Faust Among Equals (2 page)

‘Sure.' The Finance Director nodded what, for the sake of argument, we shall call his head. ‘We all know that, Steve, you've told us often enough. I'd just like to remind you that if those bloody inspectors catch us breaking the terms of the franchise, they'll have us out of here like the proverbial pea through a trumpet. Is that what you want?'

The Sales Director groaned theatrically and paused for a moment to scratch his nose (the one growing up out of his navel, not the one sprouting between his eyebrows). ‘Look, Norman,' he said, ‘there's ways round all that stuff, you know that as well as I do. All it takes is a little . . .'

The Finance Director shook what he had recently nodded. ‘And there's such a thing as being too bloody clever for your own good, Steve. You'd do well to remember that.' He rubbed the bridge of his beak with a thoughtful claw, and continued; ‘If they think we're not fulfilling the public service part of the deal . . .'

‘But we are.'

‘I'm not so sure.'

‘Neither am I,' interrupted the Production Director. ‘Take the perjury business, for instance. We could have got in serious schtuck with that.'

‘I hadn't heard about any perjury stuff,' murmured the Finance Director, tapping the edge of the table with his offside front wing. ‘Sounds interesting.'

The Production Director grinned unpleasantly, even for him. ‘I'll bet,' he said. ‘Look, in the franchise agreement it says, clause nine, sub-para three, all perjurers shall be broken on the wheel, right?'

‘Right,' agreed the Finance Director. ‘Standard procedure, it's what we've been doing for years. So?'

‘So this dangerous clown here only had the whole department cleared out and fifty roulette tables put in. If I hadn't found out about three days before the last random check . . .'

‘I still don't know what you're getting so uptight about,' growled the Sales Director. ‘A wheel's a wheel, right? And I can guarantee the whole lot of them were broke by the time . . .'

He subsided under the glare of the Finance Director's six beady red eyes, and took a sudden interest in the pencil on the table in front of him.

‘That,' said the Finance Director, ‘is definitely going too far. As,' he added sharply, ‘is this idea of changing the name of the place to Netherglades Theme Park. How the hell am I meant to explain that to the inspectors, Steve? A smear campaign by the printers?'

The Sales Director sniffed - quite an achievement, considering. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘Even a bunch of blinkered, concrete-brained civil servants is going to realise the importance of image in a business like this. You honestly believe the punters are going to be able to relate to the image we've got at the moment? I mean, would you fork out good money if you thought you were going to get your lungs ripped out with a blunt meathook?'

‘But that's the business we're in, Steve.'

The Sales Director waved an impatient talon. ‘So are an awful lot of people, Norman, that's not the point. The point is, you can torture the punters and roast them alive and coop them up in confined spaces indefinitely and flay them on spits and they'll still fall over themselves to give you money, just so long as you can convince them it's fun. That's what the holiday industry's all about, Norman. Just so long as your image is okay . . .'

‘I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one for the time being,' said the Finance Director smoothly. ‘I mean, there's obviously good arguments on both sides. Yes, we have to watch our backs as far as the inspectors are concerned. On the other hand, we've got a bloody good compliance record as far as everything else is concerned. Like, you know, waiting lists cut, catering costs reduced by half, maintenance schedules improved, security as good as ever . . .'

There was a soft cough from his left. If the Head of Security had had a head, he'd have shaken it.

‘To a certain extent, yes,' he muttered.

The Finance Director turned round sharply, and his horns twitched; a sure sign of impending trouble.

‘What do you mean, a certain extent?' he demanded. ‘Look, either nobody's escaped or . . .'

‘I was coming to that.'

 

As the echo of the report died away, a faint breeze dissipated the remaining wisps of smoke, revealing that (against all the odds) the Vampire King was still on his feet.

‘Hmm,' he croaked. ‘I'm not sure how many points you score for that.'

On the other side of the valley, Kurt ‘Mad Dog' Lundqvist blinked, swore quietly under his breath, and reached into his top pocket for another silver bullet. Nothing. Just a compass, a pearl-handled switchblade and a roll of peppermints.

‘Oh-
kay
,' he called out. ‘You want to do this the hard way, that's fine by me.'

A few minutes later they were facing each other,
mano a mano
in the sand. Lundqvist could see that the Vampire King was sweating now, his face more than usually drawn, his teeth protruding just a telltale smidgen more. All the King could see was the flash of the noon sun on Lundqvist's mirror Ray-Bans.

‘Not like you to miss the heart at four hundred yards, Kurt,' muttered the King. It was intended as a taunt, but Lundqvist accepted it as a statement of fact; which, of course, it was.

‘It's this goddamn awful rifle,' he replied. ‘Comes of trying to do two jobs at once, I guess. You ready?'

The King backed away. ‘How do you mean, two jobs, exactly?'

‘I promised the guys at
Terminator Monthly
I'd do a write-up on the new McMillan .30. Nothing like actually testing the bugger in the field, I always say. Ready yet?'

The Vampire King looked round. He was six hundred years old, completely invulnerable to anything except silver bullets and fire-hardened yew, with the strength in his hideously attenuated body of nine rogue elephants. He was also shit scared.

‘We don't have to do this, you know,' he mumbled. ‘We can just walk away, and . . .'

Lundqvist shook his head; a tiny, precise movement. The peak of his cap came up level with the King's third nipple. He tested the balance of the mallet in his right hand.

‘Sorry, Vlad,' he said. ‘A contract's a contract. Nothing personal.'

Maybe the King's mistake was to try and rush him, or maybe he didn't make a mistake at all. When you've met your match, that's it; no shame, no dishonour, just the natural course of events. In any case, there was a short blur of activity, a thud, the hollow sound of mallet-head on stake. And that was that.

As six vindictive centuries caught up with the Vampire King, he raised his head one last time and tried to give Lundqvist the stare. All that happened was that he got the stare back, with interest.

‘Just tell me, Kurt,' he croaked with the last of his breath. ‘Why the hell do you do it?'

‘The money, Vlad. So long.'

When it was all finally over, Lundqvist got to his feet, wiped the stake off on a patch of couch grass and stuck it back in his belt. There were times, he realised, when the job did get to him, although he found it hard to admit it to himself. Not the danger, of course, or the incessant conflict with hideous and unnatural monsters, or the mind-bending horrors he came face to face with every day of his life. Certainly not the killing. When a man is tired of killing, he's tired of life.

No, Lundqvist said to himself as he tucked the vampire's severed head under his arm, shouldered the rifle and started the long walk back to the jeep, I guess what really bothers me most is the lack of excitement.

 

The Most Wanted Man in History, wishing to get from Iceland to Holland and having no transport of his own, had hitched a lift. Nothing unusual in that, except that he'd hitched it off an airliner.

Since there's virtually nowhere in Iceland where you can put down a 747 without breaking bits off it, the fugitive had left it hovering about four feet off the ground, on a cushion of pink cloud. With a little grunt of effort, he jumped up, caught the pilot's door, wrenched it open and swung inside the cabin.

‘Hi,' he said cheerfully. ‘Thanks for stopping.'

The pilot looked at him, eyes rimed over with incredulous terror. What he wanted to say was, Who are you, what's happening, have you the faintest idea what's going to happen to me when the federal aviation boys found out I dumped my plane in a volcanic desert just because some guy stuck his thumb out. What actually came out was, ‘I can take you as far as Schiphol if that's any good to you.'

‘Schiphol's fine,' replied the fugitive, dropping his rucksack on the floor and flopping into the wireless operator's chair. ‘Thanks a lot.'

Without the pilot's having to do anything, the engines roared, the idiot lights on the console flickered into angry, bewildered life, and the pink cloud slowly floated up to around about ten thousand feet. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

The wireless operator and the co-pilot took an early lunch.

‘Going far?' the pilot asked, as the plane resumed its flight. He was dimly aware of a heavy, oppressive force lying across large areas of his mind like a sleeping cat on the knees of an impatient visitor, blanking off those parts of his brain that might want to raise such issues as what in God's name is going on here. Dimly aware, however, butters no parsnips.

‘Just bumming around, really,' the fugitive replied. ‘And Amsterdam's as good a place as any for that, as far as I'm concerned.'

Another thought that was hammering vainly on the locked door of the pilot's consciousness was, Hang on, why am I taking this nerd to Amsterdam when this flight's supposed to be going to Geneva? It hammered and hammered and hammered, and nobody came.

‘Very much a fun place, Amsterdam, from what I've heard,' the pilot's voice agreed. ‘Not that I've been there for, oh, fifteen years, I suppose. Not to stop, anyway. Been travelling long?'

Flight AR675, Flight AR675, come in please, urgent, come in, please
, yammered the radio. Sundry captives in the coal cellar of the pilot's mind tried using a big chunk of basic survival instinct as a battering ram, but all they did was hurt their shoulders.

‘I move about,' replied the fugitive, looking out of the window at the North Sea. ‘Born under a wandering star, that sort of thing.'

The pilot turned to his passenger. ‘Should I answer that, do you think? They seem rather uptight about something.'

‘I shouldn't bother,' the fugitive replied. ‘They'll call back later if it's important.'

‘I guess so.' The pilot leant forward and twiddled a dial on the console. The voice of Oslo air traffic control was abruptly replaced by Radio Oseberg's Music Through The Night. By virtue of some sort of ghastly air bubble in the stream of probability, they were playing ‘Riders In The Sky'.

‘Do you know,' said the pilot after a while, ‘something tells me that if we carry on this course much longer we'll be violating Swedish airspace. Do you think they'll mind?'

‘I don't think so,' replied the fugitive firmly. ‘Nice people, the Swedes.'

- At which point, two massively-armed Saab Viggens were scrambled out of Birka and screamed like stainless steel banshees north-east on a direct interception course -

‘Very expensive country, though,' the pilot was saying. ‘I had to buy a pair of shoes there once, and do you know how much they cost? Just ordinary black lace-up walking shoes, nothing fancy . . .'

‘You don't say.'

‘And coffee's absolutely astronomical, of course. Not so bad in the little back-street cafes and things, of course, but in the hotels . . .'

Ernidentified ercraft, ernidentified ercraft, here is calling the Svensk er force. Turn beck immediately or down you will be shot. Repeat, down you will be
. . .

‘Would you like me to talk to them?' suggested the fugitive.

‘Gosh, would you mind? That's extremely kind of you.'

‘No problem.'

 

The pilot of Gamma Delta Alpha Five Three Nine set his jaw, repeated the message one last time for luck, and programmed the weapons systems. First, a five-round burst from the twin twenty-mil Oerlikons, then a couple of heat-seekers, and then back home in time for a quick beer before the press conferences.

Calling Gamma Delta Alpha Five Three Nine, come in please
.

The pilot was a relatively humane man, but he couldn't help just the tiniest twinge of disappointment, deep down in the nastier bits of his repressed psyche.
Receiving you, ernidentified ercraft. Turn beck immediately or
. . .

The radio crackled.
Yes, thanks
, it said.
Do you know your flies are undone?

Proof, if proof were needed, that technology has outgrown the ability of Mankind to control it. At the end of the day, even a really first-class piece of state-of-the-art hardware needs a human to steer it, and that human must inevitably be subject to fundamental human instinctive behaviour; such as, for example, quickly glancing down to check his zip. But in the third of a second that takes, a modern class one fighter bomber can get seriously out of hand . . .

‘Good Lord,' exclaimed the pilot of the 747, ‘that fighter nearly crashed into that other fighter. Whoops!'

‘Butterfingers,' agreed the fugitive.

‘I do hope they'll be all right.'

‘I expect so. Marvellous things, ejector seats.'

‘You wouldn't get me in one of those things without one.'