Hone paused in front of a white stone pietà, the dead Christ in the arms of his bereft mother. The Saviour’s hands pierced from his crucifixion, his side open from a Roman spear, his Virgin mother bent over her lost son. North had once held someone as they died, the body sprawled like this one. He stopped himself from remembering more. Behind the statue, carved rifles and ‘In Memoriam’ tablets of those lost in the First World War. North ran his eyes over the names. Two hundred and forty-four of them. He always read the names of the fallen – counted them – figured it was the least he could do. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’ – written above, and easy to say when you weren’t the one doing the dying.
Hone’s riding coat trailed over the copper banister as he squeezed between the railing and the brown marble column directly beside the pietà. He slid his hand behind the column. It came up empty. ‘It was a dead drop,’ Hone said in explanation. ‘Old habits.’
‘Does anyone still do that?’ North asked. Surely Russians were too busy chipping away at neighbouring countries and running troll farms to drop off mysterious packages?
‘You’d be surprised. There’s an argument it’s a great deal safer than electronic communications.’
‘Unless you’re around.’
‘Unless I’m around.’ Dusting off his hands, Hone moved away from the pietà and North followed, keeping in step. North had visited the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri once before, he recalled, but it was years ago and his only memory was of a vast nave and baroque grandeur. It hadn’t changed. A smack of incense still hanging in the air from Sunday. The muffled noise of traffic from the Brompton Road. Neoclassical, Italianate; saints clutched folded robes of stone or looked down on sinners from ceilings of gilded mosaics and clouds. The only simple things in the church were the oak benches and the worn woodblock floor.
‘I’m not giving away UK passports so that criminals can give them out to all and sundry.’ Hone kept his voice down but it carried anyway.
The one-eyed man’s righteousness was exhausting, North thought. Hone intimidated, blackmailed and bribed. He’d snatched an innocent woman and was holding her hostage just to get North on the case. He slit throats and murdered without compunction and excused everything on the grounds of national security.
Somewhere a choirboy started to sing, the doleful organ notes chasing after. His voice was pure and piercingly sweet, the Latin sweeping up to the vaulted ceiling as if to escape the organ’s hold. It sounded like he had been born to do one thing, and that thing was to sing sacred music in certain praise of God.
‘Paulie’s not a criminal,’ North said, and realized to his surprise that he wanted to help the nerd.
‘If he’s responsible for leaking the program, he’s worse than a criminal. He’s a traitor and I have no truck with traitors. Don’t be naive, North, it doesn’t suit you.’
There was a chink as a coin hit the bottom of a metal box, and in a side altar across from them an old lady reached into a box of candles. ‘Do you know who that is?’ Hone pointed into the shadows at the statue of an elderly bearded man in a bishop’s mitre, clutching a staff, with a huge book spread across his knee. ‘Saint Isidore of Seville,’ Hone carried on, presuming North’s ignorance. Why did everyone always presume they knew more than he did? ‘Saint Isidore compiled the world’s first encyclopedia – twenty volumes of 448 chapters – a summing-up of everything that was known in the world. The unofficial patron saint of internet users and computer programmers.’
The saint looked tired, thought North, but then he would.
‘Isidore. I-sid-ore,’ said Hone. ‘Tobias is from an old Catholic family – he named the program after that saint. He once told me he changed the spelling to a “y” because he thought “Why?” was the big question. As in “Why are we here?” What do you say to someone when he tells you that? Once you’ve stopped laughing, I mean.’
‘I thought Syd was female,’ said North as he considered the voice he’d heard in Tobias’s office.
‘Jesus God!’ Hone’s voice echoed around the church once more. ‘Syd is a computer, North. Gender is irrelevant. Like with angels. I can’t believe the arrogant toerag threw you out and you let him do it. May I remind you while you’re stood here, anything could be happening to Esme. Her protection is down to you now.’
‘One thing at a time.’ North handed over the photographs and papers Paulie had given him. Twenty-three-year-old Yan was described as a personal assistant. ‘Who is she really?’ North said.
Hone tucked the papers in his pocket and patted them. ‘Nobody is admitting to an arms race in AI, but the Chinese are mad-keen to get ahead of the curve. Agents of the Chinese Ministry of State Security have made numerous unsuccessful attempts to breach the company’s firewalls. No great surprise then, when the medical program leaked, it emerged first in the Tsinghua University Institute for Artificial Intelligence.’
Hone gestured at him to sit down on a pew before sitting down next to him. North wondered if they looked like friends, because they weren’t. ‘You didn’t give me much notice, but yes, we know who she is.’ The one-eyed man pushed a photograph across to North of massed ranks of what he took to be academics and, behind them, a large group of serious young people North was guessing were their students. A skinny girl at the front clutched a laptop to her chest. She wore wire-framed glasses over pale eyes, her front teeth stuck out over her lower lip and her hair was short and greasy.
North moved his finger to tap under the girl’s face and Hone nodded. Chinese state security had despatched the girl to strike up a relationship with Paulie Holliday and persuade him to help her.
‘China is determined to make sure they have a home-grown pool of AI talent in their universities. Yan is – or I should say was – a talented AI engineer. Top of her class. From a family with an impressive record of public service. As far as we can make out, she gave up her PhD six months ago. As you know, the Chinese run a system that calculates a citizen’s social credit score. That decision to drop out should have been enough to have her blacklisted from travel at the very least. Instead, she turns up here with 20/20 vision and a Hollywood smile, working as an aide to a senior Chinese “trade envoy”. Octavius Chin enjoys the perks of his cover – the house in Mayfair, a millionaire lifestyle, seats at the opera – but in reality he’s a senior intelligence agent in their Ministry of State Security. He’s been operating in London for years and he’s very good at what he does.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Acquiring the skinny on anything and everything. He trades for information and if that doesn’t work, he bribes, blackmails, coerces or kills for it.’
North thought back to the frightened girl tearing down the stairs in Hackney, looking like her heart was breaking. ‘If we get her the passport, Paulie will talk.’
‘Don’t get sentimental, North. She defects and we have an international incident on our hands. Anyway, we have a bigger problem than the Chinese. The man who attacked Esme at home has no criminal record. In fact, he has no record of ever existing. No fingerprints. No dental records. Nothing to identify him or allow us to trace him.’
‘What does that mean?’ North said.
‘It means don’t disappear down some rabbit hole. Because whoever sent that man to hurt Esme isn’t done trying.’