The Heist of Hollow London, page 11
Kline resisted the urge to look anything up. It was hard to just sit here thinking about, say, moving to Reykjavik, and not check how feasible it was, how much things cost, what immigration was like, et cetera. His wrist turned involuntarily whenever these questions entered his mind and he had to turn it back. This wasn’t because he didn’t have access to a secure connection—it was piggybacked on Oakseed’s network, because outside the corpurbations the entire center of London was a reception blackspot, but Loren had ensured it was secure. Kline’s concern was he didn’t want the rest of the crew to know anything about his plans for after this job, and all of them would be able to see his activity—Mia had been clear they should all know what the others were doing. If one of the others noticed he’d sent a load of requests for info about Reykjavik—that was just an example, Kline hadn’t settled on a destination yet—and then that person got caught and interrogated and told the cops that was where he’d gone, he was screwed. So Kline just lay on the bed and made plans in his head.
Kline then started to worry that doing nothing that left a trace was, in itself, suspicious. His cover story was that he was running errands for his holder, but anyone paying the slightest attention to his movements would see he wasn’t. Who sat alone in a transient room doing nothing for hours on end? Criminals, that was who. Criminals who were either waiting to do a job or hiding out after doing one. And there was no reason to come to Kentish Cyc unless you had business related to the plant. It wasn’t exactly a prime holiday spot. He could think of no way of being here that didn’t look sketchy as hell.
* * *
It frustrated Kline that he was required to be in London at all. His role was doable from anywhere. But he could no longer access Oakseed’s global systems, because they didn’t exist. Everything that was still running was apparently now routed via RookDivest, and Mia was wary of intruding into their systems any more than necessary. Kline suggested Loren could go to London and hook up a terminal he could control from Vancouver, but Mia was unwilling to consider this. She wanted Kline on-site to deal with any problems that came up, and she was his holder so it was pointless to argue.
The plant’s system controlled all information flow in the corpurbation, whether for personal or business use, and any of the apartments could be equipped with a terminal for remote working. Before they’d left Vancouver, Loren had given Kline an unbranded terminal preloaded with all the credentials necessary to interface with the plant’s HR system. Sure enough, when Kline hooked it up he was presented with the kind of access he’d enjoyed back in Delaware, with a higher level of permissions. The Kentish Cyc workforce was smaller and more homogeneous than the ones he’d usually worked with, and Kline only needed a few hours looking at work patterns and interactions between departments to feel he had the measure of it.
Kentish Cyc was one of the few parts of Oakseed that was still running, post-collapse. All the company’s remaining retail outlets and direct services had been closed down as soon as its failure had been confirmed, joining those that had already been closed in the weeks prior, as it desperately attempted to slash costs and save itself from oblivion. And all the backroom infrastructure, like support and HR, had also been halted in anticipation of it being asset-stripped. But the company’s cyc plants, even this grubby one in a crumbling city, infallibly generated more value than they cost to run. This would go some small way toward filling the company’s black hole of debt, and the plants were considered more appealing to buyers if they were already up and running. So RookDivest had given Kentish Cyc clearance to keep doing what it was doing.
During the briefing, Drienne had noted how frustrating this was: if the place was empty and shut down, they could have just broken in and taken whatever they wanted.
“If it was shut down,” Nadi had pointed out, “they’d have it under guard, making sure people didn’t break in and take what they wanted. Especially in London—if anyone heard this place was empty and unguarded, it’d have been looted within hours. And then probably torched.”
“Exactly,” said Mia. “Business as usual is good for us.”
* * *
Kline’s first job upon arrival had been to insert Nadi into the plant. There were no vacancies in harvesting—it was a desirable job for the unqualified and inexperienced, because it came with the opportunity to earn commission, so most employees started off on the underfloor, dissolving salvage. There were vacancies on the underfloor, so Kline was able to fake and backdate a request from a xec who’d already left Kentish Cyc for any suitable workers to be sent from the huge pool RookDivest had collected from Oakseed. He also faked and backdated a response from RookDivest, which agreed Nadi—or Pris, as the correspondence referred to her—would be sent to them on the next flight to England. The background checks were minimal, because the HR system believed this person had existed within the company all her life; on top of this, Kline knew exactly what would trigger flags in the process, and had designed Nadi’s alt-id to ensure a negative response all the way down.
There was a waiting list for promotion to harvesting work, and Kline was able to nudge Nadi to the front of that queue. Mia had assured him it would be a formality to get her on harvesting from there, because people were always getting injured on the job and so they always needed temp cover. But either they’d raised their safety standards since Mia worked there or the staff was having a lucky week, because no temp vacancies were opening up. As it stood, the whole plan rested on someone at the plant being unavailable for work.
Kline thought back to how Loren had raised potential problems with Mia’s plan and been shut down. Kline hadn’t wanted to speak up then, but Loren was right, the plan wasn’t as watertight as Mia made it seem. Mia was a considerate and sympathetic holder, provided you didn’t challenge her on anything. Kline knew how to handle people like that, but you needed to think for them at times, ideally without them realizing you were doing it.
Kline looked through a few of the harvesters’ profiles and had an idea. He wasn’t sure if the others would like it, but this type of thing was the whole point of him being on the team. This was what he could do that the others couldn’t. It only took him a few minutes to implement it.
Within an hour one of the harvesters, a made called Cody, was taken off his shift and informed a complaint of misconduct had been filed against him, alleging he’d been sneaking up to the support section during late shifts and abusing a printer for his own sexual gratification. He would be suspended while an investigation took place. Kline learned his plan had been successful when a manager at the plant put these notes on Cody’s HR record. There were no further details, but Kline knew how these things went: Cody would have protested his innocence and demanded to know who had made this complaint. He’d have been told he wasn’t permitted to know, and then ushered off the premises. Kline wasn’t a monster, however—he ensured the process would include suspension on full pay, and the investigation ought to clear Cody after assessing the lack of evidence.
The HR system called up Nadi as a replacement before she’d even done a shift on the underfloor. It was possible someone on the underfloor might notice this and wonder how the new hire had jumped the waiting list, but such things happened all the time, and Kline knew too well how opaque the system could be.
* * *
After careful consideration, Kline decided that, if challenged about why he’d come to the corpurbation, he would claim he was stalking someone who lived here. He looked out his window at the block on the opposite side of the street and searched for a plausible stalkee. He was frustrated at first—the morning sun was hitting the windows at such an angle he couldn’t see a thing. But then there was a commotion in the street below and a few people leaned out their windows to see what was going on, either out of concern or a desire for live entertainment. And then he saw, one floor down and four windows along, standing on the tiny balcony that jutted from her apartment, a tired-looking woman wearing a long skirt and a bikini top, her shoulder-length yellow hair sticking out from under a baseball cap. It was hard to tell from this distance but she seemed to be in her thirties; a little soft-bellied, but her arms looked toned and supple. He guessed she was a manual worker at the plant.
He went over to his terminal and a quick search through the employment records confirmed she was a maintenance mechanic. Her name was Frankie James, she was a nat, thirty-two years old, unmarried, no children.
She was just right. Not that Kline would ever stalk anyone, but if he did, she looked like someone he would stalk: younger, a little unconventional, and not entirely unattainable. He could, if it became necessary, claim he was obsessed with her and rented this room so he could watch her from across the street, and was trying to pluck up the courage to talk to her. And it was something people wouldn’t readily admit to, so if someone confronted him about why he was here, he could first try a more innocuous explanation, such as he was an artist or poet looking for inspiration in a down-and-out part of the world, and then fall back on the stalker story if they persisted.
Good. He felt better.
To make it convincing he would come to the window and watch for Frankie James from time to time. The commotion was still going on and lots of people were coming to their windows to watch. Two women were arguing about one owing the other money, and the one who’d borrowed the money said she’d spent it on cosmetic surgery to remove scars, and the other didn’t believe her and was trying to remove her clothes so she could check. It was unclear if the women were a couple, or an ex-couple, or related to each other, or maybe one of them was seeing the other’s ex. Kline wasn’t concentrating hard enough to work it out because he was looking at Frankie James across the street. She was leaning on a railing and talking to her neighbor with great amusement, and was too distracted to know Kline was watching her.
14
A PEP TALK AND SOME POSITIVE PRODUCTIVITY STATISTICS
Harvesters use the side gate, Nadi reminded herself as she walked up to Kentish Cyc. The building was an imposing light gray box with a ribbed surface, whose only windows were on its top floor. The main entrance vestibule was a steel-and-sapphire affair that looked like it belonged on an entirely different building from the dull, forbidding structure to which it was attached. Atop the entrance was a three-dimensional rendition of Oakseed’s acorn logo. To the right of it, set into the wall, was a large metal gate, which stood open. A securit was stationed just inside, and beyond him was a gray, dark passageway broad and tall enough to accommodate a small truck, which ran all the way through the building to the other side. Nadi knew there were two doors inside the passageway that led back into the main building. These doors were used by securits and no one else.
Nadi knew everything about the layout of this building. There were aspects of security work she’d never been good at, but she could effortlessly visualize anywhere she’d familiarized herself with. Loren had asked her about this when they were planning the job, and she’d explained it was like she was looking down on the space from above. If it was a floor of a building, it was like that slice of the building had been removed and she could see into all the rooms, and she could hold that in her head while she also processed what she was seeing with her own eyes.
“That’s cool,” Loren had said.
“It’s pretty normal for securits,” Nadi told them.
“It’s still cool.”
Nadi joined the queue that was forming inside the passageway. Maybe thirty other harvesters stood ahead of her. This was the second shift of the day, which began at 9:00 A.M. The plant didn’t send harvesters into the center of the city at night—it was dangerous, and working in the dark was inefficient—but it was July and daylight hours were close to their longest, so they were packing the shifts in while they could. The harvesters shuffled along, single file, passing through a full-body scanner located in the center of the passageway. This registered everything each harvester had on their person, and while it functioned as a check for weapons, drugs, or other offensive equipment, its main purpose was to record everything each worker brought in. At the end of the shift, everyone went back through to ensure they had only what they’d brought in and no more. Walking out with any piece of salvage, however small or valueless, was strictly forbidden. Nadi passed through the scanner, glancing at the securits operating it. They would know she was a former securit, there was no hiding that. They didn’t react or treat her differently, and she didn’t expect them to. On the other side of the scanner, she was issued a helmet and sent to the platform.
The plant had been built near an old railway line that was sunk down below street level. The tracks had been removed to make nice flat pathways for the trucks that traveled to and from the center. The truck trains had fat, heavy-duty wheels that moved surprisingly fast if they had a stretch of flat ground. Each train was made up of three carriages and a steerage car that pulled the whole thing along. Securits rode in the steerage car. The first carriage contained seats for the harvesters to ride in. The other two were used to store the carts that the harvesters would take out and fill with cycleable material.
Before they all got on the train, a xec came down to the platform. He was middle-aged, with wavy dark hair and a weaving pattern tattooed up one side of his face, and a build of muscle gone to fat. Nadi knew his name was Henrik Paul, because Kline had accessed the records of the plant’s xecs and distributed them to the crew. Two of the xecs had already departed to take up other jobs, knowing whoever bought the plant would probably install their own management team; two remained.
Henrik gave them all a pep talk, relating some positive productivity statistics from the previous week and thanking them all for their contribution. Nadi wondered if this happened often. Judging from the bored reaction of his audience, it probably did. When he was done, everyone started boarding the train. As Nadi waited her turn, Henrik approached her and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Could I have a word?” he said.
Nadi nodded guilelessly and followed Henrik through the door that led inside the plant—the door they would all push their carts of salvage through when the time came to unload and deposit everything they’d found that day. Her overwhelming thought was the entire plan was sunk before it had begun: this man knew she wasn’t who she claimed to be, he knew she’d used subterfuge to get on the harvesting team, everything was fucked, abort, abort.
“I’m Henrik Paul,” the xec said, shaking Nadi’s hand. “Pris, yes? Welcome to the team.”
Was that all it was? Just a simple hello? “Thanks,” Nadi replied, but she still glanced through the glass in the door and considered where she could go if she jumped off the platform and just ran.
“One thing,” said Henrik. He seemed anxious, which was strange. She’d had very few encounters with xecs, but they generally didn’t seem intimidated by her. “You’re a made? Is that right? You came here from another site…”
“Yes. Helsinki,” she added.
“And that site’s been shut down, yes?”
“Yes. In fact, I was up for sale and they took me off the market and sent me here instead.”
“So you do know about”—he glanced around, lowered his voice—“the collapse.”
“Yes.”
“Have you mentioned it to anyone here?”
“The collapse?”
He winced, smiling tightly. “Please keep your voice down.”
“No.”
“No one in the entire corpurbation?”
“No. I don’t know anyone to tell yet.”
“Right. Good.” Henrik looked relieved. It seemed someone ought to have spoken to Nadi about this before she started work, but everyone had left it up to someone else. “Please keep it to yourself. We’re trying to keep a lid on it.”
“What?”
“Not my idea, you understand—came from higher up. Last order we got, pretty much: don’t tell the floor workers until the plant is sold. I did tell them it’s not as simple as that, we can control what information people access when they’re here, but they do occasionally come and go. But no one has any idea what it’s like here, they really don’t have a clue.” He seemed to remember he was speaking to an employee and assumed a more professional countenance. “So, yes.”
“No one knows?”
“Top floor do. No one else. Our filters are very strong, and we’ve been generating counter-info to make the workers think the company’s active and expanding, so if they did happen to hear anything about a collapse they’d think it wasn’t true. I mean, the idea of Oakseed collapsing is so ludicrous and … and improbable I can scarcely believe it myself. I’m sure it’s going to filter through sooner or later, but it’s not going to be for want of trying.” Henrik held up crossed fingers.
“Right. Well, you can count on me.”
Henrik grinned. “Excellent. Thank you.”
He told Nadi she could go, and she boarded the truck train. No one asked her why the boss wanted to speak to her personally. They were too busy amusing each other with impressions of his pep talk. Some of them were pretty funny.
* * *
After her shift, Nadi went to meet Loren at the rendezvous spot, where they were all to go after the job was done. This was a courtyard behind the old Underground station whose most notable feature was a statue of Doggy Dogg Jones, the main character in one of Oakseed’s most popular media franchises. That would have to go after Kentish Cyc was sold, unless of course it was bought by the same company that acquired the rights to the character.
