The screen fades to black, then the Rank Bajin cartoon figure appears, approvingly holding one thumb up to camera. A triangular play icon appears in the centre, offering the option to view the video again. Angelique wants to hit it with a hammer.
‘I am assuming the only reason this fucking abomination is still live is because you’re running a trace.’
‘Yes and no. We received a message, via email, telling us...’
‘Same deal as the Tivoli. I get it. If we don’t play the game, he takes his ball and goes home.’
‘That’s it. If the site or the feeds get pulled, he kills the hostages; same deal with the music downloads.’
‘He’s going to kill them anyway.’
‘And he knows we know that, but he also knows we can’t act on it. We have to let him have his fun.’
‘What about the trace?’
‘The message claims that he has monitoring in place to detect any attempt to trace the source location. If his detection measures pick up any trace activity, he kills one of the hostages.’
‘He’s bluffing. Is that kind of detection possible?’
‘Our geeks are on it. They say just from a cursory look at the set-up that he knows what he’s doing: tentative initial traces show the signal coming simultaneously from a hundred nodes on five continents. Christ, even the email he sent was carrying the digital equivalent of a postmark from half the major cities on the globe, and appeared to have originated – get this – from Cromlarig, in the north of Scotland.’
‘Nearest town to Dubh Ardrain,’ Angelique acknowledges. ‘Very fucking funny. So if he can spoof trace-route signatures, can he do what he’s claiming?’
‘Detecting our attempts? Geeks say not likely. Not theoretically impossible, but chances are he’s bluffing to deter us from trying to sniff him out.’
‘Would he chance being traced just to keep his show live? He could as easily just upload more videos on a regular basis. Less risky.’
‘Frankly, I don’t have a clue. I’m just going with what the geeks—’ There sounds a double-beat tone on the line. ‘Sorry, have to stick you on hold.’
Angelique is left staring at the screen, just a regular electronic pulse on her mobile to reassure her that it is still connected to something. As the seconds turn into minutes, she can’t help but click on the open tabs, and finds herself gazing at the three prisoners. Perhaps it’s the camera angle, but they all look somehow really small. They also look bedraggled, disorientated and exhausted, indicating they have barely slept in days. The sense of voyeurism is curiously enhanced by the absence of sound, making it seem like security footage of people oblivious of the watching cameras, though the three of them seem not so much oblivious as ignoring. The occasional glance indicates that they know about the cameras – so they’re not hidden – but they seem indifferent towards them, like they offer intrusion but not communication. That’s when it occurs to Angelique to wonder about the lack of sound. Is Darcourt scared they could communicate something about their location or about their captor? But then she gets it: another of the bastard’s sick jokes. They got where they are through miming. They never wanted a voice then, so he’s not giving them one now.
Dale’s call resumes on her mobile. Dale sounds younger than he looks, a certain energy and enthusiasm in his voice that shaves a few years off, particularly in a profession with a tendency to advance world-weariness in anybody’s register. Of course, it’s always possible his voice is bang-on for his age and it’s the strains of the job that have made him look ten years older. Even if so, that extra ten still only makes him look early forties, and good for it. But let’s not even begin to go there...
‘Sorry about that. That was the head geek, looking for my green light to commence some hopefully very gentle probing. They’re running whatever it is right now, proceeding on a steady-as-she-goes basis. If they encounter anything they don’t like the look of, they’ll hold off. But as you say, he’s going to kill them anyway. It’s a chance we have to take. It’s not like we can... fuck. Fuck.’
‘What?’
‘How is it your end?’ he asks hurriedly, anxious. ‘Have you lost it as well?’
‘Lost what?’ Angelique asks, then notices that the video window has gone blank. She clicks through the other tabs: they’re all dead; hits Refresh on the main page, just gets a ‘connecting to . . .’ message.
‘Feeds have all dropped,’ she reports. ‘Index page is getting ready to 404 me any second now.’
‘Jesus Christ. I’m calling the geeks again. Keep refreshing. And hit Shift-F5 to clear the cache and fully reload.’
‘Sir,’ she affirms.
The on-hold beep becomes like an electronic echo of her own pulse as she hits Shift-F5, Shift-F5, except her own pulse does not stay at such a digitally calibrated steady oscillation. She thinks of the three scared faces she has just been looking at, images so vividly ordinary they could each be in a room next door.
Shift-F5. Connecting to...
Shift-F5. Connecting to...
Then all of a sudden her whole body jolts in her chair as the index page reappears: the Rank Bajin logo where it was at the top, the main video window below, and underneath that, the explanation for the downtime: he’s added three mirrors underneath each of the hyperlinked names, adding more bandwidth to cope with what he anticipates will be an ever-increasing load.
She issues a steam-vent sigh, almost laughs at the relief, but it’s relative. The situation remains merely dire, as opposed to fatally irretrievable.
‘I’ll be doing well to get through this without a heart attack,’ Dale says. ‘Though at least an MI would save me from issuing a new statement on all of this. The news channels are about to go insane. I’d like to hold off for a few hours, but I’ve got to get the message out ASAP to any would-be hackers not to attempt any private investigations. It would look a sight better if we had something to offer by way of suggesting we have a lead, other than merely a corroboration that this guy really is Darcourt.’
‘I’ll go downstairs and see how we’re doing on the voice.’
‘I expect I’ll be making a statement within the hour, but if you get something, call me, even if I’m on-air at the time.’
‘You got it, sir. Oh, but one thing before you go: corroboration? Do you mean the Cromlarig link in the email? Because that’s even more public domain than the Rank Bajin picture.’
‘Shit, can’t believe I forgot to say. I meant the email, yes, but not the Cromlarig part. There was a hotlinked image at the bottom of the text. Photo of Halle Berry.’
‘Christ. From her best-known role?’
‘His way of saying he got our message.’
Angelique knew what the image on the email would show without having to see it: a dark-skinned female in a skin-tight black bodysuit, a similar sight being one of the last things Darcourt and his men clapped eyes upon before being taken down at Dubh Ardrain.
Halle Berry: most famous as Ororo Munroe, aka Storm.
The X Woman.
Angelique walks near silently down the stairs. She’s not making an effort to be stealthy; it’s just the way the place has been designed to absorb and muffle sound. The carpet on the stairs is hard-wearing and feels stiff beneath her shoes, but it cushions every footfall, and the walls either side hug the narrow passage so tightly as to prevent much reverberation. As she turns into the corridor at the bottom, she can see Ray through a double-glazed window. He looks precipitately drained, like he’d have been fine if she came down here twenty seconds ago, but now the colour has just been flushed out of him as if somebody pulled a plug. The description that would leap to most observers’ minds is that he looks like he’s just seen a ghost. Angelique is better informed: she knows it’s that he’s just heard one.
She waves to Gary, the engineer, requesting permission to enter. He gives her a nod and she reaches for the door. As soon as she pushes the handle and breaks the rubber seal around the frame, she can hear the voice all around. R
ay turns to look at her, his face a mixture of fear, uncertainty and not a little accusation: what have you done to me? He looks like he might be sick. Angelique doesn’t have time to offer assurances, as within moments she’s busy dealing with her own reactions to the voice, now uncloaked of its digital camouflage and stalking her memory like a predator.
Her hand goes to her chest, because that’s where she suddenly feels it, all over again, like somebody just opened the vault where her subconscious had locked up what it couldn’t deal with in that terrible moment. Physically, she’s standing in a sound-editing suite in Soho, but her mind is back at Dubh Ardrain, lying on the floor in agony and shock. The Kevlar stopped the shotgun pellets from penetrating her skin, but the blow itself had been point-blank and it was her ribs that absorbed the force. She never actually lost consciousness, but felt swamped, overwhelmed by brutal sensations: pain, disorientation and a deafening ringing in her ears from the muzzle-blast. She remembers his voice – this voice, this voice she can hear now in Soho – becoming audible and intelligible as those sensations gradually dissipated. She cannot hear it without experiencing a sense-memory of that pain and fear, but buried a layer beneath there is also a sense-memory of what came immediately after: of hate, of anger, of burning resolve. Here in the editing suite, she feels the bile rising, her heartbeat that bit more insistent.
‘I’m going to have to hurry you, Nick. I realise the lyrics are utterly vacuous and probably indistinguishable from a thousand other shitty songs you wrote, but you did write them, so why not take a stab.’
There it is: that narcissistic conceit and self-satisfaction in the voice, that detestably smug arrogance. As they used to say when Angelique was wee, if he was made of chocolate he’d eat himself. All but chuckling at his own cleverness.
He had stood there with Angelique flat on her back and Ray on his knees, the situation back under his control, the whip hand his again, yet the fucker still felt the need to sing when he was winning:
‘And what have you got to wank about, in your ordinary, anonymous little life? Tell me that. What the hell have you achieved? A fucking school teacher. Wife, mortgage, and a kid now, I understand. You really shine out in the crowd, Ray.’
He hadn’t changed. Same sadism, same gloating, same complacency, same weaknesses. And when she got hold of the fucker, same result.
This time, though, she’d make sure there was no escape. She was going to slap the cuffs on him personally, and she was going to make sure he was in no state to resist, far less disappear again. Before she clapped him in irons, she was going to see him on his knees. See him humbled. See him defeated.
See him bleed.
Angelique calls Dale. In the background she can hear a hubbub of chatter and the scrape of large objects being hauled around a polished floor. The Tivoli. She hopes she’s not too late.
‘You’re a life-saver,’ he tells her, though she suspects they both know that this is a purely metaphorical compliment. The influence of the new voice recording on the fortunes of Anika, Sally and Wilson is unlikely to be so decisive, and she says as much.
‘We have to take encouragement where we can find it in a shitstorm like this,’ Dale responds. ‘This at least lets us change the agenda for the next news cycle. The latest angle becomes positive progress about our new lead, us getting somewhere rather than looking literally clueless against a background of hysterical reaction to this latest horror show. Like it or not, this gig is going to be as much about managing the news as about investigating the leads. Playing the media is not a strategy, it’s a necessity, because the fucker we’re up against has made the game so, and we have to make sure we play it better than him.’
‘I know,’ she concedes. ‘It’s just a hell of a culture shock after several years of covert operations.’
‘Never knew when you had it good, huh?’
She gives a short, wry laugh. ‘I’m firing over an initial sample of Darcourt’s voice for immediate broadcast,’ she tells him. ‘Ray and Gary, the sound engineer, are fine-tuning the settings just now so that they can issue a complete set of all the recordings, but a rough-cut preview should suffice for the press conference.’
‘Good work. When they’re all done, we’ll get them online for download, get the link on to the news, Crimewatch and hope fully the front page of the BBC website.’
‘Speaking of websites, any news on tracing those live streams?’
‘No, and don’t be checking regularly for updates, because I’m informed it will be slow going. They’ve encountered firewall after firewall; not so much a needle in a haystack as like trying to find a particular strand of hay when each wisp leads to another entire haystack.’
‘There must be something they can do: Darcourt’s smart but he’s not a computer genius. Surely their command of the technology ultimately has to be better than his.’
‘There is something they can do, but it’s what the alpha geek called BFI. That’s hacker jargon, stands for Brute Force and Ignorance, meaning in programming terms a solution that gets the job done, but in an unsubtle, messy and haphazard fashion. The problem is, we need them to be stealthy, so BFI is not an option. They’re working on alternatives, but it’s not going to be swift or elegant. “Like kicking dead whales down the beach,” was the phrase he used.’
‘Sounds almost as much fun as manning the phone lines when we get the public response to the voice tapes. Commiserations to the officers on nutter-fielding duty.’
‘Agreed, but where this could prove more useful is that it might make it harder for him to operate. If we can get the public familiar with his real voice, then they’ll recognise it if they subsequently hear it for real. It’s not going to stop him from being able to grunt a few words to the cashier when he’s paying for his petrol, but if he wants twenty Regal King Size or a new order of oxygen canisters...’
‘Then he just has to put on a different accent.’
‘Shit. True enough,’ he concedes. ‘But on the bright side, all it would take is one person to genuinely recognise that voice and the whole game could change.’
‘A big if, though. The problem is, how many people will have heard Darcourt’s voice recently enough to recognise it? This is not someone who makes a lot of new friends. No matter how solid a new identity he’s created for himself since Dubh Ardrain, he’ll have been laying very low. We’re not going to end up interviewing some next-door neighbours who’ll say how normal he seemed, very polite, wouldn’t have suspected a thing, always made sure his rubbish was out on time. More the extreme end of the “kept himself to himself” part of the public-profile spectrum. I can’t think there’s many people left alive who’ll have heard his voice since his first supposed death, over a decade ago.’
‘Like I said, Angelique, it might only take one to change everything.’
The good ship black & decker
‘All of the British-based news channels are running with the clip on their headline cycles, sir. Sky and BBC News 24 are offering playback on demand via their digital services. Complete, unexpurgated versions of all the audio tracks are expected to begin appearing on the BBC’s website within the next two hours.’
‘An exciting twist to an already intriguing story, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘As I reported to you previously, sir, our sources close to the investigation indicate the police have had reason to believe it was Darcourt since the first murder, the English journalist. That is why they brought in this woman, this Angelique de Xavia. She had been working out of Paris—’
‘Under that nuisance Dougnac, yes, you said.’
‘And if I may remind you, regardless of the official reasons, she was drafted into the investigation because she has first-hand experience of Darcourt. She was instrumental in the Scottish fiasco of 2001.’
‘Quite. An extremely expensive mess. Unavoidable from time to time, but fiascos such as that serve to remind us why we insist on fifty per cent up front and the rest payable upon completion.’
�
��Indeed, sir.’
‘The only consolation was the absence of wind-borne contamination. There was, of course, the not inconsiderable cost of having Mopoza assassinated before his verbal incontinence and mental instability combined to leak something potentially toxic, but ultimately, we didn’t sustain any structural damage, only financial. The latter is always more easily repaired. But that’s what concerns me about Darcourt’s reappearance. There is a histrionically self-righteous agenda at play here, no code of professionalism. It has disturbing implications for his, shall we say, moral neutrality. One cannot help but be reminded of the Lombardy incident.’
‘I concur, sir. In retrospect, there is a certain consistency of style and, more disturbingly, motive. Not the specific motive itself, but the very fact of there clearly being one. If Lombardy, indeed, was Darcourt, then its overtones of vigilantism dictate an express requirement for decisive action.’
‘The Lombardy incident was how many years ago?’
‘Four years, sir.’
A Snowball in Hell Page 17