In the Company of Ghosts (10 page)

‘For me, not so important,’ said Doyle. ‘But I’m sure the Home Secretary gives at least half a hoot about another bump in the unemployment numbers, so if the news leaks, I do have one promise for you, it won’t be from my end.’

They left Curtis Werks sitting there in his armchair, grim faced and pecking intently at the touchscreen on his lap. Groucho Marx had evaporated into the ether, although Agatha could swear she could still smell the ghost’s cigar smoke. It made her realise how much she needed one too
. Dealing with that comedian is quite literally purgatory.
The company of ghosts wasn’t her only distraction. Doyle seemed amused as they navigated the corridor, passing the two state security officers standing as still and wordless as the statues of Roman emperors in the alcoves while he rubbed his hands together.

‘You appear uncommonly happy, Mister Doyle.’

‘Oh, misery loves company on the porcelain throne, Mrs Witchley. Especially when it’s a three flush mystery. What’s the German word for it…?’

‘Schadenfreude,’ said Agatha. ‘Either that or Porzellansitz.’

Doyle curled his fingers into a mock cup and tapped them against a wineskin clutched in the fingers of a marble statue of Pan. ‘No, I do believe it’s
Prost
!’ He reached for the pocket where he kept his phone, but Agatha placed her hand on his and stopped him.

‘I’m calling Thorson. Find out if her and Spads have tossed Saucy Simon’s flat yet.’

‘The man whose death we’re investigating developed the current standard for cell tower cryptography,’ said Agatha. ‘I think a little guardedness might be in order.’

***

Spads had to work to keep his eyes off Helen Thorson’s shapely legs as they rode the large, expensive elevator to the no-doubt equally large, expensive penthouse flat that had been Simon Werks London residence. His colleague possessed the class of flawless beauty that swivelled heads and left men panting, mixing that aloof attitude of hers with a coolness that would have given George Clooney pause in asking her out on a date. The way Thorson wore her pressed green trouser suit, the right edge of buttoned-down preppy chic to offset her supermodel sheen, broadcasting the fact she was graciously dressing like a librarian to stop her blinding lesser mortals. Just to give all the other women a little bit of a chance. For a hacker like Spads, being around the woman was agony. A cruelty on the same scale as distributing T-shirts with photographs of fast food feasts to famine victims and making the poor bastards wear it as they scrabbled about in search of the aid trucks and puddle water to drink.
I’m starving here. Starving.
He had asked Helen once about where she bought her clothes. It was a question he had picked up from one of his mother’s weekly magazines left piled around their flat.
Ten questions a man will ask you if he is Mister Right.
She had rattled off a list of unfamiliar Japanese names, like Shiroma, Junya Tashiro and Hisui. That had surprised Spads. He had been expecting the usual suspects – Dior, Prada and all the French and Italian lines that were said to signal style and good taste. From a different world, but at least one Spads could point to up in the luxury constellation of brands, spinning far out of his reach, and name. But Helen Thorson, she was beyond that. Just as connoisseurs of Marvel, Dark Horse and DC Comics had branched off, finding Spiderman and Batman a little too obvious and colonized the distant shores of manga and anime, so Helen, in her own way, had made a similar decision. When it came to fashion, Helen Thorson was a Manga Girl. It was one of the many things they had in common. She would realize this too after he had worked his way through the remaining nine questions. He had them all ready for Helen, just waiting for the right time to be asked.

Helen exited the lift ahead of him, the corridor on the top floor leading to a single flat; large wooden doors in the passage, locked. Most of the wall behind him was glass, a high view out on Hyde Park, double-decker buses running up and down the road, a few commuters on bicycles sticking to the park’s cycle paths and leaving the road free for motor traffic. Spads looked at the door. Not much of a lock for a residence this exclusive. Probably figured they didn’t need it, with the scowling bodybuilders in blazers they had on the foyer. Entering the underground garage in Thorson’s car had been rather like he’d imagine passing into Fort Knox would be. Manned checkpoint booths and steel gates thick enough they could have absorbed a grenade blast and only need a polish to take them back to pristine. Thorson produced the keycard for the flat, given to them by the ControlWerks people, fully cooperating as the few staff that knew the news of their co-founder’s death struggled to keep the news under wraps. She unlocked the door and stepped through the doorway. Spads’ phone went off as the femme fatale he was accompanying was busy punching the deactivation code into the wall’s alarm panel.

‘Cuthbert,’ trilled his mother. ‘Cuthbert, I’ve been calling you all day. Your phone’s always dead.’

‘It’s not dead, we just have really poor reception at work.’

‘And you can’t get them to give you a landline on your desk? After all you’ve put me through. Not even able to visit my old congregation in case I’m recognized.’

‘No personal calls. You know how it is, we’re monitored. There’s a single switchboard and everything comes in and out through it. Just like the old days, when you were a secretary.’

‘Of course they monitor you, after all you’ve put me through.’

‘That’s not a problem. Taken care of. I’m not a hacktivist now. I’m
co-operating
.’

‘Not with me, you’re not. Calling constantly and all you can do is worry me with your dead phone.’ Sometimes Spads wished the cover story of his mother’s relocation to Australia, grieving over her recently deceased son, had slightly more of an element of truth to it. To Spads, the new identity she had been given seemed all too similar to her old one. She was still his mother. She still seemed to believe managing her son’s life was a fulltime job. An extradition waiting to happen. Didn’t she get it? He was running with the Fedz now. Hacking for the man. With Helen by his side, he even had Dana Scully to play partner to his Fox Mulder. Angelina to his Brad.

‘I’m going to check your cookies, Cuthbert. I know how to do that on your computer. I’m going to make sure you’re not looking at anything you shouldn’t be. Your own mother,
checking
your cookies.’

He wasn’t my true father.
‘I’ll try and come back on time tonight,’ said Spads. He hung up and switched his phone to vibrate. It had always been difficult for his mother. She could see the way her son glowed, the old girl warmed herself against his illumination even as she lacked the most basic intellectual tools to understand his manifest destiny. She had spent her life in service of him, sharing his trials, and their sacrifices together had made her bitter. Spads had a theory, and even his own mother couldn’t understand it. He hadn’t told the theory to her, of course. Nor anyone else. They wouldn’t understand either. How could ordinary people begin to comprehend that the universe was a computer, and each new generation of humanity was merely an additional processing cycle carrying the software towards its ultimate aim… to decrypt god? This was Spads own private religion – one he was pope, prophet and sole worshipper for. The only thing surprising about it was that nobody else had seen it, appropriated it before him, Moore’s law written in flesh and progress. From cave paintings evolving into Photoshop. From saddles evolving into Saturn Ten rockers. The software multiplying and being fruitful. Spads’ religion wasn’t to be shared, he had realized that very early on in his life. Once, when he was having his head flushed down the toilet in a Croydon comprehensive, he had briefly thought about sharing his faith with his brutish tormenters. But that wouldn’t have been enough to stop the other boys ostracizing him – it might even have made matters worse. The light that shone from Spads, the gulf between himself and the normal pupils was just too wide. So instead, Spads had stayed inside the school’s computer lab as much and long as was allowed, avoided the tediously ungifted bulk of humanity, a clockmaker learning how the cogs and gears of the universe fitted together. Learning how the system inside mirrored the system outside. God was canny, to hide himself in mathematics that only the most worthy could comprehend, to anchor that achingly beautiful glory in the ritual and observances of software, burying the large system within the small, each reality running in emulation inside the other, nested realities like Russian babushka dolls. Just like the Christ child that Spads’ mother seemed so obsessed with, she could sense the saviour’s light shimmering inside her son. And Spads too had spent his years in the wilderness, training himself, proving himself; his light keeping everyone else away from him. He was lonely, of course. But that was the way it seemed it had to be. He had never found his Mister Myagai, never come across the Yoda to train his inner Jedi. He was too far ahead of his peers to put the gang together, for the Avengers to ever assemble with him as a member of the team. Spads had always proved himself to God by climbing the mountain alone. When he wanted to understand something, he took it apart and put it back together again. Then he would code it from scratch and make it better, at least twenty per cent more efficient each time. Despite the pain and the solitude, Spads had kept the faith, and just as he knew he would, God had kept him too. When the FBI had appeared, demanding his extradition to the USA for testing himself against their systems, their envious hands clutching an orange hood to make him blind, salivating at the thought of parading him on the Perp Walk towards their vile gladiator pit of a prison, the universe has swiftly stepped in, saving its favourite son. A quick faked-up suicide in a crowded East London prison. Then resurrection in a hidden temple of secrets, his own private Styx where the river carried in not souls, but sub rosa documents that only the pure of heart were allowed to access. Spads had been moved behind the curtain, elevated to the cabal, given access to the tools of the priesthood. What he didn’t know was if Helen Thorson was here as a test for him, part of his terrible hunger of loneliness in the desert, or as a reward for his service to the universe? He was still thinking about that one.

‘His ISP logs show a computer somewhere in here,’ said Spads. ‘I’ll find it and see if there are any hidden extras inside the screen.’

‘You do that,’ said Helen. She turned around taking in the surroundings of the flat. You could tell she liked what she saw. Even an innocent like Spads could tell that this place was dripping with wealth. Gold, silver and platinum colours everywhere you turned, polished and offset by deep brown wood. Sofas, modern, soft and luxurious. Glass cabinets filled with dark abstract sculptures. One of the walls had an oil painting of James Dean divided like a puzzle across separate squares of canvas. As a display of wealth, Simon Werks’ London office seemed restrained by comparison. His office probably saw more visitors, so who had the entrepreneur been trying to impress here?
Women like Helen
, something whispered inside him.

‘When it comes to accruing expensive art and antiques,’ said Helen, ‘there are two main types of collectors…’

Spads nodded, indicating he was listening. He enjoyed listening to Helen almost as much as looking at her.
All knowledge is useful. To be approached with humility.

‘The first use consultants to pick and choose for them,’ she continued. ‘The second make their own selections and personally read the auction books sent out by Christies and Sotheby’s, even if they send agents to bid for them to help keep the prices low. You can tell the difference from how the collection is displayed. If a consultant is responsible for curating the purchases, the most expensive objects are placed at the forefront of a home, as a testimony to their hard work and skill. If buyers are making the selections personally, they tend to position their most expensive objects in places where only they can see the purchases.’

‘Which of the two was Simon Werks?’

‘He hired his taste in,’ said Helen. ‘And he picked staff with impeccable discrimination to choose for him.’ Helen drew out her own phone and activated its camera function before walking through the flat, taking photographs from a variety of angles. Spads wasn’t sure if she was doing that so they could put things back in the same spot after the search, or recording it for the others in the office. Probably the latter, he decided. They were here with ControlWerks’ permission, and Simon Werks no longer gave much of a shit about anything.

Spads entered a dining room laid out with a full service, eight chairs, the settings with four plates piled on top of each other, every plate slightly smaller than the one underneath, three silver forks on the left, three knives on the right. Each with their own purpose, just like a programming language’s function library.
How do you eat pizza with those? Maybe one of those is a pizza fork?
He found the office, a relatively small desk joined to a large wooden shelving unit, infused with a light-sabre golden glow from hidden uplighters. A small Apple laptop rested on the desk and Spads felt a moment of deep disappointment in Simon Werks. That the man who had led the development of modern commercial cryptography would value style over substance, brand over brawn. He had expected a home-brew kit, something cryogenically-cooled and overclocked to the max, not this single piece of machined aluminium purchased from some designer boutique masquerading as a computer store. This wasn’t cool. Custom was cool: factory meant mean and beggarly. This was like breaking into the studio of your favourite grunge musician and finding a MP3 player filled with Barry Manilow tracks.
Well, he’s dead now. I shouldn’t think badly of the deceased.
He pulled around his canvas courier bag and removed his own laptop, then cracked the casing on Werks’ computer so he could connect directly to the drive. As he was mirroring the data, his phone began to vibrate. He slid the phone out to inspect the caller display. Frank Ludington from the office.