All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  As the years passed, though, she found herself rationalising many of her own dreams away, and having dreams for her kids instead. These proved no less a source of frustration, but at least helped her see how daft some of her own notions had always been. Sports cars and casinos were just a wee girl’s fantasy, but they had endured in her mind as icons that had come to represent another self she could yet aspire to be. They symbolised her belief that she was still young, that she could still do something more with her life, one day.

  Going back to college, for instance. That was meant to be the big new beginning. She had no inclination to resume her original studies, instead deciding that someone who had read as many books as she ought to have a crack at English Literature. She applied to Glasgow Uni and received an offer conditional upon topping up her qualifications, including an improved and more up-to-date Higher English. This meant a year of night classes, which was no hardship as it regularly got her out of the house and away from half-man-half-armchair and the relentless tyranny of Sky Sports. Having waited this long to restart her life, what was another year? Well, another year was time enough for Michelle, who’d graduated from Strathclyde in Pharmacy and was working at the Royal Infirmary, to meet Doctor Right, marry him and conceive their first child.

  Jane tried not to dwell on the rather mocking sense of déjà vu when she calculated that Michelle was due around about third-term in her first year as a mature student, and pressed ahead with her studies. She sat – and passed – her exams, amid the considerable distraction of Rachel being born, then enjoyed a long summer, during which it became clear that she was indispensable to her daughter. And if there was any doubt in her mind where her responsibilities lay, Michelle getting pregnant again, before the autumn leaves fell, dispelled it utterly.

  This time she had no regrets. It put into perspective what was important, and besides, she told herself, there was still time for … whatever. Michelle planned to go back to work after the second baby, so both the kids would be going off to nursery when they were two. Jane was only forty-three that autumn. She was still young; life had plenty left to offer. She’d resume her degree one day, along with whatever else she wanted to embark upon. Broadened horizons, new beginnings. One day.

  Michelle did go back, taking a job at Hairmyres Hospital once Thomas had started nursery. That was about six weeks back, just before Margaret laid down that inescapable truth which, deep down, Jane had known all along.

  There is no ‘one day’. There is only today, and today wasn’t about sports cars or casinos or degrees or new beginnings. Today was about hoovering the carpet, trailing round the supermarket and cooking stovies, before vegetating mindlessly all evening in front of the TV next to a man she still lived with only because neither of them had anywhere else to go.

  Us grannies ken the score.

  Aye. We lost.

  The specialist

  Lex was stirred from her daydreaming by the sensation of the chopper losing altitude. She’d been watching the rain streak the window to her left, there being nothing else to look at as they’d been flying through cloud for the past ten minutes.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to ask, how do pilots know where they’re going when they can’t see twenty feet in front?’ she enquired of Rebekah, sitting to her right at the controls.

  ‘Navigational instruments and the altimeter let you know where you are. You don’t think in terms of what’s directly in front – it’s not like driving a car. You think in terms of what’s five miles in front. It’s all about vectors and trajectories.’

  ‘Yeah, I got the navigational concept. But how does thinking in terms of five miles in front help you avoid some other sky-borne object that’s a hundred feet ahead inside the cloudbank, or when it’s pitch-black outside?’

  ‘Oh, that’s generally where air traffic control comes in. Flights are all logged, airspace allocated – you got corridors at different altitudes.’

  ‘Generally? What’s the exception?’

  Rebekah smiled. ‘Unofficial, unauthorised aircraft flying at ultra-low altitude to evade the ATC systems and thus remaining off the charts.’

  ‘Damn, I hate it when I know what you’re about to say. And what do those aircraft use?’

  Rebekah laughed. ‘Radar, what else? You see that panel there?’

  Lex looked at the little LED screen where Rebekah was pointing. She understood the principle but was neither impressed nor assured by the lack of detail. There was a white triangle in the centre, picked out against the blue background, two arrows flanking it, each above two decks of numbers.

  ‘Anything in the sky within range will show up, with its altitude and velocity cited beneath the blip. Quit worrying just because you can’t see tail lights or lines on a highway. You’re only seeing clouds because you’re only looking at clouds.’

  ‘I think I’d want something more than a tiny blinking light to let me know there was a Seven-Forty-Seven bearing down on us at five hundred miles per hour. What are you seeing?’

  ‘Clear passage to our refuelling stop, ETA three minutes.’

  ‘Okay. Just as long as you’re also seeing pylons, steeples and cliff faces.’

  ‘Relax. We’re not as low as you think. Just wait for the second leg if you wanna see low.’

  Lex slammed her head back against the seat and sighed. ‘Scroll up to my previous entry re knowing what you’re about to say.’

  ‘Oh, grow a spine, girl. We’re still in French airspace. We haven’t even done anything illegal yet, never mind dangerous.’

  ‘What about flying unlogged and unauthorised below … etcetera etcetera?’

  ‘I was pulling your chain. This part of the flight is logged and authorised. It’s the next part that won’t be.’

  ‘So we haven’t flown below ATC radar yet? Oh God, don’t answer that.’

  ‘Scroll up yourself, I already did.’

  ‘And you actually relish the prospect of flying over the North Sea at roughly the same altitude as a skimming pebble?’

  ‘Not a whole bunch, but I relish it more than the prospect of being escorted to an airbase by RAF fighter pilots armed with heat-seeking air-to-air missiles.’

  ‘Copy that,’ Lex agreed.

  They touched down on schedule. Having descended through a grey abyss of cumulo-nimbus, it was a relief to finally emerge into clear air, even if there wasn’t so much of it between them and terra firma. Rebekah landed the bird close to a hangar at a small private airfield, then killed the engines and waited for a fuelling truck to make its way across the runway from next to the flimsy-looking office building.

  Lex stepped outside to get some air. There was a light drizzle blowing around so she didn’t stay long, but she needed a few moments’ wandering where it was cool, with some wind in her face and her feet on the ground. She’d never been scared of flying before, nor would she say she particularly was now, but her perspective upon it had changed in recent months since riding up in the cockpit with Rebekah. She’d never felt quite so safe again in any car after her first driving lesson, suddenly bereft of the protective illusion afforded by complete ignorance. Obviously she’d never been allowed to take the controls of the helicopter, but simply being up in that thing with Rebekah had caused the same effect: the magic spell had been broken.

  That, however, only accounted for a fraction of her anxiety about this trip. In fact, the moments of visceral terror awaiting her on their low-level scoot across the English Channel and the North Sea would at least provide momentary vacations from worrying about everything else.

  ‘You okay?’ Rebekah asked, having docked the fuel hose and given the go-ahead to the truck-driver to start the pump.

  Lex nodded.

  ‘It’ll be cool,’ Rebekah assured her. ‘These things practically fly themselves. So much technology. One pilot and a dog, remember?’

  ‘I remember. And it makes me think about what we in the computer world call the Airplane Rule: a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine pr
oblems as a single-engine one. Complexity increases the possibility of failure.’

  ‘Good job we aren’t flying in an airplane, then, huh?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I’m sure the principle doesn’t apply to egg-beaters. How many engines does it have?’

  ‘Two,’ she admitted with a naughty-little-girl grin.

  ‘Figures. Tell you the truth, though, the aircraft and the sub-radar low-jinks don’t have me worried as much as the reason we need all that.’

  ‘Well, I know the etiquette about personal questions, but I’m guessing you don’t want to end up being questioned by the British authorities any more than I do. The sub-radar low-jinks are the price we pay for secrecy. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘The secrecy angle is covered. Look at the documentation we’re carrying: fake passports, drivers’ licences, credit cards – complete ID work-up. We could both make this trip on commercial transport under assumed identities and no record would show that Alexis Sinclair Richardson or Rebekah Kristine Bardell were ever here. The reason we’re doing it under the radar is that Air Bett is less antsy than the commercial carriers about itty bitty things like toting handguns and live ammunition on board their aircraft.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll tell me different, Lex, but I can’t imagine you’d feel better about walking into this thing without a gun.’

  ‘I’m pretty certain I’m carrying it for more than reassurance. That’s what I’m nervous about. It would have been cheaper, simpler and safer to stick me on a plane. Bett sent me this way, with you, on a private helicopter, under the radar, so that when I got there I’d have a gun in my hand. That’s a lot of trouble for just-in-case.’

  ‘No, Bett sent you this way, with me, on a private helicopter because he has a private helicopter and a trained pilot at his disposal. He did it because he can, and thus it’s the simplest solution. No disrespect, Lex, but if Bett really thought we were heading for a shooting match, do you think he’d have sent you and not Nuno?’

  Lex had to concede the point. Rebekah was right about this, just like she was right that the flight would be cool; terrifying, but ultimately cool. Unfortunately, it was actually neither of these things that had Lex’s guts in spasm, her brain dropping packets and her eyes looking over her shoulder. They were merely plausible explanations to offer Rebekah when she noticed.

  Truth was, Lex had been suffering from a feeling of impending disaster since the moment this mission began, and nobody could reassure her over her fears because for anyone to know what she was afraid of would require the worst of them to have come true.

  In fact, the feeling had started before she even knew what the mission was, when Bett turned up unheralded at her apartment. Bett, to her knowledge, never turned up unheralded at anyone’s apartment. If he needed you tout de suite, he paged you and you went to him, right that second, no matter where you were, what time it was, who you were with or whether you’d come yet. If for any reason he needed to visit you at home, it was the same drill, and you had, on average, about ten minutes to get ready. Whether you spent that time putting on some clothes, tidying the place or improvising an explanation to erstwhile lovers and inebriated houseguests as to why they had to leave the building at four in the morning was entirely up to you. For him to just show up and ring the doorbell was unprecedented and uncharacteristic, both of which she took as surely indicative of only one thing.

  She had been working on the procurement of some electrical schematics and architectural blueprints pertaining to the vault and safety-deposit box galleries of a bank in Lisbon. They weren’t planning any practical demonstrations; she just had to report on how much technical information she was able to acquire and what level of expertise had been necessary in doing so. The answers at that point would have been, respectively, ‘Not much so far,’ and, ‘More than this lamer has been able to exercise,’ with a rider that things might look different in a few hours if she could get this crufted-together code she was wrestling to do the needful. Consequently, she was in what real programmers called deep-hack mode – interrupts locked out – when Bett rang her bell. This, in fact, meant he had to ring her bell four times before she was drawn sufficiently close to the surface as to be able to hear it. Naturally, he was not delighted by the delay, though the displeasure in his face was nothing compared to the revulsion he must have seen staring back in hers. Happily, he’d seen the depressurisation-trauma effect of her being peremptorily yanked back from deep-hack mode before, and assumed that this was all he was seeing, thus failing to register her genuine terror and conspicuous guilt at the mere sight of him standing in her lobby.

  There’d been a number of ‘This is it’ moments since her act of moonlight freelancing on the Tiger Team job at Marledoq. The instances had depleted with time, beginning with the paranoid expectation that Bett’s every greeting was an overture towards challenging her about her deception; then graduating towards making the same assumption only when he did something slightly unusual, such as compliment her work or offer her a smile. With three months having passed, her more rational side was starting to hold sway in its bid to convince her that if Bett knew anything, he’d have done something about it by now. Her less rational, but defensively cautious, side was nonetheless still aware that Bett was the kind of calculatingly twisted individual who might keep his powder dry – and his transgressor in excruciating suspense – before finally meting out punishment just when she thought she was in the clear.

  Up until then, Marledoq had borne no consequences, least of all the ones she’d bargained on. Yeah, why wasn’t that a surprise. She’d been way too eager to grab at the bait, and once the deal was struck had thereafter been more worried about how she was going to pull off her side of it than about whether she was ever likely to see the reciprocal back-end. Man, did she ever walk into that with her pants down and her wallet open. She’d known it, truly, deep down: face it, girl, when she went to that hand-over she’d have been surprised if she was sent away with anything more than ‘Thanks’ and ‘I’ll call you’. But still she’d needed to try. Maybe it was an act of faith and maybe it was just an act of defiance, but she’d been compelled to give it a shot.

  And she’d done it, too. That was what made her feel so dumb about walking away empty-handed. She’d been smart enough to acquire the files, but not smart enough to make the most of it once she had them. Why did she just cough up like a good little girl? Why didn’t she play hard, or even halfway cute? ‘Sure, I got the memory stick, but you don’t get your hands on it until I see something more than a promise in return.’

  Yeah, right. Like she could have pulled that shit off. He’d have laughed in her face, then probably killed her and raided her apartment to get what he needed. In that respect, she was actually kind of relieved that nothing further had come of it, that it was over and she wasn’t going to hear from him again. She had no idea who she was dealing with – or even what his name was, or how he knew what he did about her. From the moment she agreed to steal the files, she had a real sense of getting in over her head, and, coming from someone who worked with Bett, that was saying something.

  So she hadn’t played hard and she hadn’t played cute, but she hadn’t played it entirely stupid either. She didn’t give up the stick before making copies of the files, albeit as much out of habit as any kind of strategic thinking. Lex was an obsessive when it came to backing up data, and the harder it had been to create or acquire something, the more insurance she required against it being wiped. Given what she’d gone through to swipe the Marledoq files, there was no way she was going to entrust their integrity to a flimsy USB stick. She’d copied the portable memory to her laptop immediately when she got back on the chopper, then transferred the data to the PC in her apartment as soon as she got home.

  It had just been a matter of back-up, nothing more underhand, and nothing he hadn’t anticipated anyway.

  ‘I’ve no way of knowing whether you’ve copied these files and you’ve no way of proving you haven’t,’ he said. ‘But
if you do have copies, I’d advise you to erase them right away and to do so without looking at them. What’s on them won’t mean much to you anyway, but as I always say, what you don’t know, you can’t be tortured to reveal.’

  She hadn’t examined them, not even the DivX audio-visual files, not having needed any dire warnings to reason that it was best for her own protection to be only the courier. She was paranoid enough about saying something that would give her away to Bett, a danger that would be greatly exacerbated by a burden of knowledge she wasn’t supposed to have. One wrong word – or rather one informed word – and she might have a lot of explaining to do.

  Nor had she felt remotely comfortable about storing this stuff on her hard drive at home, despite the data being re-encrypted, the file-extensions altered to disguise their nature and the whole cache buried somewhere so deep in the hierarchy that nobody would ever stumble across them unless they really knew what they were doing. Erasing the files seemed like the most logical and sensible thing to do because, once they were gone, so was the evidence of what she’d done, meaning she could draw a line under the whole thing.

  However, logic and sense were not enough to overcome Lex’s instinct and compulsion: when it came to data, she only erased what she was sure she’d never need again, which had thus far included only mislabelled MP3s and emails offering to make her penis twice as long. For Christ’s sake, she still had a CD up on a shelf, full of save-game files so she could pick up where she left off if she ever felt like reinstalling Doom II. There was no way she was trashing the Marledoq files for the sake of most probably only fleeting peace of mind.

  There was a compromise: if she wouldn’t be remotely comfortable storing the files locally, then she would be comfortable storing the files remotely. She copied them to an FTP server and committed its address to memory, before wiping all trace of the server and the Marledoq files from her system. After that they were out of sight and increasingly out of mind.