Halting State

“Certainly, sir.” You walk right on up to the front and hand it to him, along with its box. “The front desk is copying the phone book for you. By hand.”

His cheek twitches as he turns the gadget over in his hands. “I see a camera.” He mimes snapping a shot as he turns to Bill the Suit. “Tell ’em to photograph the pages and text me the picture. That’ll do for now. Get the list typed up and reshoot it, then send it to one of those online OCR services.” Bill looks shocked. “Go on! If they’re Googling all the civilian traffic in Scotland, it’s too late, already.” Behind you, the door opens again; you glance round and recognize Liz Kavanaugh. “Ah, good,” rasps Verity, as Bill heads for the door to engage in his amateur photography. “I was wondering when you’d get here!”

“Yes, well, I was regrettably delayed.” Liz looks at you pointedly. “You’ve got a phone for me?” You hand the mobie over. She takes it and goes over to the vacant chair next to Verity. “I had to stop to get eyeball confirmation of a murder victim’s ID.”

“Another…?” Verity’s eyebrows go up. “Is it connected?”

“Definitely.” Liz grins like a skull.

“Well, shite. If you’ll pardon my French.” Verity doesn’t hold with bad language, which makes him something of an anomaly north of the border. “Who is it this time?”

“Wayne Richardson, a Hayek Associates’ employee who has been helping with our investigations this past week.” She nods at you, and you tense. “He was the source of the original crime report and the first indication that, uh, Nigel MacDonald was missing. I caught up with our two external investigators, Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby, and they confirmed his identity.”

“That makes it, what? Four this week?”

“Three, sir,” Liz says firmly. “Because Nigel MacDonald doesn’t exist.”

Verity rolls his eyes. “Explain.”

“Sir.” Liz faces the roomful of faces. “There’s a body in Pilton. Last night, there was another body in Strathclyde—looked like a foreign-exchange student who’d gone for a midnight walk on the Clockwork Orange tracks, except his blood alcohol was zero, serum cortisol was sky-high, and there were other physical signs of stress—and, earlier in the day, he’d tried to stab a person of interest in my other case. This morning Wayne Richardson of Hayek Associates shows up dead: hit and run, apparently on his way to work, except that the hit and run in question was a taxi under remote drive authority by persons unknown.” There’s an audible wave of angry muttering from around the room. “These events are connected to an alleged kidnapping down south the day before yesterday, to yesterday’s fun and games involving Europol, a warehouse in Leith, and a bunch of very expensive servers”—you can see Verity wincing at the memory—“and this morning’s major incident alert and to the flat on the meadows with a satellite uplink on the roof we did over earlier in the week, so if anyone hasn’t got the message already, if you’ve got a PDA, or an official phone, or a personal phone you owned more than twenty-four hours ago, switch the bloody thing off right now.”

Verity glares at the assembled roomful of dibbles. “Do it!” There’s another wave of fidgeting and you get the feeling that most of it is make-show to clue the boss in that various folks aren’t totally fucked in the heid—Liz said Civil Contingencies Act earlier, and that’s enough to put the wind right up you because that bland-sounding piece of legislation lays out the rules for declaring a State of Emergency, and you’d bet good money that every other one of the lads and lasses here got tipped off about it before they started their shift, just like you. “Continue, Inspector.”

“I don’t know who our Pilton body is, and I doubt we’re going to find out via the normal channels, because he wasn’t listed in the National Identity Register.” Which is a pish-poor excuse for a mess of an identity system, has been ever since the idiots who brought it in got the wind up them over the civil disobedience campaign and turned it into a dumping ground for every buggy civil service client tracking database the pre-defederalization UK owned—but still, not listed is a headache: It’s a synonym for up to no good in copspeak. “I do know that Nigel MacDonald, who we’ve pegged as missing in suspicious circumstances in the Hayek Associates investigation, is in the register but doesn’t actually exist, but I’ve been ordered not to investigate him further because it’s a matter of national security. His flat was rented by parties unknown and seems to have been being used as a remixer by the blacknet we’ve been looking for, and I suspect the late Mr. Richardson could have told us some more about that if he wasn’t currently occupying a drawer in the mortuary.”

At that point, the muttering gets loud enough that Kavanaugh stops talking and waits for it to die down. “If you’ll permit me to continue? Yes? The third body, the exchange student, was implicated in the same business, and so are Hayek Associates, who employed the fourth, although I am assured”—at this point she stares, unreassuringly, at Verity—“that they’re on our side. This is a national-security clusterfuck rather than a police investigation, and we would be shutting it down forthwith, as soon as we’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, except for the small problem that we’ve been told by the intel community that whoever we’re up against has penetrated not only the national switched telecommunications backbone but CopSpace from top to bottom and we’re to go on standby for a major terrorist incident within the next twenty-four hours.” Liz pauses to take a deep breath, but nobody interrupts: “I don’t know where they got hold of all this, but they’re taking it seriously enough that the minister of justice has just issued an Emergency Regulations order as set out under Part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act, while they redistribute fresh authentication keys to every telco and ISP in the country. And I believe that’s what the chief inspector is just about to tell us all about…”

ELAINE: Gentleman and Players

It is a hell of a shock, being expected to identify a dead body before breakfast, and you do not appreciate it —especially when you’re also trying to digest the significance of whatever happened between you and Jack last night (and won’t that suck, if Margaret or Chris or one of the other friendly piranhas at the office find out that you’ve been shagging the gamekeeper?) and you’re spending your sanity points worrying about what the hell the two of you have got yourselves into at a practical, spy-versus-spy, level. Not to mention Jack’s criminal-record equivalent of a lousy credit history with fries on top. Which is why you’re really quite relieved when the inspector has to rush off somewhere, pausing only to extract from you a promise that you’ll keep your phone switched on in case she wants to talk to you later. She witnesses for Dr. Hughes while the two of you sign a great big ledger—on real bleached wood-pulp—to agree that this day you have confirmed the identity of Richardson, Wayne, lately employed by Hayek Associates. And you’re hanging around in the lobby (waiting while Jack uses the toilet) when the doors open again and none other than Barry Michaels of Hayek Associates walks in.

“Ah, Miss Barnaby.” He smiles, affably. “And Mr. Reed is about, I take it?” He holds up a keyfob. “Come drive with me.”

You know an order when you hear one, but you still bridle at it: “You’ll have to do better than that!”

“Yes.” He puts his smile back in its box. “It’s time to do breakfast. Today’s going to be a busy day.”

“The hell it is.” Seeing Wayne laid out on the slab turned your stomach. “I didn’t sign on for this, Barry, I signed on for an artificial reality game, not Raw-head and Bloody-bones. We—I— quit.”

He shakes his head. “I wish you could, believe me, I wish you could.”

“Could what?” Jack chooses just this exact moment to pop out of the lavatory, shaking his head in ground- hog confusion. “What’s up?”

“We’re doing breakfast. I was just explaining to Miss Barnaby that it’s too late to opt out.”

“The hell it is—”

You turn away, but he’s too fast: “They have your number, Elaine. I’d let you go—but Team Red won’t.”

Whoops. You stop, and take a deep, angry breath. “I think you owe us an explanation.”

“Over breakfast? I’m buying.”

“Mm, breakfast,” says Jack, doing a convincing imitation of a dumb-ass cartoon character.

“Fuck off…” But it’s too late, you’re outvoted, and besides, you’re wearing his trousers. What else is there to