Arabesk (96 page)

“The fire door’s out there,” Sally told Bozo as she tossed him a pack of Marlboros. “Check it’s not alarmed and go have a cigarette. Warn me if that creep comes back.”

“I don’t use tobacco.”

“That’s right,” said Atal, snapping on a wristband and letting its antistatic wire hang free while he struggled into new surgical gloves. “Don’t you know his body is a temple?”

“Yeah,” said Sally, “and yours is Disney World.”

With Bozo standing guard by the fire door and Atal busy unscrewing grey boxes, Sally made a slow circuit of Charlie Savoy’s office and let her instincts run free. She was big on instinct. Instinct was what steered an albatross through storm-torn skies and let salmon do feats of navigation only long-dead Polynesians could imitate; it was what let Aboriginal kids remember routes they’d travelled only once, years back. Instinct was survival hardwired and way more important than most people allowed.

In fact, Sally was pretty certain that even human belief in free will was hardwired and she didn’t have a problem with that contradiction, she had a problem with what it allowed humanity to do to the rest of the planet.

So if she was Charlie Savoy, local boy made extremely good courtesy of a Ph.D. in microbiology and a couple of lucky guesses, where would she stash all those valuables she couldn’t risk taking home?

Assuming she could intuit what valuables such a man might want to stash…

Dirty money, maybe. Negatives featuring random acts of senseless sex? Quite possibly from what she’d heard, but she doubted he’d mind having his prowess exposed to the world. It would be something technically brilliant but deeply illegal. Sally was counting on it.

Wu Yung was already in line for whatever Dr. Savoy kept on the hard disk of his stand-alone, which, for all she knew, was kiddie porn, but Sally intended to take spoils for herself. Charlie Savoy was one of the bad guys and somewhere there’d be leverage, something to make him stop.

There always was. Look at her father.

In the corner of Savoy’s office stood a filing cabinet made from mahogany with solid brass handles. When Sally opened the top drawer she half expected it to be lined with padded silk like a coffin. Instead she got bundles of yellowing papers in hanging files gone brittle with age. Accounts mostly, a few ancient tax returns. He’d been rich for longer than she’d been alive.

“Story of my life,” said Sally.

“What?” Atal glanced up, the cross-blade screwdriver in his hand a fetching shade of orange. He’d shoplifted it from The Wiz along with his antistatic band the day before. “What’s the story of your life?”

“All of this.” Sally gestured to a row of bronze figures that lined a long ebony sideboard near the filing cabinet. A Roman slave with a rope round his neck lay dying on a poorly carved patch of earth. A half-naked bronze dancer, wearing a wisp of tin over her pudendum pirouetted on one leg, both arms raised above her head.

“Collectable,” said Atal.

Sally looked at him.

“Late Victorian,” he said. And Sally realized there was a lot she didn’t know about his background, but then everything he knew about hers was a lie, which probably made them even.

“Got it,” Atal said suddenly, lifting free a Southgate hard drive.

“Good. Now do the laptop…”

“Did most of it already,” he said, “while you were mooning about.”

Sally sighed.

After he’d replaced the PC’s casing so that everything looked normal from the outside, Atal flipped up the screen on the laptop and sat back, feeling blindly in his pockets for a disc. The antistatic wire still hung from his wrist but its crocodile clip no longer clasped anything. Atal didn’t need it for what came next.

Extracting a CD from his pocket, he slipped the disc into the slot.

“Got a knife?” Sally demanded suddenly.

Atal had and he watched as Sally slid the blade between the doors of the sideboard, cracking it open. Twenty-five-year-old McClellan, VSOP Hine, two kinds of Bombay Sapphire, Armagnac XS, a bottle of Pussers Rum so dark it could have been treacle… The man had something for everyone, complete with matching sets of glasses.

“Okay,” asked Sally, holding up a frosted tumbler. “What’s this?”

“Bohemian,” Atal barely raised his head from the laptop. “Art deco, possibly Lalique. Smashing it would be a crime.”

Atal’s virus was a kiddie script, captured from a zombie and modified slightly, then signed with someone else’s tag. Attached to it was what mattered, a hack he’d written from scratch.

As hacks went it wasn’t bad.

A quick skim of the network showed a six-car rats’ tail exiting through a router, most of those cerberus functions had been disabled, with the machines instructed to look to an IcePort X2, which doubled as a mail server and did a reasonably neat job with network address translation, meaning everyone was effectively invisible from outside.

More or less what Atal had expected. Solid but not flashy, functional rather than bleeding edge and a good eighteen months out of date. As for the network itself, well, that still used cable.

“Okay?” he asked Sally.

She nodded.

“Right we are then.” Atal switched off the laptop, counted to thirty and switched it on again. Extracting his disc, he slipped it back into his pocket.

“It’s done,” he said and Sally smiled.

Come midnight when the system prepared itself to back up, a sliver of script would lock out anyone still connected, which would be nobody, and fuck over the central server. First thing tomorrow, when the network came up all the keyboards would freeze and every local disc would reformat itself, several times.

Of course, it was possible to stop this by switching off individual machines at the wall, but experience proved that few people ever did that until it was too late. And the joy of the whole hack was, what with the trashed server, failed network and general panic, it might be as much as twenty-four hours before anyone thought to check inside Charlie Savoy’s stand-alone to discover exactly why its hard disk kept failing to boot.

“Shit,” Sally said.

Atal turned at the heartfelt expletive and found her staring down at the splintered front of a small drawer.

“Georgian card table,” said Atal. “Extremely valuable… Well, it was.”

Only Sally wasn’t listening. She was gazing at a transparent plastic folder and Atal had to agree, for that amount of damage it wasn’t much of a haul.

“The drawer can be mended,” he said soothingly. “So only an expert will be able to tell.”

“Really?” said Sally but her attention was on the folder. It showed handwritten specifications for a genetics lab recently built in North Africa by Bayer-Rochelle in conjunction with the Emir of Tunis. A joint project was mentioned, provisionally named Eight Score & Ten.

“You okay?”

“Sure.” Sally nodded. “How about you?”

“Me?” said Atal. “I’m good.” They’d been lovers briefly at the kampong, for the week or two it took them to admit they both preferred Wu Yung. After that, their time sharing a bed was limited to those rare occasions their host summoned them both.

From his other pocket Atal produced wet wipes and started to clean down the stand-alone’s grey case and keyboard, then did the same for the laptop, finishing the laptop’s TFT screen for good measure.

Just to muddle forensics still further (given he’d messed over both machines wearing gloves and the wipedown was a put-on), Atal upended a small plastic envelope of the kind banks use for loose change and dribbled the desk with crud vacuumed from a bus stop in Tribeca.

It was fair to say, Atal felt, that the obvious advantages of spoof-bombing every crime scene with a random collection of dead skin, broken hairs and artificial fibre had given a whole new lease of life to those little handheld vacuum cleaners that RadioShack sold for extracting dust from computer vents. “You done?” he asked Sally.

She smiled.

Thursday 10th February

“So you see,” said Eugenie, “it went like this…”

Before Arabic was reintroduced as the court language of Tunis all laws were issued in Turkish, legacy code from the city having been ruled by an Ottoman
beylerley,
which translated as some kind of pasha.

The return to Arabic took place around two centuries ago, at least, it did according to Eugenie. She kept her grip on Raf’s wrist while she talked.

Already prosperous, Tunis had grown fat on the rewards of slaving, piracy and trade. And when the
moriscos
were finally expelled from al Andalus in 1609, many settled in Tunis, adding their skills in cookery, ceramics and metalwork to the city’s existing richness. It was a city of pragmatic compromise, where Jewish merchants flourished alongside those princely pirates the corsairs, who built ornate
dars
to house their families and influenced Ifriqiya’s foreign policy. Renegade Europeans mostly, converts to Islam from Spain and Italy, sometimes excused the requirement to undergo circumcision.

As for the wives of Ifriqiya’s rulers, these were either Turkish or captured Christian, rarely indigenous. And the solid foundation of the state, those who worked the fields, led caravans or bartered in the markets were often Berber, a people given to mixing magic and mysticism with their Islam.

Quite why Eugenie felt it necessary to tell him all this Raf wasn’t sure; until she got to the bit about captured foreigners giving birth to ruling beys. And then the grip on his wrist was as sharp as the steel in her grey eyes.

“Think about it,” she said.

Bizarrely, Eugenie stood to say her good-byes, first shaking Raf by the hand and then dipping forward to kiss him on the cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

Eugenie paused, briefly considering her answer. “I could say,” she said, “that I’m sorry I couldn’t convince you. That I failed to persuade you to help the Emir. But it’s more than that…”

“If you can fake sincerity,”
said the fox and got shushed into silence. If Eugenie was counterfeiting, then she was a better actor than he. Raf could almost feel her regret punctuate each word.

“I’m not faking anything,” Eugenie said flatly. “You’re not doing yourself any good behaving like this and you’re not helping Zara or Hani. I’ve read your file,” she said. “I know when someone’s got
issues.
”

“I…don’t…have…issues…” Raf said.

“No,” said Eugenie. “Of course you don’t. You have the fox instead.”

Breakfast slid into elevenses, a very English meal that seemed to exist nowhere but in Raf’s memory, the way elevenses would eventually slide into lunch. At which point, he’d have read the
Alexandrian
at least twice, and be sick of the sight of the waiter who hovered on the edge of his vision, anxious to provide anything His Excellency might need.

“Which would be what?”

Raf thought about it.

“Well?”

To give the fox its due, Tiri waited ten minutes for Raf’s answer and only reentered Raf’s mind when it realized the man had no intention of replying.

“How can I reply,” thought Raf, “when I have no idea of what the right answer is?”

“Can I ask a question?”

Raf nodded to himself.

“Why didn’t you just fuck her?”
said the fox.

“Because I didn’t.”

“You want to tell me why?”

“The time wasn’t right.”

“And is it right now?”

“No,” Raf shook his head. “Now it’s too late.”

Whether that was strictly true Raf had no idea but it was becoming, almost by default, an article of faith for him. What might have been with Zara was fractured, smashed into fragments too many to identify, never mind glue back together again…

“Excellency…”

Glossy and elegant, wrapped round an old photograph and placed in an envelope from El Iskandryia’s most famous hotel, the snakeskin was soft enough to be finest leather. The only flaw Raf could see was a ragged hole where the reptile’s head should have been.

The envelope was delivered at lunchtime by a man on a scooter. A Vespa with a Sterling engine conversion. The man wore a black biker jacket, one that looked scuffed until you got close enough to see that the damage was imprinted on the surface.

The lining was spider silk impregnated with steel and could stop a blade, no matter how narrow. It also spiralled around a slug (should anyone fire one), enabling paramedics to extract most handgun bullets with the minimum of tissue damage. High-velocity bullets, of course, were a different matter. They did their own extracting, mostly of soft tissue that got caught in the vacuum on pass-through.

Eduardo was very proud of his jacket. And in the list of his prized possessions it came a close second to his scooter, which was Italian and nearly original, apart from its engine and the new seat.

“Sorry to trouble you…”

The man at the table looked up and frowned.

Once, several months before, Eduardo had made another delivery. That time the envelope had been much bigger, the contents more obviously dangerous.

In the first package had been a chocolate box from Charbonel & Walker, empty apart from a slab of high-brisance explosive. The man now at the table had been the target, Felix Abrinsky took the blast and the
plastique
had been stolen from the offices of the Minister of Police.

Now Eduardo worked for Raf. Although Eduardo used the term loosely. He didn’t exactly work
for
His Excellency, more helped him out occasionally in return for a small monthly retainer and the use of office space behind the tram station at Place Arabi.

Both the office and retainer came out of El Iskandryia’s police budget, from an account reserved for high-level informers. Raf had never thought to mention this to Eduardo. Nor had he thought to cancel the arrangement when he resigned.