Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (48 page)

‘Shall we see?’

J-R put the phone down on the desk and grabbed for the mouse but Perce and his computer were too fast. The map zoomed back to City Road and a
John-Rhys Pemberton
icon pulsed in the location where Perce’s had stood. J-R regarded his own 8 icon. He didn’t see himself as having anything to hide – save the wealth of political information held inside his head – but seeing Perce’s pointer hover over that symbol made him wish he could wipe every record that existed about himself.

Perce turned to Mark.

‘OK, someone else.’

Mark gave Perce a level look and did not reply. J-R spoke up.

‘Dani Farr.’

J-R had no idea why he said that, but he wanted his own details off the screen. Perce’s expression was shocked. After a second he laughed like a dog coughing up a hairball.

‘Well, this’ll be interesting. I happen to know she blipped off our map a couple days ago. But let’s see. I’m going to do this different. Show you a cool feature.’

Here was a software capitalist in full-blown demo mode. J-R was often on the receiving end of these dog-and-pony shows, delivered by some open-necked entrepreneur who’d muscled into Whitehall to peddle his wares: unaware that J-R had no power to buy from them.

Perce called up Google and searched for
Dani Farr.
The screen filled with gaudy photos and news reports from the past two days. Perce selected the much-reproduced image of Dani posing with a gun, and hovered his mouse over her. A rectangle appeared around her face. For a few seconds, an animated wheel turned in its centre. Then her name appeared. Perce called up a menu and selected
Search for DANI FARR in Everything About You.
The map reappeared, with Dani’s name in the search box.

‘In case you missed it, that was face recognition.’

He hit the
Search
button. The map refreshed, but didn’t budge from the City Road locale. A little female icon hovered beside 404 City, apparently in the middle of the road.
Danielle (Dani) Farr
,
it read.

‘Oh, bollocks. Apologies. This is beta and a little flaky on refresh: why we’re not soft launching yet. Which by the way means you have time to work out who should and shouldn’t get their hands on these wares, J-R. I’m minded to say, everyone, but what do you think?’

‘Excuse me? Why would I—?’

‘First let’s get this puppy working.’

Perce struck a chord of keys. The screen refreshed but, stubbornly, it still showed Dani in the same location. He hit more keys. The map zoomed out to show the whole UK. He clicked
Search
again. The map landed at the same location. Frowning, Perce zoomed in closer, then closer still. The satellite image of the building grew grainy and filled the screen.

With the map zoomed, they could see that the female icon was moving. It edged in brief spurts from the south-east corner of the building, ever closer to the centre.

Perce pressed keys, flipping the screen back to J-R’s icon, and stood.

‘Would you please excuse me just one moment?’

He left the room.

¶NewsHound

Media gathering in Downing Street. Bethany Lehrer announcement expected within the hour.

Seven

Another institutional Georgian room; another silent policeman.

This guy was run from the same production line as Bethany’s former escorts. Square-jawed in security-service fashion, with a Hugh Grant lick of hair. Any other time she would have said, quite the hunk. His eyes darted between the outer door, the window, and onto each piece of furniture in turn: as if the occasional table might at any moment leap up and assault her. Anywhere and everywhere except at Bethany.

She’d been under unstated close protection ever since the – assault, kidnapping, whatever it was. What a privilege to have a manly escort to the site of her execution.

Waiting for the PM was like doing the same for Godot. Especially for a minister who’d woken to find herself a political remainder. She rather welcomed the moment of peace. To pass the time she decided to knock a borehole through the policeman’s permafrost.

‘No Raeworth today?’

He turned to look at her as if, after all, a piece of furniture had spoken. Then his eyes returned to the sealed door of the inner room. Just as she’d concluded he was going to stay mute, he spoke, in the closed tone of a railway announcement.

‘DS Raeworth is no longer your cover,
Minister.
’

Had there been inverted commas round that last word? There had better not have been. This was probably the last time she’d be on the receiving end of that honorific.

‘And he is – where?’

‘An incident has occurred. An investigation is under way.’

Now he sounded like the error message on a PC. By
incident
he meant Sandberg. That hapless scruff of a boy. Dreadfully her mind’s eye could only see him naked before her – an inappropriate image to memorialise the recent dead. What had the boy been doing, climbing about up there? It was a shocking coda to yesterday’s farce. The nail, too, in the coffin of her spell in office.

Coffin nail
:
terrible.
Last straw
better. Though soon she wouldn’t need her internal political censor.

‘Because I wanted to say something to Raeworth. Before I go in. That he needs to – you all need to lay off Dani Farr. She’s a victim here. I’m not about to press charges for yesterday. Poor kid: all she ever did is run when we chased her.’

This wasn’t true but it was close enough. The tables had been turned last night and they could do without someone crying harassment. More to the point, the girl had got under her skin. God speed to her, wherever she was right now.

The policeman seemed to have barely registered Bethany’s words. It was like negotiating with a self-service checkout.

‘There is. Minister. The matter of the gun.’

‘Raeworth’s gun? Surely Sandberg took it? Although – I suppose I didn’t see.’

That missing gun was a disturbing variable. Poor Raeworth. To lose a weapon and a suspect’s life in a single day. No wonder he’d been secreted away somewhere.

‘A squatted pub in Dalston is currently under search.’

This man existed only in the passive voice. Did no one have any agency, in his world?

‘No gun has been found there or on his person.’

‘But he could have hidden it somewhere.’

‘That will be clear when Farr has been picked up.’

What a filthy mess. She would always be associated with this, always. It would be the coda to every
Remember her?
in the House bars. At least there would still be the Digital Citizen. She’d get Simon to confirm before he fired her.

How was this going to run? They’d agree to a statement:
leaving under unfortunate circumstances; this her happy legacy.
It would be all sorry smiles. You give two years, wear body and soul to the bone; fuck your marriage to the point it’ll take two years of bended knee to make it back. You’re absent from your burgeoning, mysterious sons. Don’t you have the right to something as intangible, vital and downright just, as legacy?

She’d get confirmation from the PM before she left the room; that it was happening. That it was hers. Then she’d go quietly.

¶sic_girl

Wowsers. Look what I just went and found.

This little old internal email from Mondan’s security chief. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more obvious the big M knew what was going down, it does get. Read and weep, Sean.

Eight

Mark and J-R exchanged a look. Perce’s departure had dropped them back to the point where their earlier conversation had stalled. J-R began to speak but Mark placed a finger to his lips and pointed at the ceiling. J-R swallowed his words, not fully understanding.

The screen of Perce’s computer dimmed, preparing to sleep. J-R tapped the space bar to waken it. Odd that the head of such a secretive organisation would leave his screen unlocked – unless he’d done so deliberately. His actions appeared at first pure id, but purpose drove everything he did.

The male glyph labelled
John-Rhys Pemberton
was still on-screen. Its 8 icon pulsed, making sparks flutter over J-R’s field of vision. He clicked the icon.

The screen answers.

)) crystal muzzle ((

A collage of sound and image reproduces J-R’s surroundings on the flat display. Snatches of J-R’s and Perce’s voices echo from the recent past. The babble of Mondan’s giant screens, delayed and remixed to a drone, pumps from the desktop speakers. Foreshortened snatches of the room flash over one another: Mark’s hand and arm; the composite tiles of a drop-ceiling.

It’s beautiful; and disruptive.

)) polymer suspension ((

J-R’s phone is lying camera-up on the desk. He holds his hand above the lens; after a short delay, a giant’s paw fisheyes into a window on Perce’s screen. A second later a duplicate hand appears, smaller, in another division of the noisy collage. He takes his hand away; after a pause, both images vanish. Then everything wipes into itself and unfolds. The screen reconfigures itself. Top centre, an analogue clock appears and is drawn by the gravitational pull of the past: the screen, it seems, doesn’t want to dwell on now. J-R recognises the clock from the Parley application. Now it’s surrounded by an uncapped mêlée of image, noise and fragmented text.

Over the jumble hangs the glaze of a satellite map. The toy soldier labelled
John-Rhys Pemberton
marches backwards across this translucent London, retracing his steps from 404 City to Old Street: the path J-R and Mark just walked. As his digital self heaves back into the recent past, windows pop open from points along his trail and burst against the glass front of the screen. Brickwork; glass façades; skies; a brush of pedestrians. The soundscape shifts to City Road. Whenever J-R’s phone was in his hand, it had been watching.

Across the bottom of the screen, coloured info-graphics pulse and balloon, tracing peaks and lulls. At the centre of the mêlée, word pairs burst forward in crisp lower-case letters, apparently random yet laden with meaning.

)) close affliction ((

The locus scythes, pauses and scythes again, tracking to Camberwell, pausing at J-R’s flat – then with increasing frenzy, as lights rise and fade with the rapid passing of a day, to Shoreditch, Hoxton, back to Camberwell. That was yesterday. The images bloom and refresh with greater and greater speed; and then, as the clock heaves back another night, J-R is launched into the wilds of Hackney. Thursday evening.

The spinning clock slows. The gravity of the past centres on that night. The screen decorates itself with J-R’s photographs of the East End streets; and on what he found there.

)) chocolate dark ((

He watches the visual torrent until he understands. He’s watching himself – and what he experienced, the evening his BlackBerry died and he went AWOL. These are stored sensations, archived against his physical progress, timed to his passage across the map. Somehow Perce has bottled his interior and exterior life, and relayed it onto this PC. What it paints is more painful and familiar than a mother’s disappointment. How has this machine come to know him?

The indicators at the bottom of the screen pulse and flash with intense reds as the clock slows to a stop. The system has identified a peak in the signals it’s tracing. Indoor scenes bathed in oxblood fill the fleeting windows. Distended male faces shoved together in the heat and pulse of midnight. Lips.

)) finger fall ((

The sights and sounds trigger memories that J-R’s drunken brain had left behind in that Hackney bar. Whether it’s alcohol or fear that’s held these memories at bay, he can’t say; but knowing now what’s about to appear – what Mark’s about to see – he repeat-clicks the mouse and slaps the keyboard, searching for an off. The images pour over him like a dream he can’t wake from. Mark has stiffened in his chair.

‘
What
’
s your name?
’ says a voice, baffled like a recording on wax cylinder.

There’s a pause, filled with hot breath and a brush of fabric. Another voice replies.

‘
It
’
s Mark. My name is Mark.
’

Mark stands. His chair scrapes back on the mock-stone flooring. J-R remembers now: when the boy named Jo asked him for his name, he hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. But why choose to call himself Mark, of all things?

He still doesn’t know what happened next – what he went on to do with that strange boy, Jo. He longs to see more of this moment, dig out everything he’s buried; but he also needs to stop it, right away.

‘J-R?’ says Mark.

Some atavistic memory of PC training returns to J-R and he hits the keys
Alt-F4.
The cacophony gutters, replaced by a desktop image of lush forgiving fields and folder icons. The intimate rustles give way to the harmonics of the air conditioner and the computer’s fan – backed by the low babble of the giant screens around them.

‘J-R?’

J-R keeps his head down a moment, then draws a breath and looks up.

‘Yes, Mark.’

‘That was your voice.’

‘Ah – yes. Yes, I think it was.’

‘But what – why did you call yourself Mark? What were we seeing?’

‘I don’t know – I mean, I
do
know, but none of that seemed real, did it? Like a video game – I imagine.’

He laughs, but the laugh sounds as though it’s been channelled through Perce’s demonic software.

‘That was you?’ says Mark. ‘We were seeing you, hearing you – at that location?’

J-R does not reply at once. Into the silence an electric scream intrudes – the air conditioning has changed gear, sending a ripple of cold through the sweat on his back.

‘Mark, I –’