by Tom Holt
Lundqvist groaned. He really wasn’t in the mood.
‘Piss off, Bull,’ he said. ‘And switch that thing off before you go.’
Don’t be like that, man. There’s something really heavy going down, and . . .
‘Later, Bull, okay? I’m busy. And besides, I still owe you a kicking for that last tip-off you gave me. Remember?’
The radio crackled nervously. Hey, man, that wasn’t my fault. How was I supposed to know . . . ?
‘Rule number one, Bull, nobody grasses up the Antichrist, even if he is moonlighting. He wasn’t pleased, Bull. We had him down at the station five hours before he told us who he was. I nearly got my licence pulled over that one.’
Yeah, well, nobody’s perfect.This time, I got what you want. I got George for you.
Lundqvist jammed a wedge in his adrenaline and raised an eyebrow. ‘Sure, Bull,’ he said. ‘You and every other cheap informer between here and Delphi. Go hustle somebody else.’
No, man, I’m serious. I know where he is. Or at least, where the girl is.
‘How?’
How.
‘No, you clown, how do you know where the girl is? Is it just pure intuition, or have you actually seen her?’
Let’s talk money first.
Lundqvist snarled. Then he took off his tie, jury-rigged the joystick and put his hands palm-downwards on the console.
What you doing, man?
‘Holding a seance, Bull. And when you materialise, I’m gonna kick your ectoplasm up through your ears, okay? Now then, have you seen her or not?’
Okay, okay, cool it. The Ancestors told me.
‘I’m losing patience here, Bull. If you don’t come clean before I count to five, it’s gonna be one sadistic beating for yes, two sadistic beatings for no . . .’
I’m telling the truth, man, I heard it from the Ancestors. Like in Australia, okay? There’s all these wild dudes out there who run the songlines, and they’re all in the same union with me. As soon as I heard, I thought of you, I thought . . .
‘Australia?’
You got it. Place called Maralinga. They don’t call it that, of course, they call it D sharp minor, F natural, B natural, G flat, but I looked it up on a map and . . .
Lundqvist grinned and untied the joystick. ‘Thanks, Bull,’ he said. ‘I’ll check it out. And maybe I’ll let you off with exorcism when I see you next. And maybe not.’
The radio switched off.
CHAPTER NINE
Danny Bennett knew for a fact that he had a Destiny, just as a dog knows it has fleas.
It was written in the stars that one day, Danny Bennett would unmask the most staggering conspiracy, lay bare the most Machiavellian cover-up, make the ultimate documentary, win the ultimate award, make the once and future awards ceremony speech. The trouble with the stars is that sometimes they can’t read their own handwriting. Either that, or there was another Daniel Woodward Bernstein Bennett out there somewhere who got all his namesake’s mail by mistake.
In any event, his latest staggering exposé of corruption and intrigue in the Foodstuffs Colouring and Preservatives Directorate, engagingly titled ‘Offal You Can’t Refuse’, had made such an impression that here he was, covering the Round-Australia Land-Yacht Race for one of the top forty satellite TV companies. Promotion, you could say, if you’re happy with the concept of being promoted downwards.
Media analysts tended to observe that if Isaac Newton had followed Danny’s career over the last five years, the apple would have been entirely superfluous.
He pulled in, stared blankly at five miles of featureless, arrow-straight road in front of him, and consulted the map. Even with the map held the wrong way up, the only possible conclusion was that he’d come the wrong way, and that there was nothing for it but to turn round and drive the eighty-seven miles back into Arrampagatta. The fact that by the time he got to where he was supposed to be, the race would be across the state line and heading north was tempered by the certainty that Danny wouldn’t be able to recognise a land-yacht if one ran up his backside.
Which is what one promptly did.
Glancing in his rear-view mirror, all Danny could see was a whacking great sail, flolloped untidily across the back window. He frowned, opened the door and got out.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. He couldn’t help noticing something that looked uncomfortably like a sailing ship on wheels, which seemed for all the world as if it was trying to get into the boot of his car.
‘Why the hell,’ said a voice from somewhere inside the canvas, ‘don’t you look where you’re bloody well going?’
‘I wasn’t going,’ Danny replied. ‘I was parked. What is that thing?’
Out from behind the sail came about seven feet of man, topped with flashing Ray-Ban mirror sunglasses and idly passing a toothbrush from hand to hand. ‘Is that your car?’ he said.
‘It’s a hire car,’ Danny replied. ‘What’s . . . ?’
He became aware that the handle of the toothbrush was level with his heart. Somehow, this frightened him.
‘I need a lift.’
‘Right,’ Danny said. ‘That’s fine. I’m going back to Arrampagatta; that’s about ninety miles that way, but you’re welcome to—’
‘No. I need to go this way. Get in and drive.’
The stranger emphasised these words by drawing the bristles of the toothbrush against the pile across the palm of his hand, and some sort of atavistic survival instinct told Danny that this was a really good opportunity to practise being scared shitless. He complied.
As he shut the door and turned the key in the ignition, he realised why. He knew the guy.
‘So you’re in the race,’ he said, by way of a diversion.
‘What race?’
‘The land-yacht race,’ Danny replied, looking straight ahead. ‘That was a land-yacht you were riding, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Lundqvist! It had to be Lundqvist.
Excellence is its own best advertisement, in the covert assassination and dirty tricks business as in everything else. Build a better mantrap and the world will beat a path to your door. As a result, Lundqvist’s identity and professional reputation were tolerably well known among certain circles, although nobody with a penchant for waking up two mornings in a row would ever have dreamt of trying to make any sort of fuss about it.
Now Danny had a talent; a quite staggering intuitive ability, which enabled him to see just under half the story in a blinding flash of inspiration. Once the speck of insight had found its way into his brain, he then proceeded to coat it with innumerable layers of his own brand of imaginative gibberish, but that was by the way. His most recent researches had led him to the plain fact that wherever something significant, mysterious and horrible had happened in the last fifteen years, one Kurt Lundqvist had been somewhere in the vicinity at the time - visiting his aunt, seeing his dentist, attending a conference on early church music perhaps, but there, nevertheless. Once you’d seen that common factor, the conclusion was obvious.
Danny Bennett knew, instinctively but conclusively, that Lundqvist was the number one torpedo for the Milk Marketing Board. And here he was, in Danny’s car, toothbrushed up and twitching with raw adrenaline, out in the middle of the Australian Outback.
‘Um,’ Danny said. ‘Where was it you wanted to go, exactly?’
‘George’s Sheep Farm. Carry on along this road another seventy miles, it should be the first turning on your left. Got that?’
Danny nodded, his brain teeming all the while.
Sheep farm! What the hell would the Milk Marketing Board want with a sheep farm? Either the MMB bosses were running a covert dairy operation using cows with cotton wool stuck all over their backs, or else the whole thing was a front for something even more sinister. Part of his flesh crawled with feverish excitement. The rest just crawled.
‘Funny thing,’ Danny said. ‘I’d got the idea the race didn’t go anywhere near here.’
He didn’t look
round, but he could sense the lenses of the Ray-Bans scorching the side of his head. ‘I’m taking a short cut,’ Lundqvist said.
‘A short cut. In a race.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fine.’
The next hour seemed to pass very slowly. There was Lundqvist in the passenger seat, grimly munching his way through a roll of peppermints he’d found in the glove box, and there was Danny, desperately trying to suss it all out and find the little stray clue that would tie in a New South Wales sheepranch, the Watergate break-in and the Banco Ambrosiano. It was there, he knew it; just a matter of isolating one little wisp of a connection . . .
‘We’re here.’
Danny stood on the brake, slewing the car half round. His eyes met Lundqvist’s, in roughly the same manner as a hedge-hog meets an eighteen-wheel Mack truck.
‘So,’ Danny said. ‘This is where you get out, then.’
‘Yeah.’ The door opened, Lundqvist grabbed his rucksack off the back seat and extracted the grotesque lengths of knee and elbow from which he appeared to be largely constructed. He slammed the door and started to walk up the long dirt track.
Discretion is the better part of valour, as the saying goes. By the same author, but not perhaps so well known, are such equally profound saws as, ‘Aspirin is the spice of geography,’ and, ‘You can lead a horse to water but never double on three no trumps.’ Danny drove on, decided to count to ten, got to seven and backed up. Then he drove on down the narrow track. On the seat beside him there now rested a loaded video camera.
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, ‘Baaa,’ 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 mouse-hole, 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-Wittenberg 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 door post. 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 sail-plane 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 on 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.
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 twelve-mile 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 shit-scared 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.
And then the lights flickered again, this time resolving themselves into a ten-foot-high neon questionnaire.
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