‘Seriously though, I could sit here exchanging crude sexual insults with you all day, but I don’t want to get all buddy movie with you; I just want to expedite getting this information.’
‘Act and talk less like a wanker then,’ she suggested.
‘Please, will you answer my questions?’ he asked, mildly exasperated.
‘Such a pain having to deal with us little people, isn’t it? Answer me first. What’s going to happen?’
Du Bois looked at her for a while, trying to decide how much to tell her.
‘D notice,’ he finally said. ‘Nothing goes out on the news; a cover story will be found for the locals. It’ll become an urban myth.’
‘It’ll go out on the Internet,’ Mossa said.
No, it won’t, du Bois thought. The Circle had the resources to police even that. He shrugged.
Mossa pointed at the nine pictures on the phone. ‘These kids weren’t terrorists.’
Du Bois didn’t answer.
‘Look. You’ve got everything on the files, obviously, but that’s not what you want. You’re looking for a little bit of local info, right?’
Du Bois nodded.
‘This wasn’t a terrorist incident?’
‘It seems unlikely.’
‘Then what?’
‘Drugs lab explosion,’ he told her, failing to sound even remotely sincere.
‘With deco? Hazmat? Techies from some agency I’ve never even heard of? You want to insult my intelligence, you can go and fuck yourself.’ She turned back to her laptop.
‘You know I’m not going to tell you, right? If it’s any consolation, the ongoing investigation is going to have nothing to do with you,’ he said impatiently. Reasoning with people is such a chore, du Bois thought.
Mossa turned back to face him. ‘Fine. Level with me. Is this something I have to worry about?’
Du Bois gave this some thought.
‘Yes. However, it’s not something you can do anything about. Feel better?’
Mossa studied him for a moment.
‘That I believe. They’re a group of goths, or emos, or whatever unhappy white kids like to call themselves these days. They set themselves up as some sort of club of hedonists. Sex, drugs, ropey music, that sort of thing.’
‘A cult?’ du Bois asked.
‘Wouldn’t know, wouldn’t be surprised if they dabbled in that sort of thing, but I think their focus was on exterminating rational thought and getting laid. Though they were into the vampire thing.’ Du Bois raised an eyebrow. ‘Bloodletting.’
‘Why?’ he asked, mystified.
Mossa shrugged. ‘Fun?’
Du Bois wondered if that was how this had happened. Something in the blood, a sensitive enough mind would act like a beacon.
‘Is that significant?’ Mossa asked, watching du Bois’s reactions.
‘Why your interest?’ du Bois countered, ignoring her question.
‘Minor-league dealing. We were getting close to arresting one of the weaker ones, getting them to turn over and give us someone bigger. Vice caught just the slightest whiff of specialised prostitution.’
‘Specialised?’
‘Maybe the bloodletting,’ Mossa said, shrugging.
Du Bois reached down and touched the centre of his phone screen. The central picture expanded to fill the screen. The girl in the picture was not just attractive, she was beautiful, the sort of beauty that could stop a room and make people either desire or hate her. She was slender, pale, with high cheekbones, dark eyes. Her dyed-black hair was a travesty. Even through the surveillance picture he could see a sadness that was more than a subcultural affectation. This was an unhappy, isolated and lonely girl, and he thought he knew why.
Mossa knew her. ‘Natalie Luckwicke, twenty-one, from Bradford. She may be vice’s whiff of prostitution. Rumour has it that she does tricks for some of the better-paying and weirder johns in the area.’
Clear all that shit off her face and she could command a high price, du Bois thought. He tried to imagine what she would look like now, but he had no real frame of reference. It could be her. It could be any of a thousand girls her age.
‘Pimp?’ du Bois asked, still studying the picture as he downloaded all the information he could find about her.
‘Nothing so prosaic. Just a friend who knows people, can make the right introductions, that sort of thing. A real sleazy piece of shit called William Arbogast. Mid-level dealer to Portsmouth’s great and good, has fingers in some dodgy Internet sites as well.’
He was already downloading all the information on Arbogast. He quickly went through blinds and holding companies, found his connection to online porn sites and did a search through them with tightly defined parameters, found what he was looking for and cleaned up the image. Even with the wig, the make-up and the bad camera work, it was Natalie Luckwicke he saw in his mind’s eye. He didn’t like seeing her this way. Mossa watched him clench his fist. He cut the feed off.
‘Thank you,’ he said. Mossa just nodded. Du Bois turned and headed for the door.
‘Tell me something.’ Du Bois stopped. ‘Who do you work for?’ When he turned to look at her, Mossa was surprised to see that he was smiling. There wasn’t much humour in the smile.
‘Would you believe the druids?’
Mossa frowned. ‘You’re not funny.’ She went back to the laptop even as all the information on the Pretoria Road incident was being wiped from that computer and every other computer, regardless of security, all over the world.
Du Bois forwarded everything he had found out to Control. The question was, could she have survived an incursion, even one as small-scale as this?
King Jeremy stared at the manticore through the bars of its cage. It, or rather she, had the body of a red lion, rows of shark-like teeth and a scorpion tail that could fire its sting and quickly regrow it. The bat-like wings had been the most difficult. They allowed it to glide but not fly. It was of little use in the arena but he liked to remain true to the designs in the Shattered Skies Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.
It was the face he liked the most though. She had been a model once, before she became graft meat. She had made the mistake of laughing at him at some party. It had been a matter of dropping something in her drink and programming her to kidnap herself. No way to trace it back to him. Beautiful face, monstrous body – difficult to imagine how he could be more like God, Jeremy mused. It was the misery on her face he liked. The desperately-trying-to-work-out-what-had-happened-to-herself. It wasn’t just her flesh he’d violated; it was everything she knew about reality. Pretty young women weren’t turned into monsters and forced to fight in an arena in her world. Bitch wasn’t laughing now, he thought.
Jeremy realised that he couldn’t remember her name any more. He shrugged and looked back at the monitor. He still found it easier to use high-spec monitors than do it entirely in his head. The situation in Portsmouth was very interesting and pointed towards more of the lost tech, as they had started calling it because it sounded cooler than super tech or alien tech. They still had no idea what it was or where it came from, though much of it seemed to be very old.
Jeremy had first heard rumours in the darker parts of the black market that dealt in technology far in advance of what people thought possible. Jeremy had been in his second year at MIT. Hacking, various data crimes and all-out electronic theft had not enabled him to afford the sort of prices that the lost tech commanded. They had, however, provided him with more than enough money to hire military contractors, as mercenaries were called these days, to hit one of the deals and steal the item.
Despite the multiple electronic blinds and go-betweens he had put between himself and the contractors, it had been the most frightening thing that Jeremy had ever done, but he’d hit the jackpot. As far as he could tell, what they had stolen was some sort of miniature nano-machine factory capable – assuming enough energy and raw materials – of producing the tiny machines that could create just about anything and alter matter at its molecular level. He’d named it Cornucopia after the magic item on the final level of Pagan Earth.