“You’re the guy who’s been taking over my runners, aren’t you?” Brewer said, “Jenny put you on to them—to Simon and the others. Is that what she was doing in the Goat and Compasses today? Making deliveries?”
The stranger shook his head. “She doesn’t make deliveries,” he said. “She has nothing to do with that aspect of the business at all—except, of course, that she did give me the information which allowed me to make contact with some of your agents. I only needed a handful of names; the rest I did myself.”
“Did she tell you where to find me?” Brewer asked, warily. He wondered whether the accent might be German, or maybe Serbian.
The stranger shook his head. “That was Simon,” he said. “You embarrassed him. He told me you were after me—and why you suddenly stopped asking questions. Jenny doesn’t know that I know you were at the flat, any more than she knows about the things you took. It was careless of me to leave them lying around, but I simply didn’t realize that you might be able to walk through my security systems as easily as I could walk through yours.”
That was a scoring point; without Jenny’s help, Brewer would never have been able to worm his way into the stranger’s flat, and they both knew it.
“Fate seems to have been determined to throw us together,” Brewer observed. “Did you pick up my ex-girlfriend solely in order to find out about my distribution system, or did she just happen to give you the idea of making a little extra money that way?”
“What do you make of the proteins?” the other asked, pointedly ignoring the question. “How much have you figured out?”
What Brewer had figured out was that the one advantage left to him might well be that the other man couldn’t possibly know how little he knew, so he wasn’t about to tell him.
“Jenny’s looking very well,” Brewer commented, instead. “Rather better than you are, I think—which presumably means that you’re testing your freshly-hatched miracles on her before applying them to yourself. Sensible enough, I suppose, but not entirely sporting. No wonder Simon thinks you’re a creep. You’ll want to do a few more runs before you’re certain, of course. Better safe than sorry.” That was the best he could do without admitting that he hadn’t a clue what the proteins were for, or where they might have come from.
“We’re not enemies, Mr Brewer,” said the man with the disturbing eyes. “We’re not even rivals—not really.”
Brewer didn’t understand that move either. Was the stranger trying to make a deal? If so, he thought, the best thing to do was play along with it. “Sure,” he replied. “We’re both on the same side: the side of the psychotropic revolution. Marked down by destiny to be the midwives of the Ubermenschen.”
“Jenny told me all about that,” the stranger admitted. “She told me that you were sincere but I wasn’t convinced.”
“Is that why you’re here—to be convinced?” Brewer couldn’t believe it was as simple as that.
“Not exactly,” said the dark-eyed man. “I came out of curiosity. While I’m here, though, I suppose I ought to recover the things you stole, and obliterate all the records of your analyses.” He stressed the word all very faintly, perhaps to remind Brewer that memories were records too.
“I can understand that,” Brewer said. “I’m irredeemably curious myself.”
The stranger hesitated, as if he were hovering on the brink of some make-or-break decision. Then, making up his mind, he set the specimen bottle down on the bench beside him and took something out of his pocket.
Brewer recognized the device immediately. It was a sterile pack containing a disposable drug-delivery device: what the tabloids had taken to calling a “smart syringe” since it had become the darling of all the hardcore mainliners. The instrument wasn’t so very smart, but it was subtle; its bioconductors could deliver drugs to underlying tissues without ripping up the superficial tissues. Deeper probes did tend to break a few capillaries, but they only left a little round mark like a bruise—or a lovebite.
“Need a fix?” Brewer asked, uneasily.
With a dexterity that might have been admirable in other circumstances the stranger took the cap off the specimen bottle one-handed and carefully transferred the fluid to the barrel of the device.
“Keep your hands on the bench,” the stranger instructed him.
Brewer instantly raised his hands from the bench and came to his feet. He wasn’t being stubborn or heroic—it was just a reflex, animated by fear. He swung his fist, the way he’d seen a hundred men actors swing theirs in a hundred action-movies.
The dark-eyed man pivoted on his heel, and moved so fast that Brewer couldn’t keep track of him. It might have been the blindness of Brewer’s panic, but the speed of the man seemed supernatural. Brewer found himself reeling backwards, clutching his stomach. It hurt horribly, but he hadn’t yet had the wind knocked out of him and he was able to lunge forward again, as if to tackle the other around the knees.
The second assault was no more effective than the first. The unseen blow to his head hurt even worse than the smack in the belly. It didn’t leave Brewer unconscious, but it knocked him down and it knocked him silly. He was on all fours, wondering whether he could get up again, when he felt a foot in the small of his back, forcing him further down. He pressed upwards against the force, but he couldn’t resist it. Once he was flat on the ground, with an irresistible weight bearing down on him, he felt the pressure-pad of the smart syringe at his neck.
The contact lasted at least twenty seconds, but there was nothing Brewer could do to break it. It didn’t hurt—that, after all, was the whole point of smart syringes.
Brewer was slightly surprised that he was still conscious when the instrument was withdrawn, although there was no earthly reason to suppose that the straw-coloured liquid might have been an anaesthetic. By the time the weight was removed from his back the pain in his head was easily bearable, but he still felt nauseous. He thought it best to stay down until he was sure he could stand up straight. He was dimly conscious of the dark-eyed man moving to the bench where the pills were.
Eventually, he picked himself up, and met the stare of those remarkable eyes. “Thanks,” he said, putting on the bravest face he could. “I thought I’d lost my chance to analyse the stuff.”
“You’ve got every chance,” the dark-eyed man assured him. “But there really isn’t any hurry. Not now. You know where to find me when you’re fully prepared for a rational discussion.”
Having said that, the stranger simply turned away, walked to the door of the lab, and went out. It shouldn’t have been easy to exit the building without the proper codes, but Brewer didn’t suppose the unwelcome visitor would get into any difficulties.
A quick check told him that the remaining pills were gone and that the data displayed on his screen had all been dumped. It wasn’t a thorough job, though; he probably had enough traces left in the equipment to do another run, and he ought to be able to recover the ghosted data from the hard disk. The dark-eyed man didn’t seem to care what Brewer had found out, or what he still might find out. Brewer wondered exactly what the mysterious stranger had meant by “fully prepared”. It couldn’t be a simple matter of attitude.
Brewer used an ordinary hypodermic to extract some blood from the discoloured patch at the side of his neck, but he didn’t start any kind of immediate analysis; he stuck it in the refrigerator and hurried out into the night. He didn’t stop until he reached a payphone.
He used a generic phonecard of the kind anyone could buy at the checkout in any supermarket but he was careful to route the call through Talinn; the people whose help he needed preferred to deal with careful customers.
~ * ~
It was so late by the time Brewer got back on the road that Simple Simon was at home, sleeping the sleep of the unintimidated. Unsurprisingly, he was alone. His door had three good locks on it and his window had two, but the glass was so old it hadn’t been proofed against solvents, so Brewer was able to get in without disturbing his hos
t and conduct a rapid but thorough search.
He found Simon’s supply easily enough, buried beneath the youth’s collection of business cards. It was a collection like any other; Simon stripped telephone booths the way younger kids stripped foreign stamps from used envelopes. Brewer pocketed all but a few of the pills. Then he positioned himself by the side of Simon’s bed.
He filled a common-or-garden hypodermic syringe that he hadn’t bothered to sterilize, and pressed it suggestively to Simon’s throat while switching on the bedside lamp. He wished that he’d made more effort to cultivate the expertise of intimidation. No matter how hard one tried to be businesslike, it seemed, there was something about the drug business that resisted rational reform.
“Don’t jump, Simon,” he advised, as the boy’s eyes flew open. “Quite apart from the fact that you’d impale your Adam’s apple, you’d get a shot of something very nasty indeed.”
Simon spluttered and twitched a bit, but he got the message.
“What is this?” he complained.
“Tell me about Jenny’s boyfriend, Simon,” Brewer said. “Tell me everything you know, and tell it fast.”
“What’s in the syringe?” Simon wanted to know.
“Just something to set your nerves jangling. It won’t do any permanent damage, but it’ll make every kind of sensory experience excruciatingly painful for at least twenty-four hours. If you don’t want to live through the most godawful day imaginable, tell me about the guy who’s fitting you out with your new supplies. Tell me everything, and pray that it might be enough.”
Simon had been about to protest that he didn’t know anything at all but he changed his mind. “He’s a chemist, just like you,” he said, as if that might make the news more welcome. “Analyses stuff for the government, or anybody else who pays ... he says his name’s Anthony Marklow, but I don’t think he’s even English. His stuff’s not better, just different. I’m not about to stop using yours, believe me. It’s just...”
“Marklow, Simon. Tell me about Marklow. What’s Jenny been doing for him? Is she selling stuff to the whores—or giving it away? What is it?”
“I don’t know! What’s the matter with you? What was all that stuff about not being a gangster, hey? What was all that stuff about room for everybody in a boom market?”
“This isn’t about economic competition, Simon. It’s about something more serious. Marklow’s not just hawking happy pills. He’s doing something else, and I need to know what it is. Now, Simon. What’s he doing as well as cutting into my trade?”
“How the fuck should I know?” the youth wailed, with patent sincerity. “I just... you’ll have to ask the girls. Jenny talks to the girls, not to me. If she gives them something, they sure as hell don’t tell me.”
With the forefinger of his free hand Brewer pulled his collar down and pointed to the side of his neck, where there was a blue mark that would soon turn purple, and then brown. Simon’s frightened eyes followed the gesture with mesmeric concentration.
“Have you seen anyone sporting marks like this?” Brewer asked.
“Sure,” Simon told him. “I thought it was funny—the doc doesn’t usually shoot stuff into a person’s neck, and you wouldn’t think the girls would do it to themselves. Why ... ?” He stopped, evidently wondering how the mark on Brewer’s neck had got there but not daring to ask.
“How many?” Brewer wanted to know.
“I’ve seen three,” Simon said, implying that there might be dozens or hundreds more. “Why the neck?”
“Maybe he doesn’t have time to get them to roll their sleeves up,” Brewer replied, drawing the point of the syringe an inch or two away from Simon’s throat. A more likely explanation was that the target was the carotid artery, which would feed the drug straight into the brain—except that his brain still seemed to be working normally. He wasn’t high and he wasn’t dopey; whatever had been shot into his flesh hadn’t been a psychotropic. Maybe the hit had been aimed at one of the brain’s associated bodies. If so, the pituitary had to be the favourite with the pineal close behind. The pituitary was the master gland, the dispatcher controlling the hormonal couriers which kept the body in order. The pineal still carried an aura of Cartesian mystery that had intrigued a legion of modern investigators.
Simon freed one of his naked arms from the duvet and reached out to push Brewer’s hypodermic even further away. Brewer let him do it; if the boy had known anything more about Marklow he’d have spilled it.
“How long has Jenny looked the way she does now?” Brewer asked.
“Don’t know,” Simon replied, yet again. “She started coming around three, maybe four months ago. Every three weeks or so. Like I say, she doesn’t talk to me. Just to the girls. I didn’t know she was with the creepy guy, at first. I saw him pick her up one night. I’ve seen them together a couple of times since, always after dark. I thought...” He trailed off, as if no longer certain of what he had thought.
“Why creepy, Simon? What’s so creepy about him?” Brewer realized as he posed the question that it might be important. “Creepy” wasn’t the kind of word people like Simon usually bandied about; it was a whole generation out of date.
“Short for creepy-crawly,” Simon said. “It’s those eyes—the way they can make you feel, like spiders running down your spine. He makes out he’s being generous—free samples, nice prices—but there’s something behind it all. Not exactly a threat, not like you’d better deal or else... more like I know you better than you know yourself. What would you call him?”
Brewer thought about the impossibly dark, impossibly empty but unsettling eyes. “I don’t know,” he confessed. He thought about Jenny’s miraculously blue eyes and marvellously clear skin, and added: “Whatever he’s come up with, it cuts deeper than happy pills or dream machines.”
“I could try to get some for you,” Simon said. He was obviously anxious to make up for petty treasons past now that he knew what Brewer was capable of, violence-wise.
“You’re too late,” Brewer told him, grimly. “I already got my free sample.” He went to the drawer where Simon kept his collection and grabbed a handful of the advertising cards. He threw them at Simon, then went back for a second handful.
“I want a number, Simon,” he said. “I want to meet a girl with a bruise just like mine but older—a lot older.”
Simon was about to protest that he hadn’t any idea which girl went with which card, but he thought better of it. He was a dedicated hobbyist, after all; he had a collector’s pride. It took him a couple of minutes, but he found what he was looking for. Brewer took it.
“You’d better get that great gaping hole in your window fixed,” Brewer told the boy. “There’s a terrible draught in here.”
~ * ~
When his staff turned up the following morning Brewer told them to drop everything else and concentrate on a rush job. They didn’t ask any questions; they would assume that it was an industrial espionage job beyond the pale of legality but it wasn’t the first time they’d done that kind of work and it wouldn’t be the last. They went to it with a will; it was a welcome break from the usual routine.
It only took Brewer fifteen minutes to recover the data Jenny’s boyfriend had erased. As soon as he had it he passed it on to Johanna. “If you can figure out what they’re for,” he said. “You win a nice prize. You won’t find anything like them in the patent files, but there has to be something, somewhere, which will give us a clue. A protein is a protein is a protein.”
“Any clues?” Johanna asked.
“They might be something to do with tissue rejuvenation, but not in any of the conventional approaches.”
She raised her eyebrows at that and glanced at the little bladder-packs on his desk, which were full of rich red blood. He nodded. “Same sort of filing,” he said. “Field tests are already under way. That’s why we have a lot of catching up to do. The compounds you’re looking at are probably supportive; I’m going after the chap they support.”
That was another clue and she acknowledged it with a nod. She knew that a “chap”, in this context, was probably a virus vector—something that had to be kept in a suspension containing living tissue.
If Johanna saw the mark on Brewer’s neck she didn’t give it a second glance; she probably thought he’d spent the night with a girl. He had, of course, spent the last few hours of darkness with a sleepy whore, but she hadn’t been in the least amorous. She’d been very expensive, but not by virtue of her business acumen; her reluctance to talk had been perfectly genuine—but she was, after all, a whore. It had only been a matter of fixing the right price.
The whore hadn’t known Marklow’s name. She’d only seen him three times. He’d been very polite, she said, but there was something about those eyes—as if they could look right into you and see the blood coursing through your veins. Jenny had persuaded her to take part in the “secret experiment”, using her own improved appearance as a lure. The drug had been pitched to her as a cosmetic treatment, not as any kind of elixir of life: plastic surgery without the knife.
The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology] Page 53
