Kraken (32 page)

He put his finger to his lips and creep-creeped out of the main road into the alley where the voices were. Subby followed him in the same tippy-toe, into the shadow where someone was muttering.

T
HE LIFT DOORS OPENED, AND
B
ILLY, LOOKING BACK FROM THE FIRE
escape, saw three dark-dressed figures in motorcycle helmets. Dane had his weapon up. There was a percussion.

“Go,” said Wati-Kirk from Billy’s pocket, and “Go,” said Dane without looking back. Billy and Mo dragged Simon down the stairs.

“What about Dane?” Billy kept saying. But Wati was gone again.

It was many floors down. Adrenalin was all that stopped Mo and Billy collapsing under Simon’s weight. They heard scuffles, muffled by walls, above them. Billy felt a horrid crawl of ghosts on his skin as Simon’s tormentors swept through him. When at last they reached the ground floor Billy was gasping, almost retching.

“Don’t fucking stand there,” said the little Kirk in his pocket. “Move.” A random man at his front door stared at the ghosts of Simon in bewilderment so great he was not even scared. Billy and Mo barrelled toward the elevator shaft and the front door beyond it, but it opened and there were two of Tattoo’s men. Grey cam gear, dark-visored helmets, reaching for weapons.

Mo cried out and threw up her hands. Billy stood in front of her and fired the phaser.

He didn’t panic. He had time to reflect for an instant on how calm he was, that he was raising the weapon and pressing the firing stud.

There was no recoil. There was that kitsch sound, that line of light, punching into the chest of the man at the front and flaring in a bruise of light across him as he flew back. The second man was running at Billy in expert zigzag, and Billy shot several times and missed, scorching the walls.

Mo was screaming. Billy threw out his hand. The man stopped hard as if he had run into something. He bounced against nothing visible. The man butted the nothing with his helmet, with an audible percussion.

Billy did not hear the lift arrive or its doors open. He only saw Dane step out behind the Tattoo’s man and swing his empty speargun hard at that featureless motorcycle helmet, in a curve like a batsman’s. The man went down, his pistol skittering away. His helmet flew off.

His head was a head-sized fist. It clenched and unclenched.

It opened. Its huge palm was face-forward. As the man rose it clenched again. Dane punched him hard on the back of his hand-head. The attacker fell again.

“Come on,” Dane said.

They ran a twisting route to Mo’s car, and they helped her lay the shivering ghost-delirious Simon inside. Tribble whickered. “I can’t promise.”

“See what you can do,” Dane said. “We’ll find you. Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “And they don’t know me. Even if …” She looked uncertain. There had been no eyes.

“Go, then. Go.” Dane patted the roof of her car as if releasing it. When she had gone he felt the handles of car doors near them until he found by finger-intuition one he liked, and had it open.

“What are they?” Billy said. “Those men?”

“The knuckleheads?” Dane started the car. There were screams behind them. “Takes a certain sort.” He was exhilarated. “There are advantages. You’ve got to like fighting. You should see them naked. Well, you shouldn’t.”

“How do they see?” They sped into night. Dane glanced at Billy. Grinned and jiggled in his seat and shook his head.

“God, Billy,” he said. “The way your mind works.”

“Right.” It was Wati, back in the Kirk again. “Put some distance between us and Goss and Subby.”

“You genius,” Dane said. “What did you do?”

“Just helps to be able to do voices. I’ll be one second.”

Dane accelerated. He waggled the speargun with his left hand. “This is shit,” he said. “I’ve never had to … We’re going to need more than this. It was crap. I need a new weapon.”

G
OSS STOOD STILL AS A BONE
. H
E LISTENED
.

“This is a blind, you see, Subby,” he said. “I’m wondering where Sparklehorse went.”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” said a voice from the crude figure on the roof’s vertex. “You got had, is what, you psychopath motherfucker.” That came from a comedy-frog-shaped eraser discarded by the kerb.

And from a windowbox of long-dead plants, the voice of a little plastic diver: “Good night.”

“Well,” said Goss, in the silence after Wati left. “Well, Princess Subby. Would you look at that? What a fiddly tra la.”

T
HEY WERE OVER THE RIVER
. W
ITH WATER BETWEEN THEM AND
that awful fight ground, Dane guided the car to a silent space behind lockups, mean garages at the bottom of a tower. He turned off the engine and they sat in the dark. Billy felt his heart slow, his muscles relax one by one.

“This is why we should go in with him,” Dane said. “We can’t take that sort of shit on our own.”

Billy nodded slowly. The nod mutated until it was a shake of the head. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Billy said.

He closed his eyes and tried to think. He looked into the black behind his own eyes as if it was the black of the sea. He tried to reach down into it, for some deep intuition. He could reach, and feel, nothing. He sighed. He drummed his fingers on the window in frustration. The touch of the glass cooled his fingertips. Not an idea, but a focus, a sense of where to look. He opened his eyes.

“The guy,” he said. “In the bottle, the guy I found. Where’s he in all this?”

“I don’t know,” Dane said. “That’s the problem, we don’t know who he is.”

“Uh …” said Wati. “That ain’t true.”

“What?” Dane said to the tiny figure.

“I told you, when that officer-thing grabbed me, it sort of bled. Bits of info and stuff that went into it. I think I remember feeling … I knew who …” Wati probed his sore spots for information. “Adler,” he said. “That was his name, the geezer in the bottle.”

“Adler?” Dane said. “Al Adler?”

“Who is he?” Billy said. “Was he? A friend?”

Dane’s face went through a run of feelings. “Not exactly. I met him but I never … Al Adler was a tuppenny nothing until he got in with Grisamentum.” They looked at each other. “He turned into a fixer. He ran stuff for Gris.”

“What happened to him after Grisamentum disappeared?” Billy said.

“I thought he was off drinking himself to death or something. He was totally Grisamentum’s man. I met him like once just after the funeral, I thought he was losing it. He was yammering about the various people he’d been working with because of his boss, how exciting blah blah. Total denial.”

“No.” Billy looked away and spoke out of the car window, through the glass into the garage’s shadows. “He wasn’t propping up any bars anywhere. He was doing something that got him killed, in the museum, on the night the kraken went. What if he’s been working for Grisamentum all this time?”

“There was something,” Wati said. “It was like …” He interpreted the bruises of the police-thing. “It was like it was, he’d been there for a long time. Since before you knew him. He was done before he was born.”

“How does that …?” Billy said.

“Oh, time,” Dane said. “Time time time. Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon. Al got turned into a memory, didn’t he?” He beat out a pattern on the dashboard. With his tension came little flexes of whatever small arcane muscles he had, and bioluminescence pulsed in his fingertips with each contact.

“Alright,” Dane said finally. “He’s involved. We’ve got Simon, we’ve got a lead. We have to find out who hired him. I need to steal a phone and I need to get begging with Jason Smyle. The chameleon you asked about once. He’ll help us. Me.”

“Yeah,” said Billy. “You know what we’re going to find out, though, right? It’s him. Grisamentum. He’s behind this. He’s got the kraken.” He turned back to face his companions. “And for whatever reason, he wants us too.”

Chapter Forty-One

E
VERYONE WITH AN EAR TO THE CITY KNEW
G
OSS AND
S
UBBY
were back. Goss, about whom they said he didn’t keep his heart in him, so he’s not afraid of anything; and Subby, about whom what can you say? Back for yet another last job. There was a lot of that going around. This time the Tattoo was their paymaster, and the job was something to do with the disappearance of the kraken—yes, the squidnapping—which the Tattoo either had or had not engineered, depending which rumour was preferred.

Whether he had or not, he was on the hard hunt. It was not enough, it seemed, that he ordered his corps of strange self-loathing fist-headed thugs and controlled his altered and ruined punisheds, who stumbled trailing their mechanical flexes, their electric additions, from hole to hole, relaying orders and mindlessly gathering information. Now he had Goss and Subby and the rest of the worst of London’s mercs looking for Dane Parnell who—
did you hear?
—got chucked out of the Krakenists.

According to the complex lay of the theopolitical land, allegiances and temporary affiliations were made for a war that everyone felt was about to start. It was all something to do with a curdling that everyone could feel.

Tattoo sought his pariahs. He sent one of his bust machine-people to ask the worst of his bloodprice operators whether they had any news for him. He made sure it was well known that he had made this particular overture. A strategy of terror.
That’s right. We’re that bad
.

J
EAN
M
ONTAGNE WAS THE SENIOR SECURITY GUARD ON DUTY AT THE
entrance to London’s second-most-swish auction house. He was forty-six. He had moved to the city from France nearly two decades previously. Jean was a father of three, though to his great regret he had little contact with his oldest daughter, whom he had fathered when he was much too young. Jean was an accomplished Muay Thai fighter.

He had been in charge of his shift-group for several years, and had proved his abilities when the occasional crazy had tried to enter, hunting some artefact or other being priced within, usually insisting it was theirs and had been illicitly taken. Jean was careful and polite. He recognised every employee in the place by face, he was pretty sure, and knew a good proportion of them by name.

“Morning.” “Morning.” “Morning, Jean.” “Morning.”

“What’s …?” The man for whom the entry gate stuck was smiling up at him in apology, holding up his card.

“Hi there, morning,” Jean said. The man was early forties, thin, with neat receding hair cut short. “Wrong ID,” Jean said. The guy worked in acquisitions, he thought. Mike, he thought his name was. The man laughed at his mistake. He was holding a credit card.

“Sorry, don’t know what I’m doing.” He patted the pockets of his suit in search.

“Here,” said Jean, and buzzed Mike, or actually he thought Mick, in, to acquisitions. Or accounts. “Have a good one, bring that card next time.”

“Got it,” said the man. “Cheers.” He walked toward the lifts, and Jean did not feel any qualms about the interaction at all.

M
ADDY
S
INGH WAS THE OFFICE MANAGER OF THE SALES FLOOR
. S
HE
was thirty-eight, well dressed, gay in a not-strictly-out-but-not-denying-it way. She liked watching ballet, particularly traditional.

“Morning.”

She looked at the man coming toward her.

“Hi,” she said. She knew him, rooted in her mind for his name.

“I need to check something,” he said. Maddy no longer spoke to her brother, because of a huge bust-up they’d had.

The man smirked, raised his right hand, split his fingers between the middle and ring fingers.

“Live long and be prosperous.”

“Live long and
prosper,”
she corrected. He was called Joel, she was pretty sure, and he was in IT. “Come on, make Spock proud.” Maddy Singh hated cooking, and lived off high-end convenience food.

“Sorry,” he said. “I need to check some details on our Trekkie sale, the names of some buyers.”

“The geek bonanza?” she said. “Laura’s dealing with that stuff.” She waved to the rear of the room.

“Cheers,” said Joel, if that was his name, made the sign again in good-bye, as everyone in the office had been doing for weeks, some struggling to get their fingers in the right position. “I never was a good Klingon,” he said.

“Vulcan,”
said Maddy over her shoulder. “God, you’re bloody hopeless.” She thought about the man not at all, ever again in her life.

“L
AURA.”

“Oh, hi.” Laura looked up. The man by her desk worked in HR, if she remembered correctly.

“Quick favour,” he said. “You’ve got the bumph from the
Star Trek
auction, right?” She nodded. “I need a list of buyers and sellers.”

Laura was twenty-seven, red-haired, slim. She was severely in debt, had investigated bankruptcy proceedings on the Internet. She had a predilection for hip-hop that amused and slightly embarrassed her.

“Right,” she said, frowned, poked around on her computer. “Um, what’s that about then?” He couldn’t be HR, she must have misremembered: a payment-chaser, obviously.

“Oh, you know,” he said, shook his head and raised his eyebrows to show how long-suffering he was. Laura laughed.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can imagine.” Laura was considering going back to do a master’s in literature. She pulled up files. “Were you at the sale?” she said. “Did you dress up?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Colour me all beamed up.”

“Do you need all of them?” she said. “I have to have authorisation, you know.”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully. “I should probably get them all, but …” He chewed his lip. “Tell you what,” he said. “If you call upstairs you can get confirmation from, you know, John, and maybe print me off the lot, but there’s no hurry. In the meantime, though, could you just give me the details of lot 601?”

Laura click-clicked. “Alright,” she said. “Can I get back to you about the others in a couple of hours?”

“No hurry.”

“Ooh, anonymous buyer,” she said.