Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (43 page)

The bookcase by his bed is all tattered old paperbacks. Makes sense, somehow, that he’d fetishise old stuff. Dani doesn’t have a single paper book in her whole flat, except tech manuals for C variants and UNIX. Something about Sam that he’s holding onto.

She props herself on an elbow so she can stroke his forehead.

‘Sam?’

‘Sure.’

‘Earlier on. What were you doing at the Flamingo?’

He doesn’t reply. She sits up on her elbow to look at him. He’s wary.

‘I got so mental last night,’ she says, ‘it made sense at the time for you to be there; but now I don’t get the logic?’

He’s looking at her as if she never spoke. Then he sits forward, breaking from her stroking, and draws up his knees.

‘Sam?’

‘OK, let’s think how to do this.’

‘What? No, let’s not think. Let’s answer Dani’s cocking question. What is this?’

‘I was hoping Graham had already said something to you, or—’

‘Gah! Sam, what the fuck? Why mention Gray?’

She stops. Of its own accord, her eye has diverted to the top shelf of his bookcase. Telling her she missed something there. Among the old books, some are new. There. Five matching spines with dayglo letters dancing down them.

GIGGLY PIGGLIES ON THE FARM.

GIGGLY PIGGLIES GO ON HOLIDAY.

‘Holy fuck,’ she says. ‘No. No way.’

GIGGLY PIGGLIES AT THE THEME PARK.

GIGGLY PIGGLIES AT THE CIRCUS.

Sam gets up and walks away from her.

‘Sam?’

He pulls on a pair of grey sweatpants. Trendy ones, not skaggy like Dani’s would be.

‘Sam!’ she says.

She pulls out the fifth book –
GIGGLY PIGGLIES AND THE LOST DOG
– and holds it up for him to see. He turns to look at it, nods slightly, then looks her in the eye.

‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘you told me you were capable of fighting the system but through other channels. Some shit like that.’

‘OK. Sure. So?’

She slaps the book down on the bedcovers. Places a finger on the glossy cover.

‘So tell me what you meant by that.’

He folds slim arms across his almost hairless chest.

‘Why don’t you tell me?’

¶riotbaby

Remember, children. Tomorrow, high noon.

Eighteen

It’s a one-man kettle.

The video hub room is a three-metre cube lined with cable-dangling equipment – all innards. It hangs mid-air between the inner and outer screens of 404 City, accessed by a boxed-in metal ladder and crawl space. Leo swiped himself into it less than a minute ago. Already the policeman is hammering on the locked door.

He pops out his flat-head screwdriver. Does it matter if they catch him? Does he have a choice? Three minutes tops before some Mondan rent-a-cop makes it up here to give the cop an access-all-areas pass as powerful as Leo’s. So he moves from rack to rack like a robot on a car assembly: click open a panel; flick lines out; bridge connections; snap the first Black Box into place; stow it deep in the gubbins where it won’t be seen. Close the panel. Onto the next node.

Another series of hammering blows. This guy loves making a noise. Or he’s very pissed. Pretty sure it’s both.

Here’s how Leo reasons now: if the copper catches him and figures out he came in here to fuck with the video kit, it’ll take like x nanoseconds to find his hidden warez and the gig is off.

Matter of fact, it doesn’t even matter if the cop catches Leo. If he knows what the kid’s been up to in here he’ll find the tech and so likewise.

So, logic: Leo needs the man not to work out what he’s up to.

Not that Leo’s looking to be caught. The image of the big cop, gun hard on Dani, rubber veins throbbing on his neck, is burned in his retinas. The guy will only be madder now.

So only one scenario works: the copper needs not to catch Leo and he needs not to work out why Leo was ever here.

So Leo needs two things: an escape route, and a diversion to distract the cop from his white-hat hack.

He reaches a posi screwdriver from the tool bag at his feet. His hand brushes cloth inside the bag: the banner – the one they never used at the demo this afternoon, still rolled up inside. Bingo: a diversion, right there. Thank fuck Leo never got to hang it out at the demo. Story logic: he needs a diversion, a diversion appears.

So, now: escape route. Leo doesn’t question that one will appear. Story logic says there is one.

At the bottom of the access ladder the cop shouts through the door in a hyper-reasonable hostage negotiator voice. It comes through as
wah-wah-wah wa-wah wah.
Leo isn’t listening anyway. He’s scanning walls and ceiling as he slides the fourth and final Black Box into place. He slams the array panel shut and twists the retaining clips into place. Brushes his hands together, job done. Then he spots it: a hatch, up in the corner of the ceiling. And a set of folding steps by the equipment rack. Poetry. He slips his screwdrivers back into the backpack and snaps shut his cases, then clambers up the steps to pop the hatch.

He pokes his head into the eye of a cable tornado. It twists in cascades up the vertical conduit he’d seen from outside. The space is barely lit, by grates set in the walls. It smells of solder and new-build. Its shielded-cable nerves carry signals to every pixel on the vast displays. Leo’s inside the biggest HDMI lead in the universe.

He ducks back into the hub room to retrieve his equipment cases and backpack, shoves them ahead through the hatch and climbs up to bury the cases in the rubber spew of cable. When he’s sure they can’t be seen he opens his backpack, pulls out the furled-up banner and stows the backpack, too.

From below, a friendly
beepity-beep
and the door smashes open. Time up. He slams the hatch shut. OK, story, where next?

Which is when he sees the ladder. He starts to climb it, up the conduit, through the tumbling video lines, banner tucked under his arm.

Logic says
up
is not the best way to escape from a thirty-two-storey building, but Leo’s caught in the certainty that says: here it is. Your hero moment. Ready for you to climb up the aluminium rungs of. Tomorrow everyone will know the name
identikid.

‘Leo Sandberg!’

What? No, not that name. Who shouted?

The hatch punches open down below: the cop, storming on his tail. How does he know the kid’s name? Leo tastes an acid jet of reality. Someone has grassed him. One of the crew? Undercover Met?

The cop barrels out of the hatch and catches sight of Leo, above him in the half-light. Leo starts climbing faster. His usual thing is to stunt in the open air, with mates and videophones close by so the cops don’t dare go heavy. In here it might as well be 1976. He’s in the guts of the enemy without a working phone. He climbs.

As the cop clangs up the bottom rungs, Leo stops at a panel in the wall. He heaves the handle and scrabbles through a narrow crawl-space. At the end, a second hatch. His dark-adapted eyes scream against the light as he pulls it open. He squeezes out onto a walkway running across the top of the abyss – crossing the roof of the Top Spot at the halfway point. Story logic. This is too good.

He slams the hatch shut, does his best to wedge it with a hooked aluminium pole hung on the wall. He hears the cop clanking up the ladder. He has thirty seconds tops. He turns and has a nanosecond of wrenching vertigo, then levels his internal gyro and jogs across the gantry bridge.

When he found the banner in his backpack, he figured he’d use it to explain why he was here in 404. He’d claim he was planning to hang it somewhere. They’d write him off as some Protester v1.0 and never suss that he’d hacked the video gear. But now he can actually hang the banner out across this walkway, then escape through Perce’s office using his magic swipecard. Perfect diversion, perfect escape.

As he runs he feels for the loose end of the banner. Winter, his girl, has sewn two dozen metal hooks along the top. He slows to lean over the handrail and, running smooth, he clicks the hooks on, one, two, three. The hatch rattles loudly. There’s a muffled shout. Leaning out over the gaping atrium he keeps sidestepping fast, never looking down, click, step, click, step, click, unrolling the banner as he goes and letting the heavy swags dangle down. The banner’s message is revealed to the space below, word by word:

_{YOU WHY}

_{WOULD PUT}

_{NOT YOUR}

_{PASS TRUST . . .}

He’s halfway done when the roll of banner slips from his arms. He fumbles the air for it, leaning out to pull it back, filling his arms with cloth. His hand has barely got a hold on the banner’s flailing end when a crash rings out, so close it could have come from inside his ear, echoing like a gunshot in a tunnel. Then that shout again.

‘
Leo Sandberg!
’

Instinct straightens his bent-over body. His simian muscles say that when his body straightens, his feet will be on the ground and he’ll stand up straight. But they aren’t and he doesn’t. The banner in his hands outweighs the traction of his trainers on the metal gantry floor.

Which is how, his hands still gripping the banner, Leo tips so gracefully forward across the handrail, turns in the air and begins to fall.

The banner unrolls as he arcs down from the gantry. When it hits full length, it jolts Leo’s arm, too hard for his fingers to grip. The banner wrenches from his hand and kicks away to billow proudly in the air above him. Leo tumbles backwards into the purified air of the atrium. As he falls, he looks up at the bully face of the receding cop leaning over the rail, his helpless arms stretched into the abyss – and at the banner as it flails below his feet. In two lines of Winter’s crisp hand-painted type it reads:

_{YOU WOULD NOT PASS YOUR DOOR-KEY TO THE FIRST MAN WHO ASKED FOR IT.}

_{WHY PUT YOUR TRUST IN A STATE THAT WOULD TAKE THE KEY TO YOUR OWN SELF?}

_{—ELYSE MARTINGALE}

Bummer in a way to be falling backwards and miss the main show but it’s good to see the banner. It looks pretty cool. Shame it’s only half-attached.

How awesome would it be right now to film this. But he doesn’t have his phone.

¶identikid

#

Nineteen

Dani shoves the window open with the butt of her hand and looks down at the empty street. Chill hits her blood like a shot of heroin. Sam’s silk dressing gown gives zero protection for her gooseflesh. She turns to where he sits with the sheets ground up around him, looking down at his folded hands. His neck muscles work as though he’s trying to swallow a bee.

‘So you’re running the sockpuppet?’ she says.

He looks up at her.

‘Huh?’

‘You’re this character
zero
?’

‘Well, Dani—’

‘Which is a stupid name, by the way. Is that some kind of William Gibson shit? Like
Count Zero
?’

‘William who?’

She kicks the bare sole of his foot. He yanks it away and smiles up at her in this massively patronising way.

‘I’m impressed though,’ he says. ‘Truly. How did you figure it out?’

More to the point,
what
did she figure out? There’s so much weirdness sloshing around, she can’t pin down exactly what Sam has and hasn’t done: who he is and who he isn’t.

‘I
was
going to tell you,’ he says. ‘You need to know that.’

‘Oh, yeah? Were you going to do that before or after you fucked me? Oh, wait. Too late.’

‘After this whole thing was over.’

‘Of course,’ she says. ‘
This whole thing.
As in you’re still up to something, right now,’ she says. ‘With Leo?’

He nods.

‘
Gah!
’ she
says, slapping her hands against her sides and striding off across the room. ‘I
knew
there was something screwy when I spoke to him after the demo. He was talking about something big about to go down – using this weird marketing speak. You know what it sounded like?’

She’s arrived back at Sam who’s still sitting in the same position on the low bed. He shakes his head.

‘It sounded like someone else was talking through him,’ she says. ‘And then guess who shows up at his karaoke club night? Mister Marketing Bullshit himself.’

‘
My
club night, strictly speaking. I’m the promoter.’

‘Of course you are, Sam.’

‘I
am
,’ he says, apparently stung. ‘We use them to raise funds for – activities.’

‘Activities. Right. But the weird thing? It still would have taken me forever to make the connection between you and Leo – maybe I never would have worked the whole thing out, except that just now I saw –’

She nods at where the Pigglies book still lies on the bed beside Sam.

‘Ah,’ he says, picking it up.

He opens the cover as though the title-page picture of cavorting pigs will help him answer some question.

‘Yes,’ he says, closing the book and setting it aside. ‘Not your standard bedside reading for a single adult male.’

‘It’s like it was shouting for my attention from the shelf. It took me a moment to see it but then it all made sense, for the first time this week. It was totally our Walter White/Hank Schrader moment.’

‘Uh?’ says Sam, genuinely puzzled.

‘Never mind.’

She kneels in front of him, eye to eye. The solution is rapidly taking shape, like when the knotty logic of a code routine flips suddenly to show a perfect, previously hidden form.