The Dali Deception

by Adam Maxwell

  Katie shrugged.

  Violet put her finger in her ear and tried to activate her earpiece.

  “Zoe, can you hear me?” Violet asked. She waited for a few seconds. “Zoe? Zoe are you there? Waste of bloody money these earpieces are…”

  Katie looked expectantly but Violet shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Inside all this metal must be blocking the signal.”

  Suddenly Katie went stiff. Drawing herself up to her full height, she stood stock still, eyes wide. Violet was about to move forward when Katie slowly lifted her hand and placed it on her shoulder. They stood in silence, each of them staring in a different direction, each of them waiting for something.

  ‘Something’ arrived in the form of the barrel of a sawn-off shotgun as the cabin door directly behind Katie burst open.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” said a voice with as much charm as roadkill.

  Violet and Katie turned around, slowly raising their hands. The owner of the voice held the shotgun high, aiming it in the general vicinity of their heads. Glancing past their muscle-bound speaker, Violet counted four – no, five – other security guards. All big, all muscled and all dressed in ill-fitting tuxedos.

  Scanning the threats, Katie could see that the man closest to the door was the only one with a firearm. So it wasn’t all bad news. Given the lack of bulges in their jackets and around their ankles she was fairly convinced she was right about that. Just as convinced that two of the other four had plain knuckle-dusters, one had a knuckle-duster with some sort of moulded knife attachment and the last of them wielded a dull machete.

  Something of an ill-advised choice given the surroundings — but everyone had their weapon of choice. Katie was pretty sure she could take them, and looked to Violet for confirmation. But as she turned her head the barrels of the shotgun had been placed against Violet’s temple.

  “–repeat... Five security guards waiting for you in room 512.” Zoe’s voice suddenly echoed in Katie and Violet’s earpieces. “Please acknowledge.”

  Katie made a move as if scratching her right wrist and pressed one of the sensors Zoe had given her.

  “Shitbags,” came the response. Zoe’s end went dead once again.

  “We’ve been watching you since you came in,” the shotgun security guard said.

  “We’re just lost,” said Violet, her eyes focused on the trigger of the shotgun that was pressed against her head. “Can you tell us the way back to the gaming floor? We were looking for the toilet and–”

  The shotgun-wielding security shoved the rough ends of the sawn-off against Violet’s brow. She rocked back on her heel, ready for the shove, not letting it catch her off guard.

  “Hear that lads?” sawn-off said. “These ladies are lost.”

  Loud, derisive laughter poured out of the cabin.

  “We’ve been watching you since you broke in through the emergency exit, you dumb bitch.” Sawn-off shoved her again but didn’t step out of the cabin.

  Katie was waiting. If he stepped in front of her she could disarm him before he blew Violet’s head off, then swing around and take the other four down with two shells before they knew what...

  “You, short stuff, start walking,” sawn-off continued. “Long, tall, Sally...”

  More laughter from the audience in the cabin.

  “Get your enormous arse walking too.” He made a snorting noise, as if he had a cold and was trying to clear his sinuses down the back of his throat. “Try anything and I’ll cut the pair of you down before you can take three steps. Understand?”

  “Yes,” said Violet.

  Katie nodded.

  “Say it!” Sawn-off spat the words, tiny globs of saliva flying in a cloud in front of his angular face.

  Katie took half a step away from him, her hands still held in surrender.

  “She doesn’t talk,” said Violet.

  Sawn-off turned the barrels toward Katie, stepping out of the room. The knife-wielding security guard came into the corridor too, stepping behind Katie, out of her line of sight. Sawn-off moved closer, he was six foot two, six foot three maybe, with a buzz-cut that looked like the head of a hammer.

  “She’ll speak if I tell her to speak,” sawn-off said, having to look up to address Katie. In spite of his own height she still had a good six inches on him.

  The knife-wielding security reached up and touched the tip of the blade against the nape of Katie’s neck, drawing it across and scraping the skin a little. Not enough to draw blood but enough to make Violet want to say something.

  “She won’t. Can’t,” Violet said, a pleading tone entering her voice as her eyes flicked from the knife to the shotgun to Katie’s face. Katie was unmoved.

  “I’ve never had one as big as this before, boss,” knife-boy said. “Maybe we can give her something to talk about.”

  Knife-boy cut a piece of material from the corner of the top Katie was wearing.

  Sawn-off laughed. “Yeah boys, what do you think...I once fucked a bird that was this big...” He threw his arms wide to illustrate his point.

  Katie didn’t miss a beat. Her hands — still held in the surrender position — clenched into fists and she threw first one then the other straight into the side of sawn-off’s head.

  When it came to inflicting injuries, Katie was a surgeon, and the literal double-whammy hadn’t just been an opportunistic attack. Far from it.

  The first punch, thrown with her dominant right hand, impacted on sawn-off’s jaw. Choosing the jaw rather than, for example, the ear caused the head to begin to suddenly twist around. As Katie knew only too well, this would cause a force of acceleration which, after the briefest of moments, is countered by rapid deceleration.

  That is, unless you’ve hit someone so hard their head has come off, but that only usually happens in video games.

  At this point, the brain smacks against the inside of the skull and bounces back. Next it would smash into the opposite side of the skull and, if you’d been hit as hard as sawn-off had, then this might continue a number of times before the brain came to rest

  The second blow, also to the jaw, was for two purposes. Firstly to accentuate the fast-slow internal beating being doled out to the victim’s brain and secondly to slam sawn-off into the wall in an attempt to disarm him.

  Squalls of panic filled the room as sawn-off hit the wall and slid down. Katie spun around to take out knife-boy, but as she lunged forward into the cabin one of the knuckle-dusters produced another gun.

  Katie hesitated, then held her hands up in surrender once more.

  It was small and snub-nosed, but it was a gun, and as skilled as she was, Katie knew she wasn’t bullet-proof. As snub-nose stumbled forward, barrel-first, Katie’s ear crackled into life. It was Zoe.

  “Katie, Violet, if you can hear me, hold tight.” She sounded panicked, but it was a controlled panic. “We have your location. If you can stay alive for five minutes we can give you a distraction. A big one.”

  As snub-nose exited the cabin, knife-boy scrambled down to check on his colleague. Sawn-off was conscious but was like a wiped blackboard. His broken jaw hung at an unpleasant angle from his face.

  “Can you last five minutes?” Zoe’s voice again, just for Violet and Katie.

  Snub-nose moved forward and shoved the barrel of his gun into Katie’s mouth. He was shorter than his colleague, and as a result had to almost fully extend his arm to do so.

  “I bet I could get you to talk,” he said. “I can get any woman to talk. All it takes it a lit cigarette and a bit of imagination. Then you can’t shut them up, can you lads?”

  The rumbles of agreement were still there, but they were less confident.

  “Then the only way to shut them up is to shove a cock in their mouth. Bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you, you big, dumb, broad?”

  Katie raised her head a little so that snub-nose could no longer reach her mouth, then carefully tapped her wrist to indicate to Zoe that five minutes would be absolutely fine, thank you
very much.

  Chapter 35

  Lucas had spent the past fifteen minutes wishing he could turn off his earpiece. Or at least get Zoe to shut the fuck up when she was trying to contact Violet and not him.

  He was trying to concentrate and she kept buzzing around inside his head like a goddamned mind-fly. Whatever the fuck that was. What was that?

  “Split, sir?” the dealer was pointing at his cards, glancing at the other players.

  Lucas stared at the cards he had been dealt, snapped his consciousness back to the table and began apologising, saying how maybe he might take a break but then feeding them the inveterate gambler’s line of ‘just one more hand’ and that yes, he would split.

  There were a host of possible winning hands, depending on the choices his fellow players made. Lucas had now been counting the deck for over an hour and, thanks to a combination of factors, he was now fairly certain of the position of the majority of cards within it. Of course, the main reason for the ease of counting was that the dealer was fucking incompetent.

  Three times she should have shuffled or replaced the decks and three times she singularly failed to do so. Every time she didn’t bother shuffling Lucas threw a few hands. He didn’t want her to lose her job. At least, at the beginning he didn’t.

  But the more he won, the less he cared. He’d been pretty sure, when his winning had passed the twenty thousand pound mark, that she would call security, and she had appeared to make some sort of call to management.

  A call that remained unanswered. And now, with Zoe babbling in his ear, Lucas had found out that this was because the security staff were otherwise engaged. And so he went for it. Winning hands, winning split hands, tips to the other punters, he was drawing as much attention to himself as he could possibly engineer.

  He was pretty sure it would all be over when the players at the table, with his guidance, had collectively won so many chips that the dealer had to radio the cage for more to be delivered. But, no, in the end all that happened was that more chips were delivered.

  Lucas had begun to think that his monk-like avoidance of casinos for fear of getting caught was a waste of time and that he could quite easily have made his money in this way instead of dealing in forgeries and heists until...

  “Lucas, keep doing what you’re doing.” It was Zoe’s voice in his head, and he couldn’t reply lest they find the earpiece and assume it was electronic instead of mental powers that were influencing his winning. “We’ve lost contact with Violet and Katie and we think they’ve been...”

  “What?” asked Lucas.

  “What, what?” the dealer asked Lucas with a smile. “I didn’t say anything, sir.”

  Lucas waved his hand to dismiss the line of questioning and turned to a waitress to order a very large drink.

  “We think they’ve been taken by the security team for the casino,” Zoe said.

  Lucas nodded to the dealer, who plucked a card from the shoe and placed it in front of them. He went bust and lost a thousand pounds.

  “Keep doing what you’re doing. I’ve got a handle on their location and Barry has an idea to cause a different type of distraction. It should give them a window of opportunity to let them complete their mission.”

  “Right,” said Lucas, to the dealer and to Zoe. “Deal me in.”

  *

  “So what is it that’s happening?” Barry asked, trying to take an interest in what Zoe was doing. He basically had two options; sit in the front of the van and stare at the pigeons in the car park or sit in the back of the van with Zoe and all her computers and occasionally ask a polite question.

  If she furrowed her eyebrows and harrumphed he knew it was a bad time and to shut the hell up. If she started chattering and pointing to the screen and using words he’d never heard before then that meant it was a good time and to continue pestering her.

  The furrowed eyebrows had been in place for the best part of fifteen minutes and, in spite of the previous evidence, Barry was fairly certain that Zoe wanted to be asked what was going on.

  Zoe let out a long, slow, sigh then ran her hands through her hair and pointed to one of the screens. As far as Barry could tell it was gibberish, but it must have meant something because Zoe was staring intently at it.

  “I’ve got the security-camera feed.” Zoe gestured to one of the monitors that displayed alternating pictures of deserted corridors within the bowels of the ship and was punctuated by views of the gambling floor. “But it’s analogue.”

  The way she said that word, as if it had taken a dump on her tongue and forced her to swallow it.

  “And analogue is a problem?” asked Barry. He understood analogue. He liked it. Vinyl sounded better than digital.

  Zoe shifted her gaze away from the screen to look at Barry. “Not inherently, no,” she said. “A digital system like the one the banker has, you can properly hack it, make it do your bidding. But this, you’re waiting for the feed to come around. I mean, there are some aspects of it where they have their own circuit where I’ve been able to isolate them but...”

  The image on the monitor changed. It was a security guard with a shotgun walking down a corridor below deck.

  “But what?” asked Barry, sensing his input was required.

  “But there was another circuit. It was weird. Like a doorbell or something. Not a video feed.” Zoe gave up on that and flicked all four monitors to video feeds. “You see the guy with the shotgun?” Zoe asked.

  Barry nodded.

  “Tell me if you see him go into room 512.”

  On the monitor to Zoe’s right, Violet came into view, closely followed by Katie.

  “Violet, Katie, do you read me, over.” Zoe tapped furiously at her keyboard but there was no response. “They’re going in circles. We need to get comms back up,” she said to Barry, who nodded appreciatively. “The tech Katie’s wearing acts a bit like sonar, so I’ve been able to get a good portion of the ship mapped while they’ve been wandering about.”

  “But if you can’t talk to them...”

  “Then I can’t help them.”

  “That bloke with the shotgun’s just gone in to room 512,” said Barry, a big, dumb smile spreading across his face as he finally got the chance to help.

  “Fuck,” said Zoe, instantly bursting his bubble. “They’re on to us.”

  “What?” asked Barry. “How do you know?”

  “Violet, Katie, there are five security guards in room 512. Can you hear me?” Zoe’s voice was beginning to crack, the nerves setting in.

  “It’s okay, Zoe,” said Barry, putting his hand on her forearm.

  Zoe looked at it as if he’d just placed a live octopus on her.

  “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it. Okay?” Barry’s tone was softer. Zoe flicked a smile on and off, then started at the keyboard again. “Look, they’ve stopped.”

  Zoe turned to the video feed to see Violet and Katie standing at a junction, looking around. They were definitely lost. Zoe tried to enhance the image, zooming in to try to discern where in the hell they were. It was blurred and partially obscured by Violet, but there was no mistake.

  “Violet, Katie, please respond. You need to move on now. In room 512 next to you there are five guards, probably heavily armed, ready to take you. I repeat... Five security guards waiting for you in room 512. Please acknowledge.”

  A green light suddenly appeared in the corner of Zoe’s screen.

  “Yes!” said Zoe, turning to Barry. “We’ve got them back online!”

  Barry pointed at the screen. The door to room 512 was open and a shotgun was levelled at Violet and Katie.

  “Shitbags,” said Zoe and turned off the mic. “Barry, what can we do? We need to do something, what can we do?”

  Barry stared at the screen and scratched his stubble. “Take a breath, Zoe,” he said. “Katie’s pretty fucking handy, so they aren’t going to get shot. But we need a backup plan for them, you’re right there.”

  Zoe looked at the reams of i
nformation that were appearing on her screen. Katie had responded and the system was harvesting all the data she’d inadvertently been gathering.

  Barry was watching the scene between Violet, Katie and the ambushers silently play out on the monitor. The bloke holding the sawn-off was moving, letting a guy with what looked like a knife come out into the corridor. There was talking. Violet looked worried but Katie didn’t.

  The security guard with the knife came to Katie’s back.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Barry. “You say you can pinpoint their location?”

  “Yeah,” replied Zoe.

  “Even if they can’t hear us?”

  “Yeah.”

  Barry and Zoe’s eyes both flicked to the monitor at the same moment sawn-off threw his arms wide.

  Zoe winced as Katie exploded into violent action.

  “Holy shit!” said Zoe, as Katie’s blows connected and sawn-off bounced off the wall like a rag doll.

  “I know, she’s quite a woman, isn’t she?” said Barry.

  It was over as quickly as it had begun as another of the security guards waded in with a pistol of some description.

  “Right then,” said Barry. “Tell them to stay alive for five minutes then we’ll have a distraction for them.”

  “Okay,” said Zoe. “What?”

  Barry grinned. “I’m going to blow a fucking big hole in the side of the boat.”

  “Katie, Violet, if you can hear me, hold tight.” Zoe was keeping it together, the adrenaline was coursing through her but she felt in control. “We have your location. If you can stay alive for five minutes we can give you a distraction. A big one.”

  There was no response from either of them. Zoe just stared as the owner of the gun shoved the barrel into Katie’s mouth.

  “Oh, she’s going to fucking punish him for that,” said Barry

  “Can you last five minutes?” Zoe asked as calmly as she could muster.

  Finally the response came through from Katie.

  Yes. They could last five minutes.

  Zoe exhaled.

  Chapter 36