Christopher Brookmyre
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Authors: Fun All,v1.0 Games
Book Jacket
Until Somebody
Loses an Eye
Christopher Brookmyre
First published in Great Britain in May 2005 by Little, Brown This paperback edition published in April 2006 by Abacus Copyright c 2005 Christopher Brookmvre
'Teenage Wristband' written by Greg Dulli. From the Twilight Singers album
Blackberry Belle
. Copyright c 2003 Kali Nichta Music (BMI). Lyrics reproduced by kind permission of Greg Dulli.
www.thetwilightsingers.com
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All characters in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are
fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN-10: 0-3491-1745-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-3491-1745-4
Typeset in Palatino by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Abacus
An imprint of
Time Warner Book Group UK
Brettenham House
Lancaster Place
London WC2E 7EN
www.twbg.co.uk
For Hilary Hale and Caroline Dawnay,
without whom . . .
Thanks: Marisa, Greg Dulli, Roger Cantwell and Duncan Spilling for fitting all those words on the cover.
Special thanks also to Calvin for their song 'Supercar', which resonated so hauntingly around the time I conceived this little fairy tale.
Contents
1
37
51
75
Abduction: how to do it properly
95
103
135
147
161
171
193
209
241
249
269
Decent, normal, sensible girls
279
293
303
307
319
331
I've allowed myself to lead this little life,
when inside me there was so much more.
Shirley Valentine
, by Willy Russell
The secret of a joyful life is to live dangerously.
Nietzsche
Toyz
'It would encourage me, you know, to think . . . or rather it would comfort me, no, wrong word, well, maybe the right word, but it would, you know, inspire me but at the same time sort of soothe me in an all-is-well-in-heavenand-earth kind of way to think, ah, what am I trying to say here?'
Som was sitting on an upturned black flight case, rocking it back ten or fifteen degrees as he rolled his heels on the frosted gravel in front of Bett's mansion. Lex wished he wouldn't do that,
really
wished he wouldn't do that. Okay, it was Som's case, Som's stuff, and maybe he was cool with the contents getting clattered in the less-than-improbable event that his feet slipped and put him on his skinny Thai ass, but that wasn't the point. It was bad practice. There were several black flight cases sitting out there with the three of them in the cold tonight, as on any such night, and Lex didn't much like the thought of Som using the vessel of her fragile, delicately packed and fastidiously inventoried kit as a makeshift shooting stick. Weighing further upon her discomfiture was the fact that Armand's flight cases were occasionally known to accommodate materials sufficient to denude the immediate vicinity of any standing structure, mammalian life, or even vegetation.
'Som, you're 404-ing,' she warned him.
'Sorry. I'm just saying, wouldn't you love to believe that somewhere in this world there really is at least one - just one - hollowed-out volcano containing a super high-tech ops base under the command of a fully fledged evil genius?
I mean, I could live with all the havoc the evil genius might wreak simply to know there was a facility like that in existence. It would just make the world a more fantastical place, don't you reckon? In a Santa-really-does-exist-after-all kind of way, you know?'
'Would it need to have a retractable roof for space-rockets and nuclear missiles to launch through?' Armand asked, bringing a measured irritation to bear in the precision of his accented pronunciation.
'I'd settle for a submarine dock,' Som responded, with an equally measured, deliberate guilelessness.
'So,' the Frenchman said, 'the thought of an actual, existent, staffed and fully functioning underground base doesn't, how would you say, blow your 1
hair back? It must be inside a hollowed-out volcano and run by a cackling megalomaniac or it's merely part of the crushing ordinariness of life's relentlessly drab ennui?'
'Not at all,' Som protested. 'I didn't say that. Did I say that?'
'No, but you could be more "up" about it,' Armand complained. 'I've been looking forward to this, you know. Really looking forward to it.'
Lex smiled to herself at the sight of Armand - mercenary, soldier, explosives adept and trained killer - putting on a petted lip and acting like a disappointed child for the express purpose of winding up a scrawny adolescent techno-geek half his age.
'I'm "up",' Som insisted. 'I'm extremely up. I'm looking forward to it as much as you. I'm just, you know, insulating myself against disappointment.'
'A pitifully negative approach to life,' Armand condemned.
'Easy for you to say. When I was a kid, my parents took me to Tunisia, and we went to visit the place they filmed Star Wars. I was eight years old, and--'
'Pitifully negative,' Armand repeated. 'And cowardly to boot.'
'I'm just saying, I'd love to believe it'll be all chrome and glass and LED
read-outs everywhere, but I'm preparing myself in case it's just a quarry with a roof.'
'Silence, coward. Be gone. Alexis,
ma chere
, when Rebekah gets here with our transport, I'm going to sit up front with our designated driver. Sorry to land you with Som, but I plan on enjoying myself this evening and I don't want him "bumming me out".'
'Yeah, sure,' Lex said, rolling her eyes. '
That
's why you want to sit beside Rebekah. Forget it. It'll be girls in the front, boys in the back. I've been waiting years for some female solidarity around here.'
Armand waved dismissively at her, but knew she wouldn't be giving ground, just as she knew he had no intention of sitting anywhere but next to his playmate. There had to be twenty years between them, but as Som and Armand's relationship seemed to be based upon bringing out each other's inner thirteenyear-old, the age gap was irrelevant to their inseparable (and often insufferable) camaraderie. It was the female solidarity she was less sure about. Rebekah had been with the outfit a month now and, despite being the only other female, they'd barely engaged in anything other than the most perfunctory of exchanges.
This was pretty familiar, however. Lex had seen it before, in herself and, more recently, in Somboon. The blase and cocky figure who was so nonchalantly leaning on easily fifty thousand dollars' worth of electronics, as he bantered about the interior fittings of the underground weapons facility they were about to assault, might fail to recognise the hunched and introverted serial nail-biter who'd barely managed anything more articulate than gaze-averted mumbles for the first month in their company. Rebekah had been less physically withdrawn than Som was during those earliest days, and she looked unused to shrinking from anyone's gaze, not least because she was five-nine and a looker. She was always straight-backed and forthright in her posture, but this struck Lex as a conditioned reflex, a body-language statement of 'no comment'. When she did speak, her accent was American, the delivery a little clipped and forced, like discipline was overruling shyness and more than a little fear. Som had once referred to her as 'the she-bot', a throwaway remark that nonetheless accurately identified something automated about her behaviour.
Rebekah had been unquestionably scared, nervous of her new environment and untrusting of its apparent security; noticeably starting at telephones and doorbells and, rather curiously, at overhead aircraft. Post-traumatic stress disorder, or what used to be known as plain old shell-shock, any observer might reasonably have diagnosed, but Lex could identify the symptoms of a more specific anxiety: that of the fugitive. The girl was still waiting for a trapdoor to open beneath her.
'Lex, you're welcome to sit with Rebekah, far as I'm concerned,' Som said.
'I figure "the Transport Manager" has gotta have some serious driving skillz. She's gonna be throwing that bus around, man. I don't want a front-row seat.'
'I could hear that
z
, Som,' Lex warned him. 'You've got to drop the leet speak. Seriously.
I
'm the hacker here.'
'I'm so grateful to the American cultural imperialists that they have made English the international language of code-crunchers and keypad monkeys,'
Armand said with a sigh, the steam of his breath billowing affectedly in the moonlight. 'It would pain me too much to hear French so vandalised.'
'Ah, bullshit,' Som replied. 'French is just too effete-sounding to be of any use with technology. I mean, listen:
ordinateur
. That sounds like something that runs on steam, with, like, brass fittings and a big wooden plinth.'
'Exactly. You describe elegance and grace, agelessness and finery. That is French. Plastic, fibreglass, coils of tangled cable, porno download, shoot-emup - English, English, English.'
'Fuck you.'
'
Encore, Anglais, Anglais, Anglais.
'
'Our new Transport Manager.' That was how Rebekah had been introduced by Bett, with their leader's typically cryptic brevity. Each one of them came here with two things: a talent and a past. Everybody would find out the former soon enough, but only Bett would be privy to the latter. Bett knew everyone's past, but nobody knew his. There were fragments one could piece together, clues in remarks and logical assumptions, but they didn't render a whole that was either coherent or remotely vivid. Some mili-tary involvement, obviously. Police work, here in France and possibly further afield. No wife, no children, no siblings or parents ever referred to. Multilingual. First language: pick one from three. Accent unplaceable. Provenance unknowable. A cipher, and yet known in certain influential circles. Private, and yet highly connected. Cold, and yet conscientiously loyal. Solitary, and yet surrounding himself with cohorts, generally much younger, who were energetic and often immature. Bett collected them, brought to his attention by shadowy contacts and murkily submerged channels of information. Rescued them, no question, from each of their secret pasts, but he kept hold of those secrets too, an unspoken but ever-looming means of leverage. His employees were thus a remarkable raggle-taggle of waifs and strays, who found themselves grateful but beholden, and not a little scared. Lex didn't know anyone else's story for certain, but guessed they would share a number of elements, prominent among them a precipitous epiphany regarding the price a single rash act could exact from what one only now realised had been a bright future. In her case, she put it down to adolescent impetuousness and misdirected anger. Mistakes we all made on the road to adulthood, lessons we could only learn first hand. Nineteen was a difficult age. Anything beyond twelve, in fact, was a difficult age, but turning nineteen stuck in the mind as being especially tough - something to do with her parents' marriage breaking up around that particular birthday, which happened to be September 12th 2001. Adolescent impetuousness. Alienation. Despair. Misdirected anger. A common enough story. You let your feelings get the better of you and you do something that makes sense at the time, but which will have far more damaging consequences than you have the vision or clarity to foresee from your emotional and immature perspective. Such as getting shit-faced and totalling your dad's car, deliberately screwing up your exams, selling off your mom's heirloom jewellery, or causing an overseas emergency and mid-level international diplomatic crisis from inside your Toronto bedroom.