Halting State

There’s doubt in his voice, and suddenly you can see what’s going through his mind: lying awake at night, next to your sleeping form, thinking morbid thoughts about the future, self-doubt gnawing at him—it’s the mirror image of your own uncertainty, only he’s externalizing it, projecting it on the big picture rather than worrying about his own prospects. So you swallow your cutting response and instead nod at him, encouraging. Maybe you can salvage something more than memories if you help him get this out of his system first.

“A ‘capture the flag’ exercise by a bunch of deniable hackers—well, either it works, or it doesn’t. If it works, they’ve got the kind of espionage edge that the old-time CIA or KGB would have creamed themselves over, and if it fails, they’ve learned something.” He pulls on a tee-shirt by the light of the bedside lamp and pads around to your side of the room. “Want to stay here? Or come downstairs and talk?”

You slide out of bed and pick up his dressing-gown, from where you dropped it last night. “I’m listening.”

“Michaels wants to use us to flush out Team Red’s resident agent so he can then back-track through their audit trail and roll up the hole Team Red came in through. Assuming we trust him when he says SPOOKS isn’t compromised, all we have to do is set up a situation where they come for Nigel MacDonald, then wrap them up… And there’s always the chance that my filter tool has caught some more stolen prestige items overnight.”

His happy babble is slowing down, his uncertainty finally rising to the level of consciousness. “Jack. Listen.” You’re standing behind him. It’d be really easy to reach out and put your arms around his waist, if you could just break through his preoccupation. “You’re talking about people who have, at best, been involved in a criminal conspiracy to commit robbery, and at worst, have been involved in preparing the groundwork for a major act of terrorism. Who come from a country where people who do that sort of thing usually end up dead, and who know they’re expendable, and we’re sniffing around after them.” He tenses. “Remember last time? Remember your niece is still missing? And you think getting in deeper is a good idea?”

You can see it all laid out before you. All you have to do is draft a whitewash report, nothing found, and scurry back to London with your tail between your legs before the shit hits the fan. Maggie and Chris will pat you on the head, and you can get back onto the Dietrich-Brunner promotion treadmill (even without the funny handshake, nod, and wink from Barry Michaels that says she’s one of us, look after her). And you can put Jack on a flight to Amsterdam to continue installing the hang-over he was working on when this whole mad whirlwind blew out of nowhere to engulf you both. You don’t have to see each other ever again, and nobody needs to get hurt. Jack can go back to biting his belly raw over an unjust wound, and you can go back to keeping the world at bay. Chalk it up to experience and leave Michaels to swear over the wreckage of his intricately planned human-engineering hack. Jump back into your emotional coffin and slam the lid; nobody needs to get hurt. And if this wasn’t the morning after, that’s exactly what you’d do.

He shudders and begins to turn round. “Elaine, I don’t think they’ll just let me leave. There’s stuff I used to do in my last job, I can see why they’d want me—”

You can feel his breath on your cheek, shallow and anxious. You lean towards him. “If you get yourself stabbed again, I will be very angry with you.”

“I”—he reaches out to you hesitantly—“know.”

And then the doorbell rings.

JACK: Body of Evidence

The moment is as fragile as a painted eggshell. The doorbell rings just as Elaine’s early-morning chill seems to be thawing: just as you pick up her first indication that she isn’t, actually, embarrassed or mad at you or wishing she’d chewed her arm off at the shoulder and slipped out the window rather than waiting for dawn. It is an instant laden with profundity—and the bell shatters it.

“You’d better answer that,” she says, looking at you as calmly as a robot, the urgency of the moment suddenly masked.

“Okay.” You grab your underpants and hop towards the staircase, pausing to get one foot in at a time.

The doorbell chimes again just as you get to it. You pause for a moment, then stick your face up to the security lens. The fish-eye view is hard to interpret, but it looks like a police uniform. Your stomach does a double back-flip of Olympic-qualifying proportions as you twist the Yale lock and pull. “Hello?”

“Mr… Reed? Jack Reed?” There’s something odd about the constable, and then it clicks: He’s reading from a handwritten piece of paper. (That, and he looks very young and inexperienced.) “Inspector Kavanaugh sent me. Would you be aware of the location of a Ms. Barnaby?”

“I’m Jack. She’s here, too.” The handwritten note gives you a sudden flicker of optimism. “What can we do for you?”

“If I can come inside, sir?” You take a step back, involuntarily. The constable looks a little unhappy about something, as if he’s steeling himself to deliver some bad news. “I’m told that yesterday you were in Glasgow. Is that correct?”

An icy moment of clarity: Should I call my solicitor now? you wonder.

“Yes,” calls Elaine, and you look round automatically. She’s standing at the top of the staircase, huddled inside your dressing-gown.

“I see, ma’am.” The cop nods, and you notice something else that’s odd—he’s not wearing heavy-framed glasses, and there’s no webcam Velcro’d to the front of his anti-stabby vest. You peer at the name tag on his chest: LOCKHART. “Well, in that case, the inspector said to pass on her apologies, and would you mind coming down to the city mortuary to attempt to”—he swallows—“identify a deceased person for us?”

“Oh fuck,” you say, just as Elaine expresses a similar sentiment. You glance at her and see your own shock, mirrored and multiplied.

“I’m sorry, sir.” PC Lockhart sounds mortified.

It’s got to be Mr. Wu Chen, prize bastard and the only person you know who was angling to get himself killed. One James Bond movie too many tries to bubble past your tongue, but the mummy lobe clamps down before you can say something you might regret later, like he knew the shortest way to my heart or the bastard owes me a new keyboard. Because that would be Inappropriate, and saying Inappropriate things at the Wrong Time in front of a Police Officer is bound to get you into Hot Water, and despite the fact that the past week has somewhat taken the shine off your virginal relationship with the forces of law’n’order, and despite the fact that Elaine (astonishingly) doesn’t think you’re some kind of pervert and (even more astonishingly) seems to want to install herself in your life, you have no desire to become any more intimate with their ways than you already are.

“We’ll come along,” you hear yourself say. “We’re just…up. Do you mind if we get dressed first?”

Lockhart looks mortified, as if he’s dreaming and has just realized he’s wearing a pink tutu under his tunic. “No! No! I’ll just be waiting…”

“Down here, yes.” You retreat upstairs towards Elaine, who is mouthing something at you furiously but completely inaudibly. She waits until you’re in the bedroom, then shuts the door. “What about my suit?”

“Oh.” You stop to think, one leg in your jeans and the other out. “I’ll go get it out of the machine.” Too late you realize that what she was really asking was, Do you have an ironing board? The miracles of modern fabric technology only stretch so far.

“Never mind.” She rummages through the closet and pulls out a pair of your combat pants that have seen better days, and a SIMS 4: NOW IT’S REAL tee-shirt. “Have you got a belt? I’ll drop in at the hotel afterwards…”

A couple of minutes later you’re both downstairs and pulling your boots on. PC Lockhart is hovering and havering as if he’s not quite sure what to do with himself. You duck into the kitchen and scoop Elaine’s business weeds into a spare carrier bag while she pointedly makes small-talk in the living room, grab your own jacket, wallet, and phone—and then it’s time to go. “If you’ll follow me, please?” asks Lockhart.

Unlike the Glaswegian cop, Lockhart doesn’t rate a souped-up Volvo with a stack of electronic countermeasures and a boot full of hazard warning signs. You end up knee-cap to knee-cap with Elaine in the back of a wee white Toyota hybrid that looks like something a real car would carry as a life-boat. Lockhart drives like a myopic granny, slowing for every speed pillow and chicane as he potters along the road to Canonmills, then uphill