The Minority Council (20 page)

I pulled off the glove on my right hand, revealing the thin white scars, twin crosses of the Midnight Mayor, that some tit with a plan had once hacked into our skin. “I swear by the badge of my office, by the running of the water in the pipes and the singing of the electricity in the wire, by the red-eyed dragon that guards the city walls and by the blue electric fire of our blood, that if you do this for me, I will guarantee that you and all your tribe are given access to the rubbish dumps of your choice. Let me have no shadow, let my feet make no sound upon the stones, if I should lie.”

Behind the little imp eyes, little imp minds contemplated this; black dust-tangled hairs rose and fell across their backs with every fast breath. Then, without any
outward sign of change on their features, one gave a single nod and hauled itself out of the vacuum bag, spilling a cloud of dust, and hopped down onto the floor. The others followed, two, three, then a fourth, slipping out of the warm grey depths of the bag; and there were other sounds too, a rattling overhead and a scrambling underfoot. The imps waddled out into the corridor with the overstretched gait of creatures not used to walking when crawling was an option and, from the pipes and dirty ducts of the building, the rest of the tribe followed.

They popped out from the torn yellow foam that wrapped around the heating pipes, slipped messily down the trash chutes and crawled out of the Dumpsters against the grey walls, slithered out from the hollows behind the toilet cisterns and unfolded from the shadows above the boilers. They rolled off the dust-covered cable trays and popped out of the ducting in the floor which carried half-chewed bits of Ethernet cable and slime-smeared trucking. The smallest were barely rat-sized, the largest and oldest the size of a small Labrador. They scuttled along the walls, leaving greasy tiny finger marks; they waddled along the floors, trailing felt and grit as they moved; they slithered along piping in the ceiling, spilling a small cloud of dried-up dirt like wedding confetti on their kin below.

They carried with them the thick sweet stench of blocked-up drainpipes and cigarette ash and, though they made no words as they moved, they clicked at each other busily, the little slither-snick of every sound you’ve half thought you half heard in the night, or the creak-crack of the cold pipe warming up, now mimicked perfectly from their tiny throats, and with surprising volume. A dozen,
two dozen, maybe thirty, thirty-five imps came crawling out of the forgotten pieces of the building, following the one who still held in its hand the curling papers showing the route to their refuse dump of choice, like a sacred text pointing to the holy land. As they reached a small grate at the end of the corridor, this was levered up with practised skill by four of them, and feet-first the imps jumped one at a time, down into an unpleasantly warm darkness that stank of grease turned to sludge. I watched them, listening for the shuffling below the floor that the ignorant would have called water in clogged-up pipes or the sound of furniture scraping the floor. The one with the paper was the last to jump, shooting me a look of determination as he was about to slip into the darkness.

“Sss… sss… swee…”

“I’ve sworn,” I answered. “I won’t forget.”

It gave a sharp nod, imp-to-imp respect, and dropped into the darkness below.

The sun was already starting to wonder what was the point, when I let myself out of the office across the street from Harlun and Phelps and went in search of a sandwich and more coffee. I was beginning to feel the weight of the day: a broken night of a few scant hours’ sleep leading into a broken day that promised another broken night. My hours had always been erratic, but this mortal body we wore did not hold up well, and was infuriatingly prone to fatigue and injury.

I went to the same coffee shop where—had it only been yesterday?—I’d talked to Nabeela about monsters and the Midnight Mayor—ordered a sandwich and coffee and sat in the window to wait.

I judged that the imps would need at least twenty minutes to start making their presence felt, and a good forty to get the Aldermen’s undivided attention. Imp infestations were more of an annoyance than a true menace to health and hygiene, but the arrival of a whole tribe at once could disrupt even the most flexible of organisations, and the Aldermen were not renowned for their out-of-the-box crisis management. I’d picked up a newspaper from a rack by the door, and skimmed the headlines. A climate conference had ended in failure in Mexico; a politician had been caught sleeping with the wrong person again and was very sorry to have done that to his wife, two kids and the public at large; the elderly were being pushed further down the priority lists of the NHS as government cuts meant there weren’t enough nurses to go around; and someone called Micky had won some competition to sing the role of a giant insect in a musical version of
Metamorphosis
.

Across the street, in the glass foyer of Harlun and Phelps, the security men on the front desk were growing unusually animated as they talked to each other, phones pressed to their ears.

I took another slurp of coffee and kept reading.

Members of the public had expressed anger at delays on the Underground, price rises on the buses and the general state of the roads; a children’s TV presenter was photographed puking into a gutter in Mayfair; an interviewer earnestly wondered whether the actor on the next page had found it harder to play a monster or the monster’s maker; and Sally the Panda was finally pregnant, and expecting twins.

Outside, the world turned. Rush hour was approach
ing: a sharp buzzing on the air, a rumbling beneath our feet, the time of day when every sorcerer’s heart beat faster, and your teeth ached like you’d washed them in vinegar. There were now Aldermen in the foyer of Harlun and Phelps, also on the phone, looking fraught. A gaggle of suited men and women was forming by the entrance, some holding briefcases, most with nothing, moving with the herd gracelessness of startled deer. More were arriving with every second, and now there were men in yellow bibs, herding office workers towards the main door like dogs controlling a flock of sheep. My phone rang but, seeing Kelly’s name, I didn’t answer. I watched from over my newspaper and, as the lights started going out on the top floors of the building, I couldn’t hide my smile. Imps weren’t usually trouble; but who could blame them if sometimes they nibbled through the wrong cable to the wrong circuit?

The building started clearing in proper fashion now, the men in yellow bibs acquiring signs that said “Muster Point A” and “Evacuation Officer” to wave above their heads. The street was a roiling mass of suits, only the black-clad Aldermen still inside; most of the workers were giving up right there and slinging their coats on. They began to disperse towards the Underground and buses, or bickered over who was first to hail a particular cab.

Around this scene of discordance the city flowed, not oblivious, but far too self-absorbed to give a damn, or worse, be
seen
to give a damn. Staring was for tourists, and this was not a tourist part of town.

Except…

Except
, there were one or two men showing more
interest than they should. Sorcerers are, regrettably, far too busy learning the mysteries of the arcane arts to catch evening classes in espionage, but find yourself hunted long enough and you start to spot the signs. Was it normal for utilities vans to be parked for so long on a double red line like that, next to a sign proclaiming “Danger—Works in Progress,” with no sign of a worker working on anything more than a mug of tea? Sure, there was the British work ethic to consider, which valued the cuppa more than myrrh or gold, but this was the Corporation of London, where tomorrow happened now, and yesterday was a land for losers. And how handy that the van was parked just opposite Harlun and Phelps, with an excellent eye-line to both the main door and the service entrance. And, now I looked again, was that woman in a suit really taking so long over one cup of coffee, when she’d been sat by the long café window for as long as I’d been here?

What had Templeman said?

Nothing helpful or precise, but he’d been afraid enough to warn us against the fairy godmother. Don’t blow stuff up, don’t do anything spectacular, don’t get caught by the godmother.

Would they really be so pissed off that they’d try and lift the Midnight Mayor from under the Aldermen’s noses?

It took a lot of balls to cross an Alderman, let alone a whole bunch of them, and as stake-outs went, it didn’t get much more ballsy than this. If they were here for me, they’d be armed against the usual spells I wore to distract the casually wandering eye. Something more extravagant would be called for. I reached for my mobile and dialled 999.

“Hi, yeah, um, look, I don’t know if this is the right
number to call or anything, but there’s like, this van parked across the street, yeah, and there’s been these men going in and out of it for a while now and I didn’t think it was anything, I mean, it may not be anything yeah, but they’ve been like, parked there for ages now and I, uh, I work just opposite yeah and they’re like not working around here or anything and I just think they’re a bit suspicious, you know?”

“How do you mean ‘suspicious,’ sir?” asked the emergency operator.

“Well, you know, they’re parked on a double red to begin with, I mean, what the hell is that about, and they’ve been like putting stuff in the back of their van in, like, this really odd way, you know, like, making sure no one’s watching or stuff. I don’t know, maybe they robbed a hardware store or something, because I saw some of the stuff they’re putting in there and it’s all like nails in these big big crates and big barrels of chemicals and stuff.”

I prayed for a bright—and yet not too bright—operator, and struck lucky. “What kind of chemicals, sir? Did you see any labels?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. “I mean it’s not like I stopped to look that closely, you know, I mean, they felt really hostile, like how you didn’t want to get too close or anything. But the van smelt really funny, I mean like, you know um… like cleaning stuff? That really strong cleaning stuff, like um… ammonia or something?”

It took the police four and a half minutes to arrive.

They even brought armed response with them, surrounding the van with heavily armed bastards all in black.

Bomb disposal took only another three minutes, by which time the men in the van were lying in handcuffs on
the ground, and the woman at the end of the café window had made a discreet exit.

I piled my dirty cup onto my used plate, folded the newspaper back onto its rack and, as the first bomb-disposal officer started to thread his fibre-optic camera into the back of the parked van, I headed for the goods entrance of Harlun and Phelps.

It was a building in distress.

Frantic men and women with tool boxes scurried through the corridors as, across the building, systems that had functioned perfectly well an hour and a half ago creaked and groaned like a pregnant volcano. And there was something in the walls. No one was saying it, but at every little rattle or snap out of place, eyes flashed nervously upwards, fingers tightened around spanners, breaths were sucked in a little too fast. From the lower floors, where pipes met wires met dust, the imps were digging their nests. Loudly, disruptively and, above all else, unstoppably. Imps have little concept of distress or discomfort, and once they’ve got a mission they’ll carry it through with thick-skulled relentlessness.

I summoned a service lift, but the button didn’t light up. A man nearby in the white apron of a caterer was having a sneaky fag beneath an air-conditioning vent that sounded in a full fit of anaphylaxis.

“Whole fucking system’s gone weird,” he replied when I asked what was up with the lifts. “If it’s not the fucking boilers then it’s the fucking computers; some kind of virus got in and now everything’s just gone tits up.”

I turned away, cursing under my breath. I’d aimed for disruption when I spammed the Aldermen’s email server; what I hadn’t planned on was having to take the stairs up
fourteen floors. I pushed through the doors to the service stairs, and started the long, dull climb up to the Aldermen’s office.

Our knees hurt by the eighth floor.

At the fourteenth we stopped to gasp down air, hands on our knees, head bowed forward. When we felt less light-headed, I pushed the stairwell door and let myself in as quietly as possible to the Aldermen’s office.

In my absence, no good had come to these orderly open-plan desks.

Computers everywhere were in distress. Some were merely off, their screens dead and black; some gave the high-pitched scream of smashed keyboards stuck on overload; some were actually smoking, black noxious fumes rising from their hard drive and flattening in a cloud under the ceiling. Someone had tried to fix things by pulling out the very cables from the wall cavity; but this had been too little, too late, and now the fluorescent lights were flickering and buzzing, in the kitchen the kettle was boiling dry, and the hot-air fan in the bathroom was switching on and off with giddying speed. The virus I’d sent had got into the system and then some. I let myself into my office in its tucked-away corner, and locked the door behind me.

I waded across to my desk through the mess of papers, and turned on the computer. Having thought for a while, my computer loaded, and sat patiently to attention. I opened the email and there it was: my original bit of spam, copied no less than thirty-three times from thirty-three different email addresses as it had replicated through the system and been bounced right back to me from other Aldermen’s infected computers. It had worked better than
I’d hoped, and we felt a stirring of juvenile glee as I deleted the messages, wiping their cursed symbols off the screen with the back of my hand, and tossing the sickly bubble of static and power into the nearest mains socket to fizzle out with a spurt of blue electricity and a burning smell.