Jon Evans - Swarm

But maybe even an ordinary guy like me could do one thing for one person. Maybe I could find my best friend. And if I was lucky, and decisive, and I moved fast, maybe I could even save him.

I found a London Underground station by following roads towards busier roads, street lights, and larger buildings, until I stumbled across Kensal Green. I was glad I didn’t have to interact with anyone to purchase my fare. En route I had purchased bandages, chocolate bars and a Coke, for my wounded hand and their sugar-rush energy respectively, and the woman who had sold them to me had actually double-taked and backed away from me before reluctantly consummating the transaction. Behind the black hood I must have looked like nine different flavours of hell.

I knew from my post-university European tour that Earl’s Court was riddled with Internet cafes. I found a 24-hour one with semi-private booths and semi-new machines. The Russian-accented immigrant who took my money seemed only slightly nonplussed by my battered and hooded appearance; I supposed places like this attracted all sorts.

Once ensconced, I played my last remaining card, my only valuable asset. I had garnered it only hours earlier, when I had shoulder-surfed as Jesse opened a secure shell connection to the Argus system, and recognized the pattern his fingers formed as they flew over the keyboard. A pattern I knew from high school.

Login: jester

Password: ancalag0n

My plan was simple: use Argus to find what had happened to Jesse. Maybe Anya was still pretending to be his ally and lover – but I doubted it. My disappearance would be hard to explain. I suspected he was now in Russian-controlled accommodations considerably less comfortable than those in Viktor Kharlamov’s mansion.

It took me an hour to master Argus well enough to determine that my plan was doomed to failure.I felt like a fist had emerged from that computer screen and punched. My one card, my sole asset, had been a useless joker. It was not possible to follow what Anya and Jesse had done today because, like a vampire, Anya Azaryeva did not appear on Argus’s cameras at all. Every trace of her had been erased from the system.

Erased.

“Holes,” I muttered.

My degree was in electrical engineering, meaning that I had spent considerable time tracking the flow of electrons through circuits. But sometimes, I had learned at university, it was much easier to reverse the order of things and track holes; not electrons, but their absence.

By cutting herself out of Argus, Anya must have left huge, jagged gaps in its data. Those gaps would be easy to find. I couldn’t watch anything she had done – but I could use her erasure to find everything and everywhere she had been.

I began to assemble and track all the timecode discontinuities in Argus’s records. Then I created a map showing the location of every bit of footage that my opponents had erased, a narrative of negation. It wasn’t easy. The system was designed to track patterns, not absences, so I had to write several new scripts. By the time I finished mapping the non-data it was 3 AM, pain burned in my lower back like a fire in coal mine, and my mind felt deadened by my cranial overdrive, as if all my brain’s crenellations had been ironed flat. But I was still sharp enough to observe how the dead zone in Argus’s sight had moved over the course of the day, and to conclude that on her way back to the mansion Anya had stopped on a street named ‘The Butts’, in the town of Brentford, just west of London proper.

I called up the cameras around The Butts, and looked for changes before and after the erasure of Anya’s visit. It was like one of those Can you spot 20 differences in these two pictures? puzzles. I had never been good at those, but Argus had software to answer that question for me, and it highlighted a parked white van that had changed positions during Anya’s ten-minute visit.

I fast-forwarded the camera in question, until suddenly that white van disappeared in a blur of motion. I rewinded, slowed it down, pressed PLAY. Then I leaned forward until my face was almost touching the computer screen, and repeated it in slow motion.

Two men had carried a carpet out to that van. A carpet? Or Jesse’s body, wrapped in a carpet? And if so, was he alive or dead? It was suddenly hard to breathe, my lungs felt squeezed shut, incapable of taking in air. It had never occurred to me that they might kill him. Surely he was too valuable to them alive. Surely not even Anya was capable of ordering her lover of three years executed as casually as that.

My hands shook as I instructed Argus to track the vehicle in question. It had left Brentford and headed due north, along country roads, wandering in and out of camera coverage, until it reached the very same airfield on which I had landed less than 24 hours ago.

I sagged with a kind of appalled relief. He was alive, but beyond my help, or probably anyone’s. They had flown him out of the country, probably to Russia -

No, they hadn’t. I stiffened with surprise, prompting a bolt of agony in my lower back, as Argus’s tale of the van’s behaviour continued to unspool before me. It did reach the airfield, but the gate was closed and locked. After a brief discussion between driver and gate-guard, the van had turned away and started back south without ever unloading its cargo.

I skimmed the daily record of the airfield cameras. The ability to look back and forth in time, wherever and at whatever I liked, was already becoming almost second nature; those patches between Brentford and the airstrip where the van had been invisible seemed like undesirable aberrations, jagged tears in the smooth fabric of the panopticon. It seemed that all flights had ceased and the airfield had closed around 3PM this afternoon. I wondered why. G8 security? I hoped so. It was about time the bad guys got hoist on their own petard.

The white van had returned to Brentford; the carpet, and its contents, had been carried back into the stately old house on The Butts; and according to Argus, as of fifteen seconds ago, there had been no visible activity since.

I drew the tentative conclusion that I knew where Jesse was.

Now I just had to figure out what to do about it.

The black cab to Brentford cost me sixty pounds, but time seemed of the essence, and I could steal more money if necessary. The Butts was a cobblestoned thoroughfare in a quiet residential district, lined by big old houses with an air of genteel decay. At 4AM it was postapocalyptically lifeless, which suited me fine.

I stood beside the white van that had driven to and from the airfield and stared over the rusted wrought-iron fence at the house that I believed was Jesse’s prison. The night air was cold and I shivered in my hoodie. I did not feel like a man capable of a successful home invasion. I felt tired and weak and half-crippled and empty.

Various James Bond scenarios played through my brain. In one I broke in through a basement and rescued Jesse without his guards ever knowing. In another I climbed the walls and entered in through a skylight in the roof. In a third I improvised a club, triggered some sort of distraction out front, and brained them when they came out to investigate.

Daydreams all. I was not James Bond, and there was no way I could outfight former Russian Special Forces soldiers in hand-to-and combat, element of surprise or no. I had to try to outthink them, to treat this not as a battle but an engineering problem.

This quiet residential neighbourhood might not be without its advantages. My resources were slender at best; but maybe I could forage for more.

First I hustled to Brentford’s High Street and its 24-hour convenience store. To my surprise they sold cheap prepaid Virgin Mobile cell phones, so I bought one of those, as well as a cigarette lighter and a newspaper, as well from the sleep-deprived Asian man behind the counter. Then I returned to The Butts, and sidled not onto the target property, but the one right next door.