At this stage, the most plausible hypothesis seems to be one of mistaken identity; it doesn’t fit well with the professionalism of the kidnapping, but nobody’s perfect. What I need, to take the idea any further, is a list of the Hilgemann’s patients. Details of the staff might also come in handy.
I call my usual hacking service.
The ringing tone seems to reverberate deep within my skull. There’s no doubt that NeuroComm’s product psychologists chose these bizarre acoustics to give a strong impression of privacy, but I’m not impressed; it just makes me feel claustrophobic. At the same time, my external vision fades to black-and-white—supposedly to lessen the distraction, but in fact it’s just one more tedious gimmick.
Bella answers on the fourth ring, as always. Her face seems to hover about a metre away, vivid against reality’s greys, vanishing at the neck as if revealed by some magical spotlight. She smiles coolly. ‘Andrew, it’s good to see you. What can I do for you?’
‘Andrew’ is the name I use for one of my CypherClerk masks. Her own synthetic human visage might also be nothing but a mask, repeating word for word the speech intentions of an actual person—or it might be a pure artifact, the interface to anything from a glorified answering machine to a system that actually does ninety-nine per cent of the hacking itself. I really don’t care who or what Bella is; she/he/it/they get results, and that’s all that matters to me.
‘The Hilgemann Institute, Perth branch. I want all their patient records, and all their staff records.’
‘Back how far?’
‘Well… thirty years, if it’s on line. If the old stuff is archived, and it’s going to cost a fortune to get your hands on it, forget it.’
She nods. ‘Two thousand dollars.’
I know better than to try to haggle. ‘Fine.’
‘Call back in four hours. Your password is “paradigm”.’
As the room regains its normal hues, it strikes me that two thousand dollars would be a lot of money to Martha Andrews—not to mention the fifteen thousand I’ve already received in advance. Of course, if her lawyers were confident of a large settlement and a fat contingency fee, fifteen thousand would be nothing to them. Their wish to be anonymous might be no more sinister than my own use of a pseudonym with Bella; when laws are being broken, it’s nice to have bulkheads against the risk of a conspiracy charge.
Do I talk to Martha? I can’t see how it could upset her lawyers, and even if she hired me herself (which can’t yet be ruled out completely; her finances may have hidden depths) then she chose anonymity over the alternative of explicitly instructing me to keep my distance.
I have no real choice but to act as if I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to the question of my client’s identity—even if the truth is that, so far, nothing about the case fascinates me more.
Martha looks very much like her sister, with a little more flesh and a lot more worries. On the phone she asked, ‘Who are you working for? The hospital?’ When I told her that I wasn’t free to disclose my client’s name, she seemed to take that to mean yes. (In fact, it’s inconceivable; IS owns a great slab of shares in Pinkerton’s Investigations, so the Hilgemann would never hire a freelance.) Now, face to face, I’m almost certain that she wasn’t dissembling.
‘Really, I’m the last person to help you find Laura. She was in their care, not mine. I can’t imagine how they could have let something like this happen.’
‘No—but forget their incompetence, just for a moment. Do you have any idea why someone might want to kidnap Laura?’
She shakes her head. ‘What use would she be to anyone?’ The kitchen, where we’re sitting, is tiny and spotless. In the room next door, her boys are playing this summer’s craze, Tibetan Zen Demons on Acid vs Haitian Voodoo Gods on Ice—and not in their heads like the rich kids; she winces at the sound of a theatrically bloodcurdling scream, followed by a loud, wet explosion, and live cheers. ‘I’ve told you, I’m in no better position to answer that than anyone else. Maybe she wasn’t kidnapped. Maybe the Hilgemann harmed her somehow—mistreated her, or tried out a new kind of drug that went wrong—and their whole story about her disappearance is a cover-up. I’m only guessing, of course, but you ought to keep the possibility in mind. Assuming that you are interested in finding out the truth.’
‘Were you close to Laura?’
She frowns. ‘Close? Haven’t they told you? What she’s like?’
‘Attached to her, then? Did you visit her often?’
‘No. Never. There was no point visiting her—she wouldn’t have known what it meant. She wouldn’t have known it was happening.’
‘Did your parents feel the same way?’
She shrugs. ‘My mother used to see her, about once a month. She wasn’t fooling herself—she knew it made no difference to Laura—but she thought it was the right thing to do, regardless. I mean, she knew she’d feel guilty if she stayed away, and by the time they had mods that could fix that, she was too set in her ways to want to change. But I’ve never had any problem, myself; Laura’s not a person, so far as I’m concerned, and I’d only feel like a hypocrite if I tried pretending otherwise.’
‘I take it you’re planning to be a bit more sentimental in court?’
She laughs, unoffended. ‘No. We’re suing for punitive damages, not compensation for “emotional suffering”.
The issue will be the hospital’s negligence, not my feelings. I may be an opportunist, but I’m not going to perjure myself.’
On the train back into the city, I wonder: would Martha have arranged her sister’s abduction, for the sake of punitive damages? Her unwillingness to milk the suit for all it’s worth might be a calculated ploy, a way to ensure a jury’s sympathy by seeming to forgo exploitation. There’s at least one flaw in this theory, though: why not demand a ransom—which could be recovered, through the courts, from the Hilgemann? Why leave the motive for the kidnapping a mystery crying out for an explanation, inviting suspicions of fraud?
I emerge from the airless crush of the underground to find the streets almost as crowded, with evening shoppers lugging post-Christmas bargains, and buskers so devoid of talent—natural or otherwise—that I feel like stooping down and switching their credit machines into refund mode.
‘You’re a mean-spirited bastard,’ says Karen. I nod agreement.
As I approach the sandwich-board man, I tell myself I’m going to walk by as if I hadn’t even noticed him, but a few steps later, I stop and turn to stare. His meekly downturned face is as pale as a slug—God doesn’t want us messing with our pigmentation! — and he wears a black suit that must be purgatory in this heat. Amongst the brightly clad, bare-limbed crowd, he looks like a nineteenth-century missionary stranded in an African marketplace. I’ve seen the same man before, wearing the same imaginative message, repeated front and back:
sinners
repent! judgement is nigh!
Nigh! After thirty-three years, nigh! No wonder he stares at the ground. What the fuck has been going on in his brain for the last three decades? Does he wake every morning, thinking—for the ten-thousandth time—‘Today’s the day’? That’s not faith, it’s paralysis.
I stand awhile, just watching him. He paces slowly back and forth along a fixed path, halting when the flow of shoppers is too heavily against him. Most people are ignoring him, but I notice a teenage boy collide with him intentionally and roughly shoulder him aside, and I feel a shameful surge of delight.