Mike worked in Cambridge, but he lived out in the sticks. The T only took him part of the way, and as he stumbled onto the platform he realized fuzzily that he was far too tired to drive. Did I really just pull a fifty-hour shift in the office? he wondered. Or am I imagining an extra day? Whatever the facts, he was beyond tired. He was at the point where his eyelids were closing on him, randomly trying to fool him into falling asleep on his feet. So he phoned for a taxi, nearly zoning out against a concrete pillar just inside the station lobby while he waited. The cab was stuffy and hot and smelled of anonymous cheap sex and furtive medicinal transactions. It was probably his imagination but he could almost feel the driver watching him in the mirror, the itchy, prickly touch of the guy's eyeballs on his face. It was a relief to get out and slowly climb the steps to his apartment. "Hello, strange place," he muttered to himself as he unlocked the door. "When was I last here?"
Mike knew he was tired, but it was only when he mis-entered the code to switch off his intruder alarm twice in a row that he got a visceral sense of how totally out of it he was. Whoa, hold on! He leaned against the wall and yawned, forced himself to focus, and deliberately held off from fumbling at the manically bleeping control panel until he'd blinked back the fuzz enough to see the numbers. Two days? he wondered vaguely as he slouched upstairs, the door banging shut behind him. Yeah, two days. A night and most of a day with the SOC team picking over the bones of the buried fortress, then a night and most of the next morning debriefing the paranoid defector in a safe house. Then more meetings all afternoon, trying to get it through Tony Vecchio's head that yes, the source was crazy-in fact, the source was bug-fuck crazy with brass knobs on-but he was an interesting crazy, whose every lead had turned over a stone with something nasty scuttling for cover from underneath it, and even the crazy bits were internally consistent.
Mike stumbled past the coat rail and shed his jacket and tie, then fumbled with his shoelaces for a minute. While he was busy unraveling the sacred mysteries of knot theory, Oscar slid out of the living room door, stretching stiffly and casting him a where-have-you-been glare. "I'll get to you in a minute," Mike mumbled. He was used to working irregular hours; Helen the cleaner had instructions for keeping the cat fed and watered when he wasn't about, though she drew the line at the litter tray. It turned out that unlacing the shoes took the last of his energy. He meant to check Oscar's food and water, but instead he staggered into the bedroom and collapsed on the unmade bed. Sleep came slamming down like a guillotine blade.
A couple of hours later, Oscar dragged Mike back to semiwakefulness. "Aagh." Mike opened his eyes. "Damn. What time is it?" The elderly tom lowered his head and butted his shoulder for attention, purring quietly. I was dreaming, wasn't I? Mike remembered. Something about being in a fancy restaurant with-her. The ex-girlfriend, the journalist. Miriam. She'd dumped him when he'd explained about The Job. It'd been back during one of his self-hating patches, otherwise he probably wouldn't have been that brutal with the truth, but experience had taught him-"Damn." Oscar purred louder and leaned against his stomach. Why was I naked from the waist down? What the hell is my subconscious trying to tell me?
It was only about six o'clock in the evening, far too early to turn over and go back to sleep if he wanted to be ready for the office tomorrow. Mike shook his head, trying to dislodge the cobwebs. Then he sat up, gently pushed Oscar out of the way, and began to undress. After ten minutes in the shower with the heat turned right up he felt almost human, although the taste in his mouth and the stubble itching on his jaw felt like curious reminders of a forgotten binge. Virtual bar-hopping, all the aftereffects with none of the fun. He shook his head disgustedly, toweled himself dry, dragged on sweat pants and tee, then took stock.
The flat was remarkably tidy, considering how little time he'd had to spend on chores in the past week-thank Helen for that. She'd left him a note on the kitchen table, scribbled in her big, childish handwriting: milk stail, bout more. He smiled at that. Oscar's bowls were half-full, so he ignored the cat's special pleading and went through into what had been a cramped storeroom when he moved in. Now it was an even more cramped gym, or as much of one as there was space for in the bachelor apartment. He flipped the radio on as he climbed wearily onto the exercise bike: Maybe I should have held the shower? he wondered as he turned the friction up a notch and began pedaling.
Fifteen minutes on the bike then a round of push-ups and he began to feel a bit looser. It was almost time to start on the punch bag, but as he came up on fifty sit-ups the phone in the living room rang. Swearing, he abandoned the exercise and made a dash for the handset before the answering machine could cut in. "Yes?" he demanded.
"Mike Fleming? Can you quote your badge number?"
"I-who is this?" he demanded, shivering slightly as the sweat began to evaporate.
"Mike Fleming. Badge number. This is an unsecured line." The man at the other end of the phone sounded impatient.
"Oh, okay." More fallout from work. Head office, maybe? Mike paused for a moment, then recited his number. "Now. What's this about?"
"Can you confirm that you were in a meeting with Tony Vecchio and Pete Garfinkle this afternoon?"
"I-" Mike's head spun. "Look, I'm not supposed to discuss this on an open line. If you want to talk about it at the office then you need to schedule an appointment-"
"Listen, Fleming. I'm not cleared for the content of the meeting. Question is, were you in it? Think before you answer, because if you answer wrong you're in deep shit."
"I-yes." Mike found himself staring at the wall opposite. "Now. Who exactly am I talking to?" The CLID display on his phone just said number withheld. Which was pretty remarkable, on the face of it, because this wasn't an ordinary caller-ID box. And this wasn't an ordinary caller: his line was ex-directory, for starters.
"A minibus will pick you up in fifteen minutes, Fleming. Pack for overnight." The line went dead, leaving him staring at the phone as if it had just grown fangs.
"What the hell?" Oscar walked past his ankle, leaning heavily. "Shit." He tapped the hook then dialed the office. "Tony Vecchio's line, please, it's Mike Fleming. Oh-okay. He's in a meeting? Can you-yeah, is Pete Garfinkle in? What, he's in a meeting too? Okay, I'll try later. No, no message." He put the phone down and frowned. "Fifteen minutes?"
Once upon a time, when he was younger, Mike had believed all the myths.
He'd believed that one syringe full of heroin was enough to turn a fine, upstanding family man into a slavering junkie. He'd believed that marijuana caused lung cancer, dementia, and short-term memory loss, that freebase cocaine-crack-could trigger fits of unpredictable rage, and that the gangs of organized criminals who had a lock on the distribution and sale of illegal narcotics in the United States were about the greatest internal threat that the country faced.
When he was even younger he'd also believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.
Now… he still believed in the gangs. Ten years of stalking grade-A scumbags and seeing just what they did to the people around them left precious little room for illusions about his fellow humanity. Some dealers were just ethically impaired entrepreneurs working in a shady high-risk field, attracted by the potential for high profits. But you had to have a ruthless streak to take that level of risk, or be oblivious to the suffering around you, and the dangers of the field seemed to repel sane people after a while. The whole business of illegal drugs was a magnet for seekers of the only real drug, the one that was addictive at first exposure, the one that drove people mad and kept them coming back for more until it killed them: easy money. The promise of quick cash money drew scumbags like flies to a fresh dog turd. Anyone who was in the area inevitably started to smell of shit sooner or later, even if they'd started out clean. Even the cops, and they were supposed to be the good guys.