Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “Hello, Andrei? This is Eve, Mr. Bigge’s executive assistant. How are you today? I need the services of an escrow agent with a sideline in post-acquisition repossessions…”

  * * *

  When in doubt, follow the detectives.

  The Bond had obeyed this rubric on other track-and-trace jobs and found it to be worthwhile. This time it was turning out to be problematic.

  After overcoming the minor obstacle posed by the unreadably ancient hard drive—the lab technician he’d procured from the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park had been pathetically eager to cooperate after the second fingernail—he’d been able to establish the details of Bernard’s banking arrangements. No loose ends: he dutifully buried both body and hard drive platters (after giving the latter a good scrubbing with steel wool and denting them with a hammer) before tooling up and driving to Kensington High Street, whereupon he encountered another minor obstacle in the shape of an armed robbery in progress. The oppo had form and enthusiasm but precious little technique. He tsked silently to himself as he garotted the sentry in the back alley, shoved the corpse in a recycling bin, and cut the data cables to the bank. Then he adjusted his tie, straightened his lapels, and nipped round the front to make his appearance.

  The Reservoir Dogs re-enactment society went down hard. The Bond wasn’t self-indulgent enough to hang around for Mexican stand-offs and long expletive-filled soliloquies. His plan was simple: grab the document, go full Terminator on any witnesses, and get out. But the plan went off the rails immediately after he unloaded a breaching round into the door to the back offices. Some assclown wanted to play Robin of Sherwood. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, but Robin was rocking it like he was snorting bath salts: he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of arrows and they flew thick and fast.

  The Bond, not being suicidally inclined, declined to storm a narrow corridor under beaten fire. But now he encountered a snag. Not being sartorially challenged, he hadn’t thought to pad out his pockets with flash-bangs: they ruined the hang of his jacket. So he had to wait for a lull in the re-enactment of Agincourt before he stuck his Atchisson AA-12 around the corner and sent half a magazine of HEFA rounds downrange. And it turned out he’d waited just a second too long. The rain of baby fragmentation grenades stripped the wallpaper very efficiently—the bank’s shopfitters could thank him later—but they failed to flay the flesh from the bones of his enemy because Robin Hood evidently moonlighted as the Scarlet Pimpernel.

  By the time he’d searched the offices and made it to the back alleyway the alleyway was empty. He swore bitterly and tossed the assault shotgun in the paper recycling bin. Then he marched out onto the high street, pondering his options.

  “Fucking amateurs,” he huffed in disgust as he banged out an update to the boss via secure email. Then he stalked off in high dudgeon to a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge, where he’d drink a dry martini or two, pick up a MILF in search of some rough, and await an update on the identity of Eve’s little helpers.

  The following morning he rose before dawn, showered and dressed alone—the shag had staggered away at some point in the early hours, her scorecard updated—and checked in with HQ. Apparently Ms. Starkey had subcontracted the job of acquiring the manuscript to her brother, and it was he who had been in the back at the bank the day before. The Bond was intrigued to learn that Starkeys didn’t reproduce by laying their eggs in paralyzed estate agents. It made the leave no loose ends directive somewhat iffy, to say the least. On the other hand he now had a name for his Robin Hood: a HiveCo Security thief-taker codenamed ABLE ARCHER. Well, well, well. ABLE ARCHER was clearly extremely motivated to locate Ms. Starkey’s brother and his playmates. And so was the Bond. Starkey Jr. was very much off the grid, not showing up on the electoral register, the telephone directory, or any regular utility bills: his public footprint was so smudged that he might as well be sleeping under Waterloo Bridge. But he was in possession of the note, and absent authorization to go interrogate the ice queen the Bond was going to have to locate Jeremy Starkey himself.

  A plan came together in his head. Obtaining ABLE ARCHER’s phone number was easily accomplished through channels at HiveCo—all it took was an enquiry from the Bigge Organization about her availability for hire. Once he had her mobile number it was trivially easy to submit a location services disclosure order through one of the Bigge Organization’s security subsidiaries, and with the LSDO in hand to start stalking her phone. Presently the Bond was back in the DB9, crawling towards Kensington Park. Where he was pretty sure ABLE ARCHER would attempt to pick up the trail come morning.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Eve’s escrow fixer had been busy overnight.

  “Ms. Starkey? This is Andrei. I have news for you—yes, yes, your offer to preempt is accepted by the vendor. I keeped the offer to fifty million dollars US, this is acceptable, yes? The vendor requires completion within eighteen hours. The deposit wire transfer to VX Bank (BVI) Limited in Tortola for five million, I email you the account SWIFT and IBAN details now—”

  “Excellent!” Eve smiled and nodded, even though there was no way Andrei could see her. She paused her review of options for improving her zygomatic arch and checked her Outlook inbox. Sure enough, the email appeared as she watched. “I’ll review this and issue payment immediately. How is fulfillment to proceed?”

  “The vendor will email me the collection instructions once the bank confirms the deposit is in their suspense account. I have local subcontractors on-site in the British Virgin Islands: you don’t need to be aware of the details. Title deeds to appropriate properties to the value of forty-five million, held by the usual vehicles. We transfer ownership as usual: wire me my fee and I take care of repossession of assets once you confirm goods are correct.” He chuckled drily. After a second or two, Eve joined him. “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re living in a sixties crime caper movie?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t say that I do,” she said indulgently. Her cheek twitched. “But don’t let me keep you! I have funds to transfer.”

  It took a little more than twenty minutes for Eve to dole out the payments—even with her stratospheric degree of access, Finance required confirmation that Rupert had authorized her to transfer millions of pounds to an anonymous numbered bank account in a tax haven, and to spend another few dozen million buying title to certain opaque investment vehicles that owned luxury properties and transferring them to a law firm in another tax haven—but by nine o’clock (eleven hundred hours in Dubăsari) the money had hit the vendor’s offshore account, and Andrei phoned her back to confirm that the payment was confirmed.

  “They have the deeds, many gracious thank-yous, Ms. Starkey, and I am forwarding you the encrypted email they sent me under your public key. When you have opened it you need to reply to the address in it to confirm receipt, is that acceptable?”

  “I’ll do that,” Eve said. Outlook binged for attention, and she glanced at her screen again. “Aha, this looks like it.” The message was quite large, and decrypting the attachments took almost a minute, but at last she could see them: a Word document and a PDF file, evidently a scan of some sort. “Excellent, I have decrypted them. I’ll be back in touch shortly to confirm stage two.”

  Eve opened the covering letter first. The manuscript, it seemed, was bound inside the cover of another book, and misfiled on the wrong shelf in a private library somewhere in London. The directions to retrieve it could be found in the attached PDF, a scan of a hand-drawn treasure map of some antiquity. The handwriting was the beautiful copperplate cursive that clerks had used before typewriters, its authorship anonymous. She frowned as she looked at the scan. Weird: it wasn’t a normal map, one with an absolute frame of reference and a compass rose. Rather, it was a series of waypoints on a treasure hunt. The starting point was an oddly familiar address on Kensington Palace Gardens. And then—

  She swore softly to herself. It’s a set-up. Got to be. There was absolutely no possible wa
y that it could be a coincidence.

  “Meet me at the same cafe as last time,” she told her brother, then copied the map onto a memory stick and deleted the unencrypted copy from her PC. “Make sure nobody follows you. And leave your phone at home.”

  Half an hour later Imp sat down across the table from her in the branch of Costa. “Morning,” he grumped. “This had better be good.”

  “Had a bad night? What did your crew say?”

  “They said thanks for the forty large, now fuck off.” He rubbed his forehead. “I really don’t think it’s going to work.”

  “Well, maybe I can change your mind.” Eve waited patiently while he stirred three sachets of sugar into his coffee. “While you were lying in, I sorted out the map. You don’t have to worry about anybody else coming after it—the auction is closed. And it turns out the manuscript is right on our doorstep. How well do you know—” And she told him the address.

  “How well do I—” Imp froze—“the old family home?” he said, with studied disinterest. “Never been there, why?”

  “It’s interesting that you should say that.” She smirked, and took a sip of her drink. “It turns out that’s where the directions to retrieve the manuscript start. It’s a schematic, a kind of diagram rather than a traditional map, and it says you need to start on the top floor—the third floor—of the ancestral pile, where there’s a secret door. Do you know anything about that?”

  “A secret door on the third floor?” His indignation was clearly feigned: “What rot!”

  Eve just smiled tightly until he caught on, at which point he flushed silently and glanced aside.

  “Ball, court, your side of the net.” She slid the USB stick across the table towards him. After a moment he palmed it. “I don’t know when you broke in there or why, I probably don’t want to know, but that’s where the treasure hunt starts.”

  “This stinks,” he warned her.

  She nodded. “It reminds me of Father. ‘In magic, there are no coincidences.’” Her smile slipped. “Tell your crew, I can guarantee no pursuit—the other bids have been terminated, the trail dead-ends here. No thugs with guns will come after you, but I do need that manuscript, and there’s another sixty thousand in it for you.” Eve paused. “No, fuck that shit. He’s not watching and you’re fam, right? Get me the manuscript and I’ll round it up to a quarter million, total. I’m pretty sure I can fly it under the radar. If necessary I’ll hit my own savings. But do yourself a favor and do not under any circumstances look past the title page, ’kay? Or even handle the book yourself. Treat it like radioactive waste and let someone else pick up the lethal dose. Because it’s the kind of book that Dad taught us about, rather than the kind he taught us from: it’s the kind that eats people.”

  * * *

  When Imp got home he found Doc and Game Boy in the back engaged in a Warcraft nostalgia tour, but no sign of the Deliverator. A miasma of burned toast filled the kitchen. Charcoal briquettes that had once been crumpets sat forgotten atop the overflowing compost bin.

  “I’ve been to see my sister again,” he announced to the backs of their heads, “and she upped her offer. She also said the guys with guns are out of the picture. But I still think we should turn her down.” Then he chucked the USB stick at the back of Game Boy’s head.

  Game Boy reached out and snagged it without looking, then brought his hand back down to the keyboard in time to do something unspeakable to a green-haired minotaur with unfeasibly large jubblies who was wielding a glowing purple labrys the size of the Empire State Building. Moments later he slid the stick into a spare port on his gaming rig. “Get the healer,” he chanted in the voice of Elmer Fudd.

  Imp winced: “Dude, that’s not how you sing Wagner,” he began, then something explosively pyrotechnic lit up the battlefield that spanned the row of monitors.

  Doc waved his fists in the air, and disconnected. “You distracted me!” he accused.

  “Then you’re too easily distracted.”

  Imp watched Game Boy play on for a few minutes.

  “What’s she offering now?” Doc asked cautiously.

  “A quarter million if we complete the job.” Imp shoved his hands in his pockets. “But I don’t like it.”

  Game Boy broke off his song to ask, “What of?” just as Doc said, “You’re right, that’s too fucking much. There’s something wrong with it.”

  Imp took a deep breath and nodded. “Evie got hold of the map. Guess where it starts?” His index finger circled in the air, pointed inexorably towards the ceiling.

  “Well fuuuuu…”

  Doc’s frustration finally got Game Boy’s undivided attention. He logged out, then spun his chair around. “How much money did you say again?”

  “A quarter of a million, minus the forty thou we already got paid.” A tinkling of tiny bells rattled through the room, tinny as the one-bit sound chip in a novelty greeting card. Imp shrugged. “But the map starts on the top floor, at the door to nowhere. And it’s old. Like, old enough it probably dates to when my family lived here. Do I have to tell you how scary that is? I don’t believe in coincidences, GeeBee. And Eve, she said don’t, whatever you do, try to read the book.”

  “Why ever not?” asked Doc.

  “Because it’s a fucking spell book,” Imp finally snapped. “I know one when I smell one, I learned that much from my dad.” He paused. “It’s why I don’t have a family.”

  “What about your sister—”

  But Imp was already shaking his head. “Evie is—” He hesitated to say dead inside, but the more he thought about it the more it felt right. He wasn’t sure the sister he remembered growing up with was even in there any more, screaming wordlessly behind the glossy lacquered mask she wore all the time now. Eve had been all right when she was young, but after things went bad she’d turned hard. Not just hard: she’d turned to stone, made of herself a ferocious engine of destruction warped in widdershins coils opposed to Imp’s clockwise rebellion. Their paths might cross twice in a turn but their directions couldn’t be more different. “She went wrong,” he said, then stopped, leaving the final words unspoken: after Mum.

  “Not seeing it,” said Doc, even as Game Boy burst out with “A spell book! Cool!”

  Oh Jesus, Imp thought, rolling his eyes, spare me. “It’s not cool,” he snapped. “If you think it’s cool you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. If you mess with it you will die in agony, slowly. It’s the sort of thing that puts ideas into your head, ideas like corpse-worms and glowing phosphorescent hagfish, chewing their way through your dreams as they core out your soul.”

  “Is that why you were looking at all those old tomes in the library?” Game Boy asked cheekily.

  “Oh for—” Imp sat down heavily. “It wasn’t in the library,” he said. “I’d have felt it. Spell books, there’s a kind of weight to them, like you’re reading your own execution notice, or a dead god’s last will and testament.” Books bound in human skin and written in a formal propositional calculus where each axiom was a closure wrapped around eternal damnation. “Big sis’s boss is paying for a retrieval, and he’s paying large, which means it’s rare and dangerous.”

  Which meant it wasn’t a fake-out, like the 99 percent of soi-disant spell books which eventually turned out to be a joke, a diary of a psychotic breakdown, or a farrago of myths and legends. Maybe one time in a hundred a spell book turned out to be that rarest of rare things—a necromantic laboratory workbook, a dream quest protocol, a distillation of true knowledge so compact that it burned like a beacon in the black void, attracting the attention of things that fed behind the walls of the world.

  He continued to think aloud: “Eve won’t get it herself, but is willing to more than triple her offer to us. She’s worried. She knows—she believes in us—that we can do it, but it’s dangerous.” He met Doc’s transfixed gaze. “So I’m selfish!” He burst out: “I don’t want you to die and leave me alone.”

  “But a quarter of a million! You co
uld make the movie! I could be a star!”

  “You could die inside and something else would be walking around wearing your body like a cheap suit,” Imp cautioned. “Would it be worth it then?”

  “But it’s somewhere upstairs,” Doc pointed out. “Which means nobody else is going to get to it without us knowing. And your sister says the guys with the guns aren’t going to bother us. How about we discuss it when Del gets here?”

  “Huh. About that. Where is she?” asked Imp.

  Doc looked at Game Boy: Game Boy looked at Doc. And suddenly it was apparent that neither of them knew where she’d gone.

  * * *

  Del walked across the park, her hoodie raised to cover her hair, heading for the side-street where she’d dumped her hot wheels the day before.

  Successful career criminals have several rules of thumb to live by. Don’t shit in your own backyard is one; three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead is another; and for a third, never return to the scene of a successful caper. However, Del was not a successful career criminal. Rebecca was the Deliverator—ironic nod to a fictional hero, the protagonist of a cyberpunk epic about ninjutsu, linguistics, and extreme pizza delivery—and she broke the rules in all innocence.

  Del mostly didn’t drive: she didn’t have a license for one thing, and she couldn’t be arsed jumping through the flaming hoops of the test process for another. She was happy with her bike, thank you very much. She could get just about anywhere in London on her bike faster than anything with a motor, flowing through crevices and pedestrianized zones like water. She could take it on the tube for the occasional excursion out as far as Zone Six, but her bike had its limits: and one hard limit was that you couldn’t take your crew with you.

  Hence Imp’s insistence on teaching her to drive. Which, she had to admit, had been a ton of fun, from the process of stealthily casing her ride, sneaking in and springing the door lock, faking out the anti-theft immobilizer, and hot-wiring the ignition; to the raw physical power rush of putting metal and mass and explosive fuel in motion and taking to the highway. Driving held her attention. And driving spoke to her. Not in the same language as cycling, of course, but driving was like learning a second tongue, one that expanded and illuminated her view of the world. Being trapped inside a padded box and forced to interface with the road through a complicated series of linkages and gears and motors was claustrophobic after the fumes-in-her-face freedom of riding her bike, but some of her mojo came across nonetheless. She could ace the North Circular in a jacked Toyota Tercel faster than Sabine Schmitz could lap the Nürburgring in a Transit van, and the only times the plod had got on her tail she’d left them, well, plodding.