available NOW - click here
Virtual Assassin is a tense thriller with powerful political and moral implications from new author Simon Kearns. It tracks the story of successful young graphic designer, Lee Coller, sickened with the Iraq war and the no-regrets position of Tony Blair. When he hears a VIP is about to visit his office, he obsesses it might be Blair and chalks out a plan of revenge. But will Blair visit after all? And will Lee do the unthinkable? Can one act of violence make up for so many others?
“... a pacy read ... indicative of the shallow heyday of New Labour.”
- Time Out
The light blinked green for two seconds then turned red. All the lights went off.
They wanted him to sleep.
Holding his breath he listened to the sounds of an alien environment, magnified and echoed by the suddenness of the dark. The jangle of keys receded down a corridor of earshot, a distant door slammed.
Grey sounds. Grey smells. Institutionalised, depersonalised, dulled out. The darkness too was a greyish shade of black. Eventually, his eyes began to adjust and the cell, faintly illuminated by a light that had no discernable source, gradually materialised. It was about six feet by twelve, bare but for a low, stainless steel toilet and washbasin. He sat on a thin mattress supported by a shelf that jutted from the wall.
They wanted him to sleep and he wanted to sleep.
He was alone for the first time in many hours. The dark blue tide of uniforms, which carried him from one unknowable location to the next, had now receded and left him here in this tiny room.
The cell looked brand new. There was no graffiti on the walls, no clichéd bars of days crossed out. White tiles from floor to ceiling, the grouting immaculate. The toilet was so clean it appeared unused. There were no dents in the metallic door where hardened fists had punched in fits of regret, no fingernail scratch marks. The cell displayed no evidence of previous internees. Everything had a wipe-down surface. All stains had been erased.
Lee Coller realised he was disappearing from the world. This cubicle, custody suite number five, was the next stage of his deletion. They had already taken his fingerprints and DNA. By the time he appeared in court he would no longer exist as a person at all. Only his crime would be visible, held up for scrutiny and evaluation.
A pale grey blanket sat neatly folded at the end of the mattress. He put out his hand to feel it. It was soft and this surprised him, he had expected it to be coarse, punitively rough. He lay down along the shelf, his head on the blanket.
There was a gap in his right-hand pocket where he kept his mobile phone. His belt and shoelaces had been removed. They were watching him. The black domed protrusion in the centre of the ceiling regarded him; a closed-circuit Cyclops.
There were sixteen tiles from one end of the cell to the other. He did not want to know this, but he had already counted. His eyes had paced the floor. Sixteen tiles by eight.
Lee waited. Waiting was all he could do. He wanted to sleep but he could not. He feared he would never be able to sleep again. The events of the day kept flashing in his mind, disjointed, random images. Shutting his eyes tight he tried to think of something else. He could not contemplate a future of any kind; it was a complete unknown. By his own actions he had removed himself from all consideration of what was to become of him. The present was just too terrible to think about; time was being measured out in unfamiliar portions and he could not bear to come to terms with this so soon.
It was to the past that he desperately lurched. He thought about Rosa. Lying on the prison shelf-bed he thought about Rosa’s naked body. He thought about her hair, the mole on her belly, the variegating polish of her toenails. Lee had made his choice, and his choice had been not Rosa. How could that be?
From recent memory came a conversation. He was standing outside a pub with his friend, Ray. His friend was asking him: What do you think you will do, Lee? And his reply: I don’t know yet. I don’t know what I’ve got in me.
It had been in him then, the anger, this will for destruction. It had been nudging him the day he hid the letter opener in his office drawer. It had been waiting in him, ready to explode, the night he saw the little girl. It had been there right from the start; from the very first moment Blair’s name was mentioned.
They were going to judge him. He wondered if they would understand what he had done. He did not understand it himself. He could see how the decisions he made had brought him to the cell. He could remember why these decisions had been made, but he knew that he had not taken it all as seriously as he ought to have.
It had been a mistake, but he knew it wasn’t. He had sleepwalked into a nightmare, but he had been fully conscious of what he was doing. At every stage of his wide-awake progression to custody suite number five he had regarded himself with a dissociative incredulity. It was all just one thing after another.
Virtual Assassin
by Simon Kearns
Revenge Ink
ISBN 978-0-9558078-9-3 The publishers ... Revenge Ink
Available on Amazon click here
