“I’m sure you won’t be,” Yuri said with as much sincerity as he could assemble.
“Gwendoline is my granddaughter,” Ainsley said, letting the pride seep into his tone.
Yuri was suddenly much more alert. That fact wasn’t listed in any Connexion security network, which was extremely odd. Ainsley already had nine marriages under his belt, producing thirty-two acknowledged children, most of whom worked in Connexion management. In turn they had numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren, forming a large dynasty covering the full spectrum from dedicated workaholics to high-maintenance airhead princesses, every one of whom was guarded with a vigilance that was once the province of Earth’s nuclear codes.
“I know,” Ainsley said contritely. “You can’t find a record of her. But her grandmother, Nataskia, and I only had a brief fling; Evette was the result. Nataskia didn’t want Evette involved with Connexion, or the rest of the family. I couldn’t blame her for that—fuck knows we’re not exactly a convention of saints and introverts—so I respected her wishes. There was a discreet trust fund set up, which was increased when Gwendoline came along. The three of them have lived outside of media attention and corporate politics and done well for themselves. I kept minimal contact, which hurt, but I sucked it up, and everyone was happy ever after.”
“I see,” Yuri said diplomatically. “So what’s happened?”
“Horatio Seymore,” Gwendoline said, tears welling up.
“Who is he?”
“My boyfriend. He’s vanished.” It was a classic summer romance, she explained. Her first true love. She’d just started an internship with a London finance software firm—obtained entirely on her own merit, Ainsley chipped in proudly. Horatio was a waiter in one of the HazBeanz franchises in the City, frequented by her office. He was nineteen, and Bristol University had offered him a place studying social sciences, which was why he was signed up as a trainee barista for the summer, to earn some money toward the fees. He wanted a career working with underprivileged children in the ribbon towns, helping them get their lives in order.
Yuri did his best not to groan and roll his eyes. Classic wasn’t the word, he thought; it was Lady Chatterley rewritten for the twenty-second century. She was comfortably off, leading a sheltered socialite life amid her own class, while he was poor and modest, dedicating his life to a worthy cause. The attraction was enacted at an atomic level. When Gwendoline’s altme sent Boris a file loaded with images, Yuri found it hard to decide which of the two kids was the prettiest. Even given the summer’s anomalous heat, there were an excessive number of pictures of Horatio with his shirt off—playing football with pals, at the beach, lazing in the park. As well as being adorably noble, given the whole social worker gig, he was quite a sports hunk, with Caribbean heritage giving his nicely muscled body a dark-honey sheen and dusting his brown eyes with a vivacious sparkle. His heavily curled hair was long and unkempt, adding to his desirability.
“Okay,” Yuri said slowly when the story of the world’s newest, greatest-ever love affair had been recited. “So when you say ‘vanished,’ what exactly makes you think that?” He could well imagine how besotted and loyally devoted the lovely Gwendoline was to her new beau, but boys Horatio’s age…The lad would be a magnet for babes and cougars alike; he could quite easily be staying in some lingerie model’s luxurious bedroom, fucking himself senseless night and day. Lucky little bastard. Yuri tried to focus on the girl again.
“I spent Tuesday night in his flat with him,” Gwendoline said. “I left early Wednesday morning to come back here and get changed for work. We had tickets to see SungSolar play at the J-Mac club that night. He never showed up.”
“So that’s a day and a half?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said with sulky resentment, “but we liveline each other all day long. I visit his HazBeanz once or twice a day. After I left here on Wednesday morning, his altme was offline. He didn’t respond to any type of call, not even a straight phone ping. He wasn’t in HazBeanz when I went to check at lunch, and the manageress said he never came in that morning. My altme ran a check through London’s ER registries, and he wasn’t admitted to hospital. When he didn’t show for the concert, I even called his parents. They didn’t know where he was, and now they’re worried. I went back to his flat but he never came home last night.”
“You stayed there all night?” Yuri queried. “By yourself?”
“Yes. I accessed the London police network this morning, but their Turing said I can’t file a missing person report until Horatio’s been gone for forty-eight hours.” She hung her head, long hair falling like a ragged curtain across her face. “I know you must think I’m really stupid for calling you, grandfather, but I didn’t know what else to do. Horatio wouldn’t just vanish without telling me, I know he wouldn’t. We know everything about each other. We never kept secrets.”
“Does he know who you are?” Yuri asked.
“He knows mummy and grandma are well off, but that’s all.”
“So he doesn’t know you’re actually a Zangari, that you are Ainsley’s granddaughter?”
“No,” she said in a tiny voice. “Please, I just want to know he’s okay.”
Ainsley patted her shoulder. “It’s all right, sweetheart, you did the right thing letting me know. We’ll find him for you. Can you give us a moment, please?”
Gwendoline nodded meekly and left the lounge.
“I ran a check through the London police network,” Poi Li said. “Horatio wasn’t involved in any incident yesterday morning, and there’s no arrest record. The police don’t have him in custody.”
Yuri pulled a face. “He’s young. That opens up a few options, especially if he’s not the entirely faithful type.”
“Ha!” Ainsley grunted. “If you were a horny nineteen-year-old and you had Gwendoline in your bed every night, would you go wolfing around the block?”
“It’s been known,” Yuri replied, as tactfully as he could.
“This whole thing: it’s unusual,” Ainsley said. “I don’t fucking like unusual, not when there’s family involved. Especially exposed family.”
“We need to bring the women in,” Poi Li said. “Give them proper security.”
“Yeah,” Ainsley agreed. “Shit, Nataskia will bust my balls. This is everything she didn’t want. And fuck knows how Neva will react.”
“Who’s Neva?” Yuri asked.
“My second-to-last ex. I was married to her when Nataskia had Evette. She doesn’t know about that.”
“Oh.” Yuri’s gaze locked on Poi Li as he tried to remain expressionless.
“So what do you think?” Ainsley asked.
“Okay,” Yuri said, and took a breath. “We have a few scenarios to consider here. Horatio has run off with another girl or boy, and he’s too guilty right now to call Gwendoline and tell her it’s over. Second: He’s had an accident, and the hospital hasn’t identified him—unlikely in this day and age, but possible. Third: He’s dead. We’ll need to check the morgues, but again he should have been identified already. Last option, and the most likely: He’s in trouble with people you really should not be in trouble with.”
“It’s not blackmail?” Ainsley asked; he sounded surprised.
“I’m going to take Gwendoline at her word when she said that she never told him she’s related to you. If this is blackmail, that would mean someone found out.”
“How?” Ainsley snapped.
“Some junior in the legal division got the wrong file by mistake; same thing but with an employee in the finance company handling the trust fund; her mother or grandmother let something slip by accident.” He paused, extrapolating the possibilities. “But if a professional gang did find out, they’d snatch her, not him. Unless…”
“What?”
Yuri glanced at the door Gwendoline had closed behind her. “She’s
scamming you.”
“No fucking way!”
“Sir, she has no real bond with you, and she’s excluded from the dynasty with all the wealth, privilege, and prestige that brings.”
“Okay, I’ve only seen her a few times in her life, I admit that, but she knows there’s a place for her in Connexion anytime she wants. She chose to be independent, she worked hard at her exams—and got herself good grades, too. And she’s only seventeen, for Christ’s sake! Girls like that, brought up the way she’s been, they don’t come up with criminal master plans. If she wants money, she can have it. I’m not broke. She just has to ask.”
“All right, acknowledged. So that scenario would be doubtful.”
“We need to find out what’s happened to Horatio,” Poi Li said. “But without any fuss. Which is where you come in. This has to be kept quiet.”
“Poi Li recommended you,” Ainsley said. “She said you were the one we needed for a job like this. I know this is a big ask, but fuck it, this is my family!”
“It’s a logical ask,” Yuri said, trying to make it sound businesslike—although inside he was flying. A personal favor for Ainsley fucking Zangari? This is my cast-iron route to head of security. “My office already has executive authority, and uses it. I can request any file or operation we need without anyone wondering why.”
“Thanks,” Ainsley said. “I appreciate that, Yuri, I mean it.”
Yuri held up a hand. “This is not a one-person investigation, sir. I understand and appreciate the need for discretion, but I’ll be bringing in some of my team to assist. Not many, but people I trust.”
“Of course.”
“If this is ordinary bad, I need to get started right now.”
“What’s ordinary bad?” Ainsley asked.
“He’s got a dependency problem, or he’s placed some bets offline—neither of which he’ll tell Gwendoline about, for all their lovey-dovey honesty with each other. If he owes money to those kind of people, then right now he’s in some blacked-out room having the shit kicked out of him. The danger there is that once they break him—and they will—he’ll call Gwendoline, begging for money. So first priority, we install a link diversion on her altme. If he calls, that gets routed straight to me.”
“Whatever you need, whatever it costs. Just get it done.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
—
Yuri called Jessika Mye while he was still in the rickety old lift on his way back down to the entrance hall. She’d joined the Monitoring Office as one of its first recruits, at age thirty-four—a Hong Kong native who’d immigrated to Akitha, where she’d got her exobiology master’s degree. When he asked her why she’d come back to Earth, she’d told him that Akitha was too quiet for her, and she wanted the money to buy full telomere treatments. Yuri could sort of appreciate that; the Utopial principle strove for egalitarianism, but not even their society could afford to provide telomere treatments for the entire population from such an early age. Akitha democratically decided that, for a thirty-four-year-old, it was vanity, not necessity. Jessika was attractive and clearly motivated to remain so. Yuri quite liked that determination, to be able to reject past choices with confidence if they didn’t meet her own demanding standard, so he gave her the job there and then.
“What’s up, chief?” she asked.
“We have a new investigation. I can’t even give you a priority rating, it’s so high.”
“Sounds cool. What is it?”
“Missing person.”
“Seriously?”
Yuri smiled at the doubt in her tone. The lift reached the ground floor, and he tugged the cage door open. “Oh, yes.”
“Why the hell are we doing a missing persons?”
“Because it’s important. And that’s why I want you. I’m sending the address over now. Be there in five minutes.”
Yuri walked straight back to the Sloane Square hub and went out along a radial to loop, then around that to the Hackney hub at the end of Graham Road. As he went, Boris started loading instructions into the Olyix Monitoring Office G7Turing. He wanted a record of Horatio Seymore’s travels through the Connexion network for the last four days. Bank search for financial status. Facial recognition search through Hackney’s public surveillance cameras, going back three days. A request routed through the Connexion Metropolitan Police liaison office for gang activity in Hackney.
Those would do for a start.
Eleanor Road, on the edge of London Fields, was half old brick terrace houses with tall slate roofs that had all undergone conversions to add a loft room for the budget middle classes still inhabiting London’s suburbs. The remainder of the buildings were newer, purpose-built tenements, narrow and tall to fit in as many one-bedroom flats as possible, with the rent and management optimized for a fast turnover of young low-wage workers with service jobs in the city. Exactly like Horatio.
Jessika’s heels clattered on the pavement behind Yuri as he approached the front of Horatio’s building.
“Good timing.” He smirked as she caught up with him. She was wearing a smart cherry-pink office suit and white blouse, with slim five-centimeter heels; her face flushed even through her perfect makeup. Her normally immaculate jet-black hair was ruffled from hurrying along the street.
“And you blend in so flawlessly.”
“Hey!” she protested. “I’m strictly an office meetings and cocktails kind of girl.”
“Right.” He told Boris to let them in; Gwendoline had given him the code.
The hallway and stairs were bare concrete, shaped by onetime printed molds and formed by civic construction bots—cheap and coldly utilitarian. Horatio’s flat was two rooms: a slim shower and toilet suite; and the living room equipped with a tiny galley kitchen, a built-in wardrobe, and a sofa sleeper. With two stools standing beside the kitchen bar, there wasn’t even room for a chair.
“Depressing,” Jessika said as she glanced around.
“No sign of a struggle,” Yuri said. “So he wasn’t taken from here.”
“Outside then.”
“Boris, what have you got for me on Wednesday morning?”
“Connexion has no record of Horatio Seymore using the hub network since twenty-one-seventeen hours on Tuesday night, when he left the Hackney hub on Graham Road. That is a global negative, not just London.”
“Did I ask for a global search?”
“No, but the G7Turing deduced it was relevant.”
“Crap. If it gets any smarter, we’ll be out of a job. Okay, what about Gwendoline?”
“Her record is complete and current. She entered the Hackney hub at six fifty-eight on Wednesday morning and went straight to Sloane Square. After a day at work in the City, using her usual hubs, she returned to Hackney on Wednesday evening at nine forty-nine. She left this morning at seven fifty.”
“Right, get me a visual record of Eleanor Road on Wednesday, starting at six thirty that morning. Let’s see where Horatio went.”
“Confirmed,” Boris said.
Jessika opened the wardrobe door. “Not much in here,” she said, eyeing the clothes.
“He doesn’t have any money.”
“Then why are we interested?”
Yuri gave her an apologetic shrug. “Super classified: He’s the boyfriend of one of Ainsley’s granddaughters.”
“Ah.”
“There is no visual record of Horatio leaving his home address on Wednesday morning,” Boris reported.
Yuri and Jessika exchanged a glance. He went over to the window at the rear of the flat, which gave him a view of the tiny gardens backing onto the houses of Horton Road, which ran parallel to Eleanor Road. The window was locked from the inside. “Okay, check Horton Road for me. If he jumped out here, he had to go through a house. Maybe he knows his neighbors well enough.”
Jessika frowned and went back into the narrow shower room, checking the frosted glass cubicle. “Well, he’s not here.”
“You’re looking in the shower cubicle?” he asked skeptically.
“Check out an old movie called Psycho.”
“No visual confirmation of him on Horton Road on Wednesday or today,” Boris said.
“What is this, the case of the vanishing magician?” Jessika asked.
“No,” Yuri said, not liking where his thoughts were going. “Boris, run a visual recognition for Gwendoline on Eleanor Road Wednesday morning.”
“There is none.”
“How can that be?” Jessika grunted.
“Confirm she entered Hackney hub at six fifty-eight on Wednesday, please?”
“Our files have visual confirmation of that.”
“Right, use public surveillance files. Backtrack her from entering the hub.”
“There is a discrepancy. The visual record can track her back to the point where she emerged from the end of Eleanor Road onto Wilton Way.”
“So the records for Eleanor Road are corrupted?”
“The Turing is running a diagnostic.”
“What are you thinking?” Jessika asked.
“This snatch was well planned and executed,” Yuri said. “We’re dealing with some serious professionals here. So given Horatio was one very fit, good-looking adolescent, I’d say we need to think absolute worst case.”