by Andrew Lane
Natalie closed her eyes briefly. Parents were so stupid sometimes. She’d heard the story, like, sooo many times before. ‘Yeah, I know. They died in a car crash three years ago. I remember when it happened.’
‘Two.’ A brief spasm of pain crossed her mother’s face. ‘Two years ago.’
‘Right. Sorry.’
‘What I didn’t tell you is that Calum was in the car with them. He was fourteen – a year older than you were. He was . . . injured.’
Natalie had a sudden flash of horrible scarring, like from some gross horror film, and winced. She didn’t like ugly things.
Her mother must have caught her expression. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said drily. ‘He’s not a monster who has to hide away from all human contact. Looking at him, you can’t tell quite how serious the crash was. But when he moves . . .’ She paused. ‘Well, his spine was affected. There was nerve damage.’
‘He has a broken back?’
‘Not quite. It was never actually broken, but the damage to the nerves was so great that his legs are paralysed.’
Natalie thought for a moment. ‘Oh, right. He’s in a wheelchair. That’s OK.’
Her mother shook her head. ‘Actually, no. He’s got a wheelchair – a very good, very expensive one, but he doesn’t like to use it. He says it makes him feel like he’s not on a level with anyone else.’
Natalie tried to imagine what Calum Challenger did without a wheelchair. The only thought that came to mind was just too stupid for words, but she said it anyway. ‘So what does he do – crawl around the apartment or something?’
‘Not quite. It’s difficult to describe. Wait and see.’ She reached out and pressed a series of keys on a security pad by the door. Somewhere behind it, Natalie heard a buzz.
While she waited for something to happen, Natalie looked around. Behind her was a large lift – one of those you see in American movies looking like they are only half made, out of wire mesh and metal struts, with those strange wooden doors that split horizontally in the middle and open up and down on some kind of pulley system, rather than side to side. The lift had brought them directly up from the door that led off the street – and ‘street’, Natalie thought, was a polite way of describing the narrow cobbled alley where they had parked. The lobby area where they were now waiting was lined in unpainted brick that was so old the corners were rounded and bits of them were flaking off. This place probably dated back centuries.
Her eye was caught by a movement above the lift. For a moment, she thought it might be a rat, and she was prepared to utter a dramatic ‘Eugh!’ and demand that they left, like, right away, but she recognized it as a camera. A closed-circuit security camera. The movement had been the camera rotating so that it was pointed directly at her.
She turned her back on it, the way she turned her back on anything that didn’t fit into her ideal world.
A few moments later the door opened.
The boy standing in the doorway was not what she had expected. He was tall – taller than her, and she was taller than average – and his nose and jaw were so perfectly formed that his face looked like something from a Greek statue. His hair was collar length and unkempt, but in a ‘can’t be bothered’ way rather than a messy, ‘can’t look after myself’ way. His eyes were a piercing blue, and he was standing strangely, slumped against the door frame with his left arm out of sight, but what she could see of his torso made her think of an inverted triangle – immensely wide shoulders and thick arms, a chest that narrowed down to a thin waist and legs that were much narrower than his arms.
‘Professor Livingstone,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’
Natalie’s mother smiled. ‘Nice to see you too, Calum. I was in London for a conference, and I had some spare time, so I thought I’d come over and see how you are.’
Calum was nodding politely, but his eyes were scanning Natalie’s face. She could almost feel a spot of heat where his gaze touched, and she had to fight hard to maintain a steady, challenging stare back at him.’
‘You brought your personal assistant?’ Calum asked.
‘No, I brought my daughter. Calum Challenger, meet Natalie Livingstone.’
‘I suppose you’d better come in,’ he said. He turned round clumsily, and Natalie saw that the arm that was out of sight behind the door frame was actually reaching up above Calum’s head and holding on to a leather strap that had been screwed into the ceiling. As her eyes grew used to the dim light within the apartment, she saw that there were similar straps – like the ones she’d seen on buses, on the rare occasions she’d had to catch a bus – hanging in a regular pattern all the way across the room.
Just at the moment her mind worked out what they were for, and her lips formed an unplanned ‘You have to be kidding!’, Calum Challenger reached out with his right hand for another of the straps, and begin the process of swinging across the apartment, obviously expecting them to follow.
That, she thought as she watched him move away from them, would explain the arms and the shoulders. His upper-body strength must be amazing.
‘Freaked?’ her mother asked softly.
‘Getting there,’ she replied.
Exhausted, hot and sweating, Gecko swung in from the fire escape through the window into his flat.
It wasn’t the main window, of course. He kept that closed for security reasons – burglary was a common problem in south London. He swung in through the smaller window on the top – the one he kept open for ventilation. It was barely large enough for a cat to get through, let alone a burglar, but he knew that if he came down the fire escape fast enough, grabbed the right metal strut in the right place, swung round and launched himself feet-first at the small opening then he could pass right through, flip in the air and land on his feet in the centre of the living room. There were maybe fifteen people in London who could do that – eight of them were squatting in the three-storey house where he lived, and none of the others were burglars. Trespassers, yes; risk-takers, certainly; but not burglars.
It all went perfectly up until the point at which his feet were supposed to hit the wooden floor of his living room. His speed down the fire escape was perfectly judged; his hands gripped the strut in the right place and didn’t slip, and his body slid right through the open window like a letter through a letter box. His clothes didn’t even touch the window frame.
The problem was that someone had put a chair in the centre of the room.
He hit it and his legs crumpled beneath him just as the chair toppled over, pushed by the force of his arrival. He hit the floor, tucking into an automatic roll, but feeling something in his shoulder tear. With luck it was just a few muscle fibres, rather than a tendon.
He came out of the roll in a crouch, hands on the wooden boards and feet braced, ready to push himself away and run. There was nowhere to run. A man stood directly in front of him, legs braced, hands on his hips. Another man was standing by the door to the hall. The closed door.
Both men had crew-cut hair and faces that looked like they had taken some beatings in their time. One of them was black, the other white. They both wore black jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets and sunglasses, even though they were indoors.
‘Are you here to do the cable installation?’ Gecko asked. He could hear the pain and the tiredness in his voice, but he couldn’t help himself.’
The man in front of him smiled. ‘Eduardo Ortiz,’ he said. His voice had a foreign twang – Polish, perhaps. Maybe Russian.
‘My name is Gecko. I have never heard of this “Ortiz”.’
The smiling man in front of Gecko reached out his hand and took Gecko by the hair, pulling him upright. Gecko couldn’t help noticing, in the few moments before the hand vanished from his sight and the pain began, that his knuckles were scarred and his little finger ended halfway.
‘It wasn’t a question. You are Eduardo Ortiz, also known as Gecko. A gecko is an annoying little reptile that can run up walls, yes? I looked it up in a dictionary.’
>
‘No, really,’ Gecko said through clenched teeth, ‘I told you, I have never heard of him.’
The man twisted Gecko’s head left and right. Gecko’s scalp burned with the pain of the wrenched hair.
‘Apart from us and you, there is nobody here. If this isn’t your place, then what are you doing here?’
‘Burglary?’ Gecko ventured.
The man released Gecko’s hair, pushing him backwards at the same time. Gecko stumbled, but caught himself before he could fall over.
‘Funny you should mention burglary. We hear from friends of ours that you are very good at climbing walls and getting through small gaps.’ He gestured to the tiny window. ‘We would have asked for a demonstration, but we have seen the evidence ourselves. We want you to come and work for us. In a . . . private capacity.’
‘Installing cable?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not installing. Taking away. Money, jewellery, passports, iPods, mobile phones . . . anything you can carry.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘People out there take precautions if they think someone can get into their flats or houses. They lock their doors and windows, and they install alarm systems, but if they think it’s impossible then they don’t worry so much. But someone like you, who can get into impossible places . . . well, you would be quite an asset to us.’
‘And who is this “us”?’ Gecko asked.
The man shrugged. ‘We are new to this country. From Eastern Europe, you understand. It is . . . a land of opportunity. We, for instance, have the opportunity to make a lot of money. You have the opportunity to not get your arms and legs broken. Everyone is happy, apart from the people who lose their money and jewellery and mobile phones, but even they can claim on their insurance, so they are happy as well in the end.’
‘Can I . . . think about it?’ Gecko asked.
‘Do not think too hard. Thinking is a dangerous hobby. In Eastern Europe, we are fatalists. We believe that what happens is meant to happen. You are meant to work for us, committing burglaries. It is fate. Accept it.’ He moved towards the door. His silent companion stepped to one side and opened it. ‘We will return tomorrow for your answer, which will be “yes”, but we would rather you came to that conclusion of your own free will than be forced into it here by us.’ He stopped, and pointed a finger at Gecko’s face. Either by accident or design, the way he held his hand made it look like he was miming a gun. ‘Do not talk to the police. Do not talk to your friends. Do not talk to anyone about this. It is between ourselves, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Gecko said quietly, but he was talking to a closing door.
CHAPTER
two
Tara Flynn’s bedroom was like Tara Flynn herself – small, dark and chaotic. She sat on her bed, tablet computer propped up against a pillow on the duvet in front of her and a Bluetooth keyboard perched on her lap. Her long brown hair fell in front of her face like a curtain, shutting out the world.
A window popped up in the corner of the screen, accompanied by a soft chime. The words How’s it goin’? were highlighted within it.
Tara clicked on the window, and typed a response: No luck yet. She pressed
She went back to what she was doing: attempting to find a way inside the security firewalls of a big and remarkably secretive company who called themselves Nemor Incorporated, but about which it was incredibly difficult to find out anything. She’d only discovered their internet presence by following a link from an email that had been revealed on WikiLeaks. Nemor Incorporated didn’t seem to have an openly available, easily accessed website for those people that wanted information on what the company did, or wanted to apply for a job. It almost seemed like you needed to already know about the website in order to find it: you couldn’t just look up the company name on Google or Bing and link to it. In fact, when Tara had tried to do just that she’d got no hits on the name, which almost made her think that Nemor Incorporated was actually paying the big search-engine providers to keep their name out of searches.
Another soft chime alerted her to a response – one that her app quickly decrypted before displaying it. Tara and her friends never communicated using unencrypted messages. Stuff that moved across the internet could be easily captured and read by anyone. That was how Tara and her friends got most of their information in the first place.
Nemor’s some kind of big fish in commerce, that’s for sure, the message read. Their name crops up in emails from defence contractors, the US government, large tech companies – all kinds of places, some quite nasty. They’re into something big. What are the chances you can get in?
Tara snorted. Chances are 100%, moron, she typed, and sent the message.
While she waited for a response, she brought up the Nemor Incorporated website in her browser. There were some generic pictures of bright young people with neat smiles, neat haircuts and neat suits that looked like they’d been provided by an advertising company, and some close-ups of generic scientific stuff like silicon chips and chemistry-lab equipment that looked like they’d been ripped off from somewhere else on the internet – nothing which actually said what it was that the company did. There was a short paragraph that said absolutely nothing in 200 words, and a line of text that said: ‘If you have a Nemor Inc. user ID and password, please log in now. If you wish to contact Nemor Inc., please use the contact email address below.’ Two empty text boxes let people type in user IDs and passwords, if they had them. Below that was a hyperlinked email address.
Tara pinged the email address using one of her own apps, but the response came straight back: – Error – this email address is invalid.
Interesting. They didn’t seem to want – or maybe expect – any incoming emails from members of the public. That kind of industrial secrecy made Tara and the other people in her group very suspicious.
She set another app working on the user ID and password boxes, cycling through millions of permutations of names and words picked randomly from the dictionary on the faint chance that some combination might accidentally be correct, but she wasn’t holding out much hope. To get past this kind of authentication system you usually needed to know something about one of the employees – a name that you could use as a basis for generating a system username, and some personal information that would help identify a password, like their date of birth, or their partner’s date of birth, or a favourite hobby or something. Here, she had nothing. Even the WikiLeaks references weren’t specific enough.
Frustrated, she called up the HTML code underlying the website and glanced through it. The code was concise, neatly written and well documented. But there was something odd about it.
She looked closer. There was a hotspot on the site – a button that could be clicked, which led to a different site, but the button was the same colour as the background website colour, so it was effectively invisible. You had to know it was there if you wanted to click on it – just like you had to know that there was a company called Nemor Incorporated if you wanted to find their website in the first place.
Another soft chime, and a new message popped up in a window. You want to hand it across to someone else to work on?
No! she typed back. She knew that the loose affiliation of activists, anarchists and hackers that she hung out with – electronically, at least – had a whole load of computer experts who were more experienced than she was, but she felt like this was her baby. Investigating Nemor Incorporated had been entrusted to her, and she wanted to prove that she could do it, break their security. If they were part of the military/industrial/financial complex that effectively controlled the entire world through puppet governments and complicated financial transactions, then she wanted to do her bit to shut them down. If politics and democracy couldn’t clean up the world, then it was time for the activists to have a go.
Now that she knew where on the website it was, she clicked on the hidden button. Her browser screen cleared, and the Nemor
Incorporated front page wiped away to be replaced with a different screen. This one was much more impressive, and much more informative. Beneath a company logo that looked weirdly like a unicorn caught in the crosshairs of a telescopic rifle there were hyperlinks to other pages that appeared to be site maps, lists of company locations, lists of departments, subsidiary companies . . . all kinds of things. It was going to take her a while to filter the information.
Another chime, and a message window opened up. She glanced at it quickly, ready to put her friends off so she could work her way through the website she’d discovered.
Miss Tara Flynn, the message started, you have found our hidden website. Congratulations. We need to talk to you.
What the . . . ? She glanced around her bedroom automatically, suddenly suspicious that someone was watching her, but the door was closed and she was alone.
Who is this? she typed back after a few minutes of indecision.
The answer flashed back almost instantly. This is Nemor Incorporated, Security Division.
How did you track me? she typed, heart hammering in her chest. Nobody had ever managed to penetrate her own computer firewalls before. She’d thought she was impregnable.
Child’s play, came the response. Not even worth the time to explain. Let us get to the point – you are committing industrial espionage. You have two choices – face legal consequences, or agree to do something for us. We could use your particular skills.
Tara took a deep breath. This was scary. If they knew who she was then they would know where she was, and that could lead to all kinds of unfortunate consequences.
She glanced again at her bedroom door. Somewhere out there, in the halls of residence, her college friends were drinking, dancing, talking and otherwise having fun. And in here she seemed to have awakened a serpent.