Halting State

determine credit worthiness and ‘eligibility to participate,’ it says. The anti-nutcase clause. And we signed to let them vary the T’s and C’s.”

“So?”

“The anti-nutcase clause is effectively a privacy waiver for positive vetting. And the T’s and C’s—”

“Official Secrets Act, as a click-through?”

“Something like that.” She shifts from one foot to the other restlessly, as if thinking about running away. “About your niece, Elsie is it? Are you close to her? Spooks Control says it was the other side.”

The other side. A nice turn of phrase, but who exactly are the other side? And what does it mean? “They would say that, wouldn’t they.” You suppose you ought to feel angry, but you’re actually just filled with a monstrous sense of surprise. “I’m…not that close, really.” It’s just my niece. If it wasn’t you at the centre of it all, if it was some other poor bastard on the receiving end of this sinister post-modern joke, you’d be laughing hysterically. As it is, maybe crying is an appropriate response. “Let’s—”

The curtain jerks open, admitting a police officer, goggle-eyed and cammed up like a paratrooper wearing a spider-eyed mask. “Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby? I’m to take you across to Edinburgh. If you’d like to put your chop here…”

He hands you a clipboard and a pen, old-fashioned ink and a sticky panel for you to thumbprint at the bottom of the page of small print with the Saltire and red lion rampant, and as you sign your name to the revised EULA, you can feel the waters closing in over your head.

SUE: Cover-up

When the big electromagnet quenches, your first panicky thought is that it fucking is a bomb, and that slimy shite Michaels is lying through his pants. Then you realize that you’re still alive and, in fact, nobody is hurt—but it’s no thanks to les Hommes de l’ONCLE.

(Later you find an article in Wikipedia that explains it. Apparently when you warm up a superconductor to its critical temperature, and it stops superconducting, any electrons circulating in it suddenly stop circulating freely, and the energy all comes out as heat instantly. Which heats up the liquid nitrogen refrigerant the magnet is sitting in from about minus two hundred degrees to minus fifty degrees in a fraction of a second, vapourizing it—and the vapour occupies a whole lot more space than the liquid. So it’s not far off being a bomb.)

But when it happened, you weren’t expecting it. So one moment you were sitting there, listening to Barry Michaels out himself as some kind of spook, and the next thing you heard was a faint popping sound—more like a bump than anything, or maybe it’s a figment of your imagination—and then God’s own steam-whistle went off about two metres away from the back of your heid.

(In hospitals with body scanners, they put the magnets under a metal duct, venting through the ceiling and walls to the outside air, and they make sure the windows are all toughened glass and all the window units and doors are designed to blow open but not to pop out of their frames. And indeed, there’s a thing like a giant extractor hood hunching over the smoking thermos from hell in the warehouse from which Michaels has so signally failed to dismisseth the Leith police. And that’s probably what saves your life.)

For a few seconds the roaring whistling sound fills the room, bashing on your ear-drums and battering at your guts like the afterburning exhaust of a fighter at an air show, more like a jackhammer than an actual noise. Then it begins to die down. You take a deep breath, feeling light-headed, and the room begins to spin. It keeps spinning, and it’s really funny, you’ve got to laugh—it’s the aftermath of the explosion. Has somebody slipped you a popper? Because that’s what it feels like, it’s like you’ve gone from sober to six pints drunk in five seconds flat. And then your head begins to clear, and you feel sick with fright. “What’s happening? Liz! Tell me!”

Liz is gasping for breath, too, and there’s a rattling thunder of fans, a tangible blast sucking a draft of air in through the suddenly flapping doorway. “Be. Okay. In a minute.”

The door slams open again as the S Division boyos race in, guns drawn and twitchy. “On the ground! On the ground!” One of them shouts at Kemal, obviously getting completely the wrong end of the stick. “On the ground, motherfucker!”

“He’s ours,” calls out McMullen. “Call an ambulance crew, we, we need oxygen in here.” No shit, you think: Kemal is on the floor, gasping and twitching and generally not looking terribly healthy. “Evac, evacuate the building.”

Three minutes later you’re arguing with a paramedic who wants you to lie down on his wee stretcher so he can play doctors and constables. “I’m fine, dinna worry about me,” you reassure him. Which isn’t entirely true— you’ve got a splitting headache left over from when the gadget blew out its load—but the only person who’s really in need of help seems to be Kemal, and he’s on his way to the Western General in the back of an ambulance with a mask strapped to his face. “I gotta fill in the chief.”

You manage to make your way over to the mobile incident headquarters, where the uniform on duty nods you through to the back office. Liz is already there, with McMullen and Michaels, and Detective Superintendent Verity, and Kemal’s deputy Mario, none of them looking terribly happy. “Shut the door, Smith,” snaps Verity. McMullen, looking very out of place in his golfing duds, points a finger at Michaels. “You have some explaining to do.”

Michaels glances at his watch. “Not as much as you will if you don’t come up with a good cover story,” he mutters. He sounds genuinely rattled. So it’s pass the exploding surprise whoopee cushion public enquiry parcel, is it? you wonder. “If it wasn’t for the damned meddling flying squad, or that prize twat Wayne…”

McMullen takes a deep breath. Judging by the expression on his face, you figure he’s keeping a tight lid on. Poor bastard—this isn’t the kind of hole in one he’d been expecting to handle on his day off. “Would one or the other of you please explain the situation in words of one syllable?” he finally manages.

“I suppose so.” Michaels pats back a fly-away wisp of blond hair. “Hayek Associates are what used to be called a front company. On the one hand, they do what it says on the tin—stabilize in-game economies, maximize stakeholder fun, that kind of thing. On the other hand, they give us a good opportunity to keep an eye on certain disorderly elements who like to meet up in one game space or another to swap dragon-slaying hints, as it were.”

“Who is ‘us’?” Liz asks.

Michaels frowns. “You don’t need to know that, but Mr. McMullen”—the deputy chief nods, lugubriously—“can vouch for us. In any case, you need to understand that most of Hayek Associates’ employees are just what they appear to be. When the robbery took place, Wayne panicked—I can confirm that he’s a civilian—and called you. Which caused us to acquire an audit trail in CopSpace, which is monitored by—”

“They have no need to know,” interrupts Mario. He looks at Michaels, pleadingly. “Can this wait for Kemal?”

“Other agencies, as I was saying,” Michaels continues, as if the interruption hadn’t taken place. “An elite pan-European counter-espionage police task force. Who promptly put two and two together and got five, hence this morning’s little excursion.”

“The warehouse.” McMullen gives Michaels a hard stare. “It’s yours?”

There’s a brief pause, then Michaels inclines his head. “Yes. Nothing to do with that blacknet you’re looking for in Leith. All those machines are just there to feed data in and out of the 5-million-pound quantum processor that your idiot friend”—he almost snarls at Mario—“has comprehensively broken.”

You try to catch Liz’s eye, but she’s doing the Botox thing, cheek muscles virtually paralysed. Pounds not euros—so it’s an English thing. Under the articles of independence MI5 and MI6 and GCHQ and SOCA and the rest of the southern intelligence apparat have got the free run of Scotland; meanwhile, the Republic’s own intel capabilities are strictly local, mainly focussed on keeping an eye on the local Muj bampots down the pub and suchlike. It’s on a level with the rest of Scotland’s military and diplomatic clout— strictly toytown. (After all, who on earth would want to invade Scotland?) But more importantly, you can hear the