How many other people? Fact is, he doesn’t know.
This isn’t a calculated attack. It’s a test of himself, by himself, to see whether he could take it. To find out who he is.
Now he’s horrified by the prospect of causing death or injury to that little girl over there, talking excitedly to her mother. Or the posse of Indian tourists in the corner of the waiting room, unaccountably dressed all in white. It was one thing questioning his own existence, and too bad if some other people got caught up in the answer. But Dinky Dutta never intended for others to die before he got the chance. No way.
Drop the idea of dropping it by the pier.
You’re just going to have to wait, Dinky, till the boat comes in and goes out again.
Wait until it’s midstream, as planned. Shame about the extra waiting time. You could try meditating like your Dad taught you. May not help but it won’t make things worse: time can’t go any slower than it is now.
(8) Tony gets ahead
Tony’s sitting comfortably. Not as in – completely relaxed; more like – at ease, mainly, with a sequence of events successfully initiated, now proceeding more-or-less as planned.
It reminds him of the lull between exam papers - ‘Finals’, back in the days before
continuous assessment. Like as not you knew you’d done all right in the previous paper; now all you had to do was stay on track for the next one. A monkish existence with perhaps a couple of drinks at night to help you sleep. For those few weeks, you were chaste, pure, purposeful.
The way Gandhi must have been all the time; him and Nelson Mandela.
Enough tiresome reminiscence! Let’s get an update.
Dinky has taken the photos and his alter ego has sent them to Tony, complete with
warning message from ‘osamaobama’. Didn’t he do well, thinks Tony, to identify the location in every shot? Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf, Canary Wharf, an icon in triplicate. Silly email address, but terrorists probably would have a warped sense of humour, wouldn’t they?
Soooooo...
A few minutes ago Tony duly forwarded the message and the photos to the command and
control centre in New Scotland Yard, c/o the exclusive email address issued to senior 2012
executives and other London luminaries. A couple of minutes later, he phoned an even more exclusive number and asked for ‘Bessie’, as he had been instructed to do in the event of an emergency. When s/he came to the phone, ‘Bessie’
was duly impressed. Having closed the call only a few moments ago, Tony is now sitting comfortably, waiting for the pace of events to pick up.
One more thing. Though it wasn’t in the plan (at least, not in the version of the plan that Tony explained to Dinky), as he was forwarding the photos from ‘osamaobama’, Tony attached something else along with them.
Rude not to, really, when the email seemed to be crying out for further attachments.
The extra attachment was Tony’s photograph of Dinky standing at the back of the
Thames Clipper, helpfully labeled ‘DinkyDutta.jpg’. In the covering note, Tony didn’t say anything to incriminate the youth. Was careful not to. He merely wrote that
‘there may have been something not quite right about this young man who recently came
for interview in my office.’ Nothing in what he said that couldn’t be judged irrelevant when the proper police inquiry gets going. But Tony is guessing it might need an extra nudge to get it going properly. Like having a brown face to put things to, even if it later turns out to be quite the wrong face, sadly misplaced.
Even while he was setting him up, Tony also kept his word to Dinky. In between
emailing Scotland Yard and his phone call to ‘Bessie’, Tony also sent the
‘osamaobama’ pictures back to Dinky, this time to the boy’s official email address. As Tony promised all along, Dinky could still be the one to break the story, though he might be more intimately involved in it than he was previously led to expect. But any misunderstanding will soon be cleared up, surely.
Thus for the time being we shall leave Tony as we found him. Sitting in his office,
waiting for something big.
Something big enough to Make the Games.
(9) Breathless
She is struggling to get more air into her lungs.
Eyes shining, chest heaving. Yes, Pete can see but he's determined not to look at the swell of Rupa's breasts, rising and falling against the scooped edges of her low-cut top.
So out of breath she must have run up the ramp from the DLR station into the campus,
and again up the stairs to his academic office.
New ruling from university managers: lecturers should not have personal nameplates on
their doors. Rooms in which lecturers happen to work are to be labeled
‘academic office’.
She knocked but by the time Pete answered she had already opened the door and entered
the room.
Crossed his mind to be annoyed. Then Pete saw Rupa's agitated face and in quick
succession he invited her to sit down, asked her if she needed a glass of water, directed her, needlessly, to take a deep breath, all the while wondering what on earth had brought her here out of term-time and in such a state.
‘It's Dinky,’ she declares, brushing aside Pete’s solicitude for her. ‘He’s gonna do
something stupid.
I just know it, right. You're going to help me find him.
We've got to stop him, right. Please say you will.’
Praise the Lord! Student begins conversation with tutor other than by saying 'I,m
confused. Can you tell me what to write?'
Not meaning to belittle Rupa's obvious concerns, thinks Pete with his 'student-facing'
face on, at least this is better than being asked to explain yet again an assignment I've already explained half a dozen times before.
‘I’ll do what I can, Rupa. You know I always do what I can for my students’. He’s
answering on auto-pilot (with plenty of automatic cheese, clearly), but even before he gets the words out, he knows they’re in the wrong register. Supportive-sounding professional clichés won't do. His first instinct was correct. This is not going to be a question of university procedure, putting in a good word, or coaxing an increasingly impatient administrator into letting passable students remain registered for a module they’ve hardly attended.
No, no, nothing like that. Whatever’s going on here, is of a quite different order.
Thank God.
Ain’t no stopping her now. Words come tumbling out like dice.
Logged on. Dinky tweeting. Crazy. Not at our place, not home with parents. Tweets
mention Canary Wharf.
Says explosion, people dying. Dinky not himself.
We’ve got to go and look.
Now she’s on her knees, imploring him. Whoah, there – stop, please! In only a few
seconds Pete's veered from interest to empathy to acute embarrassment.
What if somebody saw? Happened to be walking past and looked through the glass slit in the door?
Female student kneeling in front of male academic.
Doesn’t bear thinking about.
Afterwards he will cringe at the thought that this is what it took to get him out of his seat.
This is what nudged him into going with Rupa to find Dinky.
Not because he was unreservedly concerned, either for Dinky or for her state of mind.
True, he wasn't entirely indifferent, but the main thing was to get this sexy girl out of the kneeling position before someone mistook him for Bill Clinton.
‘There’s something else,’ Rupa is saying. Not only her eyes but her whole body is
downcast, dejected. ‘I was so worried about Dinky that I phoned the police.’
Would they act or hardly re-act at all?
She wasn,t sure, but she said she thought she had to try them, at least.
> ‘They didn’t seem bothered at first. I told them about the tweets and gave them Dinky’s login. The phone operator took it down but I could tell he wasn’t that interested. Then, when I said Dinky’s full name, it was like an alarm went off.’
The urgency of finding her lost lover and rescuing him from danger, is taking over from Rupa's anxiety about having done the wrong thing. The stupidest thing. She braces herself to tell Pete the rest of the story:
‘I was put on hold for a few seconds and then a very cool woman came on. She sounded
different. Y’know, authority. And she wanted to know loads about Dinky, but I could tell she already knew quite a lot –
knew too much about him. Then I realised they were already looking for him, chasing
him down, and I was just making it easier for them.
‘So I ended the call and started running over here to find you. I thought they might come
after me as well, and maybe they could use my phone to trace me, so I binned it. And I really wish I hadn't because it was a present from my mum, and she'll murder me when I go home without it.’
Here she crumples, scrunched up like a piece of waste paper, then unfolds again till she's pumped up and ready to go.
This way and that, collapsed and refurbished in just two ticks. Aaah, the resilience of youth!
But Pete isn’t so supple nowadays. Frowning, he might even be mumbling to himself, he
crosses the room, takes his jacket off the hook and puts it on.
From the slabs of sunlight crashing through his office window, he knows he'll be too hot.
But without the homely stuff in his jacket pockets, he'd feel even more uncomfortable. There's a photo of Carol and the kids, for example, which he never knowingly goes without.
Moves through the door and turns back, momentarily, to lock it. Rupa is already
impatient, like a child who won't go on without her parents and can't wait for them to catch up.
But he does catch up, and now the two of them are aligned. Walking smartly along the corridor, side-by-side: the way detectives do on TV.
Down onto the DLR platform, where the train indicator says there'll be one in four
minutes. No quicker way of getting to Canary Wharf.
The distance from campus to the Wharf is not much more than the length of two Royal
Docks. But the docks were built for big ships and plenty of them: it’s too far to walk. Call a cab and it’s bound to get snarled up in traffic. So they must wait, in this place where they have waited a thousand times before, at the start of a thousand unexceptional journeys.
Today is not one of those days. Rupa can taste catastrophe, she’s convinced of it, and she’s pacing up and down the platform, willing the little red train to be here now. Pete isn’t sure what to think.
In some ways he resents Rupa’s apprehension and the impact it’s having on him. And
why did you come to me anyway, when I’m not even your personal tutor? Yet he’s glad to be out of the office, doing something –
anything – that just might be conclusive.
(10) On my way
At last, my boat comes in. I saw it first approaching, then leaving Greenland – no, not the barren island but the next Clipper stop, first one to the east of Canary Wharf. And now it’s crossing the river to the pier by the Four Seasons Hotel. Walking on water towards me; to save me. One on each side, two seagulls are its acolytes. What a heavenly boat!
So close I can hear the onboard instructions: Ladies and Gentlemen, we will shortly be arriving at Canary Wharf. If you are leaving the Clipper, please disembark from the front of the boat. Please have your tickets ready for inspection.
It scrapes softly along the side of the pier like a car tire riding the curb. Now they lower a tiny little bridge between the boat and the pier –
ingenious, really. Half a dozen passengers get off and three of us get on. No, there’ll be a few more –
a late influx of strong, silent types, running down the ramp, across the pier and onto the
boat.
The little bridge is pulled up right behind them. Just in time, lads.
Short hair, clean cut. White, short-sleeved shirts, matching ties and chunky sports bags.
Four of these guys; by the look of them, they’ve arrived direct screen from corporate America.
Jocks not geeks, they might be a relay team. Of course, Dinky finally realises, they’ll be from Team USA, the much-heralded, widely-trumpeted, Games-Time occupants of my university
campus.
Sorry, my former university. Keep forgetting I’m not going back.
So I’m making my way to the back of the boat, still carrying my laptop and that dynamite sports bag. No obstacles, no naked flames, nobody coming the other way. Even better – now I’ve got here, it looks like I’m going to have the rear deck to myself. Standing room and two rows of seats, open to the elements and empty of people. Perfect. Already we’re moving away from the pier. Canary Wharf skyscrapers, lovely old word from the 1920s New World, starting to look like a Mondrian. Docklands Boogie-Woogie. As soon as the boat’s midstream, I can sink the bag containing the acetone peroxide and its toxic ingredients, and drop the case with laptop and camera in it. Over the side, the whole lot. Only a few more seconds, and I shall be released.
Just then a party of chittering Chinese tourists comes out of the saloon to take pictures of each other. Bloody Hell! I can’t let them see me chucking stuff over. And what if they use a flash? Could it set off the bomb in my bag? It’s not a naked flame, I wouldn’t have thought so.
But I don’t fuckin’
know...!
Clickety-click, I’m still here, so I guess that’s the answer. They’ve posed and pushed buttons for each other, and now it looks like they’re going back into the saloon, thank God. Such a relief: the boat’s already slowing down to approach Tower Bridge, and normally the tourists can’t get enough of it. I thought I’d be stuck with them until the next stop, Tower, and there’s always a crowd to get on there.
Wait a minute, through the glass in the saloon door I can see one of the American relay team has been beckoning to the Chinese, calling them back inside.
I wonder what that’s all about.
The Yanks are coming! Two doors into the saloon, one on each side of the boat, and there are two jocks bursting through each one. If this is part of their training, I don’t want to be part of it! I start to get up and go but one of them shouts at me in a clipped, Scottish accent: ‘Sit down.
Don’t move’.
Not quite American, then. Now I see that apart from the one doing the talking, shouting, the other three have got guns drawn, pointing at me.
So they are a team; it’s just a different kind of relay.
He says I mustn’t move. But I’ve got to do something to get my bag out of their firing line. If they fire, even if a gun goes off by accident, then the bag will blow up, and I don’t know whether it will take the whole boat with it. There’s a boatload of people
– well, OK, the boat’s not actually loaded with people; but everyone on here, their lives are at risk, I’ve put them at risk, unless I manage to move my bag off the boat.
But when I do move they are going to shoot me, aren’t they? And they are going to shoot me in the head, dead; because they think I’m a terrorist and they’ve been told that terrorists wear their explosives in vests round their chests. It’s the fashion. Wounding a suicide bomber may allow him to detonate his bomb, that’s what the Met Commissioner said. The policy is to take
them out. Completely.
This second, the split second it takes me to talk to you about the second splitting, does seem to be going on for a very long time. So it might be true, then, what they say about the drowning man. But no, they’re wrong. Truth is I am now looking inside myself and my past life is no longer churning around in there. Blessed relief! There is only this....
(11) Aftermath
Thump...thump...
thump. The sound of the fridge door closing. But that’s nothing to the bish-bash-bosh going on in his mind’s eye.
Pete’s all a-jumble. It is early evening, six hours or so after Dinky Dutta died by his own hand. Or at the hands of the police. Or else it was ‘suicide by cop’. You pays your money (or perhaps you don’t pay, if you get your news online), and you takes your choice. Meanwhile Pete has no choice but to go over it again and again. He’s alone in his study, pacing up and down the rug that runs between the door and his desk by the window. Carol’s in the kitchen, preparing their dinner. This he knows because he can hear it every time she closes the door of the fridge.
The noise - for Chrissake, how many ingredients were in the fridge to start with? - keeps bringing him back to the surface; but doesn’t stop him being swamped by the continuous rehearsal of recent events.
Rupa’s frozen face when she heard the explosion.
Games Makers Page 12
