All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Segnier?’

  ‘Our man on the inside; there’s always someone willing to suck up to his potential new bosses, especially for a decent kickback. Segnier warned us there was something in the pipeline that could change the game. It was top-secret, and he wasn’t even sure himself what it was at the time.’

  ‘But he sure found out, didn’t he?’

  Lex held her breath, staring at the screen, forcing her eyes to stay there and not look at Bett, who was sitting two feet away. One fleeting reference now and she’d be lost.

  ‘Oh yes. He managed to get some computer files smuggled out. There was a window, an opportunity, I don’t know what, but I do know we paid top dollar for them.’

  ‘You and everybody else.’

  ‘Indeed. Once he knew what he had, the bastard sold the files all over the place. Suddenly everybody knew what Deimos was developing.’

  ‘And Deimos’s value just as suddenly went stratospheric.’

  Nuno’s voice broke across the speakers again. Armand automatically pulled on his headphones to continue following Jane and Parrier’s conversation.

  ‘Sir, it’s Dirlos. Someone from reception just handed him a piece of paper. I couldn’t see what it was, but I’m guessing it had to be a fax. He took one look at it and now he’s dialling his cellular.’

  Bett turned a dial on the audio console and jacked up the volume from the OSE suite. The phone sitting next to Parrier on the bureau began to ring.

  ‘Shit,’ Bett muttered. He lifted his finger from the mute button, but as he did so, Parrier pressed something on the keypad to silence the ringing and continued talking, unwilling to be interrupted mid-flow.

  Bett switched channel on the mike, transmitting only to Nuno.

  ‘What’s Dirlos doing now?’

  ‘He’s giving the piece of paper back to the receptionist with instructions and he’s waving to someone down the lobby. Big guy on his way.’

  Bett switched channel again.

  ‘So now everybody wants to acquire Deimos,’ Parrier said. ‘Not just to be first with the new technology, but to have a head start on developing weapons that will circumvent it. Willis could name his price. Two hundred million, three hundred, who knows? But as everything in the files was pertaining to one man, to this Fleming, we guessed it was some solo genius rather than a team effort we were dealing with.’

  ‘Get out of there,’ Bett’s voice stated, calm but insistent. ‘Now. Dirlos knows something’s wrong.’

  Jane held her position, two things keeping her from obeying. One, the secondary consideration, was that there was a guard outside the door. The primary consideration was that she still didn’t have the name, and if she ran now, she wouldn’t get a second chance.

  ‘I figured: take him out and the project dies too,’ Parrier went on with a shrug, the planned murder of her son merely a logical transaction to this prick. ‘Deimos’s price tag drops back down to what we wanted.’

  ‘Jane, get out of there. Dirlos is heading for the lifts. He’s got another OSE security officer with him. You are out of time.’

  She had to get him to say it.

  ‘But before you can get to Fleming yourselves,’ she prompted, ‘he ends up in the hands of …’

  ‘Our mutual friend,’ Parrier replied. ‘So now we’re back in the same situation: everybody bidding up the price.’ The phone rang out again, but on this occasion only once. Parrier looked at it, clearly this time not required to take any action. Alongside him, the printer hummed into life. ‘The problem for us,’ he went on, ‘is that if someone else gets it, they’ll want Marledoq too, otherwise they’d be recreating the project from scratch. And that sucker Willis will sell it to them despite everything, because he’ll have nothing left and whoever it is will be offering a decent price. Nothing like what it would have cost them if Deimos still had Fleming, but still cheap to the bidder, even factoring in whatever they end up paying out to that thieving asshole R …’

  He stopped, his lips forming the first letter of the name he was about to speak. His eyes had fallen upon the sheet of paper that had just glided out from the printer on to the desk next to his thigh. It was upside down, but Jane was only four feet away, close enough to recognise her own photograph, a head-and-shoulders crop from a shot Ross had taken of her posing with Rachel.

  Parrier’s gaze lifted from the paper and alighted once more on Jane, his mouth now slack, that crucial word melted away. Then his eyes suddenly narrowed as it all fitted together.

  He took a step forward and swung an open-handed slap at Jane’s face.

  It didn’t connect. She had repeated certain movements thousands of times in the past few days, a process of ‘retraining reflexes’. It nonetheless surprised her how automatically her response came, though it was made easier by how early Parrier had telegraphed his strike. He was a man used to having someone else do his fighting for him. Jane blocked with her left hand, her torso rotating at the waist, before recoiling as she drove her right fist into his throat, aiming as she’d been trained to, at a point two feet behind him. He buckled, clutching his neck, breathing in with a strangulated gasp, but somehow managing to utter a cry of ‘Denis’ as he exhaled.

  The door opened almost immediately, but Jane had already drawn the Walther from her ankle. She stepped behind the dazed and reeling Parrier, and pulled him off-balance towards her with an arm around his neck as Denis came through the door, pistol in hand. She got off three rounds, hitting him with two, both in the chest. He fell backwards against the door, the gun tumbling from his startled grip, but not before firing one desperate shot, which hit Parrier in the stomach. Jane released her arm from his neck and let him fall to the carpet, where he curled up in the embryo position, clutching his wound.

  In the brief moment of silence that followed, Jane could hear the chop of rotor blades outside.

  ‘The roof,’ Bett’s voice insisted. ‘Get there now. Dirlos is in the lift.’

  But she still didn’t have what she’d come for.

  She placed a heel on Parrier’s shoulder and dug down, spinning him around so that he was looking up at her.

  ‘Stings a wee bit, eh?’ she said. ‘Not such a big fan of guns now, are we?’

  He grimaced, trying to roll on to his side. She kicked him on to his back again and pointed the Walther at his face.

  ‘Who is the vendor?’ she asked.

  He looked baffled amid the racking pain. She was worried for a second that Bett was wrong and somehow the name had remained secret, but realised the source of his confusion was that until very recently Parrier had been under the impression that the vendor’s identity was something she already knew.

  ‘WHO IS HE?’ she shouted. ‘HIS NAME. NOW.’

  Parrier looked towards the door. Denis was lying motionless, blood pooling beneath him, but more help was on the way. She swung her arm a few short degrees and shot him in the right thigh. He bucked and howled in response, trying to turn, trying to grab at the source of the pain, but her foot kept him pinned.

  ‘His name,’ she repeated. ‘Or I keep shooting.’

  Parrier spluttered, snot and tears exploding from his nose.

  ‘Roth,’ he gasped. ‘Marius Roth.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she told him, angling the Walther to point at his other thigh.

  ‘I SWEAR,’ he screamed. ‘It’s Marius Roth. Marius Roth.’

  ‘Ring any bells?’ she asked Bett.

  ‘More than Quasimodo. Now get the fuck out of there. Dirlos will be up any second.‘

  Jane stepped off of Parrier, who immediately curled up on his side like a poked woodlouse. He was squirming and helpless but, she realised, he was also still a threat.

  ‘He could warn this Roth, couldn’t he?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Not could. Will. There’d be money in it.’

  Jane looked into Parrier’s face, now staring back up, eyes wide in horrified realisation as he deduced what her last words meant. She fear
ed she’d see all the things Alexis had told her about, and that it would stay her hand, but instead she saw Ross in the same position, Michelle, Rachel, Donald, begging for their lives from this man and those he sent to do his bidding.

  She emptied the Walther, firing the remaining four shots into his chest, then reached to her right calf for a change of clip. As she slotted the new magazine home, she looked around the suite but couldn’t see which, if any, of the windows slid open. From outside in the corridor she heard the chime the lift made to herald its arrival moments ahead of its doors opening.

  Dirlos, plus one.

  She ran across the room and picked up the pistol that lay on the carpet next to Denis’s dead hand, switching the lighter Walther to her weaker left. She tried not to look at his face. She’d only seen it twice before she’d killed the guy, but now wasn’t the time to get philosophical.

  Jane threw the door open to the wall and peered around the frame as she heard the lift slide open at the far end of the corridor. Dirlos emerged, drawing a handgun as he did so, a second man at his back. She crossed her wrists and leaned into the gap, opening fire with both weapons. The two men dived to the floor, Dirlos scrambling for the nearby stairwell and the other back into the lift. She didn’t fancy her chances of taking down two armed pros, especially not at that distance, but she did think she might buy herself some time to escape. It was Bett’s technique but it was as much Nuno’s psychology she was banking on, something he’d told her as he was teaching her a particular blow. ‘Make your first strike very hard, very fast and very controlled, and most opponents will fear they’re beaten already.’ These guys weren’t likely to throw in the towel, but they’d be that bit more slow and careful about approaching this door.

  She withdrew on swift feet but waited for the return volley to cover her intentions. When it came, after a long few seconds, she levelled both guns at one of the windows and tore it away in a million twinkling jewels, the sound of the helicopter becoming immediately louder.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, hurry. Rebekah’s waiting and the entire hotel security staff’s on its way up there.’

  Jane stepped through the gap and found herself only three feet from the edge. She tried not to look down, but she had come out on one of the inland-looking sides, where the play of street lights and the glow of distant buildings conveyed an unavoidable sense of altitude. She looked to her right, saw the access stairs about twenty yards away, only a low balustrade, barely waist-high, hemming her in from the drop. There was no further gunfire from inside. Bad sign. They were on the move. She got her head down, focused her gaze on where she was putting her feet and concentrated on putting one rapidly but carefully in front of the other.

  The access stair was more like a ladder, just an inclining column of steel steps. Jane was almost at the top of it when Bett warned her that Dirlos’s accomplice was about to step out on to the ledge. She turned around and loosed off three shots as he emerged through the aluminium frame. He was spun by the impact, his feet slipping on the treacherous carpet of glistening shards, before he tumbled over the low barrier, his falling cry swallowed by the sound of the chopper.

  Jane hauled herself over the edge and on to the roof. Air Bett was ahead, the cockpit door beckoningly open. She saw Rebekah looking anxiously towards her, both hands on the controls.

  Jane noticed the wheels drag as she ran towards the helicopter, its weight not quite borne by them as the blades strained impatiently to lift the craft away. It lurched a couple of feet as she reached to climb in, causing her to take a step back. Then she turned and looked behind, figuring that this close to the noise, she might not hear Bett’s warning if Dirlos was on his way up the ladder. Facing forwards again, she threw herself at the gap and clambered aboard.

  ‘And she’s outta there!’ Lex exclaimed with delighted relief. However, when she looked to Bett for his reaction she found him still concentrating on the monitors.

  ‘Not yet,’ he stated gravely.

  They watched Dirlos open a black case, one of a pile lying on the floor of the suite, and pull a long black tube from within. He removed another object from the container – cylindrical but tapered at one end – and placed it inside the first.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ was Lex’s revised opinion.

  Bett’s voice screeched from the cockpit radio.

  ‘Dirlos is on his way to the roof with a Sam. Acknowledge: Incoming Sam.’

  ‘Incoming Sam, acknowledged,’ Rebekah replied, lifting the chopper away from the concrete.

  ‘What’s a Sam?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Surface-to-air missile.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Get us out of here.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘We can’t get out of range. We fly off right now, we’re an easy target.’

  ‘So what the hell are we going to do?’

  Jane felt her stomach lurch as the chopper swung around, barely moving in space but turning to face the access stairs she’d ascended. She looked at the automatic she’d taken from Denis. It would be more effective than the PPK from that range but she couldn’t remember how many rounds she’d fired and she wasn’t feeling lucky. Nor could she remember how many she’d fired from the Walther, but at least she did have spare ammunition for that. She pulled her last spare clip from her calf, ejected the current mag and reloaded.

  ‘I’m getting out,’ she announced. ‘Put us down. I’ll wait until he sticks his head up and blow the fucking thing off.’

  ‘Go for it,’ Rebekah hailed, gently lowering the aircraft.

  Jane reached for the doorhandle, estimating ten feet from touchdown, but as she looked out through the side window, she saw Dirlos dead ahead, already emerging from a different access stair on the coastal side of the building.

  ‘Oh shit, we’re too late,’ she shouted. ‘What do we do?’

  Rebekah looked too. Dirlos was getting to his feet, picking up the missile-launcher and hefting it to his right shoulder.

  ‘Turn on the wipers,’ Rebekah growled, hauling at the joystick.

  The helicopter banked sharply and suddenly, swinging at speed towards Dirlos as though on a pendulum. There was a disturbingly minor variation in the hum of the rotor and a feather-light sensation of impact, a fraction of a second before the windows were sprayed with red.

  Rebekah picked up altitude and velocity, taking them out to sea and out of sight, though not before turning on the wipers.

  A Basque tale (old as time?)

  Rebekah flew them out low over the blackness of the Mediterranean to disguise their direction, before banking to follow the coastline for a few miles and finally heading back inland. The journey took ten, maybe fifteen minutes, but Jane was barely aware of it. She was still back in that suite, back on those steel steps, back on that rooftop. She was aware of her pulse only now in the aftermath, the same as often happened at the gym, the thumping syncopation only noticeable now that what caused it had ceased. There was something else coursing inside her too, an energy that made her feel tiny pinpricks over every inch of skin, tingling in her fingers, lifting hairs from her scalp. It was like a heightened state of being, not something you came down from easily. No drink and no drug was going to let her sleep tonight, she was sure.

  When they landed back at Maison Rla an Tir, Rebekah had to give her a nudge to bring her personally back to earth. She didn’t know how long she might have sat oblivious in the cockpit otherwise, disconnected from her immediate surroundings.

  As she hopped down on to the grass, the sight of her reception committee reconnected her fast. Bett was standing waiting on the gravel, arms folded, wearing an expression that might be familiar to anyone who ever worked monitoring dials at Sellafield or Dounreay. Alexis stood close by him, offering Jane a look that implied her attendance was an act of solidarity. Rebekah was still busy in the cockpit, flicking switches and ticking boxes on a chart. It was no doubt an important procedure, but Jane couldn’t help wondering whether she was merely hidi
ng out until this confrontation was over.

  Jane stood her ground, facing off wordlessly with Bett for a few seconds.

  ‘I’m fine, I’m doing all right, thanks for asking,’ she eventually said, underlining that he hadn’t.

  ‘More by luck than judgement,’ he countered. ‘I told you directly not to—’

  ‘I got the name. I think that says my judgement wasn’t too far off.’

  ‘You abandoned all protocols, all safeguards. You took enormous risks that could have seen the entire mission—’

  ‘I had one chance and I took it,’ she insisted, controlling the volume in her voice but powerless to repress the indignation. ‘Risk/benefit, remember? I was the one who was there. It was my call, my risk.’

  ‘You disobeyed direct orders, repeatedly. I told you—’

  ‘And I told you, I’m not one of your subordinates. I don’t take orders from you, Mr Bett.’

  Rebekah finally emerged from the cockpit and stood a few yards off, she and Alexis uncomfortable but compelled observers.

  ‘When you’re in the field, yes, you do take fucking orders from me, because the moment you set foot inside that hotel, you did it as part of a team. In the field, you respect the chain of command, because when you don’t, nobody knows where the hell they stand. When you went off the reservation tonight, it wasn’t your risk to take, because what you did could have got you and Rebekah killed.’

  Jane looked to Rebekah, who was biting her lip apologetically, like she was sorry to have been used as the trump card in Bett’s argument. But if Jane had to lose, she decided she wasn’t going to do it with grace.

  ‘Don’t forget about your expensive helicopter,’ she said. ‘You could have lost that too, another of your possessions. And that really would have been a tragedy.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, do you honestly think …’

  Bett let his words falter and looked from Jane to Rebekah, then lastly, perhaps longest, to Alexis, these three women ringed around him beneath the night. The rage seemed to fall from his face like a retreating wave, revealing a sadness beneath it. Jane thought she noticed him nod to himself, the smallest of movements but the involuntary outward signal of some resolution within.