Halting State

ELAINE: Morning After

There’s a subterranean snuffling sound from somewhere under the duvet, then a sense of warmth. You freeze for a moment while the recoil-reflex dies away, then relax into it. An arm slowly reaches across you, an animal comfort—or maybe he can’t quite believe he isn’t alone (and is having second thoughts).

This is not the first time you’ve woken up with the dawn to find yourself in a strange man’s bed. (Well, not a complete stranger—but you’ve known him for less than a week, and what’s that in real terms?) Mind you, on second thoughts, if you’re mutually attracted to someone, a week in close proximity is enough time to figure out what you’ve both got in mind: And no number of extra months will make one whit of difference if one or the other of you isn’t interested. And yesterday was more than a little crazy, which always tends to speed things up. But if you lie awake for much longer staring at the floral Rorschach patterns on the inside of the curtains—where did he get them? or, more realistically, who inflicted them on him and why did they hate him so much?—you’re going to start worrying morbidly about whether it was really a good idea, about whether it was sensible, rather than being what you both needed at the time. And if you start tugging at the loose ends of your self-doubt like that, not only will you bury the memory of comfort under a cairn of buts, you’ll stifle any prospect of continuing to explore this thorny maze of insecurity and need that hems you in…just like you did last time. Trust you to get involved with a man who’s even more insecure than you are.

“Jack?”

He shuffles closer, spooning up to your back. “Mm?”

“Been awake long?”

He pauses for a long time. “Had difficulty sleeping.”

“Well.” You press your back against him. “We’re going to have to face the music later.”

“If there is a later.”

You bite the inside of your cheek. Ah well. “Isn’t there going to be one?” Please don’t tell me he’s bailing out already…

“I’ve been working through what Michaels said—”

You unromantic sod! you think, somewhat relieved.

“—about the implications of a core-router exploit on a national level.”

Oh for fuck’s sake. You resist the urge to elbow him in the ribs. “Yes? Is it bad?”

“Very…especially the worst case. Imagine you can’t get any money out of a cashpoint, even though there’s money in your bank account. That’s annoying, right? Now imagine the entire APACS network goes down. And, oh, the contents of your bank account are randomized, along with everyone else’s. And all the supermarket stock-control databases go down, so they don’t know what’s moving and what’s on the shelves. And all their suppliers’ networks go down, so nobody knows what stock they’ve got, and where it is. And finally, all the Internet service providers and telcos and cellcos go down hard, and stay down—”

You’re fully awake now. “Stop. You’re saying, no communications? No money? No food? What are you saying?”

“That’s the start of it.” His tone of voice is maddeningly reasonable. “No transport, because you can’t trust the remote driver services or the online navigation systems and the road-pricing and speed-control systems are down. Medical services are knocked back to emergency-only because NHSNet is down. The police are forced back to relying on runners and whistles, and as for the fire service…better hope there aren’t any. When people start dying, you can’t even identify them, because the identity register’s been scrambled, too, so the biometrics point to the wrong personal files.”

“That sounds more like an act of war than a hack.” You roll away from him.

“That’s what it would be.” He sounds almost pleased with himself. You don’t see why: It’s not as if Michaels is paying him to do this kind of freelance analysis while he’s in bed, is it? “And that’s the twentieth-century model, what they used to call an electronic Pearl Harbour. Things have moved on since then. More likely, it would be a lot more subtle. Footnotes inserted in government reports feeding into World Trade Organization negotiating positions. Nothing we’d notice at first, nothing that would be obvious for a couple of years. You don’t want to halt the state in its tracks, you simply want to divert it into a siding of your choice. And if a couple of auditors die in a taxi crash, who cares?”

“What—” You stop, feeling cold. Despite your carefully cultivated habit of keeping work and private life separate, he’s got you to put your thinking cap on. Any vague thoughts about a pre-prandial cuddle go out the window. “You’re messing with my head! I need coffee first.”

“You want coffee at a time like this?” You can feel him shaking his head through the mattress.

Fuck him, you think, heavy with regret. Or not, as the case may be. You lift the duvet back and sit up, shivering in the cool air. “Coffee, slave.”

“It doesn’t have to happen,” he says hopefully. “Nobody in their right mind would do such a thing, not short of actual pre-existing hostilities. The Guoanbu for sure doesn’t want to destroy Scotland’s infrastructure—we’re part of the EU, their biggest trading partner. On the other hand, by demonstrating that they’ve got such a capability, they force us to pay attention to it…we’re into diplomacy here, aren’t we?”

There’s doubt in his voice, and suddenly you can see what’s going through his mind: lying awake at night, next to your sleeping form, thinking morbid thoughts about the future, self-doubt gnawing at him—it’s the mirror image of your own uncertainty, only he’s externalizing it, projecting it on the big picture rather than worrying about his own prospects. So you swallow your cutting response and instead nod at him, encouraging. Maybe you can salvage something more than memories if you help him get this out of his system first.

“A ‘capture the flag’ exercise by a bunch of deniable hackers—well, either it works, or it doesn’t. If it works, they’ve got the kind of espionage edge that the old-time CIA or KGB would have creamed themselves over, and if it fails, they’ve learned something.” He pulls on a tee-shirt by the light of the bedside lamp and pads around to your side of the room. “Want to stay here? Or come downstairs and talk?”

You slide out of bed and pick up his dressing-gown, from where you dropped it last night. “I’m listening.”

“Michaels wants to use us to flush out Team Red’s resident agent so he can then back-track through their audit trail and roll up the hole Team Red came in through. Assuming we trust him when he says SPOOKS isn’t compromised, all we have to do is set up a situation where they come for Nigel MacDonald, then wrap them up…And there’s always the chance that my filter tool has caught some more stolen prestige items overnight.”

His happy babble is slowing down, his uncertainty finally rising to the level of consciousness. “Jack. Listen.” You’re standing behind him. It’d be really easy to reach out and put your arms around his waist, if you could just break through his preoccupation. “You’re talking about people who have, at best, been involved in a criminal conspiracy to commit robbery, and at worst, have been involved in preparing the groundwork for a major act of terrorism. Who come from a country where people who do that sort of thing usually end up dead, and who know they’re expendable, and we’re sniffing around after them.” He tenses. “Remember last time? Remember your niece is still missing? And you think getting in deeper is a good idea?”

You can see it all laid out before you. All you have to do is draft a whitewash report, nothing found, and scurry back to London with your tail between your legs before the shit hits the fan. Maggie and Chris will pat you on the head, and you can get back onto the Dietrich-Brunner promotion treadmill (even without the funny handshake, nod, and wink from Barry Michaels that says she’s one of us, look after her). And you can put Jack on a flight to Amsterdam to continue installing the hang-over he was working on when this whole mad whirlwind blew out of nowhere to engulf you both. You don’t have to see each other ever again, and nobody needs to get hurt. Jack can go back to biting his belly raw over an unjust wound, and you can go back to keeping the world at bay. Chalk it up to experience and leave Michaels to swear over the wreckage of his intricately planned human-engineering hack. Jump back into your emotional coffin and slam the lid; nobody needs to get hurt. And if this wasn’t the morning after, that’s exactly what you’d do.

He shudders and begins to turn round. “Elaine, I don’t think they’ll just let me leave. There’s stuff I used to do in my last job, I can see why they’d want me—”

You can feel his breath on your cheek, shallow and anxious. You lean towards him. “If you get yourself stabbed again, I will be very angry with you.”

“I”—he reaches out to you hesitantly—“know.”

And then the doorbell rings.