Big Brother's Little Sister

by Mike Bursell

  “Mum. Not today. Please?”

  “We're going.”

  At this point, and I'm not proud to say it, I burst into tears. I don't do this. Well, not often. And I don't do it for effect. Ever. And she knows that. And it wasn't for effect this time, either: I couldn't help myself.

  “Lena...” She reached a hand over, suddenly full of concern. “Lena? Are you OK?”

  “I just want to be home tonight. With you,” I managed to get out, through sobs.

  “Why, darling?” She held my hand.

  I shrugged. I knew, of course. I'm scared. And I'm not sure – not sure sure – that it's going to be as easy as I think it is in there. But I couldn't tell her.

  “Are you OK?”

  I shrugged again. “Yeah. Kind of.” I started to cry again. “No.”

  “OK, love.” She got up from her chair and leaned over to give me a hug. “I'll call Geoff. We'll stay in.”

  “Thanks, Mum.” I returned the hug. “I'm sorry. Really.”

  She got up. “I'll call Geoff. We'll have sausages and mash, OK?”

  I nodded, and sniffed.

  She went to get her phone, and then turned round to me. “Is there a test?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  She raised her eyebrows, then smiled. “OK. I love you.”

  We had sausages and mashed potato, as she'd promised. And baked beans. We talked, and I didn't meet Geoff. I didn't tell Mum what we had planned for the next day, though every last little fibre of me wanted to. But I got to spend the evening with Mum, which is what I wanted, and I knew that she would be pleased, tomorrow, when I got taken away, that we had. Though she'd wonder exactly why I had asked, and what I had known, but she'd keep that to herself.

  The next morning came.

  The one thing I was a little concerned about was Kareem. I wasn't sure how he would manage under detailed questioning, and I also felt bad about putting him in a position where he could get into trouble. Mo, however, had spent more time with him than I had, and was sure that he was going to be OK. It seemed that Mo had grown to trust – and even like – him, and therefore was keen to put in extra work to ensure that he was above suspicion. The key thing was making sure that the signs of the attack were obvious enough that Kareem, as a fairly decent systems administrator for the school systems, would spot them, but that the detailed signs were hidden so deeply that nobody would expect him to have noticed them before. Mo had been careful not to give him too much detail, under the standard “need-to-know” doctrine that the less you know, the less you can give away. Mo had explained that Kareem seemed confident, and I had to live with that: there was no way I could quiz him myself without blowing the cover and letting Kareem into the bigger secret, which he certainly didn't have any need to know.

  Mo had cleaned out enough of the software he'd put into the systems to make it untraceable: he'd removed all traces and logs of any links to any real systems that he had, and planted a few fake ones, hopefully enough to make it look like I'd been set up when the Enforcers started investigating properly. I'd suggested leaving some canaries in, as they couldn't easily be traced, but Mo hadn't wanted to alert the Enforcers to the fact that we – Floyd – were already using the technique, and on reflection, I agreed. We had taken a week to plan it, set it up, and prime Kareem to do his part.

  At the last minute, I had convinced Mo to add a final piece into the jigsaw: the name “Floyd”. When the Enforcers discovered the attack, we wanted them to know that it was Floyd orchestrating it. Mo agreed to put enough information in the logs of the application generating the network traffic that Kareem would find it easily, and, piecing it together, would be able to tell the Enforcers that it looked like this attack was being managed personally by a senior leader of Floyd, the group. But then he had a better idea. Rather than put it in the logs, why not put it into the bank transfer details? When transferring a negative amount, give it a reference 'From Floyd, with love'? I was sold, and it meant that from the moment anybody noticed the problems with the Young Enforcer bank accounts, they would be searching desperately for Floyd. If they thought that Floyd had messed up and left a trail to a leader of the group – or the leader of the group – they would be all over it. They would want him. Very badly.

  And it had all gone perfectly - until they actually came through the window, and were much, much more serious about it than I'd ever guessed they would.

  Chapter 27 – Everybody screamed, of course

  Everyone screamed, of course, when the black figures came through the windows. Nobody expects their maths lesson to be interrupted in that way – though quite a few people might hope for it – so the whole thing was quite a surprise. The crash as the glass went was mirrored by a bang as the class-room door exploded inwards, followed by another four members of the security forces.

  I'd assumed, when Mo and I had been planning this, that we'd have to pretend to be shocked, but we were screaming with the rest of the class. And, of course, Mr Jeffreys. Ah, Mr Jeffreys. Brave Mr Jeffreys. Brave, foolish Mr Jeffreys. We really hadn't planned for him or what he might do: it hadn't occurred to us to think beyond the likely reactions of the pupils in the class. But as the room filled with black figures, scanning the room from behind their googles and gas masks, panning their stubby little machine-guns around the pupils, Mr Jeffreys took control. After an initial scream, like the rest of us, he shouted: “Children, hands on your head, hands on your head.”

  After my initial surprise at his saying anything – and at the men with guns, of course – I decided that Mr Jeffreys seemed to be following quite a sensible course of action, but it seemed that not everybody agreed. Five of the gun-men immediately turned to face him, while the others focused on the class. The ones around him then squirted something in his face, two of them pulled out telescopic batons, and hit the back of his legs until he collapsed to the ground, paused for a breath and then started hitting him repeatedly round the head until he stopped moving.

  By the time he was on his knees, most of us had gone quiet, staring at the scene in front of us, but when they started hitting him again, people started screaming again. Two of the boys – not Mo, I noticed, despite everything going on around me – started towards him, but they were waved back by guns. Four of the black suits then picked Mr Jeffreys up and carried him out, the others waiting in the room, covering us with their scary weapons. And I think that's when I realised quite how much trouble we were in, and exactly what I'd started.

  Look: you know what happens next, right? I'm going to end up in a Child Internment Camp, blah, blah. Do I really need to go through this in every excruciating detail? Because, I have to tell you, this is when things got rather out of control, and I'm not proud of it, because I thought we – I – had everything sorted down to the last detail. And, despite playing it calm, this really freaks me out. Seriously - "the wheels came off this thing", as I'm sure they'd say on TV. It wasn't my finest hour. And I was scared. Not just a little bit: really, really scared.

  I was scared. Not just a little bit: really, really scared. We stood there, all of us, frozen, and then the door was kicked in.

  Well, that was unnecessary, I thought to myself. They just went out of there, and it's not going to be locked. But they kicked it in anyway, properly off its hinges - to make a point, I suppose. One of them strode through the door, followed by the ones who'd left with Mr Jeffreys. There was no sign of him, but I didn't have time to think about that, not right then. The last one to enter turned round and faced the doorway, covering it with a gun. I could hear Ms Martin shouting at him, but he wasn't letting her through. I had a weird moment when I realised that it might not be a man at all: the figure was quite slight, and could quite easily have been a woman. It didn't seem to be very important: the gun was what mattered.

  The first person back in took off his gas mask. I assumed I'd be able to see his face, but he was wearing a balaclava. He was tall, and I could see some dark hair from underneath the black fabric. "Which
one of you," he asked, with a steely quietness, "is the nasty little piece of work they call Floyd? Because one of you silly little boys is playing way out of his league.”

  Someone - one of the girls to my left, and behind me - giggled. "Floyd?" she said. "Floyd's not a person. Floyd's a movement. We're all Floyd."

  Oh God, no, I thought. It can't go like this. We can't stand up to them. Please don't, please don't even try.

  I heard one of the boys take a breath, as if he was about to speak up, too, but the man in the balaclava took two quick steps towards the girl who'd spoken. It was Jenny Taylor, I saw, as I turned to follow his progress, and she was trying hard to look defiant. That can't be a good idea. Just because you stood up to a Young Enforcer, and didn't get caught, it doesn't mean you should do this. It doesn't mean you can do this. This is different. These are real Enforcers. With body armour. And guns. Mum was right about the guns.

  He pulled his arm back, and slapped her, hard, across the face, with the back of his gloved hand. She slammed down through her chair and onto the floor, where she looked back up in terror at him, whimpering.

  "Right," he continued to the rest of us, as if nothing had happened. "Any more heroes?" There was silence, and he waited for a few long seconds in case anybody wanted to say something. "If no-one's talking, we'll do it another way. Stand at your desk, and bring up the settings for your desktop tablet." He walked back to the front of the classroom and put his hands behind his back, watching us all.

  Stunned, and frightened, we all went to our desks, and fiddled with the tablet display that was attached to each, bringing up the information about each system. I could hear Jenny, still whimpering, picking herself up off the floor and doing the same. One of the other armed men - and this one was a man, I could tell from his voice - went down the rows, reading out details from each desk system. He started from the other end of the classroom, advancing down one row and then going up the next, approaching closer and closer to mine.

  Because, as we'd planned, Mo had set up the system on my desk to broadcast what should look like it was coordinating the attack on the bank details for all the Young Enforcers. It was supposed to look to be very obviously from the desk system, but was actually being controlled by one of the systems that he had taken over within the school. He'd then erased all links with the school systems – he wouldn't be able to use them again but that was a minor price to pay, given how easily he should be able to take over some other organisation's machines – and had come into school as usual. On the way in, he'd passed a note under the door of the room where Kareem kept the cleaning materials and a variety of other school-related stuff. When Kareem had got that note, which he did when he went into the room to get the keys he needed for the day's tasks, he had hopefully destroyed it and gone straight to the computer room.

  I wasn't proud of the fact that we'd had to get Kareem to help, because we were, frankly, using him. But we'd done a two person job on him: Mo had spent lots of time with Kareem convincing him to set me up to be taken by the Enforcers, and I'd found a couple of times to speak to Kareem and go on about how people like Mo were the scum of the Earth, and deserved everything they got from the Government. Mo told me that Kareem was really beginning to dislike me, and when he explained the plan that I'd come up with, Kareem had, with some reluctance, agreed. Mo had pointed out that once the Enforcers worked out, with Kareem's 'expert help' – based on Mo's explanations of what he'd done – that I'd been set up, they would think that somebody had worked out that I was a Y.T. and had set me up. That way, Kareem didn't need to feel too guilty that I was going to spend much time in a Camp, as I would be released almost immediately.

  Mo had set things up to be immediately obvious to anyone running even basic scans on the school network and systems, and within a few minutes, Kareem had all the evidence he needed to make an urgent call to the local Enforcer station. And, since he was a good citizen - or at least pretending to be one - that was exactly what he did. The information he'd passed over had given enough information to the Enforcers to allow them to track the attack's source closely enough that they could tell it was from a desk system in one of the classes in the school. A little further digging would allow them to work out exactly which class it was, and they all they would need to do would be to go to the classroom and check each desk and its system. Which is what they were doing now. It was unclear why exactly they had needed to come through the windows, unless what they were planning to do was terrify people. Oh, yes: that was why.

  I could hear the man who was checking the systems as he got closer. "No, not this one." End of the row two over: on to the next row. "No. No. No." The next one was Mo's desk. I held my breath. "No." I let it out. There was no reason why they should have chosen or identified him, but still... One more in that row. "No." He was starting on my row. "Nothing." That was two behind my desk. I tried to control my breathing, but realised that everyone was scared: nobody else around me knew what was happening. Keeping my breathing under control might be more suspicious than seeming nervous. "Nope." That was the desk one behind me.

  He came up to me, standing to my left, and looked over my shoulder. I knew what he was looking for: a listing on the screen that would show lots of network traffic being sent from my system to a machine somewhere out on the public network. A listing which shouldn't be there, and had no reason to be on a school pupil's desktop screen.

  The world stood still, and I caught Mo glancing at me. Look away, look away, I wanted to scream at him. He did.

  The man standing behind me didn't say anything, but I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a glimpse of him looking up suddenly at the man in the middle of the room.

  "Yes?" asked the man in the balaclava.

  "Yes, boss."

  Suddenly, all the quiet, the calm, evaporated. Balaclava guy's arm swept up abruptly, his hand - no, something in it, a gun - pointing directly at me. "PUT YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD AND DO NOT MOVE!" he shouted, and black figures converged on me from all directions.

  "No! It's not me!" I had time to scream, in real terror, before my arms were roughly bundled behind me, some kind of binding was put around my wrists, and a hand was clasped over my mouth. I stared at Mo, who seemed about to try to come to my rescue, the silly boy, and managed to shake my head quickly. This seemed to annoy whoever had put their hand over my mouth, because I heard a female voice in my ear, quite distinct despite the gas mask, whispering "if you try anything, or I think you're going to try to bite me, you're going to get a kicking like your bloody stupid teacher, right?" I froze, which seemed to satisfy her, and within seconds I was being frogmarched to the door. My classmates looked on in horror, but despite being rather preoccupied with my own problems, I was pleased to note that none of them tried to stop the Enforcers, as they wouldn't have stood a chance.

  The person covering the corridor outside moved ahead of us and out of the way. I was pushed forward and presented to Mrs Martin. "What's going on?" she demanded, sounding quite brave, I thought through my fear.

  "Shut up," said the leader of the black-figured group. She bridled, but did as she was told. "We are arresting this child under suspicion of belonging to a terrorist group. Are you the head teacher of this school?" Mrs Martin nodded. "I am going to give you a receipt. This should be passed to her parent or guardian. Do you understand?" She nodded again. "What is her name?"

  "It ... it's Lena."

  "Write her full name here, and her address." He handed her a form on a clipboard. She filled it in, glancing up at me, horrified. I tried to look at her with something approaching calm. I failed. "Name of parents or guardians, occupation here." She wrote more information on the form.

  "But you can't ... I won't let you ...". The man in black body armour snatched the clipboard from her, turned his back on her, and scanned what she'd written, snorting in amusement.

  "Oh dear, Lena," he sneered nastily at me, "no Daddy around to look after you.” He took another look at the form. “And Mummy's in the polic
e, is she? She's going to be awfully disappointed in her little girl." I glared at him, trying not to look as terrified as I was, and he laughed.

  "Right, we're off," he announced to his squad, peremptorily dismissing Ms Martin. The other black-armoured squad who formed up behind me. "If anyone tries to stop us, youth or adult," he said, raising his voice so that everybody could hear, "shoot their kneecaps out." He looked around at the crowd that had gathered at the doors of the classrooms that flanked the corridor. "Second person, we aim higher, understood?" People moved back, and we headed out, along the corridor, past the library, past the computer room – where Kareem stood, studiously looking at the floor, and avoiding looking up at us – past Mr Rudge, who was standing looking horrified in the school office doorway, and out of the front doors.