Halting State

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…

ELAINE: Stitched Up

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. Voila: 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.