The Society Karen Guyler (best books to read .TXT) 📖

she swiped her temporary access pass. It opened when she tapped on it.

“Eva, right?” She nodded at the guy who opened it. “You’re with me today. Iago, yeah, trust me, I’ve heard it all before, I know Othello was the black dude. In case you can’t tell, my mum wasn’t a Shakespearean buff. She wanted a good old English name for me, but it all got a bit lost in translation, Iago’s Welsh, in case you were wondering. Take a seat.”

He waved an arm that was thicker, more muscled, than her thigh under his navy blue jumper. “You won’t have worked on this kind of system before, state-of-the-art.” He emphasised each of the words as though he’d invented it. Maybe he had.

“It looks impressive.”

She sank onto the chair, looking from one to the other of the screens wallpapering the wall behind the long office desk. Nothing on any of them was distinctive enough to hint at where the cityscapes in various degrees of daylight and different weather were. Its official name might be the Surveillance Division, but the Post-It note had it more accurately.

“Where do you want to go for me to show you how this baby works? World’s your oyster.”

And Lily, the pearl in it somewhere. Eva could watch all available feeds for the rest of her life and still never find her. She didn’t even have a starting point. That Addison’s jet hadn’t landed at their first fuel stop on the way to India was fuelling her slow-burning panic.

It might help to focus on something else. “Is it possible to watch remote areas?”

“Sure, if we have a bird above it.”

“How about thirty odd miles south west of Seitu township in Ethiopia?”

“That’s pretty specific but no probs, let’s see what we’ve got round there.”

“Could you see what you had there a week or so ago?”

“Time travel?” Iago rubbed his hands together, pulled up his sleeves with a flourish. “Now you’re cooking.”

He explained each step as he zoomed in and tracked around the remote area away from the township. He fed the co-ordinates of the water supply Every Drop had tapped into his computer program and waited for the archive to pull up recent footage.

“How long do you keep it?”

“I’ve got an algorithm. It calculates the likelihood of ongoing interest based on activity in the area, current and developing threats.”

“That’s impressive.”

He ran his hands over the wall to wall desk at which they were sitting. “Yeah, she’s pretty sweet.” He peered at his desktop. “You might not think so, nothing for that place in the archive.”

“Could you try one more?”

After an elevated threat level in the broader area earlier in the year, the algorithm had saved some footage of the water source used for Tirupudur. While the archive sorted and retrieved, Iago showed Eva how to work on her brief, but it was hard to focus on finding Aleksandr Oblov’s wife with the time lapse backward journey in India playing out beside her. Sometimes in night vision, sometimes in bleached-out equatorial sunlight, every frame showed an area desert-like in its activity.

Eva set up an alert through the London hospital network for Kathy and Aleksandr Oblov. Tracing the footage of him being taken ill backwards and expanding the search to cover the entire street, the most suspicious person Eva could see anywhere near him was his bodyguard. He was huge, mean-looking, a man you’d cross the road to avoid, not inflame by going after his boss.

Kathy Oblov was a ghost, an anomaly with no social media presence, barely any online footprint that Eva could find. No sightings of her or her husband since his collapse in the system trawl so far. No call to emergency services or the police to respond to a sudden death at their home address, so he must at least still be alive.

“How’s it going?” Iago asked after a while.

“I’m not finding anything on Kathy Oblov. If she’s had enough plastic surgery, would facial recognition still be able to find her?”

“If she’s different on enough of the right points on her face, it could be like looking for a new person. You’re thinking that’s why?”

“It’s the hobby of a lot of oligarch’s wives.”

“I’m glad I’m happy kicking a ball around. It’s a good shout, I can run some permutations through a couple of channels. Grab a coffee, it’ll take a while.”

But Eva didn’t understand what he was saying to her. The archived screen stole her entire attention. She froze the image. Twilight where Every Drop’s contractors had tamed the underground freedom of groundwater into the network of pipes that carried life to Tirupudur, time-stamped the day the first reports of sickness came through.

She leapt up. “I have to go out, I’ll be right back.”

‘Right back’ must have morphed to ‘she’s taking a long time’ to ‘where the hell is she’ by the time Dario joined her.

“You might want something stronger.” He nodded at her ginger beer on the table between them.

“I was thinking the same for you.” The largest coffee the wine bar did was only a couple of mouthfuls, so she’d ordered him two.

“I feel like we should have met under the clock at the station or on a park bench with identical briefcases.” He placed a memory stick beside her drink. “I downloaded it yesterday.”

“Getting psychic in your old age?”

“Vaishali was promoted yesterday to acting CEO.” Eva nearly choked on her drink. “With ownership of the accounts.”

“Do you still have oversight?”

He shook his head, downed one of the coffees. “That’s why I downloaded everything yesterday.”

“What about Letitia?”

“She’s doing Vaishali’s job.”

“Our accountant is doing social media and donations?” The bottles of wine artily arranged in cabinets behind the bar looked enticing. “On whose say so?”

“Stuart did the ‘development chats’.” Dario hooked air quotes around his sarcasm. “With the full weight of the Board.” He shotted the other coffee. “Apparently. He also vetoed the idea of water purifiers. Not allowed to source any, not needed is his excuse.”

Not needed? Cost was driving that decision, people’s