Shredder (18 page)

“And left you to it?”

“I don't think he would have been much use, to be honest.”

“What would you have done, if that riot hadn't started?”

“I have no idea.”

“How did it start, anyway? Did you see?”

“The police tried to arrest some black guys in a boy racer, and the crowd turned ugly, and somebody had a go at the cop car with a scaffolding pole, and after that it all went crazy.”

Zoe frowned. “Who did?”

“Everybody did.”

“No, I mean, who took a scaffolding pole to the cop car?”

How the hell had she zeroed in on that?
I wondered. I hadn't been boasting—it wasn't something I felt proud of. “Some guy,” I said.

She sat up, her hands resting on my chest, her green eyes puzzled and her full lips parted in surprise. The sight of her was so distracting I didn't hear her question.

“Sorry?” I said.

“Was it you? Who started the riot?”

I hesitated. “It was all I could think of,” I said.

She stared at me, as if she was too shocked to speak; then lay down across me again, her breasts pressing into my chest, and she kissed me, tenderly at first, then more urgently, and I ran my hands through her hair and rolled her over, knocking into a side table and sending another porcelain shepherdess tumbling to her doom.

An hour later we'd shared a hot bath and something to eat. The instant noodles were two years past their sell-by date and tasted like ready-salted sawdust, but we were both so hungry we didn't mind. Now wearing only a bath towel, Zoe lay across the double bed—a big brass monstrosity draped in lacy white sheets that took up almost the whole main bedroom—examining the Turk's laptop.

It was one of those sleek ultraslim numbers in brushed aluminum with no moving parts, not even
a DVD drive. As soon as she opened the lid it sprang to life—well, to the log-in screen, anyhow: a bland blue field with a generic silhouette for a picture and a single empty log-in box, with the caption in a curly foreign script that I took to be Turkish.

“Did you grab the power adapter?” said Zoe.

“Damn it,” I said. “No.”

“Never mind,” she said. “Finding a new one shouldn't be a problem. Provided there are still some shops left tomorrow.”

“We don't even know if there's anything on it we can use.”

“I'll find out,” said Zoe. “It's not as if I have anything else to do.”

“Does this place have Internet?” I said.

“No, but one of the neighbors will,” said Zoe. “I'll just piggyback on their wireless.”

“So you can hack it? The laptop?”

“Anything a human being can program, another human being can hack,” said Zoe. “In theory. Given enough time.”

“I'm not sure if we have much time,” I said. “The Turk got away in one piece. He'll find what's left of his people soon, and they'll regroup, and he's going to want that laptop back.”

“Let's hope he does,” said Zoe. “Because that would mean there's something on it we can bargain with.”

Later that night we unlocked the bedroom windows and hauled them open and lay naked in the draft. The rain had cooled the night air, and after months of stifling heat, getting goose bumps was a novelty; besides, it gave us an excuse to cuddle up more closely. We talked and dozed and shagged and talked and dozed again; she told me a little about the bored, resentful cops who had been babysitting her in the safe house. She'd mentioned her dad to them, not so much to impress them as to make conversation, but they seemed to know the story already, and they weren't impressed. Maybe they knew the truth behind the official version: that DCI Prendergast had been on the take from the Guvnor, and when he was no further use the Guvnor had murdered him. When the call came to shut down the safe house and send Zoe back to York the cops guarding her couldn't oblige quickly enough, and ignored all her protests; less than twenty minutes later she'd found herself on the street, alone, in some Midlands city of rotting concrete. She
couldn't reach me, and Patrick was only an hour or two away by car….

She didn't go into detail about what the Turk's men had done while they'd held her prisoner, and I didn't ask, because it didn't matter anymore. But when I told her about my time at the Guvnor's place in Maida Vale and about Richard killing the nanny and going after McGovern's kids, and how I'd stolen his phone, she turned her head towards me.

“What time was that?” It was dark in the little room but I could sense her frowning.

“About three in the morning. No, four…the Guvnor let me go about half four.”

“Someone rang the Turk,” she said. “He was at the flat, I heard them talk.”

“Richard, I know.”

“No…this was later. About seven in the morning—no, exactly seven—Nico had this stupid digital watch that used to beep the hours, and I heard it go off. The Turk had arrived really early, to talk to his guys, and someone called him, and the two of them spoke in English. The Turk didn't say much, but I think it was about how you'd killed that guy, because he looked really pissed off.”

“You mean it was someone else on the Guvnor's crew?”

“It must have been. Who else knew that Richard was dead? But I heard a bit of what this other guy said—he made it sound like Richard had been his best friend; it was weird.”

I stared upwards into the darkness. The wind swept the sounds of the city over us: the rumble of a passenger jet coming in to land, two dogs in the next street having a barking competition, and as ever, the wail of sirens—tonight there seemed to be more of those than ever, their wails overlapping and distorting each other like a dozen drunken singers mangling the same tune.

That was the question I hadn't wanted to ask the Guvnor, but I'd asked Junior:
If the Turk turned Richard, how do you know he hasn't turned someone else?

From what Zoe was saying, it sounded like the Turk had. Which was fine, in one way, because the sooner the Guvnor was defeated the sooner this war would be over, and the Turk wouldn't need to use Zoe or me as pawns anymore…Except after today the Turk wasn't going to be interested in playing chess. Thanks to me two of his people had been crippled, three killed, and he himself had only just escaped being stoned to death in the street like a whore in the Bible. I was headed for that shredder of his, and knowing the Turk he'd find a way to have
Zoe lower me in while he watched. And if the police ever found out I had started that riot in Clapham, they'd happily let him.

I knew now where Amobi and the other cops stood in this battle—on the sidelines, watching. Why would they care if the Turk had a mole in the Guvnor's mob? They had no use for that information. The only person who might find it useful was the Guvnor himself. Right now, maybe just for a day or two, the Turk was weakened and on the defensive; this might be all McGovern needed to finish him off.

I had to get back to the Guvnor and tell him. Somehow.

The next morning, after a breakfast of baked beans warmed in the microwave, Zoe retrieved a second laptop from a wall safe concealed behind a painting. She explained to me her aunt used the same number combination for every lock, with a roll of her eyes that suggested she considered anyone who did that a total cretin. I nodded agreement, failing to mention I too used the same password for almost everything online…but then unlike her aunt I owned nothing worth stealing and I had no secrets worth knowing.

While I looked on Zoe fired up the second laptop, decrypted the next-door neighbor's wireless security, logged on to the Net using a proxy, and downloaded a suite of utilities from some Finnish hacker site. Then she set about creating a VPN, or something, into the Turk's laptop. At first she explained what she was doing, but as the work got harder her explanations tailed off. I'd stopped listening by then anyway: computer hacking isn't exactly a spectator sport, and I had a job of my own to do that wasn't nearly so straightforward. I had to find the Guvnor again, this time without Amobi's help.

That afternoon I kissed Zoe goodbye like a dutiful husband heading to the office. Neither of us mentioned that this might be the last time we ever saw each other; to say so seemed to invite disaster somehow, and if I'd thought about it too hard I might never have left. It took me fifteen minutes to walk to Richmond station; there were cop cars patrolling the streets, looking for would-be rioters, and I didn't want to draw attention to myself by running. I caught a tube train that would take me all the way across London, albeit very slowly, and sat hunched in the end carriage with my hood up, trying to look inconspicuous. Every tube train and platform and
forecourt was dotted with surveillance cameras, but before very long I gave up worrying about them or even looking for them—what was the point, when they were everywhere? The time to avoid being caught on CCTV would have been during that riot, but in the heat of the moment it had never occurred to me.

During the last outbreak of rioting, before the London Olympics, the cops had eventually come piling in with shields and batons to clear the streets—but they made relatively few arrests at that point. All that came later, when they'd gathered every scrap of CCTV footage they could find and analyzed it frame by frame, identifying everyone they could who'd been present, regardless of what those people had actually been doing. About four weeks after the riots came a wave of dawn raids: snatch squads had kicked in doors across the city, rounding up hundreds of suspects at the same time. When the accused came up in court the magistrates refused to hear any denials or excuses or explanations. It was like everyone who'd witnessed the unrest was infected with a plague virus and had to be quarantined before an epidemic of rioting brought down our civilization. One guy had been sentenced
to a year in prison for taking a plastic bottle of water from the wreckage of a shop long after the real looters had been and gone.

Eventually the cops would come for me, I knew, but they'd have to find me first, and I wouldn't be their top priority; they'd start with the teenagers who lived at home with Mum and Dad: police always go for the easiest targets first—it boosts their productivity figures. I was less worried about them than I was about the Turk; his people were better motivated, and he didn't have to worry about paying them to work antisocial hours. All their hours were antisocial.

The tube journey took less time than I expected because so many stations along the route were closed, and the train rattled echoing past empty, fully lit platforms. Each time, the guard announced beforehand in a bored drone that due to the “current situation” the next station was not operational and passengers for such-and-such a place should change somewhere else. I didn't know if there were actual riots in progress on the streets above me, or whether this rush was just a precaution; but all the same the guilt weighed down on me like the million tons of earth hanging over my head. If the judges were right
and riot was a transmissible disease, I was Typhoid Mary.

The nearest station to the Horsemonger pub was open, though. I ran up the escalator—I hate standing and waiting, it makes me feel like a cow on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt—half expecting to emerge into a scene from the Blitz. But life here, just as in Richmond, seemed to be carrying on as normal; there were buses rumbling and squealing along the street, and cabs, and traffic, and a flower-seller cheerfully hawking his wares to passersby. All the smashed windows and burning vehicles, all that was happening in some other London a million miles away. I set off down the street towards the Guvnor's pub, and it seemed no distance compared to last time, now that I knew where I was going.

But when I found the place, and stood looking at it from across the street, my first thought was I'd been wrong about the riots not coming here.

The Horsemonger was an empty blackened shell with fresh plywood nailed over its broken windows. The pavement around it had been swept clean of debris, but it was still streaked with charcoal, and the once-gleaming crimson tiles that ran along the façade were all cracked and blackened and dulled.
I knew the Guvnor's stock was low, but I hadn't expected this; I'd thought even rampaging local yobs would still have feared his reputation enough to give any business of his a wide berth.

My second thought was: no, I hadn't been wrong. There had been no rampage here. The Horsemonger was the only business I could see that had suffered. This wasn't riot damage—it was another act of war by the Turk: hitting McGovern in his heartland, advertising his weakness to the world. It had certainly left me stranded; I knew I'd been taking a long shot coming here, but I had no other way of contacting the Guvnor.

“You want a drink, you'll have to go to the corner shop, like all the other kiddies,” quavered a voice beside me. It was an old man sitting on a bench, wearing a quilted anorak and a flat cap pulled down over his eyes—far too hot an outfit for this weather. When I glimpsed the gray hair sprouting from the old man's ears and the woolly cardigan peeping out around his collar, I finally recognized him: Slasher Eric, the amateur plastic surgeon. Out here on the street, sitting alone with his fists in his pockets, he looked shrunken and harmless, like a shark out of water. I felt a twinge of pity for him, till it occurred to
me to wonder what he was clutching in that pocket. It was probably best to keep my distance, so I sat down at the far end of his bench.

“Looking for someone?” he said, without turning his head. He was staring at the pub as if he thought it might spontaneously refurbish itself and reopen.

“Same someone as last time,” I said.

“There were cops watching this place round the clock till two days ago,” said Eric. “They disappeared after it went up. Makes sense, I suppose—why would anyone come here now?”