It was definitely a model of a shopping centre.
Pushing the plate tiredly away from me I took a sip of my drink. I don't know what it was, but it had alcohol in it, so I decided I'd finish it with another cigarette before pushing on to the next hotel along.
When I looked up I immediately noticed that someone else had entered the restaurant and was sitting about six tables away, gazing benignly at the menu. For a long time I just stared at him, my cigarette burning closer and closer to my fingers.
It was Alkland.
* * *
Let me explain what I mean about the rough beast of unpleasantness I mentioned earlier, the one for ever slouching towards my life to be born.
There is a little god somewhere whose sole function is to make sure that there's a lot of grief in my life. The rough beast doesn't just visit me occasionally: there's a regular fucking bus route. Most of the reason for this is that I end up with the jobs that no one else could handle, but part of it is this little bastard god who sits there keeping a steady eye on the grief meter, giving the lever a jog every now and then. What's happened, I suspect, is that someone on the other side of the universe has made a pact with the guys in charge, selling his soul for a grief-free life. The grief has to get used up somehow otherwise it would just pile somewhere and make the place look untidy, and so they give it all to me.
And what is really weird is that it always comes in equal-sized packets. Some jobs are a bastard from minute one, continue to be a bastard throughout, and finish in a bastard way too. Others, however, start off alarmingly smoothly, full of unlikely coincidences and strange good fortune, and those are the ones that I really hate. Because it means that they're saving all the trouble for later, that all the dangerous, strange and unpleasant grief that I know I have coming to me has coalesced in a pulsating mountain somewhere further along the line, and is sitting there waiting for me to run into it.
My cigarette eventually burnt my fingers and I stubbed it out. There was simply no question that it was Alkland who was sitting not five yards away from me. I didn't have to consult the cube in my pocket to be sure of that. Sitting there, taking his time over the menu, he was like an advert for how lifelike cube images were. He looked a little tired, and his suit was rather crumpled, but otherwise he was exactly as I had expected.
I picked my knife and fork back up and moved the crud on my plate around a bit, covertly glancing across the room. The Actioneer, was, I suspected, a little tenser than he looked, but all in all he was doing quite a good job of it. No one else had entered the restaurant with him: evidently his captors were confident that he wouldn't make a break for it. After all, where could he go?
After a few minutes he looked at his watch with a frown, irritated as only an Actioneer can be at being kept waiting. Then he went back to the menu, doubtless thinking up ways in which it could be improved and made more efficient. I was surprised, actually, at how well-adapted he seemed, how blended in. He almost looked as if he was on holiday, which, for someone who was being forcibly kept from doing billions of things, showed fairly high reserves of resignation. When the art student eventually appeared and wandered within shouting distance of his table, he looked up and smiled vaguely.
'Hello, my dear: how are you this evening?'
'Fine thank you, Mr Alkland, and you?'
'Oh, fine, fine. Relaxing nicely, thank you. So. Is there anything worth eating on this badly-designed menu this evening?'
'No, not really. The chef said he thought the Chicken & la Turk with strawberry yoghurt and braised sunflower seeds probably wouldn't do anyone any actual harm, but he didn't seem too confident.'
I was gobsmacked, I really was. I'd done my very best to be charming to the art student, which was probably more charming than you'd expect, and hadn't got a single word out of her. It just went to show what looking like a harmless professor does for you. I haven't described what I look like, have I? Remind me later and I will: it's not that bad, but it's kind of uncompromising. Every face says something: the deal with mine is that though you might not like what it's saying you have to admire the strength of its convictions.
'What does it look like?' Alkland asked doubtfully. The waitress thought for a moment.
'Strange.'
'I can't say I'm surprised. Well, I suppose I'll have to risk it.'
'Anything to drink, sir?'
'A glass of wine would be rather nice. Any idea how long it'll be? To the nearest day?'
'Well, he's already cooked one thing this evening, so he'll probably be a bit tired, but I'll try and hurry it up for you, sir.'
Thank you, my dear,' Alkland beamed endearingly, handing her his menu and settling back down to gaze benignly round the room.
I flagged her down as she passed, and asked for the check, lighting a cigarette and settling down for a long wait. She was back before I'd finished it, however, with both my check and a salad for Alkland, for God's sake. He hadn't even ordered one and there he was eating something within minutes. Obviously some people have got it and some people haven't.
I paid up and went straight to the lobby, where a uniformed flunky was now standing, trying to look busy. Maybe this was the off season, or perhaps this was the least favoured of Play's hotels. It was certainly a good choice for a gang to hole up in. Passing myself off as 'one of his party' I asked which room Alkland had, and the flunky was glad to help. He told me twice, it was such a novelty to have something to do, and when I asked him where the bar was he practically carried me there.
For the next two hours I sat unobtrusively in the bar, flicking through magazines and keeping an eye out. I'd decided to wait until after shutdown before I did anything, and the bar was conveniently placed for making sure nobody I was interested in left the hotel without my knowing. A few couples were dotted around the bar and a handful passed through on their way somewhere else, but no one who didn't look like they were Stable born and bred. Either the gang were lying low in their rooms, or were out and about in Stable. I considered asking the lobby flunky for a list of registered guests, on the off-chance that I might recognise any of the names, but decided that it would look too suspicious. Just before ten o'clock Alkland passed by the door, heading towards the stairs up to the rooms, but I didn't follow him. I knew where he was going.
By half past ten I was the only person left in the bar. One by one, stifling yawns, everyone else had sloped off. I wondered if the Authorities put something in the water. Rebellion and sedition are night-time ideas, two a.m. thoughts, the stuff of tired eyes and black coffee. I bet all those revolutionaries and activists way back would never have got so grumpy if they'd always been safely tucked up in bed by eleven o'clock.
I was feeling far from tired. I was tense and geared up, ready for action. If there had been a mood detector near me it would have blown up taking three city blocks with it. But I faked a few yawns and looked at my watch a couple of times, in case anyone noticed. At five to eleven, yawning massively, I bid goodnight to the barman dozily wiping the counter down and made for the lobby. The flunky had disappeared and there was no one else in sight. Casting a quick glance around I sidled out the front door.
I saw why Snedd had run into trouble the moment I was outside. No one, but no one, was around. The Stablents could have time-shared their Neighbourhood with a race who only ever wanted to be out on the streets at night, and neither would have known the other existed. I snuck round the side of the hotel and made my way through the undergrowth towards the back, taking care to keep close to the walls. Alkland was in room 301, which was on the back right corner of the building on the third floor. Rather than risk getting shot in two before I got anywhere near him, the plan was to scale the wall and slip into his room that way. If they let him roam the hotel by himself it was unlikely there'd be that many guards in his suite. A narrow alley ran behind the hotel, and I crossed to the far side of it to look up and judge how hard the climb was going to be.
It didn't look too bad. There were plenty of sills and ornamental bits, and with the pads I only really needed them as backup anyway. I walked silently up to the wall and prepared myself for being intrepid. Again.
The pads were the latest InsectoSukz® model. They're not easy to use, because you have to get the knack of turning the suction on and off at the right times, but for all your wall-scaling needs, there's simply no better product.
I'm pretty flash with pads, and within a couple of strenuous minutes I was level with the third floor. Going sideways for a while I negotiated myself until I was up next to the window to suite 301. The window was open, I noticed gloomily: I wasn't even going to have to force it. The longer this kind of luck went on, the worse things were going to get sooner or later.
The curtains were drawn, which was a bit of a bummer. Obviously I hadn't been able to go up to the third floor and waltz around, checking exactly where the rooms were, and it would have been nice to have had some confirmation that this was the right one. I suspected glumly, however, that things were probably still going to be going my way for a while yet.
Bracing my feet on the top sill of the window of room 201, I took off the hand pads and rolled them up. 301's window slid open easily and I hooked one elbow inside while I took the pads off my feet, hoping vaguely that if any Stable policeman was going to take a shot at me at any point it wouldn't be now. They didn't, and I quickly and reasonably lithely levered myself up and into the room.
Looking back, the next five minutes were the last straightforward ones of the whole job, the last time when I still thought it was going to be just a run-of-the-mill, albeit rather intrepid, 'find-this-man-and-rescue-him' kind of job.
I know I still haven't explained what it is I do, exactly, but the problem is, I can't really, not the important stuff. Most of the time it's just a sort of fixer, finder, deal-with-a-small-problem kind of job. There are a lot of people who do that kind of thing. Sometimes, as you may have gathered, I'm prepared to go a little further and take a steal, cover-up, kill-someone kind of job. There's quite a few who'll handle those too.
And sometimes it's something else again, something nobody else can do, and it's that I'm going to find hard to explain to you. It's to do with me, and someone who died a while back. But mainly to do with me.
Still, my point is, nothing much happened in the next five minutes. I stepped silently into the room, and saw that Alkland was sleeping in the bed.
My run of dismally good luck was continuing: there was no one else in the room, not a single guard of any shape or description. A small suitcase lay on the floor in front of the wardrobe, which interested me. Presumably it and its contents had been provided by Alkland's captors. Whoever they were, they were going to some lengths to keep him happy. The suite, if you're interested, was roomy and looked comfortable, and though some of the upholstery was in questionable taste I'd say it represented reasonable value for money.
Once I'd established that there was no one who was going to leap out at me and spoil my composure, I locked the suite door and put the catch down. I unwound a length of the microcable I had with me and tied it round one leg of the bed, putting the dispenser on the windowsill ready for later. Then I pulled a chair up to beside the bed and lit a cigarette.
I've done this sort of thing before, you see, and I can tell you that there are very, very few ways of waking someone up quietly. If you poke them, they make a noise. If you do that nonsense about whispering in their ear while clamping your hand over their mouth it scares the living shit out of them when they wake up, not surprisingly, and some of them make a hell of a racket thrashing about. One guy I tried waking that way made so much noise I had to knock him unconscious, and then wait two and half hours for him to come to. When he did he made even more noise, and in the end I had to knock him out again and carry him away, which was not ideal. The best way I've found, and there's no patent on this so you should feel absolutely free to use it, is to sit by the bed and smoke.
There's a little bit of the brain that stays awake when you're asleep, keeping half an eye open, making sure everything's ticking over nicely and that your feet aren't on fire or anything. After you've been sitting a while a few smoke molecules drift down into the guy's lungs. The brain doesn't notice for a while, and then suddenly it thinks, 'Now hang on: I'm asleep. I'm not smoking. Bloody hell, I'm not even a smoker. Something's going on.'
There's nothing to panic about yet, so it just prods the rest of the brain gently awake, giving it the option to react if it sees the need. The person very quietly and comfortably drifts to fifty per cent awakeness, drowsily checks out the situation, and then goes back to sleep if there's nothing wrong. If there's a strange man dressed entirely in black holding a gun sitting smoking by the bed, however, they wake up very quickly and absolutely silently. Believe me, it works every time.
While I waited I thought. I hadn't really had the time in the last couple of days to apply myself to most of the points on my internal memo. Sure, I'd bought batteries for the Gravbenda®, useless bastard of a thing that it is, but I hadn't sat down and worked out what it was that the Centre alone could supply that would move a gang to the lengths this one had gone to. I had to hand it to them, actually: not only had they snatched Alkland and spirited themselves in here, but now they were here they were playing it pretty cool. Despite the fact that I was now sitting by the bed where my quarry was, I was no closer to understanding what exactly was going on. If I could get us both out and back to the Centre in one piece it didn't really matter of course, but I like to know these things.
After a minute or two Alkland began to stir in his sleep. I put my thoughts on hold and waited for him to drift awake, slipping the gun beneath my jacket so he didn't have too much to deal with at once. Then I realised that he wasn't waking at all, but dreaming, and I leant forward to watch his face. Beneath the lids his eyes were rapidly moving back and forth, and his body began to stir more frequently, his head slowly moving back and forth.