Faust Amongst Equals Tom Holt
Page 12
Lundqvist froze in the doorway.
That statement is rather ambiguous. Since it was something like ninety in the shade, and there was enough moisture gathering in the armpits of his shirt to hold a tall ships race on, Lundqvist was by no means frozen. He was, rather, still.
Inside the big shed thing (Lundqvist was a bit vague about the proper names of agricultural buildings) a girl was counting sheep.
`Seventy-six, seventy-seven, seventy-eight, seventy-nine - come on, Hilda, up you get - eighty...'
The shear-your-own idea, Helen admitted to herself, hadn't been the tearaway spectacular success she'd hoped for. In the back of her mind, she had the notion that you needed just a bit more passing trade for a venture of that kind, and perhaps she should have realised that earlier. Still, no use crying over spilt milk (Danny Bennett would have disputed that remark, and it's as well he wasn't on hand to do so); what she did have on the credit side of the ledger was many, many sheep, and it surely wasn't beyond the wit of man to find some way of exploiting the resource.
She paused, hands on hips, and frowned. Then she cracked the small whip she held and shouted.
`Come on, Doris, you aren't even trying.'
Doris gave her a blank stare, said, `Baas,' and trotted grimly round the jump. The rest of the flock, however, did as they were told, and jumped. The face that launched a thousand sheeps, and all that jazz.
Not a bad wheeze, though she said it herself. What do you give the insomniac who's got everything? Trained performing sheep, of course.
Meanwhile, in the doorway, Lundqvist was motionless, listening. Where Helen was, it stood to reason, George couldn't be far away. All he needed to do was wait, like a cat at a mousehole, and the idiot would walk straight into his arms.
Well yes. Quite.
On the one hand, Lundqvist said to himself, quite apart from his virtually infinite resources of supernatural special effects, Lucky George has the reputation of being a crack shot, naturally gifted all-in wrestler and ex-Wittemberg fencing blue. On the other hand, I have a toothbrush.
Had a toothbrush.
A few seconds of frantic pocket-searching followed, at the end of which Lundqvist moaned softly and bumped his head three or four times against the doorpost. He'd come all this way - stolen a helicopter, hijacked an airliner, taken a series of cars and lorries without permission and finally mugged a sailplane pilot - only to leave his toothbrush somewhere between here and the entrance of the driveway. And Lucky George liable to turn up at any minute ...
`Excuse me,' called the girl from the interior of the shed. `Can I help you or something?'
Lundqvist stood upright. A stray pellet of inspiration had lodged in the back of his brain. ' `Yes,' he said. `I think you can.'
By the time Danny Bennett had climbed up on to the rail of the silage clamp to get a better view and got the camera in his shoulder and found the thing you pressed to make it go and
the other thing you twiddled to get it in focus, he'd missed some of the best bits. He'd missed Lundqvist running like a hare out of the shed, with a flock of ravening sheep snapping at his heels and the current Miss World bringing up the rear cracking a whip and shouting, `Go on, Doris, kill!' He'd missed Lundqvist's quite spectacular leap up into the hayloft, and the lead ewe's frantic efforts to jump up and bite his throat out. He'd missed the really good bit, where the girl had brought up a ladder and the sheep had gone swarming up it like firemen on piecework, followed by Lundqvist jumping out the other side and landing in the water butt.
What he had got, though, was Lundqvist grabbing the girl, bundling her under his arm and running like fun back up the drive, while seventeen livid sheep stood on the hay platform realising that learning to come down the ladder had been pencilled on the timetable for the week after next.
He hadn't the faintest idea of what was going on, of course, but that was so close to normality that it was comforting rather than otherwise. What he did recognise was bloody good television.
Familiarity is, indeed, the most powerful anaesthetic of all. To Helen of Troy, bumping about under Lundqvist's arm and trying to write Been kidnapped. Dinner in fridge. Love, Helen xxx on the back of a feed bill with an eyebrow pencil, being abducted was just like old times. It was, after all, what she was
best at.
`You,' screamed Lundqvist, `start the goddamn car!'
Danny, recognising that the remark was addressed to himself, started to climb down from his eyrie and then checked himself. Yes, sure, a good journalist's first duty is to cover the story, but did that involve assisting in the abduction of beauty queens by known hit-men?
`Start the fucking car,' Lundqvist reiterated, as if somehow conscious of Danny's internal debate, `or I'll rip your nuts off with a plastic fork!'
Yes, Danny decided, it probably did. Without releasing his hold on the camera, he fumbled in his trouser pocket for the. car keys.
You know how it is with keys. Shy, elusive creatures, the trouser pocket is their natural habitat and they are masters of the arts of camouflage and concealment. Their favourite ploy is to snuggle down into the folds of a crumpled pocket handkerchief and stop up the mouth of the burrow with any loose change that might be lying about. Failing that, they find a loose thread in the seam to snag themselves on, and cling like limpets. Danny's keys did both.
Just'a minute,' he called out, jiggling furiously. `I won't keep you, I've just got to...'
He jiggled too hard and dropped the camera.
Five minutes of the best action sequence he'd ever been privileged to witness, spinning and twirling through the air on its way to obliteration on the rock-hard ground, twenty feet below. In that split second when he realised what had happened, Danny felt the most devastatingly acute feeling of loss that any human being could conceivably register without the top of his head coming unscrewed. It had had everything - sex, violence, action, comedy and white fluffy animals - and in one and a half seconds' time it was going to hit the deck and go splat. He launched himself into the air, stretched out a frantic arm like Michelangelo's Adam, and just managed to get the tips of his fingers round the carrying handle.
His last thought, before he hit the deck and went splat, was
Phew that was close.
When he opened his eyes, it was dark. Then someone slowly turned up the lights.
It was just like being at the cinema.
The faint glow was coming from directly in front of him. As he stared, it seemed to resolve itself into shapes. Patterns. Letters.
YOU ARE DEAD
Danny started violently; or rather, he didn't. It was like trying to rub your eyes with a hand that's just been amputated; the brain ordered a spasm of movement, and the space where the nerves had once been sent back the message that spasms are off.
SORRY
Gosh, Danny couldn't help thinking, it's nice of them to say that. Perhaps it wasn't a hundred per cent sincere, no more than We apologise for any delay notices at the head of a twelvemile tailback, but the fact that they bothered at all was reassuring, in a way. It implied that there was someone, or perhaps Someone, you could write to and complain.
DEATH IS PERFECTLY NORMAL.
PLEASE DON'T WORRY
The letters flickered and faded, and it was dark again; but there was no immediate impulse towards terror, because they were playing piped music. Airport music. Supermarket music. Please-hold-the-line music. Now everybody knows that when this sort of music plays, the only possible emotion is passive boredom; and it's impossible to be passively bored and shitscared at the same time. Danny sighed and allowed his mind
to wander.
Well, I'm dead. What a bloody nuisance, here I am dead and no camera. My first really big scoop and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
Then it occurred to him that death is hardly a scoop for any journalist. It's the one story that everyone covers and nobody gets to phone in. Danny opened where his mouth had been and screamed.
Noiselessly.
PLEASE HELP US TO HELP YOU
BY COMPLETING THIS SIMPLE FORM
Put like that, it would be churlish to refuse.
Full name: Daniel Woodward Bernstein Bennett. Date of birth: December 14th, 1959
Nationality: British
Smoking or non-smoking: non-smoking
Evening meal?
And so on. The form scrolled forward - breakfast is served in the dining area between 7.00 and 9.00, the fire escapes are situated at the end of the corridor, if you have managed to take it with you, please deposit it in the safety deposit box in the front office - and as it did so, Danny realised something.
A common factor. A link. New South Wales, a sheep station, Kurt Lundqvist.
Me!
Lundqvist! Bloody hellfire, I've been hit by a hit-man!
Danny's spiritual remains sat bolt upright, and where his eyes had once been shone with ecstatic joy. For, in a moment of transcendent knowledge such as one tends to associate with the Great Transition, Danny had suddenly realised that all his life, everything he'd fought and worked and sweated and been humiliated for, must have been worthwhile.
`Hey!' he yelled, `this is great! I've been silenced! I must have known too much!'
And then the reaction, deadening and crushing as a piledriver. Absolute Sunday-morning-and-no-milk-left despair.
Yes, obviously he'd known too much. Obviously he'd been put out of the way, by Them, by the unseen conspirators ...
(All rooms must be vacated by 12 noon on Judgement Day. Please do not place objects down the toilet bowl. If you would like your past life to flash before you, please dial your credit card number down to the front desk and select channel 12 on your remote control handset ...)
Unfortunately, he hadn't the faintest idea what it was he'd known too much about.
CHAPTER
TEN
GEORGE frowned. This, he couldn't help feeling, was a trifle disturbing.
Your dinner, the kidnap note had said, is in the fridge. Upon inspection, however, the fridge turned out to contain nothing but vegetables. One of the things that he'd always liked about Helen was that, unlike ninety-five per cent of the rest of her sex, she didn't confuse food with scenery. Had she chosen this moment of all moments to go to the bad? Or had she simply written `fridge' when she meant `freezer'?
The latter hypothesis proved to be correct, since the freezer turned out to contain two frozen pizzas and a microwave lasagne. He decided on the lasagne, turned it out of its foil container on to a plate, and smiled at it.
Then he frowned at it, to give the melted cheese on the top that distinctive browned-under-the-grill look.
Callous? Insensitive? Just like a man? These are hard thoughts, and not really applicable. It's true that there have been heroes and men of action who've gone haring off to rescue damsels on an empty stomach, but what the epics don't tell you is that their subsequent performance was considerably hampered by indigestion and heartburn. Your class hero knows this. Hercules, for example, had a double cheeseburger
with fries, coleslaw and an ambrosia shake before snatching Alcestis out of the arms of the King of Death, and Sir Lancelot always insisted on a round of cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off before so much as looking at a dragon.
Logic, said George to himself. A spot of logic is called for here.
Who'd want to kidnap Helen of Troy? Well, yes, that's a pretty dumb question, so let's rephrase it. Apart from every red-blooded male in the world, who'd want to kidnap Helen of Troy? Easy. Lundqvist.
By way of confirmation of this working hypothesis, there was the tape in the video camera which some untidy person had left lying about by the silage clamp, right next to the corpse. Having laughed at the bit with the sheep and been suitably impressed at the big jump into the hayloft, George wound back the tape and sat for a few minutes, his mind turning over like Mozart in his grave during a Jonathan Miller production of Cosi fan Tutti. Then he suddenly scowled and snapped his fingers.
Two seagulls hopped down and perched on the top of the telly, trying to eat the aluminium trim.
`Hey,' George said, `this isn't on, you know.'
`Quark?'
`Kidnapping people,' George explained. `My compliments to Mr Lundqvist, and ask him if there's any particular order he wants his bones broken in.'
`Quark.'
`No.'
The seagulls flapped their wings and lifted out of the window. George played the video through once more. Then he made a phone call. How! This is a recorded spirit message. Kindly leave your name and a medium through whom you can be
contacted and I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
He shrugged and tried a different number. When it answered, his side of the conversation went like this:
`Hello? Yes, could I have Mr Bosch, please, extension 3092. Yes, thanks, I'll hold.'
The hold facility on the switchboard played you the Dies Irae, as interpreted by a computer synthesizer. Eventually.. . `Bosch here.'
`Ronnie,' said George, `how's tricks? The project coming together at last?'
`Bloody hell, George ...' The voice changed in pitch, though not in volume, until it became a rather heavy conspiratorial hiss. `You really have got to stop calling me at work like this. You have no idea how embarrassing-'
`Yes, sorry. How's the Garden of Earthly Delights coming along, by the way?'
Bosch sighed. `Don't ask,' he said. `Even if we make it out of foam rubber instead of expanded polystyrene, the ninetyfoot-high cracked eggshell just isn't going to stay up there, I just know it, and the sprinkler system's completely up a tree. I've got seventy-six thousand purple tubular carnivorous plants out there dying of dehydration, but do they listen?'
George tutted sympathetically. `Par for the course, it sounds to me. Look, can you do me a quick favour?'
Bosch growled darkly. `Depends,' he said. `I mean, there's favours and favours. I think opening wormholes in the fabric of virtual reality for you to hide your rope ladder in probably puts us all square, don't you?'
George laughed cheerfully. `Call those wormholes, Ron?' he said. `I'd have been better off stashing the gear under the bed only I didn't want to hurt your feelings. I would also remind you of that time back at Wittenberg when I let you borrow my red slashed fustian doublet three weeks running when you were chasing after that barmaid with the big -'
`All right,' Bosch cut him short. `I was younger then. Dammit, I was alive then. What do you want this time?'
`Just a note of where Lundqvist is right now.'
`That's all?'
`For now, Ron.'
Meanwhile, Lundqvist was negotiating with two seagulls.
`We got the Revenue off your back like you said,' Larry croaked, `although we couldn't do anything about your 1986 expenses claim. I mean,' he added quickly, as Lundqvist's eyes smouldered, `putting five thousand cubic feet of cyanide gas down as entertaining potential clients is going a bit too far, you've got to -'
`The hell with you,' Lundqvist snapped. `Those particular clients were pretty peculiar people. So what? You've got to be weird to need a transtemporal security consultant in the first place.'
`Okay,' said Mike. `But do you really expect the tax guys to believe you got through thirty-seven dozen throwing knives in one fiscal quarter. Don't you ever re-use them?'
A shrewd thrust from a wingtip suggested to him that this was a subject best left alone. He cleared his throat, ruffled his feathers with his beak and changed tack.
`Anyway,' he said, `they've unfrozen your bank accounts and the bailiffs have released your goods. We've kept our side of the bargain.'
`Good,' Lundqvist replied icily. `Now we can start talking.'
The seagulls exchanged glances. `I thought we'd been -'
'Preliminaries,' Lundqvist said. `Now we get to the good stuff. That is, unless your man wants to play it the hard way.
Because if he does, the only thing the girl's gonna be launching from now on is oil rigs.'
Larry sighed. `Let's hear it, then,' he said.
`Fine by me,' Lundqvist said. `I want George, I want him here, and no tricks. You got that?'
'Quark'
'Right. Now piss off.'
The seagulls lifted their wings and flapped noisily out through the open window. Lundqvist grinned and drew the shutters.
`Actually,' said a voice from the corner of the room, `would you mind awfully much leaving the window? It's a bit stuffy in here.'
Lundqvist snarled.
`Please.'
`Sure. You want me to leave the window. You think I was born yesterday?'
`Not really,' Helen said, smiling. `If you had been, you'd be all pink and small and covered in fluffy down, and you'd need feeding all the time. Talking of which, I thought we'd have dinner around sevenish.'
Lundqvist scowled. `We'll eat when I say so,' he said. `If I say so. You got ...?'
Helen ignored him. With a dainty flick of her slim wrists, she wriggled free of the handcuffs and drew a liberated finger along the top of the table next to where she was tied up. It left a furrow in the dust. She didn't say anything, but she tutted.
`I'll need some ingredients,' she went on. `Four pounds of potatoes, a large cabbage, two pounds of parsnips...'
`We'll have corned beef and like it,' Lundqvist grunted.
`I doubt that,' replied Helen. `Also some desiccated coconut, some ginger, sunflower oil - it's better for you, more polyunsaturates - and a pound of self-raising flour. You'll just have time to pop out before the shops shut.'
Lundqvist turned round slowly. Helen had slipped free of all her bonds by now. She was standing up and tying a pinny round her waist. There was a horrible look in her eye, and for a moment Lundqvist's heart stopped.
Far back, in the left luggage room of one of the most twisted psyches in the history of Creation, a woman's voice was calling; shrill, hard, cruel.