Byrne is fifty-two. His knees ache from twenty years of sitting behind a steering wheel, but the trike has given him a new geometry. On a motorbike, a man is a racer; bent over, vulnerable. In the trike, he sits upright, like a charioteer. The two wheels at the front, the single drive wheel at the back—the reverse trike configuration—means he can brake hard on a slick patch of moss and the vehicle won’t tuck under. It will just stop. Or slide predictably. He trusts the machine more than he trusts most of his superiors.
"Contact," Aoife says, her voice suddenly tight. "Human heat signatures. Three, no, four. Moving between the shipping containers." Trike Patrol - Irish
Byrne kills the speaker. "They bought the trike. Not me. The machine." Byrne is fifty-two
It is 3:00 AM on a Tuesday in November. The diesel smell of a small farmyard mixes with the iodine of the sea. Garda Cillian Byrne kills the engine on his RT-P (the police-spec model) and listens. The silence is not empty. It is a living thing, filled with the percussion of dripping blackthorn and the low grumble of a distant timber lorry that shouldn’t be running this late. In the trike, he sits upright, like a charioteer
It is a bluff. Customs are thirty minutes away. The drone has their faces, but the light is poor. The trike has their plates, but the van is likely stolen. But the trike itself is the argument. It is so unusual, so unexpected, that the men cannot compute the risk. In their cognitive map of law enforcement, there is no slot for "Trike Patrol."