The Heist of Hollow London, page 22
“Have you seen Drienne?” he asked.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” Kline said.
“Loren?”
“No.”
Arlo stared in panic. “Loren should’ve got here first. So where’s the Coyne?”
Kline reached into a pocket and produced the Coyne with quiet, smug triumph.
“How’d you get it?” Arlo said.
“I went to the dead-waste outlet in case Loren needed help. They weren’t there but this was.”
“But what happened to Loren? Did the police get them?”
“Probably—cops were everywhere. I had to bluff my way past some; I said I’d come to visit my niece. They told me to get the hell out.”
“It’s on fire,” Arlo said, shaking his head. “The whole place is going up, and I don’t know where Drienne or Loren are…”
“Nadi?”
“Cops got her. Probably dragged her out and put her in a wagon. Which is, y’know, bad, but better than being caught in the fire.”
“If the plant’s burning down, the comms aren’t coming back on.”
“So we’ve got no way of getting in touch with any of them.”
“At least we got the Coyne,” Kline said, smiling. “I mean, we did it. We just need to get out of here, and—”
“I just can’t understand what’s happened to Drienne. She was with me, and then…”
Just then they became aware of an approaching noise, and turned to see a drone descending toward them, about the size and shape of a tin can. Kline stood up: he and Arlo both assumed it was a police drone. It was matte black with no markings, and it settled on the bench.
Arlo and Kline glanced at each other. Then both of them simultaneously received a message from the drone, a short bounce. The message dropped a pin onto their maps, due south-southwest, with an instruction for them to go there immediately. This wasn’t the plan. They were meant to catch the overline back to NiZCOval and wait for Mia to arrive. If they’d succeeded, she would split the money, give them their freedom, and they could go their separate ways. If they’d failed, Mia would take them back to Vancouver to be sold. But the message said the overline had been suspended due to events in Kentish Cyc, so Mia would pick them up at the pin instead.
“So what, are we just supposed to walk there?” said Arlo.
“It’s only a little over two kilometers,” Kline replied.
“What about the others?”
“They’ll have to make their own way.”
“But how will they know to go there?”
“If they come here they’ll get the same message from the drone.” The drone looked conspicuous on the bench, so Kline moved it underneath, just behind one of the legs. Arlo still seemed unhappy about it, but they both left their label on the bench (Arlo’s had an image of a lily) and started walking.
* * *
As Arlo and Kline returned to the main road, Kline towing his suitcase, they saw firefighters trying to dampen the blaze, but there was no saving the plant. They could only prevent the fire from spreading further. The structure was starting to collapse in on itself.
“Well,” said Kline in a low voice, “we could hardly have hoped for a better cover.”
Arlo had to admit this was true, but he also pointed out people had certainly died in there.
“No one made them burn the place down,” said Kline. “We certainly didn’t.”
“Those workers were manipulated,” Arlo said. “Just like we were. At every stage. If they hadn’t been kept in the dark about the collapse of the company, there wouldn’t have been this whole wave of paranoia—”
“So what, they were justified in burning the place down?”
Arlo shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe.” Despite his concern for those caught in the fire, his own terrifying experience of escaping from it, and his distaste for Kline hailing its convenience, it didn’t feel entirely wrong that it had happened. The plant passing into new ownership would change nothing. All Oakseed facilities would be run along the same exploitative lines as before. The only meaningful thing you could do was destroy the asset completely, even if it wasn’t in your best interests.
But Arlo could tell Kline had no patience for this line of thought, and they didn’t want to have this argument within earshot of anyone who might report them for seditious activity, so they started walking down the road that led to Camden Town.
Once they hit the edge of the corpurbation, Arlo was struck by how abruptly it ended. He’d seen this from the carriage on the way here, but it was even starker on the ground. Although this was not the most lucrative patch of the city, it was the closest to the plant and so, whenever circumstances made travel into the center difficult, these areas had been harvested instead. Practically everything had gone. Between the dry weeds you could see the footprints of what had once been buildings, and sunken areas that were formerly basements. You could trace outlines of roads and curbs in the cracked tarmac, concrete, and stone. But Oakseed had taken everything else and fed it into their machine, leaving a hard, flat plain behind. Kentish Cyc might be dead but the other plants would continue its work until this barren vista had rolled over the whole city.
* * *
Arlo and Kline barely spoke. They didn’t want to attract attention, but they had nothing to say to each other anyway. Arlo regularly looked behind himself, pretending to be keeping an eye out for cops or vagues, but really he was hoping to see Drienne catching up, castigating them for not waiting for her. They took turns wheeling Kline’s suitcase over the uneven ground.
As they neared the pin Mia had sent them, they started to encounter buildings that hadn’t been harvested yet. The sun was sinking behind the battered skyline. And then Kline noticed a copter crossing the sky, getting lower and moving closer. It was black and had no markings, just like the drone that had told them to come here.
“Is that Mia?” said Arlo.
“I assume so,” said Kline.
They walked toward the copter as it landed on the exact spot indicated by the pin. It was a vehicle of substantial size, probably a military-political model. The cockpit was blacked out, and while there was room for a human pilot it probably didn’t have one. It was transport for someone very wealthy and important; as the door on the side slid back, they could see its interior décor was understated but luxurious. And there was only one person inside it, and that was Mia.
Mia stood on the threshold, looking from Kline to Arlo. “You do have it?” she asked them urgently.
Kline reached into his pocket and brought out the Coyne.
“Excellent.” She smiled broadly and clapped her hands together. “Come aboard.”
Arlo went first, and Mia put out a hand to help him up. “We should fly back over there and look for the others,” he said.
“No.”
“But we may be able to help—”
“Arlo,” Mia said, putting a hand on Arlo’s shoulder. “I’d love to go looking for them, I would. But I didn’t make you both walk down here for fun, I did it so no one sees me or this copter anywhere near that plant.”
“She’s right,” Kline said. (He still hadn’t boarded the copter, Arlo noted.)
Mia turned to Kline and said, “Thank you,” in a tone that made clear his support was absolutely meaningless.
“The others could be arrested or dead or, at best, they got taken to hospital where their identities will probably be blown. If they haven’t they have to contact us so we can pick them up. If they can’t contact us they have to make it to the port and out of the country under their own steam.”
“But I think Drienne might have escaped from there on a truck train,” said Arlo. “She’s probably gone back to NiZCOval, we could go looking—”
“Why would she escape on a truck train?” said Mia. “Why not go to the rendezvous as agreed?”
“It was a chaotic situation—”
“She suffers from duplisychosis,” said Kline, who still hadn’t boarded.
Mia’s eyes flicked up and fixed on Kline. “Duplisychosis.”
“Yes, it’s a condition some mades suffer from where—”
“I know what it is.” She turned to Arlo. “You didn’t think to mention this earlier?”
“Well. I thought you might not want her on the operation,” Arlo said.
“Possibly not, no, but we could’ve mitigated it if I’d known. But you didn’t tell me and now this has happened.”
“Sorry. But with that in mind, can we go and look—”
“No. Hopefully she’ll come to her senses and find a way to contact us or make her own way back.” She motioned for Kline to come aboard.
Kline didn’t move. “When you said you were coming in a copter, I didn’t expect this. How’d you afford a vehicle this fancy?”
Mia laughed. “This isn’t mine.”
“Oh.”
“I called in a favor from a client. He doesn’t know what I’m doing with it.”
“Ah, right. Yeah, that makes sense.” Kline still didn’t step aboard. He put the Coyne back into his pocket.
“Kline, what the fuck are you doing?” said Arlo.
“I’d like to renegotiate the terms,” said Kline.
33
JUST LIKE FLOATING AWAY
Kline really wanted to step aboard the copter. From where he stood he could catch the wood-and-leather scent of the interior, he could see its finely upholstered chairs and compact, elegant fittings. He particularly liked the drinks cabinet. Looking at the copter, and imagining being in it and rising above the desolate landscape, he felt a fundamental shift at the core of his being. He didn’t belong down here, he belonged in there, soaring above it all. When he got his share of the money, and after he’d made his first few investments and they’d paid out, he was definitely going to buy a copter of his own. He could happily live in one of these, and maybe he would. But all of this confirmed to him the necessity of what he was about to do.
“I want to talk about our share,” said Kline. “There’s only three of us here—”
“I was clear about that,” said Mia, glaring furiously at him. “We still don’t know what happened to the others; I’ll be holding their shares for now. And you each get ten percent, whatever happens.”
“And I understand why you said that, because you didn’t want us disposing of each other to get a better share—”
“This is nonnegotiable, Kline.”
“Is it, though? Because I’ve got the money, and as it stands you’ve a lot more to lose than I have.”
Mia’s eyes narrowed. “I own you.”
“So what, you’re going to report me to the police?”
“Come on, you prick,” said Arlo, “we had a deal, it’s a great deal, just give her the Coyne—we still need her to get out of here.”
“Do we? With the money on there we can do anything we like.”
“It hasn’t been laundered. And the security—”
“We can get around that, the encryption on this thing must be ancient.” Kline imagined it crumbling like a rusty padlock, because that was effectively what it was.
Mia made an exasperated noise. “It’s not as simple as you think. This is your last chance. Hand it over now.”
Kline had been building up to this part. He still had his trump card to play, he just wanted to see how she reacted when he didn’t do as he was told. “See, there’s something else I found out about—”
Mia pulled a small pistol from her pocket and shot Kline through the head.
* * *
Arlo was so dazed, it took several seconds for him to realize Mia might very well shoot him too. He was the only witness to what had just happened. It was much simpler all round to just kill them both—the law wouldn’t touch her for it, and it would also mean she didn’t have to pay them. Arlo was still on the copter and wondered if he should hop off and run for his life. But he didn’t, and Mia paid Arlo no attention at all as she crouched next to Kline and took the Coyne from his pocket. Then she climbed back into the copter. Arlo watched as the door slid closed on the sight of Kline’s maroon-suited body and his suitcase lying next to each other on the ground. Arlo abstractly remembered the suitcase contained a nice golf shirt he’d asked Kline to pack for him, but he did nothing to claim it.
The copter’s suspension cancellation was so effective, you could barely feel any movement inside as it took off. It was just like floating away, as if the physical forces of the world outside had no effect.
Arlo sat in one of the chairs while Mia poured him a drink, and he absorbed what he’d just witnessed. He recalled Mia had raised her gun high and held her arm very straight, clearly conscious of the risk she might damage the Coyne if she tried to shoot Kline anywhere other than his head. She’d made a clean shot to exposed skin in a fatal area. She’d done the whole thing so calmly.
Mia handed Arlo a highball, saying, “Sorry you had to see that.” He didn’t remember her asking him what he wanted to drink—had she remembered from Vancouver what his drink was? How thoughtful.
“Was that necessary?” he asked.
Mia thought for a moment. “On balance, yes, I think it was. He was the one member of the party I was never sure about, and I decided before you left Vancouver that if he made trouble I wasn’t going to fuck around. I did give him a chance, didn’t I? You saw me.”
“Right.” Pause. “I mean—”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He’d been about to point out she hadn’t warned Kline she was going to kill him, but then thought better of it. When Arlo met Mia he hadn’t thought her capable of murder. But then he hadn’t spent a lot of time around murderers. Of course, legally she wasn’t a murderer, she’d probably never consider killing a nat—but that was exactly it, until now he’d felt like she treated him and the rest of the crew as real people. She’d even offered them the chance to legally become real people.
Mia sat at a desk with the Coyne. There was a compartment by the side of her seat: she reached into it and retrieved a facer plugged into a slate. The tech looked clunky, like something Arlo would have used at nursery—it was probably vintage, as old as the Coyne itself. “I would like to know what’s happened to the others.”
“Can you check arrest records for their alt-ids?” said Arlo.
Mia smiled as she brought the Coyne within range of the facer. “Obviously. But this is the priority.”
Arlo kept seeing the foolish expression on Kline’s face as he’d been shot. Yeah, he was annoying, aloof, and he’d been greedy, but he hadn’t asked to be involved in this. None of them had. And they’d just left his body out there in the rubble, where no one would care what had happened to him, just another fool who went wandering in the badlands—
“What?” said Mia, eyes still fixed on the Coyne, her forehead creasing in irritation and puzzlement.
“Is something wrong?”
“It’s a fake.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what I said, it’s a fucking fake. It’s printed.” Mia tapped it against the table.
Arlo couldn’t have felt more panicked if a trapdoor had just opened directly underneath him in the floor of the copter. “It can’t be. That’s the one that came from the locker.”
“You’re sure you didn’t screw up and leave the real one in the locker and take the copy away with you?”
“No—absolutely not. I was so worried about doing that—”
“Why would you worry about that? Why would that even be a possibility?”
“Because I worry about things. But no—there was a dent…” He took the Coyne from Mia. “Yes. This one has no dent. This has to be the one I took from the locker.”
“Then why’s it fake, Arlo?”
“Well … I mean, the Coyne was out of my sight for—”
“How long?”
“I had to throw it down a trash pipe, and—”
“A trash pipe?”
“To make sure the police didn’t catch us carrying it. That’s how come Kline had it instead of me. Loren was meant to pick it up, but they—”
“Didn’t?”
“Doesn’t seem like it, Kline got there and found it and there was no one around.”
“That’s what he told you. You weren’t there.”
“Well … yes.”
“Jesus Christ…”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“But a trash pipe? So Kline could have picked up the wrong thing by mistake at the other end?”
“No—look, there’s no way this would’ve been put down the trash pipe. It’s basematter, you can cycle this easily. No way would someone forego the commission by chucking it in the trash, which is more effort than cycling it.”
Mia glared at him, and he thought she was going to tell him what an idiot he’d been. But instead, eventually, she said, “You’re right. It’s not impossible, but it’s so unlikely it’s not worth considering.”
“Plus, it was in my sunglasses case. I told Loren it was in my sunglasses case.”
“But Loren didn’t pick it up. Kline did. Did he know it was in your sunglasses case?”
“I don’t know. It was just before the network went down so he might not have seen the message. I mean, you could ask him if he knew if you hadn’t—”
“Please, let’s not get into whether or not I should have killed Kline.”
“But if this”—he held up the Coyne—“is the one I took from the locker, it must have been a fake all along.”
“No. It was real, Samson got me to work on it, remember?”
“Samson switched it out for a fake, then. After you worked on it. That must be it.” Arlo took this in. “So there’s no money. It was all for nothing—”
“Shut up,” said Mia. She thought for a moment. “Why put a fake in a locker only you can open? Who are you fooling? Doesn’t make sense.” She jabbed the air with her finger. “No. This is easy. We can figure this out.” She located a device that looked like a thick pen with a jelly tip, plugged it into her slate, and ran the tip over the surface of the fake Coyne. She looked at the window her slate brought up, then put pen and slate down and pointed at the fake. “It’s new. Printed in the last day or so.”
