Josh walked along the Embankment south of the river, watching the solar barges drift past. There was no reason to be in this part of London particularly – there were other places that Richard Broomhall could be – but this was central, with hostels and more: an entire ecology of homelessness, a bleak, pervasive undersea of living that was easy to fall into and hard to escape. Every few minutes, he checked his phone display. At 10:01am, finally, output appeared: Entry OK. Thirty seconds later, an appended message brightened: 1st gen replication successful, 53 processes spawned.
Although Petra had slipped the querybot inside the net's defences, she did not know how subtle and pervasive it could be, and he had not told her. Most of his spawned code would suicide quietly in a kind of controlled apoptosis, deliberate suicide just like human cells, for the sake of the body's health. The risk of being traced back to Petra was low. He would have liked more detailed progress reports from the burrowing code, but more traffic meant greater likelihood of monitors noticing and His phone buzzed, and for a moment was too blurred to make out. They've found me. But he blinked and refocused, to identify the caller as Kath Gleason, from Sophie's school.
"Hello, Josh."
"Miss Gleason."
"Kath, please. I just thought I should check in with you."
"There's no news."
"I didn't think there was." In the phone image, she shook her head. "Your, er, Mrs Cumberland came in to see Eileen. Asked for Sophie to be taken off the school roll."
Eileen was the headmistress.
"The school roll…?"
"Mrs Cumberland said that regardless of the outcome, Sophie would never return."
Josh rubbed his face. There's only one outcome.
"I'm sure Maria's right."
"Probably. It's just- We asked about you, for confirmation, and she said you're out of the picture."
"Out of the picture."
"That's what she said."
He looked up at the rotating wind-turbines, the long row stretching past the Houses of Parliament, and said again, without knowing why: "I'm sure she's right."
"Oh, then… Are you in Swindon at the moment?"
"Nowhere near."
"I just wondered if you were going to be around."
Josh stared at her in the phone.
Christ, she's hitting on me.
Sometimes a woman was interested and he didn't get it – in fact, he still didn't believe that Petra could fancy him – but this was blatant. With Sophie worse than comatose – persistent vegetative state meant there was nothing left to awaken – and Maria filled with confusion, hating him… How did that equate with him being available?
"The Brezhinskis aren't doing too well," Kath went on. "The father's still bottling things up inside, the mother's still drinking, and Marek… We'd like to see him back in school."
"It sounds as if the family needs help. Would the school pay for counselling?"
"I… don't know."
"There's someone who could help, so long as she does get paid. I can put her in touch with the family directly. You can vouch for her, if Mr Brezhinski asks you."
"Vouch for whom, exactly?"
"Dr Suzanne Duchesne. I'll send you her details."
"Well, I-"
"Thank you, Kath. It's good to meet a teacher who really cares."
"Oh. Thanks."
He killed the call.
Christ, what a bitch.
After some ten seconds, the phone buzzed again – She's calling back, for God's sake – but it was his querybot, returning initial results. Only one instance showed an above-fifty-percent match: some three seconds of unfocused footage, a youth in white shirt and veil-cap ascending a staircase. The location was a college, so it should be filled with young people, and for a moment Josh did not understand how the probability rating could be so high – it was his own algorithm, after all. But the timestamp was 19.57, far too late for normal classes.
Two nights ago. Even if it's him, he could be dead.
Bad thinking. Useless pessimism.
The college was within walking distance – another reason for the high probability – and at close range he could redfang querybots into the building system without going through the Web. And the physical movement would help him forget about Kath Gleason, and the images she invoked in his mind, with a montage backdrop of Sophie-memories: playing in school, playing in the garden, giggling at a worm, lying in a bed surrounded by monitors.
He walked fast.
Perhaps it looked better at night, but in daylight the college exterior showed cracked paintwork and dull windows. Someone had smeared black goo over the spycams, which did not bode well for trawling through the surveillance logs. Josh decided to make the college's problems worse, just for the time being, by slipping interference bots into the building system and blanking out recordings for the yard and corridors he passed through. Once inside, a garish display screen showed adverts – salsa classes every Wednesday, homemade cakes for sale tomorrow lunchtime – and a searchable timetable.
In the brief footage of Richard Broomhall, this noticeboard appeared in the background, so the staircase over there must be where he ascended. But where had he been going? Josh flicked through the timetable. If Richard went up a floor, there would have been just one class about to start: Intermediate Mandarin, room 17, instructor T. Maxwell. A trivial hack popped up a fragment of low-level data:
‹instructor› ‹name›
‹firstname›Tarquin‹/firstname›
‹surname›Maxwell‹/surname› ‹/name›
‹citizenID›100087TQ3598ML‹/citizenID›
‹address›‹a1›84a Gladwell Court‹/a1›‹a2›London‹/a2›
‹pc›W349 8AQ1‹/pc›
‹/address›
‹empType›PT‹/empType›
‹/instructor›
Josh could have accessed the relevant schema to check, but PT clearly designated part-time employees. Maxwell could be anywhere, so rather than stake out the home address or manually search the college premises, a realtime GPSID hack was called for.
On resigning from Ghost Force and the Army in one go, Josh went through a series of exit interviews, including one with Lofty Young. They had sat inside the quartermaster's office next to Pre-Deployment Stores, and shot the breeze for a few minutes. Then Lofty had reached into a drawer, and pulled out a shoulder-holstered handgun, a black phone, and three iridescent memory flakes. Leaving them on the desktop, he stood up.
"Ah, the old bladder. Must go for a slash-ex." Ex meant military exercise, and what he meant was, he needed to pee. "All part of getting old, like noticing how every little thing needs thumbprint and vocal confirmation these days. There's still shedloads of stuff floating around, mind, that's impossible to track."
"That's what quartermasters are for."
"Yeah." At the door, Lofty gave a half grin. "I'll be a few minutes. Too bad it's so hard to keep the inventory straight."
After he had gone, Josh had stared at the desktop.
Message received, boss.
The shoulder holster felt snug, the phone and memory flakes disappeared into his pockets, and the desk was clear. When Lofty returned he nodded, talked about nothing in particular for several minutes, then shook Josh's hand, and that was that.
Now he used his phone – not the same handset, but containing the same firmware and covert-ops enhancements – and accessed GPSID via the "unofficial" portal whose URI was known only to retired operatives like Josh. Deep beneath the Chilterns, the MetaWatch team kept track of the portal's use. While Richard Broomhall's father was on a persons-of-interest list, using the portal to track Richard directly would flag up warnings; but there would be no reason to notice Josh tracking down an ordinary language teacher called Maxwell, however unusual the poor bastard's first name might be.
Having made the request, he had to wait while the verify-and-authorise procedures did their thing. Meanwhile, there were two messages waiting, and he played Maria's first.
"Hey, Josh. I know you're working, but I want us to meet. Not alone. There's- Make it the Highbury Arms, would you? Leave me a message about which day, what time, and I'll confirm."
And the second, from Mr Hammond, the hospital consultant who had delivered so much bad news already: "I'm afraid there's something not so pleasant that we need to talk about. We have some notion of your intent, but in the case of a long-term patient it would be best for explicit permission from a parent, both if possible. While stem-cell regen is the opti mum choice, every week there are injured children whose organs need immediate replacement in order to-"
He wiped the message.
You fucking bastard.
So many battlefield injuries, his friends' liquefied flesh hot and sticky on his skin, and the time he pulled the trigger that blew away the, the – don't think of it – with the spraying red and God he was so young, scarcely more than Sophie's age. Not just firefights, but the desperate tragedy of men killed while hauling gear across mountains, driving or climbing far from hospitals. The reality of pain and imminent death, the necessity of triage, saving those who can survive, and there had been too many rifle salutes fired into the Herefordshire sky above Union Jack-draped coffins, the pomp and strength of military ceremony when it mattered most, keeping the survivors strong, but none of that would allow him to think of them splitting Sophie open for the organs inside her.
Something molten was roiling inside him, desperate for the blaze of violence and blood, and when the map appeared on his phone display with Maxwell's coordinates marked in red, the address in Gladwell Court, he hoped that this man had something to do with the boy's disappearance, knew information that needed to be beaten out of him, or would panic and fight so that the only option was to kill him.
No. Control.
Punch to the throat and leave him gagging as he There's a missing boy, and he's the objective.
Then his feelings were tight inside him once more, and he was on the move.
• • •
Bursting open the front door, Josh stalked straight into the living room. On the couch, a small man raised his hands, shrinking back and squeaking: "Who are you? Please don't-Don't."
"Tarquin Maxwell, three nights ago you met this boy." Josh flashed a still from the surveillance log. "What for? What were you up to, you bastard?"
"He, um, brought me. Something." Globules of sweat spread on Maxwell's forehead. He flicked his purplish tongue across his lips. "For the stress. Medicinal. It's, er…"
"Virapharm, and you know the penalty for possession, and what I want to know is where is the boy?"
"It was the first time I-Wait, no. He's from Mr Khan, but for God's sake don't use my name because they'll take my kneecaps" – tears flowed – "so don't say I told you, please."
"Tell about Khan."
"No, I-"
"Tarquin, tell me or I'll rip the information from you, so choose."
"They'll use iron bars on my kn-kneecaps. They're like that. I didn't know, before. Before I dealt with him."
"Tell me."
"Businesses, he's got businesses."
"Where? What kind?"
"Shops, a taxi service, garages. He's-"
"Where will he be?"
"I was about to… Oh, Jesus. To tell you."
"Where?"
"Corner store called, um… I can show you on a map." Fingers trembling, he tried to pull out his phone. "Sorry, I…"
"This one." Josh thumbed his own phone, and presented it face-first to Maxwell. "Tap on the places you know."
"Here's the store." Maxwell's teeth were cutting into his lower lip as he scrolled the display. "And he's got places there and… there. Don't know about the cabs."
Josh slapped the side of Maxwell's jaw, the torque producing shock. Maxwell had been starting to relax, getting the idea that he had some control in this situation.
"Describe Khan."
"He's – oh, God – dark, got a scar on his cheek here" – he pointed – "and a moustache."
"Height? Tall or short?"
"Same as you. Thin."
Asked to estimate Josh's height, Maxwell would exaggerate from the effect of fear; but then he was also scared of Khan.
"Will he have people with him?"
"Always." Maxwell's larynx worked as he nodded. "Big buggers."
"Once I've gone, don't think we won't be monitoring every word, Tarquin. You understand, right?"
"I-Right. Yes."
"Stay here, keep silent."
There was a kicked-in door that needed to be repaired, and the fear would not keep him here forever; but an hour or two was enough.
"Remember," added Josh.
A corner store, very traditional, if you didn't notice the armoured glass, the profusion of spycams. There was a possible route in through a back yard; or else through the shop like an ordinary customer. Scanning from his phone, Josh found the spycams shielded, impossible to redfang. But some part of the network would connect to the Web, and that would be his entry point, if he needed one. For now, he wanted to physically scout the shop, and see if Khan was inside.
Loading up subversion ware in case of opportunity, he crossed the street and went into the shop, accompanied by an overhead beep: a detector registering his knife. His image would be in the system; but his phone was already polling for available devices, seeking interfaces. Meanwhile, he extracted a bottle of hypercaffeinated Run! and a foil pack of Japanese chocolate. Behind the counter, a woman took his cash without comment, clearly used to doing phoneless business. Porno mags, little more than a folded poster with an embedded thirty-second movie, plus a malleable plastic attachment for that little kinaesthetic extra, were on the shelves above the cat food. Josh delayed, as though fighting an embarrassed urge to browse, until his phone vibrated silently three times. He shook his head, as if pretending disgust – a pretence of a pretence – and left the store.
There was a pub across the street. Even though it was early, when he entered the dark lounge there were fifteen, sixteen drinkers inside. Hard looks followed him as he carried his Coke to a corner and sat at a small sticky table. He got to work on his phone, following his subversion ware's progress as it mapped the network's topology. The system architecture was big, and so was the hardware net it ran on, far too extensive for a simple corner shop. Got it.
The shop was an end of terrace, a converted house, and one of four houses in a row that were conjoined: a single building inside, while from the street you could not tell.
They're watching me.
Shit. This was attention he did not need, as two of the men on barstools were staring at him. Pressing a bead into his left ear, he tapped the phone then leaned back against the wall, eyes almost shut as though listening to music. Then, with an idle motion, he sipped from his Coke. In his phone, a surveillance image moved, overlaid with a transcript pane, showing their conversation as text, in time with the audio in his earbead. unknown#1: "So who's this?" unknown#2: " This is Richie, Mr Khan."
/** ‹‹conditional match››unknown#3="R"**/
/** ‹‹conditional match››unknown#1="K"**/
K: "You're not local, are you, Richie?"
R: "Er, no, sir."
K: "You know your way around?" unknown#2: "I could help him, Mr Khan."
K: "Why would you do that, Jayce?" unknown#2: "Look after a mate, like."
His software had identified Richard Broomhall and Khan, conditionally rather than absolutely, but Josh had no doubts: this was who he was looking for. He noted the other youth's use of Richie rather than Richard. Plus, the image of Khan was clear – there would be no mistaking him.
Now the guys at the bar were returning their attention to him. This was not good. He checked the other drinkers. Most remained focused on their drinks or their inner thoughts, whatever they were, while at a small table like his, a heavy woman was pushing two empty glasses away from her. Her makeup formed strata, emphasising, not hiding, the fault lines and general crumbling.
When she realised Josh was staring at her, she raised her eyebrows.
"Don't tell me" – Josh pointed at the two empty glasses – "you drank two at once."
"Nah. My mate Sylvia was with me."
"Well, do you need another?"
"Got a cake in the oven, going to burn. Need to get home."
Good. He had thought she was about to leave.
"I shouldn't either," he said. "Have another, I mean."
"Mind, I went to the offie last night, brought back some lagers, need finishing off."
"That sounds tempting."
Flakes of mascara moved when she batted her eyes.
"Wouldn't want to drink alone." She wiggled her soft mass. "Don't seem right."
"Damn straight. I'm Joe."
"I'm Azure."
"Nice name."
"Well. Come on then."
They left, shoulder pressed to shoulder, while the guys at the bar watched. This close to Azure, Josh kept his breathing shallow. In the Regiment, he had been through desensitisation training, able to function in heavier and heavier concentrations of tear gas; it served him well now, coping with the thickness of Azure's perfume. No doubt made from the finest ingredients in a bathtub just down the road, and flogged off a market stall.
As she made a joke and laughed, he turned to smile, checking back. In the pub doorway, both men were watching. Josh slipped an arm around Azure's massive waist.
"Up here," she said. "This door, see?"
They went into a small entrance hall. A former townhouse, now flats, and she clearly lived upstairs. Her buttocks heaved as she started the climb, starting to puff; then Josh helped push her up. By the time they reached the top, they were both laughing. They almost fell inside, then Azure lumbered into the kitchen, looking for her lagers.
From the sitting room, a window opened out back, almost without sound. Josh swung through in one motion, pushed the thing shut – it would remain unlocked, but she might not notice for a while – then crimped his fingertips into the gap between bricks, made a shuffling traverse above a twenty-foot drop, then caught hold of a drainpipe, tested it with a tug, and descended most of the way. Overstuffed, split rubbish bags littered the ground, but from the wall he leaped over them and landed, crouching. Then he went over the back wall, and into a lane running behind the houses.
Poor Azure.
But another disappointment in her life might save a fourteen year-old boy, and that was the only consolation Josh could find for acting like a bastard, using sneaky avoidance in a way that would make his old instructors proud.
An hour and twenty minutes later, he was about to resume his sneakiness. From another back lane, he had watched the row of houses until all was quiet, while his phone displayed diagrams and images of the interior. The terrace was eight houses long – clearly, buying the whole row was too much even for Khan – and Josh's chosen entrance point was the fifth house along, owned by a law-abiding widower (according to a quick scan on the Web) who had nothing to do with any of Khan's enterprises, and had on occasion complained to police and council services about the noise from next door.
The house in question was number 39, and there was no sign of the owner moving about. In an ideal penetration exercise, Josh would prepare for longer, take additional equipment, and if possible three of his highly trained mates. But sometimes you had to act quickly or not bother, so he crossed the alley, jumped up, and clamped his hands onto brick. Then he was in a kind of vertical sprinter's crouch, pushing off with one foot, swinging out then jerking in with his arms, making full use of the myotatic reflex for fast power; and he was over. Tumbling sideways, he dropped like a cat, and remained on all fours at the rear of a tidy lawn.
A check of his phone revealed his subversion ware at work, altering the logged images from four different spycams over the last few seconds. Then he slipped across the lawn, just as his phone cracked the house system, and the back door's lock clicked open. He listened, then entered, taking in controlled large breaths, knowing that the reptile brain inside every human can respond to subliminal airborne molecules, communicating with the civilised mind in the form of intuition.
Nothing. He smiled, partly because it was the same old thrill: breaking the rules for a definite good; but he no longer had the Regiment behind him if things went tits up. Then he moved through the tidy house, climbing the stairs to the upper hallway, and finding the loft door in the ceiling. Standing on the banister, he reached up to push the door aside; then he grabbed hold, palms in, and swung his feet up, jack-knifing upward through the opening.
He shone a thin white beam from his phone, then gekkotagged the phone to his shoulder, freeing his hands. Looking around the darkened loft space, he saw neat transparent boxes, all labelled. Old comics – here, an X-Men run from the 1970s, artwork by Neal Adams – and hardcore fitness books: Pavel Tsatsouline, Scott Sonnon, Ross Enamait, Matt Furey. Josh smiled, then turned his attention to the chipboard wall that separated this place from Khan's enterprise next door.
From his belt, he twisted free his buckle, then pressed hard. A memory-steel blade uncurled, then snapped into stiffness. It was sawtooth, and just what he needed. He pressed the blade against the chipboard, increased pressure, then doubled it. The point went through.
Got it.
There was no vibration from his phone. His subversion ware was doing its work, hiding his intrusion from the house system. Too much reliance on high tech, and not enough on simple materials. But then, if the partition wall had been metal or brick, he would have found a different way in; because there always was a weakness.
He started to saw down, starting the opening that would let him inside.