Hard Return

by Rosie Claverton

  ‘I guess he is,’ Jason said. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘What happened to your watch?’ Lewis asked.

  ‘I think Nikolai has it. Or Pansy.’

  Lewis checked his. ‘Coming up twelve. You’ve got time for a shower if you’re quick.’

  ‘Yeah, ta.’

  Jason fell silent and they both waited awkwardly for a long moment.

  ‘I don’t need a nanny for my shower, Lulu.’

  Lewis frowned. ‘You keep calling me that, in here. You haven’t done that for years.’

  Jason shifted, offering half a shrug. ‘You know, it’s using my old name again, being in here. It’s bringing it all back.’

  ‘It’s not like that now, Jay. It’s just a temporary thing. We’re different men now.’

  ‘Different, yeah. It’s just this place. I know it’s not like the nick, but it’s bloody weird.’

  Lewis shrugged. ‘You get used it. It’s got its perks.’

  Jason picked up his towel, as Lewis awkwardly nodded at him and left the room. Exactly how different was this Lewis from the man he had known? He was definitely hiding something from him. Maybe he and Stoker were cooking up some escape plan of their own, and Lewis didn’t know how to tell Jason that he didn’t need rescuing after all. Maybe Lewis had just caught an early night and Stoker went to report in with the Governor.

  Jason sluiced off the sweat in two minutes, towelled off, and struggled to find clean clothes that he hadn’t gambled away the night before. He was never drinking Nikolai’s homemade vodka again. He was lucky he hadn’t gone blind. He was grateful when Bo had called curfew at midnight, the only elite sober enough to do it. Well, the only one present.

  Jason shook his head, trying to get Stoker out of it. He didn’t want to think about what kind of guy he was if everyone in here thought Lewis was gay for him. He didn’t want to think about any of that. He had to focus on the mission, the part of it that wasn’t to do with Lewis.

  He arrived in the kitchen and threw together a quick tomato pasta with some mushrooms, carrots, and tinned frankfurters. It was all out by twelve-thirty, with the minimal amount of ribbing by the men about his hangover. Jason took the last portion and looked for a seat. Lewis was sitting at a full table, apart from Stoker, who had taken up with Pansy. Jason avoided both of them and sat with Anchor, Gareth, and Bo.

  ‘You slept through the drone,’ Gareth said.

  ‘What drone?’ Jason said, just as his brain reminded him that Lewis had mentioned something about it when he'd been waking him up.

  ‘It flew right overhead for a couple of minutes, spinning in circles or something. Probably just some kids – and they wouldn’t have seen much of anything, really. It’s not like we painted SOS on the roof or anything.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be the smartest way of getting out of here,’ Anchor said.

  Gareth looked at him, shocked. He whispered, ‘How the fuck do you know about that?’

  Jason looked between all of them at the table. ‘Know about what?’ he said, equally quiet.

  ‘The question is,’ Anchor said, staring at Gareth, ‘how do you know?’

  ‘Because I’ve been here for months and people talk.’

  ‘Talk about what?’ Jason said, patience thin with his still-throbbing head and no access to paracetamol.

  ‘It’s need-to-know,’ Bo said, one of the rare times he deigned to speak.

  ‘Well, everyone seems to know except me.’ Jason could feel himself losing control of his temper, and almost punched Anchor when he laid a hand on his arm.

  ‘The Project,’ Anchor said. ‘It’s to get everyone out of here.’

  ‘Out…as in, escape?’ Jason was baffled. ‘Back to the real world? Won’t they just round us up again?’

  Anchor slowly shook his head.

  ‘No, see, because that’s the whole point of us being here,’ Gareth said, excitedly. ‘We’ve been put in here to plot our escape!’

  ‘This place is so fucked up,’ Jason muttered.

  ‘You get used to it,’ Gareth said.

  Jason waved his fork at him. ‘See, you’re the second person to say that to me today, and I don’t get it. It’s nothing like prison and yet everyone just gets on with things, as if we’re still inside. Including working on a project that makes no bloody sense.’

  ‘We’ve always been at war with Eurasia,’ Anchor said with a cryptic smile.

  They all stared at him. He shook his head, and ate another mouthful without comment.

  ‘Well, maybe we'd understand the Project if we were all in on it,’ Gareth said, pointedly. ‘Except Mr G-is-for-God reckons some of us aren’t good enough to be on the team.’

  ‘Watch it,’ Bo said, his low voice full of threat.

  Gareth held up his hands. ‘I’m watching, I’m watching. I’m just saying I might have a lot to offer, if I was given a chance.’

  ‘Do you know the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’?’ Anchor clapped Gareth on the shoulder. ‘You’re the cook who dumps half a bottle of chilli sauce in it.’

  ‘Everyone likes spicy broth,’ Gareth said, squirming out of Anchor’s hold, but looking less angry than he had.

  They moved on to talking about chillies and the hottest they'd had, but Jason’s mind was still stuck on the Project. Had the rumour mill got it wrong? How could the point of this place be getting a bunch of blokes to escape? It was a compound in the woods, not a prison, so they wouldn’t learn anything about The Great Escape. Why would anyone want to study them plotting and growing vegetables and playing poker?

  And how did this fit in with Mole’s death? Had that been part of the plan from The Powers That Be? Did a little murder shake things up in the box? Maybe they were all getting too comfortable and the random death of their compatriot might get their arses moving.

  The idea alone made Jason feel sick, or maybe that was the last of the vodka rolling around in his stomach. Why had he agreed to come into this place and be part of this experiment? Who knew how they were fucking with their minds in here. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

  He had to get out, and fast. He needed to get a message to Amy.

  Chapter 24: My First Is in Code

  Someone was knocking on her office door. Amy reluctantly got up to open it and was unsurprised to see Owain.

  ‘You changed the code,’ he said, disbelievingly.

  ‘Please come in,’ she said, with a mock bow.

  He strode in and grabbed for her laptop, where she had been reviewing the report about the earlier drone flight. A spiral of flight over them before disappearing from view. The security agents hadn’t been fast enough to see who had been flying it, but it had come from local farmland. They'd put it down to ‘boys and their toys’. Amy hoped they were wrong.

  Owain pulled up the current feed from the mess, which was deserted. On one of the tables, the playing cards and chips had been left out, but there was something odd about them. They seemed to be in a pattern.

  Amy’s eyes flicked over it, recognised the pattern, translated it in her head, played a simple word game, and came up with an answer. She knew what she had to do. However, she suspected Owain wasn’t going to let it go that easily.

  ‘Jason left the cards and chips like this.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘Explain it to me.’

  ‘Would saying ‘please’ kill you?’

  Owain thumped his fist down on the desk. ‘I do not have time for this. Everyone in the Surveillance Room saw him do it. They’re agents, Amy – they recognise a cipher pattern when they see it. They just can’t understand why P8 is sending messages when he isn’t an agent.’

  Amy pointed at him in triumphant accusation. ‘There are agents on the inside! I knew it!’

&n
bsp; Owain glowered at her. ‘I told you, I don’t have time—’

  ‘Is it the mysterious P1?’

  ‘I’m the one asking the questions. Explain this cipher to me or I will throw you out.’

  She could hear that he meant it and snatched up a piece of cardboard box that was one of the many bits of junk cluttering up her office.

  ‘It’s simply positional,’ she said. ‘Look, here’s what Jason’s done with the cards.’

  She drew a grid of six by six boxes and shaded in the locations of the cards on the tables.

  ‘What about the chips?’

  ‘They’re a distraction. It’s only the cards that are important – six decks, in this pattern. Then we fill in the code.’

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  S

  T

  U

  V

  W

  X

  Y

  Z

  0

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Owain took the pen from her hand, and jotted down the results:

  F M U 2 3 8

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It might not be in order. The code’s too simple for that. I’m not sure what the numbers mean – I guess they don’t know their prisoner numbers?’

  Owain shook his head.

  ‘No idea. This message is presumably meant for you?’

  ‘This is a code we mess around with at home,’ she said. ‘It can only be for me.’

  ‘Tell me what the letters mean then. I know you know something.’

  Amy scratched at her head, trying to buy time.

  ‘I am fucking warning you.’

  She had never heard Owain sound so cold, so much like the agent Frieda wanted to make him. He was truly lost to them and he was never coming back. How had she ever trusted him?

  She stared straight into his eyes, hoping she could be equally icy. ‘FM is for ‘Find Me’. The code doesn’t allow for an SOS signal. The U is…well, it’s for a nickname, between us.’

  ‘What nickname? He’s never called you—’

  ‘Ursula,’ she said, quickly. ‘The sea witch from The Little Mermaid.’

  ‘Why would he call you Ursula?’

  ‘It’s the song,’ she mumbled. ‘My work is for the ‘poor unfortunate souls’.’

  Owain slowly shook his head. ‘You two are really weird, you know that?’

  ‘I know.’

  He picked up the piece of cardboard to take with him, heading for the door.

  ‘Will you tell me, if he sends more messages?’ Amy said.

  ‘I hope for both your sakes that he doesn’t,’ he said, and closed the door behind him.

  Amy sat down hard in her chair, and smiled to herself. ‘Ursula…’

  She picked up another bit of cardboard and wrote a new grid, double-checking her working:

  T

  H

  E

  Q

  U

  I

  C

  K

  B

  R

  O

  W

  N

  F

  O

  X

  J

  U

  M

  P

  S

  O

  V

  E

  R

  T

  H

  E

  L

  A

  Z

  Y

  D

  O

  G

  This was the first cipher Amy had taught Jason, when they were messing around with the idea. She recalled the conversation vividly, curled up on the sofa in the old house, the end credits of some action movie paused on the TV screen.

  ‘What if you’re being held hostage somewhere and you need to send me a message?’

  ‘I’ll write HELP.’

  ‘What if it’s a secret message that you need to leave in a bottle, or tucked into a crack in the wall? What about that?’

  ‘I’m still going to go for HELP. Or, better – AVENGE ME.’

  She had whacked him with her slipper then.

  ‘What about on camera?’ she said. ‘If I can see you, but you can’t speak to me.’

  That’s when he'd agreed to learn one purely for the cameras, because he realised that happened pretty regularly and he needed a way to get out a message when his phone got inevitably smashed or stolen. They'd spent the night working through ciphers, sending each other messages, and he'd left tins on the counter or squares of toast on a plate to send her random things until they'd burned it into their brains, but never used it for real.

  Shaking off her reverie, Amy wrote out the letters Jason had sent her:

  I N S L A G

  Rearranging the letters, she dismissed ‘aligns’ and came up with the only order that made sense in their situation:

  S I G N A L

  Jason had noticed the lack of phone signal from his miniature mobile phone, and he was asking her to do something about it. What the hell was she going to do about it?

  From Amy’s limited knowledge of signal jammers, they were a pain in the arse to keep running. Like computer servers, they needed reliable power and a good cooling system to work. She only had a passing familiarity with the civilian systems, many of which were portable for all your car-stealing needs, but she imagined any military-grade system would be beyond her technical knowledge – unless it had a large red button marked ‘OFF’.

  The first problem was finding it. Logic dictated that it was somewhere above ground, but logic had burned her before. Above ground was already a headache, but it could also include ‘suspended halfway up a tree’. If someone was feeling particularly creative, it could even be inside the tree, with its little jammy tendrils creeping over the branches.

  Technobotany aside, she had to come up with a convincing plan. She had found her predecessor’s toolkit, which was surprisingly well-stocked with the sort of things she would recommend. She'd also found a laptop b
ag that included a handy space for said toolkit, so she was ready for a field trip. If only she knew where.

  It turned out that cracking the code had been the easy part.

  Chapter 25: Forty Winks

  Lying awake, Jason felt intensely homesick.

  He had sent Amy a message, but he had no idea if she had a way of seeing it – though the minimum he'd expect from her, after forty-eight hours, was hacking a security camera feed. Nikolai had watched him suspiciously, then rolled his eyes and left him to it, despite being under orders to act like his shadow. Jason thought Nikolai would rather he ended up dead, all told.

  Like the heroine of a romance novel, he wondered if Amy was thinking about him. That she was worried about him was a given, but did she miss him? Was she thinking about what had passed between them, in that strange familiar apartment that hadn’t ever really become their home?

  He'd wanted to please her, to know her, but she'd felt distant that night. They'd been waiting for each other for so long that somehow it felt inevitable, how they'd fallen together, yet he felt like he didn’t have her full attention. Had she been lost in her head, unable to drag her thoughts away from the danger they faced? He had also felt the urgency, the haste of it all. He hoped he hadn’t hurt her. He hoped she wasn’t overthinking it, like he was.

  He felt restless, and thoughts of sex didn’t help. He snatched up his fleece and crept over to the dormitory door, walking out into near-complete darkness. ‘He took a leak, and then decided to explore the corridor. He had remembered to bring a cigarette and, old habits dying hard, he made his way to the door to smoke it.

  It was locked.

  He tried the handle but it wouldn’t budge. There was no sign of a lock on the door, no keyhole or electronic pad to be seen. Did the Governor have some secret way of locking the door from his office? Had whoever was monitoring them really given him that much power?

  ‘They locked it. They lock it every night.’

  Jason whirled round. A figure stood silhouetted in the glaring brightness of the main corridor lights, and Jason could just make out the stiff clumps of hair trailing over his shoulders.