Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (12 page)

The tennis court was in sight, barely, through the last screen of foliage. After those final trees there was a wide arc of exposed, open ground to be 66

traversed: beds of gravel between lines of paving stones, bark pathways intersecting rough grass and kempt lawn, and, rather strangely, two glass panels cut into the flowerbeds. She could see Joanna, patrolling back and forth inside the court between the exits, at first glance boxed in, but in terms of the game, formidably protected by wooden (and thus paint-proof) boards, four feet high on all sides beneath the tall wire mesh. The tree line meant the rear entrance to the court offered a shorter dash without cover, but being thus the more attractive option, she reckoned it also the more likely to be staked out. Figuring blundering recklessness had served her well so far, she took a deep breath and made an all-or-nothing charge for glory.

'Joanna!' she called, shouting, near-hysterical with giggling excitement as she ran. Joanna caught sight of her and came forward to the front entrance to offer cover fire as Rory came hurtling from the bushes thirty yards and forty degrees away.

'Don't look back,' Joanna shouted, but Emily couldn't help turning her head as Joanna crouched and fired past her. Rory, however, wasn't running towards her, but zigzagging in minor fluctuations of a near-perpendicular tangent of her path. She understood why about a quarter of a second later when he unleashed his cascade of shots and took out both of them. Joanna's tactical calls had given them a near decisive advantage, but her big mistake had been the one Parlabane of all people warned against. By going to the entrance, she'd put them both in the same line of fire, making one big target that was all too easy for Rory to daub in predatory purple.

'Fuck piss bollocks,' Joanna mourned, while behind her, Emily could hear Rory chuckle in self-satisfied delight as he jogged towards the base.

'Jack. This is Joanna. Are you on this channel?'

'Sure am.'

'We're at the base, Emily and I are both hit. Rory's gonna have both flags in about ten seconds. It's down to you, I'm afraid.'

'This is Liz,' said a second remote voice, defying UML's imposed silence. Trust me, Jack, however inconsequential you might believe this game to be, you still don't want to be sharing a planet with that bastard if he wins it. You do everything in your power. I'll give you money. Sexual favours. Whatever it takes.'

'Hey, pile on the pressure, why don't you,' Parlabane replied.

'Much obliged, ladies,' Rory said as he bent down to pick up the red flag.

'
All
of you,' he added pointedly for Liz's benefit, then headed into the court to seize the blue standard.

'Avert microphones please, dead people,' Campbell appealed. Emily removed her headset altogether as she got up and helped Joanna to her feet.

67

'Look,' Joanna said excitedly, flipping the boom away; from her mouth and pointing towards the trees. 'It's. . . shit, just Liz on her way back. Thought it was Jack.'

'What's the difference? One's out of the game and the other couldn't hit water if he fell out of a boat. Rory's as good as home.'

'I wouldn't be so sure,' Joanna said, a mock-stern but definitely coy admonishment in her expression.

'No, believe me, I was with him. He was tactically pretty smart, but he painted half that forest purple. Our best bet is if Rory impales himself on one of the flags.'

'He missed every shot at the target practice over there, didn't he?' Joanna asked rhetorically, pointing to the lamp-post near the carpark where they'd had their cursory weapons training. 'From twenty feet, yeah?'

'Every shot. Yes.'

'Right. Now follow the angle from where we were standing.'

Emily did.

'You've got to be kidding.'

'Nope.'

A good thirty yards past the lamp-post, well back in an otherwise nearempty carpark (and partially obscured from where they had been standing by a short hedge), there sat the liveried yellow minibus with a UML logo on the bonnet. A cruder design was picked out in purple down the flank.

'I don't get the significance of the letter, though. Is it W for wanker?'

'It's not supposed to be a letter. It's supposed to be an arse.'

It was an appropriate moment for Parlabane to make his reappearance, the bushel hiding his light having been discarded. He stepped furtively from the tree line close to where Emily had made her own final, doomed dash for home.

'Get the bastard,' Liz shouted to him, pointing at Rory as he emerged from the base bearing both flags. He was exiting by the rear, which would leave him with more distance to cover overall, but less of it across open ground. Once he made it to the trees, he was as good as gone. Parlabane had only a few seconds to make the difference. At this point, Emily knew she would have been blazing away with her weapon, getting as much paint into the air as the mechanism would allow and putting her faith in the law of averages over her own accuracy. Parlabane, though, dropped to one knee and held the gun steadily in both hands, eyes fixed on his running target. He rolled his head around his neck, blinked once and levelled his weapon, the barrel minutely following Rory's trajectory towards the safety of the woods, which were two seconds, one second away. Parlabane's finger left the trigger-guard and moved to the trigger itself.

Then his protective goggles turned purple and he fell over. 68

Rory disappeared into the woods a moment before Vale emerged from them, forty yards down the tree line.

'You know,' said Parlabane as Vale ambled towards him, 'deep down I just knew you were going to do that.'

'Then I'd hate to disappoint you.'

'What about Rory?' Emily asked. 'We'd better tell him he's won.'

'Nah, fuck it,' Liz replied. 'Let the bastard run. Wouldn't want to deprive him of his heroic moment bringing the flag to base - even if it is the best part of a mile away. Who's hungry?'

69

Buggery and Aperitifs

Rory's phone went off as he made his way down the grand staircase to the lobby. He felt the vibration against his chest and heard only the accompanying buzz, having disabled the ringtone before sliding the thing into his inside breast pocket. This action had become a
de rigueur
matter of etiquette in recent times, people making such an eye-rolling scene if your mobile happened to ring while they were in the process of eating - even if they weren't at your bloody table. Sometimes they'd act like you'd got your dick out and started having a chug in front of your fellow diners. It was a conversation, for God's sake: what did it matter whether it was to someone at your table or someone on the other end of the line? Well, clearly it mattered to some. The amount of tutting that could accompany a ringtone in a restaurant could be far louder than the electronic jingle itself, to say nothing of the germdisseminating phlegm spray all those clicking tongues generated. And how many bloody times did you hear the shrewish mantra of the mobile-phobic:

'Do they think they're
that
important that they have to be in touch at all times?

It's not as though it's a million-pound deal or a matter of life and death they're talking about.'

Rory
had
taken calls on this mobile that were entirely and crucially pertinent to million-pound business matters. Unfortunately, they had so far been in airports or hands-free at the wheel of his car; unfortunately because he'd dearly love to take one in a busy restaurant, just so that he could go up to one of these snivelling wankers and say: 'Actually, I
am
that important and I
was
talking about a million-pound deal.'

The done thing now though, especially in company, was to kill the sound, switch to vibrate and then excuse yourself so that you could take the call out of the room without anyone knowing that's what you were up to. Phone call as excretory function. Lovely. As Liz had advised him, this was doubly polite because not only did it prevent the noisy interruption and awkwardness of taking a call at the table, but it avoided the implication towards your fellow diners that there was someone more important or more interesting whom you'd rather talk to than sit listening to them bumping their gums. Rory took her point on this one, but didn't think how it looked reflected how it was. 71

Taking a call at dinner was no disrespect to the merits of your company. You could be having dinner with Keith Richards, Robert De Niro, Heidi Fleiss and the Dalai Lama, but if you didn't recognise the incoming number you'd still want to take that call, because it was new, because it was full of possibilities, because it was the next, unwritten page.

Rory, not having engaged any company yet, didn't have to make his excuses this time, though he knew he'd have to keep it brief. He intended to make a good impression on his fellow guests, and knew that those with mobile-phobic tendencies would regard it as outrageous attention-seeking to be having a cellular-conveyed conversation in a public place while there was a dedicated, functioning landline at his personal disposal in his bedroom upstairs. Besides, even he would concede that to walk into a social gathering of relatively new faces while yours was clamped to your phone made you look like a complete wanker.

He slid the phone into his palm and opened it, always a pleasure. Petty, juvenile and admittedly quite sad, but a pleasure nonetheless. It was a Mazienen M-Kard, a silver sliver about the size of three stacked credit cards when dormant, but with two aluminium wafers extending its length top and bottom when activated. The extension at the top housed the LCD panel and speaker, while the strip at the bottom bore the mic. Rory had been through dozens of mobile phones, upgrading with each generation of technology or even the latest non-essential but gadget-tastic feature, whether it be photo-messaging or voice-recognition-dialling-and-commands, but the M-Kard remained his favourite despite being almost nine months old. It was a comparatively ascetic piece of hardware, waterproof, necessarily light on extras, a slender and elegant exemplar of spatially economic design. Its sound quality was unremarkable, it didn't take pictures, it didn't play MP3s and its minuscule keypad was a bugger to write text messages on, but it looked beautiful, weighed nothing and made Rory feel like Captain Kirk every time he used it. The only drawback about the M-Kard was that it looked like the kind of natty receptacle a flash bastard such as himself might plausibly port his Charlie around in, which was something you unfortunately had to consider when observing this nascent twenty-first-century dining protocol. If you were constantly excusing yourself before 'just nipping out to the bathroom', and they clocked you wheeching this suspicious silver number from your pocket as you went, then they could have you down as a cokehead before the coffee and mints were served. Add to that the fact that he worked in advertising and people would regard it as a given.

This particularly pissed Rory off, because he didn't do cocaine but was nonetheless widely assumed to and scowlingly disapproved of accordingly. As far as he understood, it was a drug that made people feel hyperconfident, 72

unselfconscious, dynamic, visionary and empowered, while causing them to riff tirelessly and energetically upon thoughts and ideas that came pouring forth like a Vegas slot machine paying out the jackpot. Given that this was how Rory felt and behaved most of the time anyway, there was little incentive for him to be sniffing up Johnson's Baby Powder cut with a minute quantity of something that had previously spent time inside a condom shoved up a Colombian farmhand's arse. But try telling that to the people who thought he had the portrait of Dorian Glen in his attic just because he had a creative gift and didn't go around with his face tripping him the whole time. He recognised the number on the LCD. Finlay, his younger brother. Now there was someone who
did
do a lot of drugs. Mostly hash, recreationally (or rather for 'rest enhancement' as Finlay put it), but no stranger to posh or whizz when he needed an eighteen-or even twenty-four-hour session at the computer in order to get a piece of code into operable shape. Finlay, however, was shy, modest, geeky and reclusive, so on the rare occasions when his scrawny pale frame was dragged, squinting, into the daylight, those who met him would find it hard to imagine him even fronting up at the off-licence to ask for a can of Top Deck shandy. 'What an adorable little computer-geek,'

they'd be thinking. 'Let's adopt him. He'll be easy to look after, I've read about them: they live on phone-out pizzas and Pepsi Max, and as long as he's got access to Sky One for
Buffy
and
Star Trek
, that'll be all his appetites catered for.' Unlike that nasty cokehead brother of his, natch. There was one appetite that Rory and Finlay did share, with equal voracity, allowing them to enthuse openly with each other about something even less acceptable in polite company than smoking, cocaine or mobile phones at the dinner table. It was even-money that was precisely what he was calling about, which was why Rory was not remotely tempted to hit Divert.

'Finlay, how's it going, bro'?'

'Cool. Where are you?'

'Middle of nowhere. That thing I told you about.'

'Oh yeah. Is it good?'

'Look, I can't talk. About to do some meet and greet.'

'Shake and fake.'

'Exactly. So cut to. What is it?'

'Two words: Dawn Yuill.'

'Whoah, whoah, don't tease me. Seriously?'

'Seriously.'

'Real skin, or more cheesecake?'

'Nip-slip. Getting out of a limo at some awards do. More than a nip-slip, in fact. The way she's leaning forward, it's a lot more than just your usual blurry down-blouse.'

73

'Confirmed visible nipple?'

'In colour. And uploading now. You got net access there?'

'Nah. Have to wait until I get back. Something to look forward to. Where'd you get it?'

'My source at
HotGoss
. They'll have it on Thursday, unless she finds out and her lawyers try to get an injunction.'

'No chance. It was a public place, no case to make. Besides, she needs the exposure. Is it colour?'