Something Coming Through, page 21
part #1 of Something Coming Series
Henry took the phone back. ‘You’ve got yourself in a bit of a pickle, Mr Ackroyd. But we’re willing to help you if you help us. We’ll make sure you aren’t disturbed here. No unexpected visitors. We’ll pay all your medical expenses, including reconstructive dentistry. And we’ll pay a finder’s fee, too.’
They dickered about the price, but Eddie’s heart wasn’t in it. After a couple of minutes he agreed on about half what Chloe had expected him to demand. It wasn’t much of a story, he said. He was only trying to make a living, like everyone else.
‘Why don’t you tell us about the people who beat you up,’ Henry said. ‘Was it in the street, or did they pull you into a car and take you somewhere?’
Eddie said that they had been waiting for him in his house. ‘Two of them. One about your age, the other younger. They tied me to a chair, and they started to snap records in half. I collect early opera records. 78 rpm.’
‘Really? I still have some of my dad’s old LPs,’ Henry said.
He was, Chloe could tell, having fun.
He and Eddie discussed the merits and demerits of digital v. analogue for a couple of minutes, Henry expressing interest when Eddie explained how he used steel needles to play his records, then steering the conversation back to the main topic.
Eddie said, ‘Luckily, they didn’t know which ones were valuable. I have several early Carusos, recorded before his voice changed, including Trimarchi’s “Un Bacio Ancora”. I have a near-mint copy of Alessandro Moreschi on G and T singing “Ave Maria”. One of the last castratis, the only one ever recorded.’ He paused to spit into his cup. ‘They missed those, but they broke twenty-two others, right in front of me. I told them I would answer their questions, but they broke them anyway. Because they could. And then, after we talked, they beat me up.’
He said that he’d told them everything he knew.
‘I mentioned my client to you,’ he said to Chloe. ‘That’s who they were mostly interested in. I explained that I’d never met him. That he feeds me tips and I follow them up, interview the people involved, get their stories. That’s what he’s interested in. Their stories.’
Eddie said that he’d done it seven times now. Always the same, he said. First a clue to send him to the general area. When he found the people who were getting ready to break out, he’d document them as fully as possible. After he uploaded everything, he’d be paid in shellcoin, the African digital currency. Completely untraceable.
‘The one in Dagenham, I noticed the flyer, followed it up. The boy, Fahad, wouldn’t give me the time of day, but I knew he was the focus of the breakout,’ Eddie said, and delicately spat into his cup again. ‘And I knew he was holding out on me, that he had a potent artefact, or had been exposed to one. You noticed it too, that’s why you’re here. But I saw him first.’
Chloe said, ‘I guess I’m losing my edge.’
She felt a little sorry for Eddie, punished because he’d been caught up in something he didn’t understand.
Henry went over the business with the client. Eddie stuck to his story, saying, ‘I’m telling you what I told them. He always contacted me. Afterwards, I’d send the video clips and the interviews, always to a different email address.’
He didn’t have the addresses. The thugs had taken his tablet and his phone.
Henry asked Eddie if he knew who they worked for. ‘Are you certain they weren’t police?’
Eddie said, ‘I know police. I was part of the Occupy movement when I was a student. I marched against breaking up the health service, privatising universities…It seems foolish now, but at the time we really thought we could change things. I know police. And they weren’t police.’
Chloe said, ‘How did they find you?’
Eddie shrugged, one hairy shoulder bare in his hospital gown.
Henry said, ‘He put some of Fahad’s pictures up for sale on eBay.’
‘They’re mine, fair and square,’ Eddie said.
Chloe said, ‘You bought them off Mr Archer, didn’t you?’
‘Just doing what I do,’ Eddie said. ‘Trying to make a living any way I can.’
‘You beat me on that hustle, Eddie,’ Chloe said. ‘I’ll give you that.’
‘And look where it got me.’ Eddie spat into his cup, looked at Chloe. His eyes were bloodshot, the bruised flesh around them beginning to take on a yellow tint. He said, ‘Be careful out there. What we’ve walked into, it’s some seriously strange shit.’
28. The Worst Thing
Mangala | 30 July
Vic was woken by the scratchy rhythm of his phone’s ringtone and groped for it half asleep, the terrible shadow of a hangover looming at the edge of his consciousness. He couldn’t find the bedside table or the damn phone, wincingly opened his eyes. An unfamiliar bedroom, pink pillowcases and pink sheets and some kind of patchwork quilt, the naked curve of a woman’s back close to him.
It had been his day off yesterday. A Saturday. He’d gone into Junktown and found Dodger, who’d told him that he hadn’t been able to find out much about Danny Drury.
‘From what I heard, he doesn’t represent on the streets. But I did hear that he recently hired some tasty geezers. Former soldiers. Serious muscle. Word is he’s looking to rumble with someone.’
‘With Cal McBride?’
Vic was thinking of Skip’s idea that Drury and McBride were headed for that Elder Culture site in Idunn’s Valley.
‘That was one of the names mentioned.’
Vic gave Dodger another forty and told him to find out who Drury had a beef with, and headed over to his ex’s place to pick up the last of his stuff. Halfway there, he became stuck in an epic traffic jam on the ring road. A juvenile plainswalker had wandered onto the carriageway and there’d been a pile-up when a truck skidding around it had ploughed into half a dozen other vehicles. Vic glimpsed the biochine in the distance, sails semaphoring sunlight as it scampered away, pursued by the round-up crew. Way back, when Petra had been nothing more than huts and tents strung along half a dozen streets bulldozed out of the playa, biochines had wandered all over the place, innocently curious about the new arrivals. These days, they were rarely spotted inside the city limits: they had learned what humans could do, and kept well away.
It took more than an hour to round up the biochine and reopen the ring road. And when Vic arrived at what used to be his home, late and exasperated, his ex, Janet, straight away told him that she had a new boyfriend, and they were getting serious.
‘He’s moving in, actually. So I appreciate you finding the time to come over and take away your things.’
‘Because he was poking about in the back of the garage, taking an inventory of your old paint cans, and got upset, finding my shit?’
‘He’s a lovely man. A surgeon at the hospital, came up just a year ago. You might even like him.’
‘I’m not ready for double dating, but hey, I’m pleased for you. Really. Have he and Poppy hit it off?’
Poppy was Janet’s daughter from her previous marriage. Nine years old, bright, energetic, and possessed of an infallible bullshit detector when it came to grown-ups. And presently – Vic was certain it wasn’t a coincidence – at a friend’s house on a playdate. He still missed her, missed their walks along the rim trails in the hills above the lake. Poppy was a fiend for natural history, loved to take photos of biochines and to collect bugs. Hoppers, mirror flies, army beetles, blinkies, web worms, Goliath grubs, and all the other weird insects that weren’t really insects.
Janet said, ‘She and Aldo get along just fine. How are you doing, Vic?’
‘You know. Making out.’
They were talking in the big kitchen, with its work island surfaced in polished pink marble, the sweep of glass that looked out over the rock garden and the view of the blue expanse of Lake Europa, the reservoir that stored the city’s water. It was a minimalist house, Janet’s previous husband having been an architect. Cantilevered levels of concrete and glass, clean white spaces, carefully selected pieces of imported furniture. Vic had never felt comfortable there. He’d felt exposed in all that light. There’d been no corner he could claim as his own.
Janet was a tall energetic redhead, the owner of a 3D printing company, on the board of the city’s hospital and a founding member of the city’s eighteen-hole golf club. They’d met at a police charity ball, lust at first sight, love a little later. But Janet had always wanted his full attention, had always resented his work, the unpredictability and the long hours, the fact that he was never really off duty. The usual grief. After two years she’d told Vic it wasn’t working, and that was that. She knew what she wanted, knew when to give up on something. He didn’t much like her ruthlessness – as far as he was concerned, it was selfishness masked by pragmatism – but he had to respect her honesty.
She offered him lunch, but he noticed that she kept glancing at her watch and knew from her pinched look that she wanted to be elsewhere, with her new boyfriend or out on the links. So he stuck the plastic crates of his stuff into his car – an old pair of hiking boots, a Kindle loaded with history books, clothes that Janet had bought him, the aftershave and lotions she’d given him as birthday and Christmas presents – and to celebrate this last tick mark in the dissolution of his marriage he tied one on in the Irish pub, drinking until last orders.
He couldn’t recall the woman’s name; he must have picked her up in the pub. Or no, he remembered now, he’d tried to walk back to the municipal apartment building, one in the morning, the sun burning on the glass fronts of office buildings. One of the downsides of thirty-one days of sunlight was coming out of some dim cosy pub or bar long past midnight and being blasted by atomic radiance. As if you were some vampire about to explode into dust. He’d stopped at the diner on the corner of Hope and Esperance, ordered a mac and cheese to settle his stomach, the waitress had just been coming off shift, and here he was.
The phone still doing its thing.
It was in his jacket, strewn with the rest of his clothes on the floor. The caller was Mikkel Madsen, saying, ‘I need you to come in, Vic.’ Refusing to explain what it was about, saying again, ‘Come in. As soon as you can.’
Vic felt a tremor of foreboding pass through the heavy gravity of his hangover, and although there was nothing he wanted more than to collapse back into bed and sleep until noon, he started to gather up his scattered clothing. The woman on the bed – Joni, he remembered, Hi I’m Joni written in ornate red lettering on her name badge, a perky thirtysomething who’d been impressed to meet an actual murder police she’d seen on the local news – rolled over and looked at him through the spill of her hair and said so that was how it was with the resignation of someone this had happened to before.
Vic’s head thumped full of blood when he sat down on the edge of the bed to pull on his trousers; he swallowed a mouthful of saliva. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. And without knowing why he added, ‘I’m really sorry.’
Joni turned out to live in one of the blocks of system-built flats that could be erected inside a week using stacks of components shipped from Earth, everything from framework steels to doorknobs and taps. Vic called a cab but baled out halfway to the UN Building and in a Starbucks threw up in the toilet and drank half a litre of chocolate milk that he immediately regretted. It wasn’t just the usual feeling that he’d been badly beaten and cast onto the deck of a wildly pitching ship: there was also a terrible sense of existential doom, as if he’d become a wretched ghost haunting his own life.
‘I hope you feel as bad as you look,’ Mikkel said, when Vic at last arrived in the squad room. Only a couple of investigators were working on this Sunday morning, both of them looking at Vic and then looking away, deepening his feeling that something truly dreadful was rushing towards him.
He said, ‘The kid fucked up, didn’t he? How bad?’
‘The skipper wants to talk to you,’ Mikkel said, and there she was at the doorway of her office, Captain Lucille Colombier, giving Vic a look of pity and tender concern, and he knew at once it was the worst thing.
29. The Reef
London | 10 July
‘Fahad and his friends knew what they were doing when they chose this place,’ Sandra Hamilton said. ‘Plenty of foot traffic, half a dozen public exit points and an unknown number through shops and workshops…And then there’s the composition of the coral itself, the way it grows. The place is a regular Swiss cheese. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to keep track if things go sideways.’
Henry Harris said, ‘What about other interested parties?’
‘My spotters haven’t seen any sign that anyone else is keeping watch. But I can’t rule anything out,’ Sandra said. ‘The police could have intercepted every message sent to Chloe’s phone. And they’ve had a presence in the Reef ever since people moved in. They’re embedded.’
They were in the back of a sweltering van in the ruined lorry park next to the Reef, studying views of its exterior and interior. One of Sandra’s young men was controlling drones that patrolled the perimeter; two more were keeping watch inside, transmitting images from their spex. Sandra was dressed in her white tracksuit; Henry had changed into cargo shorts and a long green shirt printed with parrots, an attempt to disguise himself as a sightseer.
He looked at Chloe and said, ‘As long as you stick to the plan you’ll be fine. We’ll keep watch and run interference. We’ll have your back at all times. All you have to do is sit tight and wait for Fahad to make contact. If everything works out, we’ll take things from there. If things look as if they’re about to go pear-shaped, I’ll tell you to walk away. And that’s exactly what’ll you’ll do. Walk and don’t look back.’
Sandra said, ‘We have just enough time to go over the script once more.’
‘Let’s just do it,’ Chloe said, but she felt far from ready as she walked towards the looming bulk of the Reef, a fluttering sense of precarious insecurity that reminded her of her first day in big school. She was wearing her spex, transmitting everything she saw to Sandra and her crew, and to Henry, who had gone on ahead of her, had already disappeared into the Reef’s maw.
Its swollen, thundercloud-coloured lobes bulged up five or six storeys high: an early experiment in growing flood defences with construction coral that had run wild and spread halfway across the Thames before the commensal organisms that fabricated it, several hundred types of alien bacterioforms, had been brought under control with hormone sprays developed by one of Ada Morange’s companies. Chloe crossed a kind of apron that had been bulldozed out of a tongue of coral and sealed with a translucent polymer that showed the complex three-dimensional web of stony branches beneath, their purple and indigo shades spreading across her camo jacket. There was a small bus station, a line of tour coaches. Before he’d left the van Henry had put on a name badge: Hi! I’m Henry from Springfield IL. Chloe was hoping that he wouldn’t try to make some kind of move on Fahad, attempt to snatch him.
She passed through the shadows of spiky buttresses, followed a wide passageway illuminated by shafts of sunlight that dropped through the latticework ceiling at irregular intervals. The circular openings to tunnels that led deeper into the Reef loomed ahead. There were entire buildings buried in there, penetrated and invaded and overtopped by the exuberant growth. There were workshops and factories, mazes of passageways, voids, and veins, and the homes of five thousand people. Climate refugees, plain old-fashioned illegal immigrants, and a variety of crews of tribes, biohackers and pirates who wanted to live off-grid in a self-declared semi-autonomous free zone. The authorities generally left them alone because the Reef was one of the places that the Jackaroo claimed to find very interesting, and no one knew how they would respond to an attempt to regulate it or shut it down.
Chloe hadn’t spent much time in the Reef after starting work with Disruption Theory, but the free market was the same as it ever was. It was housed in a small shopping mall that had been flooded by the river and then swallowed by the Reef. The coral’s growth held back the river’s flood now, and pumps kept the mall dry. Its retail units had been excavated and subdivided, and a bustling maze of tiny shops, tattoo and body-mod parlours, cafés, bars and food stalls had colonised the broad walkway and food court. Coral bulged overhead, strung with webs of fairy lights.
Henry’s voice buzzed in the earpiece of Chloe’s spex. ‘I see you. No, don’t look for me. We should assume that the kid and his friends are watching. Find a place to sit. Make yourself comfortable and be prepared for a long wait. These things never run to schedule.’
But Chloe had already seen the person she’d been looking for, turning away from her, walking unhurriedly across her line of sight towards the public toilets. ‘I have to pee – nerves, I guess,’ she told Henry, and switched off her spex and ducked inside the toilets, an egg-shaped space saturated with a hallucinogenic ultraviolet glow.
Gail Ann was standing at the sink, touching up her lipstick. She was dressed in a denim jacket and roomy shorts and big hiking boots. An antique People’s Liberation Army cap was tilted over one eye. Her gaze met Chloe’s in the mirror and she grinned and said, ‘I feel like a spy in a spy film.’
Chloe had made a quick call to her friend when she’d returned to her hotel room to collect her stuff. She said now, ‘This is going to sound insanely inadequate, but thanks for coming.’
‘I’m not going to miss an important chapter in my exclusive. Is it safe to talk?’
‘I’m with some people, but they won’t follow me in here.’ She described Sandra’s young men and Henry’s costume, and said, ‘I’m supposed to talk to Fahad, persuade him to come with me. While I’m doing that, you could try to get close to his friends. They probably know who you are, from the gym. Find out how they know Fahad, what they know about his situation…And you should tell them about me. Answer any questions they ask.’
Gail Ann capped her lipstick and blew a kiss at her reflection. She looked confident and unflappable, up for anything. ‘Make friends. I can do that.’
