All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘The gist of it, yes.’

  ‘She stepped in at a moment’s notice, improvised, postured, got the guy to trust her, instantly, and thus got him to divulge secret information even though she’d only met him minutes before. I confess, I’d hate to be in the position whereby she sought to deceive me. She’s one of the few people who I have no doubt could manage it.’

  ‘Yeah, well, just like all men aren’t necessarily much cop at the brute force and roadmap-reading, it doesn’t follow that I could do what she does just because I’m female. And I really don’t see what being a mother has to do with it.’

  ‘Being a mother instils a ruthlessness of mind, a linearity of purpose.’

  ‘No, being a mother muddles your mind and gives you a meandering loss of purpose. If you’d seen me around my children, it would soon cure your delusions.’

  ‘What if I’d seen you face down a trained killer and allow no pain or peril to stand between you and rescuing a child? Would that suggest a linearity of purpose to you?’

  ‘Needs must when the devil drives, Mr Bett.’

  ‘He’s saddled up, Mrs Fleming. But so are you. Being a mother makes you adroit at partitioning areas of your life, of your mind: adult-to-adult, adult-to-child. Putting on a happy face for the baby even though you feel like shit, putting on a stern one to admonish even though, inside, you’re pissing yourself laughing at what the kid has just done. Don’t you think all those years of playing a one-woman good-cop, bad-cop to get the little buggers to cooperate would make you adept at maintaining a deceit in order to procure what you need?’

  ‘There’s a big difference between deceiving a toddler and deceiving an intelligent adult.’

  ‘True. You probably never had to burst your own nose in order to deceive a toddler. Mrs Fleming, in the space of a few hours on Tuesday, you stole two cars and a passport, then successfully violated border security at an international port. Yesterday you kidnapped two hardened criminals and ear-wigged their conversation before priming them for interrogation with a convincing performance of ruthlessness bordering on the sadistic. I’ve been in this game a while. Trust me when I tell you, you’ve got what it takes.’

  The litany sounded like he was talking about someone else, and, at the time, much of doing it had felt like someone else, but Jane knew it would now constitute only self-indulgence to go on thinking that way. You have evolved over millennia … That thousands of years older woman. It was her. And that nineteen-year-old with everything to look forward to was still her too.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m sold. What now?’

  Bett looked her up and down appraisingly.

  ‘Are you slim because you eat nothing or are you slim because you keep fit?’ he asked.

  ‘I go to the gym a couple of times a week, when I can manage.’

  ‘Good. That should make it easier on you.’

  ‘Easier? Why? What has fitness to do with espionage?’

  Jane was woken by an old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock on her bedside cabinet, which brought her to consciousness with a heart-racing jolt, partly from the insistent cacophonous racket and partly from the shock of it not having been there when she went to sleep. She flapped blurrily for it with her right hand and succeeded only in knocking it over, which served to amplify the din as the ghastly device fitted violently upon the wooden surface. She sat up and tugged the chain on her bedside lamp, then lifted the clock in both hands, placing it in her lap as she searched for the switch to shut the thing up. Having succeeded, she turned it over and read the dial. No chance, she thought. Obviously wrong. She picked up her wrist-watch to find out the right time, only to discover that the clock had been correct and it really was five a.m.

  ‘You have got to be kidding,’ she mumbled, dropping the clock on to the duvet and flopping back to the horizontal.

  She spent a few moments trying to decide which part of her hurt the most. Not her legs, definitely, because they had been amputated by some lunatic and replaced with fossilised tree-trunks incapable of any flexibility, far less weight-bearing or motile properties. The same bampot had also employed some super-torqued racking device to tighten her buttocks so that they felt taut enough to repel steel. His name was Nuno. He had spent four (was it five? Felt like twelve) hours with her in Bett’s gymnasium as an introductory lesson in effective ways to hurt people. It was early days, she knew, but she reckoned she was off to a flyer given how much she had learned to hurt herself. Boxercise class had never been like that. She had never kicked or punched anything so hard or so often as that hanging bag, though it had proven a doughty opponent, easily inflicting more damage on her than she had landed on it.

  He had done horrible things to her arms too, but that damage was light compared to what Rebekah had wreaked upon them and her poor shoulders, downstairs in the basement shooting range. She’d heard people say that your first time riding a horse made you hurt in muscles you didn’t previously know you had. Well, she now knew the same was true of firing fully automatic machine guns, especially after warming up with about five hundred rounds of pistol shooting. The pain went right down to her fingers, already mashed by sustained bag-pounding, and thoroughly finished off by an hour’s supervised repeated disassembly and reassembly of both weapons.

  Groundwork, Bett had called it. Foundations.

  ‘And just how does this provide a foundation for harnessing those feminine wiles you were waxing lyrical about?’ she had asked. ‘Whatever happened to using guile and intuition to entice men to play a different game?’

  ‘You don’t need training for that, Mrs Fleming, you’re a natural. However, while deceit and pretence can get you into many places, they may not get you out again. One of the first rules you will learn here is never to walk into a situation without knowing how you intend to exit, and to be ready for that way to suddenly change, or be closed altogether. When that happens, your guile and intuition may not be enough, in which case you need to be able to play the men’s games too. Little as you’d like to, I’m sure you can imagine many circumstances in which you might need these skills.’

  He’d looked at her, demanding acknowledgement.

  ‘Yes,’ she conceded.

  ‘Good. But mostly you’re learning them for the circumstances you can’t imagine.’

  It had been early evening before she moved on to anything related to intelligence gathering, and that hadn’t spared her physically either. Her eyes and ears had felt the strain from so much of Somboon’s gadgetry, but the ultimate winner, she decided, the grand prize for the sorest anatomical component, went to her brain, which felt thoroughly swollen with overload, strained from the logic flips and psychological contortionism she’d been instructed in by Bett and his Canadian protégé.

  She’d crept into bed around midnight, having been told she’d ‘probably done enough for day one’. Five hours later this, this bloody alarm clock had gone off and she just knew that any minute someone would be in to haul her out of bed and begin the torture all over again. She couldn’t say whether they could turn her into a trained assassin in three days, but she was pretty sure that by the end of it she would definitely be ready to kill someone.

  Jane had never been convinced of the maxim that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but that morning made her a true believer. It was Nuno who came to escort her, via a light breakfast, back to the rigours of the gymnasium, where, instead of suffering a cumulative fatigue, she found to her surprise that her limbs actually felt better able to repeat what they had taken on yesterday. She felt looser, lighter and, yes, stronger, giving her the sensation of building on foundations rather than drawing from a dwindling reserve.

  She even, she had to concede, began to enjoy it, and took a girlish delight at what she discovered herself able to do.

  ‘I can’t teach you a lot of things in a few days,’ Nuno told her, ‘but I can teach you to do a select few things very well.’

  Any scepticism she retained about their respective abilities to ac
hieve this was dispelled come the end of their second session, when he got her to execute a deflective block that involved a perpendicular step and a redistribution of her bodyweight, using the strength of the attacker’s own blow to force him off-balance. It didn’t feel like much while she was doing it, but that was before he demonstrated exactly what she was deflecting when he repeated the blow on a flat wooden target dummy and shattered it into splinters. Her surprise at this was then trumped when he got her to repeat the strike on a fresh dummy and she sent her own hand through its wooden face too.

  Down in the basement, Rebekah moved her on to more skilled use of the guns, after the previous day’s mere ‘familiarisation and demystification exercise’, which, she explained, had been about ‘boring the hell out of you and making these suckers seem as mundane and functionary as a vacuum cleaner’.

  Rebekah would never know how unintentionally inspirational her choice of words had been.

  Jane thereafter took up her arms with gusto, and learned to her delight that she was, in Rebekah’s opinion, an ‘outstanding’ shot. That was what she exclaimed after each firing exercise: ‘Outstanding’, an unmistakable military cadence about it. It shouldn’t have come as so much of a surprise, had she thought about it. Remember Ross and those bloody fairground shooting galleries. The boy couldn’t miss. It had to have come from somewhere, and it was natural to assume such traditionally masculine talents were inherited from the father. However, Tom had usually had a go at those rifle ranges too, and, as Ross once put it, he couldn’t hit shite if he fell down a stank.

  Less intimidated by the whole of what she was embarking upon, she then found it easier to unshackle herself from her natural technophobia as she was reintroduced to Somboon’s plethora of hardware. Rebekah’s wisdom about demystification and her jewel of a metaphor served Jane well among the electronica, though she suspected Som would be less sanguine about his creations being considered mundane and functionary.

  By the time she got around to Alexis again, her appetite for this previously arcane knowledge remained such that she was actually sorry computer hacking wasn’t on the agenda. She was also, she would only reluctantly admit, a little sorry that on this occasion Bett was not around to supervise, busying himself elsewhere for the evening. It was, she decided, a healthy sign of her being more comfortable with all that she was taking on, that even his brooding presence was no longer something to put her on edge. Another sign was that she was starting to talk to her instructors like they were people, rather than jailers or even fellow inmates.

  Alexis was the most open, though perhaps only because she was the one Jane was around when she started feeling comfortable enough to talk much herself.

  ‘So how did you get to be a hacker?’ Jane had asked, genuinely curious about what she considered a true netherworld of almost alien intellect.

  ‘I’m not a hacker,’ was Alexis’s surprising and rather indignant reply.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not quite “down” with the argot. Is “hacker” pejorative these days?’

  ‘Oh, no. Hacker is what I aspire to be, not what I would call myself. It’s a misused term in mainstream culture. When most people talk about hackers, they really mean crackers, and that’s closer to what I am. A cracker is someone who breaks into other people’s computer systems, and true hackers figure that’s a pretty lame use of your abilities.’

  ‘It’s come in useful for you, though, hasn’t it? It brought you to Bett’s attention, anyway.’

  Alexis laughed, a bitter edge to it.

  ‘Fair to say it sure did. But, to be honest, I’m not even an especially good cracker. That wasn’t why Bett came in for me. It was more because he figured I was predisposed toward getting into where I’m not supposed to be and tinkering with shit that isn’t mine. I’ve got hacker aspirations but a cracker mentality.’

  ‘So what’s a hacker?’

  ‘A hacker is someone who really knows their shit when it comes to programming. The hackers’ own definition is, and I quote: “Someone who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.”‘

  ‘From what I’ve seen and heard so far, that sounds like you.’

  ‘I know some tricks, but they’re cracker tricks, mainly; script-kiddie stuff. I’m like a kid punk guitarist who can play a lot of cool-sounding riffs, but can’t read a note of music. Truth is I can play better than a lot of classically trained people, but even more than music, computers are about structure, protocols, formalities. My learning process has usually been a matter of cumbersome and sloppy reverse-engineering. I was supposed to go to college to learn how to read the music, you know? But it didn’t happen. Things got in the way.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Let me put it this way …’

  When Jane walked into the firing range the next day, she found Rebekah wrestling with a human dummy far more substantial-looking than the target figures Jane had been shooting so far. They’d been wooden, no sturdier than the kind of cases fruit used to come in at the supermarket, with gun-toting figures painted on them, or sometimes merely concentric circles. This dummy was fully three-dimensional and heavy, constructed of similar material – and certainly similar bulk – to the punchbag she was rapidly succeeding, according to Nuno, in ‘making her bitch’. Rebekah was hauling one upright, while another two lay on the concrete floor.

  ‘We reckon you’re ready for some hot-dogging, to use a hideously American phrase,’ said an unexpected, disembodied voice. Bett. She looked along the barrier and saw him step out from one of the corrals.

  ‘Hot-dogging?’

  ‘Yes. Ghastly, isn’t it? Anyway, you’ve seen the movies, right? Guys firing guns with just one hand? Firing bloody machine guns with just one hand!’

  ‘Yes. I’d assumed it was nonsense even before I felt one of these things.’

  ‘It is nonsense. If you’re going to use one hand to fire a gun, you’d be as well having a gun in each hand.‘

  He held out two matching Hechler & Koch nine-millimetre pistols, presenting the grips. Jane took them, a little dubiously, as Rebekah hitched one of the dummies to a hook and reeled it ten yards back down the range. It was closer, by at least ten yards, than the standard targets, but Jane didn’t fancy her chances of hitting it with more than the first shot if she was firing, as normally instructed, in quick succession.

  She pulled on her ear-protectors and took position behind the barrier, her now comfortable firing stance impossibly encumbered by the second gun.

  ‘Okay, let him have it,’ Bett commanded.

  She fired on order. One of the first pair of shots hit home, but after that the bullets went zinging into the walls and ceiling around an embarrassingly wide radius.

  Jane looked to Rebekah and pulled an Oops! face. Rebekah grinned and shook her head. Then Bett came up behind her and put his arms beneath Jane’s oxters, pulling her hands into position. She felt one of his biceps brush her right breast, his own taut chest pressing into her shoulder. They’d never touched before, never been this close. He smelled freshly of outdoors, like clean washing on the rope. Her body tensed a little at that brushing contact, though she didn’t think the locus of his touch was intentional. His hands felt firm and callused, like her father’s had been, and, like her father’s, they were a confident and steady guide.

  ‘You have to cross your hands,’ he explained, a gentleness to his voice despite the volume required to penetrate her ear-protectors. ‘That way the recoil has something to play against. And don’t pull both triggers at once. You want an alternating pattern of shots.’

  He stepped back and she tried again, firing four rounds from each pistol. She managed only two hits from the eight shots, though the radius of the missed rounds was considerably less erratic.

  ‘I don’t see the point,’ she complained. ‘I could hit that target with every shot if I was firing one pistol.’

  ‘I
t’s not just about accuracy,’ Bett said.

  ‘Not much point firing the bloody thing without it,’ she countered.

  ‘It’s about fields of fire.’

  He vaulted over the barrier and into the range, where he and Rebekah proceeded to hang two more dummies from moving overhead trellises. The three of them dangled and swung, side by side, less than two feet apart and ten yards back.

  As they did, Jane ejected the spent magazines and quickly slapped in replacements. It already felt a practised action, as natural and familiar as assembling the liquidiser at home in her kitchen.

  ‘Okay, so you can hit a human-size target from twenty yards no problem,’ Bett said, climbing back behind the barrier. ‘If we need a sniper, you’re our girl.’ He stepped towards the target controls, his hand hovering over the panel. ‘But look, what do you know, you’re in a confined space, nowhere to retreat, three men bearing down on you, two hundred pounds each, ten yards away, and one little bullet isn’t going to drop them unless it’s right through the centre of the brain. What do you do?’

  He slapped the panel. All three targets began advancing the short distance towards the barrier. Jane crossed the guns and fired, the hammers beating rapidly in syncopation as her wrists fought the recoil, to describe a narrow arc across her automated assailants. Bullets thumped into the padding, rocking all three dummies back on their hangers and in one case blowing a head off completely.

  Bett slapped the button again, stopping them five feet away.