by Tom Holt
Sticking in the small of the skin’s back was a dagger, driven in up to its hilt. There was no blade, fortuitously. George eased his way into the skin, settled his face as comfortably as possible into the mask, and stepped out of the cubicle.
‘Okay,’ said the attendant fiend. ‘The rest of the detail are waiting outside.’
‘Just going.’
‘Hey.’
‘Yes.’
‘Forgotten something?’
‘Have I?’
‘In the rack,’ said the fiend, pointing. ‘Take your pick. Limit of three per competitor.’
From the rack, George selected a nine-inch stiletto, a Venetian-pattern cinquedea dagger and a short Flemish falchion. Then he stepped outside.
There were about thirty competitors, all dressed (to take them at face value, so to speak) in skins with knives stuck through them. Some of them were having a crafty last cigarette, others were fine-tuning their eyebrows, polishing their elbows, or just standing around tapping their feet. An eagle-headed fiend with talons for hands waved an umbrella in the air to attract their attention.
‘Right, guys and girls,’ it said. ‘Just a few ground rules before we start. Now, we all want to have a good time, so the key thing to remember is, don’t get carried away. Right?’
A few of the competitors nodded. The fiend continued.
‘Now,’ it said, ‘the objective is, to stab as many of your fellow competitors repeatedly through the body and neck as you can within the allotted time without getting stabbed yourself. Now, for your comfort and convenience, we have to say No Head Wounds. The skins are perfectly safe under normal use, but in the past we have had a few problems with direct hits on the temples and the eyes. That still leaves you a hell of a lot of body surface to be going on with, and I’m sure you’ll all agree that safe’s better than sorry.’
A slight sussuration of background grumbling soon faded away, and the fiend continued:
‘The only other thing we do insist on is, for obvious reasons, No Disembowelling. Now I realise that some of you here today will have perfectly genuine tribal, cultural or religious disembowelling traditions, and of course we respect that. So all of you are equipped with our very realistic plastic giblets, which fit neatly into the concealed pocket in the front of your skinsuits here -’ The fiend demonstrated, pulling a yard of polythene colon out of his stomach and folding it away neatly. ‘- and you release those by simply pulling on the little blue ripcord which you’ll find midway between the nipples on your skinsuit. Right, that’s it, basically. Go out and have a bloody good time.’
The fiend blew a whistle, jumped sideways and curled up into a tight ball with its arms over its head. George hadn’t been standing there for more than a twentieth of a second when the man who’d been on his immediate left threw away his cigarette, brandished a stagshorn-hilted Provençal hunting sword and jumped at him.
George sidestepped, landed a kick on his assailant’s behind as he sailed by, and said, ‘Boo!’ Then he ran for it.
From the cover of an overturned table (in which a Florentine-pattern broadsword and two richly inlaid baselards were already embedded) he watched the game with growing fascination. After the first heady slugfest, which eliminated the duffers and the majority of the corporate entertainment crowd, the pace slowed down dramatically and the element of skill came to the fore.
Since there was sod-all natural cover, concealment and stalking were confined to pretending to be a hideously mangled corpse until your prospective victim had turned his back. That explained, George realised, the knife-hilt already inserted in the suit. The trick, apparently, was simply to count the number of hilts projecting out of each potential body. Two or more meant he was probably genuine. Once you’d got that far, approach with caution nevertheless, because a number of competitors (who’d clearly done this before) had taken the precaution of impaling themselves with one of their three permitted weapons before hitting the deck. Not, in George’s opinion at least, strictly ethical, but presumably within the letter if not the spirit of the rules.
George was just bracing himself to step out from his hide and have a go when a body crumpled down over the side of his table and landed heavily in his lap. As it fell, its face-mask was pulled aside and George recognised the features of his lawyer, Mr Van Appin.
‘Hello, Pete,’ George said. ‘What are you doing here?’
Mr Van Appin grimaced. ‘I died,’ he said.
George raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you had a special arrangement,’ he said.
‘I did,’ Van Appin replied. ‘I had a watertight agreement. Trouble is, I drafted it myself.’
George restrained a snigger. ‘Bad move, that.’
‘It was, rather,’ the lawyer replied. ‘Still, a fee’s a fee, and when your best client comes to you and asks you to do a job, you don’t turn round and say, Sorry, conflict of interests, try the guys down the road. That’s not the way successful practices are built up, George.’
‘Suppose not.’
Mr Van Appin shrugged. ‘It’s not so bad, actually,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got my, uh, other offices in the other centuries, so I can continue to service my existing client base, more or less, while being in a position to extend my operation to this exciting new catchment area down here. I mean, if you can’t get business down here . . .’
‘Pete,’ George shook his head sadly. ‘I think you’re in for a bit of a shock if you think you’re the only lawyer in these parts. I think you’ll find there’s rather a lot of them end up here. All of them, in fact, sooner or later.’
Mr Van Appin shrugged. ‘So what?’ he said. ‘A little competition never did anybody any harm. So long, George.’
‘Ciao, Pete.’
Mr Van Appin quivered and lay still, and George leant back against his table leg and watched for a few minutes. Two competitors had run each other through with Spanish rapiers at exactly the same moment and were arguing heatedly about who scored what.
‘Excuse me.’ George felt a light tap on his shoulder. He whirled round, saw a figure with no clothes on looming over him with some sort of poleaxe, and lunged with the cinquedea. The blade went through smoothly and out the other side.
‘I think you’re supposed to fall over or something,’ George said.
‘Actually,’ replied the man, ‘I’m just the linesman.’
‘Oh.’ George grinned awkwardly. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘No problem.’ The linesman, who had just been transferred at his own request from the spectral engineers’ corps, after a long and distinguished term of service as a captain of spectral warriors, shrugged and died. ‘It happens to me all the time,’ he said posthumously.
‘Was there something?’ George asked.
‘I just wondered,’ said the linesman, ‘are you Lucky George Faust, by any chance?’
George nodded. ‘Who wants to know?’ he asked.
‘It’s just that Kurt Lundqvist’s headed this way with a posse of heavily charred fiends,’ the linesman replied. ‘For reasons of my own which I won’t bore you with, I don’t fancy being around when he gets here. In fact,’ the linesman added, ‘things have worked out pretty damn near perfect, you killing me like that. I mean, stands to reason, even that vindictive little sod can’t kill me if I’m dead already.’
‘It was nothing.’
The linesman smiled, reached in his pocket and produced two credit cards, which he laid on his eyelids. ‘It’s cheaper this way if you’re a regular customer,’ he explained. ‘Good luck.’
‘Thanks.’ George looked up and saw a seagull hovering overhead. It occurred to him that Larry wouldn’t be able to recognise him in his skinsuit, so he stripped it off and dumped it.
‘Hey,’ said a competitor, who’d been stalking George for seven minutes with a two-foot balloch knife. ‘That’s cheating.’
‘Nuts,’ George replied, and swatted him over the head with a chair. He collapsed on the ground, muttering. The seagull perched on the edge o
f the table and ruffled its wing feathers with its beak.
‘Sodding awful place for flying, this,’ Larry remarked with his mouth full. ‘Thermals in all the wrong places, because of all the fires.’
‘Found it yet?’
‘The emergency exit?’ The seagull nodded its beak. ‘Follow me.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There is much esoteric argument in contract killing circles about the greatest asset a hit-man can have. Some say, the new Steyr sniper’s rifle with infra-red dot sights and integral sound suppressor. Others argue for a mint condition, first-issue Sykes-Fairbairn combat knife, while a significant minority gives its vote to the .50 calibre Desert Eagle with Hydrashock +P ammo and a Kassnar ’scope.
Kurt Lundqvist begs to differ. As far as he’s concerned, the assassin most likely to succeed is the one who has rather more brains than can comfortably be fitted into a matchbox, all the matches having been removed. This, he realises, rules out about ninety-seven per cent of his professional colleagues, but so what? The last person to call him a reactionary elitist is now an integral part of the foundations of New York’s celebrated Flatiron Building.
His sequence of thought, once he’d realised that Lucky George had slipped past him at the Hellza-Pop-Inn, was as follows:
Lucky George has escaped.
When it comes to getting away with it, Lucky George is about the best there is.
It is, therefore, pointless to try and stop Lucky George getting to the emergency exit. Far better to go directly to the emergency exit and wait for him there.
Slowly, with infinite labour, Links Jotapian drove the last crampon into the side of the pit and paused, dragging air into his creased lungs before hauling himself over the lip of the pit and on to solid ground.
Some escape, huh? First, he’d broken his fall by throwing his arms and legs out to their full extent, until the friction of his hands and feet against the toughened glass sides of the shaft had slowed him down and eventually stopped him.
Fair enough, but he couldn’t stay wedged like that for ever; and as soon as he moved hand or foot, down he’d continue going.
Fortunately, however, he’d got with him his Kurt Lundqvist Limited Edition Adventurer’s Kit. As a matter of cold fact, the production of this piece of merchandising hadn’t been sanctioned by the man himself, which may account for the fact that the merchandiser now lives at the bottom of the Hudson River and wears concrete trainers. Nevertheless, the contents of the package (which collapses down to the size of a ballpoint pen, and is made, of course, in Korea) include such useful items as suction pads for hands and feet, crampons, a folding iceaxe, two hundred yards of gossamer-thin polymer cord (breaking point six tons) and a small rectangular key thing with no discernible purpose whatsoever.
One-handed opening of Kit, extraction of suction pad, donning of same and adhesion to the wall. It was then just a case of biffing in crampons and the long hard slog uphill. Still better than school.
‘Mr Lundqvist.’ The walkie-talkie was dead, squatted into a jumble of springs and wires by a collision with the shaft wall. He dumped it - a month’s waiting on tables at Baisbekian’s Diner down the tubes, but one learns to be stoical under combat conditions - and applied his mind. Think like Lundqvist, and you’ll know where he is.
Links cast an eye over the grounds of the Park, and concentrated. Lucky George is a pro, right? Where would a pro hide? Think Lesson Six. Answer: a pro will always try and find a crowd to mingle with, because the best camouflage is people. In fact, that’s really the only reason Links could possibly imagine for their existing at all.
Various crowds dotted about the place. The queue for the Ferris Ears; no, too static. A pro tries not to remain stationary for more than five seconds in a combat zone. Therefore rule out also the milling throng waiting to go on the torture by outsize musical instruments, and the Knight Eaten By Dogs booth. There was quite a knot of people hanging about at the top of the campus, opposite the Ferris Ears, but that was also too conspicuous; the Toad Rides (up to the top of the sand dunes and back astride a giant red-spotted toad, conducted by a bear-headed fiend - fifty cents, children and perjurors half price) were closely supervised by fiends, and a pro doesn’t go anywhere where there’re too many guards looking at faces. There were a few passers-by waiting for Captain Beaky’s next feed, but in the circumstances George probably wouldn’t feel too comfortable hanging about round there. That left the paintball game.
Idiots rush in where demons fear to tread. Slowly and deliberately, Links checked his equipment. Night-stick; Smith & Wesson Model 686 in .357, loaded with Federal 160-grain jacketed hollow-points; handcuffs; ninja throwing-stars. Something else, but he couldn’t remember what. Ah yes, that was it, and he had indeed remembered to put on clean underwear that morning. He pulled his balaclava down over his face and broke into a loping run.
Honest to God, his intention had been simply to find Lundqvist and help out. The thought of making the collar himself, alone and unassisted, wiping his mentor’s eye and incidentally claiming the staggeringly huge reward, hadn’t once cross his mind. But . . .
There he was, large as life, strolling hands in pockets towards the emergency exit, eating candy floss and with a seagull sitting on his shoulder. Lucky George, History’s most wanted man. Hot damn!
With a cool smoothness born of countless hours of practice in front of the bathroom mirror, Links crouched, drew and assumed a perfect Weaver stance. Feeling for the bottom of the trigger, McGivern-style, he drew a fine bead on the side of George’s head, took up the slack on the trigger and yelled, ‘Freeze!’
George stopped, looked round at him and said, ‘Me?’
‘You.’ Links half-closed his left eye, concentrating with all his being on the little strips of light either side of the foresight. ‘One move and you’re history, man.’
George raised an eyebrow. ‘How do you mean?’ he said.
The gyroscope inside Links’ brain wobbled slightly. ‘What?’ he shouted.
‘How do you mean, history? Do I become suddenly famous or something?’
‘It means you get to be strictly past tense, man. Like, the late Lucky George, kinda thing. You get?’
‘Late for what?’
‘Your own funeral, sucker.’ The foresight of the Smith wavered about; no matter how you try, you just can’t combine repartee with marksmanship. Ask Oscar Wilde or anyone.
‘Oh, I think they’d wait, don’t you?’ George replied. ‘I mean, not much point having the wretched thing if there’s nothing to bury. Mind you, if, for example, mine was at ten thirty and they’d got another one booked in at eleven fifteen, say, I can see there could be problems. Hearses double-parked, that sort of thing. Right, I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘Look . . .’
‘On the other hand,’ George continued through a mouthful of finely spun sugar, ‘the same would go for weddings, wouldn’t it, and think how many times the bride shows up late. Never causes a problem in the long run, though, does it? I think they make allowances for that sort of thing in the scheduling.’
‘Look . . .’
George nodded upwards. ‘There’s a seagull hovering over your head with a ten-pound lead weight in its claws, had you noticed?’
Links sneered. ‘You think I was born yesterday?’ he said contemptuously.
George considered. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you were you’re pretty damn precocious, that’s all I can say. I take it you’re not fussed about the seagull?’
‘Look . . .’
The lead weight fell, hitting Links on the back of the head. ‘Thanks, Larry,’ George called out. ‘Right, can we please get on? This place is starting to get on my nerves.’
The emergency exit was just behind the Helmeted Dwarf, cunningly concealed in the gaping jaws of a twelve-foot-long polystyrene dragon. Just to ram the point home, there was also a big No Entry sign just above the dragon’s head, qualified by the words Except for Access. After a final look round, George reached
for the door handle . . .
. . . But the door swung out of its own accord, to reveal Lundqvist, standing behind his trusty .40 Glock. Before George had time to move at all, Lundqvist was through the door and the pistol’s ugly snout was nuzzling his ear.
‘Okay, George,’ Lundqvist hissed. ‘Lose the gulls. Now.’
George shrugged. ‘You heard the man, guys. Go for a ride on the Lucky Dipper or something. I shan’t be long.’
Mike flapped his wings and opened his beak to protest; but his bird’s eye, hundreds of times more perceptive than its human equivalent, saw Lundqvist’s finger move maybe a thousandth of an inch on the trigger and he subsided. ‘Be seeing you, then,’ he gulped, and bobbed away into the breeze. Larry remained where he was.
‘You too, beakface,’ Lundqvist growled.
‘You’ll pay for this,’ the gull replied. ‘One day.’
Lundqvist grinned. ‘You reckon?’
Larry nodded. ‘Maybe not tomorrow,’ he said, ‘maybe not this year. But sometime, somewhere, you’ll be hanging out washing or cleaning the car, and then, splat! You just think about it, Lundqvist, that’s all.’
With long, heavy wingbeats he dragged himself into the air, and soon was nothing but a white speck. Lundqvist let his breath go.
‘You and me, George,’ he said.
‘You and me, Kurt. How about a nice game of backgammon?’
Lundqvist shook his head. ‘Not this time, George,’ he said. ‘This time it’s goodbye, for ever. Dead or alive, they said, remember.’
‘I take it you’re going for the lazy option.’
Lundqvist nodded. ‘It’s my back,’ he said. ‘Too much heavy lifting and I get shooting pains up my left side.’
George raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Don’t think dead’s got a lot of significance here, Kurt,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind my saying so. Sort of goes with the territory, if you see what I—’
‘No.’ Lundqvist’s grin widened. ‘This thing’s loaded with hollow-points filled with holy water.’