I cut to the chase.
Not Your Personal Army. It’s the first thing that’s come close to making me smile in days.
We are only typing text into computers, unable to see each other’s faces or hear each other’s voices, but it still feels awkward to ask for a favour and then tell the guy I’m asking that I don’t trust him. Or more like I can’t afford to trust him. I need to do this myself, see the results with my own eyes. There’s too much at stake for me to take it at face value if I give him Syne’s name and he hits me back with an address. I don’t know for sure this is Stonefish any more than he knows I’m Buzzkill.
I wait for a reply, suddenly conscious of the airport sounds all around me that my mind had previously muted. Then he replies.
I put a hand to my mouth to stifle a gasp, daring to hope.
Two links appear in the chat window and I click on both.
Hardly breathing, I type my next line.
I tell him he can ask for anything. I mean it.
I wait again. Once more it’s like somebody turned up the volume on the hubbub, the music, the tannoys.
I get a lump in my throat as I consider how I am making my promise in good faith, but may not be around to keep it.
He sends me the usernames and passwords, and in a few seconds I have access to two vast government databases at such a high level of clearance that I can picture snow on top of the browser windows.
I get to work, tapping in my searches.
As Stonefish explains, if someone is a resident of the UK, or if they have ever been a resident of the UK, I can see where they live and where they used to live. I can look up any name. I can see the before and after on names that were changed by deed poll. I can find details on anyone who has lived here and worked here, going back decades.
I can do all of these things, but I what I can’t do is find a bloody listing in any of them for Aldous Syne.
I think about that photo Jack showed me. It looked like there were foreign-language books in the background. I worry that Syne is someone who doesn’t live here, who has never actually lived here. It hits me to the gut that Jack could be right about him outsourcing everything, carrying out his plans at a distance. But then I remember how he was celebrated as a great British inventor. Quintessentially British in fact, the lone eccentric working in his shed. So even if he was of foreign stock, he must have been born here, he must have lived here.
For Lilly’s sake, he has to still live here.
I hear a commotion and look up, startled as I always am at my own vulnerability when I’ve become so lost in what I am doing that I forget my physical circumstances.
I see flashing lights through the windows.
I feel myself go rigid before I spot the paramedics rushing through the concourse. They are heading for the security search area, where I can see airport staff beckon them frantically. I hear someone call out the words ‘heart attack’, and feel my own thumping through my ribcage.
These databases are necessarily very specific, so I try again in case I’ve got some minor detail wrong, like misspelled something or transposed a couple of letters. Even as I type I know this is as desperate as it sounds, but I do it anyway.
I still get nothing.
As I shift in my seat, I feel the phony prototype in my pocket pulled against my thigh. Suddenly I understand what the evidence on my screen is trying to tell me.
Aldous Syne does not exist.
They say that when people think they are about to die, the reason they recount their life flashing before their eyes is down to their brains rapidly searching all of their memories for information or for a previous experience that might show them how to survive. Something like that happens to me as I stare at the blank search results. In a moment that starts off in shock and panic, my mind goes into an accelerated state, calculating so many things in a rapid chain of logical deduction that it’s like my brain has been swapped for a high-end processor.
I know who is behind this.
Jack was wrong when he said the prototype was worthless. Right now this piece of metal in my pocket is worth millions. Tens of millions. It’s all the leverage I need to get Lilly back.
To make that happen, I will have to do what I do best, and I’ll have to do it the way I do best: on my own.
I reach for my mobile and dial.
Parlabane watches the paramedics load a stricken figure into their ambulance on a trolley, one of them hand-pumping air through a mask clamped to the patient’s face. Looks like it might be a cardiac arrest, and it may not be the only one before the evening is out.
He is growing more anxious with each minute that ticks away. There’s no let-up in the rain drumming down upon the car, and he peers intently through the windscreen between beats of the wiper blades, alternating his scrutiny with glances at each of the mirrors.
The paramedics close their doors and the ambulance high-tails it away from the terminal, blue lights flashing. He saw it arrive and now he’s seeing it leave again. He couldn’t say how much time has elapsed in between, but he knows it felt like an eternity, and his waiting isn’t over.
To distract himself, he opens his laptop and begins looking up stock databases, using his mobile as a hotspot again. He strikes out a couple of times, then finally happens upon a recent listing of who owns Synergis stock. As he predicted, there are a lot of shareholdings owned by companies, the most substantial of which is a firm called Ridge Break Associates.
RBA.
So near and yet so far. He looks again towards the terminal, a sick feeling taking hold. The longer this goes on, the less he’s sure Sam’s idea was a wise one. He has to hold his nerve, but the waiting is gut-wrenching.
‘Why is this taking so long?’ he says aloud.
He runs a search on Ridge Break Associates, discovering that it is in turn wholly owned by a company named Milton’s Lake, which means nothing to him. This is the labyrinth he predicted.
His eyes are drawn from the screen by more flashing lights, this time accompanied by the sound of sirens. This time it’s not an ambulance. Police are arriving at speed from different directions. He can only hope they aren’t heading for the terminal to arrest Sam on a tip-off.
It doesn’t look like it.
Police vehicles slew across all exits from the car park, while another two pull up only yards in front of where Parlabane is sitting. They rapidly disgorge men in Kevlar to surround the Qashqai, levelling sub-machine guns.
One of the officers stares at Parlabane through the windscreen and commands him to step out of the vehicle with his hands above his head.
Parlabane lets out a sigh, muttering to himself as he reaches for the handle.
‘Here we fucking go.’
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY
It only takes half an hour from Luton Parkway, but it feels longer as I am impatient to make the call. I daren’t attempt it while I’m in transit: it’s going to be one of the most important conversations of my life and I can’t afford to have it cut off because I’ve gone into a flipping tunnel.
The train pulls in
to St Pancras and I step on to the platform.
I put the battery back in my phone and make sure the signal is strong. I check the time. It’s 9.30 p.m. but I know the offices will still be manned given everything that’s been going on today.
The receptionist picks up on the second ring and I make my request. A moment later I am being rebuffed, as I knew I would.
‘I’m sorry, but I can’t give out anybody’s home or mobile numbers. If you give me your number, I can ask—’
‘Her to give me a call, yes. Please do that urgently. It’s very important.’
‘And can I have your name please?’
‘Just tell Miss Dunwoodie it’s regarding her ten-thirty tomorrow morning. She’ll know what it’s about.’
I hang up and make my way along the platform, the eye patch still working its magic. I have Jack to thank for that, I reflect, and I hope he’s okay. I look up at the arches and the brickwork. Any other time I’ve been here I’ve allowed myself a little Harry Potter daydream, but right now he’s all I think about.
It was in a little café just around the corner from here that I first arranged to meet him: first laid eyes upon him in the flesh, though he didn’t know I was looking. I went there armed with the threat of dobbing him in to the authorities. Now I’m back here after calling the cops on him for real.
TRADING FUTURES
She was the first face I saw, the first voice I heard in my head as soon as I allowed myself to accept that Aldous Syne was a fiction. Syne had been dreamed up by Cruz to help market the Synapse, and to hide the fact that he had stolen the design and murdered its inventor.
I sussed that Cruz was Zardoz, the anonymous electronics geek who had paid Lansing to steal files for him during the nineties, in his Ferox days. Cruz must have been the person my mum was entangled with back then too, when she was involved in industrial espionage. (A horrible thought crept in at that point, but my internal defences backgrounded it, blocking out anything that might distract my brain from processing what was urgent.)
The murder of Skelton must have been what spooked her and made her realise she was in too deep. That was when she sought out Jack, but he ended up fleeing the country. Twenty years on, Cruz leaned on Lansing again, this time to find out the online identity of the hacker he knew to be Ruth Roberts’s daughter. He knew Mum’s real name, and he knew about the Saudi website thing. (Still I blocked it. Vital processes only. Interrupts locked out.)
He roped me in as a warning to Mum to keep quiet. That was it: he was planning the biggest con of his life and he must have feared she knew something that could threaten him.
His plan was to use the Syne myth one more time, buying back Synergis for buttons then selling its stock for millions. But he wasn’t working alone. He had a silent partner, one who did exist, but not one he could trust, as it turned out.
It was that statement this morning that gave her away. Such a great performance too, so convincingly shocked, tired and grief-stricken. I’ve played it back since to double-check I wasn’t misremembering, but even before that I could recall every word.
‘I have spoken to Aldous Syne and broken the news . . . Aldous was distraught and I am making this statement right now at this most difficult time on the understanding that his grief and his privacy will not be disturbed.’
She could only have stood up and said that if she knew there was no danger of being contradicted. Only one other person knew Aldous Syne never existed, and she had murdered him the night before. At that point the question remaining was why, but I’ve answered it since.
My phone rings as I reach the shopping concourse. Most of the shops are closed, but there’s a café open and still tables outside. I take a seat and answer.
‘Jane. How good of you to call back.’
I keep my tone neutral. I think of Lilly as incentive not to lose my rag, but it’s a double-edged sword, as the thought of what this woman might be prepared to do to her fills me with volcanic rage. ‘I thought the terms of the deal were agreed. If there’s a problem, can we discuss it tomorrow? I don’t really have time to talk right now.’
She’s forcing politeness too, hiding how shocked and angry she must be that I’ve sussed her identity. I’m partly focusing on the background, wondering where she is. It’s quiet, no echo. I reckon she’s probably at home or maybe a hotel room. I wonder where Lilly is, then instantly block the thought.
I find my focus. This is what I do. This is how I do it.
‘I know Syne is a phantom. I know the Dimension is a fraud. And I know you’ve got my sister, so I suggest you make time and you pay close attention to what I am about to say.’
I leave it a moment, listening to her response; or more accurately the absence of one. Even in such silences, I can always hear what someone is telling me, and in Dunwoodie’s case it’s all panic and swearwords.
‘Tomorrow’s meeting needs to be rearranged. Not rescheduled – just a change of venue and an alteration to the agenda. The whole point of asking me to Paddington was for me to get arrested and for the cops to then give you back the prototype. Trust me, the last thing you want is for that to happen. I know what the Dimension is worth to you, but that value only holds as long as people believe it’s real. If I get arrested, I will tell everybody that both your invention and its inventor are pure fantasy. After that, Synergis will be worth nothing.’
I hear her swallow. Her voice is quieter, her mouth dry.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’m going to text you a link to a location. I want you to hang up and call me back once you’re looking at it on the map.’
The process takes about three minutes in total, including the necessary wait time I build in.
She calls back.
‘What the hell? It’s the Tate Modern. You could have just told me that, especially as your first link didn’t even work.’
I look at my laptop, and the invaluable information that is now staring back from the screen. As I suspected, Cruz was the hacker of the two; or at least knew how to operate safely in that sphere. But now she’s on her own.
‘If I had simply told you that, then I wouldn’t have been able to install the malware on your phone that’s just told me your exact location.’
She’s at home. I guess a hotel was too risky with an effective (and memorable) hostage in tow. I read her back the address.
‘I could send the cops there right now, catch you with Lilly. I could have her back within the hour and I’d be able to pull this whole thing crashing down around you. But that’s not what either of us wants.’
There’s a pause, while it sinks in that I’m offering a way out of this for both of us.
‘I know your story, Jane. I know who you are, what you’ve done and why you did it. We’ve both been through all kinds of shit and we both understand that you do whatever it takes to survive. I’m prepared to make a deal because we’ve got more in common than you’d believe.’
I hear her breathing at the other end of the line. If I strained harder I could probably hear her heartbeat.
‘I’m listening.’
‘We make the exchange tomorrow at the Tate Modern. I give you back the prototype and you give me back my sister. But before that, we make another exchange.’
‘Of what?’
‘Our fates. I give you mine to hold over me, and you give me yours.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Yes, you do. We’re kindred spirits. There’s a way we can make our interests mutual, and our destructions mutually assured.’
She pauses.
She gets it.
‘You want stock.’
‘Yes. I’ve earned it for my part in this. I’m emailing you the details and the numbers right now. At the closing price today, this holding is worth just under seventy grand. In terms of what you stand to gain, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a small price to pay.’
‘A small price today,’ she states irritably. ‘But according to market projections, this slice of
the pie could be worth a couple of million by next week.’
‘And that’s the point. Even after I’ve got Lilly back, it would only hurt my interests if I told anybody the truth. I become complicit in the whole fraud, and we both have a bright future as long as neither of us divulges what we know about the other.’
‘You don’t have that bright a future. The police are looking for you, so presumably this all falls apart if you’re caught.’
‘They won’t be looking for me much longer. They’re only after me because you fed them my name as a tip. You can tell them it was a mistake. They don’t have any solid evidence against me. Besides, I’m not the one the cops are really interested in. They’re after a killer, not a hacker. Give them that and they’ll be satisfied.’
‘Except that it leaves your partner twisting in the wind,’ she observes. She almost sounds impressed.
‘As I said, you and I are kindred spirits: I’m only interested in me and Lilly. Besides, it’s better than what you did to your partner: I’m not murdering the poor bastard. I can send you the password to decrypt the video files from last night, and that will give you all the proof the cops need to pin everything on their prime suspect.’
‘You’re willing to sell out Jack Parlabane to the police?’ she asks, like she wants to believe it but can’t quite allow herself.
‘You should refresh your news feeds. I already have.’
DEAD TO RIGHTS
‘If you want to catch Jack Parlabane, the bloke you’re after for killing Leo Cruz, you need to get to Luton Airport right now. He is in the short-stay car park, sitting inside a black Nissan Qashqai, registration number . . .’
Parlabane hears Sam’s voice booming through the speakers. The insulated walls of the interview room are absorbing all the reverb, making the sound so dry that she could be sitting only feet away, except he’s never heard her speak so loud.
Detective Superintendent Feeney nods to DC Kalawo and she stops the playback.
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