Future Shock

Future Shock by Chris Green

You will be walking along Lynch Lane past the old furniture warehouse on your way to work. A Chromatics tune will be running through your head when two dudes in dark clothing jump out of a black Nissan Pathfinder with tinted windows. The taller of the two, a gangly figure with slicked back hair and Police sunglasses, will grab you. He will point a gun at your head. The shorter one with the Fleur de Lys tattoo on his arm will give you a swift blow to the stomach. They will blindfold you and tie your hands behind your back. They will bundle you roughly into the back of the Pathfinder. With a textbook skid, they will drive off.

There will be a silence, just the noise of the diesel engine as it makes its way through the early morning traffic. Fleur de Lys will break the silence. He will say that as long as you behave, you will come to no harm. He will explain that they are Second-Year students on the Criminality course at the university and this is the assignment for their Kidnapping module. They are both hoping for First Class Honours, having got marks in the 70s for the Burglary and the Theft modules. If these are Year 2 modules on the Criminality course, you will speculate what the Year 3 modules might be. GBH, Murder perhaps? You will let the thought pass.

You will be taken to a house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. You will be quickly hustled in. They will remove the blindfold. The rooms will have blackout curtains. In the gloom, it will feel subterranean. They will take you through to the kitchen. The sink will be filled with a heap of condemned dishes. The fridge will be full of energy drinks. You will be bound to a chair.

Your captors will not share their names, but will say they know yours, Stephen Wright. They must have got the wrong Stephen Wright. No one is likely to pay ransom for you. Both your parents are dead and if they ask your wife Saskia, she is unlikely to oblige. You are in the middle of divorce proceedings. You will try to explain this, but it will meet with hostility. Gangly will trash your mobile phone, with extreme prejudice.

After an hour, they will untie your hands, but will not make any of the errors that kidnappers make in films, like leaving the gun on the table. Apart from Gangly pushing you around a bit, the pair will be quite pleasant through the rest of the morning. Fleur de Lys will offer tea and toast. Gangly will show a preference for Red Bull and make his way through several cans. The two of them will become chatty, in a guarded kind of way. You will learn that they are both Arsenal fans and, in their spare time, play in an soul funk band. Gangly plays bass (probably with extreme prejudice) and Fleur de Lys, tenor saxophone. Why does Gangly need his sunglasses in the house, you will wonder?

The subject will keep coming back to their hopes for a good mark for Kidnapping. Beneath the gangster act, and the disdain for the kitchen, you will see two diligent students. Despite his short stature, Fleur de Lys managed an incredible 93% in the Impersonating a Police Officer exercise. He will ask you to look over the Risk Assessment they have drawn up. It will seem very thorough, running into six pages. You will notice their calculation of the residual risk of a Fatal Accident is alarmingly high because they have a real gun, a Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistol.

You will spend the afternoon watching The Godfather on DVD. Once the horse’s head in the bed scene is out of the way (Gangly’s favourite scene, he will confide), he will go off to make a discrete phonecall. In a quiet passage in the film, you will overhear some large numbers being mentioned. You will imagine that this has something to do with their ransom demand. Gangly will not refer to the call when he returns, although he will use his phone to take a photo of you holding a copy of that day’s newspaper, and send it. At four o’clock, just as Michael Corleone is arranging the simultaneous murders of the Dons, there will be a knock at the door. It will be the module assessors, Craig and Simone, along with a Staffordshire Bull Terrier called Caesar.

At first glance, they will not strike you as university lecturers. Both Simone and Craig, you will estimate, are in their forties, but trying desperately to look younger. Craig will be a thick-set man with a swarthy complexion, designer stubble, and a selection of piercings. Although a warm day, he will be wearing a heavy leather coat with dozens of pockets. Simone will be of dual heritage, with olive skin and smoky black eyes. She will wear a tight skirt. She will have snake tattoos on her calves.

They will settle into easy conversation while Caesar sniffs out his surroundings in a confrontational manner. Craig and Simone will get down to the business at hand, the assessment of Gangly and Fleur de Lys’s Kidnapping assignment. Simone will go over the GANTT chart they have handed her. She will suggest it suffers from analysis paralysis, but needs more project alignment. You will assume that her students know what she’s talking about, even though their gaze seems to be focussed firmly on her skirt moving up her legs.

Craig will explain to you the origins of the course. The idea for a Criminality Degree, he will tell you, developed out of the excess of Criminology courses. There are now so many graduates trained for police work, probation service, prison service, social work, criminal law and community development work that it seemed a good idea to balance it up by training a few offenders. It all comes down to social engineering.

‘The university needs to compete in the marketplace by developing new courses,’ he will say. ‘Bums on seats is the key. So far, we are the only university in the country that offers this programme. We are oversubscribed for next year’s intake.’

Although it will be comforting to hear this, you will not want to get too complacent. You will just want to get out of there alive.

‘So the abduction went well,’ Craig will say, addressing Gangly. ‘No one saw you making the capture?’

‘No,’ he will say. ‘It was flawless.’

‘And you’ve recorded all of this on the spreadsheet for evaluation?’

‘Indeedy,’ Gangly will say, opening up Excel on his laptop.

‘And the neighbours are away on holiday, I understand.’

‘They are stretched out on a beach somewhere in Costa Packet.’

‘No one coming round to feed the pets?’

‘Oh No! The dog died last week,’ Gangly will say, leaving open the suggestion that he might have had a hand in the dog’s passing.

‘Good. What about the ransom money?’ Craig will say. ‘You’ve made the call?’

‘Oh Yes.’

‘And the other party’s response was favourable?’

‘They need some time to put the cash together. I told them they had until midday tomorrow,’ he will say, taking a pull on his can of Dr Pepper.

You will wonder who on earth the other party could be.

‘You will have thought about how you will prevent the captive from escaping tonight,’ Craig will continue.

‘We are planning to tie him up again and sleep in shifts,’ Fleur de Lys will reply.

‘What about the feedback form?’ Simone will say. ‘Did you remember to create one?’

‘I jigged the one from the Shoplifting module,’

‘Now there’s one very important thing you need to remember and this will count as twenty per cent of the overall mark we give you,’ Craig will say. ‘The handover! Things can go wrong here, so I want you to think it through very carefully.’

‘Firstly, as it says in Marciano and Trattler, you must select a suitable site, at least a mile from a main road,’ Fleur de Lys will say. ‘We have checked out a fifteen-mile radius and have several sites in mind.’

‘Because as Gorenje, says in Bronowski, Kray et al, you must rearrange the exchange at least once,’ Gangly will say, smiling. ‘A last-minute switch can be advantageous.’

‘That’s right,’ Simone will say. ‘Don’t forget the literature review counts for another ten per cent.’

Once Craig and Simone have left, you will spend the evening watching Goodfellas, in silence. Your captors will not feel inclined to share any more information with you. You will wonder if there is a psychological motive behind this silence, or whether they just enjoy violent films? Gangly, in particular, will seem entranced by the violence. You will be left in a state of uncertainty, both scared and perplexed at what is happening, wondering how real this episode is. Even if the whole kidnapping exercise is a mockup for the assessment, it will be impossible not to feel some unease. And all the other scenarios will appear to be dire. They have a real gun and have made a ransom demand, which you will be certain that no one is going to pay, and you have no means of escape.

When the film finishes, Gangly will tie your arms behind your back and bind your legs together. He will hand the Beretta to Fleur de Lys. Then, still wearing his sunglasses, he will take his can of Full Throttle upstairs, leaving Fleur de Lys to guard you for the first shift. While it would be unreasonable to suggest that you like either of your kidnappers, you will feel definitely more comfortable with Fleur de Lys. He is less edgy than his comrade.

You will start a conversation, hoping to gain some information about what is really going on. You will want to establish why they have picked you, who can have possibly agreed to pay the ransom, and what will happen tomorrow if they do not. You will be unlucky on all three counts.

‘Kidnapping would not have been my choice,’ Fleur de Lys will say. ‘Most students seem to be happy with the traditional crime route, but I’m into Identity Theft. Sadly, they haven’t written a module for it yet.’

You will nod, pretending to be interested in his choice of career path.

‘Watch this,’ he will say, opening up his laptop.

He will key in a few commands and get into Facebook by the back door. A number of options will open up.

‘Clever stuff,’ you will say.

He will put in a search for Paul Rutherford. He will be offered a choice of multiple Paul Rutherfords.

‘Pick one,’ he will say.

You will select one at random.

‘OK,’ he will say. ‘Let’s see what we can find out.’

Within minutes, he will have home address, date of birth and full-face and profile photographs. By going into another site, he will have his National Insurance number and credit card details. He will not even have had to become one of Paul’s Facebook friends.

‘I can now get a duplicate driving licence with a change of address and a passport,’ he will say. ‘And of course, I can buy items online as I have the bank details. See how easy it is. He’s even told the whole world that he will be away for two weeks and he has booked the dog into a kennel. And look how easy his signature is.’

‘But eventually the real Paul Rutherford will discover that someone has stolen his identity,’ you will say to him.

‘Well, of course, you have to do it step by step,’ he will say. ‘You have to do things in the right order and know what you can use, when, and for how long, but this is something that with practice you can learn. For instance, this Paul Rutherford is hardly going to check his bank statements in Marrakesh.’

‘Can’t it be traced back to you?’

‘I use a proxy server.’

You will wonder if Fleur de Lys has already stolen your identity. He will not say that he has, but he will not say that he hasn’t. Might there be a connection between this and the kidnapping?

It will be three or four a.m. by the time the shifts change and Gangly takes over, by which time you will have found out about John the Ripper (the password cracker), Kismet and Eraser, each of which can get up close and intimate with your hard drive. You will have even had a tour of the Google UK server. Nothing is safe from the practised hacker.

On his own, Gangly will seem to have lost some of his composure. He will light one Camel after another, making his way through the packet. Halfway through Reservoir Dogs, he will go off to make a call on a new burner phone. After a few moments, you will be able to hear him shouting, but you will not be able to make out the words because of Mr White and Mr Blonde shouting on the soundtrack of the film. He will be changing the terms or the location of the ransom demand.

You will have often read reports in the Standard or seen grainy footage on the regional news of police in bullet-proof fatigues carrying out commando-style dawn raids on the perpetrators of serious crime. They are called the Armed Response Unit and they undergo close quarters battle training to carry out the task with a degree of menace. They quietly gather outside the premises. The officer in charge shouts out an order, then two burly constables beat down the door with a door breach, which is basically a twenty-three kilo battering ram. The rest of the team then pile in, point their weapons at anything that moves or looks as if it is about to move, and shout ‘freeze’. You will be praying that you are about to get such a visit……. Alas, you will not.

The thought will keep returning to you, why would anyone want to kidnap you? There seems to be no chance of a payoff. You are overdrawn at the bank, have no liquid assets, and since the breakup with Saskia, you have let your life insurance payments lapse. The packaging museum where you work is going broke, unable to compete with more glamorous leisure attractions, like the Space Simulator or the Reality TV Museum. You will be on short time and all the staff will have been issued with redundancy notices. It will seem likely that they have kidnapped the wrong person. But how does this help the situation? And wouldn’t such an error have come to light earlier with the sending of the photograph? You will cast a glance at the minatory black weapon sticking out of Gangly’s hip pocket. This, you will feel, is the real problem.

Your mortality under threat, you will begin to regret that you haven’t done more with your life. You are nearly forty and have only had three jobs. You have always lived in the same town. The only time you’ve been abroad was to France on a school trip. You’ve never been to a nightclub, put a bet on a horse, or had a speeding ticket. You have never been to a big football match or been to Glastonbury. Despite your caution, you could not avoid mistakes. Both your marriages have been a failure. Melanie could not live with what she called ‘your total lack of ambition’. She ran off with an oil rig technician and took your two children, Ben and Alice, to live in Nova Scotia. You only see them now through Skype. Saskia told you that you were the least adventurous person she had ever known. She is still living in the flat you bought together, while you are renting a room from your friend, Bazza, in his terraced house in Toker’s End.

You won’t have had a chance to read the papers or catch the news. If you had, you would have discovered that there had been a near collision over Heathrow, civil unrest on the streets of several European capitals in protest against austerity measures, and someone had hacked into the GCHQ computer. You would also have found out that there was a tiger on the loose, a mature alpha male, having escaped from a private zoo. You would have been aware there was panic after a golfer was mauled to death and that police had launched a large-scale operation using helicopters and thermal imaging cameras. Tigers can cover a large amount of ground quickly, and sightings had appeared in three different counties. You would realise that so far the killer tiger had evaded the search teams.

The ride to what you will assume is the exchange point will be uncomfortable. You will be tied up and once again blindfolded, lying in the back of the Pathfinder. Following his earlier phonecall, Gangly will seem particularly surly. You will wonder if some element of the negotiations has not gone according to plan. It is easy to see that such a thing might occur, the capacity for misunderstanding being immense.

After a few minutes, the SUV will stop with a lurch. Your captors will throw you roughly out. Gangly will take off your blindfold and untie your hands and legs. You will be in a clearing in a wood. Shafts of sunlight will be piercing through the canopy. Gangly will point the gun at you and order you to walk on ahead. From out of the undergrowth there will be a loud roar. The titanic beast will launch its attack. Gangly will be bowled over, knocking the gun from his grip. The big cat’s giant claws will rip into his flesh. He will scream. Fleur de Lys will make a run for it. You will scramble back into the Pathfinder. The keys will be in the ignition. Or will they?

You can never tell what will happen in this unpredictable world, can you?

Copyright © Chris Green, 2024: All rights reserved