Halting State

ELAINE: Stitched Up

You don’t know what you were expecting from the body shop, but it certainly wasn’t a rumpled-looking bear-driving gamer called Jack. (Alias Teddy or otherwise.) And while you do know what you were expecting from the investigation, it wasn’t spend a rainy afternoon in a hotel conference room playing swords’n’sorcery games.

But at least Jack’s congenial, and he seems to know how the game works, which is the main thing.

You’re about halfway through the tutorial, learning how to pick locks, sneak across butterfly floors, and turn small furry critters to stone with your Mad Powerz, when your phone rings. You put the game on hold for a moment: “Yes?”

It’s Chris Morgan. “Elaine? We’re breaking for a bite to eat now, and it’s a good excuse to get everybody up to date. Want to meet me in the lobby in ten minutes?”

You spare a glance for the mouse you’re trying to turn into a stalactite. “Can do.” A thought strikes you. “Should I bring Jack?”

“Jack? The body shop guy?”

“The consultant,” you correct him.

“Hmm. Yes, bring him along. I’m not sure what he can contribute, but you never know.”

You hang up, glare at the wee sleekit, couring, timorous beastie, and try the gesture again. Voilà: instant stone-baked rodent. Well, at least that worked. You log out, then tap Jack on the shoulder. He jumps. “Yes?” he asks.

“Finish whatever you’re doing, we’re going for dinner. On the company.”

“What—okay, yeah.” You can just about see his eyes twitching behind the opaque disks of his gaming glasses. “Ten seconds…right.” He slides the glasses off. “What should I expect?”

“We’re going for dinner,” you repeat patiently. “You know, a chance to have a meeting without starving to death.”

“Yes, but who with? You’re the only person I’ve met so far,” he adds.

“Oh, right. I guess I should have introduced you—well, the rest of the team was in a meeting when you showed up, so it wasn’t exactly practical. Now’s your chance. Unless you had something else on?”

Jack looks momentarily perplexed. “No, nothing doing,” he says ruefully. He lays his glasses down carefully on top of the gaming laptop—the screen’s a shimmery blur from where you’re sitting. “I have no life.” He chuckles, trying to make a joke of the obviously defensive reaction, and you feel a stab of unworklike empathy.

“Well, let’s go.” You stand up. “I’ll introduce you to everybody.”

Chris is down in the lobby with Mohammed and Brendan. They’ve shed their ties, which is a bad sign—either there’s zero probability of any client action today, or Chris is planning on leading an overnight death march. But at least it’ll be a well-fed death march, you figure, as he leads you all into the hotel bistro. The manager has already sorted out a table at the back. A minute later Margaret and Faye show up and the forced small-talk and time-filling silences stop.

“Brendan, why don’t you fill us all in on the time line?” Chris suggests, once introductions are made and starters are ordered.

“Sure.” Brendan stares at his water glass dourly for a moment. (Another sign that things are going badly: Chris didn’t start by ordering a couple of bottles of stockbroker’s ruin. He wants everybody sober.) “It’s a mess. Here’s what we know. Last Thursday someone at Hayek managed to get the police interested. They were supposed to be keeping a lid on it pending a proper investigation, but someone panicked, and to make matters worse, it’s local plod, not SOCA or the Serious Fraud Agency. Then the police discovered that one of Hayek’s people, Nigel MacDonald, is missing. The latest update—don’t ask me for details, and I shall tell you no lies—is that it’s a full-on missing person investigation. Seems the plod went to call on Mr. MacDonald at home and found signs of a struggle: They’re treating it as a possible murder case.”

You look around the table as your soup arrives: There are long faces all round. “That isn’t very helpful,” Margaret says carefully. Damn right it isn’t: Having to work with the police getting underfoot is bad enough, having the Police actually threatening to do their job…

“Indeed not.” Brendan sounds ghoulishly pleased with himself. “Can I continue? It appears to be an inside job, the insider in question has vanished, the police think he may be dead, and to add to the fun, they’re treating the offices as a secondary crime scene. If MacDonald is dead, that turns this into a murder investigation, and they pull out all the stops.” His glance takes in Jack, who is sitting next to you, shoulders slightly hunched as he chews on a crust of garlic bread. “Obviously, they’re going to consider the robbery in Avalon Four as a likely motive for the hypothetical killing, so if that happens, we won’t be able to move without tripping over a dibble.”

Margaret smiles and puts her soup spoon down. “What did you achieve today?” she asks you. And you think: I should have seen this coming.

“I—” You corpse for a moment. What the hell are you going to say? I played games for four hours straight? It must show on your face because Margaret’s smile becomes slightly fixed as she waits. “I, uh…”

“Um. May I?” asks Jack. You nod, speechless. “We obviously couldn’t get access to Hayek Associates, so we decided to use the time productively by setting up a high-performance Zone client network, then covering some essential familiarization material. We also discussed ways and means of tracking Mr. MacDonald’s history in Zonespace, because—as you’re no doubt aware—most inside jobs also involve an external partner who can launder the merchandise, and finding the outside connection is our best hope for discovering what actually happened inside Hayek Associates.”

He then launches into a spiel of explanatory technobabble that leaves you agog with admiration. It’s not so much the ten-euro words that do it as the polished professionalism with which he slots them together. For a moment, you almost know what it must feel like to be a Thames Gateway resident talking to a flood insurance salesman. “That’s about it,” you add, shrugging, when he nods at you. “Any questions?” You hold your breath, hoping nobody calls your bluff.

Margaret is studying Jack as if he’s your pet sheep-dog and she’s just caught him reciting Shakespearean sonnets. At least you’re off the hook. “No, no questions,” she says thoughtfully. She looks at Brendan. “When can we get access?”

“I’ve asked London to try to get someone to talk to the police.” He drives a piece of bruschetta around his plate in pursuit of a puddle of olive oil. “Hopefully, tomorrow morning if we can just get through to this Inspector Kavanaugh’s boss.”

“Right.” Chris leans back in his chair and smiles lopsidedly. “We’ll have to wait on it, then. Meanwhile, here’s something for you all to bear in mind. If it turns out that Nigel MacDonald was working on his own, or with an external partner, but essentially trying to rip his employer—then we’re off the hook. The HA business plan is exonerated, our remit doesn’t include criminal background checks on junior employees, and we’re out of here. On the other hand, if there’s evidence pointing to a member of the board, we’re still potentially in trouble. So we have a good idea what we’re looking for, don’t we?”

You nod, even though you’ve got a nagging feeling that this doesn’t entirely add up. Does Chris have some kind of hidden agenda here? But then he takes a sip of water and continues.

“Whatever the cause, though, we need to know enough about what happened, and how, to ensure it doesn’t bite us again. So, Elaine, finding out what actually happened is still your absolute priority, while the rest of us make sure it was just a rogue employee.”

Oh, now you get it. Chris is setting up to pull everyone else out, just as soon as he’s confirmed that none of Hayek Associates’ board were in on the robbery. You’re going to get left with the clean-up, and doubtless he’ll cut a deal to subcontract your services out to Hayek’s insurers, or maybe even the local cops, for a tidy sum. Stitch-up. You’re going to be stuck up here in Edinburgh hunting needles in virtual haystacks while Chris and Margaret go home, announce the job’s all done, and move on to the next project. Lovely!

After the meal, there’s a general drift towards the hotel bar, where Chris has announced his intention of buying a round. It’s the usual team-building thing, and it’s the last thing you feel like taking part in, constructive attitude or no. But Margaret corners you in the lobby, all the same. “I hope you don’t think you’re being singled out for something bad,” she says, a calculating light in her eyes. “It’s not like that at all. Chris got word from above that he’s wanted down south, and I agreed that we need someone with a steady hand to tidy this up, and we really need to get back to London before Avixa or GenState notice we’re gone. Chris trusts you; otherwise, he wouldn’t have put it in your hands.”

You manage to force yourself to smile. Okay, so it is a stitch-up. You don’t score points inside DBA for being the lone gun on a trouble-shooting mission, out in the cold where nobody can see you. “That’s perfectly alright, Margaret. Chris was completely clear on what he wanted. I’ll see it gets done.”

“Good. Between you and me, Chris misread this situation, and he knows it. Unless it turns out that we’re all in the shit together, Chris overreacted massively. I think the stress of juggling six cat-A clients simultaneously may be getting to him.” That’s enough to make you raise an eyebrow, and you file it away for future reference: Normally even full partners don’t handle more than two or three cat-A’s at once, plus a handful of smaller jobs.

Margaret glances across the lobby. “That native guide of yours. Doesn’t look like much, but that was a very slick line of bullshit he sold us.”

“It wasn’t bullshit,” you say defensively. “He’s from the games industry. He probably bought that suit this morning, but he knows his own field like the back of his hand—what did you expect?”

“Not that.” She smiles unexpectedly. “Good luck with your insider hunt. And don’t let the natives pull any wool over your eyes.” She turns and stalks off in search of other minions to intimidate, leaving you flexing your fingers and trying to decide whether you want to strangle her or go down on your knees and beg for lessons.

Right now, you don’t much feel like going along with Chris and the gang and making nicey-nicey. Then you spot Jack across the lobby. He’s dithering around the doorway. You move to intercept him. “Hi.”

“Hi.” He looks uncertain. “I was just heading off.” He looks like an overgrown kid who’s been caught not doing his homework.

For a split second you teeter on the cusp of a choice. You have two options: Do you tell him “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and go back to your hotel bedroom to watch downloads and brood? Or do you take him in hand, and say, “The evening’s young, and I need to get out of here for a bit. Fancy a glass of wine?”

Mm, decisions.

“I need to get away from work for a bit. Do you know any good wine bars at this end of town?” A moment later you kick yourself: What if he thinks it’s a come-on? But Jack is timid, and well trained or sufficiently domesticated to simply nod.

“Beats doing the ironing.” He smiles to show he’s just kidding about comparing you to a pile of rumpled shirts.

“Well, cool.” He holds the door open, then heads off down the street. It’s late enough that the sun’s low and dazzling, forcing you to keep your eyes down rather than goggling at the insane architecture.

“Have you been to Edinburgh before?”

“No. This is my first time in Scotland.” There’s a shop window full of garish tartans and a discount book-shop with a window full of those blue-on-white Scottish flags. They’re big on flags here, almost as big as the Americans: something to do with their new franchise independence, probably. As long as they keep voting the British federal line in Brussels, that’s all the English establishment want: But perhaps things look different from this side of the frontier. “Where are we?”

“This is the West End of the New Town, so-called because they only built it about two hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a world heritage site, hence the manky stonework that keeps falling off the buildings and crushing tourists.” He glances at you swiftly. “Not often, you’ll be pleased to know.” He’s got his glasses on, and they’re lit up, washing the whites of his eyes in kaleidoscope colours.

“I’m reassured. Hey, we’re out of the office. This isn’t billable, you don’t have to keep working.”

He looks startled. “What, my glasses? No, I was just checking the eating-out guide.”

“I thought you lived here?”

“Yeah, but.” You come to a corner and he pauses, waiting for the traffic lights to change. “Wine bars aren’t my usual scene.”

“Oh, it doesn’t need to be a posh wine bar. Anywhere that’s not the hotel bar will do right now—I just wanted to get away.”

He brightens, visibly. “I’m better at pubs.” He pauses as the traffic stops, and the green man lights up. “Um, you seem a little tense.”

“You could say that.” You hurry across the road and realize the house-front you’re walking past is actually a branch of Boots. “I hate that kind of scene. When they break the bad news to you while you’ve got your mouth full, so you can’t tell them exactly what you think.”

“Hmm. It was a stitch-up, then? I’m not used to your kind of work, it sounded like one but I wasn’t sure…”

“Oh, it’s a stitch-up alright.” You take a deep breath. “Nothing to be done about it, I guess. Chris and Margaret are going to take the kiddies home and leave me to sort out everything while they take the credit for it. At least, I think that’s what’s going on—assuming Chris doesn’t have some kind of covert agenda—” You realize you’re babbling at a near stranger and shut up. That’s a bad sign. And your feet are putting you on notice that wearing five-centimetre heels on the Edinburgh streets is probably not a good idea—everywhere seems to be uphill. “Where’s this pub?”

“Not far.” He gestures at another pedestrian crossing and another damned uphill road. “See?” And indeed you do: There’s a pub nestling between a news-agent and a charity shop on the other side of the crossing.

While Jack orders stuff at the bar, you pin down a bench seat at a table in one corner of a big, lino-floored room and take a look around. There’s a TV on a curious inner vestibule over the door, and lots of dark wooden panelling, but it looks less like a pub and more like a railway waiting room from a seventies historical drama. Only the huge row of whisky bottles behind the bar, and the odd, pillar-shaped dispensers suggest that someone other than British Rail does the catering here. Even the games machine is an antique, curved-glass monitor and all. The bar’s almost empty, except for a couple of dour old men hunched over one end of the bar as if they’re afraid of being recognized.

Jack appears, clutching two pint glasses. “I hope this is okay,” he says, “CAMRA rate it highly on their local wiki.”

You look around. “It’s half-empty. Isn’t that usually a bad sign?”

“The evening’s young.” He slides a glass towards you. “And it’s a Monday.”

“Don’t remind me.” God, four more days of this before you get a chance to dash home for the weekend. You’ll miss combat on Wednesday, your evening class on Thursday, and Mum phoning you on Friday to nag you about whatever comes to hand. “Maybe tomorrow we can actually make some headway…”

“Yeah, well.” He takes a mouthful of beer. “Have you thought about paying for a background search on the elusive Mr. MacDonald?”

“Office hours.” You sip your beer. It tastes light and remarkably bitter, but not in a bad way. “Do yourself a favour, don’t carry the job home with you.” You don’t know why you’re warning him off this way—maybe it’s just because he seems a little lost among the sharks—but what the hell.

He sighs. “You’re talking to the wrong guy. I’ve had three years of death marches and no life. If I switched off easily, I’d have fallen by the wayside ages ago.”

“Well. Different workplaces.” You pause, wondering what you’re doing sitting in a pub with a strange man you met this morning at work. “How did you get into it?”

“Oh, the usual. I was about eight when Dad gave me an old box and tried to teach me how to program it in BASIC. He gave up trying to keep up after I discovered assembler. I went to university in Edinburgh, ended up studying CS because it was interesting, nearly failed my course because I spent too much time playing games and working with a couple of friends on an attempted start-up that didn’t go anywhere, and had to get a job. Luckily, one of my other friends was already working for Nutshell Productions and got me an interview, and it went from there.”

All of which is factual but doesn’t tell you anything about what makes him tick. “And?”

“And then”—he looks lost for a few seconds, then blinks rapidly—“my mother got lung cancer. Looked like a treatable one at first, but turned nasty—she ended up needing bleeding-edge immune system treatments that hadn’t been approved by NICE, so I paid for them. Sophie kicked in a little as well, but she and Bill had the kids to look after. For a time it looked as if Mum was in remission, but then she caught multidrug-resistant pneumonia, and that was it.”

He shudders a little as you mentally kick yourself for being a prying bitch: It’s not the explanation you were after, but it puts things in perspective. Change the subject, dammit. “Writing games pays that well?”

He stares at his glass. “It pays pretty well. I should consider myself lucky, that’s what Sophie—my sister—keeps telling me. It just doesn’t seem…” He takes another mouthful of beer. “Here, look. This glass. There’s about half a pint in it, right? An optimist: It’s half-full. The pessimist: It’s half-empty. Right now, for the past year, I’ve been looking at a half-empty glass. Then last week my employers poured piss in it. This morning, the fairy godmother at AlfaGuru just handed me a shot of single malt. I’d like to apologize in advance if I look a bit green about the gills, it’s been a hell of a roller-coaster ride.”

Shit. You choose your next words carefully: “The glass isn’t half-empty or half-full. What you’re looking at is half a pint of depreciable assets sitting in a pint of capital infrastructure that can be amortized over two accounting periods.”

Jack chuckles. “That’s the finance version, is it?”

“I think so.” You pause. “Is there an engineering one?”

“Let me see.” He stares at the glass. “Yes! It’s quite simple: That’s half a pint, all that’s wrong is the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”

“Right.” Your own glass is going down, you notice. “The reenactor’s version: The glass should be made of pigskin and the beer’s historically inauthentic.”

“The police officer’s version—” There’s a maniacal cackling noise from Jack’s pocket. “’Scuse me.” He pulls out his phone. “Yes? Who is—hello?” Pause. “Hello?” Pause. “This isn’t funny,” he says, in an odd tone of voice. “Who are you? What do you want?” Pause. “Hello? Hello?”

He puts the phone down carefully, as if he’s afraid it’ll bite him.

“What was that?” You ask.

“I don’t know.” He picks up his glass and chugs half the content straight down. “Number withheld. If it happens again, I think I need to talk to the police.”

“What?” You stare at him. “Have you got a stalker, or something?”

“I don’t know.” He looks puzzled, now. “It was—it sounded like a school playground, you know? Kids shouting, for about five seconds. Then a voice said, ‘Think of her children,’ and hung up.” Puzzlement is turning into perplexity on his face. Whatever the caller might have thought, Jack clearly doesn’t know what it’s all about. And neither do you, you realize, with a hollow feeling in your guts.

“Any ex-girlfriends?” you ask, trying to keep your tone light.

“Not since Mum got sick.” He twitches and you think, You poor bastard: There’s a nasty little story there, of that you can be sure, but now’s not the time to go digging. “Before you ask, no, I have never been married, and I don’t know any raging bampots of the first water who hang around playgrounds recording…voices…” He trails off.

“What is it?”

“Nah, can’t be happening,” he mumbles to himself. “Nobody’d be crazy enough to try to make me drop this job by threatening Elsie and Mary, would they? Sophie’s daughters,” he adds after a second. “They’d have to be nuts, wouldn’t they?”

You’re gripping the edge of the table way too tight, tense with unwelcome memories that he’s just summoned like spirits from the vasty deep. “I think you’d better report this to the police,” you hear yourself telling him, as if from the other end of a dark tunnel. “Just in case.” And hope to hell that’s all it is, a wrong number, a prank call. Because the alternative isn’t something you want to think about.