Rule 34 - Charles Stross [107]
“Just a second.” (Pause.) “Oh, hello again. Sorry about the delay, sir. Are your medicines helping today?”
What is this, fucking Kaiser? “Yes, I’m much better now, thanks. And I’m using the new identity.” Beast of Birkenshaw my ass: another psychopathic serial killer? Mother-fuckers! What the fuck do they think they’re doing, giving me these names? “I’m calling because I need another minion; the first two broke. Is the denial-of-service situation any better today?”
“I can’t discuss the situation at head office.” She sounds a bit snippy. Then you realize; it’s about two o’clock in the morning back in California. (Assuming that’s where the Operation runs its call centre from.) And she’s the same operator you spoke to yesterday daytime (assuming they’re not using real-time speech filtering). “What do you want, Able November?”
“Like I said, I need a new gofer.” Briefly you outline what you’ve got in mind. “And a new handle—some clever fucker thinks it’s funny to keep giving me serial-killer names. I want that to stop.”
“Please hold. This could take some time.”
You’re on hold for nearly fifteen minutes, as it happens: You amuse yourself with the pad, playing a couple of levels of Jack Ketch while you wait for the callback. Finally, your left ear vibrates. “Hi, Able November. What have you got for me?”
The operator is different this time, male with a Midwestern drawl. “Lemme see if I’ve got this right? Your last two recruits are dead? And you’re still in the field? Why?”
It’s time to poke the bear and see if it snarls, so you extemporize. “The cops got a DNA sample when I looked in on the first investigation. So the John Christie identity is pinned. And, incidentally, that name belongs to a dead serial killer, and so does Peter Manuel—someone’s sticking ringers in your identity portfolio, and it’s not fucking funny. I have to wait while Legal serve an injunction to get my sample destroyed when the investigation winds down—you know and I know that I didn’t kill Blair. The original plan won’t fly, but I figure I can salvage something from the wreckage. It was your Issyk-Kulistan scam that gave me the idea.”
One of the annoying things about VoIP codecs is that they filter out nonvoice traffic. You can’t hear the pursed lips of a huff of annoyance; the tells of a tense boiler-room background are silenced by digital audio filtering. So you have to wait three or four seconds, half of which is spent by the signal path as your words go wandering up to geosynchronous orbit and wobble back down to a ground station in the Sierra Nevada, out along a fat pipe, into vibrations in the air hitting the operator’s ear-drum, and the return path therefrom. And then:
“The BZZT fuck?” (Cheap piece-of-shit throat mikes max out easily and start to clip when a pissed-off operator shouts into them.) “Wendy got me out of bed so—this—” (Ooh, lots of big tells! You hang on his loss of control, fascinated by the unintentional data leak dripping from the glass ceiling high above.) “—The fuck told you about IRIK?”
“Control sent me to the consulate here for new papers yesterday. They were probably panicking, or didn’t get the memo about how secret it is. Don’t worry, it’s all under wraps. Nobody else knows. It’s probably just a side-effect of the chaos caused by the, the attacks.” So the Issyk-Kulistan connection is another stove-pipe they’re running? Juicy! You allow a little wavery plaint to creep into your voice. “Is there anything I can do to help out . . . ?”
“You goddamn bet there is!” There’s a heart-felt emphasis on the words. “Stupid dumb fucks are misusing the diplomatic channel for fucking stupid dumb-ass smuggling, would you believe it? Penny-ante shit. But that’s neither here nor there. Son, you’re in the field. You’ve seen what those mother-fuckers are doing to our proxies.”
“The”—rape machine lizard shapeshifters—“adversaries, yes.”
“Yeah, them.