by Rob Aspinall
“We’re here to steal your eyes,” I said to him. Clarence laughed. Inge too. “Target acquired,” I said over the radio.
11
Hidden Treasures
Philippe ditched the car down an alley. I knew he was ditching it because he wiped down the inside with my blanket. He told me to take all my stuff with me and dump anything I didn’t need. Once done, Philippe handed the blanket to a homeless man huddled inside a sleeping bag. I did the same with the hospital dressing gown and slippers. He seemed really pleased. We stepped out onto one of the main streets among the beautiful people of Stockholm, in a plush part of town – designer shops and high-end restaurants occupying pristine old stone buildings. Even the pavement was posh. Grey-white square tiling with not a single one loose or cracked.
“I could get used to it here,” I said to Philippe, almost jogging to keep up with his long stride.
“Don’t,” he said, rounding a corner. “We’re not staying.”
The sky was grey, but the air fresh. A giant brass clock on the roof of a bank chimed noon. Already it felt like a long day.
“If you give me my passport and money back, you can cut me loose,” I said to Philippe. “You know, without me slowing you down.”
“Nice try,” he said. “You’re staying with me until we get clear.”
“But it’s so nice here,” I said. “It’s really beautiful. Plus, it’s dark a lot of the time, so great for hiding.”
“And renowned for suicides,” Philippe said.
“God, you really put the un in fun, don’t you?
“It’s just a fact.”
“Snow. Saunas. Meatballs. Knitwear. Why would anyone want to top themselves here? Especially considering all the strapping young men and women,” I said, turning my head to watch the leggy locals strolling by in their wonderful cardigans.
Mr Brightside ignored me. He had a tighter word limit than Twitter. Any more than ten or twenty and he got a nose bleed. We came across a narrow side street.
“Down here,” Philippe said.
He led me to a fat metal door. Rusty and unassuming. There was a glass spyhole burrowed in at head height. Or, at least, that’s what I assumed it was. Philippe checked left to right that no one was looking and unscrewed the flask. He handed it to me and removed the eyeball from the plastic pouch.
I felt queasy. “Oh my God, you’re actually touching it.”
He held the eyeball up to the spyhole, iris first. The spyhole lit up neon blue, reading the eye. The door buzzed and clunked open, heavy and all metal. We stepped inside, where it was cold and pitch dark, feet clapping on the hard floor. I heard the door shut behind us. Square, industrial lights shunted on like a line of dominoes, from over our heads to the far end of the room.
“Fuck a duck,” I said, open jawed. “Is this yours?”
“Yes,” Philippe said, popping the eyeball back in the pouch and screwing the top on the flask.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked, walking along the ten-foot-wide central aisle.
The place was like a treasure trove. Classical paintings. Modern art. A red Ferrari. A green Lamborghini. An ancient silver Rolls Royce.
“From a very rich man,” Philippe said. “This is my nest egg.”
“JPAC don’t have a pension scheme?”
“Not exactly.”
“So what, you stole his stuff?”
“A former target. A Swedish billionaire. I tracked him to this place.”
“Let me guess,” I said pointing to the flask. “That’s his eyeball.”
Philippe shrugged. “He wasn’t using it.”
He strolled down the aisle beyond me towards the far end of the warehouse. I followed behind, but couldn’t resist reaching out to touch the Rolls Royce.
“Don’t touch that,” Philippe said, without turning his head.
I touched it anyway and gave him the finger behind his back. I followed him to the far end, where … yup, he had himself a gun wall. There must have been a hundred or so on there. Big ones. Small ones. Old ones. New ones. Each one had its own hook attached to the back wall.
“What are you planning on doing?” I said. “Invading Denmark?”
“Some people collect stamps …” Philippe said, picking a cowboy-style gun off its perch and blowing down the barrel. “They all have a story.”
“So did the people they killed,” I said.
Philippe angled the six-shooter towards my chest, his Spanish eyes narrowing, skin bunching around the edges.
I backed off a step. “I mean, yay! Gun wall.”
Philippe put the weapon back and moved over to a steel cabinet to the right of his private arsenal. He opened one of the doors. Pulled out an empty black rucksack. He told me to take a step back, knelt low and pushed down on the shiny white floor with both hands. A metre-square section dropped and slid out of sight, revealing a stash of keys, papers, credit cards and passports of different colours. Wads of money too, bundled tight together. Dollars. Euros. Pounds sterling. There must have been hundreds of thousands. Easily the most cash I’d ever seen. Philippe bagged the passports, a wedge of euros and a couple of credit cards. He pocketed a set of door keys and tugged at the trapdoor in the floor. It slid back shut so you couldn’t even see the join.
“Okay, we’re all set,” Philippe said, tucking the flask away in the rucksack and zipping it up.
“So, which car shall we take?” I asked. “I vote Ferrari.”
12
Border Crossing
All that cash and all those supercars and we take a four-change, twelve-hour, cattle-class night train to Germany. At least I had my passport back, necessary for the border crossing. Philippe power-slept in the seat opposite me with military precision. I considered slipping a hand inside his trouser pocket where I knew he had my credit card, but it was hard to tell just how out of it he was, sat bolt upright in his seat, both hands clenched in a fist. I settled for dozing in between changes until we reached our destination.
It was late when we stepped off the train in Berlin. Cold, too, my breath steaming in the air as we emerged from the train station. We didn’t talk. I didn’t even question where the taxi from the station was taking us. I was sleepier than a cat in the afternoon sun, eyelids heavy as lead. The sound of a thumping door snapped me awake.
“Where are we?” I asked as the taxi drove away down the country lane.
It was even colder here. A misty, murky farmer’s field full of cabbages behind us and what looked like a farmhouse in front.
“Home number two,” Philippe said.
“Don’t tell me … JPAC are inside and you want me to go in and recover a frozen testicle.”
“Funny,” he said, unamused. “Let’s get inside.”
Our feet crunched over the gravel driveway that curved past the side of the farmhouse and opened out into a courtyard. We stopped in front of an oak door twice my height.
“Another barn. Oh, fab.”
“Don’t worry, this one’s a conversion,” Philippe said, lifting a plant pot and retrieving a key. “This place, no one knows about.”
Philippe locked the door behind us and flicked on the lights. It was basic, rustic and draughty. Exposed brick and wooden beams that brought back memories of Oslo. Memories that snatched the very breath out of me. I shook them off and strolled around the living room. There was a traditional stone fireplace with a coat of arms style arrangement on the chimney breast above it. A pair of really old-looking, scarred metal shields and spears crossed in an X shape. Philippe and his bloody weapons. I’d have asked for the backstory but I was too tired for a history lesson on where, why and how he picked them up. Knowing him, he’d probably beheaded a tribal elder and stolen them for his collection. As for the rest of the place, there were a couple of deep red sofas that had seen better decades. And, oh yeah, no sodding TV.
The living area bled into a roomy country kitchen featuring a high, square island with a breakfast bar and stools at one end, plus a circular
dining table in one corner.
Philippe showed me to my bedroom. I say bedroom. More like an interrogation room. Unlike the other rooms, he kept it locked. There was even a meat hook hanging from the ceiling.
“Uh, don’t mind that,” Philippe said, detaching the hook from around the beam over our heads.
He opened out a fold-up bed attached to the wall. Single and thin, it just about scraped through the Lorna Walker bum-wiggle test. Philippe busied himself removing a power saw and a few body bags from the far corner of the room.
“I’ll just get these out of your way,” he said, squirrelling them into a storage room in the hallway. I emptied the contents of my bag onto the bed. I picked up Auntie Claire’s blouse. Buried my face in it, breathing in stale sweat and detergent. I bet any money they’d snatched her while she was scrubbing the kitchen sink. I walked downstairs into the living area with the blouse.
“Where can I get rid of this?” I asked.
Philippe stood in the kitchen, Scotch bottle and tumbler in hand. He pointed at a big stainless-steel bin under one of the tops. I walked over, stepped hard on the pedal and dumped the clothes. They were too painful a reminder.
“Pour me one of those,” I said.
Philippe grabbed a glass from inside one of the cream, lattice window cupboards. He glugged out a double on one of the varnished wood tops.
“Straight, or do you like to mix it?” he asked.
“What?” How could he know?
“Straight or not?” he asked, screwing the top back on the bottle.
“It was one kiss,” I snapped. “God, aren’t I allowed to be curious?”
Philippe looked way, way confused. “I was talking about the drink. Do you prefer it straight?”
“As a bullet,” I said, chilli-pepper cheeks cooling off.
“What were you talking about?” he asked, sliding my drink over.
“Nothing,” I said, downing it in one. I was getting used to the burn now.
A few more nightcaps in front of the fire was all it took to get Philippe talking. I wanted to know where he’d got his heart.
“You still haven’t told me,” I said. “How are you here? Breathing. Drinking.”
“I was shot by MI5.”
“Yeah, felt it right here,” I said, pointing to the lower left of my gut.
“I collapsed in the church,” he said. “Woke up in a cryogenic chamber in the London docklands.”
Suddenly, I got a flash of memory. A huge warehouse. Awake in a glass pod full of cryogenic ice. An empty operating table. A pair of monitors with live brain scans. A man cleaning a set of surgical tools in a portable sink. An EKG machine blipping away outside the chamber with pads on my head and chest.
“The doctors told me they got to me just in time to preserve my brain activity,” Philippe said. “They put me on life support and performed an emergency transplant. An organ cloned from my own DNA. They’ve got a whole bank of them,” he said, swirling the ice in his glass. “Every spare part you need. Much easier than training a new recruit.”
I saw it all, clear as day. A rack full of organs in clear bags in the back of a refrigerated lorry, parked up inside an abandoned warehouse. A large, empty, dirty space with rusty steel pillars, a concrete floor and the distant sound of a ship’s horn. One of the surgeons talked to me as a pigeon flew in through a yellowed, broken window pane in the ceiling. Now out of the pod. Every part of me hooked up to tubes and wires and bleeping monitors wheeled in alongside the bed I lay on. Talk about vivid. I felt a creasing of pain throughout my body.
“You okay?” Philippe asked.
“I’ll be fine,” I said, breathing out the pain. “So if it’s your own organ, then no rejection drugs, right? I’m well jel.”
“Well jel?” Philippe asked.
“Jel. You know? Jealous.”
“You mean envious?”
“Whatevs. If they’ve got the cloning tech, why not let the rest of the world have it?”
Philippe laughed into his glass and shook his head condescendingly.
“So what now?” I asked. “How long do I leave it before I can go back home?”
Philippe waved his glass around the room. “This is home now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Underground. Off the grid.”
“What, go into hiding for the rest of my life? Not now they think we’re both dead.”
“What do you think’s going to happen?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, drunkenly clanking my glass on the coffee table. “I was thinking I wait for the dust to settle and then I go back to my old life. Back to sixth form college.”
“And how about when you use your bank card? Make a hospital appointment? Any one of a million things. You don’t think it’ll register?”
“I can use an assumed identity. I’d rather take my chances back home than stay here on Cold Comfort Farm.”
“Who said anything about staying here?” Philippe said. “I’ve got contacts in Venezuela.”
“The doctors say I might only have five or so years left. I don’t want to spend them in Venez-wherever. I was ready to go into hiding before, but after …” I didn’t want to say her name. “After the stuff in the barn, I realise how important home is. I want to finish sixth form. At least see my friends again. There’s an … um, boy, I like.”
I picked up my glass and tried to drink. I forgot it was empty. I was more wasted than I thought.
“What I’m saying is, I want a normal life. However short it might be.”
Philippe got up and disappeared into another part of the barn he hadn’t shown me yet. What for? Razor wire? That power saw? If I popped back up on the JPAC grid, I was a threat to his cover. Shit. Nice one, Lorn. Your mouth’s bigger than your brain, as usual. Philippe returned with an iPad. I breathed a sigh of relief, the colour flooding back into my cheeks.
“What are your login details for Facebook?” he asked.
“I thought the internet was off limits,” I said.
“I’ve got a shadow app. Lets me browse undetected.”
“Comes in handy for stalking your prey, hey?”
He shrugged. I gave him my email address.
“And the password?” he asked.
“Funkybananas. All one word.”
Philippe tapped it in. He handed me the iPad. I knew they’d dragged my name through the mud on the news. I also figured JPAC would have made something up about my death. That I’d gone psycho. Killed Auntie Claire. I was ready for that.
I wasn’t ready for the facey hate storm. It was all over the newsfeed. All over my timeline. People I thought were my friends …
Sick beatch. Fkd in da head.
Psycho slut killed her auntie. WTF?
Always nu she woz a nutta LOL!
Bitch b krz! #batshit
Scartits does it again.
Murdering whore!!!!
OMG wot a monster.
DIE LW DIE!!!
Knew she was a freak, but WTF? #thinkunosum1
OMG her poor aunt.
U gonna rot for wot u dun.
Sum1 shudv sectioned the slag.
Just cos she was fat n ugly. Tuk it out on the world.
Gud job she topped herself. Woulda done it for her.
Cowardly bitch. Didn’t wanna face wot she dun.
NE1 no were she buried? #spitonhergrave
There were hundreds of comments just like those. The spit on her grave campaign was a biggie. Thousands of likes.
Wasn’t she ur BFF? Someone asked Becki.
BFF? Fk no … She wrote back.
Took pity on her after her op. #charity #sickpeeps #disabled
Had no idea.
Bit embarassin actually.
Tried to kiss me at hers. #unwantedcrush #awkward
This was it. Social Armageddon. Full nuclear fallout. I was officially radioactive.
Tears spotted the iPad like rain. I sucked up the hurt and wiped them off the screen with my sleeve. I signe
d out and handed the iPad back to Philippe, my hand trembling a little.
“So,” I said, wearing a facsimile smile and a sniffle. “What’s Venezuela like this time of year?”
13
Safe House
I stirred endless circles in my porridge, sat on a stool at the breakfast bar on the end of the kitchen island, thinking about Auntie Claire. The feelings came like freak waves out of nowhere, submerging me in brief bouts of ice-cold despair. I’d stop whatever I was doing, for example, stirring warmed-up oats and milk Philippe had brought over from the farmhouse. Then the wave would roll on through and I’d bob up back to the surface. I’d take a breath and continue stirring.
I hated porridge, but it was good for my heart. After porridge it was cabbage, picked fresh from the field, cut up and steamed. I hated cabbage, but it was good for my heart.
“There must be something else to eat,” I said, chewing tiredly on a shred of dark-green yak.
“Eat it,” Philippe said. “It’s good for you.”
I sighed and chewed, watching dust dance in the air as unspoilt country sunlight shafted in through large lattice windows.
“It’s all we’ve got for now,” Philippe said. “Magda will bring more supplies over later.”
“Magda?”
“My housekeeper. She lives over in the farmhouse. Keeps this place ready for me. She’s nice. You’ll like her.”
It was close to nine in the morning. Pill-pop time. I went through my usual ritual, downing medicine with glasses of water until my belly bloated out. I hopped back onto my stool and browsed the internet on Philippe’s iPad using his shadow app thingy.
“Hey, are you on Pinterest?” I asked him.
He stopped mid-dish-wash and looked over his shoulder at me, like I was talking gibberish.
“How about Facebook? Snapchat? Twitter? Tinder?” I asked.
Philippe shook his head and went back to scrubbing a stainless-steel pan with a worn yellow scrubbing brush.