The Atrocity Archives (39 page)

"What's going on? What
did
that?" Her
lips work like a fish out of water.

I shake my head.
"Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars tongue
be
loosed. Okay, talk. I reckon we've got about two, three minutes to nail
this before—"

"This was all a setup?"

"I don't know yet. Look, how do I get onto the
roof?"

"Isn't that a skylight?" she asks, pointing.

"Yeah." Being who I am I always carry a
Leatherman multitool so I whip it out and look
around for a chair I can pile on top of the desk and stand on, one that
doesn't have wheels and a gas strut. "See any chairs I
can—"

I'll say this much, detective training obviously
enables you to figure out how to get onto a roof fast. Josephine simply
walks over to the ladder nestling in a corner between one wall and a
battered filing cabinet and pulls it out. "This what you're
looking
for?"

"Uh, yeah. Thanks." She passes it to me and I
fumble with it for a moment, figuring out how to set it up. Then
another moment, juggling the multitool and the half-consumed pigeon's
foot and looking at the ladder dubiously.

"Give me those," she says.

"But—"

"Listen,
I'm
the one who deals with
idiot vandals and climbs around on pitched roofs looking for broken
skylights, okay? And—" she glances at the door "—if I
mess up you can
phone your boss and let him know what's happening."

"Oh," I mumble, then hand her the gadgets and
hold the ladder steady while she swarms up it like a circus acrobat. A
moment later there's a noise like a herd of baby elephants thudding on
the rooftop as she scrambles across to the camera mount. The camera may
be on a moving platform but there's a limit to how far it can depress
and clearly she's right below the azimuth platform—just as long as she
isn't visible to both the traffic camera out back and the schoolyard
monitor out front. More shaking, then there's a loud clack and the
Portakabin lights go out.

A second or two later she reappears, feet first,
through the opening. "Right, that should do it," she
says. "I shorted
the power cable to the platform. "Hey, the lights—"

"I think you shorted a bit more than that." I
hold the ladder as she climbs down. "Now, we've got an
immobilized one
up top, that's good. Let's see if we can find the controller."

A quick search of the hut reveals a bunch of fun
stuff I hadn't been expecting, like an ADSL line to the regional police
IT hub, a PC running some kind of terminal
emulator, and another dedicated machine with the cameras showing
overlapping windows on-screen. I could kiss them; they may have
outsourced the monitoring to private security firms but they've kept
the hardware all on the same backbone network. The blinkenlights are
beeping and twittering like crazy as everything's now running on backup
battery power, but that's okay. I pull out a breakout box and scramble
around under a desk until I've got my palmtop plugged into the network
hub to sniff packets. Barely a second later it dings at me. "Oh,
lovely." So much for
firewalled up to the eyeballs.
I
unplug
and surface again, then scroll through the several hundred screenfuls
of unencrypted bureaucratic computerese my network sniffer has grabbed.
"
That
looks promising. Uh, I wouldn't go outside just
yet but I
think we're going to be all right."

"Explain." She's about ten centimetres shorter
than I am, but I'm suddenly aware that I'm sharing the Portakabin with
an irate, wet, detective inspector who's probably a black belt at
something or other lethal and who is just about to really lose her
cool: "You've got about ten seconds from
now
to tell me
everything. Or I'm calling for backup and warrant card or no you are
going in a cell until I get some answers. Capisce?"

"I surrender." I don't, really, but I point at
my palmtop. "It's a fair cop, guv. Look, someone's been too
clever by
half here. The camera up top is basically a glorified webcam. I mean,
it's running a web server and it's plugged into the constabulary's
intranet via broadband. Every ten seconds or so a program back at HQ
polls it and grabs the latest picture, okay? That's in addition to
whatever the guy downstairs tells it to look at. Anyway, someone
else
just sent it an HTTP request with a honking great big file upload
attached, and I don't think your IT department is in the habit of using
South Korean primary schools as proxy servers, are they? And a
compromised firewall, no less. Lovely! Your cameras may have been
0wnZ0r3d by a fucking script kiddie, but they're
not as fucking smart as they
think
they are otherwise they'd
have fucking stripped off the fucking referrer headers, wouldn't
they?"
I stop talking and make sure I've saved the logfile somewhere secure,
then for good measure I email it to myself at work.

"Right. So I know their IP address and it's time
to locate them." It's the work of about thirty seconds to track
it to a
dial-up account on one of the big national ISPs—one of the free
anonymous ones. "Hmm. If you want to help, you could get me an
S22
disclosure notice for the phone number behind this dial-up account.
Then we can persuade the phone company to tell us the street address
and go pay them a visit and ask why they killed our friend with the key
ring—" My hands are shaking from the adrenalin high and I am
beginning
to feel angry, not just an ordinary day-to-day pissed-off feeling but
the kind of true and brutal rage that demands revenge.

"Killed? Oh." She opens the door an inch and
looks outside: she looks a little grey around the gills, but she
doesn't lose it. Tough woman.

"It's SCORPION STARE. Look, S22 data disclosure
order first, it's a fucking murder investigation now, isn't it? Then we
go visiting. But we're going to have to make out like it's accidental,
or the press will come trampling all over us and we won't be able to
get anything done." I write down the hostname while she gets on
the
mobile to head office. The first sirens start to wail even before she
picks up my note and calls for medical backup. I sit there staring at
the door, contemplating the mess, my mind whirling. "Tell the
ambulance
crew it's a freak lightning strike," I say as the thought takes
me. "You're already in this up to your ears, we don't need to get
anyone
else involved—"

Then my phone rings.

As it happens we don't visit
any murderous hackers, but presently the car pound is fronted
with white plastic scene-of-crime sheeting and a photographer and a
couple of forensics guys show up and Josephine, who
has found something more urgent to obsess over than ripping me a new
asshole, is busy directing their preliminary workover. I'm poring over
screenfuls of tcpdump output in the control room when the same unmarked
car that dropped us off here pulls up with Constable Routledge at the
wheel and a very unexpected passenger in the back. I gape as he gets
out of the car and walks toward the hut. "Who's this?"
demands
Josephine, coming over and sticking her head in through the window.

I open the door. "Hi, boss. Boss, meet Detective
Inspector Sullivan. Josephine, this is my boss—you want to come in and
sit down?"

Andy nods at her distractedly: "I'm Andy. Bob,
brief me." He glances at her again as she shoves through the
door and
closes it behind her. "Are you—"

"She knows too much already." I shrug. "Well?" I
ask her. "This is your chance to get out."

"Fuck that." She glares at me, then Andy: "Two
mornings ago it was a freak accident and a cow, today it's a murder
investigation—I trust you're not planning on escalating it any
further,
terrorist massacres and biological weapons are a little outside my
remit—and I want some answers.
If
you please."

"Okay, you'll get them," Andy says mildly. "Start talking," he tells
me.

"Code blue called at three thirty the day before
yesterday. I flew out to take a look, found a dead cow that had been
zapped by SCORPION STARE—unless there's a basilisk loose in Milton
Keynes—went down to our friends in Cheltenham for briefing yesterday,
stayed overnight, came up here this morning. The cow was bought from a
slaughterhouse and transported to the scene in a trailer towed by a
stolen car, which was later dumped and transferred to this pound.
Inspector Sullivan is our force liaison—external circle two, no need
to
know. She brought me here and I took a patch test, and right then
someone zapped the car—we were lucky to survive.
One down out front. We've, uh, trapped a camera up top that I
think
will prove to have firmware loaded with SCORPION STARE, and I sniffed
packets coming in from a compromised host. Police intranet, fire-walled
to hell and back, hacked via some vile little dweeb using a primary
school web server in South Korea. We were just about to run down the
intruder in meat-space and go ask some pointed questions when you
arrived." I yawn, and Andy looks at me oddly. Extreme stress
sometimes
does that to me, makes me tired, and I've been running on my nerves for
most of the past few days.

"All right." Andy scratches his chin
thoughtfully. "There's been a new development."

"New development?" I echo.

"Yes. We received a blackmail note." And it's no
fucking
wonder
that he's looking slightly glassy-eyed—he must
be in shock.

"
Blackmail?
What are they—"

"It came via email from an anonymous remixer on
the public Internet. Whoever wrote it knows about MAGINOT BLUE STARS
and wants us to know that they disapprove, especially of SCORPION
STARE. No sign that they've got CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, though. They're
giving us three days to cancel the entire project or they'll blow it
wide open in quote the most public way imaginable unquote."

"Shit."

"Smelly brown stuff, yes. Angleton is
displeased." Andy shakes his head. "We tracked the
message back to a
dial-up host in the UK—"

I hold up a piece of paper. "This one?"

He squints at it. "I think so. We did the S22
soft-shoe shuffle but it's no good, they used the SIMM card from a
prepaid mobile phone bought for cash in a supermarket in Birmingham
three months ago. The best we could do was trace the caller's location
to the centre of Milton Keynes." He glances at Josephine. "Did you
impress her—"

"Listen." She speaks quietly and with great
force: "Firstly, this appears to be an
investigation into murder—and now blackmail, of a government
department, right?—and in case you hadn't noticed, organising criminal
investigations just happens to be my speciality. Secondly, I do not
appreciate being forcibly gagged. I
have
signed a certain piece
of paper, and the only stuff I leak is what you get when you drill
holes in me. Finally, I am getting really pissed off with the runaround
you're giving me about a particularly serious incident on my turf, and
if you don't start answering my questions soon I'm going to have to
arrest you for wasting police time. Now, which is it going to
be?"

"Oh, for crying out loud." Andy rolls his eyes,
then says very rapidly: "By the abjuration of Dee and the name
of
Claude Dansey I hereby exercise subsection D paragraph sixteen clause
twelve and bind you to service from now and forevermore. Right, that's
it. You're drafted, and may whatever deity you believe in have mercy on
your soul."

"Hey. Wait." She takes a step back. "What's
going on?" There's a faint stink of burning sulphur in the air.

"You've just talked yourself into the Laundry,"
I say, shaking my head. "Just try to remember I tried to keep
you out
of this."

"The Laundry? What are you talking about? I
thought you were from Cheltenham?" The smell of brimstone is
getting
stronger. "Hey, is something on fire?"

"Wrong guess," says Andy. "Bob can explain
later. For now, just remember that we work for the same people,
ultimately, only we deal with a higher order of threat than everyday
stuff like rogue states, terrorist nukes, and so on. Cheltenham is the
cover story. Bob, the blackmailer threatened to upload SCORPION STARE
to the ring of steel."

"Oh shit." I sit down hard on the edge of a
desk. "That is so very not good that I don't want to think
about it
right now." The ring of steel is the network of surveillance
cameras
that were installed around the financial heart of the city of London in
the late 1990s to deter terrorist bombings. "Look, did Angleton
have
any other—"

"Yes. He wants us to go visit Site Able right
now, that's the lead development team at the research centre behind
SCORPION STARE. Um, inspector? You're in. As I said, you're drafted.
Your boss, that would be Deputy Chief Constable Dunwoody, is about to
get a memo about you from the Home Office—we'll worry about whether
you
can go back to your old job afterward. As of now, this investigation is
your only priority. Site Able runs out of an office unit at Kiln Farm
industrial estate, covered as a UK subsidiary of an American software
company: in reality they're part of the residual unprivatised rump of
DERA, uh, QinetiQ. The bunch that handles Q-projects."

"While you're busy wanking over your cow-burning
nonsense I've got a ring of car thieves to—" Josephine shakes
her head
distractedly, sniffs suspiciously, then stops trying to fight the geas.
"
That smell
 … Why do these people at
Kiln
Farm need a visit?"

"Because they're the lead team on the group who
developed SCORPION STARE," Andy explains, "and Angleton
doesn't think
it's a coincidence that our blackmailer burned a cow in Milton Keynes.
He thinks they're a bunch of locals. Bob, if you've got a trace that'll
be enough to narrow it down to the building—"

"Yes?" Josephine nods to herself. "But you
need
to find the individual responsible, and any time bombs they've left,
and there's a small matter of evidence." A thought strikes her. "What
happens when you catch them?"