The Magpie Trap: A Novel (29 page)

But Cheryl could not
dismiss the past as easily as Danny, and saw the chance to get in another
barbed comment.

‘
Straggling cobwebs of my old life
? You really think you are
something don’t you, Danny?
That’s
what’s
always been your problem. You can’t just accept, like everybody else that you
might have to just settle for normal. That’s not settling for second best, by
the way, its just accepting that someone isn’t going to just decide that you,
above all others, deserve a big break. You’ve always compared yourself to
Chris; don’t now see this as your meal-ticket!’

           
Danny
rose from his creaky garden chair with a sigh. There was no way that they could
rebuild their broken communication channels; some key connection had been lost,
and now they could not achieve the same wavelength.

‘You’ve always treated
me like a child. Now you are punishing me like one…’

The anger was still
burning brightly in Cheryl however, ‘You behave like a schoolboy, and that’s
exactly why you are in this position.’

‘Why is it women feel the
right to dismiss men’s concerns these days as though they are flights of fancy?
I dream; I hold great desires; I want to see everything; in days gone by, I
would have been revered as a philosopher; now I am ridiculed in the problem
pages of your damn magazines as some kind of lost cause,’ Danny almost shouted
back at her, unable to bite his tongue any longer. He had to make something
which
meant something
pass across
their communication gap, and the louder he shouted, the less data seemed to be
being received.

‘It’s because your
great desires
are always as if they are
lifted straight out of the adventure books which you read as kids. Danny, you
are not, nor can you be, a pirate, and yet you three are all off to
Mauritius
to try and be exactly that…’

“That isn’t what I
mean; I want something transcendental, something that means something…’ He
stopped, unable to find the words to describe his universal thoughts.

‘We could have had
something transcendental here Danny; kids. That’s what I wanted. That’s the
big project
which could have made your
life mean something… it just wasn’t enough though was it?’

Cheryl collapsed into
sobs on the table; the great communication gap between the two of them had suddenly
been fused; the years of radio silence were now over. It was as though a huge
cloud had been lifted. Suddenly they each knew that the things that they had
left unsaid - the big ideas which they buried under the million petty arguments
- were the magnets which continued to draw them together despite everything.

They had a deep primal
understanding. Danny picked Cheryl up, hardly feeling her dead weight in his
arms as he pushed open the patio doors and carried her to the sofa. His
shoulder was already soaking wet from Cheryl’s tears, and yet his own eyes were
dry.

All Danny could think
was four words, over and over again in his head:
What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?

They fell asleep in
each other’s arms.

Morning wafted into the front room like a bad
smell; bringing with it harsh reality and the consequences of their actions.
Danny had been awake for a while; crushed up against the multitude of cushions
which made up the sultan’s bed of a sofa. He was staring gently at Cheryl’s face,
stroking her still unfamiliarly short hair; the hair clips which had held up a
collection of long strands down the side had long since fallen out, and it was
now a straggly mess. He was trying to iron out the creases with his hands, to
caress everything back into the same place it had been on the previous night.

Through a small gap in
the maroon curtains, he saw that it had started out a grey morning, reflecting
his melancholy mood. The stolen hours of last night now had to be returned, but
he still had these peaceful moments before his wife woke up.

Cheryl smelled faintly
of spirits, the lingering after-taste of rum was still on her tongue. She was
usually so careful about brushing her teeth that Danny
revelled
in the difference. Her eyes were jet black; dried
riverbeds of mascara tears made them seem like panda eyes. She shivered in her
sleep, and unconsciously drew Danny closer into her grasp, but gradually the
cold worked its way into her system.

He saw the first signs
of her waking. A twitch of the nose as though she was about to sneeze. A sleepy
murmur emanated from her lips. She was starting to emerge from whatever
alternate reality she had hidden in for the past few hours. Danny wanted her to
be shielded from the cold, harsh reality of the morning.

Then he heard the soft,
bare footsteps of Jean stepping out of her bed upstairs, directly above them at
the front of the house. The house was so well insulated that surely she would
not have heard them talking away at the back of the house the previous night,
but for her to discover them now would be a disaster that he was not willing to
face.

For Jean, this would be
just another morning; waking up, putting on the kettle, a brief read of the
papers, followed by whatever else she did before work. For Danny, these were
the last strands of normality.

Slowly, almost
imperceptibly, he began to untangle himself from the tight knot of limbs on the
sofa. He managed to work his numb right arm out from underneath Cheryl, as
though one false move would spring a trap. He continued to gently stroke her
cheek with his other hand, lulling her into a false sense of security.

Then he had to somehow
climb over the sleeping body which he achieved in stages. Afterwards, he
carefully replaced his missing body with a series of cushions from the back of
the sofa, and in one nimble move, his lithe limbs were
balletically
lifted over her, and he was away.

If escaping from your
past is so difficult, thought Danny, escaping from
Edison
’s Printers will be a walk in the park…

As he quietly closed
the front door behind him, a sense that he was not only literally closing a
door, but symbolically closing the door rushed over him. For him,
Leeds
would always mean Cheryl. And even if the last night was supposed to
be the full stop - the emotional goodbye - there would be a permanent question
mark over her; the symbol which asked ‘what might have been’.

The only thing that was
certain was that he would never see her again.

Cells

I am
trapped in my own little cell from which I construct my own reality. I deal
with email and IP addresses, mobile numbers, websites, instead of people. It
becomes a game; how real do I want to make this seem? What can I do?

Hundreds of people must feel this way… I could
lose my company millions of pounds with the click of a button, or I could make
my company millions… A phone and a laptop are the only tools they allow me in
my cell. I think I am making contact with the outside world but it may only be
an illusion. My reality could be self-perpetuating.

           
My world comprises distinct cells,
in which I play my game. There is my social circle, work, family, betting…
Within the cells we can reinvent ourselves - become who we want to be. But this
persona becomes lost in translation between data streams. In the old analogue
reality, that sepia tinted world in which our bodies still exist, our
part-machine new personas cannot be seen by the human eye. How do we stop
ourselves becoming fragmented? How do we stop key parts of ourselves breaking
off and floating off into hyperspace or being hi-jacked by a strong gust of
wind and blown to some far off corner of the world where we cannot get it back.

           
I started to lose myself in this way
when I entered into the world of work; the boundaries of my self-hood gradually
slipped away, developing into a serious case of erosion. What do we have left?
How can we hold back the slippage of the houses of our memories? They will all
eventually fall into the comforting, nihilistic sea.

As there is no reason to leave the cells, we only
realise
too late that we are falling too… that we no
longer live in an age of true consequence. After all we can simply press the
off-button and we no longer have to contemplate the pain we cause.

I know what I’m doing; I’m trying to plead my case
for if we are caught. I’ll plead technological insanity, schizophrenia brought
on by too much e. Not e as in the drug; I mean electronics.

But I’m just making fucking excuses. I know very
well that there are still consequences to my actions; I know very well that
people might get hurt. I started to go to betting shops simply to feel the
reality of handing the money over; to smell the money, dirtied by the grubby
little hands of the feral inhabitants of the place. I go to pubs to try and
break away. I still live in a real world of touch, taste and smell; it is not
just sight.

I do feel as though I am behind a big screen
though, being watched by somebody - who? Is there a God; is there somebody controlling
our actions, our thoughts?

Even when I try and slip away from the cameras, I
will still be a little red dot in an air traffic control tower - a plane
crossing the seas to
Mauritius
. Then
I’ll be the bit of data which says that I withdrew money at a cash machine, or
else I’ll be the biometric information stored at an airport at my destination.
And someone, somewhere will know what I’ve done.
It’s a
kind of artificial conscience which is the new religion. Right now, a satellite
is tracking our van’s progress as Mark drives along the

Even if I’m not caught, I’ll be punished for what
I do.
 

The Intertel Shift

Mark’s dreams were unhappy ones. He’d spent so
long trying to ensure that all of the technical aspects of the plan worked to
perfection that his mind seemed capable of only thinking of the systems and
what could go wrong with them. He dreamed of the wire-cutters triggering the
alarm at the perimeter fence despite the fact that the Intertel Shift was
supposed to send all such alarms haywire for the night. He dreamed that the
dummy system that he’d set up would suddenly stop working and they’d be
exposed. Most of all, he dreamed about the moment that they’d have to enter the
Precisioner unit. This was the moment that it could all go wrong. It was the
one weak link in the whole plan and Mark’s unconscious thoughts reminded him of
that fact over and over again.

The problem with the
entry to the Precisioner unit was the fact that they would have to over-ride
the door code. And every time Mark had rigged up a system to replicate this,
the alarm had gone off when he’d over-ridden the code more than once in quick
succession. And the problem with this was the fact that only somebody outside
the site, working on the dummy system would be able to over-ride the code.
Unless they managed to open the door at the exact moment it needed to be open,
the rest of their plan would all be in vain.

Mark’s dreams therefore
always seemed to comprise his reaching the door and finding it locked, or
accidentally setting the alarm off. What happened next differed slightly from
dream to dream, but generally involved either the big security guard, Callum
Burr, catching them in the act and inflicting terrible violence, or else the
blue-flashing lights of the police would appear on scene. No matter how many
times he replayed it, the outcome was always the same. Somebody got hurt.

At about
three am
, Mark got up from his bed. He’d writhed and
kicked so much in his sleep that the bedclothes were on the floor and the sheet
was hanging off the side. He knew that he’d never be able to get back to sleep
again. Now, he was in it for the long haul. When the dawn broke, it would be
the start of the day in which he’d undertake a stupid, brave, desperate, heroic
heist upon probably the best protected site in the north of
England
; a site he knew so well from countless
maintenance visits to repair the very security systems he was now hoping to
bypass.

Something would go
wrong. Something was bound to go wrong. In nearly every heist film he’d ever
seen, something always went wrong. The criminals can never be seen to get away
with it, not unless they are unrealistically, film-star good-looking like Brad
Pitt and George Clooney in the
Oceans
Eleven
films. And Mark knew that he wasn’t film-star good-looking; Chris
Parker, perhaps. But not him.

He dragged himself down
into the kitchen and busied himself with making a cup of tea in his massive
mug. He forced himself to look at the framed picture of his mother and father
on the wall, just to remember why he was putting himself through such torment.
In the picture, his mother and father were sharing some stupid joke. It was probably
the one time in their whole shared lives that they’d laughed at the same time.
And now his dad was gone; maybe it was the least he could do to try to put a
smile back on his mam’s face.

He wished that he had
more time to test the systems. He wished that he’d have been able to try a
couple of other ways of over-riding the door code. But the Intertel Shift
dictated that it had to be that night. The Intertel Shift into which they’d
poured all of their hopes.

What if it doesn’t happen as we all expect it to?
What if, just like the telecoms companies say, the changeover is simple and
easy and everything works just as it is supposed to? What if
Edison
’s are
already prepared for this kind of assault? After all, it’s not restricted
information that the Intertel Shift will happen… This has become all too real,
all too quickly.

The watched kettle
finally boiled and Mark started to pour the steaming water into his mug. The
argument carried on in his head. Perhaps God was back, playing his usual
tricks.

But everybody’s talked-down the Intertel Shift so
much that now it’s nothing but a joke, just like the Millennium Bug. Everybody
remembers the story of the boy who cried wolf, and they’ve not bothered to
worry about the consequences this time. And even if they have, it’s not as
though that’s our only plan. We’ve got dummy systems, ways of over-riding the
door locks. We’ve seen the goddamn plans for the site. We know exactly how
everything will pan out. It will be like clock-work.

Mark’s clock did not appear
to be working however. The second hand crawled over the face like it had run
out of batteries. He turned his back on it and shuffled out of the kitchen. He
climbed the stairs slowly and made for the box room and for the computer. His
leg seemed to ache much more than it had done for a long time now. Perhaps it
was an ache of warning, or of premonition. Mark had never really trusted to
signs, but right then he felt like Danny Morris in his willingness to believe.
Maybe it was time for a last attempt to make an on-line confession?

He clicked on his
computer and waited for it to boot-up. As usual, it took far too long. He’d
have to do something about cleaning up the disk and freeing up some space. It
seemed to wheeze and moan like an old man, breathing heavily with the effort to
attain fully working-order.

When the system was
finally up and running, he immediately made for his email account. Not that he
was expecting any emails, but it was habit. One of the new emails caught his
eye straight away. It had been sent from that same email address that had sent
him the vicious magpies videos. For a moment, he started to wonder whether the
man that had sent them had anything to do with the heist that they were
planning. Surely Danny wasn’t capable of coming up with a plan like that on his
own…

He opened the email.
There was no attachment this time, just a simple couple of lines of text.
Quickly, he scanned it.

Mark,

Daniel Morris and Chris Parker are planning to
double-cross you. They will make off with the money. You must stay with them,
no matter how much you want to run away. And Mark; trust to the Intertel Shift;
it
will
happen. Do not ask me how I know, but trust me on this. You need to do
this one thing for your family and then the rest of your life can be lived in
peace.

There as no email
signatory. There was no indication of how the man knew about what they were
going to undertake. But somehow, Mark convinced himself that he should not
bring up the contents of the email with Danny and Chris. This was his secret.
And if anything were to go wrong, he could always contact the sender and get
his advice. The man seemed to want to help, after all, and who was he to
question the motives of another person. Even God, it seemed, had a part to play
in this; everyone had a stake or an opinion.

Callum Burr also received communication that
night. It interrupted his enjoyment of the last few drops of his
Highland Park
whisky. He’d once set the bottle aside for a
special occasion but since Hunter’s arrival on site and his continuous talk
about giving up the booze, Burr had been driven to drink even more than he
usually was. Over the past couple of days he’d managed to sink almost the full
bottle.

‘Hello?’ he croaked,
answering his mobile on the third ring.

‘Ah, Mr. Burr; I am
very happy to speak to you. I speak to you with a warning. There is something
that you should know. A way of putting your Mr. Hunter back in his place.’

‘Go on,’ said Callum,
deciding that he’d better not have another swig of the drink until the conversation
was over. He carefully placed his tumbler on his coffee table.

‘Tomorrow night is the
Intertel Shift,’ said the voice.

‘I know that,’ said
Callum, feeling superior. He knew all about the Shift. He’d bought a new
digital telly and he could already get loads more channels.

‘So you know that
tomorrow night, when there is a changeover, most security systems will cease to
work properly; security systems such as the ones on your very site?’

‘Yeah,’ lied Callum,
gruffly. He picked at some of the frayed ends of thread on the arm of his chair
and waited for the voice to get on with telling him what he was supposed to
already know.

‘Tomorrow night, you
must be on your guard. Do not let Hunter investigate when the security systems
start to go crazy. This is your final mission. If you distract Mr. Hunter, then
our debt will be wiped clean. If you do not, then the debt will be bigger than
you can possibly imagine.’

‘But what’s going to
happen? Is somebody going to try to raid the site?’

‘That’s not your
concern. Your concern is Hunter.’

‘But how will I
distract him?’

‘Take his access badge
again. Make up anything. Say that you will investigate any emergencies
yourself. Say you want to go outside and call your wife. Lie, Callum Burr, lie.
I’m sure that it comes easily to you.’

Callum Burr felt his
face glow red. Part of it was embarrassment. Another part was excitement. If
what this mysterious man was telling him was right, he’d certainly have one
over on Hunter.

‘You can get rid of
Hunter once and for all if you follow these instructions. Number one; take a
bottle of whisky in to work. Plant it somewhere so it looks as though Hunter
has been drinking on the job and that’s why he failed to interpret the Intertel
Shift. Number two;
make sure that you
take his badge.’

‘Is that all?’ asked
Burr.

‘That’s all. I am a man
of my word, and once you have done that, your part in this story will come to
an end.’

Callum Burr smiled. It
was nice to have somebody batting on his team for once. It was nice that
someone was looking out for him so much. Most of all, he had to admit it, it
would be nice to be able to put a certain Jim Hunter in his place. And if
Charlie Wade happened to come a-knocking, he’d be able to tell him
yes sir, I know all about why the security systems
have gone all-haywire. The dinosaur Jim Hunter doesn’t though. And look sir,
what’s that bottle of whisky that he’s left lying around.