Dead Lies Dreaming

by Charles Stross

  “Well jolly good, carry on then, nice to hear you’re keeping busy!” Rupert whiffled on in this mode for a minute, during which Eve gradually felt more and more uneasy. Rupe didn’t believe in soft-soaping his minions, especially her. Something was very wrong here. Is it (a) something I’ve done, or (b) something I haven’t done, or (c) something he wants me to do? she wondered. “How soon can you have it up and running?” he demanded.

  What—she stared at her notepad. She had sketched her idea with pencil and paper. Her computer was, of course, keylogged six ways from Sunday, but—Oh, he must have upgraded the cameras again. “I’m not sure, sir.” It was going to require some complicated custom fabrications, unusual metalwork that wouldn’t be embrittled by exposure to liquid nitrogen coolant. Actual rocket science. “There’s apparently a cemetery in Canada that has a pilot plant that operates like this, but it’s a bit new and experimental.”

  The fourteenth-century Iron Maiden of Nuremberg was a myth concocted in the Victorian era to titillate the proto-moderns and reinforce their sense of superiority over their benighted ancestors. According to the story, victims were forced inside the sarcophagus-shaped device and it was clamped shut around them, then spikes were screwed into their flesh. When the screams stopped and the blood slowed to a trickle, the spikes were withdrawn and what was left was dropped into a deep ravine through a hole in the bottom. It was bullshit, but it was prime grand guignol bullshit, the sort of thing guaranteed to keep the boss off her back for a while—especially once her twenty-first-century improvements were up and running.

  “Set up a shell company and run the accounts through it,” Rupert instructed her. “Index it under hobby projects. Before they start bending metal I’d like to see the schematics.” This was typical Rupe behavior. Rupe loved snuff. One of his hobby subsidiaries existed solely to provide employment for a sick fuck of a former slaughterhouse technician in Somerset who turned standard-size shipping containers into mobile gallows. He was selling them by mail-order to the more sanity-challenged corners of the globe. (The less said about the concealed webcams Rupe had insisted on adding, the better; but the small print buried in the sales contract granted him exclusive copyright over their feeds. Rupe’s true claim to genius lay in his expertise with buried small print.) “How does it work, exactly?” he asked eagerly.

  For the next ten minutes Eve did her best to explain. Human bodies are notoriously hard to dispose of, but one promising approach is to compost them. First, the corpse needed to be chilled with liquid nitrogen. (For that purpose, her iron maiden would be lined with cold fingers fed from an LNG tank.) Once frozen, the body would be dropped into a modified industrial shredder—one with special blades, tempered to survive ultra-low temperatures—to reduce it to mulch. It would be piped into a fermentation vessel, where bacterial cultures would be injected, causing decomposition, breaking down the subject’s DNA and generating heat for the mansion. Finally, the residual slurry would be flushed away through the sewer system. The Canadian cemetery also composted bodies, but the intent was to provide a dignified, environmentally approved final exit. Eve’s approach was efficient, logical, but—

  Her vision blurred and doubled as she stared at the sketch on her drawing pad. Why the hell am I doing this? she wondered, skewered on the cusp of acute cognitive dissonance.

  She’d started this morning with a fantasy of slamming the iron maiden’s lid on Rupert’s grinning face (for once, set in a rictus of terror rather than gloating). She would listen to the scream of boiling liquid nitrogen escaping from around his rapidly cooling corpse, then push the button to drop him into the flashing blades of the shredder that would flush him into the septic tank for composting. Then she’d turn on her heel and ascend to take her place at the head of the boardroom table. The blame sat squarely on Rupert’s shoulders: if he hadn’t shackled her to him she could have simply left—

  But now her fantasy was sharpening and coming into close-up focus, bright and clear beneath the voyeuristic cameras Rupe had scattered through her life, and it wasn’t Rupe’s face in the iron maiden: it was her brother’s.

  She realized with a sick sense of despair that she might never be free of Rupert. Over the years he’d molded her into the perfect assistant, polished to a state of gleaming perfection to carry out his will. She could destroy his body, but he’d installed a little sliver of his soul inside her.

  “I’m sorry?” she asked, acutely aware that she’d zoned out and missed a possibly critical question or two.

  “—Said, if it looks good, I’ll want you to file for patent rights and look into setting it up for limited batch-scale manufacturing? I’m sure the Home Office will be interested in buying it. Maybe you could give it glass walls so they can auction tickets to the executions?”

  “Of course,” she said automatically, and crabbed a tiny footnote on her pad. “I’ll see to it, sir.”

  “Great!” Rupert sounded ever so jolly when she stroked his turgid ego. “Now, about that manuscript. How’s the acquisition coming along? I see you retained Andrei’s people to handle reclamation of the escrow funds and that’s good, but there’s a quarter of a million earmarked for non-recoverable expenses? And an ex-gratia payment to HiveCo Security?”

  “Yes, yes, exactly so, My Lord.” She swallowed. Had she really promised her kid brother a quarter of a big one? She must have been mad: it was well above her normal discretionary spending, which meant it would be flagged for Rupert’s attention. She hoped like hell that she’d drawn up the title deeds properly and the mortgage was in order. If she’d screwed up, she and Imp were both dead. “The agents I retained ran into competition—the kind with very large guns, I’m afraid. It spooked them, so I upped their retainer rather than trying to recruit another team. Trying to keep the operation as small as possible, you see. We also had a problem with a HiveCo thief-taker but they were trivially easy to buy off, and meanwhile my team’s back on the job. More importantly, I’m confident the opposition don’t have any more leads. So there’s that.”

  “Excellent! I look forward to reading it when I get home. Which, by the way, should be the day after tomorrow now—I had some unavoidable meetings in Panama, but I’m clearing them tomorrow and then I’m about eight hours away as the Gulfstream flies. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about the oppo bidders getting back in the game, I’ve put my man on their case and—” He carried on for a few seconds before she could get a word in edgewise.

  “—Wait,” she said, scrabbling for traction, “you sent the Bond after them?”

  “Yes! So I’m afraid you’re stuck driving the Bentley or the Lambo for the next week—the DB9’s fully booked. But you should have smooth sailing just as soon as he’s tracked down all the loose ends and tidied them away.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” she said, her voice just slightly strangled. The Bond—any of Rupert’s Mr. Bonds—was always a son-of-a-bitch. The job demanded it, and Rupert worked them hard. As with Fleming’s fictional 00-agents, their life expectancy was less than twenty-four months. However, the current incumbent was even worse than his predecessors: a stone-cold psychopath, death on two legs. “That’s good to know.” Just keep him the hell away from me. Eve had met the current Bond only twice and was not a fan. If she was ever trapped in a stuck lift with him only one of them was going to make it out alive, and she was determined it would be her. “Is the Bond going to get in my way?”

  “Not unless something goes wrong!” Rupe said brightly. “But that’s not happening. So.” Expectant pause, then: “Tell me, what color is your thong?”

  “I’m wearing the black lace Bordelle one you bought me—” Her gaze sharpened. “Hey, don’t you have a camera under my desk?”

  “Good idea! Not yet, I’ll get one put in once I’m home. When did you last wax?”

  Eve put her pen down, set her shoulders back, plumped her lips out, and faked a lascivious grin. Good thing I wore a trouser suit. “Last night, before my bath, thinking about you, sir,” she lied
, simulating arousal in her bleak office cell under the gaze of Rupert’s cameras. It was unusually easy to fake it while she talked dirty to him today. At some point in the past ten minutes a dam had burst. She’d known for years that she’d eventually have a final reckoning with Rupert, but now she knew it couldn’t wait any longer. Imp was in the frame: if she didn’t want to lose her brother for good—the last remaining connection to her old life, before she started down this darkling path—she’d have to deal with the Bond, and if she dealt with the Bond she’d have to deal with his master, which meant—

  She grew increasingly turned on as she delivered the submissive spiel Rupert expected: tension winding tighter and higher, the blueprint on her blotter breathless with the promise of final release, imagining him choking and gagging and finally convulsing. After Rupert ended the call she sat motionless for a minute, pulse pounding, thinking about masturbating. That was one act for which telekinesis was a game-changer; but she couldn’t bring herself to do it here, not under the gaze of Rupert’s cameras. Especially not if it meant admitting to herself how much she’d grown to resemble her master’s dark fixations.

  Either way, this has to end soon, she thought, and by soon, I mean before the boss gets home.

  * * *

  “Whoo! That was fucking awesome!”

  Del turned off the ignition. Wendy leaned across the transmission tunnel and tried to kiss her on the cheek, just as Del was turning to face her: their lips collided. Speech became difficult for a time; when they separated, Del was breathing fast. “You’re telling me. Gonna need new plates.”

  “So sue me.” Wendy checked her phone again. The lap timer on her clock app was frozen at 46 minutes and 27 seconds. “That makes an average of—holy fuck. And you did that in daylight hours, not at four in the morning!”

  “Yup.” Del looked smug. The engine pinged as it cooled. “Going to need a garage though, the tires are unhappy.” (Somewhere in the trackless suburban wastes of London, a blameless banker’s wife who had the misfortune to drive a similar bus was going to get a nasty surprise in the mail. She’d later claim an alibi, courtesy of the traffic cameras around her daughter’s school gate.)

  “Holy…” Wendy unlatched the passenger door and climbed out, shaky from the adrenaline crash. She took a deep breath. “I didn’t scream.” She took another breath. Nor had she thrown up when they passed the camera gantry with the display of skulls at Junction 24. Highways England could only stick you up there if they caught you, after all, and by then she was pretty confident that wasn’t going to happen. “Next time I try to race with you, remind me to indent for a helicopter pursuit in advance.”

  “I’m faster than helicopters,” Del said smugly as she stepped down from the SUV. The central locking chirped. She bent at the front and rear bumpers, pausing to peel a layer of laminate off the plates, which she then wadded up and shoved in a pocket. “So.” She watched Wendy expectantly. “You going to bust me for dangerous driving, Officer? Or what was that really about?”

  Wendy shook her head. “I just—” She shook her head again. “We were being watched, back in the cafe. Bloke in a suit tailed us when we left. But I’m pretty sure you lost him.”

  “Oh. Not one of your co-workers?”

  “Deffo not one of mine.” And that had Wendy well rattled. “Do you know what your mates were trying to st—liberate from the safe deposit box at the bank? The one that attracted all the unwelcome attention?”

  “I dunno, some letter I think. I wasn’t paying attention, you know? Too busy trying not to get stuck in traffic.” She tapped the side of her forehead: “Better than satnav, but I don’t have much room for anything else while I’m cogitating.” Del was indeed better than satnav: it was her special genius to figure out perfect routes.1 “Anyway, Imp took it to his sister. She’s who hired us,” Del added.

  “Well.” Wendy kicked the curb. “Looks like I need to talk to your friends. Can you hook me up?”

  Del cocked her head to one side. “How about … nope?”

  “Well.” Wendy sniffed. “It’s for their own good, you know? I think you’re in danger.”

  “How about we go wherever it is you want to take me and then give me a reason why I should trust you?” Del jabbed back. Out of her armored cyborg shell she was thin-skinned and sensitive. “It better not be a cop shop, Officer.”

  “I keep telling you, I’m off the force.” Wendy tugged her gently along the cracked pavement, stepping over dogshit and dandelions sprouting in the cracks, passing boarded-up windows until they came to an anonymous door in sun-bleached red paint. “This is where I live. It’s not much, but I call it home.”

  Taking Rebecca home with her was her way of showing trust: a calculated risk, and not much of one at that. Wendy had already demonstrated she had the upper hand, proven that she could be useful to Del, held her hand … accidentally kissed her. Del wasn’t stupid, maniacal driving notwithstanding—there had been that one stretch where Wendy had timed her for ten miles at an average of 160 mph. Wendy would swear that Del had known which vehicles were going to switch lanes before their drivers did, anticipating and positioning herself with eerie precision. Which was probably why her palms were moist and her pulse was so hard to ignore. Del would come inside and they could bond over a beer while she tried to dig a little deeper into her strange little crime family, and—

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  Suddenly Wendy found herself staring into Rebecca’s concerned face at close range, and it was clearly not a face that she let out very often: awkward. “I, uh, I was just thinking,” she began, then swallowed. “Come on in.”

  Her bedsit felt grubby and even tinier than usual with company. “Make yourself at home.” She’d turned the bed back into a sofa before she went out, for which she was suddenly grateful. To have invited Rebecca back to slept-in sheets would have been beyond awkward. In truth, she hadn’t imagined bringing anyone back here when she’d headed out that morning. It just seemed like a good idea to hitch a ride home, a decent idea to talk to the Deliverator somewhere where she knew they couldn’t be overheard, and … she was running out of excuses. She popped the fridge door. “Beer?”

  “I’m driving,” Rebecca deadpanned, holding her hand out.

  “Not right at this instant, I hope.” Wendy passed her a can. It was the last of a six-pack of Heineken she’d been rationing all week. “Can’t offer you any weed, I’m afraid: current employer insists on having a stupid piss-test clause in my contract because they do jobs for the Home Office. Maybe next year.” The office was abuzz with rumors that the New Management was going to decriminalize cannabis and opium, the better to raise tax revenue.

  Rebecca sighed as she pulled the ring. Her can hissed like an indignant cat. “I wasn’t expecting beer or grass. Beer’s good, though. You wanna make out?” She eyed Wendy with such frank curiosity that her mouth dried up.

  “Not on a first date.” She opened her own beer and gulped a mouthful of mostly-froth, acrid and sharp. Reconsidered: “Maybe?”

  “Is this a date?” Rebecca asked ironically. “Because it started out really fucking badly. You need to work on your pick-up technique, girl.”

  “Yeah well I’m sorry, I—” Wendy was close to babbling—“you were freaking out on me and I thought you were going to run and I wasn’t sure how else to find you—” this was a lie, but only a partial one—“and we needed to talk. You, me, your friends. Like I said. But I need you to trust me and I get that you’re not going to take me to see them so where does that leave us—”

  Rebecca tugged her down to the sofa beside her, and she sprawled, off-balance. “Sit. Drink. Shut the fuck up for five minutes while I think,” said the Deliverator, not unkindly.

  Wendy sat and drank and STFU’d in hope.

  After a minute or so, Rebecca sighed and leaned back, stretching her arm along the back of the sofa behind Wendy’s head. “Feeling better now,” she admitted. “That drive took more out of me than I expected.”

>   It seemed to call for a response, but Wendy kept it to a laconic “True.” She drank another mouthful, suppressed an increasingly urgent need to burp.

  “Tell me again why you ain’t arresting me.”

  Wendy glanced at Rebecca sharply, but saw only heavy-lidded amusement staring back at her. “Like I said, my manager ordered me off your case. Somebody paid more for us to drop the investigation than the underwriter was paying us to carry it out. It’s how the system works: the company is in business to make money, not uphold the law.”

  “But you didn’t know that when you put the cuffs on me, you were just off-duty.” Rebecca grabbed Wendy’s wrist, nearly spilling her beer, then leaned across her to grab her other arm. She brought her wrists together—She’s really strong, Wendy registered—and held them above her head.

  “Hey!”

  “Let’s see how you like it,” Rebecca said, then leaned in and kissed her. Wendy squirmed, uncertain where this was going—trick or treat?—but she kissed back. Felt Rebecca pressing up against her flank, warm and solid. Eventually, Rebecca pulled back. “What do you want with me?”

  “You—” she hesitated, not ready to continue this line of questioning, and shied away from the personal—“I still need to know what was in that box,” she said, heart hammering between her ribs. “What the letter was about.”

  “That’s not what I was asking.”

  Rebecca kissed her again, and this time Wendy whimpered quietly into her mouth.

  Oh God, she thought. “Your interrogation technique needs more practice,” she whispered, and Rebecca snorted back laughter. “Like this,” she added, and now she was the one nibbling at Rebecca’s throat.

  “The letter.” Rebecca moaned softly. “What’s so important about it, anyway?”

  Wendy stilled. “Four mobbed-up heavies with AKs shoot up a bank, then a bloke with light artillery smears them all over the walls and tries to take out your friends, then someone else pays my employer to drop the investigation, and you don’t even know what it says?” She retreated from Rebecca. “Has it occurred to you that someone wants whatever’s in that letter badly enough to kill for it? And if I could find you, maybe they could find you as well?” Shit, she realized with a sudden pang of remorse, I’m frightening her. The Deliverator’s crew didn’t carry weapons; at worst, they hired actors armed with stage props. “I mean, they might not try to kill you,” she backpedalled awkwardly. “They might just want to invite you back to their place for tea and crumpets and a chance to discuss the works of Søren Kierkegaard—”