Daring Dooz (The Implosion Trilogy (Book 2)) (9 page)

The only
sign of real happiness was on the face of one of the pedestrians who had dived
to the pavement as soon as he’d seen the gun in Jimmy’s hand.

He was back
to his feet, looking down at his iPhone screen, and, although he was re-running
video, all he could see was pound signs, lots and lots and lots of lovely pound
signs.

Chapter 18

Digby
Elton-John sat at his desk in his sparse, wood-laminate-floored office and was
having a creative muse.

He was
musing on how fucking difficult it was to have a creative muse. For two days
now, on and off, he’d been staring at a sheet of paper on his desk. The paper
had the words
NO CASE TOO TRIVIAL
and
NO COMPLAINT TOO PUERILE
written at
the top. And that was it.

He hadn't
come up with any other words for his advertisement. The advertisement which he
felt certain would take his business into another more profitable direction -
at least until he retired in a couple of years’ time.

He’d
Googled ‘writers block cures’ and idly toyed with a couple of them to no avail.
But this morning, he’d had a brainwave. Whisky. In old black and white films,
reporters and writers always had a bottle of whisky next to their typewriter.

With still
an hour to go before mid-day, Digby was halfway down his emergency bottle of Johnnie
Walker, and was beginning to doubt the effectiveness of this approach, pleasant
though it was. One: because no words had appeared on the paper and Two: because
he had just spent 15 minutes trying to curl a paperclip out of his drink with
his index finger. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how closely he looked,
it wouldn't budge. Only when he raised his glass for another slug, did he
manage to work out that the paperclip was under the glass.

Obviously,
the whisky tactic wasn’t working. Perhaps, if he combined it with another
method? Relaxing. Yes. Those old reporters and writers always looked so cool.
Digby went for it. He removed his tie.

Ten minutes
later, the paper was still blank, and the room was beginning to go in and out
of focus. He realised that perhaps the alcohol level ought to be reined in - a
black coffee would be nice.

Digby stood
up, and his trousers, without the support of his tie, fell to the floor. He was
too far gone to realise they’d were now around his ankles, although he was
vaguely aware the room had become a little colder. He shuffled over to his
‘refreshments’ area and shoved half a mug of cold coffee into the microwave.
Then he shuffled back.

As he
stared at the paper for the thousandth time, he began to really concentrate
like never before, almost entering a trance-like state. This was new for Digby.
He seemed to be turning in on himself. A low pulsating drone started to
permeate his brain. Maybe this was like the
Tibetan Chant of the Dead or that
transcendental meditation stuff where you slip down
into deeper and more meaningful levels of consciousness and spiritual
awareness. This was the time to write the ad - emotive, powerful words that
would shake his competitors to the core with their originality and brilliance.
After a few minutes in this heightened state, the
low, pulsating, all encompassing drone went
ping - and Digby’s coffee was ready.

He shuffled
over, and shuffled back with the mug. He took another gulp of whisky and looked
down at his legs. He was surprised to see he was wearing deathly white
drainpipe trousers rather than the grey flannels he’d put on before coming out.

No matter.
Maybe if he looked at other ads for inspiration? The
London Evening Standard
was in his desk drawer. He spread it out on
the desk. The first thing he noticed was not an advertisement. It was a news
item. The front page featured the usual stuff about some MPs and a sheep at an
animal sanctuary, but next to it were some pictures of an elderly lady wearing
motorbike leathers, upending some chap into a waste paper bin. The headline
ran: Mystery Gran Bins Gunman with a subhead: Do
you
know the have-a-go heroine?

He looked
carefully. He looked closely. There was something about that face. But after a
few seconds, he thought, there’s something about lots of faces, and turned to
the classified ads section.

Digby took
another large gulp of whisky. Somebody had hidden the coffee. He looked down at
his wristband for inspiration. What Would Dan Dare Do?

He drifted
back in time. Suppose Dan wanted to hire a cleaning lady for a weekly dusting
down of his interplanetary space ship, Anastasia. What would he write for the
advertisement he posted on the noticeboard of the Spacefleet Spaceport canteen?
He’d probably write
CLEANING LADY WANTED
as a headline. And for the second time in a minute, something stirred in the
depths of his brain. The same area of his brain that stirred when he’d seen the
Mystery Gran in the paper. But both stirrings were too far down to make any
connections.

The whisky
bottle, however, was very close, and what was left of his brain knew exactly
how to make a connection with it.

He drained
the bottle carefully into the glass, gulped it down in one, and, after a few
moments of euphoria, slid quietly to the floor.

When he
came to, five hours later, he crawled to his chair and slowly hauled his
shattered body up into a sitting position. The sheet of paper was on his desk,
and he was amazed to see the advertisement had been completed. The words were
great - emotive, powerful, original, brilliant - and ready to work some magic. While
he was otherwise engaged, the creative muse must taken time out to pay an
unscheduled visit.

Chapter 19

Looking out
across London from his fabulously appointed executive office on the upper
floors of the Shard,
Giles Montagu-Scott was fretting.

He wasn’t fretting about the astronomical rent - he had unbelievable
amounts of ready cash. He wasn’t fretting about the criminality and mayhem on
the streets down below. He wasn’t even fretting about the criminality and
mayhem in the Palace of Westminster whose towers and turrets glistened in the late
evening sunlight.

No. He was fretting about his baby.

The birth had been a surprise, and he never thought it would grow so
fast. And if he’d known it was going to become so popular, he wouldn't have
given it such a stupid name -
Daring
Dooz.

In five short years,
Daring Dooz
had become one of the world’s top selling magazines, with an international
circulation approaching three million.

Giles started
Daring Dooz
off
as a blog for idiots who would believe anything he wrote. He began to realise
that the word is full of idiots, and so, the more they seemed to like it, the
more he wrote.

Daring Dooz
featured outrageous,
courageous, bizarre, death-defying action from around the world - and people
loved it.

Soon,
Daring Dooz
was a small
black and white A5, 16-page monthly magazine, selling at £1 - and, to Giles’
surprise, people still loved it. And they continued to love it - even now, when
it had turned into a glossy, 120-page, full-colour international spectacular.

It had grown from a baby into a monster. A monster which he now felt was
getting out of control - or, at least, difficult to manage. And Giles didn't
like
anything
that was difficult.

Before he changed his name by deed poll, Cyril Tweedy had been a wimp.
In fact, he still
was
a wimp.
However, this was the personality trait which had driven him to such
stratospheric heights of commercial success.

Cyril had always wanted to be a man of action - a mountaineer, an
astronaut, a potholer, a deep-sea diver. But because of a slight childhood
asthmatic condition and an aversion to anything even slightly uncomfortable, he
had, throughout his life, avoided all physical activity and potentially
dangerous situations.

He started the
Daring Dooz
blog to compensate for his own lack of derring-do. He realised, after the first
online edition, that Cyril Tweedy was not a name to associate with the sort of
content he was generating. So after a few quid with the Legal Deed Poll
Service, the second edition saw the arrival of a new editor, Giles
Montagu-Scott. Giles sounded like an ex-guards officer who, without a thought,
walked the Arctic wastes, climbed Everest without oxygen, trekked across the
Sahara and swam the Pacific, even when the weather forecast was bad.

The reasons for his executive fretting were both cumulative and current.

 
Cumulative, because Giles knew
the big lie. Probably this was the biggest lie
ever
in publishing - something only
he
knew. It was pressing down on him like a ton weight - the fact
that he had invented and fabricated
every
single aspect of
every
story he had
ever put into his magazine.
Daring Dooz
was completely fake, every edition, from beginning to end.

The more boring and uninteresting his personal life had become, the more
outrageous and ridiculously dramatic were the stories.

To make things worse, all the items in the magazine had to be supported
by photographs. Fortunately, this was probably the one area where Giles truly
excelled. He had become, mainly out of fear of being discovered, an expert in
Photoshop. He could manipulate photographs like no one else on the planet. He’d
been on courses by international experts, and courses by people who looked down
on the international experts as amateurs, until his skills were so honed that
even the sad sods who roamed the web looking for Photoshop trickery, never
picked up his deceptions.

Despite the outrageous nature of the stories, there was never a peep of
suspicion from
Daring Dooz
readers.
If some voluptuous blonde, wearing next to nothing, was skiing off a 300-foot
calving Arctic ice flow into a pedalo, they were happy - as long as the story
contained lots of details about her sex life.

If some nubile, scantily clad, ex-cheerleader was bungee jumping down
the inside of an erupting volcano, or a female wrestler playing the bagpipes
went over Niagara Falls in a tin bath - they were happy - as long as the story
contained lots of details about their sex lives.

The rest of the publishing world dismissed
Daring Dooz
as something designed to keep paper shredder
manufacturers in business. On a TV media programme, someone had once described
Daring Dooz
as making the
National Enquirer
look like the
New York Times.

But they could all sod off. Giles had built an international community
of three million idiots who didn't care what the rest of the world thought.
And, anyway, he was the one with an office in the Shard and a 30-acre Georgian
mansion in Berkshire, plus suites of offices in New York, Hong Kong, Sydney and
Buenos Aires.

Giles was always careful to cover his tracks, announcing that the
adventurers featured in his magazine had signed exclusivity agreements and, as
they were modest souls by nature, were happy not to give interviews to the rest
of the media, or appear at any public event. They trusted the integrity of
Daring Dooz
- and that’s why they gave
their stories to the magazine.

Even if some slimy investigative journalist had cottoned on, and tried
to trace the missing adventurers and exposed the fraud on the front page of a
national newspaper, Giles suspected it wouldn’t affect his circulation much.
Daring Dooz
readers were a community of
hopeless, gullible dreamers. They
wanted
to believe. This was
their
magazine,
and no one would
ever
take it away
from them. His market research teams had shown that ‘Daring Doozers’ didn’t
read newspapers, and that they were the sort of people who would turn off the
TV when the news came on.

He’d also recently compounded the problem by adding a wildly successful section
on Ufology. The email, Twitter and Facebook responses had been incredible. So
he had even more stories to invent - although, to be honest, it wasn’t as
difficult as the other stuff. With UFOs, you could recycle old ideas, and
faking photographs was a doddle for the world’s leading Photoshop expert. He
thought of changing the title to
Daring
Dooz and UFO News
- it had a nice rhyming ring to it. But that was for
later - there were other, more pressing, issues.

As the sun sank to the horizon, and the River Thames slithering off into
the distance like a golden snake, Giles began to fret about the current
pressing issue - and it was a big one - splashed all over the front page of the
London Evening Standard.
The leader
was
the usual stuff about
a few MPs and a sheep at an animal sanctuary, but next to it was a picture of a
rather sleek, elderly lady wearing motorbike leathers, upending some armed bank
robber into a rubbish bin. And, judging from the headlines, no one knew who she
was! Apparently, there was a media storm. It had already gone coast to coast in
the US, and was featuring big-time internationally. What a story! A granny
whacking an armed robber - then disappearing into thin air! Now that
would
be something to feature in
Daring Dooz
- a real live heroine!

He switched
on the six o’clock TV news and, almost immediately, saw the iPhone footage taken
by the canny, Enfield pedestrian. It was shot from a low angle, but it was
impressive, if a little too violent for Giles’ taste. But you could see the old
lady was really, really fit - and she was riding a pretty impressive motorbike.
Maybe his readers were fed up with stories of Brazilian-thonged bimbos
white-water rafting along tarantula-infested Himalayan rivers and re-living
their trauma after breaking a fingernail. Here, on the front page, was a
real
woman. A woman who could disarm and
immobilise gun-toting thugs at point-blank range. She was modest and, he
observed when checking the replays, pretty good looking. In fact, she was
extremely
good looking. There was no
need to add ‘for her age’ - she was a cracker, full stop.

His mind
raced. He could run all sorts of stories about her - how did she get so good,
where was she from, how was her love life - all backed with real photographs
and, who knows, real video which he could use on YouTube to promote magazine
and merchandise sales.

It could get him off the story-writing hook for at least a couple of
months, maybe even longer. It might even encourage other real-life heroes and
heroines to call and enquire about the magazine featuring their exploits.

Giles had missed the story when it broke at lunchtime. He checked on
line, and
everyone
was talking about
her. There were a couple of people from Liberty going on about the human rights
of gun-wielding bank robbers and their extended families, but, in the main,
people thought she was bloody brilliant. A YouTube version of the iPhone video
already had five million hits, and all the comments were either whole-heartedly
positive, or lascivious. Either way she was just what his readers wanted.

He knew he was staring at a goldmine. But where the hell
was
she? Who was this woman with the
looks and charisma, not to mention the street-fighting skills, to go
global-plus. He
had
to be the first
to find her. He had to beat the other bastards to the punch. He re-ran the
video and winced for the third time as Jimmy Wilmot took his unexpected plunge.

Then suddenly, he sat up straight, grabbed the remote and re-wound the
footage. There it was - just a few frames - at the bottom right of the screen.
The rear number plate of the motorbike was in shot. It was out of focus, there
was iPhone shake - but it
was
in
shot.

He dumped the video from his TV to his Mac video-editing software,
grabbed the best of the three frames, dropped it into Photoshop and, after a
few minutes of manipulation, stared with considerable satisfaction at a crystal
clear version of Mrs Hathaway’s
vehicle registration
number
.