by Adam Blake
A fair few of them turned out to fit right into that framework. They were historians with published works including a biography of Oliver Cromwell (Nigel DeClerk), a history of religious dissenters in northern Europe (Phyllida Giuliani) and a racy study of the British interregnum called The Headless Kingdom (Stephen Rake). The rest didn’t appear to be famous in any field that Google cared about. They were stubborn enigmas until Rush remembered that they had to have taken other books out of the British Library, too, and would probably still be on the main user database. That gave him full names and contact details, and opened up a lot of other options.
Most of which then closed again, pretty quickly.
When Rush saw the pattern emerging, he swore under his breath. He called Kennedy in a state of barely suppressed hysteria and told her that he had something he needed to talk over with her right then. She told him to meet her at the Union Chapel, so he grabbed his coat and sprinted most of the way there.
She was sitting right under the pulpit, with her backside on the back of one pew and her feet on the seat of the pew behind. Even in a deconsecrated church, that felt slightly shocking to Rush, whose Catholic upbringing furnished him with enough devils and guilt for any three ordinary people.
She was talking on the phone, and judging by the half of the conversation he could hear, it was to a boyfriend.
‘No, of course I miss you. It’s just that I’m still … if I could get up to see you, I would. You know I would.’
Squeak and rattle of the boyfriend’s voice. He sounded shrill.
‘I get that, babe. But I don’t know and I can’t promise.’
Squeak. Rattle rattle squeak. ‘Izzy,’ Kennedy said, interrupting the flow. ‘Isobel. Stop. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’ Rattle. ‘Yeah. Love you, too. Well, hold that thought and we’ll work on it soon.’
She snapped the phone shut and put it away. Rush stared at her. He’d registered that the boyfriend was a girlfriend and was trying to process the information.
‘What?’ Kennedy said.
He pulled himself together and handed her the sheaf of printouts he was carrying. ‘Wales was obsessed with that book,’ he said. ‘God’s Plan Revealed, and the talking trumpet, and all the rest of it. He was trying to work up a list of everyone who’d read it or even taken it out of the stacks. So then I tried to find out who these people were. Some of them are dead, but that’s—’
‘Recently?’ Kennedy broke in quickly.
She was instantly alert, in a way that told Rush this news wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not recently. Why?’
‘Never mind. Go on.’
‘Well, these were people who took the book out back in the forties and fifties. It would be a bit surprising if they were still around. But here’s the weird thing. Some of the names kept coming up in archived news reports. I ignored them, at first – thought they were probably just coincidence. But I started noticing that all the news items were about people going missing. Around about a dozen of the people who were on Wales’s list have disappeared. And you see the dates? They’re all this year, within a couple of months of each other. That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.’
‘No. It sounds like a conspiracy. But mass kidnapping?’
‘A minute ago, you looked like you were ready to buy mass murder,’ Rush said. ‘What’s the difference?’
Kennedy shrugged. ‘Mass murder is part of the Judas People’s regular MO,’ she said. ‘But usually they cover their tracks and make it look like an accident. People going missing means other people going looking for them.’
Rush gave her a bewildered and slightly scandalised stare. ‘You’re telling me they’d kill people just because they happened to read a particular book?’
‘It’s fair to say, even on my limited experience, that that’s the core of their remit,’ Kennedy told him.
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. Rush, I told you what you were getting into. If you want to back out, now’s a really good time. They came after me last night and I was lucky to get away in one piece.’
She told him about the two Elohim and the scary ninja girl. Rush was both shaken and fascinated, and stopped her with frequent questions. When she’d finished, he shook his head as though to clear it.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ Kennedy said. ‘We read the book.’
25
‘This,’ Manolis said, ‘is going to be a ram raid.’
Tillman chewed down on the words and found he didn’t like them much. ‘There’s no way to do it with finesse?’ he asked. ‘Get in, get out again, nobody the wiser?’
They were in the back room at the Pantheon and Manolis was once again sitting at his command deck. He’d thrown away the Linux interface he usually defaulted to and taken the system back to the bare bone of some prompt-and-command structure that displayed in green text on black background moving up the screen too fast for the eye to follow. The screens, plural: there were whole recursive nests of them, opening out of each other and then falling back again in a fractal cascade.
‘I wish,’ he muttered distractedly. ‘But there’s nobody who’s meant to have access to this data in real time. Not even the government. You must understand, Leo, this is not one system of cameras. It’s thousands of systems, millions of individual machines, most of them set up by local councils for traffic control or to monitor public order hotspots. The police, the army, MI5 and MI6 and NaCTSO, they all make search requests on these systems, all the time, and they’re accommodated. But they follow protocols, they go through channels, and they take their time. What we do is different. What we do is to interrogate all the systems simultaneously.’
‘And you can make that work?’ Tillman asked.
Manolis blew out a breath with an audible puff. ‘Damn yes, I can make it work. But not for long. As soon as I’m in, every system will report a breach and every operator will try first to shut me out and then to backtrack the query and find me. This they will succeed in doing, definitely, if we give them long enough. Proxy servers – even the best proxy servers – are not designed to stand up under that level of interrogation. So before they obtain our real-world location, we get what we need and we close down. The numbers, please.’
Tillman gave him a sheet of folded paper, on which he’d written five different registration numbers. Manolis entered them one by one into a small search window at the bottom right of the screen. He did it with scrupulous care, referring back to the paper after each tap on the keyboard. All of the numbers belonged to motorcycles purchased in the UK in the last six months: specifically, all of them belonged to red-on-silver Ducati Multistrada Sports with side panniers and Pirelli Scorpion Trail tyres fitted front and back. Tillman had heard the absolute conviction in Kevin’s voice, along with the wistfulness and the hunger, and would have staked his life on the accuracy of that description. Even in its basic configuration, the Multistrada was an expensive toy, and the machine that had made such an impression on Kevin was bespoke, not off the rack. That was the only thing that gave them a fighting chance on this.
There were 4.2 million CCTV cameras mounted on the streets of Britain, with more coming online all the time. And a very large proportion of them used some form of optical recognition system for vehicle licence plates. So in theory, if they pooled all the log listings for the CCTV camera networks that Manolis could hack into, they should end up with five dotted lines spun out across space and time, with each line representing the path taken by one of the five bikes. Only one of the five lines would intersect the Smoker’s Paradise newsagent’s shop in Fynes Street, Pimlico, and that one would be their target.
Manolis turned a slightly tense face to Tillman. ‘Ready?’
‘What do you mean, am I ready? All I’ve got to do is stand here, Mano. Take it away whenever the spirit moves inside you.’
Manolis tapped a key. ‘
I’m an atheist,’ he murmured. ‘But I’m a very bad atheist. Let’s hope God takes that into account.’
The windows on the screen now seemed to be shuffling themselves like cards in a deck, the stack reshaping itself in peristaltic ripples with each screen refresh.
‘Are we in?’ Tillman asked.
‘Some hold-outs. But yes, mostly we’re in. And wait … wait … yes, already we have a winner, I think.’
‘We do?’
Manolis dragged one of the windows away from the stack. ‘These are central London feeds,’ he said. ‘And this bike – TC62 BGZ – is all over everywhere.’
‘Was it in Pimlico last night?’
‘I’ll tell you as soon as I know. But it was in Clerkenwell the day before. It’s her, Leo. I feel it in my soul.’
‘Your atheist soul.’
‘You think Christians have the monopoly? Yes, my atheist soul.’ Manolis was silent for a moment, then he swore. ‘Buggering shit.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Tillman demanded, but he could see that the deck was thinning out.
‘They see me already. Good security. Too good to take the candy I offer. They’re not bothering to backtrack, they’re just shutting the systems down and rebooting, to break the connection. So …’
‘So?’
‘Ram raid becomes hijack.’ The Greek’s long, elegant fingers flicked at the keyboard with ethereal delicacy. ‘I am now the traffic controller for the whole of the Greater London area. Congratulate me, Leo.’
‘You’re the man for the job,’ Tillman said tersely. ‘Doesn’t it make us easier to find, though?’
‘Yes. Once I let go. Right now …’ Manolis fell silent again, concentrating on the input from the screens and the information flows he was managing to control and merge moment by moment into a single data dump. Tillman said nothing, just let him work.
‘Done,’ Manolis said at last. ‘Almost done. Leo, remove the flash drive, there, from the machine, when I tell you to.’
The flash drive was bright yellow and bore the smiling face of a cartoon duck. It wasn’t an ironic statement, it was just part of a job lot that Manolis had bought cheaply from a wholesaler. Their capacity interested him more than their aesthetic. Tillman took the small wedge of plastic between finger and thumb, then waited until Manolis said ‘Now.’
He tugged the drive free. In the same moment, Manolis spread both of his hands over the keyboard and pressed down four or five keys simultaneously. He held the pose while the remaining windows popped like soap bubbles, one by one, until only one was left. On this one, the actor Wilfrid Brambell mouthed silently against a backdrop of metal bedframes and discarded tyres.
Manolis raised his hands from the keys and flexed his fingers. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Death to tyrants.’
‘Death?’ Tillman echoed.
Manolis shrugged brusquely. ‘Well, not death, exactly. It depends on your opinion of classic British sitcoms. I personally think Steptoe and Son was a highlight. So I’m giving the traffic control computers a free download of the first and second seasons. This should prevent them from completing a trace on us. It’s very hard to swim upstream, even when the stream is running through fibre-optic cable.’
With the command deck effectively offline, Manolis had to break out a battered old laptop to examine the data they’d stolen. His initial instincts proved correct: the licence plate TC62 BGZ had been recorded by a camera in Vincent Square at 11.30 p.m. the previous evening. There was no camera in Fynes Street itself, but that was close enough – and the bike’s movements over the past two days gave ample confirmation. It had been clocked half a dozen times in Islington, on St Peter’s Street, and it had been in Onslow Street that same afternoon.
‘No wonder you lost her,’ Tillman said. ‘You thought she was still on foot. And while you were taking the long way round, she switched to the bike. Probably drove right past you.’
‘No, probably not,’ Manolis protested. ‘Some things I might miss. I wouldn’t miss this bike.’
‘Sorry,’ Tillman said dryly. ‘I didn’t mean to question your professional expertise. Okay, Mano, let’s work out the clusters. I want an introduction to this girl. How close can you get me?’
‘I land you in her bedroom. Soft as thistledown.’
Which made Tillman wince a little, both because the girl was less than half his age and because he’d seen from the blood evidence what she was capable of in the bedroom.
‘I’ll settle for the front door,’ he said. ‘And I’ll wear hobnail boots so she hears me coming. I’m not in the mood for suicide.’
The phone rang and Manolis picked up. He said ‘Yes’ twice, then held the phone out to Tillman. ‘Your friend,’ he said.
‘Which friend?’ Tillman demanded.
‘The one my wife wouldn’t approve of.’
Tillman took the phone. ‘Hello, Heather.’
‘You said to tell you if I was moving.’
‘So where are you moving to?’
‘Avranches. Normandy. A day trip.’
‘Okay. Check in when you get back.’
‘Will do, Leo.’
Tillman rang off and gave the phone back. ‘Caitlin doesn’t have to worry,’ he told Manolis. ‘Heather has refined tastes.’
Manolis shook his head sorrowfully. ‘A pity. We would have been good together.’
‘Throw yourself into your work,’ Tillman suggested gravely.
Manolis did. And Tillman played fifty-one-card patience for three hours while his old comms sergeant worked through the endless data streams, eliminating and collating.
‘Here,’ he said at last. ‘I think I have it, Leo. This is the place where your girl has spent most of her time over the last three days – all of the time when she wasn’t watching you or the refined blonde.’
‘Where is it?’ Tillman asked, putting the cards away. ‘Where does she live?’
‘In a warehouse, apparently,’ Manolis said, with a good deal less confidence. ‘On an industrial estate in Hayes.’ He gave Tillman a doubtful look. ‘Perhaps this is her day job.’
26
Kennedy met with a lot more trouble than she expected in tracking down a copy of Johann Toller’s book to read. Borrowing a computer at the Charing Cross Library, and trying not to disturb the sleeping winos who used the reading room as a flophouse, she was able to find twenty-three copies of A Trumpet Speaking Judgment that had been listed at one time or another in the catalogues of the libraries of the world. That made it marginally less scarce than a Gutenberg Bible.
But actually it was a whole lot scarcer, because once Kennedy started calling around she discovered that every single one of those copies had been bought, burned, stolen or just plain mislaid in the space of the last few years. There wasn’t a copy of Toller’s book to be had for love or money.
Well, maybe for money. She called John Partridge, who grumbled that Kennedy was asking him to search for a needle in a haystack and that he’d get round to it when he could, and then called her back, less than an hour later, to report that he’d found a copy of the book. Or, he added, scrupulously, something almost as good.
‘What does that mean?’ Kennedy asked suspiciously.
‘Well, I tried the obvious,’ Partridge told her. ‘I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to find either a scan of the book or an e-version. Most books that are out of copyright have been put through the OCR mincing machine and made available online. But I hit a brick wall. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. A lot of links that should have led to your book turned out to be dead-ends. The sites had been completely erased. Viral markers on the search engines, nothing at all at the URLs.’
‘So?’
‘Digital slash-and-burn, Heather, my love. Someone went after those sites with malice aforethought, tore them down and then sowed the ground with salt.’
‘Could be nothing to do with our text, of course,’ Kennedy thought aloud.
‘If it was one site, the odds would favour c
oincidence. After half a dozen, you pay your money and take your choice.’
‘And how many times did you come across this, John?’
‘A lot more than half a dozen. In the end, I got lucky – up to a point, anyway – by specifically targeting non-live data. In other words, old stored downloads of data sets from defunct sites or sites that don’t offer direct internet access. And that’s where we come to the good news.’
‘There’s good news?’
‘The place where I found the abstract was the Scriptorial at Avranches, in northern France. They haven’t got an actual copy of the book, but they’ve got a full typed transcript.’
‘And they can send it to me? That’s brilliant.’
‘Hold your horses, ex-sergeant. They absolutely refuse to make the transcript available online or to send it out in file form because they no longer have the original text to compare it with. They used to have a copy of the actual book, but it was ruined in an accident a few years ago. There’s no way of verifying the authenticity of the transcript and the curators don’t want to be responsible for bad scholarship. But they will let you examine the transcript, if you turn up in the flesh. The head of the preservation department there is a man named Gilles Bouchard. He’s a friend of a friend of a friend of someone I used to be very friendly with, once upon a time. For her sake, he’ll bend the rules a little for you.’
‘Did I just hear a subliminal love story, John?’ Kennedy asked. ‘No, I know, a gentleman never tells. Listen, this is great. Really. If I owed you a pint before, I owe you a brewery now.’
‘Distillery, please. My poison of choice is usquebaugh.’
‘Single malt or blended?’
‘Surprise me. But not too far north. The winters are murder on my arthritis.’
Kennedy hung up and made some more calls. The last of these was to Rush.