Halting State (19 page)

You find Liz near the centre of the room, kneeling over a Eurocop who is retching himself dry over a waste-paper basket. She’s got his glasses off, and when she glances at you, she looks haggard. “Don’t go anywhere near the stairwell,” she warns you. “Maurice and Jacques are still making sure the site’s clear before they scram the backup generator.”

Backup generator?
“The chief’s about sixty seconds away from sending in S Division,” you tell her. “He telled me to be your runner.”

“I see.” The Man in Black stops puking long enough to groan and sit back, leaning against a pillar. Liz thinks for a moment: “Tell the chief it’s all under control, but we hit electronic countermeasures. So far all we’ve got is lights on and nobody home, but if S Div come in shooting, it’s going to go blue on blue.”

“Electronic countermeasures.” You look around in disbelief. “Is that all this is?”

“No,” she says tightly, “but we’ll have it off-line in a couple of minutes. Go!”

You’ll say this for Verity, the old fart doesn’t believe in stomping on his subordinates’ chilblains. “Tell Kavanaugh she’s got fifteen minutes, or until she calls for backup.” You high-tail it back to the room of servers and pass the word on.

“Good. Mario, are you feeling better yet?” Mario, now sitting with his back to the pillar and the bin within arm’s reach, nods wearily. His glasses lie on the floor nearby, lighting the carpet up with a jagged lightning show.

“I will be alright.” He doesn’t sound it. “The others will…” He stops talking and takes a couple of deep breaths. “They’re upstairs now, except Hilda and Franz. They are looking for the generator.”

It’s almost as if someone is listening to him: There’s a tremendous double bang that shakes the floor, followed by the moan of a thousand fans whirring down into silence.

You can’t stop yourself. “It sounds like they found it,” you say, and—despite yourself—giggle. After a moment, you realize Mario and Liz are both staring at you as if you’ve grown a second head. So you stop.

“Let’s go and find Kemal,” says Liz. “What
are
these things, anyway?”

“Multi-core blade servers,” Mario pushes himself laboriously to his feet. “Each rack houses two hundred and fifty-six blades, each blade has that many processor cores—and each core is a thousand times as powerful as your phone. We are standing inside a million euros’ worth of mainframe.” He shuffles towards the interior of the data centre, back bowed like an old man. “This is an odd place to put a data centre, yes?”

You look at Liz: Liz looks back at you and shrugs. You mouth “ICE” at her, and she just twitches. “Who owns them? Where are they from?” she asks.

“That is an interesting question.” And one that Mario, who is rapidly recovering his composure, does not appear to want to answer. You peer at one of the glass doors, shining your torch through: The panel inside is labelled
LENOVO.

He heads towards the other end of the server room, and Liz follows him closely. You stick behind her, logging everything (you hope). At the other end of the room there’s a set of fire doors and a stairwell leading up—as well as another pair of fire doors with some kind of blinking fire-alarm and gas sensor mounted next to them, and Kemal himself clattering down the stairs towards you. “Not in there!” he calls.

“Why not?” asks Liz, peering at the blinkenlights by the door.

“It might not be safe.” Kemal’s eyes look hollow without the goggles. You shine your torch on the panel; it
seems
to be saying there’s no problem.

“Right,” she says with heavy irony. “I see.” She pushes the door open before Kemal or Mario can stop her. “What
is
this?”

It’s another server room, but a lot smaller than the last one, and there’s a Frankenstein machine squatting in the middle of it all, like a cheap horror prop. There are cylinders of compressed gas and lots of narrow pipes and valves, all converging on something that looks like the stainless steel thermos flask from hell, sitting under an industrial-grade cooker hood with a gigantic duct vanishing into the ceiling. There’s another rack of boxes with blinkenlights sitting next to it, flashing and winking—evidently they’re on a separate power supply. And it’s
steaming
, a trickle of chilly smoky vapour wreathing its neck. “Hey, is this dangerous?” you ask.

“Stay away from it, Sergeant!” Kemal insists sharply. “It might be explosive.”

That’s a thought, but you’ve heard enough bullshit already that you’re not about to take his word for it. What kind of bampot builds a bomb with dry ice special effects and blinking LEDs, anyway? You unhook your cams and walk around it slowly, panning up and down to capture the lot.

“Wait!” Kemal hisses. “Don’t get too close.” He steps towards you. At the same moment, you feel an odd tugging. It’s almost as if your cam has acquired a life of its own. Startled, you pull back, then glance at the thermos flask. You’re two metres away from it. You can feel the chilly vapour on your skin: You try not to inhale as you sweep the camera across the scene, then take a step back.

“Is it
dangerous
?” Liz demands, “Because if so, we’ve got to evacuate—”

“It’s another server,” Kemal says carefully, “but not a kind you can buy in a shop. In fact, what it’s doing here…” He trails off. “The power’s down,” he remarks quietly. “The refrigerator fans are quiet.”

“How long until it reaches its critical temperature?” asks Mario, right behind him.

Kemal nearly jumps. “We can’t risk that! We need it intact.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” Liz insists.

Kemal grunts, a sound like an irritated pig. “This whole installation shouldn’t exist. You don’t just drop data centres in the middle of suburbs; you’d need to get the power company to run extra cables in from the substation. There are enough processor blades in the next room to listen in on every Internet packet and voice call in Scotland; we think”—he points at the steaming Frankenstein machine—“this is probably the refrigeration vessel for a quantum processor—”

A door slams in the next room. You hear raised voices.
Angry
voices, and footsteps coming closer. Liz gestures you to one side of the door, and you quietly pull your can of whoop-ass. She nods minutely and takes a step back.

“—don’t care! You shouldn’t be here!”

“—idiots had checked with eurocontrol first—”

The doors bang open. Liz is already standing to one side, and she’s drawn her warrant card.

Standing in the doorway is one of Kemal’s henchmen, caught in vituperative argumentation with a familiar figure—Barry Michaels, CTO of Hayek Associates—and someone else behind him, middle-aged and red-faced. Barry’s hair is even more fly-away than it was when you turned up in his boardroom last Thursday, and he’s the one who’s doing most of the shouting. Henchman Number One, for his part, has lost his Man in Black poise. Possibly this is something to do with the way Barry—who, you notice, not only looks like an old public-school boy but is built like an old public-school rugby squad quarterback—has got him by the scruff of his immaculate suit jacket and is almost frog-marching him—

“Stop right there,” Liz says firmly. “You’re under arrest.”

You step sideways, keeping them both covered with your pepper spray.

Barry snorts, disgustedly. “No I’m not. Chief Constable?”

You look past him, at the man in the hounds-tooth check trousers and scary canary-yellow cardigan, with the golfing shoes and the somehow familiar face. So does Liz.

“Oh shit,” she says faintly.

“You can say that again. If you like,” says Deputy Chief Constable McMullen, who right this moment is looking distinctly peevish about been pulled away from the golf course on his day off. “Inspector, I’m here to tell you to do whatever this man tells you to do. Do you understand?”

Liz’s face is a picture. “Sir?”

Barry clears his throat. “Inspector, please turn around and face the wall. Try and forget everything you’ve seen in this building.” After a moment, he glances your way. “That goes for you, too, Sergeant.”

“But—”

“Do as he says,” McMullen says firmly. He sounds more resigned than anything else. “He’s in charge here.”

You lower your pepper spray reluctantly. “What’s going on?” you ask, inexplicably pleased with yourself for stifling your initial instinct to yell
whae the fuck?
instead.

“It’s a mix-up,” says Michaels. “Not your fault—not your force’s fault, Mr. McMullen, nobody local is blameworthy—but Kemal here forgot to notify eurocontrol about what he was doing. They’d have told him to leave well alone, but he had to go for gold, didn’t you? Now we’re just going to have to sit tight until the clean-up crew arrive to sweep the mess under the rug and put everything back where it belongs. Otherwise…” He sniffs. “I was serious about facing the wall, Sergeant.”

You glance at Liz. She nods. You turn around.

“I’m going to have to confiscate your evidence footage,” he adds, apologetically.

“What?” You can’t stop yourself. “That’s illegal!”

“I think you’ll find my department has a specific exemption.” He speaks with the Olympian certainty of a man who can use a deputy chief constable as his personal warrant card. He clearly outranks Kemal and his merry Men in Black. Hell, he probably outranks the minister. What does
that
mean? “We’ll just have to wait here for the cleaners. Shouldn’t be too long.”

Kemal clears his throat. “The power’s off. Is your quantum gadget stable? If it warms up?”

“Not my field, old boy, I’m a peopleware person. I suppose the cleaner chappies will sort it out once we get the power back up—we’ll be invoicing you for the downtime—”

At which moment, the big electromagnet quenches.

It’s your fault Jack nearly got arrested. But what did you expect?

Luckily there’s camera footage of the incident, and he’s the one with a hole in his jacket and a broken chunk of electronics, not to mention the fact that the nearest thing to a knife on his person is a multitool with a one-inch blade. But afterwards, you’re so angry you could kick yourself—or preferably the jobsworth in the security guard’s uniform who called the police over and told the constable that
Jack
had assaulted
someone else
—a someone else who by that time had probably legged it all the way over the great firewall of China and was, to put it in copspeak, Unable to Testify.

Equally luckily, the constable was willing to listen to your eyewitness account before doing anything hasty. So instead of filling out an arrest form, a disclosure notice for the CCTV footage was served, and sometime in the next couple of weeks Strathclyde’s finest will review the take and see if a crime was, in fact, committed.

Of course, you’d been labouring under the misapprehension that the men and women in uniforms wearing
SECURITY
badges were actually there to provide
security
,
as opposed to preventing attendees from chugging the free plastic cups of sherry provided by some of the more optimistic exhibitors: But that’s par for the course in Glasgow, it seems; the commission of an actual crime fills their dour Presbyterian hearts with joy (
look, a member of the criminal classes is actually
working!) while a complaint from the victim is an occasion for much swithering about clean-up rates and blackening the name of our good town and so on and so forth.

Which is why you find yourself, about two hours later, standing on a street outside the conference centre, miles from anything (except for a couple of high-rise hotels, a preserved dockyard crane the size of the Eiffel Tower, and a Foster Associates’ mothership that looks to have suffered a wee navigation mishap on final approach into London’s docklands), trying to cajole a shocky and stressed-out Jack in the direction of shelter. Because it’s Glasgow, where the weather offers you a creative combination of hypothermia and sunburn simultaneously: and right now it’s playing a DJ mix with six El Nino events, a monsoon, and a drought on the turntables.

Anyway. Blood sugar is the most important thing to get under control after a stressful confrontation, so that’s what you decide to tackle first. “C’mon, Jack, let’s get back to the city centre and try to find some lunch.”

Jack groans and mutters something inaudible. He’s been withdrawn, like a snail pulling itself tightly back into its shell, ever since the security goons ejected you both from the giant wood-louse; and it’s not just his lack of an umbrella. “’M an idiot.”

You know better than to agree with that self-summary, and you also know better than to disagree with it. “No, that idiot with the badge was the idiot. You aren’t an idiot yet—but you will be if you don’t get something to eat and a chance to chill out. You’re taking the rest of the day off. Understand?”

That raises the ghost of a smile. “The train journey’s not billable time, anyway.” But he unhunches slightly and begins to walk, face screwed up in distaste. “Who are Guoanbu?” he asks, pronouncing the word carefully. “Some kind of Chinese farming clan?”

You shake your head. “Never heard of them. Try Googling?”

“Okay.” He twitches. “Mind if I call a taxi?”

“I’ll do it.” You phone the first cab company that comes up in your glasses and they promise that a car will be with you inside of two minutes. “Getting anywhere?”

You notice his face. Jack’s gaping stupidly again, the way he does when he’s been surprised by something and hasn’t remembered he’s in public: He was probably wearing an embryonic version of that expression when the midwife spanked him on the bum. “Oh fuck,” he says, then his facial muscles twitch and come back under control. “Oh dear baby fucking Jesus Christ on a roller-skate.”

“What?” It’s raining, you’re irritated with yourself, now you’re annoyed at Jack: Fists on hips, you feel a strong urge to bite somebody’s head off. (It’s just a shame you’d regret the consequences.) “Would you care to
explain
yourself? Or are we just swearing in the rain because it’s wet, or something?”

He swallows. “I found out who Guoanbu are,” he says. “Here.” And he flicks a tag at your glasses. It takes you a moment to open it. And then you see:
GUOJIA ANQUAN BU. MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY
. Guoanbu is an abbreviation or acronym or whatever the Mandarin equivalent is for KGB, CIA, MI5, Mossad.
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION ON THE NIGHT FLIGHT TO GUANZHOU
. “Chen was scared that they’d, they’d ‘have my kidneys’ if he squealed. Said he wanted two million, plus witness protection. That’s when he ran.” Jack’s face is pale in the chilly drizzle. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

A driverless black minivan wearing a
TAXI
sign on its bonnet glides up to the kerb beside you and unlocks its doors. “Sounds like a game of
SPOOKS
to me,” you say lightly, and get in. “Come on, the rain’s getting heavier.”

Your map tells you there’s a cluster of interesting-sounding restaurants in the West End, so you tell the call-centre driver to take you there. He has a bit of trouble making out your accent at first, but you convey your desires successfully at the third attempt and settle back to watch the steering wheel twitch in the grip of a poltergeist, beneath the rain-streaked windscreen. There are probably webcams in the headlight and brake light assemblies; you certainly hope your driver can see better than you can. “Do you know where we’re going?” Jack asks anxiously. “I’m lost in Glasgow.”

He’s speaking metaphorically: Of course nobody is ever really lost, not anymore. “Never been here in my life,” you say cheerfully enough, “but I’ve found a couple of restaurant review forums and a mashup overlay. What do you think of this—contemporary Russian/Eastern European fusion cuisine, German beers, vodka bar next door, and old Soviet décor? It’s called Stavka.”

“Stavka? There’s one of those up in Dundee,” he says dismissively. “It’s okay, but a bit heavy on the cabbage and mutton.”

“Well then”—the taxi circles a roundabout closely then accelerates hard, forcing you to grab one of the handles—“we can see what’s next door.”

“Next door, that’d be on Sauchiehall Street, right? Hey, why are we going this way?”

Something in Jack’s tone of voice makes you sit up sharply: Your seat belt brings you up short. “What do you mean?”

“Sauchiehall Street is
that
way,” he says.

“It could be a one-way—” You stop trying. Obviously he’s been over here often enough that he knows some of the street names. A moped whizzes past on the other side of the road as the taxi accelerates. Then your phone rings. “What’s going on?”

“Your phone,” Jack suggests. “I’ll sort this out. Hey, driver—” He’s talking to the mike under the red LED behind the empty driver’s seat as you see the phone call is from an unlisted number.

“Who is this?” You run the volume up so you can hear over the traffic noises.

There’s a familiar three-bar jingle, then: “Agent Barnaby, this is Spooks Control.” You muffle a groan; this is almost exactly the worst possible time for
SPOOKS’
GMs to assign you another task. On the other hand, you can record it and deal with it later. “Your authenticator is: Mapplethorpe Paints Roses.”

“Talk to my voice mail please, I’m busy right now.” You try to keep your tone brisk but professional.

“You are in a taxi in Glasgow,” the
SPOOKS
call-centre droid continues, an edge of urgency creeping into his voice. “Unfortunately, its remote driver service has been penetrated by a Guoanbu black operations team.
This is not a game.
”

“What. The. Hell?” You stare at the wiperless windscreen, where Jack is now speaking very loudly and urgently into the microphone, and you realize the taxi’s accelerated to match the speed limit, and the central locking is engaged, and there’s a perspex screen between the two of you and the controls.

“Guoanbu assassins have used this technique in the past: They hijack a taxi or car, drive it to a sufficiently isolated location, and crash it. Your investigation of the leak at Hayek Associates has made you a target. We can’t give you a police intercept without exposing our knowledge of their penetration of our infrastructure, which might provoke a major incident. You must break out of the taxi while it is stationary at traffic lights, or break into the driver’s compartment and disable it.” Jack is shouting and thumping the electric window control. “Call in when you have time,” says the spook. Then your phone goes dead.

“Shit.” Swearing doesn’t achieve anything, but under the circumstances…You look left, right, left again: traffic, rain, a blurring wall of four-story tenements stacked out of red sandstone blocks rushing by. “We’ve got to get out of here, Jack!”

Jack turns. There’s panic in his eyes. “I heard!” He thumps the latch on the polycarbonate screen with the flat of his hand, then swears. The taxi’s doing about sixty kilometres per hour, bearing right onto a two-lane-wide stretch of concrete underpass—they’re big on brutalist road-building on this side of the country, it seems—and he’s unfastened his seat belt so he can get at the screen. If the carjacker just decides to aim for the nearest bridge abutment, it’ll be curtains for Jack—but no, the webcam in the passenger compartment is dangling from its socket like a popped eyeball. Your mind flashes through scenarios.
Bridge
: No, too much chance of an ambulance rescuing someone. They’ll wait until you’re out of town, then drive over the edge of a quarry, or into a river, or the sea. Webcams popped to prevent blackboxing, doubtless a necessary safety precaution for the careful automotive assassin.
The unruly passengers broke into the driver’s compartment, nobody to blame but themselves:
That’s what this is all about, it’s an SFPD assassination, after all. Oddly, you can feel an icy sheen of sweat in the small of your back, but you’re not frightened or panicking: You’ve played this game a hundred times before, planted plastic boxes on the walls of consulates, tailed another spook through a busy city’s streets, made the dead-letter drop…

Oh.

“Jack. We’ve got to get into the cab. I know what to do.” The buttons on the steering column are mocking you: so easy to press, but impossibly inaccessible. Your hands unfasten your seat belt on autopilot. “Give me your multitool.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls it out, passing it to you handle first: “Why?”

You turn it over in your hands—a lump of machined titanium with weirdly recessed slots and bumps in it, frustratingly opaque when you’re in a hurry. “I want to unscrew that latch.”

“Oh.” He hunches round on the jump-seat. “But—”

“We’ve got time,” you reassure him, even though you’re not entirely sure of it yourself. The cold sweat is spreading.

“Give me that.” He takes the multitool: His hands are large and warm, his nails evenly clipped, but there’s an odd twist to his index fingers, almost as if their tips are curved. You notice this as you place the tool in his palm. It’s funny what you notice when you’re skating on the thin ice above a chilly pool of panic.

Jack crouches, flips the jump-seat out of the way, and kneels on the floor so he can peer at the catch on the sliding panel. Things flip out and latch into place as he twists the tool, then begins swearing continuously in a conversational tone of voice. “Got it.” A black screw pops out and disappears onto the similarly black carpet. Then another. The buildings are thinning out on either side as the taxi sways and bounces, slowing as it merges with a stream of out-bound traffic, always sticking to the overtaking lanes, keeping close to the speed limit. You twitch in the grip of second thoughts—
shouldn’t we have tried to get a door or window open?
—but then you have visions of falling out of a fast-moving taxi in traffic. A third screw comes loose. “Shit. This one’s stripped.”

“What—”

“Lend me a shoe.”

He’s wearing trainers, you realize. You quickly unlace one of your shoes, thanking providence that round toes and platform heels are in again. Yours are only a couple of centimetres high, but it’s enough for Jack to use it as a hammer, whacking the flat rasp-blade of his tool between the catch and the panel, levering away, until—“Gotcha!” He looks over his shoulder at you, sheepishly. “What do I do now?”

“Reach over and engage the autopilot,” you explain. “Once it goes into automatic drive, it’ll lock on to the roadside beacons and cut the remote driver out of the loop.” You hope. “Then you can take back manual control if nothing goes wrong.”

He looks befuddled. “But I can’t drive!”

“Then strap yourself in and stay out of my way.” You’re not sure you can do this—you’re a Londoner, you don’t own a car, your driving license is just another form of ID—but the taxi’s speeding up, and the traffic is thinning out, and there are only occasional buildings now. “Okay. Brace yourself.”

You slide the panel sideways and grab the steering wheel. There isn’t room to fit your body through the window, just your left arm, reaching around to the driver’s seat on the right, and the alarm that starts screaming in your ears as soon as you get the panel open is deafening: The taxi lurches horribly towards the near side, and you stab at the buttons, bending a fingernail back and painfully clouting your knuckles as the steering wheel begins to spin—

And straightens out as the autopilot locks on to the markings on the open road—

Too hard.

There are limits to what idiot servos are capable of. You hear the blare of horns from outside, then a horrible crunching thump from behind that whacks you back into the passenger compartment, as the taxi spins across the central reservation and slides towards the on-coming lights.

Then everything stops making sense.