Wolf in Shadow-eARC (31 page)

The detective hesitated then shook his head.

“Mister Parkes won’t like it,” the thug warned.

Drudge looked like Odysseus faced with sailing between Scylla and Charybdis or a man trying to choose between staying for a visit from his mother-in-law or taking a cycling holiday on the Yorkshire Moors. He took a step forward.

“You intend to arrest a Special Branch Commander on the witness statement of a tin-pot thug?” Jameson asked, softly.

Drudge shook his head.

Karla laughed out loud.

Drudge gazed at her in sheer hatred, trying to intimidate her with the policeman’s glare. Everyone quailed before the policeman’s glare, running a quick mental check through their various offenses. Everyone had at least one black spot on their conscience. Karla held his gaze and gave a sardonic grin. Her conscience was spotless, largely because she didn’t have one. Drudge looked away first. Karla could outstare a Siberian tiger.

“I guess we’re done here,” Jameson said.

He and Karla walked back to the Jag.

“Maybe it was no more than the underworld settling a business dispute in the traditional way?” Jameson asked, rhetorically.

“Perhaps, but dogs aren’t the only animal to leave tracks like that,” replied Karla. “It could have been a wolf.”

“Wolves aren’t that big.”

“Werewolves are.”

Rhian slept late the next morning, but she still rose exhausted. The ground tilted when she levered herself up, so she steadied herself with a hand upon the wall. Her bed was a tangled mess. She remembered little of her dreams, little except for the crunch of teeth on cartilage and bones, and the taste of hot salty blood. She shuddered at the memory, her face drawn and wan in the bathroom mirror. Dark panda-shadows circumnavigated her eyes.

She was a mess. Could she have gone down with ’flu?

Frankie sat clutching a mug of tea when Rhian dropped carefully onto a kitchen chair. Without a word she poured a mug for Rhian and added two sugars, waving away Rhian’s protests that she didn’t use sweeteners.

“I know you don’t, but drink it anyway,” Frankie said. “Magic costs, and you need to replace the energy.”

“I don’t do magic,” Rhian said.

Frankie snorted.

“You might not do magic, but magic certainly does you. Where do you think the wolf gets its power from?”

Rhian took a sip of the sweet, liquid and felt sick. Her head throbbed, so she rested it carefully in both hands, a precaution to prevent it falling off her shoulders.

“The wolf feeds on your life force.” Frankie answered her own question. You used to sleep it off when you changed back. Now you can flip back and forwards, you will feel the full impact.” Her voice softened. “Take these.”

She plonked two aspirin down in front of Rhian, who knocked them back with a gulp of the revolting tea.

“Don’t you have any magic spells for hangover symptoms?” Rhian asked.

“Hmm, not a good idea,” Frankie replied. “I can suppress the symptoms, but that will only delay matters and build up the blood debt. Aspirin is safer. And the wolf was busy last night.”

“What makes you think so?” Rhian asked.

“Well, apart from your condition, I saw you on television.”

“What?” Rhian snapped her head up. She immediately regretted giving way to the impulse. The top of her skull kept going when her head stopped. It snapped back with a lurch that gave her double vision.

“Come and see,” Frankie said. “You’re on Sat News. No, I’ll carry your tea for you. I don’t want it all over the carpet.”

Frankie switched on the TV in the lounge and they sat down to watch the rolling news. There were a couple of items on the latest economic disasters and an interview with a politician trying to explain why her husband had charged the hire of pornographic movies to her Parliamentary expenses. Then Rhian was on, or rather the wolf was on.

“Slaughter on the London streets,” claimed the anchor woman with the usual accuracy of the press. “Gang warfare turns our city into a battlefield,” her male co-author added. Why did they have to do a bloody irritating double act? Why did it take two presenters to read the autocue and why was there always one of each sex? And why was she wasting her time on
why
questions?

The channel moved into film footage taken from the air showing figures moving indistinctly through the shadows of the scrap yard, scurrying quickly across the lighted zones. Flashes marked out gunshots, the sequence ending with a burst of automatic fire straight into the camera.

“Our brave reporters were repeatedly fired on,” said the anorexic and over made-up presenter, silicone-enhanced bosom heaving with excitement.

The next video sequence showed a truck burning in the distance. Then they ran it all again in slow motion with little circles picking out men who were running, firing, and falling.

“Astonishingly, a large fighting dog was involved,” said the male presenter.

A new set of blown-up fuzzy sequences showed the wolf jumping into the back of an open truck and attacking three men. Gun muzzles flashed, but all three men went down. They repeated the sequence in slow motion at least twice.

Rhian ran for the bathroom and talked to Hugh on the big white telephone. She only had the tea to throw up so was soon dry-heaving. She washed her face before carefully removing the blade from her lady-shave. Slowly and deliberately she sliced the blade across her arm, welcoming the pain of punishment.

“Where’s Karla?” Randolph asked.

“I left her in the underground car park,” Jameson replied.

“I suppose she is terrorizing the security staff,” Randolph said.

“She’s asleep in the car,” Jameson said, somewhat defensively.

Actually, Karla never slept, but she did need to shut down every now and then. Jameson thought that this was when she sifted and catalogued the memories in her head, like defragging a computer drive. Just how much information could she store before the disk was full and memories had to be deleted?

Randolph’s office was a model of Spartan efficiency, neat shelves of hard copy in cardboard sleeves and a line of civil service light-grey filing cabinets. One glass wall looked out over the Thames, Jameson could see a twin jet Airbus in the red-and-blue livery of British Airways climb steeply out of London’s City Airport. The runways were sandwiched between the Royal Albert and King George V docks, so the airport was almost an island.

The small airliner passed over the tower which housed the Commission. The building’s sound proofing was so good that the jet seemed to fly silently, like an airship. It would refuel at Shannon in Ireland and then head out to Kennedy Airport in New York, an air bridge that spanned the ocean between the financial districts of the North Atlantic’s twin cities. The planes used the old Concorde flight numbers. They consisted entirely of business-class seats so the “masters of the universe” were not exposed to the
hoi polloi.

Jameson jerked his attention back, aware that Randolph was speaking.

“What?”

“It amazes me how you’ve lasted this long, Jameson. You have the attention span of a crested newt.”

“Sorry,” Jameson said.

“But then, I must admit you have a good minder,” Randolph said. “I asked you about the Martin Street Massacre, as I believe the drunken halfwits in the press have dubbed last night’s incident.”

“It seems to have been just an outbreak of gang warfare,” Jameson said. “Although there was one singular observation.”

“Oh, yes?” Randolph lifted his head.

“A large dog was involved.

“A guard dog,” Randolph waved a hand dismissively.

“Apparently not.”

“One of the attackers had a pet pit bull?”

“Possibly,” Jameson replied.

“We have enough problems without creating phantoms to chase.”

Randolph was right, of course, but something about the incident bothered Jameson. He had some half-recollection of an old case, but Randolph was talking again.

“So tell me about this Shternberg fellow?” Randolph said.

Jameson marshalled his thoughts. “Rich city fat cat, ruthless, intelligent, unemotional, narcissistic with a massive sense of self worth—he is probably a functioning psychopath.”

“I see. He sounds like a fairly typical financier. Do you think he would be capable of killing?”

“I think he could be capable of anything, if he thought it in his interest and that he could get away with it,” Jameson replied. “And I suspect his overweening sense of superiority leads him to conclude that he could get away with quite a lot.”

“Right,” Randolph scribbled some notes on a pad with a pencil-thin silver fountain pen. “I suppose he is human?”

“Yes, Karla was certain, and he had no smell of magic about him.”

“So he didn’t personally summon a daemon,” Randolph said. “It wouldn’t astonish me if Shternberg knew where to hire a hit man, but how the hell would he know how to find a sorcerer capable of opening gates on the scale we’ve measured?”

“It would help if we knew more about his background,” Jameson said. “Our enemies in MI5 must have a file on him.”

Randolph gave a hollow laugh. “They would hardly tell us. The only people MI5 have ever voluntarily shared information with are their friends in the KGB.”

He tapped the silver pen on his teeth, and Jameson looked out of the window. A turbo-prop short-haul airliner descended steeply down to the runway. Landing gear extended, it looked like a stooping hawk.

“He’s the only lead, so we’ll prod him a little and see if we get a reaction,” Randolph said. “We’ll start by triggering a revenue investigation into his affairs. Nothing puts the wind up a corporate like the tax man.”

“I doubt you’ll find anything. He strikes me as too fly to commit tax evasion.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but the investigation will tie him in knots.”

“Maybe, and if it doesn’t?” Jameson asked.

“Then we apply direct pressure.”

“If he’s sorcerous connections, the reaction could be unpleasant,” Jameson said.

Randolph smiled like Sweeney Todd, the daemon barber of Fleet Street. “Nothing you and Karla can’t handle, I’m sure.”

CHAPTER 16
DR. FAUSTUS AND
OTHER PROBLEMS

Jameson was seriously pissed off, well and truly miffed. He accepted that a pension for a Commission field operative was largely a theoretical concept because he wouldn’t live to collect, but he never expected to die of boredom. He also hated getting up in the early morning. In fact, the list of things he hated about the current operation would fill a Kindle. He fidgeted in his car seat, playing with the radio. The popular classic station was playing Wagner, for the fifteenth time that week. Radio 3, the BBC serious music channel, was broadcasting an experimental symphony for massed lawn mowers and typewriter. BBC Radio 2 fielded a chat-show presenter reminiscing about his upbringing in rural Ireland. You had to be seven or have had a frontal lobotomy to like BBC Radio 1.

Reluctantly, he put on Radio 4’s morning heavyweight news analysis. The formidable BBC journalist, Jeremy Paxman, was skewering a politician to the proverbial wall. Jameson wondered why they all bothered. The politician was lying, he knew he was lying, and he knew that the listeners all knew he was lying. What was the point? Even Paxman sounded bored.

“You know what gets me about corporates?” Jameson asked. “It’s their weird need for money-based status symbols that make their lives difficult. Take Shternberg here. He locates his business in the Docklands financial center, the most expensive office space in London, East London. Then he insists on living in a country mansion in the fashionable green belt west of London, so he has a horrendous commute. The only sensible way to get into the city is by train, like the lumpen proletariat. So does he do that? No! He takes a car from his estate north to a light airfield, where he boards a helicopter. Helicopters aren’t allowed into City Airport, so he has to land in a disused power station coal yard in West London, on the wrong side of the river. He then grinds by car through the traffic jams all the way to Docklands. I mean, where’s the sense in that? It takes four times as long as the train and is a lot less comfortable. The only advantage of the helicopter is that it wastes an obscene amount of money.”

He paused for breath before continuing.

“Surely, there are less inconvenient ways of showing off your wealth. Julius Caesar built a luxury villa at huge expense then pulled it down at first viewing on the grounds that he didn’t like the color scheme of the master bedroom. Now that’s conspicuous consumption. All it cost him was one day. And a shedload of cash, but he’d borrowed the cash. Karla, Karla?”

Jameson was ranting to himself. Karla had put her seat back and switched off. Jameson looked at her enviously. She had many qualities; even when switched off she could vitalize in a microsecond if her keen senses detected potential danger. But she didn’t do routine surveillance, so he had to. He could not even lose himself in literature.

He had promised himself the pleasure of a reread of
Marlowe’s Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus
. In it Marlowe addressed the Calvinist world picture of absolute predestination. The idea was that God marked out the damned from birth and there was nothing they could do to alter their fate. Free will in this philosophy was a delusion. This was an important theme when Marlowe was up at Cambridge in the 1500s.

Jameson wished he had paid more attention to his tutors when he was there. Sin, damnation, and death were vague concepts to a young man more interested in girls and sport. They meant rather more to him now.

Faustus was thrice damned, first by God, then by Satan, and finally by his own choices.

“
If we say that we have no sin,

We deceive ourselves, and there’s no truth in us.

Why then belike we must sin,

And so consequently die.

Ay, we must die an everlasting death
.”

Faustus’ sin was greed, the academic’s sin of greed for knowledge beyond mortal reach. It ended with a pact with the devil. Jameson had it on good authority, the Library, that Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus was a thinly disguised parody of Dr. Dee.