Charles Stross - Halting State

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.

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.”