This Other Eden (17 page)

‘Here,’
said Max and threw her his car keys.

‘Thanks,’
said Rosalie.

Max
would love to have believed that there was a poignant glance, a meeting of eyes,
an unmistakable moment of understanding, and perhaps even affection between
them. But there wasn’t. She just grabbed the keys and fucked off.

‘See
you sometime,’ he murmured as Rosalie flipped the switch on the BioLock and
disappeared into the tube which led to the car-port.

Max
turned to face Plastic, who was staggering to his feet in some considerable
pain. Plastic had, of course, witnessed Max’s craven disloyalty. What is more,
that disloyalty was not over yet. As the BioLock closed behind Rosalie, Max
marched over to Plastic.

‘I
don’t want you to call your security people, Plastic. I want you to let the
girl go.’

Max
gulped, Nathan gulped, even Tolstoy gurgled slightly. None of them could quite
believe that Max was aiding and abetting the escape of someone who had just
kicked the most powerful person in Hollywood in the balls. Everyone knew that
Max was a bit mad, but this was insane.

‘You
want me to let her go?’ Plastic inquired.

‘Yes,’
said Max.

Plastic
could see that Max was clearly determined. He also knew that Max was young, fit
and very strong. He shrugged.

‘Looks
like she’s going to get away then.’

There
was a pause in which nobody made a sound except the numerous mutant animals
which were still voicing their protest at the sudden disturbance.

‘Uhm… listen, Plastic … Mr Tolstoy,’ Max mumbled, reason returning to its
throne, ‘I hope this incident won’t affect our working relationship.’

‘You
hope it won’t affect our working relationship?’

‘Yes.’

‘You
take sides with a woman who tries to execute me and you hope it won’t affect
our working relationship?’

‘If
that’s OK by you.’

‘All
right then,’ said Plastic, ever the pragmatist. ‘I don’t know what we would
have done with her if we’d caught her anyway. The last thing I need is to be
seen dragging some cute little greenie through the courts. You can bet your
best dollar she’d get all the sympathy. Just as a matter of interest, though,
may I inquire why you brought this homicidal lunatic along to a creative
meeting?’

‘I just
met her at DigiMac… I thought you might be interested. I didn’t know she
was going to try and execute you.’

‘Thank
you. That’s nice to know. Are you porking her?’

‘Well,
I . .

‘Good,
because it’s a connection we can use. Nathan here is going to write me a movie
for you to star in. A movie about the battle between Mother Earth and
Claustrosphere. He’s going to write about how those decent but misguided souls
in the Green Movement learn that, far from threatening the survival of the
human race, Claustrosphere is in fact ensuring it. Isn’t that right, Nathan?’

‘That’s
exactly the type of plot I had in mind,’ Nathan said hastily.

‘Good.’

Broadening
the campaign.

After Max and Nathan had
left, Plastic returned to his communications room in the house. A marketing
strategy has to be many-levelled. You can’t just make a decent ad. A
well-designed packet alone is not enough. A marketing strategy has to set the
agenda for consumption. A perfect marketing strategy not only provides the
product, it also identifies and promotes the need. All his life Plastic Tolstoy
had known that the easiest market to exploit is the one which you create
yourself.

Chapter
Twelve

The paranoid conspiracy theorist

Trapped
nerd.

Judy was cornered and he
knew it. There were two of them outside the cubicle. What is more, they were
armed, and Judy was not. Normally in these circumstances, when an agent is
trapped in a toilet cubicle, there is a convenient back window through which to
make an escape. This time, however, there was no window and probably a good
thing too, considering that the lavatory was on the 190th floor.

‘Come
on out, man.’ The tone was violent, with the hint of a sneer. ‘Unless you want
them to find you with your pants down.

It was
a point, thought the terrified Judy. If one has to fight, best not to have to
do it with your trousers round your ankles. He pulled them up and readied
himself for the inevitable. Outside they were laughing; they had their man and
they knew it. Judy desperately tried to recall his training. It was a while
since he had found himself in a combat situation and, in truth, he had never
been very good at it anyway.

‘Make a
plan,’ he said to himself. That was what he had been taught. If your opponent
is confident, then he is at his most vulnerable. The idea being that an
assailant who thinks he has the attack in the bag will move sloppily, he will
make mistakes. This is the point where clear thinking and properly planned
actions can turn the tables.

OK,
thought Judy, there are two men outside the door, which is my only exit. They
are bigger and tougher than I am, they are also armed. Clearly they are going
to be feeling confident. Hence, according to combat training, they are at their
most vulnerable.

Judy’s
plan was simple. He knew from the voices that one of his assailants was
standing directly outside the cubicle door and that the other was slightly off
to one side. What Judy would do was kick the door open with all his might,
slamming it into the face of the first of his enemies. He must then follow
through instantly. He must be out of the cubicle before the first man’s nose
had even started to bleed. Having emerged from the cubicle, he must immediately
stick his fingers in the eyes of the second man, the one who was off to the
side. He would have to move fast enough to give the second man no time to raise
his guard. Then, with both assailants briefly disabled, he would run out of the
toilet. He would not pause, he would make no witty cracks, he would simply run,
for his foes would surely not take long to revive. So that then was the plan.
One: kick the door open. Two: emerge and stab eyes with fingers. Three: run
away. In this manner, Judy, a weedy man of five-foot-five with one leg slightly
longer than the other, would get the better of two enormous, armed thugs.

Very
gently he edged open the lock of the door, a necessary prerequisite for kicking
it open. It was a tense moment. If they heard the bolt slip, he was dead. They
didn’t and Judy had the door unlocked. Holding on to the toilet paper
dispenser, he drew his foot back against the lavatory bowl, getting ready for
the mighty kick.

‘Are
you still out there?’ he inquired, attempting a casual tone.

‘That’s
right, and now we’re coming in to get you,’ the thug replied, thus establishing
to Judy’s satisfaction that the first assailant was still in the same position.

‘Good,’
said Judy, and with all the force that fear and loathing could summon up in his
small body, he drove his boot against the cubicle door.

Sadly,
the door was an inward opener. The whole cubicle shook with the impact, and
pain shot up all the way from the tip of Judy’s toes to deep within his
bollocks. From there, the pain proceeded upwards through his agonised body,
finally coming to rest at the back of his head and making his eyeballs rattle.
Judy sank back on to the toilet seat as the two thugs burst in and started to
beat him with rolled up magazines.

‘Please,
please, guys!’ Judy screamed as the blows fell about his head and shoulders.

‘Repeat
after me,’ said Cruise, beating Judy all the while, ‘I am a stupid little queer
and a disgrace to the Bureau.’

Agent
Cruise had been nursing a deep resentment for Judy ever since Rosalie had cut
his arm open in the desert. The humiliation of being cut up by some freaky
little green chick had weighed heavily on him in the weeks since his return and
he had come, irrationally, to blame Judy for the failure of his mission.
Somehow he felt there must have been something in the environmental briefing he
had been given that had been inadequate. Cruise concluded that Schwartz had
stitched him up. Therefore, when Judy returned from his adventure on the
stricken oil tanker, he found Cruise waiting for him and looking for trouble.

‘I am a
stupid little queer and a disgrace to the Bureau,’ Judy shouted.

‘And
don’t you forget it,’ said Cruise, administering a final swipe with the
magazine.

‘Hey,’
said Cruise’s companion. ‘It’s nearly noon, we’d better get into the meeting,
you know what Klaw’s like if you’re late.’

The man
was referring to the monthly meeting of the FBI’s Environmental Department,
which all three of them had been on their way to when the ambush had occurred.

‘OK,’
said Cruise. ‘Looks like you’re off the hook for now, Schwartz, but you’ll be
back next month and I’m going to get you all over again.’

But by
now Judy had had a moment’s breathing space to size up his opponent and prepare
a counter-attack.

‘No you
aren’t,’ Judy replied, ‘because in the meantime I’m going to devote my life to
hacking my way into your file and compiling a comprehensive list of every
single bar-tab, taxi ride and hotel room you have ever claimed on expenses.
Then if you hit me with a rolled-up magazine again, I will send that list to
one of the numerous congressmen who got elected by promising to cut waste in
government, so they can use your name in their personal crusade to haul in big
spending federal agencies like the FBI.’

It was
a complicated plan, but Cruise for one could see how effective it might be.

‘Yes,
well…‘ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘Just
watch it, that’s all,’ he added rather weakly, and with that they all went into
the meeting.

Dark
 suspicions.

The departmental meeting
was not going very much better for Judy than the meeting in the toilet.

‘You’re
saying you don’t think the captain of the stricken tanker killed himself.’ The
voice of Judy’s boss, Bill Klaw, was heavy with sarcasm.

‘That
is correct, sir,’ said Judy, trying to sound firm.

‘You
find the guy, a known drunk, I might add, dead in his sinking ship, a bottle in
one hand, a smoking gun in the other, his brains in the trash basket and you
don’t think he killed himself?’

‘I’ve
looked into his background, sir. I’ve found nothing that suggests a suicidal
personality.’

‘Oh, I
see. In that case, of course there’s
no way
he could have killed
himself,’ Klaw said, showing his exasperation to the whole room, in which
thirty or so equally exasperated field officers were assembled. It was nearly
lunchtime and nobody was interested in Schwartz’s paranoid investigations

‘Brilliant
deduction work, Schwartz.’ Klaw continued in this withering vein. ‘The captain
never tried to kill himself
before,
so why should he now? Did you by any
chance discover whether the guy had ever
lost a billion-dollar tanker and
destroyed three hundred miles of coastline
before!! And if not, did it not
occur to you that this might have been a factor in dampening his normally sunny
disposition!’

‘I
don’t think he killed himself, sir. I believe his ship was sabotaged and that
the captain was murdered to prevent the discovery of that sabotage. I inspected
the hold of the tanker, sir, accompanied by the ship’s number two, a woman
named Jackson. I have her testimony here …‘ Judy could see that Maw was
losing patience. He pressed on quickly … ‘The condition of the ruptures in
the walls of the ship were not conducive to the reasons given by the coastguard
for the wreck, sir. I noted that the lip of the tears were predominately
curling outwards, sir, which, you will agree, is very strange. A ship holed
externally by treacherous rocks would have shown damage caving inwards, which
it did, to a certain extent, but not entirely. Some of the damage distinctly
suggested pressure from within. The kind of pressure which could only have been
caused by an internal explosion.’

‘What
is this, Schwartz? The coastguard are satisfied that the ship got caught in a
rocky channel. Are you moonlighting for the insurance company or something?’

‘Insurance
is not an issue, sir. There is no claim because the captain is presumed to have
been drunk.’

‘In
that case, there’s no possible motive for anybody wanting to sink the damn
thing now.

‘What
about the close proximity of the Natura ship, sir?’

‘What
about it? They’re always there, aren’t they? The little cockroaches.’