10 Amsterdam

 

 

“You ever been to one of the dope cafes?”

“What a question. No, as it happens.”

“Well, I think you should, you can’t come to Amsterdam without seeing one. Or the Anne Frank museum, it’s quite small.” Ella tailed off.

“Trying to get rid of me?” Sharp and suspicious.

“O god no, absolutely not, I’ve just got to check with some friends, that they’ll be ok.” There was a pregnant silence. “You’re hot babe.”

That got Josies attention. “Huh? Oh, you mean the warrants.”

“The arrest warrants yes, I was trying to be polite. You see the place we’re going is a squat, it’s the last free haven in Amsterdam, it’s often under observation itself, and I have to be sensitive.”

“Of course… Sorry.”

“De nada.”

“Hey, could you look after my suitcase?”

Shit, the suitcase. “Yeah, I’ll just leave it in the back for now.” With whatever it contains whoever you are, straight lady who knows so much about the business. Not that I’m the clean and sparkly one out of us right now, obviously. A thought that was already taking most of Ella’s processing power.

“Drop me at an Internet Cafe, a busy one, with plenty of computers. We’ll meet up at the Vondleplatz car park in, what, four hours do it?”

“I guess.” answered Ella, feeling slightly steamrollered. “Yeah, four hours should do it.” Josie certainly seemed to have a mission, Ella supposed she had people to talk to, and wondered who they were.

Parky

Parky was annoyed, he’d been given this stupid job by the nasty little man from the colonies, who was not ‘one of us’ at all. The Captain might be the ranking officer now, but when they’d been in the service they’d held the same rank, Parky had taken a step down for the extra money, and had no concerns about that. Soldiering was a job, just like any other, it wasn’t so much about rank as the life experiences you had.

And the man was useless, he was a desk pilot, he’d lost the woman straight away, apparently they’d split up the moment Parky had peeled off to make the drop. The target had dropped the new contact in a layby and high tailed it down some dirt tracks; by god that woman could drive that little lorry, and she seemed to know the geography of Europe like the back of her hand, always able to find a back way out of a trap.

Perhaps he was underestimating these travellers, their natural state of alertness and readiness? He supposed it must take competence to live like that, so close to the edge all the time, out on their own. He had taken a bit of a liking to the target over the week. He’d followed her from the beginning, he noticed all sorts of basic things she’d fouled up in a military sense, but he’d also noticed the clever little ways she improvised out of what was at hand, a Special Forces trick. Maybe she was IRA, or Yakuza, a militarised gangster, but they all had similar training in defensive tactics, she broke the mould. She’d had no offensive training that he recognised, yet she always had an out, an unexpected counter ruse.

Again and again the woman, who he knew to be civillian, had kept her cool, she had run when she should have hid, hid when she should have run, counter attacked turning their own weapons back on them, walked out of the jaws of traps that they had no opportunity to close. She’d stopped and started, gone round and round, hid, appeared where they’d rather she didn’t, made tailing her with less than a six team with helicopter cover impossible, so they’d lost her, again and again.

And she had kept running until she suddenly completely dropped off the map in a disorientingly professional way, whereupon she had, what? Hidden out, gone to ground, like a professional soldier would? Nothing like, she’d come stalking them, like a copper. He remembered the way she’d studied the tyre prints and the Claymore mine, and fuck knows why the Captain deployed that. This job was becomig like a fucking training excercise, or something out of a book.

But she wasn’t military, you could tell, military were trained to act in a certain way, by the book. With her, you could see it wasn’t a book, it was like she was wild, a wild animal living in the wild world. He noticed the way she’d kept the wall to her right so a weapon could cover the widest field of fire. She’d not been holding an assault rifle when she’d searched Dragon in Marseille, but she’d acted the same as the people who did. She’d stalked the hall systematically like a wild panther, like an ancient barbarian hero.

This was a problem, he was a man who had devoted his life to fighting other soldiers. Sure he got paid, and sometimes there were perks, but that was just the life of a soldier. The more important thing was there were rules, and the big rule was you didn’t make war on non combatants, no matter how competent they had turned out to be at throwing things back. Much as he’d enjoyed stalking the target, his respect for her as an opponent told him there had to be a limit. He felt it would be some sort of sacrelige to kill anything so beautifully competent for such a shoddy reason as rescuing the Captain’s career.

His father had been a soldier, and his before him, all officers in the ‘Glorious Gloucesters’, the local regiment, which had surrendered to a man in the Korean War, where his father had been tortured to death by the revolutionary Chinese. His family were from the center of England, from the rich and successful heart of the Industrial revolution, the Potteries, and he knew his position amongst the exalted extended as much from the geographical accident of his birth as it did from the willingness of his family to fight and die for their assets.

He came from what would be called a military family. Not an Army family, that was how he would have described lower orders, the less regarded families, the ranks. No, a military family, which meant leadership, influence, position. Parky himself hadn’t climed high, the generations varied, some officers flourished in wartime who weren’t so lucky in peacetime, and military families were the same, the fortues ebbing and flooding around a few hundred core sets of genes. His father had been sprinkled liberally with postumous medals, to reinforce how important it was for him to drown tied to a child’s school chair in the Imjin River. His grandfather had died in a hail of bullets at the Somme and been decently buried in a mass grave that was mostly body parts, so he had received less medals.

Parky had had a career already; a five and three Captains commission, extended to ten years active service. He bought off his three years in the Territorials, then looked for something in the commercial sector. Happy to prolong his military career he avoided civilian security and joined up with one of the new Military Companies working in troublespots for local dictators. Every year every nation discards its thousand trained killers to make their own way in the world, so there was never a shortage of security personnel for hire. Ella had met them at protests and evictions many times, on both sides which she always felt was something of an irony.

Parky had enjoyed the life, and drifted around from job to job and company to company. One day he was tipped for an interview for a top secret job. The fellow officer that gave him the tip had recieved a cash payment to recruit people meeting a particular criterior, that they should have no living family. He had not told Parky, as he probably wouldn’t have joined the team. Parky was neither a particularly bad man nor a stupid one.

This, and the grudging admiration and benevolent regard with which Parky had begun to hold the woman, a curious inversion of Stockholm Syndrome, made him unhappier still. This was a stupid order, it would draw attention, it was a panic tactic. Parky knew the Captain had no grasp of tactics, had seen the failures play out one by one. The fool didn’t know how to command, was not bred for it, he had wild over the top ideas, he was like an evil genius sometimes, was probably mad.

Parky had met this type before, he wished the progeny of these colonial upstarts, the sons of grocers, wouldn’t come and sully his precious soldiery with their money fixations. Unable to rise through English society they’d looked for a short cut in the colonies, hoping to come back with a title for a ladder. But most of them were mediocre, inside they were shopkeepers, and the sons of shopkeepers, they’d left in search of the wealth, not the excitement. So they’d been stuck out there, as mediocre in la-la-land as they’d been in England.

He checked his weapon again. Not his usual gun, that was the other problem with these outfits, there was no standardisation of weapons, the Roman army had used standard equipment in standard pattern forts throughout the Empire. That alone was what had made them the Army of armies, virtually unbeatable. No matter what time of day or night, no matter if a soldier had just arrived, if he was drunk or in the blind dark he knew straight away where to get kitted and fitted, where to guard and where to fight, where to eat, shit and sleep. You couldn’t surprise the Romans, they already had a plan.

The British army had been good, there’d been a couple of changes of weapon in his time, one from that pile of crap that jammed all the time. But more or less, you knew how to make it work without having to stop and think, an important factor when you are in a killing zone. He checked again, peered closely in the poor light at the fire selection switch. He couldn’t decide whether it was on automatic or single fire, and the markings were next to useless, in Chinese or something. It needed to be on single fire for accurate sniping. When he’d cleaned it after the range the rifling looked worn, really, it was dreadful, giving him these shoddy bloody tools, he’d be lucky if it didn’t just blow up.

He decided, after this job was over he was getting out of this line of work, he’d look for something in tourism or tracking. He’s always fancied doing Bear Grylls courses, dead easy that stuff, money wasn’t so good, but with the bonus he’d get for this one, he would be able to afford it. An early retirement herding overweight lower management bods around assault courses, he could think of worse.

A vehicle turned into the end of the road. That was the target, French plates, very distinctive sillouette, he’d not seen one of those since Annecy. As it got closer he made out the cluttered roof, the chimney, the silver bands that were the edges of the solar panels. He lifted the rifle, drew a bead on the yellow coated figure in the left hand seat. He really hated when a job went sour like this, he’d a good mind to just miss her, nobody would second guess the debrief of a lone sniper. Allowing for the relative movement of the truck as it came towards him he braced his back against the heavy buttress of steel tubing, and squeezed the trigger.

The gun rattled and recoiled upwards. Shit, he thought, it’s on auto, I’ll kill her if I fire again, I might have already. He dropped the gun in front of him and tried to switch over to single shot. Shit shit shit, doing this, can’t look at that, did I get the shot, did I get the shot? There was a thump, suspension squeaked in protest; I must of hit it, that was a kerb. Parky fiddled baffled, the switch was jammed by something. Then he remembered the Armourers briefing; finger off the trigger, it’s a safety feature so you can’t accidentally switch when firing. Parky suspected it was actually a design flaw and that they were using them because they were cheap and untracable. There was a thump as the second axle mounted the kerb. The switch clicked. Parky looked up over the bin he was crouched behind, but he was just a fraction of a second too late.

 

Ella took a right and a left aiming for a shortcut that went around the back of Westpoort railway station into a small factory estate. She got up to fifty K and throttled back to coast, looking along the right for the unit where she was meant to make the drop. On both sides of the road industrial units turned matt grey shoulders to the passing traffic. Big roller bins lined the sides of the metal sheds with brightly coloured lids, freegan Ella’s view was naturally drawn to these, and she scanned the protuding rubbish with a practiced eye.

This meant, ironically, that she was looking in roughly the right direction when it happened, ironically, because she didn’t notice a thing till too late. The man was a professional, he was trained to stand motionless, merging with the background. He was wearing light grey working clothes that merged beautifully with the colour of the sheds, and his head and shoulders were in one of the few patches of deep shadow behind a heavy tube steel buttress that ran half way up the tall industrial buildings.

There was a crackling noise, and something bit her left cheek. The shot came through the windscreen on the passenger side and hit the reflective vest that always hung over the far left passenger seat about 20cm down on the left hand side, passing straight through the seat back as if it were butter, and stopping when it hit the steel back wall of the cab with an echoing clang. The gaping hole was right where the heart would have been in a left hand drive driver.

She was surprised by the size of the hole as she had assumed bullets would leave small neat holes, but this rather depended, on what the bullet had hit since being fired, which ways it was subsequently spinning, and crucially the quality of the rifling in the weapon that fired it in the first place. This bullet from this gun that had just deflected through this windscreen had been spinning like the moon Phoebus, in several pieces the combined radius of a small fist.

Ella couldn’t have known at this point that the weapon had been last used to massacre the innocent population of a South American village, and was still loaded with illegal explosive bullets. She couldn’t have known that a subsequent fusillade would have led to the gun exploding killing the left handed man using it, that by stopping him firing it again she was about to save his life. At least, momentarily.

Startled, she looked across the cab at the starred bullet hole in the windscreen, her hand flew to her cheek. Blood, and it felt like glass in her face. Without thinking she veered away from the holes she could see, her mind didn’t work out the line of fire at this point; the holes were to her left, so she should head right.

Veering sharply to the right, still looking vainly the other way for the spot where the shot came from, she bounced up the low kerb stones. Thirty meters are covered quickly at fifty-eight kilometers an hour and Ella covered them in two short seconds, long enough to glance round and register Parky’s flamboyant moustache and surprised expression. Her foot hit the brake just as the fast moving truck hit the bin.

The large metal wheeled bins on the pavement were braked, but not enough to resist a glancing impact from well over two tons of metal travelling fifteen meters every second. The bin, which must have weighed a significant proportion of a ton, went from stationary to moving instantaneously, and flew backwards catching Parky at port arms position, the butt of his rifle against his hip, the tip still pointed at the back of the now moving bin.

It was the movement that caught Ella’s eye, the man straightened slightly aand began to look up  and then he jerked, a meter before the bin should have hit him, and slammed back into the buttress behind. The bin rebounded away and there he stood briefly, and clearly, Eduardo’s assistant.

After a moment he slumped to his knees in a boneless way. He couldn’t collapse any further for the front two thirds of a NATO style assault rifle projecting obscenely from his hips in a way that looked distinctly terminal for the wearer; his small body didn’t look big enough to accomodate the other third. His mouth gurgled red, he held the rifle tightly by the barrel.

Ella floored the throttle and roared up the street, she was getting used to this now, drive away fast. Every time she’d got out to help she’d got a bloody phone call from Eduardo. She shouted aloud. “Christ on a bike. Was that for me, or Josie?” There was no answer but the clatter of the valve followers. Her heart beating like a voodoo drummer trying to raise a deaf zombie she tried to consider the problem rationally.

She’d already been shot at this week, and drugged and chased and tied up and tortured for that matter, but the shot hit Josie’s seat, not hers. Ella couldn’t distance herself from the one big fact, that she was almost the only person who knew her French plated truck was right hand drive. Even Ella herself sometimes walked round to the wrong door to get in, and she lived in it. She’d been wearing black, the empty seat had been wearing a dayglo bib.

But there’s no blame attached to blindness. Ella decided she’d dump the woman, who was probably pig bait anyway, and ditch the suitcase in one of the canals, after searching it for loose cash of course. She made the three kilometers to the squat on auto pilot, eyes glazed, blood dripping heedlessly from the open scratch on her cheek.

The gate was open as she got there and she drove in with a glassy wave, and headed round the tree lined concrete roads to Steffies big showmans trailer, deep in the woods.

The ADM is the biggest and oldest squat in Amsterdam. It has been squatted twice, when it was left undeveloped after the first eviction in the nineties a new crew resquatted it and this time held it. It is a lucky squat in that the previous owners of the land willed it to be used for ship building, and since there is no ship building industry left in Amsterdam the occupation has been morally unchallangable since.

That is not to say the current ‘owners’ haven’t made spirited, and usually illegal attempts to clear the terrain, several times they have done crash demolitions of part of the site with big diggers. The occupiers have responded by becoming human shields, climbing on the diggers, clambering around in a collapsing building, defying the man to hurt them. This is a risky strategy, as Bertie Luske is a minor gangland figure, with a history in the boxing ring, and a reputation for murdering competition.

During twenty years of occupation the site evolved organically, a test bed for bottom up social evolution. The buildings and structures are less ramshackle, more persistent than they look. There is government by meetings, the communitas aiming for consensus, a bold experiment amongst the Despots of Europe, surviving despite all the odds. They poke and prod at the city’s weaknesses, laugh at it’s pride and arrogance, they are the other Holland, the Holland of reasonable people.

Once a pond for overproduced automobiles, now there is twenty years of tree growth, silver birch and willow have completely colonised the terrain, a bold scar of wildlife habitat slashed through the concrete belly of the docks. There are domes, straw bale houses, wooden sheds, tree houses, boats, space ships, converted vehicles of every type and variety, caravans, and other constructions that completely defy simple, or in some case complex, description. These are homes for the hundreds of independent spirits who live there in the autonomous anarchist commune. More or less.

Steffie had been one of the original squatters, Ella had met her at a festival, running a queer bar, and had helped her out with a little proplem. Well, to be honest the problem had come from Ella’s own crew, which was how come Ella had started frequenting the bar. Problem solved, Ella’s crew had discovered some manners, and Ella had made a good friend. Steffie and Ella had a lot in common, although they did not see each other often they did value the rare instances of each other’s company.

Ellie parked deep in the woodland that had been half the height when she’d first come here a decade ago. She found her way through the meandering paths and into Steffie’s garden. Over the years Ella had helped build parts of the seating and covered areas, had helped build the little bar and DJ area. She smiled in fond recollection, happy days. She climbed the steps and knocked on the glass door.

“Yah?”

“Steffie, it’s me.”

“Darling, Ella, what are you doing here, I had no warning, it’s so lovely to see you.” She unfolded herself from the fireside chair and came elegantly to the door. “Come in, come in, would you like some tea?”

Ella told her quickly, the shooting, the truck, she had to get it off the roads, she couldn’t drive it around Amsterdam with a bullet hole in the windscreen, and she didn’t have time to explain the bullet hole, except to say it was a courier job that had gone sour.

“But of course you must do it here.” Steffie exclaimed, “Where did you park it?” She bent to pull on her boots, “Come on, we’ll move it into the loads.”

The loads is the name for the big boat building shed. At one time it would have been capable of making big thirty meter barges, ten at a time, the one time delivery system for a country that was essentially a series of silt islands in a lake. Now it had become the work bays of a number of artists, businesses or hobbyists, was lined with all manner of outlandish creations. In one bay, a metal woman wove sinuously up out of a pile of steel shavings, her form tricking the eye into seeing life, movement even, in the pile of lifeless steel. In another bay a mad tubular framed three wheel vehicle paused in a strange transformation between unreal states. Looking around she could see all sorts of woodburning stoves, from a tiny intricate thing shaped like a jewel, to a huge ships boiler that looked big enough to consume whole pallets.

A huge crane hung overhead, weighing the great cavern down, strange organic things hung, relics of the last festival. Here, great painted heads peered over a stack of plywood, there a pair of steel spoked wheels the height of a man hinted at some strange contraption.

Freddy’s bay was full of old car parts. Steffie marched in speaking fast in Dutch. Freddie’s head swung to look at Ella, he raised an eyebrow in recognition and nodded at Steffie. “Ok, if you get the glass I will take out the old one. Hi Ella, we’ll have a beer later, jah?”

“Good to see you Freddy, for sure, I want to see your latest creations.” As well as repairing and restoring cars and trucks, Freddy made metal sculpture. He regularly made new stools for the squat bar, everybody who lived there gave part of their output, maybe time, or stuff, into the community. A voluntary tax, that maintained and improved the infrastructure. Nowadays there was also a small living charge; the place had evolved services, electric, internet and phones, toilets, workshops and offices, the cost was tiny in real terms, which could still be a lot to people off the grid.

Freddy smiled acknowledgment and turning to the work bench started collecting together some tools. Steffie turned on her heel. Ella followed in her wake. “We need to find Aarti.” They marched along the concrete road, their boots crunching in time. Tall herself, occaisionally Ella had to put in an extra step to keep up with her taller friend. They turned the corner past the offices and came to Aarti’s shed. After a few moments he emerged from the dusty darkness clutching the bottom half of a shop window dummy. As if this happened all the time Steffie launched into a fierce monologue.

Aarti looked less and less willing until in the end he said “Nay.” There was a short conversation in Dutch, one of the many times Ella wished she’d been born in the north-east and not the south-east of France, where she’d have probably learned a little Flemish. Steffie spoke some more, pleaded, shook her head and mentioned Freddy. Aart shook his head from side to side. He disappeared back into the shed. Steffie turned to Ella and explained.

“He has said he will think about it. He doesn’t want to give you the windscreen from his transit in case he wants to get it running again. I told him Freddy would weld a plate over the hole so it would be dry, but then it would be difficult to repair again.” She winced, “I think he is right. Maybe Freddy will give us a ride to the car breakers.” There was excited yelling from the back of the shed. “He’s found another windscreen, he thinks it might be a spare he found years ago in a bin, it is a bit scratched he says, but no bullet holes.” Aart laughed from the darkness, it was a warm plummy sound, news gets round this place fast thought Ella.

They put the windscreen on a trolley and towed it back to the loads, jinking and jumping over the broad fissures and rail tracks in the aged concrete. Freddy, good to his word had already stripped the old one, and they held the new one up to see. It looked the right shape and size. Freddy quickly and expertly cleaned the edge with a angle sander and got out a gun of sealant. “I like these.” He said and grinned. Ella nodded, remembering the time she’d tried to replace the traditional type of rear window in a four wheel drive that’d got broken during an eviction. It’d taken two people, a long piece of string, half a bottle of washing up liquid, an assortment of bent screwdrivers, a rubber mallet, and three hours to do. This was glued and fitted in seconds, and they adjourned to the bar to let it set.

The bar in the ADM is not like a traditional bar. It doesn’t sell food or beer for one thing, potentially a fatal flaw, but one the locals have got round by filling the place with their own beer and spirits. Of course if a visitor should turn up, which they sometimes do in surprising numbers, they can usually buy a beer from somebody, purely as a private arrangement you understand. And there are bands, and somebody will cook. The ADM bar is well known on the gig circuit amongst small to medium bands, it is a tough gig, they are discerning punters, get the ADM bar jumping and that is all the validation you need.

Right now it was quiet, a few of the ADM’ers were drinking or talking. Somebody passed a spliff, Steffie passed it straight on to Ella. They admired Freddies new bar stools, amazing creations of pieced together shapes, fully a meter high, some with a slight spring to them, some rock solid, all different, yet clearly of the same stamp.

The admiration wasn’t just from gratitude for the help, Freddie, like many of the artists there was good, at least in part because the squat itself freed the residents from the huge costs life imposes, rent, bills, wage slavery, commuting. The residents there are freer to achieve their full potential, they are time rich. Sometimes Ella wished she lived there, suspected she’d blown an offer some years back by having such itchy feet. And the ADM was a difficult place to get into.

The glue was set by the time they got back. Freddy reached into the cab and pulled out a box. “I put a little heater in there to speed it.” He said. Ella knew it was solar powered, that the whole site was powered from the roof of the office block. She jumped in and revelled in the transmuted sunlight trapped in the lovely warm seat.

“Thanks for everything Steff, Freddy, I’ll explain when I can.”

“And come for a good long visit, bring your tools.” Steffie laughed. “I’ve got this idea, remember the plan for pedal powered smoothie makers?”

Ella laughed too. “Aww, Steff, you’re the best.”

“It’s nothing, de nada.”

Ella rolled out through the huge sliding gate. Well, there was no way she was asking for sanctuary now, not after the shooting. Josie would just have to be more forthcoming, or find somewhere else to stay. Ella felt she was owed a serious explanation. She drove thoughtfully around the long curving dock road, gazing sightlessly at the acres of new cars, the tanks and tankers of the bio-fuel depot. The big new overpass loomed and shaded, then passed behind, and Ella missed jolting over the old railway line whose land it had usurped.

She picked up Josie, against her better judgment, and parked the truck in the east of the city hidden between a block of low rise low rent housing and a sparsely populated dock area. The area hadn’t suffered the gentrification of the city, it wasn’t burdened by full employment, education, equal access to services and products. The people were visibly multi ethnic, the free food store in the middle of some wasteland did roaring trade, giving lightly bruised greens, some slightly spotted carrots, the odd mouldering peach away with the good stuff that was six hours too old to be edible. It was picked over by short dark people muffled in second hand clothes against the northern chill. Their genes said they were freezing to death, but their hearts were glad the bullets had been left behind in the home country.

The underbelly of every city was like this, a place of minimal aspirations, marginal livings, of pride you could bend steel round living alongside crack and smack junkies who would steal the teeth from your mouth and the rings from your fingers. Theft, prostitution and drugs were the only stimulants to this moribund economy half peopled by decent aliens, half by broken down locals. If a city is a revolving door, this place is the gutter where the queuing hopefuls tangle with the consumed ejecta, these are the ones who aren’t keeping up. If you live in a city without subscribing utterly to its venal motives you are consumed, and spat out broken. Every city has these places, and you can hide in them if you obey certain rules, the most important of which is to be poor. Ella, by definition looked poor, she got her clothes and ate at the same bins as many of the locals. The problem was Josie, who still looked like she’d parachuted in from Wall Street.

Because it was spring Josie wouldn’t need the wood burner, and they found a good place to park the truck between two derelict buildings with the back door opening onto a canal view, albeit an urban commercial canal, which they both laughingly agreed did detract a little from the dream. Josie put the kettle on, and tripping over each other until Josie jumped out of the way onto the sofa, Ella extricated the dissembled mountain bike from its little hole under the sink, then took a quick shower.

She slurped the cool tea quickly, and jumped on the bike for the three kilometer ride into the city to find Jan. Ella loved riding a bike in Amsterdam, to start with it was so flat. Holland isn’t about geography, it’s so flat and marginal most of it is barely land. You look as hard as you like and you see no horizon, around you is only stuff, the stuff the Dutch have built in the expectation that they’re going to have to work to keep it from floating away.

The bridges and the buildings have gravity, solidity, an aura of broad based permanance. The windmills have broad fat bases, the horses have dinner plate feet to stop them sinking into the ooze. The Dutch have hill envy and have to build artificial ones when they have a particularly challenging canal to cross.

And the bike lanes were the best, hitting a cyclist is practicaly the worst crime you can commit in Holland, the bright red tracks go everywhere, and it is not uncommon to be driving a car the right way down a one way road and meet a mob of bicycles coming the other way, who somehow have right of way. Oh yes, this is the way to run a city.

Dutch bikes too, they gave the rider an appearance of ethreal height, sitting comfortably in an armchair position a meter off the ground, the contrast with the hunched sweating mountain biker or racer is another example of hill envy, height equaling solidity. Add to that the Dutch tallness, and until you have seen the bike lights change in the Station Platz, the sea of heads majestically rising and falling to their pedals, you have not seen the earthly personification of moral superiority. Seeing a crowd of Dutch on bikes, she still couldn’t understand how they could have been invaded by the Nazis. Maybe the Nazis were riding Dutch bikes too?

She turned into the bar district and looked for somewhere to hook her mountain bike. She could probably leave the old panniers on here, but she would need to empty them of valuables. She wedged it into a long row of tall elegant cycles where its low bars and small knobbly wheels made it almost impossible to miss, and a nightmare to wedge in. She always worried, it was old, but had once been good, and might still be a target. She could have left it in the Turkish district overnight with no lock, but here in the city center there were more druggies; junkies and drunks. She laughed at the cosmic irony.

She headed south through the centrum and tried a couple of sports bars, met several characters and asked if anyone knew Jan’s hangouts. She tried the dope bars, again nobody knew, or was telling. Finally an old stoner in one of the oldest Cafes suggested the name of a nightclub over a shared joint. They were in a glass cubicle, an innovation since the change in smoking laws, and most of the bars that survived had to fit special smokers areas. This one was particularly grotesque, she felt like an exhibit, brightly lit in a glass cage, but the old toker didn’t seem too bothered. He was probably used to seeing the hookers similarly displayed in the front windows of the houses down by the canals.

Ella

I walked up and down the queue for the club hoping I’d recognise someone. Suddenly I was gripped from behind, although enveloped would be more accurate. “Hey Travelling Girl,” came a throaty whisper from below my ear, “I haven’t seen those beautiful blue eyes for a lifetime, what say we ditch these losers,” he indicated the queue expansively with a bulky right arm, “and head to where the real party’s at.”

“Mad Jan, as I live and breathe,” I breathed back. His left arm disappeared from around my waist, and his broad back turned and made surprising headway through the crowd. Momentarily that was explained as I saw the two outriders, knifing through the crowd like sharks, gently shifting people till there was always a natural space in front of the big man.

“Madame,” deeply and quietly behind me, a voice like fingers dusting my back, a dark black man of exceptional condition, like a decathlete, and shaved head held one arm out and around indicating flow or movement in the great man’s wake. My, my, I considered. Little Jan has more than his usual retinue, and I wondered why he was out the front of a club, even one as nice as this, on foot. Sure the celebs limo in to the front, but the biggies, they have a discreet back way for them.

We slunk around a corner and into the back of a large blacked out Merc people carrier. The two sharks circled away from the door into a tasty looking 4×4 parked behind us. As I turned in my seat to watch them I felt a sharp prick in my ass, and not the pleasurable kind either. I turned sharply and saw the chocolate voiced black guy putting something away.

“That wasn’t nice,” I said, or tried to say, as the soporific took immediate control of my mind, progressively packing it in cotton wool and putting it in a chest ready to move to the wrong house. “But I wanted that teddy, the teddy in the box. That is my birthday penis and I want it myself.” I turned to the others. “You have to get your friends out of the room, I can’t use it with them there.” The large penis nestled on the floor looking so soft and inviting, the end dribbled clear liquid. I wanted to sit on it, like a long silky space hopper and bounce up and down. “You two timer”, said my girlfriend, “what’s wrong with my cock?” she said pulling her kilt aside.

“That’s not the point” I said, “it was my teddy, and I put it somewhere safe, now I can’t find it.”

“Where did you put it?”

“That’s what I don’t know.” I whined, “You have it if you want it so bad, I just want the box, you have to get those people out.”

Wearily he examined my nails.

“Used a firearm, explosive device, or artillery device in the last two weeks?”

Ah, back in the room, that was strange. My scattered thoughts reassembled with a dizzying momentum. “Why, want to buy some?”

“These tests are very accurate.”

“So then you’ll be able to tell me.”

“We just want to know what was in the package.”

“My fucking laundry, and who’s we?”

“We found the code.”

“That’s no code, it’s my laundry list.”

“We know the code was in the bottom of the package. We know there was money and the code. You decoded it and made the drop. What was in the package. We know you were given permission to look, and we know you Ellen, we know you looked.”

“Na mate, you know I was given permission, you assume I looked. You are wasting your time, I am as pure as the motives behind politics.”

He laughed, finally, and not just with his mouth. There was another prick.

 

Eduardo

Jesus, the job couldn’t have gone more wrong. It must be some sort of conspiracy. Eduardo overtook a slow moving car with a curse. She’d assassinated Parky, and he had to assume she was coming for him next. Well, he had one more job to do, and then he was out of it. Tickets booked to Argentina, spare passport for the connection on to Thailand, then he was safe and on his way home. He cut up a slow lorry to take the off ramp. There was a blare of horns from behind. God these cars were good. Be a shame to have to ditch it. Perhaps they’d give him another one when the heat died down.

Ella

I came to again, in a starched white hospital bed, a pretty nurse in close attendance. I closed my eyes again firmly, a minor fantasy drifting across my mind. I decided I would ask her to play and my eyes reopened to see Jan’s mad grinning face.

“Sorry,” said Jan, “you’ve been gone a long time, then you turn up with a gift wrapped code done up like a cracker puzzle, I had to know if you’d been turned.”

“You dirty fascist fuck,” I shouted with as much violence as I could muster while keeping the nausea at bay, “are you on fucking drugs or something? I thought you were my friend, Jan?”

“But I am your friend girly, that’s why my medics let you sleep off the headaches, that stuff is filthy, do you know it’s against the Geneva convention even to use this shit on hamsters? Don’t you love me for giving you rare and exciting drugs?”

“You know more about me than I do Jan, I feel raped.”

He became more serious. “Hey girlie, everyone makes up crazy shit on this stuff, no-one thinks anything of it.”

But I thought something of it. “You drugged me, and interrogated me.”

“Yeah.” He gave her a fierce glare. “Which is how I know the other fuckers did too.”

“That’s not news Jan, I knew I was drugged by the enemy. What is news,” She was speaking slowly and distinctly now, “What is news, is that my friends do it too. In what way are you different to them Jan?”

“We’re the good guys.” He replied defensively.

“I am wearing a hospital smock, somebody fucking strip searched me Jan, they never stripped me.”

“Don’t be dumb, bitch! They just didn’t have the courtesy to tell you.” That stopped me, the thought of those creeps in Gibraltar pawing at me while I was still unconscious in the taxi made my skin crawl. “These people are proper bad missy, they’re doing the job for kicks, for fun. They get a hardon from pulling a bead on a civilian and squeezing off a few rounds.”

He paused. “Get dressed, I’ll be through there.”

 

He paused to drink, a big convulsive swallow. He slammed the heavy crystal glass back on the rosewood Arabic table, which rocked slightly. He eyed Rocco, then looked back to the glass, until the tall black man refilled it and withdrew again. “I seen these sort in action Missy, in the Congo, then in Angola and Liberia. They lived to go hunting, they didn’t care about the money, they just loved to hurt people.”

“I seen a man run into a grass hut, come out holding a pregnant woman by the hair with one hand, with a baby swinging by the heel from the other. He was beating the woman with the kid to get her moving, but you see, he’d already smashed the kids brains out on the inside of the hut, just to get her attention.”

Ella couldn’t help herself, “Shit.”

“That’s not the worst,” he looked up sharply, his eyes searching her face, for sympathy? “I saw worse, casual torture, casual disfigurement of corpses. Sometimes for strategic advantage, more often because those men have no souls.”

He looked down at his glass, seemed surprised that it was empty again. Grunted as it was refilled. Paused, looking at the pale amber swirl lighting up the tips of his fingers. “Then they would rape them. Men, women, children, dead or alive. Some of them cut off the men’s genitals or the women’s breasts, a sort of a sex change. A couple of times I saw the fuckers do it to a live one.” He sipped his drink. “There was a young lad, sixteen or seventeen, but underdeveloped, you know, they don’t get enough to eat in those villages, there’s always some fucking warlord burning their crappy fucking crops.”

The big man looked close to tears. “Three of them held him by two short ropes, one on each wrist. They pushed him backwards, over the bodies of his sisters I guess, all killed by the mortars. Maurice, The Butcher we called him, ripped down the boy’s pants. He shouted some merde about female circumcision, there was always some bullshit justification for these animals, and he grabbed the boys cock and pulled out his bayonet.”

“The kid starts yelling, he had no idea what Maurice had been talking about, but he understood sixty centimeters of self sharpening killing stick. He starts to wriggle, the two others pull his arms tighter, the boys naked buttocks are rubbing all over what used to be his sisters or whatever faces, and Butcher Maurice is dancing around making play slashes with the bloody great knife. Suddenly Maurice shouts in rage, the boy had jerked and Maurice cut his own hand. The blood is mingling with the women’s smashed up faces between the boys legs.”

“Maurice looks down at the meat in his hand. “Whoops.” He shouts, and the bayonet swings. The boy screams, and to shut him up Maurice shoves the boys limp bleeding cock into his mouth and runs the bayonet through one cheek and out the other to keep it there. Then the three rolled him over and raped him.”

A deep silence enveloped the room.

“That wasn’t the worst bit.”

Jan lifted the glass, shook his head, replaced it on the table with exagerated care.

“The worst bit was they looked like they’d done this before.”

Ella sat. Stared. Fuck.

“It strikes me that you need some help if you’ve been playing with these guys. It’s the PMC’s who are doing all the shipping of unacknowledgable cargo, the Private Military Companies, formed up when being a solo mercenary was outlawed. They just supply behind the lines guarding duties, but that doesn’t mean much when they’re working within an occupied country with resistance fighters everywhere.”

“They use military shipping facilities, but are not accountable to the chain of command to declare or verify the contents of their containers. Because what they do is semi legal, and the weapons they use are often completely illegal; anti personel mines, cluster munitions, cattle prods, dum dum exploding bullets, thumbscrews, and stuff, everyone assumes they’ll have illegal shit in their trucks so they never search them, just in case. If you want to look for the two hundred tons of morphine leaving Helmund province every year, look no further than Kabul airport.”

“I thought it went through Turkey?”

The big man grinned, “Oh, it’s not going to Turkey, it goes to Italy, an American airbase near Pisa, then helicoptered to a processing plant somewhere on the Swiss border. It’s only the freelancers who ship the Turkey route, the Turkey Shoot as it’s known, because that’s where the enforcement agencies gather the low hung fruit to prove they’re busy.”

Thinking Pisa, Italy, Josie? Ella continued, “So it’s the French then, or the Swiss.”

“No,” the big man sighed, “The business is way beyond the capabilities of mere countries Ella. In this case it’s a corporation, called Buyer Pharmacuticals. It’s a multinational, shares a couple of board members with Eagle Stoop, the PMC that subcontracted security services in west Helmund.”

“Eagle Stoop?”

“Eagle Foods, Eagle Air, Eagle Power, Screaming Eagles, all spin-off companies from the original mercenary company Eagle Stoop, how they reinvest their cash and cash in on service and supply contracts to repair the economies they just fucked.” He patted a folder on the desk. “We did some looking, you did good work missy, a lot of this is new intelligence.”

“But Eduardo, he’s no mercenary, He’s blind as a bat, everyone agrees he was never a soldier.”

“The modern PMC isn’t just composed of special forces nuts, they employ shit loads of specialists, desk pilots, computer geeks, weapons analysts and designers, toilet fitters, even gamers; to drive the drones. They could look like anyone, be anyone, but they will all have one thing in common, they like to hurt people.”

“Thing is missy, what you hippies never realised, your smuggling games become more problematic as the corporations are squeezed for profit. Every year goes by the profit from a business must increase, or it must take over competing businesses, just in order to survive. The corporations were always going to take over the global illegal drugs trade, because they have less morals than governments. Face it, both the Brit and the US governments have used drugs for civil control, the CIA from Laos and Nam, the UK openly in China and India. The Brits invented drug dealing, and gunboat diplomacy, they were the first to grow opium as a commercial operation in Afganistan, that was in Helmund too you know. Sort of a family tradition you might say.”

“Wow, shit Jan, this is pretty serious then. Thanks for the introduction, nice job you got me into, fishing expedition was it, hope you like the catch.”

He leant forward heavily in the dark leather chair, making it creak in protest. “I never met or heard of your contact, or his assistant. Nor have I, or would I, ever recommend you to somebody I didn’t already have a satisfactory working relationship with.” He stopped, lowered his voice. “I can only assume that one of my contacts has been compromised.” He looked at Ella under lowered eyebrows. “Perhaps you’d best lie low. I employ a lot of ex services people, and I know, statistically, some of them have to be spies.” He smiled confidently. “Now I know the who and the what I can start taking precautions, I can handle the code for you too if you want?”

Ella didn’t need to think about it, he was only slightly better than the enemy, he might be on the right team, but he still used the enemy’s methods. “Not a fucking hope Jan, I’m leaving.”

“In that case let me tell you what’s going on Ella. You need briefing if you’re going it alone. If I repeat myself it will be for a reason, briefings are to impart life saving information, and the best way to ensure the information is retained is repetition.”

“Take a young woman from a bar in Southern Spain on a descending spiral into peril. Give her a package to deliver in Marseille, a French Connection one might say, with a link on to Amsterdam to get paid. A series of increasingly threatening encounters drive her towards her destination, unwrapping layers of the mystery she slowly reveals a  global conspiracy to, to what?”

“It seems, the PiKey Code is some sort of back door for the government to hack every microsoft computer, it is a security code that triggers instructions coded within the anti-virus.  It is essentially a computer tracker designed to email all your logins and passwords to a server in the Government. Do you know about six degrees of separation?”

“Yeah, that’s like I could write a letter to the Pope, and give it to somebody, like a christian I know or something, who’d give it to somebody, and in six goes it would reach the Pope, or whatever. That was a Stanley Milgram experiment I think.”

“Ok professor, somebody like that. Thing is, this sort of virus could map all our regular associations very easily in very few steps.”

“This virus could expose the informal webs of communication between the disorganised and dissipated Anarchist activists, the smaller the cells get, the harder they are to track. Big unions like the CNT were easily trackable, that’s how they were destroyed. This is all about control.”

“Modern state control includes expanding fields of illegal activity, including widespread hacking, phones and emails, and widespread murder and kidnapping, such as rendition. These are Black operations, and their budget grows year on year, and has done since the fifties. It helps then if Black Ops can become self supporting. And how do you think that happens? Can you even imagine the cash value of the global trade just in Heroin and Cocaine?”

Ella knew the answer to this one. “A billion?”

“In 1980 guess how much heroin Afghanistan contributed to the world market? None, because it was all channeling through the Russian military to the Russian domestic junkies. After the CIA and US military had trained and funded Al Qaeda, which means ‘the List’ incidentally, the list of those dissidents who can be armed and will fight off the invaders, to beat off the Russian invasion, six years later Afghans were supplying forty percent, and by nineteen ninety-nine eighty percent of the global heroin market.”

“The year 2000 and the Taliban insurrection reduces the volume of heroin leaving the country from in excess of 300 tonnes to 18 tons, them old Muslims, they just hate drugs you know.” He grinned “By far the biggest busts nowadays are in Islamic countries, Iran and Turkey, on the southern route to Europe, although the small quantity still going through the Russian Federation seems to be immune for some reason. Three hundred tonnes has an uncut street value of about five hundred billion dollars, half a trillion. Mind you, to put that in context, that is almost exactly the US defence budget, funny that.”

Now Ella was surprised, a billion sounded a lot, but half a trillion?

“So if you found out that on September the ninth, 2001, President Bush the younger had the Afghan invasion plans on his desk, what do you think might happen next?”

“September 2001? That was,.. holy crap, two days before 9/11 and the Twin Towers.”

“That’s right little sister. Three buildings were reduced to rubble with military precision, two hit by airplanes, then another is hit by a missile or ‘rogue’ military jet. Yes babe, 9/11. Lucky they had those invasion plans handy eh?”

“No, I mean I’ve heard some bullshit, but I saw the thing happen. I was glued to the telly before the second plane hit, and they repeated the first one after I got home. I heard it on the radio on the bus, I was on my way home from classes. Tha was real, hundreds died, they’re not going to do all that just for heroin.”

“What do you think you saw?”

“I saw two planes hit two towers and then the towers fell down.”

“Let us just be clear, you didn’t see buildings knocked over by the planes did you, you saw the buildings survive the plane strikes, then fall down later.”

“That’s true, but the fires weakened the buildings, that’s why they collapsed.”

“Check the footage again, there was a woman standing, waving, at the hole in the wall in building two, where the plane had gone in, the hole the smoke was coming out, and she wasn’t burned to a cinder, oh no, she was waving and waving. People from the upper floors escaped by the stairs, after the impacts. Steel doesn’t weaken appreciably below a couple of thousand degrees centigrade, which is more than enough to toast a person, even for a few seconds. The building had been designed to resist an air strike, famously so, as it was the first in the city to be advertised as plane proof. And the people on the floors above who escaped through a landing in the staircase on that very floor reported smoke but little heat or flame.”

“The planes had to be crashed by wireless, the Jihadi’s were inept pilots according to their instructors, and most of those named were just that, they were simply names lifted from ‘the List’ of Al Qaeda and unrelated to the actual skyjacking. DO you have a flight simulator?”

Ella nodded, she had, years before, got it bundled with a new computer. It had a DC3 jet that she’d tried twice and given up on because it was so difficult to steer. “You think you could hit a building with three lessons?”

Ella thought it extremely unlikely. She’d been unable to fly one of the ungainly monsters under a bridge, it turned way too slow and if it hadn’t fallen like a brick into the ocean below it would have crashed into one of the bridge supports.

“Despite two of the ‘Jihadi’s’ leaving a spectacular trail of very unIslamic debauch, and intelligence reports suggesting just such an attack was imminent, that apparently never reached the White House, the planes got well into controlled and restricted airspace without a flight plan, and without a USAF scramble.” He held out his hands. “How much evidence do you need to see?”

He continued anyway.

“A number of specialists have claimed that the collapses were military demolition, they found traces of military grade Thermate, not the crap you can buy in the hardware, that’s just aluminium powder and rust, you can make it with a file, but real melt through a car engine Military Patent Thermate with sulphur and barium-nitrate in it. There was an ex-CIA dude, passed through here ten years back looking for an anonymous passport, who said that all the characteristics of these collapses show they must have been controlled demolitions, probably ex Agency sub contractors providing the hardware.”

“It was a professional demolition, three scyscrapers fell straight and true, and there is the Thermate, the special hard to get Thermite, pointing right at Special Operations for the labour. That was a military or CIA style operation, they did the plane impacts on the twin towers, probably took over the fly by wire and run them remotely, left the smoking gun, the bogus pilot trail, either staged a missile attack or remote piloted a fighter jet at the Pentagon, with the Scramble overrides that stopped it being very substantially shot down, and finally the demolitions of buildings one, two and seven, particularly building seven, the one that wasn’t hit by a plane.”

“Sounds like a coup.”

“Yeah, I could see why you could think that, except that that already happened; in ’63, JFK, the military-industrial complex has been on top since then.”

“No, I meant a computer takeover, War Games meets H.A.L.”

“What, you mean the robots rebellion?” He laughed, widely. “Woo baby, that’s really out there.” He was silent for a few moments thinking, “No, I don’t think so, we still turn them off regularly, when they crash, and that doesn’t explain Muhammad Atacar and his mate, they are real people.” He shook his head firmly. “Crazy bitch, you want to know the weird bit?”

“Go On.”

“We’re talking private sector here babe, the illegal drugs trade is firmly in the private sector, being illegal and all?”

“Ok.” Equivocally.

“What do prices always do in the private sector?”

“Go on.”

“That’s right babe.” He laughed lightly at her puzzlement, his round cheeks dark against the light. “Ain’t noth’n goin on but the rent. They go up babe, one thing about prices is they just keep on going up, and I know for a fact that the street price of heroin was almost the same in 1986 as it was in 2010.”

If that was true? “Inflation.”

“That’s right babe, inflation. In real terms the price has dropped continuously for a quarter century, by about 25%. What commercial business or bank would put up with depreciation year on year for three decades, the state that’s who, someone who’d be ashamed of all the money they were making. Still, half a trillion is still half a trillion dollars eh, imagine having the monopoly on that, you’d have to invent a World Bank to put that in.”

“Half a trillion?” she said flatly. “I still don’t see where you got that from.”

“Ok, we have published figures for 1999 of around three hundred and fifty tonnes, which is three hundred and fifty thousand kilo’s or three hundred and fifty million grammes, and a gram will make at least ten ten pound bags, which makes…”

“Three hundred and fifty billion euros, I thought you said the US budget was five hundred billion?”

“US Dollars babe, which is near enough three hundred billion Euros, and that is uncut, pure, you could be talking about three times that once it’s been stamped on, had inert filler added. What if these people are controlling supply side as well, and cutting it by sixty per-cent in transit, you could double that total, all in revenue for the single supplier.” He paused significantly. “Which brings us to Air America, the obvious source of the 9/11 flyers by wire.”

“That was a film right?”

He cleared his throat and shook his head sadly. “Ella babe, please try keep up, I’m talking about the CIA funded and run operation during the Vietnam War. Air America was a CIA front, a real airline, but mostly flying black ops or breaking embargoes. They flew in and out of Vietnam, sure, and black ops in Cambodia and Laos, recruiting ex special ops generalists, and sometimes specialists, with flying experience. But they were also servicing black ops in South America; Guatamala, the first US coup for commerce with United Fruit, Bolivia, Peru, where they set up a lucrative trade with the local Coca growers supplying inner city dealers in the US who targeted activists, including the Freaks and the Black Panthers. With cocaine, in case you hadn’t guessed.“

“If we say, as a ballpark statement, that the cocaine trade makes a trillion dollars a year then you can think that in purely cash terms the global trade in heroin and cocaine alone could pay for the whole of NATO, and the defunct Warsaw pact, and everyone else who has an army for that matter. The global trade in Heroin and Cocaine are worth more than the world spends on oil and weapons put together, in fact the UN values the global drugs trade at four trillion US Dollars, about the same as the US foreign debt, that could include a trillion each on smack and charlie for the powers that be, unbanked pure profit.”

“Is this shit for real Jan?”

“Of course, I’ve only given you figures that’re already in the public domain, with two suppositions that seem supported by the prevalance of smack and coke use in the Europe and the US. One supposition is in the assertion that the private sector would have been driven by market forces to raise the price in line with inflation, at the very least, it’s almost as if they’re embarassed about the money, that the money isn’t really the point. Then you take the proven activities of the CIA in South America in the sixties and seventies, factor in that the worlds become a nastier place since then, and suppose the Brit intelligence have copied since. It’s no co-incidence that the old Opium trader by Royal Appointment to China is the one based in Helmund, the center of  the Afghani Opium fields, the Thin Red Line of the British Infantry.”

“That’s why I think the US and UK have split the business so, for historical as much as geographical reasons. The Brits have history with opium, the Yanks with coke. This is the big dirty secret about the drugs world, that the bulk is being moved and processed with the implicit knowledge of some of the most influential people in the system, government looking the other way, while specially formed corporations do the work. I know about it because I’m not from the drug world, I’m a mercenary, I’m like one of the civilian contractors who are being paid to guard and move the morphine to the Labs in Piedmont, in the mountains above Marseille where it’s cracked into heroin.”

“And how much does get found, probably less than a hundred tons a year, less than ten percent of the total, and most of that in Muslim countries. Imagine you’ve got to move a ton and a half of heroin around the place every day, how are you possibly going to do that for thirty years without being substantially caught unless you are the system. The busts are just when the state finds the competition, small operations who don’t know what the real picture is?”

“Those are the bad boys who don’t like sole traders, who stamp on competition. They gave you this code, that you had to assume was something to do with drugs, knowing you’d check it out before delivery, cos you’re known to do delivery with ethics. You’d check it out with your connections, it’d get onto the internet and flag itself, for collection, if you know what I mean. Your infected friends are identified and are being considered as gateways for penetration or skapegoating, mission accomplished. Lets just hope the other side consider the information you have on them as negligable, that would depend on how much they know you know. If you know what I mean.” He grinned. “Tell you what I’d do, I’d go to ground, forget you ever heard of all this, come back up in five or so years and see if you still have any friends.”

“Bollocks Jan, we’ve got to expose this.”

“You’re crazy girlie, you remind me of Lucio the forger, he never quit either. He was a crazy dude, knocked 3% off the Citibank’s share price in the sixties with thousands of faked travellers checks, the bank collapsed in the 2008 crash, terminally weakened. He never stopped trying to fuck the system. He escaped from Spain twice, once when he deserted from Franco’s Army during the revolution and again when he escaped from Franco’s death squads with ETA. Go to ground, I’m telling you, you’ve been playing with the big boys, and they play rough.”

“Na, fuck that man, somebody is trying to use me to get to my friends, and it’s your fault, you recommended me. You’re gonna help me fight this.”

“You don’t think people have tried, but these guys aren’t just crooks and gangsters babe, this is the global military elite, these people asassinate whole countries for a hundreth of what we’re talking about. Shit, I’ve armed two counter-revolutions and a half dozen popular uprisings, and I wouldn’t even like those dudes to know I’d been talking about them.”

“When the governments curb ‘essential’ military spending, the secret branches of the military industrial complex of interests create some with the materials at hand. And given the UK’s history in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century , enslaving indians, forcing them to grow huge volumes of opium, partly to support the UK national habit in many widely available medicines and tonics, partly to profit from developing markets, like China, where the term Gun Boat Diplomacy was coined, as they gently pursuaded the Chinese, during a rare period of openness on their part, to become a nation one quarter of whom were opium addicts.”

“The CIA first discovered the double pay-off from Cocaine in the fight against the Black Panthers, it is a weapon with two pay-offs, it both damages your enemy and benefits yourself. Firstly, it clouds their judgement, makes them uselessly paranoid, and turns them into criminals, making them arrestable, disabling them as an enemy. Secondly there are plane-loads of money which need to be lost, and it’s big bucks, it can’t just be lost down the back of the sofa. So it is sloshed around in the top secret Black Budget until it turns up paying defence contractors for providing commercial military style services guarding the loot or shipping the product, or pays for parts for militarised drones to decapitate the heads of uncompliant ‘rogue states’.”

“So it is no surprise that in the age of the corporate raiders,  the old Pirate Companies run amock, that the US CIA and Corporate Soldiers should be running coke from South America, trading it with the UK MI5 and Private Military running smack from Helmund, the bottom line being, not just money but control. The only thing that has kept prices relatively stable.”

“In order to cover their exploits and grow their market base they conduct penetration operations within the counter communities, both to develop their sales contacts and also to use as patsies for the token drug busts, pumping them with funds just before the bust through their network of agitators and agents, and then overclaiming the haul, making a ten thousand buck deal look like a million, to make the books look like they balanced. Government seizes the money at the end of the day anyway, what goes around comes around.  But anyone who does the maths comes to a staggering bulk of drugs moving one way through a mighty network, only a fraction of which is ever ‘seized’, and only a fraction of which profit has been accounted for.”

“And of course, once you, an ex soldier in a relatively small government department overlooked since the fall of the Cold War, realise the double payoff of straight drugs, you are bound to think of the triple payoff; if you dope the drugs with other substances which further incapacitate your opponents.  Or create new drugs; you would want to reduce IQ and increase paranoia, reduce drive, both to act and to breed, and incubate dependencies.”

Ella thought about the current crop of ‘recreational’ drugs, “Though what,” she wondered to herself, “was recreational about meiow, or crack, meth or the latest Ketamine variants.”

“Babe, they cut down the Twin Towers for this, think they’ll hesitate to kill lil ole you?”

He studied the set of her face intently. “Ok girly, you ever heard of the Hindus? Well they have this Caste thing right which is pretty poor on casteless people, but, well, their second top caste is warrior; it goes priest, warrior, merchant etc, and you’re a warrior. Kshatriya or some such Hindi word, but it means you, like your ancestors and like your progeny, are all soldiers, professional fighters. You’ll all always be fighters, so what’s the point in fighting it? The problem with us Europeans is we’ve had too many big wars, one per generation when everyone had to fight, and we’ve lost sight of who the born warriors are. You’re a born warrior, and you need to be living the James Bond dream to stay sane and happy, girlie.”

He sighed deeply. He told her she shouldn’t come around waving the wages of sin under his nose, she shouldn’t offer such power as the PiKey Code represented to someone like him, corrupted by power decades ago when he was just a humble warrior like her. He damned sure wished he’d just given the power away when he’d had the chance, that was his life challenge; to reject the power that flooded to him like mercury to a magnet.

He said that the code was her life challenge, that she knew what to do with the damn thing. And if it meant giving it to him, well he sure as hell knew a few people who’d buy it. He knew a Chechen gangster who joked that for us westerners, borders represent barriers and limits, whereas for him they represented opportunities. He wished her luck on her venture, and any help she may need. She turned down all his offers.

Ella found her bike, eventually. It seemed as if whole days had passed since she’d parked it, but it had only been one night. She cycled thoughtfully through the late morning traffic to the truck.

Josie looked up from Ella’s lap top in surprise.

“Shi…” was all she had time for before Ella was in the room, punching.

The bitch reflexively curled into a ball with her hands wrapped round her head like a helmet and started kicking out with her feet. Ella’s running assault threw the woman from the seat and the two ended in the corner of the truck, Ella raining ineffectual blows on the bitch’s arms.

“Who the fuck are you working for?”

“Nobody. You. If you want.”

Ella glared at Josie panting.

“You’re the only one who could make a real difference, the PiKey Code is a superweapon, I’m throwing my lot in with you.”

The two women made a frozen tableau of heavy breathers.

“Don’t you want to know what it is. I can prove to you that I’m not your enemy. This is a government planted back door into everybodies mailboxes and key loggers, for a one shot send of all information contained within or with links to, the target mailbox, and the operating system’s own key logger file where it relates to the mailbox.”

“So?” But it was nice to have it confirmed.

“Including passwords, and a copy of itself as verification of the authenticity of the databurst.”

“And?”

“And the email to which it sends this information is held within the Anti Virus itself, secret.”

“So?”

“So you can’t use it as evidence, as whoever it is can change the address when the anti-virus updates, no pointing finger, no evidence.”

“So it’s useless, which is exactly what you would tell me if you were working for Eagle Foods.”

“But I hacked your emails, and your boyfriend in La La land has cracked it, not the address, but, well, let me put it this way. It’ll copy the data burst to every email mentioned in the address book, instead of to the one recipient in the antiviral.”

“What difference does that make.”

The bitch snatched a notebook and flicked feverishly to a fresh page. When she looked up Ella was offering a pencil. The bitch looked closely at Ella’s face for a moment before bending her head to her task. She drew a series of circles, then put a cross through all but one. “The circles are computers, the crosses are antiviral applications, the first thing that starts on your computer, the thing that polices everything else. Look,” she said, drawing an arrow from a filled circle to the empty one. “The mailbox programmed to recieve the burst doesn’t have a commercial antivirus. It will be something like the NSA or GCHQ and will have its own arrangements, without the back door, or in this case perhaps, wide open front door would be more accurate. When it recieves the burst it is stored and analysed safely. She drew an arrow between two filled circles. “But if this accidentally got sent to a commercial mailbox, it’s copy of itself, the verification for the normal recipient, would be automatically scanned by the recipient mailboxes antivirus.” She looked expectantly at Ella, Light slowly dawned, Ella’s face shifted from anger, through puzzlement and understanding to hilarity.

“And then we do it again…”

“That’s right Ella, it repeats. Do you know the story about the old craftsman who did a big job for the Chinese emperor?”

“Vaguely rings a bell, rice, wasn’t it.”

“That’s right. He asked for payment in rice, as much as could cover a chess board, if one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, doubling every time. “

“The emperor agreed on the spot, thought it sounded cheap.”

“But then his grand vizier said no, the total would represent every grain of rice in what was at the time a very rich empire.”

“Shit.”

“That is what we call a Cascade Email scenario, and would quickly paralyse the internet. Now do you believe I’m your friend?”

“But why were you hacking my mailbox, why have you been so dodgy and suspicious. Where were you going and what are you carrying?”

The bitch looked squarely in Ellas face. “Because I assumed you had to be one of ‘them’, just,.. different them; after me.” She fielded Ella’s puzzled look.” I’m on the run, from the Brit pigs, and probably the Feds by now too. I bump into some sketchy CIA scenario with secret codes and everything. And to be fair, Ella, you are wanted for terror offences in Marseille; a nuclear attack, and there will probably be more by the time they’re finished. You looked like the ripest, lowest slung Plant in hystory.”

This was a big revelation for Ella, although it was true she had had an interesting week. “Oh, I don’t know what to make of all this.” She said shaking her head sadly.

“Of course I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

“Really?” Ella replied sardonically, “I would never have guessed.”

“Everything you know about me is wrong.”

“…” Ella’s eyebrows disappeared upwards.

“I’m probably wanted for murder and terror offences, and I’m smuggling a load of communications equipment for an overseas organisation that is on the trading banned list.”

“Whaat?” Ella’s mouth fell open, and she’d thought she was in trouble.

“If you’re going to ask your friends for sanctuary, they’ll have to know what sort of person they’ll be harbouring, or they’ll not be able to make a well judged decision.”

Ella didn’t know what to think of this, on the one hand Josie wasn’t carrying arms or drugs, which always made it complicated if you were carrying yourself. On the other, murderer? That didn’t seem to add up, this woman had a deep passion for the environment, people, that was what motivated her as an activist. But murder? It must have been one of those accidental things, somebody killed during an action, something like that, probably Josie was just being melodramatic. That’s a point. “So what is your real name?”

“Ah, here’s where I have to ask you to trust me again, but this time I won’t lie, I just won’t tell you.”

“What?”

“My activist name is The Bitch, but my friends just call me Josie.” She saw Ella’s mixed emotions writ clearly on her face. “Ella, I have no record under my birth name, all my records are in my activist name, it’s my get out of jail free card, I have a superstition that if I tell anyone it’ll hex it.”

Enlightenment dawned. “Wow, that is mental, you must have been a well behaved kid then, not like me.”

“No, I just realised young that life sucked, you can either blank it out, or try to change it.”

“Look, I can’t tell my friends this, I need more, you’ll have to tell me more.”

“But this is what I’m trying to say, I think. We don’t need to stay there. I checked with my people on an internet chat room last night, we could use this consignment.”

“What?”

“I’ve got a set of special lap tops, they’re a secure internet communications system for an activist network, humane people smugglers, they need it to keep the gangsters from busting their operation. These computers change IP’s automatically, they’re set up with proxy servers, in Mongolia I think, and some quantum algorithm shit that produces state of the art rolling encryption, although we wouldn’t need that probably. I don’t really understand them but I was shown their set up and configuration, we could work it out from there? They’re completely untracable, anywhere in the globe, we can hack some wifi’s here in the city and use them to seed the Pikey Code. Global internet gridlock.”

Ella sat back stunned. “Ok, start from the beginning.”

 

This time Ella took Josie to see Jan.

“Why?”

“I have to talk to him, he has something we need.”

“What?”

“Guilt.”

The meeting is tense, uneasy, the bitch starts on the offensive.

“I need to know what side you’re on.”

“The side of the Angels.”

“Can you sell us weapons?”

“Honey, I can do better than that, I can give you weapons.”

“Don’t call me that. Even though you know what those weapons are made to do?”

“I’m an anarchist, and part of my politic is destabilising the enemy.”

“You don’t think that’s what I do, I just do it responsibly. If there are no weapons there can only be very small wars.”

“I just provide the same tools the other side uses, I redress the balance. I don’t tell anyone whether or when to pull a trigger.”

“You just maintain the availability of triggers.”

“But only to us.”

“You control part of the supply of materiel used by armies to kill civillians.”

“That’s an odd way to put it, I supply weapons to revolutionary armies to liberate themselves.”

“Do you supply ISIS?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not, it’s a revolutionary army isn’t it?”

“Mostly because they have all the weapons they need, partly because they’re with the wrong side of this ideological revolution, they’re fascists, remnants of Saddam’s Baath party.”

“They want the same thing we do, they’re working toward the overthrow of the western consumerist system, surely that makes them like us?”

“No, they want a repressive ideological regime.”

“Unlike ETA or the IRA?”

“Bullshit, they’re socialists.”

“And socialism isn’t capable of becoming a repressive regime? Centralised committes are by nature repressive organs. How about Russia, or China, both major exporters of arms and conflict, many of which cause almost exclusively civillian casualties.”

“Which is why I’m an anarchist.”

“That was one thing the Spanish anarchists learned during the revolution; you can’t beat a trained army using the same weapons, but you can beat it by preventing your opponent from obtaining weapons.”

“If I don’t provide them someone else will, the Chinese or the Russians for instance. It’s not like I’m setting an example, that people wouldn’t buy arms if I didn’t sell them.”

Josie’s fierce expression cracked slightly, she looked sadly at the man. “Europe is the worlds second largest weapons producer, after the US, and until very recently openly traded with anyone we weren’t actually at war with. During the Second World War, Sweden, Switzerland and the US were selling to both sides, although the US stopped supplying the Nazis when they chose a side and joined the war half-way through.”

“Arms dealers in the UK, Belgium, Italy and Holland have provided small arms used in recent European murders and massacres, many of which were sourced outside Europe and imported. Strange, because Europe can provide weapons ranging from torture equipment like electric prods, thumb cuffs, the so called ‘stinger sticks’, and ankle cuffs; small arms like pistols, rifles, and light machine guns; grenades, for throwing or firing from a rifle, and mortars from anti-personel to ‘city-busters’; mines; anti-vehicle, cluster, claymore, and tank; weapons like heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft guns, field and big guns; weapons platforms like cars, trucks, tanks, buses, weaponised ground and airborne drones, helicopters, ground and air attack aeroplanes, ships from coastal patrol craft to cruisers, battleships, the aptly named destroyers, and missiles ranging from the shoulder fired anti tank or aircraft to full ICBM’s, with warheads, which could include chemical, biological or nuclear warheads, and the means to manufacture replacements. European sourced weapons turn up in almost every conflict in the world, usually on both sides. Arms are one of the ways the big bloc’s control the world, by supplying opposing sides of small regional conflicts, escalating political instability, instilling greed, and incidentally causing a hundred thousand deaths a day.”

“This is how they do it in the UK; take the Falluja 2 chlorine gas plant in Iraq. The year after he was caught gassing five thousand Kurds to death in 1988, Saddam Hussein bought, on credit, a chlorine gas manufacturing plant from a UK company. Despite being warned it would probably be used to make more poison gas, you can’t use them for much else, the loan was insured by the Export Credits Guarantee Department, a Qango department with links to the UK Department for Trade and Industry. After the Yanks pulled the plug on Saddam for gasing the Kurds again, instead of the Iranians, who he was meant to gas, the ECGD paid up the outstanding balance owed to the UK company. They then billed that to the Iraqui national debt, a fraction of the £240 million the Iraqi people owe the UK for the arms the UK sold to Hussein to use on the Iraqui’s, Kurds, and Iranians. Of course, a good part of that quarter of a billion British pounds the Iraqui people owe the UK tax payers is interest charged by banks like the Midland bank on the loan. Hussein defaulted after he got toppled, but up to then he’d spent £620 million just in the UK, just on weapons.”

“Thing to remember, the ECGD, which specialises in insuring UK companies against payment defaults on overseas weapons sales, generated 95% of the developing worlds debt with the UK, debt the UK government were then prevailed upon to reduce by three quarters, which was subsequently done by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor. Which means the UK arms trade, the sole responsibility of the Department for Trade and Industry, has been three quarter subsidised in over-selling to the globe by the UK tax-payers. Three quarters of those weapons of mass destruction Hans Blicks was looking for but couldn’t find were bought for Saddam Hussein by the British tax-payers, paid by the Export Credits Guarantee Department. The remaining quarter will be paid for, in time, by the very Iraqi’s the weapons were being used against.”

“Three quarters of ECGD’s business is ascociated with BAE Systems. Previously called British Aerospace, it has specialised in all aspects of airborne assault, from planes like the Hawk and Jaguar, to military Air Traffic Control systems, to missile guidance systems, and has risen to prominence on the world market, despite its products not always being the best, and sometimes being missold. This process boosts UK companies profits at the cost of UK tax-payers, the national debt of the countries involved, and the millions of casualties of the wars. During the space of the twentieth century around eighty million people have died as a result of the global arms trade. That’s the population of France, say, or the UK.”

“BAE and Southampton shipbuilders Vosper Thornycroft were involved in an arms deal with the House of Saud, the Al Yamamah contract that was expedited by £600 million in bungs, that’s well over half a billion in bribes alone. BAE supplied ground attack fighter planes, Vosper Thornycroft supplied fast coastal patrol boats, to a regime that beheads people at half-time during football matches for disobedience to the King, that bans women from driving cars, that keeps foreign workers in actual slavery with antiquated debt laws. That is a country that took a £6 billion weapons order from the UK just before invading Syria. Syria is suffering from the prior invasion of UK armed troops and Hussein’s old Palace Guard, now trading as ISIS.”

“Take Imperial Defence Services, a UK company who supplied the pistol used by Michael Ryan in Hungerford who massacred sixteen of his neighbours. IDS also supply Bushmaster machine guns and illegally short shot-guns to Aegis, a PMC working in Iraq.”

“Whats a PMC again?”

“A PMC, Ellie, is a Private Military Company, what mercanaries do now that solo mercenarying is illegal. They provide transport and logistics, soldiers, military training, and security. They are civilian contractors for government, international, and civil organisations authorised to accompany an army to the field of battle, authorised to use lethal force. They are companies in the sense that they are incorporated legitimate business enterprises, liscensed to conduct the business surrounding war. It is  how Margaret Thatcher’s boy Mark ended up being tried in a South African court for trying to procure helicopters for a mercenary Coup in Equatorial Guinea. The question they were deciding was whether he was acting for the legitimate authority of the region, which is itself a somewhat tenuous notion at the best of times. These guns get to nutters all the time, all the established dealers have their story, what’s yours Jan?”

Looking uncommonly as if his mouth were moving without his control Jan blurted, “I sold the gun to the Belgian coke dealer who went crazy and shot twenty people.”

The word burst from Ella’s lips. “Jan!”

“How do you justify that?”

“You don’t think I’m proud do you? That’s the way people are, look at the Tutsi’s and the Hutu’s in Rwanda hacking each other to bits, the world has always been like that, there’ve always been nutters. But there are a whole lot more nutters working for the corrupt governments, and we need arms and money to fight them.”

“That’s bullshit man, the Hutu’s were stirred up by psycho leaders, weaponised, to plan and execute a genocide on the Tutsi’s, some of whom retaliated out of fear. The plan was always to steal their land, and was stirred up by a small group of leaders wanting to consolidate their financial power. In your view human beings are always going to do this sort of thing because they are all animals, in the real version those who prepared, orchestrated, and carried through the genocide were individuals, who can be caught and held responsible for the actions they chose. What about East Timor, Serbia Croatia, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, the Kurds of Iraq, the Chinese Cultural Revolution; these slaughters were each the responsibility of one man, and each of those men bought arms from Europe to consiolidate their personal power and influence. You, as an arms dealer, are part of the problem, my friend.”

Ellie butted in with a question. “How do you get the guns?”

Jan shook his big shaggy head, like a great bull at bay. “That’s the point, it’s easy, a lot easier than getting drugs, and if you’re canny, mostly legal. You set up a front company at a post box address in somewhere like New York, or Bulgaria, pay on a Cayman numbered bank account. All you need is an end-user certificate, issued by the government buying the weapons, which I used to have made by Lucio, complete fakes. You can even get round international embargoes, as long as the weapons are legal in the country of despatch, and there is a chain of legal countries to export through who will trade with a country that’ll trade with the embargoed countries, you can sell anything anywhere.”

“You mean there are no international laws on arms trading?”

“Ellie, you are so naive, when activists managed to stop Ashok Leyland from indirectly supplying militarised lorries to the Janjaweed death squads, satellite intel showed the Chinese had stepped into the breach and provided a replacemet order with fake civilian use certification. As long as these psycho nutters have money they can get anything else, no matter who they’ve annoyed.”

“And if they get guns, they can use them to get money, so why the fuck do you sell them guns, look, I’m sorry Ella, I know he’s your friend and everything, but he’s a fucking fascist fuck, he’s the fucking enemy, what are we doing here?”

“Mouthy, isn’t she? I don’t sell to the enemy, I only sell to anarchists who need to fight back.”

“Who’s Lucio?”

“Huh?”

“You said Lucio made the certificates, the government ones?”

“Lucio, the builder, quite a character, yes, I used to get his ID’s. I was doing some things for the Red Army Faction and got an introducion, so of course I asked him.”

“He did all those CitiBank travellers cheques yeah, broke the bank?”

“Yeah.”

“So he’s a hero, yeah, he’s destroyed authority and subverted social order.”

“Absolutely.”

“But he’s also subverted social order through facilitating nuts getting guns?”

“Woah, wait a minute, I bin doing my own certificates for decades, the Belgian with the gun was only a few years ago, nothing to do with Lucio.”

“But he did you End User Certificates, for the RAF I’m guessing, probably Baader, the PLO maybe, definitely ETA, and the Irish perhaps?” The short pale woman looked up at him. “And escape papers for killers, perhaps?”

Jan stood immobile, expressionless, the tiny flickers of his eyes the only sign he breathed.

“And they created a few bodies, dead proles, all in the cause of the revolution.”

Motionless, like a great toad, waiting to flick out his lethal tongue, waiting to pounce on his prey.

“And you have since distinguished yourself with the odd unfortunate lapse, so you only have a few deaths on your conscience, as a dealer of death, to verified nutters who do no good whatsoever, however much they destabilise order. If you are to be better than them don’t you think perhaps you have to destabilise order with a fucking conscience?”

She spat the last sentence with venom, like a spitting cobra, which has finally revealed itself, opened its hood, bared its fangs and shot its poison.

“Yes, and I’ve done worse, how do you work out the ethical calculus of selling pistols and grenades to Palestinian kids, so they can defend themselves against the Israeli’s, who retaliate with further murders every time the Palestinians murder one of theirs, then their children come back for more weapons to avenge their brothers and fathers. How would you think of me if you knew I sent arms to the Tutsi’s, to defend themselves, when I knew some would be used to massacre unarmed Hutu’s.”

“Jesus.” The single word was torn from Ella’s lips.

The cobra spat coldly, “You’re fuelling it, with no arms there are less deaths. It used to be that small gangs of armed thugs fought each other to death over the spoils of conquest, now small gangs of thugs kill huge numbers of innocent civillians to get the other thugs capitulation; what about that is all right?”

She had risen to her toes as she spoke, hammering the last syllables, muscles standing out on her neck and arms, coming almost nose to nose with the big dangerous man. From reflex his arm began to swing up, find refuge in a physical reaction to the fight, but too slowly, trained responses acknowledging an underestimated threat almost too late. Her voice dropped, hissing, her hooded eyes hypnotising him.

“It always comes down to the same thing, soldiers like you hurting civilians like me.”

His right arm stopped moving, hand curled but not yet fisted, level with his barrel chest. The cloud passed from his brow. He smoothly stepped back a half pace from the danger, pasted a huge smile on his face, and ostentatiously fished with that hand in an inside pocket. “I regret to admit that sometimes mistakes can be made. But it is always easy to criticise without first suggesting an alternative to criticise it by; if there is a better way to return the power to the people, I can’t wait to hear it.” His hand emerged with a large gold tin, about the size of a pocket dictionary. “Anyone fancy a toot?”

“Now you’re offering me the CIA drug too?”

“It’s weed not coke, old-school sensimillia.”

Ella grabbed it greedily. “I’ll deal with this.”

“I do as it happens…”

“Do you have the makings? I’ve got some baccy, skins..?”

“…have an alternative.”

He passed cigarette papers to Ella and nodded at the pale woman, “You now have my undivided attention, go on.”

“There are people we can kill, assassinate. People who are the system, people who have no agenda but greed, people who have no ethics only crisis management. Cut off the head and the beast dies.”

Ella looked shocked, Jan surprised and intrigued nodded his head in admiration, this sounded like his kind of plan. He reassessed his view of the small short haired woman, again.

“These are people who we can kill without penalty because they aren’t human, people who can be killed by weapons that are harmless to humans. We kill the corporations, and the killing field is the stock market.”

Jan shook his head. “I’ve heard this one, ‘follow the money’ yes, but how can you do what the stock market crash failed to do in the twenties? Investor confidence crashed, but the big corporations survived.”

“That was then, this is now; then nations were the predominant power, could invent the dough to prop things up, and were in some way, however slight, accountable to people. Now, people have stopped voting, and the corporations political contributions to all parties ensure that they are de facto the electorate, influencing the parties and the government to support their selfish aims. The continuing recession is an enemy of the monetary system, a sign of it’s deep crisis of confidence, and as such it can be our friend in this action.”

Jan nodded. “Shit, kick an enemy while they’re down. You don’t hand your enemy a wet sponge, you administer the coup de grace while they’re weakened.”

“Exactly, if we hammer the corporations during the existing recession, while they are already mortgaged to the hilt, we stand a better chance of success. There was a very interesting and instructive six months at the beginning of the Cold War when the Chinese could have nuked Europe with their new secret atomic missiles, kicking off the automatic emergency plan of mutual retaliation between the US and USSR. Because the two powers would have wiped themselves and Europe out in one automatically triggered eight hour engagement, China would have achieved its historic aim, to turn all non-Chinese into ghosts. If we had a weapon that can back-door commercial computers, using the Government arrangement with the big computer manufacturers and anti-viral companies, we could hack those big companies to death.”

“I didn’t even know such a thing exists?”

“Well it does, now, and I think I know where I,” She looked over at Ella, “we might be able to get one.” Ella continued to look puzzled, although the seething clouds of blue smoke may have contributed slightly.

“Say more.” The big man rumbled.

“Trade secret.” Her face smiled but her look was diamonds. “You don’t ‘need to know’.”

The big man laughed, “Untrustworthy you mean, don’t worry, you’re probably right at that. You have some challenging views, lady, many of your points have been well taken.”

“But I’ll need some stuff, generic computing stuff.”

Jan smiled broadly, he was a clever man. “Aha, you’ve armed the weapon. The PiKey Code? In this I am absolutely at your command, give me your list and I will expedite to a country of your choosing. This one’s on the house ladies.”

“A utility van, telecom would be best. Three cantennas, with standard ariel ports on them, with cables to fit. Oh, and a selective downloader bot for a keylogger and a remote screen bot, both on one USB.”

 

 

As they parted Jan pulled Ella aside. “Look babe, I know I’m an arms dealer and everything, but what is her basic hostility, you know what I mean.”

“Wow Jan, you’d managed to have the whole conversation without being condescending, it’s probably because she thinks you drugged her girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?” he spluttered, “What the fuck has her girlfriend…” He tailed off and looked at Ella reappriasingly. “Sorry Ella,” He smiled uncertainly, “I got some work to do, but we cool?”

“She’s with me Jan.” Already regretting the lie, Ella unwound a little.

Jan’s eyebrows shot up. “Remind me to introduce you to my Haitian boyfriend, you’ve met him, he was the one who drugged you, he has no love for you French.”

By that, Ella was surprised. He replied to her look of surprised outrage “And that’s not even a joke.”

She responded like a shot. “Shit Jan, you’re using our fathers tools to demolish our fathers house, you of all people, how do you think that will go.”

“I’ve tried not to think over the decades ba…Ella.”

“Look, I love you for so many things, and I even used to find your bombs and guns stuff sexy, but the world’s changed. We used to think we were fighting the pigs, who were the puppets of the rich and powerful lords, who had themselves elected to parliament to protect their priviledge; now we know we’re fighting the corporations not the governments, whose stated aim is to make profit for a few wealthy stateless persons with no allegience to state or people. This is a different sphere of operations, we need different weapons; it’s no good killing corporate jerks, cos they’re conscripts not volunteers;  the Bitch is right, it’s the corporations we need to kill, not the employees.”

“It’s the lack of ethics behind consumer exploitation that is driving the arms trade, the drugs trade, the money scam, that is causing the direct environmental degradation and death. And it is them, the legal fiction that is the corporation, that can kill without consequence for the human employees of the company, to be resurrected with a different name the next day. There is management with no accountability, it gives the employees the magic clipboard they need to think everything they do is right, their boss, a non-human, told them to do it. Just like the guards at Auschwitz and the electrocutioners in that famous American experiment, only their bosses were human. There is one reason why people submit easily to coercion, we are a social species and submit automatically to dominant winners. Problem is, we don’t define the race any more. In the name of humanity, these inhuman creatures, half man half law, they are our enemy, because they have become the only goal of our race.”

He nodded, his head bowed.“I’m glad you didn’ give that thing to me dol, I won’t use it right, I’m a world fixing machine, when the world no longer needs world fixing machines I will become obsolete and die. But you, you are the last human, the last being with a conscience. You, and the thing you do with this thing, will last forever. You are the last free human Ella, you are the only one with the right to throw the first stone.”

He looked around, as if seeing the room for the first time. “And then maybe we’ll see the other sort of revolution, a mental coup.” The big man sighed deeply. “Although I’m not an optimist.”

Ella seemed infected by the pessimism.

He rumbled on, “This is the job for the lone assassin, the warrior monk, they are too powerful for someone like me to fight with a force, but they will have vulnerabilities, and you have a weapon of some sort, and they may prove vulnerable. But you must attack their money stream. That is the way to kill a corporation, through the market. Kill confidence and you kill the company, or its assets at least. If it can’t fund its debt it will fold.” He glared at them fiercly. “You must destroy Eagle Stoop, it is the only way we will survive, Eduardo represents a lot of dangerous, dangerous men.”

It was then that Ella realised what she must do. She had to give the Code away, but not to any one person, that would put her in a position of power, choosing sides, when she wasn’t sure who was on which side still. No, she had to give it to everyone, simultaneously. Jan was right, she wasn’t a Guru or a merchant, everything about her life screamed soldier, and always had. The truck, the travelling, the missions and adventures. After accepting that it was just a matter of choosing a side.

“I’m a soldier,” she thought “and my power resides in my heart to fight, not in my willingness to rule. I needed to finish this drop, and move on. I could hold this information, like Jan had in the past, and use it to build a power-base. But I couldn’t trust myself with power, they’d get to me, like they had to him. So I’ll just have to keep marching on till the end of the campaign.”

The two women left the anonymous office building by the back door with a bag of military grade cantennas, parabolic ariels that are used to amplify, or hack, a weak wifi signal, and headed back to the truck. Once there they cleared the small desk and started to set up the equipment.

“Ok, tell me.”

Josie booted up Ella’s netbook and opened a network connection. “So this was where I got to.” Ella remembered the saved e-mail.   Josie opened the browser and logged into Ella’s email.

“What the fuck?”

Josie wordlessly hovered the pointer over the user name box. The password was there, right after the username, the prompt had remembered one time when Ella had not hit the shift key cleanly and carried on typing, a thing she did a lot.

“Clean your cookie cache occasionally.” The Bitch said bluntly. “You should read your mail every now and then too.” She pointed to a magnified text on another screen. Ella sat down and read;

“40, I’ve hacked it four you as much as I can.” Then the text ran; “Apologies for previous unverified message. Pi Key copies target’s contacts, passwords and logins to a server, probably in Chelt or Lang, with a copy of itself as verification. I hacked it, was all in a primary code, and reversed its priorities, now it emails above data to ALL email contacts instead of to the original target. To update your version change letter at position twenty to value of letter at position eight. Make no other changes, whatever it was for, it’s now broken, use with care from a remote location. x”

The Bitch looked round grinning, “You don’t get a lot remoter than a rebel server in Outer Mongolia. All we have to do is send this to a few big corporate mainframes and the wires will melt all the way to China. The flow of money will cease.”

“Wait a second. “ Ella fished in the bottom of the bag, bringing out her battered copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. She flicked through to page forty, there at the top of the page, the first word was ‘four’, the misspelling in the first line of the email. Now Ella was grinning too. “The message checks out, it’s genuine.” She explained about the book code Sammy had made her use, every mail would start with a number, a page number, and the first line would contain the first whole word on that page, used in context as much as possible. Absence of this would indicate that either the conduit had been hacked, or that Sammy was being forced to mail against her will.

She told her about the previous mail, Sammy’s dodgy attachment.

The bitch grins in admiration, “Wow, I thought we were on it, I’d like to meet your Sammy, she sounds deeply twisted.”

“I think she spends too much time on the internet.” Ella agreed. “So what is the plan? A friend used to use a password folder, it bombarded the entry screen with all possible passwords, couldn’t we just do that.”

“We do that first to get in to their network, but that won’t give us their email password, unless we’re really lucky. No, I have an app to raid their key logger.”

“What’s that?”

“Right, some of the older OS’s, like windows eight and nine, came with a key logger. This is a record of every key that is pressed on a particular computer. If you have the key log of a computer and watch it online for a period you can reconstruct their usernames and passwords relatively easily.”

“Isn’t that a bit dumb.”

“Yes, but handy for us. It means we need to target blue chip companies, but ones with no computing interests, they’ll all have the weakness, their company computers will all share the same slightly older operating system, with patches to fix the leak.”

“Wow, you know a bit.”

“The future is electronic.”

The two women set out to hack the head offices of some multinationals. It was a lot easier than they’d thought.

To begin with.