“Nigel, yeah? There are three of us here normally, but Andy’s on holiday and Charlie’s in Reading for a meeting. We hot desk, so none of us need to be here in the building, yeah? Just me holding the fort today. Tea?”
It had been a long time since the kitchenette area had been cleaned properly, and Andrea was sorely tempted to decline. But that would seem unusual, and she didn’t want any of this to strike young Nigel as odd. So she said, “Yes, thanks. Milk, no sugar.”
“Same,” said Steve, and looked around at the workbench and shelves. “So what are you working on here, Nigel? Something to do with eight-oh-two-eleven, is that right?” 802.11 was the technical term for the set of standards defining wifi signals. Steve used it casually, without explanation.
Nigel didn’t miss a beat. “Sure, sure,” he said, pouring the kettle, “but we’re not working with the alliance. It’s kind of a parallel protocol, yeah? Like, we’re theorising range extension through quantum state information in the bandwidth. It’s amazing, as if you’re stretching the wavelength out for more effective penetration, yeah?” He moved his hands apart, like pulling taut an invisible string, to demonstrate.
Steve seemed sceptical. “That sounds ambitious. How far along are you?”
Nigel laughed. “Early days, brother, early days. But it takes real disruption to stand out now, yeah? Andy’s the physicist, the science man. Charlie’s the coder. It’s him you want to speak to if you’re all about the hacking. I’m just an entrepreneur, but I know the jargon and I get the mindset.”
Andrea nodded, understanding. “You’re the man who sweet-talks the investors and lets the others be creative while you take care of the business side.”
“Sure, sure, and this is such an amazing place to do it. So…vibrant.” He said it with reverence, and if there was any lingering doubt in Andrea’s mind that Nigel Marsh was an archetypal class tourist, it was dispelled when he handed Steve his tea and said, “Where you from, brother?”
“Croydon,” Steve replied.
“Sure, sure, but I mean where are you from, yeah? What’s your homeland?”
“My mum and dad were both from Kingston,” said Steve, with only the hint of a sigh. “But they met after they came to London.”
“Right on,” Nigel smiled. “What an amazing world, yeah?”
Andrea would have happily punched Nigel right in his smug, bearded hipster face herself, but Steve was remarkably sanguine about the whole thing, and for now they had to play along.
Play along with what, though? There was something off about Nigel, and not just his class tourism. But SignalAir’s lack of substance, or tangible products, meant nothing. There were plenty of tech companies, some of them pulling down millions in investments, with no more staff or equipment than an anonymous, archetypal ‘new Shoreditch’ office like this. As they made small talk, and she gave Nigel her fake business card in preparation to leave, she realised there was nothing here she could put her finger on, nothing to make her any more suspicious of him than she already was. Nothing except an unease deep inside that said: something is wrong.
In the cab heading back, Steve laughed off the ‘homeland’ conversation as nothing he hadn’t heard before, and, inevitably, from rich white kids. “Bet you anything he spent six months backpacking around Asia,” said Steve, “and now he thinks that was enough to erase all his racial privilege. I mean, he probably lived in a yurt for a whole month, so he might as well have grown up working on a plantation, yeah?”
Andrea laughed at Steve’s imitation. “I’m just impressed you managed to hold on to your tea. So what’s your take? Racism aside, does he seem on the level to you? I’m no techie, but that stuff about quantum waves sounds like sci-fi.”
“Yeah, but…” Steve shrugged. “I mean, I once knew a bloke who managed to encode tiny bits of data into DNS traffic, so I’d never say it’s impossible. But what Marsh is proposing would be a massive breakthrough in physics. They’d be legends, potential Nobel winners.”
“Hmmm. That kind of fame doesn’t exactly sit well with covert ops. Could they maybe sell the tech to foreign actors? Would it have any application in guerrilla tactics, maybe drones?”
“I guess long-range ad hoc control, without the need for extenders or satellites, would be something.” Then he jerked, as if startled. “Hang on. Why drones?”
Andrea grimaced in apology. “Can’t say; sorry. Would it make a difference?”
“It might be nothing.” Steve pulled out his Nexus and started typing. “But let me check with Patel.”
51
Bridge went straight back to the guest house from Guichetech. She wanted to ensure anyone following would see her do as she’d said, but she also knew she’d need items from her go-bag to break into Montgomery’s flat.
In the room, she opened the Dell and signed into the secure partition, to check he hadn’t tampered with anything while he was messing around in her fake calendar. God, what an arrogant prick. It would have been bad enough before, when he thought she was an HR inspector, but to start messing around now that he knew she was here undercover —
FROM: Mourad, Henri
TO: Dunston, Emily / Finlay, Giles / Sharp, Brigitte
SUBJECT: Where☺s Thumper?
Bridge froze, her finger hovering above the trackpad button as she re-read the subject line. ‘Thumper’ was the code name they’d assigned to Voclaine after
