Caught on Camera

Zoë Sharp

Traffic was murder. Olivia sat simmering inside her vehicle, one of a stationary herd on the A40 eastbound. Part of the usual vast migration into London on a Monday morning. All going nowhere.

She clenched her fingers around the rim of the steering wheel, a useless gesture when the car was in self-drive anyway, but it gave her some small illusion of control where none existed.

‘Time?’ she snapped.

The in-dash unit responded promptly, although to Olivia’s ears its soothing female tones sounded ever so slightly smug. ‘The time is 08:48 and 26 seconds. The distance remaining to your destination is 4.9 miles. Your current speed is 0.0 mph. At your current speed you will be unable to reach your destination by 09:00.’

‘Yeah, thanks for that,’ Olivia muttered. ‘Now tell me something I don’t know.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand that question. Can you repeat it?’

‘No.’ And before the computer could query that, she added quickly, ‘Mute audio.’

In her head, Olivia was already practising the excuses she was going to have to make for committing the cardinal sin of being late on her first day in a new job. But that’s just how they came across—as excuses.

‘How could you be so stupid?’ She should have known it was going to be bad. They’d been digging up this section between West Acton and the White City toll plaza for months. One snarl-up after another.

It was all supposed to have got better after they privatised the major arterial routes into the capital. Olivia had only made sporadic visits into the city from her family home in Northolt while she’d studied for her degree at Oxford, but she couldn’t say she’d noticed much of an improvement.

And now it was going to make her woefully late for her first day on the job. Not just her first day, but her first job. First proper job since the mandatory community tasks to build enough citizen points to attend uni in the first place, anyway.

The car in front restarted, travelled another two yards, and stopped again. The hope that had begun to bloom in Olivia’s chest stopped with it.

Still, at least she could see the squat grey concrete structure of the toll plaza up ahead. There were only three lanes open, according to the in-dash monitor, which probably accounted for the delay as vehicles jockeyed for position.

Left to its own devices, the auto self-drive would feed everyone through the plaza in no time, but as soon as people with high-end models hit their priority overrides to jump the queue, you were back to chaos again. They were also the only ones who could afford the annual passes, which had their own express lane. Everyone else—Olivia included—had to buy the shorter duration tickets. Her parents had celebrated her graduation by chipping in towards her first month’s pass.

But it was the far left-hand lane—the cash lane—that always caused the most problems. The amount varied according to pressure of traffic and time of day, so you could never be quite sure in advance how much. Half the time people failed to bring the right money, or simply didn’t have enough for the toll. In fact, Olivia could see a young man standing by the cash window now, arguing with the woman behind the glass. His body language was pleading.

Olivia was too far away to hear anything of the exchange, but his thin arms windmilled. There were nervous stains on the back of his hooded sweatshirt.

The young man stepped back, shoulders slumping, and for a moment Olivia thought the argument was over. Then he reached inside the unzipped sweatshirt and when she could see his hands again, he was holding a gun.

Olivia’s mouth fell open, the spit on her tongue evaporating instantly. She scrabbled for her handbag, fumbled inside. When she glanced up again, the young man was still by the toll booth, still brandishing the gun unsteadily at the woman inside. She’d ducked out of sight.

With a growl of frustration, Olivia tipped the contents of the bag out onto the passenger seat. It landed in a haphazard sprawl of keys, hairbrush, makeup oddments, documents, but no smartphone. Then she remembered. When she arrived this morning she was due to be issued with her official kit, including communications. With that in mind, she’d left her own phone at home on the hall table. No point in carrying both.

That thought jogged another. At her final interview they’d shown her the Taser stunner she’d be using. It was twice as old, and probably twice the size and weight, of the one her dad bought her just before she went to uni. She’d decided there and then to bend the rules and carry her own. She had it with her now, in the glove box. It was fully charged.

She leaned across, flipped open the glove box lid and pulled out the Taser. It wasn’t a top of the range model, but not far off, made of black composite and shaped like a conventional pistol. She swallowed. Her dad had insisted that she practise with the stunner, but that was back when he first presented it to her. She’d certainly never had to use it in anger.

Another glance. The young man was still by the toll booth window, still waving the gun. The similarity between the size and shape of the weapon to the one in Olivia’s hands was not lost on her. But she knew without a doubt that his was a real gun.

She hesitated. Should I get involved? Or sit tight and leave it to the professionals?

‘Time?’ she demanded again.

‘The time is 09:01 and 13 seconds. The distance remaining to—’

‘Mute audio.’

The deciding factor.

Olivia had been a fully fledged graduate detective in the New London Police Service for one whole minute.

Pushing out her chin, she opened the car door and stepped out onto the road. The engine cut off automatically as she exited the vehicle. The driver alongside barely gave her a second glance as she strode forward between the lines of cars. She kept the Taser down by her side so it was hidden in the folds of her long skirt.

The gunman was shrieking at the crouching cashier as Olivia approached, so he didn’t notice until she was a little more than five yards from him. Then he spun round, the fear leaping in his eyes.

‘Stay back!’ He was close to screaming. The barrel of the gun arced wildly in Olivia’s direction. Had he pulled the trigger it was unlikely he would hit her, but she had no intention of relying on that.

She took a deep breath, resisting the urge to raise her hands. The stunner was still hidden from view by her side. Its maximum range was fifteen feet. She knew she needed to be nearer to be sure.

‘Look, all I want to do is get to work,’ she said, pushing out a smile, aiming for reasonable with maybe just a hint of irritation. ‘It’s my first day, and I’m already late. You want money? Okay. I don’t have very much, but I can give you some money. Let’s get this over with and then we can all be on our way.’

The would-be robber hesitated, glancing back at the toll booth. The cashier was still down out of sight, and the slots in the window meant he could neither shoot at her nor reach the cash drawer, lying tantalisingly open inside. He hammered both fists against the bulletproof glass in frustration, hurling abuse.

Olivia edged a step closer. She could see he was barely out of his teens, his cheeks and chin heavily blotched with acne. His hair clung to his scalp in unwashed clumps.

He was scared, too—maybe even more scared than she was. Fear forced the sweat out of him like tar on a summer-hot stretch of road. It sheened on his face and leached through the armpits of the thin sweatshirt.

The gun was a Smith & Wesson Model 14 revolver, practically a museum piece. What her dad would have referred to as a ‘thirty-eight special.’ It looked dark and solid in the boy’s hands.

She swallowed.

Now or never.

She slid forward another foot, trying to gauge the distance, keeping her right hand hidden. In her left she held out a few crumpled banknotes. The euros favoured by the black economy rather than new sterling. Not enough for the fix his body so obviously craved but, she hoped, folded over enough to seem enticing, nonetheless.

And once he caught sight of it, the boy couldn’t drag his eyes away. Muscle memory brought him closer by another couple of steps, closing the gap between them until an instinctive wariness overruled.

Come on, come on, Olivia willed. Just another couple of feet…

He must have sensed something of her own anxiety. The boy’s eyes twitched constantly overhead, checking for the first sign of the Tactical Response Unit that was undoubtedly en route. He began to back up, swinging the revolver up as he did so.

‘Look,’ Olivia said, watching him scurry out of range, ‘I’m going to put the money down right here, and you can come and get it, okay? But be quick, because otherwise you’ll miss your chance.’

She caught the agony of indecision on the boy’s face before she stooped to scatter the euros onto the cracked tarmac at her feet. As she straightened and took a couple of small steps in reverse, the wind was already plucking at the curled notes.

That was too much for him. With an inarticulate cry, the boy dived for the cash just as the next gust sent it skittering out of reach. He pounced again, barely six feet away from her now.

Olivia brought the Taser up level and into full view, gripping it in both hands. She pointed the muzzle at the centre of the boy’s chest, just like her dad taught her.

Oh God, what do I say? For a split-second her mind went totally blank.

‘Police!’ she barked then. ‘Don’t move!’

At least, it should have been a bark, but came out closer to a yelp—more lapdog than attack dog.

The boy had just pounced on one of the errant notes, but his head snapped up, and the triumph on his face shattered into terror.

‘No, no, no!’ He paddled backwards, robbed of both coordination and coherence.

He lifted his right hand. Olivia had time to register the grime caked into his skin, the fingernails bitten past the quick. He scrambled another couple of feet farther away from her, gaining distance all the time. The window of opportunity wasn’t so much closing as being slammed shut.

‘Please, don’t shoot me. It’s not—’

A distant part of Olivia’s brain heard the words, but could not compute their meaning. Her eyes were locked on the gun in the boy’s hands. It seemed to have grown suddenly huge, like a cartoon version, and it was swinging directly towards her.

She shut her eyes and pulled the trigger.

With a disappointingly modest snap, the explosive air cartridge at the end of the Taser’s barrel discharged. It sent the pair of tight-packed electrodes fizzing outwards at just over 130 feet a second. The probes followed fractionally divergent trajectories, widening to their optimum spread. Hair-fine wires spun out in their wake, making a faint whirring noise as they rapidly uncoiled.

Despite Olivia’s haphazard aim, both darts lanced into the front of the boy’s grubby sweatshirt. She opened her eyes just in time to watch the glimmer of surprise cross his face before the fifty-thousand-volt charge hit him.

The initial burst lasted eight seconds, by which time he was on the ground and twisted into a tight foetal ball. His limbs juddered and twitched. The gun dropped from fingers distorted into the arthritis-ravaged claws of an old man. He was ageing and shrinking before her eyes.

Sick to her stomach, Olivia realised that she had no idea how to make it stop. Her dad hadn’t included that particular piece of information in his briefings. After she’d fired, she was supposed to simply put the Taser down and run away, leaving her would-be attacker wracked by uncontrollable spasms. The device would continue to fire short bursts into his system, enough to keep him down, until she had made her escape.

The worst thing was the noise it made. A sort of gleeful crackling, like one of those blue neon tubes in old-fashioned butchers’ shops. The kind used to electrocute flies.

In desperation, Olivia ejected the cartridge as though it was spent. As soon as it was separated from the power pack in the main body of the Taser, the voltage chopped off, and the terrible noise ceased.

The boy continued to jitter and shake for what seemed like a long time afterwards. Olivia toed the Smith & Wesson out of his reach and waited. Her hands were shaking, but she slotted a new cartridge onto the end of the Taser and kept him covered, just in case.

The drama over, she was aware of other sights and sounds returning to her consciousness. The cashier stuck her head up but refused to leave the safety of her toll booth.

A few people from the closest cars called congratulations to her, although she noted none had ventured earlier out to help. But she would bet they’d all taken vids on their dash-cams or phones that would already be up on the Internet.

Overhead, above the constant buzzing of the surveillance drones, she heard a chopping thunder approaching through the low cloud to the southeast. The boy had recovered enough to hear it, too. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, glancing fearfully at the sky like a fat rabbit in hawk country.

‘You a copper or something?’ he demanded then.

She nodded.

‘Privvy or State?’

‘State,’ she said, and caught something in his face, no doubt surprise at the way she’d fumbled the whole thing.

The noise above them rose through loud into uncomfortable. The boy’s panic seemed to grow with it. As fast as they’d opened their car doors and windows, the onlookers retreated, shutting them again. She missed the boy’s next words, had to duck her head for him to repeat them.

‘I said, arrest me,’ he shouted. ‘State can still do that, can’t they—even here?’

The helicopter dropped suddenly out of the cloud, a black Westland with the English Constabulary plc logo on the body. Olivia stared up at it, shielding her eyes against the dust. The side door was open and the first of the TRU team was poised in the aperture. He was holding one of the new BAE sniper rifles with the butt pulled up hard into his shoulder, ready.

‘Please!’ the boy yelled. ‘Do it now. Before they land.’

Confused, Olivia launched into the revised standard caution. It was one of the first things they taught you, but she’d known it by heart since she was a child, in any case. ‘You have the right to remain silent…’

While she spoke, the helicopter circled once as the pilot recce’d for a fast landing site. The downdraught blasted grit from the construction works into Olivia’s hair and eyes. By the time she’d finished the boy’s rights, the pilot had threaded the craft between the earth-moving machinery and the overhead wires and touched down less than a hundred yards away.

The six-man squad, in bulky body armour and bristling with tech, debussed with smooth precision and came pounding across the tarmac towards them.

‘Thanks,’ the boy said, more quietly now, as the whine of the rotors died away.

‘What for?’ Olivia said, stung by his obvious relief. ‘You’re still under arrest, you know.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, sullen, jerking his head towards the men now surrounding them, ‘but if you’d left me to that lot, I’d be dead.’

Detective (Grade 1) Damien Wheeler checked out his reflection in the mirrored back wall of the lift as it clanked its way down from the fourth floor and was thoroughly satisfied by what he saw. He smoothed down his tie and made sure that, when he thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, his jacket opened just far enough to reveal the shoulder holster underneath. Pity that all it held was a Taser.

It was one of Wheeler’s great regrets that he’d come into the service too late to be allowed a real gun. The prospect of carrying had been one of the attractions of applying for police training college in the first place. But, by the time he’d qualified, public disquiet over the number of civilian casualties had grown into uproar, and the brief experiment of wholesale arming of the British police was over.

Anyway, there was no police training college anymore. Just a boot camp for the front-line bobbies—cannon fodder most of them, who would have been squaddies if there was still a defence budget. That and university degrees for the wannabe detectives.

Despite his comparative youth—only just turned thirty—Wheeler thought of himself as last of the old school. A real policeman. Came up the hard way and proud of it. He’d made it to Detective Sergeant before the reorganisation, when they’d got rid of the old system of ranks. Somehow, DG1 didn’t have the same ring to it at all.

He ducked his head, like a boxer, and practised his ice-cool cop stare. He was pleased with that look. It suited him. Went with the square jaw and cobalt-blue eyes. He just hoped it would have more effect on the new girl than the waste-of-time trainee he’d ended up with. It had taken three days of being at his most charming before he discovered she was a lesbian. Bitch. He bet that was why the lieutenant had foisted her off on to him in the first place.

He still couldn’t get used to calling former Detective Inspector Job ‘Lieutenant’—just too damn American for his taste. Still, if Job couldn’t be bothered to go down to reception to meet the new girl in person, why shouldn’t Wheeler have a crack at her?

And at least it showed that even the mighty Lieutenant Job could throw his toys out of his pram occasionally. Wheeler had been secretly pleased when Job’s trainee hadn’t arrived dead on 09:00. By 10:30 he was struggling to contain his glee—hadn’t been able to resist a quick dig.

‘I’m sure Ms Milton will provide a perfectly reasonable explanation,’ was all Job had said, but Wheeler was sure he was seething, underneath. He must have been. After all, the old man outranked him. He’d had first pick and Olivia Milton was his choice, and she’d screwed up on her first day.

And then the call had come in. Bloody Milton had not only managed to foil an armed robbery on her way in, but had disarmed and arrested the perpetrator, single-handed. Unbelievable. The captain had already been up to congratulate Job, like the lieutenant had anything to do with it. The bastard always came up smelling of roses.

The lift finally wheezed to a stop at ground-floor level and let out a half-hearted bing-bong as the doors lurched open. Wheeler stepped out, running a hand over his styled blond hair. He pushed through the doors to the reception area to find a couple of gorillas from English Custodial Services plc were just signing for the new prisoner.

The Milton girl was standing facing away from the door, but even from that angle what he saw made Wheeler suck in his six-pack a little more, and set a predatory gleam in his eye.

She was tall, with long red hair tied at the nape of her neck by a velvet ribbon. From the back, her figure was classic hourglass, emphasised by the long skirt she wore, which flared out from a narrow waist. Now, that was more like it.

Wheeler sauntered over.

‘Miss Milton, is it?’ he asked casually. ‘Or should I say, newly minted Detective (Grade 3) Milton?’

The girl turned, nodded, and he found his eyes naturally drawn to the slightly bulging third button of her cream blouse. After a second he caught himself enough to thrust out a hand.

‘Damien Wheeler—DG1 Wheeler, to be precise,’ he said, giving her his best smooth smile and manly handshake. It was slightly disconcerting to come across a woman whose eyes were on a level with his own. Hers were hazel where he’d been hoping for green, but you couldn’t have everything. ‘Lieutenant Job asked me to take you up to the office, show you the ropes. If you’re all done?’

The wary look on the girl’s face lifted. ‘Oh, yes. Fine.’

She flashed a quick smile to the ECS guys, who lit up like all their Christmases had come at once. To Wheeler’s surprise, the smile also extended to the junkie trash she’d just brought in. ‘This is where I leave you,’ she told him. ‘Mike and Tony here will sort you out with the details of the rehab centre. When your solicitor arrives, she should be able to arrange a deal if you agree to enter the programme voluntarily.’

The kid smiled back at her, grateful and more than a touch adoring. Wheeler hastily led her away, hurrying to open the door out of reception for her. A bit of old-world gallantry always went down well.

She moved through ahead of him and made straight for the stairs, ignoring the waiting lift. He had no option but to follow her lead.

‘Bit of exercise—good idea,’ he said, hearty, trying to make the best of it. ‘Thought you might have had enough of that for one day, eh?’

She didn’t respond, and he saved his breath until they were on the second floor landing.

‘You’re quite something, you know,’ he said then, pausing to treat her to his coolly assessing stare. The one that had them melting in his hand. ‘Bringing that kid in by yourself takes some guts. Not to mention getting on first-name terms with the boys from ECS so fast. Piece of advice for you though, Olivia—it is Olivia, isn’t it?’

She nodded, frowning. Sweet, really.

‘Don’t try to mother all the lame ducks you bring in. Caring is the last thing you need to do, or you’ll burn out inside five years.’ He looked her up and down. ‘Not that you’ll be here that long.’

She bridled at that. ‘Are you implying I’m not serious about my career?’

He flashed her another smile, his amusement genuine.

‘Not at all, babe. Quite the opposite, in fact. Bright girl like you? I think you’ll be here twelve months, tops. Get some experience at the sharp end. Then you’ll have had enough of slumming it with us at State and you’ll jump ship to the Privvies, just like all the rest.’

The girl looked about to speak, but remained silent. Confirmation if ever he heard it. You could always spot the ambitious ones. Still, no reason not to make hay while the sun shone. He moved closer, touched her arm.

‘Hey, don’t sweat it. Not everybody has what it takes to stick with a pretty thankless job—underfunded, understaffed—when they could be swanning around as a company cop with all the latest investigative toys to play with, and their own armed backup squad on call twenty-four/seven.’

‘If you think it’s so great with the private force, why are you still here?’ she demanded.

He straightened his jacket, shot a cuff. ‘Not everyone can afford to be a shareholder and pay for their justice,’ he said, aiming for quiet dignity and not quite hitting it. ‘State—it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.’

In other words, Olivia considered, you aren’t good enough to be taken on by the private sector.

She pegged the type as soon as she laid eyes on Wheeler. It was a relief when he introduced himself and she realised he wasn’t the one she’d be working for directly. Olivia hoped she hadn’t made her reaction too obvious, but good God, the man was an octopus in rank aftershave and a cheap tan suit.

Okay, he was good-looking, in a way, but something slightly artificial stopped him short of being actually attractive. The upside-down-triangle physique was impressive enough, but by the time they’d climbed to the fourth floor, he was breathless. All show and no go.

Still, her course tutors had warned her she might face resentment from those State coppers who didn’t have the ability or the drive to make the switch. Olivia supposed that even this smarmy approach was better than outright hostility.

And besides, he’d been almost spot-on in his assessment. She’d been planning on a year—two at the most—to add some extra shine to her degree, then looking for an opportunity with all the perks he’d mentioned. Who wouldn’t?

Wheeler led her into the untidy, open-plan office and introduced her to his own trainee, a demure-looking Asian girl. The girl gave her a sympathetic smile and, as soon as Wheeler’s back was turned, rolled her eyes and made a fast hand gesture that confirmed Olivia’s initial impression.

Even the captain put in an appearance. Boydell was a short, stubby little Welshman, with fat-fingered hands and a rounded face. He also had the most penetrating gaze Olivia had ever come across. She could still remember it boring into her during the preliminary interview. Trying to get inside her skull and probably unravelling her motives all too successfully.

Captain Boydell shook her hand vigorously, welcomed her to the team, and left with a cheerful throwaway remark that she should be ready to give interviews to the press at 15:30.

‘Interviews, sir?’ she repeated faintly

Boydell paused in the doorway. ‘You’re quite the heroine of the hour, Detective Milton. You don’t think I’m going to pass up a golden PR opportunity like this when it’s dropped in my lap, do you?’

Olivia watched him leave with the first stirrings of apprehension. An inkling that maybe her best course of action this morning might have been to stay in her car.

What, and let that TRU sniper shoot the kid? It might have been her conscience talking.

‘Well, Ms Milton, you’ve certainly made quite an impression on your first day,’ said a measured voice behind her.

She turned to find a sombre man regarding her without the faintest trace of approval, no discernible inflection in his voice. Distantly, she heard Wheeler introducing Lieutenant Job, and her heart sank a little farther.

‘Yes, sir.’

Job continued his brooding stare for a moment longer. He was old—fifty at least—and what hair he had was clipped short and grey. Who stayed balding these days when they no longer needed to? Suddenly, even Wheeler’s obvious charms began to seem preferable.

‘Do you mean “yes, sir” that was your original intention, or “yes, sir” that was merely an added bonus?’

Olivia opened her mouth, then shut it again and glared at him. He was playing word games with her. Whichever option she chose, she was damned.

‘Well, sir,’ she said at last, sweetly. ‘I thought I’d start as I meant to go on.’

‘Hm.’ Job’s expression didn’t alter, she was sure of that, but something flickered in his stone-grey eyes. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

He glanced at Wheeler, who’d been lounging on the corner of a desk. ‘If you wouldn’t mind taking Ms Milton to collect her equipment.’ It was assembled as a question, delivered as an order.

Wheeler straightened at once. ‘My pleasure, boss.’

His manner didn’t soften any when he was dealing with any of his underlings, Olivia noted with slight relief that didn’t last.

‘And after that, Ms Milton, I’ll see you in the review suite,’ he said. ‘Then you can give me a full account of your actions this morning.’

As he moved away Wheeler’s voice murmured in her ear. ‘Cheer up, babe. People hardly ever die during interrogation any more…’

‘Again, Ms Milton,’ Job ordered. ‘Take me through it again, from the beginning, and don’t leave anything out.’

‘I’ve already told you,’ Olivia said wearily. She’d done well in the Interview and Interrogation module of the course, but having a good theoretical knowledge of the techniques being used against her was, she discovered, little defence.

‘Well, tell me again.’

Job sat back in the moulded plastic chair on the other side of the scuffed 3D projector grid and took a sip of his coffee. Olivia’s own cup stood untouched by her elbow, cold now, the recyclable cup starting to go soggy at the base.

Apart from the deactivated table-top grid, four chairs, and the standard recorder, the room was bare. Grubby and unforgiving. Above Job, the diodes in two of the cheap LED spotlights were burning out. Their flickering threw his face into sinister, unforgiving shadow.

Doggedly, she went back over her story, forcing herself to stick rigidly to the facts, not to add inconsequential details. Occasionally, Job scribbled one-word notes on paper rather than directly into his tablet. He used a pen—a real ink pen—and who used those anymore? Olivia couldn’t read his writing.

‘So,’ he said when she’d petered out, ‘what have you learned from this, Ms Milton?’

‘Learned, sir?’

‘If you were put into exactly the same situation tomorrow morning, what would you do?’

‘Probably the same again,’ she said without hesitation.

‘Hm, would you, indeed?’

He did pick up his tablet then, dabbed the screen to fire up the projector. It was an old unit, the cooling fans squeaking, and when the holographic image appeared on the grid between them, it flickered as badly as the lights.

The Privvies had whole rooms given over to reconstruction and review, Olivia knew, not just this crappy miniaturised display. There, you could move among life-size figures rendered from footage from the security drones that buzzed constantly overhead. It brought new meaning to the words ‘caught in the act.’

The pictures from the toll plaza were incomplete in the camera blind spots and these processors weren’t adequate to supply the missing pixels. Still, she could recognise the scene easily enough. The time display showed it was moments before the boy—she now knew his name was Trevor—approached the cashier.

Job let it run until the gun came into view, then froze the image, which shivered as though an earthquake had struck. He nodded to the time marker.

‘08:59,’ he said in that cold, clear voice she was coming to dislike. ‘The drones’ recognition software has just alerted the Tactical Response Unit. The cashier has worked for the company for five years. She’s fully trained and knows that all she has to do is keep her head down for eleven minutes, maximum, and it will all be over. Clear so far?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He glanced at her, his expression unreadable. At some point, she noted, his nose had been broken. Not badly, just enough to slightly thicken the bridge.

He thumbed the tablet and they watched events unfold in silence. Another few minutes crawled past while Trevor hammered and threatened at the booth window. Then another figure appeared—her own.

Olivia shifted in her seat, trying not to squirm. It was plain even to her own eyes that she had been terrified, her body movements jerkily stiff. It was embarrassingly obvious, too, that she was clumsily trying to hide something in her right hand. In her left she held out the money, as if trying to coax a wily horse with lumps of sugar.

Job froze the image again, just, it seemed to Olivia, when she was at her most ungainly. ‘What were you thinking at this point, Ms Milton?’

Olivia shrugged. ‘I don’t know…that I needed to stop him before he injured the cashier, I suppose. Why, what should I have been thinking?’

The last bit came out snappier than she had intended, if his brief stillness was anything to go by.

‘Any number of questions spring to mind. Where did the boy come from? You’ve said you didn’t see him actually arrive. So, did he walk? Get out of a car? Off the back of a motorcycle? The vital question is, is he alone, or does he have accomplices who may be armed, also?’

He tapped a finger as if on the head of her 3D image and she flinched, like he’d just stuck a pin into a voodoo doll.

‘At this point you are fixated on your one main target, Ms Milton. You are blind to your surroundings and have completely disregarded any other possible sources of danger—to yourself or the public.’

The tableau moved on again, while her blush scaled her cheeks and neck. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been wrong…

He didn’t comment through her brief exchange with Trevor, and the boy’s grab for the money. Olivia watched herself bring the Taser up, holding the weapon out in front of her as if she was afraid of it. Afraid of what it might do. Pathetic, really.

At the time she’d been so certain that the boy had aimed his gun at her, that he’d been about to pull the trigger. Now she saw that he’d been trying to surrender it.

And she’d shot him anyway.

Job stopped the replay again. The projector juddered in protest. ‘If one of the legal scavengers decides to take this on, you may face charges for excessive force. Just as, before the firearm ban, you’d now be held on a manslaughter charge at the very least.’ He leaned closer, studying the weapon in her hand. ‘That’s a nice piece, but carry the standard-issue Taser in future.’

‘I’m told they’re not as good. Less range and power.’

‘That might be so, but they are also instantly recognisable, and impossible to mistake for anything else.’

‘I see,’ she murmured, but her voice must have told him that she didn’t.

He sighed. ‘You have a lot to learn, Ms Milton, but you have a great deal of potential, and if you’re prepared to stay for long enough, I can train you. But it’s not something you can pick up in six months or a year, and then move on. Not if you truly want to fulfill all that promise.’

Her blush had been subsiding. Now it bloomed upwards again.

Job ignored her discomfort. He remotely collapsed the scene and opened another in its place. Still the toll plaza, but cleaner imagery from a higher perspective.

Initially, Olivia struggled to work out where the camera had been positioned. Then it swept around as though the scene itself was rotating, and she realised it could only come from inside the TRU helicopter.

The view pitched and steadied. For the first time, Olivia noticed a tiny set of cross hairs overlaying the picture.

Down on the ground she saw herself standing over the boy, aiming the weapon at his writhing body. The hologram zoomed onto her face. For a split second the cross hairs centred on her forehead as she stood there, gaping up directly into the lens. Then, as Olivia watched, she saw herself lift a hand to shelter her eyes against the debris from the rotor wash. As she did so, the outline of the Taser she clutched became more clearly defined.

A cold prickle ran across her skin as the hairs struggled to rise. She knew now exactly where that camera had been mounted. When she looked through the ghosted scene to Job, she found him watching her reaction, unsmiling.

He nodded. ‘Yes, it was a close one, wasn’t it? Just be thankful, Ms Milton, that the TRU sniper hesitated long enough to recognise your non-standard-issue Taser for what it was. And also that he was your average hot-blooded heterosexual male with an understandable disinclination towards killing a pretty girl, despite his undoubtedly thorough training.’ He rose, buttoned his jacket and looked down at her. ‘Tomorrow, you might not be so lucky.’