Vicious Circle

by Mike Carey

  “I don’t have the faintest idea,” I said. It was true, as far as it went: I didn’t know where Fanke was right then. I was pretty sure I knew where he was going to turn up at some point in the very near future, but I was keeping that little nugget to myself. Maybe Gwillam was the best chance I had of dropping a wrench into Fanke’s good works, but at the expense of Abbie’s soul? It couldn’t be done that way. Not if I was going to be able to look in the mirror afterward.

  Gwillam nodded to Sallis, who stepped up beside me. He tucked his gun into a holster strapped across his chest under his jacket and took a double handful of my hair, pulling my head back as far as he could. I tensed against him, but standing over me like that he could exert a lot more leverage than I could. Unhurriedly, Gwillam uncorked the large bottle and poured some of its contents onto one of the surgical swabs. The pungent smell of some strong disinfectant filled the air. Gwillam carefully swabbed the area where my shoulder and throat met, then threw the used swab down on the chair.

  “I’m telling you all I know,” I snarled, finding it hard to talk with my head tilted back so sharply.

  “We’ll see,” said Gwillam tersely. He tore the bubble wrap open, loaded the syringe with the snap-in ampoule and pumped it lightly, sending a thin jet of fluid spraying from its tip. “Hold him steady,” he warned Sallis, bending back over the doctor bag for a moment so that I lost sight of him. “If this goes into his carotid artery, it will probably kill him.”

  That was bad news, whichever way you looked at it. But even if I survived this, it was obvious that Gwillam was about to shoot me full of some thiopental derivative to ensure a fuller and franker discussion. Was there anything I could do to stop him? I couldn’t think of a damn thing.

  What did I know about truth serums? Only what I’d picked up from reading cheap spy thrillers, but that was enough to know that they didn’t work. They were just disinhibitors, cutting the brake cables of your subconscious so that you freewheeled endlessly, gabbling on about whatever came into your head. People injected with propofol or pentathol couldn’t consciously lie, but they could and did talk a load of free-associative shite. That was why truth drugs didn’t turn up much anymore even in cheap spy thrillers.

  On the other hand, did I want to free-associate in front of Gwillam about Asmodeus and Abbie and Juliet and St. Michael’s Church? No, I didn’t. This was definitely a good time to be keeping my thoughts to myself.

  And just then, another bit of trivia that I didn’t even know I knew popped up out of nowhere. I suddenly remembered what class of drugs the truth serums belonged to—and it gave me the bare bones of an idea; thin and pathetic but marginally better than nothing. No harm in trying, anyway: the only downside was that if it didn’t work, I might never wake up. I started to breathe fast and deep, forcing air into my lungs.

  “Would it be better if he was unconscious?” Sallis asked, with what from my point of view sounded like an indecent amount of enthusiasm.

  “Hardly,” Gwillam snapped. “How will he be able to answer any questions if you’ve put your fist through his skull?”

  He loomed back into my field of vision, the needle raised in his hand.

  “Gwillam!” I growled, still breathing in fast, forced gasps. I must have looked like I was starting a full-fledged panic attack.

  Gwillam hesitated. “What?” he asked.

  “I’m allergic.”

  “Allergic to what, exactly?” Gwillam asked, his tone dangerously mild.

  There could be any of twenty different drugs in the syringe. All I could do was guess.

  “Propofol,” I said.

  Gwillam shrugged. “Then you can relax,” he said. “This is something different.”

  The needle came down towards my neck. I twisted suddenly in Sallis’s hands, and Gwillam stopped: he didn’t want to kill me—or at least, not until he’d asked the rest of his questions. “Hold him steady,” he rasped, and Sallis threw one arm around my neck, leaned in hard against me to restrict my movement as much as he could.

  All of this was just playing for time while I drew as many breaths as I could, working my lungs like bellows until the actual moment when the tip of the needle slid into my skin and Gwillam’s thumb pushed home the plunger.

  A red curtain fell across my mind. A black one followed, half a second later. But they weren’t curtains at all, they were solid walls, and I crashed into unconsciousness so fast and hard that I actually felt the impact.

  * * *

  I woke up slowly and painfully; bleeding fragments of thought running together like mercury, pooling like ultra-cold lakes in the fractal wastelands of my cerebellum.

  The “I” came first, but there was nothing to join it to. Just I. What I? Where I? Who the fuck cared? It couldn’t matter. Whoever he was, let the bastard wait. There was pain going on somewhere nearby and I wanted to lie low so that it didn’t find me.

  A minute or an hour later, an “am” trickled down from somewhere and attached itself to the “I.” I am. I therefore think.

  It was me, again, bubbling up from under the chemical sludge of anaesthesia whether I liked it or not; being harshly, achingly reborn in a dark, cold room that seemed to be hanging at an angle. But no, that was me. I was lying skewed, my cheek pressed against the floor, my legs canted up into the air. I couldn’t figure it out so I let it go.

  I was still alive, anyway. And I was still thinking. Any brain damage? How would I tell? If you’ve lost enough of your brain function to make a difference, you’ve probably lost the ability to see it as a problem. Maybe the terrific throbbing inside my skull was a good sign: there had to be a lot of nerves in there still doing their jobs.

  Truth serums are general anaesthetics. They’re the primary inducers that you’re given to kick your conscious mind away into the long grass so that your body can be cut and spliced and sewn without any kickback from your cerebellum. By hyperventilating, I’d made sure that I got as big and fast a hit as the dose in Gwillam’s syringe could provide. I was hoping that I’d go straight past the rambling stage into full unconsciousness. It might even have worked: I didn’t have any memory of talking, anyway. But maybe a hole in your memory was normal with these things.

  I opened my eyes, but there was nothing to see. Either I’d been struck with hysterical blindness, or I was in an absolutely dark space. I tried to move, and couldn’t. I could lift my head, just, but that turned out to be a mistake because it made the throbbing worse. I opened my mouth to swear and discovered that my tongue was glued to my dry palate.

  Belatedly I remembered that I’d been tied to a chair. It seemed that I still was, but that the chair was now lying on its side on the ground. That explained the weird position I was in and the fact that I couldn’t move.

  Son of a bitch! Didn’t the Vatican ever sign the Geneva Convention? They’d just wheeled or dragged the chair, with me in it, over to some cupboard and pushed it inside so hard or so clumsily that it had fallen over. That was no way to treat a prisoner.

  As the pain gradually subsided, I worked at the ropes. They felt pretty loose: the original intention had just been to stop me moving while Gwillam interrogated me, not to keep me a prisoner forever. Consequently Sallis and Zucker hadn’t bothered to check whether the knots fell within reach of my fingers.

  All the same, it took me a long time—I guessed more than an hour—to get my hands free. By that time, my fingers were so sore and abraded from the stiff sisal fibers that I had to rest up for a while before I started on my legs. Getting them free was much faster, but it took a good ten minutes of massaging life back into them before I could stand.

  Okay, so I was free. But where the hell was I? I set out from the chair in tiny, inching steps, my arms out straight ahead of me, until I found a wall. Then I worked my way along it to the corner. This was no cupboard, obviously: it was a fair-size room, although the roughcast feel of the walls still suggested a storage area of some kind rather than a public space.

  I was intending to circumnavigate the room, but a little way along the second wall I found a door—and t
hen its very welcome neighbor, a light switch. I turned it on with a silent prayer, and three strip lights flickered into life over my head, leaving me blinking in a harsh, white radiance.

  I’d guessed right: this was a storeroom, high-ceilinged, with deep shelves running the entire length of the far wall. They were all empty, though, except for a few circular drums about a foot and a half in diameter, which were presumably old movie reels. When the standing exhibition went walkabout, they must have taken pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down. Either that or Gwillam had ordered the room cleared to make sure I didn’t find anything that might help me escape.

  But nobody’s perfect. As my gaze came full circle and I looked across at the far side of the door from where I stood, a grim smile spread across my face. Because screwed to the wall, hiding in plain sight, was a small white box with a red cross stenciled on its face. A first aid kit.

  My ticket out of here.

  Twenty

  THE CONTENTS OF A FIRST AID KIT VARY A LOT FROM PLACE to place, but the core is always the same—bandages and sticking plasters in a million different shapes and sizes. There’s usually a bottle of disinfectant and some cotton buds; this one even had a few exotics like Savlon spray and vinegar for stings. None of that mattered a damn. I was looking for items that had either a point or an edge.

  I got lucky. There was a tiny pair of scissors, a pair of splinter forceps, and a half-dozen safety pins.

  The door had a simple mortice deadlock with no lockmaker’s name on the plate. I dropped the forceps back into the box: probably too wide, and certainly not strong enough. I bent back one of the safety pins into a nearly straight line, then using the scissors as a makeshift pair of pliers I twisted the sharp end up and back into a hook. After a hairpin, it’s my favorite kind of improvised lockpick, and it was easily up to a job as straightforward as this.

  Five minutes were all it took to work the lock’s three levers around into the release position, the third one falling into place with a very satisfying click. Before I tried the door, I turned the light out and let my eyes adjust to the dark again. There was no light coming from under the door: if there had been, I’d have noticed it before, when the room was still in darkness. Under the circumstances, the goal was to see before I was seen. Otherwise I’d be back to square one.

  After about a minute, I eased the door open as silently as I could. Peering out, I waited until the wider darkness outside had started to resolve itself into shapes before I stepped out. I was in another part of the massive main exhibition area, as sepulchral and empty as the part where Gwillam had interrogated me. There should be any number of ways out onto the street from here, or into other parts of the South Bank complex that were still open to the public. All I had to do was to make sure I didn’t bump into any of Gwillam’s merry little band on the way. In the case of Po, though, that meant not just avoiding being seen but also not letting him get my scent.

  The level I was on seemed to be entirely deserted, so from that point of view I was doing fine. I thought about resting up for a few minutes here before I moved on; but time was pressing: I didn’t know what I might have said while I was under the drug, or how much Gwillam now knew. There was also the fact that since I was still dressed only in a hospital gown I’d probably get hypothermia if I hung around too long in this frigid air.

  After a minute or so of tacking backward and forward across the huge space I found a staircase and headed down, taking it slow in the pitch dark to avoid going arse over tip all the way to the bottom. I was reasoning that at the very least I’d probably hit a door to the car park—which in turn had to connect with the street. Even if there was a security grille and it was locked shut, I was reasonably sure that I’d be able to jimmix it and get out.

  But the door at the bottom of the stairwell was a fire door, with a padlock and chain hung over the bar in defiance of law and logic. I retraced my steps to the floor above, tried the door there. It opened when I pushed, so I stopped when the crack was about an inch wide and peered in.

  Not quite dark here: there were lights on somewhere ahead—a dull, slightly bluish glow coming around the edge of what looked like a movable partition wall up ahead of me and slightly to my left. I listened: no sound at all, except for the very faint hum of some kind of machinery.

  I stepped out and eased the door closed behind me. Sooner or later I had to come out of the stairwell, and the closer to the ground I was the better I’d like it. The South Bank Centre is a spectacular vertical maze even with the lights on. I could waste a quarter of an hour or more just shuffling up and down in the dark.

  A few steps brought me to the edge of the partition wall. Moving as slowly and silently as I could, I leaned around it and looked in at the source of the light.

  A man was sitting in a cheap plastic bucket chair at a computer terminal. His back was to me, but I recognized the bald spot: it was Sallis. He was scrolling slowly through endless screens of double-columned text, and he seemed absolutely intent. The gun, with the silencer now removed, sat beside him on the desk where the computer had been set up, in between a Republic of Coffee cup and a Styrofoam burger box. The Anathemata might be tooled up for war but they were living like cops on a stakeout.

  I considered my options. No one else in sight, and no other islands of light in the immense room. Sallis was deep into something that seemed to have completely cut him off from the world around him. I could sneak on past him, and maybe make it to another exit without him clocking me on the way.

  On the other hand, there was the gun. And the clothes. And whatever money he might have in his pockets. Needs must when the devil drives.

  I took a step back, then another; and one sideways. Working from memory, that was the best I could do. I charged the partition shoulder first, taking a flying leap at the last moment so that I hit it high and had all my weight on its upper half as it came down and I came down with it.

  Sallis didn’t even yell. He did make some kind of a sound, but it’s not one I could do justice to without specialized equipment. His head slammed forward into the desk with a solid smack as he fell, forced down by the weight of the partition and my body; then the legs of the desk gave way and he just vanished from sight under the general wreckage.

  I rolled over twice and came up quickly, spinning to face him in case he was still conscious and going for the gun, but I needn’t have worried. He was sprawled on the ground, absolutely still, his head and upper body under the fallen partition. I snatched the gun up myself, tried to work out which end was which, and eventually found the safety catch. With that matter sorted, I levered the near end of the partition wall aside with my foot. Sallis was out cold, a trickle of blood wending its way down his forehead from a shallow cut. He was still breathing, though, and the cut was the only wound I could see. He’d probably get out of this with nothing worse than a headache.

  I stripped him quickly, shrugged into his jeans, shirt, and jacket. They fitted me pretty well, all things considered, and the slight stink of his stale sweat was a price I was willing to pay. I searched his pockets. Bingo: a small wad of notes, a card wallet, even a set of car keys on a fancy fob that bore the Mitsubishi logo. I took the gun, too, since there was no way of getting back my weapon of choice.

  I was done, and I had places to be, but I hesitated because an idea had struck me. Another one came hard on its heels, way above average, and annoying because it meant going back the way I’d come. I wasn’t sure whether the gain in matériel would offset the loss of time, but either way I didn’t have the luxury of standing here agonizing about it.

  First things first. Rooting amidst the wreckage of the desk, I found a few sheets of paper and a black pen. I rested the paper against Sallis’s back and scribbled a brief note. It probably wouldn’t help, but it couldn’t hurt so what the hell. I folded the note and tucked it into the waistband of his underpants, like a fiver into a Chippendale’s jockstrap.