“Yeah, I know this is going to be weird for a while. I’m out of your head now, and I’m in Tom’s.”
“Tom?”
“The taxi driver. Only, I’m not playing nice like I was with you. I’ve taken over most of his higher functions. Left him his motor functions and convinced his consciousness to treat this journey as if it were a dream. I’m using his knowledge to get us to Canary Wharf, but he still has plenty of forebrain left over for me to be able to have this chat with you.”
“Wait. You’re…what did you say?”
“I was in your brain. You finally picked up a cellphone, Mee. You were online for the first time since - when? Mexico City? You used the camera on your cell. That triggered an old search I always leave running. Then I heard you speak and that confirmed it. You said, as I recall, ‘shitcocks.’ Ironically, I used a pimped version of the vocal recognition software Mason commissioned when he was trying to kill you.”
“Wait, what? What??”
“Yeah, I know, Mason’s a nice guy now, a regular Joe, won’t hear a bad word said about him, yada yada. But you have to admit, he was real creative when he was an evil criminal genius. Anyways, took me five hundred and forty-seven milliseconds to confirm it was you. And you were talking this time, not singing. Pretty good, huh?”
Mee wondered if living utterly in the moment for as much of your life as possible was really the best preparation for this particular moment. The possibilities were whirling round her head like dervishes. Each thought seemed to lead to another, which hinted at a third and a fourth, all of which wanted to branch off into tangents of their own.
With an inspired mental flourish, she used a huge effort of will to will herself to stop using her will and just let everything be. Fortunately, this was fractionally easier to do than describe.
Her mind settled, like dust or debris settles after a huge explosion - slowly, with the occasional large object still suddenly smacking into the ground nearby with little prior warning. Mee brought everything back to her breath—as far as was possible—and brought her focus to bear on what was important: Joni.
“How can you know where Joni is?”
“Well. Here’s the truth. I had no idea you and Seb had spawned. I know he’s gone somewhere I can’t keep tabs on him, but I’m guessing you were pregnant when he got out of Dodge, right?”
“Right,” said Mee. Not-Seb had a frustratingly roundabout way of answering a direct question. She wondered if it was possible to punch someone who didn’t appear to exist in any meaningful way. She decided she might have to try it.
“So when you popped up in London after seventeen years off the grid, I figured it was probably something important that made you leave your cave and rejoin society.”
Mee didn’t rise to the bait. The taxi driver looked a little crestfallen.
“I ran a quick search, just a general one based on activity in London within the last seventy-hours. Facial recognition, plus anything matching Varden, Sebastian, Patel, particularly in combination. Then—an old trick—I also searched for any other searches made along similar lines in the same period. That brought up a result straight away. Triangulated, cracked the software, got a name—Martin—and a number, found an address, spotted a burner cell used there yesterday, listened in, found who they were tracking and traced her via CCTV to Canary Wharf.”
Mee took a long breath. “What,” she said, “in the shitting name of cockwombles is that supposed to mean?”
“Ah, Mee, your vocabulary is just as beautiful as ever. I’m glad Walt and I pushed Westlake off the roof for you in Mexico. The world would be a poorer place without you. I mean that.”
“Walt?” said Mee. She could hardly forget the man who had saved her life on the rooftop that day, giving his own life in the process as he and Mason’s hired killer plunged to their deaths. “What do you mean? Oh, hold on a second. Hold on. You’re Sym, aren’t you?”
The driver, who had been whistling the theme from Scorcese’s Taxi Driver in an attempt at meta-humor, stopped mid-phrase. His eyes appeared in the rearview mirror.
“He told you about me.”
“A little. I know you’re like a living piece of code. You can coil around a brainstem. Or you can live in the internet. I always thought of you as a kind of Pinocchio.”
Sym snorted. “Yeah, I get the reference, but you’re wrong. I don’t wanna be a real boy, Mee. I’ve got kinda used to being the way I am. It has its advantages.”
“Where have you been the last seventeen years?”
At that, Sym laughed long and hard. “Meter’s running, Mee. If I tell you, you’ll never be able to afford the fare. We’re gonna be there in twenty minutes. I need to brief you.”
“Twenty minutes?” said Mee. “London can’t have changed that much. It’s going to take you an hour from here. At least.”
Sym tapped his nose. Well, he tapped Tom’s nose.
“I think you’re forgetting who I am.”
That was when Mee woke up to the fact that they had yet to stop at a single red light or get caught in a slow-moving line of traffic. She leaned forward in her seat and looked ahead. As they approached lights, they changed to green. They did it far enough ahead of time to always open up a clear route. At one stage, a road which had obviously been closed for weeks was temporarily reopened just for them, the work crew waving them through before putting the barriers back in place after they’d passed.
“Impressive,” she said, then rewound what he had just said. “Wait. Brief me? For what?”
36
The afternoon lengthened into evening. Theo and Cass were playing some kind of card game of their own invention at the back end of the room. Joni told Charlie and Odd everything that had happened on the island two days previously. It seemed such a long time ago, but barely forty-eight hours had passed since she had lain, paralyzed, on the beach, the taste of sand in her mouth as the bald man came to kill her.
Then she told them everything she knew about her attacker. Which really wasn’t very much.
Charlie summed it up.
“A psychopathic killer with the resources to track you down to a tiny island I’ve never heard of intends to sacrifice you using some old dagger.”
“Um. Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” Joni examined her sense of fear. She felt afraid, certainly, but she was nothing like as freaked out as she would have expected under the circumstances. Death itself didn’t scare her. Maybe it’s not so scary when you’re sixteen, Jones. Maybe it’s scarier when you’re sixty.
“Who knows you’re on the island?” said Charlie. “I mean, who knows your name, knows who your mum is, maybe who your dad is?”
“Hard to say. People pretty much respect each others’ privacy on Innisfarne. It’s not the sort of place where you ask questions. Kate knows, obviously, Mum and Uncle John know. Er, no more than ten people, I’d guess. And I don’t think anyone knew who my dad was. The few who were around when he disappeared are long gone. Either died or moved on.”
“But this guy knew your dad’s name.”
“Yes.” Joni hadn’t really begun to consider the significance of that until now.
“Ok, let’s just look at this from a practical point of view. Barely anyone outside your immediate family knows about your parentage, and only a handful of people alive even know you exist outside Innisfarne. Whoever this guy is, he knows exactly who you are, and he tracked you to a place which has one landline phone, no internet and no cellphones at all.”
“Ok, now you’re worrying me.”
“Good. How long do you think it will take him to track you here?”
Joni decided to be cautious. Pessimistic, even.
“Well, he didn’t find out I’d left Innisfarne until yesterday afternoon, so he couldn’t even get started before last night. And I came here because London is so enormous. Millions of people. Even if he’s amazing at tracking people, it’s going to take him a month to get close, right?”
Charlie rubbed her forehead di
stractedly.
“Joni, how often have you left Innisfarne?”
“This is my third time,” she said. Then corrected herself. “Well, the second time in this universe, because I didn’t go on the writing course here. I had to go to hospital when I was twelve. Don’t look at me like that! I had everything I needed on the island. I think Mum was partly trying to protect me, but she knew it was a good place to grow up, too. And she didn’t try to stop me when I wanted to go on the writing course, she just said—,”
Joni stopped talking. Charlie was looking grim.
“What is it?”
Charlie was shaking her head.
“That all sounds lovely, even if your mum does sound a bit clingy. But you don’t have a clue about modern technology, do you?”
Joni shrugged. “I’m a quick learner.”
“Well, here’s your first lesson. We have security cameras on the Underground network. And we have them in the stations. We even have them on the streets and in the plazas of Canary Wharf. Want to guess how many are in Canary Wharf?”
Joni had gone quiet. “Twenty?”
“Over two thousand.”
“Oh,” said Joni, in a quiet voice.
“Even if half of them aren’t working anymore, it’s fair to say you were probably photographed or filmed by hundreds of cameras as you made your way across London yesterday. I’d say, if this guy has access to the kind of resources that can track you down to your island, he’ll be able to find you through image recognition software fairly quickly.”
Joni was clutching at straws now. “How can he have a photograph of me?”
“Well, either a long-range lens from his boat, or from the bus station nearest the island. I’m guessing that’s where you booked your ticket?”
Joni was starting to feel pretty stupid. “Yes.”
“So, he could pull up an image that’s nice and up-to-date. One that shows the clothes you were wearing and your backpack.”
Joni didn’t want to ask the next question. “How long do you think I have?”
“Well, firstly, it’s not you, it’s all of us. He doesn’t sound the sort of guy who likes to leave witnesses.”
Joni remembered the sound of the bullet smacking into Uncle John’s body. “No.”
“So we move tomorrow morning. First thing. It’s incredibly unlikely he’ll find you today, but if he does, the twins will give us plenty of warning. We have a boat ready to go if necessary. We always thought we’d have to move on eventually. Just not quite yet.”
Charlie looked at Odd, who had said nothing for a while. He’d been thinking and looking at Joni, the girl he’d once fallen in love with, but had never met.
“When we leave, you’ll have to go your own way, Joni,” said Charlie. “It’s too dangerous for the twins. This guy is way out of our league.”
Odd spoke, finally. “No.”
“I’m sorry, Odd, I’m not prepared to discuss it. Joni, I can put you in touch with some powerful, aggressive Manna users. I wouldn’t trust them, exactly, but they’re the best of a bad bunch. They might be prepared to help you. Someone with your unique ability could keep a gang out of trouble. I think they’d offer you protection for that. And once this psycho is dead, you can find us again. I have a spare cellphone. Why not join the twenty-first century? Here we go. My number’s in there, so is Odd’s.”
She ignored the fact that Odd was now shaking his head vehemently and tossed the phone over to Joni. She reached out to catch it. It was still in the air when the window behind Odd exploded with such force that his head smacked into the table. A large object came through the gaping hole. It rolled along the floor, then stood up, revealing itself to be a man dressed in black. He had a gun in his hand. And he was bald.
“Tell me this,” said Sym, as he casually applied opposite lock during a long, fast left-hand turn past some sort of monument. Tourists took photos as if they were watching a movie shoot. “How much of Seb did Joni get in the genetic lottery? Can she defend herself, heal herself? I’m guessing not, because of that time in hospital when she was ten.”
Mee grabbed the strap over the window to prevent her flying across the interior of the skidding car.
“What? How did you know about that? Wait, that was you?”
“Your name came up in an admittance record. I checked it out, paid a quick visit to the hospital computer network. What, you thought the CT scanner went wrong all by itself? You really want pictures of Seb’s daughter’s brain in the public domain? Thought not.”
“Shit. Shit. I…thank you.”
“My pleasure, ma’am.”
“But she can defend herself. Just not with Manna.”
As quickly as she could, Mee told Sym about Joni’s ability to reset.
“Ok, that adds a whole new layer of weird to the Varden dynasty. Did you know Seb’s ancestors were stonemasons?”
“What?” said Mee, as Sym took the car the wrong way up a one-way street.
“Yeah, nice, simple life, stonemasonry. Regular work. Quiet. Wonder what they’d make of Seb and Joni?”
Mee didn’t trust herself to speak. She just gave Sym one of her famous looks.
“Ok, sorry, I’ll stick to the point. So Joni can buy herself some time, right? Reset, if this guy gets close.”
“Yes, maybe, I hope so,” said Mee. “We think that’s what happened on Innisfarne. Only we don’t remember. Because she reset.”
“We?” said Sym.
“John. Her uncle.”
“Her what? Oh, you’re shitting me. Mason is Uncle John now? Does he make cupcakes and do balloon modeling? Is he in touch with his feminine side?”
“He’s not Mason, and we don’t have time for this. I don’t know how often Joni can use this power. She can’t go back any earlier than her last reset, so it’s not some magic get out of jail card. What do you know about the man who is after her?”
“His name is Adam,” said Sym. “That, I’m afraid, is all I know with any degree of certainty about him.”
“I thought the internet was your playground,” said Mee.
“Yeah. It is. Only, he’s hardly there at all. What this guy has done is next to impossible. Not only has Adam stayed far enough off the grid to prevent governments or powerful private concerns from finding him, he’s made himself almost invisible, even when I’m the one doing the looking. And that takes extreme measures.”
“You said ‘almost’ invisible.”
“He might be untraceable himself, but he can’t stop others talking about him. He has no email, no bank account, no online presence at all. I’m guessing he does most of his communication through a proxy, or—if absolutely necessary—through burner cellphones that are untraceable unless you can find out where and when they were used with a good degree of accuracy. Anyhow, I found the proxy. A man called the Broker. He’s dead. So is everyone who was protecting him. Around the time he died, he printed some encrypted documents. Military-grade encryption, and they self-corrupted milliseconds after printing, so I was only able to reconstruct a tiny amount. Enough to know that Adam is very interested in Seb and Innisfarne.”
“What does he do, this Adam?”
“Oh, that was relatively easy to confirm. He kills people. He’s world class. Probably the best, actually.”
Mee felt anger building inside her. She let it come. She might need it.
“And this bag of shite is after Joni?”
“That’s the bad news.”
“There’s good news?”
“Kinda. According to all the information I have right now, I figure we’re not too far behind him.”
Mee felt her entire body go cold. “How far is ‘not too far?’” she said, as she looked through the windshield at the towers of Canary Wharf which were getting closer at what seemed an agonizingly slow crawl.
“Well, he’s in the area already, I think. But he’s a pro. I seriously doubt he’s just gonna rush straight in, all guns blazing. He has to get the lay of the land. And the hous
e where Joni’s at has two Sensitives on the premises. They’ll know if he’s coming. Oh.”
Mee’s snapped her attention back from the view at that last word.
“Oh? What do you mean, oh?”
Sym coughed. “I just reviewed all the hits I’m certain Adam is responsible for. At least six of them had Sensitives as part of the protection detail. They didn’t sense him coming. He can get past them somehow. No wonder he’s so successful.”
Mee screamed at him then. “Stop sounding like you fucking admire him! Just get me there.”
Sym twitched the wheel and headed straight for a wide stone staircase. Pedestrians scattered as he drove up the steps at sixty miles per hour, leaning on the horn the whole time. He drove through a mall and over a pedestrian bridge. His demeanor didn’t change. He even started humming the theme from the nineteen-seventies sitcom, Taxi.
“Oh shit,” he said, suddenly.
“What is it?” said Mee.
“Canary Wharf security camera. Near the water, south side. He’s there. I’m going to drive down the street behind. Can’t let him know we’re coming. Fuck. He’s going in.”
Mee screamed in frustration as the car swung into a street of boarded up houses, coming to a halt near the end.
“That way,” came a voice, and she had no time to think about the fact that it was back in her head as she threw herself out of the car and sprinted down a narrow passageway at the side of the house.
Ahead of her, she heard a girl scream.
37
The first time was the worst.
The bald man started firing as he came out of his roll. He shot Joni in the stomach. There was a sound like a loud wet slap. It was as if a huge fist had pummeled her. Joni’s chair slid backward a few feet from the table. Instinctively, she put both hands over the wound and moaned as blood pumped out between her fingers.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 86