‘So apparently I have to make my own hot drinks? Woot.’
Graham’s head has appeared above the sofa back.
‘Not at all.’
Sam heads back to the counter. Gray gives Dani a shit-eating grin and wags his little finger. Which means either Sam’s cock, or I’ve got him wrapped around my. Dani raises her middle finger in reply and takes a sip through the doughy froth. The coffee smells of scorched wood. She puts it down, checks her phone – not yet seven – and rubs muck from her eyes. Over on the sofa, Gray takes a bright orange shirt from his rucksack and pulls it on. It reads THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 129.0.0.1. He looks up and winks. He knows she’ll get it and Sam won’t.
Sam puts down a coffee for Gray then walks to his desk and stuffs his tablet into a leather man-bag.
‘So,’ he says. ‘I know what we’re going to do.’
Dani shifts: there’s the pain in her arsehole again.
‘But first,’ says Sam, ‘you both need to know: something’s happened.’
Dani sits forward in alarm.
‘Parley? Already?’
‘No.’ He’s gauging her reaction. ‘Not to Parley. To Leo.’
While Dani dresses, Sam and Gray huddle together in the kitchen. The last week is starting to make a kind of sense if she reruns it in a use-case where Gray helped Sam take over Parley and stir up TakeBackID. But most of the who-did-what-whens are still unclear – for instance, who did the Digital Citizen hack? Assuming there was a hack.
This much she does get: the finale is today. The centrepiece will be a takeover of the giant screens at 404 City. Leo was prepping for this last night when he fell. When they pushed him. When whatever happened. Anyway, when he died.
Her head goes back to yesterday evening.
Leo handing her the gun
do what you want with it he said
the weight of it in her hand
now hes dead
She walks over to join the others in the kitchen.
‘What’s wrong with the front door?’ asks Sam. ‘You have a swipe card. You can just walk in.’
‘Not with security and police all over the building, after—’
Gray stops himself. After Leo fell to his death, he means.
‘Plus I’m not going anywhere,’ he says. ‘I need to run the screen hack from here, now we don’t have—’
Now they don’t have Leo.
‘So . . .’ says Gray.
Both men turn to Dani expectantly. She’s missed something.
‘What do you think?’ asks Sam.
‘I think you’re both dicks.’
‘Oh, cheers, Dan,’ says Gray. ‘We’re trying to make this right.’
‘With your secret master plan to so-called save the Internet? What, did Julian Assange fuck James Bond and shit you both?’
Sam smiles at that.
‘Sounds about right.’
Dani smashes her cup down on the table.
‘No, but Leo’s dead, Sam. Do you even understand that?’ Her stomach’s on a fast spin. ‘I never knew anyone who died – I mean, who’s my age. I only just met him!’
‘Then why this, if you only met him yesterday?’
Dani doesn’t reply for fear of crying. Bastard tears. Even Gray looks wounded.
‘Jesus, that’s cold,’ he says.
‘No, I’m serious,’ says Sam. ‘You never even met him, Gray. I knew him. He was a good guy and I’m sorry this had to happen. But I can’t stand phony sentiment.’
Dani turns to Gray.
‘Do you actually know this guy?’ Then she rounds on Sam. ‘You made him go in there, remember? This is on you.’
Sam gets up, super-slow, tucks his chair under the table and sighs. The patience of Christ coming down from the mountaintop.
‘I do remember. That’s why we need to put this right – and stay calm while we do it.’
Gray is shaking. She puts her hand on his – an old reflex, wired up somewhere. Sam walks to his desk to gather stuff. He keeps on speaking in the same uninflected tone.
‘So, Dani.’ She sits up: why? ‘If Gray stays here to set the dogs on Perce, someone else needs to go into 404 and get the disks. Someone who knows how to find the DigiCitz and Parley servers and get out the drives undamaged.’
Dani grinds her chair round to face him.
‘Oh, me?’ She points to her chest, gets up and talks to his back. ‘You want me to go into the place where Leo got killed? I told you: the police are after me.’
Sam zips up his leather satchel.
‘OK, fine. We let Parley die and Perce gets away with fucking up your life. Your call.’
She gets up to march about the apartment, wanting to push things off its neat surfaces, groping for words.
‘This is – people don’t do this kind of shit in my world. We work things out. You know, with brains? There’s going to be a clean way – a systems way – to fix this.’
‘Well,’ Sam checks his phone, ‘you have four hours to find it. Good luck with that.’
‘We can get at Perce from here, online. Gray just said so.’
Gray stands from the kitchen table.
‘No, Dan, he’s right. We need the hard drives. Evidence. Before they wipe them. And I can’t save the Personas from here without server-side permissions.’
Leo handing her the gun
do what you want with it he said
the weight of it in her hand
now hes dead
Dani screws up her face and pushes her hair back with both hands. She bores a look into Gray. She knows he’s right and he knows he’s right. He shrugs. She drops her hands to her sides.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘OK, fuck!’
She sits on a sofa to think it over but there’s no thinking to be done.
‘So I go in,’ she says. ‘I work there. Why shouldn’t I be there?’
Sam is quizzical, like he was expecting more of a fight.
‘And meanwhile,’ he says, ‘Graham will take over their screens and turn the botnet on their website.’
Gray nods.
‘I’ll have the whole of 404 City singing Daisy, Daisy by noon,’ he says.
¶takebackIDhub
We are beyond words.
“Protester killed in ‘tragic accident’ at corporate headquarters.” fub.ar/20dfd7b
CITE THIS.
Rally at 404.
Two
The screen was bigger than the sky. Six blocks out it took hold of City Road. J-R and Mark were walking into a sea of data. The upper face of the building was grained with sun-bright pixels, as though it had swallowed half of London’s electric current. Sliding banners, tag lines, splashes of news and flashbulb faces of celebrities – a constant motion of planes and angles. Somewhere within this industrial crash of information were walls, floors, windows, doors; but for a block or two it was impossible to make them out. Everyone walked slack-eyed towards this beacon, smartphones hanging loosely in their hands. The irresistible cry – look into the light – has drawn us to our screens since we were born. It found its final exercise here.
As they left the borders of the City, details came into focus below the wall of moving light. A glass buttress jutted from the building’s foot, biting pavement. Only now did their eyes fathom scale. A flow of microdots on the forecourt revealed itself as a gathering of dissidents, unrolling a placard against the interference of uniformed guards. Police and the murmurings of trouble. Cameras. J-R put out a hand to slow Mark and assess the situation.
‘Ready?’ smiled Mark.
J-R squinted at his friend against the morning light and the flare of the building’s glass. They’d barely spoken since they’d met at Old Street Tube station.
‘Why are you here?’ said J-R, surprising himself by speaking. He realised he was echoing Graham’s words from the day before. ‘Why help me?’
Mark reared his head back slightly and pursed his lips.
‘Because we’re mates,’ he said. ‘Do you need more than that?’
He reached to touch J-R’s sleeve briefly with two fingers. A frisson passed up J-R’s arm. He placed his hand on the affected area.
‘Because the thing is,’ he said, ‘last night, when you spoke about –’ he didn’t want to say fucking ‘– about what you wanted to do to Sean Perce, you sounded like you were, I don’t know, crowing.’
Mark started to speak.
‘No, no, hear me out,’ said J-R, realising how much he sounded like a politician. ‘And it made me wonder. So when I got home I did something I probably should have done in the first place – a bit of digging. And I must say, I was surprised. Your blog – the organisations you’ve been involved with. You didn’t tell me.’
‘Digging? On me? Christ, J-R.’
‘I’ve trusted you with things I wouldn’t have shown to anyone.’
‘I should walk away – right now.’
‘Except –’ J-R wondered whether he was going to complete the sentence. ‘Except you don’t want to miss the chance to fuck Sean Perce, do you?’
‘Oh, and you feeling like supporting him right now?’
‘Have you or have you not been using me to dig up dirt on Mondan?’
‘Jesus! You approached me, remember?’
‘Because I’d naïvely hoped we might – God, I don’t know –’
Mark took several deep breaths, as though recovering from a punch to the gut.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘This is why you never see anyone any more. You don’t seem to realise what this job has turned you into. Maybe all those friends you never hear from any more – maybe they’re worried you might do some digging on them, too.’
‘That’s in the past. I do want to be more present than I’ve been, for my friends – for you. I mean –’
Mark checked his smartwatch.
‘Fuck.’ He turned his wrist for J-R to see. ‘Sorry, we don’t have time for couple counselling. Vanna’s expecting us.’
He turned and marched on the entrance. Couple counselling? J-R’s heart rate mounted as he caught up with Mark. In the knot of journos on the forecourt Frank Pritchett, a stringer for the Independent, caught J-R’s eye: damn. What would Pritchett make of his presence here? He flashed his ministry ID at the policeman, who nodded and stepped aside to let them in. It wasn’t clear if he would have moved to stop them entering without this generic institutional proof.
Someone shouted an unintelligible slogan as J-R pushed on a glass door etched with the zero of 404. They walked along the tower’s splayed foot towards an inner rift in the vertical expanse. Beyond the reception desk and electronic turnstiles, a great glass inversion opened thirty storeys up into the centre of the building. At the top lurked Perce, the tunnel spider brooding in the glow of his screens. The bottom of the shaft, where the boy had landed, was two storeys below ground, out of sight.
‘Ready?’ said Mark.
J-R composed his face into a smile.
Mark had been too long at the front desk. J-R fidgeted on the angular sofa, watched by two policemen at the turnstiles. The receptionist handed Mark a handset on a long snake of cable. J-R checked his watch. He wondered where Bethany was. Unforgivable to have abandoned her at the launch event. Though lord knows what he’d have done in the face of those protesters. Dani Farr had been among them, had allegedly attacked Bethany. When he heard the news last night he’d broken his silence to ring Krish – who’d been blunt, even by his standards.
‘You’re precisely not needed here, J-R. Everybody thinks you’re a cowardly prick for going to ground but you’re in the clear. The polis have their suspect. Today is about them catching the crooks. You take five. On Monday I’ll get the Perm Sec to spank your airse for emailing that contract. That’ll be the long and short.’
Yes, they had the suspect: in a body bag. J-R stared down at the sweaty knot of fingers in his lap. There was only one reason Krish would say Bethany didn’t need help, when she so clearly did: it was already over for her.
Mark returned from the reception desk, looking cross or puzzled – J-R still did not know how to read the inward turn of his face.
‘We’re to go up now,’ he said.
His eyes didn’t match his breezy tone.
‘Your friend is here? Vanna?’
‘It seems not. We’re not meeting her.’
‘Then who?’
‘Perce. Sean Perce is waiting for us. Top floor.’
J-R looked up at the halo of light filling the atrium.
‘—Primitive encampment forming around the base of the glass tower. Behind me you’ll see the tents. Police are monitoring the situation but as yet all seems peaceful.’
‘Yes, Carol, we’re seeing footage of the site of last night’s incident. What looks like a hand-painted banner hanging from a balcony, a message on it to do with – door keys? And here a police forensics team. The investigation of protester Leo Sandberg’s tragic death looks well under way.’
‘Indeed it is, Julian. And in a related development we understand that Metropolitan Police officers have found the person responsible for leaking emails from Digital Minister Bethany Lehrer. We understand this person is not the hacker Danielle Farr, though she is still wanted for questioning. Though all parties are remaining tight-lipped about an alleged violent incident yesterday, involving Ms Farr and the minister.’
‘So the situation there remains tense?’
‘Tense indeed, Julian.’
‘Stay with us, Carol. We’ll continue to update on the situation at Mondan’s London headquarters as it unfolds. In other news . . .’
Three
‘What’s he up to?’ asks Dani.
‘Huh?’ says Gray, his eyes fixed on Sam’s big screen.
Dani points at a window where email titles scroll by: FW: Daily press cuts – Saturday and RE: Everything about you launch.
‘These are Perce’s mails? Live?’ says Dani.
He nods. Sam is off across the room, doing something on his tablet.
‘And you watch these all the time?’ she says.
He nods again, typing.
‘So this week you must have seen something about when they trashed me to the press?’
Gray stays silent.
‘So why didn’t you tell me?’ she says. ‘Warn me?’
He keeps typing a moment, then stops and turns to her.
‘Because he didn’t say anything about that. He did mention you in a couple of mails but that was about using your code for a thing.’
‘Using my – which code?’
He shrugs again and returns to the screen.
‘No idea. He’s said all kinds of incriminating stuff in here. We’re going to use it on the big screens today. But nothing about doxing you to the press.’
Something is eating at Dani but she can’t say what.
‘But Dan?’ says Gray, turning to her again.
He sounds nearly tender: much as he can.
‘Yeah?’ she says.
‘You’re still flying as Terry, though? With the credit card I gave you?’
‘What? Sure. Pretty much. Anything Dani-related is still clogged up in a ton of evil shit.’
She’s been on Parley this morning, as Terry. It’s bursting with angry attention over last night’s events – under the pennants
‘Good. Because if you go into 404? You need to be worried whether they can see you.’
This makes her heart skip.
‘You’re shitting me. No.’
‘Just saying be careful is all.’
There’s something else. She waits.
‘You know yesterday morning,’ he says, ‘when you didn’t show for the meeting with Jonquil?’
‘I was getting ready for the thing with Bethany Lehrer –? And Leo –?’
‘But d
id you know Jonquil had the police waiting for you back at Parley? Those government cops?’
‘Holy – no. You are actually scaring me. God!’ She stands. ‘Why do you have to do this? Jonquil’s looking out for me.’
‘Sure,’ says Gray. ‘The woman who’s shutting down Parley is your best pal.’
Dani feels her blood run away down some inner plughole.
Leo handing her the gun
do what you want with it he said
the weight of it in her hand
now hes dead
Gray looks at her for a moment then gets up and heads for the bathroom. She stops him with a hand on his wrist. He looks down at the hand so she removes it.
‘One thing I can’t get straight,’ she says.
‘Just one?’
She grins unconvincingly. He puts a hand on his wrist, where her hand had been.
‘About those police, I mean. You know they came to Parley on, what was it? Early Tuesday morning?’ He nods. ‘Six of them, with guns. They said sic was a threat. They thought I was a threat. Why would they think that?’
‘I guess somebody told them so?’
‘Thanks for that stroke of genius.’
‘Just trying to be, you know, supportive?’
‘But who, Gray. Who could have done that?’
Gray does his big comic shrug. She nods – he’s as data-free as she is here. After a beat, he says: ‘Uh, so – call of nature? My bladder feels like I drank Hydro-Man.’
‘Yeah, way too much info,’ she says, batting him away.
When he’s gone she looks over to Sam. He’s tapping at his tablet, expression fixed. She reaches under the monitor on the desk and finds a toggle, switching the display from Gray’s laptop to Sam’s desktop Mac. A login screen: Sam Corrigan; Admin; Guest. Password locked. She looks around for a post-it but apparently Sam’s not that dumb. She tries a couple of obvious strings, but nothing.
Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Page 31