Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Kris Alexandros: Taking One for the Team

I attended my lecture, and I think I did as well in my studies as should be expected. I was a little distracted worrying about my friends, but I didn't believe they would ever be in any danger. Just before the lecture started, Mr Spenser had called me again and suggested a little psychological influence might be appropriate. I thought about Marco and Dwayne running around like loose pair of cannon, maybe deciding that they had a better plan, and gave my approval. I knew at the time I was going to regret it, some instinct always spoke up, and I was quite surprised later when I heard that Spenser hadn't done anything drastic.

During the lecture, I worried about what might happen if Spenser went further than we had agreed. If he actually tried to hurt the members of our group, it would be a terrible thing because I knew that smugglers in this country quite often were in the habit to carry knives, and could indulge in other criminal activities to the side. But in every scene I had imagined, one of them found that tangling with Ferrari was a bad mistake. Well, of course, I'd seen her active in inter-college fencing tournaments, and if she was carrying a live sword then there would be no contest. Even against men whose living involved fighting with knives, they would mostly be there as a deterrent, or fighting those who lacked the skill or the means to fight back.

When I left the lecture, there were two messages waiting on my phone. One from a number I didn't know, telling me that Spenser was dangerous and was possibly linked to the less salubrious side of my family's business. The person sending me this tip, whose identity I didn't have the first guess of at the time, was quite insistent that I would be in less danger if I steered away from interacting with whichever branch of my family had suggested I contact them. The second message – which could well have been delivered first, I probably wouldn't have noticed the sending times when I turned my phone back on after a lecture – was from Spenser himself, to say that the truck with the Box on had been ambushed by some kind of government officials, possibly the revenue, close outside Spenser's premises.

I texted him back, and ran to my car. I was parked on the Ppark &and Rride parking lot opposite the college, the same as Marco had been. But I could just cross the pedestrian bridge across the main road, get behind the wheel, and then quickly speed in the direction of the main town. I didn't need to go right around the one way system, because I had no need to bring the vehicle back to campus. I was heading for the same address I had copied out earlier, when I first set off, but the different answers I was getting from Monty (I think she was using Dwayne's phone while he was incapacitated), from Marco, and from Spenser left me quite confused and inclined to change my plans more than a handful of times.

Spenser told me that the 'Revenue', a word he used as if it was the name of some army or organisation, had swooped on my friends and tried to take the Box from them. But that the girl in the group had shown herself to be an energetic daredevil, and had demonstrated quick thinking that allowed my other two friends to escape. Now at that point, I had assumed that meant Ferrari, as she wasn't averse to feats of action in general. I was more than a little surprised when Marco told me that Ferrari had not left the campus, as that was the only immediate point of inconsistency in the two stories. However, I filed that detail away in my mind as something I would have to ask about later. I didn't want to waste much time typing such complex questions on a nine-button keyboard when I was also trying to drive down the main road.

Marco let me know as soon as they decided to go to that farm, and even sent me a copy of the message with the address in it. I wasn't even close to town at that point, the roadworks had caused the traffic to be quite tightly packed, so I turned off as quickly as possible and headed straight for the farm.

I stopped when my satnav said I was there. Back then, it was a bit unreliable still. I was on a narrow road, where you couldn't pass somebody coming the other way without driving through a mass of leaves that might have been a hedge a little way farther back. It didn't look like a farm to me. Well, I can't really say that. Beyond the overgrown possibly-hedges were fields that were full of growing things that could quite possibly have been crops of some kind, and I guess that means it could be a farm. But there wasn't a farmhouse, there wasn't any sign of an entrance, and there wasn't some guy with an incomprehensible country accent leaning on a gate chewing straw. There wasn't even a guy on a tractor for me to ask directions.