Invisible Armies (4 page)

   "My ATM card," she says, thinking aloud. She checks her wallet and nearly drops it, exhaustion making her move clumsily, as if carrying an anvil. Relief floods into her at the sight of the silver card with the Citibank logo. How strange that this little piece of plastic, and its four-digit code, can be the sole difference between comfort and desperation.
   "We should go to the police," she suggests.
    "The police?" Laurent shakes his head. "No. Here that is never a good idea. Everyone who is anyone is for sale. And Kishkinda have much more money than you. It will only be a beacon for them."
    "You think they'll still be after us here?" Until now she has assumed that once they reach Bangalore they are safe.
    "They have a long arm and a long memory. We won't be safe anywhere in India."
    "Then what do we do? We can get money, but we can't leave the country. They've got our passports."
    "A hotel," Laurent says.
    "They'll want our passports too."
    He manages a tired smile. "I think we'll find a five-hundred rupee note works just as well, at the kind of hotel I have in mind. Worry about tomorrow tomorrow. First we must rest. Rest is a weapon."
* * *
    Berry's Hotel, on Church Street, obviously dates back to the days of the Raj. Its foyer's mahogany panelling, ancient leather couches and iron-lace elevator doors have a certain decaying stateliness. Unfortunately the same charm does not extend to its rooms, whose most noticeable features are low ceilings, exposed wiring, rusted plumbing, cracked furniture, stained linoleum and torn bedding, but Danielle is too tired to care. She is just glad that they found an ATM quickly and that the hotel's obsequious proprietor was happy to take money in place of identification. She and Laurent fall onto the room's two twin beds and pass out so quickly she does not even remember to undress, much less pull the cover over her. Not that they need covers. Bangalore, a thousand metres above sea level, is cooler than most of India, but it still feels like a hot summer night in Boston.
    She spends the night trapped in nightmares of a labyrinthine prison, pursued by men with warped faces in business suits, carrying lathis, down endless gray corridors that echo with the howls of dogs. She wakes to Laurent's gentle but persistent shaking, and half-sits, supporting herself on her elbows, still dazed. Her dreams slip from her mind like sand through fingers. She welcomes the amnesia.
    "I'm sorry," he says. His voice is grim. "You need to get up."
    "What for? What's wrong?"
    "Have some coffee." Two paper cups with bright red COFFEE DAY logos sit on the table between the beds. "I made some phone calls. I have news. None of it good."/p>

Chapter  
7 

<    Angus is late. Keiran waits in the corner of the Prince Albert, a diminishing pint of Kronenbourg on the table before him, increasingly annoyed, trying to ignore the noise and the smoke of a London pub at ten PM. Angus is thirty minutes late by the time the small, fine-featured Scotsman finally enters the pub from Coldharbour Lane and weaves through the crowd towards Keiran. With his colourful tattoos, and the gold strands woven into his dreadlocks, Angus stands out vividly even in the sea of spectacular humanity that is Brixton.
    "I remember you used to be punctual," Keiran says sourly, as Angus sits.
    "Did I? Really? Must have been all those drugs." Angus smiles. "I apologize. Usual Tube problems. Why are we here?"
    Keiran says, "I'm giving up."
    "Giving up what?"
    "Giving up your project. I quit. Find someone else to do it. Sorry."
    Angus blinks. "What prompted this?"
    Keiran shrugs and sips from his Kronenbourg. "I just have too many other things going on to keep working on this too. Sorry. I shouldn't have agreed to try to do you a favour in the first place."
    After a moment, Angus says, "Did you at least send Jaya's passport to your friend?"
   Keiran nods. "They should already be back in Goa by now."
   Angus studies Keiran silently for a moment.
   "I'm sorry," Keiran says. "I just don't have the time. I've made zero progress anyways. Two weeks and I'm still nowhere. I'm probably too rusty to help you in a timely manner."
   "I don’t understand. Last I knew you, you would have lived for this. You would have been positively bubbling with excitement. You would have been up hacking all night, every night."
    "Last you knew me was four years ago," Keiran says. "When I was probably off my head on drugs all night, every night. Things are different now. I'm sorry. Of course I'd like to help you out. I just don't have time to waste on things like your project."
    "As simple as that. You just don't have time to waste."
    "As simple as that."
    "Well," Angus says. "Of course I'd hate to waste your time. I know it's just enormously valuable." His voice is thick with sarcasm. "Thirty pounds an hour, no? Is that what they pay you to keep the virtual cogs of capitalism running smooth? Is that how much you sell yourself for?"
    "Angus. There's no point arguing. My decision is made. You asked me for a favour, I took a hack at it, I didn't get anywhere, and now I'm done. End of story."
    Angus studies him. Then he says, "Do you remember the car park?"
    Keiran twitches. After a moment he says, "Vividly."
    "You remember your last words to me then? Of course you do, mind like a black hole, nothing escapes. Refresh my memory. What were they, exactly?"
    After a moment, Keiran says, "The exact words were 'I owe you my life.'"
    Angus nods and says nothing.
    "Angus, for Christ's sake. I know what I said. But you can't just waltz back four years later and demand I throw my life away on one of your pointless gestures."
    "I'm not asking you to break the Bank of England. Just to do a little research."
    "In blatant violation of the law. No. I've already taken too big a risk for this. I have a life now. I have too much to lose."
    "A life?" Angus asks. "It is to weep. A man with what is widely described as the most gifted technical mind ever to come out of the UK, a man who once believed in a better world, reduced to working at an investment bank. How exciting. How inspirational. Come on, LoTek –"
   "Don't call me that. I've given up all that bullshit. And I can't believe you haven't. Fucking grow up already. You're over thirty, man. Rebellion isn't sexy any more. You're not seriously still an anarchist, are you?"
    Angus says, quietly, "I still believe in a better world."
    Keiran, suddenly uncomfortable, retreats into cynicism. "Well. So do I. A better world for me."
    "Come on. Even if I believed you were that selfish. Posh birds, expense accounts, your own flat in Clapham Common? That's the extent of your ambition? That's your dream world?"
    "Closest I'm likely to get in the real world."
    "You should fucking own the real world," Angus says, a little anger seeping into his voice. "People speak of you in whispers."
    "I'm flattered. Which gets me nowhere. Here's another real-world shocker; the opinions of anarchists, crusties, and cipherpunks count for very little. What does count is that I don't have a degree, and if I tell the truth about that massive gap in my CV, I go straight to prison. Most gifted technical mind? How nice of you to say. The truth is I'm lucky to be where I am. Remember LoTek's Law."
    "Ah yes. Always be invisible. Corollary: I succeed to the extent that I do not exist. What good is all your access if you never fucking do anything with it? Tell me something, mate. How can you not have woken up every single morning since you took this bullshit City job feeling like you're slowly pissing your life away? "
    Keiran pauses. The dreadlocked Scotsman's sharp instinct for the weak spot has not deserted him.
   "Come on, Keiran," Angus says. "You're not an ordinary human being. You've been trying that on for, what, three years now? You must be about fucking bursting by now. Stop trying to make yourself a zombie. It's no good to anyone. You should be making a difference, and right now you barely exist. If you died tonight, if you walked out of this pub and in front of a bus, what difference would it make?"
   "Enough," Keiran says. "Save your breath. You are not going to recruit me to your oh-so-noble cause."
   "Maybe not. But you owe me nonetheless. And I'm calling in that debt."
   "Maybe it's too late."
   Angus shrugs. "I remember you were an honourable man, once. Maybe that's changed too."
    Keiran looks at him for a long time.
    "What are you saying exactly?" he asks. "When it's done, if I can do it, then we're all square, the debt is done, I owe you nothing? Is that the proposed agreement?"
    "That's the proposed agreement," Angus says.
    "And what if I can't? I wasn't lying, before. I have been trying. And I'm nowhere."
    "What the good people tell me is that if you can't, no one can."
    Keiran inclines his head. "Might be some truth to that."
    They look at each other. Eventually Keiran raises his pint glass to Angus, as if in salute, drains it, and sighs.
    "I pay my debts," he says. "Always have, always will."
    Angus nods.
    "All right. I'll find a way in. I'll give you all Kishkinda's secrets."
    Angus smiles. "Of course you will, mate. Never doubted you for a minute."
* * *
    Much later that same night, Keiran sits in his flat, stares dully at his laptop, and wonders if he inadvertently told Angus the truth when he claimed he was too rusty to be of use. Breaking into Kishkinda's corporate network should be straightforward. They're a mining company, not a technology concern. Information security should be an afterthought, their network replete with unpatched weaknesses and vulnerable computers. And there are plenty of possible entry points: Kishkinda is a large enough corporate entity that their network spans offices in Europe and North America as well as the mine itself. But despite truly applying himself to the problem for the first time, Keiran has failed to carve out so much as a toehold on any of their machines.
    Again he refreshes the network map he has generated that shows all of Kishkinda's gateway machines, those which connect their corporate network to the wider Internet. Again he feels like a rock climber staring at a wall of sheer steel. Every one of these machines is tightly firewalled and runs no unnecessary software. Those programs they do run have been religiously patched with security updates, some as recently as this week. And much of the traffic he has been able to sniff going to and from Kishkinda, via intermediary machines owned by others that he has been able to hack, is protected by military-grade encryption.
    "Who are these bastards?" he mutters to himself. He would expect this level of security from an intelligence agency, or an Internet security firm, not a midlevel mining concern. He wonders exactly why Angus is targeting Kishkinda, and who exactly Jayalitha is, and why she is important. Then he wonders why Danielle hasn't emailed him a confirmation that Jayalitha's passport delivery is complete. She was supposed to be back in Goa by now. But then she is in India, world leader in excessive bureaucracy and incomprehensible delays. Keiran decides to give her another few days before writing and asking her for an update. Then he returns to his search for some kind of chink in Kishkinda's impregnable steel wall./p>

Chapter  
8 

    "I called my group's office here," Laurent says, as Danielle struggles for full wakefulness. "No answer. I called the national office in Bombay. Again no answer. Those phones should always be answered, 24 hours. I called headquarters in Vancouver. They don't know exactly what's happening either. Almost all of our people in India have been arrested. The government are calling Justice International a drug smuggling ring. Our people in Kishkinda as well, they say they grew and supplied the drugs. Most of all they want to arrest us."
    "Us? You and me?"
    "They seem to believe that you are one of us."
    "But – the police. You're saying the Indian police want to arrest me for being a drug smuggler." The words sound ridiculous leaving her mouth.
    "Exactly."
    "That's crazy."
    "Yes. It is crazy. It is also very real."
    Danielle stares at him, trying to absorb the blow. She has not escaped yesterday's danger. She is not safe. She is, incredibly, a wanted criminal. Maybe, she tells herself, this is just another dream. Maybe she will wake into a more pleasant reality any second now. This is too awful. It can't really be happening.
    She shakes her head to clear it. "I need to understand exactly what is going on."
   "The what is very simple. Kishkinda poisons the ground around the mine, doing terrible things, as you saw, to those who live there. My group tries to stop them. They think you are one of us. And they have declared war. They cannot attack us directly now we have escaped, so they have the police come after us."
   "Just like that? They just tell the police what to do?"
   "Bribes, false evidence, political influence," he says. "They have millions upon millions of dollars. More than enough to put us in jail."
    "We should go to the consulate."
    "No," he says sharply. "No. The consulate will help if you are arrested. They will not help you escape arrest. They will inform the Indian police if you go to them."
    "But if we turn ourselves in, publicly, they won't dare to –"
    "Of course they will. Do you know how many Westerners are in Indian jails on drug charges? You know the bureaucracy and corruption here. Do you really think the police were one hundred per cent correct with every such conviction? Believe me, some of them are innocent men with powerful enemies. Do you really believe it can't happen to you? My group will fight this, but you know what Indian courts are like. Slow, corrupt, incompetent. No. What we must do is leave the country. We won't be safe until we escape India."
    "How? We don't have passports, we can't get new ones, and the police are after us."
    Laurent nods. "That's the essence of the problem."
    "Jesus." Danielle sits up, reaches for a cappucino, sips it. She feels like she has stepped into quicksand, that she will soon be sucked down and suffocated whether she struggles or not. This is something too big and pervasive to tackle on her own. She feels like she has already used up all her luck and resourcefulness. She can't handle being on the run from false drug charges in a foreign country.
    "I just want to go home," she says faintly.
    "I'm sorry. That isn't possible."
   She has to call someone for help. But who? Her parents? She can just imagine how they would react. Oh, they would try to help, certainly, with all the money she might ever need, with outraged calls to their congressman and senator and the Indian ambassador, careful to work only through the proper channels – and she knows none of it will serve to conceal the fact that they will believe the allegations that their fuckup black-sheep daughter is smuggling drugs from India. She can almost hear her father:
How could you get yourself into this?
She can imagine her mother telling her to turn herself in for her own good, her own safety. No. She will go to her parents if she is arrested. Their kind of proper-channels influence might help her then. Not before.
    "What I don't understand is
why
," Laurent says. "We've been fighting Kishkinda for years. They think nothing of disappearing an Indian, but a Westerner, until now we might be intimidated, roughed up, but having us arrested, let alone all of us arrested, never before, that is very visible, very risky. For them as well as us. Something extraordinary has stirred them. I'm sorry. You seem to have come just as someone hit the Kishkinda beehive with a very big stick."
    "Just my luck."