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The History Book

Page 23

by Humphrey Hawksley


  FIFTY-FIVE

  Thursday, 9:06 a.m., BST

  Cranley and Tappler wait for Kat to wash up. Tappler’s taken down a picture so that a computer can project images onto a plain white wall. The room is dark, with curtains drawn across the windows looking into the garden. There is an iron stove in the fireplace, with logs stacked on either side, and a bank of video monitors showing approaches to the house.

  Before she filled the bathtub, Kat told Cranley how she found them, gave them the jump drive, told them to fix up a laptop to see if the data from Media Axis had survived. Tappler left out a set of his wife’s clothes, pants and a green shirt, and explained that she and the children had gone to France until things quieted down. Kat’s shoes are drying in the kitchen.

  She walks downstairs, drying her hair with a towel. Cranley wraps his hand around the pot on the coffee table. “Freshly made, very drinkable, if you want some,” he says to Kat, pointing to a chair.

  She elects to stand. He shrugs, pours two coffees, takes one himself. He picks up the other cup from the edge of the stove and holds it out for her.

  Kat nods toward the computer. “Anything?”

  “Patchy,” says Tappler. “Not everything. But something.”

  Kat sits down at Tappler’s computer. “I should be able to get a clearer copy.” She goes online, keys in her passwords, and opens the account to which she sent Suzy’s History Book. She takes a sip of coffee, lets it seep into her, keeping her alert, despite every fiber crying out for rest. She watches the software work. The screen freezes, moves, freezes, moves again.

  Cranley stands by the French windows, fingering the edge of the curtain, watchful as to what’s going on outside, double-checking what he sees with the monitors inside.

  The computer hourglass is frozen. Behind it, the screen appears to sweep itself like dunes being rearranged in a sandstorm.

  Tappler cups his pipe in his right hand, pushing tobacco down with his thumb. His left hand hangs, swinging back and forward, brushing the back of his dog by the side of his chair.

  “Shit,” whispers Kat.

  A familiar symbol appears in front of Kat. She recognizes the Chinese characters first, , closes her eyes, and opens them again to see the whole message.

  :hacktrap,1471

  CAPTURED BY

  National Intrusion Computer Network Protection Center, Shanghai

  Tappler glances up, his eyes thoughtful. Cranley drops the curtain, walks across, and looks over her shoulder. “Where does it leave us?”

  “They are so, so good,” mutters Kat. She unplugs the computer from the wall.

  “Where’s the router?” she asks Tappler, who gets up and walks to a desk in the corner, where there’s a white, flat, oblong box with a small antenna.

  “Disconnect it,” she says. “Then destroy it.”

  Tappler pulls the router’s connection from the electrical socket, puts it on the floor, and stamps on it.

  “Does your oven work?”

  Tappler nods.

  “Put the router on a cookie sheet, stick it in the oven, and cook it.”

  Tappler nods again.

  “Where’s the jump drive?”

  “Near the computer, behind the mouse pad,” says Tappler.

  Her eyes fall on it. Tappler goes through to the kitchen while Kat runs her hand around the edge of the computer, finds the USB port, connects the jump drive, and looks at Cranley.

  “It leaves us with limited time. If they got that message into my system, they’ll know where I logged on from.” She shrugs. “Is this the area where you said you have some control?”

  “I’m checking,” answers Cranley, dialing a number on his cell phone, “whether I still do.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  Thursday, 9:23 a.m., BST

  The computer screen jiggers, registering the jump drive. Cranley’s talking on the cell and looking at the garden. Tappler returns from the kitchen and stands behind her.

  “We found two sections clear from damage,” he says. “Go to the search function and type in ‘ACR was founded.’”

  Kat presses the keys. The projector light comes on. She reads it from the screen. It’s a corporate Web page, with pictures of laboratories and oil rigs.

  ACR was founded in December 2002, and after rapid expansion, now directly employs more than 300,000 people in over 120 countries worldwide, with hub offices in Washington, Moscow and Beijing . . .

  Tappler gives her time to read it, then says, “Stay in that section and put into the search ‘premier provider.’”

  In order to continue its role as a premier provider with proven capabilities, ACR has subcontracted research and development projects for gas and oil exploration in Central Asia to its subsidiary RingSet. These reserves are considered to be a useful contribution to the diversification of energy supplies, along with other areas of exploration, such as in Africa and Latin America.

  “Now,” says Tappler, “try ‘Strongcross Sports and Community Center.’”

  The highlighting shows the words. Kat goes back to the beginning of the sentence.

  In the last financial year, ACR donated US$29 million to Strongcross Sports and Community Center in Iowa. RingSet gave the same charity US$19 million. RingSet profits for the previous year were US$7.8 billion after tax. US$2.6 billion went to ACR, whose overall profits were US$51 billion. Seventy-nine percent of ACR’s revenue came from government projects with the Chinese, Russian and American military.

  “Who wrote this?” she asks.

  “Suzy, probably,” says Cranley, who’s off the phone and joining them. Kat reads on.

  The Strongcross Center then donated US$2.3 million to Jim Abbott’s presidential election campaign. Four hundred thirty-six subscribers to the charity gave US$99,000 each, the maximum for individual donations. Other donations from individuals, the charity and its offshoots, such as the Strongcross Swimming Team, went to state and county organizations connected with the party and the campaign.

  Kat’s hand hovers over the keyboard.

  “You get the idea?” Cranley’s eyes flit up to the monitors, which show a bicyclist crossing the entrance of the driveway. On another, a line of ducks walk across the back lawn.

  “I get it,” says Kat.

  “Now enter—” begins Tappler.

  “Hold on,” says Kat, pouring herself more coffee.

  “The company specializes in leasing trade concessions areas. They include Voz Island, Felixstowe Port, and the Byford airbase.”

  She searches for RingSet and Voz Island.

  She stabs her finger on the screen. “How far away is this airfield?”

  “Fifty, sixty miles,” says Tappler.

  She puts in a search for Yulya Gracheva.

  The screen swirls with merging colors, the software finds the name, but water has damaged too much data for it to produce an image.

  Then Yulya appears in a video, but it’s grainy, as if taken from a cell phone. She enters a door, stomping snow off her boots. She takes off a fur hat, down jacket, and gloves and rubs her hands together to warm herself.

  The picture widens and becomes more clear. Yulya is in a large room, low ceiling, dim light, and half a dozen groups of people, standing against a wall, where the windows are frosted over, but letting in pale blue winter light. They are badly dressed, eyes flittering and mostly cast down to the floor.

  She moves quickly and decisively as if she’s in a hurry to go somewhere else. She summons one person from each group: an elderly woman; a young man; another but slightly older; a girl, about ten years old; a young woman—all dressed against the winter, faces reddened by cold.

  They are ordered into another room. Each group must be a family. Hands reach out to stop the separations. Faces crumple, and the cries come over tinny and distorted on the recording.

  Yulya follows them in. So does the camera. Yulya closes the door and shoots each of them dead, three rounds each, two shots to the head and one to the chest.

  For
a few seconds, the film goes to black.

  “Who the hell took that?” mutters Tappler.

  “A whistle-blower?” says Cranley.

  Kat says nothing.

  The screen lights up. The surviving family members are dressed in suits and overcoats. They’re standing on the stage of a hall, holding up certificates. The picture suddenly changes. It’s clear, no longer cell phone quality, showing a headline story in Russian onto which a translation is superimposed.

  RingSet gives share options to Aralsk farmers.

  Yulya and Tiina Gracheva are on the stage, applauding.

  Kat remembers her dad and Suzy arguing once over the Iraq war, and her dad saying that Saddam controlled societies by killing and torturing half the people and rewarding the others.

  The next section is a series of photographs of Tiina and Yulya with various world leaders. They are in the White House Oval Office with President Abbott, and again with his predecessor; with British Prime Minister Michael Rand; signing a memorandum of understanding on oil and gas exploration in the Kremlin; at a banquet with the Chinese president in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing; and again in China, signing a contract in Shanghai.

  Every world leader of any worth apparently needs to know Tiina and Yulya Gracheva—and do business with them.

  No wonder Suzy called her dossier The History Book.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Thursday, 9:37 a.m., BST

  There’s a map, hand-drawn and scanned in. Then it cuts to show a metal door with grille bars onto which is stenciled F-10689. Behind, through blackness, a beam of light shows up bits of a whitewashed back wall. The moving lens picks up a shackle around a wrist and then stops.

  John Polinski’s face is worn down by imprisonment. His eyes are sad, sharp, thoughtful, and he forces a smile. She sees traces of the campaigning attorney, the father being strong for his children, but grief seeps out until Kat can feel it roaring through her like a gale.

  Her father speaks.

  “I should be dead, but someone is keeping me alive. I am being held in a camp near an old Soviet military base in Kazakhstan. You’ve shown your bravery, but you have to stop. Even if I get out of here, they’ll follow me and bring me back. Or decide to kill me. Much worse, Suzy, they will get to you.”

  His eyes are welling up, and his hand comes up as if the camera is a prison window, the manacle clinking loudly against the lens.

  “You have a full life ahead of you, and you need to lead it. Don’t die trying to change something that can’t be changed.”

  Despite his defeated tone, John Polinski’s powerful presence remains so tangible that Kat feels her father is close enough to touch; that if it’s real and she can bring him back home, then she won’t have to keep running.

  The manacled wrist comes into view again, and a hand pushes a wisp of hair behind an ear. Fingers brush the bearded growth on his chin. The picture flickers and fades.

  Kat swallows, keeps looking at the screen, because she isn’t able to face Cranley or Tappler.

  “Who saw him?” says Kat softly.

  “Mike,” says Cranley. “It took months to plan. Suzy wanted to go. He wouldn’t let her.”

  “How?”

  “He got a job at the port, then at the airbase, then as a cleaner on the plane. The planes ferry VIPs, and they don’t keep that sort of staff at the other end.”

  Kat jabs her finger at the key to start the recording again. Nothing happens. She tries again. A black-and-white wave swishes onto the screen. She hears her father’s voice breaking up. “I sho . . . be dead . . . old Sov . . . milit . . . stan . . .”

  There’s no picture now. Water has gotten into it.

  Kat feels stripped down to the bone. She cups her face in her hands, and somewhere from deep inside herself, she lets out a loud, gut-wrenching cry.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Thursday, 9:16 p.m., BST

  Rain clears the skies, and the moon throws itself over the flat landscape like a spotlight. After twisting through villages, the road stretches straight ahead, interrupted by a small rotary, where roads lead off on both sides. To the right is a newly built housing complex. To the left is a high fence, and farther along, partly blocked by a cluster of trees, a watchtower marked by a small, single green light.

  Kat gives herself only seconds to take it all in. She eases the powerful motorcycle into a track off the road, puts it on its kickstand, and leaves the engine running.

  She slept the rest of the morning, then told Cranley what she planned. He didn’t object and told her the flight schedules between Byford and Voz Island.

  She asked him to use up some final favors to get Liz Luxton freed from wherever she was. She also formatted a cell phone SIM card, copied data over from the ruined jump drive, wrapped it in plastic wrap and polyethylene, and taped it to her back. Sometime, she might try to repair the damage.

  She let Suzy’s ring dry out, wrapped it the same way, and taped it inside the pocket of her pants.

  With the jump drive ruined, intrusion into her Internet files, and Cage and possibly Mercedes compromised, the only place she’s fairly sure Suzy’s History Book is safe is on the hard drive in Liz’s edit suite at Media Axis.

  As the sun dipped, she got Tappler to run her down country lanes until she spotted a black-and-silver Yamaha 649cc V Star Classic motorcycle in a pub parking lot, with a black helmet locked to it.

  She hot-wired it, and it took her about an hour to get to where she is now, a hundred yards back from the entrance of RingSet’s airbase.

  Allowing her eyes to adjust to the night, Kat crawls closer to get a better look. The fence has three layers. The first two are electrified, the outer wire with a weak current. The middle fence would be far more powerful, and the inner fence is a mix of barbed and razor wire. Two more watchtowers are visible; one to her left and one way across the runway, on the curve of the fence.

  Part of the runway is lit up with activity. She sees the movement of people and hears their shouting above the drone of either a generator or an aircraft engine.

  She slaps at a mosquito circling her cheek, picks out seed heads that have stuck to her sleeve, watches, plans, then gets back onto the bike and rides a couple of miles farther until she comes to a sign warning of road construction and sharp turns for half a mile. The road is more isolated. After curving away from her, it uncoils itself to become straight until being swallowed into the blackness of a forest.

  While she’s been there, only RingSet trucks have used the road, white with the blue logo, a single driver in each, and roller doors down the back.

  Kat watches for two hours. When a truck goes in, a light is shined on the license plate, and the driver’s palm is read through the driver’s-side window. One goes in at seven minutes past ten; out at twenty-five minutes to eleven. Next hour; in at four minutes past eleven; out at twenty-seven minutes to midnight.

  By then, after the country pubs have emptied, people have gone to their beds, and clouds have thankfully darkened the moon, the road lies quiet and empty. If they run all night, the next truck in is due in half an hour.

  With no lights, Kat rides to the start of the roadwork, keeping the engine slow and barely audible. With wire from the bike’s storage box, she straps two red and white cones to the backseat of the bike, together with a flashing orange warning light, and rides toward the junction.

  According to her GPS, the left-hand fork heads to the town of Woodbridge and then onto Felixstowe. The right-hand fork is a small side road going north. The next village is Campsea Ash. Kat puts a cone in the middle of the intersection with a warning light flashing and parks the bike along the side road, pushing it up the bank to give it elevation. She has a flashlight in her hand.

  When she sees a truck’s lights from half a mile ahead, she turns on the Yamaha’s headlight. The truck driver flashes his lights against the glare. Kat steps into the road, swinging her flashlight back and forth. The truck slows. The sweep of Kat’s beam catches on the cones.
The driver’s arm is up, shielding his eyes. Kat’s in front of the truck, with her flashlight in his face.

  She mustn’t speak; a female voice would alert him. He mustn’t see her; her clothes match no uniform from RingSet. She needs him to open the door, and then she hopes she’ll be too quick for him, except she’s not seeing some overweight man just waiting to retire at the wheel but a slender, olive-skinned figure, slightly unshaven, eyes irritated and alert, with the physique of an athlete, who can move fast, left hand on the wheel, and right hand somewhere else, reaching.

  She lowers her flashlight beam to the ground, waving him around the cone. The driver’s right hand comes up to the wheel, foot eases back on the accelerator, a finger to the forehead in recognition that all is normal, the expression of a working man relieved that his shift will end without incident.

  When he’s past, taillights fading into the night, Kat runs to the bike, starts the engine, kills the headlight, and catches up with the truck, careful not to let her engine rev too loudly. She coasts closer, staying in his side-mirror blind spot.

  She gets the feel of his driving. He’s safe, uses plenty of brake, and is slow to accelerate out of a turn. As the road straightens, she turns the lights on full beam, roars past, keeps going about half a mile, takes the next corner, turns the bike around, headlight on full beam, and heads back toward him, needle creeping up, eyes checking every second, 53, 67, 74, 80, 85 . . .

  Kat’s banking on a single, very human thing. The driver’s on a salary. For Kat, it’s personal.

  The truck’s coming around a corner, lighting up the crooked edge of a house, a fence, an orchard, a child’s swing hanging from a tree, sweeping around the turn until the headlights settle back on the straight road, edges of light showing the overgrown bank, glare to glare with Kat.

  He’s doing 30. Kat’s going three times faster. His hand’s steady on the wheel. Kat’s not shifting, either, coming toward him for a head-on unless one of them moves over.

 

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