Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  But modern cars were increasingly hard to steal. It wasn’t just the chips and the remote unlocking and the LoJack trackers and the secret policeman in the engine management software. These days you had to worry about the pentacle scribed in goat blood under the driver’s seat, the black tallow candle and the curse-stained ivory gear knob, the nightmares that would follow you home, dreams of your car-smashed carcass in a continuous stream of creative and agonizing exsanguinations whenever you closed your eyes. They’d keep it up until your throat was raw from screaming and throwing up. They’d keep it up until you turned yourself in to the insurance underwriters for exorcism and punishment, or aspirated and drowned on your own vomit without ever waking up.

  So the 2010 Cayenne had been something of a sweet find for Del. It was old enough to predate in-car electronics sophisticated enough to support curseware, new enough to be seriously hot, and best of all, once equipped with the right cloned plates it was the identical twin to a wholly respectable Mom’s Taxi in Chelmsford, owned by an investment banker’s wife from the Home Counties who stayed the hell out of the congestion charge zone and used her five hundred horsepower turbocharged teutonic battle wagon to bus Emily and Callum to school and back every day, with a shopping side-quest to Waitrose twice a week.

  Even though the Porsche was now dirty—Imp had warned her the bank had cameras out back, so they’d made the cloned plates—Del couldn’t quite bring herself to abandon it for good without at least a token attempt to keep it. I could get new plates, she bluffed herself, if it hasn’t been towed. Because that would be easier than finding a replacement, for sure.

  Hence the early morning walk.

  Gotcha.

  Del swung round the corner and spotted the row of parked cars. The Cayenne was still shoehorned between a BMW and a Fiat, but some arsewipe private security company had stuck a boot on one wheel. Glowing green runes warned of appalling consequences for unauthorized removal. Also, a squirrel had shat on the windscreen. Del fumed silently as she turned away, barely caring if anybody saw her, barely noticing until warm fingers closed around her right wrist, shockingly intimate, followed by a sudden snik of cold metal.

  “Not exactly an ice-cream van, is it?” chirped a voice as her arm was yanked up behind her shoulder. “Let’s you and me go somewhere and talk, KLF girl.”

  “What—” Del grimaced—“the fuck are you on, woman?”

  “Justified and Ancient! I’m not stupid, I know how to work Lyric Finder, even though the band split before either of us were born.”

  A metallic chinking and the drag of leg irons told Del that she was well and truly in the shit. The bottom dropped out of her stomach as if a trapdoor had sprung open beneath her feet. Fear threatened to choke her. She tried to swing her left hand but there was a manacle on that wrist too, and it twisted behind her back abruptly and then there were chains everywhere, locking her down and leashing her to the Cayenne’s door handle.

  The woman walked round in front of her. She had pale skin and spiky chestnut hair and eyes like a police recruiting poster, and if Del had met her in Ruby Tuesday over a couple of beers she might have thought she was cute, but there was nothing cute about this sickening sense of dread, about the chains, about the telescoping baton that kept flickering in and out of visibility in the woman’s hand like a bad special effect. “I dunno what this is about, woman, you’ve got the wrong person, lemme go—”

  “Chill.” The woman reached out and tugged Del’s hood back, then as she recoiled tapped her gently on the forehead with one index finger. “We know who you are: Rebecca McKee, age 21, no fixed abode but we know where your mum lives, we know where your dog goes to school, no fixed abode but you’re a demon on two wheels and you’re also the getaway driver for the gang that turfed Hamleys the other week.”

  Del flip-flopped like a gaffed fish for a few seconds, then yanked at the leash as hard as she could. With a scream of abused metal the Porsche’s passenger door handle bent and she began to sidestep away, but the chain between her ankles somehow turned into a rigid bar. She began to face-plant and ended up with her nose tucked into the cleft between the cop’s neck and shoulder. The woman smelled of lavender; Del wrinkled her nose and opened her mouth to bite, then felt strong arms circling her. “Will you just stop freaking out for a moment and listen to me?”

  Del drew a shuddering breath: “Chains—”

  The chains were gone, but the woman held her in a bear hug that trapped Del’s arms. “Take a deep breath. And another. That better?” She peered into Del’s blown pupils. “Still freaking. What are you afraid of? Are you on—”

  “Don’t kill me—”

  “I’m not going to! Will you chill the hell out? I just want to talk, for Christ’s sake!”

  The adrenaline spike began to subside, the waves of chagrin, embarrassment, and grief finally washing Del up on the shore of acceptance. “What the fuck you want, then?”

  “I’m Wendy, and there’s an ice-cream parlor on the other side of the park: Is yours a 99?” A flashing smile lit up Del’s face and she felt the knot of tension in her chest twist into hopeful incredulity.

  “I’ll—” she took a deep breath—“what?”

  “If I let go of you, will you come with me and let me buy you an ice cream and explain things? I’ll let you go afterwards, I promise.”

  Del managed a shaky nod. Wendy still didn’t let go, but the arms wrapped around Del no longer felt like handcuffs. “You’re not going to arrest me?”

  Wendy rolled her eyes. “I’m not a cop, and I’m not on the clock, so no, I’m not—I can’t—do that.”

  “But Imp said you were—” She realized her mistake and shut her mouth before she could leak any more secrets.

  “Imp is your theatrical friend with the shit fashion sense?” Wendy smirked at her expression. “Yes, I might have told him I was a cop. I might also have been kind of lying: whatever it takes to get the job done. I’m a private sector thief-taker, it’s not my job to enforce the law. And like I said, I’m not working today.” She opened her arms and took a step back, baffling Del. Suddenly she could feel the cold again, up and down her front. “Are you coming for that ice cream?”

  Del shook herself. “Woman, it’s fucking December.” She stared at her, openly perplexed. “What?”

  Wendy rubbed two fingers together. “My treat.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Del muttered, but Wendy held out a hand. She stared at it for a few seconds before she took it. Wendy drew her closer, placed Del’s hand on her arm, then led them back into the park, towards the kiosk.

  * * *

  The Bond sat on a park bench, staring at his phone in faux-idleness. Fucking dykes, he thought, clutching resentment close to the shrivelled cockles of his heart. The burring hum of a quadrotor drone drifted overhead like a nightmare hornet. He squinted at the phone screen, lips curled judgmentally. The feed from the drone’s stabilized imaging platform showed him the sway of the getaway driver’s bundled dreads, the thief-taker’s slyly stolen glances, the slight quirk of her lips. She held her target’s arm too close. Bet they’ll be in bed within twenty-four hours. Assuming they last that long. His imagination leered lasciviously.

  Oblivious to the drone, Wendy steered Del towards the coffee and refreshments kiosk. Once they were indoors, the Bond recalled his remote-controlled minion. He opened the aluminum briefcase and packed the drone away to recharge. Then he picked it up and followed his targets over to the kiosk, to rent a seat for the price of a coffee.

  The Bond had come to appreciate the benefits of wearing a well-cut business suit and conservative tie. It made you anonymous, at least if you were a clean-shaven white male like him. It was the civilian equivalent of the camouflage BDUs he’d worn to work before he took Rupert’s shilling. Go low, people thought you were the Money; go high, they thought you worked for the Money. And the Money came with a license.

  The Bond wasn’t quite boring enough to be a Gray Man—a totally average guy, the p
erfect street-level tail—he was too tall and muscular. But with his suit and briefcase nobody would spare him a second glance. Nobody dreamed it contained a drone with an optional grenade launcher and thermobaric rounds, nobody imagined the suppressed Glock 17 Gen4 and its spare magazines, the duct tape and the gag and the row of foam-wrapped syringes loaded with flunitrazepam and suxamethonium. All the paraphernalia of what those in the trade euphemistically termed “wet work.”

  There was no equivalent anonymity for women or anyone else who didn’t code as white and male. Both the thief-taker and the thief were distinctive and easy to track: the butch ex-cop in her combat pants and paratroop boots, the dark-skinned bike courier with her dreads and skintight leggings. Put them in a boardroom or a ballroom and they’d stand out. Put them in cocktail dresses or skirt suits and drop them in a drafty warehouse or a bus terminus and they’d still stand out.

  After giving them time to get settled, the Bond entered the kiosk and settled into a corner seat, where he pretended to look at his phone as he sipped his coffee. Smartphones had been another major innovation in tradecraft: everybody carried one, you could use them to track owners who were clueless about SIGINT, and you could hide your gaze behind a screen more easily than a newspaper. So he waited, and while he waited he eavesdropped.

  “It’s my day off and I was stood down from the job,” the thief-taker was explaining, “so not only do I not have to arrest you, legally I can’t. Unlike a police officer I don’t have any particular powers of arrest, except when I’m on the clock and executing a warrant. Even then, I’m supposed to wait for the force to show up and do their job. I mean, the common law power of citizen’s arrest—section 24A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984)—only works if I catch y—er, someone—in the act of committing a crime, and it has to be something serious, like assault or theft. At any other time I’d be committing a crime myself—unlawful detention.”

  The car thief narrowed her eyes suspiciously: “But you cuffed me!”

  “Yep.” The thief-taker briefly looked abashed. “You were having a panic attack. I thought you might hurt yourself. Also—” she side-eyed the car thief—“don’t you think it was a little bit hot?”

  “Fucking give me a safeword next time!” Del glared at her. “And ask, don’t grab!”

  “Consent is kind of difficult to get when you’re freaking out.” Wendy paused. “But next time, just so you know—if there is a next time—if you want me to chain you up, all you have to do is—”

  Mount Deliverator blasted out a pyroclastic flow: “No!” She subsided, glowering. “We are not having this conversation in public!”

  “You’re so easy!” Wendy taunted: “You’re so far in the closet you can see snowflakes falling in the street light!”

  “You’re going to get us chucked out! And I haven’t had my ice cream yet!”

  And so on and on and back and forth, verbal fencing moderating into heavy flirting for almost half an hour as the coffee cooled and the ice cream melted and the thief-taker worked—very effectively, the Bond thought—at building a rapport with her mark. Her snitch. Her informant.

  Grooming, they called this, when conducted for unlawful ends. Not that the Bond cared one way or the other about legality—the only lawful authority that rocked his world was the privilege of money—but it was interesting to watch Wendy work her target over with words rather than weapons. It was apparent that they had a rapport, and not just the polarity of predator and prey, the cop and the robber, or even the black lead and the red lead clamped to the terminals of the car battery in the basement. The Bond had heard about the easy intimacy that the very best interrogators used to make their subjects spill their guts out of a misplaced desire to be helpful, but he’d scarcely credited its existence before now. His interrogations were messy affairs involving pliers and screaming. They usually ended up in a shallow grave in the forest: not in an ice cream parlor, feeding the other participant spoonfuls of frozen yoghurt while gazing wistfully into their eyes.

  After a while Rebecca was sprawled at ease in her chair, not even trying to flee when Wendy went to order more refreshments. Instead, her gaze lingered on the other woman’s ass. Then when Wendy returned, Rebecca’s hand shyly crept across the table to touch her arm. (Disgusting, thought the Bond, salivating slightly as he leaned forward.)

  “Admit it, you wanted me,” Del said. “I mean, something from—”

  “I know what you mean.” Wendy smiled. “And yes. But what I want, and what my boss wants, and what his customer wants, are all different things, and my boss and the customer get zip while I’m off the clock. So this is me time, or maybe us time.”

  “Is there an us? You’re moving kind of fast.”

  “Would you rather I moved slow?”

  “… Not really. So what do you want?”

  “I thought maybe we could hang out together? Go for a drive in the country or something.”

  Del snorted. “Fat chance.” Of a sudden, her expression clamped down, guarded and remote.

  Wendy slowly reached inside her hoodie’s pouch. “I can get your ride un-clamped. What do you think?”

  “You know that’s not—” Del licked her lips.

  “Not your car, right? Doesn’t matter, I’ll do it anyway. Then we’ll go for a drive together.” She produced her phone with a flourish, then raised one eyebrow. “If you like?”

  “You can’t just…”

  “Watch me.” Wendy dialed a number. (The Bond waited patiently as the illegal picocell in his briefcase snatched her call from the aether, decrypted and recorded it, then forwarded it to its destination.) “Hey, boss? Yeah, it’s Wendy. Listen, can you do me a favor? There’s a car parked—yeah, that one, yeah, listen, some chancer’s stuck a wheel clamp on it, yeah, can you get it removed? Really? Okay, that’d be great.” Wendy paused. “Hang on, they what?” Her voice rose. “Can they even do that? Well, fuck!” She ended the call, then noticed Rebecca staring at her. “What?”

  “What’s happening?”

  “I do not believe this.” Wendy shook her head. “Shit was a lot simpler when I was a cop.” She noticed Rebecca’s sudden tension: “Oh, it’s not about you, you can relax. Boss man says the boot’s coming off your car within the hour.” She shrugged. “The bad news for me is, I’ve been pulled off your case completely. So my employer doesn’t get paid. Boo hoo, some other job will come up. The good news for you is someone coughed up more money than Hamleys insurance underwriters to buy out the investigation, and because we’re HiveCo Security—not law enforcement—money talks. You have friends in high places, it seems. Do you have friends in high places?”

  Rebecca boggled. “I don’t get it.”

  “Well that’s okay because that makes two of us. But it does make life a little easier, doesn’t it? Now I’m not being paid to haul you in, but my boss is going to want to talk to you: he’s actively trying to hire transhumans for this program I’m part of, and as there’s always been a revolving door between thief-taking and smarter crim—” Her phone vibrated—“job done, boot’s off. Listen, that’s a sweet ride. How about we head for the M40, then once we hit the M25 you show me how fast you can lap London?”1

  CANNONBALL RUN ON THE M25

  In the end, the hammer blow that finally cracked the crystal shell around Eve’s conscience was a phone call that interrupted her while preparing a request for tender.

  The Komatsu buried in the sub-subbasement had been annoying Eve for some months now, if only by implication. They’d run out of room for further downwards excavation, which meant some creative outside-the-box thinking was required to deal with the mansion’s persistent sanitation problem. The ground beneath central London was principally composed of sedimentary rocks: clay, chalk, and mudstone. If you dug too deep, then you were going to undermine your own foundations unless you were willing to be obvious about it (and sinking reinforced concrete pillars twenty meters underground was nothing if not obvious). Extend too far to either side and the ne
ighboring billionaires would take offense and tie you up in court for years.

  The Komatsu mini-digger was where it was because it was impossible to go any deeper, and the tunnel of shallow trenches behind it was slowly filling up, patches of shiny, fresh-poured cement betraying the final resting places of Rupe’s victims.

  An in-house crematorium being impractical, Eve had been searching for a better solution to the problem of corpse disposal. But just as she thought she’d found a solution—just as she was drafting a serious requirements document and bill of materials for her very own Eiserne Jungfrau—the fucking phone rang.

  “Yes?” she barked, quite forgetting herself for a moment—but only a moment, because then her eyes tracked to the caller ID and she gulped before continuing in a very different tone of voice: “Sorry sir, I wasn’t expecting you, how may I be of service?”

  “Am I interrupting something good?” Rupert sounded amused rather than outraged. Phew. Eve dabbed at her forehead.

  “I’m really sorry, sir, I was working on a final solution to the packing density problem in the sub-subbasement—” she glanced sideways at the dog-eared paperback lying facedown on her desk, copiously annotated: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach—“and I may have become slightly distracted.”