The Cryptographer

by Tobias Hill

  She should be resigned to it by now. Instead a faint, fine anger unfurls in her. The first of the day. ‘Soon. I’d like it to be soon.’

  ‘And the Revenue gets what the Revenue wants. I hope you’re prepared, though. He won’t be easy.’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘Not as such. No one’s met him. What I mean is, when you’re as rich as he is, you don’t have to be nice. You don’t need to make things easy for anyone.’

  ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Course I am,’ he says equably, leaning back, getting the sun on his face. ‘That’s not the point. Don’t worry about me, worry about him. Otherwise you’ll find yourself out of your depth before you even know you’re in deep water.’

  ‘Sounds dangerous.’

  ‘You can laugh now.’

  ‘I’ll pack a wetsuit, shall I?’

  ‘A bikini might be better. I’ll help you choose, if you like.’

  ‘I’ll manage, thanks for the offer. Look, it’s a random investigation. There are no inconsistencies in the accounts,’ she lies. ‘I’ll be done inside four months.’

  ‘If you say so. Quite a chance, his number coming up.’

  ‘The same as anyone else. What are you thinking?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He watches her, calculating. ‘You might need help, all the same.’

  ‘Whose help?’

  ‘Well, two heads are better than one, especially if one of them’s mine.’

  She laughs despite herself. Carl scowling over his cup. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Alright. Why not?’

  ‘I don’t think we’d work well together,’ she says. Which is, she thinks, already the guaranteed understatement of the day. ‘And my clients are my own business.’

  ‘Of course they are, of course. I don’t mean to pry.’

  ‘Of course you don’t, Carl. Why don’t you ask the Board?’

  Reluctantly, hopefully, he smiles. ‘You know why.’ And immediately she does.

  ‘Because you asked them already. You’re unbelievable. And what did they say?’

  ‘They told me to ask you.’

  ‘Good. And I’m telling you I don’t need your help. But thanks. Really. Thanks for the offer.’

  She watches him swear and look away. The tension that has condensed in her begins to dissipate. In profile he is more attractive. His ancestry comes through more strongly. Something Phoenician, she imagines, by way of south London.

  ‘You think you’ve got it all fixed up.’ A muscle works in his jaw. Although he looks older, acts older, he is barely twenty. Little more than half her age.

  ‘Carl,’ Anna says, ‘you don’t need to be jealous of me. I’m not like you.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’ He leans in on her. ‘But everyone’s driving for something, aren’t they? The drive for five. You can’t spend all day working with money and not want it. You know how the Revenue works, and how it doesn’t. You wouldn’t be the first to put that to better use, would you? Tell me you don’t want more.’

  ‘I don’t want more.’

  He nods. For a moment she thinks he understands. That she is not like him. That her desires are less utilitarian than ambition or wealth. Then he nods again. ‘So you can give me a piece of Law.’

  ‘Not for a hundred hula skirts,’ she says, and he sits back and smiles balefully.

  ‘You’re a cunt, Anna. But I do mean that in a nice way.’ He closes the briefcase on his lap, locks it, stands up. ‘Eat up, you’ll be late. What are you doing after?’

  ‘Whatever you like.’

  She watches him across Limeburner Square, his grey figure disappearing into the crowd. These are the people who dream of John Law, she thinks. She thinks of the drive, the yen, the gleam. The words like three steps down, a diminishing progression of desire.

  Upriver at Westminster, Big Ben begins to strike, the first tolls hazy with distance, unchanged for a hundred and sixty years. In Anna’s mind, childrens’ rhymes. All the churches of the twin city, talking of money.

  When will you pay me? Say the bells of Old Bailey.

  When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch.

  When will that be? Say the bells of Stepney.

  She will know everything about him. She will have the facts at her fingertips. Of course she will.

  People say many things about John Law. Not all of them are true, of course. But Anna is an inspector of the Inland Revenue, a collector of taxes, not a member of a jury. And of course she can’t help but know, when people say so many things.

  They say he is Scottish by birth. This at least she half believes. She has not spoken to him herself, not yet, but she has heard him speak, naturally, and there is a certain inflection, a softness and edge, something which might once have been an accent. Now it is almost nothing, just as there are people who say he is nothing. Although Anna suspects this is untrue. She is beginning to think there will be more to him than meets the eye. In the flesh.

  They say that by the age of ten, John Law could program machine code as if it were his first language. They say that he was orphaned into a lifetime inheritance: also that he is the son of a single mother, a factory worker from the island of Coll, who appeared for a time on screens everywhere. No one has fifteen minutes of fame any more; instead they get an hour that nobody watches. As far as Anna recalls, the woman was dour and unremarkable except for her eyes, which were much like his. Kennedy eyes. The factory processed krill. This is old news. Anna heard of no gene test done then, and no one would care now if there was.

  They say he is addicted, but no one can agree to what. In any week of coverage Law will overdose on crystal stim, be found drunk in an alleyway, downloading banned pornography, eating prohibited foods. On Sundays he will be recorded phoning for cheap prostitutes from glossy hotel penthouses.

  No one says he is addicted to money. That is expected of him.

  They call him the first quadrillionaire. They say that measured by the ounce, his body is 91,000 times more valuable than gold. They say he married his first love: they buy the social photographs. They say the marriage has gone bad. They say he has been cloned three times. His brain has been regrown and he has taught it everything he knows. He keeps it for its company, like a bird that talks. They say his sperm has been refined. His wife will give birth to himself. So they say.

  They say he can break the code. Of course they do. That more than anything: that most of all.

  John Law is the man who made the first great electric currency. He did it alone, they say, in room nine of the London Savoy. He invented a perfect code, and from the code he made a money that would come to be used by billions of people. He called it Soft Gold. When Anna tries to imagine its ones and fives and tens, they are nothing but the fur of static on a screen, the hum of a wire in the rain. There is nothing to the new money except the code, and the code can’t be broken.

  In God We Trust, she thinks, as she works through the rhythms and formulas of the office. It was what they used to print on the American dollar bills. She remembers how you could smell the ink of the words and feel the paper in your wallet, the sweat in its seams. You could tell that other people had done the same. You could sense hot countries, cigar boxes, bank tellers’ fingers. Greed and generosity. People believed in the paper, even if they didn’t believe in the god.

  It is only two years since they cancelled the dollar, the last exchangeable hard currency. Already Anna has trouble thinking of money that way. Of currency as touchable. The sour smell of alloy, the arcane traces of urine and cocaine on old notes. It seems to her that money was always meant to be this way. Invisible.

  There is no sweat on Soft Gold. It carries no residue of human places. But people trust it because of the code, which can never be broken. In Code We Trust.

  You have to trust, of course, she thinks. Because you need money. You need it even if you hate it. And in money, trust is everything.

  These are the things that everyone knows, the b
ar-room apocrypha. But then Anna is not everyone. She is professionally knowledgeable. She is in possession of the facts.

  People say that he is the richest man in the world. Anna knows enough to believe they may not be wrong. She knows, for example, that Law was rich even before Soft Gold. At the age of thirteen he designed and released a computer virus, Pandora, which in eight days was said to have done financial damage running into multiple millions. During the resultant periods of community service, Law put his talents to better use, inventing Asphodel Nine, a revolutionary system for embedding encrypted information in the genetic code of plants and flowers. The text of a secret in the stem of an iris. At seventeen he sold the patents to the US government for seven and a half million dollars.

  According to the last Revenue report – four and a half years old – he owns property in cities on five continents. He is the only individual to possess land in Antarctica, an estate of lodges and ice caves. He has a yacht with thirty-seven rooms. Some of them will play any music you ask them for: anything, you just have to ask. The ages are measured in possessions, Anna thinks, stone, iron and silicon. And Law has everything. He might almost be living in a different century.

  She has never seen him in person, but she knows what he is capable of. By chance, she has already been to the place that holds his code, the hall where his money is constantly being made and sent out into the world. She remembers it now, at night, as she cooks for herself. Rehearsing the facts of the case. Alone with a glass of drink beside her, the radio on low, old music, the windows clad with condensation against the dark.

  The office is near Hatton Garden, London. Anna recalls that it has no discernable name. It is designed in a late-twentieth-century style, reconstituted Gothic, rough granite and fluted windows. It is larger than the buildings around it, although this is not immediately apparent. It hides behind road trees, itinerant late-lunch crowds, flower stalls. If a passer-by noticed it at all he would take it for a city block, not one building. And it is not noticeable. The passers-by pass on by, as they are intended to do.

  The office effaces itself. Its mass is broken up by alleyways, service gates, inaccessible courtyards. The power is hidden in ordinary office architecture. It is just an ordinary office. But there is only one door, with no name on it.

  Years ago the building housed De Beers, the monopolists of diamonds, bankrupted by unnatural jewels. They were replaced by other companies with similar needs in security and unobtrusiveness. At one time there were two corporations and eight subsidiaries in the building. Now there is only one. It is called SoftMark. A company with a name like that could do anything, and so it does. Instead of diamonds it sells silicon. As well as making money, it makes money out of nothing.

  Otherwise the office has changed little. Anna found she could still imagine the gem cutters inside, the stones raw as coal. None of this was as long ago as it seems, she knows. History gets closer as the times get faster. And they do change fast now. Today even tomorrow feels like yesterday.

  She chops green fans of dill into a bowl of Arctic river prawns. The music plays. Water simmers on the hob. She scrubs black mineral earth from the silver skins of new potatoes.

  The office has seven floors and six basements. Twelve storeys are comprised of SoftMark’s business facilities – computer hardware and software – but the floor of the sixth basement is paved with silicon. There is nothing there except the pavement, black and vitreous. The basement is very large, an area of hectares or acres. Armed guards echo through the empty halls.

  She has been there only once. It is not an easy place to be, in any sense. She was admitted on Revenue business, one of nine. There was a moment when her colleagues were talking, all of them together, and she was alone.

  She bent down to feel the pavement. It was cool to the touch and dark but also clear, like a window at night from the inside. The sensation she felt was not unlike vertigo. She saw – under her own reflected face – the silicon chips. Hundreds and thousands of them, small as the tesserae in a mosaic.

  For as long as she could she stayed like that, looking. Once she saw a read-out illuminate deep below the surface, like a coin falling into a well. Then her superior was calling her name, and she had to go.

  Don’t worry about me, worry about him. Otherwise you’ll find yourself out of your depth before you even know you’re in deep water.

  Anna believes that. It is something she can joke about, but not something she needs to be told. She has always taken care. A child dressed up for rain in her sister’s favourite photograph; a girl watching river skaters, the skaters her parents, vague in the foggy distance; a woman smiling at the camera, but always carefully, a careful woman, always.

  She wonders if John Law is the same. In her experience – which is to say her experience of others, her vicarious working life – it is almost impossible to be rich and careless, at least for long. But in the exaggerated stories people tell Law is more than careless. He is wild with the excess of his own wealth, mad as a Midas. There are famously few pictures of him, but in those Anna has seen he is often impatient, rarely at ease. She is not sure he looks cautious. It isn’t carelessness, necessarily, but there is something, a recurrent expression. Restlessness, a contained volatility. He looks like a man who might take comfort in taking risks.

  So Anna thinks. But then again, Anna is in possession of the facts. The fact is that the Revenue’s interest in John Law is anything but random. If he were a careful man, he would never have become Anna’s client in the first place.

  For days her mind ticks over with him, so loud it is as if she hears it. She still has her regular portfolio, there are other clients to see, some of them wealthy, many well connected, and all of them difficult, because it is to her that the difficult clients will talk, if at all; it is a reputation she has, a talent for the unobtrusive retrieval of information. But her heart is not in it, now, and her thoughts are elsewhere. She wishes there was someone to talk to about Law, though there is only her sister Martha, who she sees the first Friday of each month at most, or her parents, old and divorced, divorced from their grown children, grown into new lives – or Lawrence. There is always Lawrence.

  Those who know her a little would say she is too proud to doubt herself. Those who know her better would tell her she is taking her work too much to heart. So they would tell her, if they could see her now. Tonight she waits a long time for sleep. When it comes it is bad with dreams.

  She is cleaning new potatoes again. This is a ridiculous thing to dream of, she thinks, even as it is happening, and she laughs at the pale things in her hands.

  The water simmers. The old music plays. She is dancing a little, to herself, moving only fractionally; a dance of fractions. There is someone behind her in the kitchen. She doesn’t remember him arriving. He is telling her about new potatoes. Somewhere in the world, he says, there are always new potatoes.

  How many do you want? Anna says, and the man behind her says:

  None for me. How many for you?

  She laughs again. I don’t want any either, she says. I don’t know why I’m doing this.

  What do you want, then? the man behind her says.

  She says, I want to stop keeping watch. Let someone else do it. I’m tired of watching.

  She doesn’t say, I would like to be watched. Nor does the man answer. Anna doesn’t look at him. Some part of her knows there are rules to this dream, old laws, and that if she turns round the man will die. She wants to tell him, to warn him of the danger, but the dream won’t let her. Instead of speaking she goes on with what she is doing. She cleans the potato in her hands.

  It is small and cool against her fingers. There is a scar on one side. When she peels at it the mark remains, under the skin. The flesh is like congealed ink. Anna takes a knife and cuts deeper. The water beside her begins to seethe.

  Now the substance is exposed, glistening. The white flesh is stained through with fine dark lines. The pattern is not natural. It lacks that symmetry. Ann
a leans closer and goes still. She almost believes she can read them, these bright black capillaries. And then she can. She sees that the flesh is full of numbers.

  What is it, Anna? says the voice behind her. It is soft, with only the trace of an accent. Anna, what does it say?

  The next day she tries Lawrence, once at ten and again before noon. He picks up just as the machine kicks in. ‘It’s me,’ she says.

  ‘So I hear.’ His voice is still rough with sleep. In the background a smoother version is asking her to leave a message. It stops abruptly. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She releases her breath, as if it could leave her lighter. She has caught him before the first drink, before he has lost his edge. In this state he still has something of his old keenness. It is what she needs of him, now she has made up her mind to need him. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re under investigation.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because I have nothing to investigate.’ She hears him turn away to cough. ‘My pension would hardly interest them, it hardly interests me. Because for an inspector, you’re so terribly trustworthy, Anna, and such a terribly bad liar. Your sense of humour leaves much to be desired, by the way. Why don’t you try to keep it for the evenings, when good people are past noticing?’

  ‘You’ll miss it.’

  ‘Like hell I will.’

  ‘Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something.’ A siren goes past down in Limeburner Square or Pilgrim Street. ‘… Confidentially.’

  ‘You can trust me,’ he says. And Anna hesitates.

  ‘I know. There was something else too. Do you remember Carl?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Carl Caunt. Young. Ambitious. He was still a trainee, when you –’

  ‘I remember. The loud one. What about him?’

  ‘Yesterday we talked about the Cryptographer. He’d already heard.’