by Eddie Saint
AS THE FINAL lunchtime bulletin of the day wrapped up a section on the Referendum, Weasel turned to his campaign team of one and let out a disappointed sigh.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ asked Stoat. ‘You smashed it today!’
It was true. The hospital line had been nice and simple and had been swallowed gratefully by all the channels, but still it left Weasel feeling flat.
‘Oh, I don’t know, princess,’ he said. ‘It just seems too easy. There’s no challenge any more.’
Stoat brought up the latest polls and slid his phone across the table. The difference was now as close as trouser pocket and waistcoat pocket, with the ‘Don’t Knows’ down tying shoelaces. Stoat thought it should have cheered his friend up. It didn’t.
‘Remember when there was more of a thrill to the chase?’ Weasel asked.
‘Aren’t the rising polls thrilling enough for you?’
‘No, they are. They are! Don’t get me wrong,’ said Weasel. ‘It’s just…’
He drained his pint and stared at the bottom of the glass.
‘It’s just, with all this Pincer and Vulpine stuff, I feel like I’m just the eye candy. The real work is being done somewhere else, and call me old fashioned but if we win I want to feel like I’ve played my full part.’
His words sat like deflated balloons on the table between them. Stoat knew it was time to act.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking…’
‘Steady there, princess. Can’t expect to have brains and beauty!’ said Weasel. It usually cheered him up to tease Stoat.
But not today.
‘No, listen. I’m serious,’ said Stoat. ‘This whole Pincer thing has got me thinking.’
Weasel had several years’ experience of listening to the product of Stoat’s ‘thinking’. But, in the absence of any other court jester to lighten his mood he cut his old friend some slack.
‘Go on then, princess. What’s on your brain cell?’
‘Well, it’s just that Pincer says ‘Data’ it the new gold, right?’
‘Up to speed at last! Well done that Stoat!’
‘No, listen. I’m serious.’
Weasel put on a more serious expression, but his eyes still sparkled with mischief.
‘Well, I have a load of customers,’ continued Stoat, unperturbed. ‘Why don’t we try to recreate a bit of Pincer magic of our own?’
‘You do know,’ Weasel said, ‘there are Rules about using Private Data.’
Weasel was thinking, longingly, of the forbidden fruit that was the database of all Stoat’s business customers, stored on a computer in his office.
‘Rules? Like what?’ said Stoat.
‘Well, like don’t, if you must know.’
‘Look, this list of names will be exactly the same when we have finished with it. No harm done. We will just do what Pincer does, send a few messages. If folks don’t want to read them that’s up to them.’
‘But we might get caught.’
‘Haven’t we been over this already? It’s like Pincer said, once the result is in the bag then we can deal with any complaints by just batting them away, and telling folks to get over it. If anyone gets serious about punishing us it will be far too late to go back and run the vote again, and the fines would never break the bank anyway.’
Weasel could feel a customary barbed comment rising in his throat, but something made him hold it back. He ran over the idea Stoat had just floated.
‘Do you know what?’ he said. ‘I knew there was a reason I let you be my number two.’
Within ten minutes they were sitting in Stoat’s office, rifling through his list of customers and working out how to do whatever it was Pincer was doing.
They both stared at the screen full of names and numbers, wondering how to weave them into gold. Unfortunately, when it came down to it they were both ‘ideas’ animals. In terms of the ‘grunt’, the actual ‘donkey work’, they always got someone in.
After no more than a minute of staring at the contact list their next move was obvious to both of them. Stoat opened his office door and scanned his assembled workers.
‘Theo,’ he said, calling in the direction of a Hedgehog working at a desk on his own. ‘Would you mind stepping into my office a moment?’
Within fifteen minutes Theo’s nimble fingers had knocked up a passable imitation of Pincer’s set up, based on what Stoat could explain of it, and with the proviso to forget everything he heard once he had finished. The end product was like a crayon drawing of the real thing, but to Weasel and Stoat it looked like a masterpiece.
‘Now,’ said Weasel, rubbing his paws together. ‘What shall we send?’
The shadow of the HQ building had covered his bench by early evening and still Higgins had not emerged. He got up to stretch his stiff limbs, and tipped the growing collection of coins into a zipped pocket, safe and sound. He had a keen urge to empty his bladder, and while he would normally not think twice about cocking his leg when nature called, here in the centre of the city he always felt a little decorum was called for, so he limped off into the shrubbery around the grass square’s edge. All the while he made sure he kept his eyes on the HQ doors.
He had just begun to relieve himself when he saw her: a monochrome, striped creature standing on the top step of the HQ entrance fiddling with an antique phone. Ivan was sure when he saw her that this, finally, was a Badger: his Badger. He stood motionless in the shrubbery and watched as she put the antique to her ear and actually started to talk into it.
These Wild Wooders are so behind! Perhaps this won’t be too tricky after all.
He kept his gaze on the Badger as she descended the steps, crossed the road and… yes, as she started to walk across the grass in his direction!
Like taking hens from a coop, he thought, as he shrank further back behind a rhododendron.
‘That’s fine, yes… yes… well, I’ll tell maintenance but…’
The Badger was so close now that her voice carried easily to Ivan.
‘Ok, yes… a-ha… yes… no, that’s no problem, no… yes, well, I’m on my way now. Back in half an hour.’
Ivan crept, after a fashion, from bush to bush, keeping the Badger within earshot but staying out of sight.
‘Right. Well, thanks Dug. Tell Jay to get the kettle on in half an hour. I’m not sure I’ve got the energy for this job that I used to. Hmmm? Yes… yes… Bye then. Yep, buy.’
That was when he knew his luck was definitely in. After all the struggles he had gone through during the week, the careless Badger with the antique phone was going to lead him straight to Jay J Cottontail.
Oh yes, this was most certainly a happy day!
THE FIRST WE knew that Mel was back was when the front door slammed. A gust of air had run down the chute in the basement and over our ribbons, playfully trying to get from the back garden to the front in the time it took for Mel to step across the threshold. It slammed the door on its way out.
‘Coffee’s just coming,’ I said, greeting her in the hall.
She looked tired, like it had been a long day in work.
‘Any news on Tony?’
I was concerned for him, sure, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I also saw him as our Get Out Of Jail Free card. If he woke up we could stop trying to guess what Hornworm was and just cut to the chase.
Mel shook her head.
‘He’s still unconscious,’ she said. ‘But his vitals are strong, so he should make it, given time.’
‘And any more on who did it?’
She shrugged and let out a quiet snort.
‘Well, I can’t find anyone else who can lay their hands on that type of poison, so I’m still sticking with Plan A, for now. Any advance on you-know-what?’ she asked, as she sat down with a big sigh and grasped her mug.
I took her through all we had discovered so far: the networks; the projects; the lack of news stories about Fox and Tiger projects. She took off her half-moon specs, rubbed her eyes and said it would help
her tired brain if we took her downstairs and showed her the network of ribbons, rather than just trying to explain it.
‘It looks to me,’ she said, ‘that the Tigers are simply flexing their muscles ready to start a Trade war. They’ve built a distribution network and they have favours they can call in all over the world.’
‘Ok,’ I said, ‘but is that Hornworm?’
She shook her head.
‘No reason it should be, really. There’s nothing secret about wanting to trade.’
‘Well, we’ve got Fox activity helping Weasel’s Leave campaign. Is that Hornworm?’
She gave that even less thought.
‘No, it can’t be. Hornworm was around way before the Referendum was even thought of.’
The three of us stared at the network of ribbons as the evening rolled on.
‘Tony said Hornworm was bigger than anything he’d seen before. All we have found is just one interesting dead end after another,’ I said at last. I was all ready to start thinking about a Plan B. If the Foxes were going to keep trying to get me, and Dug, then the least I could do would be to report on everything I knew they were up to. It might end up being a martyr’s last stand, but I figured it would be at least marginally better than going out with a whimper, killed by my own front door.
‘Let’s at least collect evidence of cheating in Weasel’s campaign. We can do that, right? Download all we can find. Throw the Dog stuff in too. I know some safe journalists I can send it to. That way, if for any mad reason Weasel wins, and the Foxes succeed in keeping us quiet…’
I looked at Dug, who was clearly still alive three months after going into hiding. I figured we could be ok, hunkering down somewhere, if we had to. It might even be like old times, sharing a bedroom. I only hoped it would be less smelly.
‘Well, at least there’ll be evidence of cheating, for any journalist brave enough to publish it,’ I finished.
We spent half an hour grabbing what we could. In the end we found evidence for a fair bit coming from the Dogs as well as Foxes, and a recent spike of activity that seemed to come from inside Wild Wood itself. We didn’t have time to pinpoint where exactly, but I stuck that on my growing list of things to do if I ever got out of the chase with my tail intact. Hornworm was still nowhere to be seen, but I tried to stay positive as I zipped up all the evidence and sent it to my journo friends.
‘You never know,’ I said to Dug, with a wink, ‘I might stay alive long enough to write it up myself.’
The only places where the damp lingered were his foot, ribs and paw, where the bandages held on to the river water and couldn’t easily be shaken off. Ivan stood in the garden of the Badger’s house and prepared himself for his big finale.
The Badger had taken a river bus several stops up stream, way beyond the political district and the mansion neighbourhoods with which Ivan was more familiar. That had given him his first challenge: how to follow her without being seen. The answer had come in the combined shapes of a refuse collection barge and a bridge. While in the air, the jump had made him feel brave and cunning, like a secret agent from a novel or a blockbuster film. The landing, however, had soon brought him down to earth with a bump. All his cuts and bruises came into sharp focus, and the landing, though soft, had more than a passing note of a pungent odour.
He was happy to see the Badger disembark while his barge was still in her wake. On the far side of the vessel, so as not to be seen from the jetty, he slipped silently into the water, and made his way to the muddy bank a small distance down stream. In his mind’s eye he emerged from the water heroic and rippling, the water droplets shining off his lustrous fur, the sun glinting off his one good eye. As an added bonus, the stench from the rubbish had been thoroughly washed off him.
He did the full shake, as energetically as his ribs would allow, and squelched across the sucking mud to dry land, where he picked up the Badger’s trail again. She had turned his way from the taxi stop and then taken a left, up hill away from the river, into a maze of broad, tree-lined streets with neat, semi-detached houses. For a moment he thought he had lost her down an avenue of chestnut trees, but the sound of a front door slamming made him turn his head, and he caught the retreating shape of a Badger through a frosted glass window.
Now he had his prey in range. It was time to study the lie of the land, and wait.
A patient Fox.
He couldn’t see an obvious way in through the front, so he prowled slowly around to the rear of the property, where all the gardens backed on to one another, without anything so convenient as an access road or alley way. Instead he had to haul his battle-hardened frame over a bin lined wall, before climbing through gaps in two poorly maintained fences, and finally leaping over a third from the roof of a hen house.
‘Your luck is in, ladies,’ he whispered to them as he leapt off their roof. ‘I have a bigger prize cooped up next door.’
In his mind he pictured a close up of his face, more rugged than battered, as he gazed beyond the camera, giving the viewers time to enjoy his clever use of the word ‘coop’. The next shot had him leaping off the roof and rolling on the green turf of the Badger’s back garden, before coming upright again: shaken, not stirred.
A stone seat, lost in the overgrown grass, knocked him off his secret agent’s stride, but only momentarily. In fact, while he rubbed his head better, he realised the bench gave him an ideal vantage point from which to survey the rear of the house.
There was only one door, and no open windows, and recent experience told him that Service agents kept their back doors locked. He wasn’t going to fall for that again. He carefully scanned the rest of the house, and it was then that he noticed an old coal hatch, wide open, that he presumed must lead down into a basement. Basements were more his territory. That was his way in!
Steeling himself for another moody, middle distance stare, he came out from behind the stone bench and took a confident stride towards the house. This was his big scene, the one where he completed his mission. Gemini would be so proud…
That was when he heard a familiar voice (rather high pitched, male but quite effeminate).
It spoke from barely a tail’s length behind him.
The four words it said burst Ivan’s heroic bubble as quickly and as totally as a hot stage light on a helium balloon.
The voice said:
‘Seconds away… Round Two!’
Chapter Twenty-Three
THIS TIME HE had been lucky to escape with his life.
The Kangaroo had hit him, hard, in the chest. It had brought a fresh hell of pain to his bandaged ribs and stolen all his breath. In an odd way, though, it was his total incapacity that, in the end, probably saved him. Doubled over and incapable even of gasping as his solar plexus continued to shrink and shrink, Ivan had been unable to brace himself, or even dodge, as the Kangaroo backed up and gave him both feet, and Ivan’s helpless frame had been launched high over the neighbour’s hen house, over both fences, even over the perimeter wall, landing neatly, if abruptly, on the road next to the bins.
The car whose path he had landed in stopped, neatly, just short of Ivan, and a concerned Mole came out of the car to check he was alright.
‘I need your car,’ growled Ivan, putting on the most menacing voice he could muster. He couldn’t be sure quite how long he had before the Kangaroo caught up with him, but he knew it would be counted in seconds rather than minutes.
‘Well, that’s lucky,’ said the Mole, ‘because it’s a Taxi. Where to?’
Unable to marshal his thoughts beyond the simple idea that he had, seemingly, just hailed a cab, Ivan crawled into the back seat and gave an address two streets away from his Army basement. The Mole had wanted to take him to a hospital but Ivan reassured him that he had all he needed at home. And if ‘home’ was in the fancy mansion neighbourhood then the Mole was quite happy not to argue.
When they arrived Ivan emptied his zipped pocket of all the magic money he had collected during the day.
&n
bsp; It covered the fare exactly.
Chapter Twenty-Four
‘SLEEP ON IT.’ That’s what folks say, isn’t it? The brain might be an amazing organ, but during the waking hours it can fall in to being not much more than a machine. Switch yourself off for a few hours, though, and it can work wonders in your dreams.
I woke on that Friday morning with the thrill of knowing exactly what Hornworm was. It was as if I had spent the entire night inside President Vulpine’s mind, looking at the world through his eyes. There was no longer a network of ribbons but a giant game board, with pieces to be moved, strategies to be played out and, finally, a clear goal. A prize to be won.
Tony had been right. It was bigger than anything I’d ever seen.
I pulled my phone under the quilt and went back to my research of the Hornworm caterpillar, just to be sure. The answer stared me in the face, so obvious now I knew what it meant.
I woke Mel and Dug, but they were too sleepy to tell them straight away so I put the coffee on and paced impatiently up and down in the kitchen while above me I heard them shuffle out of bed and down the stairs.
‘Genius,’ said Dug, when I told him. That hit the spot. Highlight of the day, right there!
‘We must tell Toad straight away,’ said Mel, already reaching for her coat before her coffee was finished.
But Dug stayed at the table, staring at his mug. There was something in the slant of his ears that took a little of the air out of my balloon.
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘If this is a sulk because younger sister has just nailed Hornworm then park it. A, we don’t have time for sibling rivalry; B, you called me in anyway; and C, I wouldn’t have seen it without you. It was a definite Cottontail team effort.’
He looked up from the table.
‘We can’t tell Toad,’ he said.
Mel turned on him as she buttoned her coat.
‘We most certainly CAN tell Toad. In fact, we must!’
Dug held up his paws in surrender.
‘I mean we can’t tell Toad.’