The Scioneer (11 page)

What had
they done? Drugged him?
Possibly. Who are they? The Scientist. The… Doctor. Gorski.
Yes! Gorski. And somebody else? Can’t remember. Maybe. But Gorski
definitely. Hold on to that one. And why are you looking for him
again? For the money. Yes. No. For Pechev. No. There was something
else. Why am I looking for Gorski?

Something
tickling his subconscious, like an
ant crawling over his cortex, something on the tip
of his tongue, a taste….

The recipe
book.

Delić
had to
move, but his legs refused to comply. He fell face first on to the
bedroom floor and had to drag himself commando-style into the
lounge. He saw the smashed lock and splintered wood of the front
door and finally his memories of the meeting earlier that day broke
through the dam of his drug-induced haze. He pulled out his iHound
and sent out the signal for the iHare. The coordinates came back in
a fraction of a second. Delić looked at them with doubt for a
moment, but let it go. He didn’t feel he could sit on a motorbike
just yet, so he stumbled to the kitchen, struggled to open the
fridge and pulled out a litre of Limpopo Mineral. He sat back
against the wall and drank it dry while the grogginess wore
off.

***

‘We’ll
take the back-stairs,’ said Crystal, ‘There’s no need to let the
bouncers know we
’re
here.’

‘He will be
here, won’t he?’ Lek asked, suddenly unsure of his plan.

‘Oh yes,
he only goes home to sleep. Otherwise he would never leave. Come
on.’

‘Wait!’ said
Lek, trying to keep his voice down.

‘What’s the
matter?’

He stared
around, his eyes wild, before breathing out, ‘Nothing. I just.... I
just keep getting this feeling that we’re being
followed.’

‘We probably
are, hon. Come on.’

They
climbed a rusted wrought-iron
flight of steps at the back of the building, up to the top
floor where Crystal thumbprinted a Smarte-bell and a heavy security
door clicked open. The air in the corridors of The Swinging
Hammocks was heavy with the smell of sex. Crystal was used to it,
having survived her teenage years in one of the many cells, but to
Lek the rank smell of blood and sweat was almost too much. He
fought back the urge to gag, trying not to think of the thin
Eastern Europan girls laying back, bending over, kneeling down in
the rooms behind the thin plywood doors. He heard a deep groan of
pleasure from one of the customers, but otherwise no other sound.
The corridors were quiet.

‘It’s
still early,’ said Crystal, as if reading his mind, ‘This way,’ and
she led Lek back down to the floor below, via the staff staircase
to the thumping bass of the Shangri-La day-club and the tiny office
where a puffy faced man seemed to be peering over a pile of dirty
laundry. In truth, it was Danny Calabas, slumped in his swivel
chair, staring intently into the middle-distance with a lascivious
grin playing on his lips. It took a moment before his glazed
bloodshot eyes registered the presence of other people in his
office.

‘Crystal.’ He croaked. ‘How’s the scars baby? Healing
nicely?’ He turned his head slowly, licked the back of his hand,
and tried to focus on Lek’s face through a field of poppies.
‘Gorski. I heard your name on the grapevine today. What a surprise.
So what can I do for you two lovebirds?’

‘How much
would it cost to buy one of your girls, Danny?’ Lek began, without
preamble, and he felt Crystal’s eyes turn on him.

‘Ha!
Which one you got in mind, doc? Lara? Sirita? Aija? It don’t
matter. They ain’t for sale. None of them.’

‘Oh come
on, everything’s for sale, Dan, at the right price.’ Crystal heard
that same cold tone in Lek’s voice again.

‘I’ll
drink to that!’ Calabas replied ‘Shit, I want that line on my
headstone!’

‘So how
much? For Crystal here?’ Lek asked.

‘You two
planning on…. running away?’ said Danny, with a glint in his eye
that suggested he knew more than he was letting on.

‘Well,
Crystal could run away any day of the week, but some twisted sense
of loyalty keeps bringing her back to you. Maybe because you told
her that if she didn’t play the game, rather than burn her nipples,
you’d put one of her eyes out next time she stepped out of line.
Isn’t that right Dan?’ Lek paused for effect. He stood up, closed
and locked the office door. ‘Somebody once told me a good deal
is
only
a good deal
when everybody walks away happy.’ He picked up the telephone from
the desk, and in one fluid movement, wrenched the cable from the
socket. Crystal gasped and even Danny snapped out of his trance.
‘So here’s the deal: I am going to give you this 5,000 cred,’ he
said, pulling one of the bundles from his pocket, and Calabas’
toadish eyes bulged even further out of their sockets. ‘That figure
is non-negotiable, by the way, and in return, you’re going to let
Miss Purcell here walk out of this filthy cess pit you call The
Shangri-La – what a joke that is – and never come back.’

Calabas
gave a
dry nervous laugh. ‘The thing is Gorski, she may be older than the
rest of the girls and sure, she hasn’t got many miles left in
her...’ Lek stole a glance at Crystal, who looked like she might
stab either of the men in the room at any given moment ‘... but
she’s worth at least four times...’

‘Oh wait,
Danny,’ said Lek coolly, ‘I haven’t finished yet. Hear me out. So,
C5,000 for Crystal, which you’ll happily accept, because if you
don’t...’ Lek reached into his other pocket and pulled out a
handful of vials and hypos ‘... then I’ll personally mix you some
brand new scions right here and now, and jab them into your
eyeballs.’

At the
sight of the needles, Danny
Calabas recoiled like a vampire from a crucifix. He broke
out in a sweat, which stood out on his warty forehead like oily
bubbles, and his already greenish skin turned ashen.

Lek laid
it on thick, ‘I don’t even know what I’ve got here,’ he joked,
picking up the vials one by one, ‘let’s see, swordfish... bear...
pig... crab.... worker-ant.... what a range. Think of the
possibilities.’

‘Put...
them... away! Please.’ spluttered Calabas. ‘Just get the fuck out
of here! Take that whore with you!’

In a
flash, Lek leaned over the desk, grabbed him by the collar and
hoisted him off his chair. He picked up a single hypo, flicked the
cap off and held it to Calabas’ neck. ‘Don’t make me angry Dan. I
wouldn’t want our deal to turn sour. You wouldn’t want to find one
of these sticking out of your pillow in Mummy’s house, would
you?’

Lek
managed to push
Calabas
away just before he vomited bile down his shirt front. Calabas
wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and swore
violently.

‘Get out
of my club. You and your... woman. And keep your money!’

‘No, I
insist’ said Lek, and threw the bundle of banknotes at Danny
Calabas’ head. ‘A deal’s a deal.’

Chapter
15

Apart
from a few hairy moments when he had tried to take the odd corner
too quickly and nearly lost the bike from under
him, Delić was feeling better. The
afternoon heat was fading and the cooler air against his face was
helping him stay awake. He had stuffed in a handful of goji berries
before leaving the flat, and his belief alone in their cure-all
properties had done wonders for his groggy head. He changed gear
and gunned the throttle on his Suzuki Plasma, roaring over
Blackfriars Bridge. The biorg, wrapped around the motorbike engine
beneath him like a fat yellow octopus, responded to the change and
throbbed against his thighs. Delić felt the bike and its biorg were
part of him, a single being on the chase. All he could think of was
Gorski and the recipe book. He dipped his head against the wind and
pushed the bike even faster through the traffic, the tails of his
raincoat flapping out behind him and revealing the twin Meisters
strapped against his naked torso.

***

Crystal
pushed Lek through a fire door and into the Shangri-La day
club.
In the pitch
darkness, he strained to make out the forms and faces of the
nocto-goggled clubbers, high on Dolphine and grinding against one
another in their kinetic-sound-suits, each producing a different
vibe or pitch which made up the cacophony of so-called music. Lek
hadn’t been to one of these places in years, and he still found
them bizarre, if not a little disconcerting. Groupthink Music
started in San Francisco in the early thirties, when experimental
jazz club owners put the onus on the audience to provide their own
entertainment and gave everybody at the door a cheap musical
instrument to bang or blow for the duration of the evening. Anybody
not playing was summarily kicked out of the club. It wasn’t until
Zimmer Zimmer, a German DJ vibing in a small club in Hamburg
designed the first sound-suit, which created its own noise based on
the rhythm and speed of his movements, that the genre really took
off. It was an explosion in the clubbing world, and sounded the
death knell for the Cowell Inc. chart-based superclubs and
dancehalls, where DJs only ever played the new wavs of
flash-in-the-pan wannabes covering old classics. Groupthink was
something else, pulling collectively on the crowd mentality to
create a new-clubbing experience. Every night was different, the
music constantly evolving, depending on the mood in the room.
Instigators were the new DJs: individuals who could single-handedly
change-up the tempo or cool it off as the day wore on. They were
often the ones seen doing lines of Border-Collie off the toilet
cisterns, and on more than one occasion in recent months,
dance-floor wars between heavy-hitting instigators had boiled over
into violence, as two or more had struggled to be the one
controlling the crowd.

It was
five o’ clock and although the siesta crowd had mostly left, the
dance
-floor was still
packed, moving like a single homogonous cell of humanity to music
that sounded like it was being beamed down from outer-space. Lek
turned to say something to Crystal, but received a hard slap in the
face instead.

‘How dare
you?!’ she screamed at him over the music. ‘Do you think I’m just a
piece of meat that you and that wanker in there can fight over?
How
dare
you?!’ she
screamed again.

‘It’s not like
that!’ Lek tried to explain.

‘And 5000
creds! A lousy five grand! Is that all I’m worth to you?!’

‘There’s
more than that at stake here!’ Lek shouted, grabbing at her arms in
the dark, as she struggled to smack him again. ‘More than your
pride! Can’t you see that?!’

The fight
went out of Crystal, and Lek spoke as softly as he could above the
music. ‘I couldn’t put a price on your head. Don’t you understand?
I just can’t leave you behind. And I can’t take you without at
least trying to make sure you’ll be safe from him.’

‘I know.
I know.’ Crystal sighed and Lek felt the tears on her face as he
kissed her. She turned him around slowly and held him against the
wall, pressing her body against his. The music swelled and pulsated
in their ears and for a moment they were alone in a sea of
obscurity, existing only for one another.

Lek
pulled her over to a nearby sofa, where they joined a couple of
semi-conscious Chillaxed clubbers. Crystal slipped their
nocto-goggles from their heads and handed a pair to Lek. When he
pulled them on the entire room appeared before him in shades of
green, infrared and ultra-violet. And there was Crystal, smiling at
him seductively in the half light. There, hidden in the darkness
from the rest of the world, Lek had a fleeting feeling that they
might just make it out alive. She turned around on the sofa and
curled her body against his, and he buried his face in the nape of
her neck, kissing her softly and breathing in the very essence of
her. He thought about her perfect genes, thought about grafting her
DNA on to his and feeling her, part of him, on the most fundamental
level: in his bones, in his blood, on his tongue and under his
skin. He wanted her there and then; could have stayed on that sofa
forever, with the strange music and the soft glow of the
mood-lights washing over him like the Aurora Borealis.

But Lek
knew better, and he to
uched his lips against Crystal’s cheek one more time and
reluctantly pushed her away. ‘We have to go,’ he said, ‘someone is
coming.’

***

Roma
Bruc
e stood on the steps
of her high-rise in the warmth of the October sun and called the
pack. Her strangled howl - half wolf, half human - echoed off the
walls of the housing estate and from the doorways of the tower
blocks across the way, a group of five hooded figures loped into
view. These were the top echelon of Roma’s gang - the Brixton
Wolves. There were scores of soldiers spread throughout this part
of South London, but Roma, as alpha–female of the pack, dealt only
with these five, her lieutenants. One by one they approached her,
bowing in respect before offering their necks as a sign of
deference. Roma stood before them, saying nothing at first, letting
her yellow eyes bore into them all and revelling in her power. Some
people are born into greatness, others have it thrust upon them,
but Roma Bruce had earned her stripes on the mean streets of
Brixton, fighting hard and killing ruthlessly when necessary. She
was the worthy leader of the human-wolf pack and would fight tooth
and claw to hold on to her position until somebody tough enough, or
lucky enough, ripped it from her.