Rule 34

You look at Kemal, silently: Kemal looks at you. And for a split second you can read his mind. Kemal is thinking exactly the same thought as you, or any other cop in your situation. Which is this: What drug is he on?

“Would you run that by me again?” you ask.

“Certainly.” He nods. “Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example . . . have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face- to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person. And that’s what ATHENA is about. Society has become so complicated that people can’t reliably make moral choices; but ATHENA will nudge them into doing the right thing anyway.”

His eyes glitter maliciously in their saggy pouches. “If it works properly, you’ll be needing a new job by and by . . .”

ANWAR: Getting Answers

Sleep comes hard, and after tossing and turning uneasily in the cold wide bed—Bibi is still away—you rise early and head for the office. You’re running on autopilot, going through the motions in yesterday’s soiled clothes because your mind is elsewhere, scampering and spinning the spiked hamster wheel of your fears.

Tariq is dead. That hurts, even before the stabbing fear that you might be responsible. Answers. There must be an answer somewhere. Kicked the bucket. The dead-eyed man and the not-beer bubbling away in the attic and the too-good-to-be-true job and Adam’s sly suggestion that you’ve been trolled, and suggestion for cashing in on it—

You want answers.

Because if Adam’s right, and the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan isn’t just a sock-puppet but a flat- out fiction, a Potemkin Republic set up to snare the siloviki, you’re in violation of the terms of the license they made you sign when they released you. And that’s you, back inside that cell in Saughton for another six months. At least. If they don’t find something new to charge you with.

(And your hamster-mind is skittering ahead in blind panic, trying to figure out ways around the onrushing wall of steel spikes. Maybe if you can prove you’ve been acting in good faith—or perhaps if it is a fake you can resign and dob them in to Mr. Webber or Inspector Butthurt, demonstrate you’re a good and responsible citizen—assuming the madman with the suitcase doesn’t come after you . . .)

The office is as you left it when you received Bibi’s panicky call yesterday afternoon. It feels like an infinity ago. You sit down, open up your laptop, and check for email. Nothing from head office, just a handful of spam. Actually, there hasn’t been anything from head office—the Foreign Ministry—this week. No updates, no memos, no bulletins and reminders about policy on export licenses, charges for visas, cancelled passports, office supplies.

You frown and check your settings. They look alright, but how can you be sure? Maybe the Ministry’s mail server is sulking. Or perhaps there’s a public holiday that lasts all week, and nobody thought to tell you. Or a general strike or a meteor strike. Whatever the cause, it’s disturbing. So you turn to your handy quick reference guide to running a consular mission, and bounce around the hyperlinks until you come to a list of voice contacts. Ah, technical support. Issyk-Kulistan is four hours ahead of Edinburgh; you paste the contact into your phone app and wait patiently as it tries to connect. And tries to connect. And clicks over to dump you in voice-mail hell. An interminable announcement in the sonorous Turkic dialect rolls over you, before switching to English and informing you that: “You have reached the mailbox of senior consular support engineer Kenebek Bakiyev. Direct customer support is available on Mondays and Wednesdays between the hours of 8 A.M. and 1 P.M. For outside hours support, please leave a message after the tone. BEEP. I’m sorry, this mailbox is now full.”

You stare at the screen. “What the fuck? What the fucking fuck?” The calendar on your desktop is telling you that today is Wednesday and the time is ten past nine, local time—ten past one in Bishkek.

You are not an idiot; you were not born yesterday. You know exactly what’s going on here. You’re supposed to buy the story and sit tight until next Monday, aren’t you? It’s a delaying tactic. What kind of technical-support line is available for ten hours a week, carefully timed for when most of its customers are still asleep in their beds? They’re gaslighting you. Or maybe not. A sudden moment of doubt: Issyk-Kulistan is very poor. What if they can’t afford to run a proper support desk or help-line? If this is the best they can do—how secure is your pay?

You check the phone wiki again and again. Digging deeper, looking for clues. Then a thought strikes you, and thirty seconds later you’ve got another number. You feed another contact to the phone app, and ten seconds later a voice answers you in the flattened vowels of London’s East End: “’ Ello, you’ve reached the consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. How can I help you?”

I not we, you notice. “Hi,” you say, “this is Anwar, at the Scottish consulate. Listen, can you tell me, have you had any email through from the Ministry since Monday afternoon?”

It takes a minute or two for you to get Mr. East-Ender to grudgingly acknowledge your identity, and another minute for him to get the picture, but by the time you put the phone down, you know two new facts: that IRIK have only bothered to establish a one-man consular presence in England, and no, he hasn’t heard anything from head office either.

Your moustache twitches at the half-imagined odour of dead Rattus norvegicus, and you turn to your browser. There are news aggregators and search engines and attention proxies, and you are a master of the web, a veritable expert. Even though you’re having to pipe everything through a mess of translation agents, it is but the work of half an hour for you to churn through a hundred searches, refining and reducing and recycling your terms until you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s not going on. There’s no public holiday today. There are no football matches, riots, or debates going on in the chamber of deputies. More significantly, a bit more digging reveals that there are no bandits, bank robberies, or bombings. In fact, Issyk- Kulistan is a bit of a news black hole. It’s as if a cone of Internet silence has descended across the entire country, and nobody outside has noticed.

Your skin crawls; you’re running low on excuses. If Adam’s right—then the sock- puppet nation is about to be wadded up and thrown away. And you know too damned much. You know about empty-eyed men with suitcases they want you to look after, and trade delegations with bags of not-bread mix. You don’t have to be Inspector Rebus to know what happens to bagmen who aren’t sitting tight when the music stops.

You try a different strategy and waste a few minutes hunting for notifications of service outages afflicting the major trunks in and out of the country. Then you have a moment of blinding realization.

Voice mail.

You flip through the Ministry’s online directory until you come to a different section. With a shaky finger, you drag the address card into your phone and prod the connect button, already rehearsing your abject apologies. It rings twice, then a man answers it, speaking an unfamiliar language. There’s music in the background, tinny voices singing. “Hello?” you say tentatively: “Is Colonel Datka there?”

“One moment.” The speaker’s English is very good, almost unaccented. There’s a scraping sound, as of a hand covering a mobile phone, some muffled conversation. “Felix is tied up right now, but he’ll be along in a minute. Who should I say is calling?”

Your tongue swells abruptly, and you cough. “To whom am I speaking?”