The Fail Safe

by Jack Heath

  ‘I have to go to my locker,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ Fero said.

  She stopped and turned around. ‘What do you want, Fero?’

  He hesitated. He wanted to say that he knew what she had been through – what she was still going through. Not just the blade, not just the pain, but the nightmares afterwards. The strange, irrational shame. The fear that at any moment, armed men would emerge from the shadows, grab him, and carry him right back to the torture chamber.

  But he couldn’t say any of that. What if she had been turned? What if after her interrogation she had been threatened or bribed into spying for the Library? She was a Kamauan. She couldn’t be trusted.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I’ll see you later.’

  Relief flashed across her face and she walked quickly away. He was a reminder of what had happened that night – she wanted nothing to do with him.

  His next class was Kamauan history. Ms Tilya had been missing for two weeks, and had been replaced by a man whose lessons were much less subversive. He barely glanced up from the state-mandated lesson plan.

  Fero sat in angry silence as his fellow students blamed all of Kamau’s problems on his country. They talked openly about a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Besmar. The teacher nodded as though that were a reasonable solution.

  Troy Maschenov had left school at age ten, but his military training had featured some classes in geopolitics. He had learned that the Kamauan government was made up of dangerous lunatics who flouted international law and would destroy Besmar at the first opportunity. But he hadn’t realised that the citizens of Kamau were equally bloodthirsty. The government was not a dictatorship. The population was not oppressed, and the elections were real. Nina Grigieva, the ruthless Kamauan president, was a perfect representative of her people.

  The worst part was knowing that after his brainwashing, he had been almost as bad as his classmates. He never suggested bombing Besmar, but he wouldn’t have spoken up if someone else had proposed it. The Library hadn’t just made him believe he wasn’t Besmari. They had made him believe that Besmaris weren’t human beings.

  At lunchtime Fero sat alone, eating a small part of his rations, watching these same kids kick a soccer ball around. As though they hadn’t just suggested killing a million people to achieve peace.

  The rest of the day’s classes passed quickly. His grades no longer mattered, so he paid no attention to what the teachers were saying, unless they addressed him directly. Instead he rehearsed in his head, going over and over this afternoon’s plan. He would only get one chance to escape; a failed attempt would see him sent right back to Velechnya. Would the Library try to erase his identity again? Or would they simply execute him this time? He tried not to let this thought distract him.

  Before he left the school, Fero went into the bathroom and pulled the grey jumper on over his school shirt. He put his green blazer back on to conceal the change. There was nothing he could do about the dark green trousers yet.

  Fero returned to the train station, his bag full of assignments he would never do and permission notes Zuri and Wilt would never see. He was hyper-alert, watching everyone out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t let himself be arrested now. Not when he was so close to freedom.

  He boarded the train. There weren’t quite as many empty seats as this morning, but enough. No sign of the old woman with the bleach-blonde hair. He rode the train for a couple of minutes and got off at the station under Wilt and Zuri’s apartment building.

  There it was: the platform, the escalator, the graffiti marking the CCTV blind spot. The last place he would ever live as Fero Dremovich.

  He dug one of the batteries out of his pocket. Nine volts wasn’t much, but if the steel wool connected the positive and negative ends it would be enough to create a spark.

  He stepped onto the bottom of the escalator, took a deep breath—

  And disappeared.

  HIGH-VALUE TARGET

  ‘Wait.’ Jeska Schreber looked from one monitor to another with growing panic. ‘What just happened?’

  None of the other Cataloguers looked away from their computers. There were hundreds of people in this cavernous underground hall, but most wore headphones or earplugs. The only sounds were the clacking of keys, soft phone conversations and Schreber’s increasingly panicked breaths.

  She put down her cappuccino so she could type with both hands. She left one screen focused on the group of green-uniformed students flowing up onto the street, although she couldn’t see Troy Maschenov among them. On the other screen she reversed the last few seconds of footage from inside the train station. People walked backwards all over the platform. Troy Maschenov came into view on the escalator, amid all the other students. A white square hovered around his head. The facial recognition algorithm measured the distance from his brows to his eyes and mouth, confirming his identity.

  Schreber hit play and watched him slip out of frame. Then she cut to the same time at the street view above. The rest of the students appeared a second later, but Maschenov didn’t. Somehow he had boarded the escalator at the bottom . . .

  . . . and vanished before he reached the top.

  Could Maschenov have clambered over the railing and be hiding in a blind spot? But he’d be trapped – what would that achieve?

  The facial recognition software scanned the street-level footage. No matches found.

  Schreber nibbled her lip. If she located Maschenov before the Chief Librarian found out she’d lost him, she wouldn’t get in trouble. But if she couldn’t track him down and her boss found out she had waited before reporting him missing . . .

  She picked up the phone.

  The Chief answered after only two rings. She always took calls from Schreber immediately. Anything to do with Troy Maschenov was considered urgent. ‘This is Noelein.’

  Schreber swallowed. ‘I’ve lost Maschenov. I can’t—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t find him on any of the cameras. He’s been missing for . . .’ she checked the time stamp on the footage, ‘. . . eleven seconds.’

  ‘I’m on my way. What about his mobile?’

  Schreber brought up the readout and exhaled. ‘Still tracking.’ According to the coordinates, though, he was still walking with the other students. Why couldn’t she see him?

  ‘It must be some kind of camera error,’ she said. ‘One of the feeds could be sending yesterday’s signal for some reason. If – argh!’

  The Chief Librarian loomed right behind her, her huge eyes boring into the screens. She was a petite woman with feathery hair and neatly painted nails. In her creamcoloured suit and silhouetted by the fluorescent lamps above, she looked like an avenging angel.

  ‘Any do not track chips interfering with the cameras?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Schreber said. ‘The footage is all there, but Maschenov isn’t in it.’

  ‘Show me the moment he disappeared.’

  Hands shaking, Schreber scrolled back. They both watched Troy Maschenov slide up the escalator out of sight. Then, at the top—

  Noelein tapped the screen so hard the LED backlight flickered. ‘There.’

  Schreber stared. That was Maschenov all right. She hadn’t seen him among the other school students because he’d ditched his green blazer to reveal a grey jumper. He was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, hiding his features from the facial recognition software.

  ‘He changed clothes in a blind spot,’ Noelein said. ‘He’s trying to escape – the suggested memories must have been compromised.’

  Her voice was grim. Schreber didn’t know how many former Besmari spies had been subjected to identity therapy – that information was above her clearance level – but she knew that it sometimes went wrong. In the best-case scenario the subjects became forgetful and confused, unable to function in Kamauan society. In worse cases they became violent and had to be put down.

  Usually the subject’s mind deteriorated slowly, and the
Library had some warning. This was something else. Maschenov didn’t look like he was going crazy. He looked like he had a plan.

  Noelein was on her phone. ‘I need you to dispatch a team,’ she said. ‘Authorisation Romeo, X-ray, Tango. The target is Troy Maschenov – fourteen-year-old Eurasian male wearing a grey jumper, dark green trousers, dark blue baseball cap and sunglasses. One-sixty centimetres tall, sixty kilos, medium-length black hair. Stand by for his location. He’s a highly trained Besmari agent. Ideally you’d get him alive, but dead is preferable to escaped. You got all that? Good.’

  She put the call on hold and turned back to Schreber. ‘Show me where he goes after leaving the subway.’

  Schreber was already cueing up the footage. She felt more confident now. No one knew these feeds better than her. It would be easy to follow Maschenov from one camera to the next, even surrounded as he was by a crowd of slow-moving commuters. They watched in fast-forward as Maschenov stepped off the escalator, walked past the bins and—

  ‘Stop,’ Noelein said. ‘Go back.’

  Schreber rewound. Then she saw it. Maschenov had tossed something into one of the bins.

  ‘Zoom in.’

  Schreber did so, but there was no way to tell what Maschenov had discarded. It was too small, and the resolution of the footage was too low.

  ‘We’ll have to – what is that?’

  The air shimmered above the bin. A wisp of smoke corkscrewed upwards, becoming a black cloud. Flames flickered from the mouth of the bin.

  People stopped walking. Some nudged their friends and pointed. The camera had no microphone, but Schreber could see passers-by yelling, maybe in warning.

  Maschenov ran.

  This triggered a panic as others fled too, perhaps thinking the bin would explode. People heading towards the train station saw the chaos and froze, confused. The escalator kept discharging commuters onto the street, but as soon as they saw and heard the commotion they tried to turn around and go back down. It was pandemonium.

  The smoke grew thicker and thicker, mingling with the snow and clouding the camera lenses. Now everyone looked like they were wearing grey and black. With so many people running in every direction, it was impossible to track Maschenov.

  ‘I’ve lost him,’ Schreber said.

  ‘Has he dumped his mobile?’

  ‘Not yet. It’s moving north.’

  Noelein was already talking into the phone again. ‘We don’t have a visual. But you can track him using his mobile.’ She read out the number. ‘It looks like he’s headed for the Besmari border. Grab him before he gets there. Where are the nearest Librarians?’ She paused, listening. ‘That’s too far. He’ll be gone by the time they get there. Get the local cops to call me, ASAP.’

  She ended the call and turned back to Schreber. ‘I want you going through the camera feeds along the rampart. Not just at the Besmari border – Russia and Ukraine, too. He’s smart. We can’t be sure exactly where he’ll try to cross. I’ll assign some extra Cataloguers to help you. If you want to keep your job, find him quickly.’

  Schreber kept her mouth shut. She should have noticed Maschenov’s costume change right away, and she should have been more suspicious of the item he dropped in the bin this morning. She was lucky Noelein hadn’t accused her of treason and locked her up in Velechnya.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said.

  ‘Call me when you have something to report.’ Noelein strode back into her office and slammed the door.

  The acrid smoke stung Sergeant Hilliev’s nostrils as he ran up the street. His team were close behind him, scanning side alleys for threats. Two women, one man. All highly trained. All willing to follow his orders without question.

  Four other operatives were coming up from the subway as another five converged on Maschenov’s mobile phone from a nearby alley. Every available agent was on his trail.

  A few panicked civilians called out to the passing police officers. ‘Is it terrorists?’ one demanded. ‘Has Besmar invaded?’ another shouted. A third person just pointed back towards the train station and bellowed, ‘Fire!’

  ‘Everything is under control,’ Hilliev told them as he ran. ‘Return to your homes or workplaces.’

  Not everyone shouted questions at the cops. Many people kept their heads down, their eyes turned away. Trust in the police force had deteriorated over the past few years. Most people had a friend or relative who had been arrested for some minor offence or no offence at all.

  Hilliev didn’t like it – he had signed up to protect people, not to lock them up for no reason, threaten them, deliver them to a mysterious man with a guillotine. But he was too old to change careers, and cops who rocked the boat tended to find themselves in prison. And cops in prison soon wound up dead.

  At least this time he knew the target was guilty. The file said Troy Maschenov had been caught red-handed, although the actual crime was redacted. Noelein said that since his escape from Velechnya he had become a severe threat to Kamau.

  ‘How close are we?’ Hilliev demanded.

  The officer behind him had a GPS device that showed the position of Maschenov’s phone within a tolerance of three metres. It also showed the locations of the three groups of police. ‘We’re sixty metres away,’ he said. ‘Team B is eighty metres away, Team C is seventy-five.’

  ‘Okay. Slow down,’ Hilliev said. ‘We don’t want him to hear us coming before we have visual confirmation.’

  Hilliev wasn’t sure why he had been dispatched for this mission. Neutralising Besmari spies was the purview of the Library, not the local police force. But Noelein had said that the Librarians were too far away, and she wanted the team to be led by someone who knew what Maschenov looked like.

  ‘So send a picture,’ Hilliev had said.

  ‘A picture is no substitute for a face-to-face meeting,’ Noelein had replied.

  ‘I’ve never met Troy Maschenov.’

  ‘You met Fero Dremovich. They’re identical twins, but Maschenov was raised by his father in Besmar.’

  Hilliev had hesitated. He had arrested Dremovich after an anti-government riot a month ago. When the computer detected his resemblance to Maschenov, who had been convicted of treason, Noelein showed up to verify the boy’s identity.

  She had explicitly said they weren’t identical twins – Dremovich was two months younger than Maschenov. But Hilliev was too smart to openly accuse Noelein of lying to him.

  So now here he was, running as quietly as he could up this smoky street, looking for a familiar face.

  Luckily the wind was blowing south and Maschenov was moving north. This not only concealed the noise of their approach but also meant that Maschenov was moving out of the smoke cloud. If Hilliev had been fleeing from the authorities, he would have gone south with the smoke and stayed hidden from the cameras for longer. Maschenov must be desperate to get to the Besmari border.

  A bunch of high school students, three boys and two girls, were walking briskly along the footpath up ahead. One of the boys must be Maschenov. He had changed back into his uniform and joined a group of similar-aged kids. He was smart, but Hilliev was smarter. He looked at the cop with the GPS, who confirmed his deductions with a nod.

  ‘I can’t tell which one is him,’ Hilliev murmured. ‘Grab all three boys, okay?’

  The cop with the GPS punched in Maschenov’s mobile number. They didn’t wait to hear it ring – they just broke into a sprint towards the five teenagers.

  The teens heard them coming in time to turn around but not in time to run. Hilliev slammed into the tallest boy and caught him before he hit the ground. The other boys screamed as they were lifted off their feet. One of the girls yelled something and swung her bag at the male police officer, but he grabbed it before it could do any damage.

  ‘Stay back!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

  Hilliev looked at the terrified faces of the three boys. None of them looked anything like Fero Dremovich.

  One of the backpacks was buz
zing.

  With a sinking feeling, Hilliev unzipped it. There, on top of the schoolbooks, was Troy Maschenov’s mobile.

  ‘Show me your phones,’ he demanded. ‘Now.’

  The teenagers hurriedly dug their mobiles out of their pockets. None were missing.

  ‘Call Noelein,’ Hilliev told the cop with the GPS. ‘Tell her Maschenov planted the phone on one of the other kids.’ He turned to the teenagers. ‘I sincerely apologise for giving you a fright. If I were you, I’d head home.’

  The kids didn’t need to be told twice.

  Nervous about the match on Friday. What if I screw up a shot in front of Gliyana? I kind of wish she wasn’t coming. But if I play really well and she isn’t there, that would be a shame too.

  There were no other new entries. Zuri closed the journal. Maschenov had once been a ruthless Besmari agent, but now he was just a teenage boy. Kind, shy and – judging by the events of four weeks ago – brave.

  Zuri had been a Librarian for a long time. She had been ordered to do many things that violated her personal moral code, and she had obeyed those orders without objection. When she started to feel guilty, she had learned to quickly turn her mind to other things. She slept soundly. But even though she and Wilt went through Maschenov’s things every time he left the house, reading his journal seemed to get harder rather than easier. The longer she spent pretending to be his mother, the more intrusive it felt to spy on his private thoughts.

  ‘Anything?’ Wilt asked. He was making sure the stitching of the mattress was intact and that nothing was concealed inside.

  ‘Just girls and sports,’ Zuri said. ‘Nothing suspicious.’

  ‘The fact that he uses a pen and paper at all is suspicious. Other kids only keep digital journals. Which girl?’

  ‘Gliyana. Is she one of ours?’

  Wilt grunted and started checking behind the posters on the walls. His clearance level was higher than hers. He didn’t always answer her questions.

  Zuri began pinching the corners of the carpet, checking that it was still nailed down. It was. As always, there was no evidence that Fero Dremovich was turning back into Troy Maschenov.