Edge (14 page)

    Perhaps it was Josh's past that had her thinking about the intelligence services; in any case, when he knocked four times on a metal door – thump, thumpthump, thump – she had to fight down a giggle.

    "Don't tell me it's a secret signal."

    "Just don't knock it."

    Was that a pun? She might have asked, but a small hatch scraped back, something silver shone – checking out with a mirror, not exposing an eyeball – then the hatch clunked shut, and the door swung inward.

    "Petra teaches paranoia." Josh's tone lightened, but not in humour. "The kind that keeps you alive when they're really out to get you."

"Oh. That kind."

    Inside, old khaki mats stretched across a stone floor. Battered-looking punchbags hung from chains. In front of the class stood a lean, fit-looking woman wearing old sweats, her hands wrapped in stained pink bandages.

    "See Petra's hand wraps?" Josh kept his voice low. "As dainty she gets."

    The stains looked to be old blood.
Petra's, or other peo
ple's?
Two rows of men and women in pyjama-like white outfits stood ready, intent on Petra.

    "Why isn't she dressed like her students?"

    "Actually" – Josh pointed to one corner where a smaller number waited, in tattered shorts and T-shirts – "they're the regulars."

    Also, they were smiling. In front of the others, Petra was talking with hands clasped behind her back.

    "So in your dojo" – she nodded to the black belts in the group – "you teach, what do you call it, focused awareness."

    "
Zanshin
."

    "Right. While on the street, awareness is your first weapon. Run if you can, fight if you have to, in which case fight to win."

    The black belts nodded first, then the others. Beside Suzanne, Josh was failing to stop his grin widening.

    "And then there's distancing and timing, right? What do you guys call them?"

    "
Ma-ai
and–"

    "YAAHHH!" She whipped something silver against a black belt's throat. "You're fucking dead."

    Then she had spun away and was standing beyond kicking range, blade held high.

    
Baise-moi.

    It was rare for Suzanne's thinking to be shocked back into French.

    "Ah, Petra." Josh shook his head, teeth bared in a fighter's smile. "You're good."

    The karate guys looked pale.

    "We do street shotokan," said Petra. "No white
gis
, no tag-you're-it play-sparring. This is the real tradition, people." She threw the knife –
thunk
– into pockmarked chipboard. "And next time someone's holding a weapon and giving you the soothing verbals, you'll know precisely what they're fucking up to, won't you?"

    Nods, and acknowledgements sounding like "
Uss
." Another Japanese word.

    "All right, partner up." Petra pointed. "Every visitor with one of my gang. One-step drills, coming up. And… go."

    The karate guys started to drop into fighting stances – then froze as the others started spitting, waving their arms and yelling: "You fucking want this?" "Who you fuckin' lookin' at?" "Come on then. Come on."

    Then the gesticulating fighters leaped into the attack, and the defenders fell back with clumsy blocks. Only two of the karate guys – one black belt, one brown – roared into the onslaught and slammed their opponents back with heavy punches.

    "Good." Petra nodded to the pair. "Everyone else, shape up."

    Josh was chuckling.

    
I'm cold and sweating, about to pee myself, and he finds this
funny? My God.

    For the rest of the session, Petra dropped the disorienting antics but kept the pressure on. By the end, the visitors were responding well, their previous fighting reflexes now operating under conditions of adrenal overload, laid down in the amygdala, the brain's emergency response system. The old training would now kick in under circumstances where they might have frozen before. It wasn't any kind of cognitive strategy that Suzanne had instilled in her clients; but the mechanism was clear enough… and still, even now as they wrapped up the training session, touching fists or bowing to each other, frightening to observe.

    "Can one of you close the place up?" Petra pulled off her sweat-soaked T-shirt – her sports bra was black – then pulled on a sweatshirt bearing the words: I FIGHT LIKE A GIRL – SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR BALLS. "I've got an old buddy here to beat up."

    "Or I could buy you a drink," called Josh.

    "Guess I'll let him off." Petra winked at her students. "Nice work tonight."

In a pub called the Thin Stiletto, Suzanne sat with Petra while Josh went up to the bar.

    "Your students are impressive," said Suzanne.

    "The visitors did all right."

    "Now that their conditioned reflexes are triggered by appropriate cues, in the context of massive adrenaline dump."

    "They just needed to field-strip what they knew, and take control."

    "And you like empowering people."

    "Uh-huh. You're good, aren't you, Dr Duchesne? Plus, you understood what was going on, even though you're not a fighter."

    Josh came back with Petra's blackcurrant-andlemonade and Suzanne's coffee.

    "You girls are such boozers. By the way, Suzanne left her phone at home."

    "Good." Petra saluted him with her glass. "And yes, it was one of my officers that redfanged you that little warning."

    "Thanks. Back in a mo."

    While Josh was paying and fetching his drink – it looked like Coke – Petra checked her own phone, then nodded.

    "No one's listening here and now."

    "What about Josh's phone?"

    "Oh, he's secure, except when he's talking to you. He and his mates use PFUC crypto among themselves."

    "What's that? You did say pea-fuck, didn't you?"

    "There's a polite version, but the truth is it stands for Pretty Fucking Unbreakable Code."

    Suzanne realised that she had missed something.

    "When you say someone's listening in, you mean the police, right?"

    "Official authorities, let's say."

    "So why is that a problem? We all want Richard back."

    "And some of us might bend the regs to do so. In management circles, that's called breaking the law."

    "Oh."

    When Josh returned, he toasted them both.

    "Your health. Tell me, you still run ShieldIx 3 for security?"

    Petra said, "You're really not supposed to know that."

    "So let's say, hypothetically, you were logged on. You'd be running a session pool with its own flows, processes, and threads. Marked with your user ID."

    "Hypothetically, I'm a grandma and I know how to suck eggs."

    "Uh-huh. So if you kick off a querybot – hypothetically – that would create a second session pool for it to execute in. Right?"

    "Sure." Petra looked at Suzanne. "You following this?"

    "I only speak French and English."

    "You hang around with buddy boy long enough, you'll get fluent in Geek for sure."

    "For God's sake," said Josh. "Now, a second pool with whose user ID?"

    "Same as the first session pool. I log on, create a new pool, it picks up my user ID automatically."

    Josh smiled. "
Automatically
is the keyword du jour. Substitute a subclass instance for the controller, and you can adopt chief security officer privileges."

    "You're joking."

    "If someone's installed a monitor, like some old Observer pattern – distributed across the net and with heavy use of proxies – then you're effectively screwing with its Observers list." Josh pushed a memory flake across the table. "That's all you need. There's another copy of the bot code, too."

    "Good, cause I deleted the one you sent me. Just as well, since we had an internal audit including full phone scan today. Bastards."

    Suzanne took a sip of air, realised she had finished her coffee, and put the cup down.

    "Have you changed your mind, Petra? Before, you didn't want to help Josh with the search, and now you do, is that right?"

    "Kind of. This monitoring shit doesn't add up."

    "I don't really follow what you've been saying."

    "That's just shooting the breeze about the security design and how to slip past it. You asked who's observing, and I said official authorities, but I really mean Five, or someone like them."

    "Five?"

    "MI5, sweetheart. The big boys, and the reason that doesn't add up is that if they were looking for young Richard, they'd have found him by now." Petra's cheekbones appeared to sharpen as her mouth tensed. "In whatever condition."

    
Oh, God.

    "They've got a monitor on anything to do with Broomhall," said Josh. "He's flagged as need-to-watch. It's got all the signs, hasn't it?"

    "Looks that way. Either he's been a naughty boy or he's crossed people in the corridors of power."

    Suzanne did not see how this prevented people doing everything they could to search for one missing boy. Or perhaps she did. People saw intricate fictions all around them in the workplace, exactly as real and exactly as imaginary as the airborne chemicals in an ant nest that drove the behaviour of every member, including the socalled queen, who was a captive breeder more than a ruler, every ant existing in its place, carrying out its role in the emergent behaviour of the nest-as-a-whole.

    "What are you thinking?" asked Josh.

    "About ant nests, and the way people behave."

    "Whoo." Petra raised her glass towards Josh. "She's too deep for you, mate."

    "We're just… Never mind."

    "So, you two are OK getting back by yourselves?"

    "Sure."

    "Then I'll see you."

    Petra stood, tugging down her I FIGHT LIKE A GIRL sweatshirt, outlining her breasts. Perhaps it was a distraction for the men in the bar, because the memory flake was gone from the tabletop, though Suzanne had not seen Petra pocket it. Then Petra turned, revealing the back of her sweatshirt – another friendly message: CASTRATION? IT'S JUST LIKE SHELLING PEAS – and left.

    "That was abrupt," said Suzanne.

    "Just her way."

    "But she's going to help."

    "Because she likes my hack. First, it's elegant. Second, it exploits a ShieldIx feature she didn't know about. Hardly anyone knows."

    "Really." Suzanne put her fingertips on the back of his hand, felt an electric fizz, and withdrew. "That's not why she's helping you. The word, I think, is
smitten
."

    "Jesus, not you as well." Josh stared at the exit Petra had left by. "She happens to be gay, you know."

    "Actually, I got that. I stand by smitten."

    "Oh, please. Isn't there anyone who can rescue me?"

    Suzanne tried not to think too much about the meaning of her response, knowing she could shut up, but saying it anyway.

    "Maybe there is."

 

Trafalgar Square, early. Quite why he had walked here, Richard did not know. The atmosphere around the fountains was odd, just a few homeless people –
people like me
– sleeping on the benches, roused and rousted by cleaning staff. Commuters were waiting at the bus stops and streaming toward their offices; down here it was too early for tourists. It was as if the old statues and monument had a viscosity that slowed their passage through time, as if their awakening came later than the streets. Wanting to be different from the others groaning awake on the benches, Richard pulled off his garish sweatshirt, quickly replacing his cap on his head. With luck, he looked like someone on his way to school, not a vagrant. But he wondered, as he saw the grime on the clothes of those who had slept here overnight, how long he could pass himself off as normal, how long before he became invisible like these others.

    "I'm sorry," a turbaned worker was saying to someone, no, two people, "but you have to move on. Here, this'll get you breakfast."

    "You're very kind, young man."

    "Why don't you pop over to the station for a cuppa? They'll let you sit a while."

    The vagrants he was addressing were a white-haired couple, their clothes frayed but not stained, fragile faces clean but not fresh. They were rosy-cheeked from sunlight, and they smiled at the man for his kindness. Richard could only stand and watch them walk away toward Charing Cross, where they might have an hour or two sitting on hard metal seats before someone moved them on. As they walked, the woman slipped her hand into the man's, and they continued on with the delicate, heartbreaking sweetness of aged love.

    
It's not supposed to be like this.

    There are no comfortable places to sit – or lie down – in the external world of stone and concrete buildings. Indoors, there are few places of refuge for someone who has no money to pay. Already he was learning the hardness of the world. He felt like a swimmer far from shore, face dipped beneath the surface for longer and longer periods of time; soon enough he would be under and sinking.

    "It's not right, is it?" It was the man in the turban, addressing him. "An old couple like that."

    "Er… No, sir."

    "Which is why you work hard in school, isn't it? My daughter is top of her class."

    "Oh. Good."

    The man's smile was disconcerting in its warmth, shaming Richard for not revealing his true nature: a runaway, and worse.
I'm a criminal now.
Inside that college, he'd handed over contraband – drugs or who knew what – and if he hadn't dodged the cameras as well as he'd intended, then the police would be hunting him down. Maybe he should try to get away from London. But nowhere was under tighter surveillance than the railways.