This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  It was one of those box-ticking London hotel rooms: a bed, a toilet, and a TV on a bracket, high up one wall. The window gave on to a gloomy brick shaft lined with other blind windows. The bed was scattered with sandwich wrappers and styrofoam cups. There was barely enough space for Aoife, Irene, and the three quiet men with watchful expressions who sat by the door. Aoife didn’t know any of these men personally, but she knew what they were. And she had seen what they could do to people. This was one of two reasons why she quit her last job.

  The eldest of the three was a small, wiry man with a sun-darkened face and deft, birdlike movements. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, with a PC in his lap, talking into an earpiece. Aoife overheard a soft Scottish accent. The other two, burlier, with heavy, bored faces, sat on chairs inside the door, fiddling with their phones, waiting to go. A sports bag lay on the floor between them. They’re the snatch squad, thought Aoife. Gaffer tape, syringes, cable ties, hood. They’ll go in last, when all the rest of it is ready.

  Irene gave Aoife her briefing.

  It’s a one-day job. Five grand, cash, paid as soon as it’s over.

  How did you hear of me?

  Willy McDonnell mentioned you. He said you were good. He said Belfast was sorry when you went to work for Six.

  I wanted to see the world.

  Yeah, well, now that you’ve seen it, McDonnell says Five would take you back. He told me to tell you that. Me and him were pals in his Branch days. In Belfast and Bessbrook. When it was fun.

  Fun for you, maybe, you fucking tourist. But Aoife didn’t say that out loud. She needed this gig, having just discovered, on her return from what she’d hoped was her last ever assignment, that her parents had lost all their money, and her money too, the savings she’d been counting on to launch her new life, and which she had given to her father to invest for her. Also, she found it hard to feel too superior. She had come to understand that, like Irene, she was really a tourist herself. That was her other main reason for quitting.

  Who’s the target?

  Irene handed her a photograph. The man in it was youngish, balding on top.

  He’s a New York banker. Mahmoud Karmi. US-born Palestinian, currently visiting London. He’s been secretly shifting large sums of untraceable cash to bank accounts in Kenya. The Americans think that it goes from there to the Islamists in Mombasa. We’re going to lift him today, then pass him on to the Yanks, no papers, no warrants. Catch is, he’s a US citizen, so he has to disappear without anyone knowing.

  What do you need me for?

  He’s staying in a posh hotel in Marylebone. He’ll be leaving it shortly, to walk to an office in Soho. The office is our front. We’ll lift him when he gets there. Just in case he does something unexpected, or he twigs that we’re on to him, we need someone to stay close to him on the street, without being noticed. That’s you.

  Aoife picked up her mark outside his hotel. He was dressed in a polo shirt, khakis, deck shoes and a light linen jacket, Brooks Brothers or similar. An expensive leather satchel was strapped crossways around his chest, as if he was worried that someone might snatch it.

  He walked out of the lobby without looking left or right, nearly colliding with a passer-by. He’d be easy to follow.

  Aoife had camouflaged herself for the British high street – Zara and Primark, oversize sunglasses, grey high-top sneakers. A Selfridge bag contained three baseball caps – one blue, one white, one pink – and three light cotton jackets in different styles and colours. If her mark happened to look at her directly, she could drop back a few yards, change shape and colour, then catch up again.

  But he walked stiffly and fast, never turning his head. Aoife followed him down Welbeck Street, Henrietta Place, Vere Street, until they reached Oxford Street. There, slowed by the press of shoppers, he stepped into a door and took out a map. It was a tourist map, the kind they leave out in racks in hotel lobbies. Aoife watched his reflection in the a window. The map was shaking in his hand.

  He folded the map, stepped off the curb, then immediately leaped back again, chased by the horn of a bus that was inches from

  crushing him. But instead of recoiling in shock, he turned and looked about him.

  He knows that someone could be following him, Aoife decided. He’s been trying to hide that knowledge. But that near miss disinhibited him. He let his fear show.

  A pedestrian light turned green and Aoife, hanging back this time, followed him east down Oxford Street, across Regent Street, and then right on to Argyll Street. They were now in Soho, only yards from the destination, a fake brass plate for a fictional law firm. Her job was done once he left the street.

  Aoife was slowing, preparing to drop out of the tail, when she saw it happen. There was a postbox on the curb, a red English pillar box, and as he approached it his hand slipped into his satchel. She saw a white flash as his hand snaked to the postbox. Without breaking stride, he continued on his way. She watched him walk on a few yards, checking the street numbers, until he stopped at a door between two dingy shopfronts. He pressed a buzzer, looked about him. The door opened, and he was gone.

  Aoife crossed back over to the postbox. A mail drop. That hadn’t been foreseen in her briefing.

  The mail compartment was protected by a thick metal door, crusted with many years of coats of red paint. Royal Mail, it said on the box. They had the Royal Mail in Northern Ireland too. And she knew how to open its postboxes. She had the tweezers in her purse.

  She leaned against the postbox while pretending to search through her shopping bag. Whatever she was looking for in her bag, an observer, if there was one, would have concluded that she couldn’t find it, though she gave it plenty of time.

  The mail from this box had been recently collected. There were only a few letters lying in the base. The five on top, identical white envelopes, were clearly the ones that she wanted, but she grabbed everything in the box, just to be sure, stuffed it into her carrier bag, closed the door and walked off.

  The Scotsman was sitting on the floor of the hotel room, the PC in his lap, but his colleagues were gone. He seemed relaxed now, uncoiled, his legs no longer crossed but stretched out in front of him. He didn’t move them for Aoife. She had to step over him to get to Irene, standing by the blind little window, listening to her phone. She shook her head quickly at Aoife, warning her not to speak, then listened some more, then ended the call.

  It’s done, Irene told them. We just have to wait a few minutes for the cash to arrive, then we can shut this room down.

  There was a problem, said Aoife. But I sorted it.

  She took the letters from the bag and handed them to Irene.

  Irene shuffled through the letters. The Scotsman came over to join them.

  A mail drop, said Irene. Jesus . . . He must have known that we were on to him.

  Despite herself, Aoife looked at the envelopes as Irene studied each in turn. They were made from expensive paper, embossed with the name of the Marylebone Hotel. Hand stamped, not franked. The addresses were written in spidery ink:

  The Editor, Private Eye

  The Editor, Guardian newspapers

  The Chair, Commons Committee on Intelligence and Security

  The Commissioner, Metropolitan Police

  The Director, MI5

  Aoife yawned. She could feel them both watching her.

  God, she confided, I’m dying for a cigarette. I always am, after a job. Could I have a crafty one here, while we wait for the cash?

  Irene put the envelopes away, picked up her laptop. Turning the screen away from Aoife, she began to tap at it.

  You can’t smoke in this hotel room. There’s a two-hundred-pound fine.

  Then I’ll just pop outside for a moment. Maybe get a coffee from Pret, while I’m at it. Do you fancy anything?

  Irene and the Scotsman looked at each other.

  Tea for me, he sa
id. Milk and one sugar.

  For the first time, he smiled at her.

  Shall I give you the cash?

  My treat. Irene?

  Irene, typing, didn’t look up.

  No thanks.

  The Scotsman flattened himself against the wall, giving her room to pass. He had remembered his manners. He had also, she noticed, put his ear piece back in.

  Once the door closed behind her, she heard him talking quietly and fast. The door was thin. She had to force herself to walk slowly down the corridor, not to break into a run. The hotel was very old, and the emergency stairwell wrapped around the shaft of the single elevator. She went down the stairs two at a time, and every time she passed the door of the lift she pressed the call button; anyone using it to come after her would be stopped at every floor.

  Aoife crossed Oxford Street, ploughed west through angry shoppers, took the stairs down to Marble Arch Tube. There, in the line for the ticket machine, she slipped her phone into a young woman’s handbag. Judging from her sundress and carry-on case, the woman might, with luck, be heading to one of the airports, laying a useful false trail.

  Coming up to the street again, on the opposite side, Aoife walked up the Edgware Road. At Edgware Road Tube station, she slipped her Oyster card into a storm drain and bought a day pass from a machine, paying with coins. A Bakerloo train took her to Charing Cross Station, where she cut through Spring Gardens to the Mall. She walked south-west, down the right side of the street, so she could watch, on her left, to see if she was followed. She was not.

  From Victoria Station, she took a Southern Rail train as far as Kent House, near the little apartment that she kept in Penge. She didn’t think anyone knew about it. She still lived by Northern Ireland rules.

  The apartment, rented furnished, held nothing that Aoife cared about, apart from some clothes and some books. She collected her real passport, the Irish one, from a drawer by the bed. The two fake ones were hidden in the crumb tray of a broken toaster. She took those too, putting them in a backpack with the books, some clothes, and a few other basics.

  A loose ceiling tile hid the bank notes that she’d stashed for times like this. Pounds, dollars and euros. Cash would pay for a bus ride to Fishguard. It would pay for the ferry to Rosslare in Ireland. Common Travel Area, no formal ID check, no questions asked – so long as you looked white. She could spend some time in the Republic, somewhere nice, out west, in a quiet bed and breakfast. Or she could use one of the back roads that she knew to slip across the border. She didn’t want to go back there, but she knew people in the north.

  The lobby of her building smelled of chemicals, and was walled on two sides with translucent cubes of green glass. It had always reminded Aoife of an ageing public swimming pool. The lobby contained a rubber plant, a metal table and two fake-leather chairs that no one ever sat in.

  Someone was sitting in one of them now.

  He looked about fifty, with dark stubble at either end of his long, balding head. He sat back in the chair, a computer open on his lap, hands behind his head. He smiled when he saw her.

  Aoife McCoy. You shouldn’t have come back here.

  American, she thought. Or maybe Canadian.

  She slipped off her backpack, holding it left-handed. It was no use as a weapon, but it might do as a shield.

  The stranger closed the laptop, stretched and stood. He was rickety and tall, like a badly made scaffold. His business suit and hand-stitched brogues were in need of urgent care.

  Aoife sidled away from him, towards the door and the light.

  You used to want to be an actor, he said. I have a part for you now.

  No thanks. I’m resting.

  She reached the door, took the handle. He made no effort to stop her.

  Your target wasn’t a crook or a terrorist. He was a whistle-blower.

  I got that, thanks. Not my problem. Bye-bye.

  She turned the door handle.

  He’s already dead. They killed him to stop him telling what he knows.

  Another good reason why it’s none of my business . . . How do you know all this?

  He showed her the computer.

  I’m reading their communications. In real time.

  She eased the door open. Keep him talking, she thought.

  Good with the cyber stuff, are you?

  I certainly am. And you’re good at the real life. That’s why I want you. I’m in need of a burglar. Or, you might say, a familiar. If you work for me, I can keep you alive until we find a way out of this. I have a plan.

  No thanks. I’m off. From now on, I’m a one-man band.

  She pulled the door open.

  You’re a loose end, Aoife. The Scotch guy reckons you’ll head back to Ireland. He thinks you’ll feel safer there. And he knows Ireland very well. Spent a lot of time there, back in the old days. Working both sides of the border.

  I know people there. They’ll look after me.

  He tapped his laptop sadly.

  Irene knows those people too. She’s a very good liar. You should hear what she’s already saying about you.

  How do I know you’re not working with them? Keeping me talking until someone else gets here?

  That’s a good question. Tell me this, Aoife: what was in that mail drop?

  Mail.

  There were five big letters, in hotel envelopes. He wrote them just before he left the hotel and put the stamps on them himself. He didn’t trust the desk clerk to mail them for him. They were addressed to—

  That doesn’t prove anything. Irene could have told you that.

  Did you get a look at his handwriting?

  What do you mean?

  He reached into his jacket, took out a letter, tossed it over. Aoife caught it.

  It was a small, square white envelope, containing, she could tell from the feel, a stiff card. It had a UK airmail stamp, cancelled in London a week before. Aoife looked at the handwriting. Spiky but clear. It was the same as the writing on the envelopes that she’d given to Irene.

  It’s addressed to Professor John Roland, in New York City, said the stranger. It was a distress signal. A rescue call. But he didn’t send it in time.

  Your name is Roland?

  I have a lot of names. You can call me Towse.

  Night had come, and brought an offshore wind with it. They sat outside the trailer, on the deck, so that Towse and Aoife could smoke after they finished the pizza. They looked west, across Newark Bay. Country music played on in the background. It sounded louder, now that the light had faded – plaintive waltzes, sighing steel guitars. A ship thudded past, bound for the yellow lights of Newark harbour. The sky was a dome of dull orange, a chemical haze in the glare of the seaboard. Towse poured them all whiskey, then sat back and sighed.

  It’s so lovely here, he said, gesturing towards Newark. All that life and hope. It may have got a bit curdled, but life and hope, all the same.

  I don’t get you, said Michael. What I want to know is, why are we in New Jersey?

  To finish what Alice started.

  How?

  Do you know what a matching engine is?

  They didn’t.

  Do you know what a stock exchange is?

  They thought that they did.

  OK. That’s a start . . . Well, once upon a time, a stock exchange was a trading floor full of fat, shouty people throwing paper in the air. But that was forty years ago. Nowadays, stocks are bought and sold online, by people with computers, and more and more often by the computers themselves, trading by algorithm. The deals are put together in servers owned by the exchanges. These servers are known as matching engines, because they match up the buyers and sellers. Black boxes, some call them. You with me?

  They were.

  There used to be only a few big stock exchanges around the world, like the NYSE and Hong Kon
g and London, but now there are dozens in New York alone. And each one has its own matching engine. And almost all of those engines are here, in New Jersey.

  Why?

  Because of high-frequency computer trading. Online markets move so fast, now, that the speed of light is a factor. You can gain an edge just by being as close to the black box as possible. Millionths of a second are worth billions of dollars. So most of the New York exchanges put their servers just across the Hudson, in New Jersey. It’s very close to Wall Street, but the real estate’s much cheaper. One of those exchanges belongs to Fess, through a front company. We’re here to break into it.

  Why would we want to do that?

  Because, Aoife, this exchange has an even more private exchange nested inside it. It’s what’s known as a dark pool, a side pot where big players can do deals in secret. The thing that spooked Alice was in Fess’s dark pool. She was updating its code to make it OmniCent compatible when she noticed something very strange. To find out exactly what, we have to observe the engine from inside the engine itself, to eliminate the distortions you get from watching from a distance. So we have to break into the server itself, and plug ourselves into it.

  Towse took out his laptop, opened the lid and turned it towards Aoife.

  This is the data centre where Fess’s black box is physically located. It’s a bit like a high-tech storage-rental unit – it hosts lots of other fintech servers too. The owners of the building have spent millions on security – key-card access, biometrics, mantrap corridors, the lot. But they hate giving money to actual people, so the only guards on duty at any one time are a couple of illegal immigrants on minimum wage. The local taxpayer stumps up the most for its human security, courtesy of the Bayonne police force.

  Aoife looked at the screen.

  This info is good. Where did you get it?

  From the local taxpayer.

  I can’t do it alone.

  Take Michael.

  Aoife looked at Michael. He was nodding off, drowsy from the whiskey.

  Why don’t you come, Towse?

  Because we can’t run the risk of my face being seen.