Mile End station was in the East End, north of the river. As the train slowed, Lyla pulled up the hood of her anorak to hide her face. Gryffin shoved his hands in his pockets and made a point of not meeting anyone’s gaze. I stared back defiantly and wild-eyed at anyone who glanced my way.
“Stop it,” Gryffin said nervously. “You look like one of them.”
“Good,” I snapped. “Maybe they won’t fuck with us.”
As we exited the station, a steady stream of people filed onto the escalators, nearly all white. Boisterous young men sporting shaved heads and motocross jackets, older people who would have fit right into the audience at a midwestern NPR fundraiser. A few small groups displayed the Svarlight logo, though they were outnumbered by guys supporting DOA, Defenders of Albion, or other UK groups. Several families had kids in tow, which made it look less like a nationalist march than a Waldorf school picnic, without the angst.
A lot of people carried hand-lettered signs with messages like MY JOB WENT TO EU, BRING IT BACK!, or ADJUNCT = NO FUTURE. There were counterdemonstrators, too, flaunting slogans like NO TO FASCISM, HOPE NOT HATE, and DOA IS DOA. For the moment, the two factions kept a safe distance from each other.
A tall black woman strode past us, murmuring an invective. “Great,” Gryffin said. “They really do think you’re one of them.”
Lyla whirled to poke him with a gloved finger. “No one told you to come. Keep your mouth shut or fuck off, both of you. I mean it.”
I met Gryffin’s gaze, willing him to leave. He was nothing but deadweight; Lyla might lead me to Tindra. But Gryffin just jammed his hands in his pockets and walked on.
A greenway had been constructed around Mile End, incorporating a retired overpass and landscaped with leafless birches and plume grass. It reminded me of the High Line, only with the Regent’s Canal running alongside it. Despite the greasy fog and chill wind, children’s playgrounds lent the scene a festive air, as did the sounds of distant laughter and an occasional burst of applause.
Lyla headed toward the canal towpath. After fifteen minutes, we left the path for a well-trodden stretch that led to a busy street. On the other side was a vast expanse of green lawns and plane trees, benches lining a broad walkway.
I ran to catch up with Lyla, who was scanning her mobile.
“She’s done something to her mobile, or he has—I can’t track her. And I still have no signal.” She glanced at a helicopter hovering in the near distance. “Might be they’re jamming the signals for crowd control. But you were right…”
She indicated two blond guys sporting Svarlight’s oak leaf and lightning bolt on their shirts. “If this Erik is connected with them, maybe he won’t be that hard to find. He might be one of the speakers.”
“Hiding in plain sight?” I shot her a dubious look.
“I don’t know. Maybe my brother’s already found her. That’s what I hope.”
We crossed the street and joined the crowd entering Victoria Park.
The explosive exhilaration I’d felt with the first few hits of crank had settled into a steady, shining buzz. I craved more but needed to pace myself. Gryffin walked ahead of us, messenger bag slung over one shoulder, his tall frame stooped like a disconsolate commuter’s. Lyla remained focused on her mobile.
“Any news?” I asked after a few minutes.
“No.” Her hood slipped back, and I saw her eyes were red. “It was so fucking stupid of her to come here. She knew Tommy would go after her. She knows it’s not safe for him.”
“‘Safe’?”
“Since Afghanistan? He has issues. Tindra hoped her app would help him. That was one of the reasons she developed it.”
“Ludus Mentis?” I felt a bolt of panic. “He hasn’t tried it, has he?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
It might, I thought. A lot. But I said nothing.
The park was so big that, once inside, the demonstrators hardly seemed an organized crowd, just scattered groups making the best of a dreary afternoon. There were definitely many more cops here. Many more scary-looking people, too, including a lot of heavily tattooed, booted men who chanted and carried signs with that distinctive white flag with a red cross.
JOBS-FIRST!
3,000,000 ISLAMISTS IN ENGLAND
100%
TAKE BACK CONTROL
WHITE GENOCIDE
I looked at Lyla. She’d drawn the hood back around her face so that she resembled a huge black bird. “What’s ‘one hundred percent’ mean?”
“One hundred percent white.”
“What about the red-and-white flag?”
“Saint George’s flag. It symbolizes England, as opposed to the United Kingdom. The right wing’s made it a racist thing. Him and the dragon…”
She gestured at two teenagers carrying a banner that displayed a knight in red armor thrusting a sword into a dragon emblazoned with a crescent moon. “ISIS talks about Crusaders, and they play right into it.”
I sidestepped an elderly woman who glared furiously at the teenagers. “Tindra told me what happened to her when she was a girl.”
Lyla drew up short. “What did she tell you?”
“That she was assaulted by a family friend, and her father did nothing. Is that who Erik is? Her father?”
“No.” Lyla’s tone was adamant. “She would never have agreed to see her father. She despises him. A Swedish Democrat—a white supremacist, though he never called himself that.”
“Isn’t everyone in Sweden white?”
“It’s not funny.”
I glanced over and saw Gryffin waiting for us beneath a tree. Lyla began to walk again. “He’s on HNN,” she said. “Her father. She can see him anytime she wants.”
“What’s HNN?”
“White supremacist website, biggest in the world after Stormfront. Herla Network News. He has a regular podcast, Valî’s Hour.”
“I thought they shut down Stormfront.”
“They did. HNN, too. But they just find another server that doesn’t mind taking Nazi money. I mean, your fucking FBI claims it lost its records on Stormfront. So the white supremacists just burrow into the Dark Web. You can find anything there—Nazi propaganda, how to make bombs. HNN pretends to be a site for heathens, but that’s just a front. That mosque firebombed in Berlin? They were behind that. And those murders at that crèche in Denmark.”
“So Tindra’s father is a Nazi?”
“Of course not.” She laughed bitterly. “Just a good Swede promoting free speech and northern European folk culture. Like them.” She gestured at the people around us.
“You think he’s here?”
“I sincerely doubt that.”
We caught up with Gryffin, his shoulders hunched against the wind as he hurried toward us.
“Hey, what took you so long?” He pointed to the crowd gathered around a monument a few hundred yards off. “That seems to be the main event. Any idea what this Erik looks like?”
Lyla shook her head. She withdrew a pair of compact binoculars from her backpack and focused them on the crowd. I heard her curse softly.
Hundreds of people had assembled here, along with police in riot gear who stood watching them impassively, arms behind their backs. A large group of men marched in orderly formation toward the monument, two by two, close enough that I caught whiffs of their aftershave. All wore identical white polo shirts and brown khaki pants. Most had close-cropped hair, and their ages ran from older teenagers to white-haired men well past seventy.
There must have been a hundred of them. A few carried homemade cardboard shields crisscrossed with black duct tape that formed crude lightning bolts and symbols like deconstructed swastikas. The shields resembled something a kid would make for a school project, which only made them more disturbing.
“Jesus.” Gryffin shuddered. “It’s Oswald Mosley’s grandchildren.”
I watched, nervously zipping and unzipping my leather jacket. My skin felt brittle, as though I’d shatter if someone touched me. Finding Tindra or Tommy or an unknown Erik here seemed as likely as finding my long-lost photos of Quinn. The police observed but made no move to intervene as the white shirts headed toward the front of the crowd. I ran my tongue across my cracked lips, fighting the urge to run.
After the last of the white shirts passed, Lyla lowered her binoculars. “We need to split up. If you see Tindra or my brother, text me if you can get a signal. Otherwise we’ll meet back here in half an hour.”
As Gryffin nodded and started toward the monument, Lyla turned to me. “You’ll want to keep an eye on that,” she said, indicating my bag. “And don’t take off, right?”
It was as much a plea as a warning. I zipped up my jacket and walked away without looking back. I didn’t intend to see either one of them again.