I stubbed out the cigarette, gave her a broad wink, and said, a little too loud, ‘Myra, would you mind driving me to my hotel?’
She grinned back at me and said, again as if for the benefit of anyone who might be listening, ‘No problem.’
I put on all my clothes except my jacket, stooped to zip up my overnight bag, and said: ‘Ah, I left my cloth in the shower.’
I leaned into the shower stall, recovered the pistol, turned around –
My foot reached the drawer of the bedside cabinet a second before her hand, and slammed it shut. As she jerked back I opened the drawer again, and fished out the pistol that I’d known for sure would be there.
Myra sat rigid, white-faced, clutching the quilt as if for protection.
‘I’m ready,’ I told her. I slipped her big heavy automatic into my jacket pocket, picked up the jacket and draped it across my arm and hand. ‘We can leave as soon as you’re dressed.’
When she was dressed, and we were back in her living-room, she tried a casual reach for her handbag, but I got to it first. I pocketed yet another pistol, this one even smaller and lighter than my own, tossed her the keys and nodded for the door. She pulled on her long fur coat, and descended the stairs in front of me. The black Skoda still stood alone on the street.
Following my silent indications, she opened the passenger door and slid across to the driver’s seat. I got in and closed the door. She turned the key and the engine started immediately, as did the heater. Just as well – I was freezing after going those few steps in the open without my jacket.
She faced me, tears in her eyes.
‘Jon,’ she said, ‘what are you doing? I trusted you. Are you working for Reid?’
‘I see you’re not worried about bugs in your car,’ I remarked. ‘I don’t think you were worried about bugs in your flat, either. Start driving.’
Her shoulders slumped. ‘OK, OK,’ she said. ‘Where to?’
‘Karaganda.’
‘What?’ She looked at me, open-mouthed. ‘That’s hundreds of kilometres. Semipalatinsk is closer.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Shut up and drive.’
The border on the Karaganda road was only fifty kilometres distant, and I knew – from my conversation with the KPF cadres the previous night – that the greater Kazakh republic had a border post there, and the ISTWR hadn’t.
Myra engaged the gears, and the vehicle pulled out as the first snow of the day began to fall.
Myra’s story, I’d decided, just didn’t add up. If she and her doings were under surveillance, my visit had to be known. If she was out of favour with the authorities, her contact with me could only be interpreted with suspicion. It must be as obvious to her as it was to me that the first thing I’d do once I was safely home was to give her story all the publicity I could, risks or no risks.
It followed that both she, and the ISTWR’s security apparatus, wanted me to expose it – and that she was still well in favour with that apparatus. This implied that her story of the little republic’s having been completely taken over by some faction linked with Reid’s company was false. Far more likely it was that the core of the state was opposed to a (no doubt encroaching) company take-over, and wanted my earnest exposure as the perfect political pretext (before or after the fact) for reasserting their own control.
So whatever was going on, whether it was the company or the state that had struck first, there was no way I wanted to get involved. And there was no way, either, that whatever deeper threat we faced from Reid’s technocrats would be countered by political campaigning. The only way out that I could see was to take the whole story to the one state that could act swiftly, and whose intentions I trusted slightly more than those of any other state I could think of: the surrounding Kazakh Republic.
Which was why we were now driving along between metre-high, ploughed-back ridges of snow, on a road covered by a fall already centimetres deep.
Myra tried to speak once or twice, pleaded with me to explain what I was doing, and each time I told her, as harshly as possible, to shut the fuck up. I wanted her scared, off-balance; I wanted her to think me capable of shooting her. Which I certainly was not, but her sincere belief that I was should help to keep her out of trouble, whoever won.
In less than an hour the border was only a minute’s drive away. We topped a scrubby ridge and I could see the lights of the Kazakh border post through the snowfall. And a moment later and three hundred metres ahead, a line of men in bright yellow survival-suits with big black rifles, waving us down.
‘Mutual Protection,’ Myra said, with a bitter laugh. ‘So what now, smart-ass?’
‘Stop the car,’ I said levelly. ‘Slew it so your side is nearest, and get out with your hands up.’
I looked at her startled face and added as she applied the brake, ‘If that’s OK with you.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said.
She was a good driver. She brought the car to a halt just fast enough to skid the rear end around and bury the front in the snowdrift.
I opened the passenger door, rolled out with my jacket and gun, and pushed my way through the top of the oily, gritty snow of the drift, keeping the car’s bulk between me and the company guards. I crawled forward on knees and elbows until the approaching line of men had passed me on their way to the car. I could hear Myra’s raised, officious, protesting voice, and hoped that whatever she thought of me getting away, the last thing she’d want was for me to fall into her opponents’ hands.
I kept crawling forward, as close to the roadside snow-ridge as possible. The grit lacerated my palms, elbows and knees. The warmth was bleeding from my body with every passing second. When I could bear it no longer, I lifted myself to a sprinter’s crouch. The lights of the border post were half a kilometre away. I glanced back. The men were inspecting the car, Myra was kicking up a major political incident.
I started to run. At first I tried to run doubled-up, but I couldn’t do it. I straightened up and began to run flat-out. My sides felt as if they were being skewered on hot swords. I swore I’d never smoke again.
Then I felt a great thump on my back, and saw the blood spurt from my chest, and I followed its red arc forward onto the snow, as if I could catch the drops.
I was on my back, looking up at a white sky. Above me an impossible object floated, a diamond ship: faceted, sparkling, like the delicate white ghost of a stealth bomber, suspended on ridiculously faint jets. A rope-ladder snaked down from it, a white-clad man descended. I raised my head a couple of centimetres as he reached the ground, and faced me. It was David Reid. His face told me nothing.
Yellow suits, goggled faces. Myra, her arms firmly held as she strained towards me.
‘Love never dies,’ I tried to say, and died.
THE FLOODGATES OF ANARCHY
17
Android Spiritual
‘Move and you’re dead!’
The cheerful Cockney voice of Esteemed Senior Eon Talgarth, Judge Resident at the Court of the Fifth Quarter, boomed from loudspeakers all around the hundred-metre square of his stockaded property. Enough of the guns mounted on the stockade were pointing inward to make the court an execution-ground for those in the centre. The neutrals who’d fled to the perimeter would be safe, but the opposing groups, each numbering a couple of dozen, confronting each other in front of Talgarth’s dais, were at the focus of the cones of fire. The situation became clear to all in that target-area within a few seconds.