“Well, that is now a question, although it sounds mostly like a rhetorical one. Don’t tell me—
childrenofthenight.com
, yes?”
It was a good guess. The woman he was talking to nodded. She had artificially dark hair and Nefertiti eye makeup and was dressed in multiple layers of black and purple clothing, with plenty of crushed velvet, taffeta and corsetry on show.
“The official website of the People for Ethical Sunless Treatment,” said the Prime Minister.
“It’s People for Ethical Treatment of the Sunless, actually. PETS.”
“Of course. Silly mistake. My acronym would spell PEST, wouldn’t it?”
Several journalists laughed.
“Well, miz,” the Prime Minister went on, “you tell me how exactly would you go about obtaining their consent and making sure it was unanimous, or even a majority opinion? If there were some sort of Sunless spokesperson, someone elected to represent them, a community leader, that would give us someone to deal with directly. But there isn’t, is there?”
“Count Dracula?” somebody near the back of the room offered.
“I said elected, not hereditary peer.”
Now everybody laughed, apart from the PETS woman.
“As it is,” the Prime Minster went on, “the Sunless are this amorphous, undemocratic mass, and we’re left with the unsatisfactory but unavoidable compromise of a legal contract that had to be imposed from above rather than bilaterally agreed upon. There was no other way. I know you and everyone in your pressure group believe the Sunless have a voice that deserves to be listened to, and I’m broadly sympathetic to the notion, but where is it, this voice? If it existed, surely we’d have heard from it by now.”
“Have you really tried? Aren’t you hearing it now, with the riots?”
“You’ve had your turn. Next question, please. Someone else?”
“So you’ll be shipping Sunless off to the Solarvilles as soon as they’re built, is that it?” said a television reporter.
“What makes you think they’re not built already?”
“Well, that was a computer-generated simulation, wasn’t it? Work hasn’t begun yet.”
“Mr Lambourne? Perhaps you can enlighten the gentleman from Sky News?”
“Of course, Prime Minister,” said Lambourne. “That’s no simulation you’re looking at. That is the actual thing, the working prototype, situated on Dep-Chem-owned land in Hertfordshire, near Hitchin. Those hills in the background are the eastern tip of the Chilterns. The venue is ready to receive its first residents right away. As soon as tonight, even.”
“And tonight,” said the Prime Minister, “is indeed when we’ll commence the task of moving Sunless out of certain SRAs and into Solarville One, in the hope of defusing present tensions. SHADE will be overseeing the operation, with the assistance of the army. It’ll be a mammoth, complex undertaking, but I think you’ll agree that the end-result will make the effort more than worthwhile.”
The conference was wound up soon after. On the way out each journalist was handed an electronic press kit containing images and easy-to-assimilate information about the Solarville project. Shortly after that, Lambourne summoned Slocock via text message for a debrief.
“Reckon it went well?” he said as they took a turn together through Victoria Tower Gardens. Traffic grumbled on one side of the small park, the Thames tumbled along on the other.
“Apart from Wax muffing it, yes.”
“Yes, he did seem to lose the plot all of a sudden, didn’t he? Weak man. Panicked by tough decisions. Not like you and me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he quits the job soon, maybe even before October. Wax is definitely on the wane.” Lambourne chuckled; Slocock didn’t. “Too corny?”
“Ever thought of writing headlines for the
Sun
?”
“That bad? Anyway, at least we don’t have need of him any more, not now that the proverbial ball is rolling. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that there are no further obstacles facing us. We’re free and clear. The PM’s agreed, in principle, to buy Solarville One and take out an option on the others. He’ll have to okay it with the Chancellor first, but that’s purely a formality.”
“Really? He likes the idea that much?”
“Doesn’t
like
it, as such, but recognises that it’s his least unpalatable option and best hope. I get the impression he senses it could be an election winner, too. It’s the sort of forthright, robust policy decision that might just halt his decline in the polls, perhaps even reverse it.”
The pathway they were following had led them to a small Gothic monument near the river bank, the Buxton Memorial Fountain. They stopped beside it while the bells of Parliament tolled twelve o’clock. It was the most pleasant day of the year yet, and the buds on the trees were pushing out their leaves like a choir breaking into song.
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” said Slocock. “Labour getting in yet again. You’ll have wasted all that donation money, for one thing.”
“I told you at the time, a hundred K isn’t a big deal for me.”
“Two hundred, actually.”
“Even so. I dropped ten times that much on a Bugatti Veyron last week, and you know what? I’m probably never even going to drive it. I just had to have one—because I can.”
“You’re honestly saying you don’t care whether there’s a Conservative victory?”
“I’m above caring,” said Lambourne. “You don’t seem to appreciate, Giles, that for a man in my position, political partisanship is an irrelevance. Left, right, red, blue, it’s all the same to me. What counts is whether I have them in my pocket or not. As I do with our dear leader. We’re best buddies now. I’ve reinvigorated him with Solarville, given him a new lease of life. Brought him back from the dead, even. We’re firmly on track, he and I.”
“But I thought we were working towards putting the Tories back in charge.”
“A wise man hedges his bets. When circumstances change, one needs to be sure that one can change with them. The unveiling of the Solarville project was originally scheduled for after the election, but that became, as we know, unfeasible. Long-term was telescoped to short-term. We couldn’t hold off. Net result: Solarville is now a Labour initiative. I don’t see what the problem is. It doesn’t materially affect you.”
“No, it doesn’t, but... but you had me pressurise Wax into it.”
“Pressure, not pressurise. To pressurise is to perform a specific physical procedure relating to the atmosphere of an enclosed system. Did they not teach you anything at that school of yours? And yes, I enlisted your aid in twisting his arm. I used an asset I had. What of it?”
“That’s all I am to you?” said Slocock. “An asset?”
“And what am I to you, Giles?” Lambourne replied. “A meal ticket. Let’s not pretend we have anything more between us beyond what each of us can get out of the other. Certainly let’s not pretend we’re yoked together by a shared ideology,” he scoffed. “That would be absurd.”
“I felt we... we had a sort of... understanding?” Slocock was aware how pathetic he sounded, like a girl asking a boy if he loved her.
Lambourne leaned close. “Let me explain to you something about power, my boy. You think power is being in government? That’s not power. That’s a glorified parish council. Power—true power—is being able to move people around like the pieces on a chessboard, without an opponent to thwart you with counterattacks. Power is getting your own way, all the time, and being answerable to no one. Power is the position I’m in, a position you will never be in. I’m sorry to state it so baldly, but I feel it has to be said and now is as good a time as any. Gaining absolute, unfettered control of others is the only thing that motivates me. My wealth is simply the means to that end, as well as a happy by-product of it. You and your aspirations and those of all the political class are of as much consequence to me as the mewling and squabbling of pre-schoolers.”
Secretly, in that dark corner of the soul where people stow the things they don’t want to admit to themselves, Slocock had known all along how little he meant to Lambourne. He had kidded himself that they were fellow-travellers, in order to maintain some self-respect, but deep down he’d understood almost from the beginning that they were—and only ever would be—motorist and hitchhiker.
Having his nose rubbed in this truth was not a pleasant experience. The urge to break some portion of Lambourne’s anatomy was strong, but happily Slocock had more sense than to give it free rein. He could physically injure Lambourne, but Lambourne, in return, could
destroy
him.
He settled for a bit of carefully calibrated snittiness instead.
“So then,” he said. “You’ve got everything you want. Bully for you. You’ve sold your Solarvilles, complete with built-in failsafe in case things go tits up.”
“Yes,” said Lambourne curtly, “and I’ll thank you not to speak of that again.”
“Does the PM even know? Does he realise what he’s signed up for?”
“He does, as a matter of fact. He’s been fully apprised of what a Solarville is capable of. But it’s not a matter of public knowledge and, save for a crisis, will never have to be. And that, Giles, is the last I’ll hear from you on the matter. We do not mention the failsafe, at all, to anyone, even each other. I’m not sure why I ever told you about it in the first place. It was, perhaps, a lapse of judgement. I saw no harm at the time in letting you in on the game. Don’t make me regret that decision. It would really not go well for you if you did.”
Slocock nodded, a stiff show of contrition. “It shall not pass my lips again.”
“It had better not. Same goes for Subject V. You are implicit in that, don’t forget.”
Slocock could not suppress a small shudder as he recalled the first and only time he had clapped eyes on Subject V. The memory was etched in his brain, repugnant at every level imaginable.
“That you know of Subject V and have taken no steps to report it makes you an accessory,” Lambourne said. “Don’t even think of ever using his existence as leverage against me. Try to topple me, and you’ll be the one going down. And on that note...”
Lambourne took out his iPhone and summoned his chauffeur with a tap of an icon. By the time he reached the park gates, his Bentley Continental would be there waiting for him, door open.
“A useful chat, Giles. I hope you’ll come away from it with a slightly clearer grasp of the state of our relationship.”
“Oh, I have, Nathaniel, don’t you worry.”
After Lambourne had gone, Slocock loitered a little longer in the shadow of the Memorial Fountain. The monument had been erected in 1865 by an MP, Charles Buxton, to celebrate the abolition of the slave trade. The drinking fountain which sheltered within the ornate gothic structure bore an inscription saluting William Wilberforce and other emancipators, including Buxton’s own father.
Slocock found sympathising with the downtrodden difficult at the best of times. But this was not the best of times, and as he bent to take a drink at one of the fountain’s four marble basins, he felt that he understood the thirst of the shackled and indentured to be free.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Redlaw awoke with a start. His Cindermaker rested in his left hand, his index finger curled loosely around the trigger. His right shoulder was still a nexus of pain, but hurt markedly less than earlier.
He was sitting propped up against a bare brick wall. He smelled dust, dankness and the stale-sweet aroma of beer. He blinked into a cavernous gloom, fuzzily piecing together where he was. He had slept hard—the deep dreamless slumber of the lost and dispossessed.
He was in the cellar of a pub. An old pub—old, out of business and closed down. A sliver of light fell from between the flaps of the steel trapdoor overhead like a guillotine blade, dust motes turning to gold as they drifted through it. Midday, by the angle of the light. Damn it. He’d been out far longer than planned.
He creaked upright. Illyria. Where was she? He looked over to a corner of the cellar, the one furthest from the trapdoor, where empty wine racks and a few sticks of furniture from upstairs had been piled up tightly and carefully. Together they formed a kind of lean-to tepee, and inside it, balled like a foetus, she lay.
Redlaw was struck by how vulnerable she seemed, in sleep. There was no hint here of the lithe, lethal creature he had witnessed just a few hours ago, tearing a dozen Sunless apart with virtually no effort. This, now, was a slender, frail-looking thing, huddled behind a makeshift bulwark in fear of even the slightest touch of sunlight.
He had no choice but to leave her there. It surprised him that this even bothered him; Illyria Strakosha could unarguably fend for herself. It felt like an abandonment nonetheless.
He climbed the steep cobwebby staircase up to the bar and retraced the route he and Illyria had taken through the building, after they had broken in last night. He found the back door whose boarded-up window Illyria had punched through. He stepped out, shading his eyes, into a backyard where locals had fly-tipped all the rubbish they couldn’t be bothered to carry down to the proper waste dump. He picked his way through to the back gate and out to the street.
The pub—The Cross In Hand; he recalled Illyria pointing out the sign to him and making some crack—stood on a corner. He was a while getting his bearings. One tract of north London suburbia looked much like another. NW2, the street signs said. Borough of Barnet. He followed his nose until he reached Cricklewood Broadway. The blood pouch in his coat pocket sloshed gloopily with every step, as if to remind him what he had to do.