The Deepest Cut

by Conor Corderoy

I took that for a ‘no’ and said, “Because it wouldn’t hurt. You’d never know about it. I’m going to shoot you in the kneecaps instead. That hurts.”

  He made a little squeak. One of the girls on the TV was saying “Yes? Yes?” like she was answering the phone. I gave him a moment and thought about the strange mixture of emotions he must be experiencing. I was getting deep like I do sometimes.

  Then I told him, “But I don’t have to. We can do a deal. You tell me what I want to know, and I don’t blow off your kneecaps. You think we can do that?”

  He made a noise that might have been affirmative. I thought he could learn something from the girl on the TV. She had it down pat. She was saying it over and over, no problem.

  I said, “Ask me what I want to know?”

  He said, “Wha…what do you want to know?”

  I smacked him hard across the back of the head and kicked the chair out from under him. It was an office chair on casters and it went spinning across the room then crashed into a filing cabinet. Slob hit the ground hard, covering his face with his arms. I put one knee on his chest and leveled the gun at his face.

  I said, “I’ll ask the questions, motherfucker! You give the answers.”

  He looked at me like I was being unreasonable. He was right. I was.

  I said, “There’s a girl here—petite, pretty, dark. She’s a prisoner. Where is she?”

  His mouth was trembling, so it was hard for him to talk, but he managed, “I don’t see ’em. I don’t know what they look like.”

  My eyes narrowed. I wanted to shoot him right there and then. I said, “Them?”

  He swallowed. He knew he’d said something wrong, but he didn’t know what. He gestured toward where his pal had disappeared a couple of minutes earlier. “In the cells. But I don’t know—”

  “Who would know?”

  He swallowed again. It was something he wasn’t finding easy. “Don?”

  I couldn’t help it. I snarled. “Are you telling me or asking me?”

  His face went gray. He said, “Don.”

  “That the guy who just went down there?”

  He nodded. “He takes care of the…cells.”

  I shook my head. I was having trouble wrapping my head around it. I said, “This is a God damn power station! Why the hell have you got cells?”

  He shrugged with his eyebrows. He didn’t know. He was just the hired help.

  I pointed at the containers. “What’s with them? The containers?”

  He was confused. He hesitated then said, “That’s how they ship them out—in the containers?”

  “The girls?”

  He nodded.

  “Where to?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Honest. I just sit here. I don’t get involved.”

  I stood and pulled him to his feet. I said, “For once in your miserable life, it’s going to pay off for you. Turn around.”

  He turned his back to me and hunched his shoulders. I couldn’t kill a guy that pathetic.

  I said, “For your own sake, when they question you, tell them you never saw me. You were taken by surprise.”

  I put him down and left, along the passage and toward the cells.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I followed the passage for maybe thirty or forty yards. The light got dimmer as I moved along. Soon I came to an iron grill. Beyond it the passage turned right and descended a flight of steps into blackness. There was an iris scanner on the grill. I showed it Superman’s eye and the grill opened.

  The stairs led down through half a spiral. There was no light in the stairwell, but there was a dull glow filtering up from the bottom. I came out at a small antechamber with another grill. On the other side was a wide passage with seven metal doors evenly spaced on each side. I was sure these were the cells. Each of the doors was open. There was no sign of Slob’s buddy.

  I took the Superman’s eye and used it one more time. No one was there. There were two bunks in each, which made a total of twenty-eight girls. I wondered what the hell they were using them for. Genetic experiments were a recurring theme with these people. The thought made me sick.

  I explored each of the cells on the right-hand side in turn. There were empty and half-drank plastic water bottles and fast-food containers were strewn about. By the quantity, I figured they had been there for maybe four or five days. So, if Maria had been here, she would have been the newcomer.

  The left-hand cells told a similar story, until I came to the fourth one. There were the usual water bottles and pot noodles, but one of the pots was unlike the others. I almost missed it, but a slight difference caught my eye and made me look again. The lid had been left on and there was a corner of cloth poking out from under it—the sort of thing you would only notice if you were trying to find something. I picked it up and pulled out the cloth. It was a corner torn from Maria’s blouse—a desperate attempt to send a message on the off chance that I might find this crazy place. I felt a savage twist in my gut that I couldn’t give her hope—let her know I was on her trail.

  At the end, the passage made a T-junction, and from each branch more passages ran off with more cells. There must have been a hundred and forty cells, at least. Maybe there were more and I hadn’t found them. Either way, all the ones I’d found had been unoccupied. It had the feel of a place that was only starting to gear up to some full use in the future. I could still hear Slob in my head, telling me they used the containers to ship the girls out. Where the hell did they send them? And for what? I needed Slob’s pal, but there was no sign of him.

  Until I came to the end of the right-hand branch of the T. There was a grill, which Superman’s eye opened, and a flight of stairs similar to the last, which curved up to the right. I could hear sounds filtering down. Canned laughter. At least it wasn’t porn, unless they’d come up with a new genre that I didn’t know about. Sit-com porn. The possibilities were rich.

  I climbed the stairs slowly, keeping my back to the outside wall and the Smith & Wesson held out in front of me. I got to the top of the stairs without meeting Friend of Slob. There was a landing that turned sharp left. The sound of the TV was loud and the show was recognizable as a repeat. I could hear rapid knocking and a voice saying, “Penny…Penny…Penny…” Laughter.

  I edged around the corner. I was face to face with a wall. The wall was pale-green plastic from the floor to about three or four foot high. Above that, it was glass or Perspex up to the ceiling. There was a normal door on the right, with a normal handle. Through the glass panel I could see Friend of Slob sitting gawping at a TV, like a clone of his pal. He had a dirty plate on the desk by his side, and occasionally, his gawp turned into a loose smile and he laughed along with the canned laughter on the TV, even when what they said wasn’t funny. He was a true child of the Zombie Revolution.

  I kicked in the door. He clambered to his feet and I slammed my fist down into his gut. His eyes bulged and he went “Whoomph!” I slapped him twice back-handed, and, while his ears were ringing, I grabbed him by his synthetic clip-on tie and threw him on his back. I kneeled on his solar plexus and shoved the barrel of the .44 into his mouth.

  I said, “You have heard of Dirty Harry…”

  His eyes went wide.

  “Then you know all about the Smith & Wesson 29. It won’t hurt, but they’ll be picking bits of your skull out of the concrete for months. It will be very upsetting for your mother.”

  A nasty smell made me look down. His pants were slowly turning dark at the crotch. He was going to be very cooperative.

  I smiled at him. “Talk to me. Tell me everything I want to know, and you will live to see the dawn. But you have to promise me you’ll get a real job tomorrow, okay?”

  He nodded and tried to talk around the barrel. It sounded like, “I onging—”

  “Where are the girls?” I removed the barrel.

  He swallowed hard. “They shipped out, about two hours ago. There wasn’t many. Only twenty-eight.”

  “I am look
ing for one girl in particular. She’s not tall. She’s dark, looks Mediterranean.”

  He was nodding. “Yeah, I know the one. She’s different to all the others. I noticed. They always go for the tall blonde ones. But she arrived last minute. She was short, dark, cute—”

  I curled my lip and snarled at him. “Watch your mouth. Where are they being taken?”

  He went pale and started to sweat. “I don’t know. Middle East, North Africa, maybe… They don’t tell us nothing. But the driver…”

  He hesitated and I cocked the piece.

  He gabbled, “Waitwaitwait! When he saw your…the woman you’re after, he said they had plenty of them. They liked the blonde, Western ones.”

  I stared at him. “This is a white slaving operation?”

  He was sweating and shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t know. I don’t fink so, but some of the girls—”

  I cut across him. “License plate of the truck!”

  I saw his eyes flick to the desk. He saw me follow his gaze too late. I stepped over. There was a dispatch form. I shook my head. How crazy were these people? There was the name of the driver, Hassan Marabet. The destination was Port of Dover, the plate was KAO05S. I had a flash of Maria, sitting in a darkened container with twenty-seven other women—cramped, terrified and abused. I turned to Friend of Slob. He was on his knees, staring at me. Suddenly I was filled with hatred, revulsion and a fury I couldn’t control.

  I put my revolver on the desk and stepped away from it. I nodded at it. I said, “Go ahead. Take it.”

  His expression turned a nasty mixture of predatory and crafty. He eyed the gun sideways, swallowed, looked at me then back at the gun. He lunged. He should have got to his feet first. He might have made it—maybe.

  I waited till he had the gun in his hand, till he was actually a threat. Then I stepped over, grabbed his arm with my left, levered the barrel around with my right, and pressed his finger on the trigger. At that range it blew his face off. That was for calling Maria ‘cute.’

  I took the dispatch form. There was a back door to the cabin and I kicked that open, too. I was being stupid. I wanted them to hear me. I wanted them all to come for me. I wanted to punish them for what they had done—what they were doing—to Maria.

  But nobody came. In my bones, I knew they wouldn’t. I was still playing his game. I followed the passage for another few minutes then came to a set of double doors on my right.

  I pushed through and found myself in a large lab. There were no technicians. The rows of benches and the apparatus were all empty and still, except for a bank of eight-foot glass tanks across the wall, maybe forty feet away. There must have been a hundred of them running the length of the room. The glass was tinted green—or the liquid in it was green—but the tanks were transparent and you could see clearly what was inside them. People—mostly women—but there were some men and children, too.

  I felt a sick twist in my gut. I inspected each one carefully, but Maria wasn’t there. I knew they had been left there as a message to me. This was just part of what was in store for her—and for me. They had known I was coming, all right. They didn’t mind me killing a couple of guards. They were expendable and replaceable, but lab technicians, scientists? They were more valuable. There were none of those for me to go primal on.

  I walked out and followed the passage to the end. It led me back to the containers and the long staircase to the top. Nobody stopped me. Nobody intercepted me. I got to the atrium in the reception and walked out of the main door. At the barrier, I left Superman’s eye on his desk in case they wanted to bury him with it.

  I headed toward The Dragon’s Head at a fast trot. I got into the Daemon, fired up the big V12 and burned rubber for Bala, the nearest town big enough to have a public phone box.

  I made it in two minutes and almost killed myself five times on the way. At the entrance to the town, there was a major intersection with a broad patch of lawn and a car park on either side of the main A road. I was going too fast to slow and stop, so I cut across the lawn and the A road and skidded to a halt in the far car park. By the time the Daemon had stopped moving, I was already half out of the door and running. I’d spotted a payphone by the entrance.

  I stuck my card in the slot and dialed Russell. It rang for about twenty years before I heard his voice. It had that pillow sound.

  “Yes…”

  “I have a truck with a container on its way to Dover. It left the station…you understand? The station—”

  His reply sounded peeved, like I thought he was stupid. “I understand the station, yes…”

  “Okay, it left the station about two hours ago. Final destination North Africa or the Middle East. Registration number, KAO05S.”

  I heard him chuckle. “Cute… ‘Chaos’. Our friend is the chairman of the Kallisti Corporation, which owns the controlling share of the station.”

  “Russell, I need—”

  “Don’t talk, we don’t want any trigger words. Just listen. We haven’t long. I take it the virgin is contained, so to speak.”

  Virgin, Mary, Maria… “Yes.”

  “She’ll be met, but they won’t have a tin opener. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reggie’s friends will house a pigeon on the coop.”

  “What?”

  “Think, boy! And Tom will meet you at the docks with a baited glove.”

  “Russell, I have no idea—”

  “I take it you are driving your monstrous machine…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just go. Go to the Dover Docks, Union Street car park off the big roundabout. And make haste, boy. Go!”

  I climbed back into the TVR and barked “Dover Docks!” at the GPS. It blinked at me and told me it was three hundred miles of freeway, what the Brits call ‘motorway’, and would take me five hours and thirty-five minutes. I laughed.

  I filled up at a gas station and hit the highway at a hundred and twenty mph. Then I began to hit the gas. When the Brits decide to make a mean car, they make it mean, and the TVR Daemon is the meanest SOB of a car ever made. It sounds like a Harley on steroids and will do zero to sixty in three seconds. It accelerates like a jump jet, will do two hundred mph without breaking a sweat and it doesn’t give a fuck if your heart can take it or not. It’s mean.

  There was very little traffic at that time of night. I averaged one hundred and eighty miles per hour. Sometimes I hit two hundred. While I drove, I tried to relax and think about what Russell was trying to tell me. A pigeon and a baited glove. He would house a pigeon on the coop and give me the baited glove.

  It came to me suddenly. A homing pigeon. Reggie was placing a homing device on the truck. The baited glove was what the pigeon would return to. The tracker. His guy was going to give me the tracker.

  An hour and fifty minutes after I’d left Bala, I was pulling off the Prince of Wales roundabout and into the Union Street car park at the Dover Docks. I parked, got out of the car and planted my ass on the trunk while I lit up a Camel. The place was floodlit, but there was a feeling of desolation. Occasionally, you could hear the mournful call of a foghorn answered by a confused seagull that didn’t realize it was nighttime. Bill Bryson once said that if you got more than two Brits together, whatever time of day or night, before long, they started laughing. It’s true. But it wasn’t true that night at the Dover Docks. What people I could see were dark shadows in dead, orange light. If they spoke to each other, it was in muted tones. Their footsteps echoed and were lost. Somewhere, it seemed very far away, the sea sighed.

  I blew smoke into the night air. It took on an amber hue for a few seconds then vanished on a cool sea breeze. I saw a dark Range Rover approaching at speed along the viaduct from the Clarence Place. It pulled up next to me and a tall guy with blond hair and the loose, military bearing of a professional killer climbed out. He had a black leather jacket and SAS written all over him. He smiled at me.

  He said, “Harry? I’m Tom. Richard asked me to give
you something.”

  Tom, Dick and Harry. Cute. I gave him my best lopsided smile and said, “Cool.”

  He yanked open the back door and pulled out a kitbag, which he dumped on the back seat of the Daemon. “You’ve got your tracker in there and a few other goodies, courtesy of his nibs. You’re booked on the next ferry to Boulogne. Departs in half an hour.” He glanced unconsciously at his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes. I’ll take you to the VIP departure lounge so you can look at your birthday gifts.” He gave the Daemon the once-over. “Nice motor. V12?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “By the time you get across, Hassan will have six hours head start on you. He has a co-driver and they may do twenty-four hour stretches.” He jerked his head at the hood. “She should allow you to catch up, but don’t get too close. Hassan’s a pro. He’ll spot you. Your brief is to observe and report.” He smiled like he was telling me something real nice. “Try not to kill anyone.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “I’ll do my best, Tom.”

  He smiled a different kind of smile then that made him oddly human. He said, “I know you won’t. I wouldn’t.”

  I followed him back in the Daemon the way he’d come. The ferry was loading and a small, wiry Scots guy that I guessed was one of Tom’s colleagues, grabbed my keys and loaded the car. Meanwhile, Tom took me to the VIP lounge. It was deserted. I guess very important people don’t travel at four in the morning.

  I said, “Can I get a drink?” and dumped the content of the kitbag on a sofa.

  He said, “Sure. Irish is your tipple, isn’t it?”

  I stared at him. The bar was deserted, but he was behind it pouring two generous measures. I said, “Who told you that?”

  He came around and handed me my drink. “We know a lot more than what you like to drink, Murdoch. But I’ll let his nibs explain why when the time is right.”

  I felt suddenly mad. I said, “Maybe I think the time is right now.”

  He held my eye as he sipped. They were mild, like his voice when he spoke, but they were the eyes of a killer. No mistake. “I’m on your side, Murdoch. Don’t take it out on me.” He pointed at the stuff on the couch. “What have you got?”