Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Marco Schmidt: New Enemies

As we hurtled down the narrow country lanes, my first thought was to worry about Ferrari's safety. She'd shot off in the opposite direction, up Melrose Lane, but that road only went back to the university, and we already knew that these CIA guys had people all over campus. I didn't know if they were real CIA or impostors, but I couldn't think of any reason the US government would be interested in the Box. It made no sense at all, it was only a game.

At that point I had two possible interpretations of what was going on around us, both of which almost but not quite made some kind of sense. I could assume that this was just another layer of subterfuge on top of a sports psychology experiment. It was all a show, to test our responses and how well our personal morals held up in a stressful situation. Nobody was really getting hurt. But then if Ferrari wasn't in on it she'd already thrown one actor down the stairs and knocked another one out cold back there. Surely that would be enough of a problem to stop the experiment.

Or I could assume that Barton had some grain of truth in his story, whether or not they were real CIA. He'd said a weapon of some kind. Was it possible that someone was using the Box to hide bombs – or even nuclear material – either with or without the knowledge of the department? It could be as large as a college-wide conspiracy, concocting elaborate stories to get groups of students to hide material or to smuggle it, depending on how the game went. Or it could be as small as one lab tech with links to a terrorist cell spotting that the game would give them an easy place to conceal contraband. But whichever it was, if they were real, there was somebody willing to do whatever it took to get their hands on that Box.

Both theories had obvious holes. Neither seemed particularly logical from the point of view of whoever had started the whole exercise. But both were better than anything else I could think of at that point. And in the absence of better ideas, I decided to assume that what Nigel had told me was the truth, until more evidence presented itself. I didn't have time to stop and think, it took my full attention to keep us on the road. The hedges rattled against the window as we raced past, and occasionally low branches banged against the roof. It was one of those roads where if you stare along it, the greenery all seems to be cut back in a rectangle the size of an average car. It must be extra terrifying for Monty, without the shelter of a cab to protect her, but all I could do right now was hope that none of the stray vegetation actually injured her. I was too terrified to stop and check.

Pulling across another junction, the meeting point of two roads where the only signpost pointed to the town, I at least slowed down a little. We hadn't quite taken the shortest route, so anyone wanting to follow us now might as well be scouring the whole area. Carrying a cargo so distinctive would make it easier for them, but if they were pretending to be government agents I guessed they couldn't rely on the police or any other organised authority to help them search. We could stay out of sight until we had this thing squirreled away somewhere safe.

"What's the address?" I asked Dwayne. He was still staring straight ahead, a little shaken by the race through narrow, twisting roads. I repeated the question, and he seemed to recover enough to read it off from the little piece of paper Kris had given us. On a business park on the edge of town, the kind of area where there was no end to the identical wide roads, and identical concrete buildings housing all kinds of factories for companies you would never even have heard of if you weren't working in the right industries. A company that made the replacement pieces of glass for half the world's break-glass fire alarms, or the sensors for a particular type of automatic door. Things that have to exist somewhere, but that the town will never really be proud of. We drove up and down identical roads fringed by identical concrete sidewalks, between identical concrete buildings. Eventually, we saw the name Paris Avenue, which sounded a lot fancier than it looked. The address we'd been given was a double unit at the end of the road, surrounded by chain link fencing with coils of barbed wire on the top. There was a huge yard, mostly filled with trucks carrying identical sized metal containers, and huge stacks of containers around the back of two buildings that looked just the same as every other building in this place.