Solomon's Keepers (28 page)

Twenty-six

Shaw is sitting alone in the conference room. He’s watching the videoconference screen and rerunning the dialogue he’s just had with Eva while he’s waiting for the other participants to join.

‘I can’t have you here, Eva, I just can’t. We’ve been over this. Now what else did she tell you?’

Eva sounding like a kid who’s just had her ball stolen.

‘I have written it all down, you know. There’s a record of all the things I have found out, who I spoke to, things Rees told me – maybe shouldn’t have but did. It’s in a safe place and I promise you I won’t hesitate to put it out there. And even if I weren’t around I have left instructions to make sure it gets out there.’ It’s a bluff but if Brodzky could do it…

‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘No. I’d like to. But you’re too smart and your bosses are too powerful. I don’t understand what they want. I don’t even trust myself on this. I won’t let anyone take this chance away from.’

‘Yes but what chance? If you don’t tell me what she said there isn’t a chance. You think you can get him back on your own.’

He doesn’t want to dwell on how he imagines Dooley’s reaction to a civilian sitting in as he discusses his final moves. He looks again at the security lock.

An oriental face slides across screen two. Shaw recognises Nim Chou from the Solomon files.

‘Afternoon, or rather evening, John. Just the two of us right now?’

Precisely on the hour, Dooley slides into view. At several times life size on the videoconference screen he is a disconcerting sight. His big face looks stern and unmoving but the voice is warm.

‘Shaw, you sure you’re working hard enough? – You look too good to be taking this seriously. Chou, you think those Brits have something they can do at their end with the monitors? We missing something?’

‘Classified, Sir,’ Chou says.

‘Mmm.’

‘You guys still using clocks over there?’

‘I gather they called to indicate they’d be late. It’s all the election fever. It’s all looking a bit desperate, lots of last minute scrambles – which we’ll get to in due course. There is a major rally tomorrow – as you’ll hear.’

‘Hmm. So, who is this guy we’re waiting for anyway?’

‘Deputy Commissioner. British Metropolitan Police,’ Shaw says. ‘Name’s Oakley.’

‘We getting the run-around or is this guy going to help?’

‘Frankly? Not much help in the past, Sir. Our people see it as a political appointment and he’d have to take a steer from Sterland – who is probably going to lose.’

‘Clearance? Can we talk freely?’

‘He’s been briefed and he’s cleared. The conference will be at Top Secret level, Sir. There are two other participants at this end registered and signed off who may or may not attend.’

The light flashes on the secure line and Shaw hits the button.

A recorded voice. British accented. ‘Good evening, Michael Oakley here.’

A black-uniformed figure takes his seat mid-screen. A long lean face and cautious eyes.

‘You want to lead us into this, Shaw? I believe we have some critical updates.’

‘Yes, Sir. Just by way of introductions, Deputy Commissioner Oakley heads the team who will deploy our support both on the ground and airborne, Sir. He has been liaising with the British services and our own people. I have already given him a briefing on the aspects of the project and the technology that are relevant to the operation in hand.’

‘Very good.’ Dooley growls. ‘We greatly appreciate your assistance, Deputy Commissioner, especially at this particular juncture with all your other pressing duties. Earlier today I received a briefing from the White House and I understand Prime Minister Sterland has spoken with President Keeley. I believe there was a good meeting of minds and the basis established for our next steps. I hope you have been given the same input.’

Oakley is impassive. ‘We’ll do all we can. It is very much our objective to spare any embarrassment to the United States and the agencies involved in this exercise. Indeed, I think we all recognise the priority of upholding our shared National Security interests at stake here.’

Shaw continues. ‘I suggest I summarize what we have. Nim, we’ll get to you if there are any specifics and then I’ll ask Commissioner Oakley to comment on preparations on his side.’ A collective mumble is confirmation.

Shaw: ‘All we know at this point is that there is a further escapade planned which we believe is tomorrow – and most likely timed to coincide with the march planned tomorrow evening. The Freedom party has been hitting the campaign trail pretty hard and putting KomViva out there. We believe he’ll be in the area tomorrow evening. We do know that Reuben Matzov is due to appear on the Jimmy Line show – General, that’s…’

‘I know who he is – Jeez we get that arsehole over here too. Jimmy Line, that is, I have no comment to make about the other individual you mention.’

Oakley allows a tight smile.

‘…and he also has a big party planned tomorrow which is a kind of pre-election bash and a showcase for the new so-called Sensomandos…’

‘The what?’

‘Sensomandos, that’s what they call the next group of implanted, er, the next KomVivas, if you like. Our information is only sketchy. We think it’s around London and we believe it may involve a helicopter – that’s really all we have and we can’t rely on that.

‘Nim, do you want to give us the technical update?’

Nim’s voice is pitched to make cheap appliances vibrate in sympathy. Over the speaker he sounds part of a chorus of identical siblings. ‘So the latest is that we’ve been working on locating him as soon as he’s transmitting. We know the frequency range that their transmissions use and the signature of the base device. We have full spectrum airborne listening cover. We know they change frequencies but there’s nothing else out there with a signal density like that so it’s not a problem to pick him up. We are monitoring the KomViva service and within two minutes of a high power transmission starting we will have a location. Assuming he’s still in one of those areas we will have coordinates to pass to your ground team.’

Dooley is grateful for the briefest update he’s ever heard from Nim. ‘Deputy Commissioner Oakley, perhaps I could ask you to say something here about your readiness…’

Oakley clears his throat. ‘Yes, indeed. We have three four man snatch teams on the ground – two in cars and one operating from a river police launch on the Thames. There will be two separate police aircrews on standby in alternating shifts. Whenever he moves, we’re ready for him. We generally work a four man squad for this kind of job and these men are all seasoned operators. The very best. Each squad includes a marksman. We would expect to be able to drop in approximately fifteen minutes, perhaps less, depending on exactly where he is. Our orders, and I understand this was specifically covered at the highest level, are to recover the asset by any necessary means. In practical terms we have to allow for the likelihood of that meaning our man being killed. We will also of course be monitoring the KomViva service and any intelligence we get that way is fed directly through to the teams.’

Dooley grunts. ‘But we’re still waiting for his move. Right? We don’t have anything to move on until we pick up a signal.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Which leads me to the next question: one Mr. Matzov. I believe you said he’s in London tomorrow? President Keeley has requested you bring Mr. Matzov to an interview, quite low key. We understand the sensitivities but we need you to have him available tomorrow.

‘I am not aware of any such action being sanctioned.’

‘I think you’ll find it has been now. Please check with your Commissioner and have him check with Downing Street.’

‘Mr. Matzov is not directly associated with KomViva. Nor for that matter is Downing Street the correct…’

‘Yes he is. He controls it, owns it too if you can keep up with him covering his tracks.’

‘He is not an executive. And I doubt the Director of Public…’

‘Christ, he talks about it all the time. The party he funds has KomViva stitched into its manifesto pledges. What do you call that over there?’

‘Steady on, General.’

‘We want him Deputy Commissioner. We happen to know he’s hijacked an asset which constitutes a major threat to United States National Security – and indeed your own British National Security. We want him present and correct when this goes down tomorrow.’

‘But it would be unprecedented.’

‘That may be so. These are extraordinary circumstances.’

‘I have no clear grounds – no guidance at this juncture – to arrest the chief sponsor of one of the major parties on the eve of the election. This isn’t Burma.’

‘I didn’t say anything about arresting him. You can do that later.’

Dooley slides his palms forward flat against the table top on either side of the speakerphone. He has heard enough.

‘We appreciate your participation, Deputy Commissioner. I know if anybody can catch him then your team will. I only want to add one thing. I want someone there from my team. I’ve sent someone, should be with you shortly. I want someone there who knows him. That all right with you? Good. Let’s make sure we get him.’

Twenty-seven

Beyond the double doors, down the shiny corridor in Studio One, the action in the crimson lounge set that all television viewers associate with The Jimmy Line Show is under way. Rees watches it on the monitor, alone in a back room and waiting for Zena to give him the final jump. Jimmy sits in a shaft of light with the bulky shapes of the cameras in attendance like high-tech ruminants at a nativity. He leans and reaches across a desk beside him. Pandi, his co-host, is seated opposite on a couch, her sheen and smile brighter then the surrounding brilliance. A quick pan shot shows the front rows of the audience as a dim crescent of pale blue masks. Jimmy is announcing his weightiest guest. Even he finds it hard to overdo it; ‘Billionaire, maverick, owner of Network One, ‘the man behind KomViva, Sensomondo and of course the sponsor of the Freedom Party.’ Matzov is coming on.

The studio bursts into rapturous applause which Jimmy’s eyebrows pretend is spontaneous. He looks about him and back to the bulky figure with shaggy black hair that is now crossing the floor to take a seat on the couch opposite. It is an honour for Jimmy, a great privilege to welcome Reuben Matzov and, to an alert observer, something that is scaring the crap out of him. He beams at his guest, at the camera, and then his eyes flick to the autocue pane in the table in front of his knees. He doesn’t hide this. It is part of his patter. Once at least in every show he makes a joke of it by reading slowly or fluffing his lines. He seems overawed by Matzov but steadies himself with his usual routine. He looks up to the camera and declaims that all this technology is too much for him, then his eyes lead across to the girl next to Matzov on the couch: ‘But forget how it works, how does it feel? Rrright, Pandi?’

The girl with the blender ethnicity, cartoon curves and platinum wig crosses her legs less than demurely.

Matzov smiles good-naturedly at this exhibition. That’s what you do on Jimmy Line. Pandi always sits on the couch next to the guests and the running joke is that she gropes them throughout the session. She’s supposedly bisexual and certainly extraordinarily pretty. The audience laughs on cue. They sense it has special significance tonight. She pours herself over Matzov but holds back from slipping a hand between his legs.

Jimmy: ‘Well there you go. Can you feel that out there? And keep those messages coming in too. We’re talking with the man himself, the man who invented KomViva, maybe the only man who knows who KomViva really is. We’re gonna find out what he has planned for us next with Sensomondo. Always the biggest noises on Jimmy Line! We are not going to disappoint you tonight.’ The audience is chanting let’s get started, the floor manager is signalling the coming break.

Zena comes in with a couple of new security guards. They tug at their collars and cuffs and look around the room as though for released birds. They always double up when Matzov’s near. When they’re done looking around they exchange a couple of comments and step outside. Rees knows immediately something is wrong. Zena looks panicked and sick.

‘What’s up?’

She takes her time unwrapping the Escalon switch, as though she doesn’t want him to have it, keeps looking at the doors.

‘Come on, what is it? Something or nothing?’

Another look, then a whisper. ‘Something. Got to be quick. I need you to help me. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Good timing, Zena.’

‘Shit timing. Now keep really quiet, promise?’

‘Okay.’

‘Eva came.’

‘What?’

‘Eva came to see me. She showed me a picture of you two together. Told me the story.’

When she’s not looking around she’s looking rapiers through him.

‘Eva came to see you? Fuck! When? Here? What did…’

‘Sshh. Yesterday. Somehow she found me. She knows what’s going on. She seems to know all sorts. And not only her. There’s going to be fallout. I don’t know what to do.’

‘What did she say? Where is she?’

‘Hold on, wait a minute. She’s not here. She came to the flat. She says that Reuben will…’

‘I’ve got to see her.’

‘Rees, yes, I know. Hold on! Listen to me.

‘I thought…’

‘She obviously still loves you. She’s tracked you down. I told her I’d speak to you about her if Jozef agreed. I don’t know what’s happening, I haven’t heard from him for days but I had a text from him. I’m really worried. We’ve got to be careful.’

‘She said that about me?’

‘If Reuben is on to her we’re all in trouble, Rees. Big trouble.’

‘She doesn’t know about all this, what I look like now.’ Zena is looking at the door again.

‘We’ve got to make a plan. I need you to help me.’

‘She’s going to think I’m a mess.’

‘Snap out of it, Rees.’

‘How can I speak to her? You’ve got a phone!’

‘Forget it. Not here. I have to give you the switch and you have to promise to go through with the scat. Help me, Rees, I’m really scared. You have to go through with it. Afterwards, at the party, when we’re done, that’s when we’ll be able to do something. Everyone will be caught up in the Sensomondo show. I plan to slip away then. I won’t be needed and the attention will all be on the new guys. But I can’t do anything until then.’

‘She gives him the shot. He can picture Eva, smiling, picture her as though she were right by him, smell that smell of her skin as though he’d never left that morning, as though he could will the clock to turn back to that morning, will all the intervening nonsense to go away, celebrity, foreign account, hookie fans, all of it…but then the drug takes over and he’s catching his breath and into the all too familiar routine: the faint squeeze in the abdomen that signals the rush is on its way and then just enough time to take a breath and tighten up; crouching on his knees for a count of three; a groaning, grimacing gargoyle, innards electrified from balls to brain, razor cuts scribbled all over his skin. This part never gets any better. His body wants to grapple with immediate reality but his mind is on Eva. She’s out there.

‘Rees, promise me you’ll see it through. I don’t know what they’ll do if…’

‘I’ll do it.’ He says. How long have I got till we’re on? I’ll do it.’

‘Ten minutes. I’ll come back at five. You know you pick up in the studio…’

‘Yeah, but right now I need a piss.’

But he doesn’t. The security guys look at him and he tells them he needs some air. He knows the building plan and the back stairs to the rooftop, two floors up. They look at one another and he snaps at them. They daren’t fuck with him once he’s on. What’s he going to do? One of them comes up with him. The light climbs up the stairwell ahead of them and spills out through the open security door to a path of non-slip mats leading to the chopper. It sits there hunched under wilting rotors and pregnant with dark tanks of liquid mounted on each side over wide spray arms. They’ve finished working on it and the crew has gone inside. The wind across the grey flat roof cuffs his ears and the surrounding skyscrapers stand stiffly, shiny-buttoned against the night sky.

The security guy overtakes him to check out the chopper. Rees isn’t supposed to be there yet and the guard doesn’t want any changes of plan. He checks the interior, confirming what he knows – that the keys are downstairs with security. They haven’t been cleared to give them to him yet. He’s satisfied and slopes off. ‘Check that out. Nice, eh?’ he says as he passes back. His look around tells him he’s safe. They’re five hundred feet up and there’s only one stairwell Rees could take, which is where he’s going to stand and light up out of the wind.

Rees admires the pearlescent paint and coppery dark leather seats until the guard is out of sight and then swings inside the passenger door and rips out the passenger seatback. It’s a clunker of a chute – the kind that sounds good in a safety catalogue but is an idiot’s choice for what he has in mind. Bastard round canopy is no use for steering and isn’t even a cert to open. He estimates he’ll have a count of five, tops. The seat release is a pig and the lugs have never been used. Did he grunt doing it? The guard seems to have spotted something and has his head around the door like a glove puppet. Rees hears a yell as he wiggles the chute on to his back and beetles across the blind side of the roof. At the corner he can pull up in the angle of the single railing that runs around the balustrade. For a long instant he is a statue leaning into the up rush of streetlight and noise and then he plummets down the bright vertical roadway of windows towards the red and white streaks of the traffic and the grey flange of a car park below. One, two, three, four, fuck! Now!

The chute rips behind, billows and cuts the roar of the wind. Rees veers in and then out from the building, legs swaying over traffic in a river of light. Down there a forgotten world is exploding into detail, collage becomes cars, speckles become people, people become faces looking up.

He hits the street amidst a clamour of yelling. The canopy drapes a bonnet that nearly clips him as he rolls. It’s a good clean landing. A cabbie is yelling, a line of faces open-mouthed. Right in front of him there’s a redhead for a moment he’s sure is Eva. She stares at him with hands outstretched; she’s crying tears of laughter, hope, incredulity, recognition. But when the blur of his tears clears she has become someone else and is moving away. He’s half a block away and he needs to hurry. Someone knows who he is and he can feel people pressing to touch him. He jogs back towards the entrance to the tower. He tries a young girl first. ‘Please, I need to borrow a phone’ but she body-swerves away. ‘I need to make an urgent call.’ This isn’t working. He must look a freak. He’s got a fucking mask on for Christ’s sake! One more time; young guy at a bus stop and he’s got it in his hand. Rees has his wrist and then the phone. ‘One minute and you get it back.’ He stays where he is and dials her number. The young man just watches. Rees doesn’t even know if Eva still has the same number.

The traffic is loud. People everywhere are talking. It clicks. A voice. Standard fucking voicemail! Not even Spanish. Is she there?

‘Eva? Hello, it’s me, Rees, answer the phone, I want to talk…’ He has to shoulder the young guy away. He’s tugging at his sleeve. ‘Eva, I know you’re out there. I know you found me. You can’t know how great that makes me feel. I’m a little high right now and I am about to do something stupid – I can guess what you’d say to that – but this time it’s to fly a chopper over a crowd of people – I’m in central London – and then I have to do this one other stupid thing for…and then I want us to…’ Bastard has it away from his ear. Someone helps him and he’s got it back. Rees is out of time and starts running.

The security guy sees him at the front door. All he is thinking about is Eva’s voice. If only he’d heard it, can hear it now, the bustle in that Spanish timbre, the way she revs up to a laugh, the way she starts ‘you’ with a j.

He’s inside. One more for Zena and then to hell with it. Stuff it all. He should have done this a long time ago.

A uniformed non-entity postures and Rees tells him to go fuck himself. Always attack. You don’t know who I am? He calls and it seems someone does. Matzov’s guys see him to the lift with a ‘Where the fuck?’ and they glide up through softly whistling layers of night. Doors open. The media tower a maze of lights, movement and the bright young people with so much and so little to do.

‘Welcome back. We’re talking down and dirty with Reuben Matzov: billionaire, media mogul, political padrone, bon viveur…Did I say that right? Who writes this stuff? Don’t they speak English? …And the man responsible for the biggest leap forward in entertainment since…noooo, not me!…I was going to say since moving pictures. Okay, same thing. We’re talking about a sensational new experience that is nothing short of a new way of living; you already know KomViva, anybody heard of that?’ Huge applause and whistling confirms the obvious. ‘Of course you have – and unless you’ve been doing time in the wrong jail – hell, even if you have – you’ll know what he’s been up to. And now we have a new generation, the sensational Sensomondo and a new team of Sensomandos all ready to bring us the best experiences of the world out there.’ The Jimmy Line beam pans across the mid section of the live audience, down to the autocue and back to Pandi and Matzov. ‘Hey! Looks like Pandi’s doing a little reality check of her own.’

Pandi obliges with a wiggle of the shoulders and a theatrical squeeze.

Matzov is already talking, the bass voice quivering, resonant and barrelled. ‘History will view this as a turning point, not just in entertainment but in the way we lived, in what it meant to be human, in what it meant to share experience, a whole sensibility with other people. The basis of a civilized society. You all have a chance to be a part of this history in the making. I urge you not to waste that chance. I want you to join me in celebrating this new world. I want to offer you a special chance to be part of it. We will all be judged by generations to come on what we made of his opportunity. Tonight I am celebrating the realization of a personal dream – but it is a dream worth nothing unless you all elect to share in it…to keep it alive, to grow its power and its purpose. There are those who would turn back…’

The voice is rich and persuasive as it always is, the sound from a world beyond the whines and shouts of the little people who weave the dream, the scorn of those who oppose it, the silence of those who have died for it.