by Jem Tugwell
Femi’s hand exploded – his controller exploded! Two explosions couldn’t be a coincidence.
She was meant to be in a game, but they were calling it a terror attack.
She couldn’t be part of this. There were people around her, on the road, in offices.
Lilou walked on, trying to see someone to surrender to, but like everywhere, there weren’t any police around.
Her hand fell to her controller and she touched the release mechanism and twisted the controller off. She didn’t know what to do with it. She couldn’t leave it for a child to find.
She saw a small dot hovering above the junction at the end of the road. A drone. That had to be official.
She headed forward and as she got close, the drone twitched and rotated towards her.
Lilou stood still and waited as the drone seemed to recognise her and swooped down.
Chapter 71
Zoe screamed at Clive. ‘The drone’s got her. She’s not running.’
Zoe spun from the carousel and sprinted, losing sight of Clive as she passed the Pierhead building. Clive had been patrolling right by the building, and Zoe could see him ahead of her now. His run was ungainly, but he was making progress.
Zoe was quicker.
She drew level with Clive. He was running and talking on his HUD, struggling to be understood with all his panting. Zoe flashed him a smile. Clive groaned, and flapped a hand to grab her. He missed and tried to go faster.
Zoe could see the drone ahead of her. Lilou stood underneath it, waving her left arm. It was missing a hand. Luckily the few pedestrians who saw Zoe running, turned and ran in the opposite direction.
‘I never… I didn’t know,’ Lilou said as Zoe stopped in front of her.
Zoe took a couple of big breaths and looked at Lilou’s truncated left arm. A small connector poked from the end.
Lilou’s game controller balanced in her right hand. Her legs were shaking and her eyes wide open.
A car pulled up to a stop and the door opened.
‘No. Go, go!’ Zoe shouted at the car, trying to get the car’s passengers safe, not realising that it was empty.
She heard Clive’s ragged breathing right behind her, but instead of stopping he snatched the game controller from Lilou’s hand and jumped into the car. Zoe took a step forward. ‘Clive, no.’
Clive turned to her and shook his head and waved her away. He started talking and the car’s door slid shut.
The car headed away.
She could see Clive staring back at her, clutching the bomb.
Chapter 72
Serge watched the dot on the screen, trying to work out what Lilou was doing.
She wasn’t moving and she had detached her hand. She’d done it a few times but doing it while standing so close to the target didn’t make sense.
Maybe she was waiting for a gap to make the final charge? Maybe.
The dot started moving again and Serge rocked forward in his chair.
It was too fast for a pedestrian. Sully had been in a car nearly all the time, but why would Lilou do it now?
She wouldn’t. And not to move away from the finish.
In his Game Control window, he clicked on the last remaining dot then moved the mouse and clicked on the menu. He chose the ‘Retire player’ option, then selected ‘Player arrested’.
The same message box popped up asking him if he was sure.
He pressed ‘Yes’.
Collateral damage was simply a part of the game.
Chapter 73
The tsunami wave of #TinyCopTakedown messages had swamped Clive’s HUD as he paced around the Plass, scanning for Lilou. They picked him up and swept him away. Each new message battered him and sent him under the water.
Worse was the truth that grabbed him like a savage current and sucked him down.
He had saved Zoe, but failed Ava.
Down.
He had encouraged Ava to come out of her shell.
If she had stayed timid, she’d have stayed in the van.
Deeper.
She’d still be alive.
Clive’s knees gave way and he dropped to the pavement.
Her death was his fault.
It grasped him, weighed on him like a huge ball of concrete. Too heavy to carry, it crushed him.
***
Eventually, Clive’s brain began to win the battle with his guilt. More immediate thoughts took hold. There could be no more deaths. He had to stop Lilou.
Was this bravery or a coward trying to avoid more failure and guilt? He couldn’t decide, but the motivation didn’t matter. He forced himself to rewatch the footage with a logical detective’s eye. Tatsuko’s explosion was too soon after she was caught for there to be any chance to safely disarm Lilou’s controller. Then the drone messaged that it had Lilou standing below it. The news jolted him into action. He ran. It was up to him. There was only one way that gave any hope.
Now, as the car rolled away, Clive could see Zoe’s face. She looked distraught, mouthing a long, silent ‘No’. He couldn’t tell Zoe what he was going to do. She would have tried to protect him. She would have grabbed the bomb herself. He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t carry Zoe’s death as well.
An idea flashed into his mind as he ran: a simple journey of only a 0.1 of a mile. He could run it, but a car would be quicker. He hoped that if it wasn’t quick enough, then at least the structure of the car might absorb some of the blast.
Only now he was in the flimsy car, did he worry about flying shrapnel after the explosion. Too late – he was committed, so he forced his head clear of everything else and focused on the logistics. It didn’t work. All he could see was Ava’s face.
Shoving the heel of his palm at his face, he scoured the fears from his cheek. ‘Focus,’ he muttered.
The car was limited to 20mph in town, so ten miles in thirty minutes, one mile in three. 0.3 of a mile in one minute. That meant his 0.1 of a mile would take a third of a minute. Twenty seconds, then he still had to get out of the car and get rid of the bomb.
Too long, he thought and looked at the controller, wishing for hardware failures, lazy programmers and buggy code.
The other three had all exploded, so he wasn’t holding out much hope.
Traditional churches and religion held no power for him, and it seemed hypocritical to start praying to a god he didn’t believe in. What did he believe in? Only one thing. So he looked to the sky and chanted the prayer from an old Mayan legend that had always worked for him in the past.
‘Ixcacao, Goddess of Chocolate, see my tears and come to my aid.’
He allowed a second for divine intervention, but even Ixcacao failed him now and the game controller started to flash red and get hot.
His breathing had been jagged from running when he got in the car, but now his pulse spiked and he gasped out hard, short panting breaths.
His hands started to tremble, and his knee jigged up and down.
Oh shit, oh shit, span around in his head. Was this really his end? Would he meet Ava again so soon?
He glanced up and looked out of the car window. He was close but was it enough time?
The display in the palm of the controller started counting down.
Clive’s knee jigged up and down faster.
The car stopped and said happily, ‘You have reached your destination.’
The door seemed to take a lifetime to open on slow electric motors designed to prevent a door flying open and hitting someone. Clive scrambled out when the door was still only half open.
He still had to cross the twenty odd yards of the walkway before he could get to the Roath Basin.
The Uniform guarding the bridge turned and looked, not sure how he could help.
The display on the controller hit ‘00:04’.
Clive dithered but time seemed to slow as he tried deciding between his original plan or throwing the hand into the car and hoping.
He visualised bits of the car flying through the air.
He didn’t know enough about cars or explosives to make the right choice.
He could lie on the bomb like Ava. Go out a hero, but the idea grated. Ava was a true hero. She had willingly given her life to save people when she had so much ahead of her. He would be giving up on life. He’d be saying that it was too much for him. He’d be the shrapnel, but it would be suicide, not a sacrifice. It would devalue Ava’s memory.
So, he ran, letting his right arm pull back. Like a javelin thrower, except he didn’t want a high arcing throw. More a hard and flat chuck, but with no risk of the hand kissing the water and bouncing up like the skimming stones he had thrown as a kid.
He bunched the muscles in his shoulder, still yards from the water, and threw.
‘Down,’ he shouted and launched himself for the hard slabs on the walkway.
Clive was still airborne when the controller completed its descent, scraping over the edge of the dock before it hit the water.
He hadn’t got any real distance in the throw. Not even close to where he hoped for.
Clive heard the controller explode and tensed his body, hoping that whatever came his way would miss.
But the weak throw meant that the controller was close to the concrete of the wall at the edge of the water. The wall took most of the explosion.
A jet of water was forced up and over the wall. All the harder, sharper shrapnel bounced off the wall and ricocheted back into the basin.
A shock of cold water landed on Clive.
He rolled onto his back.
Water, he could deal with.
Ava’s face flashed before him, he screwed his eyes shut, but could still see her body as she covered Tatsuko in calm acceptance.
The flash of white.
Someone had to pay.
Part 3
Aftermath
Chapter 74
Clive and Zoe couldn’t risk taking Lilou to London on the train. They decided that a car was the quickest, simplest option that also provided a degree of physical confinement.
Zoe sat next to Clive, with Lilou opposite. One end of the handcuffs was shackled around her right hand. With no left hand, the other end of the handcuffs was closed around the fabric of the seat belt. It allowed her a little freedom of movement for the long journey and prevented any attempt at escape.
Zoe didn’t like travelling backwards, but Clive had pushed Lilou in first and chosen his habitual direction of travel. Zoe tried to ignore it.
The car moved off and turned the corner. Zoe shifted in her seat to see where they were going, her shoulder and leg brushing against Clive. Water from his shirt and trousers happily jumped across to hers. She looked down at the two damp patches.
‘No offence, Boss,’ she said, unclipping her seat belt. One of the car’s sensors reported the seat belt coming out of its clasp. The car’s processor saw that the seat had an iMe signal on it. The programming told the car to report the breach, so it set an alarm off and stopped. ‘All passengers must wear a seat belt,’ it said.
Zoe half-stood, constrained by the height of the roof of the car, and completed a distorted Quasimodo-like transfer to the seat next to Lilou. The car restarted when her seat belt clicked home.
Lilou remained frozen in her seat. The shock had leached all the colour from her. Zoe studied her, trying to get a sense of this gamer, but it was like looking at a plaster statue in a museum.
Clive’s clothes were beginning to steam gently as the heater in the car circulated air. Despite the heat, he shivered. ‘My bomb disposal technique was a million miles from the heroic throw I’d imagined,’ he said. ‘I was lucky.’ A shudder rippled through him and his eyes fixed on something in the distance.
The moisture in the air condensed onto the inside of the car windows giving it a damp, laundry room smell, but with a sickly undertone.
Mud from the water, Zoe decided, and shut her mind to any other possible sources of the smell.
‘Lilou,’ she said with a gentle tone, leaving Clive to his thoughts.
Lilou seemed to wake and her eyes moved, and her head turned a few degrees. She looked like a robot restarting after a recharge – still not fully conscious. She blinked a couple of times and seemed to start breathing again.
‘It was a game. Like all the others I’ve played… not… not,’ she said. ‘I had a bomb on my arm all along.’ Lilou shuddered and tears pooled in the corners of her eyes. ‘Are the other players all dead?’ She rocked her head back and forth.
‘Sully’s alive,’ Zoe said, thinking this would help her, but he saw Lilou’s forehead furrow.
‘Why him?’
Zoe explained how Sully had cheated by using a friend.
‘Typical,’ Lilou said. ‘That must be how he won the first trial.’
‘His hand killed six scientists,’ Zoe said.
Lilou gasped and her hand moved like it would cover her mouth, but the seat belt and handcuff made for a slow, jerky movement. Her hand got there eventually.
‘Eleven dead in total, and a few bystanders with injuries from flying fragments,’ Zoe said.
‘Including Ava,’ Clive said with a harder edge in his voice than Zoe used.
Lilou shook her head again before dropping her hand. Her head dropped as well, and Zoe could hear sniffling. Teardrops fell and made small dots on the legs of Lilou’s trousers.
‘I’d played their games before. Never anything like this,’ she said quietly, and then her head snapped up. Her wild, pleading eyes shot between Zoe and Clive. ‘You must believe me. I never knew.’ Her eyes continued their pleading of her innocence, then with a smaller voice, she said, ‘A game. The greatest game ever. And the prizes were enormous. The BST hand and all that money.’
‘Was that why you did it?’
‘Yes, but also the challenge. Parkour is fun, but not like winning a gold medal at the Olympics. The game was the same level of challenge.’ She looked at her left wrist. ‘Maybe more.’
‘Tell us,’ Zoe prompted, and Lilou talked them through the meeting in Rouen, the selection and her time in the UK.
‘Were you ever meant to finish in London?’ Zoe asked.
‘No.’
Zoe glanced at Clive. Clive had been right, so much for Lance’s certainty, she thought.
If they were going to get any further with the case, they needed to trace Serge. Sully hadn’t been any help. All he had done was shrug and say, ‘A man. I don’t know – an old, scruffy smoker. I didn’t pay attention to him.’
‘Could you describe Serge in detail, Lilou?’ Zoe asked, and held her breath. This was their only lead.
‘Yes,’ was all Lilou said, but Zoe could see certainty in her eyes. ‘I’ll do anything to help find him. He needs to pay for what he’s done to those people.’
Zoe moved her hand in an iMe hand dance, and then her HUD appeared on the car’s display screen.
At the top of the screen was the title: ‘FaceFit v4.7’. The rest of the screen was blank.
‘Start… Suspect… Serge… Unknown family name.’
The title changed to: ‘FaceFit v4.7: Suspect: Serge,
Zoe looked at Lilou. ‘You scroll by swiping with a finger. Select one by double-tapping and zoom in and out with a pinching movement.’
Lilou nodded and sat forward in her chair. She moved her hand, but the seat belt’s inertia mechanism caught and held her hand away from the screen.
Zoe looked at Clive. His eyes were back inside the car, but it looked he was in deep shadows. He nodded his agreement.
She unlocked the handcuff from Lilou’s wrist. The handcuffs slid down the seat belt and settled in Lilou’s lap.
Zoe watched as Lilou scrolled back and forth through the face shapes before settling on one. ‘This is closest. But it’s not perfect.’
‘That’s OK. Once you’ve gone through all the opt
ions then you can adjust it,’ Zoe said. ‘Select it for now if that’s the closest.’
Lilou did and the screen redrew with a choice of hairstyles.
She chose one, and then did the same for age, eye shape, eye colour, skin tone, nose shape, ear size and all the other possible facial features.
At the end of her selections, a man with a long, thin face and a shock of grey hair stared out of the screen. Lilou said, ‘More or less – that’s him. It’s not perfect.’
Zoe’s hand moved as she took control of her HUD. She moved the cursor and clicked a button on the side of the screen that looked like a small, blue cog.
A calm, patient voice came through the car’s speakers. ‘What adjustments would you like to make?’
‘Tell it and it will change the face,’ Zoe said.
Lilou stared at the face and said, ‘Older. Iller.’
‘What illness?’ the voice said.
‘I don’t know, but he smoked a lot and coughed.’
‘High probability of asthma or lung cancer. Adjusting,’ the software said.
The colour of the face on the screen changed from a healthier pinky glow to a drawn, grey pallor. The eyes sagged and dark smudges appeared under the eyes.
‘Iller,’ Lilou said.
Zoe sat back in her seat as Lilou talked the FaceFit software through all the subtle changes to the face on the screen.
‘Any other changes?’ the voice said.
‘No. That’s him,’ Lilou said.
***
Clive typed out a message on his HUD, and then went back and corrected all his typing errors. Some were the result of ‘fat fingers’ – his careless aim on the airborne keyboard, others were the result of his terrible spelling and reliance on the spelling checker.
He read through the message: ‘Urgent assistance required in tracing male, late fifties or early sixties. Known as Serge. FaceFit attached.’
He searched through the international directory of police contacts, narrowing his search to France and then Rouen. He found the entry for an Inspector Bisset, selected the name and pressed send.
Clive’s Buddy rolled out a message banner almost immediately.