Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (41 page)

‘Very well.’

‘Come alone, Bar. Just you and the RACdroid.’

‘No, my dear man, no! Come alone into your lion’s den? You think I don’t know how
many
people you have killed? No. I shall bring four people with me, to protect my
tender flesh against your glass knifeblade.’

‘You can bring two,’ said Iago.

‘Four.’

The hologram vanished. The conversation was at an end.

‘Iago,’ Diana said. ‘Jack, I mean – you’re not really thinking of giving yourself up to him? You heard what he said!’

‘Right now,’ he said, glancing over at Sapho, ‘the choices are: either I go with them or everybody inside this bubble dies.’

‘Only Ra’allah can help us now,’ said Sapho.

‘I need to know how they found us!’ Iago said. ‘I make it my business not to be found, and yet – here they are.’ He looked at his two companions. ‘Don’t
worry about me; I’ve escaped from prison before. I can do it again.’

4

The End of Bar-le-duc

Bar-le-duc’s sloop was much larger than the
Red Rum
. Diana, Iago and Sapho watched it manoeuvre cumbrously to present one of its doors to the little craft’s
rear lock. It was not well done. At one point the flank of the sloop banged against the walls of the house, causing the whole structure to deform and bulge, ringing with a resonant, deep
boing
sound and shaking leaves and debris into the central space to float and swirl.

‘Steady!’ muttered Iago.

But eventually it was done. The great sword-shaped length of the police sloop dominated the view from the house windows; a fat tangent line drawn off the curve of the sphere. The sound of
Red
Rum
’s back door being opened echoed around the space.

‘Here they come,’ muttered Iago.

The first thing to emerge from the airlock was the RACdroid itself; a circular silverblue face, blankly inexpressive, above an ovoid torso and four flexible gel limbs; it clambered into the
sphere and made its way along one of the guy-cables, stopping halfway along. Bar-le-duc came next. In person he was a tall, distinguished-looking man. His long hair floated distractingly bouffant
in zero-gravity and perhaps his features were slightly too large for his pale brown face. But his triangular wedge of a nose was certainly impressively aristocratic-looking, and his eyes had an
eagle’s directness. He was carrying a gun which he kept unerringly directed at Iago as he negotiated the airlock and came into the larger space. ‘Jack!’ he said, smiling. But then
his face grew stern. ‘Three of you? I thought it was just you and Ms Argent?’

‘Your sources are not infallible, then,’ said Iago. ‘I’m pleased to hear that. This is Sapho. She’s no threat to you.’

‘Ra’allah protect us,’ muttered Sapho.

‘No
threat
?’ repeated Bar-le-duc. ‘Well, well, perhaps so. Nonetheless, I must ask you, Ms Sapho, to
go away
– go over there, to where those purple-leaved
bushes are. Stay visible, if you please, but do remove yourself from my immediate vicinity. I will shoot you if you make any sudden moves – believe me.’

‘I believe you,’ said Sapho, and pulled herself along a guy-rope until she reached the wall over by Bar-le-duc’s left. When he was happy she was far enough away, he called to
her to stop.

Meanwhile, Bar-le-duc’s four figures (all men) were coming through one after the other. Diana’s heart was beating more rapidly. It was actually happening. It was
really
happening. She had no weapon; and she could not see how Iago could take on
five
armed and trained commandos. It was starting to look as though he was actually going to be taken into custody.
And then, what followed? Hadn’t Bar-le-duc said it himself? The authorities would dismantle him organ by organ, in a waterfall of blood, to get at what was in his head. ‘Iago,’
she said, urgently. ‘What shall we do?’

‘We shall stay calm,’ said Iago, levelly.

‘Good advice, Ms Argent,’ said Bar-le-duc. He kicked off gently from a guy-cable, and floated through plain air towards them. Ten metres away to the left, a little below them, the
RACdroid perched, recording everything.

‘I brought the droid, as you can see,’ said Bar-le-duc. ‘Though now that we’re
here
, I’m not sure we really need it.’

‘This is the deal,’ said Iago, in a clear, loud voice, for the benefit of the Droid. ‘It takes the form of a contract. You, Bar-le-duc, agree, by the legal powers invested in
you, to let Ms Diana Argent go free. You will leave her in this place with her companion, Sapho, and the functioning space sloop currently docked – the ship is called the
Red Rum 2020
.
Both the two of them, and the ship, are specifically identified in this contract. You agree to leave this sphere and this ship in good order,
and
you agree to leave both Ms Argent and her
friend unmolested, cleared of legal taint. In return, I agree to go with you without violence.’

‘
No
violence,’ repeated Bar-le-duc, forcefully.

‘None. I contract to make no assault upon you, your men or your equipment, and to accompany you to whichever destination you choose.’

‘I could simply take you, Jack,’ said Bar-le-duc, wagging a finger.

‘You could try,’ said Iago. ‘But you cannot afford to kill me, since you need what is in my head. And I am very skilled at causing death and damage to other human beings. This
means I could make the passage very . . . troublesome for you.’

Bar-le-duc looked at him. His eyes, a striking violet-blue, neither blinked nor wavered. ‘And if I agree to your contract?’

‘Then I shall come with you, as I have specified, and do you no harm. The details are in the RACdroid now.’

‘RACdroids can be destroyed,’ Bar-le-duc said.

‘If that happens then Ms Argent’s legal immunity is destroyed too. Believe me, that’s the last thing I want to happen. So I have no incentive to do you any harm, or to damage
the droid. I’m proposing to legally link
my
good behaviour to
her
immunity. That is the contract. Do you agree to it?’

After a pause, Bar-le-duc said: ‘yes.’ Then speaking more loudly, for the benefit of the droid, he said: ‘I, André Bar-le-duc, contract as Jack Glass has
specified.’

‘Iago,’ said Diana. ‘You can’t go with him. You’re going to your own death!’

‘It looks like a heroic gesture, doesn’t it?’ said Bar-le-duc, speaking not with sarcastic mockery, but rather with a dignified and mournful precision. ‘Self-sacrifice.
But I have known Jack for longer than you. He is planning something – he has something up his sleeve. Isn’t that so Jack?’

‘All I care about,’ said Iago, ‘is that Diana’s legal immunity is assured.’ He was looking at each of the men Bar-le-duc had brought in, one after the other, as if
sizing them up. But what could he possibly do? All were armed, trained, and loyal to their master – their loyalty reinforced with CRFs.

‘It is done,’ said Bar-le-duc. ‘The RACdroid has the contract. I must say, Jack, this has gone smoother than I thought it might.’

Diana felt panic rising inside her. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said.

‘You are free, Diana,’ Iago said. But he didn’t look at her.

Bar-le-duc shook his head. ‘It’s poor form of you, Jack – toying with this girl’s heart!’

‘Oh,
what
do you mean?’ Iago snapped at him. ‘Don’t talk nonsense.’ He sounded genuinely annoyed.

Bar-le-duc, addressed Diana. ‘Ms Argent, my dear,’ he said. ‘Believe me when I tell you: Jack Glass looks at people in the way an artist or an architect looks at his raw
materials. He is not interested in them – in you – he is only interested in what he can
do
with them, with you. Now, perhaps he feels that what he is going to do with these
people, these trillions of human beings,
is
worthwhile, or virtuous, or in the service of the greater good. Maybe he genuinely thinks so! But it seems to me that this does not excuse his
behaviour. Means do not justify the end. People must not be used as tools. They must, rather, be treated as people.’

‘You intend to treat
me
as a person, do you?’ said Iago, evidently annoyed by this lecture.

‘That
is
different. You know it, just as I do. I serve justice, and the law – order. If we did not have strict and just punishment for transgression, then what would we . .
.’

That was the precise moment Bar-le-duc was cut in two – slain, killed, destroyed.

Everything inside the bubble went crazy. Explosive decompression. All the air inside the globe convulsed with a great recursive lurch.

Diana was wrenched and dragged sideways. She wheeled dizzyingly full circle and kept on spinning. The abrupt rapidity of the motion threw her arms and legs out, starfishwise.

Chaos.

It was chaos, and old night.

Despite the unexpected suddenness Diana instantly understood what was going on. As she shot through the air and bounced hard against the fabric of the bubble, knocking the breath from her, she
realised that the side of the bubble had split open. She realised that Bar-le-duc’s torso had been turned into an expanding cloud of red droplets.

Uh!

There was something more, immediately before the explosion, something else. Who was it said it originally? – Shakespeare was it? Searching her bId-less memory for the source of the
quotation, she alighted on Shakespeare:
the code got all weird
. That was the best way she could think of describing it. She felt some strangeness, some occlusion in her ability not just to
process but even to
parse
reality. For a moment, reality had acquired the unmistakeable flavour of a Worldtuality; before snapping (almost
tangibly
snapping) back to actual reality. A
bulge, or shrinkage; fear clutching the brain. Perhaps, she thought, it was her own senses, so finely tuned, so thoroughly bred into her. They gave her an intimation that this thing was about to
happen. And it did.

Somebody had shot Bar-le-duc with a piece of heavy ordnance. This had literally, and horribly, chopped his body in two. The shot had broken in through the wall of the bubble – and smashed
the docked sloop in half too. Using goddess-alone-knew-what advanced targeting technology, somebody
outside
the bubble had locked onto Bar-le-duc, and fired a superfast projectile through
the wall of the globe
right through him
.

Almost as pressing a question as
who
? was –
how
? But more pressing than either was: what shall we do to stop this haemorrhage of air?

Diana saw that she was being sucked towards the breach in the wall of the globe. She saw three of Bar-le-duc’s men wriggling in flight, all pulled along the same trajectory. The fourth man
was nowhere to be seen. He had been standing, she recalled, near where the gash in the side of the wall now was, so presumably he had been obliterated.

Whirlwind.

The RACdroid was leaning in their direction, although it had anchored itself automatically to the guy-cable.

Sapho, weirdly parti-coloured – sprayed red down one side only – was flying at a tangent to Diana. Dia saw her land in amongst the threshing bushes, waving her arms to absorb the
impact, and struggling to hold on.

The vagaries of the impact had thrown Iago in the
opposite
direction to the breach – Diana saw him disappear into the miniature forest. Like Sapho, he looked as though a spray gun
had coated him with a fine mist of red paint.

That red had been Bar-le-duc, moments before.

It occurred to Diana that Iago must be being sucked out of the
second
hole. Because there must be an exit breach to correspond to the entry point. The projectile having entered and
bisected the globe must have punched through on the far side – that was why Iago was sucked away in that direction. That meant his death. He had vanished; he must be floating airless and
blasted in empty vacuum. But it meant
their
deaths too – no globe this size could survive two major breaches. The air would drain like water through a sieve. They had moments, only,
left.

They were all going to die. The thought crystallised briefly in Diana’s mind: Iago said
this
was the choice! To go with Bar-le-duc, or for everybody to die.

She collided against the side of the sphere with enough force to punch the air out of her lungs. Rebound-bounced. Span three sixty. She caught sight of one of Bar-le-duc’s men vanishing
into the projectile’s entry-hole. The fellow threw his arms wide, his face a rictus of panic, and clawed at the lip of the hole, trying to hold on. But the sides were slippery, the curved
edge of the gash worked against him, and the force of air too strong. He scrabbled for a moment, and then he was gone. As she hurtled diagonally across the mouth of the hole Diana saw, briefly,
right down it – into a chaos of swirling spaceship metal fragments and rubbish, and beyond that into blackness.

A hole in the fabric of the world and all air and heat and life swooshing through it.

All around her people were yelling; their mouths working and flexing. She could even, just about, hear the wah-wah-wah of their words, though smothered and distorted beyond comprehension by the
huge noise of gushing air.

A second impact, cushioned by the foliage. Diana clung to the springy branches, and felt the whole stretch of bush heave as if about to come away from the wall. But it stayed where it was, and
she clung for her life. The two remaining Bar-le-duc men had found similar gripping points.

As she turned her head to scan the chaos inside the dome, she saw something massy and angular fly through the air. This object, whatever it was, struck one of the two men on the head. The
collision deflected it only marginally – it was clearly very massy – and it zoomed towards the breach.

Had it reached the gap face on, it would have slipped straight through. But Providence, or the goddess, determined that it reached the gap in such an orientation that its angular corners jammed
in the aperture. The ambient roar of air changed timbre, rose a little. The wall bulged; but the obstacle stayed put.