Rule 34 - Charles Stross [151]
The frown is back. “Nae fear, it’s a matter of time.”
“Shit.” The drones must have arrived overhead too late to catch his trail. It’s daylight, and the sun’s out, so the heat signature from his footsteps will be washed out, and if he was smart, Christie will have disabled all his personal electronics. “Ahem. Motivation. I’m flailing in the dark here, but even leaving aside the sock-puppet ID, Christie doesn’t sound right to me. He’s from out of town, he’s got diplomatic connections with Issyk-Kulistan, hence the connection to Mr. Hussein.”
“He’s got more than that,” Dickie mutters. “Mr. Hussein has some questions to answer about what we found in his bathroom.”
“What? Drugs? Kiddie-porn?”
“Neither: But we found a bucketful of bootleg replicator feedstock he was busy trying to flush down the toilet.” Dickie looks smug. “Almost certainly the same stuff that’s been turning up in your Saturday night specials down in Leith. I trust we will shake loose where he got it from in due course.”
It’s the feedstock channel you’ve been chasing for months, under-resourced and overworked. Typical of Dickie to roll it up for you as a side-show. Asshole. “Huh. That’s not like Anwar; he’s always been one for the white-collar scams. But you asked about Christie?”
“Aye. What do you think?”
Well, at last. “I think he’s working for some organized crime syndicate or other. I don’t know what he’s doing in Edinburgh, but the ATHENA killings rattled his cage, and he or his took it as a personal attack. Maybe it was a personal attack; what if he turned up on our door-step because he was looking to do business with the victims? Or kill them as rivals, or something.”
“I don’t like coincidences,” Dickie says, almost as if he’s accusing you of rigging the dice. “Why did he run into this girl-friend of yours? Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit of a big coincidence, too?”
You stare at the hologram on the wall. “Yes, you’re absolutely right,” you hear yourself saying. “It’s almost as if we were being nudged into noticing him, or something—”
You stop dead. More dominoes appear in your imaginary hand, slotting neatly into place on the board.
“What? Say what’s on your mind, woman.”
“ATHENA is at the root of this.” Lack of professional courtesy indeed. “ATHENA is all about analysing social networks to reward good behaviour and punish defectors. Moxie—ICIU—was trying to tell me something about it just now, sir. Some kind of central Asian government has been using it to get at netcrime rings, going too far and arranging accidents. What if I’m the accident that’s being arranged for Christie?”
“Huh.” Dickie stares at you. “The cult of the lone gun detective again, Inspector?”
“Give me some credit for not being stupid, sir: You and I both know what gets successful prosecutions, and it isn’t that Life on Mars shit.” (What gets results is an ops room full of detectives working together as a team, with a fully documented work flow and built-in quality assurance. Transparency after the fact, everyone lifelogging to sealed evidence servers and evidence secured under lock and key so that the Procurator Fiscal can prove a watertight case in court. Sherlock Holmes has been superseded by business process refactoring, and success is all about good management.) “But I probably came to ATHENA’s attention via ICIU. I’m one of the nodes on the graph that’s got lots of long-range inputs; I’m an easier inside contact to reach than an officer who doesn’t deal with other netcrime units on a day-to-day basis. And everything ATHENA knows about how we work comes from our external social traffic.”
“So you’re the trigger, or bait, or summat. And ye ken ATHENA’s trying to feed Christie to us. And if ATHENA can noodge you, it can noodge Christie, can’t it? So where’s Christie bound for—” Dickie stops dead. His eyes widen. “Your friend was staying in the West End Hilton, was she not? Let’s go pay her hotel a visit right now,” he says. And you realize, to your chagrin, that just for once he’s right.
ATHENA: Meatpuppet
Ants. I am surrounded by fucking