Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  In front of her, somebody clicked on a pocket torch and ran it over the roof to the far side. ‘No sign that anyone’s been here.’

  ‘Do you think they could be holding Sarah and the others somewhere beyond the station areas?’ asked Spice.

  ‘Seems unlikely,’ replied the boy with the torch. ‘They would have to have used one of the permanent runs at least part of the way.’ These runs formed a one-way system over the city and were strung from the tops of steel posts which were bolted into the roofs themselves. In order to safeguard them and keep them hidden, most of the stations were constructed on buildings with little or no roof access. Their careful placement and extra height meant that a person travelling on them moved mainly through gravitational force, without having to exert any physical effort. Assuming that Chymes’ men kept their prisoners bound in some fashion, it seemed to Spice that it would be impossible for them to travel in any other way than via these gravitational fast lanes.

  ‘This is the end of the North Seven Run, isn’t it?’ Spice walked over to the boy, whose name was Tom, her boots crunching on the gravelled roof. He pulled a crumpled map from his bag and shone the torch over it. ‘It’s the North Seven all right, but it ain’t the end. There’s another three stations, but they’re marked on ’ere as unsafe.’

  ‘Where do they go?’ Spice traced her finger up a blue line on the map. Several of the others came over to look.

  ‘The last one is Adam, see?’ A grubby finger jabbed the map. ‘Looks like it’s actually in the park, on the north side of Park Crescent.’

  ‘Surprising. The crescent is brightly lit at night. You’d think the line would show from the ground.’

  ‘Depends on how high it is.’

  ‘Parkland. Wonder what it’s attached to.’ Spice thought for a moment. ‘I’m going to go up there to take a look. You hang on here. If the line’s impassable, I’ll head right back, but either way I shouldn’t be gone more than a few minutes.’

  ‘Says here that it’s unsafe.’

  ‘Zalian always writes “unsafe” when he’s not sure about the condition of a run. I’m the lightest. Anyway, we have to check out all the possibilities. Start working out our next route, will you?’

  Spice swung herself out and onto the pale concrete ledge once more, looking back down behind her to where Broadcasting House cut into the road like the prow of an ocean liner. She smiled. ‘They insisted that nothing should ever obscure the view north up this street, did you know that?’

  ‘Who did?’ asked Tom.

  ‘The original architects. A couple of hundred years ago this was the grandest street in London.’ She hoisted herself up to the height of the cable overhead and clipped on her line-belt with practiced ease. ‘Still looks nice at night, don’t it?’

  ‘Go easy, eh?’ said Tom. He had always rather fancied Spice, but she seemed to show no interest in men. ‘You want to take the walkie-talkie?’

  ‘No, you’d better hang on to it. See you.’ She lifted her boots from the ledge and was carried away in a rush of air between the shadowed buildings which housed so many doctors and lawyers and architects, as she headed up toward the southern tip of Regent’s Park.

  Tom turned to the others. ‘Come on, then, let’s get our route sorted out. Anyone got any bright ideas as to where to look next?’

  ‘What about the top of the Capital building? It’d give them a good vantage point,’ suggested a heavy-set girl with cropped black hair. She and the others were using the break to have a smoke and to stretch tired muscles.

  ‘No, it’s too high. We can’t get up there from this side. You’d have to take one of the top two north runs for that.’

  ‘How long should we wait for Spice?’

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  ‘What if she doesn’t come back?’

  ‘She’ll come back.’

  Tom sat down with the map, folding and refolding it nervously in his fingers. Dividing up the roof territory and searching it in sections wasn’t his idea of a good plan, but in the absence of any other suggestions from Zalian there was little else he could do but go along with it. But if Chymes believed in dividing to conquer, they seemed to be playing right into his hands. He rose and walked over to the edge of the roof, to stare off into the patch of inky blackness above the park.

  It was seven minutes to midnight. On the rooftop of Harrods, Damien’s group were starting to fight among themselves. The young punk was too new to command the respect of his team, but had been entrusted with leadership because he had somehow won the favour of Dr Zalian. Ever since he had arrived in the Roofworld, Zalian had taken him under his wing and had made a point of providing him with special training. Some of the others, four women and five men, had been angered by this. Now they were annoyed by Zalian’s refusal to join them in the search and were quick to show Damien their resentment.

  The boy had proven extraordinarily agile at crossing the city, but had no idea how to maintain discipline within his group, which had raggedly and noisily travelled west as far as Knightsbridge. They were now waiting on the roof of the department store while Damien consulted the map, trying to work out where the boundaries of their search area lay. ‘We start here and work down to the river,’ he said uncertainly, looking up at the sour-faced girl standing next to him.

  ‘How can we, if we’re all supposed to meet up at Central One?’ She turned aside and spat on the brickwork. Behind her, somebody lit a joint and coughed.

  ‘Hey, put that out! We’ve got to stay straight in case we run into any of Chymes’ men.’ Damien reached over and tried to snatch the joint away, but moved too slowly.

  ‘I dunno what you’re so worried about. We won’t find any over this far,’ said Tony, the tall, acned teenager who had lit the joint. ‘This isn’t anywhere near New Age territory.’ He pulled hard on the joint, insolently jetting the smoke at Damien.

  ‘You know so much about it, Tony, you want to take charge?’ Damien’s fear showed through, making the others uncomfortable and rebellious. ‘We’ve got to go down to the river. There’s no connecting run from here to Notting Hill.’

  Tony snatched the map up and held it close to Damien’s face. ‘We wanna fan out wide and go east, not north,’ he shouted in a hard cockney accent. ‘Harrods is the start of East Four and we can take it as far as Scott Station above the Albert Hall. Has anybody thought of looking there?’ He threw the map back and made as if to set off.

  ‘You can’t go anywhere until I say so,’ shouted Damien. ‘Suppose we split up and one of us runs into an ambush?’

  ‘Be a fucking sight better than all of us copping it,’ said Tony, clambering up onto a steel ventilator shaft and hooking his line to the cable overhead. Damien could see that any show of strength on his part would only lead to an outright mutiny. Reluctantly, he turned to face the others. ‘OK, folks,’ he called, ‘looks like we’re heading to Scott Station.’

  ‘Can we have a five-minute break first?’ somebody called from the back. ‘I’m knackered. We only just got here.’ Above, Tony hesitated, waiting for a decision from Damien, who was surprised to see that by backing down he had won a small if grudging victory.

  ‘Yeah, all right, but five minutes only. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.’ Damien unclipped his walkie-talkie and set it down on the shaft as Tony climbed down and joined him. Leading the others, they walked to the centre of the roof and sat.

  The front of the department store remained lit with thousands of dazzling white lightbulbs, its windows filled with scenes from Christmas fairytales. Although there was a permanent run attached to the roof of the store, it was rarely used due to the risk of being spotted from the roadway below. The Harrods building was one which too many people raised their eyes to. Its roof could also be clearly spotted by revellers from the garden nightclub situated on top of a department store several blocks away. Zalian had instructed teams to alight there for no longer than was absolutely necessary.

  ‘How long have you been up here?�
�� asked Tony, lighting his dormant joint once more. This time Damien removed any complaint from his reply.

  ‘Just over a year,’ he said. ‘I was a fitter’s mate. Got made redundant. It was all cash-in-hand work and I couldn’t find anything else that paid a living wage. I came up here like a shot.’

  ‘Same with me,’ said Tony, passing the joint to a girl who sat behind him oiling her line-gun. ‘Except I’ve been here three years now. D’you go back down much?’

  ‘You must be joking,’ said Damien. ‘I never had anything down there worth missing. Except the movies. I go down a couple of times a week for the films.’

  ‘Cinema skylights, funny how they’re never locked. Like the ones in swimming pools and Turkish baths. Guess they figure there’s nothing worth nicking in places like that. Me, I never bother going down to street level any more.’ Tony took a long pull on the joint and held his breath down. ‘I used to go out with this girl from the East Four krewe, but they all went over to Chymes. She tried to get me to come. Fuck that, I told her. Don’t know now, though. It’s not like it was. Zalian’s useless, no guts. We get stoned all the time. Hardly surprising, with a junkie in charge.’

  As soon as he said this he realized that he had caused any budding friendliness between Damien and himself to be stillborn. Damien, after all, was still the leader and they had all received lectures from Zalian about the group’s declining adherence to the rules. The fact that Zalian had been such a disciplinarian partly explained why people had begun to drift across to the other side, where sworn allegiance and exotic ceremony counted more than mere hard work and army-style pack drill.

  ‘We’d better get going.’ Tony hauled himself to his feet and swung his equipment bag to his shoulder. The joint did not seem to have affected his coordination. Damien rose without speaking and followed closely behind.

  Tony stepped around a ventilation housing and looked over towards the edge of the building, flicking his roach away. There, floodlit from the bulbs below, stood Chymes himself, dressed from head to foot in glistening armourlike black leather, his cape lifting around his raised arms.

  Suddenly there was a harsh, tearing sound in the air. Wheeling around, Tony was just in time to catch Damien, who fell forward into his arms with a sudden shout of pain. Protruding from his chest was a short steel shaft, buried deep in the flesh. Surprised by the sudden weight of Damien’s body he toppled over, as Chymes’ men appeared from the cable overhead and dropped onto the rest of the search party with knives in their hands.

  No one even had time to unseal their weapons. Damien had forgotten to order a loading drill before they set off. As his friends fell beneath the fists and knives of Chymes’ skinheads, Tony heaved himself out from beneath Damien’s body and crawled towards the roof edge, where his walkie-talkie still lay. He realized that it would only be a matter of moments now before one of the others spotted him. Jumping up, he saw that Chymes had vanished from his vantage point. He pulled his newly acquired dart-gun free and ran for the radio set.

  With a shock he realized that the low brick stack ahead would conceal him from the others. Behind him was the scuffle of boots on concrete and the unmistakable sound of someone dying. Thumbing the signal switch, he summoned Zalian.

  ‘Come in, for Chrissake, come in,’ he hissed, holding down the ‘Send’ tab. ‘Come in, is there anybody out there? Come in!’

  The line was dead. The sound of a bootfall behind made him turn and look up. Chymes himself was staring down at him. ‘Cut off? Perhaps you haven’t paid your bill recently,’ he said, reaching down and ripping the walkie-talkie from Tony’s grasp with a jerk of his gloved hand. He tossed it carelessly behind him. For a second, the lights from below illuminated the inside of his hood. His dark eyes reflected a madness more chilling than anything Tony had ever seen before.

  ‘Oh!’ was all he had time to say before his reflexes began to work once more and his finger squeezed the trigger of his gun, springing a coated dart into Chymes’ thigh. Grunting in sudden agony, the tall cloaked figure clutched his leg as Tony leapt for the walkie-talkie. Seizing it, he opened the line and shouted into the microphone, praying that someone was listening at the other end. ‘It’s Chymes, he’s here….’

  Chymes whirled, his cloak flaring, as he grabbed Tony by his neck and lifted him bodily from the ground. He swung the boy over the edge of the roof with ease, letting his feet kick in space. His hood had fallen back, revealing the flowing mane of greasy black hair, the stygian eyes.

  ‘How much better it would have been for you to join us,’ said Chymes, with mocking sadness in his voice. ‘Unfortunately, membership is temporarily closed, until we have finished putting our house in order. Destruction brings about the death of material, but the spirit renews like before, the life.’

  The boy looked back, choking in horror and bewilderment.

  ‘That means getting rid of people like you, sonny. It’s time for you to hit the road.’ He started to release his grip on Tony’s neck. The boy let out a strangled scream. Smiling, Chymes leaned into the boy’s face. ‘Next time,’ he whispered, ‘listen to your boss. Don’t fuck with eagles unless you can fly.’

  He released his hand and Tony was suddenly clutching at empty air. Screaming, the boy plunged feet-first down the front of the glittering building. As he fell his thrashing arms and legs destroyed hundreds of bulbs, in a series of electrical explosions which had the theatricality of an extravagant Christmas display filled with sparkling fire and light.

  Chapter 33

  Roofworld

  The operations room was a bizarre amalgam of old and new. Ancient tin station lamps threw pools of light onto portable plastic cases filled with micro-circuitry. Coils of rope and sheets of tin vied for floor space with boxes of technical components, most of them for use with computers. Zalian switched on his radio transmitter, explaining the basic layout and operation of the equipment to Robert as he went along. Rose was able to seat herself in a corner of the room beside one of the lamps, where she could be left in peace with Charlotte’s notebooks. Perhaps she could decipher them alone. She could certainly do no worse than Zalian, who seemed to take every opportunity to sidetrack away from the problem at hand.

  The leader of the Roofworld flicked a strand of blonde hair from his eyes and booted up the portable computer which stood balanced precariously on the corner of one of the packing cases. As sets of trading hieroglyphics began to unscroll, he pointed the key sections out to Robert.

  ‘OK, you asked me how we manage to get along up here, so I’m going to explain our financing system to you.’ Zalian punched the computer keyboard as he accessed one of his coded files. Curiosity getting the better of her, Rose lowered the notebook and came over to watch.

  ‘I think you’re going to tell me that you’re actually a bunch of crooks,’ Robert said, examining the green screen suspiciously. ‘Where else do you get the money for all the equipment?’

  ‘I prefer to think of us as social humanitarians,’ said Zalian loftily, ‘taking from the rich and giving to those in need. Us.’

  Robert looked across at Rose, who shrugged reasonably.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing. When we do take from the rich, we make damned sure that they never notice. We only steal from the major multinational corporations. And how, you may ask, do we manage to get away with that?’

  Robert tapped the glowing screen with his fingernail. ‘I think I know the answer to that one. You select companies that can stand a few losses.’

  ‘Exactly. I choose companies which I consider to be too large for their own, or anyone else’s, good, like the ones listed here…Coca-Cola, Sony, Barclays…they all allow an annual budget for corporate pilfering. If you like, we are simply tapping that.’

  Zalian looked at the screen with pride, keying the net profits and losses of one corporation after another, proud to be able to show somebody his secret system.

  ‘Some of the targets I pick are chosen simply because they piss me off,’ he added, �
��like McDonald’s and British Associated Tobacco. And companies with heavy Sun City connections. It’s just a matter of relocating a few assets…’

  ‘Stealing, you mean.’

  ‘…By reworking their computer records from up here. Previous Roofworld leaders before me have been doing it for years in one form or another, except that before computers came along they’d go down into the big department stores and simply steal merchandise, fencing it and redistributing most of the retail value to their own people.’

  As he spoke, Zalian inserted another program into the computer. ‘Now of course, with the creation of central databanks, we are much more traceable, so we have to make tax-deductible charity donations through officially registered companies. And the way we asset strip the multis is much more sophisticated than swiping a few consumer durables through a skylight.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ admitted Robert.

  ‘You’re supposed to be. Lee is one of our best hackers. And right now, he’s the only one we’ve got left. He figures that he can get into just about any system once he’s had a look at their overall accounts set-up.’

  ‘But how does he get to see that?’ asked Robert, turning to Rose once more and raising his eyebrows.

  ‘That’s the easy part,’ said Zalian. ‘We use the Old Boy Network.’

  ‘The Old Boy Network? What’s that?’

  ‘When long-termers have had enough up here they often want to return to the ground. After a few years’ service, most roofers eventually start to crave a more peaceful, ordered life. But many still have the spark, even though they’re no longer involved with the Roofworld. It’s like a drug to them. Years later, they still want to be a part of it. Maybe because they believe in what the Roofworld does. Maybe they just want to re-experience the rush of adrenaline that taking a few risks can give you. We fix up our Old Boys and Girls with jobs at the multis, as janitors, secretaries, clerks, at every level. Most of the larger buildings in the West End have an ex-roofer for a night watchperson. They help prevent us from being discovered and they gather all kinds of information.’