Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  Weasel held up the ill-gotten wallet and, with a gesture of good-natured tomfoolery, handed it back to his friend.

  ‘Norman, Norman, calm down. I wasn’t going to keep it.’

  The Stoat took the wallet, with a huff reserved for an old friend who, while being tremendous fun to be around, could also be an undeniable pain in the tail.

  ‘Well, anyway, I would have bought you a drink if you’d asked.’

  ‘I know that, my old friend. So no harm done, eh?’

  ‘I just think you should have asked first, that’s all’

  ‘Alright princess. You are right.’

  ‘You know I am. It’s not fair to take other folks’ money just like that.’

  Weasel spread his arms wide and gestured to The Stump’s clientele, all suited and booted with their pay cheques from the City.

  ‘Not so loud, eh? How do you think this lot get their money?’

  Touché, thought Stoat.

  ‘It’s ok taking something that isn’t yours,’ Weasel continued, ‘just so long as you don’t get caught. And if you do get caught make sure it is too late and you’ve spent the cash.’

  The two old friends propped up the bar and settled down to their drinks.

  ‘Anyway, Stoatey, me old mate. I reckon this time next year you’ll have enough money to buy a whiskey brewery.’

  ‘It’s a ‘distillery’, you do know that, right? Whiskey is a distilled spirit.’ Stoat would run through a brick wall for his friend but he did sometimes wonder if Weasel wasn’t just buttoned up at the back.

  ‘Well, you can buy one of them too!’ Weasel took a deep swig from his pint and let out a loud, satisfied burp. ‘Did you see the memo I fired off this morning?’

  ‘I’ve been busy all morning,’ Stoat replied, sheepishly.

  ‘Well, not to worry. You can see it now.’

  Weasel flourished Stoat’s phone (How does he keep managing to do that? thought the hapless Stoat). It was open on a CryptoChat group page. At the top was a message called ‘Hi guys!’ with an attachment of Weasel’s memo. It read:

  Memo

  From: Oliver Weasel

  To: Premium Level Investors

  Security Level: Full encryption - For Your Eyes Only

  Been having a think. The LEAF League is so powerful it really does my nut. Every time we find a financial loophole they try to close it. How is an honest Weasel supposed to make a living up against that? Or me, even? So anyway, I’m not the most tech savvy tool in the box, but I’ve got a good nose for skulduggery, and I’ve seen one or two elections around the world starting to come up trumps, if you get my drift. My nose tells me there may be more than old fashioned debate swaying the voters, am I right? Anyway, happy if you put me straight, don’t mean to tread on toes and all that, but if any investor wants to help speed up the demise of The League (you didn’t see me write that, ok?) then so be it. Admittedly, a few laws may be broken in the process, but, hey, laws can always be changed… or paid off.

  All memos and traces of conversations should be hidden, as per. I propose setting up a group on CryptoChat. Let me know ASAP if you want to be in on a working party for finding pro-active ways to undermine The League.

  I’m off to try and give old Toad a push.

  Down the hatch!

  W

  Underneath there were two newer messages. Stoat looked at the names on the messages and did a double take.

  ‘Is that…?’ he asked, pointing to the first name.

  Weasel nodded a slow, satisfied grin.

  ‘And… this? I mean, really?’ he said, looking at the second name.

  Weasel sat back on his bar stool, folded his arms and put on a most self-satisfied grin.

  ‘And that’s not the best bit,’ said Weasel. He took his own phone out of his pocket and showed Stoat the headline news on the WWBC homepage. ‘I had a little chat with old Triple T this lunchtime, and he’s only gone and fallen for it!’

  Stoat took in the headline and scanned the first paragraph. His mouth slowly gaped open.

  ‘You..? He really…? Well!’

  He looked at his old friend with a mixture of fear and admiration.

  ‘So, no time to waste,’ said Weasel, flicking back to the CryptoChat message. ‘You take the Dog and I’ll handle the Fox. Are you in?’

  Stoat steadied himself and took in the massive new plan Weasel had just laid before him. He himself was being given the task of explaining the Referendum plan to Tommy Pincer, multi-billionaire and bankroller of Dog Party candidates. That was no small job in itself, but it paled into nothing when put up against Weasel’s mission: to enlist the help of President Vulpine himself, ruler of the entire Fox nation from the Eastern Forests to the Valley’s edge.

  As Stoat stared into the middle distance, trying to take in everything he had just found out, Weasel did a singularly unusual thing. Raising his right paw to attract the landlord’s attention he said, ‘Two more, when you’re ready Jeff. And have one yourself. My round!’

  A CATERPILLAR OF the Tobacco Moth is called a Tobacco Hornworm. A Hornworm is easy to identify, resembling as it does a very large, bright green caterpillar with seven white stripes on its flank that look like cigarettes. It also has two red ‘horns’. Considerably larger than most caterpillars, a single Hornworm can destroy an entire, mature tomato plant in just two days.

  - from Badgernet.com

  I had spent much of the afternoon researching ‘Hornworm’ from every angle, but I just couldn’t find anything that helped me unpick that message. Was it something to do with size? Destructive power? Nothing I came up with felt quite right.

  By early evening I was starting to see Hornworm caterpillars every time I closed my eyes. Hence the decision to give my mind a break by digging deeper into my hunky, would-be friend Buck Wildheart.

  I could take or leave the canine eye candy, but I figured it would be fun to track the request back to source. The ‘back-track’ protocol was a nifty bit of code Dug had taught me. He was full of surprises, that brother of mine. I mean, one minute he’s sitting on my head and gassing me ‘til I nearly puke, and the next thing you know he’s passing on all his sneaky hacking tips. I never asked him where he got his bits of code from, but he seemed to be able to lay his paws on something for most situations.

  I fired out the lines of code and waited, imagining my mini program entering via the ‘Friend Request’ window and then following a circuitous, but ultimately unbroken chain back to base. Twelve seconds was all it took.

  Turns out it was Foxes, so I guess I can have a point for that. It was lucky too, in a way, because the older, less gaseous Dug had made me study the Fox network. He said it was a good one to practise on because it was massive and easy to spot. You could usually smell a Fox agent. They would try very hard to come across as authentic but it was like feeding a dictionary to a robot and then expecting it to hold a conversation about last night’s game.

  ‘The football was really, really good. I loved the football. It was a great game. Did you like the football?’

  Sorry comrade. Get back to the forest.

  Anyway, once I was back at base with comrade Buck, on his (or her?) terminal I had a decision to make: where to now? The easiest path was to see where else the buff Buck had sent his request.

  Have you ever plotted a Phishing trawl? Daft question, I guess. I mean, why would you? Unless you are a bit mad for code and data and stuff like that, and I know from lonely school experience there aren’t too many of us around. If you’re interested, and thanks for asking, you run this code and it shows you all the places a Phishing request was sent to.

  You seldom get any surprises, but it’s worth it for the cool visual heat maps that get churned out. There’s a certain organic beauty in them.

  I rattled out the Phish map code and waited to see what it would reel in.

  The first map result was blank, which to be honest had only happened to me that first time when Dug was teaching it to me. It’s really simple
code, but I knew it was possible that my coding was a bit rusty, so I backed up, deleted it and started again, from the top.

  Again, a blank map.

  That made me have a real head scratch. I couldn’t quite work out what had happened. It was like opening the door to your house and finding a brick wall. The code was easy; I was in Buck’s terminal – that should have been all that mattered. I tried once more, only this time I didn’t delete the code. Instead I debugged it, line by line, looking for my error.

  But there wasn’t one.

  I ran the code one more time, and again the map that should have been awash with coloured dots remained resolutely white. So I called up the data output file to see if there was an error there.

  That was when things went nuclear.

  There was a line for ‘Requests Sent:’. It usually gives a number up in the high thousands, and corresponds to the number of dots on the map. It tells you how many accounts the agent has tried to contact with their request.

  It was obvious then that I was in trouble.

  Big trouble.

  There had been only one request sent.

  Buck Wildheart had been after me.

  ON REFLECTION, MEASURED from the clanging of the breakfast bell to this late interview, it had not been ‘almost a happy day’. Remove the last hour and there would have been no question. It would have ranked up there in Ivan’s top ten good days in the Fox Special Force. But once his shift clock turned past the final hour and he had still had no reply to his Friend Request he knew his gamble had not paid off. He stood in front of Commander Reynard’s desk and, fearing the worst, he kept his eyes focused, like a good soldier, on the black ‘interview’ spot on the wall in front of him.

  ‘Let me see if I have it straight,’ said the Commander in clipped tones, hovering just behind Ivan’s left shoulder. ‘You picked up a message from Oak Leaf this morning. Rather than bring that intel here to me you chose to use your in-it-i-a-tive.’ He gave the final word five syllables and sounded each one out, almost at a whisper, into Ivan’s ear.

  Ivan was not an expert at picking up social signals, never had been, but he was almost certain that the Commander was not happy with him.

  Reynard walked past Ivan and took a seat behind the desk.

  ‘Initiative, Fairy…’

  Ivan winced.

  ‘Initiative. It is a powerful thing. Used well it can save lives, win wars, make heroes.’ He studied Ivan from over the top of his steepled fingers. ‘But use it badly, and a battle can be lost forever.’

  Ivan the Whys had once written, ‘A mistake is a stepping stone to success’. His namesake now ran that line around and around in his head, hoping against hope that success would come soon.

  ‘Fairy…’

  Ivan winced again. The Commander was definitely not happy with him.

  ‘Fairy, you have had training on some of the most sophisticated alternative warfare techniques currently in operation anywhere in the known world.’ Reynard let the magnitude of the Fox war machinery sink in as he rose and stepped across to the window and looked out. ‘In the morning we can influence a hill-billy Dog, in the afternoon we can eavesdrop on Toad Hall and in the evening we can dictate what news stories Rats are discussing over their lagers in Orchid Meadow.’ He looked out of the window as he spoke, as if the world outside were his to command.

  Ivan suddenly felt very thirsty. He shifted restlessly on his club foot.

  ‘You have all that at your fingertips,’ continued Reynard, turning away from the window to fix Ivan with a laser-like stare, ‘and what did you do?’

  Ivan almost answered. He really struggled with social cues. Fortunately, on balance he thought it unlikely that the Commander had already forgotten what Ivan had reported to him. The stare that could melt iron was another clue. He deduced it must be one of those ‘rhetorical questions’ he had been warned about, that seldom brought good news in their wake.

  Commander Reynard stood to his full height and delivered his final point with sinister precision.

  ‘You… sent…a….RootShoot…Friend Request!’

  Ivan went pale. A military career, following in his uncle’s footsteps, had always been his dream. In the Fox Army that meant one of two things: join the espionage team in the city; or begin combat training in the snowy steppes of the Far Northern Forest. When he thought he’d totally messed up the entrance exam for the spy service he was inconsolable, and had spent the night in a tent in the garden as the first snows fell, trying to prepare himself for a Northern posting. He had stared in disbelief and thanked the stars when the letter dropped on the mat to say he had passed. Challenging the cubs in school who said his uncle must have fixed it for him, he swore that his uncle, their President, was honest and fair. He would never bend the rules.

  The work didn’t come naturally to him, but he was loyal, and dogged, and every day he tried to be a better Fox, just as Ivan the Whys suggested. To have his uncle say, ‘Well done, Ivan,’ was his only ambition, and there, standing uncomfortably in front of Commander Reynard’s desk, a compliment from his uncle seemed further away than the Far Northern Forest. He could already feel the chill of the snow.

  Reynard’s terse words cut into Ivan’s disconsolate thoughts.

  ‘There’s no way around this, Fairy,’ he said. ‘Your uncle is who he is…’

  Ivan jolted back to the present. He realised he had begun to slouch under the weight of pessimistic thoughts, but something about the Commander’s tone made him snap back to attention. He refocused on the black spot behind the Commander’s head.

  ‘Here it comes,’ he thought. ‘A disgrace to the family, sent to the Forests never to return.’

  ‘…so we have to try to make an agent of you.’

  Ivan blinked. Had he caught a ray of hope in those words?

  ‘Against my better judgment I am not allowed to send you to the Far Northern Forests.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!’ ran the thoughts in Ivan’s head.

  Reynard stopped prowling and sat down again. He picked up Oak Leaf’s file from his desk.

  ‘Instead, I need to find a way to help you… improve.’ The final word had fought hard to be uttered, against all the best efforts of Reynard’s tongue, teeth and lips.

  ‘So…,’ he continued, in a tone that screamed that his better judgement was being held hostage by the commands he had received from his superior officer, but which Ivan mistook for ‘kind and business-like’.

  ‘…with that in mind, I will give you a chance to redeem yourself. Oak Leaf seems to have information about Hornworm and now he is looking to share it. I have added his current location to the file. We categorically cannot risk Hornworm information getting out so we need him ‘neutralised’.’

  ‘That is your job. Succeed, and maybe you will get to stay here a little longer.’

  He handed the Oak Leaf file back to Ivan.

  ‘I will pass on ‘Jay J Cottontail’ to a new operative and see if we can find out who she is and what she knows. Get it? Got it? Good! Now clear off before I change my mind.’

  Ivan turned and limped out of the room as if in a dream. He had been certain that the Far Northern Forest was calling him. Now he had a new mission, and it wasn’t in the Computer Room.

  He was ‘working his way up’.

  ‘Well done, Ivan,’ he said quietly to himself, in a brave attempt at his uncle’s accent. ‘Well done, lad.’

  It was while I was dropping off to sleep that it hit me. I was annoyed I hadn’t spotted it sooner, but I guess the whole Buck Wildheart thing had distracted me. It was something my old school friends had said. The lines of text kept spooling across my mind.

  LENNY: Hey, talking of ‘losing contact’, what ever happened to Jay’s brother Dug? He was the first to get me into C5ive.

  JENNY: Or Jay, come to think of it???

  Twice I’d seen it but it hadn’t registered. Why should it? It was only my name.

  ‘Jay’.

 
Everyone called me Jay: my school teachers, Mother, even my Doe and Buck. In fact, there was only one person I knew who called me anything else.

  Dug.

  And what did he call me?

  ‘JJ’!

  I rolled out of bed and rubbed my eyes to try to wake up while my laptop booted up. When the screen fired up there was the message, just as I remembered it.

  Hi JJ,

  I’ve got something I know you’ll like.

  Was it just a coincidence? It was pretty bizarre if it was. ‘T’ had gone to a lot of trouble to get that message on to my laptop. And then he’d called me ‘JJ’.

  What was ‘T’ trying to tell me?

  My mouse hovered over the unopened attachment while I took stock. Someone with skills better than Dug’s had sent it to me. If they were friendly then that attachment might give me a clue to finding Dug. But if they were a hunter, and I risked clicking on the file, I could be sending up a flare, right over Chandler’s, right to my warren entrance…

  ‘A mistake is a stepping stone to success,’ Ivan reminded himself as he sat in the library and opened up the dictionary. The Commander had emphasised the word ‘neutralised’, so before making another mistake Ivan wanted to be crystal clear what that word meant. He was being given a second chance. This time he wasn’t going to let his initiative get in the way. He was going to do precisely what he was ordered to do. Uncle would be so proud of him!

  When he found the entry he was disappointed to see that it had, not one, but three definitions.

  Neutralise (v)

  - Make ineffective

  - Make chemically neutral

  - Disarm

  Which definition had the Commander meant?

  Inspiration was an infrequent visitor in Ivan’s mind, but maybe it was the euphoria of getting a second chance, or perhaps the late hour. Whatever the reason, inspiration knocked right then and Ivan threw the door wide open.

  He had been told in basic training that spies liked word play. It was all about hiding things cleverly. And as he cast his mind back inspiration hooked another memory from his training days and brought it close: Chemistry.