Halting State

BEDROOM 2, and Liz dives towards KITCHEN. “Hold it!” There’s something in his voice that brings the inspector up sharply.

“How bad is it?”

“Need SOCO to tell us, skipper. It’s not like there’s a body or anything—”

“Then why are you—”

“We’re too late: It’s already been sanitized.”

ELAINE: Being Constructive

Saturday morning finds you rolling out of a sleeper train berth bright and early, in Edinburgh. Capital of the People’s Republic of Scotland, jewel of the north, biggest tourist trap in Europe, and a whole bunch of other things. The first not-so-subtle hint you’re not in England is the row of flags flying over the railway station concourse—pale blue background, white diagonal cross. They’re feeling their new EU-regional cojones, the Scots. It’s a puzzler, but at least they’re not insisting you clear customs and immigration: Thank Brussels for something.

The taxi ride to your hotel rubs in the fact that you’ve come to another country. It’s the old-fashioned kind of black cab, with a real human being behind the wheel instead of a webcam and a drone jockey in a call centre. Your driver manages to detour past a weird building, all non-Euclidean swoops and curves (he proudly declares it to be a parliament, even though it looks like it just arrived from Mars, then confides that it cost a science-fictional amount, confirming the Martian origins of its budget oversight process). Then he takes a hyperspace detour round the back of a bunch of office blocks and into a rural wilderness, around the grassy flank of an extinct volcano so pristine that you half expect to see a pitched battle in progress between ghostly armies in kilts. Finally, you pop back out into a stonily pompous Victorian satellite town centre: except that back home, buildings don’t usually have battlements with cannons carved into them.

Okay, so maybe they’re feeling their cojones because they’ve invented hyperspace travel. You ease your death grip on the black cab’s grab rail and twitch your map overlay into life. “Malmaison,” says the driver.

“Uh…” You blink. The hotel does indeed appear to have gun turrets. And gargoyles. Then your tourist map twitches and rearranges itself in front of your eyes as the overloaded Galileo service catches up with you. “This is the, uh, Niddrie Malmaison. I wanted the West End one?”

“Oh, reet. Ahcannaebemissingthe—” You blink at the subsequent stream of consonants interspersed with vowels that sound subtly wrong. Maybe you’d have been better off waiting for a call- centre-controlled limo. But evidently no reply is expected: The driver hits the pause button on his meter and engages the mysterious fifth wheel that allows taxis everywhere to turn on the spot. And you’re off again, into a bizarre grey maze of steep streets and steeper buildings, with or without battlements. Eventually you find yourself in front of what your map overlay insists is the right hotel, and you can relax and bill it to the company account. The frightening numbers suddenly feel a lot less threatening when you remember you’re being billed in euros, not pounds.

This hotel also has crenulations, towers, and flagpoles, but they seem to have missed out on the more alarming architectural excursions and the lobby has a reassuringly familiar interior, furnished in international hotel- chain glass and chrome.

Negotiating the front desk isn’t hard, and once you’ve installed the contents of your suit carrier in the bijou closet and parked your laptop on the beautifully arranged desk, you suddenly realize that it is barely nine o’clock in the morning: You’re in a foreign capital city, you don’t actually have to check your work email until tomorrow, and once you’ve showered the sleeper-induced kinks out of your neck and shoulders, you’ve got an entire day in which to do touristy things. The prospect is inexplicably frightening and alluring. So, of course, you do it.

On Sunday you deal with a mild hang-over, a business-planning facial in the conference suite that staggers on for six and a half hours, and the inexplicable realization that the previous day you purchased a five-foot-long claymore from a dodgy pawnshop on North Bridge, and you have no idea how to get the thing home through the metal detectors at Euston without being arrested for carrying an offensive weapon, viz., a two-handed sword.

It must be something in the water.

On Monday morning you awake with the dawn, a mild sense of dread gnawing at your stomach. It’s performance anxiety, the kind you get when you’re about to be plunged into an unpredictable situation. So you dress, grab a light breakfast in the hotel restaurant, then collect your briefcase and go down to the lobby to meet up with Chris and Brendan and the others at nine thirty sharp.

“’Lo, ’Laine,” says Mohammed, grinning behind his glasses: He’s got them dialled all the way to opaque, and with his dark suit, he looks more like a historic mob hit-man than an accountant. “Are we ready to rock?”

“Speak for yourself,” snorts Maggie, making him jump. “Elaine, have you heard from—”

You spot the unopened email, hovering in your peripheral vision like a discreet butler. “Not before breakfast,” you say. Flicking a finger, you open it. It’s from CapG, and they’ve found a native guide for you. “Yes, thanks.” You skim the message. “That looks okay,” you concede.

“He’ll be over here after lunchtime,” Maggie adds, proving she’s more networked than you are. “If I were you, I’d take him off-site for orientation before you move in.”

“Well, yes.” Does she think you were born yesterday? Or, your sneaky bone prods you, is she trying to keep you out of the loop for some reason?

“Mohammed, you and I are going to have a little chat with Mr. Michaels and Mr. Hackman.”

“Have you brought your garlic and holy water?” asks Chris, kibitzing from the side-line.

“Ha-ha, very droll.” Maggie gives him a long stare.

“I’m not kidding. If you haven’t met Hackman…he’s like Lamb, John Lamb. From HSBC.”

Maggie shudders. “Really.” The Silence of the Lambs is a company in-joke around the coffee station.

“Yes.” Chris claps her on the shoulder, lightly. “If that’s our first taxi…”

A couple of minutes later you find yourself knee to knee with Faye and Brendan in a driverless black cab, hurtling around cobblestoned mews like a one-half-scale model of Knightsbridge. It’s raining, and condensation from your breath coats the taxi window beside your head. Faye is busy with a spreadsheet, you see from her glasses and the keyboard laser-projected across the conference folder on her lap. “Have you ever been in on a search order before?” asks Brendan.

You shake your head. “Not much to it,” he says cheerily. Tapping the side of his glasses: “We serve the court order on the defendant and go in. The law’s near enough the same, it dates to the eighties and nineties, back before the locals got uppity. If they try to stop us, we find the nearest police officer and point out that they’re disobeying a court order to prevent the destruction of evidence. A little bird tells me the cops are already camping out on the door-step, so we won’t have far to go. Meanwhile, I’ve got a second order ready to go in on their telco —Fred’s handling it—to cut off all their communications if they don’t play ball.”

You shake your head. “They’re a net company. That’ll leave them dead in the water.”

“Oh yes.” He nods cheerfully: “Take them down for two working days, and they’ll probably go out of business. They’re on the sharp end of quality of service guarantees with teeth. It’s our nuclear option.” From the way he’s stroking his briefcase you have an uncomfortable feeling that he hopes he’s going to get to push the button.

“Brendan—” Faye warns, fingers tap-tapping at her lap.

“Sorry.” He doesn’t sound it. You smear the condensation with your sleeve and look out at the traffic. Four euros a litre for diesel up here, and the road’s still jammed.

An uncomfortable minute of stop-go traffic later, the taxi takes an abrupt left, then left again, and grinds to a halt. All you can see out of the window is a muddy car-park surrounded by dripping trees, but when you call up your overlay, you see that this is it: Unless the address is wrong, you’re in the right place. Brendan waves his company card at the scanner, the doors spring open, and you immediately put both your feet in an ankle-deep icy puddle.