Prologue
In which Fee gives a new friend a lift.
Fee…
I am not an impulsive person, impulsive people get themselves and other people hurt, they don’t have any follow through, their plans don’t come together. The people that I have been… fortunate enough to find myself working within the interest of saving the living things of the planet have come out of even dangerous confrontations with the powers that be with little more than scrapes and bruises, even if it has sometimes meant I haven’t been as lucky.
Considering that a few of them have the survival skills of a sugared-up thirteen-year-old boy running through a knife factory, I am proud of that.
My plans always come together, even if sometimes the forces of money and corruption and pure, smooth-brained idiocy still win. Often win.
Generally, win.
Sometimes win.Any win, any day where there is a little more green space and a little less concrete in the world is victory.
So not being impulsive, it gave me no pleasure as I drove across the middle of Ireland in a car that was probably stolen (even if the smuggler who had boated me across from England to Drogheda and then sold the car to me swore from the Arctic to the Antarctic that it had belonged to his great-aunt Agnes in Donegal, who couldn’t drive any longer the poor thing), tothink back over the last two days or so and consider how many impulsive things I had done.
Things started to go all pear-shaped and impulsive-like at the protest at the building site in the Lancashire mosslands the morning before. I was to have spent the time while the protest distracted the corporate reps pretending to be one of the crowd, whilst using it to observe the security detail for the project and who got called in to deal with the rumpus.
Then later, my group could go back and cause some proper damage knowing what we were up against. It was a simple enough plan, which got bollocksed up fast when rather than the usual mess of badly uniformed, over-caffeinated retired police, the guards turned out to be efficient, well-groomed, and fucking enormous.
Apparently, our protest was coinciding with a visit to the site from the very biggest of wigs. The head man at one of the two corporations building the massive computer server farm that I was very interested in seeing not built, Alec Davies himself, was there during the protest in all of his resplendent, Godking luster, looking massively hungover and deeply irritable.
A billionaire on the best of days is already the most vile beast walking upon our beautiful Mother Earth, but one with a case of the brown bottle flu having to listen to a bunch of Uni-aged kids chanting, “We are unstoppable, a better world is possible!” and “Save the Earth, show its worth” out of sync with each other, is as dangerous as a well-poked bear.
He was gloating rather than glaring, pointing the giant who looked like the head of his security detail towards the group of semi-useful, if well-meaning idiots who had chained themselves to the site in a way that blocked access to the supply trucks that were on their way. I could tell he wanted a path cleared so he could talk to them himself.
Oh, that ended up being a right fucking mess. Lily and Logan -Scottish twins from a wealthy family who loved to commit ‘actions’ for the planet and make a holy show of themselves - hadn’t been able to resist a chance to show off their commitment to the cause and might have ended up telling him the entire plan because neither of them had ever been told to shut it as small children.
Luckily, I never told them anything important, because, well, they were theater kids, so they loved the sound of their own voices.
They had, however, chosen to partake of a lot of swag that was delivered to them and the rest of the protestors chained to the construction site without questioning where it came from. And they let Davies get more than a few words in edgewise, which was a mistake
I snorted quietly to myself, taking a swig of the now cold tea I had been nursing since I got in the car back in Drogheda.
Seeing where things were going, I acted impulsively and stepped forward, about to join the shackled protestors when I ended up facing Davies. For a moment we stared at each other and I swear I couldn’t tell you if the soundtrack for our stare-down should have been something from a spaghetti western when the two gunslingers were about to draw or Barry White.
He was so handsome, and so corrupt, that I am sure Oscar Wilde could have written a modern sequel toThe Portrait of Dorian Grayabout him.
Pixels of Alec Daviesor the like.
I let that impulsive moment pass me by, though it had led directly to another impulsive act, as these things tended to do. And as to how that would turn out I couldn’t yet say-
Yawning, I almost took the car off the road. I swerved on nothing, the tires spitting gravel, and all I could do to wake myself up was roll down the windows to let incold air and the stink of peat.
Looking at the car clock I figured out that I had been up for closer to twenty-four hours than not. I thanked god that it was too dark out for me to see the bulk of Country Longford, since the night may be lulling, but the flat, grey landscape in Longford was the visual equivalent of Ambien.Even I, who was properly obsessed with the green of Ireland, found it tedious as hell.
It would be dawn before I would reach my Granddad’s and I certainly hoped I’d make it in one piece. It would have helped to have some music on, something to sing along with and blast the cobwebs out of my head but I couldn’t risk it.
I needed to be able to hear if the billionaire in the trunk started thrashing about.
Chapter One
In which there are Wet Willow Tits and searing hangovers.
Alec…
The day before…
