Halting State (26 page)

There’s a subterranean snuffling sound from somewhere under the duvet, then a sense of warmth. You freeze for a moment while the recoil-reflex dies away, then relax into it. An arm slowly reaches across you, an animal comfort—or maybe
he
can’t quite believe he isn’t alone (and is having second thoughts).

This is not the first time you’ve woken up with the dawn to find yourself in a strange man’s bed. (Well, not a complete stranger—but you’ve known him for less than a week, and what’s that in real terms?) Mind you, on second thoughts, if you’re mutually attracted to someone, a week in close proximity is enough time to figure out what you’ve both got in mind: And no number of extra months will make one whit of difference if one or the other of you isn’t interested. And yesterday was more than a little crazy, which always tends to speed things up. But if you lie awake for much longer staring at the floral Rorschach patterns on the inside of the curtains—
where did he get them?
or, more realistically,
who inflicted them on him and why did they hate him so much?
—you’re going to start worrying morbidly about whether it was really a good idea, about whether it was
sensible
, rather than being what you both needed at the time. And if you start tugging at the loose ends of your self-doubt like that, not only will you bury the memory of comfort under a cairn of
buts
, you’ll stifle any prospect of continuing to explore this thorny maze of insecurity and need that hems you in…just like you did last time. Trust you to get involved with a man who’s even more insecure than you are.

“Jack?”

He shuffles closer, spooning up to your back. “Mm?”

“Been awake long?”

He pauses for a long time. “Had difficulty sleeping.”

“Well.” You press your back against him. “We’re going to have to face the music later.”

“If there
is
a later.”

You bite the inside of your cheek.
Ah well.
“Isn’t there going to be one?”
Please don’t tell me he’s bailing out already
…

“I’ve been working through what Michaels said—”

You unromantic sod!
you think, somewhat relieved.

“—about the implications of a core-router exploit on a national level.”

Oh for fuck’s sake.
You resist the urge to elbow him in the ribs. “Yes? Is it bad?”

“Very…especially the worst case. Imagine you can’t get any money out of a cashpoint, even though there’s money in your bank account. That’s annoying, right? Now imagine the entire APACS network goes down. And, oh, the contents of your bank account are randomized, along with everyone else’s. And all the supermarket stock-control databases go down, so they don’t know what’s moving and what’s on the shelves. And all their suppliers’ networks go down, so nobody knows what stock they’ve got, and where it is. And finally, all the Internet service providers and telcos and cellcos go down hard, and stay down—”

You’re fully awake now. “Stop. You’re saying, no communications? No money? No food? What are you saying?”

“That’s the start of it.” His tone of voice is maddeningly reasonable. “No transport, because you can’t trust the remote driver services or the online navigation systems and the road-pricing and speed-control systems are down. Medical services are knocked back to emergency-only because NHSNet is down. The police are forced back to relying on runners and whistles, and as for the fire service…better hope there aren’t any. When people start dying, you can’t even identify them, because the identity register’s been scrambled, too, so the biometrics point to the wrong personal files.”

“That sounds more like an act of war than a hack.” You roll away from him.

“That’s what it would be.” He sounds almost pleased with himself. You don’t see why: It’s not as if Michaels is paying him to do this kind of freelance analysis while he’s in bed, is it? “And that’s the
twentieth-century
model, what they used to call an electronic Pearl Harbour. Things have moved on since then. More likely, it would be a lot more subtle. Footnotes inserted in government reports feeding into World Trade Organization negotiating positions. Nothing we’d notice at first, nothing that would be obvious for a couple of years. You don’t want to halt the state in its tracks, you simply want to divert it into a siding of your choice. And if a couple of auditors die in a taxi crash, who cares?”

“What—” You stop, feeling cold. Despite your carefully cultivated habit of keeping work and private life separate, he’s got you to put your thinking cap on. Any vague thoughts about a pre-prandial cuddle go out the window. “You’re messing with my head! I need coffee first.”

“You want coffee at a time like this?” You can feel him shaking his head through the mattress.

Fuck him,
you think, heavy with regret.
Or not, as the case may be.
You lift the duvet back and sit up, shivering in the cool air. “Coffee, slave.”

“It doesn’t have to happen,” he says hopefully. “Nobody in their right mind would
do
such a thing, not short of actual pre-existing hostilities. The Guoanbu for sure doesn’t want to destroy Scotland’s infrastructure—we’re part of the EU, their biggest trading partner. On the other hand, by demonstrating that they’ve got such a capability, they force us to pay attention to it…we’re into diplomacy here, aren’t we?”

There’s doubt in his voice, and suddenly you can see what’s going through his mind: lying awake at night, next to your sleeping form, thinking morbid thoughts about the future, self-doubt gnawing at him—it’s the mirror image of your own uncertainty, only he’s externalizing it, projecting it on the big picture rather than worrying about his own prospects. So you swallow your cutting response and instead nod at him, encouraging. Maybe you can salvage something more than memories if you help him get this out of his system first.

“A ‘capture the flag’ exercise by a bunch of deniable hackers—well, either it works, or it doesn’t. If it works, they’ve got the kind of espionage edge that the old-time CIA or KGB would have creamed themselves over, and if it fails, they’ve learned something.” He pulls on a tee-shirt by the light of the bedside lamp and pads around to your side of the room. “Want to stay here? Or come downstairs and talk?”

You slide out of bed and pick up his dressing-gown, from where you dropped it last night. “I’m listening.”

“Michaels wants to use us to flush out Team Red’s resident agent so he can then back-track through their audit trail and roll up the hole Team Red came in through. Assuming we trust him when he says
SPOOKS
isn’t compromised, all we have to do is set up a situation where they come for Nigel MacDonald, then wrap them up…And there’s always the chance that my filter tool has caught some more stolen prestige items overnight.”

His happy babble is slowing down, his uncertainty finally rising to the level of consciousness. “Jack. Listen.” You’re standing behind him. It’d be really easy to reach out and put your arms around his waist, if you could just break through his preoccupation. “You’re talking about people who have, at best, been involved in a criminal conspiracy to commit robbery, and at worst, have been involved in preparing the groundwork for a major act of terrorism. Who come from a country where people who do that sort of thing usually end up dead, and who know they’re expendable, and we’re sniffing around after them.” He tenses. “Remember last time? Remember your niece is still missing? And you think getting in deeper is a good idea?”

You can see it all laid out before you. All you have to do is draft a whitewash report,
nothing found
, and scurry back to London with your tail between your legs before the shit hits the fan. Maggie and Chris will pat you on the head, and you can get back onto the Dietrich-Brunner promotion treadmill (even without the funny handshake, nod, and wink from Barry Michaels that says
she’s one of us, look after her
). And you can put Jack on a flight to Amsterdam to continue installing the hang-over he was working on when this whole mad whirlwind blew out of nowhere to engulf you both. You don’t have to see each other ever again, and nobody needs to get hurt. Jack can go back to biting his belly raw over an unjust wound, and you can go back to keeping the world at bay. Chalk it up to experience and leave Michaels to swear over the wreckage of his intricately planned human-engineering hack. Jump back into your emotional coffin and slam the lid; nobody needs to get hurt. And if this wasn’t the morning after, that’s exactly what you’d do.

He shudders and begins to turn round. “Elaine, I don’t think they’ll just let me leave. There’s stuff I used to do in my last job, I can see why they’d want me—”

You can feel his breath on your cheek, shallow and anxious. You lean towards him. “If you get yourself stabbed again, I will be
very angry
with you.”

“I”—he reaches out to you hesitantly—“know.”

And then the doorbell rings.

The moment is as fragile as a painted eggshell. The doorbell rings just as Elaine’s early-morning chill seems to be thawing: just as you pick up her first indication that she isn’t, actually, embarrassed or mad at you or wishing she’d chewed her arm off at the shoulder and slipped out the window rather than waiting for dawn. It is an instant laden with profundity—and the bell shatters it.

“You’d better answer that,” she says, looking at you as calmly as a robot, the urgency of the moment suddenly masked.

“Okay.” You grab your underpants and hop towards the staircase, pausing to get one foot in at a time.

The doorbell chimes again just as you get to it. You pause for a moment, then stick your face up to the security lens. The fish-eye view is hard to interpret, but it looks like a police uniform. Your stomach does a double back-flip of Olympic-qualifying proportions as you twist the Yale lock and pull. “Hello?”

“Mr…. Reed? Jack Reed?” There’s something odd about the constable, and then it clicks: He’s reading from a handwritten piece of paper. (That, and he looks very young and inexperienced.) “Inspector Kavanaugh sent me. Would you be aware of the location of a Ms. Barnaby?”

“I’m Jack. She’s here, too.” The handwritten note gives you a sudden flicker of optimism. “What can we do for you?”

“If I can come inside, sir?” You take a step back, involuntarily. The constable looks a little unhappy about something, as if he’s steeling himself to deliver some bad news. “I’m told that yesterday you were in Glasgow. Is that correct?”

An icy moment of clarity:
Should I call my solicitor now?
you wonder.

“Yes,” calls Elaine, and you look round automatically. She’s standing at the top of the staircase, huddled inside your dressing-gown.

“I see, ma’am.” The cop nods, and you notice something else that’s odd—he’s not wearing heavy-framed glasses, and there’s no webcam Velcro’d to the front of his anti-stabby vest. You peer at the name tag on his chest:
LOCKHART
. “Well, in that case, the inspector said to pass on her apologies, and would you mind coming down to the city mortuary to attempt to”—he swallows—“identify a deceased person for us?”

“Oh
fuck
,” you say, just as Elaine expresses a similar sentiment. You glance at her and see your own shock, mirrored and multiplied.

“I’m sorry, sir.” PC Lockhart sounds mortified.

It’s got to be Mr. Wu Chen, prize bastard and the only person you know who was angling to get himself killed. One James Bond movie too many tries to bubble past your tongue, but the mummy lobe clamps down before you can say something you might regret later, like
he knew the shortest way to my heart
or
the bastard owes me a new keyboard
. Because that would be Inappropriate, and saying Inappropriate things at the Wrong Time in front of a Police Officer is bound to get you into Hot Water, and despite the fact that the past week has somewhat taken the shine off your virginal relationship with the forces of law’n’order, and despite the fact that Elaine (astonishingly) doesn’t think you’re some kind of pervert and (even more astonishingly) seems to want to install herself in your life, you have no desire to become any more intimate with their ways than you already are.

“We’ll come along,” you hear yourself say. “We’re just…up. Do you mind if we get dressed first?”

Lockhart looks mortified, as if he’s dreaming and has just realized he’s wearing a pink tutu under his tunic. “No! No! I’ll just be waiting…”

“Down here, yes.” You retreat upstairs towards Elaine, who is mouthing something at you furiously but completely inaudibly. She waits until you’re in the bedroom, then shuts the door. “What about my suit?”

“Oh.” You stop to think, one leg in your jeans and the other out. “I’ll go get it out of the machine.” Too late you realize that what she was
really
asking was,
Do you have an ironing board?
The miracles of modern fabric technology only stretch so far.

“Never mind.” She rummages through the closet and pulls out a pair of your combat pants that have seen better days, and a
SIMS
4:
NOW IT’S REAL
tee-shirt. “Have you got a belt? I’ll drop in at the hotel afterwards…”

A couple of minutes later you’re both downstairs and pulling your boots on. PC Lockhart is hovering and havering as if he’s not quite sure what to do with himself. You duck into the kitchen and scoop Elaine’s business weeds into a spare carrier bag while she pointedly makes small-talk in the living room, grab your own jacket, wallet, and phone—and then it’s time to go. “If you’ll follow me, please?” asks Lockhart.

Unlike the Glaswegian cop, Lockhart doesn’t rate a souped-up Volvo with a stack of electronic countermeasures and a boot full of hazard warning signs. You end up knee-cap to knee-cap with Elaine in the back of a wee white Toyota hybrid that looks like something a real car would carry as a life-boat. Lockhart drives like a myopic granny, slowing for every speed pillow and chicane as he potters along the road to Canonmills, then uphill towards the city centre with the power pack whining like an overloaded dentist’s drill (from back in your childhood, before dentists got their hands on the orbital death-rays they use nowadays for hunting down unfortunate plaques of bacteria and nuking them back into the pre-Cambrian).

Edinburgh’s city mortuary is a flat-roofed brutalist brick-and-concrete bunker occupying a hole between two of the tall stone buildings of the Cowgate, in the heart of the old town. Time runs differently in Edinburgh: The old town is old because it dates to the middle ages. (There are rumours of entire lost streets down here within the mediaeval city walls, barricaded, buried, and built-over after the plague carried away their denizens.) Lockhart approaches the mortuary directly, driving up the Mound and over and down through the Grassmarket, where they used to hang witches and heretics. Picturesque and gingerbread it might be, but this ain city has a dark history, and no mistake. You travel in silence, shoulder to shoulder, and when Elaine takes hold of your hand, her fingers are cold and tense.

Finally, Lockhart turns sharply uphill and then slides into the car-park. There’s a loading bay at the gloomy back for the ambulances and hearses, but the ordinary traffic gets the view of the pub opposite. Lockhart gets out and holds the door for you while you clamber into the daylight and blink as Elaine unpacks herself. “Where’s the inspector?” she asks, looking round.

“She said she’d be here.” Lockhart fumbles with his handset, which takes a moment to boot. “Go on inside.”

He’s still fumbling with the handset as you go through the mirrored doors and find yourself facing a woman who could pass for Elaine’s elder sister—the tougher, short-haired one carved from cold, grey northern marble. “Mr. Reed, Ms. Barnaby? I’m Inspector Kavanaugh. Sue Smith—Sergeant Smith—has been telling me about you.” She doesn’t look like a happy camper, and for an instant the mummy lobe starts yammering about guilt, urging you to confess to something, anything,
everything
—the eighth of slate in the stash tin that PC Lockhart failed to spot under the sofa cushions, or the time you swiped Paul Doulton’s Mars Bar in Secondary Two. You keep a lid on it: You seem to be getting better about not incriminating yourself the moment an officer of the law blinks at you. “I was hoping to make your acquaintance yesterday.”

“Really?” asks Elaine, with every appearance of being intensely interested. “We were in Glasgow in the morning, then in a meeting.”

“A
meeting
.” The way Kavanaugh pronounces the word makes it sound like a criminal conspiracy to conduct business in accordance with the rules of procedure: Or maybe it’s just her mouth wash disagreeing with her. (A quick tongue around your teeth convinces you that perhaps taking the time for a brush and shave wouldn’t have been a bad idea.) “Well, that’s as may be. Barry Michaels called me—at home, on a voice line, I might add—to tell me you were working for him. And he suggested you might be able to help me clear up a little problem.”

“A problem—” you begin to echo, as Elaine elbows you in the ribs.

“Of course we’d be happy to help,” she butts in smoothly: “Insofar as it’s compatible with our duties.”
Ouch,
you think. “What can we do for you?”

You’ve got a sinking feeling about this. “I’d like to ask you if you can formally identify a deceased gentleman.”

Elaine grabs your hand. You tense as she draws close. “What happened?”

“I can tell you more afterwards,” says Kavanaugh. She glances at the inner doorway. “Jimmy? I’ve got your witnesses.” The speakerphone crackles, and then there’s a buzz as the door unlatches.

You’ve seen mortuaries a hundred times on television, but that doesn’t do the place justice. For one thing they smell a bit like a hospital…only, not. And the quiet. It’s like the offices at the funeral home after Mum died. Sure, there are people going in and out of small rooms with tablets and bundles of paperwork, but there’s a marked shortage of levity in this place. If you could bottle whatever it is and sell it to schools, they’d give you a gong: It’s the concentrated essence of sobriety. And you’ve just been dragged into it without even a shave and a hang-over.

Elaine trots along after the long-legged inspector, dragging you along in her wake. Her lips are a thin blue slash beneath the old-fashioned fluorescents. “In here,” says the inspector, holding an office door open. For a moment you worry—but it’s just an office, with a desk and a half-bald man in a white coat but no stethoscope. “Dr. Hughes? These are my witnesses. You might want to go easy, they haven’t had much warning.”

Hughes raises an eyebrow. “That makes three of us,” he comments. A deep breath: “Well, I assume you know where you are?” You force yourself to nod. “Good. Well, I’m the duty pathologist today, and I gather the inspector here would like you to confirm a positive identification. Have either of you ever done this before?” You shake your head. Elaine’s grip on your hand tightens as Hughes gives the inspector a sharp look. “They’re not next of kin, are they?”

Your heart flops around madly, missing a beat.
Who can it be?
Your hands are sweating. You’ve been here before, hung-over in the presence of the law to witness something you don’t want to admit—

“Adult male.” Kavanaugh shakes her head, then glances at you. “Is something the matter, Mr. Reed?”

“No—I mean, not this: I don’t think so.” You take a deep breath. The mummy lobe kicks up a cacophonous din, demanding that you unload everything you know on the inspector
right now
, but you manage to beat it into submission: “I have a weak stomach.” Which is an exaggeration, but not by much.

“Alright.” That’s Dr. Hughes. He glances at Inspector Kavanaugh. “In that case I’ll take Ms….”

“Ms. Barnaby and Mr. Reed.”

“Yes. Ms. Barnaby? If you’re comfortable with this, in a moment I shall show you into the, ah, viewing room. Mr. Reed, if you’d like to wait here. After you’ve had enough time, I’ll bring you back here and take Mr. Reed in while the inspector records your statement.”

“Is it”—Elaine’s voice is uncharacteristically weak—“I mean, is this necessary?”

Dr. Hughes glances at the inspector. Kavanaugh clears her throat. “I’m afraid it is, under the circumstances.” She gives you a significant look. “I believe you know enough about image filtering to explain why to me.”

The bottom drops out of your stomach again, just after you thought you’d gotten a grip on yourself. Elaine’s hand slips away, lubricated by the sweat of your palm. “I’m ready,” she says.

They disappear through a disappointingly ordinary-looking inner-office door, and Kavanaugh focusses on you. “Yes?” she asks.

“Did Michaels.” You swallow. “Did he tell you about my niece?”

“About who?” In the bright office light you can see her pupils dilate.

“He says his people are looking for her,” the mummy lobe pushes out. Then you add, consciously: “And I don’t trust him.”

“Christ, I don’t blame you for
that
.” She looks concerned. “What’s the story?”

You explain the background, weird calls, and the photographs, and the police reports—and that last call. It’s not true that the inspector has a Botox-frozen face: It goes through quite a few expressions in just thirty seconds, running through a spectrum of surprise and outrage. But then she cuts you off with a brief gesture. “Later.” She glances at the door. “If you can identify the person in there, I’d be very grateful. But I—” The door opens and she swallows whatever she was about to come out with. Framed in the opening is a whey-faced Elaine, looking between you and the inspector as if she’s certain one of you killed Colonel Mustard in the Drawing Room with the Candlestick.

It’s your turn. Dr. Hughes beckons. “Just follow me,” he says, not unkindly. There’s a short corridor, then another door, and—
a window running along one wall?
“Take your time,” he says. “When you’ve seen enough, or if you feel at all unwell, we’ll go outside.” Which is all very easy to say, but you
do
feel unwell: It’s giving you a horrible sense of déjà vu, and not in a good way.

A light comes on in the room on the other side of the window. It’s small and bare, with tiled walls, and a trolley with a draped form.

You blink, trying to bring it into focus. He looks like he’s deeply asleep, what you can see of him: head and shoulders only. And something is
very
wrong indeed, you realize immediately. Your mouth is dry. You work your jaw, trying to get your salivary glands to lubricate your tongue. “I saw him yesterday,” you say, and you’re pretty sure you’re telling the truth. “That’s enough.”

“Thank you.” This time you see Hughes flip the switch. “Are you feeling alright?” he asks, solicitously. “The toilets are just round here—”

“No.” You take a deep breath and try to pull yourself together. “I’m okay.”

Hughes leads you back out through the short corridor and into his office, where Inspector Kavanaugh is waiting, with Elaine, whose expression of numb surprise you can feel mirrored on your own face.