Halting State

and it was all over bar the bleedin’. But I feel like a right wally, skipper.”

“You and me both, Sergeant, and you know who the enquiry’s going to blame for assigning an uncertified officer to personal protection duty.”

That’s scant comfort, and ye ken the inspector knows it, but it’s a worse mess for her, you’ve got to admit— you’re not climbing the greasy pole after all. On the other hand—“We wuz in a collective tizzy, Liz, thanks to those bloody spooks and their full-dress crapfest. If they hadna sprung the terrorism alert at the same time we had to shut down CopSpace, we’d maybe hae stood a chance, and if we’d had CopSpace, again, we’d hae known what was happening. I blame myself—I should have told Bob to get his boots back upstairs the instant he’d spoken to the front desk.”

“You’re trying to second-guess an IPCC enquiry, Sue. My advice? Drop it, it’s over.” Liz looks irritated. “Besides, we shouldn’t talk about it outside of school. It looks like collusion in the wrong light, and that would never do.”

“Oh, okay.” Collusion is a political word, and you’ll take Liz’s word for it looking bad. You tighten your grip on your hat, realize what you’re doing, twitch it round in your lap, then let go again. It’s too much like sitting in a dentist’s waiting room for comfort. All it would need is a NO PHONES sign and a ticking clock on the mantelpiece above a dysfunctional gas fire to drive the message home. But this particular waiting room’s in better shape than your tooth doctor’s front room, right down to the extra-uncomfortable chairs and the civilian receptionist outside.

Kavanaugh looks at her watch. “Not long now,” she remarks, and you realize she’s bloody nervous, too. And then the inner-office door opens.

“Inspector Kavanaugh, Sergeant Smith, please take a seat.”

There are two chairs waiting for you, opposite a desk the size of a wee conference-table. And on the other side of it is the top brass—Deputy Chief Constable McMullen, who is definitely not dressed for the golf course this morning, sitting with a face like a hanging judge beneath a photie of his boss, Andrew Sampson, chief constable of South East Scotland force, shaking hands with the last-but-one justice minister on the back steps outside Holyrood, just to rub it in. But you have to work hard not to raise an eyebrow, because sitting next to him is that fly-case, Michaels—and another character in a grey suit with a face like a horse and a look that says high-altitude civil service, so high you need an oxygen mask just to breathe up there.

“At ease, sit down.” That’s McMullen. He glances to either side. “I want to make it clear right now that this is not a disciplinary hearing. Nothing is being recorded, and nothing you say here will go on any record. Is that understood?”

You don’t dare look round, but you can just about hear the sonic boom from Liz’s eyebrows as they head for the stratosphere. It’s policing, but not as we know it—everything is on the record, these days, lest the clients start throwing themselves down the stairs and suing the force for compensation. “Isnae that a bit…radical?” you hear yourself asking, somewhat to your own disbelief.

“It’s necessary.” McMullen doesn’t look terribly happy. “As Mr. Jones from the Joint Defense Ministry will explain…?”

Jones—the high-flyer—has been looking at something in a leather folio. Now he closes it, puts in on the desk, and clears his throat. “I’m here to inform you that the events that took place at the West End Malmaison the Thursday before last are the subject of a classification order issued by the Ministry of Justice, at our request. The Home Office down south is also playing along. You may not discuss those events with anyone outside this room, other than the direct participants, without breach of the Official Secrets Act. You will need to sign these forms before you leave”—he taps the folder—“to confirm that you have been so informed. That’s the bad news.” He pauses for a moment. “On the other hand, you won’t be facing a board of enquiry.”

Really? But they didn’t need to call you here to tell you that in person, did they? So what’s going on?

McMullen clears his throat. “This leaves us with a little problem.” He pointedly doesn’t glance at Michaels, who’s got his arms crossed and is looking smugly dishevelled, or at Jones, who appears to have turned back into a cardboard statue of a civil servant. “The disposal of one Marcus Hackman. Who I believe you arrested and charged with attempted murder, possessing an unlicensed firearm, and, Inspector…?”

Liz clears her throat. “Also, two counts of murder—Wayne Richardson and Wu Chen—and that’s before we get into the esoteric stuff—solicitation of murder, conspiracy, membership of an organized criminal enterprise, whatever we can pin on him for the blacknet node he was running out of the MacDonald safe house, the various securities violations, insider trading, fraud, and you could probably nail him for spying if you were willing to drag everything up in court.” Now you spare her a glance: She rolls her eyes. “Of course, that’s all just fall-out from trying to cover up his first mistake, which was to have so little confidence in his own business venture that he expected it to fail and configured it as a honey trap for investors.”

Across the desk, Michaels is finally looking a bit less smug. “Hayek Associates wouldn’t be able to do their job if they didn’t look and function like a real company, Inspector. And this may come as a surprise to you, but we in the intelligence community aren’t actually experts in running dot-com start-ups. We went and took on board some people with good experience and a solid background that checked out, relying on them to make most of the running, and one of them turned out to be a particularly bad egg, and another of them was a slightly less bad egg. The problem was figuring out who was who without trucking everyone who worked at Hayek Associates into a secret bunker and interrogating them, which would have risked blowing the cover operation sky- high. All it takes is one contrarian who doesn’t approve of being used as a stalking-horse by the government and leaks it via a backnet or a blog or a newspaper, and…” He shrugs.

Oh, so that’s the way the wind is blowing! You smile politely and try to look like a dumb cop. Let Michaels incriminate himself if he wants to.

“What about SPOOKS?” asks Liz, and you blink. “And where did the zombies come from?”

“The zombies were from just about every AR and LARP in town,” says Michaels. “When Hackman realized his blacknet friends—Team Red in fact, but he probably thought he was dealing with the Russian mafiya—fucked up on killing Mr. Reed and Ms. Barnaby, he got them to organize a flash mob for him—an organized zombie fest outside the hotel, promise of prizes for the best-dressed undead, word out that it had been cleared with yourselves and there’d be a couple of TV crews in attendance. You’ve got to admire it as a piece of improvisation—it got your attention, didn’t it? It also distracted everyone while Hackman was trying to work out his own solution to the problem.”

“Wayne Richardson?” prompts Liz.

“Wayne, Wayne.” Michaels looks pained. “Wayne was just the weakest link. Hackman was the bad one. When he found out about the MacDonald identity, he suggested setting up a better back story. I should have realized earlier, but he really wanted the flat so he could loan it out to some shady characters he owed a favour or two. Local gangsters. They installed the blacknet node to replace the one you shut down last year; where better to put it than in the apartment of someone who doesn’t exist? Then Hackman realized it had other uses. Wayne he got to via the usual mixture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Thick as thieves— but there’s always a leader, and when Wayne panicked and tried to cut a deal, Hackman got rid of him.”

At which point things fall into place in your head. Except for one thing. “Why did you get Jack fired from his job?” you ask.

“Because we wanted to recruit him,” Michaels explains. “ARGs like SPOOKS don’t grow on trees, they take years to develop. SPOOKS was our first toe in the water. It taught us a lot about what we need to do to run a virtual HUMINT operation, and it fed into the design process for SPOOKS 2.0, which will roll out next year. Most of the developers don’t need to know what they’re doing—we pointed them at a similar development project, used it to break the back of the coding, then cancelled it and disbanded the team once it was nearly done. But we need some of them—the smart ones, who can take the ninety-five per cent complete code for STEAMING and turn it into SPOOKS 2.0 then keep it running. And we needed Elaine for two reasons—to flush Hackman from cover, and because we wanted to recruit her, too.”

And things are falling into place. Because it all comes back to Hackman, and the inadequate job Michaels did of positively vetting his tame sociopathic CEO and the chancer of a marketing manager. All CEOs are a bit sociopathic—it takes a really obsessive personality type to take a business public, especially in the fevered climate of a bubble, not just any bubble but the third one in a row—and Michaels had no way of getting