Rule 34

business exists in a vacuum, and no enterprise—criminal or otherwise—can succeed unless its clients and suppliers trust each other. Unreliable, incompetent, greedy, grasping, poor impulse control—these traits drag down and dismember the management of ’Ndrangheta, cripple the profitability of the Yakuza, and hamstring the Russian Mafiya. They’re slow learners. Even as late as the early noughties, organized crime had barely begun to absorb the lessons of modern management; as for innovation, Al Capone would have recognized most of their business models on sight.

The Operation knows one thing, and knows it well—how to set up and manage a business for maximum growth until it’s time to negotiate a successful sale and cash out. They have single-handedly dragged the management of vice into the late twentieth century, if not the twenty-first: a monumental, if questionable, achievement.

But now they’re under attack.

The Operation’s business is at its most effective when it can tap new audiences, gain new customers, expand markets—reach out to new sources of profit. Lack of brand awareness is the biggest obstacle to establishing any new sales channel (legal or otherwise), and you can’t advertise counterfeit goods or illegal services through regulated media. Consequently, the Operation is highly dependant on all kinds of spam, from shoutcasting on in-game voice channels to the old search engine optimization racket.

Over the past three days, more than fifty individuals have died in unlikely and frequently messy manners— electrocuted by miswired domestic robots, hearts stopped by improbable prescribing errors, driven off the edge of multi-story car-parks by malfunctioning car autopilots, shot by police in raids on the wrong address. Most of these people are not actual affiliates or employees of the Operation. They are, however, all involved at one level or another in the unregulated network-marketing sector.

Something must be done.

Part 2

LIZ: Mote, Eye, Redux

There is one good thing about being seconded to run interference for Dodgy Dickie’s murder investigation, and it is this: CID always get allocated the best cars, right after Traffic. They get the same priority as the regular community patrols, and that’s a hell of a long way up the pecking order from ICIU.

When you show up at the transport desk this time, you don’t have to grovel for a segway: Instead there’s an unmarked Chinese Volvo waiting for you, silver-grey luxury on wheels. As you slide behind the wheel and orient yourself with the controls, you see it’s got a console full of extras on the passenger side—traffic data terminal, ANPR cameras, external laser projector, the works. So this is how the other half drive, you think enviously as you thumb the airport short-stay car-park into the autopilot and hit the GO button. A moment later, the car reverses out into the station yard and turns towards Queensferry Road in eerie silence: You’re halfway to Turnhouse before it fires up the diesel generator under the bonnet.

Self-driving cars are a mixed blessing. Right now, you miss the bad old days when you needed to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road: It’d be a welcome distraction. But current health and safety regulations say that only officers assigned to ongoing pursuit and patrol driving duties—and the training that goes with them—are allowed to actually operate vehicles. It’s something to do with the force being liable for damages if you run over any civilians. So you use the spare quarter hour to dig into the CopSpace image of Dickie’s incident room and try to familiarize yourself with who’s doing what (and how far they’ve got so far).

The car parks itself in a police-only bay near domestic/EU arrivals, at Terminal One. You head for the meeting point adjacent to Customs with a sinking heart. CopSpace at the airport is congested, full of security warnings and immigration tags as well as the usual detritus: criminals on probation, minicab drivers with unpaid licenses, and the like. But after a minute, your specs lock onto someone and flicker for attention. You see a vaguely familiar face in the crowd, towing a neat carry-on bag as he stands in front of the exit, scanning—

Yes, that’s him. You start forward. Medium height, dark eyes, Middle Eastern skin, sharp suit. He’s looking around, but he hasn’t clocked you yet. He’s alone this time, no mob of super-cop extras in tow. His head turns. “Kemal Aslan, I presume,” you say, pre-empting him. “Welcome back to Scotland.”

His expression of annoyance is so quickly masked you can’t be sure it even exists—is it your imagination?— and he extends a hand. “Ah, Inspector Kavanaugh.” You take it and shake. His palm is cool and dry. “I hope you’re well.” He ducks his head. It’s a long way from the arrogant confidence he exuded the first time you saw him, five years ago.

“Well enough.” You gesture towards the exit: “I’ve got a car. How long are you here for?”

“As long as it takes.” You head for the doors; he follows. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping en route, I need to check in at my hotel? Then we should talk.”

You stop. “I’m not entirely clear on what you think there is to talk about,” you snap, and he recoils as if you’ve just bared your teeth at him. “We’ve got a sensitive time-critical investigation to run, and unless you’ve got some insight to contribute, something that we should know, you’re just not that high a priority.”

To your surprise he nods. “I appreciate that,” he says softly. “But it is not the only investigation in progress. I am here to help—all of them. On my previous visit, we started out badly. I will apologize, if that is what you desire. But afterwards, we must work together. It is very important.”

You manage not to gape at him, but you’re momentarily at a loss: He delivers his spiel with a dead-pan sincerity that leaves you scrabbling for a handle to hang your anger on. Finally, you manage to say: “In the car. We can discuss this later.” Then you start walking again, so wound-up that you’re as jerky as a marionette.

The car is halfway to his hotel—a boutique establishment in Haymarket—before he speaks again. “Has there been any progress in your investigation?”

“I need to get you signed on and authorized before I can disclose intelligence material.” You’re already working out a shortest path in your head, a circuit of the necessary offices: You need to drag Kemal past the super’s office door for pro forma approval, then your own desk to verify that authentication of his credentials is already in the channel via Europol, then up to Doc, who can tell one of his sergeants to give him external consulting access to the virtual incident room. His eagerness to get started ahead of the formalities is grating and borderline- toxic. (But then, you ask yourself, What would you do in his shoes?) “Can you tell me what’s going on from your end of things?”

“It is a massacre,” he says simply.

For a moment you think you misheard. “A what?”

“A massacre.” He stares out through the ghost of the head-up display as the tidy shop-fronts of Corstorphine slide past. “We have linked eight deaths to the, the atrocity, already. They all occurred within a six-hour period. But the incident is ongoing: I expect more to come to light.”

It’s a really good thing the car’s driving itself; otherwise, the force would probably be looking at an out-of- court settlement, and you’d be looking at the inside of an ambulance. “What? Where’s this coming from?”

“The victims all died within the same period. They died at home, in circumstances superficially resembling domestic accidents. They were all—all—involved in online marketing activities of questionable legality. Some of them were found immediately, others took time to be discovered. We are currently examining a number of other deaths over the same period. I expect the number to rise, sharply.”

Eight murders? You find the figure implausible, comically ludicrous. That’s more murders than Edinburgh gets in a year—a really bad year at that. It puts you in mind of stories you heard at Uncle Bert’s knee, from his time in the RUC during the Troubles. A faint inkling begins to dawn on you. “Tell me this isn’t political? More of that shit, like five years ago—”