‘Information. They want to know what we’ve discovered of their operation, how much of that we’ve told Walshaw. Once they know that they’ll see what they can salvage. Hopefully that isn’t going to be much, we’ve done a pretty good job up to now.’
‘Great. That makes me feel one hell of a lot better.’ She lapsed into sullen silence.
Greg guessed they’d been lying in the blank metal cell for a couple of hours before the hatch swung open.
It was Mark who drew the latches, accompanied by two more of Kendric’s bodyguards. A biolum came on above them. After hours of dusk, the glare sent Greg’s tear ducts into frantic action.
‘Still on your backs?’ Mark gloated. ‘I thought I’d be pulling you off each other by now. Or aren’t you up to that? Maybe fancy something different, animals and the like? I heard you gland freaks are kind’ve warped.’
Gabriel glared at him silently, realizing just how nasty things could turn if she started antagonizing him.
Mark bent down and released Greg’s legs with a complex-looking mechanical key.
Greg was jerked roughly to his feet. Every ache and pain suddenly doubled in intensity. His legs nearly collapsed as a wave of nausea hit him. He saw the front of his dress shirt was stained by a long ribbon of dried blood; his nose had been bleeding again while he’d been unconscious.
One of the bodyguards supported him as he stumbled out into the corridor. It didn’t possess anything like the ostentation of the upper decks. Pipes ran along the walls, red letters were stencilled across small hatches. The engine noise was more pronounced.
Another three bodyguards were waiting for him outside. Including Toby, who glowered with unconcealed menace.
‘Christ,’ Greg croaked. ‘I must scare you lot shitless.’
‘Gonna have you, white boy,’ Toby whispered dangerously. ‘Gonna take you a-fucking-part.’
‘Not yet, Toby,’ Mark said, pushing a shaky Gabriel ahead of him. ‘When the Man has finished with him.’
Greg was marched up and out on to the afterdeck. The sun was nearly full overhead. Well over six hours since they’d been snatched from the Duo. Would Walshaw have noticed? He’d told the security chief he would help to analyse the data in the Crays, but he hadn’t given a specific time. Of course, Eleanor would be frantic, but would she ring Walshaw? And even if she did there was nothing to make him look here.
At least he’d been right about ‘here’. The Mirriam was sailing sedately down the Nene.
The course the Nene took for the first thirty kilometres east of Peterborough was a new one. The PSP’s delay in authorizing construction of the city’s port meant that the old river course had been lost at the start of the Warming, disappearing beneath the water and silt which laid siege to the city boundaries. A couple of years later, when the wharves’ foundations were being laid, the dredgers cut a straight line from the port right out to the old estuary at Tydd Gote.
Mirriam was following a huge container freighter out towards the Wash. There was another freighter trailing a couple of kilometres behind. They were the only things moving in a very confined universe. All Greg could see was river, sky, and high gene-tailored coral levees, covered in tall stringy reeds.
The tide was full, just beginning to turn, showing a thin line of chocolate mud below the bottom of the reeds.
Mirriam seemed to be losing ground on the freighter in front. Greg glanced over the taffrail to see four crewmen inflating two odd-looking craft on the edge of the diving platform. They were blunt-nosed dinghies with a couple of simple benches strung between the triplex tubing that formed the sides. A loose surplus of leathery fabric ran round the outside. It was only after a big fan, caged in a protective mesh, hinged up to the vertical at the rear of one of the dinghies that Greg realized they were actually hovercraft.
Gabriel nudged him and he turned to see Kendric approaching. Mirriam’s owner was wearing olive-green track-suit trousers and a light waterproof jacket. Hermione was at his side, as always; dressed in natty designer equivalents of her husband’s attire. But it was the woman keeping a short distance behind who held Greg’s attention.
She was in her late twenties with a second chin just beginning to develop; her dumpy face was framed by straight jet-black hair, cut in a fringe along her eyebrows, falling to her shoulders at the sides. Her skin was dark and leathery, heavily wrinkled from excessive sun exposure.
He was convinced that she was the woman he’d seen at the ambush. He could still see her slightly bulky frame in that trio walking calmly down the road.
Kendric’s gaze swept across Greg and Gabriel, utterly unperturbed. A cattleman checking his stock.
‘Put them in with Rod and Laurrie,’ Kendric said to Mark. ‘You and Toby come with us.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Mark replied.
‘Postponed,’ Toby muttered in Greg’s ear. ‘That’s all.’
‘Right, get them down there,’ Mark was saying.
Kendric and Hermione began to descend the ladder to the diving platform. The crewmen were holding the fully rigged hovercraft steady in Mirriam’s wake.
‘You’ll have to take our cuffs off,’ Greg pointed out.
‘Maybe we’ll just throw you down,’ said Toby.
‘Take ’em off,’ Mark said. ‘And you two, don’t think about jumping.’
Greg just managed the climb down the ladder, frightened his weak, trembling hands were going to lose their grip. He flopped down in the bottom of a hovercraft, exhausted and horribly woozy.
Gabriel sat on a bench next to him, breathing heavily. One of the crewmen cuffed them both again.
‘Are you all right?’ Gabriel asked, her face anxious.
‘Yeah.’
He heard the fan start up, an incessant droning whine. There was a surge of motion, then the deck tilted up as they climbed the levee wall. The dizziness returned.
When they were down the other side, he struggled into a sitting position against the tough plastic of the gunwale, trying to take an interest in the journey. The sour-faced woman was perched on the rear bench, her waterproof zippered up against the occasional scythe of spray. Her hair was blowing about in the slipstream.
One of the Mirriam’s crewmen was up front, steering from behind a little Perspex windshield. A bodyguard was sitting behind him, giving Greg and Gabriel the occasional impersonal glance. At least Toby wasn’t on board. He managed to get his eyes above the gunwale.
It’d taken centuries to drain the original fenland marches and turn them into farmland; generations had laboured to liberate the rich black loam from the water, rewarded with the most fertile soil in Europe. The polar melt drowned them in eighteen months. The Fens basin wasn’t a sea, it was mud, tens of metres thick with a tackiness gradient that varied from a few centimetres of weed-clogged salt water on the surface down to near-solid treacle.
An ex-Fenman living in Oakham had once told Greg that it was possible to tell the age of a Fens house by looking at its doorstep. The older it was the more the loam would’ve dried out and contracted beneath it, leaving the doorstep high and dry. Really ancient cottages had a gap below the bottom of the stone and the ground.
Greg couldn’t see any doorsteps; on the few lonely farmhouses still visible he was hard pushed even to see the doors. Twelve years of sluggish tidal suction had chewed out their foundations, pulling them down into the absorptive alluvial quagmire. Some of the sturdier buildings had managed to retain their shape, upper floors rising out of the brown-glass surface over which the hovercraft were racing. But the majority had subsided into tiny flattened islands, with juncus rushes growing out of the shattered bricks and skeletal timbers. Ragged felt hems of blue-green algae encircled all of them.
The hovercraft took a gently meandering course, avoiding the solid protrusions and swollen semi-submerged branches of dead copses in wide curves. Greg and Gabriel were following Kendric’s craft, slicing through the fine spray its passage whipped up. Behind them, the horizon was marked by a fine green l
ine. The Nene levee. Which meant they were heading approximately south. It didn’t make any sense to Greg. There was nothing ahead of them.
Nobody lived in the basin. Crabs and gastropods thrived in the nutrient-rich sludge. But no one could earn a living from catching them. An ordinary fishing boat would stick fast in the mud. Conceivably a very light sail-powered catamaran or trimaran might be able to move about. And the idea of deploying nets or pots was laughable. In fact, hovercraft were just about the only vehicles which could be used successfully on the Fens basin.
From being the most fertile tract of land in Europe the Fens had reverted into a zone of barren desolation rivalling the Sicilian desert for inhospitableness. The sheer sameness of the quagmire was numbing Greg, bleeding away any last reserves of hope and defiance into the stifling atmosphere. Endless kilometres flowed past, compounding the sense of isolation. Gabriel had hunched up in her seat, defeated.
His attention drifted. Analysing his predicament was suddenly futile, tiresome in the heat and moisture. His thoughts began to freefall, wondering what Eleanor was doing right now. And please don’t let Kendric think she was important.
‘Greg.’
The urgency in Gabriel’s voice made him look round quickly. A town was rising out of the horizon’s uncompromising interface between brown and blue. It was like a mirage, its base lost in the black and silver ripples of shimmering inflamed air. Kendric’s hovercraft was powering straight for it, leading them in.
‘Hey.’
The bodyguard sitting behind the pilot turned, boredom reigning. ‘What?’
‘Where are we?’ Greg asked.
‘Wisbech. Why, does it make a difference?’
He should’ve known. Wisbech was the harbinger. The self-declared Capital of the Fens was the first instance of wholesale evacuation in England. At the start of the Warming, excessive rains and record tides had sent the Nene cascading over its banks. And in those days the river ran straight through the centre of the town.
Greg had remained glued to the flatscreen for a week while pontoons of news channel cameras chugged through the flooded streets. He remembered the pictures of drowned orchards ringing the town, the sodden refugees slumped apathetically in Royal Marine assault boats, clutching pathetically small bundles of possessions. It was something out of the Third World, not England. The novelty of such scenes had paled rapidly in the months, and then years, which followed, as town after town succumbed to the water.
Wisbech only looked whole from a distance, close-up it was in a sorry state. The outskirts had collapsed completely, leaving a broad inverted moat of rubble, protecting the town’s heart from the larger vagaries of the swelling mud tides.
Both hovercraft slowed, manoeuvring cautiously around hummocks coated in vigorous growths of reeds. The narrow channels between them were choked with algae, so thick in some places it resembled a green clay. It was stirred up by the hovercraft’s downdraught, freeing pockets of rancid gas. Gabriel and the crewmen coughed and swore, clamping their hands over their faces, Greg couldn’t smell a thing; his throat began to dry, though.
Five metal streetlamps marked one channel for them, miraculously remaining upright after all these years. The conical algal encrustations around them were actually solidifying, turning them into cartoon desert islands. From the height of the poles left above the surface Greg guessed that the street must’ve been about one and a half metres below the hovercraft.
Further in, the mounds became more regular, the channels echoing the street pattern they covered. Sections of walls had survived here, triangular, cracked, and leaning at crooked angles. The brickwork was obscured by a viscid pebble-dash of gull droppings. An eerie desynchronized harmonic from the electric fans was bouncing back off them, amplifying their natural soft purr to a vociferous clattering reverberation.
Overhead, hundreds of gulls twisted in devious helices, calling shrilly, the high-decibel feedback from the entire flock a brazen fortissimo rolling across the ruins. Greg realized it was impossible to creep up on Wisbech.
They swept out of the mounds and into a suburb that was still standing; two-storey houses bordering a light industrial estate. The mud came half-way up the ground-floor windows. There was no glass left in them. Second-storey windows were shattered, crystalline shark teeth sticking out of mouldering frames. Walls bulged, roofs sagged alarmingly, shedding tiles like autumn leaves. Gutters were wadded with grass and bindweed.
Moving on.
The Nene’s old course was a serpentine semiliquid desert, three hundred and fifty metres wide, flat and featureless. All the embankment buildings had been pulverized by the febrile floodwater, their debris sucked away by the inexorable vortices generated by the clash between currents of salt water and fresh water. Since then the eternal mud had oozed back, a great leveller.
Wisbech used to have a bustling port, the river lined by ugly warehouses and towering cranes. Greg had no way of telling where the iron titans had once stood.
Both hovercraft picked up speed on the flat. The heat pressed down, magnified by still, heavy air. Even the gulls abandoned the chase.
Greg received a pernicious impression of waiting depth. He was eager to reach the other side.
Their destination was becoming apparent straight ahead, on the other side of the old river course. The most prominent building there was. An old brick mill tower, slightly tapering, stained almost completely black with age.
Greg didn’t understand how it could’ve possibly survived until they arrived at its base, riding noisily across the buckled corrugated roof of a petrol station which was elevated half a metre above the mud. The tower had been built on the summit of a raised stony mound. While chaos and ruin had boiled all around, it had remained aloof and untouched.
Tufts of tough bermuda grass grew around its base; there was a good two metres of hard-packed earth between the bricks and the mud. The blades in front of the door were trampled down.
Kendric’s hovercraft beached itself on the left of the door, Greg’s drew up on the right. The pilot kept going until the bow was bumping the filthy brick, then killed the lift.
The tower door opened and a man came out. He was fortyish, dressed in a fawn sweatshirt and olive-green Wranglers; his shoes were black leather, polished to a sergeant major’s shine. A brown belt holster held a Browning 9mm automatic.
Kendric and Hermione alighted from their hovercraft. Greg was hauled to his feet beside Gabriel. The man from the tower took in the fresh crimson splash down his shirt, the way he kept swaying from side to side.
‘You were told: intact,’ he said to Kendric. There was no deference shown. Kendric seemed to be among equals at last.
‘He can walk, he can talk,’ Kendric retorted indifferently, and marched off into the tower.
‘Un-cuff them,’ said the man, ‘and get them upstairs. He’s waiting.’
The crewmen began deflating the hovercraft. Mark unlocked the cuffs and waved them into the tower.
Resignation had settled in long ago. Greg stepped across the door, shuffling like one of the undead, shamed and impotent.
The basement was bare, brick walls and concrete floor, a smack of dampness in the air, but not as much as there should’ve been. He spotted a bright conditioning duct disappearing into the rude wooden plank ceiling. A deflated hovercraft of the same kind they’d arrived in sat in the middle of the floor. There was a cast-iron staircase opposite the door.
‘Up,’ said Mark.
Shiny black shoes were already vanishing through the hole in the ceiling.
The first floor was also one big room, appreciably drier, used for storing crates of food. There were quite a few Harrods hampers stacked beside a small grey metal desk.
The second floor was a living room, carpeted in a thick steel-blue soft pile. Its furniture was modern, matching timber-framed leather chairs and settee, a low ceramic coffee-table, and rose-teak executive desk with a recessed Olivetti terminal. Cupboards and a glass-fronted drinks cabinet were f
ixed to the wall, purpose built, they fitted the shallow incline perfectly. Light shone through a single frosted glass window half-way up the wall. The brickwork had been left uncovered, scrubbed clean.
The dumpy woman who’d accompanied Greg on the hovercraft was waiting at the top of the stairs. Which was impossible, because she was following him up. Had to be twins.
But that revelation was blown straight out of his mind by the next person he saw. Kendric was talking earnestly to Leopold Armstrong. And Greg knew he’d finally met the person who’d organized the blitz on Philip Evans’s core.
England’s ex-president was fifty-seven, but still trim and fit; his meaty face had a few more lines than Greg remembered, his mop of neatly cut silver hair was combed back tidily. He wore a simple Shetland cardigan over an open-neck cotton shirt. So ordinary. Almost homely.
Greg had thought he was beyond any further surprises, but he just stood and gawked until Gabriel bumped into his back, and her curse was sliced off in mid-flow as she caught sight of Armstrong.
He looked both of them over, taking his time. The tip of his tongue moistened his lips. Greg resisted the ridiculous urge to straighten his rumpled dinner jacket.
Mark clattered up the stairs behind them, and hustled them forward. The little living room was beginning to get crowded. Hermione had stretched out in one of the two leather chairs, feigning lethargy. In addition to the man who’d met them outside there was another obvious hardliner hovering around Armstrong, just waiting for Greg to try something.
‘Sit him down, Neville,’ he said. ‘Before he falls.’
The man who’d met them outside the tower stabbed his forefinger at the settee, and Greg collapsed into it gratefully. Gabriel joined him after a second thrust.
His name had given Greg the key, placing the face; astonishing the trivia a mind can hold. Neville Turner: junior Home Office minister in the PSP government, second-in-command of the People’s Constables, one of the many shadow figures orbiting Armstrong’s periphery.
The Mandel Files, Volume 1 Page 35