the store, paid cash for a ticket at the Knightsbridge Underground station, and disappeared into a dense cloud of commuters.
“Shit,” I said.
“No, this is perfect. It’s way easier to track people on the Tube. There are cameras all over the underground, even on the trains, and once they enter a station they can’t disappear into a blind spot, they can only pass through one of a small number of exits or transfer corridors.”
Another minimized window began to flicker. Jesse switched to the map, which now sported a flashing red location marker amid the sea of green. “There, see? She transferred at Piccadilly Circus to the Bakerloo.” The location marker submarined, and reappeared south of the river. “Exited at Lambeth North.”
I shook my head, awed.
“Yes, it’s astonishing, isn’t it?” Anya said. “A technical marvel, a social monster. Imagine when they have camera drones flying all over the city like pigeons. Watching us carefully. Erasing dissent before it even begins.”
“Come on,” I said. “In China, sure, but here? Or the US, or Canada? I can’t see it.”
“Knowledge is power, James, especially secret knowledge, and power corrupts.”
“Shit,” Jesse said. “We lost her. South of the river there are fewer cameras. She vanished on Hercules Road.”
He called up another map of London, this one mottled by a pattern that looked like an ink spill. Pretty much everything inside the Circle Line was a faint pink, but outside, patches of light blue developed, some isolated, some forming sizeable contiguous areas. I understood: a map of panopticon visibility. New islands and coastlines of coverage appeared as we zoomed in. Lambeth North was surrounded by roughly equal amounts of pink and blue. Once on Hercules Road, across from the station, Dana could in theory have walked a full mile without encountering another camera, if she had chosen her course very carefully.
“If we go through all the cameras around there for the last month,” I speculated, “have them look for Dmitri and Dana -“
“Yes,” Anya acknowledged. “But I think we will learn little more. Did you see, she paid cash for everything? They know they might be watched. No coincidence, I think, that she came from and went to a place outside of Argus’s remit.”
“So what do we do now?”
Jesse shrugged. “What else? We do it ourselves.”
“Ourselves?”
He grinned. “Fetch me my deerskin cap, Watson. The game’s afoot!”
“Not you,” Anya said to me. “The police will be looking for you, and they have Argus too.”
I nodded slowly. “Live by the panopticon, die by the panopticon.”
“Yes,” Jesse said, “exactly.”
I felt a bit bereft, a little like Miss Moneypenny wishing Bond luck, as I watched Jesse and Anya depart to investigate the situation on Hercules Road. But I wasn’t that worried about their safety, as they were bringing some of her uncle’s security men; and I didn’t really wish I was going with them. I felt like I had already used up my lifetime quota of adventure, and then some. Sitting in a luxury mansion waiting for my friends to return and tell me about their adventures seemed like a perfectly reasonable and defensible way to spend the rest of my life.
While waiting I used Tor to log into my private Gmail account, known only to Jesse and a few old friends. Several had sent me emails, probably wondering what the hell had happened to me and/or encouraging me to turn myself in. I decided that on second thought I didn’t want to read them and be reminded of my former life. That life was over.
I was about two seconds away from logging out when a chat window opened unexpectedly on my screen.
The person at the other end was
Chapter 58
I stared at the blank emptiness of the GChat window, not knowing what to think, until words crawled across it:
SW: james is that really you?
I swallowed, wondering the same thing in reverse. It was her style, at least; for whatever reason, she and I never used uppercase characters when IMing each other. My fingers found their way to the keyboard and I responded:
JK: yes.
SW: proof, please. sorry but don’t know what to believe.
I took a deep breath, thought of a nonsensical pillow-talk in-joke -
JK: pumpkin potato, but never potato pumpkin
SW: oh thank god
SW: james i thought you were dead. i thought you were dead it and it was my fault. sory for typos i’m crying can’t really see. what happened? where are you?
JK: your turn. how do i know it’s you?
SW: you never clean the french press right after you use it, no matter how many times i ask. when you open beer bottles you put the caps on top of the fridge.
SW: enough, or do you want more?
It was enough. I licked my lips, then asked the big one:
JK: how could you do it?
SW: do what?
JK: like you don’t fucking know.
SW: probably but i’m not sure.
JK: selling axon to drug cartels and rogue nations and funnelling the money into the bank accounts i never knew i had. pretending i was doing it. never telling me anything.
SW: i couldn’t. james I am so sorry, you have no idea because words can’t express, but there was just too much at stake. no one was supposed to find out. it just all got fucked up.
When I read that I snarled audibly at her use of the passive voice.
SW: are you with them now? jesse and anya?
JK: no.
It wasn’t technically a lie, not that I should have cared about lying to her. I felt my pulse quickening into a drumbeat of rage that threatened to overwhelm me.
SW: then where are you? what happened? can i help? send money, anything? just name it.
JK: the fucking nerve on you. help? sure. you can stop pretending like we’re still even friends. you deceive me for three years, ruin my life, nearly get me tortured to death, and now you want to do something for me? ok. turn yourself in, admit everything, clear my name. make me an innocent man again. that would be a fucking good start.
