A less-than-ideal world/Not-so-innocent bystanders/How'd we do?
In an ideal world, 26 would have stood out in the road and looked for the green dot of the laser-scope they'd fitted to the top of the MARK III's jerry-rigged optics, calling the projector team, giving them guidance. But it was still dead busy outside our little portable toilet hideaway; standing outside with a mobile clamped to your head, following a green dot and giving directions into the mouthpiece would have drawn attention. We didn't want any attention.
We had all agreed to keep phone calls to a minimum. No one knew exactly how long the old phones' batteries would hold out, and it just seemed like the more we left a digital record that could be traced back to us -- by our voices, say, possibly captured by whatever super-spy technology the MI5 or Met were using in London -- the riskier it was. So we waited. 26 stood on the toilet, one foot braced on either side of the seat (I didn't want to think about what it would be like if she slipped and fell down the hole -- but the lid was so flimsy neither of us wanted to risk our weight to it). I stood on the floor, craning my neck up to see if the green dot appeared on 26's face, which was level with the gap. We both hoped it didn't skewer her eyeball, because, well, that would be bad.
And there it was, on her nose. “Your nose!” I said. She whipped the reflector up and I clambered up on the seat beside her (nearly knocking her into the filthy stew of muck and wee and mysterious blue liquid sloshing around below us) and peered intently at the wall of the salmony-yellow brickwork of the Commons, now gray with the dim light of early night. I had a little pair of binox, but have you ever tried to spot a reflected, jiggling green dot on a wall a hundred yards away through a pair of tiny opera glasses? It's thumpingly hard.
But I caught it. “Right there,” I said. We hadn't found anything to anchor the reflector to, but we'd figured on being the very last team to go, and from the opposite bank to all the other shots, which we hoped would have made the cops slower to respond. Ten, fifteen minutes, and off we'd go. Now we were first, and we'd have to stay up and running for as long as we could. I didn't know what was going on with my zeroed-out mates, but I was surely hoping that they got it sorted quickly.
I texted another “1” to the projector crew and held my breath.
Then I let it go in a whoosh as the opening frames of my beautiful, wonderful, perfect video started rolling on the crenelated walls of the Commons. We'd superimposed a QR code on the top right corner of the frame, and it rotated every ten seconds; each 2D barcode trans- lated into the URL of a different mirror of the video with the embedded TheyWorkForYou stats. The little battery-powered video player plugged into the projector was programmed to roll the video, wait a random interval between ten and two hundred seconds, then roll it again.
The first time it ran, I craned my neck around 26's trembling biceps to see if I could see the crowd reacting. I heard some excited voices, and maybe a change in the timbre of the traffic noises, but I couldn't say for sure. Then the video stopped and we very, very carefully changed places, trying not to let the reflector budge by the tiniest amount. It wasn't that heavy at first, but after holding it in place while I counted one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus to forty-three, I felt my own arms start to tremble. Now it was my turn to be nearly knocked into the soup by 26 as she stood up on tiptoe to get a look out the grill. This being the second run, we expected a lot more people to notice, and they did; I could hear it from where I stood.
“They're stopping traffic,” 26 said. “A whole gang of tourists, looks like, standing in the middle of the road where they get the best view.”
“Any of them looking this way?”
“A few, but I'm pretty sure the beam is over their heads, the way you've got it aimed; they won't see the light unless they get up higher. Oh, wait, someone's moving one of the curtains on the high window. Shit!”
And that's when the second run finished.
We swapped again, both of us trembling. We'd been breathing floral-scented shit-fumes for ten minutes solid now, and between the lightheadedness, the excitement, and the weird, plasticky acoustics in the Porta-Loo, we were nervous as cats. Add to that the prospect of imminent discovery and arrest, and it's a wonder neither of us had a stroke.
“How many times are we going to do this?” I said. I hadn't wanted to be the first one to say it, but it was clear that 26 was a lot tougher than me.
She made the tiniest of shrugs, keeping the reflector still. “Until someone else is in position, I suppose. Can't stop until then.”
Not unless we get caught. I didn't say it. Didn't have to. We were both thinking it.
The video started again. Now I didn't have to look out the window to know that it was drawing a crowd. I could hear them. Also, the unmistakable voice of authority, coppers telling people to move along, the crackle of police radios. Distant sirens. I was in the middle of switching with 26 when the phone buzzed. She dug it out of my pocket and fumbled it and we both snatched for it as it fell toward the festering crap-stroganoff below us. I managed to bat it so that it fell to the floor instead. 26 went for it as I tried to realign the reflector. It was from the bridge: 1. They were ready. I managed to get the reflector lined up again just as the video ended, and we changed quickly into our tourist outfits, stuffing the hi-viz and builder's clothes into the carrier bags and switching on our CCTV- killing laser-hats. We snuck out of the toilet hand in hand, our palms so sweaty that they practically dripped. As we slipped out the door, a beefy copper clapped a hand on each of our shoulders.
“Just a minute, please,” he said, with that hard filth voice that made my heart stop beating. Four polite words, but they might as well have been, “And now you die.”
I swallowed, then dredged up my thickest, most northern voice, widened my eyes and said, “Excuse us, officer! We're just here for the weekend and we told our Mam and Dad we'd meet them at the Parliament to take our coach and well, we were both caught a bit short and this was the only toilet we could find -- I know it was wrong, but it was a desperate situation.”
He got squinty and thoughtful and then, by microscopic increments, the hand on my shoul- der loosened up.
“Mind if I see your arms, lad?” he said.
I understood then, but pretended I didn't. He thought we'd been injecting drugs in the toilet. I gladly held my arms out, and so did 26. “Like this?” I said, putting even more northernness in my voice, so I sounded like the comedy Yorkshireman in a pantomime. But the copper didn't twig. After a short look at my arms he said, “McDonald's is always a better bet for a public convenience if you really need to go. It's dangerous to sneak into a construction site, you never know what's lying around. Not to mention you could get done for trespassing. Don't let me catch you at it again, all right?”
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 Tres- passing 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 back-seat, 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 news-sheet 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 A.M., 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 em- bankment, 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 -- tell 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 damn huge crowd to get lost in. Westminster Bridge was well 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 back set.
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 back-slaps 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 head-lock that had me choking on my bacon buttie. I finished choking just as the video cut out, mid-play. 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 back-slapping 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 thick 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 photo-shoot 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.
Twilight of the commercial interludes
WHEW! How's that for a conclusion? It's not over, you know. There's an epilogue yet to come. It wasn't an easy epilogue to write, either. I would have loved to have ended the story here, but Trent had more to say, as you'll find out in a moment.