Proxy, p.1
Proxy, page 1
PROXY
GARY GIBSON
First Published by Brain in a Jar Books 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Gary Gibson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Gary Gibson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
First Edition.
Cover art by Ben Baldwin.
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
About the Author
Also by Gary Gibson
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The final draft of this novel was completed in late September 2019. The first reported outbreak of coronavirus in the Wuhan Province of mainland China occurred three months later, on 31 December 2019.
CHAPTER
ONE
STACY
As soon as the train pulled into St. Pancreas, passengers started pushing open overhead bins, squeezing past each other, or dragging heavy luggage on their way to the doors. Stacy Cotter, however, remained in her seat, staring fixedly out at the grey expanse of the station platform, gripped by a familiar panic.
Was it too late now, she wondered, to turn back? To return to the life she had made for herself in Paris? A small and quiet life, certainly, with small pleasures and a minor administrative role in an academic publishing house. But one that was, nonetheless, pleasingly anonymous.
Then she reminded herself for the thousandth time why she had come all this way and finally forced herself to stand.
Pulling a single, small bag over one shoulder, Stacy joined the flow of bodies out of the train and onto the platform. Nobody looked at her: indeed, nobody had paid her the slightest bit of attention from the moment she had first boarded the train back at Gare du Nord.
Yet there remained that same lingering fear that she was being watched—that her every movement was on the verge of being splashed across social media.
How many times, back in the bad old days, had she glanced over her shoulder only to find someone with their phone or bracelet up, its lens pointed straight at her, a cruel smirk twisting their mouths out of shape?
Too many by far.
So when she glanced around the concourse, it was not entirely a shock to discover a man about the same age as her—twenty-four or twenty-five, give or take—staring at her from a neighbouring platform with a puzzled expression, as if she might be someone he knew but couldn’t quite place.
She ducked her head down and picked up her pace, tugging her hoodie up until it partly concealed her face. Her bobbed hair was the very opposite of the style she’d worn when she had fled the British Isles, but clearly that wasn’t enough to conceal her identity from those with long enough memories.
The station was filled with a cacophony of voices, synthesised and otherwise, announcing departures or delays as she followed in the wake of the other train passengers. The station, she saw, was dotted with even more cameras than she remembered, whether hidden within dark mirrored domes or nakedly visible. She hunched her shoulders and kept her head down, all too aware that English paparazzi were in the habit of secreting illegal lenses in train stations and airports in the hope of catching the great and the good unawares.
Or maybe, she thought as she hurried along the platform towards the main concourse, she was fretting over nothing: when she had last spoken with Wilber via an encrypted app, he had repeatedly assured her that both the press and the public had long since forgotten about her. It had been years, he had reminded her, since the scandal that once made her briefly notorious.
Even so, her heart beat faster when she passed her data bracelet above the security gate and it chimed to let her pass into the security zone of St. Pancreas. Medical border staff stood at tables, wearing surgical masks and latex gloves, waiting to process the new arrivals from the European mainland.
When her turn finally came, Stacy handed over both of her passports—her regular passport and her medical one. A government information film, demonstrating how to detect signs of pandemic and whom to report them to, ran on a wall-mounted screen nearby.
Then, at last, Stacy found herself alone in the centre of the station’s main concourse and realized she no longer remembered which way to go. Everything looked dustier and more decrepit than she remembered, and most of the shop windows were boarded over. Then again, only a few people could afford to travel abroad these days, so perhaps this wasn’t so surprising.
Just for a moment, Stacy’s gaze met that of another man, clad in a green bomber jacket and standing at a kiosk close by one of the station exits. He quickly glanced away, focusing a little too intently on an interactive station guide next to the kiosk. He had dark hair cropped close to his skull and a slight overbite. After another moment he tapped his data bracelet and walked out through the exit and out of sight.
She had the sudden nagging sensation she’d seen him somewhere before. Had he been on the same train from Paris?
No, she decided: she was imagining things. He was just another random passerby, like the man she’d caught staring at her from a neighbouring platform. Perhaps he, too, had been trying to place her, and perhaps days from now he might remember something about a girl who looked just like her, and who had been all over the news a few short years before.
At worst, he could be a journalist, staking out the station. But it didn’t matter: he was gone now, disappeared into the bustle of the London streets.
Stacy forced herself to relax and breathe more evenly. Tapping at her own bracelet, she spoke her destination, and the bracelet vibrated against her wrist to indicate which way she should go.
Turning, she at last saw the sign for the subway and made her way down the broad stone steps leading to the underground platform.
Disembarking at Angel Station, Stacy made her way back up broad steps leading to a wide boulevard. She tasted the warm, muggy air of a city she hadn’t set foot in for the better part of a decade. Everything looked different after so many years in Paris; or perhaps, she mused, it was she who had undergone the greater change.
Making her way across the street, she felt some of the tension that had been building up inside her ever since she had decided to return home from Paris finally begin to dissipate. Those men she had caught looking her way had no idea who she was. Few had reason to remember Stacy Cotter—except perhaps for Martin Wilber, the man who had agreed to tell her story.
The true story.
You’re just yesterday’s news, Stacy reminded herself. The thought was curiously comforting. It wasn’t like there was a lack of fresh scandals to keep people entertained on their morning commute.
Finding her way blocked by unexpected building works, Stacy tapped once again at her bracelet until it provided her with a new route. Then, as she turned to retrace her steps, she saw the same man she had seen back in the station, recognisable by his green bomber jacket, turn the corner towards her.
His gaze remained fixed on the pavement, but some instinct made her certain beyond all doubt that he had followed her here, all the way from St. Pancreas.
At last, his gaze flicked up and their eyes met. His expression didn’t change, but he immediately came to a halt and began tapping at his bracelet, as if consulting it for directions. At no point did he appear to acknowledge he even knew she was there before at last turning to walk back the way he’d come with an unhurried pace.
Now she was sure she’d seen him somewhere before. Feeling a tightness in her lungs, Stacy forced herself to breathe out. But where had—?
And just like that, Stacy remembered exactly where.
She had seen him not once, but several times, in a coffee shop she frequented close by her flat in Paris’s twentieth arrondissement.
What was he doing here in London, and seemingly following her, when the medical visas necessary to cross most international borders could cost a small fortune?
Stacy lifted her data bracelet to her mouth and called Wilber. She heard the slight tremble in her voice as she spoke his name. He picked up immediately.
“Miss Cotter?” Wilber asked. “You’re on your way?”
“Someone’s following me,” she said, crossing to the other side of the street and turning right to join the flow of pedestrians down St John’s Street. “I saw him in Paris, and now he’s here.”
There was a slight pause before Wilber replied. “You’re quite certain he’s following you?”
“Very.”
“Another journalist, perhaps? Or—?”
He paused, and she finished his sentence for him. “Or sent by Raphael?” she said breathlessly, picking up her pace. “It’s possible.”
“Where are you right now?” he asked.
“St John’s Street.”
Another pause. “So you must be walking towards Friend Street?”
Glancing ahead, she saw a street sign confirming what the journalist had said. “I am.”
“Excellent,” said Wilber. She heard a slight strain in his voice and guessed he was climbing the steps from the basement café where they had arranged to meet. “There’s a pub down the other end of Friend Street called the—”
“The Black Friar,” she said, suddenly remembering it from years before. “Yes, I know it.”
“It’s much closer to where you are than the café,” he said. “I think it’s best we get you off the street as soon as possible. We’ll meet at the Friar instead.” His voice huffed slightly as if he were hurrying. “I’ll be there in a minute or two. All right?”
“Sounds good,” she agreed, cutting the connection and picking up her pace even more. A moment before she turned into Friend Street, she glanced back over her shoulder: to her endless relief, there was no sign of anyone in a bomber jacket.
Friend Street was quiet and residential, with hardly any foot traffic. She could see the warm and welcoming lights of the Black Friar pub up ahead at the next corner. Her footsteps echoed loudly on the concrete, and she slowed a little to catch her breath.
A taxi passed her, its batteries emitting a soft hum. It pulled up sharply just a few metres in front of Stacy. She faltered, afraid of who might emerge, but the man who disembarked from the taxi wasn’t anyone she’d seen before; he quickly ascended the steps of a house, touching his bracelet to the lock of the front door and stepping through as it swung open without once glancing her way.
The taxi, a flimsy-looking plastic bubble with two empty couches facing each other, drove itself off into the distance.
You’re overreacting, Stacy chided herself, and resumed walking.
Stacy had hardly taken more than a few steps before someone slammed into her from behind, hard enough to knock her off her feet. Fingers wrapped themselves around her face, pressing a soft cloth over her nose and mouth. She kicked wildly and tried to prise the hand free, but something sweet and cloying filled her lungs when she drew breath to shout for help.
All of a sudden it became infinitely easier not to struggle and to let herself go limp. There was somewhere she had to be, but she somehow couldn’t quite remember where or for what purpose. Her limbs felt pleasantly heavy, and as she slipped into darkness, she heard a taxi door being opened.
The last thing she remembered before she passed out was a flash of green fabric close against her face.
The pain woke her more than anything else.
Opening her eyes, Stacy saw dusty concrete beneath her sprawled legs, her spine pressed against something hard and narrow and vertical. She was slumped forward, both arms twisted painfully behind her back and joined together by something sharp and tight that dug into her skin.
She tried to pull her hands free and yelped at the feeling of something cutting deep into her skin. She leaned back immediately to relieve the pressure, feeling beads of sweat pop out on her forehead.
Tendrils of panic were by now worming their way deep inside her, her heartbeat loud and rapid in her ears. The room she was in was small, not much larger than a cupboard. It had flaking plaster walls, bare floorboards, a single closed door and no windows. The only light came from a single lightbulb overhead.
Sucking in a breath to try to steady her nerves, Stacy felt around with her fingertips. Her wrists felt like they were bound to something set almost flush with the wall behind her and with only a narrow gap between.
Tilting her head back, Stacy saw a metal pipe, orange with rust, rising vertically from immediately behind her before passing through the ceiling and out of sight.
Her mouth and throat felt desert-dry. Maybe it was something to do with whatever had been used to knock her out. And as to who had kidnapped her, well… that wasn’t hard to guess.
Further tentative exploration suggested her kidnapper had used zip ties to bind her wrists. And judging by what else her fingers were telling her, he’d looped a tie around each of her wrists, with a third joining them together around the back of the pipe.
Then Stacy looked down at her legs and realized there was something wrong with them.
Her jeans were a different colour than the ones she’d been wearing, and instead of sneakers, she was now wearing heavy black boots identical to those worn by the green-jacket man.
They weren’t, in fact, her legs.
The realization of what must have happened—that, rather than being the victim of an ordinary kidnapping, she had been body-jacked—washed over Stacy in a tide of horror.
And that meant her kidnapper was running around somewhere out there, beyond this room, inside her stolen body. And he could do anything he wanted to with it.
Stacy fought back a rush of nausea, her breathing hard and shallow. Then she screamed, because it was the most obvious, practical thing to do: someone, somewhere, might hear her. But when the sound emerged from her borrowed throat, it sounded closer to a bellow, frightening in its maleness.
She screamed and yelled again, then listened, chest heaving, hoping someone might have heard her.
She heard no response: no sound of movement or voices making startled queries. Worse, the plaster walls appeared to be doing an excellent job of absorbing all the noise.
She knew then, with a rush of dreadful certainty, that no one was coming.
Only then did Stacy become aware of a faint throbbing sensation between the shoulder blades of her involuntarily borrowed body. It could only, she realized, be the proxy bead her kidnapper had used on her.
Usually, proxy beads were injected into the skin at the back of the neck over the spine, so why, she wondered, had the body-jacker instead injected it between his shoulder blades?
The answer came almost as soon as she had asked herself the question: it would be just about impossible for her to dig the bead back out, should she get her hands free and find something sharp enough to cut the bead out of her flesh.
Think. It wasn’t like she was the first woman to be body-jacked against her will.
It had been the one constant danger of the bad old days, that a proxy session with a client might end up with her tied up helpless while some stranger ran amok with her flesh and blood. It was the kind of thing the other girls like her had all talked about; how to get free, how to get the proxy bead back out, how to get help if you found yourself trapped in that one shared nightmare scenario.
She could figure a way out of this somehow. She just had to not let herself give in to panic.
She forced herself again to breathe more shallowly and take care to more closely study the room around her, in the hope of finding something—anything—that might tell her where she was or offer a way to get herself free.
It struck her then that the room looked unfinished, with bags of cement piled in one corner, and the door appearing to be little more than a sheet of plywood mounted on cheap hinges.
Wherever she was, she knew, it would be someplace her kidnapper didn’t expect her to be found anytime soon. And so long as he had complete control of her body, he could pump it full of deadly drugs or poison, or drown it in the sea, or walk it in front of a bus or a train.
