‘I’m going to get the First Aid,’ decided Fiorinda, abruptly.
‘Please. Got some morphine, allegedly, before they dropped me off, but it’s barely touching this. Uh, please. And could you move that light?’
Ax put out the lamp. Fiorinda darted to the armoire, and came back with the box. In deep shadow, she pressed a diamorphine popper to his white throat, snapped it; and another. Immediately he sighed. ‘Ah, thanks.’ The eerily calm voice became a slurred murmur. ‘Jack Vries is alive and well, knew you’d be thrilled Ax. Can I talk to my dad?’
‘Not now, sweetheart,’ said Fiorinda. ‘Let the drug take you away.’
‘Got to keep still,’ mumbled Sage, ‘Lying down with m’head still, tha’s all, my brat. Better tomorrow, not as bad as it looks, di’n’t mean to scare you.’
They left him, closed in the heavy curtains, and stood, Fiorinda with her hand pressed over her mouth. The room seemed unnaturally bright, blood red hangings, blood red carpet: veined in cruel, barbed sickles of gold.
Ax requested a second interview with Lady Anne, and found her rock-solid. Clearly she resented the Neurobomb agenda, but there’d been a division of the spoils and she was satisfied. She had her captive king to play with. She apologised for the charade of Mr Pender’s ‘disappearence’, and explained to His Majesty that England must have Neurobomb technology, and there was no political will for a partnership with the Welsh, who in any case denied they had access to the Zen Self company’s work at Caer Siddi. Therefore the lost machines must be located—
I’ll bet there’s ‘no political will’ from the Welsh side either, thought Ax. Grasscuts still sting, it hurt to know how England was rated by the other countries of Britain. Slavery, secret police, the labour camps. Bring back the days when we were just crap at any form of competitive sport—
‘Did you know that the Zen Self scanners can’t be used for weapon development?’
Lady Anne inclined her head. ‘I believe all advanced technologies are open to adaptation. Mr Pender may have exaggerated the difficulties, when speaking to Your Majesty, in the light of his religious scruples.’
‘I see.’
How fucking ironic that this self-deluded apparatchik was the one who was supposed to believe, starry-eyed, in magic. He thought of Sage’s information space science, its fabulous diversity. B-loc and Immix. Decoding the 0s and 1s of reality itself. Air for Mars. And Fiorinda, ah, my living goddess… But mostly he thought of the people of England, and the only way he could protect them now. The flag of St George didn’t matter a damn.
He was disoriented, lost, stepping over the edge.
‘In view of developments,’ Lady Anne was saying. ‘Your Majesty may wish me to cancel the Yellow Drawing Room evenings?’
The name of this game is cat and mouse. When brutal pressure fails, you apply sweeteners. Make the prisoners grateful, call a halt to the torture, make them afraid the bad conditions will come back. Lady Anne’s offer was amusing, in a way. But the last thing Ax wanted now was to lose the misery that was Rick’s Place.
‘Certainly not,’ He took out a pack of cigarettes, which he’d snagged from one of the nightclub tables, last week. ‘May I?’ She bridled, but he lit up anyway. One of the attendants (they were not alone this time) scurried with a silver bowl. ‘It was for times like this, great emergencies, that the Rock and Roll Reich was invented. The show must go on.’
He did not know what the hell was happening, outside these walls. Everyone he cared about could have been rounded up and shot. Russia could have declared war on China, and they could both have the Neurobomb. He wasn’t going to ask Lady Anne to enlighten him. He wasn’t going to ask her any more questions at all… He was only in this room because it would have looked fucking strange, if his boyfriend had come back blinded and he didn’t ask to speak to the management.
But he saw the flicker in her eyes, and stored that knowledge.
‘We’ll continue to entertain our guests. It’s the least we can do. Mr Pender, I am sure, will be ready to continue the investigation soon.’
They left Sage sleeping, with the ghost to watch over him, and went for a stroll in the grounds. It was a day of mist, the warmth of late August colliding with a cold front from the sea. The spear-carriers, guards and servants, kept a respectful distance. The Lord and Lady walked to the middle of the smoothly shaven lawns, alone. ‘I know you blamed me,’ said Fiorinda, biting her lip. ‘Because you went away, and he decided to get his liver ripped out fighting a duel with my father. Now you see. You can’t stop him either.’
‘Yeah,’ said Ax, ‘Plus you got yourself hatefully raped, just to save a few lives. I was always disgusted with you about that, too.’
Everything terrible thing they had said to each other was possibly true, but the love was stronger. She laid her forehead against his shoulder, and he held her there, his cheek pressed against her hair. They walked on.
‘I’ve searched the First Aid Help menu. There’s nothing about people who’ve been tortured by having needles stuck behind their eyes, but there’s plenty about eye-socket gadget injuries. We can extrapolate.’
Medical assistance might be offered, but they weren’t going to trust it.
‘Good,’ said Ax.
‘Something else you should probably know,’ she added, head down, thrusting her fists into the pockets of her drab hoodie. The Triumvirate wore dull and shabby old clothes when they weren’t in Rick’s Place, in odd contrast to the shining black and white of their attendants. The paparazzi of Crisis Europe (the paps will always find a way) had pictures of this, and called it a rebel statement. They were wrong. It was simply good taste.
He nodded, without meaning.
‘I’m pregnant.’
Ax stopped walking. He stared at her. ‘Oh God. How…how long?’
‘I’d missed a period just before Sage left. It never happened.’
‘Oh, my God.’ He had not been counting. ‘I didn’t think. It never crossed my… Oh, God, no wonder you’ve been hating me.’
‘Shut up. Anyway, I’ve been necking rot gut vodka regardless, so you can hate me too. You didn’t ask me how I’m sure.’
‘Are you sure? Have you tested?’
‘Are you kidding? Under their eyes? No I fucking have not!’
‘But you’re sure you’re pregnant?’
‘It’s not that I’m so sure,’ she said, staring at the toes of her shoes, left foot, right foot. ‘though I am… It’s like this. In less than two weeks I’m going to miss another period, and I don’t think we kept it locked-down secret before all this happened that I was trying to have a baby. This is a royal prison. You can bet your life somebody’s keeping an eye on the queen’s linen.’
‘Fuck.’
‘Well, anyway, what are we going to do now?’
They were approaching the tank trap. A thin mist shrouded the park. They turned and headed back, before their attendants intervened.
‘I know what we should do,’ said Ax. ‘I’d already decided. We find out if the Scots are real, which I think they are, and sell England to them.’
She thought about it. ‘How do we find out?’
‘Try our luck. Give them the gear.’
Fiorinda watched her shoes for two paces, then she nodded. ‘Yeah. How else?’ She looked up, pale as a candleflame, her stubborn jaw set hard. ‘That sounds to me like a bloody good idea. Let’s do it.’
Ax grinned, with the same fierce satisfaction. Then his face broke up, he blundered, sobbing like a child, into her arms. The guards and servants watched this, a cast of Shakespearian extras, but that was okay. Good King Ax might well be distressed, with the dilemma he was in over his boyfriend.
Phil MacLean’s sympathies were impeccably Celtic, but before Dissolution he’d been one of the former UK’s outspoken radical rockstars, same breed as Ax Preston and the English ‘Few’. He was an ideal “Rick’s Place” regular: vetted and approved by the secret police, and yet a half-way plausible buddy for the T
riumvirate… Sovra Campbell was nothing so vulgar as a rockstar! She was a conservatoire-trained violinist, stooping to conquer the popular music audience with phenomenal success; no political background whatsoever. As agents they made a good team, a typical, awkward, rock-tour line-up partnership: the verisimilitude enhanced by a few colourful scraps between their followers.
Were they really empowered, by the Edinburgh Assembly and the Convocation of Elders, to offer Ax and his lovers a ticket out of jail? Ax believed it. The price was convincingly high, for one thing. No face-saving Act of Union: England as a nation state would disappear, But if Ax said yes, the Scots would retire their current President—an ancient celeb, who agreed to the deal—and take drastic action. They’d looked into it carefully, and believed that a rescue would be legally justified. They had cleared the proposal, secretly, with Dublin, and Cardiff.
This was the pitch Phil and Sovra had been giving Ax, hiding it in plain sight, in elliptical conversations. Ax had been temporising, always coming to the same sticking point. Wallingham’s a fortress, you don’t know the details, what’s your game plan, how are your reivers going to get us out? The Scots had no answer. But they knew Ax did: and they knew that when he was ready, if he was ever ready, he would hand over the means.
It had been easy to talk. It was difficult to commit, very scary: but there was no other way to do it except to do it. The Thursday night after Sage came home, Ax went beyond the point of no return, and the Scots immediately closed with him. A hard choice, but it could have been worse.
Better than falling into the hands of the Irish—
He left the Scots’ table and strolled into the crowd: smiling, doing his job, desperately trying to read through the lies, the ignorance, the baseless gossip. Are you ‘queer for Brussels’, Mr Preston? I am not.
Do you think we should let Belarus go under?
Ooh, it hasn’t come to that, not nearly. You know, I’m just a rockstar, the decisions aren’t made at Wallingham, but—
Women like glittery dolls, men in sleek tailoring, jigged around on that recalcitrant dance floor. The guest bands did their spots. Regulars asked after Sage. ‘A throat infection,’ said Ax. ‘He must have picked it up in London. A singer has to be careful you know. Maybe next week.’ Did they know what had really happened to Aoxomoxoa? That’s the wrong question. They all knew what happened to people who make trouble, and that their favoured rank would be no protection. They’d just forgotten there was ever another way. If you told them it used to be illegal to obtain evidence by torture in this country, they’d wonder what you were on.
Fiorinda went to sit with the Scots; giving her shadows an easy time, because these were safe associates. She was in a teasing mood, dividing her barbs evenly between the raw-porridge-eating, home-spun MacLeans, and the effete cosmopolitan Campbells. Or should that be the raggey-plaided clueless sentimental MacLeans, and the forward-thrusting ruthless, proletarian-crushing Campbells??? It was all in fun, with bursts of laughter that turned heads, and brought a regional tv crew over. The mediafolk were sent packing, with cat calls and showers of austerity twiglets.
You’ve done us to death! Pick on somebody else—!
Fiorinda and the violin diva took a turn around the room together, as if this was the Eighteenth century. They made an arresting couple: the rockstar queen in her timeless party frock, a fine old Kashmiri shawl in brown and gold covering her shoulders. The tall Sikh woman with the long face and strange, light eyes, who bore the name of one of the greatest Highland clans, arrayed in sober high fashion.
They paused to admire the Klimt hangings.
‘We mustn’t touch,’ said Fiorinda. ‘They’re fabulously valuable.’
‘Are they no’ replicas?’
‘Nope, the real thing. As is the Van Dyck over there, and the Delacroix: both hung in here because they are yellow. And people are allowed to smoke all over them. Crazy, isn’t it.’
The two women bent closer. ‘I don’t actually like Klimt,’ confided Fiorinda, absentmindedly lifting the fabric to examine a detail. She dropped it again, grabbing Sovra in pretended alarm. ‘Oops, what a crime. I’ll get us thrown out. I’m such a klutz about the ornaments in this treasure house.’
‘A troubled man,’ agreed Sovra. ‘Maybe no too open in his sexuality,’ she added severely, and calmly transferred a slip of glittering crystal, that had just been pressed onto her bare arm, to a place of greater safety:
eks, not fade away.
George had smuggled the chip into Rick’s Place, early in July. It held the whole instruction set for hacking into Wallingham, plus the barmy army battle plan for the May raid. It had never left the Drawing Room, as there was a good chance it wouldn’t have got through the punitive search and scan the Triumvirate suffered when they were taken back to their rooms. The Klimt hangings were cleaned by ultrasound twice a year, the next date still months away: so they’d been a smart hiding place, keep it simple, always the best.
The Scots would be scanned, but approved guests didn’t get taken apart, and the chip was very small, and practically inert.
This I can do for you, my prince, thought Fiorinda. You have to tear your heart out, but you don’t have to hand it over personally. Now we find out. Maybe she’ll take that straight to Lady Anne… She wondered how it felt to be Sovra, and what would make someone sign up to be a secret agent, hey, you’re a fine musician, be shot for sixpence, it’ll do nothing for your career—
Sovra may have been thinking on the same lines. ‘Are they no’ afraid you three’ll take advantage, mixing freely with all sorts of chancers in here?’
‘The Drawing Room is comprehensively wired,’ said Fiorinda, ‘and protected by ritual magic. And they trust us. What could happen? Even Greg Mursal knows Ax Preston would never betray his country.’
England and Scotland looked at each other with reserved respect. A hell of a bungee jump, sister. And you. Good luck. And you. They returned to the table, because Ax had begun to play. He’d brought down his famous cherry-red Gibson, for the first time in the history of Rick’s Place. He gave them a blistering solo set, a blast of pure and hard electric, nothing green or organic about it. He didn’t give a fuck how they reacted: but the crowd was wowed, smitten, ecstatic. The dip in popularity Ax had suffered, those weeks when his star had faltered, were forgotten. As long as he was locked up in Wallingham, he could do no wrong.
‘That was way cool!’ gasped one of his courtiers, at the end of the recital: pronouncing the ancient jargon with gusto. ‘You are such a pro, Sir!’
‘Yeah,’ said Ax, meeting Fiorinda’s eyes across the smoky dark and the lights, and getting the a-okay. It’s done. ‘That’s me. A real old pro.’
Phil and Sovra’s tour was over. Their last visit to Rick’s Place was the last night they spent in England. The reivers, who’d slipped over the border by ones and twos—augmented discreetly through the summer, as the agents became certain they would close the deal, stayed behind: gone to earth, with their smuggled arms. The operation was handled so there was no marked discrepancy in numbers in the tour party, coming and going: but border control wasn’t tight, for approved festival traffic. Safely delivered in Edinburgh, George’s chip was deciphered, evaluated and passed on to the commanders of the raid, who moved south to join their troops.
Ax and Fiorinda obeyed the White Box’s instructions, and dosed their bodhisattva with diamorphine until he refused it; wanting to stay clear and be with them. He often insisted he was fine, but at night he would cling to them, shaken by fits of deep, helpless trembling. Fiorinda thought that one day he’d tell her what had been going on in his mind, and it would be nightmares featuring Jack Vries as an appalling father, a merciless god. When a tame medic arrived they drove him off: openly angry, outraged and shocked.
Lady Anne felt that Jack Vries’ apology was insupportably delayed, and dreaded the moment when she’d have to approve a renewed interrogation. Since she did not believe in the Neurobomb agenda, she contemplated pois
on, to get rid of the unlucky third once and for all. But it would be difficult. The Lord and Lady refused to allow the servants near Mr Pender, and would give him no medicine except of their own providing.
They’d thought of poison. They were living on Rick’s Place bar snacks.
They spoke to each other with stitched-up mouths, the days passed, they went down to Rick’s Place again. China’s adventures in Central Asia eclipsed the run up to the US election: which held no interest, it was such a sure thing for Fred. A group of rogue neurophysicists in Argentina had been caught trying to build an ‘A’ team, and arrested. A colossal, Stalinist, Russian engineering project, last ditch defence (according to the Russian Feds) against the ‘global-warming ice-age’, had been abandoned, devastated by extreme weather. They heard nothing more about a public announcement that Mr Preston was not a werewolf: that deal seemed to be on hold.
They knew nothing, except that Phil and Sovra seemed to have got away with it, since there’d been no immediate repercussions. Then a couple of stragglers from the Scottish tour turned up at the club on Friday, and passed the message: it’s on.
The raiders hit the Wallingham perimeter around midnight of the seventeenth of September, their arrival by road buried in the traffic spike when the nightclub closed. They were in a strange land, and they’d never attacked a fortress before. But Ax and Sage did plug-and-play battle orders, designed to survive hippie guerrilla idiocy or inspiration: they didn’t know any other way. The first phase of the operation went smoothly. Wallingham’s security software had of course been reviewed after the May debacle, but the codes had been reset not replaced, so change didn’t go very deep. The very expensive package that generated frequently changed, randomised passwords throughout the systems, had not been ditched. The ‘Rick’s Place’ traffic spike was the last genuine information Wallingham’s defenders, human or machine, ever saw.
The perimeter was secure in half an hour. The attack on the house itself began about one thirty am. Entry (all doors and windows were physically locked and barred, as well as being systemically alarmed), was effected through a scullery window; which was simply forced. The indoor troops were getting reports and visuals that looked and sounded perfectly convincing, and showed only a quiet night. They had no idea they had no alarm system, or that the perimeter was lost. They didn’t know anything was wrong, until the Scots were all over them.
Band of Gypsys Page 25