Gridlock (16 page)

Eventually, Toss got the arm folded down beside Deborah and the little catch Geoffrey had designed clipped over it. Geoffrey explained that, were Deborah ever to release that catch, she was to be extremely sure that there was somebody standing over her to absorb the blow. For were the iron to merely swing wildly and unchecked to the full stretch of the arm, it was most likely that the force would topple Deborah's chair.

'Great,' said Deborah, 'so this one's for putting me out of action, is it? I tell the murderers not to worry, that I'll just fling myself on the ground to make their job a little easier.'

'It's for close quarters fighting, Deborah,' said Geoffrey.

'Yeah,' added Toss excitedly, 'you have to imagine that the geezer is standing over you, right. He's come across the room, right, saying . . . "I'll waste the bitch, I'll cream her sweet arse. She is history. She is dead meat. She is—"'

'Yeah, OK, Toss, I'll imagine my own death if that's all right by you.'

'Just trying to get you used to heavy geezers, Debbo. Know what I mean?'

'Toss, till I was eighteen I lived in New York City. In New York if you don't get threatened occasionally you go see a therapist and ask him why you have no charisma. Where I used to live you asked someone "how was their day", they'd say it was fine, nobody shot at them. People in New York go to Beirut for a break.'

Deborah was aware that New York was not actually quite the war zone she described, but she rather enjoyed massaging the paranoid prejudices of foreigners.

'All right,' said Toss, 'we'll forget the character stuff and get to the point, right. He is standing over you with a blunt machete, saying that he's going to fillet you, dice you up and leave you marinating in a puddle of gore, unless you hand over the plans. What do you do?'

'I hand over the plans.'

'Well, yeah, that's right, but if you don't have the plans or an unexpected fit of bravery comes over you, that's when you flick the switch – but don't do it now, all right, because it packs a wicked hook.'

Geoffrey went on to explain that once the punch had been delivered, if time allowed, Deborah should put the arm across her and attach the iron end to the opposite arm of the chair so that the elbow of the jointed anglepoise arm pointed out in front of her like the prow of a ship. Having done this, there was a small wire coiled up in the end of one of the chair arms, Deborah should stretch this across and hook it onto the other arm, thus forming a drawstring to the angle-poise bow. Geoffrey had concealed two nasty-looking bolt-like arrows in the uprights of Deborah's seat back.

'Stick an apple on your head, Toss,' said Deborah, 'I feel like some target practice.'

'Later,' said Geoffrey, who was behind Deborah fitting something into the back of the chair. It was a battery which Toss had pinched for him from a temporary traffic light. Geoffrey wired this up to the handles of the chair, adding a small charge-convertor which made it possible for Deborah to deliver all the electricity in the battery in one hit, if she so desired. Geoffrey reckoned that there would be enough power to seriously scare any enemy who grabbed the handles of Deborah's chair.

'Especially if you can manoeuvre him to stand in a puddle,' Geoffrey added.

'Well, I'll sure try and remember that,' replied Deborah.

'And finally there is this,' and in danger of cutting himself and Deborah, Geoffrey put a nasty, vicious-looking hatchet into a niche down by Deborah's leg.

'Oh yeah, and how does that work?' asked Deborah.

'Uhm, well, you have to grab it and chop the bloke with it,' admitted Geoffrey rather shamefacedly.

'That's OK, Geoffrey,' said Deborah. 'It can't all be
Star Wars.
I'm kinda pleased you left a human element in there. When I kill, I like to feel the guy die. So what about you, Geoffrey? What weapons of death have you equipped yourself with?'

'Oh I'll be all right. I have to get on with the engine,' said Geoffrey. 'I wanted to see you all right first, after all I can run, sort of.'

Deborah hoped that Geoffrey was right.

The murderers that Sam had commissioned to find and kill Geoffrey had found a willing source of information in Denise, the woman at Geoffrey's place of work with the 'You don't have to be mad etc' sticker on her desk. She did not know much, but what she did she was happy to divulge.

'Well, he keeps himself to himself really,' she wittered, meaning that he was generally ignored. 'A very quiet man, terribly brave. I mean if I looked like him I'm not sure I'd want to go on really, would you? Being a burden and all. Anyway, we haven't seen him for a week or so, he rang in sick. Probably still hung-over from Suzi's leaving do. That was the last time I saw him. He had a
lovely
time, you could tell by the way he twitched. Everyone just treated him as one of the gang. They're a wonderful lot that work here you know. Mad of course, oh yes, we're all completely potty, but wonderful. Friends? Well not really that I noticed, I think they like to be more with their own kind really, don't you? Less embarrassing for them. I did see a lady in a wheelchair come and pick him up once or twice in her car. Lovely, isn't it, that they can help each other like that?'

Sam Turk's hired thugs were not the only people involved in investigations. The hack pack from the
Sunday Word
had descended on the Royal Princess Hotel, Brighton, where the upper echelons of Digby's party had stayed during conference week. Not the upper upper echelons, but Digby-level echelons. On arrival, the dedicated journos had proceeded to interview everyone, buying drinks and slipping tenners about pretty liberally.

Of course the
Word,
like all the scandal sheets, had its regular spies, whom it kept on retainers, at any venue where the famous might be found. Every hospital has its porter alert for the arrival of an overdosed sporting personality or a newsreader with a Coke bottle stuck in some important little place. All the top drinkeries have a waiter on the lookout for any celebrities who seem to have a weak bladder and who always return from the toilet rather cheerful and with a small white moustache. However, regarding Digby, the regular spies at the Royal Princess knew nothing, and so the search was spread further.

'That ex-minister, Digby Parkhurst,' the hacks would ask, 'the one who resigned in disgrace. Remember anything about him the night before his speech? Anything that might have upset him?'

The hacks heard of the dressing down Digby had received over breakfast from Ingmar Bresslaw. They heard how the previous evening Digby had arrived late for the launch of the Global Crappee and how he had seemed very angry with Sam Turk. Eventually the hacks got lucky. From a receptionist, they heard that a barman knew about a maid who had a funny story about a bloke wandering the corridors of the hotel, late at night, in drag.

'I couldn't believe it, well you wouldn't, would you?' the maid said, accepting a gin and tonic. 1 mean it was obviously a man, it's all this European influence I reckon, all the blokes are turning into poofs.'

The maid explained that the fellow had been in full drag and drunk as a lord. She had met him as she came out of the lift, it had been on the top floor where the suites are. The hacks knew already that this was the floor on which Digby had stayed. Sensing a scoop, they asked the girl to describe the man in drag.

'Well, I must say, he made quite a presentable woman,' she recalled. 'Slim he was, good looking I expect, under the make-up. I remember thinking it was a shame he was a poof. I can tell you there weren't many good-looking men staying in this hotel during conference. Lot of fat bastards and no mistake.'

'Anything else about the bloke?' the anxious reporters asked, 'anything to distinguish him?'

'Not really, no. Except, of course, that he was definitely Scottish.'

'Scottish,' the hacks confirmed.

'Oh definitely, he called me a wee lassie.'

The elegant Dutchman was almost white with shock. Not many things in this wicked man's life had shocked him. Things that would cause a normal person to have to sit down for a minute and have a cup of tea, left Cornelius Brandt completely cold. He headed an enormous oil-based multinational company that had, for a century, abused human rights and fundamental employment practices worldwide – but Cornelius was unmoved by this. His company, Imperial Oil, had tenaciously hung on in South Africa through the worst excesses of apartheid. This, Cornelius thought merely good business. He had personally and happily dealt with Pinochet's brutal regime in Chile; he had fuelled the aircraft that had got Samosa out of Nicaragua, and never had Cornelius Brandt turned a hair, let alone been shocked. You could have crept up behind him and burst balloons in his earhole from now until the end of time and he would not have twitched – but now, Cornelius Brandt was shocked.

He gripped the arms of his chair with pale, transluscent knuckles, the bones, seemingly, trying to burst from his grasping, clawlike fingers. 'We have known each other many years, yes?' he said, in that peculiar sing-song accent with which the Dutch speak English. An accent which is normally kind and pleasant, but coming from Cornelius, it sounded like the authentic voice of a henchman of the devil.

'Sure, we go back, Cornelius,' answered Sam Turk with his usual easy charm. Sam was a bluff, straightforward Yankee who could say 'You're fired, your desk has been cleared' in such a manner that people often did not realize what had happened until they had left his office. It was this easy tone that had been in Sam's voice when he had informed Brandt that Global Motors would, without question, destroy him and Imperial Oil within an absolute maximum of fifteen years.

'We can run cars on hydrogen, Cornelius,' good ol' Sam had drawled. 'It's happened. The alternative is here, oil is history.'

'Oil is history . . .!' Tell Cornelius Brandt any three words but those! Say to him 'your wife's dead', that would be fine. 'Is it in?' Cornelius could handle at a pinch, but never 'oil is history'.

'Samuel, you and I, we have fought many good battles together, we are old and good boys, you and I!' Cornelius was trying to sound as relaxed as Sam but the piece of concrete in his larynx was making it difficult. 'Is it thirty years since you and I lobbied Congress, side by side, over the super highways?'

'Thirty-five, Cornelius.'

'Don't let us be fighters to each other, Sam. It would be sad, no?'

'Ain't gonna be no fight, Cornelius, not unless you call putting an old hound to sleep a fight. You're the past, my old friend, you ain't got nothing to fight with.'

Cornelius dropped the Mr Nice Guy act.

'Listen, Turk, you may think you've grabbed my curly short ones, but I've got a tiger in my pants and it's going to bite you, old pal! We'll lobby to licence fee this engine out of existence. We'll push for twenty years of safety tests. We'll blow up your fuck factories—'

'Cornelius, once Mr and Mrs USA realize that they can drive to Alabama without paying a penny in fuel . . . Once the President realizes he ain't never going to have to kiss ass to any Arab ever again . . . Once the EEC sees the possibility of complete self-sufficiency . . .You know better than anyone how unstable the oil supply is. Every damn week there's somebody about to start a war in the Middle East. The day after we demonstrate this engine to the world, you get your death sentence, pal, and you just sit around waiting to die.'

Cornelius said nothing. Very slowly he swallowed an aspirin, sipping from a lead crystal goblet inscribed 'Stay on side, we need you,' and signed Richard Nixon.

'Of course, it doesn't have to be that way,' said Sam.

Druscilla 'Corker' McCorkadale entered the Ministry for Transport with a firm, purposeful tread. Everything about her suggested that she had lots to do and no time to waste. This was actually an illusion because Corker had just had her car driven around for fifteen minutes until the photographers arrived. Corker had specifically asked the press office to invite some cameras, in order that her first bustling day as Minister for Transport might be duly recorded.

'Tell them it will be a super photo,' Corker had said.

'Will you be making any kind of statement, Minister?' the press officer had enquired.

'Don't be silly,' said Corker. 'What on earth would I want to do that for?' The Prime Minister had chosen Digby's replacement well.

Just around the corner from the Ministry, Corker had her driver stop the car and remove from the boot a collapsible bicycle.

'Have you got the yellow reflector sash?' Corker whispered.

'Yes, madam, here you are.' The driver handed it over and Corker pushed off. 'Ching ching,' went her bell.

'Shifto, you chaps, I've a department to run,' she shouted cheerily, wobbling towards the hack pack on her unaccustomed steed.

'This way, Minister! Look this way please,' they shouted as the motor drives sprang into action. Corker reluctantly allowed herself to be stopped by the cameras. Ever the professional, she could not prevent a modest portion of still-shapely thigh peeping out from beneath her rising hemline, as an elegantly shod foot perched on the pedal.

Druscilla had been known as 'Corker' since the first day she entered government, when the
Sunday Word
had headlined a four-year-old photo of her in a bikini with the phrase 'Coo what a Corker!' She made a great fuss of demanding to know the source of the photograph, but colleagues suspected that she had sent it herself. Until her promotion to transport, Corker had been a junior minister at the Department for Health and, despite her relatively lowly antecedents, she was already extremely well known to the public. The reason being that she was a voracious publicity vulture. Corker had once fainted in Dixons, having hyperventilated at the sight of so many cameras.

It had been Corker's brilliant media intervention that had saved the Government over the great fishy beef scandal.

The feeding of fishmeal to British livestock appeared to be causing cows to go a bit scaly and spend an unhealthy amount of time sitting in puddles. This has led some scientists to propose the possibility that, since the average British teenager eats his or her weight in hamburgers every six hours, pretty soon now we might expect a few of them to start going 'glop, glop, glop', breathing through their armpits and spawning half a million eggs. Once this possibility hit the news-stands ('OH COD! BEEF HAS HAD ITS CHIPS!'), there was, understandably, a degree of panic, and, for just a moment, it actually looked like the farmers might have to sell their Rolls-Royces. However, at the last minute, Corker, the Junior Minister for Health, had saved the day. Not by introducing any new guidelines regarding the rearing of cattle, but by taking a posse of photographers to the Tower of London where she allowed herself to be photographed standing between two Beefeaters, eating a hamburger.

It was this genius for damage control that had led the Prime Minister to promote Corker to a senior ministerial post, in the hope that she would smile winningly whilst the Civil Service sorted out the Digby mess.

'We've got a complete environmental panic brewing, Mrs McCorkadale,' Ingmar Bresslaw had said to her during her breakfast briefing the previous week. 'Would you call that sausage cooked? I wouldn't call it cooked. What is wrong with this sodding country? Even the bloody dagoes can cook.' Ingmar took a pull at a hip flask, whilst Corker sympathized diplomatically. She knew not to get on the wrong side of Ingmar Bresslaw.

'An environmental panic, you say, Ingmar? It's not the bloody greenhouse effect again, is it? I just don't understand that one. For centuries all the British have done is moan about the lousy weather, and when we
do
get the chance of a bit of sunshine everyone starts bellyaching that Southend will soon be under water. Honestly, who
cares
whether Southend is under water or not? Nobody I know lives there. Do you know anybody who lives at Southend, Ingmar?'

Ingmar admitted that he did not. Corker was very much his kind of minister: obscenely ambitious but without any particular political principles to justify that ambition. Corker simply loved being famous and she would do
anything
to get in the papers. This was a minister who would climb Churchill's statue and sit on his face for six column inches.

'No, it's not the greenhouse effect, Mrs McCorkadale,' answered Ingmar, giving his sausage the sort of bristling, eyebrowish look that made the bowels of young back-benchers dissolve and put them in severe danger of losing their deposits. 'It's roads.'

'Oh yes,' said Corker. 'That's
fascinating,'
she added, wondering how her lip gloss was holding up. There was an awful lot of it on the rim of her coffee cup, so there couldn't be much left on her.

'This government has a massive road-building plan,' Ingmar was saying. 'Truly colossal. A plan that, if fully implemented, will create traffic jams well into the next century.'

'Sorry, Ingmar, small point,' said Corker, grabbing a chance to show that she was listening and on the ball . . . 'You mean rid us of jams.'

'No, Minister, I mean
create
jams,' said Ingmar, lowering his voice to slightly less than its usual boom. 'The purpose of building roads is to stimulate the economy. If we were ever to arrive at a system of roads which was jam free there would be no excuse to build any more, which is the language of recession and I hope you have no wish to hear that kind of language in your ministry, Minister. Traffic jams are a necessary factor in continued economic growth.'

'You're kidding me,' said Corker.

'I am not kidding you, Minister. Why do you think motorways are constantly covered in bollards and contraflows, restricting traffic to snail-like single lanes?' enquired Ingmar.

'Uhm . . . roadworks?' Corker answered, weakly.

'When did you ever see any actual roadworks being carried out behind those walls of bollards, Minister? Perhaps once a year. Is it not more common to see mile upon mile of pristine tarmac bollarded off for no apparent reason at all? The reason for that, Minister, is to create jams, jams that will persuade the public to accept further road building.'

'Coo,' said Corker, absolutely astonished. She had, of course, noticed that there has never been a major road built, ever, that did not end up constantly jammed, but she had never realized what a good thing it was . . . 'I suppose all this is a bit of a secret though, is it?' she added, trying to look professional.

'Yes, it is a secret,' said Ingmar, 'as, indeed, is our whole road strategy. There was considerable public disquiet anyway, but now that bugger Parkhurst has panicked the entire country, we are going to have to lie very low.'

'Yes, it's all off, isn't it? I heard the Prime Minister denying everything at conference. Did you have a good conference, Ingmar? I had a marvellous conference. Perhaps you saw that photo of me on a donkey? It was gruesome, I hated it,' said Corker, who had had it framed.

'Yes,' said Ingmar, pursuing his point with a weary sigh. 'As far as the public are concerned it is all off. It is your job, Mrs McCorkadale, to continue to reassure the public that we never even entertained the sort of road plans that the imbecile Parkhurst revealed at conference.'

'Right ho,' said Corker putting on her serious face. 'All off . . . never even on. Got it.'

'Until such times as you are told otherwise, the Prime Minister wishes you to present the friendly, socially aware face of our transport policy to the general public.'

'You've got the right girl, Ingmar.' Corker couldn't believe her luck, she was in the fast lane and it was easy street. Ahead of her lay years of photo calls, years of adoring profiles in the women's mags about keeping her make-up straight through a workaholic sixteen-hour day. By the time she'd finished, if she wasn't Prime Minister, she would certainly be able to get her own chat show, and that would be even better.

'In the meantime,' said Ingmar, fixing his fiery, bloodshot eyes on Corker's, in order to intimidate her with the awesome seriousness of the situation.

'The old bugger fancies me,' thought Corker, giving him a wry, flirty little smile, all subtle innuendo, with a hint of white teeth.

'In the meantime,' repeated Ingmar, 'and kindly stop grinning at me like a simpleton, Mrs McCorkadale.' Corker laughed as if to show that she knew Ingmar was only joking . . . 'In the meantime,' Ingmar continued, 'the Prime Minister wishes you to allow for the massive road-building preparations to continue.'

'Uhm, which road-building preparations would these be, Ingmar?' enquired Corker.

'The ones which do not exist, Minister.'

'I see.'

'The ones which have never existed and which you must deny at all times.'

'Right ho.'

'The ones which your senior civil servants are working on as we speak, looking to the day when the public will be persuaded to accept the necessity of thousands of new roads.'

'And how are they to be persuaded of that, Ingmar?' enquired Corker.

'Never you mind about that,' declared Ingmar. 'I shall attend to the manipulation of public opinion. I have methods.'

And by the scarily sinister way that he said it, it seemed to Corker that Ingmar was probably intending to individually torture each and every British subject until they called for the paving of the Home Counties.

'Well, that all seems pretty straightforward,' said Corker.

And thus it was that Corker McCorkadale came to be demonstrating the environmental face of government transport policy by cycling the last hundred yards to work and flashing her legs for the cameras. Whilst behind the walls of Whitehall, Digby's precious models continued to spread across tables, over filing cabinets and out into corridors.

It was hot and sweaty in Detroit that night. Bruce Tungsten was sitting up late, alone in his vast office. All the lights were out, but Bruce was occasionally illuminated by a burning flash or a shower of sparks at his window. Brace's office overlooked the vast Global Motors works and even though everybody bought Japanese these days, the long, hot night rang to the sounds of American industry. Global Motors, an enormous corporation, dedicated to the art of making losses with out-of-date machinery and out-of-date cars. Out-of-date? Of course they were out-of-date, the Japanese innovated every five minutes, damn it.