Charles Stross - Rule 34

You sit there, quietly fuming, as Dickie rolls unconcernedly away from his ambush of your unfunded project: If you’d actually been able to devote resources to following up the empties for the black-market fabber trade, you might have got to Mikey before someone killed him. “Anyway, this is where things get weird.”

The wall scrolls sideways to reveal a different bathroom demise. This scene’s helpfully labelled in German, as you recognize from the six syllable train-wreck attached to the tanning-salon sun bed.

“Dresden, Germany. This is the bathroom of Markus Hasler, a fine upstanding son of the city with a background in pharmaceutical spam, illegal sale of medicinal products, and counterfeit goods. That is a sun bed. At the same time our Mr. Blair was being plumbed into his personal jet wash—give or take a couple of hours—Mr. Hasler apparently drank half a litre of schnapps spiked with tranquillizers and climbed inside his sun bed. The control circuitry of which had been modified to override the safety shut-offs. He died in hospital yesterday without regaining consciousness.”

There is a low muttering and shuffling going on around you and you nod, unconsciously picking up on the vibe: the rest of the room realizing they’re in an out-of-Kansas situation. MacLeish continues implacably. “Both Mike Blair and Markus Hasler had prior conviction records in much the same field of criminal expertise. They died in notdissimilar manners as a result of incidents that commenced within three hours of each other.” He shifts from foot to foot. “There are reports of other, similar deaths in different jurisdictions this morning—that is, of persons involved in illegal network marketing activities, dying in circumstances superficially resembling domestic incidents.”

Dickie catches your eye. “I’d like to thank DI Kavanaugh for drawing the initial match to my attention, and Sergeant Cunningham for flagging the additional cases that came in while Liz was off shift.” Well that’s torn it. And so, yet again, Moxie escapes a well-deserved bollocking for playing fast and loose with the chain of command.

“As of this meeting, we’re continuing the investigation into the Michael Blair homicide. However, we’re going to have to recognize the need to integrate into a larger Europol investigation into the multiple parallel killings of at least two and possibly many more convicted criminals across member-state borders. And that’s why I’ve invited DI Kavanaugh to run the international liaison side of the investigation and provide input on the possible bootleg fabber connection.”

He’s got you, willy-nilly: drafted back into a CID murder investigation—and fuck your existing case-load and understaffed department. And there’s no way he can’t know what he’s doing to your performance metrics. Dickie is clearly out to get you: Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.

Someone’s going to bleed for this. And it’s not going to be you.

“—the bloody hell did you think you were—”

“—wisnae my fault, skipper! It’s tagged priority —”

“—doing going around the—”

“— one , mandatory escalate, so I pushed it at the duty inspector, and he—”

“—chain of command—”

Moxie raises his hands in surrender right as your frustrated snarl runs down.

You glance around. Then you stare into his eyes, hard. “Run that past me again.”

Moxie swallows. “Like I said, it was an urgent request for input on a homicide investigation. You were off shift, and there was a no-delay flag on it: golden forty-eight. So I pointed it at the duty desk. I havnae been telling tales out of school to Dodgy, skipper, please! What would you have done?”

“I’d have— fuck .” You restrain the urge to punch the corridor wall and draw a deep breath instead. The trouble is, Moxie isn’t wrong. “Who was on the duty desk?”

“It was Inspector Rodney, ma’am.” Sheila Rodney. Who doesn’t, as far as you know, carry a knife for your back. But who knows well enough to forward a lead to the Blair murder investigation.

“Fuck.” You take another deep breath. “Grab yourself a coffee, then see me in my office in fifteen minutes. You heard what Dickie said? That means your work-load just doubled for the rest of the week, so let’s go run through it before I have to go talk to the Europol investigators.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“If I’m being pulled off ICIU for the duration, I’ve got to brief Doc Green.”

Moxie looks at you as if your dog just died, and you don’t have the heart to stay angry. You give him a gentle shove on the shoulder. “Get going, Sergeant. There’s more than enough shit to go round, this time.”

And then you head upstairs, across the walkway, into the adjacent block, and around the corner to Chief Inspector Dixon’s wee office.

George “Doc Green” Dixon is (a) your nominal superior, and (b) not interested in the day-to-day running of ICIU, outwith its potential to dump embarrassing shit in his lap without warning. George is old-school, trained up via computer forensics to occupy a trusted niche in CID (trawling paedophiles’ phones for evidence of thoughtcrime) while keeping one foot in the stirrup of the runaway horse that is Infrastructure IT.

He doesn’t have much time for ICIU—especially after the time he dropped round when you weren’t in, and Moxie showed him the Goatsedance video followed by a brisk webtour of the shocksites of Lothian and Borders, culminating in the infamous penile degloving accident fansite (which apparently left him with PTSD and permanent scarring on the insides of his eyelids). Ever since, he’s been more than happy to leave you alone to run your little fiefdom as you see fit.

George is a verra verra busy man, as he never tires of reminding you from behind the cover of his salt-and-pepper moustache. He probably thinks his manner is avuncular: You think it’s patronizing, but it’s not your job to pass comment. In any case, he’s effective. Before Dodgy Dickie dissolved the morning briefing, you’d already emailed Doc to beg a minute of his time, so you have no compunction about going straight round to IIT and hammering on his battered office door.

“Enter.” Doc looks up as you open the door. For a moment you think he’s playing a Sims game on his desk: Then you recognize the new annexe over the road. Sims, yes, but it’s some kind of architectural model—he’s probably looking for a way to shoe-horn more bandwidth through the crumbling concrete walls. “Have a seat. What’s come up this time, Liz?”

You can’t help yourself: You pull a face. “Have you been following Dickie MacLeish’s murder investigation, sir?”

“No.” He raises an eyebrow that looks like it’s got a sleeping caterpillar glued to it. “Should I have?”

“It’s a crawling horror. First, it’s gone political. Secondly, it looks like it’s not a one off. We’ve had contacts from Europol about similar killings in Germany and possibly Italy. It’s a three-sigma match or better—if they hadn’t happened simultaneously, we’d be looking for a serial killer. Anyway, the initial lead-in came via ICIU, and there’s an input angle from one of my current cases, so Dickie just upped and announced that he’s drafting me to coordinate with the foreign investigators, without so much as a by-your-leave.”

“Well, that’s nice to know,” George says heavily. “Did he ask you first?”

You shake your head. “I’m not happy, sir. But it’s a murder case, and a high-profile one. It’d look bad if I kicked up a fuss.”

“Huh.” A long pause. “What do you want to do?”

You do not fail to spot the emphasis. “What I’d like to do is to get on with running my unit, sir. It’s not as if we’re short of work right now. Trouble is, he framed it as a fait accompli. If you want me to hold the fort, I’m going to need some backup.”