Our Memory Like Dust

by Gavin Chait

  ‘The ship looks as if it’s sinking. Looks like there are hundreds on board. I’ll see if I can get one of our engineers out as well.’

  He switches on the small turbine beneath the kayak and jets towards the ship, skipping over the choppy water.

  Shakiso is quickly alongside, each using their paddles as rudders and leaning into the sea.

  ‘Let’s not get too close,’ says Simon, Shakiso signalling her agreement. They have no wish to cause anyone to jump into the water to reach them. Their kayaks are small, and they would soon be swamped.

  Shakiso calls the coastguard, giving them her position. The young woman taking notes sounds shocked.

  ‘Do you know how many people are on board?’ she asks.

  Shakiso shouts the question through to Simon. He shakes his head. ‘Several hundred, I think.’

  He is speaking to Hollis.

  ‘I’ve got a helicopter on the way to the Climate stores. Daphne’s on the way in one we can use to lift people ashore. Where do you think they’re going to stay? That’s hardly the best place to come aground.’

  ‘Think you can find some of the local radio stations? Maybe put out a call on the connect for help?’ answers Shakiso.

  As they get closer, Simon is able to see a crack running up the mid-section of the ship and down into the water. People are packed tightly on the deck, with only enough room to stand. Gulls are flying overhead, diving down to the ship and back up, their shrieks mournful and terrifying.

  An orange and white helicopter flies out from along the cliffs, passing over them. White spray closer to the shore as the rescue boat at St Davids Lifeboat Station slides down its tracks, thunks into the water and charges towards them.

  Simon spots the call-sign on the bottom of the helicopter and joins their channel.

  ‘This is Simon Adaro in the kayaks below you. We made the call. Over.’

  ‘We’ll take over from here. Over,’ says a crackly and impatient voice.

  ‘We can help,’ he says. ‘We have support helicopters packed with supplies heading here. Where do you intend to beach these people? That crack is no good, and you can’t bring the ship any closer to the shore. Over.’

  The line goes silent, and Simon can imagine the hurried discussion taking place as the helicopter circles over the ship.

  ‘There’s a field near Whitesands. We should be able to get people and supplies in there easily. Over.’

  ‘Thanks. We’ll meet you there. Out.’

  Simon signals to Shakiso. ‘We can meet them on the shore,’ leaning over and digging his paddle in the water. His kayak turns in a sweeping arc towards the tumbling surf at Whitesands.

  The wind is rising, flinging up white fleece on the waves as they pound and bounce across the water.

  They cut power as they reach the shoreline, surfing in on the waves and dragging their kayaks up the beach.

  Two helicopters arrive. One bears the Achenia logo. The other is the red and white of His Majesty’s Coastguard. Each lands in the field at the north end of the beach, sending up sand and grass.

  An agitated-looking man walks urgently towards the Achenian helicopter. Simon and Shakiso join them as a hurried conversation starts.

  ‘– and this is Simon Adaro,’ says the young woman who piloted the Achenian helicopter. ‘Hello, sir,’ she grins.

  ‘Hello, Daphne, good to see you.’

  ‘Mr Adaro,’ says the young District Officer. ‘We’re grateful for your help, but you understand that the Coastguard has overall responsibility.’

  ‘I understand that, but most of your capacity is currently blockading the Mediterranean,’ he says.

  The man raises his hands and smiles. ‘That’s politics, sir. My job is to prevent loss of life and to protect the coast. We’ll take all the help we can get.’

  A huge Achenian freight helicopter swings over the bluff and drops on to the grass. An old man hops out, grinning in recognition when he sees Shakiso, and limps across the field. He sweeps her up in his arms.

  ‘You must be Simon,’ he says, turning to him. ‘I’m Elias, an old friend of Shak’s. We’ve got water, blankets, food – nothing hot, I’m afraid – where do you want us?’

  The rotors slow to the point they can speak normally, and everyone begins to sound much less anxious.

  The young District Officer looks momentarily overwhelmed. ‘We’ll need to get people off the ship and bring it under control. I’ve got two tugs coming in from Pembroke Dock. I’m not sure they’re any better than that wreck, but it’s all we have. Once the ship is safe, we can start getting people ashore. We’ll need to make sure we keep families together, have a record of who is arriving. But, please, make sure everyone gets a blanket and some water. It’s going to be a cold night.’

  Shakiso smiles and grips his shoulder. ‘You’re doing fine,’ she says.

  Cars start arriving, pulling into the parking lot, concerned men and women gathering nearby, unsure what to do.

  ‘We came when we heard it on the radio,’ says one old woman. ‘Those poor people.’

  Many have brought blankets and warm food.

  Media drones from Facebook and the BBC hover over the tugs, rebroadcasting individual feeds from people gathering along the cliffs, watching as the tugs draw near. There is a press of people on the deck all pushing to be closer to the sides to see what is happening. A man falls into the water followed by others.

  Shouts of horror on the shore.

  Rescue boats circle, picking people out of the choppy ocean. Echoing sounds of amplified instructions.

  ‘Please stay on the ship. Please stay on the ship.’

  The wind howls into the shore, pushing the water flat. Someone lights a fire. More are lit.

  The first seekers are set down on the beach.

  A woman, holding her baby, weeps, splashing her face with seawater. Overcome, a woman rushes from amongst the waiting locals, embracing her and leading her and her child towards the blankets.

  Coastguard officials run back and forth trying to ensure they have tallied every arrival.

  The seekers gather near the fires. Their eyes are haunted, faces gaunt, overwhelmed with exhaustion.

  ‘We ran out of food a week ago –’

  ‘– we threw the dead overboard –’

  ‘– my son –’

  ‘– please, drink –’

  ‘– let me help with your child –’

  ‘– I am grateful –’

  White faces and black faces. Eyes and hands and feet and bodies to hold them with.

  ‘I think there’s about eight hundred survivors,’ says the District Officer, his jacket stained and wet. ‘Where are we going to put them? We don’t have anywhere?’

  ‘I think people here might have some ideas,’ says Shakiso.

  ‘What? No, we’ll lose track of them. They can’t just go home with anyone.’

  ‘We’re inside the Perimeter, and you have the registration numbers of the cars. You’ll know where they are,’ says Simon.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ says Shakiso.

  Cars begin leaving, the parking lot emptying, each with a new family on their way to a new home, for – even in the depths of darkness – there are those who will reach out a hand and bring others in need into the light.

  Simon and Shakiso walk to the furthest end of the beach. They climb up on to the bluff and watch the lights of the tugs and helicopters out in the water, the murmur and emotion of the people on the shore.

  ‘Have I told you?’ he asks.

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ she says, her eyes bright and smiling.

  ‘I love you,’ he says.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to say. Something—’

  She puts a finger on his lips.

  ‘I love you,’ she says. ‘But if it’s another woman, I’ll kill both of you.’

  He laughs, looking sad.

  He shakes his head.

  He tells her, his word
s indistinct and broken in the wind.

  Her eyes widen.

  She asks.

  He explains.

  She kisses him gently on the lips.

  On the nose.

  On each cheek.

  She rests her forehead on his.

  And the wind wipes away her tears.

  31

  ‘Tell her the story of the grey men,’ says Tiémoko.

  They are seated on the rooftop terrace of a hotel restaurant overlooking the ocean. Shakiso and Simon arrived back in Dakar from Wales early this morning, and they intend travelling to Aroundu with Tiémoko tomorrow.

  The sounds of the city echo in the distance. In the corner near the entrance, an informal band has been playing the same song repeatedly for the last half hour. Each time they reach what may be the middle of the song, something seems to disrupt them. First it is the mixing desk, then an amplifier; at the moment they are deep in discussions about the quality of their seating.

  ‘I said, I’m never telling that story,’ says Simon, giving him a look of extreme discomfort.

  Tiémoko’s smile is ruthless. ‘Do you, or do you not, trust this woman?’

  Shakiso grins. ‘Yes, dude, do you not trust me?’

  Simon looks from one to the other, exasperated. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Remember, though, this makes you an accomplice to some of the most illegal behaviour our government has a name for.’

  He looks around, somewhat unhappily. No one is paying them any attention, and the noise of chatter and music prevents casual eavesdropping.

  ‘I abbreviated that story of getting Zhi out of England,’ he says.

  ‘Which bit?’ she asks.

  ‘The bit where he just leaves,’ he says.

  Tiémoko is smiling and laughing.

  ‘Wait,’ says Shakiso, ‘let me see how much I remember,’ topping up their glasses from the bottle of rioja before continuing. ‘So, while Hollis was still in hospital you hacked into the national surveillance system so you could follow cabinet ministers around. Then, after you got conscripted, you roped Tiémoko and that Chinese friend of yours, Liao Zhi, into helping you?’

  Tiémoko nods. ‘Simon wasn’t sure what to do with it, and I thought up the idea of publishing the locations of a list of people to boycott as a form of civil protest.’

  ‘And who came up with the name?’ she asks.

  Simon and Tiémoko exchange a knowing glance, laughing. ‘Zhi. Only he would call something TheShitList.’

  ‘Right,’ says Shakiso. ‘And how do you get away with publishing a list of senior politicians’ actual whereabouts without getting arrested?’

  ‘We had to disguise the source of our information and created this social network tool so people could let us know if they saw someone on our list. Hardly anyone recognized our targets, and we’d fill in the gaps from the surveillance system,’ says Simon.

  ‘I don’t see how that makes money?’

  ‘That wasn’t the intention. To be honest, it was a terrible idea. People liked it, and quite a few politicians were embarrassed when shops refused to sell them things, but it felt petty.’

  ‘What changed?’

  ‘I finished my national service and had more time to focus on it, and a few months later a war criminal in exile in Bahrain announced he was coming on a shopping trip to London. Few knew what he looked like, and no one knew who would be in his retinue. Bahrain gave him a diplomatic passport, and our government said they were powerless to stop him visiting. There were some serious protests outside parliament.

  ‘I got a call from Harrods. They were worried about reputational damage if they accidentally sold anything to these people. We put together a custom package for them. Their security staff would get a warning when anyone on the list arrived, and everyone else could use their rims to identify anyone in this chap’s party.

  ‘After that, we got contracts from a number of retailers all prepared to pay extremely well.’

  ‘Then you guys got raided?’

  Simon nods. ‘We had four good years before they came knocking, but, yes, we obviously shouldn’t have had the information we did. I knew we needed an alternative, and we had built an independent surveillance system by then. I hoped they’d leave us alone when they realized, but our government has their own approach to getting their point across. Tiémoko’s father was quietly told to take his son and go back to Senegal. Zhi was arrested as an illegal immigrant.’

  He laughs, remembering. ‘I hid out in my old van behind the police station where they were holding him. They used to put prisoners in these single-person transit pods and shuttle them around. I followed behind as soon as he was in one and hacked the damn thing. I was simultaneously turning off the street cameras filming me while trying to break into this silly pod.’

  ‘Weren’t they going to deport him? Couldn’t you wait?’ asks Shakiso.

  Simon glances at Tiémoko, who shakes his head, ‘No, not so simple. Zhi really was illegally in the country, and that’s an offence. Worse, England’s naturalization laws made their shareholding illegal. Tiémoko, at least, had his father’s diplomatic protection, but Zhi was doubly cursed. They were threatening ten years of solitary confinement.’

  ‘This is how you were forced out of the company?’ asks Shakiso, staring at Tiémoko curiously. ‘Do you resent that?’

  His eyes cloud briefly, and he exchanges a troubled glance with Simon. ‘I have made my peace with it,’ he says, eventually.

  ‘Ah,’ says Shakiso, carefully dropping the topic in the face of their discomfort. ‘So, what really happened?’

  ‘It’s fairly elaborate,’ says Simon.

  Shakiso tilts the wine bottle, swirling the contents, ‘The night is but a pup, and I’m sure they have more of this lovely vintage.’

  ‘Go on,’ says Tiémoko, smiling. ‘I’ll help.’

  Near the entrance, the band have stopped again, now agitated over something they are viewing on a console. A bone-thin old man dressed in a greyed and careworn boubou, his hair an olive-coloured burst about his head and leaning on a two-headed stave for support, joins them.

  Simon sighs, drums his fingers on the table and nods.

  ‘The old surveillance cameras were fairly easy to fool. After Perimeter was turned on, they could track him no matter where he went. We needed to figure out how to avoid it following us around, get Zhi a false identity to travel, and make sure I didn’t end up being arrested afterwards.’

  He refills his glass to the brim.

  ‘I had been toying with the idea for AnoniCar, and we had twenty cars driving around London. This was early in their development, and we hadn’t destroyed the private keys yet.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asks Shakiso.

  ‘The whole point of these cars is that you get in and, from there, no one knows who you are until you get out and Perimeter eventually figures out where you went. But you do need to be identified before you get in, so we can get paid and check that you’re not on TheShitList.

  ‘Anyone who could get into the system by using the private key could find out who was in the car by knowing who had got into it in the first place. I was being watched and, even though the system was being tested, I couldn’t take the risk of keeping the keys on me.’

  ‘Who had them?’

  ‘I did,’ says Tiémoko. ‘I wrote some of the original code for the systems.’

  ‘How does it even work?’

  ‘Three-card Monte,’ says Simon.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a card trick,’ says Tiémoko. ‘All the cars driving within a similar area are taken on round-about routes and then enter a single warehouse we own. The warehouse is a Faraday cage and is coated in super-black, the same material on the outside of those drones,’ pointing upwards to where the drones are circling. ‘Do that a few times but, each time, add extra cars or take cars out of circulation.’

  ‘That can’t be enough to prevent detection?’

  ‘It isn’t,’ says Simon. �
��We’re not trying for complete invisibility. We only suggest you’ll have ninety minutes after you leave the vehicle before Perimeter will figure out who you are.’

  Shakiso blinks repeatedly. ‘People pay for this?’

  ‘They have their reasons,’ says Simon.

  ‘And the grey men? How do they feature?’

  ‘The ambassador isn’t one person.’

  ‘I know that, although I don’t know why,’ says Shakiso.

  ‘Blame Perimeter,’ says Simon.

  ‘It was developed by the Americans,’ says Tiémoko. ‘The US is too big for practical use, so it only covers their largest cities and their border walls. England and Wales are small, and cover is complete.

  ‘You have to acknowledge the deviousness of their plan. The Chinese realized their intelligence agents would be tracked anywhere they went. Overnight, every embassy renamed all their staff. They all became one ambassador with the identity chosen from a previous incumbent.’

  ‘Right,’ says Shakiso. ‘No matter what, the English ambassador is always Liu Xiaoming.’

  ‘Their identities are entirely legitimate as well,’ says Tiémoko. ‘None of the staff look alike. They may not have the same gender. They all share a single identity.’

  Shakiso sits back in her chair, her eyes wide, grinning in admiration. ‘I think I see where this goes.’

  There is a moment of silence as she works through the implications of the set-up. Shaking her head, she flags a waiter and orders more wine.

  ‘What next? How do you even get an ambassador to use AnoniCar?’ she asks.

  ‘Zhi said at least one of them must be enjoying a little infidelity which they would prefer the embassy not to know about,’ says Tiémoko.

  ‘And they’d need a private car to drive them there?’

  ‘We ran advertising targeting the embassy, and pretty soon we had someone. Every evening at exactly twenty past seven, this ambassador would step into the car and travel two hours across the city, get out, stay for an hour and then come back. We’d have about five hours during which time an ambassador would be out of circulation and entirely under our control.’

  ‘You stole his identity,’ she says in delight. ‘Where was Zhi during all this?’