Kill The Monster, Chapter 6

IV. MISTER INCY WINCY

The early morning traffic was a chain of revving solitary confinement cells, each bearing its own angry prisoner. Nothing was moving. The street was a mass of expanding gases, car exhaust made visible by the cold. It would still have been there in the warm, of course - the cold only made him more acutely aware that he was breathing it.

Baronia Hirondelle's sales office was in central London, of course. In Regent Street, no less. He had been informed that ringing a bell on a discreet single door wedged between Carre Blanc and Adolfo Dominguez would admit him to an upper office. He had even been given the location of a private parking space in Soho Square, reserved solely for Hirondelle clients. He was travelling in the Toyota. He was certain of his ability to refurbish Lilianne Four, but totally unsure whether the car would subsequently gas, decapitate or electrify him via some fiendish internal agency. He had taken its guts out. It had a grudge against him.

Despite the congestion charge, London's teeming idiots still loved their cars. The early frost had melted on most of them; at any time during daylight hours, most of the cars in the capital were from outside town. Only a few vehicles bore the proud white signs of having been recently parked on drives less than a mile away, on some of the most expensive land on Earth.

One of them, directly ahead of him, stopped dead in a long line of cars stretching up past Marble Arch, had his name written in the ice rime on the rear window.

HELLO SEAN AGNELLO! PLEASE PULL OVER!

The car was a taxi, a decrepit blue Ford with a Hackney Carriage plate on the rear bumper and a roof plate saying AARDVARK TAXIS.

He started so violently that the car stalled. After a New York Second, the cars behind him sounded their horns in chorus, despite the fact that the queue was crawling forward even more slowly than the human evolution of its drivers.

He swore, and stamped on the clutch, turned the key. He looked up the road. A man was standing in the road beside the taxi, waving his arms desperately in Sean's direction. Whatever driver anger was currently being directed at Sean had to be nothing compared to what this second man was suffering. He was alone; there was clearly nobody in the driver's seat of his car. Whilst he was outside his car semaphoring Sean, he was holding up an entire street of traffic.

Sean pulled over onto a set of double red lines just short of a zebra crossing. He noticed with disquiet that a traffic warden had already looked up from writing a ticket on the bonnet of a nearby car, much in the way a crocodile might slither ominously into the water upstream from a swimming wildebeeste. He watched the line of cars ahead. Further up the street, the taxi pulled over in its turn, in a narrow part of the road, forcing other cars to squeeze past it. A succesion of automatic windows wound down, and Sean could see saliva jetting from the insides of the cars as London's wonderful citizens expressed their frank opinions of the taxi driver's taxi driving abilities.

He got out of his own car and walked up the street towards the taxi, wondering if he was about to be discreetly and exotically murdered, perhaps with ricin or plutonium, or a bullet made of ice that would melt in the wound it made.

The other man was wrapped up warm against the cold, in an anorak and scarf. Despite this, he was still stamping his feet to keep warm. He was Asian enough to be a real taxi driver, at least.

"Hello", he said. "Thanks for stopping. I've got to keep this brief. Despite the job, I pay for my own parking tickets. This is about Hirondelle." The accent also suggested taxi driver.

"Do you work for Hirondelle?"

"Fuck off, no. Do I look like a pod person?"

"I'll pay for your parking ticket", said Sean, "if you can tell me what's going on."

"I was rather hoping", grinned the other man, "that you could."

"How do you know my name?"

"I'll tell you further down the road. I know a spot in Camden where we might be able to park up for free. Right now I suggest you look to that traffic warden writing you a ticket."

Sean turned and watched the warden idly. Traffic fines were the least of his worries today.

"There's a multi storey car park in Oxford Street. Park up there and meet me in Hamleys café. Keep the receipt. I solemnly promise I will pay for your parking." And if I'm going to meet you, it'll be in a place of my choosing. "I'll see you there in two hours. I have an appointment at Hirondelle."

The other man squirmed inside his coat. "I think I'd better speak to you before that."

***

The top floor café in Hamleys was mostly empty; parents with children did not shop before eleven a.m. As the father of a young and acquisitive boy, Sean made frequent guilty trips to Hamleys on his infrequent short stays in his home country. Hamleys was the only toy store he knew of that still stocked genuine action figures that resembled real soldiers and carried guns, unlike the gayer and less confrontational new-look Action Man. It also stocked absolutely every zoological taxon in plush form, allowing him to buy back the affections of both his son and his wife.

The café was situated just above the Airfix models section. This had allowed him to pick out a particularly fine model of a MiG-29 Fulcrum for Mickey. There were no good British planes nowadays. When he was young, there had been Vulcans, Buccaneers and Harriers. Sean had had to buy Mickey Russian and French model aircraft in order to stop him growing up worshipping America.

It took half an hour for the other man to arrive. When he did, it was clear he had been running. It was a long way between Hamleys and the Oxford Street multi storey.

"You look like you need a sit down and a cup of cocoa."

The taxi driver flopped down into the seat opposite. Sean could see him nervously glancing right and left, checking out the uniformed shop staff and the children being shepherded by their mothers as if any of these might somehow present a threat.

"You're going", said the taxi driver, his breath beginning to return to normal, "to Hirondelle." The Sarf Landan accent had vanished, been cranked up several housing bands. This was little surprise.

"Certainly am", smiled Sean. "I have informed them I want to trade in my Super Phaeton for a Quadriga sedan. Plus, they have a quantity of crashed ironmongery to remove from my mother's garden." He paused and looked the taxi driver up and down thoughtfully. "You're far too public school to be a real taxi driver."

"Dannowotchoo mean, squire". The accent had switched back instantaneously, but now it was a caricature of its previous self. "I didn't see any point in maintaining the pretence with you. I always get the bastard Taxi Driver jobs. Mind you, I always get the Asian Property Millionaire jobs too. Those are more fun. I apologize for the makeshift method of communicating with you, but I really had to stop you before you got to Hirondelle. You see, we don't know that many people who get to go there."

He pulled out a battered copy of Top Marques from his inside pocket, slapped it down on the table. "Page thirteen. Your father was killed by a Hirondelle."

Sean smiled thinly. "Funny you should put it like that."

"I mean what I say. We know all about the Curse of Hirondelle. It's real." He pulled out an even more battered Telegraph from his inside pocket and slapped it down in turn.

"Page seven. The deaths of two Hirondelle employees in the front garden of your father's house."

Sean nodded. "The police are still investigating. My mother and I are under orders not to leave the country."

"But Hirondelle have pressed no charges."

"They've been very understanding about the whole thing. Evidence is beginning to emerge that one of the men in the car may have been under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs and seized the wheel from the other man."

The taxi driver nodded. "This case is very similar to the way in which five Hirondelle owners have died since 1959. Did you know that?"

"Yes, I did. One of them jumped out of the top storey of his house, claiming he could fly, another ran out of his house into an oncoming truck claiming he was being chased by velociraptors. A third bashed out the brains of his wife and family with a jack handle, believing they had been replaced by what he described as 'subterranean mind control gnomes'; he later committed suicide in prison. The fourth cut off his own hands with welding gear, because he thought they were going to strangle him as he slept. The fifth drowned in a twelve-inch-deep pond in his back garden near his garage." Sean sipped his coffee. "And three died of brain embolisms, which is also a comon symptom of LSD poisoning. Did I leave anything out?"

"You've done your homework."

"Certainly have."

A number of small children were running past a Christmas display downstairs, carrying complimentary balloons. One of the glass baubles on the display was broken, jagged, tears before bedtime waiting to happen.

"What are you going to Hirondelle to do, Mr. Agnello?"

Sean picked up the giant gingerbread man he'd ordered and began to strip off the purple smarties that were its buttons. "Before I answer that", he said, "I'll have to know who you work for."

"I can't tell you that."

"I think you'll find you can." Sean tossed a smartie into the air and caught it in his mouth. "Otherwise you will get zero cooperation from me."

"Look, I'm really not authorized to reveal that sort of information."

One of the complimentary balloons brushed past the bauble and vanished with a BANG. The taxi driver whirled in his chair. A gun came out of his coat quicker than a blink. He rather ruined the effect by almost dropping the gun and accidentally shooting a passing waitress in the empties, but the speed of the draw was impressive.

Everybody else, of course, had turned round to look at the source of the bang. Nobody noticed the gun being decocked and returned to the holster sheepishly.

"SIG-Sauer P226", said Sean. "Very popular with the MoD. Military intelligence?"

The other man writhed with embarrassment in his chair. "Erm. No. And there are very good reasons for that."

"Such as?"

The taxi driver cringed asymptotically towards invisibility, but said nothing.

Sean swung backwards on his chair. "Look, if you level with me, I'll level with you. Tell you what, I'll give you one fact about me for every one you give me about you. Deal?"

The secret agent considered this. "Deal."

"Okay. I suspect my father was murdered by devices concealed inside the engine of his Hirondelle Super Phaeton to prevent the engine being disassembled. Your turn, go."

The other man nodded. "We believe a good number of other people were similarly murdered between now and 1925. Possibly even earlier. We didn't know about the brain embolisms, though; that's very useful information."

Sean considered his next revelation carefully. "I believe a similar mechanism was activated in the car that crashed on leaving my parents' house four days ago. In that case, I believe the device wasn't intended to activate when it did." That skirted round the truth, but it would do for now.

The taxi driver examined the coffee rings on the table in great detail. "Um - we've been investigating Baronia Hirondelle for some time."

"Clarify 'we'."

"Not at liberty to say. But we're not military intelligence. This isn't fair. You're supposed to be giving me one of your facts now."

"You said there were very good reasons for you not being military intelligence. What are they?"

"I can't answer that question."

"Then I can't give you any more information from my side."

The other man's face strained in exasperation. "I can't tell you", he said, "because you won't believe me."

"Four days ago I inhaled enough hallucinogenic gas in my dad's garage to think I was being attacked by a mansized spider. Try me."

Again, the look to right and left. "All right. We believe military intelligence of various different kinds have already investigated Hirondelle's. We believe Hirondelle put a stop to their investigations."

This wiped the look of quiet confidence from Sean's face. "You think their influence goes that high?"

"I think you misunderstand me. I work for a government department, not military, but with an investigative capability. My department became suspicious about Hirondelle over two years ago. Nobody works at Hirondelle, it seems, apart from members of four large, very old families, the Drakes, the Speights, the Chaneys, and the Jakeses, who have worked for the company for years. The place is like a hive."

"What about Mr. Wilson? The owner? Does he belong to a family who've ever worked for the company?"

The taxi driver shook his head. "Stockholder names only ever seem to crop up once. Sometimes Drakes, Speights, Jakeses and Chaneys hold stock, but they always seem to yield up their stock in its entirety overnight as soon as a Jones or a Smith or a Wilson turns up. And it is always a Smith or a Jones or a Wilson. Never a Llewellyn or a Sidebotham or a Van Den Kock."

"Have you considered that that's strange in itself? That the stockholders are the only part of the company that seems to accept members from the outside world? As if the company just sits there ticking over till the right overseer happens along? Most of the time, if the company changes hands to someone who isn't a Drake, a Speight, a Chaney, or a Jakes, the new owner only ever holds the stock for a year or so at the most. And then sells the stock back into the company, to a Speight or a Jakes or a Chaney, and is never seen again."

"And seems not to have existed prior to becoming a stockholder", added the taxi driver.

"Pardon?"

"These stockholders, these owners. They all have passports, bank accounts, driving licences. When traced, these passports all seem to have been issued on submission of valid birth certificates. But when the certificate is tracked down, nobody in the local area can remember a person of that name. And there are no other human traces of the passport holder before the time when he or she became a stockholder at Hirondelle."

Sean threw another smartie into his mouth. "It's the stockholders who are the key. Everything's prepared for their arrival. The whole company's like an incubator waiting for an egg to be laid. The stockholders arrive, they live off the company, they leave."

"Or die. We have no idea where they go after they sell out." The taxi driver huddled inside his coat, as if the room were cold. "You know, the Aztecs used to treat sacrificial victims in the same way. Young enemy soldies who'd distinguished themselves in battle. They'd be led to the temple over carpets of flowers, fed the finest food, made king for a day. And then, on the final day, they'd suddenly be held down, and their hearts hacked out with a stone knife. People's behaviour sometimes can't be second guessed."

Sean drained the last of his coffee. "Oh, I don't know. What do you think I'm going back to Baronia Hirondelle for?"

The other man shook his head. "I've really no idea."

"I'm going to kill them. All of the Members of the Board."

The taxi driver stared at Sean a second; then he shook his head again. "No. It won't work."

"Why not?"

"It's been tried before."

"What?"

"You remember all those previous investigations I was talking about? We find traces of them, like paleontologists finding the tracks of vanished animals in the rock. Every time we request a document or other piece of evidence, we find that not just one, but several people have requested that same thing previously. When we've tried to track these people down, on one occasion the trail has led to some very scary places. Sometimes those places have tried to investigate us back. But what we always find, in every case, is that the person who requested the document is dead. Quite suddenly, of a heart attack, stroke, or car accident. Usually about two to three weeks after they first commence their investigation."

Sean's skin tingled. "I had a friend in military intelligence. Went into it after he left the Royal Engineers. He died in a car accident."

"Maybe that's how he died." The other man shrugged. "Of course, car accidents also happen naturally. How are you going to kill them? Not that I'd recommend it, of course."

Sean fished in his inside pocket, brought out the pen case. He laid the pen case on the table, popped it open. The bronze tube nestled on the fake velvet where the pen should be.

"Ah", said the taxi driver, peering at it professionally. "One of the active warranty seals. I believe that size usually puts out a quite powerful nerve poison."

Sean stared at it like a stone age man looking at a hand grenade. "It certainly kills fish", he said.

"Fish", said the taxi driver.

"Uh-huh. If you drop it in a river on the end of a wire, run a long way away, and put a charge through the wire, all sorts of things bob up to the surface." He ground his teeth nervously. "All sorts of dead things."

The taxi driver swallowed as he looked at the cylinder. "And you still think it's got enough in it to kill a room full of directors?"

"If it's anything like the hallucinogen cylinders from higher up in the engine, it's good for quite a few uses. Of course, this one's already killed a human being."

The taximan crooked an eyebrow. "Your father?"

Sean nodded. "And a lot of fish", he added.

"And the hallucinogens killed the two Hirondelle employees."

"Yes. That was quite a relief, to be quite honest."

"Why is that?"

"It proved they were human." He thought about this. "However, it does not explain why the entire company is behaving like a bunch of space aliens."

The other man leaned back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head. "Well, at first we suspected they might simply be Americans."

"Of course."

"Then we realized they seemed to have anticipated the development of the motor car, to say nothing of the recent history of Europe. In 1871, they move from Paris to Brussels, a few short months before the Franco-Prussian War. In 1914, they vacate Brussels for Rome. In 1939, they leave Rome and come to Britain. We found this highly suspicious. So we took the liberty of poking around one of their prior sites, in Paris. Most evidence of their presence had been very efficiently removed; but not all of it." He tossed a gleaming something over the table. Instinctively, Sean caught it. It was small, round and hard, and glittered in the light.

"A ball bearing", said Sean.

"A perfectly spherical ball bearing. Measured with a micrometer, its diameter is exactly the same along all axes."

"Wait a minute." Sean examined his convex reflection in the steel. "There's no such thing, surely."

"Absolutely not. The Earth's gravity flattens all ball bearings slightly, rendering them slightly oblate. The only place a perfectly spherical ball bearing can be manufactured is a free fall environment. Out in space." He also pulled out a ziplock bag and slid it over to Sean. It contained metal swarf.

"Metal swarf", said Sean.

"You know, all metal on Earth contains a certain minute quantity of lead, and a certain minute quantity of uranium. Over time, uranium decays radioactively into lead. As soon as a system becomes closed - as soon as uranium-containing material is spewed out by a volcano and solidifies, or is breathed in by a living thing that then stops living, or is forged into a piece of steel by someone - it becomes possible for the amount of radioactive decay of the system, the relative ratios of uranium, lead, thorium, and proactinium in it, to be used to date it. The process used to be wildly unreliable, but big advances have been made in the last couple of years. Mr. Agnello, as far as we know, this metal was used to make steam carriages in Paris by Baronia Hirondelle in the years before 1871, and as far as we know, the metal itself was forged in 2025 A.D."

Sean sat silent, wondering how much of this could conceivably be believed. He cleared his throat. "So, if you felt the need to stop me on the way to Hirondelle's offices, you must have wanted me to do something while I was there. What would that something be exactly?"

The other man grinned. "Nothing much, nothing much. We have a, I suppose you could call it a device, which we would very much like you to leave in Hirondelle's offices during your visit." He reached down into a plastic bag at his right hand. "I call it Mr. Incy Wincy Spider."

He put the device down on the table. It was indeed spider-shaped. A central metal body was surrounded by a ring of rubber claws, feet, or hooks, that hinged into it. The whole apparatus was about the size of a tennis ball.

"Isn't it a bit big for a bug?" said Sean.

The other man smiled. "Fie on you for suggesting such a thing. Bugging is illegal."

"Where do you suggest I stick it?"

The other man's smile grew so wide that it threatened to engulf his entire head. "We will issue you with very specific instructions."

***

He sat in a waiting room floored with marble so black and polished as to resemble an unbroken sheet of oil. All about him, carved and fretted forms inhabited columns and ceiling roses, lintels, balustrades and windowframes - lions, flowers, demons, fishes, faces, as if the building's creators had meant to bedevil anyone seeking an angle on their thought processes by bombarding the senses with sheer variety of images. There was also a good deal of carved oak. The room reeked of beeswax.

The small coffee table before him was home to one single leaflet, entitled BARONIA HIRONDELLE: AN EXCLUSIVE CAR FOR A DISCERNING MARKET.

"Ah, Mr. Agnello. We are so pleased to meet you."

The extended hand looked human and seemed to contain no hidden poison needles. Sean shook it.

"I'm very sorry", mumbled Sean, "for your tragic loss."

"Quite so, quite so." The smile seemed almost beatific. The face was the same face as that of the mechanic he had killed, for whose death he was offering condolence. This time, it was the mechanic wearing the pinstripe, but otherwise the resemblance was correct to the last wrinkle, as if the death of the mechanic had forced Hirondelle to take another clone out of storage. "A terrible accident. We are still conducting our own investigations. We do believe, however, that it was the driver, not the car, who was to blame."

"If I'd thought it was the car", said Sean, "I wouldn't be here." He tried hard to smile without drooling. The other man's suit was impeccable, turning him into a passable facsimile of an Earthman. Hadn't an anthropologist once said that Neanderthal Man could have been put in a suit and hat and sent out into the streets of London, and no-one would be able to tell the difference?

Sean felt like the Neanderthal. Before knocking on the door downstairs, he had walked past a shop selling the appalling pink geometric tie the other man was wearing. Every tie in the window had cost over a hundred pounds. There was even a crisp white handkerchief, folded into a neat triangle, poking out of his breast pocket, along with the obligatory Armistice poppy. Sean had forgotten to buy his own poppy; he was wearing neither suit nor a wire. The taxi driver had told him no wires. No wires, no cameras, no recording equipment of any kind. And no weapons. Please remember, all previous investigations into these people have failed. There must be reasons why this is the case, and we think this is quite simply that Baronia Hirondelle are far more technologically sophisticated than we are.

In his present condition, the geometric spirals on the pink tie made him feel sick. He had refused the cup of coffee he'd been offered. He hadn't known whether it would have a synergic effect when combined with the drug.

They will almost certainly be checking you out with all manner of futuristic lie detection gear. They'll be able to tell from your heart rate, respiration, and voice stress whether you're lying. For this reason, we'd like you to take this. It's the very latest in designer drugs. It changes your brainwaves, never mind your heart rate. It fits your cover story, as it's popular with millionaires, and it may confuse their lie detection gear, if they have any -

"I'm William Speight, Sales Manager for Hirondelle Europe. Would you like to come through to the sales suite?"

Sean struggled to his feet. The perfect floor rocked like a boat deck. He had no idea whether this was the effect of the drug he had taken, or of one Hirondelle had somehow surreptitiously administered, or of an actual movement of the floor. Still, the other man seemed to be having no difficulty in standing up. Sean accompanied him through a double oval door with a carved wooden jamb. The carvings seemed Polynesian.

How the hell can anyone know I'm being checked out with lie detectors?

One unexpected side effect of the drug was that it felt really, really good. He had to fight an overwhelming sensation that William Speight was his very best friend in all the world, who wanted only to help him.

"The carvings are Polynesian", explained Mr. William Speight, who was not his friend. "A grateful present from Taufa'ahau Tupou, King of Tonga, one of our most loyal customers. You may or may not know that His Majesty was the world's heaviest monarch in his day, weighing over 31 stone. It was necessary to completely remodel the insite of the Serafine Landau '75 to accommodate him."

The Sales Suite was, entirely unexpectedly, the size of the hangar deck on an aircraft carrier.

"We combine the Sales Suite with the Hirondelle museum", said Mr. Speight.

The Hirondelle marque had changed over the years. 1890's models with three wheels and electrically ignited gas headlamps gave way to the 1925 Auriga de Chasse with its silver alloy cylinder head and whalebone fascia ("sadly not possible in today's atmosphere of political correctness", commented Mr. Speight sadly), which was succeeded in turn by a wartime staff car produced for British Generals, the Iceni Merkabah '41. Mr. Speight was at pains to point out the thickness of the bulletproof shielding on the windscreen, side doors and fuel tanks.

"We hear that your own business is military, and that much of it is conducted in Africa", he explained.

"I deal with the aftermath of war", grinned Sean, having difficulty with the word 'aftermath'. "It's mine clearance work. Exclusively for national governments and the U.N. Armour underneath the car would probably be more useful." He held an upraised palm low in case Mr. Speight did not realize what he meant by underneath.

"Ah, then, the '42 Testudo might suit your purposes better. Optimized for desert warfare. Notice the wire reinforced tyres. A Testudo suffered a direct hit by a German Teller mine at Alamein and continued moving to the other side of the field without losing one of the officers it was carrying, one of whom happened to be Bernard Law Montgomery."

"Gosh", said Sean, despite himself. "What sort of Teller? The TMi-35?"

"The TMi-29", said Mr. Speight, with satisfaction.

"Gosh", said Sean, who knew his mines.

Mr. Speight was only too pleased to throw open the bonnets of all the museum cars and talk Sean through the engines. The engines had changed slowly and reluctantly over the years. Initially, there had been only one air cooled cylinder, then an air cooled 'V', then water cooling. Mr. Speight revealed that today's engines used a special coolant supplied by Hirondelle itself, though he made no mention of liquid nitrogen. The workings of the engine itself were highly secret, though Mr. Speight could divulge that ceramics and rotor blades were involved in its manufacture.

The airbox, meanwhile, seemed not to have changed in over one hundred years. This was hardly surprising to Sean, as the airbox was providing the power. He giggled softly. Mr. Speight, wrong-footed, smiled pleasantly back. The smile, however, was becoming strained. Sean's heavily sedated state was growing increasingly difficult to ignore. Sean was aware, as well, that Hirondelle reserved the right to reject customers it considered beneath the brand - George Best had been rejected, for example, along with Keith Moon, Sai Baba, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Al Capone, and any and all American millionaires from Las Vegas and Miami. There was even reputed to be a Hirondelle rejectees' club, whose members counted themselves proud to have qualified.

By this time, Sean and Mr. Speight had been joined by Mr. Jakes, Mr. Drake, and Mr. Chaney, all impeccably suited, all smiles, all with Armistice poppies in their buttonholes. All three men were welcoming and enthusiastic, most interested in Agnello Henehan's work in mine clearance in former war zones. Sean explained that the former joint shareholder, Ronnie Henehan, had been killed in a carjacking accident in Johannesburg, one day after he'd finished a two month stint clearing antipersonnel mines in the Congo. He had been on his way to attend an international conference on land mine control at the time. Sean had bought Ronnie's widow out of the company at a premium, "and unfortunately", he finished, as he always did, "we are still turning work away."

Mr. Speight, Mr. Jakes, Mr. Drake, and Mr. Chaney, representing the Hirondelle sales team fro Europe, Russia, the UK and Scandinavia respectively, had nothing but praise for Sean's efforts to remove explosive devices from beneath the tender pink feet of African children, and wanted to know, had his decision to go into the business of dismantling the machinery of war been influenced by religion at all? Had he received a calling from God? Sean replied that he had spoken to God a number of times in his career, normally immediately after being wounded by shrapnel. However, God had never spoken back. Mr. Drake patted him on the arm in a friendly fashion, saying: "Maybe that's just because you haven't heard Him yet." Speight, Drake, Jakes and Chaney looked at one another, nodded, and beamed.

Mr. Speight cleared his throat and apologized profusely to Sean for the trauma that had been caused him and his mother following the death of his father. Particularly since Hirondelle had learned of the calibre of man they had mistreated - a man who helped save innocent lives by risking his own in the Third World - they were, as a company, deeply, deeply ashamed. Overly heavy-handed sales techniques had been used. The Hirondelle warranty was not the single central law of humankind's existence. Furthermore, the fact that Sean's family home had been subjected to a visit by Hirondelle employees who might have been under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs was unforgivable.

Mr. Speight offered to exchange Sean's existing Super Phaeton for a brand new 2005 Mahayana Phantasm with whatever spectrum of options he desired, free of charge. In addition, he offered ten years' complimentary free service.

Even within the cosy warm embrace of the drug, Sean blinked in astonishment. Such a deal was equivalent to sidling up to an ordinary man on the street and hissing: Pssst! Would you like a million quid?

The four men waited for Sean's response with wide, expectant eyes, as if they were about to hear whether or not he would be giving them a million pounds.

"Erm", said Sean. "Gosh."

He explained that his family were still in mourning, and that the decision should properly be his mother's, but that he would communicate it to her immediately. He had difficulty with the word 'communicate'. The drug added a sentence that thanked Baronia Hirondelle for its kindness and understanding in his mother's time of trouble.

It was as if he had personally saved the lives of all four men's children. The smiles ripped across their faces as if invisible knives had slashed their cheeks open. The teeth behind the smiles were huge and white and hurtful to Sean's eyes to look upon. There was a celebratory non-alcoholic drink, despite the fact that no agreement to actually do anything had been reached. Sean drank the drink, giggling as he realized that it might contain an exotic heavy metal poison that might shut down his kidneys in a week's time. He was on top of the world. The Hirondelle company, that group of murdering fiends, were his friends. The whole world was his friend, forever.

He had to get out of there, right away.

He indicated a need to visit the toilet immediately, and was allowed to. The toilets were gigantic, walled with monolithic black slate carved into images of fountains, dominated by a single huge mirror, the glass in which alone had to weigh over a tonne. The basins were art deco seashells, the toilet Japanese. It played soft mood music as Sean vomited into it.

How long had the drink been in his stomach? Two minutes? Five? Ten? How often did the pyloric sphincter open to admit food, water and poison to the intestine? Could a heavy metal poison be absorbed via the stomach wall?

Still, at least he hadn't needed to pretend.

The bug - the enormous, spidery bug - came out of his jacket pocket, and went PLOP into the bowlful of vomit. One touch on the silver-handled flush - which played Handel's Water Music - later, and he waved goodbye to it as it circled down the S-bend, where he had been told it would lock itself into place with powerful spring-loaded rubber pseudopodia. He had no idea what sort of useful intelligence any government agency might imagine it could gather from a microphone placed in a toilet - but he had accomplished the mission he'd been given.

There were complimentary breath mints, safety razors, soap cakes, and cologne bottles lining the shelf beneath the mirror. He ate three of the mints, washed his face and hands clean of vomit chunks, and left. One round of beaming smiles and handshakes later, and he was out in the street below, dazed by thundering traffic, with a headache building behind his eyes that threatened to beat them clear of his skull with every fresh beat of his heart. He wondered if the mints, poison or non-alcoholic drink had combined with the drug. He vowed never to do mints, poison or fresh mango juice again.

His mobile phone rang. He answered it.

Yes, we was aware he was meeting Sam, his wife, later on today at the London Eye. Yes, he knew that this was Sam speaking, and did indeed remember her voice from that time he said 'I do'. Yes, he knew he had a son, and yes, he could truthfully say that he was not drunk. Yes, he would be there are two, cut his own cock off, poke holes in it and use it as a wind instrument if he lied. Yes, he could pop into Hamleys and buy Mickey a present as a consolation for missing his début in the First Eleven on Saturday. Yes, he was a brute beast with the fine sensibilities of a sedentary invertebrate lifeform that sat on the seabed blowing food particles in and out of an arse that was also its mouth.

He realized as he rang off that he was holding an enormous die-cast metal replica of a Hirondelle Mahayana Phantasm, which the company had graciously gifted him on hearing that he had put off a visit with his son to make their appointment. He also had a highly detailed Airfix kit of a Dornier Pfeil. He wondered how he was going to manoeuvre both of them through the Underground.

His phone rang again.

"Hello?"

"Pete, they can't do that. I don't care if they've only found antivehicular, the Mouvement Pour La Démocratie have been putting antipersonnel under every tenth antivehicular to stop idiots cutting just that sort of corner."

"Pete, I just heard a TM62M go off at your end."

"That was not a bangalore, Pete, I know a UR67 when I hear one. That was a Soviet-made PMN going off all on its own, probably with one of Lieutenant bloody Makanga's bloody iron bloody legionnaires on top of it."

"No, don't bother. Those things are made to attack armoured vehicles. I doubt you'll find anything big enough to bury. Maybe that'll make the Lieutenant more eager to use costly modern methods."

"Look, Pete, I know you're doing all you can. Just make it clear that when our invoices list 'consumables', that means diesel oil, pepsi-cola, and Bangalore torpedoes, not little wee black men jumping up and down the field on pogo sticks."

He ended the call. The phone rang again.

"PETE -"

"Oh, hello you."

"Yes, I am. You are aware this isn't a secure line, I take it."

"They were very nice. Worryingly nice. I suspect they may have poisoned me."

"I haven't got time. I am about to see my wife and child at the London Eye." He was at the Underground station beneath Piccadilly Circus by now, fumbling with change prior to entering into negotiations with the ticket machine. "Perhaps we can meet up later."

"I don't know. Six o'clock, maybe?"

"Look, either you want to meet up or you don't. I take illegal drugs for you, you get home late for me. What sort of secret agent are you?"

The machine rejected three of his pound coins. He inspected them carefully and found them to be Congolese Francs. Swearing, he searched his wallet for a five pound note as he held the mobile between ear and shoulder. "Look, I've really got to go now. I'll see you, oh, I don't know, at Kensington indoor market at six."

"What do you mean, it's not there any more?"

"All right, Camden, then. Ciao."

He thumbed the call closed. All he needed now was one final phone call from his mother.

The phone rang.

***

"And over there is where Grandpa Owen defused a hundred-pounder. Particularly tricky, that one; had a trembler switch."

London's skyline had changed since he'd last seen it. There was at least one odd vibrator-shaped building that he didn't recognize. It was becoming more and more difficult, as the years passed, to identify parts of London that Grandpa Owen had defused.

"Did Granpa Owen ever defuse a V-2?"

"No, V-2's were fused to explode before they hit the ground, and they had a lot of rocket fuel in them too. That would have exploded even if the detonator hadn't."

"Did he ever defuse a Grand Slam?"

"No, Grand Slam was one of ours -"

Sam stared down at the gardens towards Greenwich. "The sunset looks beautiful on the water. Don't those gardens look beautiful?"

Sean nodded. "Yeah, they're all owned by the Admiralty and Royal Artillery. See the lines of guns?"

"Did Grandpa Owen ever defuse a butterfly bomb?"

He slapped Mickey on the shoulder. "Ah, now you're talking. That's a real man's air-dropped area denial munition. The trembler switch was the primary means of setting it off. Could have won the war with those, could the Luftwaffe." He pointed a finger out towards Clapham Junction. "And over there is where some of the first V-1's fell on London. Each V-1 carried 850 kilos of high explosive -"

"What are you actually doing out at High Acres?" said Sam.

"Pardon?"

"I phoned Lilianne and asked her what the urgent problem was. She said it was something to do with the car. She said you'd spent five days dismantling Owen's car. She said that only you could really explain why. Sean, Pete is running the company single-handed down in Katanga, I am still ferrying Mickey backward and forward to school, and you are fiddling with a goddamned car."

What do I do? Tell her I drove into London this morning with a poison gas capsule with the intent to kill a whole board of Company Directors? "It's to do with the warranty on the Hirondelle, love. Dad left the engine in an awful state, and he wasn't supposed to have even touched it. The Hirondelle people were putting a lot of pressure on Mum to renew the warranty. I drove into town this morning and made them see the error of their ways." There. Almost entirely true, and no-one made an accessory to attempted murder.

"How did you do that?" Tower Bridge was coming round again. As a child, he remembered, he'd always thought Tower Bridge was London Bridge. He'd been horrified to hear that London Bridge was being sold off, and to Americans of all people.

"I appealed to their better nature."

"The better nature of a set of managers in a car company." The Bridge was up. A river barge was coming through it. At the western end of the capsule, tourist cameras were flashing redundantly, as if a single flash cube could illuminate an entire city at sunset. It was far more likely to reflect off the capsule glass and ruin the picture.

"Yes." He could hardly believe it himself. "They've offered Mum an exchange and free warranty package worth close on a million pounds. They were embarrassed, I think. Two of their employees were killed on the way back from High Acres. They'd been taking drugs, and one of them grabbed the wheel and steered the car into a tree." Neglecting to mention, of course, that the tree was on Mum's front lawn.

"A million pounds." Sam was a firm believer in the First Law of Free Lunch Dynamics. "There must be a catch."

There is. That car will probably kill whoever sits in it.

"Not that I've spotted. Look, love, I've got to see some guy about things that go bang in Camden at six -"

She exhaled despairingly. He tried desperately to retrieve the situation. "- so I thought we could maybe meet up in Leicester Square outside the Odeon at half past seven? I can nip into an internet café and book us some tickets to see, uh, something -"

She was warming. It would be a breakneck dash across town, though. "To see what?"

"Uh, they've remade Hong Kong Phooey as a movie. Snoop Dogg is playing Penry, the Mild Mannered Janitor."

"Is it animated?"

"Uh, partially. I believe Spot the Cat is animated. But a major plot hole has been eliminated in that Penry is no longer the only talking bipedal dog in the city who is not Hong Kong Phooey."

"Penrific." She leaned back on the rail as the Houses of Parliament sailed past. "Of course, you realize we'll have to take a child in order to maintain the fiction that we're not attending the movie for our own enjoyment."

Mickey was already suspicious. "What's Hong Kong Phooey?"

"Never you mind. It's a thing mummies and daddies enjoy."

Sam smirked as Centre Point and the Post Office Tower filed discreetly by behind her.

***

The watch came off and clattered down onto the table. The stopwatch function went on.

"You've got forty-five minutes."

"Suits me." The rain was sleeting down the sheeting overhead and falling in great sloughed skins into the gutters. The seating area for the fast food booths in Camden Market was only flimsily protected against the rain. All around, the market was already ablaze with Christmas lights, even this early in November.

The mobile phone was also lying on the table, turned off. The taximan was nursing the most inexpensive caffè latte available in cupped hands, while Sean tucked in to falafel, crispy chicken chow mein and chips which he had obtained from three entirely separate booths.

"Well, first off, they didn't kil me. At least, I don't think so. At least, I'm not dead yet."

The taximan nodded. "I must get as much information out of you as possible, before you potentially die." He took an unconcerned slurp of coffee.

"They treated me like a VIP. Effectively, they just offered me a million pounds in vehicles and free maintenance. It was bizarre. I mean, I have just killed two of their staff."

The other man looked up sharply. "I didn't know you'd killed them."

Sean shrugged in an attempt at insouciance. "They wouldn't even have been on the road if I hadn't started messing with the car."

The taximan nodded. "Yes. Well, this is good."

"Good?" Sean had difficulty being indignant around a mouthful of chicken. "I have to decide whether or not to accept a million pounds!"

"Oh, the torture of it. Actually, I wouldn't accept. Never take on a ticking bomb, even if it's a solid gold one."

"Would you eat shit or commit gross homosexual acts for a million pounds?"

The taximan considered this. "Probably. But I wouldn't give up the thought of avenging my own father."

Sean considered this. "You have me there." He manoeuvred a morsel of chicken onto a three-cornered structure of chips and loaded it into his mouth.

"Did they get" - the taxi driver smacked his lips, forming his next phrase carefully - "religious at all?"

"Actually, yes. One of them asked me if I'd received a calling from God."

"Interesting. They've never done that before. But we have noticed that they seem to be religious. As I said, I've visited two of their previous sites. Paris and Brussels, specifically - my expense account didn't reach to Rome - and been told by a nice old lady, who showed me round the Paris site, that Hirondelle had a room dedicated to worship. The place is all apartments nowadays, and her apartment is what used to be the chapel."

"What about the one in Brussels?"

"Torn down, hit by a bomb in World War Two. The Paris apartment looked like a chapel right enough - wood panelling round the walls, a circular set of mounts on one wall where a crucifix could have gone -"

"Circular mounts? That doesn't sound like a cross to me."

The other man shrugged. "Maybe a Celtic cross. I don't know, I'm Hindu. But the funny thing is", he said, looking up at Sean, "that the dead people, the dead investigators, the ones who came before me who requested the files on Hirondelle and its employees - their deaths were, in some cases, considered by the police to be suspicious, because despite the fact that the victims died peacefully without warning in their sleep, someone appeared to have given them the last rites."

Sean passed with a plastic forkful of chip halfway to his mouth. "Come again?"

"In one case, a small typewritten scrap of paper with the words for extreme unction was found by the bed of the victim. They'd even bothered to laminate it. Probably dropped it in a moment of carelessness, perhaps after being surprised and having to leave in haste. In another case where a man died at home, he'd been sleeping in his daughter's bed because he was drunk and she was staying over at her grandmother's. There was a baby alarm in the room, and by a chance coincidence it was turned on. Imagine his wife's terror when she wakes up and clearly hears, in the middle of the night, a man's voice administering the last rites to her husband."

"You say that with entirely too much relish."

"You have entirely too much relish on those chips."

Sean mumbled round a mouthful of falafel. "It's H.P."

"Whatever. In any case, by the time she'd heaved herself out of bed thinking she'd been drinking, whoever it was was gone and her husband was dead. Fatal stroke, at thirty-four."

Sean shrugged. "So they're religious. So what?"

The other man gripped his coffee cup like a novice pilot might his joystick, squinting into the festive gloom for eavesdroppers. "We don't know yet. But we've had another major breakthrough. We've finally managed to get hold of a sample of Wilson's DNA." He paused to let the full grandeur of the statement sink in. "Wilson the major stockholder."

Sean absorbed this as he chewed on a final piece of gristle. "So what will that tell us?"

"Erm, well, whether he's human, for one thing. The tests should take a month or so. We're having them rushed through as a priority."

"Who's we?"

The other man inhaled deeply, and held his breath as he considered Sean's need to know; then, he let out as much as he dared. "I can reveal that I do work for His Majesty's Government." He drained the last remnants of his coffee. "So, what will you do about their offer?"

"Accept it", said Sean. "I'd be a fool not to. I'll accept it, then keep the damn car in a locked garage one hundred miles from home. Then I'll wait till the end of the free maintenance period and sell it, make Mum a cool half million, maybe even more."

"What if I asked you to keep Hirondelle on the book, get a few more free visits to their site, maybe to the factory itself. Would you do that?"

Sean looked at the other man across a table littered with disposable crockery.

"I said hi to my son for the first time in two weeks today. I don't want to never say hi to him again."

The taxi driver considered this, and nodded.

"You shouldn't attempt anything with respect to the Hirondelle board", he said. "We believe there have been two previous occasions where plans for a full-scale assault by Thames Valley Police officers and Special Branch on Hirondelle's factory premises were drawn up. On both occasions, those plans were cancelled after all the senior officers associated with them died suddenly. If they can do that to the security services, they can certainly do it to you. And you have a wife and child to support."

Sean nodded. "Okay, I'll take that at face value. Thank you."

"Can we call you if we need you again? If things change?"

"You don't have my phone number."

"We have your phone number."

"I suppose I should have expected that. I suppose I can't stop you." Sean got to his feet. "But try to ring during daylight hours, there's a good chap."

The taxi driver nodded. He extended a hand. Sean took it, and shook it.

"You realize, I have no proof whatsoever that you aren't working for Hirondelle's."

The taximan grinned. "None whatsoever. Be seeing you."

"Be seeing you."

As he walked off into the pre-Christmas bustle, skipping through the curtain of rain still dribbling from the edge of the building, a thin, arthritically-knuckled hand came out of the crowd and grabbed the label of his jacket. He turned to stare in to a beard decorated with a generous helping of last week's dinner.

"Leaflet?" said the beard, smiling with surprising gentility.

Sean nodded and took the proferred piece of paper. He read it. It said: WE CAN PROVE GOD EXISTS VIA MATHEMATICS.

"It's all right", said the beard. "I'm a harmless lunatic." Sean became aware that the beard was wearing a home-knitted sweater covered with mathematical formulae.

The crowd around the beard, who Sean realized were wearing T shirts and hoodies with the same pattern, laughed at Sean's expense for some reason. Sean realized that he was, in fact, surrounded by harmless lunatics.

"Uh, thanks", he said, and transferred the flyer to his pocket for later disposal. When he turned round, the taxi driver had gone.

***

Thirty minutes later, Leicester Square was filled with balloons and grown men and women dressed as cartoon animals. Evidently money was being collected for charity. He gave five pounds absent-mindedly to a bipedal tiger who shook a plastic tub in his face.

They were there, real and alive, standing with their backs to a fifty foot poster of Vin Diesel dressed as Roger Bacon, looking across at Wesley Snipes as Berthold Schwarz - Schwarz, geddit? A five foot photo caption said: ONE SECRET COULD BLOW UP THE WORLD. ONE MAN WANTS TO KEEP IT FOR ANOTHER HUNDRED YEARS. A thirty foot high title announced: BLACK POWDER: EXPLODING ACROSS THE BIG SCREEN DECEMBER 4TH.

He smiled. Sam smiled back lopsidedly. He was on time, after all, for a change. It deserved at least a half smile.

"I've been thinking", he said. "What do you think - do I really need to spend my time blowing things up in Africa? There are some really good jobs in Estate Agency -"

Her eyes lit up like Christmas stars. She threw herself at him. She had gained weight since the last time she'd thrown herself at him. After all, she'd had a child in between. The impact was considerable, but pleasant.

"Oh, Dad", said the child disgustedly. "Estate agents don't bring home blown off parts of anyone."