Faust Among Equals (34 page)

‘Look . . .'

‘On the other hand,' George continued through a mouthful of finely spun sugar, ‘the same would go for weddings, wouldn't it, and think how many times the bride shows up late. Never causes a problem in the long run, though, does it? I think they make allowances for that sort of thing in the scheduling.'

‘
Look
. . .'

George nodded upwards. ‘There's a seagull hovering over your head with a ten-pound lead weight in its claws, had you noticed?'

Links sneered. ‘You think I was born yesterday?' he said contemptuously.

George considered. ‘Well,' he said, ‘if you were you're pretty damn precocious, that's all I can say. I take it you're not fussed about the seagull?'

‘
Look
. . .'

The lead weight fell, hitting Links on the back of the head. ‘Thanks, Larry,' George called out. ‘Right, can we please get on? This place is starting to get on my nerves.'

The emergency exit was just behind the Helmeted Dwarf, cunningly concealed in the gaping jaws of a twelve-foot-long polystyrene dragon. Just to ram the point home, there was also a big No Entry sign just above the dragon's head, qualified by the words
Except for Access
. After a final look round, George reached for the door handle . . .

. . . But the door swung out of its own accord, to reveal Lundqvist, standing behind his trusty .40 Glock. Before George had time to move at all, Lundqvist was through the door and the pistol's ugly snout was nuzzling his ear.

‘Okay, George,' Lundqvist hissed. ‘Lose the gulls. Now.'

George shrugged. ‘You heard the man, guys. Go for a ride on the Lucky Dipper or something. I shan't be long.'

Mike flapped his wings and opened his beak to protest; but his bird's eye, hundreds of times more perceptive than its human equivalent, saw Lundqvist's finger move maybe a thousandth of an inch on the trigger and he subsided. ‘Be seeing you, then,' he gulped, and bobbed away into the breeze. Larry remained where he was.

‘You too, beakface,' Lundqvist growled.

‘You'll pay for this,' the gull replied. ‘One day.'

Lundqvist grinned. ‘You reckon?'

Larry nodded. ‘Maybe not tomorrow,' he said, ‘maybe not this year. But sometime, somewhere, you'll be hanging out washing or cleaning the car, and then,
splat!
You just think about it, Lundqvist, that's all.'

With long, heavy wingbeats he dragged himself into the air, and soon was nothing but a white speck. Lundqvist let his breath go.

‘You and me, George,' he said.

‘You and me, Kurt. How about a nice game of backgammon?'

Lundqvist shook his head. ‘Not this time, George,' he said. ‘This time it's goodbye, for ever. Dead or alive, they said, remember.'

‘I take it you're going for the lazy option.'

Lundqvist nodded. ‘It's my back,' he said. ‘Too much heavy lifting and I get shooting pains up my left side.'

George raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Don't think dead's got a lot of significance here, Kurt,' he said, ‘if you don't mind my saying so. Sort of goes with the territory, if you see what I—'

‘No.' Lundqvist's grin widened. ‘This thing's loaded with hollow-points filled with holy water.'

‘I see,' said George. ‘A water pistol.'

‘Holy water,' Lundqvist repeated. ‘Dead and exorcised in one shot. We call it one-stop termination. You ain't going
nowhere
.'

‘How terribly clever.' George's face had on its patient, let's-humour-the-child expression, the very same one that had haunted Lundqvist's childhood nightmares. It meant, ‘Kurt, I'm going to make you look an absolute plonker in front of the whole school,' and it had never once failed to deliver. Lundqvist quickly reviewed the situation in his mind and decided that for the first and last time, George was simply bluffing.

‘So,' George said, ‘you reckon you can just cold-bloodedly pull the trigger and blow my brains out, is that it?'

‘Yup. '

The expression blossomed into a smile of tender contempt. ‘Not unless you take the safety catch off first you can't,' he said.

In the split second it took Lundqvist to check, see that the safety catch was indeed off, and start squeezing off the shot, George had taken the reminder of his candy floss, stuck it up the barrel of the gun and kicked Lundqvist savagely in the nuts. With a howl that was five-per-cent pain and ninety-five-per-cent frustrated rage, Lundqvist slowly doubled up and sagged on to the ground.

‘Never mind, Kurt,' said George, not unkindly, as he stepped over his fallen assailant. ‘One of these days you'll get something right, just you wait and see.'

Then he stepped through the door and closed it behind him.

 

Thanks to his abstemious lifestyle and peak physical condition it took Lundqvist maybe a total of three minutes to recover sufficiently to haul himself up on to his feet, totter wildly and fall flat on his face, banging his forehead painfully on a sharp stone. Which only goes to show; had he ruined his health with alcohol, rich foods and dissipation he'd never have been fit enough to get beaten up in the first place.

Once he'd managed to get his legs working again, he pulled the candy-floss stick out of the muzzle of his gun, kicked open the emergency exit door, and burst through.

Circumstances alter cases. None of that hyper-cautious catlike stealth one associates with the covert operations pro - flattening oneself against walls, darting in and out of shadows and leaping round corners in a copybook FBI crouch. As soon as he was through the door, he simply ran as fast as he could down the tunnel, firing wildly into the darkness and shouting, ‘You bastard, I'm gonna rip your frigging lungs out!' at the top of his voice.

Which is why he didn't notice the pillar; not, at least, until it connected with his chin.

Thirty seconds later, Lucky George emerged from behind the pillar, prodded Lundqvist's head with his foot to make sure he was indeed fast asleep, bent down, picked up the pistol and slipped it in his pocket. A more punctilious man would have written out a receipt, but George was in a hurry.

A length of parcel string and a few Boy Scout knots later, he stood up, looked both ways along the tunnel, switched on Lundqvist's torch (which the silly man had forgotten all about in his excitement) and strolled on up the tunnel, whistling.

Four hundred yards or so later, he came to a T-junction. There were helpful signs painted on the wall, thus:

Synonyms, George thought, but never mind. He turned left.

Three hundred yards brought him to a lift. Why walk, he said to himself, when you can ride?

The trick is, not to go down.

The doors slid open, revealing the usual selection of buttons, labelled:

The red light was on opposite GROUND. As for the rest; CAFETERIA sounded nice, MEZZANINE was anybody's guess, and FILE STORE sent a shiver oscillating through his central nervous system. He was about to press CAFETERIA when something inside him coughed discreetly and whispered,
Try the boiler room
.

George rationalised. Well, why not? The words conjured up a picture of a big, noisy, dark jungle of pipes and machines, the sort of place you could hide in for ages with no chance of anybody finding you; a good place to pause, regroup and work out what to do next.

George wasn't convinced. What the devil do I want to go to the boiler room for? Sounds absolutely awful. He reached out to prod CAFETERIA, but his finger froze, a few thousandths of an inch away from contact.

Try the boiler room
.

The philosopher Socrates, so tradition has it, played host to an inner voice, accustomed to telling him what to do in moments of indecision. History tells us that Socrates was found guilty on trumped-up charges and executed by poison, but maybe we don't have all the facts. Maybe, a nanosecond before drinking the hemlock, Socrates asked his inner voice
What the fuck have you gone and got me into, peanut-brain?
and the inner voice explained it all in words of one syllable, allowing the great philosopher to die with a huge cocky grin frozen all over his face.

Maybe there's a coffee machine in the boiler room.

He lowered his finger and pressed the appropriate button, closing the lift door.

 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the jammy bastards, for they shall see God without an appointment.

It was dark in the boiler room, as he'd predicted. It was also very quiet, and very cold. All the surfaces were thick with dust. All in all, Lucky George decided, he'd been in more convivial graves. Which was, incidentally, true.

There were pipes, just as in his mental picture, and machines. Enormous machines, painted matt black enamel with heavy solid brass fittings, very old-fashioned, high quality looking. No plastic anywhere; steel, brass and the occasional glass cover, white enamel dial, engraved brass control panel. None of the machines appeared to be switched on. The place had the look of a major vintage traction engine rally five minutes after the beer tent has opened.

George had been wandering about for perhaps ten minutes or so (not that Time seemed a particularly useful concept in a place like this, like an umbrella at the bottom of the sea) when he thought he heard a tiny, distant screaming noise, like a very small, fast lathe. He walked towards it.

It was a long walk. The place was, he realised, absolutely huge, and full of these enormous, silent pieces of hardware; each one, he noticed curiously, apparently different. He hadn't the faintest idea what any of them were. Ah, but if only he could get in here with a small crane and a fleet of big lorries, there was an absolute fortune in scrap value alone.

If wishes were pantechnicons, beggars would invest heavily in offshore roll-up unit trusts. George dismissed the thought from his mind, because the light and the noise were getting closer. Still a hell of a long way away, though. George's feet were beginning to hurt.

Scree-ee-ee-eee
. Pause.
Scree-ee-yoww-ee
. Unmistakable sound of cutting metal. Someone was making something.

‘Bugger!'

A minuscule voice, ever so far away. George stopped dead in his tracks and listened, but all he could hear was the sound of the lathe, like the shriek of an hysterical elf.

Blessed are the bone idle, for they shall stand and watch other people working.

George walked on towards the noise.

 

Had Links Jotapian been there, instead of lying on his back sleeping the sleep of the mildly concussed, he'd have witnessed a near perfect exhibition of the art of getting out of being tied up without cutting your wrists on the string.

Having woken up, assessed the position and sworn a lot, Lundqvist used his feet to back himself up against the wall. No help there; the sides were smooth as glass, so no useful rocky outcrops to saw through the rope on.

String professionally tight, so no percentage in curling the hands up small in the hope of slipping them through.

Never mind. The seasoned campaigner anticipates this sort of thing. On the back of Lundqvist's trouser belt was a thing like a big plastic button. In fact, this was a snap-on cover, easily flicked off with the fingernails, underneath which was a tiny sliver of scalpel blade fixed lengthways into the belt on a rivet. Nothing easier than to fray the rope up against that a few times and then gently ease it apart.

Cheating? In the trade, they call it materiel superiority.

A little later Lundqvist stood up, marshalled his limbs into some semblance of discipline and trudged up the corridor. He knew without being told that he was on a hiding to nothing. He was lost, unarmed, punch-drunk and thoroughly demoralised. High time he retired, made way for all those up and coming youngsters who were the hope of the profession for the years to come.

Absolutely. Just as soon as he'd found Lucky bloody George and disembowelled him with his bare hands, he'd pack the whole thing in, buy a little bungalow somewhere and grow lupins. Until then, the idea of giving up was unthinkable. It would be like going on a round-the-world cruise knowing you'd left the oven on.

In due course he came to a lift.

A likely story. You don't get presented with the Academy of Elite Forces' coveted Gold Silencer Award three years in succession (‘First of all I'd like to thank my victims, without whom . . .') unless you can recognise a supernaturally induced hologram when you see one. If the wretched thing had had TRAP over the door in three-foot-high neon letters, it couldn't have been more obvious.

On the other hand, what the hell? He walked in, pressed a button at random, and folded his arms.

 

Screee-eee-eeeeee-ee-clunk
.

‘Anybody home?'

George waited for a moment, listening to his voice echoing around the galleries of silent ironmongery until it was soaked up in the dust-insulated vastness. If there was anybody there, they were either lying in wait, too engrossed in what they were doing to hear, or listening to something on headphones.

Well, if they were lying in wait, they'd had plenty of opportunities by now. He walked on.