They ran back the way they had come. Janis stood clear as Kohn crawled to the top of the stairs and used the gun’s sensors to look over the edge. Nothing there. They went down the stairs and out across the foyer, back to back. Nobody had responded to the fire alarm. Just as well.
The whole place looked as if a gas bomb had hit it. Everything intact but bodies everywhere. Vehicles still pulling in seemed suddenly to go on automatic: driverless. Good reflexes, these civilians. Nothing between here and the truck but the Cadillac, and the slumped body of the agent Janis had shot. They got behind an inexplicable object, a sort of concrete tub filled with packed earth. (Kohn had always vaguely assumed the things were provided to give cover in shoot-outs. Part of the facilities.) He edged around it and very deliberately pumped a few more shots into the body.
‘I’ll go first,’ he said. ‘Give you cover.’
He crossed the tarmac as in an unpredictable dance with an invisible partner: dash and stop, turn, fall, roll, jump, run, swing around…He’d just passed the body when the head and arm came up. A pistol shot zipped past his ear. Kohn looked at the body – dark skin, dark suit, dark stains spreading, the unsteady hand squeezing for another go. Gun, you do let me down sometimes. He aimed carefully, and sent the agent’s pistol spinning away. The man moaned on to his broken hand. Kohn looked at him, then shrugged and walked to the cab. The engine was still running. He waved to Janis. She dashed across, her only manoeuvre a wide swing around the man they’d both failed to kill.
As they pulled away the other agent sprinted across their path. Kohn swerved to run him down, but missed. The last thing he saw in the rear-view before going down the exit ramp was the Cadillac transfigured, shining in a beam that matched its colour and stabbed straight down from the sky.
Janis looked at her hands. They were shaking, and no effort on her part could make them stop. Of course not, she thought, annoyed with herself, and looked out at the vehicles ahead. Outlined with almost diagrammatic sharpness by the glades, their colours a spectrum-shifted stab in the dark, the cars and trucks and tankers paced and cruised and fell back and overtook. Slow relative to each other, cruelly fast from the roadside view, the pedestrian perspective. Or the equestrian. The thought raised a smirk.
She turned to Kohn. He was mouthing into the mike that angled in front of his lips. He saw her looking and stopped.
‘Just arguing with the gun,’ he said. ‘I think it’s become a pacifist.’
He looked so serious that Janis laughed.
‘I’ve gone back over everything in my mind,’ Kohn went on, ‘and it seems to me that I aimed at the head and not the leg of that rider who was coming up on you. The gun says it went for the larger moving target. The woman who attacked me – I was just going to blast her, but the gun flashed at the time that there was no time to fire. So I had to break her collarbone instead.’
‘It didn’t interfere when you shot that MIB to finish him off. But…you didn’t finish him off!’
‘No, that was gen,’ Kohn said. ‘Five lead rounds went into him.’ He laughed, not turning from the road. ‘It’s like I said. They ain’t human – at least, not all the way through.’
‘You could have tested that theory on his head. Or was that the gun again, staying your hand?’
Kohn grimaced. ‘No. It’s just – it’s all right to shoot somebody if they’re down but might still be a threat, but otherwise, no. Something like that. I should have killed him, you know. That green you brought down – very well done, by the way – you can’t finish off someone like that. Just a grunt like us, basically. Disarm and leave if you can’t take prisoner or help. Stasis is different. They’re not under the Convention – secret police are like spies in wartime as far as I’m concerned: anyone has a perfect right to shoot them down like dogs.’
‘So why didn’t you, damn it?’ She was surprised at how angry she felt.
After a moment Kohn sighed and said, ‘Just a bad mercenary habit.’
There was no indication of pursuit, but they decided they’d better enter ANR territory by a less direct route than Kohn had originally planned. They swung east and came into Edinburgh from the south. They turned left at the North British Hotel on to Pretender Street, then right and up Stuart Street, across Charles Edward Street and down the long hill towards the Firth of Forth. (The city council had changed dozens of street-names in a fit of pique at the Restoration, and no one had since dared to change them back.) At Granton Harbour Kohn drove the truck carefully out along the long stone pier to a wooden jetty at the end. The harbour was full of small sailing-boats. Rigging chimed against masts. Away to the west they could see against the sky-glow of towns the twisted remnants of the Forth Bridge, like a shy child’s fingers over its eyes.
‘Looks like the road stops here,’ Janis pointed out.
‘We just have to wait.’
‘You’ve done this before!’
‘Yes, but not here.’
After about an hour – Janis dozing, Kohn smoking – they heard diesels chugging. A trawler, its bow-wave unhealthily phosphorescent, the green-white-and-blue tricolour of the Republic snapping from its stern and a shielded machine-gun at the bow. It came to a halt in the water about ten metres from the pier.
‘Get out of the truck,’ said a barely raised voice.
They clambered down. Kohn wondered how they were supposed to identify themselves.
‘Who are you?’
They gave their names.
‘Fine, fine,’ said the voice. ‘The machines told us tae expect you.’
The boat pulled in and a rope was thrown on to the jetty. Kohn, rather awkwardly, wrapped it around a bollard. A dozen people swarmed out of the boat and all over the truck, turning load into cargo. Whenever either Janis or Moh started forward to help they were politely told to get out of the way, and after the third time they did. The truck was backed along the pier and driven off to be returned to the Edinburgh branch of the hire company, with paperwork to show that it had been somewhere else entirely. Janis and Moh were escorted aboard and the boat cast off and headed across the water to the dark coastline of Fife.
‘Funny thing,’ Janis remarked as they stood in the wheelhouse, sipping black tea, ‘you can’t smell the fish.’
Kohn made a smothered, snorting noise, and the helmsman guffawed.
‘There hasna been a smell of fish here for years!’
This comment was borne out when they landed at the harbour of what, to Janis’s enhanced vision, looked even more like a ghost town than it was. It had obviously once been a fishing port, then a tourist/leisure marina. The few people who lived here now were ANR. It wasn’t exactly a front-line place – there was no front line – but it was on a tacitly acknowledged border of one of the patches of territory that made up the Republic. A controlled zone.
Two vehicles waited on the quay. One was a truck, to take the cargo. The other was a low-profile version of a jeep, a humvee. Janis and Moh stood uncertainly on the quay with their bags and weapons. A tall man and a short man got out of the humvee and walked up to them.
The tall man was wearing a dark jumpsuit with a row of tiny badges – national and party – on the breast pocket. Kohn recognized it as the closest the ANR had to a uniform, and, judging by the large number and small size of the badges, this guy had to be of very high rank. Face fleshy – more with muscle than fat – relaxed mouth, broken veins on the cheeks. The small man was almost hidden in a bulky overcoat and a homburg hat, in the shade of which his fine-boned face was lit by the glow of a cigarette. Only one people had features quite like that.
The tall man smiled and shook hands with Janis, then Moh. He knew their names.