by John Marrs
“Hello, Libby,” Jude began, and he offered her a thin smile. His tone was a combination of friendly but assertive. She had not met this version of him before.
“How have you been?” Jude continued, but Libby wasn’t yet ready to respond. It didn’t appear to concern him. “I’m glad you came. Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to sit?” He pointed to a chair opposite him. Libby shook her head and eyed him up and down as if it were the first time they had met. And in many ways, it was. This was not the man she once had feelings for; this man was a stranger. “You must have a lot of questions,” he said. “Go ahead.”
She nodded and cleared her throat, but try as she might, she couldn’t stop nerves from catching her vocal cords.
“Of all the places you could have brought me, why did you choose this street?” she asked.
“We’ll get to that soon, I promise,” he replied.
“How long have you been following me?”
“In person, it’s been around a couple of weeks now. Through your phone data, tracking devices, spending patterns, internet usage, and public profile, I suppose I’ve never stopped following you. Not from the night we met in Manchester, or even the months leading up to it.”
“So we didn’t meet by chance then?”
“No, we didn’t.”
Something inside Libby sank. She was almost disappointed to hear him admit to what she had already assumed. “How did you know I’d be in that pub?”
“We had access to all your personal details, including your emails and diary.”
“You mean you hacked into them?”
“Yes.”
“And when you found out where I’d be spending the weekend, you followed me?” Jude nodded again. “How did you know I’d talk to you?”
“I didn’t. I pursued you from bar to bar and I waited until after you’d had a few drinks before trying to get your attention. I knew from Facebook photos you enjoyed karaoke, and your Spotify playlists told me Michael Jackson was your favourite artist.”
“The friends you were with. Were they in on this?”
“They weren’t my friends.”
“I saw them. You were standing with a group of men.”
“No, I was standing behind a group of men. I had no more of an idea who they were than they did of me. Like my driverless car, you didn’t think to question what you were seeing.”
“Why would I? I trust people until I have no reason to. My first instinct isn’t to assume everything I hear or see is a lie. Well, at least it wasn’t until you came along. How could you be sure I’d be attracted to you?”
“From the profiles you’d filled in when you joined online dating websites. We looked at the type of men whose pages you visited, how long you hovered over each picture. We analysed their personality traits and, of course, we took a look at your ex, William. We studied your turn-ons and turn-offs, recreational interests, the online conversations you had, and what qualities someone needed before you’d consider meeting them. I adapted my appearance accordingly. I cut and coloured my hair, wore contact lenses, and dressed in the style of clothes you preferred your men in. I became everything you were looking for. The only thing we couldn’t engineer was chemistry. And you cannot deny we had that. When you left, I took your glass with me from the pub and did the Match Your DNA test on it to see if we were genetically designed for each other. Would you like to know the result?”
Libby’s eyes blazed with fury, but she kept her fingers rigid so they wouldn’t ball into fists and reveal to Jude how violated she felt. “No, I do not,” she replied through gritted teeth. Quietly, though, she was terrified she might be matched with a psychopath. “The conversations we had that night, they were engineered too?”
“Some of them, yes.”
“Like what?”
“Like my love of foreign films, baking, and knowledge of Michael Jackson songs.”
“But you knew all the words.”
“My team sent the lyrics to my smart lens, and I was reading them. Then I quickly took it out as you came over to talk to me. But not everything was staged.”
“What was genuine?”
“My interest in what you had to say.”
Libby laughed. “Do you expect me to believe that?”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything I say. But if you’re so convinced that I’m going to lie to you, then why did you come here tonight?”
Libby opened her mouth, then stopped herself. She didn’t have an answer. “What do I call you?” she asked instead. “I assume Jude Harrison isn’t your real name?”
He shook his head. “Continue to call me Jude, if it makes things easier.”
“No, I want your real name.”
“It’s inconsequential. I’m already buried so deeply in the World Wide Web that by the time you’ve left here—and should you choose to inform the police of our encounter—my real name won’t matter. They’ll be no closer to finding me.”
“I don’t care. You owe it to me.”
“It’s Noah Harris.”
The name felt familiar to Libby, but her head was swimming with too much information to pinpoint from where.
“Why call yourself Jude?”
“‘Hey Jude’ was your late brother’s favourite song. They played it as his funeral. When it reached the chorus, your family rose to their feet, linked their hands in the air, and sang along with the ‘na na’ parts. Soon everyone was standing up and joining in.”
“How dare you! How could you know that?”
“People record everything these days for posterity. It wasn’t hard to find online.”
Libby shuddered at the depth of his research and knowledge. “Of all the people in the world you could have picked, why me?”
“We needed someone with morals and values and who genuinely cared about the welfare of strangers. For the broadcast, we needed a woman who both men and women of all ages could warm to. And for them to invest emotionally in her, she would need to be broken.”
“You think the world sees me as broken?”
“Am I wrong?”
“You’re an arsehole.”
“We had to give our mark a Passenger to throw her support behind. Who better than a man with a sob story and to whom she was attracted? The fact you had our shared loathing for autonomous vehicles was of course a huge selling point and one of the reasons why we placed you inside that jury.”
“You put me there? I wasn’t randomly selected?”
“I assumed you had realised that by now. We wanted a personality who’d question the decisions the other jurors made. I must admit, we thought we might’ve made a bad call after the first day when the others kept railroading you and you gave up fighting back. But by day two and shortly before the first hijack, you came into your own. At that point we knew we couldn’t have asked for anyone better.”
Inside, Libby was still seething. She had long come to terms with her manipulation, but she hadn’t known how deep the lies ran. She felt like an idiot. “But why me specifically? There are millions of women out there who share my views.”
“But there aren’t any who share what you and I share.”
Libby raised her eyebrows. “Which is?”
“When you arrived here, you asked me why I picked this location. From what I gathered during the harvesting of your data, there are three events that’ve shaped who you are. Finding your brother’s body, your boyfriend fathering a child with another woman, and then witnessing three people die on this road. One of those, we have in common.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The three generations of women you watched die right outside this door were my wife, my daughter, and my mother.”
CHAPTER 65
Libby took a step back from Noah and shook her head. “This is another one of your lies, isn’t it?” she spat. �
�You’re disgusting.”
Without giving him the opportunity to defend himself, she turned to make her way towards the door. Behind her, chair legs scraped across the slate floor. Her body tensed and she clasped the handle of the knife tighter.
“Don’t go,” said Noah. “Please.” And for the first time that night, she heard something akin to desperation in his voice. It was enough to bring her to a standstill. “I said you deserved the truth and this is the truth. I swear.”
“I don’t believe you.” She shook her head and turned to see him on his feet. Something was preventing her from taking those few extra steps and leaving the café. Suddenly she recalled why she knew the name Noah Harris. He wasn’t the only one who could keep secrets. She would carry this alone for the time being.
“Stephenie, Gracie, and Mary; my wife, daughter, and mum. I was at work when I received a call from a nurse at Queen Elizabeth Hospital to tell me they’d been involved in an accident. It wasn’t until I got there that I learned I’d lost all three.”
“Their names are in the public domain,” said Libby, her tone deadpan.
Noah lifted the phone from his desk and asked the operating system to open a folder. He moved towards Libby, his arm outstretched to pass her the device for closer inspection. Again, she clenched the knife and took three steps backwards. Noah appeared disappointed by her cautiousness and placed the phone upon the table closest to her before returning to his seat.
Inside, Libby found dozens and dozens of albums, each crammed with family photographs. She swiped through the folders, opening them randomly. One contained images of Noah as a boy with an older lad, along with a younger-looking woman she recognised from the car accident, Noah’s mother, she assumed. Other folders contained wedding photographs, honeymoon pictures, and shots of a newborn child and Noah.
“Watch the videos,” he urged, and she pressed play. In the first, Stephenie was sitting on a bench in a garden, nursing a baby. Her voice belonged to the same woman she had comforted on Monroe Street. Libby would never forget how in her dying breaths, she had only wanted to know that her daughter was safe.
Libby hesitated before she spoke again. “I’m sorry for what happened to them, but that doesn’t explain your role in the hijacking and why you hurt so many innocent people.”
“None of it was supposed to happen. Nobody should have died. Everything just . . . escalated . . . into an event that was completely out of my control. I couldn’t stop him.”
“Who?”
“Alex.”
“Who is that?”
“My brother.”
“And what was his role?”
“He’s one of the people you called the Hacker.”
“Your brother was the Hacker?” she said slowly.
“One of the Hackers. The Hacker wasn’t just one person. The voice you heard was a speech synthesis—an artificial production of the human voice. A handful of people—men and women of different ages, accents, dialects, and languages—took it in turns to dictate what the Hacker was going to say while others controlled what images you saw on-screen. To make what happened a success took a global network of people. Please, will you sit down so I can explain?”
Libby paused. She took another look over her shoulder at the door behind her and determined that if she felt threatened by Noah, she could reach it before he reached her. She softened her grip on the knife and chose a chair two tables away from him. Then she gritted her teeth and tried not to lose herself in the eyes she’d once longed to see again.
“I should start at the beginning,” he said. “Back in the forties, during the Second World War, my granddad started a business building engines for army vehicles. Then, over the years, it diversified and was handed down to our dad. When Alex and I left university, we began working for him as computer programmers creating software and developing radars, orientation sensors, and lidar for Level Five cars. Dad was in line for a multimillion-pound government contract to provide the software and cameras for emergency services vehicles. It was the biggest deal in our company history. And because Britain was going to be the first country to go completely autonomous, the plan was to then sell our software and systems globally. Years after Brexit, we were still a little shaky, but this meant job security for our six hundred employees.” Noah clicked his fingers. “Then, just like that, it was all over.”
“Why?”
“We were good to go—we had the staff and technology in place and we’d expanded our premises. It was Alex who spotted a flaw in the software that’d already been developed by others and that we were now working on. It was like a tiny gap in a fence but a gap nonetheless. It meant the so-called secured, unhackable software could, in theory, be breached. We reported it and we were assured it was going to be repaired. Then a week before the contracts were to be signed, a rival company from India appeared and undercut us with a cheaper tender. We pushed back until we price matched them, but when they did it again, it was all over. We’d have been operating at a massive loss. So the government gave them the contract. We were sure the Indians couldn’t offer a better product than us, and we were right. Because when we reverse-engineered their software, it was identical to ours. They’d stolen our work, and the only place they could’ve got it from was inside the government.”
“Then why didn’t you sue for copyright infringement?”
“Vital sections of our paperwork for our patent applications had ‘gone missing’ once they reached the Intellectual Property Authority. By the time we found out, it was too late. The Indians had fast-track patented our work. Every international lawyer we approached told us we had no chance of winning litigation or compensation.”
“And your dad’s business?”
“Within six months, the shareholders demanded it went into administration, and the workforce was made redundant. Most of our staff lived in and around villages near to the plant, and within a handful of years those areas became desolate. People were forced to move away to find work, house prices dropped so those who stayed were in negative equity, there were rises in alcoholism and even suicides. Some of these people had worked for Dad and his father all their lives. And my dad blamed himself for it all. The guilt and stress hit him so hard that he had a stroke, and within the year he died of complications from pneumonia.”
Noah paused to reach for a bottle on the floor. He unscrewed the cap and offered it to Libby. The dust in the room was making her throat scratchy, but she declined.
“What happened hit my brother harder than it did me,” he continued. “We were both close to Dad, but Alex was the firstborn and a chip off the old block. I watched him sink into a deeper and deeper depression. He’d been diagnosed as bipolar as a teenager and he stopped taking his prescribed drugs and started self-medicating. He was unstable; he became bitter and angry and would lose his temper over nothing. Several times he was arrested for fighting and ended up behind bars for a few months. Then, on his release, he vanished. We couldn’t find him; he wasn’t at his flat, he didn’t answer his phone or reply to our messages. When the police couldn’t locate him either, we began to fear the worst. But as suddenly as he went, he reappeared.”
In spite of herself, Libby was being drawn into Noah’s story. “Where had he been?” she asked.
“He wouldn’t tell me, but there was something different about him. It wasn’t just that he was sober or back on his meds; it was that he’d developed a focus I’d not seen in him for a long time. Eventually he admitted he’d been spending time with a group of what he called ‘like-minded people.’ It sounded like he’d joined a cult or something, but it was a community of hackers he’d found hiding on the dark web. Alex had joined an organisation whose goal was to wreck the British driverless-car industry. He learned we weren’t the only company the government shafted over cheaper foreign tenders. There were at least a dozen businesses that played an early part in the Road Revolution that also had
their products stolen from right under their noses thanks to patent tampering and theft. Alex was encouraged to join and find a way to work together to bring the industry to its knees and create awareness of what they’d been doing to home-grown businesses. And he begged me to become involved.”
“And you said yes.”
“No, not at first. Like Alex, I resented what they did to Dad’s business, but I couldn’t afford to drop everything and take on his crusade. Steph and I had Gracie by then, and they were my priorities.”
“Then what made you change your mind?”
“The day my family was killed by a Level Five driverless car. No one would tell us why my girls died, only that the inquest jury found them to be at fault. It didn’t even recommend reviewing the software.”
“So Alex suggested the hijacking as a way to get revenge?”
Noah allowed the question to hang in the air for a moment before answering.
“No, Libby. That was all my idea.”
CHAPTER 66
Libby’s body stiffened, her anger towards Noah intensifying. For the briefest of moments, she had understood his bitterness towards the government for what it had done to his family business and his frustration at the blame given to his mother and wife for the accident that killed them. But after admitting the hijacking was his idea, her sympathy for him evaporated.
Noah must have sensed the drop in temperature between them as he became ill at ease, rubbing the palms of his hands against his face and shaking his head.
“You have to let me explain,” he began. “At first, the plan was to cripple the cars. All vehicles—no matter what make or model—share some software which lets them communicate within one another, like warning each other if there’s traffic or roadworks ahead. Because we had an input into that programming, we knew how to find our way back in and go straight to these sensors.