Kill Someone

by Luke Smitherd

  “Sorry, Chris. I really understand you saying that, but it’s just not an option here. Better not to waste time now mate, seriously.” He pointed at the chair. “Sit down, try and slow your breathing and relax a bit more, and I’ll run through a few last bits of info. Then I can be on my way and leave you to it. Now I’m going to give you something to bear in mind while we’re talking to try and help get the ball rolling, so to speak. To, you know, save you and the girls as much time as possible, because as you’ve seen, we go to the minute on this. You see it doesn’t matter if you’ve got someone by the throat and start squeezing at, say, 2:59 pm. If they’re still alive by 3:00 pm, or whenever that particular time deadline is, that’s a limb or a head coming off. Do you see?”

  I saw. And even as the room spun and I felt like I was going to faint, he asked his next question and I realized that he hadn’t needed to; that I was already—in a distant part of my mind—asking it myself:

  “So as I say, try and be thinking as we’re talking. Is there anyone you know, perhaps, that you believe you could kill? Anyone that—given that you have to kill someone—is bad enough that they deserve to die more than an innocent? Anyone that deserves to die more than these girls who do so much charity work for others? Your victim doesn’t have to be a pedophile or a rapist or whatever, just someone that you think deserves it more than the girls. Anyone who is, quite frankly, just a bastard or a bitch.”

  He shrugged.

  “Chris? Do you know anyone like that?”

  ***

  Chapter Two: Previous Candidates, The Selection Process Begins, and Bypassing The Gatekeeper

  ***

  I want you to know something from here on out. Hindsight is a wonderful, blissful, unrealistic idiot. That’s the one good thing to come out of all of this. I learned to be easier on myself when I can’t think of things to do or say “at the time.” The Process taught me that much.

  Can you imagine? Looking back on all that happened and picking apart Every. Single. Decision. Was this right; could I have done that; should I have done that; oh my God, why didn’t I think of that…

  All the time. Every day. All the counselors in the world couldn’t help because I could never tell them what really happened, although I came close a few times. I think I’ve found a way to make it better, though. I think so. A way to find peace of a sort.

  But I still have to get the story out of me.

  Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is this: while I have no intention of ever letting this account be read by anyone for as long as I live, it may still be found when I’m dead. If it is, then I need to make something very clear indeed.

  You shouldn’t judge my choices. I’m not you, and more importantly, you sure as hell weren’t me at that time. The knowledge that in a few hours a young woman is going to lose another limb, or her life, because of your choices… that tends to have a tremendous impact on your higher reasoning. So save me the I would have done this, why didn’t you do this bullshit. I can guarantee that after the fact I’ve thought about whatever approach you’ve come up with, because I’ve had the misfortune of going through them all in my head over the last nine years. Non-stop. ”At the time” makes all the difference. ”At the time” I was a fucking idiot.

  It was just me. On my own. A stupid punk kid. And the clock. Always the clock.

  Well… just me and Klaus.

  ***

  “Oh, wait, that reminds me,” the Man in White said, clicking his fingers and then pointing them at the huge man who was now standing behind me. “What do you want to call him?”

  “What?” I asked. I was pretty numb now. It was a blessing.

  “My friend here,” the Man in White said. “He’s going to be with you pretty much constantly until this ends, one way or the other, so you need to decide what to call him.” The question was ludicrous, as if we were talking about a dog.

  “Doesn’t… he have a name?”

  “Of course he does, but you don’t get to know that. I could have made one up, but I always prefer to let you guys decide it for yourselves. I could tell you that I do that because it’ll help you remember, but really it’s because it’s just one of those things that makes a job interesting, you know? So. What name?”

  I turned slightly, not wanting to stare at the large man. He’d stepped back, not to give me a better look—Klaus isn’t that kind of guy—but because he’d moved naturally into a more relaxed position (or whatever he considered relaxed) and now I could see and consider him clearly. As crazy and strangely lighthearted as the question seemed in that situation, my mind had already told me the answer. It had already seen the blonde hair, the over-the-top government spook get-up, the ridiculously Aryan look of the guy, and had come up with an answer.

  “Klaus,” I said, quietly.

  “Klaus? Like a German guy?” the Man in White cried and clapped his hands together once as he laughed. “Ha! That’s a new one! You hear that, Klausy?” His finger wagged in the large man’s direction, who from that moment and forevermore would be Klaus in my eyes. Klaus, for his part, didn’t change his position or facial expression in the slightest. He simply continued to loom. And then something hit me.

  “A new… wait, you like to let ‘us guys’ decide it for ourselves?” I asked, almost reluctant to point out what I’d noticed in case it was a big slip up on his part, one that could get me in trouble because I shouldn’t know… but I had to know. “This isn’t the first time you’ve done this. Or something like this. Is it?”

  “Oh, no, no,” said White, speaking in a slightly surprised tone of voice that immediately told me it wasn’t a slip up at all. “Didn’t I tell you? Oh, no, wait, I didn’t, did I? I didn’t show you the video or anything. Hold on,” he said, holding up a gloved finger as he picked up the iPad from the table again and began to poke at it. “Fancy gloves,” he said offhandedly as he tapped away. “You can get similar ones at the petrol station, you know, crappy woolen ones, but these are fancy. They still look nice and you can’t even notice they have the special tips that let you use a touchscreen. Pretty cool. You should get some; they still aren’t really that much. They don’t work with the thumbprint lock though. You have to take them off for that.”

  He talked as if he were on a sales call, and I wanted to kill him.

  You could kill him. That would count.

  And Klaus would kill me before I even picked up a knife.

  “Here, here,” White said eagerly, turning the pad around once more. “Some more people you might recognize. Don’t worry. This isn’t, you know …live footage or whatever. It’s recorded. It’s not nice though. See him? You recognize him?”

  I did. I recognized the man onscreen immediately and any hope that might have remained – impotent, desperate hope that still clung to this being bullshit or a sick prank or something – disappeared.

  Onscreen, I saw some slightly shaky but otherwise clear footage of Peter Carsdale, who had briefly been a news item about two years prior. The only reason I remembered him was because of the angle behind the story and because he was a West Midlands guy. He’d been quite sensationally found innocent during his trial for the murder of Priesh Kamani due to a cast-iron alibi turning up halfway through the trial. Prior to that, it looked like an open-and-shut case of murder to the local media, which had already been baying for his blood (at least as much as mere local media can actually bay). Once his guilt was in doubt, it was a national media item for about a day before being replaced by whatever bullshit a Kardashian was up to at the time. I remembered them finding him innocent very clearly. I’d been really pleased. I like a comeback story. I always have.

  I watched as Peter Carsdale beat Priesh Kamani to death with a crowbar before my eyes. I assumed it was Priesh Kamani. It was clearly an Indian man, but the flying hands and shaky camera and blood and distorted features made it difficult to tell.

  Clearly, this was footage that didn’t make it to trial.

  It was dark wherever they were. Outside a
t night, perhaps. The ground beneath the stricken Kamani was concrete, so it was doubtful that they were indoors. I wanted to look away, but I didn’t. A man was dying before my eyes. It was captivating, and I couldn’t help it. It would have made me feel sick normally, but I didn’t think I could feel any more nauseated than I already did.

  “And this one,” White said, flicking the image sideways to reveal the frozen first frame of another video, this one better lit. He pressed play. The video showed a cheap hotel room where a struggling, bound, and gagged middle-aged woman thrashed against the bonds tying her to the bed… and against the light weight of the thin, much younger woman that sat astride her waist. The younger woman was weeping and held a kitchen knife in her trembling hand. I didn’t recognize either of them.

  “Don’t make me do this,” she sobbed, turning and looking to someone off-camera. “Please. Don’t make me do this.” The response that came was quiet and muffled and obviously not the voice of whoever was holding the camera, as it seemed to come from a man standing some distance from the microphone. I could still hear him, though. I wish I hadn’t. The words were so horribly prophetic.

  “You don’t have to,” the speaker said, calmly. “We’re not making you do anything. This is your choice.”

  In response, the young woman’s head fell backwards as she screamed, and her hand gripped the knife’s handle tightly. She then moved lightning-fast. Suddenly, the knife shot up and over and down, again and again and again in a frenzied blur as it plunged into the older woman’s throat and chest. Her victim’s struggles ceased after the second strike, but the younger woman kept going, screaming all the while as blood flecked her arms and chest.

  The screen went black once more.

  “Recognise any of those people?” White asked, laying the tablet down.

  “The first one,” I mumbled.

  “Sorry?” White asked, his forehead creasing as he sat forward slightly.

  “The first one,” I repeated, more loudly.

  “Oh, not the second as well?” White said, sounding genuinely surprised. “That was Jenny Tuttle. Recognise the name?” I did, vaguely, once I’d heard it. That name had been in the news, but I recalled it being mentioned in a rape case. Obviously, that was wrong.

  “Yes. Vaguely. That’s older than the Peter Carsdale case, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. Two years before. We don’t film them anymore like this. Logistically, it makes things more difficult. We have to have somebody with a decent camera there, and we prefer, uh, Klaus to keep his hands free. You will have a camera feed on you at all times, but it doesn’t give us as good a picture as this, so we don’t make such a big deal of actually recording and storing it. We don’t need to anymore, really. We have enough footage to make our point to the new guys.”

  I’m going to have a camera feed on me at all times. ”How do you mean”, was going to be the next question past my lips, but the usual mental hierarchy of importance came into play as that thought was kicked aside by:

  “What point? What point are you trying to make?”

  “That you don’t have to worry about us fucking you, Chris. You don’t remember the Tuttle case very well, but you can look it up. Just like the Carsdale case, she ended up with a watertight alibi that saved her behind, one that came out of nowhere. We could have let her hang. Peter too, but we didn’t. We were as good as our word, and these are the cases that actually made it to court. That doesn’t happen, normally. We’ve done this lots of times Chris, and on the rare instances where our Participant got into legal trouble—”

  “Your what?”

  “Our Participant, that’s what you are now. On the instances where our Participant was caught, we got them off, as promised. The boss is very, very big on rules, Chris, as you’ve probably realized, but that means we have to abide by them too. Whatever we say we’ll do, we’ll do, so keep up your end of the bargain, and we’ll keep up ours.”

  Silence.

  “But what’s the point of this?” I asked again, lost for anything else to say. White shrugged, again, and I wanted to kill him, just like that.

  “I told you. It’s not my job to know, Chris. I just have to pass the information on to you. Oh, and this as well. Klaus?” White said, chuckling as he used the name, and turned in his seat, holding out a hand to his associate. Klaus reached a gloved hand inside his jacket and pulled something black out of his inside pocket. It looked like an activity monitor or something, attached to a small strap. He handed it to the Man in White.

  “You have to attach this to your ankle,” White said, giving it to me. “As you can probably guess, it’s a tag. Once it’s on, you won’t be able to take it off unless you cut it off, or we do so using the correct device. Obviously, if the former happens, the girls die, yadda yadda yadda. This will let us know where you are, and when, but to be honest, this is really just added insurance, and enables us to track you around the building at work. Or at least we will if this lasts until Monday and you do actually have to go into work. You know, because it might raise a few eyebrows if Klausy here rocks up and sits next to you in your cubicle.”

  “Wait,” I said, another sinking feeling beginning in my stomach as I held the black lump of plastic in my hand. I could only assume that, by this point, my stomach had sunk to somewhere around my ankles. “What do you mean? Why would Klaus even be there even if, even if, you know, people at work wouldn’t, uh, look what the fuck are you talking about?” I thought I knew what he meant and the idea of it was making me babble.

  “Well… obviously…” said White, looking so genuinely confused that he even briefly glanced at Klaus for confirmation that it was obvious, “you’ll have a chaperone. How else would we make totally sure you weren’t up to anything? We have a wire for you to wear at all times, and you will also be wearing a camera pin for the feed—Klaus will have spare batteries for you to replace at set intervals so they don’t run out, no excuses—but wherever you are, he’ll be close by. How did you think we are going to be totally sure? Oh no. When I leave today, Klaus stays here with you. He goes where you go, and when you’re at work, he’ll be outside in the car park, monitoring your feeds. If those feeds go dead, blah blah blah, you know. They won’t. These are extremely expensive and state of the art. There’s only one way they’re going dead, and that’s if someone messes with them.” He pointed at me and smiled in a way that was almost apologetic.

  “No. No,” I babbled, not knowing why I was freaking out so much at this—I’d just agreed to commit murder, after all—but I was. I didn’t agree to all this extra stuff. “He can’t stay here. My parents…” This man, this thing, being with me all the time? The thought was awful and worse was the one that came with it:

  I’d better get this done quickly so that I can be rid of him.

  I pushed it away, hard, but the realization that they were already changing me was sickening.

  “Your parents are away for two weeks,” White said. “And this will all be over one way or another, long before they get back.” I pictured Mum and Dad walking in the door, happy and refreshed, unaware that their son had become a killer in their absence. Then the Man in White stood, and adrenalin shot through me once again as I realized that he was about to leave.

  “That’s it?” I shrieked, and lowered my voice when I spoke again. I’d noticed that Klaus had straightened up too. “You’re leaving?”

  “Nothing more to add really, Chris,” the Man in White said, and in a bizarre moment, he extended his hand for me to shake. I didn’t take it. I simply stood there trembling, with my mouth hanging open. “Klaus will tell me when you’ve done the job, and I’ll stop the clock and run the usual checks. Then we’ll be finished. If there’s anything you think of in the meantime, just ask Klaus, and he’ll ask me. But you’d probably be best just to get a move on.” He paused, and his voice softened when he spoke again. “Look, you really could just quit right now, you know. You don’t have to do anything. I know you think that’s not a real option,
but it is. Just say the word.”

  “Don’t… don’t…”

  “Just… really. If you’re going to actually do this… don’t get any ideas,” White said, ignoring me, but dropping his hand back to his side. “Not only for your own safety,” he nodded in Klaus’ direction, “but for, you know, theirs. Any hint of messing around, they’re done. We’ll do it in a heartbeat. We’re monitoring your phone, laptop, and emails, too—if you think I’m bullshitting you, I can tell you that you were last on YouPorn on your laptop and Cracked.com on your phone, and the last email you sent was to GoDaddy customer support—plus, if any cops come for Klaus, not only will he deal with them very easily and you’ll have that on your conscience, but the girls too. Hey, I don’t wanna repeat myself, but I feel like I’ve gotta be clear. But look. It’s up to you.”

  “But it isn’t fair! If I have to go to work, then that’s taking up time, isn’t it?” I hissed, clutching at straws. “That’s almost guaranteeing that on work days, the girls are getting… it’s not fair! I can’t kill someone while I’m working, can I?”

  I will never forget his next words.

  “Are you sure, Chris?” he said, his face blank and awful behind the dark mirrors of his sunglasses. I saw my own face reflecting back at me, slackening before my eyes. “There aren’t CCTV cameras everywhere at your building. We checked. Isn’t there someone at your workplace that is just an utter cunt?”

  I just stood there, paralysed by both the reality of my situation and, God help me, the possibilities.

  “I probably won’t see you again, Chris,” the Man in White said, “and for what it’s worth, I am sorry. If it wasn’t me telling you all this, it’d be someone else. Good luck. Remember: stay off camera and out of sight of witnesses, and it’s almost certain that you won’t even hear from the police. We’ll take care of you either way.”

  He gave Klaus a thumbs up. Klaus nodded. Then the Man in White pointed at the emptied gun on the counter.

  “I’m going to take that. It can’t help you anyway, and y’know, we were just making a point.” He picked the weapon up and stashed it inside his jacket, and then he walked out of the kitchen and into the hallway, heading for the front door. I stood frozen to the spot, wanting to scream something to make him wait, but the clock was already ticking. Stopping him would just be taking up valuable time.