The car was a little three-door town car with a tiny engine. The metallic silver paint was bubbling around the wheel rims, but she didn’t care. Cars were cars, distinguishable only by their size and colour. Once in the driver’s seat with the destination transferring from her watch to the onboard computer, she decided to let it drive her out of the city. She liked driving, but motorways were much more fun than the stop-start of London’s crowded streets.
She decided to use the time it took to reach the M25/M4 interchange to review work emails. She searched for any warning signs of what had her boss so worried, but could find nothing. Not that she was honestly expecting to.
I’m always the one who stands up for what’s right, she thought, although the idea niggled her, poking at her for sitting in a car on her way to give up what could change the face of Europe.
She ignored it, searched again, read messages and reviewed conference calls where she’d been dogged or robust. Her boss characterised her as just rude enough to startle and just brazen enough to lead.
Despite a desperate urge to find evidence with which she could beat herself up, on which she could pin the disciplinary investigation; nothing. Her clients were happy, her reviews were good.
As she was finishing up, passing Hammersmith on the A4 before hitting the M4, a message hit the top of her pile from human resources. They were officially informing her of the disciplinary hearing she’d been warned was coming. She was cautioned against deleting any messages, documentation or other files that could be called upon in evidence. They indicated she might wish to have an independent advocate present.
The words that burned her were in the subject line: Market manipulation. A crime punishable by an unlimited fine and jail time, a likely disbarring from working in finance and, at the very minimum, getting junked by her firm.
Her first thought was how she’d cope outside finance, how she’d find another job when it became apparent she’d been fired for dishonesty. It wouldn’t just mean finding a new job, she was facing complete ruination.
I’m innocent, she thought. I haven’t done anything. That should matter. Darker thoughts swirled around her, pushing through, that it didn’t count whether she’d done it, all that mattered was whether they believed it. An old university friend, Lilya, worked in human resources, a director for a small start-up. Over cocktails one night, she’d confessed that the CEO of the firm was an inveterate sex pest, and her job was not to punish him but to protect the firm, which meant finding ways to get rid of the women who tried to bring actions against him.
‘Don’t ever forget this, Mands,’ Lilya had drawled over the fourth or fifth cosmopolitan. ‘HR’s there to look after the interests of the firm. They’ll set you on fire if it serves their purposes. Protecting you is not even on the list.’
Amanda let the car continue driving out into the shires. The countryside passing in a fuzz on featureless green.
Would giving the drive back to Tangle really solve her problems?
She couldn’t conceive of a situation in which it didn’t help her, in which it didn’t return her life to something she recognised. It’s obvious Crisp is fucking with my social credit score, she thought. He’s as much as admitted it.
She fidgeted in her seat, checking and rechecking the time to her destination. She snatched at thoughts of whether she’d made the right choice.
I’d love to do something, she thought, but the only rational choice is to get out of this and let someone else deal with it. Someone with the skills, whose job it actually is to fix shit like this.
Amanda knew what she’d do if she was able, but she wasn’t.
‘Anyone can come up with a good idea,’ she would tell her analysts and associates. ‘It takes hard skills to turn that from something in your head into a successful business.’ I’m just another schlub with a good idea but no way of implementing it, she thought.
Hitting the river Severn, she took control of the car. It had enough power to get her to Tangle and then back to Cardiff, when it would need plugging in for half an hour to recharge the batteries.
After the basin of Cardiff, she dropped off the motorway network and climbed into the Beacons. The roads were smaller, ancient lanes tarmaced with no thought to future drivers. The journey twisted and turned, along high ridges and down deep valleys along crystalline streams.
Amanda grew restless, turned her head left and right, checked her mirror, but passing traffic fell from every few seconds to every few minutes. Rain fell in spurts, bursting onto the land like broken pipes and giving way as bright, hot sunshine erupted through the purple clouds.
Finally, the broken road to Tangle’s cottage—hidden from half the world’s governments—appeared in a gap through a long line of conifers.
Steep banks rose on both sides, heather running to pink and purple all around. The road curved sharply back on itself and then, resplendent in glorious sunshine, the cottage appeared like a gingerbread house in white and brown. Old lead diamond windows stared out at Amanda as she parked the car.
A small gate stopped her driving right up to the porch, so she abandoned the car and climbed over the stone wall, coming down heavily, driving the air from her lungs. She stood gasping, hands on her knees and eyes to the floor when all she wanted was to be staring at the front door for when Tangle appeared.
No one came to see what was going on. Realising her moment might not have passed, Amanda straightened, walked to the door and rapped hard.
‘Tangle, open the fuck up.’
Nothing, so she banged on the door with her fist until the skin on her knuckles scuffed.
She swallowed, breathed and spat. ‘I’m not fucking leaving until you and I have a solid conversation. We’ll start with how you stole my life’s savings and left me all your fucking debts.’
The door opened slowly, the house’s inhabitant only gradually revealed as the light pierced the gloom. His eyes glinted, unchanged from the first time she’d met him.
‘Hi, Amanda,’ he said and she was gratified by the embarrassment in his voice.
Tangle stood as he’d always done, weight on one foot, taller than her by a head. His broad shoulders filled the door, but time hadn’t left him entirely untouched: his hair was grey at the temples, thinning on top when he ducked under a low wooden beam.
Amanda followed him in, a small staircase to her right, doorways on her left and right, Tangle heading back deeper in the house.
‘Not bad for a man who was dead by the time I read his letter,’ she said to his back.
He didn’t respond, opening a door onto a room filled with incandescence. Amanda blinked to find herself in the kitchen, decades out of date, Formica peeling on the counters and smelling of rancid grease and detergent.
The room was bathed in sunshine from vast windows; even the roof was made from glass tiles. It was an addition to the original house—certainly that century—sharply contrasting with the Tudor feel of the rest of the building.
Folding doors were wrenched back, allowing warm air to flood the kitchen with the smells of wild flowers and summer afternoons. A small frame hung in the air over a solid oak table with legs as thick as bricks, projectors set up in a triangular layout on its surface.
Tangle turned around, his dark eyes wide, assessing her from head to toe. She felt read.
‘It’s good to see you.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said without thinking. The drive burned in her pocket but she left it alone. ‘Dead. Dead? You’re supposed to be dead. Why aren’t you dead?’
‘I had to do that,’ he said, without sounding defensive at all. Hearing him not caring enough to justify his actions, she recalled how she’d hated him for so long.
The words wishing him truly dead rose in her throat but she swallowed them down. I’m not a sodding child now, she thought.
‘Who else knows you’re not dead?’ she asked.
‘Depends on who you’ve told.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought I’d done a better job.’
&
nbsp; ‘You rely too much on your own brain,’ she snarked, happy that Ichi had figured him out, satisfied she could take the credit.
He shrugged. ‘If you found me, then who knows?’ He looked at her then, hearing his own words. ‘You’re smart, Dandy, but I checked you out and you never followed up with the quantitative side of your career.’ He looked disappointed, as if she were a child who’d taken the easy path.
‘It took me three years to clear my name and your debts,’ she said, and it was the only reason she was glad he was living and breathing. ‘How could you do that? You just… fucked off and left me to face the consequences of your addiction.’
‘I am an addict, Dandy. I’m not sure making good decisions was at its zenith at the time.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Really?’ He laughed, a sparkling chuckle she’d seen stop a room, entrancing everyone who heard it. She could feel its charm now, but she’d been inoculated years before. ‘I ended up in Dundee. I don’t even know how I got there. It didn’t last long, the locals didn’t take kindly to some posh boy arriving and stealing their caches of the good stuff. I bummed around for a couple of years.’ He smiled sheepishly, his eyes sliding off her for the first time as he looked back in time. ‘I should probably be dead. Years off my life at the very least. But here I am. Hiding again.’
‘But you got clean?’ Amanda didn’t like the sound of hope in her voice, bubbling up from a part of her she didn’t want to acknowledge.
He nodded. She could see the hesitation, but the house around her was clean, smelled of fresh air and cut grass. These weren’t the signs of the Tangle she knew, who could only think of how he could afford his next visit to his dealer.
She fished the drive out of her pocket. ‘This is yours. I want you to have it back so the destruction of my life can stop please.’
He stared at it. ‘Fucking hell, Dandy. You brought it here?’
‘Just take it,’ she said, pleased with the unhappiness in his voice.
‘I can’t. The whole point was that you should get it, that it would be far away from me. Jesus, what have you done?’
CHAPTER TEN
THE DRIVE SAT in her fingers, a nodule of fear and power rendered into electronics. Tangle wouldn’t touch it; he stepped back from her until he ran up against the sink.
‘Why? Why send it to me?’ asked Amanda, holding it like a talisman whose power she didn’t know how to invoke.
‘Sit down, please.’
‘I’ll sit down when I want,’ she growled.
The smile was gone from his face, frozen muscles pulling tight against paling skin. ‘I’ve got nowhere else to go.’
‘Why send it to me?’ she asked again.
He grit his teeth. ‘You don’t get it. This was my fox hole, the place I found where no one would come looking. Yet here you are.’ He spread his hands out. ‘Where am I supposed to go now?’
‘Am I going to have to ask you a third time?’ she said slowly.
‘You’ve not fucking changed, have you?’ Amanda heard no anger in his voice, only despair.
‘You’re the one who fell out of my life, who destroyed everything,’ said Amanda and regretted it immediately; she heard her tone, the hysteria in her voice. She closed her eyes to calm down. When she opened them again, Tangle was looking at her, fear radiating from him.
She knew it wasn’t her fault, but Tangle would never work out how to navigate his way through this.
‘Shall we start again?’ she asked, the words tasting of lead in her mouth.
He said nothing, waited for her to continue.
‘I got the drive, got your letter. I found Ichi—who’s in London, by the way. I know what’s on here, Tangle, know what the GRU are doing. God, I was in Paris the day before the Front Nationale’s latest bombing. I was in Couer Defence; it could have been me. Now it seems it might not have been them, but a false flag operation by Russian agents, right along with the Algerian gunmen who attacked the synagogue in the old city.’ She put the drive on the table. His eyes followed her movement, watching the drive as if it might explode.
‘But why send it to me? I’m not the person who does this.’ She laughed, a sharp, cracking noise she couldn’t take back. ‘You can’t do this either.’ She didn’t accept that he could have changed enough. Once an addict, always an addict. ‘Why not find someone who could deal with it? You knew people who could have helped, when we were together.’ The words hurt her to say.
‘You tried that, right?’ he said, as if from a great distance.
She nodded. ‘I have, but honestly? I’ve been knocking on the doors of idiots with no more preparation than I have. Gatekeepers, designed to filter out the cranks. Guess what? When a single woman with no history or experience in this area walks in and says, “The Russians are coming,” she doesn’t make it through that filter.’
‘That’s not the point. You could have gone public; you must have put this together long enough ago that whistleblowing sites would have had time to verify and publish it by now. You could have saved lives.’
Kumu rose in her mind, the clatter of automatic fire.
‘Do you know about Tallinn?’ she asked. A blank look.
‘I can’t risk connecting with the outside world,’ said Tangle. ‘Each time I do it makes me easier to find.’ He sighed. ‘Not that it matters now.’
‘Ichi’s collective is gone.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, although his tone said nothing of the sort.
‘I don’t know how many death squads they sent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ichi’s the only survivor.’ It wasn’t true, but she wasn’t in a mood to give him anything to feel good about. The words flowed poisonously, corrupting her even as they were aimed at him.
If he’d looked pale before, he was ashen now. He came to the table and sat down, ready to blow away on the slightest breeze.
‘What did you think they’d do?’ she asked, glad to be throwing the question at someone else for a change. ‘You’ve got the downfall of governments stowed in that drive: it would be bigger than the genocide of the Uighurs, Kernov’s Nazism, the default of the Indian government. The Americans want it to save their Union, the Europeans want to save themselves, and our own bunch of shits want it for who knows what reason.’
‘What about the Chinese?’ he asked lightly.
She looked at the ceiling as if considering the question. ‘They’re the one lot who haven’t come to my flat, forced me to drink coffee against my will, detained me at an airport or tortured and shot at me.’
‘Coffee?’ he smirked and despite herself she was glad to see it.
‘Long story. Now, unless you want me to remember just how fucking angry I am with you, answer my question. Why send me the drive?’
‘The Byzantine Generals,’ he said.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Imagine a general.’ He ignored her raised eyebrows. ‘One of seven, charged with the defence of Byzantium. But he doesn’t know if any of the others are reliable. He’s worried that they’ll say one thing and do another. Because although they’re on the same side, they’re also competing with one another, politicking, scheming to be the last one standing if the war goes badly for the city.
‘The general knows he needs to plan for the coming battle, but can’t trust that if he calls for the others to send their armies, that they’ll do as asked. Worse still, it’s possible that at least one of them will say they’ll go and then hold back, dooming the others. Any strategy based on trust is doomed to failure, but he has no way to know which generals are unreliable.’
He stopped talking, watching for her response. Amanda knew the problem, she’d read about it; it was the heart of blockchain technology. She thought through what she knew and then understood. Fury flashed through her like an exploding firework then was gone, leaving behind a smoking trail of disbelief.
She stood, found a glass, filled it with water, took a mouthful and returne
d to the table, where she threw the rest of the contents in Tangle’s face. Over his spluttering she said, ‘Just be glad I’m a grown-up, that I’ve had to deal with real horror since that drive arrived, or I’d have smashed your face into that table until I had no strength left.’
‘I had to know who was coming for it, who I could trust. Don’t you see?’ He wiped his face with his hands, jerking at his top and brushing down his trousers.
‘What I see is someone hanging me out to dry. My social credit score has tanked without explanation. They’re not done with me.’
‘How is giving me the drive back going to help?’ he yelled. ‘Why come here?’
‘I’m done being your bait. You will fix this,’ she said, wanting to pin him with her voice like a butterfly against the wall.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘That drive won’t help you one bit, because I can’t fix this. Why didn’t you just give it to the first government that came calling?’
‘Did you want me to?’ she asked, incredulous.
‘No, of course not. I wanted to see what they were going to do, so I could choose.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said hotly. ‘You didn’t even know about Tallinn. How exactly did you think you were going to monitor everything happening in my life?’
He didn’t respond.
‘My God, you’ve been spying on me?’ She remembered Tatsu warning about her own appliances recording her conversations.
He shook his head. ‘No.’
She stared at him hard.
‘Honestly. I haven’t.’
‘What’s the plan then?’ she asked, fingering the rim of the glass.
‘Look—’ he began.
‘You don’t fucking have one!’
He opened his mouth, but she knew the expression, could see the words about to tumble forth.
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