“Blast off!” Decca’s fingers galloped across her laptop’s keyboards. “Come on. Come on.” She drummed the table. “’Sakes! There’s monster traffic. I can’t log on.”
I prayed the grid would crash.
On the television screen a montage of scenes from earlier was rolling: shots of the so-called bomb factory, my freak-out, the rescue and a slickly edited ‘happy family’ moment, showing my tearful reunion with Maxine, which had been expertly cut together so it looked as if I were being reunited with Tamara. If I hadn’t actually been there, I would have been fooled. The package finished with a stuntman wearing a black and white keffiyeh, exploding into the conservatory on a motorcycle in a blizzard of glass. My parents’ version of events spun as truth.
A reporter was standing outside the alleged bomb factory talking to camera. “Tamara and Tarquin Gold are in shock. They are still reeling after Latif Hajjaj thwarted a rescue attempt, dramatically snatching Dasha Gold back from right beneath their noses. The police have carried out a thorough search of the premises. Martyr videos, weapons and bomb-making materials have been retrieved. The evidence points to a network of terrorist cells. Reports suggest the kidnappings are the first of many planned outrages against so-called degenerate Western values. Tomorrow Latif Hajjaj’s parents will be charged with masterminding a series of attacks on London. The police are stepping up security.”
“These clowns kill me,” Latif muttered.
Next up, Dad announced they were going live to Downing Street to hear from the prime minister, and then we were in Number 10. The prime minister was at his most statesmanlike. Speaking directly to camera, he locked eyes with the nation and said gravely, “Latif Hajjaj is a threat to democracy, to liberty and to Londoners. That’s why you must log onto Tracker and hunt him down. Be vigilant. Today it is Dasha. Tomorrow it could be your child. So get tracking. Together we can cleanse society of terrorism and make London a safer place. We will never give in to terrorism in any form.”
My heart stopped. Dad had pulled it off. He had managed to network the CCTV cameras and roll out the surveillance state – all in the name of entertainment. And by a weird twist of fate I had given him the opportunity. He’d conjured up my kidnap, a lone wolf and a terrorist threat to convince people that they must come together to fight a terrible evil. He’d brainwashed the nation into chasing down make-believe villains.
A sappy photo of me flashed up. A smile flickered across Latif’s face. “To think I’m risking my neck for that…”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
As they went to the commercial break, my parents chimed, “A million pounds goes to anyone who gives us information leading to Latif’s arrest. Change your life by changing our lives. Remember, it pays to play. Dasha’s counting on you.” In the office behind the studio the phones lit up.
“See what I mean? Tracker’s turning crimewatching into a game, and that sucks,” Decca growled. “’Sakes, next he’ll be dishing out loyalty cards, luxury yachts and kill-all-you-want vouchers.”
“Tonight’s like a pilot for Tracker. If he catches us, then he’ll argue that Tracker should be kept in place as a weekly show. I know what angle they’ll use.” I impersonated Mum’s voice. “It’s all about making crime-fighting fun. Edgy. Tracker is Sherlock Holmes for the media-savvy generation.”
Latif laughed. “Media-sappy generation, more like.”
“Man, this laptop’s slow!” Decca tapped her fingers frantically on the table. “Come on. Come on. I can’t get connected to the ‘street search’.” She scraped back her chair and began pacing up and down the room. “There must be monster traffic.”
Latif took his tablet out of his rucksack. “Wait up, chicas, I’m going to be good at this. Don’t forget monitoring CCTV cameras is my specialty. So with the help of Tracker’s eyes, I should have an exit plan in zero time.” He hunched over the unregistered tablet, logging onto Tracker under some fake identity – as God knew who…
“At last your paranoia has a practical use!” Decca joked. “Hey, what about finding some likely suspects, a few red herrings to get them off our trail?”
“Throw a few ghosts into the machine? Sounds like a plan,” Latif agreed.
“What? Text in fake sightings?” I shivered, wishing we didn’t have to stoop to my parents’ level.
I went over to Decca’s laptop and as I watched the rainbow-coloured wheel rotate on the computer screen, part of me wished it would keep spinning for ever. I didn’t want to get people arrested or find out how hopeless our situation was on street level. But when I touched the trackpad, Tracker’s ‘street search’ spun into view. “We’re up and running,” I whispered.
Decca shunted me off the chair and ran through the registration process using a false name, address and email. Ignacio someone or other. More voodoo-finger tapping, and then she shouted, “Bingo! Let’s do it, baby.” Within seconds, she was calling up London streets, shaking her head ever more gloomily with every click. “Take a look at this. It’s a nightmare out there. Police everywhere, roadblocks and vigilantes.”
Latif stood behind Decca, resting his elbows on her shoulders while he watched the screen. I hovered close by. After she’d called up a random selection of streets, he tsked. “The feds mean business.” Then he sat down on the bed and started checking street views on his tablet.
“Oh no, I can’t believe it!” I hissed, pointing at the television. A split screen revealed two streets. In one street, two kids were walking along, eyes glued to their smartphones. In the second, policemen in full riot gear were piling out of vans. The split screens dissolved into one when the policemen entered the street where the kids were walking and started shadowing them. The kids were oblivious to the danger.
Tracker went back to a split-screen frame. This time the right-hand screen showed the Golds sitting in the studio while the live CCTV feed rolled on the left-hand screen. The studio audience went nuts; clapping, screaming and jumping about like lunatics. I watched through splayed fingers as the police arrested the kids, snapped their wrists into handcuffs and bundled them into a waiting police van. Tamara Gold could hardly contain her excitement. “Hold the line, Clare from Camden. The police will be IDing the suspects shortly.” I couldn’t deny it: the Golds had a natural flare for stagecraft.
As if taking their cue from Tamara Gold, two policemen disappeared into the van. Immediately the Golds started a bloodthirsty countdown, “Three, two, one, ZERO…” Tamara pressed her studio earpiece with her fingertips. “We have negative identification. Better luck next time. Keep watching. Keep calling. Keep sourcing suspects. One hundred pounds will be coming your way, Clare from Camden, for playing the game.” With a smile she turned to her husband, who took up the refrain.
“False alarm, sleuths! Keep on tracking. Keep crowd-scanning. Keep calling.” Then he started urging people to get out into the parks and places unwatched by CCTV. “We’re relying on you to fill in the gaps. Search out the dark, unfilmed spaces with your smartphones. Crunch Towners, this is your chance to get rich.”
My unease ramped up. The idea of being hunted down in Crunch Town terrified me.
“Had any luck, Lats? ’Sakes, look at these losers.” Decca clicked onto a selection of streets near Victoria Station. At each location people were prowling around, chasing down likely suspects. Most were checking Tracker, eyes glued to smartphones or taking calls from friends who were scouring the CCTV network on computers at home. All had a cash-hungry gleam in their eyes. My skin crawled. Bounty hunters. Panic cramped my stomach. Between them, my parents, the police and the vigilantes, they had the city on lockdown.
“This isn’t television. This is video gaming live and raw.” Latif looked up from his tablet, eyes dark and furious. “And we’re at the top level.”
A SWAT unit leapt from a police van on Westbourne Grove. They were following up a tip-off from Natasha Barrington in Notting Hill. A glinting snake of shields slithered down the street, swallowing the kids up, like a reinforc
ed python. The girl was wearing a green hoodie similar to the one I’d been wearing back at Maxine’s house. The boy was wearing a keffiyeh. I frowned. The kids bore a striking resemblance to us – well, our clothes, at least.
“Spot the difference! Looks like they’re using actors to keep the suspense up.” I rubbed my eyes; it was unsettling to watch a nation chasing down phantoms.
The VJs were spinning through hundreds of viewers’ sightings, cranking the music up to fever pitch.
“What are you going to do?” Decca tapped in a W12 postcode. Footage of people milling about on Shepherd’s Bush Green came up on screen. “It’s crazy out there. You’ll be caught right away.”
“Truth!” Latif was tapping away manically. “I’m checking the parks.” His eyes widened. “’Sakes, Holland Park is on helicam. They’ve got copters filming unmonitored spaces, and the footage is connected to the grid. There’s no CCTV in Crunch Town, but getting there is risky. The route is camera-heavy.”
“Could we hole up here for now?” I said without enthusiasm.
“What about…?” Latif raised his eyes upwards, indicating Ralph.
“Never leaves his room. So he shouldn’t be a problem. Gus, on the other hand, is. He’s mostly round Frankie’s. But when he’s here, he’s in and out of my room like a freakin’ yo-yo.”
“Do you trust him?”
Decca shrugged. “If money’s involved – no. And if there’s a sniff of celebrity – absolutely not.”
I was poking around a walk-in wardrobe stuffed full of canvases. “This could be our new home. Not sure about the wow fact—” I broke off when I heard Dad announce smoothly, “Coming up after the break, we’ll bring you the last sighting of the terrorist scum and our angel. Sleuths, stay tuned.”
“No way.” I sat down on the bed and slumped back against the pillows, praying they hadn’t sourced footage of us since our escape from Orchard Road. I shut my eyes, lying corpse-like through car ads and celebrity-endorsed tat, until the Tracker theme tune blasted out once again.
Propping myself up onto my elbow, I let out a zizz of disbelief. Two generic kids were standing in a crowd outside Finsbury Park Bowling Alley, so far so ordinary, except for the red arrow pulsing above their heads. A minute later, spooky déjà vu, as I watched two kids, the taller of the two in an England shirt and a baseball cap, push through the crowd, step out into the road, walk quickly past a queue of cars waiting for the lights to change and get into Decca’s Ford. All the while the red arrow bobbed above us like a wicked aura. They zoomed in on the registration. Zoom, zoom, zoom, like something out of a spy movie.
I pulled off the wig. “Now what?” I whispered. My stress levels were sky high. I felt as if I were about to explode.
“We need an exit plan. Believe it! They’ll trace your registration to this house in seconds, if they haven’t already.” Latif was checking routes, brow furrowed. “It’s crazed out there. I reckon the sewer network’s our best chance right now.” Clocking our horrified faces, he added, “I’m serious. We’ve got less than zero minutes to get out of here and nowhere to go. Think about it.”
“Chill, Lats.” Decca grabbed his arm as he stormed past. “Ignacio gave me the car when he went back to Argentina. It’s registered in his name, at his address; the insurance and tax are in his name, too, so it can’t be traced to me. I never use this address for official stuff. I don’t want to blow the squat.”
“Yeah. But it’s on the streets. It’s been seen. So it won’t take long to track. We’ve got minutes. Not hours.” He took off the England shirt and flung it onto the bed. He adjusted his purple and gold trackie, immediately looking more at ease. “It’ll take them no time to trace our route back here by cross-referencing the CCTV footage. So it’s the sewers for def. Dex, check for manholes in the streets nearby.” He was pacing the room, hands linked behind his head. “We need to enter the sewers at a blind spot. Can you think of any manholes on the Lillington Gardens estate?”
I was freaking now. “But there are rats in the sewers, aren’t there? The size of dogs.”
“Any better ideas?” he asked, without looking over.
On screen, my parents were building up to Latif’s alleged jihad video. “Stay tuned if you want to find out what turned an A-grade student into a ‘soldier’…” Then they broke for adverts.
As the thriller music rolled, the pay-as-you-go phone that Yukiko had given to Decca beeped. He read the text out loud: “Links at 1.00 everything is going to be all right.”
Decca rolled her eyes. “Great, Ren. What the hell does that mean? Is that his idea of a joke?”
“It’s coded,” Latif said, rereading the text. “What’s the time, Dex?”
“Quarter to one.”
“We’ve got fifteen minutes to solve it so the meeting place must be close by and known to us.” Latif continued pacing, muttering the text under his breath: “Everything is going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right…”
For some reason, the phrase seemed familiar. I racked my brain. After a few seconds, Decca whooped and shouted, “I’ve got it!”
We looked at her expectantly.
“It’s Martin Creed’s installation.” Decca slapped her hand to her forehead. “That’s where I used to meet Ren most times,” she said, as she quickly called up one of the CCTV camera feeds outside Tate Britain. I joined them at the computer. Sure enough, the white neon tubes spelt out: EVERTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. I smiled bitterly, remembering how I’d walked past it on the night of the train crash. Back then, I had interpreted the sign as a good omen. It seemed like an age ago, so much had happened since then – so much bad stuff had gone down. Now two empty cabs were parked up in the taxi rank outside Tate Britain – nothing out of the ordinary.
We exchanged looks, shrugged. No eureka moment.
The laptop clock hit five to one.
“Sewers it is, then,” Latif said.
“No, no, look!” I pointed at the computer screen. “Both registration numbers are masked. And there’s someone inside.”
The door of the first cab was slowly opening, a figure climbed out.
“It’s Ren,” Decca shouted, as a Japanese Elvis lookalike emerged. Yukiko followed. She was dressed in a black maxi dress and a veiled bonnet. She glided from the cab like a Victorian ghost. Minutes later, the door of the second cab opened and out clambered Jeannie. All three stretched, as if they’d woken from a long sleep. Then they moved into a huddle, exchanging a few words before fanning out, each choosing one of the three CCTV cameras monitoring the entrance. When they were within range, they took rocks from their pockets and threw them at the cameras. Both Yukiko and Ren hit their targets with their first shot. Jeannie missed. Seeming to mutter under her breath, she fished another rock from her pocket and tried again. ZAP. The connection went dead. Decca checked the other camera feeds; both crackled white noise.
“Blinding!” Latif said, with a wink.
“Please, God, let everything be all right,” I whispered.
Decca was clicking through nearby streets. “Yeah, but we’ve got a major problem. The CCTV on the way over there is still operational. Our route’s live.”
“How long will it take to get there?” I asked nervously.
“Ten minutes by foot, five by car.” Decca clacked her tongue as she double-checked the route. “We’d better take the car. Too many bounty hunters.”
On the TV screen, my parents were trying to keep calm as events took a turn for the unexpected. Both wore fixed smiles. Both pressed their earpieces as they listened to the producer’s brief on the situation. Their stretched expressions gave nothing away. My father was the first to speak. The camera zoomed in. “We are receiving accounts of cabs coming into the city from the suburbs. Initial reports suggest cabbies have turned out in support of our campaign to find Dasha.” The relief was visible on his face.
We turned to look at each other. What the hell was going on?
CCTV feeds showed cabbies heading i
n from the suburbs, taking over the streets like a revolutionary army. But the Golds continued to praise the cabbies’ public-spirited action.
A flustered newsreader was stumbling over her words as she tried to deal with the breaking news, and manage the claims and counterclaims in a way that would keep the Golds ahead of the game.
“A growing number of taxis are heading into central London, in an as yet unexplained phenomenon. We go live to Janet Drake in central London.”
“Thank you, Natalie. As you can see, the centre of London is thronging with taxis. The cabbies are out in force in a show of solidarity for the Golds, and they will be helping in the search. A short while ago, I was speaking to a London cabbie who told me that they supported the Golds and—” Suddenly the reporter was ambushed by a rowdy group of cabbies. A middle-aged man with a goatee grabbed the mike.
“Don’t believe her claptrap. We are staging a protest over the imprisonment of fellow cabbie – Mrs Hajjaj – and the illegal treatment of her family. Our aim is to disrupt Tracker, and cause chaos throughout London by disabling the CCTV.” Obviously enjoying himself, he cranked up the volume. “ARE YOU LISTENING, PRIME MINISTER? LONDON CABBIES ARE REVOLTING!”
His cabbies-in-crime laughed and gave the thumbs up to the camera. Then they handed back the mike and made a beeline for their cabs. I noticed their registration numbers were covered up.
A shaky-looking Janet Drake stuttered. “We have received unsubstantiated reports that cab drivers are knocking out CCTV cameras. Back to you in the studio, Natalie Provost…”
The first images showing cabbies disabling CCTV cameras flashed up. We punched the air in unison. The Golds’ smiles vanished. Their initial hopes had been dashed live on screen. Disappointment clouded their faces. Dad was cracking his knuckles. A breaking news crawler stated: Cabbies Invade the City.
I smiled. The control-freaks were losing control.
“Awesome.” Latif punched the air. “Cabbies kick ass. That’s rad! Believe it! Vamos, chicas.” He was already by the door. He grabbed three coats from a rack: a parka for me, a duffle for Decca, a military overcoat for himself. More layers. Another disguise. He slid the tablet into his pocket.
Stitch-Up Page 25
