One hundred and twenty metres to destination. Fucking bus company. You start walking.
This part of town has an uneasy relationship with affluence. Besides the obligatory state-owned Tesco Local, there’s a weird mix of closed and barricaded shop-fronts, charity stores with windows stuffed full of last decade’s brown leather sofas, and imaginative little boutiques selling up-market tchotchkes. You pass a kebab shop and an Asian jewellery store before you reach the chocolatier and the usual anonymous black door beside it.
There is a buzzer. You mash your thumb on the button for flat 1F2 and wait. And wait. After a minute, you push it again and hold. Just your luck if Vivian’s chosen this lunch-time to go do her shopping. There’s no reply, but the door opens in your face; a young guy slithers past you, earbuds screwed in as tight as his closed face. You catch the door with your toe and a moment later you’re on your way upstairs.
The tenement stairwell is grey and dusty, worn flagstones and black-enamelled cast-iron handrails leading up into the gloom. On the first-floor landing you find three heavy-looking doorways. The tarnished brass name-plate saying CROLLA ASSOCIATES tells you all you need to know, and you push the doorbell beside it. There is, as you expected, no response. You stand, holding your breath.
Well, you’ve come all this way: Why stop here?
There’s a multifunction pen in your pocket. It doesn’t look like anything special, but there are five cartridges and a bunch of complicated springs inside that barrel. And there’s a wallet in your other pocket, and along with the phone and driving license, it contains a couple of other cards. One of which might have raised an eyebrow if the Polis had Dumpster-dived your pockets and thought to peel away the laminated stickers to reveal the intricately etched sheet of fullerene-reinforced plastic within. But even then, it’s not obvious what the etching is, and you’ve got an explanation for how you came by it that would get you off the hook under most circumstances. Except these.
You take thirty seconds to twist and warp some springy bits of steel-tough plastic free from the card, another twenty seconds to swap them in place of the ball-point cartridge, and ten seconds to bump the lock. Then you step inside Vivian Crolla’s apartment.
You let the door slip shut behind you, and in that very instant you realize that something is irrevocably awry.
It’s never entirely quiet in a Scottish tenement flat. The floorboard-creaking footfalls of upstairs’ unseen neighbours. The drone of a news channel on next door’s PC. If the windows look out over the front, there’s the interminable road noise of a major thoroughfare (muted, now, by last-century standards, but still present). The faint susurration of Arctic methane flowing through the pipe to the fuel cell: the whir of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
The windows face out back, the neighbours are at work, and you can’t hear the fridge. Is that all? There’s a faint hissing from somewhere.
You glance up. The illumination filtering into the rectangular central hall comes through open doorways, and it has the numinous tint of daylight. You take your picklock card and use its edge to delicately swipe the light switch, leaving no prints.
“Vivian?” you call quietly.
There’s a strong floral stink in the flat, as from one of those fucking air fresheners women like to put in the bathroom to make out that they shit roses.
“Vivian?” you ask again, walking towards the living room. “I got your email. Vivian . . .”
There’s a scrap of paper on the floor. You frown and bend to pick it up. It’s white, overprinted in mostly green ink (with faint yellow and pink tints), approximately six centimetres by twelve in size. You remember its like from your childhood: It’s a foreign bank-note. “The Royal Bank of Scotland plc PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND ONE POUND STERLING, At their head office here in Edinburgh, by order of the board, 30th March 1999.”
Dead words. Dead currency. Dead bank. Broken promise.
Inside the austerely furnished living room, there lies a mattress. It has been cocooned in shrink-wrap plastic, sealed against the elements. The fragile husk of Vivian Crolla forms a mound under the polythene integument, like a pupa bonded to the surface of a leaf. She’s barely one metre fifty in her stockinged feet, grey-haired and thin, as if all the juices of a life unlived have been sucked out of her. She’s neatly dressed in a dark suit and pearl necklace, all present and correct but for a missing shoe and a premature death. There is a rip in the side of the shrink-wrap, a deep gash that plunges into the interior of the mattress, from which irredeemable green-ink promises bleed halfway across the carpet.
(Damn her, why couldn’t she have stuffed her mattress with fifty-euro notes instead of unrecyclable toilet paper? a corner of you thinks irreverently.)
You bend close to her and touch her shoulder through the plastic. She’s cold and stiff. Someone obviously shrink-wrapped her onto the mattress while she was unconscious or already dead. But who, and why? Rising, you stalk through the kitchen, her office, the bathroom. The stink in the bathroom is chokingly thick, almost unbreathable: The electronic air freshener is farting away like a cow with irritable-bowel syndrome.
You lick your dry lips. “This isn’t funny anymore,” you complain, an ironic metacommentary on your internal turmoil. Then the true state of jeopardy slams into you like a railway spike of purest distilled paranoia, and you see, with merciless clarity:
Someone has gotten inside your decision loop.
They’re a rival or an enemy. They’ve identified and killed your chosen COO and CFO, hours or days before you were ready to make them employment offers. They’re sending you a message: Get out of town. Get out of town now. Run away, little business man, while there’s still time.
You can’t get out of town, even if you want to. The Polis have got your DNA on file as belonging to John Christie, a contact of Mike Blair (deceased). You need to dance the John-Christie-is-an-innocent-bystander fandango until you can serve the paper-work to get your samples destroyed, or your usefulness to the Operation will be at an end: and with it, your career.
To make matters worse, you’re here now. Vivian Crolla isn’t going to vanish silently from Scottish society without anyone asking questions: Sooner or later, one of her business associates or relatives or nosy neighbours will crawl whimpering to the public servants, who will break down her door, pinch the bridge of their nose beneath suddenly watering eyes, and call for CID and forensics. And then it’ll be déjà vu all over again, and you’d better hope you’re not shedding flakes of dead skin because if they get a sequence match linking you to both scenes—
You begin to sidle back towards the front door, shuddering beneath the livid caul of rage that has settled over your shoulders, all the while thinking:
Once is happenstance, but twice is enemy action.
Someone’s going to bleed for this. And it’s not going to be you.
LIZ: Snowballing Hell
Thursday morning dawns moist and miserable. You turn yourself out of bed, scramble two eggs, and remember to bag up the plastic waste for collection on your way out the door. Then—forty minutes before you’re due on shift—your phone pulls on its work personality and rings for you. It’s Moxie. This can only be trouble.
“Skipper?” He screws his face up like a hamster worried you’re going to steal his peanut: “You decent?”
You take your thumb off the camera. “I was about to head in. What’s come up?”
“I think you want to be here half an hour ago; it’s about that wave you were tracking with ICIS? I got a call from a lieutenant in the Dresden KRIPO; he’s trying to get in touch with you urgently about an investigation?” Moxie’s bamboozled befuddlement is not unreasonable—death in Deutschland isn’t a regular bullet point on your daily team briefings.
“I’ll call him as soon as I’m in the office.” You pause. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Uh, Chief Inspector MacLeish wants to see you. It’s about the Blair case. He’s raising a request for research and says it’s priorit
y one.” Screamingly urgent, in other words.
“Well, ping him and tell him I’m in transit.” You hang up and neck your coffee, burn your tongue, swear in an extremely unladylike manner as you grab for a glass of tap-water, then run through your check-list and are out the door in record time. You make it to the end of the road as a minibus trundles away from the stop, swear again, and drop the ghost of a tenner on its icon. For a miracle, it accepts the bid, whines to a halt, and kneels as you run to catch up. The other passengers glare irritably at you as you climb aboard, slightly breathless. You take a seat, then realize you left your hair-brush at home. So: another bad hair day is already underway.
There’s no hurrying the bus as it meanders around the back streets, diverting to pick folks up and drop them off. Sooner or later, your work-subsidized travel pass will get you to the office, but unlike a taxi, there’s no quality-of-service guarantee and no privacy. So you’re left tapping your fingers in frustration, unwilling to log into CopSpace in public (because you’re an inspector, and your work is a wee bit more confidential than J. Random Plod’s notebook: There’s a lot at stake if your desktop leaks). So much for telecommuting. Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.
So it is that you arrive at work at 8:42 A.M., ahead of your start of shift and in a timely manner . . . but disastrously out of touch with the events unfolding around you.
Your first inkling that this may be something worse than a regular bad-hair day comes as you step down off the bus and walk towards the front entrance in Fettes Avenue. They unwired the police HQ comprehensively back in the teens: Consequently, it senses your approach and it knows how to get your attention. The left arm of your spectacles vibrates for attention, and you instinctively touch your phone in acknowledgment. Blinking arrows glide urgently across the powder-blue furnishings in the waiting area, urging you inward: GOTO ROOM D31: BABYLON BRIEFING TO COMMENCE IN 15.
What on earth ... ? You barely have time to wonder, before a blizzard of Post-its spring up, occluding nearly every hard surface in sight, and you see the grisly news: Dickie has added you to the team investigating the Mike Blair murder.
You whistle tunelessly through your front teeth and straighten up, then head towards the meatspace incident room: There’s a list of fifty-odd officers on the case, from constables up to the DCI himself, and probably a super watching over his shoulder and demanding hourly updates for the PR flaks at the Ministry of Justice. As you expected, Mikey’s double-wetsuit misadventure has gone political, on top of the usual three-ring circus that shows up for every murder case. (It’s the one crime for which all the police forces of the former United Kingdom pull out all the stops—but the 95–per cent clean-up rate you take a justifiable pride in comes at a ruinous, multi-millioneuro expense.)
Access to CopSpace—an augmented-reality overlay that maps a view of the criminal-intel knowledge base across the physical world in front of your eyes—doesn’t make police stations with control centres and briefing rooms obsolete. Quite the contrary. It’s not so long ago that you and your colleagues were plunged into the collective nightmare of a total breach of network security and had to fall back to prepaid supermarket mobies and passing around notes printed on manual typewriters. Maintaining a physical command centre is vital. Policing requires systematic teamwork, which means communication; and even when they’re working, online conferencing systems just aren’t quite good enough to make face-to-face meetings obsolete. Working teleconferencing is right around the corner, just like food pills, the flying car, and energy too cheap to meter.
There’s a scrum in the corridor outside D31, so you hang back a bit and wait for it to disperse. Then Moxie shows up. “Skipper.” He nods—sketchy acknowledgment—and you nod back.
“What’s the story?” you ask him.
Moxie’s gaze flickers sidelong, taking in the neighbours. He clears his throat. “Lieutenant Heyne from Dresden really wants to talk about his suspected homicide, skipper. So I—”
“Homicide?” you ask. “I thought the victim was in hospital.”
“Died overnight.” Moxie shrugs uncomfortably. “There’s also a Sergeant Nobile from the Gruppo Anticrimine Tecnologico in Rome who wants to bend your ear. Urgently.”
Oh Jesus. You rack your brains: “What force is he with?”
“Wait a sec.” Moxie’s looking it up in the directory. You could have done it yourself, you just thought he might have done the leg work already. “It’s part of the Guardia di Finanza, the national financial, customs, and economic police?” He looks slightly boggled, eyes twitching as he saccades through the infodump. “They also do cybercrime, he’s on the Europol R34 distribution, says it’s about the homicide in Dresden and, uh . . .” He nods at the front of the queue, which is beginning to shuffle into Mac’s briefing. “An associated murder in Trieste. There’s more. That feedstock you were looking for—”
“It’ll have to wait.” There’s the usual pre-caff mumbled meet and greet in the doorway, then you’re in and looking for a free seat near the back. Not fast enough; MacLeish is waiting just inside and makes eye contact.
“Inspector.” He nods. Subsequent words flow like grit through engine oil. “You were right; thanks for forwarding me that case.”
You show him your best botox face: It’s a moment to take home and treasure, but you’re not going to waste your brownie points gloating in the middle of a murder investigation. “I gather a bunch more contacts have come in overnight.”
“Aye, well . . . this is really fucking abnormal, if you’ll pardon my French. Never seen anything like it.”
“Me neither,” you concede. “What do you need from ICIU?”
“All your Bing and Google mojo, and a pipe into Europol. Oh, and anything you know about grey-market fabber feedstock. Why don’t you sit in the front row?”
After that, there’s no escape.
“Morning, peeps.”
Dodgy Dickie stands before a plain white wall bearing the Lothian and Borders logo, and below it a new name: Operation Babylon. The atmosphere in the room is expectant, and just a little angry: one-third suits, one-third boots, and a mashup of civilian support specialists.
“We’ve got a murder. Not your normal ned-on-ned stabby, unfortunately: This one’s got legs. We’re out of the golden forty-eight”—he means the first two days of the investigation—“and to make matters worse, DI Kavanaugh, who first clocked it as a culpable homicide, has drawn some really disturbing parallels with at least two other killings and an ongoing investigation into contraband supplies.”
What? you wonder, puzzled. Then an IM sidles into your specs. It’s Moxie. SORRY SKIPPER MAC ASKED ABOUT GREY FABS AND INCOMING CASES. Well, that tears it: Dickie is ahead of you on your own portfolio. You’d turn and glare at your sergeant, only he’s wisely decided that discretion is the better part of valour and staked out a corner at the back. Great.
“Here’s the situation.” The wall behind Dodgy Dickie does a wipe to reveal Mikey’s bathroom death scene. “Note the victim is taped and gagged. It’s set up to resemble an accidental autoerotic fatality: The thing he’s plumbed into is a mid-1960s colonic irrigation machine, a collector’s piece formerly owned by the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu—apparently he insisted on daily enemas. Ahem. Note the evidence of sexual stimulation. The enema fluid contains a borderline-toxic concentration of a medicine usually prescribed for impotence, but that’s not what killed him. Mr. Blair is HIV-positive and on multidrug maintenance. He also has hypertension, and is on meds for that condition. Pathology tells us that one of the protease inhibitors he’s on interacts very badly with Viagra. And the full work-up DI Kavanaugh ordered tells us that what he had in his system at the time was his prescription cocktail and a buttload of Viagra. But again, that’s not what killed him.”
Mac glances at you, his face unreadable. “The proximate cause of death was cardiac arrest. So we order
ed a full work-up on the enema fluid, so pathology went trawling for known pharmaceuticals.” They can do that, these days: They’ve got lab-on-a-chip analysers that can identify thousands of drugs in microgram quantities. Or so they told you on the last re-cert course you did on organic forensics.
“What they found was his prescription meds and the Viagra, and one last thing—the enema fluid was loaded with grapefruit juice.” Grapefruit juice? You see winces going round the audience. Dickie continues: “I’m told that grapefruit juice is a catastrophe waiting to happen if you’re on certain types of blood-pressure medicine—it interferes with them, just as badly as Viagra interferes with protease inhibitors. What we’ve got is a cocktail of drug interactions: Viagra and ritonavir, which massively increased the effect of the Viagra, which depresses the user’s blood pressure, and grapefruit juice doing much the same to his ACE inhibitor.”
He looks at his notes. “I’m told the grapefruit juice alone would have had the effect of causing a severe drop in blood pressure lasting a few hours. Add a cocktail of Viagra and ritonavir, and Professor Davies is of the opinion it’d be enough to push him over the edge.” As chief pathologist, Professor Davies ought to know. “What’s interesting is, who knew about Blair’s prescription, and worked out precisely what to slip in his happy juice? And who helped Mr. Blair into his underwear. We’d really like to know the answer to that one . . . but it’s not the only lead I want us to follow up.”
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