Redlaw - 01 (13 page)

Slocock stepped back, panting, flushed with success. He turned and looked to Khun Sarawong. He resented his need for affirmation from the instructor, but was unable to keep from seeking it.

Khun Sarawong merely put his palms together and gave a curt bow. “Not bad,” he said. “For a
nak muay farang
.”

It wasn’t much, but given the source, it was high praise indeed. Slocock retired to the showers happy. In the toilets, he helped himself to a quick toot of the old Bolivian marching powder from a golden snuffbox, a family heirloom that had seen his great-grandfather through the First World War and his grandfather through the Second.
Muay thai
and a prodigious cocaine habit might seem incompatible bedfellows, but in fact the cardiovascular training helped counteract the drug’s harmful effects, while the coke mitigated the post-exertion aches and pains and boosted his depleted energy reserves. It was almost as if the two things were made for each other, a perfect marriage of opposites.

He then spent some time studying himself in a wall mirror. His physique was superb for a man in his mid-thirties. Hell, it was superb full stop. Not an ounce of flab to be seen. The muscles seemed to glide across one another with every movement he made, smooth as cloud shadows on a hillside. The face wasn’t bad, either. A little long, perhaps, a little too pointed at the chin, and the nose was slightly larger than the ideal, but all in all a symmetrical, well-put together face. Slocock looked at it and, as usual, did not fail to like what he saw. Political pundits frequently commented on his appearance, his “public schoolboy good looks,” his “athletic build.” In any number of blogs and online surveys he was rated the handsomest man in Westminster, although that wasn’t saying much, given the troll-like quality of the competition. One website, politiciansidliketofuck.com, placed him in the top three most shaggable elected officials in the world. A rival site, politiciansidliketofuckoff.com, ranked him similarly highly, but that was far less of an accolade.

A bead of blood bulged suddenly from his reflection’s left nostril. Slocock sniffed it back up, but the blood would not be restrained, swelling from the nostril and then dribbling down his upper lip. He stemmed the flow with a twist of toilet paper. Had Adebayo punched him in the nose? Possibly. More likely, though, it was the coke.

The coke, which even now was forming a hard nucleus in his brain, defining his thoughts, sharpening his convictions until they were certainties. Oh, glorious coke, which took a man who was already considerable and made even more of him. Slocock felt his personality expanding until he was no longer merely full of himself, he could barely be contained, like a universe in a bottle.

His mobile trilled. He dug it out of his gym bag and flipped it open.

“Yes?”

“Slocock? Wax.”

“Maurice! Maurice, old mate. How you doing, Maurice, Morrie, the Maurice-meister? What up?
¿Qué pasa?
”

“Slocock, are you all right?”

“Don’t I sound all right? I’m all right. I’m fine. Never better. What can I do for you? To what do I owe the thingummy of this call? How can I help my fellow duellist across the dispatch box, my other half, my oppo?” During his few weeks at Sandhurst, before getting booted out for conduct unbecoming, Slocock had managed to pick up a few pieces of military slang, which he liked to drop into the dialogue now and then to suggest the army career he’d not actually had.

“Ah,” said Wax. “I see. You’ve had a little... pharmaceutical assistance, haven’t you?”

“No idea what you’re talking about. Just been working out, that’s all. I’m charged with endorphins. Riding a natural high.” He inhaled hard through his unplugged nostril and hissed the air noisily out through pursed lips. “Pure and undefiled, that’s me. My body is a temple.”

“Yes, well... Listen, Slocock. I’ve got some news for you.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes. I’ve managed to bring the PM on board.”

“Really? No shitting?”

“He wasn’t having any of it at first, but I talked him round. What swung it was something you said, about all of this looking like an act of benevolence.”

“Well, it is. I mean, let’s be honest, it’s for our own security, and that’s paramount, but the Sunless gain something too. Everybody wins.”

“And Lambourne can have these things up and running how soon?”

“The first’s already been completed,” said Slocock. “Far as I know, it’s ready for use.”

“Completed? But I was led to believe the project was only at the blueprint stage.”

“What you were led to believe, Waxy old pal, and what’s actually the case, are two very different kettles of fish. Nathaniel escalated the project to priority status once it became clear how restless the Sunless are getting in their SRAs. One facility’s been built, there’s a further two well on their way to being finished, and the land’s been surveyed and the materials purchased for at least a dozen more. All the sites are on property Nathaniel owns, so he hasn’t even had to apply for planning permission. The work falls within the category of legitimate change of use.”

“From factories to... to whatever these places are going to be called.”

“That’s right.”

“What
are
they going to be called?”

“Nathaniel’s publicists are working on that right now. We’ll let you know. The main thing is, you did it, Mo. Well done. Bent the PM’s ear and wormed some sense into him. I knew you had it in you.”

“And I’m safe now? You promise that memory stick isn’t going anywhere?”

“Nowhere except somewhere safe that only I know about.”

“I don’t suppose... I don’t suppose I could have it, could I?”

“What, to watch? For your own personal viewing pleasure?
Maurice Wax’s Greatest Hits
?”

“No. Not for that. Not at all. Just so that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. To make sure.”

“Oh, Mo. Mo, my foe. Mo the Joe who likes a low blow from a ’ho. That’s not going to happen. No way. The stick stays with me. Something to keep you honest. A stick to beat you with, as it were. Which of course, you being you, I think you’d quite enjoy.”

Wax’s voice turned icy. “You’re an utter turd, Slocock. You know that?”

“Know it, don’t care,” Slocock replied blithely.

“One day you’re going to get your comeuppance.”

“Perhaps. But not, Wax, from you. Never from you.”

“You know what my grandfather would have called you? A
putznasher yutz
.”

“I do love those Yiddish insults. They’re so expressive, so onomatopoeic. Did your grandpa yell that over this shoulder as he fled from the Nazis? I bet that told them.”

“Fuck you, Slocock.”

“And a very good day to you too, Wax,” Slocock said, and slapped his phone shut.

He re-examined himself in the mirror. The screw of toilet paper was soaked red, but when he tugged it out there was no renewed flow of blood. Triumph was blazing in his reflection’s eyes, but it was nothing next to the triumph Slocock felt inside. He’d done it. He’d moulded the malleable Wax, and Wax in turn had brought the Prime Minister into the fold. All was going swimmingly.

If only Wax knew the full potential of Lambourne’s scheme.

Maurice Wax, whose grandparents had escaped Germany a few weeks before Kristallnacht and who liked to brag how they had instilled a strong sense of fairness and justice in him as a young boy, along with a loathing for intolerance and oppression...

Oh,
there
was irony. Irony galore.

CHAPTER TEN

It was both dream and memory. A memory within a dream.

The day Leary gave him the crucifix he now wore.

Until then, Redlaw had made do with a small silver cross on a slender chain.

Leary had told him that wasn’t good enough. Too modest. Too restrained.

“What you need,” she’d said, “is something nice and ostentatious and Catholic. Like mine.” She waggled the crucifix she wore, with its carved Christ. The whole thing was the size of the palm of Redlaw’s hand. “Not that piddly little whatnot no bigger than an ant.”

Accordingly, one evening she presented him with a velvet-covered box. Inside lay the wooden crucifix, strung on a strong-looking steel chain that looked like the kind used in making handcuffs—same diameter, same density of links.

“Think of it as an anniversary gift. Celebrating five years, to the day, since we first partnered up.”

“No figure on it like there is on yours,” Redlaw remarked, holding the crucifix up for inspection.

“In deference to your Protestant sensibilities. Didn’t want to go too far. There’s only so much showiness you C of E types can take before your heads explode. We left-footers, by contrast, we love a bit of holy bling. Now, are you going to put it on or what?”

He did as bidden.

“Feels heavy,” he said.

“So it should. Can’t have you mincing around not accepting the full weight of your faith. Christianity’s not simple. It uplifts, but it’s also a millstone round our necks. All the stuff we’re supposed to do and not supposed to do. All the sins we try not to commit but commit anyway.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I forgot, it’s a monk I’m talking to,” said Leary. “Ever thought of getting yourself a tonsure, Redlaw? It’d suit you,
and
no one would realise you have a bald spot.”

“I don’t have a bald spot.”

“Trust me, you do. But it’s our secret. Ours and your barber’s.”

“Shut up, Leary.”

She just laughed. She never took him seriously, even when he was at his most serious. “So you’re not going to thank me, then?”

“For what? Informing me I’m going thin on top?”

“That and the cross.”

“I haven’t decided if I’m keeping it or not.”

“That’s okay. I know you will. See, the thing is, as with everything where God is concerned, it might not be what you want, but it might just be what you need.”

“Thank you for that insightful little aphorism, sergeant. Now, are we going to stand here all night jabbering, or are we going to get out there and wrangle Sunless?”

“Lead on, boss. To the SHADEmobile! I’m driving, mind.”

A week later Redlaw contracted shingles. Two days after that, Leary was dead.

The crucifix stayed on. He hadn’t removed it since.

Surfacing from sleep, he groped for it now, in his hospital bed. His right arm wouldn’t budge, so he used his left. His fingers closed around the familiar contours, that axis of pity and sorrow.

“Redlaw.”

He opened his eyes. Commodore Macarthur was seated at his bedside. They two, and a host of purring machines, were the only occupants of the small private ward. Venetian blinds ruled the daylight like lines on a sheet of foolscap.

“Marm,” he croaked.

“There you are,” Macarthur said. “You poor thing. Came a real cropper this time, didn’t you? And it’s all my fault. I should never have sent you to check out that nest. Not alone, at any rate.”

“There were dozens of them. You weren’t to know.”

“Still, I should have made you take backup, instead of sending it along afterwards. If we weren’t so stretched right now...”

“I’d never have accepted backup.”

“I’d have insisted. How are you feeling?”

Redlaw glanced at his shoulder, which was tightly and thickly bandaged, his arm in an immobiliser sling. “Sore,” he said.

“What have the docs said?”

“That I’m lucky those officers arrived when they did and that one of them knew how to tie a tourniquet, else the blood loss might have done for me. And that I’ve lost a significant chunk of my deltoid muscle and some of the triceps, but the surgeons did a good repair job and I should still have the use of my arm. They tell me it’ll require weeks of physio, but I reckon if I get back to work as soon as possible, and stay active, then things’ll fix themselves.”

“Oh, no,” said Macarthur, with an emphatic shake of the head. “Not going to happen. Not on my watch. You’re staying put and you’re following doctors’ orders, Redlaw. Those are
my
orders.”

“Forgive me, marm, but with all that’s going on, we are, as you said, stretched. We need all the resources we can muster. We need feet on the street.”

“We need your backside in bed. I can’t have you going out there with a half-crippled arm. However much I could do with you, I’m going to have to cope without. Until you’re in tip-top condition again, you won’t be an asset, you’ll be a liability—mostly to yourself.”

“Marm—”

“Redlaw.” She thumped the mattress, and a shockwave of pain shivered across his chest from his shoulder, although he tried not to let this show. “Listen to me, you pigheaded...
man
. You almost died and I’m beating myself up into wee little pieces over that. I’ll not be responsible for you risking your neck again, at least not until I’m certain you’re back to full fitness. Look on this as providence. You’ve a chance now to lie back, take things easy for a while, rest, have some space, get some perspective. Don’t squander it, make the most of it. Think about what you want from life, and from SHADE, and from yourself. Take a good hard look at yourself and try and figure out what you’re about and what you’re after.”