Proxy, page 10
This, thought Ray, was definitely turning out to be one of the weirdest days of his career.
He looked back in at Stacy. She had tilted her head to one side, regarding him with a groggy expression.
“I don’t suppose you’ve any idea what’s going on?” Ray asked her.
A slurry of incomprehensible vowels emerged from deep within the girl’s throat. Her eyelids flickered shut and her head fell back against her pillow.
She began snoring loudly.
Ray went back over to the window to see for himself what was going on. All he saw at first was a brick wall and some bins lining an empty street. Whoever had been out there was gone. He could still hear shouting, but it was further away now, coming from the other side of the building.
Crossing to the other side of the corridor, Ray looked out of the window in an adjacent room and down to the café across the road. Its silent occupants had finally ended their strange vigil, and were now streaming out of it en masse and towards the Institute’s entrance.
Ray reached for the latch and swung the window open so he could lean out and get a better view. At least a dozen cars had come to a halt all across the street in front of the Institute’s main building, blocking the traffic in the process. He watched with slack-jawed amazement as yet more people came streaming out of adjacent streets or emerged from newly arrived cars. Far more of them than had been in the café, and all headed towards the Peartree.
A phrase floated up from the earliest years of Ray’s youth: flash mobs, crowds of people who organised online before carrying out spontaneous group actions or protests at a prearranged time and place.
But what, Ray wondered, were they protesting about? Assuming they were protesting about anything?
As Ray continued to watch, a private-hire bus came around a corner and pulled to a halt in the middle of the road, adding yet further to the chaos. Yet more people came pouring out of it. They were of all types, ages, genders and backgrounds: he saw old men and young women, some in suits and others in overalls or uniforms or even in their pyjamas. Some looked like down-and-outs, while others wore expensive jackets or had artfully arranged hair like they’d come straight from a fashion shoot.
They acted as one, swarming towards the Institute’s front entrance as if they all shared the same clear sense of purpose. He leaned a little further out, seeing now that the entrance was crammed with dozens, if not hundreds, of people all pushing to get inside.
He could see no sign of Markov’s private security. Either they’d been pushed back inside the building, or they had fled.
Unease stirred deep in Ray’s chest. He stepped back through to Stacy’s room—so far as he could tell, the Institute’s one and only patient—and regarded her speculatively.
It wasn’t possible, was it, that all of this chaos and bustle had something to do with her…?
The idea was ridiculous, to put it mildly. Even so, Ray made a further attempt to try and wake Raphael Markov’s daughter from her drugged stupor. Perhaps his only recourse, if she was in danger, was to try and get her out of the building himself.
Stacy’s eyes flickered back open, her gaze still vacant.
“Your mother sent me,” said Ray, more loudly now they were alone. “Amy Cotter. Do you understand?”
“Mhm,” Stacy slurred.
This time he heard shouting that sounded like it came from inside the building, echoing up the stairwell next to the bank of elevators.
A trickle of cold ice found its way down Ray’s spine. He darted over to the window in Stacy’s room and pressed his face against the glass. Now the street below was crowded with yet more new arrivals; several bicycles lay abandoned next to the bins, and he saw a woman in bare feet and wearing a nightie hurry out of sight and undoubtedly headed to join all the rest.
Ray heard shuffling feet from down the corridor. The trickle of ice turned into frigid fingers around his heart.
Just as he was about to lift her out of the bed to try and carry her out of the Peartree, a kid in ripped jeans appeared at the door of the private room, followed by a woman in her forties wearing running gear.
Then more came flooding in, cramming themselves into the room and cutting off any potential avenue of escape. Ray found himself surrounded by a tide of human flesh, and he let out a bellow of fear, afraid of what they might do to him.
Instead, they were surprisingly gentle. Hands peeled Stacy out of Ray’s grasp, while others held him back from interfering. Ray recognized one of them from the café. Two of them slid a pair of shoes onto Stacy’s feet while a third, a man, took off his heavy coat and worked her arms inside its sleeves.
Stacy, clearly still drugged to the eyeballs, offered no resistance.
“Hey!” Ray shouted ineffectually, as angry as he was terrified. “Put her down!”
None of them showed any indication they even knew he was there.
It’s like I’m a ghost, he thought, trying to push past the people separating him from Stacy.
Despite all his efforts, Ray was gently but firmly repulsed. More people crammed inside the room until he was nearly crushed against a wall.
He had one brief glimpse of the top of Stacy’s head as the mob bustled her into the corridor, several holding onto her arms and shoulders to keep her from sliding to the floor.
Ray grabbed hold of a skinny student-type with a backpack and a thin fuzz of beard and demanded to know who he was and who had sent him.
The kid just stared blankly back at him like a sleepwalker. A second attempt to communicate with another member of the mob got Ray no further.
Not one of them had said so much as a single word.
The room began to empty once more as the mob exited into the corridor. Ray followed behind, standing on tiptoe to try and see Stacy, and caught a glimpse of her being guided down the stairs.
Rather than keep fighting his way through the mob, Ray headed for the elevators. If he could get downstairs ahead of them, perhaps he still had a chance to grab Stacy and get her to safety, or at least figure out where they were taking her.
By the time he emerged on the ground floor, however, the entrance and vestibule were so flooded with milling bodies it was impossible to push past them. No matter how hard he tried to force his way through, the crowd pushed back with equal or greater force in perfect, unspoken unison.
Helpless and frustrated and more than a little horrified, Ray had no choice but to watch as Stacy Cotter was rapidly led out of the Peartree Medical Institute and into the sunlit street beyond.
The crowd surged out of the building in her wake, as if she exerted some magnetic force that drew them to her. Ray followed as close behind as he could, seeing several of Markov’s goons standing in stunned silence further down the road at what they presumably considered a safe distance. One had a bloodied nose, and the arm had been ripped from the jacket of another.
The mob rapidly began to dissipate. Ray ran among them, shouting Stacy’s name, but she’d as good as vanished amidst the chaos. The same people who’d carried her off had already slipped down side-streets or boarded cars and buses already pulling away into neighbouring streets.
But she had to be somewhere close by. If only he could find her...!
After another minute, most of the mob had entirely dispersed. It was enough to make Ray wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing.
Then he heard the wail of police sirens, drawing closer.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
ELIJAH
Light hadn’t yet dawned above the London rooftops by the time Elijah, still wearing the skin he’d used to proxy out of Wormwood Scrubs, pulled up in the van outside his old mate Dom’s place.
To his surprise, he saw Dom standing outside the door of his mum’s house. He wore a courier’s uniform, and a bicycle leaned against a railing next to him.
When Elijah got out of the van and walked towards him, Dom, who had been in the act of pulling on a pair of fingerless gloves, regarded him with apprehension. Clearly, he was wondering why an enormous, scarred thug was headed straight for him. He swallowed visibly, but remained where he was.
Elijah stepped right up to Dom and pulled at the lapel of his courier uniform. “What’s this shit?” he demanded. “You legit now?”
Dom stumbled back, his eyes wide and frightened. “Do I, uh… do I know you?”
Elijah couldn’t keep a broad grin from spreading across his borrowed face. “It’s me, Elijah,” he said, pointing at the back of his own neck and making a trigger-pulling motion. “Long time no see, Dom.”
Dom blinked rapidly, his mouth opening and closing again. In the next moment a mixture of horror and fascination replaced his fear. “Elijah? Elijah Waits?”
Elijah nodded.
“Prove it,” said Dom, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “What was the name of that bird you were dating whose brother nicked my wallet that time we met at the Infirmary?”
“Julie,” Elijah replied without hesitation. “It’s good to see you, Dom.”
Dom’s shoulders sagged, and he glanced at the house behind him. “Look, I’d invite you in for a cuppa before I went to work, but Mum might think you was a bailiff after her ex or something.”
Elijah chuckled. “I don’t have enough time, anyway. I’ve got maybe a couple of hours at most before the proxy runs out.”
Dom nodded. “Just to be clear, you’re still inside the Scrubs? As in, right this second?”
Elijah nodded. “Afraid so.”
Dom sucked air through his teeth. “Risky. They’re coming down hard on prison proxying, I hear.”
“Risky, but necessary. You still got that key I left with you?”
Dom thought for a moment. “The one for the storage unit?”
Elijah nodded. “Get me that key,” he told Dom, “and I’ll be out of your hair in two minutes.”
It took five minutes rather than two, but soon Elijah was back in the van. The sky had turned a smoky orange by the time he pulled up outside a self-storage warehouse in Walthamstow. The whole place was automatic—not a human being in sight—and had the added advantage of requiring neither fingerprint nor retinal ID to get inside.
Elijah headed straight for Unit 155 and unlocked it, then got to work digging through piles of old furniture that had belonged to his gran. It wasn’t long before he found the filing cabinet right where he’d left it. The bracelet he’d come for was still duct-taped to the underside of a drawer.
Turning the bracelet on, Elijah accessed its settings and changed its colour from black to green so he could more easily distinguish it from the one he already wore, and which had been supplied to him along with his thuggish proxy. After slipping it onto his wrist, he looked around some more until he located a hunting knife he’d stashed at the bottom of a box of mouldering paperbacks.
Next, he went looking for Stan, all too aware as he departed the warehouse that his time was already running out.
By the time Elijah parked in a lane near Tower Hamlets, the streets were busy with morning traffic. He’d been half afraid The Saracen’s Head might finally have been demolished, but it was still there, and still open, even at this godforsaken hour of the morning.
Stepping inside the pub felt like stepping a hundred years into the past. The interior walls were still painted black, and Ernest was still working the early, early morning shift behind the bar as if the intervening years had never happened.
The only customer at this time of the morning, however, was Stan. Even hardened alcoholics needed to sleep sometimes, Elijah assumed. Elijah knew it was Stan only because Ernest allowed no-one else to sit at the table closest to the men’s toilets.
Today, Stan wore the body of a forty-something down-and-out—most likely one of his regular crew of proxy partners. Nobody knew what Stan himself really looked like. He sat on a three-seater lounge sofa that looked like it had been rescued from a demolition site.
“Eli,” said the down-and-out as Elijah approached the table. “Thought you might come to visit.”
Elijah stopped and stared at him. “Stan. How did you know—?”
“I heard on the grapevine you were out and looking for information. Who else were you going to talk to, if not me?”
Elijah realized his mouth was hanging open and quickly closed it. Ernest took a seat on a stool behind the bar, reading a tablet and pretending not to be listening to everything they said.
Elijah wrinkled his nose. “No offence meant,” he said, “but your proxy stinks something awful.”
Stan smiled, revealing several cracked and yellowed teeth. “And you’re fucking ugly.” He gave Elijah an up-and-down look. “Is that really the proxy Lorenz gave you?”
“He’s big and he’s strong,” said Elijah. “Better than that pile of rags you’re wearing.”
“Ex-paratrooper,” said Stan, one grimy hand patting layers of clothes laid over the proxy’s chest. “Fucker can move fast when he wants to.” He glanced towards the bar and nodded to Ernest. “Let’s get down to business, shall we?”
In response, Ernest folded his tablet up, tossed it onto the counter and disappeared into the back office, closing the door after him.
Elijah waited another moment, then stepped around the table and dropped onto the sofa next to Stan. This close, the smell of urine and cheap alcohol was particularly overpowering. At the same time, he let the hunting knife slip from out of the sleeve of his skin’s jacket and pressed its tip against the proxy’s inside thigh.
Stan looked down at the blade and back up at Elijah. “Am I supposed to be scared of that? You know this is why I always wear a skin when I do business, right?”
“Last I heard,” said Elijah, his voice low and even, “you got a couple of your regular skins killed and now you’re finding it harder to persuade anyone to proxy with you, however much you pay them.” He nodded at the proxy’s ragged clothes and sneered. “Your standards have dropped since the last time I saw you, Stan. The way I see it, one more dead proxy and you’re as good as out of business.”
Stan shrugged. “One makes do with what one can.”
“The night I got nailed for Rob’s murder I had arranged to come here straight from the factory to see you,” Elijah continued. “Someone grabbed me from behind and forcibly proxied me with someone else. When I got back inside my own skin, I was standing over Rob’s corpse with a hammer in one hand, wondering what the fuck was going on even as the boys in blue were pulling up outside.” He leaned in closer to Stan’s proxy, ignoring its foul odour. “Apart from Rob, you were the only one who knew where I’d be, and when.”
“That doesn’t mean I had anything to do with it.” Stan gazed back at him, seemingly unperturbed. “Do you know the most important thing in my line of business, Elijah? It’s trust. People come to me because they trust me with information. If I started sharing that information with people who shouldn’t have it, that trust would be gone and I’d be out of business.” The proxy reached out and placed one finger against the top of the blade, gently angling it away from his groin. “I didn’t tell anyone anything about you that could possibly have led to your friend’s murder. If I did things like that, I’d be long out of business.”
“Yeah, but—!”
“Elijah,” Stan said a little more firmly. “Have you ever heard any suggestion I was anything but completely reliable?”
Elijah let out a disgusted snort and leaned back. He kept the knife in his hand, though, laying it flat across his lap. “Fine, then. So who could have set me up?”
“Manufacturing and selling proxy is a dangerous business,” Stan replied. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that. As I recall, you and Rob were doing great business selling hopscotch at a time absolutely no one else even knew such an advanced form of proxy existed.”
“So?”
“So that’s the kind of thing that makes people jealous,” said Stan. “Some bigger dealers wanted you to sell the hopscotch recipe to them, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, they did,” Elijah admitted. “Except we weren’t selling.”
“Which threatened to hurt their business,” said Stan. “Is it really so surprising somebody decided to put you out of commission and steal the recipe?” Stan leaned closer, enough so that Elijah found himself holding his breath rather than inhale the putrid stench emanating from the proxy’s diseased mouth. “Nowadays hopscotch is everywhere, innit?” He touched one grimy hand to his chest. “Even I use it. Makes my job a lot easier, I’ll tell you. Wouldn’t have taken much to set someone to keep an eye on you, then take you and your friend out when the opportunity arose.”
Elijah stared back at him. “The cops impounded our 3D printers and equipment. I always figured one of them must have taken the hopscotch recipe from the backups and sold it on.”
Stan nodded. “Now, if you’d only done a deal with those people when they were willing to ask nicely, you’d be sitting here in person.”
Elijah ignored the jibe. “Except someone just tried to have me killed inside the Scrubs. That’s why I’m here: to find out who.”
“I see,” said Stan. “Any idea why they’d want to do that? It can’t be business rivalry, not after this long. And half the planet has hopscotch now.”
Because I still want to know where hopscotch came from, thought Elijah. Because I’m still asking questions.
“All I care about,” he said by way of an answer, “is finding out who’s after me. So can you help or not?”
Stan shrugged. “Maybe.” He leered at Elijah. “But it’ll cost you.”
Elijah felt himself tense. If this kept up, he wouldn’t have any money left. “How much?”
“First,” said Stan, his eyes flicking down towards the knife in Elijah’s lap and then back up, “you put the fucking pig sticker away. Then we talk.”
They stared at each other for a long moment, then Elijah tucked the knife inside his proxy’s jacket.
“Better,” said Stan. “But before we talk about who’s trying to kill you, I want to talk about hopscotch. You and Rob were the first to get hold of it. So how did it wind up in your hands?”
