Pendulum

by Adam Hamdy

  ‘It says he was selling crystal meth on the Satin Road. It’s an illicit online marketplace, a successor to the Silk Road,’ Connie summarised as she scanned the article. ‘His mum found him hanging in his bedroom. His note, posted to Facebook, said he couldn’t live with the shame of his drug dealing any longer.’

  ‘Another suicide. Another set of shocking revelations,’ Wallace mused. ‘No wonder Bailey was interested in this.’

  ‘Any idea what this number is?’ Connie asked, signalling the scrawled digits on the top sheet.

  Wallace shook his head.

  ‘Let’s try it,’ Connie suggested. ‘It’s American. Two-one-two area code is New York.’ She tapped the number into her phone.

  They waited as the call connected. Wallace could hear the faint sound of someone speaking.

  ‘Voicemail,’ Connie explained. ‘You have reached Special Agent Christine Ash of the FBI, please leave a message et cetera. Should I leave one?’

  Wallace shook his head. ‘Not until we know who to trust,’ he said, and Connie hung up. ‘Did you take my laptop to your friend?’

  She nodded. ‘Let me try him.’ She tapped in a number and the call rang out to voicemail. ‘Riley, it’s Connie. Let me know how you’re getting on with that machine. I really need an answer.’ She hung up and looked at Wallace. ‘He keeps his own time,’ she said apologetically. ‘What do you want to do now?’

  ‘Detective Bailey mentioned something else; the Salamander Monkey Puzzle,’ Wallace said.

  Connie typed the words into her phone and ran a Google search. Her phone displayed a set of random results, and she scrolled down. ‘I can’t see anything with an obvious connection,’ she observed. ‘But there is a pub called the Monkey Puzzle in Paddington. Might have been his local. It’s not too far from here.’

  Wallace nodded slowly. ‘Let’s check it out,’ he said.

  ‘Riley, it’s Connie. Let me know how you’re getting on with that machine. I really need an answer,’ Riley heard the words replayed by his voicemail. Favours were a pain in the bloody arse, he thought to himself.

  He rolled out of bed and bent over to pick up the boxer shorts he’d been wearing the previous day – they looked clean enough. He slipped them on and walked over to the living area. The laptop bag was lying on the small couch. He sat next to it and took the machine out. A Dell; the mark of someone with no imagination. He switched on the laptop and interrupted the start-up process to cut into the boot menu. He rose with a sigh and carried the computer to his server room, where he input a six-digit code on the keypad and heard the room exhale as the pressurised door opened. He pulled it wide, and, as he stepped into the cooler environment, goose bumps formed on his skin and his nipples hardened. Riley loved feeling the cold on his body. He shut the door behind him and heard the hiss of the pneumatic seal pressurising.

  He walked into the centre of the server room, where his work station was concealed by the servers that were humming and whirring all around him; his little army of drones mining the world for saleable information. He placed the laptop on his neatly organised metal mesh desk and reached into one of the cubby holes on the shelf above. He pulled out a USB drive and connected it to one of the ports on the machine. A green light on the drive flashed and then flickered as one of his bespoke cracking programs started working on the laptop. Riley tapped the desk with his fingertips. He cycled through a dozen iterations before the laptop screen changed colour and the Windows start menu came to life. His cracking program had bypassed the Windows password and he now had full administrator access to the machine.

  Riley brought up the DOS command prompt and pulled up the system registry. He looked at the pattern of behaviour and saw that the machine had not been active for over a month. There was nothing unusual in the registry: browser, email, word processing programs activated by the user, with a bunch of background processes running automatically on start up. Riley reached into another cubby hole and produced a large, freestanding hard drive marked ‘Shadow Stalker’. He plugged the USB 3.0 cable into one of the Dell’s ports and opened the file window, which displayed a single executable file called Shadow Stalker. Riley double clicked it, and a black DOS-like window opened, only this one instantly began cycling through hundreds of thousands of files on the laptop. Riley left his program to do its work and exited the server room. It was coming up to lunchtime and he had a feeling it was Monday. If he got dressed, there was a chance he’d catch the blonde from the tenth floor buying her tuna, sweetcorn and mayonnaise ciabatta at the sandwich bar across the street.

  19

  The weak November sun lit London’s busy streets as Wallace and Connie navigated the swarm of pedestrians that moved in every direction around Paddington Station. Wallace wore his hood up, concealing his face from all but the most determined observers. He and Connie held hands and could have passed for any carefree couple.

  ‘Was Detective Bailey based around here?’ Connie asked.

  Wallace nodded towards Edgware Road. ‘Paddington Green Station,’ he replied. ‘This was his patch.’

  ‘Salamander could be a person,’ Connie observed.

  Wallace nodded. He’d thought as much when Connie had discovered the pub.

  Connie’s phone directed them off Praed Street. They cut along Norfolk Street, which was lined with three-storey Georgian terraces that had been converted into hotels, which looked as though they might be cheaper than the one Connie and Wallace were staying in. Left on to Sussex Gardens and they found the Monkey Puzzle on the corner of the next block. The beer garden was concealed by an ivy-covered wall, and the pub itself was situated at the base of a low-rise, brown-brick apartment building. It looked like the sort of residence local councils threw up all over Britain in the early 1980s. Connie and Wallace climbed a small flight of tiled steps that led up to a gate, but it was locked, so they continued down Southwick Street to the pub’s main entrance. A green sign above the door identified the pub and one beside the door informed passers-by that the Monkey Puzzle was the home of good food and real ales. Large picture windows revealed little; the interior looked dark and gloomy.

  They entered a surprisingly traditional pub: the floor was laid with a wild paisley carpet; the furniture was all deep browns and reds; and stained-glass dividers separated sections of the lounge and threw a kaleidoscope of light about the place. The only mark of modernity was the colour of the walls – a brilliant white, which helped brighten the place. There were a handful of customers in the pub and a few in the beer garden; mid-afternoon on a Monday was hardly peak drinking time.

  ‘How do we do this?’ Connie asked quietly.

  Wallace looked over at the bar. A tall, tattooed man with a shaven head stood behind it. He leaned against one of the drinks fridges and stared into the middle distance. As Wallace approached, he focused with practised hospitality.

  ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘Two Cokes,’ Wallace replied.

  ‘Ice and lemon?’ the barman queried as he reached for the glasses.

  ‘Yes,’ Wallace said. As the barman prepared the drinks, he continued, ‘I’m looking for a guy called Salamander?’

  The barman glanced up at Wallace, who was sure he saw a flicker of recognition, but shook his head. ‘Never heard of him, mate,’ he replied, pushing the brimming glasses on to the bar. ‘That’ll be four-forty.’

  Wallace handed over a five-pound note and passed Connie her drink.

  ‘A mutual friend suggested we should talk to him,’ Connie tried.

  The barman shook his head again and handed Wallace his change. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Wish I could help you,’ he added as he backed away from them and returned to his position by the fridge.

  Connie sipped her drink. ‘What now?’ she asked.

  Wallace was at a loss.

  ‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ she suggested. ‘I’ll try Riley again.’

  Wallace looked round in frustration and caught the eye of a man who was studying him from across the
bar. The man had jet-black hair that sat atop the jowly, pasty face of an alcoholic. His pale, pockmarked skin was scarred so badly that it was difficult to guess his age, but the black beady eyes that gazed at Wallace suggested the man had lived an eternity.

  ‘We need to get out of here. I think that guy just recognised me,’ Wallace said quietly. ‘Finish your drink.’

  Connie glanced at the scarred man and immediately reverted to Wallace. ‘He’s coming over,’ she said.

  Wallace looked in the man’s direction and saw him lumbering towards them. He wasn’t tall, maybe five feet seven, but he was broad and his squat neck and wide shoulders reminded Wallace of a bull. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, taking hold of Connie’s hand, but he was too late; the Scarred Man had positioned himself between them and the exit, and was now closing in. ‘Get ready to run,’ Wallace advised as he prepared himself to fight.

  The Scarred Man drew close. ‘You’re too fucking dumb to be cops,’ he observed, looking them up and down derisively. ‘What d’ya want with Salamander?’

  ‘A friend sent us,’ Wallace replied.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘DS Bailey.’

  The Scarred Man thought for a moment. ‘Bailey?’ he asked.

  Connie smiled and nodded.

  ‘Come back tonight,’ the Scarred Man instructed.

  ‘Do you know Salamander?’ Wallace asked.

  ‘Don’t be a fucking retard all ya life,’ the Scarred Man advised with more than a hint of aggression.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Wallace said to Connie. He took hold of her arm, pulled her gently towards the door and led her into the hazy sunlight.

  ‘What time is tonight?’ Connie asked, as she pulled her jacket tight in an attempt to fend off the cold air that bit her neck.

  Wallace smiled nervously. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going back in there to ask for an appointment. Come on.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘The hotel,’ Wallace said. ‘Let’s see if we can get hold of your friend.’

  Riley Cotton strolled along Victoria Street with the satisfied gait of a man who’d spent the afternoon in the company of two fine, fun-filled Australians. He’d seen the blonde in the sandwich bar. Some might call it stalking, but Riley regarded it as attentiveness. He knew what sandwich she had on which day, he noticed when she added anything new to her wardrobe, and he noted her weight loss, and occasional weight gain. The blonde had looked particularly fine that afternoon; she’d been wearing a pair of skin-tight jeans and a blue sweater that clung to her chest like an old friend. Riley had often fantasised about the blonde, but still didn’t know her name. He choked every time he got within ten feet of her and today was no exception. His head brimmed with erotic images of the two of them together, her innocent face twisted in the throes of lust. But no matter how tempting the possibility, Riley could never stump up the courage to approach her. Instead, as she had done so many times, the blonde excited passions that had to be satisfied by others, so Riley had shuffled out of the sandwich bar and strolled off towards the Churchill Gardens Estate.

  Most of the red-brick council estate was now in private hands, and flats that had once been available to the poor and helpless were now bought and sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Riley had found the Australians through an online escort agency. Tara and Michelle – he wasn’t sure those were their real names – charged him three hundred an hour, and unlike the blonde, the two professionals elicited no inhibition. Tara was a tanned brunette with an athletic body and a gorgeous smile. Michelle was a fake blonde. She stood a couple of inches shorter than Tara, at about five feet six, and had fuller curves. As a customer, Riley suffered from none of the shyness of a lover, and he was most forthright in instructing the girls what to do to him and each other. Their two-bedroom, second-floor flat became his domain and he lived out his wildest sexual fantasies for three hours until he left, almost a thousand pounds lighter.

  It was quarter to five when Riley entered his building. The sun had dropped below the rooftops and lazy fingers of light were reaching through the gaps between buildings, casting the world in a hazy red glow.

  ‘Afternoon, Vimal,’ Riley said to the short Indian security guard behind the front desk.

  ‘You’re looking happy, Mister C,’ Vimal observed impishly. ‘Good trip down under?’

  ‘You know how it is,’ Riley replied. He had scored some grass from Vimal a few times and had once pointed him in the direction of the Australians in the smoke-fuelled bonhomie of a buy.

  ‘I do, Mister C, I do,’ Vimal leered.

  Riley crossed the lobby and stepped into the waiting elevator, hit the button for the eighteenth floor, and turned to study himself in the mirror. His expensive black suit and fitted shirt made his dishevelled appearance look roguishly glamorous. His tousled hair, his stubble and his bloodshot eyes were all offset by the quality of his tailoring. No wonder the Australians always said he was their favourite client. When the elevator doors opened, Riley walked across the eighteenth-floor lobby to the double doors and tapped his four-digit code into the keypad. The doors buzzed, and Riley pushed one open, triggering the alarm system, which started squawking and continued making the nagging sound until Riley fed the deactivation code into the keypad. The large room fell silent, save for the distant, quiet murmur of the server room cooling system. Outside, Riley could hear the muffled sound of London traffic as rush hour began in earnest. The sun had fallen quickly and the city was starting to sparkle with flecks of artificial light.

  Riley headed over to the server room, hoping that his hack had yielded information that would conclude his favour for Connie. He entered his security code and stepped through the pressurised door. As he rounded the corner, he was dismayed to see a set of warning windows open on his main terminal. He hurried to his desk and pulled out the retractable metal shelf that held his master keyboard and tablet. The first window informed him that a device was attempting to access the Wi-Fi network. Riley picked up the tablet stylus and moved the window to reveal that the main terminal had identified another attempt. Beneath that window was another. And another. And another. Riley felt his stomach tie itself into a knot as he checked the machine Connie had given him. His hack had completed its search of deleted files and discovered that someone had altered the system registry. There were a number of entries relating to a Facebook domain that had been removed. More worrying was the concealed program that ran on start-up and activated a simple ping that tried to access local Wi-Fi.

  Riley switched back to his main terminal and brought up his Wi-Fi system. He had layer upon layer of protection and used encryption systems that were beyond those used by the most secure banks. There was no way Connie’s laptop could have accessed his network, and when he checked his network connections, it wasn’t there. Ever paranoid, Riley went back to the notification windows and checked their properties. The last alert had happened at three p.m. It made no sense for the attempts to have suddenly stopped. Riley used the main terminal to bring up his Wi-Fi network and logged into the traffic system to look at the data packets being transferred. He sorted the packets by machine tag, and there, to his horror, he saw a machine identifier he did not recognise.

  He looked down at Connie’s laptop with terrible realisation. Someone had installed an automated program to hack the nearest Wi-Fi network whenever the machine was powered up. Someone had concealed the existence of the hack from both the host machine and the network. Riley’s machine had only logged the attempts because he was a paranoid nut who knew more about computers than anyone he’d ever met. But whoever did this probably knew more than him, which meant NSA or someone even more dangerous. Either equated to big trouble, so Riley picked up the laptop and dropped it on the floor. He stood up, lifted his chair and thumped the heavy metal casters on to the device until it was dead. He checked his Wi-Fi log and saw that the alien data packets had stopped. If the hard drive wasn’t too badly damaged, he could boot the disk in a safe environment and try
to reverse engineer the program. He had no idea what information was being sent – but a program that could bypass his security and conceal itself during operation would be tremendously valuable.

  As Riley stooped to pick through the debris, he heard the hiss of the pressurised door. Puzzled by the sound, he stepped forward only to be greeted by the terrifying sight of a masked man rounding the bank of servers. The large, muscular figure was clad in synthetic body armour, wore a mask that covered his mouth and nose, and a pair of opaque goggles above that. The tails of a long black coat trailed behind the fearsome figure. Riley guessed that this man, or an associate, was responsible for the Wi-Fi hack and that the small data packets were simple identifiers to enable the programmer to locate the originating machine. It was an elegantly simple, highly sophisticated bugging program.

  ‘I don’t—’ Riley began. He stopped talking as the masked man raised a gloved hand to reveal a pistol.

  ‘Please,’ Riley begged, but the masked man ignored him. He pulled the trigger and the gun fired a dart that hit Riley square in the chest. Riley felt a sudden heaviness permeate his body. He tried to turn towards his desk, but his legs failed him, and his eyes rolled back in his head moments before he hit the floor with a heavy thud.

  20

  The gentle hum of the cooling fans roused Riley. His eyes were polluted with the grit of a thousand hangovers. His head felt raw and it seemed as though he could feel his brain grating against the inner lining of his skull. Every muscle in his body ached and his testicles and groin felt swollen and tender. His body had reacted badly to whatever substance had knocked him out. He tried to focus on the blur of lights and colours. He shook his head slowly, provoking a sudden stab of pain in both temples, which made him wince and clench his eyes tightly shut. He tried to raise his hands, but they were restrained. When he opened his eyes and looked down, his predicament slowly came into focus.