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Down on the ground, I got dressed as quietly as I could in the semidarkness. The burner phone said that it was 6:34 a.m. Cole was an early riser—he went to the gym before work most days and was usually at his desk at his office in Limehouse by nine at the latest. Which meant I had just enough time to walk across London to intercept him before he got there. The only question was what to do about my bag. It was heavy—heavier than I really wanted to drag with me, and it would be safe in the luggage cage under the bed. But I didn’t know whether I would be coming back—it was all too possible that answering Jeff’s email last night would turn out to have been a huge mistake. In the end I unlocked the cage and dragged the rucksack out, swinging it onto my back with a grimace.
In the lobby, I left the keys on the counter and then let myself out into the early-morning chill of a London February.
* * *
THE WALK TO LIMEHOUSE WAS longer than I had thought, and by the time I began to weave my way through the narrow streets of Wapping, down to the river and Cole’s office, the traffic was humming, and I was getting more and more anxious.
It wasn’t only the ticking clock of Cole’s arrival that was making me concerned. I had never felt so conscious of the hundreds and thousands of CCTV cameras London possessed, had rarely even noticed them before today unless I was on a job. Now, as I ducked down alleyways and walked swiftly past the entrances of Tube stations, I felt painfully aware of them—the little plastic lenses following me as I passed, capturing my image, storing it on disk or passing it remotely to some control room back in Scotland Yard. The only saving grace—and a fact I tried to keep reminding myself of as my paranoia mounted—was the fact that there were so many of them. Looking for one person in the thousands of images churned out by London’s vast surveillance web would be not so much like looking for a needle in a haystack as like looking for one particular grain of sand on a beach. I just had to hope that facial recognition wasn’t yet at a stage where computers could cut out the humans and scan for a particular set of biometric features. They couldn’t do that yet… could they? It felt like only yesterday that I’d been reading sarcastic blogs about iPhones failing to distinguish between Chinese faces.
Well, if they could, there was nothing I could do about it for the moment. All I could do was get to Cole’s office and intercept him before he disappeared inside for the day.
Cerberus Security was a tech company that specialized in privacy and security apps for mobile phones. It had started out small, with an ad-blocking app that had proven unexpectedly successful. Later it had expanded into password managers, antivirus apps, and software aimed at worried parents trying to keep tabs on their kids.
The company was housed in Kynes Wharf, a massive black-painted wooden building right down by the Thames. In its day it had been a cotton warehouse, receiving bales from all over the world off ships that made their way up the river at high tide. Now it had been converted into hipster offices. Once upon a time, Cerberus had occupied just the top floor, back when Cole had joined the firm barely out of university. In the years since, it had expanded to take over the entire building, slowly pushing out the other tenants, and Cole had risen with it.
Now, as I swung around the corner, I saw an intermittent stream of young people coming from the opposite direction. They didn’t look like the office workers at Arden Alliance—most of them were too young, and they were for the most part not dressed in suits and ties. I would have fit in fine here with my blond hair and Converse. But I wasn’t intending to go inside—not yet, anyway. Instead I waited, scanning the approaching workers for Cole’s face and trying not to meet the eye of the boxy CCTV camera mounted on top of a high wall, nestled amid the barbed wire like a strange bird. Jesus. They were everywhere. I moved away, turning to face the Thames and its expanse of stinking low-tide mud, though I knew it was stupid—if the police requisitioned footage from that camera, my image was already captured. Turning my back now wasn’t going to help.
I looked at my phone, anxiety coiling in my stomach. Ten past nine. Had I missed him? The thought of braving the reception desk with their Do you have an appointment? and their Can I see some ID? was not a pleasant one.
And then I saw him. My stomach did a flip.
He was striding along, head down, looking at his phone, with his hood up, shading his face. His dark blond hair, or what I could see of it, was wet and uncombed, as if he’d come straight from the gym showers, and he looked gaunt and unshaven, and a lot like he hadn’t slept. Cole had always borne a strong resemblance to the lead in an American high school drama—handsome, clean cut, a total contrast to Gabe’s dirty, bearded sexiness. I had once heard two teenage girls in an airport gigglingly debate whether he was Zac Efron. Now he looked—well, he looked like a man whose best friend had been brutally murdered, I supposed.
“Cole,” I called, keeping my voice low. He looked up, then around, puzzled, apparently not sure where the call had come from. I took a breath. “Cole, it’s me.”
He stopped at that, this time looking directly at me, puzzled. Then recognition clicked, and his expression changed to shock.
“Jack?” His voice gave me the same little gut-wrenching jolt I had experienced on the call yesterday. “Are you—wait, have you done something to your hair? I barely recognized you.”
“I need to talk to you.” My face felt stiff with the effort of holding everything in check.
Cole nodded, plainly concerned but trying not to show it too obviously. “Of course.” He waved an arm at the door of Cerberus Security. “Come on in.”
For a moment I hesitated. It felt like a truly terrible idea, walking into his office under the eyes of his colleagues and receptionists and security staff. But what was the alternative? Having this conversation out in the street? Both seemed impossible.
“Could we—” I swallowed and glanced up and down the street, clocking once again the security cameras, the guard just inside the office foyer. “Is there a coffee shop, or somewhere we could go and talk privately? I don’t want—” I stopped, not sure how to say what I meant. What I was trying to say was that I didn’t want to get him in trouble if the police came asking questions after our meeting, but how could I blurt that straight out?
Cole stood looking down at me for a moment, worried puzzlement etched between his dark brows.
“Depends how private you want. We could go back to the flat?”
Cole’s flat was only ten minutes’ walk from Cerberus, a gorgeous penthouse in a converted warehouse overlooking the Thames that’d had Gabe groaning that he was in the wrong job the first time Cole had shown it to us. It would be quiet… and private. But somehow the suggestion made me uneasy. A building that fancy was sure to have CCTV, and it wasn’t impossible the police might have staked it out already. There was also the question of Cole’s girlfriend, a beautiful model-turned-artist called Noemie. I didn’t want to drag her into it if I could possibly help it.
“Is Noemie there?” I asked at last, and Cole shook his head.
“She’s in San Francisco for work.”
“I just think your flat—” I stopped, glancing at his colleagues streaming past. There was no way I could say what I wanted to—that the police were after me, and his flat felt too dangerous. Even standing here left me itchy with a sense of exposure I couldn’t articulate. But Cole seemed to understand.
“Okay, look, I have an idea. An old church, round the corner. It’s never locked this time of year; the vicar leaves it open in case rough sleepers need a place to warm up.”
I nodded, and he led the way back in the direction he had come, through a couple of narrow alleys, and out into a deserted graveyard, with a small, soot-stained church dominated by a pair of enormous yews. In the corner were a couple of tents and a homeless man rolled up in a sleeping bag. His eyes were closed. I shivered in sympathy and put a handful of coins—all the change I had—in the empty paper cup beside his carry mat. He didn’t stir, and I only hoped he would wake up before someone else helped themselves to the money. Then I hurried after Cole.
I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder, checking for cameras as we made our way up the path between the fallen gravestones, but there were none, or none that I could see. The tall wooden door looked closed—but when Cole pushed it gently, it swung inwards, and together we slipped through the entrance and into the church.
Inside it was chilly and quiet, with a sense of being almost but not quite abandoned. As I followed Cole down the aisle we passed straight-backed pews silently facing a rather dusty altar. Little silvery motes floated in the thin pale light filtering through the stained-glass windows.
“How did you know about this place?” I whispered.
