Frazer Lee - The Lamplighters

“You okay, toots?”

Jessie was part way up the path to the house. She looked back at Marla who had stopped at the gate, staring blankly up at the white stucco giant.

“Fine. I’m fine.” She walked on, catching up. “Let’s just get inside shall we?”

She passed Jessie, who looked a little concerned by Marla’s behavior, and headed for the summerhouse door. It was framed by late afternoon shadow, cool and inviting.

Inside, Jessie poured them both a stiff drink from a little stainless steel hipflask that she had hidden behind a throw cushion. Marla slugged back the drink, balancing out the effects of the smoke and the heat.

“Why didn’t you tell me about them before? The cameras?”

“Look, you seemed so damned blissed out, I didn’t want to lay any downers on you. I thought you’d spot them yourself soon enough anyway, city girl like you.”

“Must be losing my touch, or my eyesight. Or both.”

Marla felt positively myopic. How had she missed these spies in the skies, watching her as she walked up the path to the house, tracking her movements as she made her way to Jessie’s and Pietro’s? Why didn’t she notice them zooming in on her as she chatted with Adam outside the summerhouse?

There’s a thing , thought Marla sighing with relief. Maybe there isn’t anything wrong with me after all. Adam didn’t want to make a move because he knew the cameras were there! Her sigh became a dry chuckle. Then her chuckling stopped—he should’ve told her about the cameras sooner too. Whatever, she’d just have to drag him inside and jump him next time. Try zooming in on that , pesky cameras. Then a new flood of paranoia invaded her daydream—what if there were cameras inside the summerhouse? In the bedroom. The shower? She looked up at the ceiling, nervously peering into the corner shadows.

“Oh don’t worry girl, they’re not inside,” laughed Jessie, reading her mind.

“Yeah but… How do you know that?”

“First thing I checked. Fucked if I’m giving Fowler a free show of my ass.”

Marla made a harrumphing sound, unconvinced. But, try as she might, she could see no cameras inside her little home.

“So are you gonna help me? Get this party started?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. No you don’t.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Easy. Go for a jog.”

First yoga and now jogging? This was turning into a full-blown triathlon. Marla snatched the hipflask from Jessie’s hand and drank from it defiantly.

Jessie’s instructions seemed simple enough. Three days from now, Marla was to get up at seven o’clock, have a light breakfast of fruit and juice, then shower. She would then slip into a pair of shorts and a vest and start jogging at exactly eight o’clock. Her route was to take her away from the house, down the path she had first walked up on her arrival at the island, then down past the security building. Reaching the steps on her left, she was to jog down them and onto the jetty, where she would be required to perform a series of seductive stretches to distract Fowler’s bored black-clad security drones.

And the purpose of this fool’s errand? To divert interest, enabling Jessie to sneak round to The Big House and break in undetected. So they could have a secret bloody party.

Marla had decided she needed her head examined. She wasn’t even sure if jogging that far was possible. The last time she had run, really run, was for the number 29 bus on Tottenham Court Road. Wishing she hadn’t pointed this out to Jessie, she now faced the prospect of two “practice runs” leading up to the main event. Anyone watching on the cameras would get used to seeing Marla taking a morning jog. They would, in fact, think she was being a good girl and following Fowler’s rulebook guidelines about daily exercise. Her change in route down to the jetty though, coupled with the sexy stretches, would create enough of a stir to prevent them from noticing Jessie skulking through the trees towards The Big House.

With a resigned sigh, Marla pulled on her sneakers and jogged out the door. Truth was, she needed a party just as much as the others did, even if it meant exercising. And if Adam was around—well, a little interest from his cohorts might provoke him to finally make a move next time he and Marla were alone.

Closing the blinds in her little room, Jessie carefully slid the laptop from out of its hiding place. The plastic casing actually creaked as she opened up the lid and wiped dust from the grubby screen. She hit the power button and the battered old machine’s hard drive made an alarming grinding sound as it booted up. She should have gotten used to the noise by now of course but the skittering growl, like that of an ancient pet cat, never failed to give her the willies. It was a deeply unsettling sound to her, the sound of the island’s only unauthorized laptop threatening to die horribly, taking with it her only hope of hacking into the network. She felt nervous, twitchy, and gnawed on one of her fingernails. Jessie hoped she’d been convincing enough about the party, that Marla wouldn’t suspect anything. Getting inside the Big House, all that was true of course, but merely a by-product of what was really at stake here. The machine’s tiny screen flickered into glorious life (if slightly burned out through the layer of grime)—the expanse of pixels lighting up her face with the red glow of The Consortium Inc. corporate logo. She’d been tempted to grab a different desktop wallpaper off the net, a picture of the New York skyline, civilization, anything—heck, even a picture of The Hoff in his Speedos would do. But to do so would be too high a risk; she needed to stay within the intranet parameters wherever possible, only straying outside at the last moment. She remembered the thrill of first hacking the communications protocols and finding the island’s satellite uplink. It had taken a week of solid decoding—all so Vera could make a call home. What a mistake that had turned out to be. Jessie tried to put such bitter regrets to the back of her mind and focus on with the job in hand. Even after months away from the mainland, her grasp of operating code had not diminished. In fact on an archaic machine like this, which forced her to learn everything all over again, she could genuinely say her coding had improved. She involuntarily crossed her fingers, willing herself to be lucky when the time came. She would only have a few minutes to hack in and she’d better be ready. The laptop had better be ready too. Jessie hissed through her teeth as the dirty glow of the screen dipped suddenly. She had almost forgotten to plug the power cable into the wall socket to charge the baby up. Quickly rectifying the problem, she flicked on the wall power. The laptop’s little yellow light came on, just below the border of the screen, to tell Jessie the battery was charging. She kicked back tensely and smoked a cigarette, waiting for the light to turn green.

Chief of Security Fowler wrestled the pistachio nut from its shell and bit into it, never once taking his eyes off of the bank of monitor screens in front of him. The observation room, affectionately known as “The Snug”, was both his sanctuary and the nerve center of his entire security operation. He had as many eyes as a fly in this place, one screen giving him a view of sandy coastline, another floating high above the jetty. Dozens of cameras, dotted around the island, constantly feeding him visual intelligence about what the hell these goddamn Lamplighters (not to mention his own work-shy grunts) were up to. Still no goddamned sign of Anders. Fowler was beginning to suspect the worst. His best guy, washed out to sea or worse. What a waste.

Flicking the pistachio shell into the wastepaper basket, he selected another nut without looking away from the screens for one second. Fucking blink and you’ll fucking miss it , the foul-mouthed Senior Prison Warden used to say to him. His old boss was a man with a sense of humor so dry you needed to take a glass of water with every joke. Fowler marveled at the clockwork precision with which the screens clicked from one scene to the next, on a never-ending cycle of pan and track back, pan and track back. Looking at the screens, the Chief was reminded of the three-sixty degree view of the watchtower at the Prison—Bentham’s Panopticon, a favorite invention of Fowler’s from the nineteenth century. It featured a central watchtower around which prison cells were situated. The effect was such that the inmates began to police themselves, as they were unsure when they were being watched—either by the guards or by each other. Rather like the Panopticon, the cameras not only served to monitor, but to subtly discipline the island’s inhabitants. The Snug was his very own watchtower, and he was so very pleased whenever he saw the fruits of his labors being projected onto the screens in front of him. Like right now, for instance.