He surrendered. He couldn’t control a 14-year-old girl. What chance did he have of defeating the Board?
Fangfang hadn’t met Hone till that morning. She went to sleep in Newcastle and woke up in the London apartment with a thick head and an urge to vomit – her Macbook on the sofa next to her. He would put money on ketamine. Her mother and grandmother weren’t happy at her disappearance, but she’d reassured them in the phone call she was allowed. “Working for the government. Hush Hush. All good.” North wondered if they were relieved their troublesome genius-child was making trouble some place other than upstairs. Disposable phones, pizzas, burgers, cheese, crackers, chocolate, gum and a dozen cans of diet coke appeared, and Hone said he’d a daughter her age and who knew how far a girl with her skill set could go these days? It was a woman’s world. North didn’t believe a word of it. Even if it was true, even if his pink-cheeked daughter was the apple of his one eye, and he kept pencils in a mug inscribed with “World’s Best Dad”, Hone would kill Fang without breaking his step.
“Is he the devil?” she asked, pulling herself into the bank of computers and North didn’t know how serious she was being. He hedged his bets.
“I don’t know yet.”
The Friends of Cyclops? A distant arm of MI5 wanting yet more distance from the operation. One thing was certain – Hone’s first concern was not keeping Fangfang or North alive.
“My guess too, they’ve installed their own spyware and everything we do,” she waggled her small stubby fingers at the bank of computers, “they’re across. But…” she leaned into him to whisper into his ear, “I could disable it? Block the outbound traffic – intercept it and play a pre-recorded feed to them?” She sat back in the seat, waiting for his agreement.
Being across everything they were across worked both ways. It meant Hone assumed he and his “friends” knew everything North knew. It would instil confidence, and the sense they were in control. But there were all sorts of ways to control a situation.
North shook his head. “They’ll enjoy watching you work Fang. Dazzle them.”
She understood when he laid it out for her. Armitage was dead. He’d handled and grown the wealth of the Board as he’d handled and grown his own. The Board then had to be in disarray as they picked their own way through the morass of figures and hidden accounts to pull back their money from the financial gaming tables across the world. Doubtless the Board was already filling JP’s directorships, steering his companies, transferring funds, winding up businesses, shutting down accounts, and deleting hard drives. North and Fangfang were in a race, because housekeeping was under way, and every minute that passed made what they were going to do harder.
“What happened to Stella?” she asked as she typed. Her voice was unconcerned, but the answer mattered.
“Nothing good,” he said.
“And the stupid one?”
“Disneyland.”
Fang snorted. “Peggy’s not coming back, is she?” She’d saved the most important for last. The teacher who taught her she was special.
He didn’t know what to say, because he didn’t know the truth of it.
“But this is going to hurt them, isn’t it – the ones who took her?”
“That’s the idea. Maximum damage. No mercy shown.”
The black eyes lifted, resting on his face for a moment as she reached for the nearest can of diet coke – the rip of the ring-pull, the explosion of air loud in the room and caramel froth spilled from it. She took a noisy swig, holding the coke in her mouth as she settled at the keyboard, swallowing as the first fingertip hit the first key. It was like home. And she was doing it right.
North stopped existing for her. He smiled. Admiring her skill, her focus. He wondered what his life might have been like if his talent was hacking systems rather than killing people.
Fang was settled. Meanwhile his ribs still hurt from the bomb blast and he needed coffee. Badly. Somewhere in this liniment and decay-smelling apartment there had to be a kitchen. Yellowing sheets covered a sofa, the sacking belly of its webbing spilling out its sawdust guts over the ancient parquet floor. He lifted a corner of another sheet as he passed revealing a dusty velour armchair, its seat cushion dished as if its owner had recently stepped away. From the impressions in the carpet, the chair usually stood in front of the ancient three bar electric heater, which itself blocked a magnificent marble and peacock-tiled fireplace. The former resident apparently regarded the open fire as a luxury she couldn’t afford.
The kitchen might have been installed in the thirties but it was better than North expected. At least it had running water and the oven, though old, was clean enough, three battered aluminium pans nesting one in the other on the hob, their lids balanced precariously across the smallest. Best of all there was a battered yellow plastic kettle. Was instant coffee too much to hope for? He tugged open the overhead cupboard, the wood sticking, snarling against the carcass. Three rusty tins of jellied chicken, three basic range beans, two tins of branded soup which he was convinced they didn’t make any more and one small jar of grey coffee, a thin layer of white fur across it. He swallowed down his disgust as he scraped away the fur with a tin spoon. Maybe the coffee at the bottom would be OK? As imminent risks to his life went – it was down there.
It was the sudden thought of some remnant-twist of fresh coffee, that made him pull open the fridge door.
The old lady’s tiny body toppled to the floor with a thud, her sheepskin-slippered feet catching on the shelf, the woollen stockings long since set in frozen manacles around her skinny ankles, the frosted corpse of a Siamese cat clutched between her bony fingers. North leapt back, his body smashing against the cooker, rattling the aluminium pans, knocking the lids to the floor. He reached out to stop the pans following after. He didn’t want Fang in here.
He listened hard. His own racing heartbeat. The sound of her tapping, the occasional curse as she found her way through the corporate firewalls blocked.
Exhaled.
The old lady’s body lay on its side against the linoleum. Her sparse grey hair rimed with ice, the grey eyes staring out of a yellow and purple face. An elderly Serb, the one-eyed man had said. Keen to make reparations for her sins past. She owned the apartment. She probably owned the whole house. No husband. No children. No nosy neighbours. North couldn’t see a wound – the crimson bruise against the temple, the mark of a strangler’s grip, not even the neat entrance of a bullet. He hoped there was one. That whoever had killed her didn’t bundle her into the fridge, throw the cat in after, and leave her to die. He looked at the fingernails. They were black-tipped, the nails broken. The nails of a prisoner who had tried in vain to open a cell door, the nails of the dead and buried who woke in the coffin to scrabble against the lid and scream in the lonesome dark.
North breathed out once and in again. Hone needed discretion for this operation. You didn’t get more discreet than dead. He didn’t know when she was killed, but North had no doubt her corpse was left there as a reminder that it was safer to be on Hone’s team because bad things happened to those who weren’t. It wasn’t subtle. Stepping away from the body he eased open the grubby sashed window, leaning his hands on the sill, the fire escape zig-zagging down the side of the building, the noise of sirens and traffic and London filling the room. What had the old woman done? He’d probably never know. He glanced back at the twisted fingers – he doubted she was any sort of innocent. He had to hope she wasn’t.
Hone threatened everyone North loved. There weren’t many. But there were some. He attached no value to his own life – but he attached it to theirs, to Fang and to Jess, to the men and women he’d fought alongside. As he sat across from Hone in the North London greasy spoon, he believed the threats. If there was the slightest doubt then, there wasn’t any more. “You’re one of the good guys now.” He didn’t think so. “Play fair by us,” Hone instructed, “and we’ll play fair by you.” The old lady served a purpose – provided a safe space and a reminder. Fang and Nor
th were serving a purpose too. He hoped they wouldn’t end up the same way – with a prayer for the dying.
Leaving the window open, he moved back to the corpse. Gently, North went down on one knee to pick the old lady up in his arms. Whoever she’d been, whatever her crimes, her bones were fragile and her flesh clammy and cold, the cat’s front leg snapping as he pushed the two bodies back into the fridge, and closed the door on his dead landlady, his back against it.
Fang watched as he emerged from the kitchen, a steaming mug of the de-furred coffee in his hand. She had plaited her hair again into two stubby black ropes, and the machines around her hummed and buzzed as if they were talking to her. Had she heard the crash of the lids after all? He sipped the coffee as he walked – trying for casual, she was a kid, she didn’t need to know, and his gorge rose at the bitter taste of something old and dead and gone.
Fang’s attention switched back to the screens. She waved in the general direction of the chair she wanted him to draw closer to one of the terminals. Code covered the screen, a horizontal bar at its heart, a red cursor flashing in the corner. Numbers counting down in the bottom right hand corner. Thirty-two seconds, thirty-one.
“Did you ever kill anyone, North?” Her round black eyes behind their Joe 90 spectacles were fixed on the numbers rather than his face.
Was she scared of him? He was a stranger to her, and he was a killer. Fear was an understandable response.
“I was a soldier, Fangfang.”
She was certainly scared – he could read it in her now she was close. A fluttering. Shallow breaths and pale cold skin. And she was right to be scared. He was dangerous to know.
“When you weren’t a soldier?”
Twenty-two seconds.
Was it his imagination or had the numbers got bigger on the screen? What would happen when the countdown reached zero? She was supposed to be breaking and entering JP Armitage’s personal files. Why then was Fangfang sat on her hands – her legs swinging, her feet not touching the floor? If the Board realised what was happening they would wipe everything away and start again. Fang had to know that. Was she prepared to let the Board know the hack was under way?
Besides which, he couldn’t tell her how many people he had killed. There were too many. But he wouldn’t lie to her and claim to be an innocent.
The changing numbers were reflected and reversed in her glasses as she waited. Something was wrong. Because if she wasn’t cooperating, Fang wouldn’t rely on the Board to discover and block the hack. Teenage pride would never let that happen. If she had decided not to cooperate after all, she’d sabotage it herself – wipe everything away that they needed to break apart the Board. Destroy the only hope they had of beating the enemy.
She’d plant her own cyber bomb. Wait for the detonation, the fireball, the mushroom cloud to go up. That’s what the numbers were, he realised. A countdown. Fang was showing him what she was capable of.
This was an interrogation, because she was still deciding.
It was a question of trust.
Could she trust him? Because she needed answers and honesty.
Did he ever kill anyone?
Soon after Tarn recruited him, out of the Army, out of rehab, hanging from a leather strap on a crowded tube, when he wasn’t sure yet whether he could kill in cold blood, he’d watched another passenger tucked behind the partitioning glass – fifties, his coat laid neatly over his lap, respectable and dull.
There was nothing about him that drew the eye, yet North couldn’t look away. The physical sensation of imminent danger, as the commuter filled in the last few clues of a crossword, the Telegraph folded perfectly across and along. His busy eyes on the empty boxes, on the clues, avoiding the elderly, pregnant women, any mother with a child. Only allowing himself one lingering glance towards a blazered girl, standing down the carriage from him, her head bent over her phone. He was used to being unseen, North thought. Relied on his insignificance. When he’d looked away from the girl, North thought that he’d misjudged him.
The traveller put away the pen, and allowed his hand to slide beneath his coat.
Excitement. Mounting tension. Almost unbearable glee. The tube train rattling along the line. Carriage lights. Black tunnel walls. North could scarcely credit what he thought the commuter was feeling set against the impassive face. Was it the schoolgirl? Surely not?
Then he’d seen that the man’s unblinking gaze was transfixed by the child’s reflection. And North understood the traveller’s urge to do unspeakable violence. The blood-lust. The urgent need for everything he’d promised himself. The sweet flesh. Last breath. Dying light.
As the tube train drew into the station, the girl looked up from the phone and stood by the doors. They opened and she stepped out onto the platform as the commuter stood, tucked the crossword under his arm, his mac over his forearm, and followed.
The escalator. The ticket barrier. The exit. North kept back. Was he right or wrong? Would the man turn for home? Take a different route from the girl? She turned left, and so did he.
Outside, away from the blaze of the tube station’s lights, it was dark – winter. The girl’s headphones were on.
“A man was going to hurt a girl – not much older than you – maybe not that night, but soon – so I stopped him.”
Or did North kill an innocent commuter with a roving eye. He never knew, but he trusted his intuition because the alternative was to gamble with the girl’s life.
Thirteen seconds.
The puzzler was wearing his coat as he turned left again past the big houses – the girl’s kilted figure ahead of him, matching his pace to hers. He’d done it before, thought North. Would do it again. Waiting for the perfect moment. When the road tightened, North walked up behind him, put his arm around his throat and slid a knife between his ribs. “Seven down,” he whispered into the man’s ear, “Azrael.” The commuter never made a sound. The girl ahead kept walking.
Fang turned. “You don’t know that he’d have hurt her.”
Fang was used to a virtual world where computers provided the answers. In the real world you had to make your own mind up. Am I in love? Is there a God? Do I kill this man? There was no program for some things.
“Call it an instinct.”
And who knows maybe that night he murdered an innocent man who took the wrong route home? North lived in the chaos of never knowing, because he had no choice.
Seven seconds.
They even killed the cat. He heard Fang’s voice as loudly as if she’d spoken the words into his ear. Did Fang know what was in the fridge? Not what, he reminded himself – who.
“Would you do it again? To protect a girl you don’t really know.” They were strangers. He was a moron-person next to her.
But he was older. Bigger. Stronger. Altogether more dangerous.
And the child in front of him needed protection. Needed to know he was there for her.
That they were in this together. To find Peggy, or to punish those who’d hurt her.
Four seconds.
With a blaze of light the screen filled with numbers and symbols, bathing her round face in a white light. And he saw it. Saw her open the fridge door. Before he arrived.
Because her name was Fangfang and she opened doors.
She wasn’t staying for bitcoins and passports. She was staying because of her mother and grandmother. Because she had no choice in the matter. She was terrified of the one-eyed man, what he’d done, what he would do, and she was right to be. But his name was Michael North and she didn’t have to be scared of him. They were on the same side. Their own.
Would you do it again to protect a girl you didn’t really know? Three. Two.
“In a heartbeat,” he told her – his reward the briefest of blue-wired grins as she pressed the cursor and stopped her program detonating the only chance they had of taking apart the Board.
Zero.
He must have slept, JP’s dusty face filling his mind – the tycoon’s power and en
ergy extinguished, his body tumbling into darkness and dust. When he came to, he was slumped in the armchair, his eyes gritty and sore, Fangfang asleep at the desk across from him, her head resting on her crossed arms, behind a wall of diet coke cans she had built between her and the door. He nudged the oversized office chair to one side careful not to disturb the sleeping girl.
Deals, mergers, brokerage, philanthropic giving – Fang had found it all. Incomprehensible emails to financial chief officers and agents across the world to buy and sell, to shut down, break up, build up, and expand. Tentacles reaching over continents amassing fortune after fortune. Obscene wealth pulling everything towards it – eating up the universe. The odd philanthropic exception like the biomedical centre for academic studies he funded in Cambridge. Trying to assuage his guilt, thought North.
“These are JP Armitage’s personal files stored on the second home network he set up to access the office,” Fangfang’s voice was sludgy as she knuckled the eyeballs behind her spectacles till they squeaked. “Latest security, top-level encryption. Props to me.”
Her own skill appeared to hearten her and she sat up straighter in the chair. “They’ve erased him out of existence at home and in his office – locking him out as user, changing passwords, deleting files but this was still out there – different user, different passwords, access to the whole caboodle and set up to override everything.”
“He had another way in?”
She nodded. “A backdoor he used a lot and that’s gone. They’d have expected that. This one though, it’s more of a tiny attic window, he only used it once – I’m guessing to check he could, and he never used it again. I almost missed it myself.” Fangfang sounded resentful.
JP Armitage kept the way in as insurance. The good thing for North was that he was there to cash the policy even if Armitage wasn’t.
Fang stared at the computer screens, drawn back into the rows of figures and companies. “And all this?” Her bitten-down forefinger pointed at the pound signs, the dollars, the rows of endless noughts. “What do we do now we’ve found it?”
Killing State Page 33