Joe Country полностью

Before returning to her room Catherine went downstairs and wordlessly dropped the holiday request on Louisa’s desk. On her way back she passed Ho leaving the kitchen: a slice of pizza hung from his mouth, and he was carrying a plastic bottle in his left hand, his right still bandaged up. He said nothing. He was probably working out how best to trace Harkness’s car, she surmised, though he was in fact thinking about mousetraps, how there was a thing about if you invented a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to your door. Frankly, though, Roddy couldn’t see how mousetraps could be bettered, the one he’d found in Wicinski’s bin being an unimprovably effective way of silencing the bastards. Not to mention damaging fingers. How was he supposed to navigate the keyboard jungle with his hand taped up? It was like attaching bells to a ninja. You were robbing him of his greatest strength.

When he got back to his office Wicinski was there, but not working; staring, rather, at Roddy. So that was the way it was. Okay, thought Ho. You and me. Right here, right now. One hand tied behind his back, kind of, but that wouldn’t slow him down: a back-flip, a left-handed throat jab . . . His arm was suddenly wet because he’d crushed his plastic bottle, flushing its contents over his wrist, in reaction to which he’d bitten through his pizza, half of which dropped to the floor. Shit. He put the bottle on his desk, retrieved his lunch, Wicinski’s eyes never wavering. You wanna piece of me? thought Roddy. Wanna try your luck? Bigger men than Wicinski had been mentally ground to paste by the Rodster. He removed a small brown pellet of dirt from his pizza—he was always finding pellet-shaped bits of dirt here just like the ones he found at home: strange—and flicked it away. Not about to let the staring weirdo spoil his lunch.

He logged on and picked up where he’d left off. One-handed he might be, but snatching data from Hampstead’s Mickey Mouse street-warden company was easy as kicking a puppy: the algorithm he’d triggered before going to warm his pizza had finished its job already, decoding the password. He copied it, flipped to the command screen and pasted it where the prompt demanded: bingo. Free and total access to all stored data, so now he could spend as long as he liked watching raw footage of cars parked on various roads in Hampstead, across a four-month timespan. He’d like to see Wicinski pull that off. The Rodster, on the other hand; give the Rodster anything with a monitor and a keyboard, he’d be watching rough cuts of the next Star Wars movie before you’d opened the popcorn.

Still sticky-fingered, he fed today’s date into the search box, and his left-hand screen fragmented into thirty-two boxes, each providing a live feed from one of Hampstead’s traffic-control cameras. And this was Roddy working single-handed, he reminded himself; his primo digits out of action, though flexible enough to shovel what remained of his pizza slice into his mouth. Back to the command screen: let’s skip back a couple of hours, see what was happening then. He could feel the new boy’s eyes on him. Maybe Lamb hadn’t given him anything to do; maybe Lamb had just told him to observe and learn, which was fair enough, but let’s face it: the only lesson he’d be taking home today was how far short of Roddy Ho’s skill sets he fell. Watch and weep, new boy, watch and weep. Roddy was viewing footage from this morning now, thirty-two boxes’ worth, each flipping into a new channel every few seconds because there was a lot of CCTV in Hampstead: a lot. Like everywhere else in London, when you walked the streets you were auditioning for the non-speaking role of passerby.

Or perhaps trying out as a stuntman.

Because there: blink and you’d miss it. Sixth screen along, third row down. He paused everything, moved the clock back thirty seconds, maximised the box that had caught his eye and ran it again. River Cartwright, jumping onto a moving car and clinging on for maybe seven seconds? Six? Roddy was going to time it, bet on that, but meanwhile he was enjoying the spectacle: the world’s worst suicide attempt. The car couldn’t have been going more than twenty. It was kind of a pity Cartwright had fallen off soon as he did, because if he’d managed another second or two, he’d have been dumped slap in the middle of the junction. And as far as Roddy was concerned, there was nothing wrong with River Cartwright that being involved in a major traffic pile-up wouldn’t put right.

A small detail entertainment-wise, but a crucial one so far as his task went, was that the number plate of the car Cartwright was attempting to sledge showed up bright and clear in the frame.