dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Web chatter says that they’re gearing up for something big, but chatter on the Internet is as likely to be as wrong as it is to be accurate.”

  “Every fifth or sixth word of that made sense to me,” Abernathy said, “But it pretty much matches the answer I have on the card, so would you like to gamble for tonight’s grand prize?”

  “Oh gosh, dare I?” Ani said. “Well, I came here with nothing…. I’ll gamble.”

  “Excellent. And here is the big money question: Which fledgling member of YETI is going to be helping infiltrate victorious with a view to discovering just what lies behind their seemingly random reign of digital terror?”

  Ani feigned the excitement of a game show contestant, hand up in the air and shifting from foot to foot as if she needed to visit the toilet: “Oh me! Pick me! Please, pick me!”

  “And tonight’s lucky winner is: Ani Lee.” Abernathy said, grinning in spite of himself.

  “I never win the bloody holiday.” Ani said, gloomily.

  “Not so fast, there.” Abernathy said. “There is a holiday that comes along with this prize. Think of a romantic location.”

  “Rome? Venice? No, Paris.”

  “Close.” Abernathy said. “Try Yeovil.”

  “Where?” Ani asked.

  Abernathy’s grin told her everything she needed to know.

  They grabbed a coffee in Starbucks and stared at each other over the table, somewhat awkwardly. Of course the awkwardness was, she guessed, pretty much a constant feature of Eddie’s life; hers, on the other hand, was carefully cultivated. Again with the acting.

  Since joining YETI, and moving to London from Cambridge, she’d found most of her teenage awkwardness had pretty much disappeared. Being a handpicked member of a teen spy ring had that effect on a person. Lodging with Gretchen—who was, quite simply, the coolest, cleverest person that she had ever met—and finding herself treated and listened to as an equal, had sanded off the last few corners of her self-consciousness.

  It had been the kind of self-consciousness that Eddie was twitchy with now. It was as if his heart were pumping it around his blood stream.

  He’d make a terrible operative. He was far too jumpy. His demeanor pretty much screamed, “I HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE!” In the privacy of their bedrooms, at the launch pad of their laptops, these kinds of misfits saw themselves as kings of all they surveyed. In life, they tended toward socially dysfunctional.

  “I have a boyfriend,” Ani said. “I mean, I’m flattered and everything …”

  It was a nice, awkward opener for a conversation that had stalled as soon as they’d sat down. It made her seem naïve, but also put the idea of her as a girl rather than just a hacker front and center in his mind. It also put him slightly on the defensive, which was always handy.

  “Oh,” he said, following it up with a swift trip around the more common sounds of hesitation. “Um. Well. Er.”

  Ani waited. Sense would issue from that mouth at some point, she was sure of it.

  “Look,” he said, “I think you’ve got the wrong idea. I’m not interested in you that way …”

  Wickedly, and for no other reason than the sheer heck of it, Ani pretended to be insulted. She frowned, narrowed her eyes, looked downward—and thus, downcast—as if his dismissal had wounded her.

  “I-I mean, of course I’m …” Eddie’s attempt at freeing himself from his tangled feelings tailed off, presumably to prevent causing more offense than he already hadn’t.

  Eddie tried again. “I, er, belong to a group.”

  Of all the ways she’d been expecting to get him to reveal that, pretending to be slighted hadn’t even been on the list. Perhaps she was even better at this than she thought. Or Eddie was just lousy at keeping his mouth shut.

  She looked up again, but still played dumb. “I don’t have much time for music,” she said. “Would I have heard of you?”

  Eddie laughed. “Not that kind of group. Have you heard of victorious?”

  Ani did a measured double take.

  “The hacking group?” she asked, making sure her tone contained enough awe and surprise to sell it. “Freedom fighters of the information superhighway. What about them?”

  “Them is a dataset that contains me,” he said. “And judging by your skills, it could include you, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t be modest. You killed it back there. You were in an Instanto email server. Goodness only knows what havoc you’d have caused if I’d have left you to it.”

  Ani looked coy.

  “I can get into places,” she said. “I just never know what to do when I am in.”

  “We can help you with that.”

  “You can? But I’m going back to London tomorrow …”

  Eddie grinned.

  “You’re from London? All the better. victorious has cells all over, you know, but down here, we’re thin on the ground. Plenty more of us in London. Give me your deets, and I’ll pass them on.”

  “Do I have to take some kind of test?”

  “I’d say you just passed,” Eddie said. “With an A+.”

  When they were finished, and Eddie had left the coffee shop, Ani took out her phone and speed-dialed Abernathy.

  He answered before she even heard it ring.

  “Ms. Lee,” he said, “how delightful to hear from you. I’m told the weather is lovely in the West Country this time of the year. Do I take it we were successful in our endeavor?”

  “Mission accomplished,” Ani said. “I’m in.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY WALK INTO A BOWLING ALLEY

  Joe Dyson stopped in front of the building and his mouth twisted downward into a frown. He thought two things in rapid succession. First up was: Bowling? And then: I must be in the wrong place.

  Even though the address matched the one he’d been given by the shifty-looking guy with the thatched eyebrows, he was still sure he’d made a mistake.

  He thought, again: BOWLING?

  The alley was on the edge of a set of sinister industrial units on the dark side of Luton, and it was rundown and badly in need of a new coat of paint. Like the rest of Luton he’d seen, actually.

  It was called Midwest Lanes, although “Midwest of what?” was a pretty valid question. It had a vague 1950s American vibe, but like something you would come up with if you were trying to capture that feeling but had never been to the U.S. (Joe, of course, had. He’d been born and raised there), or seen pictures of the 1950s, and were relying instead on half-memories of shows like Happy Days, but you’d never actually seen the shows and were reduced to listening to the descriptions of a slightly crazy uncle. So, in order to really commit to this ludicrous project, you decide to deliver the final absurdity:

  You put the resulting folly down on an industrial park in Luton.

  And left it to rot, by the look of it.

  Cracked pavement set up trip hazards that—anywhere else—would be magnets for litigious chancers. There was a lot of malfunctioning neon lighting and bad paintwork that had been bad even before it had started to peel.

  Joe approached the front, pushed hard and the IN door squeaked open. He waited a couple of seconds, preparing himself, and then stepped through.

  Inside, the lighting was poor, the carpet was worn and caught his shoe soles, and the air was full of cleaning chemicals that failed, somehow, to cover unpleasant odors from the distant past: beer, tobacco, and dead dreams, presumably. Off to Joe’s left were the bathrooms, to his immediate right was the reception desk. Straight ahead was a café that had seen better days: a greasy spoon, heavy on the grease, and you probably needed to bring your own spoon. A group of youths sat on chairs and tables in the café, and they watched him with suspicion from the moment he entered the place.

  Seven of them. Not good odds if things turned bad, but better odds that one of them knew the answer to the question that had brought Joe here in the first place.

  Better not get into a fight, then, he thou
ght, then crossed the foyer toward them.

  Sometimes, YETI missions weren’t about saving the world or even putting bad guys behind bars; they were about doing something small, just to help someone out.

  Abernathy was funny like that.

  For every few officially sanctioned missions, there was one like this: off book, unauthorized, more to do with righting a wrong than impressing his bosses in Whitehall.

  Abernathy had come around to Joe’s place on Mortimer Street when Joe was grabbing some down time. Playing on one of his pinball tables and racking up a score that—at long last—stood a chance of overtaking Ellie’s from a few weeks back.

  Joe had celebrated the bump in salary he’d gotten in the aftermath of the Palgrave affair by investing in a Stern Walking Dead table, the one with zombie heads and a crossbow. It turned out that Ellie—another definite plus in the wake of the .wav business—was a natural when it came to pinball. She’d been ribbing him about it for a while now, and Joe thought it was about time to play catch-up.

  Abernathy had let himself in, and Joe quit the table—and the multiball he’d just triggered—nodding a greeting.

  “I assume we have Ms. Butcher to thank for the sudden attention to cleaning.” Abernathy said. “How is everything going?”

  “Not bad,” Joe said, gesturing at the oversized sofas that Abernathy had footed the bill for. “Is this a social call, or have the YETI headquarters been compromised again?”

  “Ha ha.” Abernathy sat down, still ramrod straight and surely not taking full advantage of the plush upholstery. “I have a little job for you, but it’s not quite YETI.”

  “A charitable cause?” Joe asked. “Where and why?”

  “A friend of a friend threw this my way. I tried to get the official stamp for it, but even though it didn’t make so much as a ripple in Whitehall, I still believe it to be worthy of our attention. Condensed version: a concerned social worker in Luton, of all places, is worried that a few of the teenage runaways that they have sleeping on the streets there have dropped off the radar.”

  “Maybe they’re just trying out a new town? Or a new city? Or a friend’s couch …”

  Abernathy tilted his head and raised an eyebrow.

  “I guess that’s the question you need to answer, isn’t it?” he said. “The Luton train leaves from St. Pancras in”—he consulted his wristwatch—“thirty-five minutes. You’ll need an overnight bag.”

  You could tell a lot about a group dynamic by observing it as you approached. If you watched carefully, watched the group’s initial movements, saw them operating under primal pack rules, you could usually figure out the pecking order of the individuals within the system. You got to see who was the muscle, who was the brains, and who was its heart.

  The “muscles” flexed, because their first reaction to a newcomer was always protective. They would change their body language to reflect their defensive instinct—often subtly—telegraphing which way they’d go if it looked like trouble was coming. Their bodies would shift in one of two directions: either toward the newcomer, or away from him, depending on the kind of leader that beat at the heart of the pack.

  If their alpha was made of intellect and strategy—if his control over them was primarily cerebral—then the muscles, move would be forward, so when push came to shove, they’d be ready to put themselves between the interloper and the alpha of their particular pack, primed to act as a buffer for any violence that ensued. If the alpha was, on the other hand, defined by his own violent tendencies—if his control over the pack was one of physical threat—then the move would be backward, to flank the alpha and offer support in the teeth of the oncoming threat while maintaining silent deference to his alpha status.

  The “brains” of the group would remain still, analyzing the situation, but not committing to pack behavior yet. They would run scenarios, study the intruder, work out his weaknesses and strengths, and only then would they start to move to support the outcome of the best simulation they had played out in their heads.

  The “heart” was always the alpha, the nucleus around which the other electrons circulated. If he was a thinker, then he would usually relax, safe behind the physical screen that the rest of his pack would provide. If he was a fighter, then there was a high probability that he would tense and puff up, ready to lead his “dogs” into battle.

  None of this would happen consciously, of course, because pack structures actually existed below the level of thought, more of a reflex or an instinct. It happened in a very brief window of time, and before the conscious mind kicked in. It was subject to immediate changes and modifications, dependent on far too many variables to calculate: the demeanor of the approaching individual, the attitudes or moods of any members of the pack, the safety of home court advantage, whether they’d just eaten, whether their leader was riding high in their opinion or whether his reign was at its nadir. The group would pass beyond meaningful structural analysis when minds got in the way, becoming amorphous and unreadable.

  By the time that happened, though, Joe had already gotten a pretty good read on the group.

  The alpha was a chisel-faced, slender white guy, maybe eighteen or nineteen years on the clock of life, with ratty dreadlocks in his bleached, to orange, hair. A pierced nose and two facial tattoos—a stylized 666 to the side of his left eye and a jigsaw puzzle piece on his cheek—suggested a level of not-giving-a-damn that sent alarm bells ringing in Joe’s mind. The guy neither tensed nor relaxed as Joe approached. If anything, he looked utterly indifferent.

  Joe watched the other members of the group to see how they reacted, instead.

  The remaining six kids, ranging from short and fat to tall and gangly, made the tiny movements that Joe had pretty much been expecting, with the “muscles” flexing and the “brains” assessing. There were four figures that really needed to be watched: three muscles and the alpha. The other three betrayed their fear—and with it, their lack of confidence in their own abilities if things got violent. One of them even flashed his eyes around, as if looking for an exit route. It still left four kids who might be inclined toward causing Joe immediate harm, but the “muscles” were back-up-the-alpha types, and that meant an extra second or two in Joe’s favor as they organized themselves into a fighting formation.

  Joe stopped in front of the group, gave them a warm smile, manufactured the pheromones that advised them to treat him with caution and said, “Hey, guys. Look, I’m sorry to drop in on you like this, but my name’s Joe and I heard that you might be the ones to come to if I need a little … if I could, maybe … if you … Aw, heck. Look, I need to buy some kids. You got any you could sell me?”

  He’d started with the social worker who’d flagged the disappearances, but it uncovered little more than Abernathy had already told him. That was one of the things about Abernathy: he was thorough.

  The social worker had been a determined, compassionate woman fighting against impossible odds. Budget cuts had only made it easier for kids to fall through the system’s cracks, and the only safety net that existed for them was life on the streets. Heck of a safety net. It made Joe wonder just when it was that the country lost its heart.

  Joe got only background details on the missing kids: six horror stories that you’d think came from a lurid paperback novel, or from Mayhew’s study of Victorian society, “London Labour and the London Poor,” but surely not from twenty-first century reality. They were biographies that differed only in the types of abuses and tragedies suffered, the drugs and violence endured, the moment that all hope was lost and dreams dashed.

  Joe had promised the woman that he would try his best to find them, and then he’d hit the streets.

  The word homelessness—or its cowardly double word twin, rough sleeping—did little to describe the world that Joe encountered. Fall down all the rungs of the UK’s socio-economic ladder and you landed, not on a soft mattress of second chances, or halfway house security, but rather on the cold concrete and asphalt of the city street
s.

  Joe had spent his first day talking to the homeless people of Luton, listening to their stories and trying not to let the details of each person’s personal tragedy play on his conscience. Compartmentalization. Keep the political and emotional facets of the problem to one side, and concentrate on the question Abernathy had sent him here to answer: Where did the six homeless kids go?

  His entrance, and conversational gambit, took the group by surprise, and when they didn’t reply immediately, Joe pointed to the alpha kid’s tattoo.

  “Brave choice,” he said. “A 666 tattoo. Brave, because it’s six-six-six, and, I guess, because it’s on your face.”

  “You know what it represents?” The kid asked, trying for menacing, but missing by a yard, or so, because Joe had him rattled.

  “Sure. It’s what you get if you add up all the numbers on a roulette wheel.” Joe grinned. “You in charge here?”

  He’d quickly discovered that kids disappearing from the streets weren’t as rare occurrences as you might think. And most of those disappearances had a pretty straightforward explanation behind them. There was a big difference between the types of homeless, for one thing. There were long-term and short-term street people and, luckily, most fell into the latter category. Being without a roof over their heads was a transient phase for these folks: kids found sofas to surf on or caring individuals who took a risk by putting them up or they discovered that squatting in empty houses was a better alternative to cardboard beds in shop doorways.

  Others left, turning their backs on the city that had turned its back on them.

  So there was a chance that the six names on his list could have found their own ways out of their personal predicaments.

  Except, of course, it was six names.

  All teens.

  All had disappeared within weeks of one another, and no one had heard a word from them since.