Starlight Peninsula (7 page)

‘How was your weekend? You and Sean get up to much?’

Eloise looked, she hoped, blandly non-committal. ‘Oh, you know. Nothing special.’

Scott was wearing a bright blue three-piece suit, with turquoise lining. His hair, thick and glistening with gel, sat on top of his head like a brown turban. The bridge of his teeth was too narrow for his mouth; now he smiled, showing pale pink gums.

‘You like this suit? I hope I don’t look like a banker. God, I love suits. Ronald at RJB has this new range, just absolute masterpieces.’

‘What a nice waistcoat.’

Eloise had just received two messages on her cell phone: one from Carina wanting to know if she would be staying again, and the other
from a real estate agent. Sean had passed on her number. The agent wanted to discuss the sale of the house. Prospects were excellent. Values on the Starlight Peninsula had rocketed; the area was hot right now. Would look forward to her call.

She deleted the message.

Scott stroked his blue sleeve. ‘Ronald talked me into the suit. Thee freaked out at the price. Then she calmed down and said, Oh well, as Shakespeare said, “The apparel oft proclaims the man.” Isn’t that great?’

She looked at him: his wonder-of-the-world grin, his big hair, the
blink
he did, the blink that set off the smile that showed how much he relished life, how genuine he was, how enthusiastic and passionate. Sometimes she had a sense of a small busy person inside him, pulling the levers for smile, blink, beam, bray.

‘Reports are coming in that Jack Anthony got a shock off the urinal. Apocryphal at this stage.’

‘Ouch,’ Eloise said.

‘Also Selena says over at Q the coat hangers in hair and make-up are making clicking and sizzling noises, and there’s an electric smell. Why haven’t we all gone out on strike?’

‘I know. Someone’s going to get killed.’

‘I wonder if it’s like, carcinogenic,’ Ian the cameraman said.

‘What if you’re pregnant? Karen’s pregnant. So is Hine at reception. You don’t want to be getting shocks when you’re …’

They waited for the car outside reception. Under a cloudless sky the light was impressively clear, the shadow of a plane tree making a perfect shape on the asphalt, the reflections of leaves sliding over the car windscreen as it drove up. They loaded their gear and got in, Scott on the phone to Kurt Hartmann’s man, Chad Loafer, who was getting a lot of talking done.

‘Chad,’ Scott said, rolling his eyes at Eloise, ‘mate, I understand.’

An hour later they entered the gates of the Hartmann estate and
approached the mansion, with its grey-pink castle battlements and dinky turrets, its flagpole and helicopter pad, and garaging for thirty cars.

A security guard bustled out of the topiary and waved them towards the front door, where they were met by a small black-clad man with a shaven head.

‘Chad Loafer, head of Mr Hartmann’s security,’ he told them.

A great door creaked open, all oaken and Narnian and faux-gnarled, and Loafer led them into a large reception lit by lamps in the shape of flaming torches. He withdrew, silently. The room was filled with large squashy white sofas flanked by pedestals on which sat dishes of colourful sweets. Eloise imagined Hartmann arriving in a witch’s hat, on a sleigh, driven by a dwarf.

‘Jesus,’ Scott whispered, looking around the room. One whole wall was a mirror. They eyed themselves, wary.

‘I wonder if he’s watching us.’

‘Yeah, cameras. No wait, the mirror’s two-way. He’s behind it. In, like, a control room with a big chair.’

They could see into another room beyond the reception, in which armchairs faced large computer screens. The internet mogul and his business partners were enthusiastic gamers; in fact Hartmann had first discovered he was being spied on by the security services when his computer games started running slow by one seventh of a second. He picked this up straight away, had the problem investigated, and found his entire system was being routed through an external system run by the spy agency, the GCSB.

Next to the chairs and screens were more stands holding dishes filled with sweets. It was a child’s fantasy: the sweets, the screens, the fake swords crossed above the doors, the suits of armour standing at attention by the dungeon-style doors. One entire wall of the gaming room was covered by a photo of Hartmann’s face.

A door opened and Hartmann entered, followed by his head of
security. Loafer was dwarfed by his charge, who was obese and six foot six.

‘Good morning,’ Hartmann said, lightly wringing his hands. He had a massive face, a shaven head, a smile full of wicked little teeth and an air of amused, cartoonish criminality. Loafer did a rapid check of the room, touched his ear and spoke into his sleeve. Scott blinked and beamed. Eloise’s mouth involuntarily twitched. It was impossible not to feel a certain hilarious amazement, here in the fairytale castle, standing before the elven king of criminal kitsch. Loafer smiled; for a moment they were all grinning.

Through the window there was a view of a glowing green lawn, and topiary in the shape of battlements.

‘Roger that,’ Loafer growled into his sleeve.

‘Welcome,’ Hartmann said. There were introductions all round. After shaking hands, Hartmann drew a bottle of hand santiser from his pocket and briskly lathered.

He said, ‘First we are going to do something I love. Chad, would you please?

They followed him out to a courtyard where two cars were parked, their gleam and burnish enhanced by the extraordinary clarity of the day. A man wearing a fluoro vest was polishing a pink Cadillac sporting the number plate COCK. Parked beside it was a black Humvee, whose number plate read: KILL.

‘My babies,’ Hartmann said. ‘In fact these are the only two not yet taken by the court. I had a fleet of sixteen classic cars, as you probably know, all taken after the police raided my house. It was here,’ he pointed at a gap between the manicured hedges, ‘that the squad came through. They landed their choppers out on the green, and burst through. All armed to the teeth. They took my staff at gunpoint. Nearly shot brave Chad on the lawn. I had made my way to the panic room; they smashed their way in. They put boots on my neck.’ He gestured for them to follow and went on formally, ‘All this at the behest of the United States
Government, who had spied on me, who requested the New Zealand Government to spy on me illegally. All because I run a file-sharing website that Hollywood says rips the studios off.’

‘Absolutely,’ Scott said.

‘The People decided what material they stored on my site. I played no part in their choices. I was merely the host. The People are going to retake the internet. Do you know that?’

‘For sure,’ Scott said. ‘Where would it suit you to sit down so we can set things up and discuss all this properly …’

‘First we do the nice thing.’

‘Oh yes?’

Hartmann clapped his hands. ‘Chad, if you please.’

Loafer now whirred up behind them on a golf cart. He dismounted respectfully, and indicated that Eloise and Scott should get on.

‘All aboard,’ Hartmann said, hefting himself behind the wheel. ‘We are going to feed the chickens.’

They trundled slowly across the estate, driven by Hartmann.

Scott leaned close to Eloise and whispered, ‘Feed the chickens. Think it’s some sort of code?’

They got off beside a wooden shed with a silver iron roof, and Hartmann produced a paper bag, into which he plunged his hand. He took Scott’s hand, gently turning it. Holding his own great fist above Scott’s upturned palm, he allowed a stream of small pellets to trickle into it.

Hartmann opened a wooden gate, and they followed him into the yard, wading through straw. Scents of wood chip and pine mingled with the big man’s smell: spearmint, peppermint, cherry.

‘Chook chook,’ he said softly, and folded Eloise’s hand in his own. She felt the heat of his huge soft palm, looked into his small eyes and saw, or thought she saw, behind the ageing effect of the bulk and the camp and the Bond-villain persona, someone intelligent, gauche, amoral, young.

‘This,’ Hartmann said, ‘is my Zen.’

On the toy grass, in the implausible brightness, they fed the crowding chickens. Nearby towered Hartmann’s giant statue of a grazing giraffe, its black shadow crossing the gentle hills. Eloise found herself looking at the internet mogul’s trousers, which were black cotton and necessarily stretchy, due to his height and bulk. They were poignant, unfashionable, slightly too short, revealing black socks and soft orthopaedic shoes; they pointed to the sartorial trials of the oversized. Movie villain, hacker, fugitive from US justice and struggling fat guy: condemned to wear uncool pants.

Eloise had done the research: since the raid on his property, Hartmann had been out on bail, fighting extradition by the US Government. His file-sharing website, on which his customers had stored copyrighted material, had allegedly deprived artists and studios of five hundred million dollars’ worth of intellectual property.

Depending on who you asked, Hartmann was hero, maverick, hacker, pirate, internet freedom-fighter, crook. He was undeniably a philistine. He played computer games all night and slept half the day. Books, according to Hartmann, were today’s equivalent of cave drawings. Books were
over
. His interests included gaming, girls, cars, lollies, bling, bad art, his Narnian castle, Twitter and, more lately, bringing down the government of Jack Dance, which had collaborated with the Americans first to spy on him illegally, then to arrest him.

It had been leaked, although denied and not proven, that Jack Dance, as minister in charge of security services, had known personally about the illegal spying, and this had caused Dance political difficulties. The Dance Government was keen to grant Hartmann’s extradition and speed him out of the country with a swift boot to the arse. As far as Dance was concerned, Hartmann had caused him so much grief he could rot in an American supermax jail for the next fifty years.

‘Chook chook,’ Hartmann called, throwing the last of the feed in
the air. Out near the stone battlements, Loafer patrolled in his own golf cart. Hartmann looked over at him fondly.

‘Chad was Special Forces. He can kill with his bare hands.’

Scott brushed his suit sleeve. ‘Do you feel threatened?’

‘The US wants to extradite me, but it’s a hassle. It takes time. Wouldn’t it be easier for them to kill me?’

‘But, here? Surely not?’

‘One day I might be found dead. They will say, Heart attack. They will announce, Stroke. Who would know? A big guy like me. I got it coming,’ he said ambiguously. ‘Climb on board. I will show you around my house.’

He led them on a tour: the ballroom with giant black chandelier, a dining room decorated with suits of armour and mounted deers’ heads, more luxurious gaming parlours, a succession of brothelly bedrooms decorated with gilt and fur. In one grand, pink-lit bathroom, bathers could swim towards a giant photograph of Hartmann’s face.

After inspecting a huge kitchen, in which women in Orwellian smocks were working in silence, they arrived in a room that looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. There was a half-circle of screens, as if Hartmann was in the habit of making conference calls to high places: White House, Kremlin, International Space Station. Eloise wandered about the room, hands behind her back. She kept glancing at Hartmann, studying his face, his bland, inscrutable smile. The house was unbelievable. To what extent was Hartmann’s life, for him, a vast, camp joke?

Hartmann gestured to a large black-and-gold throne.

‘What a perfect spot, my friends. Let’s do the interview here!’

They came away with a decent amount of material to edit and a bag of promotional odds and ends: a miniature giraffe sculpture, a pink toy Cadillac and DVDs of Hartmann performing hip hop and rap songs with a troupe of girls in hot pants.

In the mansion’s forecourt Hartmann rested his big hand on the car door.

‘Don’t forget, my friends, now you’ve interviewed me, the security services will be watching you. Every communication will be monitored. Just because they got caught spying on me illegally doesn’t mean they stopped. They changed the rules to suit themselves, and they went right on spying. And you should look into leaks. Who leaked that Jack Dance knew I was being spied on illegally? Dance denies he knew, and he’s got away with it — but he will want to know who dropped him in it. Was it his opponents, or one of his own team?’

He turned away from Scott and said, ‘It was nice to meet you, Ms Eloise Hay. You have enjoyed feeding my chickens?’

‘Yes. Thanks. They were lovely.’

‘You know Eloise, when I was young, I was the best hacker in Europe. I was caught a few times, jailed even. I made some mistakes! And then, you know, my country’s government gave me money, they paid me, to break into security systems, to test their vulnerability.’

She nodded, mesmerised by his giant head and tiny little teeth.

‘And so, Eloise, I can hack into systems that exist now. But did you know data can be mined from the past as well as the present? Emails, calls, texts, you name it. Information is power. It can be used to expose, but it can also be used to bargain. As
currency
. In that case, when information is used as cold hard currency, it is nothing personal, Eloise. It’s just business.’

It’s chust business
.

‘Goodbye, Eloise. Goodbye, my friends.’

He raised his hand and the car moved slowly down the gravel drive, towards the mock portcullis.

As they crossed the dinky bridge over the moat, Scott looked at the bobbing ducks and said, ‘You know what else? Now we’ve interviewed him
he’ll
be monitoring everything we do, too.’

‘Really?’

‘In fact, he’s probably been doing it since we contacted him. He’s the master hacker, remember. He’ll be into our emails, texts, everything. So no fat jokes. Show respect. We don’t want to piss him off.’

There was a short silence, Eloise mentally reviewing her communications thus far. No sharing about Hartmann’s poignant pants, then.