the packet. “This bread mix is interesting. You could brew with it. The beer would probably taste like shit—it doesn’t have any hops—but it’ll still be beer.” And with that, he slides it into one capacious coat pocket.

You take another deep gulp from your pint glass. “So?”

“So think of S. cerevisiae as a handy little biological factory.” The Gnome peers at the bag of bread mix. “Normally it’ll produce bread. But suppose you want to send some interesting chemical feedstock to someone. All they need to know is that they chuck the bread mix in a sterile demijohn with five or ten litres of warm water. And then… It produces crap beer. Only before they put it in the demijohn, they add Secret Ingredient X, which is probably some dietary supplement you can buy over the counter in any health-food shop. And in the presence of Secret Ingredient X, some extra metabolic pathway gets switched on, because this is not your ordinary S. cerevisiae; this is mutant ninja genetically engineered superyeast.”

“But what does it make?”

The Gnome finishes his pint and meets you with a bright-eyed smile. “I really have no idea. And you know what? I don’t particularly want to know. You don’t want to know. Colonel Datka doesn’t want you to know; otherwise, he’d have told you. It’s a lot simpler if all anybody knows is that you’ve been told to hand out free samples of organic bread mix by your employer’s trade delegation. Oh, and we didn’t have this conversation, and we weren’t in the back of a pub where there’s sod-all phone signal and no free net access and no CCTV because it’s quarried out of the side of a granite cliff-face. Are we singing from the same hymn book?”

After a moment, you nod. “Is this what you were asking me to keep an eye out for?”

“Could be.” The Gnome reaches into one pocket and pulls out a fat lump of dead cow-skin, as battered and shapeless as if it has been whacked with a hammer. He opens it and pulls out a stack of bank-notes. “This is for you. Don’t spend them all in the same place.”

You reach out and snatch the money. There’s the thick end of a thousand euros there, maybe more. Before the savage deflation of the past few years, you might have thought he was cheaping on you. But not now. It’s enough to pay the mortgage arrears for three months. “I don’t know if I should be doing this.”

The Gnome’s grin slips. “Neither do I, laddie, neither do I.” He puts the wallet away, then pats you on the knee. “But just consider the alternatives.”

TOYMAKER: Headhunter

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

This is not rocket science. (Rocket science: fucking 1930s shit invented by Nazi übermensch engineers and so easy that by the 1990s even a bunch of camel-fucking towel-heads could master it.)

This is not AI. (Artificial intelligence: fucking 1950s shit invented by Jew-boy intellectuals at Stanford and MIT and so useless that by the 1990s its highest achievement was beating a vodka-swilling Russian commie dog-fucker at chess.)

This is not genetic engineering. (Genetic engineering: fucking 1970s shit invented by… you get the picture.)

This is logistics!

It goes back to the fucking Stone Age!

They can put a genetically engineered AI on Mars, but they can’t shift a fucking suitcase between two hotels without losing it.

I am surrounded by ants, and if this continues I am going to pull on my size-fourteen boots and go for a stomp. See if I don’t.

This isn’t a complex job. Truly, it isn’t. I move hotels every day or two—in fact, I’ve been doing it every day or two for several years now. It’s not as if my job’s compatible with having a mortgage or living in a fucking suburban shoe-box with an avocado bathroom suite and a bored housewife and nosy neighbours peering over the picket fence, is it? Santa’s got a lot of travelling to do if all good children are going to get their toys, and the jet lag’s a mother-fucker. (And so’s my carbon footprint, but that’s not my problem: The whiners’ll figure out a way to fix global warming. Meanwhile, I fly business class.)

As I was saying, I travel a lot, and I travel light. 5.62 kilograms, to be precise. That’s the maximum payload weight I allow myself to pack in my trolley case—that, and the clothes on my back and the contents of my brief-case. If it goes over 5.62 kilos, I have to throw something out. You can get a lot into 5.62 kilos: shaver, suit, change of shirt and underwear, commercial samples, computers. Hotels have same-day cleaning stores that sell toiletries and I’m on expenses and if something starts getting shabby I buy a replacement and it goes in the trash, capisce?

My needs are simple: I need a hotel room and my luggage and a desk to sit at with the pad at the end of the day (and no, I’m not stupid—I don’t keep anything important on my pad, it’s all waiting in the cloud—I am in a very virtual line of work, almost ethereal).

Anyway, this is what I am paying you for.

It inconveniences me mightily if I get to my new hotel room after a hard day’s work and my rolling flight case with 5.62 kilograms of home is not there waiting for me.

I need a change of underwear, and I need a shave, and I need my luggage. Only somebody has lost my shit.

I hold you responsible.

I see you nodding like a parcel-shelf dog. No, don’t look at me like that. This is about logistics, the necessary life-support infrastructure for the modern commercial traveller. If you can’t get your logistics right, you don’t deserve to be in the hotel business, and I will personally make it my business to see that your corporate customer-satisfaction officer learns that there is a day manager on the front desk at this hotel who is fucking off the customers. And it won’t stop there. You will start to piss away corporate hospitality accounts like a junkie bleeding out into the urinal through his dick. Your staff will cross the road to avoid you, and you will see vultures circling overhead because your days in the hospitality trade will be numbered. You will lose your job and the government will foreclose on your mortgage and you will be cast out on the street to starve like an abandoned dog or be eaten alive by feral mutant children who will skull-fuck your rotting corpse through the eye-sockets with their huge gangrenous organs. This is all because you neglected to pay sufficient attention to your one most important customer today, namely me. No, don’t you fucking look at me like that, you cunt! If it’s not me, then it could be anybody else who walks up to your desk today, this month, this year.

It could be anybody, as long as they hate you with a fiery, all-consuming passion and decide to devote the next few months of their life to monstering you into an early grave for the sheer fun of pulling apart a quivering lump of feckless time-expired meat.

Get me my luggage, mister hospitality manager. It was due here two hours ago via interhotel transfer from the Marriott on Lothian Road—here’s the receipt. I’ll be generous: You’ve got a couple of hours to save your job, your career, and your life. I’m going to go hunt down some dinner. Make sure my luggage is in my room and waiting for me when I get back, and we’ll say no more about this matter.

—What line of work am I in, you ask?

It’s not really any of your fucking business.

I sell toys.

You’re the acting Toymaker in Edinburgh this month, here to take care of a nasty little headache for the Operation (along the way to setting up a new subsidiary). Supply-chain logistics and order fulfilment in the Central Belt—the Edinburgh–Glasgow M8 conurbation, where two-thirds of the population of the gallus wee free time-share republic huddle together below the highlands—have taken a dive in the shitter of late. Unfulfilled demand remains high, but supply is patchy, and there is a risk of ad hoc competition emerging.

Competition would be bad. The Operation likes its subsidiaries to maintain a supply-side monopoly and goes to some lengths to keep it that way, even tolerating competition between local franchisee storefronts—it’s a significant opportunity cost, but deterring interlopers from entering the market in the first place is cheaper than dislodging them once they’re dug in.

Scotland is a mess. Word came down from the very top: Someone needs to go into the field and fix things. It’s not just a matter of repairing the existing franchise, but of evaluating new market opportunities and if necessary taking the over-the-hill cash cow to the slaughterhouse, then bootstrapping a new clean-room start-up to replace it. Scotland is a small but significant market. As an entrepreneur backed by the Operation’s training, guidance, and investor confidence, you can seize the opportunity to make your mark without pissing on the gate-posts of any of the big incumbents. So you raise your virtual hand, volunteer for the job, and pull on the green wellies to wade out into the sticks and take control.

Contrary to what you told the swithering fuckwad on the hotel front desk, it is not your habit to fly everywhere business class. In fact, you avoid flying wherever possible. You have gone to great lengths to maintain a clean identity, using all the tools the Operation has made available to you. Airports are surveillance choke points, and the ubiquitous camera networks have AI behavioural monitors these days. Your unfortunate medical condition has certain side-effects—nobody say “Voight-Kampff test” or you’ll rip their fucking lungs out and shit down their windpipe—and if someone’s told them to look for members of an organization that pursues an enlightened policy of positive discrimination with respect to people with certain neurological disabilities, you’d have nowhere to run. (It’s outrageous—blatant discrimination—but it seems there’s one rule for the neurotypical, and another for people like you.)

So you travel by train and ship. Freighter from Anchorage to Vladivostok, trans-Siberian express to Moscow, more tedious railway time-table shite until you arrived in the Schengen zone, then finally some blessed modernity. Two fucking weeks, and all because you’re a persecuted minority.

The shiny new shinkansen blasted through the English countryside at over three hundred kilometres per hour, but you couldn’t help noticing that not even Japan Rail could fix the English public-service disease. You reflected on the issue at length—perhaps if they made their train managers chop off a finger joint every time they were five minutes late or ran out of coffee in first class—but on reflection, you decided the health-and-safety busybodies would have a cow. And so you glared stonily at the refreshments manager before you went back to refactoring the structure of the regional business unit that the Operation sent you to kill or cure.

There are numerous obstacles to progress.

Your predecessor in Scotland, the man who established the Operation’s subsidiary in that country, died unexpectedly two years ago—of high blood pressure, not low treachery. He was a knuckle-dragging gangster of the old school, a veteran of the underground wars that thrashed the siloviki revenants out of the EU a decade ago. A street warrior, not a theoretician, in other words—and his business philosophy reflected his background. But he understood the basics.

All the Operation’s subsidiaries and start-ups operate on the principle of making dreams come true: recondite or frightening and illegal dreams, true, but dreams nonetheless. They require a marketing operation to bring the wares to the attention of the buying public, a fulfilment arm to get the goods to the punters, and a collection arm to pay for it all. So far, so good.

Violence is a regrettable but necessary overhead on the balance sheets of the Operation’s start-ups. Like any enterprise that operates beyond the boundaries delineated by governments—with their self-proclaimed monopoly on the use of violence and their hypocritical attitude towards the legitimacy of certain markets—they must provide for their own defence. To the Operation’s way of thinking, there is much to be said for the rule of fist and baseball bat: By keeping the beatings sub-lethal, costs are constrained—and the threat of escalation remains in reserve. Blood is a big expense, as the man said. Bodies are costly, warfare is capital-intensive, and if you have to dig out the machine-guns and start hiring soldiers, your profit margin is about to go into a power dive.

Your predecessor, despite resembling a rabid silverback gorilla in both physical appearance and personal hygiene, understood this instinctively: He ran a tight ship and maintained credit control in a drastically hands-on manner. He had a rep for tittering unnervingly as he stroked his baseball bat and stared at his debtors’ knee-caps. Almost everybody paid up on the spot: Nobody wanted to find out just what he was laughing at.

Unfortunately you lack the physical presence and instinctive sense of the theatrical to make this strategy work. Moreover, since the Gorilla went to monkey heaven, the franchisees and street-level clients have become unduly frisky. Getting a handle on the major defaulters is proving tedious although there are plenty of small fry to make an example of and opportunities for profit along the way: Thanks to the Organization, you are in a position to outsource enforcement to contractors in the budget-medical-supplies business.

But you don’t want to waste your time playing hands-on godfather to a slumful of nitwitted glue sniffers. It’s a lousy business model, with no scope for exponential scaling and monetization of the sweat equity you’re going to have to inject to make any headway. The outputs from the Gorilla’s franchise scale linearly with the human inputs, because criminal retailing is labour-intensive. And while the Gorilla was content to weed his patch in person, you have higher ambitions than a lifetime of stoop labour.

The first thing they teach you in VC school is to pick a business model with scope for non-linear growth. Consequently, you have concluded that it would be far better to trash the Gorilla’s operation completely and establish a new one of your own design (“leveraging best-practice agile methodologies to maximize return on stakeholder investment in accordance with the Operation’s total start-up commitment protocols,” as your funding pitch puts it) than to try to nurse the emphysemic mafia hold-over out of its intensive care bed and back into a wheelchair.

So you drew up your plans and pitched them at the Operation, talked through the cash flow and gained their grudging assent—and more importantly, the first round of stakeholder equity to bootstrap the new business, on condition you keep the old cash cow pumping for the time being. And now you need to recruit an executive team for the start-up.

You’re about to go Gangster 2.0…

One of the disadvantages of the virtual corporate lifestyle is that it keeps you too busy for the local health clubs and dojos. In response, you’ve developed a number of ad hoc work-out substitutes. One of them is that you never catch a bus or a taxi if you can rent a bicycle or walk. Another—which also happens to be good COMSEC practice—is never to contact clients via the networks if you can visit them in person without being observed. So when you walk out of the Hilton, your first stop is the Lothian Bike railing outside.

You always plan to turn up on a client’s doorstep spick and span, unexpected as a hangman. To this end you buy lightweight business suits that are impregnated with a magic nanotech fabric treatment that sheds sweat and body odours, not to mention dirt flung up from road surfaces. Before you start pedalling, you fire up a nifty (and highly illegal) applet that makes the jailbroken disposaphone you’re carrying emulate a cluster of zombie GPS transmitters: You tell it to send your rented bicycle’s tiny mind on a random tour of the Old Town. (It’s all for the best if nobody can interrogate the bike about your movements later.)

Once you’re on the bike lane, the lack of wireless access leaves you blind—but it’s a welcome, familiar feeling, like having your own personal cloaking field. It’s a good palliative against the anxiety you feel for your missing luggage. The police INDECT networks might still be able to track you if they were watching right now, but the rich data they depend on is so bandwidth-intensive that it isn’t routinely archived: In another twenty-four hours, there’ll be no trace that you ever came this way. Before you set off, you downloaded a map and memorized a series of left/right branches and waypoints—it’s an archaic skill called “orienteering”—so you make good time, despite the lack of navaids.

You review Number One Client’s background yet again as you pedal along beneath the trees that line Dean Park Crescent (all the crescents here are tree-lined these days, legacy of a government scheme to roll back urban warming), giving your thighs as thorough a work-out as any stationary cycling machine.

Number One Client has been of interest to the Operation for some time. He has a number of technical aptitudes that have brought him to prominence in the employment database, and to your personal attention as a candidate for head-hunting. In particular, he’s been of use in the past for organizing medium-scale redistribution of grey-market fabber feedstock. He’s proficient in highly scalable network-mediated marketing operations with high-yield outputs, and has a proven record of organizing wholesale-supply-chain ventures that include unmonitored cross-border trade, central multi-carrier dispatch of bespoke custom products, and VAT evasion. Which, all in all, is a pretty good match for what you’re looking for in a chief operations officer.

The Gorilla didn’t see any reason to employ someone with Number One Client’s characteristics, but you’ve already established his operational shortcomings. The Gorilla’s idea of how to sell this particular product was straight out of the nineteenth-century arts and crafts movement. Whereas Number One Client’s business experience is a comfortably close approximation to the enterprise you intend to bootstrap; the only question remaining is, is Number One Client suitable management material? Especially at the level you’re planning to grow the business to.

Number One Client is not, alas, a flawless ruby in the dust. He has a criminal conviction and has served a stretch in prison—that, on its own, is sufficient to disqualify him from executive progression within the Operation. But failure to obey the eleventh commandment is no obstacle to a management post, under suitable governance, and you need somebody with Number One Client’s aptitudes and (equally importantly) local connections. A preliminary interview is indicated.

And so you turn into an avenue of big stone houses and dismount at the kerb beside Number One Client’s town house, lock the bicycle, walk up to the front door, and (careful not to touch it with your bare skin) ring Michael Blair’s doorbell.

LIZ: Black Swans

You’re out of the office early (flexitime is one of the perks of the back-office inspector’s rank these days) and go home to get changed for your date with Dorothy. Not that you’re flustered or anything: If your life was a house, she’d merely be the unexploded bomb ticking away in the wreckage of your cellar, capable of blowing you all the way to Oz at any moment.

You rush home and:

This is your life, and there’s no rug big enough to sweep it all under—at least not in the half-hour you’ve allowed yourself for doing the Clark Kent/Superman phone-booth thing before you rush out again. So you compromise on:

Before you go out, you stare at the bathroom unit uncertainly, reflecting. You’ve spent twenty minutes rushing around like a schoolgirl on a first date, and to what end? It’s not like Dorothy doesn’t know what you are—faking soft edges will cut no ice. The thought’s meant to count, isn’t it? Or the gesture. You’re dressing up for her, or not dressing up for her—you’re old enough that you ought to know your own mind. You’ve been kicked in the teeth by love often enough that you should have figured out who you are by now. But you’ve fallen into an existential trap with this vocation of yours, haven’t you? It’s easy to know how you’re meant to function when you wear a uniform: You do the job and follow the procedures, and everyone knows what you’re meant to be doing. What you wear dictates how you behave.

… But there’s no uniform for a date with Dorothy.

You panic and get changed again, and in the end you make yourself late enough that you end up calling a taxi, sitting twitchily on the edge of the grey-and-orange seat as it grumbles uphill towards George Street. It bumps across the guided busway that bisects Queen Street and chugs up Dundas Street, wheezing to a halt at the corner: You pay up and climb out, and a trio of miniskirted girls nearly stab you to death with their stilettos as they stampede to get in. Just another night out on the tiles in Auld Reekie, nothing to see here but a single thirtysomething woman in sensible shoes walking towards a wine bar full of braying bankers.

Dorothy has found a stool at the bar and is sitting with her back to you, nursing a caipirinha and keeping a quiet watch on the huge mirror behind the bar. Stylish as ever, she makes you feel like a gawky schoolgirl just by existing. You make eye contact through the looking glass, and she gives a little wave of invitation as you walk towards her, a flick of the wrist. Then she’s turning, smiling, and you embrace self-consciously. She smells of lavender water. “Hey, darling, you’re looking gorgeous! How are you keeping?”

“I’m good. Yourself?” You step back, find there’s a gap in the row of bar-stools—but the next one over is already occupied by a bloke who’s the spitting image of a kiddie-fiddler you helped put away ten years ago. (Only ten years younger, of course.) You turn away from him hastily as Dorothy’s smile opens up like the sun, and she waves past you, attracting the barman’s hypnotized gaze.

“I’m in town for the next two weeks”—she runs a hand through her hair, which is a deeper chestnut red than it was last time you saw her, and about ten centimetres longer—“visiting the Cage out at Gogarburn for an ongoing evaluation at the bank: Then I’ve got a spot evaluation on some American company’s local operation.” The Cage is the secure zone within the National Bank of Scotland campus: Dorothy is an auditor, the kind who gets to travel a lot. Her little black dress is more boardroom than cocktail bar—doubtless her brief-case and jacket are waiting in the cloakroom—but with her string of pearls and porcelain complexion, she could make it work anywhere. “They’ve stuck me in a tedious hotel in the West End, Julian is in Moscow this month, so of course…” She raises a meticulously stencilled eyebrow at you.

“We can see about that.” The barman pauses in front of you. “White wine spritzer, please,” you tell him, and flash your ID badge before he can card you. You wait until he delivers before continuing: “Have you eaten yet?”

“No. But there’s a place round the corner that’s been getting good reviews.” She looks at you speculatively.

“Do you have any plans? Outside of work?” You can’t help yourself: You have to ask.

“I don’t know yet.” For a moment she looks uncertain. “This is an odd one.” You catch the warning before she continues. “I may have to put in lots of overtime. I was hoping we could catch up if the job permits.”

Dorothy’s always like this. Babs accused you of being married to the job (and she wasn’t wrong), but Dorothy makes you look like a slacker. That alone would be enough to make your relationship with her an on-again off-again thing: And that’s before you get round to thinking about Julian, her primary.

So you nod, hesitantly. “I don’t have a lot on in the evenings this week. And I’m free Saturday and Monday. Is there anything particular you want to do? Theatre, music—”

“I was hoping we could start by finding somewhere for dinner?” She bites her lip. “And then I’d like to pick your brains about a little problem I’ve got at work…”

Dorothy is indeed staying in a boring business hotel in the West End. You end up in the bar around midnight, by way of a sushi restaurant and a couple of rounds of margaritas. You’re not sure whether you’re meant to play predator or prey here—it’s been months since the last time your paths intersected—but you’ve got a plushly padded booth to yourselves, and you catch her stealing sly glances at you in the mirror while she’s at the bar ordering a round. “I can’t stay too late—I’m on shift tomorrow,” you tell her regretfully, as she sits down opposite and bends forward to peel off her pumps.

She curls her lower lip, pointedly not pouting. “That’s a shame,” she says. You freeze, outwardly expressionless as her unshod left foot comes into contact with the inside of your right calf. Question answered. “Didn’t you say you’re free Saturday?”

You catch your breath: “Yes, I am.” Actually, clearing weekend leave usually takes advance notice, but you’re on weekday office hours right now: You can swing Saturday and Monday if you need to. Maybe even swap Sunday for Monday… Her stockinged foot caresses your ankle. It’s smooth, muscular (all those hours in hotel health clubs), reminding you, rubbing. “That’s assuming I don’t get roped into the latest mess.”

She shows you her teeth. “What could possibly be more important than next Saturday?” (She’s playing with you. If her own job demanded it, she’d stand you up in a split second.) “I thought nothing ever happened in Innovative Crime? Have they got you back on CID?” She pulls back her foot, leaving you tingling.

“The day before yesterday I was on a community team assignment and got called in on what turned out to be homicide—not your usual ned-on-ned stabby action: more like Tarantino meets Dali.”

“Wow.” Her eyes widen. “Why are you here, then?” She nudges your foot again: But this time it’s an accident, not enemy action.

“Because after I corralled the witness and set up the incident room, CID turned up and took all my toys away.” You shrug. “Not that I’ve got a problem with that. I don’t need an extra helping of crap to top up my regular work-load. But Dickie—uh, we’re on Chatham House rules here, aren’t we?” She nods. “He’s the big swinging dick on the investigation, and he’s your classic narrow-focus, results-oriented, overdriven, alpha-male prick. He’s treating it as a regular crime and he’s looking for a suitable perp. Which is normally best practice and the right thing to do, except I happen to know that there was a death in, um, another jurisdiction around the same time, and it bears significant points of similarity. All of which scream meme at me. Internet meme, class one, virulent. Only Tricky Dickie doesn’t want to know.”

“Oy.” Dorothy leans back and takes a deep breath, then raises her glass. “I didn’t hear any of that, I take it.”

“No, of course not.” You nod at her. “What’s your sob story?”

“Work.” She pulls a face. “Another bloody ethics-compliance audit. You walk in the door, and everyone gets defensive, like they expect you to put them on a ducking stool and accuse them of witchcraft or something.”

“Ethics: It’s not just next door to Suffolk anymore.” It’s feeble and she’s heard it a thousand times but it still raises a smile.

Dorothy’s job is an odd one: catching corporate corruption before it metastasizes and infects society at large. After Enron collapsed—while you were still in secondary school—the Americans passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, accounting regulations for catching corporate malfeasance. But all they were looking for was accounting irregularities: symptoms of maladministration. The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.

Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiralling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.

The European Parliament responded by focussing on corporate governance. If corporations wanted to be legal citizens, the politicians riding the backlash declared, they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted, and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged—those who could look at an organization and sound a warning if its structure rewarded pathological behaviour. And as for the newly nationalized supermarket monopolies, a flourishing future as government-owned logistics hubs beckoned. After all, with no post offices, high-street banks, or independent general stores, who else could do the job?

“It’s a bank.” Dorothy shrugs. “We’re running a three-year review for them, focussing on human resources, internal promotion practices, and how they monitor compliance with social-policy directives for dealing with customers in default.” Defaults are a political hot potato in this deflationary age. The ground still hasn’t stopped shaking from the collapse of the noughties investment bubble, and only government intervention has stopped Scotland—and the other western EU members—following America down the road of mass repossessions, Greenspan favelas, and civil unrest. “Bankers aren’t stupid this decade; they know what happened to their predecessors. What we’re worrying about is getting to the next decade’s managers before they unlearn the lesson. And there’s some other stuff, but I can’t talk about that.”

Her mention of other stuff is uncharacteristically low-key. And you know Dorothy well enough to have a clue what makes her tick. “Usual rules?”

“Cross your heart and hope to spontaneously combust, more like.”

“Well.” You take a lick of salt from the rim of your glass, roll your tongue at her. “We can see about that.”

“I’m serious.” Her lips pale.

“So am I. What do you think would happen if I compromised a live intelligence-led investigation?” (Translation: Why do you want to tell me this?)

“Much the same.” She looks at you for a moment. “Is your phone on? Remove the battery.”

You stare at her. Then you reach into your handbag and take out your phone and pop the back of the case. “There’s a camera behind the bar. It’s overlooking the till, but it can see the mirror.”

“I know. I checked earlier. It’s hi-def, but we’re far enough away that it won’t record a good enough picture for lip-reading. And we’re less likely to be overheard here.” She pulls out her own phone and removes the battery. You suddenly feel as naked as you’ve ever been with her.

“You didn’t look me up just for old time’s sake,” you accuse.

“Not—entirely.” She doesn’t try to look away. “I’m sorry. Yes, I have an ulterior motive. I need a sanity check, Liz.”

“A sanity check? Banking ethics isn’t my—”

“This isn’t about banking. You’re on my disclosure notice; nobody’s going to think twice about me hooking up with a girl-friend.”

The indefinite article stings, a reminder of where you stand with Dorothy. “Disclosure notice. I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

She waves it off. “It’s a sealed declaration of interests, for the enhanced background enquiry—so I can’t be blackmailed. It’s basically just an enhanced CRB check with extras, Liz.” She pauses. “You’re not in the closet. I mean, at work. Are you?”

“Not for years.”

“Good. Look, what I’m concerned about is that nobody’s likely to listen in on this, and anybody who notices us here is going to assume the obvious.” She slides her leg against your knee again. “Oh yes, I’m looking forward to Saturday. Are you?” Her eyes are gleaming. You focus on her lips, glossy and plump with anticipation, and shiver.

“If I were a man, I’d call you a cock-tease.” You manage to summon up something not unlike a coy smile.

“I’d like to take you upstairs after this drink, but I think my room’s probably bugged.” She says it so casually, it takes you a moment to understand her words. “I can understand if you don’t want that. Listening in, I mean.”

It’s like a bucket of cold water in the face. “Who’s bugging you?”

“I’m not entirely sure. It goes back about two months; I ran across some rather weird correlations when I was going over the transactions for—um, never mind. Anyway, my boss buried my email and reassigned me when I tried to raise it with him last month. Said it was circumstantial, and we didn’t have the resources to go after random leads. Well, I’ve been doing some more digging, and when I got here, I found a concealed camera in my bedroom and one in the shower.”

There is a famous optical illusion: a silhouette of a vase, which—once you know what to look for—suddenly flips into a silhouette of two faces looking at each other. (Or vice versa.) You’re looking at Dorothy’s face and one moment you could have sworn she’s excited, turned on—and the next, she’s frightened. Context is everything.

“What do you think’s going on?” you ask her.

She shoves her glass to one side of the table and leans forward. “I can’t tell you the details. But part of what we do is abstract social-network analysis on waves, IM, email, phone calls—looking for indicators of pathological communications patterns. If you can track who’s talking to who, you can work out which parts of an organization work together, and see emergent patterns of behaviour. It goes back to the classic study on Enron’s email corpus in the noughties, but there’s been a lot of work since then on agent-assisted NLP and transitive clique identification… There’s also some promising work on determination of ethical or conspiratorial networks. There are other data sets we can trawl exhaustively—the banking crisis, the full corpus of internal communications left behind in the wake of the Goldman Sachs collapse. All the data sets from businesses we’ve audited since the corporate-responsibility criteria were introduced, suitably blinded and anonymized. We use them to spot warning signs. You get a different pattern of communication in groups who’re colluding to instigate a cover-up, for instance.”

At this point, you’re working hard to keep your eyes open. Dorothy would have made a kick-ass accountant if she hadn’t decided to go into corporate psychoanalysis: She could bore for Europe in the Olympics if she wanted to. But you ken where she’s going with this. It’s not so dissimilar to what you do in the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit—which, come to think of it, is how you met her in the first place, at a conference on pre-emptive gang-crime prevention. “What did you find?”

“What got my attention is the bank I’m here to audit—I got an anonymous tip to look into something and, well, there’s a pattern of communication in their investment arm that looks worryingly similar to some of the crazier stuff that was going on in 2007. Subprime investments, dangerous quant stuff. Unethical, if not illegal. Only it’s not real estate this time, Liz. I pulled the audit trail, and it turns out they’re investing heavily in options trades based on government bonds from a breakaway republic in the back end of Asia.

“What’s alarming me is… round about 2009, one of the things that happened during the great recession was that banks almost universally ran out of liquidity, all over the world, simultaneously. It got to the point where national regulators started turning a blind eye when their banks accepted deposits in cash from, uh, irregular sources. Money laundering. Some say up to a third of a trillion dollars in black money was laundered into the global banking system during the crash. It was the last hurrah of the great drugs cartels: Decriminalization and the dollar collapse effectively bankrupted them over the next decade. But ending the war on drugs didn’t end organized crime, and there are still gangs out there with money to launder. Anyway, I got a tip-off. Began looking for signs of weirdness in the money supply in the, the Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. We’ve got far less data on them than on our own banks, but I didn’t have to look hard. If they’re so poor, and they’ve got a 40 per cent unemployment rate, how come their GDP rose 30 per cent on independence?

“Anyway? I took it to my line manager, and he told me to lay off. It’s all inconclusive, and anyway, it’s outside our purview. Drop it completely, in other words. Then I got sent up here to do a routine audit, and it turns out that my hotel room’s bugged. Also—I think I spotted a man following me yesterday. On the tram, home from work. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m scared, Liz.”

There’s a time to stand on your work/life balance metric, and a time to throw the rule-book out the window. Dorothy is clearly frightened—so scared it took her three cocktails and a presumptively bug-free bar to open up to you. Unfortunately, a lot of what she told you is as confidential as the contents of your own ongoing investigations (i.e. it’s a honking great disciplinary—or even criminal—offence to talk about it out of school), not to mention reeking of some kind of artificial reality game to anyone who doesn’t know that she really is a chartered social-pathology analyst who works for the Department of Trade and Industry’s Ethical Oversight Inspectorate. (A fancy way of saying she’s a canary in the kind of coal mine where they call the Serious Fraud Office to deal with the cave-ins.)

So, despite being off duty, you put the battery back in your phone and file, in quick succession: an open case report (“female reports being trailed by unidentified male”) with a note that this is subject to investigation under the Protection from Harassment Act; a note for the intelligence desk (subject reports threatening behaviour: Due to sensitive nature of employment they suspect a possible violation of Whistleblower Protection Act); and finally a memo to yourself (“look into organized crime/connection with Issyk-Kulistan”), which you will probably off-load onto Moxie’s overflowing to-do heap on the morrow.

The latter might be treading dangerously close to misuse of police resources for personal gain, but your soft-shoe shuffle if anyone asks will revolve around a third-party tip-off about persons of interest to an ongoing organized-crime investigation in another force area: At worst, the skipper will yell at you and deliver his #3 Not Getting Distracted lecture again.

All of which adds up to this: If Dorothy needs to talk to a control-room officer in a hurry, they’ll clock her CopSpace trail, realize that a detective inspector’s taking her concerns seriously, and listen. (Probably.) Which is the sort of thing that sometimes saves lives, and certainly you’ll sleep a wee bit more soundly for knowing she’s safe under the watching eyes of your colleagues. “That’s filed,” you tell her, and yawn. “Are you going to be okay for the now?”

“I’ll have to be.” She smiles shakily as she stands up. “I’ll not be asking you to come up to my room.” She rolls her eyes in the direction of the camera dome behind the bar, and you don’t have the heart to remind her that for every one she can see, there’ll be at least two that she doesn’t. “Saturday… your place?”

You stand up, too. “It’s yours. If you want to come back with me tonight—”

She leans forward, and of an instant you’re hugging each other. Her breath is hot against your neck. “Better not,” she murmurs. “If I’m really being watched, I’m contagious. All the same, I’m going to check into a different hotel tomorrow and hope it throws them, whoever they are.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“I think so. So. Are we on for the weekend?”

“If you want—”

She turns her head and kisses you hard on the mouth. You swallow a gasp, suddenly acutely aware that you’re in public—then she pulls back, leaving your lips tingling. “Yes, I want. Good night, darling.” Her smile is a fey thing. It fades as she walks towards the lobby, leaving you standing by the table, your nipples tight, your breath stolen, and your head full of harm.

ANWAR: Diplomat

Over the next four days you fall into a comfortable work-day pattern. Get out of bed, go to the bathroom and get dressed and go downstairs to the kitchen, where Bibi has just about finished getting the breakfast down the bairns before she heads out to sign into the pharmacy at the Leith Walk Tesco. You drink a glass of tea, eat your muesli, grab your phone, and kiss Bibi good-bye. From your front door, it’s twenty minutes to the office on foot or, if it’s pishing down, thirty minutes by way of a quick dash to a shelter and a long wait for the tram.

Not much happens at the office. A couple of times a day, some chancer rings your buzzer, wanting a bag of bread mix and a novelty tourist brochure. (You’ve got a stack of the things in a cardboard display by the door; they cycle tiredly through a grey-scale slide show of yaks, yurts, and tractor factories—the Ministry of Tourism’s budget doesn’t stretch to colour e-ink, let alone hiring a photographer to update their archive footage.) You sadistically abuse the rubber plant whenever you can be bothered and expense a couple of big colour picture frames for the wall, loaded with the least-kitsch corners of the Ministry’s wallpaper archive—mostly mountains and mosques—to make it look more like an authentic consulate.

On day three, a certain existential anomie sets in. So you amuse yourself with your bootleg phone and specs: You pull down your favourite procedural wallpaper from the cloud and overlay the bare, beige office walls with a gigantic play-space hosting an improbable orgy-themed mashup from XXXMen and BackRoomBoyz. It’s machinima-generated real-time porn, and you don’t want to look at their faces for too long or you’ll get creeped out by the inbred uncanny valley features, but all that pumping and writhing and sucking is a good distraction from the fact that is slowly sneaking up on you: You’re bored.

Here you are in your good business suit, sitting at a desk in the consulate, prim and proper as can be, like a maiden aunt haunted by fantasies of debauchery. And there is nothing to fucking do. Welcome to boredomspace. Since you hung out your shingle you have entertained one visiting trade delegation, six assorted shifty-eyed locals in search of a loaf, two adventurous backpackers, a yak-milk importer looking to make an end-run around EU animal-husbandry regulations, and seven confused visitors looking for the games company upstairs.

There are, of course, the language lessons: On your own initiative you’ve expensed a set of Rosetta Stone courseware on Kyrgyz, and you’re trying to spend half an hour a day on it. But you’ve never had much of a knack for language study, you keep tripping over the Cyrillic alphabet, and the spoken tongue sounds like you’re gargling rusty nails (and leaves your throat feeling like it, too). Google Translate doesn’t handle Kyrgyz very well: Luckily the Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducts all their correspondence in mangled English. You really wouldn’t bother except for a nagging sense that at the next interview, it might be good to know what they’re saying behind your back.

In the end, you find yourself reading the small print on the back of a bag of bread mix and thinking about what the Gnome said about home brew. Shite beer, he’d said, unless you add a cofactor. Well, it’s not like you know a lot about brewing to begin with, is it? So you hop on the web and, at considerable risk to your soul, begin searching for websites dedicated to the unclean pursuit.

When the buzzer goes off, you’re queasily engrossed in an account of certain jail-cell antics involving buckets, sugar, yeast, and unspeakable contaminants. The things neds will do to get off their heids… you jump, swear quietly, and hit the entryphone button. “Come in.”

You’re standing up when the door opens. Your visitor is probably white underneath the grime, walks with an odd shuffle, and could benefit from a shower and a session at a launderette. He’s probably about twenty and painfully thin. You smile politely. “Welcome to the Issyk-Kulistan Consulate, sir. Would you mind stating your name and business?”

“Ahm Jaxxie. Icannaehingyurrrbagaffbreidmix, likesay?”

Oh, he’s one of them. You nod sympathetically, walk over to the trunkful of INSECT-FREE FAIR TRADE ORGANIC BREAD MIX BARLEY-RYE, and pull out a bag. “One of these?” you ask, remembering to breathe through your mouth as you approach him.

“Gimmedat hingmie.” He makes a lunge for the bag, and you pull it away from him. He wears no specs, which is probably a good thing: He doesn’t look like the type to appreciate the panting contents of the leather sling he’s standing in front of in pornspace.

“You know how to use it, right?” You stare at him. “You know about the cofactor. What is it?”

Jaxxie stares at you in confusion. “Whut?”

“The stuff you add to the bread mix when you’re making beer. What is it?”

“Whut? Ayedinnaekenyeraxent, man. Whityurwantin?”

“What. Have. You. Been. Told. To. Add. To. This. When. You. Brew?” You hold the bag up. Jaxxie’s eyes track the bag like a dog hoping for a treat, oblivious to the gamine sailor boy and the pair of huge leather bears making out lasciviously at his feet.

“Ung. Hingmy. Awthat.” He produces a small glass bottle of tablets from somewhere in his Swiss Army jacket. You peer at the label: Selenium. “Gedditat Hollandunbarrut, likesay? Fuckin’ippies.”

“Very good.” You smile ingratiatingly and hand over the bread mix. “Don’t do anything with it that I wouldn’t do.” You wink at the virtual Marine who’s rubbing his crotch on Jaxxie’s leg and show him the door. Dietary supplements, right. The virtual marine is strangling the one-eyed trouser python and making calf eyes at you: Annoyed, you kill the wallpaper and drop back into beige-walled boredomspace. “Fucking hippies.” You sit back down at the desk and go back to reading up on home brewing. Maybe, you reflect, jailhouse recipes aren’t the best way forward.

You are a lucky man in many respects. You have a house (a genuine, authentic house with its own roof! Not a tenement!), an adoring wife with a respectable and moderately lucrative profession, and two bouncing children who squeal with delight when they see you (although of late you could swear that Naseem is holding back a little, in a faint foreshadowing of adolescent male surliness).

You also have two aunts, an uncle, a mother-in-law, six assorted grandparents, a vast and inchoate clan of in-laws and first cousins and nieces and nephews, and other, more distant relations whose precise proximity to your blood line can only be expressed algebraically—

What you don’t have is privacy.

Privacy is a luxury; to buy it you need to be able to buy space and fit locks, to switch off the phone and live without fear of dependency on others. Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artefact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of email and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.

Not that you normally need privacy. Your home life is happily lived in the presence of others: It’s not as if you don’t share a bed with your wife or put up with her mother popping round for a bag of rice and a sink-side chat every day. The other corners of your life you discreetly hide away in public houses and public toilets (although to be perfectly truthful, the latter make you increasingly nervous: You’ve begun to pick your partners for their bedroom décor as much as their looks). Still, once in a while, you want to bring something home with you without attracting Bibi’s attention or the bairns’ curiosity. And so, it’s time to go up to the loft again.

When you bought (or, more accurately, inherited) the house, you knew it had a loft—but not much more. When you first got up there, you weren’t impressed, but since then you’ve fitted DIY insulation and nailed it down with boards and carpet tiles so you can walk around. A loft ladder followed, and LED lighting tiles and mains outlets; you’re hoping soon to have enough cash to pay for a dormer window to replace the Velux. Bibi doesn’t come up here (she doesn’t like ladders—gets dizzy), and you’ve told her it’s a storeroom. Which is true up to a point, but you’ve got a chair and some bean bags and a projection TV and a small fridge for the beer. Before the filth collared you, you kept your waterpipe and a stash up here: But you don’t want Mr. Webber to get the idea you’re living a “disorganized lifestyle,” so you’ve reluctantly laid off the skunk. There’s also a tin-can aerial lined up on Cousin Tariq’s roof, an interesting router running firmware he downloaded off the dark side of the net, and a clean pad he gave you to work on when you got out of nick. But you haven’t spent much time up here since you got the new job.

That’s about to change, isn’t it?

There’s a wee hole-in-the-wall shop just off Easter Road, run by a middle-aged white guy with a straggly beard—Cousin Itt would probably grunt ’ippie on sight—that services the home-brew hobbyists. The shop smells of yeast and hot plastic from the fabber he’s got in the back for running up obscure knobbly connectors; most of the stuff he sells is off-the-shelf, though. When you walk in, he’s deep in conversation with a fat middle-aged woman with crimson hair, whose unseasonal shaggy black coat makes her look like a tank in the sheep army.

You spend a few minutes gawping at the gleaming stainless steel machine—it looks like a dissected automatic washer/dryer—that sits in pride of place on the shop counter. It’s some sort of German vorsprungdurch-technik microprocessor-managed brewery in a box—put in raw materials, select program, leave for a month, drink the output—but you don’t have a thousand euros to spare for it. Then you poke around the shelves for a bit, hunting for the items on your shopping list. The shopkeeper’s still yacking to the woman, who seems to be some sort of local beer monster, and pays no attention to you until you get to the throat-clearing toe-tapping stage. “Aye, sir? What can I do you for?”

You ignore the slip of the tongue. “I need these. And, uh, a siphon. And an airlock, I think.” You’ve been doing your homework, but you’re not entirely sure what an airlock looks like until he steps out from behind the counter and produces a transparent plastic hingmy.

“Boiled water goes here,” he says, showing you how. “Then you stick it in the bung like so. If you’re just getting started, you might want one of our starter packs. What kind of beer were you after?”

“Um, I’ve already got one,” you say: “a present.”

“IPA or Lager?” asks the woman, chipping in. “Is it bottom-fermenting or top-fermenting?”

You look at her blankly. The shopkeeper clocks what’s up and none-too-subtly eyeballs the nosy lass to butt out. “It’s okay,” he says quietly, “I’ve got a starter FAQ on the website. In five languages.” He passes you a card. “If you want, I’ve got a friend who can rent you some cellar space—”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” you say hurriedly: “I just need the, uh, apparatus?” Obviously he kens the ethnic angle, thinks you’re wanting the opportunity to quaff a wee bevvy at home with no betraying six-packs.

“Well that’s okay, then. Twenty-four ninety-six, please.”

You hand over the cash and flee, then realize once you’re out of the door that you forgot to ask for a bag and you’re going home clutching a huge plastic bucket labelled FERMENTATION BIN and decorated with pictures of overflowing beer glasses. And he forgot to offer you one! Have these people no shame?

Bibi, for a miracle, is in the kitchen when you open the front door. You head upstairs at a dash and hurl the incriminating bucket up the loft steps before she has a chance to see it. You’ve still got to figure out how to get twenty litres of freshly boiled water up to it, and how to keep it warm afterwards, but at least she doesn’t have to know about you conducting your filthy haram experiments under her roof.

There is, of course, the old electric kettle, if you can remember where it’s lurking. It’s corroded and leaks alarmingly around the water gauge, but you don’t think Bibi threw it out. You clamber down the ladder and go into the kitchen to hunt around. Finally you think to look in the cellar, where the mains distribution board, the gas meter, and several piles of junk lurk villainously in wait for unshod feet. The kettle is resting under a layer of moldy plaster dust in one of the slowly deliquescing cardboard boxes. The cellar smells of damp brickwork, and your sinuses clamp shut in protest before you can beat a retreat. Which is why Bibi finds you in the kitchen, clutching a dusty kettle and breathing heavily through your mouth, when she bustles in with a wheelie-bag full of groceries.

“Help me unpack this,” she says breathlessly, then notices the kettle: “Oh good, are you taking it for recycling?”

“I need it for the office,” you say, then the breath catches in your throat as a convulsive sneezing fit takes hold. “Aaagh! Choo!”

“Not over the saag, you naughty man!” She thrusts a wad of tissue at you. “This bag needs refrigerating. When you’re feeling better?”

You blink red-rimmed eyes at her. “The cellar is damp.”

“Oh dear, has the dehumidifier filled up again?”

“What dehumidifier?”

“The one we borrowed from Martin, silly. Don’t you remember?”

She looks at you with a speculative expression that puts you in mind of a stableman sizing up an elderly mule for the glue factory. You sigh. Now that she mentions it, you remember her telling you something about dampness and a gadget the old guy next door had offered to loan her. “No, no I didn’t,” you admit. “You say it’s filling up?”

“Yes,” she says brightly: “It needs emptying once a week!”

“Damp. In the cellar.” If Sameena’s plans to try and hold a family reunion in Lahore to corral everyone into buying into some kind of extended family takeover of a half-completed hotel complex had worked, you wouldn’t have a problem with rising damp in the cellar. (You might have to dodge the occasional lunatic in explosive corsetry, but it can’t be any more risky than running the gauntlet of the random bampots down the Foot of the Walk on a Saturday night.) Alas, you were one of the idiots who balked at the idea of turning to the hospitality trade. “Besides, it rains too much there!” you moaned at your mother-in-law, regurgitating childhood memories of a June vacation. Oh, the irony.

“Yes. I think it’s getting worse.” Your wife tilts her head on one side as she looks at you. “What are you going to do about it?”

You sigh, deeply. “I’ll see if I can round up someone who knows about such things.”

She hands you a cardboard punnet full of mushrooms. “You’d better. Or we’ll be growing these down there.”

You help Bibi unpack the groceries that need refrigerating, then retreat upstairs to the bathroom, clutching the kettle. Not being entirely stupid, you wash the filthy thing out in the wash-basin, then take it up to the attic and return for a bucket of water (which you manhandle up the ladder precariously, with much sloshing and dripping).

Finally, you glance at the brew shop’s website, where there is indeed a multilingual FAQ. It’s in Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi among other languages, if you recognize the characters correctly: You’ll have to settle for English.

“First boil 20 litres of water and allow to cool to 40 degrees…”

You plug the kettle in, fill it up, throw the switch, and all the lights and electrics go out. A few seconds later, you hear Bibi cursing most immodestly downstairs.

You’re really going to have to tackle the damp now, aren’t you? Otherwise, you’re never going to hear the end of it.

On day four of your new occupation, you receive an invitation to a diplomatic reception at the Georgian consulate.

Actually, you received it on day two, or rather your spam filter received it, whereupon it languished in MIME-encapsulated limbo until you could be bothered to skim the contents of the mailbox, swear, then freak out and run squawking in circles.

“You are invited to attend an informal cheese and wine reception at the Georgian Consulate on Brunswick Street on—” (tonight) “—at 7:30 P.M., hosted by the Trans-Caucasian Inward Investment and Tourism Trust. RSVP, etc.”

After about fifteen minutes you wise up and dash off a hasty query to Head Office: Should I stay or should I go? You haven’t been keeping up with the daily bulletins from the Diplomatic Service—they are replete with information about yak wool exports, the lemon harvest, and the urgent need to redress the balance-of-trade deficit, but not so fascinatingly full of matters of statecraft—so you have not the veriest inkling of a clue as to whether the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan is on kissing terms with Georgia, or at war, or something in between. All you really know about politics in the part of the world you represent is that it can be alarmingly personal at times, not to mention bloody-minded, brutal, byzantine, and any number of other unpleasant adjectives beginning with “b.”

There’s no immediate reply, so you call the Gnome. “Help,” you say succinctly.

There’s a brief, pregnant pause. “Help what?”

“I’ve been invited to a diplomatic reception! Help!”

“You’re beyond help, laddie.” He sounds amused. “You’ll just have to fend for yourself. Is it one of the Middle East missions?”

“No!” You swallow. “It’s Georgia.”

“Georgia next to Alabama or—oh, I see. Well you may be in luck, then: They drink alcohol. Just remember not to mention the South Ossetian question, the Transnistrian dispute, Azerbaijani shi’ite separatism, or the existence of Abkhazia. You’ve never heard of any of those places, so you should be able to quaff a free bevvy or six and leg it without giving mortal offence.”

“How do you know all this?” you ask in something like awe.

“I looked it up on wikipedia. Oh, and try to remember, the Russians are not their friends. Have a fun party! Cunt.” He hangs up.

(Cunt isn’t an unusual expostulation from the Gnome; it’s commonly directed at any lucky acquaintance who has gotten to stick their gristle missile in a particularly cute twink, and indicates envy rather than ire. Nevertheless, you feel acutely inadequate: It’s a shame you can’t send the man himself in your place, but he’d probably piss in the punchbowl and start a trade war or something. Just to drop you in it. The cunt.)

There is no reply from the Foreign Ministry, and with a sinking heart you realize it’s Thursday afternoon over here and probably closing in on sundown—they’ll be knocking off early for Friday. You’re on your own. So you apply yourself to wiki-fiddling for a couple of hours of fascinated voyeuristic geopolitical prurience—you had no idea the IRIK had such interesting neighbours. Then it’s knocking off time for you, too, with a few hours to fill until the party.

The shortest route to the Brunswick Street consulate is via Calton Hill, and your favourite pub; so you decide to fortify yourself with some water of life and a pitta wrap before you nip round and do the James Bond cocktail-circuit thing.

The Gnome is not in residence at this time. Neither is Olaf, the Norwegian barman you quite fancy. It’s still quiet—the Friday night meat market hasn’t opened yet—so you sit in a corner and quietly shovel back your ale and chicken tikka wrap. You’ve got time to borrow a pad, boot an anonymous guest VM, and spend half an hour poking around a somewhat dodgy chat room Tariq introduced you to—one that you’re not supposed to go within a thousand kilometres of during your probation, maybe because it has something to do with the seamy underside of Internet affiliate-scheme marketing. (But they’d have to swab the screen for DNA to prove you were there: And anyway, you’re just looking, aren’t you?) Right now it’s a big disappointment. Nobody seems to be posting there this week—it’s like the usual denizens have all gone on holiday. Or been lifted by the Polis, more like, you think uneasily and log out of the anonymous guest account, which goes poofing up to bit-rot heaven.

With a sinking heart, you stand and make your way round the hill towards London Road, and thence towards the Georgian consulate, which is itself ensconced in a different-kind-of-Georgian town house opposite a row of imposingly colonnaded hotel frontages. Scotland, being one of those odd semi-autonomous states embedded within the EU post-independence and still only semi-devolved from their former parent nation, doesn’t rate actual embassies. Nevertheless, the glowing affluence of a real consulate fills you with mild envy: There’s a shiny black BMW hybrid in diplomatic plates plugged into the charge point outside the front door, and a flag on a pole sticking out of the second-floor window-casement. Not to mention bunting and coloured lights inside the wedged-open front door.

A Scottish woman in a trouser suit and expensive eyewear clocks you and smiles professionally. “Mr. Hussein. We’ve been looking forward to meeting you! Have you had your tea, then?”

Your ears perk up at this decidedly non-Edinburgh hospitality, but your stomach’s been rumbled: You nod. “Alas, yes, Ms.—”

“Macintosh, Fi Macintosh.” She beckons you in like an affable praying mantis—she’s about ten centimetres taller than you, and looms alarmingly. “Notary and assistant to the first consul. That’s Dr. Mazniashvili. Won’t you come in? We have grape juice—or wine, if you’re so inclined.”

“There’s more than one of you?” you ask, as she ushers you into a space not unlike a dentist’s waiting room—except that the receptionist’s counter has been stacked three bottles deep in refreshments, and there’s a table stacked high with trays of canapés. Several patients sit in chairs around the room or stand in small clusters, talking quietly with pained expressions. You pounce on a tumbler, splash a generous shot of Talisker into it, and raise it: “Your health.”

Fi half smiles, then picks up a tall glass full of orange juice. “Prosit,” she replies. “The meat cocktail snacks are halal, by the way.” She takes a sip. “Yes, there are four of us here, but only the first consul is a Georgian national. I understand you’re not actually from Issyk-Kulistan yourself?”

“No.” You glance from side to side. Here you are, trapped with a glass of single malt and a red-headed stick insect—what can you say? “That is to say, there aren’t any natives of Issyk-Kulistan in Scotland, as far as the Foreign Ministry was able to determine, so they put the job out to tender and ended up hiring me.”

“Ah.” She nods slowly. “One of those jobs. I don’t suppose it’s terribly busy, is it?”

You suck in your lower lip and clutch your tumbler close. “No, not really.”

She nods again. “You’re the sixth, you know.”

“The sixth? Sixth what?”

“Sixth pseudo.” She peers at you over the rim of her glasses, which are recording everything and projecting a head-up display on her retinas. “They offered you a steady job in return for processing forms, notarizing documents, sorting out accommodation for distressed natives, and so on. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t see what business of yours my employment is,” you say, perhaps a trifle more waspishly than is tactful.

She blinks. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.” She nods sidelong at a fellow with a face like the north end of a southbound freight locomotive. “That’s Gerald Williams. He’s the honorary consul for the Popular Democratic Republic of Saint Lucia. You might want to look up the, ah, constitutional crisis there seven years ago. They were the first pseudo—in their case, they used to be a real country, albeit a wee one. But after the big hurricane, a consortium of developers literally bought the place—made the population an offer they couldn’t refuse, relocate somewhere with better weather and about ten thousand euros a head. Now it’s a shell country, specializing in banking and carboncredit exports—they’re still signatory to the climate protocols.”

She knocks back her OJ like she’s trying to wash away the taste of a dead slug. “They’re legit, if shady. I shouldn’t really say this, but I hope you double-checked who you were doing business with. One of these days, we’re going to see a really nasty pseudo, and the consequences are going to be unpleasant all round.” She smiles tightly. “Georgia’s celebrating it’s thirtieth anniversary later this year, and we’re throwing a party. Perhaps you’d like to come?”

“I’d—love to,” you manage. “What did you do”—to get this gig, you’re about to say: It comes out as—“before you worked for the Georgian consulate?”

“A doctorate in international relations, specializing in the history of the Transcaucasus in the latter half of the twentieth century. I did my field work in Tbilisi.” She reaches for the mixers and tops up her OJ, then adds a splash of vodka. “It was this, or move to Brussels. I can do simultaneous translation between English and Kartuli, you know.” Her smile broadens. “And yourself?”

Rumbled. You shrug. “I’m trying to learn Kyrgyz.” Badly, you don’t add. Nor do you mention that your highest degree is a lower second from the polytechnic of real life with a postgraduate diploma in Scallie Studies from Saughton. “And I’ve got a great line in breadmix samples from the People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan. Guaranteed insect-free!”

“So your republic exists primarily to export bread mix to the EU?” She sniffs, evidently amused. “Wait here, Mr. Hussein, I’ll be right back.” And with that she disappears into the front parlour of the Georgian consulate.

You amble around the room for a while. The background chatter is getting louder, and more visitors are arriving—to your untrained eye it’s impossible to tell whether they’re diplomats or art-school drop-outs, but they seem to know what they’re doing, and a high proportion of them look even less Scottish than you. You find yourself chatting to a poet who lives in Pilton—apparently an émigré from Tashkent, if you understand his rapid-fire Turkish-accented Scots dialect correctly. You smile and nod politely and work your way towards the bottom of your tumbler.

The world is taking on a rosy glow of bonhomie when Fi—or should that be Dr. Macintosh?—returns to the party. As it happens, you’ve just turned away from your poet to refill your glass, so she heads straight towards you. She’s got a small, dog-eared paperback in one hand. “Sorry, ran into a spot of bother in the kitchen,” she says unapologetically. “Listen, you’re obviously new to all this, and I suddenly remembered I had a book that came in handy when I was getting started. An introductory text.” She pushes it at you with a slightly furtive expression: The penny drops, and you slide it into your jacket pocket and thank her effusively. “No, really, it’s the least I could do. Don’t take it too seriously, but you’d be surprised how far it’ll take you. It does what it says on the can.” She smiles. “I’d better circulate now—we’re beginning to fill up. See you around…”

As she turns away, you risk a quick scooby at the book’s cover. On the rebound from the double-take you glare at her receding back—then remember where you are and whose whisky you’re drinking, and force yourself to calm down. The Idiot’s Pocket Guide to International Diplomacy indeed!

What kind of amateur does she take you for?

TOYMAKER: Hostile Takeover

It’s like the punch-line to a knock-knock joke gone wrong:

You are not stupid: You aren’t carrying anything illegal on your person—it’s all in your head. Even your fall-guy phone is only guilty of behaving in a shifty manner. So you do not attempt to flee. Instead, you do as the uniformed gentleman requests and meekly step into the front hall to help him with his enquiries, whereupon you realize that something is very wrong indeed because the walls and ceiling and floor are covered in clear plastic anticontamination sheets, and there’s a scene of crime officer in a bunny suit coming down the stairs. “Will a driving license do?” you ask the cop.

You can see him giving you the quick up and down with his glasses, which is an oh-shit moment. “What’s your name?” he asks.

“John, John Christie,” you volunteer, reaching for your wallet. “Is Mike here? Is there some kind of problem?” You force an expression of worried concern, a little apprehension. Under the circumstances, it comes easily enough.

“A driving license will do. Pass it here, please.” You fumble the card and slide it towards him. Most of the John Christie ID is loaded in your phone, from microcredits to bank accounts—it’s very solid. “Why are you here?”

“I was hoping to see… Mike…” You slow your spiel as if uncertain, even though any fool can tell that something has gone seriously non-linear here. You make an effort to memorize the dibble’s name-plate: PC BROWN, presumably working for INSPECTOR SCARLET of Rainbow Division. Just your luck you aren’t wearing a lifelogger, or you could stand on your rights a little harder—but no, that might not be a good idea. Every instinct is telling you to disengage. Mike’s obviously in big trouble, which means you won’t be hiring him—that’s for sure. You need to get clear before the cops start focussing on you. A factoid pops out of the Mike Blair file and screams for your attention, and you instantly realize it’s a good one. “He said to drop by if I was ever in Edinburgh.”

PC Brown turns your driving license over in his hand, and you can see some flickering in his glasses. He’s got a contactless reader, online to the DVLA database and then back to CopSpace once they’ve authenticated it. The photograph matches, and the license is genuine. He glances back at you and twitches his head, superimposing a head-up ghost image beside your face. Then he hands the card back. “Where did you meet Mr… ?”

“Mike? It was at the Admiral Duncan, in London, about six months ago. Or maybe eight? Or was it after Pride? Anyway, we, er… got to know each other quite well.” You clear your throat. “It’s personal. He invited me to drop round if I was ever in Edinburgh, and I’m here for the next week on business, and I was hoping he didn’t have anything else on for the weekend. Is something wrong?”

Brown’s expression morphs through a whole sequence of emotions as you give him the Big Lie, backed up by some telegraphic wiggling of eyebrows and seasoned with just the tiniest bit of camp. You have not, in fact, ever met Mike (and you hope to hell he’s lying dead in an autopsy room so he can’t contradict you); even if you had, you wouldn’t want to fuck him. On the other hand, the Operation’s files went into quite a lot of detail on the subject of his personal life, and getting off with him after a Pride march in what has long been one of the biggest knocking shops in London is entirely plausible. The Scottish Polis get all red-faced and sweaty at the merest suggestion of locker-room homophobia: It’s amusing to watch the cop switch from investigating-person-of-interest mode to dealing with bereaved significant other in the space of a sentence. (It works even better if there is some latent locker-room homophobia, so you’re careful to lean just a little too close and hold the eye contact a second too long.)

“Is something wrong?” you ask, feigning worry, as he begins to open his mouth. And you know that, really, nothing is wrong. If you were neurotypical and going up against the speech stress analysis he’s watching in his fancy-pants glasses, you’d be in deep doo-doo, getting flustered from all the falsehoods: But you’re not, and the cops’ sexy tech passes the handicap to their side when they get to deal with the likes of you. It’s only if they get you in front of a psych with a PCL-R check-list that you’ve got to start worrying.

“Mr. Christie, John, I’m really sorry.” He takes a deep breath. “Would you like to sit down?” He’s all solicitude, waving you into the spotless kitchen (which is interestingly bereft of forensic turds). “I’m very sorry, but—”

“Oh God,” you say, shoving the “distraught” slider all the way up to eleven. “He’s been in an accident, hasn’t he?”

There’s another cop coming down the staircase, and they’re going into full-on sit-down-and-have-a-cup-of-tea mode, as if they expect you to go into shock. “What makes you think there’s been an accident?” asks Brown, but it’s just a residual autonomic cop reflex—he’s already bought your spiel on outline.

“Mike’s big on water sports,” you say off-hand, then make to look horrified. “Oh God. What’s happened?”

“I’m really sorry.” PC Brown looks sideways at the newcomer, DET SGT GREEN. (Yeah, right, you think.) “Um. There’s been a, a fatality, sir. We’re still trying to ascertain the precise nature of events.” Which means it wasn’t an accident. “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief, sir. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a saliva sample.” They’ve already got your fingerprint biometrics off the driving license: This means they’re serious about logging identities.

You nod shakily. “Sure. Oh God.” You hunch up a little and do the weepy thing—not too much of it, you don’t want to ham it up and tip them off. “I can’t believe it.” Which is entirely true. Mikey’s dossier said he’s never been involved in anything serious enough to warrant a hit—that was one of the reasons you were going to interview him. Walking in on a homicide investigation is classic dumb bad luck. Your immediate task is to stop it graduating into a classic fuck-up, which is best done by cooperating with the cops for the time being. There are forms you can serve later to get “John Christie’s” DNA taken off the database once they figure out that he’s an innocent bystander, then you can retire the ID with a “do not recycle” flag.

Brown produces a sample tube and a cotton swab, and invites you to say “Aaagh,” which you do with alacrity. After which it’s all tea and sympathy, minus the tea, and “we’re terribly sorry, you’re free to go, sir,” after they get you to repeat in front of their specs that you haven’t seen Mike for at least half a year. And why should you not be free to go? “John Christie” is simply a contact whose state-issued biometric ID checks out, who has donated a DNA sample for the investigation, and who is at best an embarrassing distraction from the job in hand.

You leave by the front door and pedal very slowly, being careful to wobble for the cameras until you’re out of sight of the house. There’s been a fatality. Hence all the plastic sheeting and the DNA swab dance routine. We’re still trying to ascertain the precise nature of events. Which means it wasn’t an accident: Accidents don’t call for a detective sergeant to cover the site. Something has gone seriously fucking wrong here, and it looks like you may need to abort the operation, close up shop, and leave town on the schedule you just fed the Polis.

But first, you’ve got a fall-back option.

You bicycle away from the former abode of Michael Blair, your mood very dark. Somehow, all the fun has been sucked out of this venture before it even got started. Number One Client had the supreme bad taste to get himself whacked at a maximally inconvenient time. You’ve still got a job of work to do, but the hotel lost your luggage, and on top of that you’ve got the added vexation of falling within the penumbra of police sousveillance (which will take some work to get disentangled from when it’s time to leave).

Luckily—ironically—you haven’t done anything illegal yet. All you have to do is be John Christie for a week, then switch to another primary ID and stay clean while the paper-work to pull his DNA off the system chugs along. It’s not like you’re a serial killer or anything, is it? But it’s still a nuisance.

So you decide to execute your fall-back plan and visit your Number Two Client.

While you were doing the weepy in front of PC Brown the sun came out and most of the clouds have fucked off to Glasgow. Alas, there’s a brisk breeze blowing. You can die of sunburn and hypothermia during a Scottish summer—simultaneously, with added insomnia on top from the midnight sun. (It goes below the horizon, but it never really gets dark.) Swearing at the weather under your breath, you cycle uphill into the wind for half a kilometre, then pause at a cycle rack to ditch the wheels.

Once you’re clear of the pedal-powered snitch, you can safely reboot the phone and hit the online maps for a route to Number Two Client. Actually, you’re querying for a route to the boutique chocolate shop in Fountainbridge, above which they live and run their business—another way to avoid cropping up in a CopSpace crawl—but no matter. You haven’t memorized this particular route because you expected to be holed up with Mikey-boy for the whole morning and a chunk of the afternoon, but again: no matter. Your candidate for chief operations officer may have drawn the ace of spades, but you’re still holding a card for the CFO. And according to the dossier head office sent you, Vivian works from home.

The Polis know you’re in town, so hiding your trail may actually be a bad idea at this point. Accordingly, you hoof it to the nearest bus-stop and call a micro. While you wait for it, you review what the Operation knows about her (and is willing to stick in a mangled bitmap image file on an off-shore cloud).

Vivian Crolla. Age forty-eight, single, chartered accountant by trade—not so much an adornment to her profession as a butt-nugget dangling from its arse-hairs. She has been investigated by the ACA disciplinary committee three times but escaped unscathed save for a reprimand on the first occasion (now timed-out). She’s been investigated by the Revenue twice (inconclusively). She has come to the attention of the Serious Fraud Office and escaped without receiving as much as a police caution. She’s so slippery, you could skin her and market the hide as a surface for frying pans. And that’s just her public persona.

What the Operation knows about Vivian is enough that if you were with the Polis, you’d be smacking your chops and writing her up for the Procurator Fiscal while mentally drafting the press release. When she was the Gorilla’s banker, she ran the most efficient money-laundering operation ever seen north of Hadrian’s Wall, and if it wasn’t for the ongoing deflationary spiral and a slightly embarrassing problem repatriating her overseas assets while under the nose of the Revenue, she’d be living in a castle in Fife with a helicopter and pilot for the weekly shopping trips to Jenners. As it is, you figure she’s only marking time until she retires in style, at which point she’ll leg it to Palermo, where they have retirement homes stacked to the ceiling with her type of merry widow.

The bus, when it comes, is empty. You hole up in what used to be the driver’s seat, and it moves off silently. It’s a great way to tour the Athens of the North, and you watch entranced as it rolls over the speed pillows and cobble-stones on its way south-east. You’ve bid a fiver for a route divert, and for a miracle there’s no other money-bags aboard to up the ante: It’s going to take you close to Vivian’s front door.

Now, this scene is one you haven’t rehearsed for, and so you’re going to have to play it with a certain delicacy. But it’s not rocket science. You’ve got a handle on Vivian and her history. She’s even worked for the Operation before—unwittingly, at a lower level, but nonetheless. There are strings to pull, but she’s an experienced player, predictable up to a point. That’s why you were leaving her for the second interview.

The bus whines as it crawls up the slope, then totters anaemically along Lothian Road, stopping to pick up and put down the usual losers along the way. You keep yourself buttoned up, avoiding eye contact. (Back home? It’d be a stretch limo with tinted windows all the way. But a start-up job in Scotland calls for the Peoples’ Car and plenty of warm bodies to get lost among.) It rolls slowly past your hotel, then the row of pompous fin-de-siècle bank frontages thrown up a couple of decades since and now half-boarded-over: Then at the big five-way intersection, it hangs a right, and your phone pleeps a set-down alert at you.

One hundred and twenty metres to destination. Fucking bus company. You start walking.

This part of town has an uneasy relationship with affluence. Besides the obligatory state-owned Tesco Local, there’s a weird mix of closed and barricaded shop-fronts, charity stores with windows stuffed full of last decade’s brown leather sofas, and imaginative little boutiques selling up-market tchotchkes. You pass a kebab shop and an Asian jewellery store before you reach the chocolatier and the usual anonymous black door beside it.

There is a buzzer. You mash your thumb on the button for flat 1F2 and wait. And wait. After a minute, you push it again and hold. Just your luck if Vivian’s chosen this lunch-time to go do her shopping. There’s no reply, but the door opens in your face; a young guy slithers past you, earbuds screwed in as tight as his closed face. You catch the door with your toe and a moment later you’re on your way upstairs.

The tenement stairwell is grey and dusty, worn flagstones and black-enamelled cast-iron handrails leading up into the gloom. On the first-floor landing you find three heavy-looking doorways. The tarnished brass name-plate saying CROLLA ASSOCIATES tells you all you need to know, and you push the doorbell beside it. There is, as you expected, no response. You stand, holding your breath.

Well, you’ve come all this way: Why stop here?

There’s a multifunction pen in your pocket. It doesn’t look like anything special, but there are five cartridges and a bunch of complicated springs inside that barrel. And there’s a wallet in your other pocket, and along with the phone and driving license, it contains a couple of other cards. One of which might have raised an eyebrow if the Polis had Dumpster-dived your pockets and thought to peel away the laminated stickers to reveal the intricately etched sheet of fullerene-reinforced plastic within. But even then, it’s not obvious what the etching is, and you’ve got an explanation for how you came by it that would get you off the hook under most circumstances. Except these.

You take thirty seconds to twist and warp some springy bits of steel-tough plastic free from the card, another twenty seconds to swap them in place of the ball-point cartridge, and ten seconds to bump the lock. Then you step inside Vivian Crolla’s apartment.

You let the door slip shut behind you, and in that very instant you realize that something is irrevocably awry.

It’s never entirely quiet in a Scottish tenement flat. The floorboard-creaking footfalls of upstairs’ unseen neighbours. The drone of a news channel on next door’s PC. If the windows look out over the front, there’s the interminable road noise of a major thoroughfare (muted, now, by last-century standards, but still present). The faint susurration of Arctic methane flowing through the pipe to the fuel cell: the whir of the refrigerator in the kitchen.

The windows face out back, the neighbours are at work, and you can’t hear the fridge. Is that all? There’s a faint hissing from somewhere.

You glance up. The illumination filtering into the rectangular central hall comes through open doorways, and it has the numinous tint of daylight. You take your picklock card and use its edge to delicately swipe the light switch, leaving no prints.

“Vivian?” you call quietly.

There’s a strong floral stink in the flat, as from one of those fucking air fresheners women like to put in the bathroom to make out that they shit roses.

“Vivian?” you ask again, walking towards the living room. “I got your email. Vivian…”

There’s a scrap of paper on the floor. You frown and bend to pick it up. It’s white, overprinted in mostly green ink (with faint yellow and pink tints), approximately six centimetres by twelve in size. You remember its like from your childhood: It’s a foreign bank-note. “The Royal Bank of Scotland plc PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND ONE POUND STERLING, At their head office here in Edinburgh, by order of the board, 30th March 1999.”

Dead words. Dead currency. Dead bank. Broken promise.

Inside the austerely furnished living room, there lies a mattress. It has been cocooned in shrink-wrap plastic, sealed against the elements. The fragile husk of Vivian Crolla forms a mound under the polythene integument, like a pupa bonded to the surface of a leaf. She’s barely one metre fifty in her stockinged feet, grey-haired and thin, as if all the juices of a life unlived have been sucked out of her. She’s neatly dressed in a dark suit and pearl necklace, all present and correct but for a missing shoe and a premature death. There is a rip in the side of the shrink-wrap, a deep gash that plunges into the interior of the mattress, from which irredeemable green-ink promises bleed halfway across the carpet.

(Damn her, why couldn’t she have stuffed her mattress with fifty-euro notes instead of unrecyclable toilet paper? a corner of you thinks irreverently.)

You bend close to her and touch her shoulder through the plastic. She’s cold and stiff. Someone obviously shrink-wrapped her onto the mattress while she was unconscious or already dead. But who, and why? Rising, you stalk through the kitchen, her office, the bathroom. The stink in the bathroom is chokingly thick, almost unbreathable: The electronic air freshener is farting away like a cow with irritable-bowel syndrome.

You lick your dry lips. “This isn’t funny anymore,” you complain, an ironic metacommentary on your internal turmoil. Then the true state of jeopardy slams into you like a railway spike of purest distilled paranoia, and you see, with merciless clarity:

Someone has gotten inside your decision loop.

They’re a rival or an enemy. They’ve identified and killed your chosen COO and CFO, hours or days before you were ready to make them employment offers. They’re sending you a message: Get out of town. Get out of town now. Run away, little business man, while there’s still time.

You can’t get out of town, even if you want to. The Polis have got your DNA on file as belonging to John Christie, a contact of Mike Blair (deceased). You need to dance the John-Christie-is-an-innocent-bystander fandango until you can serve the paper-work to get your samples destroyed, or your usefulness to the Operation will be at an end: and with it, your career.

To make matters worse, you’re here now. Vivian Crolla isn’t going to vanish silently from Scottish society without anyone asking questions: Sooner or later, one of her business associates or relatives or nosy neighbours will crawl whimpering to the public servants, who will break down her door, pinch the bridge of their nose beneath suddenly watering eyes, and call for CID and forensics. And then it’ll be déjà vu all over again, and you’d better hope you’re not shedding flakes of dead skin because if they get a sequence match linking you to both scenes—

You begin to sidle back towards the front door, shuddering beneath the livid caul of rage that has settled over your shoulders, all the while thinking:

Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.

Someone’s going to bleed for this. And it’s not going to be you.

LIZ: Snowballing Hell

Thursday morning dawns moist and miserable. You turn yourself out of bed, scramble two eggs, and remember to bag up the plastic waste for collection on your way out the door. Then—forty minutes before you’re due on shift—your phone pulls on its work personality and rings for you. It’s Moxie. This can only be trouble.

“Skipper?” He screws his face up like a hamster worried you’re going to steal his peanut: “You decent?”

You take your thumb off the camera. “I was about to head in. What’s come up?”

“I think you want to be here half an hour ago; it’s about that wave you were tracking with ICIS? I got a call from a lieutenant in the Dresden KRIPO; he’s trying to get in touch with you urgently about an investigation?” Moxie’s bamboozled befuddlement is not unreasonable—death in Deutschland isn’t a regular bullet point on your daily team briefings.

“I’ll call him as soon as I’m in the office.” You pause. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Uh, Chief Inspector MacLeish wants to see you. It’s about the Blair case. He’s raising a request for research and says it’s priority one.” Screamingly urgent, in other words.

“Well, ping him and tell him I’m in transit.” You hang up and neck your coffee, burn your tongue, swear in an extremely unladylike manner as you grab for a glass of tap-water, then run through your check-list and are out the door in record time. You make it to the end of the road as a minibus trundles away from the stop, swear again, and drop the ghost of a tenner on its icon. For a miracle, it accepts the bid, whines to a halt, and kneels as you run to catch up. The other passengers glare irritably at you as you climb aboard, slightly breathless. You take a seat, then realize you left your hair-brush at home. So: another bad hair day is already underway.

There’s no hurrying the bus as it meanders around the back streets, diverting to pick folks up and drop them off. Sooner or later, your work-subsidized travel pass will get you to the office, but unlike a taxi, there’s no quality-of-service guarantee and no privacy. So you’re left tapping your fingers in frustration, unwilling to log into CopSpace in public (because you’re an inspector, and your work is a wee bit more confidential than J. Random Plod’s notebook: There’s a lot at stake if your desktop leaks). So much for telecommuting. Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.

So it is that you arrive at work at 8:42 A.M., ahead of your start of shift and in a timely manner… but disastrously out of touch with the events unfolding around you.

Your first inkling that this may be something worse than a regular bad-hair day comes as you step down off the bus and walk towards the front entrance in Fettes Avenue. They unwired the police HQ comprehensively back in the teens: Consequently, it senses your approach and it knows how to get your attention. The left arm of your spectacles vibrates for attention, and you instinctively touch your phone in acknowledgment. Blinking arrows glide urgently across the powder-blue furnishings in the waiting area, urging you inward: GOTO ROOM D31: BABYLON BRIEFING TO COMMENCE IN 15.

What on earth… ? You barely have time to wonder, before a blizzard of Post-its spring up, occluding nearly every hard surface in sight, and you see the grisly news: Dickie has added you to the team investigating the Mike Blair murder.

You whistle tunelessly through your front teeth and straighten up, then head towards the meatspace incident room: There’s a list of fifty-odd officers on the case, from constables up to the DCI himself, and probably a super watching over his shoulder and demanding hourly updates for the PR flaks at the Ministry of Justice. As you expected, Mikey’s double-wetsuit misadventure has gone political, on top of the usual three-ring circus that shows up for every murder case. (It’s the one crime for which all the police forces of the former United Kingdom pull out all the stops—but the 95–per cent clean-up rate you take a justifiable pride in comes at a ruinous, multi-millioneuro expense.)

Access to CopSpace—an augmented-reality overlay that maps a view of the criminal-intel knowledge base across the physical world in front of your eyes—doesn’t make police stations with control centres and briefing rooms obsolete. Quite the contrary. It’s not so long ago that you and your colleagues were plunged into the collective nightmare of a total breach of network security and had to fall back to prepaid supermarket mobies and passing around notes printed on manual typewriters. Maintaining a physical command centre is vital. Policing requires systematic teamwork, which means communication; and even when they’re working, online conferencing systems just aren’t quite good enough to make face-to-face meetings obsolete. Working teleconferencing is right around the corner, just like food pills, the flying car, and energy too cheap to meter.

There’s a scrum in the corridor outside D31, so you hang back a bit and wait for it to disperse. Then Moxie shows up. “Skipper.” He nods—sketchy acknowledgment—and you nod back.

“What’s the story?” you ask him.

Moxie’s gaze flickers sidelong, taking in the neighbours. He clears his throat. “Lieutenant Heyne from Dresden really wants to talk about his suspected homicide, skipper. So I—”

“Homicide?” you ask. “I thought the victim was in hospital.”

“Died overnight.” Moxie shrugs uncomfortably. “There’s also a Sergeant Nobile from the Gruppo Anticrimine Tecnologico in Rome who wants to bend your ear. Urgently.”

Oh Jesus. You rack your brains: “What force is he with?”

“Wait a sec.” Moxie’s looking it up in the directory. You could have done it yourself, you just thought he might have done the leg work already. “It’s part of the Guardia di Finanza, the national financial, customs, and economic police?” He looks slightly boggled, eyes twitching as he saccades through the infodump. “They also do cybercrime, he’s on the Europol R34 distribution, says it’s about the homicide in Dresden and, uh…” He nods at the front of the queue, which is beginning to shuffle into Mac’s briefing. “An associated murder in Trieste. There’s more. That feedstock you were looking for—”

“It’ll have to wait.” There’s the usual pre-caff mumbled meet and greet in the doorway, then you’re in and looking for a free seat near the back. Not fast enough; MacLeish is waiting just inside and makes eye contact.

“Inspector.” He nods. Subsequent words flow like grit through engine oil. “You were right; thanks for forwarding me that case.”

You show him your best botox face: It’s a moment to take home and treasure, but you’re not going to waste your brownie points gloating in the middle of a murder investigation. “I gather a bunch more contacts have come in overnight.”

“Aye, well… this is really fucking abnormal, if you’ll pardon my French. Never seen anything like it.”

“Me neither,” you concede. “What do you need from ICIU?”

“All your Bing and Google mojo, and a pipe into Europol. Oh, and anything you know about grey-market fabber feedstock. Why don’t you sit in the front row?”

After that, there’s no escape.

“Morning, peeps.”

Dodgy Dickie stands before a plain white wall bearing the Lothian and Borders logo, and below it a new name: Operation Babylon. The atmosphere in the room is expectant, and just a little angry: one-third suits, one-third boots, and a mashup of civilian support specialists.

“We’ve got a murder. Not your normal ned-on-ned stabby, unfortunately: This one’s got legs. We’re out of the golden forty-eight”—he means the first two days of the investigation—“and to make matters worse, DI Kavanaugh, who first clocked it as a culpable homicide, has drawn some really disturbing parallels with at least two other killings and an ongoing investigation into contraband supplies.”

What? you wonder, puzzled. Then an IM sidles into your specs. It’s Moxie. SORRY SKIPPER MAC ASKED ABOUT GREY FABS AND INCOMING CASES. Well, that tears it: Dickie is ahead of you on your own portfolio. You’d turn and glare at your sergeant, only he’s wisely decided that discretion is the better part of valour and staked out a corner at the back. Great.

“Here’s the situation.” The wall behind Dodgy Dickie does a wipe to reveal Mikey’s bathroom death scene. “Note the victim is taped and gagged. It’s set up to resemble an accidental autoerotic fatality: The thing he’s plumbed into is a mid-1960s colonic irrigation machine, a collector’s piece formerly owned by the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu—apparently he insisted on daily enemas. Ahem. Note the evidence of sexual stimulation. The enema fluid contains a borderline-toxic concentration of a medicine usually prescribed for impotence, but that’s not what killed him. Mr. Blair is HIV-positive and on multidrug maintenance. He also has hypertension, and is on meds for that condition. Pathology tells us that one of the protease inhibitors he’s on interacts very badly with Viagra. And the full work-up DI Kavanaugh ordered tells us that what he had in his system at the time was his prescription cocktail and a buttload of Viagra. But again, that’s not what killed him.”

Mac glances at you, his face unreadable. “The proximate cause of death was cardiac arrest. So we ordered a full work-up on the enema fluid, so pathology went trawling for known pharmaceuticals.” They can do that, these days: They’ve got lab-on-a-chip analysers that can identify thousands of drugs in microgram quantities. Or so they told you on the last re-cert course you did on organic forensics.

“What they found was his prescription meds and the Viagra, and one last thing—the enema fluid was loaded with grapefruit juice.” Grapefruit juice? You see winces going round the audience. Dickie continues: “I’m told that grapefruit juice is a catastrophe waiting to happen if you’re on certain types of blood-pressure medicine—it interferes with them, just as badly as Viagra interferes with protease inhibitors. What we’ve got is a cocktail of drug interactions: Viagra and ritonavir, which massively increased the effect of the Viagra, which depresses the user’s blood pressure, and grapefruit juice doing much the same to his ACE inhibitor.”

He looks at his notes. “I’m told the grapefruit juice alone would have had the effect of causing a severe drop in blood pressure lasting a few hours. Add a cocktail of Viagra and ritonavir, and Professor Davies is of the opinion it’d be enough to push him over the edge.” As chief pathologist, Professor Davies ought to know. “What’s interesting is, who knew about Blair’s prescription, and worked out precisely what to slip in his happy juice? And who helped Mr. Blair into his underwear. We’d really like to know the answer to that one… but it’s not the only lead I want us to follow up.”

You’re doing your best to keep your botox face in place. Otherwise, your eyebrows would be halfway to merging with your hair-line. Dodgy Dickie MacLeish is solid, unimaginative, and methodical: If he’s haring off in search of a homicidal pharmacist, then either somebody’s slipped him a Mickey Finn or all simpler explanations have already been ruled out. Which is very bad news.

“SOC did a complete sweep of the premises,” Dickie continues. “In the process, they found these.” He flicks up a picture of a wooden shelf bracketed to a whitewashed brick wall—a cellar, of course. There’s a neat row of sealed black canisters along it. You swear under your breath: You’ve seen their like before, fly-tipped in on-street recycling bins all over town. “Fabber cartridges. Unchipped, cheap knockoffs of the official product. These ones are all full of high-temperature thermosetting granules, presumably bound for a contraband factory somewhere in Edinburgh. They’re untraceable and illegal, and their presence suggests a connection to an ongoing investigation of DI Kavanaugh’s.”

You sit there, quietly fuming, as Dickie rolls unconcernedly away from his ambush of your unfunded project: If you’d actually been able to devote resources to following up the empties for the black-market fabber trade, you might have got to Mikey before someone killed him. “Anyway, this is where things get weird.”

The wall scrolls sideways to reveal a different bathroom demise. This scene’s helpfully labelled in German, as you recognize from the six syllable train-wreck attached to the tanning-salon sun bed.

“Dresden, Germany. This is the bathroom of Markus Hasler, a fine upstanding son of the city with a background in pharmaceutical spam, illegal sale of medicinal products, and counterfeit goods. That is a sun bed. At the same time our Mr. Blair was being plumbed into his personal jet wash—give or take a couple of hours—Mr. Hasler apparently drank half a litre of schnapps spiked with tranquillizers and climbed inside his sun bed. The control circuitry of which had been modified to override the safety shut-offs. He died in hospital yesterday without regaining consciousness.”

There is a low muttering and shuffling going on around you and you nod, unconsciously picking up on the vibe: the rest of the room realizing they’re in an out-of-Kansas situation. MacLeish continues implacably. “Both Mike Blair and Markus Hasler had prior conviction records in much the same field of criminal expertise. They died in notdissimilar manners as a result of incidents that commenced within three hours of each other.” He shifts from foot to foot. “There are reports of other, similar deaths in different jurisdictions this morning—that is, of persons involved in illegal network marketing activities, dying in circumstances superficially resembling domestic incidents.”

Dickie catches your eye. “I’d like to thank DI Kavanaugh for drawing the initial match to my attention, and Sergeant Cunningham for flagging the additional cases that came in while Liz was off shift.” Well that’s torn it. And so, yet again, Moxie escapes a well-deserved bollocking for playing fast and loose with the chain of command.

“As of this meeting, we’re continuing the investigation into the Michael Blair homicide. However, we’re going to have to recognize the need to integrate into a larger Europol investigation into the multiple parallel killings of at least two and possibly many more convicted criminals across member-state borders. And that’s why I’ve invited DI Kavanaugh to run the international liaison side of the investigation and provide input on the possible bootleg fabber connection.”

He’s got you, willy-nilly: drafted back into a CID murder investigation—and fuck your existing case-load and understaffed department. And there’s no way he can’t know what he’s doing to your performance metrics. Dickie is clearly out to get you: Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.

Someone’s going to bleed for this. And it’s not going to be you.

“—the bloody hell did you think you were—”

“—wisnae my fault, skipper! It’s tagged priority—”

“—doing going around the—”

“—one, mandatory escalate, so I pushed it at the duty inspector, and he—”

“—chain of command—”

Moxie raises his hands in surrender right as your frustrated snarl runs down.

You glance around. Then you stare into his eyes, hard. “Run that past me again.”

Moxie swallows. “Like I said, it was an urgent request for input on a homicide investigation. You were off shift, and there was a no-delay flag on it: golden forty-eight. So I pointed it at the duty desk. I havnae been telling tales out of school to Dodgy, skipper, please! What would you have done?”

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

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

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

“Fifteen minutes?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So am I. Sir.”

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

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

Moxie is waiting for you in your office and, for a miracle, he’s brought you a mug of latte just the way you like it. He’s wearing an appropriately sheepish expression, which finally makes your mind up for you. “Chill, Moxie. I’m not happy, but it’s not your fault. Next time try to give me some more warning, okay?”

He looks relieved. “I wanted to, skipper, but Chief Inspector MacLeish scheduled you for the briefing before I could get to you.”

Before he could get to you through regular channels, he means, but you don’t pursue the point. “I’ve just had a little chat with Chief Inspector Dixon. He’s going to try and square things with the deputy superintendent to get some backup in here. But in the meantime, it looks like Dickie’s little empire-building gambit is working. I’m going to be very scarce around here for the rest of the month, or until Dickie gets his man. So how about we go over what you’ve got on your desk, what I’ve got on mine that’s going to be added to your case-load while I’m gone, and what extra resources you need to keep your head above water in the meantime. Yes?”

Dawning horror steals across Moxie’s face. “Whu—you’re leaving me in charge?”

“Up to a point. I’ll still be around, but only for about an hour a day.” (Rule #1: always budget 50 per cent more time for your people than you tell them you’ve got.) “Think hard before you escalate. Speedy’s off today: I’ll be repeating this chat with him when he’s back in. You’re going to have to co-ordinate with him directly, not through me. Meanwhile, your case-load: Show it to me.”

For about the next hour, Moxie subjects you to his team’s current case-load in all its mind-numbingly recondite, not to mention perverse, detail.

Publicity surrounding the Morningside Cannibals has led to a spate of copy-cat offences against sanity, some of them literally so (as in: There are folks dining on cloned haunch of pedigree Siamese tonight). There’s an anonymous perp randomly posting upskirt videos on neighbourhood blogs, captured by a microcam strapped to one of the too-tame squirrels in the Botanic Gardens. Moxie’s looking for the fabber source of some disturbingly simple meth-lab-in-a-brick chemistry kits that are circulating among the usual numpties in Lochend, and there’s the regular slew of urban-legend queries from the more gullible elements of CID to field. There’s the hentai fan base to keep an eye on, with their current interest in Hitler Yaoi and holocaust tentacle porn—still illegal in Germany, which is giving rise to cross-jurisdictional headaches—and their ongoing attempt to exhaustively explore the M girls N cups polynomial space in NP time, as a computer geek of your acquaintance once put it.

(You’re not quite sure what the NP time bit means, but the combination of cheap machinima tools and lots of unemployed games programmers have turned Edinburgh into a hot-bed of photorealistic fetish video production even though it’s technically illegal. The burden of evidence is higher under Scottish law, so despite having tougher porn laws than England, the smart shocksite developers have all moved north, while their development tools and websites have migrated into the Russian blacknet cloud. Fighting it is an unwinnable battle, so your job is merely to flag up anything involving real-live actors—especially minors—and try to avoid unwittingly popularizing the stuff via the Streisand Effect.)

At the end of the hour you’re just about reeling from the deluge, but you’ve given Moxie a framework for prioritizing his jobs over the next week, not to mention your home and personal mobile numbers and strict instructions to call you immediately if anything really fucked comes up. You can see he’s getting psyched up, ready and prepared to perform triage on Tubgirl should the need make itself known—right up until the moment your mobie rings.

You answer it. It’s Dodgy Dickie. Shit. “Wait one,” you mouth at Moxie. “Yes?”

MacLeish looks like his ulcer’s playing up again. “Inspector? Are you up to speed on the international angle yet?”

You bite back your instant reaction: “I’m in the process of clearing my desk and handing off all current ICIU operations to a subordinate. It’s going to take me another half-hour today, and a couple of hours tomorrow when my relief sergeant is in the shop. So your answer is a conditional ‘no,’ sir. Has something come up?”

“You bet it has, and it’s touching down at Turnhouse in an hour. We’ve got an investigator from Europol flying in to poke his nose where it doesn’t belong. I want you to meet him and keep him the hell off my back. Is that understood?”

Your instant impulse is to tell Dickie to fuck right off, but the prospect of subsequently explaining your language to a disciplinary tribunal is not attractive. “I understand you consider my management of a secure hand-off of my departmental responsibilities is less important than what is basically a baby-sitting job, sir. I’m going to comply with your request, but not at the cost of making a hash of a bunch of other, admittedly lower-priority, investigations that are already in progress. I’ll take care of the busybodies, but you don’t tell me how to run my unit. Am I clear?”

For a moment, Dickie looks as if he’s about to blow a gasket, but then he nods, jerkily. “Perfectly.”

“Good.” You hang up, and check your desktop. Sure enough, there’s a stack of busybody IMs that have come in while you were briefing Moxie, insistently asking for you and demanding that you do this, do that, hither and yon. Dickie’s management style is to shoot at the monkey’s feet, make the monkey dance. Especially when the monkey was, ten years ago, number one in his graduating class, and as recently as five years ago, the number-one candidate for the post he’s currently occupying. You rub your eyes. “I’m too old for this shit,” you hear yourself say.

“Skipper?” Moxie is looking at you. “Anything I can do to help?”

“No, just as long as you’re clear on where we’re going. I’ve got to go out to the airport to meet a flight in. Cover my back?”

He sketches a videogame rendition of a salute. “Yes, ma’am!”

“Cool.” You finish reading the IM stack, then your tenuous control fractures like a sheet of toughened glass held for too long over a naked flame of rage as you see your contact details. “Shit.”

“Skipper?”

“That’s all I fucking need this morning. All.”

“What—”

“Nothing you can do, Moxie.” You get a handle on it fast, but for a moment you’re blurring with bloody-eyed rage. Because you recognize the name on the passenger manifest, the Eurocop who’s coming to visit and who Dodgy Dickie has detailed you to organize the disposition of. It’s the man who cost you your career, five years ago.

Kemal.

ANWAR: Cousin Tariq

Wednesday evening in the Hussein household.

You have retreated upstairs to your den because your mother-in-law has come round to visit Bibi (who is home early from work), and she’s in a state—utterly inconsolable, in fact. Most of the time Sameena is okay for an old bat, unless you happen to be single: She is afflicted with Bridezilla-by-proxy syndrome and is always in search of a wedding to organize. But tonight she’s wailing and pulling her hair, upset beyond all reason. She supplements Uncle Taleb’s income by housekeeping—to keep it respectable, she only works for gay men. Anyway, she found one of her clients dead on the bathroom floor this Tuesday, and it gave her a funny turn, and every evening since she’s come round to angst and wail like a one-woman banshee convention. You’d think she’d be getting over it by now, but no: If anything, it gets worse.

Right now, despite Bibi plying her with tea and sympathy, she’s so far out of her tree that the squirrels are sending out search parties: After half an hour of her wailing, you finally crack, climb the loft ladder, and pull it up behind you. Maybe you should tell Bibi to bring home some Valium from work? Nobody would miss it, and it’d be a small mercy for the old woman. But right now, her sobbing is getting on your tits mightily, so you stick your music library on random play, bury your phone under a cushion, and haul out Tariq’s spare pad from behind the slowly bubbling beer bucket with the vague idea of seeing if he’s got any work for you.

As soon as you open it up and get online via the dodgy directional aerial he set you up with, he calls you. “Anwar, my man! How are you hanging?”

Tariq has this annoying habit of trying to talk slang like the hep rappers and gangsta cats of previous generations. It’s annoying because he gets it badly wrong every time. He wears a two-sizes-too-small porkpie hat and dyes his moustache orange because he thinks it’s cool (plus, it annoys the fuck out of Imam Hafiz—not to mention his elder sister Bibi). He also takes the piss out of everybody. What’s really galling is that you’ve got a sneaky feeling that he might be onto something. Certainly, Tariq’s gone further and got more in twenty-four years than you have in nearly thirty; otherwise, why would you be working for him?

“I’m hanging fine, cuz, just fine. But your mother is another matter. She is down in the kitchen with Bibi, and I am up in the attic and close to jamming cotton wool in my ears, I can tell you. She’s fucking lost it, she’s lost the plot, cuz.”

“Did you know the stiff she found was murdered? It’s on the Spurtle’s newscrawl, the filth are all over it. That’s some heavy shit right there, my man—and that’s before you get into the juicier rumours about how he was whacked. Fucking chancer if you ask me, fucker deserved it. But it’s hard on Mom, walking in on him while she was about her scodgies… Listen, I’ve got a job on. Do you have time to look over some templates for me? I’m customizing a chat room for Ali, and I need someone to whack the scripts and try to make them fall over.”

“Which Ali are you working for—short, fat Ali, tall’n’bearded Ali, or psycho punk Ali?”

“You know fucking well I don’t work with Shorty McFatso, and Skinny McBeardy’s a fucking space cadet—got no money because he spends everything he can scrounge on maryjane.”

“What, he’s got a Scottish girl-friend now?”

Tariq rolls his eyes as if you’ve said something dumb, then changes the subject: “I’m putting this board together on behalf of our mutual friend Ali the Punk, capisce? I just need a unit tester to walk the scripts over it. If you can spare me a few hours from your critically important diplomatic duties—”

“If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time.” It’s not as if you’re busy in the office. “I can start as soon as you like.” You don’t know much about Punk Ali, but you’re pretty sure you’d have heard if he was a waster.

Tariq tilts his head slightly, casting his eyes in shadow: You can see the organized firefly flicker of his oh-so-posh contact lenses, retinal-scanning displays for the plugged-in generation. “Can you get away for an hour or two?” he asks.

“Guess so.” Anything to get away from the fearful caterwauling downstairs. “Where do you want to meet?”

“You know the Halfway House, on Fleshmarket Close?”

Of course you know it; it’s one of the Gnome’s favoured hang-outs precisely because it’s half-underground, in a microwave shadow, where mobiles work erratically and GPS doesn’t reach. Stands to reason Tariq would know about it, too. “Sure. See you there in half an hour?”

Tariq cuts the connection. You switch off the pad and lay it aside, then peer at the beer bucket. The wee transparent plastic hingmy—airlock? But you thought only spaceships had them—farts at you. It smells of yeast and a faint tang of something metallic. You fight back the urge to lift the lid and sneak a look inside (the brewing FAQs were all very insistent that you shouldna do that). “Sleep tight,” you admonish it, then you drop the trap-door and scramble down the ladder and out into the night.

It’s evening, but you need sunglasses: That’s Edinburgh in late spring/ early summer. The sun’s low, but staying up later and later, and the local pagans will be doing that infidel sex-festival thing that the local Christians get so hot and bothered about on Calton Hill in a couple of weeks. You pull your shoes and suit jacket on and trudge up to the high street, then down the steep and garish shop-frontage of Cockburn Street to the top of Fleshmarket Close. You walk down the steps carefully, clutching the handrail until you come to the landing with the Halfway House. Tariq’s in the back booth, of course, nursing a pint of heavy. You nod at him, then turn to the bar and order a lager. A minute later, you’re squeezing in knee to knee with Cousin Porkie McWideboy. He raises his glass to you cheerily.

“I didn’t know you drank here,” you tell him. Which is the truth.

“I don’t drink alcohol.” Tariq wipes suds from his moustache.

“Neither do I.” You raise your glass to him. “Watch me practice not drinking alcohol.” He looks irritated but responds in kind.

“Here’s the package.” Tariq slides a wee memory card across the table at you. “There’s a hi-def movie file on this card. Play it, it’s a movie. Change its suffix to dot-exe and run it, and it’ll do something else. Remember to change it back again after you’re done with it of an evening, awright?”

You eye the card with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Then you pull out your phone, elaborately remove the Argyle sock, and inspect it carefully. There is, as you anticipated, no signal, so you roll the sock back over it and stare at Tariq pointedly. “I’m still on probation,” you remind him. “I thought you said this was about testing a chat room?”

“It could be.” Tariq’s noncommittal. “There’s a VM in there, and it’s hosting a web app with a chat room. Nothing else. But you don’t want it to go anywhere near the net. You’re going to stay one hundred per cent off-line while you’re running it, and you keep it that way. Get the picture?”

You get it alright, and it gives you pause for thought. If Mr. Webber gets the idea that you’re a webmonkey for your cousin, he’ll yell at you because you’re nae supposed to go near a web server while you’re on probation—but as long as it’s legal webmonkey shit, you’re pretty sure you can plead wife-and-two-bairns-to-support and get off with a slap on the wrist and a talking-to. They’re supposed to be trying to rehabilitate you, after all, and Tariq’s not one of the dodgy playmates named in the injunction.

But only because he was too smart to get caught.

This doesn’t sound like your regular webmonkey business. There’s no need to take elaborate concealment measures if something’s halal—this business with stegged VMs and sneakernet exchanges in wireless shadows has got to be something else. Just like Colonel Datka’s bread mix.

“I’m not taking it unless you tell me what it is.” You leave the chip on the table, stranded sober and central between two beer glasses. “Seriously, cuz. A man could go to prison.”

“Not really. Not unless you fuck up.” His moustache twitches upward at the corners. “The VM contains a web app with a chat-room application and some test data. I want you to unit test the chat room and its templates for browser accessibility, search semantics, the usual shit. That’s all, except I want you to keep your yap shut and make sure you’re off-line while you do it. Five hundred euros, take it or leave it.”

That’s good money for a webmonkey, and you’re tempted. But. “What’s the payload going to be?” you ask.

“I don’t know yet. Fresh bluefin tuna sashimi by airmail, fix your speeding tickets, your bank balance is temporarily overdrawn, hello I am the widow of Barrister Nkomo, dearly beloved in Christ can you be sincere, we know what you did last Saturday night. Who the fuck cares? It’s just money. They give me the site, I mess with the chat-room software, you get to test it all works. That’s all. There’s no payload there.” Not yet.

You watch as your left hand reaches out to cover the memory card. It’s like it’s at the end of someone else’s arm, someone a couple of years younger, someone without a wife and kids to protect, someone who’s never done time in prison. It’s like it belongs to someone stupid and short-sighted. You’re not short-sighted and stupid; you know better than to take on a Joe job—a hijacked copy of a legit website, one that Tariq’s upstream mate is going to turn into a shell for some kind of scam after he finishes busily installing backdoors in the community portal. Knowing Tariq, it’s probably going to host some horrible malware that’s going to recruit unwitting mules to visit the chat room, then infest their phones and empty their bank accounts. But it’s not a Joe job, you hear yourself thinking, if there’s no payload. It might not happen. If the word yet didn’t keep appending itself to that thought, you’d be a happy camper.

“Relax, cuz.”

“Five hundred euros,” you remind him, and stand up, leaving your half-full pint: You don’t want to risk your mother-in-law smelling it on your breath and recognizing it when you go home.

“Five hundred euros for the father of my niece and nephew. Trust me, I wouldn’t be asking you to do this if I thought they might end up growing up without their dad.” Tariq raises his glass. “Just remember to stay off-line while you run it, and nothing can possibly go wrong.”

When you get home an hour later, you find, to your relief, that Sameena has gone home. Bibi’s in the kitchen, perched on a stool at the breakfast bar, poring over a pad, clearly engrossed. “Hello,” you say, then pause. “Where are the kids?”

It takes a moment for her to look up. “Naseem’s at PlayPal’s. They’re doing five-a-side football tonight. Farida’s staying with her grandparents for the evening.” Which isn’t so unusual, but then she drops the bomb. “Is there anything we should be talking about?”

You hate it when Bibi gets like this: nostrils slightly flared, brows drawn in, squinting at you like you’re a bug in a test-tube. You call it her professional face. “What are you reading?” you ask. It looks to be illustrated, but you can’t read English upside down.

“Oh, just community practice training material,” she says dismissively. “We have to do these revision exercises regularly to stay up to date. Current best practice in identification and clinical management of at-risk groups, communicating infection-control information about STIs to MSMs, that sort of thing.” She rests a hand on the screen. “Where’ve you been?”

“Out seeing Tariq,” you say. There’s no point concealing it from her. “He’s got a little job for me.”

“Oh Anwar.” She smiles, eyes narrowing. Then the smile fades, leaving only the set stare. “Tell me he hasn’t talked you into one of his schemes?”

“I have a perfectly good job!” you protest. “I’m the honorary consul for the Independent—”

Bibi sighs and taps one of her shoes against the table leg. It begins to dawn upon you that you may be in real trouble here.

“How much did he promise you?”

Surrender is inevitable. “Five hundred euros. It’s just a—”

She interrupts: “I’m going to kill my little shit of a brother one of these days.” Your stomach does a back-flip. Your wife is a nice, quiet, well-brought-up lady who does not interrupt people unless they’re in so deep they need to pause for decompression on the way back up. Right now, she’s exuding more quiet menace than Keanu Reeves in The Godfather remake. “He knows where you’ve been, he knows you’re on probation, and he ought to know better.” Her hands are balled up into fists like walnuts, small and hard as wooden clubs.

“It’s nothing, he just wants me to test a website,” you protest. “Listen, it’s not malware and there’s nothing shady about it, it’s just that he wants me to test out a chat-room set-up he’s configuring for a friend. He knows I need the work, and I can be discreet—”

“Really?” Fist on hip, she glares at you. “If you’re so good at being discreet, perhaps you’d like to explain this?” She points, and now you really know you’re in trouble, because the object of her ire is sitting on the countertop beside the sink, looking for all the world like a bag of Produce of People’s Number Four Grain Products Factory of Issyk-Kulistan—

“It’s, um, bread mix?” Your heart sinks. “Isn’t it?”

“Quite possibly. Although I don’t suppose it meets EU standards on food safety. Or labelling. Hygiene, for that matter. And I’m curious, oh my husband, as to why anyone would bother shipping prepackaged bread mix from Kyrgyzstan instead of bulk grain, or maybe flour.”

“Oh, that’s easy enough!” you exclaim with relief. “Colonel Datka’s got his finger in the flour factory and is using the shipments to—”

“I’m told the going price is sixty euros a bag,” she hisses: “For bread mix. Do you really want Naseem and Farida to grow up fatherless, my husband? Motherless, too, because I swear if you get yourself arrested again, I shall die of shame. But no, you don’t need to worry about me; you just carry on and thoughtlessly follow your own selfish urges without considering the consequences, man.”

She pronounces that last with such lip-smacking contempt that you recoil instinctively, racking your brain for an explanation. It must be the women’s studies group at the mosque; they’ve clearly got to her. Next thing you know, she’ll be ditching her jeans for a niqab and angrily denouncing the oligo-hetero-patriarchy on marches. The spectre of no more sex on the home front hovers over you, and despite your desire for dick, the idea of losing your wife to a bunch of hairy-legged feminist separatist fundamentalists fills you with horror.

“Please, Bibi, it’s not like that! I only want what’s best for the bairns. If I don’t work, what kind of role model am I going to be for them? But the idiots in the probation service don’t want me to use my skills—”

“I think you mean they don’t want you to get yourself slung back inside for breaking the law. And do you know something, oh my husband? Neither do I! If this was just about the dodgy bread mix, I could ignore it. Or maybe if it was just the odd job for Tariq. I can even ignore the other stuff. I’m not blind. I know what our marriage is to you.” She leans towards you and sniffs. “But he’s had you in that pub again, hasn’t he? And you couldn’t even be bothered to hide it! You smell of beer. Mouthwash right now, or you’ll set them a bad example.” Her nostrils flare. “My mother would have a fit.”

“Sammy isn’t here,” you say defensively. “And anyway, I only had one pint—”

“Oh yes, just one pint. That’s like being a little bit pregnant, or just one casual sex partner, or just one arrest and criminal conviction. Or just one scam at a time. What does it take to get through to you? You’ve got to learn to think ahead! You’ve got to be more discreet!”

You blink at her. The anger seems to have ebbed into wide-eyed confusion. She’s really worried, you realize. It’s not just a bad day in the dispensary, so let’s yell at the house-husband (though that’s happened in the past). What’s got into her? Then another thought strikes you. “You said it’s changing hands for sixty euros a bag. Do you know who’s paying that much for it? I know where to get more; we could clean up—”

That night, you get to bed down on the attic floor, with the burping brew-kit airlock to keep you company as you try to work out exactly what you said wrong.

Women! Who knows why they do what they do? Certainly not you—and you even married one.

TOYMAKER: Reality Excursion

You!

Yes, you. Who the fuck did you think I was talking to, the Tooth Fairy? (That’s him on the left)—Jesus? No, I’m talking to you, fuckwit. Whoever or whatever you are, watching over me…

I’m an executive, you know. That’s why there’s a chip in my head. The Operation put it there so they could keep track of me. You’ve got to look at it from their point of view; it’s cheap due diligence—couple of dozen terabytes of non-volatile storage, mikes and GPS for metadata—“to deter you from going behind our backs,” they said. It’s not just a recorder, either. They can make LTE chipsets really small, you know? Phone chipset in the head. Maybe it’s transmitting all the time, and you’re sitting in a darkened room listening to my subvocalized thoughts. Or maybe you’re just an AI application, running pattern-matching code on the speech-to-text output, somewhere in the cloud. What if it’s receiving, too, controlling the old meatpuppet? Maybe there’s a bomb in my skull. Learning too much about our employers is a firing expense—they’re said to favour nine-millimetre—but what if they wanted to be sure? Multi-channel redundancy via cognitive radio. Push a button, bounce a signal off the moon, hello, bomb, pleased to meet you! Let’s go out with a splash.

You only live in my imagination. (I die, you die.) But I can still talk to you. And we have a problem, my invisible friend.

… No. Let me be more precise. I have a problem. Enemies. They’ve iced my primary candidates for COO and CFO before I could door-step them for a pre-induction assessment. To make matters worse, I became a person of interest in the police investigation—purely by coincidence—and they took a DNA sample. I’m pinned down here until we can file a Privacy Redaction Order and get the sample incinerated.

And for the icing on the shit-cake, my fucking luggage is still missing . Missing!

… That was as of three hours ago. Maybe the cunt on the Hilton hospitality desk has found it. That’d be a shame: I was looking forward to taking it out of his hide, with compound interest on top. (Five point six two kilograms.) Fuck it, my sample was in there. And my meds. I’ve been giving myself a little holiday from the pills recently, giving myself a holiday to remember what it’s like to have a mind of my own. Neurodiverse. (Losing it from the front desk onwards… maybe that wasn’t such a good idea?) Guess I just have to hold myself together until I can get my luggage back or I’ll skin Mr. Hospitality in a bathtub full of brine.

But anyway: I have a phone. I always have a phone, short of brain surgery to separate me from it. Phones are deadlier than guns. I need to talk to the business-support desk. Arms-race death match between the cognitive radio free Internet rebels and the lizards who run the secret world government: We use the rebels’ remixers. And the phone in my head connects direct through the undernet, diving for a nameless server in central Asia—

“Hello?”

Look around, my invisible friend, see the park, the mud grey field, and the trees? We have bandwidth here. The council installed routers in all the lampposts, the better to handle the feed from the webcams in all the street-lamps. The lizards want to catch the rape machines, but they’re too cunning. Bushes block the electromagnetic emissions from the lights.

“Hello?”

“Uh, this is, is Able November in Edinburgh.”

You—that is to say, me—use Able November as a code-name when talking to the Operation’s call centre. This is the twenty-first century, and even international crime syndicates and off-shore venture-capital trusts—the two are sometimes hard to tell apart—need offshore call centres. You can’t do business without the right tools, after all.

(Is that a police reconnaissance drone cruising just below the eaves of the tenements on the other side of the field? Or is it just a very large bat?)

“Hello, Able November. What is your situation?”

“Mike Blair has been murdered. Vivian Crolla has been murdered. My”—fuck shit piss cocksucking—“luggage has gone missing with my meds and I haven’t had any for seventy-two hours. I am”—mother-fucking ANGRY—“losing my objectivity somewhat. Can you help? The meds are the hard part.”

“I’m putting you on hold. Please wait.”

You find a wooden bench and sit down, touching it, feeling the dry crumbling grain of decomposing dead lignified hermaphrodite flesh between your fingers. You obey the order to hold on instinctively, clutching the surface with one hand. If you lose your grip, you might fall up into the sky: You’re very light. This is a really fucking shitty time to have an attack, but it’s not so surprising. Every so often you cut back on your meds for a couple of days, re-establish your baseline. Is it just bad luck that when you’re ready to go back on the pills, they steal your luggage and murder your contacts? The police have eyes in the sky, watching and waiting. How can these not be connected?

“Able November,” says the woman you’re listening to—her voice distorted by the hearing implant in your skull, drain-pipe echo of an encrypted tunnel—“what’s that about your meds? Are you taking them?”

“No,” you want to shout, but the phone is in your head, and if you yell aloud, someone or something bad might hear. Gently. The mike in your throat hears all. “My meds are in my luggage. My luggage has been missing for two days.” Little white lies shining like baby teeth in a shallow grave.

“Okay, we can take care of that for you,” says your operator. “I’m going to send your prescription through to the nearest pharmacy for an emergency resupply. Uh, your identity. Is it still clean?”

“No,” you say. “No, no.” It’s your fault. You told the police to steal my DNA, didn’t you? Mother-fucking ghost-chip-skull-bomb invisible capitalist friends, can’t trust ’em anywhere. “It’s…” You realize you’re hyperventilating and force yourself to slow down. “I visited Mike Blair and found a murder investigation in progress.” Cops in ceramic terylene overalls picking tiny fragments of your skull off the bathroom floor… “They sampled me as a POI. This identity’s dirty. I need a fall-back.”

“Okay, don’t worry. I’m putting you on hold again.”

You hold, while the police RPV ghosts across the park on silent ducted fans, searching the bushes for rape machines—no, rape machines don’t exist. Crazy childhood phantasms that lurk into adulthood: They’re less real than this phone in your skull, the life-line to the Operation’s soothing dream of control. Once you get on your meds again, the bad stuff will all go away. The same cannot be said of all the other shit. You say paranoia, I say surveillance state. Worried about being tracked by hidden cameras, stealthy air-borne remotely piloted vehicles, and chips implanted in your skull? You’re merely a realist.

The twenty-first century so far has been a really fucking awful couple of decades for paranoid schizophrenics. Luckily, you’re not paranoid—you just have these little breakdowns from time to time. A medication side-effect—a side-effect of coming off your meds, that is. Usually at the least convenient time—like now. Something is watching you from the trash can alongside the footpath. Then it moves. A starling. (They’re making a come-back from the brink of extinction.)

“I’m going to text a route to a local pharmacy to your handset. I want you to go there immediately, they know you’re a tourist, and it’s urgent. Don’t leave until you’ve got your pills. Do you understand?”

You nod happily, glad that someone is there to catch your fall. Not a lizard—lizards never catch. “Yes.” They want to brainwash you and make a good little worker-robot-slave out of your flayed soul.

“Okay. You’re to stop using your current identity immediately after you get your prescription. There’s a new background waiting for you, and I’ll send you the collection details in the next message. Clear?”

“Yes.” You swallow. Your throat is unaccountably dry. This always happens when the firewall in your head springs a leak. “What else?”

“We can’t help with your contacts,” she says abruptly, sibilants buzzing like an angry hornet just behind your left ear. “You’re not the only founder-executive with problems today. We’re busy fighting off denial-of-service attacks on all fronts. Marketing/Communications are experiencing severe functional ablation, and it’s degrading our ability to comply with our service-level agreements. Basic medical and identity services are running normally, but unfortunately as a Tier Two executive, you may experience delays in fulfilment of your general support requests. If you can find out who exactly killed your contacts, you are to let us know immediately.”

Is it the lizards—your loyal lips are frozen shut. The operator does not need to hear about the lizards. (She’s not the only one. Most people don’t believe in the lizards and react badly if you try to tell them: It’s the brainwashing.) The operator sounds tense and tired. She doesn’t need any more worries. If you make her worry that you are losing it, talking about shape-changing lizards, she may push that button and bounce that signal off the moon and hello, Mr. Brain-Bomb, good-bye Toymaker. So you do not say one word about the lizards. Like the rape machines, they’re imaginary haunts—except, an edgy feeling tells you, they’re not.

“I’ll do that,” you reassure the operator.

“Okay, go get your meds.” And a moment later the phone in your wallet vibrates and a couple of numbered tags show up on its map of the city, along with a helpfully walkable route.

You have a mission. You’re going to get your meds, pick up your new identity documents, then look into replacing your luggage and finding somewhere safe to stay. That’s all you can do right now. Maybe when you’re back in familiar headspace, you can make plans for whittling down the number of your enemies; but that’s not a job for this afternoon.

The nearest pharmacy turns out to be inside a red-brick Tesco superstore, the shiny green glass cylinder of a government-run vertical farm rising from the former parking lot behind it. You sidle up to the counter and make yourself known to the government employee behind the counter. She bustles off into the back room, and the pharmacist comes out. She’s a pretty, petite woman, thirtysomething Anglo-Indian. “Mr. Christie?” she asks. It’s an alias—it’s your alias, for the next hour at least. “May I see some proof of identity?”

You show her your entirely authentic driving license and she reads it with dark, unreadable eyes then scans your thumbprint and verifies it. “Thank you,” she says. Into the back, then back out again with a bag: “You’ve had this prescription before?”

You nod, eagerly. It’s a selective metabotropic glutamate agonist, sturdy and well-understood, a neuroleptic firewall proof against the rape-machine fantasies and mind-control issues you’ve had ever since the disastrous clinical trial they put you through during your teens. “My luggage went missing. I, uh, I really need this.” You reach out, watching the minute tremors in your hand as if from a great distance.

“I’ll say you do.” She hands the box over with a curious expression on her face. “There’s no charge: You’re in Scotland, we still have a National Health Service. That’s you, then. Have a nice day.” They have a working health-care system here, don’t they? You nod jerkily, then back away.

Outside the shiny socialized factory farm, post office, pharmacy, and general-purpose omnistore, you gulp down two tablets—one of the doctors at the clinic told you how to do that, pump-priming, years ago—and stand there shaking for a minute. Grey streets, tall buildings looking down on you with eye-socket windows. Bats glide overhead, or pigeons, or RPVs with terahertz radar eyes, vigilant for the deviant. You shiver. You need to get under cover before they come for you… give the meds time to cut in. You haven’t had an attack this bad since… since…

Don’t think about it.

You are the Toymaker’s avatar in this nation-state. You’re the executive: strong, and determined, and entrepreneurial, and skilled. You’re not some kind of paranoid-schizophrenic personality-disorder case, stoned on his own brain chemistry. There really is a chip in your skull, monitoring and controlling and stabilizing on behalf of the conspiracy for which you work. There really is someone or something watching over you, controlling from afar. The hallucinations are going to go away, then you’re going to take this reality by the throat and twist it until it crackles under your fingers like… like…

The replacement prescription sits heavy in your pocket, reassuring, a chemotaxic anchor pulling you closer to the harbour of high-functioning quasi-sanity. Just knowing it’s in your system makes you feel better. So you walk back along the main road towards town, taking your time (and avoiding the nosy buses and their intrusive cameras). About half a mile later you pass a hole-in-the-wall diner, where you pause to order a mixed meze and a plate of falafels. The bored Middle Eastern guy behind the bar spends his time between serving you hunched over an elderly pad, handset glued to his ears, evidently talking an Alzheimer’s patient through replying to an email: “No, look, at the top, it says get mail, write, address book, reply, tap reply—no, not the red dot, below the red dot, what do you see?” His despairing half-duplex monotone soothes your rattled nerves, reassuring you that he’s not remotely likely to be spying on you.

When you leave the restaurant, the day has brightened considerably. There are no bushes for concealment, no sinister shapes flitting past overhead—an unmanned police segway rolls up the hill, cameras panning in all directions, but even the neurotypical can see that.

Another fifty minutes of walking sees you back in the West End, approaching the marble-fronted monolith of the Hilton. You are relatively calm, at peace with what it is you are about to do. It’s true they have misplaced your luggage, and with it your sample merchandise. However—let us retain a sense of proportion—this is not the worst thing that has happened to you today, is it? Once you have unpacked your 5.62 kilograms of home and bolted the hotel-room door you’ll be safe. It just depends on whether the fool on the hospitality desk has found—

Your march across the polished floor of the lobby comes to an abrupt halt. There’s a well-dressed woman waiting beside the desk, but nobody behind it. You can feel your arousal level rising: You need your bag; your commercial sample is sleeping in it; are they playing with you? The woman is watching you with elaborate inattentiveness, carefully avoiding eye contact. “Do you work here?” you demand.

“No.” Now she looks at you. A wry twist of the lips. “They’re trying to find my parcel. I had it sent poste restante—FedEx say they delivered it this morning, but the hotel know nothing.”

The very idea! Suddenly it strikes you. You shipped your luggage via Yamato, a takuhaibin logistics company, and they simply don’t lose things. But if this woman’s package went missing, and she used FedEx—“My luggage is missing, too,” you confess. “Think they’ve got a problem?”

“I’d say so.” She nods. “Mr. MacAndrews says they’ve been having network trouble all day. That’s usually a euphemism for malware, in my experience.”

An upswing in cybernetic infestation isn’t your problem, but it puts the hospitality manager’s attitude in a different light. Maybe he’s not actually trying to fuck with you—

And here he comes, scurrying back out from a locked door with a box in his hands. He sees you and does a double-take, but goes straight for your companion: “Ms. Straight? We found it! They’ve got the computers working again, and it was sitting in our loading area along with the other inbound consignments.” He looks at you directly. “Mr… Christie? Your luggage was missing, too, wasn’t it?” Cheeky sod. You nod. “I’ll just go see if it’s turned up as well, now we’ve got our logistics working again.”

He turns and rushes off, leaving your companion looking at her box. “Humph. I thought he was supposed to get some proof of identity before handing items over,” she says disapprovingly.

“Well, that’s his problem, isn’t it?” you say, and smile at her. You focus on her properly for the first time, taking in: red hair, carefully styled; lips and eyes emphasized, but not heavy on the slap; wearing a green dress with a low neckline that’s kept on the business side of sexy by a black jacket. Mature but rootable, in other words, and if she isn’t on the pull, you’re a cactus.

You haven’t had any action for a couple of weeks now. You don’t know where the local cruising grounds are, and here in the dour puritan anglosphere the hotel front desk doesn’t provide room service. You have certain needs—exacerbated now you’re coming down from your little reality excursion. You posted an ad on a swinger aggregator a couple of days ago, but no joy yet. The idea of her plumped wasp-sting lips wrapped around your cock appeals: You take conscious control of your smile and widen it.

“I suppose so.” She catches your eye and smiles back. “I’ll just have to wait.”

Interested but coy: You’ve met this attitude before, and it bugs the living fuck out of you. Why don’t these sheeple admit that it’s pointless and drop the pretence that they care? Oh, but I’d feel guilty, they say if you ask them why they tipped the waiter/returned the excess change they were given/didn’t pad the insurance claim/turned down the zipless fuck—even though there’s absolutely no chance that anyone would catch them. You smile back at her and nod.

“Are you staying here for long?” you ask.

“Oh, just checking in for a few nights.” She raises an eyebrow. “Yourself?”

“The same,” you say honestly. “Here on business, just checking in, gone tomorrow. At a loose end, really.”

Her pupils dilate slightly, and there are some other cues: You’ve studied this shit, looked into NLP, and you focus on emitting the right signals, mirroring her subconscious arousal. “That’s a shame,” she says. “What line are you in?”

That’s off-script, but not too far off-script. “I’m in toys,” you say. It’s even true. “Re-establishing a local supply-chain subsidiary that’s been neglected for too long.” The door is opening: The irritating Mr. McAndrews is on his way back. “Busy by day, totally at a loose end by night. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in dinner?”

Two out of three times, they say no at this point: If she says yes, you’ve got about a 40–per cent chance of finding out if she swallows. McAndrews is busy with the telescoping handle of what out of the corner of one eye you recognize is your case. You keep your eye-balls pointed the right way (which is not at Ms. Straight’s face or tits).

“Sure,” she says, her smile medium-flirtatious. “Meet here, eight tonight?”

“Glad to,” you say, mirroring her expression and carefully concealing your satisfaction. Then you break contact deliberately, slewing towards Mr. McAndrews, who is wrestling your suitcase to a halt in front of you. “Ah, excellent. By the way, Ms. Straight here—”

“—Dorothy—” You glance back at her, let your smile widen, nod slightly.

“—was expecting you to ask for some ID—”

“Ach, yes, but you see, we have a record.” McAndrews twitches at the discreet camera dome overhead. “Nobody would steal from us.”

Dorothy is raising an eyebrow at you. “John,” you volunteer.

“Mr. John R. Christie. If you could just sign here?”

McAndrews thrusts a tablet at you. Bastard.

“I’ll see you this evening, John.” She turns and is gone.

You take your luggage up to your room and go through it with shaking hands. Here’s the sample merchandise, occupying half the case: You plug it in to charge, just in case a demo is called for in the next couple of days. Here’s your “sterile” pad—still in the box it came in from PC WORLD—and here are your spare clothes. Toothbrush. Shaver. Meds. Bling case. You carefully arrange the small items on the desk in their correct order. Then you put the pad online and tell it to download its work personality from the cloud while you have a scalding-hot shower and change your clothes.

Of course you can’t stay here. But you must stay here. Or rather: “John Christie” has to stay where the police expect to find him during their investigation. You can be someone else, somewhere else. And your sample merchandise had better be somewhere else, lest the police find it in your custody. That would totally suck.

Luckily, there’s a magical mystery tour in your phone that’ll take you out of John Christie’s panopticon-enforced sheep’s clothing and give you a new suit and a second shot at lift-off. But the sudden shortage of candidate executives for your business plan is disturbing: Finding two of them dead is not a coincidence. You need backup before you start digging for the killers. And you’re going to get very little of it until the Operation cleans up after that DoS attack.

A plan begins to come together in your mind. You’ll renew your room for the rest of the week, but you won’t be there: You’re going to set up shop elsewhere. You’re going to go and buy new luggage and pick up your new papers, like Operation support told you to. Leave your old luggage with the sample merchandise parked with a useful idiot, just in case the police come snooping. Forward all calls, sanitize the room with a brisk spritz of sports stadium DNA, and all that’s left is the legal wrap-up: “John Christie” will still be staying in your hotel room, but you’ll be gone. Meanwhile, tonight there’s dinner—and hopefully baka sekusu with the Straight bitch for dessert.

You’ve had better days, but this one is showing signs of improvement.

The pad finishes downloading. You rename some files, point the browser at a malware site, and allow it to infect the machine, scrambling certain files to provide you with deniability if anyone searches it. Then you shove it in the room safe, pick up your meds, bling, and keyring, pull on a pair of glasses, pick up your case (with fully charged sample merchandise), and head out the door.

Once you pair them with your skullphone, the glasses steer you across the main road and down a picturesque path that meanders through Princes Street Gardens, out of sight of the trams, around the base of the huge granite butt-plug on which the castle squats. The skullphone’s display is austere, basic: You can only cram so much intelligence into a gram of glucose fuel-cell-powered silicon leeching off your blood sugar and dissolved oxygen. A third of a mile later, you cross a bridge across the buried railway station, then through a slightly tatty subterranean shopping mall where you spend half an hour hunting for the necessities to replace your regular luggage. Half the storefronts are shuttered, victims of high-street flight. Climbing the Waverley Steps you pause, then turn right and cross the intersection with North Bridge. According to the messages queued in your chip, your new identity documents can be obtained from an office on the third floor of the huge pile of Gothic limestone within whose windows you can just see an eerily glowing glass cube.

You walk through the revolving door and cross the lobby of the old post-office building to the glass-walled lifts that slide silently up and down within the echoing atrium. There’s a transparent airlock in front of the lift doors. “John Christie, for the honorary consul of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan,” you say, as the outer door closes behind you. There’s a puff of air from the explosive detectors below, a beep, and the lift door opens before you. Thirty seconds later, you’re standing in a narrow corridor, outside a glass door and an entryphone. You push the buzzer. “Mr. Christie? Please come in, it’s the second office on the left,” says a Scottish-accented voice.

You silently repeat your line as you walk along to the second door and arrive as a thirtyish British-Asian man in a cheap suit pulls it open and looks up at you with a peculiarly bovine expression. “What can I do for you?”

“Colonel Datka sent me.” You can see the key turning in the lock behind his petrified eyes. “I’m here to collect some papers. And I have a little job for you.”

Interlude 1 KEMAL: Spamcop

Welcome to the postnational age.

Here you are, sitting in the window-seat of a creaky old Embraer as it makes its final approach into Edinburgh airport, banking over the tidal barrage and the wind farms in the Firth of Forth: It’s been five years since your only previous visit, and not long enough by far.

Eggs and spam.

Back then, you had the glamour and the mojo, the whole Men in Black thing working for you: the Europol supercop from l’Organisation pour Nourrir et Consolider L’Europe, travelling with a tiger team of forensic analysts and a digitally signed email from the Judge d’Inquisition to hand in case you needed to steam-roller your way across the objections of a provincial police force who didn’t realize what they were dealing with. Except things went terribly wrong—the national-security dinosaurs rising from their uneasy sleep, opening the closet doors to draw forth a conga line of dancing skeletons. It still gives you the cold shudders, thinking about the ease with which a couple of teams of coke-fuelled black-hat Shanghainese hackers rooted the network backbones of a pair of peripheral states: And the shit you stumbled into out here on the edge of the North Sea was as nothing compared to what your colleagues had to clean up in Gdansk and Warsaw. Not to mention the chewing out your boss François gave you during your performance eval the following spring. Black marks on the Man in Black’s record. And the rudeness of the Scottish police—that really rankled. Professional respect: Have these people never heard of it?

Eggs, ham, and spam.

The plane’s wings buzz angrily as flaps extend: The wave-crests are an endless tessellation of white triangles below, marred by the wake of a sailboat. Four years in career limbo, reassigned to Business Affairs and buried leech deep in the bowels of the Department of Internet Fraud. Four years spent in a pokey little office in a corner of Madou Plaza Tower, where flies buzz madly beneath the chilly glare of LED spotlights, patiently paging through reams of spam in search of the websites of the idiots who pay to rent botnets by the hour—

Eggs, ham, sausage, and spam.

Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.

Spam, ham, sausage, and spam.

The white-noise roar of the cabin air-conditioning is augmented by a new noise, the wind rush from around the open nose-wheel door as the landing gear drops.

Most of the public don’t notice it, but the war on spam goes ever on, and it’s a war on two fronts. One front, your own, is fought by battalions of law-enforcement officers and prosecutors. The most egregious junk sells hard goods—stuff with a physical shipping address—to the vulnerable; fake pharmaceuticals to die by, trashy Tanzanian machine-tool parts, unlicensed herbal supplements from Nigeria, counterfeit designer clothes and handbags and heart valves made of shoe-leather. They show up, you order the goods, backtrace through courier and logistics to the mother-lode, obtain a warrant, pop goes the weasel, round and round the merry-go-round.

Spam, eggs, spam, spam, ham, and spam.

The brigades of system administrators and programmers on the other front tackle the problem from the opposite end, with ever-more-elaborate AI filters that scan message traffic and tell ham from spam. Ninety-five per cent of all human-readable traffic over the net is spam, a figure virtually unchanged since the late noughties. There are dumb filters and smart filters. Dumb filters look for naughty words. Smart filters look for patterns of diction that are characteristic of automatically assembled text—for much spam is generated by drivel-speaking AI, designed purely to fool the smart filters by convincing them that it’s the effusion of a real human being and of interest to the recipients. Slowly but surely the Turing Test war proceeds, as the spammers are forced to invest in ever-more-elaborate AI engines to generate conversations that can temporarily convince the spamcops’ AI engines that they are in fact human beings.

Spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, ham, spam, potato, and spam.

And still you’re losing.

There’s a bump and rumble, and you’re shoved forward against your lap-belt as the regional jet’s thrust reversers cut in. Welcome to the Republic of Scotland, semi-privatized satrapy of the former United Kingdom and sock-puppet independent vote on the Council of Ministers—soon to acquire the extra clout of a pair of senators, once the tedious ratification treaty completes and the European Parliament upgrades to a fully bicameral legislature. You’re back, and this time you don’t have a posse of high-powered forensic analysts behind you, or diplomatic letters of marque and reprise, or much of anything in fact: just a dossier, a disturbing-to-terrifying trend analysis from a research team in the Sorbonne, and a suggestive pattern of murders smeared bloody-handed across the width and depth of the EU.

Spam, spam, spam, murder, and spam.

Seventy years of research and development into artificial intelligence failed to deliver HAL 9000, but they did provide a huge array of toolkits for tackling complex problems. Today, in the wake of the bursting of the worldwide higher-education bubble, the big funding sources in computational artificial-intelligence research are computer games and cognitive marketing services, from personalized message generation to automated spear phishing. Some say the spammers are pouring more money into Minsky’s inheritors than the US Department of Defense ever imagined. The spamcops retaliate. There’s an arms race in progress, and some experts mutter dark warnings of the Spamularity: the global chaos that will ensue once the first distributed spamming engine achieves human-equivalent sentience. Possibly the only thing holding it back is the multi-tiered nature of the darknet economy: Malware that supports spamware frequently carries virus-scanning payloads that immunize host computers and phones against rival strains of infection. After all, it’s a free-market economy, red in tooth and claw: And if you can’t count on a state to keep the opposition in check, you’ve got to see to your security yourself.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked memes, spam, spam, spam, and spam.

This week, for the first time in a couple of years, the machine-generated spew has faltered significantly. Most of the usual darknets are still vomiting forth the gibber fantastic, but their core semantic networks aren’t updating: It’s the same flavour of froth as last week’s, and thereby easier to filter out. No new botnets have surfaced, switching from build-out to broadcast mode: There has been a curious absence of new malware strains. Spam has actually fallen. It would be glad tidings, indeed, if not for the puzzling question of why. And those unsolved killings. Which is what your superiors have sent you to look into in Edinburgh: They skimmed the bullet point in your résumé and mistakenly assumed you’d be at home here, able to work hand in glove with the locals. Truly the jaws of irony are agape!

The battle against spam had grown into a bitter trench war fought on two fronts—and now a new front has been opened. Someone—or more worryingly, some thing—seems to have adopted a draconian approach to the problem you and yours have failed to solve in nearly four decades. And the question that everyone is worrying about is: Whatever next?

Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Nothing but spam!

FELIX: First Citizen

When the First Citizen has a bad night’s sleep, he likes to share.

You have been recalled to the capital on urgent business—certain currency-triangulation transactions require your personal biometric signature, as one of the trustees of the national bank—and so it is no major surprise when your morning starts with the plaintive tweedle of the satphone. It sits on one of the fake Louis Quatorze bedside tables in your hotel suite. You roll over, dislodging the blonde Ukrainian girl from her death grip on the bolster (Why is she still here? Doesn’t she have a bed of her own to go to?), and pick up the handset.

“Colonel Datka, sir? This is Eagle’s Nest.”

“Yes, yes,” you say irritably, trying to focus on the illuminated dial of the alarm clock. It’s four thirty, but when the Eagle’s Nest calls, it is rash to hang up. “What is it?”

“His Excellency is asking for you. Are you presentable? We have a car en route.”

Shit, you think. Is Bhaskar all right? You recognize the voice at the other end of the line: It’s one of the First Citizen’s regular bodyguards, Dmitry something, an ethnic Russian. (Minor reassurance: A stranger’s voice would be worrying.) “I will be ready in five minutes,” you say, and stifle a fear-threaded yawn. “Is there anything I should be prepared for?”

“I don’t think so.” Dmitry sounds uncertain. “He had a very disturbed night. The usual, is all.”

“I’ll be ready,” you reassure the man, and hang up. The brunette has noticed your usual morning stiffening and is rubbing her lips against your manhood, but you have other needs: You shove her face away and clamber across her, pad past the empty champagne bucket towards the en suite bathroom. The solid silver urinal in the shape of a gaping, open-mouthed cherub swallows your steaming piss-stream. “Make yourselves useful and find me some clean underwear,” you grunt at the girls. “I have an appointment with the First Citizen.”

“Yes, Colonel,” they echo, with the precisely correct degree of respect tinged with awe. They’re almost annoyingly well-trained. Say anything you like about the plumbing: The Erkindik Hotel front desk supplies the best whores in Bishkek, if not the whole of Kyrgyzstan.

Ten minutes later, you’re presentable, in the uniform of a colonel in the Army Intelligence Directorate, gold braid and red shoulder tabs and three rows of brightly polished medals—no less than is your due—as you head downstairs to the hotel lobby. (Bhaskar offered to promote you to lieutenant general a couple of times, but only halfway down the vodka bottle: Tact—or prudence—has kept you from reminding him of this when he’s sober. In any case, chief of military overseas intelligence is a colonel’s position in these half-assed times: You don’t want to give General Medvedev cause to think you’re making a play for his job.)

Two black-suited fellows from the presidential security detachment are waiting for you in the lobby. Four more stand on the sidewalk by the beetle-shiny armoured Mercedes. They see you safely on board, and seconds later you’re slamming through the deserted predawn boulevards of the capital in the middle of a convoy of armed pick-up trucks, blue lights flickering off the concrete frontages to either side, your armed guards scanning for threats with gunsight eyes.

The American has weaselled his way into your entourage again. (Let him have his illusory privilege of access: It’s so much easier to keep an eye on him when he thinks he’s keeping an eye on you.) He’s sitting in the middle jump-seat opposite, clutching his pad in both hands like a determined chipmunk who refuses to give up his nut. “What is it this time?” you ask, staring pointedly at him.

“It’s the exchange rate.” Blue fireflies flicker and gleam inside his rimless glasses. “All it takes is a two-point fluctuation, and we lose a hundred million on the exchanges.” He doesn’t smile. How long is it since you could always tell an American by their smile? Good dentistry is expensive: Flashing bright teeth in these straitened times is like wearing a jacket that says MUG ME. “Can you talk him out of it?”

You suppress a sigh. “You seem to think Bhaskar is a tame bullock, to be herded this way and that. He isn’t, and if you persist in this mode of thinking, he will give you a nasty surprise.”

The American’s lips curl. “Who’s running this, you or the Operation?” he asks. “Without our collateral, you’d be—”

You smile without showing your teeth. He stops chittering, gratifyingly fast. Chipmunk-American has seen a pit viper. “We are duly grateful to our investors. Nevertheless, you will refrain from discussing the First Citizen in language more appropriate to cattle. Without his continuing patronage, your operation is nothing. We are not stupid, Mr. White. If you didn’t need our special expertise, you wouldn’t be engaged in this joint venture with, ah, those ‘crazy Kyrgyz.’”

It’s hard to tell if Mr. White blanches in the strobing glow of the street-lamps and the blue LEDs of the lead escort, but your choice of words echoes his own language. Stupid little geek probably imagines you’ve cracked the encryption on his secure VoIP link, forgetting who owns all the bandwidth in and out of both countries—both Kyrgyzstan and the recession-hit sock puppet in the East that he’s using for his little logistics operation. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“Leave Bhaskar to me,” you reassure him. “And leave the currency-stabilization talks alone. Your concerns are noted, and I agree—it would be absolutely deplorable to lose a hundred million euros of your money through inattention. Nevertheless, attempting to micromanage the First Citizen would be unwise. Trust me on this: I’ve known him for more than forty years.” Since you were both in the Young Pioneers together, back in the dog days of the Soviet Union.

You consider saying more to the creep, promising a little something to sweeten the deal and keep suckering him in, but at that point the convoy slows, and the car turns sharply, nosing over a recessed barrier and down a steep ramp into an underground security check-point and parking garage. It’s under the back of the New Wing, across the street from the White House—Bhaskar’s office and bachelor pad, a hideous lump of white marble that looks like a tax office fucking an airport terminal.

You leave the Operation’s representative sitting in the limo as the guards salute and wave you forward across the crimson carpet and into the elevator with the best Korean terahertz radar and explosive sniffers hidden in its walnut-veneered walls. Then it’s into the corridor under the road, and another elevator that whisks you upstairs—then down another corridor that serves as a security firebreak for the guards on Bhaskar’s private quarters to check you out, and finally another elevator. Then the doors slide open, and you’re in Xanadu.

Xanadu is three stories high, ten metres on a side, and occupies about an eighth of the presidential palace’s floor-plan. It’s mounted on shock-absorbers driven into bed-rock and hermetically sealed from the rest of the White House by steel plates embedded in the walls: an insulated bubble of purest lunacy, the personal quarters of the First Citizen of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan. Whoever designed it was clearly channelling Samuel Coleridge on dodgy pharmaceuticals by way of Norman Foster rather than the ghost of Kublai Khan, but beggars—and First Citizens—can’t be choosers: It came to light after you’d finished kicking that bum Adskhan into exile in Prague. Personally, if it had been you, you’d have demolished the thing rather than sleep in it, but after the second assassination attempt, Bhaskar got the message and retreated inside his predecessor’s hermetically sealed pleasure dome.

You find him sitting in the sunken circular seat with the fish-tank floor and pink leather cushions, wearing one of those Japanese dressinggown things and looking morose. There are bags under his eyes, and he has neglected to shave. His big, bony feet splay across the glass, footprints for the rainbow carp to gape and mouth at from beneath. “Is it morning?” he asks hopefully.

“It will be, soon.” You carefully descend the steps—you’ve never trusted that glass floor not to dump you in the water—and embrace, cheek to cheek. “Are you well, brother? What’s troubling you?”

“I can’t sleep.” The First Citizen—you remember playing “tag” in the woods out behind the apartment block you both lived in—looks despondent. “The pills aren’t helping. I feel like I’m going mad at times, let me tell you. It’s this artificial light: I never see the sun these days. Bad dreams, whenever I manage to get to sleep.” He rubs his index finger alongside his crooked, slightly splayed nose.

“We should get you a woman—” You stop when you see the look in his eyes. He hasn’t been the same since Yelena died. Some men need all the women they can get, but for others, one is all they want for a lifetime. “Or a bottle of vodka? And some dirty videos. When did we last kick back with a good movie?”

Now his shoulders relax. “I’m supposed to tutor a meeting of the All-Republic Commission on Finance this afternoon,” he says quietly. “Most of those fucking peasants wouldn’t know a credit default swap if it bit them on the bell-end. And listen, they aren’t paying me to teach macroeconomics at the state academy anymore. Those bastards, if they were my students, they’d be heading for a ‘fail.’ All they can think of is lining their own pockets. What the fuck do they care about the future?”

“The committee will still be there tomorrow, and the day after,” you point out. “Send a reliable deputy…” Now you understand the expression. “What is it?”

“What indeed?” He raises an eyebrow. “It’s the future. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”

“What?”

“Listen.” The First Citizen glances away. “Suppose I ordered you to arrest the American, the investment agent. No reason given, just shut his little crime syndicate down right now and bugger the big picture. Would you do it?”

“For you, boss? Of course, in a split instant.” You shrug. “Of course, it would make a real mess,” you add, conspiratorially: Subtext, you’d completely fuck over our past two years’ work.

“Right, right.” Bhaskar limply punches the open palm of his left hand, winces slightly from the carpal tunnel syndrome that’s plagued him for decades. “You’d do it, but first you make sure I am fully informed as to the consequences.” (Little does he truly appreciate the real risks involved: It’s your job to protect your unworldly genius of a childhood friend from the real-world consequences of such a whim. To ensure that when it’s time for you to bring the hammer down and Bhaskar to fix the deficit, there are no overlooked survivors with enough money to pay for assassins.) “I’m not asking you to do that. But the point is, at least I know where you stand. You’re not afraid to tell me. But those fuckers on the all-state council? That rat-bag Kurmanbek smiles like a vulture and makes nicey-nicey noises, but do you think he’d lend me a horse if my pony was lamed—”

Kurmanbek is the vice-president—or rather, the ethnic Uzbek counterweight in the ruling coalition Bhaskar presides over: in other words, Nuisance Central. And, of course, Bhaskar’s right: If he asked Kurmanbek the time, the answer would be whatever was most convenient for the veep. “Is the committee’s immediate agenda critical?” you ask. “Because if not—why not send Kurmanbek to deputize? I’ll have someone listen in”—you’re talking about bugging a state committee—“and compare the minutes to what actually gets said. Worst case, you skip class. Best case, Kurmanbek hands you some live ammunition. But either way, you need a couple of days off, boss. Kick back with a couple of bottles and some decadent Iranian musicals. Maybe a game—when did you last go on an epic quest?”

The First Citizen brightens. “You’re right, Felix. I should skip school more often!” You nod, encouraging.

It’s got to be a horrible life, trapped here in a hermetically sealed bubble inside a presidential palace, unable to go out in daylight without a platoon of soldiers with fixed bayonets on all sides, children grown up and wife dead of a stroke these past three years. Not to mention that fucking annoying Georgian extradition warrant floating around Interpol like an unexploded bomb—you know Bhaskar didn’t order the guards to fire on that crowd; it was a horrible fuck-up by an idiot second lieutenant—but the upshot is he’s stuck here in the middle of Bishkek, not even able to go to the casinos in St. Petersburg for an evening at the roulette table. (Or whatever it is that he enjoys: Knowing Bhaskar, given the choice he’d probably disguise himself as a professor, sneak into the university campus, and teach a seminar on the history of monetarism. If all the Republic’s previous presidents’ vices were as recondite as his, Moscow would be coming to you for loans.)

You’ve had a ringside seat, seen what it’s doing to your childhood friend, watched him reduced to fishing for assurances that he’s still loved, shuffling around his carpeted pleasure-prison in the dark. If any smiling bastard tried to convince you to front a coup, you’d shoot him yourself, you think, just to stay out of the presidential padded cell.

Then the First Citizen puts a friendly arm around your shoulder and drops you in it head first:

“But tell me now, how is the Przewalsk business coming along? I’ve been fielding questions from the EU ambassador’s office, but they’re becoming more insistent, and that whining louse Borisovitch in State is starting to give me back-chat…”

THE OPERATION: Blofeld Blues

There is no sabre-scarred monocle-wearing bullet-headed bad guy stroking a white cat at the centre of this conspiracy.

Nor are there any tropical-island bases patrolled by Komodo dragons, assault-rifle-toting boiler-suited henchmen, or stolen nuclear weapons.

The wildest conspiracies are the quietest.

This one started out as a venture-capital partnership that has opted for mutual unlimited liability in lieu of filing certain important papers that the Internal Revenue Service would be very interested in seeing.

In this decade, the United States faces a cumulative gross budget deficit of around 30 trillion dollars—or about 16 trillion euros, or 20 trillion renminbi. It’s the hangover from a century of imperial overstretch, the flip side of the butcher’s bill from trying to force the world to play by the conqueror’s rule-book for too long. The IRS is grabbing every bent cent they can find these days, trying to outrun the law of compound interest. However, their intrusive banking compliance regime doesn’t reach as far as it did a decade or more ago because foreigners aren’t terribly scared of Uncle Sam anymore. For the rising powers of the BRIC, helping the US government balance its books is not exactly high on the agenda of realpolitik. So while most Americans get to tighten their belts and swallow a painful prescription from the IMF, the few, the lucky—those who invested their assets overseas, before the money supply exploded in the wake of one banking crisis too many—are stranded, facing a 90–per cent marginal tax rate if they try to repatriate their wealth.

Hence, the Operation. Invest overseas, invest efficiently, invest for maximum growth, and who gives a fuck about collateral damage? They’re foreigners. They got us into this mess, and now they’re holding our heads underwater by debasing our currency. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke!

The Operation is nominally headquartered in California.

To the IRS—and anyone else who enquires—it appears to be a small, somewhat lackadaisical investment partnership, with a software subsidiary who maintain the expert systems its strategic planning runs on. A couple of successful companies huddle close to the parent organization’s feet: a small ISP, a private management college (not that anyone’s paying for MBAs this decade, when they could be training as plumbers or auto mechanics instead), and an off-shore secretarial bureau. As VC firms go, the only thing distinguishing the Operation from its peers is how undistinguished it looks. Its managers seem to have poor judgement, funding too many second-rate entrepreneurs who drop out of sight after a couple of months. It’s almost as if they don’t want to make a profit, don’t feel the visionary’s urge to set the world ablaze.

Komodo dragons, nuclear missiles, and island bases are all high-maintenance overheads. They’re inefficient. And the Operation values efficiency above all else.

The Operation proactively recruits executive-calibre material from among the unfairly-discriminated-against neurodiverse. It provides a supportive and caring environment in which these battered souls can grow and be all that they want to be. The hate-word “psychopath” conjures up visions of knife-wielding maniacs, but that’s a far cry from the reality of the Operation’s entrepreneurial spirit. In reality, it’s an unacknowledged truth that amidst the cut and thrust of boardroom politics, a touch of antisocial personality disorder is an asset—the Operation merely makes the best of its human resources, polishes and trains them to keep their natural impulsive drives harnessed to the wagon of success. Their classes in corporate and managerial ethics really are first-rate: By the time they graduate and leave the nest, the new entrepreneurs know exactly what they must do to succeed.

One of the dirty little truths of organized crime is that for the most part its management is incompetent. No business exists in a vacuum, and no enterprise—criminal or otherwise—can succeed unless its clients and suppliers trust each other. Unreliable, incompetent, greedy, grasping, poor impulse control—these traits drag down and dismember the management of ’Ndrangheta, cripple the profitability of the Yakuza, and hamstring the Russian Mafiya. They’re slow learners. Even as late as the early noughties, organized crime had barely begun to absorb the lessons of modern management; as for innovation, Al Capone would have recognized most of their business models on sight.

The Operation knows one thing, and knows it well—how to set up and manage a business for maximum growth until it’s time to negotiate a successful sale and cash out. They have single-handedly dragged the management of vice into the late twentieth century, if not the twenty-first: a monumental, if questionable, achievement.

But now they’re under attack.

The Operation’s business is at its most effective when it can tap new audiences, gain new customers, expand markets—reach out to new sources of profit. Lack of brand awareness is the biggest obstacle to establishing any new sales channel (legal or otherwise), and you can’t advertise counterfeit goods or illegal services through regulated media. Consequently, the Operation is highly dependant on all kinds of spam, from shoutcasting on in-game voice channels to the old search engine optimization racket.

Over the past three days, more than fifty individuals have died in unlikely and frequently messy manners—electrocuted by miswired domestic robots, hearts stopped by improbable prescribing errors, driven off the edge of multi-story car-parks by malfunctioning car autopilots, shot by police in raids on the wrong address. Most of these people are not actual affiliates or employees of the Operation. They are, however, all involved at one level or another in the unregulated network-marketing sector.

Something must be done.