Pirate Cinema (47 page)

"We could get four of these and spread ourselves out in hiding spots all along the south bank, set the projector up on the north side of the river, and hit Parliament over and over again, switching over every time we heard the sirens start," I said.

"There's only two pots on the Range Rover," Aziz said. "But there's a wrecker up the road we should be able to scout for more."

"Lining up the shots at that distance will be tricky," Chester said.

In answer, Rabid Dog pulled a laser-pointer out of his shirt pocket. "What about a laser-sight?" he said. He turned it on and aimed it at the pot we'd set up half-way down the road from Aziz's place. It neatly cornered and showed up on the building-side where we'd been testing out the video.

The sun was rising now, and there was more traffic, and the projector light was harder to see. But it didn't matter. This would
work
.

"What about the CCTVs?" Dodger said.

"Hats," Jem said. "Pull 'em down low. Wear anonymous stuff -- jeans and tees, that sort of thing."

Dodger made a face. "Forget it," he said. "They'll put your piccie on the evening news, call you a terrorist, someone'll shop you by breakfast. Count me out," he said.

"When did you get to be such a scared little kitten? I thought you were meant to be all hard and fearless, Dodge." Jem and Dodger rarely fought anymore, but when they did, it was like watching brothers go at it, that same total abandon, that same fast and scary escalation.

Aziz raised his hands. "Calmness," he said. "Calmness, please. Jem, Dodger, there's something we'd like to show you." He nodded at one of his acolytes, Brenda, who went to a shelf and took down one of the familiar mosquito-zapping hats.

Dodger made a rude noise. "That thing barely has a brim! It wouldn't do you any good."

Aziz rolled his eyes. "It's not a disguise. Brenda?"

Brenda took off the flat-cap she wore. Her kinky black hair sprung out into a halo. She stuffed it back under the mosquito hat and smiled.

"Observe," Aziz said, and held up his phone so that the camera lens shone at her.

Zap
.

An instantaneous line of green light snapped out of the hat and drilled directly into the lens. There was a light crackling sound from Aziz's phone, and then the screen went dark. He chucked it onto a workbench that I now noticed was covered in lightly charred, semi-obsolete phones.

"I got the idea from those posh anti-paparazzi handbags," he said. "The ones that detect a camera-focus and detonate a flash before it can shoot? Scourge of the tabloid photog, they are. I thought that I could probably use the optics in one of these things to find CCTVs, anything with a camera. You wear one of these going down the street and anything close enough to get a decent look at you will be fried before you come into range. What's more, you'll blend right in wearing these things -- everyone's got 'em. Don't suppose they'll last long, once the law figures out what we're about, but I figure we might as well use them for something fabulous while we can. I've got eight ready -- should be plenty for a projector crew and four runners to take on the reflectors. At this rate, we should be able to light up the House of Commons for a good two or three
hours
and still get away clean."

Dodger's mouth was slack, his eyes wide. Jem slapped him lightly across one cheek.

"Right," Jem said. "How's that suit you, Dodger my boy?"

When I'd first cut the "It's Not Fair," short, I'd automatically inserted my usual credit-reel, with my little Cecil B. DeVil pitchfork-and-horns logo and URLs. I excised this, then went over the file with a hexadecimal editor, looking for any serial numbers, user keys, or other metadata that might lead back to me. Just to be on the safe side, I ran the video through an online transcoder, upsampling the video and audio by a tiny amount, then downsampling it again. The resulting file was minutely fuzzier (which hardly mattered, given the projection method we were planning on using), but I felt better about the possibility that there might be some sort of sneaky serial numbers or other scary snitchware lurking in the file.

We built several quick-and-dirty pages to host it, embedding the video from five different sources, including ZeroKTube, but also using several YouTubes that punters would be able to access without having to install any software. But the really tricky thing was, we
also
embedded the TheyWorkForYou page that tracked the vote-record for each MP on the upcoming TIP-Ex vote. Because the vote hadn't happened yet, all this showed was N/A in each MP's voting column; but once they'd cast their vote, it would be there, searchable by post-code. A single link would place a phone call or send an e-mail to the MP's office, and a second link went to a page with the platforms of all the MPs' competitors in the upcoming election.

The message wasn't subtle: "We're watching you. We will let every voter in the country know about how you voted in this one. You may think it'll be hard to get re-elected if your party chucks you out for going against the whip, but it'll be just as hard to get your seat back if thousands of your constituents go door-to-door explaining to their neighbors how you sold them down the river."

Granted, it wasn't much different from the message that we'd been sending them all along, all the way back to the first TIP vote, but the numbers had been steadily growing, and with the media splash from our creative projector-graffiti, we were hoping they might take this a little more seriously.

26 and I caught a nap together that afternoon in the Zeroday while Chester and Hester and Jem and Dog scouted locations; they'd done fantastic work finding us underground sites for the original Pirate Cinemas, and reckoned that between Google satellite images of the rooftops and a little ground surveying, they'd be able to find plenty of rooftops on the South Bank with a view of the Commons. They were also going to scout out the North Bank for sites that might be able to get a clear shot of the east wall, which would be tricky, but a lot more dramatic. Aziz and his elves were working on gluing heavy fixings to the lamp-posts so that they could be attached to whatever was handy and then fast-cemented into place once they were correctly lined up. If we got it all right, each crew would show up in hi-viz vests with cones and that, get the reflector into place, make sure it was working, fix it with fiendish adhesive, and scarper. The projector crew would hit each reflector until the law showed up and took it down -- they could just drape someone's jacket over the reflector, of course, but it might take them a while to hit on that strategy, and once the pic went dark, we'd wait a random interval and then switch to another one. The law would never know if they'd got all the sites -- and we'd save the last, a direct shot, for just before dawn,
hours
after the first hit, when the first of the morning commuters were coming across the bridges.

It was a risky strategy, but Jem insisted that it was our best one, the one that would make the biggest splash. And since he was going to work the projector, we couldn't really talk him out of it. He assured us that as soon as the picture was lined up, he'd do a runner and leave it running unattended until the lackwits and jobsworths at the Met took it down. We'd wear gloves and wipe everything down with bleach-wipes, and the laser-hats would take care of any CCTVs.

All this whirled through my mind as I tried to sleep in the middle of the hot, sunny afternoon, a wheezing fan blowing over me and 26. I tried to concentrate on my breath and the smell of her skin behind her ears and in the crook of her chin, but my stupid brain kept returning to the night's plan, and all the ways it could go wrong, and just how risky it was, and how much riskier it would be if I didn't get some sleep -- I'd be so logy and stupid with sleep-deprivation, I'd be bound to make some ridiculous cock-up and get us all sent away. Which, of course, made me even more anxious and even
less
able to sleep, and so on.

But at a certain point, it just doesn't matter how tightly you're wound or how much your mind is racing, sleep comes and takes its toll from you, and so sleep I did, and dream terrible, anxious dreams in which I was looking all over for the Bradford motor-coach station, then looking for my knapsack and lappie in Hyde Park, then looking for Jem in all our haunts, then looking for the Zeroday, which seemed to have moved of its own volition, then looking for 26, then looking for the mirrored pots of the Land Rover lights -- while a clashing brass band played on in the background, so loud it drowned out all thought, making it harder and harder to think straight. I was practically weeping with frustration when I realized that the brass band was my alarm, a little salute to Bradford and its brassy history, and it was time to get out of bed and commit some crimes by cover of dark.

I shook 26 awake, pulled on my clothes, then shook her awake again, for she had crawled back into bed and put a pillow over her head. "Come on, love," I said, "time to go and save Britain."

"Sod Britain," she said from under the pillow.

"Time to go and put the screws to Parliament, then," I said.

"That's a little better," she said.

"Time to go and pull off the most amazing feat of pirate cinematry that the world has ever seen -- does that suit madam's taste?"

"
Much
better," she said. "Come on, then, enough slacking. Let's do it!"

Perhaps the simplest thing to do here is catalog all the ways that this plan went
wrong
. Because, of course, that's where all the excitement was -- but also because the plan mostly went
right
. The building site that the scouting party found was just
perfect
for the projector. Dodger was able to tap into the mains without even using any special kit, and the route they found up the scaffolding avoided all the vibration anti-climb sensors. Once up on top, they used one of the many winches to bring the projector up and got it settled in in a matter of minutes. Of the four other sites scouted for the reflector setups, two were iron-clad: one was a roped-off section of multi-story car park that was invisible from the street and from the parking area, but had a straight shot to Parliament and the building-site. The other was a pedestrian stairwell descending from the Embankment Rail bridge -- all it took was some safety yellow tape and a "NO ENTRY - CONSTRUCTION - WE REGRET THE INCONVENIENCE" sign at top and bottom to ensure that no company would be along.

The other two were... less ideal.

The first was up on the roof of the London Film Museum. The scouting party had discovered an emergency stairwell during a daylight hours visit, and they'd fiddled the lock with a lump of polymer clay wrapped in aluminum foil so that it remained opened, but still closed the circuit that told the system it was locked. The idea was to go up all the stairs to the rooftop, get the shot sorted, and head back out -- but the door opened out on the touristy strip in front of the London Eye and the London Aquarium. Hard to say what would be worse: trying to sneak out of the door with heaps of witnesses around in daylight, or sneaking out at night when it was utterly deserted. Okay, not hard to say: it would definitely be worse at night.

For a shot at the east side of Parliament, the best they could do was a temporary sewer-works site with its own temporary toilet; the green Porta-Loo box had removable panels below the roofline where someone standing inside the toilets might pull off a bank-shot with the projector's light, but it would be an insanely tight shot, and the person inside would have no idea whether or how many coppers were looking on as the gig unfolded. Plus the scouts were uncertain as to whether there were any handy poles, shelves, or brackets that might be used to anchor the reflector once it was in place, allowing the conspirators to get away while the show played on.

Of course, 26 volunteered us for this one. "Wouldn't want anyone else stuck in such an awful spot," she said. "Not for my idea."

"Excuse me, loads of us came up with the idea," I said. "All together."

"The reflectors were my idea," she said. "Case closed."

Aziz and the White Whale rolled up to the Zeroday around 7:00 P.M., just as the summer sun was starting to drift down toward the horizon, sending fierce light stabbing into the eyes of anyone foolish enough to look west. We piled into the back of the van and sorted through the piles of kit. We'd dressed in our dustiest, dirtiest builders' trousers from the Pirate Cinema heydays, proper builders' clothes caked in plaster dust and all sorts of muck and grunge. Aziz's gang had other plans, though: "Strip off," ordered Brenda with an evil grin.

Before we could ask what she was about, she'd torn open a huge black bin liner and spilled out a small mountain of awful Souvenir of London clothing: T-shirts that said "Bladdy Lahndin," and "I LOVE LONDON" and "Norf London," and pictures of Routemaster buses, Union Jacks, Lord Nelson on his column, and various jug-eared Royals. The shorts had "London" emblazoned across their bums, and sported enormous cargo-pockets for all your tourist dross.