The Better Mousetrap (2 page)

She knew, of course, that Western capitalism simply couldn’t function unless dragons were strictly controlled. Their instinct was to seek out large accumulations of wealth and sit on them, carbonising anybody who came within nose-shot; which was why the firm she worked for had such an impressive client portfolio in the banking and art-gallery sector. Even so. There was still a small, idealistic, whale-saving corner of her mind where she couldn’t help thinking there had to be a better way. Dragon safari parks, maybe, or really long-term designated deposit accounts. But the closest anybody had ever come to making a go of it was the US military’s secret trials at Fort Knox; and it had taken the legendary Kurt Lundqvist and two thousand gallons of SlayMore TripleX-Xtra to sort that one out. No: it was really quite simple, when you looked at it sensibly. Harsh commercial realities. Them or us.

Time. She got up, knocking over her briefcase in doing so. The lid burst open and a load of stuff spilled out of it onto the floor. She sighed and patiently shovelled it all back in, then tried to close the lid. Needless to say, it wouldn’t shut. She shuffled the contents around a bit, took out a tube of manticore-rated tranquillisers and stowed it away in her pocket, and tried again. Success.

From her other pocket she took out a small black box, like an old-fashioned photographer’s light meter. She turned a dial at the side and watched the needles on the three dials. When a dragon dies, the temperature drops, humidity levels rocket and the ambient Mortensen quotient falls back to a constant 6.339. It was all over bar the dentistry.

Even so.

Other practitioners - taller, more powerfully built members of the profession: men - liked to draw a sword at this point, or at the very least lock and load a fifty-calibre Barrett sniper rifle or a rocket launcher. She knew better than that. If the bloody thing was still alive, no amount of hardware would save her. There’d be a blinding white light, and the last thing she’d hear would be the hiss of her bodily fluids boiling inside her and a soft, reptilian snigger. But the meter said that the dragon was dead, and if there was one thing you could rely on in this business it was a Kawaguchiya XP770 E-Z-Scan. Gripping the briefcase tightly in her left hand, she started to walk up the tunnel.

According to the company’s literature, the vaults of the City branch of the National Lombard Bank are the biggest in Europe. They’re proud of the fact, the implication being that NatLom have got more money than anybody else, and so need somewhere big to keep it all. She was used to all that sort of thing, of course, having seen and de-infested them all in her time, but nevertheless, the sheer scale of what she saw as she walked through the melted ruin of the massive steel door made her catch her breath. You could have built a cathedral in there, or a railway terminal. The roof was disturbingly high, its proportions emphasised by the shiny white tiles and brushed-steel fittings— what was left of them. The dragon had been busy, ripping out what it couldn’t be bothered to melt. Dragons like space, and an absence of clutter behind which their enemies can hide.

She felt something soft under her feet; but she paid it no attention. She was looking at the dragon.

It was, quite unmistakably, dead. In its last throes it had twisted itself up like the rubber band on a balsa-wood aeroplane, its head jammed tight under its left wing, its open jaws pointing at the roof, its claws frozen in the air in a last frantic scrabble. She deliberately froze her emotions and noted that it was indeed a full-grown adult male, somewhere between three and five hundred years old (after three hundred it’s hard to tell precisely without careful examination of the claws and the ring of bone at the base of the horn); in any event, it was an old example of a species that improves exponentially with age. The teeth-she counted, then did the mental arithmetic. The teeth were traditionally the dragon-slayer’s perks; except, of course, that under the terms of her contract, they belonged to the firm, not to her. Annoying, since it’d be her job to gouge the bloody things out. At twelve thousand dollars a tooth … She sighed. One of these days, the banks were going to find out how much those things were worth, and then there’d be trouble.

Green scales, she noticed. Who were they using as dragonknackers these days? Ibbotsons did a quick, efficient job but their charges were vicious. K & J Dragon Removals were quite reasonable, but they were sloppy about details such as acid leakage and blood clean-up, which annoyed the clients. (Understandable: no conscientious employer liked to see its staff dissolving from the feet up, or suddenly gifted with the ability to understand the language of birds.) The last she’d heard, Hancocks had been using Harry Fry, who was the most appalling cowboy. Zauberwerk UK were rumoured to be doing all their disposals inhouse. That made sense, given the high value of dragon-salvage. There were enough scales on this one alone to insulate a whole fleet of space shuttles.

Under her feet, something soft. Also, something that wasn’t there. She knelt down and picked up a handful of fine white ash.

The something that wasn’t there, she realised with a jolt that shook her whole body, was money. According to the bank, there should be— She took the briefing memo out of her pocket, counted the noughts and swore. And, as well as the cash, there ought to be bonds, securities, debentures, all that sort of thing. A substantial part of the wealth of the country should be down here, neatly parcelled up in bundles and sealed in wrappers. Instead, there was ash, and a great deal of empty space.

She looked at the dragon. For some reason which she couldn’t begin to imagine, the dragon had incinerated all the money, every last note of it. Which was crazy. The love of dragons for cash money was, according to all the best authorities, the fiercest, most passionate emotion in the whole world. They scooped it up, nested in it, played with it for hours like happy kittens and, as far as they were concerned, nice soft paper was even better than gold. A dragon would be as likely to eat its own young as to damage a banknote.

With the side of her foot she traced a little furrow in the ash. Unthinkable, she thought. Unless—

She walked slowly across the floor until she was standing next to the vast contorted carcass. She studied the way the ash lay scooped and heaped into dunes around it. She put her head on one side and squinted a little. A bit like a sandcastle, or rather, a ring of sand forts surrounding a citadel. Even in its last convulsive moments, as the SlayMore dissolved its guts and burnt away its heart and lungs, it had been trying to shield something with its enormous bulk.

What, though? She could tell from the lie of the ash that it had done everything it could not to roll on one particular spot, but there was nothing there; just a fine layer of ash covering the white tiles. Something: something so valuable, maybe, that as far as the dragon was concerned billions of dollars’ worth of negotiable currency was just more clutter to be got rid of, along with the shelves and the cabinets and the surveillance hardware. In which case, something truly beyond price. But there wasn’t anything there. Just ash and floor.

Not my problem, she thought; and then it occurred to her that, as soon as she gave the all-clear, the manager would come scuttling down the tunnel expecting to see all that money, and wasn’t he ever going to be disappointed. She winced. It wasn’t her fault and she’d done a thoroughly professional, efficient job, but she had a strong feeling that the client wasn’t going to be happy. Never mind, she told herself. Let’s finish up and get out of here, before the ash hits the fan.

Serpentine dentistry is a miserable affair. She got the pliers out of her briefcase, pulled on her Teflon-impregnated gloves and made a start. She had a plastic box to put the teeth in. Mercifully, they came out relatively easily, but her wrists and elbows were still painfully sore by the time she’d finished. The key thing, of course, was to make sure that you didn’t drop one…

She clipped the lid onto the box, stuffed it into her briefcase, put away the pliers, took off the gloves. Ash powdered under her heel. The next bit, she reckoned, was going to be awkward. She took her phone out of her pocket and thumbed in the number.

‘All done,’ she said.

‘Are you all right? Is it—?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the— I mean, did it do much damage?’

Deep breath. ‘You’d better see for yourself.’

‘Not the shelving,’ the manager’s voice whimpered. It was brand new last month. God only knows what the board’s going to say if we’ve got to have all new shelving.’

‘I don’t think you need worry too much about that,’ she said, and rang off.

One last look back at the dragon. It was wrong to feel sympathy for it. Anything that big and powerful that allowed itself to be killed by a squirt of chemical hidden in a gobbet of liver was a disgrace to supernature and deserved whatever it got. But all that money; she’d seen yearling dragon colts fight each other to the death over a Scottish five-pound note. Burning all that money because it wasn’t worth anything, because it was irrelevant … She squeezed her brain for an alternative explanation, but there wasn’t one. The only possible reason was that it had found something else buried in the vault; something so valuable that, in comparison, money had no meaning. Even in the last stages of a SlayMore death it had avoided a small patch of the tiled floor, so as not to damage something. But she’d looked. There was nothing there.

She was positive there was nothing. After all, she’d looked.

Clearly, not carefully enough. Dropping her briefcase, she sprinted across the floor, kicking up little spirals of ash as she ran. Scrambling over an uplifted scaly leg, she dropped to her knees and scrabbled.

It had burned all the money, just as it had trashed the fittings and smelted the built-in fixtures. Dragons were like that, obsessive-compulsive. When they went broody, everything that wasn’t treasure had to go. So if there was anything, anything at all, on that patch of desperately guarded floor, that’d be it, the something. A gemstone, perhaps - no, too bulky. All right, then, a microchip. What about the legendary ninth-generation Kawaguchiya sentient microprocessor prototype, which was believed to be locked away in a bank vault somewhere, waiting for the day when the global economy had grown enough to afford its existence? That’d be a hoard worthy of a really knowledgeable dragon. And it’d be small.

Her fingernails trailed furrows in the ash. Some things are too small to see but big enough to feel. In the distance she could hear footsteps echoing in the tunnel. The manager was coming, and she really didn’t want him to find her like this, it’d lead to all sorts of awkwardness. In despair, she made one more sweep with her left hand, and touched something.

A cardboard tube. Just like the ones you find in the middle of toilet rolls.

Oh, she thought.

It didn’t matter, she told herself. Whatever it was, supposing it even existed, it sure as hell wasn’t hers. It occurred to her that her motive been pure curiosity, because she urgently needed to know why the dragon had destroyed all that money. If she’d actually found it, this notional little thing of inestimable value, there was always the risk that she might have slipped it in her pocket without thinking, the way you do, and that would’ve been stealing.

She stood up, pocketed the toilet-roll core, brushed five thousand dollars’ worth of ash off her knees and walked away. She met the manager halfway up the tunnel. He was carrying a torch and a big box file. ‘All yours,’ she said briskly. ‘We’ll send over the clean-up squad around lunchtime.’

He was looking at her. ‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘You aren’t even singed. How did—?’

She smiled at him; and she knew that, in spite of the hurricane of trouble and sorrow that was about to envelop him, it’d be that smile that haunted him as he lay awake in the early hours of the morning. ‘Piece of cake,’ she said. ‘We’re professionals. This is what we do.’

‘Yes, but you’re all covered in—’

‘Sorry, must rush. Another appointment.’

She managed to keep from breaking into a run until she was out of the building.

Nobody gets to see Mr Sprague without an appointment. Nobody.

Mr Sprague sat behind his desk, reading. It was a beautiful desk, figured burr walnut, Louis Something, with nothing on it to cover up the exquisite grain of the wood apart from three green telephones and a framed photograph of a sad woman and a plump, scowling girl in jodhpurs. The document in his hands was a report on a horrendous multiple pile-up on the A779, which was going to cost the company something in the region of twelve million pounds, assuming that liability could be established.

Mr Sprague frowned, opened the top drawer of the desk and extracted a single Malteser from the bag.

He’d been in insurance all his working life, and he knew that really it was just a series of bets. You bet people money that they wouldn’t set fire to their homes, smash up their cars, fall off ladders or die in their early fifties. Bets like that ought really to be safe as houses (safer, Mr Sprague thought sadly, safer) since the mark had a vested interest in losing, surely. Apparently not. Every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year, some damn fool of a policyholder somehow contrived to win his bet, which meant that the company had to pay him (or, if he’d won the bet really conclusively, his heirs) sums of money which should have gone to the shareholders, or the company reserves, or wherever profits went when he’d finished with them. Mr Sprague really didn’t care about that. What concerned him was that there should be profits; huge ones, and bigger every year. It was the only way he had of keeping score, and he had a very competitive nature.

He crunched the Malteser and sucked the honeycomb centre. Yum.

According to the report, some complete idiot of a policyholder had won the jackpot by ramming his nasty little red Peugeot up the tailpipe of a lorry carrying - you had to laugh or you’d cry - fifty thousand gallons of concentrated nitric acid. The lorry had swerved, hit a number of other cars (some of them expensive cars containing even more expensive people), overturned, sprayed acid everywhere; then other cars had hit other cars, which in turn hit the central reservation, blasted through it like a bullet through butter, and spread the general carnival atmosphere to the traffic on the northbound side of the road. Twelve million quid, gone with the wind. It wasn’t fair.