Solomon's Keepers (21 page)

Nineteen

The news is dominated by reports about riots. There’s a new temper on the streets that many will blame on the exceptionally hot summer. Night after night the same neighbourhoods come alive in the light of urban bonfires and to the sound of sirens. The television news shows pictures of upturned cars lying in the streets like dead beetles and silhouetted figures running in the shadows in front of mounted police. Each morning the papers report more wrecked and looted shops, more bullied and beaten passers-by. But riots aren’t like floods or droughts; they aren’t weather, they don’t just happen when the temperature reaches a particular threshold. There are underlying causes, catalysts. There have to be better explanations than the tired repetition of racial tensions and deprived metropolitan youth.

While the others talk of complex webs of causality, and the merits of curfews, it is Network One that identifies the significant influence of a secretive new group calling itself the Union Jackals. They are masters of the use of mobile communications to orchestrate sudden gatherings that wrong-foot the police, wreak havoc and then melt away leaving the impromptu crowds of spectators and hangers-on to face the anger and frustration, the horses and the batons.

Night after night the same formula of lurid defiance and destruction goes unpunished and every bulletin carries yet more platitudes from identical wooden police chiefs and politicians.

After three weeks the army is called in to Manchester and the nation watches soldiers in khaki battledress protect swelling numbers of foreign correspondents as they report live from the front line on the futility of every effort to stop the chaos.

In a rare statement via an intermediary, The Union Jackals admit responsibility and gloat that Britain is in for a ‘summer of discontent.’ Again, it is Network One that gets the scoop. As it turns out later, they had infiltrated the Jackals months before and built a map of the organization and its extraordinary habits. They tracked the leaders as they planned each outrage, lounging in the back of chauffeur-driven limousines amongst champagne bottles and cartoon molls, all sponsored with the spoils of their looting and a previously unknown sideline in protection money. They constitute a cynical new force on the British crime scene. In an ironic twist on their apparent racist motivation, it turns out they are themselves mostly recent immigrants from Eastern Europe.

The back of a large van. No windows. Rees is already dressed in his black get up with thick-soled boots laced up his shins, black combats and a tight balaclava over his ears. A shot of whisky has covered the sick taste that went before – Escalon dealing one of its occasional twisters. He’s steady now. Everyone is back in position. They run the video again on the laptop. He already knows it but embedded video always has to go over several times or the hookies won’t get it. The corner of a dark street. A large man in a dark suit emerges from a doorway into yellow streetlight and a limousine pulls up at the kerb in front of him. The big man opens the car door even before it has completely stopped and two women emerge with a little guy between them. He affects nonchalance but looks too quickly up and down the street. It’s a short walk across the pavement and he acts as if he knows he’s being watched – as if he’s always watched. The two women are on stacked heels and link their arms with his. He leans his head forward as if urging them on. If they were steadier they’d be frogmarching him. They’re not wearing much but their big curves would stop a bullet.

Myron’s actor, Seth, pauses the film as they single file past the doorman and Rees sees the little guy face-on to the camera. It’s the face of a thousand movie thugs: nondescript, hard-eyed, thin-lipped with tension. A scar complicates one eyebrow. His hair is overly black and slicked back. The girls’ faces are lost in a toss of big hair. Their heads are caught at identical angles in a synchronized simper. He zooms in.

‘Remember the face,’ Seth says in the hard-bitten tone he’s been practising all afternoon. ‘He’s the head man, calls himself Drakal. Watch yourself, he’s dangerous. According to our research he’s a killer. He’s a hard man to pin down, rarely seen in public. He made his way up via child prostitution, racketeering, immigration scams and drugs. He’s left a trail of disappeared friends. He came to the UK nine months ago and hasn’t wasted time getting stuck in. He usually packs a nine millimetre and his help is never far away. So you take this – the Heckler and Koch MP5. You’ve got thirty rounds per magazine. That’s two seconds – which is why they call it the ‘room broom.’

He rolls the rest of the video and Drakal enters the club

‘We believe we have their location tonight. They’ve laid on the usual party girls for when they’re done. We know the hotel suite. We’ll get you on the roof. Take a look at this.’

Rees already knows it but he takes a look at the plan Seth holds out.

‘Three storeys. You go up the neighbouring fire escape and cross the roof here. The top balcony is directly above them. Here. You can wait there until we confirm they’re inside It won’t be easy from there but it’s doable.’

He can’t resist a smile. He knows Myron has the suite rented but he’ll climb anyway and wait on his balcony. It needs to look hard. Seth has probably never been in anything tougher than a playground scrap but he looks the part. Strange how now he’s schooling them. This is almost like a training exercise on the kill house.

Zena sends that they are going into the building. The van starts to move. It’s nearly two in the morning.

The doors open and you jump down into the street and step through the black iron gates into the neighbouring garden. The pack is heavy and you have a climbing rope coiled on your shoulder and the MP5 swinging under one arm. You jog across the lawn and a concrete patio where rubbish bins gather at the back door as though for a smoke. The fire escape is a black zigzag against the bricks. They don’t bother with the Christmas cake paint at the back. The air is warm and the night still. You move slowly but the soles of your boots make a faint squeak on the metal steps. There are more footsteps behind you but you don’t look round. Three turns, two in darkness to reach the top. Traffic noise on a hint of breeze that climbs over the roof to meet you. Tree tops balloon in the gardens behind. In the façade next door there are lighted windows, wakefulness sprinkled randomly in the dark.

A flaking balustrade fronts the roof and you make your way to where its shadows lean in from the street. Between the uprights, you can see three storeys down to the kerbs and the cars parked in a layer of aspic street light. The start of the hotel is a step over a low wall. You count off the windows from the plan, measuring against the mirror image of the buildings opposite. Zena sends again. They are in position. Second storey, just as planned. When you look over the balustrade there is a towel spread on the balcony – a private signal. You slip off the pack and the HK and walk to the dark side of the roof to secure the rope to a metal bracket on a chimney. Déjà vu. The rope snakes across the roof and you pull it taught and clip on ready to abseil. There’s a moment or two to play with the grenades and heft the HK. A few flicks of the safety and an out and in of the magazine. You sling it over your shoulder. A final check of the Sharman’s blue-lit face, then the rubber smell of the mask. The old routines reaching through the drugs and the nonsense. Zena gets the two taps on the head and sends to go. You think of Armand as you swing across the balustrade and into light. Welcome to the world of entertainment.

Just like old times. The blast pushes the window in and echoes from the fascia opposite. Even in the interior rooms they’ll feel it like colliding with a truck. You step through smoke and dust and swing the muzzle light across the room. It’s an anteroom of the suite with nothing but a coffee table, some couches and the remains of a large vase. The whole scene is rhinestoned with broken glass. You open the door to the corridor and kick into the main living room. The first movement in the beam is a girl in a complex harness of black lace underwear. She is dismounting from a figure on the couch. Both are luminous in the light from the television. He has a shirt on but nothing else, long hair, he’s a sidekick.

‘Floor, face down,’ you tell them.

Drakal is in the main bedroom, the two girls feeding on his midriff are now terrified and won’t let him get up. His eyes blaze like stoplights. He reaches for the side table and you give it a burst. The wooden backboard screeches into blonde splinters, not quite where you aim and the big ceramic lamp stand collapses in musical rain. The girls scream. The second magazine snaps in and you hold Drakal’s forehead in the light and tell him to freeze. Seth’s team are through the front door. Their torches strafe the room. You hold your beam on Drakal and catch the cuffs glistening as they go on his wrist. The girls gather to the top of the bed like a pair of springs. ‘We’ll take him from here,’ Seth says, best baritone.

There are people milling in the street below but they can only watch as you belay to the pavement and run through stabs of flashlight to the waiting van. Behind the cameras someone calls out ‘Are you the SAS? Police? Someone shouts KomViva. There’s a chant of let’s get started.’

They will have to wait for the morning news. The tyres whine. You have a party of your own to go to.

Matzov’s Media One makes it a double whammy. They break the story in the morning editions of their papers with a full spread on the ringleaders, now in captivity, and an exhaustive catalogue of their offences. ‘KomViva – this is what justice feels like’ says the headline.

The longer it goes on, the more Rees feels that some kind of trade off is going on inside his head. He’s trading big for little, getting sensation and losing context. The Escalon ensures that he experiences every scat in incredible zestful detail, sensation by sensation, each needlepoint of apprehension, the choreography, and the kata of each play, every goose bump and bead of sweat. But he’s lost the big picture. What is he doing? It doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is the sweet warmth of kerosene in the start up, the precise squidge of the chrome shift of the Ferrari, the hot snatch of rubber and the shear and shriek of escape, knowing the tactile subtleties of yielding flesh, keeping going on a tough scat when your muscles are burning and adrenaline squeezing like an accordion in your guts. What matters is feeling more alive than anyone else for ninety minutes a day. Is that fucked up?

He hasn’t read the papers for weeks. Someone shows him the Jackals spread in The News and it comes as a surprise. He hadn’t known what they had done. Had heard it and forgotten. But he remembers Drakal’s eyes blazing, the girls coiling like springs.

It’s an effort but he forces himself to read it. The world outside has become an alien place. He reads about streets on fire, the Prime Minister facing hostile questions in The House, about a palpable sense of relief that the ringleaders have been brought to justice. He reads about himself. Sometimes Myron and Zena have joked with him about stories before but he has let it wash over him. It has always been marketing hype put out by Matzov’s people. This is different. They have a picture of him abseiling to the pavement. There are shots of Drakal and two other men being led away in handcuffs. As he reads he expects to come across anger at the stunt they have pulled. He expects disbelief, even ridicule. But there isn’t any. There is no outrage, there is no disbelief, no challenge. The hotel seems pleased to be featured, grateful for the compensation. There is no criticism from the police or politicians. He remembers the barrage of flashlights, the way they left a blue core inside the white, an after flash. He’s not a concept: He is real. KomViva makes him real to the subscribers and now he has a reality to the wider public too; a figure in black with a balaclava and boots. He turns the page. There he is again. A head shot with the lights picking out a KV logo on the forehead of his balaclava. He never noticed that before. An anonymous celebrity. He thinks of Matzov. Sooner or later they will get to you. Once you become a public figure there will be no let up. You are going to be the eyes, the ears, the mouth…It will drive them crazy. You’ll be like Superman. And you’d better believe that the whole world is going to be after the scoop of finding out who you are.’

In the week after the hotel scat KomViva subscription applications skyrocket. No one can get a box. They join the waiting list. They say that the devices that are out there are changing hands for tens of thousands. Every now and again a rumour starts that there are boxes on sale at a particular store and then there are lines around the block within hours. Two new manufacturers announce they are manufacturing under licence. They will ship boxes in the millions by Christmas. Myron says it has been on The Ten o’ Clock News.

The growing scale of the subscriber base adds pressure for more and bigger entertainment. The success of the Drakal scat has helped convince Matzov about the big gesture and common denominator entertainment. He wants Myron to step up the scale of his pure entertainment stunts. There will be another big gesture next month, every month and they take time to prepare. They have to look plausible. The big dramatic scenarios need scripts and preparation and travel. Sex is the easiest. Celebrities continue to volunteer to participate in scats. Now that there are causes they are keener than ever. Jayleen Diamond was the first one to get it. She could see where this was headed right away. Jayleen wasn’t some B list celebrity on the slide. She was sexy and smart and on the way up. She knew that the rules had changed forever. Who’s going to listen to songs through headphones and watch people come on to a camera when they can have a song sung just for them, when they can make love? Celebrity, she said, is now a contact sport.