‘What the hell has Ruby been teaching you?” Rose asked her - her face overcome with exactly the look of consternation El imagined she’d briefly worn herself, on hearing Sophie’s pronouncement.
“Honestly, Mum,” Sophie said, once again managing to sound both exasperated and patronising, “I keep telling you: it’s Sita, not Ruby. Ruby’s not taught me anything in ages. Not for, like, a month.”
“Well, whichever one of them it is, I’m not sure at all that I like them advising you on… on…”
A blush began to form on Rose’s cheeks; deepened, then spread outwards, up and down, until her skin was the colour of pink grapefruit.
“How to meet girls?” Sophie offered, mock-innocently.
“Jesus,” El muttered, under her breath - making a mental note to speak very seriously to Sita, once the Madera business was sorted.
“Didn’t know you were such a prude,” the kid said, grinning. “That either of you were. You don’t need to worry, anyway. She wasn’t telling me how to do it - she was telling me how she does it. I don’t want to meet girls. Or boys, come to that.”
“Hear, here,” agreed Harriet, her own lips now stretched into a grin. “In any case, Sophie - it’s very good advice, and I for one appreciate it, even if these two don’t.”
“You don’t have to encourage her,” Rose chided.
Harriet stood up from the sofa, straightened her t-shirt, ran a hand through her hair and smoothed down the front of her jeans.
“It is good advice,” she said. “And you should be happy about it, too. The more mysterious I appear, the less likely I am to give us all away. Really, in an ideal world, I’d say absolutely nothing at all. Just stand there at the bar like an enigmatic statue until she takes my hand and leads me back to her hotel room.”
“Jesus!” El repeated, more loudly.
“Don’t worry, I’ve heard her say worse,” Sophie told her. “Much worse.”
“And yet somehow, I find myself not remotely comforted,” Rose replied, still blushing furiously.
“Anyway.” Harriet paused; ran her tongue over her teeth, apparently in the spirit of removing any errant cake crumbs that might have been caught there. “Time I was off. Wish me luck.”
“Vaya con Dios,” Sophie said.
Rose looked from her daughter to her sister and then, helplessly bewildered, to El, who could only shrug.
“Much appreciated,” said Harriet, making for the door. “Here’s hoping I can sweep her off her feet, eh? For all our sakes.”
Chapter 21
Kingston, London, May 1998
While Harriet was steeling herself to hit the bar scene, Karen and Fergus, El knew, were preparing themselves for a different but no less daunting challenge.
“Fucking kills me to say it,” Karen had answered, when Ruby had asked her how feasible it would be for her to execute the idea they’d been kicking around, “but I don’t think I can do it. Not on my own. I’d need help. A lot of help.”
“What sort of help are we talking?”
Karen had mulled this over.
“Bodies,” she’d said eventually. “Two more than me, at least. One to work the system remotely and another to come with me and do the business with the alarms while I… you know. A very particular sort of someone, that last one.”
With this, it had been Ruby’s turn to ponder the options.
“Your Fergus,” she’d begun after a while. “Know anyone like that, does he?”
Karen had looked down, thoughtfully, at her own hands; at the tips of her fingers.
“You know what?” she’d said. “I reckon he might.”
The induction of Fergus himself into their ever-growing crew for this particular stage of the job had been, as Karen had put it, a no-brainer. He knew already how his wife and her friends earned their money, so no uncomfortable revelations or explanations had been necessary; he was every bit as adept with technology as Karen - though his interests led him by and large in other directions - and could therefore be trusted to do what needed to be done at Karen’s laptop, even while she was otherwise engaged. Perhaps most importantly, he was so absolutely devoted to her that there had been almost no chance of him refusing to participate.
It was through Fergus’ intervention, moreover, that Karen had been able to recruit the second body she’d sought.
“His name’s Jeremiah,” she’d told El. “He’s Fergus’ best mate from uni. You’ve probably met him - he’s the one who did the ceremony at the wedding.”
El had remembered, though somewhat vaguely, a pale but heavily tattooed white boy in a suit at the altar of the chapel, reading from a sheaf of printed notes as he pronounced Karen and Fergus husband and wife in a reedy Estuary accent. And something else, too; something about his skin, his knuckles…
“The one with the implants,” she’d said. “The LED lights on his hands."
“In his hands,” Karen had corrected her. “They’re subdermal. Under the skin, not on it.”
Like Fergus, she’d explained, Jeremiah was a grinder: a biohacker, dedicated to improving the performance and aesthetic of his body through modification, and specifically the introduction of the lights, magnetics, microchips and other technological paraphernalia that both men believed would make them, in a succession of small and incremental ways, very slightly more than human.
“Does he have horns, too?” El had asked – her imagination conjuring another set of spikes like Fergus’, another pair of metal nubs protruding from another pink-white forehead.
“No.” Karen had snorted. “I told you - the horns don’t do anything. They’re cosmetic - he just likes the look of them. I love the boy, I do, but seriously - he might as well have gone out and got himself breast implants, for all the use they are.”
What Jeremiah did have, and what he’d offered to share with Karen - once he’d committed to the job - was an extensive knowledge of anti-surveillance makeup.
“For security cameras,” Karen had said. “CCTV. You know they’re starting to link it up to automatic facial recognition systems now? Don’t ask me how I know, and don’t pass it on, but I’ve got it on very good authority that at least one local council near here’s planning on rolling it out, end of this year. It’s fucking scary. You get caught on camera somewhere hooked up to a database of faces, and all of a sudden everyone knows exactly where you are and where they can find you. Not just the police, either.”
“And the makeup… hides your face?”
“Sort of. Facial recognition algorithms look for patterns in images - like we talked about last year, yeah?”
She’d meant the con they’d run in San Francisco, El had known; the one that had necessitated that Karen create a facial recognition software package of her own, albeit one that was more or less entirely non-functional.
“Sure.”
“Well, same principle. What the makeup does is disrupt the pixels in the images, so you - or the database, probably - can’t tell one face from another. Or, if the makeup’s really good, from a different sort of image altogether. That’s the problem, when the technology’s as rudimentary as it is at the minute - the algorithm can’t see something and intuit, the way a person would if they saw a face.”
“And you’re using this makeup to stop the cameras recognising you?”
“If they’re there… yeah. This Pasadena bloke… odds are, he’s paranoid as fuck. I would be, if I were him. And if he’s paranoid and he’s clever, then he won’t be relying on any existing CCTV network - he’ll rig up his own, around the perimeter of his gaff, and hook it up to every fucking database going. So, assuming the cameras are there… we’ll need to find a way around them.”
“And you couldn’t just wear a balaclava? Or, I don’t know… a coat with the hood up, or something?”
Karen had sighed and shaken her head, the gesture a pitch-perfect replica of the one Sophie so often deployed when El or Rose or both of them said something so irredeemably foolish she felt it barely worthy of a r
esponse.
“And look like we’re about to rob the place?” she’d said. “Yeah - great idea that’d be. No, what you want is us looking like we’re out for a walk, or we got lost on our way somewhere. We go properly wild with the makeup, and chuck on a bit of glitter or whatever, and if anyone’s looking - if he’s looking, Pasadena - then he’ll think we’re on our way to a fancy dress party. And by the time we’re close enough to him that he might be starting to get suspicious, we can knock out whatever cameras are left ourselves. You know - manually. By hand.”
His proficiency with camouflage makeup, though, wasn’t the only skill Jeremiah would be bringing to the table.
“Biometrics,” Karen had related, later on - the day before Rose’s birthday, when Karen and Fergus and Jeremiah had been preparing to get their own efforts underway.
“Biometrics?”
“Yeah. Trust me, if this Pasadena’s anything like me, and I reckon he is - there’ll be some sort of biometric security in place at the house, at the very least on the doors. Fingerprint recognition on the locks, maybe. Jeremiah can get us ‘round it.”
“How?”
Karen had looked, suddenly, very shifty.
“You’ll keep it to yourself, if I tell you? Like, really to yourself?”
“Sure.”
She’d paused; taken a swig of the isotonic drink she’d been sipping from.
“He can clone them,” she’d said. “Fingerprints. As long as he can get hold of a copy of them - and they’re everywhere in the States, Americans fingerprint bloody everyone, all the time - then he can clone them. He uses… I’m not even sure what material it is, to be honest with you, he’s never even told Fergus. Some sort of cured resin, maybe. He hacks the fingerprints, downloads them, uses a 3D printer to etch them onto the material… and what he ends up with, you can stick on top of your own fingertips like an extra layer of skin. Like… you know those plasters you get for blisters and verrucas? Like that. Or like a contact lens, but for your fingers.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Tell me about it. That sort of technology… it’s properly innovative stuff, even by my standards. Christ knows how he got it. Or how he built it, knowing him. He’s not…”
“Wait a second,” El had interrupted her, remembering how Hannah had described Pasadena. “How would Jeremiah get them, the fingerprints? I thought nobody even knew this Pasadena guy’s real name, let alone had access to any of his records.”
The shifty look had morphed, almost immediately, into a broad, impish grin.
“That was then,” Karen had answered, obviously delighted with herself. “Different story now, innit?”
“You found him? Found out who he is?”
The grin had widened further.
“Oh, yeah. He is a clever fucker, don’t get me wrong. But me and Fergus… turns out, we’re cleverer.”
Pasadena, she’d told El - alias James Huang, Leo Zhang, Jacob Li and a dozen other online pseudonyms - had been born thirty years earlier in Burlingame, Northern California, not far at all from what would become Silicon Valley. His birth name - and the one still listed on his passport and tax returns, to Karen’s surprise - was Stuart Ma. He’d studied computer science at MIT, then had started, though hadn’t completed, graduate work at CalTech in Pasadena - the source, Karen had speculated, of his nickname. He had been an IT security consultant, she’d discovered - though only briefly, leaving the role after six months to, in effect, disappear into the digital ether.
“Nobody else seems to have rumbled who he actually is, which is interesting,” Karen had said. “And when I say interesting, what I mean is useful. Really fucking useful.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah. You know how Ruby’s always talking about finding people’s levers?”
El had nodded.
“I think - I think - we might have one of his.”
Fergus, they’d agreed, would stay behind at the house in Kingston - working remotely in their basement Batcave, while Karen and Jeremiah headed out into the encroaching night.
For this particular stay in the U.K., Pasadena had landed on the most rural part of London he’d likely been able to rent: a remote farmhouse built on a patch of countryside not far from Osterley Park, surrounded on one side by woodland and on the other by a disused field.
They drove most of the way out there, crossing south to west in Jeremiah’s Beetle before pulling in to a car park close to the Osterley Underground and tackling the remaining mile on foot, white leather holdalls on their backs and Pierrot clown costumes complementing the dazzle camouflage slathered across their faces. This appearance attracted only a small amount of attention from the commuters milling around the station; almost certainly, Karen claimed later, because she’d been right, and everyone who saw them had leapt immediately to the conclusion that they were indeed on their way to a fancy dress party. What else, after all, could two young people possibly have been doing in the west London suburbs on a Tuesday evening, dressed like auditionees from an am-dram revival of the Commedia dell’arte?
She’d been right about the security too, she told El. By whatever means, Pasadena had arranged for the installation of a sophisticated array of private CCTV cameras around his property - their lenses keeping watch not only on the farmhouse, but on the adjacent field, the woodland and the stretches of road that circled both. For the benefit of the latter cameras, she and Jeremiah had put on a show: laughing and staggering and exchanging friendly shoulder-punches in the manner of the drunk party-goers Pasadena, if he was watching the footage, would likely believe them to be. The other cameras - the ones around the farmhouse - required somewhat more sophisticated tactics.
“He’ll jam them,” Karen had said, meaning Jeremiah. “He’s got this… let’s call it a signal-blocker, shall we, for argument’s sake? It’s not an even slightly accurate description, but it’s a good enough analogy if you don’t want me to spend all day explaining how wireless signals work.”
“Wireless?” El had responded - feeling every bit as out of her depth as she always did, whenever Karen got technical.
“I’m not talking about an actual radio, before you ask. Not in the way you'd mean it. Wireless… it’s a way of transmitting camera signals over a network, instead of along a cable. Over a radio band - hence the name. If Pasadena’s not been in town long, he’s not gonna have had a chance to dig up the ground and lay a load of cables, is he? So his cameras, and there’ll be cameras… they’ll have to be wireless. He’ll have to set up his own network and relay the footage over it. The commercially available stuff, what bit of it there is… it doesn’t run fast. The images it sends are more or less unwatchable, they’re so jerky. But if the bloke knows what he’s doing, he’ll have a tinker. Find a way to make it run faster, so he can get his cameras working wirelessly.”
“And Jeremiah’s going to block the signal?”
“He’d better. He’d fucking better. Or we’re all fucked.”
Fortunately for all concerned, except possibly Pasadena himself, the signal-blocking had gone smoothly: Jeremiah’s jammer, a handheld black box that called to mind the fruit of a union between a cigarette packet and a hedgehog, apparently proving powerful enough to disrupt the farmhouse’s security cameras with ease.
The backdoor lock - biometric, as Karen had predicted - had given them even less trouble: a single scan of the duplicate fingerprint that sheathed Jeremiah’s index finger like a tiny condom proving sufficient to grant them access to the farmhouse’s interior.
All they had to do, after that, was deal with Pasadena face-to-face.
Chapter 22
Mayfair, London, May 1998
Madera was in London; she had to be, if Carruthers and Pasadena and the acrobat girl had bedded down already.
Unlike her colleagues, though, Madera appeared to have paid cash for everything she’d bought since arriving in the city - and had left, or so Karen insisted, not so much as a traceable receipt for a cup of coffee in her wake.
Which made finding her nigh-on impossible.
In the end, after sweet-talking the porters, concierges and night receptionists of every high-end hotel she could think of and coming up empty, Kat settled on a change of tack – one which seemed to satisfy Ruby, once she’d run the idea past her.
Clearly, Kat couldn’t go to Madera. But maybe, just maybe, she could get Madera to come to her.
Now, Madera hadn’t sounded, from that bitch Hannah’s description, like someone who’d suffer anything less than five-star quarters - so unless she owned property of her own in the capital, and was holed up there for the duration, her accommodation options were pretty finite. Which meant that at least one of the hotel staff she’d spoken to must have been lying; likely because Madera had paid them handsomely enough to keep their silence, even in face of Kat’s most merciless charm offensive.
But there were other questions she could ask. Other clues she could drop.
She’d visited ninety-three hotels that first time, a whirligig of flying visits that had taken her the better part of three days. Three very uncomfortable days: her hips aching and her legs seizing and cramping whenever she dared to put weight on them and not her walking stick, worried sick that someone - maybe Carruthers, maybe Madera herself - was going to take a shot at her from a high window or run her through with a knife whenever she was outside in the open.
She was more selective, the second time around; restricting her interrogations only to those staff members – twenty-two of them, in total - who’d struck her as awkward or evasive or prevaricating at first blush. All of them had been hiding something, she was sure - though she knew from experience that a little prevarication was sometimes par for the course, in high-end hospitality circles. She just had to hope that one of them was hiding Madera.
The Remembrance Page 18