A Snowball in Hell

by Christopher Brookmyre

  I ushered them into the building, holding open the sturdy steel door which I had fitted to replace the aluminium lightweight effort that had been there originally. Once the last of them was inside, I closed it behind them, slid the reinforced-steel bar into place and padlocked it. As there was a table inside, generously laid out with champagne flutes and several ice buckets containing bottles of Veuve Clicquot, none of them were perturbed by this, if they even noticed.

  I then made my way to the far end of the building, where I let myself in through the other door, climbing on to an observation gantry upon which stood a video camera on a tripod. The champagne-sipping delegates were gathered on a narrow strip of concrete approximately forty metres away, and between them and myself was an earth-covered area of ground, extending the full width of the building. They were all standing at least a foot back from the edge of the concrete, for fear of smearing their uniformly expensive footwear. No trip to Milan was purely about business, after all.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen, and thank you all for coming,’ I announced, bringing them to order. ‘I apologise if I misled anybody as to the uniqueness of their invitation, but I promise whole-heartedly that I was telling nothing but the truth with regard to the demonstration in which you are about to participate.’

  (At this point, one or two were no doubt assuming these last few words to be either merely clumsy phrasing on my part or a mistranslation on theirs.)

  ‘All of the hardware involved is pre-Ottawa, manufactured and sold by companies represented here today, and once you have experienced, first-hand, what it can do, I guarantee you will no longer be concerned with treaties, sanctions or embargoes. ‘

  I produced a remote from my pocket and pushed some buttons. Several red lights blinked into life along the back and side walls. A few delegates proved themselves sufficiently familiar with their own catalogues as to recognise the devices the lights were mounted on. An incredulity borne mainly of cosseted smugness prevented panic: ‘We’re important and successful – nothing that bad ever happens to us.’

  ‘As the two delegates from Ordnance Systems Europe will be no doubt proud to inform you, the devices I have just activated are modified versions of their own best-selling Shashka AP, altered to explode on a timer, which will run out in six minutes in the case of the mines behind you. The devices lining the side walls will explode in parallel pairs, staggered by two minutes from your end to mine. The door you entered by is secured by a deadbolt-and-padlock combination that would require a solid ninety seconds of oxy-acetylene work to cut through, if there was anyone out there inclined to assist and who was conveniently thus equipped, which there isn’t.’

  At this, one of them scuttled over to the door and gave it a trial push, then a more desperate full-blooded shoulder barge once it struck him that this might be for real.

  ‘The Shashka APs, as your literature proudly boasts, have a kill radius of twenty feet, so you really don’t want to be hanging around up that end for too long, no matter how good the champagne. The good news is, the door I just entered through will remain unlocked for you to exit at any time. The bad news is, between it and where you’re standing lies buried a veritable compendium of your various products. It is the landmine equivalent of a jumbo-size Christmas selection box: the finest that OSE, Gieselcorp, CMK and BDE have to offer. There’s Limpets, Katzbalgers, CMK-13s, Razorclams, Shurikens, you name it.’

  The cosseted smugness effect was merely reinforced by my outlining their predicament. The more I talked, the more convinced they became that the Shashkas were blanks or replicas. There were even a few tuts, as it was assumed they were being subjected to some kind of protest, and they were already pulling on their ideological flak jackets. Their body language mostly said ‘yeah, yeah’, expressing not fear, but anger that they’d been had and been grossly inconvenienced by some sandal-wearing bleeding-heart peacenik.

  If how wrong they were was a number, it would have to be written down in scientific notation.

  ‘Okay, yes, very good, we get your point,’ ventured one of them, a Gieselcorp suit named Hans Mueller. ‘The evil hypocrites of the arms industry who never have to face the threat of their own products, something like that?’ he suggested in his heavily accented English. ‘I see you have a video camera to record our discomfort and show your friends, perhaps even put on a website, yes? But here in Italy there are very strong laws regarding false imprisonment, yes? So even bringing us here under false pretences could see you face a custodial sentence. It would therefore be in your own interest to surrender the videotape. Because though it could be used to embarrass us, it would be far more damaging to you. So I suggest you stop recording and hand over the tape. You can still tell your friends your story about how you shamed and defeated the evil businessmen. No proof, but no need to go to jail either.’

  The guy hadn’t left the concrete strip, but I believed this was still out of concern for his shoes.

  ‘You want the tape, come and get it,’ I said.

  He stared up at me for a moment, muttered something to the other suits and then shrugged.

  ‘On second thought, keep the tape. It’s supposed to show us cowering in fear or hammering at the door in panic. Not quite so useful to your protest campaign if instead it just shows us ignoring this infantile charade and...’

  I’m guessing he was going to say ‘walking to the other side’, which is what he was in the process of doing (hang ze Italian lezzer, zis is about principle) when he got blown so high that his body hit the corrugated ceiling before disintegrating on the way down.

  Have to hand it to the manufacturers: the integrity of their trigger construction was superb. Only one of the subsequent explosions caused a nearby device to detonate without being stepped on. At first I thought it was two, but when I replayed the tape in slo-mo, I was able to determine that it was actually the weight of a CMK exec’s head, descending from thirty feet, that had activated the previously suspect AP.

  If you’re interested in these things, out of national pride or corporate profile or even just spread-betting, it was a Dutchman from OSE who made it furthest, almost halfway, in fact, before he realised he’d stood on one. It was a limpet with a weight-release trigger, so he remained rooted to the spot until the flanking Shashkas got him. I’ve often wondered what was the last thing to go through his head. My best guess is his arsehole.

  What do you mean you never heard of the landmine-merchants massacre? The atrocity that drenched the defence industry with a bloodstain it was forced to launder in public? That stimulus of international debate and bitter controversy, every condemnation of the murders nonetheless dripping with inescapable equivocation due to the victims being hoist by their own petard? How could you possibly have missed a story as big as that?

  Exactly. They moved heaven and earth – mostly earth – to cover it up, with God knows what levels of collusion and influence being brought to bear. It didn’t happen. Not so much as an internet rumour. Even the murder of the farmer got the screens thrown up around it: officially attributed to some travelling indigent.

  By way of consolation, the experience served me well for the future, teaching me that the events had to be immediately accessible to the public, after which there could be no way of the authorities getting the toothpaste back into the tube. At the time, though, it was more than a disappointment at my wasted effort: it was a humiliation, because of what it taught me about my own predicament.

  I had the videotape, of course, but there was the rub: I was scared to release it. I reckoned I could dub over my voice and edit out any glimpses of myself from the footage, but I didn’t know enough about the forensics of these things to be confident I wasn’t giving anything away. My humiliation lay in that I had too much to lose by drawing so much attention to myself, and it wasn’t just the authorities that I had to worry about bringing down upon me. No matter how smart or careful I thought I could be, the second I announced myself, I was starting a countdown to my own death.

  That
inescapable risk-benefit equation: if I didn’t identify myself as the author of the deed, it was useless by way of altering my son’s legacy; but to identify myself as the author of the deed was suicide.

  I had to make do with trips to Scotland to see my son as close up as I dared. The double disguises of being presumed dead and of no longer quite resembling the deceased anyway served me well. I did, however, unavoidably spend a great deal of time in hotel rooms, with little to pass the time but British television. I got very, very close to my boy on occasion, though never enough to exchange words, to look into his eyes while we spoke to each other. Over time, the frequency of my trips increased, as did my frustration at what I couldn’t do for him, and my awareness of what I must. The idea didn’t go away: the sense of untapped power and possibilities grew and grew. Only the price never changed.

  Physicists ought to look into the mass-gravity relationship as it is uniquely warped by dead weight. No matter how skinny and waif-like the body, it always seems to feel 50 per cent heavier once it’s lifeless. This girl is five-foot nothing and, I’d estimate, seven stone soaking wet, yet she still has me worked up into a sweat as I get her ready for transport. Could be my condition, right enough – mustn’t forget that.

  Even just sitting her up while I change her t-shirt takes some haulage. I am grateful, as ever, that once I get the body inside the golfing flight-bag, it will be a lot more easily manoeuvrable. Who invented these things? I ought to look him up and send him some champers or whisky by way of gratitude. I don’t know how they rate for taking your clubs abroad, but for moving bodies around – in broad daylight, if need be – they are second to none. Even the golf bag itself, once you remove the internal dividers, makes an ideal means of keeping the stiff – or more pertinently, I should say, the flopper – in place and the shape disguised. You zip the canvas flight-bag around the whole affair and then you can just wheel it about on the rollers.

  Her old t-shirt is a bit whiffy, but that is understandable after what she’s been through. We’ll never be in a hurry to add scent to sound and vision on our tellies or the internet.

  I begin by trying to haul it over her head, then give up and cut it with a knife. Pitiful to think there had been paparazzi stalking her in vain for weeks, tabloid picture editors on tenterhooks for the thus far unattainable prize of a topless shot, and internet Photoshop geeks doing digitally manipulated zoom-ins of wait-was-that-a-nipple? frame captures from her Bedroom Popstars dance routines... and all because of these two skinny tits.

  I pull the new t-shirt over her head and tug her arms through the sleeves, then stand back and take a picture, in case it gets suppressed or its significance missed. She is slumped in the shot, her head lolled to one side and her hair hanging partly over her face, straggling ends reaching on to the slogan. Has a certain zombie-chic about it.

  I wheel her out to the van and check my watch. Couldn’t be late: have to catch the last train, after all.

  I make it to Graining North station for twenty past eleven. It is an unmanned facility, on the outer limits of the tube system. Network rail trains thunder obliviously through it, with even the local mainline services stopping at Graining West instead. I sit inside my vehicle in the car park for a while with my lights off, keeping watch for any other approaching passengers. It wouldn’t matter if one showed up once I was on the platform – I’d just make sure I was at the very end – but I don’t want anybody coming through the station as I make my way from the van.

  I pull my hood all the way forward and keep my head down from here on in. I’m not quite ready for my close-up, and I’m certainly not giving them it on the shitty CCTV system that’s monitoring the unmanned station.

  There is nobody in sight, and nobody already on the platform.

  Would have been unlikely anyway, as I timed it to arrive in the car park shortly after the penultimate service departed.

  I stand and wait for an irritatingly long six minutes. The final train is four minutes late, just long enough for me to worry that it has been cancelled, that they’ve changed the timetable or the lazy cunts have just decided to call it quits early. However, at 11:38, along it comes, the final service into central London, originating from the Graining West terminus one stop up the line.

  I watch it rumble arthritically along the edge of the platform. As it passes I see only one passenger, seated with her back to me. I roll my companion along behind me for a couple of dozen yards so that I can board several carriages along.

  Unsurprisingly, the other passenger doesn’t alight. Who takes the tube a solitary stop from Graining West to Graining North, especially at this time of night? Nah, she is heading into London: probably on her way to a night shift somewhere, emptying bins and wiping down desks before the daytime worker drones return to don their headsets, boot up their PCs and jack their souls directly into the system that controls them. No wonder Sally here had hurled herself at every camera rather than take her place among the indentured undead.

  Oh yeah, forgot the drum roll and trumpets. The winner of Dying to be Famous is... Sally. Yay. There’ll be more of a fanfare when the public finds out. To which end, I get to work once the train has pulled away.

  I unzip the canvas and haul her out of the golf bag within, lying her carefully down on the frayed upholstery of the seating. Then I zip the flight-bag again and make my way into the next carriage, in case anybody gets on the one she’s in at the next stop.

  Nobody does. It’s another empty station. Nobody but me gets on the service heading back to Graining North from the opposite platform, and nobody else gets off there either.

  As I walk briskly back to the van, I wonder which unsuspecting traveller will win the golden ticket to their own fifteen minutes by being the one lucky enough to find her. It’s a limited offer, though: as she’s in the end carriage, she could make it all the way into central London before she’s disturbed, so there’s a good chance she’ll come to on her own and stagger off the train herself.

  For she’s alive – alive! – say it in your best Bride-of-Frankenstein voice. Alive: that’s the prize; part of it, anyway. Accompanied or not, very soon she’ll walk off that carriage, blinking and disorientated, into a sea of gaping faces and a hundred clicking camera-phones, all trying to seize their own slice of the moment. And this will only be the beginning.

  Congratulations, Sally. You don’t belong to me any more – but that doesn’t mean you’re free. You belong to them now. That’s what you never understood. None of you did.

  And won’t everybody in the whole country be so happy to see her? A good news day at last on a story that had only produced horror and heartache. A glimmer of hope for the cops too, a chance, finally, to get some first-hand information. Yes, they’re all going to be happy, so very, very happy that Sally has been found alive.

  It will only be later that they realise this was the opposite of what they ought to have wished for.

  Push the ghosts

  ‘More head-hunters in looking for you,’ Morrit says. ‘Asians again, I think, or maybe Middle East: Dubai and that.’

  The old man manages to make it sound like he’s a lonely room-mate passing on phone messages from numerous girlfriends. There’s an aridity and affected grumpiness about him that can make anything he says sound like a complaint. Took Zal a while to understand that it presented no reliable indicator upon Morrit’s state of mind: it was, as Lizzie had helpfully explained, merely symptomatic of his being from Yorkshire. He takes a singular satisfaction in sounding pissed off even when inside he is whistling. Today, though, his weary tone reflects a frustrated sense of futility about the information he is conveying. No matter how enticing the potential engagement sounds, there is no point in Morrit pondering the prospect, he believes, because Zal will inevitably reject it.

  It would be inaccurate to say that it has become a growing source of tension between them, but it has definitely been leading to an increasing sense of puzzlement and confusion on the old man’s part, and Zal is aware
it will soon have to be addressed. They are coming to the end of another contract, and they both know it’s time for a change. The confusion part stems from Zal having concealed that he concurs, thus Morrit is wondering if Zal is planning to just stay on this ship forever.

  Their first contract was for six months. Six months had turned into four years and Morrit couldn’t understand why Zal didn’t appear to have itchy feet. Given that Morrit referred to him as ‘Mac’ and believed his name to be Innes McMillan, it would be fair to say that Zal had never entirely levelled with him.

  Lizzie had left about a year and a half back, to get married. There weren’t a lot of single males on these trips – not ones under sixty, at least – but she had met this guy who was a senior executive for the cruise line. Morrit and Zal both knew she hadn’t intended to be extending her career as a magician’s assistant: she had stuck with her dad when he needed her, knowing he would be forced to retire from the game soon enough. But then Zal had come along and changed everything, and she found herself still climbing in and out of boxes as her thirties trickled away. They were both sorry to lose her, but Morrit took a deep satisfaction not just from her happiness, but from no longer worrying that she had sacrificed too much of herself just to look after him. Unfortunately, this left him free to channel all his paternal concerns, as well as his guilt-stained gratitude, towards the overall welfare of Zal instead.

  Morrit’s arthritis had slowly but inexorably worsened, to the extent that he eventually had to accept that he would no longer be able to usefully grip a saw, never mind anything more precise. Over the same time, however, he had been teaching Zal the very skills he was losing, and so was able to direct his apprentice’s hands in realising the props and apparatus that they had collaborated to design. He was a living encyclopaedia of both hardware and technique, which, allied to Zal’s stagecraft, made for a very successful collaboration. In the absence of Lizzie, they had put their efforts into designing new tricks for Zal to perform alone, rather than into looking for a replacement. They liked the way they could spark ideas off each other and liked the challenge of reshaping the show, but another unspoken factor was that they weren’t ready to let an outsider anywhere close to their professional partnership.