Tillman put the cards back in his pocket.
‘Well?’ he asked.
Manolis nodded.
‘She had a tail?’
Manolis held up his hand, the thumb and forefinger a halfinch apart. ‘A little one,’ he said. ‘Cottontail, like a rabbit. Pretty much definite, Leo. Was the same girl that was following you two nights ago. I didn’t get a clear shot of her face, but the height, the build — identical. Let me show you.’
He took off his gloves and then his helmet. From inside the helmet he removed, with great care, a small lozenge of black plastic that had been affixed there by two steel brackets clipped to the helmet’s inside rim. At one end of the device, the only break in its smooth surface, there was a tiny glass bulb: the micro-camera’s lens.
From the lozenge, Manolis detached the even smaller plastic wafer that was the memory card. He booted up the computer in the corner of the tiny room, and slid the card into a reader built into the front fascia.
A window opened and began to fill with thumbnails. Manolis leaned close to the screen, squinting at the tiny images with furious concentration. ‘Here,’ he said at last. He clicked the mouse and one of the images expanded. It showed the part of Hunter Street that ran behind Coram’s Fields. The image was tilted slightly, which wasn’t surprising, since it had been taken from a moving motorcycle. What was surprising was that there was no motion blur of any kind, only a little fish-eye distortion, because of the curvature of the lens. Manolis knew his kit and what it was capable of.
He zoomed in on a corner of the image. A woman — Heather Kennedy — was walking away from the camera, her face turned in profile. Fifty yards behind her was a shorter figure, a girl, very slight in build, wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt. She had her back to the camera, her face not visible at all.
Manolis tapped the mouse and the screen flickered, one image replacing another so that the figures moved forward in jerky freeze-frame. At the same time, the angles and relationships shifted. Manolis had overtaken the girl and continued to take pictures as he passed her. The image tilted even further, but the focus stayed pin-sharp even when he zoomed in to the point where her head filled the screen.
Her head, but not her face. As though she could sense the camera, she turned away from it, so Manolis had got only the back of her neck, the curve of her cheek.
‘I would have gone back for another pass,’ he said to Tillman apologetically. ‘But I didn’t think I’d get away with it. You know, you can just tell, sometimes, if someone’s got their radar out, and it felt like she did. I didn’t want to scare her off. But she looks like the same one to me.’
‘Same one,’ Tillman said. ‘Definitely. And she hasn’t let me get a clear look at her face, either. So she was tailing me and now she’s tailing Heather. Did you manage to follow her back to source?’
Manolis clenched and unclenched his fists, and bowed his bullet head. ‘Sorry, Leo. I lost her. I don’t think she saw me, I think she just has good tradecraft. She zigs and zags a lot, and I was in traffic. She went down Onslow Street. There are steps down from the main road. Steep. I can’t drive down there. And if I ditch the bike and follow, she sees me, she knows why I come. I had to let her go. So then I go round by Saffron Hill, but there’s no sign. She’s already gone.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Mano. What you’ve got is good. Very good. But stay free. I may need you to do one more thing for me.’
‘It’s all in the price. You’ve got me for three more days.’
‘You’ve given me everything I asked for. If you do this, I’ll pay you a bonus. But I’m absolutely fine if you say no, because the risk profile just changed radically.’
‘I never said I wanted to keep my head down, Leo. Only way to avoid all the risks is to be dead. What do you want me to do?’
‘Nothing, just yet,’ Tillman said. ‘Heather said she was attacked last night, and this girl pulled her irons out of the fire. I want to go look over that ground. Might pick up something that we can use. Because what I really want to do, right now, is to meet this kid and ask her what it is she thinks she’s doing.’
Manolis shrugged. ‘I’m here when you need me,’ he said. ‘But one thing, Leo. If you need to see your friend again, better make it somewhere else.’
Tillman was surprised. ‘Why’s that, Mano? I’d have thought Heather would be just your type.’
‘Yeah, exactly,’ Manolis agreed. ‘Caitlin thinks so, too.’
22
Matthew Jukes caved in very quickly once money was mentioned, but the list of Alex Wales’s files that he handed to Rush furtively in the alcove that housed the coffee machine ran to over fifty pages, and the file names mostly gave no clue at all as to their contents.
‘Is there any way to get these files back up on another computer?’ Rush asked Jukes.
‘Anywhere you like,’ Jukes said. He was a sour-faced bugger, normally, but the combination of money and an opportunity to show off had rendered him magically cordial. ‘All this stuff is in the mainframe. Even if you save to your own C or D drive, there’s a hundred per cent back-up at the end of the day. That’s standard policy.’
‘So you can set me up with Wales’s files, on my own machine?’
‘It would be my pleasure.’
In fact, Jukes went one better than that. He faked a temporary administrator ID for Rush, which gave him full access not just to Alex Wales’s files but also to his usage stats. That meant Rush could see what he’d done and when he’d done it, which files he’d kept open for longest, even which ones he’d printed out.
And the results were surprising. As Allan Scholl’s PA, most of Wales’s time should have been divided between Scholl’s diary and Scholl’s inbox. In fact, Wales seemed to have gotten that bread-and-butter stuff out of the way right at the start of each day, logging on as early as 7 a.m. After that, he let the emails lie wherever they fell, while he trawled through pages and pages of what looked like gibberish — random screeds of numbers and letters separated by occasional backslashes.
‘Database logs,’ Jukes said carelessly. ‘They look like that unless you go in through the client server. You can’t open them up as files like you can with Word docs and stuff like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of the architecture. It’s event-driven.’
‘Jukes, I have no idea what you just said.’
‘That’s obvious,’ Jukes sneered, his natural obnoxiousness bobbing briefly to the surface. ‘All right. Say you ask a question like how many people are there in the world?’
‘Okay. Say I do.’
‘So what’s the answer?’
‘There isn’t any answer,’ Rush said. ‘It’s changing all the time. It’s changed in the time it takes you to ask me the question.’
‘Exactly. Same with this stuff. Event-driven architecture just means that the system keeps adjusting itself in real time. External events trigger updates. So every time you ask the question, you get a different answer. You can’t open the file because there isn’t a file. There’s a data set that keeps changing.’
Rush scrolled through pages and pages of the same kind of nonsense. Occasionally he saw something that looked like a surname with initials attached. MILTONTF. LUBINSKIJJ. SPEEDWELLNM. The rest was impenetrable, just alphanumeric vomit.
‘So what question was he asking?’ Rush demanded. ‘Is there any way we can tell?’