Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle (28 page)

There’s a turning beyond a run of older buildings. Crumbling brick, earthy darkness. As he squints towards the unlit fissure a young man appears from it. He stops dead in the gaslight and their eyes meet. His face is stoatish, pale and slender; his eyes a question or demand. J-R’s phone is raised, positioned to shoot.

)) this boy ((

it says.

Now J-R makes out the discreet signage above the door from which the boy has just emerged; and the ruddy light spilling from it. A soft thrum of electronic music escapes into the cul-de-sac. A bar or club, half-hidden from the world’s sight down this dank alley.

The tableau is static for a number of seconds; then the young man speaks.

‘Do you have a light at all?’ he asks.

They’re perhaps ten metres apart in the night air. The boy’s voice is light but clear. His hands stay in his jacket pockets.

‘I – no, I don’t – I don’t smoke. I’m sorry.’

The boy smiles at some unknown misstep.

‘That’s OK, mate, I don’t actually smoke. You know?’

And J-R does know. The unbuttressed walls at last give way and crumble in a forgiving rain of London brick. The rubble swallows the boy, J-R and the abandoned theatre of the street.

¶riotbaby

On your marks . . .

Sixteen

Dani kicks pizza spam from the doormat. The mansion block is empty and dark. She doesn’t know what time it is. She double-steps all four flights to her flat, locks the door behind her and beelines for the fridge. No beer. A reproachful trace of yesterday’s marsala hangs around the microwave. She opens the door that leads onto the lightwell and fire escape, to let in air. The flat is stale and abandoned, as though she moved out months ago – though she was only here this morning. In that time she’s been plastered naked across the net, hounded offline by a million trolls and born again as AStrangeFish.

Moving to the bedroom, she sets Terry’s backpack on the unmade bed, stuffs in random clothes for thirty seconds then heads to the bathroom and repeats the exercise with toothpaste, a razor and other washbag gumph. Then she zips up the bag. This is packing, Terry style.

She pauses in the lounge to rotate on her feet and grid-scan for anything else she might need: she doesn’t know how long she’ll be away. Her eyes light on her PC; but she knows it’s marked with Dani and anyway too big to travel with. From now on everything needs to be as near to weightless as possible, and connected only to Terry. This isn’t paranoia: it’s the new logic.

Zero nags at her. In the last five hours she’s connected from cafes, the bus, a bench in Green Park and the neutral lobby of the hotel she recce’d earlier, searching out the answer to just one question. A hard enough puzzle to drive trolls, Sam and Bethany from her mind:
who is zero?

She knows he/she has strong skills to have walked onto Parley’s locked-down internal network. She wishes she could stop believing it’s Gray. That doesn’t even make sense. And no way could he imitate sic_girl. He can barely imitate himself, the Auton. But who else would have the access?

Familiar sparkles seep out of the walls and ripple into a live display. The illusion of light and motion settles on her like the landscape passing a train window. It reminds her muscles to be exhausted. In the shifting forms a shape grows: a flowing surface, nimble and false. It’s familiar in the way a face is before you recognise it.

Someone hammers on the front door. The light patterns flick off as though a switch is thrown. The flat has no internal hallway – the door gives onto the sitting room, three metres away from where Dani is standing. Another burst of knocking. The door shakes.

‘
Miss Farr!
’

The policemen from Tuesday, barely muffled by the door’s thin wood. She knew they’d be back to hound her, now she’s totally this outlaw.

‘
We saw you come in. Would you please open the door?
’

‘So you found me. In my flat. Fucking genius!’

‘
Miss Farr, it
’
s in your interests to cooperate. We only want to speak to you.
’

‘Congratulations, you just did.’ Hitching the bag onto her shoulder. ‘Now fuck off!’

Whoa. She hadn’t known she was going to say that. A steady kicking starts. The prefab door shakes under the crunch of standard-issue boot.

‘Hey!’ she says. ‘Are you even allowed to do that? Don’t you need a warrant or something?’

‘
What are we doing, Miss Farr? We
’
re having a conversation.
’

The kicking continues. Flat Meg White drumbeats
.
If they enter, she’s Dani again. She needs to be Terry, to move and be nowhere. She walks on the pads of her feet to the kitchen and out of the open door onto the fire escape. The lightwell is a building turned inside out: frosted windows look out from all the flats, onto a white-tiled cavity down the centre of the building. A skylight glows overhead with a trace of day.

Another distant bout of hammering as she skips down the metal steps. No doubt where she’s headed: there’s this hotel. She’s already been there once today. She got the name from her new online bestie, identikid. She has the plan.

Plan, though? What is she racing into? None of this is her. Perhaps it’s Terry.

She slides open the ground-floor window, checks to left and right, slips onto the lino of the hall and heads for the front door and the street.

Why do some women forget they’re women when they go online?

Take a look at this Danielle Farr we’re hearing so much about. What is she thinking when she posts sick and degrading images of abused and trafficked women? And of herself? Does she spare a thought for the four-decade fight to liberate us from male oppression?

Has she forgotten she’s even a woman?

She uses her body like it’s property to pass around. She embraces the obscene patter of any woman-hating troll. Danielle Farr is living proof of how far the Internet has set us back from the hard-earned freedoms of the seventies. She’s bought into every single lie they’ve spun: that flaunting your body is self-expression not exploitation; that women can be defined by how they look; that if we want a voice we have to sing men’s tune.

When I see her sad little face peering out from these degrading pictures all I feel for this pathetic specimen is sympathy.

But sorry, sister, you ain’t no sister of mine.

Seventeen

‘I’m calling Sean,’ said Bethany.

Krish kept looking forward at the road, past Eric, the driver.

‘As soon as we get back to the office,’ she said, ‘I’m calling him.’

‘You are not calling him. That is something you will not do.’

Outside the car the Westminster evening trundled by. Using a car to travel three blocks is hardly eco, but that’s the price you pay for media scrutiny.

‘I actually am. And by the way, at what point did you get to tell me whether or not I can ring my lover?’

‘Oh, lord, please.’ Krish dropped to sotto voce as if Eric wasn’t right in front of them. ‘For your information, I started telling you whom to call when you put this plane into a nosedive. I’m pulling on the stick as hard as I can and I’d appreciate you letting me help. As far as you’re concerned Mr Perce is not your lover. He is nobody.’

Foolish to have spoken the thing out loud.

‘When you see him at the launch,’ said Krish, ‘you’ll be polite and distant. Everything you do sends the signal you barely know that man.’

From the window she caught a pedestrian’s eye. Brief shock of recognition.

‘Anyone in the country with a web browser knows there’s more to it.’

The car turned sharply. Bethany had failed to notice they were already pulling round the back of Artemis House. A pack of paps stood on the corner. Eric had cornered fast but they’d have got one of her startled face through the glass.

‘Thanks for the warning,’ she said.

Krish turned to watch the pressmen check their shots as the car descended the ramp to the car park.

‘Freelancers. Fewer today. They won’t sell anything. Unless we give them a cause – like, say, ringing Sean Perce.’

Eric pulled into Bethany’s parking spot. Krish hopped out before they’d come to a stop. Bethany launched herself out of her side. They slammed their doors in unison and faced off across the car.

‘How will anyone know if I make a private call? Are you planning to brief my phone log to the media?’

Krish leaned heavily across the car roof, looking almost sorrowful.

‘
He
would, though. He’d know. And if you don’t see that, you need to.’

‘Oh, come
on.
’

He broke for the stairs, forcing her to follow. Eric manhandled red boxes from the passenger seat.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘That’s a crazy accusation. Sean is a hard arse but he’s the good guys.’

As they entered the stairwell Krish pushed the door shut behind them, blocking out Eric.

‘Krish! That’s
rude
!’

He turned on her with the force of a Hebridean wind.

‘You need to think hard about where you place your loyalties this week. That man is out for anything he can recover from this situation and believe me, he isn’t waiting around for the phone to ring.’

‘Krish? You’re actually scaring me now.’

She glanced through the glass pane set into the door, into the car park. Eric stood a discreet three metres away, a statue. Not looking their way.

‘Are you saying Sean has been in touch?’ she hissed.

‘I’ll tell you who
has
been in touch. I’ll tell you who you
are
going to call. You are going to call your husband, who’s been on the phone to me roughly every thirty seconds.’

Oh, God, Peter – she’d been planning to call him. She’d meant to. She balled her fists and for a second thought she might pummel Krish in the chest. Instead she gave the door a single furious wallop. It sounded a dull note. Through the glass Eric started but didn’t turn. Those guys are pros. One more thing she’d miss when they gave her the heave-ho.

Except she mustn’t think that way. She’d bought herself time.

‘We need to kill this,’ she said. ‘I can’t – I
will not
go down over this, this nothing. Get me meat, Krish. We have until the morning. I’m ready to fight this but I’m batting air.’

Krish let out a breath. His shoulders settled and he turned away from her.

‘I try, aye. But I’m near the limit of who I can ring and bollock just now.’

Bethany nodded slowly. Through the glass Eric shifted from foot to foot. She turned a smile on Krish: a minister’s smile.

‘So then: shall we? I believe I have a call to make.’

¶riotbaby

Get set . . .

Eighteen

On the black-painted floorboards of the Flamingo, identikid preps for a practice run, tools arrayed around him. Winter is furled on the deflated sofa by the door, half-watching him over her tablet. Reynard is behind the sound desk, laying a mix into giant Sennheisers. The room is on mute except for the clicks and scrapes of Leo’s tools.

He’s test-rigged the four Black Boxes to the HD feed of the 72-inch plasma they use for karaoke nights. In a Terminal window on his MacBook he’s hacking the code that runs the Boxes but it’s a struggle. It’s good he gave himself time to test the set-up before tomorrow night. Don’t want to be fiddling with USB plugs, thirty storeys above the stonework.

The laptop pings. A new alert comes in every fifteen seconds: questions and connections from his widening network; dominos to set in line before tomorrow. It all takes time, which sometimes he doesn’t mind – these TakeBack girls are proper fit. He has a feeling about the new blood called AStrangeFish. She and Leo’ve been shooting shit since she first came online this arvo. Her avatar is a cartoony fish but he’s sure it’s a girl.

He’s got more busy going on right now than he thought he’d ever see but he’s loving every second. He leans over to kill alerts so he can concentrate on a specially gnarly bit of wiring; but before he can touch the trackpad up pops one alert he can’t ignore. He skips onto Parley.

¶riotbaby

Is it working yet?

¶identikid

hey man im on it these generic leads you sent are retarded

¶riotbaby

Do you need tech help?

¶identikid

fuck no im cool alright

¶riotbaby

You’ll tell me if you can’t handle it?

¶identikid

im handling it get off my tits man

¶riotbaby

Good boy. How are numbers looking?

¶identikid

s’cool. a hundred for definites. probs more

¶riotbaby

Good. We need enough bodies to fill the space. Whisper me when you’re ready?

¶identikid

yea ok wil defs whisp laters bro

¶riotbaby

Later, kid.