The Fox, the Dog, and the King

by Matt Doyle

  I’m not picking up on too much of the actual content of what’s being said up ahead. Other than the occasional loud outburst, the group is keeping things quiet, which makes me wonder where these tunnels are running under. They’re probably worried about being caught. My hand finds a turning on the wall and someone starts to grumble about something not being worth it for a few extra bucks on the side. The voice is low, but close, which means that they’ve stopped. I slip back behind the turn and wait. A static fuzz fills my earpiece for a moment. They must be Tapping .

  I wait for the fuzz to die down and for the footsteps to resume, then I wait a little longer so that I’m not walking too close behind them. From what little I can make out, the group seems too preoccupied with their disdain for Castleford’s methods to actually notice me, but it wouldn’t pay to get overconfident and drop the careful approach just yet. We walk in a straight line for another ten minutes or so, until I hear the faint sound of boots on metal. Frowning, I push on and find another turning, but there are no sounds coming from down in the darkness. I sigh and make an instinctual decision. If there’s no sound coming from the shadows, they must have kept going .

  I walk on and find myself irrationally happy to see a metal walkway bridging the flow. That explains the metal clunking at least. Interestingly, I can see from here that the sewer is set out identically on both sides of the running waste. Each side tunnel, barely visible with the poor lighting, is matched by another on the opposite side. I must have missed that because I was too busy paying attention to the targets. Speaking of which…

  Taking care not to fill the area with the same echoed steps that I’d heard, I walk across the bridge, taking note of the light buzz that creeps into my ear. More Tapping. It’s weak, though. It must be further on this time. I’ll have to speed up .

  Moving as quickly as I can without both safety and sound becoming an issue, I soon come to another turning. I pause long enough to check there are no signs of movement, then move on, trying to find something to catch on to. Just as I’m about to double back and check down the last tunnel, a loud scraping noise cuts through all the other subtle constants. I keep moving and, the moment I find myself at another turning, the noise comes again, but louder.

  I turn and make my way down into the darkness, noting that the wall has changed from cold and sticky to warm and less sticky. Small mercies and all that. Partway down, I find a small power generator pushed up against the wall. And I mean small. From the feel of it, it’s about the size of Lori’s temperature maintaining box.

  That makes me smile, and my mind drifts back to the night she convinced me to go to the Kitsune show, essentially kick-starting my involvement with this mess. That was a good cup of coffee. What did the instructions say? If you put something that isn’t already prepared, it gets confused and overheats? That’s like me right now. She sent me into this case unprepared, and now I don’t have a clue what I’m doing down here and feel like just setting Bert loose to track these idiots down. Ugh. Work time, Cassie.

  I shake my head and try to focus on the task at hand. The generator is resting on what feels like a metal table. It’s warm too, which means that it’s running, probably to power the lights. Having stopped already, I wait and listen. At first, nothing but the ongoing ambience filters through, but then, a loud fuzz cuts into the earpiece again.

  That’s closer than the first one. I should be able to hear them.

  But there’s nothing else.

  I pat the generator gently and realise that it’s not doing what I thought it was. I haven’t come across any others along the way, which would mean that, unless the others were either hidden or off down the tunnels I skipped, it’s been powering a large area of lighting. Even as bad as the lights are, there’s no way this thing is supplying all of them. When I feel it, the cabling is sticking out to the side too. Why wouldn’t you have it pushed up so that the cables were behind it? And none of this explains the scraping sound.

  Crouching down, I let my hand follow one of the table legs down to the ground, then use a single finger to explore a small hole. It runs back towards the cables. I feel around, and quickly confirm that there are identical pits extending under each leg. Guiding tracks?

  With no sounds coming in to guide me, I decide that I may as well work to that assumption, and move to the side of the generator with no cables sticking out. I give it a shove, which is pretty difficult with an immobile Familiar on your shoulder, regardless of how lightweight he is. The table scrapes noisily along the wall until it reaches the end of the holes. A quiet click sounds, followed by an equally quiet swish at my feet, bringing with it some proper light. I crouch again and see that the light is coming from a small crawlspace. Well, it’s the height of a crawlspace and it’s built like a crawlspace, but the general shape is closer to that of a vent from some science fiction movie. Whichever way I look at it, it’s got to be where my targets went, which means it’s also where I’ve got to go. Which creates a new problem.

  I lift Bert from my shoulder and place him in front of me on the floor, then whisper, “Bert. We’re going inside, but I need you to be as quiet as possible. Do not give verbal responses unless you need to warn me of something. If you understand, flash your left eye.”

  A red light flashes in front of my right eye and I open my mouth to start chastising the shiny little menace, then realise that he was flashing his left eye, not the eye in front of my left. So technically, he did what I said. “OK, you first.”

  Bert clacks forward into the small area, and switches to a slow waddle, minimising some of the noise. I follow after and, once we get a couple of feet inside, the opening behind us swishes closed again and the sound of grinding metal fades in behind it. The crawlspace doesn’t go on too far, and we soon find ourselves nearing a well-lit opening. It sounds quiet, so I tell Bert, “Keep going.”

  Bert obeys, and we come out into a warm, carpeted hallway with some proper lights hanging down from a ceiling high enough for me to stand up and put Bert back onto my shoulder. The hallway seems to stretch on in both directions, and a few feet to the side, there’s a wooden door. At this point, there’s no way to tell if the group continued on in one direction or the other, or if they went through the door. The door will be the easiest and quickest thing to check .

  Moving quietly, I grab the doorknob and give a tentative twist. It moves easily, and the door begins to slide open. That’s a good sign that the group I’ve been following may have come through here. I push the door open enough to slide around and make my way into a darkened room with a distinctly musty smell. The door makes no move to swing shut behind me, and I don’t move to close it myself. If needed, it’ll provide a good escape route. Plus, the light from the hallway is helping me make out some shapes. The way things are strewn about haphazardly makes the room look like a cellar of some sort. There’s a box labelled “clothes” near the door, and next to that an open box of old external hard drives. Around the other side of the door, I find the battered remains of a vaguely familiar looking table.

  Somewhere inside Bert, his gears start to turn, and their grinding creates the illusion of a low, mechanical growl in my ear. Then, three things happen at once. I feel Bert’s talons tense as he readies to pounce. I hear the sound of a hammer being pulled back and clicking into place in an old-style revolver. And I realise where we are. “Bert! Stand down!”

  I turn just in time to see the silhouette of a woman in front of a flight of concrete stairs at the back of the room drop her gun into one hand and whack a light switch, instantly flooding the room with an unnecessarily bright flash of white.

  “Caz? What the Hell were you doing in the supply halls?” Charlie asks.

  “TAPPERS,” CHARLIE SAYS incredulously. “In the supply halls.”

  I haven’t told Charlie everything. Honestly, I don’t have the time right now, and I’m a little preoccupied with trying to get a response from my friends on the currently poorly named response team. She does know that I was trai
ling a group for a case at least. “Hanson, you there?” I say, my finger held tight on the transmit button, but my earpiece continues to remain silent. I shake my head in frustration. “Yeah. So, what are the supply halls?”

  Charlie shrugs. “That’s no secret. You know how we normally keep stimulants in one place and just pick up what we need? Well, if we’re expecting a big order, then we ship them below ground to the relevant Elite. Makes it easier that way.”

  “So, these hallways connect the different houses for the Elite Dealers?”

  “And the main supply stores, yeah. I’m surprised you didn’t know about them. When you never asked how I got stocked up for major deals, I assumed someone had told you.”

  “I thought you just picked them up.”

  “Huh,” Charlie replies, leaning back against the wall and crossing her arms. “I suppose you weren’t ever here during a delivery.”

  I open my mouth to respond, but a voice cuts in on my earpiece. “Cassie, you there?” Hanson asks.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” I reply, my relief mixing with my frustration. “What happened?”

  “We got hit with a bunch of fuzz when they used the first set of Gloves in the tunnels, but the auto-reset didn’t kick in. I think you were probably too close and they did a number on the equipment. We lost your tracker too.”

  “Diu . Is it back on now?”

  “Yeah. It says you’re around Fenchurch Street. That seem about right?”

  “Really? You think I’d be able to tell that down in the tunnels?”

  “I don’t know. Can you?”

  “Not down there, no. But yes, I’m on Fenchurch Street.”

  “So, you’re not down in the tunnels now?”

  “No, I lost the group and ended up back topside. Any ideas what to do now?”

  “Yeah, get yourself back down there. Another guy went in about ten minutes after you. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to catch him and pick up the trail again.”

  I rub my forehead and ask, “And if I get too close to him when he uses the Gloves? Then what? The tracker’s gonna cut out again.”

  Hanson pauses, then says, “It’ll come back again eventually.”

  “Yeah, by which time, I could’ve been jumped by twenty people with no sign of backup in sight.”

  Hanson clicks her tongue over the earpiece. That I can hear it means that she’s intentionally transmitting it. Thanks for that, Hanson .

  “You could shout, really loud,” she tries.

  Charlie taps my shoulder and hands me a sheet of paper that reads, Did the Tapping affect Bert? I reread it and glance at the little mechanical gargoyle who’s wandering around the room and examining the furniture in his ongoing quest for a decent scratch post. “Thank you,” I say to Charlie, then hit the transmit button and say, “The Tapping didn’t seem to effect Bert. Familiars are built not to be damaged by small surges, right?”

  “You tell me,” Hanson replies, slightly bemused.

  “Yeah, it was something about avoiding the risk of having their programming scrambled too easily. If I send you his tracer details, you should be able to connect to that if the main tracer cuts.”

  “OK, but what if the comms go down again?”

  “If comms go down but you can still follow one of the tracers, then send a team in if we stay in one place for more than a minute. If you can’t catch either tracer, then send a team to the point where it went down. If the message was right about timings, I can’t be too far from the meeting point now. If you can, though, get them to enter from above. The way this is going, the sewers are a direct route to wherever they’re holding the dogs, but the actual building will be on street level.”

  “Roger that. I’ll get them ready to move. Keep us updated if you can.”

  “Will do,” I reply and turn back to Charlie, who is now staring at me with a suspicious look on her face.

  “Dogs?” she asks.

  “Long story. Bert, come here a minute.” Bert waddles over and I slide a panel on his stomach aside so I can check the identification number on the outside of his frontal servicing hatch. I hit the transmit button and read it off to Hanson, then confirm that we’ll move when we know the straggler has gone by. Bert, being Bert, wanders off completely unfazed. Charlie, on the other hand, is still looking at me. “What?”

  “I need to know what our halls are being used for.”

  I could argue with her on that point, but that would only slow me down right now, so I take the quick route instead and confirm, “Someone’s set up a dogfight. The audience is definitely using them to get to the venue. I don’t know if they were used to transport the dogs themselves, but it’s possible.”

  “You’ve gotta be…and when were you gonna tell me that?”

  I shrug. “After we stop it.”

  “Caz, we work hard to not get on the wrong side of the law any more than necessary. Something like that in one of our non-public areas could be really detrimental to that relationship. You get that, right?”

  Honestly? I hadn’t thought about that. In my defence, I didn’t know about the tunnels before today, and I have been very wrapped up in figuring out how to stop the thing from happening. “The PD know who the group belongs to, and they definitely aren’t Dealers. Besides, we’re all only after one guy. They’d never pin it all on you guys.”

  “Except they’ll want to ask questions about why the halls were potentially being used to transport dogs, won’t they?” I can’t argue that one, so I don’t. When I remain silent, Charlie says, “I need a name, Caz, so that I can try to sort things out at our end.”

  “Fine,” I sigh. “But leave it to us to deal with him, yeah? His name’s Malcolm Castleford. He’s…”

  “The accountant? Oh, Hell.”

  A ball of fuzz runs through my earpiece and I squint. Ahead of me, the clock on Charlie’s wall glitches, just like it did before the Kitsune show. I nod towards it and say, “I think a Tapper just entered the halls.”

  We make our way back down into Charlie’s cellar and she says, “This could get really messy, Caz.”

  “It’s already messy, Charlie. There’s a lot going on here, and the worst part is, I don’t know what half of it is.”

  “No, I mean it could get…okay, not messy, but complicated. Castleford does a lot of work for a lot of people, and if he’s going around setting up dogfights, then he’s going to be looking at repercussions from more people than he probably realises. We don’t do animal cruelty.”

  “I know.”

  “We’re gonna need to talk about this too. Damage control is gonna be a bitch, so I need to know what you know.”

  I crack the door open and step out into the hall. I can hear footsteps moving off to my left. They aren’t running, but they aren’t slow either. I pat my shoulder, and Bert starts scaling my leg and making his way up my back. “Look, I promise I’ll come and tell you what I can when it’s all over. Right now, though, I need to try to stop the fight from happening.”

  Charlie sighs. “Twenty people, huh? You gonna be okay?”

  I pat Bert’s head and say, “I’ll be fine. I don’t intend to actually move in until backup gets there anyway.”

  “I could give you a million and one examples of when you’ve said that and done the complete opposite.” She groans and adds, “But you don’t break promises, so I’m holding you to that talk, even if you have to deliver it from a hospital bed. You better get going before you lose the guy.”

  I nod and start moving briskly down the hall. There are no dark shadows to hide in here, which makes it lucky there are so many turns and side paths to stick by instead. That’s not to say it’s a maze like the sewers, it’s more that the halls are a bit twisty. They must be built to follow the shape of the buildings above. Maybe they weave in between cellars. I turn another corner and see that the hallway now stretches on a fair distance. Well, far enough that I should be able to see the guy anyway. But I can’t. He must have sped up without me noticing .

&nbs
p; I start to run, barely noticing a gap in the wall as I pass, and end up having to double back a few steps. Studying the offending section, I can see that it’s been built from wooden slats, each wallpapered to match the surrounding area. That’s weird. One of the boards is loose too, and there’s sound coming through from behind it. I close my eyes and listen. Barking. He must have been in a hurry and not put the board back properly .

  I slide a few of the boards out, taking extra care not to make any unnecessary noise, and slip inside. Behind the wall, I find a dusty, concrete floor, and a scattering of equally dusty crates. There’s a set of metal steps off to the side, and looking up, I can see people lining the platform above, staring intently at a space somewhere ahead of me. Most of them clearly aren’t happy to be here. I creep around the side of one of the crates and follow their line of sight. We’re in an old warehouse. I can tell it’s disused because half the windows are cracked, and the lighting is a temporary set of spotlights hooked up to a portable generator. In the middle of the room, someone has set up a circle of smaller crates with tall metal fencing resting on the inside of the circle like a cage. Behind that, a makeshift stage has been set up, upon which stands Malcolm Castleford with a microphone in hand. There’s a camera on a tripod next to him, with the lens angled down into the circle. He’s talking nervously about how the event is a reward from the boss for all their hard work. Any other time, I would have believed him. And so would countless others, which is what he’s obviously banking on .

  “Hanson,” I whisper. “I found the place. It’s some sort of abandoned warehouse, I think. How close are you?”

  “Not far. We started moving towards you after the last call. Give us maybe…ten minutes, if the traffic stays clear.”

  “Try to be quicker if you can. This isn’t looking good.”