“Yeah.” Del was uncharacteristically repressed. “I didn’t sign up for guns, man.”
“Neither did I,” Imp pointed out, but nobody was listening to him.
“We should ditch this job,” Doc proposed. “You can’t make movies if you’re dead, can you? Remember rule number one? Don’t die. If you break rule one, you automatically lose at everything. Don’t do it, Jeremy, it’s not worth it.”
Imp sighed. “Yeah, I guess.” He took another mouthful of regrettable beer. “Um. This.” He brandished the letter they’d found in the deposit box. “It’s probably worth something to Eve anyway, so I should maybe go and haggle with her. See if she’ll pay extra for it. But you’re right, this shit isn’t worth what she’s paying us.”
Del’s sharp-eyed gaze tracked to the letter. “So what’s it say?”
“Bear with me…” Imp smoothed the crumpled paper out. “It’s pretty much what I was expecting: an invitation to submit bids for a map leading to the location of a lost manuscript. There’s some crap about a Darknet marketplace—”
“Let me see that.” Game Boy grabbed at it and the paper somehow slid through Imp’s fingers. “Huh. Good luck tracing this, it’s almost definitely offshore. Bids with a deposit paid in US dollars to a numbered bank account in the Cayman Islands, to be held in crow—no, escrow, whatever the fuck that is—”
“It means the bank holds the money and releases it to the—”
“Enough already.” Imp flapped his beer-unencumbered hand: “I hear you. We don’t like the guns, we can’t go any further without spending a metric fuckton of money that we don’t have, so we’re out of the game, yes? Are we all agreed? So all that remains is for me to sell this to Eve for as much extra dosh as I can guilt-trip out of her. Yes?”
“Yes!” Game Boy shouted at him excitedly.
“Great.” Imp necked the rest of his can, then chucked it atop the overflowing pile in the far corner of the room. “I’m going out. Give me that,” he added, taking the letter back from Game Boy. “Don’t wait up.”
* * *
Eve was not happy to be summoned by her brother. She was even less pleased by his choice of meeting place, even though it was within easy walking distance. “You did not bring me here for the coffee,” she hissed. “It’s terrible!”
“It’s Costa.” Imp shrugged. “Would you prefer Starbucks?”
Eve’s gaze flickered briefly to the Gammon she was test-driving today. He stood close to the entrance, furtively sipping the spiced vanilla chai latte she’d inflicted on him, as if he was scared it would cost him his man card. (He’ll never do, she decided, what if an assassin ambushes me in the fitting rooms at Dolci Follie?) “You did this to punish me for something,” she guessed, projecting wildly.
“Busted.” Imp smiled crookedly. Today he wore his normal art-student-gone-to-seed costume: a beautifully tailored wool coat that featured oil stains and a Frankensteinian line of stitches across the shoulders, paint-spattered jeans, and a once-smart dress shirt.
“So what is it?” she demanded. “Did you get the book?”
“Nope.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a creased envelope which he placed in front of her, oblivious to the Gammon frantically scrambling for his concealed pistol. “This is the bid letter you wanted me to retrieve. They want funds to be placed in escrow. I can’t proceed any further.”
Eve smiled. “Leave it to me.” Behind Imp, the Gammon began to relax.
“No, I don’t think you understand. I can’t proceed any further.” Imp glowered at her. “We were made, Eve, we nearly got caught! A bunch of thugs with guns hit the bank while we were in the back, they were clearly after the same thing, and there was an undercover cop waiting to arrest us. Explosions! Machine guns! Car chases! Not my cup of orange pekoe at all.” He gesticulated dramatically, nearly spilling his espresso.
It all sounded a bit overblown to Eve. “Are you exaggerating?” she asked, raising one perfectly threaded eyebrow at him.
“Am I—” He recoiled indignantly, the picture of aggrieved innocence.
“It’s just that you have a history of, shall we say, creative confabulation. Remember the hijacking incident?”
“I was eight.”
“You cleared out an entire airport terminal! And you kept doing it. There was that time when we went to the zoo and you gave lollipops made from energy drinks to the chimpanzees—”
“It was hot! I didn’t like to see them suffer. And I was drunk.” He crossed his arms defensively. “Right now I’m sober. The bank was full of lunatics with assault rifles, sis. I don’t like it when bad men point big guns at me,” he said plaintively. “I should have listened to—”
“Wait.” She laid a slim, cold hand on his wrist. “It’s going to be all right. Just give me a second to process this.”
Eve picked up the letter and read it carefully. “This looks … useful, yes. I can deal with the money side of things, you don’t need to worry about it.” She reached into her handbag and pulled out her phone, photographed the letter, and emailed it to her duty assistant, along with brief instructions. “Bear with me.” If her kid brother was not exaggerating for effect, then there was indeed an adversary at work, which meant she needed to get a handle on the book fast. The BBC news app had a story about—her eyes widened before she managed to freeze her face. A hot, shivery feeling rippled up her back, prickling sweat springing out under her blouse. Three dead in bank bloodbath. “Okay, I can see why you might be a little upset.”
“Upset—”
Eve flashed him a sympathetic smile. “If I had any idea this was going to happen I wouldn’t have sent you,” she said, putting every microgram of sincerity she could muster into her reassurance. “But it’s done now. I was going to authorize 20K for getting hold of this note, but in view of unforeseen circumstances I’m going to double that. Forty thousand pounds, okay? Where do you want me to send it?”
“We agreed eighty thousand.”
“Eighty thousand for the entire job—for getting the book. This was just the first step, but, fair do’s, it turns out it was a pretty big step: bigger than I expected.” Eve allowed her cut-glass diction to slip back into the more relaxed dialect of their shared childhood, feeling a hateful pride in her ability to manipulate Jeremy so easily despite the passage of time. Nevertheless, a pang of conscience stabbed at her for endangering him. “Forty thousand puts you not too far off your funding goal, doesn’t it? If you want to dump me and bail on the job, I’m not stopping you.”
Imp shook his head. “Look, it’s not just me, sis. I’ve got to think about my homies. They’re really upset. If it was just me, and if you could take care of the troublesome details—” he brushed imaginary lint from his sleeve—“I could see my way to helping you out. But we’ve got a thief-taker on our tail now, know what I mean? We work as a team. I can’t do this job on my own, and they’re going to flat-out refuse if there are guns involved. Or thief-takers. Have you ever seen a public hanging? I mean for real, not on TV?”
“Good point.” Eve chewed her lower lip pensively, quite forgetting her demeanor. “But I think the thief-taker may turn out to be good news. If it was real cops we might have a problem, but thief-takers—it should be easy enough to pay them off. They’re all private sector contractors. Did you get a name? As for the gunmen—leave them to me.” A thought struck her and she tittered quietly, then stopped when she saw her brother’s expression. “What?”
“You scare me when you laugh like that.”
She smiled. “I just thought, my boss owns a couple of private security companies. After I buy out the thief-taker who’s looking for you, I can have them sort out you and your friends’ criminal background checks and actually hire you—on payroll, as thief-takers in your own right—to hunt down the gang of transhumans that hit Hamleys toy shop. Wouldn’t that be priceless?”
Imp’s face was such a picture that she couldn’t hold back another giggle.
“You don’t ha
ve to do that,” she told him when she regained control, “but the best way to short-circuit an investigation is to take it over and investigate yourself, don’t you think? Anyway, I’ll deal with the thief-taker. Then I’ll bid on the treasure map. Meanwhile, I want you to sell your playmates on the idea that they’re going to get paid extra and nobody is going to shoot at them—I’ll provide security if there’s even the slightest whiff of trouble. Will you do that for your sister? Special favor, Jerm? Pretty please?”
“Stop batting your eyelashes at me, it’s not even remotely convincing … And yes, dammit, I’ll try, seeing it’s you who’s asking. I’m not promising anything, though. Right now they’re feeling burned.”
* * *
School was out but, as Wendy was learning, being Head Prefect in ABLE ARCHER class gave her special privileges—like being able to raid the classroom supplies cupboard for her own projects.
Under the watchful eyes of the New Management coalition, the previous government’s bonfire of red tape had been replaced by a blast furnace, principally fueled by any regulations that got in the way of big money doing whatever the hell it pleased. Loopholes in gun control laws for licensed security guards were the least of it. Data protection and privacy regulations had gone the same way as planning permission and habeas corpus, and HiveCo Security could tap into all sorts of interesting databases … such as the ANPR system used to levy a congestion charge on traffic entering the controlled zone around London, the Highways Agency traffic cameras monitoring major junctions, and even some weird-ass camera network called SCORPION STARE that seemed to have nodes everywhere. Shodan said it ran on IP addresses owned by the Ministry of Defense, but that was obvious bullshit. I ought to get a poster for the office wall, she mused: Judge Dredd: I am the Law.
Speaking of Shodan, HiveCo had a horrifyingly expensive corporate account on the internet-of-things search engine, and once Wendy discovered it, she was fascinated. Baby monitors, color-cycling light bulbs, shop CCTV systems, HD television sets with unpatched operating systems and unchanged administrator passwords: they were all there, leaking secrets incontinently on the public internet if you knew where to point your web browser. The HiveCo corporate feed could search by geographical location, and there was a plugin for Google Maps. Wendy could drill into London using Street View, ask for unsecured cameras in the neighborhood she was investigating, then window-peep to her heart’s content.
It was probably still illegal, but who was going to call her on it in this time of 40 percent cuts to local government—and policing—budgets? If a free and frank exchange of ballistic projectiles in a bank robbery/bloodbath wasn’t enough to get her a charge sheet, then she was unlikely to catch any shit for snooping on smart toilets.
Wendy wrote up her report in a blazing hurry then hung around her cubicle for a long time, snooping on camera feeds. Eventually she found a view of the back of her own head, disappearing down an alleyway (the view inconveniently barricaded by a row of overflowing bins). She picked up the trail in the high street, where a black Porsche SUV glided along in monochrome silence, pursued by an angry woman on roller-blades. She glimpsed herself weaving in and out of oblivious pedestrians, jumping into the street to avoid a pram, leaping back onto the pavement to dodge a delivery van. The SUV turned right across traffic to dodge down a street running past a park. Right on cue, the woman on skates dismounted, stumbling to a panting halt on the pavement as the order to break off pursuit reached her.
Wendy skipped from camera to camera, swearing whenever she hit a blank spot or a gap in the record—too many systems still only recorded in low-def, or even spooled to tape—but she kept following the getaway car as it cruised past Kensington Park and slowed. She froze a frame in which a door swung open, scrubbed forward a couple of seconds and counted fewer indistinct heads, then backed up.
There. Him. She spotted the teenager in the hoodie crossing the road behind the SUV, heading into the park. She bookmarked and carefully saved the stream, then moved on. No more flung-open door footage, but one fewer head: the flare of a coat, a familiar figure glimpsed from behind, walking along the pavement behind the car. She followed him to a zebra crossing, then a footpath. London’s parks were heavily instrumented, a legacy of IRA bombing campaigns during the early 1990s. The municipal cameras were crap but they let her track Not-Bernard-Harris and Kid-in-Hoodie halfway across the park, in the direction of the mews behind Kensington Palace. Then she hit a blind spot. There was a dead zone where none of the cameras were working and nobody had fixed them because it was all outsourced these days, including monitoring the outsourcing agency’s performance and deliverables, so why bother when you can spend your maintenance budget on comfy office chairs and a C-suite pay raise? Or maybe there was something more sinister than everyday corruption and negligence at work. Hmm.
Fuming, Wendy dropped a bunch of pins around the target area on the street map. Then she went back to tracking the cute getaway woman with the dreads and the infuriatingly insouciant attitude as she drove away from the park. Just a kilometer further away she parallel-parked the Cayenne neatly, then got out and walked a hundred meters and entered a tube station. Which would have been great for further surveillance if only the cameras in the lobby of that particular station had been working, but somehow Getaway Girl managed to vanish inside during a very precise six-minute interval when there was no monitoring because the computer that controlled the station’s cameras was installing a Windows update and rebooting.
It was almost as if her target had known.
Wendy pushed her chair back from the desk and stretched to ease the crick in her neck. She blinked furiously, eyes watering from a couple of hours staring at a too-cheap monitor, and checked the time on her phone: it was nearly half past six. At least she had tomorrow off work, thanks to Gibson not being a total tool after she’d nearly gotten her ass shot off. She’d go home and cook herself dinner, maybe catch up on the washing, and have an early night. Then tomorrow she’d go for a walk in the park and see what she could find.
* * *
Back in her subterranean den Eve allowed herself a private Two Minute Hate—at Chez Bigge, one screamed silently in the privacy of one’s own head if one knew what was good for one: all the walls had ears, not to mention eyes and speech stress analyzers—then, with every outward appearance of calm, she placed the bid letter on her desk and tried to stare it into submission. When that failed she busied herself with make-work, directing one of the less unreliable members of her staff to identify the thief-taker at the bank—best to buy off the pursuit, as long as they were clueless about the manuscript. But finally she ran out of delaying tactics. So she took a deep breath, moistened her lips, adjusted her telephone headset, and made the unavoidable call.
Rupert answered the phone unusually quickly. “Yes?” He sounded irritable.
“My Lord.” He liked My Lord as a title, almost as much as he liked Master or Boss. “It’s about the rare manuscript. The acquisition is still in progress, but I’ve encountered some pushback, and I need clarification on how to proceed. Is this a convenient time?”
“Not terribly, no.” Rupert sounded distracted. “Don’t stop, get on with it,” she heard him tell someone else. “Ah, good.” A shuddering gasp. “Talk to me, Eve.”
Oh God, he’s with a rent boy again, she realized, or maybe a call girl, or—Rupert spread his affections widely, and wasn’t terribly happy to be interrupted in the act—“Yes, My Lord,” she said, re-centering herself. “A rival firm is bidding high and there’s already a body count—they tried to preempt with extreme prejudice. They smell of siloviki to me, but it might be a double-blind. Anyway, I’ve acquired the tender but I think it’s time-critical and I’d like your permission to throw money at the problem.”
“Yes, I already heard about it from Dmitry in Smyrna; it makes sense that there would be competition from that direction. Ahh, ahh—yes, how much money?” He sounded slightly breathless. “Keep going,” he added.
“
Twenty-five million should get their attention: Permission to escalate if it doesn’t? Of course we’ll repossess most of that when we terminate the acquisition process,” she added; “I’ll put Andrei on it.”
“Yes yes, that’s great, do it, do it—I’m talking to you, Eve, not you there. I mean here. By the way, Eve, what are you wearing?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m in my purple leather bodysuit,” she began, “and the thigh-high boots you bought me in Cannes.” She extemporized on the fly, narrating a fictional fetish session for her master while he pleasured himself upon his boy, girl, or bondage goat. He eventually climaxed with a glutinous ululation that made her skin crawl, then hung up on her.
Eve stared at the ceiling blindly. I’d like to wrap you up tight in cling film, she thought viciously, trying on a fantasy of her own for size. It wasn’t particularly sexy, but—I’d hang you from a meat hook in the dungeon until you’re ripe and buzzing with flies. Or maybe not. She closed her eyes and waited for the flames of rage and shame to subside. Right now Rupert was a long way away, and he almost certainly wasn’t spying on her through the cameras in her office, since he hadn’t commanded her to undress or masturbate for him. He didn’t respect his chattels’ personal boundaries, and for the time being that category included her. We’ll see what you say when the table is turned, she promised herself, and jotted down a brief reminder for her future self: add observe subordinates’ personal boundaries (where reasonable) to her list of policies when she seized control. Then she spent a soothing five minutes on the internet, pricing up elastrator devices for Rupert.
Next she took a deep breath and placed another call. This one used a Darknet voice server to connect to her personal concierge at a market-oriented Advanced Persistent Threat headquartered in Transnistria: a criminal enterprise so dangerous that the FBI had offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for anyone who could take them down.
Dead Lies Dreaming Page 17