“He’s looking this way!” Harry exclaims. “Oh yeah, he’s well cute, love guys in glasses! Cor, I could do some damage to that. Is he with you?”
Damn shit bollocks! She knew it was stupid having him out there, she knew it. Greg, you idiot! I’m never listening to you again!
Greg: “Er, you’d better tell him you’ve never seen me before or something, Jo, otherwise – ”
“Yes he is,” says Joanna. “That’s my chauffeur.”
Greg: “Oh – right, good idea! Let me get the hat on!”
Harry’s pursing his lips. “S’pose he’s not on my bus though, right? All the best geezers are straight.”
“Who, James? Oh, he’s gay all right.” Joanna raises her eyebrows suggestively at Harry. “He’s been single for ages, too.”
Greg: “What? Why’d you say... oh, you little...!”
“Want me to put a good word in?”
Harry breaks into a savage grin. “It’s not a word I want to put in – ”
“He’s not your chauffeur really, is he?” says Nick, taking a seat on the sofa beside his still-glaring wife. “He’s your bodyguard.”
“Bodyguard?” Harry looks out of the window again. “Hot!”
“I looked up Global Investigations,” Nick continues in a conversational way. “You’re the biggest detective agency in the country. So I doubt any of you go anywhere without backup, and a speedy getaway. That’s what the guy outside is for, right? And I imagine he’s monitoring everything remotely through your Vades™ and recording us right now.”
Larissa folds her arms tighter, narrows her eyes further.
“Cool!” Harry ambles over from the window towards Joanna. He juts out his muscled chest and pulls what’s meant to be a sexy smile right in front of her – not that it’s for her benefit. “All right, James mate? You picking me up okay? If you like to watch, that’s fine by me!”
Greg: “Oh God. Thanks a lot, Jo!”
Joanna slides the Vades™ off her face. Slowly and deliberately, she touches the power button and folds them away into her handbag. “Just a friendly chat, Mr Brady, nothing more.” She offers Harry an apologetic shrug, which he seems to accept.
“All right. Have a seat. And please, call me Nick.”
Joanna makes herself comfortable in one of the matching leather armchairs, placing her handbag beside the smoked glass coffee table in front of her. For a second it feels odd, not to have her auto’s display overlaid on whatever she sees, not to be connected to anything.
She coughs softly into her palm, once. A question.
Greg: “Receiving you loud and clear. Looks like you were right!”
She suppresses the urge to smile as she hears Greg’s voice. The receiver is concealed, virtually invisible unless you’re shining a bright light inside her left ear and poking around with a cotton bud.
He can still hear her, too. Amongst all the normal microbiosensors inside her blouse and trousers, monitoring her health, are half a dozen wireless audio pickups transmitting everything she hears back to Greg. Good old-fashioned radio technology, that doesn’t need 5G or any other kind of wi-fi. This is Global Investigations fieldwork protocol: always have an obvious method of staying in touch, plus a concealed method too. Nick’s guess is spot on. They never go anywhere without backup.
“Just before we start, I take it you’re happy for us to talk like this?” She makes a vague gesture, managing to take in both Larissa and Harry without pointing at them. “You don’t want to speak privately?”
He shakes his head. “It’s fine. They were involved with... what you’re here for. You can trust them.”
Greg: “Might not be so quick to trust your wife if you knew what we know.”
True. Maybe that’s why Larissa is eyeballing Joanna as if she wants to pick her up and throw her through the window.
“Yeah, no worries, me and Nick are old mates from way back,” says Harry cheerfully. “So my lips are sealed for once. Normally I like ‘em wide open, know what I mean?”
It crosses Joanna’s mind to wonder why Harry Buonsanto is acting like an East End cockney, despite clearly not being one... and then she remembers the tags outside Amy Pearce’s home. The abuse her Spanish boyfriend has suffered. She can’t imagine anyone calling Harry a ‘cont’, despite his Italian background. He just sounds too British. A working class down-to-earth lad, nice one mate, sorted, know what I mean? Obviously he’s a lot smarter than he seems. He’s dodged those tags that made Juan-Miguel’s life such hell.
Nick and Larissa face her like she’s at a job interview, with Harry still lounging around near the window and checking out her boyfriend over the road. Joanna decides the best thing to do is keep talking.
So she does. She re-establishes that she works for Global Investigations (UK) Ltd as an investigations analyst. She tells them that she’s looking into unusual auto behaviour, trying to find a pattern that might lead to the source of the blackware coming into the country. If she can –
“Blackware?” Nick interrupts with a twitch.
“Yes, illegal software, designed for criminal activity. Usually very sophisticated. False timelines, sim-room cloners, artificial profiles...”
It’s Larissa’s turn to twitch, at that last example. Joanna suspected she might.
Nick shifts his weight. “I thought... I thought you were just here because of our autos acting oddly.”
“I am. The one is going to lead me to the other.”
Joanna can’t help but notice that both Nick and Larissa are growing tenser and tenser, like someone is tightening the keys in their backs.
According to her research, she goes on, it seems that several people coincidentally experienced a total failure of their auto’s privacy settings at exactly the same time, on the evening of Saturday 28 May. She has tried to talk to some of them but been ignored.
“Understandable, really,” she smiles. “They must be so embarrassed to have their private lives made public that they’d rather not talk about it. Nobody wants a scandal, do they! But these people all suffered multiple privacy settings failures – ”
“Which people are we talking about, exactly?” Nick asks politely, but his expression is fixed. Like he’s challenging her.
Greg: “Leo Travis... Eleanor Ranklin... Fionnula O’Brannigan...”
“...Mr and Mrs Dongming... Drake Jackson,” she says aloud as Greg supplies each name. “I believe they’re all familiar to you?”
Nick licks his lips. Larissa presses hers tighter. Joanna decides there’s nothing else to do but plough on.
“Coincidentally, it seems that all of these people were in the same place on the evening of Saturday 28 May. Attending your tenth anniversary party. Here in this house.”
The air clogs with silence.
Greg: “Keep going!”
“Coincidentally again... almost half of the guests who attended your party have brief gaps in their public timelines, all around the same time. The sort of gap that can only really be caused by their autos being completely shut down.”
She locks eyes with Nick, whose face is unmoving but – she can tell – is breathing rapidly, his barrel chest rising and falling.
“And even more coincidentally... the internet service provider TransDigital Incorporated suffered a power failure at its Enfield data centre that night. That’s the same place where you work as a senior on-site supervisor, is that right?”
The thick silence in the room hems her in, like a fog of guilt.
“I contacted TransDigital about this, and they said there was scheduled maintenance downtime that evening for the swapping-out of servers, which unfortunately took longer than intended and resulted in temporary loss of online services to their customers. As senior on-site supervisor, I’m surprised you weren’t involved in that maintenance, Mr Brady?”
Nick opens his mouth slightly, then closes it again. He can’t meet her eyes any more.
Behind her, Harry mutters what sounds like “Shit the bed.”
r /> Joanna decides it’s cards on the table time. “Here’s what I think, Mr Brady. I think something happened at TransDigital to affect the autos of everyone at your party. I think they are hushing the whole thing up. And I think you somehow shut down the entire data centre remotely, to stop whatever it was happening. Even though as far as I can tell, you don’t have the authority to do that.”
Joanna decides now’s the time for a disarming smile. She leans forwards conspiratorially. “So, just between us... want to tell me how you managed that little trick?”
Then she jumps back as Larissa’s hand snakes out and slams something onto the coffee table with a loud CRACK!
“There yuh go!” she shouts. “You already know, ent? This what you’re after all along, might as well have the friggin’ t’ing!”
Joanna stares down at a small, chrome memory stick on the coffee table, surrounded by a spiderweb of fractured glass.
Greg: “Shit! What was that? Jo, your heart rate’s in the red!”
Too right it is. Joanna struggles to find her voice. “Look, uh, Mrs Brady, I’ve only come to – ”
“You farse an’ out’a place here!” Larissa’s face is dark and furious. “Waltz in my house wit your bol’ face, wit your ol’ talk, like we don’ know what you after! Damn maco!”
Greg: “Um, my auto’s translating that as... you’re meddling in other people’s business... you’re pushy, demanding, using clever banter... you’re a damn spy...”
Joanna bites back a command for Greg to shut up, knowing it will sound like she’s saying it to Larissa. Nick is trying to calm her down, but she throws off his huge arm like she’s got the strength of five women. “No, she vex me now! Come here trow out takka to reel us in, but you doh skylark me, eh-eh! I pull you square on ye azz!”
Greg: “You’ve irritated her now… thrown out bait... but can’t play the fool... um, something about your bottom...”
“Just listen to me for one minute,” says Joanna firmly, annoyed now.
“Oh? You wan’ me skin up yo pretteh face, nah? Watch yuhself!”
Greg: “Okay, that’s enough of that. Jo, say this to her...”
Joanna listens to him for a moment, then thrusts her own face forwards and yells “Hol’ strain! Don’ stick break in your ears!”
Larissa’s whole face pops like a woman having a bucket of ice water thrown at her.
Shocked silence. Wow. It worked.
“I’m not here for this.” Joanna points to the memory stick on the cracked table. “We’ve confiscated plenty of those already. We don’t need any more.”
Nick finally manages to ease his wife back onto the sofa, one arm around her. “So you... you know what that is, then?”
“It’s a K8 program,” says Joanna, feeling back in control. “It creates an entirely fake auto profile. It’s probably the rarest piece of blackware in this country, so I’m guessing you picked it up in... Trinidad?”
Larissa nods reluctantly. There’s fear on her face now, alongside the anger. No wonder – she must think she’s on the verge of being arrested. Possession of blackware gets you a minimum three year prison sentence.
Joanna had already worked out that Nick’s wife used a K8 program to fool some members of her family in Trinidad. According to their online chatter, they still think Larissa has a completely different husband, and a child as well! She had been unsure whether to tell Nick or not, that his wife was involved in highly illegal activity. But now it’s obvious he knows all about it.
“Listen... Ms O’Donnell... I understand your agency is hunting down blackware, and I know what Larissa did violates the IIR, but there’s much bigger criminal activity going on here. That’s why I agreed to talk to you.”
Flutter of excitement in her belly. “Go on.”
“What you said about TransDigital, and the shutdown... it’s true. I know they were responsible for all the privacy setting problems. I also know Amit – my boss – is covering it all up. He’s made sure nothing can be tracked back to him, but he’s the cause of the whole thing. Well.” Nick pulls a rueful face. “Him and me.”
Larissa turns to her husband, lays a hand on the side of his face. “Mooksie. You don’ need to...”
“It’s all right, love.” He takes her hand, looks Joanna in the eye. “I can provide you with all the evidence you need, if you ignore my wife’s crimes. Deal?”
Joanna can hear Harry drawing a big dramatic breath behind her, like he’s watching a telenovella and this is the cliffhanger ending.
She reaches out to touch the memory stick on the table. Touches it, and pushes it gently back towards Larissa.
“What crimes are these, then?”
Harry exhales like a force ten gale.
Larissa explodes again – but this time with laughter. Really, really infectious laughter that has Joanna wanting to laugh too and, yes, there goes Greg, giggling in her left ear.
“Dis ain’t a police t’ing! Dis ain’t even a proper investigation you running. Is just you being nosey! You just as dodgy as we are, missy! Yes?”
Joanna considers – then nods. “Ever thought of becoming a detective?” she asks, causing Larissa to boom with more laughter.
Nick visibly relaxes. “So you’re not here on police business?”
“I’m not even here on Global Investigations business. This is my personal project.”
“Woah!” exclaims Harry. “Rogue spies! Awesome!”
Nick’s smile is almost as broad as his shoulders. It takes years off him. “Awesome’s the word!”
Greg: “It is pretty awesome actually, when you put it like that… you’re a rogue agent, Jo!”
Joanna wants to tut, sigh, roll her eyes and shake her head all at once. Boys!
Before long, Nick is explaining everything, with the air of a man who has been waiting to get something off his chest for months:
“Back in May, Amit – Amit Chudasama, he’s site manager where I work – came to me and asked me to run tests on a new auto server. Apparently it came from some new company called Integrated Vision Systems Ltd. He told me not to discuss it with other staff, he wanted the tests to be off the record. At the time he said this was because this new server could host any kind of auto, which meant we could replace all the specific Microsoft or Google servers with these new ones, and save a lot of money. Obviously that would be controversial so I had to keep it secret – ”
“This server,” says Joanna, unable to hold back any longer. “BBX4001?”
Nick blinks in surprise. “How the hell did you know that?”
Greg: “WOO-HOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
“Ow! Ah, I’ll explain in a minute, carry on.”
Joanna listens to Greg performing what sounds like a kind of tribal victory dance. She forces herself to sit still, even though she too wants to jump around with joy. She was right, this is another BBX lead. They’re back on the right track!
Nick continues, sharing his story with her. How he set up the BBX4001 server on TransDigital’s network, but kept it secret from his colleagues. He ran tests for weeks, using his own auto as a guinea pig. When he started getting suspicious of Larissa (she hugs him at this point, looking ashamed), he migrated her auto onto it, which is where he found her K8 program. And then the autos of everyone they invited to their anniversary party started migrating onto the server too, through the open port. Like they were mirroring their owners, becoming guests in Nick and Larissa’s new home.
It didn’t take long for Nick to work out that somehow, the BBX4001 server was causing errors in the privacy settings for each auto. They started sharing things which were never intended to be shared. Which is how Larissa found out about Nick’s secret obsession with playing old-school computer games.
And Nick found out about Larissa faking a Trinidadian husband and son.
And every single party guest found out far too much about each other.
Joanna listens intently as Nick explains how he managed to put a stop to it. Only Amit Chudasama had th
e authority to force a total power shutdown of the Enfield data centre. So Nick used Larissa’s K8 program to pretend to be Amit! His fake profile worked so well it fooled the network into thinking he was the real Amit, allowing him to switch off the power. Which is why so many of the party guests have gaps in their timelines.
“Genius,” Joanna tells Nick, getting a surprised smile in return. “Seriously, Mr Brady, that is very impressive work. You did the right thing. That could have been catastrophic if it spread.”
“It was catastrophic, y’nah?” Larissa says. “So many people’s lives got mash-up.”
“S’true,” chips in Harry. “A lot of us got seriously screwed. It was embarrassing, you know? Degradin’, actually. We were all... mortificato.”
Nick nods sombrely. “Harry lost a boyfriend because of this. Our friends Leo and Diane are going through a divorce now... Quon’s in prison for drug dealing... Drake’s still in rehab... Larissa’s friend Eleanor even emigrated to Australia.”
“Nobody saw it coming.” Harry shrugs. “You wouldn’t, would you? If you can’t trust your own auto, what can you trust?”
There’s a quiet moment when they digest that. All of them, Joanna can tell, feeling the same queasiness.
Greg: “Jo, the company search results just came back. Surprise surprise, Integrated Vision Systems Ltd doesn’t exist anywhere. Just as fake as the other one.”
Joanna can’t stop a heavy sigh from escaping. Another lead blocked. Almost talking to herself, she says “It’s a shame you shut down the BBX server. I’d have loved to get my hands on it.”
Nick gestures with his thumb. “It’s under the stairs, if you want a look.”
There’s another quiet moment, but this time it’s because Joanna is shocked rigid.
Greg: “What did he just say?!”
Two minutes later, all four of them are standing in the hallway as Nick opens the triangular door underneath the staircase. The small cupboard is stacked with boxes, tins of paint, piles of paperbacks and all the other assorted bits and pieces everyone stuffs into cubbyholes like this. Nick reaches in and pulls things aside so Joanna can see... a flat metal box, encased within a plastic frame about 30cm square and half that in height. There are sockets and panels along the front. No power cable, no network lead, no UHD connectors. It’s just sitting there by itself.
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