‘Exactly,’ Gwillam confirmed. ‘The remnants of Anton Fanke’s organisation, now completely eradicated. Whatever Asmodeus is doing, he’s been thrown back on his own resources. We have a window, and if we use it wisely - if we cooperate and pool our intelligence - we can bring him down.’
I shook my head firmly. ‘No,’ I said, ‘we can’t. Because that - bringing him down, I mean - is exactly where we part company. You want him dead; I just want him caught.’
‘I want the demon dead,’ Gwillam corrected me.
‘And you don’t care who else gets left in the dirt - or under it - along the way. I’ve seen you work, Gwillam. I chose Jenna-Jane Mulbridge as a partner over you - that ought to tell you a lot.’
‘Suppose I swore - on the book that I love - not to kill Ditko unless it’s absolutely unavoidable?’
‘You’re excommunicated. You’ve got nothing to lose now, have you?’
The train pulled into the next station, and Gwillam stood. The young woman turned her head to stare at him, but he moved his hand in an almost imperceptible horizontal gesture:
No
.
You can call me,’ he said. ‘A message left at the house in St Albans - where you tracked me down last time - will still reach me. Don’t let false pride lead you astray, Castor. You’re right that my word on this thing, even my sworn word, is worth nothing. I’ll break any promise and betray any trust, to cauterise this evil. But if your methods were a little more like mine, fewer people would have died. Consider. And when you reach the end of your own pathetic Calvary, let me know. My offer will still be open.’
He stepped down, followed by his two asymmetrical minders. Four stops to go before Paddington. I used the intervening time to get my head together and to try to shake off the lingering atmosphere of that fucking dream.
The estimable Mr Dicks was on duty at the front desk again, and his flatulent grunt as he pressed the gate release said louder than words that seeing me had made his day. I walked on by, whistling a slightly out-of-tune ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’.
The place was dark and all but deserted. Another guard was checking windows in a desultory way, but I didn’t see anybody else around until I got up onto the second floor and noticed the faint glow coming from between the slatted blinds of Jenna-Jane’s office. I went by on tippy-toe, very keen not to alert her to my presence.
The map room was in darkness, but when I turned on the light I found that Trudie was there all the same. She’d been sitting in the dark, up to her knees in shredded paper. That at least explained where the map had gone, although not why.
She looked up and gave me a hollow-eyed stare. She looked as though she’d been crying, but she wasn’t crying now. Her fists were clenched, but the cat’s cradles normally wound round her knuckles trailed across the floor now like Pierrot’s sleeves, giving her a tragic air.
‘You okay?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really.’ Her tone was hard, but brittle too - a catch at the back of it warning me to tread carefully.
‘I was going to ask you how it went,’ I said, indicating the torn fragments of map, ‘but I guess I’ve got my answer.’
‘He’s not back yet. Not in London, anyway. No new lines. Nothing to go on. Waste of time.’
I waited. If she wanted to tell me what had happened, she’d tell me. If she didn’t, asking about it might bring on a crisis we probably didn’t have time for. For something to do, I started to clear up some of the mess. Where the black lines had been too thickly overlaid on each other, becoming a single indecipherable mass, Trudie had at some point resorted to a silver Sharpie marker. The silver lines, their lustre deadened by the thick black tracery underneath, looked like day-old snail slime.
‘I took your advice,’ Trudie said in that same dangerous tone.
Down on one knee, my fists full of scraps like the guy who lays the trail on a paperchase, I looked up at her. Her red-rimmed eyes blinked once, twice, three times.
‘What advice was that?’
‘You said I should look in the basement here. If I wanted to know who I was working for.’
Okay. That explained a lot.
‘Those cell blocks are a logical extrapolation from a certain position,’ I said carefully. ‘I just wanted you to think about the implications of—’
‘I know what you
wanted
, Castor,’ Trudie growled. ‘I told you I’ve been down there. Tonight. About an hour ago. I’d have to be pretty fucking dense not to get it, wouldn’t I?’
A pause.
‘Look. Look at this,’ Trudie said. She held out her hand, which was shaking visibly. ‘An hour. It just won’t stop.’ She took a deep breath and stood. Her hand fell to her side again, the fingers flexing and clenching. ‘Principled resignations,’ she said, shaking her head sombrely. ‘They look really bad on your CV, don’t they? Nobody likes a quitter. Especially a holier-than-thou quitter.’
I took a step towards her, but the hand came up again like a shot, warding me off. She didn’t want any consolation that I could offer, even though it looked as though the tears were starting again.
‘You’re still wrong,’ she said, ‘and Mulbridge is still right. That’s the horror of it, Castor - that we have to turn ourselves into what she is if we want to survive. Hell is coming to Earth, one piece at a time. Not the sky falling, but the ground opening up under our feet. There’s nowhere that’s safe to stand any more. If I walk out on this, it will just be because I’m a coward, like you.’
I didn’t argue. It wasn’t just her hands that were shaking, it was her whole body. She looked down at the trailing strings that dangled from her wrists, made a half-hearted gesture towards rewinding them, but then gave it up after the first two or three turns.
‘Will you?’ I asked her. ‘Walk out?’
Trudie shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘Not yet. Not until we’ve found Asmodeus and got him locked away again. After that . . . I’ll see how I feel.’
‘Then can I ask for your help with one other thing?’ I asked, keeping my tone studiously neutral.
‘What’s that?’
‘The Super-Self entity. Gil is scheduled to start his demolition run at midnight. I want to get in there first and see if I can take it down myself.’
Trudie stared at me, mystification rousing her for the first time from her own tortured thoughts. ‘Take it down?’ she repeated. ‘Last time it chewed us up and spat us out. Why should tonight be any different?’
‘Because tonight I’ve got a secret weapon,’ I said. ‘Inspired by you, actually. I liked what you did with the map - the way you pushed yourself out past your comfort zone and did the necessary. I think maybe I can do the same thing here. But I want an anchor in case things go Pete Tong on me. The two of us working together damped that thing down just enough so that we could walk out of Super-Self on our own four feet. That’s what I want you to do tonight: be my back-up, and give me some room to manoeuvre if it drops on me before I make my play.’
Trudie hesitated for a second, then shrugged. ‘Okay. Why not?’
‘Thanks. Is there anything else you need to do here?’
She surveyed the devastation she’d wrought and shook her head again. ‘No. I think I’m done.’
We were both pretty near stony, as it turned out - I should have kept one of those fifties back for emergencies - so my first idea of grabbing a cab down to the Strand foundered on an absence of hard cash. We used our travel-cards from earlier in the day instead, taking the Circle back round to King’s Cross and then changing to the Piccadilly Line. But Holborn was closed because of a suspect package, so we were booted off at Russell Square and had to walk the rest of the way.
That didn’t feel like much of a hardship. The day had been another scorcher, and even this late in the evening, with the rush-hour crowds long gone, the train had smelled like one titanic armpit. It was a relief to walk in the cooling air, and to feel the city poised on that luminous knife-edge where day becomes night. There was still light in the sky, but the buildings were black masses on either side of us, the occasional still-open shop looking like a cave in a cliff face.
Another dark mass rose ahead of us, and it took me a moment to realise what it was. When I did, I stopped dead and stared at it in blank-faced wonder.
Trudie looked at me curiously, then followed my gaze. The same penny dropped a moment later.
‘Mary, mother of us!’ she whispered.
London hasn’t had a tram system since before the Second World War, but some of the infrastructure is still kicking around. You can see stretches of track in a hundred places where old street surfaces haven’t been asphalted over, or have been restored, and in my west London stamping ground the Acton tram depot, which looks like a Victorian siding shed with white-brick walls and a massive fan-vaulted ceiling, was still used for buses right up until last year.
What we were looking at was the north end of the Kingsway underpass - an underground tramway closed down in the 1940s. Later on, the council converted part of it into a tunnel for cars and buses coming from Aldwych by the simple expedient of building a new steel-and-cement corridor within the tiled and brick-built passage that already existed. The rest had been closed off and left to rot.
‘How did we miss it?’ Trudie demanded, amazed.
I was asking myself the same question. The answer - beyond ‘We’re thick as bricks and we can’t find our own arses without a map’ - was that the tunnel had no opening between Holborn and the river. This end was on Southampton Row, a couple of hundred yards up from Holborn station, and the other end was somewhere on the Embankment west of Waterloo Bridge. Both ends were closed off now, and apart from this short stretch of black stone parapet wall there was nothing to show on the surface that the tunnel was there.
We looked at each other, probably thinking in tandem. If this was where Asmodeus was hiding, then going inside with the light failing and no torch was probably insane. On the other hand, with the demon still out of town, this might be the best chance we were ever going to get.
‘Do you feel anything?’ I asked Trudie.
She raised her hands in front of her face, fingers flicking back and forth, weaving complex traceries out of her looped strings. ‘Nothing,’ she said tersely. ‘How about you?’
‘Nothing,’ I admitted. ‘You think we should call J-J?’
‘I think we should go in,’ Trudie said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘We don’t know when Asmodeus will be back. If we wait for the MOU people to get here, he might arrive first and get a whiff of us somehow. The best thing would be to find out exactly where he’s been hiding, then back off. When he goes in, we seal the exits and pump OPG or Tabun in - incapacitate him at a distance.’
It sounded good to me. I looked at my watch. Almost eleven. If the timing worked out, we could even kill two birds with one stone. When we called Gil in to lay an ambush for Asmodeus, he’d have to call off the Super-Self raid. Then I could come back tomorrow and try out my secret weapon in daylight, with the wind at my back.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said.
15
The tramway tunnel slopes down from the regular road surface at an angle of about twenty degrees. For the first fifty yards or so, it’s not a tunnel at all because it’s open to the sky; it’s just a cobblestoned ramp, bordered on either side by black stone walls, with wrought-iron gates closing it off from the street.
We didn’t bother checking to see whether the gates were locked. The walls were low enough to climb, and Trudie was way ahead of me, already vaulting up one-handed onto the parapet and then dropping silently on the further side. A couple of passers-by gave us a curious look as I clambered after her, but they didn’t challenge us and I thought it was unlikely they’d dial 999. More likely than not, they’d think we were looking for a private spot to do some dogging.
Trudie walked on down the ramp, but stopped when she came to the tunnel opening. The gates here looked a lot more solid, and since they reached to within an inch or so of the tunnel roof, they couldn’t be climbed.
Trudie rattled them experimentally, then turned to me as I came up beside her. ‘Did you bring your lock picks?’ she asked.
I shook my head. Picking locks was a hobby of mine, dating back to a doomed attempt in my early twenties to make my name as a stage magician. I always appreciated a chance to keep my hand in, but I tended not to carry my burglary kit with me unless I knew I was going to use it. I’d had too many painful brushes with the long arm and short temper of the law to court any more of them when I didn’t have to.
It was impossible to see anything beyond the gates. We were entirely below the level of the street now, and almost no light filtered this far down. Perhaps that was why it took me a few seconds to see what was staring me in the face. The big padlock on the lower gates had been twisted with immense force, until the hasp had snapped off clean at one end, and then hung loosely in place again on the chain so that it looked as though the gates were still secured.
I slipped it off and let it fall to the ground, then took the chain and pulled it through the gates’ central uprights. I pushed the gate open, wincing a little at the loud squealing of the hinges even though I knew there was nobody inside. I bowed and threw out my free hand, inviting Trudie to go through first.
‘We’re not going to be able to see much,’ she pointed out as she crossed the threshold.
‘That depends,’ I muttered. I slipped through the gates behind her and pulled them to. ‘They connected all the lights back up for an art installation a few years back - something to do with the twentieth anniversary of 1984. Pen covered it for the Art Attacks webzine. If we’re lucky, there’ll be a switch somewhere.’
There wasn’t, or at least not at first. We advanced into the gloom, skirting huge grey bags full of builders’ rubble and canted stacks of MEN AT WORK signs. Dead leaves from seasons past didn’t so much crunch as sigh under our feet, crumbling instantly into dust like vampires caught out at dawn. There was no obvious sign that anyone had been here recently before us, but I put my trust in the broken padlock and kept on going.