"Brookmyre, Christopher - A Big Boy Did It" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

'Normally with terrorist groups, there's so much factionalism and internal politicking that members eventually start turning dissident and selling out their former comrades. Again, this hasn't applied to the Black Spirit. For one thing, there are no ideological tensions because there's no ideology to argue about. But our anecdotal evidence suggests that there are two stronger reasons for the loyalty he has enjoyed. One is that his collaborators are handsomely remunerated. The other is that he has a long memory and nobody in their right mind wants to get on the wrong side of this bastard.'
No, course not. All the fanatics, psychopaths and assassins round the globe, they all skip a beat at the mention of his name. He eats guns and shits bullets. He bathes in blood and dines on body parts. Oh God, keep talkin' baby, keep talkin', ooh yeah baby. He's the baddest of the bad. He's a killing machine. Ooh you say it so good, you say it so nasty, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooooooh . . .
Fuck off.
Lexington had probably told Wells to ham it up in order to light a fire under everybody, but there had been no need
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for such priming. If the Black Spirit had walked in the door right then, the MI5 creep would have dropped to his knees and swallowed every inch.
He's a whole new species. He's audacious. He's resourceful. He's ingenious. He's cool. He's bad. He's scary. He's got a two-foot cock.
Aye, very good.
He's a wanker, that's what he is.
All terrorists are wankers. Whatever flags they wrapped themselves in, whatever religions, histories or myths they attached to their crusades, they were, to a man, just wankers. They told themselves and anyone bored enough to listen that they were in it for the glory of their cause or the welfare of their 'people' (few of whom were ever consulted about this), but the truth was that they were in it because they liked killing people. Every last fucking one of them.
Listening to Wells eulogise about this tosspot was making her itch. Her spine was stiffening, her fingers stretching taut by her side, clenching and unclenching. 'Designer-brand terrorism.' Listen to yourself, you prick.
Oh yeah, it's mass murder, but it's mass murder with style.
The victims should be bloody well honoured to die at the hands of someone with such panache. It was laughable to hear him talk about how inventive, how proficient, how good the Black Spirit was at terrorism. You didn't have to be 'good' to be a terrorist, you just had to be, well, no better way of putting it: a wanker. You just had to be prepared to do despicable things; there was no genius required in their execution. You could walk up behind Captain Shephard eating in a restaurant and smash him unconscious with a whisky bottle - that didn't mean he wouldn't plaster you across the four walls in a square go. The whole
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point about terrorism was that any arsehole could do it, anywhere, anyhow. That was where the 'terror' part came from - society not being able to protect itself from a threat that could come from any source and strike at any target. It was all about attacking the unsuspecting and the undefended.
The cops and the politicians could be relied upon to go on TV and denounce every terrorist incident as 'cowardly'. The perpetrators would be smirking at this flimsy little insult, or justifying it to themselves as a legitimate tactic against a much larger foe. But it was cowardly. Planting bombs in unguarded places took no balls at all.
How hard was it for the Black Spirit and his wankers- in-arms to blow up that train in St Petersburg? You wouldn't get far in an airport with a suitcase full of C4, but at a railway station, you could simply climb on board, stick your luggage in the rack, then walk away again, which was what they did. No checks, no X-rays, no sniffer dogs, and no-one in the carriage left alive to give a statement.
Madrid had taken slightly more sophistication, but for Wells to describe it as 'audacious' was a generosity borne of infatuation. The word he was looking for was 'sneaky'. For effect, Child Molester had said the explosion 'also' demolished the adjoining cinema, which was true but more than a trifle disingenuous. It was the cinema itself that was bombed, its adjacency proving the point of least resistance in attacking a heavily guarded target. The intelligence agencies racked their brains to decipher the political ramifications of it being the Spanish US embassy that was singled out, before they were forced to conclude that there were none. It had an accessible public building backing on to it and other US embassies didn't, that was all. The nationality was irrelevant.
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Not that the cinema was entirely a soft touch. There were very few capital cities in the world where you could catch a flick without first having someone root through your handbag, and given ETA's on-going bloodlust, Madrid wasn't one of them. However, no matter how security- conscious the staff were trained to be, if there was one thing guaranteed to inspire credulity in modern-day Europe, it was bureaucracy. People are sceptical of what seems too good to be true, but if something sounds like a pain in the arse, they've no problem believing it must be for real. The Black Spirit's outfit posed as officials from the city's Health and Safety department, complete with IDs and paperwork, there to perform a spot-check on the cinema's alarms, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and sprinkler systems. They removed all of the extinguishers, saying they didn't meet the latest specifications, then fitted their own replacements. According to the house manager's death-bed statement, they even got him to sign a receipt, telling him an invoice would follow shortly. It sure did.
Audacious?
When she was nine, someone wrapped a dogturd in newspaper, placed it on her doorstep, set it alight, rang the doorbell then fucked off. Her father answered the door and immediately began stamping on the flaming parcel, covering his slippers in shit. That was roughly how audacious the Black Spirit's activities were. Neither perpetrator had the guts to look their victims in the eye.
It wasn't the only thing they had in common, either. They were both bullies, both cowards. They picked on the little guy and then they ran away.
Teachers the world over faithfully preached the message that bullies were cowards. In her classroom, the bullies had smirked, the way she pictured the terrorists smirk. Load
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of shite, they were telling themselves. They weren't cowards; cowards shat it, and they shat it from no-one. They were some of the hardest guys - and girls - in the school, no question they could look after themselves in a barney. But funny, they didn't go picking fights with the other hard cases. If they wanted to look tough, surely that's what they should have done?
Don't be stupid.
Human experience taught that when people wanted to look tough, they picked on easy targets. A short-arsed megalomaniac picked Jews. A Lilley-livered political mediocrity picked single mothers. A deludedly ambitious cardinal picked gays. A bloated Ugandan dictator picked Asians. And endless halfwit nonentities in Leeside had picked the wee darkie lassie with the funny name.
Consequently, she had serious anger-management issues around the whole bullying thing. And the whole racism thing, and the whole sexism thing, though they were really just parts of the same whole. Her parents and her brother had all handled the abuse a lot better. Mum and Dad, having been expelled by Amin with a two-year-old son and a baby well on the way, perhaps had a wider perspective on it. A council house in Renfrewshire was a bit of a comedown from the lifestyle they'd once built for themselves, but under the circumstances it was sanctuary, and if some of the locals called them names or left turd-bombs on their doorstep, then it was still a lesser form of racial abuse than what they'd already survived.
Her brother, James, had always been thick-skinned and easy-going to the point of irritating. He got his share of verbal and physical abuse, arguably more than her, being older and therefore first into each of the educational snake- pits. It just never seemed to get to him; at least not in any
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way that he let anyone see. Perhaps that was how he coped, in combination with being too bloody affable to make many enemies. It helped that he was good at football, which accorded a certain respect as well as the protection of his fellow school-team members. When he reached secondary age, he also had the subsidiary benefits of going to Parkhead every other Saturday, which seemed to place him in a context that made him easier to accept, even to the bampots. Maybe especially to the bampots.
She had never enjoyed any comparable advantages, being far too short to get picked for netball, the only game the girls were ever offered at St Mary's primary school. At Sacred Heart secondary, she did make the hockey team, but sporting prowess was not the same source of kudos among the female peer group. Clique politics and popularity power-struggles were far more important. Athletic ability only counted for something if it was one of the in- crowd that had it; hence the hundred metres was a big deal in first and second year when Maggie Hanley won it. When the wee darkie girl with the funny name won it in third year, it was because Maggie wasn't interested in 'that wee lassie stuff any more (though the wee darkie girl with the funny name remembered Maggie looking pretty fucking interested as she overtook her with ten metres to go).
By that age, she'd been too long the outsider to want anything to do with the fake sorority of all that fickle factionalism. Bereft of anything substantial that they had in common, the cliques were usually united solely by who they didn't like. Across the various parties, this tended to be a reciprocal list, but most of them had room on it for her too. This was because she 'didn't make it easy for herself, which she took to mean she didn't drop to her knees in gratitude whenever one of these bitches condescended to
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actually be polite to her for a change. The other inference was that she had to expect a certain amount of racial abuse and she shouldn't be so sensitive; or to state it more simply, she should know her place. And to put this attitude into full perspective, it had to be appreciated that the source of the quote was the assistant headmistress.
The occasion was significant too. After years of Pilate- class hand-washing on the part of the teaching staff any time she reported being punched, kicked, spat on or merely insulted, it was suddenly a serious matter the first time the abuser came off second best. She had 'over-reacted', she was 'hyper-sensitive', even 'volatile'. Yeah, maybe she was. Maybe it was that junior-sibling syndrome, being ultra- assertive, over-competitive, always wanting to leave her mark or have the last word. Or maybe it was that since the age of five she had been taking shit in the classrooms and playgrounds of schools where other than herself and James, the closest thing they had to an ethnic minority was the Byrne twins from Dublin.
'Chocolate Button' had been her unwanted nickname since Primary Two, applied because she was small and brown, get it? Chocolate was, in fact, the prefix for any number of hilarious remarks, all of which only got funnier the more she heard them. If she was a Proddy, she would be a Chocolate Orange. No, please, stop, these pants have got to do me all day. Granted, it wasn't the most offensive term she would hear ('She'd diarrhoea an' she thought she was meltin' - ha ha ha ha'), but the term itself didn't matter. What mattered was that she heard it every day, and every time it was used, the intention was to remind her that she was different and she didn't belong.
That was why she 'over-reacted' and 'brought shame on the school' during a third-year hockey match against St
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Stephen's. 'All' her opponent had done was sing the chorus of that Deacon Blue song, Chocolate Girl, every time she came within earshot. The girl hadn't meant any offence, she said later (though it had sounded more like 'mmm hmm hmm mmf hmm mmf'). She had heard it on the radio at lunchtime and just couldn't get the song out of her head all afternoon.
Sure. Same as the Sacred Heart winger didn't mean to hit her. The hockey stick accidentally flew out of her hand and into the poor girl's face. Twice.
But did it solve anything? No. Did it change the other girl's racist attitude? Probably not. Did it make her instantly popular and respected in the eyes of her classmates? Don't be daft.
And did it make her feel better?
Oh, fuck yeah.
It was an epiphany.
Like she was reborn. It would be facile to say that she found her vocation in that violent catharsis, but its roots could certainly be traced back to there. In that moment, all the mouths that had ever called her chocolate this or darkie that became as one: one that was spitting teeth, dripping blood and thoroughly wishing it had stayed shut.
Her parents hadn't been entirely enamoured of the idea when she professed her intention to join the police. Their experience of uniformed authority had understandably not made it something to which they wished their children to aspire (though to be fair, in their adopted home, they had been reassured enormously by the gormless plods telling them 'we're looking into it' after each instance of harassment, vandalism or flaming jobbies). She therefore acquiesced when they suggested she go to university first, an undertaking they were undoubtedly sure would shake this
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undesirable notion from her head. It didn't. She flirted with new ambitions on a daily basis - that's what university is for, isn't it? - but flirting was as far as it went: she and the polis were betrothed.