She’s so smart. It’s weird how clever she is. It must be exhausting.
“I did,” I said. I was looking at where the Range Rover was fading into the darkness, and I told them, the visitors were only here for one night. I knew they wouldn’t unpack completely, they were bound to come out for something they’d left in the car. I described how the wind changed direction, carrying the sound of the men singing towards me. How I’d crouched, rain lashing my cheeks, thinking about selfishness and anarchy and the island. I was cold, I told them, so cold that my teeth went numb when I smiled, thinking about what I would do.
I told them how I saw the light change as the tent door was unzipped. A man crept out and turned back to zip it up before making his way to the car.
After a minute, Shirley opened her door, and the rest of us followed her over to where it had happened.
“Look,” said Shirley, pointing her flashlight at the ground. “His footsteps come this way, and then there’s a flattened patch on the ground. She yanked the rope and the open door slammed into him, knocking him on his back.”
I was nodding now, yes, that’s right, Shirley, he was out cold. I dragged him, unconscious, all the way to the cliff edge and rolled him over. The policemen didn’t look as if they believed us so Shirley traced my steps for them with the beam of the flashlight. One cop’s hand tightened on my arm.
I rolled the man over and he went head first, over the edge into the jagged dark, onto the knife-edge cliffs. The hungry sea swallowed him.
Shirley told them what happened next: “Then she pulled the pegs out and rolled the tent over the cliff with the men inside.”
The cops looked at me, horrified, imagining themselves in the dark tent, blind and terrified, being shoved over the edge. The ground was damp and soft. It wasn’t difficult. When I lifted the edge of the ground sheet at first the men were annoyed, they thought it was their friend playing a joke. I felt their anger change to panic as they realized that I wasn’t their friend.
One of the cops looked as if he might cry. He stared at me and asked, “Why?”
I just shrugged. I think maybe I was sort of smiling but I didn’t find it funny, I was just smiling a bit. Remembering: They weren’t even from here and they were rude, and if you buy all the pancakes there will be anarchy.
He tried again, “Did you put the pancakes in the car so we would think it was Margie?”
I didn’t answer that either. I couldn’t answer that. You can’t explain that to incomers. The other cop tried to make sense of it. “Why did you try to make it look like Margie? She’s your friend, isn’t she?”
Shirley looked at me, her eyes open a little too wide. She seemed excited. “Did you think Margie could make it all right, Alison?” I just smiled, but my heart was hammering. And then she said: “You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
Well, I was angry then. I shouted at her, “Shirley! That has to be witchcraft. How could you possibly know Margie took the blame?”
Shirley’s voice dropped so low, the wind almost took it away. “Why did she do that?”
Well, I was just burbling by then. I said, “Margie told me, she said, ‘Killing a friend’s husband is bad, Alison, but if I say I killed my own husband, people will always suppose he did something. We can tell them that, Alison, and I’ll get two years.’”
Shirley was standing back from the cops, she was shaking her head softly, warning me, but I wouldn’t be told what to do. I shouted again, “Margie said, ‘If we tell them you came to the house in one of your moods, your odd moods, and just hid and jumped out and killed him, they’ll put you away forever, Alison. They’ll never let you out!’ But you can’t know that, Shirley, not from Margie crying and footsteps and visitors’ books and pancakes! How can you know all that?”
Shirley’s eyes were wide and shining. The bitter wind shrieked as it pulled at her cape.
“Alison,” said Shirley quietly, “I didn’t.”
THE ADVENTURE OF THE EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION
by Cory Doctorow
Holmes buzzed me into his mansion flat above Baker Street Station without a word, as was his custom, but the human subconscious is a curious instrument. It can detect minute signals so fine that the conscious mind would dismiss them as trivialities. My subconscious picked up on some cue—the presence of a full stop in his text, perhaps: “Watson, I must see you at once.” Or perhaps he held down the door admission buzzer for an infinitesimence longer than was customary.
I endured unaccountable nerves on the ride up in the lift, whose smell reminded me as ever of Changi airport, hinting at both luxury and industry. Or perhaps I felt no nerves at all—I may be fooled by one of my memory’s many expert lies, its seamless insertion of the present-day’s facts into my recollections of the past. That easy facility with untruth is the reason for empiricism. No one, not even the storied Sherlock Holmes himself, can claim to have perfect recollection. It’s a matter of neuroanatomy. Why would your brain waste its precious, finite neurons on precise recall of the crunch of this morning’s toast when there are matters of real import that it must also store and track?
I had barely touched the polished brass knocker on flat 221 when the handle turned and the door flew open. I caught a momentary glimpse of Holmes’s aquiline features in the light from the hallway sconce before he turned on his heel and stalked back into the gloom of his vestibule, the tails of his mouse-colored dressing-gown swirling behind him as he disappeared into his study. I followed him, resisting the temptation to switch on a light to guide me through the long, dark corridor.
The remains of a fire were in the grate, and its homey smell warred with the actinic stink of stale tobacco smoke and the gamy smell of Holmes himself, who was overdue for a shower. He was in a bad way.
“Watson, grateful as I am for your chronicles of my little ‘adventures,’ it is sometimes the case that I cannot recognize myself in their annals.” He gestured around him and I saw, in the half-light, a number of the first editions I had gifted to him, fluttering with Post-it tabs stuck to their pages. “Moreover, some days I wish I could be that literary creation of yours with all his glittering intellect and cool reason, rather than the imperfection you see before you.”
It was not the first time I’d seen my friend in the midst of a visit by the black dog. Seeing that man—yes, that creature of glittering intellect and cool reason—so affected never failed to shake me. This was certainly the most serious episode I’d witnessed—if, that is, my memory is not tricking me with its penchant for drama again. His hands, normally so steady and sure, shook visibly as he put match to pipe and exhaled a cloud of choking smoke to hover in the yellow fog staining the ceiling and the books on the highest cases.
“Holmes, whatever it is, you know I’ll help in any way I can.”
He glared fiercely, then looked away. “It’s Mycroft,” he said.
I knew better than to say anything, so I waited.
“It’s not anything so crass as sibling rivalry. Mycroft is my superior in abductive reasoning and I admit it freely and without rancor. His prodigious gifts come at the expense of his physical abilities.” I repressed a smile. The Holmes brothers were a binary set, with Holmes as the vertical, whip-thin 1, and Mycroft as a perfectly round 0 in all directions. Holmes, for all his cerebral nature, possessed an animal strength and was a fearsome boxer, all vibrating reflex and devastating “scientific” technique. Mycroft might have been one of the most important men in Whitehall, but he would have been hard-pressed to fight off a stroppy schoolboy, let alone some of the villains Sherlock had laid out in the deadly back-ways of London.
“If my brother and I have fallen out, it is over principle, not pettiness.” He clenched his hands. “I am aware that insisting one’s grievance is not personal is often a sure indicator that it is absolutely personal, but I assure you that in my case, it is true.”
“I don’t doubt it, Holmes, but perhaps it would help if you filled me in on the nature of your dispute?”
>
Abruptly, he levered himself out of his chair and crossed to stand at the drawn curtains. He seemed to be listening for something, head cocked, eyes burning fiercely into the middle-distance. Then, as if he’d heard it, he walked back to me and stood close enough that I could smell the stale sweat and tobacco again. His hand darted to my jacket pocket and came out holding my phone. He wedged it deliberately into the crack between the cushion and chair.
“Give me a moment to change into walking clothes, would you?” he said, his voice projecting just a little louder than was normal. He left the room then, and I tapped my coat-pocket where my phone had been, bewildered at my friend’s behavior, which was odd even by his extraordinary standards.
I contemplated digging into the cushions to retrieve my phone—my practice partners were covering the emergency calls, but it wasn’t unusual for me to get an urgent page all the same. Private practice meant that I was liberated from the tyranny of the NHS’s endless “accountability” audits and fearsome paperwork, but I was delivered into the impatient attentions of the Harley Street clientele, who expected to be ministered to (and fawned over) as customers first and patients second.
My fingers were just on its corner when Holmes bounded in again, dressed in his usual grey man mufti; Primark loafers, nondescript charcoal slacks, canary shirt with a calculated wilt at the collar, blue tie with a sloppy knot. He covered it with a suit-jacket that looked to all appearances like something bought three for eighty pounds at an end-of-season closeout at a discounter’s. As I watched, he underwent his customary, remarkable transformation, his body language and habits of facial expression shifting in a thousand minute ways, somehow disguising his extraordinary height, his patrician features, his harrowing gaze. He was now so utterly forgettable—a sales-clerk in a mobile phone shop; a security guard on a construction site; even a canvasser trying to get passers-by to sign up for the RSPCA—that he could blend in anywhere in the UK. I’d seen him do the trick innumerable times, with and without props, but it never failed to thrill.
“Holmes—” I began, and he stopped me with a hand, and his burning stare emerged from his disguise. Not now, Watson, he said, without words. We took our leave from the Baker Street mansion flats, blending in with the crowds streaming out of the train-station. He led me down the Marylebone Road and then into the back-streets where the perpetual King’s Cross/St Pancras building sites were, ringed with faded wooden billboards. The groaning of heavy machinery blended with the belching thunder of trucks’ diesel engines and the tooting of black cabs fighting their way around the snarl.
Holmes fitted a bluetooth earpiece and spoke into it. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking to me. “You understand why we’re here?”
“I believe I do.” I spoke at a normal tone, and kept my gaze ahead. The earpiece was on the other side, leaving Holmes’s near ear unplugged. “You believe that we are under surveillance, and given the mention of Mycroft, I presume you believe that this surveillance is being conducted by one of the security services.”
He cocked his head in perfect pantomime of someone listening to an interlocutor in an earpiece, then said, “Precisely. Watson, you are an apt pupil. I have said on more than one occasion that Mycroft is the British government, the analyst without portfolio who knows the secrets from every branch, who serves to synthesize that raw intelligence into what the spying classes call ‘actionable.’”
We turned the corner and dodged two builders in high-visibility clothing, smoking and scowling at their phones. Holmes neither lowered his tone nor paused, as either of those things would have excited suspicion.
“Naturally, as those agencies have commanded more ministerial attention, more freedom of action, and more strings-free allocations with which to practice their dark arts, Mycroft’s star has only risen. As keen a reasoner as my brother is, he is not impervious to certain common human failings, such as the fallacy that if one does good, then whatever one does in the service of that good cannot be bad.”
I turned this over in my mind for a moment before getting its sense. “He’s defending his turf.”
“That is a very genteel way of putting it. A more accurate, if less charitable characterization would be that he’s building a little empire through a tangle of favor-trading, generous procurements, and, when all else fails, character assassination.”
I thought of the elder Holmes, corpulent, with deep-sunk eyes and protruding brow. He could be stern and even impatient, but— “Holmes, I can’t believe that your brother would—”
“Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant, James.” He only called me by the old pet name of my departed Mary when he was really in knots. My breath quickened. “For it’s true. Ah, here we are.”
“Here” turned out to be a shuttered cabinet-maker’s workshop, its old-fashioned, hand-painted sign faded to near illegibility. Holmes produced a key from a pocket and smoothly unlocked the heavy padlock to let us both in, fingers going quickly to a new-looking alarm panel to one side of the door and tapping in a code.
“Had an estate agent show me around last week,” he said. “Snapped a quick photo of the key and made my own, and of course it was trivial to watch her fingers on the keypad. This place was in one family for over a century, but their building was sold out from under them and now they’ve gone bust. The new freeholder is waiting for planning permission to build a high-rise and only considering the shortest of leases.”
The lights came on, revealing a sad scene of an old family firm gone to ash in the property wars, work-tables and tools worn by the passing of generations of skilled hands. Holmes perched on a workbench next to a cast-iron vise with a huge steel lever. He puffed his pipe alight and bade me sit in the only chair, a broken ladderback thing with a tapestry cushion that emitted a puff of ancient dust when I settled.
“I was deep in my researches when the young man knocked. I may have been a little short with him, for he was apologetic as I led him into my study and sat him by the fire. I told him that no apologies were necessary. I have, after all, hung out my shingle—I’ve no business snapping at prospective clients who interrupt my day.”
Holmes spoke in his normal tones, the raconteur’s humblebrag, without any hint of the nervousness I’d detected in him from the moment I’d stepped through his door. We might have been in his study ourselves.
“I knew straightaway that he was a soldier, military intelligence, and recently suspended. I could see that he was a newly single man, strong-willed, and trying to give up cigarettes. I don’t get many visitors from the signals intelligence side of the world, and my heart quickened at the thought of a spot of real intrigue for a change.”
“I understand that you are a man who can keep confidences, Mr. Holmes.”
“I have held STRAP 3 clearance on nine separate occasions, though at the moment I hold no clearances whatsoever. Nevertheless, you may be assured that Her Majesty’s Government has given me its imprimatur as to my discretion.”
My visitor barked a humorless laugh then. “Here stands before you proof that HMG is no judge of character.”
“I had assumed as much. You’ve brought me a document, I expect.”
He looked abashed, then defiant. “Yes, indeed I have,” and he drew this from his pocket and thrust it upon me.
Holmes drew a neatly folded sheet of A4 from his inside pocket and passed it to me. I unfolded it and studied it.
“Apart from the UK TOP SECRET STRAP 1 COMINT markings at the top, I can make neither head nor tail,” I admitted.
“It’s rather specialized,” Holmes said. “But it might help if I told you that this document, headed ‘HIMR. Data Mining Research Problem Book,’ relates to malware implantation by GCHQ.”
“I know that malware is the latest in a series of names for computer viruses, and I suppose that ‘malware implantation’ is the practice of infecting your adversaries with malicious computer code.”
“Quite so. You may have heard, furthermore, of EDGEHILL, the TOP SE
CRET STRAP 1 program whose existence was revealed in one of the Snowden documents?”
“It rings a bell, but to be honest, I got a sort of fatigue from the Snowden news—it was all so technical, and so dismal.”
“Tedium and dismalness are powerful weapons—far more powerful than secrecy in many cases. Any bit of business that can be made sufficiently tedious and over-complexified naturally repels public attention and all but the most diligent of investigators. Think of the allegedly public hearings that demand their attendees sit through seven or eight hours of monotonic formalities before the main business is tabled—or of the lengthy, tedious documents our friends in Brussels and Westminster are so fond of. If you want to do something genuinely evil, it is best for you that it also be fantastically dull.”
“Well, this document certainly qualifies.” I passed it back.
“Only because you can’t see through the lines. EDGEHILL—and its American cousin at the NSA, BULLRUN—is, quite simply, a sabotage program. Its mission is to introduce or discover programmer errors in everyday software in computers, mobile devices, network switches, and firmware—the nebulous code that has crept into everything from insulin pumps to automobiles to thermostats—and weaponize them. All code will have errors for the same reason that all books, no matter how carefully edited, have typos, and those errors are discoverable by anyone who puts his mind to it. Even you, John.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“Nonsense. A nine-year-old girl discovered a critical flaw in the iPhone operating system not so many years ago. The systems have not grown less complex and error-prone since then—the only thing that’s changed is the stakes, which keep getting higher. The latest towers erected by our offshore friends in the formerly unfashionable parts of London rely upon tuned seismic dampers whose firmware is no more or less robust than the iPhone I made you leave under a cushion in my flat. The human errors in our skyscrapers and pacemakers are festering because the jolly lads in signals intelligence want to be able to turn your phone into a roving wiretap.”
Echoes of Sherlock Holmes Page 34
