Confidence

Cold, thinks Myka. Always so damn cold in this city, whatever the weather. And this is summer?

She pulls the belt of her raincoat tighter around her; adjusts her glasses, tucks a red-streaked strand of hair behind her ear.

He's alone at the table: head bent over a Financial Times, university tie stretched tight across the pinstripes of his paunch. He hasn't ordered food yet, she notices - he's here for a while.

An apologetic word to the maitre d' about the breeze from the balcony - apologies, she's found, really get things done with the English - and she's seated at the table next to his, close enough to hear the disapproving tuts and sighs he releases with every turn of the page. It's a performance, she knows, this show of indignation at the state of the world - though for whose benefit, in the relatively emptiness of the restaurant, she isn't sure.

His jacket - a light wool blazer with a caduceus insignia on the lapel, exactly what she'd expect - hangs loosely from the back of his chair. It's the work of a second to lean back, stretch out an arm and lift the wallet from the inside pocket.

She palms it; waits a minute, two, then - on the pretence of a fallen napkin - bends down to place it an inch or so from where he's sitting. Which is when she sees the woman: dark features, navy suit, Myka's age or older, striding over to his table with a tight smile of recognition.

She changes course: brushes the wallet into the napkin, picks them both up from the ground and slides them into her lap, the leather hidden by the heavy cloth.

Eyes straight ahead, she picks up the menu, settles back and listens.

----

Rupert Scott, thinks Helena, might be the perfect mark. Narcissistic, avaricious, obsessive - a walking brace of personality disorders held together with money and family connections, propelled towards his undoing - towards her - by sheer doubt-demolishing belief in the rightness of his cause.

There are, she knows, a thousand gaps and lapses and dissonances between appearance and reality, between the look of the thing and its essence - she operates, for the most part, in just those liminal spaces, in the almosts and the in-betweens. But there's something satisfying, something pleasurable to be found in the occasional moment of concordance between surface and structure, and Scott - from his porcine chins and college cufflinks to his braying laugh and ski-slope tan - gives precisely that pleasure, that satisfaction. He is exactly as he appears to be.

"Wonderful to see you again, Rupert," she says, easing down into the seat opposite his.

"And you, my dear," he says. His eyes drop to her breasts; linger there for a moment before flitting upwards to meet hers. "What news on the Rialto?"

"Straight to business, then," she says, voice pitched somewhere between disappointment and flirtation. "Shall we start with the numbers?"

"Let's. What do you have for me?"

She opens her case - Bottega Veneta, soft and recognisably expensive - and withdraws a sheath of documents, littered with charts and line graphs, screenshots and datasets. She passes them across the table; he takes them, eagerly.

"The polls are promising," she says.

"Very promising," he says, studying the papers.

"Everything that we've seen indicates that these four boroughs are the safest, in terms of fielding candidates." She points to a short list of place-names on the top sheet. "We can be reasonably confident, on the basis of the polling outcomes here, that your people can capture the vote share you need. In all four cases, public trust in the incumbent is very, very low."

"'Reasonably confident'? That doesn't sound like a solid yes to me, Georgina."

"I deal in probabilities, Rupert, not certainties. Would you rather I lied to you? Told you this was a sure thing?"

"I'd rather you told me that everything was going to plan. That these seats were in the bag, as it were."

"I'm not going to do that."

"I hired you to win this for me."

"And I will. Do you think this is my first rodeo?"

"Nobody's questioning your qualifications. Or your capabilities. I'd just like to be sure that we're moving in the right direction."

"The numbers speak for themselves. Field your candidates and you will very likely win - the odds are in your favour. But there are no guarantees, surely you know that?"

He looks down again at the papers.

"What are these?" he says, indicating one of the graphs.

"Social media," she says dismissively.

"It says I have followers?"

"350,000, yes. But that's your personal account. The party's has closer to half a million."

"Half a million people like us?"

"Yes. As you said: you hired me to win."

"And they'd all be willing to cast a vote for us on the day?"

"Again: there are no guarantees. But I can tell you that the outcomes of our previous campaigns suggest a strong correspondence between online behaviour - offering a Like or a Follow, for example - and offline decision-making."

"So the odds are...?"

"Very good, yes."

"I don't know what to say."

"There's no need to say anything. Things are, as you put it, moving in the right direction."

"Thank you, then. It's very impressive."

"I'm just doing my job, Rupert."

He hands back the papers.

"What are the next steps?" he says. "What do you need from me?"

"I'd like to get you out on the road. Have you and your people out there actually meeting the constituents. Now might also be time for us to launch a more mainstream media campaign, to start to make a dent in your advertising budget. Local news at first, I think. We can always roll it out nationally thereafter. I assume you have a war chest?"

"How else would I pay for you?"

"Good. I'll need full access."

"Of course."

The woman at the next table - a willowy redhead with terrible shoes - looks up from her coffee and locks eyes, momentarily, with Helena.

Perhaps, she thinks. In another time and place, perhaps.

"When can we start?" he says.

She smiles.

"We've already started," she tells him.

----

"I didn't do it," says Myka, back in the apartment.

"I knew it!" says Pete. "I knew you couldn't handle the rope!"

"The timing was off," she says, leaning back into the warm recesses of the couch. For a furnished rental, she thinks, they really didn't do so badly - Artie's taste in accommodation is improving every time. "He wasn't alone."

"Betcha I could've made it work."

"Really? Like that?"

She gestures down at the plastercast moulded to his left leg, the sling supporting the opposite shoulder.

"Even with these babies," he says. "I'm a professional."

"We should try it next time" she says. "See how long it takes for you to pick up a wallet with that wrist. Judging by your performance with the ramen and the chopsticks last night, we'll be there a while."

"I'm still, what did you call it? Dexterous. Still dexterous. One bowl of noodles doesn't prove anything. And it's not like Artie can use chopsticks either."

"Artie never plays the inside. He doesn't need dexterity."

He pouts; presses his weight down onto his crutch.

"Who was it, anyway?" he says.

"Who was who?"

"With Scott. This afternoon."

"Some British woman."

"This is London, Mykes. They're all British."

"I think she was his campaign manager - they were talking strategy."

"You should get Artie to look into it when he gets back. We didn't factor that in. Wasn't Scott supposed to be running the show?"

"He was. I guess she's a new player."

"What's she like? Other than British."

"From what I heard? Arrogant. Upper class. Sort of... uncomfortably sexual."

"I should meet her. I think we'd get alone."

"She'd eat you alive."

"What a way to go, though, right?"

She throws a cushion at him from across the room. He bats it away with the crutch, temporarily losing his balance on the descent.

"Did you get a name?" he says, righting himself.

"Georgina something."

"Georgina." He rolls the name around his mouth, drawing out the vowels. "Georgina. I like that."

"You'd better hope she likes a man with a limp, then."

"It's really more of a hop right now."

He demonstrates, this time toppling over altogether. The carpet breaks his fall.

"I'm tempted to leave you there," she says.

"Like that's a threat. This floor's more comfortable than the bed I had in the last place."

"It was Tokyo. Everyone sleeps on futons there."

"May as well have been concrete. Hey, do you think I should run interference? On this Georgina?"

"Unless you plan to do it from a prostrate position, no."

"Someone's gonna have to, if she's a player. Especially if she's managing the campaign now."

"I'll do it. I'll talk to Artie, get him to do a little digging, and I'll do it."

"You think she's, you know... one of the girls?"

"What? No. I don't know. And even if she was... is that the only way you know how to work someone?"

"Hasn't failed me yet," he says, waggling his eyebrows.

"I'm calling Artie. You can fend for yourself where you are."

He holds the sling away from his body, rolls onto his belly and looks up at her, imploringly.

"It wouldn't be the worst thing," he says. "For you, I mean. Getting some skin in the game."

"I'm going to ignore that metaphor. The same way I'm going to ignore you, right now."

She disentangles herself from the couch and walks to the kitchen, stepping across him as she goes.

"Come on!" he calls after her. "I'm just looking out for you! And you look like Rita Hayworth with that hair - who wouldn't be into that?"

----

Claudia has a new toy: a modular television, eight screens in one, spread out across one wall of the office.

"Is that for us?" says Helena, closing then locking the door behind her. "Or just for you?"

"For us," says Claudia, pulling off her headphones. "Obviously for us. Look."

She picks up a remote control - one of over 20, Helena knows, that she keeps to hand in a drawer of her desk - and points it at the television, which springs to life immediately, each screen displaying a different set of information, a different detail of the job. The middle screen shows a telephoto shot of Rupert Scott, stepping out of his Mercedes and into what Helena recognises as his city bolt-hole, a penthouse flat in Pimlico with a view of the river.

"To keep us focused on the job," says Claudia, drawing circles around Scott's face and neck with a laser pen.

"Useful," says Helena. "How much did it set us back?"

"You think I paid for it? With money? I'm hurt."

"My apologies. I should have known better."

Claudia presses a button on the remote, and a plain-text webpage appears on the middle screen, relegating Scott's face to the far-left of the wall.

"So, I directed another 5,000 followers to the party account - they should show up in the next day or two."

"Will that be enough?"

"More than that and it'll look suspicious. I know your guy thinks digital technologies are something that happen to other people, but all it takes is someone to tip him off, whisper something in his ear, and the whole thing crumbles. Slow is better."

"I trust you."

"You should. Did you get the account numbers?"

"He's having his assistant send them over this afternoon."

"By email?"

"I believe so."

"That's just asking for it. I'm telling you, H.G. - if we weren't scamming him, someone else would be. Some Nigerian prince, probably."

"When were you hoping to transfer the funds?"

"Soon. But slow is better there, too. Slow and incremental. £5000,000 he'll miss, if it goes all at once - £20,000 a week on expenses, maybe not. Not at first, anyway."

"So long as we can wrap this up before he decides it's time for us to take that campaign bus of his out on the road."

"The one that looks like an ice-cream truck?"

"I'm not entirely convinced it wasn't an ice-cream truck, once upon a time. Its PA system looks decidedly homemade."

"Give me a week. That should be enough."

"Alright. Then perhaps we can take that holiday we talked about."

"Wasn't this whole trip supposed to be a holiday? I was planning to do the tourist thing along the Southbank before you met our friend here."

"Could you have walked away from a mark like this?"

"Not the point. I needed a holiday, H.G. You needed a holiday. Something to take your mind off the game for a while."

"I rather like the game."

"I know you do. But you can't be on every hour of the day. You need to relax. Lay down on a beach somewhere and just... stop. Somewhere with sunshine. Fancy wine. A little romance, even."

"I'm perfectly fine as I am, thank you."

"See, that's your problem. You think you're doing fine. But you're gonna burn yourself out. And I don't even remember the last time you..."

The screen emits a high-pitched, momentarily deafening whistle, then a series of pings that put Helena in mind of white goods and kitchen appliances.

"What the hell?" says Claudia.

She pulls out a keyboard from the wooden panel below the television and begins to type - fingers moving rapidly over letters and digits, projecting line after line of code across all eight screens.

"What?" says Helena. “What is it?

"This is weird. This is seriously weird."

"Please explain, and quickly. There's something quite alarming about the sounds I'm hearing."

"Someone's in the website. The new one."

"The one you made for Scott?"

"No. Georgina Herbert’s website. Your website."

"That hardly seems cause for alarm. It's visible to search engines, is it not? It's probably Scott's assistant double-checking my credentials before she releases the funds."

"You don't understand. Someone's in the website, not on it. Whoever it is, they're in the back door."

"We're being hacked?"

"More like... visited. They're not changing anything. Just kinda... looking around."

"Do you know who?"

"No. But you better believe I'm gonna find out."

----

Artie walks the room, back and forth, worrying his chin with his thumb and finger as he paces.

"Here's the thing," he says. "This woman, this campaign consultant: she doesn't exist."

"What does that mean?" says Myka from the couch.

"She's not real," says Artie.

"I don't understand.”

"It means you got played," says Pete, smirking. "Or somebody did, and you got caught in the crossfire. She's a grifter. Right, A-man?"

"It looks that way," says Artie. "And don't call me that. Never call me that."

"The identity's a fake," says Pete. "Less than two months old. There's a Georgina Herbert mentioned in one of Scott's press releases - we figure that's who you saw earlier – so Artie followed the trail, and there's a ton of stuff about her and the work she's done with all these other politicians. One of the tabloids has her out to dinner with Tony Blair and his wife. But..."

He pauses, dramatically.

"None of it's real?" says Myka.

"None of it existed until earlier this year," says Artie. "The articles are plants - mock-ups. And the online profiles, even her website - they all date back to April 1st."

"So whoever she is, she's working Scott?" says Myka.

"One way or another," says Artie. "And probably not alone. There's too much detail there for just one person.”

Myka pauses; thinks.

"What do we do?" she says.

"I say we take her down," says Pete. "Her and Scott both."

"No," says Artie. "We back off."

"What?" says Pete. "No way. We've been prepping this since Paris."

"It's too big a risk," says Artie. "Too many variables. Two crews working the same mark? No good can come of that."

"We can handle it," says Pete. "Right, Mykes?"

"Is there a third option?" says Myka. "If she's after Scott too, couldn't we reach out to her? See what play she’s working?"

"Team up?" says Pete.

"Absolutely not," says Artie. "We have no idea who this woman is, or who she's involved with. She could be anybody."

"Or she could be just what we need," says Pete. "We're already a man down since Leena left."

"We'll find someone," says Artie. "But not her, okay? Not an unknown quantity. Here and now, we cut our losses."

"And just let her win?" says Pete. "Let her have Scott?"

"Yes," says Artie. "Unless you have a better idea?"

----

Helena cuts into her steak; suppresses a shudder as the blood pools onto her knife and the plate beneath.

“You like it blue, I hope?” says Scott, through a mouthful of pâté.

“I do,” she says, biting into the meat, breathing through her nose as she swallows.

“Thank Christ for that. Can’t bear a woman who doesn’t know how to eat.”

He skewers a duck heart with his fork.

“I’m concerned,” he says, “about Wakefield West.”

“Concerned?”

“Your report had us down there as a foregone conclusion.”

“Didn’t we establish,” she says sharply, “that there was no such thing, in these circumstances?”

“A likelihood, then. A strong probability.”

“You’re ahead in the polls there, yes. What’s your point, Rupert?”

He places a newspaper down on the table between them – a broadsheet, folded in the centre.

“Today’s Telegraph,” he says. “It tells rather a different story.”

She scans the paper; zeroes in on the offending column.

“It does, doesn’t it?” she says, after a moment.

She holds his stare; smiles.

“It’s hardly cause for happiness, Georgina. They’re predicting a landslide win for the Tories.”

“Why do you think they’re making that prediction, Rupert?” she says.

“Seems clear enough to me. They took a poll of their own. An impartial one,” he adds.

“And who,” she says, smiling wider, baring teeth, “do you imagine they commissioned to run it, this new poll?”

Shock, then admiration colours his features as the realisation dawns.

“You little minx,” he says eventually.

She dips her head, a parody of self-effacement.

“As I told you before,” she says, “I know how to do my job.”

“But why? Why throw ‘em off the scent like that?”

“A predicted win for your candidate means a lot of attention. Attention on him, but also on you. Attention from some very powerful people who’d rather not see the status quo disrupted.”

“But you tell them that we don’t stand a chance, that everything’s the same as it was…?”

“And you’re no longer a threat. Stay an outsider, just below the radar, and you’re free to continue exactly as you have been, unimpeded.”

“Then, come election day…”

“The good people of Wakefield West – and Canley, and Fairham, and Somerset North… they vote exactly as they always intended to. Exactly as they told us they would – for you, and your candidate.”

“It’s genius.”

She takes a final bite of the bloody steak.

“It’s what it do,” she says. “Only ever what I do.”

----

Half a mile from the restaurant, crossing Vauxhall Bridge, she retrieves a mobile phone from her briefcase and dials a number.

“You’ve reached Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,” says the voice on the other end of the call. “How can we navigate your case?”

“Claudia.”

“Serious. Got it. What’s up?”

“I need you to drain the account.”

“Now?”

“Now. We’re out of time.”

“Okay. I’m on it. Want me to make the website disappear?”

“All of it. Make all of it disappear.”

“It’s done.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“Then what? Are you coming back to the office?”

“No. In fact: can you pack a suitcase and meet me at Heathrow for 4.30?”

“I don’t think I ever unpacked. Where are we going?”

“Spain. Tonight.”

“Awesome. Is this the holiday you promised me?”

“It will be. Eventually.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, we have a painting to sell.”

“I’m not even gonna ask. I’ll see you at 4.30, okay? Terminal 5.”

She hangs up.

Helena waits a moment, takes in the view from the bridge – then, entirely innocuously, drops the phone and the briefcase into the water below.

----

On the other side of the bridge and twenty steps behind, dark glasses covering her face and still-red hair gathered under a crochet hat, Myka watches the woman – whatever her name might be.

When she moves, Myka follows – over the river and through the city.