by Andrew Ives
Slippery Eel
Sedgwick slammed the window shut in exasperation, only to find it flap back ajar due to the missing fixtures. He had planned his actions meticulously and even at this early stage things had started to go wrong.
He walked back towards the lab where his attention had been diverted, forcing him to leave Eric there gagged and bound. He strolled casually back, attempting to regain his breath from this unexpected exertion.
On entering, Sedgwick was horrified to find the lab empty, only a flickering monitor lit the room instead of the light from the adjacent stairway, the door having closed behind him.
When Sedgwick left Eric and pursued the unknown intruder, he flung the coded door open and ran through the lab into the corridor, leaving Eric to prevent the door closing by putting his foot in the gap.
Eric had flicked the door open further with his foot and slipped through. The automatic arm above the door pulled it shut behind him, locking as it closed. During the day, the door was unlocked from the lab side, but at night it became locked from either direction on closing. Eric knew Sedgwick would have to enter the code in the dark, buying him precious moments to escape.
It was unfortunate for Eric that Karen got away so quickly.
Sedgwick returned to the door. Finding the keypad difficult to see, he turned the glowing monitor to point towards the numbers and typed "C2715Y."
The lock clicked and Sedgwick wound the catch violently round, angrily flinging the door open once more.
He ran down the stairs two or three at a time, skidding to a stop on the polished tiles of the foyer below. Eric was still nowhere to be seen and Sedgwick was worried he might have escaped in only those few seconds of carelessness. He began to doubt whether he should ever have contemplated such an exploit.
Frantically looking around, Sedgwick could see no one. The foyer was only partially lit from external lamps shining through the glass frontage, none of the internal lights were on.
The leaves of a potted plant waved gently on the far side of the room, had Sedgwick not been so agitated he would barely have noticed.
He realised that Eric couldn't have left through the front doors, his swipe card had been invalidated when he was made redundant that afternoon and there was no way through, in either direction, without one. Eric had hoped for another exit somewhere around the programmers' area, and the plant's leaf indicated this.
Sedgwick ran to the programming wing, finding Eric at the first door he opened. Laying on the floor, Eric was sweating and coughing. He was no athlete at the best of times but with a rag in his mouth and tied up, it was amazing he had managed to get even this far.
Recaptured
Sedgwick too was out of breath. He was of a similar build to Eric and the occasional cigar had done him no good at all. He recovered quickly, grateful to have recaptured his evasive prisoner.
Pulling Eric up by his lapels, he marched him back upstairs at gunpoint. Eric was visibly disheartened, knowing he was living on borrowed time and that he would be disposed of once he had served his purpose.
On reaching the lab, Sedgwick jammed the coded door open with a wad of scrap printer paper. He prodded Eric in the back with the gun barrel before marching him further, through the lab, into the corridor and into a store cupboard.
This store cupboard was where this department kept their stationery - writing paper, photocopier and printer paper, folders etc. Sedgwick shoved Eric inside while pulling in one of the swivel chairs.
Eric was pushed onto the chair and turned to face the wall opposite the doorway. Sedgwick took his own clip-on ID card from his pocket and left it on the floor behind the chair without Eric's knowledge and locked the door behind him.
Sedgwick returned to the lab where he had left the petrol can on entering and brought it back to the corridor.
He unscrewed the cap, leaving it dangling on its strap, poured some petrol over the door and the swivel chairs outside, taking care not to use too much. Sedgwick took the remainder back to the lab, placing it on the workbench by the door.
He then opened Eric's computer casing and removed the hard drive, before picking up the pieces of PsiNapse headset he had discarded earlier, putting them all at the top of the stairs outside the lab door.
Tracks To Cover
Sedgwick went inside his office where the security cameras and fire alarms were controlled from. He had disabled the fire alarms earlier that day, but the security cameras had to be left on to cover his tracks. They were time coded and he couldn't switch them off until now.
He unlocked the video suite and rewound the recording back to the previous intruder. He should have recognised Karen but the poor light and black leathers conspired to keep her identity from him. In a change to his plan, he stopped the tape at the point before he entered, recorded some footage of the empty lab (with the petrol can and the door jammed open) over the recording of his entry, and finally stopped the tape at this point by ripping the wires out.
He dropped his office keys deliberately on the floor and left to continue his calculated arson. This was going to clear his debts once and for all.
Back in the lab, Sedgwick doused anything and everything with petrol, so the whole room smelled strongly and disgustingly of the potent liquid. Sedgwick left the room while he disposed of the can by throwing it from the swinging toilet window into the alley outside. It had Eric's and only Eric's fingerprints on it and he wanted this incriminating evidence to survive the fire.
By the time Sedgwick got back to the corridor, an orange light was already flickering and glowing brightly. The monitor Karen left on had ignited the petrol fumes and Sedgwick was beginning to panic. He ran back to the lab towards his exit, and was relieved to find the lab was hardly burning.
He stood for a moment admiring his wicked deed. His plot somehow had a twisted beauty in its intricacy and its fulfilment of his motive. His face shone with orange reflections as he checked for any last-moment flaws in his nefarious plan that may have been caused by the unexpected intruder.
As his mind wandered, he neglected to see the flame lick ever nearer to the ethanol tank that lay under the workbench beside him, hesitating as if lying in wait, as if to bite off his hand when the moment was right.
When his guard was down, it would do just that.
Eric heard a yell, an agonising scream that he felt sure was from Sedgwick. The plan could not be running smoothly and he might yet have a chance to escape if things had gone wrong.
He had already turned the chair around and now slid to the floor, landing on Sedgwick's ID card. This was puzzling, but he needed to get out more urgently than he needed to understand Sedgwick's intentions.
Oblivious to the raging fire outside, Eric crawled the short distance and kicked at the foot of the door. The door absorbed his blows, only bending enough to instantly shut tight again after every kick. The door was constructed from sturdy plywood and Eric had to kick several more times before a crack appeared around the door handle.
While pausing to catch his breath for a last massive effort, he heard another door slam shut.
This instilled a vision of horror in Eric, his desperation had turned to futility.
The slamming noise was the coded door to the lab. Even with Sedgwick's ID card, with his hands tied there would be no way out. He wouldn't fit through the toilet window had he even known of its existence. The lab door needed a code which he couldn't enter and the lab was engulfed in flames by now anyway. In the other direction there were two more doors needing similar codes.
As smoke seeped under the cupboard door, Eric knew he had to get his hands free if he was ever going to get out alive.
* * *
Home And Dry
The front door swung open and in stumbled Karen, exhausted and limping slightly from her painfully grazed leg. She had removed her crash helmet during the elevator journey and now placed her gloves inside.
It had started to rain heavily and she was thankful to have all but missed the downp
our. If she soon received a not-altogether-unexpected visit from the police, it would be less incriminating if they found her bike clothes dry. She stepped out of her leathers and folded them neatly before putting them in their usual place in the hall airing cupboard.
Karen took the rucksack into her spare-computer room and mixed the new ill-gotten blank disks with her own. She decided to install Eric's hard drive in her own computer while she considered where the chips could be safely hidden. She flipped the keyboard over onto the Z-bed she stored there, removed the casing panel and inserted the ribbon cable as if it were second nature. She had done this twice today already and had been taught that she ought to make a back up of this drive urgently.
Replacing the keyboard, she panicked from not knowing where she could hide the remaining incriminating items, having not considered this unlikely eventuality. She could not let this feeling of persecution cause her to lose her cool and make mistakes. She had to keep calm at all costs.
But how could she have expected the police, if that's who it was, to arrive almost instantly? They even had a chance to shoot at her! This whole burglary was only intended to be just a small stint of retaliatory thieving to pay Psi back for the lousy way they had treated and dismissed her; just a low-risk affair, yet somehow her plan of revenge had gone awry. Now she found herself lucky to escape without injury and surely it would not be long before there was a knock at her door.
Karen decided that there would be no point in hiding the evidence too thoroughly. If the police strongly suspected her, they would turn the flat upside-down to find the goods. It would be more sensible to concentrate on alleviating suspicion by making it seem as if she had been at home all night. The rain holding off was a good omen and she felt she ought to make more use of this fortuitous twist of fate.
She removed the polystyrene slab from the rucksack and folded up the Z-bed with the rucksack and the remaining, less fragile items inside. She then found an old toaster box and put the polystyrene inside with the chips facing downwards, covering it with the other pieces of polystyrene and various old carrier bags full of broken television aerials and cable. This would have to suffice for the time being.
She hurriedly left the room, rushing around the living room turning on a lamp, the television and video, before putting on the kettle in the kitchen and then rushing into the bathroom, unbuttoning her blouse on the way. She emerged minutes later, soon after the kettle had boiled, having exchanged her black blouse and faded jeans for a pale blue towelling dressing gown as if ready for bed. She walked to the kitchen in bare feet, her hair neatly brushed; disguising the haste in which she had dressed herself.
Karen poured the steaming water into her cup and added a spoonful of white drinking chocolate. She took a carton of dubious-looking milk from her sonic fridge, thinking perhaps she ought to have turned the volume up. Instead of sugar, she added a spoonful of dark honey and stirred the syrupy mixture vigorously.
She then laid lengthways on the settee with both feet up and sighed a sigh of exhaustion, tilting her head back. Her dog crept over to her and pleased on his appearance, she beckoned him up with her.
He disobediently walked away, back to his warm beanbag, but Karen was too tired to call again. She felt the soreness on her calf and on examination found a tender red line across the back of her leg, something she might later find incriminating. She rubbed it gently as her attention wandered to the television.
CableFax
Karen picked up the remote control, a daunting fifty-key contraption, and changed channels to her local 24-hour news channel. It was unlikely that news of her exploits would have made it to broadcast yet if at all, but in a city where most crime went unreported let alone unsolved, there was a chance that she might have made it onto at least the detailed local news section on CableFax.
CableFax was the digital multimedia system that was simultaneously broadcast along with the television pictures through the optic fibre cables to every subscriber. Eric had 'subscribed' her and now she had all the benefits open to her at the touch of a button. CableFax was like teletext except that the broadcasting baud rate was high enough to enable digital pictures and graphics to be transmitted and paged near-instantaneously with perfect clarity. This meant that instead of waiting for the half-hourly general news cycles to return on the television, very localised news (amongst other things) could be paged up the moment it was needed. It was on this that Karen felt she might have appeared.
The local news menu appeared - the headlines in bold type read: Murder, Siege, Fire, Robbery, Robbery, Robbery, Drugs etc. Karen paged through the robberies and found that none were anything to do with Psi, none of them were burglaries and she was further relieved to find she was not mentioned anywhere amongst them.
She returned to the main menu intending to page "Siege" as that was certain to have some digital footage available when she noticed that "Fire" was somewhat more interesting than it had originally seemed.
"FIRE at downtown laboratories: p216 dfu" read the headline in yellow type. 'Digital Footage Unavailable' at that moment was denoted by the 'dfu' suffix and being written in yellow also went to indicate that this was a very recent occurrence. Karen hurriedly tapped out the number.
"Blaze at Bradmore St. Labs; Arson Suspected.
A raging fire broke out at Psi Industries Laboratories around midnight tonight causing extensive damage. Firemen are now said to have the blaze under control and as yet, no casualties have been found.
The fire is believed to have started on the first floor of the four-storey building which was due to be vacated tomorrow.
A discarded petrol can was found near the scene and police say they have not ruled out the possibility of foul play.
More news to follow on our main bulletin."
Karen read the words open-mouthed, astonished to find that such a major incident could have happened in the short space of time since she left. The time at the top of the screen read 1:14 and it was difficult to believe that Psi could have been burned down in only the last hour.
She turned the CableFax off and the newscaster behind started to read out that night's sport results. Karen left the news on in case they would come to mention the fire, but as umpteen dull scores were read out, her mind wandered back to just how large a part she played in the fire.
Could she have been the cause? She did leave that monitor on, but that could hardly be blamed for such a fire. Surely the cop(s) that shot at her would have left the building more carefully than that? And they did say that there was a petrol can found at the scene. If that was nothing to do with her, then it must have belonged to her pursuers. If her pursuers left a petrol can behind then they were almost certainly not cops, and if that was the case, who the hell were they? They certainly got in easily enough.
Karen really was dumbfounded as to who could have perpetrated such a devastating arson attack.
She soon realised that she had a cast-iron motive: an intense and well-known grudge against Psi and Sedgwick in particular. She also had a swipe card (albeit a now invalidated one) and worst of all, she was actually there and therefore had no alibi at all. If she was seen by anyone, she really would be in quite a predicament.
On realising this, she bit her knuckle and began to think her way out of this compromising situation. The rain still pattered gently on her translucent LCD windows while she drank and mulled over her excuses.
On the up side, it was still raining strongly and had been since she arrived home. Her bike outside would be soaking and would have cooled down by now leaving no sign that it had been used all night. She had managed to get home relatively unscathed and dry also. She had safely hidden away her swag, although it would seem the police would not be looking for that now. She also wore black leathers on a black bike in the dark which made her difficult to see, let alone recognise. They were commonplace items too.
On the down side, she had had one of many rows that day with the boss and had been sacked from a company she was known to disl
ike. She had no alibi where she had been tonight and if her lie about being at home was to be contradicted by a witness she would be up to her neck in it.
Oh, and there were a couple of bullet holes in her bike and a fresh one on her leg. Excellent.
Things were looking so grim, she could almost hear the knocks that very moment.
She watched telly and waited. Still no knocks came. Football scores came and went; still nothing. Yawn.
She was stirred temporarily by an interesting (and loud) bike advert for the new, Yamaha Low-Emissions J1001. No guesswork was ever needed cornering on this virtually self-steering vehicle. Eric's bike was all very well, but this really was the business; it boasted inert gas UV tubes around the halogen headlamps for improved night-riding visibility, new dyed `frozen smoke' fairings available in hypercolour; fuel injection eked out over 207 miles on a single gallon, compared to the 'alleged' 138mpg of her now-ancient Venom and better yet, an even more glamorous 257mph. Wow.
She drooled some more; long enough only to make a mental note of their www address before her heavy eyelids gave way. A feature-length Sell-o-vision advert for a multiple-egg dry boiler followed and soon she was asleep.
Awakening
Karen was awoken from her deep slumber by her dog, at some time around four that morning. She winced as he pawed at her leg, the pain suddenly reminding her of that night's events.
She sat up and squinted at the television as she stroked him, barely seeing the screen through half-closed eyes. The television would usually have turned itself off when the channel went off air for the night, but the 24-hour news station never did and as such the set had remained on. It was lucky that it had.
Karen soon recalled why she had left this channel on and after patiently sitting through some of the more-major-but-still-less-interesting-to-her news stories, she found what she had been waiting for. The small caption in the bottom left corner of the screen changed to "CableFax 216" and Karen knew this was the Psi fire story before the newsreader had opened her mouth. Footage of the fire appeared over the newsreader's shoulder.