by Chris Thomas
32
‘An environmental mishap?’ asked Harris. ‘That doesn’t sound like these people. They seem too thorough to have mishaps. But it certainly seemed to catch them off-guard. Grace, did you get anything on the audio?’
‘No, nothing, other than a loud crash like someone dropping a bowling ball on the floor,’ she replied. ‘Although, hang on a second.’
‘What is it?’
Brooks scanned through the audio signal of the seconds just after the crash noise. ‘There. Did you hear it?’
‘No,’ they both replied in unison.
‘Wait a minute, let me enhance it. There.’
‘Is that a scream?’
‘I think so, just it’s drowned out by the noise reverberating around the warehouse and Mister Host speaking to camera, but it’s definitely there.’
‘Another victim off-camera suddenly becoming aware of their fate, perhaps?’ asked Fowler.
‘Possibly,’ replied Harris, turning back to the show.
‘AS I WAS SAYING,’ continued the Host. ‘The winner, with a huge eighteen bitcoins, is our good friend BoxofBrains. Great to see you, my man, we’ve not seen you here for a few weeks. What would you like to ask Cramer? He’s just about got one more answer left in him.’
Evening, Host, good to be back. I’d like to know, does he now regret his life?
‘Excellent question, Brains. So, Cramer, given the situation you now find yourself in, if you could go back in time, would you do things differently?’
McAllister was seriously flagging now, his head raised for mere seconds before slumping back into his chest. He managed a few grunts, when the Host raised his head up with the clipboard.
‘Cramer, Mister Brains would like to know …’
‘I heard what you said, you piece of shit,’ he spluttered. ‘The answer is yes, I’d do it differently.’
‘OK, so perhaps a little remorse creeping into the C-Mac? A few regrets maybe?’ the Host said into the camera.
But before he could carry on, McAllister continued, ‘I’d torture more kids, fuck more rent-boys, but most of all, I’d find you, rip your heart out, and stuff it beating into your mouth while looking you square in the eyes.’
‘I’m honoured that you would single me out for special attention, Cramer, but I think it’s time to end your sorry little existence. Just for the privilege of our friends around the world watching this, I want a close up of your face. So the people can see as deep into your eyes as I can while I tell you that you deserve every tiny amount of pain that you are in. You made people’s lives a misery, but more than that, this pointless excuse of a justice system let you get away with it. Do you understand that, Cramer? We are righting the wrongs. I hope you feel even a little scared and can maybe see just what you did to people. Brains, choose an ending.’
Thank you, Host. I think we can all be satisfied that justice has been done tonight. I think Cramer just chose his own ending.
‘Thank you, Brains, I think we’ll all enjoy this.’
‘No. Fucking. Way,’ exclaimed Fowler. ‘Are they seriously going to—’
‘I think so,’ replied Harris, glued to the screen. ‘Just keep the tracker going, keep the recording going.’
‘The tracker is there. It had god knows how many layers to penetrate, but it got there in the end. It just can’t get past their final firewall.’
‘Damn, come on,’ whispered Harris through gritted teeth, as he watched a goon hand a pristine silver serrated hunting knife to the Host.
He placed the clipboard and microphone down on McAllister’s lap, put one boot up on his thigh, and plunged the knife into the sternum. McAllister began convulsing, and as the Host sliced the blade up through his chest, frothy blood came foaming from his mouth.
‘Goodbye, Cramer,’ the Host whispered. ‘It’s been a pleasure.’
With that, he dropped the knife and plunged his hand deep into the opening below the ribs. Before he could finish, a huge scream ripped through the set. He pulled his hand out and the goons began running around in all directions, trying to find the source. Suddenly, small metal objects came flying from the darkness; a hammer, a wrench, a screwdriver, anything. One after another.
‘What on Earth is going on?’ asked Brooks.
‘There,’ said Harris, pointing on the screen to what appeared to be a young girl. She was running around, faster than the goons could keep up with. With one last throw, a large spanner landed in front of Jarvis, striking the console. Harris, Fowler, and Brooks’ screens all went black.
‘Bollocks,’ shouted Harris.
‘No, wait a sec. Bugger me, we’re in,’ shouted Fowler, excitedly. ‘Whoever that was, it looks like they knocked the main server. It must have disconnected it somehow from whichever machine was running the security program. The tracker’s worked.’
‘Get as much as you can, IP addresses, physical location, anything,’ replied Harris.
‘Already on it. Wait a minute,’ he paused, examining the incoming data. ‘For fuck’s sake.’
‘What is it?’
‘The information’s coming through, but again, it’s all encrypted. Christ, these people were paranoid. It shouldn’t be too hard, but it will take some time.’
‘Bollocks. I’ll get word to the Super. He’ll want to know anyway.’
EVENTUALLY, the intruder was surrounded, restrained, and hooded. Despite wailing like a banshee, kicking and thrashing for all she was worth, it was no good. The goons had them.
‘Get this lot cleared up, we’re moving out in ten minutes,’ shouted Alistair, as the main warehouse lights lit up a scene of carnage.
The goons began clearing up the set, cleaning up the blood, and removing the dead body with the efficiency of soldiers dismantling a field gun. Eric and Stan headed straight for the comms room to undo all their earlier work.
‘Where the hell did she come from?’ Alistair asked.
‘No idea, she must have been hiding in amongst all the racks,’ replied Jarvis. ‘Maybe you should have gotten these imbeciles to check a little more thoroughly.’
‘Alright, you’ve made your point. What’s the situation?’
‘Transmission went off air when she hit the console with the spanner. Chances are people all saw the commotion, but I need to get back to the house to check everything.’
‘OK, pack everything away as soon as. Have Eric see to Mister Henderson,’ said Alistair, walking around the back of the curtain before shouting at the goons still wrestling with the prisoner. ‘In my car. I want a word.’
The goons nodded and dragged the prisoner out of the warehouse and into the yard. Alistair bent down and lifted Joe back upright, before walking off to the exit and getting into his car. Eric came out of the back office with an armful of manuals, wires, and tools, which he placed in a transit van that had now reversed into the warehouse. He untied Joe, pulling his mask off. Joe squinted as the bright LED light burned into his eyes.
‘Mister Henderson, we’re all done,’ said Eric, pulling Joe to his feet. ‘Once we’ve gone, everything here will be back to normal. I suggest you lock up as quickly as you can and get the hell out of here. We’ll be in touch imminently.’
‘What?’ asked Joe, with a mixture of concern and annoyance. ‘I did my bit, you can leave me alone now.’
‘We need to debrief you, just so you’re well-prepared for what might happen, especially if the police become involved.’
‘The police?’ exclaimed Joe. ‘I thought you lot were supposed to be experts in making sure they wouldn’t get involved.’
‘We are, but it’s always a good idea to plan for any eventuality,’ replied Eric, patting him on the cheek.
AS THE LAST of the vans closed their doors and left the yard, Alistair, Jarvis, and Gilbert climbed into the back of the limousine, where their captive was firmly buckled to the seat.
‘Let’s see who we have here,’ said Alistair, as he removed the hood. The three of them looked in surprise at the young
girl staring back at them; surprised at how young she looked and surprised at how little she appeared to be scared of them.
‘What’s your name?’ asked Gilbert.
‘Daisy,’ replied the girl.
‘Well, Daisy,’ said Alistair, taking a large Cuban cigar from a compartment in the arm of his chair. ‘You’re coming home with us.’
33
Back in the computer room at Clifton Hall, Jarvis trawled through reams of data being churned out by his printer. Whilst he liked to think that he considered the environment, there was something nobler about reading data off of a huge pile of green-lined continuous feed dot matrix paper.
Somehow, it took him back to his childhood, when his father would bring computers home from work to repair. Early and primitive PCs that covered the entire dining room table, with screens smaller than a modern tablet computer. They worked on pure code, and he would sit for hours with his father, reading out lines and lines of the stuff whilst he typed indiscernible rows of letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, until, at the end of it, he could sit back in wonder and watch as he controlled a small spacecraft flying around the screen blasting aliens.
After a while, the code became as natural to Jarvis as English. He thought in code and would write ingenious lines down on whatever scrap of paper he had to hand when they randomly popped into his head. And watching his father fix the machines had given him an early interest in networks and hardware. He was well-acquainted with private packet networking and internet protocols long before the rest of the planet even became aware of what would come to be known as the World Wide Web.
Like many of his ilk, he was looked down on by his peers and laughed at as the archetypal nerd. As he withdrew further into the world of programming, he had developed what he liked to think of as games, although they were more like pranks. His particular favourite was to hack into his halls of residence server and transmit adult movies onto the computers of anyone logged on in their dormitory. He was aware of a few black eyes dealt by disgusted girlfriends.
His talent and aptitude in both programming and hardware interfacing had brought him to the attention of the belligerent and slightly obnoxious young entrepreneur, Alistair Goodfellow. Whilst Jarvis had jumped on the bandwagon of the infant internet, his new acquaintance had a vision that the future lay in large, grey brick-like telephones that people could carry around in their pockets.
‘People won’t buy stuff on the internet, they won’t trust it,’ Alistair would say.
‘People won’t want to carry around a telephone the size of a book,’ Jarvis would counter.
After a couple of years of drunken nights in the pub discussing their respective technologies, it dawned on Alistair that they could combine the two into something special. Alistair would be the driving force and public face of the new online mobile phone shop with Jarvis happy to stay out of the limelight and stick to the programming and techie side of things. Soon, Alistair’s vision had turned into a very successful and, above all, highly lucrative reality. It was always Alistair’s company and it made him wealthy beyond imagination, but Jarvis had stayed with him, heading up the IT sections of his empire, happy just to tinker away with newer and newer technologies. And to take the stock options and high-end six figure salary.
But when Alistair sold the company, the excitement was gone. Jarvis could no longer motivate himself to work for a faceless board of nobodies in America, people more concerned with keeping the shareholders happy than really embracing the spirit that had created the success in the first place. He knew that Alistair felt the same, that he needed something to focus his boundless energy into, to give his life meaning again. It was all very well owning a house with fifteen bedrooms, but when it was just you and a bunch of house-keepers it was largely pointless.
Over a game of snooker in Alistair’s new country house, the one he now found himself stood in, they had begun discussing a court case that was featuring prominently in the news. A husband and wife were jailed for trafficking young girls from Eastern Europe, with promises of work and education in the United Kingdom, only to force them into sex slavery. Their solicitors and barristers were able to twist the testimonies of the girls involved; so much so, and invoking so many mitigating factors (their own children’s wellbeing and the woman’s elderly mother who required round the clock care being just two), that they received relatively pitiful sentences. And taking into account the time they had already spent in custody, the pair basically walked free from court. The tabloids had a field day and there was general uproar, especially when the photographs were published of them leaving the courtroom, holding hands, laughing, and swearing at the assembled throng of journalists.
After a couple of whiskies, Jarvis asked the hypothetical,
‘If those two were stood in this room right now, and you could do anything you wanted to them without being found out, what would you do?’
‘I’d want to hurt them,’ he replied. ‘Not because I like hurting people, but to make them realise just what they had done. Having clever lawyers might make them believe, in their own minds, that they’re not guilty, but I would want them to see that they are. And that is one of the fundamental problems with the justice system in this country …’
Jarvis recalled zoning out as the rant went on for quite a while, going through his own answer to his question in his head. But at the end of the night, they had had a plan. A purpose. Jarvis would have access to whatever funds he needed to procure all the necessary technology, and Alistair would call in a few contacts.
‘We’ll need a name,’ Jarvis had said, semi-drunkenly, as he made for the door to go to bed. ‘What with us being the new saviours of the righteous and all.’
‘Quite right,’ Alistair replied. ‘All brotherhoods like ours need a name.’
Jarvis had never imagined, on that night two years ago, what their little project would turn into. But they had so many plans for it that they couldn’t happen fast enough, as far as Jarvis was concerned.
And concerned was precisely what Jarvis now became as he spotted it on about the thirtieth page of the print-out: a breach.
‘Oh. Bollocks,’ he said to himself.
He pressed the internal dial button, waiting for Alistair to pick up. Nothing; he would have to walk it. He ripped the page off of the printer and hastened up to the main quarters. This required a fairly urgent meeting, but more importantly, it needed Alistair to pull all his strings to stop the whole project going down the pan.
34
Alistair reclined in his favourite leather armchair, resting a crystal tumbler of whisky on one arm and picking at a brass stud on the other. He watched on the CCTV monitor as Daisy paced up and down in her room, periodically trying the window and door again just in case they had somehow become unlocked since the last time she’d tried. There was something about this girl. He had encountered many troubled teenagers during his charity work, but she seemed to have a spark that he liked.
The door to the room unlocked and she turned around to face it as Gilbert entered, carrying a large tray full of food. He set it down on the table and poured a glass of water for her. She stood with her back against the wardrobe, whilst Gilbert motioned for her to sit down.
‘Come, my dear,’ he said to her, pulling a chair away from the table. ‘It’s roast chicken, roast potatoes, stuffing, vegetables, and sausages in bacon; everything that you asked for. It’s perfectly fine, we’re not going to poison you. In fact, chef would be quite offended at the mere suggestion.’
Deciding it was time to get to know the new guest a little better, Alistair put his drink down and walked down the hallway to Daisy’s room. He passed Gilbert on the way.
‘She’s an interesting one,’ said Gilbert. ‘She’s really not giving much away. Given the set of circumstances she’s found herself in, she seems remarkably calm.’
Alistair nodded and continued past. He knocked on the door and, after waiting a few seconds for a reply that never came, let himself in.
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‘Good evening, Daisy,’ he said.
Daisy glanced up from her plate, chewing on a large mouthful of food. As much as she hated being detained against her will, she had to admit that not only was this the nicest food she’d eaten for a long time, it was probably the best she’d ever eaten. She once again found herself in a place that she didn’t want to be, but in the big scheme of things, this was about as good as her life had been for as long as she could remember. But these people were murderers, why were they being so nice to her?
‘May I?’ said Alistair, pointing to the chair opposite.
Daisy stared at him blankly. Why on Earth was he asking her if he could sit down?
‘Yes, OK. I guess,’ she replied, slightly confused, as Alistair sat down. ‘Have you come here to kill me?’
‘No, of course not. If that was our intention we would have done so by now,’ he said, half-jokingly, sitting back with one leg resting on the other knee. ‘So, Daisy, tell me a little about yourself.’
‘No, I don’t believe you. I think you’ll try and find out what I know then kill me,’ she answered.
Alistair stifled a laugh. ‘Seriously, I’m not here to kill you. After all, you haven’t even finished your dinner yet. Plus, blood is a nightmare to get out of these tablecloths. Please, tell me about Daisy.’
She eyed him suspiciously. Although he seemed nice, she thought she should probably do what he asked for her own safety.
‘So, like what?’
‘Like how did you come to be in that warehouse? You might have caused us a lot of aggravation you know.’
‘I saw you kill someone,’ she said, through a mouthful of food. ‘Give me one good reason why I don’t call the police.’
‘Because you can’t,’ he replied, curtly. ‘Anyway, you didn’t see me kill someone, now did you? It was, how shall we say, unfortunate that you were witness to that unpleasantness. It most certainly wasn’t for your eyes, and for that you have my sincerest apologies. But like I said, how did you come to be in that warehouse?’
