Tin Larrick - Voices From The Back Seat

Taylor’s Dummy

It was of no particular concern to Switch that they'd finally made him. In fact, he was a little relieved. Twenty years he'd been undercover. Twenty years, and the job was becoming stale. At least now he could really test his mettle, by continuing to work while simultaneously escaping the heat.
Ian Switch was a police mole. He'd started doing some work for central government in the 1980s, but then the Cold War fizzled out and he was reduced to plying his trade as a freelance mole-for-hire. He'd also done some private security work and a bit of muscle for some fairly dubious characters, but he'd since found out that the real money was in police stations. It was lucrative, but it was also ridiculously easy - police station security being so woefully substandard. Contractors wandered in and out unchallenged, and the amount of sensitive information left lying around on desks meant it was an easy hit. He roamed the country on a rotating basis, visiting central stations and rural police houses alike, absorbing valuable information for onward sale.
But now… now someone was onto him. Some bright young upstart, a clever dick, someone who bothered to look at things a bit closer than the average worker and join the dots. Someone with a personality. One of the few left in the service who didn't have a ‘too-difficult’ light.
He checked the reflection of his weathered face in the rear view mirror, and a grin tugged at the corner of his mouth as he realised that, whatever would be snapping at his heels in months to come, he didn’t care.
He did not have a cavalier attitude to evading the law, and there was certainly nothing self-destructive about him. But, rather than spend his life looking over his shoulder, he would rather take whatever was coming right on the chin. Do the time. Face the music. Get the karmic circle over and done with, then he could reassess.
And because he was not scared of being caught, he had that extra layer that meant he would always be one step ahead, unlike so many of his desperate, drug-addled peers, who only ever retained their liberty through blind luck. People would have to look at him very closely indeed to ever suspect him. Even clever dicks.
He fingered the laminated ID badge in his hand, and clipped on his tool belt. He locked the van and shuffled across the car park to the station’s main doors. He lit a nasty-smelling roll-up as he jabbed the main doorbell.
A young constable opened the door. Switch gave a crooked smile and held up the badge.
The constable said nothing, but smiled and stepped aside to allow Switch to enter. He even held the door open for him.
Switch stepped inside.
***
Buchanan Williams had always been suspicious of attractive women, and this one was a killer. And while the introductory part of this double-barrelled, colloquial analogy was fairly accurate - she had perfect legs, a stunning visage and icy blue eyes - it was also true in the literal sense. She was, in fact, a paid assassin.
One might be forgiven for thinking that she had adopted a clever - even sassy - name for herself, one that both harmonised with and advertised her chosen profession. But this was not the case. She had been born Michelle Fire, and Michelle Fire she would always be. That it suited the more glamorous aspect of her trade was purely coincidental.
She resisted the urge to scowl at Buchanan. He was pointedly ignoring her, as if he knew that lingering in the bar would somehow draw attention to her. He was already ordering a cranberry juice when she had arrived, and this in itself went contravened the plan. She was supposed to arrive first, then Buchanan. A quick acknowledgement, then they were to leave five minutes apart and rendezvous at the disused apartment across the street.
And here she was, waiting for him, while he picked at olives on the bar with a toothpick and flirted with the barmaid. Fire flicked a strand of hair behind her ear and ground her teeth, willing Buchanan to hurry up. She could feel the overweight man to her immediate right moving slowly closer to her, and she knew she in was serious danger of being chatted up.
She shuffled away from the overweight man, and tried desperately to catch Buchanan’s eye. She moved closer, and when she was less than six feet away she decided he was ignoring her deliberately. She spun on her heel, and left the bar.
Buchanan picked the last of the olives from the little glass dish on the bar, just as his cell phone vibrated gently in his pocket. He excused himself from the conversation with the barmaid, and flipped the phone open.
“Hello?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Fire hissed. “We were supposed to be at the RVP fifteen minutes ago.”
“Where are you?” Buchanan said, looking around the bar.
“I’m there already. Got fed up for you waiting to finish your courtship.”
At this, Buchanan caught the barmaid’s eye. Your wife? she mouthed silently. Buchanan frowned and shook his head.
“I’ll be right there,” he said.
“You better be.”
Fire clapped her own phone shut and moved to the large bay window, which afforded her a good view of the entrance to the hotel. She set up the rifle and pointed it down at the busy street. The constant hubbub of traffic echoed around the concrete valley of tall buildings that lined the long Bratislavan street.
Buchanan appeared on the street, and Fire could not resist a smirk as he stepped into the cross-hairs. She whispered ‘bang’ to herself, then moved away from the sights as Buchanan crossed the street and out of her vision, entering the building four floors below her. She stood the weapon carefully against the window ledge, lay down on the floor, and punched out one hundred rapid-fire sit-ups.
***
No one in their right mind would ever have described Magine Taylor as a clever dick. In fact, if Ian Switch realised that this simple creature was the heat he had to worry about, he would have been laughed out loud.
“Excuse me, love.”
She looked up to see a man in overalls carrying a toolbox.
“Sorry to bother you. Just got to take a look at the ceiling lights. Carry on as if I’m not here.”
Magine waved him on without a word, and continued rolling the new word around her brain. The man in overalls erected his stepladder. Once at the top he put on some goggles, and made a show of removing some ceiling tiles.
Concealed inside Ian Switch’s goggles was a tiny, high-powered camera, and once he was satisfied Magine was not interested in his presence, he began photographing the array of documents strewn about her desk.
While taking the photographs, he kept a watchful eye on Magine. She did not appear engaged in anything other than navigating her way around a web page - in fact other than punctuating her movements with the occasional mouse click, she did not seem to be doing anything at all. Once or twice her cell phone sounded, and after replying by text message, she returned to her computer screen.
He began to grow uncomfortable at the top of the ladder. He had been waiting for Magine to leave her desk so he could have a better look, but it appeared this would be a long wait. He stared around the office from the top of his ladder, catching his reflection in the one-way mirror glass used in the station windows, then descended and went outside for a break.
He left her slouched back in her chair, idly clicking her mouse in a slow, metronomic rhythm around the screen; her chin resting in her left palm, a pose that squashed her mouth and cheeks into an malleable pout.
Procrastinator. Pro-cras-tin-a-tor. Magine rolled the syllables around her tongue as she flicked through the online dictionary. Someone - she couldn’t remember who - had asked her why she procrastinated so much. She had placed her hands indignantly on her hips and pouted I don’t. Retort safely delivered, she had made a mental note to find out what it meant as a priority.
There. Found it: Delay. Put off taking action. Defer till a later time.
I don’t, she thought. Do I?
A half-empty coffee cup with a vivid pink lipstick stain on the rim stood on the desk next to a smouldering cigarette, both of which flanked a desk telephone. Her eyes wandered to the telephone as it rang, and her gaze remained fixed on it for a moment, as if she were trying to calculate the amount of surplus movement that would be required to actually answer the damn thing.
Eventually, her sense of responsibility just about got the better of her, and she hauled herself upright to answer it, knocking the coffee cup over her keyboard as she reached for the receiver.
“Oh, shit,” she cried, frantically trying to mop up the spillage with some important-looking reports.
Yes, Ian Switch would have laughed until he cried.
He stood under a willow tree bordering the station car park, smoking quietly and sipping at some awful coffee in a styrofoam cup. Reassessing the situation, he concluded that no one could really have any idea of the value of the information that Magine had in her possession. She was an assistant, a scribe - and yet ahead of the impending intelligence meeting, the only person who had full access to the tactical portfolio was her. This struck him as being a monstrous oversight by the powers-that-be.
He gazed through the windows and surveyed the open-plan chaos of the uniform patrol office, rendered smoky-grey by the one-way glass, and shrugged inwardly. Their loss, he thought, and trampled his cigarette underfoot. He rang the bell to be allowed access to the station again, and returned to the seventh floor and the procrastinating PA.
When he arrived, however, he was perturbed to find the office empty. Moreover, Magine Taylor’s previously occupied workstation now appeared to be in something of a mess. The chair was on its back, the mouse was dangling over the edge of the desk, and dark brown coffee was spreading across the desk towards a pile of papers.
Realising she had either left in a hurry or been taken against her will, Switch decided to follow her lead. He gathered up his belongings, stuffed a wad of papers from the desk into his bag - no time to assess their importance - and fled from the building. Someone had got to her. They must have.