City of Shadows tr-6

by Alex Scarrow

  ‘No,’ cut in Liam. ‘Close to that’s fine for us, so it is.’

  ‘Close to it?’ One of Delbert’s bushy eyebrows rose suspiciously. ‘You actually want the noise, do you?’

  Liam shrugged. ‘It won’t be a problem for us.’

  ‘Hmm…’ Delbert stroked his bottom lip, both bushy brows lowered, almost a scowl. ‘You gonna tell me what yer business is?’

  ‘It’s private,’ said Liam.

  ‘ Private covers a multitude of sins, lad. I may not be entirely above the board here, but there’s some things I won’t be a party to. You understand what I’m sayin’?’

  Liam figured he might have to feed the man a titbit of information. Just enough to satisfy his beady-eyed curiosity.

  ‘Science experiments.’ He nodded at Rashim. ‘Dr Anwar here is something of a… a scientist.’

  ‘Science, is it?’ That seemed to appeal to Delbert. ‘What are yer… some sort of inventor?’

  ‘I… err…’ He looked at Liam. Liam nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose. Yes, an inventor.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Herbert. ‘Might I ask what kind of things you invent?’ He looked eager. ‘See, I also have quite an interest in the sciences, sir.’

  ‘Not now, Bertie!’ Delbert sat back in his chair and wiped his hands and finished his mouthful of cheese as he gave his visitors some silent consideration.

  ‘All right, then. I’ll show you what I got. Then you and me, lad… we’re gonna need to talk about the money.’

  Delbert got up, reached for the lamp’s brass handle, lifted it off the table and waved for them to follow him. He led them down through a tight squeeze between packing crates, along a narrow tunnel, low enough that Bob had to stoop down to enter it.

  They turned a corner to see by the dim glow of Delbert’s lamp an archway almost as large as Delbert’s main one. Along the left-hand wall were a few stacks of goods. Along the wall opposite were three evenly spaced alcoves.

  ‘The one on the left leads directly out on to Farringdon Street. I don’t use it myself, but I got keys to it. You can use that access, just so long as you’re mindful to lock it secure at night. That way you don’t need to be disturbing my business all the time. The middle one’s a small storage room. I don’t use it. The right one is the one you can have.’

  He walked over towards that alcove. It receded further along than it first appeared to. Ten feet, a low, narrow tunnel. At the end a small arched oak door with a thick padlock on it. Delbert fumbled in his trouser pocket and pulled out a jangling keyring.

  ‘I’ll give you this key, of course,’ he said as he picked out the keyhole and inserted the key.

  ‘That is the only copy of the key?’ asked Rashim.

  Delbert made a face. ‘Of course! Of course!’

  The lock clanked loudly and the thick door creaked inwards. Liam heard it almost immediately — the muted sound of something not so far away throbbing deeply. He glanced at Rashim who smiled back approvingly.

  The generator’s close by. Perfect.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Delbert, stepping inside. He raised the lamp in his hand and shadows danced around the empty space as they filed in behind him. Above the throb — more of a vibration sensed through the brick walls and the floor than it was a sound — they heard the faint squeak of rats scuttling for the safety of a dark corner.

  The girls will just love the idea of that.

  ‘I don’t believe yer goin’ to get any more private a place than this, gents!’ Delbert’s voice rang off the bricks, an almost endless echo that seemed to take an eternity to finally fade to nothing. He picked up a thick candle sitting on the floor amid its own solid nest of melted wax and lit it.

  With the extra flickering light, Liam took in more details of their surroundings. It was about a third smaller than their archway under the Williamsburg Bridge. And no other rooms off this space. This was it. A rectangle of stone-slab floor, about twelve yards by six, encased by a low curving ceiling of bricks. Almost a dungeon… if you let yourself think about it that way. Or like a large cabin aboard some vessel. Liam suspected that the ever-present pulsing throb would eventually be no more a distraction after a while than the engine of an ocean liner.

  ‘This would be an appropriate location,’ rumbled Bob finally.

  And we can make it like home, can’t we?

  The other place had been just as spartan and grim as this. But they’d managed to make it comfortable. Make it theirs.

  ‘All right, Mr Hook,’ said Liam. ‘I think you have yourself some tenants.’

  Delbert slapped him amicably on the back. ‘Oh, come now, to hell with this Mister Hook nonsense! Call me Hooky, or Del if you want, young man.’

  He turned to face Liam with a mock-serious glint in his eye. ‘But not Delboy. Right? I draw the line at that!’ He flexed his neck and tugged down on his waistcoat, a subconscious tic of his, so it seemed. ‘The last cheeky plonker called me that ended up with a big fat lip. Didn’t he, Bertie?’

  ‘Uh… it’s Herbert actually.’

  Delbert sighed. ‘Now, boy, let’s not show off in front of the clients. Right, then! Let’s go and discuss the rent, gentlemen!’

  He led Liam and Bob out of the room. Rashim remained behind, taking in the space a moment longer.

  ‘You’re really an inventor, sir?’ asked Bertie.

  Rashim shrugged. ‘More a quantum technician really.’

  The young man didn’t understand the term, but seemed impressed with it all the same. ‘Well, that sounds jolly exciting, sir.’ He offered his hand to Rashim. ‘I do hope we shall have a chance to talk some time. I’ve got some ideas I’d love to share with you, if you’d care to…?’

  ‘Uh? Oh… sure, Bertie.’ Rashim shook his hand. ‘Yes, we’ll talk some time.’

  ‘Pft! You know, Dr Anwar, I hate it when Delbert introduces me with that damnable nickname. It’s only him that calls me Bertie. No one else!’

  Rashim snuffed the candle out and stepped back out of the room to follow the others before the receding light of the gas lamp dwindled to nothing and they were left in the pitch-black darkness.

  ‘Herbert,’ the young man called out after Rashim. ‘My name’s actually Herbert.’ But Rashim wasn’t listening; he was trying to catch up with the dwindling lamp light.

  The young man was alone in the gloom, the skittering of emboldened rats emerging now it was almost wholly dark again. ‘I was jolly well christened Herbert George Wells! Not bloomin’ Bertie.’

  But Rashim had turned a corner and was gone.

  Chapter 46

  7 October 2001, Harcourt, Ohio

  Sheriff Marge McDormand cradled the mug of green tea in both hands as she stared at the computer screen in front of her.

  ‘Hell of a crazy world,’ she muttered to herself.

  ‘What’s that, Marge?’

  ‘Nothing, Jerry,’ she replied. She looked past the computer at her husband, sitting in the desk opposite hers. ‘And it’s “Sheriff” during office hours, my dear.’

  Jerry pulled a biro out of his mouth and sighed. ‘It’s not enough I’m your office boy?’

  ‘The term is “Deputy”, hon… and that’s only until we can find someone else to stand in.’ She smiled at him. ‘I’m sure we’ll find someone soon. Then you can go back to being a kept man.’

  She looked back at the screen. Quiet day in Harcourt. She’d done her rounds this morning. Nothing much to write up. A stolen car dumped outside Gary’s Bar. No harm done to it other than the driver’s-side window forced and the steering column’s plastic hood broken to jack the ignition. That and giving Henry Learry — the town drunk — a lift in the squad car back home to his anxious wife. Marge had found him fast asleep behind the wheel of his truck after a night binge-drinking, still way too soaked to be trusted to drive the thing home safely.

  Those were the sort of things that Marge dealt with day to day. The occasional problem with kids breaking into and messing around in the abandoned factories,
the occasional domestic dispute, the occasional kitty stuck up a tree. That was it. Police work in Harcourt.

  Suited her. She was far too old to be dealing with real crime. She carried a firearm on her hip, but in five years as sheriff here she’d yet to unpop the leather flap of her holster in the course of doing her job.

  Which was just fine.

  The morning’s breakfast round had ended up as it always did at the diner where she’d got into the habit of picking up a take-out coffee and doughnut for Jerry and a green tea for herself. The Williams girl, Kaydee-Lee, usually served her and kept her there talking about everything and nothing for five minutes longer than it took to serve up the order.

  That poor young girl’s so lonely.

  Marge wondered why on earth she stayed in Harcourt. This place was a town with a past, not a future: a glorified departure lounge for an ageing population that seemed to shrink by a couple of dozen every harsh winter.

  This morning, though, Kaydee-Lee had had some company. A disarmingly pleasant young man with an interesting accent and charmingly old-fashioned manners. For some reason Marge thought he was Canadian until she got back in the car and placed his accent. Irish. The pair of them seemed to be getting on like old buddies. Thick as thieves.

  That girl needed someone in her lonely life. And the young man seemed to be a nice enough find.

  Good for you, girl.

  Marge sipped her tea and returned to her routine of grazing through news websites and the state police intranet pages. The world really seemed to have gone quite mad in the wake of that terror attack in New York. The President was busy banging a drum for the whole world to go to war with Iraq for some reason. Even though there was evidence surfacing that the terrorists had mostly come from Saudi Arabia.

  Go figure.

  And what about those guys in Afghanistan? What were they called? Tally-something? Jerry kept calling them the Telly — Tallies. Like those children’s characters on TV. Weren’t they more likely involved in attacking the Twin Towers than this Saddam Hussein fellow over in Iraq?

  Marge shook her head. Americans were quite rightly angry. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers were grieving for loved ones right now, but now was surely not the best of times to be making big decisions like who to go to war with.

  The boys want a war. She sighed again. And they’ll get their war sure enough.

  She clicked to close the MSNBC news page and then pulled up the state police bulletin page. It featured the usual day-to-day bumph, plus the now obligatory daily notices on the current terror threat level. Today it was, as it was yesterday and the day before: RED — SEVERE. Beside the colour-coded alert was a reminder for all law-enforcement personnel to be vigilant for ‘suspicious activities and persons’.

  Marge was always alert for suspicious activities and persons. It was — well duh, excu-u-use me — her job anyway! She found the notice vaguely patronizing. It would be like telling young Kaydee-Lee to make a special effort not to pour scalding coffee over the head of the next customer she served.

  Grating her teeth, she dutifully scanned the rest of the page then hit the link to the FBI’s ViCAP site. The Bureau were featuring front and centre a rogues’ gallery of Most Wanteds. Two dozen mugshots, a fair number of them dark-skinned and sporting dark Santa Claus beards large enough to lose a small dog in.

  ‘Nope,’ she muttered, ‘not seen any of you types skulking around here in Harcourt… nor you… nor you, Mr Osama bin Laden, nor you, Mr Manuel Caraccus.’ She clicked on the link for the second page of the gallery.

  ‘Nor…’ And stopped mid-mutter. She was looking at a face she’d seen just ten minutes ago.

  Jerry heard her suck in her breath. He looked up from the paperwork on his desk. ‘Given yourself another paper cut, Marge?’ He noticed her wide eyes, her glasses reflecting the pale glow of the computer screen, the styrofoam cup held midway between the desk and her mouth, which now hung open, not making a sound — a rare event in itself.

  ‘You OK over there, Marge?’

  Chapter 47

  7 October 2001, Green Acres Elementary School, Harcourt, Ohio

  ‘Looks like you’re going to have to dig through some walls by the look of this.’ Maddy clicked on the screen and zoomed in on a portion of the blueprint.

  Rashim nodded. ‘It appears as if they left space between these walls for cabling to run from the generator room up to the lights on the top. And over here.’ He pointed on the screen. ‘Cabling that leads out to an external distribution node.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I guess they planned to have the generator as a part of the viaduct from the very beginning. Fascinating.’

  Rashim reached for the mouse. Fingers touched. And recoiled. An awkward half a second.

  ‘All yours,’ Maddy said a little too quickly.

  He dragged the pixellated image of the blueprint across the screen. ‘Hmm, it would be a lot easier knocking through to the generator room itself. Only two walls between our archway and that big steam engine in there.’

  ‘But would you really want to do that? Bust right in there? There’s probably “steam engine” engineers or whatever you call them in there. Coal-shovellers and stuff. We’ve got to be ultra-discreet about this.’

  ‘Indeed. Yes… so maybe then, we’ll have to tap the cabling somewhere along this conduit. It’s a lot more work.’ He leaned forward. ‘And I imagine a bit of a squeeze, shuffling along inside that space between the walls.’ He squinted and muttered a curse in Farsi. ‘I wish this image was at a higher resolution.’

  ‘Best I could get.’ She shrugged. ‘In fact, it was the only blueprint image I could find.’ She’d spent a good part of yesterday back at the Internet cafe in the retail park. She’d found an architectural website with an archive of Victorian-era building projects. The Holborn Viaduct was hardly the grandest of London projects, but historically notable because of its incorporation of the city’s first electric generator.

  ‘It looks fiddly… but it is discreet, Rashim, and that’s the important thing. If we’re going to start leeching on their power, we’ve got to make it so that, if they work out the generator’s not delivering the power it’s designed to deliver, it’s got to be almost impossible for them to figure out where the power is leaking away to. The only way they’ll figure out what’s going on is if they decide to track the course of the cables. Thing is, if we tap the output cautiously — little and often — it’ll never be enough of a drain for them to consider stopping the engine and overhauling everything to figure it out.’

  ‘Hopefully.’

  She made a face. ‘Hopefully.’

  ‘Hey! You all right there, Sal?’

  She looked up. Liam was crossing the cracked and weed-speckled playground. He casually kicked his way through a pile of dead leaves, this year’s fall from the maple trees lined up beside what was once the school bus drop-off point. The leaves rustled and skittered across the tarmac, caught by a fresh breeze.

  Early October, it was getting cold now. The clouds above were promising snow, not rain. Sal shivered inside her parka, puffing a cloud of vapour out in front of her. Liam joined her on the swing. Sat on the plastic strap-seat next to her. The rusting frame creaked as they both swung gently, idly.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Jay-zus!’ He rubbed his hands together vigorously. ‘It’s cold out here! You should come in.’

  ‘I’m in all the time. I came out to get some fresh air.’

  ‘Aye…’tis a bit smelly inside, so it is.’

  Both Bob and Becks were eating the same convenience meals as them. However, their body chemistry preferred high-protein, low-fat foods. And preferably blended to a baby mush. But tins of refried beans in New Orleans sauce, Uncle YangYang Kettle Noodles and pop tarts had to suffice as their source of nutrition. It just meant they farted constantly. Particularly Bob. He was like some flea-bitten, wiry old mongrel dog letting them off one after the other without any sense of embarrassment. Seemingly without a care in the world.


  ‘Why do you do that?’ she asked presently.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Talk like you do. The whole Irish thing. You’re not even Irish.’

  ‘Hey! Jayz-… I just…’ His mouth flapped for a moment then shut with a coconut clop. He looked hurt. Sal winced. That had come out sounding all wrong and she felt guilty.

  ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be rude, Liam. I just think it all sounds… I dunno, fake now.’

  He swung in silence. The frame creaked.

  ‘I’ve stopped using those Indian words. I don’t think I even knew what they meant. I’m not even sure if they were real Hindi words.’ She still had the sing-song Indian accent, though. She’d even started consciously trying to lose that. If it wasn’t real, if it was some technician’s idea of how an Indian girl from 2026 ought to sound… then she was damned if she was going to follow his programming.

  ‘I talk this way, Sal… because it’s the only way I know how to talk.’

  ‘It’s just code, Liam. It’s code. Worse than that… the Irish thing? It’s a cheesy cliche.’

  ‘It’s who I am.’ He shrugged. ‘Even if that does make me a — whatcha-call-it? — a cliche.’

  She looked at him. ‘How can you do that, though? Go on just like before, like nothing’s happened?’

  He managed a wry smile. ‘Why not? Nothing about me has changed at all, so. I’m exactly the same person I was.’

  ‘But how can you be the same person now you know what you are? Everything — everything — planted in our minds before we woke up… none of it ever happened! It’s nothing! God… I mean, maybe we’ve got chips in our heads just like Bob and Becks. Have you considered that?’

  ‘Aye. But it doesn’t worry me any.’

  ‘How can it not?’

  He shrugged. ‘Anyway, Maddy reckons we’re not the same as them. Our minds aren’t computers but proper human minds. That’s why we had to believe we were human. So we’d act like humans. Think like humans.’