Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (40 page)

'How did he react?'

'Spat the dummy, but it looked like the tantrum of a helpless man. He called us traitors and cowards and ranted about finding people who had the balls to go through with it. That didn't sound very likely, seeing as we were the best he'd come up with so far. And that was the end of it. We never heard from him again, and Toby and I didn't see much of each other after that either. Mutual disgust, it would be fair to call it. We'd learned some things about ourselves and each other that we didn't much like.

'I felt like I'd had a lucky escape. It taught me that I didn't care about politics, didn't even hate the lefties as much as I'd convinced myself. Toby was more chastened by it, though. He's got more character than me. We had a few mutual acquaintances, so I heard about him here and there. The summer after graduation, he went off and did some voluntary work with underprivileged kids in Tyneside. Ended up staying there and running his own charity. Meanwhile I just got on with what I always did best: pleasing number one.'

'I was pretty scared for a while in case Shiach showed up again. I half expected 245

to see a news story reporting a death that bore a resemblance to one of the plans we'd discussed, or more likely to see that Shiach had got himself arrested in a failed attempt. But there was nothing.'

'Just because you noticed nothing doesn't mean nothing happened,' Kathy said. 'I mean, wasn't that the point? Unsuspicious deaths don't make the news.'

'True, but. . . a lot of these plans were things that would have been reported: they weren't all supposed to look accidental, just incidental. Innocent bystander scenarios, or--'

'Something that would conceal the true motive and intended target,' Vale interrupted. 'Such as a medieval massacre of unconnected strangers.'

'It's a lot more ambitious than anything we dreamed up, but the principle is the same,' Toby conceded. 'Though if it is Shiach, then at least we're not up against any kind of military genius. He was a failure, posted as liaison to the weekend soldiers because he was no use to the real ones. That's why he wanted to wage his own private war with his own secret army. If it hadn't been for the lefties, I don't know what he'd have done for an enemy.'

'The only thing the prisoner could tell us about the man in charge was that he had a tattoo,' said Vale.

'A boat,' Baxter added. 'I mentioned it earl--'

'He didn't say boat, he said ferry.'

'Sorry. I was being more general to widen the net.'

'Feriens Tego,' said Toby with a nod. 'What?'

'Feriens Tego. I don't know about a tattoo, but that was the MoV motto. Rory and I thought it sounded really cool, but then we were idiots who still thought the problems of the world could be solved by eliminating the people who disagreed with us.'

'What does it mean?' Kathy asked.

'Get your retaliation in first, attack is the best form of defence. Literally:

"Striking, I defend". The kind of simplistic, half-witted macho bullshit that makes perfect sense to people who need an enemy in order to define themselves. It's Shiach, all right. And it sounds very much like Campbell was - is

- the Architect. It's taken them more than fifteen years to get their project off the ground, but in order for it to succeed, they'd need to silence the people who can identify its hand. No use suiciding a dissident if there's people out there who recognise the MO.'

'Yeah, but what the hell did I do?' Kathy asked. 'Or Joanna, or Max?'

'Max said he was in the TA,' Liz told them. 'And he was pretty hawkish in his views last night.'

'But presumably not hawkish enough,' Toby observed. 'Otherwise he'd be on the
out
side of the building.'

246

'Brilliant,' said Kathy. 'So it's psychopathic right-wing extremists on the outside trying to get in to kill the right-wing not-quite-extreme-enough-ists on the inside.'

'And maybe it's not quite as simple as that,' Baxter said meekly. 'Rory and Toby aren't the only people here who knew each other in the past, nor the only ones with something to be ashamed of. Hate to break it to you, Kathy, but you're actually a plus one. Campbell hired Seventh Chime for the same reason he came to me, and he must have been pissing himself the whole time to know how much I was squirming. So I guess your pal Emily didn't tell you the whole truth about her own student radicalism.'

It was slow going, more out of cautious necessity than Parlabane's physical abilities. He could have hauled himself along a lot quicker, but the greater his movements, the more sphincter-puckering the dip as the cable's brackets strained to support his weight. Keeping it slow, steady and smooth, his body tight to the spiral, lessened the bounce effect that threatened to bring his mission to an abrupt end.

Since being stabbed in prison, he had embarked upon an unprecedented commitment to his personal fitness in an overcompensating attempt to prove to himself that his recovery was complete. The approach of the big four-oh had also donned its own tracksuit and whistle, and between the two it would be accurate to say he was in the best shape of his life, other than missing a few feet of gut. It meant that he was ably disposed to haul his own weight and that of his burden across the blackened void without breaking too much of a sweat, but the irony of the bag's contents was as prominently vivid in his mind's eye as the prospect of what he was required to do with them. He remained still for a moment in order to arrest the cable's swing, having reached the point where he'd have to descend. The outbuilding was a tantalising few feet to the left of the phone-line; once he'd climbed down far enough he could probably swing to its roof, but while he was already nervous about the strength of the cable, that was nothing compared to his dubiety with regard to Vale's improvised climbing cord. Parlabane hooked the crook of his right arm around the line in order to allow his left arm to wiggle free of one canvas strap. The bag then dangled beneath his back, requiring him to swing to and fro a little until his right hand could get hold of the zip. Immediately he pulled it, he could feel the weight inside press forward and squeeze into the opening gap, the touch of it against his knuckles a hideous foretaste of what was to come. He stopped the zip where it was. If he opened it any further, the whole lot would simply tumble out and disappear, which was admittedly a tempting prospect in isolation, but less so when the consequences were factored in. Turning himself on to his front, the bag now dangled in front of him, 247

allowing him to get hold of the loose handle with his right hand. Another semi-rotation flipped him over again, this time leaving the holdall resting on his chest.

The smell was like low tide on the shores of Loch Shite. Parlabane's motivations had had plenty of aspersions cast upon them in his time, rightly and wrongly. For the things he had done, the lengths he had gone to, the acts he had committed, he had been variously described as self-aggrandising, egotistical, self-loathing, isolationist, monomaniacal, eminently slappable and just plain nuts. Fair enough, he'd thought. Not even all-American comic-book superheroes were pure and uncomplicatedly altruistic in their deeds, and he'd never attempted to justify his activities by depicting himself as a champion of the people. Tonight though, he figured he must be on some kind of all-time shortlist of the selflessly heroic. Batman was out for revenge. Superman was trying to earn the approval of two dead father figures. Indiana Jones wanted fortune and glory. Luke Skywalker was a bored farmboy looking for kicks. Han Solo just wanted the cash and to grope Princess Leia's tits outside the force field generator. Other than its necessity in helping stave off a massacre, there was no personal pay-off for Parlabane in taking twenty-five feet of human small intestine from a canvas bag and using it in lieu of climbing rope.

It was very slimy. This tactile aspect was naturally a major consideration in the potential boak factor, but an even greater one with regard to grip. Going down would be an express ride, but the return journey promised to be more problematic, especially with a can of fuel on his back. Gagging reflexively at the combination of touch, smell and
Icare d'Afrique
recall, he tugged a length from the bag, letting it spill out until one end was free. It was going to be a long time before link sausages were back on the breakfast menu back home in East London Street.

Supporting himself with his ankles and the inside of his left elbow, he tied the end around the cable in a practised knot, yanking at it to check it wouldn't slide undone. His fist slipped along it at first, due to his reluctance to squeeze, but when he did, it appeared to be holding. He let the rest of the intestines drop from the bag and dangle into the darkness. There was so little light from the rear of the building that he couldn't see the ground, but from the free movement of the 'rope', he could tell it hadn't touched the bottom. He wasn't worried about the drop at the end, but if it was too high to reach when he went to climb back up, it would be gauntlet time.

Parlabane climbed forward a few inches and uncurled his right foot from the cable so that he could hook his ankle around the descendant. He was about to let go of the bag as a potentially entangling encumbrance when he heard the sound of hurried footsteps heading his way.

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Keech.

He'd been made. All the way across, he'd been scanning, albeit upside down, for any sign of human activity on the horizon, but just because he hadn't seen them didn't mean they couldn't see him. If they were using those infrareds he and Vale discussed, he'd have been easier to spot than if he'd been doing this in daylight. His mind raced ahead, extrapolating scenarios. Armed only with a blade, the bad guy wouldn't be able to get him without climbing up himself, but he could call for help, which would mean someone shinning up the telephone pole and cutting the cable to bring him down. Could he make it back to the house before they made it to the top? Alternatively, of course, they could just shoot him in the head, or with one of those postulated tranquilliser darts. Again, survival would hinge on him reaching the roof before the shooter got a bead on him, assuming the guy whose footsteps he could hear wasn't packing a gun himself.

It was all rendered moot as the footsteps passed underneath and he saw the man, bearing a machete in both hands, charge forward, intent upon attack but oblivious to the target suspended above him. He watched in grateful disbelief as the man headed towards the house, his back now to Parlabane. That the guy had failed to see the intestines didn't augur well for the height of that final drop, but from Parlabane's angle it was hard to tell whether they'd have been in his line of sight anyway.

The man rounded the corner at the end of the house, where he slowed his run, pulling up like he'd twanged a muscle or was giving up on a forlorn pursuit. Parlabane watched him look around, cautiously at first, holding the machete now in preparation to defend rather than strike, then drop his guard altogether and wander rather purposelessly about the area. It seemed, as ever, incredible that he would not at some point glance up and spot Parlabane, even in this darkness, but the earthbound human tendency to survey only two dimensions had rendered him effectively invisible plenty of times before, and seemed to be protecting him again now.

'There's nobody here,' he heard the man say, though to whom was less apparent.

He walked around some more, poking half-heartedly at a shrub with his machete.

'Yes, I heard you, and I'm
standing
ten feet from the northwestern wall,'

he replied, to whatever had apparently been said in between. He wasn't holding a radio, but was clearly in remote communication somehow. 'Nah, it wouldn't be the transmitter. More likely a clipping error with the wireframe. The fucker's probably just inside. Yeah, okay. I'll have another quick check. Gotcha.'

WTF?

249

The guy had been running full tilt, determined upon something even though he couldn't see it. Determined upon some
one
, in fact, given that he was in machete-wielding mode. Then when that someone turned out not to be there, whoever he was talking to had insisted this target, this person, was a few feet from the north-western wall; insisted according to his faulty information, which involved a 'wireframe' with a 'clipping error'.

Parlabane didn't consider himself a computer expert by any means, but he would lay claim to a solid grasp of modern PC fundamentals, such as how to bypass the office security to surf proscribed sites at work, and where in the system to hide certain jpegs so the wife won't stumble across them; as well as, naturally, the basic console commands for cheating at most of the bestknown video games. Clipping was what you switched off when you decided it would be easier and/or more interesting to be able to walk, fly or drive your seventy-foot Japanese mechanoid through walls.

The bastard this bloke was talking to was looking at a 3D model. A transparent, wireframe one to be precise, and inside it he had a means of pinpointing the location of his targets. The machete bloke had been despatched to kill because according to their computer, someone was outside the building. However, the position had been wrong, perhaps because Parlabane was not only outside the wireframe, but thirty-odd feet up at a point not triangulated in the model.

No. Even allowing for it wrongly positioning him on the vertical axis, it didn't explain why the guy was looking forty odd yards away on the horizontal from where Parlabane was silently hanging on.

Unless it
wasn't
wrong.

The medal, the fucking UML campaign medal: that was the transmitter. Campbell had pinned one to each of them at the start of the evening, so that some swine with a laptop could keep track of everyone inside. He was then relaying that information to his cohorts via some form of concealed comms system, maybe an in-ear sub-vocal rig, and they were acting live on that information. That was why they had launched an attack through the snooker room: they knew there were two isolated targets down there, with more on their way. Easy pickings and an encouraging start for the trialists, or it would have been but for that once-in-a-lifetime, unrepeatable circus feat. Then on the stairs, when they knew they'd meet resistance, they sent two guys to attack Rory, Liz, Joanna and Kathy
because they thought there was only one target
. The girls had gone to bed early due to events at dinner - Joanna in the huff, the others despairing of ever seeing dessert - leaving their medals in their rooms when they were roused. Everyone goes to assist Rory, leaving Alison and the medalless Sir Lachlan vulnerable at the far end of the house: cue attack at the other 250