Mr Thomas part 3

08:05:2003
The next installment of the story. For parts 1 and 2 scroll down the page.
Apologies for the weird quotation marks. This computer has a german keyboard and I'm buggered if I can work out how to do English punctuation on it.

Perhaps it was the shock, perhaps a combination of shock and the squatting position he was in, but at that moment Chip Thomas farted loudly. The noise reverberated around the van and the man smiled slowly.

“Don’t be alarmed, Mr Thomas. Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

Mr Thomas felt at once embarassed and angry at himself for coming across as a spineless wimp on the verge of shitting himself. He had mulled over a possible reunion with these people several times in his head but it had never crossed his mind that it would be in a white van in Cheshunt with the smell of fart lingering in the air. The man relaxed against the side of the van and started rolling a cigarette.

“What… what are you doing here?” Of the hundred questions Mr Thomas wanted to ask the man it seemed a fair one to start with.

“I came to have a chat with you, Mr Thomas, but more importantly I came to deliver a flat screen television care of someone called Telly Thief.”

“Tel Aviv?”

“Whatever. The precise details of my cover aren’t important. Suffice to say that if you make any enquiries about my presence here you won’t get anywhere so don’t try. Ask around too much and you’ll get beaten up.”

“By men in black bodysuits?”

“No, by criminal thugs. Just a piece of advice. I’m not threatening you.”

“What do you want? Who are you? What happened in Japan?” Now the torrent of questions started. With each one Mr Thomas found his tone of voice becoming higher.

“I mean, what the fuck’s going on with you people? Who are you?”

“Easy.” The man inhaled from his roll-up and fixed him with a level gaze.

“Easy.” He said again. Mr Thomas relaxed a bit.

“I quite understand your concern. You’ve been through some rather… confusing circumstances since our last meeting. You deserve a full explanation, but I can’t give you one. Would a partial one do?”

“Well no, actually, I think…”

“It’s all you’re going to get.” The man barked. Mr Thomas detected a hardening in the man’s bearing. For the first time since they met Mr Thomas felt that this man was capable of doing him harm; kill him if need be.

“At least tell me what I can call you.”

“My name is Chris Frost. Sorry for not introducing myself before. I’ve had my eye on you so long it feels like I know you very well, right, Cipriani?”.

“Don’t call me that. How long have you been watching me?”

“Long enough. Right up to now in fact. Look, I know a thing or two about civil liberties. Believe me, I don’t like pissing people about or taking note of every boring bloody thing they do, but sometimes it’s important that we do so.”

“Who’s we?”

“Oh, just me and a few mates of mine”. Mr Thomas sensed that he wasn’t going to get much more information on this subject.

“Well you’ve certainly had your fun with me haven’t you? And now half of Japan’s seen me on a bloody comedy show! What was that all about?”

“No one’s seen you on anything. That programme was piped directly to your hotel room.”

“What?” Mr Thomas was aghast “But… why?”

“Can’t you work it out?”

“No! I can’t! OK, I failed the bloody flying-a-plane test! You didn’t have to rub my fucking nose in it!”.

“Yes. We. Bloody. Fucking. DID!” Frost roared.

There was a long silence during which Frost finished his cigarette and stubbed it out on the van’s floor.

“Right.” He said. “Here’s how it goes. It actually didn’t matter whether you tried to fly the plane, chickened out, or took a shit on the flight controls. We were always going to reject you as a candidate for our organisation. Not only that, but your rejection had to be as cruel and confusing as possible. And in case you thought you’d imagined the whole thing, we rigged up your TV so you saw yourself humiliated on a game show or comedy show. If you tried to make any enquiries we’d very gently threaten you. Remember the name of the guy who spoke to you in the airport? Sran?”

“Yeah! D. Sran! There was a button on the airplane…”

“Yes. D.Sran was the key. Just to let you know that none of it was a coincidence.” Anyway, that was when the real test started.”

“What?”

“Listen to me. The cockpit test was a fake. The rejection was a fake. The TV show was a fake. Mr Obata’s death in front of a bullet train was a fake. None of it was real, but it all seemed real enough to you, right? Like nothing that’s ever happened in your life before, right?”

“I think that’s fair to say…”

“And that’s when the real test started! We’ve been watching you like a hawk since you came back. Who you’ve spoken to, what you’ve been doing, how many times you’ve used your computer, what you’ve been doing on that computer…”

Frost gave a malign smile. Oh god he’s seen me wanking, thought Mr Thomas. They’ve seen the porn. He also remembered that he still hadn’t removed the bloody `Cablecom Tech is Your Solution` banner from his porn folder.

„So that‘s basically it, then“, Said Frost. „The real test was of your initiative following your little Japan adventure. Are you going to take action and try and find out about us, the TV show, Mr Obata? D.Sran? How we managed to drug you up and somehow smuggle you out of Airside in Heathrow? How we got you back on the plane? There were a hundred lines of enquiry you could have persued, and did you persue even one of them?. No, you went back to work, didn‘t say shit and tried to… to… wank yourself into a better frame of mind!“

Chip felt defeated, deflated. He remembered getting told off as a boy by a teacher or a parent. They‘d often used this fantasy-good-boy reality-bad-boy approach. He would be presented with a possible act of proper behaviour, posed as a question. Then had that compared with what he had actually done. Did you clean the kitchen like I told you to? No, you played on your Atari. Did you do the essay and hand it in like you were supposed to? No, you handed it in a day late, and in pencil. Did you become a sort of amateur supersleuth and uncover the Secret Knights of the Bilderberg Group or whoever these fuckers are, and become a hero? No, you had a wank.

„Right, that‘s it.“. Frost opened the back door of the van and started to get out.

„That‘s it?“ croaked Mr Thomas.

„Pretty much. By the way, if it‘s any consolation, you wouldn‘t have got anywhere if you had tried to find out what was going on, but we‘d have appreciated the effort. As it is you won‘t be hearing from us again so I‘m sorry that we‘ve wasted your time.“

„Well… er…“

Frost stepped out onto the tarmac.

„I need your help with one thing, though.“

„What?“

„I need you to help me get this TV into the van. Weighs a bloody ton.“

Mr Thomas helped Frost pick up the massive box which was sitting on the Tarmac next to the van. He wondered why he hadn‘t noticed it sitting there before. Together they manoevered it into the back of the Transit. Mr Thomas had to crouch painfully as he carried the leading end of the box to the back of the compartment. By the time he got out, Frost was already in the driver‘s seat and gunning the engine. Mr Thomas ran to the drivers side and tapped on the window. Frost wound it down.

„Erm, can you give me a lift to the station?“ After all the weirdness it felt odd to make such a mundane request, but he‘d missed his ride with Bill the racist and didn‘t relish a long dark walk down the road.

„It‘s not on my way“ replied Frost. „Now piss off.“

He slammed the van into gear and screeched off out of the car park.

As it happened, a long dark walk down the road back to Cheshunt station was exactly what Chip Thomas needed. It suited his mood perfectly. If he realised that he hadn‘t felt too bad since the Japan trip compared to how he felt now. Now he felt personally violated. It was worse for him to know his computer had been accessed by a handful of unknown people than how he had felt about being laughed at by millions and millons of Japanese. At least no one saw that fake comedy show, he thought in a pathetic attempt to notch up at least one consolation.

The attempt failed and he found himself descending into rage. He shouldn‘t have even been on a fake „Happy-Time Mixture“. He shouldn‘t have his private life pried into like that. He shouldn‘t even have to be walking down this road! What was it that bastard had said, „I don‘t like pissing people about“ and „Sorry for wasting your time“? Like fuck he‘s sorry. He‘s probably laughing right now, and in a company van. My company…

Then in a wonderful moment Mr Thomas looked up and saw Cheshunt station. Not wonderful because it was startlingly beautiful (it wasn‘t). Not even because it promised a way out of this fucking place, but because at that moment Mr Thomas finally had an idea.

So they wanted him to get busy and investigate, did they? Well he would. Not when they expected it, though, but when and how he chose. And while they expected him to fail, he‘d catch them out by getting to the bottom of this whole thing.

He went down the steps that led to a dank platform. There was only one other person there, standing further up on the other side. He reasoned it out. Either they had genuinely washed their hands of him now, or they were still watching him to see what he would do now. If they had stopped the surveillance then he could surprise them, which was good. If they were still watching him, they‘d see he was trying to track them down. Then either they would leave him to it or intervene somehow. Maybe send Frost back in to meet me. If they don‘t intervene then he would effectively be free to do what he wanted, which would help in his investigations.

The only factor he couldn‘t be sure of was what would they think of him going after them now, after he‘d been rejected both fraudulently and genuinely and with as much humiliation as possible- both times.
Maybe…

His train of thought was interrupted by a real train that came whipping through the station without stopping. The shock wave it created nudged Mr Thomas back a centimetre. Mavbe…

Maybe… the second rejection was a fake as well!. Maybe the real real test starts now!

Mr Thomas‘ head spun round- firstly to the left, then right, looking for anything. A CCTV camera was fixed to a pole at the end of the platform, pointing towards him. It was filthy and looked broken. He looked across the platform at the other figure who was ambling slowly in circles down the end. It ocurred to Mr Thomas that the man was extremely drunk.

It could be a broken camera and a blind drunk, he thought, or it could be a surveillence network and a special field agent. There was no way of telling so he might as well work on the assumption that everything he did was observed and act accordingly. A loud voice made him jump.

„Attention! Attention!“ It barked. It was an announcement coming out of the station tannoy. „Would passengers standing on platform two please move back from the platform edge. Through train approaching!“

Nothing happened. It dawned on Mr Thomas that the announcement was referring to the train that had just passed through the station a minute before. Some bloody good their system is, he thought. I could have been splatterd like Mr Obata. Only that didn‘t happen did it? I wonder if he ever did try to find out about that comedy show? If he didn‘t get killed, why didn‘t he send me the info about that? Might he have just not bothered to do it? That wasn‘t like a Japanese business colleague. Generally he‘d found that when they said they‘d do something for you they‘d come through with the goods.

Obata. That was where he would start. He‘d send Obata a business mail on some pretext, and just stick a p.s. at the bottom asking about the comedy show. If Frost and his lot were still reading his mail they wouldn‘t miss it. It would be his announcement to them that he was back in the game. The funny thing was, the info that Obata dug out would probably be useless, as the makers of the show would have nothing to do with the specially edited version that was piped to his hotel TV set.

The train back into London trundled into the station. Mail Obata, Mr Thomas thought. Mail Obata in the morning and for now just get home and sleep. He boarded the carriage and flopped onto a seat. The train smelled of piss but he didn‘t mind.



[ Back to the Public Albatross System]