The nanoids had concluded that he was one point of Wisdom less than they had initially assessed? That was both annoying and odd, thought Butcher as he opened the door of the Vectra and climbed behind the wheel.

‘Set-tings,’ he said, focusing on WIS.

Wisdom is a measure of social intelligence - the ability to read a room, spot a social faux pas, judge the mood of someone you’ve met, by contrast with INT, which is more properly academic intelligence - the ability to recall and accurately apply information.

Which meant that he’d missed something in that interaction with Emmy. But how could the nanoids know that? They were just teeny-tiny machines. They might improve his hearing, but they couldn’t listen with his ears. They responded to the way his synapses fired, not at what had fired them - at least, if he had understood the technology, which, he had to admit, was unlikely. All the same, it felt like this was beyond what the nanoids ought to be feasibly capable of. So why had they noticed the interaction with her in particular?

She had the broken square glyph over her head. It was the same one he had. She was the only one he’d seen, since the procedure, to have the glyph.

Holy shit, she’d had the procedure! Of course she had! Which meant that… Well, she might have been working for BRS, but that seemed unlikely. Only two people were supposed to have had the procedure, yet there was Emmy. So the only place she could have got it was Cuttler. Which meant that Cuttler hadn’t just taken nanoids, but could pass them on to other people. This rocked him. Did Emmy know she’d had it done? Of course she did. You couldn’t not notice someone drilling into your skull. And as she didn’t look like someone out for vengeance, that meant she must have consented to the procedure, which meant she knew where Cuttler was - or at least, knew where he had been. And it meant they were closer that she had made out, because it didn’t feel to Butcher like Cuttler was just going to give away nanoids to any random acquaintance.

But this drop in his WIS was more significant than that, if it meant that the nanoids were responding to the nearby presence of another colony of nanoids - and he tried to gloss over the idea that he had voluntarily become little more than a walking termite mound, but suspected the image would be back to haunt his nightmares. It meant that there must be some kind of awareness in the nanoids of when there was another person nearby who’d had the procedure. That was why he could see the broken square over her head. So if his brain activity hadn’t shown what the nanoids would consider a “normal” response to an encounter with someone with the glyph, then they’d conclude that he lacked the WIS to have reached the right conclusion… It was either that, or something even stranger that he wasn’t prepared to consider at this point.

He turned on the engine, pulled away from the curb and did a circuit before pulling back into a different space. There was something to be said for driving a car as forgettably dull as this one, he had to admit. Then he retrieved the DSLR from the boot, propped the camera up on the dashboard, and settled into wait and see what Emmy did next.

*

You couldn’t rush an observation. That was something they taught you right at the start of training in the Det. You had to plan carefully. Even the most straightforward observation mission needed a team of at least six. At any one time, two would be on duty, two would be present in the observation location, but resting, and two would be outside the observation location - doing a mix of proper rest and mobile recce. In an urban environment, the more the merrier. It was pretty much the golden rule that you do not try to conduct an urban observation mission on your own. In the places where the SRR usually conducted operations, getting caught when out solo was a recipe for an unexpected encounter in an alleyway that ended with a bullet in the back of your head

But with no choice, you did your best and, to be fair, Cheltenham was at least an order of magnitude less hostile than his usual operational context, and his current target didn’t look like the sort to bottle someone. If Emmy thought he was watching, she’d leave by the block’s back entrance. But five out of seven possible routes from there still brought her back into his line of sight. More likely, she’d not think of it. Most people don’t if they’ve never been followed before.

He identified the window of 210 and watched the light go out at 11. Emmy didn’t leave the building, as far as he could tell. In the morning, the light came on and a few minutes later, she appeared at the front door in pretty much the same clothes he’d seen her in the previous day. She huffed clouds of breath into the chill morning air as she did a quick stretching routine, then she turned the corner and stretched out her legs for a swift run towards Arle Road.

Butcher envied her. His legs felt stiff and numb from the night’s watch, the bottle in the footwell of the passenger side was half-full with stale urine and his mouth felt like something had died or shat in it, or both.

In a routine observation, now would be the time to break into her apartment and place microphones and, if you had time, a camera. Although in recent years it had become more a case of looking to see if the mark had any smart devices and hacking the cameras and microphones on them, but that was only true if you were conducting observation ops in a modern city. Half the places he’d spent long, dull nights watching bad people do boring shit, they didn’t even have Wifi. Plus, the really dangerous folk weren’t that stupid. You didn’t find Alexa sitting on the desk of murderous terrorist leaders or corrupt foreign oligarchs. Well… most of the time.

But for him, today, there would be no breaking and entering. Instead, he popped the drone out of the window onto the roof of the car and, having snapped the BRS smartphone into the controller, sent it zipping after Emmy at a good altitude. Just low enough that he could follow the progress of her yellow singlet but high enough that he wasn’t risking running into any obstacles - and well out of the path of any of the umpteen helicopters that always seemed to be on their way to or from the local racecourse.

She set a swift but steady pace and within just a few minutes he was at the limit of the drone’s range. Luckily, he’d bought one with an auto-aware function so, when he hit the point at which its contact with his controller reached its furthest point, it simply stopped in the air and he watched Emmy disappear. Butcher hit the “return” button on the controller and the drone reversed its route, back to the car, without him needing to pay any more attention. He heard it land on the roof a few minutes later and he pulled it back in as he studied the route Emmy had taken so far.

Pilot 1

Yeah, right, thought Butcher as he blinked away the update from the Nanoids. Seriously? But from a quick study of Google Maps, he thought he had a pretty good idea of the route Emmy was going to take, based on her pace. So he sent the drone, out again, a little while later and, sure enough, he caught her on her way back along Gloucester Road. It was a good thing he’d tried to be early, though, because, if anything, she was moving faster on the way back than she had on the way out! It was an impressive performance. In a different life, he might have tried to persuade her to join up with that sort of fitness and discipline.

He had the drone return, though, so it was well out of sight by the time she made it back to the apartment block and he watched her go in.

Twenty minutes later he finally spotted her leaving the underground car park in a white Nissan Leaf. She was wearing the same singlet - probably a clean one, he figured - but now under a matching tracksuit. He didn’t bother to follow. He already knew where she was going.

*

Butcher spent the rest of the morning finding a hotel and sorting through his gear, carefully. He “borrowed” a pillow case from the hotel, wrapped the pistol in it and stowed them in the Vectra’s glove compartment. In the unlikely event the compartment was opened, it would give him at least a few seconds before whoever saw it clocked the pistol. Long enough to cover it up or deal with the observer, with luck.

Then he set up the laptop, ignored the prompts to connect to the hotel’s wifi and set the DSLR to upload its footage to the hard drive. While it worked on that, he decided to get some well-earned shut-eye, but just as he was drifting off the BRS phone on the bedside table began to vibrate urgently.

‘Parsons,’ said Butcher wearily, answering it in speaker mode.

‘You’ve been busy, Butcher,’ said Ball. ‘Wales. High Wycombe. Now back to Cheltenham. What have you got for me?’

‘I had to do some shopping,’ said Butcher.

‘I noticed,’ Ball replied. ‘What did you buy in the middle of a Welsh field?’

‘Insurance,’ said Butcher. ‘But don’t worry about that. I’ve got a lead.’

‘What have you found?’

‘Again, not your problem,’ said Butcher. He saw no reason to give Ball anything he hadn’t agreed to. ‘When I’ve got Cuttler, I’ll let you know. But I already know more than the police do.’

‘Mm-hm,’ said Ball. ‘We’re watching you, Butcher. Don’t fuck this up for yourself.’

Butcher hung up on him without another word, closed his eyes and fell into blissful, dreamless, pain-free sleep.

*

By 1600 he was in the car park at the gym. He spotted Emmy’s car and, strolling past it, stopped for a moment to tie the shoelace he had strategically loosened a few minutes before. It gave him an easy opportunity to slip one of the GPS trackers from Blacksite into her tire well. He wasn’t sure how significant Emmy was in the big picture, but she was tagged with the Project Dragon glyph and that was enough to make her a long-term person of interest, as far as he was concerned. He returned to his car, parked outside a furniture store a good distance away, and checked that the GPS tracker was giving a good return signal to the website.

He was now officially breaking the law. The tracking devices were officially supposed to go into your own vehicle so you could track them if they were stolen - or you could track company vehicles and suchlike. Using them to track someone who didn’t know they were carrying the device was pretty naughty. But any naughtiness short of murder Butcher thought was still a win in the unlikely event that he got caught.

Her car showed as moving just a few minutes after six o’clock and he tracked her to the Sainsbury’s just up the road. But because he never trusted technology a hundred percent, Butcher drove over there, found the car and watched her come out of the supermarket, with three bags of shopping. Then she drove out to an empty single-storey commercial unit on the edge of town.

With less traffic around, he was more exposed if he tried to keep eyes on, so he parked up at a distance, clocked where she’d stopped from the GPS, grabbed the camera and made it the rest of the way on foot before taking up a position behind a set of large, metal wheelie bins.

She was still in the car when he arrived, and he crouched out of her line of sight, the DSLR clicking away at maximum zoom and night-time setting on. She made a point of looking all around her, although there was no chance she was going to spot him in the dark

She took one bag into the unit with her, locking the door behind her. Fifteen minutes later she came out with no bag and locked the door again - and again looked all around her as she walked to the car. For the first time that day, she looked less cautious than she did nervous. Butcher watched her drive away and then waited for ten minutes before he left his hiding place.

He walked back to the car, put the DSLR in the boot, retrieving a pair of black latex gloves, the lockpicks and a Mini Maglite instead. Then he took the Browning from the glove compartment and stuffed it into a pocket before walking back to the unit. He had already spotted a pair of CCTV cameras observing the empty parking space at the front and the main door, so he stayed well out of their line of view while he quickly browsed the Internet for some details on the make and model he was looking at.

As he had suspected, they were part of a local system - so whatever they were recording was going to a hard drive inside the unit. Which meant that he didn’t need to worry if they saw him, just as long as he could wipe the hard drive while he was inside. Butcher relaxed and walked straight towards the door, pulling on the gloves.

It was a simple tumbler lock and it gave him no more than a minute’s resistance. As he pushed the door open, he tucked the tools away and put a hand into his pocket for the pistol, slowly removing it as he crossed the threshold and quietly worked the action to put a round in the chamber, pushing the safety catch up as he did so.

The place was dark, though. There was a smell to empty places and this one had it, even though there were other markers to say people had been here. He was surprised that he could detect a scent of sweat and body spray that he instantly knew was Emmy. But also pizza, although that scent was older. And… socks?

Default DEX adjusted to 6

That was interesting, he thought, and wondered if that was because of his lock-picking or his sense of smell. But he pushed his curiosity to one side, blinked away the update and pulled the Maglite out of his pocket with his left hand, twisted it on and held it up, resting his torch hand on the back of the wrist of his pistol hand as he tracked it around the empty room.

It was obvious that someone had been living there. There was a mattress and blankets. There were a lot of books stacked in piles, with titles like “Fundamental Neuroscience” and “Nanotechnology & Biosensors”. There was also a full collection of George RR Martin’s fantasy series. Butcher had never seen the appeal, himself.

At the back of the unit he found a kitchen counter and a well-stocked fridge, including the food he guessed Emmy had brought, but with a lot of stuff with use-by dates well past. Next to a sink he found an empty plastic pint bottle with a date two days old.

But next to the kitchen was what was probably intended to be a storeroom by the builder and that was where Butcher found what looked like an improvised clean lab. With plastic sheeting draped from a framework with stainless steel benches, tools, and an over-pressure machine to keep the space sterile, Butcher immediately recalled the iTorture room at BRS. This was obviously someone’s attempt to replicate that with building supplies. He’d seen a Toolstation not far away. It would have been easy to pick most of this up as a job-lot in one visit. The heavy-duty microscope on the steel bench was probably a more complicated purchase. It was the kind of thing the police could use as a lead - trace the manufacturer and look at their customer records to work out how Cuttler had bought it. But that wasn’t going to work for him. For all the advantages he had from his training, BRS’s money and, arguably, Project Dragon, he still didn’t have access to search warrants or court instructions.

At one end of Cuttler’s clean room there was a large metal framework that looks like a blend between a medieval rack and an exercise machine.

It was obvious that Cuttler had been here. And Butcher was prepared to guess that, if Emmy had had the procedure, this was where she’d had it. Was it the price Cuttler paid for her assistance? Was she a guinea pig for his testing? Right now, he had no idea. But she obviously expected him to come back here. The only question was whether she was right or if Cuttler was already in the wind.

Oh, and there was the recording centre for the CCTV. The green light was on, but the monitor was blank. Butcher flicked on the monitor to reveal the current view outside, confirming it was working. Then he flicked through the controls to find historical records and the monitor displayed a month of recordings in the memory. Anything longer than that, he guessed, was recorded over. But this was gold.

He quickly shut the whole system down and popped the hard drive, slipping it in the inside pocket of her gabardine, then he made his way back to the door and stowed the pistol and torch back in his pockets. He opened the door a crack and looked out to the space outside to check it was clear, then he quickly stepped out, locked the door behind him - a lot easier than opening it in the first place - and walked away.

Investigation 3

Some distance from the car, he stopped in the middle of the road and his hand went back into his pocket. It was already falling dark, but he could see a person by the car: a woman, standing just on the edge of the bright street light. She was wearing a winter coat, a wooly hat and a snood pulled up over her face. Beneath the coat he could see loose trousers and sensible shoes. But the big, red flag as he approached was a black leather shoulder bag, worn cross-body. The zip on the bag was open and her right hand rested above the opening. Her body was angled in his direction but she was looking away, obviously tracking him in her peripheral vision as he approached.

He scanned the area, quickly. There was no sign of anyone else.

‘Hi,’ he said, drawing closer, his right hand on the grip of the pistol in his pocket. ‘Can I help you?’

‘You’re already helping me, Mister Parsons,’ she said, turning to look at him with a smile of scarlet lipstick, but her calm demeanour didn’t hide the momentary twitch of her right hand towards the opening of her bag, ‘Mister Ball asked me to check up on you - you, know, just to put eyes on. Make sure you’re doing your job and not leading us on a wild goose chase.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replied, putting the car between them and gently pushing the safety down on the Browning.

‘Cautious,’ acknowledged the woman. ‘I respect that.’

Her hand dipped into the bag and, his hand now outside her line of sight, Butcher slid the pistol from out of his pocket, resting it against his thigh, finger still against the guard. But when she withdrew her hand, slowly, it was just to reveal a smartphone. She glanced down at it and touched a button.

Butcher’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He retrieved it with his left hand and held it up to his ear.

‘Miss Cook works for me,’ said Ball. ‘I can’t be on your back every day, Butcher. She’s going to be your handler until we have Cuttler. Treat her with respect, please. She’s just an employee.’

‘Just?’ said Butcher.

‘A valued employee,’ Ball emphasized. Then he hung up.

‘Fine,’ said Butcher to the woman called Cook. ‘Give me your number. I’ll call you in the morning with an update.’

She touched a button again and Butcher’s phone buzzed with an arriving SMS. He watched her as Cook carefully dropped the phone into her open bag. Then, without another word, he yanked open the door and climbed in, slipping the Browning into the side pocket of the driver’s door. His eyes stayed on her open bag until he pulled away. As he drove, he checked her in his rear view mirror and saw her carefully zipping the bag closed.