Angelmaker (80 page)

And then, later still, in a quiet moment, in an empty room.

“Hello?” the voice on the other end of the phone says cautiously.

“Hello,” Joe says. “You know who this is?”

“Well, I know who it can’t be. There was a chap I once sent socks to, and you sound like him—but that fellow’s been accused of all manner of frightful things. The government thinks he’s a regular walking Armageddon. Amending the Human Rights Act and passing all sorts of rather iffy laws. I don’t approve, to be honest. I think the law’s the law and it says what it says for a reason. Do you know, they sent a rather indifferent policeman up here to ask me if I knew anything?”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Lord, it
is
you. How extraordinary.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble.”

“No, no. It was rather exciting. I told him you breathed fire and ate raw meat. He seemed to think he knew that already.”

“Oh. Yes.”

“So what on Earth are you doing on my phone? I would have thought you had Sabine women to abduct and suchlike.”

“How’s the golf coming along?”

“God, what a question. Do you know, I think I hate golf? It was never my favourite thing, but somehow now I suspect it will kill me, in the end. That and the membership. I feel I can say this to you because you’ve got larger things to worry about than telling the board of governors I’ve gone off the game. And of course no one in their right mind will believe anything you say.”

“That is quite true.”

“But with the best will in the world, I doubt you really want to know about golf. It doesn’t strike me as your biggest worry, just about now.”

“Well, no. To be honest, I wondered if you’d do something for me.”

“Highly unlikely. You’re a sinner.”

“I quite understand.”

“Not an offer I can’t refuse, or anything? No horse’s head coming my way?”

“I always felt sorry for the horse. It didn’t have anything to do with him, did it?”

“No. But I think I hate horses more than golf. My grandchildren are at that stage. It’s actually more time-consuming than a marriage, having a horse, and suddenly I have four to take care of, because there’s no question of a ten-year-old really looking after a horse by herself.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, this isn’t that sort of offer. It’s the other sort, where you can say ‘no’ if you want to. I’m actually expecting you to, but I have to ask.”

“I suppose I had better hear what you want, just so I can refuse in fullest understanding.”

“Well, I sent you a package.”

“Oh, was that you? Marvellous gallery of fancy and lies, I thought.”

“It’s all true.”

“So you say.”

“Yes. But you read it, is the point.”

“Oh, yes. Mind you, I suppose, given what’s happening with the bees and so on, it’s no more far-fetched than the official line.”

“No.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Well, I’m going to steal a plane, and I wondered if you wanted to fly it.”

“Definitely not.”

“Right.”

“In fact, I’m going to come down there and refuse in person. Where shall I meet you?”

“I’ll have someone pick you up.”

“As long as you understand the answer is absolutely no.”

“I do.”

“I’ll bring my flight suit, just to rub it in.”

“Right.”

“What kind of plane am I refusing to fly here?”

“A Lancaster, I thought.”

“Good choice. If I was mad enough to do anything of the kind for you, I’d appreciate your sense of history. Save the world, eh?”

“I’m a madman. Everyone says so.”

“Hah. Well, I don’t think I could argue with that even if I was going to help you. You better have someone meet my train, I always get frightfully lost in London.”

On the roof of the Pablum Club, Joe Spork lies on his back and stares into the endless sky. The felons and free spirits have gone home, and the plan—call it one plan, though in truth it’s about a thousand plans, all jumbled together in a tangle of criminal behaviour so bewildering as to make even his eyes water—is in motion. Everyone else’s bit, at least. His own remains to be begun, let alone accomplished. The clock is ticking, and he can hear it in his head, imagines the tiny wings of Frankie’s bees on their way home. When the circle closes, he must be ready, or it won’t matter how good his plan was. On the other hand, if it’s not good enough, he’ll never get to where he needs to be. And yet, as he looks up and up and up, he finds that he is not worried about that at all. The things he will do over the next twenty-four hours—attack, fight, live or die—are the right things. The best things he could be doing.

A moment later, he hears a step on the asphalt, and feels the warmth of Polly Cradle lying next to him. Soon they must get up, and travel, and do gangster’s work. But these stolen moments are theirs alone.

E
ighteen hours later, in the cave beneath the hill, the
Ada Lovelace
broods and grumbles. Arc lights burn and shadows jump on the walls. Joe Spork’s shoulders are covered in soot and grime, and his hair is matted. From time to time, he dips his whole head in a vat of water and lets the run-off cool him. It is too hot, too smoky, too choking, too metallic.

It’s perfect.

The Ruskinites—Ted Sholt’s Ruskinites—left clear instructions for waking the
Lovelace
. Joe is following a handwritten guide, step by step, the pages open on a barrelhead. He has opened the drive cavity, cleaned and oiled the gears and replaced them. He can smell the grease on his skin.

He works, and in between times, when something must cool or set, he sits with Frankie’s list, her off-switch, and reads them again and again. His hands twitch and twist in the air. Eyes closed, he can feel the outline of the Apprehension Engine, knows Frankie’s clever clips and catches, the route through the wires and coils from the beehive shell to the heart. He commits it to memory, and makes Polly Cradle test him. For each correct answer, he gets a kiss. For each wrong one, a frown.

On a length of discarded rail Joe pounds red-white metal, folds and flattens, replacing a control lever in the floor of the driver’s cab. There can be no weaknesses, not today.

The technique is called
Mokume-gane
. He laughs, suddenly, loudly, and it echoes through the enclosed space. Of course. If one were to do this with gold and iron, and then immerse the result in nitric acid, the iron would dissolve. A truly subtle metalworker—a genius—might fold the metal in leaf-thin layers, an
origami
so carefully executed that the resulting mesh of gold would flex like cloth, would appear to have been woven.

He takes the washed steel rod and quenches it, then—obedient to the requirements of the instruction manual—fits it and cools it again in place. There is a brief, high sound, like a chime as it settles into the mechanism. He hesitates.

“Try.”

The
Lovelace
growls again, and this time whines as well, and the engine—decoupled, for the moment, from its massive load—shifts slightly on the track.

All night and much of the day he has worked like that, and he is not tired. It is as if twenty years of sleep and certainty have stored themselves up in him for discharge in a time of need. The
Lovelace
is ready.

Polly Cradle catches him around the neck and drags him up into the driver’s cab. On the floor of the engine she makes love to him, skin slick with transferred grime.

“
Aglœc-wif
,” he murmurs afterwards, and she isn’t sure whether he means her or the train. Together, they wait for the beginning: the night of misrule.

It is known, among coppers and criminals alike, that society can be policed only because it consents. When the burden of law or government is too great, or too oppressive, or when economic need or famine breaks the normal course of life, there simply are not—can never be—enough coppers to hold the line. Thus, if a man wishes to commit a crime which by its nature must excite the immediate response of every policeman within twenty miles, his first precaution should be to await a volcano or a popular revolution, so that these diligent officers have other things on their minds.

On the other hand, if criminals were ever sufficiently organised as to commit a hundred major crimes on one night, or better yet, a thousand, the vast majority of them must get away scot-free. In such circumstances, a particular institution not immediately recognised as vital to the survival of the state—not, in fact, Downing Street, or the House of Commons, or the Palace—would have to fight for attention, might even be sorely neglected for some hours, especially if its champions in Whitehall were themselves distracted.

Of course, criminals being by and large self-interested and mistrustful of one another, such an event is generally thought by the forces of law and order to be quite impossible.

The night is very quiet, and very cold. On the Chantry Road in London’s financial heart, the tall, imperial buildings sleep. Even the modern additions, steel and glass statement-constructs seeking to overmatch a heritage of blood, art, and conquest by sheer size, are closed up and cold. Lights burn on the upper floors, traders and analysts letting commerce take precedence over family one more time in a desperate attempt to add to a Christmas bonus they won’t have time to spend. On the street, a fox wanders to and fro, plucking at the bulging dustbins and yowling.

At midnight oh one, with a flash so bright that for a moment it is daytime in the dark, open-plan offices all around, the doors come off the Ravenscroft Savings & Commodities Bank. The explosion is so unnecessarily huge that the great steel shutters on the front of the building are also torn away, flying across the street and destroying a vintage Aston Martin. The fox is flung bodily into a sculpture garden, and makes his displeasure at this imposition widely known. Policemen hasten to the spot. Terrorism or robbery, it hardly matters: the action has a blunt defiance which must be answered.

But when they get there, there’s no one robbing the place. It’s just open.