“Reprehensible though they may be, you were right to conclude that the posts and streamchats you’ve identified do not in themselves justify police involvement,” she said. “And we do not ever recommend that private citizens—or corporations—conduct investigations of this nature on their own recognizance, as there is a risk that they will not appreciate the boundary between legitimate inquiry and invasions of privacy. Not to mention acts of espionage.”
His father shifted irritably, but to Gabriel’s relief he held his tongue. The meeting was on the record; Uncle Mik had warned them that there would be a degree of officiousness in the language Sharon would be obliged to use. Gabriel had taken that to mean he could expect a telling-off, but he hadn’t thought he would actually find her so intimidating.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Sharon. Even to himself his voice sounded small.
“No,” she replied matter-of-factly, “you noticed an unusual pattern of onstream activity and in the course of consulting with your app developer”—she nodded at Herran—“you uncovered several facts which suggested a conspiracy to engage in libelous and inflammatory discourse. With the aim of discrediting a minority group,” she added, with a glance at the tablet screen; they could see Achebe was now looking down and to the side and they could hear the soft, swift tap of his fingers as he frantically took notes.
“You weren’t sure whether this discourse constituted hate speech, but were nevertheless deeply concerned about the implications and you rightly relayed those concerns to your City Councillor,” Sharon went on. She glared at Mikal, who was chuckling softly. “That is correct, is it not?”
The glare shifted across the table to Gabriel and a visibly perplexed Herran. His father grunted appreciatively, and nudged him.
“I . . . ah . . . Yes, that’s correct,” said Gabriel. “That’s exactly what happened, right, Herran?” He turned and gave the little gem an encouraging nod; he sensed rather than saw that behind him, his father was doing the same.
“Okay,” said Herran, without his usual certainty.
“Okay,” said Sharon, sounding very certain indeed. “Now, those concerns are sufficient to warrant our attention, especially given the current threat level in the city. I’m going to remind you all that everything we say here is to be kept in strict confidence. You’re clear on what that means, aren’t you, Herran?”
“Top secret,” said Herran.
“That’s right.” She looked around at them, her expression grim. “It may be that this consortium we’re calling Kaboom is simply taking advantage of recent events, but we’ll be looking into the possibility that its actions are not merely opportunistic. What you’ve identified suggests an organized group working against the gillung community in general and Thames Tidal Power in particular. Our primary objective right now is to track down whoever’s behind the recent terrorist attack against that very community. We know they are also very well resourced, highly organized, and extremely secretive, and that suggests that Kaboom and the terrorists might be part of the same group, or at any rate aligned with and aware of each other’s activities.” She focused on Gabriel. “You suspected this too, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t put it together exactly like that,” he said hesitantly. “At first I thought they were just random trolls, because we get a lot of those. Then when I realized how many avatars were being used, I thought maybe we were being trolled by one of the groups that lobbied so hard against us—Estuary Preservation or Bankside BioMass, someone like that. I was going to expose them because however much they don’t like us, everyone’s signed up to a Code of Practice not to use avatars and not to troll. But when we worked out how complicated the whole thing was, and how much effort had gone into making the avatars untraceable, I thought . . . Well, I didn’t know what to think; it just seemed like it was a whole lot bigger than anything I’d been imagining. And then you confirmed that the toxin wasn’t an accident, that it was targeted . . . Yes,” he ended, his voice almost a whisper, “yes, I realized that it might be connected.”
“‘Might be’ is the operative term,” Sharon replied. Her tone had turned unexpectedly gentle. “Remember, these are only suspicions at this point. It’s going to take some time to unpick them and see where we end up. And by ‘we’ I mean ‘we the police.’ You should continue to respond to Kaboom’s provocations exactly as you have been, and we would find it very helpful if you shared links to those threads with Inspector Achebe. But I don’t want any escalation in your responses to them, and definitely no more investigating from you, Gabriel. You’re a minor as well as a civilian, and I don’t want you any more involved than you already are.” Her smile lit up her eyes this time. “Having said that, I would like to add, on behalf of the Met, that your and Herran’s diligence has given us an important lead we wouldn’t have otherwise. So thank you, both of you. Well done.”
Gabriel’s head was spinning. “I . . . um . . . okay. Thank you.”
“Don’t do it again.”
He felt a tiny surge of rebellion. Why, if they had done so much, was it unthinkable that they might do more? But his father and uncle were both nodding agreement and there was an edge to Herran’s rocking that signaled that it could easily turn into distress. And despite the smile, Aunt Sharon’s face wore a don’t-argue-with-me look that he had no good reason to challenge.
“No, ma’am, I won’t.”
She was gone a few minutes later, now in possession of a memtab with all the files and links to Kaboom and still in contact with Achebe via her earset even as she bade Herran good-bye, gave Gabriel a brief, fierce hug, followed it with another for his father, and went up on tiptoes to kiss Mikal good-bye. Then she was out the door, talking rapidly into her earset even as it slammed behind her.
Mikal turned back to the others with a rueful smile. “You know she’s not just saying that, right? She’s really grateful you found this. Also really worried.”
“I guess.” Gabriel shuffled his feet.
“You and Herran did good, Gabriel: you really did. The way you handled things went right up to the edge, but not quite over. Achebe and the officers in data forensics will replicate the trace you ran so there can be no challenge to the evidence, and they’ll be doing whatever they have to so the people behind this won’t ever know you were involved.” He looked over the boy’s head and met Bal’s eyes, wondering if his oldest friend was angry with him. They had been so few, not all that long ago: so outcast and so desperate. Back then they’d been used to living on the brink, Bal and Gaela, himself and Aryel, a scant handful of others. They’d been used to bad options and huge uncertainties and the endless, instinctive calculations of risk. It had been the stuff of daily life. They had hardly dared to dream of the future, let alone imagine that they might one day be so much better off—with so much more at stake.
“Bal—” he began.
“It’s fine,” Bal cut in quietly. “We’ve always known he’d be safe with you, Mik. Both of you. You and Sharon have to play it straight, I get that. It’s fine. We know who you are.”
Tears did not come easily to Mikal’s split-lidded eyes, but he found himself blinking them clear, and not for effect.
“Right,” he said, clapping Bal’s broad shoulder. Then he turned to the little savant. “You okay, Herran? Want to talk anything over?”
“No,” Herran said firmly. “Not talk. Home.”
Mikal escorted them all to the door and watched them walk away. Gabriel ushered Herran into the stairwell as Bal looked back to raise a hand in farewell. There was some indefinable thing about the body language of father and son, a shared tension as they glanced at each other, and Mikal wondered what else was going on.
Whatever it was, it was none of his business—not yet, at least, and probably not ever. The splintering into little cells of self-contained family—himself, Sharon and their boys, Aryel and Eli, Bal and Gaela with Gabriel and Eve—was a token of the freedoms they’d won in those old, old battles that had never really ended. Another sorti
e was imminent, and once more there was ground to be gained, or lost.
We’re never not on a precipice, he thought. The scenery changes, but never the drop.
17
The Traditional Democratic Party, as the Trads were officially known, was headquartered in an old, grand, and somewhat fusty confection of concrete and glass in the heart of Whitehall. They also had a network of local offices throughout the city and suburbs, including a glossy first-floor suite at one of the most desirable addresses in the financial district, where large public screens streamed party news, policies and promises for the edification of passersby. Corporate allies were abundant in that area, controlling multiple floors of buildings into which Mikal Varsi could have slipped on the pretext of other business. The Trad members on the City Council had private offices like his own, which he thought would have been simplest of all. But it was to none of these places that he had been invited.
Instead, he found himself turning off a thoroughfare noisy with evening traffic into a passage between glass-fronted towers favored by brokers, bankers, and other less definable providers of financial services; then into an alley where darkness had already fallen, the gloom settling early in a space so narrow that he could stand in the middle and press his hands flat against the walls on either side. It zigzagged and dog-legged until it finally delivered him to an unmarked door set into a wall of venerable London brick. There was neither handle nor lock on its exterior. He looked around. The alley continued for a few feet until it met another, wider passageway, from where came a glow of brighter light, the mingled smells of cooking and bins and the clash of pots and pans. He glanced around the corner and saw a larger door open and a brief stream of what looked like kitchen workers come out, joking among each other, shouting back at unseen colleagues.
Mikal stepped back into the shadows of the smaller alley and checked his tablet. It confirmed that he had indeed arrived at his destination. As he slid it away, considering whether to knock, wait, or walk around the corner and surprise the kitchen staff, the door swung silently inward and a young, powerfully built norm woman in a livery he recognized poked her head out.
“Mr. Varsi? Come with me, please.”
He ducked through the door after her, past what looked like a security office on one side and what sounded like the kitchen on the other. He had dropped the route he’d been sent into a standard navigational app and he knew both where he was and that there were far more direct ways of getting here. Under other circumstances he would have found being snuck in through the back door thoroughly objectionable, but it had taken only a moment’s stream-searching to realize that he would have had no chance whatever of entering from the front without generating vidsnaps and instant, breathless gossip on all the wrong streams. Even this far from the bar, the clamor was deafening. The establishment, which styled itself a club, was a favorite of the city’s thrusting business élite: a place to see and be seen, talk and be talked about. There would be few of his constituents here, unless they had found work pouring drinks or waiting tables.
Ascending the narrow stair behind his guide, he caught a glimpse of the main floor through a series of long slitted windows which allowed a clear view while maintaining the privacy of those on their way to the upper sanctum. He could see that customers were stacked five-deep around the bar, and there were so many chattering knots of humanity that there was barely any room to move about. The entrance to the dining room was guarded by a maître d’ with a tablet and an expression of such smug complacency that Mikal fantasized for a moment about going down there and insisting he had a reservation, just to see what would happen. Braying laughter and the tinkle of glassware washed up from the general tumult.
At the top of the stairs, the woman pressed her fingers to an identipad next to a door as solid and unmarked as the one below, although of a rather finer finish. She pushed it open, said, “Welcome to the Karma Club,” and stood back to let him go through first.
He stepped into an oasis of calm and realized that he had misjudged the place; it really was a club, although he suspected most of the patrons downstairs would find that as much of a surprise as he did. The room was large and softly lit, with a small bar at one end from which smartly suited servers brought elegant drinks to a clientele who sat in comfortable chairs or stood at tall windows talking quietly as they gazed out at the darkening city. For all that this was clearly where a select few came to meet and mingle, it lacked the excessive opulence that Mikal normally associated with the idle rich. Though tasteful and artfully designed, there was a businesslike aura about the place, a sense that membership was based on competence and perhaps ruthlessness rather than any accident of birth. Those admitted here had worked hard enough and been clever enough, and paid enough attention, to discover the stair and the door and another level of achievement. The strivers had been left downstairs. These people had already arrived: they knew the price of admission, and the expectations that came with it.
He was not surprised to see Moira Charles in conversation with a business-suited man enough like her in age, demeanor, and general upscale ordinariness for Mikal to think him as likely to be friend or colleague as brother or lover. She caught his eye and nodded, but did not approach. It would suit no one—Trads or Mikal or Standard BioSolutions—for her to be party to their meeting, but from the look of relief on her face he surmised that she’d been on hand to take the flak if he’d failed to turn up. No one else in the room appeared to have noticed that an eight-foot-tall man with double-thumbed hands and split-lidded eyes had arrived in their midst.
His guide crossed to another door with a briskness that suggested they should not tarry, knocked sharply, and opened it. This time she did not follow him in; instead, the door closed silently, leaving him to contemplate the person who was waiting for him.
The man sat at a table in what was evidently a private dining room. Water had been poured, and a tumbler of amber liquor rested near his hand. He was still burly although he was no longer young, his face heavy about the jowls and small, sharp eyes buried deep in folds of flesh. The receding hair was more white than gray. He conveyed neither the desperate ambition of the crowd downstairs nor the self-satisfaction of the deal-makers on the other side of the door. He looked like a man for whom the fine linens and crystal on the table, the exclusivity of the setting, and the summoning of the nominally powerful were entirely ordinary. Mikal had often wondered if rich norms knew how much easy presumption they projected, without ever needing to say a word.
“Mikal Varsi,” said the man in a tone that suggested he did not speak the name lightly.
“Abraham Mitford,” said Mikal, and noted the tiny glint of surprise in the man’s eyes. So he had not automatically assumed that Mikal would recognize him. “I wondered who wanted to talk to me.”
“I wondered who you thought it would be. Sit.” He gestured toward the empty chair opposite. “Drink?”
Mikal glanced at the glass Mitford was lifting and said, “Whiskey’s fine. Whatever you’re drinking.”
There was a slight pause in the motion, again just a hint that this was not what he’d anticipated, but he tapped the order into a small tablet by his elbow without comment before sitting back, glass in hand. “So,” he said. “Whom were you expecting?”
“You were a possibility,” Mikal replied evenly. “I knew it wouldn’t be a party spokesperson, or a sitting politician.”
Mitford was beginning to get used to surprises. “Of course,” he said, as though the significance of the fact were just sinking in. “You’ve been doing this a while.”
“I have.”
“I’ve had meetings where people are surprised not to be seeing the leader or chairperson or whatever. It’s good that you aren’t that naïve. Although—” He paused as the door opened to admit a server bearing Mikal’s drink and watched, silent and flinty-eyed, as the tumbler was precisely placed and the man withdrew.
“Although?” Mikal prompted, taking a sip. It was, as he’d expected, a
fine single malt, smoky and peaty, and pleasantly warm going down. He noticed with weary resignation that Mitford was staring at his hand: the way the two thumbs and three fingers gripped and tilted the glass. He rested it gently back on the table, watching the opposition grandee pull his attention away with an effort. Like Moira Charles, no actual distaste was allowed to show.
Mitford recollected his sentence. “Although I’m curious to know how you imagine the current situation in the city is going to develop.”
“I assume you mean politically.”
“Also commercially, economically.” He smiled without mirth. “A man of your experience must realize how linked those factors are.”
“I think,” Mikal said carefully, “that the level of resentment at the moment is the highest it’s been in at least a decade. We’ve been in economic recovery for most of that time, but the benefits have not been evenly distributed and that’s generated a lot of discontent in segments of the population who feel left behind, particularly suburban residents and workers in traditional industries. That, in turn, is fueling a new factionalism: people no longer believe that a rising tide will lift all boats. It’s making them angry—both at those they think have benefited more than they have and at anyone they feel sold them false promises. They’re going to punish whomever they believe is responsible, commercially and politically.” He took another sip of his whiskey and regarded Mitford over the rim of the glass.
The older man harrumphed his approval. “That’s exactly what we think.”
“We the Traditional Democrats, or we the board of directors of Standard BioSolutions?”
Mitford chuckled. “I have very little to do with the running of Standard,” he said. “I’m a nonexecutive director; I show up to a few meetings a year, advise on strategy. I know Moira, obviously, and I can tell you she is part of a very sharp team who understand their business. But this conversation is in the context of my interest in the party.”
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