by Jem Tugwell
‘Time to destination: Three minutes,’ the car said. Clive stopped reading and disconnected his HUD from the car.
The car’s display blanked and then scrolled through ‘Disconnected… Purging viewing history… Purging personal data… Done’, then clicked off.
Now his HUD was private again, he checked his messages. Still nothing from Sophia.
‘In Edinburgh with work, talk when I’m back,’ he typed, then added ‘Love you. Xxx.’ He pressed ‘Send’, hoping the message would find Sophia’s heart and she would give him another chance.
***
Isla and Gregor led Clive and Ava across a busy office crowded with Uniforms.
Everything gleamed, new and shiny. No battered desks, no dust. Nothing like PCU.
‘How have you got so many Uniforms?’ Ava asked.
‘Devolution,’ Isla said.
Ava frowned.
‘Parliament likes to spend on a strong, visible presence here,’ Gregor said, his Scottish accent had a harder Glasgow edge than Isla’s softer version. ‘It’s not enough for us to turn up after the event and convict the offender. Parliament wants a deterrent so that the crime doesn’t happen at all.’
Ava nodded. ‘Makes sense,’ she said.
‘Not with our budget,’ Clive moaned.
They reached a door to a meeting room made from floor to ceiling frosted glass. The door hissed open and showed another new desk, chairs and a man in his late twenties waiting for them. He wore an Inspector’s dark blue uniform, which contrasted with his pale freckled skin and ginger hair.
Clive initiated the sharing of contact details and the name ‘Alain Robertson’ flashed up on Clive’s HUD.
They sat and Clive’s smile disappeared and he knotted his eyebrows.
‘I’ve read the complaint made by Sully Rossi against PC Stewart for assault and unnecessary use of force.’ He glanced at Isla and Gregor. The look on Clive’s face made them shuffle on their chairs. ‘I’ve also read the report from all four officers present that Mr Rossi tripped and fell and that is what caused his injuries.’
‘True,’ Alain said. Isla and Gregor nodded.
‘But,’ Clive said, ‘I also read the doctor’s report. The injuries on Mr Rossi’s face are consistent with a trip, but the bruising on his back would make it seem like his complaint might have some merit.’
Ava nodded, going along with Clive’s interpretation. The locals were all frowning and looking worried.
Clive couldn’t keep it up, and his stern face dissolved into a smile. ‘Unfortunately for me, I remember PC Stewart only too well. She broke my heart last time I was at Twickenham by running in two tries in the last ten minutes and stealing the last real Calcutta Cup from us.’
Isla beamed at the memory. ‘Always a pleasure to score against the English.’
‘I’m convinced that the video I have seen is the result of some malicious attempt to discredit PC Stewart with computer-generated images, and that Mr Rossi tripped. The bruises on his back were from PC Stewart’s brave and selfless attempt to break Mr Rossi’s fall.’
There were nods all around the room.
‘Now that’s over,’ Clive said. ‘Where’s his hand?’
***
Sully was still sitting in the same chair, looking deflated. This time Clive and Ava sat in the chairs opposite him. Isla and Gregor decorated the wall behind them, flanking the mirror that hid Alain Robertson’s presence.
Ava said, ‘Tell us about the game.’
Sully’s eyes flashed wide. ‘You know about it?’
‘Forbidden Island?’ she nodded. ‘Yes, we know.’
‘How?’
‘Tell us about your finish point.’
‘You know where it is. I showed them.’ Sully nodded towards Isla and Gregor.
‘I know. But why there?’ Clive asked.
Sully shrugged. ‘We come to your country, break your surveillance and turn up at the heart of your democracy. Your famous places. It’s perfect. We show we can get anywhere.’
‘Do you think that sitting in a police interview room really shows that?’ Ava said.
Sully wilted under Ava’s glare. He looked down and placed his right hand over the end of the BST universal mount.
‘Big price to pay,’ Clive said, nodding at Sully’s arm.
‘Worth it.’
‘Really?’
‘Money and a BST hand… A BST hand. It’s a dream. An easy swap.’ Sully made it sound like the most obvious thing in the world.
Clive couldn’t agree, even in a hospital full of care and pain management. He definitely couldn’t have used a machete.
Clive tapped the box in front of him. ‘But this isn’t a BST hand.’
‘No. A simple controller for the game.’
‘We’ll find out what it really is. Tell us about the others.’
‘Nothing to tell. We were all chosen.’
‘How?’
‘It started with forum chat about why some games were getting more and more dangerous. Then rumours it was preparation for a game on the Forbidden Island. No one believed it. Then there were more details, it seemed to be getting real.’ He looked to be reliving the excitement of the news. ‘Then there was talk of ten chosen players. The ten best.’
He puffed his chest out a little at this, then seemed to remember where he was and deflated again.
‘What happened next?’ Clive said, prompting, wanting more.
‘I got an invitation.’ Sully’s chest puffed out again. ‘We were told to meet.’
‘Where?’ Clive asked.
Sully said nothing and dropped his eyes back to his hand. He shrugged.
‘Where?’ Clive said more forcefully.
‘Can’t say.’
‘I know we’re meant to deport you, but any deliberate attempt to damage UK Border Control property is a criminal offence. Minimum five years in prison.’
‘I didn’t damage anything.’
‘A court won’t believe you. They’ll think you were trying to break your iTourist.’
Sully kept looking at his hand.
‘Five years… A little information in return for a trip home,’ Clive said and paused. ‘An easy swap.’
Sully’s head shot up at Clive’s reuse of the words he had said earlier.
Clive held his gaze and waited.
Nothing happened.
‘A little information and a trip home. You can collect your money, your new hand and live your life. Much better than a prison,’ Ava said, as persuasive as the very best con-artist. ‘Think of your new life… Italian sunshine or rainy British prison. They won’t know you said anything.’
Sully looked at Ava and then nodded. ‘Rouen. At the cathedral,’ he said.
‘OK,’ said Ava. She looked at Clive. He nodded for her to carry on. She seemed to be connecting better to Sully.
‘What happened?’ Ava said.
‘The organiser called himself Serge. He met me at the cathedral. He took me somewhere. I was in the back of a van with no windows, so I don’t know where. We all ended up in a big farm building.’
‘We?’
‘There were ten of us. A tiny room each and a bigger space for food and meetings.’
‘The ten to play the game?’
‘We thought so, but there were tests first.’
‘Go on.’
Sully talked them through the first two tests: the long walk to the coast, then the shorter second test.
‘You ended up at the site of the V1 rocket launch?’ Clive said. The choice of the venue seemed symbolic, like the UK was back in the targets of an attack, not a simple game. But how could the three remaining handless gamers possibly hurt anything other than themselves?
Sully nodded. ‘The tests got us from ten to seven and then to five.’
‘But there are four of you here?’ Ava said.
‘Yes, the game was only for four. The last test was to see if we were really dedicated. Serge showed us the BST hands. We couldn’t
believe it. I mean, I’d never seen one before, let along held one.’
Some of the lust seemed to have returned to Sully’s eyes as he remembered.
‘What was the last test?’
‘A fake guillotine. I was called last, but I hadn’t heard screams or seen any blood. It seemed like a trick. The blade fell and stopped before it hit. Still, it was scary.’
Clive hadn’t realised he was gripping the table tight as Sully talked about the guillotine. He forced his hands to unlock and rested them in his lap.
‘We found out later that the first guy bailed. That left four.’
‘You, Lilou, Femi and Tatsuko?’
Sully nodded.
‘Then what?’
Sully described his round the houses trip to Glasgow, taxi to Dumfries and his hotel. It was all stuff they knew already from his signal trace.
Clive and Ava sat forward in rapt attention when he described thrashing around in the bushes for the parcel.
‘And what was in the parcel?’ Clive said.
‘The game controller, a light… and a machete.’
Clive and Ava were both very quiet, very still as Sully described the ease with which he had sacrificed his hand to the game.
‘How did the game controller get into the country?’ Clive said.
Chapter 47
Tatsuko thought she was doing OK considering, but her mother disagreed – Faster, lazy girl.
The first half of her journey had been good. She’d enjoyed the downs, the fields and the little villages.
She was going slower now as her route became full of towns and people. Mostly they looked through her. Serge called them HUD zombies. The people walking around, typing and reading their HUDs, and not paying attention. Body present, but brain elsewhere.
Very few of them stared at her. Only some of the eco-protesters, with their placards about the evils of air travel, viewed her suspiciously. She didn’t think she looked like an American who had flown to the UK. She didn’t even think she looked like a tourist, especially as the city was so diverse. Maybe she wasn’t subtle enough with her hand and the A to Z map book. Maybe some people were simply unfriendly. Aggressive even. Only the woman in a multicoloured hoodie with a ‘Liberation, Empowerment, Responsibility’ placard smiled at her.
Tatsuko huddled in the corner of a shop. Both the windows and the door were boarded up and covered in scruffy and careless graffiti tags. The derelict space gave her the privacy she wanted, but she could have done without the reek of stale piss.
She felt more deflated when she checked her display. ‘Game position – Third’. Her mother’s disappointed frown deepened.
She pressed on, finding it easier to blend in with her head down – another grumpy Brit walking along the road.
She decided to stay on the south side of the river, hoping it would be quieter.
Her next target was Wandsworth Bridge, about one and a half miles away.
***
Tatsuko paused on the path and looked left across Wandsworth Bridge. She stopped and wondered about crossing the bridge and approaching her target from the other side of the river.
‘Fuckin’ ’ell. Don’t just stop,’ the person behind her said, as he navigated around her.
‘Yeah, I must have cost you at least half a second of your fantastic life,’ she shouted after him.
He raised his middle finger at her. She turned back and took in the Thames’ slow progress and the famous skyline in the distance. She’d see it all much closer soon.
Two cars with strobing blue lights appeared on the opposite side of the river. Tatsuko froze. Could be nothing, she told herself, and breathed out when the lights flashed past the bridge and headed north. She ducked her head and hurried on, keeping to her original plan of staying south of the river.
She found a private corner where one wall of a block of flats turned sharply and joined an office block. At least this didn’t smell of piss. She pulled out her A-Z and checked her game controller. ‘Distance to finish – 4.4 miles.’
Better, she thought. Maybe an hour and forty minutes. She didn’t really want to look, but checked her position anyway. ‘Game position – Second’.
Something had happened. She’d overtaken someone.
She set off again, a bit more bounce in her stride, but the nagging pain in her foot kept returning.
It could be psychosomatic, but she’d had the ache since doing that gait analysis at the hotel. Maybe there was a real issue with her foot.
She caught her reflection in the window of a shop. Not her best look. Crusty jeans, windblown hair, nasty waterproof coat. She could see something different in her stance. Perhaps it was making her foot worse. She looked more carefully in the next shop window.
The weight of the game controller was definitely pulling her left shoulder down, bending her stance a little, pushing more weight on to the aching foot.
Trying to walk straighter and more upright, she pressed on. Her foot felt a little better.
Chapter 48
Femi jogged along Upper Newtownards Road. He was nearly there.
The hard, fast miles he had covered had left him tired, but in this last mile, he felt light on his feet. He would need to try and find a way in. If this was SA, there would be guards and dogs. And unsmiling soldiers with guns.
But there weren’t.
There was a roundabout with a large tree in it and Femi followed the road alongside the tall metal fence. The large double gates were open. The sign said that Stormont Estate was a public park – open to pedestrians until 18:00. Just as well that Femi decided to run the final section of his journey, and he had an hour before closing.
He looked along the Prince of Wales Avenue as it rose and saw the huge, white, elegant Parliament Building in the distance. He could see his finish point.
First, he had to get past the Uniform in the small hut next to the road. He turned left after he went through the gates and took the curving path. Two lines of tall, imposing trees stretched away up the hill towards Parliament. He walked onto the grass and up between them, glancing at the back of the police hut as he passed it. No one came to check on him.
Nearly there. He wanted to run. The others could be closer to their finish points. He might lose by mere seconds.
He couldn’t risk it. A mud-splattered black man running towards the Parliament Building might be met with force. It would be in SA. Better to finish second than be tackled by soldiers, or worse.
Femi walked on, a longer stride than normal. Faster, more urgent, trying to look like he was late meeting his family.
He covered the ground quickly and reached the roundabout, barely glancing at the white stone with a bronze statue of some bloke on top.
He headed to the final rise, maybe two hundred metres from the finish line.
A couple of Uniforms stood off to the right of the building, watching the approach to the building, alert but not freaked out by anything. Femi dropped his head, not wanting to catch their eye.
He lengthened his stride again.
Risking a glance at the Uniforms, he saw they were looking straight at him. Their casual body language had changed – their hands were on their guns.
‘Shit,’ said Femi, forcing himself to stop and look back down the avenue. He did a ‘tourist absorbing the view’ act, rotating the whole way around, taking the chance to double-check the Uniforms. They were still watching, noticeably more relaxed, but with hands still on guns.
Femi started walking again as an open-topped bus trundled up to the roundabout. It stopped and disgorged a couple of loud families. Little kids running ahead of exasperated parents shouting for them to wait.
It proved a good distraction. The Uniforms weren’t looking at him anymore.
He got to the bottom of the steps and looked up. Such a fantastic building. Massive white columns supporting the front. Beautiful.
Twenty-five metres to go.
He put his foot on the first step. The Uniforms hadn’t moved. S
econd step. Still good.
Femi climbed, step after step. Hoping. Feeling the eyes of the police.
He reached the top step.
More cries from the parents dragged the Uniforms’ eyes away from him again.
He pulled his game controller from his pocket and looked at the display. A large animated chequered flag fluttered in an electronic wind. A gold dot appeared in the centre and grew, morphing into spinning text. The text stopped spinning.
‘1st place – Winner!!’ it said.
Femi shot both hands to the sky and shouted, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
He did a little dance on the spot to celebrate.
‘You OK, sir?’ one of the Uniforms called, but there was laughter in his voice. All the suspicion gone.
Then he looked up at Femi’s hand and his posture changed. He started to walk towards him.
Femi looked at the game controller again. The whole hand was flashing alternate green then red. Some sort of built in celebration light show, Femi thought.
It didn’t matter now – he’d won. Soon to be back home with his family.
The flashing was red now. Femi looked at the screen, his concern growing as the Uniforms got closer.
He put his right hand on the game controller.
It was getting hot.
Chapter 49
Sully had been left in a cell to mope and pout. His kicking and banging on the door made him look more like a spoilt child than the ‘world champion’ he claimed to be. Clive, Ava, Isla, Gregor and Alain were all back in the frosted glass office. Sitting around the meeting table and looking at the box in the middle that held the game controller.
‘There’s no way someone got that controller through a UK Border check,’ Clive said.
They all nodded their silent agreement.
Clive pulled the used Amazon delivery box with the familiar logo and half the address label on each flap on the top closer.
The game controller rested on sheets of bubble-wrap. Like most Amazon packages, the box was way too big for the content and it looked like they were discussing how to return an unwanted birthday present.
Clive pushed the box back to Gregor. ‘Seal it up.’
The conversation stalled as Gregor did. A rustle as more bubble-wrap went in, a noisy rasp followed by a dull snip, as he pulled the tape and used the nearly blunt safety scissors to chew through the tape. He patted the tape down, sealing the two flaps and entombing the controller.