Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  OVERDRAWN AT THE PENNINE BANK

  The very next day, Wendy wrote up her preliminary notes on the Hamleys cash room job and her interviews with the fired security staff. Then she went to the bank.

  She was already familiar with the front-of-shop layout thanks to Gibson’s briefing and videos, but no amount of poor quality CCTV could convey the ambiance of a site. Nor could a report substitute for interviews with witnesses. It wasn’t what they wanted to tell you that was important—human memory could be disastrously misleading—but what they revealed in response to questioning, the insights they let slip without even noticing. Not that she suspected an inside job, but something about this crew of robbers raised her hackles. She had an uneasy sense that there was more to them than met the eye.

  “Hello, I’m Wendy from HiveCo Security. I have an appointment with Mr. Granger.”

  The combination of her shiny new HiveCo Security badge and an appointment brokered via the bank’s insurance underwriters got her whisked straight through the armored door without even a pat-down. There was nothing on-site worth dying for, after all: it was only money, and precious little of it at that in banking terms. (Retail branches were in any case insured against robbery.) Professional bank robbers knew this, and in recent decades almost never got violent. It wasn’t worth an extra-heavy sentence. Meanwhile, the mirror-glass and riveted door frames and very visible safe in the back room reassured the customers that their paychecks were safe. It was, in short, security theater rather than effective security.

  The smiling clerk (Alicia, according to her badge) led Wendy past an open plan area to the manager’s office. “Nigel’s in this morning and you’re in luck, he was on duty during the incident the other week,” she confided. Pausing at the door she called, “Nigel? Nigel?” (A muffled grunt came in reply.) “I have a Miss Deere from HiveCo Investigations to see you? It’s about the incident.”

  Wendy slipped past her and twisted the door handle. “You’ll find there’s an appointment in your Outlook,” she called, then pushed the door open. “Mr. Granger, I presume?”

  A second grunt, louder this time, clearly originated from the bald-headed man behind the desk. Wendy pushed past Alicia, who gave a startled squeak: she clearly wasn’t accustomed to being sidelined so easily. Babes in the woods, Wendy thought. Three toddlers armed with paper clips could raid this place. As she cleared the doorway Wendy saw the reason for the wordless grunts. Did nobody teach you not to chew with your mouth open? She smiled tightly at the manager as he hastily swallowed, then placed the uneaten half of his baguette on his mouse mat.

  “Ahrm. Hem. Mrs. Darling, HiveCo? Is this about the incident?”

  “If by incident you are referring to the armed robbery on the fourteenth, then yes, I’m here to follow up on the investigation. I have some questions that the police report didn’t answer.” Her long glance took in Alicia; the clerk hovered in the hallway, staring at her wide-eyed. If this was her idea of excitement, she’d clearly led a very sheltered life. Wendy pulled out her badge and held it up for the surveillance cameras: “Let me introduce myself properly. Wendy Deere, consulting detective, HiveCo Security. HiveCo has been commissioned by the Ministry of Justice to provide domain-specific support for investigations into transhuman crimes such as your recent incident, and I’m your case officer.”

  Mr. Granger cleared his throat. “The MOJ? I thought the Home Office were in charge of policing?”

  Wendy smiled. “You might think that, but the New Management disagrees. I have common-law powers of arrest, and a warrant to remand the perpetrators for trial at the Old Bailey, bypassing the Home Office and Met Police bureaucracy. In fact, I used to be with the Met before this role was outsourced.” Misleading, but technically true. “HiveCo Security are paid on commission and we get results. Marketing call it Agile Incident Management, but we’re really just old-fashioned thief-takers.” Her smile widened. “Are you a thief, Mr. Granger?” To his sudden and exaggerated head-shaking, she nodded: “Then you’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

  Without waiting to be invited, she took a seat before his desk. “Now.” She held up a USB key loaded with the CCTV video files. “I’ve got a copy of your video recordings from the day in question, and I’d like you to talk me through them.”

  Granger looked at her USB stick as if it was a poisonous centipede. “I suppose so?” He glanced at Alicia, then back at Wendy: “Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea, please. Milk, no sugar.” She placed the USB stick in front of him.

  “We’re not allowed to plug personal electronic devices into company computers,” he said with ill-feigned regret.

  “Well then.” Wendy had come prepared. She opened her briefcase and pulled out a tablet: “We can watch it on this, but I’d still like to record your commentary as we go through it.”

  Granger frowned unhappily but nodded, clearly not enthused at having to sacrifice his lunch break. Tough, Wendy thought to herself; if your security was worth a bucket of warm spit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. “First, let’s look at the camera behind the tellers’ windows. Would you mind talking me through what’s going on? In your own words, please…”

  “Sure. On the left, that’s Marie. On the right, John’s handling the premier account and forex desk. The middle would be Alicia, but she was on an early break that day so there’s an empty position. The usual SIA Level 2 certified warm body from G4S is on door duty, can’t remember his name but I can look him up if you want. Off-screen to the left are the two in-house ATMs and the two check deposit terminals. Queue for machines on the left, counter service on the right, and Eric is walking the floor looking for personal banking walk-ins and loan appointments. It’s early in the lunchtime rush so the queue isn’t too—”

  But Wendy was no longer listening. Because she’d spotted something very interesting indeed on the second screen on Granger’s desk—the one streaming the live camera feed from the branch interior, where two now-familiar figures had just walked in the door. “Fuck me,” she breathed, “they couldn’t possibly be that stupid.” Could they?

  * * *

  At precisely the moment that Wendy Deere was sitting down to review CCTV files with Mr. Granger, Eve pushed the button and smiled at the entryphone camera of a very different institution. It was a false smile, a brittle layer of ice covering the black waters beneath—waters in which she was drowning. But she kept coming back out of a sense of duty: filial piety, if you wanted a euphemism, although guilt was closer to the mark.

  The buzzer sounded. Eve stepped into the lobby, then signed the guest book, starting her twice-a-month routine. The lobby was well lit, with padded armchairs and a touching floral display on a side-table—a memorial to a former resident, recently departed. The manager’s office was empty, as it was most of the time over the weekend, but the CCTV monitor showed views of the main corridors. Eve turned left from the lobby, entered the PIN to unlock the door, and walked past a dining room (currently empty, the tables set for dinner) towards her mother’s bedroom.

  Pay no attention to the TVs blaring through open doorways, the occasional repetitive chime of a call button. Ignore the bad-tempered bitching from Room 11’s resident, who shouted every five minutes for her long-dead mummy and daddy to take her home to a house she’d moved on from two-thirds of a century ago. This was a good home. One of the signs of a good home was that it didn’t reek of piss and shit. Her mother’s nursing home passed this test: the carpets were clean, the paintwork bright, the orderlies friendly and patient and just a little bit dull. Dull was good, dull didn’t get bored or abusive or take liberties. The regular nurses were middle-aged and experienced, sensible and on the ball, although at the weekend there tended to be fresh faces, agency staff covering gaps in the rota.

  Nursing homes were expensive, and most people stayed out of them as long as possible. Consequently there was a lot of churn, a lot of residents in the late stages of dementia or infirmity who checked in for the last few months until the end
, with a leavening of bedbound and chairbound folks with longer-term prognoses. Mum was unusual: she was long-term stable but profoundly disabled, bedbound and fed through a gastric tube, clutching repetitively at the side of her hospital bed. Helplessly dependent, in other words. The Bigge Organization paid the bills as long as Eve worked for Rupert. It was another of the barbed hooks he’d caught her on, so that she must dance whenever he pulled her puppet strings.

  Eve hated nursing home visits, and not just because of her guilt and shame over Mum. She hated them because they were a reminder that no torment she could possibly inflict compared to the artistry of dementia, the king of torturers.

  Rupert had once made her slowly skin an arms dealer alive, over nearly three days. The arms dealer had stiffed Rupe over a consignment of lewisite—second-generation mustard gas—for the Syrian government. Not only did the dealer have to pay, he had to be seen to have paid by his replacement. Rupert made her wear a torturer’s mask and fetish gear—a leather corset and thigh-high stiletto boots—and recorded the vivisection in full HD video.1 But the delicate Mona Lisa brushwork of Alzheimer’s disease beat any pain she could inflict as thoroughly as Leonardo’s masterpiece outshone a toddler’s finger painting.

  Mrs. Morris in room 18 was a Holocaust survivor. The electric chair couldn’t hold a candle to the incandescent terror she experienced whenever they showered her, for her past had imploded into the present: this was her eternal Auschwitz, and her kindly but slightly dull carers were camp guards who’d escaped from her nightmares. Eve had once tried to settle her, grounding her in the present—but five minutes later she’d forgotten again, and was sucked right back into her private final solution.

  Eve did not—could not—believe in a loving God because she visited Hell every second Sunday of the month to take tea with the damned. No loving God could possibly allow a place like this to exist. Hell came with beige carpets, en suite bedrooms, and satellite TV. But through every open bedroom door the screaming of souls in torment could be heard. And the worst thing about it was that there was no reason for it. There were no capering demons with pitchforks to enumerate the sins of the damned, no mercy for the virtuous, and no justice for anyone. Just endless suffering for all, trapped in the swirling mists of the eternal present.

  The nursing office door was ajar. Eve knocked, then smiled stiffly at the occupant. Marcia was a middle-aged professional, one of the regular staff nurses. She held up a finger for a moment as she finished writing in a fat lever-arch file, then closed it and returned it to a lockable file cabinet. Eventually she met Eve’s gaze and nodded, acknowledging her. “Miss Starkey? Have you seen your mother yet?”

  Miss Starkey. She knew her name. Eve was a regular here.

  Eve shook her head. “I just arrived and saw you were in,” she said. “How is she this month? How’s her weight?”

  “I’ll just check for you.” Marcia pulled her mother’s file from the cabinet. “Let’s see … hmm. Down five hundred grams since your last visit? Oh dear. I need to look at the feeding records, we may need to add another supplement dose to her meals.”

  Eve’s smile froze over. “I thought the nutritionist was booked to see her last Tuesday?”

  “Hmm, let’s see—you’re quite right, of course. As usual. Looks like Linda dropped the ball—I’ll action it at the staff meeting on Monday and book another appointment.”

  “That would be good, yes.” Eve’s smile warmed slightly. “I’ll go and see her now. I don’t suppose there’ve been any changes?”

  Marcia’s expression melted into sympathy. “I’m sorry, love.”

  Eve nodded, then turned and stalked up the corridor to her biweekly bedside appointment with the hollowed-out shell of her mother, who wailed continuously in the grip of a terror from which no respite was possible.

  * * *

  “Hello sir, how may I help you?”

  The junior manager in the grass-green suit smiled up at Doc, slightly glassy-eyed but keeping a game professional face on.

  Imp smiled back at her, then discreetly poked Doc in the ribs. Doc startled.

  “Uh,” he said.

  “The box,” Imp reminded him. Doc cast him an aggrieved look and Imp chilled. They were well inside the lobby and there were three short queues forming.

  “Getting there.” Doc glowered at him, then turned back to the woman, who was fighting off an embryonic frown. “I have a safe deposit box,” Doc told her. “I need to check the contents: there’s a bearer bond that may have expired and the bloody computer’s eaten my scan—”

  “Yes sir, if you’d care to take a seat over there?” She gestured at an unoccupied desk. “Someone will be with you shortly. And your—”

  “Husband,” Doc said with a straight face.

  “Please.”

  Imp smiled at her, tucked Doc’s hand under his arm, and led him to the waiting area.

  “What was that about?” Imp murmured between motionless lips as he sat down.

  “Overloading her with meaningless trivia—” Doc patted him on the back of the wrist—“dear.”

  “Really.” Imp paused. “You remembered to bring the account details and the ID, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  They’d agreed that Doc, with his penchant for highly regrettable suits, would be better at masquerading as the Bernard bloke. Imp could camp it up as his usual flamboyantly louche self, and provide top cover for Doc if it became necessary to bullshit their way out of a sticky wicket. The forged driving license and wallet padding—Bernard’s bank card, PIN, inside leg measurement, and other details—had come via Imp’s sister.

  Imp’s plan was quite simple: they weren’t going to rob the bank at all. They needed to go through the contents of the deposit box and photograph the paper contents, but if the security drones wanted to cavity-search them at any point in the process then that was totes copacetic, at least as far as Imp was concerned. (Doc’s opinion of cavity searches had not been solicited during the formulation of this plan. In Imp’s opinion, it was best not to invite a negative reaction.)

  Both of them had smartphones. Del, lurking nearby in her posh ride, was on speed dial. Either of them could sweet-talk their way out of any trouble short of a shoot-out with a bit of skull sweat. The plan didn’t call for any risk-taking at all: What could possibly go wrong?

  * * *

  Fuck fuck fuck … “Look!” Wendy stared at the CCTV feed, transfixed.

  “What?” Mr. Granger frowned at her. “What is it?”

  “Look! It’s them!” She stabbed her finger at the desktop monitor, then pointed back at the tablet, freezing the replay on it.

  “I don’t see—”

  Wendy had pored over the footage of the original robbery enough times that the faces leapt out at her. “It’s them!” Hat Guy and Bad Suit, as large as life and twice as ugly, holding hands and sitting at a desk in the open-plan area. They made a surprisingly cute couple, she thought. “It’s them!” She bounced up and down unconsciously. “They’re two of the transhumans behind the robbery, right there!” She pulled out her phone and began to text Gibson immediately: Suspects returned to SOC, send backup stat.

  “They’re not in costume—”

  “No, of course not! These are the planners, the brains behind it! They’re probably casing you for a follow-up job right now!”

  Mr. Granger’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he narrowly avoided swallowing his tongue. “I should call the—”

  “No, stop and listen, this is very important.” Wendy turned her best officer-of-the-law expression on him: “We have a chance to catch them red-handed right now, but we need to separate them from their accomplices, who won’t be far away at all. We also need evidence of what they’re up to. CCTV on its own won’t be quite enough to convict them—neither of them laid a finger on the proceeds of the robbery: they could legitimately claim to just be bystanders and it’s all a coincidence. So I want you to find out what they want, and give it to them, while I
sit here and watch. Once we know what they’re doing, we can either grab them or set up a sting later. It’s all perfectly safe. Just remember: I’ll be watching you from back here. If you think there’s trouble and you want me to drop the hammer, tug your left ear, like this.” Wendy demonstrated.

  Granger’s face turned a very interesting shade of green. “But, but, what if you’re wrong and they’re armed? You can’t protect me on your own!”

  Wendy grinned like a maniac. “Did you ever see that movie, Kill Bill: Volume One?” she asked. Granger looked confused. “I can do this,” she said, pulling her riot baton out of thin air with a flourish and pointing it at the camera, “and if they’re packing heat, I can do this.” The baton vanished, replaced by something sharper. “And that’s just for starters…”

  * * *

  Imp was bored enough to already be fidgeting and plotting mischief when a door at the back of the bank finally opened. A middle-aged, balding bloke in a suit with a tie in the bank’s colors came out and made eye contact with Doc. His approach to the desk was almost furtive: Imp would have been genuinely concerned that they might have been rumbled if the guy didn’t have the pinch-faced demeanor of a complete prat.

  The manager extended a hand and Doc rose to shake it: “Good morning, I’m Mr. Granger. You are…?”

  “Bernard Harris,” Doc said easily, pumping the Granger dude’s hand. Granger twitched it away and wiped it on his leg as he sat down. Imp instantly took a dislike to him. Something about Granger struck him as being as phoney as a thirteen-pound note. “I’d like to check my deposit box,” Doc said before Imp could intervene.

  Granger nodded. “That can be arranged. Do you have any ID with you, sir?”