“I want to check the room,” I told her, pulling back.
“Is that all you want?” she asked and even Humphrey Bogart would have crumbled at this point, but then he had never been given a case to handle that was referred to him personally by the Magic Circle.
“Yes,” I lied and found it harder than at any time I could remember. There was so much more that I wanted. Her file had said that before she worked ordering books she had been an aspiring gymnast and a real prospect for an Olympic medal until upper body development ended her career. And when they referred to ‘upper body development’ they weren’t talking about her musculature. That would explain how she kept her figure so fantastic and offered up the tantalising prospect that she was bendy in all kinds of interesting ways, which made turning down her offer all the more torture for me.
“Well I don’t believe you,” she said, not letting me off the hook easily, “but I’ll let it pass. For now. That doesn’t mean that I’m letting it pass for good though.”
She slid the door key into place and the locked popped open. I squeezed past her (since she didn’t leave me any other choice and I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the experience) and checked the room. It was a suite, actually, with several rooms and the most expensive that the Agency card could buy, which meant the best that the hotel offered. That made checking it out thoroughly take that much longer, all under Miranda’s watching eyes, but it proved to be free from marauding intruders, assassins and kidnappers.
“Don’t let anyone in, keep your windows shut and if you order room service then get it sent to my room and I’ll bring it across,” I warned her when I was satisfied.
“Champagne and oysters?” she teased.
“You’ll be eating them alone, unless you want me to invite the waiter in for you,” I told her.
“Depends how cute he is,” she teased. “Aren’t you being just a little bit overprotective?”
“I haven’t lost a client yet,” I told her, conveniently forgetting the time in Mexico since I had recovered that one in good health within a few hours anyway, so it didn’t really count, “and I’m not about to start now. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
I closed the door for her, since she seemed reluctant to do so herself.
I wasn’t ready for sleep though, and it wasn’t the strip club that had put me in that frame of mind. There were still things to be done. Once back in my own suite, I broke open one of the small, but exquisitely expensive, bottles of wine from the mini bar and then broke out my computer equipment from inside my briefcase. I could tell nobody had tampered with it because it was Agency issue briefcase and if someone had tried to force their way in then the room would be just a set of scorched walls and the hotel would be adding the redecoration bill onto my account.
Slipping Traske’s disc into the drive, I fired up the video feed. The Peppermint Hippo Club certainly did have CCTV. There must have been two dozen cameras inside and outside the club. Every entrance and exit was covered as well as the main stage, smaller performance rooms and the offices as well. The only places safe from the prying electronic eyes was inside the toilet stalls and I wasn’t sure whether that was because there weren’t cameras there or because the feeds had been suppressed by Traske before he downloaded the data. One of the cameras gave a clear view of the booth where Miranda and I had sat to enjoy the champagne and the dancing. I mentally calculated the angles and was relieved that I had probably obscured most of the American’s unfortunate ‘accident’ with my back. Not that the police would have pressed their investigation into that as soon as they knew who I worked for.
It was obvious that six months of footage was going to be far too much to work through manually, even if I was selective about what I watched (ignoring the cameras that were fixed on the performance stages for example and ignoring the hours that the club was closed to the public), so I connected to the hotel’s wi-fi and set up a link to the Agency’s mainframe. I could use the photograph of Arnold as a reference for the facial recognition software to scan through the material and look for matches. It would find any footage starring the missing chemist in a matter of hours and certainly by morning. The software was state of the art, was considered to be virtually infallible and the rumours that it was actually all done using the multifaceted eyes of genetically-modified and carefully trained Sumatran fruit flies were absolute nonsense. It was one of the more imaginative work-related rumours, though.
The CCTV footage dealt with, I checked my emails, but there was nothing significant to the case, so I dimmed the lights and turned in. The dreams I allowed myself that night were filled with all the possibilities that I had denied myself in reality, but I squashed them ruthlessly after the first few minutes and fell into a controlled sleep.
The Morning After The Night Before
The sun was up early, but I was up even earlier. The time that we spend asleep is the time that we are at our most vulnerable and there are more than enough nasty things out there that would like to use our vulnerable, sleeping minds to gain access to either us or our world in general. Dreams attacks are the most common attempts to gain influence over ordinary humans with the obvious exceptions of money and sexual favours. Most demonic forces don’t have any money and the way most of them look only the truly insane would accept an offer of sexual favours from them. As a result, the ability to control, and even shut off, the dreaming state when not in specially shielded areas is drilled into would-be agents at a very early stage in their basic training. The inability to master this skill is grounds for being quietly taken off the programme and found an inoffensive desk job elsewhere in the civil service. Since I’m not good with being vulnerable, I spend as little time asleep as body and mind will allow. Anyway, there was work I could be getting on with. First, though, there was showering and breakfast to be getting on with. Room service proved to be one of the hotel’s many good points, being both rapid and good quality. The coffee was good enough that I didn’t want to use it to disinfect the drains, which is my usual reaction to hotel coffee. Suitably restored, I fired up the computer again and reconnected with the mainframe. The machine immediately informed me how many new e-mails had arrived and I immediately ignored the message.
The results were back from the CCTV footage, which wasn’t bad work considering how much raw data there must have been to process. The Agency has some of the fastest computers in the known world, capable of giving both NASA and the CIA a run for their money. It also possesses some of the best programmers thanks to the huge grants that are provided to the University of Oxford’s Computing Sciences department. Picking out a face in a crowd on low-grade CCTV images was for them something akin to asking a post-doctoral maths graduate what one plus one equals. Either you get the answer two or you get a debate on seven dimensional algebra that only twenty-three people in the whole world can understand. Fortunately, on this occasion I received the short answer.
The abbreviated footage had been enhanced, colourised (though why I don’t know since I didn’t ask for that) and downloaded to my Agency mailbox. I was just grateful that they hadn’t added 3D as an optional extra since the contact lenses irritate my eyes. After the search, there wasn’t a lot of footage left to look at. Arnie had apparently only visited the club on one occasion and hadn’t stayed there for any great length of time, unless he had been able to evade the camera coverage, which was extremely unlikely considering the number of cameras there were and the angles that they covered. As well as being short, the footage wasn’t overly exciting either. Arnie arrived at the main door and was admitted by my good friend Butch after a quick consultation of the big doorman’s clipboard. Inside the club, he looked around quite deliberately, as though scanning the room for someone that he had already arranged to meet. Failing to find whoever it was, he instead took a table and ordered a drink. He noticeably didn’t pay a lot of attention to what was happening on the stage. He also didn’t pay a lot of attention to his drink. I was reminded of Miranda at the pub
on the Thames and even if I hadn’t received confirmation from the door DNA scanners that the person I knew as Miranda Harcourt was, in fact, the real Miranda Harcourt it would have been obvious that these two were brother and sister.
After a while, a woman took the other seat at the table, kissing Arnie lightly on the cheek. The colourisation process had given her long hair a strong reddish tint, but that was probably a bit off since it also gave her face a slightly greenish pallor. Arnie had been clearly perturbed before she arrived, but after some apparently soothing conversation (I noticed that she was idly stroking the back of his hand on the table in a reassuring manner throughout) he relaxed a little. They stayed there for another few minutes and then left together shortly afterwards, hand in hand. The drink that the waitress had brought him remained untouched on the table.
It wasn’t the most fascinating piece of film I’d ever seen and certainly not up there with James Cameron’s Oscar-winning Spanish language romantic drama Hispanic, which remained the biggest box-office money maker of all time, but it was a good deal shorter and far less expensive. I watched it a dozen times over, making notes as I went. When I had finally had enough, I sent a couple of e-mails back to the IT team and looked up the train times back to Oxford. There weren’t any direct trains, but the connection times at Reading were favourable. My ordered taxi was waiting for me as I exited the lobby and within thirty five minutes I was walking back through the staff entrance of Agency HQ.
Mettles gave me a nod of acknowledgement, but made no attempt to waylay me this time and I took the lift up to the IT section on the fifteenth floor. The main Agency computer centre isn’t just on the fifteenth floor it is the fifteenth floor. The whole level is taken up with room after room of climatically controlled banks of computer servers and processors, the human operators of which are squashed into one small corner section of the building. To gain access to the actual machinery requires a three hour decontamination process so rigorous that most of the maintenance staff have taken to living inside the quarantine zone for the whole week rather than undergo it twice every day. Nobody else seemed to mind this very much since computer techs seem to talk a different language to the rest of us and any conversation with them ends up couched in terms of ‘petaflops’, ‘binary black holes’ and ‘perturbation theory’ even if it starts with a simple ‘how are you today?’.
The banks of electronics churn out enough heat to run the radiators throughout the entire building during the winter and provide the local power stations with the excess throughout the year. Since the larger, faster, computers needed to be super-cooled to operate at maximum efficiency there is always a paradoxical chill about the place. The closest recorded temperature to absolute zero was measured inside the Agency’s computer centre.
I presented my credentials and fake work order number to the receptionist and was directed to a sealed room to wait for the programmer who had been assigned to work on my problem. The room was glass-walled, but all forms of electro-magnetic interference had to be cancelled out in this section so as not to interfere with the sensitive equipment, making it one of the most surveillance-proof places on the planet, possibly even more so than Director Grayson’s office. At the touch of a button, the energy-sensitive glass could be hit by a tiny electrical current and turned completely opaque.
The operator who joined me in the room was not like most computer geeks are imagined to be. He was properly groomed, possessed no straggly facial hair, didn’t wear glasses, was dressed in a smart suit and was handsome enough to break hearts all over the place. Grayson demanded quality work from his employees, but he also expected them to be presentable as well. His idea was that if you dressed professionally you would act professionally. This wasn’t always the case, as civil servants across the world are constantly proving, but if you wanted to deviate from the Director’s dress code then you had better be the very best in your field and absolutely vital to Agency operations.
“I have what you requested ready,” he said, without preamble. Usually the backroom staff of the Agency were delighted to spend time with the field agents whose work they supported. We were supposed to be the glamorous side of the organisation and to be with us was to share in some of the excitement and danger. Since what most people consider to be ‘excitement’ comes from facing off against deadly threats without proper preparation and ‘danger’ is both terrifying and likely to get you dead, field agents cultivated a few stories that they could relate to suitably awestruck office bunnies without giving themselves traumatic flashbacks. This tech-head went straight to the computer screen and gave it his thumbprint, bringing the screen to life with a list of available files, barely even acknowledging my presence. He selected a code off the list and the CCTV footage came up on the screen. “First off,” he then said with some disapproval, “I’ve rechecked the chromatic interpolation code myself line by line and it’s functioning perfectly.”
“I’d probably be grateful to you if I understood more than three words of what you just said.” I’d hoped to get an operator whose first language was English, not computerese. I hadn’t been that lucky.
“There’s nothing wrong with the colour,” he translated with a slight scowl. “It’s been checked and rechecked and it’s fine.”
“All right,” I accepted. There was no point annoying him any further than I already had by questioning the software’s ability and then his own communication skills. The process, as I understood it, is that the computers identify certain known objects (in this case possibly the bottles of drink behind the bar) and then use the known colours of those objects to extrapolate what colour everything else on the footage should be. It’s the same process that they use to ruin all the old black and white movies only infinitely more detailed. “What about the woman?” I pointed her out on the screen. “Have you managed to identify her yet?”
“Not exactly,” he replied diffidently. Like most of the people working at the Agency, he believed that he was amongst the best at what he did (which he was or he wouldn’t be there in the first place) and he didn’t like it when there was something that eluded him. I could relate to that.
“What do you mean not exactly? Either you have or you haven’t. Which is it?” I tried not to sound too aggressive, but failed.
“We haven’t managed to identify her yet,” He shrugged helplessly to show that there was nothing that he could do about that. With virtually every activity that anyone indulged in now generating an electronic footprint providing information about them and pretty much all that information being available to the Agency in one form or another it was somewhat surprising that the woman didn’t show up anywhere. The same facial recognition software would have been applied to every photograph in the passport bureau, driver licensing and National Health Service databases. She clearly hadn’t held any public service posts as they all now required photo ID, as did most companies of any reasonable size nowadays, and all those IDs were electronically stored and therefore accessible to us. It was all but unheard of for none of these searches to come up with an identification. “But we have identified her type.”
“Sorry, her what?”
“Her type,” he repeated, which didn’t help all that much. “She’s a Siren.”
“She’s a Siren?” I was starting to sound like an echo in a wildlife preserve.
He nodded his head to confirm what he’d just told me, not finding it as hard to credit as I did. “Yes, a Siren. A genus of the Selkie family. A sea-living…”
“Yes, I know what a Siren is thank you very much,” I forestalled him before he could go off on some detailed encyclopaedic description of all the information that you never wished to hear about Sirens. “What I don’t know is what the hell one is doing walking around the mainland without displaying the proper authorisation. Is there anything around her neck?”
His expression made it clear that once the woman had been identified as a Siren the first thing that had been done was to examine every frame of footage for the ID tag
that should have been dangling from her throat. “Can you find out if any Sirens have come on land officially in the last six months, no make that a year, and cross reference with the CCTV image?” I asked, unable to stop myself. Asking questions is what investigators do. It’s what I do. Of course it was possible, I knew that, but I still asked the question.
“That’s already been done,” the operator confirmed shortly. “There is no match.”
“Of course there isn’t. Alert Border Control. Someone there has really messed up big time. See if there is any record of her in any of the Siren Registers.”
“Sirens are not required to be registered unless they plan to leave the reservation and come onto land,” he informed me primly. Clearly, that had already been thought of that as well and had already been checked.
“No match?”
“No match,” he confirmed.
“Fine,” I muttered, though it clearly was no such thing. An unregistered Siren wandering around was a major breakdown in security and this was a Siren who had never come ashore before, which made her inexperienced in handling herself around humans. That was not a good sign. “Send the picture to the Siren Liaison Bureau and tell them to distribute it to reservations worldwide. I want to know who she is and how she got here.”
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 9