False Value (Rivers of London 8)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘That would have been one way of getting rid of you,’ I said. ‘They’ve got lethal traps in there.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he said. ‘Like what? Bear traps?’

  ‘You know what kind of traps,’ I said, and Stephen lost his snide look.

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Enough to not go rushing in,’ I said. Which was a lie, but seemed to be enough to give Stephen pause.

  ‘What’s in this for you?’ asked Stephen.

  I sidled over to the German Segafredo coffee dispenser. This was always a reliable caffeine source, as most of the mice rushed in to empty the Mountain Dew machine and then would drain the Coca-Cola spigot and Red Bull cabinet before stooping to coffee.

  ‘Just doing my job,’ I said.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Stephen. ‘I did some digging into you. You rocked the boat and got canned. You’re all on your lonesome.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Stephen, looking pleased with himself. ‘Because I’ve being reading a LiveJournal by F*ckTheresaMay678. Interesting stuff.’

  My God, I thought, Silver was right – Nigerian princes and all.

  ‘You can believe what you like,’ I said, because Silver had said not to overplay it. ‘But if you get yourself zapped by a jellyfish bomb that’s your lookout.’

  Stephen opened his mouth and shut it quickly. Over his shoulder I saw Johnson approaching. Damn, but Stephen’s instincts were good.

  ‘Is that my coffee?’ said Johnson as he joined us.

  I said it was, and handed over my coffee.

  ‘Got a stand-up meeting in five,’ said Stephen, and wandered off. Johnson watched him go.

  ‘Is that our rat?’ he asked.

  ‘Possibly rat adjacent,’ I said, and had a twinge of uneasiness about lying to my boss.

  Always remember who you’re really working for, Silver had said, and I’d just nodded because it never occurred to me that that would be hard.

  Johnson sent me off to do a random tag check.

  I popped up to the Vogon office to grab a Vogon-enabled babelphone and found Leo working away at one of the terminals. I wasn’t paying attention and had he carried on working I’d have thought nothing of it – we all worked on the terminals after all – but the guilty start when I walked in made me instantly suspicious.

  ‘What are you up to?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, but Leo was a council estate boy like me and ‘nothing’, usually spelt with two fs and a k, is your first response to everything. I sat down in one of the operating chairs and put my feet up on his desk. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms.

  ‘How did you find those CCTV breaks?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because they’re random as shit,’ I said, and they certainly didn’t correspond to anyone entering the building. At least not through the main entrance, and the fire exits were all reliably alarmed – I’d checked. ‘So how did you spot them?’

  Leo gave me a long look and then nodded.

  ‘Can you keep a fucking secret?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s been known.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Have you ever gone out and got so hammered that you wake up pissed?’

  ‘Done that.’

  ‘I went to a wedding in Essex, an old friend,’ said Leo. ‘And drank quite a lot and didn’t get much sleep and to cut a long story short had to come straight from the train station to here. Let’s just say I hadn’t got to the hangover stage yet.’

  Which according to the contract I signed was a dismissible offence – an instantly dismissible offence at that.

  ‘And nobody noticed?’

  ‘I was wearing dark glasses,’ he said. ‘And luckily Johnson was out that morning. What I needed was something I could sit in front of that looked like work.’

  Leo had put the views from six different CCTV cameras on to a screen in a remote cubicle on the second floor, grabbed a litre of sweetened iced black coffee from the vending machine with the hyperactive squirrel on the front.

  ‘I reckoned if I lasted until about eleven I could throw up in a corridor and sign myself out sick.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just call in sick?’

  ‘Because I was still pissed and wasn’t making the best decisions,’ said Leo.

  Anyway, he cued up three weeks of footage, put it on fast-forward and settled in to do some serious skiving. As he sat there slumped in his chair he let the screen go in and out of focus until enough alcohol had been displaced by caffeine to make him realise what he was looking at.

  About every hour, one or more of the camera feeds would blank out. The outages lasted under five seconds but where multiple feeds were involved the outages were simultaneous.

  ‘Did you check the other CCTV feeds?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Leo. ‘Because by the time I’d noticed the hangover had kicked, hadn’t it – so I signed myself out sick, as planned, got a good night’s sleep and came in early the next morning.’

  And found the random glitches extended to all the feeds he could access. He told Johnson, and then spent the rest of the day looking in vain for a pattern while the outside contractors who’d installed the cameras were called in to check their work. They did, or so they claimed, exhaustive tests on all the systems and found nothing. It was rumoured that Skinner himself had supervised a network diagnosis over the Christmas holidays, and while that also found nothing the glitches stopped.

  ‘They said it must have been a technical fault but Johnson said he wanted to bring in someone new to investigate,’ said Leo. ‘And that turned out to be you.’

  The implication – that Johnson didn’t trust anyone who’d been working at the SCC when the glitches happened – wasn’t lost on either of us. No wonder Leo was vexed.

  ‘I think it was a technical glitch,’ I said. ‘But there might still be a rat.’

  Leo shrugged and I left him to whatever it was he didn’t want me to know he was doing, and went to see if I could catch some mice up to no good.

  Vogon-issue babelphones looked the same as the general-issue ones – bright green plastic phones with an LCD screen – but with added functionality. One function allowed me to identify who was logged in at a particular terminal, which then allowed me to visually check that the right person had logged in with the right ID card.

  Johnson preferred overt sweeps, where everybody could see he was checking. He thought they were a deterrent.

  ‘Also, they know I’m not down there for the company.’

  I was more covert, partly because I was less conspicuous than Johnson, but mostly because in reality I was only conducting the sweep so I could poke about amongst the cubicles for my own nefarious purposes.

  That’s why I found Victor, alone for once, wrangling a snack machine in the chill area on the fourth floor just short of where the skyway led to the restricted area.

  He was frowning at the selection – away from the Cage the snack machines reverted to the bog standard things you could find in any canteen, train station or casualty unit. Victor stabbed the buttons and waited while the machine whirred out a packet of Hula Hoops.

  ‘Where’s Everest?’ I asked.

  Victor glanced towards where the skyway connected to Bambleweeny.

  ‘Doing a consultation,’ he said.

  ‘He’s not working on the secret project, then?’ I asked.

  ‘What secret project is that?’ he said carefully.

  I nodded over at the skyway.

  ‘That one over there.’

  ‘Did you read the confidentiality clauses in your employment contract?’ said Victor.

  ‘I tried,’ I said. ‘But I kept on falling asleep.’

  ‘They’re pretty specific about not talking about the secret project in Bambleweeny,’ he
said. ‘Or Deep Thought.’

  Which was yet another reference from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

  ‘He wants an answer to the ultimate question?’ I asked.

  ‘You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment,’ said Victor, and offered me a Hula Hoop. ‘But I doubt it. I expect it’s more Marvin the Paranoid Android than anything else.’

  ‘An AGI?’ I asked, because at the Serious Cybernetics Corporation it was important to make a distinction between Artificial General Intelligence and ordinary AI. AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Turing test and ask difficult philosophical questions before going ‘Daisy-Daisy’ and trying to wipe out humanity, while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.

  Victor was agnostic about AGI, but warned me about Everest who, like Princeton, prayed every night for the Singularity when choirs of algorithms would upload him aloft to a digital heaven where anything would be possible and everything permitted.

  ‘That’s assuming that the Singularity hasn’t already happened,’ said Victor. ‘And we’re not sentient virtual personalities inhabiting a simulation of reality.’

  ‘How would we know?’ I said.

  Simulation or not, I felt I’d done a good day’s work. Stephen the wannabe cat-burglar had been contained and I’d triangulated another potential source into Bambleweeny.

  I now looked forward to spending an uneventful afternoon pretending to be a security officer to keep Johnson happy.

  Hah – I don’t why I bother making plans, I really don’t.

  I’d taken to experimenting with the vending machines in the Cage, so I was in the middle of coaxing a kosher hot dog out of the Hot Nosh 24/6 machine when the attack happened. I’d heard the unmistakable approach- ing hubbub of the Terrence Skinner walking- around-show and I turned to make a quick safety check on his location. Skinner was over by a table full of adoring mice pulling up a chair and sitting down, all the better to socialise with his employees and as a bonus ruin their lunch hour. The same female bodyguard I’d seen before, and had christened Ms Side-eye, hovered behind his shoulder while minions scampered off to carry out various errands. One headed for the vending machines and I saw her checking notes hastily written on her hand before selecting the baguette dispenser. Once I had my kosher hot dog I glanced back towards Skinner and saw a man get to his feet at the next table along.

  Now, I’ve been a specialist officer for most of my career. But I did my probation around Trafalgar Square, Soho and Covent Garden and you don’t do that without learning to spot trouble before it starts.

  He was white and unremarkable, brown hair and beard both long and in need of a trim. He was of the death metal T-shirt and jeans brigade, one purple, the other black, both worn loose to cover his paunch. It’s hard to say what caught my eye – the speed and suddenness with which he stood, or the dramatic set of his shoulders as he prepared for his big moment in the limelight.

  I saw the gun first. It looked like a toy fashioned from white plastic, but its very crudeness set off alarms. The man held it in his right hand and raised and straightened his arm, body turned to the side as if he was taking part in a duel.

  ‘Gun!’ I shouted, even as I started running.

  Ms Side-eye was good. She didn’t waste time looking for the shooter. Instead she grabbed Skinner by his collar and yanked him backwards off his chair, dropping him out of the line of fire and allowing herself to get her body between his and half the room.

  I charged forward and was less than six metres from the shooter when he fired – close enough to see the tendons in his wrist shift as he pulled the trigger.

  There was a huge bang and a gout of flame as long as the man’s forearm shot from the snub barrel of the pistol. The bodyguard yelled, her back arching, spun around, tripped over her own feet and fell crashing amongst the suddenly empty chairs around her.

  Panic was rippling out from the shooter, people scrambling backwards off their chairs, some going under the tables, some going over. I knew from experience that there was going to be a sloshing effect as people further away pushing in to get a better view met the inner wave of people fleeing outwards.

  The shooter dropped his gun and walked towards Skinner. As he went, he transferred something from his left hand – a long, knife-shaped lump of white plastic. One of the mice didn’t get out of his way fast enough and he slashed them with his plastic sword. The mouse was wearing a sleeveless denim jacket and the blade parted the fabric as if it was paper and cut into the green T-shirt underneath. The man bellowed and, sensibly, threw himself backwards out of the way.

  The shooter ignored the man and walked forward. I tried to get an impello-palma away but a couple of panicking mice ran right into me and spun me round. As I stumbled around trying to get eyes on the shooter again, I felt the whoosh of someone somewhere doing a spell. I got orientated just in time to see the shooter stagger backwards into a table, recover himself and lurch forward with his impossibly sharp plastic knife held aloft.

  Tackling a suspect with a knife is all about neutralising the knife. They can kick, punch, knee, elbow and bite you. But the knife is what will kill you, so that’s your focus. Thus it’s always handy when they brandish it in the air, away from anyone’s soft dangly parts. And even better when they’re distracted enough by their intended target that they don’t see you coming.

  I ran right into him and brought my fist down as hard as I could on the point between his right shoulder and his neck. The man slumped forward, dropping the plastic knife and landing face down on the floor. This is the so-called brachial stun which I’d been taught at Hendon and which had cropped up at least once in every officer safety refresher I’d ever attended. I’d never done it for real before and was so surprised when the man went down that I nearly fucked up the follow-up.

  It was only when he groaned that I thought to grab his right hand in a wrist lock and put my knee in his back to stop him from rolling over.

  ‘No,’ he wailed.

  I was reaching for my non-existent cuffs when he burst into tears.

  There was a scattering of applause, which is always appreciated but not exactly useful. A couple of adventurous mice shuffled forward as if to help.

  ‘Okay!’ I shouted in my best police voice. ‘Can I ask everyone who is not a Vogon to stay where they are, please?’

  I kept my weight on the shooter’s arms but he obviously wasn’t the wriggling type – instead he continued to cry. I glanced over at Ms Side-eye, who was sitting up and clutching her side. She winced as she probed for injuries, but I didn’t see any blood.

  I looked over to make sure nobody had touched the weapons. I couldn’t see the gun. But the white plastic knife lay where it had fallen, a red smear still on its blade – which reminded me. The guy who’d been cut was sitting on a chair at a nearby table, breathing hard while he held a wad of bloody – but not soaked, thank God – paper towels to his side.

  ‘Mr Skinner!’ I called, turning away from the guy. ‘Are you okay?’

  He was lying behind the bodyguard half under a table. He tried to sit up, but the bodyguard pushed him firmly back down.

  ‘I’m just bonzer,’ he said.

  It probably took Johnson less than ninety seconds to make it down from his office, but it felt like much longer.

  6

  December: Changes in Relative Charge

  London commercial property crashes are as routine and as cyclical as the career of the boy band du jour. There is an economic boom, companies expand and demand greater office space. Property companies buy land to build offices, which drives up prices, which inflates the value of the property companies. Investors pile in because the value is increasing, thus pushing up the value even further and giving a better virtual return on investment. The property companies start building a series of increasingly utilitarian offices, but before most of them are
finished the market contracts, demand slumps and London ends up with massive amounts of surplus office space.

  This is good news for the police, because they can rent some relatively cheap offices in a safely anonymous building when they want to stash a specialist unit away from other police, the media, and the sort of people who have friends in high places. Bonus points if you situate it somewhere people don’t normally visit such as Slough, Croydon or – in the case of Operation Fretwork – Hornchurch.

  There, Officer Alona Silver had grown a pocket policing empire in a refurbished 1930s industrial building that had been going begging since 2012. It had thick brick walls, adequate car parking and the sort of anonymous dullness that is a boon to anyone who needs somewhere secure to plan something shady.

  ‘Welcome to the Exchange,’ said Silver, when she picked me and Nightingale up from reception. We were issued with corporate-looking guest IDs on lanyards which we were required to hang around our necks at all times. Silver wore one with her name and picture on it, beside a red and orange strip which was definitely not her warrant card or any other kind of official issue. They were obviously taking secrecy very seriously – I had to wonder why.

  ‘It starts with money laundering,’ said Silver once we’d reached the safety of her office. ‘Where it goes after that I don’t know.’

  With its lack of decoration, steel filing cases and severe grey and black metal desks, I think Silver had been aiming at austere and no-nonsense. Whatever the initial plans had been, it had been buried under stacks of box files, papers, copies of Forbes, The Economist and other glossy financial porn mags. Two walls had been covered in pinboards including the wall with the windows in it. I could just see grey daylight filtering over the top.

  Silver ushered us into a pair of cheap tubular knock-off Bauhaus chairs and retreated behind her desk. She offered coffee but Nightingale asked for tea. That done, Silver fished a laptop out from under a stack of paper, stabbed at its keyboard and then turned it round to show us the screen. It displayed a publicity still of Terrence Skinner smiling at the camera, in a casual navy jacket and white shirt with the collar and top button unfastened. He looked pleased with himself.