by Graham Marks
It was Izzy and Orlando he didn’t get. The two of them looked like they could make it tough going, each in their own particular way.
Tommy had sort of made excuses for Izzy when he was showing Paul the room and the layout of the squat, saying he shouldn’t mind her, she was just upset about Jez… that they were all close-knit, like a family. When someone dies in a family, it’s hard, he’d said. Which was true, but it didn’t mean you had to take it out on someone who’d had nothing to do with what had happened. Mind you, he hadn’t seen her be especially friendly or nice to anyone else, either.
And then there was Orlando, who was another thing altogether. Paul shifted in the camp bed, attempting to get more comfortable, which he kind of knew was just not going to happen. Orlando was… odd. No other way of putting it. For a start, he looked like a geek, but came on like he was The Man. The Man With All The Answers. Paul had watched him when they’d eaten – lasagne, cooked by Sky, the first real food he’d eaten in days. He could still taste the spicy meat sauce.
Orlando, like Izzy, had an attitude, but his seemed to be deeper somehow, ingrained, like dirt that you couldn’t scrub off. He was obviously younger than Sky, but Sky was the one taking orders – consulted, but not in charge. How did geeks get to take control, be the ones who made the rules, become the boss? Force of character, he supposed. And having people around them who did what they were told. That would certainly help.
Paul wasn’t sure whether he was the kind of person who did what he was told. When it came to his stepfather the answer was a definite, absolute no, and he wondered how this was all going to work out. Lying here, in this room, the sounds of two people he hardly knew drifting through their hours of sleep and keeping him awake, he could feel this negative space in his gut, an uneasy emptiness that he knew from experience would climb slowly towards panic, if he let it.
What was he doing here, with these people?
Maybe he should just get up, collect his stuff and leave. See if he really could make it by himself in London. Why did he need to be with this lot? It had been exciting to be with Rob and Terri on the way down here, doing shit and getting a real buzz from it. But now, in this house, with the whole group and everything, he wasn’t so sure. What had Tommy said? It was like a family. Except it was nothing like his family. He didn’t have brothers or sisters. He’d never had to deal with any of that, didn’t, he realised, actually know how to deal with it. Or really want to.
As he was turning over again, and rearranging the lumps in his pillow, Paul stopped. He could do with taking a leak. God, he was never going to get to sleep at this rate. As quietly as he could, he unzipped his sleeping bag and carefully eased himself off the flimsy camp bed. Standing on the threadbare carpet in his jockeys and a T-shirt, staring through bleary eyes at the monochrome darkness, he wondered what was happening back at home in Newcastle: was his mam in a flap about him going off and not coming back? Or did she think he was just away with mates and not worried at all?
He could always phone to find out…
No. If he called, she’d only try to get him to come home, and in the middle of all the uncertainty, the one thing Paul was sure of was that he didn’t want to go home. Not right now. He stepped over a pair of trainers and a pile of someone’s clothes and slowly turned the handle on the door, pulling it open just enough for him to slip through. The door to the bathroom, a few feet across the landing, was wide open and the glow of a street lamp through the frosted glass cast a pale, diffused shaft of orange, like a pathway, across the carpet.
Tiptoeing over to the bathroom he stepped on to the cold lino flooring, which sent an involuntary shiver down his back, and was about to push the door to when he heard a voice. Voices? No… sounded like just the one. Paul stopped. Had someone left a radio or the TV on? He checked his watch, which wasn’t there as he’d taken it off. Who knew what the time was. He took a couple of steps back, frowning as he listened harder, straining to see if he could pick up more of what was being said. No, he couldn’t, but he was sure it was an actual person he could hear talking and not the TV.
He started for the bathroom again, thinking that what he should be doing was taking a piss and getting back to bed, so he could try to go to sleep. But then he stopped, curiosity getting the better of him. This was like when he was a kid, when his parents were starting to seriously bitch with each other. To begin with they never used to argue in front of him, saving it for when he’d gone to bed. He used to lie there, the sound of their voices filtering up through the floor of his room from the kitchen below.
Just the sound, the tone, the anger. None of the words.
What exactly they might be was left to his overactive imagination, which worked out that what his parents must be talking about was him. Sometimes he’d creep out of bed and hug the shadows until he was at the top of the stairs, where he’d sit in a huddle, peering through the banisters at the kitchen door.
With the same sense of risk and guilt he’d felt all those years ago, Paul went to the top of the stairs and leaned forward slightly. There was, now his eyes had adjusted, a faint glow from downstairs, which he could see was coming from the thin strip of light escaping from under the kitchen door. Whoever was talking was in there. Without really thinking about it, Paul sat down, resting his chin on his knees and automatically reaching to play with the ring on his little finger. It wasn’t there and for a second he panicked that he might’ve lost it, finally remembering he’d put it on the small bamboo table between his and Tommy’s bed, along with his chain.
The sound of chair legs scraping on the floor and footsteps.
‘No!’ said the voice.
Orlando. Slightly muffled, but it was him. ‘Look, you don’t control me… Agreement? What agreement?’
A long pause.
‘Did I sign anything?… Forget it, you can’t make me stop. What we’re doing is important and needs to be done – and done for the right reasons… the public good, not personal gain…’
A humourless laugh.
‘You don’t get it, do you? This is my gig now, not yours.’
Silence. A long one.
‘Look, I don’t need your money any more. This “joke organisation”, as you call it, is self-financing now… yeah, that’s what I said, self-financing, and it’s none of your sodding business how. Not that it ever really was…’
Silence. More footsteps.
‘Are you threatening me?… And just exactly how are you going to do that, might I ask? You don’t know where we… Southgate? No… no we, ah, we weren’t ever there…’
The chair legs scraping on the floor again.
‘Must, um… must’ve been someone else.’ Orlando cleared his throat, sounded uncertain for a moment. ‘I don’t care what you say, what stupid threats you make, we’re not stopping…’
A dull slap… Orlando hitting the kitchen table? Paul shivered, the coolness breaking his concentration and bringing him back to where he was. Sitting on the stairs, eavesdropping. Not something he wanted anyone to find him doing. He stood up.
‘They get me, what makes you think I won’t implicate you? Right? Think about that before you come on like some nightclub bouncer…’
Silence again.
‘Stupid shit!’
Mumbling, footsteps, things being moved. Kitchen noises. Then the door opened, light spilled out like a dam had broken and in the glare Paul saw Orlando’s shadow. Before he could react there was a click and the light went out. In the pitch-black, his eyes momentarily confused, Paul wheeled round and hurried back towards his room.
He got to the door, turned the handle, pushed the door and slipped inside, closing it behind him. Great, except, unlike before, the bloody thing decided to squeak. As he stood in the room he could hear Orlando coming up the stairs and wondered if he’d heard the noise. He stayed stock-still, his heart thumping, unable to think what to do next. And now he really did need to go to the bog.
And then it occurred to him. Maybe that was what he
should do. It might explain any noises Orlando had heard. He didn’t really have much choice, cos if he stood around doing nothing for very much longer he was so going to piss himself. Paul reached out, opened the door and went back out on to the landing, trying to act as if he’d just woken up.
He was halfway to the bathroom, and thinking Orlando must’ve already got up to the next floor, when the silence was broken.
‘Tommy?’
Paul stopped, yawned fit to crack his face and scratched his head as he looked to see who was talking.
‘No… Paul… whoozat?’ he mumbled, hoping, as he saw Orlando standing by the next flight of stairs, that his performance didn’t look like too much of an act.
The lights came on and, through scrunched-up eyes, Paul saw Orlando, hand on the switch, head to one side, observing him.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Bathroom?’
‘Oh… right… OK.’ Orlando switched the lights out again. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, right…’ Paul turned and shambled into the bathroom, closing and locking the door behind him. He flipped the lid up and sat down, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. He’d got away with it. Just.
He wondered what the conversation he’d overheard the arse end of had meant. Who had Orlando been talking to? It had sounded serious, the talk of threats and stuff. It sounded like he’d been talking to someone who thought he could tell Orlando what to do. And Orlando had sounded like someone who didn’t appreciate being talked to like that… he liked to tell people, not get told. Dictator geek.
And then, just before the phone call ended, Orlando had made his own threat, something about how if they, somebody, whoever, got him, he’d snitch on the guy on the other end of the line. Like ‘I’m gonna tell on you!’ What kind of a girly threat was that?
Paul finished, stood up and flushed, wondering, after it was too late and the water was roaring down the pan, if the noise was going to wake people up. Not much he could do about that now. He yawned again, this time for real, and went back to his room. His and Rob’s and Tommy’s room. He climbed back into his sleeping bag, cold now, and pulled it tight around him. He’d stick around for a bit. Why not? It looked like it could get quite interesting, and he had nothing better to do…
14
Tuesday 1st August, Thames House
Jane Mercer had been in the office since well before 8.00 a.m. She wanted to be the first one there, and also be completely up to speed with all the latest information, including the last of the material that had come over yesterday from Steven Pearce in the Threat Evaluation team. She could tell from his attitude he thought the whole Omega Place thing was a complete waste of time – his time, anyway. She couldn’t really blame him. There was hardly anything to go on, plus there was the ridiculous ‘As Soon As Possible’ deadline.
So, here she was, on the first day of the rest of her life, waiting for the two extra people she and her deputy, Ray Salter, had had seconded to them. Once everyone was there she could brief them. On what, she still wasn’t too sure. What she was sure of was that they were going to need a lot more evidence before they had any chance of closing these people down. Mercer leafed through the papers one more time, allowing her mind to go into free fall as she scanned the pages and let all the facts and figures blend together in her head.
These people were on a mission, and their mission was… what? OK, put simply it appeared to be to (a) alert the public at large to the ‘threat’ to their privacy posed by the proliferation of CCTV cameras, and (b) to actually do something about it by destroying as many of the cameras as they could. Without getting caught. That was pivotal. And, as far as anyone seemed to know, nobody belonging to the organisation had ever been caught – as in apprehended. But maybe they’d been caught, somewhere on one of their operations, by one of the cameras they seemed to hate so much.
That was what they should find out.
Mercer got up and prised the plastic cap off a metre-long postal tube leaning against her desk. She twisted out the contents, unrolled a large-scale map of the United Kingdom and was pinning it to the massive cork pinboard which covered almost one wall of the room when Ray Salter arrived. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder and was holding two large cups of coffee in a cardboard carrier in one hand and a grease-stained paper bag in the other, both of which he put on the nearest desk.
‘Breakfast, boss.’
‘Skinny latte, no sugar?’
‘No sugar in the coffee, as requested. Plenty on the doughnuts.’
‘I’m a fifty per cent angel.’ Mercer walked over to the desk. ‘Which is mine?’
‘The one with the “x” on it.’
‘Thanks.’ She picked up her cup, popped off the lid and took a sip. ‘You’re early.’
‘You’re earlier.’
‘Too much to do, too little time to do it in and too few people to do it with. Plus ça change with this place, Ray. We’ve got budget, but not enough personnel, we’ve got a brief, but a fat chance of answering it. Typical sound-bite decision making…’ Mercer put her coffee down, opened the paper bag and took out one of the doughnuts. ‘Everything looks great on the bloody internal memo, though.’
‘As you say, boss, nothing changes. What’s going on the map?’
‘Red pushpins, one for each of the locations where we know there’s been any Omega Place activity. Now that you’re here, we might be able to get them in place before the others arrive, which at least gives the impression we know what we’re doing.’
Salter efficiently demolished his doughnut in three bites, without spilling any jam, and then licked his fingers.
‘Right…’
‘Very impressive, Ray.’
‘Years of practice, boss.’
‘Time so well spent. Now come and give me a hand with the pins.’ Mercer, still holding her uneaten doughnut in one hand, picked up a small cardboard box and threw it to her assistant.
Salter caught it. ‘I was thinking, on the way in, what we need to do is get hold of –’
‘The CCTV footage from all the places they’ve been to?’ Mercer interrupted as she flipped open a folder with her free hand and picked up some sheets of paper that had been stapled together. ‘My thoughts exactly. Whoever they are, they appear to be clever enough not to get caught in the act, but they could well be on film checking out their targets beforehand.’
‘But, if you didn’t know this was an organised campaign, why would you spot them, right?’
Mercer nodded, frowning, as she looked at the document she was holding. ‘We’ll start putting pins at locations within the M25, OK?’ She leaned back against a desk, crossing her feet. ‘Thing is, Ray, we have no idea how many people we’re talking about here, how they work or who we’re looking for.’
‘Stuff like this… radical, direct action? It’s usually small teams, isn’t it… you know, cells. Highly mobile, too. I’d bet they work in pairs as well, one lookout, one doer; any more would be too obvious. We’re just going to have to trawl though a shedload of grainy tape and see if we can see any of the same faces. And there is going to be miles of the bloody stuff.’
‘We won’t be going through it, because you and I have got better things to do with our lives than that.’ Mercer grinned. ‘Like sticking pins in maps.’
‘So who gets the shitty end of the stick?’
‘I think the lucky winner of that peachy job should be the last person to arrive this morning.’
‘Nice. And, once we’ve completed this,’ Ray jerked a thumb at the map, ‘what are we going to do?’
‘Go digging.’
‘For what?’
‘More. We have almost nothing right now. Just one set of prints, belonging to one name, James Hudson Baker, who’s alive and kicking and has to be somewhere. And not forgetting Omega Place, the name itself. It must be called that for a reason, which we have to try and find out. Two needles in one haystack.’
‘Twice as much fun, boss.’<
br />
Mercer finally took a bite of her doughnut, jam spilling out and running down her hand.
Salter smiled. ‘Like I said, boss, years of practice.’
‘Know what worries me most about these people?’ Mercer licked her fingers.
‘No, what?’
‘They’ve got inside information, Ray. Someone’s telling tales out of school, and it’s part of our brief to find out who it is.’
‘And we could be well and truly screwed if we do, boss?’
‘Precisely.’
15
Friday 11th August, Kingsland Road
Paul sat in the café stirring sugar into his mug of tea. Another mug was opposite him on the scarred, wood-effect table top, waiting for Sky, who’d gone for supplies – tobacco, papers and such. In this limbo moment, on his own for once, Paul found himself thinking about where he was and why he was there at all. It had been, what – ten, twelve days? Something like that – since he’d arrived in London and sort of become a part of Omega Place. Whatever that meant.
He remembered what he’d thought it meant, when he’d first read the flyer Terri had dropped in the street back up in Grainger. He’d thought Omega Place would be made up of all these people with ideas they were passionate about, that’d keep them arguing for hours. It would all be to do with common goals and action and changing the status quo. All those things he and Dave used to talk about with anyone who’d listen. They’d been called the Red Two for a bit, until the rank and file got bored with the joke, because that was what they seemed best at, getting bored. They didn’t seem remotely interested in changing anything, except their hairstyle or upgrading their mobiles or blagging the latest download.
And the bunch he was with now weren’t so very different. There were no discussions, no debates, none of that stuff. Any talking seemed to be done behind closed doors, Orlando in a huddle with Sky, sometimes with Terri or Izzy, who, unlike Tommy or Rob, looked like they took things remotely seriously. From where he sat, in a pale, distant orbit, still an outsider, Paul could observe. They rarely asked his opinion, which was OK because he didn’t yet know what it was.
