Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (3 page)

‘And that’s your only name?’ he says.

‘Sorry what?’

Goon Two – Acne – for some reason flips out.

‘
Do you have an online alias?
’ he barks.

‘All right, all right, Jesus! I go by Nightshade. No secret.’

She pulls out her hands to make a
calm down
gesture, palming her phone in the process. Racist writes in his notebook while Acne smirks at her.

‘
Nightshade
,’ he says. ‘Is that what you’d call emo?’

‘It’s what I’d call why is this your business?’

Acne flares red but Racist puts out his hand, shutting the guy down. Or this is just some good cop/bad cop routine.

‘Only Nightshade?’ says Racist.

‘How do you mean,
only
?’

What does this guy know? She’s sure as hell not telling him her other online identities. The cop’s eyes bore into her.

‘And is there anybody else in this building at this time?’ he says.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I think maybe six guys just muscled in and pushed me about and tried to smash up my phone. But other than that – no.’

There’s a long silence then Racist slowly closes his notebook and pockets it. Murmurs to Acne, who starts to chivvy the other four police, all whispers. Acne turns to Dani.

‘Can my men access the rest of the building from there?’ he asks, pointing to the stairwell and lift.

‘They – yes, but they’ll need a swipe,’ she says.

She wiggles her card out of its lanyard and passes it to Acne, who sends the men off with it. Why is she helping them? Acne and Racist look down on her like proud parents.

‘Your cooperation is appreciated, Miss Farr,’ says Racist.

He walks over to perch beside her on the reception desk, shedding his big-guy swagger like he’s shucking off a coat. The change betrays a subtlety Dani hadn’t guessed at. So far anger has kept her fuelled. Kindness could paralyse. She stands up again, folding her arms and tucking her phone by her side. Even standing, she’s only eye-to-eye with the seated cop.

‘OK?’ she says. ‘So?’

‘So. Are my colleagues going to find anyone upstairs? A woman perhaps?’

His voice is soft, north-western. She stares him out until he shrugs and tries another tack.

‘I’m right in saying the social network called Partly is operated from these premises?’

Dani wants to keep up the silence but she needs to correct him. People ought to name things correctly. She nods at the Parley logo on the wall behind him.

‘Par
ley
,’ she reads to him. ‘Not Partly
.
As in talking peace.’

Off to her side Acne flexes his fingers. He’s working out seven different ways to kill her with his hands.

‘Par
ley
,
then.’ Racist is unflustered. ‘It is controlled from here?’

Dani screws up her face.
Controlled
?
How to answer such a noobie question without swearing or taking the piss? Racist draws a long breath and exchanges a look with Acne.

‘Look. Miss Farr.’ Ms. ‘There’s a serious incident taking place right now on your Partly system.’ Dani prepares to interrupt but he holds up his hands. ‘Par
ley.
And we’re here to stop it. We will stop it.’

She blinks at his massive face. His eyes are gently grey.
An incident
? He takes another breath.

‘So,’ he says. ‘Tell me –’

He has his little notebook out again. Something important is coming.

‘– is the Parley user known as Sick Girl in this building?’

‘Is the – excuse me? You’re asking what?’

‘I’m asking where I can find this user Sick Girl. We have reason to believe she’s in this building.’

‘You what? She bloody isn’t.’

‘If you’re so sure of that, how about you tell me where she is? Name, address and phone number. And while you’re at it can you shut off her Parley account, please.’

Dani realises her jaw is hanging open. She shuts it.

‘You’re serious?’ she says.

‘Yes, Miss Farr, this is extremely serious. In the last seven hours this Sick Girl has made a series of accusations about a government minister, published a string of confidential government documents and she’s showing no sign of stopping this behaviour. We would appreciate—’

‘No, as in: you’re not joking? You want me to give you sic_girl’s
phone number
?’

In spite of everything she starts to laugh. The furious face of the policemen only makes it crazier. She can’t stop.

‘I fail to see –’ says Racist.

Dani gulps in air to get hold of herself.

‘That is so –
ha!
Would you like Super Mario’s number, too? I think I might have Lara Croft’s!’

The policemen exchange a look.

‘Those,’ says Racist in the voice of a man imparting great wisdom, ‘are fictional characters, Ms Farr.’

That shuts Dani up for just a second. Then her cheeks fill up again with lulz.

‘And sic_girl isn’t?’ she manages.

Then she’s off again, with the gut-shaking laugh of the sleep-deprived.

¶riotbaby:

And im telling YOU, friend. Its just another part of their agenda. They want to own us and theyre taking us one piece at a time.

You think this is an isolated thing? This isnt isolated. Its a tiny part of a bigger plan. They won’t rest till they know everything about you. No secrets, no privacy.

And you want to know the worst of it? They dont even care we know. Theyll lie to our faces and theyll smile and smile.

You know what this point is?

This is the point where we start fighting back.

¶bottomhalfofthepage:

More lies from the party of you-turns and spin.

She is called Betterny but that does not mean she is better’n me.

LOL

No, I know that’s not how you spell it.

Three

John-Rhys Pemberton’s Blackberry sounded from under a pile of policy briefs beside his Party laptop. He decided to ignore it until he completed his sentence.

Not unusually, J-R had been up a while. Since 4:45, in fact. Perched on his sofa in boxers and socks, he bent forward over his Party laptop and tackled the previous day’s internal correspondence for Bethany Lehrer, the Minister of State for a Digital Society. A forgotten bowl of Shreddies coagulated at his feet as he deciphered Bethan’s handwritten notes and converted them into memoranda for the civil servants who ran her Private Office.

The first note was crammed onto both sides of a Doonesbury notelet.

1 a.m. (!!!)

I’m still working through my box and I’m frankly peed off. Can you please tell those jobsworths to stop abbreviating my official title on their submissions? This one is addressed to ‘MoS-aDS’. Sounds like MOSSAD! Basically they can write my title out in full. It isn’t THAT long?? Ta babes. Bethx

That was an easy one. In the memorandum, J-R had written:

1) The Minister notes that certain forms of abbreviated address have become standard on Ministerial Submissions, perhaps not entirely through design. Whilst appreciating the drive for brevity, the Minister asks that, in future, full official titles are used on all correspondence through her Office.

The next note was scratched out on Ministry of Technology notepaper.

Monday.

J-R, I’m completely caffeine starved. Can you persuade one of these brontosauruses to once in a while take a break from wiggling their mouses around and get me a skinny latte? Do they honestly expect me to down tools from running the country and wait in line with the spotty wonks in Prêt à Manger? Cheers ears. Bx

J-R had been struggling with this one for ten minutes. He’d got as far as:

2) The Minister is not unaware of the heavy workload of her Private Office staff, and greatly appreciates the efforts of the whole team in supporting her official duties. Nevertheless,

The cursor blinked useless after the comma. As the minister’s communications spad – special advisor – J-R’s role was meant to include speechwriting, drafting of lines-to-take on political issues and working with the civil servants on policy statements. To be fair, he did very often get to do these things and was still in awe of the responsibility and trust so placed upon him at the age of twenty-six. The Digital Citizen initiative he was currently working on was of national importance. Bethan, for all anyone could say of her, was decent and principled, and up until recently he’d trusted her as a mother, but a great deal of his time – generally the small hours of each morning – was spent diverting the floodwaters of her consciousness into language her officials could understand and respond to.

He’d taken to this court translator role with gusto; had picked up officialese like a native in a matter of days. If anything, he’d become too fluent. His friends, when he ever saw them these days, had begun to rag him when this new jargon crept into his pub vocabulary. They’d threatened to charge him five pounds every time he said, ‘I don’t disagree with that’ instead of ‘Yes’ – or ‘notwithstanding’ for ‘even so’ – or ‘whilst’ for ‘while’. He didn’t mind. A maturing speech denoted a new gravity. Underneath, they respected him for it, even whilst they teased him. The occasional hints he was able to drop about the business of Bethany’s office carried more import than the drudge-work most of them described, in their long days toiling at structured finance, audits or viral marketing – whatever those might be. None of them had advanced very far up their chosen food chains. J-R was at the heart of government.

He shook his head to clear it, stretched his arms, beat a tattoo on his tummy and was about to have another crack at the latte paragraph, when the BlackBerry started to buzz again somewhere out of view. He traced it to a spill of draft White Papers and extracted it. There were now five messages. He read the first, from fifteen minutes back:

Substance, meet fan. Dancing pigs unleashed on Teesside. How soon can you be here?

This was confounding, but it was from Big Krish – ergo, important. J-R fiddled the cursor to
Call contact.
Before the line had rung once, Krish’s Glasgow drawl kicked in.

‘J-R, thank feck. You ever hear of a social network called Parley?’

Krish was never one for pleasantries. J-R trotted to the still-dark bedroom in search of trousers.

‘I do occasionally venture into the twenty-first century,’ he said.

‘Sorry, aye. I need you at Parley pronto. No, before pronto. Get there yesterday.’

‘Because –?’

J-R tucked the BlackBerry between his shoulder and ear and rifled the wardrobe with the other. He prayed he had at least one ironed shirt.

‘Because some wee girl is on there just now, putting it about that our flagship programme has been hacked.’

Still holding the phone with his shoulder, J-R hopped across the half-lit room, struggling his right leg into a pair of suit trousers. His foot connected with something sharp.

‘
Yah!
’ he cried into the BlackBerry.

‘Jesus, man, don’t take it so hard,’ said Krish.

J-R stooped to extract the offending object from his foot. The spare nib for his cartridge pen. He’d been looking for that. He really should tidy.

‘No, it’s – I’m fine. What form are these accusations taking?

‘She’s linking to documents. Mebbe real, mebbe not.’

J-R froze with the sharp nib in his fingers. Documents? A data hack? For the last fortnight he’d been doing a serviceable job of not thinking about the wretched email that was burning a hole in his inbox. Now it pinged straight back into his mind. What precisely had Bethany sent that man, in the small hours of the night?

‘But is there substance?’ he asked. ‘
Have
we been hacked?’

Either Krish hadn’t heard or he chose not to answer.

‘OK, look,’ he said, ‘I’ve emailed you the address for Parley’s offices. Shoreditch. Take your beard wax – there be hipsters.’

Rubbing his clean-shaven jowls, J-R took the BlackBerry away from his ear and navigated to his emails.
Parley. 23 Martlet Street, London E1. Contact name: Jonquil Carter.
He returned the phone to his ear.

‘Got it. I’m there.’

‘And you’ll report back the second you have a thing.’

‘Yes, yes. And Krish –’

‘Aye?’

‘What’s all this about pigs?’

Snootlet! Porquette! Dip-Dap!

And Trottie, too!

If you’re wiggly

And not very biggly

Then you’re giggly

You’re giggly

A giggly giggly piggly!

‘Ay, ha ha, yes, that’s the song.
Giggly, giggly, giggly.
Oh, God, right? Ha ha! Proper off it!’

‘And your spam misery began as soon as you registered online for the government’s pilot Digital Citizen programme.’

‘Well, that was a while back, but now it does keep coming on. I can’t use a website except those wee pigs keep popping up. On my PC, on my phone, even here in the office. I log on. I think I’m OK for a while. Then I click on my Internet and it says
Piggle
instead of
Google
and there they are – those wee pigs dancing like a bunch of divvies. And I hear that
di-di-di-didididi-di
. Everything I click on after that, it’s pigs.’