“You used to be full-time with SXB, that’s why we’ve still got you flagged as a standby,” said the dispatcher. A worried-looking cop glanced round from the pilot’s seat, leaving the driving to the autopilot. “The regulars, like I said, they’re all en route from Brasilia by suborbital. We’re a peaceful city. This is the first bomb scare we’ve had in nearly twenty years. You’re the only specialist — active or reserve — in town today.”
“Jesus! So it had to happen when everyone was away. What can you tell me about the scene?”
“The perp’s holed up in a refugee stack in Saint-Leger. Says he’s got an improv gadget, and he’s going to detonate it in an hour minus eight minutes unless we accede to his demands. We’re not sure what kind it is, or what his demands are, but it doesn’t really matter — even a pipe bomb loaded with cobalt sixty would make a huge mess of the neighborhood.”
“Right.” Rachel shook her head. “’Scuse me, I’ve just come from a meeting with a bunch of time-wasters, and I’m trying to get my head together. You’re saying it’s going to be a hands-on job?”
“He’s holed up in a cheap apartment tree. He’s indoors, well away from windows, vents, doors. Our floor penetrator says he’s in the entertainment room with something dense enough to be a gadget. The stack is dusted, but we’re having fun replaying the ubiquitous surveillance takes for the past month — seems he started jamming before anything else, and his RFID tag trace is much too clean. Someone has to go inside and talk him down or take him out, and you’ve got more experience of this than any of us. It says here you’ve done more than twenty of these jobs; that makes you our nearest expert.”
“Hell and deviltry. Who’s the underwriter for this block?”
“It’s all outsourced by the city government — I think Lloyds has something to do with it. Whatever, you bill us for any expenses, and we’ll sort them out. Anything you need for the job is yours, period.”
“Okay.” She sighed, half-appalled at how easy it was to slip back into old ways of thinking and feeling. Last time, she’d sworn it would be her last job. Last time she’d actually tried to slit her wrists afterward, before she saw sense and realized that there were easier ways out of the profession. Like switching to something even more dangerous, as it turned out. “One condition: my husband. Get someone to call him, right now. If he’s in town tell him to get under cover. And get as many people as possible into bunkers. The older apartments are riddled with the things, aren’t they? There is no guarantee that I’m going to be able to pull this off on my own without a support and planning backstop team, and I don’t want you to count on miracles. Have you got a disaster kit standing by?”
“We’re already evacuating, and there’ll be a disaster kit waiting on-site when you arrive,” said the dispatcher. “Our normal SXB team are on the way home, but they won’t be able to take over for an hour and a half, and they’ll be into reentry blackout in about ten minutes — I think that means they won’t be much help to you.”
“Right.” Rachel nodded, redundantly. She’d dressed for the office, but unlike Madam Chairman, she didn’t go in for retro-femme frills and frou-frou: she’d had enough of that in the year she’d spent in the New Republic. What does the bitch have against me, anyway? she asked herself, making a mental note to do some data mining later. She dialed her jacket and leggings to sky blue — calming colors — and settled back in the seat, breathing deeply and steadily. “No point asking for armor, I guess. Do you have any snipers on hand?”
“Three teams are on their way. They’ll be set up with crossfire and hard-surface-penetrating sights in about twenty minutes. Inspector MacDougal is supervising.”
“Has he evacuated the apartments yet?”
“It’s in progress. She’s moving in noisemakers as her people pull the civilians. Orders are to avoid anything that might tip him off that we’ve got an operation in train.”
’Good. Hmm. You said the perp’s an artist.” Rachel paused. “Does anyone know what kind of artist?”
The transporter leaned into the corner with the Boulevard Jacques, then surged down the monorail track. Other pods, their guidance systems overridden, slewed out of its way: two police trucks, bouncing on their pneumatic tires, were coming up fast behind. The buildings thereabouts were old, stone and brick and wood that had gone up back before the Diaspora and gone out of fashion sometime since, lending the old quarter something of the air of a twenty-first-century theme park far gone in ungenteel decay. “He’s an historical re-enactor,” said the dispatcher. “There’s something here about colonies. Colonialism. Apparently it’s all to do with reenacting the historic process of black liberation before the holocaust.”
“Which holocaust?”
“The African one. Says here he impersonates a pre-holocaust emperor called Idi Amin, uh, Idi Amin Dada. There’s a release about reinterpreting the absurdist elements of the Ugandan proletarian reformation dialectic through the refracting lens of neo-Dadaist ideological situationism.”
“Whatever that means. Okay. Next question, where was this guy born? Where did he come from? What does he do?”
“He was born somewhere in Paraguay. He’s had extensive phenotype surgery to make himself resemble his role model, the Last King of Scotland or President of Uganda or whoever he was. Got a brochure from one of his performances here — says he tries to act as an emulation platform for the original Idi Amin’s soul.”
“And now he’s gone crazy, right? Can you dig anything up about the history of the original Mister Amin? Sounds Islamicist to me. Was he an Arab or something?”
The transporter braked, swerved wildly, then hopped off the monorail and nosed in between a whole mass of cops milling around in front of a large, decrepit-looking spiral of modular refugee condominiums hanging off an extruded titanium tree. A steady stream of people flowed out of the block, escorted by rentacops in the direction of the Place de Philosophes. Rachel could already see a queue of lifters coming in, trying to evacuate as many people as possible from the blocks around ground zero. It didn’t matter whether or not this particular fuckwit was competent enough to build a working nuke: if the Plutonium Fairy had been generous, he could make his gadget fizzle and contaminate several blocks. Even a lump of plastique coated with stolen high-level waste could be messy. Actinide metal chelation and gene repair therapy for several thousand people was one hell of an expensive way to pay for an artistic tantrum, and if he did manage to achieve prompt criticality …
The officer in charge — a tall blond woman with a trail of cops surrounding her — was coming over. “You! Are you the specialist dispatch has been praying for?” she demanded.
“Yeah, that’s me.” Rachel shrugged uncomfortably. “Bad news is, I’ve had no time to prep for this job, and I haven’t done one in three or four years. What have you got for me?”
“A real bampot, it would seem. I’m Inspector Rosa MacDougal, Laughing Joker Enforcement Associates. Please follow me.”
The rentacop site office was the center of a hive of activity, expanding to cover half the grassed-over car park in front of the apartment block. The office itself was painted vomit-green and showed little sign of regular maintenance, or even cleaning. “I haven’t worked with Laughing Joker before,” Rachel admitted. “First, let me tell you that as with all SXB ops, this is pro bono, but we expect unrestricted donations of equipment and support during the event, and death benefits for next of kin if things go pear-shaped. We do not accept liability for failure, on account of the SXB point team usually being too dead to argue the point. We just do our best. Is that clear with you?”
“Crystal.” MacDougal pointed at a chair. “Sit yourself down. We’ve got half an hour before it goes critical.”
“Right.” Rachel sat. She made a steeple of her fingers, then sighed. “How sure are you that this is genuine?”
“The first thing anyone knew about it was when the building’s passive neutron sniffer jumped off the wall. At first the block manager thought
it was malf-ing, but it turns out yon Idiot was tickling the dragon’s tail. He’d got a cheap-ass assembler blueprint from some anarchist phile vault, and he’s been buying beryllium feedstock for his kitchen assembler over the past six months.”
“Shit. Beryllium. And nobody noticed?”
“Hey.” MacDougal spread her hands. “Nobody here is paying us for sparrow-fart coverage. Private enterprise doesn’t stretch to ubiquitous handholding. We go poking our noses in uninvited, we get sued till we bleed. It’s a free market, isn’t it?”
“Huh.” Rachel nodded. It was an old, familiar picture. With nine hundred permanent seats on the UN Security SIG, the only miracle was that anything ever got done at all. Still, if anything could stimulate cooperation, it was the lethal combination of household nanofactories and cheap black-market weapons-grade fissiles. The right to self-defense did not, it was generally held, extend as far as mutually assured destruction — at least, not in built-up areas. Hence the SXB volunteers, and her recurring nightmares and subsequent move to the diplomatic corps’ covert arms control team. Which was basically the same job on an interstellar scale, with the benefit that governments usually tended to be more rational about the disposition of their strategic interstellar deterrents than bampot street performers with a grudge against society and a home brew nuke.
Okay. So our target somehow scored twelve kilos of weapons-grade heavy metal and tested a subcritical assembly before anybody noticed. What then?”
“The block management ’bot issued an automatic fourteen-day eviction notice for violation of the tenancy agreement. There’s a strict zero-tolerance policy for weapons of mass destruction in this town.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Rachel rubbed her forehead.
“It gets better,” Inspector MacDougal added with morbid enthusiasm. “Our bampot messaged the management ’bot right back, demanding that they recognize him as President of Uganda, King of Scotland, Supreme Planetary Dictator, and Left Hand of the Eschaton. The ’bot told him to fuck right off, which probably wasnae good idea: that’s when he threatened to nuke ’em.”
“So, basically it’s your routine tenant/landlord fracas, with added fallout plume.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Shit. So what happened next?”
“Well, the management ’bot flagged the threat as being (a) a threat to damage the residential property, and (b) subtype, bomb hoax. So it called up its insurance link, and our ’bot sent Officer Schwartz round to have a polite word. And that’s when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene.”
“Is Officer Schwartz available?” asked Rachel.
“Right here,” grunted what Rachel had mistaken for a spare suit of full military plate. It wasn’t: it was SWAT-team armor, and it was also occupied. Schwartz turned ponderously toward her. “I was just up-suiting for to go in.”
“Oh.” Rachel blinked. “Just what’s the situation up there, then?”
“A very large man, he is,” said Schwartz. “High-melatonin tweak. Also, high-androgenic steroid tweak. Built like the west end of an eastbound panzer. Lives like a pig! Ach.” He grunted. “He is an artiste. This does not, I say, entitle one to live like animal.”
“Tell her what happened,” MacDougal said tiredly, breaking off from fielding a call on her wristplant.
“Oh. This artist demands to be crowned King of Africa or some such. I tell him politely no, he may however he crowned king of the stretch of gutter between numbers 19 and 21 on the Rue Tabazan if he wishes to not leave quietly. I was not armored up at that time, so when monsieur l’artiste points a gun at me, I leave quietly instead and thank my fate for I am allowed to do so.”
“What kind of gun?”
“Database says it is a historical replica Kalashnikov mechanism.”
“Did you see any sign of his bomb?” asked Rachel, with a sinking sensation.
“Only the dead man’s trigger strapped to his left wrist,” said Officer Schwartz, a glint in his eyes just visible through the thick visor of his helmet. “But my helmet detected slow neutron flux. He says it is a uranium-gun design, by your leave.”
“Oh shit!” Rachel leaned forward, thinking furiously: Nuclear blackmail. Fail-hard switch. Simple but deadly uranium-gun design. Loon lies bleeding, in the distance the double flash of the X-ray pulse burning the opaque air, plasma shutter flickering to release the heat pulse. Idi Amin Dadaist impersonating a dead dictator to perfection. Fifty-one minutes to detonation, if he has the guts to follow through. The performance artist scorned. What would an artist do?
“Give him half a chance and an audience, he’ll push the button,” she said faintly.
“I’m sorry?”
She looked out of the window at the steady stream of poor evacuees being shepherded away from the site. They were clearly poor; most of them had lopsided or misshapen or otherwise ugly, natural faces — one or two actually looked aged. “He’s an artist,” she said calmly. “I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe — shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction. That name — Dadaist. It’s a dead giveaway. Expect a senseless act of mass violence, the theater of cruelty. About all I can do is try and keep him talking while you get in position to kill him. And don’t give him anything he might mistake for an audience. What kind of profile match do you have?”
“He’s a good old-fashioned radge. That is to say, a dangerous fuckwit,” said MacDougal, frowning. She blinked for a moment as if she had something in her eye, then flicked another glyph at Rachel. “Here. Read it fast, then start talking. I don’t think we’ve got much time for sitting around.”
“Okay.” Rachel’s nostrils flared, taking in a malodorous mixture of stale coffee, nervous sweat, the odor of a police mobile incident room sitting on the edge of ground zero. She focused on the notes — not that there was much to read, beyond the usual tired litany of red-lined credit ratings, public trust derivatives, broken promises, exhibitions of petrified feco-stalagmites, and an advanced career as an art-school dropout. Idi had tried to get into the army, any army — but not even a second-rate private mercenary garrison force from Wichita would take him. Nutty as a squirrel cage, said a telling wikinote from the recruiting sergeant’s personal assist. MacDougal’s diagnosis was already looking worryingly plausible when Rachel stumbled into the docs covering his lifelong obsession and saw the ancient photographs, and the bills from the cheapjack body shop Idi — his real name of record, now he’d put his dismal family history behind him — spent all his meager insurance handouts on. “Treponema pallidum injections — holy shit, he paid to be infected with syphilis?”
“Yeah, and not just any kind — he wanted the fun tertiary version where your bones begin to melt, your face falls off, and you suffer from dementia and wild rages. None of the intervening decades of oozing pus from the genitals for our man Idi.”
“He’s mad.” Rachel shook her head.
“I’ve been telling you that, yes. What I want to know is, can you take him?”
“Hmm.” She took stock. “He’s big. Is he as hard as he looks?”
“No.” This from Schwartz. “I could myself have easily taken him, without armor. Only he had a gun. He is ill, an autosickie.”
“Well then.” Rachel reached a decision. “We’ve got, what? Forty-four minutes? When you’ve got everybody out, I think I’m going to have to go in and talk to him face-to-face. Keep the guns out of sight but if you can get a shot straight down through the ceiling that—”
“No bullets,” said MacDougal. “We don’t know how he’s wired the dead man’s handle, and we can’t afford to take chances. We’ve got these, though.” She held up a small case: “Robowasps loaded with sleepy-juice, remotely guided. One sting, and he’ll be turned off in ten seconds. The hairy time is between him realizing he’s going down and the lights going o
ut. Someone’s got to stop him yelling a detonation command, tripping the dead man’s handle, or otherwise making the weasel go pop.”
“Okay.” Rachel nodded thoughtfully, trying to ignore the churning in her gut and the instinctive urge to jump up and run — anywhere, as long as it was away from the diseased loony with the Osama complex and the atom bomb upstairs. “So you hook into me for a full sensory feed, I go in, I talk, I play it by ear. We’ll need two code words. ‘I’m going to sneeze’ means I’m going to try to punch him out myself. And, uh, ‘That’s a funny smell’ means I want you to come in with everything you’ve got. If you can plant a lobotomy shot on him, do it, even if you have to shoot through me. Just try to miss my brain stem if it comes down to it. That’s how we play this game. Wasps would be better, though. I’ll try not to call you unless I’m sure I can immobilize him, or I’m sure he’s about to push the button.” She shivered, feeling a familiar rush of nervous energy.
“Are you about that certain?” Schwartz asked, sounding dubious.
Rachel stared at him. “This fuckwit is going to maybe kill dozens, maybe hundreds of people if we don’t nail him right now,” she said. “What do you think?”
Schwartz swallowed. MacDougal shook her head. “What is it you do for a living, again?” she asked.
“I reach the parts ordinary disarmament inspectors don’t touch.” Rachel grinned, baring her teeth at her own fear. She stood up. “Let’s go sort him out.”
HARMLESS
Earth, seen from orbit in the twenty-fourth century, was a planet harrowed by technological civilization, bearing the scars left by a hatchling transcendence. Nearly 10 percent of its surface had been concreted over at one time or another. Whole swaths of it bore the suture marks of incomplete reterraforming operations. From the jungles of the Sahara to the fragile grassland of the Amazon basin it was hard to find any part of the planetary surface that hadn’t been touched by the hand of technology.
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