Charles Stross - Halting State

You feel embarrassed: She’s absolutely right. You’re also feeling a little shaky. You don’t know quite how you expected Wu Chen to react, but trying to stab you and making a run for it—if he’d had a real sharpie instead of a penknife, or if he’d missed the keyboard, which you’re going to have to replace, dammit—it’s outside the playbook and there’s no GM to appeal to. “Crap,” you mumble.

“You can say that again.” Elaine pauses. For a moment you made naked eye contact with her, unscreened by enhanced reality: It’s acutely embarrassing, the kind of out-of-context behaviour that business etiquette is intended to avoid. She looks shaken, too, but she’s keeping a good lid on it. “Come on, let’s get you patched up,” she says, taking a step backwards, and breaking whatever information transfer it was that was going on between you via some kind of sub-verbal mammalian protocol layer.

Then she takes you by the undamaged hand and leads you back into the real world.

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…