Dead Air

Iain Banks sprang to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel,
The Wasp Factory,
in 1984. Since then he has gained enormous and popular critical acclaim with further works of both fiction and science fiction, all of which are available in either Abacus or Orbit paperbacks. In 1993 he was acknowledged as one of the Best of Young British Writers. In 1996 his number one bestseller,
The Crow Road
was a dapted for television.
The Times
has acclaimed Iain Banks ‘the most imaginative British novelist of his generation’.

Iain Banks lives in Fife, Scotland.

Praise for
Dead Air

‘Banks’s clever, tense book gives a good idea of where fiction might usefully go with this material. Staying away from the media-described events at Ground Zero, he impressively details the social aftermath in London: paranoia on underground trains and in high buildings, suspicion of foreigners, a delirious new edge to political argument and sexual encounters’

Mark Lawson -
Guardian

‘Banks ranks - along with Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin - as one of Scotland’s most successful writers, and his new novel,
Dead Air
, will do nothing to diminish his reputation. A thrilling read, it’s a dazzlingly clever, edgy, suspenseful book’

Scotland on Sunday

‘A Buchanesque adventure yarn set in 21
^st
-century London’

The Times

‘
Dead Air
is just one of many immediate responses to a shocking event, the kind of exhausting, careering ride of a novel adored by speed junkies. Possibly though, it’s just what we all need’

Independent

‘City life, political integrity and personal trust come under Banks’s coruscating spotlight’

Mirror

‘The trademark dark wit is at its best, and this daring book looks set to become one of the most important novels this year’

Vivid

Praise for
The Business

‘Devilishly inventive and inventively devilish’

Sunday Times

‘For any lover of a good story well told, a new book by Iain Banks is always a treat. Imagination, wit and complexity are his hall-marks and
The Business
is no exception’

Sunday Express

‘Written with enormous energy, crunchy wit and more curves than an alpine road … this is a poisoned bonbon, a bitter fairy tale …
The Business
is the business’

Independent

‘A highly inventive piece of work, amusing and sinister by turns … any chapter of
The Business
picked at random will give an idea of Iain Banks’s merits: the technical pizzazz, the profound compassion, above all an understanding of the way the world works’

Guardian

‘It is impressive to find a British novelist with such evident range … intellectually exhilarating’

Observer

‘Eng. Lit. for the age of www’

Independent on Sunday

Further praise for Iain Banks

‘The most imaginative novelist of his generation … an exceptional talent’

The Times

‘His technical facility with language now matches his instinct for story-telling. And the combination makes him one of the best British novelists’

Guardian

‘Currents of dark wit swirl through Banks’s writing, enriching its buoyancy … and like Graham Greene, he can readily open the reader’s senses to the “foreign-ness” of places’

Scotland on Sunday

‘His satire is exquisitely poised, his story-telling gripping’

Independent

‘A phenomenon!’

William Gibson

by Iain Banks

THE WASP FACTORY
WALKING ON GLASS
THE BRIDGE
ESPEDAIR STREET
CANAL DREAMS
THE CROW ROAD
COMPLICITY
WHIT
A SONG OF STONE
THE BUSINESS
DEAD AIR
THE STEEP APPROACH TO GARBADALE

And as Iain M. Banks
CONSIDER PHLEBAS
THE PLAYER OF GAMES
USE OF WEAPONS
THE STATE OF THE ART
AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND
FEERSUM ENDJINN
EXCESSION
INVERSIONS
LOOK TO WINDWARD
THE ALGEBRAIST
MATTER

Dead Air

IAIN BANKS

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2008

Copyright © 2002 Iain Banks

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any
resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher,
nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7481 0989 0

This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette Livre UK Company

For Roger 
With thanks to Mic and Brad

One

‘ B ’ IS FOR APPLE

‘You’re breaking up.’

‘—orry?’

‘Never mind.’

‘—at?’

‘See you later.’ I folded the phone.

This was three weeks before the stuff with the Clout club and Raine (sorry; the stuff with the Clout club and ‘Raine’) and the taxi and the road under the railway bridge and the window and the nose-biffing incident and basically the whole grisly West-to-East-End night experience when I realised some bastard or bastards unknown seriously wanted to harm me, or even - and this was according to their own threats - kill me.

All of which actually happened not far from here (here where we’re starting; here where we’re picking up our story precisely because it was like the start and the end of something, a time when everyone knew exactly where they were), all of it probably within sight, if not a stone’s throw, of this raised
here
. Maybe; there’s no going back to check because the place where we’re starting’s not there any more.

Whatever; I associate what happened in one place with what happened in the other, with things beginning and finishing and - like the first tile in one of those impressive but irredeemably geeky record-breaking domino-falling displays that people stage in sports halls, where one tiny event leads to a whole toppling, fanning, branching cascade of tiny events, which happen so fast and so together they become one big event - with just stuff generally being
set in train
, being pinged from a rest state into restless, reckless, spreading, escalating motion.

‘Who was that?’ Jo joined me at the parapet.

‘No idea,’ I lied. ‘Didn’t recognise the number.’

She pushed a short glass into my hand. There was ice in the whisky and an apple squatting on top of the glass like a fat red-green backside on a crystal toilet. I looked over my shades at her.

She extracted a strip of celery from her Bloody Mary and clinked my glass with hers. ‘You should eat.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Yeah. Precisely.’

Jo was small with very thick black hair - cut short - and very thin white skin - variously pierced. She had a wide, rock-star’s mouth, which was sort of fitting as she did PR for the Ice House record label. Today she was looking vaguely Drowned World-era Madonna-ish, with black tights, a short tartan skirt and an old leather jacket over an artfully ripped T-shirt. People, not all Americans, had been known to call her cute and feisty, though not normally twice. She had a temper, which was why I automatically lied about the phone call even though I had no reason to. Well, almost no reason.

I hoisted the apple from the glass and took a bite. It looked shiny and great but tasted of nothing much. Jo was probably right that I ought to eat something. Breakfast had been some orange juice and a couple of lines of coke each. I did very little of that stuff these days, but I had this theory that the last time you want to get coked up is late at night when you just make your body stay up way beyond the time it wants to and you therefore stand a good chance of missing the next day; snort during the hours of daylight instead and sort of slide off into alcohol as the evening descends, so maintaining something remotely like the body’s usual rhythms.

As a result we hadn’t eaten much of the wedding brunch at all and probably should force ourselves to eat a little, just to keep things on an even keel. On the other hand the apple was pretty unappetising. I put it down on the chest-high brick parapet. It wobbled and started to roll towards the drop. I caught it and steadied it before it could fall the hundred or so feet to the pitted asphalt of the abandoned car park beneath. Which was not, in fact, totally abandoned; my pal Ed had left his gleaming new yellow Porsche at one end, near the gates. Everybody else had parked in the almost unnaturally quiet and empty street on the other side of the old factory.

Kulwinder and Faye had lived here in the not-yet fashionable bit of London’s East End north of Canary Wharf for a couple of years, always knowing that the place was likely to be demolished at any time. The red-brick building was over a century old. It had originally made stuff with lead; mostly lead soldiers and lead shot (which apparently needed a big tall tower to drop little spits of molten lead down into a big water pool). Hence the height of the place; eight tall floors, mostly full of artists’ studios for the last dozen years or so.

Kulwinder and Faye had leased half the top floor and turned it into a big New York style loft; spare, echoing and vast. It was as white as an art gallery and it didn’t really have many readily identifiable rooms; instead it had what stage people would call spaces. Mainly one big space, full of minimalism, but very expensive and artfully arranged minimalism.

However, some developer had finally got their planning permission and so the place was getting knocked down in a week or two. Kul and Faye had already bought a place in Shoreditch. Buying seemed to encourage the need for further commitment so they’d got married this morning and Jo and I were two of the fifty or so guests invited to the wedding (I couldn’t make it; show to do) and the subsequent feast back at the loft. Not, like I say, that we’d eaten much.

I frowned and dug into my glass to hook out the ice, dropping the glistening blocks on the wide brick parapet.

Jo shrugged. ‘That’s the way it came, hon,’ she said.

I sipped cold whisky and looked out towards the unseen river. The roof terrace faced south and east, producing shadowed views beneath the scattered clouds floating over the towers of Canary Wharf and the unending cluttered flatness of Essex. A cool wind chilled my wet fingers.

I didn’t like it when Jo said ‘hon’. Thought it sounded like an affectation. She said ‘daunce’ sometimes, too, when she meant ‘dance’. She’d grown up in a posh bit of Manchester but she sounded like she was from somewhere between Manhattan and Mayfair.

I looked at the slowly melting ice cubes puddling on the brickwork and wondered if there were similar little things about me that were starting to annoy her.

I flicked the lozenges of ice overboard, down to the cratered asphalt of the car park.