“Where’s the car?”
“No trace.”
Spiros picks up the picture of the man with the camera and walks out.
Spiros fills a cup of water from the drinks machine in the corridor and hands it to Danny. He draws one for himself, and then reaches into his inside jacket pocket and takes out the picture of the photographer. “I didn’t show you this,” he says. “Any ideas?”
Danny examines the picture, hands it back to Spiros, and says, “Never seen him before. May I have a copy?” Spiros thinks about it and nods.
Selina has scrubbed up well and she leans across the table towards Sunil. She’s not beautiful. She has a strong nose and dense black eyebrows, but they’re framed with a burst of wavy dark brown hair. They’ve just demolished dolmades, small fish, green beans in tomato and garlic sauce, and a pile of charcoal-grilled lamb chops. “Where were you born?” she asks.
Sunil laughs. “Croydon,” he says. “It’s a suburb in south London. It wasn’t Bombay. Lipame.”
“Good try,” she says. “It’s a bit sad if your first Greek word is sorry. But let’s get it right. It’s not quite right the way you said it. It’s lee-PAH-may! Go on!” When she repeats the middle syllable her lips open wide. The waiter brings another jug of wine and puts it on the table. Sunil practises the word after her. Several times.
“I have a little house,” she says. “It’s up in the hills towards Temploni. It’s quite cool at night.” She giggles. “I’ve got three goats and six chickens and I am useless at looking after them. My vegetables die. Every year I have big plans for my vegetables and by July they are dead. That’s my life. At work I try very hard to keep people alive, and when I get home the sun has roasted the peppers to death. The goats despise me. Have you ever kept goats?”
Sunil admits that although there may be vast herds of goats in Croydon, he’s never come across them.
“Goats are very intelligent,” Selina says. “Sheep—you just eat. Goats—you know there’s consciousness there. They’re funny. They’re adapted to survive. You should meet my goats.”
Sunil puts his hand across the table. She puts hers over his. “I would very much like to meet your goats,” he says. She nods, and calls “To logoriasmo, parakolo!” to the waiter. Sunil is making a neat pile of Euros on the table when Jack walks in.
Directors come in two flavours—charm or totalitarian dictator. Jack is charm. “Selina,” he says, “you are looking stunning tonight. Sunil, the plane is leaving in two hours. Sorry to break up the party.”
Sunil sees her eyes look down and her shoulders slump. “Sorry, Jack, not possible,” he says. “We’re running a parametric vector equalisation test on the corpses. It won’t be finished until around eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. If we interrupt it we’ll scramble the data.”
“Lynne’s not going to be happy,” Jack says.
“Send the plane back tomorrow. We’ll have the equipment packed, at the airport, and ready to go at fourteen hundred hours.”
Jack thinks for a few seconds and nods. “Okay,” he says, “it’s your gig. But the flight costs come off your budget, not mine. Goodnight, Selina.” He walks out.
The brown eyes lift and focus on Sunil’s. “What exactly is a parametric vector equalisation test?” she asks.
“Haven’t got the faintest idea,” he says. “I think we’ll have to ask the goats.”
Lynne and Danny are sitting in his office in the security centre looking at the pictures of a ginger-haired man holding a camera. “Spiros sent the pictures to Interpol,” he says. “They’re getting nowhere, but I have some friends who can dig a little deeper. His name is usually Adrian Kopp, but he has a dozen passports. He’s a freelance. Ex CIA.”
Danny swivels his chair around. “We’ve hacked everything we can hack. We still can’t find out who’s doing this to us. So far we haven’t found this man, let alone the others.”
“What others?”
“There have to be four or five at least. Times of death, Lynne. Nobody can get from Corfu to Kiev in an hour. This one’s our only lead so far.”
The man who sometimes calls himself Adrian Kopp is wearing cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt with a blue Texan university logo. He has his feet up on the chair in front of him. “That’s a hundred percent hit rate,” he says. “Worth the bonus, I think. I’ve put them back at least six months—maybe a year. They’re going nowhere, and you’ll be there first.”
The balding man sitting behind his very big desk nods and smiles.
Aluminium carry cases are stacked up in the computing centre. The portable units are laid out on a bench and connected to a central bay with thick cables. Sunil stands behind his technical team. Jack stands behind him. Progress bars crawl across screens as petabytes of data move between the links.
Lynne walks in. “Is it going to work?” she asks.
Sunil takes a fifty pence piece from his pocket, flips it into the air, catches it on the back of his hand, and examines it. “Maybe,” he says.
“Because if it doesn’t,” Lynne adds, “we’re in deep shit.”
FAST FORWARD two hours. The progress bars hit 100%. It gets quieter as the CPU fans in the portable units wind down to idle. Sunil stretches his back and says quietly to his team, “That’s all the material we’ve got. Move it into the simulators very carefully, one actor at a time. Start with Amber—she’s our worst-case scenario.”
What was flesh, what ate, what breathed, what read books and made love is now a collection of electron cloud superimpositions. Maybe it always was. Golden hair is numbers. Blue eyes are arrays of colour-spectrum frequencies. Fear and affection are probabilities. The computers will now attempt to act the actors.
Jack is floating. Jack is the camera. Amber walks down the street with snowflakes blowing around her hair. Lynne sits beside Jack in the cradle. Neither of them is smiling. There is a faint, subtle something about Amber that doesn’t quite flow. Sunil and his team are tweaking settings but generally making things worse.
They try a scene with the simulacra of each of their dead actors. Nothing works. They’re looking at a brilliant display of technology and a cold and inadequate experience. This time the nymphs have really departed.
“So,” Lynne says. “We’ve got three-quarters of a movie we have no hope of finishing. Terrific! Got any ideas?”
“Only one,” Jack says. “Get the writers in. I’ve put together the sequences that work. Maybe they can plot around them.”
“What are we going to do for actors?”
“Get some new ones.”
Lynne sighs. “It took five months to get the other brains functioning. We don’t have five months. The money will walk. We have to do something… drastic.”
Danny indeed has friends. There isn’t a film studio in the world that isn’t laced with security cameras. In Vladivostok there’s a team of high-powered ex-Soviet space industry computer experts with some very cute image- enhancement software, top-notch hacking skills, and a considerable fondness for dollars.
He’s looking at video of a service area in an obscure corner of Universa Studios in Los Angeles. A white van with a ladder strapped to the top pulls up and a ginger-haired man steps out. A red circle appears around his face and the video slows to about one frame every two seconds. Inside the circle the fuzzy image clarifies. There’s no doubt. Adrian Kopp carries a tool bag into the building, and the door shuts behind him.
Danny punches keys on his computer at the same time as he’s initiating a connection on a quantum- encrypted handset. It’s answered immediately. “The money is going into your account… now. I’ll wait till you confirm. (TWO BEATS) Pleasure. How good is the firewall at Universa?”
“Top grade commercial,” the voice at the other end of the line says, “but not up to military standards.”
