Rule 34 - Charles Stross [72]
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.