Halting State (12 page)

You glance sideways to see how the others are taking it. Doubtless this is old news to Liz and explains her headache, but the chief is looking very down in the dumps, and no mistake. And then Dr. Tweed mouses over to the kitchen and clips through the door to the scene beyond.

“This is the kitchen. It’s been sanitized, too, and I’d be very surprised if it’s been used for its notional purpose in the past couple of years. Real kitchens are lovely places, they can tell us a lot. From the type of grease and particulates retained in the extractor hood over the cooker, to the foodstuffs in the refrigerator, and the contents of the bin, they can be a gold mine. A surprising number of burglars help themselves to a snack on their way through, so it always pays to check the rubbish…but anyway. The fridge is, um, see for yourselves.” The door on the virtual refrigerator blinks magically open to reveal a pristine interior. “It’s been cleaned out. This is how we found it. There are no contents; the brown stain on the side is a povidone iodine hospital scrub. Meanwhile, over
here
we have a patch on the work-top where you’ll see there’s a faint outline—matches a microwave oven. Why the hell anyone would leave the electronics in the living room but take the microwave oven is, well, your guess is as good as mine. But that’s what they did: They scrubbed the fridge out and lifted the microwave. Maybe they’d been using it for toasting RFID tags or something. But the whole thing’s been thoroughly sanitized.”

“Sanitized?”
Verity explodes. “Are you telling us you can’t get anything?”

“Yes, I am—at least, so far.” Tweed nods like a dashboard ornament. He starts counting off fingers. “There are no human traces in the place that haven’t been thoroughly cleaned or scrambled. When the LCN results came back, it was a smeared mess—we got a DNA sample alright, one from about three hundred people in parallel.”

“What else doesn’t fit?” asks Liz.

Tweed shrugs. “The bedding has been stripped down. I lifted debris samples on the mattress debris, but that’s been contaminated, too.”

Verity snorted. “How do you contaminate DNA evidence?”

“We work with really tiny samples, so you—the bad guys—just give us too much evidence. Best bet is whoever sanitized the flat spent a couple of hours on the top deck of a bus with a small vacuum cleaner. We all shed skin particles like mad wherever we go. Blast dust from a bus seat cushion all over a crime scene, and it’s like smearing over a fingerprint on a glass by passing it around the entire population of a night-club—all I can lift from it is a horrible mess.”

“Bah.” Verity crosses his arms. “What else?”

Liz raises an eyebrow. “I’d like to give everyone a quick overview. If you don’t mind, I’m going to pass the baton to Joe from ICE. Unless there’s anything else that’s important, Doctor?”

Tweed sighs. “Nothing that changes the overall picture.”

“Joe?”

Joe’s a weedy little pencil-necked geek, almost a self-parody act. “Hi!” He squeaks. “You want to know about the servers? Okay, here’s the story: We’ve got nothing. It’s a really nice pile of kit, all of it less than two years old, professional business gear rather than SOHO—but there are no manuals, removable media, or licenses, and the fixed media, hard disks and flash, have all been nuked. I mean, it’s scrubbed, tight down to the bare metal, using a tool that conforms to DOD 5220.22-M. That’s what we use when we’re decommissioning confidential but non-classified kit. Someone
really
didn’t want us taking a look at their video library. Which is a bit of a head-scratcher because if we want it back, it’s a fair bet that not even GCHQ will be able to help.”

“The roof-top garden,” Liz prompts.

“Oh,
that
.”

“Yes.” Liz nods to the chief’s raised eyebrows—waggling like a pair of hairy caterpillars arguing over a tasty leaf—“Here’s the fun bit.”

Joe nods eager affirmation. “This is where it gets weird. Our boy had gone up through the skylight and stuck a satellite dish on his roof. An illegal one; it turns out he didn’t have a building warrant and it’s over a metre in diameter. Um. Actually it’s a metre and a half, on a powered azimuth mount, and it’s an uplink. We don’t know where it was pointed because when we gained access, it was parked in the vertical position, but it was plugged into a bunch of black boxes in the hall. I’m still not sure what half of it is, but there’s also a cell antenna on the roof, and
that’s
plugged into what appears to be a custom GNU radio box, and they’re all switched through the server rack in the living room.”

“Explain GNU radio,” says Liz, in a tone of voice that says she’s already been here, and it doesn’t get any better.

“Sure. It’s a soft radio. You plug a sufficiently fast digital signal processor onto the back of an analogue-to-digital converter and a wire, and simulate the radio procedurally. Run a program and it’s a TV receiver, run a different program and it’s a cellphone base station.”

“Isnae that illegal?” calls Bill, from the back.

“Well spotted.” Joe flashes a grin, suddenly assertive now he’s on his own ground. “Firstly, it’s free—you can download it from just about anywhere—and secondly, you can run it on just about any PC with the aid of about thirty euros’ worth of off-the-shelf kit. So the actual state of the law—not being a complete ass—is that
using
it is illegal under
certain circumstances
. Not having the contents of his media, I can’t tell you what he was doing with it, but using the box he was running it on as an illegal satellite TV decoder would be like shaving with a katana. Twenty to one he was doing something naughty.”

“Such as?” prompted Verity. “What sort of stuff would a man like that be doing in his spare time?”

Joe twitched. “This isn’t spare-time kit, I’m afraid. Current best price I could find on the hardware is somewhere north of twenty thousand euros. He might have been sucking down naughty satellite broadcasts and feeding them to his friends, but…well. He might have been snooping on phone calls for the Russian
mafiya
or running an anonymous cellular phone remixer to bypass the security services. I can’t tell because whoever turned him over wiped all the media, but I can tell you what it
looks
like. Do you suppose it could be something to do with that murder in Pilton?”

“Very possibly,” says Liz. For his part, Verity looks like he’s bitten into an apple and found half a worm. “I wasn’t going to put it in so many words, but the roomful of kit makes me think that we may be up against a blacknet here—possibly the same one we had all that trouble with last year.” There are groans all around the room, especially from the old-school detective suits at the back. “What we found in the flat fits the pattern, and MacDonald’s disappearance would also fit if you view it as an elimination followed by sanitary measures.”

“It does that,” Verity grates, letting the words out reluctantly, “so we’ll consider it.
Fuck
. Alright, it’s showtime. Bill, get onto facilities and book an incident room. Liz, I trust ye’ve started a new HOLMES instance? Email everyone the URL and start getting this all into it. Pencil me in the SIO slot and keep me updated. Who’s handling the Pilton murder, isn’t it Fergus? Let’s get this linked into that data set and see what we can fish up…”

You realize with a sinking feeling that everybody else around here knows what Liz and Verity are speaking about—and from the long faces it’s bad, very bad indeed. But you didnae get to be a sergeant by sticking your pinkie up and saying
Please miss, what blacknet was tha’?
So you get yourself into CopSpace and go hunting it, and when you see what comes back, you just about boak.

Because if Liz is right, that poor bastard MacDonald won’t be giving you a witness statement. And that’s just for starters…

You don’t know what you were expecting from the body shop, but it certainly wasn’t a rumpled-looking bear-driving gamer called Jack. (Alias Teddy or otherwise.) And while you
do
know what you were expecting from the investigation, it wasn’t spend a rainy afternoon in a hotel conference room playing swords’n’sorcery games.

But at least Jack’s congenial, and he seems to know how the game works, which is the main thing.

You’re about halfway through the tutorial, learning how to pick locks, sneak across butterfly floors, and turn small furry critters to stone with your Mad Powerz, when your phone rings. You put the game on hold for a moment: “Yes?”

It’s Chris Morgan. “Elaine? We’re breaking for a bite to eat now, and it’s a good excuse to get everybody up to date. Want to meet me in the lobby in ten minutes?”

You spare a glance for the mouse you’re trying to turn into a stalactite. “Can do.” A thought strikes you. “Should I bring Jack?”

“Jack? The body shop guy?”

“The consultant,” you correct him.

“Hmm. Yes, bring him along. I’m not sure what he can contribute, but you never know.”

You hang up, glare at the wee sleekit, couring, timorous beastie, and try the gesture again.
Voilà
: instant stone-baked rodent. Well, at least
that
worked. You log out, then tap Jack on the shoulder. He jumps. “Yes?” he asks.

“Finish whatever you’re doing, we’re going for dinner. On the company.”

“What—okay, yeah.” You can just about see his eyes twitching behind the opaque disks of his gaming glasses. “Ten seconds…right.” He slides the glasses off. “What should I expect?”

“We’re going for dinner,” you repeat patiently. “You know, a chance to have a meeting without starving to death.”

“Yes, but who with? You’re the only person I’ve met so far,” he adds.

“Oh, right. I guess I should have introduced you—well, the rest of the team was in a meeting when you showed up, so it wasn’t exactly practical. Now’s your chance. Unless you had something else on?”

Jack looks momentarily perplexed. “No, nothing doing,” he says ruefully. He lays his glasses down carefully on top of the gaming laptop—the screen’s a shimmery blur from where you’re sitting. “I have no life.” He chuckles, trying to make a joke of the obviously defensive reaction, and you feel a stab of unworklike empathy.

“Well, let’s go.” You stand up. “I’ll introduce you to everybody.”

Chris is down in the lobby with Mohammed and Brendan. They’ve shed their ties, which is a bad sign—either there’s zero probability of any client action today, or Chris is planning on leading an overnight death march. But at least it’ll be a well-fed death march, you figure, as he leads you all into the hotel bistro. The manager has already sorted out a table at the back. A minute later Margaret and Faye show up and the forced small-talk and time-filling silences stop.

“Brendan, why don’t you fill us all in on the time line?” Chris suggests, once introductions are made and starters are ordered.

“Sure.” Brendan stares at his water glass dourly for a moment. (Another sign that things are going badly: Chris didn’t start by ordering a couple of bottles of stockbroker’s ruin. He wants everybody sober.) “It’s a mess. Here’s what we know. Last Thursday someone at Hayek managed to get the police
interested
. They were supposed to be keeping a lid on it pending a proper investigation, but someone panicked, and to make matters worse, it’s local plod, not SOCA or the Serious Fraud Agency. Then the police discovered that one of Hayek’s people, Nigel MacDonald, is missing. The latest update—don’t ask me for details, and I shall tell you no lies—is that it’s a full-on missing person investigation. Seems the plod went to call on Mr. MacDonald at home and found signs of a struggle: They’re treating it as a possible murder case.”

You look around the table as your soup arrives: There are long faces all round. “That isn’t very helpful,” Margaret says carefully. Damn right it isn’t: Having to work with the police getting underfoot is bad enough, having the Police actually threatening to
do their job
…

“Indeed not.” Brendan sounds ghoulishly pleased with himself. “Can I continue? It appears to be an inside job, the insider in question has vanished, the police think he may be dead, and to add to the fun, they’re treating the offices as a secondary crime scene. If MacDonald
is
dead, that turns this into a murder investigation, and they pull out all the stops.” His glance takes in Jack, who is sitting next to you, shoulders slightly hunched as he chews on a crust of garlic bread. “Obviously, they’re going to consider the robbery in Avalon Four as a likely motive for the hypothetical killing, so if that happens, we won’t be able to move without tripping over a dibble.”

Margaret smiles and puts her soup spoon down. “What did you achieve today?” she asks you. And you think:
I should have seen this coming
.

“I—” You corpse for a moment.
What the
hell
are you going to say? I played games for four hours straight?
It must show on your face because Margaret’s smile becomes slightly fixed as she waits. “I, uh…”

“Um. May I?” asks Jack. You nod, speechless. “We obviously couldn’t get access to Hayek Associates, so we decided to use the time productively by setting up a high-performance Zone client network, then covering some essential familiarization material. We also discussed ways and means of tracking Mr. MacDonald’s history in Zonespace, because—as you’re no doubt aware—most inside jobs also involve an external partner who can launder the merchandise, and finding the outside connection is our best hope for discovering what actually happened inside Hayek Associates.”

He then launches into a spiel of explanatory technobabble that leaves you agog with admiration. It’s not so much the ten-euro words that do it as the polished professionalism with which he slots them together. For a moment, you almost know what it must feel like to be a Thames Gateway resident talking to a flood insurance salesman. “That’s about it,” you add, shrugging, when he nods at you. “Any questions?” You hold your breath, hoping nobody calls your bluff.

Margaret is studying Jack as if he’s your pet sheep-dog and she’s just caught him reciting Shakespearean sonnets. At least
you’re
off the hook. “No, no questions,” she says thoughtfully. She looks at Brendan. “When can we get access?”

“I’ve asked London to try to get someone to talk to the police.” He drives a piece of bruschetta around his plate in pursuit of a puddle of olive oil. “Hopefully, tomorrow morning if we can just get through to this Inspector Kavanaugh’s boss.”

“Right.” Chris leans back in his chair and smiles lopsidedly. “We’ll have to wait on it, then. Meanwhile, here’s something for you all to bear in mind. If it turns out that Nigel MacDonald was working on his own, or with an external partner, but essentially trying to rip his employer—then we’re off the hook. The HA business plan is exonerated, our remit doesn’t include criminal background checks on junior employees, and we’re out of here. On the other hand, if there’s evidence pointing to a member of the board, we’re still potentially in trouble. So we have a good idea what we’re looking for, don’t we?”

You nod, even though you’ve got a nagging feeling that this doesn’t entirely add up.
Does Chris have some kind of hidden agenda here?
But then he takes a sip of water and continues.

“Whatever the cause, though, we need to know enough about what happened, and how, to ensure it doesn’t bite us again. So, Elaine, finding out what
actually
happened is still your absolute priority, while the rest of us make sure it was just a rogue employee.”

Oh,
now
you get it. Chris is setting up to pull everyone else out, just as soon as he’s confirmed that none of Hayek Associates’ board were in on the robbery. You’re going to get left with the clean-up, and doubtless he’ll cut a deal to subcontract your services out to Hayek’s insurers, or maybe even the local cops, for a tidy sum.
Stitch-up.
You’re going to be stuck up here in Edinburgh hunting needles in virtual haystacks while Chris and Margaret go home, announce the job’s all done, and move on to the next project. Lovely!

After the meal, there’s a general drift towards the hotel bar, where Chris has announced his intention of buying a round. It’s the usual team-building thing, and it’s the last thing you feel like taking part in, constructive attitude or no. But Margaret corners you in the lobby, all the same. “I hope you don’t think you’re being singled out for something bad,” she says, a calculating light in her eyes. “It’s not like that at all. Chris got word from above that he’s wanted down south, and I agreed that we need someone with a steady hand to tidy this up, and we really need to get back to London before Avixa or GenState notice we’re gone. Chris trusts you; otherwise, he wouldn’t have put it in your hands.”

You manage to force yourself to smile.
Okay, so it
is
a stitch-up.
You don’t score points inside DBA for being the lone gun on a trouble-shooting mission, out in the cold where nobody can see you. “That’s perfectly alright, Margaret. Chris was completely clear on what he wanted. I’ll see it gets done.”

“Good. Between you and me, Chris misread this situation, and he knows it. Unless it turns out that we’re all in the shit together, Chris overreacted massively. I think the stress of juggling six cat-A clients simultaneously may be getting to him.” That’s enough to make you raise an eyebrow, and you file it away for future reference: Normally even full partners don’t handle more than two or three cat-A’s at once, plus a handful of smaller jobs.

Margaret glances across the lobby. “That native guide of yours. Doesn’t look like much, but that was a very slick line of bullshit he sold us.”

“It wasn’t bullshit,” you say defensively. “He’s from the games industry. He probably bought that suit this morning, but he knows his own field like the back of his hand—what did you expect?”

“Not that.” She smiles unexpectedly. “Good luck with your insider hunt. And don’t let the natives pull any wool over your eyes.” She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.

Right now, you don’t much feel like going along with Chris and the gang and making nicey-nicey. Then you spot Jack across the lobby. He’s dithering around the doorway. You move to intercept him. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He looks uncertain. “I was just heading off.” He looks like an overgrown kid who’s been caught not doing his homework.

For a split second you teeter on the cusp of a choice. You have two options: Do you tell him “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and go back to your hotel bedroom to watch downloads and brood? Or do you take him in hand, and say, “The evening’s young, and I need to get out of here for a bit. Fancy a glass of wine?”

Mm, decisions.

“I need to get away from work for a bit. Do you know any good wine bars at this end of town?” A moment later you kick yourself:
What if he thinks it’s a come-on?
But Jack is timid, and well trained or sufficiently domesticated to simply nod.

“Beats doing the ironing.” He smiles to show he’s just kidding about comparing you to a pile of rumpled shirts.

“Well, cool.” He holds the door open, then heads off down the street. It’s late enough that the sun’s low and dazzling, forcing you to keep your eyes down rather than goggling at the insane architecture.

“Have you been to Edinburgh before?”

“No. This is my first time in Scotland.” There’s a shop window full of garish tartans and a discount book-shop with a window full of those blue-on-white Scottish flags. They’re big on flags here, almost as big as the Americans: something to do with their new franchise independence, probably. As long as they keep voting the British federal line in Brussels, that’s all the English establishment want: But perhaps things look different from this side of the frontier. “Where are we?”

“This is the West End of the New Town, so-called because they only built it about two hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a world heritage site, hence the manky stonework that keeps falling off the buildings and crushing tourists.” He glances at you swiftly. “Not often, you’ll be pleased to know.” He’s got his glasses on, and they’re lit up, washing the whites of his eyes in kaleidoscope colours.

“I’m reassured. Hey, we’re out of the office. This isn’t billable, you don’t have to keep working.”

He looks startled. “What, my glasses? No, I was just checking the eating-out guide.”

“I thought you lived here?”

“Yeah, but.” You come to a corner and he pauses, waiting for the traffic lights to change. “Wine bars aren’t my usual scene.”

“Oh, it doesn’t need to be a posh wine bar. Anywhere that’s not the hotel bar will do right now—I just wanted to get away.”

He brightens, visibly. “I’m better at pubs.” He pauses as the traffic stops, and the green man lights up. “Um, you seem a little tense.”

“You could say that.” You hurry across the road and realize the house-front you’re walking past is actually a branch of Boots. “I hate that kind of scene. When they break the bad news to you while you’ve got your mouth full, so you can’t tell them exactly what you think.”

“Hmm. It
was
a stitch-up, then? I’m not used to your kind of work, it sounded like one but I wasn’t sure…”

“Oh, it’s a stitch-up alright.” You take a deep breath. “Nothing to be done about it, I guess. Chris and Margaret are going to take the kiddies home and leave me to sort out everything while they take the credit for it. At least, I
think
that’s what’s going on—assuming Chris doesn’t have some kind of covert agenda—” You realize you’re babbling at a near stranger and shut up. That’s a bad sign. And your feet are putting you on notice that wearing five-centimetre heels on the Edinburgh streets is probably not a good idea—everywhere seems to be uphill. “Where’s this pub?”