Spook Street полностью

After fetching the ice for Chapman’s knee—and Jeez, it was painful the way old folks crumbled: Ho was broad-minded, it was one of the things Kim, his girlfriend, most admired about him, but seriously, old people made him feel ill—he’d returned to his machines. He planned to stay late; there was stuff he preferred to do from a Service computer. It was kind of a dare—a task he’d been set. A quest, even. A quest, and the prize was his lady’s hand. Though after four dates, and the amount of money he’d shelled out, her hand was the least he was owed.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t into him. Roddy Ho didn’t fool easy, and Mama Internet had taught him well. When a chick was really into you, there were ways you could tell, and one of the ways you could tell was when she said “I’m really into you,” saying it low and breathy into his ear, friendly as a kitten, her leg brushing across the front of his trousers.

So yeah, she was into him. It was just that so far, at evening’s end, she’d had an important reason for getting home alone, a sick flatmate or a need to be up very very early next day, “but soon, Roddy, soon,” which was a phrase he’d hugged to himself like a hot-water bottle once he’d got home alone himself. Soon. He liked the sound of that. And if completing a quest made soon come sooner, then he was up for it. That was definitely the right phrase.

So anyway: his task. What had happened, the evening before, Kim, his girlfriend, had been asking him how he did what he did; how he hacked in and out of other people’s networks, big and small. He’d had to laugh. “Hacking,” he’d explained, implied slicing and chopping, like using a machete to move through a jungle. But when he did it—“When Roddy Ho does it, babes”—ghosting was the word you were after, because he left no tracks, and nobody knew he’d been there.

“So you can’t, like, change anything? You leave everything the way it was?”

Again: ha! She was so cute and so sexy, but she really didn’t get the things the Rodster could do with a keyboard.

“Kim,” he’d said. “Babes.” She loved it when he called her that. “I can change anything I want. I just make it look like it’s always been that way, you dig?”

And she dug, of course she did, because she laughed too in that sexy way she had, and gazed at him with liquid eyes.

“That’s great, you’re so wonderful, because . . . ”

Because it turned out she had a friend with a problem.

Long story short, the friend had been ripped off by the company she worked for, well, used to work for, only they’d fired her for some made-up shit when the real reason was she was too good at her job, and they couldn’t afford to pay the commission they owed her—“Thousands of pounds, Roddy”—and now she couldn’t afford a lawyer to sue them, so if there was any way he could “ghost” into this company’s system and adjust their accounts so the money they owed her ended up on her credit card or something, that would be beyond wonderful. Because she was such a sweet friend, and pretty too, and she’d be so grateful to Roddy, and Kim would be grateful too, and wouldn’t that be nice, Roddy having two pretty girls feeling grateful and friendly towards him at the same time?

And Roddy had gulped and adjusted himself, and said, “Sure, babes,” but it had come out squeaky.

So anyway. As luck would have it, Kim had had the company’s details jotted down on a piece of card, which was in front of Roddy now. So it was just a matter of getting into submarine mode, diving into the deep web, and it didn’t matter that the others were still floating round Slough House, because not one of them would realise what he was up to if they were watching over his shoulder.

Because he worked better at low temperatures he opened the nearest window, let cold damp air refresh him, then settled to his quest.

At the junction where the road from Smithfield ran under the Barbican complex, Patrice took shelter outside a gym which was disgorging toned, sweaty City workers, bags in one hand, smartphones in the other, already catching up on what they’d missed while on the treadmill. The massive structure overhead kept the rain off, but the air was damp, and the pavements lumpy with some kind of deposit from the concrete overhangs. It felt like the entrance to an underground garage.

For one brief moment, he remembered the cellar.

Each of the boys, on their twelfth birthday, had been locked in a cellar at Les Arbres, with no natural light and just one candle. Every morning, a single bread roll and a beaker of water was delivered. And every morning, they were told they would be released as soon as they asked for their freedom. Bertrand, Patrice remembered, had lasted just seventeen days before asking to be released. Patrice remembered Frank’s look of disdain at his son’s reappearance, as if it were an act of cowardice, or betrayal. Patrice himself had lasted a full month: at the time, a new record.

Yves had lasted two.