A Stranger Is Just an Enemy You Haven't Punched Yet
Present Day: Turnhouse International Airport, Edinburgh
Cooper sighed as he massaged his aching left leg, stretching it out into the aisle of the Boeing 737, not that he felt he had any right to complain about the occasional bout of aches and pains considering that he’d fallen six thousand feet without a parachute, resulting in a twenty-four-week stay in hospital, half of that in intensive care.
When the pilot announced over the public address system that, “We regret there will be a delay in landing due to technical difficulties in the airport terminal,” it filled him with a sudden inexplicable rage and it was only the self-discipline honed by years of keeping his head in bad situations that stopped him from jumping up and wrapping his fists around the first available throat.
Many of the other hundred and twenty-two passengers lacked his level of self-control, and fights broke out all up and down the length of the plane. In the hundreds of flights he’d been on, he’d never seen such raw aggression before, and that included the one he’d been blown out of.
Once they were on the ground, one of the flight attendants came out of hiding to tell them that anyone who could leave under their own steam was free to disembark, which he thought was strange until he saw the terminal.
It was obvious that whatever caused the delay had been more than just a computer glitch, besides the usual airport police, their Sig MCX carbines pointing at the floor as they scanned the crowd for suspicious activity, there was also what seemed to be half of Edinburgh’s constabulary (all armed with either hand guns or tasers) marshalling the long, snaking lines that led to the customs desks.
The shops and bars were all closed with one shutter being dented and stained with blood, as if someone had tried to use a head as a battering ram, whatever had happened, the authorities were obviously too busy to bother with a few isolated fistfights on incoming flights.
He was standing near the back of a queue that was moving so imperceptibly slowly he half-expected to be passed by a snail in a hurry at any second. They’d been the last flight to land and on the overhead arrivals board, each of the “DELAYED” signs was changing to “REDIRECTED” one at a time.
That provoked a young man waiting for one of the arrivals to throw a punch at a passing member of staff, a middle-aged woman from an airline check-in desk. She jumped back to avoid the blow, tripped over a suitcase and fell backwards into a hen party, sending carrier bags full of duty-free drinks crashing to the floor with a smashing of glass. One of the teenage girls squealed with fury as alcohol splashed onto her dress and bent over to grab the woman by the hair. She grabbed back but only came away with a cheap, plastic, fluorescent-pink wig.
A riot broke out, violence spreading like a virus, with every man, woman, and in one case, guide dog for themselves, hitting, scratching, and biting (not always by the dog) as the police stood quietly on the periphery, like shy teenagers waiting to be asked onto the floor at the school dance.
Cooper had read the aggressive body language all around him long before the trouble started and had taken sanctuary in the toilets. He knew that if he stayed and hit anybody, he risked spending a night in the cells when the police arrested the winners.
He waited in the cubical for ten minutes after the noise outside subsided before walking back into the concourse, which was empty except for overturned desks with boarding passes and passports scattered about like oversized confetti.
When he got outside, he was just in time to see the police vans and ambulances leaving with the last of the winners and losers. Once they’d gone he had his pick of a rank full of taxis, but it took him several tries to find a driver who wasn’t looking for a fight.
He’d sat in the front next to Alexei, the Greek driver who didn’t know what everyone else was mad about either. They had to swerve several times to get past open-doored cars stopped in the middle of the road as their owners fought each other with hatred in their eyes.
He breathed a sigh of relief when they drew up in front of his nondescript, detached bungalow at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was on the outskirts of Edinburgh and looked like it grew out of the steep hill it backed onto. He didn’t spend much time there, but it was somewhere safe (well, as safe as anywhere could be for people like him) to relax in.
It took him a minute to get past the mountain of letters piled up in the hallway, but when he did, the inside looked untouched since the last time he’d been there.
It could’ve been mistaken for a show-house with its open-plan living-room and kitchen, it was also very modern, very chic and very not him.
He was exhausted from a nine-hour flight, not including several delays and stopovers, and after throwing the letters in the recycling bin and running an RF detector over the walls in all the rooms, checking for surveillance devices; then made himself a big mug of black coffee and settled down on the settee; he preferred green tea but needed the caffeine to stay awake. If he’d been the intended target of the bomb, he had to figure out who was behind it before they discovered that he was back in the country.
He turned on the TV, picked a news channel at random and settled back to rest for a minute or two, on-screen a colonel, in full dress uniform, was blaming the city-wide riots on terrorists releasing hallucinogenic gas through the sewer system.
Maybe it was his years as a human lie detector, both in military intelligence and as a conman, but it was obvious that the colonel didn’t believe a word he was saying, even as he was calling for bigger budgets and stricter laws to combat terrorism.
His head nodded as sleep crept up on him and a second later the mug tipped over, boiling hot coffee scalding its way down the inside of his leg. He jumped to his feet and ran into the kitchen, hopping out of his trousers on the way to wash his burnt flesh with a wet dishcloth from the sink.
That’s when he saw the black limo with tinted windows bumping up on the pavement. Four men wearing black suits, earpieces and constipated expressions got out, one of them holding a back door open for a woman. She was five foot eight tall, in her late fifties and immaculately dressed in a powder blue Chanel suit. Two of the men stayed with the car as the other pair followed her towards the house. One of them picked the lock expertly and closed the door behind them almost silently.
As they entered the room, they found him standing to attention in his shirt and boxer shorts, right hand on his heart as he dum dum da de dum-ed his way through Hail to the Chief whilst he kept his Glock 32 hidden behind his back in his other hand.
The woman was Madeleine Mary Yates, the head of an American government agency so secret that he suspected that they denied their existence to each other, which would make signing office birthday cards a bit of a nightmare.
“I don’t know what sort of party you’re planning, Mr Cooper,” she said raising an eyebrow at his floral underwear, “but I just wanted to talk,” she was so angular that he imagined that sex with her would cause many paper-cut like injuries.
“Is that why you picked the lock instead of knocking?” he said as the two agents took position either side of her.
“I was testing your security system, I thought it would have been better.”
“I disarmed it before you touched the door, it takes a fortune in air freshener to get rid of the smell of combusting human flesh.”
She looked at him askance before deciding that he was only joking. He wasn’t, just exaggerating. Anyone who tried to enter the house without first using his encoded key and fingerprint lock would get a mule’s kick worth of electrical current that would only kill someone with a very bad heart or a pacemaker.
“So what can I do for you, Maddie?”
“The United States Government would like its money back,” she said through gritted teeth at the use of the pet name, even though she realised he was only calling her that because he knew she hated it.
“Then the United States Government can build the world’s biggest dust-buster and go vacuum the jungle for whatever didn’t burn up in the crash.”
“Our intel says the money was never on the plane in the first place and that you set the bomb to cover that up,” Yates said, sitting on the settee where the coffee had spilt.
“Because skydiving six thousand feet without a parachute was such a great idea, I suppose?”
She was only half-listening as she wondered why the seat was warm and wet, drew entirely the wrong conclusion and stood promptly back up again.
“Some people,” she said, running her hand over the damp patch on the back of her skirt, a disgusted expression on her face, “think you had a parachute and your injuries were because your cohorts left you for dead when you wouldn’t tell them where you hid the money.”
“Well, ‘some people’ are wrong, but I did enjoy the use of ‘cohorts’, haven’t heard that for a while. What about the other players, aren’t you investigating them?” he said walking over to pick up his trousers where he’d dropped them near the sink, moving the pistol to keep it hidden from their perspective as he went.
“They’re mostly dead, but when it comes to the living ones, I’m looking at you because whenever someone’s running a con you’re invariably the prime suspect, and I firmly believe that you have the money stashed somewhere.”
“Well, even if I don’t win, it’s an honour just to be nominated,” he said, hiding the gun in the sink as he pulled his trousers on. When he glanced out of the window, he saw the other two agents lying on the pavement, their blood running into the gutter.
By the time the hydraulic battering ram hit the front door, shaking the building, he’d already grabbed his Glock and was running to the back of the house.
He sprinted through the armoured door of what used to be a guest bedroom and turned to slam it shut, but before he could Yates and her escorts barrelled in after him, the last one closing it as Cooper hit the big, red button with ‘Lock’ printed on it in white lettering. He’d painted the room in deep bronze green that was army surplus before the army knew it.
Monitors displayed ceiling-camera views of every room in the house. “I don’t know what you were running from, but I suspect that you were leaving me behind to die,” Yates said, sounding aggrieved. Her two agents looked at each other with raised eyebrows and ‘What about us?’ expressions on their faces, but said nothing.
“You got one of your goons…”
“Hey!” the shorter of the two men cut Cooper off, sounding offended.
“Sorry, I’ll correct myself, one of your agents broke in when you thought I was sure to be sleeping after a long flight, which means you’re not my guests and so you’re not my responsibility,” he said, using his thumbprint to unlock steel doors where the built-in wardrobe used to be, to reveal an impressive array of weaponry.
“What about Saxon and Buckley?” the taller of her agents said to Yates.
“If you’re talking about your two friends waiting outside… sorry, but they’re both dead,” Cooper said, putting on a belt holster to hold the Glock 32, before slipping on a black poacher’s jacket and taking out a backpack stuffed with a fortune in low denomination pounds, euros and dollars.
He slung an SA80 assault rifle (preemptively surplus to army requirements) over one shoulder and a Kalashnikov over the other, finishing by putting a Glock 43 in an ankle holster.
“Where’s the exit?” Yates said, as the first missile hit, only causing minor damage as he’d lined the building with two layers of depleted uranium tank armour, which was also preemptively… well, I imagine you get the point by now.
“C’mon,” Yates snapped when he was too busy filling every available pocket with ammunition to answer, “this is a panic room with no food or water, and people like you don’t live in places with only one way out,” she said, as a second rocket shook the house.
He pulled a lever on the back wall disguised as a coat hook (in tribute to the old TV shows he used to watch as a child) without answering and the middle of the wall swung open to reveal a roomy garage carved out of the hill. Overhead fluorescent lights sparking into life as a third projectile demolished the front of the house.
“How the hell did you get this built?” she said in astonishment as they stepped through the doorway.
“I used Batman’s contractors.”
As he slammed and locked the door behind them he realised the shooting had stopped, which meant that the intruders were in the house and wanted him alive and if that were true then they used the missiles because they knew about the armour plating, and he had to wonder what else they knew about.
There were nine expensive, classic cars parked on opposite sides of the garage, facing each other. The tenth vehicle was a black hummer that stuck out like a sore thumb. He threw the rifles and backpack into the boot as the high-pitched whine of a carbide-tipped drill started behind them. It would take them a while to get through what was a repurposed bank vault door set into reinforced concrete and setting off an explosion big enough to blow it open in a confined space would be very bad for all concerned.
After starting the car from a battery booster pack, as it hadn’t been moved for over six months, he pulled his gun and insisted that the agents threw their poorly concealed Beretta pistols in the boot as well; he was taking her and her men with him so he could find out if they knew anything he didn’t.
He made Yates sit behind the driver’s seat, as he knew she wasn’t the type to attack him personally and after sizing up the two agents carefully, he decided that the tall, shaven-headed one in his mid-thirties was the most dangerous and got him to sit in the front, where he’d be easy to shoot if he made a move, whilst the other one, a middle-aged man with black curly hair sat in the back beside Yates.
They drove off down a twisting tunnel with him humming the Mission Impossible theme, much to everyone else’s annoyance, it led to the other side of the hill, a quarter-of-a-mile away, coming out of what looked like one of the lock-ups belonging to the houses opposite.
The grey roller door started to open automatically as they approached it, revealing a Challenger 2 battle tank on the other side, cannon pointing right at them.
Four soldiers in battle fatigues were positioned on either side of the tank, rifles trained on them. An officer stood farther back, holding his hands behind his back. He was a tall, good-looking man in his thirties with short, brown hair showing under his beret. Behind him was an armoured personnel carrier.
“Hands where I can see them as you exit the vehicle, please,” he said in the kind of cut-glass, accent where house sounds like ice with an ‘h’ stuck on the front, they got out holding their hands up.
“Excellent, now very slowly and carefully drop your weapons.”
Cooper dropped his guns and kicked them toward the squaddies.
“No-one else is armed? Very well, which one of you is Callum Cooper?” He said eventually.
“There’s a woman, two secret service templates and me, so why don’t you give it your best guess?” he said irritatedly.
“Good afternoon, Mr Cooper, please come with me,” he said with a nod.
“You’re a bit senior to be a tank commander, aren’t you?” he said, alluding to the two stars beneath a crown on his epaulettes.
“My apologies for being remiss in introducing myself, I am Colonel Charles Grant, and we felt that this was above a corporal’s––what is the expression you Americans use?” he said, turning his attention to Yates.
“Pay grade,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Quite so.”
“Did you really need to demolish my house?” he said, without any unnecessary movement, whilst keeping his hands in plain sight, the last thing he needed was a trigger-happy squaddie blowing a hole in his chest.
“Oh, that wasn’t our doing, the responsible parties fled when our patrol trundled past the end of your road on the way to your bolthole.” Grant said, nodding at two of his men to gather up the weapons as the other two covered them. They searched the hummer, finding the guns and backpack in the boot and then frisked them all, which led to a startled expression from Yates.
“This would have never have happened to Batman,” Cooper said under his breath.
“Excuse me, but those Berettas belong to the United States government!” Yates shouted, outraged, although not being suicidal enough to make any sudden moves either.
“And you can have them back when I see the necessary permits for carrying concealed weaponry,” Grant said without raising his voice.
“We’ll see what our ambassador has to say about that,” she snapped.
“You’ve has been wandering around Scotland waving firearms and intimidating the locals,” Grant said with a sigh, “and although I am sure that one’s government is fully cognisant of your exploits, I believe that, to paraphrase an old television programme from your homeland, ‘should you be caught or killed, they will disavow any knowledge of your action,’ would you care to call the ambassador and clarify matters?” he said pulling a mobile phone from his battledress.
“If I can speak in their defence,” Cooper, who’d been looking from one to the other like a spectator at a tennis match, said, “they’re terrible at intimidation.”
“You haven’t seen the last me,” she snapped in a stunning fit of originality, as she stormed off followed by her men. Grant opened his mouth to speak, but Cooper held an index finger up, “Give it a minute,” he said, just as Yates returned exasperatedly, having realised that she didn’t know how to get back to her car, “Don’t say it,” she snapped.
“Go that way for a hundred yards,” he said pointing to the left, “then first right, and first right again and call a taxi, if they flattened your limo along with my house. Oh, and you were correct, about it not being the last I’d see of you,” he said cheerily.
“I told you not to say it,” she said. “Scots,” she muttered under her breath as she left again, “never trust a people who throw tree trunks for fun.”
“So, Colonel, I suppose that wherever you’re taking me isn’t voluntary, but since I’m no longer a member of the armed forces and I don’t see any civilian police here, I’m not under arrest either, and you have no legal right to detain me.”
“Sorry, but I have my orders, perhaps we can preserve civility and call it a very specific application of martial law.”
“Why not?” He said with a shrug, "I’ve certainly never met a politer kidnapper.”