This all rather suited him. Apart from that one time with the leg wound, he had never brought his work home with him; there had never been any need to. Home was where he went when he wasn’t being a Coureur, a solid hub about which to rotate a peripatetic lifestyle. He liked it here. He liked Lewis, and he even rather liked Angela, to the extent that she existed in his life at all. For all that he could never predict, from one week to the next, where work would take him, it was a settled life and he had it organised the way he liked it.
For example, all his jobs were delivered to an anonymised email account which deleted and rewrote itself twenty-eight times every day on an all-but-forgotten secure server in a basement at the Ministry of Defence. He was used to this, used to the familiar little ping on his phone as some new Situation was delivered.
He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a stringer had hand-delivered instructions to him.
It was also some years – not since his entry-level days as a stringer himself, in fact – since he had been asked to create a legend for someone.
He sat on the sofa and looked at the slip of paper he had extracted from between the pages of the brick-sized copy of
Atlas Shrugged
. Male. Caucasian. Light brown hair, hazel eyes. Height so and so, weight such and such. Name: Roger Curtis. And that was it. He was, in effect, being asked to build Mr Curtis from the pavement up.
Which, while undeniably interesting in an academic sort of way, was a bit pedestrian and quite a distance outside his usual briefs these days. On the other hand, it was stuff he could do without having to leave London. And the note included a URL and a set of code strings which gave him access to an operational account and a line of credit running to a little over a million euros.
That last gave him some pause. Operational funding was perfectly normal – one had to buy tickets, book hotels, sometimes hand out bribes – but the sum here was beyond his experience and it left him a little flatfooted. It was up to him who Mr Curtis was, but who wanted to be Mr Curtis for this fantastical amount of money?
The note also included a link to an online dropbox which contained a single notepad file with the words ‘I used to date the Rokeby Venus.’ A recognition string by which the recipient of the legend – or at least a go-between come to collect it – would make themselves known to him. This at least was perfectly standard. Everything about the job was perfectly standard. Except the money. The money stood out from the perfect standardisation like a sore thumb, and he had to ponder why whoever was wrangling this job had allowed that to slip by. A message?
This is important. Don’t screw up
? Or just simple honest carelessness?
Impossible to know. A job was a job. A quick check of his account confirmed that he had already been paid for it, and paid well.
Fair enough. Seth took out his phone and created a couple of new contacts, then disguised the bank URL and code strings as phone numbers and web addresses. He memorised Mr Curtis’s physical attributes. Then he ate the slip of paper and opened the copy of
Atlas Shrugged
at the first page.
After a dozen pages, he closed the book, got up, and dumped it in the kitchen bin. The stringer at the laundrette was right; it was terrible.
M
R
C
URTIS WAS
a Scot. That was the first thing he decided. Scottish independence had not been the simple, pain-free process envisaged by generations of SNP politicians, and many municipal buildings – including the record offices of a number of towns – had been torched in the Separation Riots and their documents and servers destroyed. There was an enormous black hole in Scotland’s public data, and it was a simple matter to insert a nonexistent person into it. It was also a bit of a cliché, but just because something is a cliché doesn’t make it untrue. Hundreds of thousands of real people had had all their personal data destroyed during the Riots too. He checked through newspaper files of the Separation, noted which record offices had been destroyed, which schools.
He took a train to Edinburgh – sat for an hour at the border post outside Berwick while Scottish customs officers searched the carriages for drugs and other contraband – and wandered the city for a couple of days, getting a feel for the place. He thought Scotland was having a bit of a rough time these days. The tail-end of North Sea Oil which the new state had inherited had become uneconomic to extract some years before, tourism hadn’t taken up the slack to the degree everyone had been banking on, and the big tech firms had fled Silicon Glen for more stable parts of Europe. The city, even its historic heart, was looking shabby and the locals looked grey and thin and unhappy. A debate had already begun at Westminster over whether to allow Scotland to rejoin England; the consensus seemed to be a resounding no at the moment. There were still English MPs with long enough memories to want to punish the Scots for leaving the United Kingdom in the first place.
Back in London, he did the hacking himself. He wardrove around the City and the West End, latching on to corporate hotspots whose encryption hadn’t been kept up to date, sat in nearby libraries and coffee shops and calmly inserted Roger Curtis’s birth and education information into the databases in Edinburgh. He backstopped the data with fragmentary bits about Mr Curtis’s parents – both deceased now, sadly – supposedly retrieved from riot-damaged servers and seared filing cabinets. In hacking terms, it was shooting fish in a barrel. Desperate for funds, the Edinburgh government had offered the country as a private data haven, but hadn’t bothered to upgrade its public data security for almost a decade. He breezed through the databases, tweaking and adjusting, and it was as if he had never been there.
University records were almost as easy. The United States was littered with the corpses of little failed colleges, particularly in the Midwest. Roger Curtis went to one of these, not far from Milwaukee. Of his classmates and tutors, a statistically-convincing number were now dead. Everyone else was scattered as far from Europe as possible, their trails becoming blurred and unreadable.
He left Mr Curtis’s work history vague. A year as an itinerant citizen journalist in South America. Some volunteer work with charities in Guatemala and Chile. Then back to Britain and a succession of small temporary jobs in London with firms which had now gone bust and whose details were sparse to the point of transparency. Most recently, a flat in Balham. Seth went south of the river and rented the flat himself in Mr Curtis’s name, then set about the dull minutiae of accumulating utility bills, making a slight nuisance of himself with the letting agents, getting a parking ticket in Tooting, and so on and so forth. He left as much room as possible for customisation by whoever came along later to drive Mr Curtis.
The whole thing took him about three weeks, and at the end of it he still had most of the operational funds left, which he felt professionally rather proud of. He gave the data one last tweak, left one last complaint about the drains with the letting agents, left a message in a Coureur dropbox that the legend was ready for handover, and headed to Padstow to spend the weekend with his sister.
A
T AROUND EIGHT
o’clock on Sunday night a previously-unknown wing of an almost-overlooked homegrown terrorist organisation blew up a signal junction box just outside Swindon.
The box, about the size of a shoebox, was a switch for about seventy optical cables carrying data from points and signals between London and Land’s End. The explosion, achieved by drilling a hole into the switch’s casing and then pouring in gunpowder obtained by opening up fireworks, was so discreet that it was only discovered the following morning when engineers located the cable break and went to repair it. At roughly the same time, a very vague and barely-literate press release claiming responsibility for the outrage began to make the rounds. Hardly anyone had ever heard of the culprits before, and no one ever heard of them again.
The signal break didn’t stop trains altogether, but it caused delays for an hour or so until a workaround was sorted out, and that caused a knock-on effect which meant that the six forty-five from Padstow, due to arrive in Paddington at ten o’clock, did not actually get into Paddington until almost midnight. Seth, lugging his weekend bag down the platform with the rest of the disgruntled passengers, avoided the enormous scrum at the taxi rank, left the station altogether, and walked down to the big hotels near the bottom of the Edgware Road, where there were always taxis aplenty. He waved one cab down as it made to pull into the rank beside the Marriott, slung his bag inside, and settled back against the seat with his eyes closed.
I
T WAS VERY
nearly one in the morning when Seth paid off the taxi outside his building in Farringdon and dragged his bag tiredly up the stairs. Kids from the local council estate had managed to bypass the street door’s lock again and they’d smashed all the lightbulbs on Seth’s landing. He could feel the glass crunch under his feet as he walked along by the dim light of his phone’s screen, and he made a note to tear a strip off the building’s security in the morning.
Outside his door, there also seemed to be something sticky mixed up with the glass. Seth grumbled to himself and unlocked the front door and stepped inside and immediately fell over something lying on the floor in the hallway.
Swearing at the top of his voice now, Seth got up and tried the hall light switch, but it didn’t seem to work so he took his phone out again and turned on its screen and by the light from that he saw Lewis lying on his back on the floor, his eyes open, a little black hole in his forehead and his face distorted as if it had been badly inflated. Under his head and shoulders was a big puddle of a dark liquid, which had run out under the door and onto the landing.
Seth’s mind refused to process any of this.
Nor would it process the hunched figure lying half in and half out of Lewis’s bedroom doorway, the barrette which had once been in its hair now tumbled against the skirting just outside the kitchen.
He heard glass crunch, behind him.
He turned and saw a dark figure detach itself from the shadows of the doorway opposite. By the light from his phone he saw that it was wearing tight-fitting dark clothing and carrying what appeared to be a pistol with a very long barrel. The figure raised the pistol and gestured with it and Seth raised his hands above his head. Another gesture, and Seth took a step back down the hallway as the gunman reached the doorway and raised the gun and pointed it at his head.
There was a soft coughing noise, and the top third of the dark figure’s head fountained off in a pattering spray of droplets and bits of bone and tissue. For a fraction of a second, the body remained upright, then its knees unlocked and it crumpled to the floor.
Seth stayed where he was, hands above his head, face spattered with gore.
After a few moments, another figure moved into the doorway. This figure was also holding a gun.
“Anyone else?” the figure asked.
Seth shrugged.
“I didn’t see anyone else about.” The figure stepped into the flat and nudged the gunman’s body with a toe. “Jesus Maria,” he said. “What a mess.” Now Seth could see him properly, he could see he was of medium height, quite unremarkable-looking. Unlike the gun he was holding, which looked like something knocked together in someone’s shed from bits and pieces of garden equipment, bits of hose and short lengths of two-centimetre copper piping.
He looked at Seth. “Put your hands down,” he said, and he closed the door behind him. “Is there anything in here you absolutely can’t live without?”
Seth shook his head and lowered his hands.
“Okay. Get changed, wash your face and get a coat. And hurry.”
Seth tipped his head to one side. “And you are...?”
His unremarkable-looking saviour looked at him. He shrugged, and that weird
improvised
-looking gun seemed to disappear into the folds of his coat.
“Call me Leo,” he said.
T
HERE WAS A
battered old Espace parked around the corner, and Leo had the key. Seth allowed himself to be put into the front passenger seat, watched himself do up the seat belt, watched through the windscreen as the early-morning streets began to unroll in front of him. He felt as if his life had suddenly become something he was watching from outside. He was faintly aware that he was trembling.
“That shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry it did,” Leo said, navigating them around the tricky one-way system and late-night pavement-diving drunks of King’s Cross.
Seth turned his head to look at the unassuming young man, found that he was quite unable to speak.
Leo glanced at him, then had to perform an emergency stop as a cab launched itself from the kerb without signalling in front of them. He did not, though, hammer the flat of his hand on the middle of the steering wheel in order to sound the horn, as another driver might. He muttered a few words Seth didn’t recognise, and let the cab go.
“One day,” he said to himself, “I’m going to come back here and revenge myself on the fucking drivers in this town.” His English was excellent, almost Received Pronunciation, but he had a faint accent Seth couldn’t place.
Seth said, “I’m going to be sick.”
Leo got the car stopped at the side of the road and helped Seth out and over to the mouth of an alleyway, where Seth threw up what felt like everything he had ever eaten and then knelt with his cheek pressed against the rough brickwork of a wall, sobbing while the world yawed and pitched around him.
Then he was in the car again, without remembering getting back in, and unfamiliar streets were opening up ahead of him in the streetlights and the red lights of vehicles ahead of him stretched up into a terrible unknown distance and Leo was talking again.
“I tried,” he was saying. “I tried to keep you all away from the flat, but I was having to improvise and it didn’t work. Your friends... I’m sorry. It didn’t work.”