DS Young casts an eye over him. Black uniform, utility belt, helmet, badge. He looks just like a regular officer of the Met. Which is good, because he isn’t.
He starts to open the ward door for her when there’s a bustle of voices. She turns to find two doctors approaching: a man in a suit and a woman in surgeon’s whites. Have they been lying in wait?
They start talking, sounding angry. DS Young stands with hands in pockets and listens to them. Well, not listens. Their words are like light summer raindrops brushing her face as they blow past. Something about something being intolerable, or something. One of them says they’re very unhappy with the police forcing them to make an entire ward off-limits to hospital staff, then goes on about patients desperately needing beds, all the recent cuts putting them under pressure, blah blah blah. The other one then moans about having private doctors and nurses coming in and out under police escort, demanding to know just who they have in the ward, why can’t they be treated by regular medical staff, blah blah blah.
DS Young glances at the man in the police uniform, who raises his eyebrows as if amused. She can tell what he’s thinking. He’s thinking how much more annoyed they’d be if they knew he wasn’t a real copper. That would really blow their minds. It’s not just private medics working in this ward, it’s private security staff masquerading as Metropolitan Police officers too.
The two doctors keep talking, something about blah blah, something else about blah blah. She hasn’t got time for this. Revolving to look at them properly, she focuses on the icons floating above both of their heads. Triple-blinks at one, then the other. Reads the text that flashes down inside the strawberry-tinted lenses of her spectacles.
She says “Bless you, Doctor Perrott, do you really think it’s a good idea to have changed your daughter’s privacy settings so you can keep such a close eye on everything she does? I could understand if she were a kiddie, but she’s in her twenties. Do you think it might be a bit weird, making copies of all her sexnet activity and replaying them later, usually around two in the morning according to your logs?”
She says “And bless you too, Doctor Brookfield, for keeping that second bank account hidden from your husband, and forcing him to pay the lion’s share of the mortgage. Even though you haven’t put his name on the deeds to the house, despite proclaiming that you have to all your mutual friends. Making sure that the lie gets back to him, are we?”
She says “Bless you both.”
They stagger backwards. As if she slammed her huge fists into their ugly, wet, floppy faces.
DS Young leaves them gabbling like panicked geese as she yanks open the heavy door and walks into the ward. Behind her, the not-policeman folds his arms and takes his place, preventing the doctors from following. Like he’s paid to.
Her footsteps ring around the ward as she walks down it. There are empty hospital beds on either side, plastic curtains hanging open. It sounds like it’s started raining outside, spattering against frosted glass windows set high in the walls.
At the end of the ward are the private rooms. Two figures stand outside. One of them is another not-policeman in full fake uniform, while the other wears a dark grey suit and is genuine.
Detective Constable Joseph Reyner gives her the very mildest of smiles as she approaches. Nothing more than professional courtesy. He’s worked in CDCU for nearly two years now, and has never complained about anything she’s asked him to do. That’s why he’s lasted two years.
At 28, Reyner is a good fifteen years younger than her. He’s mixed race, slim, serious, efficient, skilled. He gets the job done. He doesn’t talk about his private life when he’s at work, which is another reason why she doesn’t mind working with him. Nothing worse than coppers banging on about their husbands and wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and holidays and babies and parties and nights out and all the other things DS Young doesn’t have.
It is almost funny, though. The way he keeps a tight lid on his life, keeps himself to himself. Reyner thinks she has no idea what he gets up to when he’s off duty. He thinks his little hobby as a tag author is a secret. All his micro-stories, written in online tags invisible to the naked eye, posted across the streets of London. (She’s read them. They’re shit.) All his submissions to the trendy underground tag-mags. He’s even got fans now. Watch out, AB Foster.
DC Reyner also thinks she doesn’t know about the cont girl from Berlin he’s dating. Or the married woman in HR Professional Services he’s flirting with. Or his old university mate who’s earning more than he should because he’s started dealing cocaine, something Reyner is trying to put a stop to. Or all the other things going on in his tightly-lidded life. She likes that. When they think she doesn’t know them.
The little circle-and-cross icon hovers above his head, like it does above everyone’s. But there’s no need to bless DC Reyner. Not unless he gives her a reason.
With a nod to the private room, DC Reyner tells her that doctor such-and-such is in there now, and that there’s no change in the patient’s condition, still critical but stable, something about the doctor saying all they can do is monitor closely for signs of improvement, it’s a waiting game, and so on.
“I hate waiting,” announces DS Young. She knows it changes nothing, but it’s important that she makes her opinion clear.
She opens the door and steps inside the private room, with DC Reyner following. The air is close and muggy, with a flat metallic taste. The room has been turned into an intensive care unit, with all the latest equipment. There are beeping sounds from various monitors and life-support machinery standing around the single bed in the middle of the room. The doctor is a woman in her fifties, who looks up from tapping on a tablet to nod at DS Young, before getting on with her work. Like she’s paid to.
Hands deep in coat pockets, DS Young stares down at the figure in the bed. His head is almost completely wrapped in bandages and his neck surrounded by a brace. An oxygen mask covers his face, connected to a ventilator. Electrodes inserted under the skin on his bare chest send tiny electrical charges to his heart. Plastic tubes pump blood back and forth to a hemodialysis machine. His left arm is held aloft on a strap, clearly broken, while an IV drip coils into his other arm.
The car crash survivor.
She grinds her teeth. Despite DCI Crowe effectively being in her pocket, even he can’t stop her coming under serious pressure about this case. They’ve got a dead police officer at the Hilton Hotel to explain, and they can’t. All they have is a room full of sophisticated equipment – servers, hard drives, tablets, monitors – all erased down to factory settings. No traces of what they were being used for. Zero data. So it’s no surprise the CDCU is coming under a lot of scrutiny. This happened on their watch.
What DCI Crowe doesn’t know is that she lied to his face. Her official report stated that both passengers in the car had died on impact. She quickly filed official death certificates for both, including false cremation orders. Except for DC Reyner, nobody else in the Met Police knows that one of the two men survived. Barely.
She doesn’t trust the rest of the force. She’s seen how corrupt they can be. She’s looked into their souls and found out all the things they really get up to, the sides of themselves they don’t want to show. Shitty, shitty people, all of them. Trust them with her secrets? Up. Your. Arse.
And so she came up with the plan of keeping the survivor secret. Hidden away in this sealed-off ward. Looked after by private doctors and guarded by private security, whose silence DS Young has bought and paid for from her discretionary funds. The hospital authorities aren’t happy about it, but they didn’t challenge it. They’re not going to refuse the police.
Well. It isn’t exactly 100% her plan.
It’s part of His plan.
She’s waiting for the day that DC Reyner’s curiosity gets the better of him and he asks her where she got the idea from, so she can tell him: “Divine inspiration.”
The man in the bed is her only lead to the criminal
organisation she’s been hunting for years, the bastard geniuses producing the blackware that makes her life such hell. He’s all she’s got. The missing link.
They know his name, but she doesn’t believe it. After everything she’s seen, and all the ways she’s been blindsided and outmanoeuvred, she isn’t taking anyone at face value. This man cannot be what he seems to be. There’s a lot more under the surface. She’s going to scratch away at his mask, his skin, his flesh, gouging her way in towards the real heart beating inside.
“If he ever wakes up,” she says softly, “I want to be the first thing he sees.”
DC Reyner replies with something or other, and so does the doctor. But of course it’s not worth listening to. After a minute, both of them leave the private room, closing the door behind them.
Detective Sergeant Yvonne Young stays motionless, staring down at the man in the bed. He looks so helpless lying there, wired up to all the machines keeping his lungs breathing, his blood pumping, his brain ticking. Automating the functions of his life.
She watches him as attentively as a mother would, through her strawberry-tinted glasses. The circle-and-cross icon glows in the air above his bandaged face.
Bless.
Auto 2
THE AUTOMATIC AFTERLIFE
Digital detective Joanna O’Donnell’s investigation into a dangerous hacktivist group has ended with her partner dead.
But death is no longer the end. Your auto can keep running after you’ve gone, interacting with those you left behind. So Greg Randall’s auto – Greg A – lives on as a digital echo of the man Joanna loved. The man she got killed.
Joanna discovers Greg A holds the key to the catastrophic revolution the hacktivists have planned. When every auto in the world will betray its user, exposing all secrets publicly on the internet.
A revolution that history will call the First Auto War…
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About the Author
David Wailing writes modern fiction, a blend of mystery, thriller and humour.
The key theme of David’s novels is ‘identity’ - people pretending to be something they're not. All his work is focused around characters that fake being someone else or take on others’ characteristics.
At present David has five novels available as Kindle ebooks: Auto, Auto 2, Duallists, Fake Kate and Bang: Memoirs of a Relationship Assassin.
David lives in North London and wishes someone would hurry up and invent the auto.
www.davidwailing.com
www.facebook.com/davidwailing
www.twitter.com/davidwailing
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