Christopher Brookmyre (25 page)

It was no mitigation to be able to state that he hadn't as yet actually succeeded in inventing the bloody thing. That only made him even more of a tube for being in this situation and failing to anticipate that it was exactly what was bound to happen.

Precautions had been taken at the behest of those at Deimos happily blessed with any eejit-level foresight. But it was Ross's belief that those precautions had themselves been the instrument by which he was placed in danger, like some Escheresque loop or self-fulfilling prophecy. Security at Marledoq was seriously beefed up, in accordance with the assessments and recommendations of this shadowy and faintly sinister consultant outfit Willis had brought in, beginning with their 'Tiger Team' phoney assault on the facility. But by the time the first trip-laser or optical-recognition scanner had been fitted, as far as Ross was concerned, it was already too late. The Tiger Team themselves had been the source of the leak, he was sure. Why else would that girl have a removable-memory device plugged into the back of his PC?

He'd expressed his concerns to Willis, but the old man was in typical ostrichmode. He trusted this firm implicitly. Mr Bett traded on the utmost integrity, honesty and discretion, wouldn't tolerate any duplicity, reputation worthless if there was ever any question of blah blah blah.

Aye, right. So honest and reputable that they'd fucked off with a shedload of kit, some of it still in Beta. The stock inconsistency had been blamed on cumulative staff pilfering, exacerbated by guys helping themselves to souvenirs out of spite after being canned for their abysmal performance on the one night they were put to the test. Ross reckoned otherwise. Those clowns had proven they barely knew which way to point a pistol; what the hell were they going to do with a Sonic Blackjack or a Resin-Cannon? And even if his crew hadn't stolen the gear and this Bett guy was as straight as Willis believed, it wasn't robots he had working for him. Any firm could have a traitor in their midst, something of which Ross had become acutely aware the second he saw that girl hurriedly tapping away at his machine.

The single greatest security precaution they had in place prior to then was the simple fact that nobody on the outside even knew what might be there to steal. And yet she had known not only what, but specifically where to find it, too.

Willis, being this buttoned-up old-school (tie) fossil, had seemed almost as disturbed by the very impoliteness of Ross's accusation of Bett as by the substance of it. It was as though he found the idea of dishonesty and underhandedness so distasteful that he recoiled from dealing with it, much like how Ross felt when faced with removing someone else's hair from a plug-hole. The extrapolated implication that it meant they had some unknown, duplicitous defector on their own books therefore appalled Willis so much that it sent him sailing many more miles down the river in Egypt, further entrenching him in the self-comforting belief that all of Bett's people were beyond reproach. Sometimes Ross wanted to ask him what he thought people got up to with the missiles his company sold, and where he reckoned the collateral damage of taking out twenty civilians in a bread queue ranked on the scale of impoliteness.

'Why,' Willis asked him, 'if there was a leak at Marledoq, would a doubleagent on Bett's team be required to sneak out the files? Why wouldn't the traitor simply copy them himself?' Ross conceded that he didn't have any firm answers, though distance and deniability were two that sounded pretty plausible.

However, on Ross's insistence, Willis did ask Bett about what the girl was doing with a portable memory interface jacked into his computer. The answer, Willis reported, was that it contained her own tools of the trade and allowed her to manipulate the system from whichever terminal was handy; in this case a machine in Lab Four because she was down there as part of the search for the one unaccounted staff member: him.

This sounded neatly plausible and had satisfied Willis, but Ross remained of the opinion that it was a hell of a coincidence her part in the search took her straight to that lab, where she logged on to that particular machine. Nonetheless, he had to leave it at that. Nothing could be proved, and Willis wasn't the type to aggressively pursue it. Under the circumstances, Ross thought it best not to also enquire of Willis whether he'd asked Bett about all the missing gear. The embarrassment level for that would have been potentially lifethreatening: Willis's cravat might have intervened and strangled him rather than allow him to commit such a social faux pas.

He kind of felt sorry for him, to be honest. Willis was a gentle old soul, naturally shy (with which Ross could certainly identify) and tending to give the impression he'd been born at least thirty years too late. It was hard to picture him offering much in the way of parry-and-thrust in the modern era of boardroom warfare, and with rumours constantly rife about Phobos selling Deimos or even just shutting it down, it was generally expected that he'd be bowing out gracefully in the not-too-distant future. It seemed incongruous to think of the guy as an arms dealer, but in another way, Willis represented the quintessence of the arms industry. Suits and friendly faces, meetings in suites, lunches on yachts, deals and contracts, just high-spec commodities and large cheques changing hands, like any other business. Presumably it was easy to think of it that way when you were never around to see what happened next. And besides, it wasn't the arms industry, or the weapons industry, it was the

'defence' industry. Nobody
ever
bought weapons to attack anyone. What a horrid thought that one's merchandise could ever be so irresponsibly abused. Ross had seen the missiles lined up in storage, partially assembled for safety. It was easy to see what Willis saw: sleek shapes, precision engineering, cutting-edge technology, gleaming steel. Fetish objects of a very male aesthetic, lined up, cold, clean and glinting like Porsches in a showroom. But he knew never to lose sight of their purpose, like he ought never to let Willis's being a crusty old duffer cause him to forget he earned his corn flogging bombs. And he knew never, ever to forget that just because he worked in developing non-lethal weapons, it didn't change that he was in the employ of the most deadly, amoral and untrustworthy business on earth.

It was something he'd tried to bear in mind since day one, though inevitably it did fade into the background for considerable periods. Every job became comfortably familiar, if not exactly routine, given enough time - even jobs located inside a weapons research facility hidden under a mountain. However, there had been plenty of incidents that restored his cautiously stark perspective, not least the Tiger Team incursion, after which he had prudently assumed it merely a matter of time before his video clips were playing before certain alarmed and influential eyes.

No expense had been spared to improve security at Marledoq (and to be fair, anyone who could get past the provisions installed upon Bett's recommendations
deserved
to make off with their prize), but that only protected the goods. If someone decided to go after the source, there was only one inch of cheap front door to negotiate. Ross might be an untreatable workaholic, but even he wasn't inclined to move a bed into the lab and live in the bloody place. Nor could he consider the facility as secure as everyone else did, because somebody there had already sold the jerseys once. On top of that, given the kind of kit that was lying around, it wouldn't be hard for that same traitor to arrange a tragic but unsuspicious little industrial accident. He'd therefore made it a personal priority to meticulously - but inconspicuously - watch his back. So when it finally happened, when they came for him, he had a start; it wasn't much, but it was enough, because he'd long been ready to run. As an early precaution, he'd long ago wiped all sensitive files from his home PC, and wiped them properly, not merely deleted them: the appropriate memory sectors had been overwritten nine times by strings of randomly generated numbers. Nobody tossing the flat would find anything more controversial than a few illegal movie downloads, but just as important was to be sure that neither, if they came uninvited, would they find him.

He had tenaciously persuaded Deimos to authorise the purchase of a videophone entry system at his apartment block, but as their property management people continued to show no sign whatsoever of actually installing the thing, he'd made a few unauthorised installations of his own. One of them was a hidden camera pointed at his front door, motion-activated because it was wireless and ran off a battery. The other, more vital, was a dual-sensor, motion-activated alarm system that sent a signal to a vibrating pager. The first sensor merely detected motion and 'woke up' the system's second stage, which detected whether whatever had triggered stage one now remained in front of the door; in effect a lack-of-motion detector. Thus, a neighbour walking past would cause the system to return to sleep, but someone pausing for more than a second sent a signal to the pager. Most times it was the postman, or Monsieur Torcy from the flat above coming home pished again and forgetting he still had another flight of stairs to climb. All of this was verifiable via the remote camera, though the hour on the clock was usually enough: the postman always came between seven and quarter past, while Monsieur Torcy usually tried his key in the wrong lock ten minutes after chucking-out time at Cafe Colette.

So when the pager woke him at four in the morning, he knew before checking the miniature monitor on his bedside table that it wasn't a Jehovah's Witness with a fucked wristwatch. He saw two men in heavy coats, one of them crouched at the lock. He didn't wait to check whether the guy was just shining it up with Brasso. Within seconds, Ross was gone, out his bedroom window in just his T-shirt and boxers, along the ledge like he'd practised, then up the external fire escape to the roof.

Once up there, he uncovered the bag he had stashed beneath a tarpaulin, and proceeded to pull on a pair of black jeans, a black jersey, a warm jacket
(noir)
and a pair of grey running shoes. Even in times of peril, there were still certain minimum standards to be observed, and he drew the line at black trainers; after all, if things went okay, people would get to see him again in daylight. Also inside the bag were his passport, five hundred euros and two lip-balm tubes containing something more than lip balm. When packing the bag he'd considered more heroic measures and the items appropriate to carrying them out. He could have at his disposal an arsenal of temporarily debilitating devices, as well as the drop on anyone who came calling. He'd have an unseen elevated perspective, or the option of an ambush when whoever it was left the building afterwards. Trouble was, chances were a million to one on that such late-night gentlemen callers would have their own arsenals of permanently debilitating devices, and the steel to use them in the chaos of the moment.

As Ross stood there, shaking from more than just the cold, he knew how much he'd understood himself when he made his provisions. He wasn't cut out for that, never had been. The only martial art he was trained in was putting one foot rapidly in front of the other. Shanks's pony, ninth dan. He'd learned it at school and kept up the training ever since that first time he'd been made to appreciate that getting your sums right did not always reflect well within your peer group.

Boffin. That was the least pejorative term he remembered, the only one that had any trace of compliment or acknowledgement to it. Funny word, he'd always thought. It did contain that trace of acknowledgement, but there was something disrespectful intended by it too. Brainy sub-genus of freak, but freak nonetheless. It was the word the tabloids patronisingly used to describe scientists whose findings they approved of or whose work in some way amused them. (Scientists they disagreed with, of course, were 'so-called experts'. Just because you were the world authority on something didn't mean you knew more about it than a gin-soaked and pish-stained leader-writer.) So at school, sometimes he was described as a boffin, but mainly the term for someone of even slightly elevated intellect was 'fuckin' poof', and his feet had rapidly developed a Pavlovian response to hearing it.

He made his way across the rooftops, travelling along the street and around the corner, climbing where the abutting buildings were higher, carefully lowering himself where the level dropped. When he reached the end of the terrace, he trotted on soft feet down the fire escape and into the narrow alley between the tenement building and Jarry's bakery. As he jogged quietly between the walls he recalled his dry runs of the route. It wasn't the more physically demanding or potentially dangerous parts that stuck in his memory, but the easier, more straightforward stretches such as this, because that was when his mind had been more free to doubt the wisdom - or more pertinently the necessity - of what he was doing.

You're kidding yourself, pal, he'd thought. It felt daft, scuttling about in the dark. What the hell was he going to say to anyone who caught him at it? He could always tell them he was trying to screw a few flats, at least it would sound more plausible and less embarrassing than the truth. Rehearsing a getaway in case big bad men come to get him. How fucking ridiculous did that sound? Who the hell did he think he was? He was just some wee geek from East Kilbride, getting carried away with himself. But it was always seductive to think of yourself as insignificant, that the true principals will play out their drama centre stage as you fade into the background, fifth business, a role without repercussions. What was he doing all this time at Marledoq if it wasn't an attempt to create something hugely significant, and how had he envisaged its impact if not as the heart of a drama that would have massive repercussions?

No point playing the innocent civilian. His dream of success was a whole industry's nightmare, and if he represented just a potential threat to it, then the threat to him was real and immediate. These fuckers didn't play the percentages. Even potential threats could wipe points off share prices, regardless of whether they ever came to anything, and there was no length to which they wouldn't go to make
damn sure
they never came to anything. That was why his car was parked not outside his building but close to the end of the alley, as close each night as he could find a space. He'd been doing it for nearly three weeks, fending off the self-consciousness he sometimes felt about it. It was crazy, egotistical paranoia, he'd chided himself. It starts with this shit and before you know it, you've got Geoffrey Rush and Russell Crowe fighting over who gets to play you in a biopic. But egotism was not something Ross could be accused of, nor had there ever been much chance of describing a slightly introverted workaholic 'fuckin' poof' as crazy. As for paranoid, well, that was moot now; the moment that pager went off, it proved beyond all reasonable doubt that they really were out to get him. He remotely unlocked the black TT and jumped in, slinging his bag on to the passenger seat before turning the ignition. As the engine growled into life, the thought belatedly occurred to him that they could have booby-trapped the vehicle. He stayed his right hand for a moment, resting it on the gearstick, his left foot on the clutch. In the movies, it was always turning the key that did it: that was what had sparked his fear; but in reality, the possibility remained. In reality, nobody wired a bomb to the ignition - it was too much bother. They stuck them underneath with a mercury switch: it was the motion that triggered the explosion. He got out and looked under the car, conscious of how crucial the seconds were as they ticked away without him travelling. He couldn't see anything, but the street lighting was dim, and to check properly he'd need a mirror to see right underneath.