"I'll bring charges! You arranged this distraction—"
Rachel reached out, picked Madam Chairman up by her elbows, and deposited her on the conference table in a howl of outrage and a flurry of silk skirts. "Stick to minding your desk," Rachel said coldly, unable to resist the urge to rub it in. "The adults have got important work to be getting on with."
Rachel just about had the shakes under control by the time she reached the main exit. Stupid, stupid! she chided herself. Blowing up at Madam Chairman could only make things worse, and with the job ahead she needed desperately to cultivate a calm head. A police transporter was waiting for her in the landscaped courtyard outside the UN office dome, squatting in the shadow of a giant statue of Otto von Bismarck. "Suspect an unemployed artist and recluse believed to be named Idi Amin Dadaist," the police dispatcher told her via her bonephone, simultaneously throwing a bunch of images at the inside of her left eyelid. "No previous record other than minor torts for public arts happenings with no purchase of public disturbance and meme pollution rights, and an outstanding lawsuit from the People's Republic of Midlothian over his claim to the title of Last King of Scotland. He's—"
The next words were drowned out by the warble of alarm sirens. Someone in the headquarters bubble had been told what was going down a few blocks away. "I haven't even done a training update for one of these in three years!" Rachel shouted into the palm of her hand as she jogged toward the transporter. She climbed in, and it surged away, meters ahead of the human tide streaming out of the building toward the nearest bomb shelters. "Don't you have anyone who's current?"
"You used to be full-time with SXB, that's why we've still got you flagged as a standby," said the dispatcher. A worried-looking cop glanced round from the pilot's seat, leaving the driving to the autopilot. "The regulars, like I said, they're all en route from Brasilia by suborbital. We're a peaceful city. This is the first bomb scare we've had in nearly twenty years. You're the only specialist—active or reserve—in town today."
"Jesus! So it had to happen when everyone was away. What can you tell me about the scene?"
"The perp's holed up in a refugee stack in Saint-Leger. Says he's got an improv gadget, and he's going to detonate it in an hour minus eight minutes unless we accede to his demands. We're not sure what kind it is, or what his demands are, but it doesn't really matter—even a pipe bomb loaded with cobalt sixty would make a huge mess of the neighborhood."
"Right." Rachel shook her head. "'Scuse me, I've just come from a meeting with a bunch of time-wasters, and I'm trying to get my head together.
You're saying it's going to be a hands-on job?"
"He's holed up in a cheap apartment tree. He's indoors, well away from windows, vents, doors. Our floor penetrator says he's in the entertainment room with something dense enough to be a gadget. The stack is dusted, but we're having fun replaying the ubiquitous surveillance takes for the past month—seems he started jamming before anything else, and his RFID tag trace is much too clean. Someone has to go inside and talk him down or take him out, and you've got more experience of this than any of us. It says here you've done more than twenty of these jobs; that makes you our nearest expert."
"Hell and deviltry. Who's the underwriter for this block?"
"It's all outsourced by the city government—I think Lloyds has something to do with it. Whatever, you bill us for any expenses, and we'll sort them out.
Anything you need for the job is yours, period."
"Okay." She sighed, half-appalled at how easy it was to slip back into old ways of thinking and feeling. Last time, she'd sworn it would be her last job.
Last time she'd actually tried to slit her wrists afterward, before she saw sense and realized that there were easier ways out of the profession. Like switching to something even more dangerous, as it turned out. "One condition: my husband. Get someone to call him, right now. If he's in town tell him to get under cover. And get as many people as possible into bunkers. The older apartments are riddled with the things, aren't they?
There is no guarantee that I'm going to be able to pull this off on my own without a support and planning backstop team, and I don't want you to count on miracles. Have you got a disaster kit standing by?"
"We're already evacuating, and there'll be a disaster kit waiting on-site when you arrive," said the dispatcher. "Our normal SXB team are on the way home, but they won't be able to take over for an hour and a half, and they'll be into reentry blackout in about ten minutes—I think that means they won't be much help to you."
"Right." Rachel nodded, redundantly. She'd dressed for the office, but unlike Madam Chairman, she didn't go in for retro-femme frills and frou-frou: she'd had enough of that in the year she'd spent in the New Republic. What does the bitch have against me, anyway? she asked herself, making a mental note to do some data mining later. She dialed her jacket and leggings to sky blue—calming colors—and settled back in the seat, breathing deeply and steadily. "No point asking for armor, I guess. Do you have any snipers on hand?"
"Three teams are on their way. They'll be set up with crossfire and hard-surface-penetrating sights in about twenty minutes. Inspector MacDougal is supervising."
"Has he evacuated the apartments yet?"
"It's in progress. She's moving in noisemakers as her people pull the civilians. Orders are to avoid anything that might tip him off that we've got an operation in train."
'Good. Hmm. You said the perp's an artist." Rachel paused. "Does anyone know what kind of artist?"
The transporter leaned into the corner with the Boulevard Jacques, then surged down the monorail track. Other pods, their guidance systems overridden, slewed out of its way: two police trucks, bouncing on their pneumatic tires, were coming up fast behind. The buildings thereabouts were old, stone and brick and wood that had gone up back before the Diaspora and gone out of fashion sometime since, lending the old quarter something of the air of a twenty-first-century theme park far gone in ungenteel decay. "He's an historical re-enactor," said the dispatcher.
"There's something here about colonies. Colonialism. Apparently it's all to do with reenacting the historic process of black liberation before the holocaust."
"Which holocaust?"
"The African one. Says here he impersonates a pre-holocaust emperor called Idi Amin, uh, Idi Amin Dada. There's a release about reinterpreting the absurdist elements of the Ugandan proletarian reformation dialectic through the refracting lens of neo-Dadaist ideological situationism."
"Whatever that means. Okay. Next question, where was this guy born?
Where did he come from? What does he do?"
"He was born somewhere in Paraguay. He's had extensive phenotype surgery to make himself resemble his role model, the Last King of Scotland or President of Uganda or whoever he was. Got a brochure from one of his performances here—says he tries to act as an emulation platform for the original Idi Amin's soul."
"And now he's gone crazy, right? Can you dig anything up about the history of the original Mister Amin? Sounds Islamicist to me. Was he an Arab or something?"
The transporter braked, swerved wildly, then hopped off the monorail and nosed in between a whole mass of cops milling around in front of a large, decrepit-looking spiral of modular refugee condominiums hanging off an extruded titanium tree. A steady stream of people flowed out of the block, escorted by rentacops in the direction of the Place de Philosophes. Rachel could already see a queue of lifters coming in, trying to evacuate as many people as possible from the blocks around ground zero. It didn't matter whether or not this particular fuckwit was competent enough to build a working nuke: if the Plutonium Fairy had been generous, he could make his gadget fizzle and contaminate several blocks. Even a lump of plastique coated with stolen high-level waste could be messy. Actinide metal chelation and gene repair therapy for several thousand people was one hell of an expensive way to pay for an artistic tantrum, and if he did manage to achieve prompt criticality …
The officer in charge—a tall blond woman with a trail of cops surrounding her—was coming over. "You! Are you the specialist dispatch has been praying for?" she demanded.
"Yeah, that's me." Rachel shrugged uncomfortably. "Bad news is, I've had no time to prep for this job, and I haven't done one in three or four years.
What have you got for me?"
"A real bampot, it would seem. I'm Inspector Rosa MacDougal, Laughing Joker Enforcement Associates. Please follow me."
The rentacop site office was the center of a hive of activity, expanding to cover half the grassed-over car park in front of the apartment block. The office itself was painted vomit-green and showed little sign of regular maintenance, or even cleaning. "I haven't worked with Laughing Joker before," Rachel admitted. "First, let me tell you that as with all SXB ops, this is pro bono, but we expect unrestricted donations of equipment and support during the event, and death benefits for next of kin if things go pear-shaped. We do not accept liability for failure, on account of the SXB
point team usually being too dead to argue the point. We just do our best.
Is that clear with you?"
"Crystal." MacDougal pointed at a chair. "Sit yourself down. We've got half an hour before it goes critical."
"Right." Rachel sat. She made a steeple of her fingers, then sighed. "How sure are you that this is genuine?"
"The first thing anyone knew about it was when the building's passive neutron sniffer jumped off the wall. At first the block manager thought it was malf-ing, but it turns out yon Idiot was tickling the dragon's tail. He'd got a cheap-ass assembler blueprint from some anarchist phile vault, and he's been buying beryllium feedstock for his kitchen assembler over the past six months."
"Shit. Beryllium. And nobody noticed?"
"Hey." MacDougal spread her hands. "Nobody here is paying us for sparrow-fart coverage. Private enterprise doesn't stretch to ubiquitous hand-holding. We go poking our noses in uninvited, we get sued till we bleed. It's a free market, isn't it?"
"Huh." Rachel nodded. It was an old, familiar picture. With nine hundred permanent seats on the UN Security SIG, the only miracle was that anything ever got done at all. Still, if anything could stimulate cooperation, it was the lethal combination of household nanofactories and cheap black-market weapons-grade fissiles. The right to self-defense did not, it was generally held, extend as far as mutually assured destruction—at least, not in built-up areas. Hence the SXB volunteers, and her recurring nightmares and subsequent move to the diplomatic corps' covert arms control team.
Which was basically the same job on an interstellar scale, with the benefit that governments usually tended to be more rational about the disposition of their strategic interstellar deterrents than bampot street performers with a grudge against society and a home brew nuke.
Okay. So our target somehow scored twelve kilos of weapons-grade heavy metal and tested a subcritical assembly before anybody noticed. What then?"
"The block management 'bot issued an automatic fourteen-day eviction notice for violation of the tenancy agreement. There's a strict zero-tolerance policy for weapons of mass destruction in this town."
"Oh, sweet Jesus." Rachel rubbed her forehead.
"It gets better," Inspector MacDougal added with morbid enthusiasm. "Our bampot messaged the management 'bot right back, demanding that they recognize him as President of Uganda, King of Scotland, Supreme Planetary Dictator, and Left Hand of the Eschaton. The 'bot told him to fuck right off, which probably wasnae good idea: that's when he threatened to nuke 'em."
"So, basically it's your routine tenant/landlord fracas, with added fallout plume."
"That's about the size of it." "Shit. So what happened next?"
"Well, the management 'bot flagged the threat as being (a) a threat to damage the residential property, and (b) subtype, bomb hoax. So it called up its insurance link, and our 'bot sent Officer Schwartz round to have a polite word. And that's when it turned intae the full-dress faeco-ventilatory intersection scene."
"Is Officer Schwartz available?" asked Rachel.
"Right here," grunted what Rachel had mistaken for a spare suit of full military plate. It wasn't: it was SWAT-team armor, and it was also occupied.
Schwartz turned ponderously toward her. "I was just up-suiting for to go in."
"Oh." Rachel blinked. "Just what's the situation up there, then?"
"A very large man, he is," said Schwartz. "High-melatonin tweak. Also, high-androgenic steroid tweak. Built like the west end of an eastbound panzer. Lives like a pig! Ach." He grunted. "He is an artiste. This does not, I say, entitle one to live like animal."
"Tell her what happened," MacDougal said tiredly, breaking off from fielding a call on her wristplant.
"Oh. This artist demands to be crowned King of Africa or some such. I tell him politely no, he may however he crowned king of the stretch of gutter between numbers 19 and 21 on the Rue Tabazan if he wishes to not leave quietly. I was not armored up at that time, so when monsieur I 'artiste points a gun at me, I leave quietly instead and thank my fate for I am allowed to do so."
"What kind of gun?"
"Database says it is a historical replica Kalashnikov mechanism."
"Did you see any sign of his bomb?" asked Rachel, with a sinking sensation.
"Only the dead man's trigger strapped to his left wrist," said Officer Schwartz, a glint in his eyes just visible through the thick visor of his helmet.
"But my helmet detected slow neutron flux. He says it is a uranium-gun design, by your leave."
"Oh shit!" Rachel leaned forward, thinking furiously: Nuclear blackmail. Fail-hard switch. Simple but deadly uranium-gun design. Loon lies bleeding, in the distance the double flash of the X-ray pulse burning the opaque air, plasma shutter flickering to release the heat pulse. Idi Amin Dadaist impersonating a dead dictator to perfection. Fifty-one minutes to detonation, if he has the guts to follow through. The performance artist scorned. What would an artist do?