Locked and Loaded: A Riz Sabir Thriller Omnibus

by Charlie Flowers

  I’d read that the physical symptoms of withdrawal were close to the flu, with all that that entailed.

  I went back to the laptop. I’d been killing time by typing up some coursework for the degree module. My piece de resistance was a comparison between modern jihadism and Bakuninist terrorism in the late 19th century. I’d been working on it for months on and off, but that would have to wait for now as the incoming communications were backing up. Here was an office email on the continuing riots and demos caused by that Mohammed trailer. A graphic came up of a great swathing curve all across the near and middle East. Embassies attacked, staff killed… more grist to the mill for the Infidels.

  Another email held some copies of some conspiracy magazines, and some way-off-the-wall speculation about Breivik, Order 777, and “Lionheart”.

  I sighed and disassembled a pen, then tried to put it back together. We needed to get back in the world. Who the hell was Lionheart, anyway? Before me on the desk were some printouts that Tchéky had left, graphs of phrases and words trending in online chatter, both overt and covert. “Breivik”, “777”, “spectacular”, they were all going through the roof. Something was coming. Something really, really, bad.

  27

  3rd October

  6am the next morning. Bang-Bang was spark-out, curled up on me, and the towels on the bed were spattered with sick. I hadn’t slept much. The NyQuil still seemed to be working, helping her to ride out the worst of the shakes and stuff I couldn’t begin to get my head round. I had an appointment at the French Ministry of Defence in an hour.

  I went down to the lobby and hailed a cab to the address they’d given me, 14 Rue Saint Dominique. The cabby had to drop me off at a cordon of what to my untrained eye looked like CRS and several armoured cars. Tchéky met me at the cordon and took me through, to a deserted street hung with tricolours.

  ‘Welcome to our security. VigiPirate counter-terrorist patrols and “La Jaune”. Mobile Gendarmerie. Feel safer?’

  ‘Much.’

  We walked to the vehicle entrance of the Defence Ministry and I got my laminate and checked in. Tchéky took me through the vehicle courtyard and into the main building. ‘Now, we look around. The NATO conference is later today, here. Let me know if you see… feel… anything imminent.’

  For the next few hours I wandered, looking at firing lines, windows, patrolling sniffer-dog teams. I was even shown a knot of officials who turned out to be the Defence Minister’s team. But try as I might I couldn’t get a feel for how any of our roaming Neo-Nazi friends could breach this.

  Tchéky and I went to a café outside the cordon at 11am and we went over some signals chatter printouts and more photos. Nothing conclusive so far. Apparently his DPSD people were all over Paris central, seeing what they could see. He regarded me over the coffees and then asked the question I’d been waiting for. ‘Riz, please excuse me… your fiancée, she will be OK? She will beat this?’

  I stirred a spoon in the cup. ‘If she’s the Holly I know, Tchéky, yes, she will. She’ll beat this. All she’ll need is someone to throw hand grenades at her for the rest of her life.’

  He looked at me blankly. I took the spoon out of my cup. ‘It’s a quote from Full Metal Jacket mate, don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Bien.’

  I got back to the hotel at noon. Stevie was on the reception and I went over to say hello. He smiled and showed me a handwritten note. It was in Bang-Bang’s handwriting. ‘Your lady has been busy, mon ami. She sent down this, and I had to get Tchéky’s Technical Service people in to help.’

  I read the note out, and started to laugh about halfway through it. “1 kitchen mixing bowl; USB extender cable; camera tripod; rubber bands; cordless drill; 6mm nut; lots of chocolate; 50-inch plasma screen; USB splitter; wireless printer, Sony Vaio Z Series laptop; 2 Orange France 3G USB Modems with Lets Go Sim Cards topped-up and REGISTERED S’IL VOUS PLAIT; spare leads; adaptors, car chargers, 2 sets of Vuzix VR290 glasses…xxx luv ya Stevie, Holly”.

  ‘Stevie, I know what’s she’s building. I think. If she didn’t order a load of planks, nails, and tinfoil, everything’s fine.’

  ‘J’ai pas compris.’

  ‘Mate, don’t worry. She’s just replaced one addiction with another.’

  I swiped the card and opened the door into Bang-Bang’s kingdom of rehab chaos. Two techie-looking guys were fussing over what looked like a miniature radome on a camera tripod on the balcony, with a cable that led to Bang-Bang and her netbook, perched on the bed like a smack-Scheherezade. She was tapping away on the keyboard and she smiled when she registered me. The place still smelled of sick and she still looked like death but there seemed to be a sense of mission in her eyes. The tech guys nodded at me and left.

  She blew her nose on a tissue and spoke. ‘Babe. I’ve been busy. I think I’ve got the little raccoon bastards back under control, and they’ve shown me something you need to see.’

  ‘Sure doll. What’s with the wifi booster?’

  We both looked at the Heath Robinson contraption on the balcony. She laughed. ‘Have you SEEN the charges for internet in this place?’

  ‘Doll - it’s on the KTS account!’

  ‘Oh. Ah well, can’t hurt to have a backup. I’m piggybacking off the Barclays office over the road. Want some chocolate?’

  ‘The… Barclays office over the road…?’ I went to the balcony to look. Sure enough, there it was.

  ‘I’ve also transferred some funds from dead accounts out. 51,000 Euros do ya?’

  ‘Christ help us. Where did you put it?’

  ‘Bit Coins and Linden Dollars, babe.’

  I sat with her on the bed, which was a warzone of empty icecream containers and opened cartons and bottles of various medicines. She handed me some chocolate, then a laptop and a set of those virtual reality glasses. On the screen, a source code editor was running alongside some sort of vector graphics generator. ‘You can shut those down. We’re going into Second Life. That’s where they are now. I’ve got FlameLite back under control, reprogrammed their parameters, set them hunting on MMORPGs and social networks. And they’ve found a mutual friend.’

  I placed the glasses over my eyes and wiggled the bud earphones into my ears. I concentrated on remembering the controls. To my relief, I found that Bang-Bang had already set up my avatar. Years ago I’d wasted a good half-day trying to build a useful likeness of myself in the Second Life staging area, only to give up when someone had walked past me smoking a pipe with a chicken on his head. Followed by a giant bee.

  I looked around. As I swung my gaze left and right the virtual world began to render itself from monochrome into colour. Bang-Bang’s avatar was standing next to me, and pointed left. Ah. It was coming back to me. I hit the headphone symbol and got her voice in my ears. ‘’Ello! OK babes. Look around. See where we are.’

  I looked. Oh no.

  “Hello RizwanSabir Welcome to RACCOON CITY Resident Evil Outbreak Sim” said the panel in my left eyepiece. We were in a grim grey brick bunker with green wallmounted displays. And before us were a good half-dozen stunted little figures. The raccoons, infomorphs, whatever they were called, looked even worse in this virtual environment. Like warped furry people. Two walked forward holding the hands of… a white girl wearing an England away shirt.

  ‘Duckie???’

  The avatar made a hand gesture and Duckie’s voice popped into my left ear. ‘Wotcha you two. I’m actually in an internet café in West Bromwich, on a headset, and I’ve only got about an hour. These raccoon-things found me in here and were yacking away but I don’t understand them. But I’ve got something here in SL to show you… you’re not gonna like it. I’m in with the C18, the B and H crew, the Infidels, SVS, all of them. They’ve been planning their mission right here in a far, far corner of Second Life. Ready?’

  Bang-Bang’s avatar nodded and looked at me. I took a deep breath and spoke into my headset. ‘OK. Ready. How do we get there?’

  Duckie waved her other hand and
a URL appeared in a box. ‘Click it. We teleport.’

  We clicked the link.We materialised on a dark blue hill, under a dark sky, no stars, no moon. The raccoons chittered and Duckie spoke to us. ‘Look around you, guys. Recognise it?’

  We panned right and left. I did. How could I not? It had been on constant rotation on the TV news for months since 22nd July 2011.

  ‘Duckie, this is a simulation of Utoya Island, isn’t it?’

  Her avatar nodded slowly, the framerate making her head jerk. ‘Yeah. Look down there.’

  The avatar pointed. I saw muzzle flashes in the distance. ‘All day and night, C18, Blood and Honour, Belgian Blood and Honour, Infidels… all day, they recreate the massacre.’

  We watched.

  ‘All day and night, they practice. There’s more. Go to invisible and follow me.’

  Bang-Bang spoke in my ear. ‘I’ve customised our avatars with b.places HUDs for rapid flying, and invisibility scripts for the obvious. Look for the button with the cloak on it?’

  After a few false tries I was cloaked and we floated down and round a hill, to a sprawl of buildings. Hangar blocks. We faded in through the ceiling of the largest hangar and stopped. I waited for the frame rate to catch up and looked down. I was looking into a brightly-lit area. Red and black flags hung from the walls at either end. It was full of avatars, moving in groups, clustering. I could see weapons. AKs, grenades, pistols. Wooden crates. I turned to look at the other end of the area. There was a mockup of two large mosques, and parked vehicles. I saw an outline of a roundabout, and what looked like a gas or petrol tanker. We looked at each other and pressed the cursors to go lower. Duckie dropped down to the hangar floor into a knot of avatars.

  We hung in the air above the meeting like wraiths as Duckie moved amongst the avatars, chatting away and exchanging greetings. Our two little infomorph friends sat in the rafters of the hangar, visible only to us. Their asphalt eyes gleamed wetly. In my earphones I could hear a soft “snick” sound every now and then as Bang-Bang used her camera function to take snapshots to be analysed when we got out. As carefully as we could, we ran our cursors over the figures gathered below us and watched the boxes that came up. We were looking for names. Snick.

  I noticed a banner at the hangar’s end and moved towards it to bring it into better focus. A large khanda, the Sikh symbol, with “Sikhs Versus Shariah” underneath it. I turned back and gestured to Bang-Bang. She took a photo.

  The whole thing was eerie. Was this the future of intelligence-gathering? No blood, no dirt, just time-lagged ghosts spying on each others’ virtual rooms?

  Several minutes later Duckie’s avatar’s face turned ceilingwards. Her voice came to our ears on a private channel. ‘Guys. I’m out of time. Copy this flyer and copy my number, it’s a pay-as-you-go mobile you can get me on. Sparingly! See you in real life honeys.’

  A text box came up next to her with a number and a virtual gig flyer. Snick.

  On Bang-Bang’s cue, we hit the “up” cursors and floated up through the ceiling. A moment’s stickiness and then were out and floating away and turning into the deep blue gloom, our AI familiars floating up with us. Bang-Bang spoke to them and they chattered in their new language. They teleported out, going from 64 to 32 then to 8-bit. Then they were gone and we were alone in the sky above Utoya Island 2. The horizon thinned to a narrow, vivid line of blues, greys, and silvers. We faded up into the black, reverse-skydiving until we hung in nothingness.

  I took off the glasses and returned to the real world with relief. ‘Was that it?’

  Bang-Bang took her own glasses off and her eyes ever-so-slowly refocused on mine. ‘That was it. Give me two minutes and I’ll get the photos up on the main screen.’

  I studied her as dispassionately as I could. She was off the heroin, with a rather snotty nose, and back on her old drugs of coding and the internet. I could never get truly comfortable with this weird shadow existence, but she was years younger than me and a child of Web 2.0, flying in it like a bird.

  28

  October 4th

  The day was sunny and warm. Bang-Bang seemed fine, although a bit pale and wobbly, and demanded that we stroll the boulevards. She’d gone to the Crazy Horse Revue with Marianne last night and left me to man the computers and try and keep ahead of what was going on back in the world. And the world was falling apart.

  Bang-Bang had returned at midnight with a bottle of Moet and we’d made the most of it and watched some Luc Besson films on cable.

  And now it was a new day. We bought a map at a shop and decided to strike out towards the Avenue Foch and just go where the wind took us. By late afternoon we were sightseed-out and had plotted up on an outside table at a restaurant off Quai de Dion Bouton. We had a cheeky carafe of red wine and we were dead set on making the most of it. Bang-Bang stuck her gum on the underside of the table and said to me and no-one in particular, ‘Should we be on the lookout for runaway schoolgirls and English teachers?’

  I laughed. ‘Yeh. Good one. I think DPSD have got their dragnet out in Paris for Nazis, not elopers.’

  ‘Ah. OK.’

  ‘Thought about what we’re going to do when we get back to Blighty, Holly doll?’

  She stretched and smiled at me. ‘What do we do when we get back? Back to me getting asked for ID in shops again, whooh… See Mum and Dad. Not get shot or rendered for a bit. Cook lots. A dinner party. Cook for you, you’re skinny, Riz my darling. Go to bed for a fortnight... How about you?’

  ‘Same same. Cook for YOU. You’re very skinny. We’ve got two jobs on at the office but we can work round that.’

  ‘Two jobs?’

  ‘Well, three really. First one is moving KTS’s offices to somewhere where the cops can’t get us. Second is the Colonel’s big plan to get Met cops on the payroll. Third is pinning down what the Infidels and or C18 are planning and taking them out.’

  ‘I know. Dangerous stuff.’

  ‘OK… apart from that…’

  We both laughed and drank some of the rough earthy wine.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts Holly.’

  She looked at me. ‘When we were in Second Life last night… that place Duckie and the raccoons took us to. Did the floor plans and building mockups look remotely French to you?’

  ‘No. It looked British. And I saw French and Belgian fellas going by their handles, but no reference to anything at all in France. I saw models of two big mosques that looked well-British, not French in style at all. French mosques are squarer, more blocky, they’re often in the style of Moroccan mosques, whereas UK mosques these days are sort of mock-Moghul.’

  ‘Mock what?’

  ‘Work with me here babe. I know this stuff. Oh, and the cars in their floor plans were driving on the left, not the right.’

  She puffed out her cheeks and thought for a bit.

  ‘I noticed the cars. I’m thinking all this whack-the-NATO conference stuff is just a blind. I reckon they’re going to try and get the arms to Britain. And as and when we do find this truck and its container, what are you thinking of doing?’

  I placed a Sony Ericsson W995 mobile phone on the table. ‘Already set up for Google Latitude. We gluepad this onto the chassis and track it. I’m sure our new French colleagues will jark the container too, but I want some backup.’

  She nodded. ‘Plan. What’s the battery life on that thing?’

  ‘48 hours tops from when we turn it on. I hope.’

  ‘And when we’re tracking it in Britain, then what?’

  ‘We’re going to get the whole team on it and then you and me are going to have a chat with Tommy Robinson in Luton, luv. I want to know what he knows about Breivik, the Templars and the Infidels. Just a hunch. Well, not a hunch, Breivik’s talking to people from inside his prison and they never really did find the rest of those Templar Knight people.’

  We were silent for a long while. Bang-Bang’s glum face suddenly brightened.

  ‘Riz. We haven’t hit the shops properly yet.’r />
  I agreed. ‘Tomorrow I’ll treat ya.’

  Bang-Bang blew me an ironic kiss.

  Cars passed. We looked at the hospital opposite.

  ‘Holly, d’you reckon you’ve beat it?’

  She nodded. ‘I reckon I have, because I swear to almighty Allah, if I ever so much as see smack or even a needle in the future, I’m gonna run like hell and call in an airstrike.’

  She gave a little shudder. She reached for my hand and I took it. ‘All it’s left me with is a feeling I’m now a member of an exclusive club I never wanted to join. OK, penny for your thoughts, Rizwan Sabir.’

  ‘I was just remembering when me and the Colonel lost you in the MOD building and he put out an APB for a girl in a corset and French knickers.’

  She laughed with me. ‘Oh God, all those years ago last month. You had to be there.’

  I suddenly remembered I had on my person something else I’d requested the office send over. I’d been holding onto it till she was better. And found alive. Casually, I placed Bang-Bang’s Queen’s Gallantry Medal on the table in front of her.

  ‘For services to the nation, Her Britannic Majesty is pleased and all that…’

  She picked it up and burst out in incredulous laughter. ‘Oh my Lawd would you look at this! That is brilliant. Hopefully I’ll live to tell the Queen thanks myself.’

  Again we let the sheer randomness of our lives impress itselves upon us. We watched the river and the traffic. ‘Ain’t life ridiculous?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it sure is…’

  And then she suddenly gulped and went pale. ‘Doll. Look behind you. No DON’T look behind you. Wait. Wait one.’

  ‘What?’

  She started to murmur as quietly as possible. ‘One of the French or Belgian army neo-Nazis that I spotted in Parwan, is walking up the street behind you.’