The Glimpse (16 page)

‘What about the law degree?’

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‘I’l hack in and tag it on. Obviously a university check would come up negative, but court security won’t be would come up negative, but court security won’t be doing that.’

Ana nodded. Letting him get on with it, she opened up Cole’s most recent arrest report.

Cole’s current pre-charge detention depended on circumstantial evidence and inductive reasoning. The first assumption that Jasper had left the Barbican involuntarily in the Volvo, led to a second; the driver of the Volvo must have had an informant keeping him abreast of Jasper’s movements. Cole, who’d been captured riding the lift down to the blue car park shortly after Jasper, fitted the profile. Additionaly, during the wide video surveilance search to see if Jasper had left the Barbican by some other means, the Wardens had scanned for Cole. He wasn’t seen again, which pointed to the strong possibility that he was the Volvo’s second passenger.

Ana checked the other arrest reports. Cole’s first detention under the 2017 Terrorism Act occurred simply because he’d been caught on video surveilance camera taking snapshots around the Tower Bridge area several months before the bombing. Two years later, a fast-food restaurant’s surveilance camera filmed him drinking coffee beside a Novastra employee who disappeared a week later, and Cole became a suspect for the second time.

Flimsy evidence. Clearly what counted against Cole was his relationship with the Enlightenment Project leader, Richard Cox. Lila had said it herself. Cox practicaly raised him. Without that connection Cole wouldn’t have stood out from the crowd. But this time was different.

His pres-140

ence in the car park when Jasper vanished wouldn’t be ence in the car park when Jasper vanished wouldn’t be so easily explained to a courtroom. And for al she knew, the Wardens might now have discovered
Enkidu
was the name of Cole’s boat.

A shard of doubt cut through Ana. For the first time, she seriously considered the possibility that Cole stil operated for the Enlightenment Project and was involved in Jasper’s abduction. The evidence might be circumstantial, but there was a pattern, and Cole was at the centre of it. He was the invisible eye of the storm.

Dread swamped her. She began biting her fingers, an old nervous habit.

Catching Nate’s eye, she blushed, hoping that in her distraction she hadn’t done something to reveal her Pure upbringing. But then she realised why Nate’s look struck her as odd. The hostility had falen away. Anxiety lined his face.

‘So?’ he said, the defiance instantly returning. She moved aside to let him see the screen. ‘Don’t want to read al that legal jargon. Summarise, why don’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ana replied.

‘But there was that other guy, same thing right?’

‘The case of Peter Vincent, yes.’

‘And?’

‘And the blue car park is unused except for Level One where al the Pure chauffeurs wait. There’s no reason for your brother to go down there, but there’s evidence showing he took the car park lift at pretty much the same time the Pure disappeared, and neither were seen leaving time the Pure disappeared, and neither were seen leaving the Barbican afterwards.’ Nate squeezed a hand over his knuckles. The bones cracked.

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‘Yeah, we know that. What else?’

‘Peter Vincent didn’t have your brother’s connections.

His mother was just foreign.’

Nate rose abruptly. ‘Hurry up,’ he said. ‘I’l wait for you outside.’

Ana pretended to continue reading as Nate crossed the basement and headed up the concrete stairwel. The computer beside her whirred, scanning milions of IDs to find her a physical likeness. Once she was alone, she clicked open Cole’s psychiatric assessment from seven years ago and read a brief summary of his background, lifted from a second ‘unavailable’ report from his infancy.

Born twenty-four years ago to Samuel and Jennifer Winter, a drunk driver kiled his father when his mother was pregnant with her second child. Cole became disrupt-ive and problematic at nursery school. Teachers referred Jennifer Winter to a local psychologist. A preliminary examination diagnosed Cole as ADHD. The nursery refused to accept him back unless he took the advised medication.

Opposing the medication, his mother puled him from the establishment. A year later, when school became compulsory, welfare services got involved. A subsequent investigation deemed Mrs Winter unfit to care for her two boys.

Cole and Nate were placed in a foster home. Within the space of a year Cole moved to three different homes and finished in a boy’s orphanage. At ten years old, he ran away, and became a missing person. He didn’t resurface until his assault on a police officer seven years later, at a protest raly against compulsory Pure testing to al school children. Up 142

until then it had been voluntary, though you could only move to a Pure community if you’d had the test.

Ana stopped reading. She glanced at the high basement windows facing the stairwel. Nate must have been about a year old when social services took him from his mother.

Had he been shipped from foster family to foster family too? Had he ended up in the Enlightenment Project with his brother? Lila had said Nate and Rachel grew up together. Were they al from the Project?

These weren’t the sort of people she was used to dealing with. She didn’t know the first thing about growing up in the insane City with Psych Watch and welfare constantly breathing down your neck. She didn’t know what people like Nate and Cole had to do to survive.

Cole’s psychiatric report concluded with a diagnosis of Aggressive Anger Disorder, Impulse Personality Problems and a diagnostic impression of Hidden Personality Disorder.

In a courtroom, none of that would mean much. Ana could argue that eight milion Londoners had similar records. Hidden Personality Disorder just meant the examining psychiatrist thought something was wrong but examining psychiatrist thought something was wrong but couldn’t back up his judgement with anything specific.

And the Aggressive Anger Disorder diagnosis would simply be a result of his one-time arrest for assault.

She closed the computer file and sat for a few minutes.

She wondered if what she was doing proved more than any suicidal mother or DNA tests that she belonged among the Crazies. The deceit, the danger, her curiosity

– surely a normal Pure girl would be running for her life right now?

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But Ana was stil there. Because, beneath her determination to help Jasper, there was also the fact that she’d been waiting years to take control of her future.

Because like a wooden puppet in a fairy tale, when she’d ventured into the City, the strange, dark place had brought her to life.

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13

Court

Ana and Nate met Cole’s lawyer two blocks from Acton Magistrate’s court. Jackson looked marginaly better with clothes on, but even a clean shirt and suit trousers couldn’t conceal the seedy neglect that pervaded him. As they approached, the lawyer combed in the bristled tufts around his bald patch. When he saw them he stopped and began chewing on a finger.

Ana kept her distance as Nate set up the lawyer’s Ana kept her distance as Nate set up the lawyer’s interface, configuring it to the control pad she would be using to type on. The pad meant Ana could type from her lap, without an interface camera needing to track her hand gestures.

‘Put these in,’ Nate said. He thrust a set of headphones at Jackson. Jackson’s hands trembled as he fixed the soft globes into his ears. Nate glued a bit of extra fuzz on to the lawyer’s sideburns, then they tried a practice run.

Ana typed, getting a feel for the pad’s touch screen, adjusting her finger gestures to the keyboard which was smaler than the virtual one she usualy used. Jackson spoke her words out loud like a child learning to read.

As they practised, it didn’t seem possible, but the lawyer’s delivery got worse.

She looked askance at Nate. He ignored her.

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When they’d finished, Jackson began to fiddle with the hidden headphones. Sweat patches bloomed under his arms despite the cold.

‘We should go,’ she said. Nate nodded, but for a moment no one moved. Finaly, Ana put Jackson’s greasy interface chain and housing over her neck, and they trudged down Ave Road, stopping at the corner of Winchester Street.

The magistrates’ building lay up ahead, a red-brick, one-storey structure, reminiscent of the Victorian industrial era.

The grey slate roof sloped back on al four sides. Sash windows ran the length of the two visible wals.

windows ran the length of the two visible wals.

‘You’d better not mess this up,’ Nate said, scowling at thin air, so Ana couldn’t tel which of them he was talking to. Without another word, she and Jackson stepped off the kerb, leaving him behind.

At the stone-carved gable above the entrance, Jackson nervously twisted his headphones. Half the fuzz of his left sideburn dropped, dangling down at an angle. Ana stopped him just before they reached the metal detector.

Blocking him from the security guard’s view, she fixed the hair back in place.

‘You’l be fine,’ she whispered. ‘Just promise me you won’t do that in the courtroom.’ She turned and smiled at the guard, took off both the interfaces she was wearing and put them, along with the pad, on the automatic roler mat to be scanned. The guard returned her smile, raising an eyebrow at the equipment as though to say,
travelling light?

She grinned, fear and excitement jostling inside her.

They passed through a double doorway and turned left into a courtroom. Half a dozen rows of slim tables faced 146

a raised platform. Wood paneling enclosed the judge’s podium. Centred directly below the platform stood the transcriber’s beech-wood desk. The transcriber’s interface was already synched up to a projection screen.

The dock lay on Ana’s right-hand side, level with the transcriber’s desk.

Before the bench, on the left of the courtroom there was a locked glass booth.

a locked glass booth.

Ana settled into the front row beside Jackson. It was strange that after nearly three years of folowing Jasper’s studies, it was her and not him putting it al into practice.

She breathed in the smel of polished wood. Her insides tingled with anticipation.

The counsel for the prosecution arrived and took his seat at the other end of the front bench. He placed a silver pad on the table and slicked back thick hair with a large, steady hand. He glanced her way but showed no interest.

The courtroom stirred with the defendant’s arrival.

Handcuffed to a guard, Cole Winter entered the glass booth from an external doorway. A second guard sealed the booth behind them. The first removed the cuffs, then unlocked the door into the courtroom.

Ana watched Cole as he crossed to the dock. Despite the shabby suit and bruises on his face, his smooth movements conveyed deep self-assurance. His shorn hair was dark, his eyes deeply set, and his muscular frame towered above the guard. Everyone in the courtroom rose, looking left as the Bench arrived, but Cole turned his gaze to their table. His eyes met Ana’s and locked on her. Heat rose to her cheeks.

She struggled to disengage but found it impossible until he looked away.

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The Bench stepped up to their raised seats. As two of the three judges sat, everyone but Cole and the prison guards on either side of him, did likewise.

guards on either side of him, did likewise.

‘The court requests the defendant gives his ful name for the records,’ the standing magistrate said.

‘Cole Alexander Winter.’

The deep, smooth quality of his voice surprised Ana. She found herself looking at him again, noticing a tattoo the size of a postage stamp peeping out of his shirt colar. He seemed to sense her. His eyes flicked to where she sat.

She looked down immediately, staring at the pad on her lap.

‘We are here to discern,’ the standing magistrate said,

‘whether the court has the right to hold you under the pre-charge detention of the 2017 Terrorism Act. This wil be a plea before venue.’ The magistrate pushed horn-rimmed glasses up his nose several times as he spoke. ‘We wish to know,’ he continued, ‘if you are later arrested for the abduction of Jasper Taurel, how wil you plead.’

‘Not guilty,’ Cole said.

‘Prosecution, you may stand to outline your reasons for holding the defendant.’

The prosecution rose and recounted the circumstantial evidence weighing against Cole: his presence the night of the abduction in the same car park as Jasper; the formative years Cole spent with the Enlightenment Project; his close relationship with the terrorist Richard Cox.

Ana switched the pad to mute and practised touchtyping Ana switched the pad to mute and practised touchtyping with the screen lying flat on her lap. As she focused her breathing, entering the light zone of concentration she 148

used for her piano-playing, she decided she would not look at Cole again. He totaly unnerved her.

The prosecutor outlined Cole’s prior conviction for GBH

and his arrest two years ago in connection with the abduction of a Novastra employee.

‘Jasper Taurel,’ the prosecutor said, ‘is the son of Novastra CEO, David Taurel. In each of Mr Winter’s prior arrests, Novastra was the target. This alone, I’m sure, is enough to convince this court that Mr Winter’s presence in the car park, under no circumstances—’

‘Objection!’ Ana fumbled to her feet. Jackson squinted warily at her. ‘Mr Winter was questioned, but never charged in either of his prior detentions,’ she said, hoping the wobble in her voice wasn’t too obvious. ‘His prior arrests should not be counted against him.’

The female magistrate scowled. ‘This isn’t a trial, miss, sit down.’ Ana plonked into her seat. The magistrate’s eyes slid across to the prosecution. ‘Stick to the point,’ she instructed.

The prosecution straightened his tie and cleared his throat. ‘A look at Jasper Taurel’s telephone bil wil remove any doubt from this courtroom as to whether Mr Winter’s presence in the car park can be considered a mere coincidence.’