Coming Last in a Popularity Contest
The house apparently everybody knows about
With no public transport running that early and only essential businesses allowed to open, Edinburgh was like a ghost town when Cooper headed out at the crack of dawn on that Saturday morning.
His poacher’s jacket pockets were full of cash, amongst other things, with a laptop slung over his shoulder and guns concealed about his person he was ready for an unorthodox shopping trip.
Turnhouse being closed for the duration meant that he needed to find a car to get through to the next nearest airport, which was Glasgow, and, unfortunately, none of the vehicle rental businesses would be open anytime soon.
An online search earlier had found a car hire place about three miles away, there was a closer one but that was near the city centre and was covered by far too many CCTV cameras for his taste. The site he was jogging to was on the outskirts and far more secluded.
He arrived to find what he’d expected from the photos he’d googled: a white concrete and glass building in a big yard that backed onto woods. The only difference was that, with it being closed for the duration, the forecourt was empty, so he walked around the back into a glade where a heavy duty, chain-link fence separated him from the yard and garage.
As he pulled bolt cutters out of an inside pocket, a rustling in the undergrowth distracted him. He turned to see a small man, who looked as old as the trees themselves, ambling towards him using a crooked branch as a walking stick, leaves still sprouting from it.
He was dressed in a suit made of leaves and moss, green hair stuck up on his head, looking like long grass. Bushy grass eyebrows and a beard of leaves framed his face.
Cooper looked around for a dog, not that he’d ever seen someone in fancy dress walking their pet before, but he couldn’t think of another reason for anyone to be there that early.
“Nice day,” he said, moving away from the fence, to give himself fighting or running room, as he scanned the old man for visible weapons whilst casually scratching his side near his belt holster, that might seem like an overreaction, but if the man was carrying an automatic he could empty a fifteen, or eighteen-round magazine in under three-seconds, which would be a problem, regardless of his age.
“Greetings, young cantrip caster,” he said, his voice sounding like the rustle of wind through the trees.
“Cantrip caster? What’s that?”
“Thou be a spell-caster, art thou not?”
“Nope, definitely not.”
“Hmm, there is the whiff of magick about thee, but it matters naught, I be Ghillie Dhu, fairy o’ these woods,” he said leaning heavily on his stick to bow deeply, “protector o’ saplings, and mortal younglings who stray into mine domain as they gambol and play.”
“Er, sure,” he said, “ain’t life a bitch when you run out of your antipsychotic medication and all the chemists are closed?”
“Though I know naught of what thee speaketh, thine mocking tone be disrespectful and shalt not be tolerated in mine own home, thou needs must leaveth this place, post-haste.”
“Okay, give me a few minutes and I’ll be out of your hair, er, grass and foliage, that is.”
“Begone!” the fairy snarled, covering the distance between them in a blur of speed. Even though he barely tapped Cooper’s chest with his stick, it sent him flying back to bounce off the fence and land face first in the soft earth.
He jumped back up spitting out dirt, he wanted to shoot the fairy in the heart enough times to reduce it to pulp, but decided that they were both after the same thing: him getting out of there, so there was nothing to fight about. Cooper never took things personally in his business people who did that died of the bad decisions they made when they were angry.
He took several calming breaths whilst rubbing his aching chest before speaking, “Funny you should say that, I’m trying to grab a car and get the hell out of here as fast as I can,” he said picking up the bolt cutters and holding them up for the fairy to see.
“What is this car thou speaketh of and what sort of tooth-puller be that?” the Ghillie Dhu asked, as the last time he’d been around the bicycle had been considered to be cutting-edge technology.
“It’s for making holes in things like this,” he said, rattling the fence with it.
“Why would thee bother with a bairn’s toy?” The fairy said puzzled as he tapped his stick at the base of the nearest tree. Roots grew up underneath the fence, buckling and tearing it up by its concrete blocks, toppling it into the yard, crushing several cars with a deafening crash.
“And take careth not to dilly dally as thee departeth,” Ghillie Dhu said over his shoulder as he walked away.
The roots had vanished back into the ground, taking the earth they’d dislodged with them. He stared after the fairy who faded into a big, old oak tree, becoming one with it. His dirty face and sore chest being the only proof that something he didn’t want to believe in had actually happened.
He would have rather have bypassed the alarm, that was now screeching painfully loudly, and cut his way in quietly, instead of having the fence toppled with enough noise to wake the neighbourhood, now he had to factor the possibility of the imminent arrival of the police or army and could no longer afford to take his time.
Pulling the laptop from the bag, he was please to see that it still worked despite the cracked screen, fishing a USB stick with an antenna on the end out of a pocket, he plugged it into a laptop port, silencing the alarm with a single keyboard click, disabling the wireless security cameras at the same time.
Stepping gingerly over the debris, he headed for the office, noting the registration number of an estate car that was near the gate to the forecourt, on the way past. He tied a length of detonating cord around the door handle, pressed his back against the wall a few feet away, and used an electronic remote to blow it off. Inside, he drilled the lock out of a steel cabinet and took the key he was looking for. He blew the gate to the forecourt open with another length of detonating cord and gunned the car into the empty street.
As it turned out, he’d been in a hurry for nothing, as he never saw any police or army vehicles as he looked for an open petrol station.
Once he’d fuelled up, paying in cash and keeping his hood up to hide his face from the cameras, he drove around the periphery of the city to check the state of the roadblocks the army were setting up to contain the population within the city limits.
Luckily, he knew Edinburgh like the back of his hand and there were a few smaller routes open that it would take them a day or two to block off, he also knew what side streets to use to avoid the checkpoints.
After that he headed for home, to load the car and then vanish, probably forever. He had enough money in offshore numbered bank accounts to live on for the rest of his life, although he wouldn’t be the kind of super-rich he wanted to be, he’d be a long way from being poor.
Part of the reason he'd bought his apartment was that it was in a quiet cul-de-sac that backed onto a steep slope leading down to the busy Edinburgh bypass, all of which meant there was no pedestrian or vehicular through traffic, so when he entered the street the sight of an electricity and a telecom van plus a couple of dog walkers set off an aoogah, aoogah, aoogah klaxon warning in the back of his head as his instincts told him the whole thing stunk of being a trap.
He turned the car around to go back the way he’d come from as inconspicuously as possible, only to see that a black SUV with tinted windows (or a villain-mobile as he preferred to think of it as) was blocking his path. He put the car in reverse and backed up slowly as he released the seatbelt. The rearview mirror showed people pulling guns from coats and handbags as others jumped out of vans and dropped dog leads.
He shifted into first and gunned the accelerator. He was only a few feet away from the SUV when he slammed the clutch down and pulled the handbrake up as he started to spin the wheel. The car spun around with a screech of tyres and the smell of burning rubber as it completed a handbrake turn and sped back into the cul-de-sac.
Hastily fired shots missed their intended targets as people leapt for safety. Just before he hit the telecom van, he pulled the seat reclining lever and threw himself back to lie flat. Everything seemed to slow down as metal ground on metal and the driver’s airbag exploded above him.
He rolled out of a back door whilst the car was still moving and zigzagged towards his building, firing his gun in the air to keep people's heads down.
There was no-one on duty in the lobby, leaving the entrance on keypad access only, which would take too long to open, so he emptied the magazine into the large glass door from a few feet away, weakening it enough for it to shatter as he ran through it.
He sprinted up the six floors to his flat, only pausing for a second halfway, to slap a new magazine into his gun and check that nobody was catching up with him. Once he got home, he planned to get a backpack full of cash, cards, passports and his plane ticket, and head for an escape route on the roof, but, as he walked into the room, the sight that met his eyes made him jump back in shock.
A stocky man of average height in his late fifties, with spiky, blonde hair, a ginger beard and wearing a blue three-piece suit was standing at the open fridge. He was drinking from a bottle of iced tea and pointing a Beretta M9 straight at Cooper’s heart without even looking. “Hi, Coops,” Jackson Smith said, toasting him with the bottle, “it’s true what they say, frightened animals really do bolt for home, and at least I didn’t have to blow your house up this time.”
Cooper just stood and stared, letting the door slam shut behind him. “Take the laptop bag off, nice and easy, then sit down before you fall down,” Smith said waving his gun at an armchair that faced the door. “Good,” he said once Cooper had complied, “now take your Glock out with two fingers and throw it behind you.”
He did so slowly and carefully, “And the other one,” Smith said, they’d spent several days in a tent together, a situation that made it impossible to hide his choice of concealed weaponry.
“This is disappointing, I thought you were dead,” Cooper said when he regained his composure.
“Ditto,” Smith said, “only I had a working parachute,”
“But how did you have time to escape before the explosion…”
“C’mon, Coops, you’re making a case for people who say military intelligence is an oxymoron.”
“You set off the bomb yourself,” he said, realisation striking him like a physical blow, “so the money was never on the plane in the first place.”
“Congratulations, you got there in the end,” Smith said, closing the fridge door before sitting on the settee opposite.
“So, what was the con?” Cooper said.
“I dropped you and Mr Outhouse near a village where they’d find your bodies easily,” he said, holding the bottle and pointing his Beretta unwaveringly, “his pockets were stuffed with cash like your attaché case and best of all superstition would stop the locals robbing the bodies.”
“Inspection of the plane wreckage would reveal three corpses, including one who I may, or may not, have killed because he and I shared a body type, so people would naturally assume that you and Mr Outhouse had died in a heist gone wrong,” he said finishing the drink and putting the empty on the floor beside him.
“First of all, who says, ‘heist’ anymore?” Cooper said, “And doesn’t it niggle at you that if you hadn’t forgotten to mute the mobile you used to trigger the bomb you wouldn’t be wandering about in broad daylight spoiling the very popular opinion that you’re dead?”
“I’ll admit that it led to you selfishly surviving, and it turns out that there’s no old wives’ tale to stop the natives stealing from the living. So, since there was no sign of any cash on you when you were rescued, I had to tell Abbad Bin Nasir that you left me in the desert to die and used the plane for part of the trip.
“Ridiculous, I’d never have left you to die, I’d have put one in your heart and one in your head to make sure of it. So Nasir’s the big, bad warlord who’s money we stole? A thug of his introduced me to one of his baseball bats yesterday.”
“Ah, so you met Oxford.”
“That guy went to Oxford?” Cooper said incredulously.
“No, but they call him that because he bought one of their dictionaries once.”
All of which meant, he realised, that Nasir had sent Oxford to fetch him but as he’d arrived home just before curfew Oxford couldn’t have slipped away with him in tow, so he’d had to go for the alternative plan.
“Can you get me a bottle of water?” Cooper said.
“Much as I appreciate the artless subterfuge, the gun that was duct taped under your chair, along with the ones in all your other hiding places, has been removed.
“Never mind,” he said sourly “I suppose that you think you can hand me over to Nasir without me telling him the truth.”
“My doctor will be here shortly, and once he fills you full of psychoactive drugs and implants some false memories, you won’t remember any of this. In fact you’ll die screaming in agony convinced that you took the money but not able to remember what you did with it,” he said with a disarming smile, “and considering whatever the hell’s happening in this crappy city, I can’t wait to hand you over and get the hell out of here.”
“This is my city, and it’s not crappy!” Cooper snapped.
“Really?” he said with a mocking laugh, “Judging by the passport and plane ticket I found you were planning to leave for good, and say what you like about me, I’m not the one abandoning my family.”
They’d kidnapped him, treated him like a lab animal and shrunk his head, so when they wanted his help he wasn’t exactly in a mood to give it. Later he’d been too busy saving his own skin to realise that his estranged parents, and the few people he actually liked, would either die at the hands of Morrigan (whom he believed in, for no reason he could justify) or become her slaves, along with the rest of Edinburgh, and beyond. The thought of it all filled him with terrible guilt and shame, but he refused to give Smith the satisfaction of showing it.
As he desperately scanned the room for a way out, there was a rat, tat, rat-a-tat-tat at the door. “Ah, talk of the devil,” Smith said, inadvertently glancing at the source of the noise as he stood up. Cooper jumped up and threw a vicious jab, but Smith turned back, pulled his chin down at the last second and took the blow on the top of his head instead. Smith tried to bring the Beretta to bear, but Cooper swept his legs away and they both landed on their backs. The gun made a deafening bark in the enclosed space as it went off, embedding a bullet in the ceiling, to add to the noise of the banging and shouting from the other side of the reinforced door.
He jumped to his feet but Smith kicked him under the left kneecap and he went down again with a grunt of pain. As Smith sat up and turned the Beretta on him, he kicked it out of his hand from the prone position. Smith jumped on him with a snarl of anger, landing a glancing blow on the side of his head.
They rolled over and over, struggling for control of the gun as the door started to buckle under the frenzied assault. Cooper landed on top and braced himself with his elbow and good knee, to stop the rolling, then punched him in the throat.
As Smith gasped for air, he climbed to his feet and limped into the kitchen, returning seconds later with a steak knife, picking up his guns on the way. He stabbed it into the back of the leather armchair, cutting the upholstery away. Pulling an attaché case from the hole, he limped to the balcony.
Of all the methods of escape he’d planned out, the contents of the case represented the last one he actually wanted to use. Opening it, he clipped a carabiner to the railing then fastened the looped end of the stainless steel cable to it, loading the grappling iron end into a custom-made zip-line gun. He aimed at the far side of the footbridge below and fired, missing the iron guard railing he was aiming for, the grappling hook flopping over the side, digging into the concrete underside of the foot bridge when the spring loader pulled it tight.
He put on a heavy leather glove and looped a weighted handle over the line. With no time to test it, he took a deep breath and stepped into fresh air just as the door behind him burst open. Bullets buzzed either side of him, one tugging at the hem of his jacket, but he was moving so fast that he was a very difficult target to hit and he was soon out of effective range anyway.
The ground was coming up to meet him far too fast as he pulled his gloved hand down on the cable as hard as he could to brake. He hit the tarmac running, his injured knee buckling under him and sending him rolling until he bounced off of the guard rail hard enough to wind him. As he collapsed he twisted and shot the cable at point-blank range, to make sure nobody could follow him, sending it whipping back towards the window, coming dangerously close to his head as he fell.
After thirty-seconds of wheezing, he pulled himself to his feet and limped away. By road he had a twenty minute lead and once he got to somewhere with a street name, he’d call a taxi.
The sound of police sirens, already nearby, attested to the fact that rich people get the best response times. Along the way he spotted a six-foot long, three-inch thick, oak tree branch lying in the undergrowth, which he picked up to use as a makeshift walking stick.