Solaris Rising 1.5 (14 page)

If you do not come for us, we will surely come for you.

The letter this morning had been delivered to him personally by someone whose features were disturbingly unfamiliar. The dark glasses, too, added to his sense of unease.

“Here you are,” the woman had said, her words like notes struck from a cracked bell. “Matron said this one was important.”

He studied the outline of her body, as if that might unlock the clue to her identity. Even here, however, he was frustrated, as the white, knee-length jacket swirled around her like a cloud about the sun.

“Thank you,” he said, although it was difficult to speak with the reset bones of his face screaming at one another as he moulded his words.

The envelope was dreary and brown with one word, his name, scribbled upon it. Even that had been somehow smudged, the cheap black ink smeared like dried blood. He opened it with the remaining fingers of his good hand.

Inside, he found one sheet of paper, untidily folded, with printed material, something about a yardsale of old books and paintings way over in the Bronx. He was amused to see a couple of his own novels were listed there,
Same Day, Sad Hearts
, his ten-cent cowgirl-comes-to-town story, and the trashy vampire tale,
Thirst
. Neither had sold more than a broken handful of copies. His smile, though, was smacked from his face when he saw what was written on the reverse side of the flyer.

If you do not come for us, we will surely come for you.

These were the words that he fell asleep with in the pain of his hospital bed. They followed him, too, into his dreams.

H
E COULD UNDERSTAND
well enough why he had become involved with the Organisation.

They paid him the kind of money he could never earn from his writing, and he had an ex-wife and two snotty-nosed kids to support through school.

He even had some sympathy with their ideals.

In a world where money sheltered behind reinforced glass scrapers and where workers were slaves, it was not hard to feel something had to be done.

He had thought about it, in a desultory, on and off kind of way, for several years. Another book, though, had become his default setting.
This will be the one
, he said to himself over and over, like a mantra. He had been writing his last book,
Sex and the Salamander of Seoul
, when he had lost three fingers of his left hand. He told himself he had deserved this castration as a punishment for the prostitution of his writing talent. He would write no more.

He knew someone who knew someone else who had access to the Organisation.

He showed them his left hand; hell, he even showed them his shrivelled fingers that he kept in a box in his jacket pocket.

They said, “You’ve come to the right place, Joe.”

W
HEN HE AWOKE
, drenched in sour sweat, he heard the scratchy voice of the man in the bed to his right.

He turned his head as far as possible, feeling the unused muscles in his neck stretching and protesting with pain, cursing the thick swathes of bandages around his head and upper body.

What was it the old fool was saying?

The man’s voice was like a small bird’s, sing-song, sing-song, like a sparrow that has fallen from his nest and been taken from the ground by a larger, fiercer bird with claws and beak, still sing-song, but more sad-song, more accepting of fate.

Something about a bargain, doing a deal.

He twisted his body as best he could to make it easier to hear.

“I’m sorry,” the old man said, “I couldn’t help but hear.”

“What?”

“You were talking, talking in your sleep.”

He could see the old man now, skinny, his hospital shirt unbuttoned at the chest to display a gathering of wiry white hairs, like a crowd of elderly friends at some college reunion, his nose stubby and broken at some point in the past; a boxer, Joe thought, a featherweight champion, his fights recorded in
The Ring.

“You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you?”

T
HAT WAS ALSO
what they said at the Organisation.

“Everybody that walks through these doors is in some kind of trouble, my friend.”

There were two of them behind the desk, black-suited with red rose buttonholes. Strange, he remembered, the way they looked, like some film star gangsters from the previous century. The woman on the left said her name was Bonnie and the other one, he couldn’t recall her name, but one was black and the other white, and there was a guy with an automatic standing on a box, just behind the women. He looked mean and poised for action as well as beaten-up in a mature kind of way.

“Okay, Joe,” said the black woman, “we’ll take you on.”

“A
ND NOW THEY
want me back,” he said to the old man with the boxer’s nose in the next bed.

“It’s a good story, Joe.”

“After all I’ve done for them; all this, I mean,” and he gestured at his broken body.

The old man shook his head in sympathy and there was spittle climbing down from the corner of his mouth.

“I could help,” he said, sing-song, like a bird’s voice, one that’s just escaped from a predator’s mouth.

“You?” he said, “how could you help?” and there was a bitter taste in his mouth as the words slid from the back of his throat.

“Well, Joe,” he said, “I could write your story for you.”

There was something in the old man’s breath behind the words, something confident, something smiling, and something strong that stopped the sneering words from coming. Joe waited for the old man to continue.

“Yes, I could maybe do that.”

Still he paused, seeing now something he recognised in the remains of the old man’s day; behind the mask of illness that had reduced him to this tin can hospital bed.

“It’s a good story, after all, and it would have to be my last one too.”

He knew now who the old man was, and was about to express some inept platitude, some expression of privilege at finding himself in a bed next to the Great Man, when he was stopped in his tracks by the next words uttered by the Great American Writer.

“Or,” he said, “we could just swap places and you could write the story yourself.”

“H
ERE’S WHAT WE
want you to do, Joe,” said Bonnie, the white woman with pale, unlit skin.

“What do you mean?”

He was suspicious now, thinking the Grand Old Man of American Letters was maybe taking the piss, taking advantage of his disabled state.

“Well, you’re a writer, aren’t you?”

He nodded as far as the bandages about his neck would allow.

“You’re Joe Hilfiger, aren’t you? Creator of Zane Zee, one of the most underrated dicks in late-twenty-first-century crimelit?”

“Well, yes,” he said, his grin beneath the bandages so wide it made him wince with the pain of jarring bones, “but I was also responsible for Honey Sweet, Spacegirl Supreme, not to mention Van Haartsing, the zombie vampire hunter.”

“I know, I know.”

He saw the old man had raised himself into a half sitting position and was rocking to and fro in his bed with uncontrollable laughter.

“You know?”

“Over the years, Joe, I’ve made it my business to know.”

H
E HAD DONE
his homework on the Organisation.

The friend of a friend had already told him the basics. “Bim, bam, bomb,” he had said, as casually as if he were revealing the title of the book he was currently reading.

“What do you mean?” he had asked.

“I said what I said,” the friend of the friend replied, and was gone, his beer only half-finished.

“L
OOK,
J
OE,
”
THE
old man said. “I’m dying.”

He gestured as best he could to indicate disbelief, dismay, with a hint of a dismissive wave of his arm to suggest the Grand Old Man should refuse to accept such an unfair medical assessment.

“It’s true, Joe, this old bag of bones and gristle is raddled with cancer. I got days if I’m lucky.”

He did not know what to say. One of his characters, even the cowgirl whose name he had forgotten, would have had something to say, but he was not in one of his stories now.

“If I’m honest, Joe, I guess I couldn’t write your story for you now, I don’t have the strength, I don’t have the words any more, but that’s not really the deal I’m offering you.”

“What is it then?”

“Let me tell you my story first, and then you can decide if you want it to be your story too.”

H
E WAS DESPERATE;
he had lost his wife and his children and his fingers.

He was about to be given his commands by Bonnie of the Organisation; he knew there was no way back.

“It’s only a story,” he said to himself, “only a fucking story.”

He looked at the lightless sickness in the white woman’s face as she told him what he had to do, and told himself he could no longer believe what he had just said to himself, that he was just a character in a story.

“Y
OU’RE STILL YOUNG
,” the old man said. “You’re broken now, but you’ll mend.”

He nodded;
carry on
, his eyes spoke for him.

“The letter you received, Joe; if you do as I say, they’ll come for me and not for you.”

E
VERYTHING HAD CHANGED.

His instructions were in his head and now there was no possibility of a return to innocence, to writing, or to the path of love, or peace.

The orders were in his memory, the money was in his bank account, the implant was in his blood.

He was an Organisation man, for good or ill, forever.

“I
WAS YOUNG
once, Joe.”

The Great American Writer looked wistful, his memories old friends, relations come to pay their last respects.

“I was a struggling writer once, married, with kids here, there, and on their way, churning out the words, sometimes even ten thousand in a day, the poor white trash of fiction.”

The old man paused, as if questioning his commitment to telling his story.

“People thought it had come from nowhere,
The Great White Novel
, thought it was the most brilliant debut in fiction since Totem’s
Body Politic, Body Erotic,
or even as far back as Heller’s
Catch 22
or Lovecraft or Poe.”

A sigh escaped his lips, air from a punctured balloon.

“What they did not understand was the price I had to pay.”

H
E GRINNED AT
the old writer in the next bed and told him the story of how it was on his third mission that he was taken.

The bomb, this time, was concealed within a book he was to carry with him into the heat and heartlands of the enemy.

He smiled now at the thought that it had been his new friend’s follow-up novel,
Supremacy
, which had enclosed both the device and the code that would detonate the explosive.

He wondered whether the price the Grand Old Man had been forced to pay was the unpleasant opinions mouthed in his novels.

He looked about him, as he rode the moving walkways, at the citadels of capital, the monuments to greed, celebrated in his companion’s fiction.

Of course, the old man’s writing was startling in its originality, and he knew only too well that his own political principles were not so secure as to resist the lure of money or fame.

The walkway stopped a distance from the main entrance of the Manhattan Finance House and he paused to admire the glory of the impenetrable glass shell of the scraper. Sunlight rebounded from the building and fragmented into the colours of the spectrum that fell like shards of glass upon the arid concrete. It was as if the gods themselves were falling from the heavens in their rainbows, to be with mortal man, and it was this strange beauty that he was charged to bring down.

He was no longer Joe Hilfiger, failed writer, but Joseph Hilfigger, banker to the gods.

Security scanned each neuron of his brain, each pore of his skin, his rectal passage, and his briefcase.

“Good book you’re reading, sir.”

Fear momentarily creased his face but it was clear from the guard’s smile that he was merely engaged in social pleasantry, demonstrating to the visitor the efficiency of the new technology at his disposal.

“For my lunch break.”

“Better than jam donuts, sir!”

“Yes, have you read it?”

He was moving on and through glass gates when he called back to the guard with his trite question, and instantly regretted doing so. It was unnecessary and increased the risk of detection or delay; it betrayed his inexperience and a desire to flout his own organisation’s technology and its success in masking the existence of the tiny bomb.

“I have, sir, and good on him, too, sir, for telling it like it is.”

He waved in the direction of the security officer and said not another word until he reached the ninth floor where the Finance House’s computer block and data bank was housed. It was there he asked a white coated technician the way to the nearest rest room.

H
E COULD SEE
them waiting for him before the glass elevator had completed its descent.

There was no time to think about how they had detected him, although he could see the smiling face of the literary security guard amongst the soldiers and police and all their guns.

Okay
, he thought,
I’ll take you bastards with me.

He took the copy of
Supremacy
from his jacket pocket and saw the security guard pointing, his jowls shaking with excitement or fear, his brow furrowed. The scooped-out inside of the book where the bomb had nestled was now an empty shell, but pasted onto the inside front cover was the ignition code for the explosive device that would rip through the hard heart of the Manhattan empire. It was the last sentence of the Great American Writer’s final novel.