Proxy, page 8
It was a ridiculous, childish fantasy, and the images on the television screen brought every last awful memory of that time flooding back.
Not that he would ever have told her the truth, she knew now. The same truth that had brought her back across the English Channel for the sole purpose of meeting with an investigative journalist, and which had nearly ended in her death.
Ordering the TV back off, Stacy felt the first real stirrings of anger. The implication of the news report was clear: she was nothing more than a messed-up rich kid who’d turned to proxy hooking for a cheap thrill. They had reduced her to a two-dimensional sound bite entirely lacking in agency, something for worried parents and the narrow-minded to tut over.
And now here she was, waiting for her estranged father to finally come and meet her...and it was the last thing she wanted.
Moving carefully, Stacy drew back the sheets covering her. Tugging up her nightdress, she winced at the yellow and blue bruises that dotted her legs, stomach, arms and chest.
She had to get as far away as possible from the hospital before Raphael arrived. Most likely, he was coming with the intention of pumping her for information about both Martin Wilber and Isaac. And after that…well, he’d have no further reason to keep her alive.
Stacy pulled the sheets aside and gently placed her feet on the floor, but even that simple motion was enough to make her head swim.
Christ, she thought. I’ll be lucky to make it to the door.
She forced herself to breathe evenly and tried hard to ignore the pain in her back and shoulders. After another minute, she tugged loose a monitoring cuff that had been placed around her wrist and tried to stand.
She was a little wobbly at first, but managed to stay upright.
Okay. Stacy shuffled slowly over to the door, seizing its handle like it was a lifebuoy thrown from a sinking ship.
To her surprise, it wasn’t locked, as she’d fully expected it to be. She eased it open, then peered down the corridor outside.
She found herself looking at the broad shoulders and back of a large and very muscular man wearing a dark suit and talking quietly into his data bracelet. He had to be security, placed there to keep her from leaving.
Closing the door again with care so as not to make any noise, Stacy tottered back across the room and over to the window. Rolling the blinds up, she found herself looking at part of a metal fire escape. The opposite side of the street was taken up by a windowless brick wall, and when she pressed her nose against the glass and looked down, she could just about make out a row of open-topped industrial-sized waste bins set beneath the fire escape.
When she reached for the window latch, Stacy was relieved to find that this, too, was unlocked.
She hobbled back across the room, wincing with every step, and took hold of a cheap aluminium folding chair sitting under the TV. She dragged the chair next to the open window and carefully stood on it, then eased one leg over the windowsill and onto the fire escape.
She rested for a moment, one hand braced against the jamb, then swung her other leg over the sill.
It took time, but she managed to descend most of the way to the ground before running into an unanticipated problem: the fire escape came to an end a dozen feet short of the ground and just above the row of bins she had seen earlier. There was a drop-down ladder, but it was padlocked into place.
She sat down to catch her breath, already feeling winded. At least, so far as she could tell, no one had seen her or noticed her absence.
But someone would come to check on her before too long, and she needed to be far away from here before that happened.
Somehow, she found the willpower to lever herself over the fire escape railing and drop, gracelessly, onto a mound of hospital refuse bags stacked in one of the bins.
“Ow,” she said, fighting her way upright amidst the bags of stinking refuse. Something unpleasantly slimy and cold pressed against the back one of her legs. “Bloody fucking ow.”
Placing both hands on the outside edge of the bin, and ignoring the throbbing pains in her arms, belly, back and shoulders, Stacy looked up and down the narrow street that ran along this side of the hospital. No one had seen her escape. The hiss and roar of passing traffic came from a neighbouring road.
With one arm still bandaged, it took longer to climb out of the bin and drop down onto the pavement than it had taken her to climb down the fire escape. Worse, she stood out somewhat in the cheap hospital gown she was wearing.
Moving slowly, Stacy limped towards the sound of traffic. The end of the street formed a T-junction with another road along which a number of cars passed.
She thought of hailing a cab, then remembered she didn’t have her bracelet. Self-driving cabs all had inbuilt protocols that meant they had to respond to an emergency request, meaning she could still use one, but it would deliver her straight to the police and then, most likely, the police would deliver her straight back to her father.
It was still a chance, she told herself. If she could make even one person listen, or persuade someone to loan her their bracelet long enough to call Martin Wilber and tell him where she was, she might still be able to get out of this mess.
Up ahead, she saw the entrance to a small park opposite the hospital. When she got to the end of the street, her heart spasmed with joy when she saw a cab sitting waiting at the lights a block or two away and apparently unoccupied.
She stepped towards the edge of the road to hail it, then glanced over her shoulder in the direction of what she could now see was the front entrance of the hospital. Another man who looked like he spent a lot of time in the gym stood outside the entrance, a cigarette halfway to his mouth, his eyes wide as he stared back at her.
The cigarette slipped from his fingers as he raised his bracelet to his lips, speaking rapidly into it even as he broke into a run towards her.
CHAPTER
NINE
ELIJAH
The four days after Elijah spoke with Lorenz felt like the longest four days of his life.
If there was a bright side, nobody tried to murder him. It didn’t make Elijah any less certain it was just a matter of time before someone else made the attempt.
On the second day, Davie, Lorenz’s second-in-command, asked Elijah a series of questions. The fastest way for a screw to work out if an inmate was proxying his way out of prison was to ask him his birthday, so Elijah supplied Davie not only with his date of birth, but his mother’s name, her maiden name, and a bunch of details about where he’d lived and gone to school, along with the details of his arrest and trial: details which could be used by whomever he wound up proxying with to convince a suspicious screw he really was speaking to Elijah Waits.
On the morning of the fourth day, Sloane, another of Lorenz’s helpers, pressed something into Elijah’s hand as they passed by each other in the prison canteen.
Elijah folded his fingers around the paper-wrapped package without so much as glancing at Sloane. He pushed the package deep inside a pocket and tried to make it look like he was scratching his thigh. After all, you never knew who might be watching.
After that he worked in the laundry for a couple of hours before returning to his cell and pulling out the package. Unwrapping the brown paper, he found a 3D-printed proxy applicator and a slip with ‘3 A.M.’ scrawled on it. The applicator came preloaded, as Elijah had expected, with a single proxy bead.
After lights out, Elijah stared up at the underside of the bunk above his without sleeping. His cellmate snored noisily. From time to time Elijah glanced towards a radio-alarm sitting on a shelf beneath the window.
The minutes and hours dragged past as slow as continents forming and reforming over geological ages.
The instant the clock read 3 A.M., Elijah sat upright, placed the applicator against the back of his neck above the spine and pressed the trigger.
The applicator hissed faintly, firing the bead it contained deep beneath his skin.
He winced at the sharp pain. A better-quality applicator would have numbed it, but this had felt like jabbing a knitting needle into his neck.
Lying down again, Elijah pulled the applicator apart with his fingers, then tore it into strips and chewed them down. The applicator was made of a non-toxic edible material, a necessary step to reduce the risk of discovery.
Cheap or not, the proxy link kicked in within seconds. Elijah experienced a fleeting moment of vertigo before—
—finding himself looking up at a pale grey ceiling, neon light washing through half-drawn blinds.
The world span drunkenly. Everything looked too small, somehow, as if he’d suddenly grown bigger and taller. When he sat up, unfamiliar muscles shifted beneath his borrowed skin.
Still disoriented, he got himself upright without crashing into anything and staggered through to a tiny bathroom where he vomited noisily into the toilet bowl. Then he went to wash his face and stared at the unfamiliar reflection in the mirror.
He couldn’t help but laugh out loud. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d specified his proxy had to be black.
“Hello there,” said Elijah, testing out the proxy’s vocal cords. The voice sounded deep and resonant—and very, very Glaswegian. Elijah grunted out another laugh. Most likely, the proxy was someone Davie knew.
The proxy looked fifteen or twenty years older than Elijah. A scar, mostly faded, ran down one pale-skinned cheek. Another, much deeper scar, ran from one corner of the mouth most of the way to the right ear. The hands were large and spade-like with calloused, blunt fingers.
He looked, thought Elijah, like a gang enforcer on his night off—which he might well be.
“Well,” said Elijah, in as soft a voice as his proxy was capable of producing, “I’ll give you this, Lorenz. You fucking delivered.”
When he stepped back out of the bathroom, Elijah saw that he was in a hotel room barely larger than his cell. The furniture looked cheap and a strong chemical smell emanated from the carpet. A glance at the bed revealed something he’d missed: an envelope, with his initials scrawled on it.
Inside the envelope he found a pre-paid disposable bracelet. Slipping it onto his left wrist, Elijah activated it, finding it came with a linked account containing enough cash to hire a car or rent a room for another night—not that he expected the proxy session to last more than four or five hours before it wore off.
Which meant there was no time to waste.
A search of the proxy’s pockets brought up some loose change, a business card for a betting agency, and a screwdriver with a sharpened point.
Lovely. Elijah grimaced, but didn’t throw the screwdriver away.
Pulling on a heavy woollen overcoat that lay draped over a chair by the door, Elijah made his way down a cramped stairwell and past a self-service check-in desk. Stepping outside, he found himself on a quiet side-street somewhere in London.
He got moving. His proxy’s stride was much longer than his own, and his eyes a good foot further from the ground than Elijah was used to, and so he walked a little awkwardly at first. But he knew from experience he’d get used to it soon enough.
The pre-paid bracelet guided Elijah towards a row of parked cars. A few people passed him on the street, and he observed—not for the first time—how different it felt to walk around in a white, rather than a black, skin. Even a huge, ugly fucker like his proxy didn’t draw the nervous, darting glances he had too often endured as a black man.
The first time Elijah had walked inside a white man’s skin, years before, it had been a revelation. He had to suppress a grin when he passed some coppers and they didn’t so much as blink, let alone look his way.
Imagine what the world would be like if more white people got to walk around inside my skin, he thought, not for the first time. Then they’d see things differently.
Yes, some few still thought of proxy as nothing more than a cheap route to sexual kicks, but it was much more than that: it was the future, or so he fervently believed. He was convinced it was how people would live all the time in a hundred years, swapping themselves in and out of each other’s bodies all around the world, all the time, instead of furtively and in the shadows.
Upon a time, Elijah had been downright evangelical about the possibilities. It was the reason why he’d asked so many questions after their mysterious benefactor supplied him and Rob with a new, more powerful recipe for proxy. Powerful enough to make Elijah think the future he had imagined might be closer than he had at first believed.
His first taste of proxy came just a few months after his return from the total shit storm that had been the war in Korea. Back then, proxy was brand-new—so new, in fact, it wasn’t yet illegal.
That had come soon enough. First, three South Korean military pilots had been forcibly proxied in a carefully coordinated attack that ended with them crashing their jets into Seoul’s National Assembly Hall. Then a white supremacist organization nobody had heard of before forcibly proxied a dozen carefully selected targets, packed them with explosives and walked them into offices and bus terminals around Washington before detonating themselves.
Those responsible, of course, simply woke up back in their own bodies and entirely unharmed.
The Second Korean War had lasted just long enough to kill a couple of hundred UN Peacekeepers sent to monitor the situation, untold thousands of troops on either side and, according to some estimates, up to a hundred thousand civilians over the space of five years.
But what didn’t get talked about nearly as much in the post-conflict analyses, documentaries and special UN hearings were the veterans who had been too close to the 38th Parallel when the nuke was dropped, or who were struck down by nerve gas once the NK government realized they were losing.
Elijah had seen it all, and been lucky to come home considerably more intact than many of his fellow troops. Too many of those who survived spent the rest of their lives dealing with the after-effects of nerve gas and radiation, and Elijah had watched, appalled, as they were effectively abandoned, as if by sweeping them under the carpet the Western nations who had supported South Korea in the conflict could somehow make the whole fucking mess just go away.
Proxy, while far from a solution, had at least been enough to help salve the pain suffered by those affected. That it had helped start the war hardly mattered; Elijah proxied with friends and former colleagues, many of them rendered invalid and nearly all in near constant pain; for a few hours they got to walk around inside his skin and remember what it felt like to run and jump and shout and just breathe without their every nerve end screaming in protest, without worrying if their dwindling support payments might stop or be reassessed…without wondering if they might actually be better off dead.
Moving into manufacturing proxy himself had seemed like a smart move, financially as much as anything else. And it had been good for a while, until the world’s terrorists and murderers invented yet more new and innovative ways in which proxy could be used to slaughter the innocent.
Still, Elijah was committed by then, and the money he was making was good enough that he’d kept right at it until the day of his first arrest.
They’d put him inside for three years. By the time he got back out, most of his veteran friends had either succumbed to their post-war illnesses or killed themselves. He tried going straight, using some of the cash he’d squirrelled away to invest in a chain of nightclubs, but proxy was too alluring, too easy, too profitable for it not to pull him back in.
This time around, he partnered with a fellow veteran, Robin Almuth, and they set up a brand new proxy factory in the basement of a disused print shop.
And now Rob was dead, and Elijah was back inside the Scrubs serving a much, much longer sentence. Long enough, it was questionable whether he’d die of old age before he saw the outside world again with his own two eyes.
The bracelet buzzed against Elijah’s wrist, on and off again like morse code, shaking him out of his reverie and bringing him to a halt at the end of a quiet side-street. His transport turned out to be a white van. When he placed the bracelet next to the van’s door, it slid open automatically.
Once inside, a programmed voice emanating from the dashboard asked him where he wanted to go. Elijah thought for a moment, then gave it a destination, putting his seatbelt on as the van backed out of its parking spot.
Time, he decided, to find out who wanted him dead.
CHAPTER
TEN
RAY
Ray woke to the insistent buzzing of his bracelet against his wrist and saw it was still dark outside his bedroom’s one tiny window. Half-remembered dreams chased each other across the walls, fading as he found the switch on his bedside lamp. A glance at his bracelet told him it was just after eight in the morning.
Touching a finger to his bracelet, Ray heard a beep, followed by a voice that crackled with faint static.
“Ray? You up yet?”
Tip. “Of course I’m not fucking up,” Ray grunted. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Time you bloody got up,” said Tip. “Look, Ray…” He sighed. “It might be better if you don’t come to see me for a few days.”
Ray sat up, still groggy. “Why?”
“There’s a problem,” said Tip, sounding oddly evasive. “It has to do with Stokes.”
Stokes? Ray’s grogginess vanished, replaced by sudden alertness.
“I thought you said that was taken care of,” he grunted, cold acid pooling in his stomach. “What about your friend in Scotland Yard? What did he say?”
Tip’s voice sounded strained when he next spoke. “Well, it seems they caught up with Stokes, thanks to all your efforts, but in the end they…well, they decided to turn him loose, Ray.”
Ray’s nerves shifted into cold anger. Stokes had connections—the kind that could make your life short and brutal if you crossed him. And thanks to the debacle at the garage, Stokes now knew exactly who Ray was.
