Starr sneered at her. His stare was so cold it gave Ada the chills.
“If you are not serious about this, you can piss right off”, Starr finally said, breaking the brief silence that felt like an eternity. Aron Starr’s rough South London accent gave everything he said a brash edge, never more so than when he was angry. He was a very attractive black man, whose beauty Ada struggled to pinpoint or define: his large nose and thick lips might have looked out of place on another man’s face, but on his, they formed a center of gravity for the rest of his features to orbit. If Ada had to describe what made him look so aetherial, the best definition she could give was that his eyes were a perfect distance from each other. But when he was angry with you, the aesthetically pleasing symmetry of his face hardened into an impenetrable wall of judgement. Right now, his black eyes were on fixed on her, and she couldn’t bring herself to raise her gaze to meet his. Instead, she studied the tips of his white sneakers. They looked like they had never been worn out of the house, which was probably true. In the year that Ada had known Starr, she hadn’t seen him leave the Clapham townhouse.
“I’m sorry”, Ada said. “I forgot that was happening today…”
“Well it was and now it isn’t. We’ll have to wait for the next window, it could be weeks.”
“You should’ve just gone ahead and done it without me”, she said, meekly.
“We would have, but the plan had you do the intercept and we don’t exactly have the spare staff right now innit.”
“Is the window closed for certain?”
“He is already at the airport waiting for his flight back to Frankfurt.”
“Fuck…”
The plan had been simple. Ada was supposed to find Hans Zetter at the Moorgate steakhouse where he had made a lunch reservation for one, swipe his Blackberry, and keep him distracted while Michael rooted the device. This would give them full access to all his electronic communications and, they hoped, to the Citibank algo trading subsystem they had been unsuccessful in penetrating with the usual combination of software and social exploits. But now Zetter was going out of the country, and they’d have to find another opportunity. Thankfully, hacking his assistant’s email had been easy since the girl used her private Yahoo mail to run her boss’s schedule, so they would find out when he was next in town. If the assistant’s gossip chains with the other young women at the bank weren’t pure fabrication, Zetter had a certain “type”, making Ada a perfect candidate for the intercept. But now, it didn’t matter, she had missed her date.
“I am finding it very hard to trust your commitment, Ada.” He pronounced her name in a way that made it sound more like “ader”. She hated it, and he knew it.
“I’m committed! But this can’t be my entire life. I have some other stuff going on.”
“Oh, wow. Stuff? I’m sorry I didn’t realise you had stuff going on.”
“Starr, come on, that’s not fair. I fucked up today, but I’ll make it up to you.”
“I don’t think you will”, Starr said. “I can see what is happening. You are on your way out. It’s gotten to be too much and you’re scared of what we will have to do next.”
“No, that’s not —”
“Look, Ada. Things are starting to fall into place. New York is popping right now, people are starting to run demos in London, in Frankfurt, in Paris. Occupy is growing, but they can’t do it alone, without us they’s nothing but hippies camping in a park. But if we can take down the banks, they’ll occupy the vacuum. Now is the time. Not next month, Ada. We need to capture the moment before it fizzles out.”
“I’m with you!”, Ada protested. “I’m with you all the way, Aron. I’ll fix this.”
“How are you going to fix it?”
“I don’t know… I’ll go to Frankfurt. I’ll head to the airport right now and I’ll take the next flight.”
“The fuck you will. Remember, they’re tracking me. One of us crossing the border will send off alarms.”
“Oh, Aron… they’re not tracking you. Nobody is.” Sometimes she worried for Starr. His paranoid delusions were getting out of hand.
“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. They have cameras everywhere. They can track your every move if they want to, the only way to stay off their radar is to stay put and try not to raise any flags.”
“Fine”, Ada said. “I’ll take the ferry, under a false name, and a train to Germany.”
Starr thought about it. He exhaled through closed lips. “Ok, do it. Pay everything in cash or bitcoins.”
Ada would go to Frankfurt to clean up the mess she had made, but she had no intention of taking a ferry or a train. She was just humouring Starr. Everything was easier when Starr thought he got his way.
“You need to take Michael with you”, Starr said.
“I can root the phone myself. That’s not a problem.”
“Not for that. I need Michael to be on this.”
“Why?”
“There’s something else on that phone that I want.”
“What is it? Just tell me what’s on it and I’ll get it for you.”
“No”, Starr said. “This is something I need Michael to do.” He said it with such finality Ada knew it would be fruitless to try to argue. She’d be taking the ferry after all, which meant she’d have to cancel her weekend plans.
It was a crisp September morning. The summer had been a scorcher, and this was one of the first days Ada was able to wear her favourite black cardigan without looking like she was trying to hide something, which was exactly what she was doing. She liked the warmth of the summer, but she wasn’t wild about the season’s fashion — light dresses and tops didn’t provide her quite as much cover as she preferred. But this morning, the woolly garment didn’t manage to make her as comfortable as it did on the best of days. Starr was acting super weird. Though she wouldn’t admit it to his face, she was feeling uncomfortable about the direction they were going. She believed in Starr’s goal, but the means were starting to wear on her. When you at the bankers were getting off completely unscathed out of the mess and misery they had caused in the meltdown of the previous year, destroying the entire global financial system seemed like a just cause, but it put a lot of faith in the people who were to rebuild on top of the rubble. Starr believed in anarchy. Ada wasn’t so sure, but something needed to be done. It was a gamble, and this was their best bet.
The quiet side street Ada had taken through the estates joined Hoxton Street, and suddenly Ada was surrounded by people. The weekend street market was buzzing. The green and white tarps of stalls billowed in the gentle wind. If there was a global financial crisis going on, you couldn’t tell it on this market. People were out shopping, browsing clothes, knock-off Justin Bieber backpacks, used books, fruit by the pound, home made soap and mobile phone decals for sale. Dresses on rows and rows of racks, labelled £2, £5, £7. It reminded Ada of the Estonian markets where her father took her shopping before each school year. Everything was cheap, and looked the part, but at least now she could pick clothes that she liked. She stopped to touch the fabric of a dark purple jumper. It felt like it would make her skin itch. She liked the color, and for £5 it was almost too good of a deal to pass, even if she wore it just once. Everything looked better in the askew morning light that filtered gently through the fine smog, reducing the permanently under-construction skyline of the City into a faded silhouette in the distance. Ada might have succumbed to the impulse purchase, but she was already late to meet William. Just the thought of him made her take a hard swallow. He would be so disappointed when she would have to bail on him.
William saw her coming from a distance and stood up at the café table to greet her with a big grin on his face. The enthusiasm with which he waved both of his hands at her was endearing, and made her relax. Smiling back at him, she accepted his kiss on her cheek and sat opposite him on the small kerbside table.
“I took the liberty to order for us”, William said.
“I hope it’s cake.”
William grinned. “Of course.”
The small independent café, Rose’s, looked like it had always been there. Across the street was a place that appeared to be of even earlier vintage: a pie & mash shop that advertised jellied eels, among other things, in their window. The passers-by did not look like the types who would soon get a craving for eels, jellied or otherwise — the street urchin were of all possible colors, ages and shapes. A true East London scene.
The cake arrived with coffees. The Sacher torte wasn’t what Ada would have ordered, but she thought the gesture was sweet, and she let him have his little chivalrous pleasure of ordering for the lady. She wasn’t opposed to his old-fashioned gentlemanly habits, in moderation.
“Which movie do you want to see tonight? I heard the new Tarantino film is supposed to be good. The arts editor at the paper said — wait, babe. What’s wrong?” He had clued onto the grimace on her face.
“William, I’m so sorry. I was hoping we could’ve had our cake first before I have to spoil the day —”
“You have to go?”
“Yes.”
“Another one of your missions?” William insisted calling her disappearances that. The name wasn’t completely inaccurate, she surmised, and as long as she refused to tell him where she went, she couldn’t blame him for his acerbic quips.
She nodded.
“How much time do we have?”
“A couple of hours.”
He took in the new information and calculated a response. Finally, he smiled benevolently. “Let’s make the best of it then”, he said and stole a piece of cake off of her plate. She guessed he was disappointed, but he was also too practical to turn it into an argument. In that case, he’d lose even what little time she had to give him.
They drank their coffees and crossed over to the busy Kingsland road and “Little Hanoi”, a cluster of a dozen Vietnamese restaurants closely packed next to each other. Over the summer, they must have visited nearly all of them, united by their shared love of noodle soup. It was early and none of the restaurants were yet open, so they crossed the bridge and took the steps down to the canal-side path. A lot of their meetings were like this: walking hand in hand, talking about this and that, and every now and then, stopping for a snog on a park bench. Today, her cancelling of their plans had affected their dynamic, and holding William’s hand, she felt he wasn’t really there with her. She was telling him a story about a demonstration she’d been to, mostly true but with names changed to protect the guilty, when he interrupted her.
“Ada. We should go away together.”
“Wha — like, a holiday? That might be nice. Maybe next —”
“No, more like a… I don’t know.”
She waited for him to get the thought out.
“More like a permanent holiday. Leave all this —”, he waved his arm in a circular motion. She looked around. She understood what he meant, though there could have been more effective times and places to make the point. The Regent’s Canal on a bright Saturday morning was a lovely place, hardly something to want to leave behind. What he meant were the invisible social constructs around them. “— leave all this and go somewhere else.”
“Oh, William. I don’t know. There’s a lot going on with the project. We’re in a critical phase right now. But in maybe a year or two…” If they were successful and the city skyline behind them would become a museum of the banks of past, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to make herself scarce and go somewhere else.
“Let’s go right now.”
“Hah… you can’t be serious?”
They stopped. Grey geese slid by them in the canal. A cycling couple passed them, ringing their bells. “I’m dead serious”, he said.
One look at him made it clear to Ada that he was not, in fact, joking. He was a good-looking man, his round and earnest face framed by thick black hair and fashionable horn-rimmed glasses. Objectively, he wasn’t quite in the same league as Starr, but more her type. William was… gentle. But now, his usual gentle smile did not grace them with its presence. He studied her face for a reaction, which she felt she would need to give sooner rather than later, but her mind was drawing a complete blank. His proposition had launched one thousand simultaneous simulations in her mind, and until they completed, all she could do was to awkwardly scratch her arm.
“Ada?”
“Give me a minute.”
“…”
She felt overwhelmed. She felt… angry! What kind of suggestion was that, to leave everything behind and just… go? She had never thought that was something that a person could do. They couldn’t do that… unless they… could? Adding this possibility into the mix of all possible futures forced her to invalidate all previously cached decisions, and the re-computation was an expensive operation — both algorithmically and emotionally.
“You know what, forget I said anything”, Wint said when she did not produce an answer in a reasonable time.
“No, wait. Tell me more about it”, she said. She wanted to buy more time. Perhaps adding more edge conditions would make the problem less general and thus, easier to solve.
“Well, I haven’t thought about it too much, but my book has done quite well and my publisher has offered me an… attractive advance on another one. So money-wise I think it would be feasible.”
“So you’d write. What would I do?”
Wint bit his lip. “I don’t know. Whatever you want to do? Take the cryptopunk thing to a new place and start a new chapter… or however that works.”
“It doesn’t work like that. But ok, where do we go?”
“I don’t know”, Wint shrugged. “What you told me about the things going on in Estonia sound pretty interesting to me. The way the government is really getting it. Don’t you ever feel like going home?”
Home. Ada thought about the word. It wasn’t something she ever did. She didn’t think of herself as a person who had a home.
“What about your parents? Don’t you ever see them?”
“My parents are dead”, Ada said coldly. “Well, I don’t know that for a fact, but they’re dead to me. Oh — I don’t know about Estonia, William. It’s getting better, but people don’t change overnight. It’s not a good place for people like me.”
“You don’t have to be… people like you. You can be whoever you want.”
“That’s sweet. But people can tell.”
“…”
“Why can’t we just stay here… things are going well. I know I have to travel, but —”, she forced on a smile, “distance makes the heart grow fonder.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I just… It’s just… I don’t know, it’s hard. The Intrepid is almost bankrupt. All the people in my life… it’s complicated.”
“What is?”
“…”
“Do you mean I’m complicated?”
“What?”
This was something Ada had thought about for a long time, but had never had a good enough reason to bring it up. But now that he had cornered her, she felt like it was a good opportunity to hash it out to divert some of the attention away from her.
“William, why do we never meet any of your friends? You’ve met plenty of mine. And why do we meet in places like this, in Shoreditch or Hoxton or Islington or Brixton? Don’t get me wrong William, you look very hip with those glasses, but you’re not exactly the Shoreditch type.”
“…”
“Why don’t we meet near your work? Or go to the pub near where you live?”
“…”
“When do I get to meet your mother? You talk about her all the time.”
“…”
“I’m right, aren’t I? Tell me I’m not right.”
“…”
She looked at her watch.
“I better get going, I have a train to catch. Let’s talk about this later”, she said and kissed him on the lips receiving a suspicious reciprocation. She walked away, leaving him standing on the tow path, under the scrutiny of canal geese.