Christopher Fowler - Disturbia

He looked back to see the moon momentarily clear the clouds. The arcing steel lines formed a night smile, silver in the drifting snow. It looked as if the railway line was launching its cargo to the stars. Moments later the track was gone, obliterated by endless thundering carriages on their way to the terminus at Waterloo.

'ARE YOU just going to sit there and let him repeatedly flout the rules?' asked Caton-James, 'because if that drug dealer he's talking to starts putting two and two together, he could wreck everything.'

'You're joking, of course,' said Sebastian. 'We know all about him. He's just a stupid junkie. He's not in a position to help Vincent.'

'Right, he's so stupid he just worked out the answer to the last clue. I don't understand you, Sebastian. He's bound to find the next letter and read its contents now that they're up on the roof together. You promised us Reynolds would be the only one to gain full knowledge of the challenge. After tonight no one else would know a thing, that was the beauty of it, you said. Instead he's telling anyone who'll listen. Now you have these – loose cannons -'

'What do you want me to do?' asked Sebastian quietly.

'I want you to start behaving a little more like a general. We should be cleaning up our house. We need to get rid of the junkie,' said Caton-James heatedly. 'Show some balls about it. Our forefathers had to take care of their mistakes. When your own father set up the WBI -'

A sub-zero glance from Sebastian told him he had overstepped the mark. 'I'm fully aware that my father's plans for the WBI were not based on libertarian concerns.'

'We have to tidy up as we go,' Caton-James pleaded. 'I can arrange it if you don't want to.'

'No, I'll do it. Where's Xavier Stevens now?'

'You'll have to ask Barwick.'

'All right, but this is the last time I'm prepared to let outsiders interfere with the game,' said Sebastian, draining his glass and setting it down. Caton-James scowled contemptuously as their leader made a great show of rising to his feet and heading for the stairs to the reading room.

'It's not a game,' he said under his breath. That was Sebastian's trouble. He indulged his personal tastes to the detriment of the others. It was time he started looking to his laurels. There were others coming up behind him – faster, stronger men who had little interest in outdated games, and even less in fair play.

Pam could not breathe. The gag was not tied tightly, but it prevented her from taking air through her mouth, and her nose was becoming blocked. She signalled to Barwick, who finally noticed her discomfort, set down the SAS training manual Caton-James had given him to read and came over.

'I can't take it off,' he whispered at her, pointing to the ceiling. 'They're upstairs. If you make a noise they'll hear you and then we'll both be in trouble.'

Pam rolled her eyes pleadingly at him for a few minutes, enjoying his tortured indecision, then turned on the waterworks. That did the trick. Barwick slunk back to her and loosened the gag. He wasn't too familiar with the ways of women. Pam was too smart to start yelling. She realised she was inside the hive, as it were, and that her shouts were only likely to bring her enemies.

'Thank you for doing that,' she told Barwick gratefully, 'I couldn't breathe. Sinuses. And my hands are going numb.'

'I can't untie your hands, you know that.' He dragged his chair over to her and sat disconcertingly close, watching her face. He appeared genuinely concerned for her welfare, but she had no way of gauging his sincerity.

'I'm not going to try and get away.'

'I should hope not. Get me into trouble.'

One look at his weak eyes told her he had absolutely no authority here. She had heard how his colleagues treated him. Her best hope was to use him to glean information. 'Forgive me, I can't help noticing,' she said gently, 'the others seem very hard on you. Why do you let them push you around so much?'

'Oh, they're not bad fellows really,' he said, glancing nervously at the ceiling. In that moment she saw how frightened of them, and how desperate for their approval, he was. For the first time she began to wonder what they were really up to. This was far too elaborate to merely be some form of divertissement for bored aristos. She looked around at the reading-room floor, trying to see what they'd done with her shoulder bag. Her mobile phone was in it.

'I don't know your first name,' she said, trying out what she hoped was a nervous smile.

'I don't tell many people.' He looked at her shyly. 'It's Horace.'

Christ, no wonder you keep it to yourself, she thought. She was a little insulted to have been left with the stooge of the gang, the traditional court-jester-butt-of-everyone's-jokes that groups of men always seemed to designate. Clearly she was not deemed to be a major player in the night's events. Well, she would find a way to change their minds about that. They were dealing with a professional business management trainee now.

'Horace, could you get me a glass of water?' she asked sweetly, thinking hard. 'My mouth is really dry.'

This constituted a major decision for Barwick, whose pained look presumably indicated some kind of tortured thought process involving responsibility within the power hierarchy. Eventually he left her side and brought a half-full plastic bottle of Evian from the table.

'I got into trouble for buying this,' he told her, removing the cap and allowing the water to run into her upturned mouth. 'Sebastian was furious. He doesn't allow plastic at the table. How's that?' He had tipped the bottle too high. Water splashed down her chin and dripped inside her blouse. He was staring hard at her wet throat. Perhaps he'd never been this close to a female before. He wasn't doing too well now, she thought, not when you considered she was tied to a post.

'Why aren't you upstairs with the others?'

'They needed someone to guard you.'

'And they always give you the crap jobs, don't they?'

'No, I like doing this, really. I can be useful to them.'

But never really part of the team, she thought, just the dogsbody. She remembered in her business management classes how to search out the opposition leader and mark a rival, one on one. 'How do they always know where Vince is?' she asked, 'if it's not giving away trade secrets.'

Barwick seemed quite happy to talk, almost desperately so. He rubbed his florid chops, thinking. 'The League has friends everywhere,' he explained. 'We all went to university together. And we know lots of people, of course, through – the families,' he added obscurely.

'What about the traffic cameras? Vincent says you've been using them to keep tabs on him.'

'They operate on closed circuit systems, but they have feeds running from them to central monitor stations. The more important ones are dumped down onto IBM hard drives or CD-Roms at peak hours. And the private infra-red cameras installed by shopping precincts, business developments and public buildings that have to monitor occupancy to comply with fire regulations can be downloaded into a number of West End video suites, where the tapes are collated within a digitalised computer system and stored as back-up copies. We have somebody monitoring your friend's movements, following him from system to system, and he just ISDNs the appropriate monitor scenes from the suites up to St John Warner's computer system. Simple, really, although the varying download times can sometimes cause surveillance discrepancies. That's when we switch to video grabs taken from Quicktime footage on the Internet.'

Oh God, a techno-nerd, she thought. 'You like computers, do you?'

'Oh yes, my chosen field, actually.'