In the Company of Ghosts

by Stephen A Hunt

  Doyle knocked on the door set in the Monument’s base and the ticket collector let him inside before opening the round metal mesh cover to the old empty laboratory downstairs. Once within the empty stone chamber, Doyle triggered its concealed door and began descending the set of corkscrewing stairs which stood revealed. LED lights screwed into the walls flickered each time a tube train rattled by on the District Line. The spiralling stairs eventually passed into a vault, a miniaturised version of the crypt at St Paul’s cathedral. No doubt it had felt more like a church before the government’s last carbon initiative had seen all of the chamber’s ancient lamps stripped out and replaced with LED lights. The uplighters gave the space the illumination of a not particularly successful nightclub, as if one of the arches under a railway line had reluctantly been granted a drinks license. It was hot, always coal mine-warm, this deep below the surface. The heat of the computer rooms and furnace chambers overwhelmed the ability of the air conditioning vents – snaking their way to the surface – to disperse the operation’s energy.

  Mrs Rogers was sitting behind the reception desk at Passport Control, the ponytail of her long dreadlocks tied back by a crunchy. This morning she was wearing a brown knitted jumper just slightly lighter than the hue of her skin, her neck circled by a scarf in warm brown and orange Cashmere. The red fingernails of her hand were balancing a phone with one hand and a milk bottle with the other. Her son, Kendon, was lodged in the baby carrier strapped across her front. She buzzed Doyle through the rotary security turnstile, waving him in as she grumbled into a wireless earpiece, giving a thumbs-up as he deposited a bag of milk on the desk for the fridge next to her swivel chair. It was a green-disposable pack, so thin it squirmed in Doyle’s hand like a fowl trying to escape the abattoir’s electrified knife. The baby sling didn’t accessorise with Mrs Rogers’ shoulder holster, locking an upside down .45 in place; as though her little baby might lurch across and pull out the pistol to give its trigger a curious tug. Mamma with a gun. Don’t mess with the mamma. There was an angry little whine from the phone in the pocket of Doyle’s jacket as the office’s all-encompassing jamming signal severed his phone’s connection. It shouldn’t work this deep down anyway, except for the hot spots of connectivity from the tube tunnels running above. But the office took no chances. Much like a little subterranean Amish community, the tiny state-within-a-state didn’t really do the twenty first century, not the way everyone else did. It was one of the saving graces of exile down here. There were lakes deep underground where evolution had slowly ground away at the lizards and insects living below, producing legions of blind, albino curiosities. As Doyle walked through the stone corridors, he noted that many of the same forces had been at work in the Circumlocution Office. Locked away down here without natural light, out of sight and mind of the nation, those that laboured in the vaults had abandoned all the usual strictures and customs of work enforced on everyone else on the government payroll. To be sent to the Firehall, you had to be almost unemployable anywhere else to start with. Mean of habit, bent in mind and eccentric in spirit. A suit or tie down here would have been as alien as a flash of crimson skin pigmentation in a cavern’s blind newts. Many of the computer technicians attending the vaults’ server rooms were naturists. They could be seen travelling through the passages on little two-wheeled Brazilian Segway knockoffs, au naturel. Tattoos and piercings their only ornament: the pasty-skinned inheritors of humanity’s technological legacy. Doyle had even seen staff smoking down in the Firehall, foul-smelling Polish brands smuggled over on the Channel Tunnel. Rites of human sacrifice would not have seemed more outlandish in the modern day. Smoking indoors. The sartorial best you could hope for from the staff pushing little four-wheeled postal trolleys filled with beyond-secret documents were thrash metal Tshirts, heads bobbing to the beat on wireless headphones of coin-sized music players. Even Doyle, as straight a worker as could be found in the Firewall, usually kicked off his shoes and spent the rest of his day pacing the subterranean palace in his slippers. It was another realm, down inside the Firewall. Quite literally. The territory had been given independent status as a British Crown Dependency when Charles Dickens had become head of the Circumlocution Office, the cunning old rascal wangling royal consent after he’d faked his death in 1870. The miles of passages and vaults beneath London were independent of such inconveniences as the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the oversight of the Police Complaints Commission, the Health and Safety directives, the Geneva Convention and all similar vexations. That suited Doyle just fine. He enjoyed being the law almost as much as he disliked being bound by it. And the fact that his salary could be paid as tax-free as if he were working in Saudi Arabia was quite literally an added bonus.

  Ducking under an archway designed for the height of courtiers fed by a seventeenth-century diet, Doyle passed into the chamber he had staked out as his section’s own. Entering at the top of the stone steps that led to the chamber’s floor, the stairs had been choked by piles of paper-stuffed cardboard folders lashed together with tight plastic straps. Doyle leant over the balcony and called down to Spads and Thorson, their desks lost in the clutter scattered across the vault. ‘Who’s dumped this crap up here?’

  ‘Section Six,’ said Thorson. ‘The furnace is off and they’re backing up.’

  ‘Bloody ridiculous. Tell them to get their ovens fixed,’ growled Doyle. ‘Or I’ll feed a ream to the next paper pusher who sticks his pencil-neck inside here.’

  Thorson shrugged behind her monitor. ‘It’s not the furnace that’s broken. They’ve blown their carbon allowance for the week.’

  Doyle clumped down the stairs, picking his way through the detris of filing. ‘Carbon allowance? We’re the Papal State of Perished Paperwork. You tell me how global warming applies to us?’

  ‘Our smoke is vented above St. George’s Lane. The local council picks up the carbs for any pollution we emit.’

  ‘God give me strength. Where is Miss Marple?’

  ‘On her way,’ said Thorson. ‘She’s coming via her vet’s. She has to drop off her pig for its annual check-up.’

  ‘Why did I even ask? Spads, you got Saucy Simon’s last MPEG and Testament unencrypted yet for me?’

  ‘I cracked it last night,’ said the hacker, clearly pleased with himself. Sleep was an optional extra in his trade. ‘Turned a couple of Brazilian bot-nets. I tapped them for the additional processing power.’

  Doyle picked his way through the clutter. Not the Circumlocution Office’s wayward filing this time. The Firewall was still used as a storage annex of the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. Frequently, Doyle’s chamber appeared less like a place of work and more like a baronial hall being spring-cleaned by the National Trust. Thomas Lawrence oil paintings, medieval axes, rusty halberds and old flintlock rifles hung on the vault’s walls alongside modern video screens and a glass-framed set of instructions from the 1970s on what to do in the event of a biochemical attack.

  ‘Outstanding. You can use the Gameboy at lunchtime.’

  ‘What’s a Gameboy?’

  ‘Shit, I’m not that old, am I? And you’re not that young.’ Doyle hung his jacket on the handlebars of a penny-farthing leaning against the wall and flourished the folder he had been picking through in bed the previous evening. Agatha Witchley’s name was stencilled in italics across its plain manila cover. ‘You want to tell me how Witchley ever passed positive vetting?’ asked Doyle. ‘I’ve disappointed my teachers with essays longer than this.’

  ‘What you see is all we’ve got,’ said Thorson, as if that explained everything.

  ‘You worked with the old girl for years,’ said Doyle, flicking through the meagre handful of pages wedged between the folder’s cover. ‘We’ve never found out more than this about where she’s from, who she is?’

  Thorson shook her head. ‘Agatha claims memory loss if you push her. It’s possible. All we know for sure is that she was the only survivor of Flight I-267 from Rio de Janeiro
to Berlin, via Madrid. Last century, of course. The PLO was thought to be behind the luggage bomb that destroyed her plane, although they never officially claimed responsibility. Her husband and two sons were on the same flight. Agatha survived treading water for two days before a navy destroyer picked her up. That’s got to affect you.’

  ‘And her passport was burnt up in the explosion, very convenient.’

  ‘We know that someone with her name was listed on the plane’s passenger list. No record of her exists before that in any country we’ve searched. No marriage or birth certificate, not for an Agatha Witchley or her husband and children.’

  ‘Border control was old school back in those days,’ chipped in Spads. ‘I wouldn’t want to try and run what they do without computers.’ You could tell from Spads voice that he wished he’d been in there, first on the ground to computerise all the airlines’ paperwork. He’d been like a dog with a bone when he’d seen what the Circumlocution Office had to offer someone with his talents. A whole hidden state’s worth of digital filing systems and computerised databases. Obfuscation through complexity, convolution through perplexity and bureaucracy will set you free. Handing the U.S. extradition authorities a fake death certificate for a prison drug overdose that never happened, getting the FBI off Spads’ case, that was just the icing on the cake for the section’s tame hacker.

  ‘I do recall being there, Spads,’ said Doyle. Yeah, I’m old enough for that. When the Berlin wall was something you got shot for trying to cross, not a piece of acrylic-mounted builders rubble on a Potsdamer Platz tourist stand mixed in with models of the Brandenburg Gate.

  ‘I always got the impression that our previous governor knew more about Agatha’s life,’ said Thorson.

  ‘If she did, she didn’t take time to commit it on paper here,’ said Doyle. ‘The baroness is well out of it now, probably wants us to fail, just to make her time with the section look better.’

  ‘I think the paucity of Agatha’s file was discretion on the part of the baroness, rather than sabotage. She always rated Agatha. As do I. The woman closes cases.’

  Doyle shrugged. The baroness hadn’t rated Agatha Witchley highly enough to invoke diplomatic immunity to protect her from the wrath of the Israeli government. He sighed. You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps. ‘You don’t believe Gypsy Jen’s clairvoyant bollocks, do you, Thorson? You don’t believe in ghosts?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m even ready to believe in people.’ A buzzing emitted from a red lamp fixed behind a small statue of the goddess Demeter, Passport Control letting them know that they had a visitor. Thorson pointed to the image of Mrs Witchley passing through the security gates on their CCTV screen, a monochrome fresco of surveillance feeds assembled from dozens of chambers and passages flickering high on their wall. ‘You can ask her yourself.’

  The old woman resembled a duck as she waddled along, swinging a long black umbrella ahead of each step as though she was clearing rats from her path.

  ‘I thought you might be bringing me a packet of bacon,’ Doyle called as Witchley entered at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Saucisses is doing quite well, thank you,’ she replied, picking her way carefully through the boxes of paperwork with the tip of her umbrella. ‘A small touch of Osteomalacia aside.’

  Witchley’s desk had been left inside the chamber, one of five empty units, no computer on the surface. Doyle’s section short-staffed as always. She headed for her desk, then hung up her jacket on the back of the chair and laid her umbrella carefully along the edge of the work surface.

  ‘It’s not raining outside?’ said Doyle.

  ‘Were you never a member of the Scouting movement, Mister Doyle? Always be prepared. I anticipate inclement conditions.’

  ‘I’ve asked for a computer to be installed for you this afternoon,’ said Spads, indicating her clear desk.

  ‘This is Spads,’ Thorson introduced the hacker. ‘The new boy. Spads is his online handle. So far he’s refused to tell us his real name.’

  ‘Admirable caution. You’ve joined our merry band through the obituary route I take it then, Spads?’ said Mrs Witchley. ‘You can cancel that delivery for me. I won’t be using the office’s systems.’ She pulled out a little mobile phone, as black as her umbrella. ‘I prefer to access my own, remotely. Although not down here, obviously, deep within our little Sargasso Sea of counter-electronic warfare.’

  As always when something made little sense to Spads, he stared blankly at the old woman without comment, the statement orbiting around his mind, stuck in a holding pattern and waiting clearance to land.

  ‘Charles Babbage advised me it would be better that way,’ she explained, crossing over to Spads. ‘And besides, the climb to the top of the Monument to get a working phone signal is good exercise. It helps prevent my joints from seizing up.’

  ‘Charles Babbage is dead.’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ she smiled. ‘Otherwise I would probably be mad, hmm?’ Witchley hovered behind Spads’ workstation and stared at his screen. ‘That’s a ferocious amount off processing cycles you’re stealing from the net. Image comparison and shadow texture analysis? I take it there is more to the death of Simon Werks than the initial police verdict of suicide by misadventure indicates?’

  Doyle answered for the hacker. ‘Did you watch the security camera footage on the memory stick?’

  ‘Indeed I did. You might’ve warned me. Pain and sex blended together. Autoerotic asphyxiation is a lot like a Black Russian… a waste of perfectly good Vodka and Tia Maria that’s always best consumed apart.’

  ‘The footage you saw is what building security filmed. But there was another recording. Simon Werks had a concealed camera hidden below the surface of his computer screen. Only Werks and the man on his security team who installed it, one Luke Wilder, knew it was there. It was taking footage when Werks died.’ Doyle nodded at Spads. ‘Show the old biddy what the private camera took.’

  As the hacker was starting the QuickTime movie, Doyle noticed Mrs Witchley had what looked like a tiny steel hole-punch in her hand. She unobtrusively leaned over and slipped it below the bottom of Spads’ jacket hanging on the back of his chair, closing the punch’s teeth and snipping a swatch of fabric out. Shit, so that’s how my coat got cut. It seemed conversing with spectres wasn’t the sole mental disorder the old woman had. Maybe she’s into Voodoo as well? Be after our hair next, and I haven’t got that much to spare anymore.

  A film image filled the monitor, angles distorted through the prism of a wide-view fish-eye lens – larger at the centre and smaller around the edges. There were two men in maintenance overalls half way up a stepladder, faces covered by balaclavas; a third man below, pulling at a hoist attached to the ceiling with a vacuum seal. Simon Werks was oblivious as they manoeuvred his prone body into position, only starting to emerge into consciousness after they had fixed him into a noose dangling from the chandelier. Werks was really beginning to thrash as the group cut his attachment to the hoist, leaving him dangling in the air at the end of the noose. It didn’t take long for the billionaire to choke to death. He appeared heavier than he looked. Werks was wearing a mask, a ball-like rubber sex toy to gag him, which his killers left on his face as they untied a set of weights from his feet. The third man kicked out the leg of Napoleon’s mechanical desk, catching the desk’s side before it could bang on the floor. With the billionaire’s corpse left swinging from the chandelier, the three masked workmen shrank into the corner of the camera’s view, opening a window and boarding a window cleaner’s hoist. Taking their equipment, they sealed the window behind them before being hoisted out of sight.

  ‘So, two conflicting versions of his death,’ said Agatha. ‘One murder, one suicide. But which recording is correct?’

  ‘Pixel for pixel, both are,’ said Spads. ‘I’ve been running each of the files through video processing and as far as the software has been able to tell, neither of the recordings are faked.’

  ‘Now I see w
hy you had me released from Stick Hill.’

  ‘We’re branching into care in the community,’ said Doyle. ‘Anything occur to you about this?’

  ‘Three possibilities,’ said Agatha. ‘First, Mister Werks committed suicide and he or a third party decided to make his death appear like a murder. Second, he was assassinated and his death made to look like suicide. Third, he is still alive and both tapes are fakes.’