“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to tie this blindfold across your eyes, and I don’t want you kicking me in the balls when I do it.”
“But… if I’m blindfolded, how will I be able to take you?”
“Fair point. Force of habit,” Oates said, pointing to the packing tie. “We used a lot of these in the army.”
With Oates now holding Carlos’s gun in his back, the two of them trudged on down into the bowels of the city.
T
HEY BRANCHED OFF
the disused tube tunnel into a service shaft. From there, Carlos indicated a metal door, the hinges rusted but glistening with fresh black grease. A short ladder led them down into the first of the sewers. A rill of foul water ran along the curved base, and coagulated lumps of fat and toilet paper clung to the walls. The air made Oates gag. The ceiling was so low he had to bend almost double, and still he scraped his bald patch on the dripping bricks. The heat of human enterprise in the city above had sunk into the ground, and he was sweating under his body armour. He wanted to wipe the moustache of perspiration from his lip, but with gloved hands filthy from the walls he didn’t trust himself to touch his face. The beam of the torch jumped about in the blackness as he struggled to keep his footing. The pipe went on for perhaps thirty metres, but it seemed to Oates as if he had been travelling through that Stygian gloom for a good while when they finally came to the end.
The second sewer was broader. There was a ledge along the side, but the Victorian brickwork was still coated with grease, and it was all he could do not to slip into the murky stream below. From the smell and debris as much as his sense of direction, he reckoned they must be under Chinatown. He could hear the scuttling of rats in the dark. His guide was nimble and Oates struggled to keep up. At the back of his mind was the distant fear that if the man ahead contrived to lose him, he might never find his way back out.
He was more grateful than he cared to admit when they reached a new set of passages, different from both the nineteenth century sewers and from the service tunnels of the tube. The walls here were made up of the skinny bricks of Roman masonry. The floor beneath his feet was lined with slabs of good stone. The passage radiated the sheer age of London, the great history that made the riots above seem no more than the ancient city turning over in its sleep. In the distance, he could hear the sound of a river running underground.
“So you were in the army, yeah?” Carlos said to him. It was the first thing he had said since Oates had taken his gun.
“Yes.”
“And you were in combat?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In the Middle East.”
“Were you…”
“What?”
“S.A.S.?”
Oates almost laughed out loud, but managed to catch himself. Of course Carlos would want to think he had been defeated by some special forces ninja.
What the hell. If he wants to save face, and have a story to tell his mates which doesn’t make him look a pillock, why not?
“I can’t really talk about it,” Oates said, in the voice of portentous mystery he used when winding up Mike and Harry. “We did a lot of things that are… classified.”
Carlos nodded, suitably impressed.
“I won’t tell no one.”
“Good.”
The silence that slotted back into place after this exchange was almost companionable. Some minutes later, they came to a junction lined with fresh steel pipes.
“We have to stop here.”
“Why?”
“There are guards on the doors up ahead. You need to give them a signal so’s they know you’re coming.”
“What signal?”
Carlos nodded his head towards a large spanner leaning against the wall of the tunnel.
“Bang on the pipes. There’s a code, I can do it but not with my hands tied.”
Oates considered the request, and concluded that Carlos was sufficiently docile to be released. He had internalised the makeshift handcuffs on their long trudge through the sewers, and wasn’t likely to try anything. Particularly not when he was unarmed, and in the presence of a lethal S.A.S. commando. Oates turned him round, and split the ties with a swift jerk of his knife. Carlos rubbed the red rings around his wrists and rolled his shoulders.
Carlos stooped for the big spanner. He brought the metal tool down hard on the pipes, sending a pattern of distinct strikes clanging around the corner of the tunnel into the gloom. Oates watched, gun still trained on Carlos but held light as a dowsing rod, ready to twitch in the direction of the gap ahead if anything emerged from the darkness. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then someone beat on the pipes in answer.
There were two distinct sounds, one the original strike conducted through the air, the second the reverberations of the metal conduits. They mingled and masked one another, so that it was impossible to tell how far away the sentries were placed. They could be a hundred metres away, or just around the corner. Carlos gave the pipes a last hammer blow, as if for luck, and the two of them set off again down the tunnels.
It was the light he saw first. A curtain hung across an opening in the passage ahead, but it was full of holes, and little circles of light lay on it like coins on a table cloth. No one came out to meet them, but they could hear sounds coming from behind it. An indistinct mix of voices and machinery.
Oates could see how the posters and t-shirts of Dwayne had been produced so quickly. There were banks of printers down here, some larger presses for posters, and a couple of grubby photocopiers. Somewhere he was willing to bet he would find the 3D printer that had given the boy the gun that got him killed. Against one wall were stacks of placards attached to wooden handles, some bearing Dwayne’s face, some bearing the faces of various politicians with devil’s horns or similar adornments, some bearing slogans of Mortal Reform. One of the photocopiers was still spitting out warm leaflets. The automated motion was eerie in the empty room. The place felt not empty, but deserted.
The photocopying stopped abruptly. It had been masking a recorded voice emerging from speakers standing on a desk.
“The real mystery of modern democracy is that people continue to vote against their own best interests. Since the late 1980s in the United Kingdom, voters have continually given their support to parties promising low rates of taxation on the very richest, and have punished any party proposing wealth or land taxes, despite the fact that they themselves would not pay these taxes, and would benefit greatly from the improved public services such taxes would fund. This apparent contradiction can be explained when we consider the optimism and individualism propagated by consumer society. As children we are taught to believe in the inevitability of our own success, and as adults we vote to support not the class we are in, but the class to which we aspire and to which we feel we belong by right, if not in fact. Part of the difficulty in effecting democratic change exists because to do so involves an assault on this sense of self-worth. This sense of self-worth is no less potent for being based on a fallacy. The phenomenon is greatly exaggerated in the matter of the Treatment, for in voting against the interests of the new-young, the voter must accept not only the certainty of their own continuing poverty, but also the certainty of death. Failing to acquire the Treatment is, after all, the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. This is why we have come to believe that only direct action
–
”
Christ, not more bloody politics.
Oates advanced towards the computer to shut it off. Carlos was still hanging back by the entrance. Oates was striding forward, reaching out for the switch, when the ground beneath him disappeared. He felt his weight shift instictively as his front foot came down on air, but it was too late. His momentum carried him forward, his arms flailed at the large greasy cloth that had been stretched over the hole in the floor, and in a panic he felt his whole big body plummet down into darkness.
W
HEN HE CAME
to, the first thing he saw was Carlos’s face grinning down at him through the hatch in the roof. That suggested he had been only briefly stunned. He did a quick inventory of his limbs. He must have landed well, everything worked without too much complaint. He heard the sound of something skidding across the floor beside him, and turned his head. He was eye to toe with a steel-capped boot. Looking past it, he saw someone stoop to pick up the gun the boot had just kicked away from him. He could still hear the politics coming faintly from the speakers in the room above. Booby-trapping something you’d want to touch, that was a proper paramilitary trick. He chided himself for a lapse in his instincts.
The boots belonged to a tough looking woman in her thirties carrying a sawn off shotgun. There were a couple of other men in the room similarly armed. This was more like it. Oates actually felt grateful. He might have to come after some of these people one day if they kept going the way they were going. And if he made it out alive, of course. He didn’t need the extra guilt of thinking they were all like Carlos and the kid he had shot in the mall.
The room into which he had fallen contained, in addition to the heavies, a bare mattress with faded stains, and a series of crates. Taking up almost the whole of one wall was an ancient map of the tunnels marked as the property of the Metropolitan Water Authority. Over the old blue ink of the pipe system, later hands had drawn in more pipes and conduits in red and black and green ink, crossing out some of the old tunnels, here and there scrawling words and dimensions and tidal timings in twenty different scripts. The whole thing looked like the art project of some particularly gifted primary school class.
In front of the map stood the girl who had stolen the file from him. She was wearing a grubby white vest and tracksuit bottoms, and towelling dry her wet hair.
“This the bloke from the New Change?” the tough looking woman said to the girl.
“That’s him. He shot Dwayne.”
“You’re Lara, right?” Oates said to the woman.
“How did you know where to find me?”
“A man came to talk to me. After the shooting. He said he was in internal investigations, but I think he was a spook. He seemed to think I might be able to get that file back off you.”
One of the blokes holding a shotgun laughed at this, but Lara didn’t.
“He reckoned you were going to use it as a bargaining chip,” Oates said.
“Just goes to show,” she said.
“How do you mean?”
“They’re all about the bargaining.”
“Then why did you let me come down?”
“Hector sent a few pages from the file over to United before we got to you. We want them. We thought you might have them.”
Oates heard a click behind him. He knew what it was without having to turn around. It could have been the hammers on one of the shotguns, but his money was on Carlos’s pistol.
“There’s no need for that,” he said.
He stood up gingerly. His left ankle protested at his weight, and the knock to his head had rattled his brains. He pulled the pages from his pocket, and handed them to Lara. She took them, read through them briefly, and then removed a lighter from her pocket. She set fire to the corner and, when they were going, laid them down on the stone floor to burn out. As the fire died down, she looked quizzically at Oates.
“You don’t seem that bothered.”
“I’m not. I’m not here for the research. I’m trying to find out who killed Prudence Egwu.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“It wasn’t us if that’s what you were thinking. I’d be speaking to your spook.”
“What was in his research?”
“Right. Like I’d tell you.”
“I think it might help me to understand why he died,” Oates said. “I brought you what you wanted. Help me.”
“Help you, yeah? Do you reckon we should snitch?” She addressed this to the other heavies.
“You hate Nottingham, right?” Oates asked.
She didn’t contradict him.
“So help me to hurt them. If someone at Nottingham was involved with Prudence Egwu’s death, I won’t let them get away.”
She looked around the circle. No one made any sign. She shrugged, and turned back to Oates.
“It was a process called MRT. Memory Replacement Therapy. About how to forget who you are. Capability Egwu was trying to find a way. You go to sleep one day as one guy, and you wake up in the morning as some new guy. He used to meet with the Mortal Reformers, did you know that? He helped us to campaign for inheritance tax changes, sentencing changes, all that stuff. Back at the beginning. I think he hated what he was.”
“I don’t understand, forget? Forget what?”
Lara walked up to him, and took his hands in hers. She looked up into his face, and spoke very softly. In part, she was addressing him as if he was an idiot, a child. But in the physical contact, there was an intimacy which existed alongside the mockery, a connection of his own disgust with hers.
“Forget who you are. Forget what you’ve done. If this thing had worked, they would have been able to escape it all. They wouldn’t have to pay for anything anymore, not even in their souls. They’d get to live and do terrible things and get rich, and then at the end they’d pay to be someone young and new, with a clean conscience. With no memory of the things they’ve done. They wouldn’t have to live with themselves. That’s the last check left, that’s the only thing keeping any last shred of fairness in this world. If Nottingham or anyone else had managed to put together Capability’s research, that would be gone. Do you understand? That’s why we were willing to kill you for it. That’s why your spook wants it.”
“But if what you’re saying is true… why would Nottingham kill Prudence? Why wouldn’t they just take what he had? It doesn’t make any sense…”
And in that instant, he knew who had killed Prudence Egwu. It was like the light coming on in a room through which he had been groping his way, trying to identify the objects by touch, trying not to hurt himself in the dark. The intensity of illumination dazzled him, but as his mind cleared he saw all the facts of the case, sitting just where he had encountered them in the dark.