The first thing he remembered was how to find a local Internet cafe he had last visited many moons ago. Like the Chans offering the use of their landline telephone, the Internet cafe was another institution invaluable in its day, but which had since been surpassed by technology. For in the age of the smart-phone, then who needed to visit a shop and pay for an hour at a computer?
At the counter at the back of the cafe, Beck paid in coins for his hour. While there he also ordered a coffee, and he guessed that that was where the business made most of its money now. Looking around himself as it was poured, he saw that half of the computers had already been removed, replaced by sofas where people used free Wi-Fi on their mobiles or tablets. They were chatting with drinks, or sitting with diaries and ebooks.
Beck pondered on the theme: the rise of the web-enabled mobile phone had followed that of the Internet itself by only a decade. The Internet cafe had bridged that gap for a while. However, without diversification, as this cafe was engaging in, then such places were the indoor equivalent of the public phone box – once essential convenience now little more than illicit hang-out.
There were very few such institutions left in prime locations. However, this shop was on a side street where the rents were presumably lower, and so the break-even point easier to reach. Beck remembered when the cafe was new and always packed. Back then similar shops were popping up everywhere. And he wondered at how quickly they had gone from cutting-edge to near-needless.
Beck took his drink and moved through the young and occupied people there that weekday afternoon. He asked himself: did no one work regular hours anymore? Or was it work they were engaged in, and people simply weren’t tied to an office these days? He secured a screen in the back corner of the shop. There he swiped the card he’d been given at the till, and went straight to his email account.
He decided that it didn’t matter if Eris’s people traced him there opening his messages: they knew he was in London, and he’d be gone from the cafe in a few minutes. Nor did it matter if the machines were riddled with viruses; or if the owners were secretly copying his data hoping to scam him for all he had – in his current situation they were welcome to it. Beck wasn’t sure if he even existed officially at that moment. It was an odd feeling.
He sipped the coffee and hoped it sharpened his wits. The screen opened up to fumbled fingers, it taking three attempts to get his password in. From that shaky start, though, he quickly scanned the list of messages awaiting him. The communication he was looking for had only come in the other day, he was sure. He went down one page, down the next. Where was it? Had he already deleted it? He prayed not. On to the third page, and there it was, received two weeks ago – had it been so long? How time flew in the Digital Age.
Even in the second of relief he took to ponder this, a new message arrived from the same sender, and including the same essential web link; which for the first time he clicked on...
Several years ago – Beck couldn’t remember exactly when – he had begun receiving a regular email newsletter from a London concert hall publicising its events. Although he knew the place by reputation, it was not a venue he had ever attended. It was on the other side of London, difficult to travel to, and so he had never quite found his way there.
So how then had the venue come across his email details? He couldn’t rightly say. The place was independent, and not part of an entertainments chain he might have visited in another town. Nor was it the sort of outfit he imagined might have traded in scammed email lists.
The oddest thing though was that, although the concert hall boasted a full range of entertainments, the emails he received always seemed to be advertising a performance almost purposely chosen to militate against his tastes; most often the overwrought and overlong operas of a German composer called Minner, who Schmidt adored and had met, but who Beck himself could never get started with.
He had had a lot to think about in those early days, and a lot about Schmidt to want to forget. And so Beck paid the messages little mind. Yet over the years, every few months or so, a new one would arrive – even finding his new email address when he changed it to leave behind yet more unwanted spam email. And it became a little joke with himself, laughing at what overbearing meisterwerk he was being invited to that time.
And in the back of his mind, yes, there was always the tiny unfaced-up-to hope that here was one of his creations, still out there, needling his poor taste. But that was such a random thought. And it had first occurred at a time when the events of Schmidt and Springfields were fresh in the mind, when any random occurrence felt like a sign, and when it still felt as if anything could happen. He wasn’t to know it would be eight years before anything did.
Beck had always wondered where the link within the emails would take him. Yet he never quite clicked. And after umming and ahhing over this for a few months, and with the messages continuing to arrive with no more urgency than before, then he began to think of them less and less as a possible call to contact and more a... well, he wasn’t really sure. The mind can lie to itself, to protect itself. And now Beck wasn’t sure.
Morals are style, opinions are fashion, and fashions change. All he could say about the messages now was that he’d never quite had the heart to consign them to the junk mail folder. And now come the current crisis, at last a change in the stagnant state of things, and these messages were the first thing that had come into his mind.
Beck realised, barely able to admit the possibility to himself, that they had always felt like an alarm bell, there to ring if needed; a safety net; a last port of call. He had played things extra-cautiously those eight years; but deep down had also known that if needed, then there they were...
Now at that moment, focussed, counting seconds, he saw the email and its web link before him, and clicked on it right away – my, how his mind had changed. And what popped up – what would you expect from a theatre email? – but a ticket reservation service, ‘For valued customers.’
‘Valued customers’? He’d never been through the door.
Top of the list of Coming Attractions on the website was a show that evening; not Minner, but something which in happier times Beck might have actually quite liked to have seen. But that was not his concern as he clicked the name of the event, then chose ‘One’ for the number of seats, and ‘Best Available’ – he wasn’t bothered with the view. This brought up a seat number, which he jotted down on a scrap of paper. And a message,
‘Thank you, your ticket/s have been reserved. Please bring ID and your chosen payment method with you to the venue in good time for the performance.’
That was that. Beck went back to his inbox to see if his actions had triggered a new email. But after giving himself a minute for this to appear without result, Beck deleted every single thing from his inbox. Then deleted them all again from the deleted email folder. Then signed out, shut down the screen, finished his coffee, left the cafe, and disappeared along back streets.
Chapter 39 – Eris Regathers
Travelling back to base, Eris had kicked Forrest out of the Jaguar, making him wait for a Land Rover to pick him up instead. She needed time to think, and she would get that in separate cars. There was still her trusted chauffeur behind his silencing partition. Though he knew nothing of what had happened in the University building, not that he would judge her on it, as she judged herself.
Once ensconced within the black leather and tinted glass, and with the rumble of the engine resembling a distant geological event, she accessed the media player built into the partition between the front and rear seats. ‘Don’t hurry back,’ she told her driver on the intercom; which gave her time to review the necessary material before arrival.
Since the alarm had been sensed in the Lake District less than twenty-four hours earlier, she had lived in her memories of those early interviews with Beck. Now she must go back to the source, and see what she had forgotten.
The car was linked by satellite to her office database. On the in-car moni
tor she discovered there were hours and hours of footage – Beck had been interrogated like an internee at Guantanamo Bay. Watching the videos back, all that was missing were the orange jumpsuit and the sound of Barney the Dinosaur at full volume in the background.
Thankfully, with modern technology, the footage was digitised and searchable by keywords. Riffling through the images, Eris found the nascent Beck. She’d like to have said that he looked so much younger then, but the interviews seemed to have taken such a toll on him that he looked better eight years later. With each question, a wince. With each accusation, a gritting of the teeth, or a squinting of the eye muscles. His hair looked shiny and unwashed.
The interviewer was always unseen. The voices chopped and changed, but were usually her predecessor. She adjusted the volume and got,
‘You gave yourself up.’
‘No.’
‘You gave yourself up to let the others escape.’
‘No. They gave me up!’
Eris shook her head. ‘You went in too hard,’ she said to the memory of her own mentor, no less an influence on her than Schmidt had been on Beck. ‘And when you didn’t get a result, you gave up on him. Beck could have been dancing polkas with Anna and Eliza on alternate Tuesdays these past eight years, and you wouldn’t have known it.’
Alas, unlike Schmidt, Eris’s own mentor hadn’t conveniently disappeared. Her arrival at the position of Chief had required an inglorious transition, instigated by herself, and lamented by her ever since.
She cursed him now in the back of the car, ‘Why couldn’t you know that it was time to go? Look at the trouble you caused me. Look at what you made me have to do.’
But she hadn’t time to think about that.
Beck had just led her to what eight years ago had been his and Schmidt’s research rooms. The urgency of the situation had demanded that they got there as quickly as possible, and so she hadn’t had a chance beforehand to brush up on how the pair had worked and what she should be looking for. Now she could make up for that.
Under the keyword ‘materials’ she found what she needed. A lot of it would be over her head, but she could tag the relevant passages and get them over to her technicians. On the tape, the younger, interview-weary Beck was explaining the make-up of the different elements, the parts that went into the artifs... and so all the parts that went into the cat’s head that she now possessed.
She had charged Forrest with the task of stripping the storeroom and getting its contents back to base – and she didn’t want to see that certain object again until it was in pieces and unrecognisable. And Forrest had been right – in making his escape, Beck had given them a prize beyond rubies.
After tagging the video clips they needed, Eris threw herself back into the big seat. For there would be so much else to have to do when she got back to the office, and this would be her last chance to rest. The morning with Beck had kept her from her other duties. He had thrown a curve-ball, and got himself away. But now she had to reconnect with her technicians and her teams all across the country. She would have to learn what they had discovered, and then direct their ongoing search.
And as she rested her head and closed her eyes, she realised afresh that for the first time that she could remember, she was interested in something. And it made her want to catch the robots even more.
Chapter 40 – Ellie’s Things
After leaving the office, Ellie had cried. Not for the threat of the police finally finding her, not for her job being over, or for her life as she knew it ending. Quite the opposite – for the last eight years to be book-ended she could have cried with joy. She hardly cared what came next, so unhappy had she been by the end.
What brought her tears though were the faces – of Angela, of Victor, and of all of those who in the final instance had abandoned her, who had hidden behind those closing doors out of sight for the police to come and scoop her up.
But now, thrown out from behind her desk somewhere in the West of England, Robot Eliza was worried for herself.
From her bench in a small park just outside of the town centre, she whispered:
‘Ellie, one of two things can happen to you. You can sit here and wait to be rounded up; or you can walk back home, quietly and confidently. Collect your essentials, and be gone. And probably still be rounded up.
‘Humans cannot think of a choice where either option scares them. But you can, because you’re not human. They want to persecute you for that fact? Then persecute them for it, and give them merry hell!’
She jumped up, decisive, and began to walk.
To any in the town who cared to notice her, and many did as she was styled by expert hands, she was a shopgirl coming back from lunch, a secretary off to meet a friend for tea. They couldn’t know that in those purposeful steps she was walking to her death, either metaphorical or actual.
She recalled from her vast memory banks, upgraded from those in the early frames, whispering to herself:
‘The Tarot card for Death is not a bad card, it is a wished-for card. For it means both death and re-birth, and who does not wish for that? The energy of the universe cannot be lost, the ending of one thing is the start of another. And every day kills the one before, as sure as if it never existed. The past is an illusion, the future a fantasy. Only the present is livid and real.’
She lived in a modern condominium block, slightly more expensive than she could have afforded alone. Christopher had been helping her out for years, in payments too small and irregular to be noticed by the bank. It was essential, though, for her to be somewhere respectful, somewhere with low burglary rates – so her odd belongings were not uncovered – and with low mugging rates in the surrounding estate – for nothing would give her away like a dry cut to the cheek.
Also essential was parking, indeed having her own garage, and the most modern of such with full facility for electric cars. Again this garage could not be broken into, so unveiling the cot and pile of paperbacks she kept beside the plug.
She hadn’t time for a charge just then, but had the juice in store for a long journey – she knew she was going to London. That left nothing essential in the flat. So why was she going back there? Eight years of life can make things feel familiar and breed attachment. But her possessions were already given up on – she knew the police would already be going through them.
And that gave her the clue to her motivation – she wanted to see what she was up against, to put faces to the persecution she had feared all those years.
She walked at a steady and confident pace, from the park, along the town’s High Street – show no fear – and then along the twisting lanes between the lawns of other blocks like hers.
This was a favourite walk, especially of a morning when mist fell from the trees around the edge of the estate, to roll across the bright turf. The scene would be lit by the morning sun, and by cubes of light from kitchen windows as the residents made coffee and considered the day ahead.
All gone. Now it was early evening, the day drawing to a close.
She was almost there, just one more turn. She stopped at the corner, and saw two men in dark coats along her building’s entrance path.
She was still too far away to be seen, she hoped. And there must have been a hundred women of her age living on the estate – there was no way that they could know she was the target, was there?
Still she watched. In the road at the end of the path were two white vans, as if to drop off household appliances or pick up dry cleaning. There was no sense of anything out of the ordinary. No crowds of people behind police tape asking, ‘What’s going on, officer?’ And the officer answering, ‘It’s all top secret I’m afraid, ma’am.’ Then gesturing to the crowd with shooing arms, ‘Please move on, there’s nothing to see.’
Was this then the police’s new tactic: giving the public literally nothing to see? Meanwhile, in the building somewhere a life was being dismantled. A life as valuable as any other, despite it being artificial.
‘
Godless,’ whispered Ellie to herself. For Jesus had played no part in her creation, nor was he present now to save her. And still she stood there, twenty yards from her destruction. Why wasn’t she moving? She’d told herself she was only there to see her enemy. Yet she could easily have envisaged dark coats and plain vans from afar without putting herself in danger.
Why was she there? She knew: she was there to be caught.
At times of high muscle-tension her batteries released a temporary boost of energy – this was something like adrenaline. Afterwards the levels went back to normal, which was something like adrenaline-lag.
She had been living on that initial high since her realisation of imminent danger at the reception desk. It had staggered her for something so awful to come out of a life so calm. It had been too much to process at the time, and now had finally caught up with her.
This energy boost, combined with the similarly temporary thrill of liberation after years of hiding out, had led her to imagine Christopher and London a reality. So why hadn’t she gone there? Instead, she had come here, to the most dangerous place in the world for her, and was all but waving to the men in black coats to give herself up.
It was all too clear. She didn’t really see a hope and didn’t see a future. London was a runaway outlaw dream; she and Christopher as a brother and sister Bonnie and Clyde. But she’d been running all her life, and it wasn’t like the movies. It wasn’t glamorous, it ground you down. The reception desk had been bearable, but she couldn’t do it again, not from scratch.
And these anxieties must have been showing on her face, or perhaps she had been standing staring for too long. For the men in black coats were looking at her now, and whispering to each other, and walking towards her.
Chapter 41 – The Spoils
Was this it? Was it over? Was this her death-wish? Ellie no longer knew. She had been too long alone, too long fearful. She was getting confused, losing perspective, making everything tiny or enormous in her mind.