The Black Shepherd

by Steven Savile

  She glanced back in the direction she had come.

  The guard was still watching her.

  She straightened up slowly and carried on a little, much slower this time, carefully pacing one step in front of the other, barely moving faster than walking pace.

  Ahead of her the track bent slightly, and if she kept on she’d eventually move out of sight, mainly because of the trees that shrouded the coming stretch of track. The branches dragged low enough to scrape the roof of a decent-sized car.

  She ran beneath the canopy of trees. The ground underfoot was damp and covered with a layer of decaying leaves, which made it treacherous. Her footing felt uncertain. She slowed a little more, which was the smart thing to do, anyway.

  As Frankie rounded the bend she saw that the road was blocked by a large metal gate.

  To either side of it a high chain-link fence stretched away through the trees, ringing the compound.

  She wasn’t getting away even if she wanted to.

  The fence looked new, as did the gate. She assumed they’d been added in the last six months.

  As Frankie approached the gate the security camera mounted on one of the gateposts turned slowly in her direction. She squatted down, pretending to heave into the vegetation and the side of the track. The camera watched her.

  This was anything but the simple teaching camp in the woods it claimed to be. Guards with guns, mounted cameras, high fences – almost certainly electrified. It was a prison camp. The only reason not to let her run was that they were afraid of her finding something.

  But what?

  She turned around and made her way back, taking the return run even slower.

  The guard had a broad smile on face when she finally reached him.

  IN THE DARKNESS …

  When the man returned, he asked. ‘Do you have the answer?’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said, ‘But I am getting closer.’

  The iron lid slammed closed.

  No food. No water.

  She wanted to weep.

  She wasn’t lying. She was getting close.

  But close wasn’t good enough.

  She sank down to the ground as she heard the door close once more, stinging tears welling up in her eyes.

  She would never escape the hole.

  She would die here, a failure.

  She was going to disappoint John. That was worse than failure.

  In her mind she desperately tried to imagine the architecture of the software that protected the system. It was hard to do as everything was theoretical, but she knew code, and she knew the kind of protections a government department would fall back on. They were predictable. That was their weakness.

  But this was different. It was easier to conjure up fresh lines of code, narrowing her options down to smaller, simpler exploits, feeling out for the weakness that would eventually spring the trap – because she had been involved in developing it.

  There had to be a way, no matter how good she was. There had to be a solution.

  That was the test.

  She had spent months testing it, challenging the system to be sure it would withstand any sort of attack. That was why the Riigikogu had paid her school a lot of money; because she was the best.

  But in the darkness she heard the gentle voice mock, ‘You aren’t good enough, are you?’ even though he wasn’t there.

  She thought through the programs and worms she’d used to test it, the viruses and trojan horses and everything else. It wasn’t that the system was unbreakable. No system was. She had tested an American electoral machine and opened the source code up in less than four minutes, remotely. Every system had its weaknesses and exploits.

  She had found one here, in this code, too, but also been able to demonstrate how it could be secured, meaning she’d patched the exploit she needed now.

  She tried to think, but there was only confusion and that voice.

  ‘Not good enough, are you?’

  A sense of panic threatened to overwhelm her.

  How could there be someone else in there with her?

  She was losing her sense of self.

  There was the code.

  There was her.

  And there was the voice.

  All around her.

  Inside her.

  She scrambled to her feet, holding out her arms to try to find whoever had spoken, but there was no one in the hole with her.

  She stumbled, kicking over the bucket and spilling her day’s filth across the floor where she was going to have to sleep later.

  She slumped to her knees.

  ‘Not good enough. Not good enough.’

  She knew there was no one else in there with her.

  She knew the voice, too. It wasn’t the gentle giant who had trapped her in this hellhole.

  It was a teacher. Someone from long ago. From her past.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she begged. ‘I can’t remember you. We are one family now. There is no past.’

  She felt like she was losing her mind.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Tracking down the raw footage wasn’t a challenge.

  Rather than waiting for it to appear on screen, Laura had just run a Twitter search against Schnieder’s name and had turned up hundreds of hits. There was plenty of German-language chatter about the mystery girl, too.

  Getting a decent image of Cristiana was simple enough.

  The spin doctors were already trying to fix Schnieder’s tarnished image with staged photos of him exchanging a kiss with his doting wife as he left for work. The message was obvious, this thing was nothing, a nothing story, their marriage was stable, they were very much in love.

  And that was enough to convince Laura that it was a lie.

  She’d seen far too many shots like this dating all the way back to Profumo by way of Archer and Johnson. It was a sham. The cracks were there, showing in the wife’s body language, and the way she looked at him when she thought the camera wasn’t on her.

  This was the sort of thing that opened a crack in his reputation. It didn’t bring about the fall all by itself, but it wasn’t meant to. It was like claiming Cameron stuck his dick in a dead pig’s mouth. It didn’t need to be true. It was never meant to sound true. All you wanted when you made a claim like that was for the guy be remembered for making a statement denying putting his dick in a dead pig’s mouth. The denial ended his influence on the world stage.

  She almost felt sorry for Schnieder.

  Or would have if he wasn’t a miserable cheating bastard.

  Division’s facial-recognition software searched for a match in the background.

  It was a long shot.

  The girl was glamorous and well groomed in the image she’d extracted, but it didn’t matter if the only photos they had in their databases were of her fresh off the streets in a starkly lit mugshot or a staged, no-smile passport photograph – a face was a face. The points of similarity in the bone structure and set of the features didn’t change just because of a bit of make-up.

  Ideally, they would have had eyes on the ground, someone to walk the street outside the nightclub, check buildings in the vicinity for CCTV and try to tap into them and work a path either forwards or backwards to work out where the girl came from and went to. Lots of security footage self-held on self-contained systems still, sandboxed from the outside world. It was safer that way. It was also a pain in the arse for Laura.

  That was where old-fashioned police work, canvassing the scene, walking the beat, paid off. Which, of course, was why Peter Ash was in a hurry to get to Berlin instead of Tallinn. He was like a magpie chasing the next shiny thing sometimes.

  She needed coffee to help her think.

  She was surprised to find Magnus at the machine, the news playing silently on the TV behind him. He saw her and made a second cup.

  The report about Gerhart Schnieder’s indiscretion came on again.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ the big Dane asked, shaking his head. ‘Might as well sub
title it Man With World At His Feet Fucks Up Again.’

  ‘Not exactly newsworthy though, is it?’

  ‘Everything is grist to the machine, Laura. Everything. It sees all. Knows all. And in the end destroys all.’

  ‘That’s a bleak outlook on life.’

  He grinned. ‘I come from a place where it is dark more than half the year. Life is bleak.’

  ‘Do they know who the girl is?’

  ‘Not as far as I know, though as you’d expect Twitter is going wild over it. There’s a mob of them out there hunting like they’re all suddenly paparazzi.’

  ‘Because places like Hello! will pay a small fortune to get at her first.’

  ‘Someone knows who she is. My money’s on the bodyguard, because they didn’t just drive away from there, did they? And he’s a high-profile guy, we’re talking government car, government-sanctioned affair. They just didn’t expect to get caught on camera, because some people are just idiots.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  Magnus walked to the screen just as the image froze on Cristiana’s striking face. ‘You see this guy?’ He pointed at a man in a suit a couple of steps to the side of Schnieder. ‘See the bulge in the jacket, that’s his gun. Plain, serviceable suit. Secret Service bodyguard.’

  The image on the screen changed too quickly for her to see the bulge properly, but she trusted the Dane’s eye.

  She turned back to face him, only to see that he was flashing a pearly white smile.

  ‘What’s so funny?

  ‘I’m cheating. I’ve met him. His name’s Jakob. Schnieder came here when this building was opened.’

  ‘Cheating or not, you’ve a decent memory for faces.’

  ‘Do you think he’s the kind of guy who’d tattle to the press for a quick payday?’

  ‘There’s not a payoff big enough.’

  ‘That’s my thinking, too. So, just random bad luck, or someone else tipped them off and made sure there was at least grainy cell-phone footage to end Schnieder’s career.’

  ‘Makes you wonder who he’s pissed off, doesn’t it?’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  ‘Enjoy your run?’ The young guard laughed as she approached. His rifle was slung over his shoulder now. He was very much at ease. Enjoying himself.

  ‘I think I’m going to puke,’ she said. ‘I’m so out of shape it’s not funny.’

  ‘Well, if you feel like stretching your legs tonight, I’ll go with you. I know a decent track through the forest. Much more interesting route. And I can make sure that you don’t get lost.’

  A little voice inside her head damn near shrieked out its steer-clear warning, but he was exactly what she needed right now. She needed to gain his trust. Even if that meant putting herself directly in harm’s way.

  Not that she expected him to tell her what had happened to Irma, or who the body in the forest was. That would be too easy. But get him onside, get him to trust her, and maybe, just maybe, he’d let his guard down and she’d see or hear something she shouldn’t.

  She offered him a smile she hoped was just the right shade of cheeky to work, and said, ‘My mother warned me about going into the woods with men like you.’

  ‘Did she now?’

  ‘Lucky for you I’ve never done anything my mother told me.’

  He burst out laughing at that and shook his head.

  ‘In that case, I’ll see you back here at six thirty, assuming you’re up to it.’

  ‘Always. But right now, the shower block is calling. I stink.’ Frankie turned her back on him and walked over to her cabin, knowing full well he didn’t take his eyes off her.

  There were sounds of movement coming from a couple of the other rooms in the block. People were beginning to wake. It wouldn’t be long before there was a queue for the bathroom and the shower was out of hot water, so she bounced up the short flight of wooden steps and went inside, making sure she was the first in.

  By the time she emerged, wrapped in a towel, a couple of the other girls were waiting in the corridor.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s what sisters do,’ one of them said. ‘They hog all the hot water so the sleepy heads have to take a cold shower.’ But she said it with a chuckle. Frankie was surprised at how quickly she’d shucked off the outsider status; maybe it was because she’d sat with Alina? Well, for whatever reason, she was one of them now.

  One family.

  One World.

  Back in her room she dressed in the ill-fitting uniform of the sect, and worked the muscles in her legs. In truth, she’d barely broken a sweat.

  There was a tentative tap on her door.

  ‘Come in,’ she called. ‘I’m decent.’

  The door open. The girl behind it made no move to enter. ‘Hi, Ceska,’ she said. It was Tania, Alina’s sister. ‘I heard you looked after Alina last night. Thank you. I don’t know what you said to her, but she’s happier than I’ve seen her in a while.’

  ‘We just had a chat. Honestly, it was no big deal. I did what anyone would do.’

  ‘But you did it, not anyone, and it is a big deal. To me anyway. If there’s anything I can do, anything, you only have to ask. Promise me you’ll ask.’

  ‘I promise,’ Frankie said, and the other girl slipped back out of her room and closed the door behind her.

  Half an hour later they were all gathering round for breakfast and this time everyone wanted to talk to her.

  How things could change in twenty-four hours. There was a genuine warmth around the table now. The chatter continued throughout their shared eating time, as they drank their juices and black coffees and breakfast teas. The meal itself was a step up from the soup-kitchen fare, with eggs, cooked meats, fresh breads, cheeses, and plenty of fruit. There was choice. It might not be fine dining, but it was considerably better than the girls around the table had been eating before they found One World.

  It was easy enough to say forget the experiences that brought you to the compound, but much harder to do. Suffering was ingrained. Hardship carved scars into the soul. Some of this stuff couldn’t be forgotten. What they really meant was don’t talk about it. Don’t share the hells that caused you to run, because now you’ve stopped running. One World wanted this place to be some sort of oasis, a safe place. Somewhere the bad stuff didn’t happen.

  When the remnants of breakfast were being cleared away, Charles entered. He rubbed his hands together briskly as he looked around the faces, like he was trying to warm himself up.

  ‘Good morning, everyone. I do hope you had a good night and are fully rested. I’ve got a treat for you this morning. I didn’t want to say anything last night because I wasn’t sure what time The Shepherd would walk amongst us, but John arrived while you were all asleep, so very soon he’ll be coming through to talk to us all.’

  There were smiles on the faces of most of the girls, hungry to experience his coercive charisma again, like a drug they’d been off too long.

  ‘Before that though, I need to speak with each of you individually. Remember, I asked you to think about whatever special skills or talents you might have to offer? I know it will take a little longer one on one, but we’ve got time and this way everyone is free to talk.’ Plenty of nods around the table. ‘Another thing I want you to think about when you give your testimonies is if you’ve seen any special talents in the others, anything they might be too shy to say about themselves, or might not even know. Sometimes it takes the eyes of loved ones to help us see the best in ourselves.’

  There were a few more nods, like he was imparting great wisdom and they were eager to soak it up.

  She didn’t like his choice of words as much as anything; words like ‘testimonies’ carried a duality, first as their truths, but more often in her world as their confessions.

  Three or four of the girls glanced around, Alex and Tania looked in Frankie’s direction. It was instinctive, and she could happily have done without the attention.

  FORTY-NINE
r />   Laura didn’t know if she would be able to do it.

  And if she could that didn’t mean she should.

  The risk was that she’d get hauled upstairs and made to explain her actions. It was one thing to pull this kind of shit when they’d been back in River House and no one was looking over their shoulders, but now they’d taken up residence in the custom-built Division office that had them all under one roof it was so much more difficult not to think of themselves as part of a much bigger team.

  Would Akardi, their ODA, buy the justification that the endgame was more important than playing by the rules?

  Probably not.

  But better to be slapped on the wrist for doing something that worked than told you can’t do it in the first place, right?

  She took her capsule coffee back to her desk.

  She knew what she needed to do.

  The key, she hoped, that would keep her safe from serious breach recriminations, was her prying was retrospective. She wasn’t digging into future itinerary, nothing that could be useful for a potential terrorist threat.

  It was the finest of fine lines.

  ‘Here goes my glittering career,’ she muttered, not realizing she’d said the words out loud.

  In a matter of moments she was lost in her work.

  She’d expected it to be considerably harder to get at this stuff than it actually was. In a couple of minutes she’d proved the theory, at least.

  What she needed was there: all ministerial cars had GPS monitors installed, logging all routes the cars covered. The idea was that in the event of a kidnapping using the vehicle or theft of the car, the security services would have immediate access to up-to-the-second location data.

  It wasn’t so much different from what she’d done with Frankie, looking back over her movements since she went active in Tallinn. The difference here was that she was spying on a Government minister, and her neck was very much on the line.