by David Barker
“Boots off at the door please,” she said in accented English.
She introduced herself as Mrs Andersson and showed him around the ground floor, explaining which rooms he could use and which were private. His bedroom upstairs was a comfortable size and airy even if the décor looked rather shabby. She explained that she had her own bathroom, but that Sim would be sharing the bathroom on the landing with any tourists who rented out the third bedroom. He filled in his details on the home hub, including his new name, Lucas Trent.
“Do you want me to feed you while you stay?” she asked, looking at his stomach. “Fatten you up a bit?”
Sim smiled. “Not sure about the hours I’ll be working yet, Mrs Andersson. Best to say no for now, until I know my routine.”
“Hope you’ll not be coming back at all hours of the night, Lucas, disturbing me and the other guests. Not to mention the neighbours. This is a very respectable street.”
“Message received and understood, Mrs A. I’ll be good as gold.”
“Hmm, we’ll see about that. And it’s Mrs Andersson, not Mrs A if you don’t mind.”
She gave him a key to the house and left him to unpack. Sim hid some of his special equipment with his clean underwear and attached a small device to the new keyring. As he went to put his toiletries in the bathroom, he stopped for a moment when he saw his reflection. He stared, tracing his fingers over the new curves and shadows, trying to learn and accept his altered reality.
Sim headed back towards the town square wearing his augmented reality glasses and watched as people passing by were tinged green in his lenses. The glasses had been loaded with the known personnel of ESCO. There were simply too many for Sim to memorize. But any member of staff who came into view would register in the facial recognition software and show up as red in Sim’s glasses.
He turned to cross the road. A cyclist was approaching him. The man’s body turned red in Sim’s field of vision as a name appeared in tiny writing next to the bike. An idea occurred to the British agent and just as the cyclist was about to pass in front of him, Sim stepped out into the road. The cyclist slammed on their brakes, swerved to go around him and skidded. A car coming from the other direction slammed into the bike and the cyclist was thrown onto the bonnet. Their helmet cushioned the initial impact and as they rolled, their arm smacked into the windscreen. There was a loud crack and a howl of pain as the man continued to roll, falling off the far side of the car.
The driver leapt out as Sim rushed across the road.
“I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you,” said Sim. His stunt had worked a little too well. Sim tried to assuage his guilt with thoughts of the Swedish car’s autonomous emergency braking.
The cyclist sat up, cradling his right arm. “Din jävla…” He drew in a deep breath, wincing before he could finish his curse.
“He came out of nowhere,” said the driver to the people who had gathered to see what was happening. Close up, Sim’s AR glasses showed that the ESCO worker was a communications expert and had been working there for a couple of years. Sim stepped back into the crowd as a person with medical knowledge offered to help.
Sim found the local arbetsförmedling office near the Stadshus. He glanced up at the thin metal clock tower, glinting in the sun. The public employment service office was quiet and Sim did not have long to wait. He explained his situation – looking for a temporary post – and said that he would prefer an international company whose primary language was English. The man on the other side of the desk asked for his qualifications. Communications expert. The man shook his head and said there were no vacancies fitting the bill right now, but if one came up he would be in touch.
Sim gave his contact details and stood up to leave. “You never know, I might get lucky.”
Later, he returned to his rented accommodation, weighed down by some new hiking gear and an expensive SLR camera with a variety of lenses. There was a message waiting for him as he logged into the encryption and communication app on his roll tab. The note was from Wardle, explaining about a potential link between ESCO and the casino in Kiruna. He put on a smart jacket and a pair of chinos, then went for a simple dinner in the town centre. He listened to the wide range of languages being spoken at the restaurant while he picked at a not-very-Scandinavian lasagne verde. By the time a large portion of Tiramisu had been devoured, the street lights had started to outshine the late evening sun. Sim wandered over to the Golden Antlers casino and put on his augmented reality glasses.
As he entered the large two-storey building, Sim passed under a sign that looked like the inverted arches of a McDonalds restaurant. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a McFlurry. The grin of past memories was quickly wiped off his face as a security guard put his hand out.
“Sorry, sir. You can’t wear those glasses in here.”
“Pardon?”
“No AR devices allowed in the casino, sir. House rules are very clear about that.” The guard pointed to a set of regulations on a sign next to the entrance. “Happy to look after them for you, sir. They’ll be perfectly safe in our cloakroom.”
“But I’m short-sighted. How will I see?” Sim could see some customers walking past him and staring. He didn’t care if he was making a fuss. He needed those glasses.
“Don’t worry, sir, not the first time it has happened. We have plenty of pairs of varying strength. Sure my colleague will be able to find one to suit you. If you wouldn’t mind stepping this way.” The guard placed his hand on Sim’s shoulder and guided him towards a desk without waiting for Sim’s agreement.
Sim handed over his special glasses, was given a fob to reclaim them later, and then was asked about his prescription. He made up some negative number and pretended that they were just right when he tried them on. Finally, he was allowed to enter the casino hall. He took off his useless borrowed glasses and stuffed them in a pocket. Sim stood, looking around the bright, loud area, thinking about how he could possibly identify the ESCO employees without his AR glasses. There must have been at least one hundred people visiting the casino that night.
“Shit.”
Sim wandered the main hall, watching the glazed faces of people playing the slots. It was an oddly hypnotic combination of coins clunking into slots, barrels whirring and the beeps of losing symbols, broken up by the occasional cheer and louder clunk of coins being disgorged after a winning row. He stood next to a roulette wheel and glanced at the expectant faces. Sim never understood the appeal of roulette. Just like the slots, the odds were clearly against the punters. Only slightly so, but enough. No skill involved to tip the balance in the player’s favour. As long as enough customers played the table, the house would always win. A young woman in a shiny dress squealed when the ball landed on her corner at eight-to-one. There had to be occasional winners to keep the hope alive. He shook his head.
He moved on to the blackjack tables and sat down to watch a man accumulate an impressive stack of chips. After a few more hands, the man gifted a small chip to the croupier and exchanged the rest of his stack for several high-value tokens. Sim watched as he wandered off to the cashier near the back of the hall. An idea formed and Sim went to order a drink. He took the tumbler of vodka, a serviette and pen and settled into a seat with a good view of the cashier’s desk.
Over the next hour or so, Sim watched carefully for people coming to cash in a big win. He made a quick description of each person and tried to watch whether they left straight away or hung about in the bar afterwards. He noticed four winners – three men and a woman – had gathered around a table in stages. Once all four were there, the cork of a champagne bottle was popped and glasses were charged.
After the second bottle of bubbly had been consumed, Sim was still nursing his vodka and beginning to feel tired. He was about to order himself a coffee when the group stood up to leave. He followed at a discreet distance and watched them climb into a driverless taxi outside. Sim made a mental note of the taxi’s number and then went back inside to reclaim his AR glasses.
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He wandered back to his rented accommodation. Too cloudy for moonlight or stars and the road that his landlady’s house was on had few street lights. It never really got pitch black at this time of year, but Sim still managed to bash his shin on a ceramic pot. He swore loudly as he stumbled in the gravel and a cat screeched as it darted out from some shadowy den. Sim noticed a light flick on upstairs in the house. He glanced at his watch. 2am. Not a good start to his tenancy. He wondered if Jason Bourne had ever had to fend off a punctilious landlady.
CHAPTER 27
Sim was dreaming of Scotland when the buzz of his phone intruded on the scene. He stretched out an arm to wrap around Rosie and grasped at thin air. The phone buzzed again. He blinked as he tried to focus on the screen. Shit, nearly noon. A vacancy had come up at ESCO. Just a temporary one. A communications worker had broken his arm and collarbone yesterday and would be laid up for a few weeks. What a stroke of luck. Could Sim come in for an interview tomorrow, the employment agency worker had asked. Sim got dressed and headed into town.
Once his stomach had been sated by a plate of sausages, smoked cheese and scrambled eggs, Sim set off to find the garage that looked after the driverless taxis in Kiruna. It was a short walk to the east of the centre, just off one of the main roads. A mechanic was working under a vehicle that had been raised up on trolley jacks. Sim bent down to ask where the manager was and a greasy hand appeared, pointing a wrench towards a room at the back of the garage.
Sim knocked on the half-open door.
A woman sitting at a desk looked up. “Yes?”
“Sorry to bother you, but I think I lost my wallet in one of your cars last night.”
“Don’t think anything was handed in. Hang on. Wilma!” the woman bawled the last word out across the garage floor fighting the noise of an axle grinder that the mechanic was now using. “Wilma!”
There was no response. The woman tutted and picked up the phone. She punched one of the buttons and waited. “How many times have I told you not to listen to music when you’re on reception?” she said after the ring tone had been replaced by a voice. “Got a man here who says he lost his wallet last night.” She placed her hand over the receiver and looked up at Sim. “What time? Where?”
“Just before 2am, I was dropped off at the casino. It was the big black driverless cab. The one with the advert on the side for the Northern Lights safari.”
The woman relayed the information and waited again. She looked up and shook her head. “Definitely nothing handed in.”
“Oh,” said Sim trying to look crest-fallen. “You couldn’t tell me who the customers after me were, could you? Maybe they picked it up by accident. Perhaps a reward would jog their memory?”
The woman shook her head. “Can’t do that. Against company policy.”
Sim extracted a banknote from his pocket and flattened it out on her desk. “Like I said, I’d be happy to offer a reward.”
The woman squinted and then spoke into the phone. She listened to a response and scrawled something down on a piece of paper. She slid the information over to Sim and then placed her hand over the money.
As Sim was leaving, he noticed that the grease monkey had appeared from under the vehicle and was taking a break outside. A cigarette was pursed between purple coloured lips. Another woman. At least the company’s moniker made sense now. Venus Taxis. Sim walked over and nodded towards the car on jacks.
“Never liked electric motors myself. Too fiddly when something goes wrong,” he said.
“Don’t get much choice these days,” she replied, still staring off into the distance.
“Got a nice two-cylinder petrol bike back home.”
The mechanic turned to look at Sim. “You after a cigarette, or something?”
“No, no, nothing likely that. But actually. Yes, there was something. You know that big people carrier you have? The driverless one.”
She nodded.
“I want to play a prank on a friend of mine. He’ll be hiring it soon for a stag party. I wonder if you could modify the driver’s seat? I’ll pay, of course.”
“Modify in what way?” She was squinting at Sim by now.
Sim pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, with a sketch on it. “Think you can do that?”
The mechanic took the design and looked at it for a moment before smiling. “Yeah, should be easy enough. Stag party, huh?” She dropped her cigarette butt and ground it into the tarmac with her steel-toed boots. “Four hundred euros. Up front.” She held out her hand. Sim hesitated and then reached inside his jacket, counting out some notes.
“For that price, I get it done by tomorrow evening, OK?”
Mrs Andersson had made some stew to feed an American couple who were staying at the house and Sim was allowed to have the leftovers. Straight after supper, he set off for old Kiruna wearing his new clothes. In his backpack he had a sleeping bag, a tripod and two zoom lenses as well as a flask of hot coffee. Around his neck was the new Pentax and its wide-angle lens.
The bright sunshine had faded long ago. All the colours were blanched like a printer running low on ink as Sim hiked the few miles west. He glanced at his watch – near midnight. The roads were clear and so was the sky. The mosquitoes seemed particularly hungry and Sim spent half the journey slapping his hand ineffectually against his neck or ankles. The crescent moon was visible in the half-light, just above the eastern horizon. Sim stopped to set up his tripod and used the biggest zoom lens to photograph the celestial body.
He thought of the people he had left behind at Moon Lab One. Elsa, Lin, Yvette. How were they getting on? His chest tightened as he thought too of the corpses still up there. All the workers killed by Doctor Payne. But most of all, Sim thought about his dead son. He realised that he had not thought about James for several days. Pre-occupied with his operations and his mission. But the grief had not diminished. It had merely been stored up, waiting for something to trigger the flood of emotion. Sim discovered that his new eyes could produce tears. He squatted down, wrapping his arms around his shins and rocked to the rhythm of his sobbing.
The skies had darkened a little further by the time Sim collected himself. He had a job to do. He wiped his eyes and gathered his equipment. It was gone midnight by the time the headquarters of ESCO came into sight. Sim could see the peak of the Kiirunavaara and its lob-sided profile. He walked a little closer to the perimeter fence of the security company’s grounds and set up his tripod again. This time the lens was pointed at the ground, not up in the sky.
Sim watched the security gate for half an hour. He had snuggled into the sleeping bag to keep warm and had nearly finished the flask of coffee by the time he heard a vehicle approaching. The camera clicked away as the truck was halted next to the barrier and the driver showed some ID to the guards. The vehicle was allowed through.
Sim made notes on the perimeter patrols. And then looked up as another vehicle approached the gate. Sim could not see a driver, but it was a large people carrier with four or five passengers across two rows of seats. As the car was let through the barriers, Sim could see the taxi licence plate. The camera clicked. He would check the details later but it looked like the same one from the casino. He prayed that it was.
Then a noise off to Sim’s right, from behind one of the crumbling old houses. Sim quickly swapped out the memory card and panned his camera around to the mountain peak He started taking lots of pictures, pretending not to notice as a pair of near-identical guards approached him.
“What you doing here?” asked the first.
“At this hour?” said the second.
Sim looked round at them. “Oh, don’t mind me. Just taking some photos of the Kiirunavaara. Did I pronounce that right? New here, myself. They’re supposed to be arty. You know, with the milky way in the background. Punters love these ones. Put a limited-edition sticker on a sixty-by-forty and you can sell ‘em for five hundred euros.”
“You don’t say?” Tweedledum came closer and peered at Sim’s
equipment. He poked Sim’s rucksack with the end of his automatic rifle. “This is a restricted area. Not safe to walk around here, ‘specially at night.”
“Oh, right, nobody told me,” said Sim.
“We’re telling you,” replied Tweedledee. He pulled a walkie-talkie from the back of his belt and relayed a whispered message.
Tweedledum smiled. “Don’t worry, we’ll give you a lift back to town. Just to make sure you don’t get lost on the way back.”
“Oh, don’t need to go to all that trouble just for me,” said Sim.
“We insist.”
On the drive back, Tweedledum (or was it Tweedledee?) flicked through the pictures on Sim’s camera. Would the guard notice that all of the moon and mountain pictures had been time stamped within a few seconds of each other? Sim held his breath and smiled when his camera was handed back. The vehicle dropped off Sim back at his landlady’s house, after 1am. As he got out, one of the guards threw the rucksack and sleeping bag out through an open window. The car started to drive off.
“What about my tripod?” Sim shouted.
The car’s brakes squealed and the tripod was ejected, clattering to the ground. Sim went over to pick it up as the car zoomed off. One of the adjustment handles had broken off. Sim collected his belongings and scrunched across the gravel to his front door. He noticed that an upstairs light had come on again. He crept upstairs to his bedroom and downloaded the high-resolution pictures from the hidden memory card onto his roll tab.
CHAPTER 28
Sim grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchen as the clouds began to part and the sun emerged. His stomach rumbled as the smell of leftover bacon and toast invaded his nostrils. The look on Mrs Andersson’s face told Sim it would not be worth asking for a late breakfast. He drank his americano in silence. After analysing the pictures from his midnight walk, Sim wrote up a progress report for Wardle. He went out to buy a tie.
As he got dressed for the interview, Sim’s fingers fumbled with the new tie. It had been a long time since he had worn one of these. And, if he was being honest with himself, there was a nervousness to his movements. He had to decide whether to take any of the Overseas Division special equipment with him. It might help him out of a tight spot but, if discovered, would terminate his job prospects, perhaps with extreme prejudice. Wardle’s disguise for Sim might fool them, but finding his pockets full of secret-agent kit would not. At least the employment agency knew he was going to ESCO – it would be hard for the company to cover up if Sim went missing.
