Midnight Lamp (21 page)

‘But we’ll never find another agent.’

‘Fiorinda, get a grip. We don’t
want
to be in a cartoon. Fuck the movie.’

‘Are you going to tell Ax? Let me have a hit of that.’

Sage tucked the Maryjane into her mouth, his heart leaping as her worried, guilty
perfectly sane
expression. Long ago, he had discovered that Fiorinda had unusual talents, and she’d forced him to keep her secret, even from Ax. Things happen as they must, but this had turned out very badly.

‘Not me. This time, princess,
you
are going to tell him.’

The warm transparent darkness smelt of petrol (gas) and dust; and fugitive desert scents, along with the taint of vomit. Cars like tanks, long shiny trucks thundered by, strange great lighted shapes of concrete and steel loomed around, but they were hidden, safe in the cavernous belly of this alien world.

‘You know, I’m sure there’s a touch of nicotine in these things.’

‘Shock, horror. Sage, I feel as if we’ve stowed away on a huge spaceship. It doesn’t care about us, we don’t know where it’s going, and we had to leave everything we possessed behind. But I don’t mind. It’s so incredible just to be alive and together, I could be happy anywhere.’

‘I get that too.’

‘If only magic (how I hate that word) didn’t exist. If we could bury the filthy stuff in an unmarked grave, the way we thought we had, after that night at Drumbeg. Things would still be falling apart, but they’d be falling apart in normal ways, and we could spend our lives helping Ax try to save the world, hopefully not by being the henchpersons of a benign dictator, some other way. But you’d have to be dead and I’d have to not exist, so
I can’t make that world real
, and trust me I have tried.’

Oh, shit—

‘Mm…’ He stayed calm. ‘There could be a reason, you know, why
this
world is the easiest to maintain, now you have the trick of it again.’

‘Of course,’ she said, sweetly. ‘Because this is the real world. Don’t be silly.’

Oh, my Fiorinda.

‘D’you remember a conversation we had, one night at El Pabellon?’

‘No?’

‘Well, never mind. It’s not really important.’

He had offered to help her reach a place where she could realise that so-called magic was a newly discovered, tech-mediated potential, always inherent in the nature of things: she had called his offer
theraputic rape
. She preferred her lonely battle, and the terrible thought came to him that she could never win. This was what life would be like: Fiorinda smiling, acting like herself, but robbed of the most vital of her senses. Secretly believing she was alone in hell, and refusing to let it get her down. But don’t think like that. She is
better
, and it’s a feedback loop. The more she acts like herself, the more those pathways will be strengthened, the paranoia will weaken—

‘Hey, shall we call him? It’s late. He must be finished with the president.’

‘You want me to tell him what I did
now
?’

‘Er… No, I just want to hear his voice.’

They called Ax. He wasn’t answering, and they found they couldn’t locate him. He wasn’t at Sunset Cape: he’d called to say he was on his way back, but had not turned up. Instant panic. Oh, shit. This is how it happened before.

Ax had expected a whispered summons from an aide. In fact, Fred Eiffrich came looking for him, as the party thinned out: consoling attention for the ex-dictator, who can’t come in by the front door. They went along to Fred’s private sanctum. There was a silver tray, bourbon, ice and glasses, on a sidetable by the fireplace.

‘Will you take a drink with me, Ax? This is great sippin’ whiskey.’

‘No thank you.’

The president poured himself a small drink, no ice.

‘I guess you got my letter.’

‘Yes, Mr Eiffrich.’ Ax gave nothing back to the warmth in the president’s manner. ‘Harry delivered your letter, and the rest of the pitch. We came to Hollywood, and were taken, by your Committee’s FBI contingent, to view a reasonably unpleasant murder scene. That was a little unexpected.’

‘I wish you’d call me Fred,’

The president sat down, indicating the other armchair. ‘I’m sorry. It seemed as if sending Harry to track you down on vacation was the only card I had left. I’m sorry about the murder scene, too, but on the whole I think Phil was in the right, it could have been a breakthrough. You would have known more… I would have told you more, if I’d been able. Your redoubtable Secretary of State—excuse me, is that her title?—Ms Marlowe, wouldn’t give me the time of day. I tried to reach you personally by digital means,’ Mr Eiffrich lifted his chin. ‘They say I’m a technophobe. Maybe I don’t understand my own email program, but I wrote you about a dozen times, last winter, and every one of them bounced.’

‘I was reading them,’ said Ax. ‘I’d resigned. If anything that looked like state business turned up in my personal email, I’d check the contents and either forward it to Westminster, or have Sage seal it up and return it failed delivery. My boyfriend’s part geek, you know. You didn’t say anything about blood sacrifices, or a Fat Boy, in those emails, Mr Eiffrich. You mildly raised your concerns about the whole concept of “fusion consciousness” research—’

‘How could I tell you,’ demanded the president, ‘until I knew we were in secure contact? Uh, did you say,
boyfriend
?’

‘Yeah?’ said Ax, raising an eyebrow. ‘Sage.’

He shouldn’t have confessed about reading the emails, that was a wrong step. He felt this interview was going to be full of them.

‘Sage Pender is
your boyfriend
?’ The president looked extremely taken aback. His ruddy complexion had darkened alarmingly. Oh please, thought Ax.

‘Yes, Mr Eiffrich. Sage is my boyfriend, Fiorinda is my girlfriend, they’re both my lovers. I didn’t mean to startle you, our relationship is public knowledge.’

‘No no. That’s okay. I just, er, I just hadn’t picked up on that.’

The president sipped his whiskey, and looked into the cold fireplace.

‘Well, now you know,’ he said, having recovered his poise. ‘Phil tells me you guys are being very helpful, but so far you can only confirm that we could be right in our dreadful suspicion. I’ve done a lot of reading about fusion consciousness, Ax. I considered it my business. I’ve talked to the guys who say that the Vireo project is impossible, I’ve talked to the other guys who are convinced it’s a righteous mission, and I guess I can follow the arguments, I have a postgrad in Chemistry, far back in the mists of time. But the occult tradition, Jeez, that’s a nightmare. Spirit journeys, Kabalistic rituals, voudun, psychic aura –is that
aura
, or
aurae
, in the plural? Clairvoyance, card tricks, blood and entrails.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘It’s a mess. Not just distasteful: a mess. No logic, no core, a tangle of mutually unintelligible competing structures. There’s no way to make head or tail of it. I badly need someone who comes from that culture, and has been involved in the…the business in Europe, who can
tell
me.’

Over my dead body is that someone going to be Fiorinda, thought Ax.

‘It’s
aurae
,’ he said. ‘But you hear both. Mr Eiffrich, I don’t think I understand the situation. If you have convincing reason to believe that your fusion scientists, financed by your Defense Department, are attempting to weaponise natural magic, surely that’s enough? Surely you don’t need to prove they’re complicit in a string of murders. You can shut them down on scientific grounds.’

‘It’s a delicate matter to investigate.’

‘If you know that the Vireo Lake neuronauts are being selected for psi talent, I’d say that would be a conclusive smoking gun.’

Mr Eiffrich looked at Ax severely, and did not answer this question. ‘I have one undisputed fact that I consider significant. Did you know, the guys at Vireo got hold of Rufus O’Niall’s
head
, from your Celtics?’

‘I knew it had gone missing,’ Ax shrugged. ‘It was to be expected.’

The president stared. ‘
Expected
,’ he repeated. ‘That’s a turn of phrase. We can
expect
the heads of our enemies to become objects of exchange value?’

‘It’s not unreasonable that they’d want to look at Rufus O’Niall’s brain, you know. Did they find anything of interest?’

Mr Eiffrich shook his head. ‘Soup, or so I’m reliably informed. It was flash frozen, but they didn’t manage to defrost the soft tissue successfully.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Ax, you make my blood run cold. Okay, then, in that case, I have no evidence I can use of anything improper going on at the Vireo Lake labs, and if there’s another lab, so far I can’t find it.’ He paused, considering his words. ‘The situation, Ax, is that I have information, apart from those sacrifices, which strongly suggests that this is going on.’

‘Does a Fat Boy candidate feature in this information?’

‘At one time we had word of mouth testimony, from sources inside the Pentagon, to the effect there’s a Fat Boy in the making. We lost the witness, and all record of the statement. You’re going to ask me
how
, but I’m afraid the details are sensitive. Could they do what they want
without
courting that risk, Ax? I can’t tell what they mean when they say,
this is not a genuine possibility
.’

‘I wouldn’t lose sleep. Every big theory has its lunatic fringe.’

Mr Eiffrich sighed, and leant forward, elbows on his knees, nursing his glas. ‘Ah, well… If I started to tell you the rest of my current problems, we’d be here all night. Things fall apart, Ax.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Since I took office, I’ve been a thorn in the side of the people, and the vested interests, in this country who just
will not read
the writing on the wall, though it’s in letters a mile high. But what scares me is the social collapse. We didn’t reckon on that: now we see what happened in Europe, and we’re afraid it’s inevitable. It’s hellish. How can we use the tools of civilisation to repair the damage to our ecosystems, if civilised society itself is vanishing?’

He took a sip of whiskey. ‘You know the most appalling thing? When I was told the fusion consciousness project might be tainted by black magic,
I was relieved
. I thought: way to go, now I can stop them. And I believe I can. When I track down this rogue project, the research will be killed stone dead.’

‘But you have no evidence.’

‘We’ll get there. We’re looking at the terrorist option also, of course, but I’m convinced it has to be our own people. Don’t worry. I’m going to stop this. But it must be done
sub rosa
. The public mustn’t know. That’s one reason why I called on you, and your partners. My victory will be secret, but the people also have to be convinced. We have to show them another way.’

‘As of now, your public seems generally convinced that fusion consciousness power is a good thing. They even like the weapon.’

‘That’s what the polls are telling my advisers. Let me make the distinction I want you to help me to make. I don’t care how clean and green it is. I am not “against” fusion consciousness science, as some of my detractors claim. But to use
the information
, the pure power of
being
as a weapon of destruction, oh, no, no… That is utterly forbidden. Do you truly believe in God, Ax?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then work with me. Help me.’

Whatever happens will happen, thought Ax, and finally, mercifully, it isn’t in our hands. He decided against trying to convince Mr Eiffrich that he could take refuge with the Lord of the Daybreak, and simply nodded.

‘Uh, does Sage believe? I mean, in the conventional sense?’

‘You’d have to ask him.’

Mr Eiffrich poured himself a little more bourbon, shook his head, and smiled. ‘My God… The last time I saw you, Ax, you’d just been hauled out of a year’s brutal imprisonment, and you were setting off to invade your own country in a state of barely contained mental and physical collapse. It was the most gallant, bloody-minded stubbornness I ever saw. I hardly thought I’d see you alive again. But you came through… It was a fine thing. But recovery from the kind of trauma you had has to be slow. You can play guitar again?’

‘Yeah.’ Ax stretched out his right hand, and flexed it. ‘It’s better all the time.’ He believed his fine motor control would never be what it had been, but he wasn’t going to whine about that.

The president was looking at him with great kindness. Ax wondered if he should explain that he had no memory of their previous meeting. There were gaps in his record: the days after the rescue were blank (and most of the invasion too, tell the truth). He had been
frightened
of this meeting. He’d been sure he’d be forced to talk about England: he ought to have known better. Kathryn’s uncle Fred can be hasty, he can be intemperate, he’s been known to bluster. But he’s not a bully, and he’s definitely no fool.

‘D’you feel like answering me a couple of questions, Ax?’

Ah, shit. Here we go, after all. ‘What kind of questions?’

‘Secret history, of course…
Was
it you and Alain de Corlay, behind the operation that wrecked the Channel tunnels beyond repair?’

Alain de Corlay was Ax’s continental counterpart,
enfant terrible
intellectual and sometime frontman of the Eurotrash outfit Movie Sucré: currently one of Europe’s most formidable techno-green leaders.

‘No, that was a group run by one of the French governments, one of the four-day efforts, the spring of the year after our Dissolution. Alain and I merely collaborated in letting them do it.’

‘But why did he agree to that? I can see
your
reasons.’

‘If you want to reduce traffic, close some roads. The tunnels were a siphon, drawing a mass of refugees through France to the northern coast, and England. When they were gone, that problem dissipated.’

‘Which makes you to some extent responsible for the Boat People armada, that ended up crossing the North Sea, since they couldn’t use the tunnels?’

‘The situation was already there, but you could say that was one of mine.’

‘What can we do about the refugee situation? It’s one of the worst problems Europe faces, or so it seems from our perspective. Do you have any ideas?’