Part 13 Unperson
UNPERSON
You can’t buy fighting spirit.
– From Starship Troopers
by Robert Heinlein
Location unknown
30 December, 2355 hours
I don’t know how long I was knocked out by the anaesthetic but when I woke up I wasn’t in Southampton anymore.
It was dark.
Night.
And cold. Really cold.
I was lying on a hard surface, indoors but also, strangely, outdoors. The chill night-time air stung. I was glad I was still wearing my unfashionable fleece-lined Patagonia jacket.
I blinked rapidly, regaining focus, and saw the Unperson kneeling over me, holding a small nasal spray bottle.
He’d just roused me with a dose of Narcan.
‘Wake up, Samuel.’
He stood and joined Uri and Vasha, lurking nearby with their guns.
I sat up, groggy and woozy, blinking some more.
My wrists were cuffed in front of me with a plastic zip-tie.
I glimpsed my watch.
It was 11:55 p.m.
I looked around myself, trying to figure out where I was.
I noticed that the ceiling above me and the floor on which I sat were both made of raw grey concrete. A thick concrete spray pipe stood nearby. Dirty wheelbarrows and power tools lay about.
A building site.
For some kind of parking structure. But with no side walls: hence indoor but also outdoor.
It was also below ground level. Way below.
I could see that this unfinished structure was hemmed in by the high walls of a square-sided construction crater that itself must have been four storeys deep. I was right at the very bottom of it, where the parking structure’s concrete met dirt.
Looking up, I could just see the upper edge of the crater and beyond it, the night sky and something truly odd.
A rollercoaster.
I was next door to Luna Park, at Coney Island, not far from the project tower where I’d met Roman Oberov and his son a few days earlier.
In fact, I figured I was in the very same square construction pit I’d seen from Oberov’s top-floor apartment, the one with the parking structure being built in it.
I stood up beside the Unperson and discovered that I was not the only captive here.
There were three others.
‘Oh, damn . . .’ I said.
A pair of concrete pits lay in the floor before me and the Unperson.
One was in the very corner of the floor and it was wide and square. It was about ten feet to a side and six feet deep, with walls of sheer concrete.
It shared a common wall with the next pit, which was smaller and narrower, a slim rectangle. Running around the outside of both pits—and around the entire corner of this unfinished parking level—was a dirt trench that was open to the sky.
Inside the bigger pit was an oblong concrete box maybe seven feet long, five feet wide and three feet deep; basically, a wide concrete coffin that had been used as a trash skip.
Litter and broken equipment had been tossed into it: Coke cans, beer bottles, hot dog wrappers, a cracked construction helmet, even a small rusted-and-busted concrete mixer on wheels.
The Unperson and his crew had placed the three other captives in these pits.
In the ‘coffin’ in the bigger pit knelt Roman Oberov and his son, Dmitri, dressed in their nice suits and cuffed with zip-ties.
They looked furious.
And in the smaller rectangular pit, lying on his side, his hands bound and looking scared out of his mind, was Monty Woods, the Tech Detect.
‘Sam? Sam!’ he cried.
‘Monty . . .’
‘The fuckers, they set a trap for me. On Tinder—’
‘Quiet,’ the Unperson said.
Monty shut up immediately.
The Unperson threw a knowing look at me. ‘Your weakness is love, Samuel. Mr Woods’s weakness is his search for love. When Vasha swiped right on his profile, he rushed to meet her, desperate to find love.’
I said, ‘You’re a prick.’
‘Sticks and stones, Samuel. Sticks and stones. As for you, Mr Woods, you have proven to be too adept at your art and so—’
‘Do you realise who you’re fucking with?’
It was Roman Oberov who had spoken.
I imagined he wasn’t used to being in this position: at another man’s mercy. It was probably usually the reverse.
‘Excuse me, Mr Oberov,’ the Unperson said. ‘I was speaking with Mr Woods. I’ll get to you in a moment.’
He turned back to Monty in his pit.
‘As I was saying, somehow you hacked my communications. This was no small feat. It must, however, be punished severely.’
‘Now, wait—’ Monty yelled . . .
. . . just as Uri appeared at the edge of his rectangular pit holding the thick concrete pouring hose . . .
. . . from which he unleashed a gushing flow of concrete sludge into the pit, all over Monty Woods.
I gaped in shock.
They were drowning him in concrete.
And when it set and hardened, he’d be buried in it.
The foul grey aggregate mixture splattered all over Monty as he squirmed and shouted in terror.
‘No! Jesus, fuck, no!’
Then some of it got into his mouth and he began coughing and spitting it out.
The pit filled quickly, covering him, and soon Monty went fully under the heavy semi-liquid aggregate.
Within moments, the pit was filled to the brim with bubbling grey sludge that would set into solid concrete.
I stared in horrified disbelief at the sight.
Poor Monty . . .
The Unperson saw my look.
‘I know. What a shame,’ he said. ‘And a waste. He was a very talented and intelligent fellow. But now I won’t have to be concerned about Mr Woods and his digital skills anymore.’
The Unperson turned to face the two Russians down in their pit.
‘All right, then. Mr Oberov. Thank you for your patience. I’m ready to speak with you.’
Roman Oberov had gone pale at what he had just seen and heard.
His gangster bravado had vanished.
He knew he was in the hands of a psychopath, as pure a psycho-path as he’d ever met.
The Unperson said, ‘I worked for you once. A matter involving a hedge fund manager named Yates in Connecticut, as I recall.’
‘Are you fucking insane?’ Oberov said.
‘But you never hired my company again. As any small-business owner will tell you, repeat business is important. And in my trade, a man like you would normally be good for that. Why didn’t you hire me again?’
‘Because you’re a butcher! You were an animal with that man. You did surgery on your own face so you could enter that fund manager’s home, inhabiting the body of his butler, and then you tortured him for two days before killing him and painting the walls with his blood.’
The Unperson smiled distantly at the recollection.
‘You wanted him taught a lesson.’
‘I didn’t want the butler sent to prison for his murder.’
‘The butler was rude to me. He needed to be taught a lesson, too.’
The Unperson looked over at the concrete-pouring hose.
‘As now do you. Because it was you who made Dr Speedman aware of my existence.’
‘Now, that was—’
‘Blah, blah, blah. Mr Oberov, I’m told you’ve been known to bury your enemies in the foundations of some of the buildings in these parts. Indeed, sometimes you’ve buried them alive.’
Oberov spat, ‘You will pay for this, you dog—’
Bang!
The Unperson shot him in the face.
(I hadn’t even seen the gun appear in his hand, he’d drawn it so quicky and fluidly.)
Blood exploded out the back of Oberov’s head.
The gang lord flopped to the base of his concrete ‘coffin’, a pool of blood fanning out from his head.
‘No!’ his son, Dmitri, yelled.
Bang!
The Unperson shot him, too.
The younger Russian also collapsed, dead.
‘Honestly, Samuel, see what I mean about boredom? What a tedious conversation,’ the Unperson said. ‘I much prefer talking to you.’
I just stared down at the two dead bodies in the concrete box in the pit.
He’d killed them without the slightest hesitation.
I swallowed, figuring he was about to do the same with me.
‘Oh, Samuel, you’ve gone white,’ the Unperson said with mock concern. ‘Please, don’t look so frightened. I wouldn’t dream of killing you in such an undignified way. They were crude thugs who needed to die crudely. You deserve better. You deserve the Aristo King treatment.’
Suddenly, Uri dragged me over to the larger pit and threw me into the concrete box with the bodies of Oberov and his son.
I landed with a sickening thud right on top of Oberov’s corpse, my head bouncing off his lifeless face. Some of his blood spattered my right cheek.
The Unperson appeared at the edge of the pit, looking down at me.
‘I think it’s only fitting that Mr Oberov and his boy should be buried forever in concrete. The same end to which they condemned so many poor souls in this neighbourhood. Wouldn’t you agree?’
‘I’m not really thinking about them right now, to be honest,’ I said.
‘No, I imagine you are not,’ the Unperson said.
‘Ms Tan was very clear. She wanted you dead and buried and never seen again. Given that I went to some trouble to bury Aristo King alive at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I’ve decided that you shall suffer the same fate.
That said, because I like you, I’m going to show you a small mercy. ’
He threw something into my concrete box.
Something small and cylindrical and made of plastic.
It was a hypodermic syringe, filled with a few milligrams of clear liquid.
‘It’s Duramorph,’ he said. ‘If you want to die in your sleep, inject yourself. It will be a more pleasant way to go.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.
‘It’s been nice knowing you, Samuel Speedman. Really, it has. Farewell.’
Before I could say anything in reply, Vasha drove forward on a forklift bearing a thick concrete lid. It must have weighed at least a ton.
She manoeuvred the lid over my concrete box.
As she did, I glimpsed Uri stepping up to the edge of the pit gripping the thick pouring hose.
No way . . .
Then Vasha dropped the heavy concrete lid into place on my concrete box with a resounding boom.
My coffin went instantly dark.
I was now trapped inside.
There was no way I could have heaved open the lid by myself—it was way too heavy—but they weren’t done.
I heard sloshing noises from outside: the sound of something slapping wetly against the roof of my concrete box.
I knew what that was.
It was the sound of concrete sludge being poured onto my box and into the pit surrounding it.
Concrete in which I would be entombed forever.
I wasn’t just being buried alive.
I was being buried alive in concrete.