Rule 34

met Mike (and you hope to hell he’s lying dead in an autopsy room so he can’t contradict you); even if you had, you wouldn’t want to fuck him. On the other hand, the Operation’s files went into quite a lot of detail on the subject of his personal life, and getting off with him after a Pride march in what has long been one of the biggest knocking shops in London is entirely plausible. The Scottish Polis get all red-faced and sweaty at the merest suggestion of locker-room homophobia: It’s amusing to watch the cop switch from investigating-person-of-interest mode to dealing with bereaved significant other in the space of a sentence. (It works even better if there is some latent locker-room homophobia, so you’re careful to lean just a little too close and hold the eye contact a second too long.)

“Is something wrong?” you ask, feigning worry, as he begins to open his mouth. And you know that, really, nothing is wrong. If you were neurotypical and going up against the speech stress analysis he’s watching in his fancy-pants glasses, you’d be in deep doo-doo, getting flustered from all the falsehoods: But you’re not, and the cops’ sexy tech passes the handicap to their side when they get to deal with the likes of you. It’s only if they get you in front of a psych with a PCL-R check-list that you’ve got to start worrying.

“Mr. Christie, John, I’m really sorry.” He takes a deep breath. “Would you like to sit down?” He’s all solicitude, waving you into the spotless kitchen (which is interestingly bereft of forensic turds). “I’m very sorry, but—”

“Oh God,” you say, shoving the “distraught” slider all the way up to eleven. “He’s been in an accident, hasn’t he?”

There’s another cop coming down the staircase, and they’re going into full-on sit-down-and-have-a-cup-of- tea mode, as if they expect you to go into shock. “What makes you think there’s been an accident?” asks Brown, but it’s just a residual autonomic cop reflex—he’s already bought your spiel on outline.

“Mike’s big on water sports,” you say off-hand, then make to look horrified. “Oh God. What’s happened?”

“I’m really sorry.” PC Brown looks sideways at the newcomer, DET SGT GREEN. (Yeah, right, you think.) “Um. There’s been a, a fatality, sir. We’re still trying to ascertain the precise nature of events.” Which means it wasn’t an accident. “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief, sir. But if you don’t mind, I’d like to take a saliva sample.” They’ve already got your fingerprint biometrics off the driving license: This means they’re serious about logging identities.

You nod shakily. “Sure. Oh God.” You hunch up a little and do the weepy thing—not too much of it, you don’t want to ham it up and tip them off. “I can’t believe it.” Which is entirely true. Mikey’s dossier said he’s never been involved in anything serious enough to warrant a hit—that was one of the reasons you were going to interview him. Walking in on a homicide investigation is classic dumb bad luck. Your immediate task is to stop it graduating into a classic fuck-up, which is best done by cooperating with the cops for the time being. There are forms you can serve later to get “John Christie’s” DNA taken off the database once they figure out that he’s an innocent bystander, then you can retire the ID with a “do not recycle” flag.

Brown produces a sample tube and a cotton swab, and invites you to say “Aaagh,” which you do with alacrity. After which it’s all tea and sympathy, minus the tea, and “we’re terribly sorry, you’re free to go, sir,” after they get you to repeat in front of their specs that you haven’t seen Mike for at least half a year. And why should you not be free to go? “John Christie” is simply a contact whose state-issued biometric ID checks out, who has donated a DNA sample for the investigation, and who is at best an embarrassing distraction from the job in hand.

You leave by the front door and pedal very slowly, being careful to wobble for the cameras until you’re out of sight of the house. There’s been a fatality. Hence all the plastic sheeting and the DNA swab dance routine. We’re still trying to ascertain the precise nature of events. Which means it wasn’t an accident: Accidents don’t call for a detective sergeant to cover the site. Something has gone seriously fucking wrong here, and it looks like you may need to abort the operation, close up shop, and leave town on the schedule you just fed the Polis.

But first, you’ve got a fall-back option.

You bicycle away from the former abode of Michael Blair, your mood very dark. Somehow, all the fun has been sucked out of this venture before it even got started. Number One Client had the supreme bad taste to get himself whacked at a maximally inconvenient time. You’ve still got a job of work to do, but the hotel lost your luggage, and on top of that you’ve got the added vexation of falling within the penumbra of police sousveillance (which will take some work to get disentangled from when it’s time to leave).

Luckily—ironically—you haven’t done anything illegal yet. All you have to do is be John Christie for a week, then switch to another primary ID and stay clean while the paper-work to pull his DNA off the system chugs along. It’s not like you’re a serial killer or anything, is it? But it’s still a nuisance.

So you decide to execute your fall-back plan and visit your Number Two Client.

While you were doing the weepy in front of PC Brown the sun came out and most of the clouds have fucked off to Glasgow. Alas, there’s a brisk breeze blowing. You can die of sunburn and hypothermia during a Scottish summer—simultaneously, with added insomnia on top from the midnight sun. (It goes below the horizon, but it never really gets dark.) Swearing at the weather under your breath, you cycle uphill into the wind for half a kilometre, then pause at a cycle rack to ditch the wheels.

Once you’re clear of the pedal-powered snitch, you can safely reboot the phone and hit the online maps for a route to Number Two Client. Actually, you’re querying for a route to the boutique chocolate shop in Fountainbridge, above which they live and run their business—another way to avoid cropping up in a CopSpace crawl—but no matter. You haven’t memorized this particular route because you expected to be holed up with Mikey-boy for the whole morning and a chunk of the afternoon, but again: no matter. Your candidate for chief operations officer may have drawn the ace of spades, but you’re still holding a card for the CFO. And according to the dossier head office sent you, Vivian works from home.

The Polis know you’re in town, so hiding your trail may actually be a bad idea at this point. Accordingly, you hoof it to the nearest bus-stop and call a micro. While you wait for it, you review what the Operation knows about her (and is willing to stick in a mangled bitmap image file on an off-shore cloud).

Vivian Crolla. Age forty-eight, single, chartered accountant by trade—not so much an adornment to her profession as a butt-nugget dangling from its arse-hairs. She has been investigated by the ACA disciplinary committee three times but escaped unscathed save for a reprimand on the first occasion (now timed-out). She’s been investigated by the Revenue twice (inconclusively). She has come to the attention of the Serious Fraud Office and escaped without receiving as much as a police caution. She’s so slippery, you could skin her and market the hide as a surface for frying pans. And that’s just her public persona.

What the Operation knows about Vivian is enough that if you were with the Polis, you’d be smacking your chops and writing her up for the Procurator Fiscal while mentally drafting the press release. When she was the Gorilla’s banker, she ran the most efficient money-laundering operation ever seen north of Hadrian’s Wall, and if it wasn’t for the ongoing deflationary spiral and a slightly embarrassing problem repatriating her overseas assets while under the nose of the Revenue, she’d be living in a castle in Fife with a helicopter and pilot for the weekly shopping trips to Jenners. As it is, you figure she’s only marking time until she retires in style, at which point she’ll leg it to Palermo, where they have retirement homes stacked to the ceiling with her type of merry widow.

The bus, when it comes, is empty. You hole up in what used to be the driver’s seat, and it moves off silently. It’s a great way to tour the Athens of the North, and you watch entranced as it rolls over the speed pillows and cobble-stones on its way south-east. You’ve bid a fiver for a route divert, and for a miracle there’s no other money- bags aboard to up the ante: It’s going to take you close to Vivian’s front door.

Now, this scene is one you haven’t rehearsed for, and so you’re going to have to play it with a certain delicacy. But it’s not rocket science. You’ve got a handle on Vivian and her history. She’s even worked for the Operation before—unwittingly, at a lower level, but nonetheless. There are strings to pull, but she’s an experienced player, predictable up to a point. That’s why you were leaving her for the second interview.

The bus whines as it crawls up the slope, then totters anaemically along Lothian Road, stopping to pick up and put down the usual losers along the way. You keep yourself buttoned up, avoiding eye contact. (Back home? It’d be a stretch limo with tinted windows all the way. But a start-up job in Scotland calls for the Peoples’ Car and plenty of warm bodies to get lost among.) It rolls slowly past your hotel, then the row of pompous fin-de-siecle