False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The dead guy, a certain Branwell Petersen, MIT graduate and former Microsoft employee, had died, the witnesses thought, because he stepped between the shooter and the Rose Jars.

  “The interns said he threw himself into the line of fire,” said Reynolds. “As if his life was less important.”

  The official report claimed that the two interns had subsequently been wounded when Anthony Lane turned his gun on them, but Reynolds thought they’d actually been hit by stray rounds from the responding officer.

  “Name of Lisa Perez, aged thirty-six, married, two kids,” said Reynolds.

  Perez, a twelve-year veteran of the SJPD with a good record and reputed to be steady and reliable, had stepped into the company’s front office in response to a complaint from the neighboring business and had just asked to see whoever was in charge when she heard gunshots from the rear of the premises. Fearing an active shooter, Perez called it in and immediately investigated.

  “Now this is where it gets hinky,” said Reynolds. “According to her report, Officer Perez entered the lab and found Anthony Lane reloading his handgun. She ordered him to drop the weapon and, when he refused to comply—and indeed completed his reloading—she opened fire.”

  “Eight times?” I said.

  “For one thing, Peter,” said Reynolds, “when engaging an armed opponent you shoot them until they fall down. However, reading between the lines on the follow-up report, it was obvious to me that Officer Perez emptied her magazine and continued to pull the trigger for some time after it was obvious the incident was over. I believe the two interns were wounded by rounds from her weapon, but the SJPD glossed over this aspect of the case because in any event Officer Perez retired with a ‘service-related disability’ less than a month later.”

  Perez had been diagnosed as suffering with PTSD.

  “It was the first time she’d ever shot anyone,” said Reynolds. “It’s a traumatic thing even if it’s a righteous shoot—but I don’t need to tell you that.”

  So, probably it was the normal reaction to having violently killed a fellow human being. But Reynolds didn’t like “probably.” Which is why she managed to wangle an interview with Officer Perez, who was initially reluctant to talk but relented when Reynolds made it clear that she understood some things that were “difficult” to include in a report.

  “Some of the material Dr. Walid sent me was a lot of help,” she said. “You must thank him for me.”

  Officer Perez told Reynolds that she saw something, something she couldn’t describe, something that filled her with such fear—terrified was the word she used—that she emptied her magazine at it.

  “What does this remind you of?” asked Reynolds.

  “The petrol station in Cleveland,” I said.

  “The Cleveland gas station,” said Reynolds.

  The shooting death of John Chapman, former associate of Martin Chorley, at a petrol station in Cleveland, Ohio. I’d assumed he’d been killed by Chorley because he knew too much. But the man himself had denied it.

  “I’ve seen panic fire before,” Reynolds had said. “And this was strictly spray and pray.”

  Chapman had been accidentally shot by responding police officers who reported a similar level of incomprehensible fear. Or, rather, didn’t report it until Reynolds had turned up and ferreted it out of them.

  “Perhaps we’re dealing with a type of Fae that uses fear as a defense,” said Reynolds.

  “Why not a practitioner?” I asked.

  “It seems too reactive,” she said, and she had a point. Practitioner magic was all about thought and control. This fear projection did seem reactive. “And it didn’t do the perp much good, now, did it?”

  Assuming that Anthony Lane, our gunman, had been the source of the fear. I pointed this out and we knocked it back and forth, but agreed we didn’t have enough data to be sure.

  “Another thing you might find familiar,” said Reynolds, “was Lane’s profile.”

  “Don’t tell me—mild-mannered, apparently normal. Friends and family baffled?”

  “Yep,” said Reynolds. “Worked at the 7-Eleven on McLaughlin Avenue—less than five hundred yards away. Never showed any interest in guns until he drove to Reno the previous weekend and bought his Glock at a local gun store.”

  In other words, a similar profile to William Lloyd, who also gave no indication he was about to go postal until the day he did.

  “Do you know if he’d joined any chat rooms or had spent time on social media?” I asked.

  “What—you mean more than anyone else?” said Reynolds.

  “You can ask your friends at the NSA,” I said. “They’re bound to have the metadata.”

  Reynolds put down her coffee mug and leaned in closer to the screen. I noticed then that the mug had life-sized fingerprint smudges painted on the side.

  “Hey, guys,” she said. “How about it—you can get favors on both sides of the pond.”

  We gave them a couple of seconds to reply but of course they didn’t. The first rule of Big Brother is that Big Brother is never watching you when you want him to.

  Work pretty much covered, I gave Reynolds the Bulge update and she told me she’d leased a new car, a proper off-road SUV this time. We promised to keep each other, and presumably the NSA, regularly updated and hung up.

  There was a scratching at the door and when I investigated I found Toby sitting on his haunches and looking at me with an expectant expression. I glanced over to the first floor opposite and saw that the lights in the breakfast room were on. Toby obviously needed me to open a silver salver and liberate some sausages.

  When I’d first arrived at the Folly, Molly had insisted on cooking breakfast for twenty instead of an actual complement of three—not counting Toby. Since then the numbers of people demanding bacon, sausage, eggs and kedgeree have fluctuated, culminating in Operation Jennifer, where we must have had more than thirty people eating in shifts. It was during that period that fruit and baked goods first appeared, so that it is now possible, against all police tradition, to eat a balanced breakfast. There was a flare-up again when we had the builders in, which also saw the introduction of zacuscă, sheep’s cheese, popara and—my personal favorite—a sort of open topped sandwich with cold meat and salad.

  At some point Molly had learned how to manage her supply to match demand, so I was pleased to note that we were back down to just the five salvers and one table set with cutlery.

  Toby bounced around my feet as I hunted for the sausages, but looked disappointed when I put some on a plate under the table. Still, he nommed them all up, I noticed. There was a pot of tea waiting on the table, kept warm by a crudely knitted blue and white tea cozy with a bobble on the top.

  I poured myself a cup and considered Deep Thought.

  It had to be one of three things. A genuine Artificial General Intelligence. An intelligence that used to be a real person housed, somehow, inside a contraption constructed by mashing up a Mary Engine and one or more intact Rose Jars. Or, finally, a fake run by Skinner. The last would be a scam to create false value for the Serious Cybernetics Corporation, so that a larger competitor could be lured into buying the SCC at a hugely inflated price. According to Officer Silver, this sort of thing was currently all the rage in Silicon Valley.

  The last seemed unlikely—Skinner didn’t seem to be the type. Hype his product beyond its actual capabilities, maybe. But run a long con on this scale? Besides, if he was truly looking to generate false value, then he should at least be hinting at Deep Thought’s existence.

  I wasn’t qualified to tell whether it was a real AGI—it passed a rough approximation of a Turing Test with me, but as Everest and Victor would no doubt love to point out, that actually proved nothing except that Skinner might have produced a very sophisticated person emulator.

  I poured myself another cup of tea.

 
So it could be a ghost, revenant or some other incorporeal entity trapped inside the Mary Engine or a Rose Jar—or a combination of the same. A ghost would be sad but harmless. But a revenant—something that could eat ghosts, and directly affect people’s minds? That could be really dangerous. According to the literature, the bloody things entrenched themselves if left in place too long.

  I heard running feet and Foxglove charged into the breakfast room, naked except for a white sheet that she held over her head so that it billowed artistically behind her. She did a circuit of the room and then charged out again with Toby barking at her heels.

  Molly appeared suddenly behind me just as I raised my teacup and almost caused me to spill tea down my front. She whisked away the teapot and went gliding off. In the distance I could hear Toby barking as he and Foxglove did a lap around the second floor balcony.

  Nightingale once had a friend called David Mellenby, who was the closest thing to a modern research scientist the Folly has ever produced. I have his unpublished notes and, while much of the math is beyond me, he did record his ideas in a sort of waking dream journal—bits of which I understand.

  He postulated that there were other planes of existence which he called allokosmoi, from which the various supernatural types, including practitioners, drew their power and their influence. He speculated that if a revenant stayed in a fixed location, then that place would start to overlap with the particular allokosmos from which it drew its power. I think he thought vestigia were a boundary effect of this overlap. I’m not sure if he was right about that, but it would certainly explain invisible unicorns and many other instances of weird shit.

  Molly placed a fresh pot of tea on the table—this one had an orange and brown knitted tea cozy in the form of a broody hen.

  “The builders uncovered a chest while they were finishing up,” said Nightingale from the doorway. “Judging by the tea cozies and other things, I think it must have contained items from the downstairs mess hall.”

  Which was a polite way of saying the servants’ quarters.

  Nightingale sat down and paused while Molly fussed around him laying out cutlery, and a fine white porcelain cup, saucer and milk jug. I thought of Beyoncé Knowles and the over-sugared latte and smiled.

  “You seem remarkably cheerful for this time in the morning,” he said.

  “We have to do the raid tonight,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Nightingale, pouring a cup of tea. “I see. What’s your thinking?”

  “Someone, or something,” I said, “is using the internet to assemble an army of magical drones. We’ve identified one manufacturing cell, but we can’t be sure there aren’t more.”

  “Agreed,” said Nightingale, and thoughtfully stirred his tea.

  I read him into the briefing I’d got from Reynolds, and he drew the same conclusions I did.

  “I believe that there is a better than even chance that the ‘something’ doing the organizing is located on the closed top floor of Bambleweeny,” I said. “We need to get in there and find out, one way or the other.”

  “This makes sense, of course,” said Nightingale. “But why the urgency? Surely, if you’re right about this Deep Thought, then caution would be advisable.”

  “The situation is too unstable,” I said. “I have two suspects under my roof who even as we speak are probably plotting to double-cross me. At work, Leo Hoyt is definitely getting suspicious. But, most importantly, the Print Shop in Gillingham was wound up voluntarily. I think that means their preparations are done, and whatever they wanted those drones for is about to happen.”

  “You want to seize the initiative?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Our one advantage is that they seem to have no idea we exist. If we act now we might be able to roll them up before they know what’s hit them.”

  Nightingale frowned into his teacup.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “What have we got to lose?” I said.

  Nightingale looked up and gave me a strange, sad smile.

  “Oh, everything, Peter,” he said. “But then, such is life.”

  15

  A Strange Game

  IT WAS GO to work in black that night, although most of it was really dark blue. And as casual as we could get, because—amazingly—when going equipped it’s better not to look like you’re planning a burglary. Believe it or not, the police are trained to spot such subtle signs as balaclavas, nylon climbing harnesses and big shoulder bags that go “clonk” when you put them down.

  We arrived separately using three different Tube stations and rendezvoused inside a green late-model Transit van that I told Stephen and Mrs. Chin I’d stolen earlier from a building site that had shut up for the night.

  For all I knew, this was true. Because Silver had supplied the vehicle, and God knows where she got it from. For extra verisimilitude it came with a ramp attachment as if I truly intended to move something bulky, say a mechanical computer and a couple of Rose Jars. I told them we had to wait in the van until at least 1 a.m.

  “Why the hell are we here so early?” asked Mrs. Chin.

  “This is a big crime,” I said. “The police will pull footage from every CCTV camera in a five hundred meter radius. This looks less suspicious.”

  “Apart from the bit where we all climb into this van,” said Stephen.

  “Ah, but Mr. Skinner didn’t want any cameras pointing at his secret lift,” I said. “So this is a general blind spot. And, ditto, none of the Vogon cameras cover this area either.”

  “There’ll be something,” said Stephen. “A segregated closed circuit system linked to the top floor—at minimum.”

  “We snuff those on the way in,” I said. “And since we were going to have to sand everything once we were up there anyway, that’ll take care of any recordings.”

  “Sand?” asked Mrs. Chin.

  “Destroy with magic,” said Stephen. “What happens to silicon chips if you cast a spell too close to them.”

  Mrs. Chin nodded and glanced at her watch.

  “More than two hours?” she said.

  “If we want to be safe, yeah.”

  “The problem here,” said Mrs. Chin, “is that may be okay for you young people but some of us are going to have trouble holding our pee for that long.”

  “Got you covered,” I said, and held up two empty two-liter Diet Pepsi bottles.

  “That’s not going to cover it,” said Mrs. Chin, so I showed her the nice clean medical funnel I’d brought along to avoid spillage.

  “First working bathroom we find is mine,” said Mrs. Chin.

  Obviously variable bladder capacity had been a failure in my contingency planning but there wasn’t anything we could do about it now.

  Stephen unfolded the stepladder I’d brought so that Mrs. Chin could sit in comparative comfort while me and Stephen sat on the floor with our backs against the side of the van. With Mrs. Chin perched above us, I had a terrible urge to put my hand up whenever she asked a question.

  Partly for its entertainment value I pulled out my Airwave and set it to cover NI (Islington nick) and City.

  “What’s that?” asked Mrs. Chin.

  “Police scanner,” said Stephen.

  I interpreted a couple of incidents for them—the assault near Liverpool Street station, the noise complaint in Hoxton, the constant moaning by overworked response officers and, reading between the lines, the gnashing of teeth by their skippers because they didn’t have enough manpower.

  “Skippers?” asked Stephen.

  “Sergeants,” I said.

  “They don’t get a lot of action around here, do they?” said Mrs. Chin. “New York is much livelier. Or at least it used to be.”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. Chin,” said Stephen in a monotone. “Tell us about the good old days.”

  “Do you get a lot of action in New York
?” I asked. “Our kind of action, that is?”

  “When I was a junior we spent most of our days underground,” said Mrs. Chin.

  “Still do,” muttered Stephen.

  “There’s a whole world down there,” she said. “Subways, sewers, steam tunnels, the old rivers. A whole population that went underground during the winter—vagrants, criminals on the run . . .”

  “Mutant turtles?” I asked, and Stephen sniggered.

  “You joke,” said Mrs. Chin. “But personally I wouldn’t have been surprised. Vampires were a problem, of course—they always are. You burn out one nest and another would pop up. Got real bad in the ’70s until a bunch of homeless vets went after them with homemade napalm and flame-throwers—quite a war by all accounts.”

  “You didn’t intervene?”

  “I was a teenager at the time, but the Association stayed out of it,” said Mrs. Chin. The Association being the New York Libraries Association, the militant magical wing of the New York Public Library Services. “Although we’re all members of the Green Machine as well.” That being the AFSCME, the union that most mundane librarians belonged to.

  The war had raged until the early 1980s, when things had gone creepily quiet. But there was much less in the way of vampire incidents after that.

  “Still get them, though,” said Stephen.

  The most dangerous thing Mrs. Chin had personally dealt with was a possessed shade at the notorious Willowbrook State School on Staten Island—which I had to look up later.

  “When you say shades, what do you mean?” I asked. “Do you mean Fae?”

  “I mean everything that’s not normal,” said Mrs. Chin.

  “Like New Jersey,” said Stephen.

  Mrs. Chin nodded at me.

  “He knows what I mean,” said Mrs. Chin. “He should do, considering his domestic arrangements.”

  But yes, I teased out of Mrs. Chin, the shades were what we would call the Fae, or rather anyone who inhabited the demi-monde for anything other than style reasons. Shades were tolerated in New York—who wasn’t? But part of the Librarians’ job was to keep an eye on them.