Rule 34 - Charles Stross [79]
Back at HQ, it’s as if a giant virtual boot has kicked over the anthill. You normally get plenty of passing trade at the station, but it’s mostly beat cops checking in petty shoplifters and such-like at this time of day. Two Bizarro-world murders in rapid succession—with rumours of a Eurotrash gangland connection—have got folks nervous. They remember the hideous mess five years ago when everything fell over, back to manual typewriters and anonymous prepay mobiles while the spooks ran around upgrading the security keys on all the nation’s key routers and praying that the hackers responsible weren’t fucking with the air traffic control system or the reactor complex at Torness. The atmosphere today’s a lot like that: Word has got around the canteen grape-vine that something really out of order is going on. And you’re getting the hairy eye-ball from all sides as soon as you walk up to the desk in reception and sign a visitor’s badge for Kemal.
You run him straight upstairs to CI Dixon’s office, where Doc’s secretary casually signs his ID onto the system—logging his biometrics solely on your say-so (talk about being granted a sufficiency of rope for a career asphyxiation!)—then you herd him along the corridor to IT Support, where a pathologically detached civilian contractor registers his phone and gets him logged into CopSpace. You’ve just short-circuited about two days of procedures specifically designed to prevent J. Random Unauthorized Person from getting into IT Support’s hair, but you’re in no mood to take shit right now. If Kemal’s right about the scale of what’s going on, Dickie needs to know the shape of the tiger he’s got by the tail. And so, less than two hours after you picked him up, you’re back in front of the door to briefing room D31.
“Inspector Kavanaugh.” Dickie looks up from the surface in the middle of the room. It’s displaying a 3D cutaway of a typical Edinburgh tenement, one-sixth of life-size, with SOCO annotations hazing the air above it as thickly as the cigarette smoke of an earlier generation. “This would be . . .”
“Inspector Kemal Aslan, on assignment to Europol Business Affairs in Brussels from Emniyet Genel Müdürlüğü in Ankara.”
Kemal clears his throat. “We have been monitoring an upswing in violent deaths of individuals engaged in the Internet fraud sector.” He meets Dickie MacLeish’s fiercely sceptical gaze: “Eight so far, across Europe, all within forty-eight hours. Nine, now.”
You tag-team with him, piling it up on MacLeish: “Inspector Aslan is ready to give you an overview of the larger picture whenever you’re ready. I checked him in with IT, he’s on the system. His auths from Europol check out.” (Which is an important point, as it’s not so long ago that a nutter with a cop fetish managed to fast-talk his way onto a prostitution sweep in Portobello.)
Kemal doesn’t switch target. “We believe there is a common mechanism behind the killings, although proving a culpable human perpetrator may be—”
He’s about to get stuck into his spiel when a uniform from CID shoulders his way into your circle and clears his throat apologetically. “Inspectors.” He nods at Dickie. “Skipper? Got a moment?”
“Aye?” Dickie cuts you dead of an instant. Kemal’s neck muscles tense at that, but he bites his tongue like he’s had lots of practice lately. You peer closer at the crime scene on the virtual dissecting table. It’s one of those upper stairwell flats with a windowless hall and rooms branching off it on all sides. There’s something in the living room, like a discarded square-cut sandwich—
“—The Blair scene yesterday, his ID was in the name of John, uh, Christie. It’s just that it rang a bell with Mary as she was compiling the daily for Oversight. She’s got a true-crime reading habit, and she looked him up online, and he’s a ringer, sir.”
“What kind of ringer?” Dickie’s diction is clipped. He looks like he’s going to blow a gasket: not unusual for him, but even so . . .
“John Reginald Halliday Christie—just like