Passports are issued by the Identity and Passport Service, a rather quiet department that maintains a biometric database of the roughly eighty-five percent of the British adult population who hold passports. This passport is genuine—so the README on my phone assures me—which means, by extension, the Lamplighters for Continuity Ops must have rooted the IPS database. Otherwise any attempt to use the Bob 2.0 passport will result in my biometrics being queried with that database and linking back to the Bob 1.0 identity. I don’t know who rooted the IPS—probably our friends from MI5, for their own purposes, or possibly the police undercover intelligence folks—but realizing it’s been done at all is a holy fuck moment, because once you’ve got a genuine verified passport identity, you can get all the other stuff you’re going to need if you’re hiding out. Driving license? Yup. Credit cards? As long as you can fake out Experian and Equifax, sure: break a leg! What I’m holding isn’t a false identity—it’s a terrifyingly real one that’s been injected into the government’s own ID verification system and will hold up to official scrutiny unless CESG realize one of the crown jewel databases has been hacked by their own side. Of course, the passport’s no good for foreign travel: the instant you enter a country you’ve visited before on your previous ID, they’ll spot the identical biometrics. But as long as I stay within the UK, the only way I’ll be recognized is by eyeball, human or mechanical.
So, some nice person has provisioned my phone with a secure password database and a bunch of apps for useful services. Airbnb, Uber, that kind of thing, all linked to a genuine fake credit card backed by real money and a credit history stretching back a decade. It goes further than that. The phone has a Gmail account with a bot that helpfully sends human-looking emails back and forth, and Twitter and Facebook accounts ditto, to generate a plausible internet habit that won’t trigger any trawls at GCHQ, because I’m under no illusions: they’ll have figured out that former SOE operatives have gone off the reservation and there will be a full-dress security panic in progress this week. And there’s a version of OFCUT that points at secure servers that aren’t hosted in the Laundry’s usual server farms.
Back to the script. There is a hoodie and a pair of dark glasses waiting for me in a neat bag by the door. I put them on, cringing somewhat. If Ops have been this thorough so far, there’s no chance that SCORPION STARE will pick me up, but there are always the other camera networks. I hope there’s something about … oh. Call an Uber, have it take me to this shopping center, go to level one and look for that hair salon, reservation in the name of Boris Johnson. Make sure you’re seen by Dave, he’s a trusted resource. So I spend a couple of hours having my eyebrows reshaped and being taught how to wear and maintain a wig and use some very special makeup that makes me look completely different to infrared cameras, then I go back out and, next checklist item: call an Uber, go there, pick up keys to the Airbnb flat Bob 2.0 is renting for the next three nights (but moving on from a day early), being sure to arrive before five p.m. because a Tesco delivery van is heading your way with food and drink to sign for.
This is the life of the modern spy on the run: we’ve got an app for that! Stay indoors during daylight hours unless the excursion is mission-critical, because your biggest risk is being recognized by a human being or camera operator. Order food for delivery via supermarket apps. Use Uber to move from temporary house to house at night. Never meet anyone you know face-to-face unless it’s absolutely essential, because network analysis is a bitch; if you’ve got to attend a meeting, get an Uber to an address a couple of blocks away and walk—and check the approaches to the venue for CCTV cameras first, using Google Street View. You can be perfectly safe inside your own anonymous moving bubble of misery, programmed in advance by Lamplighters who have your best interests at heart.
If only I could sleep at night.
While I am being kept in a web 2.0 mediated virtual safe house, using a burner laptop leeching off next door’s Wi-Fi to follow the news, the world outside is moving on.
The news about SOE being shut down hard has leaked, unsurprisingly. What’s perhaps more surprising—at least, to me—is that it has been met in the press with widespread approval: lots of jerks being interviewed on the news saying “They deserve it,” lots of talking heads commentators saying “Well, it was so obviously a failing agency that…” You can fill in the ellipsis yourself. The fact that there’s no bloody successor agency in place and the nation’s occult defenses are wide open seems to have eluded the peanut gallery; perhaps because the idea that the nation needs defending in this way is such a new ingredient in the public debate that nobody seems to be questioning the line from the cabinet, which is that the police and army are on top of things and a new agency is being set up under proper oversight and will pick up the traces in due course, with help from our NATO allies. It’s insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window.
But sanity is in short supply in government these days. Instead, there are ominous smoke signals coming out of Downing Street and the COBRA committee meetings on a daily basis, drumbeats that signal the PM’s iron-jawed determination to stand firm in the face of elven terrorist sympathizers and threats to the British way of life. Possibly by introducing a new package of mandatory, child-friendly censorware for all internet users, or maybe by invoking the Civil Contingencies Act (the twenty-first century formulation for rule by decree during a state of emergency). Oh, and a steady trickle of leaks about SOE’s reckless and unaccountable waste of public funds, domestic spying and infiltration of Bible study groups, and anything else they can find in the classified reports that makes us look bad. (Of which there is rather a lot, given that a large government agency can’t possibly exist in the shadows for over seventy years without stepping in the occasional dog turd.)
There’s other news, on a global scale, and it’s just as depressing. The cleanup operation in Tokyo Bay continues, but there’s been another attack near the southwest coast of Honshu. Russia continues to be troublesome. There’s been an earthquake in Syria, in the vicinity of Palmyra, which is currently under occupation by Da’esh, and if you know what’s buried there that’s really worrying: those whack-jobs have form for robbing tombs to auction off the antiquities, and if they’ve stumbled across RANCID MOON I could be putting out the resulting fires for the next decade. Worst of all is the news from the United States, or rather, the lack of it. The political headlines are all saber-rattling over the Iranian nuclear weapons program and some bullshit enquiry into Benghazi in the run-up to a midterm election. It’s almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress … or perhaps it’s over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares. I hope I don’t get sent over there on a fact-finding mission once we’ve sorted out our domestic headaches; I’ve got a bad feeling about this.