"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Got that." I inserted the new SIMM then punched the number into my phone. Later,
I'd ring the number: a pabx there would identify my voice-print then call my phone
back, downloading a new set of numbers into its memory. Contact numbers for the
rest of my OPS cell, accessible via cellphone and erasable in a moment. The less
you knew, the less you could betray.

The London to Scotland sleeper train was a relic of an earlier age, a rolling hotel
characterized by a strange down-at-heel '70s charm. More importantly, they took
cash and didn't require ID, and there were no security checks: nothing but the usual
on-station cameras monitoring people wandering up and down the platforms.
Nothing on the train itself. We were booked through to Aberdeen but getting off in
EdinburghтАФfirst step on the precarious path to anonymizing ourselves. If the
camera spool-off was being archived to some kind of digital medium we might be in
trouble later, once the coming AI burn passed the hard take-off point, but by then
we should be good and gone.

****
Once in my cabin I changed into slacks, shirt and tieтАФimage 22, busi-ness
consultant on way home for the weekend. I dinked with my phone in a desultory
manner, then left it behind under my pillow, primed to receive silently. The restaurant
car was open and I found Eve there. She'd changed into jeans and a T-shirt and tied
her hair back, taking ten years off her appearance. She saw me and grinned, a trifle
maliciously. "Hi, Bob. Had a tough meeting? Want some coffee? Tea, maybe?"

"Coffee." I sat down at her table. "Shit," I muttered. "I thought youтАФ"

"Don't worry." She shrugged. "Look, I had a call from Mallet. He's gone off-air for
now, he'll be flying in from San Francisco via London tomorrow morning. This isn't
looking good. Durant was, uh, shot resisting arrest by the police. Apparently he went
crazy, got a gun from somewhere and holed up in the library annex demanding to
talk to the press. At least, that's the official story. Thing is, it happened about an
hour after your initial heads-up. That's too fast for a cold response."

"You think someone in the Puzzle Palace was warming the pot." My coffee arrived
and I spooned sugar into it. Hot, sweet, sticky: I needed to stay awake.

"Probably. I'm trying to keep loop traffic down so I haven't asked anyone else yet,
but you think so and I think so, so it may be true."

I thought for a minute. "What did Mallet say?"

"He said P. T. Barnum was right." She frowned. "Who was P. T. Barnum,
anyway?"

"A boy like John Major, except he didn't run away from the circus to join a firm of
accountants. Had the same idea about fooling all of the people some of the time or
some of the people all of the time, though."

"Uh-huh. Mallet would say that, then. Who cracked it first? NSA? GCHQ? GRU?"