She told him about the two Elohim and the scary ninja girl. Rush was both shaken and fascinated, and stopped her with frequent questions. When she’d finished, he shook his head as though to clear it.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ Kennedy said. ‘We read the book.’
25
‘This,’ Manolis said, ‘is going to be a ram raid.’
Tillman chewed down on the words and found he didn’t like them much. ‘There’s no way to do it with finesse?’ he asked. ‘Get in, get out again, nobody the wiser?’
They were in the back room at the Pantheon and Manolis was once again sitting at his command deck. He’d thrown away the Linux interface he usually defaulted to and taken the system back to the bare bone of some prompt-and-command structure that displayed in green text on black background moving up the screen too fast for the eye to follow. The screens, pluraclass="underline" there were whole recursive nests of them, opening out of each other and then falling back again in a fractal cascade.
‘I wish,’ he muttered distractedly. ‘But there’s nobody who’s meant to have access to this data in real time. Not even the government. You must understand, Leo, this is not one system of cameras. It’s thousands of systems, millions of individual machines, most of them set up by local councils for traffic control or to monitor public order hotspots. The police, the army, MI5 and MI6 and NaCTSO, they all make search requests on these systems, all the time, and they’re accommodated. But they follow protocols, they go through channels, and they take their time. What we do is different. What we do is to interrogate all the systems simultaneously.’
‘And you can make that work?’ Tillman asked.
Manolis blew out a breath with an audible puff. ‘Damn yes, I can make it work. But not for long. As soon as I’m in, every system will report a breach and every operator will try first to shut me out and then to backtrack the query and find me. This they will succeed in doing, definitely, if we give them long enough. Proxy servers — even the best proxy servers — are not designed to stand up under that level of interrogation. So before they obtain our real-world location, we get what we need and we close down. The numbers, please.’
Tillman gave him a sheet of folded paper, on which he’d written five different registration numbers. Manolis entered them one by one into a small search window at the bottom right of the screen. He did it with scrupulous care, referring back to the paper after each tap on the keyboard. All of the numbers belonged to motorcycles purchased in the UK in the last six months: specifically, all of them belonged to red-on-silver Ducati Multistrada Sports with side panniers and Pirelli Scorpion Trail tyres fitted front and back. Tillman had heard the absolute conviction in Kevin’s voice, along with the wistfulness and the hunger, and would have staked his life on the accuracy of that description. Even in its basic configuration, the Multistrada was an expensive toy, and the machine that had made such an impression on Kevin was bespoke, not off the rack. That was the only thing that gave them a fighting chance on this.
There were 4.2 million CCTV cameras mounted on the streets of Britain, with more coming online all the time. And a very large proportion of them used some form of optical recognition system for vehicle licence plates. So in theory, if they pooled all the log listings for the CCTV camera networks that Manolis could hack into, they should end up with five dotted lines spun out across space and time, with each line representing the path taken by one of the five bikes. Only one of the five lines would intersect the Smoker’s Paradise newsagent’s shop in Fynes Street, Pimlico, and that one would be their target.
Manolis turned a slightly tense face to Tillman. ‘Ready?’
‘What do you mean, am I ready? All I’ve got to do is stand here, Mano. Take it away whenever the spirit moves inside you.’
Manolis tapped a key. ‘I’m an atheist,’ he murmured. ‘But I’m a very bad atheist. Let’s hope God takes that into account.’
The windows on the screen now seemed to be shuffling themselves like cards in a deck, the stack reshaping itself in peristaltic ripples with each screen refresh.
‘Are we in?’ Tillman asked.
‘Some hold-outs. But yes, mostly we’re in. And wait … wait … yes, already we have a winner, I think.’
‘We do?’
Manolis dragged one of the windows away from the stack. ‘These are central London feeds,’ he said. ‘And this bike — TC62 BGZ — is all over everywhere.’
‘Was it in Pimlico last night?’
‘I’ll tell you as soon as I know. But it was in Clerkenwell the day before. It’s her, Leo. I feel it in my soul.’
‘Your atheist soul.’
‘You think Christians have the monopoly? Yes, my atheist soul.’ Manolis was silent for a moment, then he swore. ‘Buggering shit.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Tillman demanded, but he could see that the deck was thinning out.
‘They see me already. Good security. Too good to take the candy I offer. They’re not bothering to backtrack, they’re just shutting the systems down and rebooting, to break the connection. So …’
‘So?’
‘Ram raid becomes hijack.’ The Greek’s long, elegant fingers flicked at the keyboard with ethereal delicacy. ‘I am now the traffic controller for the whole of the Greater London area. Congratulate me, Leo.’
‘You’re the man for the job,’ Tillman said tersely. ‘Doesn’t it make us easier to find, though?’
‘Yes. Once I let go. Right now …’ Manolis fell silent again, concentrating on the input from the screens and the information flows he was managing to control and merge moment by moment into a single data dump. Tillman said nothing, just let him work.
‘Done,’ Manolis said at last. ‘Almost done. Leo, remove the flash drive, there, from the machine, when I tell you to.’
The flash drive was bright yellow and bore the smiling face of a cartoon duck. It wasn’t an ironic statement, it was just part of a job lot that Manolis had bought cheaply from a wholesaler. Their capacity interested him more than their aesthetic. Tillman took the small wedge of plastic between finger and thumb, then waited until Manolis said ‘Now.’
He tugged the drive free. In the same moment, Manolis spread both of his hands over the keyboard and pressed down four or five keys simultaneously. He held the pose while the remaining windows popped like soap bubbles, one by one, until only one was left. On this one, the actor Wilfrid Brambell mouthed silently against a backdrop of metal bedframes and discarded tyres.
Manolis raised his hands from the keys and flexed his fingers. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Death to tyrants.’
‘Death?’ Tillman echoed.
Manolis shrugged brusquely. ‘Well, not death, exactly. It depends on your opinion of classic British sitcoms. I personally think Steptoe and Son was a highlight. So I’m giving the traffic control computers a free download of the first and second seasons. This should prevent them from completing a trace on us. It’s very hard to swim upstream, even when the stream is running through fibre-optic cable.’
With the command deck effectively offline, Manolis had to break out a battered old laptop to examine the data they’d stolen. His initial instincts proved correct: the licence plate TC62 BGZ had been recorded by a camera in Vincent Square at 11.30 p.m. the previous evening. There was no camera in Fynes Street itself, but that was close enough — and the bike’s movements over the past two days gave ample confirmation. It had been clocked half a dozen times in Islington, on St Peter’s Street, and it had been in Onslow Street that same afternoon.
‘No wonder you lost her,’ Tillman said. ‘You thought she was still on foot. And while you were taking the long way round, she switched to the bike. Probably drove right past you.’