Pirate Cinema (48 page)

Jem said, "Eugh, did you lot rob a tour-bus?"

Brenda shook her head, and her mate, Lenny, said, "Found 'em in the skip behind the Day's Inn near Stansted, the day after some huge publishing conference pulled out. They were still in the conference bags. Such utter rubbish the cleaners didn't even nick 'em. You won't find anything less memorable to wear in the whole of London. Put 'em on under what you're wearing now, and when you get a chance, change into 'em. Put the outer layer into one of these conference bags." He nudged a slithery pile of cheap carrier bags emblazoned with THE FUTURE OF BOOKS/EARL'S COURT/LONDON and the logos of a load of publishers. "You'll look like a bunch of out-of-towners finishing one last night's revelry before going back to Des Moines or Athens or whatever."

"Or like we mugged a bunch of that lot," Jem said. "I don't really think we'll pass as out-of-towners. We're too sophisticated, mate."

Brenda and Lenny fell about laughing at this, and for a minute Jem looked so affronted I thought,
My god, he was actually serious
, and then he couldn't keep a straight face, either. We were all so nervous that we laughed much harder at all this than it deserved, and when we did strip off, and Aziz hit a pot-hole that sent us into a half-naked squirming pile, there was so much hilarity and shouting that it was a miracle that the van wasn't reported to the law by someone who mistook us for kidnap victims being spirited out of London.

The safety helmets were like old friends, and I managed to find the one that had been my favorite when we were doing the heaviest Pirate Cinema activity. There was a modified mosquito-hat for each of us, with spare battery packs. It was impossible to tell that they'd been modded. "Firmware-only hack," Brenda explained. "Once you've got the bootloader cracked, all you need to do is flash the bastard with your own code and away you go."

Hester's ears grew points. "Where's the I/O?" she said, closely examining her hat for a USB port.

Brenda said, "You'll love this. It's optical. You
literally
flash it -- with pulsed light, right there on this sensor in the back."

"You're joking."

"It makes a twisted kind of sense. This thing has so many optical sensors already, why not use them for input? After all, how many times are you going to flash them? The ROMs. only hold a couple megs; you can reflash one in a minute or two under ideal conditions."

Hester said, "What about non-ideal conditions? Say, when someone's walking down the street and you're following at a discreet distance?"

Brenda rubbed her hands together. "I really like the way you think. I don't think it'd work, though. You want to be really close, and in shadow... It'd stand out like a sore thumb. Still, it'd be something, wouldn't it? Surreptitiously reprogram every one of these things in London to kill CCTVs?"

26 held up a finger. "Could you use the lasers in the hats to zap other hats, and rewrite their firmware? Like, a virus for mosquito-hats?"

Brenda got a thoughtful, faraway look. "Tell you what: if we're not all in jail next week, let's figure it out," she said.

Jem covered his face with his hands. "You people are insane," he said. "Not in a bad way, you understand, but insane nevertheless. I thought squatting and perfecting scientific begging were odd hobbies, but little did I know that I would be the
least weird
one in this little group."

Rob cleared his throat. "I suspect that I might have that honor," he said.

Dodger put a huge hand on his shoulder. "We don't hold it against you, mate."

That ride in the back of the windowless van, swaying and making jokes, stands out as one of the most memorable moments of my life. We were balanced on the knife-edge of risk and success, a box full of possibility hurtling toward destiny. In the back of the White Whale, time seemed to stretch into infinity, and I was overwhelmed with feelings of real love for each and every one of my mates. Whatever happened after this, we'd already done something amazing, the minute we got into that van.

And then the van was pulling over at the first stop: the building site where the projector was to be mounted. First we stopped around the corner so that Brenda could hop out with a doctored mosquito hat on and wander around the site, killing any CCTVs. Then we donned our hard-hats and hi-viz and set out hazard sawhorses and muscled the projector behind the hoardings. The scouts had already cut through the chain earlier in the day, working quickly and efficiently with the ease of long practice. In a moment, we were all back in the van except for Dodger and Jem, and barreling toward the bridge.

At each stop, we shed more passengers, until it was just 26 and me in the back. As we slowed to a stop, she grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a ferocious snog that practically ripped my lips off. It was precisely the thing I needed at that moment. 26 is a clever, clever woman.

We opened the doors and ducked into the Porta-Loo box and pulled the door shut behind us. No one had been around to zap the CCTVs for us, but Aziz had pulled over right beside the toilet and we'd blocked ourselves off with the van-doors, and we had our safety helmets pulled way down low. It would have to do.

Aziz's helpers had sorted out mobile phones from the enormous stash of semi-broken old handsets in the pile: one for each pair and one more for the projector crew, with cash-only prepaid SIMs. in each. Each one had been programmed with the others' numbers, listed in their address books as PROJECTOR, BRIDGE, CAR PARK, MUSEUM and TOILET. As soon as we got the door shut behind us and the ventilation grill unscrewed, we texted "1" to each of the phones. If we'd been nicked or run into some other problem, it would have been "0." The only other permissible code was "9," which meant "abort mission" -- chuck away your gear, change clothes,
get out
.

No one sent out a 9 that night, but there were plenty of 0s.

0: The bridge. Chester and Rabid Dog were just getting this sorted -- carrying a hazard barrier down to the stairwell's bottom -- when they ran into a crew of graffiti kids, real hard lads with shaved heads and rucksacks full of multicolored spraypaint and painstakingly made stencils. They assumed (correctly) that Rabid Dog and Chester were as harmless as bunny rabbits and (incorrectly) that they were real building contractors sent to do something with the bridge's oh-so-convenient stairwell. Dog sent out the 0 while Chester negotiated with the four lads, explaining to them that he wouldn't be running to the law or nothing, but he couldn't just piss off, no matter how forcefully they pressed this point. Meanwhile:

0: The roof. This was an insane plan to begin with. Just because the alarm hadn't gone off when the scouts diddled the lock with their polymer clay did
not
mean that the alarm would not go off when Lenny and Hester opened the door. Which it did. They quickly retreated to a safe distance, setting up their barrier and then sitting down beside it and trying to look cool -- or rather, look like builders who were standing around guarding a random patch of ground while they waited for someone to turn up with some vital part or instructions or whatnot -- there's a lot of this around London. After twenty minutes of this, no guard had shown up to investigate the alarm. They decided that -- incredibly -- the alarm was just a bell that rang in that staircase, far from earshot of anyone who could do anything about it, the building equivalent of one of those car-alarms that hoots for twenty minutes solid at 3:00 A.M. without anyone who actually gives a shit whether the car is stolen turning up to investigate. At this point, they steeled themselves and
went back in
and walked up the stairs, attained the roof, verified their visual on the projector site, and sent a 1.

0: The car park. Yes, even the freaking car park, the safest, easiest, most secure spot our scouts had found. The spot was so safe that we left Rob there alone, because it was the
perfect
site, where nothing bad could possible happen. So Rob only went and dropped the accursed reflector off the fourth story ledge where he was getting set up, so that it plummeted soundlessly through the warm, black summer night, until it hit the pavement with a crash that was anything but silent. So, yeah. 0.

Are you keeping track? Zeros all round from the bridge, the roof and the car-park, which left... the toilet.

That would be us.

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In an ideal world, 26 would have stood out in the road and looked for the green dot of the laser-scope they'd fitted to the top of the MARK III's jerry-rigged optics, calling the projector team, giving them guidance. But it was still dead busy outside our little portable toilet hideaway; standing outside with a mobile clamped to your head, following a green dot and giving directions into the mouthpiece would have drawn attention. We didn't want any attention.

We had all agreed to keep phone calls to a minimum. No one knew exactly how long the old phones' batteries would hold out, and it just seemed like the more we left a digital record that could be traced back to us -- by our voices, say, possibly captured by whatever super-spy technology the MI5 or Met were using in London -- the riskier it was. So we waited. 26 stood on the toilet, one foot braced on either side of the seat (I didn't want to think about what it would be like if she slipped and fell down the hole -- but the lid was so flimsy neither of us wanted to risk our weight to it). I stood on the floor, craning my neck up to see if the green dot appeared on 26's face, which was level with the gap. We both hoped it didn't skewer her eyeball, because, well, that would be bad.

And there it was, on her nose. "Your nose!" I said. She whipped the reflector up and I clambered up on the seat beside her (nearly knocking her into the filthy stew of muck and wee and mysterious blue liquid sloshing around below us) and peered intently at the wall of the salmony-yellow brickwork of the Commons, now gray with the dim light of early night. I had a little pair of binox, but have you ever tried to spot a reflected, jiggling green dot on a wall a hundred yards away through a pair of tiny opera glasses? It's
thumpingly
hard.

But I caught it. "Right there," I said. We hadn't found anything to anchor the reflector to, but we'd figured on being the very last team to go, and from the opposite bank to all the other shots, which we hoped would have made the cops slower to respond. Ten, fifteen minutes, and off we'd go. Now we were first, and we'd have to stay up and running for as long as we could. I didn't know what was going on with my zeroed-out mates, but I was surely hoping that they got it sorted quickly.

I texted another "1" to the projector crew and held my breath.

Then I let it go in a whoosh as the opening frames of my beautiful, wonderful,
perfect
video started rolling on the crenelated walls of the Commons. We'd superimposed a QR code on the top right corner of the frame, and it rotated every ten seconds; each 2D barcode translated into the URL of a different mirror of the video with the embedded TheyWorkForYou stats. The little battery-powered video player plugged into the projector was programmed to roll the video, wait a random interval between ten and two hundred seconds, then roll it again.

The first time it ran, I craned my neck around 26's trembling biceps to see if I could see the crowd reacting. I heard some excited voices, and maybe a change in the timbre of the traffic noises, but I couldn't say for sure. Then the video stopped and we very, very carefully changed places, trying not to let the reflector budge by the tiniest amount. It wasn't that heavy at first, but after holding it in place while I counted
one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus
to forty-three, I felt my own arms start to tremble. Now it was my turn to be nearly knocked into the soup by 26 as she stood up on tiptoe to get a look out the grill. This being the second run, we expected a lot more people to notice, and they did; I could hear it from where I stood.

"They're stopping traffic," 26 said. "A whole gang of tourists, looks like, standing in the middle of the road where they get the best view."

"Any of them looking this way?"

"A few, but I'm pretty sure the beam is over their heads, the way you've got it aimed; they won't see the light unless they get up higher. Oh, wait, someone's moving one of the curtains on the high window. Shit!"

And that's when the second run finished.

We swapped again, both of us trembling. We'd been breathing floral-scented shit-fumes for ten minutes solid now, and between the lightheadedness, the excitement, and the weird, plasticky acoustics in the Porta-Loo, we were nervous as cats. Add to that the prospect of imminent discovery and arrest, and it's a wonder neither of us had a stroke.

"How many times are we going to do this?" I said. I hadn't wanted to be the first one to say it, but it was clear that 26 was a lot tougher than me.

She made the tiniest of shrugs, keeping the reflector still. "Until someone else is in position, I suppose. Can't stop until then."

Not unless we get caught
. I didn't say it. Didn't have to. We were both thinking it.

The video started again. Now I didn't have to look out the window to know that it was drawing a crowd. I could hear them. Also, the unmistakable voice of authority, coppers telling people to move along, the crackle of police radios. Distant sirens. I was in the middle of switching with 26 when the phone buzzed. She dug it out of my pocket and fumbled it and we both snatched for it as it fell toward the festering crap-stroganoff below us. I managed to bat it so that it fell to the floor instead. 26 went for it as I tried to realign the reflector. It was from the bridge: 1. They were ready. I managed to get the reflector lined up again just as the video ended, and we changed quickly into our tourist outfits, stuffing the hi-viz and builder's clothes into the carrier bags and switching on our CCTV-killing laser-hats. We snuck out of the toilet hand in hand, our palms so sweaty that they practically dripped. As we slipped out the door, a beefy copper clapped a hand on each of our shoulders.

"Just a minute, please," he said, with that hard filth voice that made my heart stop beating. Four polite words, but they might as well have been, "And now you die."

I swallowed, then dredged up my thickest, most northern voice, widened my eyes and said, "Excuse us, officer! We're just here for the weekend and we told our Mam and Dad we'd meet them at the Parliament to take our coach and well, we were both caught a bit short and this was the only toilet we could find -- I know it was wrong, but it was a desperate situation."

He got squinty and thoughtful and then, by microscopic increments, the hand on my shoulder loosened up.

"Mind if I see your arms, lad?" he said.

I understood then, but pretended I didn't. He thought we'd been injecting drugs in the toilet. I gladly held my arms out, and so did 26. "Like this?" I said, putting even more northernness in my voice, so I sounded like the comedy Yorkshireman in a pantomime. But the copper didn't twig. After a short look at my arms he said, "McDonald's is always a better bet for a public convenience if you really need to go. It's dangerous to sneak into a construction site, you never know what's lying around. Not to mention you could get done for trespassing. Don't let me catch you at it again, all right?"

He was almost smiling under his mustache, and he adjusted his anti-stab vest, running a finger around his sweaty collar. It was a hot night, which was good camouflage for our guilty flushes.

"Yes, sir," I said. 26 nodded vigorously.

"Go on now, go find your parents, and stay out of trouble."

We walked away as casually as we could, and 26 whispered to me, "I thought he'd get us as soon as your hat went off."

"My hat?" I touched the brim. I hadn't really paid much attention to it.

"You didn't notice?"

"Notice what, 26?"

"It killed the CCTVs in his helmet, breast pocket, and collar. Zap, zap, zap, the minute he grabbed us. Blink and you'd have missed it."

"I must have blinked," I said as my legs turned to water under me. I don't know what was scarier: the prospect of being recorded by the policeman's cameras, or the thought of what would have happened if the cop had noticed that my hat was shooting lasers at him.

"Let's go," I said.

It was only when we got to the Bridge Street corner that we dared to turn around. The crowd that had gathered had already started to disperse, but we could see it was in the hundreds. More importantly, when I powered up my own mobile and looked at the server logs for our video landing pages, I could see that we'd got fifteen thousand views in the past ten minutes -- as people picked up the QR code and sent them around to their mates, and so on -- and this was accelerating.

Now the mission phone buzzed again. It was the rooftop, also transmitting 1. I wondered what was happening to Rob in the garage.

As it turned out, he was being arrested.

Having dropped the reflector and smashed it to flinders, Rob found himself without much to do. So he fell back to plan Z: he rang Aziz on his own phone and told him what had happened. Aziz had grabbed a few spare reflectors from the wrecker's yard, just on general principles. He'd been parked on a dark street behind Borough Market, and it took him fifteen minutes to wend his way back to the car park. He was just about to swing into the ramp when he saw the motorcycle cop turn in and begin to ascend toward Rob.

Aziz kept driving. He thought of calling Rob but the last thing he wanted was for Rob to be on the phone with him if he got nicked. Besides, Rob wasn't an acrobat, he wasn't going to outrun a motorcycle or leap from the garage to a distant rooftop, so Aziz drove a ways off and parked up and drummed his fingers and swore under his breath for a good long while.

Meanwhile, the motorcycle cop had found our Rob, standing gormlessly in the No Trespassing zone on the fifth floor of the car park, sweating guilty buckets, waiting hopelessly for Aziz to turn up. Fortunately for Rob, he wasn't carrying anything more suspicious than a change of clothes and a laser hat, but he was so utterly suspicious and out of place that he was nicked anyway. Aziz heard the sirens again as a police car hurtled up the garage ramps, and then left with the now-handcuffed Rob in the back-seat, trying to remember if anyone he knew had a good solicitor as they took him off to the cells.

Speaking of guilty sweats: the projector team was in a considerable state, and why not? Dodger had been persuaded to leave all his ganja back at the Zeroday, just in case they got caught. No sense in handing the law an easy drugs offense for the charge-sheet. But they really could have used it. Dodger, especially -- for all his gruff bluster, he confessed to Jem that he'd never been inside and he had terrors of being sent away. As touching as his confession was, Jem had other things to worry about, like swinging the huge projector around to line up with the marks they'd scratched on the girder for each of the sites.

It turned out that the random repeat-timer on the projector was a kind of torture for the poor lads. They'd line up the shot, hit "go," and then wait, jittery, for the video to start. Each run-through was spent watching the surroundings for pointing fingers, police helicopters, or converging squad cars -- whilst also using binox to watch the reflector site to see if the cops were getting near it. Both the rooftop and the bridge crews managed to fix their reflectors in place and get lost, but Jem and Dodger were rightly worried that if they were still projecting when the cops got there, they'd be using the light-beam to get a fix on the projector's location.

It took the cops
forever
to get to the rooftop. For one thing, they clearly didn't know about the sneaky staircase trick and spent a hell of a long time monkeying around inside the building before they got to the roof, sixteen hard men in full riot gear, running around like commandos, chasing phantoms. That would have been worth a laugh from the projector crew, except they were alternating peeks through the binox with the gut-busting work of getting the projector lined up with the bridge. Having done so, they realized they had at least an hour to wait before they started up -- it was only 10:30 P.M. and we'd planned on doing the final switch-on, from the projector itself, at 5:00 A.M., just before sunrise.

Given that there'd been nothing from the car-park (we'd all stuck to the plan and not called Rob, though we spent the whole night wondering if he was being interrogated and whether he'd crack and give us up), they had to assume they'd only have the bridge, and then nothing until five. So they waited, and to kill time, they checked out Westminster with the binox and over their mobiles. It was
heaving
with people, a carpet of law enforcement, reporters, and late-night Londoners out for a spectacle.

In the seventy-eight minutes they'd been able to run the video off the rooftop reflector, hits to our landing pages totaled over a million, and the mysterious film was the front page of the BBC's site and creeping up on Sky, the *Guardian,* the *Mail* and even *Metro,* the free news-sheet they gave away on the tube. Hilariously all of the news-sites had copied the video over to their server and then stuck it behind a DRM locker with a stern copyright warning. We'd have all had a laugh at that if we weren't shitting bricks at the thought of Rob and what he may or may not have been telling the law.