Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (3 page)

“Well, as long as you're sure.” Paul McCabe turned up the collar of his coat. “Oof. Dirty old night. Everett, if you do get something from your father, would you be so good as to let me know? It may not make any sense to you, but it might to us. It could help. You will let me know, won't you? Thanks. Good night, Laura.”

He pulled the door hard against the wind.

“Well, what was that about?” Laura asked. “I always thought he was a strange little man.”

That's what that was about, Everett thought. Those last two questions. The rest was just polite games.

The visitor had left almost all his tea.

H
ow Everett had missed the ping from the drop box: he had been trying to identify Paul McCabe's soft voice at the front door. He hadn't used it much recently anyway: file swapping at school had gone quiet since Aaron Leigh got a threatening letter from Viacom's lawyers. But there was the button bouncing up and down on the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. A file was waiting. A touch took Everett to his drop box on a server in Iceland.

“Everett!” Laura had this way of putting an emphasis on the end of his name and going up in tone when she wanted him to know she was exasperated.
Everette
. “Lights out. School day tomorrow.”

“Okay, Mum.” It was nothing to knock off the light and dive under the duvet to read by screen glow. It reminded Everett of when he was a small kid, face lit by screen-shine, the duvet propped up like a tent by his clunky old netbook turned up on its side like a proper book, the display switched to vertical, watching the Dr. Who rerun on iPlayer. It had always been best on winter storm nights like this, with sleet slashing across the windows and the wind rattling the gutters. Down under the duvet had been another world then. Everett-world.

There was a single folder in the drop box.
Infundibulum
. No sender information in the check box. Date: eight pm this evening, as Everett was sitting across a table from Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan in Belgravia police station. Size: thirty gigabytes. He opened the folder carefully, ready to back out should anything computer-eating spring out. Inside was a data folder, an executable, and a note in Notepad. It didn't look like a scam. Malware liked to disguise itself as a game or an update. Malware disguising itself as anti-malware was as clever as it got. This just sat there, a big obvious executable. Everett flicked up a clever piece of software he'd traded from Abbas in school. It tracked IP addresses. From that he could identify the sender. Abbas's software came up blank. The address had been made anonymous. Something like iPredator, Everett thought, a Swedish site that encrypted IP addresses and kept them safe from prying eyes. This was starting to get exciting.

Nothing else for it. Everett clicked the download button. There was no save or run option. The executable installed as it downloaded. The screen went crazy with dozens of green timer bars, filling in the blink of an eye, unpacking and unfolding into new icons and menus. Data was downloading from the drop box as fast as the wireless link and the house broadband could handle it.

“Whoa, whoa,” Everett said, trying to click close-boxes. It was fast, too fast even for him. This was a full metal assault on Dr. Quantum.

“Everett? Are you still on that computer?”

Say nothing. Admit nothing. Everett tried to catch the hurtling installation panes. For every one he hunted down, trapped against the edge of the screen, and closed, a new one opened. The screen went dead.

“No,” Everett whispered, filled with dread that he had truly killed his computer.

Dr. Quantum blinked, then rebooted. There was a new icon on the desktop, front and centre. A single white tulip.
Infundibulum
. Everett breathed out, a long, slow sigh.

“What are you?” Everett breathed. He tapped the icon twice. The tulip blossom unfolded into digital petals. The screen filled with moving translucent veils of light, folding around each other, merging like slow waves breaking, passing through one another, spilling off sprays of ghostly silver pixels. Everything was movement and change. As soon as Everett began to grasp a pattern the banners of light morphed into something unpredictable and new. Everett thought of dragonfly wings, eerie jellyfish, translucent flower petals, the clouds of interstellar gas you saw in photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, ghosts of ghosts. He thought of the shimmering, flickering curtains of the aurora borealis high above the Arctic night. Then he saw the scale, a hair-thin cross at the centre of the screen. It drew three dimensions: left to right, down to up, front to back. A small palette of tools hovered at the edge of the window. Everett picked the magnifying glass and zoomed in on the horizontal axis. At each level of magnification, the images were the same: veils of light, like wings, or angels, or the glowing tendrils of vast space gods. In and in: the same. It looked no different. Big patterns were made of smaller patterns were made of tiny patterns. It was veils of light all the way down.

He'd seen this before. It was when he was a kid. He'd been on the home computer when he'd opened a programme because he'd liked the look of a word:
Mathyka
. It sounded like a book of spells or a gateway to a magic world. It had opened up a gateway, not into a mystical realm but into forever. Everett now knew that the black beetle-like object at the centre of the screen surrounded by halos and streamers of brilliant colours like lightning bolts was called a Mandelbrot set. He could programme one—it was easy. He'd seen that the bolts of colour that cracked off from the points of the black beetle-thing contained little black specks in them. When he zoomed in on one of those specks, it was another little black beetle, complete with coloured halos and lightnings, complete with specks, which when he zoomed in, were black beetle shapes, with haloes and lightning bolts and specks that became beetles with…In and in and in and in. He had a scream-dream that night. He was falling through the dark eye at the centre of the Mandelbrot set, falling through a lightning storm of colours and black eyes that opened into whole new Mandelbrot sets, on and on and on.

“How far does it go?” he'd asked his dad.

“All the way. It never ends.”

This wasn't a Mandelbrot set, though he could see now that it was built from that same Mathyka software that Tejendra used to model his theories of how the universe worked. This was…

“Infundibular,” Everett whispered, in the screen-light, under his duvet, with a mid-December storm gusting and howling around the eaves. He remembered where he'd heard that word before.

Tejendra had been a late convert to Dr. Who. He became a fan after he had a place of his own, where he could watch without Laura shaking her head at the geekiness of it all. It was all right for kids, but for grown men…After a Saturday game, or a wander up the Lea Valley, Everett and his dad would sit down and watch the show while their latest culinary creation evolved on the hob. “Infundibular,” Tejendra had said. “That thing, that police box. Bigger on the inside than the outside. It's easy in maths, having things that are much bigger on the inside than the outside. Now, if they were really clever, they'd make it properly infundibular, which is, the farther you go in, the bigger it gets. There'd be a smaller box inside that box, but that box would be bigger on the inside than the one containing it, and inside that one, a smaller box that was even bigger inside and so on, all the way down, so that by the time you got to the centre, it would be smaller than an electron but inside it would be bigger than the entire visible universe.”

Infundibulum. The farther in you go, the bigger it gets. There was no doubt in Everett's mind about who had left the anonymous folder in his drop box. Neither was there any doubt that this was what Paul McCabe had been asking about with his parting question. He had tried to make it sound so offhand, but it was the only reason he had come to the house. Sudden fear knotted at the base of Everett's stomach. Paul McCabe knew about this Infundibulum, and it was important to him. Did he know what it was? To Everett it was eerie mathematical patterns, sent by his father to him and him alone. To Paul McCabe it was important enough to drive an hour and a half around the M25 to slide it in as a casual aside. Did he not have access to it? Had Tejendra not wanted him to have it? Had Tejendra not trusted his own department head with it? Was Everett the only one Tejendra could trust with it?

Everett clicked down the silent, swirling hypnotic ghost-patterns. He went back to the drop box. The file had been uploaded at eight. Tejendra had been driven away in the black Audi at six. Everett was sure that whoever kidnapped him would not have handed him a laptop and said,
Sorry, we forgot, go on, please upload that file of abstruse mathematics
.

He remembered the attached note. Four words:
For you only, Everett
. No name, no signature, no greeting or sign off.
For you only, Everett
.

Thoughts, theories, suspicions swept Everett up like a strong current. He knew this state of mind too well, when he seemed to think without thinking, ideas and connections and possibilities scampering away from him like ferrets escaping from a sack. It was usually when he read a line in a book or on a blog, or the real world surprised him, in the stop-start-stop rhythm of traffic jams up Stoke Newington High Street, or the patterns the starlings made as they flocked and swooped over Hackney Marshes. His thoughts exploded outwards like a firework. He understood something about the way the world worked.

Tejendra must have set the file to automatically upload. But he couldn't have known that this was the day he would be kidnapped. He must have set a dead-man's switch. If he didn't enter a code, most likely at a set time every day, the Infundibulum folder would be uploaded. The folder would go to Everett. Not to Laura, or his friend Vinny who had the next season ticket seat at White Hart Lane, or any of his colleagues or students at the university, not even to Colette. Not to Paul McCabe. To Everett. His dad must have suspected that something like what had happened could happen. He must have suspected that he was in danger. Danger of kidnapping, Everett wondered, or something worse? He wished the thoughts would stop galloping through his head. He wished they would stop whispering things he didn't want to hear, showing him things he didn't want to imagine. When had his dad planned this? How long had he lived with the fear of the men following him, the black car? Had it been before he and Laura split up? Parents kept secrets inside secrets, Everett realised.

“Non-nuke,” Everett muttered under his breath. “He doesn't build atom bombs, so he's not important. As if.”

The bedroom felt huge and dark and under siege. The glowtube decorations turned his jacket, hung on the back of the door, into a killer attack bot from hell. For the first time since he was a small kid, Everett felt afraid in the dark. Eyes in every corner. Monsters under the bed. There could be a black car outside, remotely scanning the room for every keystroke and tap he made on Dr. Quantum's interface. Sleep would never come this night. Everett waited until the line of light from under his mum's bedroom door went out, then slipped out from under the duvet and went silently down the landing. He knew the location of every creaking board and noisy stair. He clutched Dr. Quantum to his chest. He couldn't leave it. He'd never be able to leave it. Even as he opened the fridge to rummage for cheese slices and yoghurt drink, he kept one eye on the tablet on the kitchen table. He hugged it to him as he called up a Modern Warfare BlackOps duel on Xbox Live. He couldn't concentrate. His reactions were Dad-slow. His ass got kicked again and again, but he kept playing and playing, dying and dying.

In the morning Laura found Everett asleep on the sofa with the Xbox humming and the Christmas tree lights blazing, Dr. Quantum pressed hard against the side of his face.

T
he police came round for breakfast. Victory-Rose was milk-moustached and chocolate-bearded with Coco Pops. Chris Evans was rattling on the radio. Everett was fuzzy and muzzy from bad sleep, but he knew it was police at the front door even before they rang the bell, briskly, twice. Their streetlight silhouettes behind the glass were too close together, one tall, one small, one man, one woman. Police and Mormon missionaries stood like that. Everett scraped the last of the Flora out of the tub and spread it on his toast. Low-fat spread melted strangely, separating into globules of fat and water.

“Freezing out there,” D. S. Milligan said. “High pressure must have come in in the night. I'd give yourself a good half-hour extra on the school run. Might even get a white Christmas. Is that coffee? Any chance?”

Everett poured him a Tottenham Hotspur mugful. Leah-Leanne-Leona sat down opposite Everett.

“Have a seat, why don't you,” Everett said. “Have you found him?” Victory-Rose frowned at these big people in their dark coats bringing cold into her home. She might burst into tears at any moment. Laura sat down, positioning herself behind the cereal packets to hide her vest top and shameful saggy trackies.

“Sorry, Everett,” Leah-Leanne-Leona said. Everett sized her half-smile, her screwed-up pig eyes, the little kick of her foot. You really really hate me, Everett thought.

“We have had a look at the photographs on that memory card you gave us,” Moustache Milligan said. Laura turned the radio down. “Is there some of that toast going? You couldn't stick on a couple of slices?”

Laura got up to drop two slices of whole grain into the toaster.

“You wouldn't have white, would you?” Moustache Milligan asked.

“This is a hi-fibre household,” Laura said firmly.

“I'll need it back,” Everett said.

“What?” Moustache Milligan said through coffee.

“The memory card.”

Leah-Leanne-Leona slid a transparent vinyl CD sleeve across the table.

“We've got everything we need off it. We had a good look at your photographs on our image enhancement software. Would you like to see the prints?”

She set her briefcase on the breakfast table, making room between the cafetiere and the milk carton. She took out a big glossy high-resolution print of the number plate.

“We ran a trace on the number. It belongs to a Mr. Paul Stefanidis from Hounslow. He supplies Cypriot goods to restaurants and corner stores.”

“So?”

“It's hardly likely your dad was kidnapped by an Eastern Mediterranean grocer.”

“They can clone plates. Ringers, all kinds of things like that.”

“Everett, this is Mr. Stefanidis's car. He drives an Audi. He was driving up the Mall at the time you said—you did photograph his car. He was on his way to a dinner of the London-Cyprus Business Forum.”

“What are you saying? I made this up?”

The toast sprang up. Everyone started at the sudden noise. Laura scooped two slices onto a plate and set them down in front of D. S. Milligan.

“Ah lovely. Any butter? I know it's not supposed to be good for you, but that spread stuff just tastes chemically to me.”

“We're a polyunsaturate household,” Laura said. Milligan noisily scraped half-fat spread from the freshly opened tub across his toast.

Leah-Leanne-Leona produced another glossy photograph, set it on the table, and turned it around to face Everett. It was his parting shot of the back window, the three bodies framed in it. Three backs of heads, all dark haired. Three upper torsos, all clothed in dark fabric.

“This isn't right,” Everett said. “Dad was in his bike gear. He was wearing his hi-viz rain jacket. It was bright yellow.”

“Well, Everett, we work a lot with photographs from members of the public. A lot of them are taken on the fly, on mobile phones, in all kinds of light and weather conditions. They don't have time to focus or zoom or even frame properly or anything like that. You'd be amazed at what people think they've photographed, that, when we run our expert eyes over them, really aren't there at all.”

“You changed it.”

“What's the resolution on your camera, Everett?”

“Four megapixels. And a 4x digital zoom.”

“And you were zoomed in.”

“Of course I was zoomed in.”

“And it was raining.”

“Yes. So?”

Leah-Leanne-Leona pointed to a teardrop shaped flaw on the right edge of the photograph. The bottom of the droplet was an arc of gold.

“That's a raindrop on the lens.”

“It was raining. I said that.” He knew where this was going. There was no way out. They had him, at the kitchen table, in front of his mum and his kid sister. They would take it apart pixel by pixel.

“What colour are the street lights, Everett?”

“Yellow. Sodium-vapour lamps.”

“So it's possible that another raindrop on the lens, over that figure in the middle seat, might have caught the streetlight and made it look yellow.”

“You changed it.”

“Here's the original.” The policewoman slid it into position beside the enhanced shot. It was a blow-up, big enough to show the pixel grain. There it was, the size of his thumb and as unmissable: a drop, a tear, a drip of rain right over Tejendra in the back of the car, distorting the image, filling it with diffracted yellow street light. That didn't happen. That was not what I saw, Everett thought. You changed that too.

“I didn't make this up. Why would I make this up? Why would I photograph a complete random stranger's car?”

“Begging your pardon, Mrs. Braiden, but family problems can make us do strange things,” Milligan said. There were toast crumbs in his moustache.

“
Mizz
Braiden,” Laura said stiffly. She was furious, she was humiliated; the police had called her son a liar and a fantasist at her own kitchen table and seen her in her baggy trackies and vest top and her own daughter with her mouth ringed brown with Coco Pops. “And we are not a problem family.”

“Well, I'm glad that's cleared up.” Leah-Leanne-Leona scooped the photographs back into her briefcase. “But we really want you to know, Everett, that your dad is still classified as a missing person and we will continue to investigate this case.” She stood up. Moustache Milligan hastily abandoned his second slice of toast.

“Thanks for the toast and coffee,” he said. “Best meal of the day, breakfast.”

Laura saw them out. It was light now, and Everett saw them drive off in a Skoda. Cops in reasonably priced cars. While Laura was at the door Everett took the memory chip up to his room and pushed it into Dr. Quantum.

“Everett.” Her voice from the hall was tight and angry.

“In a minute.”

“Not in a minute. Now.”

“I'm doing something.” He opened the image on the chip the police had returned to him, then the image he had sent to himself while waiting in the police station.

“I don't care what you say you're doing. I want to talk to you.”

“I'm doing something!” He moved the images next to each other, adjusted the sizes to match perfectly.

“We need to talk, Everett. This is making Vee-Arr very unhappy.” When Everett's mum was very very angry she dropped her voice and talked Oprah speak.
Classic passive-aggressive
, they said on Divorcedads.com. “Everett, I had two police in my kitchen asking me for toast and butter and calling us a problem family. Now will someone please tell me what is going on?” Everett expanded photographs with thumbs and forefingers, tapped up the magnification. Tappety tap tap. Creakety-creak-creak. The noisy board on stair number four. She was coming upstairs now.

“Everett…”

There.
There
. He met his mother on the landing. He held Dr. Quantum up in front of him.

“I'm not a liar.”

“Everett…”

“I photographed what I photographed. There. Look. I sent myself a copy before I gave the chip to the police. This is the original. There's no raindrop there. That Dad's back; that's Dad's head. They put the raindrop in.”

“What are you saying, Everett? I don't know what you're saying.”

“The police lied, Mum. They lied about the photograph. They probably lied about Mr. Cyprus Grocer Man. They sat down there at the table and lied and tried to tell you it was me was the liar.”

Laura put her hands up to her mouth. She sat down on the top step and leaned against the banister.

“Oh, God. I cannot cope with this.”

Everett settled on the carpet. He too leant against the banister. He felt like the bottom of his heart had opened and everything it had held, all the certainty and trust and joy and solidity, had spilled out into a gulf of doubt. Even toast and spread and breakfast radio was tainted.

“Let me see that.” Everett passed Dr. Quantum to his mum. She traced the details of the photographs with her fingertips. “Why?”

“I don't know.” It was a lame answer. It was not an answer.
Why
was not the question. The question was
what
. What happens next? Everett had chased that question to terrible conclusions. Leah-Leanne-Leona and Moustache Milligan might not know who had taken Tejendra—they might even believe what they had been told to sell to the Singhs over the breakfast table—but the people who had ordered that a raindrop be added to Everett's photograph knew. People who could boss the police around knew. People who knew that, when Tejendra came back, he would blow their lie sky-high. People who therefore knew that Tejendra could not expose them that way. People who knew that Tejendra could not come back. At each understanding Everett felt himself lifted higher, seeing farther. If only he could stop seeing the connections sometimes. If only he could stop thinking. He could never stop thinking, seeing those connections. It was what made him Everett Singh. The people who could order the police to tell lies, the people who had disappeared Tejendra, they didn't know that. Their mistake.

“I'll find him.”

“Everett, love, no.”

“I'll find him.”

“Everett, you can't do that.”

“I'll find him, right!”

Victory-Rose had got down off her chair and wandered to the foot of the stairs. Mummy and Evtt, as she called her big brother, were up on the landing together. At the sound of Evtt's raised voice she began to cry.

“Rosie darling, I'm coming.” Laura's whisper to Everett was low, but every word was clear. “You are not to do this. Do you understand me? You are not to do this. This is not a game. He's gone and I don't know where he's gone and I don't know why he's gone and I don't know what's going to happen and I don't know anything except that I am very very afraid and I am so scared that if you get involved, if you ask too many questions, if you tell the wrong people they're lying, you'll go too.”

“You believe me?”

“I don't know what I believe, but I am so very very scared, darling.”

Victory-Rose was crying hard now, and as Laura went to her Everett saw her shoulders tense and shake and he realised that she too was crying: crying for him.