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 l’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?

“Give him half a chance and an audience, he’ll push the button,” she said faintly.

“I’m sorry?”

She looked out of the window at the steady stream of poor evacuees being shepherded away from the site. They were clearly poor; most of them had lopsided or misshapen or otherwise ugly, natural faces — one or two actually looked aged. “He’s an artist,” she said calmly. “I’ve dealt with the type before, and recently. Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they’re some of the most dangerous folks you can meet. The Festival fringe — shit! Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction. That name — Dadaist. It’s a dead giveaway. Expect a senseless act of mass violence, the theater of cruelty. About all I can do is try and keep him talking while you get in position to kill him. And don’t give him anything he might mistake for an audience. What kind of profile match do you have?”

“He’s a good old-fashioned radge. That is to say, a dangerous fuckwit,” said MacDougal, frowning. She blinked for a moment as if she had something in her eye, then flicked another glyph at Rachel. “Here. Read it fast, then start talking. I don’t think we’ve got much time for sitting around.”

“Okay.” Rachel’s nostrils flared, taking in a malodorous mixture of stale coffee, nervous sweat, the odor of a police mobile incident room sitting on the edge of ground zero. She focused on the notes — not that there was much to read, beyond the usual tired litany of red-lined credit ratings, public trust derivatives, broken promises, exhibitions of petrified feco-stalagmites, and an advanced career as an art-school dropout. Idi had tried to get into the army, any army — but not even a second-rate private mercenary garrison force from Wichita would take him. Nutty as a squirrel cage, said a telling wikinote from the recruiting sergeant’s personal assist. MacDougal’s diagnosis was already looking worryingly plausible when Rachel stumbled into the docs covering his lifelong obsession and saw the ancient photographs, and the bills from the cheapjack body shop Idi — his real name of record, now he’d put his dismal family history behind him — spent all his meager insurance handouts on. “Treponema pallidum injections — holy shit, he paid to be infected with syphilis?”