LIZ:
Debrief
By the time you get
back to HQ, a log-jam has broken.
The first sign you
get, sitting in the back of an ambulance as a paramedic checks your
pupils, is an excitable voice call from Moxie. “Skipper, you’re
going to love this! It’s crazy! There’s been a revolution in
someplace I can’t pronounce in Asia, and it turns out the
government’s been running a scheme to use AI tools to go after
spammers? Only, see, they screwed up the training they gave their
cognitive toolkit, and it began arranging accidents—”
You tune him out as
irrelevant background noise, devoid of content. Your head hurts,
your back aches, and you’re increasingly pissed-off with yourself.
I’m getting too old for this crap. The
honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan, indeed. And some random psycho
who’s arranging staged suicides when he’s not peeling the skin off
his victim’s hands? It’s too damn much, that’s what it is. The
fire-hose of seemingly disconnected data is drowning you. At times
like this you can see where Tricky Dickie is coming from, with his
hankering for a simpler time—even if it’s not your simpler time, even if it’s a time when you and
yours were not welcome and not legal.
They make you sit on
your arse for half an hour while they confirm there’s no
concussion. A couple of messages come in on your phone’s private
personality: YES, you tell Dorothy,
YOU CAN STAY OVER. A few seconds later
she responds: I’LL GET MY BAGS.
Unresolved fragments of your untidy life are sliding towards an
uncertain resolution. Eventually, you get yourself signed off and
go back inside the madhouse, where a couple of car-loads of
uniforms are busy poking around in search of traces. There’s no
sign of Anwar, but Dickie is waiting for you in the over-furnished
living room, pacing back and forth beneath a kitsch gilt-framed
hologram of the Ka’bah. “Why?” he demands. “Why here?”
This is promising.
“Social-network analysis, intelligence driven. ICIU has a mandate
to track the international side of this investigation. After
interviewing Dr. MacDonald, Inspector Aslan and I concurred that he
wasn’t telling us everything we needed to know. I authorized a
search of his public friends lists, and
came up with a close personal connection to Mr. Hussein, via a
particular social site. As Mr. Hussein was already noted in
proximity to one of the ATHENA victims, once I’d confirmed that Dr.
MacDonald was indeed the victim at Appleton Towers, I decided to
visit Mr. Hussein and see what I could shake loose.”
You can see Dickie
winding up again, but he bottles it up for once. “Why did you not
see fit to file a report with BABYLON?” he asks, his voice
uncharacteristically soft.
“Ah, well, I
did. But there’s so much intel going
into the funnel on this one that, on reviewing the situation with
Inspector Aslan, we agreed that there was a high risk of its not
being prioritized. And as you can see, even with blues and twos, we
only just got here in time . . .”
“Aye.” Dickie’s
glower fades to a calculating frown: He’s probably spinning the PR
angle, considering how it’ll look in the newsfeeds. Detective saves victim from psycho killer in the nickof
time always plays well. “But you lost this Christie
character.”
You rub the back of
your head, ruefully. “Not for want of trying.”
“Just so. Tell me,
Inspector, what motivational factors do you think we’re looking at
here? And where do you think he’ll go?”
You blink, surprised.
“We haven’t already . . . ?”
The frown is back.
“Nae fear, it’s a matter of time.”
“Shit.” The drones
must have arrived overhead too late to catch his trail. It’s
daylight, and the sun’s out, so the heat signature from his
footsteps will be washed out, and if he was smart, Christie will
have disabled all his personal electronics. “Ahem. Motivation. I’m
flailing in the dark here, but even leaving aside the sock-puppet
ID, Christie doesn’t sound right to me. He’s from out of town, he’s
got diplomatic connections with Issyk-Kulistan, hence the
connection to Mr. Hussein.”
“He’s got more than
that,” Dickie mutters. “Mr. Hussein has some questions to answer
about what we found in his bathroom.”
“What? Drugs?
Kiddie-porn?”
“Neither: But we
found a bucketful of bootleg replicator feedstock he was busy
trying to flush down the toilet.” Dickie looks smug. “Almost
certainly the same stuff that’s been turning up in your Saturday
night specials down in Leith. I trust we will shake loose where he
got it from in due course.”
It’s the feedstock
channel you’ve been chasing for months, under-resourced and
overworked. Typical of Dickie to roll it up for you as a side-show.
Asshole. “Huh. That’s not like Anwar;
he’s always been one for the white-collar scams. But you asked
about Christie?”
“Aye. What do
you think?”
Well, at last. “I think he’s working for some organized
crime syndicate or other. I don’t know what he’s doing in
Edinburgh, but the ATHENA killings rattled his cage, and he or his
took it as a personal attack. Maybe it was a personal attack; what if he turned up on our
door-step because he was looking to do business with the victims?
Or kill them as rivals, or something.”
“I don’t like
coincidences,” Dickie says, almost as if he’s accusing you of
rigging the dice. “Why did he run into this girl-friend of yours?
Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit of a big coincidence,
too?”
You stare at the
hologram on the wall. “Yes, you’re absolutely right,” you hear
yourself saying. “It’s almost as if we were being nudged into
noticing him, or something—”
You stop dead. More
dominoes appear in your imaginary hand, slotting neatly into place
on the board.
“What? Say what’s on
your mind, woman.”
“ATHENA is at the
root of this.” Lack of professional courtesy
indeed. “ATHENA is all about analysing social networks to
reward good behaviour and punish defectors. Moxie—ICIU—was trying
to tell me something about it just now, sir. Some kind of central
Asian government has been using it to get at netcrime rings, going
too far and arranging accidents. What if I’m the accident that’s being arranged for
Christie?”
“Huh.” Dickie stares
at you. “The cult of the lone gun detective again,
Inspector?”
“Give me some credit
for not being stupid, sir: You and I
both know what gets successful prosecutions, and it isn’t that
Life on Mars shit.” (What gets results
is an ops room full of detectives working together as a team, with
a fully documented work flow and built-in quality assurance.
Transparency after the fact, everyone lifelogging to sealed
evidence servers and evidence secured under lock and key so that
the Procurator Fiscal can prove a watertight case in court.
Sherlock Holmes has been superseded by business process
refactoring, and success is all about good management.) “But I
probably came to ATHENA’s attention via ICIU. I’m one of the nodes
on the graph that’s got lots of long-range inputs; I’m an easier
inside contact to reach than an officer who doesn’t deal with other
netcrime units on a day-to-day basis. And everything ATHENA knows
about how we work comes from our external social
traffic.”
“So you’re the
trigger, or bait, or summat. And ye ken ATHENA’s trying to feed Christie to us. And if ATHENA can
noodge you, it can noodge Christie, can’t it? So where’s Christie
bound for—” Dickie stops dead. His eyes widen. “Your friend was
staying in the West End Hilton, was she not? Let’s go pay her hotel
a visit right now,” he says. And you
realize, to your chagrin, that just for once he’s
right.