I heard an engine growl behind me, and stiffened with fear, but the Audi that whipped past paid no attention. Past the residential oasis I emerged onto a street thick with shops, buses, pedestrians – and cameras. I knew I didn’t have long before Argus found me.
Chapter 62
I spotted an Oxfam sign. I knew them from previous visits to London; a secondhand charity shop, like Goodwill in the USA. Breathing hard, covered with fresh cuts and bruises, dripping blood from my left hand, I opened their door and walked inside.
“Do you have a phone?” I asked the little old lady behind the counter. “I’ve just been hit a car.”
“Yes,” she said, startled, “yes, of course, are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” I tried to look dazed while surreptitiously surveying the goods on offer.
“I’ll call an ambulance. Sit down. Please.”
“I just, I’m cold, I need to cover up,” I explained, trying to feign delirium as I grabbed a big black hooded sweater. It wasn’t hard. I wasn’t exactly feeling fully compos mentis.
“Yes, of course, sir, please, sit, I’ll -“
“I think I’d better walk to stay warm,” I told her, and strode out of the store, leaving her dumbfounded. Once outside I donned my new hoodie and started running again. Even if she didn’t call the police, I needed to get away from Argus.
I zigzagged haphazardly through the streets of London for what felt like a very long time, fuelled by the fear of being prey, trying to alternate between back alleys and huge crowds. I ran until my lungs were burning, and my legs too weak to continue. Then I walked.
Finally I decided that if I hadn’t lost my invisible panopticon pursuers, I never would; so I found a little green square of a park and slumped onto a bench, gasping for breath. Rational thought returned slowly to my brain. I tried to stanch my bleeding hand with the hoodie’s sleeve, and took stock of my situation.
Assets: almost none. Clothing, including a face-hiding hoodie and a decent pair of Asics; knowledge, most of it dangerous, or useless, or both; liberty, probably temporary.
Liabilities: where to begin? Police forces around the globe thought me a mass-murdering terrorist; Anya and the forces of her “billionaire uncle” were doubtless already after me, aided by all of London’s million-strong closed-circuit cameras; Jesse and Sophie were presumably in unfriendly custody; no one else might help me; my wounded hand probably needed stitches, and my back still hurt like hell; and I had no money whatsoever.
Realistically it was only a matter of time, probably only hours, before either the police or the Russians recaptured me. Meanwhile, the fate of the free world arguably rested on my shoulders. I felt like a paraplegic Atlas.
I supposed I could add one item to my Assets list, in a way. I quite literally had nothing left to lose.
With that in mind, when my breath was recovered, I stood and headed for the nearest corner shop labelled FOOD & WINE. A small lineup waited at the cash register. I approached the proprietor directly, and said, “Excuse me, I’m a tourist, new around here, can you just -” before pretending to notice the other customers and demurring, “Never mind, handle them first.”
The grizzled man behind the counter frowned at me, turned to the lead customer, took her money, opened the cash register. Without allowing myself to stop and think about it, I leaned over, reached in, grabbed a fistful of twenty-pound notes, and turned and ran.
I half-expected pursuit, but those present were so shocked that I heard no cry of fury or dismay before the door shut behind me and I was on the street and running again. Pedestrians stared at me curiously but nobody intervened. I stuffed the stolen money in my stolen hoodie’s inner pocket, jinked down a side street, gradually adopted the gait of a man running for fitness rather than his life, and eventually slowed to a sedate walk.
I didn’t even feel guilty. When you are wanted worldwide for crimes against humanity, mere theft seems like a misdemeanour. In a quiet corner I counted my money and found myself with a net worth of two hundred and eighty pounds, which under the circumstances was a million times better than zero. Now that I had money, I had options; and now that I had options, I began to formulate a plan.
Everything that was going on was too much. The putative Russian drone attack on America, whatever had happened to Sophie across the Atlantic – with Jesse and Sophie gone, captured or compromised or whatever, those problems were beyond me. I couldn’t change whether the world as I knew it would survive or collapse. I didn’t play in that league.
But maybe even an ordinary guy like me could do one thing for one person. Maybe I could find my best friend. And if I was lucky, and decisive, and I moved fast, maybe I could even save him.
Chapter 63
I found a London Underground station by following roads towards busier roads, street lights, and larger buildings, until I stumbled across Kensal Green. I was glad I didn’t have to interact with anyone to purchase my fare. En route I had purchased bandages, chocolate bars and a Coke, for my wounded hand and their sugar-rush energy respectively, and the woman who had sold them to me had actually double-taked and backed away from me before reluctantly consummating the transaction. Behind the black hood I must have looked like nine different flavours of hell.
I knew from my post-university European tour that Earl’s Court was riddled with Internet cafes. I found a 24-hour one with semi-private booths and semi-new machines. The Russian-accented immigrant who took my money seemed only slightly nonplussed by my battered and hooded appearance; I supposed places like this attracted all sorts.
Once ensconced, I played my last remaining card, my only valuable asset. I had garnered it only hours earlier, when I had shoulder-surfed as Jesse opened a secure shell connection to the Argus system, and recognized the pattern his fingers formed as they flew over the keyboard. A pattern I knew from high school.
Login: jester
Password: ancalag0n
My plan was simple: use Argus to find what had happened to Jesse. Maybe Anya was still pretending to be his ally and lover – but I doubted it. My disappearance would be hard to explain. I suspected he was now in Russian-controlled accommodations considerably less comfortable than those in Viktor Kharlamov’s mansion.
It took me an hour to master Argus well enough to determine that my plan was doomed to failure.I felt like a fist had emerged from that computer screen and punched. My one card, my sole asset, had been a useless joker. It was not possible to follow what Anya and Jesse had done today because, like a vampire, Anya Azaryeva did not appear on Argus’s cameras at all. Every trace of her had been erased from the system.
Erased.
“Holes,” I muttered.
My degree was in electrical engineering, meaning that I had spent considerable time tracking the flow of electrons through circuits. But sometimes, I had learned at university, it was much easier to reverse the order of things and track holes; not electrons, but their absence.
By cutting herself out of Argus, Anya must have left huge, jagged gaps in its data. Those gaps would be easy to find. I couldn’t watch anything she had done – but I could use her erasure to find everything and everywhere she had been.
I began to assemble and track all the timecode discontinuities in Argus’s records. Then I created a map showing the location of every bit of footage that my opponents had erased, a narrative of negation. It wasn’t easy. The system was designed to track patterns, not absences, so I had to write several new scripts. By the time I finished mapping the non-data it was 3 AM, pain burned in my lower back like a fire in coal mine, and my mind felt deadened by my cranial overdrive, as if all my brain’s crenellations had been ironed flat. But I was still sharp enough to observe how the dead zone in Argus’s sight had moved over the course of the day, and to conclude that on her way back to the mansion Anya had stopped on a street named ‘The Butts’, in the town of Brentford, just west of London proper.