Halting State

SUE: Pigs in a China Shop

By the time you reach your destination in Leith, there’s a full-dress panic in progress. Liz has IM’d Detective Superintendent Verity direct—with Kemal from Europol’s encouragement—and Verity has hit the panic button and sent every warm body south of Pilton on a wild goose chase to cordon off the block around the warehouse on Lindsay Road. Which is more than slightly inconvenient, because it’s about a hundred metres up the road from the National Executive complex on Victoria Quay, which is home to about five thousand civil service PowerPoint pushers and the population of designer furniture stores, ethnic restaurants, exclusive health clubs, real ale pubs, and cheap hookers who serve them. If Verity—or his boss, because this kind of shit tends to rise to the top—has to evacuate Victoria Quay, Questions Will be Asked in Parliament, not to mention generating many megabytes of editorial wittering in the virtual birdcage liners, and possibly some discreet resignations if the shit overflows and ends up in the air-conditioning. In fact, you wouldn’t be surprised if Verity is crapping his britches by now: This has the potential to turn into an Ian Blair moment, the kind of policing SNAFU that remains the stuff of legend decades later. Kemal and his crack squad of dark-suited mirrorshade-wearing super-cops may be used to this sort of shit, but Edinburgh’s a wee little regional boutique capital of some half million souls, about as far off the terrorism map as Oklahoma City. Which probably explains why events unfold like the Keystone Kops on crack, only with better special effects.

The remote control BMWs slow down as they hit Starbank Road and rumble alongside the docks, then pull in just past the old Newhaven fish market. “Everybody out,” says the man in black. “We walk from here.” There’s a vanload of uniforms parked up ahead: They’re setting up a barricade and preparing to divert the flow of traffic into town. It’s going to cause a real clusterfuck in short order, because half the delivery trucks for the Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre, and all the consumers, go this way—not to mention the buses and the Line Two supertrams. In fact, it’s going to be nearly as bad as that time some prize tit invited Tony Blair to come out of retirement and give the graduation speech up at Heriot-Watt. “Liz, are you sure you need me for this? Because Mac’s going to be needing every warm body he can get—”

“Stick around,” Liz hisses, trying to keep it down so the MIBs don’t notice. “You’re right, but I want to keep a second pair of eyeballs on these clowns. With your phone’s liferecorder running, if you please.” She’s wound up as tense as a spring surprise.

“Thinking of the enquiry?”

She gives a surprised little laugh. “Of course I am, Sergeant.” She looks over to the fence around the Western Harbour complex. “We’re too low on the totem pole to catch the flak for this one, but if the chief super himself isn’t out here in the next hour, I’d be very much surprised, and he’s going to want to know exactly what’s been going on.”

“Ah. Okay.” You discreetly switch all your cameras to continuous evidence logging and tap your ear with one finger. “I’m on it.” Then you fiddle with the menus in the MilSpec glasses Kemal gave you until you dredge up a local CopSpace overlay so you can see what the hell’s going on. Your earlier diagnosis of a traffic clusterfuck is confirmed: Flashing red diversion routes are springing up all over the north side of the city like chicken-pox. Overhead, a vast swirly cylinder delineates a no-fly zone—they’re diverting flights in and out of Turnhouse, airliners that would normally be on final approach over the Firth of Forth. You wince, involuntarily. What do they think—

Whoops. You’re halfway along the block, behind Liz, and now you notice a bunch of support vehicles parked just round the corner: fire engines, a fire brigade support truck, a couple of ambulances, and the big mobile HQ from Fettes Row. There are even a couple of olive drab landies…“Skipper, they brought the army?”

Up ahead, Kemal’s control is slipping: “What’s this? I didn’t call for backup! You were to divert the traffic and keep a low profile, not throw a party!” He gestures at the self-kicking ant-hill ahead, his expression disgusted.

“What did you expect?” Liz sounds resigned. “If you didn’t want to make a fuss, you shouldn’t have told anyone you were coming. Everyone’s scared that if there’s a blow-up on their turf, they’ll catch it in the neck, so they’re all dancing the major incident whisky tango foxtrot. At a guess, I’d say the first national-level news cameras will be along in another minute.”

“Merde.” He touches his earpiece. “We’re going to have to go in immediately.”

The target is just round the corner: It’s a big eighteenth-century stone pile, probably a bonded warehouse back in the day, now fallen upon less industrious times. The news just keeps on getting better: CopSpace shows you that the warehouses either side of it have been converted into yuppie dormitories full of lawyers and civil servants and the like. A sign over the front door proclaims it to be a branch of a well-known outdoors and extreme sports retail chain, which might be plausible if it wasn’t so clearly shuttered and padlocked. The Euro-cops have staked it out—video cameras up and down the street have been logging a metric shitload of data for weeks, capturing the faces of everyone going in and out and feeding them into some arcane international anti-terrorism database, and your glasses are just brimming with playback options—but they don’t seem to have noticed that it’s slap bang in the middle of a high-density residential area. “Aren’t you going to evacuate the neighbours first?” asks Liz. “Because if not, someone needs to tell the brass.”

Kemal swears quietly. “Go tell your commissioner,” he says tersely. “We’re starting in sixty seconds.”

The men (and women) in black are spreading around the building, not bothering to conceal themselves. Kemal’s brought nearly a dozen bodies along, and they’re getting set up: So far, it looks like a normal forced entry, except they’re all dressed like accountants and carrying paintball guns and briefcases. They seem to be listening for something, waiting on the word of a distant control centre to which you have no access. Liz taps you on the shoulder. “Stick with me,” she warns. “I don’t want you catching any of their shit.” Then she heads for the mobile HQ at the double. A couple of dibbles are waiting outside, looking pissed—probably missing their mid-shift break thanks to the entirely unplanned crisis. “I need to see the chief,” she announces, holding her warrant card where they can see it. They look relieved to see the two of you: At last, someone who looks as if they know what’s going on. If only they knew…

The control room in the HQ truck smells of stale coffee and sweat from all the bodies crowded inside it. One wall is a gigantic screen, presumably for those brass who could never get the hang of gestural inputs and eyeball tracking: It puts you in mind of the old joke about the mouse shaped like a pepper spray. Half a dozen dispatchers are hunched over battered HQ laptops, directing the traffic teams outside and fighting a losing battle with the inevitable tailbacks. Verity is leaning over a desk in front of it, yakking on one phone while another one trills for attention at his left elbow. He rolls his eyes as soon as he sees Liz. “I’ll be sure to do that, sir,” he says, “but the inspector’s just arrived and I need to find out what’s going on from her before I can tell you anything more. If you’ll excuse me…” He hangs up. “Save me from micromanaging”—he spots your cammy lights in time—“gentlemen. Right. What’s going on, Kavanaugh?” Verity using surnames is a very bad sign. “The deputy minister wants to know.”

Aw, shite. Liz makes the best of it. “They’re not telling me sir, but it’s some kind of national-security flap. The good news is, it’s not your usual bampot bomb-throwers this time. The bad news is, they’re about to shut down every communications link in—”

There’s a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city. The words NO SIGNAL blink for a moment above Verity’s livid face. “Get after them!” he snaps. “I need eyeballs on the ground!”

Behind him the dispatchers are swearing and scribbling post-it notes: Their sergeant’s telling them off to bring up the fall-back paper system, but it’s not going to do any good—they’re already deep into SFPD territory. System Fails, People Die. From the doorway you can hear an eerie chorus of burglar alarms and car-location sensors: They’re all panicking at the lonely air-waves. There are more traffic lights in Leith than individual officers to replace them, and right now they’re all going out of sequence. You follow Liz down the steps into the cold midmorning light, just as there’s a bang from the front door of the warehouse. “Come on,” she says urgently, and heads across the road at a trot.

You rush after her, through the blizzard of milspace warning messages about fields of fire from overlooking windows and roof-tops—the MIBs have broken the door open and are into the warehouse. Seagulls squawk and wheel in the empty blue sky overhead as you take the front step, the worn sandstone gritty beneath your boots. One of the MIBs holds up a hand, standing in the twilight vestibule—there’s a rapid sequence of banging noises, then a solid thump. “Not clear yet,” she says, in a thick German accent. Looking at the walls, you see translucent shadows through them—there’s some kind of cute mapping system built into the MIB glasses, so that as the spooks move through the building, they feed a map of it into a shared overlay. It’s a bit like having X-ray vision. Then you begin to get a headache: The rooms are ghosting, not matching up. “Scheisse,” says your MIB, raising her paintball gun.

Red ideograms drip down the walls, bloody trails of information bleeding into the edges of your visual field. There’s a harsh squawking noise as the MIB spins round and unloads two rounds into the wall, half-deafening you. She shouts something in German and dashes towards an inner door, beyond which the ghostly outline of a lift shaft is superimposed over a spiral staircase and a small office, alternate realities competing for your attention. There’s another bang from inside the building, and the lights flicker. Liz looks round at you, her face white, and begins to say something, but a noise like grinding metal drowns her out, and pale tentacles vomit from her mouth. You can’t see the door you came in at anymore—the ideograms are everywhere, mocking you, and none of the walls match up. You take the nearest entrance, which is roughly where you remember the front desk as being. The room is slowly spinning around you, and there are bugs crawling on the walls. Your stomach twists, bile rising at the back of your throat: Then someone touches you. You jump a mile before your realize it’s Liz, tugging at your glasses. With them off, the room turns out to be insect-and rotation-free, but the grinding noise continues, mingling with shouts and the occasional banging of paint guns. “Get out!” she shouts, close enough to your ear that you can actually hear her. “Tell Verity!”

You nod, and she shoves you towards the doorway—visible now you’ve gotten out of the treacherous glasses. You pause in the entrance and fumble your official specs onto your face, but they’ve crashed completely; a rolling curtain of many-coloured hash blocks out your visual field. You pull them off hastily. Better to face the world barefaced than risk whatever chaos is fucking up your CopSpace.

You stumble out into the daylight, blink like a startled hedgehog while you get your bearings back, then home in on the chief, who is standing beside the HQ truck. “It’s a right mess in there,” you begin.

He cuts you off immediately: “Do they need backup?”

“I’m not rightly sure, CopSpace is fucked. The inspector told me to tell you, they’ve hit countermeasures. They’re flailing about in the toy box, you know?”

“Right.” He takes a deep breath. “Go back in and find Liz. Keep us in the loop. You, over here!” He gestures at the heavies from S Division, who’re waiting about near their response cars. “Get your goggles off, follow the sergeant here, and get ready to find out what the feds have got themselves hung up on.”

“But I—” It’s no use complaining: The chief has got it into his head that this is some kind of ned-in-a-china-shop problem, and unless you can get Kemal to stop laying about and get the hell out, Verity’ll send in the armed response boys after him. And won’t that be a fine mess? “On my way, sir.”

You rush back over to the warehouse and dive in the door, staying low. “Inspector,” you yell, over the noise—it’s like someone’s running a sawmill in there—“where are you?”

“Through here!” You just about hear her voice and home in on it. There’s a doorway behind the counter and an office. Chairs have been knocked over, and there’s a huge smear of purple paint on one wall. More to the point, it’s dark. Hitting the light switch doesn’t achieve much—someone’s cut the power. You draw your torch and flick it to wide-angle, lighting up the ceiling with it at arm’s length, then duck-walk towards the second, inner door.

The room looks to have been halfway converted into open-plan offices, once upon a time. Cast-iron pillars spaced every four metres or so support a high ceiling of wooden timbers—but the floor has been raised and covered in those beige tiles they use to cover cable ducts, and the arched, shuttered window casements all have air-conditioning units bolted to the wall below them. The lights are out, and the room is not only dark, but sweltering hot and spectacularly noisy. Between each pair of pillars a glass-fronted box like an old-style telephone booth rises most of the way to the ceiling, and these are the source of the racket: There must be at least twenty of them. You glance through one smoked-glass front, somewhat spooked, and see rows of green-and-violet LEDs blinking from a sea of aluminium fascias. They’re routers or telephone switch gear or something. Each pillar emits a blast of hot air and a variety of hissing, crackling, and whining noises, but the real source of the noise is somewhere deeper inside the building.

You find Liz near the centre of the room, kneeling over a Eurocop who is retching himself dry over a waste-paper basket. She’s got his glasses off, and when she glances at you, she looks haggard. “Don’t go anywhere near the stairwell,” she warns you. “Maurice and Jacques are still making sure the site’s clear before they scram the backup generator.”

Backup generator? “The chief’s about sixty seconds away from sending in S Division,” you tell her. “He telled me to be your runner.”

“I see.” The Man in Black stops puking long enough to groan and sit back, leaning against a pillar. Liz thinks for a moment: “Tell the chief it’s all under control, but we hit electronic countermeasures. So far all we’ve got is lights on and nobody home, but if S Div come in shooting, it’s going to go blue on blue.”

“Electronic countermeasures.” You look around in disbelief. “Is that all this is?”

“No,” she says tightly, “but we’ll have it off-line in a couple of minutes. Go!”

You’ll say this for Verity, the old fart doesn’t believe in stomping on his subordinates’ chilblains. “Tell Kavanaugh she’s got fifteen minutes, or until she calls for backup.” You high-tail it back to the room of servers and pass the word on.

“Good. Mario, are you feeling better yet?” Mario, now sitting with his back to the pillar and the bin within arm’s reach, nods wearily. His glasses lie on the floor nearby, lighting the carpet up with a jagged lightning show.

“I will be alright.” He doesn’t sound it. “The others will…” He stops talking and takes a couple of deep breaths. “They’re upstairs now, except Hilda and Franz. They are looking for the generator.”

It’s almost as if someone is listening to him: There’s a tremendous double bang that shakes the floor, followed by the moan of a thousand fans whirring down into silence.

You can’t stop yourself. “It sounds like they found it,” you say, and—despite yourself—giggle. After a moment, you realize Mario and Liz are both staring at you as if you’ve grown a second head. So you stop.

“Let’s go and find Kemal,” says Liz. “What are these things, anyway?”

“Multi-core blade servers,” Mario pushes himself laboriously to his feet. “Each rack houses two hundred and fifty-six blades, each blade has that many processor cores—and each core is a thousand times as powerful as your phone. We are standing inside a million euros’ worth of mainframe.” He shuffles towards the interior of the data centre, back bowed like an old man. “This is an odd place to put a data centre, yes?”

You look at Liz: Liz looks back at you and shrugs. You mouth “ICE” at her, and she just twitches. “Who owns them? Where are they from?” she asks.

“That is an interesting question.” And one that Mario, who is rapidly recovering his composure, does not appear to want to answer. You peer at one of the glass doors, shining your torch through: The panel inside is labelled LENOVO.

He heads towards the other end of the server room, and Liz follows him closely. You stick behind her, logging everything (you hope). At the other end of the room there’s a set of fire doors and a stairwell leading up—as well as another pair of fire doors with some kind of blinking fire-alarm and gas sensor mounted next to them, and Kemal himself clattering down the stairs towards you. “Not in there!” he calls.

“Why not?” asks Liz, peering at the blinkenlights by the door.

“It might not be safe.” Kemal’s eyes look hollow without the goggles. You shine your torch on the panel; it seems to be saying there’s no problem.

“Right,” she says with heavy irony. “I see.” She pushes the door open before Kemal or Mario can stop her. “What is this?”

It’s another server room, but a lot smaller than the last one, and there’s a Frankenstein machine squatting in the middle of it all, like a cheap horror prop. There are cylinders of compressed gas and lots of narrow pipes and valves, all converging on something that looks like the stainless steel thermos flask from hell, sitting under an industrial-grade cooker hood with a gigantic duct vanishing into the ceiling. There’s another rack of boxes with blinkenlights sitting next to it, flashing and winking—evidently they’re on a separate power supply. And it’s steaming, a trickle of chilly smoky vapour wreathing its neck. “Hey, is this dangerous?” you ask.

“Stay away from it, Sergeant!” Kemal insists sharply. “It might be explosive.”

That’s a thought, but you’ve heard enough bullshit already that you’re not about to take his word for it. What kind of bampot builds a bomb with dry ice special effects and blinking LEDs, anyway? You unhook your cams and walk around it slowly, panning up and down to capture the lot.

“Wait!” Kemal hisses. “Don’t get too close.” He steps towards you. At the same moment, you feel an odd tugging. It’s almost as if your cam has acquired a life of its own. Startled, you pull back, then glance at the thermos flask. You’re two metres away from it. You can feel the chilly vapour on your skin: You try not to inhale as you sweep the camera across the scene, then take a step back.

“Is it dangerous?” Liz demands, “Because if so, we’ve got to evacuate—”

“It’s another server,” Kemal says carefully, “but not a kind you can buy in a shop. In fact, what it’s doing here…” He trails off. “The power’s down,” he remarks quietly. “The refrigerator fans are quiet.”

“How long until it reaches its critical temperature?” asks Mario, right behind him.

Kemal nearly jumps. “We can’t risk that! We need it intact.”

“Tell me what’s going on,” Liz insists.

Kemal grunts, a sound like an irritated pig. “This whole installation shouldn’t exist. You don’t just drop data centres in the middle of suburbs; you’d need to get the power company to run extra cables in from the substation. There are enough processor blades in the next room to listen in on every Internet packet and voice call in Scotland; we think”—he points at the steaming Frankenstein machine—“this is probably the refrigeration vessel for a quantum processor—”

A door slams in the next room. You hear raised voices. Angry voices, and footsteps coming closer. Liz gestures you to one side of the door, and you quietly pull your can of whoop-ass. She nods minutely and takes a step back.

“—don’t care! You shouldn’t be here!”

“—idiots had checked with eurocontrol first—”

The doors bang open. Liz is already standing to one side, and she’s drawn her warrant card.

Standing in the doorway is one of Kemal’s henchmen, caught in vituperative argumentation with a familiar figure—Barry Michaels, CTO of Hayek Associates—and someone else behind him, middle-aged and red-faced. Barry’s hair is even more fly-away than it was when you turned up in his boardroom last Thursday, and he’s the one who’s doing most of the shouting. Henchman Number One, for his part, has lost his Man in Black poise. Possibly this is something to do with the way Barry—who, you notice, not only looks like an old public-school boy but is built like an old public-school rugby squad quarterback—has got him by the scruff of his immaculate suit jacket and is almost frog-marching him—

“Stop right there,” Liz says firmly. “You’re under arrest.”

You step sideways, keeping them both covered with your pepper spray.

Barry snorts, disgustedly. “No I’m not. Chief Constable?”

You look past him, at the man in the hounds-tooth check trousers and scary canary-yellow cardigan, with the golfing shoes and the somehow familiar face. So does Liz.

“Oh shit,” she says faintly.

“You can say that again. If you like,” says Deputy Chief Constable McMullen, who right this moment is looking distinctly peevish about been pulled away from the golf course on his day off. “Inspector, I’m here to tell you to do whatever this man tells you to do. Do you understand?”

Liz’s face is a picture. “Sir?”

Barry clears his throat. “Inspector, please turn around and face the wall. Try and forget everything you’ve seen in this building.” After a moment, he glances your way. “That goes for you, too, Sergeant.”

“But—”

“Do as he says,” McMullen says firmly. He sounds more resigned than anything else. “He’s in charge here.”

You lower your pepper spray reluctantly. “What’s going on?” you ask, inexplicably pleased with yourself for stifling your initial instinct to yell whae the fuck? instead.

“It’s a mix-up,” says Michaels. “Not your fault—not your force’s fault, Mr. McMullen, nobody local is blameworthy—but Kemal here forgot to notify eurocontrol about what he was doing. They’d have told him to leave well alone, but he had to go for gold, didn’t you? Now we’re just going to have to sit tight until the clean-up crew arrive to sweep the mess under the rug and put everything back where it belongs. Otherwise…” He sniffs. “I was serious about facing the wall, Sergeant.”

You glance at Liz. She nods. You turn around.

“I’m going to have to confiscate your evidence footage,” he adds, apologetically.

“What?” You can’t stop yourself. “That’s illegal!”

“I think you’ll find my department has a specific exemption.” He speaks with the Olympian certainty of a man who can use a deputy chief constable as his personal warrant card. He clearly outranks Kemal and his merry Men in Black. Hell, he probably outranks the minister. What does that mean? “We’ll just have to wait here for the cleaners. Shouldn’t be too long.”

Kemal clears his throat. “The power’s off. Is your quantum gadget stable? If it warms up?”

“Not my field, old boy, I’m a peopleware person. I suppose the cleaner chappies will sort it out once we get the power back up—we’ll be invoicing you for the downtime—”

At which moment, the big electromagnet quenches.