Tom crouches on the floor of the cell, his back to the wall.
Other than a hole in the floor for human waste, the room is empty.
A bare cube.
He rubs his head, still woozy since waking up a few minutes ago on his back in the middle of the floor.
He catches something in his peripheral vision.
A plaster on the back of his hand.
How did he get here? Remember. He must remember.
Running. He is running. An evening jog. Randomly taking corners, lost in the flow. There is a car. He remembers a car. Front wheel on a jack. Driver kneeling. Tom stops, jogging on the spot, asks if he can help. Then something bizarre. Driver stands too quickly. Tom feels a sting.
He drops his arm and takes a closer look.
Peeling away the plaster: a tiny speck of congealed blood, sitting on a pin prick.
Blackness. Then bright light. A hood is removed. He’s in a room. Never seen it before. It’s large. Dominated by three large planks of wood. No, too wide to be planks. Doors. Detached doors. Arranged into a U-shape. A workstation. Supported by bricks.
‘Help …’ Tom croaks. ‘Help …’
Makeshift desktop surface is piled high. Enormous stacks. Self-assembled hardware, wires springing out at all angles. ‘Follow. The. Instructions.’ His captor’s voice is electronic, human but filtered. Coming from behind him. He twists to catch a glimpse, but can’t move. Thick rope binds his torso to the chair back. ‘Follow. The. Instructions.’ Tom throws his body in every direction. Frantically. Only his hands are free.
There is a piece of paper in the corner of the room. Tom drops to his hands and knees and crawls towards it.
It’s in fact several pages, stapled together. He turns it over in his hands, an image flashing in his memory.
He bends over the work desk. Tapping on the keyboard with uncertain fingers. Looking back and forth between the pages, filled with instructions, and monitors arrayed in front. A website. The instructions are to build a website. An untraceable one.
Tom tears the pages off, one by one, letting them drop to the floor, until only the stub remains. He looks closer at what binds them.
It is a thick staple.
The website is done. Tom twists his head to see if his captor can see. The room appears empty. He screams wildly. And then there’s the sting again.
The staple has been straightened out into a jagged strip. It has taken some time, and Tom wipes the blood from his fingers on to the wall.
He grips the staple and slides it into the tiny space between the thick electronic lock and the door jamb of the cell. He pokes it until he can feel the other end hit the solid wall of the bolt. He waggles the material, probing for the end of the bolt. Beads of sweat form near his hairline as he feels the staple warp and buckle under the pressure he is putting on it. This is his only chance. And then his thumb slips forwards and he feels the makeshift pick slide in between the bolt and the strike plate. The door unlocks with a satisfying thunk.
But twenty minutes later he has not moved and is still staring at the door.
He should have escaped.
By now he should be far away.
Maybe it is the drowsiness, but something is stopping him – a memory – nagging at him, as persistent as the throb in his head.
He has been running. But his direction is not planned. He is taking streets at random. He, Tom McLeitch, the best firewall builder in Scotland, and the only man who could have done that job. And his captor is waiting for him. How? Tom doesn’t have his phone on him, so there is no GPS to track. And he is miles away from his apartment.
Tom makes a decision and undresses, putting his clothes and shoes in a pile. He then scours his body, and then his clothes and shoes, looking for a tracking device. He is not going to escape only to be caught again.
He finds nothing.
He squats naked on the cold floor, his palm pressed to his forehead, as if the pressure might squeeze the answer out. His ear is cocked to the door, listening for any sound.
Tom considers whether there is more than one abductor. He shakes his head. That wouldn’t explain how his kidnapper had been waiting in a car on a street that Tom had never been down before and only turned into on a whim.
So faint he thinks it could be a mosquito. But it’s too cold for mosquitoes. It’s a car. And it’s approaching.
He pulls on his clothes and shoes, pushes open the door and scrambles out. He’s in a dank corridor. Opposite him is another room. The door is ajar, and he can see the monitors and hardware he was forced to use. At the end of the corridor is an exit, framed by white light, and he hits it as hard as he can in full pelt, enjoying the feeling as it swings open and clangs on the far wall.
He doesn’t stop until he is in a thicket of trees, a hundred yards or more away. He throws himself down on to the ground and twists to face the direction he has come.
It looks like a disused bomb shelter. Only the roof can be seen, peeking out about a foot above the grass: hidden from sight.
The engine noise is getting louder now, and he thinks he sees flashes of something through the canopy of trees.
He bolts upright and sprints.
Ten minutes later, Tom stands at a T-junction, his chest heaving from exertion. The topography around him has changed from dense woods to fields and hedgerows.
He looks at the two roads that stretch out in opposite directions. He takes a deep breath and takes the left turn.
Ten minutes later, Tom stands on the side of a main road, at the point where the route he was following merges, his thumb extended, waving down passing cars.
One stops, and a window rolls down. Tom approaches the car hesitantly, in a wide arc, waiting to see who is inside.
But it is only an older man, in his sixties, asking where Tom is going.
‘Wherever you are,’ he replies, getting in.
The man is retired, driving back from visiting family in Aberdeen. He chats nervously to fill the silence, his eyes occasionally flitting down to Tom’s bleeding fingers, while Tom stares silently through the window at his side mirror, checking the cars behind him.
No one is following.
The driver lets Tom out in the middle of town.
‘The police station is down that alleyway and on the right,’ he says, in answer to Tom’s question, before driving off.
Tom walks quickly down the alleyway, his mind doing its best to remember the route here. The bunker was no more than five miles from where he is now. The police could be there in fifteen minutes or less.
He is so immersed in his thoughts that he does not notice the person walking towards him from the opposite end of the alleyway. By the time Tom looks up, the other person is less than a few feet away.
A hand reaches for Tom with terrifying swiftness, the palm gripping Tom’s face. A chemical smell jams itself up his nose with the force of two fingers, and he drops to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.