This Eden

by Ed O’Loughlin

  The car was a Pajero jeep, with plates from Northern Ireland.

  You’re driving, said the Scotsman, and handed her the key.

  He slid into the seat behind her, put on his safety belt, settled himself in her blind spot.

  This is your town. You know where to go.

  Aoife’s parents lived less than a mile north of the Cross Guns Bridge, with a straight road between them, no turnings. Aoife wondered if Towse had known that when he set up his rendezvous with Michael. It seemed neat, almost trite, corner-cutting.

  It was early afternoon, and though she’d lost track of the news and the days of the week, she recalled, from the heavy traffic, that this was a Friday afternoon, when Dublin’s business and government classes, abandoning pretence, slope off early for the weekend. The heavy traffic bought her time, as she drove south along Botanic Road. But it eased, as it always does, as the cars inched past Hart’s Corner. Too soon, they had reached Whitworth Road. To the right, the Brian Boru and the furniture warehouse. A derelict grain silo. Thirst.

  This is it, she said. The Cross Guns Bridge.

  Park outside that furniture shop.

  She cut the engine, folded her hands in her lap.

  So, we wait?

  One minute.

  In the mirror, she watched him take out a medical face mask and loop it in place.

  What’s with that mask? I’ve been seeing those everywhere these past few days. Is it some kind of fad?

  He ignored her question.

  Give me the key, then get out.

  She handed it to him, over her shoulder. Then she opened her door and got out. He mirrored her movements, so their doors clicked shut at precisely the same time.

  That towpath. Walk in front of me.

  They turned on to the towpath beside the canal. The wind had dropped and the sun had come out, bringing with it a couple of anglers, urbanites in tracksuits. Aoife had heard that the Royal Canal had fish in it, but she had never seen anyone catch one around here.

  She slowed her steps.

  He’s not here, she said.

  I’ll be the judge of that. Keep walking.

  They passed the two fishermen, who stood well apart on the edge of the basin, tackle bags and bicycles beside them on the path. One stared fixedly at his float, bobbing in the ripples, but the other one cast and recast repeatedly, dragging a spinner back and forth through the water.

  He’ll catch nothing like that, said the Scotsman.

  You like fishing?

  I like catching things.

  They were near the next lock, up the rise in the towpath. Four men, street drinkers, sat along the big wooden beam that opens the lock gate. They blew smoke, talked loudly, watched Aoife approach.

  The Scotsman stopped.

  He’s not here, he said. We’ll wait at the car. He’ll show up eventually.

  But Aoife ignored him. She was staring at the tramps.

  She might have known it.

  She might have known that Towse would send Michael off to do his dirty work, while he lurked here in safety. It was what he had done every time before.

  It’s him, she said, walking faster.

  If you don’t stop, hissed the Scotsman, I’ll put one in your back.

  Shut up and follow me. You wanted my boss? You can have him.

  She pointed at the street drinkers, who – sensing drama – had slid down off the beam and stood, leaning against it.

  That lanky bastard there, on the right, said Aoife. The one with the cider. There he is. He’s yours.

  Towse smiled at them, raised the can, said something in Polish. His friends laughed, raised cans and bottles, drank. The Scotsman’s hand went inside his jacket.

  Are you taking the piss?

  That’s my boss. That’s Towse.

  Towse? Who the fuck is Towse? What are you talking about?

  She stared at him.

  You don’t know who Towse is?

  Towse belched loudly, grinned.

  Iss werry nice day, he said.

  The Scotsman took out his pistol, waved it in Towse’s general direction.

  That, my girl, is an alcoholic Polish tramp. We told you, we want your boss, or you and your parents are finished. We told you, no stupid games.

  He is the boss.

  No he isn’t. We’ve been tracking you for weeks, now. We know who you work for. That Canadian hacktivist. The one whose DNA we couldn’t even trace. He calls himself Atarian.

  Michael?

  It made no sense to her. How could anyone mistake Michael for an international mastermind? Who could create an illusion like that?

  Towse, leaning back on his elbows, blew out a perfect smoke ring, took another swig from his can.

  You were given a chance, said the Scotsman.

  His gun was pointed at her face.

  You won’t shoot me, she said, but she found she couldn’t help shutting her eyes, averting her face from the gun, as if from a cold wind. He had to be bluffing.

  I’m the only lead you’ve got, she said. If you shoot me, you’re finished.

  The sound of a hammer, thumbed back, advanced a different proposition.

  Now she knew why the Scotsman had put on a mask.

  She screwed her eyes tighter, leaned away, listening for birdsong, a plane, the cars on the bridge. Anything but the long silence.

  A bottle smashed. Something splashed in the canal. A grunt of pain, voices shouting in Polish.

  Aoife opened her eyes. The Scotsman was crouched on the towpath, one hand raised to protect his head, the other waving his gun around blindly. Blood ran down his forehead into his eyes.

  A second bottle whizzed past him, narrowly missing. A can, bouncing off his shoulder, span on the towpath, discharging a stream of hot, steaming piss.

  The street drinkers, crouched behind the wooden beam of the lock gate, were bombarding the Scotsman with everything they had. Towse skipped out to one side, beckoning.

  Up here, Aoife! Run!

  She charged past him, not breaking stride. Up over the short, steep rise in the towpath, running too hard to even think of looking back. What if the Scotsman was running after her? He’d be fitter than her, most likely. He would also be a very good shot.

  The towpath was wide and straight, pitilessly exposed, for hundreds of yards ahead of her. She had to get off it before he could shoot.

  There was a stone wall on the right, a grassy bank beyond it – a ridge of waste between canal and railway. She vaulted the wall, scrambled over the grass, gasping for breath, and fell down the other side, tumbling through thistles and elders, through tramp-shitted newspapers and stinging nettles, until she was caught in the briars by a fence above the tracks.

  And now, held by the thorns, winded, she was finally at bay. She couldn’t move her arms without thrashing the bushes. If the Scotsman came after her, there was nothing she could do.

  She lay there, trusting only to silence, staring up at the sky. A freight train clacked past, but she couldn’t turn her head to see it.

  This was the kind of place, she knew from her police days, where killers dumped bodies. Towpaths and railway cuttings. She had tidied herself away for the Scotsman. She had managed to tick two boxes at once.

  A thrashing noise in the bushes above her.

  And as she lay there, awaiting her fate, a thought struck her: why would a man piss in a beer can when he was standing beside a deserted canal?

  Was this the final mystery of her short time on this planet? The wonder she would take with her into the beyond?

  Towse’s face appeared above her.

  It’s OK, he said. He’s gone.

  Gone?

  Yeah. He left.

  He was going to kill me, and then he just left?

  He got a call on his phone
. He left in a hurry.

  She thought about that.

  He’s gone to kill Michael?

  That’s what I’m thinking.

  She tried shifting her arms, gave up.

  If you help me out of these briars, I won’t hurt you.

  Promise?

  I promise.

  Towse started pulling the briars away from her, one by one.

  Fess’s people don’t know that you’re part of this, Aoife said. They don’t even know you exist.

  That’s how I like to play it.

  That’s what Michael was for. That’s why you brought him along with us. You needed a face.

  I prefer the term ‘avatar’. But basically, yes.

  Her arms were free now; she stretched them in front of her. Her combat jacket had protected her arms and her body, but her hands were covered in cuts from the thorns.

  So all that stuff about promising Alice you’d take care of him, that was a lie?

  No. I did promise her I’d look after him. Which is why he’s still alive. Probably.

  Probably?

  Towse pulled a briar away from her leg.

  I’m guessing that phone call was someone telling your Scotch friend where Michael is now. He probably triggered some kind of alarm.

  Where is he?

  In the server room at Inscape’s Dublin front company. He’s delivering my virus. That Scotch guy will be on his way over there now.

  He freed her other leg and stepped back, keeping out of reach. Aoife stood. Her jeans were made of thin denim. There was a trickle of blood running down her right ankle.

  She scrambled up the steep bank. When she reached the top, she looked back at Towse, who was climbing behind her.

  We have to warn him.

  There’s no way to call him. He doesn’t have a phone.

  She jumped down to the towpath and set off, back towards the bridge.

  You should have been there to look after him, Towse said, catching up. That’s how I planned it.

  I had to go see my parents. They told me my father was dying.

  They had reached the second lock, where the tramps had gone back to their drinking. Maybe the threat of lethal violence was something they took in their stride, here in this half-life. Or maybe they were, very wisely, just too drunk to care. Aoife stopped, briskly hugged each of them, kept going. Towse spoke to them in Polish, ran to catch up.

  How is your father?

  It was a trap. Irene from London is holding them hostage and they haven’t even noticed. Where’s Inscape’s office?

  A place called Spencer Dock. You have to go there and help Michael, before it’s too late.

  Aoife suddenly realised, sickened, that she had a big choice to make. And history told her she wasn’t good at big choices. Michael, or her parents. Then she told herself that she had no choice at all.

  I can’t help Michael. The Scotsman has a car. I’m on foot. But it’s only a kilometre to my parents’ place. I have to go help them.

  They had reached the first of the two fishermen, the one with the spinner, and had to check their stride while he swung his rod to cast. His lure hit the water, and they set off again.

  Aoife, listen – where does this towpath go?

  She stopped, staring ahead. From where she stood, looking eastward, she could see a mile of the canal, running past Mountjoy Prison and Croke Park stadium, towards Ballybough, North Strand, and the place where it joined the Liffey, near its mouth, in the docklands. Spencer Dock.

  It’s Friday afternoon in Dublin, Aoife. Gridlock. That Scotch guy’s in a car. Don’t worry about your parents. I’ll take care of them.

  You don’t even know where they live.

  Of course I know where they live. I promise you, I’ll take care of them. Now go and help Michael.

  The other fisherman had taken his shoes and socks off, rolled up his pants and was sitting on the edge of the basin, feet in the water, watching his float in a trance. He has his rod, his bag and his bicycle, Aoife thought. He doesn’t care if he never catches anything. He doesn’t need luck. It doesn’t exist for him.

  Towse, she said. Give me a lot of money.

  He handed her a wad of bills. She spread them in front of the fisherman’s face.

  Hey mister, she said. I want to buy your bike. I need it right now.

  He looked at her, then at the money. The money went in his pocket. His eyes went back to the float.

  She picked up the bicycle, swung a leg over it, and took off east along the towpath.

  Towse watched her go, then turned to the fisherman.

  Not bad. Three thousand euros for a rusty old bike.

  Not bad at all. I pulled it out of the canal when I got here. It was fouling my line.

  *

  The server room was much larger than the office in front of it. Rows of steel cabinets, seven feet high and with narrow aisles between them, held stacks of networked processors, a maze of cables and switches and blinking LEDs. Fans hummed behind the cabinets, extracting their exhaust heat, piping it up to the open-plan ceiling, eight feet clear of the tops of the server stacks. An LED strip overhead, designed to minimise heat, produced just enough light to show the cables and ducts that snaked along the roof beams. Power. Cooling. Optic-fibre connections. Bottles of inert gases, pressurised, for automatic release in the event of a fire. There were also cameras mounted on servomotor swivels, watching the room from above. Michael looked at the nearest camera. It looked back. It had a little red light underneath it.

  There was no helping that now. Michael locked the door from the inside, opened Towse’s envelope. It contained a single page, a printout of the room’s layout, with scrawled drawings in the margins, labelled with handwritten words.

  Seen from above, in this printout schematic, the server banks formed a rectangular maze, not quite symmetric, with two entry/exits on either side. Towards the middle of the maze, offset from its centre, was a small dead-end chamber. Towse had marked it Go here.

  Michael made a couple of false turns, wandering up and down the narrow aisles between the servers, past blinking red eyes, before he found this hidden chamber. It contained a chair and a table, Ikea again, with a monitor and a keyboard and a landline telephone.

  It was a long time since the last human had been here. They had left a styrofoam cup on the table, and mould had formed on the dregs of their coffee, bloomed, prospered and died, leaving a hard black slick in the bottom of the cup. Michael ran a finger over the table. No dust. Dust comes from the skin of the living. This place was a tomb.

  He sat, pressed the space bar on the keyboard, and the screen came to life.

  Fess’s instructions showed a sketch of the PC stack under the table. It had a row of USB ports. Arrows pointed to them.

  USB ports: stick the thumb drive in any of these.

  How stupid does he think I am? Does he think I don’t know what to do with a thumb drive?

  It was in the envelope. He shook it out and looked at it, loose in the palm of his hand.

  Michael had never held a weapon before.

  The thumb drive was oval, coated in rubberised grey plastic. There was a little hole in the end so you could thread it on a key ring. Its plug was protected by a cap of the same plastic. Michael pulled at it, experimentally, and it slid off a couple of millimetres, showing bare metal underneath. He stopped. What if the cap wouldn’t go on again? What if the bared plug seeped electronic spermatozoa, blindly seeking the slots of the USB ports? In the womb of this labyrinth, dark fertilisation . . . If you pulled the pin from a grenade, could you put it back in again?

  He wondered if anyone else in history – even the bombardier of the Enola Gay – had ever triggered, one-handed, such destructive power.

  Michael became aware of tiny lights blinking – green, white and red – in the row of st
eel cabinets opposite the table. It was hard not to feel they were watching him, that they knew why he was here. The hum of the cooling systems, the white noise of the fans, left him with only his eyes to protect him in the gloom. The camera looked down from the ceiling.

  There was another row of servers behind his back. Anything could be happening there, in his blindspot.

  He pushed back the chair, span it to face the rear. More lights stared at him, softly blinking, or hard and steady. In the dark gaps between them, dormant lights bided their time.

  These lights made no sense to him. What were they for? No one ever came here. No one ever looked at them, or learned anything from them. If something went wrong, a message would be sent automatically to somewhere that mattered – Mumbai or Palo Alto. If a light blinks on and off in a redundant server room, and there is no one there to see it . . . Then he thought of synapses firing inside a skull. There was someone else here, apart from

  himself.

  Slowly, like someone who unexpectedly finds themselves in the presence of a large carnivore, Michael put the thumb drive back in the envelope. Slowly, he rose from the chair.

  If Towse was telling the truth, this was too big for him. He didn’t want to destroy the world he’d grown up in. He remembered Alice, the life they’d shared together, less than three months before. It had been comfortable, really. It seemed a paradise, now. And even though it was lost – for him, and for Alice – other people still lived it. Traffic lights and central heating. Parks and bridges. Schools and hospitals. Movies and childhood. These things weren’t bad – far from it. But they were also expressions of money. Were they enemies as well?

  It couldn’t be true. Towse must be using him. This was Inscape, Campbell Fess’s company. Towse and Fess had an old score between them. But Michael would not serve.

  The little lights were still watching him. Had there been a change in their configuration, their winks and hard stares? Were they forming shapes behind his back, monstrous glyphs, adding mass and dimensions, gathering substance, moving to attack?

  He folded the instructions, put them back in his pocket. He would turn and walk out of here, into the sunshine.

  On the desk, the telephone rang.