Pirate Cinema (23 page)

Cover: The enemy had given this one to us. Ever since the cinemas had introduced mandatory metal-detectors and coat-checks for phones and computers, every film opening looks more like an airport security queue, with a long snake of bored, angry people shuffling slowly toward a couple of shaved-head thugs who'll grope them, run them through a metal detector, and take their phone and laptop and that off them, just in case they're one of the mythological screen-cappers.

This is London. Where you have a queue of people with money, you have a small ecosystem of tramps, hawkers, and human spam delivery systems passing out brochures, cards, and loot-bags advertising cheap curry, dodgy minicabs, Chinese Tun-La massage (whatever that is), American pizza, Minneapolis Fried Chicken, strip clubs, and discount fashion outlets.

This would be our cover. Chester had found us an enormous bag filled with lurid purple T-shirts in a skip, advertising a defunct Internet cafe (most of them had gone bust since the Theft of Intellectual Property Act raids began). They were gigantic, designed to hang to your knees, turning the wearer into a walking billboard. To these, we added baseball caps from a stall in Petticoat Lane Market that was happy to part with them as they were worn and a bit scuffed.

Countermeasures: These caps were our countermeasures. Between the baggy shirts and the hats, it would be hard for the CCTVs to pick us up or track us (Chester had read a thriller novel that said that a handful of gravel in one shoe each, would add enough randomness to make our gaits unrecognizable to the automated systems working the cameras).

But just to be sure, Aziz hooked us up with strings of miniature infrared LEDs, little pinhead things that we painstakingly stitched around the brims with electrical thread that ran into a fingernail-sized power-pack that took a watch battery. These would strobe ultra-bright infrared light that was invisible to the human eye, but was blinding to the CCTVs.

Or so Aziz said. He told us that the cameras were all sensitive into the infrared range so that they could take pictures in poor light, and that they automatically dialed up the sensitivity to max when the sun went down. As they strained to capture the glimmers of IR emitted by our faces, we would overwhelm them with the bright, invisible light. (Not that we told Aziz exactly what we were planning; as Jem said, the less he knew, the less he could be punished for not reporting. Aziz didn't seem to mind.)

Aziz had a pile of CCTVs (Aziz had a pile of everything), and he had me put on the hat and walk around in front of it for a time, walking close and far, even looking straight at it, with the hat on. Then he showed us the video: there I was, but where my head was supposed to be, there was just a white indistinct blob, like my noggin had been replaced by a poltergeist that manifested itself as ball lightning.

Escape routes: Piss easy. Leicester Square is a rat-run of alleyways, roads, and pass-throughs that run through the lobbies of clubs, restaurants, and cinemas, leading down to the heaving crowds of Trafalgar Square, up into the mazed alleys of Chinatown, toward the throngs of Piccadilly to the west and the street performers and hawkers of Covent Garden to the east. In other words, getting from Leicester Square to the anonymous depths of central London was only a matter of going a few steps, finding a doorway to shuck your purple shirt and baseball hat in, and then you'd be whistling on your way to safety.

It was a rush to get it all done in time for the big night. We worked around the clock silkscreening, wiring, writing disk-images, planning routes. I saw Aziz's thumbdrives exactly ten days before opening night. I had the idea the next morning, leaving us with nine days.

By day eight, it was clear we weren't going to make it. I reckoned that to give out one thousand thumb-drives, we'd need at least fifteen people on the distribution side, which meant wiring up fifteen hats, and the hats were turning out to be a right beast. Aziz had shown me how to do it ten times, but soldering the flexible wire was harder than it looked, and I ruined two hats completely before I did even one.

26 promised me that she would be able to dig up ten more helpers through Cynical April. They had to be absolutely trustworthy, with nerves of steel. She knew which helpers had been the best when we were getting the word out on TIP, and which of those people had been the nerviest when it came to planning and executing secret parties. We agreed that we'd bring them in at the last minute, to minimize the chance that one would blab our plan.

With forty-eight hours to go, I was a wreck. We only had three hats done, half the drives hadn't been flashed, and I hadn't slept for more than a few hours a day. I'd drunk so much coffee that my eyes wouldn't focus and my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't hold the soldering iron. Rabid Dog was trying to take over from me, but he didn't have a clue how to do it.

"No, shit, not like that!" I said, as he burned the hat with the hot iron, filling the table with the stink of burnt plastic. "Shit man, you've
ruined
it. You retard --"

26 crossed the room in three quick steps and grabbed my flailing arms and pinned them to my sides. "Enough. That is quite enough of that. You. Are. Going. To.
Bed
." I started to object and she shook her head furiously, her mohican's ponytail flopping from side to side. "I don't want to hear it. You're going to make a complete balls-up of this adventure if you don't get some sleep -- get us all arrested, if I don't kill you first. Now, apologize to Dog."

She was right. I hung my head. "Sorry, Dog. I was out of order."

He muttered something. I felt miserable. Dog was better about talking these days, sure, but when you were cruel to him, he went right back into his own head and pulled the door shut behind him. Jem glared at me. It seemed they were all furious with me. I recognized the paranoid, angry feeling for what it was: massive sleep deprivation and caffeine overdose. Time to go to bed.

I woke fourteen hours later, feeling like weights had been tied to my arms and legs by a merry prankster who finished the job by gluing my eyes shut with wheatpaste and then taking a foul, runny shit in my mouth. Yes, I know that this is a gratuitously disgusting way of describing it. Take comfort, dear reader, in the knowledge that it is not one half so disgusting as the taste in my mouth.

I staggered to the second floor toilet and turned the tap on all the way. As always, there was a groaning and a sputtering and a coughing, and then it began to trickle cold water. The pressure up here was almost nil, and there were fittings for an old pump that was long gone that might have corrected it. As it was, it took forty-five minutes for the toilet cistern to fill up between flushes. Every now and then we'd joke about complaining to the landlord.

I slurped up as much of the water as I could get out of the tap, then changed into a brown corduroy bath-robe that 26 had surprised me with when the weather turned. I added a pair of rubber shower-sandals and made my way back down into the pub room, moving like I was underwater as the residual sleep and fatigue tugged at my flesh.

It was a hive of brightly lit, bustling activity, filled with happy chatter and speedy, efficient motion. Memory sticks were loaded, silkscreened and tied up with ribbon. Hats were stitched, soldered, powered and tested. It looked like a proper assembly line. Only one problem: I didn't recognize any of the people doing the work.

They all stopped and looked at me when I walked into the room. Someone's phone was playing jangly dance music, DJ mixes that I'd heard on Cynical April. There were four of them, two boys and two girls, about my age or a bit older, with strange, pudding-bowl haircuts and multicolored dye-jobs that matched their multicolored, chipped nail-varnish (even the blokes). They had ragged tennis shoes that were held together with tape and safety pins, black cargo trousers with loads of little pockets, and cut-down business shirts with all the collars, sleeves, and pockets torn away.

"You'd be Cecil, then," said one of the girls. She had a funny accent. Not English or Scottish. Foreign.

"Y-e-s," I said slowly.

"Right," she said, and beamed at me, showing me the little skulls laser-etched into the enamel of her front teeth. "I'm Kooka, and these are Gertie, Tomas, and Hans the Viking." Hans didn't look anything like a viking. He looked like a stiff breeze might knock him down. What was it about wimpy blokes and big, macho nicknames? But he was smiling in a friendly way, as were the others, and waving, and I waved back, still not sure what to make of these strangers.

"Are you friends of --"

"We're friends of the Jammie Dodgers!" Tomas declared. He pronounced it "ze Chammie Dodtchers!"

"We're your reinforcements," Kooka said. "We've come from Berlin to help!"

"Berlin?"

"We'd have been here sooner, but the hitchhiking was awful," she said. "Not least coming up from shitting Dover after we got off the ferry. It's like English drivers have never seen someone hitching a ride before!"

I shook my head and sat down. "I see. Erm. Who the hell are you?"

"We're from Cynical April!" Kooka said. "It's not so complicated. We've been on the boards forever, from way back. We're the German wing." Hans cleared his throat. "German and Swedish," Kooka said. "We've been fighting off the same bastards at home for years and it seemed like a holiday was in order."

I felt my mouth open and shut of its own accord. Part of me was made up that we had this help, and so exotic and energetic, with their hitchhiking and that. Part of me was furious that 26 had brought in outsiders without asking me. But the enraged part couldn't work up much fury -- I seemed to have burned out all my capacity to be furious, spending it on the week-long binge of coffee and work.

26 appeared from the kitchen, teetering under a tray carrying our teapot, a stack of our chipped, mismatched cups, the sugar bowl, the cream jug, and a small mountain of posh little health-food seed-cakes that had turned up in the skip of a fancy delicatessen in Mayfair.

"The creature lives!" she said, handing me the tray and giving me a hard kiss on the neck. I handed the tray off to two of the Germans -- or Swedes, or whatever -- and gave her a cuddle.

"This is a surprise," I said.

"Surprise!" she said, and tickled my ribs. I danced back, squirming. She was grinning with pride. What was left of my anger evaporated. "I didn't want to say anything because I half believed they wouldn't make it. I mean, hitchhiking!"

"You must try it!" Kooka said. "It's the only way to travel. All the best people do it."

"But now they're here, we're in great shape! Kooka's done all sorts of stunts and raids, isn't that right?"

Kooka curtsied and the other nodded. "We're superheroes. Legends in our own minds. The scourge of Berlin!" She gestured at the works all around her. "And we're nearly done with all this rubbish."

It was true. What we'd struggled with for a week, they'd made short work of in a few hours. Of course, we'd spent a week getting all the kinks out of the production, making expensive mistakes and learning from them. The Germans had the benefit of all those lessons and, what's more, weren't crippled by sleep deprivation, squabbling, and caffeine shakes. So they had kicked quantities of ass and torn through the remaining work in no time.

"Ya," Hans said. "Then, the party begins!"

Which, indeed, it did. The next several hours were a blur. We started off heading down to Leicester Square, ostensibly to familiarize the Germans with the escape routes (the local volunteers wouldn't need any orientation). It was sparkling, of course, even though it was only a Wednesday, alive with the chatter of thousands of people going into and out of the cinemas. I loved Leicester Square at night: the lights, the glamour, the grifters and tramps, the tourists and hen nights, the spliff and the brochureware spammers. It was like some other world where entertainment and fantasy ruled.

No one else seemed to have the same reaction. The Germans laughed at the slow, waddling coppers, climbed up on the wrought iron fence around the garden to get a view and then backtucked off it, landing on springheels like gymnasts. Rabid Dog cheered them in an uncharacteristic display of public enthusiasm. Jem joined in, and then the rest of us. Jem climbed up on the fence and gave it a try, though the rest of us told him he was insane and would split his skull. He surprised us all by doing a very credible backflip, though he landed heavily and staggered into a posh couple who shoved him off. He brushed himself off coolly and accepted our applause, then whistled the little two-note warning the drugs kids used that meant
coppers
and we saw the PCSOs heading our way and scarpered, up through Chinatown, up to Soho, threading through the crowds and legging it down alleys so skinny we had to turn sideways to pass.

26 said, "There's a big Confusing Peach get together near here tonight." She pulled out her phone and made her most adorably cute face at it, poking at the screen until it gave up the address.