A flash of red caught his attention: a girl walking on the sidewalk next to him, swinging a fringed bag and wearing a crimson skirt and blouse. Her navel was bare and he could see the tattoo of a butterfly on her flat stomach. She walked with such devil-may-care insouciance that he smiled with pleasure. Life was good. Four o'clock in the afternoon in the Square Mile… and the City was his.
The light turned to green. The traffic bulleted forward. A rapturous roar of sound ricocheted off the steep walls of the buildings, making the ground tremble. He pedaled furiously across the intersection, dodging a green Mercedes whose driver seemed more intent on shouting into the cell phone in his hand than keeping his car on the road.
It was on days like these that he was also acutely aware of that other-secret-dimension to the City. Mingling with the car fumes, the layers of noise and the haze of heat was something even more ephemeral. Digital Stardust. As he pedaled past the looming facades of London's banks, insurance companies and businesses, he imagined himself moving through an invisible but glimmering cloud.
Humming quietly behind the walls of the City's skyscrapers were machines filled with dreams. Dreams of money and power. Dreams broken down into binary code. Data. The most valued currency of all in this city where the foreign exchange turnover equaled 4637 billion dollars every day. Hidden in the brains of the computers were files, memos, research documents. A treasure trove of information protected by locked doors, computer firewalls and killer passwords.
But nothing was impossible, was it? He smiled into the wind and curved his back as he made a sharp turn into a narrow side street, leaving the worst of the traffic behind him. Doors can be knocked down; walls can be scaled and the magic of encrypted incantations dissolved. Secrets were meant to be broken. You only needed focus and determination-and wasn't it fortunate that he was gifted with both.
Today he was on a scouting expedition. His client was Bubbleboy, a toy company specializing in toys for the six- to ten-year-old age group. His target was Pittypats, Bubbleboy's biggest competitor. In this bunny-eat-bunny world, the way to gain the edge was to know your rival's secrets. Companies can glean a great deal of information about the competition by studying reports by the city's financial analysts and by trawling through newspapers and trade journals. This modus operandi is boring, unadventurous but-to be fair-not ineffective.
Public documents, however, will only allow you a partial reading of the tea leaves. Ultimately, a more innovative approach is necessary. And that was where Gabriel came in. His scouting expedition today would be only the first step in an elaborate operation designed to give Bubbleboy deep access into its main rival's secrets.
Pittypats's City offices, he was interested to see, were located in two modest, if charming late-eighteenth-century houses complete with Venetian windows and scalloped arches. Very unassuming for a company with an impressive global reach. The offices sat quietly at the end of a narrow street, dwarfed by a sixties concrete tower that was unashamedly ugly. A steel railing ran the length of the building. He chained his bike to the railing, and as he straightened, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the plate glass window. Ankle boots, jeans, grubby T-shirt with the words "City Couriers" emblazoned on the front. Leather satchel slung across his back. Clipboard clenched underneath one armpit. Good. He looked the part.
Security at Pittypats's front door was basic: the ubiquitous security camera and a buzzer and voice intercom unit. He placed his thumb on the button and almost immediately the door clicked open.
Inside it was a different matter. Against the ceiling were motion detectors, and the door leading from the tiny reception room to the rest of the building was equipped with a magnetic key card reader. No cameras in this room. Although no guarantee there weren't any somewhere deeper inside the building.
A girl, sitting behind a green-and-gold leather-inset desk, looked up as he walked in. Her hair was coiled primly behind her head, but her lips looked as though they belonged to one of the replicants in Blade Runner. The gloss was stupendous and her mouth seemed to glitter. Quite stunning, actually. But also somehow forbidding. You had the feeling that if you kissed those lips you might lose some skin.
"Can I help you?" She was looking at him coolly, one eyebrow lifted to form an impressive arc.
He smiled at her and swung the leather bag from his shoulder. "Package to deliver."
She waited while he opened the bag, her fingers clutching a pencil and tapping it softly on the old-fashioned blotter in front of her.
"Here you are." He extracted a small package wrapped in brown paper, placing it along with the clipboard on top of the desk. "Package for Mr. Peake. And it needs signing for."
"Peake?" She frowned. "No. There's no one here by that name."
He knew there wasn't. He had made sure of it beforehand, but now he spoke with exaggerated patience. "Yes. Peake. See. It says so right here." He stabbed a finger at the clipboard. "Mr. Donald Peake."
"No." She pushed it back at him, irritated. "There must be a mistake."
"This is Pittypats?"
"Yes, it is. But-"
He peered at the address on the package. "Mr. Donald Peake. Human Resources."
"Oh." Her face cleared. "Our human resources department is out in Croydon. You've got the wrong office."
No, sweetheart, I haven't, he thought silently but continued, "Would it be possible to leave the package here-for you to send it on to Mr. Peake, like?"
She looked uncertain. He watched as she worried her lower lip between her teeth. Surprisingly, the lipstick showed no sign of smudging, staying preternaturally glistening and smooth. Amazing.
"Maybe you could just ask?" he prompted. "Please, love. Help me out."
For another moment she hesitated. Then she opened the drawer of the desk and took out a small square of plastic. "Wait here."
She turned and swiped the key through the electronic scanner. The tiny red eye at the top of the scanner turned green and she pushed the door open. He caught a brief glimpse of a well-lit but completely bland hallway. There was no indication whatsoever as to what went on inside the building.
As the door swung shut behind her, he dropped to his knees and opened the bag wider. Inside was his iPAQ. Small, discreet, it was still his favorite tool for this kind of work. It was already powered up, and as there were no cameras around, he would be able to sneak a quick peek.
The screen blinked, and what it showed him made him smile with delight. Oh, great. The path forward would be relatively easy. This commission was not going to require any athletics, thank God. With his last job he had had no choice but to break-and-enter and he had found himself crawling around false ceilings, fighting his way through phone lines, air-conditioning equipment and fire sprinklers, all so he could bypass some truly maddening security controls and gain access to a restricted research area. This time around, he would be able to pluck the information from the air, so to speak.
The door opened. It was the girl. He got to his feet and closed the leather bag without fuss.
"Yes." The girl nodded. "You can leave the package here. We'll take care of it."
"Actually," he shook his head regretfully and hitched the bag onto his shoulders, "looks like it has to be Croydon, after all. Just spoke to my boss." He gestured at the cell phone clipped to his belt. "He says Mr. Peake has to sign for it personally. Sorry for the trouble."
She sighed with exasperation, but he could tell that she had already lost interest in him. "Just shut the door on your way out, please."
He opened the door and looked back. It had been a brief visit. No more than ten minutes had passed since he first walked in here. But the trip had been a definite success. Apart from everything else, it surely would have been worth it just to see those lips. He was going to have fun describing them to Isidore.