The Mammoth Book of Dracula (72 page)

There was no way to tell how long the invader had been standing there, not six feet away, watching him. Brewer had never been so startled in all his life—but he had never before been confronted by anything so nearly impossible. His electronic defences were, as he had assured Jenny, glorious in their subtlety. How glorious, therefore, must be the subtlety of the man who now stood before him, having hacked his way through the undergrowth of passwords and booby-traps?

There was nothing particularly striking about the invader himself, apart from his lustrously pale skin, his remarkably dark eyes and his astonishing aptitude for silence. He didn’t seem unusually menacing, although there was a peculiar glint in his near-black eyes which suggested that he might become menacing if crossed.

Brewer desperately wanted to say something that would save a little face, but he just wasn’t up to it. All he said, in the end, was: “Who the hell are you?” He was uncomfortably aware of the fact that it was a very tired cliche.

“You’ve seen me before, Mr Brewer,” the unwelcome visitor told him. “Several times, in fact.” He had a slight accent of some kind but it wasn’t readily identifiable.

Brewer stared hard at the invader’s face, certain that he would have remembered those coal-black eyes and that remarkable complexion. He had method enough left in him to realize that if that were so, those were exactly the features he must set aside, in order to concentrate on the rest. When he did that, he got a dim impression of
where
he had seen the man—but, not, alas, the least flicker of a name.

On the other hand, Brewer realized, given what he was doing and the way his uninvited guest had taken the trouble to sit around and wait for him to look up, there couldn’t be much doubt about the invader’s purpose in coming to call.

“Jenny said we had interests in common,” he said, knowing that there was far too much lost ground to catch up but feeling that he had to try. “You see so many people, though—all those seminars, all those cunningly contrived meetings where clients try to whip up competition in order to drive the tenders down. We were never formally introduced, were we? Funny how we can have so many mutual acquaintances, and not know one another at all.”

“I know
you
very well,” the stranger said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, one way and another.” There was suddenly something about his eyes that seemed profoundly unsettling, but there was as much sadness in it as threat.

Brewer, desperate to know exactly how much trouble he was in, tried to fathom the significance of
one way and another.
One way was obviously Jenny—but who was the other? The people Brewer met at conferences and the people he met in the course of his legitimate business had little or nothing to tell. He put two and two together and hoped he wasn’t making five.

“You’re the guy who’s been taking over my runners, aren’t you?” Brewer said, “Jenny put you on to them—to Simon and the others. Is that what she was doing in the Goat and Compasses today? Making deliveries?”

The stranger shook his head. “She doesn’t make deliveries,” he said. “She has nothing to do with that aspect of the business at all—except, of course, that she did give me the information which allowed me to make contact with some of your agents. I only needed a handful of names; the rest I did myself.”

“Did she tell you where to find me?” Brewer asked, warily. He wondered whether the accent might be German, or maybe Serbian.

The stranger shook his head. “That was Simon,” he said. “You embarrassed him. He told me you were after me—and why you suddenly stopped asking questions. Jenny doesn’t know that I know you were at the flat, any more than she knows about the things you took. It was careless of me to leave them lying around, but I simply didn’t realize that you might be able to walk through my security systems as easily as I could walk through yours.”

That was a scoring point; without Jenny’s help, Brewer would never have been able to worm his way into the stranger’s flat, and they both knew it.

“Fate seems to have been determined to throw us together,” Brewer observed. “Did you pick up my ex-girlfriend solely in order to find out about my distribution system, or did she just happen to give you the idea of making a little extra money that way?”

“What do you make of the proteins?” the other asked, pointedly ignoring the question. “How much have you figured out?”

What Brewer had figured out was that the one advantage left to him might well be that the other man couldn’t possibly know how little he knew, so he wasn’t about to tell him.

“Jenny’s looking very well,” Brewer commented, instead. “Rather better than you are, I think—which presumably means that you’re testing your freshly-hatched miracles on her before applying them to yourself. Sensible enough, I suppose, but not entirely
sporting.
No wonder Simon thinks you’re a creep. You’ll want to do a few more runs before you’re certain, of course. Better safe than sorry.” That was the best he could do without admitting that he hadn’t a clue what the proteins were for, or where they might have come from.

“We’re not enemies, Mr Brewer,” said the man with the disturbing eyes. “We’re not even rivals—not really.”

Brewer didn’t understand that move either. Was the stranger trying to make a deal? If so, he thought, the best thing to do was play along with it. “Sure,” he replied. “We’re both on the same side: the side of the psychotropic revolution. Marked down by destiny to be the midwives of the
Ubermenschen.”

“Jenny told me all about that,” the stranger admitted. “She told me that you were sincere but I wasn’t convinced.”

“Is that why you’re here—to be convinced?” Brewer couldn’t believe it was as simple as that.

“Not exactly,” said the dark-eyed man. “I came out of curiosity. While I’m here, though, I suppose I ought to recover the things you stole, and obliterate all the records of your analyses.” He stressed the word
all
very faintly, perhaps to remind Brewer that memories were records too.

“I can understand that,” Brewer said. “I’m irredeemably curious myself.”

The stranger hesitated, as if he were hovering on the brink of some make-or-break decision. Then, making up his mind, he set the specimen bottle down on the bench beside him and took something out of his pocket.

Brewer recognized the device immediately. It was a sterile pack containing a disposable drug-delivery device: what the tabloids had taken to calling a “smart syringe” since it had become the darling of all the hardcore mainliners. The instrument wasn’t so very smart, but it
was
subtle; its bioconductors could deliver drugs to underlying tissues without ripping up the superficial tissues. Deeper probes did tend to break a few capillaries, but they only left a little round mark like a bruise—or a lovebite.

“Need a fix?” Brewer asked, uneasily.

With a dexterity that might have been admirable in other circumstances the stranger took the cap off the specimen bottle one-handed and carefully transferred the fluid to the barrel of the device.

“Keep your hands on the bench,” the stranger instructed him.

Brewer instantly raised his hands from the bench and came to his feet. He wasn’t being stubborn or heroic—it was just a reflex, animated by fear. He swung his fist, the way he’d seen a hundred men actors swing theirs in a hundred action-movies.

The dark-eyed man pivoted on his heel, and moved so fast that Brewer couldn’t keep track of him. It might have been the blindness of Brewer’s panic, but the speed of the man seemed supernatural. Brewer found himself reeling backwards, clutching his stomach. It hurt horribly, but he hadn’t yet had the wind knocked out of him and he was able to lunge forward again, as if to tackle the other around the knees.

The second assault was no more effective than the first. The unseen blow to his head hurt even worse than the smack in the belly. It didn’t leave Brewer unconscious, but it knocked him down and it knocked him silly. He was on all fours, wondering whether he could get up again, when he felt a foot in the small of his back, forcing him further down. He pressed upwards against the force, but he couldn’t resist it. Once he was flat on the ground, with an irresistible weight bearing down on him, he felt the pressure-pad of the smart syringe at his neck.

The contact lasted at least twenty seconds, but there was nothing Brewer could do to break it. It didn’t hurt—that, after all, was the whole point of smart syringes.

Brewer was slightly surprised that he was still conscious when the instrument was withdrawn, although there was no earthly reason to suppose that the straw-coloured liquid might have been an anaesthetic. By the time the weight was removed from his back the pain in his head was easily bearable, but he still felt nauseous. He thought it best to stay down until he was sure he could stand up straight. He was dimly conscious of the dark-eyed man moving to the bench where the pills were.

Eventually, he picked himself up, and met the stare of those remarkable eyes. “Thanks,” he said, putting on the bravest face he could. “I thought I’d lost my chance to analyse the stuff.”

“You’ve got every chance,” the dark-eyed man assured him. “But there really isn’t any hurry. Not now. You know where to find me when you’re fully prepared for a rational discussion.”

Having said that, the stranger simply turned away, walked to the door of the lab, and went out. It shouldn’t have been easy to exit the building without the proper codes, but Brewer didn’t suppose the unwelcome visitor would get into any difficulties.

A quick check told him that the remaining pills were gone and that the data displayed on his screen had all been dumped. It wasn’t a thorough job, though; he probably had enough traces left in the equipment to do another run, and he ought to be able to recover the ghosted data from the hard disk. The dark-eyed man didn’t seem to care what Brewer had found out, or what he still might find out. Brewer wondered exactly what the mysterious stranger had meant by “fully prepared”. It couldn’t be a simple matter of attitude.

Brewer used an ordinary hypodermic to extract some blood from the discoloured patch at the side of his neck, but he didn’t start any kind of immediate analysis; he stuck it in the refrigerator and hurried out into the night. He didn’t stop until he reached a payphone.

He used a generic phonecard of the kind anyone could buy at the checkout in any supermarket but he was careful to route the call through Talinn; the people whose help he needed preferred to deal with careful customers.

~ * ~

It was so late by the time Brewer got back on the road that Simple Simon was at home, sleeping the sleep of the unintimidated. Unsurprisingly, he was alone. His door had three good locks on it and his window had two, but the glass was so old it hadn’t been proofed against solvents, so Brewer was able to get in without disturbing his host and conduct a rapid but thorough search.

He found Simon’s supply easily enough, buried beneath the youth’s collection of business cards. It was a collection like any other; Simon stripped telephone booths the way younger kids stripped foreign stamps from used envelopes. Brewer pocketed all but a few of the pills. Then he positioned himself by the side of Simon’s bed.

He filled a common-or-garden hypodermic syringe that he hadn’t bothered to sterilize, and pressed it suggestively to Simon’s throat while switching on the bedside lamp. He wished that he’d made more effort to cultivate the expertise of intimidation. No matter how hard one tried to be businesslike, it seemed, there was something about the drug business that resisted rational reform.

“Don’t jump, Simon,” he advised, as the boy’s eyes flew open. “Quite apart from the fact that you’d impale your Adam’s apple, you’d get a shot of something very nasty indeed.”

Simon spluttered and twitched a bit, but he got the message.

“What is this?” he complained.

“Tell me about Jenny’s boyfriend, Simon,” Brewer said. “Tell me everything you know, and tell it fast.”

“What’s in the syringe?” Simon wanted to know.

“Just something to set your nerves jangling. It won’t do any permanent damage, but it’ll make every kind of sensory experience excruciatingly painful for at least twenty-four hours. If you don’t want to live through the most godawful day imaginable, tell me about the guy who’s fitting you out with your new supplies. Tell me
everything,
and pray that it might be enough.”

Simon had been about to protest that he didn’t know anything at all but he changed his mind. “He’s a chemist, just like you,” he said, as if that might make the news more welcome. “Analyses stuff for the government, or anybody else who pays ... he says his name’s Anthony Marklow, but I don’t think he’s even English. His stuff’s not
better,
just different. I’m not about to stop using yours, believe me. It’s just...”

“Marklow, Simon. Tell me about
Marklow.
What’s Jenny been doing for him? Is she selling stuff to the whores—or giving it away? What is it?”

“I don’t know! What’s the matter with you? What was all that stuff about not being a gangster, hey? What was all that stuff about
room for everybody in a boom market?”

“This isn’t about economic competition, Simon. It’s about something more serious. Marklow’s not just hawking happy pills. He’s doing something else, and I need to know what it is.
Now,
Simon. What’s he doing
as well as
cutting into my trade?”