‘Time to go,’ he barks, avoiding eye contact with her.
Putin says something to the woman that Kate doesn’t understand, then marches Kate out of the kitchen and up towards the warehouse. It’s agony to move, but he ignores her pleas to slow down, dragging her by her wrist when she tries to stop. In his other hand he’s holding the remote for the neckband.
‘Try anything and I will use this again,’ he says, waving the remote in her face as they approach the warehouse.
When they reach the door, Putin looks around and pulls out his phone, which is buzzing.
‘One minute,’ he says, holding a finger up at her. He seems distracted and starts to chat quietly but urgently on the phone.
Kate stares at the warehouse door, wondering what lies behind it. A chill runs through her. The sky is pewter grey now, the sea dark and choppy. The woman’s right. There’s no escape from here. Her one attempt failed. The van driver was too far away to have heard her. It’s hopeless.
Putin is becoming more animated on the phone, defensive. Is he being reprimanded for beating her up? She turns away and her heart misses a beat. On the far hillside, across the bay, a familiar figure, a distinctive lumbering gait. She stays very still, aware that she mustn’t alert Putin. Despite the distance, she knows at once that she’s made a spot. It’s Jake. His ursine profile.
Putin hasn’t seen him. He’s still talking on his phone.
‘Can I wave goodbye to Cornwall?’ she manages to say, loudly, to Putin. ‘To England.’ The urge to scream, call out to Jake, is almost unbearable, but she knows that the pain from the neckband will be far worse. ‘It’s somewhere out there.’
He puts a hand over his phone, glances at her and then at the sea, before returning to his conversation. She’s not sure if he’s understood her question. The wind ruffles her hair as she starts to wave out to sea. She checks on Putin and looks towards Jake in the far distance again. She can hear the waves thumping against the rocks, somewhere out of sight far below her. The drop must be vertical. She scans the bay again. High tide, the sea right up against the cliffs where Jake is still visible. She became obsessed with tides in Cornwall, living in tune with their ebb and flow.
And then Putin is off the phone and grabbing her by her wrist again.
‘Come,’ he says, dragging her to the door.
‘You’re hurting me,’ she protests as he pulls out a card with his other hand and holds it against the lock of the warehouse door. She turns to look back one last time. Is that a wave from Jake? Has he seen her? She feels stronger just knowing that he’s nearby. Braver too as she is dragged inside, the door locking behind her.
103
Silas
Silas is still on the phone to his boss, Detective Inspector Ward, stunned by the news that Centaur is about to go live. News that was apparently confirmed by Rob in person.
‘Sir, what exactly has Rob got to do with Centaur?’ he asks, standing outside Rob’s apartment in Shoreditch with Strover.
For a while now Strover has been trying without success to find out who is behind the force’s imminent new facial-recognition software. The details surrounding the Centaur contract are opaque, to put it mildly.
‘It’s one of his start-ups,’ Ward says. ‘He invested in it a while back.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ Silas asks incredulously.
‘Believe me, I would have done if I could, Silas, but these things are very commercially sensitive. There were also some teething problems. Delays.’
‘And you don’t think his involvement in a facial-recognition firm has any bearing on Kate’s accident or his subsequent relationship with her, a super recogniser?’ Silas knows he’s out of order now, adopting the wrong tone for speaking with his boss.
‘Not as far as I can see,’ Ward says. ‘Except perhaps in the context of Gilmour Martin trying to frame him. From what Rob’s told me today, it seems certain now that it was Gilmour at the scene of Kate’s accident that night.’
‘How many other forces are using Centaur?’ Silas asks.
‘Just us at the moment, but then Swindon has got more surveillance cameras than most. We’re in a position to make the best use of it. If the software lives up to its promises, Centaur’s going to drive crime off the streets of this town.’
Rob is proving a very good friend to Swindon.
‘The Irish are also looking at it,’ Ward continues. ‘So are the Germans. And I had a call from my opposite number in Nottingham last night. I’m not surprised. It’s a potential game changer. Promises closer interaction between humans and computers. No more embarrassingly high error rates.’ He pauses. ‘Are you liaising with the Met over Dr Varma? I don’t want any reports of non-cooperation.’
‘I’ve told them everything I know,’ Silas says. Almost everything.
Silas signs off and briefs Strover about Centaur. She’d already got the gist of it and is equally shocked.
‘I can’t believe he didn’t tell us,’ Silas says.
‘It’s the name that’s bothering me,’ Strover says, searching for something on her phone. ‘Know what a centaur looks like?’
Silas nods. He’d read about them when he visited the Pelion peninsula in Greece a few years back, when Conor still came with them on family holidays.
‘Half man, half horse,’ Strover continues, holding out her phone to show him a picture. ‘The combination of a computer’s artificial intelligence and the human brain is also known as the centaur model. After Garry Kasparov lost against IBM’s computer Deep Blue in 1997, he invented “advanced chess”, or “centaur chess”, in which grandmasters play against each other with computers.’
Silas made the mistake once of challenging Strover to a game. And he considers himself a half-decent player. He thinks about the documents on Dr Varma’s desk. The P3 brainwave, the articles on frozen addicts and locked-in syndrome. Centaur’s coming on-stream tonight – the day Dr Varma was killed, the day Kate was taken to France after having finally recovered her recognition skills.
His phone starts to ring. It’s Jake.
‘Where are you?’ Silas asks.
‘On a hillside in Brittany overlooking Rob’s house.’
The man is a like a dog with a bone. If he’d shown the same dedication to writing crime thrillers, he’d be a bestselling author by now.
‘Have the French police been alerted?’ Jake continues. ‘I can’t see anyone around.’
Silas takes a deep breath and surveys the street. ‘I’m sorry, it’s not as straightforward as that.’
‘How do you mean?’ Jake says. ‘I thought there was an arrest warrant out for Gilmour? Kate’s in real trouble. I think I’ve just seen her. Behind the house, up on the cliffs.’
There’s no easy way to tell him. ‘Kate’s back in the UK, Jake,’ Silas begins. ‘With Rob. He’s just visited Gablecross police station. Claims he’s being framed by Gilmour.’
‘What?’ Jake’s sense of disbelief is even greater than Silas’s. ‘That’s not possible. It can’t be Kate. It must be someone else. You’ve got to believe me.’