Rule 34 - Charles Stross [98]
“Great, skipper, I could use some help. It’s been one damn thing after another this morning. I’ve got six pending RFIs from some big intelligence investigation CID are running—”
Your heart sinks. “Is it Operation Babylon?” you ask.
“How did you know?” Moxie does his best hamster nose-rubbing imitation at you.
“Meet Operation Babylon’s Europol liaison.” You point at Kemal, who is looking around with an expression that speaks volumes in monosyllables. His gizz turns especially glassy as he spots Moxie’s animated Goatsedance digiframe. (For which you make a mental note to bollock him later: Visiting brass could get entirely the wrong idea.) “It’s a black hole, Moxie, coming to swallow us. What have you got in your queue?”
You settle Kemal down with a seat and a pad, then spend the next ten minutes with Moxie dissecting: a request for information about shrink-wrap fetish clubs in Midlothian; demands that someone in IT Support decode the charge sheet you filed against one Mr. Hussein, A., back in the day (“Conspiracy to Bamboozle the Police,” suggests Moxie, identity-theft charges being confusing to officers more normally accustomed to breach-of-the-peace and public-order offences); an urgent enquiry for a backgrounder on spam filters (you boost that one to Priority A and sling it at your own job queue); a query from the desk sergeant at Gayfield Square as to whether he can arrest someone for running a home-brew fabricator (that’ll be a “no,” then—not without probable cause, and fuck knows how that one slipped into the Babylon queue); and a query about identity theft and a person of interest claiming to be Mikey Blair’s boy-friend who left a DNA sample and a junk identity trail.
(Which is just peachy, because if you dig anything up on the random Mr. Christie and present it to Dickie, he really will have a coronary on the briefing-room floor.)
Kemal clears his throat.
“Yes?”
“I have an update from the office. They have a causal chain for one of our fatalities.”
You would expect the man to look smug at this point, but he doesn’t: haunted, more like. “What?”
Kemal shakes his head. “Vito Morricone. Dead in Palermo. A yahoo-yahoo boy. He died in a kitchen accident.”
Moxie shakes his head. “A kitchen accident?”
“Yes. He was electrocuted by a deliberately miswired food processor.” (You wince: You’ve had cooking incidents like that.) Kemal continues: “It was a high-end machine, able to heat or chill as well as mincing and mixing. Programmable, networked, you can leave cold ingredients in it and switch it on before you leave work, even change recipes remotely. His partner says that it broke eight months ago, and Morricone took it to a back-street repair shop, where they fixed it for him. The case is stainless steel. A replacement part—” He shakes his head.
“What kind of replacement?”
“The report does not explain this thing. But the local investigators report that the fixer bought the replacement-part design online from a cheap pirate shop, not from the manufacturer’s website. It came with installation instructions, which he followed. Once installed, the machine could be remotely induced to short its input power supply through the case.”
You give a low whistle of appreciation: Moxie claps, slowly. “Murder. Smoking gun.”
“Yes, but.” Kemal looks troubled. “The fixer does not appear to know anything. Who supplied the sabotaged component design? And why? The investigating magistrate connected to the same pirate design site and bought the same part: It is apparently harmless. And who sent the signal to activate it? We don’t know yet.”
“But it’s an assassination? A well-planned one.” You snap your fingers. “Tariq Hussein. The vacuum robot.” The IM you got while you were talking to Anwar rises to the top of your mind. “Tariq got things fixed. Anwar said something about a kitchen appliance