The Scioneer (10 page)

He picked
it up
by the body with a
pair of steel tongs, careful to pull the whole thing out in one
piece, and then dropped it into a bio-hazard bin, which would be
picked up by Oryx Waste Disposal at the end of the working day and
emptied into the Thames. From the shelf, he took a new can of Host
– chemical gel which provided a perfect environment for the biorg
to thrive - and sprayed it all over the motor, making sure to cover
the battery, carburettor, radiator and all the filters with the
blue foam.

In a
refrigerated combination safe at the back of the workshop, Lou kept
his precious jar of biorgs. There were probably fifty five, maybe
sixty left in this batch, and that represented around 20,000 cred
after expenses. This jar was Lou’s livelihood. He unscrewed the
lid, and still wearing his gloves, scooped out a single pea–green
golf-ball sized organism. Holding it carefully in the palm of his
hands, he walked back to the Proto and placed it in a puddle of
Host which had formed on top of the battery.

In
seconds the biorg had begun to grow
in size and sprout tendrils, which wrapped around
the various parts of the engine and pushed themselves into its
pipes and tubes. It swelled and pulsated with life. Lek and Crystal
looked on, him with scientific interest, her with growing disgust.
She decided she could take no more when she noticed that it had
grown its first tooth, and hooked it artfully around the casing of
the air-filter.

She
nudged Lek, ‘Let’s get a coffee.’

Lou had
known they wouldn’t last, and he smiled paternally as he lowered
the bonnet down gently on the biorg so that it wouldn’t
burst.

‘So, what
are you thinking?’ Crystal asked as they sat down on the
battered sofa in Lou’s
office.

‘About
what?’

‘About
all this.
What are we going to do now? For all we know they could be waiting
outside for us.’

‘No, they’re
not. My guess is they’re trying to give me enough rope to hang
myself.’

‘And me
in the process?’ Crystal raised her eyebrows.

‘I’m
sorry about that. But if we play this right, if we’re smart, we can
start a new life. Together.’ He paused, then looked into Crystal’s
eyes. ‘How would you feel about that?’

‘But
where will we go? Pechev’
s bound to have contacts all over Europa. He’ll only have
to say the word, put a price on your head….’ she left the rest
unsaid.

‘I’ve
been thinking about it a lot lately. I’ve thought about going to
the police, explaining who I am, what I do, what I’ve
seen
. I imagine
they must have some kind of witness protection scheme I could sign
up for? I don’t know really. Cesar – you remember me telling you
about him? The Dynagym guy? Yes, well, Cesar thinks that Pechev’s
entire business goes far beyond just the drugs, so maybe he’ll just
take the hit and let me walk away. You never know.’ Lek tried to
sound optimistic.

She
closed her hand around his, ‘
No, Lek, listen to me. You need to accept that you,
that
we
, probably
aren’t going to get out of this in one piece. You said yourself you
know too much. Even if by some miracle, we
do
manage to escape, they are going to come after us,
believe me.’

‘Pechev
has enemies
too. Maybe I
could offer myself to one of his competitors in Slovenia or
Slovakia. It’s an up and coming market - lots of opportunities for
transferable skills like mine. I could hammer out a better deal.
You know, something along the lines of, ‘I’ll make your illegal
drugs, and you don’t leave severed heads in my fridge and threaten
to cut off my hands’.

‘Try to
be serious, for Harrison’s sake.’

‘Alright,
alright. I’m sorry. There is something else. In Vienna. It’s called
the Rubicon Institute. It’s a facility, funded by the government,
for scion-abusers who haven’t yet caused permanent damage to
themselves: people who still have a chance to reverse the effects
of the drugs. It’s ground-breaking work, stripping back the DNA to
its original form. Anyway, I was thinking I might be able to
contact them, somehow, Rubicon, that is. If I was working
indirectly for the government, they might be able to offer me some
degree of security from Pechev. And I’m sure they would be able to
find a use for me.’

‘Yeah,
target practice
...’

‘No, come
on, I a
m being serious
now. If I created this situation, chances are I’m the one who can
fix it, no? The way I see it, I could work for them as some kind of
undercover agent. Help them crack the codes, you know? Show them my
working out.’

‘Right.
Like the working out in your infamous recipe book?’ Crystal said,
her tongue lodged firmly in her cheek.

Lek
laughed for the first time that day. ‘Ah, you saw through that one,
did you?’

‘I put
two and two together back in the flat, once I stopped fearing for
my life.’

The smile
died on Lek’s lips. ‘Crystal, I… I was trying to think on my feet.
If I’d known for one moment that he was…. you know I would never
have let him hurt you. You know I…’

‘Yes, I
know. And I should have told you about the phone-call. We wouldn’t
have even been in that situation if I had. But these people are
killers Lek. I don’t need to tell you that. What is he going to
find inside that locker anyway?’

‘Well, if
everything goes to plan, he won’t find a thing. I suppose I could
leave my old notebook behind for him though. Sort of a consolation
prize.’

‘Anything of
interest in that?’

‘Only
some poor attempts at love poetry.’

‘Really?’

Lek
nodded and Crystal closed her eyes as he leaned in towards
her....

‘Your
car’s
ready!’ Lou stuck his head around the door. ‘You’re paying in cash,
yeah?’

Chapter
13

On a
filthy blood-stained mattress,
on the floor of a living room in a derelict house on
Electric Avenue, Roma Bruce woke up. She yawned, licked her lips
and opened her yellow eyes. A shaft of afternoon sunlight picked up
the dust motes floating in the air. She rolled off the mattress and
onto all fours, stretching out her limbs and arching her back.
Without a thought, she reached out for last night’s hypo, and shot
a full vial of Lupinex in between her toes. In an instant, it felt
so fucking good to be alive again, and the whole world belonged to
her. She raised her head and drank in the myriad scents and aromas
that London had to offer on a hot afternoon in October. It was
still too early to call the pack, but just the thought of the
rumble set her blood on fire. She stood up – it was getting harder
these days – and loped into the kitchen. The windows were all
smashed, and fat bluebottles buzzed around a hunk of liver on the
floor. Roma crouched over it, breathed deeply and sunk her canines
into it with relish. She was as naked as the day she was born. But
very different.

***

Danny
Calabas
had an aversion to needles. The very thought of sticking a pin into
himself brought him out in a cold sweat. For that reason he
preferred to take his drugs orally whenever possible, or anally
when he had to. With a grunt, he pushed the Natterjack-Up
suppository into his rectum, wiped his fingers on his denim shorts
and clattered out of the cubicle, unleashing a torrent of abuse on
the Filipino cleaner mopping the bathroom floor for invading his
privacy. He didn’t even know which one she was. Kai-phen maybe, who
could tell?

Natterjack
-Up
was a slow-release scion, completely illegal, which over a
twenty-four hour period dripped essence of toad into the
bloodstream, leaving the user in a permanent state of heightened
sexual desire, coupled with a pleasing sense of woozy apathy.
Frequent abusers enjoyed the added side-effect of sweating weak
hallucinogenic drugs through their pores, and could be seen licking
themselves, or indeed being licked, in doorways and back-alleys
around the city. Danny Calabas had been addicted for years, and
found it the perfect drug in his line of work. Vidmar kept him in
constant supply, in return for the use of Danny’s Serbian
prostitutes every now and again.

Danny’s
club was called the Shangri-La, and it sat proudly on the corner of
Upper and Theberton Street. It was an institution in the club scene
north of the river, and offered patrons three levels of enjoyment:
a grimy speakeasy in the cellar, with secluded wipe-clean booths, a
Castro-cave and a back street entrance which meant it stayed open
after electricurfew. Upstairs was the day-club cum lap-dancing bar,
one of the few operating in this part of town, with a private
function room for hire. There was even a kitchen too, serving the
usual fare: meat-sticks, burgers and fries, but even the mashed-up
regulars knew better than to touch the stuff. Finally, the top
floor housed the brothel, ‘The Swinging Hammocks’ as it was known,
where Danny’s girls – mainly young Eastern Europans who had been
duped into believing they were coming to London to work as au-pairs
or cleaners – performed their duties in tiny single-bedded cells,
two metres by three, some of which even had a view of the brickwork
of the building opposite. Danny Calabas, the warty, bloated 48 year
old, who still lived with his mother in Mile End, was master of it
all. He shuffled into his office at the back of the club, kicked a
couple of boxes of toilet paper out of the way and flopped into his
swivel chair with a deep sigh. The inside of his wrist tasted
vaguely of aniseed, and Danny stretched his arms out widely like a
monarch looking out over his glittering realm of sunflowers and
melting clouds, and belched loudly.

It felt
good to be in a car again. Crystal’s Proto might have looked like a
wreck
, but with the new
biorg under the bonnet, it was running like a dream. Lek felt safe
for the first time in hours - moving at speed, rather than skulking
around the side streets hoping not to be spotted. The city was
beginning to fill up again: the climate change in London had led to
a shift in the working routine - most people tended to start
earlier and finish later in order to take a couple of hours’ siesta
in the middle of the day. Lek caught a glimpse of Big Ben as they
crossed the river at Westminster – it was nearly four o’ clock.
Still over six hours to kill, or be killed.

‘What
exactly are you planning to say to
Calabas?’ Crystal asked.

‘Don’t
worry. I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.’ Lek had
heard that line in an old film he had watched as part of the
Leicester Square Open Air Oscar Winners’ Weekend last year, and it
had stuck in his head. ‘He’s a businessman after all.’

‘He’s a
slippery bastard, Lek. He’s a toad, in all senses of the word. You
don’t know him like I do.’

‘I’ve met
him a couple of times, through work mostly. Vidmar likes to keep
him sweet, so I make him up his own variant of Natterjack-Up. He’s
got a thing about needles apparently.’

‘Yes, never
touches them. He beat up one of the girls once for taking her
insulin jab in the same room as him. Justified it by saying he
wouldn’t be able to eat for a week with the nausea.’

‘Poor
lamb,’ said Lek sarcastically. He put a hand inside his sports-suit
top, fished around in a pocket full of vials and hypos, and drew
out the two stacks of cred. It had been so tempting to lay-off the
transponder on Lou Tech, but he was just an honest mechanic, if
there was such a thing. ‘Keep your eyes on the road,
Crystal’.

‘That’s a lot
of money to be handling so…. casually.’

‘Let’s get rid
of it then,’ he said, with a grin.

It came
as no surprise to Vidmar to see Crystal Purcell and Lek Gorski walk
out of an underground car-park two streets down
from the Shangri-La. As soon his original
suspicion had been confirmed, when he saw them leaving hand-in hand
from her high-rise, Lek Gorski’s intentions revealed themselves to
Vidmar like an easy cipher-square puzzle in the newspaper. He was
sitting in a window seat of the Mash-Up on Upper Street, the harsh
afternoon sunlight against the plate glass masking his presence
completely from the couple, so they walked past within feet of him,
ignorant to the danger they were in. Gorski even looked cheerful,
although he did glance back over his shoulder a couple of times to
check they weren’t being followed. Don’t these people know who
they’re dealing with? thought Vidmar. He sucked on the straw of his
papaya echinacea shake and watched the sway of Crystal Purcell’s
hips as she sauntered down the road, brushing her hand through the
tall wild flowers sprouting from the cracks in the pavement. Stay
focused, he told himself, and traced a finger down his scar. He
paid and walked in the opposite direction from his target, checking
his watch before disappearing down the ramp and into the
car-park.

Chapter
14

A thin
sliver of light broke through the depths of the tar pit
where
Delić was drowning
and his mind swam up to breathe again. So deep was the induced
slumber of the sloth extract, he had felt he was dreaming within
his dreams, sleeping within the sleep, pinned beneath the weight of
a thousand fur coats laid on top of him, and the faint drumming of
his blood pulsing in his ears was the bass beat of the music
playing at the party downstairs. Delić opened his eyes and saw an
unfamiliar ceiling. It was several minutes before the leaden stupor
in his limbs lifted and he was able to finally move again. He
slowly swung his legs off the oil-bed and sat up, holding his
bowling ball head in his hands. He ran his fingers his scalp, but
couldn’t find any fresh lumps or bleeding. His thoughts trickled
gradually into lucidity like treacle from a spoon.