Tom Aston - The Machine

He let himself hang limp, felt himself dragged backwards towards the showers. He had to form a picture of what was happening before he could try anything. There were definitely two of them on him. A third would arrive any second. The executioner. Neither of these two was going release him. Someone else was going arrive for the deed. Shit. Stone realised who it would be.

Stone cursed himself for being taken in. Williams. That bastard had been crouched in the corner, cowering and snivelling to hide his appearance. Anyone who could contort himself like that must be seriously fit. Williams was no whining businessman. He was a trained hitman.

Stone made no move. He let his hands trail limply over the faces and shoulders of the men behind him, made himself a dead-weight, to force them to hold him beneath the shoulders — they wanted him upright for some reason. He looked through half-open eyes at his killer, and considered kicking out. Williams was shorter than Stone — about 1.80m — and had the fit, spare look of an infantryman about him. Short neat hair — he could just about pass as a civilian. He was a professional, Stone would give that. He wasted no time in gloating or taunting his victim. Williams intended to be out of there in seconds. He’d be ushered upstairs and a fast car to the airport. With twenty thousand dollars earned undramatically for his few minutes work.

‘Let’s get it done,’ said the New Zealander. He dragged Stone’s pants down. ‘Turn him around!’ Stone was swivelled to face the white wall of the shower cubicle, his face slammed against the tiles. Facial bruising to make it look realistic. Prisoners the world over die from internal bleeding after brutal male rapes. Stone was to be one small addition to that unhappy list. Unremarked, unnoticed, forgotten after a perfunctory enquiry to determine cause of death. What was Williams going to use, a mop or a broom handle?

Stone kept his nerve, stayed loose, his hands by the faces of his two assailants. He could hear Williams crouch down behind him, and then the noise of a wooden mop handle clattering on the side of the shower cubicle. ‘Go, go!’ shouted the one at his left shoulder to Williams. His accent wasn’t Chinese, and he wasn’t a guard. But he was nervous all right. Four of them were crammed in a shower cubicle, and there were three of them who didn’t want blood on their clothes. Stone had something else on his mind. He had to do it now.

Eyes or windpipe? Or both? His thumb was already jabbing hard into the eye of the man to his left. He felt the side of the eyeball squash as his thumb slid into the socket. A piercing shout, right by his ear. The guy let go, yanking the thumb from his face. Stone swivelled around, jabbing a short punch at the windpipe of the other, who collapsed, sliding down the tiles in a wheezing scream.

The crouching Williams had fallen over on his backside behind Stone. Slithering backwards away across the floor and turning for the door. Williams was aborting the mission, scrambling for the exit. His plan had failed and he was about to walk away. No twenty grand, but the fast car to the airport was still on offer. He’d be on a plane in two hours wearing a business suit.

Williams’ hand was almost on the steel door when the mop handle hit his skull. Stone swung the wooden handle a second time, breaking the New Zealander's fingers as he tried to protect himself, and then connecting with another vicious blow to the skull. The assassin went down, two ragged splits reddening on his short-cropped scalp. Scarlet liquid ran across the tiles. No point asking Williams who he was working for. He wouldn’t even know.

Stone grabbed his clothes and walked out of the shower room, jamming the mop handle under the door behind him. He went to the sink and washed before he went back to his cell. None of the three guys in that room were real prisoners and they wouldn’t be missed. There was silence as he strolled past the other cells, no warder in sight. The two Malaysian men gave him a thumbs-up sign.

Back in Stone’s cell, the bottom bed had been stripped. There was no evidence Williams had ever been there.

Patent lawyer Abe Blackman had fixed another meeting with the Taiwanese gentleman, Mr Shin, in order to give his formal decision on whether he would accept him as a client. It was not exactly a difficult decision, but he always tried to play hard to get.

Blackman had drawn up the contracts ahead of time. This time, he told himself, he had really hit the motherlode. Shin was going to make him rich. He’d even placed a bottle of champagne on ice in his personal refrigerator by his desk. Blackman was an experienced lawyer, who’d pulled off a lot of sweet deals, but he found himself as excited as a ten-year-old.

As before, Shin insisted on their meeting alone. Blackman had dismissed Rayanna, his secretary, early, and Shin arrived punctually at five-thirty. Blackman ushered him in.

‘Before we begin, there is another file on which I would like your opinion, Lawyer Blackman,’ said Mr Shin stiffly.

‘You got more?’ said Blackman. This just got better. ‘Sure. Let’s take a look…’

Shin produced from his large briefcase another black plastic ring binder, similar to the three he’d given Blackman at their first meeting. ‘You need only … glance,’ said Shin. Blackman flashed a smile at the lynx-eyed Mr Shin, and took the binder. He opened it as he walked toward the table.

Then something weird happened. There was an odd rustling, a fluttering. A large insect crawled from the papers of the binder. Blackman threw the whole thing from him in horror. ‘What in God’s name?’ He stood back, his eyes wide in shock as a large, multi-coloured bug crawled over the scattered papers. It bore a hard, glossy shell, which shimmered with a poisonously bright pattern. Yellow, red and black.

Blackman stood back to keep the creature from his feet, looking round for something to kill it with. The damned thing was three inches long at least, with vicious-looking, stag-like mouthparts. ‘You got some god-awful bugs over in Taiwan, Mr Shin,’ he said.

‘Harmless,’ said Shin. He was smiling. Blackman hadn’t seen him smile before. Both men watched transfixed as the creature’s six legs stopped abruptly, and the coloured carapace on its back suddenly flicked open. A pair of wings, iridescent and transparent, like the finest paper Blackman had ever seen, fluttered and then made an invisible, buzzing blur. The bug rose into a smooth, noiseless hover above the table.

Blackman gaped, but Shin had come to life. He was grinning broadly, standing there, in his cheap suit, arms apart like a magician who’s just completed his best trick. ‘Be honest, Mr Blackman. You doubted my designs for the hovering robots. You supposed they were too small.’

‘I, I, I…’ Blackman realised he was stammering, gasping. Like a kid at a circus.

‘I can understand you were surprised, Mr Blackman, and curious,’ said Shin, looking up proudly at the hovering creature. ‘But I thought I made it plain that confidentiality was important to me.'

Shin was still smiling. He bent again and rummaged again in his oversized black case. Then he looked back at the hovering bug and calmly held an aerosol at arms length.

‘Insecticide? So is it a real bug or what, Shin? You just said it was a robot.’

‘It is much more than a robot,’ said Shin, holding out the aerosol. But instead of spraying at the bug, he quite deliberately sprayed Blackman’s neck and shoulder with an odourless mist. The flying bug turned and floated towards Blackman, and as it neared it sped up and made for his neck. Blackman flapped desperately. He knocked it away, and stepped right back against the wall, but it came back. It had huge, devilish, insect eyes, and its back had a malign pattern of black, yellow and red.