‘Rose, wait!’ called Zalian, running after her.
‘For Christ’s sake, come in, somebody! There are only four of us left, the rest are all dead. Come in…’ An anguished voice crackled out from the radio as Rose switched it back into life. You turned it off, she thought incredulously, you son of a bitch, you deliberately turned it off. Snatching up the handset, she opened the line for transmission. ‘Where are you? Which group are you in?’
‘Finally! What the hell’s going on back there? We’ve had a massacre here at West Forty. We need help, bad. Chymes was waiting for us. There are bodies everywhere, Tony’s been killed and I can hear a siren. The police will be up here any minute….’ The voice trailed off in sobs. Rose’s voice cut through.
‘Listen, how many of you are there?’
‘Two of us unhurt, two badly wounded. The rest are all dead.’
‘You’re going to have to carry the wounded ones. Leave the others, there’s nothing you can do, but you must hide or dispose of their bags and line-guns. Check their pockets for I.D. before you leave. You’ve got to delay the police in identifying the bodies, or it’s the end for all of you. Just keep your wits and work as quickly as you can. Think you can do that?’
‘We don’t take orders from you. Where’s Zalian?’
‘Nathaniel, talk to them!’
Zalian came to the microphone.
‘It’s OK. Do as she says.’
‘All right,’ replied the voice, steadier now. ‘We have a secret stash-place around here somewhere. We can hide the equipment there.’
‘OK, do it and hurry. Then get as far away as possible. Try to make it back here. If you get stuck, call me and I’ll get someone over to help bring you in.’
When Rose had replaced the handset she turned back to Zalian. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ she shouted. ‘Whose side are you on, for God’s sake? Your own people are out there dying and you don’t give a damn!’
Zalian looked shattered. He slumped down onto a packing box with his head in his hands. When he spoke, his voice had lost all authority. He sounded like a child. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing any of us can do now. It’s too late.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Rose, ducking through the door and running back outside. She suddenly knew why Zalian had left the conduit by himself earlier on and began to search the roof. She found the crumpled twist of silver foil and spent needle lying in a thin trickle of blood behind the vending machine.
‘Malpractice’, the notes had said, ‘Missing drugs case: Doctor suspended.’ She should have realized at the time. It was the only thing that could explain his sudden shifting moods. Unable to face up to his responsibilities, Zalian had begun to take heroin again. She gathered up the evidence and ran back to the conduit, hurling it onto the floor in front of him.
‘You bloody idiot,’ she cried. ‘You’re going to tell me what the hell is going on before anyone else gets killed.’ She dropped down to his level and gripped his shoulders with both hands. ‘What did you think you could gain by turning off the radio?’
Zalian refused to answer at first. He seemed to be staring out past her into the night sky beyond the conduit door, his eyes glazed with the effects of the drug. ‘Chymes can’t be beaten,’ he said at last, his voice barely audible. ‘Those who haven’t already defected will die by his hand. I couldn’t bear to listen to their agony.’
‘But you have to find a way of helping them, Nathaniel!’ Rose shouted. ‘You can’t just hide yourself away and pretend that it’s not happening. We’re the only ones who have a chance of defeating him. We can’t just give up. What about Sarah?’
‘Sarah has joined with her true master.’ His face grew hard. ‘They deceived and betrayed me and now they will bring in the New Age together.’
Chapter 34
Lair
Painfully, Robert hauled himself up onto the overlapping tiles of the roof. This wasn’t turning out to be as easy as it looked. When he had stormed away from Rose he had been planning to head back to his flat. Then, realizing that he would never be able to forgive himself for failing to witness the events of the night, his idea had been to catch up with one of the other groups, but without Rose’s help his progress had proven agonizingly slow. Stopping every few minutes to consult the complex and confusing station map, or to rest his searing muscles, he realized that by now the other groups must all be far away.
Robert gazed down at his surroundings. He seemed to be on the outskirts of the original City of London. He had left behind the towering cranes and monstrous glass office blocks of the capital’s proliferating financial institutions and had entered a much older area of narrow unrenovated buildings and filthy untrodden rooftops. Lying back against the sloping clay tiles he looked up at the stars, allowing his heartbeat gradually to return to normal.
After a few minutes he sat up, wiping the cooling sweat from his eyes. He found himself on top of a comparatively low building, just three storeys high. It had been easier to keep travelling at a downward angle in order to save his aching back, which seemed to suffer more when there was climbing to be done. He leaned over the side and tried to read a street sign which was caught in the misty light above a lamp post. It looked like Whittington, or Whittaker, Avenue. He could clearly make out the EC3 part, at least.
This roof was too steep. He was exhausted. If he stayed here he would probably fall asleep and slide straight off the edge. The next building along was taller, but appeared to have a flat roof. Robert hauled himself to his feet and fished around in his bag for his battery-powered climber. Removing the disc from its pouch, he noticed that his hands were beginning to be covered in stinging calluses.
The bar attachments for hooking lines were less frequently to be found in this area. He had been going in the wrong direction. It was time to turn back towards the centre of the city.
He examined the attachments which came with the climber and found a small collapsible grappling hook, neatly folded flat like a miniature camera tripod. Studying his line-gun, he discovered that it was also designed to launch the grappling hook from a set of grooves cut into the top of the barrel. Carefully he aimed at the top of the wall and squeezed the trigger.
The hook shot far above his target and clattered faintly on the roof beyond. It took him some minutes before he managed to haul the line back in without snagging it. Second time around, the hook caught behind a rubbed brickwork ledge and held fast. Carefully he freed the cord from the gun and rejoined it to his climbing disc. He could see that it was much darker across there than on any of the other roofs so far. He had not had cause to use the disc until now and remembered what had happened when Rose had used hers for the first time. Suppose he slipped and hurt himself, couldn’t move, how would they find him? He decided to radio in his position before attempting the crossing. Switching on his handset, he thumbed the preset frequency.
‘Hello, Rose, Zalian? Come in.’ The burst of static made him jump.
‘Identify yourself.’
‘Rose, it’s me, Robert.’ He suddenly remembered how he had left and felt sheepish. ‘Look, I’m sorry about…’
‘Skip it, we’ve got bigger things to worry about. Damien’s team has been all but wiped out by Chymes and his men. Where are you?’
‘I’m somewhere in EC3.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘That’s just it, I’m not sure. I was hoping you could give me some bearings, some landmark I could aim toward.’
‘That’s great. All we need is for you to get yourself lost. Hang on, we’re looking it up. What’s the name of the street?’
‘Whittington Avenue, I think.’ Behind him, the wind lifted an old newspaper and let it fall with a slap. ‘Pretty creepy place.’
‘Robert? We’ve another call coming in. It may be important. Can you call me back in a couple of minutes?’
‘I guess so.’
Reluctantly, Robert signed off and slipped the handset back into his pock
et. He picked up the steel climber disc which he had left hanging against the wall and clipped it to his belt. Then, very gently, he squeezed the disc’s spring-button and allowed the line to haul him up over the bricks, pushing his feet out as he rose, rather like abseiling in reverse, letting the nylon cord be drawn in until he reached the top. Dragging himself over the peak of the wall was a strain, but he managed it, collapsing at last on the other side in the centre of a long, rolled strip of tarmac. As his breathing slowed the wind began to pick up, skittering an empty drink can along the guttering.
Finally, Robert roused himself and took a look along the gently angled rooftop.
‘Oh, shit…’ His mouth fell open. Slowly rising to his feet, he continued to stare ahead. Then he began to move back to the building’s edge, fear churning in the pit of his stomach.
Chapter 35
Late Night Shopping
Martin Butterworth stared morosely into the glittering Christmas window display and wished that he was at home in bed. His breath fogged the glass as he looked in on a mythical world. Three bright young things were taking tea on a summer lawn. They were seated on gaily striped furniture and nestled in a dell of artificial flowers. The two girls were slim and tall and very white. They were clad in deceptively simple striped dresses (deceptive because such simplicity carried an extraordinarily high price tag) and were serving sandwiches from a silver salver to a young man with a psychopathic fixed grin and a missing left foot. The banner above the scene read ‘ENTER A DIFFERENT WORLD AT HARRODS’. Butterworth wished that he could. He looked down at his shoes, lifting one foot to find the sole sticky with blood.
Hargreave tapped him hard on the shoulder. ‘There’s no point you looking in there, lad,’ he said. ‘Not on the salary we pay you. You’ll have to wait until the January sale.’
The young detective constable turned reluctantly from the carefree world depicted in the window and back to the gruesome mire on the ground in front of it. The body of the boy had all but disintegrated upon hitting the mercifully deserted pavement. Most of the remains had now been removed and the area cordoned off with yellow plastic ribbon. Above them, strings of shattered lightbulbs buzzed and crackled.
‘Good selection of household items,’ noted Hargreave, cupping his hand and peering into the window. ‘Poncey Knightsbridge prices, though.’ He pointed to an adjacent kitchen display. ‘Mind you, we could do with that mop bucket right now.’
Behind him, two pale young officers dragged a leaking bin liner over to a police van which had been disguised as a British Gas emergency vehicle. Hargreave had gone to great trouble to keep the mopping-up operation under wraps. He had been working back at the main computer room when the call had come through and had left the building at a run. But he was being careful. Supposedly there was a press blackout still in force, but he had no real hopes of holding it beyond tomorrow morning. It was his bad luck that just as he was really beginning to get somewhere with the investigation there had to be another ostentatiously gory death in the centre of the city.
He punched Butterworth painfully on the arm and beckoned him away. ‘We seem to be getting warmer, don’t we?’ he said cheerfully. ‘The body’s scarcely cold.’
‘It’s going to be hard getting an identification,’ Butterworth ventured, ‘the state it was in.’
‘That’s true,’ agreed Hargreave, thoughtfully massaging his stubbled chin. ‘A person takes on a subtly different appearance when his face has been turned inside out.’ He looked at Butterworth with ghoulish glee, deliberately inviting his hatred. It was the only way to keep the boy from taking the horrors of the night home with him. ‘They’re growing careless. It’s getting to be like Friday the Thirteenth around here. But can we wait until then to catch the murderers? Or can we find out what’s going on and put a stop to it before commuters come out of the tube stations to find bodies raining down on them like some kind of biblical plague?’
He stared back at the officers as they swung the doors of the disguised police van shut. ‘It’s getting to be like a bloody Magritte painting around here, except that the victims aren’t wearing bowler hats….’
‘Sir?’
Hargreave thrust his hand into his overcoat and scratched around, thinking. ‘For something this big, I could get a fleet of men up here like that.’ He snapped his fingers in Butterworth’s startled face. His tone told the boy that this course of action had already been discounted. ‘But of course, I can’t, because the tabloids would have a bloody field day and we’d all be accused of total incompetence. Imagine it, coppers blundering about the rooftops, dropping down lift shafts in the dark. Have you heard our lads when they’re all out together? The noise is unbelievable. They’re like a herd of bloody elephants. So instead we have discreet teams of two and three operating in broad daylight, by which time the trail of the night before has gone stone cold.’
Butterworth watched the inspector light a fresh cigarette from the stub of his old one. He knew that he had failed to come up with any revelatory evidence of his own since he had been assigned to the case, but still dared to hope that he would not be sent out with the other search teams as a penance. In fact, he managed a confident smile for nearly four seconds, until Hargreave suddenly clapped him on the shoulder, nearly dislocating it. ‘So now, my little freckled friend, it’s down to you.’
‘What do you mean, sir?’
‘You’re being given a chance to prove your mettle in the field. Tomorrow night. Up there.’ Hargreave kept his bright eyes fixed on the boy’s appalled face as he pointed roofward. Butterworth experienced a sloshing feeling in the pit of his stomach. He wished that there was a toilet nearby.
‘It’s all right, lad, you won’t be alone. I’m sending Bimsley up as well. He’s not quite as gormless as you, but his feet are too big and he tends to trip over them, so you’ll have to look out for him.’
Upon hearing his name, Constable Bimsley grinned and waved from the window of the waiting van. It was a long-established fact that Bimsley was considered by many to be clinically insane and that he would do anything for a chance of promotion, no matter how dangerous the task. In his spare time he made parachute jumps and was known to the rest of the force as “Mad Dog” Bimsley. Butterworth looked over at the van and his heart sank into the pavement.
‘You can stop doing your impersonation of a basset hound now, lad, it won’t be that difficult. I just want you to have a nose around in a particular area that I have in mind and if you meet anyone up there I want you to act like you’re in the know. Naturally, you’ll have a micro-transmitter on you. All you’ll have to do is leave the line open and we’ll come up and get you before things get too hot. Now off you go and get a good night’s sleep.’ Hargreave charily lifted his Oxford toecaps over a patch of drying blood, then watched as Butterworth moved uncertainly towards the waiting vehicle.
During his trip to the computer room earlier, he had run a check on the city’s rooftop traffic surveillance and security cameras. Most of the new ones had been programmed to log the movement of anything larger than a cat. The system set in motion a videotape recording of any activity which could be attributed to a form of human interference and noted it on the night’s file discs. Cameras at three separate locations had logged activity in the past few hours and had listed the times of occurrences on the printed readout. All of them were within Hargreave’s newly defined triangle of operations. Unfortunately, the only way to discover exactly what the cameras had logged would be to play back the tapes themselves and so far he had been unable to gain access to the room housing the monitoring equipment. Hopefully though, he would be able to do this in the next hour.
He looked at his watch and sighed. Janice would be in bed asleep by now, her long legs tucked beneath her in a perfect fifties calendar repose….He yawned as he made his way back to the van, his breath condensing heavily in the air. The weekend was going to be damned cold. He would go and see Janice tomorrow and discuss his mad theory with her. Even if she thought h
e was wrong, she wouldn’t laugh at him.
Most of Hargreave’s past successes had been made possible by his justly famous powers of intuition and right now that power was working overtime. Butterworth and Bimsley would set in from one point of the triangle. Two men would cover the other. He and a squad of armed marksmen would be waiting at the apex. With a handful of vehicles stationed on the ground within the triangle, he would be able to have his men up on the rooftops within moments of a sighting. He wanted to feel sure that he could flush his murderers into a trap in the next forty-eight hours, but confidence did not come easily. There were still too many variables to consider.
In the morning he would go to the library, check out his idea and see if it held water. Until then he could not afford to relax his vigil. In the brilliant windows at his back, china-skinned women in silver wolf jackets smiled vacuously on into the night like latter-day goddesses.
Chapter 36
Into Darkness
For almost half an hour the radio remained dead. Finally, Lee managed to call in his position from Hengler station, situated on the cramped, chaotic roof of the London Palladium theatre. The station had been named after the first person to use the site for the purpose of public entertainment, mainly as a circus. If Charles Hengler could have viewed the building from its rooftops tonight, he would have been forgiven for thinking that its acrobatic traditions lived on.
Having transmitted his position back, Lee and his team finally prepared to leave. So far they had seen nothing, heard nothing, found nothing. They decided to strike south and search the area leading down to the river. For Lee it was a matter of honour to make sure that Jay’s death was avenged and so he was determined that his team should be the first to reach Chymes.
Even with the temperature steadily dropping, he was pleased to hear no complaints from his crew. Lee ran a tight ship. He knew that if they could just manage to maintain discipline, Chymes and his thugs could be beaten. What disturbed him more was Zalian’s continuing failure to locate the headquarters of the enemy. He pondered this as he carefully checked the area for telltale signs of their tracks, then turned and rejoined his team, the last—as always—to leave the roof and slip away across the city.
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