Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (3 page)

He had acted - just as now he silently endured - out of patriotism. There, 13

he'd said it. Patriotism: a word devalued by a million halfwits waving plastic Union Flags, who bought a Piccadilly tourist-shop notion of what their country represented. A word scorned by a million liberal malcontents cutting off their noses to spite their collective face, considering it untrendy to stand up for a country that enshrined the very values that saddled their every high horse. Patriotism was about knowing what your country stood for, and not being prepared to let anyone desecrate that, be they enemies foreign or domestic. Oscar Wilde called it 'the virtue of the vicious', but then he was an Irish poof, so what could you expect? And maybe he was right, but that didn't mean viciousness was without virtue. If there's a cleaver-wielding rapist at the door of your teenage daughter's student flat, would you rather she owned a sweet-natured and placid sandy Labrador or a snarling, one-hundred-andeighty-pound black Rottweiler?

Humiliating as it was to recall, Shiach had never expected to see out even one year. Selby would be reined in by a superior, or perhaps Shiach's very existence within the system would throw up too many awkward anomalies for his secret incarceration to be sustained. He'd envisaged secret meetings, confidential memos, factional lobbying and wrangling over this vital and explosive issue. What he didn't appreciate was that he had ceased to be vital, explosive or even remotely important. The issue was closed when he was locked away, and the entire point of the exercise was that he would be out of sight, out of mind, gone and officially forgotten.

And then, just two weeks ago, it happened.

'Smith, OFP 857. You have a visitor.'

The impossibility of this functioned on two levels. The first was the official, being the conditions that stipulated he wasn't allowed so much as a piece of paper and an empty milk bottle with which to communicate to the outside world. This initially made him suspect that 'visitor' was a figure of speech, and that some form of HM Prison Service officialdom was about to make itself manifest, particularly given that it was around two o'clock in the morning. However, the second level of impossibility, militating even against this more mundane scenario, was that his current accommodations were aboard HMP

Attendant
, a converted Royal Navy medical frigate presently afloat upon the North Sea a couple of miles east of Grimsby. There had been a few latter-day hulks converted in recent years, mainly to alleviate overcrowding in onshore facilities, but
Attendant
was commissioned specifically to be the last word in escape-proof confinement. While the others remained anchored in bays, really just floating cell-blocks cheaper than fresh construction, Shiach's home for the past three years was fully seaworthy, only putting in twice a week for supplies and highly vetted, closely monitored, one-on, one-off visits to prisoners. He was led to a secure, windowless room containing only two chairs and a 14

table. It wasn't the visiting room, he knew, as according to fellow inmates, that had two-way mirrors concealing an observation gallery, microphones monitoring all conversation and triangulated video cameras picking up anything the restricted perspective behind the glass might miss.

A good place for someone to have an accident, he mused as he stepped inside, two screws remaining in the corridor behind him. He took a seat and waited only a couple of minutes before the door opened and everything in his world suddenly changed. The MI5 emissary had arrived unheralded in the darkness, on a helicopter that no doubt officially never left the hangar, to conduct a meeting that never took place, with a prisoner who did not exist.

It was almost unsettlingly businesslike. He had a thousand questions, but knew he could ask none. Facts and statements, laid down flat. Conditions and parameters, time and date, special instructions and then an on-the-spot demand to accept or decline.

Not the toughest question he'd ever been asked. Accept or decline. Take this one and only chance or rot inside for the rest of your days, which were unlikely to be many given that Mike Williams was clearly prepared to be more, ahem, pragmatic than his predecessor when it came to eliminating risks. For yes, Selby was dead. Nothing lasts forever, and no one lives forever either.

Accept, he said. To which Fotheringham responded with one final stipulation, under the circumstances more difficult than anything else he'd be required to pull off.

'When you leave this room, you look like you've been kicked in the gut, that whatever you learned in here just trashed whatever was left of your hope.'

He didn't need to explain further. Speculation about himself and his status wore thin according to the law of diminishing returns, but something like this incident was bound to have the screws' jungle telegraph buzzing. It was in his best interests to infer that his dark and secret burden had just got heavier, maybe even unbearable.

What truly was unbearable was the ensuing fortnight. Short time was the hardest time, according to those inmates with a parole date to aim at. To Shiach's mind, few of his days or weeks had ever passed quicker or slower than others, but that had been when he had no reason to count them. However, if there was one benefit, it was that when the time came, he was entirely focused and ready, able to act without thought or hesitation, deliberate to the point of automatic.

Shiach always suspected Selby had screws working for him - placed agents or otherwise - as well as the more obvious plants among the various inmate populations, so it was no surprise that Williams could call upon similar unseen 15

hands when the time came.

It didn't take mass orchestration; it just took
enough
orchestration: perhaps only three, even as few as two people acting as instructed, more than likely ignorant of each other's existence, let alone activities, and certainly ignorant of the intended consequences. Even Shiach himself would never know who they were, nor they that it was him they were helping. Things happened that shouldn't happen, and things happened that no-one could plausibly anticipate, far less improvise spontaneously to take advantage of. A fight broke out in the canteen, quickly escalating (and thus revealing itself as a deliberate prelude) to a hostage situation as four screws became isolated at the port end of the dining area, next to the kitchen. Shiach had chosen a table right at the back, accompanied as ever one-on-one by a screw (on this occasion one Officer Doyle) because the canteen area offered access to a phone via the kitchen. When the intended nature of the trouble was revealed, Shiach's escort knew not to present himself as a fifth possible hostage and made for the starboard exit, which accessed the 'non-secure zone', the part of the ship housing staff facilities and accommodation.

Shiach followed him to the door, which through a glass panel he could see a screw unlocking from the other side.

'I've got no part of this,' he said, hands raised. 'Fuck's sake, don't leave me in there. It's not as if I'm gonna go anywhere, is it?'

Doyle stepped aside and ushered him through, before getting the right side of the door himself. Having spent the past fortnight giving off an air of almost desolate resignation, Shiach knew he wouldn't inspire much fear, especially with more pressing security issues to consider. And there was always the matter of being several miles out in the North Sea to allay those escape worries.

'We'll cuff this one and take him to the Rec room on B Deck,' Doyle told his colleague. 'We're gonna need all hands down here, so we need to lock him up someplace and it has to be somewhere that doesn't have a phone.'

'Christ, does that matter so much right now?' the other screw protested.

'Only if still having a job next week matters. Don't forget this is OFP 857,'

Doyle insisted, to Shiach's great relief. These considerations had, he now understood, been accurately anticipated by Fotheringham, who had briefed him on the two locations he would most likely be taken. Individual staff quarters were the most secure, but nobody was going to leave a prisoner in there with access to their own property. The entire admin suite was just a communications playground, and the engine room was a massive no-no given fire and other sabotage possibilities. Thus, it was always going to be the staff showers or their recreation den, with the toss-up being between them preferring the risk of him squashing all their ping-pong balls to pissing on their towels.

16

He was cuffed, hands in front, and taken to B Deck, keeping his head down and steadfastly maintaining his now familiar expression of defeat as nervy and agitated screws passed him hastily in the corridors. There was no time for explanations, it being enough to see him escorted by two colleagues for them to file the otherwise irregular sight under The Least of Our Problems. Doyle and his mate deposited him unfussily at the Rec room, commitments elsewhere causing them to eschew the expected lecture about what would happen to him if he abused these circumstances. Instead, Doyle settled for:

'There's a kettle, some tea, milk and stuff in the fridge. Help yourself. Don't screw up.'

Shiach nodded rather pitifully, like he'd barely have the motivation to make a cuppa, never mind get up to mischief. Satisfied, they withdrew and locked him in. The lock was a sturdy, modern, five-lever fixture, indistinct from those in the secure zone apart from there being only one fitted to this door. However, the door was not his intended means of exit. The interiors of the staff decks had been remodelled with far less concern for containment considerations, meaning that many of the partitions consisted of no more than gypsum board and wallpaper mounted on aluminium frames. The shower room's walls were constructed of sterner stuff to support the necessary ceramic coverings, but the changing area would have offered a joint-equal point of least resistance. He folded up the ping-pong table and flipped down its castors, then got his shoulder behind it and rammed it into the wall. It took only two attempts for the whole table to smash through into the corridor.

Water began pouring from the sprinklers as he emerged behind the table, accompanied by the sound of fire alarms to add to the emergency klaxons already ringing around the tub. It was possible the inmates had set something ablaze in the kitchen, but also a tactical consideration that the screws had activated the system to make things cold and uncomfortable for the miscreants, dousing spirits rather than flames. Whoever did it, for whatever ostensible motive, was quite probably obeying secret orders, because either way, the upshot for Shiach was that the exterior deck access doors were automatically unlocked for evacuation purposes.

The cold of the sprinklers' output was a reminder that things weren't going to get any more cosy from here on in, but having been numb for more than a decade, it was exhilarating to feel anything at all. Nor could he afford any time to ponder what was ahead until he had made sure of getting there, which became complicated by the unexpected investigatory reappearance of Doyle and partner at the end of the corridor. The chancers had evidently been in no hurry to get back to the fray, and so hadn't got as far away from the Rec room as he'd anticipated when he began his demolition. Shiach pulled a lever to unfold the table sideways across the passageway, the ends of either half 17

tipping the walls at about thirty degrees to the horizontal, then he turned and ran for the door to the stairwell.

He lunged up the stairs three and four at a time, pausing in front of the door to the exterior deck so that he could remove a fire extinguisher from its strapping. The door, unlocked by the fire system, opened outwards as he plunged the handle, but not without the stiff resistance of the wind whipping rain against the metal. Shiach barrelled through and narrowed his eyes against the downpour, letting the door slam heavily behind him. He took the steel cylinder he'd lifted and wedged it between the door and the lip of the first of four short steps leading on to the open deck. It hardly constituted an insurmountable barrier, but it would buy him the seconds he needed. He picked his way carefully across the slippery surface towards the starboard bow, staring out at the night, a prison the only visible vessel offering safety amid dead black nothingness.

When you leave this room, you look like you've been kicked in the gut, that
whatever you learned in here just trashed whatever was left of your hope.
Who would be asking questions if an apparently depressed and possibly desperate prisoner seized the moment to end it all, given that he didn't officially exist and had been legally dead for years anyway?

The next step was literally a leap of faith.

Yes, he'd been here before all right, but unlike Selby's pills and whisky, with the two screws cautiously closing in, this one was a limited-time offer. Its options were also more clear-cut. Rejecting the pills and whisky was easy, because it bought time and time offered possibilities, time offered hope. Fotheringham had been dangling a whole new future in front of him, the very possibility he'd been holding out his hope for. If it was actually just bait, then it meant the end of hope. Either way, there was nothing left to live for on this ship.

Fotheringham was down there with scuba gear and handcuff keys, a speedboat floating unseen half a mile away, or Shiach was about to erase himself for Mike Williams's convenience. He pulled at the rim with his fettered hands and hurled himself into the darkness, betting on the former. One of them would be right to have trusted Fotheringham, and the odds were it would be the one who had known him longer: the one who knew him as the Architect. 18

Friday, October 25, 2002

Margaret Thatcher's Rotting

Corpse

'You know, I kind of miss the Eighties,' Parlabane said, gazing disinterestedly at the passing countryside.

'Mmm,' Vale replied. 'Mobile phones you could ram a castle drawbridge with. Ghetto blasters bigger than the actual ghetto. Big hair, big shoulderpads, big eye make-up, and that was just the men.'

'What would you know about it? You probably spent most of it in dingy Eastern European hotel rooms, peering through grimy windows at trilbies and Trabbis.'