She follows Liz’s directions and finds herself at the start of a dead-end alley, a high-fenced wall on one side, an elevated railway line on the other, with dull gray brick arches underneath, each one housing a workshop: Chas Motors, Scrim Bikes, Heath Mercedes Specialists.
Up ahead, maybe 200 yards away, is a high, flat wall. In between, a reek of chemicals and engine oil, radio noise, men working in jeans and greasy overalls. Cars, hoods up, jacked up, clouded in spray paint, are out on the street.
She turns down the road, which becomes cobblestones. She slows, dropping the spring in her step. A car, three men in it, moves across the entrance, blocking her way out.
She hears a familiar song on the radio, gritty and soulful from her Dix Street days.
The three men look her over like people did on Dix Street. She’s in a community that looks after its own. Kat slows but doesn’t stop.
She sees Liz, her long arm shaking slightly, wrist raised high to attract Kat’s attention, like they’ve agreed to meet all along, and this is just how it should be. Liz’s hair is tied back, but not tidily, and she’s wearing a floral, red and white summer dress. Mike Luxton is standing beyond the raised hood of the car, one hand on the roof, the other pointing angrily at his sister.
Kat gets closer and hears Liz shouting, not caring who hears. “If you strip them out, we’re not taking it.” There’s no stutter; her irritation seems to suppress it.
“If you keep them in,” says Luxton evenly, “you’ll get picked up as soon as you leave London.”
“Do you want us to get there or not?” challenges Liz. She balances her long, willowy body by holding on to the top of the open car door with one hand and the hood with the other. As her weight shifts, her muscles race to catch up. It looks like she could fall at any moment, but she manages to keep upright.
“I want you there, and you want to be there,” says Luxton. “That’s what all this is about.” He clicks his tongue at the back of his mouth and takes a cigarette out of a pack in his jacket pocket.
“And don’t you smoke while we’re discussing this,” says Liz.
Luxton pinches the bridge of his nose with his fingers. “We can handle the checkpoints.”
“You handled them once.”
“And it worked.”
“Two months ago,” Liz shoots back. “Have you noticed what’s happened since Project Peace moved up? They’ve been upgraded.”
Behind Kat, the three men are watching the main street, not Kat.
“You guys need some help?” Kat asks, hoping to lighten the situation. She comes up on Liz’s side of the red Ford Mondeo, which is new and has a rental card hanging from the mirror.
Luxton is on the other side, his hands motionless on the hood, a brother being told off by his sister. Kat smiles.
Liz looks up. “H-hello. I’m Liz. Suzy was one of m-my best friends. She told me a lot about you. She loved you a lot.”
“Thanks,” says Kat, softly. “I thought you were running out on me the other night.”
Liz offers her hand. It feels knotted when Kat takes it. The skin is coarse, with a scar running down from the thumb. Her fingers clench with different strengths, not able to work together.
Kat looks back at the open hood. “You got a problem here?”
“They’ve put a new roadblock up on the route to where your sister was killed,” says Mike Luxton. “I don’t know what you have over in the States, but here a car comes with three ID sensors, two on each number plate and one in the engine casing. Each emits a signal, which is picked up as you approach a checkpoint. If the car’s sensors are working, they can run an immediate ID check on you. If they’re not working, they detect that, too, and pull you over. Either way, it’s risky.”
“Is our trip illegal?”
“We c-can go,” says Liz, staring down her brother. “It’s just that we don’t want them to know we’re going. If we take the sensors out, they’ll know we’ve tried to cheat them. If we keep them in, at least we’re not doing anything illegal until we’re pulled over. Then they’ll know who we are.”
Kat squats down by the front license plate and runs her fingers over the surface. A barely detectable transmitter stretches across the top of the lettering, similar to the type used in the States a few years back.
“In the rain, it’s about a three-hour drive,” says Luxton.
“The rain’s stopping,” says Liz.
“You got replacements for these?” says Kat, looking up at Luxton, her hand on the license plate.
He points to a worktable under the nearest arch, where two plates lie. Kat brings the cell phone out of her pocket. “Is this straight off the shelf?” Luxton nods.
Kat works on the Mondeo’s front seat, setting the cell phone down next to her flash card, connecting them with infrared and loading a software program into the cell phone. She turns the phone back on.
“Run the engine,” she says. Liz steps back, and Luxton starts the engine. Kat gets out, holds the cell phone a few yards away from the license plate, and summons Liz over.
“See here?” She points to the phone’s tiny screen. “It’s like our system in the States. The license plates give off the vehicle specs, service history, last mileage, registered owner. It’s a static data chip that activates when the engine’s running. Anyone can access it—police, tow truck drivers, anyone with the equipment. It’s not encrypted.”
She steps closer to the car. “Okay, Mike, cut the engine.”
As it dies, the sensor’s transmission signal also goes.
“This is a rental, so you’ll be fine,” says Kat. “I assume it’s not under either of your names.”
“Right,” says Luxton.
Guiding Liz by the elbow, Kat leans into the engine. “That’s where the really nasty one is, and you can’t get to it. They embed it inside the engine metal like an airplane’s black box. If they’re suspicious of the car, they tune into it. They’ll know who’s in it, what they’re talking about, where they’re going. Everything. This is what we need to fix.”
Kat knows about code-screening vehicles so no one can tell where they’re registered or who’s driving. Most times when they carried out an embassy job, she and Cage rigged at least two vehicles, a primary and backup.
“I’m going to override the engine casing signal with the cell phone,” Kat continues. “It’ll take about fifteen minutes. The override takes the make of the car, plate numbers, and registration details, but sends out a whole heap of false information so no one will know who we are, and in between checkpoints, they won’t know where we are, either.”
As Kat works, Luxton melts back into a workshop, and Liz perches on the hood. Kat can’t help noticing a scar underneath Liz’s right lower jaw. It matches the one she’s seen on Liz’s hand.
“Did they cut you up a few times to try and fix you?” she asks.
“W-when I was a child, they tried to loosen up my muscles.” She’s got one hand on the windshield to keep balance even when sitting. “It didn’t work very wonderfully, but at least I can walk. And I can drive.”
One set of fingers unfurls to tap her skull. “W-what I really want to do is g-get rid of my stutter. Even if I get my brain signals right, my tongue muscles are not coordinated enough to reach the right parts of my mouth to make words properly.”
“You seemed all right when you were yelling at Mike.”
One eye swims around in an orbit of its own. The other is sharp and shining. “Cerebral mystery, they should call it,” she says. “You never know what might happen. A lot of people think it’s a disease, but it’s a condition, like having a broken leg.”
“How did you know Suzy?” Kat asks.
“She found me. She was very clever.” Liz holds her hands out in front of her. “You wouldn’t think it looking at these, but I’m a video editor. I work at a production house called Media Axis, which does most of its work for the government. About a year and a half ago, I began work on the Project Peace video profile, you
know that thing by Christopher North, where I saw you on Sunday. That’s when I first met Charlotte—or Suzy, I guess. Her job was to check that everything in the documentary matched the line being put forward in the printed materials. An example would be that in China, say, they have special compartments in trains for minorities, like Tibetans or Uighurs. In Europe, we would call that racial discrimination. It was down to that sort of detail.”
A light comes on in the cell phone.
“Does the car have a cigarette lighter in it?”
“In the d-dash.”
Kat plugs in the cell phone. “Sorry, go on.”
Liz’s face is creased in thought. “But that’s not really why Suzy was there. She knew a lot more about Media Axis than I did. Everything—and I mean everything—that’s visually recorded comes into its database. It takes up three whole buildings in Docklands. Floor after floor, both above and below ground, are taken up with a digital computer archive. My tiny job on North’s video was part of a huge contract to ensure that the Coalition for Peace and Security went ahead. Eventually Suzy told me that she’d found me because she wanted to prove that the CPS was a con.”
“When was this, exactly?”
“Around Christmas, not the one just past, the one before that.”
Kat thinks back, recalling that Suzy contacted her around that time, when they hadn’t talked for months. They chatted like normal, big sister, baby sister, except Kat didn’t tell her about Dix Street, Vendetta, or that she was working for the U.S. government.
Suzy asked for help, and Kat ended up writing software and then a key-logging program so Suzy could find passwords by recording users’ keystrokes. Kat copied it onto a tiny jump drive and told her how to conceal it in a mainframe. It must have worked, because she didn’t hear from Suzy again for a long time.
“And you went along with that?” says Kat.
“I was against P-project Peace. There are dozens of editors she could have worked with. But we managed to link up, and—”
“How?” Kat interrupts.
“I guess you’d say I’m just one part of a network of people who don’t want the CPS being signed.”
“How big is this group?” presses Kat. She climbs out from inside the car, stands up, and faces Liz.
“Not yet,” says Liz, her stutter subsiding as her face flushes with what seems to be anger. She glances across toward the workshop where Luxton went. “All I can say is that we need your help. I’m not meant to tell you this now, but fuck them. I will. Suzy was on a mission to prove that four years ago, your father was murdered by the people setting up the CPS. They killed her because she got the evidence she was after.”
THIRTY
Tuesday, 2:55 p.m., BST
You smell like shit,” says Liz.
Kat’s been dozing on and off. She pushes herself up in the seat. “I got busy. No time to shower.” Kat doesn’t plan on telling anyone about her river swim, not even Cage.
Liz Luxton drives leaning forward more than is natural, her eyes fixed on the road.
The shape of her head is elongated, as if it’s been squeezed. Her mouth hangs open, and her hair, although tied back, is unkempt. Her fists show knuckle-white around the wheel as she overtakes a truck.
The cell phone, plugged into the cigarette lighter, bleeps its signal as if it is transmitting a text message.
They’re on a curve in the road, in lush countryside, deep green leaves heavy on the trees, fields of bright yellow stretching back from the four-lane highway, harvesters bringing in crops, and a lone church far in the distance against a blue sky wisped with clouds.
“Where are we?”
“Ten minutes from the new roadblock.” The car swerves suddenly, but it’s just Liz settling it back into the inside lane.
“You’re a terrible driver,” Kat says.
“I’m d-disabled. I deserve to be,” jokes Liz. She brakes, jolting Kat forward so much that her seat belt locks. Far ahead, Kat sees a truck slowing.
“Sorry. Shit driver, like you said.”
Kat’s eyes go out to fields rolling as far as she can see, some yellow, some green, some filled with purple flowers. When she turns back, Liz’s expression has changed. Her tongue plays with a mole at the side of her mouth, and Kat recognizes a woman trying to hold back tears.
“I loved Suzy. She talked about you a lot. She worried about you. That’s why I wanted to meet you, to take you where she was k-killed.”
Liz sets her good eye level on Kat for a moment before looking back to the road in front. Kat reaches out, puts her hand on Liz’s arm.
Liz’s cell phone rings. It’s Luxton. “Can you get it?” asks Liz.
“How far are you from the checkpoint?” asks Luxton.
Kat looks across to Liz, repeats the question. “Ten minutes,” says Liz.
“Okay, I heard that,” says Luxton. “They’re pulling over rental cars. One of the cameras is logging every rental, so that by the time it gets to the checkpoint, they know chapter and verse about the car and who’s meant to be driving it.”
“Shit,” says Kat under her breath.
“Might your system override the fact that it’s a rental?”
Kat shakes her head. “It won’t. They’ll have enough time to bring up the data.” Kat tells Liz, who moves across to the slow lane.
“Do you want to try again tomorrow?” says Luxton.
The way Kat’s world is running right now, tomorrow could be a year away. She shakes her head, looks across to Liz.
“We k-keep going,” Liz says, loudly enough for her brother to hear.
A pause at Luxton’s end. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”
Liz pushes herself up in her seat. “I’m pulling up ahead,” she says. “You drive. An American tourist and a cripple might do the job.”
Liz stops on the shoulder and keeps the engine running. Kat slides across behind the wheel. Ahead, on high ground, she sees a shopping mall, PC World, Toys “R” Us, McDonald’s. Liz uses a walking stick to walk around, climbs in, and slots the stick by the seat. She peers through the windshield, her good eye balled up in concentration, a line of sweat on her upper lip.
“M-move out and g-get over into the right lane,” she says. Kat follows her instructions. The traffic is jammed up, stop and go.
“We take the signs to Felixstowe.”
Kat edges forward. On a field across the road, a seagull flies around the back of a harvesting combine.
“S-see where that red container truck is?” says Liz, pointing across the rotary. “That’s where the checkpoint starts. They’re probably using exterior voice surveillance. Audio and lip.”
“Why here?”
The traffic inches forward. “The port,” says Liz. “It used to be owned by the Chinese, then the Russians bought it.” She glances across. “About six weeks ago, there was a roadside bomb, like they use in Iraq, not in the port, but on the road leading to it. It wrecked a truck and k-killed the driver.”
The traffic stops. Liz shifts in her seat and points again. “Over there, see, those iron posts on the side of the road? They’re the audio filters. They bring in sounds from the car, filter out extraneous noises, clean up the audio stream, and feed our voices to their database.”
The traffic begins moving again. Liz’s finger swings down to yellow lines painted onto the road. “That’s where it starts in earnest. Underchassis X-ray and some k-kind of thermal imaging which c-can read a person’s heat signature through a vehicle chassis. Mike used something like it when he was with the army in Iraq. They can tell if we’re armed, whether we’re sweating with fear. They can see us actually breathing.”
Kat brings her window down. A grass bank rises steeply. The wind’s cool, smelling of rain about to come. Traffic fumes are mixed with the smells of damp soil and summer harvest.
“Who owns the port?” she says.
“A company called RingSet.”
“That’d be right,” whispers Kat to herself. What are the chanc
es of Yulya reading Kat’s mind, calling the checkpoint, telling them to bring her in?
“Do you know anything about them?”
Liz puts a finger to her lips.
With a belch of air pressure, the truck ahead releases its brakes and jolts forward. Slowly, they move around, like it’s any jammed-up junction in the rain. Kat watches a couple come out of Toys “R” Us, lift a child out of a stroller into the backseat of a car.
She follows the truck onto an exit ramp sloping down toward a line of tall, concrete barriers set in the road to narrow traffic into one lane. Corrugated plastic stretches across the top of them as a roof, creating a dark area underneath.
Kat makes out four uniformed men, two on each side, two armed. The truck moves on. Liz’s head is dropped, staring at something around the glove compartment, fingers drumming on her knee.
Every few yards, a different sign instructs drivers. TURN OFF MOBILE PHONE. NO INTERNET. NO RADIO OR TELEVISION. REMOVE CONTACT LENSES. REMOVE GLOVES. TURN OFF HEADLIGHTS. ILLUMINATE INSIDE OF VEHICLE. PREPARE WINDOW FOR PALM IDENTIFICATION. RECITE CLEARLY AND SLOWLY WHEN ASKED, STATING NAME, NATIONALITY, AND POST CODE.
Kat lets the car glide up to the checkpoint line. As soon as she reaches the covered area, a spotlight hits Kat’s face.
“Do precisely what they say,” whispers Liz, pushing the central control to lock Kat’s window. The spotlight snaps off, throwing Kat’s vision out. Illuminated arrows mark a route through the concrete blocks, green for the section Kat’s in and red farther ahead.
From somewhere comes a male voice. “Place your hand on your side window glass. Look into the scanner above your head to your right.”
A blue light comes on. A three-dimensional image of Kat’s hand appears on a screen.
Liz is doing the same, hand on window, eye on scanner. God knows how it deals with the lazy eye. Liz gets a green light on both. Kat’s are still being searched.
“Passenger Luxton, get out of the car.”
Liz opens the door. She swings her legs out, heaves herself to her feet, takes a second to balance, grabs the walking stick, and heads unsteadily across to a booth between two concrete blocks and disappears.
The History Book Page 13