Lie of the Land (7 page)

From the Inchinnan industrial estate a column of black smoke rose. Two helicopters hovered on either side of it.

None of it mattered.

Another few minutes and the road started to climb into being the Erskine Bridge. The Clyde estuary shimmered and the northern hills were massing. Right now, he was the only vehicle breaching the biosec cordon at Checkpoint 24.

There were supposed to be a minimum of twenty CivCons at each of the twenty-eight exit points in the city's Outer Ring. Most of them were arseholes: ex-army, Special Forces, the best coppers, private security from overseas; all on decent pay and food. There were meant to be twenty, but today he could only see five. Maybe there was trouble somewhere, and they were overstretched.

Same as before, he told himself. Hand the thing over. Don't get smart. Give him the spiel and the smile.

Thrash metal was blasting from the sentry booth, the singer screaming over white noise feedback. The five CivCons had their helmets off; tunics open in the warmth. An older one, South African by the sound of it, moaned about the shit music.

A black guy, English, did the honours.

Pulse quickening, Carl held out his ID card for scanning. He tried to look impassive, bored even, for his retinal scan. This time
the guy didn't spit the word ‘journalist'. Maybe the surveillance drone had watched him since the city centre, seen that he hadn't stopped near any known subversives. Maybe nothing had watched him at all, and he was just imagining it. He drummed his fingers lightly on the steering wheel. ID's fine, man. Transit clearance has been given. Pull a fast one or let me out.

The CivCon didn't say a word, just nodded, handed back the ID, with the same sly smile as the first. He walked away and, after what seemed like an age, the barrier floated upwards. Stop had become an invitation to go. Just the disinfectant spray-booth, and he was away. Carl followed the arrows, stopped in the booth, and waited. The nozzles started spraying, and then they stopped.

The light was red.

Red. That meant stop. No go.

Shit.

He looked up, hands trembling, at the figure striding towards him.

The CivCon bent down. ‘Have you had a shower this morning, sir?'

Carl felt panic rising. ‘Eh . . . what? I don't unders—'

Please. Let me go. Let me get out.

The guard bent down, grinning, and looked Carl straight in the eye. ‘Close your fucking window. The spray won't work if it's open.'

And he walked away.

Relief made Carl feel like laughing. He understood, did as he was told, felt tension draining from his body.

The spray-booth went to work, and the light turned green. He put the car in gear and drove away from the checkpoint, the road ahead straight and empty. For a while, he kept checking the rear-view mirror, casting anxious glances behind. There was no sign of activity at the checkpoint, nothing to indicate a change of mood, no sudden alert; only the dayshift, hot and listless.

The checkpoint disappeared behind him and he was back on the north side of the River Clyde.

Carl took a deep breath. Then he screamed at the top of his voice until it hurt, thumping the steering wheel. He cranked the music up loud. For the first time since the Glasgow Emergency Order had been imposed, he was outside the city. An exit had been engineered. Ordinary coppers and the old laws were the worst that he would encounter unless he went near Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Stirling or Inverness, and he had no reason to go to any of those places.

8

The sun was shining. For a few days he could relax. CivCon had enough trouble in the cities to contend with to go chasing after him, though Sentinel would doubtless keep a locus on him, just in case. In any event, outside the urban emergency zones CivCon were supposed to leave everything to the police, stretched and under-resourced though they were. As he sped towards Luss and Loch Lomond, Carl kept reminding himself of that. Older laws were now in operation.

Speeding past the Luss turn-off, trees drooped their lush branches over the road, and he had to swerve every so often to avoid them. Every few minutes there was a grey patch, like mould, on a far hillside where the conifers had been harvested for wood-chip fuel. He drove, loving the feel of the car, unbelieving. There were only a few other vehicles on the road, and the occasional truck from one of the few haulage firms still in existence. A bus came towards him: folk going to Glasgow to see friends and relatives, after waiting weeks for a three-day entry permit.

The car in front of Carl turned off the main road. He was on his own now, nothing in front or behind, taking the tight curves by Loch Lomond like a rally driver, dodging the potholes. On and up towards Tyndrum he went, cloud-shadows passing across hills that reared on either side; gates and fences, old cars by the side of the road; long grass and signs for closed hotels. Then the hills relaxed, settling down for a spell, stretching out, and the sky broadened. On a straight he made sure he was above forty, then followed Eddie's instructions.

After restarting the engine, he caught the whiff of burning plastic as the circuit in the engine burned out. Maybe some blip of light on a screen back in Glasgow or Edinburgh or London had gone out. Maybe someone in Command and Control had looked away as it happened, and was now scratching his or her head at the amazing vanishing car. Maybe they were alerting the rural police right now.

‘Fuck them,' Carl shouted over his music. Second-guessing what the authorities had in mind for him was a pointless, stress-inducing exercise. The people who would make life unpleasant were there, watching and waiting. If they were going to pull him in for a Category 1 offence, keep him in a black site for as long as they pleased, then that's what they were going to do. No point in worrying about it.

Easier said than done.

At Tyndrum there was an automated biofuel station. The sign was missing a few letters. Most of the other buildings that looked like they might once have housed a business were boarded up and in the same condition. He sped past.

After another half an hour he pulled over into a lay-by. The last time he'd been to Glen Coe, many years before, the weather had been foul and the cloud low. But now the sky was higher and, miles ahead, the towering land was dark under cloud, spears of sun being doused as the steel sky rolled in over Rannoch Moor. The place was a gateway to somewhere else, the jaws of the earth waiting to swallow you whole. He sat for a few minutes, watching the change of light and shade, each movement of cloud casting a shifting intensity over hill and moor.

‘Engage autodriver,' he said. With autodriver on, the safety parameters governing the smart screen were switched off, and the windscreen lit up with object-tags and insets, a brief history of Glen Coe, its geology, and a tag for the one hotel. Still trading, but there was no information on a menu. He switched settings and
the smart screen flipped into weather mode, displaying cloud types, atmospheric pressure, humidity and the chances of the rain continuing. There was a 64 per cent likelihood that a shower would fall within the next hour.

He started the car and drove on. Within the chasm of Glen Coe itself, just twelve minutes later, the rain hit, like a hose being turned against the windscreen. It lashed down, turning the road into a river, potholes invisible, drowned. Water hammering and scorching and furious, wipers barely able to clear the windscreen. Then, as quickly as it started, the rain stopped; the tap turned tight in the off position. The smart screen was bang on the money.

‘Fuck's sake,' Carl breathed, glad to be through the downpour. He could look up at scree-strewn slopes now. He stopped the car again, getting out this time. Fresh air, damp and earthy; he could hear the river now, down below, gushing and rushing through the rocks.

Where he was headed, the blue-grey hills faded by degrees into the blue-grey sky until it was hard to say where the hills ended and where the sky began. He was hungry. Sitting on a stone, he scoffed his sandwiches, gazing up at the high tops, the ragged drops. When had the massacre been? What were the causes? He couldn't quite remember. He tried to imagine women and children being stabbed to death in the snow.

He finished his lunch and drove on. The smart screen told him about rock types and a brief sanitised version of what had happened in 1692.

•

He passed scarred hillsides where conifer plantations had been levelled for biofuel and which now resembled First World War battlefields. He passed shuttered hotels, overgrown verges and, deep into the north, empty glens and the gaping ruins of old stone houses.

Wind turbines turned on a summit or two and some stretches of road were so bad with potholes that he had to slow to walking speed to weave through them. Two buses and four cars had passed him, heading south; one big Jag had overtaken him, going north. He had not seen a single police car north of Fort William.

And everywhere, he would spot a mast on some hilltop, skeletal metal and antennae against the sky. Nothing tagged with RFID moved without being monitored, and most of the under-18s had theirs implanted for ‘safety' reasons. Sentinel sensed everything and everyone, except those who had the means to avoid it.

He drove through Fort William without stopping. SCOPE was just another tool in the state's outsourced security toolbox, another supply chain driver. No single journalist, he knew, could ever hope to slow that juggernaut as it moved up through the gears. The masts and the miles and the silent villages came and went. Afternoon eased into drowsy evening. He'd long passed Ullapool, still plenty of north left.

‘Tourist coastal route' said a faded road-sign. Now there was a laugh.

•

An hour later Carl pulled into a lay-by. To the west the evening sun cut through the clouds. He had not seen another vehicle for eighteen miles. Rubbing his eyes and the small of his back, the thrill of being behind the wheel had soured. He stretched and took a lungful of warm air. Around him there was nothing except slopes of rock and heather, up-thrusts of naked rock. He took out his palmpod; it barely registered a signal.

The sun's rays were playing on the distant hills, shadows scooped from the hunched massifs. A bird of prey hovered, lasering its target, then dropped like a dead weight. He took it all in, the spectacle.

Satnav said thirty-four miles to Inverlair. From the glove compartment he pulled out an old frayed map, spread it out on the bonnet of the car, and traced his journey. Some ninety miles south-east was the new hydroelectric dam that he was meant to swing by. It was a bugger that he had to drive there the day after tomorrow. Anyway, here he was, wherever it was. What do people do up here? Nothing. Nothing around him as far as he could see, just the vast opening north, swallowing the line of the road.

He stretched his back again, smelling summer in the grass and on the wind, easy sun over a glimpse of sea between the hills. The surrounding summits were scraped bare of vegetation, crags fissured and scrubbed like this rhino he'd seen up close once, in Edinburgh Zoo, its skin cracked and weathered and out of the reptilian past. His sandwiches were gone, and there was no more water left in the bottle. His legs were aching. Glasgow felt a long way away.

Away from the road – he had no idea of distance – was a bare fist of mountain that burst through the thin covering of green. Somewhere in his mind, the outline of the dark shape rang a bell. He had seen this photo, he was sure of it. And now here he was, looking, open-mouthed, at the real thing. He stopped the car again and got out. After a while, he became aware of another sensation – absolute silence. Only the breeze in the grass registered in his ears, birds calling in the distance. By the side of the road, in the long grass of the verge, a bee, droning and moving from flower to flower sounded like a chainsaw. The pure air filled his lungs. There was nothing to do but look and listen, but he found himself unable to do either for very long.

He drove on.

•

At a derelict filling station he stopped again to check the map. Weeds were poking up here and there through the concrete
forecourt and the station's high metal roof was missing. There were no fuel pumps on the two concrete stands. Plastic electricity cables, sheared at the root, stuck out of the ragged holes in the concrete where the pumps had stood. The booth's livery was fading under the scrub of Atlantic weathers, windows intact and covered in dust. Carl cleaned a spot with his fist and looked inside. Most of the shelves were still in place; the metal shell of a coffee machine; a chewing-gum display stand on the counter; empty plastic water bottles; a glass-fronted fridge, for sandwiches and soft drinks. He could murder a coffee. Not far now to Inverlair.

•

A few miles on, the dark scarp of a sea-cliff appeared in the distance, and the road veered abruptly down, following the curve of the bay. A road sign said ‘Inverlair'. Carl pulled over to the roadside and reached into the glove compartment. Taking out a pair of binoculars he scanned the village, most of which lined the other side of an inlet – more a fjord – bordered on three sides by steep forested hills and a few dozen houses, about half of them clustered around a pier that was jutting out into the bay. Outlying houses were spread across the green and brown hillside, with fenced fields between them and the sea. A river split the rounded uplands at the head of the bay, a rocky summit rising to the north. Carl could see what he figured was some kind of boatyard, a large grey corrugated-iron building with a high doorway. Inside, he could see a shower of sparks. Probably welding gear. On the pier there were guys hauling plastic boxes, streaming seawater, up from a waiting boat. There was nothing out of place, no CivCon, and no cops that he could see. And no telecomms mast, though most houses had a satellite dish.

In the centre of the village, halfway up the opposite headland, Carl could see ‘Inverlair Hotel' above the doorway of a solid two-storey stone building. Smoke was billowing from one of the
chimneys. There was a church at one end, a small shop and post office in the middle, and what Carl took to be a schoolhouse at the other end.