London Noir (23 page)

“What happened?”

“Electrocuted.”

“You can tell just by looking?”

The closets and drawers are filled with the worn smell of clothes long unworn. There’s dried shaving cream on the bathroom mirror.

“It stinks in here,” she’ll say, a flat statement delivered in a flat tone. “Should I open a window?”

It can be a small event: like a window opening in a nearby apartment block or blood sluicing onto the dock from a rusty outlet in a harbor wall.

“No, leave it.”

She’ll pick up a plastic entry pass from off the floor, its chain swinging gently from her long slim fingers. She’ll point at the photograph on it.

“Looks like John Frederson’s got a new face and name,” you’ll say, staring closely at the man in the picture.

She’ll turn the entry pass over, examining it carefully on both sides. “This will get you into his private suite of offices at One Canada Square,” she’ll say. “I can take you there, if you want.”

Outside the contact’s hotel you’ll be approached by a young Thai kid wearing a T-shirt with
Listen to Dr. Hook
printed on it. He’s selling DVDs out of a black Samsonite case.
Homo Abduction: Series Red
,
Teenage Revolutionary Martyrs
.
Handcuff Party
.
Necktie Strangler Meets the Teenage Crushers
.
Baby Cream Pimp IV
.

No one’s around: just the late afternoon glare.

“Anything I can’t get anywhere else?” you’ll ask.

The kid opens a back compartment in the case. These DVDs show people doing things that seem meaningless to you.

“Interested?” the kid will ask hopefully.

But you will just walk away.

3.

The tower at One Canada Square is not open to the general public. It has 3,960 windows and 4,388 steps, divided into four fire stairways linking all fifty floors. It is 800 feet high. Seen through glass, the sun leaves long white streaks across the sky.

You wander through crowds of people in the underground mall directly beneath Canary Wharf, checking entrances and exits, noting the location of cameras, sensors, and security points. Cities have scenes of their own destruction programmed into them. The world is in hock to itself.

You hear voices all around you, children playing, the rattling of cups on saucers, heels on tiled walkways. You notice frosted glass tables outside cafés, bars, and restaurants. Curved metal and plastic chairs. Music playing. Laughter. Everyone has a sleepy tranquilized look. As if they’ve been caught too far from daylight. The only things that seem familiar to you down here are the names on the brightly lit storefronts:
Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, The Gap, Mont Blanc.

People have become slaves to probability. You’ll assume you’ve been on CCTV since you first arrived. A woman takes your photograph with her cell phone. She will have blond highlights in her feather-cut hair and wear a gold plastic leather jacket, bleach-washed blue jeans, and black Cuban heel boots. You will have come to expect this kind of thing by now.

Chemical tests indicate that Prozac is now seeping into the main water supply.

The woman leans forward unobtrusively to get another shot, revealing a portion of flesh so suntanned that it looks almost gray when exposed to the strip lighting in the mall’s main concourse.

You’ll also notice that she has a tattoo at the base of her spine. They all have tattoos at the base of their spine. Or on their ankles. It’s a form of protection.

“Against what?” you’ll ask.

At one minute past 7 on the evening of Friday, February 9, 1996, a bomb concealed inside a flatbed truck wrecked an office complex at Canary Warf, killing two and injuring over a hundred. The device was detonated in an underground garage near Canada Square. It tore the front off the building next door, damaging the roof and shattering the glass atrium. Windows were sucked out of buildings a quarter-mile away. Bystanders were thrown to the floor and showered with flying glass. Things just kept on falling.

You search up and down the concourse again, checking the benches, the artificial displays of greenery, the rest areas and waste bins. You look at faces, gestures: arrangements of groups and individuals. Families are a bland nightmare when seen out in public: a series of aimless and incessant demands. The entire underground mall is designed to keep them moving. They look well fed and cared for and pink from the sun. As if they are all brand new.

You will think you can stay and rest for a moment, but you can’t. You remain on the outside of everything that’s happening down here, watching and waiting. But that’s never really been a problem for you, has it?

You see people with laptops, people with wires trailing from their ears.

You wonder where she’s got to: what can be keeping her.

Suddenly she’s there again. Walking toward you from across the mall. You recognize the long black hair, the swing of her hips, the clicking of her high heels on the tile floor. At first she doesn’t appear to be with anyone, but you quickly realize that she is not alone. Two security guards in dark suits will be following at a discreet distance. They’re almost invisible, but they never move too far from her side.

A third subtitle flickers before your eyes:
It would not be logical
to prevent superior beings from attacking the other parts of the
galaxies.

The tower at One Canada Square consists of nearly 16,000 pieces of steel that provide both the structural frame and the exterior cladding. It is designed to sway thirteen inches in the strongest winds, which are estimated to occur once every hundred years.

She will now be standing before you, the security guards taking up position on either side of her.

“Search him,” she’ll say. “He’s got a gun.” She’ll smile as they pat you down. “I told you I didn’t like them,” she’ll say.

You call her a name. She won’t like that either.

The guards step in a little closer. “Another word out of you and we’ll slice your heart in half.”

They find the gun. You’ll let them take it away from you.

“You’re coming with us,” one of them will say.

Crowds of shoppers move past you in a dream.

“Or what?”

“Or a bullet’s going right through your head, so which will it be?”

They won’t try anything here: you’re fairly certain of that. All the same, you will go along with them.

Fujitsu high-definition screens read out Bloomberg averages on the ground floor at One Canada Square. A market analyst sits back and talks on camera against a weightless array of numbers. “The shares as you can see here are just digesting reactions to that conference call, although their profits next year, he said, are set to grow by as much as fifteen …”

The lobby contains over 90,000 square feet of Italian and Guatemalan marble. It’s the color of spilled blood and gray veins.

Percentages flash by on-screen:
Omni Consumer Products,
LuthorCorp, Heartland Play Systems, Wayland Yutani
. Nothing arouses pity and terror in us like an unsuccessful franchise. It’s the same as watching the commercials in the middle of a murder documentary on television: showing you things that the dead can never see and will never know about.

You keep walking, trying to look casual, feeling the gun that’s been pushed into the small of your back ever since you were first escorted up the stairs and into the lobby.

The tower at One Canada Square has thirty-two elevators divided into four banks, each serving a different section of the building. They form a central column just beyond the main reception area. A heavy security cordon is in operation around them at all times. Access to any of the upper floors is impossible without a valid entry pass.

You’re in a world made up of names and numbers now. Reception, thirty-first floor: Bank of New York, Tyrell Corporation; reception, forty-ninth floor: Cyberdyne Systems Corporation, Computech, Stevenson Biochemical, Instantron.

A nearby sign reads:
For your safety and security, twenty-four-
hour CCTV surveillance is in operation.

Outside the wide lobby windows, a deep red sunset shines through empty buildings and sheets of mirror glass, high-rise floors glowing scarlet in the far distance.

You will go where they take you in the sure and certain knowledge that you aren’t the first and you certainly won’t be the last. There will be a brief shadowy movement behind you just before the elevator doors open. Then the gun will come down hard on the back of your neck, catching you unawares.

“Okay, you’re done,” you’ll hear one of the guards remark as you fall heavily toward the elevator floor. “Thanks for asking.”

4.

Except, of course, you never get there.

You’re already spinning round before the elevator doors have even closed properly. By the twenty-third floor, both security guards are down.

By the thirtieth floor, you will have stamped on one guard’s head until his nose, mouth, and ears are bleeding.

By the fortieth floor, you will have your own gun back and the other guard will be kneeling before you, begging for his life.

He will tell you he’s afraid. That he doesn’t want this. You shoot him once. Right through the left eye.

It’s only then that you will notice there’s Muzak playing in the elevator.

“Was that absolutely necessary?” she will ask, looking down at the bodies on the elevator floor and frowning. “The only reason I agreed to help you get up here in the first place was to avoid anything like this.”

“Made me feel better,” you’ll reply with a shrug.

* * *

The building’s floors have a compact-steel core surrounded by an outer perimeter constructed from closely spaced columns. It is capped by a pyramid 130 feet high and weighing eleven tons.

The exterior is clad in approximately 370,000 square feet of Patten Hyclad Cambric finish stainless steel.

She will throw her arms around you just as the elevator reaches the fiftieth floor. You embrace. Your hungry mouths will find each other.

An aircraft warning light at the apex of the pyramid flashes forty times a minute, 57,600 times a day.

“Coming with me?” you’ll ask.

“No.”

“Don’t you want to see this through, now that we’re both here?”

“I got you to his office,” she’ll reply. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I want.”

You exchange one last look. One last kiss.

“The pass we found in the hotel will get you through to his office,” she’ll say. “But you’d better get rid of the gun. It’ll trip the metal detectors.”

“Fine,” you’ll say. “I don’t need it anymore.”

You toss the gun into a nearby waste bin.

“You’re sure he’ll be there?” you’ll ask.

“He never leaves,” she’ll reply.

You are now entering the main reception area at Virex International,
an uninflected machine voice will announce as soon as the main office doors slide open.
Thank you for not stopping.

All the rooms but the last one will be empty.

You’ll find him sitting at his desk, a wadded-up piece of human gum, drained and useless, gazing out at the sunset.

“John Frederson?”

His head moves slowly, painfully, away from the deep crimson light still spreading over London.

“No one’s called me that in years,” he’ll say.

“Then you’ll know who sent me.”

And still he’ll sit before you, empty and staring soberly at the sun: a baffling configuration of success and failure that has confounded history.

“A little far from home, aren’t you?” he’ll finally remark.

“We’ve had some … local difficulties.”

John Frederson will nod.

“And the ghost galaxies hired you?” he’ll reply. “I’m almost insulted. I’d have thought I rated better than a mere …” He’ll pause, peer at you. “Do you even have a name?” he’ll ask, looking like the man who just patented cancer.

You know why you’re here and why we sent you. You’re clean, filed down, all biometrics erased so they can no longer be read. The best false identity is no identity at all.

“Betamax,” you reply.

John Frederson will nod again. You notice a moth skeleton still clinging to one of the net curtains over his office windows.

She’ll be taking the maintenance elevator up to the pyramid by now. She’ll remove her cell phone from the side pocket of her black patent-leather handbag and carefully slide off the back. Then she’ll start removing the SIM card. The machinery around her moves with a smooth patience.

“You owe billions to the wrong people,” you’ll say.

John Frederson will shake his head and smile.

“No,” he’ll say. “They entrusted billions to the wrong person … They made an unwise investment.”

“You overdrew your credit.”

“Credit is a matter of confidence, of one party having trust in another,” he’ll say. “We can get that back in a second.”

“You no longer have the time.”

“Fifteen years ago there was nothing here but rusting sheds, dirty water, and oil slicks,” he’ll say, and then wave a stiffening arm toward his office windows. “Everything you see out there took less than a decade and a half to accomplish. In ancient Egypt they couldn’t even get a pharaoh buried in that time.”

You can’t argue with history, especially when it hasn’t been written yet.

You stare at the moth skeleton instead.

Your name is Betamax, and you know what you’re doing.

Banks of fluorescent lights flicker into life somewhere high above you, while the clicking of her high heels on the polished metal flooring continues to reverberate around the inside of the stainless steel pyramid.

She works as she walks, quickly and efficiently taking apart her cell phone, sliding a new card into the back.

You always know what you’re doing.

You grip your left wrist in your right hand and twist. A liquid splintering sound comes from deep within your arm as bone, cartilage, and gristle slide over each other. You’ll watch the hand retract, your fingers folding themselves back into the hard geometry of a gun barrel.

* * *

John Frederson is still talking, but you’re not listening anymore.