The System (13 page)

Jim bit his lip. ‘The new Frankie … The likelihood is, she’ll have an accident pretty soon,’ he said quietly. ‘Something tragic. Something where the body isn’t …’

He trailed off; Frankie pushed him away, walked over to the sofa and sat down, letting her head fall forwards into her hands. She wanted to cry; needed to cry. But now no tears would come.

‘So that’s it?’ she managed to say. ‘He’s won?’

Sal moved his chair round to face her; Jim joined her on the sofa. ‘No,’ Sal said. ‘He hasn’t won because you’re here. You’re safe. And we’ll get you out of Paris tonight and out of Europe by tomorrow. You’ll have a new identity. They won’t find you. You’ll be fine.’

‘A new identity?’

Sal nodded. ‘We have friends around the world. You can go to Australia. Somewhere far away. You’ll be fine, Frankie. We’ll make sure of that.’

Jim put his arm around her. ‘I’m sorry, Frankie. But Sal’s right. You’ll be fine. You’ll have a new life. And so long as you lay low, so long as you …’

‘As long as I don’t stick my head above the parapet?’ Frankie cut in. ‘As long as I mind my own business and forget all about my life here, you mean?’

Jim pulled a face. ‘Better that than the alternative,’ he said awkwardly.

‘No,’ Frankie said, shrugging off Jim’s arm and standing up. ‘No, I’m not doing it. I’m not going.’

Sal looked at her archly. ‘You’re going to stay here?’ he asked. ‘There isn’t a lot of room for two of us.’

‘I’m not hiding. And I’m not running,’ Frankie said, folding her arms defiantly. ‘This all happened because of what I wrote about, because Infotec were afraid. So I’m going to make them even more afraid. I’m going to expose what they’re hiding, expose what they’re doing. I’m going to tell the world what they did, what they did to my father, my uncle. I’m going to write about everything.’

‘No,’ Sal said sharply. ‘No, you can’t do that, Frankie. It’s no good going up against Infotec. They’re too powerful. You can’t win. You don’t know who your source is and now they’ve got no way of finding you.’

‘Maybe I can’t win,’ Frankie said. ‘But I can land a few punches. I know I can. And you’re going to help me. You’ve got to help me.’ She looked at them imploringly. ‘Please?’

Sal and Jim exchanged a glance. Then Sal exhaled slowly and turned back to Frankie. ‘You really don’t want to go to Australia? It’s lovely there, I hear. Beaches, sunshine …’

Frankie shook her head. ‘Either you help me, or you let me out of this place and I’ll do it myself,’ she said. ‘I just need access to a computer.’

Sal regarded her dubiously. Then he looked over at Jim. ‘In that case she should probably meet Glen,’ he said with a little shrug.

‘Who’s Glen?’ Frankie demanded.

‘Glen …’ Jim said, thoughtfully, then looked over at Sal, who smiled opaquely.

‘We should eat,’ he said. ‘I’ll go talk to Marco, get him to rustle something up. Actually, Jim, you go up and talk to him. And then leave. We don’t want your chip here too long, don’t want to draw any unnecessary attention to this place.’

Jim nodded and pushed back his chair. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, giving Frankie’s shoulder a squeeze. ‘As soon as it gets dark.’

‘And then we meet this Glen guy?’ Frankie asked.

‘And then you meet Glen,’ Jim said, then left the room.

‘So,’ Sal said, a broad grin revealing large, yellowing teeth. ‘You play cards? I do hope so, because there’s really not much else to do around here.’

It was late. Frankie had spent hours in the café basement playing cards, watching the one screen on the wall, trying not to feel like she’d been punched in the stomach when she saw images of Milo and her doppelganger laughing as they came out of the restaurant she should have been at, their hands entwined, a blush spreading across her cheeks as people rushed up to see the rock on her finger.

What line had they fed her, Frankie found herself wondering. Did it even matter? How was it that no one noticed? Couldn’t they see it wasn’t her? Couldn’t they just … tell?

She had posed the question to Sal, but he had dismissed her with a shrug. ‘Seeing is believing,’ he’d said. ‘And believing is seeing. There is no truth in what we see, just information that we can accept or reject. Mostly we accept. If things follow a correct order, we make assumptions, fill in any gaps and move on. Infotec knows this. Your followers weren’t following you. They were following the image of you, the idea of you. And those two things remain.’

‘But …’ Frankie had started to say, then stopped, because she’d known he was right. For a few days, anyway. The new Frankie wouldn’t go to the Library again, and no one would suspect anything; it would just confirm their suspicions that Frankie thought she was too good for the Library, especially now that ‘she’ was marrying Milo. Close-ish friends could be dropped easily; anyone who would spot that Frankie wasn’t Frankie could be avoided, expunged from ‘her’ life. And no one would really care. Perhaps no one ever had.

The door opened; Jim appeared and Frankie looked up at him, immediately having to suppress the tears that had been absent for hours and which now threatened to flood out of her eyes like a child whose mother had just appeared to collect her from school, all the pent-up frustrations and adrenaline of the day immediately unlocked.

But Frankie couldn’t cry. Wouldn’t. Not over Milo. Not over what had happened. What she’d worked out that evening, her mind whirring as she played cards on autopilot, was that she’d allowed this all to happen; had allowed herself to get swept away. Had allowed that bastard to manipulate her. Because she’d liked the fact that Milo had liked her. Because she liked all the attention.

Because she’d been a sap.

She pushed her chair back and stood up. Her muscles were tight from sitting down for so long and she got a rush to the head as her blood failed to circulate quickly enough; grasping the table, she steadied herself.

‘You okay?’ Jim asked.

She nodded quickly. ‘Are we going to meet Glen?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ Jim said. ‘Put this on.’

He threw something into Frankie’s hands; when she picked it up she saw that it was a wig. A dark crop with a fringe. She raised an eyebrow, then put it on. Sal gave her the thumbs up.

Jim looked at his watch. ‘Ready?’ he asked. ‘We need to give you another new chip upstairs. You know. Just in case.’

‘Ready,’ Frankie said grimly, and put on her leather jacket – the only thing that connected her to her former life. ‘You coming?’ She looked over at Sal, but he just smiled and shook his head.

‘Where you’re going … it’s not for me,’ he said with a knowing shrug, then turned back to the cards in front of him, picking up Frankie’s hand and folding it into the pack. ‘Look after yourself, won’t you?’

Frankie nodded, then glanced over at Jim, who was holding the door open.

‘Okay?’ he said.

‘Okay.’ She nodded, and followed him up the stairs.

They walked silently through alleyways, down quiet roads, their hands in their pockets, their heads down. Jim had briefed her before they left the café: her new chip, he told her, had belonged to an unremarkable girl of a similar age from Toulouse. When Frankie asked him how they had got hold of it, he shot her a look that suggested she didn’t need to know. ‘No one was hurt, no one’s in danger,’ was all he’d say. She was to stick with him, draw no attention to herself. And that’s exactly what she did, walking through the streets of Paris. It was like she was walking through a new city: it looked the same, but underneath it was different, with depths that she hadn’t known before and threats that she’d never had cause to imagine.

Every time someone looked at her she felt her heart clench; every time a camera swivelled in her direction she froze momentarily. But after a while she started to enjoy it, started to feel slightly lighter than she used to as she glanced up at the large screens hanging across the roads and saw not herself, but the other Frankie. Earlier that day, Frankie had loathed this girl, this pretender. Now, she just felt sorry for her, felt sorry for the girl who had taken on her straightjacket, who lived within her prison.

‘In here.’ They were in the Marais district; Jim pulled her down a narrow staircase towards a dingy-looking club. Frankie followed uncertainly. Two bouncers were on the door. They opened it and nodded Jim and Frankie in; a deafening beat suddenly filled the air. Frankie followed Jim in, her chip allowing her access, drawing no attention from anyone, and immediately the heat, dry ice and smell of sweat hit her like a wall, the trance music so loud she felt disoriented for a moment or two. Then she saw Jim waving at her and followed him through the throng of moist, dancing bodies, skimpily clad, moving in virtual unison to the heavy beat, their arms in the air, their faces uplifted. The place was packed, full of beautiful, strange-looking people who would stand out in the street, their necks adorned in collars, the girls wearing shorts, trainers and bikini tops, the men wearing baggy trousers and little else, their torsos gleaming under the flashing lights.

She looked around; there were screens but the darkness of the room combined with the strobe lighting meant that the images couldn’t be seen properly. There were cameras, too, but Frankie immediately realised that they would see nothing because they were covered in condensation. Nor would the microphones be able to pick up anything other than pounding beats.

She took off her jacket and tied it around her waist, then walked quickly after Jim, suddenly not caring about the sweat dripping from her neck, down her back; she almost enjoyed the wet bodies brushing against her, the elated smiles, the shining eyes. She felt like she had died today; these people were alive, and their energy was infectious. She longed to join them, to lose herself in dancing, in the heavy beats, the strobe lighting. But she had to follow Jim, and he was walking towards the bar, where bottles of water stood waiting for whoever decided they needed to hydrate. He walked straight past it, over to the left, then down two steps and through a door that was invisible except for a small handle. Frankie ran to keep up with him; as soon as she’d walked through the door, it closed behind her and Jim locked it.

‘Down here,’ he said, walking down a narrow corridor with a stone floor and rough brick walls. They passed what looked like a store room, then a small kitchen, and finally reached another closed door. Jim was about to lift his hand to knock when Frankie stopped him.

‘What?’ he frowned.

She looked at him intently. ‘How?’ she asked, her voice a whisper. ‘How do you know this place? And Sal? I had no idea. How did I have no idea?’

He returned her gaze for a second or two, then his face crumpled into a half smile. ‘You didn’t need to,’ he said with a little shrug. ‘You were living the dream.’

Frankie’s eyes narrowed. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘And anyway I was only with Milo for a few months. Seriously, Jim. All these people, chips, underground rooms …’

Jim breathed out slowly. ‘You remember when I turned down the university funding from Infotec? The guaranteed job at the end of it?’

Frankie nodded.

‘Not such a good idea as it turns out,’ Jim said, with a sort of half smile. ‘They don’t like to be turned down. Gets them suspicious. They started messing with me. I thought I was imagining it at first. Contacts would disappear, Watchers stopped following me, my grades were always lower than expected. Then, when I left university, my blogs were discredited, companies stopped giving me contracts.’

Frankie stared at him. ‘You should have told me,’ she said, slightly hurt that he hadn’t.

‘I didn’t want you to worry. You were doing so well. Anyway, I didn’t need to. I got an approach. Turns out it wasn’t just Infotec who were interested in me. You make an enemy of Infotec and you make other friends. These friends. Come on, they’re expecting you. Glen’s expecting you …’ He took a deep breath. ‘He’s the guy. The one who started it all. He’s … he’s the most wanted man in France, possibly the world. He started all of this.’

Frankie looked at Jim curiously, at the way his eyes were shining and darting around all over the place. ‘You like him,’ she said, quietly. She had totally underestimated Jim, she realised. Had made so many assumptions about him, so many judgements. Just because he didn’t broadcast his life to everyone like she did, she’d assumed he didn’t have one.

Jim raised his eyebrows. ‘I’ve never met him,’ he said, looking slightly awkward suddenly. ‘Only a handful of people have. He moves every two days. Probably changes chips more often than you do.’ He grinned and Frankie managed a small laugh. ‘He … People like me don’t get to meet Glen.’

He knocked on the door, then knocked again, a strange kind of rhythmic knock that Frankie knew she would never be able to replicate. Immediately the door opened. Jim turned to Frankie. ‘In you go,’ he said.

Frankie frowned. ‘You’re coming in, right?’ she asked uncertainly.

Jim shook his head. ‘I’m just the delivery boy.’ He forced a smile, a note of sadness in his eye. ‘Send my best to Glen.’

‘But …’ Frankie stared after him open-mouthed as he walked back down the corridor. ‘But …’

‘No buts,’ Jim said, turning briefly before unlocking the door in front of him and disappearing back into the club. Frankie took a deep breath, turned apprehensively and walked into the room in front of her.

She didn’t know what she was expecting, but Glen, the number one enemy of Infotec had to be something special. Someone impressive, someone strong, dynamic, even tortured or strange; Frankie was prepared for all these things. What she wasn’t prepared for was the middle-aged man in a business suit sitting on a rather cheap-looking office chair.

She smiled at him. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Frankie. I’m looking for someone called Glen.’

The man looked at her thoughtfully. ‘You’ve found him,’ he said. ‘Please, sit down.’ His accent was American; his expression was one of vague impatience.

He motioned towards another office chair, the swivel broken, the blue fabric stained with coffee in several places.

Tentatively, Frankie sat down. ‘You’re Glen?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Not what you were expecting?’