One Word Kill

We stood, looking at each other. Mr Jackson was doing his level best, but the degree of awkwardness with the four of us in a brightly lit room was sufficiently high that, with a gun to my head and the option to dance or die, I would have happily opted for the sweet mercy of a bullet.

‘Wait.’ John was starting to look as uncomfortable as I felt. He ran for the lights and dialled down the dimmer to squint level. ‘This is a lot easier with a beer in you. Trust me.’

Mia approached Simon and began to swing her hips. Michael Jackson was beginning to start something at last. ‘It’s easy,’ she said, reaching for his hands. ‘You can’t do it wrong, except by just standing there.’

And somehow, she made it happen. It wasn’t down to her enthusiasm or cajoling, it wasn’t even the pretence of anonymity in the half-light, or the implicit vow of silence, a secret pact never to be spoken of. It was just something in her. Kindness maybe. But in the space of a few minutes all of us were dancing, badly, and just not caring. And John, for all his money, looks, and mastery of the piano was, by far, the worst of us!

We danced through ‘Startin Somethin’’ into ‘Baby Be Mine’, where I watched Mia, and on into ‘The Girl Is Mine’, where John and I exchanged speculative glances.

I had come to the house hurting and sick, dreading the whole thing, even as I played along that it was Simon who needed the lesson, not me. A large part of me had zero interest in going to a party. That part wanted to curl up around my illness, to turn in on itself and wait to be reprieved or to die. Even a good chunk of the part of me that said I should go was saying so out of a sense of guilt. The guilt that people on a timer feel about wasted opportunity. The big C had wrapped itself around me, and here I was thinking of letting my first real party slide by because I felt sick and I might make a fool of myself on the dance floor?

But when the beat took hold and I let myself go, it seemed that the pain and even the nausea took a back seat, replaced by a joy that was, in part, relief, but mostly just the simple primal pleasure of the dance. And yes, it was also true that some fraction of it was also down to the fact that although John Featherstonhaugh might have music at his fingertips, when it came to Motown, the rest of him jerked around with about as much sense of rhythm as an epileptic cow. It was true when he had joked that jealousy was an ugly thing. And true that I was jealous. Mia felt increasingly precious to me, even though so little had passed between us. To John, I knew she would simply be a conquest. Not treated badly. But not . . . valued to her true worth.

Inevitably ‘Thriller’ arrived, after which the needle parted company with the vinyl and we stood just a touch out of breath, a touch sweaty, starting to feel the embarrassment rise around us once more.

‘You see,’ Mia said, laughing. ‘Easy. And you’re all coming to the party, or I stop coming to D&D.’

‘OK.’ Simon agreed without hesitation. I think it was the D&D threat that did it. Mia was part of our group now. And those ties run deep. You don’t abandon a party member. Even if it means going to a party.

‘So what did Demus say?’ John asked.

We had adjourned to another living room and were distributed along the length of two huge leather sofas, the over-stuffed kind punctuated with deep-set buttons; Mia and I in one, facing Simon and John in the other.

‘Well, for starters he told us what your dad does,’ Mia said.

‘What does his dad do?’ Simon asked.

‘John’s father is, among other things, the chief financial officer for Motorola UK,’ I said. ‘He is also on the board of directors and a significant shareholder in the parent company.’

‘This is news?’ John stretched. ‘I’ve told you this before.’

‘Yeah . . .’ I deflated somewhat. ‘Well. I wasn’t listening.’

‘So why does he care what my father does?’

‘To make the gadget that’s going to record Mia’s memories, so she can be healed after her accident—’

‘Wait! What?’ John raised his hand. ‘Accident?’

‘He didn’t say much about it, but she gets hurt and we need to record her memories to put them back afterwards.’

‘This sounds like bullshit.’ John pressed his lips into a thin line.

‘His gizmo won’t work without a 68030,’ I said.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ John said.

‘It’s a microchip.’ Simon shuffled along the sofa. ‘In development. Not yet released.’

I would have asked how Simon knew this shit, but it was the sort of stuff that he always knew. Anything from the gauge of an unknown stretch of rail track in the Alabama mountains to the specifications of an unreleased microchip.

‘Well then, he waits until it comes out and buys one,’ John suggested.

‘Not an option, apparently.’ I tried to sound apologetic. After all, technically it was me that was causing all this trouble. Or would be. ‘It’s all got to happen before the end of next week.’

‘So . . .’ John spread his hands.

‘So that’s why he proved himself to you guys,’ I said. ‘With the “batter up”, and knowing all the dice rolls.’ I took a deep breath. ‘He wants us to steal one for him.’



CHAPTER 15

‘Industrial espionage? That’s what this is all about?’ John punched a cushion. ‘I knew this was all nonsense. The guy just wants to steal a march for one of the competitors. You know how much the research behind a new chip is worth, right? Hundreds of millions!’ He punched the cushion again. ‘I knew it.’

‘He’s from the future,’ I argued. ‘This new chip is like a steam engine to him. He doesn’t want to steal the ideas. Just the thing.’

‘With stakes this high he could afford any amount of special effects to fool us into believing his story.’ John started to pace around the room. ‘Think about it. He just happens to need this fabulously valuable thing to save our friend. In the future. It’s not like Mia’s in any danger. She doesn’t need saving.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Simon, unswayed by John’s passion, ‘is why he thinks we’ll be able to steal this chip for him. Even if you could argue that John might be helpful, that still leaves me and Elton. We’re not exactly top of the cat burglar list. He’d be better off kidnapping John and mailing pieces of him to his dad until he hands over the chip.’

‘Thanks.’ John favoured Simon with a rather ungrateful stare.

‘He needs John because just before Christmas John’s father took him on a bring-your-son-to-work day to the laboratory where the Japanese have sent a prototype of the chip for testing. John knows where it is and the rough layout. He needs you because he thinks you can hack into their mainframe, like in that film WarGames. I told him you couldn’t, but he says you can. He thinks you can find the combination for the safe where the chip is stored overnight. And he needs Elton because the easiest way of getting in is through the roof, and since Elton is practically Bruce Lee, he’s going to be able to scale security fences, climb buildings, and suchlike. You’ve seen what he can do.’

‘If he’s got money, can’t he just hire people to do this for him?’ Simon asked.

‘It’s a question of contacts, timing, and trust. He doesn’t know who to ask. He doesn’t have time to find out. And if he did, he couldn’t trust them.’ The real answer was that he remembered that they were involved. Not a direct memory, because apparently I was going to wipe those, but from information he gathered later. And if he remembered they were there, then they needed to be there, or none of this would work for him . . . and me. I felt selfish asking, but twenty-five years of guaranteed life, and more on offer, looked pretty damn good from where I sat, so I needed Demus to be my future. I needed my Mia to be his Mia.

‘Why does he think Simon could get information out of the mainframe? Or even get on it in the first place?’ John asked.

‘He says you’ll be able to find or guess your father’s password. He says it’s probably written down somewhere. Most likely inside his wallet. And he knows that Simon has been breaking into protected files on the mainframes at his dad’s university for years.’

They both looked at Simon, who coloured and stared at his hands. ‘There’s no law against it.’

‘See!’ I said. ‘Demus says the security in computers during the 80s is a joke, and that anyone with a good understanding of the operating system should be able to root out the combinations for the lab safes.’

‘If they’re recorded on the system,’ said Simon.

‘He seems sure they are,’ I said.

‘So, all he wants us to do is rob my father’s work of their flagship new product, then?’

‘Yes.’ I hadn’t really expected John to leap at the opportunity. ‘They won’t really be losing anything, and it will help save Mia.’