Carl hauled open the freezer door, chilly air rushed out, and he headed inside.
Luke received a flashback of himself lying in a transport system and paused by the cold entrance. Boxes of food filled the front shelves and meat hung from hooks at the back. “Well, what you waiting for?” Carl said, his breath clouding in the air.
“What’s in here? Besides the obvious?”
“Come in and close it. It’s not like I’m trying to freeze us to death.”
Luke pushed the visions to the back of his mind and mentally conceded the point. He entered and slammed the door.
Carl moved to the back, grabbed the last meat hook, and tugged it down. A high-pitched electric grind whistled somewhere outside; the freezer shuddered, and ice crystals dropped to the floor.
“What’s going on?” Luke asked.
“Watch.”
The rear wall slid smoothly to the left, revealing a varnished elevator compartment behind a brass scissor-gate, illuminated by a shell-shaped art deco light.
"It takes real effort to avoid Lynch for ten years." Carl dragged the gate to one side and gestured inside. “After you.”
“Is this original?”
“Walter salvaged it from a hotel before knocking it down. He did tons of deconstruction jobs for the government.”
The freezer wall slid back into position. Carl rattled the gate shut and hit a button marked one. The elevator shuddered before descending with a quiet hum, plunging deep below the urban pool’s surface.
“You built it?” Luke asked.
“Not exactly. It’s a London Underground service shaft; we refitted the car. You’ll see in a minute.”
“What’s the tube used for nowadays?”
“It’s mostly derelict. Stations were bricked up at the top and bottom to stop vagrants getting in, but Timetronic keeps a line open to ship prisoners between Wandsworth and the PCC.”
“Handy to know. Is this Helen’s hideout?”
“It’s a bit more than that, but yeah, we’ve created something.”
The elevator bounced to an abrupt halt in front of a dimly lit corridor, lined with London Underground’s recognizable tiles. Carl led Luke around its shallow bend and stopped by a rusty security door.
Keys jangled behind it, a lock clanked, and the door swung open.
Another one of Walter’s shaven-headed bruisers stood inside, wearing the same shirt as Carl. Luke wondered if it was an unsubtle uniform they used to identify themselves in the Zone Seven as the local crime lords.
“The boss wants to see you,” the bruiser said. “Hand over your gun.”
“No, and I came to see him.”
“Hand it—”
“Forget it.”
The bruiser grunted, headed inside, and Luke followed him down a short passage. The days of him taking orders from anyone were gone, and he realized a burden had lifted off his shoulders. Previously, he enjoyed stability, completing missions, and being part of something bigger. His life had never been in as much ongoing danger than in 2070, but the only person he answered to was himself, and he liked the feeling more than he ever expected.
The passage led out into a cavernous space, half brick and half carved rock. Pipes and cables ran around the walls and through holes in the ceiling. A faint smell of fried food hung in the air. To the right, a woman sat at a long console and observed ten monitors, displaying views inside and outside The Mega Dive. To the left, artificial light streamed out of ten individual rooms.
A large figure appeared in the doorway of one of the central rooms, almost filling it with his bulky frame. Luke broke away from the bruiser and approached him.
Walter extended his hand. “I knew we’d end up working together.”
“Seems we don’t have much choice.”
“You might be right. How does Lynch know?”
“He planted a listening device in my thumb. It’s out now, but he heard my full conversation with Helen.”
The big man swallowed hard and stood to one side, giving Luke a view inside the room. A blonde haired woman in her early thirties, dressed in black, with the same ruddy cheeks and welcoming smile of Sir Henry Penshaw, rose from a sofa and joined Walter at the doorway.
“Hello, Luke,” Helen said. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“I once knew a man who did everything in his power to give you a life,” Luke said. “I’ll make it happen.”
“I once knew a man who wrote in his diary that you were one of the best officers this country had to offer. I'm sure you can.”
Walter ushered him inside and closed the door.
Chapter 25
Helen and Walter inclined against each other on a leather couch, and she rested her hand on his knee. Luke sat opposite in a matching armchair and wondered for a moment if Sir Henry would approve of her choice in men. He didn’t really care, and never judged others unless their actions had a negative impact on his or other people’s lives.
Framed photographs of old London street scenes hung on the walls. A mahogany display cabinet sat at the back of the room, containing memorabilia from around the time of his first stint at living. This place, coupled with The Mega Dive, hinted that someone else besides Helen had a love of the past.
“How old are you, Walter?” Luke asked.
“Sixty-one, according to my birth certificate.”
“You look early-forties. It seems we’ve formed a first Timetronics Anonymous group meeting.”
“It wasn’t jail time,” Helen said. “Tell him.”
Walter rolled up his sleeve and held out a scarred right forearm. “I was TS07, a fourteen-year-old boy with Cystic Fibrosis. Plugged in '23, cured and made my comeback in '44, ran away like a petulant teenager in '45.”
“Lynch let you off the hook?” Luke asked.
“Not exactly. His power was still growing back then. They’d just about replaced the government, and Timetronic was in the process of launching the Lynch mob, so he had other things to worry about. I worked on dismantling projects, helped keep a small area intact, and developed it into Zone Seven. Lynch accepted places like it had to exist. Not everyone bought his solution.”
“I was told people go missing around you,” Luke said, remembering Maria’s quote. “Is that how you stay in his good books?”
“I’ve rounded up a few of his runaway employees. I’m not proud of it, but it keeps the wolf from the door.”
“Aren’t people free to leave the company?”
“It depends on what they’ve seen. If it’s a claycop who kidnapped and imprisoned someone opposing Timetronic, no, they can’t leave until retirement in case they gossip. I wouldn’t capture innocent people for Lynch.”
“It must be handy for him having a thug inside Zone Seven.”
“We're slowly being crushed from the outside,” Walter said. “If I didn’t collect the Zone tax to keep our facilities running, those steel walls would’ve fallen a long time ago. Ask any local and they’ll tell you the same. I don’t need to hear an outsiders point of view.”
“You forget I saw how you operated a couple of days ago.”
Helen eased Walter back against the couch. “I told him to do it.”
“Why?”
“You aren’t the first person he sent to capture me. I had to find out if Dad was right, and you were the real deal.”
Luke thought back to the fight on the second floor of The Mega Dive. Walter had only sent Carl against him when all three could've attacked with weapons. The big man also quickly switched to friendly conversation and asked him to get in touch after a couple of days, which backed up Helen’s claim.
“Hats off to you for giving Lynch the runaround for a decade,” Luke said to Helen, “But if you want to beat him, you’re going about it the wrong way.”
“Our network is nationwide, and the clayport bombings and poster campaigns get our message across. We mostly focus on London because that’s the main powerbase, and other pools aren’t nearly as strict. Throw enough c
rap at someone and it eventually sticks.”
“I meant the London Eye. Killing innocent civilians doesn’t win hearts and minds.”
Helen grimaced as if someone had just wafted horse manure below her nostrils. “That was Meakin using one of his drones. It helps with Lynch’s propaganda war.”
“If the other corporations are scared of his growing power, as you said over the radio, couldn’t you convince one of them to back you?”
“No chance. Lynch controls the media, and if I set foot in public, I’d disappear faster than a toupee in a hurricane.”
Meakin organizing the attack and Lynch controlling the media made a mockery out of the doctor’s appearance on the news at a candlelight vigil, placing a floral wreath at the foot of the London Eye. It didn’t surprise Luke; the Cairo virtual environment demonstrated how low Lynch was prepared to stoop. Murdering citizens only added to the list of crimes.
An intermittent electronic tone beeped on Walter’s digital wristwatch. He pushed a chrome stud, cutting the alert, and gave Helen a subdued look. “That’s the deadline. Let’s see what happens.”
She groaned as she rose from the couch and swept a pistol off a sideboard.
“Your meeting with Lynch?” Luke asked.
Walter nodded. “Half-two in Barbados and he organized a pod for me outside the eastern entrance.”
“After today’s events,” Helen said. “we guessed Walter would be locked inside the environment, and the pod re-routed to Wandsworth.”
Helen and Walter led Luke across to the far side of the cavern. Lights winked on a radar screen built into the console. A woman, sitting on an office-style chair in front of it, swiveled around. “Still only four cops at Flamingo.”
“This is Emma,” Helen said. “She’s been part of my team for three years.”
“You’re Luke Porterfield?” Emma asked.
“The one and unplugged,” Luke said. He scanned the high definition monitors, showing the bar’s interior, shutter, side alley, and different angles of the square. Helen probably watched his every move before stage-managing his previous altercation with Carl, and it made him realize this group had also manipulated him, though not with the same grubby intentions as Lynch.
“Incoming,” Emma said. “Two rotors and a tandem.”
“It’s my fault,” Luke said. “Kick me out if it preserves your safety.”
Helen ignored him and stared at a monitor. “Lynch’s finally doing it. I told you he’s desperate.”
“He won’t hit The Mega Dive,” Walter said.
“Why not?” Luke asked. “Lynch knows you're his route to Helen, and you snubbed his meeting. What does that tell him? It won't just be you he’ll be coming after, it’ll be Carl and anyone else connected.”
“He’d lose his only contact and influence in Zone Seven. Lynch likes to keep his finger in every pie—"
“He hates this place,” Luke interrupted. “And has the perfect excuse to kill two birds with one stone: recorded evidence of a local leader assisting a terrorist threat against the country. You’ve given him a justifiable reason to dismantle your little empire.”
Walter turned a paler shade of white. A gunmetal gray craft, four times bigger than any Luke had previously seen, with large single rotors at each end, descended outside The Mega Dive, shrouding the square in a thin cloud of dust. Its wheels jolted against the road, and a ramp lowered from the back of it. Two rotorcrafts landed thirty meters either side, blocking off the streets.
“Aren’t you warning the staff?” Luke asked.
“They’ll be captured, not killed. It’ll be more suspicious if the Lynch mob finds nobody here. The cops in the Flamingo probably saw them arrive for work.”
Twenty claycops, wearing respirators, thudded down the ramp with weapons raised and formed an extended line outside the bar. A small mechanized vehicle, the size of a dune buggy, followed them out, cut between them and rumbled up to shutter.
Helen clasped Walter’s hand. “It’s over here. We’ll move and rebuild.”
The big man didn’t reply.
“What’s that?” Luke asked.
Emma twists her chair to face him. “They call it a rat catcher. It uses CS gas to smoke people out.”
A chrome pole thrust from the vehicle’s front and smashed into the bar’s shutter, puncturing straight through it.
On the bar’s internal feed, four prongs extended sideways from the end of the pole. The rat catcher reversed, and ripped the shutter clean off. A tube rose from its side and fired four small objects into the bar. White gas jetted from each, clouding the whole area in a matter of seconds.
The barwoman staggered outside, eyes streaming and clutching her throat, straight into the line of cops. One dragged her up the tandem's ramp.
The bald bottle collector ran out of the side entrance. Shots crackled through a console speaker, and he collapsed to the ground. Two cops dragged him away by his ankles.
Ten claycops stormed through the entrance and moved between the tables. One circled behind the bar, and in a pointless act of spite, swiped a row of spirit bottles off their ledge.
Walter growled. “We can’t fight them, and they know it.”
“Them or their claytronic version?” Luke asked.
“Timetronic… Them… Whoever… The bloody Lynch mob.”
Half of the cops charged up the stairs, the others down. Luke concentrated on the feeds showing the three cellar chambers. They snaked between the barrels, ransacked the junk in the second chamber, and entered the third.
Carl and the other bruiser joined the small group at the console.
Nobody said a word as they watched the monitors.
A cop moved along each freezer from left to right, staring through the frosty windows, and gestured to the middle door.
“What’s he seen?” Helen said. “You guys didn’t leave anything, did you?”
“Nothing,” Carl said. “Maybe it’s the temperature’s slightly higher, or the window a little clearer?”
“Not these models,” Walter said. “They regulate in less than a minute.”
The cop swung open the freezer door and his colleague moved straight inside. He walked out seconds later with a joint of ham tucked under his arm.
“Greedy assholes,” Walter said. “It isn’t good enough to trash my place; they’re bloody looting it.”
For the next ten minutes, the Lynch mob opened every door and cupboard in the building. One pulled a computer server from underneath the boxing ring and stamped on it until the frame gave way and shattered circuitry spat out of its side.
By the time they’d finished sacking The Mega Dive, most of the gas had cleared on the ground level. The cops convened near the entrance and held a short meeting before heading outside. The last man out ripped a piece of a console off the wall and tossed it across the bar like a frisbee. They trudged back up the tandem’s ramp, followed by the rat catcher.
Walter slumped on a spare swivel chair. “Helen, maybe it’s time for our last resort?”
“No chance. I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.”
“He’s an old man; you can do it.”
“Not if he puts me in a transport system first. Do you want his hands on my unconscious body?”
“Are you talking about marrying Lynch?” Luke asked.
“Only as a final option,” Helen said. “The plan is to marry him, get him back to the privacy of Clifton Hall, and kill him during our first night together. We’re not there yet, and there’s no guarantee it’ll work.”
“But we’re close,” Walter said.
“You’re looking at this the wrong way,” Luke said. “He’s made you stronger.”
“How so?”
“He’s given you nothing to lose.”
“More company,” Carl said. “Screen five.”
Luke switched his focus back to the monitors. A single cop jogged down the tandem’s ramp and into The Mega Dive. He placed a metallic cube amongst the smashed glass on the bar
and returned to the craft.
Walter stepped closer to the monitor. “It’s a holosnap.”
“A what?” Luke asked.
“A virtual clip,” Helen said. “People use them for Valentine's messages; passionate speeches on a bridge in Venice, stuff like that. The holosnap plays once and deletes. It saves any future embarrassment.”
The tandem’s blades spun to a blur, it lifted off the ground and climbed out of view. The two rotorcrafts blocking the road took off shortly after, and all three appeared on the console radar heading back toward the PCC.
Four cops remained in the Flamingo, but all other signals in Zone Seven had vanished off the scanner. While the group debated emigrating or joining another one of their nationwide cells, Luke paced the cavern and considered how to land the quick knockout blows on Timetronic. Carl’s earlier revelation about an underground track between the PCC and Wandsworth gave him a route to their security nerve center, and if he wanted to reach Lynch at Clifton Hall, the drone capability needed taking out.
“We don’t know what’s on the holosnap,” Helen shouted above Walter and Carl, who were arguing about the benefits of Stoke versus Leeds. “They might be offering terms.”
Carl turned, headed for the passage, and drew a revolver.
“Wait,” Luke said. “You realize if you take the message, they'll know you were close or even watching?”
“He’s right,” Emma said. “They transmit read receipts when you open them.”
“The signal won’t reach the surface from here,” Walter said.
“I didn’t mean that,” Luke said. “A goon could poke his head in the bar every five minutes. If they see nobody come or go, and the holosnap disappears, it means they discover there’s another way in.”
“We’ve other ways out.” Walter turned to Carl. “Take the Japanese exit. Ask one of their staff to deliver bento boxes to the bar and grab the snap. If anyone stops them, get them to say the order was placed before the raid.”
“They’d still deliver after a raid?” Luke asked.
“It’s an honor thing. Besides, we’ll see any cops coming, and you’re giving them too much credit. That holosnap holds the key to our futures.”
FAST FORWARD: A Science Fiction Thriller Page 18
