Halting State hs-1

by Charles Stross

  You manage to make your way over to the mobile incident headquarters, where the uniform on duty nods you through to the back office. Liz is already there, with McMullen and Michaels, and Detective Superintendent Verity, and Kemal’s deputy Mario, none of them looking terribly happy. “Shut the door, Smith,” snaps Verity. McMullen, looking very out of place in his golfing duds, points a finger at Michaels. “You have some explaining to do.”

  Michaels glances at his watch. “Not as much as you will if you don’t come up with a good cover story,” he mutters. He sounds genuinely rattled. So it’s pass the exploding surprise whoopee cushion public enquiry parcel, is it? you wonder. “If it wasn’t for the damned meddling flying squad, or that prize twat Wayne…”

  McMullen takes a deep breath. Judging by the expression on his face, you figure he’s keeping a tight lid on. Poor bastard—this isn’t the kind of hole in one he’d been expecting to handle on his day off. “Would one or the other of you please explain the situation in words of one syllable?” he finally manages.

  “I suppose so.” Michaels pats back a fly-away wisp of blond hair. “Hayek Associates are what used to be called a front company. On the one hand, they do what it says on the tin—stabilize in-game economies, maximize stakeholder fun, that kind of thing. On the other hand, they give us a good opportunity to keep an eye on certain disorderly elements who like to meet up in one game space or another to swap dragon-slaying hints, as it were.”

  “Who is ‘us’?” Liz asks.

  Michaels frowns. “You don’t need to know that, but Mr. McMullen”—the deputy chief nods, lugubriously—“can vouch for us. In any case, you need to understand that most of Hayek Associates’ employees are just what they appear to be. When the robbery took place, Wayne panicked—I can confirm that he’s a civilian—and called you. Which caused us to acquire an audit trail in CopSpace, which is monitored by—”

  “They have no need to know,” interrupts Mario. He looks at Michaels, pleadingly. “Can this wait for Kemal?”

  “Other agencies, as I was saying,” Michaels continues, as if the interruption hadn’t taken place. “An elite pan-European counter-espionage police task force. Who promptly put two and two together and got five, hence this morning’s little excursion.”

  “The warehouse.” McMullen gives Michaels a hard stare. “It’s yours?”

  There’s a brief pause, then Michaels inclines his head. “Yes. Nothing to do with that blacknet you’re looking for in Leith. All those machines are just there to feed data in and out of the 5-million-pound quantum processor that your idiot friend”—he almost snarls at Mario—“has comprehensively broken.”

  You try to catch Liz’s eye, but she’s doing the Botox thing, cheek muscles virtually paralysed. Pounds not euros—so it’s an English thing. Under the articles of independence MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ and SOCA and the rest of the southern intelligence apparat have got the free run of Scotland; meanwhile, the Republic’s own intel capabilities are strictly local, mainly focussed on keeping an eye on the local Muj bampots down the pub and suchlike. It’s on a level with the rest of Scotland’s military and diplomatic clout—strictly toytown. (After all, who on earth would want to invade Scotland?) But more importantly, you can hear the well-nigh-deafening silence of Michaels lying by omission. If this was Saturday night down the shop, he’d be clamming up and calling for his solicitor rather than answering the next question, which is, Why is MI6 (or whoever) running a multi-million-pound operation to bug gamers down in Leith?

  “You could tell them the truth,” Liz volunteers slowly.

  “Yes?” McMullen looks thoughtful.

  “Faulty intelligence led to a major counter-terrorism raid in Leith. Which turned over a sporting goods warehouse instead of an Al Qaida cell.” She shrugs. “It’s bad PR, but we explain we were overruled by the suits from Brussels who organized it without consulting us. Blame Kemal”—she nods at Mario, who looks outraged—“and we’re off the hook, and more importantly, the spotlight is off Mr. Michaels as well.”

  “Suits me,” Michaels says dismissively.

  “I’ll have to run that one by the chief, but it ought to fly.” McMullen nods thoughtfully. “You”—he points at Mario—“you can keep your mouth shut. With your boss in the hospital, you’re off the hook, and with your boss in the hospital and not answering any damn fool questions, there’s nobody who can tell the press otherwise.”

  “It is an outrage!” Mario vents. “We are not responsible!”

  “So?” Liz glares at him, then turns to look at Michaels. “Next you’re going to tell us you want this burying so deep it’s in danger of coming up in China. Am I right?”

  Michaels splutters. “Absolutely! Of course—what do you think we are?”

  She regards him coolly. “I think you’ve got a leak.”

  He stares right back. “That’s none of your business, and I’d appreciate it if you would desist from further speculation along those lines.”

  “That’s enough.” McMullen rounds on Michaels. “You’ve done enough damage already, or have you not noticed we’ve had to shut down traffic to half the north side of the city? So I’d appreciate it if you’d cease with your high-minded requests and leave us to sort things out.” He’s building up a head of steam, is the deputy chief constable, and you’re torn between fascination at this fly-on-the-wall opportunity to see the boss in action, and the fear that he’s going to take it out on someone under his authority. “And then you and me and the super and Kavanaugh here are going to sit down, and you’re going to tell us what you can about what’s going on so we can stop blundering around in the dark and stamping on your corns.”

  “What about us?” Mario demands plaintively.

  McMullen finally blows his top. “Fuck off back tae Brussels, and I won’t have to prosecute you for wasting police time!”

  Three hours later you’re back at the station. It’s been a busy morning, mopping up after the horrendous mess Kemal’s flying circus left behind, but eventually you get a chance to catch a late lunch. Unfortunately, before you can cut and run, Liz Kavanaugh catches your eye. “Sergeant, let’s do lunch together.”

  Ah, fuck it. You know an order when you hear one. You were planning on catching up on your paperwork—there’s that wee ned to keep track of, and the incontinent dog owner the council keeps yammering on about, not to mention last week’s B#amp#E cases—but Liz obviously has something else in mind. So you nod dutifully and play along. “Where’d ye have in mind, skipper?”

  “There’s a nice little Turkish bistro on the Shore, they do excellent meze.” She holds up a car keyfob. “I’m buying.”

  Well, that’s no’ so bad. You follow Liz out of the station, and she lets you into her car—a compact Volvo, very nice—then drives down into Leith and parks next to the Shore. “What do you want to talk about?” you ask her receding back, as she heads up the pavement.

  “Patience, Sergeant.”

  Okay, so it’s serious. (If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t mind nattering about it.) You trot along after her as she ducks round a corner and leads you to a couple of pavement tables outside a small diner, opposite a small aquatic appendix pinched off from the harbour by a low bridge that appears to have been built on.

  “Have a seat, Sergeant—Sue. We’ve got plenty of time for lunch: I’ve booked this as a meeting.” She smiles, but there’s something uneasy about the expression. It doesn’t reach her eyes. She’s got her back to the glass front window of the bistro and keeps scanning the road as if she’s expecting someone. “I think you should go off-line.”

  “You sure, skipper?” You raise one eyebrow at that, and when you blink, the speech-stress plug-in is showing red spikes all over Liz.

  “Yes.”

  You slip your glasses off and physically unplug them, slipping their battery out. Then you reach into your left upper-front torso pocket, pull the PDA, and pop the fuel cell. “Satisfied?”

  A bendy-bus slinks by and blasts you with a haze
of bio-diesel, power pack roaring. Liz nods wordlessly, then pulls her own PDA out and gives it the miser’s standby. “Position your chair so you’re talking away from the window,” she says. “I don’t want anyone bouncing a laser off it.”

  “Whae the fuck?” But you do as she says, more surprised than anything else.

  A thin smile. “You can buy laser-acoustic mikes for thirty euros in Maplins online these days, Sue. And the people I’m worried about won’t think twice about breaking the law by using them.”

  “You think Michaels sold us a line of bullshit?” you burst out, finally unable to contain yourself.

  “I don’t think so, I know so.” She rubs the side of her cheek, where the headset normally rides. “Problem is, I don’t know whether he did it to keep us distracted or to make us do some dirty work for him, or what.”

  “But if he’s lyin’, he’s a—”

  She waves a hand, cutting you off. “One thing you can be sure of is, he is what he said he is. It checks out. There’s a…a restricted access file. Hard copy only, the best kind of security: They keep it in a locked room at Fettes Road. I had a look at it while you were in debrief. Michaels is on the list. We can’t touch him.”

  A waitress wanders outside, sees you both, and smiles: A moment later you’re puzzling over a menu as Liz continues to lay the situation out.

  “Hayek Associates are a front for some sort of intelligence-gathering operation. Something went wrong, and the non-spook employees hit the panic button before anyone could stop them. They’ve got a quantum processor down in Leith. Those things don’t grow on trees, Sue, I’ve been doing some reading about them and it scares me. Kemal saying TETRA is compromised scares me even more. And so does that flaky set-up in Nigel MacDonald’s flat, because it’s a dead ringer for a blacknet node we took down last year.”

  “What’s a quantum processor for?” That one’s been puzzling you all morning. It looked more like Dr. Frankenstein’s work-bench than any other machine you’ve ever seen.

  “Not my field, I don’t know much more about IT than you do.” She frowns. “But I know what they do—they’re used for special types of calculation. Not doing your word processing or playing games, but things like calculating how proteins fold, or breaking codes. And you know what? This whole thing with Hayek Associates and the robbery in Avalon Four is about codes, isn’t it? The codes your programmers were going on about, that pin down where a magic sword or whatever is.”

  “But they wouldna buy a quantum processor just so’s they could rip off their customers, is that what you’re sayin’?”

  “Yup.” Her cheek twitches. Liz is clearly not a happy camper today. “Who’s to say precisely what bunch of codes they’ve been cracking with it? Say what you will, mobile gaming takes bandwidth, so Hayek have a great excuse for running lots of fat pipes in and out of the exchanges. And I don’t think they’re going to tell us what they’re doing with it, do you? So if we want to crack this case, we’ve got to go after it from other angles. Did you get anywhere looking for the mysterious Mr. MacDonald?”

  “Not a whisper.” You shrug. Just then, the waitress reappears with your latte and something black and villainous-looking in a small glass for Liz. “It’s as if he just vanished right off the face of the earth.”

  “Maybe he did.” You look at her sharply, but she’s just staring at her coffee as if she’s afraid it’ll bite her. “I am having second thoughts about our mysterious Mr. MacDonald. I think he’s a snipe—in the American sense.”

  You can find snipe all over Fife, they’re not endangered or anything, but you take her point. “Then why did that wee fool Wayne send me off after him? Wayne’s a civilian.”

  “Yes? I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” She’s visibly falling into a dreicht, dour mood. “They’ve all got their little angles to play, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them aren’t playing against each other. And anyway, there’s that body in Pilton. Very convenient that would be, don’t you think?”

  You have the uncomfortable feeling that the inspector is trying to tell you exactly the opposite of the words she’s using. “Aye, too convenient.”

  “My thoughts exactly. I don’t buy that line about this being unconnected. And I’m really worried about that blacknet set-up in MacDonald’s house. It doesn’t fit.” She takes a sip of her Turkish coffee, and it’s at that exact point that you realize what’s going on.

  Liz is scared shitless. She thinks she’s got a sleeping dragon by the tail, and she’s not sure it isn’t about to wake up. So she’s decided to designate you as her insurance policy.

  “Jesus, skipper.”

  “He’s not answering his IMs this century.”

  “If we can’t get ahold of MacDonald, who’re we going to go after?”

  “Haven’t you heard from your two new contacts today? The nerd and the librarian?”

  “No, I—” You pause. “They were dead keen to be helpful yesterday,” you say doubtfully.

  The waitress is back with a platter of meze for Liz and a traditional Scottish fry-up breakfast for you.

  “After lunch I want you to plug yourself back in and see what’s keeping them from you,” says the inspector. “Then I’d like you to go and talk to them, off the record. They’re not suspects, but if what I think is happening is actually happening, they might be in danger if too much information about them shows up in CopSpace.”

  “In CopSpace? But—”

  “Sergeant, this is way out of my league, but I’m not convinced that idiot Kemal from Brussels was wrong. I think there’s some kind of shitty infowar nonsense going on, some kind of nasty little intra-European diplomatic espionage spat. I’ve got a nasty feeling that someone’s already been murdered because of it, and if we don’t call time, there may be a bunch more bodies showing up. And worst of all—I think whoever’s behind it has got their claws into CopSpace, maybe a blacknet, too. And you know something? I don’t intend to do their dirty work for them…”

  ELAINE: Shanghaied

  Sitting in the back of the police car as it careens along the M8 with its lights flashing, you suddenly realize you feel deathly tired—and sick. Not nauseous, not period pain, just the kind of gut-deep malaise that comes from being stressed to the breaking point. Everything’s happened too fast for you to get a handle on it: from Jack stumbling on a Chinese student who thought you were working for the security services, to Jack being stabbed, then the insane call from Spooks Control and the taxi trying to kill you both, then the word that one of Jack’s nieces had been kidnapped, and now this…it’s too fucking much. You want to hit PAUSE, make yourself a nice mug of Horlicks, put your feet up, and watch a fluffy romantic comedy before curling up in bed. Or maybe get your shiny new claymore, find a gymnasium, and spend half an hour walloping the living shit out of a dummy. Your mental overload light is flashing red. It’s too fucking much: And you’re not getting any time off to assimilate it.

  Sucks to be you.

  Constable Patel isn’t being a whole bag of laughs—he’s so keyed up and focussed on the head-up display and the steering wheel that you’re terrified he’ll explode if you ask him anything (like, oh, “are we nearly there yet?” for values of there that map onto wherever you’re taking us), and in any case the speed with which he’s zipping past the cars and trucks in the slow lane clues you in that maybe he’s exceeding the speed limit just a little—and Jack’s not much use right now, either. Come to think of it, if you’re feeling like a pile of crap, what’s he going through right now? You glance sideways, just enough to see that he’s slumped against the opposite door, cheek leaning against the window, looking half-asleep. Just mild shock, the paramedics said, but that’s not the half of it. You know what it’s like to get home after a burglary, or to hear that a friend’s died suddenly—more’s the pity, from personal experience—and right now Jack shouldn’t be here: He should be at home and in bed. A million spy thrillers and hard-boiled detective capers insist that the hero bounces back right
after being slugged upside the head, but real life’s not like that. Sucks to be him, too. You’re torn between sympathy and a despicable little sense of warmth that comes from knowing that he’s got it even worse than you have. That’s not nice, and it’s making you feel guilty, so you shove it to the back of your head. Sympathy is respectable; that’ll do for now.

  Your left spectacle frame vibrates, signalling that your phone wants to talk to you about something. Annoyed, you hit the display sync button. It’s an instant message from—

  JACK: dont look at me dont act suspicious

  You nearly bite your tongue, so hard is the urge to look round or speak aloud. Instead, you start finger-typing. And what you type is—

  ELAINE: WTF?

  JACK: our driver is listening

  ELAINE: so?

  JACK: need 2 talk l8r not near phones

  ELAINE: LOL, afraid of bugs???

  JACK: yes

  ELAINE: got crypto on fone lines

  JACK: HA keys compromised. who else?

  ELAINE: U R paranoid

  JACK: ORLY?

  A cold shiver runs up your spine as Officer Friendly slows, then accelerates up a slip road towards the gyratory that connects the motorway to the city bypass.

  ELAINE: l8r

  JACK: OK

  You clear the chat log from your phone, then switch it to standby again. What Jack’s saying is clear enough, and for all that you think he’s being a bit paranoid, he’s got a point. You’re sitting in the back of a fucking police car, for crying out loud!

  Of course, if Jack’s afraid they’re monitoring your phone and using it as an omnidirectional bug, why the hell did he have to IM you? He’s not stupid enough to think that they won’t be snooping on his texts as well, is he? Or maybe he wants them to think he’s paranoid and needs to talk to you in private? But if that’s the case, surely they’re going to realize he’s trying to make them think he’s paranoid and—that way madness lies, the infinite receding mirror-walled tunnel of spy-versusspy. Which, let’s be honest, is what you both signed up for in a fit of boredom or a burst of manic competitive analysis, never suspecting that SPOOKS wasn’t simply a game but is some kind of Machiavellian ploy to get thousands of willing agents’ boots on the ground. Useful idiots, the real spymasters used to call them, the cannon-fodder of human intelligence gathering.