One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Connor pulled on his ski-mask and gestured them to follow suit. There would be cameras all over this place, and although they’d be removing the tapes, you might never be sure you’d got them all. One stray and you’d be banished to non-extraditionland for the rest of your naturals.

  ‘Safety all automatics,’ Connor said. ‘If we encounter any resistance at this stage, neutralisation must be clean and quiet. Pistolas only, gentlemen, and I want them wearing condoms. Do it now.’

  Jackson slung the Ingram’s around his back, tightening the strap so that it was snug to his body. He unholstered his Nagan and screwed on the suppressor. They called them condoms because they were a pain in the arse to put on and it felt more natural without one, but sometimes it was better to be safe than sorry. With its short hand-stock, the Nag looked all the more disproportionate encumbered by the extra length of pipe. It reminded him of a plastic ray-gun he’d had as a kid, which in turn, depressingly, reminded him of a recurring dream. He was in a close-quarters firefight, stuck on his own, two marks bearing down on him, both changing clips and getting ready to finish him off. In his hand he had the plastic ray-gun. It was black, sleek, heavy, an evil-looking weapon. He pointed it at the marks and pulled the trigger furiously, but all it did was go click, click, click, click, click.

  ‘Right, let’s make ourselves useful,’ Connor said quietly, leading them off.

  There were two steep temporary stairways leading from the jetty to the spider deck, where the elevators were accessible. The lifts ran all the way up the central leg, but since they emerged at the general resort reception area, Alpha Team wouldn’t be using them. The spider deck was a network of narrow gantries about forty feet up from the water, encircling and interconnecting all five giant legs. In common with everything else to do with this monstrosity, it was a sight more elaborate than on smaller rigs, where the spider level might consist more simply of four walkways forming a square.

  They ran up the stairs, the metal underfoot ringing dully against the insulated contact of heavy soles. Having reached the spider deck, Connor nodded them in the direction of the north-western leg, above which they could access their point of entry: Hotel B, unfinished, unmanned and out of bounds for the evening’s guests. Gaghen put a hand on Connor’s shoulder, restraining him from proceeding.

  ‘Closed circuit,’ he said, pointing upwards. Neat, grey cameras were attached higher up the legs, trained directly on the spider deck. ‘Probably to make sure none of the punters jumps off rather than completes their sentence. Might not be turned on yet, but—’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ Connor ruled. ‘Acks, if you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Pleasure,’ Jackson replied curtly. Connor, no doubt still rattled by his and Gaghen’s abortive abort, was heaping on the camaraderie. He’d called him ‘Acks’, short for ‘Action’, a barrack-room nickname of old. Jackson couldn’t decide if it sounded cloying or just desperate. His real mates knew him as Smogmonster, after his Middlesbrough roots.

  He took aim with the silenced Nag and shot out the nearest camera, then circled the gantry around the central leg, repeating the drill on all potentially prying eyes. In each case the only sound was the breaking glass of the camera lens, preceded by the smothered report of his handgun. The trigger, irritatingly, just went click, click, click.

  Jackson’s withering sense of scale was not dissipated by the jog to the north-western leg. The gangway felt like it was extending the further down it he went, reminiscent of another, less frequent but nonetheless dick-shrivelling dream. The three of them were like fairground ducks running along there in a line, isolated and exposed. If this place had been militarised he’d have been shitting himself with every step.

  They made it to the north-western leg, where they found the door to its interior stairway locked. Connor stepped aside wordlessly as Gaghen moved in, removing a compact power-drill from his pack and applying it to the lock. Jackson imagined the squealing and reverberation being carried all around the structure, but looking back across the spider deck, he estimated that you wouldn’t even hear it at the next leg along, never mind up-top. He studied the underside of the platform, its look of grim, ugly industrial functionality making him almost sceptical that the resort complex Connor described would turn out to be up there.

  He felt a thump and looked down to see that Gaghen had removed the lock and dropped it deliberately on to his foot.

  ‘Wakey-wakey, Acks,’ he said, pulling open the door.

  They followed Connor inside. The man was definitely in a take-charge kind of mood, but then he was the one with the most riding on this. They emerged into blackness, Gaghen reaching for a torch before Connor located a switch for the lights just inside the door.

  The leg’s interior added to Jackson’s incredulity about what awaited at the top. The refurbishment programme either hadn’t reached this place yet or it simply wasn’t on the list because they weren’t expecting the paying customers to have cause to check it out. A metal staircase spiralled up the circular wall, straightening out into a landing every time it came back around in line with the door. One storey below them, the wall jutted inwards like a ring, four feet wide and two deep, with a circular steel surface spanning the centre. Jackson wasn’t sure whether its purpose was as a floor or a lid. The stairs continued below spider-deck level, disappearing through an access gap in the ring. There was a chemical smell permeating the place, strong enough to catch the back of the throat.

  ‘The oil guys use these legs for storage,’ Connor said, indicating the ring and the floor/lid below. ‘They pump all sorts of crap into them. The tanks go right down below sea-level. Delta have cleaned out the southwestern leg for storing the resort’s fresh-water supply. I don’t know what they keep in this one, but I’m not planning to light up, I’ll tell you that.’

  They followed the spiral around; the first landing skirted blank wall, but the second featured a door, beside which the words ‘Hotel B sub-level 4’ were handwritten in yellow paint. Beneath them a faded and rusty signplate alluded to the place’s history with the words ‘Cellar Deck’. Connor led them past the doorway and continued climbing until they reached Hotel B sub-level 1.

  While not quite emulating the iceberg principle, the resort had utilised a great deal of space below the platform’s topside surface. According to the plans, there were three floors of accommodation below deck, in rooms abutting the outside walls, so that all of them boasted a sea view. The remaining floorspace of those three sub-levels housed leisure facilities not reliant on natural light, such as cinemas, night clubs, bars, shops and restaurants. It was like one of those hotels that has a swimming pool and gardens on the roof, except that on the roof of this place, as well as pools and gardens, there were actually more hotels, going up six or seven storeys, with balconies on the rooms facing the Lido. Officially, the sub-level rooms belonged to whichever hotel sat atop them. This, Jackson presumed, was so that the brochure could show you a picture of the sun-kissed and pool-fringed joint upstairs, but when you arrived, unless you were paying top whack, you’d end up in the dungeon.

  He’d seen an item about the resort on TV, though he couldn’t remember whether it had been Tomorrow’s World, Holiday or Eurotrash. What he could remember was swearing he wouldn’t be seen dead in the place. With that cautionary thought, he slapped a new clip into his pistol.

  Gaghen drilled the door and they slipped through, finding themselves in the darkness of a service corridor. Flicking on his torch and taking the lead, Gaghen scanned the walls for a light switch, but instead found another door. They emerged into a bright and freshly painted hallway.

  ‘Lights are on,’ Gaghen observed pointedly, probing Connor as to whether this was expected.

  ‘’Sokay, it doesn’t mean anyone’s around. The sub-level lights are always supposed to be on. Even if the main power goes down, there’s a temporary back-up supply.’

  Connor got out one of his maps, unfolding it a couple of panels wide and placing it against the wall.
He traced a finger along it and rotated it back and forth through ninety degrees until he had satisfactorily oriented himself.

  ‘Right. There’s a stairway ringing Hotel B’s two elevator shafts, but it goes up through the lobby on the ground floor and the lifts run directly behind the reception desks. You have to pass right in front of the desks to get from one flight to the next. We’ll be emerging into plain sight for approximately eight yards – that’s if anyone happens to be looking into Hotel B from the Lido area, which is open to the guests tonight.’

  ‘What about the emergency stairways?’ Jackson asked.

  ‘Alarmed. All of them. Officially for fire notification, but mainly to prevent pissed punters taking a short-cut down an exterior staircase and falling right off the fucking rig. We’ll cut all the alarms later when we take Hotel A – that’s where the controls are. Come on. Left at the end here, then the main stairwell should be directly ahead. Halt one flight before the ground floor.’

  Connor led off again, Gaghen behind, Jackson at the rear. They took the left Connor had directed and found themselves in another telescopic hallway, this time flanked by card-operated doors on one side. Running along the wall opposite was a prefabricated tiled mural, depicting bronzed holidaymakers splashing in the sea; a curious choice given that the resort’s punters weren’t going to be getting anywhere near a beach themselves.

  Connor had reached the lifts when Jackson heard a door open and close behind him. He turned around and saw a kid of about nineteen standing six yards back along the corridor, dressed in waiter’s garb apart from the walkman clipped to his belt and the in-ear headphones that had prevented him hearing three heavily armed soldiers stomping past his room.

  The kid looked up and saw Jackson ahead of him, fatigues, boots, ski-mask, bandolier and, most entrancingly, silenced semi-auto pointed at his head. The orders had been clear. It was imperative that they remain undetected at this stage: stay out of sight, and if you are spotted, the witness must be neutralised, eliminated, or – if all that Orwellian stuff wasn’t your thing – shot dead in cold blood. Jackson looked at the kid’s face. He saw surprise, fear and confusion. He saw also that the kid was frozen to the spot. The moment stretched on and on, not elasticated by emotion but because time was actually passing and Jackson hadn’t acted.

  ‘Jesus, Acks,’ came a voice from behind. The kid sprang from his paralysis as Connor moved into his field of vision, breaking the spell. The poor bastard had barely turned on his heel when four bullets ripped into his back and dropped him to the carpet.

  Jackson still hadn’t moved.

  ‘Come on, let’s get him out of sight,’ Connor said, crouching down beside the body and lifting the plastic keycard from the kid’s still-twitching hand. ‘The fuck happened to you?’ he demanded, swiping the card through its slot and reopening the door the kid had appeared from.

  Jackson breathed in and out, buying a second’s pause he wasn’t sure he could afford.

  ‘Gun jammed,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  He couldn’t see Connor’s eyes as they carried the body into the bedroom, couldn’t see whether he was believed. Jackson’s mind rewound to the north-western leg, outside the door to that service corridor. Had they seen him change clip? If they had, they’d know he was lying. Who ever heard of a gun jamming when there’d been nothing in the chamber ahead of the first new round?

  There were crumpled clothes discarded carelessly about the floor; ghetto-blaster on one bedside table, an ashtray straddling two piles of cassettes; Glasgow Rangers team posters Blu-tacked to one wall; framed photo of a smiling girl on the dresser. On top of the duvet there was a Viz annual strewn with tobacco strands and the debris of a ripped-up fag packet.

  ‘Resident staff must have been given rooms down here,’ Connor muttered. ‘We weren’t to know. Gaghen, you’d better knock a few doors, see if there’s anyone else, and if so, deal. All right?’

  ‘Gotcha.’

  ‘Should have been upstairs in A with the rest, son,’ Connor said under his breath, closing the kid’s eyes and walking out.

  Should have, yeah, Jackson thought. Poor sod had just nipped down on his break for an illicit spliff. Now here he was, dead on the floor, shot in the back.

  He watched Connor outside in the hallway, stooping down to pocket the spent shells, like a fucking hit-man. An unaccustomed disgust flooded through Jackson. The kid’s eyes stared back every time he closed his own, but it wasn’t the look in them that was doing it. He’d seen that look before, dozens of times – the terror, the helplessness, the paralysis – and it had never stayed his hand. He’d shot people in the back himself, as well as in the face, chest, limbs and every other part of the anatomy. He’d thrown grenades through windows into huts where he’d already blocked the only door. He’d cut the throats of sleeping men and held a silencing hand over their mouths as they died. And he could do any of it again, he knew, without feeling what he was feeling now. The difference lay in one small word.

  War.

  He’d killed men of just about every colour, ideology, religion, loyalty, height, weight, shoe size or whatever else might distinguish them as individuals. But the one thing every last one of them had in common was that they were all soldiers. Rebels, guerillas, professionals, mercenaries, even conscripts: like it or not, they were all in the game, and they all knew that, too. It wasn’t an issue of whether you bore weapons, either; Jackson had killed plenty of empty-handed men. Once you were in the game, being armed was your look-out, at all times. You couldn’t ask for quarter just because you’d left your gun in your other jacket.

  But the kid wasn’t armed, he wasn’t in the game, and this certainly wasn’t a fucking war.

  Connor had told him up-front that the op was going to be on British soil and illegal. Leaving aside pedantic quibbles about the soil part, he couldn’t complain he’d been misled. He’d chosen to take part of his own volition, tempted by the money, pure and simple. It was a handsome purse that Connor had dangled in front of him, a shitload more than the adventurer clowns would be getting, and doubtless more than Connor would be offering in future. The man needed his outfit’s first op to be a success, and therefore needed to secure a few first-rate personnel in a hurry, so the money was kind of a golden hello. It was intended also to soothe those niggles about making the transition from mercenary to criminal. He would have said ‘temporary transition’, but he was philosophical enough to understand that whatever your future intentions, you can’t temporarily lose your virginity.

  Connor, in Jackson’s experience, was a solid enough man, someone whose judgment he generally trusted. He hadn’t suspected Connor was holding back any details about the job when he made the offer; even now he remained pretty sure of that. It was he who’d been naïve, who hadn’t fully thought it through. The way the plan had sounded, yes, sure, it was criminal, but he’d reckoned they could pull it off with an acceptable minimum of fatalities.

  But when he saw the assembly at the farm, he instantly began to re-evaluate his projected casualty figure. Apart from this raggle-taggle band of amateurs being so impatient to get killing that they had started on each other, the fact that Finlay Dawson was ultimately in charge had unnerved Jackson even more. Not only had he always considered Dawson a thoroughly nasty piece of work, but he tended to have the destabilising effect upon Connor of turning him into a junior sibling who was always trying too hard to impress his bigger brother. That was when Jackson first started thinking about bailing out, finding an ally in Gaghen, who had a reliably sharp eye for the logistics of these things, and who had been privately vocal to Jackson about his misgivings.

  When they confronted Connor in the dinghy, the boss had sounded reasonable enough, and made sufficient sense for Jackson to start revising the casualty projection back down. But it was only in that corridor, looking into that kid’s eyes, that he understood precisely what figure constituted an ‘acceptable minimum’, and two seconds later Connor had exceeded it.

  Connor snappe
d the plastic keycard and dropped it on the floor, then closed the door on the shameful little scene. Gaghen reported back that there was no further sign of life in the surrounding rooms. On they went.

  They made it to the stairs and climbed to just below where the steps reached the lobby’s carpeted floor. Slowly, Gaghen crawled upwards and stuck his head above ground-level. He reported that the lights were on but there was no sign of any movement outside. Connor signalled to Jackson and he scuttled low across the front of the reception desks, eyes always on the glass doors. Jackson took up a crouching position close to the foot of the next flight, and looked up the staircase. There was no-one there, not that he had decided what he would do if there was. He felt like he was on autopilot, detached from his actions but doing them because so far he hadn’t sussed out any viable alternatives. He gave the all-clear. Connor crossed the floor then headed quickly up the flight and out of view. Gaghen followed upon a further signal and then Jackson was the rearguard once more.

  There were lights on in the first-floor corridors, but it was dark from the second upwards, so they were able to concentrate on haste rather than caution as they made for the top. The main stairs stopped at the fifth floor, where Connor consulted his plans once again and directed them to the end of another corridor, where a door marked DANGER – AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY succumbed to Gaghen’s drill. Beyond it was one last flight of stairs and, at the top, one more door. They climbed to the summit and violated another lock before emerging finally on to the roof.