In the Company of Ghosts (7 page)

‘So, you’re the fool that’s been choking our pipe with Brazilian data packets? Bandwidth down here is kind of thin, in case you haven’t noticed. Sir Christopher Wren didn’t exactly design this royal hidey hole with optical cabling and wireless relays in mind, the internet not being so popular back in the seventeenth century.’

Spads flexed his arm, working out the creaks from carrying the screen and pointed to the wall’s shelving. ‘Where does the data go that you’re mirroring?’

‘You really are a coder, aren’t you? All this time here, you’ve never walked down to the office’s mainframe level? Like nothing you’ve seen before. Homebrew kit, just to keep things interesting. Non-standard, to minimise leaks. Big old prehistoric cabinets, solid-state drives and a Linux fork that’s the Galapagos Islands as far as any system evolution you’d recognize. All the paper files are captured digitally too, before they’re incinerated. Quite a sight to behold. An OCR scanning line that can chop a telephone directory and read the data in less time than it takes a man to spit.’

‘Just like us,’ said Spads. ‘Filed but not forgotten. Not completely, anyhow.’ He had been meaning to investigate Wren’s underground palace. But physical complexity confused him sometimes. He often found it easier to ignore than explore. In the old flat in East London where Spads had lived for the first twenty years of his life, he had only ever walked the same route to the bus stop. Never explored the maze of roads that led off his street, never ventured through the parks and squares nearby. It always embarrassed Spads that when someone stopped him on the pavement to ask him the way to a road that was quite probably only a minute away, he could give the person no answer and had to pretend he was visiting the area too.

Ludington rolled over to the monitor, lifting up a screwdriver set from the mess on the surface. ‘Sure is strange, right, the crap that sinks down this deep. Like some dead, rich, white guy with two different deaths on him. Simon Werks, too. Shit.’

Spads glanced up at the ceiling. It was hung with model aircraft and spaceships suspended from string, left slowly spinning by the draft from the hard drives’ cooling fans; model kits carefully put together and expertly painted before decals had been applied. ‘The SDF-1 Super Dimension Fortress, from
Macross Frontier
.’

‘You know your anime. Good to see some of the kids today still getting themselves half an education. Here, hold the back of the screen for me while I pop this.’ In Ludington’s hands, the monitor was quickly stripped apart, pieces of the set spread in an arc of components in front of the man. Turning over the rear glass substrate of the screen, the engineer ran his hands over four blue cables emerging from each corner, all of them linking into a marble-sized sphere hanging from the back. ‘Now this is a piece of work. They’ve drilled a camera in next to the control system, motion activated too. See how it’s connected to the power unit? Every time someone moves, it feeds the computer with an image file.’

‘The footage it collected was encrypted,’ said Spads. ‘As far as we know, only Werks and a single man on his security payroll had the key to unlock the file.’

‘You think? Here’s the kicker, you can access the surveillance footage remotely too,’ said Ludington. ‘All the movies that this camera took were being duplicated out through the power supply, using the building’s own electricity wiring as a line. My bet, there’s a router at the other end pumping this stuff out on a private party line.’

Spads hummed, pushing the skin of his cheek around, massaging as he mused over what the engineer had discovered.

‘You want to sneak a peek at what was being filmed inside Simon Werks’ office, this is the way to do it,’ added Ludington. ‘Nothing to trace on a bug sweep. No out-go broadcast inside the office. Router’s probably tucked away in the company’s accounting department, one port winking at the world.’

‘Werks might have wanted to access his camera remotely,’ said Spads.

‘Hell, you know that would be done easier on the dead boy’s computer if the extra feed was for himself; remote desktop already built-in and as hardened as it can be with hackers like you about, right? No, the remote feed wasn’t designed in for Simon Werks. He didn’t know about it. This was a concealed extra. And it sure wasn’t put in by the hit team to play Peeping Tom. They even suspected there was a concealed camera inside their target’s screen and they would have swapped a fake drive in and taken the real hard disc with them. If Agatha asks what my guess would be, I’d say that the hidden out-go was put in by your missing corporate security manager, in cahoots with whoever built the camera for him. And
that
dude, they know what they’re about. Blackmail, maybe. Werks’ kind of fetish webcam action isn’t going to sit too good with the investors at Davos, eh? I reckon your man on corporate security, he figured he’d collect himself a little
just-in-case
traction on his boss. Never too early to protect yourself against the next downsizing.’

‘I can find the router,’ said Spads. ‘Then trace it back to the receiving address.’

‘Lots of proxy servers to hack on that journey,’ said Ludington. He picked up a pad and pencil and scribbled down a list of names. ‘Agatha said your missing corporate security officer used to be police on the Met, which means his contacts should be local. Here’re the people in town I’d finger as being good for your camera, they’re craftsmen all. Any of their bandwidth been joining the dots with the Werks Building, then you’ve found your camera designer, maybe your missing corporate security manager too if you get lucky.’

‘Would you help me find the router?’ Spads asked. ‘It would be quicker that way. I could try, but following wiring, it’s the wrong kind of real for me.’

‘A bit of fieldwork out in the clear? That’s not something I get asked to do often. Picking up hard disks to erase is as far as I usually go.’

‘Please?’ said Spads. ‘I’m meant to be going to Simon Werks’ flat next with Helen to help examine it for evidence.’

‘Miss Thorson? That’s
fine
work. Well, all right then. I’ll play network engineer for you just this once. Maybe in return you can get me her phone number.’

‘You mean hack it?’

‘I mean
ask
for it.’

Spads shrugged apologetically. ‘I think that might be the wrong kind of real for me, too.’

***

‘Well then, Helen,’ asked Agatha as she and Thorson walked the corridor towards the morgue’s cold room. ‘I trust you’ve been prospering without me. Although not
too
much, I hope.’

‘I can’t complain,’ said Thorson. There wasn’t much irony in her tone, given that was largely all she had been doing on the way to this East London facility. ‘Actually, I could, but much good would it do for me. How anyone expects me to pay my rent on what the office pays us…’

‘Who was it that said expensive taste and some ambition in life are its only requirements? How is Mister Doyle shaping up in Margaret’s shoes?’

‘I wouldn’t believe in great schemes, they rarely amount to much in the long term.’

They had reached the doors at the end of the dimly lit windowless corridor where Doyle’s tame pathologist was waiting for them. A tall, reedy-looking woman about Doyle’s age, her white coat pulled tight against more than the chill of the basement. She looked like she belonged here, below the narrow backstreets of Stratford, far away from the old Olympic facilities. A curator for the shells of the dead; prodding and probing those who had passed. She swung the doors open and pointed out a pile of paper sick bags on the side to both of them. ‘If you’re not comfortable around dead or naked bodies…’

‘More comfortable than I should be,’ smiled Agatha, weakly.
Mine normally have clothes on.

‘I only have feelings for expensive luxuries,’ added Thorson. ‘Normally it’s a weakness. But in here…’

‘I was constantly throwing up for my first five months,’ said the doctor. She led them towards a steel table, lumpy outlines under cover, bright and harsh in the room’s arclights. ‘You’ll be amazed at how many different ways people come into the mortuary. So many different ways to die, each with their own signs.’

Agatha stopped in front of the slab. Yes, the body was definitely on it, covered over with white linen. ‘And how did Simon Werks enter here? In your opinion?’

‘I didn’t need Gary Doyle’s scene of crime statement to tell me the cause of death – that it’s strangulation is obvious. But you’re in luck. My husband works in the laboratory upstairs, and he’s just expedited the toxicology results for me. The victim was tranquillised by some kind of methoxyflurane compound. It’s hardly the normal stuff you see in a hospital, a synthetic variant probably. The regular kind leaves organ traces of dichloroacetic acid and inorganic fluoride, especially in the kidneys. This left hardly any residue. If Doyle hadn’t asked me to put this one through on the QT as a crash priority, the methoxyflurane would have completely dissipated by the time a regular autopsy was performed. No trace of foul play.’

‘Any signs of a needle mark, doctor?’ asked Thorson.

The doctor pulled back the sheets covering Simon Werk’s corpse, revealing his head and chest. There was a wide-eyed innocence to his face, framed by a dark mop of hair and high cheekbones that agreed with his family’s Irish ancestry in the lean files the office had dug up on the man.

‘No. He wasn’t injected. From how his eyes appeared when he first came in, I would say sprayed in the face with an aerosol. The osmolality of his residual urine suggests a concentrated dose. Enough to knock the victim out in seconds. Unconsciousness would last fifteen minutes at the most.’

‘Have you heard of anything like this being used before?’

‘Not like this. Some armies use the regular flavour of methoxyflurane for emergency battlefield amputations. But engineered in this way? None of the uses would be honourable ones. Take out a target for capture and interrogation. A spot of quick date rape. Put a security van driver out for long enough to cut the money box off his handcuffs, maybe.’

Agatha rocked slightly, leaning on her umbrella. ‘Roll the victim off a cliff without leaving signs of a struggle and make it look like suicide?’

‘Exactly
that
sort of mischief.’

‘Which armies use the basic compound the drug was derived from?’ asked Agatha.

‘Currently the French, Australian and New Zealand forces,’ said the doctor. ‘Only for very rough and ready amputations in extreme conditions. Others used it in the past, but it’s fallen out of favour.’

‘Yes, those damn marauding New Zealanders,’ said Thorson, sarcastically. ‘Always causing trouble out in the world.’

The doctor pulled the sheets all the way back and Agatha tugged on a pair of transparent Nitrile gloves to examine the naked body. For someone who worked behind a desk and had started out as the programming breed, Simon Werks appeared fit enough. A little pale, perhaps. Not toned enough to be considered vain. Efficient, Agatha thought. Tending the engine of the flesh and always making sure it had the right fuel. A good diet from a personal chef, with the company gym at ControlWerks’ London office at his disposal at any hour of the day.
So who did you annoy, Simon? Whose skin did you get under for you to end up like this, laid out all pale and white and sad?
The state of the body didn’t tell her anything new. A death card stuffed in the mouth would have been nice, the Jack of Clubs with the assassin’s signature on it. But nobody did anything with a Mafia flourish these days, not even the old crime families. It was an odd thing, but ghosts rarely appeared to her in the presence of a corpse. Were they put off? It seemed a strangely squeamish trait among their own, if so. She had been hoping that Simon Werks’ spectre might even surface, but that, on reflection, was far too much to hope for.
So annoyingly obtuse. It’s as if they enjoy teasing me.

‘What do you think, Mrs W?’ Thorson asked Agatha.

‘It doesn’t feel right, Helen. Anyone savage enough to kill a man for business normally requires their actions to be recognised by the world at large. If the South Americans had undertaken this job, for instance, Mister Werks would have been found in pieces in a public place with a very explicit note explaining his crimes. Framing his death as a suicide invalidates all life insurance he might have had, so we can remove that as a motive. It’s the silence of this act that bothers me most. To snatch a life so quietly. If we were hunting a single suspect, I might propose a serial killer with celebrity tastes, but this was very much a hit, from the deployment of the exotic aerosol sedative right down to the professional kill team. Just like the old days.’

‘But these aren’t the old days.’

‘No,’ said Agatha. ‘That they certainly are not.’ She felt a wellspring of sympathy rising within her for this departed soul. Imagined Simon Werks as he would have been when he was a young child, playing on his game consoles and reading the computer manuals that had brought him here, to this slab, to this unanticipated end. Not much different from her two boys, Harry and Carl. Had they looked as pale and as dead as this, floating in the dark waters of the Atlantic? Bobbing amidst the wreckage of the jetliner that hadn’t yet been claimed. The sea took everything. Everything but Agatha Witchley and the cold knot of anger eating, eroding and biting into the pit of her desiccated womb. She who the waters had washed up, bitter and distrustful, leaving only justice and vengeance and the hope she might one day understand the difference between the two. Simon Werks was cold.
So cold.
She could feel his pain, his pain that had passed, gathering inside her, like the company of ghosts. She looked up and noticed the doctor holding a paper bag out to her, holding only air.

‘Are you alright?’

Agatha shook her head. ‘I believe I’m completely empty.’

‘It takes you that way, sometimes. I’m holding this one in cold storage as a John Doe, rotating the paperwork until you want me to declare,’ said the doctor. ‘Any idea how long that’s going to be?’