CHAPTER ONE

 

 

988, 999, 996, 992, 961, 973, 987, 999, 983.

‘Fucking jealous bastards,’ muttered Amanda. She’d been in London three days before, travelling on the tube on her way out to the airport. She’d touched in but not touched out.

‘A ride I could have been chauffeured on,’ she said out loud, as if the air around her was responsible for the battering her social credit score was taking.

As well as a penalty fare three times the normal cost, the metro had flagged her up as untrustworthy. The mark would evaporate in a week’s time, but friends were leaving shocked and angry responses on her different online profiles, asking what she’d done, assuming she’d been wronged or was otherwise justified. She was, of course, but the tale would have to be delivered to each of them, to work colleagues, clients and friends, customised according to their own prejudices and assumptions about her and the system that had remarked on her human worth. She knew which laugh she’d use with clients when dismissing the event, knew how she’d splay her hands with her friends over dinner as she exclaimed her outrage. It irritated her, spending so much time and energy figuring out how to manage the effects of the downgrade.

Thank God it wasn’t something serious, she reminded herself. The system could take weeks to rectify actual errors even if promptly notified; it was literally designed not to forget.

Responding to the searches she was making, the AI that coordinated her online presence flushed the screen with suggestions for improving her score, the first of which was to always touch in and touch out when using the tube.

‘No screens or frames,’ said a voice from nearby. Amanda looked up to find a short-haired, rough-skinned woman in a dour green uniform staring at her hard. The official waved her finger down, her mouth set in a thin line.

Amanda wanted to argue, to ask if she really looked like the type they should be worried about using her tablet in the customs queue, but she held her tongue.

Flicking off the screen, she returned to shuffling toward passport control, even as the official’s gaze slid off her onto someone else surreptitiously checking their accounts for messages now they’d landed.

The Arrivals hall was a broad, poorly-lit floor with a low ceiling and colours reminiscent of varnished puke. Large tinted windows ran along one side but the view, of tarmac and grey skies against a featureless horizon, only reinforced the sense that she and all the travellers around her were lost, held nameless, outside civilisation.

Four dozen booths processed people one at a time: two dozen for travellers from the European Union, and the same again for the rest of the world. If her own queue had taken an hour to spit her out after disembarking, she knew the others would be there as long again. The thought didn’t exactly lift her mood but Amanda was able to take a breath and be thankful she was coming home, which was no small feat.

She missed a bombing in Geneva by hours, her flight one of the last to leave the city before it was shut down entirely. There were no frames showing the carnage in customs, but she’d watched more than her fill while waiting for the flight to gain clearance to take off.

A booth flashed luminous red to call her forwards. Amanda stepped in, putting her feet in the yellow outlines, showing her face to the camera and placing her hand on the tacky glass shelf so it could take her biometrics—finger print, iris scan, facial recognition. The lights around her head dimmed while they processed her identity.

She’d signed up for the blockchain passport as soon as the government had announced the beta program. No need to hunt up and down the flat for a paper passport she’d put in a ‘safe’ place, no need to renew every five years, no fear of her ID being stolen and of her blamed for being lax with her own security, when it was just as likely the authorities had been hacked.

Her chest tightened at the thought of being free of the airport, of being home. She could smell the wedge of lime in her gin.

The white light flickered but didn’t turn green. Amanda’s neck tightened; she wanted to look around for an official to come and sort out what was taking so long, but breaking eye contact with the camera ran the risk of being forced to start again, or worse, having to go join the ordinary queue and be processed manually.

As she stood there, staring into the box, she made out dark trousered legs approaching out the corner of her eye. They reached the exit of her booth and stopped.

The lights turned red, as if she were done, as if she’d already exited. No one stepped forward to push her out of the way, she hadn’t disappeared entirely. Or, she thought, looking around, the men on either side of the booth were dissuading anyone from approaching. She felt like a bacterium surrounded by white blood cells.

‘Is there a problem?’ she asked, her stomach lurching. Two men wore piped navy woollen jumpers, thin white shirts underneath and cheap blue trousers with the creases sewn in. Inelegant and militaristic. Around their waists were belts heavy with pouches and tools she didn’t recognise, whose purpose she guessed at from movies about illegal immigrants. Neither of them were armed. She wanted to laugh, to dispel her nerves at the idea that their being unarmed was somehow a positive.

They didn’t respond to her question, ignoring her like the booth. In between the plane and the world beyond the terminal she didn’t exist yet; was quite deliberately stateless. These thoughts jumbled up with her frustration at what had to be a mistake. Of course it was a mistake, she thought as the three of them stood embalmed in the silence of five hundred onlookers.

Amanda folded her arms, turned her back to the crowd. She could feel children asking their parents what was going on, hear women tutting, men turning away, believing she deserved what was happening. They wouldn’t detain her otherwise. Right?

The lights went out around her, the booth deactivated and the doors swished open. Amanda turned around, seeking guidance, finding the men flightside pointing past her, that she should follow others through the exit she’d been itching to reach a moment ago, before they’d come along like pawns surrounding a rook.

They marched her along wide corridors full of passengers, adapted golf buggies carrying the infirm and elderly. A door was opened with a lanyard, a red light winking yellow to let them through. Behind the scenes was grimmer than the soulless façade she knew so well: the walls were scuffed, the lights were harsher, white instead of the cool washed-out yellow. The carpet squares curled at the corners, and the half the ceiling tiles were missing, revealing the internal steel skeleton of the building. Out of sight of passengers, appearance didn’t matter as long as it all worked.

She gazed at the walls, thinking how a corridor needs nothing more than walls to be what it has to be.

They let her carry her bag, didn’t touch anything that was Amanda’s until they reached a small grey room; the walls were painted charcoal below three feet, winter grey from there to the puckered tiles above.

Inside, a cheap table, thin steel legs and a pitted white surface, chairs from the same place they’d sourced the rest. It was clean but Amanda felt as if there was dirt in the air, in the very fabric, soaked with lies told to protect hope under the glare of the indifferent.

One of them stayed behind with Amanda, standing with their back to a wall and not taking any notice of her.

‘Should I sit?’

Her question went unanswered.

She wouldn’t get out for an evening run now. I’ll have to catch up tomorrow, she decided. Turning around she put her leather cabin bag on the table, where it chose to lean precariously towards the edge. She pushed at it half-heartedly, but each time it fell back as if it was trying to tip off onto the floor with the witless insistence of the inanimate. With an irritated hiss, her ears suddenly hot, she lifted it up and put it back down facing the other way. The bag slumped towards the centre of the table.

That left her with nothing else to do. ‘I’ll sit down, then,’ she said, but in the absence of a response she remained on her feet. There were no obvious cameras, no observation windows disguised as mirrors; just her and a stranger in a uniform that separated them as surely as a national border.

After a few minutes she pulled her bag over, pulled open a pocket and took out her phone. She looked at the uniform, but he didn’t move or pay her any attention. She had no service, the phone reduced to an expensive address book; all her music, her diary, her life were stored online, and within that room there was no online.

She could feel messages from work piling up unanswered, pictured each passing second the dozen small ways her absence would be noticed. She had friends expecting her for drinks, she had meeting invites to be reviewed, accepted or rejected. Fractions from the whole that was her life splintering away.

Her absence wouldn’t be enough for anyone to stop and ask where she was. Adults were rarely closely monitored, easily able to disappear for a day, a week, before someone frowned as their own lives were impacted enough to find out what was going on. Except for her traders—they were deskbound, held captive by the bank as a critical interface between the company and the market. She remembered people being fetched from the toilets because the head of the desk wanted to know where they were and what they were doing. It was the kind of monitoring traders never talked about with outsiders; that they were the masters of the universe who needed permission to go for a piss, like children at school.

An hour passed. Then another. Her phone ran down as it searched for a network, any network, that might respond to a handshake.

‘Why am I being held here?’ she asked more than once. The first couple of times she tested the words out carefully, hesitating as she spoke to the uniform. He didn’t respond, his eyes staring straight ahead, as if he was standing guard outside Buckingham Palace. Eventually she directed her questions to the lights, to the walls and the door, trying to guess from where they were watching her.

‘You can’t just hold me here,’ she said, but there was an electronic lock on the door and the key hung around the neck of her guard. Her words were an idea, with no purchase on her reality.

She daydreamed about disabling the guard and taking his keys. Then, more mundanely, she imagined calling friends, colleagues who were lawyers, who would marshal resources and come down on the immigration service like a vengeful leviathan, threatening, frightening them so badly they’d cower and grovel as they escorted her out. Amanda wanted them to know they’d messed with the wrong person, to force them to apologise. She passed over whether her lawyers’ acquaintances would charge her for their time, or even if they could aid her; leveraged finance lawyers wouldn’t be much real help, but they were the magic circle, and it seemed inconceivable for them not to have someone who’d be able to master whatever duty solicitor the immigration department had on call. Besides, she’d always found that most conflicts were won in the attitude.

Her bladder pressed its case. ‘I need the toilet,’ she told the uniform, to no effect.

‘I really need to go,’ she added. She wasn’t yet at the point of threatening to relieve herself on the floor, but the idea of it made her want to cry with frustration. Why wouldn’t they just tell her what was going on?

When her need to pee had focussed all of her attention down to a single point below her stomach the door opened.

‘Thank god,’ she said, looking at the man who let himself into the room.

‘Not quite,’ he replied, smiling back. ‘I’m Crisp.’ His accent was neutral, slightly nasal. Estuary with money, she thought. Like a growling dog, the name had teeth in it.

‘Please, take a seat.’

Amanda sat down, waited for him. He wasn’t what she’d expected; tall, gym-conditioned with short-cropped blond hair. His features were rugged, wrinkled even, but framed piercing crystal azure eyes, arresting if not handsome.

He gestured at her holdall. ‘Can you open it, please.’ It wasn’t a request.

She undid all the zips. He did nothing, at first, until she realised he wanted her to pull it open so he could see inside without touching it.

‘I’m going to look inside.’

Amanda shrugged. It wasn’t as if she could object.

The first thing he did was pull out her tablet and place it to one side. ‘You have a connected watch or implant?’

She unstrapped her watch and laid it next to the tablet.

‘Portable frames?’

She shook her head.

With fingertips only he searched her bag, pulled out her clothes, held them up to the light as if seeing through the material would offer greater insight into her life. The clear plastic bag with her used underwear appeared and Amanda resisted the urge to snatch it from him.

He searched through her knickers with no more concern than he’d shown when he examined her merino jumpers. ‘This is all yours?’

She nodded.

‘Who do you work for?’

‘State Federal Finance,’ she replied.

‘The bank?’

‘The same.’ Something of which she could be proud.

He raised his eyebrows to stare at her, but said nothing.

‘Open the tablet, please.’

Which didn’t seem right. Did she have to comply with that statement? She didn’t think so, but resistance drained out of her fingers as her thoughts cooled to ash in her mind. Picking it up, he held it out in front of her. Amanda took the tablet, gazed down at it so the screen went live, then handed it back.

‘Thank you.’

Time was spent flicking through her apps. She watched him scan her inbox, her browser history. She realised he’d see the dating apps she was using, that she’d set them up so she was always logged in. He could, if he chose, see all the men she’d flagged as of interest, how she’d rated them, which ones she’d dated, slept with, ghosted.

‘They’re all white,’ he said.

She stared at him, knowing exactly what he was saying but unable to find the words to answer.

‘The men you like. All white, black hair, dark eyes. No beards, which is hardly fashionable. I’m surprised.’

There it was, she thought, gutted and angry at the same time. ‘Because I’ve got brown skin?’ The words couldn’t carry the weight of emotion and disgust she wanted them to convey.

‘Well. Quite.’ He shrugged, his eyes sliding off her and back to her bag.

‘I’m British. My parents are British.’ She stopped talking, appalled. She didn’t need to justify herself to him.

‘Your grandparents on your father’s side were Indian. Anglo-Indian, if we’re being precise, which in circumstances like this we always are. It’s why you call yourself “British”; only those who need the identity latch onto it. People from here, we’re English, or Welsh, or Scottish. We want our little patch of dirt and want the rest to know their place. You lot, you’re desperate for the world to be united, for it to be something more accepting, because we all know that if Englishness is more important than Britishness, your position is that much more precarious.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with being English,’ said Amanda.

‘No. I’m very happy being Scottish, myself,’ said Crisp. ‘But it’s the direction of travel. We were British but now we’re not; we’re smaller, diminished, prouder suddenly of being less than we were. Where does that end? Balkanisation is never very kind.’

‘Is it so bad to want to belong?’

‘To want to belong?’ he asked, pursing his lips as if considering the idea. ‘You don’t want to belong. You do belong. You’re an investment wanker, you’re into white guys, you went to Oxbridge and have all the money in the world.’ He held his hands up, lips curled and nostrils flared. ‘You’re a master of the universe. Your parents are a doctor and a professor, respectively. Pillars of the community, all of you.’ He slid the tablet onto the table and turned his whole body in her direction. ‘Success generates resentment as poverty generates repulsion. When pogroms come, everything is a reason to unpick that integration you’re so proud of.’

‘I’m not integrated,’ said Amanda. ‘I’m from here. There’s nothing to integrate, because I didn’t start out different.’

He laughed. ‘You and I are very different.’

‘You’re not the yardstick by which my citizenship is measured,’ she said.

‘Am I not?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Why are you here, then?’

Whatever fight had been coiled in her chest unwound then.

He turned to the uniform. ‘You can leave us.’

‘Sir, I can’t.’ The tone said Sir, surely you know this, that Crisp’s request was as irregular as it was pointless.

Crisp clenched his jaw, the line along his cheek showing in the light as a momentary shadow.

‘Get undressed,’ he said.

Amanda froze. From the door she could feel sudden attention from the uniform, his eyes on her for the first time.

‘I’m sorry?’ She dropped her hands below the table so he couldn’t see them shake.

‘Get undressed. I want to see you put on one of these.’ He held out the bag of dirty underwear. ‘I don’t care which, your choice.’

‘You don’t have to comply with that request,’ said the uniform, stepping away from the door. ‘It is inappropriate.’ Crisp dropped his arms to his side, his hands relaxed, open.

Feeling an edge of freedom glinting at her, Amanda watched the two men square off.

‘“It’s inappropriate,”’ mocked Crisp. ‘The casual racism was okay, was it? That’s how immigration rolls? I didn’t ask her yet if she knows who Byron was, or if she can name the last four Prime Ministers. I didn’t ask her if she had sympathies with Islamic ideology or whether killing innocent people was justifiable. So I guess I had quite a long way to go on that front. Nice to know you draw the line at sexual humiliation, though.’ He twisted his face to Amanda. ‘Tea or cappuccino? Masala or Roast Beef? Remember now, only one of these answers means you’re white enough on the inside to stay.’

‘Sir, can you please leave the room?’

Amanda watched them, could see the uniform hesitating, holding back from calling an end to whatever was happening. It felt like a conflict between two systems; like the battles between the head of trading and the head of structuring over who’d get recognition for a big deal. She realised they were from different agencies, that Crisp wasn’t immigration. Crisp remained relaxed, insouciant. He stared at the ceiling, at the uniform’s shoulder, his waist, but never returned his gaze.

‘Have you searched her?’ His tone accusing, implying any answer other than ‘yes’ meant immigration had failed in a basic duty.

The uniform didn’t reply, but reached for the walkie talkie at his belt. Before he could lift it to his face Crisp was on him, moving so swiftly Amanda didn’t realise he’d been punched to the floor until she registered the bloody splatter from his nose between his legs. It was quiet, soft—a squelch and a bump rather than an explosion—but the effect was dazzling. The uniform sat where he landed, blood painting the lower half of his face black and red as it ran onto his trousers.

‘C’mon, get up. You’re not so useless that one punch is all you’ve got.’ Crisp’s arms hung loosely at his side, like nothing had happened. A softly stuffed doll.

The uniform collected his wits and started to get up, and Crisp feinted a lunge with a little roar. His victim, as Amanda now saw him, flinched, crying out, and Crisp laughed.

‘Go on, fuck off and get back up, security, whatever’s going to make you feel better. I’ll be waiting for you to help keep our borders safe, you miserable little shit.’

The man scrabbled on his hands and knees to the door, his backside sticking up into the air. He reached for the door handle and was gone.

It dawned on Amanda she was alone with a man who’d just assaulted an immigration official for trying to intervene on her behalf.

Trembling fingers reached for the buttons of her blouse.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, a disgusted tone to his voice. ‘I’d rather watch paint dry.’ He thought about it. ‘No offence. I just needed that arsehole out of the room.’

Amanda’s fingers fell to her sides. ‘Who are you?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s a stupid question, Ms Back. Your profile says you’re pretty fucking smart; smarter than me, anyway. So for the dummy in the room, please tell me about Tangle Singh.’

Amanda’s breath caught in her throat.

‘I’m glad you’re not denying you know him.’

‘We haven’t spoken in a long time,’ she managed, wondering what last indignity he’d held back for her to stumble into.

‘That’s not an answer to my question, though, is it? We haven’t got a huge amount of time here. And as you’ve probably worked out, I’m about to become massively unpopular for breaking someone else’s rules.’ He cast his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Dipshit will be back shortly, and although it would be fun, even I’m not allowed to beat the crap out of more than one immigration official a year. You can stay quiet and it’ll all be over, or I can make things difficult.’ He stepped away from the table, which was a welcome change, but a continent away from far enough for Amanda. ‘Your choice.’

‘We haven’t spoken for nine years,’ said Amanda. ‘I have no idea where he is, or what he’s doing.’

‘No idea at all?’

She sucked at her teeth. ‘I hope he’s dead. Properly dead. But I guess he’s probably stacked up on some designer drug bought with someone else’s money.’ She shook her head. ‘I really don’t see what this has to do with me.’

‘So you’ve not heard from him?’

‘I told you, we haven’t spoken.’

He sighed as a parent might at a wilful child. ‘I didn’t ask if you’d spoken. I asked if he’d made contact with you. You could have ignored it, I couldn’t give a shit. What I want to know is; has he tried to contact you?’ He stared at her, his eyes wide. ‘We’re pressed for time here, Ms Back, and in need of answers we think only you can provide.’

She shook her head, still trying to work out what was going on.

‘Does your employer know about the bad debts and the bankruptcy?’

She clenched her fingers into her palms, ignoring the pain of nails biting into flesh. ‘He did that, not me.’

‘It’s your name on the court proceedings, though, which is all that really matters.’

The truth was she hadn’t mentioned it in her interviews and they’d never raised it even when they ran her background checks. She was suddenly pleased it had happened before social credit scores had become a thing.

‘No,’ said Amanda. ‘He hasn’t sent me anything. He hasn’t tried to make contact. I wouldn’t entertain him if he did. He’s a high-leverage type of person and I have no interest in that kind of risk.’

‘Was he always a drug addict?’

She remembered when they’d first met at a winter funfair in Hyde Park; all bright lights, huge rides and glühwein. The firm had been hosting clients at the OktoberFest tents, a stein-fuelled evening of conversations about family, holidays and deals they’d done together. One client’s flirtation had crossed into awkward territory; his hand on her back, his face too close to hers. Bored of the perpetual necessity of dealing with morons who refused to see it was her job to be nice to them and not her natural state, Amanda left the huge Britpop themed tent for a few gulps of crisp cold air.

‘Wandering hands too much for you?’ asked a tall, gorgeous Asian man. Clean shaven, curly hair and green eyes. She remembered glancing at his hands, long fingers and elegant.

‘What’s it to you?’ She didn’t need another man trying to sympathise with her.

‘I could spike his bank account if you want?’ His face was totally serious except for his eyes. His eyes danced with a green fire that even then she knew was dangerous; but unlike the inept bankers waiting for her in the pavilion, it was actually interesting.

She’d turned down his offer, but they walked a circuit of the funfair, talking about networks, influence and the future of the internet. She asked for his details, deciding she wanted to know more about the world he inhabited.

Amanda understood what Crisp wanted and who he was, and in so doing felt as if she’d found solid ground under her feet.

‘No. He was only a genius then. Making stupid decisions like the rest of us, but not yet living with the consequences.’ She paused, looked at Crisp, forced her eyes to stay on his. Smiling now, playing a role she understood. ‘What do you think he’s sent me? Why didn’t you just come to my place, ask me there?’ She kept her voice light, as casual as she could. Because there was something about this that couldn’t be legitimate. There was something about this that Crisp thought she wouldn’t like, that made him decide it was better to coerce her than ask her cooperation.

‘If it was that simple—’ started Crisp, relaxing as if he’d found a friend.

‘You’ve been to my place?’ asked Amanda, phrasing it as a question only for Crisp’s benefit.

‘You use a bunch of end-to-end encrypted communication channels, even if you don’t know it. I wanted to make sure he’d not talked to you, sent you something that way.’

She shook her head slowly, thinking about the messages she’d received over the last week. ‘What sort of timeframe?’ The key to getting out of the room was to be as cooperative as possible, to leave him regarding her as a colleague and not a suspect—or worse, an obstruction. ‘After the way we split up I think I’m the last person he’d contact. If you’ve been to my place’—she left her assumption that he was bugging her unsaid—‘then you know what I’ve received, who I’ve spoken to. Tangle’s number isn’t in my contacts list.’

Crisp’s look then—pitying, but calculating—told her Tangle might be desperate enough that she was his only option.

‘What has he done anyway? Why would anything he’d be involved with be of interest to you?’ She sighed, hoping it wasn’t too dramatic. ‘The last I saw him, years ago by the way, he was on the kind of decline from which people don’t return.’

‘Our time’s almost up,’ said Crisp. ‘He will send you something, a package. It contains material important to the state. You shouldn’t access it at all, for your own safety as much as others’.’

‘That seems epically unlikely,’ said Amanda.

A fragile silence stretched between them. She had no more words to say; she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, promise him anything and he wasn’t asking for a response so much as dictating how she should behave.

The door chimed open and two huge men stepped into the room. Behind them stood the uniform, now joined by a woman in a suit. He pointed at Crisp, blood congealing on his upper lip, a furious fear glinting in his eyes.

The suited woman stepped into the room and with a cursory glance at Amanda addressed Crisp. ‘Your clearance has been revoked. My staff will escort you out.’ Her words were clipped, a statement daring him to argue, her accent Yorkshire.

‘I’m not done,’ said Crisp, sounding like a child who wasn’t ready to go to bed.

‘Yes. You are.’ She looked at Amanda. ‘You have my full apologies and are free to go. If you can wait here, we’ll find someone to sort your status before you leave.’

‘Now, that’s above your paygrade,’ said Crisp, pressing his fingers to his nose as though to calm himself. It was the first time Amanda had seen him express anything but the bland confidence of privilege and power.

One of the guards put a hand on his shoulder and Crisp twisted, dropping and turning so that, somehow, he had the guard’s hand bent in the wrong direction, forcing him to his knees. The other guard stepped forward, but Crisp waved his finger in admonishment. ‘You want to break his wrist, take another step.’

The guard froze, turning to look at the woman.

‘Let him go,’ was all she said.

‘I don’t like being touched,’ said Crisp when they’d stepped back. The guard grasped at his wrist.

‘I expect most people would happily oblige you in that sentiment,’ said the woman sweetly, and Amanda wanted to shake her hand. ‘Right now you’ll ease off and leave. If you don’t, I’ll have them tase you until you don’t know what day of the week it is.’

Crisp stared at her then laughed. ‘Fine. Amanda, if you find anything, I want to know,’ he said, before ducking out of the room.

Amanda relaxed, her shoulders drooping in relief.

The suited woman looked her up and down, appraising and appalling in its calculation. It occurred to Amanda that they weren’t on the same side, just that they’d been united by Crisp for a few moments.

‘You better come with me,’ said the woman, and the flatness of her expression reeked of a shit show beyond Amanda’s comprehension.