Halting State

well-nigh-deafening silence of Michaels lying by omission. If this was Saturday night down the shop, he’d be clamming up and calling for his solicitor rather than answering the next question, which is, Why is MI6 (or whoever) running a multi-million-pound operation to bug gamers down in Leith?

“You could tell them the truth,” Liz volunteers slowly.

“Yes?” McMullen looks thoughtful.

“Faulty intelligence led to a major counter-terrorism raid in Leith. Which turned over a sporting goods warehouse instead of an Al Qaida cell.” She shrugs. “It’s bad PR, but we explain we were overruled by the suits from Brussels who organized it without consulting us. Blame Kemal”—she nods at Mario, who looks outraged—“and we’re off the hook, and more importantly, the spotlight is off Mr. Michaels as well.”

“Suits me,” Michaels says dismissively.

“I’ll have to run that one by the chief, but it ought to fly.” McMullen nods thoughtfully. “You”—he points at Mario—“you can keep your mouth shut. With your boss in the hospital, you’re off the hook, and with your boss in the hospital and not answering any damn fool questions, there’s nobody who can tell the press otherwise.”

“It is an outrage!” Mario vents. “We are not responsible!”

“So?” Liz glares at him, then turns to look at Michaels. “Next you’re going to tell us you want this burying so deep it’s in danger of coming up in China. Am I right?”

Michaels splutters. “Absolutely! Of course—what do you think we are?”

She regards him coolly. “I think you’ve got a leak.”

He stares right back. “That’s none of your business, and I’d appreciate it if you would desist from further speculation along those lines.”

“That’s enough.” McMullen rounds on Michaels. “You’ve done enough damage already, or have you not noticed we’ve had to shut down traffic to half the north side of the city? So I’d appreciate it if you’d cease with your high-minded requests and leave us to sort things out.” He’s building up a head of steam, is the deputy chief constable, and you’re torn between fascination at this fly-on-the-wall opportunity to see the boss in action, and the fear that he’s going to take it out on someone under his authority. “And then you and me and the super and Kavanaugh here are going to sit down, and you’re going to tell us what you can about what’s going on so we can stop blundering around in the dark and stamping on your corns.”

“What about us?” Mario demands plaintively.

McMullen finally blows his top. “Fuck off back tae Brussels, and I won’t have to prosecute you for wasting police time!”

Three hours later you’re back at the station. It’s been a busy morning, mopping up after the horrendous mess Kemal’s flying circus left behind, but eventually you get a chance to catch a late lunch. Unfortunately, before you can cut and run, Liz Kavanaugh catches your eye. “Sergeant, let’s do lunch together.”

Ah, fuck it. You know an order when you hear one. You were planning on catching up on your paperwork—there’s that wee ned to keep track of, and the incontinent dog owner the council keeps yammering on about, not to mention last week’s B#amp#E cases—but Liz obviously has something else in mind. So you nod dutifully and play along. “Where’d ye have in mind, skipper?”

“There’s a nice little Turkish bistro on the Shore, they do excellent meze.” She holds up a car keyfob. “I’m buying.”

Well, that’s no’ so bad. You follow Liz out of the station, and she lets you into her car—a compact Volvo, very nice—then drives down into Leith and parks next to the Shore. “What do you want to talk about?” you ask her receding back, as she heads up the pavement.

“Patience, Sergeant.”

Okay, so it’s serious. (If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t mind nattering about it.) You trot along after her as she ducks round a corner and leads you to a couple of pavement tables outside a small diner, opposite a small aquatic appendix pinched off from the harbour by a low bridge that appears to have been built on.

“Have a seat, Sergeant—Sue. We’ve got plenty of time for lunch: I’ve booked this as a meeting.” She smiles, but there’s something uneasy about the expression. It doesn’t reach her eyes. She’s got her back to the glass front window of the bistro and keeps scanning the road as if she’s expecting someone. “I think you should go off- line.”

“You sure, skipper?” You raise one eyebrow at that, and when you blink, the speech-stress plug-in is showing red spikes all over Liz.

“Yes.”

You slip your glasses off and physically unplug them, slipping their battery out. Then you reach into your left upper-front torso pocket, pull the PDA, and pop the fuel cell. “Satisfied?”

A bendy-bus slinks by and blasts you with a haze of bio-diesel, power pack roaring. Liz nods wordlessly, then pulls her own PDA out and gives it the miser’s standby. “Position your chair so you’re talking away from the window,” she says. “I don’t want anyone bouncing a laser off it.”

“Whae the fuck?” But you do as she says, more surprised than anything else.

A thin smile. “You can buy laser-acoustic mikes for thirty euros in Maplins online these days, Sue. And the people I’m worried about won’t think twice about breaking the law by using them.”

“You think Michaels sold us a line of bullshit?” you burst out, finally unable to contain yourself.

“I don’t think so, I know so.” She rubs the side of her cheek, where the headset normally rides. “Problem is, I don’t know whether he did it to keep us distracted or to make us do some dirty work for him, or what.”

“But if he’s lyin’, he’s a—”

She waves a hand, cutting you off. “One thing you can be sure of is, he is what he said he is. It checks out. There’s a…a restricted access file. Hard copy only, the best kind of security: They keep it in a locked room at Fettes Road. I had a look at it while you were in debrief. Michaels is on the list. We can’t touch him.”

A waitress wanders outside, sees you both, and smiles: A moment later you’re puzzling over a menu as Liz continues to lay the situation out.

“Hayek Associates are a front for some sort of intelligence-gathering operation. Something went wrong, and the non-spook employees hit the panic button before anyone could stop them. They’ve got a quantum processor down in Leith. Those things don’t grow on trees, Sue, I’ve been doing some reading about them and it scares me. Kemal saying TETRA is compromised scares me even more. And so does that flaky set-up in Nigel MacDonald’s flat, because it’s a dead ringer for a blacknet node we took down last year.”

“What’s a quantum processor for?” That one’s been puzzling you all morning. It looked more like Dr. Frankenstein’s work-bench than any other machine you’ve ever seen.

“Not my field, I don’t know much more about IT than you do.” She frowns. “But I know what they do—they’re used for special types of calculation. Not doing your word processing or playing games, but things like calculating how proteins fold, or breaking codes. And you know what? This whole thing with Hayek Associates and the robbery in Avalon Four is about codes, isn’t it? The codes your programmers were going on about, that pin down where a magic sword or whatever is.”

“But they wouldna buy a quantum processor just so’s they could rip off their customers, is that what you’re sayin’?”

“Yup.” Her cheek twitches. Liz is clearly not a happy camper today. “Who’s to say precisely what bunch of codes they’ve been cracking with it? Say what you will, mobile gaming takes bandwidth, so Hayek have a great excuse for running lots of fat pipes in and out of the exchanges. And I don’t think they’re going to tell us what they’re doing with it, do you? So if we want to crack this case, we’ve got to go after it from other angles. Did you get anywhere looking for the mysterious Mr. MacDonald?”

“Not a whisper.” You shrug. Just then, the waitress reappears with your latte and something black and villainous-looking in a small glass for Liz. “It’s as if he just vanished right off the face of the earth.”

“Maybe he did.” You look at her sharply, but she’s just staring at her coffee as if she’s afraid it’ll bite her. “I am having second thoughts about our mysterious Mr. MacDonald. I think he’s a snipe—in the American sense.”