Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (41 page)

stairwell. Right now they'd know everybody was sitting tight, waiting for the next wave, so the bastards could take their time and choose their moment, only reacting, as now, if someone appeared to be escaping from the house. Parlabane feared that any degree of optimism in the current circumstances was the equivalent of saying 'so far, so good' as he plummeted from a skyscraper, but couldn't help thinking to himself that he might just have found the edge they needed. Which, of course, wouldn't count for dick if this guy looked up, something that seemed an excruciating eventuality as he ambled unhurriedly in Parlabane's direction, moving ever closer to where the human creeper was dangling from the phone-line. It was murkily dark and he didn't know how close to the ground the thing reached, but it had to enter the periphery of the bloke's vision at some point, surely.

He held his breath, aware he could make out even the bemused tuts and sighs of the man below, followed by a sharp bout of nasal inhalation.

'God, sniff that,' the man muttered distastefully, wandering within mere feet of the smell's source.

The next thing Parlabane heard was a splat as something dripped from the end of the intestine and hit the wet stone below. The man turned his head, zeroing in on the spot where the droplet had landed. There was only one place he was going to look next.

Parlabane had no choice but to let go of the cable completely and slide down the length of slimy bowel. He was already falling at speed as the man looked up, eyes and mouth agape, in time to be sprayed liberally in both by the matter that was being squeezed from the intestine by his rapid descent. Up above, Parlabane's slimily lubricated knot slipped free under the strain of his weight, but his fall was broken by landing upon his erstwhile hunter, the pair of them tumbling to the ground a few feet apart. Parlabane reacted quicker in getting to his feet, less out of superior reflex than his opponent being temporarily blinded by faeces and convulsed by vomiting. The poor bastard was on all fours, wiping at his eyes with his sleeve while his stomach contents sprayed from his face. The machete lay on the monobloc closer to Parlabane, who quickly picked it up.

He stood over the man, wondering for a second what to do next. He had nothing to restrain him with, and even the dry heaves weren't going to keep him demobilised forever. Others, he knew, would have been sorely tempted to dish out what the bastard had had in mind for him, but Parlabane's vengeful instincts were far more spiteful than that. Whatever these pricks were specifically here for, the general principle was to silence the people who posed them a threat, whether that be those who could bear witness to events tonight or those who perhaps had testimony of a more vintage hue. Killing people was a lot easier than winning the argument, a lot easier than explaining yourself or 251

justifying your actions. These bastards were here because of arguments they couldn't win and deeds they didn't want to own up to. That being so, Parlabane wanted the fuckers taken alive. It wasn't easy when they were proving to be half-psycho, half-lemming, but it was the principle that mattered. He stepped forward and kicked his conquest as hard as he could in the left temple. The man keeled over as though his body was dragged by his neck's recoil, then lay unconscious on his back. Parlabane knelt down and cradled the man's head, turning it on one side and then the other until the device he sought dropped into his waiting, cupped palm. He slipped it into his left ear and set about dragging his foe to the outbuilding.

'Maybe I should have worried a bit more about number one myself,' Emily said. 'Then I might have been a bit more balanced. You know what they say, you can't love anyone else until you learn to love yourself. When I was a student in Edinburgh, I was just guilt-ridden and angry all the time. We live in an age when communications media can immediately bring to our attention every last tragedy that can befall our fellow man, however remote, and every last cruelty we can visit upon each other. Wars and famines you'd never have even known about a hundred years ago, in countries you'd never have heard of.'

'But isn't that a good thing?' Rory ventured timidly.

'That is a good thing, yes, in that it keeps us aware of what we ought to sort out, but if you're sensitively inclined, half an hour in front of the box is enough to make you feel thoroughly inadequate, sheltered and privileged just to be alive, Western European, HIV negative, heterosexual, unraped, unbombed, unstabbed, unmutilated, unhandicapped, uncancerous, unaddicted, unburnt, unflooded, unmugged, unpersecuted, unshot, unmined, unmolested or unsacked.

'The girl with the weight of the world in her hands. That was me. My heart was always in the right place, but it was never done bleeding. I joined every demo and fought for every cause because I felt it was my responsibility. But as it was said last night - might even have been you - did I really care so deeply about
all
those issues? How can you? You can only feel like you ought to care. It's so pathetic: I was a vegetarian as a student because I moved into a flat where all the other girls were vegetarians and I didn't have the nerve to tell them I wasn't. It was like: shit, how could I have been so remiss, how could I have not got around to turning veggie? It was an orthodoxy that I accepted without asking myself what
I
wanted, what I really believed.'

'Bet you're wishing you'd stayed veggie tonight.'

'No, I'm wishing I'd indulged myself when I had the chance. I could die here tonight and I'm starting to realise how little I've really lived.'

252

'At least you tried to make a difference. Look where my ideas of student activism have got us.'

'Mine aren't blameless either. This must have something to do with me too.'

'How do you work that out?'

'Because of Baxter. It's not really for me to say, but it hardly matters now. That's not his real name. Campbell must have known that, known about both our pasts.'

'Not his real name?'

'His real name is Daniel Brown. We were fellow student lefties, him being about the only one more conscientiously committed to absolutely bloody everything than me. He was a few years older, worked for a while then went back to nightschool to get his Highers. There was Danny, myself and a guy called Philip Young who were pretty close, considered everyone else trendy lefties or plastic socialists.'

'Philip Young. Why do I know that name?'

'He's a civil rights lawyer now, spokesperson for Taking Liberty. Max had a go at him last night.'

'Oh yeah. He's the guy they always wheel out for the TV news to denounce the Home Secretary's latest crime prevention proposals.'

'Well, if you mean he believes we should retain the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, then yes. He's the only one who really went on to practise what he preached. Back then we were all on umpteen of the same committees, and Danny in particular seemed to be involved in so many things, I don't know how he ever managed to attend a lecture.'

'We were as sure of ourselves and every bit as self-righteous as Toby's CSF,'

Baxter said. 'And ironically we perceived ourselves to be at odds with one of the same enemies: the media. It was all Tory-owned, all part of the grand right-wing conspiracy to silence dissent and spread their propaganda. We hated Rupert Murdoch and Roland Voss as much as we hated Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And like Toby and Rory, we decided it was up to us to strike back.

'We hatched our own little gunpowder plot, to burn down Roland Voss's Scottish printing plant. You know, silence the mouthpiece of the oppressor and all that; or the same as Toby, silence the people who disagree with you. Well, we knew it wouldn't exactly silence them, but it would still be a blow. Best-case scenario would be they'd have to import the English editions, which would have buggered them up editorially because the southern versions weren't quite so sensitive to Scottish feelings.

'It was pitiful. Three of us and a van full of Molotovs. Before the internet, it was actually a lot harder to learn your amateur anarchist basics. The plan 253

was to drive there in the middle of the night and lob petrol bombs over the perimeter fence to the warehouse where they stocked their paper drums, then hope for a chain reaction. I guess we were also hoping for the staff to evacuate without getting burned to death, but we didn't give them a lot of thought. It was a mercy for all concerned that we never made it. If we hadn't killed some poor bastard in the warehouse, we'd have probably torched ourselves.'

'What happened?' Kathy asked.

'We got pulled over on the way there. No, actually, we didn't pull over, not at first. A police car came up behind us and put its blue lights on to signal us to stop. Danny was driving, and he panicked, just put the foot down. Like we were going to outrun a souped-up police Sierra Cosworth in our knackered old Honda Acty that could barely break forty with a steep downslope and a tail-wind. Turned out the police were only pulling us over because we had a broken tail-light, but obviously we'd just announced that we'd something to hide. They found the petrol bombs and took us in.

'The plot all came out. I might have considered myself a hardliner, committed to the cause, but when they told me it would go down better with the judge if I cooperated, I blabbed everything. They seemed to know a lot anyway, from the questions they were asking, so I suppose I wasn't the only one to crack.

'We were found guilty of conspiring to commit arson. The cops had scared the shit out of me by initially saying we'd be up on terrorist charges, but I think they just recognised I was a silly wee lassie who'd give them all they needed if they gave her a fright. Philip and I got suspended sentences. Ironically, our lawyers played the "good little middle-class kids who'd learned their lesson"

card. We still had criminal convictions though, which didn't exactly make us hot prospects at the milk-round.'

'And what about Donald, Danny, whatever you call him?'

'He wasn't tried with us. He got taken away to London by Special Branch who were investigating his connections to other potentially subversive groups. He had previous convictions he never told us about; arrested on one too many demos. We never saw him again, just heard through the cops. He got jailed. Three-year sentence.'

'I've been rebuilding my life ever since,' Baxter said, 'and I suppose you could say I've come full circle, seeking the corporate shilling. But look where the revolution got me. I decided to change my name so that I could make a fresh start. Emily recognised me, but she was good enough to remain circumspect about it. Neither of us wanted to pick at that particular scab, but. . . I don't 254

know. I thought I had escaped the past, but that the two of us were brought together under these circumstances would suggest otherwise.'

He picked up a claymore and began walking towards one of the corridors.

'I'm off to talk to her,' he said. 'She deserves the courtesy of knowing our sad little secrets are out in the open.'

Parlabane lay the unconscious body down less than gently next to the outbuilding's wooden double doors and reached into the still revoltingly damp bag for the keys and torch Sir Lachlan had laid on. Turning on the second revealed an absence of need for the first: the lock had been crowbarred, and another look at the doors showed that they were not closed properly, just pulled to. He nudged the overlapping one with his shoulder to give a gap of about three feet, then gripped his captive under the oxters and dragged him inside, wiping his hands on the guy's jacket when he was done. Parlabane reckoned it was some kind of miracle that he hadn't spewed his load tonight; indeed would have been relieved had his stomach decided to purge itself of his first involuntary helping of cannibal cuisine. Unfortunately, and perhaps disturbingly, his stomach seemed to like it just fine. There'd been no end of doner kebabs and late-night pudding suppers about which the same could not be said.

He played the torch around the inside of the building, his nose unusually grateful for the fusty smell of encrusted grass-cuttings. His beam picked out machinery around the floor, accessories and tools about the walls and shelves: a petrol-driven mower with a seat and steering wheel, like a scaled-down tractor; a v-shaped raking attachment; a leaf blower, two edge-strimmers, a pressure-washer, hoes, spades, rakes and watering cans. There were a number of conspicuously empty spaces beneath hooks, Parlabane trying and failing to prevent himself guessing what they were there to accommodate. There were a lot of trees around here that would need regular TLC. . . Oh boy. TobeHoopertastic, as Rory the Tory might say. The cans of petrol for the fuel-driven machines sat resting on a wooden shelf at the back, alongside lubricating oil, weedkiller and pesticides. It occurred to him that Vale would probably be able to make explosives, a space rocket and possibly a time machine out of the stuff in here, but the petrol cans were less than dainty so it was going to be no easy feat just getting back to base with what he'd come for.

Power was the priority, and it looked like he might still have time on his side to ensure it stayed on. The guy he'd flattened was not equipped with any night-vision gear, so it was likely none of his fellow trialists were either. They wouldn't kill the lights while they reckoned they could still make use of their footsoldiers, whom Parlabane guessed probably had one more chance at 255

proving themselves.

His captive moaned a little as Parlabane zipped the bag closed around the lightest of the petrol cans, prompting him to have another scan of the available equipment. The strimmers were electric, so there had to be extension cables here somewhere. He trained the torch below where the strimmers hung, and saw a pile of coiled orange flex sitting on the floor next to a heavy polythene refuse sack.

Perfect. There were two separate leads. One would do for the shit-gargler, and the other he could use for climbing: toss the end weighted with the plug over the phone cable and he'd have a double-strength, unlubricated rope to get back up with. He dragged the captive further inside and knelt down again, placing the torch on the floor next to him. With its light casting knee-high shadows upon the polythene sack, Parlabane looped the flex around his prisoner in a tight spiral from his ankles to his mouth, then down his back to where he bound his wrists together, and finally back to his feet where he knotted the plug end around the jack.