I didn’t want to be a thief.
My dad was a copper; he met me a few times down the station. Most people were there for things done while drunk, high or desperate. One, a drug dealer, grinned as they took his fingerprints, and laughed at the sergeant and called him “mate” and said, “It won’t go nowhere, you’ll see!” and he was right, and waved as he left the station, “Better luck next time, mate,” gold link necklace around his throat, grubby sneakers on his feet.
The only thief I saw was seventeen years old, and even though I was just fourteen, he looked young to me. He was pale as a pillow, skinny as a stick, and he swung between inaction and violence like a weathervane in a tornado.
Now: still, shoulders down, knees bent, feet turned inwards.
Now: struggling, kicking, twisting, dropping onto the floor, trying to bash his own head out against the counter.
And now: still, silent.
And now: screaming, screaming, fucking, fucking, screaming, no words just fucking, fucking, screaming.
And now: utterly calm. Utterly silent. Staring at a locked door.
That day, my dad was supposed to take me to see a film, but he had to go back in to help apply restraints to the kid in the cell. They left him wrapped up like a carpet for twenty minutes, released him to avoid risk of suffocation, and Dad finally took me to the cinema, but the film had already begun, and the next night the kid was taken to hospital after smashing his skull on the cell wall.
“Sometimes people say it’s easy,” mused my dad, as he drove me home from our failed outing, a desultory, apologetic pile of half-eaten chips on my lap. “Easier to steal than to work; easier to lie, to get away with it. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes — too much — the system just isn’t geared for the ones who have nothing better. The dropouts and the addicts; the ones with nowhere to go. Sometimes it’s easier to cheat, because life is hard. But you gotta have your mates and your family and people around you who love you and give a damn, and you gotta have hope, big hopes for the future, ideas about what you want, because if you’ve got all of that, then living becomes easier — not easy, just a bit easier — and you can see that cheating is desperate, and desperate is hard.”
I said nothing, still fuming at my dad for having again been a victim of too much work, too many broken promises.
He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the drive, and didn’t turn the radio on.
Chapter 8
The day after Reina died, Princess Shamma bint Bandar arrived in Dubai, bearing the Chrysalis diamond. I watched, bags already packed, as Leena met her aunty and her entourage outside the hotel.
“Darling, you look beautiful!” exclaimed her aunt, and squeak, so much to tell you, oh my God, it’s been amazing, replied Leena.
No one mentioned Reina.
I stood awhile in the sun, ignoring the taxi the porter had called to take me to the airport.
“Ma’am?” he said, and when I didn’t answer, “Ma’am? Do you still want the cab?”
“No, thank you,” I replied, and was surprised by the certainty in my voice. “I think perhaps I’m not yet done here.”
So saying, I picked my suitcase up, and walked back into the hotel.
I gathered tools for my crime.
Security can spot a scout a mile off, but security never remembered me long enough to care. I stalked queens and princes, shook hands with diplomats and spies, and no one looked twice. No one ever looks twice at me.
The plastic explosive I acquired from an ex-demolitions expert who’d been sacked from his job in Qatar after eight workers died on his shift.
“People die out there all the time,” he explained, as he handed over the goods in a drawstring bag. “People are cheaper than steel. Why does it matter? Scapegoat, they made me. Hypocrisy; the death of the middle man.”
Shutting down the electricity on cue was harder, but far from impossible. The virus for the job I purchased from a supplier called BarbieDestroyedTheMoon. She — I hoped she was a she — had no issues selling to me over the darknet since, as she pointed out, Cop, thief, spy or fool, you ain’t never tracing me.
And what exactly, I asked, was it I was purchasing for my bitcoins?
It’s ripped off a CIA design, she explained. They went and used it on Iran to shut down its nuclear program, but it went public on their asses. CIA are fucking pussies. NSA are the ones you gotta respect.
I set a timecode, and implanted the virus on the laptop of a junior engineer going through an unhappy and, it turned out, entirely irrational romantic trauma.
“My wife is sleeping with another man!” he wailed, as we shared sushi and green tea at a Japanese café whose walls were coated with images of pink, wide-eyed could-be cats. “She denies it, and I tell her I’d forgive her if she admits it, but she won’t, and so I will never forgive her, never, not until the day she dies.”
I smiled, skimming sushi over soy. Never over-dip sushi; a chef once screamed at me for this sin, but the waitress apologised on his behalf, explaining that his favourite newt had died that morning, and he was a very passionate man. I quite understand, I’d replied. It can be devastating, losing a newt you love.
“Of course I can’t find any proof of her treachery,” sighed my almost-certainly-not-cuckolded junior engineer. “But that just proves how well she’s covering it up!”
I implanted the virus into his laptop while he was having a piss, and the following day he, unwitting, uploaded it to the sub-station computers where he worked along with his timesheets and a series of home-penned poems about the passions of despised love.
Chapter 9
Criminal professionalism; it is more than good practice.
Never steal in anger, and yet Reina was dead, and the Chrysalis had come to Dubai and so…
Breathe in. Count every breath. One — in — one — out.
Count to ten.
Heart rate: 76 BMP.
Blood pressure: 118/76. Systolic/diastolic. In 1615 a doctor called William Harvey published Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus — On the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals. The Chinese and Indians had arguably got there first, but it wasn’t until 1818 that Samuel Siegfried Karl Ritter von Basch invented the sphygmomanometer.
Knowledge is power.
Knowledge is freedom.
Knowledge is all I have.
There is nothing in this world which can master me, save me myself.
Days of pursuit in the Burj al Arab Jumeirah.
On a Monday I was a stranger Leena met by the poolside. On a Tuesday I was a stranger in the spa. On Wednesday I was a stranger who approached her over dinner. I stole Leena’s mobile phone, copying all its information and linking its SIM card to mine. She was at 634,000 points in Perfection.
By now you will be feeling the joy that can only come from knowing that you are approaching the pinnacle of potential. Your goals are not dreams — they are truths that you can, will and shall obtain to become the perfect, true you!
A text message on her phone:
Can’t believe Reina did this to us! Why would she be so stupid?
After twenty minutes of being separated from her phone, Leena began to panic. I handed it back to one of her security men, who suspected me of being someone nefarious, but I was already gone and he forgot.
It is not invisibility that I possess; more a steady blinking of the mind.
“We’ve all got Perfection!” whispered Suzy-Sandy-Sophie-Something in my ear as we sat in the aromatherapy room. “Even the princesses! I’m from Ogema, Wisconsin, and my pa used to sell second-hand kitchen appliances from the garage, but now I’m here and I have dinner with royalty and you just mustn’t let it get to your head, because they’re all just people, really, even though they’re Muslim!”