Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies on a Different Continent
The storage unit nobody else knows about
Cooper stood inside his unit in the self-storage facility, the door padlocked on the inside behind him. He opened a large safe (that was the only other thing in there) with a fingerprint and retina scan.
It contained low denomination dollar, euro and pound notes plus forged passports, driving licenses and credit cards along with photos of “family” that he’d staged with actors and Photoshopped, to give him a variety of backstories that either showed his fake wife and children as affluent or in heart-rendingly abject poverty.
Underneath the cash were two Glock pistols in a belt and an ankle holster, along with several spare ammunition magazines, most of the money and documents fitted into the backpack, with the rest going into the pockets of his black poachers’ jacket.
He timed his arrival at the travel agent’s so that the taxi dropped him off just before closing time, to keep the staff chattiness, and unnecessary questioning, to a minimum, a handwritten sign in the window said that they were shutting down for the duration of martial law from close of business after being refused and exemption to take bookings for the next year.
Presenting himself as a businessman in a vital industry, with a travel permit, he sat shaking and stammering his way through answers, pretending to be a coward running away, as a niggling voice in the back of his head asked how what he was really doing was any different.
The women in the shop said nothing, but looked at him with contempt as he booked a holiday to New Zealand, from there he’d contact smugglers he’d used in the past and take a private plane, flying under the radar, to Australia, where he’d settle down somewhere in the outback whilst keeping a careful eye on the Scottish news for crazy stories.
Cooper's house (the one the army doesn't know about) was actually a prestigious penthouse flat in a cul-de-sac backing onto the Edinburgh bypass, which he'd bought so he could access the roof and several, pre-planned escape routes from there.
As he walked up to the glass front entrance he was too busy going over the details of his trip in his head, making sure he’d covered all the angles, to pay attention to his surroundings, which was why he never saw the baseball bat that slammed into the back of his knees.
He twisted as he fell, rolling onto his back, the pain radiating through his legs. A big man loomed over him wearing a black suit, tie and white shirt. He was well over six feet tall, with a bull neck and a boxer’s squashed nose.
“I hit you,” he said, in a faint, South African accent, as he consulted a notepad he'd pulled from an inside pocket, “in the popliteal fossa, I'm learning a word a day and that's two,” he said looking very pleased with himself.
"I've got a word for you that usually goes with 'off', but you might have to circle back to 'F' to find it," Cooper said, reaching for his gun, but before he got there, the bat smashed into his elbow with a one-handed blow. Eye watering pain ran the length of his arm before numbness made it useless.
"This is a warning to hand over the money or Mr Nasir says the next time I’m to start cutting bits off, but I’m not to,” he checked the notepad again, his lips moving as he read, "'hospitalise' you now, before you have a chance to pay up,” something else on the page caught his attention, "oh, and I hit you on the 'humerus'," he said, happily, as he put the notepad away, to use both hands to grip the baseball bat, Cooper barely had time to wonder who Mr Nasir was before it smashed into his skull.
He woke up where he'd fallen, feeling like an icepick was being driven into his brain one sledgehammer blow at a time.
He pulled his phone out and squinted at the time through pain-filled eyes. It said 20:37, which was lucky as it meant that the concierge had gone home before he’d arrived, leaving the building on keypad entry.
Foot traffic had also dried up after the shops had closed and given the curfew, it was likely to stay that way until morning which was also fortunate, as the last thing he needed was to be discovered by some helpful passerby whilst he was carrying the large amount of cash and counterfeit documents that his attacker had left untouched.
Taking to the lift to the top floor and letting himself in past the hidden security lock, he swallowed more than twice the recommended dose of aspirins from the bathroom cabinet. He wondered how people kept on finding his secret stuff. He decided that if he'd been Superman, everybody would've been calling him Clark by the end of the first day.
The same interior design company that had decorated his now-demolished house had also done his flat, and it was also very modern, very chic and very not him, which, come to think of it, put his decorators (never call the posh ones that, they hate it) right at the top of the list of people who might have given away, or more likely sold his secrets.
The balcony looked down on a footbridge, about fifty feet below, that crossed the busy Edinburgh bypass, to houses on the other side, and the Pentland Hills beyond.
After running an RF detector over the walls, without finding any surveillance devices, he opened the spacious wardrobe in the master bedroom. A floor-to-ceiling built-in safe took up one side, hidden behind clothes and shoe racks. He opened it with a thumbprint and retina scan, tidied the half a million pounds already in there into neat piles before adding the contents of his backpack and pockets to it.
Then he sat down to double check what had to be done before leaving the country for good the next evening. Everything else would have to wait for daylight, as it was too dangerous after curfew, with armoured cars and jeeps mounted with heavy machine guns patrolling the streets and setting up more roadblocks.
He microwaved a frozen meal that had a deceptively mouth-watering photo on the packet and ate without really tasting it, as he wondered how many decades it would take Morrigan to get to the other side of the world and whether that woman was right when she said he’d likely be dead before she got there.
He caught himself yawning and went to the bedroom where he looked longingly at the beautiful, perfectly sprung, king-sized bed with 100% Egyptian cotton sheets and an electric blanket.
So, he thought, I can either luxuriate in bed and wait for the next contestant in the Callum Cooper whack-a-mole contest, or be safely uncomfortable, with a regretful sigh he fetched a mountaineers’ outdoor sleeping bag, gloves and full face thermal mask from the wardrobe before heading for the lift.
The roof access key had cost him enough to compensate the lift engineer for the trouble he would get into by saying he lost it, which was apparently a very expensive heap of trouble.
The key was also allegedly copy proof, which he took with a Dead Sea sized pinch of salt, but as arguing about it would have risked negating the secrecy approach, he just smiled through gritted teeth and paid up.
Stepping out on the roof, he wedged the lift doors open before jamming the one to the stairs, next to it shut and settled down behind the lift housings, beneath a mobile phone mast.
He didn't know if the rumours about them emitting harmful rays were true or not, but decided that he was unlikely to live long enough to worry about a lingering death from radiation poisoning, anyway.
As he fell asleep, making plans to escape the city and vanish for good the next day, he wondered who Mr Nasir was. Saying he’d stolen from him didn’t narrow it down nearly far enough to hazard a guess.