by Tom Holt
The Finance Director smiled. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘You’re saying that unless we leave you alone, something bad is going to happen to us.’ He paused, for effect. ‘Hasn’t it crossed your mind that every conceivable bad thing there is has probably happened to us already? Bearing in mind—’
The line went dead.
‘No luck,’ said Security. ‘Not enough time. Somewhere in Europe, probably late twentieth, early twenty-first century. Otherwise . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ the Finance Director replied with a sigh. ‘The chances of him doing anything silly and giving himself away are a snowflake’s chance in . . . Anyway,’ he went on, ‘at least we’re in communication. Of a sort. We’ll have him, don’t you worry.’
The Company Secretary stroked his chin, causing sparks. ‘Excuse me if I’m barking up the wrong tree here,’ he said, but wasn’t that a threat he just came out with? Otherwise, you’ll regret it, something like that?’
The Finance Director shrugged. ‘Bluster,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ replied the Company Secretary. ‘For a moment there I thought it was a threat.’
‘Same thing. Bluster is a threat you make when you’re backed up against a wall facing certain death at the hands of overwhelmingly superior forces.’
‘Ah. Like, Bluster’s last stand, sort of thing?’
The Finance Director gave him a look, and he grinned sheepishly. They both knew what the Company Secretary had originally been sent down for; and it wasn’t simony or stealing sheep. You’d have thought he’d have learnt his lesson by now.
‘Don’t worry,’ the Finance Director said. ‘There’s no threat he can possibly pose to anyone. He’s got nothing up his sleeve except his arm, take it from me.’
CHAPTER THREE
Not long afterwards, Lucky George started his reign of terror.
That’s overstating the case somewhat. More a series of brisk showers of extreme aggravation.
Historians have, after exhaustive research, pinpointed what you might term the Sarajevo or Harper’s Ferry of Lucky George’s war against humanity. It was half past six on a Friday; the place, the centre of Amiens. The victim, a young insurance salesman whose name is not recorded. As a result, the annual wreaths are laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, although soldier is probably pushing it a bit.
The victim, hurrying to catch his bus, pauses for a moment outside a branch of the Credit Lyonnais. He fumbles in his wallet until he finds his cash dispenser card. He inserts it. He waits.
After five seconds or so (which is a long time when you’re standing out in the street, painfully conscious of the ebb and flow of the French provincial bus service passing you by) the cash dispenser makes a noise. Par for the course, sure; but this isn’t part of its usual repertoire.
It burps.
The victim frowns. He presses the button marked Cancel Transaction, and waits.
The lights flicker. The machine spells out a message.
YOUR CARD HAS BEEN RETAINED
it says. Then it flickers again.
OR RATHER, EATEN
The victim raises an eyebrow. Some last smear of the basic survival instinct spattered across the back of his mind prompts him to take a step back. The lights dance.
RATHER SALTY, I THOUGHT
This time, the victim can actually smell the danger, but it’s too late. The machine is looking directly at him. In fact, it’s smiling.
AND YOU CAN’T HAVE IT BACK, SO THERE
There is a fundamental and rather dangerous urge in all of us to try and cling to the jagged edge of normality, even when it’s blindingly obvious that the longer you hold on, the further you’re going to fall when your grip finally fails. The victim presses Cancel Transaction again. Bad move.
LOOK, FOUR-EYES
The victim tries to back away, but the machine is doing a very good mongoose impression. It seems to have a direct line to the victim’s feet.
NOBODY TRIES TO CANCEL ME AND GETS AWAY WITH IT. YOU GOT THAT?
The victim’s first thought is to apologise, but the dead hand of normality is gripping the scruff of his neck. You can’t talk to these machines, he’s thinking, they’re just machines, they can’t . . .
A stream of banknotes, glued together to form something disquietingly like a tongue, lashes out of the cash slot, flails horribly in the air, and lands on the victim’s tie. Then it retracts.
TWO CAN PLAY AT THAT GAME, BUSTER
Just as the victim’s nose is pressed up against the perspex screen, his chin flattened against the diagram showing the Right Way Up, the tortured fibres of the tie give way, leaving the tongue wrapped round three inches of terylene, and the victim flat on his back in the gutter. But not for long.
He scrambles to his feet. He runs. In his haste to get away, he fails to notice the patrolling gendarme and collides with him heavily. There’s a short interlude, while the gendarme brushes the insurance salesman off his lapels.
‘Monsieur!’ There’s a wildness in his eyes that commands attention, and fair enough. When a Frenchman is palpably more afraid of something that he’s recently seen than a gendarme he’s just knocked over, there’s got to be something badly the matter. ‘Monsieur, the bank just tried to kill me. It swallowed my card, and then it ate my tie.’
The gendarme has summed up the victim as mentally disturbed and is just about to render psychiatric first-aid with his truncheon when he catches sight of the banknote tongue, still thrashing about, trying to feed three inches of tie in through the cash slot. He stares.
The machine stares back. Then - there’s no other way to put this - it sticks its tongue out at the policeman.
The gendarme stiffens. There are certain things you just don’t do, no matter how many branches and wholly-owned subsidiary companies you’ve got.
It only takes him a fraction of a second to bark out the obligatory warning. The tongue extends further and waggles about. In fact, it connects with the gendarme’s kepi, twists it round a couple of times, and stuffs it into the cash slot. There is another burp. A button lands on the pavement and rolls drunkenly away.
The rest is most definitely not silence. Out comes the gendarme’s 9mm service automatic. Three cracks, like the breaking of a giant’s leg bones. The machine goes on grinning.
It displays a derogatory message on its screen.
All this is well known, of course; you’ll find it in any history book, in one version or another. What isn’t so well recorded - probably because it’s so very unnerving, and mankind can only take so much reality before it starts demanding that something be done about it - is the fact that when the gendarme in question received his bank statement at the end of the month, he was disturbed to find an entry recording three rounds of 125-grain full metal jacket 9mm Parabellum credited to his account on the day in question.
With interest. And, of course, basic rate tax deducted at source.
Shortly after the first reports of this contretemps had reached the Hot Seat and were dismissed as being a rather offbeat practical joke, a fax machine in Toronto grabbed a secretary by the wrist as she was feeding paper into it, hurled her across the ionosphere and dumped her down in Winnipeg, in the front office of a highly respected firm of water diviners.
To make matters worse, it was a wrong number.
Microwaves the length and breadth of Florida burst simultaneously into song until switched off, while a team of firemen in Tokyo fought for two hours to release a chat-show host from the interior of a portable television set. When the unfortunate man was eventually freed, he was found to have broken several small bones in his wrists while hammering on the inside of the glass.
In Novosibirsk, an entire warehouseful of retractable ballpoint pens was destroyed by long-range artillery fire after turning into small but incredibly agile yellow snakes. The President of Venezuela appeared on national television to appeal for calm after all the office dictating machines in the country started answering back. Large parts of the centre of Pert
h were sealed off, leaving a handful of bemused Marines to watch the stately dance of the traffic lights over the sights of their machine-guns. In London, all the telephones refused to speak to each other for three hours, but nobody noticed. Workers on a People’s Farm at an undisclosed location in Shantung province were frightened out of their wits when they reported for work only to find that the newly planted rice-paddy had spontaneously landscaped itself into an eighteen-hole golf course, complete with electric carts, clubhouse and conference facilities.
Absolutely nothing peculiar happened in Ireland at all, which was perhaps the most disconcerting part of it. No statues of the Virgin Mary moved their arms or were seen to weep tears for a period calculated to have been in excess of three hours.
In Paris, the Mona Lisa giggled.
‘Okay,’ said the Finance Director. ‘You win. We’re withdrawing our agents.’
‘And about time too,’ replied Lucky George. He fumbled in his pocket for a coin to feed the phone box, but could only find a small, bent washer. He smiled at it. ‘Just count yourselves extremely lucky I’m a bit out of practice.’
‘You won’t get away with it, you know. You can hide, but you can’t run.’
‘Shouldn’t that be the other—’
‘Think about it.’
Lucky George thought about it and decided he didn’t like the Finance Director’s tone, with the result that back in the hastily prepared emergency rooms at Pandaemonium, the receiver gave the Finance Director’s ear a big, wet kiss. The Finance Director wound his handkerchief round the earpiece and went on:
‘Tell you what we’ll do, George. Give yourself up, come quietly, we’ll forget all about it. You can even have your old job back in the . . . We’ll give you a nice cushy job in the kitchens. Now I can’t say fairer than—’
The mouthpiece of the telephone popped an apple neatly into the Finance Director’s mouth, and the line went dead. Lucky George hung up, smiled the phone booth back out of existence, and crossed the road to a cafe, where he ordered a beer and a toasted sandwich.
Withdrawing all their agents. Like hell they were.
He sat for a while and smoked (a process which in his case did not involve tobacco) and then reached for his glass, upended it on the table, and began a seance.
In order to conjure the spirits of the dead, you need to link up at least three pairs of hands. Although he was alone, Lucky George didn’t seem to find this a problem.
‘You there, Bull?’
The saucer with Lucky George’s un paid bill in it rocked backwards and forwards a couple of times. Lucky George grinned and slipped a coin under the rim . . .
Oh.You thought it was the waiter who took it. Sorry to have disillusioned you.
. . . Whereupon a cloud of ectoplasm materialised above the table and hovered there, refracting light. A man in a bow tie and a black waistcoat hurried up, and took its order for coffee and a slice of cheesecake.
How.
‘Sheer bloody-mindedness, mostly,’ replied Lucky George. ‘And you?’
Not so dusty, replied the shade of Sitting Bull. They’ve recently transferred me to a job in Administration.
‘Administration?’ Lucky George raised an eyebrow. ‘Why was that, Bully?’
Search me. The only reason I could come up with was that my name fitted. Like, you do a lot of sitting and—
‘Quite so,’ Lucky George replied. ‘Anyway, to business. I seem to remember you owe me a favour, Bully.’
The ectoplasm shook its head violently, causing a fortuitous rainbow.
Don’t make me laugh, paleface. Your people stole our lands. They wiped out the buffalo. They raped our hunting-grounds with the telegraph and the iron horse. They massacred us when we tried to fight and drove us into reser vations. They destroyed our unique and vital cultural traditions and poisoned our youth with fire water and flame-grilled spicy bisonburgers. I don’t seem to recall owing any favours to anyone with skin that particularly revolting shade of pinky-apricot .
Lucky George frowned. ‘Short memory you’ve got, Bully,’ he said. ‘I’m amazed you’ve forgotten who it was advised you to invest heavily in railroad bonds and Wells Fargo Unsecured Loan Stock back in the early 1870s. Maybe I’m thinking of somebody else.’
The ectoplasm quivered slightly, like a fluorescent jelly.
Point taken. All right, what do you want?
Lucky George paused while the waiter brought the coffee. They shared the cheesecake.
‘To tell you the truth, Bully,’ said Lucky George, ‘I find myself in a bit of a fix.’
You don’t say.
‘Leave heavy irony to the living, Bully, they’ve got a flair for it. The point is, I need a spot of help. From someone on the inside on the Other Side, if you follow me.’
You want jam on it, you do.
‘Do I?’ George replied mildly. He smiled at the remains of the cheesecake, rendering it inedible under two centimetres of damson preserve. ‘It’s not a lot to ask. Of course, if you want the entire Sioux nation to find out about your career in bond-washing . . .’
All right, there’s no need to get nasty. They’ve called off all their agents, just like they said.
George raised both eyebrows. ‘You surprise me, Bully, you really do.’
Freelances, on the other hand, are not covered by the term ‘agent’. In contract law, as no doubt you recall, no contract of agency subsists in the case of a unilateral, open-ended contract (such as the offer of a public reward) until the contracting party signifies his acceptance of the offer by actually performing the contract. The leading authority on this point is the old case of Carlill versus the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company, in which—’
‘I beg your pardon?’
I’m taking law at night school. No way I’m going to be just another dumb Injun all my life. I’m allergic to sun-dried buffalo and wampum gives me eczema.
‘Good for you, Bully. Any particular freelance you have in mind?’
The ectoplasm began to laugh; and laughed so violently that it shook its fragile manifestation out of existence and vanished, absent-mindedly taking the rest of the cheesecake with it. Lucky George sighed.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Him. I might have guessed.’
Ask any detective, and he’ll tell you that getting the initial lead is the difficult part. Once you’ve got something, however slight, to go on, it’s just a matter of inspired perseverance. The problem is getting that initial lucky break.
Ask Kurt Lundqvist, and he’ll tell you that the only way to get a break is to hit something hard. Or someone.
‘Now, then,’ he said, wrapping his belt round his fist. ‘We could do this the hard way, or . . .’
He paused and reflected. Nah. Why confuse the issue by introducing alternatives?
‘We’ll do this the hard way,’ he said.
Possession of a warrant card valid in all jurisdictions, temporal as well as geographical, meant that it was no problem whatsoever for Lundqvist to nip backwards and forwards in Time in the pursuit of his enquiries. This was a great help. For one thing, if a suspect sneakily died under interrogation, he could rewind back to the deceased’s last lucid moment and start all over again . . .
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ whimpered the interviewee. ‘Honest.’
‘Listen.’ Lundqvist laid aside the belt and put an arm round the subject’s shoulders. ‘Co-operate, why don’t you? Do yourself a favour.’ He paused and grinned. ‘I have to say that, you know, it’s in the rules. Personally, the less you talk, the more I like it.’ He picked up the belt again and waggled it meaningfully under the subject’s nose.
‘No, but really,’ the subject said. ‘I honestly have never heard that name in my life before. How can I have, for Christ’s sake? He won’t even be born for another seven years . . .’
Nostradamus paused, and bit his lip.
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
‘Precisely,’ Lundqvist replied. ‘Don’t mind me, though. If you want to persis
t in fruitless denials for an hour or so, that’s absolutely fine by me.’
Nostradamus passed the tip of his tongue across his bone-dry lips. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, I admit, I’ve heard of him. Doesn’t mean to say I know where he is. I mean, I’ve heard of all sorts of people, I’ve heard of Elvis Presley. Doesn’t follow that I know where he’s hiding out.’
Lundqvist raised an eyebrow. ‘Who’s Elvis Presley?’ he asked.
Nostradamus shrugged. ‘After your time, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Or before. It gets a bit confusing, sometimes.’
‘Yeah.’ Lundqvist smiled, or at least he drew back his lips to exhibit his teeth, and clenched his fist round the belt. ‘You know, it’s really nice of you to be so brave about this. Most guys just crack up and start talking the moment I’ve tied them to the chair.’ He patted his knuckles against the palm of his other hand. ‘Say this for you, Nos, you’ve got balls. For now, anyway.’
‘Hold on!’ Nostradamus closed his eyes tightly, clenched his eyebrows together and grimaced alarmingly. ‘Something’s coming through, right now.’
‘There’s a coincidence.’
‘I can see . . .’ The prophet began to rock the chair he was tied to backwards and forwards. ‘I can see a man.’
‘Good start.’
‘He’s beating up this other man. He’s got a belt round his knuckles. He’s punching - Ouch!’
Lundqvist grinned sardonically. ‘Yes?’
‘The man’s just broken his hand,’ Nostradamus replied. ‘God, he’s in real agony, poor devil, rolling about on the floor. Hey, that really does hurt. If only I could see who it is, maybe I could warn . . .’
He stopped. Lundqvist had taken hold of his ear and was trying to unscrew it.
‘Thanks for the tip,’ he said. ‘Now, try again.’
Well, Lundqvist decided as he washed his hands, it was a start. It was something.