The Rhesus Chart (23 page)

“Marianne, your employer gave me your number.”

The adrenalin spike triggered by these words makes her shudder from the tips of her toes to the ends of her blonde ponytail. She carefully places the pistol on the sideboard beside the phone base station, then clenches her fist. “Really?”

“Yes.” The midnight caller sounds slightly amused. Going by the tone of voice, he’s male—although there are devices for obscuring that. “George mentioned some instructions he gave you for this contingency.”

The woman who calls herself Marianne shudders again, then repeats her long-memorized line: “What time of night do you call this?”

“The witching hour.” Which is the correct counter-phrase.

“I’m not a witch.” Which is a statement of fact, and not a password.

“I know. George told me all about you. How many vampires have you taken this year?”

Marianne raises her right hand to her mouth and bites the top joint of her thumb, quite hard. “Only one.” Quiet frustration. “Are you a vampire? Are you looking for a date?” She lives in hope. Although any sane vampire who knows what she is will think twice before flirting with her.

“Let’s just say I’m playing matchmaker.” He sounds drily amused. She clutches the phone tightly, trying not to get her hopes up despite the thrill of anticipation. “I have a number of candidates in mind for you, if you’d like to meet them. At least five, possibly more.”

“Oh! Yes.” She almost goes weak at the knees. “Yes, of course!” It sounds better than she could possibly have imagined; what’s the catch? “Why so many?”

“An, ah, nest has come to our attention. George is otherwise occupied, so . . .”

She puts two and two together. “You’re his old playmate, aren’t you? The one that got away!” She manages to suppress a girlish squeal of delight. “The one he keeps grumbling about!”

“He grumbles about me? I had no idea. I’m flattered! But that’s as may be. George agreed to loan your services to me in pursuit of this, ah, common goal. You can confirm this, by the way. Call him up. Set your mind at ease.”

“I’m always at ease!”

“I’m delighted to hear it. Anyway. To the task in hand: we will have to work closely together. I can assist you in isolating the targets, but the actual, ah—”

“Kiss.”

“Yes, the
kiss
is entirely up to you. The first couple should be easy enough to steal, but thereafter we will have to make them come to us.”

“You’ll bring them to me,” she says breathily, her heart pounding.

“I can’t do that if you try to, ah, kiss me,” he says. “But I am old and ugly and these are virile young bucks from the City . . .”

She takes a deep breath. “For five or six dates in a row I’ll happily do what you want.”
It’s been so long,
she silently adds.

“Excellent.” Her caller purrs. “I’ll be in touch.”

Click.

The line goes dead. She replaces the receiver, then stares at it wistfully. There’s an unaccustomed warmth in her belly, a tremulous hope emerging. Whoever her caller is, Old George would not have lightly given him her number, which means this is certainly the real thing.

She is a fetishist of the type known to the very few people who study such recondite, occult perversions as a Fang Fucker. Old George found her and carefully trained and polished her; it is her delight and her pleasure to serve whenever he sends her on a date. But the past year has been a cold and lonely one, a famine of the flesh. She has been haunted by the nagging fear that her employer has tired of her, that she’s doomed to the same future as an aging call girl whose clientele have dried up.

But now . . .

A nest. At least five! Be still my beating heart.

 • • • 

LEAVING MO SOBBING IN THE BEDROOM, I HEAD DOWNSTAIRS,
grab a couple of tumblers, and rummage around the bottle rack for the single malt in question. (The bottle’s still about half-full: neither of us is fond of drinking alone, which is a good thing.) I find a spare box of tissues on the kitchen worktop and hook it on a little finger, then take the stairs back up to the bedroom two at a time—but I needn’t have bothered; Mo is moist but composed, if a bit fragile-looking.

“Here,” I say, shaking the box of tissues loose over her lap: “I’ll pour.” I put the glasses down, uncork the bottle, and serve up a couple of uneven double-fingers of whisky. Mo gets the marginally taller tumbler once she finishes dabbing at her eyes—the bloody violin is leaning against her bedside table and she’s let go of it,
hallelujah
—and I get back into bed beside her and plump up the pillows so we’ve got something to lean against. “You don’t have to talk about it unless you want to.”

She sips thoughtfully at the amber liquid. Her hair’s a mess of twisted locks, almost in dreads: still coppery-red, although much of that comes from a bottle these days. Evidently wearing a headscarf disagrees with it, and she hasn’t had the time or energy to untangle it. “Maybe some good will come of it,” she says quietly. “They’ll have to stop the mass executions.”

“The—” I bite my tongue. Then I take an incautiously large sip from my own glass. Gears crunch in my head:
she’s back from Iran.
In the past few years, since the Arab Spring and the Green uprising that failed, the always-dependably-draconian regime has been going mad. So mad that our own Conservative government (catch phrase: hang ’em and flog ’em), who have hitherto been enthusiastically rendering all due assistance to the Iranian heroin traffic interdiction cops through the usual international police intelligence channels, have been backing away and muttering about not going too far, chaps. “What happened?” I ask, queasily curious.

“CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN strikes again.” Mo sips at her whisky, clutching the tumbler in both hands to steady it. And my heart sinks.

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the end of the world, more or less. Magic is a side effect of computation, and we’re building too damn many microprocessors into too damn many toys these days—worse, we can’t stop; civilization will fall apart if we don’t have singing Christmas cards and intelligent gas meters, apparently. But there are other sources of computation. Human brains are computing machines
par excellence
, and the more of them there are, the more thaumaturgic processor cycles we produce. The whole thing is a runaway positive-feedback loop; while the demographic transition to a low birth/low death rate means we’re near the top of the population roller coaster, it’s going to take us a long time to get rid of all those surplus brains and the microprocessors they depend on, and in the meantime, the ultrastructure of reality is becoming extra-porous. Magic is getting easier to practice and more powerful, and the things that live behind the walls of the universe are becoming intrigued by the smell of thinking fodder that wafts its way towards them. The stars are coming right, reality is coming apart at the seams, and we’ll all go together when we go.

Oh, and we can’t even murder our way clear of it early. The deliberate killing of thinking beings (or thinking machines for that matter—there is a
reason
we really don’t want to see any progress in AI) generates huge thaumic fields that can be used for, for want of a better word, necromancy. And if we don’t use the power, someone—or something else—will.

“There’s a prison near a city in the north of Iran called Mashad, I don’t know where exactly, they put me up in an airport hotel overnight, then shipped me there in an Air Force helicopter—it’s called Vakilabad, and it’s near the border. They get a lot of drug traffickers there. Well, mules: illiterate, dirt-poor Afghan refugees who cross the border on foot with half a kilo of heroin in their pockets. There’s no fence on the frontier, and no signs to tell them that the Islamic Republic of Iran has the death penalty for possession of twenty grams and that they won’t get a defense lawyer.”

Which is what gave our delightful Home Secretary cold feet about cooperation. See, here in the UK twenty grams of heroin is good for a slap on the wrist if you’re an addict; maybe a six-month sentence if they think you’re dealing. A mule caught entering the UK with half a kilo is going to get somewhere between a five- and eight-year sentence, with time off for good behavior and deportation at the end. Scragging them is seen as a bit of an overreaction. Especially as HMG is signatory to a whole bunch of treaties requiring us to work towards the abolition of the death penalty worldwide.

Mo takes a much bigger mouthful of whisky, closes her eyes, and swallows. Then she starts spluttering. I take her tumbler and refill it, wait for the coughing to subside, then offer it to her.

She continues, quietly and with remarkably little affect. “Vakilabad is a large prison, and there is a shed in the prison with a substantial roof beam running its length. They hang people from the beam; they make the prisoners stand on tall stools, then kick them away. It can take sixty bodies at one time, they told me, and although they seldom fill it up they use it every week. It’s the world’s largest gallows: they’re very proud of it.”

She puts her glass down. I hug her for a while, speechless with the horror of it.

“My contact was a man named Ahmad, from the VEVAK. What I thought I was getting into was a straightforward decontamination job—clearing up a battlefield from the Iran-Iraq War where there’d been a huge human wave attack, followed by a haunting. And that’s what Ahmad seemed to think, too, when he met me. It was all fairly laid-back at first, until a bunch of Pasdaran special forces troops turned up, led by a lieutenant—that’s the Revolutionary Guard. And they told Ahmad that the
real
problem was that the governor of Vakilabad prison had been unable to carry out any executions for nearly a month because a
Djinn
, an evil spirit, had . . . well.” She’s shaking. “I need another nip,” she adds, pulling free and picking up her tumbler again.

“A
Djinn
?” I ask, then bite my tongue again: it’s not my job to prompt her. She’ll spill when she’s good and ready.

“Well, there was a bit of an argument, and I nearly stamped my foot and told them it was a breach of protocol, but you don’t want to get into a pissing match with the local equivalent of the Waffen-SS. Ahmad said later that he’d had a bad feeling about the assignment from the start, thought it was a whitewash for something, but he didn’t like to say . . . So anyway, they piled us into a couple of Toyotas and drove us from the airport to the prison: a horrible place. It smelled of shit and despair. Once inside we were taken directly to this shed. The death chamber. I was . . . afraid. You know? You can never be quite certain what the revolutionary guards are planning because they are entirely rational, within the constraints of a belief system that is based on crazy and mutually contradictory axioms. But they gave me the VIP treatment, tea and refreshments, and they let me keep my instrument, so . . .

“We got to the death chamber. There were four bodies hanging there, and they were clearly dead, but not in the manner prescribed by law. The execution party had left in a hurry: three of the stools were still upright. The victims were levitating, Bob, hovering just below the beam the ropes were tied to, and their eyes were glowing—you know what I mean? The bioluminescence thing? Luminous worms in the darkness. They were all quite dead, and the smell was atrocious: they’d been floating there for a week, chanting:
‘Aw der hal amedn aset, aw der hal amedn aset.’
Over and over again. Through dead men’s throats.”

She pauses for another suck at the water of life and I follow her example.

“I asked Ahmad. ‘It means,
he is coming
,’ he explained. Ahmad was clearly just inches away from crapping himself with fear. ‘Now please would you banish the
Djinn
that is haunting gallows so these fine fellows will let us go?’”

She transfers her whisky glass to her left hand and reaches behind her with the right, to touch the violin case.

“I demanded some more background. Vakilabad has been busy for the past few years. He wouldn’t tell me how many people they’d hanged there, but when I guessed over a thousand he didn’t correct me downwards. Seems the execution parties had been troubled by odd sounds, emanations, chills and thumps and wails for some time; they’d put it down to, well. You can guess. I checked, then, and the background thaum reading was off the scale. Executions are a form of human sacrifice, after all, and this was death magic on a huge scale.”

She takes another sip. She’s draining the glass steadily; I reckon she’s only got ten or fifteen minutes left before she drinks herself into a stupor. What she’s telling me suggests I ought to join in, lest I have some very bad dreams, so I knock back a burning mouthful of spirit. It’s singularly disrespectful to a portwood finished single malt, but it’s too late to go back to the bathroom cabinet to check if there’s any Temazepam left—mixing drink and sedatives is dangerous.

“I had a dilemma, love.” I feel her shoulders relax slightly. “If it had been a normal exorcism I’d have had no problem helping out. But they wanted the death chamber clearing down and neutralized so they could go back to hanging people. Nobody gave a shit about the thaum count until it got in the way of them strangling illiterate peasants. But then it was all, oh, INTERPOL will know someone who can help us out! Won’t they?”

She falls silent for a moment. Then, fiercely: “I will
not
be complicit, an enabler for judicial mass-murder!”

“I—” I swallow. “You refused? But what—”

“I tried to refuse at first. The Pasdaran officer was really angry, although Ahmad said he understood. They had a big shouting match. I mentioned the European Convention on Human Rights and the recent EU Commission ruling on withdrawal of coordination of drug interdiction until they ceased executions and pointed out I’d be violating our own policy guidelines if I didn’t obtain a legal waiver from the Home Office first.

“Then Firouz—the Pasdaran lieutenant—threatened to make me stay in the death chamber until I cooperated. With a Greek chorus of corpses chanting in the background and a thaum level off the scale. And he had his hand on his pistol—still holstered—and he was giving me the eye. You know? Well no, you probably don’t: you’re male. But anyway, I lost my temper. So I nodded and smiled and took out my violin and made the dead men dance.