The Devil You Know

She wasn’t much consoled, but this time, when I held out the twenty, she took it and slipped it into her stocking top. “Do you think you can find her?” she asked. Her professional polish had all faded away in the space of a minute; she looked close to tears now.

“I don’t know. But I’m going to try.”

“Will Scrub—will she be okay?”

There was no point in sweetening the pill; whores know self-deceiving bullshit better than priests do. “I don’t know that, either,” I admitted. “I think she might be okay for a while, at least. If there’s something Damjohn doesn’t want her talking about, there’s no point in going over the top to keep her quiet if it’s only going to come out another way.”

Jasmine didn’t ask what I meant by that, and I didn’t explain. She probably wouldn’t have understood in any case, but to me it was looking like one of those logic problems that end up with the proposition that all men are Socrates, and Socrates is a rubber chicken. Thesis: I was the one who was nosing around where he shouldn’t be and asking all the awkward questions. Antithesis: Rosa was only dangerous if she told me something I wasn’t supposed to know. Synthesis: They only needed to keep her out of circulation until they’d succeeded in nailing me.

Fucking wonderful.

It felt like a long day. I went back to Pen’s place around four and killed some time recording a tune on a Walkman I’d picked up at Camden Market last year. It’s an old one—cassettes only—but it comes with its own plug-in mike and speakers, which makes it handy in all sorts of ways. It took a while to get the tune exactly right, and I was far from sure that I’d ever need it, but I had nothing better to do until either Dodson or Nicky called me and gave me the green light. I had John Gittings’s pincer movement in my mind—it had nearly got me killed the first time we’d tried it, but that was no reason to ditch a good idea. I worked steadily for an hour and a half and got a certain amount of relief from my turbulent thoughts.

Nicky didn’t call in the end; he just appeared, out of nowhere, in the accepted conspiracy-theorist style. I went downstairs looking for coffee and realized as I was pouring a generous scoopful into the moka pot that he was there, behind me, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark. He hadn’t moved at all since I came in. I could have gone right back out again without noticing him—and when I did notice him, I thought for a second that he was a visitant from some other plane entirely.

When I saw that it was just Nicky, I swore at him vehemently. He took the abuse with stoical indifference.

“I’ve done enough talking on the phone for one week,” he said quietly. “I work hard on my footprint, Felix. I keep it small for good reasons.”

“Your footprint?” I echoed sardonically.

“The traceable, recordable, visible part of my life,” he paraphrased, deadpan. “If I wanted to be visible, I’d sign onto the electoral register, wouldn’t I?”

“Whatever,” I said, giving it up. I pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him. “Have you got anything for me?”

He nodded and unfolded his arms, revealing the laptop sitting between them on the table. He pushed it across to me, and I took it.

“And—some kind of written summary?” I hazarded hopefully.

“No need for one. One folder—RUSSIAN; one file—RUSSIAN1; three thousand, two hundred records in an unbroken numerical sequence with the prefix BATR1038. Data entry in every case is by one user—the system gives him a handle of 017—and all amendments are by the same user. There’s only one conclusion a reasonable mind could draw.”

“And that is?”

“017 was the only man-slash-woman-slash-data-processing-entity to have any contact with this folder at any point.”

I absorbed this in silence, cast into momentary depression, until I saw the bolt-hole in Nicky’s wording. “You said a reasonable mind,” I pointed out.

He nodded. “Absolutely. A mind like mine, that welcomes paranoia as a way of maintaining a critical edge, comes out somewhere quite different.”

“Come on, Nicky,” I said. “Give me the punch line.”

“In a hundred and fifty-three cases, user 017 suddenly and for no apparent reason switches to a different data-input method. I found it in config.sys, because the log entry had actually been rewritten to allow it.”

“Layman’s English.”

“He ditched his keyboard and overwrote selected fields from a handheld Bluetooth keypad—probably that diNovo thing that Logitech were trailing in Houston a while back. The beauty of that is—well, I’m assuming that this is a dongle system. Keyboards are connected via an individually coded hardware key.”

“Right.”

“So a Bluetooth device wouldn’t physically connect to the computer at all. It wouldn’t have to fit the keyhole, because it wouldn’t be going in through the keyhole. It’s a completely wireless system.”

I chewed this over for a moment or two.

“But it was still user 017?” I said. “Same guy, different keyboard?”