Jones shakes his head, but rolls back a sleeve to show an elegant stamp on the inner skin of his arm. She lets her teeth flash, the tip of her tongue. ‘Much better than a fob. But Jack, that only makes three. I don’t think Regno Lönnrot counts, do you?’
He looks away. No. Lönnrot isn’t in their club. Lönnrot is a problem. And yet he knows the name, not just voyeuristically from her files, she will swear, but with depth and reference of his own.
‘Which means unless there have been more fatalities I don’t know about’ – he shakes his head: no – ‘there are two learned friends yet to be introduced.’ She raises her voice. ‘Will Ruby and Chloe please step forward now? I don’t think I want a secret audience.’ Her left eye flicks at Jones, a blink without a twin.
Pippa Keene enters first and takes her seat without apology. She is wearing the expression of a doctor considering triage.
‘I’m Ruby,’ she says. ‘Except I’m Pippa, really, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Neith murmurs back, for once reflectively bland.
‘Real names need not apply,’ Jones says. ‘We’re not supposed to be obtrusive in the system. The idea is that we’re commonplace. So Ruby is almost a job title.’
Keene tuts: get on with it. Jones looks as if he’s been caught writing notes in class.
The woman who is Chloe Williams does not sit. She walks in and takes off her coat, hooking it on a rack before turning to stand as before a firing squad, though perhaps it is one she is commanding rather than facing.
‘Bollocks,’ Chase Pakhet says, to no one in particular, and walks around the table to open her arms.
A hug? A hug between friends? Is she trying to hug me?
An alarm goes off in Neith’s head. She turns her body and extends her first finger like a blade between them, so that Pakhet must walk directly on to it to complete the embrace. The older woman flinches a little, then acknowledges the fairness of the rejection. Her expression says: Perhaps later, when you understand.
Neith doesn’t think so. It is Kyriakos who objects now, strongly, who declines in this moment of shifting allegiances and uncertain outcomes to be mounted by anyone. Pakhet is not some teary old dear, to seek such a gesture of motherhood, here and now. It is a move.
‘You helped me,’ Neith objects. She is careful to be offended by the illogic. There is no room in this for her to be plaintive.
‘Yes,’ Pakhet agrees. ‘I did.’
*
Chase Pakhet pours herself water from the school decanter in the middle of the table. The glasses are branded shatterproof, scaled and bloomed with long use in London. She purses her lips as if to say you can’t expect anything better in this place, and wouldn’t we all be happier in a pub?
Neith reminds herself where she stands. She thinks of Emmett’s vile black scars. This is where he was killed, even if the order was not given in this room. It was given by committee and remotely, and these are the people who killed him. Pippa Keene was probably in charge of his welfare – as direct a treason as Neith can readily recall. And then, too, they are the people who hounded Diana Hunter through her own mind until she died, who did the same to Anna Magdalena back when Hunter was still in charge, and to how many others, too, along the way?
She could die here. Go mad here. Be tortured here. Or perhaps they will simply be very persuasive. Perhaps they will have a perfectly simple explanation for everything.
Do not forget.
Do not feel, just because they do not mount their trophies on wooden shields and hang heads on the walls, that this is not a murder house.
‘We are on the same side, Mielikki,’ Pakhet says. ‘I know it doesn’t seem that way, but we are. You’ve still got that shield, haven’t you?’
Yes: first they must disorientate me, cut me off from my sense of who I am. They bring me to a new place, rob me of certainties, of beliefs, of friendships, of time. Then they will offer me a home, encourage me to defect. Drugs, isolation and revelation, and now this. It is well enough done.
Gnomon gives it a solid six out of ten, and has a name for it.
Wetjacking.
Competent, but hardly top tier.
Gear change: not talking to Jones, now, who still cannot look straight at her because he knows he’s a heel. Pakhet, surrogate den mother and not quite right for it. The Inspector leaves her badge in her pocket, and answers the question with a question. ‘Why aren’t you in charge?’
‘No imagination,’ Pakhet says promptly. ‘I analyse, I can’t originate. And people don’t like me running things. I don’t even like me running things. I create friction, and the centre cannot hold, most especially when the centre isn’t holding a pint. No. Tried it, didn’t like it. The shield, Mielikki. Tell me what it means.’
Hunter’s instinct warns her, as if she didn’t already know: once she commits to the shield, she will have conceded a point in Pakhet’s hidden argument. She must not underestimate the strength of it, if it persuaded Hunter for decades and still meets Pakhet’s own standards of evidence. She needs to break the rhythm – and yet the dance is not entirely avoidable. Refuse to engage altogether and they will move on to other modes. Play for time, for opportunity.
Follow the flow, but hold the line.
Like Hunter, and we know how that went.
Pakhet is still waiting, her eyes just beginning to betray impatience. Can’t take too much time over each answer. ‘Protection. Service. Justice. If necessary, sacrifice.’
‘Yes. All those things. But more. It means that you believe. You undertake those duties because you believe in the System, as do we. But we are different, because at a certain point in each of our lives, someone came to us and told us something we did not wish to hear. The System is broken – fundamentally so.’
‘Firespine.’
‘Yes. Firespine. Have you worked out what it is?’
‘A back door.’
‘No. Firespine is the problem, yes. And in its own unhelpful way, also the solution. But it isn’t a back door.’
‘A bug, then.’
‘No. In the words of the old saw, it’s not a bug; it’s a feature. The bug is people. People are messy and inconsistent. They are irrational. When our modern democracies were first put together, their makers assumed that people were ultimately rational. By the time the System was created, its architects knew that this was untrue. We can be influenced in any number of ways. The System, on the other hand, is not like that. The Witness doesn’t peep or gossip, so we trust it to see everything. You work in the Witness because it’s the best way to help people. You are the physical evidence of the System’s guarantees. Yes?’
If she says yes, she will be following the track. If she doesn’t, she will be lying. Neith measures the angles.
‘Yes.’
‘And the System is premised on the idea of a Smart Crowd – the ideal human decision-making entity. A group of sober persons each of whom brings their own opinion to bear on a given matter after due study and consideration in the light of their individuality, the whole alloyed by the use of complex but comprehensible and dependable mathematical techniques to produce an answer that tracks the best one with remarkable accuracy and produces superb outcomes.
‘The devil in the detail is that Smart Crowds are fragile. With a very little adulteration, they cease to be smart at all, and become remarkably stupid, or indeed self-harming. They are susceptible to stampeding by demagogues, poisoning by bad information. They can be made afraid, and when they do they become mobs. They can be divided by scapegoating and prejudice, bought off in fragments, even just romanced by pretty faces. And of course there’s choice architecture: the very thing we use at Tidal Flow to smooth your journey through London or to design serendipitous social spaces in the new developments of the capital. Effectively deployed bad practice under the System is a disaster. It would place the most absolute surveillance machine in history in the hands of villainous actors or mob instincts.’
‘And you stop that from happeni
ng?’
‘Oh no. Not us. The System itself, as designed by its original architects. Firespine is not a back door. It is a fault-tolerant architecture – a protocol of desperation. It adjusts where necessary, pushes people to vote when they are wise and not when they are foolish. It organises instants in time, perfect moments that unlock our better selves, serendipitous encounters to correct negative ones that make us less than we should be. The System knows us all. It knows intimately when we are struggling, when we are sad, and when we are wrong. It leads us to water and it makes us drink.’ She sips from the glass again, and smiles.
‘So, the Fire Judges – you’re what? Heroes?’ A glance at Jonathan Jones. Heroes get the girl, or the boy. Heroes are rewarded with adoration and forgiven their sins. Jones winces. Keene doesn’t like it.
How interesting. Make a note.
‘Hardly,’ Pakhet says. ‘The System does everything. It corrects the direction of travel. It invents ghost people to start the right discussions, counter-movements in the body politic. It engineers encounters for a sufficient number of people who are voting foolishly, individual, tailored experiences in the everyday which organically alter their perception.’
‘Serendipitously.’
‘Yes, of course, Oliver’s side project. Indeed. The System pushes us in the best available direction when we are foolish. It weeds out ugliness. The Monitoring Bill, for example. Two months ago there was simply no chance of it passing. We maintain an irrational boundary at the skin, as if we are not transparent to the machine in a thousand ways already. But the System has evidential studies which say the live-monitoring implant is both desirable and inevitable. It’s a huge leap forward in mental health, in anti-recidivism, in personal safety and personal development. Not to mention convenience. Why should we have to wait twenty years for that, simply because we are attached to an already-illusory notion of bodily sovereignty?
‘And it will allow the machine to make us, individually, better. To wean us off our prejudices, to bring us closer together as human beings – and not as human beings that fight and hurt and hate. The aspirational human society, the one which always seems to be out of reach. Firespine can fix that. Fix us. It makes us better people. Perhaps thirty or forty per cent kinder and more empathetic with one another. So the machine simply nudges, and we stumble a few inches and find ourselves voting the other way, as we should have from the beginning if we were our own better selves. That’s all.
‘It makes us better. Not different. Not less free. Just better.’
She smiles with a rich confidence. Neith will understand. Of course she will. They both serve, after all, the same dream. The perfect government for the perfect state.
‘The Fire Judges are not in control of it. We serve the nation, as part of the process. From time to time the System asks us to draw a line in the air: what is better and what is worse? We do not confer. We think and we vote and we move on, as a Smart Crowd must. You see? We are disinterested. We have no stake. We are not promoted by one choice and nor can our prospects be harmed by another. We are not secret rulers, we are secret civil servants. You’ve been looking for corruption; you thought Oliver was a bad, bad man, but he wasn’t. He was trying to do right, and he was cack-handed, but that’s all. If he’d grown up under the society we are trying to build, he would never have made those mistakes. We are transitional. That’s all. A flawed early release.’
‘And that’s why Hunter’s dead.’
Chase Pakhet’s face twists in genuine sorrow. ‘She was my friend, you know. For years. She mattered here, to all of us. You can’t imagine how much.’
Keene nods confirmation; Jones looks away into his hands. Whatever he finds there does not comfort him. They are deep in the midst of whatever is happening now, with this assertion of commonality. We are on the same side … They think they can persuade her to do something. To forget, most likely: to erase, to obfuscate the truth, forget the betrayal.
Can they?
Hunter’s shape in her mind knows what to do. She must counter. She must require them to extend themselves. If they do not feel pain, they will not believe she has accepted their contrition. They must make a sacrifice to her honour, or they will not believe they have bought it. She shakes her head, feeling the interrogation room chair under her thighs and back, feeling her ears pop as Rebus drops into the dark below the thermocline – and in the action, finds that she knows now what she needs to say.
‘No.’ It comes out quite firm. She looks at Jones, into dark eyes that are begging her to say yes. She says no again. They have to work. They have to work until they think they will lose. They must be more than persuaded. They must be invested in her choice, must push themselves to believe it just as they push themselves to believe their own argument, because if it is wrong then all their sins are vile.
‘Let me tell you what I think. I think years ago, Anna Magdalena tripped over you somehow. She worked at Turnpike, or near it. I imagine she saw something in the numbers that made no sense. She caught Firespine at it.’
Pakhet’s expression gives nothing away, so Neith glowers at Keene and then Jones, then back to Keene. ‘And – because you were afraid that she’d reveal what was happening and the System wouldn’t be able to survive it – you did to her what you did to Emmett. Or Hunter did. You fed the System a misdiagnosis, using Firespine’s access: a non-existent seizure disorder that presented as paranoia, and you brought her in and tried to understand how she’d found you out – but you got heavy-handed and she broke. You couldn’t put the vase back together, not even Hunter. So you created a new person out of the pieces and you called it recovery. You even gave her a job. You were able to get away with all that because whoever built Firespine gave it emergency prerogatives that allow it to override just about every aspect of the System in order to conceal itself. Because if it falls down suddenly, so does the System. Right?’
She looks around again, challenging, and none of them disagrees. She feels a lurch of horror: to come this far into the maze and find not a Minotaur but a collection of cattle mooing and dismayed. There are no grown-ups behind the secret door. There’s just this lot. Which is not to say they won’t kill her.
Keene is an empty suit, and even now she likes Pakhet, so she talks to Jones because he deserves it. She talks about the case and thinks about how much she wanted to eat dinner with him, and lets that bleed into her voice.
‘Diana Hunter walked out on you because she didn’t believe what you’ve just tried to sell me. She knew everything about this place, and she decided you were wrong. This whole setup isn’t just open to abuse, it requires it.’ She stops, turning her head to look at Jones. Yes. She can feel it all now, coming together in her mind, all the fragments rolling themselves up.
‘That’s it, isn’t it? Diana Hunter didn’t just work here. She wasn’t one of you, she trained you. She was your boss. She was Annie Bekele, or as near as. She built Firespine in the first place. And then she had a change of heart and went off and left you. You thought it would blow over. You thought everything would just carry on. But it didn’t.’
So why didn’t it? Why? If Hunter walked out, then so what? They could appoint another Fire Judge in her place and carry on, and by definition nothing Hunter did would make a difference. After all, if she’d been able to do something about it, she would have done it.
And she did do it. She did something. But what?
Neith knows she knows, but she cannot place it. In a moment she will lose the thread, the initiative. They will go back to what they were doing, and then – but she has it. Yes.
‘Hunter took the key. No – she was the key. You can’t access Firespine properly without her. Magic brooms still sweeping, even after the sorcerer’s gone, but no way to stop them or tell them what’s dirty. That’s what Smith wanted: her access.’
It’s almost like catching him with another woman. Jones purses his lips, ashamed.
‘But it was all a trick, wasn’t it? She played you. She turned h
erself in, lured you out, Smith went completely over the top and the whole thing is irrevocable now. She’s dead and you didn’t get what you need. You can’t keep the plates spinning. Lönnrot will see to that if I don’t. What was the relationship between them? What was it like?’ Genuine fascination.
‘There isn’t a word for what she was to Anna,’ Keene says after a moment. ‘We didn’t understand that properly until after Oliver’s death. We thought the change – the new look, the manner – we thought it was symbolic.’ Pakhet rolls her eyes. ‘Just a presentation of grief. But Lönnrot is …’ She stops, and shrugs. ‘Lönnrot.’
Neith peers at her. ‘Lönnrot is Lönnrot. But you still thought that meant Lönnrot was loyal to Firespine.’
From Keene no regret at all, but a brief nod of confirmation. ‘Anna was – is – pathological about the project. It was her world.’
‘And you thought that meant you had Lönnrot on your side. So now the whole thing’s gone to shit. Oh my God’ – she’s catching up with herself, running ahead – ‘that’s what you want me for. That’s why I’m still alive – you want me to catch Lönnrot for you, put the genie back in the bloody bottle. Screw you, Jack! You can tidy up your own bloody mess because I won’t do it!’
In the ensuing silence, Pippa Keene looks over at Pakhet, back at Jones. ‘We may assume that the mellowing effect of the tranquilliser has worn off at this point,’ she says. Neith seethes at her, then at Pakhet, and finally at Jones.
‘I liked you,’ she tells him, inter alia. ‘I really did. And the worst of it is I wasn’t far off. You are all the things I thought you were. You’re just also really, really wrong.’
Jones nods. ‘I can’t say I haven’t considered that possibility, Mielikki. Of course I have. But you’re wrong too.’
‘And how am I wrong?’ Do tell.
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