The Island_(1)

Edwin looked at the pile of paperwork on his desk and rubbed at his eyes. It had been a really long day, and only midway through what was bound to be a long week. It had begun with his friend Danny’s death two days ago, and since then the Island had been a hive of activity getting things prepared.

In a couple of days time Danny’s children would arrive on the Island, having just found out that they were triplets given up for adoption, and they’d be meeting here for the very first time. On top of that he had a burial to organise for Danny on the Island. Add in organising supplies and planning for every contingency, and it was no wonder he felt exhausted. It was two in the morning and high time he had some stress relief.

He got up from his desk, winced at the pain in his back and moved to the door of his office, part of his home on the Island upstairs from the clinic, and headed for the exit, moving quietly down the stairs as was his habit. Once outside he smiled. He’d always loved the cool breeze that caressed the Island through the night.

He turned left and took the path down to the beach, taking a right between two large bushes on the narrow path the kitchen staff used to bring supplies into the kitchens. A couple of turns and he was moving around the edge of the building where the Islands food was prepared and stored, unstaffed at this time of night. He knew if anyone spotted him they’d just assume he was going for his habitual late night snack, but he knew different.

He bypassed the main doors to the kitchen and entered the small courtyard that served the dual purpose of somewhere to store the trash and somewhere the chefs and porters could sneak out to for a smoke. Casually he glanced around and seeing no-one he slipped over to the backdoor of the pastry kitchen and entered a code in the keypad, a different code from the one normally used to open the door.

A quiet bump sounded next to one of the bins and he moved to the corner, reached down and pulled the handle that was now protruding from the flagstoned yard. A small hatch appeared with a ladder heading down, barely visible in the moonlight.

He quickly slid himself into the narrow passage and closed the hidden hatch above him, seeing the dim lights illuminating the twenty three rungs below him. Reaching the bottom he turned around and punched another code into the wall and the small box beside it opened. He pressed his hand to the small screen inside the box and the door beside him swung open.

Edwin smiled in anticipation. He had a lot of catching up to do.

He entered the saferoom, or as he thought of it, the ‘Bunker’ where he could retreat to if the Island was ever attacked. He ignored the open plan living area and kitchen and moved straight to the door on his left, a control room where he could make contact with the outside world if need be, but his focus wasn’t on the emergency facilities. He moved straight to the console housing the covert CCTV system that Danny Tripps had painstakingly built in secret over the last fifteen years.

His friends words came back to him, as they always did when he looked at the setup. “There’s no point in being trapped in here. Much better to see what’s going on outside. Then you retain an advantage the other side doesn’t even know about. Information is power.”

Edwin smiled and moved to the large leather desk chair facing the bank of fifteen screens. Three large screens, a dozen smaller, all assigned letters from A to O. The one hundred and thirty eight cameras hidden around the island were numbered, making the system incredibly simple to operate. Simply type in the letter for the screen then the camera number, hit enter and that’s what you saw.

The whole system was set up on a motion-activation principle, immediately discarding data that had nothing happening and that suited Edwins purposes perfectly.

He settled his fingers on the keyboard, typed A68 and hit Enter. The first of the three large screens flickered into view, a camera situated in the bedroom of Danny’s favourite PA, Patricia,. She was one of Edwin’s favourites too, a hot, toned blonde with a bundle of intelligence and determination. It wasn’t her intellect that interested him at present though as he watched the live feed from her vacant bedroom, his memory providing him with hundreds of images of her sleeping in that very bed.

He felt the familiar stirring in his groin and smiled. Time to move the recording back.

His fingers found the small dial next to the keyboard, punched in the camera number and then rotated it back. The simple system allowed him to review all recorded footage from that particular camera and he was viewing it in reverse. A couple of chambermaids darted around briefly at high speed, and then the footage caught up to Patricia undressing then sleeping. The footage continued in reverse at high speed, skipping past hours of her lying still.