Halting State

Something long is poking out of it, a black bin-liner wrapped around one end—a hockey stick, maybe? “Ah, Ms. Barnaby. I was looking for you both. Inspector Kavanaugh says—”

She raises a hand. “Don’t tell me, she wants you to stick to us like glue. Right?”

“Reet.” You stare at her hard. “You planning to be a nuisance? Or know somebody else who is?”

She meets your eyes. “I’m planning on doing what I’ve been told to do, Sergeant.” She puts the bag down. “I haven’t been told to expect you.” She stonewalls like a defence solicitor: You snort and turn aside.

Behind you, Bob clears his throat. “Sergeant?”

Jack is hammering away at the keyboard, typing like a mad thing in a pop-up window while the game he’s in unrolls in real time behind it. “What is it, Bob?”

Barnaby’s phone trills for attention: She turns away. Bob shuffles uneasily. “I think you’d better come and see for yourself, boss.”

You follow him out onto the landing outside the room. Bob points out the strip of floor-to-ceiling window. “Look.”

You stare out onto the high street. It’s the usual congested mess of buses and taxis queuing for Haymarket Interchange, with a couple of supertrams parked nose-to-tail and gumming everything up. Things have never been right there since they installed the light rail system, but nobody on the Council’s about to admit that they should have knocked down about a billion euros’ worth of historic listed buildings before they built the bloody tracks. It looks like pedestrian hell down there, even without the shambling crowd of people getting off the trams, moving oddly.

“What am I meant to be looking for, Bob?” you ask, forcing yourself to be patient.

“Zombies, skipper. What do they look like to you?”

You stare, wishing you could use your goggles—the digital zoom would be right handy at this point. It looks like any other crowd to you, at first, so you squint and look at the edges. They’re walking funny, lurching from side to side. And why has that guy got his arms outstretched? He blunders about, colliding with a woman in a business suit that’s ripped from shoulder to sleeve, and her face—

“Jesus, Bob.” You blink, then swallow. “There’s no such thing as zombies.” A little niggling doubt worries away at you. “But get yerself down to reception and tell them to shut the doors, just in case. I’m going to make some calls.”

You pull your phone out and speed-dial Liz. There’s no wait, just an immediate canned message. “Hello, you are through to Detective Inspector Kavanaugh’s voice mail. Please leave a message.”

Shit. Why’s her phone switched off? You glance out of the window again, just to confirm what you can see. “Skipper, Sue here. Ye dinna have tae take ma wuird fer it, I’ll text you a photie”—you pause, trying to get a grip on your accent, which is making a bid for freedom (as it often does in moments of stress)—“but we’re holed up in the Malmaison and there’s a bunch of zombies on the pavement outside.” You swallow. “Whit should I do?” You end the call, then take a couple of snaps of the shambling horde and send them to Liz’s mailbox. It’s probably one of those old-time flash mobs, but why here, why now, and why zombies?

You go back into the conference room just as Elaine, nodding furiously at no one in particular, ends her call and glances at you. “Sorry I was rude earlier, Sergeant. Nobody told me to expect you.”

“Reet.” You shake your head. “What’re you doing?”

“Being bait.” She swings an office chair round and sits down on it, facing you. “Actually, Jack’s the bait, I’m supposed to co-ordinate the response.”

Bait? Response? “Bait for who?” you ask cautiously.

“A bunch of gamers in China.” She sniffs. “They’re all over our critical infrastructure, but they made a few mistakes, and now Jack’s wearing a false identity—Nigel MacDonald, the guy you’ve been looking for—and we”—her emphasis on the last word is extremely odd—“expect the bad guys to expose themselves, trying to locate him so they can shut him up. They don’t know MacDonald is a sock-puppet, you see.”

“And you are…?” Scrabbling for traction, springs to mind.

“I’m secret agent X, it seems.” She grimaces. “Thing is, we don’t know how they’re going to try to get at Jack, but he’s raising a fuss to make them pay attention—”

“Got it,” says the man himself, still hunched over his gaming box. There’s a pause in his incessant typing.

“Got what?” you and Elaine ask, almost simultaneously.

“What they’re fucking doing,” says Jack, triumphantly. “At least, I think I know what they’re doing.”

“What are they doing, Jack?” asks Elaine. She’s flexing her hands unconsciously, so that for a moment you think she’s fantasizing about strangling him.

“They’ve set up a botnet, and now they’re controlling it through Zonespace. Zonespace runs distributed across most mobile phones—just about any multi-user game you play relies on one or another version of Zone/DB to handle transactions. They’re sending control packets disguised as flocks of birds or patterns of trees in the forests, or something, you know? Updating the database, and relying on the zombies in the botnet to pick up the changes. It’s their backdoor into the public network, by the way—they feed instructions to the zombies, and the zombies with the stolen authentication pad update the routing tables. The traffic looks like game-play to GCHQ or CESG or NSA or whoever’s sniffing packets; looking in-game for characters run by Abdullah and Salim holding private chat about blowing up the White House garden gnomes won’t get you a handle on what’s going on because they’re not using the game as a ludic universe to chat in, they’re using it as a transport layer! They’re tunnelling TCP/IP over AD#amp#D!”

You look at Elaine. “Is he usually like this?”

She sniffs. “I’m beginning to wonder.” Looking at Jack: “What can we expect?”

“Besides the big-time griefing? Michaels figures the Guoanbu will pull Team Red off us as soon as he hands them a list of names and faces. Nigel MacDonald is there to distract their attention—they’re meant to think his oppo are just a branch of the existing security services with a super-programmer on board, sort of a Ken Thompson figure—rather than understanding what Hayek Associates and SPOOKS are really about. But I reckon Team Red are going to be reluctant to go back in their box. They’ll take advantage of whatever chaos they can create to go after MacDonald, which means me.”

Griefing is what Davey got suspended from school for last year, not something you associate with spies and terrorists: But on the other hand…they seem to know what they’re doing, and you’ve been told to look after them, right? So you open your mouth: “I’m told there’s a blacknet operating in Edinburgh, and the inspector figures it’s possible it organized what happened to Wayne Richardson. Would this be something your bad guys might use?”

“Fuck!” Jack jerks in his chair like you’ve brought out a car battery and clamped the shockers to his wedding tackle. “Of course it would be!” (Make it a truck battery.) “That would explain—” He turns back to his laptop and starts typing again. “Fuck, fuck…” It seems that under pressure Jack comes down with a wee dose of the Tourette’s: a good thing you aren’t logging evidence right now, isn’t it?

“Is a blacknet what I think it is?” asks Elaine. There’s some kind of racket from outside the window: You’re thinking you ought to go and keep an eye on it.

“Probably.” Where’s Bob? You can understand the skipper taking her time phoning you back, but Bob’s running late. “At the protocol level, it’s an anonymous peer-to-peer currency system. It asks you to do favours, it does you favours. Like, be in front of a building with a running motor at such a time with the backdoors open, and drive to an address where someone’ll be waiting for you with a wallet full of cash and another stolen car.” At least, that’s the innocent-sounding version, because, let’s face it, burglary and criminal damage go together like love and marriage, or robbery and a get-away carriage—and most of the stuff blacknets get used for starts there and gets worse real fast. None of the perps know each other, because it’s all done with zero-knowledge proofs and anonymous remixers running out of zombie servers on some poor victim’s home-entertainment system that’s downloaded one piece of X-rated malware too many. “That’s why I’m here, to make sure nobody tries to kill Nigel MacDonald.”

There’s a roar from outside, the sound of a crowd yelling a single word over and over again.

“What’s that?” asks Elaine.