Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “Whatever it costs,” he said flatly.

  Eve felt a cold sweat wash over her. “Whatever it costs?” she echoed, seeking confirmation.

  “Whatever.” He dismissed the topic as casually as if he was discussing the weather, rather than giving her carte blanche to spill blood or money like water. “I’ll be back next week. You might as well take it easy until then. Except for the book, of course.”

  “Yes, Boss.” She stared hungrily at her notes, then double-underlined a squiggly glyph that in her own internal notation signified more work for the Komatsu in the subbasement, more quick-setting cement to fill the shallow graves, more money to silence those who could be bought and to buy the permanent silence of those who couldn’t. “I’m on it.”

  He hung up on her, and Eve fanned herself. Her skin suddenly felt a size too small and prickled with a sullen heat. Whatever it costs was Rupert-code for do whatever it takes to win. A controlling interest in a software company, a shiny new Gulfstream, a stolen Michelangelo, an assassination, a kilo of weapons-grade plutonium from North Korea: whatever he wanted, whatever the cost.

  As a rule, Rupe negotiated his less savory acquisitions carefully, confining himself to ambiguous verbal agreements, then delegating execution to someone else. Someone like Miss Evelyn Starkey, executive assistant extraordinaire. She was the one who worked the long hours, buried the bones, and painted over the cracks in Rupert’s veneer of legality. She was under no illusions about why he worked this way: if he ever got caught it was his intention that she, not Rupert, would take the fall. But beggars couldn’t be choosers, and Rupe had got the drop on her.

  As a condition for hiring her on special terms (which included paying off her student debt and providing gold-plated family medical insurance), he’d imposed a geas on her, a magical binding to enforce the non-compete clause in her contract. Eve had thought it amusingly weak, so pathetic she’d never bothered to break it. And the work he gave her was interesting, if morally dubious and intermittently illegal. But when, after a couple of months, he showed her the file he’d been keeping on her, she realized it was a snare. The very weakness of the geas meant that it wouldn’t stand scrutiny as a mitigating factor if she was ever charged with any crimes—crimes she’d committed at his direction, but which she appeared to have initiated. Every time he pulled this trick on her the file got fatter, like a cursed magical tome feeding on the life energy of the sorcerer who thought he was using it, not vice versa. The geas was irrelevant: if she didn’t want to be subjected to the full might and majesty of the law, she’d continue to fetch and carry and suck like a dead pig’s face—until he slipped, of course.

  She only needed to get lucky once.

  Eve sat in silence for a while, pondering. A concordance? The Inquisition banned it even though it was just an index to another book, then hid it in a secret appendix to the list of banned books so nobody would even know it existed? And Rupert is willing to sanction wet work to get his hands on it? She shook her head. Rupert did not sanction murder trivially, not unless at least eight digits of profit were in play. It was a purely pragmatic risk/benefit trade-off: Rupert was ruthless but not rash. The index had to be immensely valuable in the right hands. And he’d heard about it in Cyprus, from one or other of his dodgy oligarch business partners.

  After taking a minute to compose herself, Eve put through a call to Bernard Harris, an overpriced and eccentric antiquarian book dealer with whom the boss was oddly thick.

  “Mr. Harris? Hi, it’s Evelyn Starkey. The boss just told me about a rare book he’s heard is up for auction somewhere in London this week, and I was wondering if you could look into it and get back to me? Handwriting only, yes please, courier it over ASAP if you don’t mind; yes, yes, something from his, ah, Amazon wish list, last up in 1888, Vatican-prohibited, a concordance, one of a kind. Yes? Absolutely! That sounds like it. Mr. Bigge wants it, yes, definitely, he says price is no object. Will you let me know? Splendid! Ciao.”

  Good things come to those who wait, Eve told herself, and turned back to her PC’s screen with a secretive smile.

  Once Bernard put out feelers and identified the item that was up for auction, she’d authorize him to place a bid on Rupert’s behalf and set up the necessary machinery to transfer the (undoubtedly enormous) sum of laundered funds from one of the black accounts. And if there were rival bidders who wanted to play hardball, maybe go outside the rules? She’d be ready for them, too.

  Meanwhile, there were plastic surgeons to evaluate for their potential to give her the chilly face of corporate perfection. The face she’d wear once she completed her takeover of the Bigge Organization. The last face her enemies would ever see.

  * * *

  Imp strolled past the overgrown hedges and boarded up windows of Billionaire’s Row, ignoring the leaking roofs and snarling-dog security signs as he headed towards the high stone wall at the back of Kensington Palace. He was going home, for some debatable value of home.

  Once upon a time this had been a street of well-to-do family houses, the town residences of straitlaced minor gentry nestling in the shade of a second-tier palace (now serving as a state-subsidized dorm for minor royalty). A century ago, Imp’s great-grandparents had bought one of these houses with the proceeds of an early silent movie fortune. His grandparents had lived here and his father had grown up hearing tales of it, but it had been sold off to cover death duties in the sixties along with the rest of the homes on this street, as the London property market inflated out of reach of mere mortals.

  Today the average plot on Kensington Palace Gardens passed hands for roughly two hundred million pounds. Yet they all stood empty and derelict, roofs leaking, carpets mildewed, woodwork decaying, and wallpaper peeling. The sovereign wealth funds that bought the houses as investment vehicles were remote from mundane affairs like tenants and rent, never mind domestic maintenance. If the roof caved in, what did a million in reconstruction costs matter, when the title deed was appreciating by twenty million a year? Why bother with repairs when nobody lived there; and nobody could be permitted to live there lest they acquire some vestigial tenancy rights in law and encumber the liquidity of the asset.

  Imp’s ancestral pile was fronted by a rusting chain-link fence secured with padlocks, monitored by cameras on poles. He unlocked the gate and slouched up the driveway. He’d started by hacksawing the original lock, replacing it with one of his own. The cameras had been a little harder, but there were blind spots. Then Game Boy had hacked them. He’d found their unsecured logins on Shodan and tweaked their settings. The security company so proudly boasting of 24-hour monitoring on their warning signs was in fact watching the hell out of a house just down the street that shared the same long-dead architect.

  Imp marched up the front steps and rapped smartly on the door frame. “Hi, homeys, I’m honey!” he trilled, puffing out his chest as he opened the door. It squealed noisily across the floor tiles. The rain had warped it so that it tended to jam. Inside the seemingly derelict house, the porch was swept clean of debris and the inner door was sturdy despite a fresh coat of graffiti. Del was working on another of her murals, a street scene of heroic bike couriers racing to dodge shark-like cars and police with piranha heads. Muffled dance music was pounding away upstairs. Imp slung his rain-damped trench coat on a hook, wiped his feet on the doormat, removed his boots, and entered the hall.

  The front hall was lined with oak wainscoting almost to the ceiling, and floored in black and white marble. It was as snobby a lobby as any snooty butler could hope for. Imp thought it a shame that he lacked an Alfred to take the piss out of Doc’s Bat-persona. He opened a door to the left of the hall and flipped on the drawing room lights.

  To maintain the pretense of abandonment, he and Doc had installed slanted plywood cutouts just behind the bay windows, a stage backdrop painted in an Ames room illusion. From the outside, the flats provided a forced-perspective illusion of empty rooms, peeling wallpaper, and filthy floors. But the backdrops were barely
a meter deep. Behind them the rest of the house was fully inhabited, albeit not in a manner of which the owners would approve.

  “Anyone in?” he called, glancing round the squat. The big-ass TV was on, blocking out the disgusting mess in the Adam fireplace with a photorealistic display of dancing flames. Immediately behind the backdrop to the windows at the front of the room was a row of bland office desks, covered to a considerable depth in assorted semi-functional e-waste. Game Boy’s rig perched beside it, three giant monitors on arms angled inwards to focus on his joystick-and-keyboard-encrusted bucket seat. At the back of the room, a dress rack bowed under the weight of costumes, fronted by a snowdrift of discarded underwear. But the centerpiece of the room was a brown leather sofa of roughly the same dimensions as Jabba the Hutt. This was Imp’s pride and joy, and it was currently unoccupied. “Ahoy there, children! Any sign of—”

  A lithe arm snaked around his shoulders and clamped a palm over his mouth. “Shut it,” Del hissed in his ear. “No pirates here, only me.”

  “Ay, my little Tiger Lily!”

  “Fuck you, pay me.” She let go and shoved him in the small of his back, sending him reeling until he collapsed theatrically atop the giant sofa. He flopped on his back with arms spreadeagled as she tossed the canvas bank bag at him.

  “Hey, not nice!” He managed to keep the bag from whacking him in the face with its heavy padlock, which swung open. “This tagged?”

  “Not any more: I disarmed the dye packs.”

  Imp struggled towards a sitting position—the sofa was almost as big as a double bed—and looked inside.

  “Money, money, money, it’s a rich—”

  “Fuck you, pay me.” Deliverator grinned, easing the sting of her demand slightly. She was, Imp decided, extremely cute when she smiled: but despite being extremely cute she was the least likely of all his housemates to put out, as he’d established to his regret. She was totally immune to all attempts to charm her out of her skintight Lycra pants: a gold star lesbian, he figured. “Pay me now.”

  “Can I pay you in kisses?” he asked hopefully, and gave her mind a little push. “Will you do it for exposure? I can make you a star—”

  She pushed back, hard (pushing was always iffy if the pushee was another transhuman). “Try that again and I’ll introduce your kneecaps to my baseball bat.” Her grin turned menacing.

  “Only kidding! I was hoping you’d cut me a discount.”

  “Asshole. No, and just for that shit, I want an extra ten percent. And it’ll double if you ever do that again,” she warned. “Double or baseball bat: your call, mister.”

  “Ouch.” Imp massaged his forehead ruefully, then rooted around in the bag for a bit, before giving up and emptying it on the floor nearby. Bundles of bound banknotes fell out, fives and tens and twenties—nobody except dealers and gangsters used fifty pound notes. He picked up a centimeter-thick bundle. “A thousand quid—this one’s your fine: catch.” He bowled it at her. Del caught it, her mood lightening instantly. It was true: money couldn’t buy love, but it made one hell of an apology. Another: “Thousand quid.” And another. Del began to giggle.

  “Cut that out!” She jumped over the end of the sofa, pulled up his shirt-tails, and started to tickle.

  “Thousand—help! Uncle! Aunt! A kingdom for my horse! Have pity, have pity belle dame sans merci, oh the humanity!”

  She stopped. “Does anybody really say that?” she demanded.

  “Probably. Santa. As they were cru—” He trailed off, shocked sober by his tongue’s treachery in reminding him of things better forgotten. “Listen, we agreed your cut was five large—”

  “—Six now.”

  “—Okay, six. Let me up and I’ll give it to you. Here. Remember to wear gloves and count them in the kitchen sink, just in case you missed any packs.”

  “Can’t count anything in the kitchen sink until you do the washing-up. I swear the beer glasses are campaigning for the vote.”

  “It’s not my turn to—”

  “I’m sure the botulism doesn’t care whether it’s your turn or Doc’s to boil it to death in a stream of detergent; man up and get your big boy Marigolds on or I’m inviting everyone to the next tickle party.”

  “Slave driver!”

  “Bitch.” She grinned as he rolled to his feet and shuffled towards the kitchen. “Barefoot in the kitchen, that’s how I like my men.”

  “Not pregnant as well?”

  “Don’t test me, I’ve got a friend who’d lend me an ovipositor sex toy—”

  Working together made the washing up go significantly faster, although Imp kept up a steady stream of complaints as he dried dishes. Del ignored them pointedly. They both ignored the overflowing ashtrays on the window ledge: judging by the smell of stale skunk there was nothing of tobacco in them, which meant they were Game Boy’s. The highly regrettable remnants of several Cornish pasties, in contrast, were obviously Doc’s. He had a weakness for the things, but for some reason never ate the crescent section of the crust, leaving little half-moons of abandoned pastry rind lying around the place.

  After Imp bagged up the empty beer cans and Del dumped the bottles in a crate for recycling, she stepped back and produced a roll-up out of thin air. “We need to talk.”

  Crap, Imp thought. Striking a pose against the worktop with a broken cupboard door, he declaimed:

  “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,

  ‘To talk of many things:

  of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—’”

  “—I’ll give you sealing-wax!” Del snarled at him with a promise of physical injury if he continued, which only caused Imp to raise his voice to auditorium-filling levels—

  “‘Of cabbages—

  And kings— And why the sea is boiling hot—

  and whether pigs have wings.’

  Ahem. You were saying?”

  “Fuck it.” Del flicked her fingers, summoning a blue flare of light that danced around the tip of her spliff before vanishing with a giggle: “Thanks, Tink.” She drew in a long, slow lungful and held it for a couple of seconds before allowing it to trickle from her nostrils. Imp grabbed at the joint but, swift as an angry bee, Del snatched it out of reach and held it above his head. “You are pissing me off with these improv stunts,” she complained, relaxing only very slightly as the joint began to hit her. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses a fucking eye, Imp, they nearly grabbed GeeBee! Are you insane?”

  Imp forced himself not to wilt under the glowering weight of her regard. “I’m insane on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and days with a Q in their name. Otherwise I’m totally in touch with reality, thankee kindly. And thankee kindly for putting GeeBee off his game, really, what was that about, you utter toad-plucker? Were you trying to trigger him?”

  “Hmm. Yeah, nope, I didn’t think I was—no, I just didn’t think. None of us is fault-free. I’ll apologize later.” Del took another toke then reached a decision. She offered him the joint, then when he accepted it, grabbed his right ear and marched him briskly towards the drawing room. Imp staggered after her, inhaling wheezily, pursued by a faint giggling and the chiming of tiny bells. “Sit,” she commanded, shoving him down atop a hideously stained futon. “What I want to say is, there will be no more half-cocked schemes which you make up on the spur of the moment and where we get scragged if anyone stumbles. Is that understood?”

  “You’re no fun when you’re like this, Becca.” Imp whined, but at least he was listening. “If you only wanted to talk why did we have to do the dishes?”

  “Dishes weren’t going to do themselves, fool.” Del—known to her parents and the court system as Rebecca—frowned, then plucked the joint from his lips and took another furious puff. “Quit the act. You’re plotting mayhem and chaos. Confess.”

  He twitched. “I, uh, may have updated the spreadsheet. Again.”

  Del rolled her eyes. “You and your fucking spreadsheet. What’s it say this time?”

  “We made sixty, sixt
y-two thou today. That leaves thirty in the kitty after I pay you, him, and other-him your salaries for the next month. But the overheads just went through the roof, so it’s going to take a couple more jobs before we’re ready to start shooting, if we stick to the schedule.”

  “Oh for—” Del abruptly sat beside him. “Can’t you improvise?”

  “It’s the tech,” Imp complained, “4K and 8K cameras are no longer available for hire without criminal background checks. The Home Office just classified them as munitions! Sobek alone knows why they did it, but I can’t just borrow a Red One and a couple of lenses any more, they’re all stored in bank vaults under armed guard.” He grimaced. “Film cameras are another matter—yeah, as if. There’s a six-month waiting list to get your hands on a Super 16 and then you’ve got to pay for the film and development, which is going to come in at around a tenner a second if you do it on the cheap, and then you’ve got to get a license from the Ministry of Propaganda before they’ll let you digitize it.”

  “What the ever-loving fuck?”

  “They’re afraid of demons crawling out of the HDTV screens and eating people.” Imp took a slow, moody drag on the butt of the joint, then stubbed it out on the sole of his boot and glowered at the dustsheet-draped baby grand piano. “Clunge-licking magic.” There was a jangling discord of tiny bells: “No offense,” he added hastily.

  “So you need more money because now you have to pay for film and development costs on top of everything else?”

  “Yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

  “Well.” Del side-eyed him. “This film had better be fucking worth it in the end, mister big-shot director.” Standing, she added: “No more improv capers, understand?” He nodded. “Next time, you give us a script first and we all kick the tires.” He nodded unenthusiastically. “And it’s a team effort. And there is no I in team, are you with me? We’re doing this together. I’m not your sidekick, dude, we’re all equals here. Partners in crime.” Imp managed to nod and hold his tongue. “Good.” The echo of a frightening smile danced at the corners of her mouth. “Now let’s go and tell the boys, shall we?”