All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  The helicopter barely came to a halt on the landing pad, its wheels touching down for less than ten seconds, and not quite coming to a stop even then. Armand, Som and Lex bailed out, backpacks strapped to their fetching red overalls, and quickly scurried for cover as Rebekah lifted the chopper clear and away again.

  Lex scanned the flat rooftop. There was no one around. Landings on the H-pad were supposed to be prearranged, so there was no official greeting party, and nor, she hoped, would there be an investigating party, given that any observers would only have seen their chopper cursorily buzz the building then whiz off again.

  Armand went straight for the door leading to the main roof-access stairwell, for which he had a cloned swipe card, fruit of early reconnaissance work. He’d be riding the elevator all the way to the sub-basement, a destination only accessible by punching in the aforementioned plastic. His work lay with the hotel’s internal telephone exchange, all lines of which were routed through a junction housed in the bowels of the building. Once he accessed it, he had two tasks. The first was to run relay taps on the voice lines serving the top-floor suites, the second to clone-phreak the data lines serving the same rooms. The first part he’d done a thousand times before. A few minutes with cable-strippers and miniature croc-clips, some cosmetic work with electrical tape and plastic sleeving, and it would be over, the resulting evidence indistinct from routine maintenance. The clone-phreaking was a bit trickier, involving the installation and concealment of some Som-spawned hardware. This particular box of goodies intercepted the traffic in both directions and duplicated it, restoring the original signal to its particular line, while sending the cloned data out on another. From there it got bounced around a few servers – so that the cloners couldn’t be traced in the event that the hardware hack was discovered – and ultimately sent chez Bett, where Lex would analyse it later.

  Meantime, she and Som were preparing to pursue a matter of conscience, protesting demonstrably about the evils of the arms trade and the amorality of the Reine d’Azur in playing host. Before that, however, they had to site two receiver/converters on the roof, attaching one to each of the hotel’s twin mobile-phone masts. The devices were identical, duplicating each other’s work in case of malfunction. They picked up the short-range transmissions of the many bugs and cameras they had secreted – and were about to secrete – around the premises, and converted the signals from analogue to digital before sending them to base across a raft of mid-band cellular connections.

  That was priority number one. The task completed, they moved on to the reason for their ridiculously conspicuous garb.

  There were no balconies on the building, just sheer faces of glass and steel, but there was a ring of aluminium balustrades around the penthouse level, which was inset from the rest of the building by about three feet. It was also fifty per cent taller than any of the lower storeys, with its ten-foot windows slanted at about fifteen degrees, an architectural conceit that was supposed to represent a crown atop the hotel.

  Lex and Som stood close to the edge, near an emergency-access stair leading down to the narrow platform between window and balustrade, and began removing materials from their backpacks which they had laid down on the concrete. There were four suites, each with dual aspects, and they had a decoration for all of them. With Lex holding his legs in case he leaned out too far, Som reached down to the window below and attached the top end of a red paper banner to the glass, the remainder tightly rolled up on the roof. The banner was held in place by two black rubber suckers, each of which contained a video camera and transmitter, now pointing straight into the suite, with infrared capability for when the blinds were closed. They placed all eight before unfurling any, as the moment the first one was spotted, they were on injury time to complete the rest of their work: the old unseen clock that could stop any second. The banners displayed a selection of slogans copied from a website set up by the genuine protesters who were downstairs on the sidewalk. They would be torn down by hotel staff within minutes of being unveiled, hopefully with maximum haste and minimum care. They were fragile, designed to rip free easily in order to leave the cameras in place. No doubt a few of the suckers would come loose, hence the superabundance, but it was unlikely busy and harassed staff would go to the bother of removing these. Their orders would be principally to tear the banners down – some window cleaner or janitor could worry about the rest.

  All eight banners attached, Som clambered hurriedly down the access stair on to the platform, clutching his backpack, while Lex stood with her foot on the first roll. Upon his signal, she kicked it loose. It uncoiled, buffeting slightly in the breeze, covering a four-foot width of penthouse window and dangling a further twenty feet over the side. On the platform, Som pressed home two more suckers at waist-height to further secure the banner to the window, then got busy – now hidden from any occupants – replacing a half-metre stretch of plastic bird-spikes at the foot of the balustrade with ones of his own. His were near-identical in appearance and would work just as well to prevent pigeons or seagulls from roosting, but were an improvement on the originals in that every alternate spike was in fact a supersensitive directional microphone pointed at a different angle into the suite.

  Som worked fast. The longest part of the operation was the journey along the narrow platform to the site of the next banner, Som understandably not hurtling flat-out and quite definitely not looking down. He was just completing the final stretch of spikes when they got word in their earpieces from Nuno, down in the lobby, to warn that there was much running and pointing going on among staff. Time to wrap it.

  Som ascended to the roof again and they both stripped off the overalls. They stuffed them quickly into the backpacks, which they stowed out of sight between ventilation ducts before briskly heading below.

  Three men in hotel security uniforms came bursting from one of the lifts as Lex and Som made it to the foot of the access stairwell. The new arrivals took in their uniforms and breathless, hurried faces and came to precisely the conclusion intended.

  ‘L’autre ascenseur, l’autre ascenseur,’ Lex shouted angrily at them, indicating the closed doors of the other lift. ‘Allez, allez,’ she demanded. The three of them didn’t stop to confer, just barged back into the lift and descended in hasty pursuit of their quarry. Lex and Som meanwhile waited calmly for the other elevator to return from the twelfth floor, where it had by this time stopped.

  Lex got the okay from Armand in her earpiece and looked at her watch. It read 11:34. They were due to be complete by 11:35, which meant that any second now …

  She and Som shared a smile as her mobile began to ring. She pressed the talk button and Bett’s voice was instantly audible to both of them in the confined seclusion of the lift.

  ‘Status?’ he asked, all small talk and solicitousness as usual.

  ‘Status is we own the building,’ she reported.

  ‘Damn, you people are good,’ Bett replied.

  Som looked at the phone, like it might be malfunctioning.

  ‘I don’t say that enough,’ Bett went on. ‘I think it a lot, though.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Lex said, trying not to giggle at Som’s bewildered expression. Bett hung up.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you’ll find the answer somewhere on the ground floor right now.’

  Jane found herself glad of the intensive training she’d been put through, as much for the small things as the more major, such as not starting at the sounds of disembodied voices in her ears, and suppressing her instinct to reply whenever anyone could see her. She had simply walked the floor at first, around the lobbies, the stalls, the exhibition halls, to see and be seen, her ‘bodyguard’ a deliberately ostentatious adornment. She was supposed to look bored, tediously underwhelmed, which would have been difficult in her state of nervousness and excitement, but found disapproval a close and easy substitute as she perused the exhibits and displays. It was all extremely tacky; expensively so, but tacky
nonetheless. The problem was the unresolved tension between the need to glamorise the products while maintaining the façade of a moral sobriety that could never, I say never, consider these tragically necessary devices glamorous. Thus there were several nubile models in business attire dotted around many of the stands, retained in a meet-and-greet capacity, handing out leaflets and catalogues, as opposed to draped over field guns, wearing bikinis, as the exhibitors would doubtless have ideally preferred. They all looked young and, as she had suggested it to Rebekah, uncomplicated. Great pick-up potential for Bett, she thought. Miaow.

  And yet there had been as many gazes alighting on her as on the professional eye-candy, starting with her exit from the Diablo and the unseemly scrum of valets competing for the keys. It was slightly disconcerting, slightly flattering and slightly laughable. She was turning heads because people saw money and were fascinated by who owned it. Sure, she looked good in her professionally selected finery, but who wouldn’t? She’d have been embarrassed by her own affectation if it wasn’t for another thing Bett was right about (she was learning it was true what the girls said, that he was right irritatingly often): she was merely playing a part. She was enjoying it too, though she had to guard against the Brechtian technique of passing comment on the character through one’s performance.

  She had just about relaxed enough to start thinking this spying carry-on was a doddle when, at eleven thirty and thus right on schedule, Bett announced that the transceivers were in place. This meant he could now see what all of their hidden cameras were showing, including the view from her pendant. That was when the running commentary had really begun in earnest: brief CVs of the men she was standing near – names, companies, positions, history – and descriptions of the ones Bett wished her to gravitate towards.

  Conversations were struck up, small talk, petty enquiries, all the while Bett informing her whether the speaker was worth persisting with or to be let down at the politest convenience. She spoke in a neutrally English accent, as clipped as she dared without it beginning to sound put-on. Then, after less than an hour, he gave the order she didn’t realise she’d been dreading so much until it came.

  Though she’d practised the moves until they felt second nature, it was the most nerve-racking moment of the day the first time she pinned a bug to someone. The lucky recipient was one Dieter Raulf, sixty-three-year-old vice chairman of German munitions firm Gieselcorp. He had taken a seat at an adjacent table in one of the hotel lounges as she waited for the waitress to return with her coffee. The lounge was busy, but not so busy that there weren’t free tables further away. Raulf and his younger subordinate made their way past several of these, the older man affecting a distracted air as if to make out he had randomly chosen his table without even noticing who or what was nearby. And the reason she could be so certain he was affecting it was that Bett was giving her a running count of how many times the old letch’s eyes had zeroed in on her cleavage throughout his approach.

  He struck up a conversation. Mostly the usual – who was she with, what market was she in – but with a few unsolicited contributions from himself intended to convey how rich and important he was. She smiled but played it coy and reticent, as instructed. Then when she rose to go, he stood up also, extending a hand and a card. She took it with her right hand, the adhesive plastic wafer of a bug palmed in her left.

  ‘I have to know, where did you buy your suit?’ she asked, pretending to be suddenly taken by it. ‘I love the material. Do you mind?’

  He proudly told her the name of a tailor in Dortmund as she stroked the lapel, placing the bug high up, near the collar. Part of her was astonished that he didn’t immediately rip it away and demand that she be apprehended, but as Bett assured her, ‘you’re doing fine’.

  She placed six more throughout the day, mostly instances following déjà-vu-inducing reprises of the same routine. Ageing execs, drawn as though hypnotically by her enchanted jewel, or rather the tits either side, so intent upon impressing their credentials upon her that she very soon knew more about them and who they worked for than Bett’s homework could have revealed. She gave away little about herself, dropping only ambiguous replies intended to provoke further curiosity, and she asked very few questions.

  She only had to use the ‘nice suit’ gambit once more. The place had heated up as the day wore on, jackets being hung on the backs of chairs in the lounges, bars and restaurants, so she was able to slip a few fingers under collars on the pretence of resting against them as she stood up to leave. It felt easier each time, as all crimes and deceptions do.

  The last two she executed over dinner, having been ‘rescued’ from dining with her bodyguard by an invitation to join a table shared by delegates from British Defence Engineering and their counterparts at an Italian firm, CMK. Wine was flowing, and she let a glass be poured for her, but didn’t touch it beyond one sip to smear the glass authentically with lipstick. Thus it looked in use but wasn’t topped up. She stuck to mineral water and ate lightly, her appetite largely diminished by her adrenaline level, excusing herself before it was time for coffee. Her own instinct would have been to enquire after her share of the bill (at which point, she was sure, she really would have wanted a drink) but she didn’t need Bett’s prompting to know not to bother. Free to those who can afford it, as they say.

  Bett congratulated her on a prodigious first day on the job, and advised that it was time for Nuno to escort her to the main entrance while a valet very carefully returned her car. She felt relief tinged with a slight disappointment as she walked back through the expansive and thoroughly over-opulent lobby. She’d got through the first test, but she would regret coming out of the role. Just as long as the Lamborghini didn’t turn into a pumpkin.

  However, before Nuno could approach the concierge’s desk, Bett announced that there was a sudden change of plan.

  ‘I’ve got a positive ID on Pascal Parrier,’ his voice informed her. ‘He just walked past our light-switch cam in the casino. There’s a credit line of seven thousand euros in your name – your op name – at the desk. Lift two grand in hundred-euro chips and go play.’

  Jane walked in through the archway that formed the entrance to the casino from inside the hotel. There was another way in directly from the seafront avenue outside, the approach covered by a canopy. She noted the position of that door and two other exits, details she’d never have considered a week ago, but that were now a matter of routine, almost of reflex. She paused at the top of the short stair leading down four steps to the casino floor. It was a good spot for taking it all in, for Bett’s benefit as well as her own. Her first impression was that it was small, far smaller than she had ever imagined lying out of shot in those old Bond movies. There were maybe only ten or a dozen green baize tables, themselves surprisingly tiny and neat. Even the roulette wheel and the dice table seemed like they were three-fifths scale, but as the hotel’s decor was otherwise striving to make an aesthetic of excess, it was unlikely these weren’t the real deal. Nonetheless, she felt like she was looking at a mock-up, a stage set, which was fine, because she was here to act.

  She looked around, but not directly at anybody. Bett was doing that part for her, and didn’t want even cursory eye contact between Jane and her mark until they were seated at the same table. Even then, she was to let him make the first move, let him notice her. If he didn’t, she was to finish her game and walk. No chances were to be taken. He was the guy they most wanted a bug on, but he was also the last person they could afford to alert to their agenda.

  Jane scanned the gathering. She recognised some of the women as the models from the exhibition area, perhaps still on duty as hired adornments for the execs they were with. There were no bored millionairesses in cocktail dresses at the tables, pissing away tens of thousands to while away a dull evening, mainly just men in suits, perhaps playing out as much of a fantasy as Jane was. But somewhere in the place there was a scheming millionaire with evil on his mind.

  ‘Blackjack table,’
Bett directed, to Jane’s relief. Pontoon. She knew that one. ‘Bet big. Play risky but not stupid. You don’t care about the money but you like to beat the odds.’

  She walked slowly among the tables, relaxed, like it was as familiar as the supermarket. Nuno hung back on the raised area in front of the arch, hands clasped in front, back straight. She was surprised to find the table empty, no Parrier, but took a seat anyway. The dealer, a skinny and awkwardly tall female, asked her something in French. Jane didn’t reply, blanked her as though she was talking to someone else. She hated doing it, but it was the role, and her blank, ignorant indifference was definitely a near-Brechtian comment on the type of woman she was playing. Receiving no reply, the dealer tried again in English. Jane smiled patronisingly and the game began.

  She played a few hands, soon forgetting what each of the blue plastic chips represented. She was ahead for a while, then got knocked back to half her starting pile by twisting on seventeen. Her only response was to take another sip of the G&T she’d ordered. As she did, she was aware of a figure crossing the short distance from the roulette table nearby and pulling up a chair alongside her.

  ‘Payout,’ whispered Bett. Parrier.