by Finn Óg
The temperature in the room cracked up a notch as a dozen eyes flickered between the Gazelle’s feed and those of the bikes.
Libby left the room to report in.
Sam began to run east along the quay, unsure of where exactly he was going. He couldn’t see any taxis, and in any case he hadn’t brought enough cash to pay for one. The passenger ferry was slow, still it was an option, but he needed something more direct – something faster. He looked at Lido Island and his trot broke into a canter along the ancient quay. He skirted the edge of temporary fencing erected around a landing point for superyachts. Some had security guards outside, others appeared to be shrouded in darkness. A notion coursed through his mind and then he dismissed it – getting arrested would help nobody.
He ran close to the edge giving himself a view of the water below – hoping to spot a boat tied up and easy to pinch. There was nothing. Then ahead he noticed movement on the seaward side of one of the massive private boats surrounded in fencing. Was it a temporary pontoon? He kept running until desperation made up his mind. He hoped the iPhone in his pocket was as water resistant as advertised and dived gracefully into the water.
He pulled hard beneath the surface; long, hauling strokes with enormous kicks to keep him submerged and drive him forward. He couldn’t see a thing but when he reached the surface he found himself a lot shorter than he had hoped for. Still, he was close enough to see a tender bobbing merrily against a retractable walkway of steps. It wasn’t the sort of thing the yacht’s owner was likely to travel in, more of a crew workboat for cleaning the hull and windows.
The yacht itself wasn’t in darkness but he couldn’t see anyone on watch. The breeze puffed gently offshore, so he quietly breaststroked to the rubber dinghy and paused, listening for any movement. When satisfied, he hauled himself over the side and lay in the solid part of the boat for a few moments untying the bowline knot that held the painter, and then he made his profile as low as possible as the little boat began to drift from the big one. He wanted to start the engine and get going but forced himself to wait until he was as far out of earshot as possible: one hundred metres, one fifty, two hundred. When sure that none of the city lights were casting a beam over him, he leaned back and looked at the outboard, quickly identifying the fuel line and tracing the electrical starter cable to the console.
No keys.
He went back to the engine, ripped the electric start off the side of the hood, isolated the positive connection inside a discarded rubber glove that had been lying in the hull and pulled the manual rip cord. The engine shuddered to life first time and Sam increased the revs gently by easing a lever at the side of the hood forward. Because of its design the boat didn’t have a manual steering arm, so he set the engine in the centre and guided it by leaning the boat from side to side. He kept his eyes on the superyacht for a while but nothing seemed to stir. Pleased, he just kept going, increasing the speed and revs as he moved further away.
Anthony went as far as he could and took a wrong turn by a golf course, which brought him alongside a beach – a fair distance from the harbour. It was getting cold and kids were being told to gather their stuff and come on. There was moaning on the breeze, which irritated him. He had never been taken to the beach – not ever.
He trudged back in the direction he had come. It took him another twenty minutes to get to the harbour, where he glanced around before crouching by the Ford and looking under the wheel arch. He stuck his arm in, got it covered in rust and muck, and tried to remember what the man had said. It wasn’t driver’s side – was it? He tried the back wheel, then stood and walked around the car before kneeling by the passenger-side tyre, feeling around instead of looking. At last his fingers caught something in the taut metal spring. The key – wedged, as described – between the hoops of the suspension. He whipped it out and let himself in via the nearest door.
Sam didn’t want to waste any time but he didn’t want to leave the stolen tender in plain sight either. He turned the boat and motored a short distance away from the hotel, turning into a canal at the first opportunity. Up ahead was a small walkway with steps up from the water, so he lashed the boat to a lacing eye, skipped over a short fence and walked quickly over the bridge. He fired up the phone. Delaney could be seen clearly now lying beside the heiress – who appeared to be falling asleep, wrapped in his arms. His head rested against hers.
Sam walked it through. He’d bust down the door, grab Delaney, deal with him and extract. Which would have been fine but for the fact that Sam stepped off the walkway straight into the brawny arms of two police officers.
“Whoa,” said the opso, suddenly on edge at what the kid had done. “Pull the bikes back to at least one hundred metres. Let’s swap them out now for cars, please, and get a van in the area too.”
Libby came into the operations room and looked immediately up to the screens. “He’s in the car?” The encroaching darkness prevented her seeing clearly.
“Yes. I think our safe moment of arrest has probably passed,” said the opso. Not quite I told you so, but not generous either.
Libby ignored it. “He’s in the passenger seat?”
“Yes,” confirmed the opso.
“Ok,” she said, curious.
“We need to think about a cordon,” the opso muttered. “What do the higher powers say?”
“Let’s see,” she said, which was sufficiently ambiguous. In fact, all her superior had done was listen and hang up. She knew her boss would have patched himself in by now – watching with them, watching the kid, listening to everything.
Sam couldn’t understand the officers. He assumed he’d been stopped for stealing the dinghy but neither police officer so much as looked towards the boat at his back. He’d dried off a lot, but his shirt and jeans were still sticking to his body, which wasn’t lost on the cops.
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” he kept repeating.
Eventually one of the cops relented and attempted a little English. “No in water,” he said, shaking a finger at Sam.
“What?”
“No on bridge.”
“You wha?”
Sam was astonished to see them produce a plastic cable tie and attempt to loop it over one of his wrists.
“Don’t do that,” he said, offering them advice. “Seriously, please don’t be silly. Don’t be doing that.”
He wrestled his arm free and the other policeman actually placed his hand on his sidearm. Sam couldn’t believe what was happening.
“Look, there’s somewhere I need to be right now, and I’m sorry for whatever it is I’ve done but I can’t let you stick that thing on me.”
“Is no swim here,” said the cop again, and it crossed Sam’s mind that he might be being lifted because they thought he’d been in the canal. “Bridge,” the cop nodded with his head, “is private.”
“The bridge is private,” Sam repeated, flabbergasted that such minor misdemeanours were sufficient cause to be banged up.
“Si.” The cop elongated his confirmation and took another step towards Sam.
He had no choice. When the cop again reached for his wrist, Sam used the momentum to take the officer’s arm at the elbow and leaned back on both feet – falling to his arse while spinning the cop into the canal behind him. Sam rolled to his front and onto his feet and ran towards the second cop, who had panicked and drawn his Beretta. Sam could see from his stricken face that the man had no intention of firing his weapon, so he simply stuck his shoulder into his chest and knocked him flat before taking off through a series of small gardens. He leapt a fence and then had to climb a gate, and realised that he should have stayed on the other side of the canal where there was an actual road. It did make him wonder where the cops had sprung from.
As he rustled through hedges and around garden furniture, he heard windows opening above him, and then shouts as people were roused from their evening routines. By the time he got as far as the road, he could hear sirens coming from the direction he
wanted to go, so he was forced to take off up a narrow street full of poorly parked cars – away from the heiress’s hotel and deeper into the island of Lido.
Anthony sat with his hands tucked under his armpits; the car key between his legs. He found himself thinking of his mum and whether she was wondering where he was. Probably not. She might have reported him missing, but she might not. They had grown exhausted of one another – he of her submission to a life of fags, TV and cheap wine, and she of his restlessness, his willingness to get involved with what she saw simply as a bunch of older, manipulative criminals.
They hardly spoke these days. When he came in she just looked blankly at him before he went upstairs. They went through the motions: she heated oven grub for him every night, he mostly ate it; she washed his clothes, he wore them. Yet suddenly, in the car seat in the cold, he missed her.
The car smelt faintly of the gardening section at the back of the general stores near his estate. He often went there to buy compost for the weed he and a pal used to grow in the attic – but that was before he had joined Grim’s group. All that was forbidden now. He remembered ordering the seeds, checking them every day under the cellophane as it condensed like the window of the car in which he sat. He breathed in and, eventually, drifted off to sleep.
The secure line went off for the third time that night. Libby’s superior was the only one left in his building.
“Hello.”
“Hello. Well, he seems to be asleep.”
“In the vehicle,” he remarked, conveying an unusual hint of bewilderment.
“I suppose he has nowhere else to go, and it’s autumn and it’s cold.”
“Leave him.”
“Do we … need to maybe think of a cordon?”
“Not a wonderfully intelligent suggestion.”
“Sorry, I just—”
“The whole point is to see where they’re taking it and who else is involved,” her boss snapped back. “In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really change the goal – does it?”
“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” said Libby.
“Erecting a cordon would demonstrate that we knew it was there.”
“Yes, of course,” she said, admonished and embarrassed, yet grateful for the cover of the decision being taken from her.
“Let’s see what he does next.”
“Ok. Thank you.”
It was a small island, so Sam had no idea where all the police were coming from, but they were swarming the streets. He realised, with reluctance, that the darkest areas of Lido were the canals themselves. The middle of the waterways were lit by the street lights well enough to allow taxis and gondolas to proceed safely, but at the edges of the water’s surface – in the few feet beneath where people walked and drove – there was enough shadow to keep concealed.
Slowly Sam lowered himself back into the water and gently made his way by fastening his fingers between the foundation blocks of the city.
Within minutes he realised that the police were afloat too. The first hint came with a sweeping yellow light. He could see its track hit a wall – telling him that a boat was coming around a corner. He could hear its engine rise and falter and presumed that the police were methodically checking every nook and cranny of the canal walls.
He turned and swam hard for a few moments until he came to a small day boat tied to the wall. It had a canvas cover drawn over it, which he debated clambering beneath but chose instead to use the hull’s V shape to his advantage. From the bow he worked his way back between the boat and the wall, ducking under the inflatable fenders that protected the boat from the stone. Then, without straining the mooring lines too tightly, he wedged his shoulders between the hull and the wall – the gunwale of the boat almost completely concealing his head from anyone searching on foot, while the space at the waterline allowed his shoulders to do the work of the fenders and rest between the fibreglass and the bank.
He braced as the police vessel puttered towards him, the yellow sweep meticulous, the natter and communication sounding professional. The beam came to rest on his hiding place and he could hear the engine slow. Officers deliberated and then he exhaled deeply as the wash of the police boat buffeted the day sailor sideways, compressing his ribcage. The police came alongside and began using torches to examine the small craft. Then Sam heard the tearing of Velcro as they ripped open the access points in the boat’s cover. He could hear the thunk and clatter of their torches through the hull when they peered beneath the tarpaulin. After about five minutes they seemed satisfied that nobody was hiding in the boat and he heard them sticking the fur teeth of the Velcro back together before finally moving off.
Sam remained where he was, conscious that his body temperature would continue to slowly drop but reasonably confident that the canal was above ten degrees, and he knew he could stick it out for a good while. He’d been trained for exactly this type of hardship.
Twenty minutes later a second patrol boat came along, this time with a white light and not as thorough. Sam knew this crew would realise that another boat had already covered this route, but it didn’t stop them hovering alongside Sam’s boat for a few heart-stopping minutes before driving on.
And all of this was costing the heiress time and, potentially, her life.
12
“What the fuck is going on?”
The boss was astonished that this contact had called on the estate phone. “What do you mean?” He gently placed aside his alarm and listened.
“Your chief of staff has just appeared in the town.”
The boss thought for a moment. This meant all sorts of things. “What town?” he said, knowing full well what town the contact meant.
“Let’s not.”
“Ok,” said the boss slowly.
“The kid’s in the car. Why’s the kid in the car?”
The boss had no answer but his proclivity for silence was useful in such circumstances.
“The place isn’t ready. The papers aren’t even there yet.”
The boss just breathed down the line, computing.
“Can he take direction in the car?”
The boss waited a full ten seconds then said, “No.”
“What sort of shitshow are you running? Has your use expired?”
“Did you just ring to tear me a new one?” the boss asked eventually.
“I may as well have, given how little you seem to know about your own people.”
“You leave my people to me,” he said softly and gently cradled the handset. He could not recall ever having been so angry.
By dawn Sam could almost hear his own body shaking. He was creating ripples on the surface. There hadn’t been a foot or water patrol in well over an hour, and he had to assume that the police had moved their attention elsewhere. The last thing he wanted was to be climbing out of the canal just as the locals were climbing out of bed.
He emerged, shook like a Labrador and tried a gentle jog in an attempt to get his limbs functioning – but was restricted by his jeans.
The Hotel Riviera was just a few hundred yards away. He crept down the towpath, past his own stolen dinghy, which remained undisturbed, and crossed a wider footpath. Less than five minutes later he was knocking, painfully, on the door of the hotel; his chilled knuckles just about sufficiently defrosted to begin sending signals to his brain again. An old man rose grindingly from an armchair close to the door. The well-dressed gent pressed a button and admitted Sam, who thanked him and strode straight for the stairs opposite. If the old guy had any queries about Sam’s residency – or indeed his wet clothes – he didn’t pose them.
Two floors up Sam placed his feet at an angle and one shoulder against the door while his left hand pressed down on the ornate handle – no point in battling two lock bolts when one would do. He crouched a little at the knee and summoned all the explosive power he could find, engaged his glutes and lats and forced the door up and in.
It didn’t take long for the dry old timber to begin to crack. Ki
cking a door in is always noisy, slow and often unsuccessful; bits of frames give way before locks or shims, but Sam knew that steady pressure in the right place was likely to reap better results, and the heiress’s door opened with minimal noise.
He could hear a scuffle inside and turned around a separating wall to find Delaney scampering to his feet, dressed as he had been the night before. Sam wheeled to find the heiress tied, face up, to the bed. Her hands and feet appeared to be bound under the frame itself by a mixture of her own belts and clothes. She looked disturbingly peaceful and initially Sam thought she was dead until her eyes pulled focus to follow him. Then her gaze rotated to Delaney – who was trying to work out how to get out of the room.
Sam instinctively went to the heiress, tearing the belt that was forcing her arms over her head. As he did so Delaney scampered past his back. Sam turned and reached out to grab him but his blood was flowing too slowly, his muscles were contracted and his joints chilled stiff. Delaney managed to make it out the door. The belt came away in Sam’s hand, which left him stumbling backwards and baffled, and he suddenly realised that the heiress could free herself if she so wished, which only served to confuse him further.
He put it down to some sort of kinky shit and instead grabbed the hidden camera from the light fitting and took off after Delaney.
Anthony’s jaw chattered loudly with the cold. He kept thinking about that smiling weirdo who always sat at the back of meetings and said nothing. Anthony had seen him from the window – sure what did it matter at that stage? The old woman already hated him, so he could look out all he wanted. He’d seen them argue, the weirdo and the woman, and whatever they’d said the result was that he’d been chucked out on the street.
