21

A COUPLE OF hours later the report is filed and I’m back for a grilling in the virtual meeting room with the lawyers and reps.

“So it was suicide all along,” says the representative for Europe.

“Yes, ma’am,” I say.

“I’m not satisfied,” she says. “You mentioned this woman, Arlington, in your final report. What was she doing in that room?”

After what Delaney told me, I was reluctant to include her, but I needed to present an undoctored version of the spy-cam footage. Now, seeing the look on the American lawyer’s face, I regret the decision. “As I said, I think she . . .” I pause. “I’m not sure how, but I believe she knew that Alejandro had taken his own life and went there to do something, but was interrupted by Theo Buckingham.”

“How did she know that he had hanged himself?”

“Does it matter?” says the American rep, this time alone, as Collindale is now somewhere over the Atlantic. “We all saw the film. We read the pathologist’s report and the forensics. He hanged himself and the case is over.”

“That woman did something,” the European persists, this time staring at the lawyer representing the Circle who has resorted to simply staring at the table to avoid all eye contact. “She clearly went over to—”

“As SDCI Moreno speculated, probably DNA theft, and that’s hardly anything that can be prosecuted now.” The American smiles at me as the Circle’s lawyer remains deafeningly silent. “You did excellent work.”

“Don’t talk like this is all over,” the woman from Norope speaks now. “I agree with my European colleague. The involvement of this woman who hacked the local node and—”

“I’d like to draw your attention to clause one forty-three, subsection B on page fifty-seven of the contract,” he says, still smiling. “It states, very clearly, that the remit of the investigation is to identify the cause of death of Alejandro Casales, and should it prove to be murder, the identification and capture of the party or parties responsible. That has been successfully actioned. Theo Buckingham mutilated a dead body and subsequently committed suicide. Case closed. Would you like to discuss a new contract to deal with any further investigation into events tangential to these deaths?”

Both the European and Noropean representatives shake their heads, exchanging a look somewhere between frustration and defeat.

“Excellent. Well, I think that’s everything, then.” The American stands and extends a hand to Milsom. “May I commend you on your department’s speed and efficiency. You said Moreno was one of the best and I would like it to be on record that I wholeheartedly agree.”

“Thank you,” Milsom says. She’s scowling far less than when I last saw her.

“Thank you,” says the Circle’s lawyer, but she says it to me. I stare at her hand for a second and then lurch forward to shake it. “You’re welcome to come to the memorial service for Alejandro Casales. Ms. Klein assured me that the other members of the Circle would be very happy to have you attend, and I could organize the visa very swiftly in these circumstances.”

The American gov-corp lawyer glares at her and Milsom sees it too. “I’m afraid SDCI Moreno’s skills are in great demand.”

“Oh. Well, consider the offer still on the table if you can make it,” says the Circle’s lawyer, and heads for the door.

“There is just one more detail I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to,” says the American representative, having regained his composure, before the Circle lawyer can leave. “With regard to the final clause of the contract, which outlines press coverage, we have decided that it would be detrimental to the interests of the Circle to have suicide reported in relation to the death of Alejandro Casales. Therefore, the narrative agreed to with the Circle’s representative—who, as you will note, has final sign-off on the press release regarding these unfortunate events—is that Theodore Buckingham committed the murder and subsequently committed suicide. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s very close to the truth, and out of respect of the religious needs of the Circle, we feel it’s the best way to go.”

The narrative? The fucking narrative? I want to shout but everyone in the room is nodding in agreement.

“The Ministry of Justice will issue the agreed statement,” Milsom says. “If you don’t mind, we’ll make the announcement to the press once the official release has been signed off by all parties and after the staff at the Moor Hotel have been fully briefed. I’ll make sure our best press-liaison officer works with them.”

No one objects. Milsom comes and stands next to me as the lawyers and representatives file out, the Noropean saying nothing about my work, as it’s only what was expected of me anyway, and the European too angry with the American to make any positive comments. When the last one leaves Milsom shuts the door and turns to me.

“Well, case closed.”

“Is it?”

She looks up at the ceiling. “Carlos—”

“Something else is going on here. They were right to pick that hole in my report. How did Arlington know Casales had just killed himself? It would only make sense if he were chipped but he wasn’t, and that’s just . . . It’s just untidy. And there’s the fact he committed suicide in the first place. Why? Why do that? What really happened in London to make Alejandro hang himself?”

“Carlos—”

“And did you see the way the American was just shutting it down from the moment the Q and A started? I bet he knows who Arlington is and doesn’t want anyone to—”

“Moreno!” Milsom shouts, and I jump and stand straight and clasp my hands behind my back, mouth shut. “You need to walk away from this now. The case is closed. Why he committed suicide is irrelevant now.” She must see how much that sticks in my craw, because she comes over and rests a hand on my shoulder. “You have to figure out a way to live without knowing why he did it, just like everyone else who knew him will. Your professional involvement is over.”

I sag. Then I remember the invitation. “I wouldn’t normally ask, boss, but I would like to take up the offer from the Circle’s lawyer to attend the funeral.” She pulls her hand away from my shoulder. “Would you give me permission to attend? Please?”

She looks at me for a long moment as she thinks it over.

“I’d like to see my father again,” I add. “I didn’t have the chance to make amends with Alejandro but I still have the chance with my father, if you’d just let me go and—”

“No. Permission denied.”

My mouth drops open. “But—”

“Casales wasn’t immediate family. Besides, there’s no guarantee you’d get permission for that either. It’s not in the interests of the MoJ to allow you to make a trip to the Circle.”

“Please,” I say one last time, trampling my pride under my own heels. “I’ve never asked for anything for myself. Not once in almost twenty years. Please let me see him.”

“I said no, Moreno, and I don’t want to hear another word about it. Ms. Patel has offered you a night at the hotel for free as a gesture of goodwill toward the MoJ. You’re to return to London first thing tomorrow and report immediately to your case officer at MoJ HQ for a full debriefing and psychiatric assessment.” She looks at me like I’m a car engine that’s been making a strange noise. “You clearly need recalibration.”

—

I open my eyes and look up at the inside of the bed’s canopy. For the first time since the day I left the Circle, I want to go back there. I left thinking there had to be something better than being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a father who didn’t want me, living a life so simple it made me want to burn everything down out of sheer boredom. I needed more than they could give me, and at the age of sixteen, the logical place to look for it was Out There, past the boundary. My sixteen-year-old self wouldn’t understand that what I really needed could never be found anywhere but inside me. I’m still not even sure I believe that now. Sounds like the sort of bullshit my psych supervisor would say.

I want to see my father and talk to him as an adult, instead of the angry, fucked-up teenager I was back then. I’m still angry—if it weren’t for him and Alejandro, I wouldn’t be the property of the Ministry of Justice—but I feel like I need to try to get past that now. My life is what it is, and if my father dies before I can reconcile this rage into something . . . easier, I’ll never heal. I tut and tuck my hands under my head, trying to relax. Reconciling my rage? That’s definitely the kind of bullshit my psych supervisor would come up with.

Yet the pull back to the Circle remains. I want to say good-bye to Alejandro. Properly. As myself and not as someone investigating his death. And, if I am truthful with myself, I want to see if there is anything there to explain the suicide, no matter how unlikely that is. I think about what that fuck from the US gov-corp said about the narrative and wonder whether Selina will be told the truth. Probably not. And what use would it serve, anyway? He’s dead. Theo wanted everyone to think it was murder. Perhaps, in the most shit way possible, everyone is going to make that last desire of his true.

Now Alejandro has left them all behind. I don’t believe he’s gone on to some other place, be it heaven or not, but the people at the Circle have been abandoned. Perhaps it will be easier for them to think he was taken from them, rather than his choice to leave them. Would I have found it easier if my mother had been slaughtered by a madman instead of choosing to get on Atlas and leaving me behind?

Yeah. Maybe I would.

No. I won’t think about that. I’m not the man the press want me to be. I am not the victim here.

A notification pops up from Tia, informing me that there have been more than a million mentions of Alejandro Casales in the public news feeds and social streams in the last minute. A link invites me to explore but I dismiss the notification. So the press release has gone out. I just hope it will take the vultures a few hours to descend upon the hotel. No doubt they’ll be whipping themselves up into a fervor about the timing of it all, so close to the capsule being opened. The conspiracy theorists are probably having a field day.

I consider going down to the bar. But with the embargo lifted, the current guests are just as likely to harass me for the gory details as any hacks would be. I’ll spend the night up here, maybe order a couple more meals and desserts just to get the most out of this, and go back to London after a king’s breakfast.

Sometimes I have as much as a week between cases. With less than a day between this one and the one before, I reckon Milsom won’t begrudge me at least a day or two of downtime. Even the MoJ recognize the need to let their workhorses rest in the pasture once in a while. Otherwise we burn out, and that wouldn’t be the most efficient use of an asset as expensive as me. With more than thirty years left on my contract, my debt must still be in the hundreds of thousands. Certainly at the inflated prices and levels of interest those bastard hot-housers arranged. No. Don’t think about it. As Dee always said, getting angry does nothing except waste our energy. It doesn’t punish the ones who exploited us. The ones who did that to us are still exploiting homeless kids now and still making huge profits from shaping them into assets to order. My anger isn’t going to do a fucking thing for any of them.

I roll onto my side, planning to get up and go for a walk before the press hounds start barking at the door. I feel the plastic box beneath my hip and remember the gingerbread.

“Lights, twenty percent,” I say, realizing the room has slipped into the same dark as my mood. I sit up, pull the lid off the box and breathe in the scent of fresh ginger.

There’s a note resting on top of the biscuits with a “C” written on it. I unfold it to find neat handwriting that slants to the right, as if the letters are leaning into a headwind and trying to reach the end of the line.

A story for you, it says at the top, and I wonder if she mixed up my box with the one intended for her niece. Does her name begin with a “C” too? I pluck out one of the biscuits and read on while I eat it.

Once upon a time there was a priest of a secret religion. He lived in a world where everyone had magic gems stitched into their heads that let them speak to each other and sometimes lots of people all at once. The priest didn’t have one of the magic gems stitched into his head though, because he thought that talking to everyone else meant that you never listened to yourself anymore. He was so good at speaking without a magic gem, he persuaded others to have their gems taken out and to follow him wherever he went.

I stop chewing as the sense that this is actually a story for me sends a cold, creeping shiver down my back.

With so many people following this priest, he became rich and powerful, and other kings and queens watched him very carefully. Then one day, the priest died very suddenly in a foreign kingdom, and the people there had to make sure they knew what had happened to him before he could be laid to rest. A medicine woman was brought in to read his body’s final days, and she found that the priest had secretly sewn in a magic gem. Even though the gem itself was missing, she could see the stitching and the hole where it had been, even after someone else had tried to cover the hole and stitches with a spell. She was so shocked, she told the noble lady who owned the land about it right away.

“Linda, you are one sharp cookie,” I mutter. The case was still open when she brought the gingerbread to me. She wrote this to convey meaning through metaphor, avoiding critical keywords so that my APA wouldn’t detect any relationship between the content and the case.

Before the medicine woman had even finished preparing the priest for burial, powerful knights came and took the priest away and made the medicine woman promise to keep silent about the magic gem. Being a good and loyal citizen of the kingdom, she swore an oath and waved them good-bye from her door. She never told another soul about the secret gem sewn into the priest’s head, and lived a long and happy life, riding her old horse and baking cakes for handsome young men who visited from the capital of the kingdom. The end.

I smile before the implications sink in. So Delaney wasn’t lying and Alejandro did get himself chipped in London after all. If Linda was standing here right now, I’d kiss her. Instead, I finish the biscuit, put the letter back inside the box and snap the lid on tight.

After double-checking that the case status really is closed and that any keywords relating to Alejandro are no longer being automatically recorded and placed in the case file, I stand up and start to pace. Delaney said the server at the place where Alejandro got illegally chipped was destroyed in the fire—probably set by Arlington—and that Alejandro’s data was lost with it. I didn’t believe that at the time and I certainly don’t believe that now.

“Tia, apparently there was a fire at a warehouse in Wandsworth last Sunday. Can you find anything on that?”

“There are several hundred mentions that fit your parameters in news feeds and one related case file currently open for an arson investigation.”

“Can I access that file?”

“State your justification.”

I scratch the stubble on my chin. “Possible connection to secondary criminal activity. Casual inquiry.”

Tia provides a link to the file and I grin. No one is protecting this arson case—presumably to make it look as normal as possible. At my pay grade, and thanks to the bits and pieces murder inquiries always churn up, I have more freedom to poke about in other cases than many officers do. Listing it as a casual inquiry will enable me to look without copying any of the data to my personal MoJ files. If I want to do that, I’ll have to involve Milsom and I don’t want her to know about this. The moment she suspects I’m following up on anything to do with Alejandro, she’ll roast my balls.

I stop pacing and focus on the contents of the file. Three people died in the fire, thanks to the external doors being locked before the fire was set. The fact that it hasn’t been opened up to the murder team stinks, but with so many cases on at any one time, the odds are that no one will actually notice unless they are specifically looking. The arson specialist notes that the fire was started at about eight a.m., which is unusual—most arsonists like the cover of darkness—and even though it was a gloomy winter morning, there was still far more risk of being seen than most serial arsonists would like. The report states that no suspects were detected on any of the local public cams on the streets around the warehouse, but when I dig deeper I can’t find any evidence of the footage being pulled together for review. It takes me only ten minutes to isolate a picture of a petite individual wearing a dark hat and black clothes approaching one of the windows of the warehouse, holding something that looks like a bottle with a rag stuffed into it. I would bet a month’s allocation that it was Arlington.

I look up the details on the arson officer who wrote the report and find that he’s been reassigned to another department and had his pay grade raised. There hasn’t been any activity on the arson file since he submitted the report on initial findings. It’s been left to languish until a standard data cleanup archives it under “dormant” and it’s forgotten. Nicely done, dodgy high-up MoJ person, I think. It’s the best way to hide data these days: right in the open.

Even though the local node in the building was destroyed, along with the server that probably supported Alejandro’s illegal chip, I don’t believe the data has been lost. Alejandro must have continued to use his chip when he returned to the hotel; it would explain the behavior that Klein described and would account for his last words as an instruction to his Artificial Personal Assistant to send that letter, whatever it was. If his cloud storage had been housed on the warehouse server alone (which is pretty bloody unlikely anyway) Alejandro wouldn’t have been able to continue to use the chip without knowing something was wrong.

Crim-orgs that sell illegal chipping services are outside of my direct experience, but there’s a wealth of information stored in the MoJ archives. And while my search will be registered along with the thousands of other searches made by MoJ staff and AIs every hour, I’m prepared to argue the toss if it comes up. I’m officially between cases, and in the past I’ve dug about the archives, looking up whatever has taken my fancy or plugging gaps left by hot-housing and my unconventional adolescence. This isn’t unusual behavior for me, so it won’t be flagged up.

Delaney clearly hasn’t been doing hir homework—or didn’t want to let on how much ze knew—but it rapidly becomes clear that a full illegal edentity provided by these services includes the provision of the full data backup, public in-box and basic digital rights that any legitimate chip provides by law. They have to; anything else and that kind of bizarre online activity would be picked up almost instantly by the MoJ bots that look for this kind of thing. So Alejandro’s data is still out there somewhere. All I need to do to find it is isolate the false edentity.

The crim-orgs make use of the fact that even though the vast majority of people are chipped at age sixteen, sometimes things go wrong and people need a new chip, and in rare instances a new edentity. Whether they are victims of cybercrime, have been placed in a witness-protection program or have just paid a ton of money to wipe their online slate clean, there are ways to set up new edentities without any previous data being moved over.

“Tia, is the location of the origin server filed with the creation of new edentities?”

“No.”

I look up, my eyes drifting toward the ceiling rose and then swiftly darting away. “How many new edentities were activated during the time period between Wednesday ten a.m. and Saturday morning ten a.m. last week?”

“Approximately three-point-two million.”

“What the fuck? Oh, I mean registered to . . .” I pause. Where would his fake edentity be registered? Norope? London? Somewhere completely different? With no way to know, that angle won’t work either.

“No, I got it. Tia, identify all of the local nodes connected to the Internet within a kilometer radius of the Wandsworth warehouse fire that sent data last week on Saturday between nine a.m. and ten p.m.”

“Eleven local nodes detected.”

“Eliminate the public street nodes.”

“Five remaining.”

“Okay, out of those five, did any of them stop sending data after nine a.m. on the Sunday morning and remain silent since then?”

“Yes. One local node within the radius specified meets your parameters.”

I get that thrill, right in my chest, when I know I’m onto something. “I want access to the data sent by that specific node to the Internet between noon on Tuesday and midnight last Saturday. Justification: possible connection to secondary criminal activity. Casual inquiry.”

There’s a pause, long enough for me to worry that someone at the MoJ is onto me; then Tia gives me a link and I realize the delay was simply finding data from that source that would have been sent to disparate locations in the cloud and pulling it into one virtual location for review. The data is always there. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look.

I select the link. There’s so much data it’s overwhelming, represented as a list of files and numbers with time stamps that seems to go on forever. Time to start eliminating.

“Tia, move any data uploaded by edentities that have time stamps on the Tuesday into a separate temp folder called ‘Staff.’” Alejandro was still in Devon, unchipped, so anything uploaded then would have been by the people who worked at the warehouse and who may have been connected to the crim-org.

About eighty percent of the data is moved out of the list. Good. Now I just need to narrow it down to a manageable number of edentities that could plausibly be Alejandro’s. I think back to what Selina told me about his trip. She said he went up to London on Wednesday afternoon. Even if he went straight to the crim-org, it’s unlikely he would have been chipped and online much before five p.m. that evening. I take a breath to start using that as a new parameter, but, of course, the crim who set up the identity could have done that anytime and simply transferred it to Alejandro once his chip was functional.

Shit.

A different approach is required. Maybe the sort of data uploaded within this twenty percent can lead me to his space on the cloud.

“Tia, isolate any data uploaded by edentities that came online from noon on Wednesday onward, and filter for pornographic-content tags. Remove any with those tags.” I doubt very much that Alejandro got himself chipped to jerk himself off.

Another five percent gets eliminated. There’s still far too much to go through myself.

Envía la carta.

Of course. I’ve lived in England too long.

“Tia, list the edentities that either read Internet content in Spanish or that uploaded text in Spanish.”

The list shrinks before my eyes to three edentities. One leaps out at me. “El Don de la Mancha,” with a string of numbers in faded text beneath it to distinguish it from all the other thousands of that name.

“Tia, I want to see the data stored in the cloud by that edentity,” I say, selecting it with a point of my index finger.

“There is no data stored in the cloud by that edentity.”

“What?”

“There is no—”

“But how did you know the content was Spanish if it’s not there anymore?”

“I deduced the content was Spanish from the use of queries relating to creation of punctuation required to create Spanish questions with a v-keyboard, answered by the local node’s automated help function, not from the content itself.”

The thrill in my chest fizzles out. Sometimes Tia is too good.

“I take it the content was really, properly deleted?”

“Yes. I am unable to retrieve any backups mirrored to any other locations in the cloud. If a backup exists, the data relating to the transfer of the data has been deleted.”

“But, theoretically, it could still be out there?”

“Yes. Theoretically.”

There has to be another copy somewhere. He was still using it just before he died. “Right. I want you to search the Moor Hotel local node for any data uploaded to the cloud by that edentity.”

I chew my lip. This is getting very close to the stuff I’m supposed to put behind me.

“No data uploaded by that edentity.”

“Fuck!”

Arlington. She must have scrubbed all traces of his activity. Then it comes to me: what she did when her back was to the camera, after Theo had done his work with the ax and left the Diamond Suite. She wasn’t stealing DNA. She was removing his chip. The Yanks knew he was chipped all along; of course they removed it and tried to hide any traces. The “spell” in Linda’s story was probably just a dab of glue and makeup. Linda was too efficient, discovering traces of the changes to the brain caused by the recent addition of a chip before they could recover the body. They—either the Americans or the MoJ pressured by the Americans—silenced her with a simple order, most probably had her remove the mention of it from her final report, and thought it was over. After all, no one would ever suspect him to be chipped in the first place. It would have been successfully covered up if Linda were only an average pathologist. I’d send her a note if it wouldn’t raise suspicion. Maybe I will in a few days, when I’m on my next case and Milsom isn’t twitchy anymore.

I start on a second biscuit. I need to rest but that’s not a possibility. I need to think about what I’m going to say to my case officer to make sure there isn’t any serious intervention. I need to put this behind me, like Milsom said.

There’s no chance of that. I’m not some fucking walking AI that can switch this shit off just because it inconveniences the MoJ. I have to know why Alejandro got himself chipped after building an entire cult on the basis that it’s the worst thing people can ever do to themselves. I need to know what he wrote in that last letter. Theo must have destroyed the paper suicide note he stole from the desk before he got to the cottage—or Arlington took it after making sure Theo died—but the electronic version has to be out there somewhere.

The frustration of leaving this unsolved makes me want to tear the chip out of my own brain. The fucking MoJ have me made into someone who pursues an investigation thoroughly, doggedly, someone who has instincts beyond anything an AI can give them. But they only want that when it suits them. Bastards!

No. I have to rein in this anger. Do the best I can under their radar before recalibration. JeeMuh, just the thought of the machine makes sweat prickle beneath my collar, so I force it away. I focus on the next step instead.

My only hope is to track down an illegal copy made of the data without Alejandro’s or Arlington’s knowledge. There’s a chance she was siphoning off the data after she torched the original server, so he could keep using the chip seamlessly, but I don’t rate my chances at being to find a trail from her. If the case was still open I could start working with the hacking specialist who analyzed the hotel’s local node, but that’s not going to happen.

I think back to the archive content on illegal-chipping outfits. One of the many dangers of going to them instead of an approved gov-corp operation is that the crim-org will steal your data. Surely they knew who he was—even if he lied to them about his identity when he bought the service. Surely they would want to steal his data.

I go back to the original data that Tia gathered for me that was routed through the torched local node in the window when Alejandro was there. The edentities of the crims that died in the fire are there, and using them I may be able to find people connected to them who are still alive, one of whom may well have access to any data copied from Alejandro’s cloud space.

It’s a long shot, I know it is, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in the years in this job, it’s that whatever you need is in the data. You just have to know which paths through it to follow and how to eliminate the extraneous without losing patterns.

It occurs to me that this is the same crim-org that Delaney has been investigating and ze would probably do despicable things to gain the same data-access privileges as me. With hir knowledge and my data access, we could probably make a very good team on this and narrow in on some decent leads much faster. But even if ze wasn’t a scum-of-the-earth journo, I couldn’t get in touch with hir about this anyway. Too risky.

I get Tia to order another meal to my room in an hour and a half, knowing that I could easily get lost in the task and forget. I drink a glass of water for the same reason and lie on the bed.

There’s always a moment when I feel overwhelmed at the start of any data-tunneling process. There’s too much to see any kind of pattern but I know it’s in there. I take a deep breath and hold my palm level with my chest, pushing downward. I will work this out. I’ve never met a puzzle I cannot solve. This is no different.

An hour in, I have three names connected to those who died and they are solid leads. I pick one to drill down into and then the data disappears.

“Level-two data privileges revoked,” Tia says.

I break into a sweat. Milsom has discovered what I’m doing. I hold my breath, waiting for her call, but it doesn’t come.

“Did Milsom do that?”

Tia doesn’t reply.

“Tia?”

“Please wait.”

I sit up and wipe the sweat from my top lip. This is going to be a black mark if I don’t think of something quick.

“All MoJ privileges revoked.”

“What the fuck?”

“Access to MoJ personal case space revoked.”

“Tia, what the fuck is going on?”

I go to stab at the icon that’s usually in the bottom right-hand corner of my vision, but before I can select it, it disappears.