Rule 34 Read Online Free PDF Page B

back. I must have zoned out, you realize nervously. You can’t afford to do that: not here, not with the job interview that’s coming up. Ahead of you the doors are flung open on a dusty arrivals hall. A porter shuffles past you, leading a motorized baggage trolley out towards the small Antonov. There’s a bored-looking crowd just beyond a rope barrier at the far side of the hall, and among them you see a man with an upraised sign: ANWAR HUSSEIN.
    “Mr. Hussein?” A broad grin and a bushy salt-and-pepper moustache: firm handshake pumping up and down. “I am Felix Datka.” He speaks English with a heavy Russian accent. “Welcome to Przewalsk!” So that’s how you pronounce it. “Have you had a good journey from Scotland? Please, let’s fetch your suitcase, and I will drive you to your hotel.”
    You have arrived in the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. And you relax: Because now you know you are among friends.

     
    “And that was the worst part of it,” you tell him, wiping your moustache on the back of your wrist.
    “It was?” The Gnome blinks rapidly, as if there’s a mote in his eye.
    “ Yes. Once he told the porter to give my suitcase back and we escaped from the pickpockets, or the police—I’m not sure who were which—he had a black Mercedes SUV! Well, it was mostly a Mercedes and mostly black—bits of it were made locally in this car factory they’ve got that runs on chicken feathers and corn husks or something, and the paint didn’t match”—just like the shite your supplier Jaxxie runs up on the DRM-hacked fab in his garage—“but from there it was an hour’s drive into town, and then dinner in a traditional Kyrgyz restaurant”—actually a McDonald’s, after Mr. Datka tipped you the wink that most of the posh restaurants in town were Russian-owned and not halal: But you don’t want the Gnome’s pity—“the next morning, he picked me up and drove me to the Ministry building. Big concrete slab full of bureaucrats with boxy old computers, sitting around smoking.” Your nose wrinkles at the memory.
    “The Ministry.” The Gnome hums and strokes his chin. “Hmm. Indeed. And how did it go, then?”
    “It was a job interview.” You shrug. Back in your normal drag, jeans and a sweat-shirt and your favourite Miami Dolphins jacket, it’s all mercifully fading into a blur: the stiflingly close air in the airconless conference room, you in the monkey suit your cousin Tariq sourced for you from an Indonesian tailoring dotcom, sweating bullets as you tried to answer questions asked in broken English by the bored bureaucrats on the other side of the table. “They asked me lots of questions. How long I’d lived in Embra, what was my citizenship status, what I did, did I have a criminal record, that sort of thing.”
    “Did you tell them the truth?” The Gnome lays his hand on your knee, very solemnly.
    “I lied like a rug.” You weren’t sweating bullets because of the questions (you realized it was a shoo-in when you clocked you were the only candidate they’d bothered to fly out for the interview): You were sweating bullets because it was hot . Even the criminal-background question was meaningless. If they didn’t already know the answer to the question, they weren’t networked well enough to spot a ringer.
    You shrug again: “Who’re they going to call, Europol?” You let his hand lie: This is safe space, as safe as it comes, and you’re still wound up from the nervous tension of a flight into the unknown. “They flew me to Moscow, economy class! Look, you said they’ve got no money. So what’s your angle?”
    You don’t bother with what’s in it for me? because that much is clear. You have got: a bunch of blank passports and a toytown rubber stamp set; a steel-jacketed data key locked to your thumbprint and loaded with encryption certificates; documents telling the government of Scotland that you are hereby authorized to act as the legally responsible consul on