Lex wandered blearily to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of Orangina while she waited for the coffee pot to boil. She gave it a shake, popped the lid on the fridge door’s built-in opener and downed about half of it in one go. There was half a pizza in there too, left over from last night. She didn’t remember eating any of it, but distantly recalled sitting waiting for it inside Andre’s restaurant with a glass of wine. She slapped the box on to the worktop, rolled up a slice in one hand and took a bite. Tomato sauce, basil, mushrooms, Roquefort, all cold. Breakfast of champions.
She walked through to her living/working area in just her T-shirt, and sat on the edge of an armchair, surveying the disembowelled PC on the floor. The casing lay three feet from the exposed motherboard, ribbon cable spilling from the mobo like an umbilical cord, the other end of which connected it to one of her own machines. She’d set it up like that just in case Bett or anyone dropped in unexpectedly, so that it would look like she was hard at it. She glanced at the clock: just gone four. Yep, hard at it indeed.
Truth was, she’d been asleep all day.
Truth was, she’d been awake all night.
She booted up the big box, checked the lights on her router. It was getting on for decision time.
That son-of-a-bitch Willis. Why wouldn’t he tell Bett what this was about and send him the files? It was ridiculous, particularly now that Bett had told him what Lex had heard from that French thug in Scotland. ‘Everybody’s seen the video files.’ The toothpaste was out of the tube. What was there to lose in giving us a squeeze, what with us trying to help you and all?
‘Then it shouldn’t be so hard for you to procure a copy for yourself,’ Willis had replied.
The inference, as far as Bett had interpreted it, was that it wasn’t a good enough reason to proliferate – or further proliferate – copies of top-secret information. It was no more than an overheard remark, he said, second-hand at that by the time Bett was quoting it. It gave no indication of how much was really known or by whom. Lex reckoned it being overheard from someone who was trying to kidnap Ross Fleming’s goddamn niece was a pretty big indication that whatever was known was known by some heinous motherfuckers, so how’s about a heads-up for the home team? But no dice. How paranoid was this guy? And how big a secret was it that he couldn’t trust Bett with it?
Okay, all things being known, the truth was Willis ought not to trust Bett with it, given that Bett’s team was the conduit for it getting out there in the first place, but he didn’t know that. The point was … Shit, she didn’t know what the point was any more, of anything. Nothing had been straightforward since Marledoq, with the only thing making any direct sense being the blunt lesson to never, never again try and play both ends against the middle.
She had, however, given herself an out. A bluff, a piece of inspired bullshit at Chassignan, had provided her with a new option. What she had to decide now was whether to take it.
She took another bite of cold pizza and gazed again at the charade laid out at her feet.
I can check for residual data from files that might have been erased, she’d told Bett.
You can do that?
Nope, but you don’t know that, do you, smart-ass?
She didn’t have the hardware or the software, never mind the know-how to recover erased data from Fleming’s hard drive. She didn’t even have the means to determine whether or not data had been erased from any sectors of it, and that was where the dilemma lay. She had opened up a way of secretly redeeming herself: she could retrieve the files from the remote storage FTP server and claim she’d recovered them. The mystical reverence with which her abilities were regarded by the computer-illiterate meant nobody else on the team had any idea how much she knew and, thank God, even less how much she didn’t. Only Som had any kind of suss, but he didn’t poke his nose too deep because he had Alpha-geek aspirations and close discussion of her work tended to show up the limits of his knowledge. Thus, she could engage in this sham: pretend she’d been in full-on deep-hack mode, working to sift and filter buried electronic secrets – while she was actually catching up on the sleep that wouldn’t come last night, despite having spent much of the previous one awake also, parked outside Mrs Fleming’s motel.
Insomnia wasn’t a chronic problem. As a proto-hacker, her sleep patterns had seldom been regular, and certainly not dictated by the rise and set of the sun like normal, civilised humans. But there was a difference between deliberately staying awake throughout a thirty-six-hour para-meditative coding session and being unable to sleep while you lay in bed all night in the darkness. Funny what did it. For some people it was what they ate or drank; for others stress and tension. Not Lex. At times of anxiety, she had always been easily seduced by the merciful oblivion of zedding out: that sanctuary of the unconscious that unfortunately had to turf you out on your ass all too soon when morning came around. It took something headier than mere worry to keep her from her beauty sleep.
Shooting people dead at point-blank range would do it every time.
Her own personal headcount now stood at four. She used to think that repeating the experience would never be as bad as the first time, but that hadn’t turned out to be the case. The first time had been when they took down Ilianu, one of the vilest specimens of humanity she’d ever encountered. One of his maggots thought he had the drop on her in that horrible farmhouse she still had nightmares about. She was only minutes past seeing the rooms where the bastards held the girls before moving them on to their buyers, so there was little compunction to restrain her trigger finger. There was even less when the lumbering son-of-a-bitch, assuming her to be unarmed, began advancing on her with that sadistically lascivious grin.
Oh yeah, baby, I got something for you. Come get it, big boy.
She’d unloaded half the mag into him, anger, hate and fear pumping away like the slider on the pistol, all the very things Bett had tried to teach her not to feel when she was in such a situation. And when it was over, all passion spent, she understood why. For one thing, it was undisciplined, reckless even. If you’re out of control, then so is your situation, Bett had said, and he was right. When she stopped firing, she felt like she was waking from a trance, during which she’d had no awareness of her environment, her position, her colleagues, her parameters, anything: just her and the man she was shooting. Then as she watched him gurgle and twitch, it didn’t take long for anger, hate and fear to turn to relief, then for relief to turn to disgust. A dead, slaughtered human being looks like just that, no longer the thing you feared or hated, stripped of everything that drove you to kill it.
The next time had been calm, controlled, dispassionate, professional. Zeebrugge harbour, night, a container ship, Lex standing fifteen feet from a Turkish mercenary toting a Kalashnikov: put him down or in about a second and a half, it would be her gurgling and twitching on the floor.
And then Scotland.
They were going to kill a whole family. There were two of them. She had a gun, they didn’t. She had no choice, she knew, but that knowledge wasn’t doing the cocoa-and-cookies thing for her last night.
She’d gone to Maison Bla for seven, as ordered, only to be told to go home and work on Fleming’s hard drive while they went daytripping to Spain. It was a godsend. Faced with the dilemma that this task presented, she started to feel the kind of worry she could deal with, and thus procrastinatory oblivion finally beckoned.
Now that she was awake, however, it was time to decide whether to report that her day’s work had struck gold or been valiant but vain. The dilemma lay in the potential that her ‘out’ could yet become the thing that unveiled her betrayal. She didn’t know what had or hadn’t been on this hard drive. Neither did Bett, but if they got the lab-geek back successfully and it transpired that the files she ‘recovered’ had never been on his home PC, then she was going to be wide open.
And then what?
Wasn’t it about time she asked herself that, seriously? How scared was she of Bett? Answer: plenty. But rati
onally, soberly, what was she afraid that he would do if he found out? She had seen him do some horrible and merciless things – Ilianu’s detention and interrogation in what henceforth became known as the Romanian Suite being a case in point – but did she honestly think he would kill her?
Or was she actually scared that he’d simply tell her to leave?
The saddest thing was that he, the team, this, was all she had. She resented what he had turned her into. She resented the things he’d caused her to see. Most of all, she resented what he had prevented her becoming. But for better or worse, this was who she was now.
She logged on to the FTP server, selected the Marledoq files and clicked Download.
Project fuckwit
‘You know, son, it’s just occurred to me, I think this must be the most time we’ve spent together in about seven years.’
‘Is that supposed to sound like a silver lining?’
Ross looked across at his dad with a scowl and waited for the retort to register, before breaking into a smile which precipitated some welcome laughter from both of them.
It was the early hours of Friday morning. They’d been at sea now for, by his estimation, about thirty hours. The last seven or eight of these had been on a different, larger vessel with which they had rendezvoused somewhere in the Med, and the transfer had provided the worst moments since that wanker Connelly stitched them up. The first of these was in the onset of dread that accompanied the very sight of this other tub looming beyond the prow, as Ross assumed that it must represent deliverance into the hands of whoever had been on his tail from the start. Mere hollow dread, however, was a day at the fairground compared to their journey from boat to boat. Swirling winds and choppy seas dictated that no gangway could be safely deployed, so he and Dad had made the trip across the waves by breeches buoy, sliding along a cable suspended from a tiny pulley-wheel by a terrifyingly insubstantial-looking harness. It was, however, the only part of their treatment that he could reasonably describe as inhumane.
Their arrival on the other side was overseen from a gantry by a tall, relaxed, middle-aged man, elegantly dressed in a suit that probably cost more than Ross had cumulatively spent on clothes his entire life. He exuded an incongruous geniality allied to an underlying sense of power; good-natured because he was unused to being displeased. There was something almost dandified about him, supremely lacking in self-consciousness. He watched them swing aboard then made his way down to the deck to greet them.
After Ross stopped vomiting, his relief at remaining alive was enhanced by learning that he was still, for the time being, travelling. Not entirely hopefully, it had to be said, but not yet arriving either. The smaller boat, his new host explained, had been a charter, merely conveying them to his vessel where, he advised them, they would remain for as much as a week.
‘Uncertainty breeds desperation,’ he told them in lightly Euroaccented English. ‘Uncertainty about the duration of detention doubly so. I do not wish you to do anything desperate, and given what I am informed about your intellect, I do not expect you to do anything stupid. I would like you to understand that I have nothing to gain from mistreating you, unless it becomes necessary to prevent your escape.’
‘I understand that my dad’s nose was broken bringing us here. Does that count as mistreatment? Just so that we can agree on terms.’
‘Yes, Felipe told me. Mr Connelly does not work for me. These men do. They will show you to your quarters. Please, make yourselves comfortable. If there is anything you require, do not be afraid to ask.’
‘Yeah, sure. Could you sort me out with a couple of Mac-10s and about two hundred rounds of ammunition?’
‘I’m afraid not. I don’t deal in small arms, Mr Fleming.’
They’d each been taken to a spacious cabin, one on either topside of the hull, into which they were not locked, and it was made clear that they were free to move around the vessel as they pleased, unless barred by secure doors.
‘If we catch you anywhere we both know you shouldn’t be, the pleasure cruise is over and you go steerage,’ an armed guard explained.
In the hours since boarding, they’d been supplied with fresh clothes, towels, drinks and the best food Ross had eaten in days: a generous platter of grilled fish fillets, squid, prawns and taramasalata. One of the guards must have had some training as a chef, Ross opined, though this failed to encourage Dad to eat more than a few tentative mouthfuls, several times mumbling about rather having breaded haddock.
Following their repast, they were invited to follow a guard along to a spacious area near the stern, where several more of the troops were gathered. The deck boasted sofas and tables, a bar and an enormous plasma widescreen TV. It looked as though they were waiting on some kind of formal address from the boss, who was noticeably absent. However, shortly after Ross and his dad were invited to take seats, someone pointed a remote at the TV and brought the screen to life.
Despite the size of the thing and the clarity of the digital satellite picture, it took Ross a good few moments to realise he was looking at the Camp Nou stadium, where the Barcelona–Celtic game was about to kick off. It was only yesterday he’d been in the city, but the match had been the last thing on his mind then, so out here, wherever the hell here was, it was like looking at a transmission through a wormhole in time. This had happened years ago, hadn’t it? Way, way back, and in another world. It couldn’t be live tonight, beamed before them on this boat.
But it was. And thus he and his dad spent easily the most surreal couple of hours of their lives, watching Celtic grind out their most famous result in years, beers in hand, couched in the opulent luxury of a multi-million-pound yacht, in the company of several trained killers probably armed with enough firepower to mount a coup.
‘You know, I’m actually quite glad of all the guns,’ Dad said, as the match clock ran into the closing ten minutes, ‘because they give me something else to worry about. If I was concentrating exclusively on the fitba, I’d have had a bloody heart attack by now.’
The final whistle was as bittersweet as any moment of victory could ever be. As the game ran into injury time, Ross allowed himself to be drawn fully into what was on the screen until the surroundings faded from thought and vision. All his hopes and anxieties became channelled into one thing: that Barcelona would not breach the Celtic defence. Then when the referee blew to end the contest, even as his dad stood up and hugged him, the meaningless mirage dissolved and reality broke upon him as mercilessly as waking from any perfect dream. It seemed to take his dad a wee minute longer to undergo the same effect, but he got there soon enough, and looked a little embarrassed for it.
It had been a false conduit for their emotions, but it had channelled them nonetheless, and left them both a little drained. All but one of the guards dispersed soon after, though his remit appeared to involve clearing up empties rather than any great vigilance over the prisoners.
Unbidden, they made their way back to their quarters. No shepherding or prompting would have been required: Ross felt a need for some form of sanctuary, even one as illusory as his four-star jail cell.
They both paused at Ross’s door. It didn’t seem right to be alone, despite the temptations of somewhere comfortable to kip.
‘I’ve got a kettle in here. I’ll fix us up a cuppa,’ he invited. His dad nodded with a sad smile.
They said little while Ross boiled the kettle and looked out the tea bags. Dad made a couple of tentative gambits about the game, but it seemed pointless. The very momentousness of the result served only to underline how irrelevant it was. His dad was markedly aware of that, but it sounded very much like he just didn’t know what else to say.
It was in this growing silence that he ventured his remark about it being the longest they had spent together for a while.
‘Some story, eh?’ his dad remarked, shaking his head.
‘At least you’ll be able to top the lot down the pub when they start asking where everybody watched the Barca game,’ Ross
replied. They both laughed a little, but the unspoken caveat hung heavily in the air.
If you live to tell the tale.
‘Aye, not too shabby,’ Dad observed. He was indicating his immediate surroundings, but clearly meant the vessel in general. ‘There’s worse places to be held prisoner, I dare say.’
‘True, but I can’t help remembering Dr No.‘
‘Why?’
‘He laid on plush surroundings and a first-class meal for James Bond. It was to ensure he’d be well-rested and fuelled up so that he’d be fit to endure the maximum torment before finally snuffing it.’
‘Cheery thought, son.’
‘Not one I’d entertain seriously, though. Whoever our man is, he’s not interested in feeding us to his pet piranha. All of this doesn’t come cheap, so he doesn’t want me for fish-food. We’re being very well looked after because he doesn’t want to damage the merchandise. I’m worth a fortune to him.’
‘How? What does he want with you?’
‘He doesn’t want me at all. If he did, then I wouldn’t have spent the evening watching the football. But he knows a man who does. In fact, my guess is he knows quite a few men who do. And when the time comes, he’s going to hand me over to whichever of them pays him the most.’
‘But why? What is this really all about, Ross?’
‘I can’t tell you, Dad. Just knowing about this could …’
‘What? Put me in danger? Do you not think I’m there already?’
Ross couldn’t help but laugh. It was, as they say, a fair shout. He stuck the kettle on for another cup and got talking.
He blamed his provenance. Scots just can’t help inventing things. Leave one alone on a single-palm desert island and by the end of the week he’ll have built a paddle-craft using every available resource, right down to hollowed coconut shells for a propeller. Maybe it was because Scotland was such a miserable place to live that the drive to improve one’s day-to-day existence was utterly imperative. What the hell got invented in the Caribbean? Nothing. But Scotland? You name it. And Ross often would, with relish, particularly if some colleague or acquaintance made the catastrophic mistake of being in any way disrespectful of his country’s standing in the modern world.
All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye Page 27