Redlaw - 01 (33 page)

As if out of nowhere a half-brick came sailing through the air, and struck him on the forehead. Qureshi staggered and sank to his knees.

“Car,” said Khalid. “Back to the car.” He grabbed his colleague by the arm, hoisted him to his feet, and was off, hauling a rubbery-legged Qureshi with him. The Stokers and PETS protestors gave chase.

The two shadies almost made it to safety. They were within yards of the car when they were overtaken. Redlaw looked on with no small satisfaction as their pursuers dragged them to the ground and doled out a good kicking.

“‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord,” he growled.

“Well, vengeance is Redlaw’s, at any rate,” said Illyria. “I’m not so certain the Lord would approve. I think you went a tad Old Testament there.”

“Khalid had it coming. Anyway, look. Those riot squadders are wading in to help. Law enforcement solidarity.”

Sure enough, Support Group police had spotted the SHADE officers’ plight and were going to their aid. Batons rose and fell as they worked their way through the milling crowd to Khalid and Qureshi at the centre. They plucked the two of them out like prizes from a piñata and escorted them off to the sidelines within a stockade of polycarbonate shields. Both men were bruised, bloodied and bedraggled, and Qureshi was quivering and weeping in abject terror.

“It’s almost like you knew that would happen,” said Illyria.

“I didn’t, as a matter of fact,” Redlaw replied. “I was rather hoping they’d get beaten to within an inch of their lives—Khalid maybe an inch the other side.”

“And here’s you telling me to hurt people as little as possible. Double standards, eh what?”

“This was a special case.” Redlaw sidestepped as a PETS man came howling past with a stocky Stoker hot on his heels. “Anyway, we should make ourselves scarce. This isn’t the safest of places to be.”

They hadn’t gone more than a few paces before they were confronted by a wall of advancing riot police. These were reinforcements, part of a secondary call-up, newly arrived. They were moving into the square en masse, with a view to herding the rioters towards the north-west corner and ‘kettling’ them in Great George Street. Another, similar-sized contingent was marching north up Millbank to do the same. All wore full-face gas masks.

Redlaw paused, quickly weighing his options.

From behind the ranks of police came a series of hollow, fluting detonations, the sound of CS gas canisters being launched. Moments later, clouds of white vapour bloomed in the square, spreading swiftly.

“I’ll barge a hole straight through,” Illyria said, gesturing towards the riot squadders. “We’ll be out the other side in a jiffy.”

“No. There’s an alternative.”

“I don’t see one.”

“There.” He indicated the Houses of Parliament.

“We walk up to the gate and ask them to let us in?”

“Can’t hurt to try.”

The gas was drifting towards them in a thickening haze. Redlaw bunched his coat cuff over his nose and mouth and hurried towards the building’s main entrance. By the time he got there his eyes were streaming and his nostrils were dripping something that felt like acid. He thrust his SHADE badge through the bars of the gate and waved it at the police officers stationed on the other side—the Met’s Parliamentary security team, all of them armed with semiautomatic carbines.

“Let us in, for God’s sake!”

“Sir,” said one of the police officers, “please step back.”

“We’re just bystanders. Do we look like we came here to protest?”

“This is a restricted area. We’re on a state of high alert. Without proper authorisation, no one gets in.”

“But I’m SHADE.”

The policeman looked anything but impressed. “Don’t care if you’re the Queen of ruddy Sheba, mate. Now back off.” He hefted his gun ever so slightly. “I’m not carrying this thing for fun.”

“So much for law enforcement solidarity,” said Illyria to Redlaw. “We’re back to ‘barge a hole straight through,’ then.”

The riot squadders were closing in from both sides, the jaws of a human vice squeezing the Stokers and PETS protestors together. Out in the middle of the square, where the CS gas was thickest, people were crawling on their hands and knees, choking and retching.

“Perhaps...” Redlaw began, but then someone on the other side of the gate spoke his name.

“Captain Redlaw? That
is
Captain Redlaw, right?”

Redlaw blinked. His eyes stung so badly that everything was a tortured, swimming blur. He could just make out the face of the young man addressing him. It was a familiar one.

“Gentlemen,” the young man said to the police security team, “don’t you know who this is? Why are you making him stay out there where he could get his brains bashed in? Let him in. Now.”

“Will you vouch for him, sir?”

“Of course I bloody will. That’s Captain John Redlaw, living legend. Don’t know what he’s doing here, but he needs sanctuary. Open the gate.”

With a show of surly deference the policeman went to the gatehouse and pressed a switch. In no time Redlaw and Illyria were within the precincts of Parliament, safely separated from the turmoil in the square.

The young man stuck out a hand and gave Redlaw one of the tightest, firmest handshakes he’d ever known. His grip was almost painful.

“Giles Slocock,” he said. “MP for Chesham and Amersham and, as I’m sure you know, Shadow Spokesman for Sunless Affairs. Pleasure to finally meet you in person, Captain. Big fan of your work. Big, big fan.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Slocock led them across New Palace Yard and in through a surprisingly modest arched door, talking all the while.

“Something, isn’t it? I’ve seen fights before but never anything on so epic a scale. Everybody else in the House has been watching from the upstairs windows but I wanted to get out and have a really good look. Kind of a ringside seat. Close enough to smell the adrenaline. Those security cops kept telling me to get back indoors but I wasn’t having any of that. A classic piece of civil disorder going on right outside my workplace and I’m not going to check out the action for myself, first hand? I think not.”

He swept them along corridors with chessboard-pattern flooring and portraits of eminent statesmen of yesteryear frowning down from the walls. The walls and ceilings bristled with ornate carvings, like a stonemason’s fantasia, yet somehow the atmosphere remained coldly, echoingly austere.

“Talk about adversarial politics. Things might get rowdy in the debating chamber, but it’s nothing compared with out there. That, out there,
that’s
democracy in the raw. That’s left and right coming together and thrashing out their differences.”

He ushered them up a stone staircase, nodding deferentially to a pair of Lords who were peering out through a landing window, dressed in ordinary suits but carrying an unmistakable whiff of scarlet and ermine. They deigned to notice him and his companions.

“When sketch writers in the papers complain about us parliamentarians getting all ‘yah boo sucks’ across the despatch box, they forget that it could be so much worse. We’re relatively civilised. Out there’s what you’d get all the time if politicians weren’t around to represent people’s views. We keep the violence strictly verbal.”

He steered them into an office, his, a tiny untidy room whose windows looked out onto a narrow, ill-lit courtyard. He shut the door.

“Make yourselves at home.” He turned to Illyria. “I’m sorry, we haven’t been introduced...?”

“Illyria Strakosha.”

“Illyria. Lovely. The ancient name for Albania.”

“Very good. There aren’t many outside my country who know that.”

“Benefits of a reasonably expensive education.
Twelfth Night
, that’s set in Illyria, isn’t it? That’s where I remember it from. Our English teacher showed us Albania on a map, so we’d have some idea where the play’s supposed to take place. Not that it helped much. It’s all just fantasy land, is Shakespeare. Oh, and we did something in Classical Civilisation about the Illyrian Wars, which the Romans won, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Your parents’ money wasn’t wasted.”

Redlaw’s nostrils no longer felt as if they were lined with paint stripper, and his vision was clearing. He took a long, hard look at Slocock as the politician vaunted his knowledge of Illyria’s homeland, such as it was. Redlaw knew little about Giles Slocock beyond that he was famously dissolute and that he was proficient at some form of martial art. Macarthur hadn’t a kind word to say about him, but that was only to be expected—she hadn’t a kind word to say about most people, and politicians in particular grated with her. In his role as Shadow Spokesman for Sunless Affairs, Slocock had visited SHADE HQ a grand total of two times. On neither occasion had Redlaw been present, and he hadn’t felt that he’d missed much.

In the flesh, Slocock cut a more impressive figure than he did on television. His floppy-fringed haircut was a little too youthful for a man on the cusp of thirty, but the body beneath the not-cheap suit and shirt was compact and well-muscled. His hands had incredibly callused knuckles and there was a thick ridge of horny tissue along the outer edge of each palm. Even as he lounged with one buttock on his desk, he held himself with a louche grace, the posture of a man with absolute physical self-confidence. Only the broken capillaries in the whites of his eyes—there were a few too many of them—hinted at bad habits.

“So how come the two of you wound up embroiled in that mess?” Slocock enquired. “Take a wrong turn somewhere?”

Redlaw threw an acerbic glance at Illyria, which she blanked.

“We trusted to providence,” Illyria said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have.”

“Providence,” said Slocock. “Funny you should say that. Because actually it’s more than a little fortuitous that we’ve met, Captain Redlaw. May I call you John?”

“Don’t even try,” Illyria advised. “I don’t know what you have to do to be allowed to call him by his first name. Whatever it is, it’s a test I haven’t passed yet. Just stick with Redlaw.”

“Redlaw it is, then. You see, Redlaw, you and me, we have something in common.”

“We do?” said Redlaw.

“Not just a shared connection with the Night Brigade. Let me tell you what I know about your current situation. I know that you’re not technically
Captain
Redlaw any more. I know that you’re a fugitive. I know that you’ve lost your job.”

“You’re well informed.”

“Shouldn’t I be? Sunless Affairs is my brief. What goes on in SHADE, I have to keep on top of.”

“Hmm. I suppose.”

“I also know that the reason you’re out on your ear is you’ve been trying to pin the blame for the bloodlust riots on Nathaniel Lambourne. Without success.”

“So?”

“Well, he and I have a history.” Slocock’s face took on a sombre cast. He was no longer the genial, ebullient fellow of moments earlier. He was deadly earnest now. “A history that’s come to a sticky end. You want to nail the bastard to the wall? Let me help.”

Slocock outlined how he and Lambourne, having once been travellers on the same road, had come to a parting of the ways.

“Nathaniel helped me early in my career, there’s no denying,” he said. “Gave me a leg-up. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a mentor, but he was always there, introducing me to influential people, watching out for me, keeping potential enemies off my back. Everyone could do with a Nathaniel Lambourne in their corner if they want to get on in the world. I never thought there’d be any consequences. I thought I was using him. Turned out he was using me.”

Slocock looked at his hands. He appeared to be struggling with deep, contradictory emotions.

“I know a thing or two about addiction,” he said finally. “It’s well documented that I’m a substance abuser. The trouble with drugs is you think you’re in control. What you don’t realise, until it’s far too late and you’re too far in, is the drugs are in control. You’re their servant and there’s nothing you can do about it. Same with Lambourne. He had his hooks into me, and I was helpless. You’ve heard about Maurice Wax, I imagine.”

Redlaw shook his head.

“I’d have thought it was all over the mediasphere by now.”

“I’ve been busy. What of him?”

“He’s dead. Took his own life.”

“Good God.”

“Yes. And you know what drove him to it?”

“No.”

“Go on, hazard a guess.”

“Stress of work? Something to do with Solarville? Personal problems?”

“All of the above and none of the above,” said Slocock. “Me. I’m the cause. Lambourne forced me to apply pressure on him. No, not forced. I was perfectly willing. He supplied me with information to use on Wax so that the whole Solarville enterprise could be kick-started into action. He handed me a loaded gun and I pulled the trigger. I barely thought twice about it. He gave me all that was needed to ruin a man’s life, and it never even occurred to me to say ‘no.’ And then, after I’d done his dirty work for him, he treated me like I was something that had crawled out from under a rock. He felt contempt for me because I’d been so eager, so fucking puppy-dog thrilled, to do as he told me.”