Jax’s eyes did all the screaming for him.
With his torch, Lucky lit Diana’s steps back to Jax’s laptop. “Got his disk?” she asked Lucky, and checked her finger pads again. After his affirmative, she deleted the copy on Jax’s hard-drive, careful to empty it out of the computer’s trash can as well. Then out of her back pocket, she slid out a DVD and slotted it into Jax’s drive, running the clean-up program off it so no cleverdick could recreate on the laptop what she’d just deleted.
As Jax plunged, the sweeping copper entrance awning loomed up at him at a sickening speed, and he slammed into it with a force that fortunately he could no longer feel. It bounced his body face-forward over the canopy’s edge into the air, in a belly-flop dive that skewered him with a sickening thook onto the bronze spike of Robbie Burns’ quill. The twenty-five-foot sculpture of Scotland’s most famous poet had been installed on-site only the day before and, even though Jax should have been working, he had watched almost the whole show. Now he was part of it.
While the clean-up disk was running, Diana came back out onto the terrace to check on Jax. She couldn’t tell, but felt sure his blood and other bodily fluids were inking their way down Burns’ pen, writing their own ending.
DIANA had a couple more tasks before she was finished. She switched off Jax’s wifi connection and located the clock on the laptop’s system. Once she reset the computer’s time backwards to 4 AM, she clicked open the second file on her DVD.
She scrolled through Jax’s suicide note one last time: it was sad… pathetic. It was perfect even with the Australian English spelling, yet she hadn’t met him when she’d composed it. After she block-copied the text onto the computer’s clipboard and closed the original, she created a brand-new document, one that would forever record its time of creation as… she checked the screen’s corner… 4:03 AM. She pasted the copied text into the new document, saved it on his computer, and ejected her DVD slipping it safely back into her pants. As her thumb withdrew from her pocket, the button scraped at the protective pad almost peeling it off, but she felt the glue unsticking and tamped it back down.
She checked the computer’s automated properties for the suicide note to double-check her time trick had worked… It had. “Created at 4:03 AM.”
Leaving the laptop on the floor with the suicide note open, she called to Lucky, “It’s go time.” From out on the terrace where he was relishing his handiwork, he came inside and, as they started across the room to the elevator, a crease of annoyance smeared across Diana’s forehead. “Damn,” she said, and sprang back to the laptop to set its clock back to the right time, and reconnect its wifi.
BURSTING out of the revolving entranceway, what hit her was how light the breeze was down here. And the silence. The wind had petered out; at least down here on the ground it had.
Lucky’s legs were shorter than hers, so she easily strode ahead to the statue of Robbie Burns.
“I hope Jax liked poetry,” Lucky said from behind her.
Diana’s lips curled a little. “So the pen is mightier than the sword,” she said, and began to hum Auld Lang Syne.
She unzipped her side pocket and took out her phone and a small grey box. She was about to jam them together when Lucky interrupted her.
“It’s only midnight on the east coast,” he said.
She didn’t respond and kept walking, and humming. No matter what the time was, she knew that their leader, code-named Isis, expected a report on the mission.
Diana bent her head as she passed under the monumental sculpture, careful to avoid the drops of Jax’s fluids still dripping, and without lifting her eyes. She stepped over Jax’s jam-jar glasses, rammed the scrambler/voice masker onto her phone and keyed in the dialling shortcut.
While she called, Lucky stopped to check his work, enjoying the composition of Jax skewered through the stomach and flopped limp, like a frankfurt suspended on the tip of a knife. Lucky licked his lips. Wet work made him hungry.
A reflection sparked up from Jax’s lenses on the ground and Lucky crushed them beneath his steel-capped boot.
Diana heard the crunch and, with the phone at her ear, turned toward him. “Idiot,” she fumed.
“What did you say?” said a brusque female voice on the line, sounding a lot like actress and singer Bette Midler.
“Nothing, er, Isis,” said Diana into the mouthpiece. “Hey, nice voice you got there. Maybe you should croon your way into the White House.”
Isis was weary of Diana’s jokes about the voice-masking software they used to change a speaker’s voice randomly using a stock menu of celebrities. “Your report?”