Charles Stross - Halting State

“Let’s start here, in the front hall. When the ram team laid the door down, they covered the dust and print evidence from the last people to traverse the hall. When the initial survey was over, Marge and Hal from Fettes Row came in and took an impression in aerogel foam. There’s lots of dust there, and a couple of partials, but the most recent footprints are useless because whoever left them was using disposable polythene overshoes with some kind of vascular lining. Just like Marge and Hal, in fact.”

You sit up and start paying real attention. You had the idea that MacDonald and his friends were a wee bit paranoid, but this is right out of order.

“It’s the same throughout the flat. It’s been turned over by professionals. Mr. MacDonald appears to have had a serious gadget habit, not to mention some apparatus on the roof that I’ll get to shortly, and the hardware is still there. But every last piece of personal memorabilia has been removed. The place is unnaturally clean, except for the kitchen. There’s no food apart from the fridge, for example. No personal items: no photographs, no paintings or posters, no books or magazines or newspapers, no toothpaste or painkillers in the bathroom cabinet, no nail clippers, no toilet paper. Someone took the time to vacuum behind the washing machine. If I didn’t know better, I’d say nobody lived there at all, except for the kitchen. Basically, the crime scene has been thoroughly sanitized by somebody with more than a passing knowledge of forensics.”

You glance sideways to see how the others are taking it. Doubtless this is old news to Liz and explains her headache, but the chief is looking very down in the dumps, and no mistake. And then Dr. Tweed mouses over to the kitchen and clips through the door to the scene beyond.

“This is the kitchen. It’s been sanitized, too, and I’d be very surprised if it’s been used for its notional purpose in the past couple of years. Real kitchens are lovely places, they can tell us a lot. From the type of grease and particulates retained in the extractor hood over the cooker, to the foodstuffs in the refrigerator, and the contents of the bin, they can be a gold mine. A surprising number of burglars help themselves to a snack on their way through, so it always pays to check the rubbish…but anyway. The fridge is, um, see for yourselves.” The door on the virtual refrigerator blinks magically open to reveal a pristine interior. “It’s been cleaned out. This is how we found it. There are no contents; the brown stain on the side is a povidone iodine hospital scrub. Meanwhile, over here we have a patch on the work-top where you’ll see there’s a faint outline—matches a microwave oven. Why the hell anyone would leave the electronics in the living room but take the microwave oven is, well, your guess is as good as mine. But that’s what they did: They scrubbed the fridge out and lifted the microwave. Maybe they’d been using it for toasting RFID tags or something. But the whole thing’s been thoroughly sanitized.”

“Sanitized?” Verity explodes. “Are you telling us you can’t get anything?”

“Yes, I am—at least, so far.” Tweed nods like a dashboard ornament. He starts counting off fingers. “There are no human traces in the place that haven’t been thoroughly cleaned or scrambled. When the LCN results came back, it was a smeared mess—we got a DNA sample alright, one from about three hundred people in parallel.”

“What else doesn’t fit?” asks Liz.

Tweed shrugs. “The bedding has been stripped down. I lifted debris samples on the mattress debris, but that’s been contaminated, too.”

Verity snorted. “How do you contaminate DNA evidence?”

“We work with really tiny samples, so you—the bad guys—just give us too much evidence. Best bet is whoever sanitized the flat spent a couple of hours on the top deck of a bus with a small vacuum cleaner. We all shed skin particles like mad wherever we go. Blast dust from a bus seat cushion all over a crime scene, and it’s like smearing over a fingerprint on a glass by passing it around the entire population of a night-club—all I can lift from it is a horrible mess.”

“Bah.” Verity crosses his arms. “What else?”

Liz raises an eyebrow. “I’d like to give everyone a quick overview. If you don’t mind, I’m going to pass the baton to Joe from ICE. Unless there’s anything else that’s important, Doctor?”

Tweed sighs. “Nothing that changes the overall picture.”

“Joe?”

Joe’s a weedy little pencil-necked geek, almost a self-parody act. “Hi!” He squeaks. “You want to know about the servers? Okay, here’s the story: We’ve got nothing. It’s a really nice pile of kit, all of it less than two years old, professional business gear rather than SOHO—but there are no manuals, removable media, or licenses, and the fixed media, hard disks and flash, have all been nuked. I mean, it’s scrubbed, tight down to the bare metal, using a tool that conforms to DOD 5220.22-M. That’s what we use when we’re decommissioning confidential but non-classified kit. Someone really didn’t want us taking a look at their video library. Which is a bit of a head-scratcher because if we want it back, it’s a fair bet that not even GCHQ will be able to help.”

“The roof-top garden,” Liz prompts.

“Oh, that .”

“Yes.” Liz nods to the chief’s raised eyebrows—waggling like a pair of hairy caterpillars arguing over a tasty leaf—“Here’s the fun bit.”

Joe nods eager affirmation. “This is where it gets weird. Our boy had gone up through the skylight and stuck a satellite dish on his roof. An illegal one; it turns out he didn’t have a building warrant and it’s over a metre in diameter. Um. Actually it’s a metre and a half, on a powered azimuth mount, and it’s an uplink. We don’t know where it was pointed because when we gained access, it was parked in the vertical position, but it was plugged into a bunch of black boxes in the hall. I’m still not sure what half of it is, but there’s also a cell antenna on the roof, and that’s plugged into what appears to be a custom GNU radio box, and they’re all switched through the server rack in the living room.”

“Explain GNU radio,” says Liz, in a tone of voice that says she’s already been here, and it doesn’t get any better.

“Sure. It’s a soft radio. You plug a sufficiently fast digital signal processor onto the back of an analogue-to-digital converter and a wire, and simulate the radio procedurally. Run a program and it’s a TV receiver, run a different program and it’s a cellphone base station.”

“Isnae that illegal?” calls Bill, from the back.

“Well spotted.” Joe flashes a grin, suddenly assertive now he’s on his own ground. “Firstly, it’s free—you can download it from just about anywhere—and secondly, you can run it on just about any PC with the aid of about thirty euros’ worth of off-the-shelf kit. So the actual state of the law—not being a complete ass—is that using it is illegal under certain circumstances . Not having the contents of his media, I can’t tell you what he was doing with it, but using the box he was running it on as an illegal satellite TV decoder would be like shaving with a katana. Twenty to one he was doing something naughty.”

“Such as?” prompted Verity. “What sort of stuff would a man like that be doing in his spare time?”

Joe twitched. “This isn’t spare-time kit, I’m afraid. Current best price I could find on the hardware is somewhere north of twenty thousand euros. He might have been sucking down naughty satellite broadcasts and feeding them to his friends, but…well. He might have been snooping on phone calls for the Russian mafiya or running an anonymous cellular phone remixer to bypass the security services. I can’t tell because whoever turned him over wiped all the media, but I can tell you what it looks like. Do you suppose it could be something to do with that murder in Pilton?”