She offered me a cigarette, and I shook my head.
“You thinking of joining? You’d be unusual, but this is Shinjuku. You can be disgusting as a decomposing rhino and someone will want to fuck you, because you’re unusually disgusting. But you’re very beautiful, I think.”
“Get many salarymen?”
“Lots. Most of them are married but, like I said, it’s just talk. Lonely men who like to talk with someone… else.”
Out of interest, I said, “Have you got Perfection?”
She laughed. “Sure. I used to. Everyone in this city wants to be perfect. I did okay too, won like, six months discounted membership at some really swanky gym downtown, the perfect gym you know, to get the perfect body. But it got access to my bank accounts or something, or maybe my loyalty cards, you know like I don’t even know how it did it but I must have ticked a box or something, and at thirty thousand points it started telling me to quit smoking and drink less, and I was like, fuck that, and at forty thousand points it started sending me stuff from agencies that it said better matched my character profile than my current work — I mean, fuck? Like, a fucking app telling me what to fucking do with my life? Anyway, after that I started to lose points like a space invader. ‘Perfection lies within you,’ it said. I deleted the fucking thing when I got back to ten thousand points, but you know what? My friend, who fixes computers and shit, says there’s still, like, stuff on my phone tracking me, I mean, like, Perfection has still got all that access because I can’t like, just stop it, what the fuck.”
Permissions that the Facebook Messenger app requests when downloaded to your phone:
• Allows the app to change the state of network connectivity.
• Allows the app to call phone numbers without your intervention.
• Allows the app to send SMS messages.
• Allows the app to record audio with microphone. This permission allows the app to record audio at any time without your confirmation.
• Allows the app to take pictures and videos with the camera. This permission allows the app to use the camera at any time without your confirmation.
• Allows the app to read your phone’s call log, including data about incoming and outgoing calls. This permission allows apps to save your call-log data.
• Allows the app to read data about your contacts stored on your phone, including the frequency with which you’ve called, emailed, or communicated in other ways with specific individuals.
• Allows the app to read personal-profile information stored on your device, such as your name and contact information. This means the app can identify you and may send your profile information to others.
• Allows the app to get a list of accounts known by the phone. This may include any accounts created by applications you have installed.
Perfection had almost exactly the same permissions, with one difference:
• Allows the app to monitor internet history and keystrokes.
I considered for a moment the power of this tool, and saw bank accounts and passwords, online shops and credit cards, maps and travel patterns, blackmail and bribery roll before my eyes.
I wondered what I could do with that knowledge, being a thief.
Then I chided myself for narrow thinking, and asked instead: what could I do with that knowledge, being a god?
Chapter 37
A week of investigation.
Why had Byron14 sent me to Japan?
Prometheus, owner of Perfection. Subsidiary offices: Mumbai, Shanghai, Dubai, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Paris, Hamburg, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, Caracas, Santiago, Grenville (tax purposes?), Geneva (absolutely tax purposes) and Tokyo.
The Tokyo office was registered to a building in Yamanote. I walked by it twice, counting twenty-eight floors to the top of its sheer glass and concrete sides, before going in search of a business suit.
Out of curiosity, I lay on my belly in my hotel room and poked on a laptop at Prometheus. Dragging data off the net was slow, but not impossible. Like a huge number of companies across the world, the majority of Prometheus’ value was owned by a holding company, a multi-fingered corporation whose sole purpose was to own other things. At the top was Rafe Pereyra-Conroy. I recognised his face: he’d worn black in Dubai, and smiled at the royal family, and as I walked away from the robbery he’d been in the lobby, screaming down a mobile phone.
At my fucking party stole her fucking jewels do you know what this fucking does for us, do you know how much we’ve just fucking lost?!
Searching in depth for Rafe Pereyra-Conroy, you mostly found his father.
Matheus Pereyra, born in Montevideo, carried by his mother to England aged three years old, grew up in a two-bedroom bungalow in West Acton with a violent stepfather and a mother struggling to survive. Aged sixteen, Matheus left home to start work on the print floor of a Fleet Street journal, hauling reams of paper and gallons of ink into the noisy belly of the machines. There he was “Matty”, and though he hated his English stepfather, he used his surname and became Matty Conroy, one of the lads. He bought a tie and a suit, and every Friday night went down the pub with the journos, learning how to swagger and smoke, until one day someone turned round and said, “Bugger me, Matty, you’re wasted in the print room…” So began Matty Conroy’s journey into the world of media.
“Work, work, work,” he was quoted as saying. “Young people just want everything to drop on their plate, but I know, you have to work, and you have to believe. People tell you you’re too smalclass="underline" you prove you’re bigger than them. They say you’ll never make it: you remember those words and every time you fall down, you remember, you’ll make it, you’ll make it, you’ll make it.”
As a journalist, he was a disaster; as a seller of advertising space and developer of market strategies, he was a genius. Within five years he’d quit the newspaper that first hired him, and aged twenty-six he started his own.
“You know the difference between a tabloid and a newspaper?” he asked. “A tabloid actually gives people stories they’re interested in.”
Aged thirty he controlled 23 per cent of the print media market in the UK; aged thirty-four he bought his first TV station. When, aged thirty-five, the Royal Ascot Racing Club declined his membership on grounds that he did not conform to their requirements, the two newspapers and four tabloids under his control ran headline stories on the subject, with tag-lines ranging from a moderate “Old-Fashioned and Out of Touch?” through to “The Bigoted Berks of Berkshire”. To his surprise, the ancient white-gloved gentlemen of Ascot, rather than yield to this pressure, dug their heels in deeper.
“Mr Conroy’s campaign of harassment only serves to emphasise the validity of our initial judgement in declining him membership, as is our right,” explained one spokesman in a top hat.
The aristocracy of England had survived revolution, emancipation and war. Time was long, memory faded, but they never changed.
Two years later, Matty Conroy was Matheus Pereyra again, owner of a luxury cruise-ship line, a chain of chicken restaurants, a hire-car company, half a bank, and an island near Nassau. The day his value exceeded £1 billion, a rival newspaper in the UK ran an article pointing out that he paid an estimated 0.7 per cent tax on his fortune. The newspaper was sued for libel, and though the case was dropped — “for reasons of fact” as the editor put it — the lawyers’ fees crippled the paper for years to come, and it ran no more such articles.