The Administration Series (118 page)

"Oh, yes. Yes, he was. Very,
very
fucking sorry."

"
Good
." She'd worried during the long night that this thing he'd done for her might not make her feel any better after all. But it had. "Thanks," she added after a moment.

"Nothing to thank me for," he said, then stood up. "I've got to get to work. I'll be back later. I'll bring you some transcripts to keep you busy."

She heard him whistling as he went off down the corridor and smiled, ignoring the twinge in her lip. Christ, he really couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

Sara lay back and closed her eyes, the ring still in her hand. She'd smash it, probably, although it seemed a waste. She wouldn't like to own anything she bought with money from it. Maybe she could sell it, though, if she blew the money on something silly. She hadn't held a really good party for a while, with fizzy wine and decent bought-in stuff for nibbles.

She'd think of an excuse. The cat's birthday would do. She could invite all her work friends, and people from her building, and her sister and the childhood friends they still kept in touch with, and the assorted other acquaintances such as Cele, Warrick and Dillian. The flat was far too small, but maybe she could talk her neighbour into opening the connecting door again and letting it spill through. She'd paid him for the damage from the last time.

She was still planning when she fell asleep.

As the sun began to edge into the room, Warrick looked out of his living room window, searching the street below. Plenty of strolling Saturday-afternoon pedestrians, but not the one he wanted to see. Toreth was late. As an event, it rated in improbability somewhere around night following day and water flowing downhill. It wasn't even as if he was so consistently late that it was easy to plan around him. Anywhere between five minutes and an hour was perfectly likely. Occasionally, he was even early. That usually meant he wanted to fuck, though, and then they would be late, anyway.

To his annoyance, he caught himself smiling, spoiling the bad mood he'd rather been enjoying. Pity Toreth hadn't been early today.

For peace of mind, if they were required to be anywhere on time, Warrick had taken to giving himself fifteen minutes lead on the real time they needed to leave by, and then simply leaving without him if necessary. He was on the verge of doing precisely that when the comm chimed.

A call from Toreth's flat, which meant there was no chance of his getting here on time now. What would the excuse be this time? Something mildly creative, no doubt, since it was a Saturday. On a weekday it was usually work, because Toreth knew he wouldn't want details.

To his surprise, though, he heard Sara's voice, cutting in halfway through a sentence. " — hell are you? Come on, answer, come on, come on — "

"Sara?"

"Oh, thank Christ," she said, managing to sound relieved and panicky at the same time. "Is Toreth there?"

It couldn't be about anything else, of course. Their main topic of mutual concern. "No. He's late. He was supposed to be here a quarter of an hour ago. What's wrong?"

"Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. When did you hear from him last?"

"Yesterday, after lunch, I think. To confirm about this afternoon. Sara, what's wrong?"

"I was hoping . . . he's disappeared."

"What the hell do you mean, 'disappeared'?"

She hesitated. "Don't go anywhere," she said finally. "I'm on my way over."

Handcuffed to the wall in near-darkness, Toreth had plenty of time to reflect on what an idiot he'd been.

He'd been surprised when the door to the flat opened. Warrick and Sara knew the code, but both of them usually called up rather than let themselves in. Stupidly, he hadn't thought what that might mean, other than to assume he'd made a mistake. Hadn't he arranged to meet Sara at the bar?

So he'd called out, "In here," and sat there, waiting for them. Making it easy.

Nondescript dark suits, that was the first thing he noticed about them. They could have been some obscure branch of Int-Sec, or Justice getting above themselves, but they didn't show any ID. They piled through the door and across the room to him while he was still getting out of the chair.

He hadn't had a real chance against four of them, all decently trained. He made a mess, though, and broke a few glasses, which was what he'd wanted to do. The struggle came to an abrupt end when one of them caught his right wrist, twisting it up and back until he felt the bones grinding, and he'd yelled out, from the surprise as much as the pain.

One of the men, dark-haired and cold-eyed, had stepped round in front of him, straightening his suit as he did so. "My instructions are to bring you in alive
if
possible. So don't fuck me around. Cooperate, and you'll get out of this alive. Understand?"

It wasn't entirely convincing, but Toreth had nodded. Possibly dead later was better odds than definitely dead now.

"Cuff him, bring him along."

Once they left the building, he had decided to try to run for it anyway, because that would probably be his only chance. As the door opened onto the street, and he saw the black car parked immediately outside, he felt a cold pressure on his neck. Unconsciousness had followed so quickly that he didn't remember hearing the hiss of the injector.

Stupid. He'd been so fucking stupid. He heard Sara's voice in his head, saying the same thing to him at the hospital.

'My own stupid bloody fault'.

He shifted against the wall, trying to find a position that would allow him to relax a few muscles. Chained as he was, facing the wall and with his hands at head height, there weren't many options. His legs, back, arms and shoulders were all on a sliding scale somewhere between aching and agony.

When they'd cuffed him to the wall, he'd been coming round, fuzzy with the after-effects of whatever they'd given him. It hadn't been too bad at first, but he'd known how it would go. Known in a professional, abstract sense — he'd never had it done to him before.

He wondered how the hell Warrick could do this for fun. Except, of course, that he didn't. He did it for half an hour, an hour, so high on the game that it couldn't hurt him anyway. Then he got fucked hard against the wall, and afterwards he went to bed. That was fun. Not hour upon hour of the pain getting worse, long past the point when that had seemed impossible.

Putting up a fight in his flat no longer seemed like such a brilliant idea. His wrist hurt like fuck — broken, or nastily sprained, the handcuff biting into the swollen flesh. When he'd made the mistake of trying to take some of the strain off his shoulders onto the cuffs, he'd nearly blacked out. Despite the pain, he flexed his fingers from time to time, checking for feeling. Plenty of that, which he supposed was a good thing. He'd never fancied gangrene.

Apart from his wrist, he didn't seem to be in terribly bad shape. Beating him up while he was unconscious would have been a waste of time, after all. They'd taken his jacket and shirt off while he was out, but he didn't feel cold. The air in the room was warm and still — stuffy, in fact. The dim light from around the door revealed no hint of a window, but he'd yelled a few times anyway, the sound dying quickly against the walls. No sound of machinery or traffic, no voices. Underground, would be his bet.

Now they were waiting. Stopping him sleeping, lowering his resistance. Effective, and requiring minimal use of valuable personnel. Someone had read the manual.

This place definitely wasn't an I&I cell, because the doors there didn't let in light. At first, he'd guessed Internal Investigations, because Justice would never dare pull anything like this and one or two of the things he'd done could justify a disappearance.

As time had crawled by, he'd begun to let himself hope that it wasn't Internal. If it were, surely someone would've come to speak to him by now, or he would be dead. It wasn't as if he was short of alternate candidates. He'd made enough personal enemies over his career, Jonny Kemp — and possibly the rich father Sara had mentioned — being only the most recent.

With the possibility of Internal Investigations receding, he allowed himself a touch of optimism. This wouldn't go down as one of his better weekends, but he might get out of the other end of it alive.

Whatever the hell they were going to do to him instead of killing him, he wished that they'd get on and do it. Toreth twisted round, trying to rest his hip and shoulder against the wall without putting too much pressure on his wrist. Still agonisingly uncomfortable, but in a new and interesting way. He leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes.

Now. You can come back any time now. Whenever you're ready.

Eventually, he drifted into a haze of pain and exhaustion, time passing slowly.

Warrick filled the time until Sara arrived with futile calls, which in all probability she had already made: to I&I, to Toreth's flat, to his personal comm — which was dead, to coin an unfortunate phrase — and, more pessimistically, to various hospitals. Nothing.

He'd always known something like this would happen eventually. Toreth would fuck the wrong person and an outraged husband or wife would come after him. Or, worse, would send someone professional after him. Ironic that it should be now, when he'd been screwing around less than usual. Or at least he'd been keeping it quieter, which was almost as welcome and probably more likely.

When Sara arrived at the flat she looked as distraught as she had sounded. Her face was mottled with bruises a few days old, and she had one finger encased in a protective plastic sheath.

"Have you heard from him?" she asked as soon as he closed the door.

"Nothing, no."

"Oh, Christ, this is all my fault." She looked to be on the verge of tears, which wouldn't help either of them.

Taking her arm gently, he led her down the hall. "Come through to the kitchen. Can I get you something to drink?"

"No, I'm fine. I . . . " She sat down in a chair and wiped her eyes angrily with her good hand. "It's all my fault," she repeated.

Despite her refusal, he poured her a glass of his cooking brandy and pressed it into her hand. She took a sip automatically.

"All right." He sat down opposite her. "Start at the beginning."

She gestured to her face. "Boyfriend."

"Jon Kemp?" he said, and she stared, glass halfway to her lips. "I found the address for him. But he didn't tell me why he wanted it. I think I can guess, though."

She nodded. "I didn't ask him to do it, Warrick. I wouldn't have. But I didn't tell him not to, either."

Even though his first thought had been to blame her, he said, "From the temper he was in when I saw him, I don't think it would've made any difference, whatever you'd said."

"He's done something like it before, though. I mean, he didn't say anything first, not that time, but I guessed afterwards what he'd done and I didn't say anything. I knew what he was going to do to Jonny. And I know how crazy Jonny is. I should've — "

"Sara, this isn't going to help him. Tell me what happened, please."

"Okay." She had another mouthful of the drink. "We were supposed to go out last night. Work thing. He went home to change and then he never made it to the bar. I didn't think much about it because I assumed he'd met someone and — " She paused. "Well, you know."

"Yes, I know." All too well.

"Then he was supposed to be in work today. He asked me to come in, specially, to tidy up one of the cases; he wouldn't have forgotten about it. He never showed up. I waited until lunchtime because I had plenty to do, and I thought he'd call in eventually — he always calls, wherever he's ended up — but he didn't."

To his surprise, he found his hands clenching, her panic communicating itself to him. Considering that he'd rarely seen her so much as ruffled, that wasn't surprising.

"I tried to get hold of him," she continued, "but his personal comm isn't connecting. So I called his flat, no answer. And then I went round. I don't know why."

To look for a body, Warrick thought.

"He wasn't there. But there was a mess. Broken glass, stuff knocked over. That's when I started to get really worried."

"Blood?"

She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head. "No. No blood."

That was something. Not much, but something.

"It has to be Jonny," she continued. "Him or his wonderful corporate bloody father. It's my fault. Jesus, he could be dead and all because I — "

"No, he won't be." Warrick uncurled his hands, laid them flat on his thighs to stop them shaking. "What did he do to this Jon Kemp?"

She sniffed hard, composing herself. "Beat him up. He didn't say in so many words, but I think he . . . lost control. He made a mess of him — more than he meant to. Enough that I had the feeling he was worried about Jonny's father finding out from the medic or someone like that."

"But he didn't kill him. Then he'll be all right."

"How can you be so bloody
calm
about it?" she exploded.