Dan Abnett - Border Princes

A man walking a dog frowned at Jack as Jack bombed past.

‘Afternoon!’ Jack called. Twenty yards to the corner, then right. He jinked around two men carrying an old bath out to a skip. He reached the corner, and skidded around it.

Jack’s intercept prediction had almost been bang on. Left to his own devices, the young man in the suit would have doubled back again, and run headlong into Jack coming the other way.

But the young man in the suit hadn’t made it that far. A few yards in from the opposite street corner, James had him pressed against the wall in an arm-lock.

Jack trotted up, breathing hard. The young man was struggling and mouthing off.

‘Be still!’ James told him. He looked around at Jack. ‘Got him,’ he said.

‘How?’ asked Jack

‘I ran like a bastard and caught up with him,’ said James. ‘How do you think? Be still, I said!’

‘Last time I saw you pair, he had thirty yards on you,’ said Jack, panting.

‘All in the finish,’ James replied. ‘He went off too early. Soon as he began to flag, I had him. It’s pacing, Jack, pacing.’

‘My ass it is. He was flying.’

‘Are you going to help?’ James asked. The young man in the suit was struggling harder.

‘Get your hands off me! Get your filthy hands off me! I know my rights! Police brutality!’

‘Turn him round,’ Jack instructed. James manhandled the wriggling young man around to face him. The young man was sweaty and flushed, sucking painful breaths in after his exertions.

‘You think we’re police?’ Jack asked him.

‘Get your hands off me!’ the young man replied.

‘Do you think we’re the police?’ Jack asked him again, more slowly and deliberately this time.

‘Y-yes?’

‘Boy,’ smiled Jack. ‘This is going to be fun.’

They walked back to the SUV.

‘OK,’ Jack admitted. ‘Not so much fun as I’d hoped. Or success.’

‘You sure we should have let him go?’ asked James.

‘I’m telling you, that wasn’t our guy.’

James pursed his lips. ‘Unless, of course, he was, and he just hypnotised us the way he hypnotises his other victims, and we fell for it. Did you consider that?’

‘Come on, that moron couldn’t have hypnotised a… a…’

‘A what?’

‘Something that gets hypnotised very easily,’ Jack replied, fishing the carkeys out of his coat.

‘So you’re certain it wasn’t the man we’re looking for?’

‘You saw him as well as I did,’ said Jack, slightly plaintively, ‘You heard him. He was just a chancer, trying to case likely-looking homes by pretending to be doing a consumer survey. No cover story is that believably lame.’

‘I suppose. He did seem scared.’

‘Too right he was scared. Petty housebreaker, messing with me. Shame though, I thought he was the one.’ Jack blip-blipped the key fob to unlock the SUV and they got in.

‘Did he hit you?’ Jack asked.

‘What?’

‘While he was struggling? Did he catch you?’

‘What? Why?’ James replied.

‘Your nose is bleeding a little there.’

‘Huh? Oh, yeah, I think he did.’

It wasn’t yet three o’clock. Even with the secret, that was good going. Once you had them, you had to ease them in the direction you wanted them to go in, very gently. Some visits, that was slow going. Dean imagined it was a bit like steering a punt, although he’d never actually done that. He’d seen it on telly, however. Some fly-on-the-wall about arsehole toffs, punting.

Sometimes, during a visit, they resisted, due to inhibitions he didn’t yet understand. Sometimes, he had to apply quite a lot of effort to get them moving the way he wanted them to go. Occasionally, there was nothing to get a purchase on, nothing but soft mud when he sank his punting pole in, so to speak.

Dean thought he ought to write a seminar. He could train people to use the secret, and he’d heard there was really big money in sales training. Not that he was about to give the secret away to anyone, of course. It was his.

Dean came out of number eight, and said goodbye to Mrs Menzies. She seemed very pleased with her imaginary loft insulation and replacement windows. Dean was certainly very pleased with the eight hundred and sixty-six not-imaginary-at-all pounds he’d been given by Mrs Menzies. He’d made sure to collect up all his bits of paper, all the forms he’d had her sign, here and here and here. They were only mail-away coupons and inserts from magazines, but the client always saw pukka, press-hard-you’re-making-four-copies contract blanks. He tried not to ever leave any behind, but if he did, no one would give them a second look.

He walked down the street, whistling. He waited to cross back to his vehicle, and allowed some traffic to go by. A couple of saloon cars, a hatchback, then a monster black 4x4, a Porsche Cayenne or a Range Rover. It had gone past before he’d got a proper eyeful. Tasty. That’s what he wanted next. A really nice ride like that. Yes sir.

He unlocked his own vehicle. It’d do the trick for the time being. No one ever looked at it.

Dean sat down, and flipped through his sheaf of electoral roll printout. Time for one more, then he’d call it a day.

The park would be closing soon. The sign at the wrought-iron gates advertised that they would be locked at nightfall in winter. Another half an hour. The white-gold sun was slipping behind the empty trees, and long dark shadows were running out across the grass like ploughed furrows. There was a slight autumnal haze, a softness in the light, and a smell of leaves decaying.

People were walking dogs. A few kids were playing, most of them on their way home from school, laden with knapsacks. A golden retriever chased energetically across the grass, hunting down a frisbee. Its owner shouted the dog’s name. Leaves fluttered as it snatched up the red plastic disk and turned with it in its mouth.

Mr Dine sat on the top of the War Memorial, basking in the last of the sun. He was secure. No one could see him up there. He was out of sight to anyone passing by on the ground, and to anyone looking on from a distance. Besides, no one would expect a person to be up there. The Council had never bothered fencing the War Memorial with railings, because it was patently unclimbable.

He’d crashed, predictably, then switched to recovery mode. A warm glow that wasn’t the sunlight suffused him. He could hear the distant, constant hum of traffic.

The upload had restarted about an hour earlier. Not an alert, just a routine data review. He sat listening to its melodious chunter. Key link-strands had not yet been clarified and restored to satisfaction. There was still some concern, expressed via the upload, that the Principal’s status might yet be compromised and unsafe. A possibility of damage. Mr Dine was to monitor this carefully in the coming hours.

Mr Dine opened his hand and looked at the livid burn the adversarial object had left on the flesh of his palm. The wound was repairing, but it had gone through to the bone in places.

‘You’re joking! And?’ asked Gwen.

‘Well,’ said James, ‘he went off down Brunswick Way like he had an Exocet up his jacksie, and Jack and I went after him. This is the third time in one afternoon, bear in mind. I was not in the mood for another sprint. Anyway, he gets past me and Jack rugby tackles him on a traffic island.’

‘Go on.’

‘He’s only a Jehovah’s Witness, isn’t he?’

‘No!’ Gwen exclaimed with a snort. ‘Not really?’

‘I swear. He starts trying to club Jack off him with a rolled up copy of The Watchtower .’

‘What did you do?’ Gwen asked, raising her wine glass.

‘We apologised,’ James grinned.

‘But he’d run. Why had he run?’