He was almost smiling under his mustache, and he adjusted his anti-stab vest, running a finger around his sweaty collar. It was a hot night, which was good camouflage for our guilty flushes.
“Yes, sir,” I said. 26 nodded vigorously.
“Go on now, go find your parents, and stay out of trouble.”
We walked away as casually as we could, and 26 whispered to me, “I thought he’d get us as soon as your hat went off.”
“My hat?” I touched the brim. I hadn’t really paid much attention to it.
“You didn’t notice?”
“Notice what, 26?”
“It killed the CCTVs in his helmet, breast pocket, and collar. Zap, zap, zap, the minute he grabbed us. Blink and you’d have missed it.”
“I must have blinked,” I said as my legs turned to water under me. I don’t know what was scarier: the prospect of being recorded by the policeman’s cameras, or the thought of what would have happened if the cop had noticed that my hat was shooting lasers at him.
“Let’s go,” I said.
* * *
It was only when we got to the Bridge Street corner that we dared to turn around. The crowd that had gathered had already started to disperse, but we could see it was in the hundreds. More importantly, when I powered up my own mobile and looked at the server logs for our video landing pages, I could see that we’d got fifteen thousand views in the past ten minutes—as people picked up the QR code and sent them around to their mates, and so on—and this was accelerating.
Now the mission phone buzzed again. It was the rooftop, also transmitting 1. I wondered what was happening to Rob in the garage.
As it turned out, he was being arrested.
Having dropped the reflector and smashed it to flinders, Rob found himself without much to do. So he fell back to plan Z: he rang Aziz on his own phone and told him what had happened. Aziz had grabbed a few spare reflectors from the wrecker’s yard, just on general principles. He’d been parked on a dark street behind Borough Market, and it took him fifteen minutes to wend his way back to the car park. He was just about to swing into the ramp when he saw the motorcycle cop turn in and begin to ascend toward Rob.
Aziz kept driving. He thought of calling Rob but the last thing he wanted was for Rob to be on the phone with him if he got nicked. Besides, Rob wasn’t an acrobat, he wasn’t going to outrun a motorcycle or leap from the garage to a distant rooftop, so Aziz drove a ways off and parked up and drummed his fingers and swore under his breath for a good long while.
Meanwhile, the motorcycle cop had found our Rob, standing gormlessly in the No Trespassing zone on the fifth floor of the car park, sweating guilty buckets, waiting hopelessly for Aziz to turn up. Fortunately for Rob, he wasn’t carrying anything more suspicious than a change of clothes and a laser-hat, but he was so utterly suspicious and out of place that he was nicked anyway. Aziz heard the sirens again as a police car hurtled up the garage ramps, and then left with the now-handcuffed Rob in the backseat, trying to remember if anyone he knew had a good solicitor as they took him off to the cells.
Speaking of guilty sweats: the projector team was in a considerable state, and why not? Dodger had been persuaded to leave all his ganja back at the Zeroday, just in case they got caught. No sense in handing the law an easy drugs offense for the charge-sheet. But they really could have used it. Dodger, especially—for all his gruff bluster, he confessed to Jem that he’d never been inside and he had terrors of being sent away. As touching as his confession was, Jem had other things to worry about, like swinging the huge projector around to line up with the marks they’d scratched on the girder for each of the sites.
It turned out that the random repeat-timer on the projector was a kind of torture for the poor lads. They’d line up the shot, hit “go,” and then wait, jittery, for the video to start. Each run-through was spent watching the surroundings for pointing fingers, police helicopters, or converging squad cars—whilst also using binox to watch the reflector site to see if the cops were getting near it. Both the rooftop and the bridge crews managed to fix their reflectors in place and get lost, but Jem and Dodger were rightly worried that if they were still projecting when the cops got there, they’d be using the light-beam to get a fix on the projector’s location.
It took the cops forever to get to the rooftop. For one thing, they clearly didn’t know about the sneaky staircase trick and spent a hell of a long time monkeying around inside the building before they got to the roof, sixteen hard men in full riot gear, running around like commandos, chasing phantoms. That would have been worth a laugh from the projector crew, except they were alternating peeks through the binox with the gut-busting work of getting the projector lined up with the bridge. Having done so, they realized they had at least an hour to wait before they started up—it was only 10:30 P.M. and we’d planned on doing the final switch-on, from the projector itself, at 5:00 A.M., just before sunrise.
Given that there’d been nothing from the car park (we’d all stuck to the plan and not called Rob, though we spent the whole night wondering if he was being interrogated and whether he’d crack and give us up), they had to assume they’d only have the bridge, and then nothing until five. So they waited, and to kill time, they checked out Westminster with the binox and over their mobiles. It was heaving with people, a carpet of law enforcement, reporters, and late-night Londoners out for a spectacle.
In the seventy-eight minutes they’d been able to run the video off the rooftop reflector, hits to our landing pages totaled over a million, and the mysterious film was the front page of the BBC’s site and creeping up on Sky, The Guardian, the Mail and even Metro, the free newssheet they gave away on the tube. Hilariously all of the news-sites had copied the video over to their server and then stuck it behind a DRM locker with a stern copyright warning. We’d have all had a laugh at that if we weren’t shitting bricks at the thought of Rob and what he may or may not have been telling the law.
At 12:39, they hit the bridge. The graffiti kids were just putting the final touches on their mural, which was really a hell of a piece of work—running right up the whole side of the stairway and twining out over the archway, a jungle scene in psychedelic colors, all manner of slavering beasties peering out from between the foliage. When the green laser-dot began to quiver uncertainly over their mural, they were sure it was the cops, but then they caught sight of Dog, solemnly directing Chester and the reflector. Then Dog was looking at Parliament through his binox and calling out, “Higher, lower, right, right, left a bit, higher, stop.”
The graffiti kids demanded to know what was going on. Dog and Chester ignored them utterly. Then, wham, the silvery bowl Chester was holding began to glow like a spotlight, and across the river, the video ran yet again on the walls of Parliament. Chester and Dog busied themselves with the adhesive and bits of wood and rock they’d gathered, cursing as they jiggled the reflector while trying to fix it in place.
Now the graffiti kids seemed to get what was going on, and they ran all around the embankment, picking up pieces of rubbish that might help fix the reflector into place, crowding around to give “helpful” suggestions in awed tones. With their help—or perhaps in spite of it—Dog and Chester got the reflector set before the first run-through.
“Now what?” one of the graffiti kids—sixteen, green hair, face mask, a paint-smeared white disposable boiler suit—asked.
“Now we scarper,” Chester said. “And you never saw us, right?”
The painter laid a finger alongside his nose and shouted, “Skip it, lads!” and the graffiti kids vanished into the night.
“Right,” Chester said, “let’s shoot the crow, shall we?”
They changed into their tourist outfits and sauntered away, wet armpits and wet palms and fluttering hearts and all.
* * *
The plan said we’d all go back to the Zeroday when we got done with our part, but Rob never checked in, so for all we knew, the Zeroday was swarming with nabmen in blue. Plus—te
ll the truth—we couldn’t any of us bear the thought of missing the show. So like dogs returning to their vomit, we stupid criminals returned to the scene of the crime. When Hester and Lenny sidled up alongside of us with their sheepish grins, we knew we weren’t the only ones who lacked the discipline of hardcore urban paramilitary guerrillas. This was our greatest opening ever, and we wanted to be there. Luckily, there was a damned huge crowd to get lost in. Westminster Bridge was utterly rammed with gawpers, staring at the looping video on the side of Parliament, holding up their phones to video it or get the QR code and visit the site.
“How’d you go, then?” Hester said, her eyes shining.
“I think we did all right,” I said.
“Brilliantly,” 26 confirmed. “How about you?”
Hester assumed a mien of absolute nonchalance. “Nothing too collywobbly,” she said. “Bit of running around, though, yeah?” She gestured at Lenny. “This one could bring home the gold for Great Britain in the half-mile men’s depulsion. Right sprinter. Nearly left me behind.”
Lenny affected not to hear and paid attention to his mobile instead. “Eleven million,” he said.
“Cor,” said Hester.
“Blimey, too.” 26 agreed. Eleven million views! It wasn’t even six in the morning yet! Who knew that many people were even awake at this hour!
We fell silent as another run of the video ended and the crowd shuffled around the stopped traffic. There were cops somewhere nearby, blowing whistles and telling people to move along. No one seemed to hear or care. People had snapped the QR code and landed on the website and were reading out the potted history of TIP-Ex to one another. An official car fought its way through the crowd. Someone started chanting “It’s not fair!” at it, and the crowd picked it up. It was a kind of carnival atmosphere, not angry, but there was no mistaking the crowd’s feeling on the matter of the morning’s vote.
The car used its horn to push through a forest of arms holding mobile phones; half were taking snaps of the frosted windows and the grim-faced driver; the other half were showing the video to whatever luckless sod was in the backseat.
As the car swung into Parliament Square, the crowd cheered, and another round of the video began. Traffic was picking up on the bridge, but there were too many people to fit on the pavement or even the lane closest to the video—both of the eastbound lanes were now shut down, and the horns began to honk. Over the river, we could see flashes of police lights and hear snatches of siren as they searched for the now-abandoned projector.
“So,” I said, looking at the mission mobile, which showed the “1” the projector team had sent when they evacuated. “Nothing from Rob, then?”
Everyone looked at their shoes. “Nicked,” Hester said. “Musta been.”
That’s when Chester and Rabid Dog reached us. It was hugs and backslaps all round as the video rolled again, and no, they hadn’t heard from Rob, either.
It was another forty-five minutes before Jem and Dodger made it. They had eggs and fried mushrooms on their breath and down their fronts. When Jem gave me a hard hug, I said, “You bastard, you stopped for breakfast!”
He laughed and dug around his carrier bag and came up with a paper sack of drippy bacon sandwiches that we handed around. “Fantastic builder’s caf just around the corner from there,” he said.
“You are the coolest customer in all of London,” I said.
“You’re not so bad yourself, old son,” he said, and put me in a friendly headlock that had me choking on my bacon buttie. I finished choking just as the video cut out, midplay. The crowd groaned and people started asking one another whether the video would start up again. A sizable portion apparently believed it wouldn’t, and we took advantage of the general exodus to slope off and find a bus home to the Zeroday.
We made an odd group, with our shining eyes and trembling bodies, our touristy garb and hats. But London was full of odd groups just like us, and that was the point, wasn’t it? I don’t reckon anyone gave us a second look the whole way home.
“Nothing from Rob, then?” I said for the fiftieth time as we came through the door and began to collapse onto sofas and chairs and cushions and rugs. Jem chucked his balled up builder’s trousers at my head.
“I’ll make the tea,” he said, and went into the kitchen before I could retaliate.
* * *
We stayed awake hitting “reload” and listening to Radio 4 streams for as long as we could. The hit counter went gradually berserk—by 9:30 A.M., it had hit eighty million, which was greater than the population of Great Britain, which meant that either people were watching more than once, or we had foreigners tuning in, or our hit counters were unreliable. It didn’t matter, because a) the number was still rocketing up and; b) it was a rattling huge number.
What we really wanted to do was hear what was going on in Parliament, but, apart from a few tantalizing tweets from MPs on their way into work, it was a black hole. None of us had thought to sign up for seats in the gallery, and there had already been four tour-buses’ worth of out-of-towners queued up to sit in when we left. We didn’t dare call Letitia because we had already decided we wouldn’t outright admit to her that it had been us. And we didn’t dare call Rob in case some fat-fingered sergeant had Rob’s phone rattling around in his trouser pocket, waiting to answer it and see who it was that was calling this gentleman in their cells.
Sleep demanded that we spend some time with it. We didn’t even make it upstairs. The whole crew—even Aziz, who pulled up not long after we got in—ended up asleep in the parlor/pub room, the shutters closed against the blinding spring day outside. What woke us, of course, was Rob thumping on the door. He wheeled his bicycle in, looking remarkably well-slept and cocky for a man who’d been in police custody all night.
After we’d finished giving him backslapping hugs and someone’d pressed a cup of tea into his hands, he sat back on the sofa, crossed his ankles in front of him, and said, “Tell you what, I might be all butterfingers when it comes to the old reflectors, but I’m the very spit of perfection when it comes to playing dumb for the Bill. Soon as I was picked up, I started in like, what was the big deal, I was just trying to get up high to get a look at the lights on the Thames cos I wanted to maybe do a photoshoot up there some day. I laid it on proper posh, talking all this rubbish I half-remembered from the one year I spent at art school, and so on and so forth. They took my DNA and cloned my SIM—I assume you all had the good sense to ditch yours, yeah?—and forgot about me for the next eight hours. So I slept like a baby, didn’t I? My solicitor came and got me out at nine sharp, and I went home for a shower and a change of clothes, which, frankly, the rest of you might consider, no offense. Looks like I might be in for a whopping fifty-pound fine, though my solicitor says he’s sure I can beat it if I want to pay him ten times that to defend the claim.” He laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, and he was almost right, at that point.
* * *
Here’s how we found out we’d won: a reporter from The Guardian rang me on my mobile to ask me how I felt about the surprise outcome of the vote. “How’d it come out?” I said. She laughed and said that she assumed someone would have told me, of course: “Only forty-six of them bothered to turn up, but twenty-four of them voted for TIP-Ex, and that makes it the law of the land!”
“Only forty-six of them turned up for work?” I said, and everyone in the pub room looked at me. I covered the mouthpiece. “We won!” I said, my fingertips and the tips of my ears tingling. The roar from my mates was deafening—Jem frisbeed the plate he was holding into the dead fireplace and shouted “Hopa!” as it shattered.
When I could hear the phone again, the lady from The Guardian was laughing hysterically. “Yes, seems like most of the MPs heard about those videos this morning—you do know about those?”
“I heard about them,” I said. It was clear from the way she asked that she was sure I was behind them, but I wasn’t going to admit anything.
“Right, I??
?m sure you have. Anyroad, they heard about the business with the videos, and then they heard from their constituents, telling them that they’d better not vote against TIP-Ex. But, of course, the whips had told them they had to do this. So most of them solved the problem by pulling a sickie and staying home. So they barely had quorum when the question was called—the Speaker delayed the vote as long as she could, I suppose so that more MPs might straggle in, but at forty-six, they were quorate, and your Letitia Clarke-Gifford called the question; and oh, didn’t she get the filthies from her party leader. But when it came to the vote, twenty-four MPs went for TIP-Ex—eight from the ruling party, ten from the opposition, and the six independents. And now, you’ve got the law you’ve been campaigning about. So now that you’re all caught up, I wonder if I might ask you some questions?”
I have no idea what I told her, but apparently I was coherent enough that she was able to get a couple paragraphs’ worth of quotes from me that didn’t make me sound like I was boasting about the savage bollocking I’d just given to the horrible old content dinosaurs, which is precisely what I spent the rest of the afternoon doing.
Epilogue
SUE ME/AN ANNOUNCEMENT/SOLDIERING ON
The judge only deliberated for forty-five minutes. I wasn’t surprised—the dinosaurs’ case was ironclad. After all, I was guilty. All I could really say in my defense was that I thought it was real art, and that Scot would have approved. Katarina even went into the witness box and said so. But, of course, neither Scot nor his descendants were entitled to approve of my little films, and so guilty I was.