Hard Return

by Rosie Claverton

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Curfew’s at midnight. That’s one of the rules.’

  ‘No one told me the rules,’ Jason said.

  ‘That’s because it’s need-to-know and you’re clearly thick as shit.’

  Jason felt his fist clench. He wanted to punch the dickhead, but as he took a step forward, his foot hit a patch of water and his leg skidded out from under him, landing him hard on the concrete.

  Dreadlock did nothing. He just shook his head and walked away, leaving Jason lying on the freezing cold floor. Too proud to call for help, too stubborn to accept it anyway. This guy really knew how to push his buttons and watch him fail.

  Pushing himself up against the wall, Jason tested his leg and glared at the pool of water leaking in from under the door. He slowly limped back towards the dormitory, no idea what time it was, though the night was dark as coal through the mess windows. The clock on the mess wall wasn’t visible by night and Jason couldn’t find a light switch. Was that also automated? Did they switch off the lights as a signal to disperse, to enforce their curfew?

  Why were they given freedom in some areas and not others? The garden hadn’t been an intended thing, he was certain. How many of the rules of the place, including the automatic lights and automatic locks, were features that came not from outside but at their self-appointed governor’s request? Did Martin fear an uprising so much that he would keep them hemmed in by rules, routines, and restrictions?

  Jason suddenly remembered the note he had given him. He dug it out of the pocket of his fleece, holding it close to his face and squinting in the dark at the pencil scratchings:

  SAVE ME

  That was unexpected. Jason absent-mindedly placed the paper inside his mouth and chewed it to a pulp before swallowing. What exactly did the Governor need saving from? Gareth had said that Mole and the Governor were close. Did he think that Mole’s death meant they were coming for him next? Was this about a power-play in the compound?

  If it was about power, then the elites were the likeliest suspects. They would be interested in being more than second-rate. Jason recalled how Nikolai had refused to leave during his audience with the Governor. Waiting for the man to deliver exactly this kind of message? Removing any possible allies from him before seizing control?

  Jason wasn’t 100% sure he wanted to get into bed with a serial killer, but he also knew he'd been sent in here not only to get Lewis out safely but to solve the murder and prevent any further harm coming to the prisoners. Including one Martin Marldon.

  Turning away from the mess and its invisible clock, Jason caught himself once more looking towards the door. Lewis had told him that Mole had gone outside to dispose of the vegetable peelings but had been locked outside. It got dark outside well before dinner, but the lights in the mess would’ve been on. If he knew there was a risk of being shut outside, wouldn’t he have looked at the clock before stepping out into the night? Couldn’t the peelings have waited until the morning?

  If he had looked at the clock, had anyone seen him do it? The clock wasn’t that high. Maybe someone deliberately changed the time on it to trick Mole into leaving the compound when it wasn’t safe to do so. Deceiving him into certain death.

  The problem with this whole situation was that it required a driver asleep behind the wheel. Jason couldn’t imagine that this death had gone over well with the overseers of the Project. The rules were the rules, but a dead man was much more trouble than a couple of bent regulations. If it was a choice between locking the door on time or breaking a rule to save a man’s life, what would the operator behind the camera do? Or did they have strict instructions not to interfere with the affairs of the compound? If Jason started a fight club in the mess, would they just let it carry on?

  Unless they weren’t omniscient and omnipotent controllers of their fate. Maybe there weren’t cameras. Maybe they didn’t have any monitoring and it was all automated, right down to the choosing of prisoners and the perfectly-balanced meals of tins. Maybe they were just waiting for the dust to settle before they tried much beyond observation.

  Sighing, he headed back to the dormitory, no closer to the answers and feeling more than a little closed in.

  Better than freezing in the fresh air.

  Better than freedom?

  Chapter 26: You Can’t Stop the Signal

  Unable to sleep, Amy decided that night time made the most sense, as she was unlikely to run into Owain – the biggest obstacle in her path. She was confident no one else would question her closely.

  She looked at her watch. It was just after one – time for the ‘lunchtime’ meal of the night shift. She thought maybe she could use the opportunity to get outside, disappear into the chaos of their movement and onward to her destination. No one would notice she was gone, but how would she get back in? Would she spend all day and night wandering the woods in only her hoodie? She hated the cold and it was freezing down in the bunker, let alone outside.

  This was a stupid idea. How the hell was she going to find a signal jammer and disable it, when she didn’t know where it was or even what it looked like? She crashed down on the floor of her office, barely noticing the sting of the impact, not caring about the laptop bag bouncing on the hard floor. She was out of her depth. Jason was relying on her, and she was drowning.

  She felt her breathing speed up, her heart pounding, and she knew it was inevitable. Belatedly, she remembered that her tablets were unopened in the bottom of her backpack. She couldn’t even get that right. What a lazy, stupid, waste-of-space she was.

  She closed her eyes and she saw her parents, but not the hazy image of her childhood. The sharp images of just over a year past, staring at her with pity and revulsion. Knowing they had been right about her all along. She would never make anything of herself. She would never be able to survive life on her own.

  Amy fought against the rising panic, but it had hold of her now. Her throat closed and her hands trembled in front of her, her shoulders and arms aching with tension. She was losing control and there was no one to catch her. She thought she was better. She would never be better.

  She sucked in a breath, and then another. She held on to the breathing and nothing else, pressing her palms flat against the cold floor. Focus. Breathe.

  Breath after breath passed, until her hands were chilled and the floor felt warm. She opened her eyes and stared at the closed door of her office. She was okay. She was alive. Standing on wobbly legs, she checked her watch again. It was quarter past two.

  She had missed it, her one chance.

  Kicking out at the door only earned her a throbbing foot. She swore, hauled the laptop bag over her shoulder, and threw open the door. Marching out into the corridor, she looked left and right for someone, anyone, who might be able to get her out of this mess of her own making.

  Someone barged into her, sandwich in hand, and she reflexively grabbed for his sleeve.

  ‘I’m fucking late, all right?’ he snarled.

  ‘Good,’ she said, slightly breathless. ‘I need an escort.’

  The guard turned on his heel, swallowed his mouthful of bread, and flashed her a jam-smeared smile.

  ‘Do you now, love?’

  He looked her up and down, eyeing the blouse she had borrowed from IN3 that was too small even for her petite frame. It was disconcerting, being stared at so openly. It was a thing she had never experienced, not even from Jason. Was this how it was for other women all the time?

  ‘I have to perform maintenance on the signal jammer,’ she said, with barely a stutter.

  ‘I’ll take you out to the Hide now. You can be my cover with SN1 – he hates breaking the rules. I reckon you quite like it, don’t you?’

  ‘I have bent them a little in the past.’ It felt awkward in her mouth, but the agent didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘I’m SN6, by the way. You must be the tidy little TD1 th
at’s got the day shift in a twist.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want them to…lose focus.’

  What was she even saying? The words were meaningless. She felt her face flush with embarrassment, but SN6 only took that as encouragement. He placed a hand on her back and started walking her towards the tunnel and the vault door.

  ‘We keep Dodger in the Hide. He’s meant to be out in the cold on the roof, but he just won’t work out there – lazy bugger. I don’t think it’s bothered him much though.’

  Amy was momentarily unsure whether Dodger was a signals technician or the jammer itself, but it seemed they viewed the jamming unit like one of the team. If the device was inside the security agents’ base, she would struggle to conceal what she was doing from them – though she still had no idea what that was. Her quick thinking with the guard in the hall was different to carefully and competently disabling a jamming device without raising any alarms.

  The tunnel seemed longer than she remembered, and she glanced back. Yes, it was further. They must’ve passed the ladder that led to the entrance she had used. This tunnel continued for almost double the length of the walk she remembered, lit by only tiny LED units stuck into the tunnel wall. She was suddenly aware that she was alone in the dark with this man and his pace seemed to be slowing. She tried to keep up her determined walk, but his fingers caught in her shirt, his hand drifting lower.

  ‘What’s the rush, love? No one out here but us. I thought you were after an escort?’

  ‘Maybe later,’ she said.

  His hand was on her arse, cupping the cheek through her jeans. She felt uncomfortable and her instinct was to hit out, to scream, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything, do anything. She just kept walking.

  ‘Later, later,’ he said, mocking the pitch of her voice. ‘Maybe I’ll come find you in the locker room, eh?’

  Her mouth wouldn’t work, but he didn’t notice. He didn’t notice much. Maybe he just didn’t care. They finally arrived at another ladder, and he nudged her towards it with a slap.

  ‘Up you go, love. I’ll watch your step.’

  He laughed at his own joke, as she made her way unsteadily up the ladder, her laptop bag swinging awkwardly against her thigh. She couldn’t see what she was climbing towards, but the lights were coming closer together and that must mean she was near the end of the ladder.

  Her head hit the hatch and she grit her teeth to stop herself crying out. She could hear laughter above her, but no one opened the way for her. She had to wait until SN6 had climbed up behind her, climbing over her body to reach for the keypad to the right of the hatch. 4-3-2-1. The same idiotic combination that had been on her office door.

  He pushed up the hatch and she scrambled up the ladder, almost falling out of the top in her haste to get away. As she was on her hands and knees on the concrete floor, she looked up to see five tall, broad men staring back at her, with the same generic white faces and brown buzzcuts and slight smirks on their faces.

  ‘You brought us a friend, Sixy.’

  ‘She says she’s working, Number One.’

  SN6 offered her a hand up, but she got to her feet without assistance, even though the laptop bag threatened to unbalance her.

  ‘I’m here to service the signal jammer.’

  Laughter echoed around her at her words, and she realised the innuendo too late. Her face was hot and red, but SN1 – or Number One, as he was up here – didn’t say anything further. He merely gestured to a large black metal cube in the corner of the room. It was stuck with a pair of eyes someone had cut from a magazine, and a handlebar moustache. Newsprint letters, like a ransom demand, spelled out ‘DODGER’.

  Amy knelt down beside the signal case and took off her laptop bag, removing the toolkit from inside. She didn’t turn around, forcing herself to stay focused and keep her back to them, filtering out their words and their laughter and their movements. She had no real sense of where she was, except that it was maybe the size of the Eye Room. She wouldn’t look at them, at the room. She was going to do her job and get out.

  She carefully opened up the external housing for the signal jammer with her Allen keys, noting that it had some scratches and rust along the edges. Inside, the black device with its upright signal antennas looked like a cartoonist’s idea of a hacking tool, its fans whirring away to keep it from melting. It sounded like AEON on a bad day, when Amy’s now-defunct computer had been pushed to her limits in the pursuit of knowledge and perpetrators.

  The housing also contained a plastic wallet with what appeared to be a manual inside. The few typed pages were written in a disjointed English that indicated a non-native writer, the photographs showing that a colour booklet had been printed in black and white. This wasn’t in-house army technology, but a foreign import. This operation seemed to operate in some nebulous grey area, in the same way she had for years, but this felt more menacing somehow.

  Amy turned off the power and the fans whirred to a stop. She carefully cleaned the dust off the surface with a microfibre cloth, and considered her compressed air cannister, before returning it to the bag. However, the lack of noise was too obvious, and she could soon feel Number One looming over her shoulder.

  ‘Are you going to be long?’

  ‘I will be faster if I’m not interrupted.’

  ‘That’s what my wife says.’

  More laughter, but she was forced to turn the power switch back on, and the loud whirring of the fans was restored. Any loss of power to the unit would be immediately obvious. Short of breaking it with her clumsy ‘service’, she had to find another way to disable it.

  There were individual dials beside each of the antennae. She could turn them all down, which would surely reduce the gain, but she would likely still be too close to escape even that greatly reduced jamming field. As the jammer was surely designed to cover the compound, it would also be unaffected by such a minimal reduction. Maybe she could turn them all off? That would be easily discoverable though, and impossible to explain away.

  She touched the nearest antenna and held it between thumb and forefinger, twisting slightly. The stalk wobbled slightly in its housing but didn’t fall. Was that enough to disable it, or at least make it unreliable? She quickly worked her way through all eight antennae, carefully unscrewing them just the right amount.

  When she was finished, she replaced the manual and secured the housing, working as quickly as she could without drawing attention to her haste. With the box done up, and Dodger’s paper eyes looking at her dolefully, Amy packed up her tools and climbed to her feet, finally turning to face the room.

  There was a table in the centre, where three of the agents were playing cards. Another pair were seated in front of two monitors, showing night vision shots of the world outside. Amy recognised the gate where she and Cerys were surrounded, from an angle that suggested the camera was up a tree. The other screen showed the edge of a metal gate and beyond it, at some distance, a one-storey building surrounded by a metal fence.

  Where Jason was.

  Amy was then painfully aware of the door in the wall, a way into the outside world, a way towards Jason. Of course, she would likely not be able to get to him, to even get beyond that gate and into the compound from the outside. She would have to make do with having contact.

  ‘You in a hurry to leave us, pretty girl?’

  ‘Have some respect, Threesome.’ A younger agent got to his feet and gestured towards the hatch. ‘I’ll show you the way, ma’am.’

  ‘What’s with the fucking ‘ma’am’, Twofer? She’s just the tech.’

  ‘She fucking isn’t. She’s the one in charge when Jenkins is out.’

  Threesome shut up after that and Sixy looked a little put out. Twofer opened the hatch for her and let her go down first, before following and closing the hatch behind him.

  ‘Sorry about them,’ he said, on the walk back towards th
e main bunker. ‘They’re not allowed to, uh, ‘fraternise’ with the Eye girls. It makes them cranky-pants.’

  ‘It makes them dickheads,’ Amy said, without really thinking.

  Twofer laughed, a little nervous. ‘I, uh, I guess it does. Sorry.’

  ‘You already said that.’

  Amy was tired from lack of sleep, from lack of Jason, and she hadn’t been prepared for all this negative male attention. She found it exhausting. She wished she had just stayed in her house and never thought about coming out, not if this was what awaited her on the other side of the door.

  ‘I can take it from here,’ she said to Twofer, and left him standing in the tunnel, alone.

  Back in the office, she slammed the door shut and sank to the floor. After a minute, she reached for her backpack and pulled her mobile phone out of its secret compartment.

  Three bars of signal and GPRS. She wished she could feel happy about it.

  Chapter 27: Top of the Tree

  Cerys arrived for work at midday, discovered she was actually on a night shift, and went back home for a restless nap.

  Twenty hours later, Cerys emerged into the grey Cardiff morning and found Catriona waiting for her with coffee and a McDonald’s breakfast.

  ‘You are amazing,’ she told her.

  ‘I’ve found something,’ Catriona said.

  On a bench in Memorial Park, Catriona opened up her laptop as Cerys swallowed down her mouthful of egg and sausage, washing it away with strong, sweet coffee. After waiting for Cerys to finish her breakfast and sipping at her own cup, Catriona played a thirty-second clip of treetops, before turning to Cerys in triumph.

  ‘Okay…’ Cerys said, slowly. ‘Run that one past me again.’

  Catriona played the clip back at half-speed, tracing her finger along an S-curve through the trees – and a glint of silver.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘I am 89% sure you are looking at a road – and a gate.’

  Cerys pointed towards the silver glinting gate, but Catriona caught her wrist before she touched the screen.