The white strobe pummelled the walls of the nightclub.
Sara looked through the tinted window to the dancefloor, two storeys below, where clubbers silently bobbed and churned.
The office was a black box tucked into the upper reaches of the converted warehouse, like a birds’ nest folded up into the corner of a roof. An aerial gangway projected out from its front door to the middle of the ceiling, where it met a circular staircase dropping down to the floor.
‘This is the full kit.’
She looked away from the window and returned her attention to the boy. He was in his late teens, with a shaven head, emaciated frame and dirty t-shirt – the calling cards of the hacker, more focused on the mind than the body. Clear, blue, intelligent eyes stared at her from beneath a high forehead. She had forgotten his name since their meeting yesterday; there seemed little point storing away what was obviously a handle.
He waved a hand across the desk – lying there was a passport, driver’s licence and phone – and picked up each item, turning it over in his hands like a collector as he described the artisanal efforts that went into creating it.
Sara found she was zoning out, catching only brief phrases of his commentary, like listening to a radio station that was drifting. A sense of unease had been dogging her all day, a feeling that something had happened in the last twenty-four hours that would have terrible consequences for her, like a wave displaced by an undersea earthquake that builds in size and speed as it rolls inexorably towards a beach where bathers sit watching a flat sea.
He had finished speaking and was looking at her, waiting for a response. She forced herself back to the present.
‘And the things I showed you yesterday?’ she asked.
The boy shook his head. ‘Not much.’
He leaned over his laptop, his fingers lightly flicking the keys.
‘FRS is just developing now …’ He squinted into his laptop screen.
‘FRS?’ asked Sara.
‘Facial recognition software,’ he explained. ‘It wasn’t a bad picture,’ he said, looking up briefly.
Sara walked around the desk. On the laptop screen was a digital copy of her Polaroid, sliced into cubes through a superimposed grid. The boy had toyed with light and contrast, tightening the images. The man’s face was clearer, sharper, and she could see for the first time the colour of his eyes. Ice-blue.
‘But I checked the registers. Nothing.’ He tapped the return button and stood up. The image disappeared.
‘What else can I try?’
The boy inclined his head to one side and then another, like a street vendor deciding whether to accept an offer.
‘Your best solution now is time. The FRS will develop. Two, three, maybe five years. Maybe more.’
The enormity of the time frame spread out ahead of her, giving her a dizzying sense of vertigo. Each time she felt like she was getting close, her prize pulled away, like a magnetic children’s toy whose pieces repel each other when they come in close proximity.
The boy was talking again, pointing to a new picture on his laptop: her locket and chain.
‘… told you yesterday. It’s plastic, not worth anything. I recognized the design. It’s an ancient symbol, a protection from evil. Now the number …’
He toggled a switch, and multiple perspectives of the locket flashed on screen until it settled on a close-up of the underside.
‘I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it’s got some sort of code printed on it: 515195140126923. Nothing came up on the registers for this either. Could be a distributor’s serial. Or a manufacturer’s stamp. But even assuming it is one of those, it won’t get you any closer to who gave it to you.’
Sara visibly deflated. The boy’s reputation as an identity thief and procurer was unrivalled.
She remained standing in front of him. Something he had said had snagged a tripwire in her mind, alerting her to something, although she wasn’t sure of what.
‘You told me you wouldn’t show these to anyone else,’ she said, groping towards the alarm system sounding like a growing klaxon in her mind.
‘I didn’t,’ replied the boy, bristling.
‘But … you just said you did a web search …’ replied Sara, still unsure of what she was trying to say.
The boy relaxed visibly. ‘That’s not public. I use top-line VPNs and DNS redirectors. No way anyone could trace my searches back. You don’t have to worry …’
Sara didn’t hear the rest of his reply. Her focus was snatched by an electric shock that started in the base of her spine and spread in concussion waves, flowering up along her upper back and neck. Her head dipped, a reflex, as if someone had crept up behind her and had taken a swing from behind. She spun around, looking in shock at the empty room.
Sara fought for breath, her heart rate spiking as fight-or-flight responses fired throughout her system. She ran to the window and looked down.
At first, she saw nothing other than flashes of light. Then, on the ground floor, she saw them. A group of men in suits scanning the crowd, heads swivelling, searching the space.
‘There’s no need to freak …’
His voice trailed off as he joined her at the window and followed her gaze. The men had regrouped and were pushing through the crowd towards the base of the stairs leading to the office. Two bouncers blocked their way, and a mute but hostile exchange was happening.
‘Is there another way out of here?’ asked Sara.
‘They have nothing to do with …’ started the boy.
But he didn’t take his eyes off the window. Below, the bouncers were keeling over, tipping over the balustrades, and the men were moving up the stairs, the flashing light of the strobe making it seem like their bodies were teleporting forwards in tiny increments. They would be at the front door of the office in seconds.
‘Shit,’ said the boy, his assured demeanour faltering.
He ran behind his desk, stood on his chair and reached for a clasp embedded in the ceiling.
Sara looked back through the window. The men had reached the top of the stairs and were looking directly at her from the other end of the aerial walkway.
She swivelled and saw the legs of the boy disappearing up into the hatch door.
A thudding sound was getting louder and louder in her head, overpowering her ability to think. It swelled, thumping in her chest and tingling down her arms and legs. The gap between the concussions was getting longer, matching the interval of her breaths.
She willed her legs to move. The feet stamping on the metal gangway were loud enough now to be heard over the music. But something was disconnected in Sara, her body was no longer receiving signals from her mind. She looked up at the hanging hatch door, tantalizingly close, willing herself to dive on to the desk and spring up into it.
The sound in her head was deafening now, crowding out all other noise, leaving her in a cocoon swaddled in a primitive heartbeat. She noticed that time was downshifting gears, grinding to a crawl, every ion in the room seeming to vibrate in slow motion.
And then the door was opening, swinging inwards, pulsing with the time-lapse effect of the strobe, arcing with the ricochet force from a horizontal stamp with a heavy boot.
Sara stood in the centre of the floor, frozen, her eyes wide, watching as the men surged inside, flowing like water into the room. They broke over her, a rock in the centre of a stream, and carried on to the desk, where they peered up into the black square above them. First one, then another hoisted themselves up, disappearing into the boxy maw, while the final man rushed out through the front door, pounding back along the metal bridge, leaving Sara standing amidst visible slipstreams left in their wake that hung in the air around her like stardust. She traced them with her eyes, the only soundtrack to the silence being the systolic-diastolic beat in her ears.
Sara took an enormous involuntary inhalation, the deep survival breath of someone who had been oxygen-deprived to the limits of their ability. The world folded in on itself, and, with an audible pop, the music came crashing back.
She looked around her in confusion. The door was shut, and heavy boots were again clanging towards her, like the needle of time had skipped its groove. For the briefest of moments, the stardust hung in the air, a shimmering trail left by the men’s invasion of the room seconds before. She looked at the slipstreams and realized what she needed to do.
Bonner, Jonas and Page kicked down the door and burst into the Portakabin that functioned as the office of the nightclub. GCHQ had tracked the IP address linked to the Orpheus-related searches to this geo-location.
Furnishings were perfunctory – a desk, a filing cabinet, stacks of servers – and there were no corners in which to hide. Their eyes were drawn immediately to the hanging attic door, swaying slightly. From his crash through the door, Bonner vaulted up on to the desk and wedged his shoulders into the cramped space in one fluid movement. Jonas followed and Page, hearing the muffled order from Bonner, turned and ran back the way they came to close down any exits.
Sara crawled out from under the desk. Above her, she could hear the two men crawling along the floor of the attic on their hands and knees.
Before she left, she took the various accessories of the personality the boy had made her – passport, phone, driver’s licence – and threw them in the wire bin by the desk. That identity was burned. And she knew now she could not trust anyone else in the future. If she was going to stay ahead of those pursuing her, she would need to teach herself how to live off the radar.