Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  Amy the auditor slumped, open-mouthed, drooling a little under the impact of Imp’s assault. “Everything is totally under control!” he told her, hamming it up for the cameras in character as the Joker. “Nothing to see here!” He produced a heavy-duty refuse sack from his sleeve with a flourish and offered it to his victim. “Cash transfer now,” he ordered. Amy nodded vacantly and swept an armful of bundled banknotes off the counting-desk, straight into the open bin liner.

  Game Boy nonchalantly approached the vault. “Niiiice,” he remarked. The guard on the left ignored him, eyes closed by the burden of Doc Depression’s projected exhaustion. Game Boy peered at the electronic keypad and tsked as he noticed the card reader for the first time. “Keys, please,” he requested.

  “You need to open the vault for the regular cash collection service,” Imp told Amy. He moderated his force. He held her soul in the palm of his hand: it was a fragile thing of spun glass and imagination, and it was already warping beneath the weight of his self-confidence. Imp was, he smugly admitted, a bad man. But he took some satisfaction in not being a terrible man, and he didn’t want to leave a trail of shattered minds in his wake. “The key, Amy,” he emphasized.

  “The key,” Amy echoed. She stumbled towards the vault and produced a keycard which she palmed against the reader. She touched her index finger to a fingerprint scanner, then punched in a six-digit number. The door unlatched and swung open. “The cash transfer.” She reached inside and withdrew a canvas satchel secured with padlocks. “I need you to sign for it,” she said in a monotone as she presented Imp with the bag.

  Then the Bat sneezed, and all hell broke loose.

  Doc Depression’s peculiar talent required steady concentration. The unbearable itch of old money tickled his sinuses, broke him out of his focus, and shattered his grip on the guards. The left guard, the middle-aged jobsworth who had held out longest against Imp’s will-to-believe, jerked upright. “Hey!” he shouted. “Stop!” He slapped his hand against a big red button mounted on the wall. “Stop right there!”

  His co-worker, a decade younger and skinnier, bounced to his feet, yanked a baton out of a loop on his utility belt, and waved it at Game Boy. “Yeah, not cool! Hold it right there!”

  “I don’t think so.” Game Boy yanked the satchel away from Amy the auditor and threw it over his shoulder, not bothering to check where it fell. It landed neatly with its strap snug across the Wakandan princess’s shoulder. Del jerked her chin once, then sped off with the eerie economy of motion that only she could achieve. Once she had her hands on the goods, nobody on Earth could catch her.

  Game Boy turned to leave just as the guards made an ill-judged attempt to stop him. The older guard grabbed; the younger one swept his baton around, evidently aiming for Game Boy, but caught his elder colleague in the face instead. Then the youngster tripped over his own bootlaces—which had inexplicably knotted themselves together—and toppled sideways. Meanwhile the older guard screamed as his nose sprayed blood, then he, too, tripped and fell. As he fell he threw out an arm for balance, but succeeded only in punching the younger guard in the crotch. Then his handcuffs spilled from his belt pouch and closed around his wrist and his colleague’s ankle. The youngster flailed around for a few seconds before his cuffs fell out too, and mysteriously shackled his free wrist to the leg of Amy’s desk.

  Game Boy stepped over the fallen guards as if nothing untoward had happened: “I’m done here,” he announced, then walked out the door. The Bat shook his head, then trailed after him. Elsewhere in the building, alarms were shrilling.

  That just left Imp to tidy up. “You can go to sleep now,” he told Amy, “everything is just copacetic!” He gave her a final psychic nudge and she slumped slowly forward across her desk. Behind her, the two guards were fitfully pawing at each other, trying to disentangle themselves from their inadvertent bondage scene. The assistant manager in the corner was facing the wall and giggling cheerfully. As Imp left, he tugged the door closed behind him. The silent alarm was also a lockdown trigger. The strong room crew wouldn’t be getting out any time soon.

  Imp turned and moonwalked down the corridor. He briefly paused to stuff two fat bundles of banknotes into his pockets, then dropped the bin bag, even though it was still half full. Then he ran after Robin and the Bat.

  Back in the fitting room they ditched their disguises and changed back into street clothes. The plan was to split up and make their separate ways home. Del, carrying her more valuable cargo, had her own special way of making an exit that none of the others could emulate. Imp intended to pause in Model Railways on his way out: just long enough to purchase a Baby Deltic to round out Game Boy’s stocking, using the banknotes he’d stolen only minutes earlier. Never say I don’t look out for you, GeeBee, he told himself. One Christmas present down, two to go. Del was easy—she’d had her eye on a new bike for ages—and that just left Doc Depression.

  It’s fun being a Secret Santa, Imp decided.

  As long as you didn’t get caught.

  THE INTERIOR LIFE

  Mr. Bigge maintained a modest mansion in Knightsbridge, stomping ground of tech billionaires and revolution-averse Middle-Eastern potentates: the only people wealthy enough to buy property in Central London in the twenty-first century.

  (A few local families still occupied their inherited family homes. But their numbers were dwindling. Fear of losing big in the property casino gradually overcame their attachment to their roots. Then they shuffled wearily off to their suburban exile, weeping on the shoulders of their newly acquired personal wealth management advisors.)

  Rupert was an anomaly. He’d inherited the family home but he fitted in well with the elite newcomers. He came from old money but his fortune had exploded over the past decade, and he’d invested heavily in his house, trying to keep up with the oligarchs. What had once been a three-story Georgian town house (with cellar) now featured a dormered attic and two new subbasement levels. It had a cinema, swimming pool, boardroom, library, prayer room, panic room, owner’s den, staff offices, and the usual Grave of the Unknown Komatsu Mini-Excavator.1 It was, in short, a typical billionaire supervillain’s London town house.

  This was not Rupert’s only residence—he had suites in Tokyo, Manhattan, and Vancouver, a mansion in Madrid, a chateau in Normandy, and for the pièce de résistance a medieval castle on the small Channel Island where he was feudal lord—but the Knightsbridge house was his base in London.

  Miss Starkey dwelt in the attic like a business-suited Miss Havisham, sleeping in the once-upon-a-Victorian-housekeeper’s bedroom. Admittedly, this was a step up from the senior domestics, who had bunk beds in the dormer attic. (Never mind the kitchen and cellar maids who slept on bedrolls in the laundry, and paid for the privilege.) But it underlined the uncomfortable reality that in the House of Bigge, if you were not the master, you could only be a servant.

  Not that Eve spent much time in her room. Sleep was a privilege reserved for the rich, and as Rupert’s extremely busy executive assistant she could be called into action at any time of day or night to fight fires in her employer’s global empire. Eve had no family life: her father was dead, her brother estranged, and her mother indisposed. She had neither the time nor the inclination to nurture friendships. But in exchange for total devotion to her job, Eve had gained the privilege of power.

  Rupert might insist that she introduce herself to callers as his secretary, but she was effectively a corporate vice-president—lacking only the title, the pay, and the stock options. She oversaw operations on behalf of Rupert when he was unavailable. Her decrees carried the weight of her master’s voice, and she exercised his power vicariously, a power that she’d become addicted to. Her borrowed agency made an acceptable substitute for family life for now, and with enough money even cloning and surrogacy would be within reach—the only way she’d ever dare have children. Having a life of her own could wait until she was something more than Rupert’s semi-detached shadow. So it was towards this eventual emanc
ipation, and in pursuit of her own long-term goals, that Eve bent every sinew and dedicated every waking moment of her life in the service of Rupert de Montfort Bigge.

  This week Rupert was off on a jaunt to Cyprus, hobnobbing with his tax exile Russian friends and a sketchy Turkish arms dealer or two. Maybe he had already concluded his business and was plotting his next campaign from the fastness of his island castle; or perhaps he was living it up in Monaco. Either way, in his absence Eve reigned in Knightsbridge. So when she got home, she sent the Gammon down to the sub-subbasement with the kitchenware acquisitions and a work order for Sweeney the Handyman—the rack would be absolutely perfect there, as long as it was securely bolted to the ceiling—then she settled down at her desk in the office just outside Rupert’s den. There were emails to answer, memos to approve, and a press release to sign off on—all useful distractions with which to work off her nervous energy. But work was a game she played in boss mode, and all too soon she had caught up with her to-do list and was left staring at her empty inbox with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction.

  She phoned the kitchen for lunch and ordered her usual: a salad of mixed greens topped with a modest slab of bluefin tuna and a thimbleful of λ olive oil from Speiron. (Cook had said they were running low, so she dashed off a reminder to Rupert’s valet to pick up another case: at $14,600 a pop it was a steal.) While she ate at her desk, she idly priced her options for blepharoplasty, then checked her rogues’ gallery of Top 100 Richest Female Entrepreneurs for signs of unannounced plastic surgery again.

  Closing in on the big three-zero had made Eve acutely aware that her options for leveraging her appearance were narrowing, and it was time to start upgrading her outward presentation before it became too obvious. She’d realized early on that there was an eigenface towards which all female CEOs converged, a strikingly standardized Boardroom Barbie look that those who made it to the top table generally shared. She had actual proof of this: she’d had Rupert’s quants run the algorithms, and they’d spit out the precise ratio of nose length to lip fullness, hips to chest.

  The numbers didn’t lie. To make it to the top it wasn’t necessary or even desirable to be supermodel-beautiful—stereotypes could bite you, unless you were a pop star or came from serious inherited wealth—but if you didn’t have the good fortune to start out mind-buggeringly rich, you absolutely had to have the Look that coded for female executive authority. Eve intended to become the ultimate executive. She had already jettisoned any shred of her personal life that threatened to hold her back; her ears and breasts and cheekbones were just more skin in the game she was playing. Now she spent her surplus income on plastic surgery. Her objective: to become the face that launched a thousand investment vehicles.

  She wouldn’t be Rupert’s amanuensis forever.

  The desk phone rang while she was collating reviews of superstar plastic surgeons. Focus shattered, she glared at it for a moment: but switchboard had a little list of people who could handle level 2 through 4 calls while she was unavailable, which meant that it must be a level 1, which basically boiled down to Rupert or the Prince of Wales or someone of equivalent stature. She twitched her headset mic back into position. “Afternoon, Boss!” she chirped brightly. “What can I do for you?”

  Rupe chuckled glutinously. “I want you to talk dirty to me,” he said. Oh, it was one of those calls. “Where were we?”

  Eve’s brow furrowed minutely as she leaned back in her Aeron: “Let’s see, I’m working my jaw and licking my lips as I kneel in front of you, Master. My! Aren’t you hard!” (Rupe, she knew, was a marshmallow in the absence of chemical assistance.) “I can feel your pulse through your trousers as I unbutton your fly…”

  “Yes, but what are you wearing?”

  Eve closed her eyes. “My olive-green Armani suit, sheer black hold-ups, the black Jimmy Choos, and my black Rigby & Peller corset.” (Which was not what she was wearing right now, Jimmy Choos excepted, but that was the whole point.) “And the stainless steel number-three butt plug.”

  “No panties?”

  “I waxed yesterday, thinking about you, Master. I don’t want to wear panties, they’d only get soaked when I run my tongue down the underside of your throbbing man-tool…”

  Rupe’s demand for telephone sex was tiresome but predictable, and he engaged in it like a dog marking its territory by pissing: You belong to me, he was reminding her, even though I’m three thousand kilometers away. He probably did it just to remind himself that, for all her deadly efficiency, he was still the boss of her.

  Rupert de Montfort Bigge was a creature of hierarchy and privilege. He’d have been perfectly at home in the House of Commons, wagging his willy at the Leader of the Opposition during Prime Minister’s Question Time; but his political career came to a sticky end almost before it got started. If only those unfortunate photos from the secret university dining society hadn’t come out just as he was up for approval by the candidate selection committee! The photos of his throbbing man-tool getting along splendidly with a roast hog’s face, in a roast hog’s face, with applesauce spurting out of the hog’s eye sockets in viscous gouts as he pumped away with verve and enthusiasm, had certainly captured Party HQ’s attention.

  It was, in all, a bit of a career-killing move, even for a high-flyer like Rupert who was born and bred to inherit a safe Conservative seat. Because the question the committee had to consider was, if all this is coming out now, what’s going to come out later?

  (If only they’d known…)

  After his political career crashed and burned at the end of the runway, Rupert threw himself single-mindedly into a life of dissolution and vice. His reputation became such that pedigreed parents warned their debutante daughters away from him despite his near-billionaire status. (Marrying for money was all very well, but not if it meant marrying an overdose flying in loose formation with several strains of sexually transmitted diseases hitherto unknown to science.) So extreme was his drug use that the injections of cocaine threatened to rot the arteries in his cock, and his personal bodyguard required special training in administering opiate antidotes. But Rupert came to his senses just short of a mid-thirties heart attack and turned his voracious appetites away from sex and drugs, towards a single-minded pursuit of money and power. With enough money it became possible to pursue political power by proxy, and with enough political power all enemies could be vanquished. So Rupert upped his game and focussed obsessively on the business of money and power. He used his own legitimate trading activities as cover for darker transactions, which he carefully delegated to his minions so that his own hands remained clean. Meanwhile, he amused himself with acts of petty sadism—the less consensual the better. Buying up and asset-stripping nursing home chains, looting employee pension funds, drowning kittens, and hunting giant pandas: it was all balm to his soul. Best of all, as a captain of industry he didn’t even have to hide his vices from the voting public.

  It amused Rupert to demand telephone sex from Eve, whose outer shell of puritanical frigidity he found vexing. In his clubbable old-boys world view women were wives, whores, or servants. Eve certainly didn’t have the pedigree to be a society wife, although her effectiveness as a business subordinate (never dare to say partner) was unquestionable; so he alternated between door two and door three, never realizing that there was a fourth door behind which was chained a man-eating tiger, held in check only by a fraying rope of ruthlessly deferred gratification.

  The phone sex had a secondary purpose of course. It bored the crap out of the intelligence officers who were undoubtedly listening in on his mobile phone conversations: for Rupert was a Person of Interest to numerous stock exchanges, futures markets, and financial fraud investigative agencies. Crypto might be hacked (Rupe didn’t trust scramblers: what one boffin could make, another could break), but a bored officer who’d stopped listening after wanking himself silly was liable to miss the significance of the post-coital pillow talk.

  “I’ll be home tomorrow night, my dear, and I wa
s thinking I’d like you to obtain a book for me. It’s a little something for the weekend I heard about on my travels: everyone’s talking about it in Nicosia. I’d like to read it with you when I get back. Do you think you could find it for me?”

  “A book, Master?” Eve sat up and uncapped the fountain pen she’d been twirling idly for creative inspiration, notepad at the ready.

  “A banned book, Eve, a very naughty, wicked book indeed! Positively filthy, I should say.” He chuckled lasciviously. “Absolutely one of a kind, and we’ll have so much fun with it!”

  “Does it have pictures?” she asked, staying in character.

  “It’s not that kind of book, I’m afraid, but yes, it does have pictures. It’s a concordance of a lost manuscript, mentioned in the secret annex to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum—the Vatican index of books deemed heretical or contrary to morality. It was never printed, and the original was held under lock and key in the vaults of the Sacred Congregation of the Index until it disappeared in 1871, probably stolen. Someone tried to auction it in 1888, and it crops up a couple of times in various historical accounts—I’ve had it on my Amazon wish list forever—but no joy. Anyway, I want you to talk to Bernard, tell him it’s up for auction again right on our doorstep, in London! A little bird whispered in my ear.” (One of Rupe’s oligarch buddies had gone long on the nose candy and bragged about it, in other words.) “He’ll know exactly which book I mean and how to bid on it. I want you to expedite it for me. Can you do that?”

  “Of course.” Eve diligently took notes in an arcane shorthand of her own invention. If the boss was worried about eavesdroppers, this was serious. All this beating-off banter by way of beating around the bush was just cover for the real message. But … a book? “I’ll tell Bernard to look up your wish list. Do you have a price in mind, Boss?”