BANG.
This time you feel something like a punch in the ribs. But you’re close enough to grab at Hackman’s arm, now, even though your legs don’t seem to want to work properly. It’s very odd: You’ve almost got your hand on the gun-barrel, but it’s getting farther away, and what’s the ceiling doing? Something hits you appallingly hard in the back, and then your head’s in agony as you whack it on the floor, and the gun is still pointing at you, with Hackman’s face behind it, snarling like a shark that’s scented blood on the boardroom carpet and is about to bite your throat out—
Then Elaine takes a brisk step forward, straightening up from where she’s grabbed something from her bag with both hands, pivots smartly on her left ankle, and swings a huge sword over him in a motion like the windscreen wiper from hell. Through your ringing ears you hear a crunch of bone. And the last thing you see is Hackman, a surprised expression on his face, toppling towards you, as Elaine staggers with the effort of halting the instinctive backstroke that would take his face off.
Restart:
A white plastic ceiling above you, lights, and a green shape hunched over your face. Some kind of mask. Whatever you’re lying on jars painfully as the wheels ride over speed pillows. And you wish they’d turn off the siren.
Been here before. Didn’t like it any better the first time. “Looks like he’s coming round.”
Nope, sorry.
Restart:
You’ve been shot in the chest, in case you hadn’t guessed. Twice—once wasn’t enough for you? So you had to go and be a hero, because you knew what Hackman didn’t know you knew, which is that his friends on the other end of the anonymously remixed blacknet link, Team Red, had already tried to kill you a couple of times over: And to make things better, Hackman had already iced his partner in insider trading, Wayne Richardson, and it therefore followed that he wasn’t about to leave you or Elaine behind to point the finger at him. Because that’s what blacknets are good for: buying illegal handguns, arranging executions, raising dirty money at insane short-term interest rates to invest in a gamble that your own corporation is going to tank within weeks.
And you’d been meaning to tell Elaine about your lack of a real life sometime, anyway.
But getting yourself shot wasn’t clever, was it? It hurts. It’s down to a dull ache now—either you’re dying, or they whacked you full of morphine—and you can breathe, but there’s something annoying in your nose. Maybe opening your eyes would be a good idea, although they’re hot and gummy, and you feel almost as fuzzy as that time in Amsterdam, sitting in a burning chair by a canal and a broken shop window.
(Burning? Why did you think the chair was on fire?)
You manage to crowbar your eyelids apart. It’s a huge effort, but it’s rewarded by a worried face, blurred but recognizable, a ferret sniffing over its prey as if unable to decide whether to bite or groom it. “Jack?” She squeezes your hand. “Jack?”
“Grrrrumph.” That’s a highly compressed shorthand version of are you alright? Did Hackman get away? Where are the police? And what’s happening? Unfortunately, your throat didn’t work too well, so you cough and try again: “’Laine?”
She squeezes your hand so hard you’re afraid she’s going to crush it. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” Then she lets go abruptly, as if she’s suddenly realized what she’s doing and got self-conscious. “For fuck’s sake,” she bursts out suddenly. “You really scared me!”
I scared you? you think, but it’s too much of an effort to say that. “Hackman?”
She sniffs, misunderstanding. “Untrained handgun versus trained sword at that range? I was just waiting for a chance to draw on him.” She’s still holding your hand. There’s steel in those fingers, you realize. “Good thing for his sake it was blunt when I went into krumphau on him, or he’d be missing both hands.”
Well, duh. You blink, feeling stupid. She told you she was into mediaeval sword-fighting, didn’t she? What did you expect?
“Sorry. You scared the crap out of me, Jack.” Pause. “How do you feel?”
Your throat feels like it’s on fire, and there’s definitely something wrong with your chest: It makes odd crackling noises when you breathe, and you can’t quite get enough air. “Water,” you say hopefully. You’re too tired to worry about anything else. Besides, she’s here, and she’s in the chair by your—hospital bed?—so she must be okay. “Phone?”
“I phoned Sophie,” she says. “After they rebooted the phone system.” She looks apprehensive: that same facing-the-noose expression you saw earlier, back when…
“You know, then.”
She nods. “They told me everything.”
The mummy lobe—what’s left of it—closes your eyes, out of embarrassment, or respect for the dead, or something. “I couldn’t handle it back then. Not six months after Mum died. I just couldn’t handle being on my own.” The mummy lobe is tired, too: tired of holding you together through lonely years of death-march work and playing at real life, tired of emulating the society you’ve been so cut off from for so long.
“But to try blackmailing you—” She breaks off.
“How were they to know that Sophie wasn’t real? They were subcontracting hands-on stuff to a local blacknet. Probably gave it to some local muscle down south who’s laughing his rocks off. Like the story about the police who send this guy a photograph of his car, speeding, and a fine: So he sends them a photograph of a cheque. And they send him back a photograph of a pair of handcuffs…”
Cold little fingers insert themselves into your hand, kneading. “But you don’t need to be alone, if you don’t want to,” she says hesitantly. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“I do now.” You squeeze her fingers, as hard as you can, which is about drowned-rat strength right now. “Game over.”
SUE: Plea Bargain
“…So I was nattering wi’ the heid zombie in the hotel lobby when I heard the shots. The front-desk video take will show me lookin’ scunnered. It was two stories up, but I knew what they was immediately—that’s when I called, as I ran upstairs. It was all history by the time I got there, she had him on the floor with that sword of hers, and it was all over bar the bleedin’. But I feel like a right wally, skipper.”
“You and me both, Sergeant, and you know who the enquiry’s going to blame for assigning an uncertified officer to personal protection duty.”
That’s scant comfort, and ye ken the inspector knows it, but it’s a worse mess for her, you’ve got to admit—you’re not climbing the greasy pole after all. On the other hand—“We wuz in a collective tizzy, Liz, thanks to those bloody spooks and their full-dress crapfest. If they hadna sprung the terrorism alert at the same time we had to shut down CopSpace, we’d maybe hae stood a chance, and if we’d had CopSpace, again, we’d hae known what was happening. I blame myself—I should have told Bob to get his boots back upstairs the instant he’d spoken to the front desk.”
“You’re trying to second-guess an IPCC enquiry, Sue. My advice? Drop it, it’s over.” Liz looks irritated. “Besides, we shouldn’t talk about it outside of school. It looks like collusion in the wrong light, and that would never do.”
“Oh, okay.” Collusion is a political word, and you’ll take Liz’s word for it looking bad. You tighten your grip on your hat, realize what you’re doing, twitch it round in your lap, then let go again. It’s too much like sitting in a dentist’s waiting room for comfort. All it would need is a NO PHONES sign and a ticking clock on the mantelpiece above a dysfunctional gas fire to drive the message home. But this particular waiting room’s in better shape than your tooth doctor’s front room, right down to the extra-uncomfortable chairs and the civilian receptionist outside.
Kavanaugh looks at her watch. “Not long now,” she remarks, and you realize she’s bloody nervous, too. And then the inner-office door opens.
“Inspector Kavanaugh, Sergeant Smith, please take a seat.”
There are two chairs waiting for you, o
pposite a desk the size of a wee conference-table. And on the other side of it is the top brass—Deputy Chief Constable McMullen, who is definitely not dressed for the golf course this morning, sitting with a face like a hanging judge beneath a photie of his boss, Andrew Sampson, chief constable of South East Scotland force, shaking hands with the last-but-one justice minister on the back steps outside Holyrood, just to rub it in. But you have to work hard not to raise an eyebrow, because sitting next to him is that fly-case, Michaels—and another character in a grey suit with a face like a horse and a look that says high-altitude civil service, so high you need an oxygen mask just to breathe up there.
“At ease, sit down.” That’s McMullen. He glances to either side. “I want to make it clear right now that this is not a disciplinary hearing. Nothing is being recorded, and nothing you say here will go on any record. Is that understood?”
You don’t dare look round, but you can just about hear the sonic boom from Liz’s eyebrows as they head for the stratosphere. It’s policing, but not as we know it—everything is on the record, these days, lest the clients start throwing themselves down the stairs and suing the force for compensation. “Isnae that a bit…radical?” you hear yourself asking, somewhat to your own disbelief.
“It’s necessary.” McMullen doesn’t look terribly happy. “As Mr. Jones from the Joint Defense Ministry will explain…?”
Jones—the high-flyer—has been looking at something in a leather folio. Now he closes it, puts in on the desk, and clears his throat. “I’m here to inform you that the events that took place at the West End Malmaison the Thursday before last are the subject of a classification order issued by the Ministry of Justice, at our request. The Home Office down south is also playing along. You may not discuss those events with anyone outside this room, other than the direct participants, without breach of the Official Secrets Act. You will need to sign these forms before you leave”—he taps the folder—“to confirm that you have been so informed. That’s the bad news.” He pauses for a moment. “On the other hand, you won’t be facing a board of enquiry.”
Really? But they didn’t need to call you here to tell you that in person, did they? So what’s going on?
McMullen clears his throat. “This leaves us with a little problem.” He pointedly doesn’t glance at Michaels, who’s got his arms crossed and is looking smugly dishevelled, or at Jones, who appears to have turned back into a cardboard statue of a civil servant. “The disposal of one Marcus Hackman. Who I believe you arrested and charged with attempted murder, possessing an unlicensed firearm, and, Inspector…?”
Liz clears her throat. “Also, two counts of murder—Wayne Richardson and Wu Chen—and that’s before we get into the esoteric stuff—solicitation of murder, conspiracy, membership of an organized criminal enterprise, whatever we can pin on him for the blacknet node he was running out of the MacDonald safe house, the various securities violations, insider trading, fraud, and you could probably nail him for spying if you were willing to drag everything up in court.” Now you spare her a glance: She rolls her eyes. “Of course, that’s all just fall-out from trying to cover up his first mistake, which was to have so little confidence in his own business venture that he expected it to fail and configured it as a honey trap for investors.”
Across the desk, Michaels is finally looking a bit less smug. “Hayek Associates wouldn’t be able to do their job if they didn’t look and function like a real company, Inspector. And this may come as a surprise to you, but we in the intelligence community aren’t actually experts in running dot-com startups. We went and took on board some people with good experience and a solid background that checked out, relying on them to make most of the running, and one of them turned out to be a particularly bad egg, and another of them was a slightly less bad egg. The problem was figuring out who was who without trucking everyone who worked at Hayek Associates into a secret bunker and interrogating them, which would have risked blowing the cover operation sky-high. All it takes is one contrarian who doesn’t approve of being used as a stalking-horse by the government and leaks it via a backnet or a blog or a newspaper, and…” He shrugs.
Oh, so that’s the way the wind is blowing! You smile politely and try to look like a dumb cop. Let Michaels incriminate himself if he wants to.
“What about SPOOKS?” asks Liz, and you blink. “And where did the zombies come from?”
“The zombies were from just about every AR and LARP in town,” says Michaels. “When Hackman realized his blacknet friends—Team Red in fact, but he probably thought he was dealing with the Russian mafiya—fucked up on killing Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby, he got them to organize a flash mob for him—an organized zombie fest outside the hotel, promise of prizes for the best-dressed undead, word out that it had been cleared with yourselves and there’d be a couple of TV crews in attendance. You’ve got to admire it as a piece of improvisation—it got your attention, didn’t it? It also distracted everyone while Hackman was trying to work out his own solution to the problem.”
“Wayne Richardson?” prompts Liz.
“Wayne, Wayne.” Michaels looks pained. “Wayne was just the weakest link. Hackman was the bad one. When he found out about the MacDonald identity, he suggested setting up a better back story. I should have realized earlier, but he really wanted the flat so he could loan it out to some shady characters he owed a favour or two. Local gangsters. They installed the blacknet node to replace the one you shut down last year; where better to put it than in the apartment of someone who doesn’t exist? Then Hackman realized it had other uses. Wayne he got to via the usual mixture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Thick as thieves—but there’s always a leader, and when Wayne panicked and tried to cut a deal, Hackman got rid of him.”
At which point things fall into place in your head. Except for one thing. “Why did you get Jack fired from his job?” you ask.
“Because we wanted to recruit him,” Michaels explains. “ARGs like SPOOKS don’t grow on trees, they take years to develop. SPOOKS was our first toe in the water. It taught us a lot about what we need to do to run a virtual HUMINT operation, and it fed into the design process for SPOOKS 2.0, which will roll out next year. Most of the developers don’t need to know what they’re doing—we pointed them at a similar development project, used it to break the back of the coding, then cancelled it and disbanded the team once it was nearly done. But we need some of them—the smart ones, who can take the ninety-five per cent complete code for STEAMING and turn it into SPOOKS 2.0 then keep it running. And we needed Elaine for two reasons—to flush Hackman from cover, and because we wanted to recruit her, too.”
And things are falling into place. Because it all comes back to Hackman, and the inadequate job Michaels did of positively vetting his tame sociopathic CEO and the chancer of a marketing manager. All CEOs are a bit sociopathic—it takes a really obsessive personality type to take a business public, especially in the fevered climate of a bubble, not just any bubble but the third one in a row—and Michaels had no way of getting into Hackman’s skull and realize that underneath the confident reptilian exterior there lurked a huge ball of neuroses and a psychotic rage at the world for having taken his toys away from him twice already. Hackman wanted to have his cake and eat it, and didn’t think Michaels and his old-school buddies (who kept dropping in for no obvious reason that Hackman could see) were capable of holding up their end. And Wayne Richardson was Hackman’s cat’s-paw. They hedged their bets, taking out derivatives geared against the company’s success. Get in, get the VC set-up, float on the market, get out as much of your own shares as you can, then clean up when the bottom falls out, even though you’re holding most of your visible assets in options that haven’t vested yet. Only it didn’t work, because Hayek Associates were doomed to succeed: Michaels’s friends in the shadowy machinery of state simply kept pouring liquidity into their Potemkin dot-com. The bottom persistently refused to fall out—and Hackman was getting desperate.
But Hackman had an ac
e up his sleeve: He was already hooked into the local blacknet. Probably it started with his cocaine habit, or something like that; but he ended up scratching backs and hosting a node, and before long he found a way in and a seat at the table: And he found people there who wanted to pay him for information about a company he knew an awful lot about. Which is how blacknets work—people put stuff up for sale, or issue tenders, and other folks see the goods and buy them. It’s a market, just like any other, except the things that are bought and sold are illegal—drugs, confidential information, murderous favours. It was the obvious way for those spooks Liz was so uptight about to get into Hayek Associates, and they used it. Hackman sold them the company’s copy of the authentication pad for the backbone routers and the private authentication keys to Zonespace, told them how everything worked, played the part of a disgruntled employee—all to raise money to bet against his company’s inevitable success. He even solicited a final raid on their most public asset in an attempt to blow the foundations out from under them.
Only he miscalculated.
Reputations were at stake. Phone calls were made: Investigators were sent in—auditors, not spooks for the most part. Michaels wasn’t going to let his surveillance operation go down the toilet. He needed to know who was leaking secrets, and why. But as he rolled back the carpet, what he found underneath was much worse than he’d anticipated. The leaker hadn’t simply sold the family silver to a gang of thieves, they’d managed to attract the attention of the opposition. Events began to snowball—you can’t really guess just how far it went, but the arrival of Kemal’s Keystone Kops is suggestive—until it all ended up in the kind of counter-intelligence clusterfuck that is the stuff of legend thirty years later when it is declassified.
“So Hackman and Richardson were just in it for the money?” you ask. “You expect us to believe that he’d kill three folks—trying for five—just to cover it up?”
Halting State hs-1 Page 33
