The History Book

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The History Book Page 12

by Humphrey Hawksley


  “. . . coalition will feed the hungry,” North is saying. “It will protect our homes and make the world safe for us to live in.”

  Kat gets her change and leaves. She’s near a subway station called Surrey Keys. Liz Luxton’s place in Balham is a long way to the southwest. It’ll take a couple of hours to walk there.

  Now she needs a place where lots of people are using their cell phones. On the map, about a mile south, is a soccer stadium. With England celebrating a big win, there might be some hope there.

  All cell phones contain a built-in International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI), which automatically logs into the nearest base station whenever it is used. The phones’ SIM cards, which can be swapped from handset to handset, carry an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI), which contains the billing number, including the international code for the country in which it’s registered. If a phone’s reported stolen, it’s most likely this will be the number used to track it. The IMSI is also the one used to intercept and tap into cell phone conversations.

  Cell phone receiving antennae can be on any tall structure, and at least three are needed to triangulate a call. The closest tower detects the distance of the caller, but it could be in any direction. The second tower defines an arc. The third pinpoints the location.

  Some cells have devices that triangulate the phone so it can be tracked if stolen. Their cameras will automatically take pictures of the thief and send an iris ID to a police database. A phone’s laminated cover can activate to absorb fingerprints and send them as well.

  Kat has to find Bill Cage, organize a secure way of communication, and get rid of the phones quickly.

  It spits with rain. She passes an intersection where the sports screen is broken and the U.S. president, Jim Abbott, is in the White House Rose Garden. The caption says ENERGY TREATIES CONFIRMED.

  She finds the audience outside the soccer stadium, concentrating on the twin sports and politics screens. Javier Laja, the Brazil captain, is being interviewed, with sound being blasted from speakers in the stadium’s wall.

  “What will you do if you lose?” asks the interviewer.

  Laja puts on a smile, his bushy, dark hair pulled back, big hands open. “I will find a beautiful woman and make love to her,” he says.

  Kat laughs out loud. She’s eating chocolate, her body sucking in the sugar.

  The host’s reaction is deadpan. “If you win, your victory will be doubly historic because it will coincide with the historic signing of Project Peace.”

  Laja turns, spits on the ground, looks back straight into the camera, and says, “Project Peace is a trick—” The screen flickers to black.

  “I thought they had a five-second delay,” says a man close to Kat.

  “It was deliberate,” comes the answer from a woman next to him. “A lot of TV people loathe Project Peace, and no one can touch a man like Laja.”

  Kat hasn’t seen Laja since she was about twelve, and even now she gets a little choked up when she remembers their first encounter, when they were both about eight. “I’m sorry about your mom and dad,” she said to this Brazilian kid who’d lost his parents, both undocumented workers. Laja stared in front of him, his right foot on a soccer ball, not saying anything, because he didn’t understand English. Tears just tumbled down his cheeks.

  He wrote her a letter when her own mom and dad died. Kat was too broken up to reply. As the screen picks up with the same pictures of the Chinese team getting onto a plane, Kat realizes that Laja’s comment and the screen blackout have prompted people to make cell phone calls.

  Kat melts into the sea of people and fires up one of the cell phones.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tuesday, 7:46 a.m., BST

  It’s me,” she says.

  Silence for a beat. Then, “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I called twelve hours ago. Then—”

  “Aliya Raktaeva, the Kazakh embassy trade secretary,” Kat interrupts. “Was she working for you?”

  A pause. Then Cage answers straight. “Yes.”

  “Those men I killed. Are they from the same people who killed Suzy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know Suzy was dead when I went in?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know the embassy had been hit?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what Suzy was doing?”

  “I can’t answer.”

  Kat lets it go. Cage can only say so much.

  “What do I need to know?” she asks.

  “Stay away from Nate Sayer and anyone in government,” answers Cage quickly.

  “Are you safe?”

  “The next twenty-four hours will tell.”

  “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Yulya Gracheva and her mother are bad. They’re killers,” says Cage.

  “Max?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Two police motorcyclists, blue lights flashing, pull up outside the stadium, signaling people to stay on the sidewalk. A limousine with darkened windows turns into the road and accelerates past.

  “You there?” asks Cage.

  “Sorry. Yeah. Can you find Liz Luxton and tell her I need to see her? Now.” Before Cage can answer, she gives him the address in Balham, then hangs up.

  She leaves the crowd, walks half a mile until she finds an Internet café. Two guys in sweatsuits with hoods are checking in by signing onto a biometric fingerprint reader. They pay cash for a booth.

  Kat needs to find a way around that detection system. She steps back out and keeps walking southwest in the direction of Balham. She examines the Internet access on the stolen cell phones. The problem lies with their embedded antitheft systems. If she were at home in her workshop, she could have neutralized them, but not on a London street.

  It starts raining. She steps under a shop awning, removes the SIM card from the phone she used to call Cage, puts in one from another phone so that the SIM ID no longer matches the handset ID. It doesn’t make it secure, but it buys her more time. She calls Mercedes Vendetta in Washington.

  A siren flares up. At the edge of her field of view, an ambulance jumps red lights and makes a sharp right turn.

  Someone picks up at Mercedes’ end. She hears loud, rhythmic music and a woman’s voice. It’s the early hours of Tuesday over there. “M?” says Kat, hesitantly. The music fades. An English caller ID must have come up on Mercedes’ phone.

  He speaks away from the mouthpiece. “Give me a sec,” he says. A door closes. “Okay, we’re confidential,” he says. “How’s things?”

  “Has anyone come to see you?”

  “Not from your world. And what you asked me to do is fine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Is this a new number to call you on, like if I get a visit?”

  “No,” says Kat sharply. “I’ll call you again soon.”

  “You got time for advice?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t think confusion. Don’t think mistakes. Don’t think emotions—”

  “I love you for that, M,” interrupts Kat, “but I need you to do one more thing for me.”

  Kat tells him, then hangs up.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tuesday, 9:46 a.m., BST

  She finds what she needs in the third Internet café, part of a chain called Simple Net. The link between the central database and the fingerprint biometric sensor is broken. Rather than shut the store down, staff are swiping ID cards or taking an infrared record from cell phones.

  Kat uses Suzy’s ID, then pays cash for a PC with an extra hard drive in a private booth. They put Nancy’s £20 note through a scanner, and it comes out clean.

  At her computer, Kat logs into her encrypted personal storage file. While waiting for it to come up, she takes Suzy’s hard drive out of her bag, puts it on the workspace, and plugs the cord into it.

  Kat brings out her compact mirror, pretends to fish something out of her eye, sees there’
s normal activity behind her, and puts the mirror at a tilt on the glass desktop, so she can keep checking.

  Her personal file lights up as active. She messages Cage and tells him where Liz Luxton can find her.

  She waits for Suzy’s hard drive to respond. She waits for Cage to get back to her. She Googles the Project Peace pamphlet she saw at the lecture. North’s face appears, then fades to the logo of Project Peace with a caption under it, The Secure Path Ahead.

  The pamphlet is ten pages long, with pictures of energy workers of all nationalities on oil and gas fields featured early on. Further along is a chart of terror groups and mug shots of their leaders. Then a map of energy supplies around the world, spread over two pages, and divided into oil, gas, nuclear, and others. On the two back pages is a bulleted list in alphabetical order.

  • Apply yourself to the situation.

  • Better yourself in the eyes of your peers.

  • Create trust between neighbours.

  Kat scans through until:

  • Zealotry is destructive.

  Set in a bold-type box:

  Suspicion is bad; skepticism is good. Ensure you know your neighbour. If he or she doesn’t want to know you, be skeptical.

  In another:

  Make a friend of a person of another religion. If they shun you, be skeptical.

  The inside pages are a brief history—crusades, trade wars, discovery of oil, the 1978 overthrow of the shah of Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the 1991 Gulf War, 9/11, the Iraq war, Iran, Syria.

  Throughout, the Coalition for Peace and Security seems to depend on being made credible by the omnipresent historian Dr. Christopher North.

  Her eyes jig to the mirror. She sees backs of heads, glimpses of screens. She switches to Suzy’s hard drive. Nothing. She gives it time. Still no data. Condensation from her river journey must have wrecked it.

  Another glance behind her, then Kat peels the SIM card copy of the Kazakh embassy file from the small of her back and unwraps the plastic wrap and polyethylene. It’s bone dry. The PC has no slot for it. She puts an unused stolen cell phone in front of her and lines it up on an infrared link.

  She takes a flash card from her own software pack, praying that it’s survived the river. The desktop recognizes it. Kat creates a protective cordon against being monitored.

  The flash card emits a radio signal that jams triangulation of the cell phone’s signal. It also throws out an electronic decoy screen, which deceives remote surveillance on the computer.

  Kat splits the screen. On the left, she runs a video interview with North. On the right, she opens the Kazakh file.

  Now she’s certain, and it doesn’t even require seeing Yulya’s face. It’s partly the way she stands, legs half apart and torso slightly twisted. It’s the way the arms hang, too. Kat zooms in closer to look at the face and picks out the freckles and the birthmark that just appears at the rim of her hat.

  She flips on further into the file. It’s big. She can’t look at it all, and she needs to know exactly what it’s about.

  She stops at a section of e-mails, most of them one-liners, arranged by date, with no company logo or reference. They are sent from AOL, Hotmail, MSN, servers where anyone can open and close an account in a minute.

  They don’t indicate who sent them and who’s receiving them, and they’re in three languages. Given more time, Kat could source them, but Simple Net café is not the place.

  Figures for reserves in the Caspian Energy Region are incorrect.

  Where are the inaccuracies?

  Ninety percent of reserves are within Kazakhstan’s borders.

  Declare only those outside.

  You happy with that?

  Our advantage.

  See attached. Ballpark?

  Twelve percent official. Seventy percent actual. Published Kazakh reserves are 17.6 billion barrels. Actual are 120 billion barrels.

  Keep the lid on that.

  Post CPS, no problem.

  Kat recognizes the first language as Russian. She copies and pastes the second version into a search engine. It comes out as Kazakh.

  Kat’s only 24 years old and knows she’s ignorant about a great many things. What she’s looking at now is getting far too complicated.

  Oil and gas reserves are being rigged. Prices are being falsely fixed.

  Three languages mean at least three people know. The chances are that those three people also know about the photograph of a man lying dead, his blood turning snow to red.

  She highlights the file and presses the keyboard to transfer it to her personal storage file. The cursor stays hourglassed. Then a message says “File too large for transfer.”

  She could try splitting it up, but when you tamper with data, you never know if it will erase itself or send out an alert.

  In the compact mirror, she sees a face behind her, not peering at her screen, but looking straight at her.

  He stands, resting his hand on the partition. The green light makes his skin look tanned and pockmarked. His eyes are a milky gray. She feels his gaze, but doesn’t react, doesn’t match it, keeps her eyes ahead of her, turns her screen to black, drops her eyes, and sees a scuffed boot.

  “Hello, Mike,” she says. “Thanks for your help yesterday.”

  “I was right then?” His tone sounds like he doesn’t much care either way.

  “Yeah. You were.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Someone told you I was here?”

  He nods. “Liz. She was a good friend of your sister’s.”

  Kat’s not sure about the answer. She needs to know that Cage sent him. She stands up and speaks with her voice lowered. “Which someone?” she asks.

  “From Washington,” he says softly. “And not Nate Sayer.” He looks around. “You made a good choice coming here,” he continues. “You’re secure.”

  Mike Luxton moves into her booth. There’s just enough space for the two of them. Kat edges back. Her hand covers the cell phone. Her thumb and forefinger unclip the Kazakh embassy SIM card. She examines Luxton’s face. It’s unshaven and creased, with the same dulled expression as before.

  “Why do you want to see my sister?” he asks.

  “She was supposed to meet Charlotte on Sunday evening.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “I said they were friends.”

  “Why at the North lecture?”

  His expression changes, a smile at the edge of his mouth. His arrogance is naked, the threat cold, but there’s something else. The way he makes her wary isn’t just professional, it’s personal. Mike Luxton has sexual power, and she’s feeling it.

  He drops a cell phone on the desk. Kat doesn’t touch it. “To be honest, I’m not sure myself,” he says. “Liz would come herself, but she has cerebral palsy. It affects her muscle control. The birth got screwed up and they took her out with forceps that rearranged her brain, so the messages to her limbs become mangled. She gets around slowly.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kat says.

  “Don’t ever say that to her. Just give her time when she gets caught in a stutter.”

  Kat activates the PC’s screen. Cage has messaged. “They’re coming. They’re trusted.”

  She looks across to Luxton. He’s not a man she would like to see angry. She’d be wrong to think of his face as cruel. But internal scars are etched into it, giving him something untamed in his character, like with Mercedes Vendetta. She doesn’t mistrust him so much as she finds Mike Luxton an interesting man.

  “I need to see where my sister was murdered,” says Kat.

  “Understood,” he says. “Murder sites give answers.”

  It’s a struggle to keep her voice at a whisper. “Why was my sister there? Who was she with? What was she doing? Why was she at the concert? Who else was in the audience?”

  “Good questions, but they’re for Liz, not me.”

  “Where exactly was it?” presses Kat.

  “A vill
age called Snape. The concert hall’s called The Maltings.”

  He glances at the cell phone he gave her. Kat takes the back off it, slides out the battery and the SIM card, casts her eyes over them, slips them back in again, checks the number of the phone, and commits it to memory. He watches her.

  “After I leave,” he says, “give it five minutes. Go outside, walk to the intersection. Watch the TV screens there until Liz calls you.”

  Kat waits until Luxton goes, collects her things, and shuts down the computer. In the bathroom, she wraps the Kazakh SIM card again in plastic wrap and polyethylene and tapes it to her back, then messages Bill Cage with the new cell phone number.

  Then she steps out.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Tuesday, 11:58 a.m., BST

  Rain spits down past the TV screens on the street corner. Kat blends with people gathered there. They are people with time on their hands who are angry at life. They gaze at the digital images as if wishing for a miracle to fall from the sky.

  She puts one of the stolen cell phones in a garbage can, slips the other into a woman’s open shoulder bag, and keeps the one she hasn’t used.

  The cell phone that Luxton gave her beeps.

  “K-kat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you facing the ACR B-bank?”

  Diagonally across the intersection, Kat sees ACR. High on its frontage are two more TV screens, and a pub to one side.

  “C-cross over, go straight, leave the b-bank on your left and go right at the first turn. G-go round a curve, and you’ll get to a railway. T-turn right and go in under the arches.”

  Kat walks, letting Liz explain in her own time. Her grandma, when she chose to speak, used her words so slowly it used to drive Kat mad with impatience, until one day, her father whispered in her ear, “Words are all she has now. You have to let her speak them as best she can.”

 

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