by Mike Carey
They took Juliet back to the MOU, and down into the basement. The door had closed in Gil’s face. He’d done his job, and Jenna-Jane was keen to oversee the rest of the operation by herself. This was, after all, where she excelled: at the porous interface between scientific inquiry and legalised torture. It seems to be a happening place these days.
I sat and digested these facts in silence after Gil had finished speaking. Something in his face told me there was still some bad shit to come, but this was bad enough to be going on with. And in the meantime it was probably a good idea to clear the air by asking the obvious question.
‘Why are you doing this, McClennan?’ I demanded. ‘You hate my guts. It doesn’t make sense that you’d come riding to my rescue – or that you’d stab Jenna-Jane in the back, which would put you way out of position for kissing her arse.’
Gil’s mouth set in a tight line. ‘You’re right, Castor,’ he said. ‘I do hate your guts. But you saved my people down in that swimming pool, and you probably saved me too. I felt like I owed you something. And I also felt like maybe I’d enlisted in the wrong war. We’ve got two women out there, in the hands of that thing, and we’re not doing one damn thing about it.’
‘Nothing we can do,’ I pointed out, ‘until he shows his hand.’
Gil shook his head grimly. ‘Well, that was kind of the clinching argument,’ he muttered. ‘He already has, Castor. He left a note.’
The words didn’t sink in for a second. When they did, I still thought I must have misunderstood. ‘He what?’ I echoed stupidly.
‘He left a note, at your landlady’s house. It was addressed to you, but Gentle found it. She gave it to the professor, and the professor opened it and read it. Then she put it back in the envelope and stuck it in her pocket. Nobody has any idea what it says, but we’ve been forbidden to talk to the police or anyone else outside the MOU until this is all resolved. By that time we could have two more corpses on our hands.’
I was staring down at my fists, which I suddenly realised were clenched – so tightly that the knuckles showed white.
‘Fuck,’ I said hollowly.
‘The place is a fortress,’ Gil warned me. ‘Dicks and DeJong haven’t reported back yet, but she’s called the agency she uses and ordered a top-up. The building is swarming with them.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to see that note. And I’ve got to get Juliet out of there.’
‘I’m not interested in saving the demon,’ Gil said, ‘but I’ll help you get your hands on the note if you feel like trusting me. At the very least, I can get you in through the door. And I still see bringing Asmodeus down as job number one, so if you’re aiming to do that, I’m in.’
I met his gaze. ‘I’d appreciate the help,’ I said. ‘McClennan, we got off on the wrong foot . . .’
‘Yeah, we did. Because you killed my uncle and ruined the lives of some people I really care about.’
‘Actually, I more or less stood out of the way and let him kill himself. If we both come out of this alive, maybe we should have another pint and I can tell you all about it.’
Gil thought about this. ‘I’d sooner you told me how you pulled that shit off at Super-Self.’
‘All yours. With diagrams.’
‘You’re on, Castor.’ He grinned faintly, but sobered again immediately. ‘It’s a fuck of a big if, though, isn’t it?’
At the MOU, the street doors had been locked. Gil pressed the buzzer and then hammered on the glass for attention, while I waited a few feet away, pressed flat against the wall in what I hoped was the security camera’s blind spot. If the lens was a fish-eye, whoever was on the front desk was looking straight at me now and wondering what the fuck I thought I was up to.
Our luck seemed to be holding though – at least for now. The guard on the front desk, standing in for Mr Dicks, left his post and came to the door, where Gil pressed his ID against the glass for his inspection. There was a rattle and a click as the door was unlocked from inside, and Gil walked on past the guy. He was carrying a plastic carrier bag, which the security guard didn’t bother to inspect.
I came out of hiding and jammed the door open with my foot as he swung it to again. He stared at me in amazement, too surprised even to be alarmed. He was just starting to reach for his baton when Gil clocked him on the back of the head with a champagne bottle, the only thing his carrier bag contained. We hadn’t ordered the Moët, but the nice young stockbrokers at the next table hadn’t objected to us taking away the empty.
The bottle turned out to be a one-shot weapon, snapping clean at the neck, but it did the job. The guard staggered and fell forward into my arms. I dragged him out through the door, dumped him up against the wall, then went back inside and locked him out.
So far so good.
The inner door was locked against us too, but the security window, now unguarded, was our way in. Gil clambered across the counter and buzzed me through, then joined me on the other side.
He hooked a thumb back towards the guard post. ‘There’s a weapons locker in there,’ he said.
‘Guns?’ I gave him a pained stare.
‘Sidewinders. Tasers, maybe. Doesn’t hurt to take a look.’
‘Does if the locker’s fitted with an alarm,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ve got something better in mind, but I’ll need a minute or two to set it up. Come on.’
He hesitated a second longer, then shrugged and followed me. I led the way around to the right, towards the steel door and Jenna-Jane’s basement Gulag. But I stopped before we got there, at the door with the keypad lock. Rosie Crucis’s door.
‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ I told Gil, and I tapped in the code that Nathan had given me: 1086. I tried the door, but it didn’t give.
‘What the fuck?’ I growled.
‘Let me try,’ Gil said. He tapped in the same code, then a few more with less and less conviction. ‘No good,’ he muttered. ‘They’ve done a security reset. It was probably when they kitted out the lab for your succubus this morning. If you want to go to ground, I can get the new code from Nathan.’
‘No time,’ I said. ‘And the longer we hang around here, the more likely I am to be spotted. Looks like that weapons locker may be the lesser of two evils.’
We jog-trotted back to the security post, and I was looking around for something to prise open the door of the locker when I spotted something even better: a fire axe in a glass-fronted cabinet high up on the wall next to the door.
I looked at Gil. ‘Ready?’ I asked.
‘Go for it,’ he said.
I smashed the front of the cabinet with my elbow, and the shrieking jangle of the fire alarm broke the silence like an auditory smack in the face.
We ran with that clamour in our ears. Halfway down the corridor, Gil stopped dead and held out his hand for the axe. I handed it over before I even saw what he was looking at. There was a fuse box on the wall. It was locked, but only with a piddling little Ajax padlock. The first blow of the axe snapped the hasp clean off, and it was the work of a moment to flick the main switch off, plunging the corridor into darkness. Maybe this was over-finessing slightly, but when I took the axe back I used the blunt end to hammer the switch flat. Anyone trying to turn the lights back on was going to have a mountain to climb.
The darkness wasn’t absolute. Dull red emergency lights low down on the walls had come on when we triggered the fire alarm, but had only become visible now that the main lights had been extinguished. With their help we found our way back to Rosie’s door.
I hefted the axe and swung it at the lock again and again, smashing the jamb around it into jagged splinters until the door finally sagged open.
Rosie was already on her feet as I went in, and backing away from the door, but she seemed to know me even in the dark. She relaxed and came towards me, then just as suddenly tensed again and stopped dead as Gil entered behind me. She was wearing a female body today – blonde and petite and barely out of her teens – so there must have been a
t least one changing of the guard since I’d last seen her.
‘It’s all right, Rosie,’ I said, half-shouting to be heard over the siren. ‘He’s with me.’
‘Felix!’ she exclaimed, ‘What’s happening?’
‘We are, sweetheart,’ I told her. ‘Listen, how would you like to see the back of this place?’
Her eyes widened. ‘More than anything,’ she said. ‘More than anything I’ve wanted since I died.’
‘How tired are you feeling?’
Rosie smiled wickedly. ‘Less than you’d ever imagine, my sweeting. And a lot less than I’ve been seeming.’
I nodded. I’d always half-suspected that she was piling on the agony for her own nefarious reasons, but I’d never asked because any answer she gave would be bound to be picked up by Jenna-Jane’s ubiquitous spy-mikes. ‘I’m going to set you free, but I need you to stick around and watch my back for a few minutes,’ I told her. ‘Just until this racket dies down. Deal?’
Rosie gave a single, forceful nod. I turned to Gil. ‘Take out the wards,’ I said. ‘You know where they are.’
They were everywhere, of course, just as they had been in Rosie’s old quarters. Jenna-Jane had wanted to make absolutely certain that the errant spirit stayed in this room, no matter how many of her flesh-and-blood vehicles came and went through the door. The frame of the door itself was stiff with pass-nots of every shape, size and variety, but there were more of them painted on the walls, mixed into the plaster, set into the tiles of the false ceiling, and probably set in the cement floor. The aim of the exercise was to block every exit.
Gil didn’t waste time with niceties. The sound of the fire alarm covered all sins, so he just took the top hinge off the door with a few more strokes of the axe, dodging it as its own weight tore it free from the bottom hinge and it toppled sideways into the room. Then he started in on the wood of the jamb.
‘There’s a demon in the building,’ I said. ‘A succubus. I’m going to find her and set her free. Be my angel, Rosie. Ride shotgun for me.’
‘Thank you, Felix,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m yours until you’re done, I promise. And I won’t leave without saying goodbye.’
She leaned forward suddenly, the tips of her fingers caressing my cheeks, and kissed me lightly on the lips. Then she went limp, slumping against me. I lowered the insensate body gently to the ground. Rosie had left the room, though not, I fervently hoped, the building.
‘Good enough?’ McClennan demanded, standing back from his work and lowering the axe. I just pointed to the unconscious student on the floor: she was all the answer that was necessary. Gil frowned. ‘Is she going to be all right in here? She’s an innocent bystander.’
‘There isn’t really a fire, McClennan,’ I reminded him. ‘She’ll be fine.’
‘Then let’s go get them.’
In the dark, with the shrilling of the alarm in our ears, the MOU had turned into a daunting assault course. It was almost like meeting the fear-beast again. As we threaded the maze of corridors, I had to fight down a sense of urgency that was threatening to ramp its way all the way up to pure panic. The dim floor-level lighting meant that the only thing I could see clearly were my own feet. At head height, slabs and wedges and sheets of shadow slid over each other, disguising intersections and turning blank walls into doorways.
Gil knew his way better than I did, and I let him take the lead. It felt like we were heading in the right direction, and then I knew we were, because my death-sense woke and stirred at the prickly feel of the things ahead of us and below us. For me it was a noise that rode under and over and through the alarm’s cacophony, untouched by it, the sound of an orchestra tuning up in a key that didn’t have a name. It was good news, in a way. The massive steel door had to be open, otherwise the wards imprinted onto it would have acted like psychic soundproofing, and I wouldn’t be getting such a clear fix.
But we met the first of Jenna’s rent-a-cops before we got to the door. There were three of them, and we just turned a corner and came face-to-face with them. They had their sidewinder batons ready in their hands, and they were big in the same way that Dicks and adult male silverback gorillas are big. Gil flashed his ID again, but they didn’t as much as glance at it. They grabbed us and slammed us against the wall of the corridor, two of the three holding their truncheons across our throats.
‘Call it in,’ rasped the man holding onto me. He was an ugly bastard, with squared-off hair in a US Marine Corps style which probably conferred high status in the circles in which he moved. To me it had haunting echoes of Kryten from Red Dwarf.
The third man – the one who had his hands free – took out his radio and put it to his ear. ‘We’ve got two men,’ he shouted. ‘Ground floor. Yeah, exactly. West side. They’re the ones we saw on the cameras.’
He ducked his head, covering his ear as he listened to the reply. Then without warning he dropped the radio and staggered slightly as though he he’d been about to lose his footing and had to shift his balance to stay upright.
‘What did she say?’ the square-headed guy demanded.
The third man bent, very deliberately, and picked up the fallen radio. He straightened, still without saying a word, and brought his hand round in a sweeping arc. The radio impacted on the left temple of Gil’s captor with enough force to break the casing wide open. The guy dropped like a stone.
‘What the fuck are you . . . ?’ Squarehead spluttered.
The radio man went for his throat, massive hands clamping to his windpipe, and he forgot all about me as he was forced to defend himself. He brought his truncheon up and back, aiming to drive it into the other man’s face, but I jumped forward and wrapped myself around his forearm, twisting it further and further back until the baton dropped from his hand. Then the radio man finished the job, driving the back of Squarehead’s skull against the wall repeatedly until his eyes rolled back in their orbits and he crumpled, sliding down the wall to the ground.
Gil stared at the last man standing, frightened awe showing on his face.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked him. ‘You’ve never seen a five-hundred-year-old woman wearing a man’s body before?’
‘He’s coarse, but he’s strong,’ Rosie said, examining the radio man’s hairy, muscular hands and flexing his fingers slightly. The cadences of her voice were instantly recognisable despite the harsh basso burr of her vehicle’s vocal apparatus. ‘I like him.’
Jenna-Jane was probably well aware that by giving Rosie a different body to possess and inhabit every week, she was allowing an old ghost to develop a terrifying and dangerous skill-set. Rosie must have worked her way through three or four hundred volunteers in the years since I’d left the MOU. She knew the ins and outs of the human nervous system better than a London cabbie knows the way to Lullington Garth, and like the cabbie she was well past the point where she needed an A to Z.
I didn’t need one either, come to that. From this close, I could have found the entrance to Jenna-Jane’s underworld with a blindfold on and my hands tied behind my back – which was probably how a lot of its current inhabitants had arrived here. I picked up one of the fallen batons in a spirit of waste-not-want-not and led the way down the corridor, Rosie and then Gil falling in beside me.
‘How are you doing this?’ Gil asked Rosie, still staring at her in horrified fascination. ‘How are you holding him when he doesn’t want you there? It’s not like it was with the volunteers. And you seemed to be getting weaker . . .’
‘It’s been a long time since I needed informed consent, my poppet,’ Rosie pointed out with wicked amusement. ‘And the weakness . . . well, a woman in my day learned the value of being underestimated.’
At another time I probably would have laughed at that. Asmodeus wasn’t the only lion who could put on a convincing limp when the need arose.
We came to the door at last. There was a single guard on duty. Rosie dropped him with a devastating haymaker as he was opening his mouth to speak. He ricocheted off the door
frame, went down hard and didn’t move.
Rosie flexed her fingers and gave a harsh, wincing moan.
‘I’ve broken my hand,’ she lamented.
‘It’s someone else’s hand,’ I reminded her. ‘And he had it coming.’
I stepped through onto the steel platform at the head of the stairs leading down into the abyss. It was hard, as it had been the first time around, to cross that threshold, to walk into the screaming turmoil my death-sense was picking up from below, a hundred times more strident and painful than the monotone clamour of the fire alarm. But hard as it was for me, it was a lot harder for Rosie. She stopped dead in the doorway as though there was a solid barrier there, as though the steel door was locked and bolted instead of standing wide open. The wards again, the wards written on the door to keep the dead and the undead from breaking out. It kept them from breaking in too – and an axe wouldn’t be much use against die-stamped steel.
‘I can’t come through here,’ Rosie said.
‘Then watch our backs,’ I suggested. ‘And wait for us.’
‘Don’t be long, Felix.’
‘We’ll either be quick or dead,’ I muttered grimly. ‘Give it ten minutes, Rosie. One way or another, it’ll be over by then.’
She nodded tersely and set her back to the open door, a dragon in the gateway, stopping any reinforcements from the building’s upper floors from crashing our party. Probably most of the rent-a-cops were in the basement already, but every little helps.
We ran down the metal stairs, the din of our booming footsteps drowned out by the general hubbub. Down here the fire alarm’s shrill warning had to struggle to make itself heard in a chorus of bellowing and shrieking voices, metallic booms and echoes, weeping and wailing and – I strongly suspected – gnashing of teeth. The inmates of the basement Gulag seemed to be collectively going crazy.