Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “They fell over,” Sydney opined.

  “It looks like they tried to hit Robin, missed him and hit each other, then accidentally handcuffed themselves to the furniture upside-down and back-to-front.”

  “Yeah. We fired them, too,” Jeanine observed.

  “Do you lot do anything but fire people?” Wendy demanded. “You realize I’m going to have to track them down and interview them, and you just ensured that’ll take, like, about ten times as long? And you’re being billed by the hour?”

  “I don’t see what you’re complaining about, then,” Jeanine sniffed.

  “But why?”

  “Because when the shareholders ask how we lost a hundred thousand in cash takings and demand to know what we did about it, we can point to it and say that we did something. Don’t sweat it, I’m sure they’ll get new jobs eventually.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Wendy lied, mentally smacking herself in penance. “I’ll need their home addresses and any relevant contact details you have on file. All right, the disguises, what happened to them?”

  “The robbers dumped them back in the changing rooms when they reclaimed their streetwear. The police got a couple of poor-quality prints off the cubicle door latches, and took the costumes as evidence. I’ve got a crime report number for you, if you want to ask for the details?”

  “That’ll do nicely. And you’ve got close-ups of the robbers’ faces, I hope? Any stills I can take? Both face and full-body, preferably next to a display cabinet of known height so I can work up some vital stats?”

  “Yuh, c’n do that,” Sydney sniffed, then emitted a dreadful snorkeling sound, as if his nasal cavities were filling up with quick-drying cement. Jeanine gave Wendy a glance of shared misery: evidently having a sinus infection was the one thing that wasn’t a sacking offense in this place.

  Wendy stood up. “I need those stills now,” she said. “I’ve got to visit the police next, then I’ll make the rounds of the witnesses.” Who you helpfully sacked. “After that, we’ll see.”

  “Do you think you’ll find them?” Jeanine asked eagerly. “Will there be tickets to the hanging?”

  Wendy smiled wearily, then resumed her professional demeanor: “I can’t promise anything, ma’am, but I’ll ask,” she lied. “Now, about those stills…”

  One set of prints, several bewildered brain-controlled witnesses to interview, and some blurry photos. It didn’t sound like much to go on, but Wendy’d been handed worse cases. Her biggest concern was that the golden forty-eight hours had long since ticked over into penalty time, and if the cops had cracked the case Gibson wouldn’t have handed it to her. After that, her second-biggest worry was the weather. Actually confronting and arresting a gang of transhuman robbers with mind control mojo was way down the list.

  Still. A cold case, at fifty quid an hour? She could put up with a lot of rain for that.

  * * *

  Imp was deep in thought as he trudged home from his meeting with Big Sis. When he got there everybody else was out, so he ditched his suit in favor of something less likely to attract attention and headed out in search of lunch. There were a couple of all-you-can-eat buffets not far away. It was easy to fool the waiter into thinking he’d already paid, so long as he ate during the lunchtime rush and never hit them twice in the same week. So his stomach was groaning with roast beef, chicken, and mashed potato as he ambled home in midafternoon. Where he discovered a freaked-out Doc, a glum Game Boy in need of comfort hugs, and—of course—no sign of their Deliverator.

  “Where’s Becca?” he asked. “I had a very interesting meeting this morning!” He steepled his fingers, then proceeded to tug them, one by one, until his knuckles clicked.

  “Fuck knows,” Game Boy muttered despondently. “Are you going to nail it shut or am I, Doc?”

  “Nail what shut?” Imp asked, momentarily distracted.

  “The door into 1940.” Doc shuddered dramatically. “At least I hope it was 1940.”

  “It coulda been 1983,” Game Boy moaned. “Threads for real.”

  Imp stared: “What the baculum-gobbling shite are you talking about?”

  Doc stopped trying to give Game Boy a back rub—Game Boy was still hunched in on himself, but there were no tears—and glared at Imp. “The doorway to the end of the world upstairs. We went exploring…”

  Ten minutes and a little bit of clarification later, Imp paused the spiel, raced to the kitchen, and returned with an unlabelled brown bottle and three paper cups. “This calls for a little something to settle your nerves.” He poured and then passed the cups around. “Do carry on, dear fellow.”

  Doc took a sip from his cup, went straight into a volcanic blast of coughing, wiped his lips, and took another sip. “What is this?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Fell off the back of a lorry bound for the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Cask strength, of course. You were saying?”

  (Game Boy lowered his face to his cup and huffed.)

  “There is stuff up there,” Doc said portentously. “And it is up-gefucked.”

  (Game Boy risked a tentative sip, like a cat testing an unfamiliar water bowl for potability.)

  “So it’s kind of wild.” Imp shrugged. “No biggie, we’ve been living here for months—” a couple of years, in his case—“without anything breaking loose. So?”

  “We opened the door!” Game Boy’s voice, if he had raised it further, could reasonably have been described as a shriek: “Anything could happen!”

  “Nonsense,” Imp said firmly. He pushed gently. “Nothing can possibly come through. And if it did, it would almost certainly wander off at random, get lost, and starve to death in the maze. Or drown in the swimming pool. We’re perfectly safe down here, it’s safe as houses.”

  “I’m afraid of refrigerators,” Game Boy admitted under his breath. He took a full sip of his whisky and gasped as it hit his throat.

  “Where’s Del?” Imp asked again.

  “Hi, homies, how’ve you been?” Rebecca bounced in, the front door slamming in her wake. “I had a great morning!”

  “Oh good, gang’s all here.” Doc peered into his paper cup, clearly wishing it would magically refill itself.

  “Excellent!” Imp stood. “You can sit down then and have a drink. We have a job to get started on.”

  “A—” Rebecca peeled her cycling gloves off as she sat—“what kind of job?”

  “The best kind, a treasure hunt!”

  “What?” Rebecca peered at him, then sniffed her cup. “Hey, there’s booze in this, I can’t drink it, what if I’m pulled over?”

  Doc shook his head. “On your bike? Never happen—”

  “See what’s parked out front.” She grinned smugly.

  “If you get pulled over driving a stolen van, you’ve got bigger things to worry about than a breathalyzer—”

  “’S not a van, what do you take me for?” She crossed her arms and feigned disdain.

  “Go ahead,” Imp said wearily, “check it out, give her a round of applause.”

  “I’ll go.” Game Boy stood and trudged towards the front door. Paused, then returned: “Why the ever-loving fuck did you boost a Chelsea tractor, Del?”

  Rebecca smirked. “That, my friend, is not just any Chelsea tractor: it’s a 2010-model Porsche Cayenne Turbo S. With disabled anti-theft and tracking, and a—” she held up a remote keyfob—“working ignition. More than five hundred horsepower and enough torque to tow a jumbo jet. Just right for this neighborhood.”

  Game Boy reddened. “Are you trying to bring the—”

  “Relax, GeeBee,” Imp commanded: “I said relax, Boy.” He touched Game Boy’s shoulder. “I’m sure Del has a plan for avoiding the gentlemen of the law, right? Rebecca?” He put a slight hard edge on her name, casting her a warning look.

  “The bloke who sold it to me put cloned plates on it first. They match a real one registered in Clapham, so it’s all legit, see? I thought I’d park it round in the long grass at the back.”

>   “Just so we’re all keeping busy, children,” Imp grinned, “practicing our skills, yes? So: while you were driving without insurance or whatever, Game Boy and Doc went exploring upstairs, and I’ve been catching up with fam and getting us a job.”

  “Yeah, about this job—” Game Boy began.

  “I will explain everything in due course!” Imp struck a pose.

  “What’s it worth?” the Deliverator asked with barely concealed avarice.

  “Lots.” Imp side-eyed the corners of the room. “Eighty large in cash, plus extras. Cameras, lenses, lights, a sound stage. And some payments in kind as well.”

  “The fuck! What do we have to do, hand over our kidneys?”

  “It’s quite simple. A rare book came up for auction this week. Trouble is, the book dealer who had the details has been murdered—yes, it’s that valuable. He kept the contact details for the seller in a safe deposit box. My customer hired him to bid in the auction, but one of the rival bidders has gotten a bit overenthusiastic, so she’s asked me to try and get hold of the book first.” He narrowed his eyes and frowned at Del’s keyfob. “It’s really no riskier than being in possession of that.”

  Doc beat the others to the punch: “Who’s the customer? Why the fuck would they pay that much for a book? This stinks, are we being set up?”

  Imp smiled thinly. “The customer is my sister. Or rather, her boss is paying and she’s organizing everything. I very much doubt she’s going to double-cross me.”

  “Your sis—” Game Boy’s eyes widened—“you’ve got a sister?” From the way he shrank back into the sofa, he found the idea of a family of Imps terrifying.

  “Obviously he got parents, Boy, where’s your head at?”

  “I’ve got a sister,” Imp acknowledged with the haughty dignity of one who’d been caught out and now felt compelled to bluff his way to the bitter end. “She’s not an overachiever like me, but she occasionally has her uses.”

  “A book.” Doc leaned forward. “Tell us about this hundred thousand pound book.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” Imp relaxed. He reached for a plastic document wallet, and began leafing through the pages he’d printed out. “What we’re after in the first place is not the actual book itself, nobody’s got that. We don’t even know who’s selling it yet, or rather, selling the treasure map—directions to where the book is hidden. Once we’ve got that, we’ve got to get hold of the book before anyone else, and then it’s finders keepers. The book itself is a unique manuscript, and the last legal keeper was the Vatican Library, where it was stashed in the Vatican secret archive. It was stolen during the Napoleonic Wars and went missing in London in the 1880s…”

  “The book dealer,” Game Boy raised a finger, “he was killed by someone else who wants the book, do I have it right?”

  “Yes.” Imp looked slightly abashed. “A rival buyer who’s not terribly concerned with legal niceties seems to be after it, and it looks like they’re a jump ahead of us. So we’ve got to get hold of the deposit box with the auction details in it toot sweet. But that’s going to be a bit of a problem, you see.”

  “Why?” Imp wondered if Doc and Game Boy were tag-teaming him.

  “Well, you know the branch of Pennine Bank that we, uh, filmed in last month?”

  “Oh fuck off,” said Del, her eyes widening, “it’s in a deposit box there?”

  “Yes.” Imp nodded.

  “You want us to rob the same bank twice in a month?” Del’s voice rose.

  “It’ll be a piece of cake! You see, I’ve got a plan…”

  * * *

  The Bond was having a bad day.

  “What do you mean, you can’t get any data off it?” he hissed over the counter.

  “It’s ancient, sir.” The technician gave him a company-approved cheerful smile. “I mean, it’s a 40-megabyte SCSI disk—that’s short for Small Computer Serial Intelligence—they don’t make them any more? You said the PC was a 1988 model? You might be able to read it on a Mac like the one my gran still uses, as long as it was made before 1995, but PCs won’t work with them without a special card. Are you sure it came out of a PC?”

  “For the third time, yes, it came out of a PC. Big beige box, amber screen, one of those printers that shrieks like it’s having its toenails torn out with pliers. Can you get the data off it for me?”

  “Um … to be perfectly honest, I don’t think so, sir. But it’s not as if there can be anything important on it, they haven’t made these things for more than twenty years and it’s less than a tenth the capacity of a single CD-ROM, there isn’t even room for a five-minute YouTube clip on it. I’ll just put it in the recycling box here and we can sort you out with a nice new Packard Bell laptop instead; I can throw in a free Office 365 subscription if you sign up for our extended—”

  The Bond reached across the counter and grabbed the technician’s tie. “Give. It. Back,” he grated.

  The technician’s eyes went wide and he began to gabble: “Sir, here at HiveMart Digital we have a strict zero-tolerance policy for employee abuse I am going to have to call security and kindly ask you to leave the store also your actions are being recorded by surveillance cameras and we always prosecute—”

  “Disk. Now.” The Bond snapped the fingers of his free hand, and let go of the technician. “Give me back my disk.” He didn’t bother to finish the sentence with if you want to live: the technician seemed to understand instinctively.

  “Right you are sir!” He shoved the piece of delicate machinery at the Bond, letting go of it without warning. The Bond caught it effortlessly, and glared at the technician as he gabbled his way through the rest of his script in a cold-sweat panic: “Thank you for shopping at HiveMart Digital we hope you are happy with your purchase and or technical support please call again soon.”

  The Bond turned and strode towards the exit, ignoring the store security guards who dawdled towards him at the most leisurely pace they could manage without obviously shirking.

  Standards had dropped since HiveMart took over Radio Shack, he reflected grimly. He needed a real IT specialist. But his usual go-to geek was doing time in a Federal penitentiary—he’d been running some kind of Bitcoin extortion ring targeting Darknet users—and he didn’t want to use up Rupert’s people. The boss would not be happy to find bloodstains on his office parquet when he got home. Meanwhile, the high street chains that advertised the expertise of while-you-wait data migration experts turned out to be unable to migrate any data older than a time-expired carton of yoghurt. They mostly seemed to want to up-sell him a gaming laptop with a seven-year parts and labor warranty and a “free” color inkjet printer with a monthly subscription for print cartridges.

  The Bond was not technologically illiterate, but he knew his limits. Trying to excavate the contents of a hard disk that was older than he was lay outside them. Walking across the car park, he blipped the button on the keyfob until the DB9 flashed its lights at him.1 Technical support, he mused. I need technical support. And suddenly he knew exactly where to go.

  He was almost at the North Circular, following the satnav directions to the computer museum at Bletchley Park, when his phone rang. “Mike—Mister Bond speaking.” The caller failed to catch the slip. Damn it, the Bond thought. There were serious drawbacks to working for a narcissistic fantasist, unlimited budget be damned. Must remember I answer to James this week. “What can I do for you today, sir?”

  “Did you take care of business?” Rupert barked.

  “Yes sir. The dealer is closed but I got the hard drive with the data on it.”

  “Yes, about that.” Rupert’s voice sharpened. “Miss Starkey reports that someone got to Bernard before she did. And his computer was gutted.”

  “Yes sir. It was absolutely necessary to ensure there were no loose ends, so I’m in physical custody of the drive right now. Everything is under control and I will notify Miss Starkey where to find the target in due course, through regular channels.”

  “I see
. So I suppose you have a read out?”

  The Bond drew a deep breath, then regretted it as he stared at the rear end of a dump truck. They were stationary at traffic lights and the climate control was struggling. “It’s in progress, sir.” Admittedly it was very stop-go progress right now, but progress of a kind. “It’s in a rather unusual format. I’m taking it to a specialist facility.”

  “See that they don’t retain any copies. Eyes only.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Is there any chance—any chance at all—that Bernard disclosed anything to a rival bidder before you terminated the auction?”

  The Bond chose his next words carefully. “Nothing is certain in war, sir. What I can say is that I acquired the drive with his email folders. He won’t be talking to anyone who comes calling—” never again—“and without the email folders the target can’t be acquired. I will anonymously provide Miss Starkey with the data she requires, minimizing the risk of a leak, and deal with whoever she assigns to the immediate pick-up.”

  The Bond carefully didn’t mention that he’d found Bernard dead when he broke into the apartment and stole the hard disk. Nor did he speculate about who might have killed him and why—a rival bidder seemed most likely—or what he might have told them before he died, or why they didn’t bother taking the PC. It was, in the Bond’s experience, usually a bad idea to keep his employers overinformed about his activities—especially an employer with a tendency to micromanage, and a mission that had gone off the rails before the starting gun was fired.

  There were clearly one or more adversaries in the loop. But with the email records on the hard disk, he could probably work out who they were and how they’d been alerted by Bernard’s enquiries. Then he could take them out, clearing the path for Miss Starkey who, unaware of his involvement, would collect the item. Once he knew what had Rupert so engaged, he could decide what to do about it: whether to let Miss Starkey hand it over, or to take possession for himself.

  That was the trouble with “big picture” types like Rupert, after all. They relied on little people to handle the details for them, and it never seemed to occur to them that the little people might have agendas of their own.