All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye

by Christopher Brookmyre

  She reached her right hand down and took hold of it, this cock, thrilling to the feel of it, how it reared in response as her fingers encircled it. Bett’s lips met her own again. He tipped her head back with his hand and began kissing the front of her neck, followed by her breasts. He almost slipped on the soaking tiles, causing them both to laugh. He said ‘shh’ again, placed his hands on her bottom, and knelt down in front of her. He kissed her navel, her stomach and the tops of her thighs. Then he pulled her legs slightly apart and did something she’d just about resigned herself to dying without getting to experience.

  She didn’t experience it for long, for, heavenly as it felt, it soon ceased to be all she wanted, at which point she took his hand and led him through to the bedroom. All the shutters and drapes were open, beckoning in the night. That felt right too.

  Jane heard a knock at the door as she lay on her side, one arm and one leg stretched across Bett, her fingers tracing circles on his chest. It gave her a moment’s pause – some residual memory of her mum walking in on her and a teenage boyfriend, blouse unbuttoned to the navel – and in the time it took her to assure herself she had no one to answer to, Bett called out to the visitor to enter. He clicked on a bedside lamp and sat up as Alexis walked in, carrying a folder. Jane stayed horizontal and pulled the sheet higher to cover herself.

  ‘Sorry to disturb, sir. You weren’t answering the phone in your room, and …’

  ‘It’s fine, Alexis. What is it?’

  ‘Plans and photographs of Roth’s boat, Corsair.‘

  ‘At least the bastard has a sense of humour.’

  ‘It was a commissioned build,’ she said, handing over the folder, ‘and it’s over a hundred feet, so if it’s waiting out there, it shouldn’t be too hard to ID.’

  ‘It’s waiting out there,’ Bett insisted, flipping cursorily through the high-definition computer prints. ‘They said he was “arriving” yesterday. Most of the buyers assumed he was flying in from somewhere, but he’ll have come ashore in a motor launch. He’ll stay on land until it’s done – won’t go back to his boat in case someone tails him to the prize. However, Roth will want the exchange complete and the money in his account as soon as possible, which means he’ll want the goods safe but handy. It’s out there,’ he reaffirmed.

  He handed back the folder to Alexis.

  ‘Give these to Rebekah. Tell her to fly at first light. And tell her to see Som before she goes: he’s working on something for her.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Goodnight, sir. And goodnight, Jane.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ Jane replied bashfully, just before Alexis withdrew.

  Bett killed the light and snuggled down alongside her again.

  ‘I guess nothing’s ever likely to stay secret for long round here,’ she said.

  ‘You bothered?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really, no. I don’t care that they know. But I don’t want it to change anything, either. That goes double for you, understand? If you treat me different because of this, I’ll tell them all that you could only manage it the once.’

  ‘That would be a lie.’

  ‘I know, but I’m a bitch when I’m crossed.’

  ‘I won’t treat you different. But I will be watching your back.’

  ‘That’s okay. You had a pretty good view of it twenty minutes ago, and I liked what you were doing then. You can do it again if you like.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s going to be a long day, Jane. You ought to get some sleep.’

  ‘I’ve been asleep for twenty years.’

  Stolen glimpses

  There was an image of the Corsair projected across ten feet of blank wall as Jane took her seat for the briefing, as if the boat could loom any larger in anyone’s thoughts. A second laptop sat in the centre of the big table, showing a map of the coastline intersected by a grid. A tiny boat-shaped icon lay amid the blue, an information panel displaying its coordinates just above it like an outsize flag.

  ‘This is where you spotted the boat?’ she asked Rebekah.

  ‘Just about. Unless it’s moved since.’

  ‘And what if it has?’

  Rebekah was about to answer, but Somboon eagerly beat her to it.

  ‘The coordinate read-out is coming from a GPS tracking device attached to the hull. I used a modified version of the kind of sensor employed in heat-seeking missiles as the guidance system, controlling a miniature propulsion engine, and housed the lot in a magnetised aluminium casing. The whole thing was the size of a grapefruit. Once Rebekah ID-ed the boat, she just had to drop my baby out of the window into the water and it made its own way to the target.’

  ‘You had to ask,’ Alexis said wearily.

  Bett called them to order by changing the projected image to a photograph of an expensively dressed middle-aged man flanked by two younger men in sunglasses.

  ‘This is Marius Roth,’ he said. ‘He’s a multi-millionaire international broker, fixer and facilitator, operating usually just inside the cusp of respectability but generally understood, especially by those who do business with him, to be dirty as hell. He’s got his finger in a lot of pies, mostly arms related, and has a lot of political connections too. He’s acted as a go-between in a number of major international covert weapons purchases, most notably the illegal sale of helicopter gunships to Sonzola that almost brought down the Dutch government two years ago.’

  Bett hit the keyboard and changed the image to a top-down plan of the boat.

  ‘We won’t be seeing him again today. He’s not our concern. He’s on dry land to control the sale, and away from his captives in order to protect his deniability. He isn’t an obstacle and as far as bringing him to justice is concerned, Nicholas Willis hasn’t put that on the job-sheet yet. What is our concern is his security personnel. According to reliable intelligence, Roth keeps a permanent personal staff of six, supplemented according to circumstance. Reports vary as to how many. He’s made it known he has four with him at Cap Andreus, which could of course be bullshit. The real question is how many are on the boat, and it’s a question I’m sure we’d all like answered before we hit it tonight.’

  ‘No kidding,’ Alexis opined.

  ‘Unfortunately, I’m not interested in answers that come at the expense of letting them know we’re on to them. The Corsair has full radar capability, so if anyone has any suggestions regarding how we can take a closer look at them without being noticed, now’s your chance. Otherwise we start looking at worst-case scenarios and move to prep accordingly.’

  ‘What sort of thing would you be hoping to find out?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Well, apart from numbers, what weapons they have, the command structure, and, ideally, where they’re holding the prisoners so we’re not running around opening every door on the tub.’

  ‘And how could you find all that out, even if you were right alongside them?’

  ‘You’d have to ask Som …’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Alexis interrupted.

  ‘… about some of that, but basically the closer we could get, the more we could find out.’

  ‘Except that you can’t afford to be caught looking,’ Jane confirmed.

  ‘Exactly.’

  She looked again at the Corsair up on the wall, her head filling with thoughts of luxury yachts, marinas, riches, privilege and glamour. One image in particular stuck in her mind: of a doomed princess and a playboy billionaire’s son, blurred and distant, a private time intruded upon by a world greedy for voyeuristic gratification.

  ‘Shoot me down if this sounds daft,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry, he will,’ Alexis assured her, at least one person who was confident Bett wouldn’t be treating Jane differently.

  ‘But what if they thought you were looking at something else?’

  ‘Out at sea?’ Bett asked. ‘What the hell else could we be looking at?’

  Jane turned her gaze to Alexis and then Rebekah.

  ‘So where is this yacht moored?’ Jane asked.

  ‘San Raphael
,’ Bett told her. ‘Half an hour from here. Nuno chartered it three days ago and it’s been kept on standby ever since. He’s on the phone right now: we’ll have a second boat hired and ready by the time we drive down there.’

  ‘Which one will I be on? With the girls or …’

  ‘Neither,’ he replied flatly.

  ‘You can’t exclude me from this,’ she warned him. ‘You promised you wouldn’t …’

  ‘Can you scuba-dive?’ he asked.

  Jane’s heart sank. It was worse than if he was excluding her; it was that there was no way of including her. This was the situation she feared most, one of the things that had driven her to come this far: sitting it out while Ross’s fate lay in other people’s hands.

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I did it once on holiday about, God, ten years ago.’

  Bett looked at his watch.

  ‘In that case, it looks like you’ve got roughly eight hours to learn before tonight. Go on, Armand is waiting for you by the pool.’

  ‘I swear,’ Lex said, ‘if there’s any film in those things, I am not gonna see the funny side.’

  ‘Goddamn right,’ Rebekah agreed. ‘I only went for this because it was Jane’s idea. If it had been any of the guys, I’d have told them to forget it. Even Bett.’

  ‘There’s no film in mine, but I do have about a gig of memory down here,’ Somboon called out from below.

  ‘And that’s where it better stay,’ Lex warned him. ‘You stick your head above deck right now and I’ll strangle you with my bikini top. It’s not like I’m getting any other fucking use out of it.’

  ‘The things you have to do to make a living,’ Rebekah sighed. ‘Though I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. Under other circumstances this would be a pretty pleasant way to spend some time: the open sea, luxury yacht, cool drink, sunshine, to say nothing of posing as glam young starlets on the lam from the paparazzi.’

  ‘Under other circumstances, yeah. For me, those would have to include genuine solitude and for it to be about ten degrees warmer too. My nipples are starting to pick up AM radio.’

  They were, as Rebekah described, on the open sea, under spring sunshine (somewhat cooled by a maritime spring breeze), sunbathing topless on the foredeck of a yacht as it bobbed gently on the waves, only a few hundred yards from the Corsair. Their approach had been noted by the larger vessel, as Som reported – observing and listening from the cabin below through an array of zoom lenses, infrared scopes and parabolic mikes. The first response had been to hustle two people below decks out of sight, then pairs of binoculars had been produced by a couple of the crew in order to get a closer look at their visitors.

  Rebekah had been manning the tiller at that point, Lex lying up front on a lounger, tossing back dire threats if her colleague didn’t make good with her promise to take her top off also once they were in range.

  She did, and played it cute too, waiting for Som to confirm that they were being surveyed, then giving a big wave to the boys with the binoculars before losing her T-shirt. So there they were, with the bad guys too busy looking at them to notice that Som was looking back. But that was only half the subterfuge. The clincher arrived after about half an hour: Nuno and Bett a quarter of a mile away on a smaller motor launch, posing as paparazzi, massive zoom lenses in plain view for the guys with the goggles to get a load of.

  They reacted less hospitably towards the faux photographers, one of them firing a flare across their bows to demonstrate that they had been noted and were not welcome; as well as to alert the sunbathing starlets that they were being snapped. Thus alerted, Lex and Rebekah reached (gratefully) for towels and T-shirts, covering up in a fussy show of righteous celebrity outrage. The flares having drawn their attention, the photographers turned their lenses towards the Corsair, where the man who’d fired it held up a different kind of gun, intimating what would be the next shot across their bows if they didn’t get lost. They did, turning their motor launch around and zooming off with an angry buzz of the engine.

  Lex and Rebekah responded to this development by standing up to applaud, throwing in a few ‘my hero’ gestures, hands clasped to chests. Then they stripped off again and resumed their places on the loungers.

  Throughout all of this pantomime, Som was shooting, listening, noting, recording. He got the number of guards (five), even caught some of their names, sussed the approximate chain of command, noted who went to which position when each boat appeared, and got a rough fix on where the prisoners were being held that they could later cross-check against the vessel’s plans.

  Then, once he’d garnered everything he usefully could, Lex and Rebekah gave their admirers a farewell wave, got dressed again and headed for shore.

  Twilight and dark water

  Bett cut the engine and let the yacht drift silently as far as its momentum would take it. It was the cue for one final weapons and equipment check, as well as for a sharp tightening in Jane’s gut. There was no stopping this now, no going back, but it wasn’t what she might be facing that was making her apprehensive: it was what was at stake.

  She’d heard Tom’s voice, old Margaret’s on the checkout, asking who she thought she was, what she thought she was doing, but they were mere echoes, addressed to some other woman.

  The rest of the team were getting nervous too, but its manifestation was also its therapy. They talked nonsense, wound each other up.

  ‘Do you think I look fat in this?’ Alexis asked, indicating the bullet-proof armour she had on under her T-shirt.

  ‘Kevlar is very slimming,’ Armand assured her, kneeling down by the gunwale and making some final preparation to his kit. ‘Trouble is, how are they going to recognise you if they can’t see your nipples? I mean, you don’t think those guys with binoculars were looking at your face, do you?’

  ‘Maybe if I stick two bullets in front, here, I can …’

  Bett held up a hand and cut her off. ‘A-fag, everybody. A-fag. Armand, it’s time.’

  ‘A-fag?’ Jane asked. ‘What is that, like “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”?’

  ‘No, it means cut the bullshit, it’s time to get serious. It’s an abbreviated acronym.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘All fun and games until somebody loses an eye.’

  Jane nodded. ‘I hear you.’

  Alexis turned to Bett.

  ‘Hey, you guys do know this boat is on fire, right?’

  ‘I said A-fag,’ he told her.

  ‘You still got that wee tube stashed somewhere safe?’ Ross asked.

  ‘Aye. The sea air chapping your lips?’

  ‘No, just checking.’

  ‘I was afraid they’d take it off me seeing as they must have seen it on camera.’

  ‘Maybe they weren’t watching at the time, or maybe they didn’t consider it a threat. Which it isn’t, not to them. If I’d palmed you a flick knife, maybe …’

  ‘Do you want it back?’

  ‘No, just thinking aloud. I’m not so sure it’s going to matter. When I gave you it, I was thinking there’d come a time when I’d get taken off to … wherever, and they’d let you go, but I think we’re in this together for the duration. The bad news is the duration might not be very long.’

  ‘You going to tell me what it is, then?’

  ‘No. That part hasn’t changed. It’s still best for both of us that you don’t know, even if we do get sold as a job lot. Maybe especially if we get sold as a job lot.’

  ‘Can’t see it happening any other way,’ Dad said gloomily. ‘For one thing, they cannae just let me walk away if I can identify them, or if I can raise the alarm about whoever’s bought you.’

  ‘You’re also needed to ensure my cooperation,’ Ross added, unable to prevent himself glancing at his dad’s bandaged fingers. The pain had kept them both up half the night, Dad unable to sleep for the discomfort, Ross for the storms in his head.

  The atmosphere on board today had been very tense, particularly in the morning, the first time they’d faced t
heir tormentors since. Gilbert and Guillaume had mostly kept out of their way, though this was unlikely to be out of any sensitivity or regret. Every time Ross did lay eyes on either of them, his mind filled instantly with hatred and thoughts of retribution, and both of them knew that. They also knew they could take him in a second, but it was a situation their professionalism warned them to avoid: Ross was potentially irrational, and the last thing they could afford was some livid and desperate gambit on his part that ended with him dead.

  ‘So how would that work?’ Dad asked. ‘I mean, once the gavel’s down and the winner gets his purchase.’

  ‘Basically, they’ll lean on me by leaning on you until I tell them everything I can about the Gravity Well, enough for their own developers to begin work.’

  ‘But that can’t go on forever, can it? You and me locked up in a secret cell feeding out technical titbits in exchange for staying alive.’

  ‘No. The developers would be guys like me – they’d never be allowed to know the source of the information. This would give them two choices. One is to buy me out: buy my expertise, buy my silence and yours, make me a legitimate employee. But that’s a lot more risky, a lot more expensive and a lot less convenient than just shooting us both in the head once I’ve given up the goods.’

  ‘Cheery thought.’

  ‘I’m just giving it to you straight, Dad. And what’s worse is that’s only the scenario if the buyer wants to develop the technology. If they just want to stop it …’

  ‘Then the duration, as you said, won’t be very long.’

  They both found themselves staring out of the cabin’s small window, it being an easier place to look than at each other. They were sharing his dad’s quarters, Ross’s own now out of bounds, presumably in case he took the desperate option to swim for it, or perhaps, in still greater desperation, to throw a seven. There were other cabins free, but not, he guessed, with in-built surveillance.