The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  ‘Something complicated.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A sting of some kind?’

  ‘I’d tell you if I could.’

  Tillman laughed. ‘Damn, Heather. How could you be a murder cop all those years and not get good at lying? You can’t even look me in the eye. Look, you need me, and I’m offering. Of my own free will. You don’t have to say yes or no right now. Just keep in touch, and when I’m done with this other stuff I’m doing, I’ll be available for any kind of back-up or heavy lifting you need done. Where are you staying? Not at home, I’m assuming?’

  ‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘Nowhere anyone could find me.’

  ‘Well, don’t get too comfortable, all the same,’ he warned her. ‘But we should stay in touch, even if you don’t want me elbowing in on your play. Especially if you don’t want me in on it. You’ve got pen and paper? Write your address down for me.’

  So nobody with long-range listeners pointed in this direction could hear her say it out loud, Kennedy realised. She hesitated, but really there was no good reason not to give Tillman the address of the Bastion. If something did happen – if the Elohim popped up in his life, too – it would be better if he could let her know about it quickly. She wrote the name and address of the hotel on the back of a till receipt that she found in her purse. She handed it to Tillman and he thrust it into his pocket without looking at it. ‘We’ll do this again soon,’ he promised her.

  ‘I’ll yell out if I need you,’ Kennedy counter-offered. ‘I’ll leave a message at the café. Stay away from me and away from all of this, until you hear from me.’

  ‘No promises,’ he said. ‘But let’s stay in touch anyway. It’s best if each of us knows roughly where the other is, at least – in case anything happens. So I’ll assume I can reach you at this address unless you tell me you’re going to be somewhere else. Okay?’

  Kennedy nodded. ‘Okay.’

  ‘And I’ll let you know if I find out anything about the people who’ve been tailing me. Might be unconnected, like you said. Just unfinished business from my misspent youth. If it’s not, I’ll keep you in the loop.’

  They said goodbye, but as Kennedy was walking away, he called out to her. ‘Heather.’

  She turned.

  ‘Just like old times,’ he said.

  Gassan’s exact words, Kennedy thought. At the time, she’d disagreed. ‘Yeah,’ she said glumly. ‘Pretty much.’

  20

  From Coram’s, Kennedy went on to Ryegate House. It was past 9.30 a.m., now, but the building was still closed to the world, with steel shutters down over the sliding doors of the front entrance and three police cars parked in a row outside. She rang the bell a few times without eliciting any response at all. Then she went around the back of the building, found the staff entrance that Rush had mentioned and hammered on the steel-plated door as loud as she could.

  Eventually, the racket produced a result. There was a rattling of keys from inside the door. It swung open and a uniformed guard stared blankly at Kennedy from the inside. ‘This is the staff entrance,’ he said coldly.

  She stepped in past him without giving him time to react. ‘I’m on staff,’ she said. ‘I work for Professor Gassan.’

  ‘ID, please,’ the guard demanded belatedly.

  Kennedy showed her driver’s licence.

  ‘I mean, internal ID. Are you on our system? If not—’

  ‘I’ll vouch for her,’ Ben Rush said, walking up to join them in the narrow service corridor. ‘It’s all right, Cobbett. She’s investigating this.’

  ‘I thought the police were investigating,’ the other man said. Being sidestepped didn’t seem to have done much for his mood.

  ‘She’s private. Reports direct to the professor.’

  Rush took possession of her and led her away. ‘Only that would be a neat trick right now,’ he muttered grimly.

  ‘Any word there?’ Kennedy asked him. She was ashamed that she hadn’t tried to call the hospital herself, but survival had had to be the first item on the day’s agenda.

  ‘Nothing good. Lorraine called ten times already. They won’t tell her much, because she’s not family, but it sounds as though they’re having a hard time getting him stable. Police are all over the place, but they won’t give us the time of day. Mr Thornedyke’s still under sedation, and Valerie Parminter is away on a course, so there’s nobody taking decisions about anything – there’s just the police and the headless chickens. Lorraine will fix you up with a day pass, and we’ll take it from there.’

  He took Kennedy through a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells and finally through a double door into the foyer. Lorraine was standing at the reception desk with her fists clenched at her sides, hiccupping out huge, body-shaking sobs.

  The receptionist seemed unable to formulate a complete sentence, but from the fragments she did manage to get out, Kennedy gathered that Emil Gassan was dead, from a combination of toxaemia and blood loss, both probably exacerbated by an unidentified alkaloid on the blade of Alex Wales’s knife. Valerie Parminter wasn’t answering her phone. Maybe she was dead, too, Lorraine wailed. Maybe everybody was dead.

  Rush deadended the switchboard to a call again later message while Kennedy got the distraught woman calmed down a little. Dredging her memory of the staff interviews she’d done, she suggested that Lorraine go find Allan Scholl, the next in the pecking order, and tell him he was in the big chair for the day.

  All of this displacement activity helped Kennedy to keep her own emotions at arm’s length until she felt a bit more ready to deal with them. She’d known this was possible from the moment when Gassan took the wound, so she felt little surprise. What she felt instead was a sickening sense of guilt and shame that she’d let it happen – that Gassan had died because she’d been so completely unprepared. Because she’d blithely and unthinkingly set a trap for a rabbit and had no game plan when she realised she’d caught a tiger.

  Once Lorraine had left, Rush turned to Kennedy again. ‘We won’t get near Alex Wales’s desk,’ he told her. ‘The police bagged everything and took it away, then they went and bagged the desk, too. It’s wrapped up in that plastic they use at airports for busted suitcases, and police tape all on top of that.’

  Kennedy forced herself to think about practicalities. ‘What about his computer?’ she asked.

  ‘They took that first.’

  ‘And his locker?’

  ‘Oh yeah. They’re way ahead of us.’

  It would have been surprising and even mildly scandalous if they weren’t. They’d had the whole night to work in, after all, and this was their job. Kennedy had to remind herself that it wasn’t hers, any more. Not now that it had become a murder investigation. The only sane thing to do was to walk away.

  And spend the rest of her life seeing Gassan take that knife in the chest, in endless action replay.

  ‘You still want in on this?’ she asked Rush.

  ‘Doesn’t matter what I want,’ he told her. ‘In is what I’ve got.’

  Kennedy couldn’t fault the logic, especially now. With Gassan’s death, the stakes seemed a lot clearer than they had the night before. The Messengers were already trying to kill her, and they’d be coming for Rush the moment they figured out he was involved. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Do you know anyone in the IT department here?’

  The boy thought long and hard. ‘I sort of know Matthew Jukes. I mean, we’ve had a few drinks now and again.’

  Kennedy took out her wallet, drew two fifty-pound notes out of it and handed them over. ‘If your computer network has some kind of back-up storage, we may be able to get at Wales’s files that way. See if this Jukes guy will take a bribe.’

  ‘And if he won’t?’

  ‘Roll him and steal his passwords.’

  Rush whistled. ‘Going down the slippery slope real fast here, aren’t we?’

  ‘See what a bribe will do, anyway,’ Kennedy told him. ‘We’ll come up with another way in later, if that doesn’t work.
Call me when you’ve got anything to tell me, and we’ll meet up – somewhere else, not here.’

  She left the way she’d come. The staff door was unattended, but the guard who’d challenged her on the way in was having a cigarette break in the courtyard just outside. Discipline was going to hell.

  21

  After Kennedy left him, Tillman went back to the Pantheon Café. Manolis’s wife Caitlin was at the counter. She gave him a nod that was on the ragged edge of civil and unlocked the door to the back room.

  Tillman knew better than to ask her whether Manolis had called. Caitlin regarded Tillman as belonging to a disreputable past that her husband should have stepped away from long before now, and his recent reappearance in Manolis’s life had been the cause of more than one snarled and muttered argument that Tillman had tactfully pretended not to overhear.

  But Manolis was one of the best covert surveillance men he knew. There certainly wasn’t his equal in London – or at least, not walking around free – so Tillman had approached him, with some qualms, and offered him a one-off payment for a short, probably risk-free job.

  All of this pre-dated Kennedy’s call, but what she’d just told him fitted with disturbing neatness into his own ongoing problems – and that was the real reason why he hadn’t pressed her for further information. He already had some pertinent facts in his possession and was in the process of acquiring more.

  In the back room, he sat at a fly-specked table and played patience with a deck of cards that was missing the two of clubs. It was pretty pointless as a game, but it had a certain value from the point of view of Zen meditation. After three hands, the door opened and Manolis entered, still in his bike leathers and helmet. He dumped a rucksack on the table in front of Tillman.

  Tillman put the cards back in his pocket.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  Manolis nodded.

  ‘She had a tail?’

  Manolis held up his hand, the thumb and forefinger a halfinch apart. ‘A little one,’ he said. ‘Cottontail, like a rabbit. Pretty much definite, Leo. Was the same girl that was following you two nights ago. I didn’t get a clear shot of her face, but the height, the build – identical. Let me show you.’

  He took off his gloves and then his helmet. From inside the helmet he removed, with great care, a small lozenge of black plastic that had been affixed there by two steel brackets clipped to the helmet’s inside rim. At one end of the device, the only break in its smooth surface, there was a tiny glass bulb: the micro-camera’s lens.

  From the lozenge, Manolis detached the even smaller plastic wafer that was the memory card. He booted up the computer in the corner of the tiny room, and slid the card into a reader built into the front fascia.

  A window opened and began to fill with thumbnails. Manolis leaned close to the screen, squinting at the tiny images with furious concentration. ‘Here,’ he said at last. He clicked the mouse and one of the images expanded. It showed the part of Hunter Street that ran behind Coram’s Fields. The image was tilted slightly, which wasn’t surprising, since it had been taken from a moving motorcycle. What was surprising was that there was no motion blur of any kind, only a little fish-eye distortion, because of the curvature of the lens. Manolis knew his kit and what it was capable of.

  He zoomed in on a corner of the image. A woman – Heather Kennedy – was walking away from the camera, her face turned in profile. Fifty yards behind her was a shorter figure, a girl, very slight in build, wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt. She had her back to the camera, her face not visible at all.

  Manolis tapped the mouse and the screen flickered, one image replacing another so that the figures moved forward in jerky freeze-frame. At the same time, the angles and relationships shifted. Manolis had overtaken the girl and continued to take pictures as he passed her. The image tilted even further, but the focus stayed pin-sharp even when he zoomed in to the point where her head filled the screen.

  Her head, but not her face. As though she could sense the camera, she turned away from it, so Manolis had got only the back of her neck, the curve of her cheek.

  ‘I would have gone back for another pass,’ he said to Tillman apologetically. ‘But I didn’t think I’d get away with it. You know, you can just tell, sometimes, if someone’s got their radar out, and it felt like she did. I didn’t want to scare her off. But she looks like the same one to me.’

  ‘Same one,’ Tillman said. ‘Definitely. And she hasn’t let me get a clear look at her face, either. So she was tailing me and now she’s tailing Heather. Did you manage to follow her back to source?’

  Manolis clenched and unclenched his fists, and bowed his bullet head. ‘Sorry, Leo. I lost her. I don’t think she saw me, I think she just has good tradecraft. She zigs and zags a lot, and I was in traffic. She went down Onslow Street. There are steps down from the main road. Steep. I can’t drive down there. And if I ditch the bike and follow, she sees me, she knows why I come. I had to let her go. So then I go round by Saffron Hill, but there’s no sign. She’s already gone.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Mano. What you’ve got is good. Very good. But stay free. I may need you to do one more thing for me.’

  ‘It’s all in the price. You’ve got me for three more days.’

  ‘You’ve given me everything I asked for. If you do this, I’ll pay you a bonus. But I’m absolutely fine if you say no, because the risk profile just changed radically.’

  ‘I never said I wanted to keep my head down, Leo. Only way to avoid all the risks is to be dead. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Nothing, just yet,’ Tillman said. ‘Heather said she was attacked last night, and this girl pulled her irons out of the fire. I want to go look over that ground. Might pick up something that we can use. Because what I really want to do, right now, is to meet this kid and ask her what it is she thinks she’s doing.’

  Manolis shrugged. ‘I’m here when you need me,’ he said. ‘But one thing, Leo. If you need to see your friend again, better make it somewhere else.’

  Tillman was surprised. ‘Why’s that, Mano? I’d have thought Heather would be just your type.’

  ‘Yeah, exactly,’ Manolis agreed. ‘Caitlin thinks so, too.’

  22

  Matthew Jukes caved in very quickly once money was mentioned, but the list of Alex Wales’s files that he handed to Rush furtively in the alcove that housed the coffee machine ran to over fifty pages, and the file names mostly gave no clue at all as to their contents.

  ‘Is there any way to get these files back up on another computer?’ Rush asked Jukes.

  ‘Anywhere you like,’ Jukes said. He was a sour-faced bugger, normally, but the combination of money and an opportunity to show off had rendered him magically cordial. ‘All this stuff is in the mainframe. Even if you save to your own C or D drive, there’s a hundred per cent back-up at the end of the day. That’s standard policy.’

  ‘So you can set me up with Wales’s files, on my own machine?’

  ‘It would be my pleasure.’

  In fact, Jukes went one better than that. He faked a temporary administrator ID for Rush, which gave him full access not just to Alex Wales’s files but also to his usage stats. That meant Rush could see what he’d done and when he’d done it, which files he’d kept open for longest, even which ones he’d printed out.

  And the results were surprising. As Allan Scholl’s PA, most of Wales’s time should have been divided between Scholl’s diary and Scholl’s inbox. In fact, Wales seemed to have gotten that bread-and-butter stuff out of the way right at the start of each day, logging on as early as 7 a.m. After that, he let the emails lie wherever they fell, while he trawled through pages and pages of what looked like gibberish – random screeds of numbers and letters separated by occasional backslashes.

  ‘Database logs,’ Jukes said carelessly. ‘They look like that unless you go in through the client server. You can’t open them up as files like you can with Word docs and stuff like that.’

 
; ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of the architecture. It’s event-driven.’

  ‘Jukes, I have no idea what you just said.’

  ‘That’s obvious,’ Jukes sneered, his natural obnoxiousness bobbing briefly to the surface. ‘All right. Say you ask a question like how many people are there in the world?’

  ‘Okay. Say I do.’

  ‘So what’s the answer?’

  ‘There isn’t any answer,’ Rush said. ‘It’s changing all the time. It’s changed in the time it takes you to ask me the question.’

  ‘Exactly. Same with this stuff. Event-driven architecture just means that the system keeps adjusting itself in real time. External events trigger updates. So every time you ask the question, you get a different answer. You can’t open the file because there isn’t a file. There’s a data set that keeps changing.’

  Rush scrolled through pages and pages of the same kind of nonsense. Occasionally he saw something that looked like a surname with initials attached. MILTONTF. LUBINSKIJJ. SPEEDWELLNM. The rest was impenetrable, just alphanumeric vomit.

  ‘So what question was he asking?’ Rush demanded. ‘Is there any way we can tell?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Jukes waved him up out of the seat and took his place. For a few minutes, he opened windows on the screen and watched while white-on-black text scrolled through them. Occasionally he typed strings of letters in response to cursor prompts.

  What he ended up with was another array of random symbols, but he nodded as though it made sense. ‘There,’ he said, pointing.

  The tip of his finger touched the word USERS?, followed by a dozen or so numbers. Rush could see now that it recurred all the way down the screen, at least once in every two or three lines.

  ‘Users of what?’ he asked.