Invisible Armies (26 page)

   "This is it," Mulligan says. "I guess you'll be staying here a while, huh?"
   "Yes," Keiran says firmly, despite Danielle's doubtful expression.
   "Where do you sleep?" Danielle asks.
   "In here." Mulligan opens a wooden door obscured by the shadow of the stack of XBoxes, and reveals what was once a wine cellar, now occupied by a futon illuminated by a single dangling light bulb. The sheets, blanket, and pillows are black. The concrete walls are unadorned save for a bar bolted to the wall that helps Mulligan get to and from the bed.
   "That's your bedroom?" Danielle asks, unable to disguise the horror in her voice.
   "Sure. I go in and sleep, I get up and leave, why decorate?"
   "Let's play Changing Rooms later," Keiran says. "We've got some big decisions to make."
* * *
    Danielle finds it hard to concentrate on what Keiran is saying. She is wanted by the FBI. The idea sounds too unreal to take seriously. She had nothing to do with that bomb, except for falling in love with the man who made it. She is completely innocent of the San Francisco murder. This has gone too far. She is sorry for Angus and Jayalitha's family and everyone else, but her whole life could be ruined by this. She should walk to the nearest phone, call the police, and turn herself in. Surely the FBI will understand, the charges will be dropped, the truth will set her free.
    Except. Maybe she isn't, technically, innocent. She knew that a bomb was being made; she thought it was never intended to go off, true, but she was still an accessory, to that and to the Paris break-in. And turning herself in must be exactly what Shadbold wants. He's responsible for this, that's obvious, he and Laurent must have leaked evidence pointing to herself and Keiran. If he can't silence them by killing them, he can destroy their credibility, and ensure they get locked up. And continue to murder thousands of people. He wants her arrested, and by itself that's a good enough reason to run as long as she can. Because it means they are dangerous to him, somehow, while they are free.
    But if she won't turn herself in, what can she do? Her bank accounts and credit cards will be frozen. Her picture will be studied by police officers across the country, and by newspaper readers, maybe even television watchers – the UK bombing made headlines around the world, and wanted criminals always make for a juicy news segment. And who can she trust? She suspects her friends and family would all turn her in, telling themselves it's for her own safety, for her own good, no matter what Danielle might say. She can't trust anyone not in this room.
    Part of her is terrified. The prospect of being pursued by both a vengeful billionaire and the FBI is overwhelming. Part of her just wants to flee, go home, escape by any means necessary, fly back to New York or her parents in Boston and take her chances there. But the more Danielle considers her situation, the angrier she gets. Shadbold and Laurent already used and discarded her like a rag. Now they are hounding her again. In the last twenty-four hours of terror and misery she has been pursued, bruised, bloodied, nearly drowned and frozen, and now falsely accused of mass murder in the eyes of all the world – all for nothing more than the sin of knowing too much, trusting too much, and wanting to help people. She is sick of running. She wants revenge.
    "Let's face it," Keiran is saying. "If we run and hide, we're doomed. We could own every police computer in America and still just delay the inevitable. We have to go with the Napoleon doctrine. Our only defense is a good offense. We have to show that Shadbold was behind that bomb. And incidentally the murder of several thousand Indian peasants. Not that I expect the world to much care about that part."
    "I can try to take you to the evidence I buried," Jayalitha says doubtfully, "but surely returning to India will be disastrous for us all?"
    Keiran nods. "Quite right. We can't risk that while their cyberspace superman P2 is out there tracking our every move. But I'm wondering now if he might actually be their weakness. If we can get to him, find out how he can do what he does, maybe we can use that to break them open."
    "Get to him how?"
    "With luck we can get the men who chased you at the beach to tell us where he is."
    Danielle stares at him. "The men at the – are you crazy? Those were cops. What do you want to do, go to their homes, knock on their door and ask them questions? That's insane. Our pictures are in the newspaper. If we go outside, we'll be arrested."
    Keiran and Mulligan exchange a look.
    "I think you underestimate our capabilities," Keiran says.
    "What capabilities?"
    "Don't wanna brag," Mulligan says unconvincingly, "but if there are twenty better hackers in the world than LoTek and me, I'd be real surprised. I don't think you quite grok what we can do. Believe me, your buddy Shadbold has fucked with the wrong hombres. Never mind the feds. It's not like TV. They're not really that scary. Actually they're pretty dumb. I guess LoTek's right, if you just ducked off the grid they'd get you in the end, but we can keep them off your back for, I don't know, months at least. They've wanted me for ten years now, and they still don't even know my name."
    "They know mine already," Danielle says.
    "That's okay. We'll get you a new one."
    She blinks. "What?"
    "LoTek and me both got a few spare identities on the shelf. No females, but I'm sure we can make one up for you. You'll have to change your look in case they eyeball you."
    Keiran runs his fingers through his hair. "Not just you. I intend to develop the world's most sudden case of male pattern baldness."
    Danielle looks from one of them to the other, trying to work out if they're serious. Both of them are smiling.
"Are you
enjoying
this?" she asks, incredulously.
    "Well," Keiran says cautiously, "don't misunderstand, I wish it hadn't happened. But given that it has, I have to admit, on the run from the FBI, it does have a certain ring to it."
    "The legend of LoTek lives on!" Mulligan intones. "Well. Hopefully. Unless you, like, die and shit."
* * *
    Danielle looks at Mulligan's tarnished mirror, so low on the wall she has to squat to see her face, and hardly recognizes herself. She supposes that's the idea. The picture in the paper was her passport photo, taken when she had short hair. She has let it grow since then, into a bob – now a very blonde bob. She looks around. The tub and toilet bowl are scaly and stained. The floor is covered with old dirt and new tufts of hair, the latter thanks to Keiran's newly uncovered scalp. And Danielle's hair is now the shade of platinum blonde she associates with fake breasts. Well, no one ever said running for your life was dignified.
    She emerges into the living room and sits on the couch. Jayalitha is curled up in a tattered sleeping bag, dead to the world, and Mulligan has gone somewhere to buy food and electronics. Keiran sits in front of one of Mulligan's computers, his face bathed by flickering LED light.
   Danielle is reminded of the night she first met him, five years ago, at a noisy party in Oakland. She went upstairs to use the bathroom, and on the way back, saw light gleaming in a dark room. A man working at a computer. Something about the scene had intrigued her, the man's dark solitude while a party throbbed below, and she had gone in and struck up a curious conversation. It wasn't until he accompanied her out of the room a half-hour later that she realized he was tall and good-looking. And amazingly Keiran still is, despite his newly shaved head, despite the years of abuses and deprivations, junk food and drugs, he has put his body through. He is blessed with looks, health, superhuman brains. Everything comes naturally to Keiran except human understanding.
    He glances at her. "Nice hair."
    Danielle sighs. "Same to you. I feel like a walking escort service ad. You really think this will stop police from recognizing us?"
    "No. But it might slow them enough that we get a head start. The idea, remember, is that they never see us in the first place."
    Danielle nods.
    "How are you doing?" Keiran asks.
    She pauses. The question is unlike him. "I don't know," she says. "Scared. Dizzy. Angry. Stressed. I'm tired of it all already. Like, I just want the whole situation to be over, one way or another. How are you?"
    "Mostly angry. Not just at him. At the system that lets it happen. If people actually cared about a few thousand dead children in India, there would have been real investigations, Shadbold would have been found out and stopped long ago. But nobody really cares."
    "Why do you?"
    He looks at her, surprised. "What do you mean?"
    "You're not exactly a people person. What do you care about children in India?"
    "I'm not –" Keiran pauses. "What Shadbold's doing, that's, it's a crime against humanity, not just people. I believe in humanity. To quote our murdered Scottish friend, I believe in a better world." He smiles sourly. "I like the idea of people. It's the individual instances I have problems with."
    "Because we're all so stupid?"
    "You're not stupid."
    "Compared to you I am. Compared to you almost anybody is."
    "I used to think so. But, you know, lately I've begun to wonder."
    "If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?" Danielle asks sarcastically.
    "Not rich exactly. More like, why aren't I doing something with it? Why aren't I…"
    "Happy?"
    Keiran looks at her.
    "Sorry," Danielle says.
    "Is it that obvious?"
    "I can read you pretty well."
    "It doesn't make any sense," Keiran says. "I have lots of money, a lucrative and occasionally interesting position, plenty of friends. Hacker friends, chemical friends, maybe not the cream of the social crop, but I get invited to plenty of parties. And one day about six months ago I realized I was profoundly unhappy. Not depressed. Just unhappy. I didn't know why. It was a problem, so I tried to logically analyze it, come up with a rational solution, but that just didn't work. And I realized I couldn't talk to any of my friends about it. Not one. We'd just never had those kind of friendships. I was seeing this woman, but that was just, I certainly couldn't talk to her."
    "Why not?"
    "She actually was kind of stupid," Keiran admits. "But that wasn't – I mean, I just didn't know how. The only person I've ever really been able to talk to is you."
    Danielle isn't sure how to interpret that. "Maybe that's because I'm the only person you've ever even tried to really talk to."
    Keiran cocks his head and looks at her as if she has said something revelatory.
    Danielle says, "This Filipino girl I knew once told me that in Tagalog, lonely and unhappy are the same word."
    "Lonely," Keiran says, tasting the word. He sighs. "If I'm so smart, how come it's taken me thirty years to work out that utter contempt is maybe not the best default standpoint to take when dealing with other human beings?"
    Danielle half-smiles. "Yeah. I kinda wish you'd figured that out when we were dating."
    "Well, you helped put me on the road, if that's any consolation."
    "I'm flattered."
    "Was I a bastard to you?" Keiran asks. "When we dated? I'm sorry if I was. I tried not to be. I truly liked you."
    Danielle shrugs. "You were a boyfriend. Better than some, worse than others."
    Keiran looks deflated.
    "I did like you too," Danielle says hastily. "You were different. There wasn't any bullshit about you. I liked that."
    Keiran nods. They look at each other.
    "What did you owe Angus?" Danielle asks. "What did you have to pay back? I know you said you couldn't explain without his blessing, but …"
    "But he's unlikely to come back from the grave to okay it now," Keiran says.
    "Yeah."
    "Angus and Estelle, wherever they're buried, I'll bet you they're organizing the whole graveyard. Holding skeleton meetings, assembling communiques, issuing strongly worded corpse grievances. We demand better flowers and fewer maggots. Or maybe they're marching on the Pearly Gates with protest signs and gas masks. End the Cloud Nine Discrimination! Equality and salvation for all!"
    Danielle smiles wanly.
    "My sister," Keiran says. "She owed these three insane Albanians a lot of money. For drugs, I don't know what kind. They took her up top of this empty car park in Birmingham, told her she was out of chances, broke her cheekbone with a hammer. She called me. Middle of the night, I was just coming down from acid, I hardly recognized her voice. It had been years. Half her face was broken, she was sobbing, it took me ages to understand her. She said I had to bring money, six thousand pounds, and if I wasn't there by dawn, or they saw the police, they would drop her off the roof."
    "I didn't know you had a sister," Danielle says softly.
    "I don't. For all intents and purposes. She was," he hesitates, "damaged. From birth, I think. But I stupidly decided to help, called Angus, woke him. Between us we had the money, I was paranoid hacker enough to keep a few thousand around, and he'd collected dues for some protest he was organizing. I'd known him less than a year, but he was round my flat five minutes later, all his money in the glove box, to pick me up and drive me to Birmingham. It should have been simple, right? The money for the girl. I remember getting out of the car holding six thousand pounds in a Tesco bag. My sister looked like she'd been hosed down with her own blood. Up until then I had wondered if it was a ruse, if she was part of it. But no, there really were crazy Albanians. Kids, teenagers, tweakers, strung out on crystal meth. They decided the money wasn't enough, they wanted our car too. They didn't have guns, no one has guns in Britain, but they had knives and hammers. They grabbed me, I tried to fight, they hit me in the head, I fell down. It seemed pretty apparent by then that they weren't planning to let us get away alive. Angus could have just driven away. It wasn't his problem, his sister. But that was Angus. Always fighting other people's battles."
    Keiran falls silent.
    "What happened?" Danielle asks.
    "He ran us over," Keiran says. He smiles faintly at the memory. "We were all in one tight group, that was their mistake, they never thought he'd run us down with me and my sister there too. Sideswiped us like a fucking stunt driver, knocked them all over. Cracked two of my ribs and hairline-fractured a tibula. Not that I noticed until the next day. I don't remember exactly what happened after that. Concussions fragment your memory. I remember picking up a knife and stabbing one of them. I was snarling. Like a dog. Everyone was. It sounded like a dogfight. I remember Angus coming out of the car with a crowbar, and one of them hit him with a hammer. After that it gets hazy. Like a nightmare. The whole night was like a nightmare, but instead of waking up, it just kept getting more real, and more awful. Somehow we won. They ran away. Angus's arm was broken, I was the only one who could drive, so I drove us to casualty with a concussion and a broken leg. Still on acid, good thing too, dulled the pain. And while they were examining Angus and I, my sister vanished with the money. I don't know how she made it outside. She'd sprained her ankle badly. Must have had some drugs left on her."