One of Us Is Dead

7 December 2021

‘Cheers, my gorgeous! To us.’ He clinked his Champagne glass against hers.

‘Cheers,’ Shannon replied, smiling at him.

‘Eight weeks to the day since our first date — not bad, eh?’ Paul Anthony tilted his head and grinned.

She grinned too. ‘Eight weeks!’ she replied. ‘Sort of flown by! We’d make a good team,’ she said, and immediately wondered why she’d used those words.

‘More than just a team, right?’ he urged. ‘Kindred spirits. It really feels like we’re soulmates. I’m falling in love with you, Shannon. Actually, strike that.’ He grinned at her again, over the top of his glass. ‘I am in love with you. I love you.’

‘I love you too,’ she replied. But she didn’t say it with her entire heart and soul. She was in thrall to him, and yet there was something, some part of him that she didn’t know — yet, at any rate — which she felt he was holding back from her.

Or maybe it was just that negative. Because it was a big one.

That negative was the business Paul Anthony ran. During those first magical two months when they had begun dating, she could not get out of him exactly what it was that he did for a living. From the way he dressed, in stylish jackets, smart shirts, neat jeans and classy shoes, and the fact that he collected her in a chauffeured Mercedes, she figured he had to be well off. He’d told her, somewhat evasively, that he was involved in a number of businesses, but never said what they actually were.

She’d used all her skills in navigating the internet to see what she could find out about him, and had come up with absolutely nothing. It was as if he did not exist.

It was on a date a month or so into their relationship, over a monkfish stew in Tosca, a riverside restaurant in Shoreham, to the west of Brighton, when Paul and she had drunk more than they had together previously, that he finally explained a little about his work. Or at least one part of it: 3D printed handguns.

Up until then, while she had heard about 3D printed guns, she assumed they were just toys, harmless replicas. Far from it, he had explained, and had shown her photos on his phone of examples he had produced. Some did look very plastic, more like water pistols, but some looked chillingly realistic. All of them, he told her, he had made from raw materials — mostly easily obtainable — on his 3D printing equipment in his workshop. Even the bullets. And each of the guns she looked at, he told her, almost boastfully, was capable of firing live rounds of ammunition that would be lethal at varying distances.

It had shocked her. But, she had to admit, it had also thrilled her.

To be fair to Paul, since they had first met, she had always been quite cagey about her career, so neither could quite extract specifics from the other, but they each recognized that they spoke the same techy, somewhat underground language. As the boozy evening went on they asked each other more and more revealing questions, testing the water, pushing the boundaries, playfully. By what they each interpreted as a bizarre alignment in the stars, they soon realized that some of their work overlapped.

Both of them operated on the so-called dark web, via Tor — a network also known by the less sinister name of The Onion Router, partly because accessing it was like peeling back the layers of an onion. And that night each of them peeled off a few layers of themselves, including their clothes. She confided in him that she worked for a number of agencies, monitoring the dark web for a variety of objectives.

‘Shannon Kendall,’ he had said flirtatiously, back in Tosca that night. ‘I’d like to formally offer you the position of Business Development Officer. If you should choose to accept what will be a very generous offer, you will be the discreet face of my 3D gun printing business. You can start part-time to dip a toe in, as it were, and you’ll be the one to get the sales transactions, deal with manufacturing process and sort the Bitcoin payments and the despatching. It would relieve me of a load of work and free me up to focus on other aspects of my business. What do you think?’

At that moment, Shannon had the strange sense it was destiny. Paul made light of that, merely calling it a favourable circumstance. But it clearly excited them both. She liked that it was completely different to her work at SQLMT, and she knew her skill set was a perfect complement to his. But one thing concerned her.

‘You and me in the business of printing 3D guns, Paul, it’s not quite what I had in my thoughts for my next career move. Before I accept, you need to convince me that my morals haven’t gone AWOL.’

‘Look, babe,’ he’d replied. ‘You know how it is. People who want guns, want guns. They are going to get them whatever anyone does to try to stop them. You and I may as well benefit from the purchase. There’s a lot of money in this. I mean a bucket load of money. It will make both of us very rich. We don’t have to do this for ever. We don’t know or care what they use them for. We don’t ask any questions, so there’s no guilt. Supplying the guns is our business, what our customers do with the products they buy is not our concern. If we don’t do it someone else will. Right?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said somewhat hesitantly.

‘Are you in?’

She shut her eyes, leant back in her chair, took a deep breath and smiled seductively. This guy was dangerous. Dangerously attractive. And, what the hell, she felt dangerous!

‘I’m in.’