‘It’s pretty dangerous out there.’
‘You don’t have to tell me that, Jordan.’
‘Anyway, black ops have been asking for you.’
I checked my watch. ‘Are they here already?’ It didn’t worry me that Jordan called the Sentinel directors ‘black ops’. Sentinel hid in plain sight. That was the point. It was like in the old days when everyone knew where the CIA and MI5 had their offices, but they weren’t just going to saunter in and get to read top-secret files. Everyone on the CID level knew that there was something secret going on behind the big grey door, but they didn’t know what – I’d heard speculation that the unit was political liaison, or internal investigations, even non-digital surveillance – old-fashioned spookery, as Jordan plainly guessed – but if any of the detectives could even vaguely imagine what really happened behind that door, they were discreet enough to keep their thoughts to themselves.
‘They seem particularly eager to see you,’ he said, mockingly adopting Barbra Reeve’s upper-class tone by rolling an invisible pea in his mouth as he spoke.
I left Jordan to his report, passing the CID desk to the dark side of the floor, running the gauntlet of Bert and the scanners and locks before coming into the Sentinel workroom. Looking over us, Barbra stood, hands on her hips, surveying her workers in their hive. A dozen or so analysts were settling around four table clusters working multiple screens. While a couple spent a moment charging their coffee and muttering preparatory greetings, most of them had got straight to work, the analysts leaning intensely into the screens. The unalloyed dialogue between their trained eyes and the minds behind them and the images and data reeling out in front of them made me think of Eloise – apart from the fact that they had clothes on, and the brutalist office space emitted a different tone to her rainbow unicorn waterfall.
I made eye contact with Barbra and she beckoned me up.
‘Any luck yet?’ I said.
She cocked an eyebrow, sensing my increased urgency. ‘They’ve been working all night.’
‘How long do you think it will take?’ If Schindler’s team managed to hack into The I, I’d be able to find Kira in ten minutes. The longer we waited, though, the colder the trail would get.
She shifted back and folded her arms. I was still standing in the middle of the office, not invited to sit. ‘You know this is bigger than dead children, don’t you?’ Barbra said. I bit my tongue – I hadn’t told her what the family situation with David was, but I imagined she already knew I had a nine-year-old niece in Green Valley. Was she deliberately goading me, trying to draw me out? ‘We have what we need now. We got lucky with the pretext to enter Green Valley, and we need to process the component properly. After all this time, there’s no need to rush.’
I entered Green Valley, I wanted to remind her; I brought back the device. And my niece is not a pretext, I wanted to say. But I knew that would get me nowhere with Barbra Reeve. If I gave her any reason to believe my relationship with Kira would affect my professional judgement, I’d be back on filing duty before I’d closed my mouth. Instead, I took a breath, and said, ‘We should try to clear up loose ends. I could ask Detective Martinez to take me to the scene, but it might be more helpful if I can use some of Sentinel’s footage. The city doesn’t want unsolved deaths on their hands.’ A jumble of excuses and pleas, like a child begging for a treat, and still Barbra stood unmoved. ‘If a journalist stumbled over the story,’ I tried, ‘it might cause a panic.’
She tilted her head and stared into my face. ‘How do you think that might happen?’
‘You know how things are. People talk a lot. People like to share their news and they don’t have the outlet they once had.’
She scrutinised me for a moment longer and I thought I’d pushed it too far. Barbra Reeve was the last person I should try to threaten. But then her face eased into a smile and she nodded. ‘All right. I can see that you care for these kids, and that’s admirable, even though they’re not our responsibility.’ I was blindsided, bit my tongue. ‘I’ll let you use Sentinel resources, but only while we’re waiting for Bill’s team to crack into the component. We can use it as an exercise. After that, I’ll need your full attention on what he brings us. Then these kids are purely a CID matter to the extent that they’re in Stanton’s jurisdiction. Agreed?’
‘Thank you. Do you—?’
‘No, I have no idea how long it will take, Sterling.’ Barbra shrugged. ‘The physical interface and the encryption are bound to be hard to break, but Bill’s team is good. Several hours. Do what you can, but you must come back when I call you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again, and hurried out of the office and down the stairs to my workstation in the common-room pool. Barbra’s windows cleared themselves as I fired up my terminal.
Sentinel had originally been set up as a public unit that used analogue methods to prevent the recurrence of digital terror, but over the years they’d expanded well beyond that original brief, funded and supported by politicians and lobbyists who knew that Omega wouldn’t be the favoured lobbyists for ever, and that once they’d fallen, there’d be a renewed demand for fulsome – electronic – security and policing services. If Omega knew the extent of this operation, they’d find a way to disband the entire law-enforcement system in their indignation.
First, I pulled up video footage from the lamp-post cameras on Nile Street where it led into the alley, and the end camera on the alley itself, which Sentinel had fitted into a street lamp that never worked and had just become part of the general clutter and decay. Nobody would ever come across it, any more than they would wash the piss from behind the dumpster and build a garden conservatory for the homeless people who slept there. The alley behind Cubbington’s bakery, like much of Claymarket, remained what Barbra would call a low-priority vantage, but the two surveillance points were decent enough, and remained operational.
I set the two feeds back to the previous afternoon and scanned through them side by side, pausing whenever I saw a figure coming through the alleyway. I watched Cubby Rosenior and another man locking up, then later someone unlocked the back of the shop next to the bakery. I paused and checked the map – Gandalf’s bookstore. The owner of S-Town Bodega closed up and emerged from the alleyway, stopped at the corner of Nile and Mildura, then got on the number 85 bus towards – pause and check – his home in Horizon Park. Half an hour later, a cat fight erupted and was broken up by something being thrown from an unseen window of an apartment above. A brief downpour started, and someone who was dressed like a homeless man scuffled into the alleyway and took shelter against the wall, lighting a cigarette and waiting out the squall. At 6:33 p.m. on the feed, it happened.
A figure in padded jacket and balaclava, rainproof trousers and thick workboots came into the alleyway carrying a large bundle. It was hard to tell the build of the person under the bulky clothes. I could only imagine hesitation or deliberation in the grainy image on the screen. They half-turned and placed the bundle carefully, gently, across the bakery’s back entrance, the child’s ragged little sneakers poking out of the end of the grey roll of blanket. And then the person did something odd, kneeling over the body. The suspect’s back was towards the camera and hid what they were doing to the child, but they stayed bent over the child’s body for fourteen seconds before standing again and hurrying back, covered head down, a light stride, almost a skip-run. Back to the car on Nile Street, parked right outside the alley mouth. The car was an unremarkable model, a grey Toyota Camry with a trunk big enough for a child’s body, not the sort of car you’d drive dressed head-to-toe in camouflage dark. The streetside camera had picked up a clear registration number.
Although people had become complacent since the Turn, it was still unlikely that someone would dump a body with legitimate licence plates, so I was surprised when the registration number brought up an active record for a car that hadn’t been reported as stolen. It belonged to someone called Vidal Barrett, a lawyer based at the edge of Claymarket. I no
ted his office address and his home address, telephone numbers and pneum coordinates, logged out of my terminal, scanned out of the Sentinel office and hurried over to Jordan, who was leafing through a thick wad of notes, slumped over his desk, propping his head up with his hand.
‘Have you got a moment, Jordan? Did you get the report in?’
He rolled his eyes towards me so that he didn’t have to raise his head from his hand. ‘Yeah. I’ve got to go over this evidence for the Shing trial. The minutiae of creative accounting. Save me.’
‘I’ve got a lead. The person who left the girl’s body at the bakery was driving a car that’s still registered to a name and address in town. It could be a fake, but it doesn’t look like it.’
He straightened. ‘How did you…? Never mind.’ Glancing at the grey door. ‘What happens in Oz stays in Oz, right?’
‘I’ve got an address matched to the vehicle he came in, and I have authorisation for an extraordinary visit.’
Jordan narrowed his eyes at me. By ‘visit’, Jordan knew that I meant a search of the apartment, and by ‘extraordinary’, I meant fast-tracked past the usual bureaucratic processes.
‘I’m low on time,’ I pressed. ‘I only have a couple of hours. Will you come with me?’
‘Thank God,’ he said, leaning over and taking a pre-signed warrant dummy out of his desk drawer. ‘I was about to fall asleep here.’
10 The apartment registered to Vidal Barrett was in an unpretentious neighbourhood just north of the Museum District. Jordan parked half a block away and we ran across the road between gaps in the traffic, me clutching my messenger bag to my stomach. From what I’d read in his dossier, Barrett kept office hours at a small general-practice firm on the gentrified fringes of Claymarket. He was divorced, and had a sixteen-year-old daughter but the mother, Dierdra Smith, had sole custody. So there was a fair chance there’d be nobody home right now; unless, of course, there was a cleaner or a lover or a tenant. Barrett had no arrests, no convictions; took his degree at a community college an hour down the highway in Racino. There was only his driver’s licence mugshot on file, a grainy thing taken years ago, and apart from decent bone structure, a nice smile and a terrible haircut, there was little I could glean from it. Despite my training, I started building a picture of him in my mind: shabby suit, balding, cramped office, drinking habit, struggling to keep up with the alimony but doing his best. Why would a man like that be dumping dead children in the middle of the night?
Stop it, Lucie, I chided myself. I knew nothing about this man and I was being unprofessional. We were here to find out what this Vidal Barrett might have to do with the dead children; whether he’d taken Kira too. I had to be calm and clear, not work up a fantasy of unsubstantiated conclusions.
The building had a smart brass-framed door and a small but bright marble lobby. Although it was a small block, the landlord had hired a security guard – a measure that had become common since the Turn – but the desk was vacant. There was a visitors’ book and a mug, a novel and a small radio. Without thinking about it, I scanned the ceiling and the top of the walls for any tell-tale signs of pinhole cameras – a newly painted spot, an unusual crack or a divot in the beading. So often, techs had tried to worm in invisibly with a microbit and came away with a chunk of plaster. I didn’t notice anything, and although it was highly unlikely that this average building had been fitted for another case, anything was possible.
‘Let’s go,’ Jordan said, mistaking my hesitation for worry about the security guard. ‘We can sign in later, and you’ll earn your good citizen’s badge.’
I hid my grimace as we headed up the stairs to the third floor. Jordan and I got along so well because we both accepted that sometimes we had to bypass abstract regulations to do our work, but what I planned to do once we were inside would test our relationship. I clutched my bag closer to me, not looking forward to the confrontation. The hallway was carpeted with quality thick plush that was starting to wear a little down the main thoroughfares. Dim, energy-efficient bulbs shone coldly from sconces that had been made for much warmer light, and illuminated the thinness of the most recent paint job, smudges and chips showing through the single coat that had been applied perhaps a year or two ago.
We knocked three times, waiting for a good while for an answer. I listened, but there was no movement inside, and no sign of life in any of the four other apartments on that floor. Single- or two-bed flats in a commuter limbo, hard-working people feeling the suck of economic pressure under their feet, it made sense that they’d all be out – at the office, or at the bar; no family. We should have waited for the guard and shown our warrant, but Jordan put on his gloves and took out his lockpicks, another part of our extraordinary-visit service.
He closed the door quietly behind us. The first thing that hit me was a fresh and floral perfume, something you’d expect a young woman to wear. The flat was neater than I’d expected – we’d entered straight into an open-plan reception area, which led all the way to the south-facing bay windows overlooking the building’s scruffy rear garden. The plastic chairs of a green garden set were neatly leant over a table with a sun umbrella folded in the middle of it; a barbecue and a slime-filled water feature in the corner. I moved away from the window and turned a circle in the living room. A couch with a handmade patchwork quilt on it, three crammed bookcases with a clutter of empty vases on top of them, a stack of LPs towards which Jordan gravitated. A nice thick blue rug lying over the stripped wood floors, a coffee table laden with one meal’s worth of plates… breakfast from this morning, milk hardened into a yellowish sheen on the bowl. And beside that a notepad with a girl’s handwriting on it – scrawls, scratchings, doodles, names and dates; the evidence of distracted studying.
The washed-up, two-bit attorney in my mind started to dissolve away and to reform as I went into the kitchenette and looked at what was stuck on the fridge: a set of magnetic poetry jumbled up except for a line – PLEASE I LOVE SOME MILK TODAY; a souvenir magnet from Flamingo World; and a photograph of a man and a teenaged girl. The man clean-shaven and buff in a tight-fitting T-shirt, the smile familiar from his licence photo, but his short black hair in a far better style. Vidal Barrett had aged from his awkward youth to forty very handsomely. The girl was almost as tall as him as she leaned her head on the side of his, her straight dark middle-parted hair half-obscuring the design on Barrett’s T-shirt.
Behind the kitchenette, a short passageway led to a bathroom; a woman’s make-up and shampoo jumbled on the tub’s side, along with unisex skin products and a can of shaving foam. In the cabinet under the basin: toilet paper, soap, bleach, tampons. In the mirrored cabinet above only over-the-counter medication: paracetamol tablets, a bottle of antacid, a tube of haemorrhoid ointment, facial waxing strips. The first bedroom was the smaller one, the bed made, the slatted blind closed, a pile of books on the bedside table; in the closet, three suits, some casual trousers, T-shirts and sweat tops. At the end of the passage, the second bedroom was the larger one, with a corner view over the hills through grand curved windows. A desk and a bookcase were positioned against one window and a child’s double bunk bed took up the far end of the room. The bottom bunk was piled with clothes and books and bright accessories that spilled out onto the carpet, while the top level was where the girl slept, the bundled comforter and pyjamas exuding a floral-masked funk that hauled me straight back two decades to Claymarket and my redolent little bedroom. This overflowing patch was the girl’s corner of the otherwise orderly house. With so many belongings here, it looked like she spent more time in this house than just an occasional visit, and I wondered if Mr Barrett was transgressing his custody rights.
I was about to open the closet in the bedroom when there was an urgent rap at the front door. For a moment my mind was blanked by an image of yellow eyes and matted black wool, but the shade passed through me without stopping. When I got out into the living room, Jordan had opened the door and was talking to a uniformed officer.
�
�Urgent message for Ms Sterling,’ she said. ‘The director needs you back.’
‘Did you tell her we’re here?’ Jordan said, scowling between me and the officer.
‘Yes,’ I lied. It was a half-lie, because I knew that doing anything on Sentinel terminals was effectively telling Barbra Reeve, if she wanted to know. ‘I’m on my way. Thanks, officer.’
When the officer had left, I stretched my rubber gloves over my fingers, opened out my satchel on the kitchen counter, pulled a stool from under the kitchen counter, and climbed up on it.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Look away, Jordan,’ I said as I began to drill the little hole in the ceiling behind the kitchen’s light fitting.
‘Lucie, what the fuck? This is not part of the deal.’
‘I told you, look away. Go and stand outside. You’re not seeing this. You don’t know it’s happening. It won’t trouble your conscience.’
He opened his mouth and scowled at me as I installed the microphone and the fibre cameras, attaching them to the control module and inserting it into the base of the light fitting. Then he shook his head and walked out into the hallway, leaving me to set bugs in the bedrooms. I could have installed cameras in the bathroom too, but something stopped me. Call it a sense of decency, if you like. Or call it haste.
After circling the place one more time, making sure that everything looked the way we’d found it, I joined him. He closed the door behind us, checking that the lock was undamaged, then stalked off down the steps ahead of me. The guard, back at his desk, barely raised his eyes to us. Jordan had started the car by the time I’d hurried after him and got in.
For a couple of minutes he didn’t say anything, but his nature got the better of him. ‘What the fuck?’ he said again. ‘You can’t go around doing that, Lucie. You know I’ve committed three officers to this case. I’ve stuck my neck out for you, and you have to trust me. If she’s in the city, they’ll find her. We know how to do police work. I don’t care what you people do in your magic room behind the door, but this is the real world out here. We’re not some… fucken… tyranny. Citizens have rights.’
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