Jennifer Morgue (33 page)
Authors: Charles Stross
"Well, I don't think I'm bad — " She's looking at me oddly. "What the hell are you talking about"
"There are usually two Babes in every Bond movie," I say slowly. Shit, she isn't British, is she? I keep forgetting. She hasn't suffered through the ritual Bond movie every Christmas afternoon on ITV since the age of two. I'd probably seen them all by the time I was fifteen, and read some of the books, but I've never had to use the knowledge before now ...
"Look, Bond almost always has two Babes. Sometimes it's three and in a few of the later movies they experimented with one, but it's almost always two. The first to show up is the Bad Bond Babe, who usually works for the villain and who sleeps with Bond before coming to a nasty end. The second, the Good Bond Babe, helps him resolve the plot and doesn't shag him until just before the closing credits. You haven't slept with me so far, which probably means you're safe — at least, you're not the Bad Bond Babe. But you might be the glamorous female assassin from a rival organization, who's sort of a revisionist merge between the Bad Bond Babe and the Good Bond Babe, who turns up later, gets Bond out of a load of grief, tries to kill him, and eventually sleeps with him — "
" — I hope this isn't a come-on, monkey-boy, because if it is — "
"The setup's skewed. And I reckon we're going to have company soon."
"Huh? What do you mean"
"There are never two girls in the movies that feature the glamorous rival assassin," I say, trying to get my head around what this signifies. "And this plot doesn't fit that mold. Not with Mo on her way out here."
"Mo? Your girlfriend?" Ramona gives me a hard-edged stare.
I look around. The shelves are covered in business administration titles with an admixture of first editions of Ian Fleming novels — boosters for the geas, at a guess — and the portholes show me a view of a dark blue sea beneath a turquoise sky.
"She said she was coming out here right after she finished reaming Angleton," I add, and wait for the double take.
"I find that hard to believe," Ramona says primly. "I've read her dossier. She's just an academic who stumbled into some classified topics!"
"Yes, but I'll bet that dossier doesn't have much on her after your organization gave her permission to leave, does it?
That was three years ago. Did you know she works for the Laundry these days? And have you heard her violin? She plays music to die for ..."
After digesting breakfast I find I've lost my appetite for socializing. I figure I could probably poke my
nose all over the ship and make a nuisance of myself, but I'm not sure I want to jeopardize my tenuous status as a guest quite so soon.
The real James Bond would be swarming through the ventilation ducts by now, kickboxing black berets overboard and generally raising hell, but my muscles are still aching from yesterday's swim and the nearest I've ever gotten to kickboxing is watching it on TV. Billington's fiendish plot is very well thought out, and the box he's slotted me into is dismayingly effective: I'm simply not a cold-blooded killer. If Angleton had sent Alan Barnes instead, he'd know how to raise seven shades of shit, but I'm not a graduate of the Hereford advanced college of mayhem and murder. Bluntly, I'm what used to be called a boffin, and these days is known as a geek, and while I know all the POSIX options to the kill(l) command, doing it with my bare hands is beyond my sphere of competence. I'm still having guilt attacks whenever I think of the guy offshore of the defense platform, and he was trying to make stabby on my arse at the time. So if I can't do the Bond thing, all that's left is to be true to my inner geek.
I slouch downstairs and go back to my room, where, on the TV, Thunderball has just about gotten round to the bit when it's all going pear-shaped and Largo pushes the panic button on his yacht and it turns into a hydrofoil. I shut the door, wedge the chair under it, plug my cummerbund into one USB port and my bow tie into the other, then do a quick in-and-out with the power cable.
While the usual messy list of device drivers is scrolling up the screen I check inside my wardrobe. Sure enough, someone's transferred my luggage from the hotel. The suitcase I took to Darmstadt has finally caught up with me, because presumably one of the perquisites of being employed by a mad billionaire with designs on global domination is that he has a gigantic logistics and fulfillment operation dedicated to ensuring that nothing is ever missing when it's needed. I pull on a fresh pair of black jeans, a faded Scary Devil Monastery tee shirt, and a pair of rubber-soled socks: I feel much better immediately. It's as if my brain is slowly rebooting, just like the Media Center PC. It might all be for nothing if the bloody thing isn't netwotked, but you never know until you try to find out; and I might be suffering from acute cravings for unfiltered Turkish cigarettes, but at least now I know why. It's like finding out that the reason your machine's running slow is because some virus-writing spod from Maui has shanghaied it into a botnet and is using your bandwidth to spam penis enlargement ads across the Ukraine; it's a pain in the neck, but knowing what's going on is the first step to dealing with it.
The boot sequence is complete. It's amazing what you can cram into a memory stick these days: it loads a Linux kernel with some very heavily customized device drivers, looks around, scratches its head, spawns a virtual machine, and rolls right on to load the Media Center operating system on top. I hit the boss key to bring the Linux session front and center, then have a poke around. If anyone interrupts me, another tap on the boss key will bring the brain-dead TV back on-screen.
I hunker down and take a look around the/proc file system to see what I've got my hands on. Yep, it definitely beats ductcrawling as a way of kicking black beret ass.
It turns out that what I've got my hands on is annoyingly close to a stock Media Center PC. A Media Center PC is meant to look like a digital video recorder on steroids, able to play music and do stuff with your cable connection. So it's a fair bet that there's some sort of cable going into the back of the box, I reason. The box itself is pretty powerful — that is, it's roughly comparable to a ten-year-old super-computer or a five-year-old scientific workstation — and when it isn't spending half its energy scanning for viruses or painting a pretty drop-shadow under the mouse pointer it runs like greased whippet shit. But it doesn't have all the occult applications support I'm used to finding preloaded, and as a development box it sucks mud — if I hadn't brought my USB key I wouldn't even have a C compiler Having OwnZored the box, I go looking for network interfaces. First results aren't promising: there's a dedicated TV tuner card and a cable going into the back, but no wired Ethernet. But then I look again, and see the kernel's autoloaded an Orinoco driver. It hasn't come up by default, b u t ...
Hah! Five minutes of poking around tells me what's going on here. This box probably came with an internal WiFi card, but it's not in use. The PC is simply being used as a television, hooked up to the ship's coaxial backbone, and nobody's even configured the Ethernet setup under Windows. Possibly they don't know about the network card? The Laundry-issue USB stick detected it straight off and started running AirSnort in promiscuous node, hunting for wireless traffic, but it hasn't found anything yet. After about thirty seconds I realize why, and start cursing.
I'm on board the Mabuse. The Mabuse is a converted Type 1135.6 guided missile frigate, from the Severnoye Design Bureau with love, by way of the Indian Navy. They may have stripped out the VLS cells and the deck guns, but they didn't remove the damage control or countermeasures suites or rip out the shielded bulkheads. This used to be a warship, and its internal spaces are designed to withstand the EMP from a nearby nuclear blast: WiFi doesn't tunnel through solid steel armor and a Faraday cage very well. If I'm going to hack my way into Billington's communication center I'm going to need to find a back door in: an occult network as opposed to an encrypted one.
I pop the other USB stick out of the distal end of the bow tie. It's a small plastic lozenge with a USB plug at one end and a handwritten label that says RUN ME. I plug it in, then spend ten minutes adding some modifications to its startup scripts. I pop it out then reach down and pick up my dress shoes. What was it, left heel and right shoelace? I strip out the relevant gizmos and stuff them in my pockets, hit the boss button, and flip the cummerbund upside down so that it's just taking a nap in front of the TV. They haven't given me back my gun, my phone, or my tablet PC, but I've got a Tillinghast resonator, an exploding bootlace, and a Linux keydrive: down but not out, as they say. So I open the door and go looking for a source of bandwidth to leech.
A modified type three Krivak-class frigate displaces nearly 4,000 tons when fully loaded, is 120 meters long — nearly twice as long as a Boeing 747 — and can slice through the water at sixty kilometers per hour. However, when you're confined in a luxury suite carved out of the vertical launch missile cells and what used to be the forward magazine and gun turret, it feels a whole lot smaller: about the size of a large house, say. I make the mistake of going too far along a very short corridor, and find myself eyeball to hairy eyeball with a guard in standard-issue black beret and mirrorshades.
One sickly smile later I'm staring at a closed door: I'm on a long leash, but this is as far as I'm going to get.
I'm about to go back to my room when two guards step into the corridor ahead of me. "Hey, you."
"Me?" I try to act innocent.
"Yes, you. Come here."
I don't have much in the way of options, so I let them lead me downstairs, along a corridor under the owner's territory, and then out into the working spaces of the ship. Which are painted dull gray, have no carpet or woodwork to speak of, and are full of obscure bits of mechanical clutter. Everything down here is cramped and roughly finished, and from the vibration and noise thrumming through the hull they've only soundproofed the executive suite. "Where are we going?" I ask.
"Com center. Mrs. Billington wants you." We pass a bunch of sailors in black, working on bits of who-knowswhat equipment, then they take me up a staircase and through another door, down a passage and into another doorway.
The room on the other side of it is long and narrow, like a railway carriage with no windows but
equipment racks up to the ceiling on both sides of the aisle and instrument consoles every couple of feet. There are seats everywhere, and more minions in black than you can shake a stick at, still wearing mirrorshades — which is weird, because the lighting's dim enough to give me a headache. There's a continuous rumbling from underfoot which suggests to me that I'm standing right above the engine room.
Eileen Billington's suit is a surreal flash of pink in the twilight as she walks towards me. "So, Mr. Howard." Her smile's as tight as a six-pack of BOTOX injections. "How are you enjoying our little cruise so far"
"No complaints about the accommodation, but the view's a bit monotonous," I say truthfully enough. "I gather you wanted to talk to me"
"Oh yes." She probably means to smile sweetly but her lip gloss makes her look as if she's just feasted on her latest victim's throat. "Who is this woman"
"Huh?" I stare blankly until she gestures impatiently at the big display screen next to me.
"Her. There, in the cross hairs."
We're standing beside a desk or console or whatever with a gigantic flat display. A black beret sitting in front of it is riding herd on a bunch of keyboards and a trackball: he's got about seventy zillion small video windows open on different scenes. One of them is paused and zoomed to fill the middle of the screen. It's an airport terminal and it looks vaguely familiar, if a little distorted by the funny lens. Several people are crossing the camera viewpoint but only one of them is centered — a woman in a sundress and big floppy hat, large shades concealing her eyes. She's got a messenger bag slung carelessly over one shoulder, and she's carrying a battered violin case.
Very carefully, I say, "I haven't a clue." Hopefully the noise of my heart pounding away won't be audible over the ship's engines. "Why do you think I ought to know her? What is this, anyway?" I force myself to look away from Mo and find I'm staring at the console instead, tier upon tier of nineteeninch rackmount boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling. I blink and do a double take. They've got lockable. cabinet fronts, but there's a key stuck in the one right above the monitor. I can see LEDs blinking behind it, set in what looks suspiciously like the front panel of a PC. Suddenly the USB thumb drive in my pocket begins to itch furiously. "You've sure got a lot of toys here."
Eileen isn't distracted: "She has something to do with your employers," she informs me. "This is the monitoring hub." She pats the monitor. Some imp of the perverse tickles her ego, or maybe it's the geas. "Here you see the filtered take from my intelligence queue. Most of the material that comes in is rubbish, and filtering it is a big overhead; I've got entire call centers in Mumbai and Bangalore trawling the inputs from the similarity grid, looking for eyes that are watching interesting things, forwarding them to the Hopper for further analysis, and finally funneling them to me here on the Mabuse. Computer screens and keyboards where the owners are entering passwords, mostly. But sometimes we get something more useful ... the girl on the cosmetics stand in the arrivals terminal at Princess Juliana Airport, for example."
"Yes, well." I make a show of peering at the screen. "Are you sure she's who you're looking for? Could it be one of that group, there?" I point at a bunch of wiry-looking surf Nazis with curiously even haircuts "Nonsense." Eileen sniffs aristocratically. "The surge in the Bronstein Bridge definitely coincided with that woman crossing the immigration desk — " She stops and stares at me with all the warmth of a cobra inspecting a warm furry snack. "Am I monologuing? How unfortunate." She taps the black beret on his shoulder. "You, take five."
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