Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (33 page)

'And that's going to involve killing the bastards,' said Max tetchily. 'Just in case any of the bleeding hearts among us thought we'd manage it with a peace protest.' He didn't sound as angry or defiant as his words suggested, merely a scared man short of someone to blame.

'Actually,' Vale told him, 'for the time being it's going to involve preventing conflict by keeping solid stone between us and them. But if it comes to handto-hand fighting, I don't want bodies, I want prisoners.'

'I'll get you prisoners,' said Joanna, her voice weak and croaky but her tone gravely sincere. 'As long as you pull me off the bastards in time.'

'Prisoners?' Max asked, appalled. 'What, are you worried about the Geneva 200

Convention?'

'No,' interjected Parlabane. 'That would suggest we'd be concerned for the welfare of any prisoners we took. We need information.'

'What are they going to tell you?
Why
they're doing it? Knowing the motive, if there is a fucking motive, isn't going to make me feel any better about getting run through. We're under siege and
you
want to ask them questions?

Believe me, mate, violence is the only language they'll understand.'

'Can I ask a question?' It was Liz who spoke, putting her hand up as though to apologise for the interruption. 'It's kind of a communications issue, and apologies if I've missed something and we're going over old ground.'

'No, by all means, please,' invited Vale.

'Well, you said they took out the bridge, cut off the land lines and disabled the cars. What about the mobiles?'

Rory was swallowing back a sarcastic enquiry as to just how much she had missed, and whether she'd even caught the part about headless corpses in the dining room and basement, when he realised what she was saying and that he was the stupid one for missing it. To be fair to himself, Liz's perspective had the clarity of her being starkly confronted with all the facts and details, compared to the muddier view of those who'd been in the centre as those facts and details emerged and developed around them. Nonetheless, he still couldn't believe they'd missed it.

'I mean, the other stuff some intruder could pull off, sure,' she continued,

'but how could they know all the SIM cards had already been removed from our mobiles?'

As the implications sank in, all eyes turned to Baxter, who sat up straight, a startled rabbit in twelve pairs of headlights.

'We told no-one,' he said, shaking his head. 'I swear. No one. Why would we? The UML Experience, everything we were building, none of it would have worked if we let the details slip. The only people who knew anything were the guys who played the soldiers, and they only knew their parts, not ours.'

'Which leaves only you and Campbell,' Parlabane pointed out.

'Francis? Come on, you've met him. Did he strike you as someone complicit in a conspiracy to mass murder?' He looked imploringly at several faces, alighting last and longest on Emily's, Rory noticed. It was odd, as if he expected her more than anyone to believe him.

'No, but if he did strike us as such, he wouldn't be much use in said conspiracy, would he?' Parlabane said.

'Sounds like we're back to "only the true messiah would deny it".'

'Yeah, except this time it's you who's being asked to accept what the facts are telling you. Campbell was the first to disappear. He was also the only 201

person with a functioning mobile phone. His SIM was never removed, was it?'

'That's true,' Baxter conceded. 'But that's just the way we split the tasks. It could as easily have been me who had the shadowing role today, and him accompanying you on the trek.'

'Could it?' Parlabane asked. 'Was he the architect of those games? Did he decide those roles, and therefore who would and wouldn't have a phone by tonight, Donald?'

This time it was Rory who looked to Toby when the word 'architect' was mentioned. He wasn't seeking a response, rather hoping not to see one. He got his wish, Toby still intent upon Baxter.

'He did,' Baxter conceded quietly, his voice burdened with defeat. 'Mind you, if. . . no,' he decided, shaking his head.

'What?' asked Vale.

'Ach, I was thinking if he wasn't part of this, there's a chance his mobile could be in his room, but who am I kidding?'

'We'll search his room anyway,' said Vale. 'See if there's anything in there that can give us a few pointers.'

'I'll come with you,' Baxter volunteered.

'All in good time. First priority is defence. They could be coming through the windows any minute. We've got work to do.'

Baxter and Campbell couldn't have dreamt up a more effective bonding exercise than this one, Rory reckoned, as the unlucky thirteen set about barricading themselves inside. History offered encouragement. As Sir Lachlan pointed out, it wouldn't be the first time the McKinleys had turned their home into a fortress, and the first McKinley construction had been precisely that. Less encouraging was Rory's assumption that the first McKinley construction probably didn't have quite so many invitingly pregnable windows, and that its defenders were not only better armed but better trained in fending off invaders. The only thing he considered himself adept at fending off was Jehovah's Witnesses. Nonetheless, the admission that he'd done a bit of fencing at school and uni had been enough for Vale to assign Rory one of the bloodstained rapiers and the targe. Vale had been coaxing anyone who had - or even thought they had - any kind of potentially useful skills or abilities to sound off, on the grounds that they had to make the best of whatever they had, no matter how modest. Toby owned up to his student time in the Officers Training Corps, Max to a spell in the TA, and Sir Lachlan to having been an officer in the full-on, nae-kiddin' army. It would have meant more if they actually had a gun between them, but there you go: it was better than nothing, and that 202

was Vale's point. Once again, Baxter might have been looking on jealously at this spontaneous pooling of resources and burgeoning one-for-all spirit if he wasn't simply bricking it like the rest of them. Vale didn't mention specifically what
he
was bringing to the table, or where he'd learnt it, but nobody was sufficiently distracted from the impending danger to ask.

'The twenty-first century,' Rory had muttered as Sir Lachlan handed over a blade and Vale fetched the targe down from the wall. 'And we're looking at hand-to-hand fighting with. . .
these
. If we could muster a bow and arrow, it would constitute an arms race.'

'Meantime,' said Parlabane, 'heart and hand and sword and shield, we'll guard McKinley Hall.'

'Aye, very good.'

Rory stood by in case of attack while Toby opened the front door in order to bolt the heavy double storm doors in the vestibule. Once secured, with the front doors locked once again, four of them put their backs into shifting the reception desk across the entrance as a further brace. The polished floorboards were never going to look the same again, but as this was a far smaller aesthetic deterrent to potential guests than a blood-strewn pile of corpses, Rory didn't imagine Sir Lachlan having a hissy fit about it. Meanwhile, Emily, Kathy, Liz and Joanna, having collected everyone's keys, were raiding bedrooms for double mattresses, carrying one at a time between each pair, then chucking them over the gallery banister. From there, they were dragged to either side of the front door and leaned against the windowframes atop tables taken from the main restaurant. They were then secured, if that was the word, by bedsheets and lengths of torn-down curtain material nailed to the wall at either side.

'It won't hold them out for long,' Vale said, 'but nobody's going to come bursting through at speed either, and they'll be on their faces when they do.'

Further mattresses were ordered to be taken, along with bookcases and an antique bureau, to block the enclosed stairways each leading up to the first floor and down to the basement level, where the snooker room had already been breached. These stairways were at the far ends of the two main corridors extending from the reception area, the extremities obscured from the centre by S-bends in either hallway. Alison and Ger were working their way around the interior doors, Alison locking them while Ger stood by with the kind of kitchen knife that Rory associated more with Jason Voorhees than Jamie Oliver. They had started with the makeshift dining room, primarily because it had already been established as a point of entry, but also to close off any view Joanna might have caught of Grieg's body as she helped hump furniture along the corridor.

Rory, with his absurdly anachronistic armaments, was assigned to assist and escort Liz, Kathy and Joanna in barricading the eastern stairwell. They took 203

two mattresses there first, then two tall bookcases from the lounge bar, roping in the assistance of Ger and Alison to unlock the door again and ditch the contents. Meanwhile Sir Lachlan led Emily, Max and Toby at the western stairwell. They put their backs into shifting a bureau from the drawing room as a foundation for their barricade, a task that seemed to be testing the strength and coordination of all four of them.

Rory looked at the two mattresses buckled between the wall and the banister on the landing. They didn't so much comprise a barricade as a handy cushion to protect invaders should they trip on their way up to kill everybody.

'We need to take these out and start with the bookcases,' he said, standing the rapier on its point outside the door and resting the targe against the foot of the second stair going up. The others nodded their agreement. Unsurprisingly, nobody had been feeling particularly chatty, and anybody who gave an indication of having some kind of plan in any given situation was unlikely to meet with dissent.

Quietly, wordlessly, they got on with pulling the mattresses back into the corridor, then manoeuvred the first of the bookcases through the narrow firedoor. Awkward as it was, Rory was still grateful he wasn't at the other stairwell attempting the same negotiation with the bureau.

He and Liz first tried wedging the bookcase the way they had the mattresses, but it was too wide, and whatever force they could use to jam it in at a diagonal, if matched by their adversaries would simply dislodge it again.

'I reckon the best bet is to turn both of them on their sides at an angle across the landing,' Liz suggested. 'Then have bookcase, mattress, bookcase, mattress.'

Rory pictured it. There'd still be a gap at the top, but the barrier would be four widths thick, meaning anyone climbing over it from below would be prostrate to the point of lying flat as he did so. If Rory was waiting with a sword, it would be like sticking their heads through the guillotine.

'Why can't we just pile them up this side of the fire-door?' asked Kathy through the glass, the door having been closed to give them more room to manoeuvre. 'Then get some tables from--'

Her question was answered by a figure in combat fatigues lunging down the stairwell from the landing above. He was already in mid-air as Rory turned to see him, proving their barrier was too late even if they could decide how to erect it, the invader having presumably entered through the snooker room and ventured upstairs while they were deliberating in the hall. He bore a claymore above his head in two hands as he leapt, the hilt facing forward, the blade ready to be brought down with all murderous weight upon Liz and Rory, pinned on the landing between the closed door and the bookcase. Rory heard a tinkle of metal as he reached for his shield, and saw that 204

the intended arc of the claymore was at least a foot greater than the sloping ceiling would allow. The steel bit hard into plaster, killing its momentum and twisting the hilt in the intruder's grip. His feet came down a few stairs short of the landing as he attempted to arrest his lunge, his momentum sapped by the unintended blow struck above his head, but not enough for him to stop. Rory grabbed the targe as the intruder toppled forward, the claymore loose again. Its movement remained restricted in the narrow passage so that it could not be swung, only thrust, but between bodyweight and gravity it was still enough to meet Rory's shield with shuddering impact.

Muted screams rang out from the corridor as Kathy witnessed the attack from through the fire-door's thin, wire latticed window. The tip of the claymore and the first six inches behind it passed through the wood of the targe, but the collision deflected its course just past Rory's side before the intruder's body slammed into his and drove him against the wall. Unfortunately, the first thing in the blade's deflected path was Liz, who was sent sprawling over the side-turned bookcase. The attacker recoiled a few inches and pulled back his sword, which Rory noticed from the tugging against his fingers to be stuck in the targe. His eyes locked on those of his adversary, Rory tightened his grip and pushed forward with the shield, trying to prevent the intruder from dislodging his weapon.

'Rory!' Liz warned as she spotted the intruder loose his left hand to unsheathe a knife, with which he slashed out in a narrow arc. Rory stepped back against the wall and let go of the targe as the knife whipped across his chest, tearing at least three hundred quid's worth of jacket. The intruder rocked on his heels at the sudden absence of resistance, his broadsword now awkwardly encumbered at one end. He gave it a wiggle, as if trying to flip it away, or maybe testing whether he could just club Rory with this new combined implement. Evidently deciding against both, he dipped the targe to the floor and placed his foot on it, as a second swordsman appeared on the upper landing, also bearing a claymore. Rory knew this was his only chance, but before he could hurl himself, the fire-door flew open like a grenade had gone off behind it. The edge of the door caught the intruder a glancing blow to the head that spun him against the banister and tangled his legs around the embedded claymore as he fell.

He turned around to discover what had hit him, but it was questionable whether he would have had time to fully focus upon what would be the last thing he ever saw: Joanna stepping through the doorway, swinging Rory's rapier with both hands in merciless, like-for-like vengeance.