“It’s too fucking early in the morning to be mystical, Smoke.”
“She’s back there, Jerome, about a block down.”
Jerome looked at Smoke, startled. “Bettina?”
“Yeah. Sitting in a rental car. I saw her. She doesn’t want to come after you. She doesn’t want to humiliate you that way.”
“Be the first time.”
“You should know her better than that. And yourself. You don’t have to prove anything. I know you’re ready to die for us. I just think you could be more useful to us going on with the other thing. Fight for us as an artist. Public relations, consciousness raising. Be yourself, Jerome. I know that hurts. It hurt me once.”
Jerome stared at him, looking as if he was about to erupt with a fuck you. Finally, he grinned. And said, “Hey, it’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.” He slapped Smoke on the shoulder, turned to the others. “Okay. I’m outta here. Good luck, you guys. Keep your head down.”
And then he turned back to Smoke. “What kind of rental car?”
“One of those big Arabian saloon cars that uses lots of cartel oil in its gearbox. I think it was yellow or—”
“Never mind—I’ve got her on chip now.”
He hurried away. Back to Bettina.
Back to his huge black mama, Barrabas thought.
Well, why the hell not.
Barrabas looked speculatively at Smoke. “You going to tell us what the extractor came up with? From Jo Ann, I mean? What was all that stuff they were buggerin’ with in her head?”
Smoke said with flat authority, “No. I’ve got to confirm something first. Bones is in Paris, I’ll talk to him first. He’s got a lot of stuff about genetically engineered organisms stored up. When I know what I’m talking about, I’ll talk about it.”
He looked like something was eating at him, Barrabas decided. Like he’s guessed what this Bones’ll confirm for him. And it scares him.
Quietly scared.
Barrabas knew what it was like to be quietly scared.
“I wish I’d had time to arrange a private boat,” Smoke said, peering southeast, toward the coast of France. Just across the channel, but not quite visible from here. “Anyway, Dahlia said she’d have some people here to cover for us.”
Barrabas snorted. “Dahlia. Bit full of herself, that one.”
Jo Ann shot him a look. “Are you going saying something racist? Because if you are—”
“No, no, no. But—”
“I know what he means,” Smoke said, coming to his rescue. “She’s always talking about herself, her little projects. She can seem shallow.”
Jo Ann shrugged. “She had the crummy luck to be born wealthy. Her parents have a diamond wholesaling outfit. And she’s an only child. Got everything she wanted, almost instantly. She’s never been quite sure of who she was, because she had the freedom to be anyone she wanted. But she’s always there for you. She’s almost the only real friend I had in London.”
Smoke nodded. “She’s always there for us, too. She knows what she’s risking, helping us. She’ll grow up. And in the meantime, she has so many connections—she may surprise you, Patrick.”
Barrabas shrugged. “I been surprised already.” The Hover ferry’s deck hands dropped the gate chain and the crowd began moving onto the vessel, sifting through the bottleneck a few at a time like grains of sand in an hourglass.
And then Barrabas saw the SA chief of London Security, and half a dozen others, all of them in plainclothes, but with hands on guns in their coats. They were getting out of the back of an unmarked green van.
“I see them,” Smoke said. He looked at the ferry. Its gate was still about thirty feet away and there was a heavy crowd in front of them.
The plainclothes thugs started across the street toward them. Smoke reached into his pocket. Jo Ann dug her fingers into Barrabas’s arm.
And then a score of howling teen thrashers on skateboards erupted from an alleyway.
And they made straight for the startled SA heavies.
The thrashers’d look ridiculous if they didn’t look so frightful, Barrabas thought—and so kinetically in control. Their scalp-ups were molded into the sort of fins you saw on mid-twentieth-century cars. And they all wore those absurd mirrored goggles. Despite the chill, they wore nothing but skin-tight neoprene kneepants, no shoes. Every one of them was etched with lean muscletone, and gang-color tattoos. Chrome insignias from cars, from Fuel-Cell BMWs, Jaguars, Mercedes, Mitsubishi 999s, swinging, glinting, on glass chains around their necks. They skated on big, narrow translucent-plastic skateboards edged in super-glued broken bottle glass, patchy with decals; skating half crouched, heads forward, chromed teeth flashing.
Strapped to their calves, hook-shaped blades, razor sharp; spikes on knees and elbows.
And the same expression, like a kind of uniform, on every face: as wide and as evil a grin as human facial muscles are capable of.
Probably a result of their drug combination, their stoke-up rush: 2C-B mixed with methedrine and vitamins, he’d heard. Which was why they were up at dawn, raging and indifferent to the cold.
Some variant of thrash/acid-house, mixed special for the thrashers, whipped the air from a soundbox strapped to the leader’s back as he led the gang into the thick of the SA thugs. The leader—the thrasher cap’n—pumped his legs on the skateboard, its wheels gimmicked to translate the pumping motion into kinetic energy so he didn’t have to kick off from the street. The boys yelled cryptic war cries in the variation of Technicki that English street punks used, “Guhfee muh bleh outcher—”
“Arsebug uh shuva bya fook!”
“Ava gowan yehdir upa shuh!”
(Barrabas and Jo Ann and Smoke were carried on the surging tide of the crowd running from the gang, shoving brutally to get onto the Hovercraft. Barrabas watching the fight over a shoulder.)
What followed was a blur, like a cartoon animation of electrons whizzing around the nucleus of an atom; an atom undergoing fission, maybe, as blood spurted, men screamed, guns fired, all of it punctuated by the ugly thud-crunch of elbow and kneespikes ramming flesh.
“Uh killuhfuh meh me bloo’ole Yiby!”
Two of the thrashers went down yelling, one shot through the neck, another through the groin. A third with a bullet through his ankle rode away from the melee like a crane, one-legged on his skateboard.
The Second Alliance thugs were either on their knees—gashed, clothes like circus-hobo rags—or half running, half limping, back to their van. Their guns were mostly scattered across the street. Their security chief was stumbling backward, fumbling with his gun. The thrasher captain bellowed, “Gowasuckerteetsies yarble ya bollkscunts!” and smacked the gun to spin away in the air, grabbed the SA London Security chief by the neck, bent him back, kissed him openmouthed with tongue, bit off a chunk of his lower lip, spun him, and kicked him in the ass so he fell on his face. The security chief scrambled screaming in horror toward the van.
Doing all this, the thrasher captain never lost his balance on his skateboard.
And then came the seesaw sounds of approaching police sirens, and the thrashers whizzed back into their alley.
Smoke’s party stumbled hurriedly onto the hover ferry.
The boat embarked with no delays. The street’s vendors were there to give the story to the police.
But in the glassed-in café on the upper deck of the craft, Jo Ann was crying at the smudged window. “God, that was awful. Those men cut to ribbons! Two of those boys shot dead.” Adding in a whisper, “Was it for us, Smoke?”
He nodded. “Dahlia sent them for sure. Probably bought them a month’s supply of stoke-up, had ’em watching the place. And the thrashers don’t like the fascists.”