She suddenly realized she was cheek-to-cheek with him, peering at a tiny screen as if they were colleagues. She moved away and opened a window, turned on the fume cupboard. Displacement activity. Useless.
‘Who are you, anyway?’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ He flipped the gun into his left hand and pulled himself straight, held out his right.
‘Name’s Moh Kohn. I’m a security mercenary.’
‘You’re a bit late on the scene.’
He frowned as they shook hands.
‘Slight misunderstanding there. I was on a different patch last night. I’m just dropping by. Who’s responsible for guarding this block?’
Janis shrugged into her lab coat and sat on a bench.
‘Office Security Systems, last time I noticed.’
‘Kelly girls,’ Kohn sneered. He pulled up a chair and slumped in it, looked up at her disarmingly.
‘Mind if I smoke?’
‘I don’t.’ She didn’t. She didn’t give a damn any more. ‘And thanks, I don’t.’
He fingered out a packet of Benson & Hedges Moscow Gold and lit up.
‘That stuff’s almost as bad for you as tobacco,’ Janis couldn’t forbear to point out.
‘Sure. Life expectancy in my line’s fifty-five and falling, so who gives a shit?’
‘Your line? Oh, defence. So why do that?’
‘It’s a living.’ Kohn shrugged.
He laid a card on the lab bench beside her. ‘That’s us. Research establishments, universities, worthy causes a speciality.’
Janis examined the hologrammed business card suspiciously.
‘You’re commies?’
Kohn inhaled deeply, held his breath for seconds before replying.
‘Sharp of you to notice. Some of us are, but the main reason we picked the name was so we’d sound really heavy but, you know, right-on. Later – when we could afford market research – we found out most people thought Felix Dzerzhinsky was in the Bolshoi, not the Bolsheviks.’
Janis spread her hands.
‘Doesn’t mean anything to me,’ she said. ‘It was just the “Workers’ Defence” bit. I’m not into…all that. In my experience politics is guys with guns ripping me off at roadblocks.’
‘Aha,’ Kohn said. He looked like the THC was getting to him. ‘A liberal. Maybe even a libertarian. Remember school?’
‘What?’
He gave her a disconcertingly objective look.
‘Maybe the first couple years of primary school, for you.’ He raised his right hand. ‘“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Republic, and to the States for which it stands, three nations, individual—”’
‘Jesus Christ! Will you shut up!’
Janis actually found herself looking over her shoulder. It had been years—
‘I thought this was an F S Zee,’ Kohn said mildly.
‘High treason is taking it a bit far!’
‘OK. So I won’t ask you if you’ve ever, ever consciously and publicly repudiated that. I haven’t.’
‘You’re not—?’
Janis glanced sidelong, swivelled her eyes back.
‘ANR? Good goddess no. They’re terrorists, Doctor. We are a legal co-op and, uh, to be honest I’m touting for business. Now, just what has been going on here?’
She told him, briefly, while she did her rounds. At least the mice were all right. Apart from her precious drug-free controls being stoned out of their little skulls.
‘Very odd. I thought it was creeps when it happened – you know, animal liberationists. Doesn’t look like that,’ he remarked.
‘You said it.’
‘Mind you – this isn’t what I imagined an animal-research lab would look like.’
Janis stopped feeding cornflakes to the mice for a moment.
‘What did you expect? Monkeys with trodes in their heads? Do you know what monkeys cost?’
‘Marmosets thirty K,’ said a tiny, tinny voice. ‘Rhesus macaques fifty K, chimps two hundred—’
‘Oh, shut up, gun.’ Kohn’s face reddened. ‘Didn’t even know the damn’ thing had a speaker. I must have thought it was a mike.’
‘An easy mistake.’ She was struggling not to laugh.
Kohn moved on quickly: ‘What do you do, anyway, if that’s not an awkward question?’
‘It’s no secret. Basically we dose the mice with various drugs to see if they act any smarter.’
‘Smarter?’ he said. ‘Mice?’
‘Faster learning. Longer attention span. Greater retention.’
Kohn looked away for a moment, looked back. ‘You’re talking about memory drugs.’ His voice was flat.
‘Of course.’
‘Any success?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘there was one batch that looked promising, but they built a little paper hang-glider and escaped through that window…Naw, all we’ve had is stoned rodents. They take even longer to run the mazes. A result some of us could take to heart. Still…we’re like Edison. We ransack nature. And unlike him we have computers to give us variations that nature hasn’t come up with.’
‘Who’s paying for it?’
‘Now that’s a secret. I don’t know. But a team from a front for a subsidiary for an agency of whoever it is will be here in – oh god, an hour, so would you mind?’
Kohn looked embarrassed again. ‘Sorry, Doctor Taine. I’ll get out of your way, I’m behind schedule myself. I have to, uh, visit someone in hospital and then release some prisoners.’
‘I’m sure.’ She smiled at him indulgently, dismissively. ‘Bye. Oh, and I will ask our admin to check out your rates.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You’ll find we’re very competitive.’ He stood up and patted his gun. ‘Let’s go.’
When he’d gone she had the nagging feeling that more than one person had left.
The hand writhed, gesticulated autonomously as if to accompany an entirely different conversation. Plastic sheathed the forearm. A drip-feed and a myoelectric cable looped away from it.
Kohn sat on the bedside chair fiddling with the torn sleeve of Catherin Duvalier’s denim jacket. It had been washed and pressed, but not repaired, leaving an image of what his shot had done to the flesh and bone inside. The nurses’ quick soft steps, the steady pacing of the guards, set off alarms in his nerves. Again and again, in the secure ward, insecure. Catherin’s clear blue eyes, in her light-Black face with its surrounding sunburst of springy fair hair, accused.
Defensive, Kohn attacked first.
‘I have to ask you,’ he said heavily, ‘just what you think you were doing in that attack squad?’
She smiled from far away. ‘What were you doing, defending that place?’
‘Doing my job. Only giving orders. You know where it’s at…Cat.’
She winced. The nickname was her own, but one they’d all shared, as a collective named after what some people, as he’d told the scientist, thought was a ballet dancer, some thought was a cartoon cat, and only a handful recognized as the founder of a once highly successful security agency. A fine company they were, and – in her ideas, her ferocity, her speed – she’d held out the promise of becoming one of the best. Defending union offices and opposition demonstrations against the lumpen muscle-men of the Hanoverian regime, she was someone Kohn had been glad to have at his back. Success had brought more contracts – plenty of establishments needed security which the security forces, occupied with their own protection, couldn’t supply. But, one night a couple of years ago, she’d been on a squad that took out a Green Brigade sabotage team on behalf of some multinational. As the Green Brigade regarded that company’s employees as fair game and had dozens of workers’ deaths in its debit column, Kohn hadn’t given the contract a second’s thought.
Catherin had rejected her blood money and walked out.