Authors: Charles Stross
Rule 34 (13 page)
“We can see about that.” The barman pauses in front of you. “White wine spritzer, please,” you tell him, and flash your ID badge before he can card you. You wait until he delivers before continuing: “Have you eaten yet?”
“No. But there’s a place round the corner that’s been getting good reviews.” She looks at you speculatively.
“Do you have any plans? Outside of work?” You can’t help yourself: You have to ask.
“I don’t know yet.” For a moment she looks uncertain. “This is an odd one.” You catch the warning before she continues. “I may have to put in lots of overtime. I was hoping we could catch up if the job permits.”
Dorothy’s always like this. Babs accused you of being married to the job (and she wasn’t wrong), but Dorothy makes you look like a slacker. That alone would be enough to make your relationship with her an on-again off-again thing: And that’s before you get round to thinking about Julian, her primary.
So you nod, hesitantly. “I don’t have a lot on in the evenings this week. And I’m free Saturday and Monday. Is there anything particular you want to do? Theatre, music—”
“I was hoping we could start by finding somewhere for dinner?” She bites her lip. “And then I’d like to pick your brains about a little problem I’ve got at work . . .”
Dorothy is indeed staying in a boring business hotel in the West End. You end up in the bar around midnight, by way of a sushi restaurant and a couple of rounds of margaritas. You’re not sure whether you’re meant to play predator or prey here—it’s been months since the last time your paths intersected—but you’ve got a plushly padded booth to yourselves, and you catch her stealing sly glances at you in the mirror while she’s at the bar ordering a round. “I can’t stay too late—I’m on shift tomorrow,” you tell her regretfully, as she sits down opposite and bends forward to peel off her pumps.
She curls her lower lip, pointedly not pouting. “That’s a shame,” she says. You freeze, outwardly expressionless as her unshod left foot comes into contact with the inside of your right calf.
Question answered.
“Didn’t you say you’re free Saturday?”
Question answered.
“Didn’t you say you’re free Saturday?”
You catch your breath: “Yes, I am.” Actually, clearing weekend leave usually takes advance notice, but you’re on weekday office hours right now: You can swing Saturday and Monday if you need to. Maybe even swap Sunday for Monday . . . Her stockinged foot caresses your ankle. It’s smooth, muscular (all those hours in hotel health clubs), reminding you, rubbing. “That’s assuming I don’t get roped into the latest mess.”
She shows you her teeth. “What could possibly be more important than next Saturday?” (She’s playing with you. If her own job demanded it, she’d stand you up in a split second.) “I thought nothing ever happened in Innovative Crime? Have they got you back on CID?” She pulls back her foot, leaving you tingling.
“The day before yesterday I was on a community team assignment and got called in on what turned out to be homicide—not your usual ned-on-ned stabby action: more like Tarantino meets Dali.”
“Wow.” Her eyes widen. “Why are you here, then?” She nudges your foot again: But this time it’s an accident, not enemy action.
“Because after I corralled the witness and set up the incident room, CID turned up and took all my toys away.” You shrug. “Not that I’ve got a problem with that. I don’t need an extra helping of crap to top up my regular work-load. But Dickie—uh, we’re on Chatham House rules here, aren’t we?” She nods. “He’s the big swinging dick on the investigation, and he’s your classic narrow-focus, results-oriented, overdriven, alpha-male prick. He’s treating it as a regular crime and he’s looking for a suitable perp. Which is normally best practice and the right thing to do, except I happen to know that there was a death in, um, another jurisdiction around the same time, and it bears significant points of similarity. All of which scream
meme
at me. Internet meme, class one, virulent. Only Tricky Dickie doesn’t want to know.”
meme
at me. Internet meme, class one, virulent. Only Tricky Dickie doesn’t want to know.”
“Oy.” Dorothy leans back and takes a deep breath, then raises her glass. “I didn’t hear any of that, I take it.”
“No, of course not.” You nod at her. “What’s
your
sob story?”
your
sob story?”
“Work.” She pulls a face. “Another bloody ethics-compliance audit. You walk in the door, and everyone gets defensive, like they expect you to put them on a ducking stool and accuse them of witchcraft or something.”
“Ethics: It’s not just next door to Suffolk anymore.” It’s feeble and she’s heard it a thousand times but it still raises a smile.
Dorothy’s job is an odd one: catching corporate corruption before it metastasizes and infects society at large. After Enron collapsed—while you were still in secondary school—the Americans passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, accounting regulations for catching corporate malfeasance. But all they were looking for was accounting irregularities: symptoms of maladministration. The unspoken ideology of capitalism didn’t admit, back then, of any corporate duty beyond making a return on investment for the shareholders while obeying the law.
Then the terrible teens hit, with a global recession followed by a stuttering shock wave of corporate scandals as rock-ribbed enterprises were exposed as hollow husks run by conscience-free predators who were even less community-minded and altruistic than gangsters. The ravenous supermarket chains had gutted the entire logistic and retail sector, replacing high-street banks and post offices as well as food stores and gas stations, recklessly destroying community infrastructure; manufacturers had outsourced production to the cheapest overseas bidders, hollowing out the middle-class incomes on which consumer capitalism depended: The prison-industrial complex, higher education, and private medical sectors were intent on milking a public purse that no longer had a solid tax base with which to pay. Maximizing short-term profit worked brilliantly for sociopathic executives looking to climb the promotion ladder—but as a long-term strategy for stability, a spiralling Gini coefficient left a lot to be desired.
The European Parliament responded by focussing on corporate governance. If corporations wanted to be legal citizens, the politicians riding the backlash declared, they could damned well shoulder the responsibilities of good citizenship as well as the benefits. Social as well as financial audits were the order of the day. Directives outlining standards for corporate citizenship were drafted, and a lucrative niche for a new generation of management consultants emerged—those who could look at an organization and sound a warning if its structure rewarded pathological behaviour. And as for the newly nationalized supermarket monopolies, a flourishing future as government-owned logistics hubs beckoned. After all, with no post offices, high-street banks, or independent general stores, who else could do the job?
“It’s a bank.” Dorothy shrugs. “We’re running a three-year review for them, focussing on human resources, internal promotion practices, and how they monitor compliance with social-policy directives for dealing with customers in default.” Defaults are a political hot potato in this deflationary age. The ground still hasn’t stopped shaking from the collapse of the noughties investment bubble, and only government intervention has stopped Scotland—and the other western EU members—following America down the road of mass repossessions, Greenspan favelas, and civil unrest. “Bankers aren’t stupid this decade; they know what happened to their predecessors. What we’re worrying about is getting to the
next
decade’s managers before they unlearn the lesson. And there’s some other stuff, but I can’t talk about that.”
next
decade’s managers before they unlearn the lesson. And there’s some other stuff, but I can’t talk about that.”
Her mention of
other stuff
is uncharacteristically low-key. And you know Dorothy well enough to have a clue what makes her tick. “Usual rules?”
other stuff
is uncharacteristically low-key. And you know Dorothy well enough to have a clue what makes her tick. “Usual rules?”
“Cross your heart and hope to spontaneously combust, more like.”
“Well.” You take a lick of salt from the rim of your glass, roll your tongue at her. “We can see about that.”
“I’m serious.” Her lips pale.
“So am I. What do you think would happen if I compromised a live intelligence-led investigation?” (Translation:
Why do you want to tell me this?
)
Why do you want to tell me this?
)
“Much the same.” She looks at you for a moment. “Is your phone on? Remove the battery.”
You stare at her. Then you reach into your handbag and take out your phone and pop the back of the case. “There’s a camera behind the bar. It’s overlooking the till, but it can see the mirror.”
“I know. I checked earlier. It’s hi-def, but we’re far enough away that it won’t record a good enough picture for lip-reading. And we’re less likely to be overheard here.” She pulls out her own phone and removes the battery. You suddenly feel as naked as you’ve ever been with her.
“You didn’t look me up just for old time’s sake,” you accuse.
“Not—entirely.” She doesn’t try to look away. “I’m sorry. Yes, I have an ulterior motive. I need a sanity check, Liz.”
“A sanity check? Banking ethics isn’t my—”
“This isn’t about banking. You’re on my disclosure notice; nobody’s going to think twice about me hooking up with a girl-friend.”
The indefinite article stings, a reminder of where you stand with Dorothy. “Disclosure notice. I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
She waves it off. “It’s a sealed declaration of interests, for the enhanced background enquiry—so I can’t be blackmailed. It’s basically just an enhanced CRB check with extras, Liz.” She pauses. “You’re not in the closet. I mean, at work. Are you?”
“Not for years.”
“Good. Look, what I’m concerned about is that nobody’s likely to listen in on this, and anybody who notices us here is going to assume the obvious.” She slides her leg against your knee again. “Oh yes, I’m looking forward to Saturday. Are you?” Her eyes are gleaming. You focus on her lips, glossy and plump with anticipation, and shiver.
“If I were a man, I’d call you a cock-tease.” You manage to summon up something not unlike a coy smile.
“I’d like to take you upstairs after this drink, but I think my room’s probably bugged.” She says it so casually, it takes you a moment to understand her words. “I can understand if you don’t want that. Listening in, I mean.”
It’s like a bucket of cold water in the face. “Who’s bugging you?”
“I’m not entirely sure. It goes back about two months; I ran across some rather weird correlations when I was going over the transactions for—um, never mind. Anyway, my boss buried my email and reassigned me when I tried to raise it with him last month. Said it was circumstantial, and we didn’t have the resources to go after random leads. Well, I’ve been doing some more digging, and when I got here, I found a concealed camera in my bedroom and one in the shower.”
There is a famous optical illusion: a silhouette of a vase, which—once you know what to look for—suddenly flips into a silhouette of two faces looking at each other. (Or vice versa.) You’re looking at Dorothy’s face and one moment you could have sworn she’s excited, turned on—and the next, she’s frightened.
Context is everything.
Context is everything.
“What do you think’s going on?” you ask her.
She shoves her glass to one side of the table and leans forward. “I can’t tell you the details. But part of what we do is abstract social-network analysis on waves, IM, email, phone calls—looking for indicators of pathological communications patterns. If you can track who’s talking to who, you can work out which parts of an organization work together, and see emergent patterns of behaviour. It goes back to the classic study on Enron’s email corpus in the noughties, but there’s been a lot of work since then on agent-assisted NLP and transitive clique identification . . . There’s also some promising work on determination of ethical or conspiratorial networks. There are other data sets we can trawl exhaustively—the banking crisis, the full corpus of internal communications left behind in the wake of the Goldman Sachs collapse. All the data sets from businesses we’ve audited since the corporate-responsibility criteria were introduced, suitably blinded and anonymized. We use them to spot warning signs. You get a different pattern of communication in groups who’re colluding to instigate a cover-up, for instance.”
At this point, you’re working hard to keep your eyes open. Dorothy would have made a kick-ass accountant if she hadn’t decided to go into corporate psychoanalysis: She could bore for Europe in the Olympics if she wanted to. But you ken where she’s going with this. It’s not so dissimilar to what you do in the Innovative Crime Investigation Unit—which, come to think of it, is how you met her in the first place, at a conference on pre-emptive gang-crime prevention. “What did you find?”
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