This Other Eden (29 page)

Rosalie
sat silent. She was in two minds about this fellow. Not so her colleague
Saunders, who was pacing about behind Judy. He wanted none of this inconvenient
little American.

‘Look,
I don’t know why we’re even talking to this bloke, right?’

Saunders
was a tough Liverpudlian who wore a bag over his head after having lost his
face through radiation exposure. Saunders claimed that the exposure had been so
bad that he could not have his face replaced, due to the need for constant
treatment. There was, however, some suspicion amongst other Mother Earth
activists who knew Saunders well, that he had rather got to like carrying such
gruesome battle-scars.

‘He
might be straight, he might be a plant, right?’ the scouser stated. ‘Either way
we’ll never be sure, so let’s dump him now.’

‘If you
dump me I’ll get picked up in hours and I’ll do fifteen years minimum for
saving your team boss here from twenty-five to thirty in a US jail,’ Judy said
angrily. ‘Listen, I didn’t plan this, I just did it. They sent me over here
with the actual agent to ensure Rosalie Connolly’s identification. Like I say,
I’m the expert on you guys. Well, I’ve been thinking about changing sides for
years .
.
. For Christ’s sake, I know more about how close we are to
Eco-Armageddon than even you people do.’

Judy
paused to consider the reaction he was provoking. Saunders was openly hostile,
Judy could not tell about Rosalie. One thing was certain, though. Like Max
before him, Judy would be very glad when those fierce green eyes were drilling
holes in somebody else.

He
persevered.

‘You
can’t look at what’s happening to the planet every day like I have to without
being affected. Eventually, you get to thinking that maybe you’re on the wrong
side … Ever since I heard they were going to pull Ms Connolly here in for
the DigiMac hit, I’d been kind of feeling bad about it, and when they put me on
the assignment… Well, I didn’t know what I’d do, but in the end what I did
was drug the agent stupid in his hotel and pick you up myself. And that’s it,
I’m a criminal now. I can’t go back and I don’t want to. I want to join you,
I’m switching sides and I reckon I’ve earned a place in your team.

‘Earned
a place!’ Saunders shouted, his big fists clenched in anger.
‘Earned
a
place! Jesus Christ, you don’t earn a place with us typing letters for the FBI.
I’ll show you how you earn a place with us, mate!’ And with that, Saunders
whipped the bag off his head to reveal his complete absence of face. The man’s
eyes bulged out of the livid pink flesh, his teeth stood forward, stark within
the lipless hole that had been a mouth.

Judy
would have liked to have greeted this sudden revelation with a cool and steady
stare. He nearly pulled it off. Apart from being instantly and hugely sick, he
showed almost no emotion whatever. It wasn’t that Judy was particularly
squeamish, he had seen many shocking things in his time as an agent, it was
just the shock. Judy had presumed that Saunders was wearing a mask for security
reasons and to be suddenly presented with what was to all intents and purposes
a living skull was something of a surprise.

‘Ha!
Wants to fight with us!’ Saunders sneered. ‘The man’s been sick on his shirt.’

‘Oh,
for heaven’s sake, Saunders!’ said Rosalie. ‘You really are the giddy limit
sometimes. Now put your bag back over your head and shut up, or I’ll have you
counting dead seabirds in the Shetland Isles.’

Saunders,
although a decent enough chap at heart, was a colossal embarrassment to Rosalie
and indeed her whole unit. He seemed to see the entire environmental
destruction of the Earth as nothing more than global justification for him to
stamp about the place, proving how tough he was. It was very difficult to sack
a person, though, who had given their face for the cause. Besides which,
Saunders was a dedicated and brave fighter, and that had to be respected.
Still, Judy was not going to be over-concerned when he got himself shot, as he inevitably
would sooner or later, being such a complete lunatic. y

‘Look,’
said Judy, after he had cleaned up the sick a bit. ‘I know one hell of a lot
about your organisation. I also know plenty about the FBI and its attitude to
you.
I
think I can be of use. Besides which, as I say, I rescued you, Ms
Connolly.’

Rosalie
studied Judy for a long time. Judy thought to himself that just because she
could go for ages without blinking, it did not intimidate him, but this was not
true.

Finally
she said, ‘If you’re lying to me, I shall find out and I shall definitely kill
you.’

‘And
I’ll kill you as well,’ said Saunders, which completely ruined the effect.

Telephone
voice.

The phone rang, jerking
Max out of his reverie. He had been sitting deep in thought for a long time.
All the bourbon was gone, but Max could not remember finishing it.

Nathan’s
Ansafone clicked into action. Max listened briefly to the voice of the dead
writer. Ansafones had been around since before anybody still alive had been
born, and yet people still felt the need to offer the age-old instruction ‘nobody’s
in, leave a message’, etc. Max had never realised quite how English Nathan
sounded, except, of course, that this was just his telephone manner. The
English always adopted a telephone manner, Max thought. As it happened, so did
Max, except that instead of effecting a more ‘proper’ voice, like Nathan, he
instinctively tried to appear laid back. His own Ansafone message was a low
growly drawl, sounding as if nothing really mattered and life was something of
a drag anyway.

‘Ugh…
Hi, yeah.
.
. OK, it’s the machine, right? But you knew that. Listen,
uhm … leave a message, don’t leave a message … live, die, it’s all the
same dream, right?… Bye’ and you can’t get much more telephone-mannered
than that.

It was
a woman on the phone. Her voice followed Nathan’s recording. It was another
English voice, but lighter and more relaxed than Nathan’s rather stilted
message.

‘Nat,’
the voice said. ‘Nat, it’s me.’

And Max
knew that he was listening to Nathan’s gorgeous and unobtainable Flossie.

‘Look… I don’t know, I think we should talk. I got all your letters, but I haven’t
rung before because I’ve been thinking a lot… You know, about us…
something happened today, it was just so weird, anyway I want to… Oh hell,
look I’m not going to discuss it with your bloody machine … but phone me… soon… I really do think we should talk. Bye.’ There was a pause and then,
softly … ‘I love you, Nat. Glad you still love me.’

Well,
irony did not get much more painful than that. If the poor dead bastard behind
the chair could have just stayed alive another hour he would have got his girl
back. On the other hand, Max reflected, three months from now he’d probably
have been just as annoyed about the knickers on the bathroom floor as he’d ever
been.

Chasing
girls.

Max decided to leave. He
was very sorry for Nathan, but there was nothing he could do for him now. It
was best to get out. With the exception of the murderers, who were unlikely to
come forward, Max was the only person who knew that anyone besides Nathan had
been at the house that evening. Max would just walk away. He had no desire to
get caught up in the police investigation. Besides which, he was going back to
Ireland. He had something to tell Rosalie.

Max had
decided that Plastic Tolstoy had ordered Nathan’s murder. His reasoning was
clear. Nothing had been stolen, and Max, who had been in the room when the
attack happened, had been spared. Whoever it was, wanted to kill Nathan Hoddy
and Nathan Hoddy alone. No complications, like dead movie stars, just an
unknown, unattached British writer, dead, a long way from home. They knew what
they wanted to do, they had done it and left. But who had sent them? It had to
be Tolstoy. Nathan had only moved into the house the previous day, no one even
knew he was there. All he had done since returning to Hollywood was pitch his
idea to the great man.

His
idea! That had to be the key. Nathan must have stumbled upon the truth! It was
the only explanation for his swift, clinical despatch. Max pondered the story
that Nathan had forced upon him only a few hours earlier. He had not really
listened very hard, because writers telling you their ideas is generally a
pretty dull experience. He remembered the basic point, though… it was such
a wild idea he could scarcely forget it. The idea that the Claustrosphere
Corporation was funding green terrorism. This was the thesis which Nathan had
pitched to Plastic Tolstoy and which Tolstoy clearly did not wish to see
developed. This was the thesis which, Max believed, had killed Nathan.

Max
knew that he was not the first person to draw this conclusion either. In his
final mortal moment, Nathan had instinctively guessed at the identity of the
man who had ordered his death. It was Plastic Tolstoy’s image which had come in
fury into Nathan’s mind and which had from there found its way into Max’s
helmet. Outrage at Tolstoy had been Nathan’s last thought on Earth, excepting
for perhaps a fleeting sadness, when Flossie had re-entered his mind at the
point of extinction.

There
was only one conclusion to be drawn from this. Nathan’s idea was more than
fantasy. Max could not imagine why, but the Claustrosphere Corporation was
funding Mother Earth. Rosalie was in Tolstoy’s pay.

Max
wished he had not drunk so much. His head was spinning with the size of his
suspicions. It was madness. Even Max, who had little time for current affairs,
knew that if Mother Earth could close down every Claustrosphere in the world
then they would do it in an instant. They would blow them all to bits, and kill
the people who made and sold them. For Claustrosphere to fund Mother Earth was
like the chickens feeding the fox.

Max was
suddenly filled with a sense of purpose, which was a strange sensation for him.
A point seemed to have arisen in what was becoming an increasingly pointless
life. The old drunk, silly, dilettante Max was being replaced by a new Max, a
Max who wanted to know what Tolstoy and Claustrosphere were up to and why
Nathan had had to die. A Max who, more than ever wanted to talk to Rosalie. He
had been looking for a reason to see her again, now he had one. How would she
react to his suspicions? Could she possibly know already? Of course not, she
hated Claustrospheres more than anything, all Mother Earth people did.

Max
knew that he had to disappear. He could not be sure how Plastic Tolstoy would
react to the news that he had been at Nathan’s house on the night when the
murderers had done their bloody deed. Would the killers have recognised him
under the helmet? He did, after all, have a very fine and distinctive chin. All
in all, Max decided that he would like to be away from Hollywood for a while.
Ireland seemed as good a place as any.

Except
for the fact that he had of course, only thirty-six hours earlier, been
ignominiously ejected from that country and had his visa revoked.

Max was
thinking straighter than he had done in nearly a decade. Before leaving
Nathan’s house, he took Nathan’s passport from where it lay on the desk. He
also brought a knife from the kitchen and gently scraped a little of the
congealed blood from the corpse’s neck into a small envelope. He did not like
doing it. No amount of Virtual Reality blood had prepared him for the real
thing
—
it was much stickier for a start. However, he had no choice. He
had to get past passport control and he intended to use a trick that had been
employed by a character he had recently played. Max hoped it would not turn out
to be just the stuff of fiction.

Lost
in LA.

Max drove home and raided
his make-up box for a few small items of disguise: facial hair, nose putty,
latex. Max was rather proud of still owning his own make-up box, despite
enjoying the services of the best facial synthesisers in the business. Like all
actors, when he wasn’t dwelling on how wonderful and different being an actor
was, Max liked to think of himself as nothing more than a worker, an artisan
who did an honest day’s labour for an honest day’s two or three million
dollars.

‘It’s a
craft, that’s all,’ he would say, ‘and these are the tools of the trade.’

As it
happened, the only time Max ever used his make-up box was when he wished to
avoid being recognised, which, since he was an actor, was not very often.
However, as he ordered a cab to take him out to the airport, Max felt that on
this occasion some effort at disguise would be sensible.

This
was not because he was fearful that the holographic photograph in Nathan’s
passport would give him away, but merely because he knew that he had to travel
incognito. Nobody ever looked at the photos on passports any more, the DNA
cellular print was foolproof. The traveller inserted his or her passport into a
scanner followed by the forefinger of either hand. The machine then took a
single-cell-thickness laser scrape from the finger and checked that the DNA
from the scrape matched that listed on the passport. The system could not be
cheated, unless, of course, a passenger happened to have an envelope full of
dried blood belonging to the person from whom he had stolen the passport, in
which to dip his finger before sticking it into the machine.