‘The fact that both of my apprentices have a tendency to blow things up,’ said Nightingale after that incident, ‘has led me to re-evaluate my teaching methods.’
He was waiting for me in the lab along with Abigail, who was a small mixed-race young woman with angular features and a hedge of short dreads sprouting from the top of her head. Obviously she was reading the same websites as Oliver.
Laid out in stainless-steel trays on the counter in front of them were three partially disassembled plastic drones. Several others had been sent to the same lab that was working on William Lloyd’s plastic gun and machete.
I noticed that both Nightingale and my cousin were wearing plastic aprons and protective eyewear, so I fetched the same for myself from the locker by the door.
‘We’re just waiting for Dr Vaughan,’ said Nightingale as I donned my gear.
Dr Walid was still at the secure unit, trying to gently prise something coherent from William Lloyd, but Dr Vaughan had not elected to become a pathologist to start talking to living patients now.
‘She says she prefers a good mystery to a misery memoir,’ said Abigail, who was bouncing on her toes and obviously desperate to show off.
She got her chance when Dr Vaughan bustled in with a tray covered by a white cloth. She placed it on the bench by the others and whisked away the cloth like a magician.
This proved to be more pieces of spontaneously disassembled drone. I knew from Nightingale’s reports that the remains of six of them had been recovered from the scene around Stephen and Mrs Chin’s flat. Three had been sent to other labs, three were already laid out here, so this seventh came from somewhere else.
I remembered the bag of bits Melvin, the former King of the Rats, had handed me. The ones with the same dead fish vestigium that I’d sensed from the demon trap before Christmas.
I looked at Nightingale, Abigail and Dr Vaughan, who were all giving me encouraging smiles. I reached out to brush Dr Vaughan’s specimen with my fingers.
‘Gloves,’ she said.
‘These have been processed, right?’ I asked.
‘That’s no excuse for not following basic barrier procedures,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘After all, there’s no knowing whether these are organic in some fashion.’
‘You think they’re organic?’
‘Best to be sure,’ said Dr Vaughan, so I donned a pair of latex gloves.
Testing had shown that latex doesn’t interfere much when you’re sensing vestigia and, surprisingly, plastic retains the after-image of magic better than wood or flesh. Abigail says she thinks it’s down to the long chain polymers but she can’t prove it. Yet.
So I was treated to a repeat of the unpleasant sensation of sticking my face in a bowl of rotting shrimp – complete with the skin-crawling feel of thousands of tiny cilia brushing my face.
‘That’s well off, isn’t it?’ said Abigail. ‘Now try the others.’
I sighed and touched each of the other drones in turn – guessing what I would find, and not being surprised. More horrible fish guts and feelers – lovely.
I looked at Nightingale.
‘These were animated by magic, weren’t they?’ I asked.
‘The forensic team found no motors of any kind,’ said Nightingale. ‘Although there were batteries.’
‘Triple A’s,’ said Abigail. ‘Not enough to power rotors and definitely not flappy wings. Which is a stupid configuration, FYI – if you want to make something that flies.’
‘But enough electricity to keep a chip live,’ I said.
Abigail held up a glass beaker a quarter filled with pale sand – gold flecks reflected light from the window.
There are certain old-fashioned spells that rely on animal sacrifice to provide a power boost. Nowadays it’s no longer acceptable to cheerfully suffocate doves for science or magic, but I’d discovered that you can ‘sacrifice’ microprocessors instead. Providing they’re currently powered, even if it’s just the trickle your laptop uses to keep its clock running. When we ran tests on these drones, the crude mechanical output exceeded, by a fair margin, the output of the batteries, or even the mains when we tried plugging them into that. Wherever the power was coming from, it wasn’t from either source of electricity.
The fact that any extended use of magic causes microprocessors to turn into sand is why your hardcore practitioner has a mechanical watch, uses a notepad and has a retrofitted hard off-switch on their phone.
Since the vestigium of the Regent’s Canal drone matched those of the drones recovered from Mrs Chin’s flat, they were probably created by the same person. I looked at Nightingale.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Or at least by practitioners trained by the same teacher.’
‘They could have been fabricated by a third party,’ said Abigail. ‘They might not even know what they were for.’
‘Fabricated where?’
‘By anyone with the right 3-D printer,’ said Abigail.
From a policing point of view, 3-D printers were your classic new technology. Everybody knew they were going to be used by criminals for something, but nobody was sure what. And nobody, least of all the police, was going to waste resources on them until there was a big enough problem to cause an outcry. Forensically, it hadn’t been established yet whether an item could be matched with the machine that printed it, even if you had that printer to compare it to. It had taken years to empirically prove that everyone has a unique pattern of fingertip ridges, or harmonic waveforms when they speak, or variable number tandem repeats in their DNA – and even longer to get the courts to accept these as reliable indicators of guilt.
‘Your best bet is to find the design on someone’s laptop,’ said Abigail.
Since we’d exhausted that avenue, we retired along to the room formerly known as the breakfast room and now rechristened the tea room by Abigail and Dr Vaughan. There we had tea and very tiny cakes.
‘What’s this?’ I asked, pointing at a carrot cake the same size and shape as a bottle top.
‘I believe Foxglove has been constructing a doll’s house,’ said Nightingale. ‘Although I haven’t seen it.’ He looked at Abigail, who shook her head.
‘Not me neither,’ she said.
Her theory was that the building work had given Foxglove ideas and she’d branched out into three-dimensional art as a response. Molly hadn’t wanted to be left out and so contributed in the only way she could.
I popped the carrot cake into my mouth whole – it was, of course, delicious.
Dr Vaughan poked her head in to say she was heading back to UCH, where she had some non-Falcon related corpses to investigate.
‘Have to keep my hand in,’ she’d said when I asked about this. ‘If you only deal with the paranormal you can lose perspective.’
I noticed that she didn’t leave without one of Molly’s care packages.
‘How are your house guests?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Suspicious and impatient,’ I said. ‘We need to find a way to keep them penned up.’
Nightingale said that he’d discuss it with Silver that afternoon.
‘Any pressure will have to be nicely calculated,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t want to panic them into anything precipitate.’
Abigail said she could do something since she was off to Bev’s that afternoon.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be at school?’ I asked Abigail as she popped two miniature eclairs into her mouth.
‘Free period,’ she said.
‘You know I’m going to check,’ I said.
‘Whatever.’
Nightingale cut us off before we could escalate and brought us back to the case.
‘Since we’re unlikely to trace the source of the drones,’ he said, ‘perhaps, instead, we should ask ourselves who they were targeting.’
‘Easy,’ said Abigail. ‘They were after t
he music book. They attacked when you started playing it.’
‘That doesn’t necessarily follow,’ I said.
‘Then why did they attack just then?’ asked Abigail.
‘The timing might not be significant,’ I said. ‘Just because two things happen at the same time doesn’t mean they’re related.’
Abigail gave me a withering look. But everyone assumes causation when they should be thinking coincidence, and correlation when they should be asking whether Twitter is really a reliable source of information.
‘And in any case,’ said Nightingale, ‘I meant targeted in the wider sense.’
‘Since we have a drone watching Skinner’s home and a ton of them at Mrs Chin’s flat,’ I said, ‘I’m going to say the targets were the Americans – both sets.’
‘Correlation,’ grumbled Abigail.
Nightingale frowned.
‘Surely it’s a squadron of drones,’ he said. ‘Nonetheless Peter is correct. The Americans seem to be the most likely target. Which suggests what, do you think?’
‘A third party,’ I said. ‘But where from?’
‘No British or European actor would run this type of operation without at least having some contingency planning against my involvement,’ said Nightingale, who had a reputation that extended from Tralee to Novgorod. We’d encountered random Americans before, and they either hadn’t known or didn’t care.
‘American,’ I said.
‘Or Russian,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or perhaps a tradition we’ve never encountered before.’
‘Maybe if we find out what they’re after,’ I said, ‘we might learn who they are.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ said Nightingale.
That’s us police – born optimists.
I returned to the Serious Cybernetics Corporation and Bambleweeny to find Victor and Everest had colonised adjacent cubicles and were using them as temporary skips to hold reams of hard copy, used food containers and a truly impressive pyramid of empty drinks cans. Everest was still banging away at his keyboard but Victor was lying on the floor with his feet up on an operator’s chair. I asked if he was all right, but he said he was just having a quick rest.
‘It’s good that you’re back,’ he said. ‘Everest has found something you’ll want to look at.’ Victor craned his head around to look at where Everest was hunched over his desk. ‘Only I’d wait a couple of minutes. There’ll be a refreshment break soon.’
There was no sign of September Rain; instead a young white man with a fading tan leant against the wall of the nearby cubicle. He was wearing a blazer over a black T-shirt, tan chinos and black trainers. There were a couple of heavy items clipped to his belt and I took him to be another member of Total Executive Cover, albeit a much more relaxed one.
September Rain had unhesitatingly taken a bullet for Terrence Skinner. I got the impression this one might give it some thought before risking his life. Perhaps that’s why he was guarding us, rather than the big man himself.
He clocked me looking and gave me a friendly wave.
‘I really need you to introduce me to that man,’ said Victor.
‘What’s it worth?’ I asked.
‘What do you want?’
‘I’ll think of something,’ I said. ‘You might want to get up now.’
‘What, now?’
‘No time like the present.’
Victor scrambled to his feet and, crouching out of sight in his cubicle, went through a slightly desperate emergency grooming.
‘Ready?’
‘Wait, wait, wait,’ said Victor, as he looked with dismay at a beverage stain on his black and green Weyland-Yutani sweatshirt.
‘Relax,’ I said. ‘This is just first contact – we’re only going to exchange names and check he’s the right orientation.’
‘And what do you think the right orientation is?’ asked Victor.
‘The one that’s facing in your direction,’ I said.
I caught the guy’s eye and beckoned him over. It’s amazing how much easier it is to do this sort of thing now that I’m not fifteen any more. We introduced ourselves.
His name was Brad. No, really. Bradley Michael Smith. But he was cool about it.
‘Yeah, stereotype, right?’ he said. ‘It gets worse. Technically I’m Bradley Michael Smith the third, but I don’t use that.’
Brad gave Victor a hopeful smile, which seemed like a good sign to me and I let myself fade back towards Everest, who helpfully grunted to get my attention.
‘Found something?’ I asked.
‘Thank God for that,’ muttered Everest in a low voice. ‘He’s been mooning all morning. Maybe now he’ll get some work done.’
I glanced back to where Brad was regaling Victor with his tales of growing up in Santa Cruz and catching waves at Steamer Lane. Victor was nodding happily in the manner of a man who was willing to listen to ever so much chat if he’s got a chance to get his leg over later.
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Did you match up the activity logs?’
‘Yes,’ said Everest. ‘And you were right.’
‘There’s a discrepancy?’
‘You could say that,’ he said, and opened a window on his terminal.
It was split vertically, CCTV footage on the left, the terminal activity logs on the right. Everest cued it up to a point during the second week in December and let it run on fast forward. The view down into William Lloyd’s cubicle was offset to the right and I looked up and double-checked the camera’s location. Having made a mental note of that, I looked back at the screen to see the double-speed Mr Lloyd sitting down at his terminal and logging in. Immediately the activity log mirrored his actions, although most of it looked like gibberish to me.
‘He’s debugging,’ said Everest.
Behind us Victor laughed at something Bradley Michael Smith III said.
Everest speeded up the footage, overshot his mark and wound back until he found it again. William Lloyd pushed himself away from his terminal and stood up. The activity log stopped. According to the timestamp, William had been working continuously for forty-five minutes.
‘He has a routine,’ said Everest, as William ran through a series of stretches and rolled his shoulders before sitting back down, but facing away from the terminal this time. He stayed like that – staring into nothing, his lips moving.
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Counting slowly to a hundred,’ said Everest, and when William reached a hundred he turned around and resumed work.
The pattern repeated itself – forty-five minutes of work, five to ten minutes of stretching and counting – three times. Then he went to lunch, for two hours I noticed, before returning to do three more forty-five-minute sessions and then going home.
‘You said there was a discrepancy.’
‘You needed to see a normal day to understand what happened next,’ said Everest. ‘Luckily for you I went back six weeks to check, and the pattern is unchanged. If you want to go back further than that, you can get someone else. There are limits.’
‘And always this pattern?’
‘It’s good work hygiene,’ said Everest. ‘Maintains a healthy work-life balance while generating excellent productivity.’
And he always stopped work before six – I’d have to ask Guleed what he did in his free time.
‘So what happens next?’
‘He’s writing his number on his hand,’ said Everest.
I looked at the screen, which only showed an empty cubicle. I was about to ask whether this was some bit of jargon that I didn’t know, when I realised that Everest was looking back towards where Victor was, indeed, writing Brad’s number on his hand.
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘If it’s important he should memorise it,’ said Everest.
‘Okay,’ I said.
>
‘It’s important,’ said Everest.
‘Fine.’
‘I want him to be happy.’
‘Good for you.’
‘He’s my friend.’
‘Obviously,’ I said. ‘So what happens next?’
I half expected him to say that Brad and Victor would probably go on a date, but instead he fast-forwarded the linked CCTV footage until William Lloyd came back into frame. I noticed that the quality of light inside Bambleweeny didn’t change from night to day. It was as constant and as timeless as a Las Vegas casino. No wonder William had to maintain his exercise routine. We watched as he did two more forty-five-minute work ‘shifts’ and then Everest slowed the footage to normal speed and said:
‘Observe.’
I watched William start yet another work shift. After a couple of minutes I told Everest that I wasn’t seeing it.
Everest spooled back and talked me through it.
‘He sits down. He taps his keyboard to get rid of the screen saver. Uses his mouse – probably to call up his workspace. Types. Stops. Checks the screen. Moves his mouse around.’
‘And this is unusual why?’ I asked.
‘Check the activity log,’ said Everest.
It showed no activity. According to the log, all that typing and mousing wasn’t registering at all.
Then suddenly the activity log was registering again.
The high angle of the CCTV made it hard to read William’s body language but I thought I saw . . . relief, maybe?
‘The discrepancy lasts three minutes and twenty-nine seconds,’ said Everest.
And the next one occurred halfway through William’s second work stint following lunch. This time the discrepancy lasted just under four minutes and it was clear, even from the high angle, that William was annoyed.
‘He thinks there’s a problem,’ said Everest. ‘And spends ten minutes running diagnostics.’
Everest indicated the activity log, which could have been outlining Keanu Reeves’s latest existential crisis for all the sense it made to me.
False Value (Rivers of London 8) Page 16