Halting State (25 page)

And then you had to say it.

“There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” you said, through a throat that felt like bricks lined with cobwebs.

“Mm?” She tensed slightly and pulled back.

“When I was fourteen, at school”—she stopped moving in your arms, going limp, listening—“I got caught on camera.”

It was the old shame and embarrassment tap-dance. It took you a moment to gather your wits: during which she tensed. “What were you doing?”

“I was”—you took a deep breath—“she was fifteen. We were doing this, more or less. Kissing.”

You felt the tension go out of her. “That’s all?”

“The head teacher was having a, a demonstration. Showing his new camera system to the community relations constable. Who noticed it officially. They called me up.”

“What?” The tension in her arms is systolic, squeezing you like an ocean.

“Under the Sexual Offences Act, the new one they’d just passed,
any
sexual contact with an under-sixteen was—well, we didn’t know any better, and it was before they passed the amendment a couple of years later. I accepted a caution. And so did Claire.”

“What?”
Her arms tightened around you.

“I’m just trying to say.” You took a deep breath: “You may not want to go any further. With someone who’s listed on the sex offender’s register as a paedophile.”

She shuddered slightly. “A
what
?” She sounded incredulous.

“Sexual contact with a minor. It covers kissing or copping a feel, you know? She was nearly a year older than I was; another twelve months and we’d have been legal, anyway, but the trouble is, neither of us knew better than to accept a caution. It means they won’t prosecute; but it’s an admission of guilt, it gets you a criminal record, and unlike a conviction in court which carries a sentence with an expiry date, a caution is never spent. If I’d kicked up a fuss and demanded a trial, the children’s panel would have told the police to piss off and stop wasting their time, but as it is…it follows me around.” Your breath was coming too fast. “I’m
scared
.”

You realized after a moment that she was still holding on to you tightly. Almost like she was drowning. “Jack.” She spoke into the base of your throat. “I have to ask you this. Are you a nonce?”

“No, but I have to tell—” No,
you
don’t have to tell, but the mummy lobe, the five-year-old who believed what the grown-ups said about always telling the truth, had to confess to
everything
, just like that horrible morning in the head’s office—

“Honestly, Jack, you
don’t
.” Her nose was at the side of your neck. You could feel her tongue, exploring your clavicle. “It’s just a bug in the legal code. You don’t need to punish yourself any more.”

“What they’ll do—Michaels says Elsie is missing—”

“Shut up!” She was fierce, angrier than Lucy was when she found out and dumped you, hotter than the coldly venomous whispering behind your back during that last, miserable (not to mention celibate) year at university. But the strength of her hug told you it wasn’t you she was angry at. “Idiot. How old do you think I was the first time I kissed a boy?”

“I’m afraid—”

She kissed you again. “They didn’t catch me on camera. That’s the only difference between us.”

And now she’s breathing evenly and slowly, a faint draught of cool, slightly beery breath riffling through the fine hairs on your arm: And you’re studying her closed eyelids and relaxed face, her dark eyebrows relaxed in sleep, by the faint glow of the red LED street-lamp outside the bedroom window, and you’re feeling a tenderness almost as vast as the sea of surprise that’s crashed through your front door and made itself at home under the duvet, warm and naked and sleeping next to you as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

And you think,
This probably changes everything.
But whether it changes it for better or worse, only time will tell.

You know what Liz wants you to do, don’t you? She wants you to go and find the nerd and the librarian, Jack Reed and Elaine Barnaby, and put it to them that they can be of help in your investigation. (That, and she wants you to switch all your network services off and wear a tinfoil hat under your four-leafed clover.) Which would be easy enough, if you could only bloody locate the terrible twosome. As it is, when you get back to the station and go live again, you bounce in quick succession off their voice mailboxes, IM receptionists, and social websites. Which tells you a lot about them (Jack’s into extreme knitting, Elaine likes dressing up as Maid Marian and hitting people with a sword) but nothing particularly useful like where they’re hiding. After half an hour of persistently not finding them—you know they headed over to Glasgow in the morning, but, by the time you get to the point of escalating your search, both their mobies are off-line—you’re out of ideas. So it’s time to get all twentieth-century and hit the pavement.

Except these two aren’t your usual neds. They’ve got no pavement to hang out on, just a hotel room and a recycled nuclear bunker. By the time you’ve confirmed they’re not filling up a conference room at the hotel, you’ve narrowed it down a wee bit: But then you hit a blank wall down at the bunker.

“They’re not here.” It’s Beccy Webster, the Market Stabilization Executive, coming on all Lady Macbeth at you. “I haven’t seen them, they haven’t been signed in, and you’re wasting your time.” She sniffs and stares down her nose, like you’re from the cleaning agency, and you’ve just smeared printer toner all over her nice clean walls.

“Oh really?” You raise an eyebrow at her, but your authority field is down below half strength. She just looks at you icily and nods.

“Yes. We’ve tightened up security a lot since last week.”

Fuck.
“Is Mr. Richardson in his office, then?”

“Of course. But he won’t tell you any different.” One more sniff, and she signs you in, then stalks off in a huff.
Bitch.
But you’ve been here before, and you know the way. So you go and knock on Wayne’s door, and when it opens, you give him your best shit-eating grin.

“Mr. Richardson. I was hoping to find you here!”

Wayne gives you a rabbit-in-the-headlights look and backs into his room. “Really?” he asks cautiously.

You follow him in. It’s a dingy little hole, lit by a strip of blue-white daylight LEDs strung around the upper edges of the walls. He’s got a bunch of tattooed sheepskins with his name on them up on the wall behind his desk, framed so you can’t really miss them (
ALL-ANGLESEY MIDDLE MANAGEMENT SHEEP SHAGGING CHAMPION,
2014) and a suspiciously large monitor parked on the blotter. “Have you by any chance seen Jack Reed or Elaine Barnaby today?” you ask him. And this time you’ve got the speech-stress monitor on real time, just out of curiosity.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t,” he says, and he’s telling the truth, dammit.

“Do you know where they’ve gone?” you ask.

“I’m sorry, but no. They haven’t been in all day.” He frowns pensively. “That’s odd, now you mention it.” He’s green-lit within the error bars, all the way: telling the truth again.
How inconvenient.
“They were running some sort of database trawl overnight, I think. They demanded access to a lot of rather sensitive data yesterday evening and left a big batch job running.”

“What kind of data were they after?” you ask, just cross-referencing in case it spooks Wayne into putting a foot wrong.

“A bunch of stolen magic plot coupons, described in Structured Treasure Language. I gave him read-only access to our code repository, so he could compile in some modules, and hooks into a bunch of the online auction-houses who buy and trade prestige goodies. I think that’s all, but I may be wrong—they were haggling with Sam.”

“Sam…?”

“Sam Couper.”

You twitch up a mug shot you captured earlier, back when you first parachuted into their full-metal panic. “Is he in today?”

“Sure!” Wayne looks surprised. “Third door down the hall on your left, you can’t miss it: It’s the one with the sign saying ‘Real programmers do it with a float’.”

He’s right, you can’t really miss it. So you walk right up to the door and, hearing voices, open it.

You are in a windowless room, with a huge, curved desk extending around three walls. The desk is covered in flat-panel displays, electronic gadgets, wires, books, print-outs, and half-eaten pizza crusts. The walls are covered with many-coloured maps gridded out with hexagonal overlays: What bare space there is is taken up by an Ansari Space Camp calendar. Three adult males sit bolt-upright in expensive wheelie chairs, facing the centre of the room, whistling a vaguely familiar melody while one of them—balding, thirtyish, red-faced—frowns furiously, concentrating as he juggles four or five small plush Cthulhu dolls. (After a moment you realize they’re all trying to whistle the
Twilight Zone
theme, slightly out of key.)

It takes a moment for them to notice you: Then the whistling falters to a diminuendo, followed by a splattering of bat-winged beanie-monsters crashing to the institutional blue-green carpet. For a moment there is a guilt-stricken silence so thick you could hear a snowflake fall, then one of them finds his voice. “What do
you
want?” he demands. It’s Sam “traceroute is my bitch” Couper, and his associates Darren and Mike. (Darren is the juggler of eldritch horrors.)

You smile evilly. “I want to pick your brains.”

Darren shudders, but Sam is made of tougher stuff. “I already told you everything I know.”

You can’t help it. Something about this room seems to exclude you. It must be all the frustrated testosterone sweated into the concrete walls over the years: But whatever it is, it gets right up your nose. “You told me everything you knew as of three days ago, Mr. Couper. I’d like to know what transpired between yourself and Jack Reed and Elaine Barnaby yesterday afternoon or evening.”

“Huh?” Sam looks surprised. “It was Wayne. He brought them in and told me, give them what they want. They wanted a list of what we could drag out of the journal logs from the bank, right before the robbery. And the source code to some of our in-house tools so that Reed could hack on them to go search for the missing loot. That’s all, I didn’t have anything to do with them afterwards.”

“I see.”
Dammit,
he’s
telling the truth, too! How unhelpful.
“Do you know when they left?”

“When they…? No, I don’t. Reed was still here when I went home, around 7:00
P.M
. I think he was pulling an all-nighter.”

“Uh-huh.” Whatever else you can say about him, he sounds like a hard worker. You glance at Darren and Mike. “Do either of you know anything else? Your help would be very much appreciated.”

“Know—” Mike stops. “Yesterday Jack saved my ass.”

“What do you mean, he saved your ass?” you ask.

“We were—I was being Venkmann, one of the house avatars. Your two pet auditors were messing around in Avalon, and they called me in because they’d tracked down the entry point for the Orcs. Turns out it was a hacked Iron Maiden and someone had converted it into a shredder and added a bunch of traps. We were jumped by slaadi while I was immobilized, but they got me out of it. The other end of the shredder turns out to be in Zhongguo, where we don’t have any administrative access.”

It’s so much gibberish to you, but you pull one piece out of it as sounding like it needs further clarification. “Zhongguo?” You mangle his pronunciation. “Where’s that?”

“It’s another Zonespace game, run by Hentai Animatics. I captured the fight, if you want I can send you an AVI of it?”

He’s trying to be helpful, you realize with a sinking heart. That’s just what you don’t need—what you’re looking for is pushback, not volunteers. “Aye, if you could forward it to me that would maybe help,” you tell him to shut him up. “Well, I’ll be going.” You hesitate for a moment, looking at the plushies sleeping on the ocean-blue carpet. “Would you mind telling me what was all that about?” You manage to maintain an even tone of voice that would probably make Liz proud.

“Focus break,” says Russell. “We work till it gets too much, and then…juggling elder gods just seems to help with the stress, you know?”

“I see.” You beat a hasty retreat and manage to hold a lid on it until the door behind you is shut tight on the juggling rocket scientists and their mad ritual.

Hentai Animatics. At least you can see if that tentacle leads somewhere interesting…

When you step out of the lift back up to the car-park you discover that a cold drizzle is falling—and you’ve got even more voice mail to put a damper on the occasion. “Elaine from Dietrich-Brunner here—can you call me when you get this? I believe we’ve got a lead for you on the items that were stolen from Hayek Associates.” This does not improve your mood, especially when you check the time-stamp and realize it’s at least four hours old.

You call her back, but get put straight through to
her
voice mail. “Ms. Barnaby? This is Sergeant Smith, returning your call. Could you, or Mr. Reed if you are with him, call me back as soon as possible, please? Thanks.”

You’re getting a bad feeling about this. You’re supposed to be on top of things, but getting traction on this case is proving remarkably difficult—and that was before your voice mail started keeping its own counsel. Liz’s words float back to you:
Whoever’s behind it has got their claws into CopSpace.
Normally you wouldn’t credit such hallucinations, but Inspector Kavanaugh with her sharp suits and her degrees in criminology and social science isn’t so much climbing the greasy pole as riding up it on a personal jet pack; not so much a straight arrow as a guided missile aimed at making chief constable. If she’s going all swivel-eyed on you and muttering about spies and cloak-and-dagger stuff, but hasn’t gone completely off the deep end (and the arrival of Kemal’s bumbling gang of Keystone Kops this morning suggests that if she
is
nuts, the funny farm should be expecting a bumper crop), then you bloody ought to keep your eyes peeled for secret agents doing the funny handshake two-step down by the water of Leith.

So. What else can you do, beside waiting for the nerd and the librarian to surface? You consult your conscience and realize that: (a) you still haven’t recorded your evidence in the Hastie breaking-and-entering case, (b) you’ve been shamelessly neglecting Bob (who, despite your recent abduction to Liz’s firm, is still your responsibility), and (c) you’ve dead-ended, unless you want to put the Hentai Animatics lead into CopSpace and see where it goes. Which, now you think about it, isn’t a bad idea at all. So you wheech out your personal mobie—the one you usually use to keep tabs on Davey—and phone Bob on his, just on the off chance: And he picks up on the second ring. “Yes?”

“Bob? Sergeant Smith here. You busy?”

“Bus—uh, no, Sergeant! What can I do for you?” He’s like an over-eager puppy: You can see him drooling and wagging his tail while clenching a pair of size ten DMs in his mouth.

“I’ve got a little project, Bob. When you get a chance, I want you to hop along to the nearest library and borrow one of their public terminals. Dig up everything you can find on a company called Hentai Animatics—they run games”—you take time to spell it out to him—“then text it to me. Don’t bother going through CopSpace yet. If you can get it to me by end of shift, I’ll be happy.”

“I’ll do what I can, Sergeant.” You don’t need telepathy to sense the doubt in his voice.

“If you think it sounds flaky, Constable, take it to Inspector Kavanaugh. She’s who I’m working for right now.”

“Oh. Well, if you say so, ma’am! I’ll get onto it right away. Or as soon as Constable Wilson goes on his next coffee break.”

You end the call, shaking your head slightly at the thought of Paul “two lumps” Wilson running Bob ragged: Stranger things have happened, but not recently. On the other hand, that’s your lead taken care of. Now you can piss off back to the station to
finally
record your statement, catch up with big Mac in case he’s forgotten you used to work for him, and sort out the paperwork that’s been building up since last Thursday. Tomorrow is another day.