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  "I can meet you there." He looked at the side windows, rippling with water but no longer awash, as the storm lessened. "Your place, or a bar?"

  "How about a restaurant? Do you like Jamaican food? Later, say at seven?"

  "Perfect."

  "OK, I'm appending details. There's a red star on the map, highlights the place."

  "Works for me."

  "Look forward to meeting you."

  The attachment pinged and opened as the comm pane closed.

  Wow.

  Broomhall blamed her, so she would want to deflect that, get Josh on her side. If she was genuine in wanting to help him find Richard, then the rest was irrelevant.

  He realised he was staring where her image had been, as if trying to summon her back.

  Bad idea. Concentrate.

  But she was the first good thing to distract him for a long time.

  Browns and oranges dominated the restaurant. Each table bore a bonsai palm tree. Josh smiled as Suzanne Duchesne addressed the staff by their first names, and they responded likewise. A Jamaican waiter called Clyde seated them next to the wall, away from the other diners, giving them a quiet zone.

  From her shoulder bag, Suzanne drew a portable screen and unrolled it, spreading it across the table. While they waited for drinks to arrive – some kind of tea – they made small talk: how long she had lived in Kilburn (four years), where he was staying (a budget Travelodge off the M4), and who would win the general election.

  "Let's see." Josh looked down at the lifeless screen. "Sharon Caldwell is female, lesbian, an atheist rationalist with two PhDs. Then there's Billy Church, aka Fat Billy, man of the people, beer lover and fight fan, already in office, and he's just announced tax cuts."

  "You think there's no contest?"

  "I wish there were."

  Clyde brought the tea, then left them alone. Breathing in warm scents from the kitchen, Josh watched as Suzanne brought the portable screen to life. Then she tapped her phone, and the unfurled screen showed a room interior, Suzanne sitting at an angle to Richard Broomhall. Josh put his own phone on the table; both handsets winked amber, establishing a sharespace. In the image, she was putting young Richard at ease; in reality, she was tugging down her sleeve which had pulled up, just by centimetres.

  Few people would have noticed; but Josh needed only a glimpse to take in the silver scarring.

  "You want audio?" Suzanne took out her earbeads. "Or just transcription for now?"

  Printed text – her words in red, Richard's in white – scrolled down a side pane.

  "Hmm. Can we get rid of both for the moment?"

  "All right."

  "This will help the automated search." As he tapped his phone, dots sprinkled themselves across Richard's moving image, then lines joined the dots, like moving wire frames. "Improve the motion analysis."

  "On CCTV, you mean? Like on the Tube?"

  "Uh-huh. My bots can look for subtle things like – see that? The way he rubbed his nose? If that's a habit, we've just increased our chances."

  "Interesting." Her polished-chestnut eyes contained golden flecks. "Emphasising process over content. That's close to the way I work, because I'm as interested in his posture and voice tone as in the actual words."

  "But if he'd said anything about where he might go, you would have picked it up. And the police have seen this?"

  "Yes, so they should have picked up any local references I missed."

  When she focused on him, it was like the total universe concentrating its attention; when she looked at the screen, she was absorbed in the images. To Josh, this was extraordinary.

  "Here we are." Clyde bore plates of spicy bean stew with rice and bread. "Enjoy, enjoy."

  "We will."

  "Smells terrific," said Josh.

  And the taste burst into his mouth, slowing him right down. Suzanne blanked the screen – now it was the food she concentrated on – and they made little conversation until their plates were mostly empty. She pushed her plate aside just moments before he finished too.

  "I don't understand–" he would have liked to enjoy the warm feeling a while longer, but they were here for a reason – "what you mean by process over content. In your work, that is."

  "Look at this interaction." She worked her phone, bringing the screen back to life and skipping to a timestamped moment. "Here, we're discussing Richard's reaction to blades."

  The words scrolled down the transcript pane.

  "See here?" Suzanne slowed the movie down. "That gesture with his left hand, cupped toward his stomach? An unconscious reaction to my question, in parallel to the words he spoke, telling its own story."

  Josh frowned. "Gestures like that mean something?"

  "Movement and timing are most important. Here, his left hand – under control of his right cerebral hemisphere – indicates he gets an automatic feeling in his stomach at the thought or sight of knives. It's an internal reaction, call it gut feeling, and it's real because every major organ has receptors for neuropeptides, almost like another nervous system."

  "Really?"

  "When people say something is heartfelt, it's often more literal than they think. Figures of speech have to come from somewhere."

  Josh had felt his guts roiling in circumstances most people would never know. Visceral feelings were intense; he knew they were real.

  "So how does that help you?"

  "Everything is mental modelling. Even a black shirt in the open air reflects less light than a white shirt indoors, so something as basic as colour is a neural process."

  "Computation," he said.

  "Exactly. By using Richard's imagination, I could have got him to focus on the fear-feeling, experience it as a loop… See, you haven't noticed the feeling of your sock on your left foot until I mentioned it, because a constant sensation just fades away. So a gut feeling doesn't literally keep looping around, but while it's strong it feels that way."

  "All right." Josh was smiling, still aware of his foot.

  "In his imagination, I could've got him to spin the feeling in the opposite way, add some visualisation, and his fear reaction would be gone. Sounds too simple to work, yet it does."

  "But you didn't do that."

  "No, look. I taught him something else, but not for blades specifically." She flicked through thumbnail stills, then jumped the main pane to another part of the session. "Here, Richard is imagining something, and see how his eyes focus on a point in space? Even though he's seeing a picture in his mind? The entorhinal cortex has a component called the spatiotemporal grid which– Well, I'll save the neurology lecture for later, shall I?"

  "If you like." The idea of a later was appealing to Josh. "So what happened next?"

  "I taught him to experience the picture differently. Push it off to a different location and imagine it flaring bright, then washing out."

  Josh started blinking, very fast.

  Gun coming up, half the face exploding and my God he's just a kid–

  "–out now, breathe in, let the feeling out, Josh, that's right, and you're fine now."

  "Jesus." He rubbed his face, sweat-slick as if in a sauna. "Sorry."

  Clyde started to approach. "Sir? Are you all right?"

  "He's fine." Suzanne waved him back. "We're doing OK."

  "Shit." Not the language he would normally use over dinner, not with someone like this. "I don't know what happened. Something took me back–"

  "You've had counselling, after battlefield trauma."

  "I guess that's what you'd call it. Sure."

  "And they used similar techniques with you, working successfully almost all of the time, is that right?"

  "Sure." He rubbed his mouth. "Most of the time."

  "So you had a little resonance of memory, and it's all gone now."

  "It… it has gone. I feel OK."

  "Good."

  "How did you do that?"

  "Well." Her smile and gaze hummed with mystery, deep as voodoo. "Call it magic if you like."


  Casting some kind of spell, for sure.

  Suzanne noted, as they walked, the way Josh cast his attention outward, in what looked like a trained pattern: left-right-left, starting close and extending to the distance. He made a soft humming noise as he spotted something about a building, then continued scanning.

  "What did you notice?" she had to ask.

  "Huh? Oh, those flats, how the building went from stables to warehouse to homes over the centuries."

  "You're kidding." She saw the black iron crosses, part of the supports that held swelling brickwork in place. "I guess the place is old."

  "Look how the place used to be mercantile, and before that rural, because the roads follow the natural contours. See?"

  "Hmm. Interesting."

  So he could overlay mental pictures across reality, make deductions that were not obvious; and if he was the kind of software expert she thought, he could wrap himself in highly abstract, creative visualisations of complex systems she could not imagine. This was not how she had imagined an ex-soldier would be.

  "Where is your car?" she asked.

  "Not far."

  From a tiny motion of his head, she realised it was behind them somewhere, and that his walking her home took him further from the vehicle. It was good that she could read these nuances, because in some ways Josh Cumberland was unknowable, his physicality breathtaking, diverting her from the reason for their meeting.

  "Have you thought what's going to happen once you find Richard?"

  "Er, taking him home seems like a good idea."

  "It wasn't me he was running from."

  "No." Josh stopped and scanned in all directions, before turning to her. "I won't take him back into danger."

  "I believe the physical danger comes from his school. The home environment is stressful in other ways."

  "Yeah, I got that. Doesn't make Broomhall a bad man. I mean, he's money-grabbing and corporate, but I've met worse."

  "We agree. He's just different from his son."

  "Ah. Right."

  Again, he scanned the street. Did he ever stop?

  "I'm going to ask you a favour." Her heart, warm in her chest, reminded her of their conversation, the neuropeptide basis of emotion. "Let me help you look for Richard."

  Was it for Richard's sake she was asking? Or to spend more time with this man?

  Doesn't matter to Richard. We just need to get him back.

  "I'll call you," he said.

  They walked on, reaching the door to her apartment house too soon. She went inside, stopped in the hallway, and looked back out. Josh gave a little fingertip wave, an informal salute, and slipped away. It felt as if something had been pulled out of her.

  Part of her awareness, throughout the meal, had observed the natural matching of their body language, the interlocking rhythm of microgesture, and the subliminal courting dance of pheromones, their effect surfacing in the dilation of eyes, the flaring of nostrils, the inability of either person to look away.

  Josh Cumberland.

  The name rolled around in her brain, warming her, threatening her equilibrium. Perhaps he was good news, perhaps he was bad; what she could not do was ignore him.

  [ ELEVEN ]

  A plain budget hotel room at five in the morning. How often had Josh woken up in places like this? Sometimes – when rich corporates paid his expenses – he slept in five-star elegance; other times it was hard soil or rock beneath his sleeping bag, the Brecon Beacons or Tibetan Alps or the expanding Sahara, snow or heat, always different. But like a turtle in its shell, he was always at home, because of the discipline, the routines he carried everywhere.

  Drinking tap water from a plastic cup, he unrolled his screen and keypad, thumbed his phone to life, and began amending his search arguments, changing his choice of algorithms based on the new patterns he had to look for. Most of the framework remained unaltered, while his coding changes had more to do with the London Transport network, an environment he had not hacked before. Soon his more-than-querybot – call it a stealthbot – was ready to ship.

  "Hey, Petra," he dictated, his phone turning speech into text, "if you could load this inside the interface shield, we might save a missing kid."

  He sent the message, his stealthbot attached inside an anonymous archive file, along with a manifest that made it look like an ordinary in-house complex written by the Transport Police.

  For a few minutes he waited, on the off-chance that Petra was awake at this hour, then he shut everything down. What he needed was to keep fit and maintain his reflexes, so he pulled a pillow from the bed and a cheap soccer ball from his bag. It would not look like a fight gym to most people; but it was enough.

  A cat-stretch press-up, slow at first, then fluid and fast: two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups in fifteen minutes. It was deep knee-bends for the next quarter hour, five hundred Hindu squats. Then, putting the pillow on the floor, he arched backward, weight on his feet and the top of his head at first, before stretching to press forehead and nose into the pillow. He held position for four minutes, following it with a forward bridge and ab crunches to finish.

  Then he was ready to fight.

  When a struggle goes to the ground and you're on top, the guy underneath is squirming – which was what the football reproduced. Josh worked rolls and flips and reversals, grappling manoeuvres on the floor with the ball twisting beneath him. On his feet, he practiced rapid-fire hand drills, adding elbows, knees and powerful kicks. Finally, he drew his knife, and worked the combos with blade in hand, over and over on imaginary enemies; and at last he was done, taking huge breaths to slow down, his body encased in warm, slick sweat. Then he spun, a half-second before a thump rocked the door.

  He checked through the spyhole, then opened up in silence.

  "It's 6.30 in the morning." The guy in the corridor was round and soft-bodied. "You could have some consider–"

  Then his eyes triangulated on Josh's blade.

  "I like to keep sharp." Josh smiled. "Stay a cut above the rest."

  "Er… Look…" A swallow. "I… Um."

  "My apologies."

  Josh closed the door, shutting the guy out. There was a long pause, then stumbling footsteps receded.

  Before going to bed, he had filled two canteens with water from the bathroom tap, and mixed in purifying powder, because you could never trust a hotel to have clean filters. Now he drank, half a litre at first, then another half with powdered peas and milk mixed in, before checking his messages. Petra had responded, but not in the way he wanted.

  "Sorry, Josh. You've obviously worked hard on this one. But there's been a couple of, well, questionable uses of privileges recently. Internal Investigations are looking motivated. Sorry again."

  And that was it. No help from Petra.

  "Bollocks."

  Then he felt chill. It might have been the sudden cooling-off, his body still inside its layer of sweat; or perhaps it was something else.

  She changed her mind overnight.

  Not only that, but the message was way too polite for her. Had someone warned her off?

  Sluicing off in the shower was a simple pleasure, always enhanced by a workout beforehand; but now that his plans were derailed, he could have scheduled exercise for later and got something else going instead. However wonderfully his querybot was crafted, if he couldn't insert it inside the official surveillance systems, its functionality was useless.

  There was another way in, but he did not want to try it yet, not without knowing why Petra had backed off from helping him. What he wanted – as though he needed an excuse – was to talk to Suzanne Duchesne again. And he had promised to call her; but she probably thought that meant at a civilised hour.

  So hurry up and wait.

  He cranked up text-only and read from the autobiography of Lyoto Machida, a Japanese-Brazilian fighter from the civilised days of MMA cage fights. The samurai mindset was admirable, except for the daily drink-yourown-urine ritual, allegedly traditional. Josh g
lanced at the dregs of his pea-and-milk shake, and shook his head.

  Then, hoping that Suzanne was an early riser, he placed the call.

  "Hey. How are you this morning?"

  "A little surprised that you're calling."

  "You mean, at this hour. I don't have any news."

  "All right."

  "You must be busy. Can I buy you lunch later on?"