“Ask him why he didn’t go through a checkpoint,” Hammell said and the android did so, but Arthur’s heart rate was beginning to slow again and his eyes didn’t so much as flicker. “Ask him if he’s a Red Hand,” he tried, but Arthur had become a statue again. Possibly there had never been a reaction and what he’d seen was just a remnant of whatever had once been going on inside Arthur’s head; a random firing of neurons. Possibly Hammell was finding meaning where there was none.
Sitting back in his chair, he puffed out his cheeks. Arthur is just another dead end. He ordered the man’s things up from temporary storage and then checked the alert. It was still red: Providence wasn’t making headway either, though with tens of thousands of sensor blocks, multiple satellites, a hundred thousand androids and a megaAI to run everything, it could afford the odd blind alley. An I.A. could not.
A couple of minutes later, an admin android buzzed into the observation room and placed a small sealed drawer on the table. It entered a key code to flip the lid and then waited patiently by the door, covertly watching Hammell as he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and began to poke through Arthur’s possessions. Most had been ruined by the acid, especially the clothing; poor Arthur would probably have to go home in his hospital gown.
“Go find him something to wear,” he said to the admin android. “Check the lost and found, the empty lockers, whatever you can find.”
“Yes, I.A. Hammell,” the android replied, but it didn’t move. It had probably already passed the order along on one of its secret networks.
Frowning, Hammell turned back to the drawer. A white and gold logo caught his eye and he picked out a partially torn and acid-bleached matchbook. Digging deeper, he found the corresponding pack of hand-rolled contraband, safely protected inside a melted plastic sleeve. Tearing off the plastic, he glanced at the admin android as he opened the box and sniffed at the contents. Years ago, he’d been an addict, before tobacco had been criminalized. Lighting one of these now would result in a fine – a fine which Arthur wouldn’t be able to pay. You’d almost be doing him a favour.
His implant began scouring the networks for various factoids about cigarettes and their criminalization, but he mentally discarded all of it in favour of the results from the matchbook’s logo, finding that it had likely come from a long-abandoned pub deep in the Reserves.
“What’s The Happy Trout?” he said into the microphone. “Ask him.”
Mor did so, but Arthur didn’t respond and Hammell went back for one last look, moving aside a ruined, bloody T-shirt, touching what he realised was a tube of lubricant.
“Give it back to him,” he said as he pulled off the gloves, throwing them into a medical waste bin, and the android collected the drawer and left without a word. Sitting back in his chair, Hammell stared at the ruined man on the other side of the blackwall, wondering who he was really and what his story was – and whether Hammell himself would ever know it.
Maybe Toskan’s having better luck, he thought and he opened his iPalm to find out, tossing his partner’s image onto a skywall display.
“Hey,” Toskan said. “How’s the interview?”
“He’s a vegetable,” Hammell said. “The house?”
“A standard pre-Restoration apartment,” Toskan shrugged. “Lots of space with not much to fill it. Barely any food in the cupboards. Aircon on the fritz - it’s murder in here. Oh, and the bedside table is full of antivirals and oddly shaped rubber things. I left Stein playing with them.”
“He’s there?”
“He beat me here, so I couldn’t really get in and touch anything. Not that I want to.”
“He’s a prostitute,” Hammell said in a sudden flash of insight.
“Stein?” Toskan asked.
“Arthur,” Hammell tutted.
“Isn’t he a bit… old for that?”
“It takes all sorts.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Toskan said. “So why didn’t his licence show up? And what about his coefficient or lack thereof?”
“Maybe he’s not a very good one,” Hammell said, thinking that a few things were beginning to make sense. If Arthur was unlicensed, maybe his clients preferred to be outside the system somehow. Maybe Arthur really wasn’t a Red Hand - maybe he was servicing Red Hands. He glanced down at the matchbook in his hand. “Fancy a drink?”
“It’s only just stopped being morning,” Toskan protested.
“So it’s afternoon.”
“Has your hangover even cleared yet? I know mine hasn’t.”
“There’s a bar in the Reserves,” Hammell said as he turned over the matchbook in his hand. “I think Arthur was there.”
“If it’s in the Reserves, it’s closed.”
“So we’ll go somewhere else, if you’re that desperate. Jeez.”
Toskan shook his head. “It’s not worth it, Hammell. If Yun found out…”
“Fine, ok. Tonight, then.”
Toskan shifted uncomfortably. “I… um… Usually that would work on me, but I think Meera’s coming back today. I don’t want to... y’know.”
“Yeah,” Hammell said as he contemplated another night alone with the cat, a bowl of noodles and a bottle of scotch.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see you back at the office,” Hammell said and he swiped at the display to sever the connection.
“Who attacked you?” Mor asked again and Hammell felt his temper fraying.
“Stop asking,” Hammell snapped into the microphone. “We’re releasing him.”
“We do not have satisfactory answers,” Mor replied. “We can keep Mr Beecroft in custody for a further 46 hours.”
“In 46 hours, he still won’t know anything,” Hammell said and he took his hand off the button and then slapped the console in frustration.
He watched as the android informed Arthur that he was being released and saw the melted man’s face change as he looked up. Is that panic? Fear? He reached for the button again. “Tell him that he’ll be taken to his home. Tell him... Tell him he’ll be alright.”
Mor did so, but mechanically. It was an empty gesture and Hammell knew it. Feeling oddly put out, Hammell buzzed the door open, slipping the cigarettes into his pocket as he walked out. The admin android hadn’t been watching closely enough.
Chapter 5
It was late and the office was getting quieter by the minute. Not that it was ever noisy, with almost all of the work now undertaken by the megaAI in the basement and only the eerily silent androids gliding around the floors above. Still, there was no longer the hum of activity coming from outside the door of the cupboard. The civilians and wardens who loitered around the place had gone home and most of the androids were down in the basement recharging. Toskan too was long gone, disappearing the moment his shift was over to run home and see whether his wife had come yo-yoing back.
Hammell though was lingering. He’d spent much of the afternoon digging, discovering that Warden Porter had in fact made a mistake. The surveillor had not recorded a fake signal as the kid implied - it had simply broken down at an inopportune moment. Case closed.
And yet… Something was nagging at him. How had the perpetrators known there would only be one sensor block, and that it was faulty? Even out there, to forcibly cut out someone’s embedded tech in the middle of the street, and then to furthermore dump that person into a barrel of acid… Well, it was bold to say the least. Or stupid. Had they known they would get away with it? How had they known?
He heard heavy, clomping footsteps coming up the stairs and realised he had loitered right through the evening shift and into the night shift. It was amazing that someone so small could produce quite so much noise, but that was Asha Ishi. It was also amazing that someone who so clearly had a screw loose had survived as one of the last six I.A.s. He turned his light down low, but she still spotted it through the blinds as she made her way up the stairwell. She knocked gently and opened the door.
“Hammell?” she said. “You’re still here.”
“I noticed that too,” Hammell replied without looking at her.
“What are you doing?”
“Working.”
“Right. Well, don’t work too hard,” she said and she closed the door again and stomped on up the stairs.
Hammell leaned back in his chair, listening to her go. She really was fucking nuts.
He stretched his arms and set his mind back to the mystery - or rather, to looking for the mystery. There had to be something he was missing. He scanned back over the footage from a drone which was retracing Arthur’s steps, recognising a sign on a decrepit building written in faded gold lettering: The Happy Trout. Leaning in, he saw that the bar’s windows had been painted over and there were no lights on inside. The drone’s heat sensors picked up no warm bodies and its high sensitivity microphones picked up no voices. The drone flew on.
Unwilling to let it go that quickly, Hammell located the nearest surveillor, which just about covered the street, at a long distance. Logging into its memory, he found that it had recorded no movement in months - not for the entire duration of its retained memory - aside from a fox and a couple of wild cats fighting. Taking out the matchbook, he rubbed at it with his thumb. It clearly wasn’t new. Could it be possible for the matches to be twenty years old, dating from the time before the bar closed? Could Arthur have been carrying them purely by chance? He struck one and it lit first time. Would a twenty year old match still strike? His implant informed him that it was unlikely.
The fire alarm sounded suddenly, making him jump. He blew out the match as an android fire marshal came bursting in, fire extinguisher ready, and Hammell had to spend the next ten minutes trying to convince it that he’d lit a match by accident. Even androids weren’t that gullible. He received a formal warning and would no doubt be in for another lambasting from Yun in the morning.
When everything had calmed down, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to go home. And yet he stayed, spinning in his chair, thinking. His implant had been trying to feed him information on the Red Hands ever since the alert had come in and now he allowed it to, in the vague hope that it might somehow trigger something. He started with the summary on polnet:
‘The organization known as the Red Hands, or ASAC, or Monde Réel, is believed to be the last major criminal gang still operating anywhere in the world. It has been implicated in the production, smuggling and distribution of illegal narcotics; weapons trafficking; people trafficking; sexual slavery; terrorism; unlicensed prostitution; racketeering; money laundering; identity theft; kidnapping; rape; torture and murder. It came to notoriety particularly through its practice of targeting the police officers tasked with capturing its leadership, most especially Interpol’s former ‘Most Wanted Man’, Roy Brown (aka the Red King). The gang is sophisticated and well-equipped, utilizing a variety of techniques to avoid detection and further their goals, including development of advanced scrambling and shielding technology, as well as high-level hacking and reprogramming of androids, robots and other systems. The Red Hands were believed to have been destroyed by the Providence network in China four years ago, before their surprise re-emergence in Paris last December with the capture and subsequent murder of I.A. Rosine Carine...’
Rosine Carine… Even the name sent a shiver down his spine.
‘Interpol Agent’ was supposed to mean that they were one police force globally - and things may even have been that way once - but, now they were all effectively confined to their cities, and Paris had been Carine’s domain. Hammell knew the story as well as anyone. A report had come to her from an informant that Roy Brown was in the city, attempting to regroup the Red Hands after their losses in Beijing and Nanjing. Carine had taken it to her Commissioner and had been named lead investigator, even though Providence was expected to do the actual capturing.
A small technicality like that hadn’t mattered to Roy Brown though. In retaliation for Carine daring to go after the Red King, multiple Providence black spots had been created, one of which had covered the abduction of Carine and her family. Each of them had been gang-raped - men, women and children alike - before being branded with a Red Hand symbol on their backs. Then their heads had been hacked off - all in front of Rosine, who had then been sealed, alive and sobbing, inside a barrel and dumped in the Seine along with a camera to record her slow death. The footage had been released a couple of weeks later.
Hammell thought about it for a long time before he clicked on the video file. He had never dared watch it before. He managed less than a minute before he had to turn it off. His hands were shaking as he asked himself seriously for the first time whether he really wanted to risk getting involved with people capable of doing such things.
But he’s gone, he thought. Roy Brown is dead.
Searching through the files on polnet, he found the Red King’s profile and scrolled to the end, to the part titled ‘Death’. Intergov’s response to the Carine massacre had been swift and formidable. Roy Brown had been hunted throughout Paris and killed by robotic bombs along with all of his chief lieutenants. The Red Hands were no more, and nothing had given anyone cause to believe they had returned. Until today.
Glancing up at the skywall display, he experienced a strange mix of relief and panic when he saw that the alert was gone. Digging around in the records, he discovered that it was no longer red, but it wasn’t green either. It was grey. Arthur Beecroft’s attempted murder and the probable murder of another unidentified man had been dumped as a cold case after less than 14 hours. The machines had given up.
That should have been a good thing. As a cold case, it was his now, but the thought of that turned his bowels to water. If he opened the case again, his name would be plastered all over it. With all of the Red Hands’ resources and hacking skills, could he be certain they wouldn’t find out?
Alternatively, he knew he could leave it the case on the pile. Nobody would blame him. Nobody would even realise. It would be just another of the thousands of cold cases, part of the tiny fraction of a percent of modern crimes that Providence couldn’t solve.
He had a decision to make. He knew that, if he left the office now, the case would die. He would go home, have a few drinks to unwind, and would come into the office in the morning and procrastinate the day away. He would never get around to looking into it again, at least not in any serious way. This is my chance to let it go. But something was still bugging him. Not enough to make him risk re-opening the case, but enough to keep him there.
He stood up and walked around the office to try to keep himself alert, but his brain was becoming muddled. He knew he would struggle to process anything more without sleep. He went so far as to order another cup of coffee from an admin android, but when it arrived he decided not to drink it beyond a sip to swirl around his mouth, just to get rid of the bad taste. You’re done, he thought. You’ve mentally turned in already. With a sigh, he reached up to close the skywall display - and stopped. Is that…?
Sinking back down into his chair, he lined up the surveillor and drone footage and played them back simultaneously, his eyes flicking back and forth between the displays. He watched the drone arriving at a former public park which Arthur had visited on two separate occasions late at night. Not much appeared to have changed since it had been an inner city green space. It was still an open grassy field surrounded by a line of trees with old brick buildings dotted here and there. Only the length of the grass and the unruliness of the bushes hinted at the fact that it had been abandoned. The drone had spotted a heat signature in the bushes and zoned in on it. Hammell had at first assumed it would be a fox or a badger, but it was too big for either and the flailing limbs soon made it clear what was going on, dispelling any doubts about Arthur’s reasons for going there. What caught Hammell’s attention this time though was the surveillor footage. He checked the timelines again, and then leaned in close to be sure he was looking at the same bushes.
“Well, shit me out,” Hammell whispered to himself.
There
was no shortage of housing in the city, even after so many buildings had been demolished and the parks, gardens and roads had been opened up. The reduced population could live well, at least in terms of space, especially in the areas the Restoration had not yet reached. In the older buildings, entire floors or even whole blocks were often occupied by one family or sometimes, as with Hammell, just one person. But the machines of the Restoration were getting closer by the day. It wouldn’t be long before they reached Hammell’s street and he would find himself suddenly living in a perfect new building. It was supposed to be something to get excited about, but Hammell was dreading it. He tended to like things the way they were, even when he didn’t like them.
As an I.A., Hammell had a somewhat privileged status and a coefficient so high that he couldn’t spend it all. He’d filled his cavernous apartment with furniture he never used and memorabilia from a life he’d never really had: Masks from Africa, where he’d never been; statues from Asia, where he’d never been; paintings of places he never even wanted to go.
It had seemed like a good idea to knock through all of the apartments on the top floor to make one gigantic space. However he had quickly realised that he never used most of it and he had since retreated into one corner – ironically an area smaller than one of the original apartments. He really only used the living room, kitchen, bathroom and one of the bedrooms. Everything else was shut away or else had become the domain of the cat; that villainous creature which had chosen this building as her home before him, forcing herself upon him as his pet. Kitty had even had first choice of rooms. Recently she’d selected a new toilet at the far end of the building, which he was fairly sure she’d chosen just to make him and his housekeeper walk further. He’d only discovered its existence after Li mentioned that the cat hadn’t used her litter tray much in the last few days; an understatement if ever there was one. Hundreds of little packages had been dotted around the enormous floor, so evenly spaced that it almost looked like they were mean to be there. Li’s mistake, Li’s problem.
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