No Need to Sleep

No Need to Sleep – excerpt:

This novel explores the murky world of people trafficking.

Prologue:

The first night was always the hardest. The second, even though he was tired, got easier. By the third night, he was wired; totally alert; switched on; all senses operating at hyper level. He didn’t know how or why it happened this way, but after seventy two hours without sleep, Kyle Shepherd was unbelievably creative, instinctive, sensitive, aware of and in harmony with his surroundings. He couldn’t do it very often, but when he did, he routinely solved the most complex issues in his I.T. Development company. All of the software he had developed and which had made him and his company very wealthy had been invented when he was in this sleep-deprived hyper-attentive state. He had difficulty describing to others how he felt, so he just told them he felt like Superman.

That was why what he saw on that fateful Tuesday night invaded every fibre of his being and shook him to his very core and ultimately changed his life for ever.

Chapter One: The Edge of Awareness

The hum of the servers was the only sound in the room; a low, steady drone that merged with the rain whispering against the glass. Kyle Shepherd sat hunched over his keyboard, the blue glow of three monitors reflecting in his eyes. Lines of code rippled down the screens like vertical rain. His fingers moved fast, instinctively, almost independently of conscious thought. It was 3:47 a.m. He hadn’t slept for fifty hours.

The first night was always the hardest. His body fought him, tried to drag him under. The second night, resistance faded; the mind took control, sharp and clear. By the third, everything—colours, sounds, sensations—intensified. He was wired, tuned to a frequency most people never reached. A lesser man would have called it madness. Kyle called it clarity.

He rubbed his eyes and leaned back. The office was silent except for the machines, the storm, and the faint ticking of the clock above the door. His company, ‘Shepherd Systems,’ occupied the top floor of an old docklands warehouse in Dublin. He liked the place: exposed brick, concrete floors, high windows looking down over the river. It had character. It was also the only place he could think. On the desk, an empty coffee cup teetered near the edge. He reached for it automatically, forgot it was empty, and smiled faintly. ‘Out of fuel,’ he murmured, ‘Again’.

He stood, stretching. His body ached—shoulders tight, neck stiff—but his mind was alive. He could feel it humming in the air around him, the faint electricity of ideas colliding. A new encryption protocol had just fallen into place in his head—one that might double data throughput on secure networks. He’d sketch it out later. For now, he needed air – and coffee. He grabbed his coat and headed out into the rain.

The night air hit him almost like a blow. It heightened his senses even further. Cold; Wet; Sharp; Perfect. He walked along the quays, collar up, watching the city lights shimmer in the River Liffey. The streets were mostly empty—just taxis, the occasional drunk stumbling home, a few delivery vans on early runs. His brain devoured the details: the metallic smell of the rain, the hum of tyres on wet asphalt, the flicker of a traffic light changing from amber to red. Everything seemed important, alive. He’d been like this since his twenties. Sleep deprivation did something to him—something he couldn’t explain. While others crashed, his system lit up. His mind became a precision instrument. He’d designed every major piece of software that made him rich in these sleepless bursts. It wasn’t sustainable for long, but it worked and it had made him a small fortune. He passed the Samuel Beckett Bridge, its white brightly lit span glowing against the dark water. A container ship moved slowly upriver, its lights reflected in long, broken lines across the current. He paused, watching it.

Something about the ship held his attention. It wasn’t the size or shape—he’d seen dozens like it. It was the movement: slow, deliberate, too quiet. The vessel was docking at a small private quay used mostly for maintenance, not cargo. No official lights, no customs officers. Just two figures in rain gear guiding it in with handheld torches. He frowned; at this hour? Curiosity nudged him forward. He crossed the road and slipped through a gap in the chain-link fence bordering the dockyard. The rain masked his footsteps. He moved closer, hugging the shadows of the stacked containers. A forklift idled nearby, engine running, but unmanned. The air smelled of diesel and salt. His inner self had no idea why he was here but his senses were screaming at him to stay.

From behind a container, he could see the ship clearly now, the ‘Adriana,’ a Panamanian-registered freighter. A gangway extended to the quay. Men were unloading cargo—large crates at first, then smaller boxes. Their movements were efficient, practised; too smooth for dockhands improvising an after-hours job.

Then he heard it; a sound that didn’t belong; muffled; human? Then, a low, panicked cry. Kyle froze. He strained to listen. There it was again—a whimper, then a sharp command in a foreign language. Eastern European, maybe? One of the men barked something and hit the side of the container with a metal bar.

He waited: silence. Kyle’s breath quickened. He edged sideways for a better view. One of the containers—painted blue, marked only with a faded serial number—had its doors slightly open. The men were prying it wider. Inside—movement. Faces; People. A dozen at least, crammed together. Pale, exhausted, terrified. He felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Human cargo. He took an involuntary step back, his shoe scraping on gravel. One of the men looked up sharply. A torchlight swept the darkness. Kyle ducked, heart hammering. The beam passed within inches of his face. Voices rose—angry now. Someone shouted. Boots splashed in puddles. They were coming closer. He turned and ran.

The rain suddenly turned into a downpour as he sprinted between containers. Shouts echoed behind him. A gun went off—one shot, then another. Metal rang where a bullet struck the corner of a crate. He cut left, vaulted a fence, landed awkwardly and kept moving. His lungs burned. His brain screamed at him to stop, to hide—but adrenaline drove him on - down a narrow lane; across the empty car park of a shipping company; past a row of shuttered warehouses. He ducked into a service alley, pressed his back against the wall, gasping. Silence again, except for the rain. He waited; one minute; two. No footsteps. He exhaled slowly, trembling. Water dripped from his hair into his eyes. He wiped it away and glanced back toward the docks. The ship’s lights were dimming. Whatever he had just seen, they were covering it fast.

Kyle was still hyper aware. He knew he should go to the guards (Irish Police). But what would he tell them? That he’d been awake for three nights straight and had seen people in a container at four in the morning? They’d laugh. Or worse, they’d think he was hallucinating. He’d been there before—five years ago, after a similar ‘episode’. The doctor had called it ‘acute sleep deprivation psychosis.’ This time, though, he knew what he’d seen. It was real. The girl’s face—the fear in her eyes—was burned into his brain. He checked his watch. 4:32 a.m. He had a choice; pretend it hadn’t happened… or find out what was really going on. Kyle Shepherd never walked away from a mystery. He stepped out of the alley and started back toward his office, rain streaming down his face, all thoughts of getting coffee from the all night shop now put to the back of his brain, already planning his next move.

Chapter 2: Hyper-Active:

He slipped into his office, dumped his jacket on a chair and sat at his computer. Kyle knew his limits. That evening he had already resolved numerous issues on his latest piece of software. He knew he was close to burnout – for him that meant he had to sleep. After 72 hours of activity, he always knew he had to sleep soon or his body would begin to shut down and he would collapse. It had happened once in the middle of his first major development. He knew he had to work fast – soon he would need rest, 24 hours of rest at least. After that he would return to being a normal functioning member of society, awake for 16 hours and asleep for eight.

Kyle had always been restless. ADHD meant he couldn’t settle. His mind raced when others were asleep, his body followed suit. He had filled his house and his office with surveillance cameras, motion detectors, and digital locks—not because he feared criminals, necessarily, but because he feared missing something, anything, which might help either him or the public at large. He had always tried to help people and often fantasized about answering a police appeal for witnesses to an accident or a crime, but he never had - until now.

Sleep, if he attempted it now, would ruin everything. For now, he felt no fatigue. His mind worked faster than the blinking lights on the routers. He was aware of every detail: the subtle vibration of the refrigerator, the faint creak of the old wooden stairs in the corner of his office, even the rhythm of his own heartbeat as it matched the blinking cursor on the monitor. He leaned back, eyes scanning the feeds. He had a new camera he’d been experimenting with that faced the port. In addition to high definition video, it had sensors which picked up sound; surely at this time of night it would hear everything. He sighted the camera towards where he had seen the Adriana and there it was: a high-definition feed of the shipping container that had been unloaded earlier. He paused; zoomed in; detected figures moving about—two men; probably those that had shot at him. He detected a hesitancy; one of the figures was on a mobile phone – he stretched the zoom to its limit and although he could no longer make out the figure, he caught a snatch of conversation ‘naw, I think it’s clear, you can tell Pasha to come back….I don’t fucking know where he went, maybe we hit him and he’s bleeding to death somewhere, but do I give a fuck?....what, no they haven’t, and he obviously hasn’t called the cops or they’d be here by now…..so what do you think, we open it up and move them on?’ Just then, a large white van came into shot; Kyle zoomed the camera and did three lightning screen shots, capturing the faces of the two men from the ship and the driver.

He then watched as a long line of young women sheepishly exited the container and walked the short distance to the waiting van. They looked nervous and frightened. The very last one, surely no more than nineteen, seemed to glance in his direction, almost as if she knew he was watching although this was impossible. Her eyes met the camera lens, wide and unblinking, frozen in fear. She looked directly at him. It was a glance that felt like a plea. A man’s voice broke the silence. ‘Check that one last—she’s worth more.’ Kyle’s hands froze on the keyboard; worth more for what? His mind raced, a thousand scenarios flashing by. This was highly illegal. It was wrong. And he had just seen it. His pulse quickened; a cocktail of adrenaline and hyper-awareness coursing through him. He had to act. He had to report it, even if he had never reported anything before.

He grabbed his phone and dialed the emergency number – ‘hello, police please, there’s a container unloading women on the quays down near the Beckett bridge. They’re unloading from a ship called the ‘Adriana’ and transferring to a large white van, registration number 12D78643.’ He hung up when the policeman asked him his name. Why, he wasn’t entirely sure but he felt a huge sense of foreboding. While he had been watching the activity at the container, he had simultaneously been using his servers to check out the ship, the screenshots of the men and the white van. He should have had this information virtually instantly but as he glanced at the screens, his heart sank. Everything was heavily encrypted, masked through several proxy servers. Whoever ran this operation knew their way around technology. Kyle understood the implications instantly. If they discovered he had seen it…the thought made him shiver. And then, almost immediately, his fears were confirmed. His network pinged erratically. Cameras flickered. Lights blinked. His servers began shutting down; a digital intrusion. Someone was in his system.

He wasn’t just a witness anymore. He might be a target. He had already been shot at. The people who ran these operations didn’t take prisoners. Kyle leaned back, rubbing his eyes trying to stave off the exhaustion that he knew was coming and whispered to himself: this changes everything. Using his last reserves of energy, he struggled to his car and managed to drive the two miles to his apartment. He would be safe there for now he thought. He hadn’t heard any sirens; wondered if the Gardai had responded to his call; felt an overwhelming desire to help the poor people he had just seen being obviously trafficked, but he knew he was useless to anyone until he slept. After that, he would try to use his computers to see what he could track; he didn’t know what exactly he could do but he’d think of something. Little did he know that instead of him chasing trouble, it was going to be the other way around. He struggled to his bedroom and collapsed; within ten seconds he was comatose.