House of Dust (47 page)

“Quint? Where are you?”

“Katharine,” I said, relief breaking over me like a storm surge. “Where are
you
?”

“Don't interrupt me, Quint,” she said, her voice taut. “Whatever you do, don't interrupt me.” She paused and I had to bite my tongue to stop myself asking her what was going on. “I'm to tell you that he's waiting for you.” Another pause. Who the hell was “he”? “He's waiting for you . . . and Davie.” She stressed the last two words, which made me wonder. “He says you'll know where to find us.” Again she left a space between sentences. “Us,” she repeated. “You understand that? I'm . . . I'm at his mercy.”

I felt my heart race even more, but I forced myself to keep quiet.

“And Quint? He says no nostrums, okay?”

I decided against answering.

“Come now, Quint,” she said, her words suddenly rushed. “I know who he—”

Then the connection was cut.

“Fuck!” I shouted, pressing buttons to pick up the earlier message. I held the phone up for Davie to hear. Katharine's voice came again, this time the words interspersed with rapid breathing. The message was the same.

“Christ, he's got her,” I said, kicking the kerb. “He's had her all morning. He must have had her stashed somewhere when he took the shots.” An image flashed before me. “I hope she didn't see what he did to that poor sod at STAT.”

“What does it mean?” Davie demanded. “Where are we supposed to go?”

I took off my nostrum and held my hand out for his. I put them in the pockets of my jacket and stuck it behind the nearest fence. Looking back towards the wall outside Worc, I nodded slowly.

“The tunnel,” I said, starting to move. “The tunne I was in yesterday.”

“What?” Davie said, his eyes opening wide. “You mean the tunnel that leads—?”

“To the House of Dust? Aye, that's the one. Come on.”

“What about Raphael and her crew?” he asked as he caught up with me.

“What about them?” I replied, thinking of Lister 25's wrecked body. “They can go to hell. Anyway, we haven't got our nostrums so how can we let them know where we're headed?”

Davie grinned.

Thinking of our destination and the Mark Two Grendel that was waiting for us down there with Katharine, I didn't.

We were standing on the towpath outside the tunnel entrance, the water of the canal stagnant and unrippled by bulldog punts or any other craft.

“In there?” Davie asked, inclining his head. “Do you think the surveillance teams in the Camera have picked up the Grendel and Katharine?”

I was looking at him thoughtfully. “I wonder. The shooter seems to be able to shield himself from the cameras and sensors, but Katharine would show up all right. But he told us not to bring our nostrums; presumably he's already dumped hers.” I took my control card out of my pocket. “What about these? Do you think they have some kind of bug in them?”

“Maybe. Let's keep a hold of them all the same,” Davie said, examining the brickwork of the arch. “We might need them later.”

I nodded and stepped forward. “Right, big man. Let's do it.” I went into the enclosed passage. My heart pounded as I thought of Katharine at the Grendel's mercy, but I managed to get a grip on myself. Walking into the lion's den in a state of panic wasn't a good idea.

We moved further inside and paused for our eyes to get accustomed to the ghostly light from the tunnel roof. Water was dripping on to the floor and the air had the stale, rank edge that I recalled from my last visit. I listened, but couldn't pick up the sound of anyone else in the vicinity. I started forward again as quietly as I could.

Underground, in a confined, brick-lined tube that bends all over the place, you quickly lose your sense of distance and direction. Keeping an eye on the time is the only way of maintaining perspective. After five minutes I reckoned we'd done about three hundred yards. I stopped before a left-hand kink in the tunnel and looked round it cautiously. I didn't get much joy. There was another bend about fifty yards on, this time to the right. In a patch of damp earth I saw a clear footprint among a series of scuffs. I recognised it immediately. It was a large Grendel-issue boot – size eleven, I was pretty sure.

“What do you think?” Davie asked in a whisper. “This must get somewhere soon.”

I was trying to work out where we might be, but the tunnel's course had disoriented me. If Pete Pym was right about it leading to the House of Dust in what used to be Christ Church, we must have been pretty close.

“Where the hell is Katharine?” I said, swallowing hard. “The Grendel must—” I broke off as the unmistakable sound of booted feet moving at speed came from the canal end of the tunnel. “Shit. We've got company.”

Davie grabbed my arm. “Come on. That sounds like a pack of bulldogs. I don't think the shooter's going to be happy.”

We ran round the corner, then the next one. Now the tunnel was straight, a stretch of under a hundred yards leading to a heavy metal panel. There was more light around it.

“Jesus, there they are,” I gasped. I broke into a sprint.

A pair of figures were standing at the tunnel end. Katharine was close to her captor and I could see a thin rope or wire joining her to him. They turned when they heard our footsteps and I saw the Grendel again. This time he was wearing a suit, as Davie had said, and his hair was brown and curly. But even at that distance, it was the eyes that got me. They were stark and inhuman, as black as a hole in the galaxy.

The Grendel pointed a device at the metal panel and it hissed upwards. He pulled Katharine through, then swivelled back to us. We were still pounding towards them, about twenty yards off.

“You led them to me, Citizen Dalrymple,” Katharine's captor said in a loud, steady voice. “Big mistake.” He stared at me for a couple of seconds as I got nearer. “Now everybody dies.”

The gate slid down an instant before we reached it.

“Bastard!” Davie roared, turning to look back down the tunnel. The stomp of bulldog feet was getting nearer.

I was waving my control card frantically around the solid barrier, trying to activate the sensor. Nothing. The shooter must have programmed in a delay.

In the seconds before the gate rose again I had a vision of Katharine's pale, lined face. Earlier, she'd thought I was the bait. Now it looked like she was.

The first body was a few paces beyond the gate. I heard Davie grunt as he bent over it.

“Bulldog,” he said. “Head blown apart.”

I was staring at a matt black box that had been attached to the wall inside the gate. Red numbers on a small panel were changing rapidly. “Fuck!” I yelled as I saw they were counting down towards zero. “Bomb! Move!”

We hurdled two more shattered bodies and ran down a much more high-tech passage, shining metal walls enclosing a cork-tiled floor. Access panels like those in the science faculty buildings were at regular intervals and the lights were bright. But not as bright as the explosion that boomed out and cascaded after us in waves of igniting gas. Fortunately my control card got us into an entry on the left, the door closing just before the blast reached us.

“That was a bit close for comfort,” Davie said, squatting down.

We listened as another explosion rocked the underground complex, this one further down the passage.

“You could say that.” I drew the blackened sleeve of my white shirt across my eyes, then stared as they focused on what was ahead. “Bloody hell, Davie. Look at this.” I walked unsteadily down a narrow gantry that led out from the room.

He followed me into mid-air and, in silence, we took in the panorama of coercion that was all around. We'd moved into a small round area, some kind of viewing chamber. It was a glass-covered module suspended above a vast expanse of large chambers that must have been dug out of the ground at tremendous expense. There were retaining walls beneath us, separating the huge space into self-enclosed sections, all of them without roofs so that we could see down into every area. There were people all over the place, some of them in bulldog apparel but the overwhelming majority in tattered blue vests and trousers. They were mostly at work, those in the unit immediately below us bent over tables covered in the innards of large computers. I could see others further away packing books into cases and folding up clothes.

“What the . . .?” Davie's words trailed away as he pored over a screen at waist level. “Here, we can move this speed ball.” He glanced at me. “Do you want to see more?”

I nodded slowly. “It's our best chance of spotting Katharine and the arsehole who tried to atomise us.”

Davie ran his fingers over the keys and the viewing module glided smoothly away from the gantry, its suspension cables attached to a network of junction points on the roof.

“You know what this is, don't you?” I said, moving my eyes over the honeycombed complex below before pointing at the name on the screen. “It's a panopticon.”

“Oh aye,” Davie said, his head bent over the control panel. “What's that then?”

“The first modern prison was designed by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century. It was a circular building that grew out from a central observation tower. This is the New Oxford equivalent.”

“Is that right?” he said, stopping the module's motion. “Well, take a look at this. According to the plan I've accessed, we're over the Interrogation Section now.”

What we were actually over was a vision of hell. I stripped the skin from my lips with my teeth as I took in the naked bodies on racks, the women spread-eagled in front of bulldogs with leather aprons over their suits, the banks of machines with wires leading to the victims' tenderest parts. As we were hanging there, one of the torturers looked up and met my gaze. The Grendel's eyes were hard to live with, but this guy's were even worse. He gave me a twisted smile and went back to work with a knotted lash.

“Who are those poor souls?” Davie asked, his eyes wide.

I was thinking of the man I'd left in the tunnel yesterday. “Pete Pym told me there's a resistance movement in the suburbs. Those monsters are maybe trying to identify its members.”

Davie shook his head. “Why are they using methods like that? This is Science City. Surely they've got truth drugs and the like.”

I looked at him. “Truth drugs are no fun for the torturers, Davie. I bet these arseholes get a kick out of their work.”

Davie was glancing around. “I want off this contraption. I'm going to rearrange those fuckers' faces.”

“Hang on, guardsman,” I said, touching his arm. “Katharine first.” I caught his eye. “Please.”

Davie scowled as he took a final look at the scene below. “All right, Quint. But I'm coming back here afterwards, I promise you.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll come with you.”

He nodded then turned his attention back to the control panel. “Where to then? This is a whole underground city. The Grendel and Katharine could be anywhere.”

There was a blast of high explosive about a hundred yards to our right.

“There he goes,” I said. “Follow the trail of destruction.”

I just hoped that the bomber was keeping his hostage alive and in one piece.

The panopticon passed over more sweatshop enclosures and moved above heavy-duty incarceration units: people on treadmills, prisoners housed in coffin-shaped cells with no room to move, a group of at least twenty crammed in a small space. Jesus, the Black Hole of New Oxford. But the worst was yet to come.

“I don't believe this,” Davie said, the skin above his beard pale. “I do not believe this.”

I was having trouble on that front too. The module had stopped over an open area surrounded by higher walls than elsewhere in the excavated chamber. Great vertical pipes led up to the roof – I remembered the metallic columns we'd seen inside the former Christ Church – but they didn't distract me for long. What was going on below was a flashback to an older, more savage Oxford that was obviously still attractive to the city's contemporary rulers. A tall, pointed, pale stone tower stood in the centre of the space, a few bulldogs and observers in white coats keeping their distance. I recognised the monument at the foot of St Giles near the Faculty of Criminology. This was a detailed replica of the Martyrs' Memorial to Cranmer and his fellow clerics, who were burned at the stake for their Protestant beliefs by Queen Mary in the sixteenth century. Then I realised that the figures around the second stage of the tower weren't statues of the original victims – they were living human beings, shackled to the stonework.

“They're going to burn those people, Quint,” Davie said, as men in fire protection suits moved forward and lit the heaped wood at the base of the memorial with torches. “This is fucking insane.” He looked around the inside of the viewing unit. “I'm not standing for it.”

“No, Davie!” I yelled, pointing at the pair of bulldogs carrying machine-pistols beneath us. “You haven't got a chance.”

He pressed a button and a glass panel blew out of the module, an escape rope snaking towards the floor. “I don't care. This is murder.” And he was gone.

Paralysed, I watched as he slid downwards, directing a loud stream of abuse at the executioners. “Jesus, Davie,” I gasped, grabbing hold of the robe and leaning out into space. I got a lungful of acrid woodsmoke and started lowering myself incompetently, feeling my palms burn as I slipped.

I was halfway down when I realised that not all the smoke was coming from the pyre around the replica Martyrs' Memorial. My ears rang with the percussive effect of multiple explosions.

We weren't the only ones who objected to the cremation of live bodies: it seemed the Grendel did too.

By the time I got down, the armed bulldogs were sprawled motionless on the floor. The white-coated observers were cowering by the wall and the firemen were nodding dully as they were given instructions. Near them I made out the solid form of Katharine's captor, but I couldn't see her. Then there was a deafening noise as high-pressure hoses erupted all round the pyre. The fire was doused in seconds and fans sucked the smoke up the huge vent inlets.