city of anarchy

chapter twelve

Hermes sat in the plush chair of a hospital waiting room. He had removed the blood-splattered, formerly white boilersuit, but the trousers and white shirt of his internship, which he was still wearing, had begun to smell. Hermes noticed this only distantly. Still he was gazing at the floor.

He lifted his head for a moment from this self-induced trance to look at the dishevelled Agent Yvonne, who was looking not far from corpse-like in the unforgiving fluorescent hospital light, and leaned forward in her seat with her hands tightly clasped. She was also staring at the floor.

'Will she be alright?' Hermes asked.

Yvonne let out a single, short breath: one that could have meant any number of things--an ironic grunt, a choked word, a failed scream... Her pale eyes rolled languidly up to meet his gaze with a look that seemed meant to reproach the blank, wide-eyed naivety she found there. Hermes' gaze slipped back to his feet; Yvonne sighed, a little less than gently massaged her eyes through the lids, and looked at him again with renewed tiredness.

'I don't know, Hermes,' she said. 'It isn't looking good.'

Silence fell between them again. Then Hermes said, 'Do you want a drink? I mean, a coffee or something. I can go and get one from the machine.'

'Sure,' she replied, 'though I'm guessing you have nothing to get it with.'

Hermes looked awkward. She smiled and fished out a few coins, leaning forward and placing them in his hands. 'I can see the machine from here,' she said. 'You don't leave my sight. I don't want you trying anything reckless again.'

The boy ambled off in a slow, meandering sort of way, looking as half-asleep and lost as ever even on this smallest of life's journeys, but eventually he returned dutifully with a steaming plastic cup in each hand, receiving a suspicious glance from one of the other Agents on his way.

Watching him do all this, had she not known of his earlier performance, Yvonne would never have believed he was the thrill-seeking type.

She took the coffee from him and watched as he sat back down.

'You know,' he said, sipping at his drink, 'I didn't even want the job. The internship, I mean. But I needed to do something, and there it was on the board down at the job centre, saying they were interviewing for a temporary position at that place. I didn't even have to do anything--I just showed up, assuming I wouldn't get it but feeling better about myself because I'd made the effort. There were some other people there, but they took one look at me, seems like--asked me a few routine questions, which I didn't think I'd answered very well--and told me the internship was mine. Thought it was a bit weird at the time, bit I didn't want to ask.'

'Did you happen to keep the ad?' asked Yvonne. 'The one on the board?'

'I probably still have it somewhere,' Hermes said. 'But it just had a number on it; they told me where to come for the interview over the phone.'

'And where was that?'

'3rd floor, 89 Clue Street.'

Agent Yvonne grabbed a magazine and a pen from a nearby table and wrote this down. 'Why didn't you tell Agent Avgi about this?' she said, getting to her feet.

Hermes looked up at her. 'She didn't ask,' he said. 'Is it important?'

'Hermes,' Yvonne told him, 'if the Electric Man was to be believed, everything we have on the Facility is extremely important. If you can remember anything else, tell me.'

And why hadn't Avgi got this from him already? Perhaps, at the time, she had deemed it unimportant. Perhaps she had been distracted. Or perhaps she had simply been too impatient--it would not be unlike her.

'Take a handful of Agents to this address,' she said to an Agent standing nearby. 'See if you can find anything. Also, get in touch with Beans; tell him to compile what he can of a list of all known Governors currently in office.'

The Agent looked bemusedly at the magazine--Flowers Weekly--found the address and nodded.

'Wasn't the Facility a government building?' Hermes asked her, when Yvonne returned to her seat.

'Yes,' she said, picking up the coffee again. 'It was.'

'Then how come the Agency know nothing about it? Is it really so top secret?'

'So it would seem,' replied Yvonne. 'A culmination of some very shadowy politics, that place. Politics that have always sought to keep the Agency cut from the loop. Part of a wider change in the distribution of power: we get strangled as all the necessary funds and access to information that we need to function effectively go in the direction of Commander Brutt and his army of thick-skulled brutes. As well as to a few mysterious side-projects like the Facility.'

'And Brutt just does what he wants?' asked Hermes.

'Pretty much. Brutt knows we're watching him; he probably even knows we've got Agents on the inside,' Yvonne told him. 'So up until now, he's had to be careful knowing that he can't do whatever he likes with the people he bags and brings inside, front or back way. But his power keeps on growing. Prospects are looking increasingly good for young recruits with a penchant for kicking things until they bleed, and increasingly worse for anyone who might want to object.'

Yvonne sighed again and closed her eyes for a full three seconds.

'Would you believe,' she said, 'it's got so bad now that, despite supposed Agent priority in such matters, we have to race them for suspects? You were the only one we managed to pick up on the night of the explosion, and that from the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time; but you weren't the only one there. And no doubt if Brutt ever found out about you, Hermes...well, we'd be forced into handing you over.'

She sipped at the coffee thoughtfully. 'What Avgi wouldn't do to walk right into that building and snatch the suspects from them--but we've got to tread carefully, or at least as carefully as Avgi can, because if we push too hard, they'll come down on us with all the authority they can pervert. Though really, it's just a matter of time. They're afraid of Avgi, I think. They know she's going to come after them.' She finished her coffee, tipping back the dregs. 'But after everything I've seen, I'm dreading to think what they're trying to hide.'

'Agent Yvonne,' came Avgi's voice, as she appeared from one of the wards looking especially grim. 'I need to speak to you.'

Hermes watched as Yvonne shot to her feet but then moved with some nervousness, almost hesitation. Avgi glanced at Hermes; then, taking Yvonne gently but firmly by the elbow, she turned away so that the boy could make nothing more of her expression or her moving lips as she gave Yvonne the news.

The process seemed drawn out. Yvonne was now staring at her; she blinked slowly and her mouth hung slightly agape. Avgi placed a hand gently on her arm--she looked stunned.

Avgi broke away and turned solemnly in Hermes' direction. Hermes saw Yvonne close her eyes and fall back against the wall, her long, dark waves of hair, usually kept so neat, falling about her shoulders as she seemed to come a little apart.

'We will now go back to the Tower,' Agent Avgi said to Hermes, recalling his attention.

'What for?' asked Hermes, as she brought him to his feet.

Avgi gave him an unnerving look. 'For your training,' she said.

The motor scooter rolled out into the busy streets again.

Holly had slept, but briefly and uneasily. Something like guilt had been gnawing away at her ever since Dorz's accusatory, betrayed denouncement of her back at the police building; something which the more sensible part of her mind, or so she felt, had been fighting back at. Eugene was a little strange at the best of times, but he was also perfectly right in what he'd said: they should never have been involved in the first place.

She exhaled unhappily into the sharp, oncoming breeze. They kidnapped you, she told herself yet again. They had only themselves to blame if that had backfired.

Everything she had risked her life doing in the past few days had been to get herself out of the whole mess--and Eugene too, of course--...so why did she now so badly want to look over that video recording again, enough that she was making her way to Angus to wake him from a well-earned sleep?

As her thoughts had been drifting, so had her scooter, and both were cut short as the flickering red lights of a large emergency vehicle tore past, horn blaring.

Holly brought the scooter round to a stop in an abrupt curve, stabilising it with her leg. She almost swore at the rapidly retreating vehicle, a fire engine, until she saw it slowing amid a cluster of other such vehicles, red lights flashing, a little way ahead.

She looked up and for the first time saw a thin but heavy column of smoke climbing into the sky. Realigning the scooter, she willed it onwards, keeping to the edge of the road lest another hulking vehicle should decide to make its passage.

As she approached, she felt a realisation, both rapid and reluctant, slide icy-cold into place. It was enough to spur her on and nearly away from the scene of the fire as she reached it; away too from the necessity of acknowledging exactly what she knew she was seeing.

The scooter seemed to stop of its own accord. She stood, watching the blaze as it belched from the windows. Her mind took an involuntary step back--not just from the fact that she had known straight away that it was Angus' apartment, and that she knew, with an extra desperate pang, it was Angus now being carried from the building in a black bodybag--but also from the fact of herself: the fact that she was stood there, watching it at all, as if such a thing could ever happen in reality.

She felt the edges of her vision fading--the image dissolving in tears. She blinked them away, stunned, numb, white as a ghost. Her legs failed her and she fell back onto the seat. Her hands wrung the cold metal of the scooter's handlebars to try to squeeze out of them something real, something tangible; she looked down at them, her knuckles white, and inhaled. She had been holding her breath.

She looked up again and saw one of the police officers, hanging watchfully about the scene, staring in her direction.

The rules had changed. Holly felt it. She had been dragged into this twice already, and each time she fought to free herself it came, somehow, at a greater cost. She had been making deals with the devil, or so Commander Brutt now seemed to her as she stared at the fire, and each time he had taken more from her. This time, the price to remain uninvolved was too high--he had taken too much. The rules of their game had changed because now people were dying.

Holly blinked back the tears again--the rest of her action was automatic as she started the scooter up and rode away, a returning and overwhelming sense of urgency felt even through the peeling shock.

She couldn't go back home.

She had to warn Eugene.

A nervous glance in the side-mirror confirmed her fears that she had lingered too long: the police thug was pointing her out to one of his friends and they had started to move with gleeful purpose.

Holly cut into the first side-alley that presented itself, taking her neatly from their view, but they wouldn't be far behind. She tried to think her way through the swelling panic--she needed to find a phone. Her own had, rather inconveniently, died on her about a week ago and she had never found the time to replace it. There were public phones all over the place, and fortunately she still had some spare change in her pockets, but she'd need to find one on an open main road if she wanted to stop--making her much easier to spot, perhaps, but also much more difficult to creep up on.

There was a row of them against a wall, and she picked the one at the end, fumbling shakily with the coins. She had to redial twice before the number was entered correctly.

'Impassionate Deliveries, how can I help you?' blurted Eugene, jolting upright automatically in his chair and knocking over a pot of pens with his questing hand. With the hand that was still free he rubbed his eyes.

'Eugene!' cried Holly, her voice cracking with hysteria. 'You have to get out of there! Quick!'

'Holly? You just woke me up--'

'Now, Eugene! This is serious! They got Angus!'

'Angus? What?'

'Eugene, get away from there and find somewhere to hide! Before they get to you!'

'But--'

'Now!'

'Target still inside?'

'Sound asleep.'

'Good.'

'I still don't see why we have to go to all this effort,' said the man returning from his trip to the small warehouse building. The other two police officers had already settled themselves at a comfortable distance. 'There are much simpler methods. Ones that are a lot easier than having to sneak around a man we could have just shot on the spot.'

'The rewards, my friend!' said one of the others, grinning and patting him on the back. 'Your efforts shall pay dividends!'

'How long did you set the timer for?' asked the third officer.

'Three minutes,' replied the first.

The other two nodded appreciatively.

'I mean what I say,' said the second man. 'You are going to love this. Just sit back and enjoy.'

Eugene stumbled out through the door, tripped, picked himself from the floor and hurtled desperately away from the warehouse, looking around panic-stricken in case he had already been seen.

He had not, but what cover he could not obtain for himself was more than amply provided anyway when the warehouse finally exploded.

In one perfectly-timed glance back, Eugene was whipped around by the force of the explosion and sent spinning in the air, his body departing from the ground in a spectacular flailing motion that brought his head over his heels, the horror in his eyes catching the event from all the dramatic angles he could ever wish for. He saw the red-lettered sign, Impassionate Deliveries, flung half-melted and destroyed from his life's work and meaning, ablaze. A single, massive ball of flame blossomed and vanished, showering hot rubble all over him.

Eugene, grazed and shaking, buried his face in his hands, fought hard with a heaving sob and barely remembered to scramble away before the black-clad officers came after him.

The entrance to the Sir Tenebrous Tower looked different in the daylight. For one thing, the last time Hermes was here there had been more bodies--the start of what had become a gruesome trail.

'Just in case you were wondering, Hermes,' Avgi said, standing with him at the base of the stairwell, 'Agent Sofia did not make it.'

Hermes looked at her, hesitating over consolation. She was staring fixedly at the darkness ahead, and something in her tone had suggested that it would not be welcome from him. He said nothing.

'She is one of many good Agents to have died in the past twenty-four hours,' she said eventually, 'due to a series of events that simply should not have happened. To be perfectly frank, Hermes, I do not know what to make of you. After everything that has happened, I do not know if I can trust you. So it has come to this.'

The stout figure of the nurse appeared from the shadows, and with something like funereal procession, handed Agent Avgi her chainsaw.

Hermes gaped.

Avgi revved it. She looked Hermes straight in the eye. 'You may have a head start of ten seconds,' she said. 'Beginning now.'

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