Fang was sullen as they left Derkind. Abandoning him as he stood for a second to get his bearings, she elbowed her way through the back-and-forth streams of people en route to work, jostling and pushing them aside. The streets around King’s Cross were full. Not just of tourists and travellers, but with the young and gifted at ease with the world they found themselves in. Happy making big money via cutting-edge technology no one else understood, but everyone wanted.
Following in her slipstream, North had the distinct impression Fang would have preferred to stay with Tobias Hawke, his wife, and his futuristic AGI system, Syd. That she hated the fact Hawke had cast her back out into the real world.
‘This is all good, Fang.’ He caught her up, touching her arm, and she turned to face him, stopping in the middle of the pavement, making the oncoming wave of London pedestrians break over and around them. North ignored the irritation and disapproval of strangers.
It was barely half past eight in the morning and the job was over before it had really begun. Before it got messy. Which worked for him. ‘Hawke doesn’t want us. I’ll tell Hone it’s a no-go and he’ll give you back your mum, because. I’ll make sure he does.’ Hone wasn’t going to be happy, but North didn’t much care about making Hone happy. As for him, he couldn’t risk heading back to Berlin by any normal route, so maybe he’d stay in London anyway. Do whatever else Hone would want doing in exchange for letting Fang’s mum go. And last he heard, Japanese whisky was as available in London as it was in Berlin.
Fang balled up her fist and punched him hard in his chest. It didn’t hurt, but he figured she wanted it to. Around him, the passers-by who’d been so keen to move them on pulled away, giving them space. ‘Moron-person, you do not get to go boohoo again.’ She used her index finger to drill into his pectoral muscle. It hurt more than the punch. ‘Your midlife crisis is done. Your crying days are over.’ She chopped through the air with the side of her hand. ‘Understand? This is not about what happened before. This is about what is happening right now – to me. I matter. My mum matters.’
North had never seen Fang truly angry. And he had once seen her shoot a man in the face. She hadn’t even been angry then; she’d given it due consideration and crushed a cockroach under her glittering Dr. Martens. But an incandescent Fang had the white-hot power of a nuclear explosion. She was liable to take out herself and everyone else within a thousand-mile radius. North raised his palms in surrender, and Fang sucked down a long slow breath, as if she was trying to calm herself.
‘Hone doesn’t care what Tobias Hawke thinks.’ She spoke slowly, as if to give North adequate time to follow her line of argument. ‘And he doesn’t care about Syd. Hone wants Esme looked after, dodo. We don’t get out from this that easy. We are in it till the end, which means what happened in there is bad, bad, bad. Tobias Hawke doesn’t want our help – that means he won’t help us either. And my mum is feeble, North. She’s like you – she cries about everything.’
North chose to ignore the insult.
‘She will never cut it halfway across the world without me, and I don’t want to live in China, all right?’
Fang’s voice trailed off, fury burning itself out as quickly as it had come. She was fourteen and it was up to her to save her mum and she was blowing it.
He felt his own face screw up in disgust at himself. Fang was right. He’d felt relief when Tobias showed them the door. He could walk out free and clear. He’d been a nice guy, he’d come when he was called, he’d played the game by Hone’s rules, he’d offered to help and the offer had been rejected. He’d been selfish and blinkered. And he’d underestimated Fang and treated her like another teenager, thinking that he would sort things for her. Fang wasn’t sulking because Derkind was working on a future that she wanted to be part of. She was gutted because if they couldn’t find out what was going wrong at Derkind, Hone would put her mother on a plane. Under his breath, North cursed Tobias Hawke and Hone with him.
He looked down at the pavement they were walking along. Cracks ran the length and width of it across every stone, as if the pavement itself was waiting to open up into a sinkhole and swallow down the unsuspecting. He and Fang were in the spider’s web, and the more they struggled against that fact, the worse it was going to get for them. They had to move quietly, and find however many spiders there were, kill each and every one, and then and only then get the hell out of there.
‘You’re right. My “booze and boohoo days” are over. Small note, though – I am way too young for a midlife crisis, right?’
He thought there might have been the glimmer of a smile somewhere behind the Joe 90 glasses, but it was difficult to tell.
They started walking again.
‘As for Hawke not cooperating – Fang, do you need Hawke’s permission?’ It was a serious question. ‘Point of fact, do you need anyone to give you permission for anything?’
Fang sucked at her lower lip as she thought about it. ‘She’s okay, but I don’t like him, even if he did chew off his own foot,’ she said. ‘Why is he so keen to keep us out?’
North shrugged. The need to be the alpha male in any and all situations? The urge to keep Hone and his spooks out of his company? The fact he didn’t need the distraction hours before an announcement that he was about to change the world? Whatever Hawke’s reasons, North had to focus on the more immediate problem of protecting Esme Sullivan Hawke, so that he could get Fang’s mother back home.
‘Something’s off,’ Fang said. ‘Not least because they’ve had a massive hack and he fires the guy responsible and moves on – completely fine. Wouldn’t you expect a man on that short a fuse still to be ranting about it?’
‘He’s got something bigger going on with Syd.’
‘Even so.’
North thought back to the photograph of the three men – Hawke the inventor, Rafferty the politician, and Kirkham the general.
‘He’s such an idiot I don’t even feel bad about this.’ She pulled a tiny drone out of her pocket and held it in the palm of her hand. At some point, she had managed to pluck one from the air without falling to her death.
‘Fang, you stole his intellectual property.’
‘Property is theft. I read that on a T-shirt.’ She slid it back into her pocket. ‘And this cutey basically flew into my jacket so it doesn’t count.’
North frowned. ‘I’ve seen what a drone can do out in the field. Esme didn’t mention the fact that they aren’t just about surveillance and espressos and shopping deliveries. The military don’t call them drones, they call them unmanned aircraft systems or unmanned aerial combat vehicles, and they can and do carry missiles.’
Fang raised an eyebrow. ‘Look at you, knowing things all by yourself, without me having to tell you.’
‘Not to ruin my rep, but who is Enrico Fermi? The guy quoted in the foyer.’
Fang looked wide-eyed at North’s ignorance, but he pretended not to notice. ‘Fermi built the world’s first nuclear reactor,’ she said ‘Chicago Pile-1. He used it to create a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Part and parcel of how we have nuclear energy. Not to mention the two atomic bombs they dropped.’
Energy and bombs. Good and bad. North wondered whether Tobias thought there were parallels with his AI work.
‘And that pledge on the wall?’
‘As stated, it’s against autonomous weapons systems – weapons that identify, target and kill without being told to do it by a human. Shall I tell you something else you don’t know?’ Fang waited. He thought she was enjoying it. He nodded.
‘Derkind comes from the German. Der Kinder. Of the child. Derkind is also an anagram of the word “kindred”. Syd is family to Hawke. Unlike that guy he fired, apparently. I remember his name from the research – Paulie Holliday has been with them since 2013. Hawke recruited him after he read his thesis.’
Hawke had shown no emotion about Paulie Holliday. No regret or anger.
A colleague had cleared Paulie’s desk for him – acquired a cardboard box, swept his personal possessions into it and sent it all down to Jarrod at reception to be biked round. But why would someone who had been with Tobias and Esme for years choose to leak a medical tech program days before the company went public with Syd? North didn’t claim to know much about AI, but even he knew that Syd was huge. From the outside, working at Derkind, with its espresso drones and its superintelligent computer, looked like Nerd Heaven. Even before the global launch of a transformative intelligent learning system. So why would Paulie, or anyone else, not want to be part of that? Why would Paulie sabotage his own career at the very moment the company was about to go stratospheric?
‘This is what we do know: Esme was attacked in her own home and almost killed,’ North said, holding up his index finger.
‘There was a massive leak of intellectual property and the guy blamed for it was fired.’ Fang held up two fingers.
‘They have a “conscious” computer, which is going to be huge.’ North held up three fingers and briefly wondered if it looked like he was a boy scout swearing allegiance to the monarch.
‘And Tobias Hawke is a jerk.’ Fang tucked her thumb into her palm and held up four fingers.
‘What we have to do now is figure out if those things are connected,’ North said. ‘Let’s start with the ex-employee of the month, Paulie Holliday. Maybe he can tell us.’
North figured Fang’s mood could only improve if he told her to head back to Plug’s and hack into Derkind’s employment records for Paulie’s address. Paulie had to know something – the question was what?