Halting State Read Free Page A

It’s not like they’ve got blinking red navigation lights on their heids, but two of ’em are wearing sandals and the other’s enough to make you wish your Little Database of Charges had a section on Fashion Crimes: The stripes on his shirt are interfering with your specs, and the evidence cam is picking up a nasty moire effect. “Ahem,” you repeat, as a holding action, then stare at Wayne Richardson, Marketing Director. Let him sort this out.
    “Oh, excuse me.” Richardson takes his cue. “This is, uh, Sergeant Smith and Constable Lockhart. The sergeant’s here to take a statement.”
    “That’s enough,” you cut in. “If you can introduce everyone? Then ye’d better show me what happened.”
    “Uh, sure.” Richardson points at the suits with the slits for their owners’ dorsal fins first: “Marcus Hackman, CEO.”
    Hackman gives Richardson the hairy eyeball, like he’s sizing him for a concrete overcoat, but only for a second. Then he turns the charm on you with a nod and a great white smile that reveals about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of American dental prostheses that he probably wears because it’s the only way to stop the bairns from screaming and running away before he can eat them. Clearly by calling the Polis, Wayne has pissed in Hackman’s pint, but he’s too much of a professional to let your arrival perturb him. “We’re grateful that you could come, but really it’s not necessary—”
    “And Barry Michaels, our Chief Technology Officer.” Michaels is plump and rumpled in an old-Fettes-schoolboy Boris-Johnson sort of way, with a port nose and a boyish cow-lick of black hair: You peg immediately that he’s probably as bent as a three-bob note, but unlike Hackman, he’s not some kind of toxic-waste-eating Martian invader from the planet Wall Street. He nods nervously, looking like he’s eaten something disagreeable. “This is Beccy Webster, our Market Stabilization Executive.” The twentysomething hen’s a high-flyer, then? “Mike Russell, Sam Couper, and Darren Evans”—the latter is the one with the anti-webcam shirt—“are our senior quants.”
    “Excuse me?” You raise an eyebrow.
    “Sorry. They’re our economics wizards, they do the market programming around here that’s the bread and butter of our business. It’s just what they’re called.”
    You take a deep breath. “Right. I understand Mr. Richardson phoned in a report of a theft from your company. He tells me that you got it on video, and it’s something to do with a game. What exactly was stolen?” You take a wild guess: “Was it the source code, or something?”
    “Oh dear.” Michaels emotes like a sweaty-handed old theatre queen. “Anything but!” He sits up in his ejector seat—you’re certain, now, that you’ve seen one just like it in the air museum at East Fortune—and takes a deep breath. “Did you tell her it was the source code, Wayne?”
    “No, I—”
    “What did you tell the police?” Michaels demands. He sounds very upset about something. Okay, pencil him in as number two on your list of folks who don’t like airing their smalls in public . (And remember for later: There’s no smoke without a source of combustion …)
    “Nothing, I just called them because we’ve been robbed!”
    This is getting out of hand. “What was stolen?” you ask, pitching your voice a bit louder.
    “Everything in the central bank!” It’s Webster. At last, you think, someone who gives simple answers to simple questions.
    “Central bank where, on the high street?” You can’t be sure while you’re off-line, but you don’t think there are any banks at this end of Drum Brae—
    “Show her the video,” Hackman says wearily. “It’s the only way to explain.”
     
    You’re looking out across a verdant green rain-forest canopy that sprawls across the foothills of a mountain range so tall that the peaks are a vulpine blue haze in the distance, biting at the smaller of the three