Vote at Toad Hall

by Eddie Saint

  Chapter Ten

  A dumbwaiter connected all floors of the Wild Wood Security Service HQ with the basement car park. It was common when you were transferring a lot of heavy box files to reverse your car up to that mini lift and load them straight out of your boot. If you had an ‘instantly forgettable’ model you might also find that, parked at a certain angle, the raised boot obscured the dumbwaiter from the CCTV camera.

  Up on the eighth floor Mel released me from my private little lift.

  ‘That’s actually not bad,’ I said, jumping out onto the office floor. ‘A bit dark, but I’d say you are unlikely to share it with some office dork from another floor.’

  I did hope I was striking the right note, but Melody’s tune had already changed.

  ‘Right. We have about seven hours before the first of the early birds arrive, and I’ve got my best agent in intensive care, so let’s get a wriggle on.’

  The office was not as I imagined it. Dug had at least painted a brief picture of his supposedly Top Secret job, while he had been passing me his coding secrets.

  ‘Refit,’ said Mel, accurately reading the thoughts that were flashing across my mind.

  The piles of papers stacked on regimented rows of desks were nowhere to be seen, replaced with work stations in an irregular design, with computer monitors clustered together in small groups at otherwise empty work surfaces. We chose a desk that had three monitors and Mel logged them in as herself, Tony and Dug.

  ‘Nice and fast,’ I said, approvingly, and the desktops sprang into life.

  Mel winced.

  ‘They’re fast alright, but there is something about them I don’t trust,’ she said, opening up Tony Mole’s ‘Documents’ folder. ‘Mind you, I didn’t trust the new chairs when we got them either.’

  I raised an eyebrow at that.

  Mel leaned both paws on the desk and turned to consider me over her half-moon specs.

  ‘Well,’ she said with calm authority, ‘maybe I’ve got where I am today because I have trust issues.’

  She put the white memory stick into her own computer and called up the files in ‘most recent’ order.

  ‘Tony must have thought Dug was on to something with ‘Hornworm’, something it was worth passing on to a rookie journalist with a growing reputation for publishing inconvenient truths about the rich and powerful.’

  Put like that it did kind of make my chest puff out a bit.

  ‘Well, maybe, but he didn’t actually tell me anything. He just said we should meet.’

  Mel readjusted her glasses and considered the folders on her screen.

  ‘Ok, well at this point we have two choices.’

  ‘Options,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘Sorry, yes. We have two… options. Either we work out what Hornworm is, or we work out where Tony wanted to meet you, and hope there is someone else there who can put us in the picture. He sent you an attachment, didn’t he?’

  I guess if you are a Section Head in the Security Service you get to know certain things.

  ‘Yes, but it’s just fan prose for Carrington 5ive,’ I said. ‘I can’t see any mysterious Hornworm lurking in it.’

  She scrolled through the folders from the memory stick and selected one called ‘Comic Con’. There were three files in there. The most recent was the one he had sent to me.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘it looks like Tony arranged two other meetings before yours.’

  She opened the other two files and printed them off. One was called ‘Angel Delight’; the other was ‘Starship Gemini’. Both were similar to my file: full-on sci-fi fan prose. And like my file, neither had anything that looked remotely like a clue to a location or a time or a name.

  ‘Couldn’t you run some sort of analysis?’ I asked, looking around the room hopefully at the high spec kit at the heart of the Security Service HQ.

  ‘Well…’ she stalled, ‘I could, but I don’t trust my 3 o’clock friend.’

  She didn’t give me a chance to question her. Just put her elbows on the desk, spread out the three printed sheets and started marking them up with different coloured pencils.

  I watched her for a while, circling letter combinations, listing first letters, last letters, looking for a key to unlock the cypher. All the while, we were surrounded by brand new, super-fast processors that I was itching to get my hands on. I could just imagine Dug’s annoying face grinning madly if he strolled into the office and saw the scale of the refit.

  After a half hour where Mel seemed to have achieved little more than colouring in, I felt I had to plead the case for a bit of computerised efficiency.

  ‘Wait until 3 o’clock,’ was all she would say. She did print off two more copies of the files, a fresh one for her and one for me. Over the next hour I learned a lot about sci-fi, but nothing else.

  Finally, Mel’s second set of pages were as scribbled on as the first, and I had started to drop off in a chair (it had been quite a day, ok?), when a whirring fan noise struck up in the corner of the room.

  ‘Three o’clock,’ Mel said, without checking the time. I jolted back awake and looked on her screen. It was, indeed, 3 am.

  ‘Is that what’s bothering you? Your ‘3 o’clock friend’?’ I said, gesturing towards the racks of servers from where the noise was coming. ‘It’ll only be a system back-up. It’s probably standard practice to take a snap-shot of the system every day, just in case of ‘Full Office Wipe-out’. They just do it at night when they don’t expect folks to be mad enough to be using them,’

  Mel considered the information I had given her. It didn’t impress her.

  ‘I know we have only just met, so I will go easy on you. Let me ask you this: do you think I’ve got to my pay grade not knowing about a daily back-up?’

  I suddenly felt sheepish.

  ‘Well…’ I tried.

  ‘I know we have a back-up, because I scheduled it. If you are still here at six o’clock you’ll hear it. It’ll sound just like that.’ She nodded over to the efficiently whirring servers.

  So that was what was bugging her. There was clearly a system back-up going on, but to where?

  ‘Have you got a big chief who has gone over your head and put his own back-up in place too?’

  Mel shrugged.

  ‘Well, I’m not certain my boss would level with me if he had, but he denied it pretty believably when I asked him.’

  ‘So if he hasn’t put a spare back-up in place, who has?’

  ALL’S IT SAID was if you ain’t prepared, you’ve failed.’

  ‘Is that what it said? I thought it was something more catchy than that.’

  ‘Heck, I don’t know. All’s I do know is I gotta be prepared.’

  The queue at Herb’s General Store was three deep in places. Dogs of all sizes were barking their orders at the staff behind the counter, and scuffles had broken out when the last tin of beans was sold. Two old timers were at the front of the queue, discussing the news and asserting their right to favourable treatment on account of their families having been living in those hills since their grandpappies’ grandpappies were pups. A news crew had set up to film the commotion.

  ‘Thanks, Hal,’ said a well dressed Labradoodle, microphone in hand, staring into the camera. ‘The scenes you see behind me are being replicated all over this great country of ours as dozens of neighbourhoods get the prepping bug. That’s right, every Dog for streets around is looking to stockpile food and essentials and head for the hills, and it’s all on account of this.’

  An off-camera assistant handed her a copy of the local newspaper, which she held up to the camera.

  ‘LITTLE MEADOW: ARE WE NEXT?’ ran the front-page headline.

  ‘Fear seems to have gripped our rural communities overnight with the realisation that it isn’t just big cities that are a terrorist target. There is a ‘Tree of Life’ branch in almost every village these days, and who can say when, or where, the next branch will fall? Stacey Dats, ENW News, Walton Hollow.’

&n
bsp; Chapter Eleven

  MEL’S 6 am back-up duly arrived and only served to further dampen the mood we had fallen into. It reminded us of the earlier back-up, Mel’s ‘3 o’clock friend’, being sent... somewhere.

  Up until then we’d been investigating the three files that Tony had used as bait. We had hoped to get a handle on Hornworm out of them, but all they had yielded was colouring practice. Each file was a description of plot, characters and trivia about a different sci-fi title. No mention of Hornworm, no secret code, no messages.

  I don’t mind saying I was way more frustrated than Mel. For the first time in a long time I felt I was getting closer to my brother, and whatever had happened to him. I’d even got a direct invitation from Tony to learn more… I just couldn’t work out where or when the meeting was supposed to be. And with Tony in intensive care, would there even be anyone else there if I could decipher the rendezvous?

  Thankfully, Mel put me back on the right track.

  ‘We do have a Plan B,’ she said.

  ‘Which is…?’

  ‘Head to Comic Con this afternoon and see what we can see.’

  Ok. It wasn’t the most watertight plan I’d ever heard, and maybe the sleep deprivation was kicking in, but I grasped that idea like a lifeline. We knew Tony had asked his journalist friend to get them both tickets, and all his clues, if that is what they were, had heavy sci-fi overtones. If he was planning some sort of meet-up then Comic Con seemed like a pretty good shout.

  We printed the documents off again and I stashed them in a manila folder, in chronological order, and tucked them under my arm.

  ‘Let’s get you home anyway,’ said Mel, ‘before the team turn up for the day. Take the memory stick, take the print outs. Keep trying to squeeze anything you can from them. Otherwise this Comic Con trip will just remain haystack needle territory. You can even have remote access to these computers if you think it will help, although do be mindful of what bells you might be silently ringing.’

  The memory of setting off the alarms last time sent a shiver over my fur.

  ‘Don’t worry. The stick and this folder should keep me going for quite a while. I’ll be in touch if I need anything else.’

  Mel offered me a lift home, and I accepted, even though it meant she’d know my address. After the early morning hours we had just shared I was ready to trust her. There were enough shady characters on my tail. Having Mel watching my back couldn’t do me any harm.

  Yesterday had been a big day. Alarm bells had rung. A chase was on. At least now with the Comic Con files I felt like I had a foothold in the game. I hopped into the dumbwaiter as the first rosy fingers of dawn stroked the city skyline.

  Weasel had had wonderful dreams. Pincer had featured, and Selina, although not in a suitable work outfit, and there had been wires all around him and every time he cut one it spilled out liquid gold.

  Stoat seemed in a similarly good mood when they met together in The Stump for a liquid breakfast.

  ‘Have you seen the polls this morning?’ asked Stoat, thrusting his phone under Weasel’s nose. ‘Twenty one per cent! Twenty one per cent! Up from Eight in one day!’

  Weasel knew that the polls were doing well. His phone had been busy since five thirty that morning, and even the WWBC wanted to talk to him about his campaign.

  The morning papers were spread out on the two tables in the snug and, while Stoat went over to see about getting some coffee from Jeff, Weasel busied himself running through the front pages. Of the seven national papers, six led with the Referendum. Four of those had really grasped the ‘Leave the LEAF’ slogan and had started to riff on some of their own ideas, with one of them also running a piece on ‘WEASEL OR TOAD: WHO IS THE BETTER DRESSER?’ The other two papers warned of scaremongering, while the seventh paper, with a more financial focus, ignored the Referendum entirely on its front page, choosing instead to run an investigative piece on the contract awarded to a Tiger company to install the national broadband network earlier that year.

  When Stoat wandered back with a tray of coffee and pastries Weasel was just finishing the most pressing article.

  ‘It looks like waistcoats are passé,’ he beamed. ‘The crumpled suit is the new king. Apparently it shows that the wearer is, ‘honest, hard-working and puts others before himself’.’ He left the two page spread open on the table, from where a montage of his and Toad’s clothes over the years spoke eloquently about class divisions.

  Stoat placed the tray down on top of the papers.

  ‘Pride comes before a fall, and all that,’ he said. ‘There’s still two days of campaigning to go, you know.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, princess,’ replied Weasel. ‘Yesterday was just the warm up lap…’

  He thought back to the trip to Tufty Tail Street, and the digital monster Pincer was unleashing on their behalf.

  ‘You know,’ he went on. ‘I almost feel sorry for Triple T.’

  And then a newly invigorated corner of his mind piped up and he said softly,

  ‘…Almost!’

  Mother poured me a milky coffee as soon as she saw me come through the door.

  ‘Did you find your friend?’ she asked.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, the address? Yeah. Yes I did.’

  Is struck me then just how much had happened since I’d last seen Mother, rinsing Oysters and handing over Tony Mole’s address.

  She slid the coffee across and I wrapped my cold hands around the mug.

  ‘You been working late?’

  I nodded. Mother was the closest thing I had to family in The Ends. It was comforting to have her ask about my day. It almost made me feel like I had a normal life.

  ‘It’s been a bit crazy, if you must know,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t need to know, don’t worry. I’m just glad to see you back in one piece.’ She smiled at me and it felt like a light had been flicked on and all the evils of the night had scuttled away. I blew on my coffee and took a sip.

  ‘Tommy Roo came with me most of the way. He’s a diamond,’ I said.

  ‘He is that,’ said Mother. ‘He’s only just back now, as a matter of fact. Didn’t he stay with you?’

  I remembered Tommy’s parting words: ‘I’ve got your back’

  Had he been looking out for me all night?

  ‘No, I left him just before I got to the flat. There’s some stuff going down that he doesn’t need to get mixed up in.’

  Mother smiled ruefully.

  ‘So you are protecting Tommy now, are you? Keeping him out of harm’s way?’

  She laughed a gentle laugh at the thought of Tommy needing to be kept safe, and I smiled too, and realised it was the first time I’d actually relaxed in a long while.

  I drained my mug slowly, at a window table, watching The Ends wake up and giving my thoughts time to get back into a semblance of order. ‘Hornworm’ was some sort of super-toxic secret I’d been cursed with thanks to a Security Service agent who was now in Intensive Care for his trouble. I now had a race against time to either work out how to meet up with Tony’s crew (if, indeed, he had one) at Comic Con, or decipher whatever the heck ‘Hornworm’ was, before a Fox in Dog’s clothing came out of the shadows to get me. All in all it meant I was running on enough adrenaline to give my bed a miss.

  I took the three sheets of paper out of their manila folder and spread them on the table in front of me.

  If I could only crack their code I’d know what I was looking for at Comic Con later…

  A mid-morning text from Toad came in just towards the end of an interview with CanopyTV. Weasel spotted the name on his home screen. His brain was now at full battle speed. This was what he did, where he came alive. He was a player.

  See: react!

  See: react!

  It was what he was best at. He had an instinct for that sort of thing, and at mid-morning on the second day of campaigning, his instinct was telling him to pause the interview to just check his phone.

  ‘Hold up,’ he said to the interviewer.
‘I’ll answer that question in full in just a moment but, well this is a live campaign. Time is tight, and I’ve just had a text from the Prime Minister himself. I’ll have to check it. Do you mind?’

  Perfectly handled, he thought. Polite, conscientious, not trying to hide anything, but also powerless about being told what to do by Triple T – isn’t this exactly what folks want me to free them from? Having politicians telling them what to do?

  The interviewer was a pro, and she turned to do a piece to camera to fill some time while Weasel checked his phone.

  ‘The Leader of the Leave Campaign,’ she began, ‘has been working tirelessly for the ‘ordinary voter’ since the Prime Minister dropped the bombshell of this Referendum in his final week in charge. You can see behind me the remains of a working breakfast. Oliver Weasel and his team are certainly giving everything they can for your vote, but will it be enough? Despite a small upturn they are still a considerable way behind in the polls.’

  Weasel tapped her on the shoulder and, almost apologetically, showed his phone to camera. On it was the text from Toad. It read:

  Yesterday’s start didn’t give us as much campaign time as I might have liked. Can we meet for brunch instead today? I promise, no caviar this time.

  Behind his dead-pan expression Weasel was doing cartwheels. ‘Caviar! He said ‘caviar’! And ‘brunch’! What is the ordinary voter going to think of that?’

  Turning back to the interviewer he gave a little resigned shrug then sat back down to answer the original question.

  The news cycle over the next hour all had the CanopyTV interview down as a big win for Weasel. It had done his image no harm at all to be seen in the pub, arguing for the rights of the ‘ordinary voter’ on live TV and then being dragged away to deal with a text from the caviar brunch munching Prime Minister.

  Chapter Twelve

  Something about his Earl Grey Tea didn’t taste quite right to Toad. He called through to his secretary for a fresh cup, but when it came that tasted odd too. And then he realised. It wasn’t the tea he could taste: it was disappointment. More precisely, it was the polls and the caviar comment. Why had everyone picked up on that? Wasn’t he just being a good host? No point feeding a fellow with something he doesn’t like. That’s just manners.