UK57

By Joe Gantlee

Mark Laws is a brand manager for a global food company. Everything in Mark’s world is good, his career is sky-rocketing, and he’s about to marry his girlfriend, Lisa. But his life falls apart the day he decides to leave his job.

A stranger warns him that unless he returns to work he will be killed. But Mark refuses to go back. Knowing that his life is in mortal danger, he goes on the run, and meets others who have had similar warnings. Mark realizes that if he is to ever see Lisa again he must find out who is hunting him, and why he has become the fugitive known as UK57.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483459561

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Gantlee

Copyright © 2016 Joe Gantlee.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5955-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-5956-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016916683

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 11/21/2016

CONTENTS

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30

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Steve Biko

1

The loud buzzing of the alarm clock prodded Mark awake. He reached across and, with a carefully aimed finger, sent it back to sleep. As usual, Mark had important things to do, but for once they remained filed away in a distant drawer in the back of his mind. The only thing on his agenda now was sleep. He closed his eyes and drifted off again.

Twenty minutes later, an elbow found the small of his back.

‘Wakey, wakey, Mr Lazybones,’ whispered Lisa.

Mark heaved open an eye and looked at her. ‘You can call me many things, Lisa, but not that.’

‘So, how come you’re still in bed, then?’

Good question. Mark was normally up like a distress flare, ready to take on the world. But today he had other things on his mind. There was just enough light in the room for Mark’s lips to find Lisa’s, and they kissed deeply. He slid a hand inside her nightdress.

‘Mr Lazybones has become Mr Horny.’

‘Complaining?’

‘Not in the slightest,’ said Lisa, smiling.

Their lovemaking was not the kind Lisa had expected from a man who was now very late for work. It was deliciously slow. The rewards of the steady build-up were there for all to hear.

‘I don’t think our neighbours will need alarm clocks this morning,’ said Lisa, breathing heavily.

Mark smiled, nuzzled her neck and inhaled a couple of times; each breath absorbed a little more of Lisa. He struggled to remember when he’d felt this relaxed, this good. He flipped on to his side to face her. To the casual observer, Lisa was a reasonably attractive young woman, of medium build, with two slightly crooked front teeth and a bad case of bed hair. But Mark was no casual observer, he was Lisa’s fiancé, and to him everything about her was perfect. He loved her voice, her smile, her face, even her toes, which Lisa herself hated. Mark could think of no one he’d rather marry.

Lisa felt the same way about Mark. He was no Adonis – average height, average build and a stomach that no amount of low-fat food seemed capable of shifting. But he had a handsome face, dark hair, bright blue eyes and a smile that made her melt.

Mark kissed Lisa one more time and climbed slowly out of bed to pad through to the bathroom. He shaved, showered and dressed at a leisurely pace. The hare had turned into the tortoise.

Lisa put on her dressing gown and joined Mark at the breakfast table. Toast for her, porridge for him.

Lisa watched him, a curious look on her face. ‘I’ve never seen you eat so slowly.’

‘Does that mean the wedding’s off?’

Lisa smiled. ‘It’s just that you’re normally a man in a hurry.’

‘Maybe the man’s decided to slow down.’

‘I hope so.’

Mark finished his breakfast and kissed Lisa again. The kiss was not the usual weekday-morning peck. It was long and passionate.

‘I’m liking this new man,’ she said, grinning.

‘Have a good one, honey.’

‘You too.’

Mark grabbed his coat, climbed into his car and set off for work. Any hope he had of making up for lost time was sabotaged by the London traffic. Round every corner was another solid river of metal. After forty minutes of stop-start, rarely getting out of first gear, he parked his car and sat staring at the office block that filled his field of vision. In front of the building stood a huge metal sign, each letter as tall as a man: ‘Haywest’.

For the last eighteen months, Mark Laws had been a man on a mission, determined to climb to the very top of the corporate ladder. Always first at his desk, always last to leave, Mark had become the golden boy of Haywest Foods, breakfast cereal division. No-one, least of all his friends, had Mark down as a company man, but all of that changed the day he was selected for the Haywest graduate trainee programme. It was as though he’d decided to bury the old, fun-loving Mark and come up with another version of himself. In the language of marketing, this new Mark was going to be bolder, brighter, better.

Mark had already earned the title of junior brand trainee, but everyone knew he wouldn’t have it for long. He was a star in the making. Being a food company, Haywest had an employee scheme called Flavour of the Month to reward its best workers. Mark had won the scheme an unprecedented five times running.

The future looked incredibly bright for the young marketing man but, like all good things, it was about to come to an end, because today, everything in Mark’s life was about to change. Throughout the morning he found it harder to gather his thoughts, his quick-fire brain now on go-slow. For a man who was usually never lost for words, he found that they were now proving stubbornly elusive.

His strange mood came to a head during a brainstorming session for a new breakfast cereal. The meeting had been called by Mark’s boss, Sue Golman, the head of marketing for breakfast brands. Sue loved her brainstorming sessions, or brain-blasts, as she liked to call them. No one else shared Sue’s enthusiasm. They were known around the department as ‘bum-numbing sessions’.

This particular brainstorm had been called to come up with a name for a cereal currently known as Project X, a moniker hardly likely to get the shoppers of Britain salivating. And so it was that Mark found himself in a small, stuffy office in the bowels of Haywest, alongside Sue, Toby Hallis, a junior product development manager, Mai Ling, a brand manager, and Keith Turner, a graduate trainee.

‘No, Keith, you cannot call a breakfast cereal Morning Glory,’ snapped Sue. ‘This is a premium brand.’ Keith blushed. ‘Any more suggestions like that and you’ll be lucky to make Flavour of the Day, let alone Flavour of the Month.’

Sniggers all round.

‘How about Wonder Flakes?’ said Toby, praying that his little offering wouldn’t be shot down in flames.

Sue mulled, pen to mouth, and then finally wrote the name on a flip chart. ‘Yes, that’s a definite possibility,’ she said, giving ‘Wonder Flakes’ an exclamation mark that it didn’t deserve and that Toby certainly hadn’t intended. But he said nothing. He’d only been with the company for six months.

Mark yawned, but managed to keep it in his mouth.

‘Any thoughts, Mark?’ asked Sue. Her talented trainee would surely come up with the goods.

Mark dredged his brain for an answer. After an interminable delay, he finally spoke. ‘What about Fields of Gold?’

‘Fields of Gold, Fields of Gold? Okayish,’ said Sue, damning him with no praise. She wrote it down in very small letters.

The tedium continued for another sixty minutes, the group coming up with lots of suggestions, and Sue gleefully shooting most of them down. As the meeting approached its finale, the twenty-six names on the flip chart had been reduced to three, all Sue’s.

‘So, what do we think?’ she asked. Mark wondered why she’d bothered to put ‘we’ in this sentence. In Sue’s book, ‘me’ was the only word that mattered. ‘Well?’ She scanned the room.

Mark looked at the chart. Six words swam into his head – ‘I like all three of them’. They pushed at his closed mouth, trying to escape, but Mark wouldn’t release them. Why? Because they were a lie. He didn’t think that at all. So where had the words come from and what was his head playing at by even suggesting them?

‘Mark, you must have something to say,’ said Sue, banking on her star pupil to come to the rescue.

‘I like all three of them…’ once more jabbed at Mark’s brain, but the words remained trapped.

‘Come on, time is money,’ said Sue, bashing her pen impatiently against the pad.

But just when Mark thought he could hold the words back no longer, from somewhere deep within his head came something else, the words he really wanted to say, the words that would change everything.

‘I don’t like any of them. I think they’re all shit.’

§

Dade, a big, ruddy-faced man from California, had the sort of body that didn’t cope well with exercise; but right now he was moving more quickly than he’d done in a long time. The siren wailing throughout the sprawling complex had seen to that. The sound could mean only one thing – trouble. He pushed open the door to Room M and the noise hit him like a fist.

‘OS, OS, OS,’ screamed Computer 53.

Hunched over the computer was Fischer, a young man from Hamburg, his stern face bearing testimony to the seriousness of the situation.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Dade, breathing hard.

‘UK57 is the problem,’ replied Wallace, sternly.

What little blood remained in Dade’s cheeks bid its farewell. He hadn’t noticed Wallace when he’d first stepped into Room M. The second in command at FACTO only ever made an appearance when things were bad. Now was just such an occasion. Unlike those from other departments, she wasn’t required to put on a uniform. Wearing a black woollen knee-length designer dress, Wallace looked more like the CEO of a multinational, than a scientist.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Dade, looking back at the screen. In all his long years at FACTO, he’d never had an OS, and, of all the special units he’d developed, UK57 was the last he’d have expected this from. It had all been going so well.

‘Sit down,’ said Wallace, putting a hand on Dade’s shoulder. She knew how much work the developers put into their special units and how much this must be hurting him.

Dade slumped into a chair, his face still glued to the screen. ‘This can’t be happening.’

‘The camera doesn’t lie.’ Wallace watched UK57, who was sitting in his own chair, a mirror image of Dade. ‘Status, Fischer.’

Fischer, a tall rake of a man, peered at the information on screen. ‘Since the first OS at 1.47 p.m. local time, I’ve monitored UK57 very closely. He has remained OS.’

‘Didn’t you follow my directions, Fischer?’ asked Dade.

‘To the letter.’

‘Not a good state of affairs,’ said Wallace, shaking her head. ‘UK57 is very important to us, very important indeed. We’ve had enough trouble with the UK recently. We need it to stop or I can guarantee there will be repercussions.’

Dade wiped his brow, unsure whether the repercussions would impact on UK57 or himself.

‘Let’s just hope the incidence of OS is an aberration and the special unit returns to the path,’ said Wallace.

Dade breathed a sigh of relief. Although he couldn’t be held personally liable for an OS, he felt responsible for the actions of UK57. He had chosen the special unit from a large pool of candidates, spent months researching and developing his path. He had written the words for the operators and made sure that everything was in place. What on earth could have made UK57 do this?

She turned to the developer. ‘I want you to keep a very close eye on UK57.’ Dade nodded. ‘Because you do know what will happen if the special unit fails to follow the path?’ said Wallace, her blue eyes boring into him.

‘Yes,’ he said, his heart picking up its pace, ‘I know exactly what will happen.’

2

The clock on the wall said five thirty, but no one was going to leave early today. Not until they’d heard the fate of Mark Laws. The door to Sue Golman’s office finally opened and Mark stepped out. Two dozen sets of eyes turned in his direction and two dozen sets of ears pricked up, desperate to hear the verdict.

‘Well?’ prompted Toby, who’d been hovering near the door. Mark said nothing and walked past him. ‘Oh, come on.’ Toby put an arm round Mark’s shoulder as he walked alongside his colleague. ‘She must have said something. Sue always says something.’

‘Omertà,’ said Mark, pulling an imaginary zip across his mouth.

Toby walked off in a huff as Mark went over to his desk, put on his coat and, with the eyes of the department still watching him, strolled through the open-plan office and out of the building. It was the first time since he’d started at Haywest that he’d left work before eight.

Mark smiled as he drove home. His job had been hanging by a well-chewed fingernail, but he’d managed to cling on to it, just. Sue had harangued him for his bad judgement, his swearing and his criticism of her in front of her colleagues, but she’d let him live. Why? Because if there was one thing Sue hated more than someone with balls, it was someone without balls. She already had quite enough eunuchs in the breakfast cereal division.

There was another reason why Mark had survived. He was the best graduate Haywest had ever had. His attitude was superb, his timekeeping was excellent, his scores had been second to none. You couldn’t throw all that away just because of one silly outburst during a product-naming session.

Mark sang as he drove home. But it wasn’t the fact that he’d kept his job at Haywest and survived the wrath of Sue Golman that made him so happy, it was the plan that was currently brewing in his brain.

Mark told Lisa the day’s news.

‘And you lived to tell the tale?’ she said, stunned.

‘Yes, not only kept my life, kept my job too.’

Lisa hugged him. ‘God, Mark, you’re one lucky bastard. I want to be standing next to you when the meteor strikes.’

‘Okay,’ said Mark, a cheeky glint in his eye, ‘let’s pretend the meteor is on its way and we only have two hours left to live.’

Lisa grinned, only too happy to play along. They kissed as though their lives depended on it, pulled each other’s clothes off, and, still glued at the mouth, staggered like a couple of drunks into the bedroom and collapsed on to the bed.

Dade stared blankly at Computer 53 and the empty chair where UK57 usually sat. The surveillance camera told him that something had gone terribly wrong. UK57 should have been seated there right now, working late into the night, not at home with his fiancée. The Californian cursed silently. This was not how things were meant to play out.

‘We should do this more often,’ sighed Lisa, surprised to find herself in a post-coital state for the second time in one day.

‘Your wish may come true.’

‘How come?’

‘I’ve got a plan. I think we should go somewhere.’

‘Where did you have in mind, Dorset again?’

Mark smiled at the memory. ‘No, not Dorset. Somewhere a bit further afield. I think we should travel the world.’

§

The following day, Dade read an email Mark had sent to Lisa and discovered his plan. He then received his own email, revealing FACTO’s response. Red-faced, he hurried to Wallace’s office.

Wallace sat working behind her large metal desk, as Dade sat down in the chair opposite her, his face flushed.

‘Does UK57 going abroad really justify Code D?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘We need UK57 to remain at Haywest Foods. That’s his path. He needs to be in the UK. The special unit is of no use to us on the other side of the planet.’

Dade wiped his face with this hands.

‘I know you wanted a clean record before your transfer to Strategy.’

‘It’s not just the clean record,’ he said. ‘Why does it have to be Code D?’

‘It just does. But it’s not as though we invoke Code D lightly.’

‘You’ve invoked it five times already this year.’

‘Yes, but never lightly. We need to keep things on track, otherwise everything we’ve worked for will be for nothing. Do you understand?’

Dade nodded, his mind spinning as he tried to come up with an answer to this conundrum. After a while, he spoke. ‘What if I went to see UK57?’

Wallace wasn’t a woman who startled easily, but his request made her look up abruptly. ‘And said what precisely?’

‘I think I may be able to turn him back to the path.’

Wallace let his words slowly sink in. ‘It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, Dade, very dangerous indeed.’

‘But what if Code D doesn’t work? What if UK57 goes abroad?’ he said.

Wallace stared at the developer. ‘Code D has never failed us.’

‘There are special units still at large.’

‘But not for long.’ Wallace turned her attention back to the computer. ‘I cannot sanction this on my own. FACTO has only ever let one other developer try a visitation, and look what happened.’

‘Yes, but I’m not Ahlberg. She was a traitor. Look at my records. I’ve been loyal to FACTO since the day I joined.’

‘I know you have, Dade.’ Wallace drummed her manicured fingernails on the desktop. ‘Let me think about it for a while.’

Dade nodded, glad she hadn’t dismissed his suggestion out of hand. ‘When will I know your decision?’

‘When I’ve spoken to Albero.’

§

Mark closed the front door of his parents’ house and walked down the path. If his parents were shocked by his news, they hid it well. But then, this was the son who’d told them that he was going to marry his first serious girlfriend while still in his mid-twenties. They knew better than to try and talk him out of his latest plan.

Mark smiled to himself, glad to have cleared the first hurdle. He wanted to get back to Lisa, who’d just had a similar conversation with her own parents. He walked down the street and flicked the remote of his Toyota. The doors clicked open, and he was just about to grab the handle when a man stepped out of the shadows.

‘Can I have a word with you, Mark?’ Although the developer had typed the name a thousand times, it was the first time he’d ever spoken it.

Mark turned, somewhat surprised to see a middle-aged man with wild grey hair and piercing green eyes staring at him. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I need to talk to you about something of grave importance,’ he said.

The use of the word ‘grave’ made Mark’s heart beat a little faster. ‘I’m in a hurry. What is it?’

‘Let’s walk.’ Dade didn’t want to draw attention to himself by standing outside Mark’s parents’ house.

Mark shrugged and walked beside Dade. He wasn’t afraid. The man didn’t seem a threat, he was smartly dressed, calm, composed. But that word - ‘grave’?

After a few steps, the man began to talk. ‘What I’m about to tell you will sound utterly implausible, you’ll want to laugh it off as a bad joke, you’ll think it’s insane, but everything I’m about to tell you is the truth. Remember what happened at Haywest Foods when Sue Golman asked you about product names?’

Mark stopped in his tracks. ‘How the hell do you know about that?’

Dade let the information sink in before continuing. ‘For the last eighteen months, every single word that you’ve uttered at work has been prepared by me.’

Mark nearly choked. ‘You what?’

‘I know this must sound crazy to you, but it’s true. I’m what’s known as your developer. I write your words and your future path. Cast your mind back to the meeting. There were some words in your head but you didn’t want to say them, did you?’ Dade had watched the video playback of Mark’s meeting many times.

Mark could feel his heart going up through the gears. ‘This is crazy.’

‘You didn’t say them, did you? You went OS, otherwise known as off-script.’

‘Have you been spying on me?’

‘It’s a lot more than spying.’

Mark exhaled, hard. ‘You’re saying that I’ve got a script?’

‘Not just you. There are others too. People who are important to us.’

‘Me, important?’ said Mark, laughing nervously.

‘Yes, you. If you follow the path.’

‘What’s this path nonsense?’ said Mark, growing angry. ‘And whatever happened to freedom of speech?’

‘I’m afraid, in your case, it no longer exists.’

Mark glared at the man. ‘Is this some sort of wind-up? Is Toby Hallis behind this?’

Dade shook his head. ‘I’m a friend.’

‘I’ve got enough friends on Facebook. I’m going home,’ said Mark, walking quickly back towards his car.

Dade kept pace with him. ‘It’s not a joke, Mark, it’s for real. Can you remember when you first asked Lisa out?’ Lisa had been taken on at Haywest as a research graduate. She’d left after three months, but she’d been there long enough for their paths to cross. ‘I know what you said.’

‘You know about Lisa too?’ said Mark, glaring at the man.

Dade nodded. ‘You asked her on a date to The Crimson Tide Bar. She said I hardly know you and you said Only one way to rectify that.’

Mark turned on Dade, angrily. ‘How did you know that? How the hell did you know that? Have you bugged my clothes, my office?’

Dade smiled. The fish had been hooked.

Mark clenched his fists. ‘Okay, let’s suppose for one second that you can see what I do, even write what I say. What’s the big deal about me telling my boss her ideas are shit?’

‘We have a path drawn out for you, a very important path. We need you to cancel your trip abroad and go back to your job at Haywest Foods.’

‘And what if I don’t?’ said Mark. ‘What if I say Fuck you, I’m off to Australia?’

Dade stared at Mark. ‘It’s quite simple. If you do that, we’ll have no option but to kill you.’

3

Tara Moorehead was twenty-five. Unfortunately, her chances of reaching twenty-six were very slim indeed. She’d been a graduate employee at a global energy company, and for a while things had been pretty good. She had a nice ground-floor flat in Camden; a wealthy boyfriend named Shane, a city banker; and two holidays a year, one beach, one snow. Yes, life had been hunky-dory for Tara. That is, until the outburst, the moment when she’d decided to speak her mind in front of a visiting delegation from Russia. From that moment on, nothing in Tara’s short life would ever be the same again.

She walked up the steps out of Leicester Square Underground Station as the crowds poured down. Tara felt like a salmon struggling against the torrent, but she made it to the top, where she looked around and smiled. It was good to be back in London again.

Tara was going to make a surprise visit to Shane. It would certainly be a surprise for him. He’d heard nothing at all from her in over six weeks. The reason for this radio silence wasn’t that they’d fallen out. It was far more serious than that. It was because she’d been warned to never contact him again. In fact, she’d been told to never go back to London, but if there was one thing Tara hated more than anything else on earth, it was being told what to do.

She pulled her collar up against the cold as she headed north up Tottenham Court Road. She’d gone over what she was going to say to Shane a thousand times in her head, but like an actor who thinks they know their lines, the closer she got to her big moment, the more nervous she became. Would he believe her? Would he come with her? Or would he just think she’d gone completely crazy and call the police? Tara didn’t know what his reaction would be, but there was one thing she was sure about, and that was the danger she was in. Tara had taken a very big risk indeed.

She looked across the street at the bookshops on Charing Cross Road and smiled wryly to herself. Tara had been an avid reader once, but it was reading that had got her into this mess. She’d read a book about the potential dangers of nuclear energy. This question hadn’t been on the agenda when the Russian delegation came over, but it was one she desperately wanted answering. ‘How can we be sure there won’t be another Chernobyl?’ she’d asked. It was only one sentence, but it had spelt the end of her career, and it would soon spell the end of her life.

§

Alan Campbell was a big man. He hadn’t meant to be this big, but twenty years behind the wheel of a cab, twenty years avoiding gyms and twenty years of bacon butties, tea with whole milk and two sugars, had all taken their toll.

He turned his cab off Piccadilly Circus and headed down Shaftesbury Avenue. He wasn’t sure why he’d bothered to come here, not on a Wednesday night. Alan usually did the stations or the hotels, or, if he fancied going long haul, Heathrow Airport. At least you were guaranteed a fare. But round here there was too much competition, buses, rickshaws, minicabs, tubes, free bicycles and, worst of all, Uber. How was a bloke meant to make an honest living with so many cards stacked against him?

He reckoned he should have come later, at kicking-out time, when people were too drunk or too tired to care how much they forked out for their trip home. But a little voice in his head had told him that Soho would be a good place to come tonight, a very good place indeed. And so here he was, yellow light on, looking for a fare.

Tara stood by a crossing at the side of the road, waiting for the little green man to appear. He duly arrived and she stepped out. It was then that she spotted a taxi with its yellow light on, fifty yards further down the road. She was in two minds about hailing it; but