The Glimpse (15 page)

Ana didn’t know much about how things worked out in the City, but she was pretty sure entering unannounced through a back door at such an early hour meant they weren’t invited. She glanced up and down the street.

Rachel leaned back against the porch wal, watching Ana scepticaly, making her feel self-conscious. Rachel was far older than Ana, probably in her mid-twenties, and she had an edge to her. As though if you got too close you risked getting mangled.

At last, there came a dul thud from the other side of the 130

door, folowed by a click. Nate poked his head around the corner. He scanned up and down the street, then ushered Ana inside.

‘Have fun,’ Rachel said.

The halway stank of bleach. Two doors lay ahead of them. The one on the left stood open; the one on the right had been boarded over. Nate waved Ana through the open door and folowed her in, closing it behind them.

Floorboards creaked underfoot as they passed an empty living room. Up ahead lay the kitchen. Nate guided Ana through a door on their left, into a dark space that smelt of bad breath and body odour. Heavy curtains blocked the window light. Something unseen whimpered in the folds of darkness. Ana held back, pinching her nose, waiting for her eyes to adjust. Nate switched on a smal bedside light.

Just an arm’s length away, a naked man sat tied to a kitchen chair.

kitchen chair.

Ana cried out in alarm and tumbled backwards.

A sock gagged the man’s mouth. A large, pink moon of skin shone in the centre of his patchy black hair. Bushy eyebrows stuck out from the edge of his face like a misplaced moustache.

‘Mr Jackson,’ Nate said, ‘I present you with your new assistant.’ Ana’s heart felt like it had jumped right out of her.

Nate was definitely deranged. He must have some sort of Aggressive Personality Disorder because he’d tied up his brother’s lawyer and was threatening him, instead of con-ducting a normal conversation.

Nate bent over the man so that their heads were almost touching. ‘This afternoon,’ he said, ‘when you walk into 131

court to have my brother’s pre-charge detention overruled, she’l be with you. You wil carefuly folow her instructions as to how to proceed. Clear so far?’

The man’s low whining turned into a frantic effort to speak. Ana recoiled in disgust – at Nate, at the lawyer, at this ridiculous plan.

‘I haven’t got a frigging clue what you’re saying,’ Nate told the man. ‘To be quite honest, I don’t care. There’s only one rule. You do exactly what she tels you to.’

Ana swalowed down her horror as best she could.

‘Surely we could have this conversation without the viol-

‘Surely we could have this conversation without the viol-ence?’ she said. Nate folded his arms across his chest, face screwed up tight. She shook her head. What had she got herself mixed up in? ‘So how wil he know what I want him to say?’

‘He’l wear an earpiece and we’l give you an interface set to vocal. Whatever you type he’l hear through his piece.’

‘That won’t work,’ she said. ‘Someone wil notice.’

‘We’l extend his sideburns so they cover the ears,’ Nate said. ‘’Course, it would help if you could touch-type so you weren’t constantly looking down at your lap.’

Ana stared at him.
He’s demented.
But how could she back out now? She tentatively stepped forward and squatted in front of the lawyer. She ripped off the tape plugging his mouth and removed the dirty sock, almost gagging at the smel.

‘Don’t do that!’ Nate said. She shot him a scathing look.

The lawyer’s frightened eyes flitted back and forth between them. He exhaled a puff of stale air. Ana backed up, breath-132

ing through her mouth. Nate clenched his jaw but remained silent.

‘What do you think of this plan, Mr Jackson?’ she asked.

The man’s head whipped up to Nate and back down again. ‘I’m a tax lawyer,’ he stammered. ‘Not a people person. You should ask for reassignment.’

‘Take too long,’ Nate said.

‘I only get put on the cases they want me to lose.’

‘Why?’ Ana asked.

The man broke eye contact. He stared down at his pasty thin legs. ‘Because I never win.’

‘Wil they alow you to bring an assistant?’

‘If you’ve got an LLB degree.’

Ana looked over at Nate. ‘Wil I have an LLB degree?’

she asked. Nate nodded. ‘OK.’ She held her breath and began to untie the lawyer. ‘Mr Jackson,’ she said, ‘I’d like you to transfer al the information you’ve got concerning the charges against Mr Winter on to his brother’s interface so that I may study it later.’ The man rubbed his wrists. Red cord lines lay grooved in his skin.

He hesitated before getting up.

‘May I?’ he asked, pointing to a dressing gown draped across the floor at the foot of his bed.

‘Of course.’ Ana turned aside. She had no desire to see more of the crêpe-like skin stretched over angular bones, the mottled chest and arms, the wrinkles of flab at the waist, the droopy bump underneath his stained Y-fronts.

‘How can we be sure he’s going to go along with this?’

she said quietly to Nate. ‘He could easily talk to someone between now and this afternoon.’

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Nate laughed nastily. ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. He knows who he’s dealing with.’

‘Threats don’t work wel with everyone,’ Ana said. She turned to the defence lawyer. Slumped in an armchair by an oak wardrobe, he seemed slightly less pathetic in his navy dressing gown.

‘How are you regarded among your work coleagues?’

she asked him.

‘My work coleagues?’

‘Yes. And your boss who puts you on these losing cases?’

Jackson looked at her bleakly, as though expecting her to twist the knife. ‘How would it feel,’ she continued, ‘to show them that you can win?’

He shrugged. Obviously, winning lay beyond the realms of possibility.

‘Think about it,’ Ana said feigning confidence. ‘This afternoon, al you have to do is folow the script. Nobody wil know and you’l win the case.’

‘You’re just a child,’ he said.

‘I can win it.’

Jackson shook his head forlornly. No wonder Nate despised him. He was hopeless.

‘There’s a lot to do before this afternoon,’ she said

‘There’s a lot to do before this afternoon,’ she said turning to Nate. ‘I’l see you outside.’ She nodded at the lawyer, desperate to leave before he totaly demoralised her. ‘See you in court.’

Outside, the rising sun bathed the terrace houses in lemon light. Rachel was nowhere to be seen.

Ana steadied herself against a white wal and gulped 134

down the fresh air. The hearing was at 3 p.m., less than nine hours away. They couldn’t possibly be ready in time.

Nate slammed the front door. He looked ghostly pale in the light of day. His short, spiked hair needed a wash.

Dark circles ringed his eyes.

‘What was al that about?’ he said.

Ana shrugged. Looked like she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sleeping wel.

‘You better be sure about this,’ he said.

She gazed at him keeping her expression flat. She had enough to worry about without Nate doubting her ability.

‘So where did you study?’ he asked.

She didn’t answer.

‘Aren’t many Crazies our age who’ve studied law.’

‘Guess not,’ she said. He frowned at her and then, to her surprise, let it drop and turned away.

*

*

They descended into Warwick Avenue station and picked their way over sleeping bundles strewn around the ticket hal. They scanned cards across a ticket barrier, waited in a crowded tunnel that smelt of ozone and were carried by a rattling Tube under the heart of London.

They resurfaced at the Cross. The exit came up near a six-lane road, divided down the middle by antiquated railings. A brownstone building with giant arched windows stood opposite them, bearing the station’s old name: King’s Cross. Behind them, the gothic steeple of St Pancras Station clock tower pierced the sky.

Ana recognised the Victorian railway terminus. Any time 135

a committee of government officials crossed into Europe for international negotiations, they were filmed arriving at the Eurostar terminal. It was the only open passenger access to Europe and heavily restricted.

The hands on the clock-tower faces ticked towards seven. A smel of scrambled eggs and sausages from a nearby van caught the breeze. Further up the road, a uniformed man unlocked the glass door beneath the golden ‘M’ of a fast-food restaurant. A flock of people huddled in blankets and perched by railings rose and hurried towards the establishment. A smal fight broke out. A man in a puffa jacket and shorts head-butted a second guy. Fear knotted Ana’s chest. She shrunk inwardly, glad she and Nate were headed in the opposite direction. As they turned down Cresterfield Street she glanced over her shoulder. A dozen men now brawled, throwing punches, stumbling and striking innocent bystanders.

To distract herself, Ana focused on their new surroundings. Unlike Highgate High Street – the road outside her Community – the red- and brown-brick Victorian houses and factories here hadn’t been whitewashed. Few people projected or even seemed to be wearing interfaces. In the poorer London areas, advertisers obviously didn’t bother buying up the wal space.

She folowed Nate down into the basement of a building that would have housed factory workers a century ago.

Harsh fluorescents lit the low-ceilinged room. A work surface skirted three of the four wals. On it, evenly spaced out, were a dozen archaic computers. Ana wrinkled her nose at the stink of wet paint.

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‘Alex?’ Nate caled out. A man holding a roler emerged from a door at the far end of the underground room. He approached grinning. His wooly hat sat askew on his head and blue paint flecked his T-shirt.

‘So this is her?’ he asked. Nate nodded. ‘You didn’t mention she was young and pretty.’ Ana blushed and went to smooth her hair down the sides of her cheeks before realising it was no longer there. ‘Let me just finish up and I’l be with you,’ he said, retreating. ‘Take a seat.

Make yourselves at home.’

Ana pretended to inspect the equipment. Being alone with Nate made her uncomfortable.

‘You can use your interface,’ he said. ‘Plug it into the black pad linked to the PC and it’l be untraceable. No one would even know you’re online.’

Ana shrugged, but her hand reached covetously to her silver pendant with the sapphire centre. She hadn’t powered up for two days, and she was beginning to feel like she’d literaly lost one of her senses, gone deaf or something.

Nate plugged his interface into one of the pads. The wal map he was projecting vanished and reappeared on the computer screen he’d linked up to. Like at home with the flatscreen. Ana copied him with her own interface.

Relieved to discover it stil worked, she quickly turned it off again.

Nate straddled a stool in front of the computer. His hand rested on an object shaped like a stone. When he moved the oval object, the arrow on the screen moved. He opened up the downloaded file from Jackson.

Ana forgot about the giant computers and examined the 137

list of documents from Cole’s lawyer. There appeared to be four arrest reports, three under the 2017 Terrorism Act for Pre-charge Detention and one, the first of them, for assaulting an officer at a protest raly. There was also a psychiatric assessment dated from the time of Cole’s first arrest, and a police report describing what had been registered by the concert hal’s surveilance cameras the night Jasper was abducted.

Ana opened the police report first. Nate fiddled with his retro mobile. Occasionaly, he glanced over her shoulder retro mobile. Occasionaly, he glanced over her shoulder at the computer screen while she read.

Jasper had been filmed taking the stairs down to the Barbican’s blue car park, an underground lot of three levels that no longer had any functioning cameras. At the same time a Volvo with one man driving and no passengers had entered the car park. Four minutes later, the Volvo departed with two unidentified passengers. A search of sixty-two surveilance cameras in and around the arts centre revealed no other trace of Jasper leaving the premises. Thus it had been assumed that Jasper left the building in the Volvo.

Alex, the guy running the internet café, reappeared, wiping his hands on a bit of cloth. The intoxicating smel of white spirits clung to him. Ana pressed her fingers into her temples to ward off a headache. At least Alex was relaxed and friendly, unlike Nate.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Let’s see.’ He perched in front of a computer beside her and plugged his interface into another black pad. Code raced over the screen. Ana watched as he manipulated the information in ways she’d never seen before, using hand gestures to dive through the code and pick 138

out text like he was colecting up loose stitches in a strange weave of fabric.

‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Race: Caucasian. Eye colour —’

He stopped and peered at Ana. ‘Are those contacts?’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Oh, wel I guess your eyes are a grey-brown. Kind of

‘Oh, wel I guess your eyes are a grey-brown. Kind of hard to say.’

‘Just put brown.’ She shrugged, trying to smooth over her hostility.

‘Brown it is then,’ Alex said. ‘Now, hair. Mmm . . . I see you’ve got a rather talented hairdresser . . .’

‘I’l get Lila to cut and dye it properly this afternoon. Just put down brown.’

‘I’m sensing a pattern here,’ Alex said playfuly. Ana ignored him, hoping Nate wasn’t paying attention.

Alex went through al of her defining features – smal nose, pointy chin, oval face, five foot seven and skinny.

He set an age range between eighteen and twenty-two.

‘Sorry, no way anyone would believe you’re older,’ he said. ‘Just have to pretend you’re a genius. Besides if the picture is a good fit a court security guard won’t be bothering to work out how old you are. Now, al we have to do is send the system on a search for girls in the database matching your description. Then we’l check the photos and see who you could most easily pass for.

As long as you don’t buy anything on the ID, the person you’re doubling wil never know. Unless you’re unlucky enough to get ID’d in two places at exactly the same time, this wil stand up to almost anything.’