by Jack Heath
Thinking how tragic it was that an NAC representative apparently couldn’t tell a library from an art class, Henrietta asked, “What’s her name?”
Price put a large black folder on the desk and opened it, revealing dozens of paintings and sketches.
“Unfortunately, she didn’t sign her full name on the piece. But it’s a self-portrait, so I thought you might recognize her. She’s clearly an intelligent girl, and in my experience, the school librarian tends to know the smart students. Ah, here we are.”
He lifted out a sheet of faintly yellowed paper with a graphite sketch on it. In the bottom right-hand corner, there were some scribbled words – Self-portrait, Ashley – and a date. Despite Henrietta’s annoyance at this interruption, she couldn’t help but be impressed. The picture was good. The lines were hard and neat, the shading smooth and subtle. She was struck by the girl’s expression – in most student self-portraits, the subject would be smiling, making eye contact with the viewer. Artists, she guessed, like everyone else, mostly saw themselves in mirrors and photos. But this girl was looking upwards, like she was searching for something. Her eyes held what looked like determination, and perhaps anxiety.
That girl really can do everything, Henrietta thought. No wonder Price is interested.
“That’s Ashley Arthur,” she said. “Definitely.”
The man beamed. “You do know her! Terrific.” He took a business card and a pen out of his pocket. “If I wrote down some contact details, would you be able to pass them on? Which year is she in?”
“Year Ten, I think. But you’re better off going to the front office with messages.”
The man nodded. “Of course. I...” He looked embarrassed for a moment. “Would you mind if I had a quick look at a yearbook? It’s not that I don’t trust you – but I’d get in a lot of trouble if I delivered the piece to the wrong person.”
Henrietta nodded. “Sure.”
She walked over to the yearbook shelves and ran a finger along the spines. Year Ten, she thought. Let’s see – that would be...graduating class of...
BLAM!
Peachey lowered the gun as the librarian slumped to the floor, blood pouring from her ear. He stepped forwards quickly, bending down and pressing a handkerchief over the wound before the mess could reach the carpet.
Thinking of Buckland’s resurrection, Peachey felt for a pulse. There was none.
He looked at his watch: 11.04. He’d been visiting schools near the old HBS head office for almost three hours now. Thank God he’d finally caught a break.
The blood flow slowed to a trickle as it coagulated. Peachey put his hands under the librarian’s armpits and dragged her backwards, away from the glass door. One of her shoes came off. I’ll get it later, he thought.
There was a supply cupboard adjacent to the library staff room. Locked. Peachey searched the librarian’s pockets, but couldn’t find a key.
Handbag, he thought. There’ll be a handbag somewhere.
It was on the desk, near where he’d first seen her. Peachey rummaged through it, found the keys, opened the supply cupboard, and dragged the body inside. He went back for the shoe, and dropped it beside her.
There were half a dozen tubes of glue on a shelf next to the sheets of transparent plastic used to protect covers of library books. Peachey grabbed a tube on his way out. He also took the librarian’s keys, and her cash, but not the wallet.
He closed the cupboard door, locked it, and squirted the whole tube of glue into the lock. Now no one was getting inside. Not without a locksmith, or maybe a battering ram. The corpse would stay hidden for days.
He went back to the yearbook section of the library, performed the same calculation the librarian had been halfway through to work out which book Ashley would be in, and then pulled it off the shelf. He flicked through to the mugshots, which were arranged alphabetically – hers was on the second page.
The librarian had been right. It was unmistakably the same girl he’d seen at HBS, right before he was arrested. Each picture had a caption with the usual nonsense below it. Hers read:
Name: Ashley Arthur.
Favourite subject: PE.
Favourite quote: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
What I’ll miss about NSG: The free wi-fi.
I see you, Peachey thought.
There was no more useful information, so he put the book back on the shelf and went back to the librarian’s desk. He grabbed a pen and an A4 sheet of paper, and scribbled out a message: The library is CLOSED TODAY. Sorry! Looking for some tape to stick it to the door, he realized he’d probably sealed up every roll of it in the closet with the body. No matter. He pulled an anti-drug poster off the wall, peeled off the blobs of Blu-tack, and used them instead. Then he picked up his art folder and walked out, locking the door behind him.
Only one corridor separated the library from the front office. He walked slowly, pretending to examine the paintings on the walls as he went, although as far as he could tell, there was no one around to see him. Everybody was in class, students and teachers alike.
Some of the pictures were quite good, as good as what he’d done in prison. He felt a pang of regret. If he’d gone to a fancy school like this, he might be a famous artist by now.
When he got to the reception desk, the man who’d given him the visitor’s badge said, “Find who you were looking for?”
“The sketch belongs to Ashley Arthur,” Peachey said. “Would you be able to call her out of class so I could give it to her? Or should I wait until lunchtime?”
“Ashley isn’t actually here today,” the receptionist said. “If you give me the sketch, I can pass it on when she gets back.”
Peachey shook his head. “Thanks, but I have to give it to her personally, or mail it via...come to think of it, do you have a postal address for Ashley?”
The receptionist sighed. “Not one I’m allowed to share. Perhaps you could come back on Monday?”
Peachey smiled. “I’ll do that. Thanks for your help.”
He handed over the badge and walked out. When he got to the car park, he held up the librarian’s keys and pushed the unlock button. A blue hatchback chirped nearby, and he jogged over to it.
It felt good to have a new car. Whoever had gotten him out of the Hallett State Remand Centre had probably put a tracking device in the old one, and he didn’t like them knowing his whereabouts while he didn’t know theirs.
He climbed in, put on his seat belt and turned the key. It’s a shame, he thought, that the receptionist was too well trained to give me Ashley’s address.
But he wasn’t worried. Now that he knew her full name, her age, and what school she went to, Peachey could find out everything else he needed.
“Google®? You’re kidding.”
Until Benjamin said it out loud, Ash had thought she’d misheard. Had Hammond Buckland lost his mind?
“Control Tower, this is Octopus 3,” Buckland said, “requesting permission to take off.” He twisted the headset mike away from his lips and turned to Ash and Benjamin. “Would I get dressed up like this and make you meet me at the airport just for a practical joke?”
Benjamin said, “But you do know that Google®’s not an intelligence agency, right?”
“Intelligence agencies are just organizations that collect information. And Google® has indexed more than two hundred and sixty terabytes of it. The CIA can’t compete with that. Nor can any other agency.”
“That’s different. Government agencies collect valuable information. Secrets.”
“Just because something’s secret doesn’t mean it’s valuable,” Buckland said. “And vice versa. Did you know that Google® can predict and assess outbreaks of disease quicker than any health organization, because of all the people typing in their symptoms?”
“I read about that,” Benjamin admitted. “But that’s just a quirk. It doesn’t make them spies.”
“There are a lot of other quirks like it,” Buckland
said. “Because the company has become so ubiquitous, it knows way more than most people realize. If you have a Gmail account, it knows your name and who you know. If you’ve used its maps, it knows where you live, where you study, where you work. If you have Google® Desktop, it knows everything that’s on your computer. Most website owners use Google® Analytics, which tells them how many people are visiting their website, and for how long, and where they’re from – so Google® knows all that too. Thanks to Google® News, it knows what you’re interested in. Did I mention that they own YouTube?”
“But none of that is useful information,” Benjamin insisted.
“Individually, no. If Google® knows that Benjamin Whitely has googled plastic surgery, that’s insignificant. But if fifty-two per cent of people in the state have googled plastic surgery, then that information is significant. And it can be checked for correlations – how many of those people have also googled protein supplements? How many of those are under twenty? And so on.”
“Have you been monitoring my search history?”
Buckland frowned. “What do you mean?”
Benjamin reddened. “Nothing.”
“We’re missing the point,” Ash said. “There is no way that Google® is kidnapping people.”
“I didn’t say they were.” Buckland drummed his fingers on the plane’s steering yoke. “I said Alice was being held at the Googleplex, their headquarters. My guess is, they don’t even realize it.”
“My guess is, it’s a prank.” Ash said. “Or a publicity stunt by Bing™.”
“I’d agree with you,” Buckland said, “except for the way it was done. As far as we can tell, only one message was sent. It was faxed – which is very traceable, by the way – to a locked vault in the city library. Publicity stunts have to be public. The same goes for pranks, since the prankster likes to see it happening. This is something else.”
“But that’s just as stupid a place to send a real SOS as a fake one,” Ash said.
“Indeed. Which means she probably had no choice where the message ended up. Which means it’s probably real.”
“How the hell would you imprison someone at the Googleplex without Google® knowing about it?” Benjamin demanded. “Like you said, they know everything.”
“We can figure that out later,” Buckland said. “What we should be focusing on right now is how we can get her out.” After a pause, he lifted the mike back to his mouth and said, “Copy that, control.”
The pitch of the engine noise changed as Buckland’s hands fluttered over the switches.
“So who is she?” Ash asked. “Any ideas?”
“How should I know?” Buckland replied. “There are millions of Alices around the world, and hundreds of thousands of Alice Bs. Plus, the fact that she didn’t write her full name means that it’s likely to be an alias.”
“Or she was interrupted,” Benjamin said.
Ash drummed her fingers on her thigh. “Are there any Alice Bs who work for Google®, or used to?”
“Yes,” Buckland said. “I looked into that. There are four that I could find, but I have no way of working out which it is – or if it is any of them. None of them has been reported missing.”
I suppose we can ask her who she is after we rescue her, Ash thought.
Buckland turned away, his attention on the controls. The plane started to accelerate across the tarmac. The momentum pressed Ash backwards into her seat.
Benjamin turned to face her. “Are we really doing this?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Going to California, breaking into the Googleplex, rescuing a stranger?”
“Yeah.”
He grinned. “Cool.”
Ash’s stomach lurched as the wheels lifted off the ground. The walls roared and vibrated, and Ash wondered if this was what the inside of a microwave sounded like. Out the window, the landscape gradually shrank until it was the size of a train set. Tiny cars trundled back and forth across ribbon-like highways, and a boat drew a white scar across the harbour.
The boat reminded Ash of the one she’d seen at the mine – and the fear she’d heard in the soldier’s voices.
“Mr. Buckland,” Ash said.
“Yes?”
“Have you heard of ‘the ghost’?”
There was a long silence. Ash couldn’t see his face.
He said, “Who gave you that name?”
It is a name, Ash thought. I knew it. “I overheard some other thieves talking about it,” she said. “In the mine.”
“Was he there?” Buckland sounded shocked.
With growing unease, Ash told him, “They said he was coming. And I think I saw his boat.”
“Jesus,” Buckland said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Who is he?”
“No offence, but he’s probably the most skilled thief in the world. In fact...” He paused.
They waited.
“You’re freaking us out back here,” Benjamin said.
“Do you believe in supernatural powers?” Buckland asked. “Psychics, seances, anything like that?”
Ash didn’t hesitate. “Nope.”
“No way,” Benjamin agreed.
“Good,” Buckland said. “The Ghost is a thief who likes people to believe he has paranormal abilities, both clients and victims alike. Everything he steals, he makes it look like magic, so no one knows how it was taken even after it’s gone. One of his nastier habits is shooting people with a flash-bang, impaling them with a harpoon, and dragging them out of sight while the people nearby are still blinded, so the person appears to vanish. Sometimes he tosses a set of clothes onto the spot to confuse the witnesses further. It’s supposed to make people scared of him, and it works.
“He has a website where clients post details about the items they want, and then try to outbid one another on them. He closes bidding on each item once he’s stolen it, and then delivers it to whoever offered the most money. The last time I checked, the Mona Lisa was up to four hundred and fifty-four million euros.”
“Like a criminal eBay?” Benjamin said.
“Yes – with only one seller.”
“How does he know they’ll be able to pay?” Ash asked. “Surely the internet is full of people who’ll make bogus bids.”
“Anyone who does that disappears,” Buckland said. “Word got around, so it doesn’t happen any more. A few people even got turned into zombies – you don’t want to know how he does that.”
“Actually,” Benjamin said, “I kind of do.”
“He injects them with a tiny amount of tetrodotoxin, which paralyses them, stops the breathing, lowers the body temperature, and slows the pulse down until it’s undetectable, but leaves them completely conscious. Then he dumps them in a public place to be found and declared dead. There’s no way of telling how many people he’s done this to – some are cremated, alive; others regain their mobility days later, only to suffocate in their coffins or morgue drawers. But a few are able to escape, either by digging their way to the surface or screaming until someone hears, but they’re too brain-damaged by the lack of oxygen to explain what happened to them, so all they can do is shuffle and moan—”
“Stop!” Benjamin said, slightly pale. “Okay, you’re right. I didn’t want to know that.”
“How do you know so much about him?” Ash asked.
Buckland said, “I once owned the world’s fourth-largest emerald, carved into the shape of the Buddha by Cambodian priests over a thousand years ago. When it appeared on the Ghost’s site, I immediately took steps to protect it. I ordered a vault built out of sixty-six big steel bricks, stacked on top of one another and welded together. It cost me more than $130,000. There was no door – I figured I’d have the vault dismantled after I’d dealt with the Ghost some other way.
“Less than two hours after the emerald was sealed inside, he closed bidding on the site, claiming to have stolen it. I didn’t believe it – how could he have got in? But when I went back to the vault, my guards
had disappeared. I had security cameras, of course, so I watched the footage. And I saw the guards vanish in the blink of an eye, the Ghost walk towards the wall, walk through it, and walk back out, carrying the emerald.”
“That’s...impossible,” Benjamin said.
“Indeed. I assume the footage must have been faked. Someone could have broken into the security office, hacked into the computer and replaced the video file with a doctored one – difficult, but possible. I was rattled, so I went to the vault. It was intact on every side, but I still wasn’t reassured. I used a cutting torch to cut one of the bricks loose. It took more than four hours. And when I finally got it out, I could see that the emerald was gone.”
“How?” Ash was fascinated. “How did he do that?”
“If you ever figure that out,” Buckland said, “I’ll give you a million dollars to tell me.”
“No evidence of blasting or cutting equipment in the vault?” Benjamin asked.
“It took another hour for the metal to cool down enough so I could climb in through the hole without getting burned, but when I did, the inside of the vault looked exactly the same as I’d left it. Except empty.”
Ash said, “You’re sure the emerald was in there when you sealed it?”
“I checked personally, before welding the final brick.”
“It was the genuine article, not a hologram or something?”
“It was the real deal,” Buckland said sadly.
“What about time loss?” Benjamin asked. “Are you sure it was only two hours between when you sealed the vault and when he put it on his website? You didn’t black out, or anything?”
“No,” Buckland said. “I was awake the whole time, and my watch stayed in sync with every other clock I’ve seen since then. It was only two hours – and remember, the vault took four hours to open later. The whole situation is impossible.”
“Could the Ghost have built an entire fake vault?” Ash asked. “Stolen yours, left his behind, and extracted the emerald later?”
Buckland’s eyes widened. “I hadn’t considered that,” he said. “But that would have taken dozens of people, heavy machinery, and probably a lot longer than two hours. Those bricks were a metre thick – the whole thing would have weighed several tonnes. And the Ghost wouldn’t just have had to remove the vault and put a duplicate in its place. He would have had to rebuild the room it was in – no door was anywhere near wide or high enough to fit the entire vault through. That’s very clever, but I can’t believe it’s the answer.”