‘I’ve been around Amy long enough to know that,’ Cerys said. And Owain.
He hadn’t replied to her message. It was probable that he was subject to the jamming signal and that the NCA network didn’t allow access to personal email, or anything extracurricular at all. She was definitely an extracurricular. Sometimes, she wondered if he was still sleeping with Frieda, even though she tried not to wonder that.
Catriona released her, turning the laptop back towards herself. Cerys watched her, head dipped in concentration as she moved her mouse around with quick, deft movements. Her hair was tied back tight, shiny with something that had smoothed out the curls, and Cerys found her eyes losing focus as she stared at the morning sun reflecting off her flaming head.
Catriona faced the screen, back towards Cerys.
‘Here is the location of that clip on the area we covered.’
A red box was superimposed on the map, which already had a pale blue circle overlying it to represent the jammed area that had been covered by the drone’s flight.
‘If we assume that the gate is immediately before the area of interest—’
Catriona dropped a flag on the tiny spec of silver on the screen.
‘—then this is likely the area that Jason is being held.’
She added a solid red circle just beyond the flag, closer to the entrance where they had been ambushed than to the farmer’s field on the other side.
‘This probably means that the signal jammer is not in the same location as Jason is.’
She pointed to a small dark blue dot in the dead centre of her pale blue circle.
‘What about Amy?’ Cerys asked.
‘I’ve been thinking about that. We can’t know how far the tunnels go under the woodland, but we can make a guess for the entrance that you were brought to.’
Catriona picked out the entrance gate on the map with another flag, then stretched out a line from that point which produced a measurement in metres. She swept it round in an arc through the blue-shaded wood, leaving a thin black line in its wake.
‘That is the distance we estimated you walked that night. Notice anything?’
Cerys had to concentrate on the screen for several seconds before she realised how the walking line neatly swept through the flag Catriona had placed for the silvery-glinting gate.
‘They’re in the same place!’
‘Ten points to Gryffindor. Why build two things when you can build one? I will bet you anything that Amy is directly below Jason – and he doesn’t even know it.’
After his shower, before breakfast, Jason dared to check his mobile phone.
I got your message.
His heart leapt into his mouth and he felt like jumping for joy, despite his throbbing ankle from the slip yesterday. He knew Amy was watching over him, like a guardian angel with cables for wings. How the fuck she'd done it he had no clue, but he wasn’t going to question his good fortune.
With everyone pointedly not looking at each other as they dressed, he fired back a quick message while supposedly digging through Lewis’ backpack for a clean T-shirt. All he could find was a broken watch and several odd socks – typical.
Body was in the garden but died in the kitchen. They say he was locked out.
If Amy had access to the cameras, maybe she could also see the past footage. Maybe he wouldn’t have to do anything more in here, and he could let it run its course until the cavalry arrived to shut this place down. Or, if the cavalry weren’t coming but the mystery was solved, he could get him and Lewis out with a minimum of fuss.
‘You lost something?’
Lewis bent over him, wearing nothing but a towel, fresh from the shower.
‘I’m borrowing a shirt,’ Jason said, slipping the phone into a convenient hole in the lining of Lewis’ bag.
‘The one on my bunk? Mate, you are losing it.’
Jason picked up his own discarded towel and whipped at Lewis’ legs. He screeched and was seemingly on the verge of tearing off his own towel, when Bo stood up from his bunk.
‘No more of that,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a bloody stag night.’
Jason thought about talking back, about turning the towel on the elite, seeing if the broad, quiet man was capable of snapping. This was the most he had said since Jason arrived, and every instinct he had told him to provoke him, needle him. He could pretend it was to get information, but his blood was up. He was just spoiling for a fight.
‘Are you just sad you don’t get a tiara and a pretty pink sash?’
Jason saw the punch coming and dived to the side, rolling off the bed and onto the floor. He was caught in the tiny space between his and Dreadlock’s bed, but he refused to be cornered like a rat. He just about got his feet under him before Bo took another swing, catching him in the ribs.
Jason reeled to the side, crashing into the board of Dreadlock’s bunk. Bo was a big man and in peak condition. If he wanted to win this fight, he had to take him out fast. Head down, he surged forward, barrelling both shoulders into Bo’s thighs to take him to the floor.
The large man toppled backwards with a roar, Jason landing on top of him in the middle of the room. He could feel all eyes on them now, tense with anticipation, silently placing their bets. Jason went for his head, jabbing him with a right hook two, three, four times, watching his head bounce on the floor.
Bo bucked his hips and pushed at Jason’s shoulders, trying to turn Jason off him, but Jason dug his knees into his sides, keeping him down. He thumped Bo hard just below the breastbone, stealing his breath, before slowly getting to his feet and stepping away.
‘Stay the fuck down,’ he said.
Bo stayed down.
‘Lewis, get dressed and get Bo cleaned up.’ Dreadlock’s voice came from beside his bunk – Jason hadn’t registered his presence at all during the fight. ‘Jay Bird, you’re with me.’
Snatching up the T-shirt from the bed, Jason made a point of stepping over Bo – and not meeting Lewis’ eyes. He knew his mate would be disappointed in him, but he was having difficulty caring. With his adrenaline high, he felt fucking invincible.
The corridor was fucking freezing, and he yanked the T-shirt on, as Dreadlock strode away from him. As the cool air penetrated his brain and his body started reporting in just how unhappy it was, he realised he had been an idiot. Lewis was right to be disappointed. If Amy had seen that, she would be worried – and also disappointed. What the hell was happening to him in here?
Where was Dreadlock taking him? Was he going to throw him outside in his T-shirt, to freeze like Mole? Was he going to make him a cup of coffee and pat him on the back for taking out Bo, secret menace of the group? Or was he just making him half-jog up this corridor to knacker his twisted ankle before he beat him to a pulp in revenge?
When Dreadlock stopped, it was outside the Governor’s office. He knocked and opened the door without waiting. The Governor was sitting at his desk, eating toast with jam, with an oversized mug on his desk. The only mug of its kind in the place and Jason knew that for a fact, because he'd washed them all.
‘Jay Bird took out Bo.’
‘Will he recover?’ the Governor asked, with barely a pause.
‘Probably.’
‘Who started the fight?’
Dreadlock hesitated, and the Governor’s gaze passed to Jason.
‘Who started the fight?’
He was softly-spoken, but the quiet authority he exuded was unnerving. Especially as Jason had known him in his former, snivelling life.
‘It was Bo, sir,’ Jason said. ‘He came at me.’
The Governor’s eyes flicked to Dreadlock, who nodded briefly.
‘Very well. Congratulations – you now enjoy elite privileges. Dreadlock, find him a uniform and update him on his duties.’
‘Is he going into the Project Room, sir?’
The Governor regarded Jason for a moment, then shook his head with a smile.
‘I think not. You and Nikolai can take the lead there.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Dreadlock opened the door, making it clear they were leaving, and Jason nodded to the Governor before heading out into the corridor.
‘You happy now?’
‘Not really.’
‘Good.’
Dreadlock stalked angrily towards the mess, as Jason tried to make sense of what had just happened. He had taken out Bo, which meant that the man now couldn’t be relied on to police the rest. Therefore, Jason had to replace him. He was now one of the senior and more privileged members of the group, so he could go anywhere and do anything he liked.
Except he was now permanently attached to Stoker as his guard buddy and had rules to enforce and a higher-level game to play. He was also away from the kitchen, the scene of the crime.
Amy was going to kill him.
Chapter 28: Found Footage
Owain summoned Amy to the Eye Room, and she reluctantly appeared.
‘P8 has been promoted to Enhanced status, displacing P5. Please update your analysis.’
It took Amy’s sleep-deprived brain a few moments to decipher the code Owain was talking in, and then her brain filled in the blanks: Jason had done something stupid, again.
‘Yes, sir. I will review the footage and—’
‘No need for that,’ he said, too quickly. ‘All the detail will be in ID4’s incident report.’
‘Okay. What about maintenance, Agent Jenkins? We are behind on essential repairs.’
‘No more than thirty minutes downtime on the main system and no loss of recording capabilities.’ Owain sounded like he was reciting from something, which might have been one of Frieda’s Word of God pronouncements
‘Of course, sir’ she said, as if speaking to a small child. ‘You won’t even notice it’s gone.’
Back in her office, Amy looked for the footage she'd been told there was no need for her to see. The filing system was simple, yet effective: captured video from the current day was placed in a working folder in the archive, divided by camera. The cameras each had a random ten-character serial number, which was regenerated with each new day. When the day was over, the footage was archived in a new folder with a random fifteen-character label. Neither the main user interface or the archive folders appeared to have a way to search the index by date or camera. The footage was preserved for posterity, but it was impossible to actually view it in a way that made sense.
Thankfully, her current area of interest was the last few hours and it was relatively easy to find the punch-up in the dormitory. She winced as Jason took the blows, but silently cheered as he laid out the large hulk that was P5. She was pleased he had held his own, even if it now made their jobs a lot harder.
His movements were going to be more heavily scrutinised now, both inside and out, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to keep Owain from discovering that Jason had a phone he could now use. At least he was aware of the cameras and would hopefully continue to be discreet. The time stamp on the message he'd sent her confirmed that it was just before the brawl broke out, and she couldn’t tell from the footage where the phone was when he'd typed it. He was getting good at playing spy, despite his enforced hiatus while Frieda had Owain watching over them.
With every hour that passed, her desire for this to be over increased ten-fold. She didn’t want to dig into the bowels of this system under the guise of ‘maintenance’ or run into SN6 ever again. She didn’t want to find out from Owain what he meant by ‘analysis’, in case it meant she was supposed to be producing actual work instead of perusing the extremely boring notes for the days Mole had been in the compound. So far, nothing of interest had jumped out. She wasn’t sure it ever would.
She had to find a way of searching the archive folders for video from 5th March. Given the inaccessibility of the archive, she doubted the footage had been removed – it had just been automatically filed and lost from view. She opened one of the folders and then a camera subfolder within. The files were each thirty minutes long – also labelled with random characters – and she played the first file. It was a dark shot of the dormitory at night. She fast-forwarded through it and nothing at all changed. The night shifts here must be very dull indeed.
She looked at the metadata on the files. To her surprise, nothing had been stripped away in the archiving. The information included the date and time of creation: 19th December 2015 02:00. She confirmed her suspicions by opening another couple of folders, and they all told the same story – the archive was created at 2am on the day after the recording, freeing up the ‘current’ folder for a new set of footage. She could identify the files for the 5th March, if she could only find the folder created on the 6th.
She checked the number of folders: 246.
She was going to need more coffee.
Halfway through her second cup, she found the folder she was looking for – and had two-thirds of the archive numbers recorded beside their days. She didn’t want to go through all this only to find that all the important events happened on 4th March, and she couldn’t remember which folder that was.
Watching the footage alongside the notes for various prisoners confirmed her suspicions – this was the right day, and the right night. After dinner, Mole left the dining room and headed down the corridor towards the kitchen – and entered a camera blackspot. The maintenance report from 6th March identified that the corridor and kitchen cameras both needed fixing. However, she only needed to know who entered the area at this stage. All the prisoners had been in the dining area, except one. He was presumably the mysterious G, lurking in his office, which was in the blank space without cameras. How convenient for him.
However, as the minutes ticked by on the footage, no one approached the blackspot. The prisoners all left the mess around midnight, heading straight for the dormitories. P4 entered the blackspot for about two minutes, then left again. The notes on his file from other days suggested he was saying goodnight to G. IN2 was a particularly detailed reporter and Amy knew all the details of P3 and P4’s routines, right down to their dental hygiene and their favourite cereals.
Two minutes was no time to kill someone. She watched until 01:59, but no one entered or left the corridor. She moved on to the files created on 7th March, one of the days she thankfully already had listed. This was more of the same until around eight o’clock, when Lewis first entered the blank corridor and then immediately went out of the front door. She didn’t have any outside views, but she suspected what he might find.
A few minutes later, Lewis ran back in, shouting for help. Everyone ran outside. About half an hour later, four men came back through the door, carrying a small body between them. Everyone was quiet, sombre. They took him down into the blankness of that corridor, and the darkness swallowed him whole.
Mole had somehow gone from being alive in a corridor at 7pm to dead in the garden by 8am the next day. He didn’t seem to have been put there or walked there himself, not according to the continuous footage of the corridor she had just viewed. How then had it been achieved?
She needed Bryn. She needed Jason. She needed to share this fucked-up reality with them before she could even begin to make sense of it. She had forced herself to focus on the murder, because to question the sanity of the experiment was to question her own. They were operating so far outside normal society rules that she couldn’t tell which way was up, let alone think about how she might describe it to her friends, how they might stop Frieda and her disturbing lack of ethics.
The murder was safe. The murder was solvable. Or was it?
How was she meant to solve the crime when she couldn’t see all the scene, name the players, or understand the game?
Chapter 29: The Sky Is Falling
‘Jay! The kitchen is leaking!’
Saved from another round of death by poker, Jason followed Lewis out of the mess and down the corridor. The kitchen was certainly leaking, a pool of water spreading out into the corridor. Maybe the aging industrial dishwasher had breathed its last, or perhaps his theory about Mole’s death was about to be knocked on the head.
Surprisingly, neither turned out to be true. Water was pouring in from the ceiling, a hole in the flat roof above them letting in the Welsh winter weather. Jason hadn’t thought the wind was blowing that hard outside, but then this building had seen better days and probably no one thought to check out the roof before shutting in a bunch of prisoners.
‘I’ll get the ladder,’ Stoker said from the corridor, before disappearing.
Where had he even come from? He hadn’t been in the mess playing poker with the rest of them – and neither had Lewis. Jason thrust the thoughts away again, but they just kept coming back. Why couldn’t he get Pansy’s insinuations out of his brain? What the fuck was wrong with him?
‘You all right?’ Lewis asked, touching at his shoulder
‘Is there a bucket around here?’ Jason asked, voice tight, trying not to shrug away his best mate’s hand.
‘Yeah, there’s one in the store. I’ll get it.’
Jason squinted up into the rainy night, until his shirt was as soggy as Lewis’. The light in the room was off, so he was in darkness staring out into more darkness. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to discover, but all he found was that water was wet.
He was too stupid to be an elite or for the Project or to help Amy with her work here. He was just stupid enough to stand under a leaking roof and get soaked without achieving anything at all. Which is exactly how his time here felt. He could feel Amy’s disappointment deep in his chest.
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