Eve picked up the letter and read it carefully. “This looks … useful, yes. I can deal with the money side of things, you don’t need to worry about it.” She reached into her handbag and pulled out her phone, photographed the letter, and emailed it to her duty assistant, along with brief instructions. “Bear with me.” If her kid brother was not exaggerating for effect, then there was indeed an adversary at work, which meant she needed to get a handle on the book fast. The BBC news app had a story about—her eyes widened before she managed to freeze her face. A hot, shivery feeling rippled up her back, prickling sweat springing out under her blouse. Three dead in bank bloodbath. “Okay, I can see why you might be a little upset.”
“Upset—”
Eve flashed him a sympathetic smile. “If I had any idea this was going to happen I wouldn’t have sent you,” she said, putting every microgram of sincerity she could muster into her reassurance. “But it’s done now. I was going to authorize 20K for getting hold of this note, but in view of unforeseen circumstances I’m going to double that. Forty thousand pounds, okay? Where do you want me to send it?”
“We agreed eighty thousand.”
“Eighty thousand for the entire job—for getting the book. This was just the first step, but, fair do’s, it turns out it was a pretty big step: bigger than I expected.” Eve allowed her cut-glass diction to slip back into the more relaxed dialect of their shared childhood, feeling a hateful pride in her ability to manipulate Jeremy so easily despite the passage of time. Nevertheless, a pang of conscience stabbed at her for endangering him. “Forty thousand puts you not too far off your funding goal, doesn’t it? If you want to dump me and bail on the job, I’m not stopping you.”
Imp shook his head. “Look, it’s not just me, sis. I’ve got to think about my homies. They’re really upset. If it was just me, and if you could take care of the troublesome details—” he brushed imaginary lint from his sleeve—“I could see my way to helping you out. But we’ve got a thief-taker on our tail now, know what I mean? We work as a team. I can’t do this job on my own, and they’re going to flat-out refuse if there are guns involved. Or thief-takers. Have you ever seen a public hanging? I mean for real, not on TV?”
“Good point.” Eve chewed her lower lip pensively, quite forgetting her demeanor. “But I think the thief-taker may turn out to be good news. If it was real cops we might have a problem, but thief-takers—it should be easy enough to pay them off. They’re all private sector contractors. Did you get a name? As for the gunmen—leave them to me.” A thought struck her and she tittered quietly, then stopped when she saw her brother’s expression. “What?”
“You scare me when you laugh like that.”
She smiled. “I just thought, my boss owns a couple of private security companies. After I buy out the thief-taker who’s looking for you, I can have them sort out you and your friends’ criminal background checks and actually hire you—on payroll, as thief-takers in your own right—to hunt down the gang of transhumans that hit Hamleys toy shop. Wouldn’t that be priceless?”
Imp’s face was such a picture that she couldn’t hold back another giggle.
“You don’t have to do that,” she told him when she regained control, “but the best way to short-circuit an investigation is to take it over and investigate yourself, don’t you think? Anyway, I’ll deal with the thief-taker. Then I’ll bid on the treasure map. Meanwhile, I want you to sell your playmates on the idea that they’re going to get paid extra and nobody is going to shoot at them—I’ll provide security if there’s even the slightest whiff of trouble. Will you do that for your sister? Special favor, Jerm? Pretty please?”
“Stop batting your eyelashes at me, it’s not even remotely convincing … And yes, dammit, I’ll try, seeing it’s you who’s asking. I’m not promising anything, though. Right now they’re feeling burned.”
School was out but, as Wendy was learning, being Head Prefect in ABLE ARCHER class gave her special privileges—like being able to raid the classroom supplies cupboard for her own projects.
Under the watchful eyes of the New Management coalition, the previous government’s bonfire of red tape had been replaced by a blast furnace, principally fueled by any regulations that got in the way of big money doing whatever the hell it pleased. Loopholes in gun control laws for licensed security guards were the least of it. Data protection and privacy regulations had gone the same way as planning permission and habeas corpus, and HiveCo Security could tap into all sorts of interesting databases … such as the ANPR system used to levy a congestion charge on traffic entering the controlled zone around London, the Highways Agency traffic cameras monitoring major junctions, and even some weird-ass camera network called SCORPION STARE that seemed to have nodes everywhere. Shodan said it ran on IP addresses owned by the Ministry of Defense, but that was obvious bullshit. I ought to get a poster for the office wall, she mused: Judge Dredd: I am the Law.
Speaking of Shodan, HiveCo had a horrifyingly expensive corporate account on the internet-of-things search engine, and once Wendy discovered it, she was fascinated. Baby monitors, color-cycling light bulbs, shop CCTV systems, HD television sets with unpatched operating systems and unchanged administrator passwords: they were all there, leaking secrets incontinently on the public internet if you knew where to point your web browser. The HiveCo corporate feed could search by geographical location, and there was a plugin for Google Maps. Wendy could drill into London using Street View, ask for unsecured cameras in the neighborhood she was investigating, then window-peep to her heart’s content.
It was probably still illegal,
