Vicious Circle (50 page)

We moved forward. There was something cold and granular underfoot: for a moment I wasn’t sure what it was, then I heard the crunch from under Zucker’s boots and realized that I was walking on broken glass. “Fuck!” I protested. Zucker hissed me silent. My voice sounded indecently loud in the sudden hush.

Two eyes opened in the fog ahead of us: gleaming yellow eyes, about seven feet apart. An engine revved. Zucker waved, and the eyes flashed: headlights, on full beam. But we were still inside the building.

More indistinct figures were staggering through the gloom off to our right. Someone shouted, and I saw the flash of another flashlight beam. Zucker snapped his fingers, and before I even figured out that it was a signal, Po scooped me off my feet. He ran behind Zucker, around to the left, past the lights. The side of a vehicle slid by us, dull white, and two metallic
clangs
sounded one after the other. Then I was thrown down, not onto the glass-strewn floor of the atrium but into the back of some kind of van. The two loup-garous piled in after me and we backed at reckless speed, Zucker pulling the doors closed with a deafening crash, then swung around with a squeal of tires.

“Mach two,” Zucker bellowed, pounding twice on the roof with the heel of his hand.

And we tore away so fast that I was thrown over onto my face again just as I’d finally managed to get up on my hands and knees. A siren gave a mournful, oddly truncated
whoop-whoop-whoop
as the driver shoved down hard on the accelerator, making the speed limit a distant memory.

I twisted my head around; took in the gurney with its wheel locks, the medical kit on the wall, the oxygen cylinder strapped down solid in its recess. We were in an ambulance. The sneaky bastards had hijacked an ambulance.

There was a third man lounging in a fold-down seat next to the gurney. He was stocky, with a pugnacious, peeled-red face and the kind of hair that—although long and even luxuriant—starts a good couple of inches below the crown of the head, leaving a shiny circular landing area for mosquitoes. He was wearing a biker’s jacket and a pair of torn jeans that looked as though the rips had all happened by accident rather than being installed at the factory, and he was holding a gun with a silencer so long it suggested desperate overcompensation. It was pointing at my head.

“I’m Sallis,” he said, in a voice as raw as his face. “I’ll be your stewardess for this evening, and if you so much as fucking move I’ll be putting a really slow .22 hollow-point into your skull. They’ll have to pour what’s left of your brain out through your nose.”

“What’s the movie?” I asked him, and he prodded my cheek with the end of the silencer barrel as if to say that he didn’t appreciate my trying to move in on his stand-up act.

“You just lie there,” Zucker elaborated, sounding a little more relaxed now that the hard part—for him, anyway—was over. The ambulance was lurching from side to side as we banked and turned in the narrow streets, so the loup-garou had to grip a handrail to keep from being bounced off his feet: it made him seem more human, somehow. “You don’t say a word to anyone in here, including me. The next words you speak will be when you’re asked a direct question. Okay? Just nod.”

I shrugged. It felt fairly quaint to be threatened with a gun when Po was squatting beside me like a bag full of muscles with a decorative motif of teeth.

“That wasn’t a nod,” said Zucker sternly.

“You didn’t say Simon says,” I pointed out.

Sallis kicked me in the ribs, but for all the tough talk they were clearly under orders not to bring me in either dead or too badly creased. I was banking on that—on the fact that Gwillam would want to debrief me before he made any last judgments about my disposal. Otherwise I might have minded my manners a little more, and tried to leave a better impression.

I had plenty of time, as we drove on at breakneck speed through the gathering dark, to figure it out. There’d never been any fire, of course. Just a lot of smoke grenades that the loup-garous had chucked out of the ambulance’s doors as they’d crashed through the large picture windows that fronted the A&E block. The chemical smell was a cocktail of formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and maybe launch gases if they’d actually fired the fucking things from a mortar.

It figured, of course. The Anathemata wouldn’t do anything so indiscriminate as to set fire to a hospital—but the judicious application of panic was well within their remit. If anyone actually died in the resulting stampede, I’m sure Gwillam would fill in the appropriate form and a mass would be said. One thing you can’t fault about Catholics is their organizational skills.

But of course these were
ex
-Catholics: they’d been outlawed as an organization and excommunicated as individuals. What did that make them? The papacy’s equivalent of the Mission Impossible team, maybe. Fanatics, certainly; so convinced they were fighting the good fight that they’d ignored their own leaders’ orders to stop.

That made what I was doing here more dangerous, and more uncertain. Fanatics are unpredictable, zigging when you think they’re going to zag; they don’t connect to the world at the same angle as the rest of us do, and you have to bear that in mind when you try to reason with them. Better yet, cut your losses and don’t bother to try.

I’d only called Gwillam because I was out of other options, and because I didn’t know Basquiat well enough to trust her yet. Maybe she’d have enough sense to see the truth when it reared up and smacked her in the face, but maybe not. In any case, I wasn’t going to bet Pen’s life on it, or Abbie’s soul. Or my own arse, for that matter. A smart cop is still a cop, with all that that implies.

We slowed down, abruptly, then speeded up again. That process was repeated several times over the next few minutes: even with the siren, and the emergency lights presumably flashing to beat the band, we could only push so far against the press of London traffic. At one point, as we were crawling along in some jam we couldn’t shift with our borrowed moral authority, Zucker suddenly tensed and Po emitted a sound that was halfway between a snarled curse and a cat’s yowl. I knew what that meant, and it gave me a rough indicator of how far we’d come. It also left me a little awestruck at how much punishment the two loup-garous were prepared to take in the line of duty. We were crossing the river. They had to be in agony: running water is like an intravenous acid bath to the were-kin, and they took it in their stride.

Well, not quite in their stride: I noticed that Po’s claws were gouging into the plastic anti-slip slats on the floor, reducing them to ribboned ruin. His head was bowed, his breath coming in quick, barking grunts. Zucker was leaning against the gurney, his eyes clenched shut, a sheen of sweat on his pale face.

This would have been a good time to launch a daring escape, but the guy who’d introduced himself as Sallis was just as aware of that as I was. He jabbed the gun in between my shoulder blades and held it there until Zucker got his groove back. Like it or not, I was along for the whole ride.

A few moments later we dipped very sharply, with a harsh shudder as the suspension didn’t quite manage to take the strain, bumped over a series of badly fitted steel grids that shrieked under our wheels like a cageful of rats, and rolled to a halt. Zucker threw the doors open. He stepped down first, and the solid
thud
as his feet hit the ground outside had a strange echo to it. The darkness was impenetrable. Po gathered himself up and rolled out into the night with eerie, silent grace, then swiveled to stare back in at me. Sallis waved the gun, indicating that it was my turn next.

I climbed down from the back of the ambulance, and looked around. I still didn’t have enough night vision to see what kind of somewhere I was standing in, but again there was that echo, from somewhere close at hand. Every scrape of foot on concrete, every [_pop _]and
twang
from the ambulance’s engine, cooling rapidly in the night chill, had its attentive twin rushing out of the dark to join it.

A rectangle of grimy yellow light opened in front of us, and with its help I saw what I’d already guessed: we were inside, in a sepulchral space that was enormous in extent but as low-ceilinged as a church vault. White lines on the ground, parallel and evenly spaced, gave the game away still further; not a church, but an underground car park. “Get him inside,” said a cold voice, which was so dead and flat that it scarcely stirred the echoes at all. A hand—Sallis’s, presumably—gripped my shoulder from behind and I was pushed brusquely forward, Zucker and Po falling in on either side of me.

We stepped through the doorway into a concrete stairwell. Father Gwillam closed the door, which was a fire door, and pushed the bar back into place with a small grunt of effort. Then he turned to me.

“Good to see you again, Castor,” he murmured. “On the side of the angels at last.”

“Color me undecided,” I suggested.

He smiled—a brief flicker of expression that couldn’t take root in the affectless terrain of his face—and nodded. “Everything’s set up upstairs,” he said, to the company in general. It wasn’t a comment I liked very much, but my personal honor guard closed in on me as Gwillam led the way up the stairs, so I didn’t have much choice about whether or not I followed.

I was looking for clues as to where we were. Close to the Thames, I knew, but where had we crossed? Not as far east as Rotherhithe, surely? In any case, I was pretty sure I’d have heard the engine noise change if we’d come through the tunnel. But maybe we’d gone west. There was no way to be sure: at a rough guess, we could be anywhere between Wapping and Kew.

But as we came out of the stairwell onto a wide blue-carpeted corridor with a gentle incline, bells began to chime. I’d been here before, some time in the long-ago. I experienced a flash of déjŕ vu that included the insanely staring eyes of Nosferatu, and I almost had it. A cinema? Had the Anathemata found one of London’s decommissioned dream houses and moved in, as Nicky had done over in Walthamstow? That would be a pretty sick irony.

But no. As it turned out, they’d gone one better than that. Gwillam threw a door open and flicked a light switch. Striplights flickered in sequence along a wall as long as a football field. A black wall, black floor, too, scarred with the scuff marks of innumerable feet. Up ahead of me, something that looked a little like a
Tyrannosaurus rex
made of glass and black steel reared itself up to about twice my height. But it wasn’t a T. rex: it was a Zeiss projector.

“Son of a bitch!” I said, impressed in spite of myself as the penny dropped.

“That’s the sort of language Po doesn’t appreciate all that much,” Gwillam murmured, raising the disturbing possibility that he might actually have a sense of humor.

He walked around the Zeiss projector, and I followed: or rather, I was herded. The vast expanse of floor on the far side was mostly empty, except for a ghost pattern of unbleached areas on the carpet where other objects had once stood: display stands, partition walls, ancient cine cameras, life-size dioramas from great movies. The Anathemata had colonized one small area; there were a couple of guys working on laptop terminals at desks that were surrounded by thick, overlaid loops of electric cable like barbed wire entanglements. Another couple of guys were talking on cellphones, one of them tracing a line with his finger on an ops board—a huge map of London pinned to the wall, like I’d only ever seen in seventies cop shows. That was pretty much it: that, and a whole lot of empty space stretching away into the middle distance.

“You should move somewhere smaller, now that the kids have grown up,” I commented, trying for a nonchalant tone that I think I missed by a mile or so. “You’re probably paying more rent than you need to.”

Gwillam smiled thinly. He was watching my face, taking a clinical interest in my reaction. “Who mentioned rent? They left the key under the mat, and we let ourselves in. I’m assuming you know what this used to be, before it died?”

“Sure,” I said. “I know.”

But Gwillam wanted to give me the punch line, and he wasn’t going to be deterred. “It was the Museum of the Moving Image.”

Just the words conjured up a little squall of memories. The museum was part of the South Bank complex, like the National Theatre and the Festival Hall—but it was added on after all the rest were built, because film was the scruffy little Johnny-come-lately of the art world and had to make space for itself at the table with its elbows. I’d only been here once before in my life—on a school outing when I was thirteen. All the way up from Liverpool on the train, with four stuffed pork roll sandwiches and a can of Vimto to see me through the day. I’d pretended to think it was shit, because that was what all my mates were saying, but secretly I reckoned the low-tech horror of the magic lantern shows was the dog’s bollocks, and I sneaked back to watch the X-wings versus
TIE
fighters battle sequence from
Star Wars
twice over.

Now it was just an empty warehouse.

“They closed the place down some time in the late nineties,” said Gwillam, absently. “Took the exhibition on the road. It’s meant to be opening again in three years or so. In the meantime . . . it’s really handy for the West End. Sit down, Castor.”

I hadn’t even seen the chair. It was sitting in a patch of shadow just on the hither side of the ops board where two of the strip lights had failed to come on. A coil of rope and a doctor’s little black bag lay on the floor beside it. There was a table, too: a small, round coffee table with a stained Formica top that looked as though it had wandered in here from somewhere else. Gwillam swiveled the chair around to face me.

“Please,” he said, in the same deadpan tone.

“I’d rather stand.”

Gwillam sighed, pursed his lips in a way that suggested he got a lot of this selfish and hurtful behavior, but never quite got used to it.

“If you’re standing,” he pointed out patiently, “Zucker and Sallis can’t tie you to the chair.”

“My point exactly,” I agreed.

“And I want you to be tied to the chair because it makes some of the things I’m about to do to you that much easier.”