The Sudden Appearance of Hope Read online

  The man who possesses both the token and the thumbprint is Mr Kaneko. He is watched over by a security man at all times, but I have now made contact three times on three different reconnaissance missions and only once was security in my way.

  Mr Kaneko is too boring for sin. But he believes in what he does, and lives by Perfection. Every Tuesday, Perfection informs him that the best thing he can do is go to the gym, so to the gym he goes. The gym is male-only, and so exclusive it doesn’t need to advertise.

  The security guard waits in the foyer. I gain access through the service door, using the key stolen eight days ago from a personal trainer. Mr Kaneko has a private locker, always the same number – 324 – believing that these numbers are particularly auspicious. His lucky direction is north. His blood type is A+, which means he is a warrior, creative and passionate. (He is not.) He believes all this, so I have of course studied it.

  Professionalism: conduct, aim or qualities connected with skilled people.

  I walk into the male changing room without pause, horrifying many of the clientele who sit, towels hanging loose from their bare, honed flesh – and let myself into his locker with the receptionist’s master key.

  Men shout: out, out, who are you, what are you doing? I find the secure tag I need, smile brightly at them, give a half bow, and leave them to their nudity, and by the time one of them has put on his dressing gown and sandals and waddled to reception to complain, he has already forgotten.

  With the security tag in hand, I head towards Prometheus.

  Preparation, preparation, preparation.

  This was the sacred tenet of a jewel thief I once shared cocktails with on the coast of Croatia. He’d run with the Pink Panthers, back before the younger generation stepped in and things got sloppy. “Preparation!” he exclaimed, sucking alcoholic juices out of a slice of orange. “This new generation, they have no craft. They break into any old place, wave their guns around, grab the first thing to come to hand, maybe ten, twenty thousand dollars’ worth at most, not worth it, just not worth it.”

  And again, lying in Luca Evard’s arms that night in Hong Kong, letting his breathing push my head up and down as it lay on his chest, the happiest I think I’d ever been, the happiest I can remember ever being.

  I’d asked… something… his skin pressing against mine. I was scared that when we stopped talking, he would sleep, and when he slept, he would forget, and this moment would be lost.

  Now.

  And now.

  And gone.

  So I’d made him talk, and he’d said: “A thief breaks the law once, something small, and it was easy, you got away with it, you feel great, this is easy, no harm done. The next time, easy again, and the next and the next and the next until it becomes habit. Just a thing you do. And then one day, you need something more – a new car, perhaps, or a new house – and someone has it, and you don’t, but that’s okay, because you know how to get it, and also that you deserve it, because this is not just the thing you do, it’s who you are. And the next day you have a gun, and you’re not going to use it, but it becomes familiar in your hand, comfortable, and when the first person dies perhaps you’re scared, but perhaps you’re okay, because you’ve been carrying a gun around for so long that it was natural. Inevitable. Who you are. It’s people like that who scare me, the ones who aren’t doing a job, but becoming the job. The ones who don’t know where they’ll stop.”

  “Don’t coppers do the same thing? Become the job?”

  He thought about it for a second, then gave a half laugh, a thing from the back of the throat. “Maybe they do. There is a certain pressure that comes on you when you are, for example, trying to trace a murderer. You know he’s out there, ready to kill, you have the family of his latest victim downstairs and you think… do I have the right to go home at five p.m., knowing this? Can I really take a weekend off, when he’s out there? It is sometimes hard to be a good policeman and anything else.”

  “What about the woman at Hung Hom? Is she a killer?”

  “Who knows? Maybe one day.”

  Silence a while, but he was still awake, eyes white in the half light of the hotel room, mind elsewhere. I kiss his neck, keep him awake, keep this moment for ever, him, now, me, now, this remembrance, this us, a thing I had almost never said, an us together, a me and someone else who is a part of me, this present tense.

  And a little while later, he said, “I never said Hung Hom Pier.”

  “What?”

  “You said the woman at Hung Hom, but I never mentioned it.”

  He was wide awake, but I was getting drowsy.

  “Sure you did,” I replied. “Of course you did.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Silence between us. He was alert now, four thirty a.m. and the city stirring, sunrise across the sea, watching me, and the thing that had been, the moment that should have been for ever, was fading.

  Now.

  I felt it rush away.

  Becoming memory, only my memory, only a thing for me, and somehow unreal in its solitude, as if perhaps I had imagined this whole thing, a fantasy of a night with Luca Evard, a passing dream.

  And now.

  Gone. Broken like a spider’s web, trailing in the breeze.

  And I said, “I’m going to get a drink of water; do you want anything?”

  “No.”

  And I went to the bathroom, and I locked myself in, and I sat with the light off and my head in my hands for five hundred breaths, and when I let myself out again, he had forgotten, and he was asleep, and it was over.

  Preparation, preparation, preparation.

  I stole Mr Kaneko’s security tag from a gym, his thumbprint from a wine glass.

  I stole a silk suit and a large briefcase from a department store, gutted the briefcase and put it back together again with what I needed inside.

  I stole a collapsible nightstick and a can of pepper spray from the back of a police car. Fact: Japanese policemen must all study judo.

  I stole a set of mini screwdrivers, a tiny electric drill, a torch, a pack of candles, a bottle of lighter fluid, a pair of safety goggles. I timed how long each candle took to burn, cut the remainder down to size.

  The lockpicks I bought online. The tub of plain yoghurt was remarkably expensive, but this was Japan. My hotel handed out matches, and I took them. The firecrackers were hanging by the temple gate, but it felt like sacrilege, so I bought them from the shop across the road.

  I stole codes and keys, careful now, fast towards the end – everything had to be stolen close enough to the day of the robbery that credentials wouldn’t be deactivated, codes wouldn’t be changed.

  I gained access to the front-line computers at Prometheus’ reception desk by stealing the email ID of an IT man on the eleventh floor, and sending an attachment in his name entitled, “Vital Security Upgrade” to the receptionists, who opened it, and every keystroke they made from there on in became mine.

  I purchased the services of whoever coded behind the name of OsumiWasAPterodactyl and ten minutes before I walked through the front door of Prometheus, she broke into the reception desk webcams and froze the feed from ten seconds before my arrival to ten seconds after; my face never logged.

  I walked in through the front door, and no one stopped me.

  This was my sixth time in the offices of Prometheus.

  Gauguin would be nearby. How had he come to Tokyo? Perhaps he pulled footage of the plane from Sharm el-Sheikh, trying to find me, and instead found himself, holding a knife on a woman he couldn’t remember. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to invent a convincing story for how he had recovered the diamonds, my luggage, my passports. A man like Gauguin struck me as an individual who took pride in his memory, and so, of course, he had come to Tokyo because Filipa had eaten with a woman she could not remember, and Tokyo was where Perfection was.

  He would be watching, but that was fine. I counted security cameras, walked fifteen steps towards the elevators, hugging the left-han
d wall, took a sharp right turn on the sixteenth, counted seven steps across the hall, took a hard left, shuffled eight more steps with my back pressed into the wall, and avoided the first two cameras.

  A sharp left back across the hall for eight steps, a sharp right, twenty-two paces took me to the entrance to the men’s toilet. The entrance to the ladies was visible to a camera perched high and to the right; men didn’t merit the same interest.

  In the toilet I opened up my briefcase, and changed into a cleaner’s tabard and blue slacks. I pushed my hair into a baseball cap, took a bucket on wheels from a cupboard by the sinks, put a plastic bag containing my tools and tub of yoghurt inside it, balanced the mop on top.

  I walked at a cleaner’s shuffle to the elevators, head down, turned a little to the left, avoiding the angle of the camera on my face, and summoned the lift.

  A stolen ID badge took me to the seventeenth floor. Lights off, every desk spotless. Mr Yamada, the stern head of development, insisted on it. He also insisted that every day for ten minutes, his floor practised zazen, and he walked up and down the silent lines of meditating employees with a small bell to initiate and close proceedings. Other foibles of Mr Yamada: an obsessive if talented keeper of potted plants, a fanatical supporter of the San Francisco Giants, and a man who, in his youth, was credited with creating a whole new generation of VHS technology. The days of brilliance were gone; now he was management, and growing fat.

  His office was glassed off from the rest of the open-plan floor, though he proudly pointed out the blinds across the windows were never down. But of all the people on the seventeenth floor, only Mr Yamada had access to the floor above, where the real work of Perfection was done.

  He kept his pass in a safe behind a plywood cabinet door in the north-eastern corner of his office. The safe was digital; five buttons were clearly marked with the accumulation of grease from his fingerprints, two numbers even beginning to wear away. I wrote down 1, 2, 5, 7 and 9, rearranged them to 25/11/79, the birthday of his eldest son. My first attempt failed, but inverting the day/month to the American style opened the safe with ease.

  I stole his passcard, foolish to keep it in such a silly place, and walked eleven steps with my shoulder pressed to the wall, then crawled fifteen paces on my hands and knees between the desks, dragging my bucket behind me, to avoid the cameras, until I reached a bin out of the camera’s eye. It was sturdy metal, next to a filing cabinet. I filled it with handfuls of crunched paper, tipped it on its side, squirted lighter fluid all around, and gingerly lit my stub of candle, setting it on the edge of the pool of liquid.

  I crawled away, letting the flame slither down.

  The door to the eighteenth floor was two and a half inches thick, driven by pneumatic pistons. There was no avoiding the security camera here, and I couldn’t disable it without being caught in the line of sight of another camera on the other side of the room, so I ignored it, and swiped myself through.

  Somewhere, the act of opening the door would trigger security, absolutely, for Mr Yamada was not in the building and the door should not have opened, and doors built to withstand high explosive did not open and shut without notice. I started the stopwatch on my phone, and took the stairs two at a time, bucket held tight, no alarm sounding, lights flickering to life around me, woken by my footsteps. Mr Yamada’s passcard opened the door to the floor above, and now we were in a place I hadn’t yet been, an office disappointingly like every other office on the surface of the earth: chairs, desks, computers, two or three screens each, some off, some still running silently, processing a file overnight, churning through numbers while the humans slept.

  Fifteen metres from the stairwell to another security door. An eight-digit numeric code, changed every three days, impossible to crack at speed but then, its strength was also its weakness, for an eight-digit code changed every three days is next to impossible for busy members of staff to remember, and it’s always the human element that is most frail in these systems. I looked for the desk of Miss Sato, the only woman in the office, a brilliant coder relegated by her senior staff to a junior position by dint of being a woman, who had complained as we chatted after a Pilates class that next to her was Mr Sugiyama, who never remembered the door code and always wrote it down, a shocking security breach, just shocking, but who listened to her?

  I had listened.

  At Pilates, Miss Sato had worn a T-shirt bearing the image of a black bear devouring a fish. A small wooden rabbit had hung down from the zip of her rucksack. Hanging from the koi-patterned case of her mobile phone was a tiny straw sparrow, that bounced against her wrist when she made a call. Engimono: good-luck charms. Now I looked for those charms, and found a desk on which a single straw creature, perhaps a fat panda bear, perhaps merely a blob with a painted face, smiled serenely. To the left was the desk of the much-hated Mr Sugiyama, he of the poor memory, and scrawled at the very back of his leather-bound appointment book in almost indecipherably tiny writing on a pink Post-it note was an eight-digit code.

  Preparation, preparation, preparation.

  The eight-digit code opened the door; Mr Yamada’s credentials sealed the deal.

  Twenty-three seconds on the stopwatch; six breaths in, five breaths out.

  More alarms would be sounding now, and that was fine. Let them come.

  The room beyond was close to how I had imagined and all I had hoped for. I heaved the door shut behind me, heard it lock tight. Lines of servers, heat burning off them as fast as the fans could push cold air in, labelled and marked with letters and numbers, trails of cat5 cables bundled into intricate plaits, data highways rushing off into the void. The noise was a low rumble of moving air, a high hiss of magnetic plates and coils.

  A single active computer terminal with a single screen, bright and blue in the noisy gloom. I pressed the image of Mr Kaneko’s thumbprint into the grey fob I’d stolen from him, and six numbers appeared in the panel. I typed the numbers into the terminal, waited, counted my breaths, two, three, four, heard voices in the office at my back. The computer unlocked. I slipped my USB stick into the port, special delivery from Byron14, executed the file, waited.

  Nine breaths, ten breaths.

  My skin burns with expectation, my blood is on fire within me, I am alive, I am alive, in this moment, I am alive after all.

  How long does it take to write data to a USB drive?

  (USB 2.0 – 60 MB/s but in reality closer to 40 MB/s. Assuming that there’s at least 16GB of data to copy across from Prometheus’ server and that’s what, 1,000MB – call it 1,024, think binary – ×16 that’s what… 16,348MB to copy, divided by 40 that’s 410ish seconds, divide by 60 that’s just under seven minutes, no matter how fast you look at it seven minutes is six minutes too long.)

  Preparation, preparation, preparation.

  I leave the USB stick running, and at last hear the distant song of the fire alarm as the candle I had set downstairs finally burns down to a point where it touches the lighter fluid. The fluid ignites, the ignition sets paper burning in a bin, paper sends up smoke and heat, one or the other – probably the latter – triggering the fire alarm.

  May not buy me time; may buy me a few minutes.

  I stand by the shut door, pepper spray in my left hand, baton in my right. Taster classes – I am the queen of taster classes. There are fitness, language, sewing, cooking, painting and martial arts classes across the world where, for weeks at a time, I was invited not to pay for my tuition because “the first one’s free”. After ten weeks of attendance I’d say that I’d “done a little” and after twenty the experience would usually lose its value, as the length of time it would take a teacher to discover that I had experience would be as long as the class itself, and I could progress no further.

  Intensive courses. Five hours of swimming instruction. Eight of Spanish. Four of karate. Six of “boot camp fitness and boxing” on a freezing November weekend in London Fields. Enough to get an idea of all the ways I could go wrong. Enough to know that, if I
was pushed to it, I would fight.

  Fifty-five seconds.

  Sixty.

  Whatever voices had come to the eighteenth floor had been distracted by the fire on the seventeenth, for a moment – only a moment.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven…

  A hundred seconds.

  One hundred and twenty.

  On the one hundredth and fiftieth second since I had triggered the alarm, a disgraceful response time if ever I’d met one, someone tried to open the door to the server room from the outside, and found it locked.

  Voices moved, shouted, feet ran, I waited.

  Codes and cards were sought, two hundred and twenty seconds, two hundred and forty.

  On the three hundredth second, someone inputted a code and the door began to open.

  I shot a burst of yellow pepper spray into the face that appeared in the gap, and at a man’s scream, slammed the door shut again and braced against it.

  Voices, high and fast, a babbling sound, then someone a great deal more aggressive and confident than his still-howling partner began to slam his full weight against the door. I pushed back, first strike, second strike, third strike, and on the fourth I moved off, and he fell shoulder-first, balance gone, through the open door and into the room. Again, a burst of pepper spray, and this time, for his enthusiasm, a smack across the side of the face with the end of my baton, teeth breaking, blood drawn, and damn right too for the man had a gun in his hand. He falls, I take his gun, and fire almost entirely at random, at the door.

  Busy silence within, hard silence outside, accompanied by the ever-present hum of the computers.

  Intensive courses: I thought learning how to use a gun would be hard, but in America it was forty bucks and a smile.

  They waited; I waited.

  There was only one way in and one way out. The man at my feet groaned, half conscious, hands pressed to his face. I nudged him with my toe. “Off you go,” I said, and although he was half blind, he didn’t need telling twice, fumbled his way to the door, ran away on all fours, looking for a place to dry his eyes.