Glow (31 page)

‘Jesus!’ says Isaac as they begin to descend. ‘That was one of them? That’s what they look like?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What the fuck was he doing there?’ says Isaac.

‘Lacebark must be locking everything down.’

The soldier’s probably taking the stairs, so when the doors open on the ground floor they start running again. They get to the bus stop outside the carwash in time to follow three teenage girls in hijabs on to a westbound bus, and when they look back from the rear window of the top deck they can’t see anyone following.

‘You still have the keys to the roof, right?’ says Isaac.

‘Yeah.’

‘We should go up there, cut the infra-red link and plug a mic right into the transmitter. We can work out how. I spent yesterday setting up the world’s dodgiest PA system.’

‘No, Theo put glue in all the ports on the transmitter that he wasn’t planning to use. The wily cunt.’ They both smile sadly. ‘Anyway, if Lacebark are guarding the studio now they’re probably guarding the transmitter too. We should give it to the Serbians.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The transmitter and the aerial together have got to be worth, what, at least ten grand? We go to Jesnik, give him the keys to the roof, and tell him his uncle can have all the gear for free. If he wants he can start a station playing Serbian wedding music.’ The Mexican drug cartels, Theo once told him, have built their own military-grade radio networks in parts of the desert where mobile phone coverage is unreliable or insecure, but perhaps that wouldn’t be so much use in south London.

‘What would the point be?’

‘To steal Myth back from Lacebark before they find any more uses for it. We’ve got to start thinking like Cherish. Anything that distracts their attention is a good thing.’

The other option is to tip off Ofcom, who until all this started were the only bastards driving around London in unmarked surveillance vehicles that Raf ever had to worry about, but the thought of helping them out is just too sickening.

‘Don’t you remember when Barky got mixed up with the Serbians?’ says Isaac. ‘Maybe Jesnik’s OK but some of them are really fucking scary guys. If we’re going to give away the transmitter, we should at least give it to someone like Jonk. He’s been wanting to start his own station since we were kids.’

‘He won’t be able to get past Lacebark if they’re on the roof. But the Serbians must have guns.’ The sweaty bald guy in the seat in front of them has been in the process of mixing a milkshake in a Thermos flask with a bag of strawberry-flavoured protein powder and a carton of semi-skimmed, hugging all three receptacles to himself every time the bus brakes.

‘If we give up on the radio broadcast, how are we going to warn everyone about the raids?’

‘We can’t. So we have to make sure they don’t happen.’

‘But the only way to do that is to make sure Lacebark don’t catch Fourpetal today.’

The bald guy downs the milkshake and burps.

‘Yeah,’ says Raf.

‘And we have absolutely no clue where he might be. Absolutely no clue.’ Isaac looks at Raf. ‘Right?’

12.13 p.m.

By the time he gets near the climbing gym Rose is straining anxiously at her leash as if she can already guess that something important is about to happen. The noon sky’s such a steely blue that every dull mass in the foreground seems to spark at the edges like the flint in a lighter as your retina struggles to arbitrate the contrast. If Raf is right, Fourpetal will be watching the entrance of the warehouse, but he has to make sure that he sees Fourpetal before Fourpetal sees him, so he does a bit of rough mental trigonometry with the sightlines to decide on his route. After that, he pendulums back and forth from point to point, moving a bit closer each time, feeling like an authentic vengeful ghost now. The place he saves for last, even though he thinks it’s the likeliest, is the yard of the builders’ merchant, which he enters hoping he looks as if he might be on his way inside to buy some joist hangers. And maybe it’s because he deserves some good luck today but that’s where he finds Fourpetal, crouched behind one of those pallets of breeze-blocks, eating from a bag of prawn crackers.

‘Hey,’ he says. Fourpetal looks round. Raf knows that Fourpetal is going to run, because Fourpetal always runs, so he’s not obliged to await that formality before he lets Rose at him. Just as he does so, Fourpetal hurls
Lacunosities
like a brick, but the book misses by several inches and the dog has her jaws around Fourpetal’s left calf before the handle of her nylon leash has even slapped the tarmac. Fourpetal starts howling, and Raf calls Rose back. He’s always liked to imagine that she knows a total prick when she sees one, although in this case the enmity might simply be class-based.

‘I should let her really fuck you up but I’m not going to,’ he says. Fourpetal is now holding on to his leg with both hands and rocking back and forth but Raf can see that Rose didn’t even break the fabric of his trousers.

‘You followed me?’ Fourpetal says.

‘No. I just worked out what you’d probably try next. You thought taking one of Nollic’s kids hostage would be easier than getting Nollic himself.’

‘Yes.’

‘What were you going to do when they came out? Punch the nanny and then run off with one of the kids?’

‘I was going to find some way of distracting the nanny. Only if that didn’t work was I going to punch her. The trouble is, they haven’t arrived yet, and I don’t even know if this is the gym they go to. I think there’s one in London Bridge. Still, I wonder if Martin only started coming here as a way of sucking up to Nollic.’

Raf looks around. ‘Get up. We’ve got to go.’

‘Are you taking me back to your girlfriend for some sort of paramilitary tribunal?’

Raf wishes she was still, or was ever, his girlfriend. ‘No.’

‘Where, then?’

‘I’m not telling you where we’re going.’

‘Well, thank you very much for the invitation, but in this case I’ll have to send my regrets.’

‘The alternative is either Lacebark kills you or Zaya does.’ Raf looks down. ‘Or Rose, who would really like to.’ Then he sees Fourpetal raise his eyebrows in surprise, and he turns.

Ko is standing there with one hand in the kangaroo pocket of his sweatshirt, and from his posture Raf can guess he must be holding a weapon there, although there’s no way to know what it is. Raf’s hope had been that it wouldn’t matter if one of Zaya’s men was watching Fourpetal, because he would have been ordered not to intervene under any circumstances, both to make sure Fourpetal didn’t know he was there and to avoid getting captured himself when Lacebark arrived to abduct him.

‘Hi, Ko,’ Raf says. ‘Cherish sent me here to pick him up.’

Ko shakes his head. ‘No.’ Maybe he’s already spoken to her.

‘All right – next ploy?’ says Fourpetal behind him.

Raf takes a deep breath. ‘Ko, you know I’m not on this cunt’s side. You saw me set the dog on him just now. And you know I’m not on Lacebark’s side. They killed my friend. But I need to take him away.’

‘Can’t let you,’ says Ko.

‘Zaya is going to let Lacebark take him. And he’ll tell them everything. And all the people he tells them about will die unless Zaya decides to save them. That can’t be right.’ This has a much better chance of working if Ko hasn’t already been taken into Zaya’s confidence, but right now Raf can’t tell much from Ko’s face. ‘Listen, I know Fourpetal deserves to have something fucking awful happen to him. But it should be one of us who handles that. Not Lacebark. And I know you’re loyal to Zaya and Cherish. But all you have to do is tell them you couldn’t stop us from getting away. Ko, please. You told me the reason you got involved in all this was that you didn’t want to see anyone else get killed. That’s how I feel too. Come on. Just let us go.’

Ko is still impossible to read, and Raf reluctantly finds himself running the odds on a physical fight. If Ko only has a blade, not a gun, then Rose might be fast enough to get him on the ground before he even has a chance to use it on her. On the other hand, she might not. And he doesn’t know whether he’s willing to make her take that risk.

But then Ko spits something in Burmese that sounds like a curse, takes his hand out of his pocket, and stands aside.

6.31 p.m.

Raf has been up now for about thirty hours. He’d always hoped that his syndrome might turn out to be not only a bug in his programming but also, in some contexts, a superpower. But if that was ever going to happen, it would have happened since Theo disappeared, and it hasn’t. Yes, there are sometimes hours of the night when he’s more alert than the average person. But that’s nothing a few hundred milligrams of caffeine can’t replicate. There’s no secret time of day to which only Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon has entry, no 3.67 or 25.04 accessible through the back of a prop fridge. All he’s got is his deviant wavelength. If Lacebark’s conspiracy had been operating on a twenty-five-hour schedule, perhaps he would have noticed it before anyone else in London, and that would finally have vindicated his suprachiasmatic nucleus. But Lacebark keep their deviant schedules for their mines and their training facilities. He’s like Monet, who apparently gained the ability to see ultraviolet light after he had cataract surgery, if Monet had lived in a world with no known sources of ultraviolet light. That’s not much of a superpower. So right now all he can say is that he’s not quite as exhausted as he would be if he’d got up at nine in the morning on Friday instead of two in the afternoon.

The handover probably isn’t that different from Martin’s in Pakistan, except that instead of driving outside the city they’ve just assembled in the car park of a discount carpet shop. There are still a few rolls of carpet pressed yearningly against the plate glass at the front, but otherwise it looks derelict, and someone has pasted up a few of those garish purple circus posters that are so common on shopfronts around here (despite Raf never in his life having heard of anyone actually going to the circus in south London, not even when he was a kid, which makes him wonder if they could be a species of ivy that has evolved a shrewd but dated mimetic camouflage). Raf has brought Fourpetal and Rose, and two Serbian hulks in embroidered bomber jackets have come in a van.

‘This is him?’ says one of the hulks. The helix of his left ear is bandaged and Raf can’t work out how you’d get injured there until with a wince he thinks of an earring being ripped out in a scuffle. ‘Deal is, we take him all the way to farm with others?’

‘Yeah. And keep him there. In exchange for the radio station.’ Isaac negotiated this deal on Raf’s instructions, and he wanted to be here to see it happen, but Raf told him it would be an unnecessary risk. Earlier, Raf wondered whether the Serbians were going to take any precautions before rescuing Win. Unlike Zaya, they knew that Lacebark didn’t really need to be made to ‘blink’ for Win to leave the training facility, and it seemed probable that they had a better infrastructure for smuggling people in and out of London than the Burmese did, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to be tricky. Raf got his answer a couple of hours ago when he was sitting in Happy Fried Chicken with Fourpetal, trying to pass the time until this meeting. A twenty-four-hour news channel was playing on TV and during the traffic alerts there was helicopter footage of a warehouse fire near Elephant and Castle that was causing mild traffic congestion on the Old Kent Road. He already knew from Google Maps what the freight depot looked like from the air.

‘So he stay on farm?’

‘Yeah, you don’t let him go,’ says Raf. ‘If you want you can put him to work for his bed and board.’

‘Board?’

‘Food and stuff.’

The hulk nods. His cologne smells like an alcopop. ‘OK.’

‘What the hell is “farm”?’ says Fourpetal. ‘Which farm?’

Raf hands him
Lacunosities
. ‘When you’re not scraping up frozen fox shit you can pass the time with that.’

The other hulk slides open the back door of the van, which looks just like one of Lacebark’s, and Raf catches a glimpse of Win and Jesnik sitting on the floor kissing. They pull apart hurriedly and either the hulk didn’t notice or he pretends he didn’t. In the last few hours all the battery acid seems to have drained out of Fourpetal, and he meekly climbs inside. Raf realises this is his last chance to talk to Win in person. He has to finish the conversation that was interrupted in the training facility. ‘Win.’

‘Yo.’

‘You know we were talking about how
glo
can alter your circadian rhythms? I have this sleep disorder called non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome—’

‘Oh – you want to know if
glo
could do something for you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know, man. Talk to Pfizer.’

One of the hulks slides the door of the van shut. Then both get back in the front and drive away.

Raf decides to look for a pub. As he walks, he thinks about Fourpetal and Win and Jesnik all leaving London for good, and for the first time in what feels like centuries he remembers that he promised himself he’d do the same.

But he doesn’t want to.