All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye
Page 1
Also by Christopher Brookmyre
Quite Ugly One Morning
Country of the Blind
Not the End of the World
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night
Boiling a Frog
A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away
The Sacred Art of Stealing
Be My Enemy
A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil
Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks
A Snowball in Hell
Pandaemonium
Where the Bodies are Buried
When the Devil Drives
Bedlam
Bred in the Bone (published in the UK as Flesh Wounds)
Dead Girl Walking
Black Widow
The Last Hack
all
fun and
games
until
somebody
loses
an eye
christopher
brookmyre
Copyright © 2005 by Christopher Brookmyre
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
‘Teenage Wristband’ written by Greg Dulli. From the Twilight Singers album Blackberry Belle. Copyright © 2003 Kali Nichta Music (BMI).
Lyrics reproduced by kind permission of Greg Dulli.
www.thetwilightsingers.com
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Little, Brown UK
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: July 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2792-1
eISBN 978-0-8021-6572-5
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Hilary Hale and Caroline Dawnay,
without whom …
Thanks: Marisa, Greg Dulli, Roger Cantwell and
Duncan Spilling for fitting all those words on the cover.
Special thanks also to Calvin for their song Supercar,
which resonated so hauntingly around the time
I conceived this little fairy tale.
I’ve allowed myself to lead this little life, when inside me there was so much more.
Shirley Valentine, by Willy Russell
The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.
Nietzsche
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Christopher Brookmyre
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Toyz
Sports cars and casinos
The specialist
Ride, then
Abduction: how to do it properly
Unsafe building
The land of do as you please
Dislocation
Bhoys n the hood
Vital away fixture
Project fuckwit
The perfect apprentice
A tale of a tub
I, spy
Oil and water
Decent, normal, sensible girls
A Basque tale (old as time?)
Stolen glimpses
Twilight and dark water
One last bullet
The homer
Back Cover
Prologue
Toyz
‘It would encourage me, you know, to think … or rather it would comfort me, no, wrong word, well, maybe the right word, but it would, you know, inspire me but at the same time sort of soothe me in an all-is-well-in-heaven-and-earth kind of way to think, ah, what am I trying to say here?’
Som was sitting on an upturned black flight case, rocking it back ten or fifteen degrees as he rolled his heels on the frosted gravel in front of Bett’s mansion. Lex wished he wouldn’t do that, really wished he wouldn’t do that. Okay, it was Som’s case, Som’s stuff, and maybe he was cool with the contents getting clattered in the less-than-improbable event that his feet slipped and put him on his skinny Thai ass, but that wasn’t the point. It was bad practice. There were several black flight cases sitting out there with the three of them in the cold tonight, as on any such night, and Lex didn’t much like the thought of Som using the vessel of her fragile, delicately packed and fastidiously inventoried kit as a makeshift shooting stick. Weighing further upon her discomfiture was the fact that Armand’s flight cases were occasionally known to accommodate materials sufficient to denude the immediate vicinity of any standing structure, mammalian life, or even vegetation.
‘Som, you’re 404-ing,’ she warned him.
‘Sorry. I’m just saying, wouldn’t you love to believe that somewhere in this world there really is at least one – just one – hollowed-out volcano containing a super high-tech ops base under the command of a fully fledged evil genius? I mean, I could live with all the havoc the evil genius might wreak simply to know there was a facility like that in existence. It would just make the world a more fantastical place, don’t you reckon? In a Santa-really-does-exist-after-all kind of way, you know?’
‘Would it need to have a retractable roof for space-rockets and nuclear missiles to launch through?’ Armand asked, bringing a measured irritation to bear in the precision of his accented pronunciation.
‘I’d settle for a submarine dock,’ Som responded, with an equally measured, deliberate guilelessness.
‘So,’ the Frenchman said, ‘the thought of an actual, existent, staffed and fully functioning underground base doesn’t, how would you say, blow your hair back? It must be inside a hollowed-out volcano and run by a cackling megalomaniac or it’s merely part of the crushing ordinariness of life’s relentlessly drab ennui?’
‘Not at all,’ Som protested. ‘I didn’t say that. Did I say that?’
‘No, but you could be more “up” about it,’ Armand complained. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this, you know. Really looking forward to it.’
Lex smiled to herself at the sight of Armand – mercenary, soldier, explosives adept and trained killer – putting on a petted lip and acting like a disappointed child for the express purpose of winding up a scrawny adolescent techno-geek half his age.
‘I’m “up”,’ Som insisted. ‘I’m extremely up. I’m looking forward to it as much as you. I’m just, you know, insulating myself against disappointment.’
‘A pitifully negative approach to life,’ Armand condemned.
‘Easy for you to say. When I was a kid, my parents took me to Tunisia, and we went to visit the place they filmed Star Wars. I was eight years old, and—’
‘Pitifully negative,’ Armand repeated. ‘And cowardly to boot.’
‘I’m just saying, I’d love to believe it
’ll be all chrome and glass and LED read-outs everywhere, but I’m preparing myself in case it’s just a quarry with a roof.’
‘Silence, coward. Be gone. Alexis, ma chère, when Rebekah gets here with our transport, I’m going to sit up front with our designated driver. Sorry to land you with Som, but I plan on enjoying myself this evening and I don’t want him “bumming me out”.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Lex said, rolling her eyes. ‘That‘s why you want to sit beside Rebekah. Forget it. It’ll be girls in the front, boys in the back. I’ve been waiting years for some female solidarity around here.’
Armand waved dismissively at her, but knew she wouldn’t be giving ground, just as she knew he had no intention of sitting anywhere but next to his playmate. There had to be twenty years between them, but as Som and Armand’s relationship seemed to be based upon bringing out each other’s inner thirteen-year-old, the age gap was irrelevant to their inseparable (and often insufferable) camaraderie. It was the female solidarity she was less sure about. Rebekah had been with the outfit a month now and, despite being the only other female, they’d barely engaged in anything other than the most perfunctory of exchanges.
This was pretty familiar, however. Lex had seen it before, in herself and, more recently, in Somboon. The blasé and cocky figure who was so nonchalantly leaning on easily fifty thousand dollars’ worth of electronics, as he bantered about the interior fittings of the underground weapons facility they were about to assault, might fail to recognise the hunched and introverted serial nail-biter who’d barely managed anything more articulate than gaze-averted mumbles for the first month in their company. Rebekah had been less physically withdrawn than Som was during those earliest days, and she looked unused to shrinking from anyone’s gaze, not least because she was five-nine and a looker. She was always straight-backed and forthright in her posture, but this struck Lex as a conditioned reflex, a body-language statement of ‘no comment’. When she did speak, her accent was American, the delivery a little clipped and forced, like discipline was overruling shyness and more than a little fear. Som had once referred to her as ‘the she-bot’, a throwaway remark that nonetheless accurately identified something automated about her behaviour.
Rebekah had been unquestionably scared, nervous of her new environment and untrusting of its apparent security; noticeably starting at telephones and doorbells and, rather curiously, at overhead aircraft. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or what used to be known as plain old shell-shock, any observer might reasonably have diagnosed, but Lex could identify the symptoms of a more specific anxiety: that of the fugitive. The girl was still waiting for a trapdoor to open beneath her.
‘Lex, you’re welcome to sit with Rebekah, far as I’m concerned,’ Som said. ‘I figure “the Transport Manager” has gotta have some serious driving skillz. She’s gonna be throwing that bus around, man. I don’t want a front-row seat.’
‘I could hear that z, Som,’ Lex warned him. ‘You’ve got to drop the leet speak. Seriously. I’m the hacker here.’
‘I’m so grateful to the American cultural imperialists that they have made English the international language of code-crunchers and keypad monkeys,’ Armand said with a sigh, the steam of his breath billowing affectedly in the moonlight. ‘It would pain me too much to hear French so vandalised.’
‘Ah, bullshit,’ Som replied. ‘French is just too effete-sounding to be of any use with technology. I mean, listen: ordinateur. That sounds like something that runs on steam, with, like, brass fittings and a big wooden plinth.’
‘Exactly. You describe elegance and grace, agelessness and finery. That is French. Plastic, fibreglass, coils of tangled cable, porno download, shoot-em-up – English, English, English.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Encore, Anglais, Anglais, Anglais.’
‘Our new Transport Manager.’ That was how Rebekah had been introduced by Bett, with their leader’s typically cryptic brevity. Each one of them came here with two things: a talent and a past. Everybody would find out the former soon enough, but only Bett would be privy to the latter.
Bett knew everyone’s past, but nobody knew his. There were fragments one could piece together, clues in remarks and logical assumptions, but they didn’t render a whole that was either coherent or remotely vivid. Some military involvement, obviously. Police work, here in France and possibly further afield. No wife, no children, no siblings or parents ever referred to. Multilingual. First language: pick one from three. Accent unplaceable. Provenance unknowable. A cipher, and yet known in certain influential circles. Private, and yet highly connected. Cold, and yet conscientiously loyal. Solitary, and yet surrounding himself with cohorts, generally much younger, who were energetic and often immature.
Bett collected them, brought to his attention by shadowy contacts and murkily submerged channels of information. Rescued them, no question, from each of their secret pasts, but he kept hold of those secrets too, an unspoken but ever-looming means of leverage. His employees were thus a remarkable raggle-taggle of waifs and strays, who found themselves grateful but beholden, and not a little scared. Lex didn’t know anyone else’s story for certain, but guessed they would share a number of elements, prominent among them a precipitous epiphany regarding the price a single rash act could exact from what one only now realised had been a bright future.
In her case, she put it down to adolescent impetuousness and misdirected anger. Mistakes we all made on the road to adulthood, lessons we could only learn first hand. Nineteen was a difficult age. Anything beyond twelve, in fact, was a difficult age, but turning nineteen stuck in the mind as being especially tough – something to do with her parents’ marriage breaking up around that particular birthday, which happened to be September 12th 2001. Adolescent impetuousness. Alienation. Despair. Misdirected anger. A common enough story. You let your feelings get the better of you and you do something that makes sense at the time, but which will have far more damaging consequences than you have the vision or clarity to foresee from your emotional and immature perspective. Such as getting shit-faced and totalling your dad’s car, deliberately screwing up your exams, selling off your mom’s heirloom jewellery, or causing an overseas emergency and mid-level international diplomatic crisis from inside your Toronto bedroom.
Yeah. Oops, huh?
Seemed like a compelling idea at the time. Her own private act of post 9-11 anger, prompted largely by the war in Afghanistan and not at all by her parents’ marriage disintegrating. Afghanistan. That’s where they were bombing. What the hell was there to bomb in Afghanistan? Wouldn’t they have to send some army engineers over there to build some shit first, kinda to make the bombing runs worthwhile? Nineteen of the hijackers were Saudis. Bin Laden was a Saudi. The money was Saudi, the ideological pressure was Saudi. So let’s bomb Afghanistan. Fuck that.
She shut down a power station near Jedda and halted production in two major oilfields for close to eight hours. It was embarrassingly easy. In fact, if it had been even slightly harder, maybe she’d have stopped to think a little more about just what the hell she was doing. It didn’t even take very long, nor was it a particularly cute or elegant hack. She just enslaved a couple of home PCs somewhere in Kuwait and used them as bots to orchestrate a crude, worm-led, denial-of-service email attack. This predictably led the on-site techs to shut down and reboot all but the core operating systems required to keep the station online, conveniently isolating and identifying the masked ports she needed access to in order to really screw things up.
There was predictable panic at the business end over motive, perpetrators and what the attack might be a precursor to. Al Qaeda? Iraq? Israel? The US? Calls were made, denials issued, intelligence sources tapped. Fighter jets, she later learned, were put on standby in at least two countries. But while all this was happening, some über-geek in Finland, hastily retained by an oil company, was following a clumsily discarded trail of evidence all the way back to that notorious global aggressor, Canada.
What do you m
ean you never heard about it on the news?
Embarrassment stings far less if there are fewer observers, and international embarrassment is no different. Neither Canada nor Saudi were ever going to look good over this one, and they knew it would be mutually convenient to write off their losses and cover it up. Countries did it all the time, though it was easier when it was unilateral. A couple of months back, for instance, the US had misplaced a Harrier jump jet, and decided that avoiding scrutiny of the circumstances was worth more than however many million the hardware would cost to replace. Lessons were no doubt learned, private apologies and assurances granted, but, officially, nothing happened, a position that ironically might have been harder to maintain had they actually apprehended the perpetrator.
Nobody heard about it on the news, though that didn’t mean nobody knew. Bett sure knew, like he knew oh so many things, and he knew early enough to tip her off that she was hours away from being arrested.
Ah, yes, there was a memorable little interlude. Was she ever done wishing she could experience those fun few moments again, as she contemplated what some petulant keystrokes had wrought for herself in the big, wide world. He informed her by email, attaching copies of confidential correspondence, transcripts of briefings, damage reports, estimates of financial implications, projected costs of security upgrading and increased insurance premiums. A lot of very powerful, very important and very serious people would be looking for retribution over this, and that was just at the Canadian end. It looked like the last screaming tantrum of her teen years was going to hamstring her adulthood. She could see college disappearing from the horizon and prison looming up in its place. She could see a weary and crushed version of herself released in five to seven, subject to restraining orders forbidding her access to computers, the one thing in her life that she knew how to make sense of. She could see a long career in waitressing, serving coffee to the people who actually mattered, before slouching home to a shitty apartment filled with laundry and regrets.