The spelling left a lot to be desired, but there was a tattered printed list of the standard provisions and then notes about the type of things they were permitted to order as specials. Stoker, back at his side, explained that the garden’s produce was almost at an end, so onions and potatoes would need to go back on the list.
Jason bumped up the requests for tinned tomatoes, baked beans, and frozen peas, before taking a chance on red wine vinegar and Marmite. He didn’t ask for peanut butter. However, his mind was so cluttered with images of tins and calculations about mince that he had almost forgotten the real reason he was seeing the Governor in the first place.
Nikolai, one of the elites, came to fetch him just after nine. He was a tall Eastern European man with a permanent snarl like a ravenous wolf. He escorted Jason to the Governor’s office, across the corridor and to the left of the ‘Project Room’. As they entered, the Governor had his back to the door, staring at the bare window. Jason and Nikolai remained standing, waiting on the Great Man. Maybe he thought it was a power play, but Jason just thought he looked ridiculous.
He'd changed since they'd last properly seen each other, on that balcony at Amy’s old place. He was thinner now, leaner, and he sat with his shoulders set. Unlike that cringing, stammering creature Jason had once known. A whole-life order would do that to a man.
‘Nikolai, you can go.’
‘I will stay.’
The Governor turned then, twisting on a chair that did not swivel though Jason could see he wished that it did. The awkward plastic thing ruined the effect he was going for, and he looked uncomfortable with the charade.
‘There’s no need for that.’
‘There is a need, sir. We must take care.’
‘Fine. The requisition, Jason.’
Jason handed over the clipboard, his mind trying to find a way to fix this. If he couldn’t get rid of Nikolai, he'd have to find a way to talk to the Governor without their conversation being clear to the watching man. He'd already given away that he'd recognised Martin, but surely everyone here knew the Cardiff Ripper. There hadn’t been another serial killer in Wales for over twenty years – at least, not one who was caught.
‘This all seems to be in order.’
‘Thanks,’ Jason said, quickly, before he could be dismissed. ‘I know my style’s not quite the same as Mole’s, but I’ll do my best.’
‘He did his job,’ Nikolai said bluntly, stepping forward as if to haul Jason out of there.
‘Can I just check these figures?’ the Governor asked. ‘Jason, is that a nine or a seven?’
Jason stepped towards the desk, where the Governor held on to the clipboard. He peered at the number the Governor was pointing to, which was very clearly a seven.
‘Uh…seven, I think. I can run and check?’
‘No need. I’m sure we won’t run out.’
Jason felt a nudge at his side, moved his hand towards the pressure, and felt a scrap of paper catch on his fingers. He grasped it and pulled it up into his palm.
‘Anything else?’
‘Sir,’ Nikolai growled. ‘Didn’t they teach you manners in Swansea?’
‘Anything else, sir?’
‘Jason and I go back, Kolya. He’s having difficulty adjusting, but I’m confident he’ll get the hang of things here.’
‘I’m sure I will. Sir.’
Keeping the paper in his palm, Jason headed back towards the kitchen.
‘No, you go where I can see you. I have cards to play. Come.’
Nikolai herded him down the corridor and into the mess, where some of the others were playing cards. Stoker and Lewis were missing, and Jason hadn’t seen Joe since this morning, when Dreadlock had confronted him. Roshan came into the room briefly, but only to pick up a mug of tea before heading back towards the bunkroom.
‘Do you play?’ Nikolai asked Jason.
Jason looked at the table. They appeared to be playing Texas hold’em, a game he'd never been very good at, and the cards were so worried and torn that every man there probably knew the card just by looking at its back.
‘I’ll pass,’ he said.
‘Deal him in,’ said Nikolai.
Jason resigned himself to losing what few possessions he had and reluctantly took a seat. He looked at each player in turn, knowing very little about any of them and certainly nothing that would be useful in a poker game.
Gareth looked very intent on his cards, as did Anchor. Bo, the other black elite, was trying to sneak a look at Anchor’s cards. Dreadlock was leaning back in his chair, heavy-lidded eyes and loose limbs suggesting he was well on his way to drunk. Pansy wore a similar look, and Jason noticed that the mugs on the table had a clear liquid in them. As he had just thoroughly inventoried the stock cupboard, he was pretty sure there was no alcohol in it.
‘It’s vodka. Stoker doesn’t count his potatoes.’ Nikolai pushed a mug in front of Jason, and everyone waited expectantly for him to drink.
Jason drank, careful to control his reaction and swallow it without coughing. It was strong, strong enough to bring tears to his eyes, but he drained the triple-measure without flinching. Nikolai grunted what might have been approval and topped up the mug from an old squash bottle.
‘Vodka in your belly, cards in your hand – what could be better, eh? Perhaps you might even win something tonight.’
‘Kolya is a hustler,’ Dreadlock intoned from his stupor. ‘Don’t bet anything you’ll miss.’
‘I am no hustler. I make no secret of the fact I am very, very good.’
Two rounds later, the vodka had gone straight to Jason’s head, and the cards in his hand had blurred beyond recognition. They were mostly betting with clothes and portions of meat, as cigarettes were strictly rationed by the Governor and doled out daily. Jason had already given over the first helpings at dinner for a week to Nikolai, and a red T-shirt to Pansy.
Dreadlock had fallen asleep, snoring softly in the corner. Nikolai topped up everyone’s mugs and lapsed into a language Jason couldn’t understand. Bo and Gareth said nothing at all, but Pansy would not shut up, trying to get people to increase their bets.
‘Hey, Jay—Jay Bird, is it? What did you bring with you? Have you got a watch? I like a watch. What about any contraband? A nice little phone, maybe? I’ll even take a USB stick!’
Jason flicked up his sweater to show his boring analogue watch, and watched Pansy give an exaggerated eye roll.
‘You blokes are all the damn same. Barely a functional piece of tech between you. All right, all right – what else you got to play with? How about a shag with your boy, yeah?’
Jason felt his body tense, heard the room inhale, and carefully laid his pair of cards face-down on the table. How he dealt with this would affect his whole time here. He had to play it right. Except he was swimming in high-proof, homemade vodka and he didn’t have the best control of his temper on his better days.
‘What did you say?’ he ground out.
‘Come on – everyone knows you know Lulu. Was this something you cooked up together, yeah? Send him in, get Stoker hooked good, and then bring a little rearguard action to claim your cash? Tell me you’re at least pimping that beta.’
Jason knew they were all waiting on the answer. Seeing where Jason – and, by extension, Lewis – would settle in the hierarchy. Lewis had only been here a couple of weeks and it didn’t seem like he'd made a lot of friends. Except this Stoker bloke, and that was drawing the wrong kind of attention. Jason was already fucking done with these prison games.
‘Yeah, I know Lewis,’ he said, finally. ‘We ran together as kids.’
‘Since you were kids, yeah? Were you his first then, Jay Bird? Did you pop that little cocksucker’s cherry?’
Jason saw red.
‘He’s under my protection, Pansy. That clear for you? Or you need it written out in blood?’
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He knew he had fucked up as soon as the words were out, the mood in the room hot and thick, like a volcano about to erupt. He had to fix it and fast.
‘I fuck women,’ he said, and then belched. ‘Which is more than can be said for little boys like you. You even seen a real one, Pansy?’
A couple of laughs from around the table broke the tension. Jason noted they came from Gareth and Anchor. It was always good to know who was on your side, who enjoyed seeing the kid squirm. They might not be Jason’s friends yet, but at least they weren’t Pansy’s.
‘I’ve fucked lots of women.’ The kid blushed to his ears, which didn’t exactly work for his credibility. ‘I’m a PUA, I am. Bet you don’t even know The Rules.’
‘I never needed rules to get laid. That’s for your tiny painted men to go to war.’
Jason was comfortable now. He knew how to target nerd kids like this. He remembered how to be a bully, how he looked down on the kids who liked computers, science fiction, and tabletop roleplay. All the kind of things Amy embraced. If he'd known Amy when he was at school, he would’ve ignored her or shoved her in the corridor. What a dick he had been. How easy it was to slip right back into it.
‘Pansy’s got those playing cards with topless girls on them,’ Gareth chimed in. ‘Like a dirty old sailor.’
‘Nothing wrong with a dirty old sailor.’ Anchor hauled up his sleeve to show a pin-up girl flashing her assets on his bicep.
Everyone laughed, Jason picked up his cards, and the game moved on.
Chapter 22: Fly-by
At 7am on Tuesday morning, Catriona knocked on the door of the Carr house, looking for Cerys.
‘Want to bunk off work?’ she asked.
While Gwen made them bacon butties, Catriona explained her plan two or three times before Cerys’ morning head really got the message.
‘You want to fly a drone over the woodland to get aerial photos of the site. Will we be able to see anything?’
‘Maybe.’ Catriona pushed her tablet across the table. ‘Take a look at that.’
Cerys peered at the screen, rubbing at her eyes to dislodge the sleep. It appeared to be a zoomed-in map application in satellite mode.
‘I see…trees?’
‘Mostly trees, yes. But look here. This could be a clearing. Big enough for a decent-sized building anyway. Definitely big enough if it’s below the tree canopy. It might all be underground and then we wouldn’t see much of anything, but we don’t have anything else to go on.’
‘Do you have a drone just lying around?’
Catriona lifted her backpack from under the table and pulled out a small cross-shaped device in black, with little propellers and a mount for a small digital camera.
‘You’ll have to move your robot just a little bit, bach.’
Catriona moved it onto one of the chairs, as Gwen served them breakfast before taking her own toast into the living room. Since Jason had started working with Amy and Cerys had joined the police, she had given up trying to understand the conversations they had with their friends.
Cerys took a bite of the butty, washed it down with a swig of tea, and then gave Catriona her full attention, the caffeine starting to do its work.
‘Won’t the drone have problems with the jammer?’
‘I’ve thought of that. If I pre-programme a flight path in metres rather than relying on GPS coordinates, it shouldn’t need a GPS signal to fly. We just wait for it to come back to us, like a boomerang.’
‘What if the men in black shoot it down?’
Catriona looked aghast, as if she hadn’t considered that a possibility.
‘Shoot it down?’
‘They won’t,’ Cerys said, hurriedly. ‘I mean, probably not. It would draw too much attention, especially in the morning.’
‘It needs to come back for us to get the footage. I can’t rely on an upload, because of the jamming signal.’
‘Are we going out this morning then?’
‘As soon as you’re ready. We might even make it into the office before midday.’
They finished up breakfast in companionable silence and polished off a second cup of tea each, before Cerys brought round the bike. Cerys was starting to feel comfortable in Catriona’s presence, as if they were friends rather than people flung together. She hadn’t spent much time with her, thinking of her as ‘Owain’s former colleague’ rather than as an entity in her own right, but she liked Catriona’s quiet determination, her bursts of excitement, and her quick thinking.
They returned to the farmer’s field – after stopping by the farmhouse and refusing half a madeira cake – and sat down by the gate to launch their flight. It was a beautifully clear day, the storms of last night having washed away the last of the clouds, and Cerys was glad of her leathers to protect her from the soggy grass.
‘The area covered by the jammer is about two kilometres in diameter,’ Catriona said, consulting her tablet.
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘The area controlled by this group is probably much smaller than that, but they’re cutting off all approaches. No one’s really checking signal strengths out here.’
Catriona set up the drone and then fiddled with something inside a different box of bits from yesterday. ‘The flight path will go to the centre of the circle, then loop out in ever-increasing circles to cover the whole area, before flying out. It should have enough juice, but it will bail if it detects less than twenty-percent power.’
‘Like my phone battery,’ Cerys complained.
‘Ready for launch.’
Cerys observed a minute of solemn silence as the drone took to the air and headed towards the area of woodland, before becoming but a speck in the sky.
‘How long will it take?’
‘About half an hour, if the battery holds out. I brought a flask.’
‘Unidentified flying object detected, ma’am.’
The security agent in the doorway looked unimpressed with the message he had to deliver, and Amy did her best not to laugh in his face. She was covering for Owain after his late night, not that he'd asked, and she had the attention of the entire Eye Room on her.
‘Where is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s flying in circles above our heads, ma’am. It will fly by the surface compound in about two minutes.’
Surface compound. This was the first time she'd had confirmation that their bunker and the place where Jason was being held were close.
‘Have we dealt with anything like this before?’
‘Not from above, ma’am. Only the odd rambler or farm hand.’
On the screen before her, she could see movement in the Project Room and the corridors, people heading outside to see what was going on. They had to limit the damage, take out the drone before the prisoners saw it and formed ideas, find the people responsible—
Wait. Think.
She was acting like an agent, not a woman looking out for her personal interests, working independently from the NCA. She wanted Jason and the others to see this drone, remember that there were other people out here. She didn’t want the people behind it to be found, especially if those people happened to be enterprising young women whose names began with C.
‘Let’s wait for the drone to finish its flight,’ she said. ‘It’s probably just some children messing around out there. Losing their drone would alarm them.’
‘What about lockdown, ma’am?’
Amy fought against the panic that word instantly brought to mind. They could lock down the prisoners, remotely? Seal them inside the compound, or individual rooms? Confine them and cage them like animals? This really was just an extension of prison, and they were only enjoying the illusion of freedom.
‘We don’t have the external cameras to confirm, but I suspect the prisoners are already outside. It’s a little late for anything els
e.’
‘Yes, ma’am. It is.’
She felt the burn of his words, knew that he was telling her off, that her leadership was being questioned. She tried not to care about it, but she felt any retort stick in her throat. The agent turned on his heel and left.
On the monitors, every room was empty except one dormitory, where a man was sleeping away the morning and hadn’t heard a thing.
Chapter 23: Somebody that I Used to Know
‘Oi, Sleeping Beauty! The natives are restless for lunch and there was a fucking drone in the sky!’
Jason threw an arm over his head and tried to roll away from the voice shouting at him, but he was caught up in his sleeping bag and his sluggish body wouldn’t move.
‘Oh no you don’t.’
Someone grabbed at his sleeping bag and dragged it off the bed, sliding him off the bed and onto the cold, hard floor. Jason groaned and batted feebly at the insistent hands, his head threatening to split open with the force of his hangover.
‘I’ve been poisoned,’ he whined.
‘Not you too. It’s just Nikolai’s vodka – you’re the idiot, you drank it. Most of us just nurse it for the night.’
Jason crawled pathetically out of his sleeping bag and then squinted up at Lewis. Everything about last night flooded back to him. Between losing rounds of poker, he remembered Lewis’ name and Lewis’ reputation being dragged – and how he had blushed to hear it.
‘Where were you and Stoker then?’ he asked.
The grin on Lewis’ face faded. ‘Me and Stoker? Who said we were together?’
Jason supported himself on the bunk as he rose unsteadily, ignoring the hand Lewis was offering him. He suddenly felt awkward about taking it.
‘No one said anything. Neither of you were around, and you’ve been pretty inseparable since I got here.’
‘It helps to be mates with the elites,’ Lewis said, slowly, suspiciously. ‘You know that – basic prison shit. Stoker’s the least worst option.’
Hard Return Page 10
