Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Kris Alexandros: The Betrayal

I'd hurried over to the north end of campus earlier in that morning, expecting some kind of extraordinary club meeting. I got to Mendeleev Building just as the janitor was opening up the main doors, but there was a sign stuck in front of the elevators now, 'Out of Order'. I shrugged and went into the stairwell, moving past a few other students who were here to drop off sporting equipment in some club room or arrive early for their first tuition of the day. I ran all the way up, feeling pretty out of breath, but probably nowhere near as quick as my friends the day before. I noticed there was a dent on the guardrail at one point, and a long streak of paint missing from the wall where some object had gouged out a thin strip of plaster. I didn't think anything about it at the time, I assumed it had been someone stumbling in their hurry to get out when the alarm sounded yesterday, a dropped item taking a chunk out of the wall as it went over the rail.

Then I got to the club room, and nobody was there. The door out onto the roof was standing open, blowing slightly in the wind. I went over to close it, but found that the locking mechanism had been broken, and the push-bar no longer had any effect on the bolt. I wondered if some other group had broken in here, trying to get at the Box, and I cursed myself for not going to move it somewhere safe as soon as we found it. I realised Dwayne and Ferrari had probably been right, and it was good the Box was somewhere safe. But because I hadn't made the order, I didn't know where they had put it. I was feeling frustrated and out of the loop. I also didn't know where we were supposed to meet; clearly not here, as it was already 8:30 and not even Montgomery was present.

Back down the stairs again I hurried, and in the direction of Dwayne's home. He was the closest, so in the case of damage to the club room there was a good chance we would hold a meeting in his flat. I was sure enough of my deduction that I was already walking that way as I phoned him. However, all I got was a monotonous ringing, as he failed to answer. Next I called the number Sal had given me. There were people in this area who owed the circle a favour, he had told me, and I should get in touch with them once I knew where the Box was so they could help with the extraction.

"Yes?" the voice that answered had a rough accent, not foreign but not local. Southern maybe, as well as I could understand the voices of this country.

"Mister Spenser?" I tried to keep it businesslike. I was working with the mafia now, something I'd suspected half my life but only recently had confirmed, and felt I had to make a good representation of my family, "I am Isadorios Kristo Alexandros, I believe Salmoneus of our circle has spoken to you."

"Isadorio? What kind of name's that? You know where the Box is?" I found it a little challenging to understand him with the accent, making his words run together, but the terse sentences made it easier.

"Not yet, but I expect to have it some time today. Some of my friends have the Box, and I would like to have them leave it without any unnecessary violence."

"You sure you can get it off them? Because your Sal made us promises, see. If you can't give us the Box in three days, some of our guys might have to get a little creative. Don't think you're running the show, you're not in Greece now, Izzy."

"Please, call me Kris. Do you have a secure location where I could ask my friends to leave the Box? They might be edgy handing it over to someone they don't know, but if there's a venue without any people I could say I have got access to somewhere we can store it safely, and my people will make the delivery none the wiser."

"You're smarter than I thought, kid. Just don't get too smart with me. Yeah, there's probably somewhere we can give you. I'll give you a message when I found something with my guys. Hope you're as good as your word." He hung up, and I didn't know if I should be regretting it. But I would have needed to call him sooner or later anyway.

I called Dwayne again, and there was still no answer. By then I was almost at his home. The campus was huge, like a town in itself, and most of the student populace lived in buildings very much like this one, an orange stucco cube with a thirteen by five grid of identical windows on each side. It might look something like a cell block, or a giant game of whack-a-mole if your mind worked like that. It was ten minutes after we had agreed to meet now, and I knew that I should check I was heading in the right direction. So I decided to call Ferrari, who I had nominated to be the society accountant entirely because she was always responsible and I thought most likely to give me a quick answer. A quick search of the contacts list on my cell phone revealed that I only had her landline number, so was unlikely to reach her if she was already at this meeting. I dialled Marco instead.

"Hi, Marco," I spoke quickly, "I got your text to meet, but you didn't say where." I heard him muttering in the background, and guessed that he was relaying the message to someone else. There seemed a good chance that I was last to the meeting, but then why hadn't they realised that I didn't have the location? If they had discussed it the night before, it seemed possible that Dwayne, Marco, and Ferrari might have been the only ones to arrive, and not yet realised that their message to me and Montgomery was missing a detail.

"The Box isn't safe here," Ferrari's voice came on the line after a faint bleep, "We thought it would be okay until we found a better place, but we'll have to stay with it until Dwayne gets here." She gave a room number in Mendeleev, which I wasn't familiar with. I guessed they had obtained a spare key to a store room or something, and we would be carrying the Box out of there.

"Okay," I answered, "Do you want me to check if Dwayne is up yet? I'm near his residence anyway. You might need to call Montgomery as well, the message I passed on to her last night didn't mention a location."

"I'm here, kaityou-sama," Montgomery's voice was a little louder, and with odd echoes. She was clearly shouting because she was standing farther than the others from the phone, and misjudged how well I could hear her.

"I'll just check on Dwayne then," I answered, already on the stairs into his building. The keypad on the front door had a code to enter, but six of these blocks had the same code, all the buttons on the right hand side of the keypad. I could go up the stairs to the end of his corridor, and then press the buzzer there which was bound to wake him. Or if he had left his phone in his room while making breakfast in the communal kitchen which each corridor shared, I would bang on the wall between the stairwell and the kitchen.

I thought I had the best plan at that point. The Circle's contacts would get back to me with a lock up, a warehouse, or some similar facility in town. I would tell the rest of the LUSARS members that a friend of a friend had said we could store some of our equipment in whatever facility it was, and I thought they would accept that because a locker with no clear connection to our society, well away from campus, would be the best place to put the Box. And then Spenser could do whatever he needed to do with it, extract the paperwork or switch it with the correct Box, and if I went back to tidy up after them and make sure it was neat, my friends would never know that anything had changed, even in a month or more when they returned to claim the Box and pass it back to the Sports and Community Activities staff.

It was a great plan, and I was sure nothing could go wrong now.