Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle
Page 25
She wishes Sam was here. Sam was the one who sussed out that the minister was behind the trolls. Or maybe he made a mistake, but it was real when he said it.
She needs to ask a question so she does.
‘What was the slogan?’
Not for the first time, Bethany found herself disarmed by this purple-haired sprite.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘On the picture. With the tits. That you wouldn’t repeat.’
Was this a test? To see if she’d been telling the truth? Ask for an unexpected detail: that’s how Colombo cracks a lie – Just one more thing that’s puzzling me. But no, Dani wanted to know: could not tolerate a gap in the information she’d been presented with.
As Bethany began to answer, a crash burst into the room. The door bounced hard against the table, which screamed sideways across the floor and toppled to Bethany’s right, landing on its side, throwing the cardboard box against the wall. Another crash and the door burst inwards, smacking the concrete.
‘Minister! Down!’
‘Shit!’
Dani stumbled backwards to the left, away from the door. DS Raeworth was framed in the doorway. A military stance, legs firmly apart, hand under wrist and a pistol trained on Danielle, who backed into a set of empty aluminium shelves.
‘Armed Police! Do not move!’
His voice was a klaxon. Danielle shivered like a whippet. The firearm hovering in front of the policeman was horribly three dimensional. There was a sodden gap in time while Bethany found her voice.
‘There’s no call for this, Detective Sergeant. This situation is under control.’
She adjusted her hair and clothing to what she hoped was a semblance of order, and stood.
‘Ms Farr and I are speaking.’
The policeman’s eyes didn’t leave Danielle.
‘With respect, Minister, this does not look like a controlled situation. Two of my uniforms have just been assaulted. Miss Farr here has recently been photographed in possession of firearms and has evaded officers in the last twenty-four. DO NOT MOVE!’
Bethany jolted back but the command was directed at the girl. DS Raeworth hadn’t moved or changed expression while he spoke. Nor had his eyes left Dani. From his sudden change of tone Bethany saw what she was generally protected from, bunkered in authority. What others suffered. Without lowering the gun Raeworth pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and spoke rapidly into it. It returned a strangled burst of static: they were too far underground for the signal to find his colleagues. He hooked it back onto his belt.
Bethany pushed away an uncooperative lock of hair and stepped forward. Nothing to fear. Danielle stared like a caged beast.
‘Officer, I have this,’ said Bethany, taking another step towards him, reaching for his outstretched arm.
Before she could touch him, a number of things happened. Bethany couldn’t fix their arrangement in time.
The officer stepped sideways towards the door and away from her hand, keeping a bead on the girl.
Outside the door a man skidded into view – the red-dreadlocked ringleader of this morning’s protest, clothed again and hurrying from some pursuer. He clocked Bethany, then the policeman, then the gun. He froze and let out an astonished huh!
The policeman’s attention flicked to the sound. His gun may have wavered in that instant.
Dani lurched forward from the shelves. Unclear whether she was leaping for the gun or ducking for cover.
The boy caught sight of her through the door. What he saw: a hard-jawed state enforcer training a gun on a young woman, a fellow-protestor. Give him this: he found courage in that moment, enough to take a half-step towards the armed man, raise a hand and shout, ‘Hey!’
Bethany stepped back, panic swamping her urge to peace-make.
The officer, penned by small movements on every side, tried to bring both boy and girl into his sights. He shuffled a few steps backwards, towards where the table lay on its side. The gun, with its own motives, danced between two targets.
The back of Bethany’s knees touched the chair and she swept the air behind her to find a support. Her vision narrowed to a cone centred on the policeman. In the periphery, the girl, flinching as though slapped across the face; the boy, mouth open in a shout, reaching towards the policeman, palm flat as though waiting to catch a bullet. Raeworth warmed up with a shimmy of his feet. Then in a flash he performed the most extraordinary high kick Bethany had ever seen. His body jackknifed, both legs shooting into the air in front of him. His pistol rang out in the tiny concrete room with the boom of field artillery, imploding into Bethany’s eardrums and forcing a gasp from her hollow mouth. Then everything was black.
¶NewsHound
According to the press pack at the Digital Citizen launch event, Minister for a Digital Society Bethany Lehrer ‘missing’.
Awaiting confirmation.
sh.rt/0ekg75y
Eight
‘Here. Let me show you.’
Graham snapped open the clasps with a practised action, flipped the metal panel aside and set it against the wall. He stepped back with a stringy grin. Dankness welled from the broken brick aperture. J-R and Mark approached, uncertain what they were being shown. A smell emerged, older than anything J-R had so far encountered in Parley’s maze of ancient houses and concrete factory spaces.
J-R leaned forward into the gloom. Graham pushed past and stepped through the fissure, leaving a male tang behind him. Mark’s compact frame pressed J-R’s side as he, too, peered into the hole.
‘We have a bulb rigged up.’
Graham’s voice emerged from the dark. Something dripped and echoed on stone. From deeper inside came a regular knocking.
‘Ah, here we go.’
A pull-cord snapped and bare light shot from a caged lamp, only to lose itself in the lichen-coated brick of the tunnel. Cables thicker than J-R’s arm ran loose along the concrete floor. Thinner lines snaked over rusted hooks. Power, information and water running through the darkness. The bulb-light glared from Graham’s red T-shirt. It showed a cartoon sports car, gravity-defying aerodynamic apparatus towering from its rear. Beneath this, a bold white caption: SPOILER ALERT.
‘This is the guts of London,’ he said. ‘Under the pavement, the Internet.’
J-R caught Mark’s eye, then stepped inside.
‘Mind your head,’ said Graham.
J-R stooped under trailing wires. He could make nothing of the gloom ahead.
‘What people never realise about technology,’ Graham continued, ‘is when you dig underneath, it runs along the exact same channels as all the old shit.’
At the edge of sensation, a rumble began. J-R reached a hand to the curved brick ceiling. It was coated in oily growth. His shadow fell on the dark air, making a ghost in perspective. Somewhere close by was a steady run of water. The rumble grew, shaking the bulb.
‘Northern Line,’ said Graham’s voice.
Mark stepped in through the opening. Muffled by layers of ancient stone, the young men felt the clatter of wheels. J-R reached a hand towards Mark, perhaps to touch his shoulder or hand. Then he checked himself and reached instead for an iron strut.
Graham walked ahead, stooping under cables.
‘The pipe runs through this old drainage run, all the way to 404 City. Super-fast fibre. The tunnelling’s Bazalgette. Mondan’s brick and mortar backbone.’ He gave the wall a proprietary pat. ‘They installed us here when they bought Parley. They’re stabling all their acquisitions into a string of buildings from here to City Road, linked by this run. All sucking on the same pipe.’
Graham looked ahead into the dark, his back to them.
‘I’m usually down here twice a week to check our racks in Mondan’s data centre. It’s quicker than street level – ten minutes. And I don’t need to check in through 404’s front door security. The data centre’s in a basement three storeys down. Water-cooled by an underground river. I could swipe you both in there if you fancied a sniff around?’
‘Why are you even here, J-R? Mark?’
‘Pardon me?’ said J-R.
‘You heard.’
J-R and Mark exchanged a look in the gloom. Had it been wise to introduce Mark to Graham? The three of them had been talking in Parley’s basement technology suite when Graham, on some inspiration, had stormed over to reveal this ancient shaft, hidden behind a superhero movie poster like a prison escape tunnel.
J-R glanced back to the broken aperture and the light spilling from the room. Graham was ten yards further into the tunnel: the way back out was clear. Perhaps reading this intention, Graham sighed, an infinitely weary sound.
‘I’m working with you,’ said J-R, ‘to find the source of these malicious messages. Is that not what we’re doing?’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s what I’m doing.’
‘All right. And you?’
Graham turned to Mark, who looked back at Graham, appraising. J-R’s pulse ran through his neck.
‘Perhaps, Graham,’ he said, ‘you’d also like to tell us what you are doing?’
Rule one of political communications: Turn the challenge back on the challenger.
‘Maybe I’m trying to enlighten you.’
‘About? You mean your artificial intelligence theory about
sic_girl?’ Another rumble of the Underground. ‘I don’t, apologies, I can’t accept it. There’s a person, someone with political intent, behind this.’
Further silence, then Graham snorted. His laughter was acidic as his voice.
‘No, but think about it,’ said J-R. ‘This is a tightly co-ordinated assassination by degrees.’
Graham began to pace.
‘You’re a smart guy, aren’t you, J-R? You seem smart.’
He went quiet. J-R wondered if he was expected to answer, but Graham picked up again.
‘We care about that here. We’re all so fricking clever. We also hire for the ability to think lateral. It’s what makes this place different.’ J-R thought of Danielle Farr’s constant edgy impetus. ‘You should open your mind. There’s a philosophy here: stuff is possible.’
‘Is that your motto? Stuff is possible?’
‘Is it a bad motto?’
Again, that pause. For Graham, there did not seem to be such a thing as a rhetorical question.
‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘Why have you lot got it in for Dani?’
‘We lot? It isn’t – have you not seen the papers?’
‘You, the press. You know it’s assault? You can’t think she did the leaks? The hack?’
‘To be frank,’ said J-R. ‘I don’t know what to believe. But you have to ask: who knows how Parley works better than Danielle?’
He did not say, look at her behaviour, at those pictures.
‘Bullshit. It isn’t her.’
‘But, sorry, how can you know that?’
Mark was listening intently beside him. Graham stepped further into the dark.
‘Have you read The Electronic Radical?’ he said.
‘Of course. Yes.’
Hadn’t someone else spoken about Elyse Martingale recently?
‘Good. So Elyse has this idea of the plexus, yes? When everybody is linked to a free and open source of information, they’ll be radicalised. Free.’
Mark spoke at last.
‘Because they shall be able to ignore no longer the brutal truths of state control.’
Graham gave that a little round of applause.
‘Not bad, Mark. You know what I’m talking about. So, tell me. Now that we’re almost all connected – and J-R’s boss is about to link everyone up to an all-new state-controlled plexus – do you see that happening? Is it inevitable? Or is something else happening? Does it worry you that Mondan’s the largest supplier of digital surveillance tools to the British security services? As a for instance?’
J-R was rooted into the tunnel. The damp air was hard to draw into his throat. Graham had asked why he was here. The moment J-R’s BlackBerry fizzed out in the gents upstairs, some restraining force had switched off, too. Until that moment he’d been held by a gravity so familiar he’d never felt its pull. God help him, he wanted nothing more than to grab Mark by the neck and kiss him. The notion was brutal. It filled the narrow confines of the tunnel. J-R thought he might fall.
‘I’m not sure what –’
His words were muffled by mossy brick. Graham interrupted.
‘Does the word Grubly mean anything to you boys? Yes? No?’
J-R watched Mark for a reaction but he could barely make out his friend’s expression. Grubly was the invasive little programme Mark had found buried in the Digital Citizen package.
‘What I thought,’ said Graham, reading their silence.
He stretched out his arm towards Mondan’s subterranean motherlode of data.
‘Down there,’ he said. ‘That’s where you should be looking. Not here. That’s all I’m saying.’
J-R faced the wet blackness. After a beat, Graham strode towards them. He paused in front of J-R, grabbed his hand and pushed into it a nubby piece of plastic then ducked under the brick overhang, back into the room, light spilling around and through him. J-R turned the object in the half-light. It was a tiny USB drive. He held it up so its label caught the light. 128GB, it said.
The two friends turned to face one another. They remained in darkness.
¶NewsHound
BREAKING: Bethany Lehrer chief of staff Krishan Kohli overheard using the word ‘kidnap’.
And then another, shorter, word I won’t proffer here.
sh.rt/ggu27dt
Nine
Bethany was sitting on a chair.
She’d lost a few seconds at least. Dani was no longer in the room. In the corner by the overturned table, the policeman’s body was strewn like hastily abandoned clothing. Urgent voices pressed in from the corridor.
Bethany raised herself with a hand on the chair-back, testing her legs’ capacity to hold her. The hand spasmed as she released it from the chair and stood under her own balance. She took two or three foal-steps towards the fallen officer.
The voices in the hall came in and out of focus – but what if he’s – he isn’t, he isn’t. All Bethany’s energy was directed at the policeman. He looked broken: was surely dead. The ghost left on the stick when you suck the flavour from a lolly.
I’m in shock, she thought.
She crouched by the body. The head and neck were twisted against the vertical surface of the table, brochures strewn under his flaccid limbs. It was the brochures that had brought him down. As he backed away from the boy and Dani, he’d slipped on the carpet of glossy print and fallen back, cracking his head against the table edge, knocking him cold: Bethany prayed no worse than that.
Having nothing more practical than Casualty to call on, she placed two fingers on the side of Raeworth’s neck. The heat and pulse were horribly intimate but she held fingers on his flesh for long enough to be sure, then allowed herself to breathe. For a second she thought she might black out again, then a practical thought struck her: Get help. He still needs help. She turned to find her bag, her phone: but of course she didn’t have them. Everything started coming back. Dani. Dani would get help for this man. She was an OK kid.
Levering herself up against the table, Bethany tiptoed to the door through the sea of brochures. There was a rent in the concrete by the door frame: a bullet hole. Out in the hall, Dani was in command of a whispered conversation.
‘You’re identikid – right?’ she said.
Bethany propped herself in the doorway and waited for her moment. The boy spotted her and gaped. Dani shook him by his camo lapel.
‘Fucking hell, kid, come on. It’s me. From yesterday? Naked and unadorned?’
A light bulb flashed.
&nbs
p; ‘StrangeFish? No way!’
Bethany understood none of this but waited them out.
‘Christsake, way. Now c’mon. We need to get the shit out of here.’
‘But the guy?’
He pointed to the room. Dani looked, and saw Bethany. They stared at each other.
‘Yes,’ said Bethany. ‘This man needs urgent medical attention, Dani.’
Still the bit player in a TV drama.
Before Dani could reply, footsteps hammered from behind a door at the end of the hallway. The stairwell. The boy stared at the door.
‘Fuck! Why’d I come down this dead end?’
Dani grabbed his arm and scooped up a black backpack.
‘No, no – behind here, service lift.’
She pulled him to a double door. Dragged him, as she’d done to Bethany before.
‘How I got in,’ she said, opening the doors to reveal a further layer of raw metal doors – a service elevator, wedged open with a rectangular weight.
Shaken into motion, the boy bent to shift the metal weight while Dani pulled the lift doors back and started smacking buttons. Bethany was forgotten. The door to the emergency stairs rattled and flew open. DC Ackroyd and a uniformed security guard piled out, clocked Bethany and gawped at her. Then followed her eyes to the elevator doors as they eased shut. Red LED arrows animated upwards. Nobody moved. Then through the lift door, they heard a muffled whoop and shout.
‘I’m Terry Salmon and you girls can suck my cock!’
The men looked at the door in deep confusion. Bethany had no idea what the girl had meant but had to restrain herself from laughing out loud. Why was she feeling such affection for that volatile kid?
‘Here, officer, here,’ she said. ‘Your colleague needs help.’
She pointed back into the room. They gathered at the door and looked inside. DS Raeworth had risen to his hands and knees, and was crawling across the mess of brochures, shaking stars from his head.
The security man whistled through his teeth.
‘What the fuck happened here?’ he said.
What, indeed? Raeworth kneeled up dumbly, unaware of their presence. Only now did Bethany register: his gun was nowhere to be seen.