Two
From the Wharf, she led me at a brisk pace into the sunlit squalor of Jubilee Park. In person she was much as I'd assessed from the virtual connection, only her frame a little taller and the cut of her jaw more angular. She didn't seem to wear strong perfume. Instead, I could smell the fetid Thames and hear the swash of a barge passing. Every step I took I felt impelled to glance around and had to restrain myself: I was that afraid of Werth and his clan. A wino with spittle on his shaggy beard meandered across my path and I swerved around him. I've had malware breach my BAN by skin touch before now, a cheeky pop-up ad for an anti-spyware app, strangely enough, and now I wasn't taking any chances... except that I'd forgotten to wear gloves. Body Area Networks were said to be the height of convenience and sophistication. Now everyone is terrified of shaking hands or touching metal door handles or drinking from a cup that isn't theirs, and we call this normal. And we all know the trouble with normal.
We picked our way around the broken paving slabs and piles of broken glass through which weeds and small trees had long since pushed, until we were totally alone. She was swinging a small case from one finger, like it was her makeup bag or something.
First she set the bag down and did something to it, and it began hissing white noise like a fountain. No doubt it was jamming the airwaves too. She linked me our target's name and pertinent details, head-to-head, staring at me in silence as if trying to hypnotise me. Her eyes hung heavily in her eyelids like twin harvest moons setting. "Ali Hamdani. So now you know about him. Find him," she said.
I sat on a fallen tree and closed my eyes. I wrinkled my brows a great deal, tilted my head to and fro a lot, and after twelve minutes I nodded and opened my eyes again. Through my firewall I linked back to her that Ali Hamdani had taken over the identity of convicted criminal Sabri Jek Nisr. Nisr was listed as having been transported into the Penal System the morning before. I had the Portal number and his tag code, as well as the digital evidence that someone had hacked his files, changed his mugshots and infiltrated the Penal Authority as a delivery boy.
She nodded grimly, like a storm was stewing inside her. She muttered about expecting as much as she glanced at the head-and-shoulders that had been swapped into the Authority's files: the face matched that of her quarry. Then we were off, and she marched me across Grime Street and through the tall double doors of the Penal Authority office. Before I realised what we were doing, she'd obtained a transit permit for both of us. I was shocked at how easy it was to get into the system. All I had to do was swipe my P.I. certificate and link them the details I'd just supplied her. I couldn't have done it on my own, though: her client, Mr Jaar, obviously had some leverage because of the court case. After all, it was his son, Junot, who was murdered. Likewise, she couldn't have done it without me.
Two hours later we were sitting in a corridor inside the Authority's hospital-like warren. We'd passed through so many steel sphincter-hatches and barriers and all that metal started closing in around me, shortening my breath. Along came Mr Paul Edgecomb, one of the Authority's warders, and off we went. Edgecomb was to come along to guide us into Branefold oh-oh-two-one. I got to feeling pretty tense, as you can imagine. I'd sensed three attempts to hack my net, but nothing serious. Just bots doing surveys and the like, although they might have been using them to check up on me. I don't let anything put thoughts into my head.
I tried not to put my hand in my pocket to check on my pen. Edgecomb had a nose like a hawk and looked at me with poker eyes. But he spoke as calmly as the Serpentine on a windless day. He wore a plain black uniform with a peaked cap to cover his bald head. He struck me as the sort you'd want as your surgeon, but not as your confidant.
At the Portal we were all three checked over for concealed weapons and so on. They weren't as thorough as I'd feared. Edgecomb then put on his backpack. It was like a huge block of black rubber with straps. He didn't explain what it was for. Helena just carried her little case. I had no hardware at all except what was in my pockets and in my head, all of which they'd gone over half a dozen times. At least London still has those minimal thought-privacy laws.
The Portal itself looks like nothing much, you know, just like a tall version of a radiotherapy machine, big enough to walk into. So we walked in, and I was sweating so freely that I thought it must be obvious to the other two. But they were pretty solemn. Edgecomb was all business, having been inside hundreds of times before, and Helena just carried herself like her own avatar.
Suddenly Edgecomb spoke, right as the heavy door was swinging shut on silent hinges. It was like he was giving a lecture. "This particular branefold," he said, "is one of the larger ones, since it was established earlier on. The inmates have had time to organise," he said, "to the extent that they are attempting a form of secret self-government, all under our surveillance. With the limited resources at their disposal they can't construct very much, but as their spacetime inflates and stabilizes, they will be able to prospect and colonise all the more. Some of them call it New Australia. No doubt your witness will be hiding himself amongst the convicts."
Those were his exact words. I hadn't realised it was like that in there.
Just like that, the door on the other side opened and we were there. It's pretty surreal stepping out into another universe. You get a mental discontinuity as it happens, as if the world just blinked, or like when you're dozing on the train and something jogs you awake from a three-second dream.
First of all the wind nearly blew me over. Then the sky almost blinded me. The whole of it was a sharp white glare. The Portal opened into a thickly-fenced enclosure jammed with security people and machinery and defence towers. The enclosure was on a dry, round hill, and at the foot of the hill were more fences and towers. Beyond that I could make out a ragged jumble of rooftops and dusty tracks reaching away into the distance.
What a view. Talk about mood swings. I was like a barometer plunging from low to rock-bottom, wondering if I was walking off the edge into the deep end, with a 20-kilo weight tied to my neck.
We'd hardly stepped out when something whistled overhead and slammed into the ground, kicking up dust and making everyone jump ten feet. It was a bundle of leaflets which flew apart on impact, and several thousand of them flew like leaves in the wind. Before we could grab one and read it, Edgecomb pulled us in the opposite direction, claiming it was nothing at all when we demanded to know what was going on.
Down at the bottom of the hill there were people walking around, but I couldn't see much for the dust. Apart from the glaring sky it could have been a refugee camp anywhere on Earth. They say that it's mostly the unemployed, not proper criminals, who keep the branefolds filling up. Even London would be a better home than that place. At least if you live in London, you can dream of leaving occasionally. I fingered the pen-thing in my pocket.