False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale, not sounding at all pleased.

  We then spent the next half an hour thrashing out the practicalities. Because as Shakespeare said – Oh! How many operational contingency directives we receive. When first we practise to deceive.

  ‘I suggest you visit him in his new home,’ said Silver. ‘This evening by preference. That’ll stop him from getting creative over the weekend.’

  ‘Do we know where his new home is?’ I asked.

  ‘We will soon,’ said Silver smugly. ‘I have a team following him.’

  I looked over at Nightingale, who thought for a moment and then nodded.

  ‘We’ll go together,’ he said. ‘That way I can be on hand for any eventualities.’

  Beverley was going out with her mates from uni that evening, so as it happened I was free for some illicit police work.

  Stephen’s new pad was in a block of flats in a council estate off the Seven Sisters Road in Tottenham. Nightingale parked the Jag in a space out of sight of the block. As I walked towards the entrance a battered-looking silver Peugeot parked opposite flashed its lights – that would be the surveillance team.

  I was in front of a classic bit of red-brick council housing with open balconies and a central staircase. I didn’t chance the lift and instead trotted up the stairs to the third floor. As I walked along the balcony one of the doors ahead opened and Stephen stepped out. He saw me as soon as he turned to double-lock his door, and gave me a pained look. Given the black cargo pants, hoodie and nylon carry-all, he definitely looked like he was going equipped to me.

  Mind you, you’d be amazed what a creative copper can classify as ‘equipped’.

  ‘Evening all,’ I said. ‘What’s going on here, then?’

  Stephen sighed and put his bag down – it clonked when it hit the floor.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘I can be in and out in under an hour.’

  ‘If it was that easy,’ I said, ‘why were you faffing around with the door earlier?’

  ‘I never said it was going to be easy,’ he said, folding his arms across his chest. ‘I just said it was going to be fast.’

  He made no move to invite me in for coffee. I wondered what he didn’t want me to see.

  ‘Smash and grab?’ I asked.

  ‘Grab yes, smash no,’ he said. ‘Access the roof, rappel down, cut the window, grab the goods, back out the window and down to the street.’

  ‘The thing’s got to weigh half a tonne,’ I said. ‘How the fuck were you going to carry it?’

  Stephen mimed making a mystic gesture with his free hand.

  ‘What, with impello?’ Which was the go-to spell for shoving things around.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘You were just going to float it down the street to Old Street Station?’

  He shrugged. I reckoned he must have had more of a plan than that but he wasn’t about to tell me. But, then, I wouldn’t have told me either if I’d been him. In the distance I heard an ambulance siren doppler past and someone shouted a greeting. Stephen kept his arms folded, but turned to face me and more completely block me from his front door.

  ‘I thought we had an agreement,’ I said.

  ‘Hey,’ said Stephen. ‘You can be my wheelman if you like.’

  ‘Turn around, Stephen,’ I said, ‘and go back inside. We’ll talk about this on Monday.’

  ‘You want to wait until Monday?’

  ‘Is there some reason to be in a hurry?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Stephen, but he said it too casually.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Back inside.’

  Stephen picked up his bag, unlocked his front door and, being careful that I didn’t get a glimpse of the interior, went in. The door closed with a noticeable slam.

  I retreated a few metres so I wouldn’t be visible from the front door’s spyhole or the kitchen window. I waited a bit on the off chance he might be stupid enough to come out, or start a loud discussion with who or whatever he was hiding in the flat, but all I got was bored and cold. I started back up the balcony. But as I reached the staircase I heard the distinctive swarm-of-bees noise a small drone makes when flying. I stopped and looked but I couldn’t spot it.

  I told Nightingale when I got back to the Jag and then spent a couple of minutes explaining what a drone was. There was a chance it belonged to Stephen, but drones were getting common enough in private use to become a policing issue. Especially around prisons, where they were used to smuggle in contraband.

  ‘And I think he’s got someone in his flat,’ I told Nightingale, before he could be distracted by the aerial possibilities. ‘And he’s got an abseiling kit. So someone will have to watch the back so he doesn’t shimmy out the windows there.’

  ‘Silver’s people have night-vision gear,’ said Nightingale. ‘They can watch the back while I watch the front.’

  As police, we were well within our rights to knock down his door and find out exactly what Stephen had stashed in his flat, but then everything would have become officially official and word would have got out.

  ‘When hunting big game like Terrence Skinner,’ Silver had said at our first meeting, ‘one has to stay as far downwind as one can.’

  I figured South London was pretty far downwind, so I hopped on the Tube at Seven Sisters and had Beverley meet me in her sad little Kia at South Wimbledon.

  I woke up the next morning to find that Bev had incorporated me into her belly support matrix and that the nameless twins were either having a good stretch or, more likely, fighting for supremacy. My forearm was tucked neatly under the Bulge and was independently asleep from the rest of my body.

  ‘Enough,’ muttered Beverley in her sleep and placed her hand on her belly. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  The movement subsided.

  I grabbed a spare pillow, carefully substituted it for my numb arm, and eased out of the bed. Reassured that a spherical boulder wasn’t going to chase me down the hallway, I went into the kitchen to make breakfast. Maksim, Beverley’s combination handyman, bodyguard and only, as far as we knew, worshipful acolyte, had introduced me to the joys of baguette-based eggy bread. A dish even I can successfully cook. As soon as I had it sizzling on the frying pan, Beverley shuffled in wearing her slippers and stuck her head in the fridge. After a groan and a sigh she emerged again with a punnet of strawberries, an apple, and a catering-sized tub of Greek yoghurt. These she took to the counter, where she started chopping the fruit into two bowls. She looked over at my frying pan and frowned.

  ‘Grenki,’ she said. ‘Again?’

  ‘I like to play to my strengths,’ I said. ‘Where’s Maksim?’

  Beverley finished chopping the last of the fruit, which she then drowned in yoghurt.

  ‘He’s got the day off.’ She carried the bowls over to the kitchen table and sat down. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I have today off, too,’ I said. ‘But I’m still on call.’

  Once they were nice and crispy I slid the grenki out of the frying pan onto the plates and dusted them with caster sugar.

  ‘For which job?’ asked Beverley as I put the plates on the table and sat down. ‘Your fake job or your secret real job?’

  ‘Both,’ I said, and started in on my grenki before my fruit – while it was still hot.

  Once breakfast was done I finished writing up my notes from the day before. Obviously you can’t carry your notebook around when you’re undercover, but it’s still important to keep as close to a contemporary record as possible – you never know when you might have to haul it out in court.

  An hour or so later Beverley dragged me into the living room for antenatal exercises, which involved some gentle stretching, belly oiling and twenty minutes of competitive pelvic floor exercises – which Beverley won on points.

  That done, I showered and started in
on my PIP3 reading while Beverley climbed into the bath with a second-hand copy of Statistics for Environmental Science and Management. She stayed in the bath, occasionally calling down for tea and biscuits, until lunch and then insisted it was her turn to fill the dishwasher. Afterwards, once Beverley was safely stuck in front of her laptop in the living room, I surreptitiously checked to make sure she hadn’t left the plates facing the wrong way again.

  While I was doing that, my FBI contact in Washington texted me to arrange a Skype call for later that afternoon.

  The beauty of informal contacts is that they keep working regardless of your actual legal status. My contact in the FBI was Agent Kimberley Reynolds, who officially worked for the Office of Partnership Engagement and semi-officially as a one-woman department for weird shit. We’d met when she came to London to investigate the death of a senator’s son and got an impromptu introduction to the London Underground, British policing and the hidden world of magic. Since then we’d traded favours back and forth – mostly information. Our assumption was that somebody – the NSA or the FBI themselves – were monitoring the conversation at all times. So we were careful to never say anything too treasonous.

  ‘Really? The New York Public Library service?’ she said, once she’d finished asking after Beverley’s Bulge. Reynolds was a thin white woman about my age with auburn hair cut into a sensible FBI bob. She was dressed in her equally sensible work suit and had her ID hanging on a lanyard around her neck. Judging by that, and the institutional beige cubicle wall behind her, I guessed she was at work.

  ‘That’s what he claims,’ I said.

  She asked if I had any decent photographs of him and I sent her the best of Silver’s surveillance pictures. While she hadn’t had time to check into Stephen the magical cat-burglar, she did have the griff on Terrence Skinner’s bodyguards.

  ‘They’re from a West Coast outfit called Total Executive Cover, founded by a former Israeli called Ben Arad,’ said Reynolds. ‘He claims to have done “interventions” for Mossad in the 1990s, but Mossad said they never heard of him.’

  ‘Do you believe them?’ I asked.

  ‘Mossad wouldn’t tell us even if he had,’ she said. ‘But, as far as we can tell, he did his national service in the infantry. His mother was an American so he had dual citizenship and after finishing his service he moved to Los Angeles. Worked as an extra and stuntman before founding Total Executive Cover with a couple of fellow stuntmen.’

  The company’s reputation was efficient, but too show business to be truly effective. The FBI assessment was that they were perfectly fine for the average celebrity but not reliable for serious threats.

  ‘They all have Lake Arthur badges,’ she said.

  ‘Which are what exactly?’

  ‘Pay-to-play cops,’ she said.

  Because, in America, small towns run their own police departments pretty much unsupervised and a few had hit upon the idea of charging wannabe cops a fee to become peace officers.

  ‘You’re having me on,’ I said.

  ‘Nope,’ said Reynolds. ‘Meet Lake Arthur, population 430. Current police force a hundred plus – most of whom aren’t residents.’

  For 400 dollars you could get a badge and the right to carry a concealed firearm. Rumour had it Elon Musk had bought one for himself.

  ‘And so did your boy Skinner and his security detail.’

  I hoped they weren’t carrying firearms in my city – otherwise we’d have to have words. Some of which would be about having the right to remain silent.

  Reynolds confirmed that Terrence Skinner had hired Total Executive Cover following an unsuccessful carjacking in Los Angeles. Employing armed security after one failed robbery attempt still seemed a bit of an overreaction to me.

  ‘He’s a billionaire,’ said Reynolds. ‘They don’t like to be inconvenienced.’

  I asked Reynolds if she could put the bodyguards on what we’d taken to calling the Unreality List of people that might be magical, members of the demi-monde or suspiciously weird.

  ‘It would save ever so much time,’ Reynolds had said when we set it up, ‘if we just added the population of Florida right at the start.’

  I went into work on Sunday because one thing the wacky world of high-tech industry had in common with policing was a disdain for taking the weekend off.

  ‘It’s much worse in Silicon Valley,’ said Victor when I ran into him in the Cage. ‘Over there, if you don’t work the weekends they fire your arse.’

  I asked where Everest was and Victor said he was in his cubicle in Golgafrincham and that we probably wouldn’t be seeing him until Monday morning. Victor was picking up snacks and other life support items for him now.

  ‘What does he actually do?’ I asked.

  ‘He tests code,’ said Victor. ‘His official job title is Chief Wowbagger but really that just means he’s an SRE with QA.’

  Which I googled later and discovered stood for Software Reliability Engineer and Quality Assurance. Which meant that it was his job to find faults in other engineers’ code and make sure they fixed it. Victor was also QA, but his job was monitoring the automatic testing routines and ensuring both they and Everest were working properly.

  ‘Everest is way more reliable than the automatic routines,’ he said.

  Generally speaking, people were supposed to debug their own code. Everest was usually only called in if a coder was unable to fix their own work or had run screaming out of the building, never to return.

  ‘People burn out,’ said Victor, ‘or get fired. Or occasionally go crazy.’

  My work that Sunday consisted of joining a pick-up game of Firefly: The Game that I’d been invited to by Dennis Yoon. He was a Korean-American who’d worked at one of Skinner’s companies in San Jose before following his boss to London. I’d targeted him partly because of this association, but also because he lived in New Malden, which meant our commutes overlapped and I could arrange to run into him by accident on the way home.

  We met in the Brontitall conference room which Dennis had booked the previous Friday. Mice were allowed to reserve conference rooms for gaming sessions, birthday parties, book clubs – any social purpose as long as it didn’t involve the use of alcohol and/or gambling.

  The orientation video I’d watched on my first day had proudly claimed that the SCC was a company that paid for results, not desk time. The mice might have been surprised by the degree to which the company monitored them to make sure it got its money’s worth.

  Or maybe not.

  ‘They’re paying,’ said Ellis, a huge white guy who worked as an optimiser – whatever that meant. ‘If you don’t like it you can always get another job.’

  Firefly, for those that can’t guess from the title, is a board game in which the players each captain a small space freighter and attempt to survive a hostile ’verse by fair means or foul. I like to play it safe and try to stay on the right side of the law. Dennis Yoon had a buccaneer’s style and kept trying to cheat and, when caught, pretending that he’d made a mistake about the rules. Ellis was one of those meticulous players who slow the whole game down as they methodically consider every eventuality.

  Our fourth player was another white guy the others called Princeton, whose real name was Declan Genzlinger. He’d also come over from the US with Skinner when he relocated to London. He didn’t like it here much and was at pains to say so, and I took equal pains not to punch him in his smug little face. Partly because I like to think I’m bigger than that, but mostly because he worked behind the locked door on the secret project in Bambleweeny.

  ‘Is it true you’re having a kid?’ asked Dennis, while we waited for Ellis to finish assessing his objectives and make his next move.

  ‘Twins,’ I said.

  ‘Good for you,’ said Dennis, but Princeton shook his head and sighed.

  ‘It’s a mistake to have kids,�
� he said.

  When I asked why, he sighed again as if the question wearied him.

  ‘Yeah, Princeton,’ said Dennis. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because humanity as we know it is going to end in the next ten years,’ said Princeton.

  ‘You’re thinking – what?’ I asked. ‘Environmental collapse? Nuclear war? Catastrophic rain of frogs?’

  ‘He’s thinking of the Singularity,’ said Dennis.

  ‘It’s going to happen in 2029,’ said Princeton. ‘And then all this bullshit that you think is so important, you can kiss it all goodbye.’

  ‘You can’t possibly know that,’ I said.

  ‘I could show you the math but you wouldn’t understand it,’ said Princeton.

  I said that I’d believe it when I saw it.

  ‘Believe it,’ said Princeton. ‘I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’ said Dennis suddenly. And then, to me, ‘Sorry, but there’s some things he shouldn’t be talking about.’ He looked at Princeton. ‘Should you?’

  Princeton shrugged.

  ‘You’re just going to have to trust me,’ he said to me.

  ‘Are we talking or playing?’ said Ellis.

  Just what was Princeton working on in Bambleweeny that made him think the Singularity – aka the nerd rapture, aka the moment when artificial intelligence passed humanity and accelerated away into an unknowable future – was arriving a couple of decades ahead of when its other acolytes and prophets proclaimed it would?

  It had to be some form of AI.

  I considered pushing for more, but we were playing Star Fleet: Battles the following Tuesday so I reckoned I’d have more opportunities then.

  Shows you what I know.

  Stephen came in bright and early with the Monday rush. Silver’s NCA surveillance team had followed him in, so I was already in position in the Cage to bump into him. It had been agreed that I’d continue to downplay my police status. If he wanted to believe I was freelance, or a rogue, or whatever the fuck game he thought I was playing, then fine by us.

  ‘The other night,’ he said. ‘You should have let me get the job done.’