Vic’s head thumped full of blood when he sat down on the edge of the bed to pull on his trousers; he swallowed a mouthful of saliva. ‘Something’s come up,’ he said. And without knowing why he added, ‘I’m really sorry.’
Joni turned out to live in one of the blocks of system-built flats that could be erected inside a week using stacks of components shipped from Earth, everything from framework steels to doorknobs and taps. Vic called a cab but baled out halfway to the UN Building and in a Starbucks threw up in the toilet and drank half a litre of chocolate milk that he immediately regretted. It wasn’t just the usual feeling that he’d been badly beaten and cast onto the deck of a wildly pitching ship: there was also a terrible sense of existential doom, as if he’d become a wretched ghost haunting his own life.
‘I hope you feel as bad as you look,’ Mikkel said, when Vic at last arrived in the squad room. Only a couple of investigators were working on this Sunday morning, both of them looking at Vic and then looking away, deepening his feeling that something truly dreadful was rushing towards him.
He said, ‘The kid fucked up, didn’t he? How bad?’
‘The skipper wants to talk to you,’ Mikkel said, and there she was at the doorway of her office, Captain Lucille Colombier, giving Vic a look of pity and tender concern, and he knew at once it was the worst thing.
29. The Reef
London | 10 July
‘Fahad and his friends knew what they were doing when they chose this place,’ Sandra Hamilton said. ‘Plenty of foot traffic, half a dozen public exit points and an unknown number through shops and workshops…And then there’s the composition of the coral itself, the way it grows. The place is a regular Swiss cheese. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to keep track if things go sideways.’
Henry Harris said, ‘What about other interested parties?’
‘My spotters haven’t seen any sign that anyone else is keeping watch. But I can’t rule anything out,’ Sandra said. ‘The police could have intercepted every message sent to Chloe’s phone. And they’ve had a presence in the Reef ever since people moved in. They’re embedded.’
They were in the back of a sweltering van in the ruined lorry park next to the Reef, studying views of its exterior and interior. One of Sandra’s young men was controlling drones that patrolled the perimeter; two more were keeping watch inside, transmitting images from their spex. Sandra was dressed in her white tracksuit; Henry had changed into cargo shorts and a long green shirt printed with parrots, an attempt to disguise himself as a sightseer.
He looked at Chloe and said, ‘As long as you stick to the plan you’ll be fine. We’ll keep watch and run interference. We’ll have your back at all times. All you have to do is sit tight and wait for Fahad to make contact. If everything works out, we’ll take things from there. If things look as if they’re about to go pear-shaped, I’ll tell you to walk away. And that’s exactly what’ll you’ll do. Walk and don’t look back.’
Sandra said, ‘We have just enough time to go over the script once more.’
‘Let’s just do it,’ Chloe said, but she felt far from ready as she walked towards the looming bulk of the Reef, a fluttering sense of precarious insecurity that reminded her of her first day in big school. She was wearing her spex, transmitting everything she saw to Sandra and her crew, and to Henry, who had gone on ahead of her, had already disappeared into the Reef’s maw.
Its swollen, thundercloud-coloured lobes bulged up five or six storeys high: an early experiment in growing flood defences with construction coral that had run wild and spread halfway across the Thames before the commensal organisms that fabricated it, several hundred types of alien bacterioforms, had been brought under control with hormone sprays developed by one of Ada Morange’s companies. Chloe crossed a kind of apron that had been bulldozed out of a tongue of coral and sealed with a translucent polymer that showed the complex three-dimensional web of stony branches beneath, their purple and indigo shades spreading across her camo jacket. There was a small bus station, a line of tour coaches. Before he’d left the van Henry had put on a name badge: Hi! I’m Henry from Springfield IL. Chloe was hoping that he wouldn’t try to make some kind of move on Fahad, attempt to snatch him.
She passed through the shadows of spiky buttresses, followed a wide passageway illuminated by shafts of sunlight that dropped through the latticework ceiling at irregular intervals. The circular openings to tunnels that led deeper into the Reef loomed ahead. There were entire buildings buried in there, penetrated and invaded and overtopped by the exuberant growth. There were workshops and factories, mazes of passageways, voids, and veins, and the homes of five thousand people. Climate refugees, plain old-fashioned illegal immigrants, and a variety of crews of tribes, biohackers and pirates who wanted to live off-grid in a self-declared semi-autonomous free zone. The authorities generally left them alone because the Reef was one of the places that the Jackaroo claimed to find very interesting, and no one knew how they would respond to an attempt to regulate it or shut it down.
Chloe hadn’t spent much time in the Reef after starting work with Disruption Theory, but the free market was the same as it ever was. It was housed in a small shopping mall that had been flooded by the river and then swallowed by the Reef. The coral’s growth held back the river’s flood now, and pumps kept the mall dry. Its retail units had been excavated and subdivided, and a bustling maze of tiny shops, tattoo and body-mod parlours, cafés, bars and food stalls had colonised the broad walkway and food court. Coral bulged overhead, strung with webs of fairy lights.
Henry’s voice buzzed in the earpiece of Chloe’s spex. ‘I see you. No, don’t look for me. We should assume that the kid and his friends are watching. Find a place to sit. Make yourself comfortable and be prepared for a long wait. These things never run to schedule.’
But Chloe had already seen the person she’d been looking for, turning away from her, walking unhurriedly across her line of sight towards the public toilets. ‘I have to pee — nerves, I guess,’ she told Henry, and switched off her spex and ducked inside the toilets, an egg-shaped space saturated with a hallucinogenic ultraviolet glow.
Gail Ann was standing at the sink, touching up her lipstick. She was dressed in a denim jacket and roomy shorts and big hiking boots. An antique People’s Liberation Army cap was tilted over one eye. Her gaze met Chloe’s in the mirror and she grinned and said, ‘I feel like a spy in a spy film.’
Chloe had made a quick call to her friend when she’d returned to her hotel room to collect her stuff. She said now, ‘This is going to sound insanely inadequate, but thanks for coming.’
‘I’m not going to miss an important chapter in my exclusive. Is it safe to talk?’
‘I’m with some people, but they won’t follow me in here.’ She described Sandra’s young men and Henry’s costume, and said, ‘I’m supposed to talk to Fahad, persuade him to come with me. While I’m doing that, you could try to get close to his friends. They probably know who you are, from the gym. Find out how they know Fahad, what they know about his situation…And you should tell them about me. Answer any questions they ask.’
Gail Ann capped her lipstick and blew a kiss at her reflection. She looked confident and unflappable, up for anything. ‘Make friends. I can do that.’