It’s winter in August inside Ed the Ted’s lock-up. Betsy looks as if she’s been left out in the snow. The Perspex windows of the office at the back of the garage are crazed with ice, and Ed can see his own breath in the light from his old Anglepoise lamp. The lock-up had been getting colder all afternoon despite the shutters being too hot to touch and the weather girl on SkyBeeb getting excited about record summer temperatures. The Colchester lathe and the English Wheel, the Ford Focus; everything has grown a coat of white fur. Ed the Ted pulls up the collar of his bike-leathers. His hands are chapped. Working in the garage is like working in a cold store.
First job when Ed gets back from the pub is finding his old Polish-built Warsaw Pact Geiger counter. He had picked it up from Tottenham Court Road when Tottenham Court road was full of electronic shops and that small military surplus store beside Goodge Street Tube Station run by that nice old Jewish boy who knew his stuff. Big old thing in a green case like a suitcase, weighs a tonne. Ed points the Müller tube at theThing and watches the dial’s needle settling on post-Chernobyl London normal.
‘Thank God for that, Turkish had me rattled and no mistake,’ thought Ed.
Ed puts the Bakelite case on the bench beside the Anglepoise lamp with the Müller tube propped up to point at the casting. It ticks at him.
Ed makes a roll-up and sits in the dark for a bit. The impossible part, the barely visible glass squid with creepy polyp like organs, reflects the light from Ed’s roll-up. The light from the roll-up makes the polyps glow orange like an old thermionic valve. A mirage that reflects light? That means it must be some sort of physical effect. Ed has some heavy-duty welders’ gloves, so he turns the Anglepoise back on and goes in search for them. Gloves on, Ed passes his hand through the mirage. He can’t feel a thing. Maybe it’s weird field effect of some kind?
Ed put his hand out searching through the shingle of tools on the bench top until he feels the watchmaker’s wallet. Ed finds the right tip and screws the jeweller’s glass back in his eye. He turns on the bench light. Taking a deep draw, Ed lays his roll-up on the edge of the bench and hunches closer to the thing. It is thick with frost. Ed wipes some of the frost away. Under the eyeglass the surface of the casting is like the craters of the moon, with that familiar dull grey colour that oxidised aluminium has. It’s as mysterious as a 1960’s bike casting and looks just as old. When Ed scratches at the surface with the tip of the tool it leaves a bright line, just ordinary aluminium.
“But yer not ordinary are yer?” Ed tells it. ”Yer a bit too special for my liking, some top-secret high-tech malarky going on. Turkish can bloody well take you back to where you came from, or as close as he can without getting shot.”
Ed decides he really doesn’t mind Turkish getting shot.
The shutters bangs loud enough to make Ed jump; the crash of metal magnified by the arch of the brick vault of the viaduct.
“Oi Ed, you in?” Turkish calls from the lockup door.
There is an even louder bang. Turkish is kicking the door. Ed is tempted to let Turkish wear out his toes, to let him get angry and walk away. Then another crash is followed by an unintelligible curse. But then Turkish would only wait for him in the Bear, getting moodier by the minute. Ed sighs and stands up.
The steel of the side door is as hot as a stove. The bolt is stiff with expansion from the heat and it takes a minute to open. It’s bright outside, a brilliant August light silhouetting Turkish and a slighter figure. Ed shields his eyes with a hand. Turkish has brought his lad with him.
“There you are you daft old sod. I’ve been calling you; you’ve got your phone off,” Turkish said, glancing over Ed’s shoulder.
“Ed, your gaff’s all iced up.”
“Is it really?” Ed said. ”Well I never.”
Turkish stalls for a beat, frowns, and then motors on.
“That’s not caused by my cargo, is it?”
“Well, I haven’t installed air-conditioning have I Turkish?” replies Ed. “Allo, Tommy, how’s yer mum?”
“Evening, Uncle Ed. She’s alright, thanks.” nods Tommy Erdogan.
Ed looked at his Timex and then at the sky. There is an orange cast to the light and long shadows in the street. The boy is right, it’s early evening. Tommy Erdogan is a skinny version of his dad with quieter dress sense and his mother’s bright searching eyes. Ed had been the token infidel at the boy’s Aqiqah, Turkish adhering to a strictly Cockney interpretation of the Koran. When he had grown old enough to be interested in cars Tommy had spent some of his summer holidays in Ed’s garage learning how to turn metal on the Colchester and shape ally sheet on the English Wheel. He was good with his hands, thoughtful.
“What is it then, some sort of refrigerator? How did you get it working? How much do you think it’s worth?” Turkish is suddenly chipper at the happy realisation that a working thing was worth much more than a non-working thing.
“I have no idea what it is, Turkish, and you’ll need to get shot of it.”
“Now hang on, Ed, if its working…”
“Dad, we need to tell Uncle Ed.” Tommy is calm but firm, treading that thin path between Turkish’s many passions. He definitely has his mum’s head to go with her eyes.
“All in good time, son. So, if its working, Ed, what do you think it’s worth?”
“Nothing, Turkish. Not a bent penny. It’ll cost you far more than you could ever make on it.”
Turkish becomes instantly fierce. “Now hang on Ed, I haven’t gone to all that trouble to get ripped off.”
Of course he would put on a show, he’s got his son with him, can’t afford to lose face in front of the boy. There was a time when Ed cared a great deal about face; then he got old.
“No one’s ripping you off, Turkish; everyone knows what that costs. What do I need to know, Tommy?”
“Can we come in, Uncle Ed? Only,…”
The young man looks up and down The-Street-With-No-Name. Ed can see that the boy is serious, as serious as cancer. If it had been Erdogan Senior, Ed would have discounted the anxiety as an instinctive paranoia, or the usual melodrama leading up to a pitch, but the boy is worried.
“Course.” Ed turns on the fluorescents and leads the boy to the office. Turkish wanders over to the bench.
“Don’t touch anything!” Ed calls after him.
“I thought you said you’d turned it on,” complains Turkish, disappointed by a lump of metal covered in frost. “Where’s the plug?”
Ed brushes the seat cushion of his sofa and takes the office chair. Tommy looks at the sofa and choses to stand, his hand fidgeting with some printouts he has retrieved from his backpack. He hands them to Ed, his face still serious, so Ed takes out his reading glasses and scans the printouts.
“What am I looking at?”
“It’s the Heathrow UFL, the Unredacted Flight List. Best not take a photo or scan it; there are infrared QR codes printed on each page that will set off all sorts of bother if they get near the net. It shows you all the flights scheduled for the time period around the Dassault’s arrival time at Heathrow.”
“The business jet?”
Tommy nods his head.
“Just in case, I got the printout for half an hour either side.”
Ed scanned the pages.
“What’s the tag for that Dassault then, Tommy?”
“DS-E, but you won’t find it Uncle, that’s the point. And that’s the unredacted list, the one used by NATO and the Rus Federation and the Chinese, all the military. Every flight goes on that list. The list the public gets has all the sensitive flights redacted, but this one’s the real deal with all the transponder codes and call backs.”
“So nobody knew that the jet was coming?”
“It wouldn’t have made it through the defence cordon unless someone knew. It would have been shot down.”
Ed looks at Tommy over the rim of his half-moons.
“So the jets’ owned by someone who doesn’t ‘ave to bother with the niceties of international treaties or national defence protocols. That sort of someone?“
“Gorilla scale nomenklatura. How much trouble are we in Uncle Ed?”
“You got a ready bag, son?”
“Bloody hell!”