Snow Storm (26 page)

Burke made his way back
to the main office, without saying a word. Maybe he didn’t actually
know what to say and he was thinking up different scenarios. It was
hard to tell at the best of times just what went on in the young
guy’s head.

The PC who’d been in the
interview escorted the surgeon and his lawyer to the front
entrance.

McKay nearly
managed to catch up with Burke as he rounded the corner into the
main body of the office but he was too quick. By the time the boss
had shaken the spook’s hand and moved her off into his own broom
cupboard, evicting Edwards’ bam pot entourage, he’d been left
behind in the rush.

He stared through the
glass partition into Burke’s office as the two chatted seemingly
calmly, Burke nodding in a way that suggested the spook was
imparting some serious information.

McKay found himself
wishing his lip reading skills were better.

********************

Andy had
managed to spend the whole day in a trance. He’d previously thought
this would only be possible following a heavy night on the booze,
chemically anaesthetised. Now he realised concussion was more than
capable of the job.

The girls
chatted amongst themselves in whichever language it was. He
realised he had no clue which language was actually spoken in
Georgia, or the Ukraine, or most places if he thought about it.
Ignorant really, just assuming everyone with an Eastern European
accent had to be Polish, but then that was the most likely
possibility round here. A good few Polish people had moved into the
area to find work and this being Wigtownshire there weren’t
many
people
here,
let alone different nationalities. It was always more of a gene
puddle than a pool really, not surprising that anyone vaguely
different stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.

He got the
sense that something was up and the girls knew more about it than
he did. The urgency of their whispered tones made him nervous. If
they thought they had problems, chances were, he was
fucked.

He heard
another plane land. You couldn’t miss it in the quiet night. He
wondered what this time. The last one seemed to have been taking
off, the accelerating engine, sounding like a wayward petrol
lawnmower, one of these ones middle aged men sat on that looked
like toy tractors and gave the retired accountant an hour of fun
every second Sunday pretending to be Old McDonald.

This time it sounded like
the engine was slowing, killed at the last minute, before the
screech of tyres on the tarmac, as presumably the plane touched
down. It couldn’t be good news at any rate, unless this was the
cavalry being flown in to rescue him, or better still, some dozy
lawnmower owner who’d got lost and had actually killed the engine
before executing a handbrake turn or a doughnut. He’d probably be
happy with that, especially if it distracted his captors and gave
him the chance to bolt.

He tried to
get the girls attention but they were still too busy talking at
each other. There was a lot of background noise but he didn’t fancy
shouting. Funny how a hostage situation felt somehow like being
back at school. One thing was for sure, he wouldn’t be getting
Stockholm Syndrome for these boys anytime soon. That’s if they let
him live for any length of time.

He couldn’t be sure of
the girls though. They might be well far along with the whole
assimilation into the cult thing. There must be a way out of here.
He couldn’t get the cable ties undone himself, he knew that. But it
wasn’t like they were actual hand cuffs, they should be easy enough
with the right thing, something sharp or flammable. He twisted his
wrists as he thought about it, trying to find any give where he
knew there was none. He could try scraping them on the pallet, but
that wouldn’t work in a short enough time, i.e. before they decided
to dispose of him.

Eventually he managed to
get their attention by whistling. The high pitch cut through both
the noise from outside and their whispered scheming.

“
What do you
want? Water?” Ania asked as she made her way across the room in a
quiet way. Maybe there were cameras in here he thought.

“
Is there any
way you can let me loose?” he asked her. Better to die trying than
face the end having done nothing and wondering what might have
been.

She shook her head
slowly.

“
You have
nothing sharp?” he asked slowly, like a tourist who thinks his lack
of language skills can be rendered unimportant by close adherence
to the principles of vocal projection. “Nothing that
burns?”

Again she
shook her head. Of course, what was he expecting her to say? ‘Oh
here have this sulphuric acid/laser beam/plasma cutter we forgot
about’?

“
What about
your friends?” he asked, clutching at straws in a way only the
doomed knew how.

“
They have
nothing,” she replied, looking at the floor before looking back at
him with concerned eyes and touching the side of his face with an
icy hand that somehow, despite all odds, felt warm.

He tried rubbing the
cable tie on the upright bar of the pallet he sat on again,
frantically this time, but nothing. He kept going until the sting
in his wrists grew too much and he could feel the warm trickle of
blood drizzling down his hand.

There must be a way. He
would not die here. He wouldn’t allow it. It was too stupid a way
to go. Held by a bunch of nutters on the basis that you decide to
play a practical joke, one that wasn’t even on them really. The
joke was more just one between him, Davie and Colin, pretending to
be master surveillance experts and professional saboteurs. Well,
the punch line had gone down like a lead balloon and now no one was
laughing.

He heard footsteps
approaching and the door was thrust open, flooding the inside of
the shed with light, practically blinding him and his fellow
inmates. The girls huddled together in the corner as two of the
Georgians made their way purposefully towards them.

They seemed
to huddle and scatter in turn, like sheep, the last five or so in a
field, difficult to move or pin down or keep together in any kind
of cohesive group but tough to separate in order to pick them off
one by one. In this case they didn’t have to as one of the girls
was on the ground convulsing suddenly, before lying still. The
others focussed on her like a car crash.

It was then he saw the
wires connecting the girl’s body with something in the toothless,
bald one’s hand. It was then he couldn’t help himself.

“
Leave them
alone you bastards!” He shouted quite unintentionally, wanting to
do anything he could to protect the hostage girl on the ground, so
far from home and away from those who loved her.

He was now the target but
wouldn’t be for long. The giant made his way towards Andy, a smile
spreading across his gaping black hole of a mouth.

“
Fuck you,”
Andy spluttered. The anger was in charge now. “You can’t go one on
one and you can’t even move a lassie without using a tazer, fucking
useless meat head arsehole.”

The man towered above,
looking down on him, moving his neck from side to side and
swivelling his shoulders clearly relishing this, ready for the
sensory release of knocking seven bells out of this mouthy
teenager.

When he moved it was
instant, unthinking and terrifying.

Andy braced as best he
could for the blows that were coming, at least the girls would take
less. At least he’d done something good. At least he’d done
something.

When enough time lapsed
and nothing happened he opened his eyes to see that gurning face
level with his, breathing its foul stench in his. The giant tapped
his face gently with a sweaty palm before laughing and walking away
to continue with the task in hand.

Then, he was alone. The
plane had departed with its cargo, which had been replaced in his
prison by actual cargo in wooden boxes.

He felt cold and he hoped
the end would come soon. The dread that filled his mind left him
wondering why they’d kept him alive. He knew it couldn’t be
good.

********************

Victor lay in
his cell waiting. He’d done waiting, in ways lesser men could not
hope to imagine. This was nothing, a blip on an otherwise steadily
up-sweeping curve towards his ultimate destiny. Some would say his
ambitions were unjust but he’d entered a way of life all those
years ago in the frozen wastes, a covenant that required honouring.
Some of his brethren had parted ways with the true path, sold out
as they liked to say here. They had positions of authority, titles
and responsibilities, all of which served to uphold the values of
an unjust society, a society that was corrupt, rotten to the core
and had forgotten its own.

The communists had come
to power promising to free those imprisoned by indentured
servitude, only to trap them in their own version of the daily
grind, less time spent in the duties of serfdom, more in the bread
queue.

They had
called on the brotherhood for help in their war, only to betray
them when it mattered and send them back from where they’d taken
them to rot once more. Later they had tried to extinguish them with
the help of those with ambitions beyond bars and so the time they
called the bitch wars had begun.

He and his kind had
survived all of this but now they had been brought to the brink of
extinction. Now they were a dying breed and all because of their
own failings; their lust for individual power and the trappings of
success and above all some form of acceptance by the very thing
that had abandoned them in the beginning, this thing they called
society, their need to be treated like vulgar celebrities, nothing
more than performing bears, by the very people they had sworn to
despise.

He had done waiting and
could wait some more, forever if need be. He would live on through
his sons and the empire he’d created.

He laughed at himself and
his train of thought. Such thoughts of negativity were pointless.
Plans were in motion. All would be well.

Burke was alone in his
office at last. It had been a busy day and it wasn’t showing any
signs of slowing down. He placed his feet up on the desk and leaned
back in his chair letting the blood run towards his head, feeling
his eyes bulge before sitting back up when he felt suitably
distracted. He’d read somewhere that people did this for
inspiration, hanging upside down with gravity boots to get the
extra oxygen into the grey matter. He could see the reasoning,
liked the theory even, but couldn’t get over the fact that they
recommended the same thing for baldness. If they’d found a genuine
cure for that, he decided, it would have been well documented.
Nonetheless, the sensation made him feel something other than tired
and bedraggled, which was refreshing in itself.

He phoned
home. Any day now he was due to become a father. There was a
suitcase packed, a route planned, even a playlist composed on
Rachel’s Ipod. She was so very organised, quite the opposite of her
husband, who spent his life craving order and even now could not
wholeheartedly concentrate because of the awkward angle Edwards had
placed his laptop at on his desk, but who did not know where to
start. He knew it was a fault; the need to have the coffee table in
the living room cleared of all debris or disruptions to his field
of vision, the overpowering urge to move that coke bottle on the
basis that it would obscure his view of the TV should he choose to
lie down, even when he wasn’t planning on it, and he knew that even
when it was all done there would be no peace and he still wouldn’t
settle. Something always had to be wrong and if he didn’t know what
it was, it was just waiting to ambush him.

“
When are you
coming home?” she asked.

“
Don’t know
darlin,” he replied, for some reason resenting the question like it
was just another demand being made on him. He knew deep down it was
an invitation. It was her way of telling him she missed him and
loved him and that even after all these years he was still the
person she always wanted to spend more time with. He knew it was
far more than just a nag. “Maybe another hour or two.”

“
That’s not
really what I meant,” she said, almost absent minded.

“
Then what
did you mean?” he asked, eyeing a takeaway menu. Perhaps he could
make it up to her, swing by the Guru Balti on the way
home.

Home. It seemed a long
time since he’d been there. He pushed the thought to the back of
his mind. He mustn’t go there.

“
Nothing,”
she replied, meaning anything but.

“
Ok,” was all
he could come up with in response, not really wanting to get into
an argument right then.

“
No,” she
replied, as if it had been a question, before telling him she would
see him when she saw him.

Might take more than a
Guru Balti, he thought as the phone clicked back on the receiver.
He leaned back again, looking for a distraction once
more.

Edwards woke
him from his trance as he stumbled sweating and snuffling through
the door, closely followed by Black and Wilson, whom he’d heard
Campbell had renamed Decker, partly because of the obvious fit with
her partner’s name but partly because she looked like she could
throw a mean right hook.