Halting State

ELAINE: System Fails, People Die

It’s your fault Jack nearly got arrested. But what did you expect?

Luckily there’s camera footage of the incident, and he’s the one with a hole in his jacket and a broken chunk of electronics, not to mention the fact that the nearest thing to a knife on his person is a multitool with a one-inch blade. But afterwards, you’re so angry you could kick yourself—or preferably the jobsworth in the security guard’s uniform who called the police over and told the constable that Jack had assaulted someone else—a someone else who by that time had probably legged it all the way over the great firewall of China and was, to put it in copspeak, Unable to Testify.

Equally luckily, the constable was willing to listen to your eyewitness account before doing anything hasty. So instead of filling out an arrest form, a disclosure notice for the CCTV footage was served, and sometime in the next couple of weeks Strathclyde’s finest will review the take and see if a crime was, in fact, committed.

Of course, you’d been labouring under the misapprehension that the men and women in uniforms wearing SECURITY badges were actually there to provide security, as opposed to preventing attendees from chugging the free plastic cups of sherry provided by some of the more optimistic exhibitors: But that’s par for the course in Glasgow, it seems; the commission of an actual crime fills their dour Presbyterian hearts with joy (look, a member of the criminal classes is actually working!) while a complaint from the victim is an occasion for much swithering about clean-up rates and blackening the name of our good town and so on and so forth.

Which is why you find yourself, about two hours later, standing on a street outside the conference centre, miles from anything (except for a couple of high-rise hotels, a preserved dockyard crane the size of the Eiffel Tower, and a Foster Associates’ mothership that looks to have suffered a wee navigation mishap on final approach into London’s docklands), trying to cajole a shocky and stressed-out Jack in the direction of shelter. Because it’s Glasgow, where the weather offers you a creative combination of hypothermia and sunburn simultaneously: and right now it’s playing a DJ mix with six El Nino events, a monsoon, and a drought on the turntables.

Anyway. Blood sugar is the most important thing to get under control after a stressful confrontation, so that’s what you decide to tackle first. “C’mon, Jack, let’s get back to the city centre and try to find some lunch.”

Jack groans and mutters something inaudible. He’s been withdrawn, like a snail pulling itself tightly back into its shell, ever since the security goons ejected you both from the giant wood-louse; and it’s not just his lack of an umbrella. “’M an idiot.”

You know better than to agree with that self-summary, and you also know better than to disagree with it. “No, that idiot with the badge was the idiot. You aren’t an idiot yet—but you will be if you don’t get something to eat and a chance to chill out. You’re taking the rest of the day off. Understand?”

That raises the ghost of a smile. “The train journey’s not billable time, anyway.” But he unhunches slightly and begins to walk, face screwed up in distaste. “Who are Guoanbu?” he asks, pronouncing the word carefully. “Some kind of Chinese farming clan?”

You shake your head. “Never heard of them. Try Googling?”

“Okay.” He twitches. “Mind if I call a taxi?”

“I’ll do it.” You phone the first cab company that comes up in your glasses and they promise that a car will be with you inside of two minutes. “Getting anywhere?”

You notice his face. Jack’s gaping stupidly again, the way he does when he’s been surprised by something and hasn’t remembered he’s in public: He was probably wearing an embryonic version of that expression when the midwife spanked him on the bum. “Oh fuck,” he says, then his facial muscles twitch and come back under control. “Oh dear baby fucking Jesus Christ on a roller-skate.”

“What?” It’s raining, you’re irritated with yourself, now you’re annoyed at Jack: Fists on hips, you feel a strong urge to bite somebody’s head off. (It’s just a shame you’d regret the consequences.) “Would you care to explain yourself? Or are we just swearing in the rain because it’s wet, or something?”

He swallows. “I found out who Guoanbu are,” he says. “Here.” And he flicks a tag at your glasses. It takes you a moment to open it. And then you see: GUOJIA ANQUAN BU. MINISTRY OF STATE SECURITY. Guoanbu is an abbreviation or acronym or whatever the Mandarin equivalent is for KGB, CIA, MI5, Mossad. EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION ON THE NIGHT FLIGHT TO GUANZHOU. “Chen was scared that they’d, they’d ‘have my kidneys’ if he squealed. Said he wanted two million, plus witness protection. That’s when he ran.” Jack’s face is pale in the chilly drizzle. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

A driverless black minivan wearing a TAXI sign on its bonnet glides up to the kerb beside you and unlocks its doors. “Sounds like a game of SPOOKS to me,” you say lightly, and get in. “Come on, the rain’s getting heavier.”

Your map tells you there’s a cluster of interesting-sounding restaurants in the West End, so you tell the call-centre driver to take you there. He has a bit of trouble making out your accent at first, but you convey your desires successfully at the third attempt and settle back to watch the steering wheel twitch in the grip of a poltergeist, beneath the rain-streaked windscreen. There are probably webcams in the headlight and brake light assemblies; you certainly hope your driver can see better than you can. “Do you know where we’re going?” Jack asks anxiously. “I’m lost in Glasgow.”

He’s speaking metaphorically: Of course nobody is ever really lost, not anymore. “Never been here in my life,” you say cheerfully enough, “but I’ve found a couple of restaurant review forums and a mashup overlay. What do you think of this—contemporary Russian/Eastern European fusion cuisine, German beers, vodka bar next door, and old Soviet décor? It’s called Stavka.”

“Stavka? There’s one of those up in Dundee,” he says dismissively. “It’s okay, but a bit heavy on the cabbage and mutton.”

“Well then”—the taxi circles a roundabout closely then accelerates hard, forcing you to grab one of the handles—“we can see what’s next door.”

“Next door, that’d be on Sauchiehall Street, right? Hey, why are we going this way?”

Something in Jack’s tone of voice makes you sit up sharply: Your seat belt brings you up short. “What do you mean?”

“Sauchiehall Street is that way,” he says.

“It could be a one-way—” You stop trying. Obviously he’s been over here often enough that he knows some of the street names. A moped whizzes past on the other side of the road as the taxi accelerates. Then your phone rings. “What’s going on?”

“Your phone,” Jack suggests. “I’ll sort this out. Hey, driver—” He’s talking to the mike under the red LED behind the empty driver’s seat as you see the phone call is from an unlisted number.

“Who is this?” You run the volume up so you can hear over the traffic noises.

There’s a familiar three-bar jingle, then: “Agent Barnaby, this is Spooks Control.” You muffle a groan; this is almost exactly the worst possible time for SPOOKS’ GMs to assign you another task. On the other hand, you can record it and deal with it later. “Your authenticator is: Mapplethorpe Paints Roses.”

“Talk to my voice mail please, I’m busy right now.” You try to keep your tone brisk but professional.

“You are in a taxi in Glasgow,” the SPOOKS call-centre droid continues, an edge of urgency creeping into his voice. “Unfortunately, its remote driver service has been penetrated by a Guoanbu black operations team. This is not a game.”

“What. The. Hell?” You stare at the wiperless windscreen, where Jack is now speaking very loudly and urgently into the microphone, and you realize the taxi’s accelerated to match the speed limit, and the central locking is engaged, and there’s a perspex screen between the two of you and the controls.

“Guoanbu assassins have used this technique in the past: They hijack a taxi or car, drive it to a sufficiently isolated location, and crash it. Your investigation of the leak at Hayek Associates has made you a target. We can’t give you a police intercept without exposing our knowledge of their penetration of our infrastructure, which might provoke a major incident. You must break out of the taxi while it is stationary at traffic lights, or break into the driver’s compartment and disable it.” Jack is shouting and thumping the electric window control. “Call in when you have time,” says the spook. Then your phone goes dead.

“Shit.” Swearing doesn’t achieve anything, but under the circumstances…You look left, right, left again: traffic, rain, a blurring wall of four-story tenements stacked out of red sandstone blocks rushing by. “We’ve got to get out of here, Jack!”

Jack turns. There’s panic in his eyes. “I heard!” He thumps the latch on the polycarbonate screen with the flat of his hand, then swears. The taxi’s doing about sixty kilometres per hour, bearing right onto a two-lane-wide stretch of concrete underpass—they’re big on brutalist road-building on this side of the country, it seems—and he’s unfastened his seat belt so he can get at the screen. If the carjacker just decides to aim for the nearest bridge abutment, it’ll be curtains for Jack—but no, the webcam in the passenger compartment is dangling from its socket like a popped eyeball. Your mind flashes through scenarios. Bridge: No, too much chance of an ambulance rescuing someone. They’ll wait until you’re out of town, then drive over the edge of a quarry, or into a river, or the sea. Webcams popped to prevent blackboxing, doubtless a necessary safety precaution for the careful automotive assassin. The unruly passengers broke into the driver’s compartment, nobody to blame but themselves: That’s what this is all about, it’s an SFPD assassination, after all. Oddly, you can feel an icy sheen of sweat in the small of your back, but you’re not frightened or panicking: You’ve played this game a hundred times before, planted plastic boxes on the walls of consulates, tailed another spook through a busy city’s streets, made the dead-letter drop…

Oh.

“Jack. We’ve got to get into the cab. I know what to do.” The buttons on the steering column are mocking you: so easy to press, but impossibly inaccessible. Your hands unfasten your seat belt on autopilot. “Give me your multitool.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls it out, passing it to you handle first: “Why?”

You turn it over in your hands—a lump of machined titanium with weirdly recessed slots and bumps in it, frustratingly opaque when you’re in a hurry. “I want to unscrew that latch.”

“Oh.” He hunches round on the jump-seat. “But—”

“We’ve got time,” you reassure him, even though you’re not entirely sure of it yourself. The cold sweat is spreading.

“Give me that.” He takes the multitool: His hands are large and warm, his nails evenly clipped, but there’s an odd twist to his index fingers, almost as if their tips are curved. You notice this as you place the tool in his palm. It’s funny what you notice when you’re skating on the thin ice above a chilly pool of panic.

Jack crouches, flips the jump-seat out of the way, and kneels on the floor so he can peer at the catch on the sliding panel. Things flip out and latch into place as he twists the tool, then begins swearing continuously in a conversational tone of voice. “Got it.” A black screw pops out and disappears onto the similarly black carpet. Then another. The buildings are thinning out on either side as the taxi sways and bounces, slowing as it merges with a stream of out-bound traffic, always sticking to the overtaking lanes, keeping close to the speed limit. You twitch in the grip of second thoughts—shouldn’t we have tried to get a door or window open?—but then you have visions of falling out of a fast-moving taxi in traffic. A third screw comes loose. “Shit. This one’s stripped.”

“What—”

“Lend me a shoe.”

He’s wearing trainers, you realize. You quickly unlace one of your shoes, thanking providence that round toes and platform heels are in again. Yours are only a couple of centimetres high, but it’s enough for Jack to use it as a hammer, whacking the flat rasp-blade of his tool between the catch and the panel, levering away, until—“Gotcha!” He looks over his shoulder at you, sheepishly. “What do I do now?”

“Reach over and engage the autopilot,” you explain. “Once it goes into automatic drive, it’ll lock on to the roadside beacons and cut the remote driver out of the loop.” You hope. “Then you can take back manual control if nothing goes wrong.”

He looks befuddled. “But I can’t drive!”

“Then strap yourself in and stay out of my way.” You’re not sure you can do this—you’re a Londoner, you don’t own a car, your driving license is just another form of ID—but the taxi’s speeding up, and the traffic is thinning out, and there are only occasional buildings now. “Okay. Brace yourself.”

You slide the panel sideways and grab the steering wheel. There isn’t room to fit your body through the window, just your left arm, reaching around to the driver’s seat on the right, and the alarm that starts screaming in your ears as soon as you get the panel open is deafening: The taxi lurches horribly towards the near side, and you stab at the buttons, bending a fingernail back and painfully clouting your knuckles as the steering wheel begins to spin—

And straightens out as the autopilot locks on to the markings on the open road—

Too hard.

There are limits to what idiot servos are capable of. You hear the blare of horns from outside, then a horrible crunching thump from behind that whacks you back into the passenger compartment, as the taxi spins across the central reservation and slides towards the on-coming lights.

Then everything stops making sense.