Halting State (18 page)

For the first time, you have a target and a true name: Mr. Wu Chen. Never mind which is the family name and which the personal, at least it’s a name. And it’s attached to a credit card number, although you’ve only got the last four digits.
Gentlemen, start your search engines.
Elaine is wandering along behind you with the slightly stunned expression of a Mormon missionary at a Pagan Federation summer camp—it obviously
looks
like a target-rich environment—but the set of co-ordinates attached to Wu Chen’s badge (which, like all the attendee badges at this shindig is bugged with seven flavours of RFID—you checked your privacy at the door when you filled out that marketing questionnaire, unless you remembered to pack a tinfoil wallet) is moving slowly through the huge auditorium at the back of the building.

You lock Wu Chen into the map widget hovering over to the left, then simultaneously log all your Zone IDs on simultaneously, collapsing their various shards into a single mish-mash view. Why stick with a single reality when you can walk through a multiverse? Most people are only running avatars in one realm or another, and viewing them all simultaneously is an exercise in whimsy: Here’s an astronaut talking to a devil, next door to an Orc buying a book from a vampire. It’s like being stuck inside a bazaar of the bizarre. A lecture or talk or some kind of interview is breaking up in the room to your right and there’s a coffee stand to your left, starkly mundane between a timber-framed stately home and a parked flying saucer. Then you look closer. Someone’s tagged it:
AUCTION IN FOUR MINUTES
.
As you look, the
FOUR
changes to
THREE
.
The tag references a certain eBay auction…A quick glance at your map widget confirms that Wu Chen is in room 112, which is up an escalator on the left and down a corridor.

You take off up the hall fast, shouldering your way between a troupe of baboons and a Waffen SS officer who glares at you with ill-concealed annoyance. Mr. Wu Chen owes you some answers, and you’re going to get them. But lurking behind your surface preoccupation with the Dietrich-Brunner job, there’s an unpleasant realization gnawing away at your guts. Someone is sending you nastygrams—someone who seems to know you’re working for Elaine and who’s getting all their information about you via the net is trying to get at you via your nieces.
You
don’t have kids, or a partner, or much of anything—all you friends are absent—but whoever they are, they’ve sunk their claws into the nearest soft spot they can find on the net. You’re not by nature a violent man, indeed usually you go out of your way to avoid confrontations—but that’s not going to work here. The kind of shit who’d threaten a couple of kids is unlikely to play by the rules. Either they’re totally psychotic, or disastrously misinformed—but whatever the reason, they think that Elaine’s investigation, or your involvement, is a personal threat to them. They’re not playing games. Why else would they respond that way? The stakes aren’t limited to just the crazy consultancy fee CapG are paying you anymore. There’s an icy nugget of indigestible anxiety in your stomach, and it’s telling you that you need to find Mr. Wu Chen and his stolen stash of vorpal blades and djinn lamps before he disposes of them and fades into the background, leaving you to blunder about in the darkness until someone tries to chain you to another lamppost or frame you for child abduction: or something almost unimaginably worse.

You’re panting as you take the escalator steps two at a time, racing up them and along the corridor against the flow of bodies coming out of the conference room. It’s bang on the hour, and the program items are all changing in lockstep, creating swirling vortices of bodies to drown in. Room 112 is round a corner, and as you get to it, you see that the door’s wedged open and it’s almost empty. There are tables up and down each wall, with laptops open on them in neat rows linked together with security cables: They’ve been running some kind of demo. A dozen or so people are milling around, some of them poking at keyboards and some of them just chatting. You look at them with Zone-enabled eyes and see blank-faced noobs and a solitary, glum-looking Orc pounding a keyboard. An azure gemstone revolves above his head, his guilt engraved upon it.

You twitch all your personae except Theodore G. Bear into invisibility as you walk up to him. “I’m here about the auction,” you say to his hunched shoulder.

The Orc yelps and spins round, catching the edge of the laptop screen with one sleeve and nearly sending it flying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Get real,” you say. Then you remember to be polite:
You might have to hand this over to the cops, right?
“You’re auctioning a bunch of Kensu content, prestige items. You didn’t get them the usual way. Did you expect nobody would notice?”

The Orc cowers. His Zonespace muscles may be green and rippling, but in meatspace he’s just a scrawny little guy, possibly not even out of his teens. You’re no muscle-bound hulk, but you don’t look as if a strong breeze could blow you away: And besides, you’ve got the advantage of surprise on your side. “What do you want?” he quavers.

“Information.” You fabricate an unfriendly smile. “How you got the items, for starters. Who from, and when, and where. Right now, this is still an internal investigation, but Kensu are looking to set their lawyers on whoever carried out the heist. You can reduce your exposure by co-operating fully.”

Chen glances from side to side, hunting a way out. “I don’t know anything!” he protests. “I got this loot from the clubhouse basement! Someone else put it there—”

“Tell me where the clubhouse is. Tell me when you got it.”

“You think I’m stupid?”

He’s selling loot behind their backs; that’s a weak spot. You tweak your smile slightly. “No, I think you’re trying to make some extra money. Which is why I’m here. We can do this off-line, if you want—nobody needs to know.”

His sidelong glances slow down. “You’re crazy, man,” he hisses. “I don’t know anything.”

“You know about the clubhouse.” He tenses:
Oops, back off.
“Look, I’m not after you. I’m trying to get my teeth into
them
. Ten thousand euros in blind DigiCash for what you know, starting with the clubhouse’s Zone co-ordinates.”

Ten K is a respectable sum—it’s more than you used to earn in a month—but you’re pretty sure that Elaine will sign off on it without blinking if it gets you hard information. Chen looks like he’s considering it. Then he shakes his head rapidly. “Not enough. You think I’m crazy? Guoanbu will have my kidneys if I give you that!”

“Fifteen,” you say without waiting. He begins to turn his head away. “Twenty.” He looks back at you.

“Not enough. This conversation is over.”

“I can go higher, but I need clearance,” you tell him. Which is bending the truth—you couldn’t even make either of the earlier figures stick without permission—but it’s a hook; question is, will he bite?

“Two million, and witness protection, and I tell you everything,” he says flatly. “A new identity. You can arrange that, yes?”

“Huh?” You gape at the Orc like he’s grown a second head. It’s an
out-of-context
problem, you suddenly realize. “You think I’m the government?”

He looks at you with an expression of equal parts contempt and desperation, then flicks down his glasses and bangs out on the wings of a teleport spell, elsewhere into Avalon. But spells have echoes, and the fleeing Orc isn’t as hot as he thinks; you’ve got admin permissions thanks to Hayek Associates’ pull, and you IM Venkmann a brisk note as you follow him. You find yourself in a cellar, dank and stone-floored: The walls are almost completely hidden by racks of weapons and closed treasure-chests. There’s also a very surprised Orc. He reaches over his back and pulls a sword on you, then attacks. “Leave me alone!” he yells.

Simultaneously, back in the real world, something punches you hard in your side, rocking you back on your feet. You stagger, and the motion sensors in your glasses cut them back to semi-transparent—an emergency measure—and you see Mr. Wu Chen run through the doorway. You feel a little dizzy and instinctively raise your hand. It’s just a dagger strike—no real hit points to it—so you stagger after Chen.

The translucent Orc tries to bring his big blue-glowing cleaver of a broadsword down on your ursine head, but you’re armoured up to munchkin levels and deflect it with ease. You stumble as you go through the doorway, chasing the fleeing student, and there’s something odd about your jacket, a crunching, broken feeling. Something is hanging out of your left pocket. You grab hold of it and there’s a sudden sharp flash of pain as you stick something sharp into your hand. “Shit!” you swear, and turn your glasses fully transparent.

There’s a short-bladed knife embedded in the remains of what used to be your pocket folding keyboard, and your hand is dripping blood where you grabbed hold of the blade. Elaine is coming through the door, looking annoyed. “He stabbed me,” you say, and sit down hard on the nearest chair. “He…stabbed…me…?”

The keyboard caught it.
No surprise there—you rarely go outdoors without a keyboard, mouse, phone, spare PDA, and selection of witty repartee—but you’re at a loss for words. You flick your glasses back to the fight scene as Elaine swears and grabs your left hand. The Orc is backed into a corner, whaling away at you with a virtual pigsticker.

WHATS UP?
IMs Venkmann.

“Track me in Zone,” you tell the half-empty room as Elaine presses a tissue onto your hand. “I’m where the loot is, and the guy beating up on me knows how it got there.”

“Next time leave the fighting to me,” Elaine tells you. She sounds pissed.

“But he stabbed me—” Your hand is hurting.

“No, he stabbed a piece of junk in one of your pockets.”

“I’m going to nail him!” You twitch your right hand, unlimbering the blunderbuss of +6 dungeon clearing.

“No, you’re going to come with me and file a report to Security, then we’re going to sit down and have a nice cup of tea and a chat with Constable Friendly. Believe me, you don’t want to be chasing after a violent assailant—”

“No, I mean, in Avalon Six.” You’re seeing red now. The blunderbuss booms, sparking and filling the cellar with smoke. There’s a very badly damaged Orc in front of you, backing desperately towards a doorway, as Theodore T. Bear snarls a bass rumble and reloads. “I said I was here for the auction, and he freaked. But I found the loot.”

“You.” She crowds you back against the table and abruptly reaches forward and pulls your gaming glasses right off your face.

“Hey!” you protest, nose to nose with her, so uncomfortably close that you can smell her breath, a mixture of stale coffee and a faint fragrance you can’t quite identify, eyeball to eyeball with her worried expression. “I was getting somewhere—”

“Russell can track him through Zone. You’ve got a confirmed ID, but more importantly, you got yourself assaulted.
This isn’t a game,
Jack. You don’t want to find him! You want the police to deal with it. Don’t worry about evidence, there are two security cams in every room and hallway.”

You feel embarrassed: She’s absolutely right. You’re also feeling a little shaky. You don’t know quite how you expected Wu Chen to react, but trying to stab you and making a run for it—if he’d had a real sharpie instead of a penknife, or if he’d missed the keyboard, which you’re going to have to replace, dammit—it’s outside the playbook and there’s no GM to appeal to. “Crap,” you mumble.

“You can say that again.” Elaine pauses. For a moment you made naked eye contact with her, unscreened by enhanced reality: It’s acutely embarrassing, the kind of out-of-context behaviour that business etiquette is intended to avoid. She looks shaken, too, but she’s keeping a good lid on it. “Come on, let’s get you patched up,” she says, taking a step backwards, and breaking whatever information transfer it was that was going on between you via some kind of sub-verbal mammalian protocol layer.

Then she takes you by the undamaged hand and leads you back into the real world.

By the time you reach your destination in Leith, there’s a full-dress panic in progress. Liz has IM’d Detective Superintendent Verity direct—with Kemal from Europol’s encouragement—and Verity has hit the panic button and sent every warm body south of Pilton on a wild goose chase to cordon off the block around the warehouse on Lindsay Road. Which is more than slightly inconvenient, because it’s about a hundred metres up the road from the National Executive complex on Victoria Quay, which is home to about five thousand civil service PowerPoint pushers and the population of designer furniture stores, ethnic restaurants, exclusive health clubs, real ale pubs, and cheap hookers who serve them. If Verity—or his boss, because this kind of shit tends to rise to the top—has to evacuate Victoria Quay, Questions Will be Asked in Parliament, not to mention generating many megabytes of editorial wittering in the virtual birdcage liners, and possibly some discreet resignations if the shit overflows and ends up in the air-conditioning. In fact, you wouldn’t be surprised if Verity is crapping his britches by now: This has the potential to turn into an Ian Blair moment, the kind of policing SNAFU that remains the stuff of legend decades later. Kemal and his crack squad of dark-suited mirrorshade-wearing super-cops may be used to this sort of shit, but Edinburgh’s a wee little regional boutique capital of some half million souls, about as far off the terrorism map as Oklahoma City. Which probably explains why events unfold like the Keystone Kops on crack, only with better special effects.

The remote control BMWs slow down as they hit Starbank Road and rumble alongside the docks, then pull in just past the old Newhaven fish market. “Everybody out,” says the man in black. “We walk from here.” There’s a vanload of uniforms parked up ahead: They’re setting up a barricade and preparing to divert the flow of traffic into town. It’s going to cause a real clusterfuck in short order, because half the delivery trucks for the Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre, and all the consumers, go this way—not to mention the buses and the Line Two supertrams. In fact, it’s going to be nearly as bad as that time some prize tit invited Tony Blair to come out of retirement and give the graduation speech up at Heriot-Watt. “Liz, are you sure you need me for this? Because Mac’s going to be needing every warm body he can get—”

“Stick around,” Liz hisses, trying to keep it down so the MIBs don’t notice. “You’re right, but I want to keep a second pair of eyeballs on these clowns.
With
your phone’s liferecorder running, if you please.” She’s wound up as tense as a spring surprise.

“Thinking of the enquiry?”

She gives a surprised little laugh. “Of course I am, Sergeant.” She looks over to the fence around the Western Harbour complex. “We’re too low on the totem pole to catch the flak for this one, but if the chief super himself isn’t out here in the next hour, I’d be very much surprised, and he’s going to want to know
exactly
what’s been going on.”

“Ah. Okay.” You discreetly switch all your cameras to continuous evidence logging and tap your ear with one finger. “I’m on it.” Then you fiddle with the menus in the MilSpec glasses Kemal gave you until you dredge up a local CopSpace overlay so you can see what the hell’s going on. Your earlier diagnosis of a traffic clusterfuck is confirmed: Flashing red diversion routes are springing up all over the north side of the city like chicken-pox. Overhead, a vast swirly cylinder delineates a no-fly zone—they’re diverting flights in and out of Turnhouse, airliners that would normally be on final approach over the Firth of Forth. You wince, involuntarily.
What do they think
—

Whoops.
You’re halfway along the block, behind Liz, and now you notice a bunch of support vehicles parked just round the corner: fire engines, a fire brigade support truck, a couple of ambulances, and the big mobile HQ from Fettes Row. There are even a couple of olive drab landies…“Skipper, they brought the
army
?”

Up ahead, Kemal’s control is slipping: “What’s this? I didn’t call for backup! You were to divert the traffic and keep a low profile, not throw a party!” He gestures at the self-kicking ant-hill ahead, his expression disgusted.

“What did you expect?” Liz sounds resigned. “If you didn’t want to make a fuss, you shouldn’t have told anyone you were coming. Everyone’s scared that if there’s a blow-up on their turf, they’ll catch it in the neck, so they’re all dancing the major incident whisky tango foxtrot. At a guess, I’d say the first national-level news cameras will be along in another minute.”

“Merde.”
He touches his earpiece. “We’re going to have to go in immediately.”

The target is just round the corner: It’s a big eighteenth-century stone pile, probably a bonded warehouse back in the day, now fallen upon less industrious times. The news just keeps on getting better: CopSpace shows you that the warehouses either side of it have been converted into yuppie dormitories full of lawyers and civil servants and the like. A sign over the front door proclaims it to be a branch of a well-known outdoors and extreme sports retail chain, which might be plausible if it wasn’t so clearly shuttered and padlocked. The Euro-cops have staked it out—video cameras up and down the street have been logging a metric shitload of data for weeks, capturing the faces of everyone going in and out and feeding them into some arcane international anti-terrorism database, and your glasses are just brimming with playback options—but they don’t seem to have noticed that it’s slap bang in the middle of a high-density residential area. “Aren’t you going to evacuate the neighbours first?” asks Liz. “Because if not, someone needs to tell the brass.”

Kemal swears quietly. “Go tell your commissioner,” he says tersely. “We’re starting in sixty seconds.”

The men (and women) in black are spreading around the building, not bothering to conceal themselves. Kemal’s brought nearly a dozen bodies along, and they’re getting set up: So far, it looks like a normal forced entry, except they’re all dressed like accountants and carrying paintball guns and briefcases. They seem to be listening for something, waiting on the word of a distant control centre to which you have no access. Liz taps you on the shoulder. “Stick with me,” she warns. “I don’t want you catching any of their shit.” Then she heads for the mobile HQ at the double. A couple of dibbles are waiting outside, looking pissed—probably missing their mid-shift break thanks to the entirely unplanned crisis. “I need to see the chief,” she announces, holding her warrant card where they can see it. They look relieved to see the two of you:
At last, someone who looks as if they know what’s going on.
If only they knew…

The control room in the HQ truck smells of stale coffee and sweat from all the bodies crowded inside it. One wall is a gigantic screen, presumably for those brass who could never get the hang of gestural inputs and eyeball tracking: It puts you in mind of the old joke about the mouse shaped like a pepper spray. Half a dozen dispatchers are hunched over battered HQ laptops, directing the traffic teams outside and fighting a losing battle with the inevitable tailbacks. Verity is leaning over a desk in front of it, yakking on one phone while another one trills for attention at his left elbow. He rolls his eyes as soon as he sees Liz. “I’ll be sure to do that, sir,” he says, “but the inspector’s just arrived and I need to find out what’s going on from her before I can tell you anything more. If you’ll excuse me…” He hangs up. “Save me from micromanaging”—he spots your cammy lights in time—“
gentlemen
. Right. What’s going on, Kavanaugh?” Verity using surnames is a
very
bad sign. “The deputy minister wants to know.”

Aw, shite.
Liz makes the best of it. “They’re not telling me sir, but it’s some kind of national-security flap. The good news is, it’s not your usual bampot bomb-throwers this time. The bad news is, they’re about to shut down every communications link in—”

There’s a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city. The words
NO SIGNAL
blink for a moment above Verity’s livid face. “Get after them!” he snaps. “I need eyeballs on the ground!”

Behind him the dispatchers are swearing and scribbling post-it notes: Their sergeant’s telling them off to bring up the fall-back paper system, but it’s not going to do any good—they’re already deep into SFPD territory. System Fails, People Die. From the doorway you can hear an eerie chorus of burglar alarms and car-location sensors: They’re all panicking at the lonely air-waves. There are more traffic lights in Leith than individual officers to replace them, and right now they’re all going out of sequence. You follow Liz down the steps into the cold midmorning light, just as there’s a bang from the front door of the warehouse. “Come on,” she says urgently, and heads across the road at a trot.

You rush after her, through the blizzard of milspace warning messages about fields of fire from overlooking windows and roof-tops—the MIBs have broken the door open and are into the warehouse. Seagulls squawk and wheel in the empty blue sky overhead as you take the front step, the worn sandstone gritty beneath your boots. One of the MIBs holds up a hand, standing in the twilight vestibule—there’s a rapid sequence of banging noises, then a solid
thump
. “Not clear yet,” she says, in a thick German accent. Looking at the walls, you see translucent shadows through them—there’s some kind of cute mapping system built into the MIB glasses, so that as the spooks move through the building, they feed a map of it into a shared overlay. It’s a bit like having X-ray vision. Then you begin to get a headache: The rooms are ghosting, not matching up.
“Scheisse,”
says your MIB, raising her paintball gun.

Red ideograms drip down the walls, bloody trails of information bleeding into the edges of your visual field. There’s a harsh squawking noise as the MIB spins round and unloads two rounds into the wall, half-deafening you. She shouts something in German and dashes towards an inner door, beyond which the ghostly outline of a lift shaft is superimposed over a spiral staircase and a small office, alternate realities competing for your attention. There’s another bang from inside the building, and the lights flicker. Liz looks round at you, her face white, and begins to say something, but a noise like grinding metal drowns her out, and pale tentacles vomit from her mouth. You can’t see the door you came in at anymore—the ideograms are everywhere, mocking you, and none of the walls match up. You take the nearest entrance, which is roughly where you remember the front desk as being. The room is slowly spinning around you, and there are bugs crawling on the walls. Your stomach twists, bile rising at the back of your throat: Then someone touches you. You jump a mile before your realize it’s Liz, tugging at your glasses. With them off, the room turns out to be insect-and rotation-free, but the grinding noise continues, mingling with shouts and the occasional banging of paint guns. “Get out!” she shouts, close enough to your ear that you can actually hear her. “Tell Verity!”

You nod, and she shoves you towards the doorway—visible now you’ve gotten out of the treacherous glasses. You pause in the entrance and fumble your official specs onto your face, but they’ve crashed completely; a rolling curtain of many-coloured hash blocks out your visual field. You pull them off hastily. Better to face the world barefaced than risk whatever chaos is fucking up your CopSpace.

You stumble out into the daylight, blink like a startled hedgehog while you get your bearings back, then home in on the chief, who is standing beside the HQ truck. “It’s a right mess in there,” you begin.

He cuts you off immediately: “Do they need backup?”

“I’m not rightly sure, CopSpace is fucked. The inspector told me to tell you, they’ve hit countermeasures. They’re flailing about in the toy box, you know?”

“Right.” He takes a deep breath. “Go back in and find Liz. Keep us in the loop. You, over here!” He gestures at the heavies from S Division, who’re waiting about near their response cars. “Get your goggles off, follow the sergeant here, and get ready to find out what the feds have got themselves hung up on.”

“But I—” It’s no use complaining: The chief has got it into his head that this is some kind of ned-in-a-china-shop problem, and unless you can get Kemal to stop laying about and get the hell out, Verity’ll send in the armed response boys after him. And won’t
that
be a fine mess? “On my way, sir.”

You rush back over to the warehouse and dive in the door, staying low. “Inspector,” you yell, over the noise—it’s like someone’s running a sawmill in there—“where are you?”

“Through here!” You just about hear her voice and home in on it. There’s a doorway behind the counter and an office. Chairs have been knocked over, and there’s a huge smear of purple paint on one wall. More to the point, it’s
dark
. Hitting the light switch doesn’t achieve much—someone’s cut the power. You draw your torch and flick it to wide-angle, lighting up the ceiling with it at arm’s length, then duck-walk towards the second, inner door.

The room looks to have been halfway converted into open-plan offices, once upon a time. Cast-iron pillars spaced every four metres or so support a high ceiling of wooden timbers—but the floor has been raised and covered in those beige tiles they use to cover cable ducts, and the arched, shuttered window casements all have air-conditioning units bolted to the wall below them. The lights are out, and the room is not only dark, but sweltering hot and spectacularly noisy. Between each pair of pillars a glass-fronted box like an old-style telephone booth rises most of the way to the ceiling, and these are the source of the racket: There must be at least twenty of them. You glance through one smoked-glass front, somewhat spooked, and see rows of green-and-violet LEDs blinking from a sea of aluminium fascias. They’re routers or telephone switch gear or something. Each pillar emits a blast of hot air and a variety of hissing, crackling, and whining noises, but the real source of the noise is somewhere deeper inside the building.