“How many?”
“Six. No, seven. Guns drawn.”
“Not a problem.”
“It is for me. I’m not getting involved in a shootout.”
“Then don’t. I’ll deal with them.”
“Will you kill them?”
“If they’re shooting at me, then it’ll be hard not to. If my life is in peril, their lives are forfeit. It’s only fair.”
“Then I’m glad I checked beforehand,” said Redlaw. “There’s another way out. Come on.”
They climbed to the second floor and passed through an open-plan section. On any other night there would have been a score of officers here in their cubicles, taking calls, gathering intelligence on reported rogue sightings. As it was, the place was deserted. On every terminal the standard screensaver, a SHADE logo, glided to and fro like a skater on a rink. Phones chirruped once, twice, and went to voicemail.
There was a back room—a coffee lounge with a couple of vending machines and a handful of not quite comfortable plastic chairs. French windows opened out onto a smokers’ balcony situated on top of a one-storey extension. It overlooked a parking area shared with one of the neighbouring office buildings, the London branch of a Middle Eastern commercial bank. Vehicle access was obtained via a side-street.
“There’s our escape route,” Redlaw said, pointing to the large barred gate on the far side of the car park. “Think you can manage the jump down to ground level?”
“Never mind me. Think you can?”
Probably not, thought Redlaw. Not with my knees. But he straddled the safety railing anyway, giving the drop on the other side a wary glance. It was nigh on twenty feet.
Blam!
The pane of one of the French windows disintegrated, shards of glass pouring down in an avalanche. Out through the empty frame stepped Heffernan, holding his Cindermaker in a double-handed grip.
“Now that I have your attention,” he said, “that’s far enough, the pair of you. Redlaw, get back up on the balcony. You, woman—don’t know your name—keep your hands where I can see them and don’t move.”
“You didn’t hear him coming?” Redlaw said irritably out of the side of his mouth as he clambered back over the railing.
“He moves quietly for such a big blighter,” Illyria answered.
“Well, well, well. Making a break for the border, eh, Redlaw?” Heffernan’s cheek was stippled with surgical strips. “Not any longer. Give up your gun. Again.”
“May I?” said Illyria.
“Go ahead,” said Redlaw. “Be my guest. Non-lethal still—but you don’t have to go so easy on this one.”
“Less muttering, more surrendering.” Heffernan gestured with the Cindermaker. “I’m not mad keen on the idea of using this on people, so don’t make me do something I don’t—Whuff!”
Illyria punched him in the gut, driving the air from his lungs. She had crossed from Redlaw’s side to Heffernan’s, a distance of five metres, in a fraction of a second.
“Nnghh!”
She rammed an elbow down onto his trapezius, forcing him to his knees like a hammer pounding in a nail.
“Uggkk!”
She chopped him across the back of the neck, and Heffernan toppled headlong onto the balcony’s all-weather tiles as though every muscle in his body had suddenly turned to rubber. He lay there, head twitching spasmodically, mouth working like a goldfish’s.
Illyria nudged his Cindermaker away from his limp hand with her toe. “Although I doubt he’ll be holding it again any time soon.”
“What have you done to him?” said Redlaw. “I heard a bone snap.”
“Second cervical vertebra. It’s called the hangman’s fracture.”
“Is he paralysed?”
“Probably. But it’s not as permanent as it once was. Modern medicine can perform miracles. What? What’s that look for? You said not to go easy on him, and he was threatening us with a gun...”
Redlaw bent down beside Heffernan, who was making a guttural, terrified moaning sound. “We can’t leave him here like this.”
“I can. More shadies are coming. They’ve heard the gunshot. I’m not hanging around to let them take pot shots at me.” So saying, she vaulted nimbly over the railing as though it was nothing more than a fence between two fields and vanished down the other side.
Redlaw was torn. Self-preservation wouldn’t let him stay. His conscience wouldn’t let him leave.
SHADE officers appeared at the entrance to the coffee lounge, taking cover behind the doorway, guns out.
“This man is badly hurt,” Redlaw called out. “Make sure he’s immobilised and taken to hospital immediately.”
Then he straddled the railing once more and surveyed the landing zone. His best bet was the bonnet of a BMW 3-series cabriolet—some banker must be working late; no shady could afford such a car—stationed just below. He launched himself off the balcony, hitting the bonnet feet first with a resounding boom, and the BMW’s alarm started to warble. He slithered out of the deep dent his impact had created and raced to catch up with Illyria, who was already halfway across the car park.
Shouts from the balcony were swiftly followed by volleys of bullets. Redlaw zigged and zagged between cars, hunching low. The windscreen of a Rover shattered to smithereens just beside his elbow. A new-model Mini Cooper lost a wing mirror as he sped past.
Illyria was at the gate. It was a solidly made thing, several hundredweight of steel, which rolled across the entranceway on a track and was operated by a keycard. She braced one foot against the outer pillar and hauled backward on the bars. The gate squealed, screeched and shuddered as gradually, inch by inch, she heaved it open. Her body trembled with the strain. Her lips drew back from her fangs in a grimace. Bullets, meanwhile, zinged and whined around her.
At last she had made a wide enough gap. “Through!” she exhorted Redlaw. “Get through!”
Redlaw squeezed through, and Illyria followed him. They sprinted down the side-street to the junction at the end. The right turn led back towards SHADE HQ, so Redlaw chose the left, then cut through a cobbled mews to a parallel road. Traffic was almost nonexistent and they had the pavement entirely to themselves. Their footfalls resounded between the buildings. They ran and kept running, past glaringly lit display windows, until Redlaw was so winded he could scarcely catch a breath. Only when they halted, taking refuge in a bus shelter so that he could recover, did he realise that he was holding hands with Illyria. For the last few hundred metres she had been dragging him along.
He stared at their linked hands, then at her face, then at their hands again.
Illyria got the hint and let go.
“We needed to go faster,” she said. “Well, you did.”
“Sorry I... was slowing... you down,” Redlaw replied, panting. His shoulder was on fire again, thanks to Illyria tugging so hard on his arm.
“Don’t assume we’re girlfriend and boyfriend now, just because we’ve held hands. I won’t tell any of the other children at school if you won’t.”
“Ha... ha.”
“I think your Commodore Macarthur might be a tad jealous of me, though, if she knew.”
Redlaw scowled in puzzlement.
“You heard how she was talking,” said Illyria. “It was like I was stealing a husband from her.”
“Husband?” He started to chuckle mirthlessly. It ended up as uncontrollable wheezing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Macarthur’s hardly the marrying kind,” he gasped out.
“She prefers women?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she has a preference at all. The job is her wife, husband, whichever. As it is for most of us.”
“Was, you mean. For you.”
“Oh, yes,” said Redlaw, remembering. He was exiled from SHADE, like Adam from Eden. Forever. “Damn. Yes. Was.”
“She really didn’t want to lose you. I could see it in her eyes.”
“Nevertheless, she has. SHADE has. For better o
r worse, I’m freelance now. My own boss.”
“And what’s your first instruction to yourself, as your new boss?”
The bus shelter had a scroller billboard that cycled through three different posters, with a soft mechanical hum: one for toothpaste, one for face cream, then one for Vamp-B-Gone, a garlic-based repellent spray. This came in a canister small enough to fit in a pocket or handbag but was strong enough, if the strap-line was to be believed, to Stop The Undead Dead In Their Tracks.
“I don’t know,” Redlaw admitted. “I’m stymied. I need time to think.”
“You know what I used to do in Albania, during the Communist regime, when I needed to think?”
“I’m all ears.”
“Caught a bus. Sounds silly, I realise, but you must understand, under that jumped-up little tinsmith Xoxe and then later under Enver Hoxha, there wasn’t much freedom. Postwar, the country was rebuilt with Soviet Russian money and everything seemed good for a while, but Hoxha cut us off from the rest of the world and naturally the infrastructure went to pot. The buses were terrible. You were never quite sure where you were going or if you would even get there. That was part of their attraction for me—the randomness, the uncertainty. The state rigidly controlled every aspect of daily life, but the buses were a law unto themselves. You could rely on them only to be unreliable.
“So I’d board one and ride along and wait to find out where it ended up, and in the meantime I’d feel as though, for once, nobody was spying on me and I could allow my guard to drop and my mind to wander. An illusion of independence, perhaps, but it helped. And if the bus broke down—and they often would—I’d step out, and chances were I’d be somewhere unfamiliar, a district of Tirana I’d never visited before, say, or on the shores of the Adriatic, or near one of the huge black lakes, Shkodër or Ohrid. And if a Sigurimi, a secret policeman, should come up and demand to know why I was there, looking out of place, I’d simply say, ‘The buses,’ and he would nod in understanding and say back, ‘Ah yes, the buses.’
“It was on one of those trips that I...” She stopped, reflecting.
“Was turned? Became ‘shtrigafied’?”
“Yes. But that’s a story for another day. Unless...?”
He didn’t take the bait. “So you reckon we should catch the next bus that comes along. That would be the answer.”
“It beats just sitting here, and who knows where it might lead? At the very least, it’ll give us some breathing space.”
As luck would have it, a night bus was approaching. Redlaw would probably have let it go by, rejecting Illyria’s suggestion out of sheer perversity. But then he spied a SHADE patrol car some way off up the road, prowling towards them from the opposite direction. That decided it for him. He stuck out a hand and hailed the bus. It pulled up with a loud hissing and huffing, as though grumbling at the delay, and the doors flattened open. Redlaw flashed his SHADE badge at the driver.
“For her and me.”
The driver had no way of knowing how meaningless the badge was. She jerked a thumb at the empty bus.
“Make yourselves at home, luv. If you can find a seat.” She chuckled.
The SHADE car drove up on the other side, and Redlaw ducked his head. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the car slowed somewhat. When he looked up again, however, it had carried on past and was going its merry way.
“Hold tight, please,” the driver called out.
Redlaw and Illyria climbed up to the top deck as the bus lurch-lumbered off along the road.
CHAPTER TWENTY
For all that it had been hastily arranged, the transportation programme—dubbed Operation Moonlight Flit—ran pretty smoothly. Two and a half thousand infantrymen were deployed to marshal the Sunless onto coaches, which then drove convoys up the M1, leaving the motorway just past the junction with the M25 orbital and heading off into the wilds of Hertfordshire. On each coach were a dozen soldiers and half as many shadies, and two dozen Sunless, who sat bewildered and for the most part passive, having no clear idea what was going on. All they knew was that people armed with guns, grenades and religious totems had rounded them up and were taking them somewhere else, somewhere new. They accepted this with equanimity, mainly because there didn’t appear to be an alternative.
Of course things didn’t go off without the odd hitch. Vampires at the Hounslow SRA took fright and resisted being herded towards the coaches. There were scuffles, gunfire, and casualties on both sides, before calm was eventually restored. At Stoke Newington, an over-the-fence breakout had to be curtailed by SHADE officers. At Kilburn, a nervous young private in the Royal Anglian Regiment got an itchy trigger finger and accidentally shot a Sunless with a Fraxinus round. The dusting caused what had up to that moment been an orderly procedure to dissolve into pandemonium.
On the whole, however, Operation Moonlight Flit could be deemed a success. Vampires were offloaded at Solarville One and filed through the entrance in a long queue. Once inside, they fanned out and started exploring the bounds of their new, permanent home.
While the transportations were getting under way, a movement of another kind took shape.
Throughout the day the committee of the People for the Ethical Treatment of the Sunless had been busy sending out mass emails and texts, as well using social networking sites, putting together a protest rally which would march on Parliament. The Solarville project was clearly prejudicial to Sunless, the equivalent of sweeping them under the carpet, and PETS wanted to make its outrage seen and heard.
Various vaguely likeminded groups got wind of the PETS plan and decided to throw their weight behind it. Anarchists, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists and both equal opportunities and animal welfare activists all came to the conclusion that the plight of vampires was an issue for them too, and invited themselves along on the march. PETS had been expecting perhaps a couple of hundred souls to turn up at the assembly point in Green Park, and so they did, resplendent in their blackest outerwear and purplest undergarments. However, an additional thousand gatecrashers also turned up, all toting placards declaring their opposition to heavy-handed government and planet-plundering multinationals, although a few of them had the courtesy to coin slogans that had at least a tangential relevance to the matter at hand: Sunless Are An Oppressed Minority, Today Vampires—Tomorrow Jews/Blacks/Gays/Roma, Who Are The Real Bloodsuckers? and so on.
Unfortunately, the Stokers also got wind of the rally and mounted a counter rally, a show of support for the Prime Minister’s decision to put more than just a fence between vamps and the human population. By spreading the word at pubs, clubs, transport cafés and building sites they managed to drum up a decent turnout of six hundred or so. That included a number of hangers-on who had no strong feelings either way about the Sunless situation but fancied the prospect of a bit of a scrap with some leftie, pro-vamp whingers. They gathered on the other side of the river at Jubilee Gardens, beneath the skeletal gaze of the London Eye.
The PETS protestors set off along the Mall to Trafalgar Square and southward from there down Whitehall. At the head of the procession, six of them carried a coffin, on the side of which was daubed the word SUNLESS RIGHTS in blood-drippy red paint.
At roughly the same time, the Stokers and their sympathisers started trooping down the South Bank and across Westminster Bridge in an unruly rabble. While the PETS ringleaders initiated call-and-response chants through megaphones, the Stokers bandied obscenities, sang football terrace songs and tossed empty lager cans into the gutter. The PETS people waved their placards and banners, the Stokers baseball bats and crowbars.
Both groups were converging on Parliament Square.
Shortly after 10pm, Nathaniel Lambourne got a call on his iPhone from Giles Slocock.
He let the call go to voicemail. He did the same with a second call, a minute later. With the third, he picked up and barked, “What the hell is this? What do you want? I’m in a meeting here.”
Which he was. In his study at home he was teleconferencin
g with the two other members of his Solarville consortium, in Boston, and in Tokyo. 10pm was the sweet-spot hour at which all three could communicate simultaneously without it being ridiculously early in the morning or ridiculously late at night for any of them.
“It won’t be on the news yet,” Slocock said. “I thought you should hear about it as soon as possible, from the horse’s mouth.”
“Hear about what?” snapped Lambourne. “Your speech sounds slurred. Have you been drinking, Giles?”
“No. Well, yes. A bit.”
“I expect your nose isn’t any too clean, either.”
“So frigging what? Listen, just listen...”
Lambourne made an apologetic gesture to the two screens in front of him. “Gentlemen, bear with me a moment. This is something I have to deal with. Shouldn’t take too long.”
The man in Boston with the blond blow-dried hair skewed his mouth impatiently, and the man in Tokyo gave a curt bow that was in its way no less indicative of irritation. Both were plutocrats in the same league as Lambourne, both breathing the same rarefied financial air. Each had more money than he could spend in several lifetimes and each took very personally anything that inconvenienced him or did not go precisely according to plan. That they were willing to let Lambourne call a hiatus to the meeting at all was testimony to the fact that he was one of the few people they regarded as an equal. From a lesser being, anyone outside their circle of a hundred or so peers, it would have been an unpardonable insult.
Lambourne took his iPhone onto the verandah outside the study, away from the webcam. The night air was cool, with threads of mist weaving across the lawn. Something rustled beneath the rhododendron bushes just across from the swimming pool, most likely a hedgehog rooting through the undergrowth for beetles and grubs. A fox barked distantly and forlornly in the woods.
“Make this quick,” he said to Slocock. “You’d better have a damn good—”
“Wax,” said Slocock. “Wax is dead.”
“Come again?”
“Maurice Wax. It’s all over Parliament. No one’s talking about anything else. He didn’t turn up for tonight’s session. Wasn’t answering the phone. Someone was sent round to his flat in Pimlico, one of his staff, some graduate intern, to find out what had become of him. Knocked. No reply. Couldn’t get in. The landlord had a master key...”
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