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He let his hand fall to his side, revealing a swelling cheekbone, dark already against the rest of his face.

  – What? said Nick. What happened?!

  – What happened… said Paolo, is we are fucked. The pigs must have been tapping Steve’s phone. How else could they have known there was an acid factory in Kingston, and not known where? Nick… Steve thinks we’ve set him up! I mean, Steve fucking Fisk thinks we’ve set him up!

  Nick stared. He put both hands on his hat.

  – But what’s even worse, Paolo was whimpering now. Man, we can’t ditch the acid, and the pigs are going to be here any fucking minute! They’ll tear the fucking house apart! They’ll do everyone for it! I mean, we’ve got to get, like, fucking everyone, and everything, out of here in fifteen minutes or we are…

  Nick nodded blankly. A nose of drool had appeared in the corner of his mouth and was setting a course towards his chin.

  – You can get the equipment apart and into the ambulance in seven, said Paolo. Yeah?

  – Er, yeah, said Nick. The drool was starting to dangle. Where… Where the fuck do we go?

  – Wherever, said Paolo. It doesn’t matter. Just make sure no-one sees you, yeah? I’ll pack us a bag, and… try and move the others.

  By the time Paolo had picked up his phone and wallet, put on his shoes and tied back his hair, the ladder was down on the landing and Nick was pulling his feet through the trapdoor into the attic, closing it behind him.

  With the trapdoor sealed, the attic was absolutely lightless. Nick – crouching on the floor – fumbled to his right, and a second later the prismatic roofspace was bathed with a faint red glow. He had an icy kind of fear in his stomach, the kind he used to get during raids at his dad’s. For a second he gripped his temples, trying to pull himself together.

  In front of him were a metal case, a sports bag, a small cool-box with knobs on its lid, a malformed tent and four flasks, each with a handwritten label: KOH, HCL, POCL3 and NH4OH.

  Nick reached into the sports bag and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, opening the case and quickly sliding the flasks into their places, bundling away the lightproof tent and its frame into the sports bag.

  Exposed on the floor were a retort stand, an empty chromatography column and a single flask swaddled in tinfoil. Nick packed the column into the case’s final space; then he put the stand in the sports bag and turned to the flask. It was the only part of the operation that he approached with obvious delicacy. The flask contained a mixture of benzene, alumina, ethanol, methanol, alcoholic potassium hydroxide and d-lysergic acid diethylamide.

  LSD.

  A hundred thousand trips’ worth.

  It was in the last stages of purification, but touch a drop of it and you’d proceed directly into orbit. So Nick lowered the flask slowly into the cool-box with the others, fastening a strap around its neck.

  e: something in the attic

  The Vice-Admiral stepped down from the stand, shaking hands calmly with his four staff officers and bidding them each farewell. This done, he took from one of them a fluttering length of white cloth.

  With the hachimaki bound around his head, the Vice-Admiral seemed to quicken, and his spirit slipped from the officers, becoming as one of ours. For a moment he watched us – the sun of the Empire like a third eye – then he turned and led the way towards the waiting airplanes.

  In turn, the staff officers, the Lieutenant and the attendant officials began to weep. Some way inside me a residual instinct of my own was triggered by their emotion, but attempting to glance at one of them I found – somehow without surprise – that my head was unresponsive. It was frozen in the horizontal plane: not unrelaxed, but stopped, as if I had simply forgotten how to move it.

  Perhaps this disability had been with me for minutes, perhaps hours or even days without my knowledge. But it seemed to me that the Vice-Admiral’s question and my reply – an exchange of only the most distant and detached kind – had brought it suddenly into focus.

  I walked towards the Zeroes mechanically, scaling the side of my airplane without a look or a hitch.

  Reaching above my head, I felt for the canopy and sealed it. My feet fell automatically upon the pedals. With one hand, I gripped the joystick between my legs and, with the other, I activated the radio equipment. The coarse fabric covering the control panel left no sense of friction on my fingers. Looking up, I saw the Vice-Admiral wave inside his cockpit, then open the throttle and accelerate into the headwind.

  We followed in order, fighting the weight of the bombs; until finally there was only one of us left, bounding over the patches and holes in the concrete and peering through the strobic blades of the propeller.

  – You are God’s already! said a voice within my head, and the nose twitched up from the ground, then fell, then twitched again with conviction and led away upwards to the colorless clouds and sky: the sudden flickering emptiness, like the space at the end of a newsreel.

  Angus picked up the piece of paper, curved it lengthways and allowed it to fall into the box beside him. Rain and sunshine were coming alternately down the valley. It was around midday, and Angus still had a hangover; but his writing was happening easily and, for once, it made the world seem slightly less inimical.

  He left the cottage deliberately, pulling on a coat and setting off across the footbridge, up the opposite bank and over the fields to the track that led to the main road. For ten minutes or so he walked between hedges; then he arrived at a gateway, and stood beneath a tree on the roadside, his thumb held out, repeating a pop song in his head to keep from thinking.

  Hay-on-Wye was small, perched on the English border, with a castle in its middle and a multitude of second-hand bookshops. Angus walked through the town nervously, his head down, avoiding eye-contact and ducking into a newsagent. He bought four large pads of A4 paper, which the shop in the village didn’t sell, a pocket-sized notepad and a couple of biros.

  Leaving the newsagent, Angus paused outside a bookshop with windows lined in yellow plastic and a few withering novels. The relief that had propelled him from the cottage had all but evaporated now – the burning was reasserting itself – but Angus pushed open the door anyway and left his carrier bag wordlessly with the lady at the desk inside.

  Towards the back of the shop, a small square room had the word History above its door, and Angus entered it, squatting down to inspect the shelves on the left. It was here, on his one previous journey from the village, that Angus had found the diary of Vice-Admiral Matome Ugaki – Head of the Kamikaze Corps. He hadn’t really known what he was looking for at the time, except that it had somehow to evoke the same feeling as the burning did. He’d had an image in his mind, of falling from a great height, of the earth below him: a visible, inevitable fate. He’d read a few pages of the diary, and felt his first surge of passion since leaving Kingston.

  Looking at the shelves now, though, it wasn’t just that there was nothing new there to arrest him. The titles themselves had become somehow meaningless. Angus retrieved his carrier bag and hurried back out of the shop, heading along the high street past a dozen other bookshops, preparing himself to hitch back.

  The cottage was brick, half-timbered, and buried in the bottom of a valley, concealed by trees from the nearest farm. It had no road, no phone, no electricity, mice, squirrels, a chemical toilet, a chaise longue and a cold water tap. Its owners called it Hollow Cottage, and it smelt like a damp chapel.

  Angus drank two glasses of vodka when he got back, quickly, slouched on the chaise longue, the rain beating against the window beside him. He read through the passage he’d written earlier, but the Vice-Admiral, the Zeroes, even the Empire, had now become meaningless too.

  He poured himself another glass of vodka, and sat there drinking it, trying to work out where the story went next, trying to ignore himself and blot out the cottage around him.

  f: katharine d’aragó

  Some way back upstream, Staines bestrode the Thames: a place of car parks, chainstores, midd
le-income families and retired early-evening television presenters. It was a miracle of uninvention. An attractive curl in a not-unattractive river, girded round – for God alone knew what reason – in architecture of such tacky and intrusive kinds that all its positive qualities were totally effaced.

  Beneath the bridges, teenagers with spray cans found themselves unable to think of anything to write. They looked out into the rain, searching for inspiration, and ended up releasing their canisters into the air – finding some temporary satisfaction in the cloud of colour that surged away on the wind.

  Canada geese specked with fluorescent paint glided upstream, heads held high, dowdy offspring trailing in their wake. They paddled past the gin palaces moored against the banks, blind to the pedestrians rushing past traffic squeezed beneath umbrellas, to the people hurrying late into the cinema, to the Goths in their Friday night timewarp, to the Sainsbury’s now closing for the evening.

  Inspector Hooey knew little about Goths, gin palaces, or what was on in the cinema, but he did know that Sainsbury’s was closing and was in a reasonable mood, having made it there before it did. Bleary through the wipers and the splashing rain, the lights ahead of him changed down to green. He released the handbrake and let his Fiat Punto roll forward another few feet.

  Enfopol – Hooey’s destination – was a slightly secret establishment, as opposed to a top-secret one. A lot of things about Enfopol were slightly done, the most notable of which being, probably, its disguise as a soft-toy factory named Playtime’sTM. What with funding restrictions and other crippling expenses, there were just seven soft toys on the premises and only earnest, besuited people ever went in and out of the gates. Anyone looking must immediately have been suspicious, which was one of the reasons why the Enfopol headquarters were located in Knowle Green, where people didn’t tend to look.

  In theory at least, Enfopol was a good deal more sinister than its appearance suggested. At some point during the early 1990s, the FBI – with all the discretion you’d hope for from such a noted team of dark horses – started to lobby the European Council of Ministers to install a surveillance network equivalent to their own Echelon. That is to say, a computer system capable of capturing and analysing every phone call, fax, email or telex from anywhere to anywhere else in the entire world. Some protested that this was an excessive kind of precaution, but the FBI did not seem to think so. As they observed in one of their nudging communications to the European Ministers, there was serious and organised crime to be combated – a level of specificity they were never to surpass – and that meant Europe getting an up-to-the-minute real-time digital tapping system, able to locate the origin and destination of any call anywhere within seconds, even to translate what was being said from an almost boundless number of languages into English, French, German, Japanese or Finnish – Finland being the source of the necessary equipment.

  Needless to say, Enfopol tended not to work properly, and even when it did the march of technology meant that any decent encryption software could flummox it in slightly less than a second; a fact, presumably, of which a criminal of any sort of seriousness or organisation would have been more than aware. All the same, Enfopol had come into existence. The European Council of Ministers had given its approval, bypassing all other European and national governments, and now – in the British division, at least – MI5 and the CID were collaboratively having to deal with it. Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists of the Western world were tearing their hair out with a concern that closely resembled delight.

  Playtime’s™ soft-toy factory was at the end of a cul-de-sac named Sykes Lane. The semi-detached houses lining the rest of the street were silent, the occasional rectangle of a television visible through their drawn lace curtains. Hooey passed them slowly, turning left at the gates to the industrial estate and arriving at a barrier, beside which a well-lit guard was slumbering in a cubicle. Arching above him were ten pictures of different-coloured tumbling cubes, each displaying a different letter, which together made up the word PLAYTIME’S. An eleventh, smaller cube reading TM was partly obscured by a bush.

  Over a period of about three seconds, the guard woke, focused, pretended to recognise Hooey and pressed the button to raise the barrier. He saluted and remained conspicuously awake until Hooey had parked his car against the wall near the main entrance, taken his briefcase from the passenger seat, draped his raincoat over his head and dashed through the rain towards the shelter of the lobby. Then he went back to sleep.

  Inside the entrance, a skinny, red-haired receptionist was talking to the telephone on matters plainly not related to her job. Pot plants were arrayed on small stands around the walls. In a final bid to maintain the Playtime’s impression, a number of catalogues from major toy stores had been heaped on a coffee table beside an IKEA sofa. Large, mysterious soft toys with no indication as to what they were supposed to be sat on presentation tables between the pot plants. A corridor led away – straight, white and shrinking. On either side of it were doors marked with individual letters.

  – Tell you what, Dave, said the receptionist, I’ll ring you back in a minute. Yeah… Yeah. He he he! Yeah. Okay. Ciao!

  She hung up the phone and turned to the tall moustachioed figure beyond the desk.

  – What can I do for you? she asked, fixing him with unnatural blue contact lenses.

  – I’m looking for a… Norman Teather, said Hooey.

  – Well, we’ve only got the one. The receptionist giggled. I’m afraid we’re going to be needing him.

  – I had an appointment at eight, said Hooey sourly.

  – F, said the receptionist. She leant forward over the desk and pointed a self-manicured finger down the corridor, then picked the phone back up from its cradle and pressed Redial on the bank of buttons in front of her.

  The corridor descended through most of the alphabet before a sign finally announced the letter F. The door in question was blank and white as everything else was. Hooey knocked, then pushed the door open.

  Before a line of aerodynamically shaped computer monitors, a balding man with an unfortunate sweep to his hair was sipping at a cup of tea. His free hand held a mouse. As the door opened he turned unhurriedly towards it.

  – Hooey, said the man, a small smile appearing on his lips.

  – Teather, said Hooey. He held the look for two or three seconds. It seems to be, er… later than when I last saw you.

  – It does, agreed Teather. It does indeed… Moustaches are still in, though, I see. Will you have a seat?

  Hooey rolled a chair from beneath a desk, across the lime-green fitted carpet, and sat without comment. An air conditioner-cum-heater was purring in a distant corner, behind the dozen or so empty desks that filled the room. Teather was wearing a Playtime’sTM identity badge on the lapel of his suit. It featured a photo of himself imposed on a heap of varicoloured soft toys.

  – ITMA, said Teather eventually. Remember ITMA? That crackly old record you had?

  – So I put the baby on the butcher’s block, Hooey quoted instantly. What did you say?

  – I said: What’s a plenipotentiary? Teather responded. I mean… He repeated the quote in a bad Liverpool accent, then began chuckling to himself. Hooey, he said. Hooey, and good old ITMA!

  – So here you are, said Hooey, almost smiling. Behind this desk. Of all the people for me to wind up working with… All the bloody people.

  – And you a pig! Teather observed in disbelief. You! Hooey! Of all people. A filthy rozzer!

  – Look here, baldilocks, said Hooey, running a hand through his own thick hair. What are you precisely? A stuffer of soft toys?!

  – A spy! said Teather, his chubby face looking pleased with itself. Your actual bona fide MI5 spy!

  – Are you hell, scoffed Hooey. You’re a pig with pretensions, neither more nor less. Which is even bloody lower than I am.

  – Ooh, it gets personal! said Teather, rising from his seat and walking towards a drinks-maker patterned with tannin that was leaning agains
t a wall. You want tea?

  – Coffee? asked Hooey.

  – You’re even a clichéd pig! said Teather. No. You cannot have coffee. Coffee’s banned from Room F. You can have tea, or soup.

  – Alright, tea.

  Teather returned to his seat with two paper cups, in each of which was a sickly white liquid with a strip of aluminium sticking out of it, revolving slowly, looking like a magnesium fuse.

  – Cheers, said Hooey sarcastically. So…?

  – So, Teather echoed.

  – So, what do you get up to in this wretched bloody place?

  – Come, said Teather. I’ll show you.

  He rolled his chair sideways across the lime-green carpet, making space for Hooey before the wall of monitors. Then he put a hand on the mouse, dispelling a screensaver that read CAN I DO YOU NOW, SIR? and bringing a hundred or so options onto the central screen.

  As he was running the cursor down the list, the sound of ringing burst from speakers on either side of the desk.

  – Kofi! said a voice. Alright, it’s Jeremy.

  – Alright Jeremy, said another, moodier voice. What you after?

  – Any chance you could do us for an ’enry, mate?

  Teather clicked a Mute option on the right-hand side of the screen.

  – Okay, he went on. This computer has the capacity to trace any sort of electronic communication anywhere in the world. Well, that’s the theory. We’re having a bit of trouble right now with anything outside western Europe, and the time-lag’s terrible. Two, three minutes once it’s been through the translator, locator and all the other shit. No-one can work out why it’s taking so long. Anyhow, most of what I get to deal with is useless East End drugdealers talking in slang… I mean, like dope, you know? Hash. They used to just say Henry for an eighth of an ounce. Nice and simple. Henry the Eighth, you know. These days I’m getting Anne Boleyns, Annes of Cleves, Catherine Parrs… I even had a Solitaire one time. You know, Jane Seymour: Solitaire in Live and Let Die. Jane Seymour: third wife of Henry the Eighth. Took me about two hours to figure that one out. I mean, all this equipment at your fingertips – billions of pounds of it – and you spend most of your time trying to work out what the fuck cockneys are on about.