Robert Young - Gatecrasher

He was running out of platform now and all he had was the exit on one side and the train on the other.

He chose the train.

Turning and stepping through the other door he finally stopped and looked back. He could see nothing from where he stood and he clung to the bar and willed the driver to shut the doors and go.

Nothing. Seconds passed. Campbell inched a little toward the door to see if Slater was still coming. Perhaps he had jumped on a carriage further down and would make his way through the doors between the cars toward Campbell as the train moved through the tunnel. He noticed that his was the front carriage of the train and there was nowhere for him to go. When the doors closed he would be trapped. If Slater was on here.

With a loud thud, Keith Slater planted both heavy feet down on the carriage floor, appearing in the space between the next set of doors along from where Campbell stood. The smattering of people seated in the carriage looked up at them both curious, Campbell’s bruised and swollen face, Slater’s look of wild rage.

Campbell froze, fixed in Slater’s hateful glare. They stood like that for only a moment and then the doors began to beep and Slater took two strides along the aisle towards him.

Motionless for another second Campbell waited until he heard the hiss and saw the first movement of the doors and then, in one step, leapt through the gap and sprawled across the platform, landing heavily on his elbow and damaged ribs.

The doors closed behind him and Slater, stranded halfway between the two sets of doors, stared open mouthed at Campbell lying on the floor looking back at him.

Scrambling to his feet and bolting for the exit from the platform Campbell did not see Slater slam his hand against the glass of the train door. Nor did he see the look on Slater’s face as he roared his fury at him but he heard it all the way back up the escalator, fading in the reassuring sound of the train pulling away.

Thursday. 7am.

Matthew Drennan slapped at the alarm clock and shut the radio off. It was early and his body felt like it was telling him it wanted several more hours sleep. He stretched and curled up again, burying his face in the soft cool cotton of his pillow.

This was not how it was supposed to be. Not what he’d imagined. When he’d signed up for this it was the culmination of a long held ambition. Working for the security service was not going to be mundane or everyday. No nine to five grind for him in this life; that he would leave to the plebs. All those guys at school and university who had worked so dilligently, drank so often, slept around so freely and then had fallen into such mediocrity, such stultifyingly pointless middle-management cul de sacs could keep it. Drennan was on a different path. There would be excitement and danger and bad guys to take on.

There would be intrigue and subterfuge, undercover work and infiltration. He would smash drug rings, prostitution rackets, catch people traffickers, counterfeiters. He would do something, be someone, go somewhere.

But there was drudgery after all. There was boredom. Paperwork and procedure and politics at every turn. Eight years in the job and he’d barely seen any danger, barely taken any more risks than when he crossed the road or caught the night bus home late at night. As much as he’d insisted to his friends and family that he knew what he was going into, that he was realistic about what to expect, Matthew Drennan had come to realise that he had not become James Bond.

In fact, he had not become anything close to what he had expected, nor even liked. He was bored and frustrated at first but he could cope with that. He was eager to get on, to achieve. Of course he would be frustrated. But time kept passing uneventfully and with the dawning realisation that he was merely a cog, a small part of a much bigger system, Drennan felt that frustration and boredom turning into bitterness and resentment.

Sure enough there were plaudits and praise when a job was done well, when the team did what they were supposed to do. But where was the glory? The action? When did this get interesting?

Pats on the back and a moderate paypacket he could pick up working in a bloody bank. If he was going to be bored and unfulfilled he might at least have chosen a career that made him rich in the meantime. He could have gone into finance, worked in the City. He had the character and the personality for that sort of environment certainly. Cold and ruthless and hardworking when necessary.

It hadn’t always been so. At the start he’d been young and idealistic. There were principles to uphold, ideals to protect. But that had all gone now, soured through the years of disappointment.

The radio alarm blared again and he sat up and hit the snooze button, and then slumped back into the soft bedding.

It was depressing, he reflected, how easy it had been to fall into corruption, to find the men who would value and pay for his services and his position.

How easy Tyler had been to turn as well. He had spotted in the burly man that same disillusionment, that same growing detachment from the ideals he had once held close which Drennan felt so keenly. Priniciples could be expensive to buy, but when a man had abandoned them, had discovered that they were a sham, his conscience was far more easily acquired.

Of course the circles both men moved in, the contacts they had made on both sides of the law, at both ends of the criminal spectrum, had made opportunities easier to spot and much harder to ignore. Drennan had been the first to act, but Tyler had quickly followed.

At first it was bribes. Simple enough to look the other way. So often had both men been frustrated when their hard work had come to nothing, when the guilty had gone unpunished, that it made little difference to their conscience to play dumb occasionally. But it had made a difference to the bank balance.

Soon enough it was more than their silence that was for sale though. They had information with a value, influence with certain people in certain places.

And then this latest job had come along. Not from nowhere exactly. They’d had dealings with their paymaster on other occasions but on a much smaller scale. But nothing of this magnitude and certainly nothing so lucrative.

Tyler had been positively breathless at the prospect of what they were set to make from it, not least because of how simple a job it seemed to be and more so at how little they really needed to do by themselves. Those things had simply made Drennan more suspicious of the whole thing but as much as he looked at it and analysed the risks and possible outcomes, he could never, and would never, ignore the cash that was there for the taking. Cash it would take years to put in the bank normally.

So they had accepted it, found the men to do the dirty work for a slice of the money, and with the relevant information supplied to them about the job they had felt like little more than middle-men much of the time. But he’d enoyed it too. Handing out orders to these men, using the threat and intimidation of the power that he had over them. He could pay them well or put them away and though he barely said as much explicitly, he made sure that they all knew it.

But this too was falling apart now. How something so simple had unravelled so quickly and so alarmingly made Drennan’s chest tighten and his pulse pick up. Their paymaster who at first had seemed no more to him than a corrupt, white collar criminal had begun to assume a far more sinister aspect. Drennan had not felt threatened by the man at first and blamed that now as much on his own arrogant assumptions and inflated ego as on the way the man had played his part. He’d wanted Drennan and Tyler to think of him that way, and they had been more than happy to.