One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night (21 page)

Connor had reached the lifts when Jackson heard a door open and close behind him. He turned around and saw a kid of about nineteen standing six yards back along the corridor, dressed in waiter’s garb apart from the walkman clipped to his belt and the in‐
ear headphones that had prevented him hearing three heavily armed soldiers stomping past his room.

The kid looked up and saw Jackson ahead of him, fatigues, boots, ski‐
mask, bandolier and, most entrancingly, silenced semi‐
auto pointed at his head. The orders had been clear. It was imperative that they remain undetected at this stage: stay out of sight, and if you
are
spotted, the witness must be neutralised, eliminated, or – if all that Orwellian stuff wasn’t your thing – shot dead in cold blood. Jackson looked at the kid’s face. He saw surprise, fear and confusion. He saw also that the kid was frozen to the spot. The moment stretched on and on, not elasticated by emotion but because time was actually passing and Jackson hadn’t acted.

‘Jesus, Acks,’ came a voice from behind. The kid sprang from his paralysis as Connor moved into his field of vision, breaking the spell. The poor bastard had barely turned on his heel when four bullets ripped into his back and dropped him to the carpet.

Jackson still hadn’t moved.

‘Come on, let’s get him out of sight,’ Connor said, crouching down beside the body and lifting the plastic keycard from the kid’s still‐
twitching hand. ‘The fuck happened to you?’ he demanded, swiping the card through its slot and reopening the door the kid had appeared from.

Jackson breathed in and out, buying a second’s pause he wasn’t sure he could afford.

‘Gun jammed,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

He couldn’t see Connor’s eyes as they carried the body into the bedroom, couldn’t see whether he was believed. Jackson’s mind rewound to the north‐
western leg, outside the door to that service corridor. Had they seen him change clip? If they had, they’d know he was lying. Who ever heard of a gun jamming when there’d been nothing in the chamber ahead of the first new round?

There were crumpled clothes discarded carelessly about the floor; ghetto‐
blaster on one bedside table, an ashtray straddling two piles of cassettes; Glasgow Rangers team posters Blu‐
tacked to one wall; framed photo of a smiling girl on the dresser. On top of the duvet there was a
Viz
annual strewn with tobacco strands and the debris of a ripped‐
up fag packet.

‘Resident staff must have been given rooms down here,’ Connor muttered. ‘We weren’t to know. Gaghen, you’d better knock a few doors, see if there’s anyone else, and if so, deal. All right?’

‘Gotcha.’

‘Should have been upstairs in A with the rest, son,’ Connor said under his breath, closing the kid’s eyes and walking out.

Should have, yeah, Jackson thought. Poor sod had just nipped down on his break for an illicit spliff. Now here he was, dead on the floor, shot in the back.

He watched Connor outside in the hallway, stooping down to pocket the spent shells, like a fucking hit‐
man. An unaccustomed disgust flooded through Jackson. The kid’s eyes stared back every time he closed his own, but it wasn’t the look in them that was doing it. He’d seen that look before, dozens of times – the terror, the helplessness, the paralysis – and it had never stayed his hand. He’d shot people in the back himself, as well as in the face, chest, limbs and every other part of the anatomy. He’d thrown grenades through windows into huts where he’d already blocked the only door. He’d cut the throats of sleeping men and held a silencing hand over their mouths as they died. And he could do any of it again, he knew, without feeling what he was feeling now. The difference lay in one small word.

War.

He’d killed men of just about every colour, ideology, religion, loyalty, height, weight, shoe size or whatever else might distinguish them as individuals. But the one thing every last one of them had in common was that they were all soldiers. Rebels, guerillas, professionals, mercenaries, even conscripts: like it or not, they were all in the game, and they all knew that, too. It wasn’t an issue of whether you bore weapons, either; Jackson had killed plenty of empty‐
handed men. Once you were in the game, being armed was your look‐
out, at all times. You couldn’t ask for quarter just because you’d left your gun in your other jacket.

But the kid wasn’t armed, he wasn’t in the game, and this certainly wasn’t a fucking war.

Connor
had
told him up‐
front that the op was going to be on British soil and illegal. Leaving aside pedantic quibbles about the soil part, he couldn’t complain he’d been misled. he’d chosen to take part of his own volition, tempted by the money, pure and simple. It was a handsome purse that Connor had dangled in front of him, a shitload more than the adventurer clowns would be getting, and doubtless more than Connor would be offering in future. The man needed his outfit’s first op to be a success, and therefore needed to secure a few first‐
rate personnel in a hurry, so the money was kind of a golden hello. It was intended also to soothe those niggles about making the transition from mercenary to criminal. He would have said ‘temporary transition’, but he was philosophical enough to understand that whatever your future intentions, you can’t temporarily lose your virginity.

Connor, in Jackson’s experience, was a solid enough man, someone whose judgment he generally trusted. He hadn’t suspected Connor was holding back any details about the job when he made the offer; even now he remained pretty sure of that. It was he who’d been naive, who hadn’t fully thought it through. The way the plan had sounded, yes, sure, it was criminal, but he’d reckoned they could pull it off with an acceptable minimum of fatalities.

But when he saw the assembly at the farm, he instantly began to re‐
evaluate his projected casualty figure. Apart from this raggle‐
taggle band of amateurs being so impatient to get killing that they had started on
each other
, the fact that Finlay Dawson was ultimately in charge had unnerved Jackson even more. Not only had he always considered Dawson a thoroughly nasty piece of work, but he tended to have the destabilising effect upon Connor of turning him into a junior sibling who was always trying too hard to impress his bigger brother. That was when Jackson first started thinking about bailing out, finding an ally in Gaghen, who had a reliably sharp eye for the logistics of these things, and who had been privately vocal to Jackson about his misgivings.

When they confronted Connor in the dinghy, the boss had sounded reasonable enough, and made sufficient sense for Jackson to start revising the casualty projection back down. But it was only in that corridor, looking into that kid’s eyes, that he understood precisely what figure constituted an ‘acceptable minimum’, and two seconds later Connor had exceeded it.

Connor snapped the plastic keycard and dropped it on the floor, then closed the door on the shameful little scene. Gaghen reported back that there was no further sign of life in the surrounding rooms. On they went.

They made it to the stairs and climbed to just below where the steps reached the lobby’s carpeted floor. Slowly, Gaghen crawled upwards and stuck his head above ground‐
level. He reported that the lights were on but there was no sign of any movement outside. Connor signalled to Jackson and he scuttled low across the front of the reception desks, eyes always on the glass doors. Jackson took up a crouching position close to the foot of the next flight, and looked up the staircase. There was no‐
one there, not that he had decided what he would do if there was. He felt like he was on autopilot, detached from his actions but doing them because so far he hadn’t sussed out any viable alternatives. He gave the all‐
clear. Connor crossed the floor then headed quickly up the flight and out of view. Gaghen followed upon a further signal and then Jackson was the rearguard once more.

There were lights on in the first‐
floor corridors, but it was dark from the second upwards, so they were able to concentrate on haste rather than caution as they made for the top. The main stairs stopped at the fifth floor, where Connor consulted his plans once again and directed them to the end of another corridor, where a door marked DANGER – AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY succumbed to Gaghen’s drill. Beyond it was one last flight of stairs and, at the top, one more door. They climbed to the summit and violated another lock before emerging finally on to the roof.

Their goal was right before them, fenced off in a pen that also encircled the door they’d just come through. Beyond that, there was only common sense to keep you back from the edges and the drop, which on the north side went all the way to the water. The pen accommodated two huge satellite dishes, but it was the hardware for sending signals
out
that they were interested in. A towering radio aerial reached highest, tapering from a base resembling a miniature pylon into a gently swaying single steel shaft. However, in this day and age an equal priority went to its shorter neighbour, a two‐
way transponder for amplifying and relaying mobile phone service signals.

On Connor’s order, Jackson and Gaghen exposed and disconnected the power supplies to both; also, in the case of the radio aerial, ripping out all feedlines from the base. Connor, meanwhile, delicately connected the severed ends of the transponder’s power cable to a remote‐
controllable circuit‐
breaker, allowing him to switch it back on later, when required. Still squatting next to his handiwork, Connor pulled a mobile from his belt and tested for a signal, then clipped the phone back in place and stood up.

‘Thank you, gentlemen. Stage one is complete. You can now run back down the stairs naked and singing if you feel like it. Nobody on this rig can tell anyone who’s further than earshot. Except, of course,’ he added, reaching for his radio, ‘ourselves.’

Then he said the words Jackson had been dreading since that sub‐
level corridor.

‘Beta Leader, this is Alpha One. Alpha team has achieved primary objective. Commence incursion.’

‘You’re a brazen, bold, bad article.’

That was what Simone’s mum always said when she’d done something naughty, usually accompanied by the time‐
honoured ritual of the circular spanking (mother takes child’s wrist in left hand, aims swipe at bottom with right, child evades in an anti‐
clockwise motion, mother pirouettes on left heel; repeat until dizzy).

Bad she’d always understood. Little scope for moral relativism in the era of the pushchair. Bold she wrongly assumed to be a tautology, until she learned the distinction between doing something wrong and knowingly doing something wrong. Brazen she didn’t really get. It just became part of the phrase, brazenboldbadarticle. Similarly her father used to jokingly call her wee brother ‘Rank Bajin’, after a Glaswegian cartoon villain. She grasped the ‘bad yin’ part, but ‘rank’ in its adjective form had fallen from common usage at the time, so it became a meaningless prefix: all bad yins were rankbajins.

Tonight, however, she knew
exactly
what brazen meant. And Jesus Christ, did it feel good. Not that she was exactly into scarlet‐
woman territory here; she was just ignoring her husband’s big moment to take the air with another man, who was, well, obviously, not her husband. But there was an enervating sense of liberation about it, a delicious taste of a better life she was ready now to live.

She put her right arm through Matthew’s left as they exited the function suite, relishing the inquisitive look on the face of Jamie, the already discomfited receptionist. If being bold was knowingly doing something naughty, then being brazen was enjoying it.

Simone had never felt quite so confident as when she walked into that party, alone, Gavin having
had
to be down there earlier, darling. It wasn’t just about how she looked (although she did not feel inclined to be modest about that tonight), but who she
was
and what she intended to do. She quickly spotted Gavin in his constant gravitational orbit around Catherine, working the floor as the guests circulated. Once, she feared, she might have cut the pathetic figure of the mousy missus, cowering in a corner, ignored, people politely pretending not to notice her to spare all parties the embarrassment of acknowledging what was so obviously going on. Not tonight. Simone worked the floor herself, appropriating co‐
host status and earning several satisfying glares of bemused exasperation from her husband.

Despite the emotional eruptions taking place all around her, she felt largely detached from the occasion, immune from the nostalgia that seemed to be engulfing everyone else. She suspected this was because, to an extent, she was acting a part. Nonetheless, she was enjoying giving the performance, and contrary to what Gavin might assume, she was playing solely to herself. The others were not the audience: they were the extras. However, she decided to promote one of them to a cameo when she happened upon Matthew Black standing on his own.

She’d admit to pleasant surprise that he’d turned up, but back when she added his name to the invitation list, she hadn’t done so in the hope of actually speaking to him, as she thought he’d probably have no recollection of her. She just thought it would piss Gavin off to see him there, inevitably the centre of far more attention than himself.

Simone had noticed Matthew arrive, edging almost reluctantly into the room with an unexpected air of sheepishness that bordered upon the apologetic. However, her frequent glances in his direction confirmed that there was indeed a steady stream of guests approaching him in turn; but far from holding court, his manner appeared to be deferential.

When her own circulations eventually took her close by, fortuitously he had just been robbed of his previous companion. It was a night when anyone was allowed to go up and talk to anyone else, pretext not required, but she still felt rather nervous about approaching him. That whole ‘ken’t his faither’ thing, the traditional Scottish dismissal of the local boy made good, wasn’t working for her. Matthew Black might once have been in her class at school, but he’d also once had an affair with Juliette Armstrong. Phrases like ‘best actress nominee’ and ‘seven million dollars per picture’ flitted unhelpfully into her head.