All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye Read online

  Lex sighed upon making this deduction, her posture slumping as the tension lifted a little.

  ‘You finally chilling?’ Rebekah asked, taking note.

  ‘No. I’m practising holding my breath for when we inevitably splash down and go under.’

  ‘Come on, admit it, you’re starting to dig the ride. Beats the shit out of Space Mountain, don’t it?’

  ‘I think I’d be enjoying it more if we were on the way back.’

  ‘I hear ya,’ Rebekah replied. ‘But you need to chill about that too. Bett’s got faith in you, and he doesn’t strike me as leaving much to chance and just hoping you do okay.’

  ‘Sure, but that would be a bigger vote of confidence if I thought Bett’s judgement was flawless.’

  ‘You think his judgement is flawed because he has a higher estimation of you than you have of yourself?’

  ‘It’s not his estimation of me that I’ve got reservations about. And I don’t believe I’m the only one. Nobody’s said anything, but …’

  ‘But they’re thinking it, I know,’ Rebekah agreed, nodding. ‘He’s one hell of a smart guy, and I’d hate to have him as an enemy. Jeez, being on his side is hard enough. But yeah, I’ll hold my hand up, I’ve got my concerns about this one. He’s normally got all the bases covered, so I can’t help worrying that this time he’s putting all his eggs in one basket.’

  Lex managed a small laugh at this.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Oh, just an alternative perspective. Remember what I was telling you about the Airplane Rule?’

  ‘Yeah, two engines means twice as much can go wrong.’

  ‘Well, there’s a corresponding argument that the best plan is to put all your eggs in one basket – you just gotta make sure it’s a really good basket.’

  ‘So maybe Bett’s judgement isn’t so flawed after all.’

  ‘We’ll soon see.’

  She remembered Bett sitting opposite her in the cabin most of the flight home, poring over the laptop like it was a dossier, formulating, processing. If he’d been a computer, his drive access light would have been blinking faster than the beat of a hummingbird’s wings. Every so often he had a question, but it felt like he was accessing her just as functionally and impersonally as he was accessing Fleming’s copied C-Drive; his own pronouncements not so much thinking out loud as the verbal equivalent of printing a hard copy of what his brain generated.

  ‘Your take on Fleming,’ he’d demanded, for instance.

  ‘My … I …’

  ‘Come on, first impressions, one word, no hesitation.’

  ‘Okay, geek. Geek like me.’

  ‘Geek. Nerd.’

  ‘No, just geek. Geek isn’t necessarily pejorative, in certain contexts. Nerd is.’

  ‘Do geeks do a lot of drugs?’

  ‘I’m not saying they don’t, and I can’t speak for the genus, but Fleming’s drug of choice wasn’t proscribed. You saw Chassignan, sir. You don’t settle there for the nightlife. He’s a lab-rat. He lives for work.’

  ‘My thoughts too. So what else does a geek want? I’ll rephrase that: what would tempt you enough to go behind my back in search of it?’

  Lex’s mouth fell open, but no words spilled out.

  ‘Money?’ he suggested, closing the trap door again.

  ‘Two years in that little apartment? I didn’t get a picture of a guy after a fast buck. He’s young, driven, probably brilliant. Money would come in time.’

  ‘Yes. Willis didn’t tell us his salary, but, let’s face it, it’s the weapons business. You could say he’s already sold out, and yet his motivations did not appear to be material. If he was trading secrets, it was coercion, not bribery. In which case, why not go to the police?’

  Lex offered no answer, knowing none was being sought.

  ‘Why did they shut down his PC?’ Bett had later asked, yanking Lex back from window-staring introspection as to whether they could possibly get to the bottom of this without her own crucial role in it emerging.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Why bother? They didn’t go putting anything back on shelves or in drawers, so why power down when they were done looking there?’

  ‘To hide what they were looking for. Shutting down wipes certain temporary data from the OS, sorry, operating system. They went through the hierarchy manually, but, I’d guess, only after running automated searches. The keywords in those search strings would have been recoverable if they’d left the machine running.’

  ‘And are they still recoverable? You said you could restore deleted files.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Of course, if you really want to know what they were looking for, the quickest solution would be to download the files from the FTP server where I stashed them,’ she didn’t add. Instead, she told him: ‘They opened his email application and they checked through all recently generated text documents, too. They wanted to know who he’d been in touch with and what about.’

  ‘They won’t have found much, going by what I’ve seen. Willis can rest easy about that. It was, as you say, a comms device, a media … what was it?’

  ‘Toaster. Though, to be honest, until I can get a closer look at this hard drive, we really won’t know what they found. And even if I recover deleted files, there’ll be no way of knowing who deleted them: Fleming or his pursuers.’

  ‘Granted, but I think this has to be as much about the man as the motive. They were after more than secrets. He wouldn’t run just to keep Marledoq data out of their hands. Otherwise the first place he’d run to would be his employers.’

  ‘Unless he got into this mess because he’d been up to something he didn’t think his employers would be too happy about,’ Lex suggested, with acutely vivid personal insight.

  ‘Well worth bearing in mind, yes. But his value to his employers is key. Willis came down to handle everything himself, didn’t delegate. That should tell us something. He didn’t come out and say that Fleming was irreplaceable, but I’ll wager it’s close to the truth. The data probably isn’t worth much without the man. To come back to Willis’s pharmaceuticals analogy, if it was my drug firm whose remedy was going to be rendered obsolete, I wouldn’t resort to dirty tactics merely to halt its development. If I was going that far, I’d want to steal the development for myself outright.’

  ‘And to do that you’d need more than the secret formula.’

  ‘Call it extreme headhunting. And the inducements won’t be options on stock and the promise of a corner office. They’ll be the option to stay alive and the promise of removing the electrodes.’

  ‘Shit. I guess we’d better make damn sure we get to him first.’

  ‘Indeed. And make no mistake, Alexis, we’ll be competing with some very dangerous people to do so. People who already have a head start, so we’re going to need an edge of our own.’

  Lex wondered what could give them an edge against people Bett described as dangerous. She’d never heard him say that before, no matter what they were dealing with. These people are organised, he’d warn. Ruthless, paranoid, trigger-happy, efficient, vigilant, well-trained. Never dangerous. Given that he was easily the scariest person she had ever met, Lex seriously didn’t like the idea of taking on anyone he considered a worry. No shit, they’d want an edge.

  She was going to ask what he had in mind, but knew that Bett was never inviting a cue. If he knew, he’d announce. He returned to his scrutiny of the laptop and the hard-copy files Willis supplied, nodding occasionally as he flicked through them, sometimes staring out of the window at the blue sky and the clouds below. Then, a while later, he looked up from his reflections and spoke.

  ‘We’re going to need to bring in a specialist.’

  ‘In what?’ she couldn’t help but enquire. Given that they had computers, weapons, electronics, surveillance, air transport and God knows what else covered, she was genuinely puzzled as to what Bett thought they needed to ‘outsource’.

  ‘We need an operative with expert knowledge in the fi
eld,’ he told her. ‘Someone fearless, someone who can adapt and improvise, someone resourceful and cunning, stoical in the face of pain and danger, ruthlessly uncompromising in pursuit of the objective, and utterly merciless in eliminating anyone who stands in the way.’

  ‘Tall order. Who do you have in mind?’

  Ride, then

  Jane looked at the woman before her: familiar, but not entirely recognisable, no stranger, but not a particularly welcome sight either. She couldn’t honestly say who she was expecting, but was inevitably disappointed every time this hacket shambles showed up, and this hacket shambles showed up every time. Impostor. Where the hell did you come from? she wanted to ask her. What did you do with the girl who used to come around?

  When did you last see her? the impostor would rightly reply. Was it recently?

  No, she’d have to admit. It’s been a while. So long, I can’t remember.

  There were ads all over the Sunday supplements boasting about the technological properties accommodated within flat-screen plasma tellies just a couple of inches deep, but they had a long way to go before they caught up with the average bathroom mirror. Hers was only half a centimetre thick, yet provided clarity of picture that was sharp to the point of cruelty, and boasted Residual Image Sustainment, a capability far in advance of anything Sony considered state-of-the-art. This was the feature whereby no matter how many times you looked at yourself, you saw the same face, apparently unaltered and unchanging over years and even decades. Unfortunately, this feature very occasionally went on the blink and the glass presented you with an image of someone far older than you were expecting, providing a startling comparison with the face you once knew. It never lasted for long, but when it happened, it reset the system and only showed you the older face from then on. You got used to that one, and the RIS meant the older face didn’t appear to change much either, but this was merely a special effect. An optical illusion.

  Jane looked at the greying hair, hanging dry and limp where it wasn’t haphazardly kinked. She saw the deep-etched lines around her eyes and her mouth, once-taut skin draped gauntly over cheekbones like ill-worn upholstery. The mirror never showed this happening, merely proved that it had. She just couldn’t remember when. Further down she saw off-white underwear that had been through the machine a thousand times with Tom’s socks, the closest thing to intimacy between them in an age. Behind her on the bed lay trousers and a top that were among three outfits in permanent rotation, pulled from the wardrobe because they were the first to come to hand, eschewing conscious selection because that merely reminded her of the paucity of what she had to choose from.

  Her hair was seriously in need of colouring and a whole lot more TLC besides. Merely some committed effort of a morning would be a start. Those straighteners Michelle had bought her for Christmas – she’d used them a couple of times over the holidays and had been pleased with the results, but they’d lain in a drawer since Ne’erday. It wasn’t even like she could claim she was too busy or in a rush to get out of the door each day. There just never seemed any reason to make the effort, which was why her visits to the hairdresser had grown further and further apart. Who was going to notice? Not Tom, anyway. Once upon a time there’d been a punk named Blue Bell who dressed just for herself, but these days it seemed Jane Fleming was even less critical or at all noticing of her appearance than her husband.

  There hadn’t come a day when she consciously decided, sod it, I’m past caring about clothes and hairstyles and make-up, but the evidence suggested she’d reached that position nonetheless. She and Catherine used to have a good bitch about the Bothwell ladies of a certain age, with their panstick foundation, their gold shoes and their Couture d’Agneau designer suits, lunching in a tiny village whose main street nonetheless housed six hairdressers. Scornful of the aesthetic that equated all beauty with youth, Jane had always believed a woman should aspire to look good at her age, not for her age. The woman in the mirror, however, couldn’t even charitably be described as looking either. Maybe she should embrace the future by investing in a twinset and pearls. At least it would be a consciously constructed image, not simply a pot-luck payout from the bedroom’s MFI equivalent of a one-armed bandit.

  If there was a human-interest upbeat kicker at the end of the mirror’s daily bulletin, it was that what lay below the neck and under her clothes was in decent shape. This, she gloomily predicted, only meant she’d soon be one of those lean and bird-like old women rather than the round and dumpy model. Jane had always been skinny, her slimness accentuated by being comparatively tall, but her father always put her figure down to the fact that she ‘couldn’t sit at peace for five minutes’, constantly driven by a compulsive, nervous energy to forever find something useful to be getting on with. And if there was nothing useful to be getting on with, she’d get on with something anyway, such as hoovering the hall carpet for the third time that day.

  There was, however, a difference between being slim and being fit, as she’d learned the hard way when she joined a gym a couple of years back. She remembered thinking she was going to spew all over the lycra-wrapped-sinew-with-a-ponytail in front of her at that first aerobics session, and had been so sore in so many places afterwards that she’d been unable to eat more than a mouthful of dinner before retiring to bed for a painfully sleepless night. Catherine had bought her a month’s trial subscription as a birthday present and, for a few days after, Jane had been thinking of polite ways to say thanks but no thanks with regard to joining her in long-term membership. But, once the aches subsided and she was satisfied she’d suffered no permanent harm, she found herself surprisingly determined to return, and persevered because she believed this was precisely the kind of thing she should be able to handle if she was indeed young enough to change her life.

  She wasn’t so sure she’d have made it back for that second session if she’d joined after learning that us grannies ken the score. But then maybe next time she thought of Margaret at the checkout, she ought to remind herself there were women and men ten years younger alongside her at the boxercise or body-pump classes each week, many of them visibly feeling the pace more than she was.

  The slow-puncture to her pride in this particular achievement was that while it made her feel physically healthy, she nonetheless couldn’t shake the lingering notion that you should be fit for something, rather than as an end in itself. Being more lithely capable of dusting in awkward spots, or being able to vault around kitchen units in order to avoid stepping on a newly mopped floor seemed a slight return for hours of arduous training.

  Jane went into the kitchen and crouched down to have a look at what the fridge had to offer. There was some leftover pasta that would do; she only wanted a bite, as she was going to the gym and then on to a late lunch with Catherine at the Grape Vine. She stretched some cling film over the small bowl of penne, taking care to keep her fingers clear of the box’s serrated plastic strip, one of the most highly lethal cutting edges known to man. It could slice effortlessly through human flesh, and in fact could probably saw through just about any material if properly applied. The only thing it wasn’t much cop at cutting was cling film, but no design was ever perfect.

  She placed the bowl into the microwave and gave it a spin on full power. God knows how anyone ever got by before these things. She thought of her mother’s kitchen, everyone sitting down for a regimented meal because it only got served hot once, and, with a grimace, remembered oven-dried reheats (to say nothing of her older brothers eating the cold remnants of fish suppers washed down with Irn-Bru when they got up around noon after a late Saturday night). She wondered whether the Christian Right had ever pilloried the role of the microwave in disintegrating the nuclear family unit. Maybe they could boycott Comet in the name of Jesus, Mary and the Daily Mail.

  Ross had explained to her how they worked, something to do with the microwaves causing water molecules to vibrate, but Jane reckoned she had her own, more practical command of the principle. As far as she could make out,
the microwave oven super-heated crockery until it required asbestos gloves to touch it, and as a by-product of this process, any food on the said crockery would be warmed to just above room temperature.

  She poured herself a glass of grapefruit juice and was reaching for the oven gloves when her doorbell rang. As she walked down the hall to answer it, she looked out of the front window through the open living-room door to see Michelle’s Espace parked in front of the driveway. She also saw a black Vectra parked a few doors down on the other side of the street, the engine off but the driver still in his seat, looking at a folder or clipboard. She felt her hackles rise. She was sure she’d seen another one prowling around earlier, which was why she wanted to check outside before responding to the bell. Oily lizards asking you to change your gas billing to an electricity firm or vice versa. Very slimy, very persistent. ‘So you’re telling me you don’t want to save money? Seems a bit daft to me,’ one of them once said. She had come very close to heading back to the kitchen and fetching the basin full of dirty dishwater to chuck at him.

  She opened the front door and was almost knocked down by the unexpected impact of Rachel diving into a hug around her thighs; unexpected because she should have been in nursery. Michelle was behind her, on the path, with Thomas in her arms. Jane reached out to take him for a kiss and a cuddle, but he shrank back and whimpered, as he did when he was out of sorts or just woken up. Michelle looked harassed, not managing much of a smile by way of a greeting.

  ‘Gran!’ Rachel shouted delightedly. ‘Nursery’s closed. Is that good?’

  Jane laughed, but it didn’t look good for Michelle.

  ‘Come on in, all of you,’ Jane said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I’m in a bit of a guddle,’ Michelle explained redundantly. ‘They’ve had a burst pipe at the nursery. Just as well I was off today anyway – I was supposed to be taking Thomas to the dentist’s and then to get his feet measured for new shoes. Turns out I’ll be taking him to the doctor’s as well. He’s a wee bit hot, just not himself. Probably only a wee bug, but with us going away at the weekend, I want to make sure he’s not brewing anything nasty.’