House of Dust (48 page)

Davie appeared by my side, knife in hand. The blade was stained with dark blood. I didn't ask.

“Get those people down!” came a loud command. The harsh tones belonged to the Grendel. “You two!” The voice was directed at us. “Drop your weapons and come over here.”

I caught sight of Katharine as the smoke cleared. She was still attached to the Grendel by some kind of umbilical link. I turned to Davie and nodded at his knife. “Do as he says, big man,” I said quietly. “He's holding all the cards.”

Davie's jaw jutted forward. Then, with a show of extreme reluctance, he tossed his knife to one side.

“That's far enough,” the man in the suit said, a sinister smile spreading over his smooth-skinned face. He opened the flaps of his jacket and I saw a waistcoat that was festooned with small black boxes like the one I'd seen on the gate. “I've got plenty more of these hyper-explosive devices on me, Citizen Dalrymple.” He glanced at Katharine. “And your girlfriend's attached to one of them.” He nodded at me slowly, the smile still there. “So if anything happens to me, the two of us, and anyone else within a radius of about a hundred yards, will go up. Clear?”

“Clear,” I confirmed. I watched as the people – one woman and two men – got down from the memorial. “Pete!” I shouted. “Pete Pym! Over here.” It was only after I'd called him over that I realised I wasn't doing him any favours.

“Yes,” said the Grendel. “Over here, Pete Pym. You others, get as far as you can from this area.” The smile at last disappeared from his face as he looked back at us. “We're about to play the end game.”

Davie and I looked at each other nervously. I tried to catch Katharine's eye, but she was staring at the wire leading from her midriff to the Grendel's waist. I could only hope that she wasn't going to do anything to it.

“Where are we going, Number Three?” I asked, trying to establish some kind of relationship with the assassin by using the number I was sure was his; something about the way he carried himself was familiar.

The Grendel narrowed his outer space eyes at me and ran his tongue along his lips. “Where are we going, Quint? We're going to find the people who designed this place.”

“Let her go,” I said, stepping forward. “Davie and I will come with you.”

“Thanks a lot,” Davie muttered.

Pete Pym was watching the scene in bewilderment, his face and clothes blackened.

The Grendel put a hand on Katharine's shoulder. “Oh no, I want all of you to meet these fuckers.” He laughed harshly. “After all, they're responsible for me too.”

My heart sank. The lunatic had already killed God knows how many people and now he was steaming at full speed towards what he himself had called the end game.

The problem was, I'd always been completely useless at chess.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Grendel led us out of the fire chamber, Katharine keeping close to him to avoid stretching the wire that was attached to the explosive charge. Apart from one apologetic look, she concentrated on her captor rather than me. I didn't blame her.

Pete Pym drew up beside me. “How did you get in here?” he asked in a low voice.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

He shrugged. “I thought I was in the clear. After you left me in the tunnel, I went further in and laid low for an hour.” He nodded at the Grendel's back. “God knows where the freak got to. I didn't see him again till he showed up now.” He grinned loosely. “I'm bloody glad he did though.”

“So the bulldogs caught you?”

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Bastards. They must have managed to override my sub-machine. They were certain I had something to do with the resistance. Tried to get me to spill my guts about it.” Pete Pym raised his hands. “They had fun with my fingernails first.”

I fought to swallow the bile that shot into my mouth. His hands were blackened from the pyre and I hadn't noticed that the ragged fingertips were encrusted with dried blood.

“I didn't tell them anything,” he went on, “so they decided to smoke it out of me. They added a few innocent people they took off the street in Cowley to make me feel worse.” He raised his shoulders again. “I don't know if they'd have put the fire out before we croaked. I wouldn't have talked.”

The Grendel glanced round. “That's enough gabbing, Pym,” he said, fixing unblinking eyes on the local. “I know exactly what you're in here for. If you behave yourself, you might see the light of day again.” He turned to the front again, eyes now on a matt black device he was holding. It was similar to a nostrum but smaller. “Get a move on, all of you. The dogs will be here any second.”

A panel in the heat-proofed wall slid open in front of us and we came out into a narrow passage.

“Where are we going, Number Three?” I asked.

This time the Grendel didn't look round. “Keep quiet. You'll see soon enough, Citizen Dalrymple.”

At least he didn't seem so keen on blowing Davie and me to pieces now. But it puzzled me that he kept using my Edinburgh title. Perhaps he'd been eavesdropping on the conversations I'd had with Raphael and her colleagues.

There was a loud metallic bang ahead. The Grendel went into a half crouch, his limbs tensed like a big cat about to pounce. Then he glanced at the device in his hand and nodded slowly. “Interesting,” he said. “They're leaving us on our own for the time being. That was the sound of a bulldog's steel toecap hitting the wall as he pulled out of the corridor ahead.”

Davie leaned forward. “You can tell from that thing you're holding?”

The Grendel looked round at him and smiled vacantly. “Oh yes, guardsman. I know exactly what the dogs are doing.” He started walking again, in a long, loping stride that forced Katharine to run in order to keep up. “Let's surprise them. Change of plan. There's a place you should see before we confront them.”

Davie and I looked at each other helplessly; given Katharine's situation, there wasn't much we could do except go along with the assassin.

He led us down several passageways, all of them deserted. I could hear Pete Pym panting as he struggled to maintain the rapid pace. I looked up a couple of times but could see no sign of the viewing module we'd abandoned. I was pretty sure we were being tracked by other means though. As we went on, the rank smell that I'd noticed in the entry tunnel grew worse. The sound of heavy-duty extractor fans was also getting louder. I began to get a seriously bad feeling about our destination.

Finally, the Grendel stopped by an access panel and pointed the unit he was carrying at it. A door swung open and he led us in. But before I'd taken a single step, I gagged and put a hand to my face.

“Jesus, what is this place?” I gasped, breathing through my mouth.

The Grendel tossed us thick fibrous masks from a shelf on the inside wall. “This, citizen? This is the heart of darkness.” His lips parted but he didn't smile. “This is the House of Dust itself.”

I clamped a mask over my nose and mouth.

Then walked into the jaws of hell.

The authorities had managed to evacuate everyone who worked in the area. A long, wide chamber stretched ahead of us, the roof low. It looked like it had been tunnelled out of the bedrock. There was no matrix of cables for the viewing module here. On the right a series of glass-fronted rooms stretched away, each of them furnished with an operating table and banks of high-tech gear. In the first one there was a male body with the chest opened up.

I took a quick look. “The organs have been removed,” I said, my voice muffled by the mask.

“Correct,” the Grendel said. “What else do you see?”

Katharine's eyes were bulging above the white fibre. “My God, what have they been doing to those people?” she said in a weak voice, pointing at what looked like a perpendicular medieval torture frame. There was a pair of bodies hung like St Andrew on his cross, the flesh and skin partially removed from the legs. In front of the rack were blood-drenched plastic boxes.

“Don't worry,” the Grendel said gruffly. “They were dead before they got here. The bodies are being rendered. You've no idea how many uses New Oxford can find for human tissue.”

“But these aren't scientific procedures,” Davie said, staring at the scene of carnage.

The assassin glanced at him. “Not all the uses require scientific procedures,” he said suggestively. “Remember the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? One of them was Famine.”

I took a deep breath through my mouth and tried to shut out the obvious conclusion, but the Grendel wouldn't let me.

“Some of the senior employees of the transnationals that fund New Oxford have developed a taste for human flesh, it seems.” He grunted. “Apparently they got bored with haute cuisine.”

My attention was attracted by an insistent mechanical noise at the far end of the cavern, deeper and more grating than the fans.

“What's that noise?” I said, stepping forward. “It sounds like there's a mill down there.”

The Grendel nodded, the skin around his eyes creasing. “Very good, citizen. Let's take a closer look, shall we?”

Davie and Katharine glared at me. It was obvious that we were about to be shown another facet of the underworld. I shrugged at them and tried to keep up with the Grendel. He was moving even faster now, eager to show us the pièce de résistance.

We passed a heap of skeletons and individual bones, some of them clean but others bearing remnants of tendons and other tissue. Despite the mask, the stench was overpowering. I was struggling to hold on to the contents of my stomach. Then the Grendel stopped and pointed up at a great grey, riveted machine that took up the whole of the end wall. There was an automated feeder system leading from the pile of bones to the top of the contraption.

“What is it?” Katharine asked, her voice raised above the noise of rotating metal.

The Grendel pointed to a stream of off-white dust that was being directed from a pipe on the left of the machine into a large plastic sack. “They grind the bones,” he said, his eyes wide and bloodshot. I noticed that one of the irises was duller than the other. “They discovered that the residue is the ultimate in hyper-conductor material when it's combined with silicon.”

I stared at the lettering on the sack. It read “NOX Computing Industries – Grade A+++ Hyper-Conductor Base”. I bowed my head. This was the bestial heart of Brave New Oxford. The administrators presided over a state where they stripped the citizens' flesh and ground their bones – having first done everything they could to crush their spirit.

Then, suddenly, the engine in the bone mill coughed and died with a long-drawn-out moan. The Grendel started nodding slowly; beneath the mask I was sure he was smiling again. But not for long. Soon afterwards there was a loud, sliding crash as a shining steel panel came down across the full width of the chamber a few yards behind us.

We were well and truly trapped, with only the dust of the dead for company. Then I heard a faint hissing noise and watched as a plume of white gas settled over us from a small outlet in the rock ceiling.

I was senseless before my body hit the floor.

I came round in a haze, the acrid reek of vomit in my nostrils. Gradually I managed to focus on my surroundings. Davie was next to me, sitting with his head in his hands, while Pete Pym was still comatose, stretched out with his hands on his chest like a decorous corpse.

“Where are we?” I said, the words running together as I struggled to raise myself. “Davie?”

He turned to me and blinked hard, his face ashen and drawn. “Fuck knows. A holding cell, I'd guess.”

I looked around and saw the vertical bars that ran along one side of the confinement space. There was no furniture, no water supply, no nothing. All I could hear was the dull, continuous swoop of the fan in the ceiling.

“Shit,” I choked, remembering the final scene in the House of Dust. “Where's Katharine?” I glanced behind me. “And where's the Grendel?”

Davie raised his shoulders and shook his head. “Search me.”

I felt a wave of panic dash over me and tried to piece together what had happened. The cloud of gas. Maybe the Grendel hadn't been affected by it. But what about Katharine?

Then Pete Pym groaned and opened his eyes. “Where . . . where am I?” He sat up slowly. “Am I . . . dead or . . . alive?”

“The latter,” came a dry voice from beyond the rails. “But very soon, the former.”

The three of us looked to the front. I saw a figure that made my stomach clench. Jesus, how could I have been so stupid?

“Burton,” I said, moving to the rails then jerking back as I got an electric shock that made every nerve in my body tingle. “Fuck!” I yelled, jumping about and rubbing my hands together. “Elias Burton,” I said when the pain began to fade. “I should have guessed you were more than a drunken old don. Who are you in real life?”