The History Book

by Humphrey Hawksley

  She takes out the cell phone’s SIM card, slips it in, and waits for Cage’s antisurveillance route to appear. She memorizes the way out of the apartment.

  She unwraps the SIM card she’s had taped to her back to check on the Kazakh data file. Many sensitive data files have self-erasing programs written into them, and Kat has her own special program to counter it. Most times it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the erasure is on a time mechanism that takes twenty-four hours to activate.

  Kat sighs in relief. The Kazakh file is intact. She inoculates it, then flips through to the murdered man lying in the snow. She wants to go on, but tells herself to stop. There’s no time to do it properly.

  She goes into Suzy’s e-mail. But there’s nothing. Nothing in; nothing out. No copy of the e-mail Kat got on Friday night. She checks the recycling bin. Nothing. Either Suzy, knowing she was in danger, erased her own e-mails, or someone else did.

  What’s the computer doing there, anyway? It should be the first thing police take in a murder investigation. Why did Suzy not use a password?

  Kat shuts it down, rewraps her SIM card, first in plastic wrap, then in sturdier polyethylene, and tapes it under her top to the small of her back. She also wraps her own software cards in polyethylene, zips them into her pocket, and puts a change of clothes, shoes, and a wig into a shoulder bag.

  From a window in the utility room by the kitchen, she drops down onto the fire escape. Keeping flat against the brickwork, she walks down the steps into the small backyard. A wooden door, unused and partly hidden by an overgrown buddleia tree, is in the wall. Its bolts are rusted. It takes three kicks to get the lower one back. Rust flakes spill onto the ground.

  The upper bolt is too high for her to reach. Kat hauls herself halfway up the wall on an overhanging tree branch, then wedges the toe of her shoe into the gap from a broken brick. But she can’t go farther over the wall because of coils of razor wire.

  She hits the upper bolt with the heel of her hand. It doesn’t move. She hits it again. It begins to give. She keeps hitting it until it’s free. She drops down, opens the door, and steps into an alleyway.

  Ahead of her is a graceful, green iron bridge crossing the river, coming alive with workday traffic. Sunlight breaks through black clouds, then disappears again. Spitting rain hits her face.

  Halfway across the bridge is a sign telling her she is leaving Zone Two and entering Zone Three. The road narrows, forcing cars to slow down enough for police to check who is inside. Kat watches the pedestrians, sees them showing IDs. She walks back, away from the river, toward an overpass and intersection.

  She flags down a cab. “Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea, cross street Alexandra.”

  The driver examines her in his mirror, chewing gum, eyes flicking out to his side mirror. “You visiting?” he says as he pulls out. The wiper smears the windshield.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Just that, if you were staying,” he says eventually, “I’d tell you we don’t do cross streets in London. We work with the numbers.”

  “Good to know,” says Kat. She’s counting out £350 and some loose change from the money Nancy gave her.

  “You from the States?”

  “Canada.”

  “Who are you lot supporting, now you’re out of the football?” he says.

  “England, I guess. Or maybe Brazil.”

  “Russia and China’ll go in the quarterfinals,” he says. “England will top Germany. Brazil will trounce France. The final will be England-Brazil, so why Brazil?”

  “I used to know the captain, Javier Laja.”

  The cabdriver’s foot leaves the accelerator as he turns in his seat to look at Kat, not in the mirror, but face-on. “Yer ’avin’ me on.”

  “No. My dad ran a home for orphans. Javier was one of them.” She’s told no one this for years and now comes straight out with it to a stranger.

  “You still in touch?”

  “I thought about it when he became famous, but never did.” Kat notices a white flag with a red cross pegged into a slot to the left of the windshield. “That’s the England flag, isn’t it?”

  “The cross of St. George,” he says pithily. “But they’ll soon be telling us to fly a bloody Project Peace flag instead.”

  On the streets, people move quickly. They’re busy, young, mostly, well dressed, earning money. But the sidewalks blow with litter. Concrete is cracked. They pass derelict buildings, stained and boarded up.

  At a red light, just before they get onto a bridge to cross the river, the cabdriver turns in his seat and looks at her directly. “One road down from where I’m dropping you, you can’t go no farther in a vehicle without a pass.”

  Kat shifts her gaze to the river, fast running and brown with the rain, the tide so high that a line of houseboats look as if they’re sitting on the road.

  “One moment and I think they’re going over the top,” he says. “The next moment, I change my mind. Since we haven’t had no big bombs recently, they’ve got support. A lot of people reckon that once Project Peace is signed, things will get back to normal.”

  Battersea Park comes into sight, rain glistening in the trees. He stops just where Kat told him. Before he starts off again, he dials his cell phone.

  Kat’s on the sidewalk, looking at Linton Hall across the road. The cabdriver’s talking, looking straight at her. Kat starts running. The cabdriver makes a U-turn and heads back the way they came.

  FIFTEEN

  Monday, 8:13 a.m., BST

  Kat looks for an entry to Linton Hall. She starts with the double doors. They’re held by a dead bolt inside.

  She walks down a street by the side of the building, which is set back, with a wall running along the length of it. She climbs the wall and lands lightly in an alley. She’s hidden from the street, but the building has large windows, and she could be seen by anyone inside.

  The paved ground of the alley has recently been swept. Broom marks run through patches of water drying on the concrete.

  Kat hears a car slow and stop on the street. A flashing blue light reflects off an upper window of the building. From a distance, a siren wails, coming closer until it stops by the other vehicle. Two car doors open.

  A radio crackles, “We’re looking around . . . yes . . . came in five minutes ago from a cabdriver . . . blond, twenties, sports clothes . . . checking the streets now.”

  Kat moves quietly down the alley. Just before the end of the building, there’s a standpipe faucet. A door’s open next to it with keys hanging in the inside lock, and there’s a broom and bucket in the doorway. She steps over them into a large, windowless storeroom, shelves on one side with cleaning materials and a vacuum cleaner, drills and tool kits stacked up against the wall on the other.

  The door ahead is unlocked.

  Kat steps into the corridor leading to the staircase. She hears voices above.

  “Like I said, I’m the only one here.” It’s an elderly voice. “Next people due in are after eight-thirty. The place was rented out last night for a Project Peace function. They’re coming to take the computer.”

  Kat follows the curve of the corridor away from the staircase until she comes to a second, smaller staircase. On the stairwell, one flight up, there’s a fire door. She opens it an inch. Two cops are with the janitor, an old, short guy in a neat, brown uniform. He’s still talking, but Kat can’t make out the words.

  She heads back down, gets an empty bucket from the storeroom, fills it with standpipe water, then sluices it along the corridor at the foot of the main staircase, making it look as if a leak has sprung from somewhere.

  Back up at the fire door, she sees the janitor close the main double doors, glance at the computer on the reception desk, and head back down the main staircase.

  The mess she made should hold him there for five minutes.

  Kat turns on the computer behind the reception desk. While she waits for it to boot up, she goes upstairs. The doors of the lecture hall have b
een left open. Tables and chairs are stacked against the wall. The window shutters are closed and bolted. A microphone is on a stand in the middle of the stage. There’s no trace of what was there 12 hours earlier. It’s a rental hall, waiting for the next hire.

  A minute later, she’s down again, and the computer is ready. The screen saver shows the face of Dr. Christopher North and the banner of Project Peace. Tim Prescott was right. The lecture might have been sold as an open discussion, but it had been paid for by those pushing for Project Peace. That’d explain why Prescott was thrown out.

  She touches the keyboard. In the center of the screen, across North’s avuncular face, comes the narrow pop-up demanding the password.

  Kat brings out one of the data cards from her bag and slips it into the computer. She types in six digits at random and waits for it to carry out its magic. No one except Kat knows the secrets of her hacking software. For every password rejected comes a hint of what might be acceptable. The design bombards the security system so rapidly that it’s unable to tell when the quota of wrong guesses has been made. In less than five seconds, the hard drive is whirring.

  Kat flips through the screen options and quickly pulls up Suzy’s record. She does a double take at what comes up in front of her: the life of Charlotte Thomas, but with Suzy’s picture, a mug shot from three angles. Everything is there to profile a person: address; picture of the outside of her river house; Mercedes registration number; driver’s license; health insurance information. After that come boxes and boxes of details about Charlotte Thomas—mother, father, place of birth, education, work, race, sexual preference, political affiliation, travel, associates. Charlotte Thomas was raised in Colorado and Connecticut, in towns Kat has never heard of.

  Kat tries Tracy Luxton. Nothing. She tries Elizabeth Luxton. Nothing. Then just Luxton. The file on Tracy Elizabeth Luxton flickers and settles on the screen. In the time it takes Kat to copy the record to her data card, she’s memorized Liz Luxton’s address.

  She calls up a street map. It’s four miles due south of the lecture hall, and Kat plans to walk all the way. She won’t be taking any more cabs. She realizes now how much more efficient London is than the States when it comes to watching people.

  SIXTEEN

  Monday, 9:06 a.m., BST

  Kat walks south.

  Her cell phone vibrates. She already has three messages from Nate Sayer, and he’s calling again. Once more, Kat decides not to answer. In all honesty, she doesn’t know what to do about Sayer. She never has.

  Kat wrote her first piece of software to get revenge on Nate Sayer, then perfected the art while living on Dix Street.

  Her mom and dad had been hosting a lunch party at the house in Great Falls. Her dad was holding court, cracking jokes, winning support for his plans to change some important employment law. Suzy and Mom were inside, fixing lunch. Kat was swimming, climbed out of the pool, and while she was toweling herself down, her dad asked, “If you’re going inside, can you get me the big blue law book sitting right in the middle of my desk?”

  Kat ran into the kitchen, where the shade hit her like darkness; past Suzy, who was cutting up fruit; headed upstairs to her father’s study; pushed open the door and stopped, fingers turning to white as they gripped the handle.

  The window blinds were down. Slatted sunbeams across the desk mixed with the new shaft of light let in by the half-open door. The book was just where her dad said it would be, but the rest of the room took on a new shape as she stared straight into the eyes of Nate Sayer, who held her gaze, unyielding, when he could have looked away.

  “Little busy in here right now,” he said.

  Kat didn’t shift as her mother turned and wiped her mouth, looking at her daughter. Mom stood, adjusted her T-shirt printed with its image of a handcuffed Hispanic farm laborer, and walked toward the door, running her fingers through her hair.

  Kat let go of the handle and stood aside.

  Her mother’s eyes darted everywhere, skittishly flitting to Kat. “Suzy needs me in the kitchen, doesn’t she?” she muttered. A smile, a nervous laugh, she brushed past Kat.

  Sayer buckled up his pants. “You know what was happening there, Kat?”

  Kat stepped inside the room and closed the door. “Dad wanted that book,” she said, pointing past Sayer to the desk.

  Sayer picked up the book and handed it to her.

  “Up until today, you might have thought the world’s just as it seems. Now your mom and I have taught you that it’s not.”

  Kat dropped her eyes, saw the bulge inside his pants. She caught the scent of him and nearly retched. Sayer bent over to look into a small mirror her dad kept on the side of the desk.

  “Best to keep these things to ourselves,” he said, checking his chin growth with the edge of his forefinger. “The fact is that truth hurts people, Kat. Your dad, Nancy, no one wants good people to get hurt.”

  “But you’re Dad’s best friend” was all Kat could say.

  Sayer put his hand on her shoulder. She recoiled, stepped back. He patted the book in her hand. “Take that down to your dad. I expect they’ll be wanting more beers and wine out there, too. You want me to give you a hand, or can you manage?”

  “I can manage,” she whispered.

  Holding the tray like a waitress, squinting into the glare as she looked around for Suzy, Kat delivered the book on a tray of cold beers. Her mom came out and sat with Nancy and a few others, looking at the rose garden. Sayer was already at her dad’s table, throwing his head back with laughter at some joke.

  Her dad broke off to thank his daughter and to announce to everyone that while Kat had big plans to follow Suzy into law school, he thought she’d do better studying math. Sayer brushed her elbow as she put the drinks on the table. Kat headed straight for the diving board, put her hands together in front of her as if in prayer, and dived into the pool.

  That evening she told Suzy what happened.

  Suzy patted her bed for Kat to sit down. “Mom’s not happy,” she said, “and when women aren’t happy, often they do things like that.”

  “Yeah. Well, I saw it,” said Kat, challenging Suzy to make the call as to what she should do, because Suzy was twenty-five and had boyfriends and things.

  “Nate’s wrong, but he’s right, if you know what I mean,” replied Suzy. “He wasn’t forcing Mom or anything, and it’s what she does from time to time to fill some void in her life. Dad knows it. Maybe not about Nate, but he knows Mom cheats on him. Dad loves Mom. Part of what drives him are goals he can never reach. Maybe Mom’s infidelity is part of it. And he needs Uncle Nate for his work. And Aunt Nance is Mom’s best friend. She’s your godmother. If you tell anyone apart from me, then all that might fall apart.”

  By the morning, it was too late to tell anyone. Kat remembered that day as the time she became Nate Sayer’s victim. Whenever she was around Sayer, Kat felt humiliated.

  Although a year later, Kat tried to get even.

  This time, the party was at the Sayer house, with a quartet playing Mozart out in their courtyard garden, butlers moving through with canapés, laughter and political talk.

  With a cell phone and a cable in her purse, she slipped into Sayer’s study, a large, bleak room on a half landing with a narrow, high window overlooking the street.

  Two maroon walls hung with five rows of pictures, always of Sayer, someone shaking hands, someone famous, a record of a life on the fringes, a man who hid inside a uniform, and then, when the uniform was no more, tailored suits, trousers sharply pressed, shoes polished like a mirror.

  Sayer displayed his life like a peacock displays his tail.

  The desk was neat, with two telephones, a pile of magazines, a legal pad, a yellow jar of pens, and an empty In tray and Out tray.

  Kat had been in the study before and knew that Sayer kept the keys to the cabinet behind the desk in the yellow pen jar. Kat opened the door; the only thing inside was a safe.

  Using a program she’d written herself, she
attached a cable from the cell to the safe lock with a rubber suction cup like a stethoscope, covered the digital code light with a sensory fiber, punched in six incorrect digits, and waited for the cell to read the messages it was getting from the safe’s software. For fifteen minutes, Kat went through a series of combinations until the cell lit up. She pressed the Open button.

  Kat pulled out folders, closed the cupboard door, and fanned papers out on the carpet behind the desk like a deck of playing cards; bank statements, mortgage files, car and household insurance—all predictable matters.

  It was too dark for Kat to see inside the safe. She felt around with her hand, tapping the cool metal walls, but found nothing more. She unhooked the cell and put it into the safe, resting it on her hand, turning it like a compass. Its infrared sensor picked up a beam. The dial lit up, asking Kat to accept it. When she did, the left wall of the safe slid back. A tiny light came on, and Kat brought out a file of papers.

  She had also set off an alarm on Nate Sayer’s cell phone.

  New at the safe-cracking game then, Kat kept working. She didn’t notice the drone of the party get louder for a second as the door opened, a band of light streaked across the carpet and the top of the desk, and Sayer slipped into the room.

  She was absorbed in the documents in front of her. She simply couldn’t understand it. Sayer was keeping evidence of himself handing over money and breaking the law. Photographs clearly showed his own face. Bank statements matched transfers and dates. Two files were of him having sex with named women, making Kat shiver with disgust. One showed charges from the sheriff’s office of Lincoln County, Nebraska, where Sayer was accused of breaking into a meatpacking plant and lying about his identity. The next document was a photograph of Sayer handing out bribes to get the charges dropped.

  Kat smelled Sayer’s cigar smoke. The lights came on. Kat tried to make herself smaller behind the desk.