by Mike Carey
“I half killed myself raising that thing.” Gabe spat the words out, bitterly angry. “Just the effort of bringing it up from Hell—you don’t have any fucking idea! And then I had to do the binding while I was still weak and sick from calling her, and if I hadn’t got every last detail down right, she would’ve torn me apart.”
“Mr. D assumes you’re competent to do your job.”
“Oh, thanks.” Gabe’s laugh sounded like it must have left welts coming out. “Thanks so fucking much. Am I supposed to be flattered?”
“You’re supposed to do what you’re told.”
“Right, right. And if Castor gets his hands on the other little trollop?”
“He won’t.”
“Why doesn’t Damjohn just kill her and be done with it?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
Gabe didn’t seem to have any answer to that. The silence lengthened and was followed by a change of subject.
“What’s keeping that fucking moron?” Scrub’s voice, rumbling like a train passing under your feet.
“He said he had to piss.”
“Well, go and get him.”
Which was my cue to leave.
Rosa. Rosa was the key. But I didn’t have any idea how to find her or even where to start looking.
Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. It was just that nosing around the only starting point I had—the strip club—felt uncomfortably like sticking my head into the muzzle of a cannon and striking a match to see what was in there.
I was honestly amazed at my own stupidity.
The blonde on the upstairs bar shot me a look that conveyed a lot of dislike and mistrust with great economy. But my opening words were calculated to disarm her suspicions and make her love me like a long-lost brother.
“You know,” I said, smiling cheerfully, “I don’t think I’ve ever stood a round in here.”
The blonde’s lower jaw went through a cataclysmic plunge. She did her best to reel it back in.
“The drinks are on me,” I clarified helpfully. “Let’s have champagne all ’round, shall we?” I took out my wallet and slapped my credit card down on the bar. Well, okay, it was Arnold’s wallet and Arnold’s credit card, but I know he would have been happy at the thought of giving pleasure to so many people.
The barmaid recovered from her surprise and hurriedly went diving for bottles, in case I unexpectedly recovered my sanity. I took the first one from her, ripped off the foil, and popped the cork as she was setting up the glasses. The girls at the end of the bar had gotten wind of what was going on by now, and they all crowded around. I knew that the markup on the drinks was colossal and that they were probably on a percentage of bar takings as well as what they took in the bedrooms; persuading a punter to buy them a glass of champagne was an easy earner compared to the regular daily grind, if that’s the right expression.
I handed each glass out as soon as I’d poured it, pressing it into an outstretched hand happily and clumsily—and with the maximum of skin-to-skin contact. My psychic antenna was fully alert, but it only works by touch. I knew what I was looking for, but I also knew I’d have to take whatever I could get.
I struck gold around about number eight or nine. She was a pouty, slightly emaciated brunette dressed in a fire-engine red bra and panties (the panties bearing a sequined love heart at front and center), a gauzy see-through top, and a pair of black stockings adorned with fleur-de-lys.
“We’ve never met,” I said to her, taking her hand in both of mine and getting a stronger psychic fix on her. “What’s your name?”
“It’s Jasmine,” she said, giving me what she probably thought was a sultry look. “What’s yours?”
“I’m John,” I said, because it was the first thing that came to mind.
“And would you like to go upstairs with me, John?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be great.”
She smiled warmly. “What sort of thing do you like?”
“I’d like a full body-to-body massage,” I hazarded. And then, to forestall more detailed questioning, “Do you do Glaswegian?”
Jasmine bluffed like a trouper. “Of course I do, you naughty boy,” she purred. She took a key that the blonde woman handed to her, glanced perfunctorily at the number, and led me away with her arm crooked proprietorially in mine. After all, I was the only John in the place.
I couldn’t tell if I’d actually been into the room she took me to, but it was identical to all the ones I’d seen—a bleak, clean little box, and in its way as perfect a triumph of function over form as a battery cell on a chicken farm.
“So you tell me exactly how you’d like me to do it,” Jasmine coaxed, sitting me down on the bed, “and I’ll tell you how much it’s going to be.”
I put on a crestfallen face. “Actually, Jasmine,” I admitted, “I was hoping we could just talk—since it’s my first time with you, and all. So what’s the price for missionary with no trimmings?”
I was expecting ructions, but she took it in her stride; it must be more common than I’d imagined for punters to get this far and then lose their nerve.
“It’s sixty, John. Let’s get that sorted now, and then we’ve got all the time in the world just to get to know each other.”
Docilely, I counted three twenties into Jasmine’s hand. She slipped out of the room, presumably to hand it over to the duty madam, and then came back in again a few seconds later and closed the door behind her.
“Do you want me to take my clothes off?” she asked, standing over me and smiling down at me with her hands cupping her breasts.
It seemed a token gesture, given how skimpy her outfit was to start with—and it wouldn’t do anything to establish the necessary mood of calm consultation. “No, thanks,” I assured her. “What you’re wearing now is fine. Absolutely fine.”
She sat down next to me, put a hand on my knee, and snuggled in close. She had a floral smell that was sweet and delicate, but it reminded me—unfairly—of Juliet, a.k.a. Ajulutsikael. I fought the urge to pull away.
“So what would you like to talk about, John?” she cooed little-girlishly.
I went for broke. “You’ve got a colleague named Rosa,” I said. “And I guess you work some of the same nights, so I was hoping you might know her.”
It wasn’t what she expected or wanted to hear, but she rolled with it.
“Is Rosa your favorite?” she asked in the same Shirley Temple tone.
I thought about the steak knife. “Rosa leaves a very powerful impression,” I acknowledged, genuflecting at the secret altar of my conscience in penance for such a cheesy line. “And ever since I saw her, I’ve been wanting to meet up with her again. But she’s not in today.”
“That’s right. She’s not.” Jasmine was still playing the game by the house rules, but there was a guarded edge to her voice. “Do you want me to pretend to be her? You can call me Rosa, if that makes it better for you.”
I shook my head brusquely. “I want to make sure she’s all right. And I want to talk to her again.”
Jasmine didn’t answer. Either I’d struck a nerve, or she was just wondering if my obsession might spill over into actual violence. I was hoping for the former, because when I’d touched her hand, I’d got a fleeting glimpse of Rosa’s face on the surface of her mind. At the very least, she knew the girl; and, perhaps, if my luck was in, she was concerned about her already.
But her first reaction wasn’t promising. “Rosa’s fine,” she said. Her voice had changed now, closed down to a flat monotone. She took her hand off my knee.
“How do you know that?”
A pause. “Because I saw her yesterday. She’s fine.”
“When yesterday?”
Anger flared in her eyes. “Look, if you’re social services or someone, you can kiss my sodding arse!”
“I only paid for missionary, remember? I’m not social services. And I’m not a cop, either, but then you probably have pretty good radar for cops. I really do just ne
ed to talk to her. And I really am worried about her. If you tell me she’s okay, then that’s great. But when did you see her?”
Bowing to the inevitable, I took out my dwindling roll of cash and held out another twenty for her to take. She didn’t make a move for it. She just scowled at me, but not in aggression. It was more like her flexing her facial muscles as she came back out of role and took off the mask. My luck was holding. It looked as though I’d guessed right, and Jasmine was worried about Rosa on her own account. At least, that was the only reason I could think of for her not either whistling for the bouncer or helping herself to the extra twenty.
She still had to decide how far to trust me, though, and I could see it was going to be someway short of the full distance. “In the afternoon,” she said. “About two. She came in late, and Patty had words with her. Then Scrub”—she stumbled slightly on the name; I could see there was no love lost there—“Scrub came in and took her to see Mr. Damjohn.”
The pause lengthened.
“And?” I prompted.
Jasmine looked unhappy. “And she never came back in again after that.”
“Do you know where Scrub took her?”
Jasmine rolled her eyes, then shook her head once, tersely. How would she know? Why would she want to find out? This clearly wasn’t the kind of place where you asked too many questions. But that was still what I had to do.
“Does it happen often?” I asked. “Scrub taking the girls off for a talk with the boss? Does Damjohn give you a quarterly review or something?”
Another head shake. “If he needs to see us, he sees us here. But mostly he leaves it to Patty to sort out the girls. He takes care of the downstairs stuff.”
“Well, did Scrub say anything about why Damjohn needed to talk to Rosa?”
Jasmine didn’t answer at first, so I waited. Sometimes waiting works a lot better than asking again.
“He said—she’d been told before. She’d been warned. That was all. He didn’t say about what. Then she said she’d just been out for a walk. She hadn’t met anyone on the way, she just needed a walk.”
It seemed blindingly obvious that what Rosa had been warned about was tailing me. But she’d done it anyway—not to talk to me, but to take a swipe at me with a kitchen cleaver borrowed for the occasion. You did it to her. You did it to her again.
“Did they leave in a car?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“A BMW?”
“I didn’t see. But I heard it pull away.”
“Do you have any idea where Damjohn lives?”
Jasmine laughed without a trace of humor. “A long way away from here, I’ll bet. No. Nobody knows where he lives. This is the only place where we ever see him.”
“He never takes a couple of the girls back home for some unpaid overtime? Droit du seigneur sort of thing.”
“No. Not that I’ve ever heard of. Carole reckons he’s gay.”
I didn’t agree. From my brief acquaintance with Damjohn—and especially from that unwanted flash of images and ideas when I’d shaken his hand—I suspected that he got his kicks in some other way that only touched on sex at an odd tangent.
“Nothing else?” I asked, just to make sure.
She thought hard, frowned, looked at me doubtfully.
“I think Scrub said—but it doesn’t make any sense.”
“Said what?”
“Well—what I heard was ‘It’s the nice lady for you.’”
“The nice lady?”
“Yeah. Or maybe ‘the kind lady.’ Something like that. I don’t know. It just sounded funny, so it stayed in my mind.”
“Thanks, Jasmine,” I said, meaning it. “Thanks for trusting me.”
She wasn’t much consoled, but this time, when I held out the twenty, she took it and slipped it into her stocking top. “Do you think you can find her?” she asked. Her professional polish had all faded away in the space of a minute; she looked close to tears now.
“I don’t know. But I’m going to try.”
“Will Scrub—will she be okay?”
There was no point in sweetening the pill; whores know self-deceiving bullshit better than priests do. “I don’t know that, either,” I admitted. “I think she might be okay for a while, at least. If there’s something Damjohn doesn’t want her talking about, there’s no point in going over the top to keep her quiet if it’s only going to come out another way.”
Jasmine didn’t ask what I meant by that, and I didn’t explain. She probably wouldn’t have understood in any case, but to me it was looking like one of those logic problems that end up with the proposition that all men are Socrates, and Socrates is a rubber chicken. Thesis: I was the one who was nosing around where he shouldn’t be and asking all the awkward questions. Antithesis: Rosa was only dangerous if she told me something I wasn’t supposed to know. Synthesis: They only needed to keep her out of circulation until they’d succeeded in nailing me.
Fucking wonderful.
It felt like a long day. I went back to Pen’s place around four and killed some time recording a tune on a Walkman I’d picked up at Camden Market last year. It’s an old one—cassettes only—but it comes with its own plug-in mike and speakers, which makes it handy in all sorts of ways. It took a while to get the tune exactly right, and I was far from sure that I’d ever need it, but I had nothing better to do until either Dodson or Nicky called me and gave me the green light. I had John Gittings’s pincer movement in my mind—it had nearly got me killed the first time we’d tried it, but that was no reason to ditch a good idea. I worked steadily for an hour and a half and got a certain amount of relief from my turbulent thoughts.
Nicky didn’t call in the end; he just appeared, out of nowhere, in the accepted conspiracy-theorist style. I went downstairs looking for coffee and realized as I was pouring a generous scoopful into the moka pot that he was there, behind me, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. He hadn’t moved at all since I came in. I could have gone right back out again without noticing him—and when I did notice him, I thought for a second that he was a visitant from some other plane entirely.
When I saw that it was just Nicky, I swore at him vehemently. He took the abuse with stoical indifference.
“I’ve done enough talking on the phone for one week,” he said quietly. “I work hard on my footprint, Felix. I keep it small for good reasons.”
“Your footprint?” I echoed sardonically.
“The traceable, recordable, visible part of my life,” he paraphrased, deadpan. “If I wanted to be visible, I’d sign onto the electoral register, wouldn’t I?”
“Whatever,” I said, giving it up. I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him. “Have you got anything for me?”
He nodded and unfolded his arms, revealing the laptop sitting between them on the table. He pushed it across to me, and I took it.
“And—some kind of written summary?” I hazarded hopefully.
“No need for one. One folder—RUSSIAN; one file—RUSSIAN1; three thousand, two hundred records in an unbroken numerical sequence with the prefix BATR1038. Data entry in every case is by one user—the system gives him a handle of 017—and all amendments are by the same user. There’s only one conclusion a reasonable mind could draw.”
“And that is?”
“017 was the only man-slash-woman-slash-data-processing-entity to have any contact with this folder at any point.”
I absorbed this in silence, cast into momentary depression, until I saw the bolt-hole in Nicky’s wording. “You said a reasonable mind,” I pointed out.
He nodded. “Absolutely. A mind like mine, that welcomes paranoia as a way of maintaining a critical edge, comes out somewhere quite different.”
“Come on, Nicky,” I said. “Give me the punch line.”
“In a hundred and fifty-three cases, user 017 suddenly and for no apparent reason switches to a different data-input method. I found it in config.sys, because the log entry had actually been rewritten to allow it.�
�
“Layman’s English.”
“He ditched his keyboard and overwrote selected fields from a handheld Bluetooth keypad—probably that diNovo thing that Logitech were trailing in Houston a while back. The beauty of that is—well, I’m assuming that this is a dongle system. Keyboards are connected via an individually coded hardware key.”
“Right.”
“So a Bluetooth device wouldn’t physically connect to the computer at all. It wouldn’t have to fit the keyhole, because it wouldn’t be going in through the keyhole. It’s a completely wireless system.”
I chewed this over for a moment or two.
“But it was still user 017?” I said. “Same guy, different keyboard?”
Nicky grinned evilly. He was enjoying this. “It was someone telling the system he was user 017. But he had to use his own handle when he altered that config file. Even when you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you still cast a shadow. He’s user 020.”
“Got you, you bastard,” I muttered. “Nicky, that’s brilliant—thanks. I’ll be wrapping this up in the next day or so, and then you can expect Christmas to come early.”
Nicky took the praise as stoically as he’d taken the curses earlier; it would have been beneath his dignity to take a bow. But he didn’t move. “There’s one other thing, Felix,” he said.
“Go on.”
“While I was in there anyway, I took a look around some of the other folders. There were a couple of dozen of them, going back about six or seven years. The older ones are fine—no tampering, no anomalous entries. But for three years or so now, user 020 has been keeping really busy. The earliest Bluetooth-fed entry was last March. Before that, he was using an IRF widget, but the principle was the same—using the back door that the system keeps open so that you can dock your laptop or your Palm Pilot with your main machine and update address books and the like.”
He stood up.
“About two thousand records were affected,” he said. “On this drive, anyway. Assuming there are other self-contained input machines, there’s no saying what else Mr. Twenty has been getting up to.”
As he walked to the door, I called out after him, “Nicky, what’s he doing to the records? Just so I’m absolutely clear. What’s he falsifying?”
