“Hello?”, Wint says to the receiver.
“Identify yourself”, commands a male voice on the phone. It sounds foreign.
“Excuse me?”
“Identify yourself.”
“This is Wint Webster. Who is this?”
“Please hold.”
Wint feels dizzy. Rushing twenty paces from his garden to the telephone took his breath away. He really should quit smoking. Wint listens to the quiet line. There is no background noise, no breathing. He recognises the silence. It’s the same silence he heard when he tried calling Ada’s emergency number a few minutes before.
Minutes pass. Then, the line crackles.
“Who are you trying to reach?”
“Ada. Ada Effram.”
He’s put back on hold, shorter this time. He can’t believe the number still worked. He doesn’t know who he’s speaking with, but the fact that he’s reached someone has increased his chances of finding Ada and his stuffed bitcoin wallet dramatically. The prospect makes his stomach turn with nervous excitement.
The line’s active again.
“Ms. Effram is offline. I can connect you in person. Write this down.”
Wint sat at his computer and typed his credit card number into the little box on the airline’s website. He pressed the big orange button that said “Buy”, and after a moment, he had his ticket. It was the first time he’d ever bought anything online. He had been too stubborn, and he had to admit to himself, a little bit afraid. Now that it was done he wondered what the big fuss had been about. Apart from page after page of the airline trying to sell him services he didn’t want or need: seat upgrades, insurance packages, rental cars, hotel rooms (though he didn’t know where he would stay once he got to Estonia, so maybe a hotel room would have been a good idea), the act of buying a plane ticket on the internet wasn’t half bad. He clicked the button to print his ticket and left the old, beige laser printer chattering alone in the dimly lit office and started packing for the early morning departure.
When he had been a staff writer, Wint had travelled for work to conduct interviews, report on world events, and promote his book on a tour mandated by the publisher. He wasn’t the kind of person to enjoy taking time off to do nothing, apart from the occasional beach holiday when he felt the old burnout approaching. But in the last few years his job kept him chained to his desk, and the only time off he had taken had been homebound staycations and short jaunts within a driving distance of London.
He still remembered his old packing routine. He rummaged his kitchen cabinets for a ziploc bag for his toiletries, and having found one, went into the bathroom. The black-and-white-tiled room was the only brightly lit space in the house, the rest he preferred to keep shrouded in dim, warm 30-watt twilight. The halogen light pierced Wint’s eyes as he caught himself in the mirror. He couldn’t believe that after seven years he would meet Ada Effram again. The seven years’ drought. The thought alone made his testicles tingle, not in a good way. He had spent many a sleepless night wondering if the day would ever come, and many more a night dreaming — or were they nightmares? — of the day it did.
Ada Effram was the one that got away, if by got away you meant the one whose heart Wint had trampled, set on fire and left burning atop the heap of relationship rubble he’d left in his wake.
The spring of 2009 Wint had been researching a piece about cyberterrorism. A Hertfordshire regional hospital had been effectively shut down and rendered non-functional by a computer worm carrying some kind of a virus that would lock up any system it touched, and could only be undone if the hackers who controlled it chose to do so, in exchange for a hefty ransom. In later years these types of “ransomware” attacks had become so commonplace they were barely newsworthy, but in 2009 this was all new, and Wint wanted to write a piece on the people behind the act. He wanted to know what kind of person would risk murdering the weak and the infirm — one patient had died because the system controlling their life support machine stopped functioning — for financial gain.
He was interviewing a computer security expert who wasn’t very helpful for the story, his language was so full of jargon that even if Wint could understand what he was saying, he struggled to find a printable quote. But he had tipped Wint to a greyhat hacker who was working on a new exciting “crypto-currency”, a sort of digital token that could be anonymously traded, and might in the future be used by cyberterrorists as an untraceable way to get paid for their extortion. The hacker’s name was Ada Effram.
Hackers were often categorised by the color of their proverbial hats. A blackhat hacker was someone who used their abilities to wreak havoc in name of profit, politics or pure fun. A whitehat hacker on the other hand considered the ethical ramifications of their actions, and often worked day jobs for companies trying to defend their systems against intruders by racing to discover security holes and vulnerabilities faster than their blackhat counterparts. A greyhat would fall somewhere in between, and it was in part this complex and conflicted nature of Ada Effram that made Wint Webster fall madly, absolutely and all-consumingly in love with her.
It had taken a dogged, persistent campaign of courtship to win her heart (and only one split second to crush it), but eventually he managed. Now, looking at himself in the bright halogen glow of his bathroom, he wondered if he would’ve been able to convince her, had they met now. He had aged. He scratched his neat little moustache with two fingers. Ada had a deep aversion to any kind of facial hair, and one condition of allowing him to kiss her had been that he had to be clean-shaven. He didn’t dare to hope there would be any kissing involved when they met, but he didn’t want to exclude the possibility. He grabbed his trimming scissors and an electric razor from the cabinet behind the mirror, and made quick work of the tuft of hair on his lip. He’d need to shave in the morning anyway, so he didn’t bother to shave the dark, carbonated stubble left behind.
He tousled his hair and tried to remember what it had looked like that summer. He didn’t have any photos of them together. Ada categorically refused to be photographed. Wint thought she was a beautiful woman, and while Ada explained her wish to not be captured on camera as a concern for her privacy, he was certain it was at least partially motivated by self-consciousness. He couldn’t understand it then, but having recently joined the same club, he now did. He scratched his forehead under the bandage covering the stitched-up wound from the bus crash. Briefly he wondered who had died in the accident. He heard one of the ambulance technicians say there had been a fatality, but he hadn’t seen it himself. Either way, life was too short.
Determined, he unwrapped the bandage. The wound looked neat and clean, there were only a few blots of brown, crusted blood around the edges of the stitching that he wiped off with a warm, damp cloth. Despite their heavy-handedness, the medics on-site had done an excellent job patching him up. He switched on the electric razor and went to work on his head, watching strands of gray hair fall into the sink.
Wint ran his hand across the millimetre stubble on his head. Merida had tried to convince him to do this before, she said he would look like Walter White. He wasn’t familiar with the reference, but he hadn’t admitted to the fact, so he took it on good faith that looking like Walter White was a good thing. Examining himself now, he tried to think who he most looked like. Bruce Willis, maybe? Jason Statham? Hah! He wished. But with the stitches on his forehead and the military implications of his new close-cut hair, he could see the semblance to an action film hero.
The gushing of bodies out of the London Bridge station overwhelmed Wint. A lifelong Londoner, he still never got used to the sheer volume of people the city could muster in its choke points. It was a crisp early Saturday morning, and he couldn’t fathom where all these people could possibly need to be. Christmas shopping, he thought. Living alone had its benefits, fewer people to shop for. In his rolling travel suitcase he had a small present for Ada, a memento of their shared past he hoped would help her remember the good times before the bad times had rewritten their story.
Pushing through the crowd into the station Wint stopped at the departures board to look for his train. The next train to Gatwick airport left in ten minutes, platform not yet announced. He stood his suitcase up and looked around the station.
The metal and glass departure hall was such a symbol for London. Cold, hard materials to move along the cold, hard people that inhabited it. No benches anywhere in sight, even at a train station. No rubbish bins, that was a given, since someone might get the idea of dropping a bomb in one. It was a city no longer built for humans. But if not for humans, who was it built for?
He took in the faces of bypassers, one by one. A young man with red, barely-slept eyes pouring a coffee down this throat. A beautiful olive-skinned muslim man in a ankle-length dress, holding hands with his young son. A train company worker carrying a bag of Pret a Manger, eager to sit down for his hard-won fifteen minute morning break. Looking at people’s faces always helped Wint ground himself when he felt like reality was falling apart around him. At a place like this train station, it was easy to forget that every person was an actual, breathing, eating, fucking, dreaming, loving being. When seen as a group, people were just a series of physical obstacles in Wint’s way, but considered individually, he felt a deep sense of kinship with every face that passed him, every pair of eyes that caught his for a fleeting moment and then disappeared from his life forever.
In a way, this was his problem with The Platform that Zee was building at the paper. It dehumanised people. Instead of readers with individual stories, backgrounds and desires, The Platform reduced them to points of data. The language Zee’s programmers used to describe them — pipelines, funnels, streams — wasn’t that different from looking at a commuter train flush a wave of people into the station.
The departures board flickered and updated with the information about the boarding platform. Wint grabbed the handle of his suitcase — but his hand came off empty.
Wait, what? Where was it?
He spun around to look for his case, but it was nowhere to be seen. Had he left it somewhere else and wandered off deep in thought? No. He hadn’t moved.
Motherfucker! Someone had stolen it! All the goodwill he had drummed up for his fellow humans in the last few minutes vanished with a poof.
He took a few steps towards the train platforms, then stopped, turned around, and took a few more steps back towards the exits, and stopped again. Which way would the thief have gone? A train had just vomited another mass of bodies into the station, and even if he picked a direction, it was impossible to move to any direction but with the flow of people. He’d never catch them.
Panicked, he patted his chest to check the inside pocket of his jacket. His passport and plane ticket in there. His mobile phone and wallet were safely tucked in his trousers’ pockets, too. That was fortunate, he didn’t know how well he would have taken losing another wallet two days running.
Less fortunately, his house keys were in the suitcase, and the name tag on the case requested the reader to return it to his address, if lost. This meant that whoever had taken his case knew exactly where he lived, and had the means to access his house at will. Maybe the house would be ransacked for real this time.
Wint bit his lower lip hard. The pain helped him focus. Should he return home to guard his possessions? Did he want to be home if someone came knocking? What could he, realistically, do? Despite his vague recently acquired resemblance to a Bruce Willis, he wasn’t the type to hide in ventilation ducts and take out criminals.
Damn it! Damn it all, he thought. He’d catch his train and call someone to get his locks changed while he was gone. If Ada could help him find his Bitcoin wallet, he could just buy a new house.
The train lurched out of the station. Nearly empty, only a few people dotted the carriage. The Southern Railways service would stop at a handful stations before reaching Gatwick airport, and seemingly nobody in the city had any business in suburbia early Saturday morning — the traffic was one-way, and would reverse direction in the afternoon.
Wint examined the few people in the carriage as he walked down the aisle, wondering where they were headed. Most of them were going to the airport, he guessed, since many of the passengers were travelling with luggage. The other thing they all had common was that they all had their faces glued to their smart phones, swiping and tapping the glowing rectangles. An army of zombies.
He found a seat he liked, facing the direction of travel and sat down. A rough-looking man sat opposite to him in the four-seat compartment. Did he have to sit here, Wint thought? There was a completely free section just behind his. His anti-social city dweller tendencies flared up again.
Wint studied his seat neighbour. The wiry man wore dull green trousers and a sandy brown jumper under a green hooded parka. The colors were those of military fatigue, but the effect wasn’t at all militant, the man looked more like a mean wood elf. His lip and nose were pierced, and under the hood of his jacket Wint could see his ears were pierced with those rings that stretched out his earlobes into fleshy circles.
The wood elf looked right back at him and an amused smile rose to his lips.
“Travelling light”, the man said in a gruff Northern accent.
“Excuse me?”, Wint replied.
“Were you followed?”
“Uhh — I don’t think so?” What on earth was going on?
“Yes you were”, the pierced man said. “I followed you from your door to here. Let that be the first lesson, you will never know when you are being watched. If it’s not a person, it’s a drone. Small as a bumblebee. If it’s not a drone, it could be a satellite, though nae likely — too pricey”
“I’m not… why would they…”, Wint stuttered. Who were they, anyway?
“Yer probably right mate”, said the northerner. “I don’t think you were followed — other than by me, that is.”
Wint felt sheepish. “Was — was it you on the phone? Yesterday?”
“Nae, that was ops.” It took Wint a moment to understand the word. The northerner’s accent made the ‘o’ sound more like long ‘u’ — “oops”.
“Here —”, the man said and tossed a heavy paper parcel at him, “— go to the toilet and put these on. Put your clothes in the bag and bring the bag back to me. The one that way is free”, he said and nodded towards the back of the carriage.
Wint looked around. Nobody in sight, though he knew there were a few people at the back.
“Who are you?”, Wint asked. When the man didn’t answer, he added, unconvincingly: “I’m not going to put anything on until you tell me.”
“I’ll take you where you need to go”, said the elf. “But you’re not going anywhere until you get changed. If they’re not following, they’ve probably put a tracker on you.”
“They?” Wint’s curiosity finally got the better of him.
“We don’t have the time, mate”, said the elf, patiently. His tone was firm but gentle.
Wint didn’t like this, but he didn’t feel like he had a choice. He didn’t like when he wasn’t given a choice. His mouth opened and closed as he tried to come up with a counterargument, but no feasible objection came to mind. The elf smiled as he waited for Wint to adjust to his new reality, and watched after him as he clutched the paper bag and disappeared into the train toilet.
The lock clicked as Wint closed the toilet door behind him. He dug out the clothes from the bag and examined them one by one, placing them on the small counter next to the sink. A white t-shirt. A simple dark blue wool jumper. Black jeans, no belt. Gray socks, white unbranded canvas sneakers. He looked at the labels on the tongues of the shoes. They were the right size. A cheap digital Casio wristwatch. Rummaging the bottom of the bag, he snorted with disbelief when he pulled out the last item of clothing. A pair of black underpants.
“You have to be joking!”, he exclaimed out loud to no-one in particular. Couldn’t they at least let him keep his own pants?
Not finding a number for the complaints department in the bag, he acquiesced and undressed quickly. The toilet was freezing cold, the window was slightly cracked and frigid December air leaked steadily into the small space. He put on the clothes he had been given, folded his own and placed them into the brown paper bag. He was unsure what to do with his coat. There hadn’t been one in the bag. He hung it off his arm and re-entered the carriage.
Back at his seat, the elf handed him a black skullcap and the oversized fishtail parka he’d been wearing on the way in. “You’ll need these or you’ll freeze.” Wint accepted the clothes. The look wasn’t entirely unpleasant, though hopelessly too young for him.
“Estonia’s cold in the winter”, Wint said, pulling on the skullcap over his shaved head. When pushed out of his comfort zone, his English side defaulted to talking about the weather.
“You’re not going to Estonia, mate.”
The P.A. system announced the imminent arrival at the Gatwick airport station. The northerner collected Wint’s peacoat and the paper bag containing his clothes. “Your phone and wallet in here?”
Without arguing, Wint reached into the pockets of the slightly too tight jeans he was still getting used to and handed his phone, wallet and passport to the stranger. The man took them, slipped the phone into his pocket, dug out the sixty-odd quid in cash from the wallet, slid the money in between the pages of his passport and handed it back to him.
“I’ll be getting off here, I have a flight to catch”, said the man, handing him a business card. Wint looked at it. It was the calling card of a gentleman’s club in Brighton. “Go there and ask for Hanna.”
With that, the northerner was gone, and the train continued onwards to its next stop.
Wint remained seated, perplexed. He rubbed his temples, careful to avoid bothering the stitches on his wound. His headache had been better this morning, but now the familiar buzzing feeling from the day before was back. He had lost all his possessions. He was wearing another man’s clothes. He had no wallet, neither the Bitcoin variety, nor the one that held all his credit cards. He was on a train to — where did this train go after the airport anyway?
The train’s automated announcement system chimed in, finally providing at least some answers to Wint’s questions, most of which were still swimming in his head in a big bowl of confusion.
“This is a Southern Railways service to Brighton.”