by Jon Evans
“You remember your last words to me then? Of course you do, mind like a black hole, nothing escapes. Refresh my memory. What were they, exactly?”
After a moment, Keiran says, “The exact words were ‘I owe you my life.’”
Angus nods and says nothing.
“Angus, for Christ’s sake. I know what I said. But you can’t just waltz back four years later and demand I throw my life away on one of your pointless gestures.”
“I’m not asking you to break the Bank of England. Just to do a little research.”
“In blatant violation of the law. No. I’ve already taken too big a risk for this. I have a life now. I have too much to lose.”
“A life?” Angus asks. “It is to weep. A man with what is widely described as the most gifted technical mind ever to come out of the UK, a man who once believed in a better world, reduced to working at an investment bank. How exciting. How inspirational. Come on, LoTek –”
“Don’t call me that. I’ve given up all that bullshit. And I can’t believe you haven’t. Fucking grow up already. You’re over thirty, man. Rebellion isn’t sexy any more. You’re not seriously still an anarchist, are you?”
Angus says, quietly, “I still believe in a better world.”
Keiran, suddenly uncomfortable, retreats into cynicism. “Well. So do I. A better world for me.”
“Come on. Even if I believed you were that selfish. Posh birds, expense accounts, your own flat in Clapham Common? That’s the extent of your ambition? That’s your dream world?”
“Closest I’m likely to get in the real world.”
“You should fucking own the real world,” Angus says, a little anger seeping into his voice. “People speak of you in whispers.”
“I’m flattered. Which gets me nowhere. Here’s another real-world shocker; the opinions of anarchists, crusties, and cipherpunks count for very little. What does count is that I don’t have a degree, and if I tell the truth about that massive gap in my CV, I go straight to prison. Most gifted technical mind? How nice of you to say. The truth is I’m lucky to be where I am. Remember LoTek’s Law.”
“Ah yes. Always be invisible. Corollary: I succeed to the extent that I do not exist. What good is all your access if you never fucking do anything with it? Tell me something, mate. How can you not have woken up every single morning since you took this bullshit City job feeling like you’re slowly pissing your life away? “
Keiran pauses. The dreadlocked Scotsman’s sharp instinct for the weak spot has not deserted him.
“Come on, Keiran,” Angus says. “You’re not an ordinary human being. You’ve been trying that on for, what, three years now? You must be about fucking bursting by now. Stop trying to make yourself a zombie. It’s no good to anyone. You should be making a difference, and right now you barely exist. If you died tonight, if you walked out of this pub and in front of a bus, what difference would it make?”
“Enough,” Keiran says. “Save your breath. You are not going to recruit me to your oh-so-noble cause.”
“Maybe not. But you owe me nonetheless. And I’m calling in that debt.”
“Maybe it’s too late.”
Angus shrugs. “I remember you were an honourable man, once. Maybe that’s changed too.”
Keiran looks at him for a long time.
“What are you saying exactly?” he asks. “When it’s done, if I can do it, then we’re all square, the debt is done, I owe you nothing? Is that the proposed agreement?”
“That’s the proposed agreement,” Angus says.
“And what if I can’t? I wasn’t lying, before. I have been trying. And I’m nowhere.”
“What the good people tell me is that if you can’t, no one can.”
Keiran inclines his head. “Might be some truth to that.”
They look at each other. Eventually Keiran raises his pint glass to Angus, as if in salute, drains it, and sighs.
“I pay my debts,” he says. “Always have, always will.”
Angus nods.
“All right. I’ll find a way in. I’ll give you all Kishkinda’s secrets.”
Angus smiles. “Of course you will, mate. Never doubted you for a minute.”
* * *
Much later that same night, Keiran sits in his flat, stares dully at his laptop, and wonders if he inadvertently told Angus the truth when he claimed he was too rusty to be of use. Breaking into Kishkinda’s corporate network should be straightforward. They’re a mining company, not a technology concern. Information security should be an afterthought, their network replete with unpatched weaknesses and vulnerable computers. And there are plenty of possible entry points: Kishkinda is a large enough corporate entity that their network spans offices in Europe and North America as well as the mine itself. But despite truly applying himself to the problem for the first time, Keiran has failed to carve out so much as a toehold on any of their machines.
Again he refreshes the network map he has generated that shows all of Kishkinda’s gateway machines, those which connect their corporate network to the wider Internet. Again he feels like a rock climber staring at a wall of sheer steel. Every one of these machines is tightly firewalled and runs no unnecessary software. Those programs they do run have been religiously patched with security updates, some as recently as this week. And much of the traffic he has been able to sniff going to and from Kishkinda, via intermediary machines owned by others that he has been able to hack, is protected by military-grade encryption.
“Who are these bastards?” he mutters to himself. He would expect this level of security from an intelligence agency, or an Internet security firm, not a midlevel mining concern. He wonders exactly why Angus is targeting Kishkinda, and who exactly Jayalitha is, and why she is important. Then he wonders why Danielle hasn’t emailed him a confirmation that Jayalitha’s passport delivery is complete. She was supposed to be back in Goa by now. But then she is in India, world leader in excessive bureaucracy and incomprehensible delays. Keiran decides to give her another few days before writing and asking her for an update. Then he returns to his search for some kind of chink in Kishkinda’s impregnable steel wall.
Chapter 8
“I called my group’s office here,” Laurent says, as Danielle struggles for full wakefulness. “No answer. I called the national office in Bombay. Again no answer. Those phones should always be answered, 24 hours. I called headquarters in Vancouver. They don’t know exactly what’s happening either. Almost all of our people in India have been arrested. The government are calling Justice International a drug smuggling ring. Our people in Kishkinda as well, they say they grew and supplied the drugs. Most of all they want to arrest us.”
“Us? You and me?”
“They seem to believe that you are one of us.”
“But – the police. You’re saying the Indian police want to arrest me for being a drug smuggler.” The words sound ridiculous leaving her mouth.
“Exactly.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yes. It is crazy. It is also very real.”
Danielle stares at him, trying to absorb the blow. She has not escaped yesterday’s danger. She is not safe. She is, incredibly, a wanted criminal. Maybe, she tells herself, this is just another dream. Maybe she will wake into a more pleasant reality any second now. This is too awful. It can’t really be happening.
She shakes her head to clear it. “I need to understand exactly what is going on.”
“The what is very simple. Kishkinda poisons the ground around the mine, doing terrible things, as you saw, to those who live there. My group tries to stop them. They think you are one of us. And they have declared war. They cannot attack us directly now we have escaped, so they have the police come after us.”
“Just like that? They just tell the police what to do?”
“Bribes, false evidence, political influence,” he says. “They have millions upon millions of dollars. More than enough to put us in jail.”
“We should go to the consu
late.”
“No,” he says sharply. “No. The consulate will help if you are arrested. They will not help you escape arrest. They will inform the Indian police if you go to them.”
“But if we turn ourselves in, publicly, they won’t dare to –”
“Of course they will. Do you know how many Westerners are in Indian jails on drug charges? You know the bureaucracy and corruption here. Do you really think the police were one hundred per cent correct with every such conviction? Believe me, some of them are innocent men with powerful enemies. Do you really believe it can’t happen to you? My group will fight this, but you know what Indian courts are like. Slow, corrupt, incompetent. No. What we must do is leave the country. We won’t be safe until we escape India.”
“How? We don’t have passports, we can’t get new ones, and the police are after us.”
Laurent nods. “That’s the essence of the problem.”
“Jesus.” Danielle sits up, reaches for a cappucino, sips it. She feels like she has stepped into quicksand, that she will soon be sucked down and suffocated whether she struggles or not. This is something too big and pervasive to tackle on her own. She feels like she has already used up all her luck and resourcefulness. She can’t handle being on the run from false drug charges in a foreign country.
“I just want to go home,” she says faintly.
“I’m sorry. That isn’t possible.”
She has to call someone for help. But who? Her parents? She can just imagine how they would react. Oh, they would try to help, certainly, with all the money she might ever need, with outraged calls to their congressman and senator and the Indian ambassador, careful to work only through the proper channels – and she knows none of it will serve to conceal the fact that they will believe the allegations that their fuckup black-sheep daughter is smuggling drugs from India. She can almost hear her father: How could you get yourself into this? She can imagine her mother telling her to turn herself in for her own good, her own safety. No. She will go to her parents if she is arrested. Their kind of proper-channels influence might help her then. Not before.
“What I don’t understand is why,” Laurent says. “We’ve been fighting Kishkinda for years. They think nothing of disappearing an Indian, but a Westerner, until now we might be intimidated, roughed up, but having us arrested, let alone all of us arrested, never before, that is very visible, very risky. For them as well as us. Something extraordinary has stirred them. I’m sorry. You seem to have come just as someone hit the Kishkinda beehive with a very big stick.”
“Just my luck.”
”I don’t think it was luck. I believe the people holding this stick are your friend Keiran and his group.”
Keiran. Danielle has almost forgotten it was him who got her into this mess. Maybe he can help her. If anyone can, in a situation like this, it’s Keiran Kell.
“What do you know about them?” Laurent asks.
“Nothing. Except it’s totally out of character for him to be working with any group at all. Much less anticapitalist protestor types.”
“What is he like? What does he do?”
“Well.” Danielle knows that talking about Keiran is a betrayal of their friendship. But she trusts Laurent, their situation is desperate, and she angrily feels that at this point she pretty much owes Keiran a betrayal to even the score. “He’s a hacker. Or was.”
Laurent raises his eyebrows. “Hacker?”
“Breaks into computer systems. At least he used to, when we dated. But now he’s all legal, does computer security for some investment bank in London.”
“He must have gone back to his old pursuits.”
“For a bunch of antiglobalization protestors? That’s so not his politics. He’s basically the British version of a redneck libertarian.”
Laurent shrugs. “Maybe they bribed him. Maybe blackmailed. Regardless. Whatever he hacked from Kishkinda has them running scared. And chasing us.”
“Sorry,” Danielle says, feeling irrationally responsible for her ex-boyfriend.
“Don’t be. For one, it’s not your fault. For two, I’m glad of it. Remember, his group and mine are on the same side. If they scare Kishkinda, it means they have found a weakness. I wish them luck. Maybe I can even help them.”
“You won’t be helping anyone if you wind up in jail here.”
“True,” he admits.
“Are we safe here? Do you think the police will check the hotels?”
“It’s certainly possible.”
“Then we should go,” she says, alarmed.
“Maybe we should. But where?”
She thinks a moment. “Goa.”
“Goa?”
“We can stay at the ashram as long as we need. They don’t really keep records. And there’s white tourists everywhere. We’ll be anonymous. And Kishkinda might own Karnataka,” the Indian state that includes both Bangalore and the Kishkinda mine, “but Goa’s a whole different state. They won’t have as much influence there.”
Danielle gets out of bed, wincing from her bruised stomach.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
“I’ll live. Just don’t tell me any jokes for a few days. How are you?” She looks at his swollen eye and the red, scabbed-over cuts visible on his face and arms.
“It’s nothing,” he says dismissively.
Danielle instinctively looks around for something to change into and realizes she literally owns nothing but the filthy, sweat-starched clothes on her back. She takes a deep breath and tells herself not to worry about the big, life-swallowing problem, to focus on the little things, that is the only way she will be able to cope with this. One hour at a time.
“All right,” she says. “Before we go to Goa, let’s go shopping.”
* * *
She takes him to Westside, a five-story department store that would not look out of place in London or Boston. It was this store, its designer clothes, organic groceries, and English books, and especially its soothing air-conditioned environment, that kept Danielle sane during her first culture-shocked weeks in India. It still feels like an oasis. Maybe she should claim sanctuary here, like a church in the Middle Ages. Surely no policeman would dare arrest her among these racks of clothes and pyramids of soap.
She buys a small backpack’s worth of sensible travel clothes and toiletries. When she changes, she discovers that the bruise on her stomach where the lathi struck her is darkly purple, and if she reaches either arm too far in any direction, it responds with a bolt of gasping pain. She wishes for a shower. She showered earlier, in the hotel’s lukewarm water, but then had to drip dry and don her worn, dirty clothes. She is glad she has kept her hair very short since coming to India.
Laurent is waiting for her by the main entrance, in new slacks, sandals, and a dark T-shirt. Like her, he now carries a small black backpack. They step outside into the seething heat of Bangalore proper, upon sidewalks that seem to have been victimized by a recent massive earthquake, through teeming crowds of well-dressed pedestrians, past men in tailored suits and women in bright saris, street vendors selling coconuts, crumbling century-old brick buildings, brand new glass-and-steel architecture, legless beggars, hypermodern Internet cafes. They eat at KFC, otherwise populated by Indian yuppies on lunch break from their high-tech jobs. It is hard to believe, in this modern, globalized, alternately choking and glittering city of eight million souls, that just a few hundred miles away, poisoned children are dying as their parents look on, helplessly ignorant of what they can do to help, whole villages full of people who have never made a telephone call.
After they eat, Danielle flags down an autorickshaw; three wheels on a cheap motorcycle chassis, with a thin open-sided roof, painted brown and yellow, shaped like a beetle’s carapace, covering the driver and the two passenger seats. There isn’t much room in an autorickshaw. They have to sit right up against one another, packs on their laps.
“Bangalore Junction,” Danielle orders.
The driver responds with a sid
eways Indian nod, yanks the long handle on the floor that starts the engine, and charges into seemingly impermeable traffic as if auditioning for a place in the Light Brigade.
Bangalore sprawls across a huge area; their journey takes them the better part of twenty minutes. It is not so much a distance traversed as a sequence of terrifying collisions barely avoided. Indian roads are horrendously overcrowded, ‘lanes’ are a myth as rare as unicorns, and all drivers act as if imminent reincarnation is a fate devoutly to be wished. Danielle and Laurent hardly talk. The squalling horns and unmuffled autorickshaw engine drown out anything quieter than a shout, and the haze of engine fumes is caustic to the throat.
Danielle lets her mind drift. Laurent’s shoulder muscles feel like warm iron against her. She wonders if he has always been strong, or if the Foreign Legion built those muscles. She wishes she could do yoga, a run-through of the ashtanga Primary Series would clear her head, but they don’t have time, and she won’t be capable of anything strenuous until her bruise heals. She looks down at Laurent’s thick hands, folded atop the backpack on his lap. He seems somehow hyper-real, more present than the rest of the world around her. She finds herself wondering how his fingers would feel entwined in hers, touching her, caressing her face and lips, she feels a sudden strange urge to grab his hands and bite them lightly, taste the sweat-salt on his rough fingers –
She catches herself and twitches with dismay. This is ridiculous. She is running for her life. She doesn’t have time for this kind of idle daydream. Of course, she tells herself, making herself think in abstractions, that’s exactly why it’s happening, intense situations like this are bound to draw people together, danger as an aphrodisiac, her genes screaming at her to get busy reproducing now because it looks like maybe she won’t have another chance. She is attracted to him, yes of course, Laurent isn’t classically handsome but he is athletic, graceful, beautiful in a raw animal way, and he did enter her life like the archetypal knight in shining armour. But right now she has to focus on what’s important, her own escape to safety, not on the man next to her, the physicality of their bodies pressed against one another. As distracting as that is.