The Chosen Seed (22 page)

He kept his head down as he walked to the van –
not hiding, just tired
– as the cameras tracked his every move, even though by the time anyone thought to double-check his identity all hell would already have broken loose. All the information Cass Jones required was stored on the laptop, and the servers were a ticking time bomb of chaos. All in all, it had been good night’s work.

He thought of Stephen Bestwick, heading back up to his desk, the engineer no doubt already forgotten. His world was about to collapse. Still, most clouds had a silver lining, and within a month, just when he’d be at his lowest ebb, the by-then very much fired network administrator would receive a letter from an overseas bank which would, he was sure, restore Mr Bestwick’s previous good humour. There were far better ways for Mr Bestwick and his lovely wife Carole – The Bank’s personnel records were comprehensive – to spend their remaining years than as slaves to The Bank. Sitting on a boat in the Caribbean, for one.

The engine throbbed loudly as he pulled the van back out onto the street. He had customers waiting.

It was past four in the morning when Maric had knocked gently on the door of the flat. The van and uniform had
been left in a car park, as arranged, and he was once again dressed in his expensive battered jeans and surfer-style top. The solid workman’s watch had been replaced by his own Jaeger-LeCoultre and his Converse boots had not one fleck of mud on them. For a moment he’d stood there, looking at them both, and then, after Cass had wondered if perhaps time had stopped and left him in this limbo, Maric grinned. Cass was so relieved that his eyes burned and, for him at least, the corridor filled with gold that evaporated the December cold from the communal space. He was astounded the others didn’t experience it, but looking at how Freeman had shivered as he ushered the hacker in, the brightness had clearly evaded them. Cass had turned his back on it.
There is no glow
was no longer a mantra he could truthfully repeat to himself, but he wasn’t yet ready to make it his friend.

After the initial celebrations were done, Cass left Brian Freeman and Maric sipping their champagne and went into one of the bedrooms and opened the slim laptop. Sweat prickled in the creases of his fingers and his heart pounded. He should have been tired, but adrenalin had been pumping through his veins since Maric had left, and right at that moment there wasn’t even a twinge of an ache in his shoulder.

As the various copied folders filled the home screen he lit a cigarette, ignoring how dry his mouth was. Brian Freeman’s throaty laugh carried easily into the room, but he barely heard it. There was simply him and the computer. He clicked on the first copied file: details of the X accounts. He closed it down; fascinating as they might be, those weren’t what he was looking for. Once he’d found what he needed, Freeman and Dr Cornell could pore over them to their heart’s content, but right now any curiosity over
the Network’s cashflow had to take a back seat.

He searched impatiently through the files. He wouldn’t have much time to act once he’d found where Bright was keeping Luke. He had no doubt the boy would be moved as a defensive measure as soon as whatever magic Maric had worked on the systems took hold. He probably had twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six.

He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the first before stubbing it out in a saucer. The bedroom would stink by the time the owner got back. Hopefully Freeman’s cash would make up for it.

He found the folder called POTENTIALS and went straight to the fifteenth file: the Jones file. When he’d first looked through it all those months ago at his dead parents’ home, under the watchful eye of his dead brother’s ghost, there had been some strange medical records in there. At the time he hadn’t understood why Luke had had so many medical tests, or why there was a note referring to ‘secondary’ medical records held within The Bank’s employee folders.

Now he understood: those ‘secondary’ records referred to the boy he’d thought of as his nephew for all these years, the poor cuckoo in the Jones’ nest. These hidden records were for the stolen baby: the
real
Luke.

He read them over and over until his eyes blurred, but there was nothing that gave him any clue to the boy’s location. All he could see was a series of dates, and tests with names he didn’t understand. He closed the folder down and gritted his teeth. There had to be
something
. He tapped the tracking pad, refusing to let his frustration get the better of him. He couldn’t afford to miss
anything
…

Just when he was about to hurl the computer across the room in frustration, he saw something, in a secondary folder
labelled SUNDRIES, located within a folder that appeared to detail household payments. He almost smiled. Mr Bright was a clever fucker, he’d give him that; even Cass, who had been
looking
, had almost missed it.

He stared at the list. The first set of outgoings was called FEES, and at first he thought they were a load of shit lawyers’ costs – then he looked at the dates. The payments had been made over several years, at three points in each in one; the beginnings of September and January and mid-April. The last few payments were for thirteen thousand pounds. He stared at the figures until he could see them in his mind’s eye: FEES.
School fees
.

Luke might be only eight years old, but he wasn’t with Mr Bright, so someone had to be looking after him, and now he thought about it, he was quite sure that someone in Mr Bright’s position would have chosen the finest independent infant school. No doubt the child boarded as well.
So what did he do in the holidays
, Cass wondered,
stay behind?
He didn’t imagine there would be many other children who lived in the school. It would be a lonely life for a small boy – maybe there weren’t any other children at all.

His heart ached for the faceless child given away by his own grandfather. He sat back slightly and rolled his injured shoulder. How long had he been hunched over the computer? The lights were still on in the rest of the flat, but the laughter had died down and he was working in silence. He felt like he’d just woken up.
School fees
, hidden in among staff payments and laundry bills – why? The answer was whispered in his brother’s voice:
He doesn’t want the others to know
.

Cass stared at the computer. If he looked anywhere else he’d see Christian’s highly polished brogues, complete with
drops of crimson blood. Those last few months must have been terrible for Christian as he slowly became convinced that his son wasn’t his own. That was an example of how different they were: Cass wouldn’t have been able to live with that; he’d have
had
to go looking, no matter what the consequences. And that was why Christian had charged him with this task from beyond the grave, of course: because he knew Cass would keep going, no matter who got hurt. He wondered if that was why Christian’s ghost had disappeared –
he
could rest in peace now; it was Cass who could no longer sleep.

He focused on the numbers again. The termly payments stopped almost eighteen months ago, replaced by a monthly payment of just over three thousand pounds. He frowned. Even if Luke had moved from an infant school to a junior school, surely the fees would still be paid termly? He copied down the account number and then started to work back through the other files, trying to match it with anything that might give him some more information. He itched to speak to Perry Jordan – he had friends who could get access to some of The Bank’s accounts – but that path was definitely closed; if he called Perry, the investigator would
have
to call Ramsey, whether he wanted to or not.

He got to his feet and stretched out his cramped legs, relieved to see no evidence of Christian anywhere. His bladder ached and he was halfway to the toilet when his stupidity struck him: there was someone in The Bank who could help him – Brian Freeman’s mole, Diana Jacobs.

Cass was half-expecting to find Maric and the old gangster asleep in their chairs, but when he walked into the quiet lounge he found the two men hunched over a second laptop. Freeman was copying something down in his uneven scrawl – he might have the brain of an Oxbridge scholar,
but his education had been left in the gutter, and he had the handwriting to prove it. Cass waited until he’d finished the current note – looked like a list of companies. That came as no surprise: Freeman intended to make a killing out of this, as untraceably as possible.
Leave no trace
. That was their motto. He wondered if somewhere along the line they’d all become ghosts: him, Brian Freeman, Mr Bright. It was just that no one had bothered to tell them.

‘You found what you’re looking for?’ Freeman glanced up over the glasses perched so incongruously on his crooked nose.

‘Nearly,’ Cass said. ‘I need details of a bank account. I’m pretty sure the company will be Bank-owned – Bright would want control. I wondered if Diana Jacobs would be able to get it for me?’

There was a pause, and Cass understood why: they’d gone to great lengths not to ripple the surface, and now here was Cass, wanting to drop an anvil into that quiet pool.

‘She can do that,’ Maric answered, ‘if she logs in with this username and password.’ He scribbled something down and handed it to Cass. ‘I created a new user. The Bank has an imaginary employee.’

‘Won’t it be traceable to her computer?’

‘No.’ Maric grinned. ‘Not unless they get someone as good as me to dig around. And there isn’t anyone as good as me.’

Freeman called the young lawyer, and while they waited for her to call back, Cass paced the flat, leaving a trail of smoke in his wake. He guessed this must be how most people felt waiting for a bug test after having unprotected sex. His stomach churned greasily and his skin tingled. If this account number led nowhere, then he was fucked. Not only
would he have let his little brother down, but Mr Bright would have beaten him.

Maric watched him thoughtfully, his casual demeanor the complete opposite of Cass’ nervous electricity.

‘You have to learn to care less, Jones,’ he said eventually. ‘And you have to remember that there are many ways to skin a cat. If you don’t find the boy this time, there will be other times.’

Cass paused in his pacing. Maric was older than him, and had no doubt led a more interesting life, but it was all lived within systems and behind screens. He played with people from a distance. Cass’ life was blood and earth and guilt. It was
real
.

‘Time for me may well be limited,’ he said after a bit. ‘
Free
time, that is.’

Maric smiled. ‘This is true for both of us. Makes the time more fun though, doesn’t it?’

Cass almost laughed; maybe they weren’t that different after all. Knowing the game could be over at any moment certainly made him feel more alive.

Brian Freeman’s phone rang in the other room and Cass’ heart stopped. This was it. He stared at Maric and the hacker winked.

‘Let’s go and see if Fate is on your side.’

‘I don’t believe in Fate,’ Cass said automatically. As he followed the slim man along the corridor, he wondered if that was still strictly true.

‘There,’ Freeman said after he ended the call, ‘that’s who the account belongs to. It’s a medical facility, and not Flush5 either. She couldn’t go deeply enough through the layers to see who the final owner was, but my money would be on our Mr Bright.’

‘What kind of medical facility?’ Cass frowned as he looked at the address. The name of the place,
Calthorpe House
, didn’t give much away. What had all those medical tests revealed? Was there something seriously wrong with his nephew?

‘Guess that’s up to you to find out.’ Freeman got to his feet. ‘I’ll let you have Wharton and Osborne. They’re good blokes, and they like you.’ He gave a tired laugh. ‘Fuck knows why. You must still have some of that old Charlie Sutton charm. But first we need to get back to the house and get some sleep.’ He held up the small, sleek laptop. ‘And I can keep this?’

‘It’s yours,’ Maric smiled. ‘You paid for it.’

‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, son.’

‘Likewise.’ The hacker followed them to the door. Night had somehow disappeared into morning and now the building was alive with the sounds of water rushing through pipes as showers woke the residents up, and doors slamming as they answered the siren call of the office. For a while it had felt like they were the only people alive in the block, and thinking of how these people had all been asleep throughout the activity of the night made Cass wonder again at how little anyone understood of the world around them. What had Dr Cornell said?
Nothing is real. The world is on its head
. How right was the old man going to turn out to be?

‘Good luck, gentlemen.’ Maric opened the door. ‘And goodbye.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

T
he two days since DeVore’s panicked phone call had passed relatively quietly. At first Mr Bright wondered if DeVore’s nerves would get the better of him and make him call Mr Dublin or one of the others, but it appeared not. Perhaps the rumours of his own current moment of instability hadn’t reached the House of Intervention yet.

That was quite likely, of course, since Mr Bellew’s clumsy attempts at a coup had failed and the House of Intervention had gone back to its normal place in the world; keeping watch over the inhabitants, letting Mr Bright know if anything too untoward appeared in the data stream. Outside of the Inner Cohort’s annual reviews it was a forgotten place, and he doubted that Mr Dublin had remembered DeVore yet, or got around to explaining what he believed to be a shift in the powerbase.

That thought gave him some sense of comfort. Mr Dublin was good – Mr Bright quite respected him – but he had a long way to go to reach the top of this game they all played. Perhaps Mr Dublin was too pure for the machinations required in the First’s absence; he certainly lacked fire. It had always been Mr Rasnic of the pair who
Glowed
the brightest.