Edge (13 page)

    Drinking tap water from a plastic cup, he unrolled his screen and keypad, thumbed his phone to life, and began amending his search arguments, changing his choice of algorithms based on the new patterns he had to look for. Most of the framework remained unaltered, while his coding changes had more to do with the London Transport network, an environment he had not hacked before. Soon his more-than-querybot – call it a stealthbot – was ready to ship.

    "Hey, Petra," he dictated, his phone turning speech into text, "if you could load this inside the interface shield, we might save a missing kid."

    He sent the message, his stealthbot attached inside an anonymous archive file, along with a manifest that made it look like an ordinary in-house complex written by the Transport Police.

    For a few minutes he waited, on the off-chance that Petra was awake at this hour, then he shut everything down. What he needed was to keep fit and maintain his reflexes, so he pulled a pillow from the bed and a cheap soccer ball from his bag. It would not look like a fight gym to most people; but it was enough.

    A cat-stretch press-up, slow at first, then fluid and fast: two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups in fifteen minutes. It was deep knee-bends for the next quarter hour, five hundred Hindu squats. Then, putting the pillow on the floor, he arched backward, weight on his feet and the top of his head at first, before stretching to press forehead and nose into the pillow. He held position for four minutes, following it with a forward bridge and ab crunches to finish.

    Then he was ready to fight.

    When a struggle goes to the ground and you're on top, the guy underneath is squirming – which was what the football reproduced. Josh worked rolls and flips and reversals, grappling manoeuvres on the floor with the ball twisting beneath him. On his feet, he practiced rapid-fire hand drills, adding elbows, knees and powerful kicks. Finally, he drew his knife, and worked the combos with blade in hand, over and over on imaginary enemies; and at last he was done, taking huge breaths to slow down, his body encased in warm, slick sweat. Then he spun, a half-second before a thump rocked the door.

    He checked through the spyhole, then opened up in silence.

    "It's 6.30 in the morning." The guy in the corridor was round and soft-bodied. "You could have some consider–"

    Then his eyes triangulated on Josh's blade.

    "I like to keep sharp." Josh smiled. "Stay a cut above the rest."

    "Er… Look…" A swallow. "I… Um."

    "My apologies."

    Josh closed the door, shutting the guy out. There was a long pause, then stumbling footsteps receded.

    Before going to bed, he had filled two canteens with water from the bathroom tap, and mixed in purifying powder, because you could never trust a hotel to have clean filters. Now he drank, half a litre at first, then another half with powdered peas and milk mixed in, before checking his messages. Petra had responded, but not in the way he wanted.

    "Sorry, Josh. You've obviously worked hard on this one. But there's been a couple of, well, questionable uses of privileges recently. Internal Investigations are looking motivated. Sorry again."

    And that was it. No help from Petra.

    "Bollocks."

    Then he felt chill. It might have been the sudden cooling-off, his body still inside its layer of sweat; or perhaps it was something else.

    She changed her mind overnight.

    Not only that, but the message was way too polite for her. Had someone warned her off?

    Sluicing off in the shower was a simple pleasure, always enhanced by a workout beforehand; but now that his plans were derailed, he could have scheduled exercise for later and got something else going instead. However wonderfully his querybot was crafted, if he couldn't insert it inside the official surveillance systems, its functionality was useless.

    There was another way in, but he did not want to try it yet, not without knowing why Petra had backed off from helping him. What he wanted – as though he needed an excuse – was to talk to Suzanne Duchesne again. And he had promised to call her; but she probably thought that meant at a civilised hour.

    
So hurry up and wait.

    He cranked up text-only and read from the autobiography of Lyoto Machida, a Japanese-Brazilian fighter from the civilised days of MMA cage fights. The samurai mindset was admirable, except for the daily drink-yourown-urine ritual, allegedly traditional. Josh glanced at the dregs of his pea-and-milk shake, and shook his head.

    Then, hoping that Suzanne was an early riser, he placed the call.

    "Hey. How are you this morning?"

    "A little surprised that you're calling."

    "You mean, at this hour. I don't have any news."

    "All right."

    "You must be busy. Can I buy you lunch later on?"

    "I'll be at Elliptical House working with clients. Is two pm too late?"

    "Perfect."

    "Then I'll see you."

    "See you. Cheers."

    Outside the window a silver summer rain began to fall, rippling with sunlight, like magic. Probably it was there all the time, the wonder, but people were too busy to see it.

    Two o'clock. Lunch.

    "Oh, yeah."

    Good news. He could almost forget Sophie lying comatose, the beeping life support, or the wreckage of his marriage to Maria, testament to a decade or more of bad decisions.

    Like hell he could forget.

The Tube carriage rocked, half full, as Josh checked the hidden and not-so-hidden cameras. They were potential routes into the surveillance net – most transmitted realtime to relays and servers outside – but too restricted for what he needed. At the far end of the carriage, two men bumped into each other, hands going for hilts, then stopping as they rethought their situation. An abbreviated apology, a delayed nod, and they moved away from each other, eye contact broken.

    Josh's phone gave a characteristic vibration.

    
Who's sending this?

    There were people looking relaxed or bored or hacked off by their jobs; none looked away suddenly at his gaze. Someone professional then, who had redfanged a short-range message while his attention was on the two guys. There was no easy way of telling who it was; and besides the train was slowing. This was his intended stop.

    
"Victoria Station. Mind the gap."

    He could have played tag games, trying to flush out the message sender, but instead he got out as planned, keeping in the midst of other passengers as he ascended to the mainline station. Far outside rush hour, the concourse was still busy. Hunching his shoulders, he pulled out his phone, tilting it so no surveillance cams could see the screen.

 

    Getting to his feet, he crossed to one of the shadowed side-chapels, and stopped at a metal stand bearing rows of candle holders, some two-thirds in use. He used cash, bought a candle and lit it, then pressed it into place. Call it cover, acting like the real worshippers. Or call it a prayer to an imaginary entity he had no belief in: a plea to the universe for a miracle, for Sophie's sake.

    
Get out of here.

    Leaving, he kept his head down, using natural movement to disguise the way he scanned the environment, checking everyone, detecting no patterns, knowing that the real watchers were everywhere: lenses ranging in size from pinholes to golf balls, overtly on posts and hidden in nooks, outside and inside the buildings, reporting every second of every day on the ant-like behaviour sweeping through their fields of view. A camera does not blink; a server does not sleep.

    Why was someone eavesdropping on Suzanne? And who was the helpful message from, if it was real?

    He wandered into Stag Place, buffeted by wind – some kind of tunnel effect produced by the glass buildings – and found Elliptical House, its outline living up to its name. Inside, a receptionist with weightlifter muscles nodded at Josh's name, and said he was on the visitor's list.

    "Fourth floor. Lift is over there."

    "Thanks."

    There was a mutual nod, a recognition of physical potential; then Josh made his way to the lift, wondering what Richard Broomhall had thought as he made this journey, and what had flipped inside his head to make him act so differently afterwards. On the fourth floor, he found a mother-and-daughter pair just leaving Suzanne's office. Consulting room. Whatever.

    "Hey," he said.

    "Hey." Suzanne watched her clients go, then: "Come in while I grab my things."

    A smart remark rose up inside him, about grabbing her things, and he pushed it back down. As he followed her inside, he checked the observation vectors – the placement of the four internal office cameras was obvious – then turned his phone towards her, its screen hidden from surveillance.

    
LEAVE YOUR PHONE HERE
A blink of polished-chestnut eyes; a raised eyebrow. "Least I can do is buy you a sandwich," he said. "A sandwich? Is that all you're offering?" "I could have made cheese sarnies in my hotel, brought them along in a plastic box."

    "Lucky escape for me, then."

    By this time they were out in the fourth-floor lobby, and Suzanne was checking that her door was shut, while her phone remained inside atop her desk. She looked at Josh; he dipped his chin, then asked her about the rubbish strike, whether she thought the dustbin collections might restart any time soon, and if she had seen any rats around where she lived.

    "Not as yet, but I'm hoping," she said inside the lift. "Think of all those phobic patients I'll be gaining."

    "All coughing at you and spreading their bubonic plague."

    "There is that."

    Outside, they strolled past the mall, then Josh pointed as if suggesting a place to eat, and led her between a glass pillar and the main exterior wall.

    "Dead zone," he said. "Your phone is compromised, or so I've been told."

    "Compromised?" Her expression looked like the beginning of a smile; then she glanced to her left. "The police gave me a replacement handset."

    "We're on the same side."

    
Except that my search methods are illegal.

    "So what now?"

    "We go to lunch. I'm going to ask you to come somewhere with me tonight, and we can talk about that openly. If you do say yes, can you remember to forget your phone?"

    Her smile was unrestrained.

    "Josh Cumberland, you have a way with hypnotic language."

    "Er…"

Some ninety minutes later, in another dead zone free from surveillance, Josh made a call.

    "Tony? How're you doing?"

    "OK. Just on a break."

    "Good guess on my part."

    "Guess, my arse. Some of us are organised, stick to a timetable."

    "Uh-huh. Does Terry B still have his black cab?"

    "Big Tel? Course he does. Want me to have a word with him?"

    "I was hoping to book a taxi for, say, six tonight."

    "Christ, leave things till the last minute, why don't you? This job working out, is it?"

    "Keeping me busy."

    "And you need Tel? It's that sort of gig?"

    "Just for the wheels."

    "Huh. Call you right back."

    "OK."

At twenty past six, Suzanne stepped from a doorway in a Bloomsbury sidestreet, and slid into the black cab that had just pulled up. Josh, on the bench-seat beside her, smiled at her.

    "We can talk." He pointed at the ceiling-mounted cam. "We won't be recorded."

    "Is that legal?"

    "Not in the slightest."

    From the driver's seat in front of the plexiglass partition, a big hand waved in greeting.

    "He's a friend," Josh added.

    "If the police check his video log," said Suzanne, "he'll be in trouble."

    "Actually, there'll be a perfectly good-looking record of someone making this journey, with the correct background showing through the windows and all, but it won't be us. Two other people, having a harmless conversation, and the lighting on their faces just right, matching the light from outside."

    She did not really know this man. Perhaps it was worth remembering that.

    "So are we going to see someone called Petra, or is that more subterfuge?"

    "That's real. She's a police officer, and she can help us. But not by staying inside the rules."

    "Oh."

    "Her being a career police officer and all, she might be reluctant. Maybe someone who understands people really well can persuade her to slip a querybot into the system."

    "Was that
persuade
as in
manipulate
?"

    "Surely you wouldn't act unethically, Dr Duchesne."

    "Huh. So that's the only reason you wanted me along."

    "Well." There was something about the muscles in Josh's face that made his smile compelling. "What other reason could there be?"

    She smiled back.

    It was half an hour and one traffic jam later when they stood outside the railway arches, watching the taxi drive off. Rain from an earlier shower was dripping from Victorian archways; their brickwork thrumming with the sound of electromag trains sliding overhead. Broken furniture, rusted junk, and dark-stained weeds were prevalent. Welcome to Wandsworth: so near to MI6 HQ, that severe and glistening fortress, and yet a world away.