Knaves Over Queens by George R. R. Martin
‘Not okay.’ Allen panted for breath as she led him across the width of a garage as big as her flat. It was blessedly dark and it stank of engine oil and damp. A band of pain tightened around his temple. He leaned back against the cold metal curve of a big Daimler, the high-end Jaguar limousine being the garage’s only occupant. ‘Give me a minute.’
‘We don’t have one, they’ll be round here as soon as they work out we’re not down there any more. Where’s this phone?’
He swallowed back bile. ‘In the Jag.’
‘You’re kidding me!’ He caught Jenny glaring at him in the wan light filtering in through the skylight. ‘Wait, there’s a phone in his car?’
‘Yeah, I saw him using it back at the yard. I mean, either that or he was playing with a kid’s toy, and I don’t think he’s the sort to do that, yeah?’ He slumped sideways. ‘Saw it between the front seats …’ He worked the door handle, discovered it was locked. ‘Shit.’
‘Let me get this. I mean, fuck, what kind of flash bastard has a radiophone in his car, anyway?’ Jenny cast about. There was a workbench at one side of the garage, cluttered with tools. She rummaged for a minute, retrieved a steel ruler and a length of stiff wire.
‘The kind of flash bastard who runs a gang?’ Allen suggested wearily.
‘Make yourself useful, luv, see if you can find a shovel or a crowbar or something and stand next to the door?’ Jenny hurried over to the driver’s door and used the ruler to peel back the rubber seal alongside the window, then began fishing around with the loop of wire.
‘Wait, you want me to whack whoever—’
She shrugged as eloquently as only a woman with three shoulders can. ‘They’ve got a gun: do you have any better ideas?’ With a click, the Jaguar’s door unlatched. She pulled it open and peered at the radiophone. ‘I wonder how this works—’ She lifted the handset and listened for a few seconds as Allen, increasingly nervous, grabbed a lawn edger and slouched around to the side of the garage door. ‘Uh, hello, operator? Emergency services, Police. This is Detective Constable Jennifer Scott reporting a firearms incident in progress, I need back-up—’
The door handle rattled. Allen backed up a pace, wincing. His head was throbbing, otherwise he’d be working on the concrete floor of the garage. But he was in luck: the door was evidently locked, and the hand withdrew. He glanced over at Jenny just as she climbed out of the car and gestured frantically at something below her feet, then beckoned.
‘What’s—’ he caught up with her as she said, ‘Inspection trench!’
‘Inspection—’
The concrete apron gave way to wooden boards across a trench between the luxury car’s wheels. Jenny bent and tugged at a handle. ‘Help me with this. Now!’
‘But we—’
‘They’ll be back with the keys any moment now. Armed back-up will take at least five minutes to arrive, maybe seven or eight this far out.’ Allen put his back into it, and between them they raised the hatch. ‘Go on, get down.’
‘But I—’ Allen stared down the steps, into the darkness beyond the bounding box of the cellars under Pussyface’s mansion. The pain in his head intensified, almost unbearably. ‘I’m out of juice: if I go down there I’ll be trapped—’
‘Do you trust me?’ she asked. He looked at her and realized he had no choice. At some point in the past few days or weeks he’d surrendered. ‘Listen. Go down there. Nobody’s going to arrest you but Pussyface has been burying bodies since long before you came along.’
Allen scrambled down into the pit and crouched. A couple of seconds later Jenny joined him, lowering the lid. It was a narrow space, only deep enough for a mechanic lying on his back to work on the floor panel of a car, and she lay on her back beside him. It felt disturbingly as if they were sharing a shallow grave.
A click from the space above them, and daylight filtered through the cracks in the boards. ‘Ain’t nobody ’ere,’ called Sparks.
‘Keep looking.’ Pussyface sounded pissed off. ‘’E’s gotta come up for air somewhere and there’s no sign of ’im out front. Find the hole, find the Mole.’
The garage door closed, but after a moment someone switched on the overhead lights. Allen heard nothing but indistinct footsteps for a while, felt nothing but fear as Jenny shivered and leaned against him like a fox hiding in its hole from the hounds. Then Sparks’ voice: ‘Found it!’ Followed by two percussive shots that felt like hammers driven into his eardrums in the confined space. Jenny jerked against him and for a horrified moment Allen thought the bullets had hit her, but after a second he realized Sparks was shooting somewhere else.
‘Stop shootin’, ye moron!’ Allen heard Pussyface roar despite his pounding head and ringing ears.
‘But I found a hole—’ Sparks whined.
‘Ye’ll wake the neighbours and bring the polis down on us!’
Jenny tensed again and Allen realized she was unhurt, but trying to move – whether to get comfortable, or to hide, he didn’t know. He closed his eyes and reached out to feel for the comfort of soil and stone around him, but the concrete was painfully hard and a spike of pain between his eyes warned him to desist. He tightened his grip on the crowbar instead and tried to work out where Sparks and Pussyface might be.
‘Someone’s been at my motor,’ Pussyface remarked. Something in his tone made Allen shudder. ‘I locked it when I parked. An’ there’s a scratch by the door handle.’ Quietly, almost reflectively, he added, ‘Ye shouldna’ ha’ done that.’ A quiet chuckle. ‘Of course it didnae start fer you – I allus pop the distributor out.’
A click as he eased the car door open, and a faint creak as it settled on its springs. Then a pop as Pussyface tripped the bonnet release.
‘Now I ain’t got all day, kid, so I’ll tell you this now: I know yer hidin’ in here. And you an’ yer bird can come out and talk an’ I’ll hold no grudges and we’ll settle this like civilized people, right? You’ve got two minutes.’ More creaking, and a clattering from above the inspection trench over Allen’s feet, in the vicinity of the big V6 block. ‘Reet, that’s the distributor arm back in place.’ A clank as the car’s bonnet closed over the engine. “’Course it’s not going anywhere with the gearshift locked in place, right? So let’s suppose ye dinnae want to come up an’ talk: then ye won’t mind if I leave you in ’ere with this.’ A couple more clicks, and then the hoarse bellow of a starter motor gave way to the burbling rumble of an idling 5.3-litre V12 engine.
The inspection trench filled instantly with the stench of unburned petrol and exhaust fumes, and Jenny spasmed for a moment then coughed. Evidently the noise of the engine drowned out the sound of her distress, for the next thing Allen heard was the clunk of a car door latching shut, followed by hastily retreating footsteps and a slamming door.
‘Fuck—’ Jenny spasmed again. Allen tried to take shallow breaths, but the choking engine exhaust drove him close to panic. They used to gas moles, didn’t they? He could see it in his mind’s eye: Sparks waiting outside the door with a gun, the two of them trapped in here with a locked car spewing out carbon monoxide. Jenny could break into it again and turn off the engine, but that’d just tell Pussyface they’d come up for air—
Somewhere above his head, Allen thought he heard a telephone begin to ring. It was hard to tell with his ears still numb from the gunshots. Jenny raised her arms and pushed at the trapdoor at the end of the hatch, but couldn’t lift it. ‘Help me!’ she told him. Allen took a deep breath as he tried to sit up and promptly choked, the cloying fumes rasping his throat. Isn’t carbon monoxide denser than air, so it sinks? he wondered dizzily. His arms seemed a very long way away as he pushed at the wooden coffin lid in front of his face, wheezing and coughing, and Jenny slithered drunkenly past him.
The ringing stopped or changed, somehow, from the distinctive double-ring of a British telephone to a rising and falling siren tone. Allen rolled onto his hands and knees and forced himself to crawl up the steps at the end of the trench. The hatch lay beside i
If the engine stopped something bad would happen. If the engine didn’t stop something bad would happen. Jenny was waving at the window. Allen hit it with the steel bar as she flinched back out of the way, and it shattered, crystal fragments across the green leather of the seats. He dropped the bar and lurched back a step as Jenny reached inside and did something and the engine died.
In the distance, the sound of sirens. In the corner of the garage, the sound of a key turning in a lock. Allen shook his head, trying to dislodge the deafening ringing in his ears. ‘Fuck,’ Jenny said succinctly as the side door opened.
Numb and groggy with petrol fumes, Allen watched Pussyface’s fixer step inside, warily pointing a pistol at him across the car. To his gas-addled eyes it seemed more like a prop from a kid’s game of cops and robbers than a real threat: normal people didn’t own guns in Allen’s world. ‘Get on the ground! On your face now!’ he shouted.
Behind him, Jenny slumped against the car. Allen began to giggle.
Sparks didn’t take it well. ‘Get down! Down or I’ll shoot her!’
Allen only laughed louder, until he had to lean against the car for support. The situation seemed hilarious to him, especially the way the guy was getting angrier and angrier, pink-cheeked and waving his prop around. So angry, in fact, that a moment later he squeezed the trigger. Evidently he was aiming for Jenny, but had scant chance of hitting her with the muzzle pointed at the ceiling. But this didn’t strike Allen as funny any more. It was probably a real gun and Sparks was trying to shoot Jenny and his head felt like a balloon and it wasn’t funny at all.
Allen glared at Sparks as he struggled to aim the pistol, and he noticed that it didn’t hurt when he tried to listen to the concrete garage floor, even though he could distantly feel his head throbbing in time to the wailing of the police sirens in the middle distance. ‘Do something,’ he heard Jenny say through ringing ears, and so he did, crumbling the topmost inches of floor beneath Sparks’ feet more finely than he’d tried for before and fluidizing it as Sparks fell, flailing desperately for support that wasn’t there, billowing choking clouds, clogging his lungs.
The screams took quite a while to stop.
‘So, Constable.’
She was back in uniform for this visit to Inspector Matthews’ office, her first since being discharged from hospital, where she’d spent a couple of days recovering from a beating compounded by a potentially dangerous case of carbon monoxide poisoning. Not looking good. Matthews’ expression was as forbidding as a glacier, chilly at best. ‘I’ve reviewed your report. The CPS will be following it up, so at least we’ve salvaged that much.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Matthews remained seated while she stood before his desk. ‘At ease.’ He paused for a few seconds, clearly considering his next words carefully. ‘The CPS will not be pursuing a charge of manslaughter against Mr Crippen. They concluded it was a clear case of self-defence and it was not in the public interest to prosecute.’
Jenny was good: she managed not to slump, exhale, or otherwise demonstrate undue emotional relief under Matthews’ baleful inspection.
‘Sets a very bad precedent to burn informants. I’ve had a word with Superintendent Rogers at Steelhouse Lane and he’s agreed to lose the charges against him – unless we need them later. I leave it to you to impress on Mr Crippen that we own his arse from now on.’ One eyebrow creaked slowly towards his receding hairline. ‘Can you do that?’
She could do that. ‘Yes, sir. I’ll make sure he understands.’
‘Good. You’re to stay on as his handler, for what it’s worth.’ Now the inspector’s chilly exterior thawed a couple of degrees. ‘He delivered on the deposit caper, maybe he’ll be good for something else besides putting McAndrews and his gang away.’
‘I think he wants to go back to university, sir. He was studying to be a civil engineer before he caught the virus.’ With the charges dropped there was nothing but prejudice stopping him from enrolling at Imperial or UCL in the autumn. They’d discussed it that first night back home after he was discharged from hospital, both of them nervous and unsure if they had a future together. Please don’t ask for details, she thought. The argument had been intense: the make-up sex even more so.
‘A civil engineer. From Jokertown.’ Matthews focused on her. ‘Wonders never cease. I suppose as long as he keeps his nose out of any more bank vaults there should be no objection from this quarter.’
Jenny shrugged, eloquently. ‘He says if he goes back to uni this year he’ll graduate in time to get a job on the Channel Tunnel project.’ A pause. ‘Boy’s going to go far …’
Probationary
by Marko Kloos
Phase I: Hermes
South Atlantic, April 30th, 1982
The sea was as grey as battleship steel, and it looked angry, white foam caps topping ten-foot swells. Sub-Lieutenant Rory Campbell knew that the large American aircraft carriers were so immense that you couldn’t feel you were at sea unless you drove through the middle of a hurricane. But HMS Hermes, the largest carrier of the Royal Navy, was only a third the size of one of those Yank monstrosities, and she bobbed up and down in the wave troughs as she made her way south into ever more atrocious weather. But to Rory, the frigid air and the salt spray out here on the weather passageway were preferable to the smells of jet fuel and engine exhaust on the busy flight deck above.
‘What dreadful weather to go to war in,’ he grumbled and flicked his cigarette over the steel cables of the safety railing.
‘On the contrary,’ said the man standing next to him. He was a full foot taller than Rory, and the turban he wore made him even more imposing. Major Ranjit Singh, the Lion, would have looked out of place on a Royal Navy ship even without the camouflage-pattern Army uniform he was wearing, or the large curved kirpan knife on his web belt.
‘It’s perfect weather to go to war in,’ Major Singh continued. His voice was deep and sonorous, and Rory suspected that his Silver Helix minder could probably sing very well. Not that this environment or the occasion called for any singing.
‘This? Glasgow in December is a tropical paradise compared to this shite.’
‘It keeps the enemy sentries under their ponchos and close to their warm gear,’ Major Singh said. ‘In the Army, we call that “recon weather”.’
Rory had been with the Lion for three weeks now, and the man never had anything but a calm and mildly pleased expression on his face. There were droplets of seawater spray in his bushy, chest-length beard, and his turban looked damp, but he looked out over the churning waters in Hermes’ wake with unperturbed serenity, taller than Rory even as he stood bent over a little, with his wrists resting on the safety rail and his palms pressed together. An iron bangle hung from one of his wrists and swayed softly with the movements of the ship.
‘Well, I hope it clears up by the time we get to where we’re going,’ Rory said.
‘I hope it doesn’t.’ Singh looked up at the gloomy sky. ‘I hope it gets worse. It will keep the Argentinian air force on the ground.’
Rory gazed back at the dirty-looking silvery wake of the carrier. In that direction was England, seven or eight thousand miles away. And they were steadily steaming on towards the Falkland Islands, now only a few hundred miles to their south, and whatever the Argentinian military had waiting for them there. It had taken the task force most of a month to sail this far from Portsmouth, and that was a long time for the Argies to prepare their positions.
‘We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?’
‘Go to war?’ Singh flexed his hands and looked at the bangle on his wrist. ‘They know we are on the way. If diplomacy hasn’t got them off those islands yet, I don’t think it will end without bloodshed. A foolish thing, this whole
‘I talked to a lad who served in garrison there once. Says it’s a lot like the Highlands. In parts, anyway. I suppose we’ve fought over less before, we Scots.’
Rory and Major Singh didn’t have much in common physically, but they shared a Scottish background. Rory had been pleased to find out that his mentor was also from Glasgow. Ranjit Singh was almost ten years older, but they had frequented some of the same stamping grounds back home in their youth, and it was always an easy bond when your histories shared landmarks and geography. Rory was from East Kilbride, Singh from Hillhead, and while these neighbourhoods were on opposite sides of the river, both men were Partick Thistle fans, and favouring the same football team was practically as good as sharing a religion. Rory liked the big, muscular Sikh, and he felt safer and calmer in his presence. He still didn’t really think of himself as an ace – he couldn’t fly, or bend steel bars, or shoot lightning from his hands – but the Lion was one without a doubt, and being teamed up with him made Rory feel legitimate.
‘That’s just my bloody luck,’ he said. ‘My first time out for the Silver Helix, and it has to turn into a shooting war.’
The Lion chuckled softly. ‘That is what we do. They don’t call on us unless things get ugly, my friend. But you are an officer in the Royal Navy. You would be here anyway, I think.’
‘Yeah.’ Rory tried not to sound defeated. When you sign up for military service, you have to expect the risk of having to go to war, but it’s all very abstract when you are just out of secondary school and looking for a way out of East Kilbride. The recruiters emphasized travel, adventure, and pay cheques. They didn’t talk about month-long journeys into frigid waters and enemy air forces looking to put anti-ship missiles into your conveyance. When you are seventeen, you think yourself immortal anyway. But the Lion was right, of course – if Rory’s card hadn’t turned a year and a half ago he would probably be on a ship in this task force anyway, sitting in front of a radar console on one of the frigates or destroyers steaming along with Hermes in the distance.