There was a gizmo built into his left arm that was meant to deaden any pain, but it didn’t work, or if it did and this was it working, then Fixx didn’t want to be around when the gizmo hung, as it undoubtedly would. All his limbs had a nasty habit of going belly-up.
Outside might be up two floors and along a corridor, but Fixx still knew it was pouring out there. Thunder crashed off the corridor walls, loud enough to drown out the screams of those in interrogation. Questioning took place each morning from 11:00 to 11:30, and in that half-hour the whole prefecture was a riot of animal howls. By noon the howls were reduced to whimpers that faded to silence. And so it would remain, until 14:00 when it started up again and the sequence was repeated.
“What about my legs?” Fixx demanded.
“What about them?” Pig-like eyes raking contemptuously down Fixx’s naked body, stopping at the oozing pink stumps that passed for his thighs. They’d been bleeding too, but then the prosthetics Fixx had chosen back when he was rich weren’t meant to be removed. They were the permanent kind, wired into his peripheral nervous system using motor nerves grown straight to Japanese silicon. The best that Chiba could supply.
Not that it was difficult to work out why the pig-eyed bronze had decided to ignore the manufacturer’s instructions. Fixx was a renegade Jihad hacker, so violent even the Imams wouldn’t have anything to do with him. At least, he was according to the slab they’d thrust in his face, shortly after hot-keying his studio door straight out of its frame and just before some black-booted gendarme kicked him into unconsciousness.
Which was kind of weird, because Fixx had always been too busy f’f’fixxing hoojChoons to give squit for politics — moral, sexual or racial. Anyway, he’d hardly been inside long enough to soften up some petty data thief, never mind the hardened Jihad fanatic he apparently was. But then, Fixx knew he was really in there for shitting on someone else’s doorstep. If that’s what you could call hanging out at the Crash&Burn with the jailbait daughter of some brain-dead policewoman...
“Do I get my fucking legs back or not?” Fixx demanded, and was surprised to see the squat man hesitate. The sergeant was scared! Not of him, that was obvious, which meant it had to be his visitor. Fixx began to look interested.
“Someone important?” Despite four years in Paris, the French that Fixx spoke was tourist-crude. LizAlec reckoned the English were incapable of speaking French properly and no matter how many times Fixx explained about being Irish, he was still forced to agree. English, Irish, American — none of them could speak real French, never mind hack a proper fifth arrondissement Parisian accent.
“Your boss?” The sergeant said nothing and Fixx grinned. It was the wrong move — or it would have been at any other time. Bulges of neck muscles and knots of vein told Fixx the sergeant wanted to whip out the exerciser, but something made the man’s hand stop just before it reached his belt.
Blind fear, for real... Fixx was impressed. He could imagine few things that could stop the Gascon when he was at play in his own cells: whatever was going down was heavy. And better than that, whoever was about to visit, they obviously had the sergeant by the balls.
“Give me my legs,” suggested Fixx. “You don’t want to get it wrong...”
The sergeant actually thought about it, his pug face tipped to one side. And he shook his head, flicked a lighter and went straight ahead, pulling carcinogens into his lungs from an untipped Gauloise.
“Nah,” he said dismissively. “It only mentions your arm.” Checking a standard-issue Matsui pager inset in his wrist to make double sure he’d got that right, the sergeant nodded to himself and wandered away to check his appearance in a mirror. The uniform was fine but nothing short of a complete remake could have helped his face. Not that Fixx was going to mention it.
Fixx hadn’t had that many new faces — in fact, Fixx was the same sex and colour as when he started out, which made him something of a rarity, at least it did in the music business. Though he sure as hell needed a new face now. That was, if he ever got out. Fixx sighed and shuffled on the plastic bed. If he could, he’d have hidden the stumps of his legs, but the cell had no blankets and he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen his clothes... Fuck it, Fixx smiled grimly. So he was going to have to stand on his dignity: so be it, because it was all he did have to stand on.
Heels clicked on the floor outside and someone knocked, making the fat Gascon jump. God, Fixx thought to himself as the door swung back, the Neanderthal really was frightened. A tall major with high cheeks, thin lips and sunken eyes entered the room, hook nose wrinkling at the stench of tobacco and the acrid stink that rose from the floor where Fixx had pissed himself earlier after a particularly nasty blow to the kidneys. But, inquisitor’s face or not, it wasn’t the major who was important. It was the thin, bird-like woman behind him who mattered.
Not that Fixx noticed the woman, not at first. He was too busy eyeing up the Ted Brewer violin clutched in the major’s hands. It was an original Gothic, body cut down to a swirl of clear acrylic, Ashworth pickup, Pirastro strings. There were fifteen working models left in the world, and that was his.
Or had been until the prefecture blew out his door.
After seeing what the police had done to his antique 303, the Thereman and his mixing decks, Fixx hadn’t dared hope the Ted Brewer was still unbroken. But it was and poking out of the major’s pocket was a matching acrylic bow, strung with purple horsehair. The hair was snapped but that didn’t matter, the bow itself looked fine.
Lady Clare Fabio walked abruptly into the room, pushing past the major who stammered his apologies for not getting out of her way. Her greying crop was immaculate, her dark Dior lipstick perfectly applied. The only thing that looked out of place were the deep shadows round her eyes, shadows so dark that not even quality make-up could hide them.
No one need have greying hair, enhancers could reverse that as easily as a laser peel could have taken the fine lines from around her blue eyes. Any half-decent hairdresser could have done both.
“My Lady, let me get the man moved. The smell...”
Lady Clare shook her head. “I’ve smelt worse,” she said abruptly, “much worse.” She didn’t bother to mention it had been many, many years before. Her eyes took in the cell, the basic plastic bed, the lack of sheets and sharp edges, the ceiling’s permanent light strip turned up to daylight and inset behind shatter-proof polymer. The place hadn’t improved since her time as a junior prosecutor.
Everything was as it always was, including a man sitting broken-nosed and naked on the bed. Briefly Lady Clare wondered on whose orders the gendarmes had stripped him and then remembered they were hers. The man looked different to his official tri-Ds, but then, he would without his legs. His natural height had been 1.78 metres but after his accident in Moscow he’d sued himself and used the insurance to acquire the most expensive prosthetics that money could buy. Back on stage in his new legs, the man now stood 1.88 metres tall — so far as Lady Clare was concerned, that said it all.
As did the fact he could have used limb grafts or, if he was squeamish about accepting cadaver tissue, he could have had limbs clone-grown in less than five months. As it was, it took him that long to get used to his new heavy metal prosthetics. Lady Clare knew, she’d had it checked.
There was little she didn’t know about this man’s history. And most of it she would have been glad to forget, especially the bits after LizAlec came into the equation. It had been going on for over a year and she hadn’t known. Minister for Internal Security, the ultimate head of S3 and she didn’t even have a clue until just before Christmas... When Lady Clare got the first hint of what was going on, she’d tagged Fixx in her head as a social retard but nothing more, not dangerous to her or LizAlec. Except that wasn’t how LizAlec’s diary read. It seemed this was the creep LizAlec had chosen as her first lover... The kind of shit who could take a fourteen-year-old innocent to his bed without even asking her name.