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There hadn't been much more to the meeting. C had outlined the brief, and it was pretty straightforward. Find out who'd snatched Alkland, find, out where they'd taken him, and bring him back alive. There was also an unspoken sub-brief: don't let anyone know what you're up to. The Actioneers don't like it to be known that they're not on top of absolutely everything, and ACIA has no jurisdiction outside the Centre itself. Their thinking was that whoever the guys in the black hats were, chances were they'd be holed up in Red Neighbourhood, which borders on the Centre's eastern side. I wasn't so sure, but I had to go there anyway, so it would do as a place to start.

I had a CV cube on Alkland, with his likeness and various other pieces of information about him, and I had twenty-four hours before I made an initial report back to Zenda. A standard, run-of-the-mill, normal thing. Something to do.

I took the mono to Action Portal 3, and as I had five minutes to spare I found Hely, the attendant who'd last seen Alkland. He'd been reassigned from the inner mono, and Royn told me where to find him. He was eager to help, but couldn't tell me anything I didn't know already.

Before I boarded the mono Hely showed me his used tickets. I could see why they were so keen to get Alkland back. The pile really was very, very tidy.

I boarded Red Line One at 8.30 p.m., and as always immediately wished that I hadn't.

Red Neighbourhood isn't like the Centre. It isn't like Colour, either. It isn't like anywhere. The chief reason the Centre has a fucking great wall around it is to keep Red Neighbourhood out.

Let me explain a bit about the Neighbourhoods. A long, long time ago, the old deal about cities being divided by race and creed simply went down the pan. I think basically everybody got bored with the idea and lost interest: spending all day hating your neighbours was just too damn tiring. At the same time, the whole concept of cities started to change. When a nation's main city begins to cover over seventy per cent of the whole country, clearly things need to be organised a little differently.

What happened is that neighbourhoods became Neighbourhoods, self-governing and regulating states, each free to do what the hell they liked. The people that live in a given Neighbourhood are the people who like what the Neighbourhood likes. If you don't like the Neighbourhood, you get the hell out and find one that's more your sort of thing.

Unless you come from a bad Neighbourhood, in which case you're pretty much stuck where you are. Some things change, some things stay the same. So far, so what.

With time things began to get a little weird, and that's kind of how they've stayed. Everything is compacting, accelerating, solidifying, but not all of it in the same direction. There's a loose collection of Neighbourhoods that are pretty much on the same planet, and if any country-wide decisions need to be made, they get together and have a crack at it. Everybody else? Well, who knows, basically. I've seen a lot of The City, I've been around. But there's a lot of places I haven't been, places where no one's been in a hundred years, no one except the people who live there. Some places you don't go because it's too dangerous, and some places don't let outsiders in. Believe me: there are some Neighbourhoods out there where there is some very weird shit going on.

Red Neighbourhood doesn't fall into that category. It's not that bad. It's just kind of intense. I was in Red because I needed to buy a gun, and you can't buy guns in the Centre or Colour. In Red you can buy what the hell you like. At a discount.

There's no good or bad time to get on a Red mono. They don't have hours where you do certain things, or days even. You just pay your money and take your chances. Actually, by Red standards the carriage I boarded was fairly civilised. True, there was both vomit and a human turd on the seat next to mine, but I've seen worse. The prostitutes were mainly too stoned to be doing serious business, the fight down the end was over very quickly, and there were never more than two dead bodies in the carriage at any one time.

Zenda thinks I'm very brave for going into Red by myself. Partly, she's right. But partly you just have to know how to fit in, how not to be fazed. If Darv or any of those ACIA suits poked their head in here they'd get the crap beaten out of them before they sat down, because they'd look like they didn't belong.

Look at me. Okay, so I'm wearing good clothes, but that's not the point. Clothes are not an issue, Clothes cost nothing. It's in the face. I don't look; like I'm dying for this mono journey to end, like I'm about to wet myself in fear. I don't look like I'm disgusted with what I see. I look like the kind of guy who'd have a knife in your throat before you got halfway through giving him a hard time. I look like the kind of guy whose mother died in the street choking up Dopaz vomit. I look like the kind of guy who pimps his sister not just for the money, but because he hates her.

I can look like a guy who belongs.

I got off at Fuck Station Zero and weaved down a few backstreets. In Red they can't be bothered to move the garbage around, never mind the buildings. In the real depths of Red, places like Hu district, there is garbage that has literally fossilised. Finding your way around is not a problem, assuming you know your way to start off with: there aren't any maps. If you don't know where you're going you want to get the hell out of Red immediately, before something demoralising and possibly fatal happens to you.

It had been a couple of months since I was last in Red, and I was relieved to see that BarJi was still functioning. The turnover of recreational establishments in Red is kind of high, what with gang war, arson and random napalming. BarJi has been running for almost six years now, which I suspect may be some kind of record. The reason is very simple. The reason is Ji.

It's always kind of a tense moment, sticking your head into a bar in Red Neighbourhood. You can take it as a given that there'll be a fight in progress, but it's less easy to predict what kind. Will it be fists, guns or chemical weapons that are involved? Is it a personal battle or a complete free-for-all? The fight in Ji's was a very minor one of the knife variety, which made it feel like a church in spite of the grotesquely loud trash rock exploding out of the speakers.

The reason? Ji.

Ji is an old, well, friend, I guess. We met a long time ago when we were both involved in something. I may tell you about it sometime, if it's relevant. He wasn't living in Red then: he was living in Turn Again Neighbourhood, which is the second weirdest Neighbourhood I have ever set foot in. I have been in Turn twice, and there is no fucking way I am ever going there again.

I'm not even going to talk about the weirdest Neighbourhood I've seen.

Ji was a hard bastard even by Turn standards: in Red he is a king. Doped-up gangs in surrounding areas while away the hours tearing up and down streets in armoured cars, blasting the shit out of each other with anti-tank weapons and flamethrowing the pedestrians. When they get to Ji's domain, they put the guns down and observe the speed limit until they're safely out the other side. Through a series of carefully planned and hideously successful atrocities Ji has firmly established himself as someone you under no circumstances even think about fucking with. This makes him kind of a good contact to have in Red, especially as he owes me a few favours. I owe him a few too, but the kind of favours we owe each other aren't complementary, and so they don't cancel each other out. At least we don't think they do: we've never really got to the bottom of the whole thing.

I sat down at a table near the side and ordered some alcohol. This didn't go down well with the barman, but I coped with his disapproval. I knew that Ji's assistants monitored everyone who came into the bar through closed circuit vidiscreens, and that Ji would send word down as soon as he could be bothered. I took a sip of my drink, set my face for 'Reasonably Dangerous', and soaked up the local colour.

The local colour was predominantly orange. The decor was orange, the drinks were orange, the lights were orange, and the bodies of the women performing languorous gynaecological examinations of each other on the orange-lit stage were painted orange too. Ji's Bar is a Dopaz bar, and as any Dopaz-drone will tell you, orange is like, the colour, of, like, orange is, you know, orange, orange is, like, orange.

Dopaz is two things in Red Neighbourhood. It is the primary recreational drug. It is also the most common cause of death. Is Dopaz strong? Let me put it this way. Drugs are often diluted or 'cut' with other substances, either to swindle buyers or just to lower the dosage. A lot of drugs are cut with baking powder. When they cut Dopaz, they cut it with Crack.

Most of the drones in BarJi were out there in the main bar, watching the biology lesson and drinking very low dosage Dopaz drinks, about four of which will leave you unconscious for forty-eight hours. The heavy hitters would have made their way to the rooms at the back, and tomorrow would find half of them in the piles of garbage in the street, their corpses waiting to fossilise like everything else. There's no safety net in Red Neighbourhood: if you fall, you fall. You can't leave Red for a better Neighbourhood: they've all got standards, criteria, exams or fees. If you were born Red, or end up in Red, you're not going to make it out into the light. The only way out of Red is down.

While I waited for Ji I worked my way through Alkland's cube. The Actioneer was sixty-two years old, born and bred in the Centre. His father had been B at the Department of Hauling Ass for seven years, and then A for a record further thirteen. His mother had revolutionised the theory and practice of internal memoranda. Alkland's career leapt off the CV like an arrow or some other very straight thing: he wasn't just a man who was very good at doing things, but the perfect product of the Centre, a hundred per cent can-do person. His work during the last five years was classified, and I didn't have a high enough rating to break the code, but I knew that it must be very diligent stuff. The Department of Really Getting to the Heart of Things is the core department in the Centre. Everybody reports to them in the end, and the A there is effectively Chief Actioneer.

The cube told you everything you needed to know about Alkland unless you weren't an Actioneer. To them, what you did in office time was what you were. But I needed to know why whoever had kidnapped him had chosen him, and not someone else. I didn't want to know what Alkland was: I needed to know who he was. I had to understand the man.

Eventually, frustrated, I switched the setting to Portrait and a 10 x 8 x 8 hologram of Alkland popped onto the table. It showed a bony face, with grey thinning hair and a thinner nose. The eyes behind his glasses were intelligent but gentle, and the lines round the mouth told a history of wry smiles. He looked rather gentle for an Actioneer. That was all. There was nothing else to learn from the cube, and I had no more to go on.

'Stark, you fuck, how the fuck are you, fucker?'

Fuck you,' I said, turning with a smile. I know my language is far from ideal, but Ji makes me sound like a rather fey poet. I stood and stuck my hand out at him and he shook it violently and painfully, as is his wont. The two seven-foot men on either side of him regarded me dubiously.

'Who's that fucker?' he asked, nodding at the holo.

That's one of the things I want to talk with you about,' I said, sitting down again.

The main bar in Ji's is actually the most private place to talk, as all the patrons are so wasted you could set fire to their noses without them noticing. Overhearing other people's conversations is not what they're there for.

'Well, he's got to be in deep shit of some kind, for you to be looking for him,' said Ji as he settled violently into one of the other chairs round the table. Ji looks like he was hewn out of a very large rock by someone who was talented but on drugs all the time. There's a kind of rough rightness about him though, apart from round his eyes. He has some big scars there.

His bodyguards lurked round the next table, watching my every move. Given that Ji could kill either of them without breaking sweat I've always thought them kind of superfluous, but I guess there's a protocol to being a psychotic ganglord.

Ji waved in the direction of the bar and a pitcher of alcohol was on the table before his hand stopped moving. He nodded at the stage. 'What do you think of the show?'

'Obscene,' I said, nodding in appreciation, 'genuinely obscene.'

'Yeah' he grunted, pleased. 'Bred for it, you know.' He wasn't joking: they really are. Red tends not to be the Neighbourhood of choice for women. I noticed that as usual all the girls had thick black hair. Ji has a thing for that.

We chewed the rag for a while. I recapped the last few months, mentioned a couple of mutual acquaintances I'd run into. Ji told me his land had expanded another half mile to the northg which explained his bar's continued existence, recounted a couple of especially horrific successes, and used the word 'fuck' just over four hundred times.

'So' he said in the end, waving and receiving another pitcher, 'what the fuck do you want? I mean, obviously the joy of seeing my face, but what else? Nice trousers, by the way.'

'Thanks. Two things' I said, leaning over the table and dropping my voice, just in case. I have to find this guy. His name's Alkland. People who are looking for him think he might be in the Red somewhere.'

'Actioneer?'

'Yeah, and not just any old can-do smartarse. This is a golden boy.'

'What the fuck's he doing in here then?'

That I don't know. I'm not even sure he is here. All I know is that he isn't in the Centre. ACIA think he's been stolen and stashed in Red somewhere: I guess it's the logical first choice.'

I sat back and took a drink of alcohol. Ji knew what I was asking: I didn't have to spell it out for him. On the stage the sweating and toiling performers were joined by a new pair of girls, who immediately proceeded to go to the toilet over them. That's entertainment in Red for you.

'No.'

I nodded and lit another cigarette. I think I forgot to mention that I'd just had one. Well I had. I finished it, put it out, and then I lit another one. Use your imagination.