False Value

by Ben Aaronovitch

That would be Nightingale, I thought, who has plenty more where that comes from.

  I turned and ran down the stairs three at a time, swung around and did a neat jump over the railing and dropped halfway down the next flight. The coolness of the move being only slightly marred when I misjudged the landing and nearly pitched myself face forward down the rest of the stairs.

  “I think we’ve lost them,” I said when I caught up with Stephen and Mrs. Chin on the first floor. “But the feds are here. Got a back way out?”

  Stephen gave me a pained look.

  “Rear fire door,” he said. “I’ve bypassed the burglar alarm.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, but Mrs. Chin tried to hang back.

  “What about my gear?” she asked.

  “We’ll steal you new stuff,” I said while Stephen hustled her to the emergency stairs at the back of the block. Just as he’d promised there was a fire door at the bottom with DOOR IS ALARMED stenciled at eye height. And, just as promised, there was no alarm when he banged through it.

  Not that it would have made any difference if it had. Going out the back had been part of the contingency planning on my way in, Silver and Nightingale deliberately giving us a clear path to the A10.

  It was a cloudless, freezing night and behind us I heard sirens and what sounded like gunshots and explosions. Nightingale was giving us a show to keep Stephen off balance—and Mrs. Chin, too, but Nightingale wouldn’t know that.

  I heard the grass strimmer buzz and turned to find a pair of drones tracking us. They whirred through the sodium haze of the street lights, flying low to the ground, dragonfly wings a blur, gun barrel mouths shifting left and right—looking for targets.

  I hit the first one with a fireball that blew its wings off. As it fell like a discarded toy, I had a go at the second and missed. It twitched and suddenly I was looking down the gaping mouth of its gun as it locked on. I started raising my shield and I like to think I would have got it up in time, but we’ll never know. Because a ragged bolt of lightning shot past me and hit the drone just behind the head.

  Disappointingly, a crackle of blue electricity did not engulf the evil thing in an excitingly cinematic fashion. But it did seize up and fall to the ground and, given the circumstances, I’ll take what I can get.

  “Nice,” I told Stephen as we continued our rapid nonchalant stroll up St. Anne’s Road in the direction of the main road. “You’ve got to teach me that one.”

  He grunted and concentrated on helping Mrs. Chin maintain the pace. She herself was thin-lipped and determined, but she was breathing hard through her nose. I checked behind to see the blue lights reflecting off the jagged concrete edges of the maisonettes and tower blocks.

  But no more drones.

  Once we reached the A10 we slowed our pace and started to freeze. I gave Mrs. Chin my jacket and led them to South Tottenham Overground station. The station forms a bridge over the High Road, and a void beneath the platforms is used by London’s talking fox population as a listening post and way station.

  Fortunately a train pulled in within minutes of our arrival and we bundled in and mingled with assorted shift workers, cleaners and whoever else needs to escape Barking before midnight.

  I made the pair sit separately in different ends of the carriage, with me in the middle. I told them it would make it harder for the police to track our movements on CCTV, but really it was so I could surreptitiously text Nightingale—among others.

  “Where are we going?” hissed Stephen when we changed at Gospel Oak.

  “Safe house,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  To my surprise, it was Maksim that picked us up at Richmond in his Mercedes C-Class and drove us back to Beverley Avenue. In the backseat Mrs. Chin fell asleep on Stephen’s shoulder. Maksim drove with the same look of serene concentration he has when weeding the garden, cleaning the kitchen or hanging drug dealers up by their ankles. We traveled in silence until we pulled in outside Beverley’s house and she waddled out to meet us. We soon had Mrs. Chin in the best armchair with a blanket and a hot cup of tea. Stephen perched on the sofa and looked around curiously as I bustled about and Maksim readied the spare rooms.

  This mostly involved moving boxes of stuff out of two bedrooms and into a third. Beverley’s house, being made of the two halves of a semi knocked through, had two staircases and plenty of bedrooms.

  As soon as Beverley was out of the room, Mrs. Chin’s eyes snapped open and she beckoned me and Stephen over.

  “We can’t stay here,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “This is the house of a spirit. Don’t you know how dangerous they are?”

  She looked at me and I could see the slot machine whir of her thoughts suddenly slam to a halt with a row of three bananas. She flinched back in the armchair.

  “You’re consorting with one,” she said. “No, wait, you’re screwing around with one. Do you know how dangerous that is?”

  “Chill,” said Stephen. “They do things differently over here.”

  “Not that differently,” said Mrs. Chin, but she was obviously calming down. “Well, maybe they are different here. But the Hudson has been picking off rowboats and barges since the city was founded.”

  I can’t think why, I thought, but didn’t say.

  “You’re perfectly safe here,” I said. “I swear on my power.”

  Stephen made a little hiccupping laugh at that, but I think Mrs. Chin took me seriously. Or she was just too tired to argue. I showed them to their rooms and checked downstairs to find Maksim sitting in the armchair with a Taser ready in his lap. He asked me to turn the light off on my way out.

  “You didn’t need to drag poor Maksim into this,” I said as I helped Beverley construct the Bulge’s nightly support structure.

  “I didn’t call him,” said Beverley. “He turned up on his own—he only lives down the road.” She rolled over and tested the structure for firmness.

  “How did he know in the first place?” I said, as I climbed onto the bed beside her.

  “Either he has acquired a mystical bond with me,” said Beverley, “or he keeps an eye on the security system he installed last year. Pick the one that disturbs you the least.”

  I tried not to think about it as I kissed Beverley and her Bulge goodnight and pulled the duvet up and over both of us. A futile gesture, I might add, since Beverley would have acquired the whole duvet by daybreak.

  “This is not healthy,” I said.

  “Leaving aside your imposition of mundane standards to my obvious holy status for a moment, I tried to give him a nudge . . .”

  “Bev!”

  “Not that kind of nudge,” said Beverley. “We had a talk. Or actually I talked. I asked him if he thought it was right that he felt obligated to me and told him I didn’t want him to think he was.”

  “And?”

  “He quoted Vasily Zhukovsky at me,” said Beverley.

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “Russian Romantic poet,” she said, and admitted that she’d had to look him up afterward. He’d quoted in Russian, too, but Beverley reckoned she’d got the gist. “Something about accepting your destiny.”

  I sighed.

  “At least he can watch Mrs. Chin while I’m at work,” I said, and looked at the clock. It was already two in the morning. “Today.”

  “And what will you be doing today?” asked Beverley.

  “I shall be penetrating the secrets of the inner sanctum,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m disappointed,” I said.

  “What were you expecting?” asked Everest.

  Not a large open-plan office full of cubicles—beige cubicles at that—with nothing of the mannered playfulness that infested the rest of the Serious Cybernetics Co
rporation. I judged that if you counted the toilets and the two conference rooms, the office covered the whole square metreage of this floor.

  “Something a bit more lively,” I said.

  “The people working here don’t need toys,” said Everest. “This is all about brains.”

  Not that many brains, since less than a quarter of the cubicles appeared to be occupied.

  “I’m with Peter,” said Victor. “I thought it would at least have moody lighting.”

  “That would be stupid,” said Everest.

  I’d asked Skinner if I could bring along Victor and Everest as native guides and tech support. He’d said yes, providing I made sure they didn’t walk out of Bambleweeny with anything secret or, more importantly, proprietary.

  They also let me take my evidence kit in with me, although September had a good rummage through it before she let us in.

  “It’s mostly different-size bags,” I said.

  September Rain was to act as my minder, and it was she who coded us into the secret lab. Once in, I asked where William Lloyd had worked and she showed us to a cubicle a third of the way in from the door.

  There was another floor above and, if I wasn’t mistaken, there should be stairs up to it tucked away in the corner of the building, hidden behind the glass-fronted office. I tried to sneak a closer look as we walked over to William Lloyd’s cubicle, but September kept her beady eye on me.

  All the cubicles contained the same bog-standard PC tower and flat-screen monitor. Neither mouse nor keyboard were wireless, and were physically connected to the tower.

  “For security,” said Everest, and sniffed disapprovingly. “Supposedly they’re worried that ‘somebody’ will hack the Bluetooth links. As if encryption wasn’t a thing.”

  There were no personal touches in the cubicle—no mugs, calendars or amusing bobble-headed Marvel superheroes. The only odd thing was a framed wiring diagram that had been stuck on the wall of the cubicle—positioned at the head height of anyone sitting at the desk.

  It looked like it had been pulled from a magazine, an old one that had been printed before the arrival of electronic typesetting. On the right of the page was a large square spiral labeled SENSOR PAD, attached by lines to a collection of electronic wiring symbols above which was drawn a dial meter that ran from 0 to 100 and was labeled RATE. On the left of the drawing was a circular spiral labeled WITNESS WELL.

  “Does anyone know what this is?” I asked, but nobody did.

  It reminded me of the wiring diagrams my dad uses to build his amplifiers. Or, more precisely, the diagrams his various mad hi-fi friends use to build my dad’s amplifiers. He never has to pay them, except with long rambling anecdotes about the Flamingo Club or the time he swam across the Thames with Stan Getz.

  It also reminded me of the apparatus that Mrs. Chin had built on the table tennis table. So I turned to September and told her I was taking the picture as evidence.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I want to know his influences,” I said.

  She gave me a long suspicious look, but I was beginning to recognize this as her default expression and merely waited for her to say yes. When she did, I carefully removed the picture from the cubicle wall—it had been suspended from a pair of drawing pins—and slid it into a large-sized evidence bag. Then, more to annoy September than anything else, I conscientiously filled in the label with date, time and location.

  There wasn’t anything else in the cubicle—no knick-knacks, pictures, empty drinks cans, not even any stationery—which I found suspicious. I pointed at the terminal and told Everest and Victor that it was all theirs.

  They pulled up chairs and fell upon the terminal with grim cheerfulness. As Everest started probing its mysteries, I led September into the walkway and asked whether anyone had removed anything from the cubicle after the attack.

  “No,” she said. “And, before you ask, we have surveillance in place and we checked.”

  “What kind of surveillance?” I asked.

  She pointed at the ceiling.

  “The usual,” she said.

  I looked up. The ceiling was a bog-standard suspended tile affair useful for covering up ducts, cables and xenomorph infiltrations. It had recessed lighting fixtures but not, I noticed, the dark Perspex domes that marked CCTV camera positions out in the rest of the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. September was giving me an irritatingly smug look, so I searched harder. And this time I spotted them—little fisheye lenses hidden in the gaps between the tiles. There was one almost directly above William Lloyd’s cubicle.

  “How long do you keep the footage for?” I asked.

  September shrugged. “Forever, I guess.”

  “I want to look at it.”

  “I’ve already reviewed it,” said September. “The guy was boring. He sat down, did his work, drank Mountain Dew, worked some more, logged out, got up, went home.”

  “Did he interact with anyone else up here?”

  “Interaction is discouraged.”

  “So, yeah, he did,” I said.

  “So, he chatted to a few guys. Big deal.”

  “Your boss wants me to investigate,” I said. “You going to help or not?”

  “He’s your boss too,” said September.

  “Exactly,” I said, and knew I’d won.

  It was even better when September headed off toward where I suspected the stairwell was.

  “I’ll go fetch it, then,” she said.

  I followed her as far as a blank white security door tucked away out of sight. September made a point of masking the keypad when she opened it. She turned at the threshold and held up her hand to stop me following.

  “I’ll bring it down,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

  But not before I’d had a chance to look at the stairwell beyond. There had been no down flight, and the flight going up had been bounded by a wall of unpainted concrete blocks. This meant two things. One, this building was in major contravention of health and safety regulations—particularly those pertaining to emergency egress in the event of a fire. And, two, behind the crude breeze block wall there had been room for a lift shaft.

  As I walked back to where Everest and Victor were having an incomprehensible argument about file structures, I mentally reviewed my earlier explorations of the floors below. I was pretty sure that there was a gap in the floor plan that would line up nicely to form a continuous lift shaft all the way down to the basement.

  Realizing that looking at the screen told me even less than listening to Everest and Victor, I had a nose round the other cubicles. I identified Dennis Yoon’s by the Mad Max poster and the small pyramid artfully constructed out of paper clips.

  I felt it then, as elusive as a whisper at a club, a touch, a sensation . . . a memory of a vestigium.

  I stayed very still with one hand on the gray laminated chipboard of the desk and the fingertips of the other resting on the keyboard.

  There was something—I was sure of it.

  September’s face appeared over the top of the cubicle wall.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Waiting for you to get back,” I said. “Got the footage?”

  She held up a tablet and wiggled it for emphasis.

  “Hand it over, then.”

  “No,” she said. “It stays with me. You ask to see something and I show you.”

  “Is it time stamped?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then it’s not me who needs it,” I said, and led her over to Everest and Victor. “How’s it going? Are you in?”

  “Of course we’re in,” said Everest. “We have higher access than Mr. Lloyd.”

  “And?”

  “It’s all work stuff,” said Victor. “I’ve got his task list and it’s all that. We’re checking his emails,
but they’re all routine.”

  “Can you tell when he was logged in?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said Everest. “It’s all logged.”

  “Then, when you’ve finished checking that,” I said, “I want you to use the CCTV footage to check whether his work logs actually match the times he’s visible working in here.”

  “Boring,” said Everest. “Even by my standards.”

  “What’s this in aid of?” asked Victor.

  I was thinking of what William Lloyd had said to Guleed—It talks to you but nothing is ever logged—but they didn’t need to know that.

  “I want to see if he was working on a side project,” I said, which got me a narrow-eyed look of almost approval from September.

  Once I was sure they were settled in, I told them we’d meet up at the Vogon office at four o’clock and headed for the door.

  “And where are you going?” called September.

  “I’m going to see if I can wheedle some forensics out of a contact,” I said.

  10

  There is Now

  ASSUME NOTHING, believe nothing, check everything—the ABC of policing.

  Once out of the building I took a stroll around the back to Clare Street and walked along until I could see where my hypothetical lift shaft ran down the inside of the building. The windows into the shaft hadn’t been bricked up, but a quick go with telescopium, voted nine years running the world’s dullest name for a spell ever, got me enough magnification to see that what looked like closed blinds from a distance appeared, close up, to be lines painted onto a flat surface. Hardboard at a guess.

  There was no obvious external entrance to a lift on the ground floor, but I noticed a shuttered entrance with a MAX HEADROOM warning built from the same blue-gray brick as Fitzroy House, the big ugly 1960s building next door. I’ve never seen that blue-gray brick on any other building in the area, so if this was an alternative freight entrance into Bambleweeny then it might have been deliberately camouflaged.

  And what they don’t want you to know, you definitely want to know.

  Just to confirm things, I wandered further up Clare Street until I found a second shuttered goods entrance to Fitzroy House. It was unlikely that a modern office building would have two goods entrances, but I’d have to get Silver to assign one of her minions to check.