Rule 34 - Charles Stross [50]
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.