by Rufus Offor
“Amateurs!” muttered Shoop to himself as he scowled at the various mirrors in his freshly stolen Jaguar.
Shoop had written the training manual for agents in the Sphere and he knew exactly what his pursuers would try and do. One option was to try and back him into a corner. This method had a flaw though; some animals are easy targets when cornered, they get all panicky and wet themselves, much like the Boss had done. Others react in a much more violent and frenzied fashion, there’s nothing quite like being backed into a corner to bring out the best in them. Shoop found being backed into a corner an awful lot of fun, he loved it; it was when his talents truly shone. If they tried plan-A, the back him into a corner technique, they would almost definitely all end up a lot less alive than Shoop. But, since he’d just shown a greater level of sneakiness in the Bosses office than had previously been realised, he suspected that they’d have been pre-warned by the Boss. He would’ve told them that he was too dangerous for cornering; they would more than likely go down another route.
They could go one of two other ways. One was to fake some sort of organised crime style shooting and take him out quite publicly. But public displays were not in the Sphere’s best interests, being a sneaky secret type organisation and all.
He suspected that the troupe of Sphere agents wouldn’t risk openly spraying him with gun-fire in front of other people causing death and panic in the general populace. They weren’t, after all, the armed division of the metropolitan police force. No, the Sphere was happy to keep itself out of the public eye. They would probably wait until he was in a quiet place, or at least vaguely alone before trying anything. Even then they probably wouldn’t have the guts to take him on at close range.
Shoop guessed that they’d use a sniper with a non-lethal weapon from the Sphere’s technologically advanced arsenal to knock him out. Then they’d send a bogus ambulance to come and pick him up. Once in the ambulance, the game would be over.
This seemed to be the more likely option by far.
Shoop decided that, despite his need to be urgent with his investigations, the best way out of this situation was to have a bit of fun with them.
He decided that he would use “the boy who cried wolf” technique to grind them down a little so that he could make his escape.
He weaved in and out of Edinburgh streets for a while then started occasionally heading toward isolated areas. This would put them a little on edge as they’d see a possible opening for their attack. At the last minute he’d turn in a different direction effectively heading back to heavily populated areas. He also decided that he’d randomly stop next to quiet little shops, service stations, public toilets, in fact anywhere that they thought he might get out of the car. He’d take off his seat belt, open the door, close the door, put his seat belt back on and drive away. This put the snipers, who were following in a series of white vans with false plumbing company logos on the side, on edge.
During this game Shoop did manage to stop at an off licence and top up his depleted alcohol to blood ratio and grab a few spare bottles of gin for the road.
It was a tense game, and a fine line for him to be treading. If he played the game for too long, they’d know that he’d spotted them. If he actually got out of the car in a quiet enough place, then they’d be on him in an instant. Once or twice he popped his head out of the car and then drew it back in just in time to miss a concentrated sonic pulse from one of the snipers. One of the pulses sent a bystander spinning into a butchers truck where he lay for twenty minute before being found, freezing cold and with a newly developed phobia of pig’s hooves.
The more he drove around, the more they had to change vehicles and personnel to try and appear inconspicuous. It pleased Shoop greatly that he was tying up so much of the Sphere’s time and resources.
After an hour or so, Shoop decided that the game should stop. The men had been effectively messed with and they were beginning to get a little bit complacent. Appearing more obvious in their pursuit and driving with less care. He headed west again and took off toward Slateford Road. He knew a petrol station there that would be able to help him out.
The problem with escaping from the Sphere Of Influence was that they didn’t just follow you with nasty angry looking people with all manner of interesting and colourful weaponry and gadgets. The Sphere also followed you with satellite surveillance, which was a little trickier to get rid of.
Shoop had been around when the Sphere had taken satellite technology on board. In fact he’d helped Mike and Dave, the Sphere founders, to upgrade the technology behind it.
They’d made leaps and bounds with technology in many far-reaching areas of science, but there were still a few odds and ends that they couldn’t quite come to grips with. They’d done their best to try and fathom the vast array of gadgetry that they’d found in the spacecraft in the glen but much of it proved to be simply baffling. Shoop, upon his first meeting with both of them in the underground village, had supplied them with a very cooperative little green man to decipher the bits and pieces that they couldn’t figure out. It was the very same little green man that had been in a suitcase in Shoop’s car outside the pub in Bury-Saint-Edmunds when Mike first met Shoop.
They’d been rich and powerful before, but the little green man had helped to launch their organisation into orbit, literally.
The little green man, in turn, was allowed to build a small messaging devise using a speak and spell, an umbrella and some coat hangers and was picked up by his mum and dad in a big ball of light and metal in the middle of some remote woods.
The mass of vehicles continued to appear and disappear behind him.
He drove on, happily meandering his way to his destination while listening to Led Zeppelin at an unreasonable volume.
The Jaguar he drove handled exceptionally well. He himself owned a jaguar that he’d managed to pick up cheap from a police auction. It was nowhere near as swanky as the one he was driving now though.
Shoop liked Jaguars. He liked Bentley’s, Rolls Royce and old minis. He liked the royal family and British rock bands. Well, not all British rock bands, he didn’t like Queen because of Freddy Mercury and the fact that he was gay. He wasn’t homophobic, he just disliked sexual people and most of the gay people he’d met had been very sexual. Ergo, he didn’t like gays. He didn’t like Bill Clinton for the same reason and Madonna positively terrified him.
He liked all things innately British and normal and yet he was anything but. His hippy parents had been from America and Germany and his abilities were about as normal as beef flavoured custard. At the core of him, Shoop hated everything that he was and fought against himself with the vigour of Hitler denying that he was half Jewish (which he was).
A little while later he reached the petrol station at Slateford road. As he pulled in a number of his pursuers trundled past it, glancing at him out of the corner of their eyes. A man on a motorcycle stopped just outside the petrol station and pretended to check the air in his tires.
With perfect timing it began to rain very heavily. The rain blocked the view of Shoop slightly as a van pulled up on the other side of the road. No doubt it housed a sniper or two. The rain both worked in Shoop's favour and put him in slightly more jeopardy. If the snipers couldn’t see him very well, then neither could the general public, which meant that they were in a better position to stun and abduct him at close range without anyone really noticing. Before they had time to arrange themselves into a decent position to shoot him however, he ducked down in his car as if he were picking something up from the floor.
A minute passed and the man checking his bike tyres started to wonder what Shoop was doing. Two minutes went by and he stopped pretending to check his bike, glancing around with concern as the rain bounced off his helmet. At three minutes, looking across the road at the men in the white van and shrugging, he toyed with the idea of looking in the window of the car. At four he was wondering if Shoop had had some sort of serious heart palpitation. In the end he started whe
eling his bike into the petrol station forecourt and headed for the air pump via Shoop’s car. At five minutes and twenty three seconds he was telling his associates that Shoop was nowhere to be seen and that there was a big hole in the bottom of the nice flash Jaguar. His whereabouts were a complete mystery. Even the satellite surveillance hadn’t seen him run out of the petrol station. They would’ve used infra-red had they thought they’d needed to, but there was no sign that it was necessary.
Shoop had quite simply vanished without a trace.
There is a network of tunnels under the majority of cities in the world. How they got there and who dug them is, for the most part, completely unknown. Some of the tunnels are more baffling than others. The tunnels in Edinburgh were very confusing indeed. They were known to be extremely old. The technology needed to burrow these tunnels was far more advanced than any technology that was around at the time of the tunnels construction. In fact, there was no way in which they could be created even now. When the tunnels under Edinburgh had been completed, the people living above them had had very pronounced eyebrows and hunted with sharp sticks while clad in animal fur. The tunnels were an enigma.
Another of their mysteries was that there seemed to be no reason why, exactly, cities were built on top of them. The people who built cities didn’t even know that they were there, and yet, the whole world over, cities were built above them. It was as if whoever had built the tunnels had planned out our cities for us before we even knew what a city was. Before we even knew what a damn mud-hut was. It was thought that some sort of mystical energy was coursing through them and that humans were instinctively attracted to them. Also, nobody knew why, without the people on the surface knowing the location and lay-out of these tunnels, railways were laid down directly over them either.
Very few people knew of these tunnels and those who did were absolutely baffled by them.
The petrol station that Shoop had stopped in was right next to a railway. He’d stopped his car directly over a secret hatchway that entered a very narrow, very cramped, chimney like tubular hole that lead down to the underground tunnel network. He’d used a tiny laser pen to knock the bottom out of the nice shiny Jaguar and engaged the tunnel entrance. The heavy rain had hidden his exit very neatly.
He didn’t like to use the tunnels in full view of so many people but the way he saw it, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. The investigation into Bunty’s belt buckle was one that had to continue. His future and his life depended on him following it through and finding a way out of the predicament he was in.
He had no fear of the Sphere following him as the entrance was completely invisible to the naked eye. The only way into them is to know which of the cobles on the ground to push. Once pushed with exactly the right pressure and in the right sequence the cobles would fold in on themselves and reveal the entrance for a short time. After that time had elapsed the cobles would reconstruct themselves into the petrol station floor. It was one of many entrances. Shoop was one of the very few who knew about the secret entrances as he’d commissioned them from various different contractors several years earlier. Different contractors all built small parts of the entrances to ensure that not one of them knew the whole picture.
The Sphere had no idea.
Shoop liked to have as many secrets as possible. It put him one step ahead of everyone else and his secrets always came in handy when he was in tight spots.
It was a long climb down but by the time the man with the motorbike was radioing his colleagues, Shoop had reached the bottom.
The tunnel that he’d dropped down into was perfectly cylindrical and stretched off around a long sweeping corner. Most tunnels are damp, mouldy unwelcoming places, but this one was bright and clean. Because nobody ever went into the tunnels, there was no-one to mess them up. The materials that had been used to build it were quite odd looking. The walls looked like a cross between concrete and polished steal. It had a strange dull sheen to it that was unlike any other substance that Shoop knew of. On top of its clean, dull shine the tunnel also appeared to have no joins in it whatsoever. It was almost as if the builders of tunnel had put the mass of all the earth and rock through a tremendous amount of pressure and pushed it outwards, condensing it into an incredibly hard, almost impenetrable substance which made up the walls of the tunnel. Much like coal is condensed into diamond.
Shoop had placed a number of electric scooters at the various different entrances throughout the tunnel networks. They were kept in large metal cabinets against the side of the tunnel. Shoop opened the cabinet, took a scooter down and zipped off through the network of tunnels in the direction of the school that Jeeves worked at.
Although railways were built directly on top of the tunnels, there were more tunnels than there were railways and Shoop took off down a side tunnel, heading north-west.
After loosing the Sphere so successfully, he began to relax a little and noticed that his sixth sense was buzzing quite strongly again. It appeared that he was definitely on the right track.
He exited behind a church just off Craigs Road, five minutes walk from Craigmount high school where Jeeves was the librarian. He left the tunnel, sat down for a quick cigarette and was on his way.
Shoop had had dealings in the school many years before. The last time he’d visited he had caused the main building’s slow subsidence, he’d unwittingly caused under ground flooding which softened the foundations and it slowly started sliding down the hill that it was perched on. The old building had been torn down and a new one built, which meant that Shoop didn’t know his way around this one.
He set about trying to find the whereabouts of the library by successfully bribing a particularly rough looking thirteen year old named Conrad with some cigarettes. He waited for the end of the schooling day and ventured into the building to find his prey.
Jeeves was a tall, heavy set but slim man with glasses, a thick moustache and a great love for mud coloured waistcoats with matching ties. He wore chinos and ill-fitting tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows to prevent scuffing. He had just managed to get rid of the last of his students and was busy cataloguing and bar-coding a box of second hand books from a school charity event. The books were all dog-eared with broken spines, much like the majority of other books in the library. After the school was built, the new computers purchased and every other department had managed to suck the school funds dry, there had not been much money left for books, which struck Jeeves as odd as schools primary resource was the written word.
His library was stark and cold. It was lit by over-head strip lighting, the kind that induces migraine and seemed to be sucked into the grey abyss of the carpeted floor tiles. The bookshelves were made of thin, dark grey metal and seemed to stay upright by the sheer will of Jeeves alone.
His library was empty of people and, due to it being late in the year, all was dark and quiet outside the windows. Jeeves liked this time of day in the winter. With it being so dark outside he felt like there was nothing in the world but him and his books. He thoroughly enjoyed enclosed isolation and stayed late often to take advantage of the peace.
He turned off the main lights and worked using a series of desk lamps.
After a while he finished bar-coding the books and began trying to repair the more ramshackle ones. He was tentatively applying cello-tape to a copy of Catcher in the Rye when he suddenly became aware of a looming presence behind him. He stopped working, put down the book and without turning round said, “You got here sooner than I’d anticipated Mr Winkle.”
Shoop was a little put out by this. He liked being secret and was bothered by the fact that both he and Bunty Autumn seemed to have full knowledge of his existence.
“You are going to have to tell me,” said Shoop, ”just how it is that you buggers all seem to know who I am.” His eyes bored into the back of Jeeves’ head, but Jeeves refused to turn around. “Even the most powerful; intelligence agencies in the world wouldn’t begin to have the slightest inkling of
who I am and what I do, yet you lot appear to think of me as a celebrity. I’m as fictional as Bigfoot to the entire world, and yet I’m a penguin in the zoo to you. Why is that?”
“This bothers you a bit doesn’t it, I can tell.” Said Jeeves.
“No shit Sherlock!”
“Well, all I can say, Mr Winkle, is that your puzzle of how the world works may well be missing some of its pieces.”
“Eh?”
“Exactly!”
“What do you mean Exactly? That doesn’t make any sense!” Shoop shook his head as if to clear away the cobwebs that Jeeves was knitting in his mind, “none of this is important, it’s beside the point, the point is, I suppose you know why I’m here as you seem to be so damn clever!”
“I’ve got a fair idea.” said Jeeves calmly.
“Then why the hell are you still here?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, the thing is, I’m planning on asking you some questions and if you don’t answer them to my satisfaction, then I’ll have to employ a few more severe methods. If you knew that this was the case, why are you still here?”
“As I said Mr Winkle, you got here quicker than I’d expected.”
Shoop felt a bit stupid.
“Bugger the chit-chat,” He said angrily, “I’m just going to get on with it.”