Dark as Angels: We are the Enemy

by Dominic Adler

  Then, a rattling noise. Nails on concrete.

  Three kids studied the van, sniffing the air like rats. One had a pair of bolt croppers in his hands and a gun in his belt. The others looked curiously over his shoulder. One held a wooden truncheon, the other a butcher’s knife. “The van?” said the kid with the knife. “How much is it worth?”

  “Leave,” Paolo said quietly. “This won’t end well if you don’t.”

  The kid snatched at the revolver in his belt. “Fuck off, gaffer. You got stuff in ‘ere worth somefin’ aintya? What is it? Booze or ‘cotics?”

  Paolo drew his Heckler-Koch 35 – an ugly weapon, snub-barrelled and bulbous. His optical implant pulsed, slaved to the weapon’s targeting mechanism. He laser-painted the youths with the blink of an eye, suppressed nano-munitions hissing across the garage. The kids fell, bodies peppered with bullet wounds. Paolo calmly covered the dead with a tarpaulin, pausing only to shoot one boy who still breathed. Locking the door behind him, he walked quickly away.

  From the plaza, Paolo heard the indignant, high-pitched whine of Tois and Babble. Three horsemen clip-clopped along the street, municipal cops wearing bright orange jackets. A gaggle of youths made a human barrier in front of the horses, yelling for them to go away. Paolo’s audio implant, lodged in the flesh behind his ear, amplified the conversation. “Move,” ordered one of the munis. “Unless you want a hoof-mark on your head.”

  “You can’t come ‘fru ‘ere wivaht no warrant,” one of the kids screeched, hopping from foot to foot. “I know me rights, fuckin’ Gavvas!”

  “You fuckers are takin’ liberties, I’m gonna get a lawyer!”

  “I said move!” The muni ordered, pulling a shock-gun from his belt. Bluish sparks crackled at the weapon’s tip, making the kids cringe.

  “Anyhow, you’re goin’ the wrong way,” said the girl who’d Paolo given a cigarette. “I saw a moody-lookin’ cutter goin’ to the lock-ups ‘round back.”

  “Thassrite,” said another, “a proper cutter too. Wiv gold an’ evryfink. I reckon he’s got stolen shit in there. Or mebbe he’s a Red!”

  “Now, why ‘fess to that?” the muni scoffed, horse neighing. “I know all the cutters ‘round here. Who is it? Marsden Delafinch? Royale Hussain?”

  “I’m tellin’ so you’ll leave us alone!” the girl wheedled, turning the words into a crude rap. “Why hassle a brudder, when you could pinch a cutter?”

  The second muni drew a long baton. “Right, form a line. ID cards ready, you know the score. Papers and pockets.”

  With the smash of breaking glass, petrol bombs whistled across the plaza. Kids laughed, Molotovs toppling from overhead gantries. Horses whinnied and reared, hooves scattering Goon kids like skittles. A muni flinched, a chunk of concrete bouncing off his crash helmet. Youths surged forward, drawing hammers and knives. The girl giggled, dancing like a dervish while nodes screeched electronic wails from the balconies, missiles falling like hail.

  Paolo recognised the music. Not Stamp, with its synthesized bass. The was called Rage, berserker screaming, like a wounded beast.

  The war drums of the Goons.

  The munis fired shock guns, flurries of darts trailing blue fire. Two of the youths shook like landed fish, only to be replaced by more. Sticking close to the building line, Paolo skirted the plaza. The kids ignored him, busy pulling a muni from horseback and boot-stomping his face. More weapons appeared, clutched in grimy fists. Bicycle chains and friction-lock batons, knuckle-dusters and single-shot pistols.

  The remaining munis cantered towards the river, shouting into their radios. The crowd surged towards them, yelling and shouting. The horsemen drew carbines from their saddles and opened fire, a bullet hitting the dancing girl in her throat. She spun, a spray of blood making a red crescent on hot concrete. The mob howled, machetes and axes flashing. Gunshots cracked. A horse tumbled, a bloody gash in its flank. The crowd began to chant.

  SHANK THE PIGGGSSSS UPPPP!!! SHANK THE GAVVAS!!!

  Paolo crossed the bridge, back towards the Commune. Violence in the Goons was like wildfire, a match dropped in a summer-parched forest.

  “You there, stop!” ordered a reedy voice. Another muni, shock-gun ready. He was no more than twenty, chin peppered with spots. He shakily dismounted a yellow motor scooter. “Papa-seven-oh-five,” he said into his radio. “Male suspect apprehended.”

  Paolo raised his hands. “Your colleagues are under attack. They’re in serious trouble.”

  “Don’t answer me b-back,” the muni stuttered, eyes darting over Paolo’s shoulder. His radio crackled, the dispatcher’s voice sharp. Negative, get to the plaza! Urgent assistance, Papa seven-oh-five.

  “Copy that,” the muni replied. Turning to Paolo, he tugged a pair of gel-kuffs from his belt. “I’ll come back for you.”

  Papa seven-oh-five, NatSec units ARE running to this call. ALL Papa-Seven units make their way to Kenneth Livingstone Plaza.

  The muni pointed his shock gun at Paolo, gel-kuffs in his free hand. “Ball your fists and push them into the kuffs,” he ordered.

  Paolo chopped the muni’s neck with the blade of his hand, a textbook brachial-strike. The cop, eyes bulging, slumped to the ground. Ignoring the voices crackling from the radio, Paolo ratcheted the muni’s head like a bottle-top, snapping his neck. He pushed the body in the lagoon, the orange-jacketed corpse disappearing into the brackish murk. The scooter followed.

  A riot. Four dead cops. Don’t run.

  Paolo crossed flyblown plazas and crumbling boulevards, mazes of low-rise housing and early 21st Century tower blocks. A police carrier trundled around a corner, prompting a ragged volley of gunfire from balconies and walkways. The windscreen splintered, bullets punching ragged holes in the carrier’s flimsy chassis. Paolo once wondered why the munis drove vehicles liveried in non-tactical orange and yellow. Then someone told him senior officers thought bright colours were reassuring. Paolo shook his head. Reassuringly easy to hit.

  Paolo pulled up his collar. He tasted something on the air. Felt it in his bones. The gathering storm of violence, hungry for blood. A storm that would boil and rage into something else.

  War.

  seven

  Leah and Hooker drove through billowing clouds of yellowish smog. The autonomous steering kicked in, and Leah relaxed. Hooker checked his dosimeter. “Air quality ain’t good, but ambient rads are okay.”

  Leah’s smog mask hung around her neck. “You worry ‘bout that stuff too much.”

  Hooker tapped her mask. “You don’t worry ‘bout it enough.”

  “And so, equilibrium is achieved.”

  Barnes was a gated settlement, protected by blast walls and armorglass. Nestled on a defensive peninsula, security guards watched from a copse of artificial trees. Leah stopped the Mercedes at a checkpoint. “Seems like a lot of graft, radicalising Evie Kendrick. Why didn’t they just target Lottie from day one?”

  A masked guard wearing a hazmat cape ran a mirror under the 4x4. Hooker readied his ID. “My take? Lottie Rhys lives in a fortified mansion in Holland Park with GCHQ-secured Evernet. Her father has a NatSec close protection detail and cronies like Vassa Hyatt to vet newcomers. It would be easier to lure Lottie out of that bubble, rather than trying to get inside.”

  “Yeah, makes sense,” Leah replied. “The Crimson are a patient bunch, I’ll give ‘em that.”

  The guard was a ferrety-looking man, a machine pistol across his chest. “Welcome to Barnes. What’s the purpose of your visit today?” he asked politely, pulling down his mask.

  “I’m Hooker. Miss Martinez and I are accredited security contractors,” he replied, tapping his armband. “We need to speak with a client on the hurry-up. It’s a sensitive matter.”

  “Which residence?” the guard replied, pulling a pad from his pocket.

  “Sorry, client confidentiality,” Hooker replied smoothly. “PaxData code restriction. If I told you, I’d be breaching professional confidence. As you can see, we’re NatSec cleared.�
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  The guard pointed at the ballistic bag on the back seat. “I’ll have to check with my manager. Anyhow, no firearms inside the perimeter. Not even peace-bonded. You can book ‘em in with us.”

  Leah drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “For fuck’s sake. I’ve got six guineas for you not to give a shit. We ain’t here for trouble. You’d know all ‘bout it if we were.”

  “She’s from out of town,” added Hooker politely.

  “I s’pose they do stuff different out there,” the guard replied, running a scanner across Hooker’s armband. It trilled happily. “That’s fine sir. I wouldn’t want to cause any problems for a resident of ours, after all. When you’re done, make sure it’s via the north gate. I’ll clear your vehicle to leave the village.”

  “I appreciate that.” Leah leant over and pushed the guineas in the guard’s pocket. More than two month’s pay for a working stiff. “Make sure the CCTV’s wiped after we’ve gone. Understand? Technical failure, software glitch… the usual.”

  “You got it, lady.” The guard replied, nodding at the gatehouse. A barrier slid open. “On behalf of Sierra5 Security, enjoy your day in Barnes.”

  The Kendrick residence was an Edwardian villa, overlooking a manicured village green. Nannies, dressed in pinafores and respirators, wheeled bubble-prams through the smog. Leah nodded at the henge of grimy cloudscrapers encircling the peninsula, shimmering in the BluSky’s sickly glow. “I dunno why the rich still live in London. Why not Wessex? It’s meant to be perfect, ain’t it?”

  “Politics,” Hooker replied. “Living here shows faith in the Reconstruction. They go back to Wessex at the weekends.”

  “Weekends?”

  “Yeah, they only work five days, and take two off. Saturday and Sunday. They call it the weekend.”

  Leah rolled her eyes. “Lazy fuckers. Let’s go and burgle some shit.” She parked the Merc on the Kendrick’s driveway, next to a vintage Tesla.

  “Check this out. Bleep made it for me.” Hooker pulled a grey plastic box from a pocket. He flicked a switch and it warbled happily, an old-fashioned LED screen flickering with alphanumeric sequences.

  “Very retro,” said Leah. “Brute-force hack?”

  “Bleep says its heuristic, whatever that means,” Hooker replied. The device began making scratchy noises, a light on its fascia glowing green. “Okay, CCTV off, locks disengaged.”

  The front door opened into a spacious hallway. Rain capes hung from a hook, two pairs of galoshes on the floor. A poster celebrating a long-ago Olympics had pride of place, pre-Emergency London bathed in golden light. The smell of scented chilli candles pricked their noses. “I hate chilli candles,” Hooker grumbled, poking around a side table with gloved fingers. “They make me sneeze.”

  “They’re good for your breathing,” said Leah.

  “The only place you put chilli is in a curry,” Hooker replied, drawing his revolver. “I could murder a curry.”

  They entered a reception room, painted in white-and-grey checks. “I wouldn’t talk about murder,” said Leah. The body of a woman lay on the floor, arms akimbo.

  “They’re definitely in a hurry,” said Hooker. “They just capped her in the face.” The front of the victim’s skull had been blown away, a spume of gore congealing on the carpet.

  Leah nodded. “Not very subtle.”

  “At least two large calibre rounds,” Hooker added. “Noisy. A .44 or something similar, I reckon.”

  Snapping on surgical gloves, Leah rolled the body. “Evie’s mother?”

  “Reckon so. Evie’s prob’ly dead too,” Hooker replied, studying the rings on the dead woman’s fingers. “Why keep her alive once they’d taken Lottie?”

  “Now you’re thinking like the Crimson,” said Leah, patting down the corpse’s pockets. “Nothing much here. No ID or fob.”

  Upstairs they found Evie’s room, white-painted with stripped wooden floors. A vase of black roses withered artfully on a dressing table, next to a tray of cosmetics. “Where do teenage girls hide stuff?” said Hooker.

  “At their friend’s houses,” Leah replied, rifling through a dresser. She made a pile of makeup and jewellery on the bed. “This must be three grands’ worth of slap here.”

  Hooker opened a wardrobe crowded with ballgowns. Velvet and fur and lace, beaded with pearls and gemstones. “I guess Evie was doing the whole Wessex party circuit too.”

  Leah slid open a drawer and upended it on the bed. Taped underneath was a notebook. “What have we here? Bad poetry. Student politics. Poor-little-rich-girl bullshit about how much she hates her mother. That’s okay, love, you got her killed.”

  “Anything else?”

  Leah pulled a slip of paper from the book. “A clue, I reckon. A flyer for an F4P meeting in Camden.”

  LONDON (NORTH) FRONT 4 PROGRESS RESISTANCE & ASSISTANCE FOR THE BORDERLANDS

  Contact Leveller Luke for details - Fob A.00.33-987@14449

  “I’ll send Gordy the code,” said Hooker, pulling his fob from a pocket. “What does Leveller mean?”

  Leah rolled her eyes. “I can tell you were a pig. The Levellers were political radicals in the 1600’s.”

  Hooker chuckled. “How d’you know this stuff?”

  “Mandatory political education in Nu-Brightonia,” Leah shrugged. “Why’d you think I legged it?”

  “To avoid being bombed?”

  “Well, obviously. But political history lectures and veganism were nearly as bad.”

  Hooker studied the leaflet. “Leveller Luke doesn’t sound very hard-core. I mean, he’s put a fob code on a flyer.”

  Leah took the piece of paper and stuffed it in her pocket. “F4P meetings ain’t meant to be hard-core, just a recruitment tool. That’s how they did it in Brighton, before the Republic. One minute you’re making sparkly protest banners, the next you’re in the woods setting command wires.”

  Hooker nodded. He supposed some of the kids he’d killed during the war, starry-eyed revolutionaries, were no different. “Luke might know who ‘Roisin’ is.”

  Leah nodded. “I make you right.”

  Hooker’s fob buzzed, Gordy’s code flashing on-screen. “Rufus? That fob code is attributed to a Luke Vincent McCaffrey. He’s thirty-five years old, only one conviction for fly-posting. Fronts up F4P’s London North branch. Beyond that, he’s got no obvious security traces to Black Bloc or Crimson Brigade.”

  “That was the fastest subscriber’s check ever, Gordy,” Hooker replied. “How the other half live.”

  “Big fish, big hooks. I’ll fob you McCaffrey’s address. Looks like it’s in Holloway – I know how much you love it up North,” Gordy chuckled.

  “I’ll make sure I’ve got my passport,” Hooker replied, pulling a map from his pocket. “We’ll head over there now.”

  “Have you got anything else? Vassa’s fobbing me every five minutes asking for updates.”

  “Only a theory – Evie Kendrick was radicalised on Lib-net, possibly by a Crimson Brigade agent. We think they used Evie to get to Lottie Rhys. Mind you, it happened right under Hyatt’s nose.” Hooker told Gordy about the videos from Free Medway, and Evie’s would-be mentor, Roisin.

  “Roisin? What does she have to do with Lottie Rhys?” asked Gordy.

  “We’re still working on it,” Hooker replied. “There’s nothing to suggest Lottie’s interested in radical politics, is there?”

  “I’m sure Vassa would’ve mentioned something,” Gordy replied. “Mind you, it’s not unusual for rich kids to get into that sort of thing, is it?”

  “Most of ‘em draw the line at murder – Evie’s mother was executed,” Hooker continued. “Several bullets in the face with a .44, which doesn’t suggest a domestic Green Zone burglary. I’m assuming Evie’s dead too. Tell Hyatt – she can get her hands dirty and call it in.”

  “Okay, just get out of there Rufus. Find this Luke McCaffrey and squeeze his nuts. We’ve got thirty-three hours left.”

  They left the Kendrick residence an
d drove north. Leah shook her head. “Given how easy it was to bribe the guards, I guess asking for CCTV covering the house would be a waste of time?”

  Hooker was half-listening to a news station, reporters discussing rioting in the Goons. “Asking for CCTV would draw even more attention to ourselves, and the murderer probably used a doppler to change their appearance. We’d be convenient suspects if this thing goes bent.”

  “That crossed my mind,” said Leah.

  “Hyatt’s too smooth,” Hooker replied. “I don’t trust her.”

  They crossed Hammersmith Bridge, neat Regency houses replaced by plastic-roofed favelas. They passed horse-drawn wagons and shoals of muddy cyclists, watched by a gas-masked huddle of Hammer Brethren, a local street league. They wore Kevlar breastplates, helmets painted in blue-and-white piebald. Each carried a long truncheon, knives and axes on their belts. Leah pulled a face. “Those knuckle-draggers wouldn’t last ten minutes outside the wall.”

  “True, but the Government likes ‘em well enough,” Hooker replied. “They keep people in line and don’t cost a penny.”

  “Ride the crocodile long enough,” Leah said, mimicking the voice of an Oriental mystic, “eventually it will gobble you up. Why trust law and order to an army of brain-dead fascists?”

  Hooker caught a Leaguer’s eye. “Like I said, they’re cheap. I remember when this lot started, during the Hate War. They were worse back then.”

  Leah eyeballed one of the street leaguers. “You don’t talk about those days much. Is it true you got a medal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What for?”

  “Killin’ people mostly,” Hooker replied. “Then they put me in prison.”