Payback, p.1
Payback, page 1
A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE
I can’t help feeling angry sometimes at a system that locks so many people out. Everything seems designed to make the rich get richer and the poor poorer, while the young especially are ignored or patronized. But in Payback we find a group of young people fighting back, taking expensive, privileged objects and selling them to give the money to the poor. But what’s the power behind the Robin Hood slogans and social media sensation? And what happens to those caught up in the movement? This is a gripping adventure that makes you think as well as gasp – a thriller of soul and importance.
BARRY CUNNINGHAM
Publisher
Chicken House
Contents
Chapter 1. The Night of the Jaguars
Chapter 2. Thief in a Palace
Chapter 3. Tom, Keep Your Clothes On
Chapter 4. Unmasked
Chapter 5. That Thing with the Balloon
Chapter 6. Arch 17
Chapter 7. Strictly Summer Operation
Chapter 8. The Ruiz Drop
Chapter 9. Being Peter Turtle
Chapter 10. Slow-motion Social Media Disaster
Chapter 11. Direct Hit
Chapter 12. Free Climbing
Chapter 13. Sinclair
Chapter 14. Bailey Heywood
Chapter 15. Being Charlie Masham
Chapter 16. Nice Work, Slumdog
Chapter 17. Leila’s Veil
Chapter 18. Magnus Yate
Chapter 19. This Close
Chapter 20. Nuclear Sunrise, Baby
Chapter 21. Burnin’ Bad Guys
Chapter 22. Hen Do from Hell
Chapter 23. Three Points of Contact
Chapter 24. The Black Box
Chapter 25. Gorse Hill High-rise
Chapter 26. Half a Dozen Margheritas
Chapter 27. Lying for a Living
Chapter 28. Chelsea and Nadim
Chapter 29. Dog on a Bike
Chapter 30. Handover
Chapter 31. The Sting
Chapter 32. Cooper Goes Boom
Chapter 33. A Bad Week to Quit Menthols
Chapter 34. Jack-in-the-box
Chapter 35. Crazy Wrong
Chapter 36. Paper Birds
Chapter 37. The End of the Road
Chapter 38. Into the Water
Chapter 39. Lost
Chapter 40. The Wrong Side of the Line
Chapter 41. Eaten by the Dark
Chapter 42. Left for Dead
Chapter 43. Being Deathtrap Boy
Chapter 44. Curtain Line
Chapter 45. Four Conversations
Copyright
For Saffiyah Khan,
Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo
and of course for Robin Hood
Also by M.A. Griffin
Lifers
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That’s how it goes
Everybody knows
Leonard Cohen, ‘Everybody Knows’
1
The Night of the Jaguars
‘Everybody know their roles?’
We all nodded. We’d been through it a hundred times.
Satisfied, Gedge slipped his mask down and we followed suit. Now we were a gang of four anonymous identical foxes; red, lean faces, high ears and dark noses. Kallie adjusted her mask, loosened her stance and stretched. Coke went through a final check of the camcorder, panning it across the darkened car park. These guys were real pros. Me? It was my first ever steal. I was fizzing with terror.
We dipped our phone torches and moved off, skirting the walls and following Coke’s CCTV map to ensure we stayed off-camera. Gedge made short work of a locked door and led us through into the dark, deserted shopping mall. It extended, vast and silent, towards the glittering glass roof of the central dome. Above us was the first floor – two wide balconies with brass balustrades. That’s where we were headed. We stuck to the shopfronts and doorways.
‘The night guy swiped in at ten p.m., just like normal,’ Gedge whispered, ‘but right now he could be anywhere. First rule – don’t get yourselves caught before we reach the cars or it’s all off.’
My breath felt hot and damp against the plastic mask. I followed Kallie and Gedge, high with panic. Coke brought up the rear, filming. He’d be uploading the footage once we were home and dry. We skirted a silent fountain, its glassy water still, and squatted against the shuttered hut of an ice cream vendor. No sign of the night guy. Gedge made a bunch of incomprehensible SWAT-team hand signals – mostly for the camera, I guessed – and I nodded, pretending I knew what the hell he was on about.
Mostly adrenaline and fear kept my mind on the job but now and again terrifying thoughts surfaced. What if we get caught? What if the cops are waiting for us? Imagine if Dad finds out . . . I’d be kissing goodbye to my cushy allowance, for one. I wouldn’t be enjoying the luxury of the sixth-form dorms come September either. The thought sent stabs of shame through me. I was jumpy as a bag of caffeinated puppies and my Zen breathing trick – in through the nose, out through the mouth, count the breaths with your eyes on the mile of shadowy shops ahead – wasn’t working.
The Westwater Mall is basically two giant wings extending from a central atrium designed to look like the deck of an ocean liner. In the domed hall hangs the world’s largest chandelier. There are Egyptian columns, acres of Italian marble, statues of lions, griffins and angels. And that summer, two elegant Jaguars. Top spec, high performance, the works. They were due to be there until the end of August. But we had other plans.
We’d be liberating them, breaking them into bits, and selling them online.
The first of the Jags looked like a silver bullet with a red leather interior. Gedge and I tucked ourselves in against it. Kallie and Coke continued along to the second car. I checked the mall again. A grey-blue emptiness punctuated by low lines of safety lights. Maybe the night guy was taking it easy in an office somewhere. Gedge hopped into the open-top car and used his phone torch to illuminate his work. He plugged in some tricksy gizmo that could disable immobilizers and tracking devices. Nothing happened. He leant in close, cursing.
‘Hold my phone. I need both hands.’
I jumped in alongside him. The car was incredible – sleek dash, dials and data screen, bucket seats in soft leather and that unmistakable fragrance of the new and the beautiful. I felt a rush of pleasure. ‘Rendall!’ Gedge hissed.
In a daze, I’d begun taking my gloves off to run my hands along the surfaces. I stopped myself. ‘Sorry.’
Gedge fiddled and cursed in the torch beam, and something made me look up.
A sound.
Gedge killed the torch and we sat next to each other, two breathless thieves, statue-still in our badass masks. There was someone approaching. The passageway ahead was a high-ceilinged space designed to look like an oriental street market – cafes, noodle bars and conveyor-belt sushi places crowding either side of a marble walkway. Whoever it was moved cautiously. If they had a torch, they weren’t using it. The two of us instinctively slid down in our seats.
It was our night guy. By his chunky silhouette, I’d have guessed he was middle-aged. He held his guard’s cap under one arm and he was creeping through the dark like a pantomime villain. He hadn’t seen us yet; an advertising hoarding obscured the front of the car. But he was in our way. The food hall was our escape route. Gedge set to work again. His hands weren’t as steady as before.
The engine exploded into life.
The roar echoed up the mall. The headlights came on and the night guy shouted ‘Hey!’, shielding his eyes and dropping his cap. Gedge crunched the gears with a desperate series of jerks and released the clutch. We were off. I was petrified Gedge was going to mow the night guy down, but he reversed, thank God, and we crashed backwards through a display board, wheels squealing on the polished floor. He swung the Jag to the left, hit the brakes, spun the wheel right, and we shot off along the upper floor of the mall. I saw the night guy running after us, his jacket open and his shirt untucked over a swaying belly. He was already knackered. We hit maybe forty miles an hour, the engine wailing in third gear, and I winced and flinched as the balustrade flew past on one side and the store windows on the other. The car’s dash was beeping a shrill seatbelt warning.
Gedge hit the horn a couple of times. Ahead, Coke and Kallie in the second Jag were still struggling with Yate’s gadget. And they were in our way.
‘C’mon, C’mon!’ Gedge yelled, accelerating towards them.
I found myself stamping on an imaginary brake. Kallie had the video camera on us, and even through her mask I could see her eyes widen from behind the viewfinder as we closed in.
Then I heard a guttural roar as their engine sprang to life and the Jag’s lights came on full beam, dazzling us as Coke reversed wildly, leaving us a sliver of space. We screeched between the storefront of a jeweller’s and the car, swung a sharp left and tore towards the food hall, smashing a sandwich board aside as we went. Coke and Kallie followed, their engine bellowing. I got the blurred impression of a thousand cafe seats whizzing past in the dark as we screeched between marble pillars.
‘This is it! Hold on!’
The stairs – that’s right, the actual designed-for-pedestrians stairs – that took us down to the exits felt steeper than I’d imagined. We both screamed as the Jag tipped forward, its tyres hammering down the marble steps. We crashed noisily against the ground floor, braked hard and skidded to a standstill, leaving space for Coke to pull u
Ferg had disabled the alarms on the main doors. They were built to concertina open, so all we had to do was push them apart. We kept the engines running. Gedge and I shouldered the left-hand doors, Kallie and Coke the right.
‘Enough!’ Gedge yelled. ‘Let’s go!’
I held my breath as we edged through, wincing as Gedge smacked a wing mirror, but we were out.
The night air was warm, the sky a pale purple underlit by the sodium-yellow of London. We hit the gas and roared across the painted grids of the empty car park making a crow-flies line for the exits, howling wolf-whoops under a crescent moon.
Gedge threw his head back and bawled, ‘Smashin’ the system every damn day!’ as behind us mall lights exploded into life and an alarm blared. Ferg had hacked security so the police would get a delayed signal, allowing us time to vanish into the night. Gedge put the radio on and we both gave a roar of celebration at the opening of ‘Carjack’, a Kiss FM fave that name-checked us in a chorus that went, ‘Crown Heights carjack, ass on the tarmac. I’ll make you holler, shake your dollar like Payback.’ We roared the words out between gales of laughter, chanted them back to each other when the track was over.
Weird to think that only a month ago I’d started as a porter at the Midland Hotel back in Manchester, helping out Mr Ruiz. It was how I first met Payback. How all this madness began.
But for now I was sixteen, Payback was famous and it all felt good.
I wasn’t thinking about Ruiz.
2
Thief in a Palace
When the top floor of the Midland Hotel was quiet I’d ride the corridors on a laundry trolley, pushing hard from the lifts, throwing myself on to my stomach like a surfer and swishing along past the double doors of the penthouse suite, two sharp rights, steering with my trailing leg and back around to where I began. I’d set a personal best for the circuit one Saturday night in early July, despite clipping the plasterwork near the stairs and tearing a gash in the fancy wallpaper, so I was preparing myself for further greatness the night the whole Payback thing started.
I was up there delivering whisky. Edison Ruiz, I’d discovered, loved his whisky. I’d first met him, along with his associate Mr Gonzalez, when I’d dragged their bags across the lobby a few days earlier. He was just in from New Mexico, staying in Manchester for two weeks of business negotiations, and had brought enough luggage to crush an Olympic weightlifter. I’d dropped his briefcase – Mr Ruiz had it actually chained to wrist when he arrived – and ensured he was settled in his suite of penthouse rooms. It had felt good to be useful. I’d decided to celebrate by taking a laundry trolley for a spin before heading back to the lobby.
Then the old man’s door had opened again. ‘Bellboy,’ he’d said. He had grey-green eyes and held one of the hotel’s crystal decanters in liver-spotted hands. ‘I’ll be needing different whisky.’
I raised an eyebrow. The booze was on the house. ‘Is there a problem, sir?’
Mr Ruiz gave a nod. ‘This is a blend, not a single malt.’ He unstoppered it and held it out in demonstration. All whisky looks the same, right? I examined it, pretending I knew what I was looking for. ‘No, Bellboy. You smell it.’
‘Right. I knew that.’ My stomach lurched at the scent of the stuff. Last term I’d tried a few shots of a sixth-former’s stash in the dorms after lights out. Aside from drama productions one of the only benefits of boarding school was getting to experiment with smuggled goods. The whisky, though, had been a bad experience. I’d spent the bulk of the night making a close inspection of the inside of the seniors’ upstairs toilet. I battled to keep the memory from my face as I sniffed the Scotch.
‘See?’ Mr Ruiz said, replacing the glass stopper and handing the amber-coloured liquid over. ‘Ask for a single malt. Aged for twenty years, preferably more. Understood?’
Downstairs in the bar, I’d gazed hopelessly at the wall of gleaming bottles while a guy in a hotel waistcoat polished glasses. I repeated Mr Ruiz’s instructions.
That’s when Mr Gonzalez set aside his newspaper and gave a clinical smile. ‘He’s got you swapping the whisky, huh?’ He laughed, one of those joy-free sub-zero laughs, and shook his head. He had a square face, a long nose and dark hair. ‘That one,’ he suggested, pointing out a bottle.
‘Thanks.’
Gonzalez sipped his coffee and grinned. His teeth were American-bright. He straightened his canary-yellow tie. Despite the suit, he had a boxer’s build and hands. His knuckles were bruised. ‘Any time,’ he’d said.
In the next few days I’d refilled Mr Ruiz’s supply twice. We’d swapped phone numbers; he’d text when he ran out and quickly got used to me arriving with a fresh bottle wrapped in a napkin and refilling his decanter while he flicked through paperwork at the coffee table, his precious laptop in the briefcase between his legs.
That night, though, I’d knocked and got no response.
I waited and tried again, weighing my options. I had a keycard for all top-floor rooms, it felt good to help out and I didn’t want to anger the old man. Those steely eyes, immaculately pressed white shirts, that briefcase cuffed to his wrist, those polished shoes – they all belonged to a guy used to getting things his way. If he returned from a meeting to find he was out of whisky . . .
I swiped the door open and slipped inside.
The penthouse suite was a run of three connected rooms; a plush bedroom, a bathroom and a lounge with carpet so thick you could swim in it. I felt like a thief in a palace.
‘Hello?’
I waited. The lights were off. The place felt empty. I’d never been beyond the sideboard where the drinks cabinet was. I decanted the whisky then stood scoping out the suite, fighting the temptation to have a quick look around. Temptation, as always, won. I took a turn through Mr Ruiz’s sleeping quarters. I checked out the huge claw-footed bath and the gold taps. I padded across the fireplace rug and spent a few minutes goofing around on the cross trainer. Then I headed to the sliding glass doors to check out the roof garden and pool.
And that, in a way, is where everything started. The small thing that snowballed.
The doors to the roof garden were open a crack.
I stood on the threshold, feeling certain someone like Mr Ruiz would have left the place secure. I scanned the terrace, my pulse a quickening thud. The swimming pool lights made the water look milky. A towel lay on the cushion of an oak sun lounger, one of its edges lifting and dropping in the breeze. I looked for wet footprints on the decking, imagining that potential thieves might stop for a swim then leave handy tracks. Turns out they don’t. The air was still warm and somewhere below a late tram hooted its passengers home. I took a few steps out into the night before I heard the noise. Someone shifting position out there in the dark.
A sharp note of fear sang in my chest. I wasn’t alone.
I ran back inside, drew the doors shut and stopped for a quick panic. One noise on the terrace and I’d transformed into nervous-breakdown-boy. Mr Ruiz was being burgled. I couldn’t just run away, could I? I need to help in some way. Demonstrate some backbone for once.
Then I heard more movement. This time coming from the bedroom. Someone had got inside.
Screw backbone. I did what any terrified sixteen-year-old hotel porter would do. I hid behind the sofa.
I was reversing arse-first towards the shadows gathered at the fireplace when I realized there was a torch beam scanning the room. I curled up as light swept the wall above my hiding place. While I was thinking through my options, I realized the beam had changed. The torch was on the floor now, balanced on its base and projecting a pale moon on the ceiling. I heard someone prise open a door and rummage.
‘Gedge?’ said the intruder. Footsteps padded towards the glass doors. ‘It’s not here.’
Was there someone else in the room? I moved further back and found myself pressed hard against something. It was Mr Ruiz’s briefcase, tucked in against the side of the sofa. The voice, sibilant and young, continued, ‘That’s right. Nothing.’ I realized he must be talking on a phone or using one of those fancy earpieces. I gathered the case slowly into my arms. Since old man Ruiz had it handcuffed to his wrist when he’d first arrived I could at least rescue it, right? I peered around the sofa at the burglar’s thin silhouette. He had a mask pushed up into his hair so he could talk. ‘The combination is academic, isn’t it? Like I said – no case.’ He punctured a carton of juice with a straw and took a long suck. The case was what they’d come for. ‘What about Kallie?’ There was a pause. I looked across to the front door of Ruiz’s suite. I’d left it open. The intruder, finishing his juice as he leant against a doorframe, had his back turned. ‘Well I seriously doubt that’s necessary. But I can check,’ he was saying.
