A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (4 page)

“He asked you to go with him yet you turned him down.”

“Your information is good, Mr. Tamworth.”

Tamworth scribbled a note on his pad. He looked up at me again.

“But the important thing is: You know what he looks like?”

“Of course,” I replied, “but you're wasting your time. He died in Venezuela in '82.”

“No; he just made us
think
he had. We exhumed the grave the following year. It wasn't him at all. He feigned death so well that he fooled the doctors; they buried a weighted coffin. He has powers that are slightly baffling. That's why we can't say his name. I call it Rule Number One.”

“His name? Why not?”

“Because he can hear his own name—even whispered—over a thousand-yard radius, perhaps more. He uses it to sense our presence.”

“And why do you suppose he stole
Chuzzlewit
?”

Tamworth reached into his case and pulled out a file. It was marked “Most Secret—SpecOps-5 clearance only.” The slot in the front, usually reserved for a mugshot, was empty.

“We don't have a picture of him,” said Tamworth as I opened the file. “He doesn't resolve on film or video and has never been in custody long enough to be sketched. Remember the cameras at Gad's Hill?”

“Yes?”

“They didn't pick anyone up. I went through the tapes very carefully. The camera angle changed every five seconds yet there would be
no way
anyone could dodge all of them during the time they were in the building. Do you see what I mean?”

I nodded slowly and flicked through the pages of Acheron's file. Tamworth continued:

“I've been after him for five years. He has seven outstanding warrants for murder in England, eighteen in America. Extortion, theft and kidnapping. He's cold, calculating and quite ruthless. Thirty-six of his forty-two known victims were either SpecOps or police officers.”

“Hartlepool in '75?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied Tamworth slowly. “You heard about it?”

I had. Most people had. Hades had been cornered in the basement of a multistory car park after a botched robbery. One of his associates lay dead in a bank nearby; Acheron had killed the wounded man to stop him talking. In the basement, he persuaded an officer into giving him his gun, killing six others as he walked out. The only officer who survived was the one whose gun he had used. That was Acheron's idea of a joke. The officer in question never gave a satisfactory explanation as to
why
he had given up his firearm. He had taken early retirement and gassed himself in his car six years later after a short history of alcoholism and petty theft. He came to be known as the seventh victim.

“I interviewed the Hartlepool survivor before he took his own life,” Tamworth went on, “after I was instructed to find . . .
him
at any cost. My findings led us to formulate Rule Number Two: If you ever have the misfortune to face him in person,
believe nothing that he says or does
. He can lie in thought, deed, action and appearance. He has amazing persuasive powers over those of weak mind. Did I tell you that we have been authorized to use maximum force?”

“No, but I guessed.”

“SO-5 has a shoot-to-kill policy concerning our friend—”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a sec. You have the power to eliminate
without
trial?”

“Welcome to SpecOps-5, Thursday—what did you think
containment
meant?”

He laughed a laugh that was slightly disturbing.

“As the saying goes:
If you want to get into SpecOps, act kinda weird.
We don't tend to pussyfoot around.”

“Is it legal?”

“Not in the least. It's Blind Eye Grand Central below SpecOps-8. We have a saying:
Below the eight, above the law.
Ever hear it?”

“No.”

“You'll hear it a lot. In any event we make it our Rule Number Three: Apprehension is of minimal importance. What gun do you carry?”

I told him and he scribbled a note.

“I'll get some fluted expansion slugs for you.”

“There'll be hell to pay if we get caught with those.”

“Self-defense only,” explained Tamworth quickly. “
You
won't
be dealing with this man; I just want you to ID him if he shows. But listen: If the shit hits the fan I don't want any of my people left with bows and arrows against the lightning. And anything less than an expanding slug is about as much good as using wet cardboard as a flak jacket. We know almost nothing about him. No birth certificate, not even a reliable age or even who his parents were. He just appeared on the scene in '54 as a petty criminal with a literary edge and has worked his way steadily upward to being number three on the planet's most-wanted list.”

“Who're number one and two?”

“I don't know and I have been reliably informed that it's far better
not
to know.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“I'll call you. Stay alert and keep your pager with you at all times. You're on leave as of now from SO-27, so just enjoy the time off. I'll be seeing you!”

He was gone in an instant, leaving me with the SO-5 badge and a thumping heart. Boswell returned, followed by a curious Paige. I showed them both the badge.

“Way to go!” said Paige, giving me a hug, but Boswell seemed less happy. After all, he did have his own department to think about.

“They can play very rough at SO-5, Next,” said Boswell in a fatherly tone. “I want you to go back to your desk and have a long calm think about this. Have a cup of coffee and a bun. No, have
two
buns. Don't make any rash decisions, and just run through all the pros and cons of the argument. When you've done that I would be happy to adjudicate. Do you understand?”

I understood. In my hurry to leave the office I almost forgot the picture of Landen.

. . . The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts—and let's face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field—is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good—and we all know how rare
that
is . . .

ACHERON HADES
—
Degeneracy for Pleasure and Profit

T
AMWORTH DIDN
'
T
call that week, nor the week after. I tried to call him at the beginning of the third week but was put through to a trained denialist who flatly refused to admit that Tamworth or SO-5 even
existed
. I used the time to get up-to-date with some reading, filing, mending the car and also—because of the new legislation—to register Pickwick as a pet rather than a wild dodo. I took him to the town hall where a veterinary inspector studied the once-extinct bird very carefully. Pickwick stared back forlornly, as he, in common with most pets, didn't fancy the vet much.

“Plock-plock,”
said Pickwick nervously as the inspector expertly clipped the large brass ring around his ankle.

“No wings?” asked the official curiously, staring at Pickwick's slightly odd shape.

“He's a Version 1.2,” I explained. “One of the first. They didn't get the sequence complete until 1.7.”

“Must be pretty old.”

“Twelve years this October.”

“I had one of the early Thylacines,” said the official glumly. “A Version 2.1. When we decanted him he had no ears. Stone deaf. No warranty or anything. Bloody liberty, I call it. Do you read
New Splicer
?”

I had to admit that I didn't.

“They sequenced a Steller's sea cow last week. How do I even get one of those through the door?”

“Grease its sides?” I suggested. “And show it a plate of kelp?”

But the official wasn't listening; he had turned his attention to the next dodo, a pinkish creature with a long neck. The owner caught my eye and smiled sheepishly.

“Redundant strands filled in with flamingo,” he explained. “I should have used dove.”

“Version 2.9?”

“2.9.1, actually. A bit of a hotchpotch but to us he's simply Chester. We wouldn't swap him for anything.”

The inspector had been studying Chester's registration documents.

“I'm sorry,” he said at last. “2.9.1s come under the new Chimera category.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not enough dodo to be dodo. Room seven down the corridor. Follow the owner of the pukey, but be careful; I sent a quarkbeast down there this morning.”

I left Chester's owner and the official arguing together and took Pickwick for a waddle in the park. I let him off the leash
and he chased a few pigeons before fraternizing with some feral dodos who were cooling their feet in the pond. They splashed excitedly and made quiet
plock plock
noises to one another until it was time to go home.

Two days after that I had run out of ways to rearrange the furniture, so it was lucky that Tamworth called me. He told me he was on a stakeout and that I needed to join him. I hastily scribbled down the address and was in the East End in under forty minutes. The stakeout was in a shabby street of converted warehouses that had been due for demolition two decades before. I doused the lights and got out, hid anything of value and locked the car carefully. The battered Pontiac was old and grotty enough not to arouse suspicion in the grimy surroundings. I glanced around. The brickwork was crumbling and heavy smears of green algae streaked the walls where the down pipes had once been. The windows were cracked and dirty and the brick wall at ground level was stained alternately with graffiti or the sooty blackness of a recent fire. A rusty fire escape zigzagged up the dark building and cast a staccato shadow on the potholed road and several burned-out cars. I made my way to a side door according to Tamworth's instructions. Inside, large cracks had opened up in the walls and the damp and decay had mixed with the smell of Jeyes fluid and a curry shop on the ground floor. A neon light flashed on and off regularly, and I saw several women in tight skirts hovering in the dark doorways. The citizens who lived in the area were a curious mix; the lack of cheap housing in and around London attracted a cross section of people, from locals to down-and-outs to professionals. It wasn't great from a law-and-order point of view, but it did allow SpecOps agents to move around without raising suspicion.

I reached the seventh floor, where a couple of young Henry Fielding fanatics were busy swapping bubble-gum cards.

“I'll swap you one Sophia for an Amelia.”

“Piss off!” replied his friend indignantly. “If you want Sophia you're going to have to give me an Allworthy plus a Tom Jones,
as well
as the Amelia!”

His friend, realizing the rarity of a Sophia, reluctantly agreed. The deal was done and they ran off downstairs to look for hubcaps. I compared a number with the address that Tamworth had given me and rapped on a door covered with peeling peach-colored paint. It was opened cautiously by a man somewhere in his eighties. He half-hid his face from me with a wrinkled hand, and I showed him my badge.

“You must be Next,” he said in a voice that was really quite sprightly for his age. I ignored the old joke and went in. Tamworth was peering through some binoculars at a room in the building opposite and waved a greeting without looking up. I looked at the old man again and smiled.

“Call me Thursday.”

He seemed gratified at this and shook my hand.

“The name's Snood; you can call me Junior.”

“Snood?” I echoed. “Any relation to Filbert?”

The old man nodded.

“Filbert, ah yes!” he murmured. “A good lad and a fine son to his father!”

Filbert Snood was the only man who had even remotely interested me since I left Landen ten years ago. Snood had been in the ChronoGuard; he went away on assignment to Tewkesbury and never came back. I had a call from his commanding officer explaining that he had been unavoidably detained. I took that to mean another girl. It hurt at the time but I hadn't been in love with Filbert. I was certain of that because I
had
been in love with Landen. When you've been there you know it, like seeing a Turner or going for a walk on the west coast of Ireland.

“So you're his father?”

Snood walked through to the kitchen but I wasn't going to let it go.

“So how is he? Where's he living these days?”

The old man fumbled with the kettle.

“I find it hard to talk about Filbert,” he announced at length, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief. “It was
so
long ago!”

“He's dead?” I asked.

“Oh no,” murmured the old man. “He's not dead; I think you were told he was unavoidably detained, yes?”

“Yes. I thought he had found someone else or something.”

“We thought you would understand; your father was or is, I suppose, in the ChronoGuard and we use certain—let me see—
euphemisms.
”

He looked at me intently with clear blue eyes staring through heavy lids. My heart thumped heavily.

“What are you saying?” I asked him.

The old man thought about saying something else but then lapsed into silence, paused for a moment and then shuffled back to the main room to mark up videotape labels. There was obviously more to it than just a girl in Tewkesbury, but time was on my side. I let the matter drop.

It gave me a chance to look around the room. A trestle table against one damp wall was stacked with surveillance equipment. A Revox spool-to-spool tape recorder slowly revolved next to a mixing box that placed all seven bugs in the room opposite and the phone line onto eight different tracks of the tape. Set back from the windows were two binoculars, a camera with a powerful telephoto lens, and next to this a video camera recording at slow speed onto a ten-hour tape.

Tamworth looked up from the binoculars.

“Welcome, Thursday. Come and have a look!”

I looked through the binoculars. In the flat opposite, not
thirty yards distant, I could see a well-dressed man aged perhaps fifty with a pinched face and a concerned expression. He seemed to be on the phone.

“That's not him.”

Tamworth smiled.

“I know. This is his brother, Styx. We found out about him this morning. SO-14 were going to pick him up but
our
man is a much bigger fish; I called SO-1, who intervened on our behalf; Styx is our responsibility at the moment. Have a listen.”

He handed me some earphones and I looked through the binoculars again. Hades' brother was sitting at a large walnut desk flicking through a copy of the
London and District Car Trader.
As I watched, he stopped, picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Hello?” said Styx into the phone.

“Hello?” replied a middle-aged woman, the recipient of the call.

“Do you have a 1976 Chevrolet for sale?”

“Buying a car?” I asked Tamworth.

“Keep listening. Same time every week, apparently. Regular as clockwork.”

“It's only got eighty-two thousand miles on the clock,” continued the lady, “and runs really well. MOT and tax paid 'til year's end too.”

“It sounds
perfect
,” replied Styx. “I'll be willing to pay cash. Will you hold it for me? I'll be about an hour. You're in Clapham, yes?”

The woman agreed, and she read over an address that Styx didn't bother writing down. He reaffirmed his interest and then hung up, only to call a different number about another car in Hounslow. I took off the headphones and pulled out the headset jack so we could hear Styx's nasal rasp over the loudspeakers.

“How long does he do this for?”

“From SO-14 records, until he gets bored. Six hours, sometimes eight. He's not the only one either. Anyone who has ever sold a car gets someone like Styx on the phone at least once. Here, these are for you.”

He handed me a box of ammunition with expanding slugs developed for maximum internal damage.

“What is he? A buffalo?”

But Tamworth wasn't amused.

“We're up against something
quite
different here, Thursday. Pray to the GSD you never have to use them, but if you do, don't hesitate. Our man doesn't give second chances.”

I took the clip out of my automatic and reloaded it and the spare I carried with me, leaving a standard slug on top in case of an SO-1 spot check. Over in the flat, Styx had dialed another number in Ruislip.

“Hello?” replied the unfortunate car owner on the other end of the line.

“Yes, I saw your advert for a Ford Granada in today's
Trader,
” continued Styx. “Is it still for sale?”

Styx got the address out of the car owner, promised to be around in ten minutes, put the phone down and then rubbed his hands with glee, laughing childishly. He put a line through the advert and then went onto the next.

“Doesn't even have a license,” said Tamworth from the other side of the room. “He spends the rest of his time stealing ballpoints, causing electrical goods to fail
after
the guarantee has expired and scratching records in record shops.”

“A bit childish, isn't it?”

“I'd say,” replied Tamworth. “He's possessed of a certain amount of wickedness, but nothing like his brother.”

“So what's the connection between Styx and the
Chuzzlewit
manuscript?”

“We suspect that he may have it. According to SO-14's
surveillance records he brought in a package the evening of the break-in at Gad's Hill. I'm the first to admit that this is a long shot but it's the best evidence of
his
whereabouts these past three years. It's about time he broke cover.”

“Has he demanded a ransom for the manuscript?” I asked.

“No, but it's early days. It might not be as simple as we think. Our man has an estimated IQ of one eighty, so simple extortion might be too easy for him.”

Snood came in and sat down slightly shakily at the binoculars, put on the headphones and plugged in the jack. Tamworth picked up his keys and handed me a book.

“I have to meet up with my opposite number at SO-4. I'll be about an hour. If anything happens, just page me. My number is on redial one. Have a read of this if you get bored.”

I looked at the small book he had given me. It was Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre
bound in thick red leather.

“Who told you?” I asked sharply.

“Who told me what?” replied Tamworth, genuinely surprised.

“It's just . . . I've read this book a lot. When I was younger. I know it very well.”