kicking and screaming into this stupid role-play thing, the very invocation I'm supposed to be destroying. She thinks it's aboard the Explorer! And Angleton wants her to keep it running!
I stare at my phone. There's no base station signal, but I've still got a chunk of battery charge. 'Does not compute,' I say, and stub my thumb on the numeric keypad. I'm frustrated: I admit it. Nobody tells me anything; they just want to use me as a communications link, keep me in the dark and feed me shit, pose around in evening drag at a casino and drink disgusting cocktails. I go back to the desk, flip the keyboard rightside up, and hit the boss key again. Mo's sitting in the cockpit of the cigarette boat, fastening her five-point safety harness. A pair of sailors is installing a kit-bag full of ominous black gadgets in the seat next to her; over the windscreen I can see the gray flank of a Royal Navy destroyer, bristling with radomes and structures that could be anything from missile batteries to gun turrets or paint lockers, to my uneducated eye. The horizon is clear in all directions but for the rulerstraight line of an airplane's contrail crawling across the sky.
I glance sidelong at the phone, longingly: if I could call her up I could tell her — if only I wasn't stuck on board this goddamn yacht, moping like the token love interest in a bad thriller while the shit is going to hit the fan in about two hours aboard the Explorer, which is sitting less than half a kilometer away — 'What the flack has gotten into me?' I ask, wondering why I'm not angry. This bovine passivity just isn't me: Why does it feel like my best option is to just sit here and wait for Mo to arrive? Damn it, I need to get things moving.
McMurray can't afford to lose me before Ramona's delivered her surprise party trick to Billington: that gives me a lever I can pull on. And Angleton wants the geas field generator kept running? That's my cue. The penny drops: if the geas field actually works, and Billington can't shut it down, then he's going to be in a world of hurt. Could that be Angleton's plan? It's so simple it's fiendish. Almost without thinking, I dial 6-6-6. It's time to call my ride and get moving. After all, even the Good Bond Babe — token love interest and all — doesn't always spend the final minutes of the movie waiting for her absent love to come rescue her. It's time to kick ass and set off explosions.
15: SCUTTLE TO COVER
AN HOUR LATER, HAVING DONE EVERYTHING I CAN via the Media Center PC, I pocket my phone and open the door to my room. There's a lot you can do in an hour with a PC on a supposedly secure but in reality penetrated-to-Hell-and-back network, especially if you've got a USB flash drive full of hacking tools. Unfortunately there's rather less you can do on such a network without making it blindingly and immediately obvious that it's been 0wnZor3d. But on the third hand, by this point I don't give a shit. I mean, I thoroughly expect what I've done to the PC to be exposed within a matter of hours, but worrying about it is taking second place right now to worrying whether I'll still be alive by then. There's a time when you've got to look at any asset and think, Use it or lose it, baby, and that time is definitely up when you're counting down the minutes in the last hour before the men in black come for you. So, what the hell.
To start with, I disable all the system logging mechanisms, so they won't be able to figure out what's going on in a hurry. I set the remote login ports to shut down an hour hence and scramble the password databases they're so quaintly relying on, and whip up a shell script that'll fry the distributed relational database behind the surveillance management system by randomly reversioning everything and then subtly corrupting the backups.
But that's just a five-fingered warm-up exercise. Billington's empire is based on the premise that you buy commercial, off-the-shelf gear, customize it to meet a MILSPEC requirement, and sell it back to the government at a 2,000 percent markup. An awful lot of his network — all the workstations those cubicle drones from Mumbai have on their desks, basically — run Windows. You'd expect a corporate enterprise rollout of Vista to be locked down and patrolled by rabid system administrators wearing spiked collars, and you'd be right: by ordinary commercial standards, Billington's network is pretty good. The trouble is, the Windows security model has always been inside out and upside down, and they're all running exactly the same service pack release. It's a classic corporate monoculture, and I've got exactly the right herbicide stuffed up one end of my bow tie, thanks to the Laundry's network security tiger team. Eileen's mission-critical surveillance operation may be running on horribly expensive blade servers with a securely locked-down NSAapproved UNIX operating system, but the workstations are ... well, the technical term for what they'll be when I get through with them is toast. And by the time I get through with them Eileen is going to have a whole lot of the wrong kind of zombies on her hands.
The Laundry carped over giving me a decent car, even though I can prove that Aston Martins depreciate more slowly and cost less in running repairs than a Smart (after all, half the Aston Martins ever built are still on the road, and they've been in business for three-quarters of a century). But they didn't even blink over giving me a key drive stuffed full of malware that must have cost CESG about, oh, two million to develop, and which I am about to expend in the next halfhour, and which will subsequently leak out into the general public domain, whereupon it will give vendors of virus scanners spontaneous multiple orgasms and cause the authors to be cursed from one pole of the planet to the other. It's a classic case of misplaced accounting priorities, valuing depreciable capital assets a thousand times more highly than the fruits of actual labor — but that's the nature of the government organization. Let's just say that if what I'm about to unleash on the Billingtons' little empire doesn't take several hundred sysadmin-years and at least a week of wall-clock time to clean up, my middle names aren't Oliver and Francis.
My work done, I glance at my phone. The display is showing a cute little animated icon of a baby-blue Smart car, dust bunnies scudding beneath its tires, and a progress bar captioned 62Km/74% Complete. I stick it back in my pocket, then pick up the dress shoes Pinky and Brains issued to me.
Grimacing, I tie the shoe laces. Then I reach down and trench the left heel round. Instantly, the shadows in my cabin darken and deepen, taking on an ominous hue. The Tillinghast resonator is running: in this confined space it should give me just enough warning to shit myself before I die, if Billington's entrusted his operational security to daemons, but in the open ... well, it adds a whole new meaning to take to your heels.
The corridor outside my door is dark and there's an odd, musty smell in the air. I pause, skulking just inside the doorway as I wait for my eyes to adjust. Ellis Billington and his cronies are aboard the Explorer, but there's no telling who's still here, is there? I can make myself useful while I wait for Mo by finding out what's going on aboard the Mabuse. Ellis isn't so stupid he won't have some kind of getaway plan in mind, in case things go pear-shaped — and backup plans 'C'
and 'D' behind plan 'B,' for multiple redundancy — but if find out what they are ...
Oops. The door at the end of the corridor opens. 'You.
What are you doing outside your room? Go back at once!' The black beret draws his pistol.
My mind blanks for a moment, and there's a big hollow feeling. I feel a doubled heartbeat: **Is that you, Ramona?**
**What are you — ** 'There's a problem with my faucet?' I hear my mouthy saying. 'Can you take a look at it?' And I'm opening the door and stepping backwards to make room.
**Let me handle this, monkey-boy.** I can taste seawater in my sinuses.
**What are you doing? Has McMurray lost it — **
**No, but Ellis has, he ordered Eileen off the Mabuse ten minutes ago and there are scuttling charges due to blow as soon as she's clear. Something about contagious corruption in his oneiromantic matrix; he figures someone's sabotaged the ship and he's not in the mood for half-measures — ** Shit. That would be me, wouldn't it? The goon steps close and I can see green shadows behind his mirrorshades, green writhing worms twitching and squirming in rotting cadaverous eye sockets as he steps closer and raises the pistol in both hands — ** — Glock 17,** says Ramona.
And she takes over.
I jackknife forwards from the opposite side of the narrow room and bring my left hand down on the pistol, grabbing the slide and pushing it back, as my right hand comes up, curling uncomfortably to punch at his left eye. Glass shatters as he pushes up with the gun, not knowing to pull it back out of reach, and I twist it sideways. It goes off, and the noise is so loud in the confined space that it's like someone's slammed my head in a door. It feels like I've torn half the skin off my right hand but I somehow keep turning while maintaining my grip, and kick and twist away from his follow-on punch, with a searing pain in my side, like I've pulled a muscle — then I'm facing the half-rotted zombie with a gun barrel in my left hand. I grab the butt with my right, which is dripping blood, and I pull
