The profits from KSP did as profits do fed more profits, and more, cycling back forever into the system that created them, largely for the sake of yet more profit. When that profit was simply too absurdly large to invest, and after the taxman had been sent away with the sneaky suspicion that he hadnt taken his fill, the rest millions a month was siphoned off into the organisation loosely known as the Tower. Some went on simple personal pleasures the wine, girls and general luxury of a particular lifestyle. Some went to Lee, to fund his bribery and blackmail throughout the lower magicial communities in the city; some was sent to other cities to establish more links for the Tower. And a large part went on what was simply known in the records as Operations.
It took Sinclair eighteen months to get an inventory of the needs of Operations, and the result explained to a large extent why so much was sucked into it each year. The silver teeth of dead prophets, the finger bones of ancient sorcerers, the blood of mythic beasts filtered through a sieve of frozen mercury, the jade-encrusted skull of a deceased necromancer, the still-beating heart of a newborn child whose mothers womb was cursed by the hand of a voodoo witch these things all cost money, particularly in the quantities in which Bakker, Khay, Simmons and Lee were acquiring them. For Lee, a regular supply of corpses and high-quality paper seemed a priority; for Khay, his tattoos were hardly cheap; for Simmons, endless trinkets of magical enchantment were wanted, to compensate for what was by nature a weak magical inclination.
To Bakker went all the rest. I recognised some of the ingredients and could guess at their purpose. There were only so many reasons why tens of thousands of pounds could have been spent on phone lines, modems, servers and intercept technology, only so many excuses to purchase shards of stone dug up from the first Roman ruin found underneath the citys streets; only certain spells that could possibly require blue laser light reflected off a fairys aluminium wing it was easy enough to recognise the ingredients of summonings and enchantments in Bakkers wish-list, and to guess at their purpose. And it was all paid for by KSP, and Harris Simmons.
Did we need to find him?
Perhaps.
What would we do if we found him?
A problem for another time. Best not to think about it now.
I started by making a few phone calls.
Good morning, KSP reception, how may I help you?
Hi, Im calling on behalf of Amiltech Securities, Im hoping I could make an appointment to see Mr Simmons.
Mr
Harris Simmons, yes, sorry, you must have a lot in the business.
Im sorry, sir, but Mr Simmons schedule is entirely full
Im willing to be very, very persistent.
Amiltech, was it?
Yes.
Can I take your name?
Adam Rieley.
Just a moment.
The moment lasted five minutes of what sounded like the nose-pipe rendition of Greensleeves; it felt like five years. When she came back, I was so close to falling off the end of my hotel bed in dismay and irritation that I nearly did just that from surprise.
Mr Rieley?
Still here.
Im very sorry, but Mr Simmons is out of the country right now on business and wont be back for several weeks. If youd like to contact him, I suggest you send an email to his secretary would you like the address?
Any idea where hes gone?
No, Mr Rieley, sorry.
She didnt sound very sorry, but I couldnt really blame her. Thank you very much, maam, youve been most helpful.
Sorry I couldnt be of
Its fine. Thank you. I hung up and went in search of my satchel.
Harris Simmons lived in that elusive part of London to the north of Marylebone station that doesnt quite know what its trying to be, and ends up being a bit of everything old, new, rich, poor, sprawled and compressed all at once, so that the most expensive fish and chip shops in the world can find themselves between a council estate, with its police witness-appeal signs, and a walled-off, high-gated mansion. In the midnight-dimmed shops between the areas quiet mews and its wide thoroughfares, parmesan cheeses the size of chubby babies were displayed, and Italian and Greek flags drooped from windows here and there. From the pubs a polite buzz of thick-carpeted gentility rolled out from half-open doors and warmly lit interiors.
The house I was looking for, directed by Sinclairs immaculate notes, sat behind a high wall fronting onto a broad avenue that rose up from the end of the Westway towards the long bank of hills that encased north London, whose names Gospel Oak, Hampstead Heath, Primrose Hill promised leafy parks, and steep streets furnished with coffee shops.
There was an electric intercom on the gate; I buzzed it and waited. There was no answer. There was nothing so crude as a keyhole, and shards of broken bottles were cemented onto the top of the brick wall. I walked round the block until I found a cul-de-sac that led to the rear wall of the house. Here there was a smaller gate, also with an electronic buzzer, and a CCTV camera peering down at it. When I approached, a single bright light flicked on automatically next to the gate. I dragged the light and warmth out of it and curled them into the palm of my hand, immersing the gateway area in darkness again, except for the trapped glow between my fingers. Once again, I tried the electric buzzer, and got no answer. I ran my finger over the wood of the gateway, feeling the polished sheen on the black paint, until a faint, cool buzz beneath my fingers murmured tantalising hints of electricity not too far away. In place of a keyhole, Simmons had sub stituted an electromagnetic lock. I pressed my hand against the door and pulled gently at the electricity in the lock. It sparked into my fingers with an angry pop, burning a small hole through the wood of the gate; then wriggled its way into the earth at my feet as I chucked it aside. The gate swung open.
Inside the high walls, there was no light; so I let some of the trapped white glow from the outside lamp slip from my fingers. It rolled across heavy flagstones, over shallow curving walls planted out with blooming purple and yellow bulbs; it swept round the trunk, and tangled in the leaves of a weeping willow; and displaced the shadows around a hulking concrete-pretending-to-be-stone griffin which crouched outside the back patio doors, its black eyes staring angrily at the garden gate, its tongue licking the air in front of its-nose. A dry yellow and brown crust had settled over part of it, like skeletal moss, and on either side of it was a low wooden bench looking onto a scorched area of brick that had the dismal semblance of somewhere you held barbecues. I found the whole tableau the well-maintained garden, the bright flowering bulbs, the civilised layout of the place slightly unsettling. It would be all too easy to imagine Simmons, the illustrious middle-class wealthy host, serving sausages to the congregation at the local Anglican church on a Sunday, while a wife (who he didnt have) chatted nicely to the vicar. As a semblance of what normality was meant to be, we found it disturbing. Uninspiring.
I scurried past the frozen griffin as quickly as possible and went to the back patio door. The lights were all out in the house, and a burglar alarm clung to the second-floor wall above the sloping roof of what looked like a dining room, glassed round on three sides with windows onto the garden. Throwing the last of my light ahead of me in a buzzing sphere of white neon, I felt the surface of the back door until I found the keyhole at last, a keyhole! I rummaged in my bag for the set of blank keys Id bought almost on my first day of new life, fumbling through them until one fell into my fingers that looked of the right make. Having put it into the lock, I was pleased at how quickly it assumed the appropriate shape far easier to unlock things using tools, I was reminded, than when it was just you, murmuring gentle placations by yourself. I twisted, and opened the door.
The alarm immediately sounded but not in the angry, distressed manner of a security system faced with an intruder; merely the low warning bell of a timer counting down to an emergency. I hurried down the corridor until I found the controller for the alarm a keypad set into the wall. A numeric keypad was the last thing I really wanted, since the kind of magics that can predict the numbers embedded in a circuit tend to require preparation, consideration and a lot of time in execution, being of a subtler nature than the usual fistfuls of power magicians like to throw around. I found myself wishing I had the kind of equipment that all spies seemed to be assigned in prime-time BBC drama number-breakers, silenced pistols, safe-cracking devices, fingerprint scanners or even a plastic sonic bloody screwdriver. In the event, I fell back on guesswork. Hoping for the best, I rubbed my hands together, feeling the friction build up between them. When the resulting warmth began to buzz, I caught it in the palm of my hand, feeling the hairs stand up all the way along my arm from the static around my fingers, and slammed my palm as hard as I could into the keypad. The static jumped from my fingers into the piece of machinery, which gave a loud electric pop, and fell silent.
A wisp of embarrassed black smoke curled out from under the panel. The alarm stopped wailing. Feeling pleased with myself, I felt my way down the corridor until I found a light switch. Turning it on, I saw that the corridor was bare, apart from the alarm keypad and a small wooden table below it. Not a painting, not a book, not a mouldy tax demand; not a thing. I walked into what I guessed, by the empty brick fireplace, was the living room; and there, too, was nothing. The shelves were bare, the walls bare, and only the faintest indent in the cream-coloured carpet remained to suggest that a scrap of furniture had ever sat on it. The bedroom showed the same rough outline of a bed that had once been present, and the odd faded patch on the wall where a picture had hung; but other than those hints, there was nothing to suggest that the house was anything other than a hollow frame. The cupboards in the kitchen were bare and spotlessly white; the bathroom smelt of bleach. Only when I went upstairs did I find anything the one object left in the house.
It sat on the floor of what had probably been the master bedroom, a spacious, irregularly shaped area with a window onto a west-facing balcony. It was propped up on the floor by its own open shape, by the sturdiness of its expensive, thick paper. On the side facing the door someone had written in familiar handwriting:
For Matthew.
I sat down with it on the floor of an alcove away from the windows, wary of deceit. It read:
My dear Matthew,
If you truly wish to continue with this course of events, I cannot prevent you. But I hope you will at least give me the opportunity to speak with you and talk about why you have returned so full of the determination to be my enemy, when I have never meant anything but the best towards you. If you would be interested, I am attending this event and hope you receive this note in time to join me.
With ever the best regards,
Robert
P.S. Out of concern for his safety, I have removed Mr Simmons from the country and hope you will respect his innocence in anything that may lie between us enough to not endanger him as you did Mr Lee and Mr Khay by your actions.
Between the pages of the note was a small piece of yellow paper. I read it, folded it back up, put it in my pocket and, leaving the note behind, went downstairs.
What did I feel? A mixture of anger and disappointment, certainly; nothing else could explain the tension in my back and the sudden ache in my eyes. Curious, maybe? And perhaps, somewhere at the back of my mind, perhaps just a moment of uncertainty, perhaps if you stopped and thought, perhaps just
Keep moving, that was the rule. Stop and think too long and you might never move again.
Simmonss house had clearly been emptied out by someone who understood that it wasnt enough for
you
to vanish your life had to disappear too. Not just physical absence was needed, but an absence of any property or other evidence that might give your tracker a sense of how you thought, what you thought and where it might have led you. More to the point, someone had taken immense trouble to remove all personal traces that might be turned to a more magical form of pursuit.
On the other hand, not for nothing had I spent nine months as a cleaner for Lambeth Borough Council.
I tried the bathroom. The shower was immaculate, the bath glowed with polished white pristine hygiene. If it was possible for a toilet to smell of lemons, his managed it even the ventilation shaft had been dusted to shining silver perfection.
somethings, however, never change. I squatted underneath the sink and, grunting at the stiffness of the stainless steel bit, unscrewed the bottom of the waste pipe. As I pulled the part free, a splash of turgid, smelly water spilled out. A pool of water lay at the bottom of the pipe-end, but it too smelt of bleach, and the edges were largely free of the thick, muddy dirt you might usually find. I ran a finger round the rubber seal at the top, and came away with a layer of slime. I slid my nail under the seal and pulled it away from the metal of the pipe and, as I did, something so thin it was almost imperceptible moved, catching the light for a moment. I peered closer, the smell of the pipe enough to make my eyes water, and turned the pipe until the thing flashed again with a dull, dark gleam. Pinching it between thumb and forefinger, I lifted it away. It was short, might once have been almost blond, was stained with dirt and withered from the bleach, but was, despite it all, still very much a single human hair.
That was all I needed.
Back at my hotel, I washed the hair under the hot water tap until it glowed a dull browny-yellow; and, with the tweezers from my penknife, I put it carefully by itself in the middle of the soap bowl. I then put the soap bowl down in the middle of the bedroom floor and went in search of the ingredients for the spell that I needed. I pulled the telephone out of the wall and the telephone wire out of the telephone, and wrapped the wire a few times round the soap bowl to create my protective circle. I bought a packet of ten blank CDs from the local general store and took the top one for my mirror, idly spinning it round on my finger as I considered what power might be most useful.
