The Heist of Hollow London, page 26
The bewildered barista had placed their drinks on the counter. Loren thanked him and took their iced tea.
“Maybe Mia told Joshi it was impossible to launder because she wanted to steal it from him later?” said Ackland, following Loren as they walked over to a table. The barista hurried over with the coffee, which Ackland grabbed indelicately, causing some of the liquid to bubble over the side and scald his hand. He grunted with irritation.
“What, construct an elaborate heist years later to get it, instead of taking the easy money for just doing the job?” Loren said as they sat down. “Nah, that money wasn’t ever laundered because it was more valuable as blackmail material than money. This money’s got someone’s fingerprints on it, I reckon, and the cops have been looking for it. When someone spends it, a flag goes up saying this money is connected to a crime. Maybe the cops even put this particular bundle of cash out themselves to trap someone. I reckon Samson was meant to launder it for someone else, but he kept it instead, or some of it. I think he put it on the Coyne for safekeeping. He left it in London because maybe it was too difficult to take across borders—if someone checked what was on it, the flag would go up and there’s no more blackmail.” Then Loren’s face lit up. “Oh, or Samson split the money. He had another device he took with him, he had some of the money on that, and left this one behind as insurance. He might even have kept several hidden in different places.”
“Very clever,” said Ackland flatly.
“Ah, good,” said Loren, pleased to have worked that out. “Anyway, when the plant gets sold, all the contents pass to the new owners, all the lockers get reset, anyone can open them, they get inventoried, new owners find the money and bank it and”—Loren made a noise like a siren—“big red light flashes at the cop shop. So the person Samson was blackmailing needed to steal it before that happened. Samson was dead, so they could do the trick with Arlo and the eye transplant. They’d let their newly assembled heist crew believe it was just a big old chunk of money, enough to make it worth the effort. Then when it was delivered they’d launder it or even just destroy it; if they have enough money that ninety-five thousand doesn’t mean much to them.”
“You’re saying Mia was being blackmailed.”
“No, c’mon, mate. You were being blackmailed. I bet Samson got plenty of promotions and perks out of you. I wasn’t totally sure until I saw how you reacted when I spent the money. Mia—or whatever her name is, because she’s not Mia—belongs to you, and you did this whole thing through her so no one could connect it to you. Also because you knew we’d respond to her tragic backstory more than whatever the fuck yours is.”
“You’ve been very stupid about all of this, Loren.”
“You must’ve got desperate, though, eh? To come to me yourself, show your face. I guess you figured I’d stopped trusting Mia so maybe I’d trust you. So I guess you’re my actual holder, and now I’ve disobeyed you, you can report me, can’t you.”
Ackland said nothing.
“Ah—you don’t hold us. Yeah that makes sense, you registered us to someone else so we couldn’t get connected back to you. Who’s our holder, then?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’ll find out.”
“You think you can just walk away with that money?”
“That’s the plan.”
“I’ll tell the police you stole it.”
“We stole it because you told us to, y’dingus. I know you made sure to keep your hands clean, but that’s not gonna wash now, is it? Because that money leads back to you, which means you’re the only one who’d go to all this effort to steal it. Do you want a theft charge on top of everything else that’s coming your way? Make it even more obvious how guilty you are? But look—no one knows where this money’s been all this time, so I’m okay with leaving it all a big mystery how it turned up suddenly after all these years if you are.” Loren drained the rest of their iced tea and placed the glass on the table. “Thanks for that. Oh no, wait—I paid, didn’t I?” Loren stood up from the table.
“I’m going to kill you,” said Ackland quietly.
Loren gestured around the coffeehouse. “What, in front of all these people?”
Ackland reached inside his jacket, and Loren realized they’d pushed this too far. He wasn’t going to act rationally, he was going to kill them in front of all these people and who knows, he might get away with it—
Then someone arrived at Loren’s side, reached across the table, and grabbed Ackland’s arm, the one that was going for his weapon. She held it firmly as she punched him cleanly and confidently between his eyes. She punched him twice more, then while he was dazed she moved around to the other side of the table, put one hand on his chest and the other underneath the chair seat and tipped the chair backward, ensuring his head hit the tile floor. She reached into his pocket and took out the small pistol he was carrying, then kicked him hard in the ribs.
As Nadi straightened up, everyone in the café applauded, and Loren joined in, feeling like they might cry.
* * *
The overfilled police wagon parked outside Kentish Cyc had already been at the boiling point when Nadi had been thrown into it. The cops’ failure to get medical attention for her had lit the spark, and the next time the doors were opened to put someone in, the prisoners rushed them.
This happened around the same time the fire started inside the plant—Nadi wasn’t sure if it had happened before or after, but it meant the cops’ attention was not fully on their escaping prisoners, and few of them were recaptured. Gregg helped Nadi out of the wagon and took her to his apartment to recover. He’d wanted to get out of the corpurbation altogether, away from the burning building and the cops who might be looking to rearrest him—but the overline was down and he had nowhere else to go but home. Nadi’s own memories of this were patchy and she inferred much of it from talking to Gregg as she sat on his sofa, taking breaths that were made painful by the bruising on her ribs.
Gregg thought she had a concussion. Nadi knew she had a concussion. But as soon as she was lucid enough to walk in a straight line, she had to go back to the plant. He tried to stop her, but couldn’t, let’s be real.
Nadi stepped unsteadily onto the street and saw straightaway the plant was burning to the ground. She thought about this for a moment, trying to force her brutalized brain into giving her a course of action.
Then she saw a copter flying overhead. It wasn’t part of any emergency services operation: it had no markings. Mia was meant to be coming to get them in a copter—not here, that wasn’t the plan. But the overline wasn’t running, Gregg had said. So maybe the plan had changed.
Nadi headed in the direction of the copter, trying to keep sight of it. By then it was dark and Nadi hadn’t seen exactly where it had landed, but she just kept going and hoped for the best.
Then Nadi saw the copter take off, and felt despair: they’d left her behind.
Then it came back down again.
Maybe they’d seen her, knew she was on her way, they just had to give her more time. She moved faster, as fast as her battered limbs would allow. She had a better sense of where the copter was now—she could just about see the moonlight reflecting off it—
Then it took off again.
Nadi kept moving because she couldn’t think what else to do. The copter had come back once, perhaps it would again. At last she reached the spot from which it had taken off, and there she found Kline’s body.
* * *
Nadi buried Kline, after a fashion—she didn’t have anything to dig with, so she carried his body into the exposed cellar of a demolished building and covered it over with a broken door. She’d already searched him, in case he had anything important in his pockets. She took his slate and backhand, even though she couldn’t use them to communicate with the others. Then she returned to the spot where the copter had landed. Kline’s suitcase still lay there.
Nadi didn’t know why Kline was dead. But waiting for the copter to come back no longer appealed. All she could do now, it seemed, was head to one of the two places they’d agreed to meet. She couldn’t possibly go back to Kentish Cyc, so it would have to be NiZCOval. She picked up Kline’s suitcase and started walking.
* * *
It took Nadi some hours to reach NiZCOval on foot; had it not been for the genetic tweaks that had improved her stamina and rate of healing, she would never have made it. When she got there she checked if Kline’s slate had received any messages from the others. It hadn’t, so she lay on the dry grass and rested.
When she awoke, the sun was up. She’d only slept for a few hours, and she still felt terrible, but markedly less terrible. She checked Kline’s slate again: nothing on the crew’s network.
However, Nadi realized the slate had access to another network. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at when she initially accessed it—the messages were from Mia, but they weren’t directed toward the crew. After looking at a few of these she realized Kline had got into Mia’s own messages, and there was activity on there. How long he’d had access to this, she didn’t know. But the messages said where Loren was at that moment, and what was going to happen to them.
Nadi stood up, leaving Kline’s suitcase behind, and hurried in the direction of Sunglow. She ran as much of the way as she could manage.
When she arrived, she looked through the window of a coffeehouse and saw Loren, and her chest surged. They looked grimy and bruised, but they were smiling as they spoke to some xeccy guy. He looked familiar. Maybe he was the guy she’d seen on that balcony in Montevideo, maybe he wasn’t.
Nadi waited. Whatever Loren was doing, Nadi felt she should let it play out. If they seemed to be in danger, she’d step in …
* * *
Loren embraced Nadi, and Nadi returned the gesture, trying not to squeeze too hard. She had never done this affectionately before. She leaned down, and Loren stretched up, and they kissed—quickly, lightly, shyly, but happily.
“Are we good to go?” said Nadi.
Loren looked down at Ackland on the floor, and so did Nadi. “D’you think he’s defeated? He looks defeated.” They nodded to themself, picked up their empty glass, and returned it to the barista. They were about to walk away, then turned and said, “Sorry, I didn’t leave a tip, did I? How rude of me.” They told the tip jar they wanted to leave r10, then waved the Coyne over it. And Loren and Nadi walked out of the door, hand in hand.
38
LUCKY DIP BOX
The militia kicked Arlo out of the copter without explanation. Before this happened, Mia told Arlo a name: Karyn Shaw. “Your real holder,” Mia had said. Arlo didn’t know why she told him that, and didn’t get a chance to ask: the copter flew away.
Arlo walked across to NiZCOval, where he was able to get a signal. To his surprise he also found Kline’s suitcase on the grass. Loren told Arlo to stay by the suitcase: they would come and find him.
When Loren and Nadi filled him in on what had happened, Arlo thought maybe he should feel a little sorry for Mia. She’d been a pawn in this like the rest of them, and when it had all fallen apart, she’d tried to make amends by giving him the only thing of any value she had to offer. But he didn’t feel sorry for her at all. He physically couldn’t.
* * *
The world was bored of the ongoing collapse of Oakseed and endless analysis of what it meant, which had descended into corporate technical speak and mind-numbing human-interest stories, and there was nothing to fill the gap but witless conspiracy theories—and yet it was so huge, it seemed the only thing worth talking about. So when it emerged that Ackland Miles, a very senior xec at the company, had been deeply involved in a scandal that dated back many years, it was exactly what people wanted to hear. Not only was it a fresh angle, it created a strong sense the company had been rotten anyway and its collapse was a good thing, even if the economic shock was going to have dreadful global ramifications.
The scandal had never fully come to light at the time: the police knew what was happening, but when they failed to prove it, Oakseed prevented any details of the case from entering the public domain. But now the police could prove it, thanks to a quantity of currency turning up that had Miles’s fingerprints on it, and there was no Oakseed to suppress it now.
The money in question was one of many off-the-books payments made to Miles by an agent working on behalf of Sunglow. Twenty years ago, when there were still hopes of regenerating London, Miles was appointed head of social engineering, having impressed his superiors with similar work in New Orleans. To this end, he regularly sent in securits to evict squatters. Many of these were sent to prison, and if they had children, naturally they’d be taken into care. At the same time, Sunglow’s issues with its accelerated-growth mades were becoming horribly apparent, and while the world at large took little interest, at the other megas it was known that Sunglow was desperate to cover its shortfall of mades, and if the others had surplus mades, it would eagerly buy them.
Miles saw this situation, and he saw the squatters’ children being taken into care, and he saw an opportunity. Because after all, these children needed somewhere to go, and Sunglow’s nurseries were well under capacity, and if the children were young enough that they wouldn’t remember their former lives, was it so bad to send them there? They’d have better lives as mades at Sunglow than if they’d remained with their feckless parents in derelict London.
In a little over three years, Miles had sold a total of seventy-one children to Sunglow. The nursery they ended up in would give them the identity of a deceased made and alter the records to make it appear they’d always been there. Sometimes the kids asked awkward questions, but these stopped after a few months of being told this was where they came from, and the people they thought were their parents had, in fact, stolen them from this nursery. Miles had to pay off a few people, but mostly he was able to funnel the money into a dark wallet of his own.
Eventually, the police got wind that some of Sunglow’s mades weren’t all they appeared, and began to make inquiries. Sunglow made some unveiled threats in return, making it clear that officers who pursued this line could expect their careers to be terminated. But the investigation did get close to the agent who Miles dealt with, and they successfully marked some of his currency, hoping this would lead them to whoever was selling these kids. Before that happened, the agent skipped the country and Miles opted to quit while he was ahead. The investigation was suspended—but the case was never closed. Now the money had turned up, and it was open again.
As Arlo watched the story emerge, it seemed strange to him how much people cared about it. They hadn’t cared what happened to the vagues’ children when they were living rough in London. Whenever anyone surveyed the public about the vagues, most people said they should be rounded up and locked away or disposed of. These untouchables had never been considered fully human—yet now it was discovered they’d been treated as mades, the failure to respect their humanity provoked outrage.
“It horrifies them,” Loren told him as they ate a meal before boarding their flight out of London, “because suddenly they see themselves in that situation. They never worried about finding themselves in the position of a vague before, but this happens and they see a red line’s been crossed.”
Arlo agreed. But it threw a lot of things into sharp relief.
There was another part to the story, which broke after it had been in the media cycle for a day or so. Outlets had drilled down into Miles’s history with Oakseed, looking for fresh details to capitalize on the public interest, including the spell in New Orleans that had resulted in him being given his position in London. Turned out he’d used similar tactics there, just not for his own personal enrichment. Back then Oakseed was still expanding its use of mades, and would take all they could get. The kids he removed from their parents in New Orleans were sent to a nursery outside Boston. The same one where Drienne grew up.
Arlo did the maths, and it lined up. Maybe she’d been right all along. And he couldn’t ever tell her.
* * *
Karyn Shaw was a young woman formerly employed by Oakseed as an itemiser. She was based out of Hong Kong and had worked with Miles but had no obvious connection to him. She had not met any of the mades she held and never expected to—they’d all been registered in her name, but she had no involvement in the process. The deeds just turned up in her inbox. So she was very surprised when Loren, Arlo, and Nadi turned up at her home. She recognized them from the pictures on the deeds.
They told her they had a message from Miles. This part was Loren’s idea. They figured Miles would not have communicated with Karyn recently, so all she knew would be what she’d seen in the news: that Miles had been charged with kidnapping and trafficking minors. She would be desperate to know what was going on and if she was implicated. The strategy was effective: Karyn invited them inside. Her apartment was small, and it looked like she’d only recently moved in.
“Do you know anything about what Miles sent us to do?” asked Nadi.
Karyn shook her head. She sat down, clearly expecting the others to do the same, but they didn’t. Loren went to the fridge and, without asking, got themself a can of M:Pyre.
“It’s better you don’t know,” Arlo told Karyn.
“I figured that was the case, yeah,” said Karyn. “From what I heard, I mean.”
“The arrangement,” Arlo continued in a businesslike manner, “was that if we completed the job we’d be freed.”
“And we completed the job,” said Nadi.
“But…” said Karyn, looking from one of them to the other, “Miles is going to prison.”
“We still completed the job,” said Loren.
“How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”
