Prologue:

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-heaven-and-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 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 chère, 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
thirteen-year-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 blasé 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 fivenine
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 codecrunchers
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-em-up – 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 military 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.

Yeah. Oops, huh?

Seemed like a compelling idea at the time. Her own private
act of post 9-11 anger, prompted largely by the war in
Afghanistan and not at all by her parents’ marriage disintegrating.
Afghanistan. That’s where they were bombing. What
the hell was there to bomb in Afghanistan? Wouldn’t they have
to send some army engineers over there to build some shit first,
kinda to make the bombing runs worthwhile? Nineteen of the
hijackers were Saudis. Bin Laden was a Saudi. The money was
Saudi, the ideological pressure was Saudi. So let’s bomb
Afghanistan. Fuck that.

She shut down a power station near Jedda and halted production
in two major oilfields for close to eight hours. It was
embarrassingly easy. In fact, if it had been even slightly harder,
maybe she’d have stopped to think a little more about just what
the hell she was doing. It didn’t even take very long, nor was
it a particularly cute or elegant hack. She just enslaved a couple
of home PCs somewhere in Kuwait and used them as bots to
orchestrate a crude, worm-led, denial-of-service email attack.
This predictably led the on-site techs to shut down and reboot
all but the core operating systems required to keep the station
online, conveniently isolating and identifying the masked ports
she needed access to in order to really screw things up.

There was predictable panic at the business end over motive,
perpetrators and what the attack might be a precursor to. Al
Qaeda? Iraq? Israel? The US? Calls were made, denials issued,
intelligence sources tapped. Fighter jets, she later learned, were
put on standby in at least two countries. But while all this was
happening, some über-geek in Finland, hastily retained by an
oil company, was following a clumsily discarded trail of evidence
all the way back to that notorious global aggressor,
Canada.

What do you mean you never heard about it on the news?

Embarrassment stings far less if there are fewer observers,
and international embarrassment is no different. Neither Canada
nor Saudi were ever going to look good over this one, and they
knew it would be mutually convenient to write off their losses
and cover it up. Countries did it all the time, though it was
easier when it was unilateral. A couple of months back, for
instance, the US had misplaced a Harrier jump jet, and decided
that avoiding scrutiny of the circumstances was worth more
than however many million the hardware would cost to replace.
Lessons were no doubt learned, private apologies and assurances
granted, but, officially, nothing happened, a position that
ironically might have been harder to maintain had they actually
apprehended the perpetrator.

Nobody heard about it on the news, though that didn’t mean
nobody knew. Bett sure knew, like he knew oh so many things,
and he knew early enough to tip her off that she was hours
away from being arrested.

Ah, yes, there was a memorable little interlude. Was she ever
done wishing she could experience those fun few moments
again, as she contemplated what some petulant keystrokes had
wrought for herself in the big, wide world. He informed her by
email, attaching copies of confidential correspondence, transcripts
of briefings, damage reports, estimates of financial implications,
projected costs of security upgrading and increased
insurance premiums. A lot of very powerful, very important
and very serious people would be looking for retribution over
this, and that was just at the Canadian end. It looked like the
last screaming tantrum of her teen years was going to hamstring
her adulthood. She could see college disappearing from the
horizon and prison looming up in its place. She could see a
weary and crushed version of herself released in five to seven,
subject to restraining orders forbidding her access to computers,
the one thing in her life that she knew how to make sense of.
She could see a long career in waitressing, serving coffee to the
people who actually mattered, before slouching home to a shitty
apartment filled with laundry and regrets.

Bett had offered a way out. Taking it was only marginally
less scary than what she was already staring down the barrel
of, involving, as it did, disappearing from her old life with just
the clothes on her back (and doing so within an hour of receiving
the email), but as far as decisions went, it was a no-brainer. Not
quite the career trajectory she’d once envisaged, but things had
worked out a lot more colourfully than the future had looked
from her old bedroom. She had a great apartment in a beautiful
village in the south of France. She had a good job with an
excellent salary, plus health and dental. The only niggling flaw
was there was no fixed term of contract and nothing in the small
print regarding how you went about leaving. Oh, and it occasionally
involved killing people.

To Lex’s relief, Som at last stood up straight, the flight case
gently righting itself as he relieved it of his weight. He jumped
up and down on the spot a couple of times and wrapped his
arms around himself.

‘I hope this place we’re hitting has central heating,’ he said.
‘Wouldn’t have to worry if it was a hollowed-out volcano. The
top-of-the-range ones have a pool of boiling lava for the evil
genius to dispose of dissenters and broil burgers at masterplanlaunching
parties.’

‘This isn’t cold,’ Lex told him. ‘Try winter in Ontario some
time. You should have more layers on too.’

‘I didn’t expect to be standing out here more than a couple
of minutes. Plus, we’ll have to change when we get there. Bett
would have mentioned clothing at the briefing if it was an issue,
wouldn’t he?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lex replied. ‘Maybe he did. I wasn’t listening.
I thought it was your turn to pay attention.’

‘No, I traded with Armand. I have to pay attention next time.
Armand?’
‘I’m sorry, I fell asleep,’ Armand said with a shrug. ‘I’m sure
he didn’t say anything important.’

‘Where is Bett anyway?’ Lex asked.

‘Probably taking a bath,’ Armand told her. ‘You leave that
man unoccupied for any length of time and psshh! He’s in the
tub.’

‘Hey, he’s the boss,’ she reasoned. ‘Guy owns a mansion with
half-a-dozen bathrooms. Maybe he figures he’s gotta get his use
out of all of them or he’s wasted his money.’

‘Whatever makes him happy,’ Som said, stamping his feet on
the flagstones.

‘He’s Bett,’ Lex reminded him. ‘Nothing makes him happy.’

‘Okay, whatever makes him marginally less belligerent.’

‘He’s got this forecourt bugged, you both know that?’ Armand
warned, casting his eyes melodramatically towards a nearby fir.
‘Seriously, is he around?’ Lex asked again. ‘Because it doesn’t
look like anybody’s home. Or are we meeting him there?’

‘That’s a negative,’ Som said. ‘Nuno’s meeting us there. I’m
pretty sure I heard Rebekah say we were gonna pick up Bett in
Aix.’

‘In Aix?’ Lex asked, a little dismayed. ‘This place is in the
Alps. If we’re picking up Bett en route, we’ll be lucky to get
there by lunchtime tomorrow. Are we planning to hit it in daylight,
is that the deal? What would be the point of that? Who
the hell hits a place like Marledoq in the middle of the afternoon?’
‘Maybe that is the point,’ Armand suggested, smiling. ‘Why
pay anyone to guard it during office hours if the thieves and
marauders only work the late shift?’

‘You’ve been around Bett too long. You’re starting to sound
like him with that disingenuous bullshit.’

Som rasped his lips and shuddered.

‘Day or night, we’re not going to get there at all if the wheels
don’t show up. Where is she?’

‘Why don’t you wait inside if you’re cold?’ Lex suggested,
prompting him to glance back bitterly at the mansion’s sturdily
locked storm doors.

‘Yeah, very funny. But I’m gonna go sit in my car if she
doesn’t show soon. What’s the time?’

‘Seven minutes past five,’ Lex told him.

‘She’s cutting it fine,’ Som said. ‘You know what Bett’s like
about punctuality. “Late is what we call the dead”,’ he quoted.
‘She’s not late yet,’ Lex observed. ‘She was only going to Nice,
to pick up our ride, she said.’

‘She said that much?’ muttered Som. ‘Favouritism.’

‘Our ride?’ asked Armand. ‘What’s wrong with the old charabanc?’
‘Maybe it wouldn’t stand up to her hot driving skillz,’ Som
suggested, emphasising the z for Lex’s benefit.

‘I’m not so convinced about that,’ Armand said. ‘Have you
seen her in that new Beetle?’

‘Yeah,’ Lex agreed. ‘I saw her driving out of here yesterday and
it was rocking like it was being boffed by an invisible Herbie.’
‘A bit rusty with the manual transmission,’ Armand mused.

‘Not unusual for a visitor recently arrived from the United
States,’ he added archly, alluding to the typically shady provenance
of Bett’s latest appointment.

‘Yeah, well, whatever her story, Bett wouldn’t be calling her
“Transport Manager” for nothing,’ Som insisted. ‘Hey, what
time’s it now?’ he then asked.

‘It’s . . .’ Lex started, but stopped herself as it occurred to her
that Som could not possibly have come out on an op minus a
timepiece. ‘Why don’t you look at your own watch?’

‘I don’t want to roll up my sleeve. Too cold.’

‘You’re a pussy, Som,’ she told him. ‘A shivering, pitiful Thai
pussy.’

‘Thai pussy beaucoup good,’ he responded in a hammy accent.
‘Love you long time.’

‘It’s nine minutes past,’ she told him, mainly to stop the routine
going any further.

‘Shit. Doesn’t augur well for Rebekah’s first op,’ he stated.

‘She’s not late yet,’ Lex reiterated. ‘Not for fifty seconds, leastways.’

‘Well, I don’t see any headlights.’

‘Maybe her killer skillz let her drive in the dark,’ Lex told
him, emphasising the z herself this time.

‘Shhh,’ said Armand. ‘Listen. Do you hear that?’

‘What?’ asked Som.

Nobody said anything for a few moments, allowing them to
hear a low bassy sound, distant but getting incrementally louder
by the second.

‘You gotta be kidding me,’ Lex declared. She stepped further
out into the forecourt and looked around, but saw only black
night beyond the avenue of trees. Still the noise grew nearer.
‘No way,’ said Som.

‘Thirty seconds,’ Armand remarked, standing away from the
flight cases and looking towards the house, from which direction
the sound was approaching.

Less than ten seconds later, the black shape of a helicopter
swooped upwards into sight above the building and circled the
property once by way of signalling intention to land on the
gravel. The three of them stepped back towards the house, Lex
taking a moment to rest Som’s flight case down flat before
making her retreat.

She looked at her watch again. The chopper touched down
at nine minutes and fifty-four seconds past five.

‘She’s six seconds early,’ Lex reported to Som above the storm
of the rotorblades. ‘Oh ye of little faith.’

‘Transport Manager,’ Som called back. ‘Very funny. I guess
she meant Nice as in Nice Côte d’Azure airport, for a charter.
Wonder who she hired to fly the thing. Somebody who can keep
his mouth shut, I hope.’

The front cabin door opened and out stepped Rebekah in a
black one-piece jumpsuit, her blonde hair fluttering untidily in
the wind where it spilled from beneath her helmet. She slid
open the door to the passenger cabin and strode towards the
flight cases. Given their cue, Lex, Som and Armand came forward
again and joined her in loading their equipment. Directly
underneath the blades, the noise was too intense to allow any
verbal communication, so an exchange of gestures conveyed
that everything was in place and they were ready to board. Som
eagerly climbed in first, followed by Lex, deferred to by the
bowing Armand. Rebekah then slammed the cabin door closed
and returned to her seat at the controls. It was far quieter inside,
but the noise level increased again as the blades accelerated in
preparation for take-off. A voice cut across the growing whine,
carried clearly over embedded speakers along both sides of the
cabin.

‘Good evening everybody and welcome aboard this
Eurocopter Dauphin AS365N2 travelling to Marledoq via Aix
en Provence. We will be leaving very shortly, so please fasten
your seat belts and place all personal items, including handguns,
tasers and plastic explosives, securely in the hatches provided.
We ask also at this time that you stow all mobile phones
and personal tracking devices, and that passengers with laptops
refrain from hacking any mainframe computer systems as
this can interfere with our navigational instruments. We would
like to take this opportunity to say thank you for flying Air Bett,
and that we appreciate you have no choice.’