The Glimpse

by Claire Merle

  He shrugged. Obviously, winning lay beyond the realms of possibility.

  ‘Think about it,’ Ana said feigning confidence. ‘This afternoon, al you have to do is folow the script. Nobody wil know and you’l win the case.’

  ‘You’re just a child,’ he said.

  ‘I can win it.’

  Jackson shook his head forlornly. No wonder Nate despised him. He was hopeless.

  ‘There’s a lot to do before this afternoon,’ she said

  ‘There’s a lot to do before this afternoon,’ she said turning to Nate. ‘I’l see you outside.’ She nodded at the lawyer, desperate to leave before he totaly demoralised her. ‘See you in court.’

  Outside, the rising sun bathed the terrace houses in lemon light. Rachel was nowhere to be seen.

  Ana steadied herself against a white wal and gulped 134

  down the fresh air. The hearing was at 3 p.m., less than nine hours away. They couldn’t possibly be ready in time.

  Nate slammed the front door. He looked ghostly pale in the light of day. His short, spiked hair needed a wash.

  Dark circles ringed his eyes.

  ‘What was al that about?’ he said.

  Ana shrugged. Looked like she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sleeping wel.

  ‘You better be sure about this,’ he said.

  She gazed at him keeping her expression flat. She had enough to worry about without Nate doubting her ability.

  ‘So where did you study?’ he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Aren’t many Crazies our age who’ve studied law.’

  ‘Guess not,’ she said. He frowned at her and then, to her surprise, let it drop and turned away.

  *

  *

  They descended into Warwick Avenue station and picked their way over sleeping bundles strewn around the ticket hal. They scanned cards across a ticket barrier, waited in a crowded tunnel that smelt of ozone and were carried by a rattling Tube under the heart of London.

  They resurfaced at the Cross. The exit came up near a six-lane road, divided down the middle by antiquated railings. A brownstone building with giant arched windows stood opposite them, bearing the station’s old name: King’s Cross. Behind them, the gothic steeple of St Pancras Station clock tower pierced the sky.

  Ana recognised the Victorian railway terminus. Any time 135

  a committee of government officials crossed into Europe for international negotiations, they were filmed arriving at the Eurostar terminal. It was the only open passenger access to Europe and heavily restricted.

  The hands on the clock-tower faces ticked towards seven. A smel of scrambled eggs and sausages from a nearby van caught the breeze. Further up the road, a uniformed man unlocked the glass door beneath the golden ‘M’ of a fast-food restaurant. A flock of people huddled in blankets and perched by railings rose and hurried towards the establishment. A smal fight broke out. A man in a puffa jacket and shorts head-butted a second guy. Fear knotted Ana’s chest. She shrunk inwardly, glad she and Nate were headed in the opposite direction. As they turned down Cresterfield Street she glanced over her shoulder. A dozen men now brawled, throwing punches, stumbling and striking innocent bystanders.

  To distract herself, Ana focused on their new surroundings. Unlike Highgate High Street – the road outside her Community – the red- and brown-brick Victorian houses and factories here hadn’t been whitewashed. Few people projected or even seemed to be wearing interfaces. In the poorer London areas, advertisers obviously didn’t bother buying up the wal space.

  She folowed Nate down into the basement of a building that would have housed factory workers a century ago.

  Harsh fluorescents lit the low-ceilinged room. A work surface skirted three of the four wals. On it, evenly spaced out, were a dozen archaic computers. Ana wrinkled her nose at the stink of wet paint.

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  ‘Alex?’ Nate caled out. A man holding a roler emerged from a door at the far end of the underground room. He approached grinning. His wooly hat sat askew on his head and blue paint flecked his T-shirt.

  ‘So this is her?’ he asked. Nate nodded. ‘You didn’t mention she was young and pretty.’ Ana blushed and went to smooth her hair down the sides of her cheeks before realising it was no longer there. ‘Let me just finish up and I’l be with you,’ he said, retreating. ‘Take a seat.

  Make yourselves at home.’

  Ana pretended to inspect the equipment. Being alone with Nate made her uncomfortable.

  ‘You can use your interface,’ he said. ‘Plug it into the black pad linked to the PC and it’l be untraceable. No one would even know you’re online.’

  Ana shrugged, but her hand reached covetously to her silver pendant with the sapphire centre. She hadn’t powered up for two days, and she was beginning to feel like she’d literaly lost one of her senses, gone deaf or something.

  Nate plugged his interface into one of the pads. The wal map he was projecting vanished and reappeared on the computer screen he’d linked up to. Like at home with the flatscreen. Ana copied him with her own interface.

  Relieved to discover it stil worked, she quickly turned it off again.

  Nate straddled a stool in front of the computer. His hand rested on an object shaped like a stone. When he moved the oval object, the arrow on the screen moved. He opened up the downloaded file from Jackson.

  Ana forgot about the giant computers and examined the 137

  list of documents from Cole’s lawyer. There appeared to be four arrest reports, three under the 2017 Terrorism Act for Pre-charge Detention and one, the first of them, for assaulting an officer at a protest raly. There was also a psychiatric assessment dated from the time of Cole’s first arrest, and a police report describing what had been registered by the concert hal’s surveilance cameras the night Jasper was abducted.

  Ana opened the police report first. Nate fiddled with his retro mobile. Occasionaly, he glanced over her shoulder retro mobile. Occasionaly, he glanced over her shoulder at the computer screen while she read.

  Jasper had been filmed taking the stairs down to the Barbican’s blue car park, an underground lot of three levels that no longer had any functioning cameras. At the same time a Volvo with one man driving and no passengers had entered the car park. Four minutes later, the Volvo departed with two unidentified passengers. A search of sixty-two surveilance cameras in and around the arts centre revealed no other trace of Jasper leaving the premises. Thus it had been assumed that Jasper left the building in the Volvo.

  Alex, the guy running the internet café, reappeared, wiping his hands on a bit of cloth. The intoxicating smel of white spirits clung to him. Ana pressed her fingers into her temples to ward off a headache. At least Alex was relaxed and friendly, unlike Nate.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘Let’s see.’ He perched in front of a computer beside her and plugged his interface into another black pad. Code raced over the screen. Ana watched as he manipulated the information in ways she’d never seen before, using hand gestures to dive through the code and pick 138

  out text like he was colecting up loose stitches in a strange weave of fabric.

  ‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘Race: Caucasian. Eye colour —’

  He stopped and peered at Ana. ‘Are those contacts?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, wel I guess your eyes are a grey-brown. Kind of

  ‘Oh, wel I guess your eyes are a grey-brown. Kind of hard to say.’

  ‘Just put brown.’ She shrugged, trying to smooth over her hostility.

  ‘Brown it is then,’ Alex said. ‘Now, hair. Mmm . . . I see you’ve got a rather talented hairdresser . . .’

  ‘I’l get Lila to cut and dye it properly this afternoon. Just put down brown.’

  ‘I’m sensing a pattern here,’ Alex said playfuly. Ana ignored him, hoping Nate wasn’t paying attention.

  Alex went through al of her defining features – smal nose, pointy chin, oval face, five foot seven and skinny.


  He set an age range between eighteen and twenty-two.

  ‘Sorry, no way anyone would believe you’re older,’ he said. ‘Just have to pretend you’re a genius. Besides if the picture is a good fit a court security guard won’t be bothering to work out how old you are. Now, al we have to do is send the system on a search for girls in the database matching your description. Then we’l check the photos and see who you could most easily pass for.

  As long as you don’t buy anything on the ID, the person you’re doubling wil never know. Unless you’re unlucky enough to get ID’d in two places at exactly the same time, this wil stand up to almost anything.’

  ‘What about the law degree?’

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  ‘I’l hack in and tag it on. Obviously a university check would come up negative, but court security won’t be would come up negative, but court security won’t be doing that.’

  Ana nodded. Letting him get on with it, she opened up Cole’s most recent arrest report.

  Cole’s current pre-charge detention depended on circumstantial evidence and inductive reasoning. The first assumption that Jasper had left the Barbican involuntarily in the Volvo, led to a second; the driver of the Volvo must have had an informant keeping him abreast of Jasper’s movements. Cole, who’d been captured riding the lift down to the blue car park shortly after Jasper, fitted the profile. Additionaly, during the wide video surveilance search to see if Jasper had left the Barbican by some other means, the Wardens had scanned for Cole. He wasn’t seen again, which pointed to the strong possibility that he was the Volvo’s second passenger.

  Ana checked the other arrest reports. Cole’s first detention under the 2017 Terrorism Act occurred simply because he’d been caught on video surveilance camera taking snapshots around the Tower Bridge area several months before the bombing. Two years later, a fast-food restaurant’s surveilance camera filmed him drinking coffee beside a Novastra employee who disappeared a week later, and Cole became a suspect for the second time.

  Flimsy evidence. Clearly what counted against Cole was his relationship with the Enlightenment Project leader, Richard Cox. Lila had said it herself. Cox practicaly raised him. Without that connection Cole wouldn’t have stood out from the crowd. But this time was different.

  His pres-140

  ence in the car park when Jasper vanished wouldn’t be ence in the car park when Jasper vanished wouldn’t be so easily explained to a courtroom. And for al she knew, the Wardens might now have discovered Enkidu was the name of Cole’s boat.

  A shard of doubt cut through Ana. For the first time, she seriously considered the possibility that Cole stil operated for the Enlightenment Project and was involved in Jasper’s abduction. The evidence might be circumstantial, but there was a pattern, and Cole was at the centre of it. He was the invisible eye of the storm.

  Dread swamped her. She began biting her fingers, an old nervous habit.

  Catching Nate’s eye, she blushed, hoping that in her distraction she hadn’t done something to reveal her Pure upbringing. But then she realised why Nate’s look struck her as odd. The hostility had falen away. Anxiety lined his face.

  ‘So?’ he said, the defiance instantly returning. She moved aside to let him see the screen. ‘Don’t want to read al that legal jargon. Summarise, why don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ana replied.

  ‘But there was that other guy, same thing right?’

  ‘The case of Peter Vincent, yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And the blue car park is unused except for Level One where al the Pure chauffeurs wait. There’s no reason for your brother to go down there, but there’s evidence showing he took the car park lift at pretty much the same time the Pure disappeared, and neither were seen leaving time the Pure disappeared, and neither were seen leaving the Barbican afterwards.’ Nate squeezed a hand over his knuckles. The bones cracked.

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  ‘Yeah, we know that. What else?’

  ‘Peter Vincent didn’t have your brother’s connections.

  His mother was just foreign.’

  Nate rose abruptly. ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘I’l wait for you outside.’

  Ana pretended to continue reading as Nate crossed the basement and headed up the concrete stairwel. The computer beside her whirred, scanning milions of IDs to find her a physical likeness. Once she was alone, she clicked open Cole’s psychiatric assessment from seven years ago and read a brief summary of his background, lifted from a second ‘unavailable’ report from his infancy.

  Born twenty-four years ago to Samuel and Jennifer Winter, a drunk driver kiled his father when his mother was pregnant with her second child. Cole became disrupt-ive and problematic at nursery school. Teachers referred Jennifer Winter to a local psychologist. A preliminary examination diagnosed Cole as ADHD. The nursery refused to accept him back unless he took the advised medication.

  Opposing the medication, his mother puled him from the establishment. A year later, when school became compulsory, welfare services got involved. A subsequent investigation deemed Mrs Winter unfit to care for her two boys.

  Cole and Nate were placed in a foster home. Within the space of a year Cole moved to three different homes and finished in a boy’s orphanage. At ten years old, he ran away, and became a missing person. He didn’t resurface until his assault on a police officer seven years later, at a protest raly against compulsory Pure testing to al school children. Up 142

  until then it had been voluntary, though you could only move to a Pure community if you’d had the test.

  Ana stopped reading. She glanced at the high basement windows facing the stairwel. Nate must have been about a year old when social services took him from his mother.

  Had he been shipped from foster family to foster family too? Had he ended up in the Enlightenment Project with his brother? Lila had said Nate and Rachel grew up together. Were they al from the Project?

  These weren’t the sort of people she was used to dealing with. She didn’t know the first thing about growing up in the insane City with Psych Watch and welfare constantly breathing down your neck. She didn’t know what people like Nate and Cole had to do to survive.

  Cole’s psychiatric report concluded with a diagnosis of Aggressive Anger Disorder, Impulse Personality Problems and a diagnostic impression of Hidden Personality Disorder.

  In a courtroom, none of that would mean much. Ana could argue that eight milion Londoners had similar records. Hidden Personality Disorder just meant the examining psychiatrist thought something was wrong but examining psychiatrist thought something was wrong but couldn’t back up his judgement with anything specific.

  And the Aggressive Anger Disorder diagnosis would simply be a result of his one-time arrest for assault.

  She closed the computer file and sat for a few minutes.

  She wondered if what she was doing proved more than any suicidal mother or DNA tests that she belonged among the Crazies. The deceit, the danger, her curiosity

  – surely a normal Pure girl would be running for her life right now?

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  But Ana was stil there. Because, beneath her determination to help Jasper, there was also the fact that she’d been waiting years to take control of her future.

  Because like a wooden puppet in a fairy tale, when she’d ventured into the City, the strange, dark place had brought her to life.

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  13

  Court

  Ana and Nate met Cole’s lawyer two blocks from Acton Magistrate’s court. Jackson looked marginaly better with clothes on, but even a clean shirt and suit trousers couldn’t conceal the seedy neglect that pervaded him. As they approached, the lawyer combed in the bristled tufts around his bald patch. When he saw them he stopped and began chewing on a finger.

  Ana kept her distance as Nate set up the lawyer’s Ana kept her distance as Nate set up the lawyer’s interface, configuring it to the control pad she would be using to type on. The pad meant Ana could type
from her lap, without an interface camera needing to track her hand gestures.

  ‘Put these in,’ Nate said. He thrust a set of headphones at Jackson. Jackson’s hands trembled as he fixed the soft globes into his ears. Nate glued a bit of extra fuzz on to the lawyer’s sideburns, then they tried a practice run.

  Ana typed, getting a feel for the pad’s touch screen, adjusting her finger gestures to the keyboard which was smaler than the virtual one she usualy used. Jackson spoke her words out loud like a child learning to read.

  As they practised, it didn’t seem possible, but the lawyer’s delivery got worse.

  She looked askance at Nate. He ignored her.

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  When they’d finished, Jackson began to fiddle with the hidden headphones. Sweat patches bloomed under his arms despite the cold.

  ‘We should go,’ she said. Nate nodded, but for a moment no one moved. Finaly, Ana put Jackson’s greasy interface chain and housing over her neck, and they trudged down Ave Road, stopping at the corner of Winchester Street.

  The magistrates’ building lay up ahead, a red-brick, one-storey structure, reminiscent of the Victorian industrial era.

  The grey slate roof sloped back on al four sides. Sash windows ran the length of the two visible wals.

  windows ran the length of the two visible wals.

  ‘You’d better not mess this up,’ Nate said, scowling at thin air, so Ana couldn’t tel which of them he was talking to. Without another word, she and Jackson stepped off the kerb, leaving him behind.

  At the stone-carved gable above the entrance, Jackson nervously twisted his headphones. Half the fuzz of his left sideburn dropped, dangling down at an angle. Ana stopped him just before they reached the metal detector.

  Blocking him from the security guard’s view, she fixed the hair back in place.

  ‘You’l be fine,’ she whispered. ‘Just promise me you won’t do that in the courtroom.’ She turned and smiled at the guard, took off both the interfaces she was wearing and put them, along with the pad, on the automatic roler mat to be scanned. The guard returned her smile, raising an eyebrow at the equipment as though to say, travelling light?