Lost Worlds (3 page)

Both men had crew-cut hair and faces that looked like they had taken some beatings in their time. One of them was black, the other white. They both wore black jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets
and sunglasses, even though they were indoors.

‘Are you here to do the cable installation?’ Gecko asked. He could hear the pain and the tiredness in his voice, but he couldn’t help himself.’

The man in front of him smiled. ‘Eduardo Ortiz,’ he said. His voice had a foreign twang – Polish, perhaps. Maybe Russian.

‘My name is Gecko. I have never heard of this “Ortiz”.’

The smiling man in front of Gecko reached out his hand and took Gecko by the hair, pulling him upright. Gecko couldn’t help noticing, in the few moments before the hand vanished from his
sight and the pain began, that his knuckles were scarred and his little finger ended halfway.

‘It wasn’t a question. You are Eduardo Ortiz, also known as Gecko. A gecko is an annoying little reptile that can run up walls, yes? I looked it up in a dictionary.’

‘No, really,’ Gecko said through clenched teeth, ‘I told you, I have never heard of him.’

The man twisted Gecko’s head left and right. Gecko’s scalp burned with the pain of the wrenched hair.

‘Apart from us and you, there is nobody here. If this isn’t your place, then what are you doing here?’

‘Burglary?’ Gecko ventured.

The man released Gecko’s hair, pushing him backwards at the same time. Gecko stumbled, but caught himself before he could fall over.

‘Funny you should mention burglary. We hear from friends of ours that you are very good at climbing walls and getting through small gaps.’ He gestured to the tiny window. ‘We
would have asked for a demonstration, but we have seen the evidence ourselves. We want you to come and work for us. In a . . . private capacity.’

‘Installing cable?’

The man shook his head. ‘Not installing. Taking away. Money, jewellery, passports, iPods, mobile phones . . . anything you can carry.’ He nodded towards the door. ‘People out
there take precautions if they think someone can get into their flats or houses. They lock their doors and windows, and they install alarm systems, but if they think it’s impossible then they
don’t worry so much. But someone like you, who can get into impossible places . . . well, you would be quite an asset to us.’

‘And who is this “us”?’ Gecko asked.

The man shrugged. ‘We are new to this country. From Eastern Europe, you understand. It is . . . a land of opportunity. We, for instance, have the opportunity to make a lot of money. You
have the opportunity to not get your arms and legs broken. Everyone is happy, apart from the people who lose their money and jewellery and mobile phones, but even they can claim on their insurance,
so they are happy as well in the end.’

‘Can I . . . think about it?’ Gecko asked.

‘Do not think too hard. Thinking is a dangerous hobby. In Eastern Europe, we are fatalists. We believe that what happens is meant to happen. You are meant to work for us, committing
burglaries. It is fate. Accept it.’ He moved towards the door. His silent companion stepped to one side and opened it. ‘We will return tomorrow for your answer, which will be
“yes”, but we would rather you came to that conclusion of your own free will than be forced into it here by us.’ He stopped, and pointed a finger at Gecko’s face. Either by
accident or design, the way he held his hand made it look like he was miming a gun. ‘Do not talk to the police. Do not talk to your friends. Do not talk to
anyone
about this. It is
between ourselves, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Gecko said quietly, but he was talking to a closing door.

T
ara Flynn’s bedroom was like Tara Flynn herself – small, dark and chaotic. She sat on her bed, tablet computer propped up against a
pillow on the duvet in front of her and a Bluetooth keyboard perched on her lap. Her long brown hair fell in front of her face like a curtain, shutting out the world.

A window popped up in the corner of the screen, accompanied by a soft chime. The words
How’s it goin’?
were highlighted within it.

Tara clicked on the window, and typed a response:
No luck yet.
She pressed , and an application on her tablet encrypted the message and sent it out over the ether.

She went back to what she was doing: attempting to find a way inside the security firewalls of a big and remarkably secretive company who called themselves Nemor Incorporated, but about which it
was incredibly difficult to find out anything. She’d only discovered their internet presence by following a link from an email that had been revealed on WikiLeaks. Nemor Incorporated
didn’t seem to have an openly available, easily accessed website for those people that wanted information on what the company did, or wanted to apply for a job. It almost seemed like you
needed to already know about the website in order to find it: you couldn’t just look up the company name on Google or Bing and link to it. In fact, when Tara had tried to do just that
she’d got no hits on the name, which almost made her think that Nemor Incorporated was actually paying the big search-engine providers to keep their name
out
of searches.

Another soft chime alerted her to a response – one that her app quickly decrypted before displaying it. Tara and her friends never communicated using unencrypted messages. Stuff that moved
across the internet could be easily captured and read by anyone. That was how Tara and her friends got most of their information in the first place.

Nemor’s some kind of big fish in commerce, that’s for sure
, the message read.
Their name crops up in emails from defence contractors, the US government, large tech
companies – all kinds of places, some quite nasty. They’re into something big. What are the chances you can get in?

Tara snorted.
Chances are 100%, moron
, she typed, and sent the message.

While she waited for a response, she brought up the Nemor Incorporated website in her browser. There were some generic pictures of bright young people with neat smiles, neat haircuts and neat
suits that looked like they’d been provided by an advertising company, and some close-ups of generic scientific stuff like silicon chips and chemistry-lab equipment that looked like
they’d been ripped off from somewhere else on the internet – nothing which actually said what it was that the company
did
. There was a short paragraph that said absolutely
nothing in 200 words, and a line of text that said: ‘If you have a Nemor Inc. user ID and password, please log in now. If you wish to contact Nemor Inc., please use the contact email address
below.’ Two empty text boxes let people type in user IDs and passwords, if they had them. Below that was a hyperlinked email address.

Tara pinged the email address using one of her own apps, but the response came straight back: –
Error – this email address is invalid
.

Interesting. They didn’t seem to want – or maybe expect – any incoming emails from members of the public. That kind of industrial secrecy made Tara and the other people in her
group very suspicious.

She set another app working on the user ID and password boxes, cycling through millions of permutations of names and words picked randomly from the dictionary on the faint chance that some
combination might accidentally be correct, but she wasn’t holding out much hope. To get past this kind of authentication system you usually needed to know
something
about one of the
employees – a name that you could use as a basis for generating a system username, and some personal information that would help identify a password, like their date of birth, or their
partner’s date of birth, or a favourite hobby or something. Here, she had nothing. Even the WikiLeaks references weren’t specific enough.

Frustrated, she called up the HTML code underlying the website and glanced through it. The code was concise, neatly written and well documented. But there was something odd about it.

She looked closer. There was a hotspot on the site – a button that could be clicked, which led to a different site, but the button was the same colour as the background website colour, so
it was effectively invisible. You had to know it was there if you wanted to click on it – just like you had to know that there was a company called Nemor Incorporated if you wanted to find
their website in the first place.

Another soft chime, and a new message popped up in a window.
You want to hand it across to someone else to work on?

No!
she typed back. She knew that the loose affiliation of activists, anarchists and hackers that she hung out with – electronically, at least – had a whole load of computer
experts who were more experienced than she was, but she felt like this was her baby. Investigating Nemor Incorporated had been entrusted to her, and she wanted to prove that she could do it, break
their security. If they were part of the military/industrial/financial complex that effectively controlled the entire world through puppet governments and complicated financial transactions, then
she wanted to do her bit to shut them down. If politics and democracy couldn’t clean up the world, then it was time for the activists to have a go.

Now that she knew where on the website it was, she clicked on the hidden button. Her browser screen cleared, and the Nemor Incorporated front page wiped away to be replaced with a different
screen. This one was much more impressive, and much more informative. Beneath a company logo that looked weirdly like a unicorn caught in the crosshairs of a telescopic rifle there were hyperlinks
to other pages that appeared to be site maps, lists of company locations, lists of departments, subsidiary companies . . . all kinds of things. It was going to take her a while to filter the
information.

Another chime, and a message window opened up. She glanced at it quickly, ready to put her friends off so she could work her way through the website she’d discovered.

Miss Tara Flynn
, the message started,
you have found our hidden website. Congratulations. We need to talk to you.

What the . . . ? She glanced around her bedroom automatically, suddenly suspicious that someone was watching her, but the door was closed and she was alone.

Who is this?
she typed back after a few minutes of indecision.

The answer flashed back almost instantly.
This is Nemor Incorporated, Security Division
.

How did you track me?
she typed, heart hammering in her chest. Nobody had
ever
managed to penetrate her own computer firewalls before. She’d thought she was impregnable.

Child’s play
, came the response.
Not even worth the time to explain. Let us get to the point – you are committing industrial espionage. You have two choices – face
legal consequences, or agree to do something for us. We could use your particular skills.

Tara took a deep breath. This was scary. If they knew
who
she was then they would know
where
she was, and that could lead to all kinds of unfortunate consequences.

She glanced again at her bedroom door. Somewhere out there, in the halls of residence, her college friends were drinking, dancing, talking and otherwise having fun. And in here she seemed to
have awakened a serpent.

Still there?
The text appeared suddenly. It almost seemed to be mocking her.

She reached out to the keyboard to type a response.

Like a stone gargoyle, Gecko crouched on the parapet that ran round the edge of a block of offices near the river. It was the highest roof he could get to by free-running.
Free-runners were honour-bound to only use physical means of getting from place to place. Lifts and escalators were forbidden, and even stairs were frowned upon.

He supposed that he could actually climb up the
sides
of buildings, like a rock-climber, and get to higher roofs, but it would be risky – he might fall and kill himself. Yet it
wasn’t the risk that stopped him accessing the higher roofs; it was the fact that climbing slowly up the side of a building like a cockroach wasn’t
beautiful
. Free-running was an
art form. The running, the leaping, the rolling, the sliding and the controlled falling that ended in legs compressing like steel springs – they were like moves in a tennis match, or brush
strokes in a painting. Each one had to be fluid and beautiful in its own right, simplicity hiding strength and complexity, but, also, they had to fit together into something greater than
themselves. Climbing up a wall, fingers and toes scrabbling for cracks to hold on to, that had no beauty, no style.

His gaze scanned the distant horizon: a mishmash of buildings in different architectural styles, all of which went together to make up the London skyline. On his right there was a clutch of new
tower blocks that had sprung up in the few years since he had moved to London: the Shard at London Bridge; the Strata apartment block at Elephant and Castle, with three wind turbines set into its
roof; and the office block on the site of the old Baltic Exchange that was known as ‘the Gherkin’ because of its strangely bulbous shape. Gecko could think of other names for it.

He sighed. He knew that he was just trying to distract himself. He needed to make a decision: should he agree to work for the Eastern European criminals who wanted him to be their sneak-thief or
should he just pack his few possessions and disappear, move to another flat in another area?

The problem was that if he just moved a little way away, they’d find him again, and next time they wouldn’t be so polite. He supposed he could move out into the suburbs, or even to
another part of England, but how would he be able to practise free-running then? He’d seen the outskirts of London – places like Pinner, or Nine Elms: rows and rows of two-storey houses
like Lego blocks. Where was the challenge there? He supposed he could move to a different city, like Liverpool or Manchester – they had a whole set of different-sized buildings with their own
different challenges – but they also had their own criminal gangs, and pretty soon there would be someone else looking down at him, making gun-shapes with their fingers. He could find
somewhere smaller – a town or a village – but he’d probably be able to get from one side to the other via the rooftops in ten minutes. Where was the challenge? Where was the
art
?