daily team briefings.
“I’ll call him as soon as I’m in the office.” You pause. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Uh, Chief Inspector MacLeish wants to see you. It’s about the Blair case. He’s raising a request for research and says it’s priority one.” Screamingly urgent, in other words.
“Well, ping him and tell him I’m in transit.” You hang up and neck your coffee, burn your tongue, swear in an extremely unladylike manner as you grab for a glass of tap-water, then run through your check-list and are out the door in record time. You make it to the end of the road as a minibus trundles away from the stop, swear again, and drop the ghost of a tenner on its icon. For a miracle, it accepts the bid, whines to a halt, and kneels as you run to catch up. The other passengers glare irritably at you as you climb aboard, slightly breathless. You take a seat, then realize you left your hair-brush at home. So: another bad hair day is already underway.
There’s no hurrying the bus as it meanders around the back streets, diverting to pick folks up and drop them off. Sooner or later, your work-subsidized travel pass will get you to the office, but unlike a taxi, there’s no quality- of-service guarantee and no privacy. So you’re left tapping your fingers in frustration, unwilling to log into CopSpace in public (because you’re an inspector, and your work is a wee bit more confidential than J. Random Plod’s notebook: There’s a lot at stake if your desktop leaks). So much for telecommuting. Policing is one of those jobs that will always revolve around a meatspace hub, if only because you can’t build a cellblock in cyberspace.
So it is that you arrive at work at 8:42 A.M., ahead of your start of shift and in a timely manner . . . but disastrously out of touch with the events unfolding around you.
Your first inkling that this may be something worse than a regular bad-hair day comes as you step down off the bus and walk towards the front entrance in Fettes Avenue. They unwired the police HQ comprehensively back in the teens: Consequently, it senses your approach and it knows how to get your attention. The left arm of your spectacles vibrates for attention, and you instinctively touch your phone in acknowledgment. Blinking arrows glide urgently across the powder-blue furnishings in the waiting area, urging you inward: GOTO ROOM D31: BABYLON BRIEFING TO COMMENCE IN 15.
You whistle tunelessly through your front teeth and straighten up, then head towards the meatspace incident room: There’s a list of fifty-odd officers on the case, from constables up to the DCI himself, and probably a super watching over
Access to CopSpace—an augmented-reality overlay that maps a view of the criminal-intel knowledge base across the physical world in front of your eyes—doesn’t make police stations with control centres and briefing rooms obsolete. Quite the contrary. It’s not so long ago that you and your colleagues were plunged into the collective nightmare of a total breach of network security and had to fall back to prepaid supermarket mobies and passing around notes printed on
There’s a scrum in the corridor outside D31, so you hang back a bit and wait for it to disperse. Then Moxie shows up. “Skipper.” He nods—sketchy acknowledgment—and you nod back.
“What’s the story?” you ask him.
Moxie’s gaze flickers sidelong, taking in the neighbours. He clears his throat. “Lieutenant Heyne from Dresden
“Homicide?” you ask. “I thought the victim was in hospital.”
“Died overnight.” Moxie shrugs uncomfortably. “There’s also a Sergeant Nobile from the Gruppo Anticrimine Tecnologico in Rome who wants to bend your ear. Urgently.”
“Wait a sec.” Moxie’s looking it up in the directory. You could have done it yourself, you just thought he might have done the leg work already. “It’s part of the Guardia di Finanza, the national financial, customs, and economic police?” He looks slightly boggled, eyes twitching as he saccades through the infodump. “They also do cybercrime, he’s on the Europol R34 distribution, says it’s about the homicide in Dresden and, uh . . .” He nods at the front of the queue, which is beginning to shuffle into Mac’s briefing. “An associated murder in Trieste. There’s more. That feedstock you were looking for—”
“It’ll have to wait.” There’s the usual pre-caff mumbled meet and greet in the doorway, then you’re in and looking for a free seat near the back. Not fast enough; MacLeish is waiting just inside and makes eye contact.
“Inspector.” He nods. Subsequent words flow like grit through engine oil. “You were right; thanks for forwarding me that case.”
You show him your best botox face: It’s a moment to take home and treasure, but you’re not going to waste your brownie points gloating in the middle of a murder investigation. “I gather a bunch more contacts have come in overnight.”
“Aye, well . . . this is really fucking abnormal, if you’ll pardon my French. Never seen anything like it.”
“Me neither,” you concede. “What do you need from ICIU?”
“All your Bing and Google mojo, and a pipe into Europol. Oh, and anything you know about grey-market fabber feedstock. Why don’t you sit in the front row?”
After that, there’s no escape.
“Morning, peeps.”
Dodgy Dickie stands before a plain white wall bearing the Lothian and Borders logo, and below it a new name: Operation Babylon. The atmosphere in the room is expectant, and just a little angry: one-third suits, one- third boots, and a mashup of civilian support specialists.
“We’ve got a murder. Not your normal ned-on-ned stabby, unfortunately: This one’s got legs. We’re out of the golden forty-eight”—he means the first two days of the investigation—“and to make matters worse, DI Kavanaugh, who first clocked it as a culpable homicide, has drawn some really disturbing parallels with at least two other killings and an ongoing investigation into contraband supplies.”
“Here’s the situation.” The wall behind Dodgy Dickie does a wipe to reveal Mikey’s bathroom death scene. “Note the victim is taped and gagged. It’s set up to resemble an accidental autoerotic fatality: The thing he’s plumbed into is a mid-1960s colonic irrigation machine, a collector’s piece formerly owned by the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu—apparently he insisted on daily enemas. Ahem. Note the evidence of sexual stimulation. The enema fluid contains a borderline-toxic concentration of a medicine usually prescribed for impotence, but that’s not what killed him. Mr. Blair is HIV-positive and on multidrug maintenance. He also has hypertension, and is on meds for that condition. Pathology tells us that one of the protease inhibitors he’s on interacts very badly with Viagra. And the full work-up DI Kavanaugh ordered tells us that what he had in his system at the time was his prescription cocktail and a buttload of Viagra. But again, that’s not what killed him.”
Mac glances at you, his face unreadable. “The proximate cause of death was cardiac arrest. So we ordered a full work-up on the enema fluid, so pathology went trawling for known pharmaceuticals.” They can do that, these days: They’ve got lab-on-a-chip analysers that can identify thousands of drugs in microgram quantities. Or so they told you on the last re-cert course you did on organic forensics.
“What they found was his prescription meds and the Viagra, and one last thing—the enema fluid was loaded with grapefruit juice.” Grapefruit juice? You see winces going round the audience. Dickie continues: “I’m told that grapefruit juice is a catastrophe waiting to happen if you’re on certain types of blood-pressure medicine—it
