The Scioneer (13 page)

‘It doesn’t
matter. They have no way of tracking us now. I gave the bug to
Calabas.’

‘Of
course you did
,’ she
replied, shaking her head. ‘
That’s
what you were doing. I should have known you were up to
something. It wasn’t about me.’

‘It
wasn’t entirely about you,
’ said Lek, smiling.

‘You’re
not just a pretty face, Lek Gorski,’ she said and leaned over for
another kiss. ‘So, where to?’

‘All we
have to do,’ said Lek,’ is lie
low. So somewhere quiet. Anywhere. Just drive for
now.’

Crystal
turned the engine over and the new biorg purred
willingly.

***

Arid
Bomani was
the fifteen year old son of a well-to-do family from the Ivory
Coast. His father was in shipping. His mother was a primary school
inspector. He had a sister too, Elona, who was studying geology at
the University of Madrid and had once played netball for England.
He had enjoyed a sheltered upbringing in Notting Hill. He liked
cinema-shows, snake-boarding and playing the clarinet. At weekends,
his father often took him to the horse-races in Epsom and Ascot,
and occasionally monster truck rallies at the Crawley Exhibition
Centre. At school, he had many friends and was well liked by his
teachers. He excelled in languages and mathematics. He liked a girl
in his biology class called Sarah Howarth, and they had kissed once
at a disco organised by the local youth centre. Arid Bomani knelt
in front of the toilet, rolled a five cred note into a straw and
snorted a line of raw Hyenarc off the toilet-lid. He always washed
his hands after using the bathroom. Arid Bomani was a good
boy.

‘What
have you been doing?’ his father snapped, as Arid reappeared in the
lounge with his party hat, which he had forgotten he was wearing,
sitting at a new jaunty angle on his head. ‘We are waiting to cut
the cake.’

Arid
tried not
to laugh at the banality of the situation, but the giggles just
bubbled up and out of him. ‘Look at you!’ said his father, ‘You’re
a buffoon! Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ Elona, home for
a few days, was busying herself with the children around the table.
It was some cousin’s birthday and Arid’s parents had agreed to
throw the party at their house, where there was more space for the
kids to play. Arid looked out of the window and managed to stifle
another laugh when he saw a grown man dressed as a clown, sitting
on a giant bouncy castle in the garden, taking a spare moment to
smoke a cigarette. Arid’s father slapped him once around the head –
he knew his son had been upstairs masturbating again, and was about
to berate him for it, when he saw the disapproving look in his
wife’s eyes and thought better of it. ‘Take some digisnaps,
buffoon!’ he commanded instead, and handed Arid the camera to
record the occasion of some kid, surrounded by some more kids, in
somebody else’s house, blowing out the candles on a crap
caterpillar cake. Arid Bomani burst out laughing and inadvertently
took a digisnap of his own shoes.

The phone
rang. His mother answered it. ‘Arid!’ she called, ‘it is Osaze on
the phone.’

Thank
John Lennon, thought
Arid and ran upstairs. ‘I’ll take it in my room!’ he
shouted.

‘How’s it
going Bro?’ said Osaze, Arid’s best friend.

‘Jambo Osaze
man, what is happening?’

‘Tonight’s the
night, bro. Are you coming?’

‘Yes!
Yes!’ The excitement in Arid’s voice reaching fever
pitch.

‘Come now then.
We are at my house!’

Arid
put up a
few weak arguments which Osaze merely batted away, until he finally
agreed to leave. He changed into a leather vest, wet-dry-shorts and
seal-skin pumps. He tucked a knife into the inside pocket of his
vest, picked up a wad of creds from his console drawer and headed
back down to the party.

He had
hoped to slip away unnoticed, but his mother was in the hall,
gossiping with the mother of one of the other children.

‘Are you going
out?’

‘Yes mother. To
Osaze’s house. To play Liteball.’

‘Good
boy. Don’t be late home,’ said his mother, and she cupped her hands
around his face and kissed him on the forehead. He is growing up,
she thought sadly, as she noticed the hairs around his lips and
chin, and the firm set of his jaw line. He will be a fine
man.

***

Delić
stood
before the bank of Smarte Storage Lockers at Victoria Station and
realised his mistake. There must have been a thousand or more, and
he had no idea which one contained Gorski’s book and the cash. He
wished he’d asked the doctor a few more questions before he had
shot him. He took the severed thumb from his pocket, looked around
him and briefly considered pushing it against a few readers at
random. There were Terror-Guards all around the station concourse,
however, and although Pechev had the Met Police in his pocket, even
they couldn’t turn a blind eye to a skinhead trying to rob a locker
with another man’s dismembered digit. There was only one solution:
Delić would have to wait until the Smarte Locker automatically
popped open when the cred in its clock ran out, otherwise he
would
have to wait until there were
fewer people around before systematically working through the
readers. Assuming Gorski was planning to leave on the first
available train off the island, thought Delić, he was unlikely to
put more than the required amount of cred into a locker.

Rather
than merely sit and wait, he had an idea.
He approached the Europatrans desk and when he was
sure nobody was listening but the assistant behind the counter, he
said, ‘A man is… was… is
supposed
to be leaving on a train today. His name was…is Gorski. I
need to know what train he’s catching.’

‘I’m
sorry s
ir,’ said the
assistant unapologetically, ‘we can’t give out information on our
passengers.’

Delić
pulled out
the bundle of creds, making sure the assistant saw the Meisters at
the same time. He peeled one, two, three bills off the bundle and
laid them on the counter. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, adding two more
to the pile, ‘we’ll make it an even C500. How about
that?’

The
assistant hesitated for a fraction of a second and then scooped up
the cash as though he were making a normal
transaction, tapped at his keyboard and
printed off the information against a certain Dr. Gorski’s
thumbprint. He folded the paper, slipped it inside a ticket
envelope and wished Delić a safe trip.

Delić
bought a
carbonate-free coke and sat on the benches in front of the lockers.
He saw the gangs of station tramps watching him like packs of
wolves, and spat on the floor to show his disdain for their kind.
The print-out said that Gorski had bought two singles for the 22:05
train to France. Two singles, thought Delić, you’ve got some balls
Gorski. He checked the time on the station clock: 18:04. Four
hours. Just four hours. Keep your eyes on the lockers, he told
himself, the rest of your life depends on it.

***

Crystal’s
car pulled up the ramp out of the underground car-park, and the
first thin
g that struck
Lek was the setting sun. ‘Beatlemania,’ he gasped, ‘when did it get
so late? It’ll be curfew in a couple of hours. We’ve got to make
sure we’re holed up somewhere safe by then.’ Crystal drove slowly
south, since Lek said he always felt safer there. She changed
direction time and again, avoided staying on the main roads for too
long and jumped the odd red light when she could. She had to make
sure they weren’t being followed, and to give anybody the slip if
they were. She cruised across Waterloo Bridge at the height of rush
hour and the sunset on the Thames was magnificent, the sun itself
like a great blood orange sinking behind the ash-clouds over the
Houses of Parliament. It seemed as if the sky was on fire, and Lek
stared at it, taking it all in for as long as he could. He caught a
glimpse of the couples in the distance walking beneath the palm
trees along the Embankment, and remembered a time when he and
Crystal had strolled there too, holding hands for the first time.
‘This could be our last night in London,’ he said with a twinge of
sadness. After all, the city had been his home for twenty years. It
hadn’t always been a prison for him. He would miss the wide
tree-lined boulevards of Chelsea and the wilderness of St James
Park, even the seedy shaded canopies of Soho where the city’s
sex-workers plied their trade. London, the refugee capital of the
modern world: over twenty million inhabitants sweating under the
ash-clouds, walking through the once concrete jungle which nature
had reclaimed as its own. It was home to the largest exile camp in
Europa: forty square kilometres of homemade yurts and ramshackle
corrugated iron-roofed shacks, rivalling the favelas of Rio, the
Casablanca ghettos, and the shanty-towns of Johannesburg. ‘I would
have been sorry if I’d missed this,’ he sighed, taking one last
look through the back window of the car as the sun dipped behind
the skyline.

Chapter
19

The
Brixton Wolves patrolled t
he Angell Town Estate looking for prey – old people who had
stayed too long at the clubhouse, or kids who had lost track of
time on their way home from school - but when the sun finally set,
the streets usually emptied and pickings were slim. People knew
better than to stay out after dark in this part of town. Only the
drug dealers pounded the pavements with any sense of security, for
they knew they were a necessary evil. Occasionally, some junkie too
far gone on Lupinex or Hyenarc drew a blade or a pistol and put a
dealer out of business permanently, but there were always violent
repercussions sent down from on high. Pechev’s men were everywhere,
skulking near Government controlled caged off-licences, near the
Eight Ball Billiard Hall, and under the railway bridge, with
bum-bags full of cash and illegal scions. Late into the night, long
after curfew, their coded calls could be heard: ‘Bad Moon Rising!’,
‘Empire State!’, ‘Laughing Bag!’.

Raul
‘
Domino’ Tyrell hadn’t
been working the block for long, only a couple of months, and now
the nights were beginning to draw in, he had started to consider
his own mortality, knowing as he did that there were killers on the
streets. He leaned back against the wall of the Reincarn8
Gentlemen’s Club and tried to look tough, but the junkies round
this way could smell fear. No sooner had the thought crossed his
mind, than Roma Bruce and her pack of hooded freaks rolled around
the corner. Domino steeled himself, ‘Keep it together Dom. Keep it
together man,’ he muttered under his breath. Roma walked a step
ahead of the others, their glowing eyes fixed on the dealer and his
bag.

‘Domino…’
she
growled, ‘How about you let me and my gang here have a few vials
for free?’

Domino kept his
hands in his pockets so she wouldn’t see them shaking. ‘No can do
Roma. You know the rules. Cash on delivery.’

She gave
a nod
to Ronnie and
Reggie, on either side of her, and without a word, they grabbed
Domino, lifted him two feet off the ground and slammed his body
against the wall of the club.

‘Bend the
rules,’ said Roma, her eyes glaring at him from below her heavy
brows.

‘You know
I can’t, Roma. The big man….’

‘The
bi
g man, the big man,’
she echoed in a mocking tone. ‘Yeah, his time will
come.’

Just
then, three men stepped out of the club: huge hulking men – two
Torox thugs and an ape-man.

‘Yeah?’
said Roma
, when they
stared.

‘Step
off, dog,’ said one of the bulls, ‘or we’ll have to put you down.’
Roma stared at the twin bony protrusions threatening to break the
skin on his forehead and considered her pack’s chances against the
three men. She bared her teeth and snarled, but gave Ronnie and
Reggie an almost imperceptible shake of her head and the twins set
Domino back on his feet. Roma stepped to him, menacingly pushing
her face into his as she straightened his creased jacket. Domino
could smell blood on her breath when she whispered, ‘We’ll be back
later, Mister Man. Make sure you’ve got plenty of Bad Moon left for
us.’

And they
strutted off down the street and disappeared
into an alley.

‘Kane
happened to notice the drama through the window,’ said the giant
gorilla of a man in the sports suit. ‘All good in the ‘hood,
Domino?’

‘Yeah,
Cesar. Thanks guys
,’
said Domino, rubbing a patch of vitiligo on his neck nervously.
‘The wolves, man, they give me the creeps. Like something out of a
fucking horrorshow or something.’

‘You
can’t show no fear in this part of town, son,’ said
Cesar.

‘I don’t
know if I’m up to this job. Might have to speak to my man
Vidmar.’

‘Vidmar?
I didn’t know this was Vidmar’s turf.’

‘Sure is.
He took over when Carlucci got banged up for the bank-job that went
sour. Why are you so interested?’

‘Nothing. Just
a coincidence, that’s all.’

‘He’ll be down
here later if you want to do business.’

‘Yeah?
Maybe,’ said Cesar.