“Well then”—the taxi circles a roundabout closely then accelerates hard, forcing you to grab one of the handles—“we can see what’s next door.”
“Next door, that’d be on Sauchiehall Street, right? Hey, why are we going this way?”
Something in Jack’s tone of voice makes you sit up sharply: Your seat belt brings you up short. “What do you mean?”
“Sauchiehall Street is that way,” he says.
“It could be a one-way—” You stop trying. Obviously he’s been over here often enough that he knows some of the street names. A moped whizzes past on the other side of the road as the taxi accelerates. Then your phone rings. “What’s going on?”
“Your phone,” Jack suggests. “I’ll sort this out. Hey, driver—” He’s talking to the mike under the red LED behind the empty driver’s seat as you see the phone call is from an unlisted number.
“Who is this?” You run the volume up so you can hear over the traffic noises.
There’s a familiar three-bar jingle, then: “Agent Barnaby, this is Spooks Control.” You muffle a groan; this is almost exactly the worst possible time for SPOOKS’ GMs to assign you another task. On the other hand, you can record it and deal with it later. “Your authenticator is: Mapplethorpe Paints Roses.”
“Talk to my voice mail please, I’m busy right now.” You try to keep your tone brisk but professional.
“You are in a taxi in Glasgow,” the SPOOKS call-centre droid continues, an edge of urgency creeping into his voice. “Unfortunately, its remote driver service has been penetrated by a Guoanbu black operations team. This is not a game.”
“What. The. Hell?” You stare at the wiperless windscreen, where Jack is now speaking very loudly and urgently into the microphone, and you realize the taxi’s accelerated to match the speed limit, and the central locking is engaged, and there’s a perspex screen between the two of you and the controls.
“Guoanbu assassins have used this technique in the past: They hijack a taxi or car, drive it to a sufficiently isolated location, and crash it. Your investigation of the leak at Hayek Associates has made you a target. We can’t give you a police intercept without exposing our knowledge of their penetration of our infrastructure, which might provoke a major incident. You must break out of the taxi while it is stationary at traffic lights, or break into the driver’s compartment and disable it.” Jack is shouting and thumping the electric window control. “Call in when you have time,” says the spook. Then your phone goes dead.
“Shit.” Swearing doesn’t achieve anything, but under the circumstances…You look left, right, left again: traffic, rain, a blurring wall of four-story tenements stacked out of red sandstone blocks rushing by. “We’ve got to get out of here, Jack!”
Jack turns. There’s panic in his eyes. “I heard!” He thumps the latch on the polycarbonate screen with the flat of his hand, then swears. The taxi’s doing about sixty kilometres per hour, bearing right onto a two-lane-wide stretch of concrete underpass—they’re big on brutalist road-building on this side of the country, it seems—and he’s unfastened his seat belt so he can get at the screen. If the carjacker just decides to aim for the nearest bridge abutment, it’ll be curtains for Jack—but no, the webcam in the passenger compartment is dangling from its socket like a popped eyeball. Your mind flashes through scenarios. Bridge: No, too much chance of an ambulance rescuing someone. They’ll wait until you’re out of town, then drive over the edge of a quarry, or into a river, or the sea. Webcams popped to prevent blackboxing, doubtless a necessary safety precaution for the careful automotive assassin. The unruly passengers broke into the driver’s compartment, nobody to blame but themselves: That’s what this is all about, it’s an SFPD assassination, after all. Oddly, you can feel an icy sheen of sweat in the small of your back, but you’re not frightened or panicking: You’ve played this game a hundred times before, planted plastic boxes on the walls of consulates, tailed another spook through a busy city’s streets, made the dead-letter drop…
Oh.
“Jack. We’ve got to get into the cab. I know what to do.” The buttons on the steering column are mocking you: so easy to press, but impossibly inaccessible. Your hands unfasten your seat belt on autopilot. “Give me your multitool.”
He reaches into his pocket and pulls it out, passing it to you handle first: “Why?”
You turn it over in your hands—a lump of machined titanium with weirdly recessed slots and bumps in it, frustratingly opaque when you’re in a hurry. “I want to unscrew that latch.”
“Oh.” He hunches round on the jump-seat. “But—”
“We’ve got time,” you reassure him, even though you’re not entirely sure of it yourself. The cold sweat is spreading.
“Give me that.” He takes the multitooclass="underline" His hands are large and warm, his nails evenly clipped, but there’s an odd twist to his index fingers, almost as if their tips are curved. You notice this as you place the tool in his palm. It’s funny what you notice when you’re skating on the thin ice above a chilly pool of panic.
Jack crouches, flips the jump-seat out of the way, and kneels on the floor so he can peer at the catch on the sliding panel. Things flip out and latch into place as he twists the tool, then begins swearing continuously in a conversational tone of voice. “Got it.” A black screw pops out and disappears onto the similarly black carpet. Then another. The buildings are thinning out on either side as the taxi sways and bounces, slowing as it merges with a stream of out-bound traffic, always sticking to the overtaking lanes, keeping close to the speed limit. You twitch in the grip of second thoughts—shouldn’t we have tried to get a door or window open?—but then you have visions of falling out of a fast-moving taxi in traffic. A third screw comes loose. “Shit. This one’s stripped.”
“What—”
“Lend me a shoe.”
He’s wearing trainers, you realize. You quickly unlace one of your shoes, thanking providence that round toes and platform heels are in again. Yours are only a couple of centimetres high, but it’s enough for Jack to use it as a hammer, whacking the flat rasp-blade of his tool between the catch and the panel, levering away, until—“Gotcha!” He looks over his shoulder at you, sheepishly. “What do I do now?”
“Reach over and engage the autopilot,” you explain. “Once it goes into automatic drive, it’ll lock on to the roadside beacons and cut the remote driver out of the loop.” You hope. “Then you can take back manual control if nothing goes wrong.”
He looks befuddled. “But I can’t drive!”
“Then strap yourself in and stay out of my way.” You’re not sure you can do this—you’re a Londoner, you don’t own a car, your driving license is just another form of ID—but the taxi’s speeding up, and the traffic is thinning out, and there are only occasional buildings now. “Okay. Brace yourself.”
You slide the panel sideways and grab the steering wheel. There isn’t room to fit your body through the window, just your left arm, reaching around to the driver’s seat on the right, and the alarm that starts screaming in your ears as soon as you get the panel open is deafening: The taxi lurches horribly towards the near side, and you stab at the buttons, bending a fingernail back and painfully clouting your knuckles as the steering wheel begins to spin—
And straightens out as the autopilot locks on to the markings on the open road—
Too hard.
There are limits to what idiot servos are capable of. You hear the blare of horns from outside, then a horrible crunching thump from behind that whacks you back into the passenger compartment, as the taxi spins across the central reservation and slides towards the on-coming lights.