us along a gravel trail to a wrought-iron bench across from a little plot of churned earth. A piece of paper adorned with a diagram of a complicated spiral pattern, footnoted in big flowery handwriting, sat on that barren dirt, weighed down by a sinuous hunk of green malachite. Plans for its reconstruction, I supposed.
Something about that piece of paper tickled something in the back of my brain. I wondered if I’d seen that spiral pattern before. One of the fractals that so fascinated Sophie, perhaps.
“I try to come here at least once a day,” Anya said. “To be surrounded by beauty.”
“We’re wasting time,” Jesse muttered.
“Yes, of course. Jesse never likes it here,” she said to me. “It isn’t useful.”
I grimaced awkwardly.
“It’s the Russian temperament,” Jesse explained to me. “She needs to spend at least an hour a day brooding uselessly about things, or her life is incomplete.”
“Yes, exactly,” she said acidly. “Unlike you careless Canadians.”
I tried to change the subject. “Remember the good old cold-war days when you Russians were the bad guys?”
She raised an eyebrow. “We were taught you were the bad guys.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. The Americans, sure, capitalist pig running dogs, but we Canadians have socialized medicine and open-door immigration. Actually we always kind of liked you Russkies. You were the enemy, but you were a cool enemy, and you played hockey. Hard to imagine Osama bin Laden on skates. Or Jorge Ortega.”
“And now your NHL has bought all our best players.”
“I’m pretty sure most of them come of their own free will.”
“For the almighty American dollar.”
I looked at her. “No offense, but I wouldn’t expect you of all people to be complaining about the abuses of the rich.”
She looked around at her private park. “Why? Because of all this? Because my uncle is a billionare?”
“Well,” I said, “yeah.”
“He wasn’t always. My family, we were well educated, before the revolution we were aristocrats, but James, I grew up poor. A big Moscow apartment tower, three of us sleeping in one room. Cockroaches. Sometimes no hot water, even in winter. When the USSR collapsed, that was a terrible time. So many homeless. Children, even, like wolves. Criminals everywhere. Gunshots at night. My other uncle was murdered. We ate meat only once a week. The schools were terrible, no computers, nothing. Uncle Viktor, nobody thought he would amount to anything, he was an actor who collected scrap metal. But maybe because all Moscow was scrap, that began to matter.”
“He made a billion dollars out of scrap metal?” I asked incredulously.
“Among other things. They were strange times, Moscow in the nineties.”
“And the Russian government tried to assassinate him a few years ago, right? That whole radiation-poisoning thing?” That bizarre story had gotten major coverage around the world. The Kremlin had never admitted responsibility, but couldn’t deny that a former KGB agent had come to London, poisoned Kharlamov’s senior advisor with polonium, returned to Russia, and subsequently been shielded from extradition.
“Yes. If he hadn’t had the flu that day… You see, he supports democracy movements in the motherland. He always calls it that.” An indulgent, amused smile flickered on her lips. “That is our ultimate goal at Grassfire. Freedom for all motherlands. But we must be careful with our money. No matter how pure your intentions, money is always a weapon of oppression. I see that clearer than ever now. Money, power, they do strange things to people.” She gave Jesse a meaningful look.
“Like what?” I asked.
“When you have them, you become different, no matter how hard you fight to remain the same. Power corrupts, this we all know, but do you know the mechanism? It severs your human connections. It sets you adrift. People, even friends, even family, they come to you not for your company, but for your power. I see it myself. Since I was thirteen, since he became rich, the whole world sees me as a tool, not a person. An access point. An interface to my uncle’s good graces. All beautiful women experience something like that, being a symbol, a goal, a thing. But for me it was much more stark. No one was ever interested in me as a person. Only in what I could bring to them.”
“Sophie used to say the same kind of thing sometimes, about being a genius,” I mused, then realized I had just spoken of her in the past tense for the first time.
Anya looked dubious. “Maybe it’s similar.”
Again I wondered how and why Sophie could have betrayed me.
The door to the greenhouse opened, and two servants appeared, carrying a food. They did not speak a word as they arrayed our lunch on a folding table. I had never had caviar before. I pretended to like it.
Back in the corner studio, Jesse and Anya checked email. She scanned a missive written in Cyrillic, and grunted with satisfaction. “Bad news and good. All Dmitri’s access was via Tor, untraceable. But Dana logged on to Gmail from an Internet cafe in Earl’s Court three weeks ago. A fatal error, I think.”
“Gotcha.” Jesse grinned. “Now we look through the eyes of Argus, and we see all there is to see.”
Chapter 57
Anya and I shoulder-surfed while Jesse drove. Argus’s actively user-hostile interface was a complex mix of command lines and windows whose layouts and information density would have given graphic designers gibbering nightmares, but he navigated expertly, rattling out cryptic commands from memory.
When he first logged in I instinctively glanced down at his fingers on the keyboard, and noticed he was still using a password that dated back to high school:
“Their facial recognition software is pretty awesome,” Jesse said, “they have a whole server farm somewhere doing nothing else. I’m having them go through all the archive data from the cameras near that Internet cafe.”
He flipped to a Google Map stippled with so many green location markers that London looked covered by a thick moss.
“Holy crap,” I said. “Are those all the cameras?”
“No. If we showed all the cameras the whole screen would be green. These are just the densest clusters.”
A minimized window began to flicker, calling for our attention, and he swapped it to the foreground: a YouTube-like video browser. As we watched, tabs accumulated rapidly along its top edge, dozens of them rippling rightwards and then offscreen. He began to flip through them. All were brief fragments of video from black-and- white street-view security cameras, with three-week-old timestamps superimposed in the lower right. A single figure was common to them all, a slender woman with dark hair in a hooded coat. Thanks to her teddy-bear backpack I knew her even before we caught a frontal view of her face: Dana.
“Got you,” Anya whispered.
I nodded. Argus was probably built for exactly this kind of problem: isolate a person in a fragment of video, tag their location at the beginning and end of that shot, access the nearest cameras, and repeat. In the same way that a video was a collection of many still photos, you could construct a narrative out of many short video snippets. In theory you could reconstruct your target’s entire life, so long as they didn’t leave your camera network.
“Look, she went shopping.” Anya sounded amused.
We watched Dana walk into Harrods three weeks ago from the perspective of seven different cameras, some in the department store, some on the streets.
“Fast forward?” I suggested.
Jesse shook his head. “The software can only reconstruct her trail so fast. We’re already near the leading edge. But it’s bidirectional, we can rewind her backwards, too.”
He pushed a button, and time reversed. Dana moonwalked through the Victoria and Albert Museum for a little while, looking like any tourist. She seemed alone. This did not jibe at all with Dmitri’s claim that Ortega kept her in tight custody. I didn’t understand why he had bothered lying to me.
Jesse switched the arrow of time again. Dana bought a box of chocolates for cash in Harrod’s food court, left
