Rule 34 hs-2 Page 4

  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 activit
ies 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 a
re 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?”