Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (50 page)

As they entered the lift lobby Perce pulled the envelope from inside his jacket and slapped it onto J-R’s chest, then pressed the call button.

John-Rhys Pemberton. BY HAND.

‘We’ve cast it for now as
Vice President, Government and Corporate Affairs
but that’s up for discussion.’ Perce tapped the paperwork with one finger. ‘Salary will blow your public sector balls off. Don’t worry about that.’

The demos were over and the pitch landed. Perce’s whole attention was on J-R. This was one of the moments when one must rally one’s entire being, cut through the overgrowth; distil into a single potent phrase the insight that would turn events.

‘You’re – ah, sorry, I – what?’ said J-R.

With a gentle bell-tone the lift slid open. Perce reached an arm to hold back the door.

‘After you.’

J-R couldn’t pull shut his slack mouth as he entered the lift. Perce pushed the lowest button from a long selection of floors.

‘Krish Kohli tells me you’re good. And be frank: do you
have
a job right now? Or will you by the end of the evening news cycle?’

‘But Bethany isn’t –’

Perce looked at his watch and raised one eyebrow.

‘You sure of that?’ he said.

‘How can you even speak like this, when you and she –?’

Bethany in those emailed photos. Abandoning herself to Perce, owned and encrypted by him.

‘J-R,’ said Perce, ‘I’m sure you’re a great guy, and you’ll be a terrific colleague, but a word of advice: steer the fuck away from my private life.’ The grin got broader, tighter. ‘All right?’

Floors ticked down on the display.

‘So, then?’ said Perce.

J-R bought time by flipping the pages on the offer letter. It included a contract.

‘You’re asking me to come and work here?’ he said. ‘For you?’

‘Was the general idea.’

Iron soaked into J-R’s bloodstream. He flapped the contract at Perce.

‘Forgive me, but why would I, after you stole private information from me and from thousands of people? Sabotaged the programme I’ve invested heart and, and—’

‘Sabotaged it?’

‘The Giggly Pigglies. Grubly. Regular, deliberate abuse of people’s privacy. But the thing that most gets to me is the arrogance. We know that supposed hack was just a cover-up. Did you really think you could walk in and raid these data and not be caught? Information will out, Mr Perce. You’ve wrecked your contract and in the process drowned a hundred-and-seventy-million-pound public programme.’

‘The hack? Me? Bullshit.’

The lift display hit zero and continued counting down.

‘I’m sorry?’ said J-R.

At minus three, the lift huffed to a stop and the doors pinged open. Perce led J-R into a blank hallway, pulled him aside by his upper arm. J-R breathed in his male scent: the lightly toasted smell of money.

‘Listen,’ said Perce. ‘We collared the guy responsible for the Giggly Pigglies hack on Thursday. He’s already gone.’

He turned and marched on down the corridor, still talking. J-R was forced to follow.

‘We deal with our mess. How about your precious department gets its own house in order? It takes two keys to hack that data. You think that data was used for the pig stunt up north? Well if so, whoever did it got to someone at the ministry, too.’

Perce was right. Only a handful of ministry staff had access to those codes. J-R had, of course, suspected Bethany – until he found out how much more simple, and human, her transgression had been.

‘If any of that is true,’ he said, ‘why not come out and say so? Why let sic_girl threaten your contract?’

‘Because someone –’ Perce stopped again. ‘Some. One. Is setting me up. Faking this hack. Raiding my data over and over to make me look culpable. Me.’

This was not staged. Perce
felt
this. He headed off again, a grey-suited rabbit for J-R to follow along the white tunnels threading below the city.

‘I’d love to report this to the Data Commissioner, like a good boy. But can you see them believing me when I say I’ve been stitched up?’ Perce gave a comic shrug. ‘I mean, I
would
say that, wouldn’t I? I do that and this somebody
gets
me. After what I’ve built, they
get
me and I lose the chance to do amazing things for so many people.’

He guided J-R down the passage.

‘Someone is out to fuck me, J-R. I don’t. Like it. I want you to help me fix this.’ Then another shift of tone: jaunty, matey. ‘And really, is what you’ve been doing up to now so damn inspiring? Why wouldn’t you want to be here – encouraging me to play the white man in all of this?’

Confoundingly, J-R found himself laughing as he trotted behind Perce.

‘Excuse me – the
white man
?’

‘Oh, is that not PC? White
knight
,
then. See? Already you’re influencing me for the better.’

Perce was impregnable. J-R was pulled behind him. He couldn’t work here – of course not – but if he were to turn and head for home, what was waiting for him? Not Mark.

J-R turned a corner. Perce was already halfway down the plain white corridor.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Meet my other new recruit.’

¶Nightshade

so long everyone youve been the best

see you on the other side

¶sic_girl

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¶riotbaby

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¶TMI

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¶Spotted

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¶lolcatz

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¶tvjoe

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¶CelebFactor

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¶NewsHound

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¶bottomhalfofthepage

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¶therealnobody

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Eleven

That’s all her children safe. Dani stacks up the hard drives – ten slabs of intelligence, each the size of a paperback book – and wads them down with yesterday’s T-shirt. She zips up the bag. Next up, the DigiCitz drives: the disks Sam says will take Perce down. Evidence he’s been hacking people’s data left, right and centre.

‘
Sam says
’
makes it sound like she trusts Sam, which is interesting, because if you asked her she’d have said she totally doesn’t.

With another swipe of Gray’s card she unlocks the smoke-glass door of the next Meccano cabinet. Gray was right. The DigiCitz data is right next door to the Parley boxes. Easily close enough to have been hit by Perce’s killer magnet, if they’d had the chance to wipe the Parley disks.

This is way too fun. She needs to remember Leo died upstairs and police are swarming the place like bedbugs. But it’s good, too. She should be cornered and desperate; instead she’s invisibly rescuing her life’s work. Nobody knows she’s here, in this great white air-chilled data farm, deep beneath the pavement.

It takes less than five minutes to open the DigiCitz boxes and extract a hunk of magnetic information from the guts of each. She stows them in her bag, slings the strap over her shoulder and steps back to watch the serene hum of glass-faced cabinets. She wants to damage them. This is a beautiful thought, not an angry one. The calm is on her now. But it will give her simple, healing pleasure to fuck with every immaculate inch of this vault of captive data.

 
with all the careful she has terry slips the big steel pistol from her backpack and slides off the safety

         
dont ask how she even knows how to do that

                 
facing the cabinets she sets her feet wide, weighs the weapon and purses her tongue, raises the iron and unloads seven rounds into the cabinets

                         
the recoil staggers her back

                                 the smooth white walls return a volley of sonic booms

The entry-pass system beeps behind her and the door swings open with a breath. In the real, she didn’t do any of that. What she pulled from the backpack was her phone. She steps back to take a picture of the empty rack, to proffer with the and pennants. Later, when Parley’s back online.

She turns at the sound of footsteps. Shit: Sean Perce. Weirdly, he’s followed in by Pemberton, who replaces the door in its frame with a dark frown. He’s holding a wad of papers in his hand. He looks like a kid who’s just received terrible GSCE results. Perce strolls over to her.

‘Hey hey hey!’ he says, arms wide. ‘The gang’s all here!’

Dani gives him a look that could burn a hole in concrete.

‘You! You put me here!’

Pemberton hurries to her.

‘Dani, be careful. He tracked you here, from your phone.’

She looks at the phone in her hand.

‘Bullshit. This isn’t even my phone.’

But she thinks of what Gray said:
You need to be worried about whether they can see you.
She turns to Perce.

‘You have nothing. I bought this phone with a different name, different money: different everything.’

‘You did that? Amazing.’ Perce looks like a hyena on E. ‘Yet we found you. Logically, you must have given Grubly a correlation. And it matched you to the rest of Dani.’

The fingers of both his hands slide smoothly between each other. Terry into Dani, Dani into Terry. No, she’s been so careful. What data match did she give up?

Not so careful: she went on MeatSpace Thursday night, as herself. With Colin – but she doesn’t want to think about Colin. One lapse is all it takes to fall off the wagon of anonymity. Data are binary and unforgiving.

‘So you found me. Saves me finding you.’

She holds up her phone, starts to video. Clears her throat.

‘So why did you give my life to the trolls, Sean? Why are you wiping Parley?’

That’ll sound good, off camera, when she posts it. A tiny Perce jerks on the screen. She steadies her hand.

‘Now, Dani,’ he says, smooth as liquidised shit. ‘Does your presence here have anything to do with why Parley just went offline?’

She glances at her backpack, down on the floor. Perce registers and nods.

‘You could have asked me,’ he says. ‘I can give your Personas all the storage they could ever want.’

Dani’s hand wavers. That would have been easier than sneaking in here. Pemberton cuts in from out-of-frame.

‘I think you should answer Dani’s question, Sean. Did you smear her to the papers?’

Perce steps closer.

‘Listen to me, Dani.’

He puts a hand on her shoulder. She shrugs it off.

‘Hey, yo! Nobody here is my fucking dad, all right? The monkey speaks for herself.’

‘So speak,’ says Perce.

She swings the camera to stay on him. Pemberton steps out of shot.

‘Two days. In two days you take away everything I have and you blow up everyone I am. What are you going to do to put it right?’

Her voice cracks on the hazy recording. This will go viral big time.

‘Whatever I have to. We look after our own here. I’ll see you right.’

‘I’m not your own. I don’t work for Parley any more.’

‘No. You work directly for me now.’

She lowers the phone.

‘How can I work for you when you hound me out? When you peddle lies about me to some cocksucker hack? When you bust my accounts and invade my life?’

‘I did that? What a shit I am. What if I didn’t?’

‘You did. You sent my data to that journalist.’

‘Really? You saw this happen?’

Doubt. Again. She shakes her head as if she can cast it out of her hair, holds the phone back up. Perce flips from jovial to dead, cold serious.

‘Who told you I did all that, Dani?’

The blue eyes bore into the megapixels. She doesn’t want to answer.

‘Sam Corrigan,’ she says.

It’s Pemberton who jumps to attention.

‘
Corrigan
?’
he asks. ‘The Terasoft PR man?’

Dani’s camera turns on him. He puts up a protective hand.

‘The. What?’ she says.

Twelve

Bethany replaced the cup on its bone china saucer.

‘So this is pleasant,’ she said, ‘but what’s it to be? Hemlock and a hot bath, or drawn and quartered in Parliament Square?’

The room cringed for several seconds before anyone spoke. Even Krish wouldn’t look her in the eye. Karen broke the silence.

‘None of us are finding this easy, Beth.’

Oh, really, Karen, that’s interesting; because you look like you just came in your starchy knickers.

‘But it’s terrific to hear you keep up your distinctive brand of humour,’ said the PM.

Oh, yes: happy, happy Bethany,
toujours gai!
The PM came over from the window to sit by her on the sofa. Simon had care and concern down pat: it might have been what swung him the election – it certainly wasn’t his grasp of economic policy. He was painfully credible; even when you knew what horse-dung it was. She let him give her arm two slow, affectionate pats before she withdrew it with a compressed smile.