Kill The Monster, Chapter 5

III. GOOD CUSTOMER RELATIONS

He wondered what time it was. The sun wasn't yet over the house. Did it ever clear the house at this time of year? He'd lost his memory of his own latitude. There was dew on the ground, thick enough to soak his trousers as he walked towards the lawn through the longer grass by the garages. The grass did not even attempt to nibble him. He had switched off his mobile phone. Sam would have tried to phone him. One telling off would never be enough for her. He was sure he would need sleep soon, though he didn't feel it yet. But working with what he'd discovered in the car would require a clear head, whether he thought he was tired or not.

He was halfway up the lawn by the gazebo when he realized the silhouette of the house had altered. It was larger by one large, silvery car. He hadn't heard the car come up the drive. That was hardly surprising. The Baronia Hirondelle wasn't the quietest car in the world, but it was quieter than a car its size should be. The car on the front drive was one of the newer models - a Quadriga Cabriolet Luxus, the '85 model, the first Hirondelle to have four-by-four. Gleaming as if it had rolled off the production line yesterday. Hirondelle bodywork was not made of steel. Hirondelle bodywork didn't rust.

There were two men standing by the car when he rounded the house. Two men and his mother. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley were in the living room window, paws up against the glass, expressions urgent. Lilianne One normally never locked them in the house unless she was afraid they'd savage a visitor.

How do I deal with this? Without shedding human blood, that is.

He grinned. "Good morning."

"Good morning. Mr. Agnello junior, I presume."

"Yes. I see you've already met my mother. Is this about Lilianne Four?"

"I'm sorry?"

"The car. Lilianne Four. Named after my mother."

Although there were two men, there might just as well have been only one. He was looking at two different men standing in perfect postural echo with each other. One was wearing a pinstriped suit, and one a mechanic's uniform, and one was twenty years older than the other, but both were models of feudal deference that might have been cast from the same mould.

"As ever, we're sorry for your family's loss. We appreciate that this is a difficult time, but we feel, in light of your father's tragic death, that Hirondelle's normal warranty conditions might be considered a touch...draconian. We as a company feel that it would be unfair of us to penalize your family for the undoubted invalidation of warranty that has taken place in your time of grief. For this reason, and under these specific circumstances only, we would like to extend a special offer to you - our engineer here, Mr. Jakes, will, free of charge, restore all warranty seals to the condition they were in immediately following your last service, and your warranty will once again be considered fully valid up to the next mandatory service date which I believe is in -" the pinstriped man consulted a sheaf of papers - "seven months' time. All that we require is a signature and access to the vehicle; never let it be said that Baronia Hirondelle is not a compassionate company." He smiled a smile of pure altruistic love.

"Let me think about it", said Sean.

The smile faltered. "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"Well, the death of one's father leads me to review the bills situation. Since our Hirondelle warranty was invalidated, we've been looking at Mum's outgoings, and the removal of that big annual warranty payment really looked like a blessing in disguise -"

The suited retainer was crestfallen. "But this is an unprecedented offer! I don't think you quite realize the extent to which the company is breaking the rules here."

Sean patted the other man on the shoulder. "I understand, I understand. But I've been taking the old girl apart and you know, it really isn't that much of a black art to figure out what makes her tick. You see, I qualified as an aero engine mechanic in the army. Erm, on helicopters." Not even vaguely true, but nothing like beating the beehive to bring out the bees.

"I'm sorry", said the suit, evidently flustered, "you seem to be suggesting that an amateur mechanic is capable of maintaining a Hirondelle Phaeton. This is not only unwise, but also possibly dangerous. Hirondelle engines are not like other engines."

"Quite true, quite true." Sean was still considering rolling up the suit's warranty agreement and hammering it down his throat, and this allowed him to continue to grin. "Could you give us a few days to mull your suggestion over?"

"Uh, certainly. Certainly." The suit handed him the agreement. "As I said, all we need is a signature, and access to the car. Might we have a look at the car?" He actually ventured a foot in the direction of the back garden garage, where he shouldn't have known the car was kept.

"No", said Sean. "Sorry, it's not convenient right now. I'll let you know what our decision is. In the meantime, we have a busy day ahead of us. Wills to get read, ashes to scatter."

"Quite so, quite so." The suit and overall both turned to go.

"Do you mind if I take a look at your car? She's a beauty, isn't she?"

Neither of the two had expected this. They looked at each other helplessly. The suit nodded. "Of course, of course."

"The '85 Quadriga, I believe. My father wanted one of these all his life. He never managed to get his hands on one, as his finances only stretched to second hand Hirondelles, and only the Super Phaeton ever came on sale. People hold on to their Hirondelles, eh?" He leaned in through the driver window and knocked on the walnut dash.

"Please don't knock on the wood, sir. If sir prefers this car to the one he's driving now, we could always arrange an exchange."

Sean blinked. The suit saw the blink, and exploited it. "This car has been an office show model ever since the African president who owned it suffered a coup d'état. Quite frankly, we'd be glad to shift it off the list. I'm sure it would appreciate being...owned once again."

Sean nodded. "That's a very generous offer."

"Yes, sir."

"Tell you what - let me think about it. And please understand, I truly appreciate the offer. We both do. Don't we, mother?"

Lilianne One suddenly looked up, hearing her name spoken. "What? Oh - er, yes. Certainly."

Sean shook hands beamingly with both minions and sent them on their way. The huge car ground gravel beneath millwheel tyres, and rumbled gently away like an earthquake purring. Sean waved cheerily after them.

"Murdering sons of bitches", he said through gritted teeth.

"You think so?" said Lilianne One. He had expected this. Once she had accustomed herself to a situation, she did not mince words.

"I know so. And I am about to prove so." The car continued down the gravel drive, its wheels sounding like moving lava.

Then, suddenly, it veered violently off the path, as if a malevolent genie had grabbed hold of the wheel and spinned it sideways. It collided with a tree. The tree was a lime. Owen Agnello had been fond of boasting that it was over a hundred years old.

The engine was still screaming. Steam was pouring from the radiator. The man in the driver's seat, Pinstripe Suit, was flailing with his hands, as if trying to fend off invisible demons. He was not trying to escape from the car at all. The overalled mechanic, meanwhile, had struggled free of the vehicle and was running across the grass screaming.

The car exploded, in a manner that finally convinced Sean that it was powered by a turbine. Nothing else could have gone up so spectacularly.

He did not move to help at all. Neither did Lilianne One.

"What did you do?" she said.

***

The component on the breakfast bar was a small yellow metal cylinder the length of a baby's little finger. Lilianne One stared at it curiously.

"What is it?"

"Just a container. I found it tucked underneath the air intake - uh, the long silver widget - inside the engine bay. When I first put a finger on it, I thought I'd been burned, it felt so cold. But it was just what was inside it. It contains some sort of gas in a liquid state. A good deal of gas, which can escape at the end via this nozzle here." He indicated the nozzle. "Electrical connectors were attached at the nozzle end to trigger gas release."

"What sort of gas? Cyanide?"

He smiled indulgently. "It may surprise you to learn that there are poison gases that aren't cyanide. Besides, this gas isn't especially poisonous, in that it's not the actual gas that kills you, so no forensic pathologist would look for. No, the clever thing about this gas is that it's a very powerful hallucinogen, something like LSD, only maybe mixed with other components that make the trip you go on always be a bad one. I was working on the car, and I saw spiders."

"You've never been scared of spiders."

"Yes, but they've always been smaller than me before. The second time I tried it, I bubbled the gas up through water and let about ninety-nine times more air into it before breathing it. It smells like ether, but I think that's just the propellant."

"You didn't see spiders the second time round?"

"No, my face liquefied and dribbled down my chest."

"No kidding."

"No kidding. My eyes got caught in my chest hair. I had to pick them out."

She grimaced. "Now you know what the Sixties felt like."

"There were other cylinders inside the engine. I'm certain there are things in there I haven't figured out yet. When I leave the house this afternoon I'm going to lock the garage, and you shouldn't go in there under any circumstances. Understood?"

She nodded.

"They killed your father, didn't they? Those things."

He nodded back. "This stuff" - he tapped the cylinder - "just causes you to see stuff that's so scary you lose control of your car, run headlong into a wall, or stab your wife and kids to death and get yourself put away for murder. I think Dad caught one of the other devices. The more, uh, direct ones. One of the ones I haven't found yet. I thought for a couple of minutes yesterday that I was having a heart attack myself while I had my head in the engine. That's why I commandeered the fan."

The mechanic ran past the window, pursued by something Sean judged to be about dinosaur size, judging by the angle of the man's terrified eyes. He had been running round the garden for several minutes.

"Whatever it is, it lasts a long time", said Lilianne One.

"Hallucinogens tend to", said Sean. "You know, the very first guy who ever tried LSD gave himself some infinitesimal dosage of it, on the grounds that he couldn't possibly do himself any damage with such a tiny quantity. He picked himself up off the floor two or three days later. Was lucky he didn't give himslf a brain haemorrhage." He nodded to the phone. "Shall we dial 999?"

She nodded. "We'd bette. But Hirondelle will be here before the ambulance."

"Pardon?"

"I've been doing some homework on the Web. In almost every case where a Hirondelle car has been involved in an accident in Great Britain and Ireland in the last fifty years, Hirondelle mechnaics got to the scene before the emergency services did."

He thought about this, and couldn't quite believe it. "Fifty years?"

"The first reported incident of the kind was in 1954, with a Landau Superior. Though there are less reliable reports of the same sort of incident before then. One of them in the nineteen twenties."

He nodded again, thought his head wanted to shake rather than nod. "When radio transmitters were the size of briefcases and glowed while they worked." He looked up. "When did you learn to use the Web?"

"I'm not completely stupid, indolent offspring of mine. In recent years, I've even learned to operate those new-fangled colour television machines. It took a long time to master that extra dial that makes the colour work. Did you know Baronia Hirondelle Automobilia was incorporated in 1886?"

He frowned. "No. No, I didn't. Is that surprising?"

"It is when you consider Gottlieb Daimler developed the carburetted internal combustion engine in 1885. Before then, Hirondelle made steam carriages and bicycles. Then, suddenly, in 1886, they switch production over completely to their first petrol-driven model, the Baronia Velocicar. Not the fastest automobile of the time, nor the most powerful. A hell of a gamble to take, at the time. Almost as if they knew motor cars were about to take off."

This, from a woman who referred to an airbox as a long silver widget? "And I'll bet the Velocicar was faster than it had a right to be. How did you find out all this stuff?"

"Before I spent a lifetime birthing ungrateful and inconsiderate male issue, I was a legal secretary, remember? Every company registered in Britain has to file incorporation documents at Companies House. I filed your father's for him back when he left GKN and went it alone. Imagine my surprise when I found out that in the twenty-first century I was now able to request copies of those documents online." She nursed her mug of cocoa protectively.

"Hang on, back up." He re-examined the statement. "You were able to request copies online?"

"Through the post, yes." She was unable to stop herself from grinning like a demon.

"But the post takes days to arrive."

"One or two days, yes. In this case it got here this morning."

He rubbed his head. It was hurting with the pressure of internal logic. "So you've suspected there was something wrong with Hironelle for at least two or three days."

"Yes. I thought it might be better if you proved it to yourself, rather than let me tell you."

"You could have just told me."

Her eyes glittered like anglerfish lures. "And would you have believed me? 'Oh, mum can't bring herself to accept Dad's dead, the poor old fool?' 'She's trying to blame it on some innocent motor company?'"

"Uh, when you put it like that, maybe you've got a point. When did you start to suspect?"

"Right at the point when your father dropped dead. Owen never had a heart condition. He never even smoked." Boadicea had probably sounded this certain, this utterly convinced of the justness of her cause, before she'd burned Colchester. Sean had been to Colchester. He was firmly convinced of the justness of Boadicea's cause. "So, now, the question we must ask ourselves is - who are these people? How are they able to do what they do? And why are they so nervous about people looking inside the engines of the cars they make?" She looked up at Sean. "That's your cue. You're the rude mechanical."

"Rude mechanical?"

"It's Shakespeare, dear."

He thought for a moment. "Well, maybe the first thing to mention is that the engine doesn't run on petrol."

She crooked an eyebrow. "What?"

"I disconnected the fuel feeds. All of them. The engine runs fine without them. Oh, there are about five engine immobilizers wired in to the system, but once those are bypassed and the key is turned, the crank turns with it."

She mulled this over. "I don't know much about cars, but isn't that a bit...impossible?"

"Thing is, the engine only turns over if the air intake is coupled up to the main turbine. There could be another immobilizer I wasn't able to trace, but I can't find one. Which suggests that whatever force makes the engine go is actually coming out of the air intake."

The mechanic ran past the window again. He had torn off his overalls, and was attempting to gnaw the flesh off his forearm, with a surprising degree of success.

"So it's not an air intake at all."

"No. I think it's an air blower. Or exhaust gas blower. There are airtight seals in the unit. Airtight and heat resistant. I think something in the intake puts out enough power to boil a liquid which expands, powers the turbine, and then recirculates back to the unit to be used again."

"Steam power?"

"Right. Except for the fact that this system seems to use liquid nitrogen. I have no idea why."

"How do you know it's liquid nitrogen?"

"Because one of the feeds for the air intake has ice all over it and when I popped it open my skin didn't catch fire, so it's probably not liquid oxygen. I dunno. Could be liquid argon, or xenon, or something. And don't ask me where the power comes from. There are no other feeds going into the intake. The first thing I should have realized is that there are no air feeds going into the intake. Duh! No, I think whatever is in there contains the car's entire power supply for all of its working life."

All the frown lines vanished from her face. "Like a battery?"

"More like a nuclear reactor. One piece of uranium the size of a golf ball will power a nuclear submarine all the way from Anchorage to Boston. The Voyager space probes were powered by something similar. But the question has to be asked, where are these people getting this sort of technology? Bear in mind that Lilianne Four's motor was made in the nineteen seventies. And I've seen similar attachments on Hirondelle engines made in the nineteen forties." He flicked the tube across the table with a fingernail. "The only problem is, I can't open the intake up to look."

"Why not?"

He rested his head glumly in his hands. "Well, if I'm right, the insides of it are almost certain to be radioactive. I wouldn't know I'd killed myself till I had. Might already have."

She sat back from the table in alarm. "What do you mean, might already have?"

"You can't smell or taste radioactivity. I could have been irradiated by any one of half a dozen parts of the engine I opened. But I don't think so. The Hirondelle engineers who came to put Lilianne Four back together didn't bring protective clothing. They knew they weren't going to have to poke around inside the air intake, you see. I think that if I started to do that, I could be in big big trouble."

She nodded, and flicked the cylinder back towards him up the table. "So what do we do now?"

"Not sure. Until recently we've just been a minor annoyance to the people at Hirondelle. If they are people?"

Lilianne One stared out of the window at the mechanic attempting to brain himself on an ornamental water fountain. "Well, they certainly bleed like people."

"Maybe they're some sort of government department who make Bond cars for secret agents, and they've been told they have to pay for themselves by selling cars to the private market too..." It sounded lame, but to be fair, most privately-funded public projects did.

"You're clutching at straws", said Lilianne One. "They're aliens."

"I thought they bled like us."

"You haven't seen their charter of incorporation. It's straight out of Alpha Centauri. They have a board of four directors, none of whom are allowed to be shareholders in the company. Hirondelle shares are not listed publicly. All of them are currently in the hands of one man, a Mr. George Edward Wilson, who must be a very rich man indeed. However, Mr. Wilson has only been in charge of the company for the last two years, having recently bought one hundred per cent of Hirondelle's stock off a Mr. Drake in a private sale. I found a news clipping about it."

"So has he changed the way the company does business since he took over?"

"Not in the slightest. The Board change positions every couple of years or so, but the same set of names keep cropping up. And that's the weird thing. Sean, the Hirondelle company has been run by members of the same four families for the past hundred and twenty-five years."

Sean attempted to absorb this, like an amoeba attempting to absorb a microchip.

"Do we have photos of video footage of the directors at all? Is there any possibility they could be the same set of, erm, people?"

"No idea. I only realized the names were all the same about an hour ago. And another weird thing - the rules of incorporation clearly state that the shareholders are not allowed to sit on the board under any circumstances, no matter how much stock they control. I don't know any other company that has a clause like that."

Sean drummed his fingers on the table. "So who decides who gets admitted to the Board?"

"The existing members of the Board."

"What if all the Board members were killed in an accident?"

"I don't like the way that this is going, Sean."

"Yeah, but what if?"

She searched her memory. "I seem to remember a clause saying that the major shareholder would decide on the new appointments." She lifted an admonitory finger. "You are not to murder the entire company board of Hirondelle, Sean Agnello."

"You said yourself they weren't human. And they did kill Dad with all those booby traps they built into the engine."

She pursed her lips, and grimaced. The tension built.

"All right. You can kill them. Help with the washing up?"

He nodded and took his dirty mug over to the sink.