Border Princes t-2

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Why am I talking to myself?’ she added.

  She started off after them. They’d all but disappeared, and she was only jogging half-heartedly. She took out her phone and dialled. It answered after three rings.

  ‘James?’

  The line was distorted and choppy with breathing noises. ‘Running,’ he replied, with effort.

  ‘About that. Why are you and Jack running away from me?’

  ‘We’re not. We’re. Running after. The Guy.’

  ‘OK. What guy?’

  ‘The guy. We’re looking. For. He hyp. Notised you.’

  ‘No, honestly? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Well. You would. N’t. Can’t talk. Gotta puke.’

  He hung up.

  ‘Hypnotised?’ Gwen said to herself, jogging to a halt. She brushed hair out of her eyes and frowned with the effort of thinking.

  Her eyes widened. ‘Ooooooooh,’ she said, nodding.

  She started to run.

  ‘Is it my imagination, or is that getting worse?’ Owen asked.

  Toshiko’s hands ran across her keyboard. ‘It’s not your imagination. That’s really getting hot. How could it just pop out of nowhere?’

  ‘Same way everything else does,’ said Owen. ‘Got a fix yet?’

  ‘Area only. Cathays, I think. I’m narrowing the search focus. Should have a street name or a GPS fix in about three minutes. Less, if it keeps getting hotter.’

  ‘Jack needs to know about this,’ Owen said.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ she agreed.

  ‘Ianto!’ Owen yelled. ‘Get Jack on the blower!’

  Ianto picked up a cordless and pressed auto-dial.

  ‘It’s ringing,’ he said.

  Jack and James came around the street corner almost neck and neck. They had to break formation to go either side of a pillar box.

  ‘There!’ James yelled, pointing.

  This street was busier than the residential roads they had come out of. Some shops, some traffic, a muddle of people. Ahead of them, they could see the fugitive.

  Dean had been forced to slow down, simply in order to duck and weave around the pedestrians in his path. He’d already bumped into one old lady. He risked a glance backwards.

  The two men were still on his tail: the big, dark-haired guy in the long coat, and the leaner blond who’d challenged him. What were they? CID? He’d juiced the girl well enough, even though it had been off the cuff and desperate, but the blond guy hadn’t even flinched.

  How the bloody hell had he resisted?

  ‘He got to Gwen,’ James yelled, leaping a toddler on reins.

  ‘That much was obvious,’ replied Jack, turning his body sidelong to fit between two bewildered Bengali women.

  Jack’s phone started to ring. Still running, he hooked on his Bluetooth.

  ‘This is Jack.’

  ‘Owen for you,’ said Ianto’s voice.

  ‘Jack-’ Owen began.

  ‘Kinda busy, Owen!’ Jack replied, grunting as he barely avoided colliding with an opening car door.

  ‘That’s great. We’ve got a situation.’

  ‘Gee, so have we. Call me back.’

  In the Hub, Owen lowered the phone from his ear and made ‘can you believe that?’ eyes at Ianto.

  ‘I swear, he never takes me seriously,’ he said.

  ‘Getting hotter!’ Toshiko sang out from her station.

  Owen stabbed redial.

  Jack heard a crash and some squawking. He glanced over his shoulder. James had piled into an ageing hippy on a skateboard and they’d both gone over. Tin cans and potatoes clattered and rolled out of the hippy’s split shopping bags. The skateboard shot out into the road.

  ‘Sorry! Sorry!’ said James, picking himself up.

  ‘You’re a bloody menace, mister!’ the hippy yelled. James was running again. He’d lost ground. Jack had the lead, but the crowd was getting thicker. For a split second, the devil in him considered drawing his Webley and waving it around.

  ‘Coming through! One side!’ Jack roared, hoping his accent and gleaming grin would do instead.

  His phone rang again.

  ‘Seriously, Owen, it’ll have to wait.’

  ‘Don’t hang up! Don’t hang up!’ Owen gabbled.

  ‘Owen-’

  ‘We’ve got a thing. A big thing.’

  ‘Scale of one to ten?’

  ‘Er…’

  Jack hung up. He shoved through a crowd of teenagers outside a video shop. He saw the guy, ten yards away, stumbling over a dog lead. The guy looked back, saw Jack, and hurled himself in through the automatic doors of a mini-mart, banging against them when they opened too slowly.

  Jack ran up to the doors, allowed them to reopen, and walked inside. His phone rang. He ignored it.

  Bright strip lights. Soulless magnolia lino with trolley scuffs. Aisles of produce shelves and humming freezers. The smell of plastic, soap powder and vegetables. There were a few dozen people inside, most queuing at the tills, some pushing trolleys around the aisles. Everyone had come to a halt and was looking around, even the checkout girls. Muzak played.

  Everybody stared at Jack. He walked past the stack of empty wire baskets to the chrome turnstile. It was still spinning.

  He slid through it. ‘Looking for a guy,’ Jack called out. ‘He came in here a second ago. I know you all saw him.’

  The shoppers and the checkout girls gazed at Jack uncomfortably. They were thinking cops and robbers, they were thinking some dangerous nut with a weapon.

  ‘Everything’s OK,’ Jack smiled, holding up his hands. ‘There’s no danger. I just need to know where he went.’

  He looked at a football mum, who averted her eyes, then at an OAP, who shook her head in a choose someone else disavowal.

  ‘Come on, help a guy out,’ said Jack. ‘Somebody knows where he is. Anybody?’

  He caught the eye of the floor manager, a small, slope-shouldered, scrawny man in late middle age. The floor manager’s supermarket uniform was ill-fitting. He was standing at the price-check post behind the checkouts. He said something inaudible.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said Jack, cupping a hand to his ear.

  The manager coughed, and slowly picked up the stand mic on the price-check post. He thumbed the ‘on’ button and cleared his throat, which caused a brief burp of amplified feedback.

  ‘Uh,’ the floor manager’s voice came over the speakers, interrupting the Muzak. ‘Aisle five. Frozen goods.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Jack, with an honest nod.

  ‘Uh, happy to be of service,’ the floor manager replied over the speakers. He took his thumb off the button and the Muzak resumed.

  Jack hurried along the aisle-ends, and then darted up aisle four, watching everywhere for movement. The few shoppers he passed cowered back behind their trolleys or simply stared at him in fascination.

  ‘Hi,’ he whispered to several of them.

  The aisles had mid-length breaks. Jack sidled up to the aisle four break, his back against the shelves (cleaning fluids, bleach, disinfectant), and peered around the corner at the aisle five displays.

  No one in sight.

  He stepped around into aisle five, feeling the cold aura of the chest freezers. There was no one in the aisle except a huge black woman standing beside her trolley as if she’d been told to make like a statue. Her eyes were wide.

  No sign of the guy. Jack hadn’t expected to see him. Everyone in the shop had heard the floor manager rat out his position over the Tannoy.

  Jack took a step forwards and leant on the nearest freezer compartment (pizzas, stone-ground, deep pan and thin-n-crispy, budget, double-topping) and bent down to peer under the eye-level ice-boxes at the bank of freezers that backed on to the aisle five units to form aisle six. Nothing.

  He stood up again. He looked at the big black woman, and raised his eyebrows quizzically.

  Remaining otherwise immobile, her eyes still wide, the big black woman extended her index finger and jabb
ed it repeatedly in the direction of aisle six.

  She winked.

  Jack beamed and mouthed a ‘thank you’.

  As quietly as he could, Jack climbed into the freezer full of pizzas. He gently rolled himself under the eye-level display and over into the adjacent aisle six freezer (chill-fresh prawns, seafood medley, haddock portions, individual boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley sauce, fish fingers). Frosty packaging crackled softly under his weight. The big black woman’s eyes grew even wider.

  Flat on his back in the freezer compartment, Jack braced, counted silently to three, and lurched upright.

  The man in the suit was crouching down below the freezer’s fascia. He started up at Jack’s surprise appearance.

  ‘Hi there,’ said Jack.

  Dean Simms reached into his briefcase.

  Jack pounced on him.

  They went down together in a bundle of limbs. Dean’s briefcase fell out of his grasp and slapped onto the lino. Magazine inserts and a rather nice pen spilled out of it, along with a small, greasy beige lump that looked like a not-so-vital internal organ, the sort of thing that was hard to recognise in a quiz once you’d discounted liver, kidneys and spleen.

  It flopped onto the hard floor and pulsed gently.

  Struggling under Jack’s weight, Dean yelled something. Securing Dean’s arms, Jack gave him a slap that cowed him. Jack hoisted him up by the tie and leant him against the nearest freezer (summer puddings, freezer-to-oven apple pies, sorbets).

  ‘OK, you’re done,’ Jack told him. ‘Behave yourself.’ He glanced down at the pulsing lump.

  ‘Eeuww,’ he said. ‘You cough that up?’

  Dean said nothing. His eyes blazed.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Jack began, ‘here’s what’s going to happen. We-’

  His phone began to ring.

  Jack looked away for a second. All his life, Dean had listened to his old man’s advice, keen to learn from him. Retail wasn’t the only thing his dad had known about. Dean’s old man had been an amateur welter-weight. Tough old bird, his dad.

  Dean threw the jab, just the way his old man had taught him.

  Distracted by his phone, Jack caught the fist square on the jaw. He reeled away, flailing, and hit the wall-freezers opposite (Ben and Jerry’s, soft scoop vanilla, Cornish dairy cream, triple fudge sundaes). The glass door cracked with his impact.

  Jack tried to right himself, his hand to his mouth. ‘Jesus!’ he exclaimed.

  Dean had picked up the beige lump. He aimed it at Jack and squeezed it.

  Jack blinked. He took a step back. He got a sudden, strong smell of bourbon and willow.

  ‘I…’ he said. He glanced around. He leant back against the cracked glass door and shook his head.

  Dean started running, the lump in his hands. He headed for the checkout. Shoppers screamed as they saw him coming. Dean pushed through them, trying to work his way out via one of the narrow checkout lanes. A potbellied man was blocking his exit with a trolley heavy with crates of beer. A bulk purchase.

  ‘Out of my way!’ Dean yelled. He halted.

  James was standing on the far side of the checkout, facing him. James said nothing. He stared at Dean, right in the eyes. The meaning was clear.

  Dean roared and drove the crate-laden trolley at James. With the bulk purchases on board, the thing weighed fifty kilos.

  Dean rammed it into James’s legs.

  ‘Bastard!’ James yelped. He grabbed the wire cage of the ramming trolley, and threw it sideways. It flew the entire length of the shop front and crashed down on its side near the exit, castors spinning.

  James turned, deftly ducking the punch Dean threw at him, and landed a punch of his own.

  Dean hurtled backwards onto the checkout, breaking the code reader. He flopped unconscious. The checkout display flashed ‘UNKNOWN BAR CODE’.

  The shoppers and the checkout girls gave James a spontaneous round of applause. James stepped forward, and looked at the beige lump sliding towards him on the packing conveyer.

  He pulled one of the crumpled serviettes out of his pocket and gathered the thing up. It was unpleasantly warm.

  Gwen appeared behind him. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Having fun?’

  ‘Loads,’ James replied.

  ‘How did that happen?’ she asked, pointing.

  At the far end of the shop front, a broken trolley full of slumping beer crates was making the automatic exit open and close and open and close.

  ‘No idea,’ said James.

  Jack’s phone rang again. He straightened himself up on the edge of the nearest chest freezer.

  ‘You all right, honey?’ the big black woman cooed at him, peering under the eye-levels.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks,’ Jack replied. Who the hell was she?

  He opened his phone.

  ‘This is Jack.’

  ‘Jack, for God’s sake!’ said Owen’s voice. ‘In answer to your question, twenty-bloody-seven!’

  ‘On a scale of one to ten?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Owen, why the hell didn’t you call me earlier?’

  TWENTY

  ‘We’ll meet you there,’ said Owen.

  Jack hung up. ‘Owen says they’ll meet us there.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said James. He was driving. ‘Lunchtime rush. Cathays is going to be fifteen minutes minimum from here.’

  ‘Punch it,’ said Jack.

  ‘You two OK?’ James called back.

  ‘We’re fine,’ said Jack.

  ‘He got you both. Both of you,’ James said.

  ‘So you say. I don’t remember,’ said Jack.

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll take your word for it,’ Jack looked at James in the driving mirror. ‘How come he didn’t get you?’

  ‘I didn’t give him the chance. You’ve got it bagged?’

  ‘Bagged and stowed in a box,’ said Gwen. ‘Horrible thing, it was. Like an organ. Like a swollen appendix.’

  ‘Looked like a sentient gland to me,’ said Jack.

  ‘And you’d have seen plenty of those,’ said Gwen.

  ‘One or two. Owen can give us a full slice and dice later.’

  ‘If there is a later,’ said James. He braked hard. ‘Where are you going? Where are you going?’ he yelled impatiently at a drifting taxi.

  ‘Calm down,’ said Gwen.

  ‘I hate that we had to leave him there,’ James complained, hauling on the wheel as they went over a roundabout.

  ‘He’s nothing without his mojo,’ said Jack. ‘We shut him down. Who’s he gonna complain to? Who’d believe him?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said James.

  ‘Besides, this is more important,’ said Jack.

  Gwen nudged Jack. ‘James?’ said Jack.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Back there, did you throw a shopping cart full of crated beer the length of the store?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Because I have superpowers, obviously. What the hell are you asking me?’

  ‘You didn’t then?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I couldn’t.’

  ‘OK, then.’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Well, a cart got tossed-’

  ‘Arsehole!’ James shouted, and leant on the horn.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Jack.

  ‘Not you, that van. Look, the cart rolled and fell over. That’s all it was.’

  ‘The cart rolled and fell over,’ Jack said to Gwen. ‘So, you see, that’s what it was.’

  James glanced up and looked at himself in the mirror. He was sweating. It wasn’t just the stress of hard-nosed driving.

  He was a little bit scared.

  And he couldn’t tell anyone why.

  ‘Where are we going again?’ he asked.

  Jack consulted the GPS. ‘Wrigley Street. The open ground behind it.’

  ‘Guess we’re going to find out what happened to all those missing pets,�
� said James. He parped the horn. ‘Get in lane! Get in lane, you idiot!’

  Wrigley Street, Cathays. Noon. Grey clouds shooting spots of rain. Back-to-back tenements, front-and-backs, a relic of labourer’s housing.

  A blue Honda sports drew up with an ostentatious squeal of disc brakes.

  Owen and Toshiko got out. She flipped out her phone and called Ianto.

  ‘We’re on the plot. Do you have a house number?’

  ‘Number sixteen.’

  ‘Ident?’

  ‘David Gryffud Morgan. Lives alone. Pensioner.’

  ‘Thanks, Ianto. Where are the others?’

  ‘Eight minutes away, by GPS.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m going to mute you but keep you live in my pocket, OK?’

  ‘Yes, Tosh. I’m monitoring and recording.’

  Toshiko and Owen walked up to the peeling door.

  Owen rang the bell.

  ‘David Gryffud, right?’ he asked.

  ‘David Morgan. Gryffud is the middle name.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’

  The door began to open. It rattled as someone inside shook it. It was sticking.

  It opened. A tiny old man in a suit peered out at them. He had a black eye. He was one of the oldest people Owen had ever seen.

  ‘Hello, yes?’

  ‘Mr Morgan?’ Toshiko asked.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr David Morgan?’

  ‘Davey. Or Taff. They always used to call me Taff, even the wife.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Owen, rubbing his hands together. ‘Can we come in?’

  ‘Are you from the MOD?’ Davey asked cautiously.

  Owen glanced at Toshiko.

  ‘Were you expecting the MOD, Davey?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. I rung them up.’

  ‘All right then,’ smiled Owen. ‘We’re from the MOD. Can we come in?’

  Davey opened the door and limped around to let them through into the hall. They saw he was slightly scoliotic, and his frame so shrunken. So thin, like a bird. Owen thought if he stood in front of a light, they’d see his skeleton like an X-ray.

  ‘About time,’ Davey Morgan said. ‘I was at a loss. He’s very volatile, obviously. Very, very volatile. I was afraid to provoke him.’

  ‘Uh, who?’ asked Owen.

  ‘Go through, the sitting room to your right.’

  Toshiko and Owen went into the tiny sitting room. Two armchairs and a sofa. A wood-effect radiogram cabinet. An upright piano. A framed picture of the Scottish Highlands on the chimney breast. A stale aroma.