The Gallows Station

Agent Rose

2012-01-24T07:05:00.000-08:00

It's taken a while but things are starting to come together. The address book seized from Sergeant Paisley had been decrypted and our latest 'acquisition', Captain Butcher, is cooperating with his interrogators. The main reason he's talking is that he's trying to save his neck which, at the moment, is in imminent peril of being stretched thanks to his membership of the anti-Council terror organisation, Daylight. Butcher was brought in in comatose custody, tranked almost as soon as he was onboard the helicopter to prevent him from topping himself the way Paisley did. While he was under, the Mason family's re-education specialists had a look at him. He was carefully eased out of unconsciousness and then, via chemical inducements and hypnotic suggestion, the termination codes that would have killed him stone dead in the interrogation room were deactivated. Then he was woken up and Major Lally Mason's team went to work on him. Butcher is what's been described as a 'tier two capture' in whatever arcane language it is that military types speak. As a former Executioner turned freelance punching bag, security is something that passed me by since I was only ever concerned with ridding the State of those it had finished with. I was trained from the age of four to be a killer, but in very precise and narrowly defined circumstances, with the result that I'm an expert with a rope, a crack shot with a pistol, competent at hand to hand combat and completely ignorant of just about everything else including the day to day affairs of our country's myriad police forces. Of course, what makes it worse is that the people I'm working with are not even genuine police, but the Mason family's retainers who are somewhere between servants and mercenaries. All the 'great' families have retainers as a status symbol if nothing else, and they're to be found in all capacities, from scullery maids to bomb squads. The Masons, being among the richest, have a good two or three battalions of professional soldiers and Lally, as befits the eldest child of the head of the family, has overall command of them. Given the pressure the Masons are under, she's been landed with the job of eliminating their enemies - something that could realistically keep her employed until doomsday.

With evidence in our hands of the Fisher family's dubious relationship with Daylight commander Monica Grayne, the not-so-subtle forces of blackmail can be brought to bear. The Fishers have access to the Cornish coast, and it was via their estate that Monica skipped the country. Now her they're carrying the can because Lally's father, Speaker of the Council Garamond Mason, has had 'a quiet word' with Councillor Corby Fisher and persuaded him to ditch his allegiances to the Learmount family (the most vociferous of Garamond's critics) and side with the Masons. Doing so has thus plugged the loophole in the coastal defences, but at the expense of antagonising the Learmounts, who are Corby's patrons. I can see the battle lines being drawn from here because, as ever, nothing's as simple as it ought to be. After all, what we're supposed to be doing is finding Garamond's hidden enemies, not riling the ones he's already got. The Learmounts and Masons have been dancing around one another for decades, mutual wary respect keeping them from coming to blows, but in turning the Fishers like this, we may have crossed a line. If that's the case, the Masons can certainly expect a retaliation. As things stand, though, Paisley's address book has named the names we so desperately wanted - the other members of his cell. It also - and we couldn't believe our luck when this came to light - hints at the identity of the much-sought traitor inside the Council, the one who the Special Police has been searching for for the best part of two years. The address book identifies this person as 'Agent Rose' and seems to suggest that Paisley was on personal terms with him or her.

Armed with the identities of the other members of Paisley's cell, Lally issued clear-cut orders to the retainer team to bring them in for questioning. For his part, Butcher is explaining how, in his capacity as a Shore Patrol officer, he was able to sneak infiltrators through the supposed ring of steel that girts this country. Between his testimony and that of the soon-to-be-apprehended traitors on Paisley's list, this particular chunk of Daylight is in all probability finished. Once we've got them, the plan is to ensure that they confess and then present the information to Garamond and the Mason family's executive committee (the Caucus) and let them fashion it into a weapon to be used against his enemies. It'll be made to look as if the evidence has been gathered by fair, rather than foul, means and the witnesses will be re-educated and suitably conditioned to cooperate with the inquiry, after which they'll be sent to FJD for disposal. It ought to have the overall effect of silencing Garamond's critics by making him appear a lot more on the ball than he actually was when he let the Daylight cell operate under his nose in the first place. As for me, Lally's suggested a new deployment, once again to keep her little sister Trilly out of the picture for her own safety. Typical of Masons everywhere, Lally's idea of safety is closer to what I would consider mortal peril since, in order to lift Garamond completely out of the mire he dropped himself into, we're to do what two years of dedicated SP digging failed to achieve - find Agent Rose. Let me be clear on this: I'm to find Rose on my own. Me, Elenna Pointer, former Senior Executioner and hack investigator. For some bizarre reason Lally feels that I'm the ideal person to dig the traitor out, in spate of my total lack of qualifications for the job. I have this horrible feeling that the cows are coming home to roost, with the Masons extracting their pound of flesh for my role in the original Daylight conspiracy. After all, even if I do unearth Agent Rose, it'll be a cold day in hell before I get any credit for it - but there's a certain Mason daughter not a million miles away who could really, really benefit from Garamond's gratitude and forgiveness...

Black Operation

2012-01-22T02:56:00.000-08:00

I hit the ground hard. The Rhino didn't land because until the drop zone was secure, it was too risky. Therefore, the lumbering twin-rotor hovered at about thirty feet and the Mason retainers threw rappelling lines out and disappeared down them. I've used rappelling line precisely once in my career, back when Trilly was exercising her grab for the throne and pulling the teeth from her erstwhile allies, the Wastelanders, who'd had their hands on Britain's last functional nuclear warhead. On that occasion I'd exited the chopper and plunged straight through the roof of the building we were supposed to be securing, scoring a sort of tactical swing-and-a-miss in the process. This time I made sure I had hold of the rope before I reluctantly left the noisy, ratting but reasonably safe confines of the helicopter, and slid down it as fast as I dared. As befit an amateur, I smacked into the cobbles and hurt my ankles, rolling up in a heap next to the rope. The next thing I remembered was someone grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and hauling me into the cover of the old wash house as the Rhino, troops discharged, flew away and entered a holding pattern. My rescuer turned out to be Special Police Captain Sam Vickers, my fellow passenger in this retainer-led operation. Ostensibly he was the senior officer on the ground but, as with all retainer ops, it didn't work that way in practice. The troops took their orders from Lieutenant Cook and Sam could offer advice, but although they were prepared to salute Sam, that was as far as their professional respect went. As for me, they didn't know who I was and I wasn't inclined to tell them. As a former Executioner I was used to the contempt of the people, but that's not to say I was happy to give anyone a free excuse. Sam encouraged them to believe I was one of his officers and they gave me the time of day, although my tumble at the end of the rappelling line had the effect of lessening their deference.

The drop zone was an old, tumbledown manor house marked on the map as Green Gables. It was about ten miles from Dover and smack in the middle of the restricted zone that stretched right around the coast of Britain. The restricted zone was cleared for Citadel personnel only; we were there with special permission to 'extract' Captain Aloysius Butcher, an officer of Citadel's private security arm, the Shore Patrol. Butcher was compromised, an agent for a foreign state, but all we could tell his employers was that he was wanted for questioning with regard to a fraud perpetrated against the Mason family, which was an outright pack of lies backed up with convincing paperwork. We wanted him because he was a member of the terrorist organisation called Daylight, and his comrades had attacked the family and come perilously close to toppling Councillor Garamond Mason, the head of state. With so much store set in face - and of course the consequences of its loss - what the Mason retainers were really doing was expropriating and silencing the witnesses, and now it was Butcher's turn. He knew we were coming, of course. It's hard to hide the presence of a massive transport helicopter when it makes a noise like a thunderstorm in a cathedral, and we knew he wasn't going to be alone in the house. Green Gables, for all that it was rundown and looked to be on the verge of collapse, was nonetheless a Shore Patrol watch house, a listening post on the coast that spied on foreign shipping and kept an eye out for defectors and infiltrators. There were twelve Shore Patrol soldiers on the premises, including Butcher, and they were of course on full alert.

By the time I got my breath back and was able to hobble along, the shooting had already started. Some of the retainers had come down on the roof, while the others split up between the front and back doors. The Shore Patrol tended to draw its personnel from the ranks of the Urban Police so, generally speaking, they tended to be rather sloppy bullies who weren't used to having opposition. As a result their fire was wild and uncoordinated, quite in contrast with the precise and efficient return fire. As I watched from the lee of the wash house a body tumbled from an upstairs window and a rifle clattered against the cobbles. At Sam's urging I moved forward, the silenced automatic pistol in my hand. I'd been given the lightweight weapon because it had been hoped that the operation would be quick and straightforward, that all I'd have to do would be brandish the sinister thing and rely on the morale-sapping effect that silencers usually have. Now it was an extra nine inches of unwieldy barrel on a smallish sidearm of a type I wasn't used to and so, as we made our way toward the row of parked Shore Patrol cars, I unscrewed the damn thing and threw it away.

There were people in the nearest car, desperately starting it. We levelled our pistols immediately and Sam ordered them out, but in response the car's engine roared into life and drove straight at us. We fired in unison, Sam's Miller machine pistol and my poxy little sidearm. We aimed for the engine and the tyres but one of us must have capped the driver because the car kept coming as we threw ourselves aside, and then it smashed into the side of the wash house. A cloud of steam from erupted from the engine and the passengers, cut and bleeding, tried to scramble away. We recognised Butcher at once. The stocky officer was disorientated by the impact but there was pistol in his hand and it was coming to bear on us. Sam launched himself at Butcher and I piled in as best I could and together we subdued him. After that it was a case of mopping up and, as was rapidly becoming standard for these black operations, eliminating the witnesses. Green Gables was well ablaze by the time we flew away.

Reluctant Assassin

2012-01-20T04:11:00.000-08:00

We've had a breakthrough of sorts. The team Lally sent to the late Sergeant Paisley's digs returned with an address book that was written in code of some sort, an amateurish cobbled-together thing that the retainers are confident they'll crack and that's absolutely in keeping with the limited subterfuge of which pay rats are generally capable. Acting on intuition more than anything, Lally applied the code to one of the names we already knew - Amelia Fisher - to see if it was on the list. Sure enough, it was. Armed with that vital key, it ought to be a matter of time before the Mason cryptographers break the code and Lally tells me that they should have a usable decrypt by the end of the day. In the meantime she's assigning Sam Vickers, her little sister Trilly and I to the task of tracking down Monica Grayne's one known extant contact, a Shore Patrol officer named Captain Aloysius Butcher. Butcher's area of operation is the south coast, where he presumably funnels contraband, escapers and infiltrators via the various disused port facilities he's supposed to be guarding. He works with a squad of Shore Patrol soldiers, some eight or nine men, which will make grabbing him a little more complicated as we don't know how many of them - if any - are in on what their officer gets up to in his spare time. However, since we're reasonably certain that Monica got out of the country via the Fisher family's secured dock in Tintagel, Cornwall, it's hopeful that Butcher, being based on the south coast, doesn't know what's happened and so won't be expecting trouble. Ideally that means we should be able to pick him up and scarper without too much trouble and, more importantly, without leaving a mess that could return to haunt us. Either way, we can't afford to let him remain at large because he's a threat to security and a loose pair of lips on top of that, and there's every danger that if the Special Police get him before we do, Garamond Mason's secret gambit to secure his throne will be exposed and he'll be sunk - right along with us.

There's a second reason for getting us out of the capital and back to the coast: Trilly Mason. As far as we're aware, Trilly's presence with the retainer search team is unknown to Garamond and he's likely to be furious if he ever finds out: after all, he did kick her off the throne and then sell her into slavery, which was what led to Daylight getting their hands on her in the first place. Trilly and I were both re-educated by the expert brainbusters of the French military, our cortexes loaded with codes and hidden commands. My programming was stripped out via further re-education at the hands of the late re-ed chief at the FJD Academy. Trilly, on the other hand, supposedly broke hers and reasserted control with no outside help. To be honest, I'd thought that was impossible because of how re-education works - more or less 'locking out' the original personality and replacing it with an artificial one. But here was Trilly, as charming, enthusiastic, outgoing and insane as ever, telling anyone willing to listen how she'd simply battered down the walls separating her from her unwanted guest and then dragging out and destroying it. I didn't give it much thought at the time but a private conference with Sam and Lally confirmed that it was impossible, with Lally likening what Trilly claimed to have done as attempting to drive a car away without getting into it first. We agreed that there was something wrong with Trilly even though we had no idea what, and so it was in everyone's interests to keep her away from anything important until we could have her looked at properly.

Therefore we hopped on board the transport helicopter and flew south, heading for the crumbling old port city of Dover and the last-known location of Captain Butcher's team. At the moment the Mason retainers are receiving logistical support from the Office of Naval Security (aka 'Citadel'). Acting on the assumption that it's unwise to impede the head of state's private army, they've agreed to allow us access to the Shore Patrol's operating area, along with unlimited use of the facilities, in return for keeping them posted as to what we're up to - which isn't going to happen. We deliberately didn't tell Citadel what we wanted with Captain Butcher, only that he could 'help us with our inquiries'. We didn't want to draw any attention to what we were up to because it was borderline illegal. We were, after all, appropriating witnesses to a case that the Special Police was also following and our actions had resulted in one death already. Butcher, unless he proved extremely lucky, was likely to end up the same way but if the rogue captain's employers got an inkling of what we were really doing, they would likely arrest him themselves and then hand him straight to the SP, dropping us all in the same hot water in the process. Therefore we did what retainers do best: we lied to Citadel and Lally sent a sheaf of forged documents implicating Butcher in something less likely to incriminate the Mason family if anything went awry.

We flew south in one of the family's Rhino transport choppers, but this time we had company because Lally sent a squad of retainer troops with us for backup. They were loyal soldiers, veterans who'd grown up taking the Mason shilling, and that was necessary because if push came to shove and we got into a fight with the Shore Patrol, we'd need people with us who could be relied upon to pull the trigger. If we'd been SP then a firefight would be the last thing we'd need, because Citadel and the Special Police answer to the same people and blue-on-blue incidents look bad on a resume. The ideal mission progression would be that we'd locate Butcher and snatch him from under the noses of his squad-mates, as we had Paisley, only this time we'd hold our prisoner in comatose custody while the re-eds neutralised any termination codes he might carry. Until the cryptographers finish with Paisley's address book, Butcher is our last link to Daylight and he's quite possibly the linchpin of that organisation's operations on the south coast. We had to take him alive at any cost and then we had to ensure that he talked only to us. With a mission profile like that, it stood to reason that you'd need steady troops at your back because this was as 'black' an operation as you could get in a state like Council Britain. The high elite are generally untouchable but if there was one thing likely to get them into trouble it's impeding the Special Police. We were playing a high-stakes game and it would take one twitch to drop us in it, which was why I reluctantly surrendered my reliable old P883 Razer sidearm and accepted a silenced semiautomatic in exchange. The new pistol was small, nasty, lethal... it was the weapon of an assassin.

The Story So Far...

2012-01-18T04:49:00.000-08:00

With Paisley gone our options were limited. We weren't really bothered that he might be missed because officers walk out of Urban Police stations all the time and are often found the next morning in the river, having drunk themselves unconscious and toppled in. The pay rats are not generally the most gracious of individuals and they're not exactly punctilious about following rules. The fact that Paisley had been abducted by professional troops right in front of his own station was one more reason for his comrades to keep their mouths shut: it had been staged to look exactly like a Special Police swoop and if the officers who witnessed it knew what was good for them then they would forget they'd ever known a Sergeant Paisley. As far as we were concerned, though, it was an unfortunate speedbump. Major Lally Mason, my de facto commanding officer, had already sent a retainer unit to Paisley's home and they would be busily pulling the place apart right then, searching for something concrete that would link him to Daylight. We knew for a fact that he was one of their people because he'd demonstrated the fact with his spectacular suicide. What we needed was the next link in the chain. The ultimate goal was to find the Daylight network responsible for attacking Councillor Garamond Mason's much-vaunted regional extermination centres. The RECs were supposed to be the new, modern face of capital punishment, efficient factories of death that could eliminate hundreds of people at a stroke and make the gallows stations of the Final Justice Department obsolete. The Department had entered into an ill-advised alliance with Daylight to ensure that the RECs died at birth, but with such completely different reasons for the pact (threatened self-interest versus idealism) the alliance was just as doomed and now we were engaged in the executive-level arse-covering that had always been inevitable.

Rolling up the Daylight network was crucial to the survival of Garamond Mason as head of state. He'd engineered a coup that had deposed his despised younger daughter, Trilly. In true Council fashion the story was a convoluted one of power politics and family wrangling. The Mason family is near the pinnacle of Council Britain's untouchable elite. There are about twelve similar families, all sharing the Holy Grail that is the Green-Three loyalty rating. Technically that makes them equals, but as with everything, that's only the public version. The high elite have their fingers in pretty much all the pies but the actual bakeries are run by their in-house private armies - the retainers. Retainers come in all shapes and sizes, everything from domestic servants and nannies to professional assassins and, in our case, private law enforcement. Garamond's particular problem was that when FJD and Daylight united against him they delivered a heavy blow to his prestige and it came from a direction he hadn't anticipated. As Speaker of the Council Garamond is the nearest thing the regime has to a king, but he relies for his position on an image of omniscience and so if it came to light that his modernising crusade had been undermined by the regime's least-regarded bureaucracy, FJD, then he risked becoming a laughing stock. Nothing weakens a leader quite as fatally as ridicule and so that was what our mission was all about - finding those who knew what had happened and silencing them. We were following a cold trail and killing everything we found on it.

I'm a former FJD Executioner. I worked on the gallows for eleven years and in that time I killed over three thousand helpless people. I ought to be the very last person in the world to have moral reservations about what we were doing in Garamond's name, but the fact is that I was raised with the Department's credo from the age of four, so I know that FJD is not the rapacious, barely efficient murder machine that 'modernisers' like Garamond claim. FJD is as merciful as it can be, as it's allowed to be considering that all they really are is the garbage collectors of the legal system. By the time a prisoner reaches FJD all hope is gone and the only thing we can do - and it's what we do best - is put them out of their misery quickly and with consideration. Naturally enough, coming from a background like that, the potential faceless brutality of the regional extermination centres horrified me, hence my part in the Department's alliance with Daylight. Now I'm paying my penance to Garamond, doing my bit to make good the PR disaster that might yet befall him. In return for immunity from prosecution I sold the Department's boss, Councillor Merpath, down the river, thus ending the alliance. It had been fatally mired in any case, because Daylight had reneged and used it as an excuse to carry out a bombing and murder campaign we never agreed to. Handing over Merpath had been the one way to sever the link and bring the campaign to a halt before more people died, but Garamond had conditions of his own and one of them was that I turn against my erstwhile allies, something I had little compunction about doing anyway because they'd also reneged on their personal deal and re-educated me to transform me into a willing assassin. With that programming broken I'm myself again and I'm really keen to find Monica Grayne, the Daylight commander in New London Town, and explain to her the depths of my disappointment. The fact that she's apparently fled the country doesn't alter anything - indeed, the retainer investigation is now more pressing than ever because we'd like to make sure that if she ever does come back, she'll be caught and punished.

Assisted Suicide

2012-01-16T05:14:00.000-08:00

Sergeant Ron Paisley wasn't in custody for long. The Mason retainers hit the Urban Police station on Watford Road at two in the afternoon as he was arriving for his shift. Just as his car pulled up at the station's fortified gate two Panther scout cars with Mason drivers pulled up, one in front and the other behind, boxing him in. There was a brief struggle and an exchange of fire with the gate guards and then Paisley was gone, appropriately enough abducted in broad daylight. The Panthers were unmarked and painted a drab grey but the MO of the snatch was pure Special Police, naturally enough considering so many retainers came from there. Paisley was undoubtedly confused and scared, wondering what the hell he could have done to land himself in this mess because, after all, as far as anyone knew his links to Daylight, the terror group, were tenuous at best. Indeed, they were so tenuous that there remained a chance he might not know what he was mixed up in, which was why Major Laurena Mason (Lally) had him brought in on a charge of Suspicion, a neat catch-all offence that's seen many an unfortunate bystander whisked off to the gallows. At a conservative estimate based on vague memory and eleven years on the scaffold, I think I probably hanged about five hundred people guilty of nothing more and it says a lot about the regime that Suspicion is a death crime but the many and varied examples of sexual deviancy we encountered at the molly house are not.

As the senior officer it was standard form that Lally would handle the interrogation. Normally an SP Q&A was preceded by an ancient tradition known as 'the showing of the implements', torturer shorthand for giving the suspect a close-up view of the rack, the coshes, the electrodes, the boiling tar and whatever else an imaginative nutcase felt like giving his client a sniff of. Most people caved long before anything was actually used but in this case we had two good reasons for cutting corners: first, in spite of appearances we were not the police but retainers in the employ of the Mason family. Second, and more pertinently, the real police were following the same trail somewhere in our wake which meant we had first dibs on anyone we picked up. All Sergeant Paisley had done (officially) was associate with someone who was later revealed to be an enemy of the state. As evidence it was as thin and circumstantial as it was possible to get but, unhampered with any need to stick to the law, he was the last person who was going to know that. I watched the proceedings from behind the one-way armoured glass, along with Sam Vickers, my companion-in-arms, and Trilly Mason, Lally's psychopathic little sister and my supposed best friend - in her head, at least. Trilly's aged eighteen but she can be very childlike at times. She gets bored easily and her attention wanders, but if there's one thing guaranteed to have her glued, goggle-eyed, to her seat, then it's violence. Sam watched impassively as Paisley was questioned and I made a point to keep my feelings in check, but Trilly had her nose up against the glass, grinning and shouting encouragingly as her big sister got to work.

It didn't take long for Paisley to crack, but then it doesn't usually anyway. I've always considered 'expanded interrogation techniques' to be an exercise in 'rubbish-in-rubbish-out' because in order to get people to talk while working them over, you inevitably end up asking leading questions that they seize on in order to tell you what they think you want to hear. That's why, as an Executioner, I was always happier knowing as little as possible about the people delivered to my gallows. Aside from the fact that I couldn't help them, by the time I retired I'd long reached the conclusion that the death laws were arbitrarily drafted by people with a vested - usually financial - reason for enforcing them. I didn't like being the last stop on the short path of justice and from the look of it Paisley was destined to end up one more notch in the Final Justice Department's belt. At least, that was the most likely outcome until something very unexpected happened.

Lally hadn't been working on him for long when it happened. Usually, if there's a hint that a prisoner might know something really valuable all the physical brutality is set aside in favour of the far slower, gentler but way more insidious re-education therapy that entails the use of mind-altering drugs, hypnotism and the carefully crafted questions. The main reason re-ed is a 'second tier' technique is that it takes time, three or four hours at minimum, to elicit usable information. In the case of Paisley all we knew was that he'd had contact with Amelia Fisher and Monica Grayne and that the brothel madam had made it clear that he was Amelia's friend but, beyond that, there was nothing to suggest he was an important catch His social life was what had prompted us to pull him in, because pay rats and Green-Two elites absolutely do not mix. In any normal circumstances they might glimpse one another from afar and that was as familiar as they'd ever get. Leaving aside the social scandal of an Urban Police plod getting to know an aristocrat (albeit a middling one), if they even so much as exchanged a word that wasn't to do with business she would be shunned and he'd be demoted. But Cholet, the madam, had been emphatic on the point - Amelia and Paisley were close. Amelia was a 'licensed deviant', a lesbian and so from my admittedly limited experience she'd have even less reason to want to know a paid enforcer of the State's will, so what was the crux of their relationship? It was a valid question in any circumstances, let alone the ones we were facing now, and so Lally was reasonably restrained ot begin with and merely confronted him with what Cholet had said and asked for an explanation.

It must have dawned on Paisley, given what we were fishing for, that he was done for. If Suspicion wasn't enough to hang him then a charge of corrupting an elite would certainly do it. He was belligerent and defiant but what he did next astonished me. He began to dictate a blatantly false confession that implicated just about every prominent figure he could think of off the top of his head and explicitly linked them with Daylight, a word that he shouted as loud as he could... and then he stopped dead. He went rigid, contorted, started gasping for breath and, as Lally realised what was happening, turned a nasty shade of blue and expired before the crash team could get to him. He'd been fitted with a termination code and, knowing he was cornered, he'd spouted enough incriminatory nonsense to set it off. Strapped into an interrogation chair, covered by armed retainers, watched by half a dozen cameras and questioned by one of the Council's best officers, he'd managed to avoid answering the questions and commit suicide before anyone could stop him. I'd never seen anything like it but Lally was furious with herself for not realising what he was doing until it was too late. With Paisley's death we'd lost our link to Daylight but it was clear from the look on Lally's face that the trail wouldn't end here...

Underground Railway

2012-01-14T08:09:00.000-08:00

It was with a sense of overwhelming relief that I left the molly house behind. The glimpse I'd been given of the seamy underbelly of Council Britain was going to stay with me for a long time and I doubted if even a barrel of spirits would be enough to wash the stain from my cortex. If not for the fact that the molly houses enjoyed official tolerance (to a point) I would have happily stood by and watched it burn to the ground. The place served as a brothel and meeting place for what the Council, with its love of euphemisms, referred to as 'licensed deviants' - basically homosexuals and cross-dressers, plus a scattering of other 'philias' that I really didn't want to explore further. Officially everyone had to do their bit to keep Britain populated and so such people as frequented the molly houses performed as required, but their marriages were shams at best and the molly houses were the only places where they could let off the subsequent steam without being arrested. We'd arrived at the molly house of Beckenham Street as a result of our inquiries into the activities and social circle of Amelia Fisher, a female homosexual who was currently pushing up whatever plant life was capable of growing in the floor of a cellar. Executed by her own family, she was proving surprisingly garrulous, demonstrating that the dead do, in fact, tell tales. From the brothel madam we had received two names, Amelia's closest friends in the underworld that she moved in. One was Monica Grayne, the Daylight terror cell chief and the main object of our interest. The other, rather to my surprise, was one Ron Paisley, an Urban Police patrol sergeant.

Of course, it made sense that Monica would have contacts within the Urban Police. After all, when news of her romantic affair with Amelia leaked out, it was where she'd ended up working after she was sacked from the Councillor Christ Hospital. The Urban Police have an unhealthy reputation for corruption, to the point where they've acquired the nickname, 'pay rats'. Amelia Fisher and Monica Grayne were disgraced elites; the pay rats are the thugs and bullies the Council employs to keep the commoners in line. Between them the two women would have had access to enough money to 'buy' some protection because, at the end of the day, what else were the Urban Police but mercenaries? We'd been looking for something that connected Grayne and Fisher to Daylight. This could be it. After all, with the combined forces of Garamond Mason's retainers and the Special Police breathing down her neck, Monica had simply disappeared, escaping from Britain to the Continent without even breaking sweat. Perhaps she'd called in favours from people she knew, fellow 'licensed deviants' with reasons of their own for committing treason. More worryingly, though, it was possible that in the time she'd been posted to that Urban Police unit, she'd corrupted them even further than usual, creating a secret underground railway to the Continent in the process. The Special Police knew that there was one and they'd been working to crack it for years, but if it was 'in house' to the point where the Council's own enforcers were running it, then it was no wonder they couldn't find the damn thing. It was a stretch, very circumstantial and with no verifiable proof whatsoever - and that was why 'Suspicion' was an arrestable offence.

I left it to Sam to work out the details. By this point we were pulling so many strings that we could have woven a quilt, but the most important strand was the one that led to Garamond Mason. After all, we were working in his name to squash the Daylight network in the city, preferably before any of them could be picked up by the 'legitimate' SP investigators. We were involved in an arse-covering exercise, trying to salvage a rogue Councillor's reputation before his peers cottoned on and so standard procedure was to throw any suspects we unearthed to his personal wolves. So it would be in this case. We could either pay Ron Paisley a visit and show him our credentials (which weren't that great) or we could put the fear of God into him and then demand answers. If there existed an underground lifeline of any sort then we had to know about it because at some point on the chart all the little strings linked up. It was an easy enough decision: I phoned Lally Mason to let her know what we'd discovered and she arranged to have the Mason retainers raid Paisley's station. Had Paisley been a private citizen I would have felt a good deal more uncomfortable with handing him over to the family like this, but at the end of the day he was very probably corrupt and as a pay rat he was almost certainly a bastard of some sort. All Lally would really need to do was confront him with our 'evidence' (strictly hearsay) and a freshly dug grave (absolute solid fact) and let him fill in the blanks in between on his own. Whether or not he subsequently ended up in that grave was up to Lally, but given what we were doing in Garamond's name, I didn't fancy his chances. At the end of the day we were going behind the backs of the Special Police and if they found that out, there was every possibility that we'd end up sharing the same hole. It wasn't a prospect that appealed.

The Molly House

2012-01-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

There wasn't anything to mark the house on Beckenham Street from any other property. It was located in a fairly high-rent part of New London Town and looked just like all the others in that it had three floors and an attic space. There was a Record card tracking mast built into the roof of the house next door and so I suspected that the attic space in the molly house was similarly off-limits, but if that prohibition was the extent of the harassment they experienced then they could count themselves as lucky. Given what went on in molly houses, the people who frequented them were more than used to the attentions of the police in any case, which was why I'd made a point to get hold of a suitable uniform from Sam Vickers before going anywhere near the place. As for Trilly, we'd decided that the best possible place for her was in the car, officially covering the back door in case anyone should feel inclined to make a run for it. I had no idea why they might be so inclined, but then not everybody reacts to the police in the same way. As it was, I gripped the door knocker with genuine trepidation and then swung it with no real wish for the noise to be heard. Unfortunately, it wasn't my day because the door swung open at once, to reveal what I assumed was a man, albeit an outrageously dressed. It was hard to be certain exactly what I was seeing because he was wearing a very ornate dress and what Sam told me was a 'Macaroni wig', a frightening beehive thing fully two feet high and with a ridiculous little hat on top. The creature leered at Sam with undisguised lust and called him 'sweetheart' while giving me the same sort of hostile glare I get everywhere I go, although this was the first time I'd ever been glad of that.

Appearances aside, it was highly unlikely that the molly on door duty was going to try anything with us because, after all, while molly houses weren't illegal as such, they were frowned upon to the point where the Special Police didn't need much of an excuse to raid one. Sam's uniform bore collar tabs that identified him as an officer of the Criminal Investigation Unit, that branch of the SP that actually concentrated on solving crimes rather than just hitting people and it was interesting to watch the gate guard leap to the wrong conclusion and then offer his eager help to us. I'd done some reading on molly houses on the flight back from Cornwall and it was plain that they were the sorts of establishment that gave houses of ill repute a bad name. Mostly the clientèle were male homosexuals and cross-dressers, but there was usually a 'ladies' room' too and I assumed that it had been to this that Amelia Fisher had gravitated during her time in the city. It seemed an odd sort of place to find a terrorist cell but it did have the advantage that the denizens would be close-mouthed about what they got up to there. Molly houses were where society's misfits came to let off steam in a reasonably safe environment. While what they got up to inside wasn't illegal, there was a crime on the statute books entitled 'engaging in sodomy on unlicensed premises' which broadly hinted at the Council's desire to keep all the - as it saw them - rotten eggs in one basket.

We followed the molly through the house and passed a few open doors along the way. Even now it's hard to find words for the things I witnessed, everything from a bizarre sham marriage ceremony to run-of-the-mill sexual encounters. Every so often a gong would ring and everyone not otherwise occupied would stand at attention and sing the chorus of 'God Save the King' for reasons nobody seemed inclined to explain. It was small wonder that the Council did its best to keep such people under control but I couldn't help wondering what the hell these idiots thought they were doing. Toleration is a hard-won privilege in Council Britain and it was pretty obvious that the mollies had won their exemption because they had a few bent (so to speak) Councillors among their regulars, but the kind of open licentiousness we witnessed in just half an hour in that place put me in mind of people walking a tightrope over a blast furnace. They were asking for trouble and from the look on Sam's face they were likely to get it, and soon. The fact that one of the mollies tried to proposition him didn't help, but Sam showed admirable restraint in ignoring it. If it had been me, I'm not sure how I would have reacted to a man in Georgian costume and an enormous powdered wig offering to spank my truncheon, but I'd probably had hit him with it.

After what seemed like a very hot and embarrassing eternity, we reached the 'Ladies' Room' and our escort knocked a complicated, coded knock that resulted in a tumult of noise of the 'pack it away and hide it' variety before the door swung open. By that point I had a reasonable idea of what to expect and so when a woman naked but for what looked like badly torn bits of bin liner greeted us, I was prepared. Unfortunately, she immediately made a grab for me with a delighted exclamation of "Ah, the turn's arrived!" that had me instinctively drawing my pistol before Sam stepped in to forestall an incident. He laid down the law at once: we were Special Police officers pursuing an investigation and we would appreciate their cooperation. Of course, he didn't need to say what would happen to them if they didn't provide it. The unspoken threat was enough for the mollies and they invited us in, though we declined their offer of a seat on the four-poster bed, under the sheets of which, having counted the legs and divided by two, I realised eight people lay intertwined. At mention of Amelia Fisher the room's activities ceased and the Madam, who called herself Cholet, pulled on a dressing gown which indicated to everyone that playtime was, for now, over. I could have heard a pin drop as Sam broke the news of Amelia's death. It was odd, really, watching the genuine grief on their faces as we told them what had happened. If you'd listen to the Council, these people were amoral deviants whose official toleration was not going to last, but in that moment they were just like any people who'd lost a loved one. From the perspective of someone used to being the cause of death, I've never really been comfortable with grief. As an Executioner it was never my job to cry over spilled blood and I haven't really reconnected with humanity since I retired. That was why I was able to observe the outpouring of sadness with a complete coldness that even Sam remarked upon. Having had their fun spoiled, the mollies wanted us out of there so that they could, as Cholet put it, hold a 'proper' funeral for her. Therefore, she gave us the details of Amelia Fisher's 'best friends in all the world' and then had us politely thrown out. I didn't recognise the first name on the list, but the second demonstrated that we'd been right to pursue the connection, because it was Monica Grayne.

Of Mollies And Dames

2012-01-12T07:19:00.000-08:00

As ever, the drinking house is the best place to get information. I'd hesitate to call it 'intelligence' because once you ply someone with enough drink, what you get is a sort of semi-coherent surge one part stream-of-conscious and the other part rubbish with the odd usable fact therein. So it transpired at the Shire Horse, the inn at Tintagel that the workers on the Fisher estate favoured when the omnipresent Shore Patrol allowed them in. As with all the major players in the elite, the Fishers had a force of retainers, indentured servants and soldiers bound by fealty to their masters, but against that the family was not particularly wealthy or all that powerful and so there weren't many of them. Because of that they hired labourers as and when they needed them, paying them off when the job was done. It was a cheaper alternative than housing, feeding and paying a full-time staff but, as with most things, retainer forces were a status symbol and, the fewer you had, the more your peers looked down their noses at you. Some family retainer forces were formidable. The Masons, for instance, fielded a small army of them, everything from kitchen scrubbers to gunship crews, and they were highly trained, very motivated and utterly loyal. The Fishers, on the other hand, had a core of about twenty retainers, most of whom were either maids, cooks or butlers, but no in-house security at all. Then again, I doubted if they had anything worth defending apart from the dark secret buried in the cellar.

Because they only hired when they had to, the Fishers were viewed with similar disdain by the commoners. It's an accepted facet of the elite that they're rich, so genteel poverty like that of the Fishers inspired only scorn. The bar tab we ran up on Garamond Mason's expense was smaller than we'd anticipated because the tongues didn't need much oil before they began to wag. As a rule of thumb commoners talk to the Special Police when they're ordered to, and when they do they spill their guts, comprehensively and without holding back anything that could come back to haunt them later. Because of that, there was a certain air of novelty about what we were doing that ought to have had the brighter ones suspicious at the very least. I noticed one or two shrewd glances as we got the drinks in but I highly doubted if anyone would have risked checking up on us. Sam held court at the bar and I stayed close at hand, taking notes and asking the odd question now and then. We refrained from making any threats because it wasn't that kind of investigation. We already knew that the Fishers had killed their errant daughter out of fear of the harm her 'deviancy' could have done to whatever passed for their fortune. What we were doing now was sounding out the hirelings for their opinions with regard to the family. In that respect the alcohol helped because the more voluble - and gullible - tended to offer things for free that they might not otherwise have mentioned without prompting. For all that people had to speak to the SP, burning bridges with the only employer in the area was another thing altogether and so the vast majority of the commoners were coy about what they knew. The general feeling was that the Fishers were 'nice enough,' 'all right,' 'not bad,' and any number of similar non-sentiments. They hired from the village, but not often enough to qualify as 'proper' landlords. Every now and then the gardens would need attention, the dry stone wallswould need maintenance, the animals looked after and so on, and then the call would go out, the labourers and artisans would report for duty and the Fishers would pay them when they were finished. It was all very mundane but, for commoners living in what was technically a restricted area, smack in the middle of Shore Patrol territory, it was a bad arrangement because there was very little other work and so not much money. The inn ran at a loss and only the Shore Patrol really kept it afloat, which inevitably led to friction with the locals who, more often than not, were barred from their own pub. That was one reason why our tab was appreciated, because without it they'd be limited to pop.

It was over an hour before the ice cracked. By then we'd taken general statements from everyone and were collating the data in the booth we'd sequestered. In the middle of that, a young man named Terry slipped into the booth and brought with him the first usable information. Like his peers he knew of Amelia Fisher, but what made him exceptional was that he was also familiar with what he called her 'proclivities'. He knew this because he'd gone so far as cultivating her friendship, an incredibly risky proposition for a commoner in a society where the master of the household was quite entitled to horse-whip anyone who came too close to his daughter. He told us that Amelia had spurned his approaches and hinted as to why and, while homosexuality might not actually be illegal as such, it was certainly proscribed to the point where those deemed to be 'guilty' of it had a very hard life. Terry suggested that in her search for some kind of an outlet for her frustrations, Amelia had made contact with 'the scene' in New London Town. That in turn suggested a web of like-minded people who intermingled in private while publicly staying on the straight and narrow. The inference was that Amelia and Monica moved in the same circles and that gave us a chance of unraveling enough of the web to uncover those who were using it to habour terrorists. Terry was very nervous and kept glancing furtively around, but he suggested that if we really wanted an insight into Amelia Fisher's life the we ought, as he put it, to screw up our courage, hold our noses and visit the molly house on Beckenham Street in New London Town.

While it wasn't exactly a golden lead, it was at least marginally better than the generally resentful gossip we'd gleaned from the others, but the prospect of strolling casually into a molly house did not appeal to me at all. Molly houses were basically heavily regulated brothels where men and women of a similar ilk could meet, sodomise one another and cross-dress without fear of retribution. According to Sam the molly houses were regulated and the clientèle were registered, but because there was such a stigma attached to the places, they were frequently raided by the police. Given the haphazard way the death laws were compiled, I'm strongly of the opinion that homosexuality was excluded by some closeted Councillor who frequented molly houses. They certainly had a rather sick reputation but the inference I drew from Sam's mention of the police raids was that the denizens enjoyed a certain amount of freedom denied to the average citizen and I knew for a fact that there were police officers out there who dearly wished for the death laws to be amended. Had we been working on an official SP investigation it would have been a simple matter of hopping on the nearest computer, pulling up everything we knew about the Beckenham Street molly house and then organising another raid. Unfortunately, flying under the radar as we were, it meant that if we wanted to identify Amelia's friends, we'd have to go there in person and find out for ourselves and, regulated or not, I'd heard enough horror stories about the places in the past to be extremely uncomfortable with the idea. Yet we had little choice. The clock was ticking and it was certain that the longer we dallied here in Cornwall, the more likely the dirty secrets we were trying to bury would leak out. Therefore, I reached for the belt computer and called Trilly, who was still waiting for us in the helicopter, and warned her to prepare, not sure whether I should worry more for her or the people she was going to encounter in that den of ill-repute...

A Family Disgraced

2012-01-11T07:21:00.000-08:00

Amelia Fisher had taken holy orders and retired to a convent in the wilds of the Scottish Communities: that's the story Sam and I were given when we arrived at Landrake House, the ancestral seat of the Fisher family (ancestral as in it was built eighty years ago, marking the Fishers very much as new money). The particular horse's mouth that imparted this pearl was Lady Gretchen Fisher, Amelia's mother and mistress of the house when Councillor Grant Fisher is away. She saw us in the drawing room, a parlour of some sort that was crammed with book shelves that creaked under the weight of some very dusty tomes that probably hadn't been opened since they were purchased, and perhaps not even then. To judge from the expensive furnishings, the drapes and the overstuffed chairs, the Fishers liked to display their wealth and it hinted at a private insecurity about, in all likelihood, their humble origins. They were Green-Twos on the loyalty scale, marking them as very low aristocracy at best and, more likely, Johnny-come-latelies who affected the mannerisms without possessing the means. The mansion was far from decrepit or crumbling, but between the entrance hall and the parlour we passed four doors that led into rooms that were devoid of furnishings of any sort. Clearly, as the old saying puts it, while they were capable of talking the talk, they couldn't walk the walk. The Fishers were fake, just like the story Lady Gretchen tried to palm us off with.

As a long-standing CIU officer Sam Vickers was used to people lying to him because, as a frontline investigator, it came with the job. My own skills are embryonic at best and I've always relied more on luck and guesswork, but even I could see how nervous and shifty she was. She was wearing a cream-white gown and an ornate necklace, and the way she kept fiddling with the beads suggested that she was uncomfortable about something, though it might only have been my presence. Sam was in his Special Police uniform, complete with its CIU flashes on the collar but, given the reception that Executioners normally get, I was out of uniform and wore instead a nondescript, dark grey suit and trousers that had her ladyship glancing at me as I poked around the room and examined the contents. I allowed her to carry on thinking I was some kind of CIU spook because edgy people usually spill things. To test her story Sam asked for the details of the convent to which Amelia had supposedly retreated and Lady Gretchen floundered for a moment before regaining her composure and dictating the address in a voice that shook ever so slightly. Sam showed her no mercy. Normal courtesy for the elite was to accept whatever was said with a polite smile and then check up on it later if you really had to but in this case Sam flourished the belt computer's handset, punched in the information and then telephoned the convent right there and then while her ladyship sweated, obviously terrified that we were going to learn some dark family secret. Right on cue, just as the convent answered - on speaker phone - her ladyship blurted out the truth. Technically we would have been within our rights to charge her for withholding evidence, but it wasn't a road we were keen to explore since we were on Fisher property at the behest of Garamond Mason, and relations between the two families were frosty at best. It was far better from our perspective to accept our victory with good grace and so we listened as the sordid history of Amelia Fisher was revealed.

According to Lady Gretchen, her daughter had always been 'strange', rather detached from the rest of the family and not at all keen to pursue marriage, which was the accepted role of daughters of the elite. Amelia was the oldest of four children and there was only one son, who was still in school and so not in much position to run the estate in the event of a sudden inheritance. As the next best thing Amelia was expected to promote Fisher interests, cultivate connections, attend soirées, dance with eligible bachelors and finally get hitched to a fine young fellow of slightly lower rank whose assets the Fishers could then absorb. It was the way with the elite: most marriages were arranged and if the spouses happened to love one another then that was a happy coincidence. Pretty much all of the elite operate like this, the notable exception being the Masons and in particular Trilly and Lally, Garamond's two daughters, neither of whom wanted any truck with the tradition and had been strong enough to reject it. Amelia hadn't been blessed with such steel will and had been farmed off more than once to prospective in-laws, only to be sent back by return of post some time later with a label attached that read, 'unsuitable material'. Eventually the Fishers despaired of finding a match and turned their attentions to the next-oldest child, the middle girl Bronwen, who duly delivered. Left to her own devices, Amelia went to university. Showing at aptitude for chemistry, she'd found a job with Maloney Pharmaceuticals, paying for her education via her job as a laboratory assistant. That, according to her ladyship, had been where the trouble started because it was there that she'd come into contact with Monica Grayne.

It had seemed innocent enough at first, a simple student-staff relationship, but at some point along the way the two women had developed what her ladyship described as 'illegal feelings' for one another, the sort of feelings that could have disastrous repercussions for an ambitious family. They had been caught in flagrante and the scandal had exploded from there. The witness was bribed and the police were called off but the news reached the ears of Councillor Robert Learmount, the Fishers family's patron. It was made quite clear that if the Fishers wanted to enjoy the continued protection of the Learmounts, Amelia must be dealt with. And so, in the finest traditions of the elite, they sacrificed her. She was sent home in disgrace and then, on Learmount's direct orders, she was escorted down into the cellar and shot, then buried under the floor while the story of her taking holy orders was spread to account for the disappearance. As for the Grayne family, lacking so merciless a patron, they had settled for kicking Monica out of the elite, hence her transfer from the Councillor Christ Hospital and subsequent recruitment into the Urban Police. It was easy to imagine her rage. In a society so heavily prejudiced, life would have been very difficult for those who, for whatever reason, challenged the norm. As an Executioner I used to see the results of such challenges on a daily basis but the important thing is that, for all the potential for damage, sexual deviancy isn't actually against the written law - which meant the Fishers sacrificed Amelia for the sake of their wealth. No wonder they'd kept quiet about it. Now, in turn, her ladyship begged us to keep the secret. It didn't matter that nobody had seen Councillor Learmount in over a year or that the old bastard was very likely dead, they were still terrified of his family. They had been blackmailed into subservience and now they feared the police investigation that hadn't happened last time and I was more than tempted to give it to them, but for now that wasn't our job. Something as traumatic as this would have left a mark on the whole estate, not just the Fishers themselves but the domestic staff as well. Given the way Monica Grayne had drifted into the arms of Daylight and taken up arms against the Council it was possible that she'd made some sort of contact with Amelia's friends as well. Certainly there was a hole in the wall of steel that the Council had erected around Britain and the disaffected people of the estate would have made for a nicely exploitable weakness. It bore further investigation and so we resolved, as we left the premises, to find a way of sneaking back in later...

Are We There Yet?

2012-01-10T07:01:00.000-08:00

Cornwall is a very nice part of the country, let me say that right off the bat. I've been to the coast a few times now and I've always enjoyed watching the sea, listening to the crash of the waves and the cries of the gulls, but the reason Cornwall stands out is that the Shore Patrol has no jurisdiction here. Instead of those heavy-handed thugs, the Western Communities employ a force of retainers that are provided by the various lesser houses to look after security in the region. In return for this luxury they pay the Office of Naval Security a tidy sum to poke their noses elsewhere and the result is a quiet place to live. If I remember rightly not even FJD intrudes here. I think there's one active gallows station in Truro and that's about it, all other stations moribund and crumbling under the elements. I'm not certain what happens to lawbreakers in Cornwall, but this part of the world has a reputation for independence of spirit and there's every likelihood that they're dealt win 'in house', as it were. Naturally there's a price to pay, though, and in this case it's an element of corruption that permeates the atmosphere. Because fewer criminals go to the gallows, the state has to find a use for them and ever since I learned of the existence of the slave trade, I've a good idea where they go. There are a number of mining concerns here and it's likely that they need cheap labour so that's as good a guess as any. I can't help wondering, though, whether by living they got the thin end of the wedge. At least on the gallows they can only be punished once.

We traveled from New London Town in a Rhino work bird that Lally furnished for us. The twin-rotor is the Council's standard transport helicopter, with a crew of four and space for cargo or twenty passengers. With just three of us and a hire car in there, it felt like being in a noisy, flying cavern. Once the loaders had fastened the car down and showed us where the chemical toilet was, we were left to our own devices. We're traveling light, with some overnight gear, a change of clothing, a belt computer and not much else. Lally phoned ahead to let the Fisher family know we were coming and when they wanted to know why, she fell back on the traditional answer of 'requesting further details' that sufficed to hint that we knew more about what had happened than was actually the case. All we really knew was that Amelia Fisher had resigned from her post at Maloney Pharmaceuticals and, at the instigation of her family, had withdrawn from public life. The Daylight terror leader Monica Grayne, who was at the company at the same time may have been a factor in her decision. That was what we were going there to find out. The plan was that Sam Vickers and I would question Amelia while Trilly took the hire car down to Tintagel and asked around, hopefully picking up some gossip about the Fishers. In a place like this we were bound to encounter loose lips, but whether they imparted any truth remained to be seen. The Fishers were in hock to the Learmounts who, in turn, detested the Mason family for whom we worked. Once news leaked of who paid us and we'd be left talking to the wall. That was why we needed Lally. As a major in CIU she had the clout necessary to field the inevitable background checks and the fact that she was a Mason herself was to some extent irrelevant since her posting to CIU was a matter of public record.

What we needed from Amelia was some confirmation. Knowing that Monica Grayne had been at Maloney Pharmaceuticals was not the same as proving she'd been up to no good. At the time she'd been a promising and highly regarded surgeon who was attending Maloney's training course in order to learn new techniques. Then Amelia had drifted into the picture (she was an employee there) and the book snapped shut. Nobody was inclined to discuss what happened next but it had the hallmarks of a scandal. Every report on 'the fuss' was censored and redacted to the point of unreadability and if, as I suspected, Monica had in some way subverted Amelia's loyalties it hinted at a hole in the Council's security if for no other reason than the potential for blackmail. Did Monica have dirt on Amelia? Could that explain her sudden unannounced return to the family estates? We had to know because it was the first stepping stone that would take us to the truth. Monica had fled the country very recently, via means that the Special Police had yet to discover. For all that we were acting under the auspices of CIU, we were still on retainer to the Mason family and so were disinclined to let the SP in on what we were doing, at least until we'd got what we wanted. Inevitably that meant the police would be the last to know. Garamond Mason had given us strict instructions to 'make the evidence presentable' (i.e. doctor it) before we handed anything over. Therefore, as I watched the countryside flash by, I rehearsed my lines, practiced my lies and hoped that Sam and Trilly were on the ball.

Holiday at the Seaside

2012-01-09T04:52:00.000-08:00

After further digging we learned that in the immediate aftermath of whatever had transpired at Maloney Pharmaceuticals, Amelia Landrake Maybeline Fisher had been summoned to the family's estate at Tintagel, Cornwall, in the depths of the Western Communities and, once there, had taken early retirement. The file made clear that Tintagel is right on the coast, which meant that if we went there we would be dealing with the Office of Naval Security (aka Citadel) again and in particular their security force, the Shore Patrol. That prospect didn't appeal because, having encountered them already, I know them to be a lawless bunch of bullies and the only thing that ameliorated the prospect was the perennially reliable attitude of the elite toward rules and laws that threatened their convenience. That being the case, the odds were good that, regardless of whether the Fisher estates were inside the restricted zone, Citadel would either leave the Fishers alone or even defer to them. What made Tintagel most important from our perspective was that if Monica Grayne had somehow wormed her way into Amelia Fisher's life, then that cosy relationship with Citadel could very easily be exploited to allow her to come and go from Europe as she pleased. Sam's ears in particular pricked at that. Ever since Garamond Mason's 'clean sweep with a new broom', he had been pounding the beat in a Panther scout car, reduced to a foot plod and a CIU officer in name only. Councillor Snow, Garamond's flunky and the current boss of CIU, put me very strongly in mind of Dr Theobald Brown, the courtier installed at the FJD Academy in place of Principal Martin. Relationships within CIU were currently strained, with the remaining veterans marginalised and alienated by the incoming crowd, many of whom had played on their family names to secure postings. Service in the Criminal Investigation Unit looked good on a CV and so the the nameless and largely talentless scions had always been clamouring to get in but old Gates had always kept them out. Snow, his replacement, had lowered the drawbridge and CIU was no longer a happy ship. However, there were prospects for promotion and re-admittance to the circle, but they were based strictly on results and as long as he remained stuck on street patrol, Sam's chances of reclaiming his office were slender. A good investigation was like manna from heaven and he all but begged to be included.

Actually, I get the distinct feeling that if we'd said no, Garamond would have found a way to include him anyway. At the moment he's unaware that Trilly's here, and long may he stay that way. However, he's bound to want to put a watchdog with me and I suspect Sam only kept his job at CIU because he's already on retainer to the Masons and so is technically as much of a toady as the incomers. Therefore, there wasn't much resistance on my part and I only insisted that he make no mention of Trilly, to which, though puzzled, he agreed. With that settled, I rang Lally and brought her up to date on what we'd found. She had no objection to Sam joining us and I had the sneaking suspicion she'd known we'd encounter one another. She did, however, ask to speak to him and so I passed the handset across and watched him turn slightly pale as she gave him his marching orders. When he gave the phone back and I hung it up, he more or less promised to lay down his life for me, something I knew he didn't need to be threatened to promise. Trilly, of course, thought it was hilarious, all the more so because I couldn't simply order her to wait outside and give us a few minutes for fear that someone would recognise her. As far as the desk sergeants knew, they'd been charmed to within an inch of their lives by Melinda Massingham, the alias she was still using, and it was important that for the duration of our stay they remained none the wiser. With Lally's hand on the tiller the risk of exposure was minimised but there was always the danger of bumping into someone she knew.

The first thing we needed to do was enhance our travel permits to allow us out of New London Town - where we had the freedom of the city thanks to Lally - across the country and into the Western Communities. That had the potential for trouble because those Communities are under the control of the Learmount family, no friends at all of the Masons. Up until the factions were outlawed and the head of the family, Councillor Robert Learmount 'disappeared', they'd been the closest thing the Masons had to arch-rivals. Robert's disappearance had coincided with Trilly's grab for the throne and I had no doubt that the family still felt the sting. After all, however lucrative control of a Community might be, at the end of the day they were subordinate to the Speaker of the Council and it must have smarted to have to take orders from Garamond. As ever, politics had the power to make a simple job much more complicated than it had to be. The usual power structure for a Community was the ruling family and a lot of subservient 'lesser houses' that handled the day to day running and, finally, a great mass of unrepresented commoners who did what they were told, or else. With the Fishers in the Learmount pocket and the Western Communities 'bureaucratically opposed' to New London Town, we'd be walking on eggshells and so it wouldn't to be a case of simply confronting Amelia and forcing her to talk, because all that would get us was slung out again. We'd have to do this by the book, officially, following lines of communication - and that meant leaving a trail of the sort Garamond didn't want. The only reason we were doing this was so that Garamond could divest himself of his enemies with a minimum of fuss, bother or rumpus, and that meant silencing wagging tongues, not giving them a forum where they could complain about their treatment. So we'd have to be tactful, and that meant Trilly would be staying in the car. Given what was at stake I had no doubt that Lally would be able to secure the services of a helicopter for us and we'd travel on CIU authority under Lally's signature. Councillor Snow, her boss, need never know and anyway, for all that he was apparently an honest copper, he was only as pure as the people who paid him and he was just as much in hock to the Masons as were we. He might not like being asked to look the other way while his supposed subordinates bent the rules, but he had no choice if he wanted to keep his job. Therefore, I made the necessary phone calls and thought about what I'd have to pack for our holiday to the seaside.

Secrets and Lies

2012-01-08T05:31:00.000-08:00

We more or less marched into CIU headquarters with a brass band playing, in spite of Lally's instructions to keep a low profile. Mostly that was because of Trilly's bizarre orange outfit, which was so outrageous and conspicuous that people couldn't help but stare. Lally's insistence that we sneak in was down to the fact that, although she was one of CIU's Board of Commanders, she wasn't actually in the building to wave us through because she was still stuck at Cardinal, meaning that we were more or less hostage to the whims of the desk sergeant. As it turned out, though, that was the least of our worries because Trilly overwhelmed them with a combination of brashness and raw charisma that had them eating out of her hand in minutes. For all her violent tendencies and deep-seated psychological issues, the 'good' thing about psychopaths is that they can be incredibly charming when they want to be and she was on blinding form, to the point that when the Record system flagged me up a fired ex-CIU intern barred from the premises, she persuaded the desk officer overturn the ban in exchange for a smile and her phone number, both of which I knew to be fake. Once we were inside Trilly deferred to me because she'd hardly set foot in the place before, while I was pretty familiar with the layout having been stationed here for a month or so. I took care to avoid the areas where I'd worked before because even though Councillor Gates and his staff were long gone - cleared out after Garamond Mason's night of the long knives - there were still a few left who knew me and would probably have questions I might not readily be able to answer. That's why the last person I wanted to see turned out to be in the archives room when we walked in. He'd shaved his head so that his helmet would better fit - indicating that he was back on the streets - but he was still the same old Sam Vickers I remembered.

I don't know how long we stood there, just staring at one another, but it seemed like an age and an instant all rolled into one. It was Sam, looking a little haggard, but it was Sam and he was smiling shyly at me like a nervous boy, a hint of a blush on his cheeks, but it was Sam and my heart was pounding and it was SamSamSam... and then Trilly broke in by suggesting we get a room and that snapped me back into focus. I wasn't sure what I'd just felt. The thing about life as an Executioner is that your emotions are the first things to go because if you don't harden yourself to the job you fall to pieces. I've never met a schoolgirl but I think right then I was behaving like one, the dizzy kid at the back of the class with the unrequited crush on the head boy... I swallowed hard and shoved my feelings for Sam back into the mental box where I kept them, although I had to sit firmly on the lid to make sure they stayed there. Yes, I worked with him closely during the Janelle Keating affair and we'd gone on a couple of dinner dates, but nothing had ever come of it because we'd both been so busy... and now we were busy again - for the moment. In a way it was lucky that it was Sam we'd encountered and not some other officer because, for all that he pretended he'd put it past him, he was on retainer to the Mason family the same me, and in broadly the same circumstances: he'd been dragooned into it. When I first found that out I'd registered my displeasure by knocking him unconscious, but while to others that might signal the end of the relationship, Sam had forgiven me, though I suspected that was down to the fact that I hadn't reported him. Anyway, we were in the same boat and he knew damn well who Trilly was without having to ask, which was why he shut down the computer search he'd been engaged in and put himself at our disposal - on condition that I have coffee with him afterwards.

It was a fair price and I ignored Trilly's impatient tutting because, after all, when she's the one doing the schmoozing I have to let her get on with it and even hold her coat, and I wasn't going to let her have all the fun. Besides, we weren't on that tight a schedule - we merely had to track down the Daylight operatives who knew about the regional extermination centres and 'persuade' them to keep quiet about what they knew. At the moment the SP wasn't looking for them because word of their involvement hadn't really spread yet. I tried not to dwell on what the job entailed because it was apparent that any persuasion we employed was going to be violent and terminal, but it was a necessary part of my continued survival. The deal was that in return for helping Garamond Mason to clean up his mess, he would leave me alone, though it would be a cold day in hell before I believed it would be as straightforward as that. In the meantime I prompted Sam to dig through the archives that pertained to Maloney Pharmaceuticals using the keyword 'scandal'. The results were immediate and intriguing, and more or less confirmed what Sebastian Tyler had hinted at, that Eben Maloney had abruptly withdrawn his training programme after unspecified events. The interesting thing was that he hadn't done it voluntarily, but under pressure from 'representatives of the Fisher family'. They were a new one on me and I looked to Trilly for explanation. Possessed as she is of an encyclopedic knowledge of the elite, the confirmed that the Fishers were 'old money' and that they hailed from the Western Communities, with land in Cornwall. They were high Green-Twos, more or less the same as Maloney, which explained why they'd had to be above board with their pressure. Had they been Green Three a mere word in the shell-like would have been enough, but instead they'd made what the file disingenuously called a 'fuss'. With a fuss on top of a ruckus, it looked as if war had broken out in Green Belt Four. At my request Sam cross-referenced this with the name Monica Grayne, who we knew had been on the Maloney training course at the time, learning the ins and outs of prosthetic limbs and the pharmaceutical products Maloney's company was manufacturing to ease the suffering of battle amputees, something Monica had been very interested in. Sure enough, her name came up, along with an interesting report that mostly consisted of [REDACTED] and [CENSORED]. There was one name at the top, where it said :'re Amelia Fisher', establishing who the report was about, but the rest of it was a meaningless jumble of 'ifs', 'ands' and 'buts'. I sat back as I read the report, for what it was worth. It made even less sense than it should, quite apart from the obsessive censorship. Somehow Monica Grayne and this Amelia Fisher were connected and it seemed they both had something to do with Eben Maloney's hasty closure of his training school. Pressure from fellow Green-Twos wouldn't have been enough to cause him to abandon a money-making project, so something must have scared him off. But in the cutthroat world of the elite you developed a thick skin very quickly, along with the requisite balls of steel regardless of your gender and Maloney had done very well for himself, elevating a tuppenny-hapenny chain of street chemists into a major player in the pharmaceuticals business and working hand in hand with the best paymasters in the country: the Special Police. And then he'd pulled the plug and gone back to selling headache pills. What could have tainted a successful businessman to the point where obscurity seemed the better bargain? The answer wasn't in the files, I was sure about that, because the Fisher family's censors had got there first. But if Maloney was so shaken that he'd buried his own career, that left Amelia holding the key. Find her and we stood a chance of unlocking the mystery of Monica Grayne and, from there, finding her comrades...

Money and Power

2012-01-07T05:26:00.000-08:00

After we finished at Maloney Pharmaceuticals we decamped to the local pub for a drink while we compared notes. It was a warm, sunny day and so after collecting our ale (which I had to pay for) we made our way through the pub to the beer garden, which turned out to be segregated in accordance with the loyalty ratings of the customers. Trilly characteristically barged past the bouncer who was guarding the gate and all but dragged me in after her, giving the loyalty ratings short shrift the way she always did when it suited her. We found a table under the shade of a tree that was not too close to the fountain and there we sipped our drinks and brought one another up to speed on what we'd found. In Trilly's opinion Maloney is ripe for a police raid. Without even trying, she found evidence of malfeasance all over his cluttered office. For all that every elite kid has to attend the Youth Police Cadre by law, Maloney must have been a poor pupil to leave so much incriminatory stuff lying around and she spotted it straight away. When I asked her to clarify, she passed me a sheet of paper she'd brazenly nicked that was covered with printed text that consisted of very long words, chemical names and a lot of numbers. It was meaningless to me, but Trilly informed me that it was the chemical formula for 'fox', an illegal drug popular in the tenements. When my face remained stubbornly blank she rolled her eyes and made a disparaging comment to the effect that I was 'awfully uninformed about my own people', as if I had anything in common with the poor wretches forced to live in those monolithic hellholes. She gave me a quick rundown on what 'fox coke', to give it its proper name, was. The name was a corruption of 'faux', or fake, and the drug itself was an opiate that delivered the required euphoria and munchies at the expense of rotting your brain. While nobody in the elite really cared how the commoners chose to kill themselves on an individual basis, 'fox' and other things like it had an adverse effect on productivity in the factories and this had led to the Criminal Investigation Unit taking an interest. With a street price of almost £100 for a pound of the stuff, 'fox' is big business for a lot of rather nasty people.

The discovery that Mr Maloney was very probably involved in outright criminality rather took the wind out of my sails because what I'd got out of Sebastian Tyler seemed paltry by comparison. However Trilly sat back, folded her arms, chewed her lip and watched me like a hawk while I related the very much between-the-lines conversation I'd had with the factory foreman. I could see the wheels turning as she pondered and I knew that, as a Green-Three elite, she would be well aware of what the others of her class get up to. Unfortunately, the elite is more or less permanently mired in one scandal or another and, since the 'old families' all know each other, the gossip is usually common knowledge, but as far as this 'ruckus' at the factory two years ago was concerned, no bells were ringing. Then again, while the elite resorted to double-talk as a matter of routine when referring to dire happenings, to a commoner like me - with no stake in events - it could seem quite innocuous. That in itself underscored the value of having an elite and a commoner on the same team because, between us, we covered both poles of society which enabled us to cover far more ground than wholly elite team might.

There are two things guaranteed to throw the elite into a fluster: business and sex. As befit a social class not far removed from brigands, the elite are constantly looking to knock the stilts from under each other in a relentless and never-ending squabble for riches. What sets them apart from mere thugs is that they're nearly all already wealthy, with even the lowest Green-One elite having a stack of cash to fall back on. One of the by-products of this competition is the proliferation of 'venal offices', petty positions that contribute nothing to the regime but which provide a safety net in the form of an annual budget - free money - that goes straight into the pockets of the person holding it. The venal offices are one means by which wealth can be acquired without making enemies, providing a beleaguered elite with some breathing space. There's at least one venal office at FJD that I know of, the 'Office of Stationery Accountancy'. It's totally moribund, meaningless and somehow worth fifty pounds a year. Out of curiosity I poked my head around the door one day and found an empty, dusty room with a mop in one corner. With rampant corruption and big business meaning more or less the same thing, all an elite magnate really has to do to keep up with what the Joneses are up to is check the Financial Times.

That leaves sex, that other great source of scandal. As far as commoners are concerned, we're free to marry or sleep with whoever we want and nobody cares, so long as they're fellow commoners. The stratification that the elite live with relaxes further down the tree so that Red-Ones and Red-Twos can fraternise with no penalties, as they can with any sufficiently incautious Green-Ones who don't mind risking their social standing for the sake of a one-night stand. Liaisons with the elite are, however, forbidden. Thanks to some ingrained desire for inbreeding, relationships outside 'the circle' are anathema to the elite and carry very serious penalties, starting with ejection from the family and, in the case of really serious transgressions, demotion, re-education or even death. The elite are known to visit the common brothels from time to time, usually in the company of bodyguards, but every now and then one of them lets the side down by actually falling in love, and then the knives come out. Monica Grayne didn't strike me as the sort of person who cared about money or power, but she was certainly passionate about her cause. What if she'd crossed the boundaries and taken a commoner as lover? That would certainly amount to a 'ruckus' and could explain the Councillor Christ Hospital's otherwise baffling decision to let a talented plastic surgeon simply walk out the door and into the trenches of the Urban Police. It certainly bore closer inspection, but from the blank look Trilly had given me it suggested that any scandal had been suppressed, which meant we'd have to go back to Lally to get access to the CIU archives.

Breath of a Scandal

2012-01-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

Eben Maloney is a man so thin that he looks like a pile of coat hangers with clothes draped over them. He's so gangling that he seems to have extra joints in his knees and elbows and his head is bald like a bowling ball. He looks every inch the stereotype mad professor, right down to the small, round-lensed spectacles through which he squinted at the world. We encountered him on the shopfloor of his factory in Green Belt Four, where he was overseeing the activities of his staff as they swiftly and tirelessly boxed cards of pills, picking them from the line as they rolled past, then two strips of tape, a label, job done - next! It was pure mindless production line drudgery and it struck me that pretty much every industrial enterprise in Council Britain was like this. Certainly, the gallows stations were identical, with fodder (the customers) arriving in the tumbrels, after which a couple of semi-skilled labourers (usually Trilly and I) would 'process' them and another truck would arrive later to ship out the finished product. Even though I've never set foot in one of the fertiliser mills, I know enough about those ghastly places to know that it's the same there too - dead bodies arriving (often from the gallows stations) and poorly paid drudges doing whatever it takes to transform them into sacks of bone meal and 'useful by-products'. Thanks to a lucrative deal that FJD signed a few years ago, the Department gets a subsidy for every hundredweight of fertiliser produced which, of course, gave the Board of Commanders the incentive to add new offences to the list of death laws in order to maximise profits. I looked around the sterile factory with a sense of grim familiarity. Nothing ever changes.

Mr Maloney was not pleased to see us and, with the characteristic arrogance of the elite, demanded to know how we'd got in and ordered us out again in the same breath. I saw the look on Trilly's face when he used the words "you and your overdressed urchin" and stood aside while she laid down the law. It was a rare luxury to have the clout on my side and, as ever, Trilly resorted to extreme prejudice before even considering other options. She took her Record card from its holder on her breast and shoved it at him, delivering her Green-Three loyalty rating with the force of a sawn-off shotgun and, of course, it ripped through his attitude in an instant. The moment he realised that she outranked him he was subservient, helpful and friendly even though he was already sweating. A police officer might be inclined to make something of that, but the fact is Trilly has that effect on everyone. Upholding the finest and most cutthroat traditions of the elite, she uses her social class like a weapon in a fight with no rules and, while another Green-Three might have stood his ground, the Green-Two Maloney had no option but to fold. He agreed to answer her questions in his office but, grasping at the remaining straws, he refused to have anything to do with me and turned me over to his foreman instead. Trilly winked at me over her sunglasses as she followed Maloney away and I had to smile ruefully as the heads turned as she passed the serried ranks of workers. The combination of her tastelessly brash outfit and her loyalty rating had wakened them from their stupor but a word from one of the line managers got them going again.

Maloney's foreman turned out to be a handsome young man named Sebastian Tyler. He was about twenty, dressed in a white labcoat and black trousers and had neatly-combed brown hair. His features were regular and handsome and he was quite fit but he regarded me with the same suspicion in his blue eyes that I get wherever I go. To a certain extent Trilly is right when she calls my Executioner's uniform a second skin because I've worn it for so long now that I feel naked without it. Well, naked was precisely what I felt then because I'd left it at home and was in blue civvies in line with the national dress code. Tyler obviously assumed that, with my inferior Green-One loyalty rating, I was Trilly's secretary or something. He was a Green-Two like his boss and so he would have been perfectly entitled to dismiss me from the premises, or even put me to work on the production line if the mood took him. Thankfully, though, common courtesy is not entirely dead and he instead allowed me to have a look around, keeping an eye on me and preventing me from touching anything. It certainly wasn't normal for someone of such rank to be working as a lowly foreman but I declined to question him on it, partly because we were only here for a cursory look around, but mostly because it would have been pointless. A Green-One should never question her superiors - I've had that drummed into me from day one. I'm free to harass the Red-Ones and Red-Twos and, of course, to kill Red-Threes on sight, but interrogating my betters without a damn good reason could do nothing but land me in trouble. Therefore, his reasons for overseeing a factory were his to keep and mine merely to guess. That said, of course, a skilled interrogator is adept at ferreting out information without resorting to mere questions. Pity I'm not one of those.

I settled instead for making small talk and inferring what I could from his replies and in doing so I struck gold. For all the obvious bias of the loyalty rating system, I could use it to my advantage by playing dumb, so when he queried why I was interested in personnel transfers from the city hospital, I let him believe that Trilly had ordered me to find out. He accepted that without question and told me that they hadn't had anyone since the 'ruckus' two years ago. He wouldn't be drawn on the precise nature of this ruckus but the time frame more or less chimed with when Monica Grayne resigned from her post as Assistant Reconstructive Surgeon at the Councillor Christ Hospital and joined the Urban Police. It was an odd but consistent characteristic of the elite that whenever something sufficiently serious happened, they always referred to it in terms that were so innocuous as to be downright suspicious. For instance, when Trilly had her very public falling-out with her father that led to her being ejected from the Youth Police Cadre, the rest of the elite referred to it as 'that business with the Masons'. Likewise, when she compounded the sin by joining FJD and in the process trampled the family name into the mud, it had been a 'kerfuffle'. Therefore, to someone as accustomed to the affectations of the elite as I was, this 'ruckus' must have been a very serious incident indeed. Tyler might not have been forthcoming with the details, but whatever happened, it had caused Eben Maloney to withdraw his pharmaceutical training course.

It was pure gossip, of course, but it was the sort of chit chat that was easy to verify. Something had compelled Monica Grayne to give a big 'screw you' to her peers and had coincided with an incident so serious that a tuppenny-hapenny factory foreman still remembered it two years later. That suggested a scandal the memory of which, but for the odd whispered rumour, had been firmly suppressed and under ordinary circumstances even hearing this much of it would be enough to land me in shit street. The elite can be very sensitive about scandals and, for all that they're at each other's throats almost constantly, nothing causes them to close ranks faster than threatened collective interests and so I wondered as I idly chewed the fat with Tyler whether Trilly had picked up anything about it in her conversation with the shifty man who ran the place and who was best placed to know what happened...

Corruption of an Elite

2012-01-05T03:10:00.000-08:00

The file we received from Garamond Mason named one individual as an associate of Monica Grayne and from the way the document was worded I got the impression that the family squeezed the information from the source via means that were not precisely legal. Or, as Trilly put it when she characteristically cut to the point, they blackmailed someone to get it and, having seen from the sharp end precisely how integral to the elite such shady practices are, I can well believe what she says. We mulled over the implications as we sat in my kitchen and Trilly, who had in the meantime had some packages delivered via courier from her digs, was now dressed in an eye-bleedingly nasty trouser suit that looked like the sort of camouflage a really flamboyant tailor might knock up if the customer needed to hide against a black and orange background. It was like looking at a migraine given solid form and she topped the ensemble off with a broad-brimmed hat with a feather in it and a pair of sunglasses that perched on her nose so that she could peer fashionably over them. With a pair of stacked leather boots on her feet she was almost five feet five in height and I remembered that for all her ingrained arrogance about her social class, the inferiority complex that resulted from her petite stature still runs deep. I also realised that a dynamite explosion in a paint factory would produce a more stylish ensemble than the one I was confronted with and I told her to go away and put something on that was less likely to have us stopped and searched at every corner. She countered that by reminding me with her usual blunt tactlessness that even though I hadn't hanged anyone in over eighteen months, I still habitually wore the Executioner uniform that had been like a second skin almost my entire life. While a forbidding black uniform decorated with overt silver skulls down the seams of the sleeves and trouser legs might not be exactly subtle, it was still better than the sartorial nightmare Trilly affected and I was about to order her to change when bitter memory gave my synapses a sharp poke.

I stopped berating her because two things had dawned on me: first, that if we spent all day sniping at each other over what we chose to wear, we'd never get anything done. Second, and far more pertinently, it was as if we'd never been apart and the preceding year or so of police cases, abductions and separations had been only yesterday and now here we were, Elenna Pointer and Trilly Mason, working together as closely as when we'd been on the scaffold together in the mother-daughter relationship from hell. I pitied her real mother and thanked my lucky stars I'd not known her when she hit puberty because she was bad enough now, at eighteen and supposedly an adult, because she was completely willful, rebellious, violent and prejudiced... heavens only know what she must have been like at thirteen, but it wouldn't have been pretty and a psychopath with raging hormones is not something I ever want to go anywhere near. As it is, I earned her respect the hard way, by instilling some discipline in her. The fact that I'd managed to get her to come to heel and to just occasionally talk to people without sneering at them was, I suspected, also a factor in my continued survival in the feeding-time shark pool that was the elite, because Garamond had never been able to do anything with her and, as her father, he ought to have been best placed. Even though 'gratitude' and 'Garamond Mason' don't really naturally occur in the same sentence, I get the impression that he appreciates having at least one person in his daughter's life who has some control over her. That's very definitely a mixed blessing because it leaves me saddled with her, able to move around the country with far more freedom than a Green-One commoner should, but unable to divest myself of her when I want to have a conversation with someone that doesn't involve Trilly smacking the hell out of them.

As it was, our plan more or less coalesced out of the ether as we talked. The man named in the file went by the name of Eben Maloney. He was a Green-Two elite, marking him as one of the class from which the Council draws its managers and administrators and which the Green-Three aristocracy tends to look down on as parvenus. Maloney is a pharmacist with his own business in the Green Belt of New London Town where the elites like to congregate. There are four Green Belts in the city and dozens more across the country and they're like large areas of parkland enclosed behind concrete walls, inside which the housing estates of the well-off have evolved. Green Belt One, for instance, is where the mansions are to be found and is also where Trilly grew up. Conversely, Green Belt Four is home to the 'working elite' - often officers of the Special Police and the various municipal coordinators, plus a smattering of Green-One commoners who have been proven trustworthy enough to be allowed in. GB4 is the tradesmen's entrance of the elite and it's where Maloney's main business premises are to be found, although his private residence is in GB2. From what Garamond's people dug up, it seems that Maloney has regular contact with the Urban Police officers who use his shops in the city. It's reasonable to assume from there that he was the conduit via which Dr Monica Grayne made her way from the Councillor Christ Hospital to the ghettos that the Urban Police haunt. Given the way she'd so casually abandoned her birthright to serve in the trenches, it followed that she probably acted out of sympathy and compassion but, either way, if Maloney had put her in touch with the pay rats then he was our starting point because, somewhere along the way, Monica had been tipped from humanitarian concern into outright treason. Corrupting an elite was, not surprisingly, a death crime and I didn't imagine we'd have much luck loosening tongues over a subject that sensitive if we merely asked nicely. Therefore, fashion disaster or not, Trilly, with her unique combination of elite bias and a torturer's eye for opportunity, was going to be my not-so-secret weapon and I hoped, for their sakes, that they didn't force me to deploy her.

Uncharted Waters

2012-01-04T04:25:00.000-08:00

There's a printer attached to my computer that wasn't there the last time I was home and from it a file rolled this morning as I was making breakfast. I had to look around for the source of the noise before Cecil - the electronic concierge that runs my house - pointed me in the right direction. Waiting for me in the hopper was a file, or rather the edited highlights of one. It contained everything that the Special Police was willing to divulge about Monica Grayne, the Daylight terrorist who until recently was my handler. Mostly the file concerned itself with current events, but there was also a potted rundown of her history from which I learned with some surprise that she was of high elite stock. All medical personnel are elite anyway, a few medics and interns notwithstanding, so in itself that wasn't a surprise. The bombshell was that her loyalty rating was Green-Three, which put her on the same level as the Mason family and the Council she was sworn to destroy: she was born of the aristocracy. I was reading through that part of the file with widened eyes when Trilly sauntered into the kitchen clad in a bathrobe that was two sizes too big for her and with hair still damp from her shower. The fact that I was in full uniform when it was 'only' half past ten branded me, in her eyes, a 'stick in the mud' because as far as she was concerned anyone getting out of bed before midday was both insane and very boring. I didn't bother to remind her that a year and a half ago, when she was my Assistant, we started work at nine o'clock in the morning, because contradictions like that don't work on someone whose memory contains an editing suite that rewrites history on a daily basis. She moved around the kitchen and made herself some toast while I studied the file and then, over the rasping of the knife as she buttered the toast, I brought her up to date.

Rather to my surprise, Trilly didn't seem all that bothered that Monica was a fellow elite. From the perspective of a privileged commoner like myself, I couldn't see what on earth she had to rebel against, since, as the saying goes, the aristocracy 'has it made'. Monica was the youngest daughter of a rich Northumberland family and, lacking an inheritance, had gone into education to forge a career for herself. She'd excelled at medical school and gone on to study some pretty pioneering stuff in the field of prosthetic surgery. As with practically every member of the elite, her 'philanthropy' initially revolved around making things better for others of her class and the prosthetic surgery was all about rebuilding SP officers wounded in the line of duty. She'd participated in reconstructive surgery, she'd really helped to push the envelope in terms of what could be done to salvage a broken body... and then, out of the blue, she'd applied for a transfer into the Urban Police as a frontline combat medic. I had to reread that part, certain that I'd made a mistake. While it made sense that someone intent on making a career as a battle surgeon would be interested in seeing what happened at the sharp end, joining the Urban Police made no sense at all because their lot was quite different to that of the SP. The Special Police has always existed to look after and advance the cause of the elite. They have the best equipment, the biggest budget and the finest brains and they put all of that to use through a combination of brutality and class bias. Put simply, they are the guardians of our 'betters' and they have a vested interest because they're of that class. The Urban Police, on the other hand, are society's overseers. Bribed with a higher loyalty rating and something approaching a decent wage, the UP do what the SP lack the manpower to do: keep the common majority down. There's no love lost between the two forces and the rift is exacerbated by the fact that the UP gets its equipment, very second-hand and shopworn, from the Special Police, once it's past its best. It's largely thanks to this combination of indifference and contempt that so many Urban Police officers are on the take and they've earned the nickname 'pay rats' because of it.

A pay rat wounded in the line of duty will go to hospital and receive treatment from the Green-One surgical team who are his social equals. Only in very special circumstances can an injured pay rat expect to receive treatment from the likes of Monica Grayne, and yet she'd casually abandoned the old boy network to serve in the trenches, bringing with her a great deal of medical skill that her new comrades appreciated. Not unnaturally, the pay rats tried to wrap her in cotton wool because they recognised the extraordinary asset that had dropped from the heavens, but she still managed to wangle her way onto patrol duty and then earned four commendations in a single year, two of which cited heroism under fire for rescuing wounded comrades. All in all it made up for a confusing and contradictory picture. I couldn't imagine the path into the arms of a terrorist organisation is that simple for anyone, but as far as I could see Monica had no material reason at all to spurn her heritage, which left only one real conlcusion: somewhere along the way she'd developed a conscience. That was something I could respect, because consciences are rare in this country. I've got one, but I acquired mine the hard way after eleven years as an Executioner where I killed society's 'unwanted' on increasingly spurious grounds as the death laws got progressively more trivial. My conscience is the reason I've been taking all these risks lately. I know that what I did was wrong and I've been striving to make amends, although to judge from the way I've ended up as a stooge for the Masons, I've not done very well. Monica, on the other hand, seemed to have gone so far in the other direction that she'd ended up betraying her country. In terms of middle ground, she'd skated right over it and out the other end of the rink. Finding her wasn't going to be easy because, for one thing, it was unlikely she was still in Britain. However, the file contained enough background information for us to draw up a list of her contacts. Under the terms of my current 'agreement' with the Masons, they allow let me continue breathing and in return, I do their dirty work for them. In tracking down and silencing everyone concerned with the attacks against Garamond Mason's regional extermination centres I was saving the family's bacon at the expense of justice. It was blatantly illegal and I was very uneasy as I handed the file over to Trilly because we were sculling into uncharted waters...

A New Leaf

2012-01-03T05:31:00.000-08:00

If the Masons can be relied upon to do one thing then it's to twist the facts into something that suits them. In providing Garamond Mason with a full (expertly doctored) confession that named names and implicated Councillor Merpath and Daylight in the plot to destroy the regional extermination centres, I gave the waverers in the family the means they needed to distance themselves from the project. As of now work on the RECs has halted and Garamond is in closed session with the Caucus, the family's executive committee, to come up with a way to abandon the project without losing face. That part's vitally important because over the past few months Garamond's made a very big thing of the RECs, even to the extent of allowing it to be publicised on national television. In this country political U-turns can be fatal and if he simply dumps the project the whispering will go into overdrive. The perception will be that he's been beaten, the family will be weakened, and the vultures will begin to pick at the carcass of the Mason family before it's even expired. That's why he was so keen to get his hands on the confession once he discovered its existence, because it told a version of the truth that was acceptable. The Masons failing to hold their own against a bunch of commoners with guns would have been catastrophic for their prestige, but to have them fall victim to high treason could actually generate sympathy and allow Garamond to wriggle off the hook without further humiliation. It's what the public gets to see that counts. Privately he probably knows the truth, or at least enough of it to satisfy him. His eldest daughter Lally broke the case as far as he knows. He sent her from her post at the Criminal Investigation Unit to the despised ranks of the Department of Extraordinary Actions, aka Cardinal, to train the killers who were to operate the RECs. In return for this unwanted posting, she saved his bacon when the whole bureaucracy was starting to turn against him. He's grateful to her for that but sooner or later that gratitude will fade, probably once he's finished consolidating his position.

In the meantime I'm at home for the first time in a month. Everything is exactly as I remember it, from the slightly ratty second-hand furniture to the computerised concierge to the 'NO ADMITTANCE' signs on the cellar stairs, but it's pretty evident that the Mason techs have been over the place with the traditional fine-toothed comb because when I arrived, in a Panther scout car and accompanied by Lally and Trilly (who stayed on board until it was safe for her to sneak inside), the Special Police forensics team was packing up, having found nothing at all. They admitted that freely enough because, for all that she was dumped into Cardinal, Lally is a Major in CIU and so was 'one of us'. Naturally enough, I was greeted with the warmth reserved for a god-botherer at an atheist convention and was ordered to make some tea for the officers. Thus dismissed, I had a good look at Cecil, the concierge programme, and then eavesdropped via his interface panel in the kitchen. Technically that was treason but by then I didn't care because I was already more than implicated and it would take one phone call from Garamond to see me in my grave. Once upon a time he told me that I was on retainer to the family whether I wanted to be or not, and I had the distinct impression now that the cows were coming home to roost. Because of that, I justified my snooping by telling myself that that was what retainers did. Certainly, Rhona notwithstanding, I'd never met an honest retainer and if I was going to be forced onto the family's books then it made sense to get the practice in. Being honest, of course, I was lying to myself: I resented being treated like a servant in my own damn house.

After the SP officer had handed 'command of the post' over to Lally and buggered off, Trilly was able to slip in and she immediately started to make the coffee. If that girl has one marketable skill, then it's the ability to make fantastic coffee from the most unpromising of ingredients. I don't know how she does it. The coffee I use in my machine is the cheap stuff that costs about sixpence a bag and yet she somehow manages to make it taste like the deluxe brand that costs a month's wages. I listened to my marching orders while she got on with that, and learned that I was to be 'partnered' with Trilly for the foreseeable future. That was about what I'd expected and I was at least relieved to learn that Lally was restoring the dynamic from our time on the gallows in that Trilly was to be my subordinate. In practice that had never made much difference in the past because Trilly does exactly as she pleases and only occasionally did that chime with what I'd ordered her to do. For now our orders are simple: find the Daylight cell that Monica Grayne worked for and eliminate them before the SP can get its hands on them. It was about as unethical as it gets, but for the 'confession-defence' Garamond was relying upon to work, the inconvenient mouths had to be closed before they said anything untoward. I don't like working as an assassin and it was bad enough last time, when Daylight forced me to kill the REC engineering team at Garamond's party - which he still thinks was an accident because it's not something I confessed to. Having Trilly with me for this makes sense because she has no compunctions at all about killing - hell, it's practically a hobby for her. Lally encouraged me to think of it as penance and that, once it's served, I'll be allowed back into the fold. Unfortunately for her, I'm smarter than that. This is the sort of road that leads to hell, because once I've done this favour for them another will crop up, then another and another and before you know it there'll be so much blood on my hands that you couldn't wash it off with industrial bleach. All I've really done is exchange one sort of slavery for another, but at least I'm out of Daylight's clutches now, for whatever that's worth...

Loose Ends

2012-01-02T05:50:00.000-08:00

It doesn't feel like closure but that's because it's not. I've turned a corner in my life but I'm still deep within the maze. I've spent most of the day and all of last night watching Lally Mason at work and it's been a fascinating lesson in the fine art of arse-covering. To my faint surprise she's honoured her end of our bargain by allowing me to draft and redraft my 'confession' to the point where a blind man could follow the trail it laid. It points a very large finger at Councillor Merpath, absolves me from blame, omits mention of either Trilly or Rhona Woodley and blames all the attacks against the regional extermination centres on Daylight. As a legal document the confession is worthless because it's been completely manipulated, edited and fabricated, but that's not the purpose for which it was created anyway. After Lally finished proofreading it and corrected a few mistakes, she had me copy it out by hand and then burned all the drafts and the pads that they were written on so that there would be no telltale imprints that some flyboy could ESDA test later. Once all that was done she sent a trusted courier to the Criminal Investigation Unit where, as a serving Major, she commands considerable clout. CIU is not generally political because the Council realised a long time ago the value of having at least one moderately incorruptible law enforcement agency, but it still respects the big stick when it has to. In this case it provided them with an 'in' to a case they've been trying to crack for weeks, though Lally laced the pill by reminding Councillor Harvey Snow, CIU's current commander, precisely who they both ultimately answered to - her father.

All in all I was surprised at how far out on the limb Lally went for me, but I knew that rescuing Trilly counted for a lot because the sisters are very much the same in some respects: they both have very excellent reasons to hate their family and have little else to value except each other. It would be a cold day in hell before she admitted it, but I'm sure Lally's grateful for getting Trilly back, largely in one piece. Certainly she was appreciative enough to trample roughshod over the law on my behalf although Trilly had to prompt her from time to time. Lally's probably the nearest thing the Mason family has generated to an honest soul and I could tell from the way she grimaced that she didn't like what she was doing and if Trilly hadn't been there I'm positive she would have thrown me to the wolves without a second's consideration. As it was, I was just enough on her good side that she permitted me to watch as reality was rewritten into something more politically acceptable. Councillor Snow was potentially a problem, though, because he was an honest man, supposedly neutral and beyond temptation. Unlike the political weathercocks who command most of the bureaucracies and departments, the Special Police tries to appoint people who know the job rather than merely having the right connections. Like Councillor Gates before him, Snow is exceedingly leery of the 'old families' and hadn't really liked the idea of having a Mason - Lally - on his Board of Commanders, where she could potentially serve as a spy. Up until now she's respected his position and kept the politics out of their relationship and I knew she didn't like holding the Mason name over his head like some dynastic Sword of Damocles, but this was a survival situation. Unless CIU took the ball and ran with it, the Masons were in deep trouble.

Snow acknowledged receipt of the confession and the 'suggestions' that it contained but, no doubt annoyed at the circumstances by which he'd come by it, reminded her in turn that she was also a political appointee and that, furthermore, she was on secondment to Cardinal and so, nominally at least, she was off the roster. It was pure sniping and none of us believed for a moment that he would renege on the deal even if he hadn't signed it yet, if for no other reason than that if the Masons fell he would certainly fall with them. It was a petulant drawing of battle lines but it was unlikely that anything much would come of it in the short term. He'd do the sensible thing and draw up the arrest warrant for Councillor Merpath, who could in turn be relied upon to plead guilty, fall on his sword and absolve FJD from blame. He'd be 'cordially interrogated' and, confronted with my rather leading confession, he'd see which way the wind was blowing and put his head in the metaphorical noose, name names (Daylight ones) and the exercise would become one of damage limitation. His confession would allow the waverers in the Mason family to walk away from the clearly cursed regional extermination centres, the Department would suffer a mild top-down purge, the Daylight operatives would be hunted down and silenced and Garamond Mason... Garamond would do what he always does: slip away from the mess by pinning it on someone else. If there's anything at all that man is good at, it's finding scapegoats. In this case the writing's been on the wall for months, ever since he returned from exile. A necessary component of his return was the support of the Pendleton family and he's been stuck with them ever since. The Pendletons made an unwise alliance with the Wastelanders from the New London Town Irradiated Zone and they've been ripe for a good pruning for ages. How better to extricate himself from the mess than by pinning it on his incautios allies? Lally was convinced he'd do that and, as his older daughter, I suppose she's in the best position to know. All that really remains is to settle the problem of what to do about Trilly.

Garamond doesn't know she's back and Lally's not about to tell him. However, she has a head full of re-education programming that needs to be removed posthaste, before it kicks in again and she resumes the Daylight agenda. I know she's quite keen to have a 'friendly' chat with Monica Grayne, as am I, but Monica will have flown the coop long ago, probably the moment she lost contact with Lieutenant Rish. Just like Garamond, she's supremely good at distancing herself from a catastrophe and if she's still in the country I'll be very surprised. We need to hunt her down and eliminate her because she knows a hell of a lot and she'll certainly cause trouble, but she's on the back burner for now. Sorting Trilly's problems out is the priority. Garamond sold her into slavery and she's understandably very angry about that. An angry Trilly Mason is completely unpredictable - she could literally do anything - and she'll likely be quite violent about it, but unless she wants to give Garamond an excuse to have her killed, someone needs to keep her on the straight and narrow as far as humanly possible. Lally can't do it because she has her hands full rewriting history, Rhona Woodley is out of the picture for the foreseeable future, so that leaves me. Lally's encoded an official reprimand onto my Record and sentenced me to indefinite house arrest, which suits me fine. There will be techs on their way to my house and as long as Monica didn't do anything to the defence system, they'll completely strip out the security programs and rewire the place so that Cecil, the electronic concierge, will be my jailer. I've got off very lightly and Lally's already hinted that there will be 'back doors' in the programming for as and when I need to go out, but the upshot is that I'm in hock to Lally as of now. In return for not sending me to the gallows, I have to work for her and, by extension, Garamond. There are a lot of loose ends to tie up and it's almost certain that I'm going to be the one with the scissors. Then we'll see just how grateful that man really is...

Confession

2012-01-01T05:34:00.000-08:00

According to Lally I'm now a Person of Interest. What that means in practice is that I've confessed my guilt and thrown myself on the mercy of the State, which will reciprocate if it's in the mood and only if I tell all. Therefore I sat in the chair in Lally's office in the Cardinal headquarters building and sold my boss down the river. I didn't like doing it and I knew full well that if Councillor Merpath took the fall then the result would be promotion for his detestable deputy, Councillor Fraser, who Daylight has already blackmailed and with whom I share a mutual dislike. At the end of the day, though, Councillor Merpath had offered the anti-Council terror organisation Daylight a partnership and had brought them on board to help FJD fight Garamond Mason. It was definitely high treason and would see any normal citizen on the gallows before you could say 'guilty as sin', but he was a Councillor and he was well liked, even if his marbles were dribbling steadily out of his ears. It was the creeping senility that I was banking on to save him, because for all that the Councillors actively lobby for new death laws in accordance with their personal interests, hanging the mentally incapable has always been considered rather unsporting. That said, The Masons need a get-out clause in order to extricate themselves from Garamond's increasingly imperiled regional extermination centres and Daylight is the obvious candidate. Throwing Merpath to the wolves at the same time will enable the family to completely sidestep the growing accusations of incompetence by pointing to a very real - if impaired - traitor.

Rhona Woodley listened to the revelations with growing anger. She had taken me at my word that I knew nothing of the conspiracy, that I'd been entrapped by Daylight in the same way as Trilly and now she discovered that if I'd not exactly lied, then I had certainly withheld things from her. I could feel the wall going up as I spoke and I knew it was unlikely ever to come down again. She felt as if I'd used her, taken advantage of her skills while leading her unwittingly into treason. She had killed for me, subverted and stolen data and implicated herself in the belief that she was helping a friend. To discover that she'd been furthering the aims of the State's worst enemies infuriated her and the only thing stopping her from calling the police right there and then was that she'd look as guilty as I was. None of us tried to stop her from leaving when she finally stormed out but I knew it was unlikely that I'd ever see her again.

Under Lally's coaxing the full story emerged and, with it, a plan of action began to take shape. After Rhona had gone Trilly shut the door and joined us at the desk. For the moment Lally was prepared to accept that I'd been dumped into the conspiracy by Merpath, which was broadly true. However, the fact that I hadn't reported it weighed heavily against me and that was the reason why I was a Person of Interest rather than, say, a Material Witness, because the former carried with it an unspoken assumption of guilt and from such a starting point the Special Police usually charged such people with Suspicion. It didn't have to be suspicion of anything in particular because the SP were loyal servants of the elite and the death laws had been drawn up to protect that elite. Suspicion was a handy catch-all for when they couldn't pin anything specific on someone they wanted to get rid of and in my career as an Executioner I'd hanged hundreds for it. Now, unless Lally Mason developed something resembling a sense of gratitude very quickly, the odds were good that I'd be joining them. Fortunately, I had an ally in Trilly and, when she wanted to be, she could be persuasive without resorting to violence. She reminded her big sister that we'd both been re-educated very much against our will and that we'd acted in the manner we have because we'd been coerced. A properly installed re-ed programme is usually undetectable and in those cases the people who've been reprogrammed act and think naturally, even if what they're doing runs counter to their character. Trilly deliberately muddied the waters as to when I'd been re-edded by suggesting that they might have got to me before the tour of inspection that I'd gone on as a cover for my meeting with the Daylight contact. Under normal circumstances that would have cut zero ice but because it was her little sister saying this, Lally was prepared to consider it. I didn't often have cause to be thankful for the rampant nepotism of the elite, but if ever there was an occasion to be then this was it.

In order for the Masons to emerge from the REC programme smelling of anything other than shit we needed to accomplish two things: first, we had to drop our evidence of treason in the Criminal Investigation Unit's lap and, second, we needed to ensure that the evidence wasn't questioned. The point was that someone had been very active in undermining the extermination centres to the point that the concept had been rendered all but unworkable. True, the Department of Extraordinary Actions, aka Cardinal, was still on board and was more than willing to bolster it with personnel, but Cardinal's people were dodgy at best and, more usually, incompetent and downright untrustworthy. Getting the Snetterton family that controlled it to back away from a bad deal was always going to be the most straightforward part of the plot because no elite is ever going to embrace a toxic deal for fear of damaging their status. If it suddenly emerged that the man at the top at FJD had made a bargain with terrorists then Cardinal would be off the hook too. One thing I did insist on, though (with Trilly's support) was that all the guilt and suspicion be heaped upon Councillor Merpath. I didn't want FJD torn apart no matter how much I disliked what the Department stood for because they're the only family I've ever known and the individual headcutters and the students at the Academy didn't deserve the opprobrium that would result from a police investigation. Give them a scapegoat, give them the links he'd forged with the terrorists and then leave it at that. Merpath would be retired, the terrorists would go to the gallows if they didn't run first, Councillor Fraser would realise her ambition to take control of FJD and the Mason family would be able to look the Council in the face and protest their innocence, blaming the failure of the regional extermination centres on outside interference. They would be weakened by the failure; there was no doubt about that, but it wouldn't undermine them the way an uncontrolled assault on the family would. The Masons would survive and Lally would be safe. As for me, the usual scrap-heap beckoned the way it always seemed to at the end of an assignment. In return for spilling my guts and sacrificing Councillor Merpath I would be granted immunity and anonymity on condition that I return to FJD and keep my mouth shut. There'd be loose ends to tie up but I would be out of it - disgraced, possibly demoted, but safe from retribution - at least, official retribution. The odds were very high that Monica Grayne would put a price on my head and there was still the lingering issue of Trilly's vengeance against Daylight and probably her father too, but for the time being, as long as I put my name on the document and admitted to being a puppet for traitors, I would be safe. There was no other realistic option and so, with a heavy heart and hoping like hell that Lally would keep her word, I signed the confession.

Bombshell

2011-12-31T05:28:00.000-08:00

Lally Mason is on board, at least on a personal level. She didn't take much persuading because the moment we walked into her office and she discovered that 'Melinda Massingham' was her abducted sister Trilly, she was sold. I watched as the sisters embraced and I was struck by the warmth of it. Trilly was a beautiful, psychopathic eighteen year old, while Lally was twenty-one and a hardened police officer and as far as I knew neither possessed a shred of compassion. Trilly was a gleeful killer who delighted in violence and I thought I knew her pretty thoroughly by then, but there she was, holding her big sister close as tears of love rolled down her face. I didn't know she could even spell love, let alone understand the concept and I felt moved enough to back off and give them some privacy. Eventually Lally noticed Rhona and I lurking in the doorway and invited us in. Rhona shut the door behind her, Lally moved back behind her desk and the intimate atmosphere faded. With her Cardinal uniform pin-sharp and immaculate, she was suddenly all business and, with that, Trilly drifted away like a curious child confronted with a closed wardrobe that begged for a good rummage. It occurred to me as she started poking through Lally's possessions that I'd never seen the sisters relaxing together before. The last time I encountered Lally had been when she was in charge of security at the Palace after Trilly's usurpation of the Speaker's Chair. We had taken an immediate dislike to one another, possibly because by then I was so used to Trilly's ways that I'd expected her sister to be the same when, in fact, they couldn't be more different. Trilly is a voluble, cheery schemer who volunteered for Executioner training because she spied in the Department a hidden back door to promotion. Lally, by contrast, is a professional officer possessed of a cold and rational brain and all the human warmth of a lizard. They were both killers but the difference is that while Trilly delights in chaos, Lally is inhumanly mechanical about it.

I watched Lally as we talked and I noted the way her eyes constantly moved, instinctively scanning the room for threats, and the fact that there was a gun in plain sight on the desktop spoke volumes as to her opinion of the Department she'd been dumped in. The icy gaze only softened when it alighted on Trilly, and then a trace of a smile would play around the corner of her mouth. Lally demanded to know why her exiled sister was posing as 'Melinda Massingham', why I was shuttling her around and what Rhona, a Mason retainer listed as AWOL, was up to. It was one of those delicate 'make or break' moments because I knew that Lally, as a former CIU officer, was an expert at detecting lies, so I plumped for honesty and hoped for the best. I repeated in a nutshell what Trilly had told me of her slavery, her abduction by Daylight and her subsequent re-education, confident in what I was saying because the primary witness was there to confirm it, even if she was at that moment on her hands and knees and digging through a cupboard. Trilly nodded in the right places and clarified details when Lally asked for them and then went back to scrutinising her sister's private property.

Lally's ears pricked at mention of the regional extermination centres that her father was championing. Of course she was familiar with the project and she acknowledged that her posting to Cardinal was part of the plan to whip the unit into the shape necessary to run them. Furthermore she acknowledged that there was a degree of unease among the elite about the project, although humanitarian concerns were distinctly secondary to the threat the RECs posed to the interests of the major families. She rattled off a list of those who had taken umbrage to the project, beginning my superiors at FJD but I soon lost track because it seemed as if pretty much the whole of the elite stood opposed. I was simultaneously heartened and discouraged by the opposition because I knew the elite of old and, grasping and merciless as they were, they were at the same time bound by conventions of politics and honour that had the power to overrule individual concerns. The Masons were at the top of the tree for now but their presence was resented by the 'old money' families who regarded them as parvenus and hadn't really forgiven them for that messy business with the King in 1921. No matter how republican the regime styled itself, at the end of the day nobody likes a regicide, if only because of that lingering worry that if they could kill a king then they were capable of anything. In the intervening decades the Masons had developed an iron grip on the bureaucracy of the State to the point that while Garamond had a lot of enemies, such was the fear of him that none of the old families was willing to move unless the result was beyond doubt. That was why the RECs were generating so such interest: it was common knowledge that the project was faltering and, if it collapsed, it could deal Mason prestige a mortal blow.

Of course, that put Lally in a difficult position. Garamond may have divested himself of his youngest daughter, but Lally was next in line to the Mason throne and if she'd ever been anything at all then it was the obedient successor. Her growing resentment of her father - even for what he'd done to Trilly - was not therefore enough to motivate her to move against him. The rift was there but it wasn't yet deep enough for her to push him in. I knew that while Trilly didn't care a damn what became of the Masons, Lally knew that if they fell then it was she who would be first against the wall. Therefore, getting her to support the smashing of the extermination centres was going to be more difficult than I'd naively supposed because I hadn't bargained on the politics that Lally lived with every day. There was only one card left in my hand and it was the blackest of aces and if I played it then it would be to the overpowering stench of burning bridges. I risked laying myself open to accusations of high treason. Worse, I would incur the wrath of Rhona Woodley, who had so far taken me at my word. Finally, it would expose the double-dealing of FJD and possibly condemn Councillor Merpath to his own gallows - but in the end, I didn't have a choice. Lally wasn't going to pull the final rug from under her father unless there was someone else to take the fall, and in Daylight we had the ideal scapegoats. I could sell Monica Grayne, betray the terrorists, tie them all up with a neat little bow and drop them on Lally Mason's desk - and then hope like hell that she possessed something approaching a sense of gratitude for the way out that I was offering her. Therefore, I took a deep breath, shut my eyes and spilled the beans.

Double Standards

2011-12-30T05:15:00.000-08:00

The FolksWagon was crowded with three of us in there, but then it was cramped even for one person. As befit something described as 'the people's car' the FolksWagon was as basic and utilitarian as it was possible to get, with a two-stroke engine that struggled on gentle inclines and an exhaust that blew and burbled like a cauldron. The chassis was of wrought iron but the bodywork was weatherproofed paper that served as excellent bedding material for mildew and it was a good thing my car was already green or it would have had a two-tone look that nobody would want. I drove, Trilly sat in the front passenger seat and, in the rear, Rhona was hunched up on a seat far too small for her. Logically Trilly and Rhona ought to have swapped places but Trilly had resolutely refused to sit in the back and we didn't have time for either the argument or the fight that would inevitably erupt if I tried to insist. Now she was fiddling with the radio in a vain attempt to get the Youth Channel that, as a mere Green-One commoner, I was prohibited from accessing. Our travel permits were encoded onto our Record cards and, because Trilly had specified that we were on Council business, it limited the right of the police to interfere. Unfortunately, we all had the same loyalty rating because Trilly was still using the 'Melinda Massingham' disguise that Daylight had given to her. While the Green-One rating was superior to that of most commoners, it was really little more than an 'enforcer rank' shared by all those whose job it was to keep the Council's boot crushing down on the neck of the populace. That meant that our loyalty rating was the same as that of the Urban Police officers, or 'pay rats', and so we had to be polite to them rather than simply sweeping them aside the way I knew for a fact Trilly wanted to.

The carriageway split into five clearly demarcated lanes about a mile before the checkpoint, which was constructed in a manner similar to a toll road. There was a gate and a sentry box at the end of each lane, with a small parking area for more detailed searches and/or detentions and, beyond the gate, the lanes merged down into a single carriageway again. Needless to say, the potential for traffic jams was huge. The length of each queue was dictated by the loyalty rating of the driver and so the tailbacks for the Red-Two and Red-One lanes, reserved for commoners, were by far the longest and consisted mostly of buses and road freight. The majority of private cars were in the Green-One lane that we occupied, ownership of a car being beyond the means of most ordinary citizens. The queue inched along as each vehicle was stopped and inspected and it was revealing to note how the deference of the pay rats increased with the rank of those they searched, with the commoners being treated like cattle while the Green-Two and Three elites received a level of sycophancy that was almost nauseating. As their social equals the occupants of the Green-One queue earned a sort of cool politeness and were asked nicely before being turfed out of their cars. When our turn came we presented our Record cards and got out of the car without waiting to be asked. That earned us minor plaudits in the form of raised eyebrows but that vanished the moment they saw what we were wearing. Executioners might not be popular but we did have by far the most intimidating uniforms of any service because when it came to putting the wind up people there wasn't a lot that could beat black garb decorated with silver (or in Trilly's case, white) skulls, plus shoulder holsters with very large pistols in them. The pay rats shouldered arms immediately, slipping automatically into the mode of wary respect that headcutters usually got. Councillor Christ knows what was going through their heads but they treated us as if we were a pair of ticking bombs and they actively avoided Rhona the moment they recognised her Mason retainer uniform. The inspection was quick and cursory and then the barrier rose and we were waved through to resume our journey. The thought that we might be up to no good never entered their heads, conditioned as the population is to respect loyalty ratings above all else. Thanks to the self-interest of the elite, suspecting one's social superiors was tantamount to treason, which was one reason why the elite routinely got away with murder, and in the case of social equals the unwritten rule was that you didn't suspect your fellows unless they gave you reason to. Of course, it followed that those below you in rank were fair game and this explained why nearly everyone who ended up on the gallows was of Red-Two stock. It was a hard game to live as a commoner and even if, as an Executioner, I was despised as a class traitor, if there was one thing I was glad of then it was my loyalty rating.

We passed through two more checkpoints before we reached Southwark. Like most of New London Town the borough was rebuilt after the 14-18 War and there wasn't a lot left of the original city. There was a theatre there that still saw some use, but for the most part the area consisted of low-rent business premises and, here and there, headquarters of one sort or another. Cardinal's HQ was at the western end of the borough and consisted of an enclosed compound that was mostly admin buildings and what looked like hangars wherein the vehicles were based and maintained. If truth be told, the place had none of the sinister overtones I would have expected and, considering what Cardinal did for a living, that was perhaps surprising. At the very least I was expecting it to be shabby and poorly kept but it was actually quite clean and, with the hanging baskets and flower boxes around the entrance, even pretty. They had private security on the gate and it was news to me that Cardinal had such personnel but a glance at the sergeant who asked for our Record cards confirmed that he was a Snetterton retainer. Of course, just as the Masons and Pendletons had done at the Council Palace, the Snettertons had replaced whoever looked after security before with their own unimpeachably loyal cronies. This time when we got out of the car Rhona took the initiative and spoke to the sergeant as one retainer to another. They chatted easily because they were of the same cloth and so he was happy enough to let us in after a basic ID check and then, as we passed through the gate, he telephoned Lally to let her know we were coming.

Resumption

2011-12-29T03:56:00.000-08:00

I sat back and absorbed Trilly's story in silent astonishment. The fact that Garamond had been willing to sell his own daughter into slavery sickened me more than it should have, given what I've come to know about the Mason family. Likewise the selfish way that Trilly had responded to an act of kindness by the Delaforce family angered me. There's precious little generosity in this world and to have slapped away the charity of complete strangers in the way that she did was disgusting, even more so because her subsequent abduction rendered her defiance pointless. I made a note to write a letter to Mr Delaforce apologising for her conduct. Even if it never got read it would count for something because I was once again in a situation where Trilly's actions became my responsibility and the Delaforces' actions in buying people out of penury to put a roof over their heads deserved plaudits, not scorn. Trilly couldn't shed much light on what the French had done to her because even though she'd broken the programming there were traces of it left that would undoubtedly influence the way she behaved and if they had decided that there were parts of her experience best left unremembered then that's how they would stay. Deprogramming her completely was going to be like defusing a live, ticking bomb in the full knowledge that one wayward twitch could set her off.

The part of her tale that most interested me pertained to Cardinal and, more to the point, Lally Mason's posting there. I'd served with that rabble briefly and it was a pretty morbid experience. Rhona Woodley had been with them about a year, long enough to rise from raw recruit to the rank of Warrant Officer and if anything, she hated them more thoroughly than did I. However, if we wanted to destroy Garamond's extermination centres for good, Cardinal was the key because they were the only place left where he could find people willing to commit the necessary atrocities for a very small wage. Regardless of what I'd seen of them and the horror stories Rhona had told, getting into Cardinal couldn't be as easy as she made out or it would have fallen apart from the inside ages ago. Cardinal only asked one thing of its people: that they kill on command, but there had to be a command structure of some sort if only to prevent the wrong sort getting in, though what exactly constituted 'the wrong sort' in an organisation of murderers escaped me. Lally wouldn't have joined as a grunt. As favoured daughter of the Speaker of the Council - even if temporarily in disgrace - she would have vaulted up the ranks to a position where she would have as little blood on her hands as possible. She might even be at a separate headquarters, somewhere completely removed from the casual brutality of the troops. The Final Justice Department existed to execute those deemed guilty of criminal activity, but Cardinal was there to pick up the inevitable slack. Now and then the police - usually the Urban Police - would decide that it was too much trouble to bother with trial procedures, no matter how informal and whistle-stop justice already was. Then, because they served as overseers to the commoners and so had to maintain at least a semblance of cordiality, they would ring Cardinal to send someone over to sort out the problem. Thus Cardinal became a sort of 'disappearance bureau', vanishing the inconvenient paperwork along with those who generated it, although usually with considerable collateral damage.

When I first met her, Rhona had been commander of roving Cardinal patrol unit designation Four Four Delta. The patrol units concentrated on the country's Irradiated Zones and conducted regular missions of extermination against the Wastelanders within but every now and then they were unleashed against the regular citizens, usually when some Councillor felt he had a point to make. The patrol units were the most likely place to find Lally because there was a degree of vetting of personnel. Given that they had Leopard APCs and Panther scout cars at their disposal, it made sense to ensure that the people using them were, to a degree, trustworthy. Regular Cardinal foot soldiers wore overalls, balaclavas and armbands as identification, but the patrol units had formal uniforms and a rank structure. They were a legacy of the 'good old days' before the Snetterton family had got their hooks into the organisation. Patrol unit troops got decent pay and danger money on top, but the infantry were not much more than basic-wage thugs whose standard operating procedure was to swarm into the tenement blocks and drag out anyone who couldn't run away. Few survived these raids and stories of rape and looting were commonplace. It says something about a force as morally bankrupt as Cardinal that the patrol units were generally horrified at the conduct of their ground-pounding brethren and had as little to do with them as possible.

I discussed it with Rhona and Trilly and we agreed to make our way to the Cardinal HQ in Southwark and, once there, find a way to get to Lally. She would not have given up her search for Trilly - Lally was the sort who would storm the gates of hell if there was a clue on the other side - and if we delivered her little sister to her in good condition, all but on a plate, then she ought to at least give us the time of day. One thing I did learn about Lally is that she's at best a reluctant daughter. While Trilly's rebellion against Garamond was spectacular for the way that she managed to taint the whole family, Lally had toed the line at first and only latterly had she started to resist. She'd been happy where she was, as a Major in the Criminal Investigation Unit, and had wanted no part of her father's schemes. However, she was possessed of a very cold and analytical brain and had come to a different conclusion to Trilly, eschewing direct rebellion in favour of trying to get along. That desire to avoid making waves had deprived her of her sister and dumped her in with killers and if I knew anything of her at all, then it was that her resentment would be building by the day. I didn't know her opinion of the regional extermination centres but if 'Daddy' was willing to interrupt a promising career simply to put her in charge of the thugs who would be doing the killing, then the chances were strong of a deepening rift between them. Thus decided upon our course of action, Trilly duly got onto the computer system and employed her hacking skills to cut us some marching orders that would allow us to move freely about the city. Then we set off, leaving the smouldering remains of the Draftee Compound behind us.

Trilly's Story, Part Five

2011-12-28T04:29:00.000-08:00

The money changed hands and the deal was done: I was no longer the property of the Delaforce family and became an unpaid slave labourer for British Materials and Aggregates, a family consortium that ran the mines in the Welsh and Scottish Communities. Matron couldn't keep the sneer off her ugly face as she dragged me to the truck. She was happy to see the back of me but as far as she was concerned the best part was that inside of a month I would have been worked to death at the coalface. She told me with an ugly sneer that as I was choking my last in the dusty air, I'd regret throwing the Delaforces' kindness back in their faces. I didn't deign to enlighten her as to my plan, of course, or that 'dying' - at least, on paper - was integral to it. I watched her exchange some very chummy farewells with the truck driver and then the tailgate came up and I was in the dark, handcuffed to a stanchion and bored out of my skull. The seat they'd given me was rather lumpy and the way the truck rattled and swayed as it crunched over the gravel and out onto the road was really quite disorientating. I settled back as much as I could to enjoy the ride but really it wasn't a lot of fun. Every now and then we'd stop at a checkpoint and twice the tailgate was lowered so that the Urban Police could gawk at me. Upon learning that I was a slave on my way to the mines, one of the pay rats said I was too pretty for that sort of hell and made the Delaforce retainers an offer for me which, as far as I was concerned, would have led to a whole different hell. Lucky for me, no elite would ever break a contract because it's a matter of honour between gentlemen and anyway, I'd cost more than he'd see in a year.

Anyway, we'd been on the road about two hours when the ambush happened. I'd been on tenterhooks the whole time, anticipating it, and you know how it is when you're waiting for something momentous - I was living on adrenaline and, once I'd slipped out of the handcuffs, nibbling my nails. Honestly, it was so long before it happened that I was half-tempted to just squirm out of the lorry and make a run for it at the next stop, to take my chances with the automatic Red-Three loyalty rating and improvise from there. Needless to say, my sigh of relief when the automatic weapons opened up was like a force nine gust. The truck lurched on its suspension as the bullets hit and I was heartened to hear the screaming from the cab as the machine gun raked it. It sounded like a really lively gunfight and I was sorry I couldn't have played a more active part but, at the end of the day, it was a rescue and I was the damsel in distress so I had to play nice and let them have all the fun. Eventually the shooting stopped and the tailgate dropped and this unfamiliar woman peered in. I didn't know it at the time but she was Monica Grayne, Daylight's section chief. She checked the truck to make sure I was alone and then, just as I was about to ask her where Lally was, she lobbed in a gas grenade and the lights went out. I woke up on a boat, chained up again, bursting for the toilet and demanding to see the person in charge, who turned out to be Grayne again. I told her to get Lally on the phone and she just laughed at me. I got up to give her a jolly good thrashing for her impudence and found out that she was well trained in hand to hand. She avoided the punch and then landed one that knocked the wind out of me - first person who's done that in a long, long time. I think it was the novelty that floored me as much as anything. While I was gasping for breath she dragged me to the ship's lavatory and locked me inside and then, when I was finished, took me back to my cabin that was, as it turned out, stripped bare of anything I could use as a weapon.

We were at sea for about two days and I spent all that time locked in the cabin. Grayne was the only member of the crew who I saw and I eventually gave up asking to see Lally because it was obvious that I'd been kidnapped and not rescued at all. While that served the immediate purpose of getting me off the system so that Daddy couldn't track me, I hadn't bargained on being smuggled to France and, on top of everything else, I was terrified that Citadel - the Office of Naval Security - would intercept and sink us. I tried to warn Grayne of the danger that I - and, I suppose she too - was in, but she just dismissed it, telling me that Citadel wouldn't even be looking for us and that if the did spot us, we'd look like a floating log on their radar. She said our little boat had stealth capabilities but she didn't explain what that meant. She did, though, go into some detail as to what they had in mind for me and I didn't like what I heard one little bit. She said I was to be their secret weapon, the best agent Daylight ever planted, someone with inside knowledge of the elite that was so extensive that they'd use me to topple it from within. Well, while that broadly chimed with some of my aims, I'm still a loyal English girl and there was no way I was going to cooperate and told the smug bitch to her face, but all she did was smile the most sly smile I've ever seen. Then, when our boat arrived at Dee Yepp, she damn well gassed me again. I swear to you, if she does that one more time I'm going to strangle her! Anyway, it put me back in the land of nod but I recall waking up once or twice to see this swirling, colorful globe thing dangling in front of my face that turned out to be a re-education device. I tried to fight it but every time I did, they just shot me full of dope and my mind turned to jelly. I don't know how long they had me because every time I woke up, it was in the same plain white room with bright artificial lights and no windows. Eventually the programming 'stuck' and somewhere along the way I let go of my inhibitions and told them everything. Bloody re-education - they made me want to confess, and I did! I told them who was who, what was where and how to muck up the whole boiling lot of it! They turned me into a traitor and I didn't even know they'd done it until they took me back to the re-eds and planted a load of codes in my head that stopped me from betraying them. I could remember what the sadistic bastards had done to me, though, but they removed my ability to fight them. I remember languishing in my cell and just screaming at the grille on the door, demanding to be let out so I could give them all a kicking, but nobody came in to take up the offer.

And then, out of the blue, Elenna arrived...

Trilly's Story, Part Four

2011-12-27T04:59:00.000-08:00

After a week of this rubbish Mrs Delaforce tried to remonstrate with me, but I wasn't going to take it. When she told me she was at her wit's end with me I retorted that it must have been a short journey, whereupon Matron slapped me. When she did that I pointed out the contradiction between the Delaforces' supposed enlightened attitudes and the fat bully that they employed and so Margery asked her to wait outside while we had a 'frank' talk. Margery started off by telling me how jolly lucky I was to have been sold to her and how it could have been so much worse. She told me that the prettiest young things usually ended up working as prostitutes in the houses of comfort but that 'her man' - by whom she meant the retainer who'd attended the auction - had been motivated by my 'obvious helplessness' to save me. While that didn't grant her the automatic right to expect gratitude, I ought at least to recognise charity when I saw it. She had to stop then, though, because I couldn't contain the laughter any longer. While she was busy turning purple I explained to her who I was, but the blank look she gave me was painfully genuine. While she was aware of the Mason family in principle, the Delaforces were so out of touch that the name was all she knew. I invited her to get on the computer and look me up, which she did, but I was in for a nasty surprise because it turned out that Daddy had erased all mention of Trimillion Lucrezia Mason from the records and so I was reduced to being plain old Trilly Nobody.

Having called my bluff, as far as she was concerned, Margery gave me one chance to get onside and, if I passed it up, she was going to put me back on the market as second-hand goods and then woe betide me. I had no intention of kowtowing to this sorry lot and so I told her where she could stick her charity. Her response was to call Matron back in and give her the good news and that was it - I was dumped back on the street, at least metaphorically. While if I'd made the effort, I might have carved a niche at the Delaforce place, what I really needed was to be off the grid. As long as I remained a slave I'd leave a paper trail that Daddy's retainers could follow to keep tabs on me. I wanted to disappear, to drop out of sight and then effect a linkup with Lally. Ideally I needed to die to do that - well, not actually die, because that would be silly. I needed to die on paper because paper is where the family excels. Because we Masons control the bureaucracy it means that Daddy, the Caucus and the retainers know where pretty much anyone in the country is at any time. Heck, while I was in the Youth Police Cadre with my cousin Melvin we used to log into the National Net and just spy on people and it was great fun seeing what they got up to when they thought nobody was watching. The stories I could tell you! Anyway, I was putting together my plan of escape on the fly and I picked Matron's pocket and got away with the fat troll's belt computer handset, and I put it to use once I was back in the cooler to log onto the Delaforce computers again via the back door I installed. The discover that Lally had been bumped into the ranks of Cardinal was a real gift, you know, because there's few Council organisations less well monitored than that bloodthirsty bunch. If I could 'die' and then move in at the Cardinal barracks it wouldn't be too difficult to foment a rebellion against Daddy and instead of being surrounded by useless servants, I'd have armed and easily bribed soldiers.

First thing I did was place a call to Lally to let her know what I was planning and to ask her to make the arrangements to get me on the roster, but she was out and I had to leave a message. There was a funny little click on her line after I recorded the message and it sounded a bit like someone was listening in. As you know, nobody with any sense speaks plainly on the phone anyway because everything's tapped, but it was still annoying to know that they were monitoring my sister. The odd thing was the noise the thing made. Thanks to YPC again, we're all familiar with the way the Westing-standard monitoring gear works and we know its little foibles, but this sounded altogether more subtle - like high-class gear, in fact. I know that Daddy likes to use the best, but the Special Police don't free up the really good stuff and there's nothing anyone can do to change their minds. It seemed a bit odd that the SP would even be interested in me because they jumped ship like rats the moment Daddy deposed me. They dumped me squarely in the hands of the Caucus and pretended they'd never clapped eyes on me, washed their hands of me completely. I had no idea why they'd be spying on me all of a sudden and it didn't occur to me at the time that it might not be either the SP or Daddy's people. I left my message in the traditional doubletalk and the ball was in Lally's court. All I had to do then was wait for Lally to get back in touch, then fake my death and after that it would all be wine and chocolate and jolly good fun until the time came for me to unleash Cardinal.

Eventually Lally got back to me, maybe an hour later, during the quiet time while the Delaforce people were negotiating my resale and nobody was bothering me. Matron had told me earlier that I'd be going to 'the mines', whatever those are, but I just shrugged and dismissed her, adding a boot up her copious rear when she didn't get the hint. By the time she discovered that her handset was missing and stormed back into my cell I'd arranged everything with Lally using the language we used to speak to each other in when we were little, when we didn't want Daddy to overhear. Lally was going to hack into her old terminal at CIU and track the movements of the Delaforce truck and then go 'out on manouevres' and intercept it. We arranged that there would be a convincing little gunfight during which the Delaforces retainers would earn their body bags and then Lally would spirit me away and leave behind a suitably charred corpse in the burning lorry. We had it all planned and it looked great and I was itching to get going, but there was one thing I didn't take into account: I didn't realise that Daylight had overheard every word...

Trilly's Story, Part Three

2011-12-25T04:42:00.000-08:00

Well, the milk of human kindness tasted decidedly sour, that's all I can say about that one. Toby and Margery Delaforce fancied themselves as philanthropists, doing their bit to help the underlings by enslaving them, thereby putting a roof over their heads that's far grander than the poverty they were born into. They're both aged about fifty and their daughter, Theresa, is twenty and already infected with their socially conscious twaddle. The other slaves might have been happy with the arrangement because they were now 'domestics', which was a step up but to me it was demeaning and I made no bones about telling them so, which earned me a slap from matron. Matron's a retainer about the size of an armoured personnel carrier and with the face to match. She's been in service to the Delaforces for most of her life, starting as a slave herself and then working her way up the ranks, though if truth be told, she probably sat on her superiors and squashed them. She took an instant dislike to me and it was absolutely mutual. 'Whoever I thought I was,' she told me, 'I was a slave now and I could forget everything else.' Her word was law and if I had any thoughts about challenging it then she would show me the error of my ways. The other slaves thought it was hilarious, the rebellious one getting her comeuppance, except that nobody talks to me like that and gets away with it. I've only ever recognised one superior officer in my life, and that's Elenna and she had to earn my respect. Matron hadn't a hope in hell and neither did the Delaforces.

Theresa Delaforce proved to be pleasingly dim. She'd never been in the Youth Police Cadre because Father thought it was a corrupting influence and so she was schooled at home by a succession of tutors - and it showed. She had really the most romantic views of the country and the Council and it was all I could do not to laugh in her face, especially when she tried to preach the virtues of charity to me. In her warped little world the elite exists to help the commoners, as if it could be possible to better the lot of donkeys. Of course, they all thought I was one such and it struck me that it couldn't have been a coincidence that I'd ended up in the hands of a family as out-of -touch as this one. Mr Pendleton probably rigged the auction so that my exile would be in this back-of-beyond armpit of a place, with its twee ornamental gardens and antediluvian social attitudes. I don't know; maybe it was his idea of comfort, but I'll tell you now: the moment Theresa's back was turned I was hacking my way through her computer. She didn't have much idea of security and even if I did get thrown out of YPC, the fact that I'd been there meant I knew a thing or two. In less than ten minutes I was onto the National Net and from there it was a simple matter to page Lally's belt computer. We had a quick chat and I told her where I was, expecting a rescue and I was massively disappointed when Lally told me to keep my head down and play along because she couldn't say how long it would be before she got me out of there. It seemed Daddy had anticipated some disobedience on her part and had her transferred out of CIU and into, of all places, Cardinal. If I thought my exile was grubby, at least I wasn't scuffling in the gutter with those plebs and, obviously, putting together a trustworthy enough command to effect a rescue from there was going to take time.

Well, I logged off Theresa's computer - after adding a quick back door that would allow me access to any computer in the house, and reluctantly settled into my role as her ladyship's drudge. It took a lot of effort to call her ma'am and keep a straight face and even more to curtsy to 'those upstairs'. I had to swallow a lot of pride, I can tell you, but I managed to do it. Matron, though, could go hang. I wasn't going to bow and scrape to a mere servant, no matter who she thought she was. As soon as her back was turned I laid down the law to the other domestics. I took the bed closest to the radiator and told them all that they'd be sleeping by the door. There were twenty beds in there but only eleven of us, of both sexes would you believe, and I was technically the runt because I'm only eighteen, so that meant I was supposed to have the chilly bed by the door. However, I treated that with the contempt it deserved. From the looks of it they had a really easy life there no matter what Matron thought, and the 'dorm boss', who was her second-in-command, thought it would be a simple case of pounding the dogma into us newcomers. Well, as you know, nobody pounds me in any way without my permission and the 'boss' was soon disabused of her notions. It was a fractious debate because the other 'veteran' drudges joined in and pretty soon it was all of them against me and there's only so much of me to go around. Because I'm so fair-minded I let them take the first swing before I sorted them out. I used to be a pretty good fighter anyway, but FJD's approach to brawling was an eye-opener. As they say, to a headcutter anything's a weapon and that dormitory was like an arsenal. After getting the 'boss' in a headlock and punching her lights out, I proceeded to grab a long-handled warming pan and work my way through the other 'veterans' until they surrendered. Then I got the bed I wanted and left the rest of them to tidy up. One of them was unconscious for quite a while and the rest made such a racket that I had to threaten to kill them, just so I could get some peace. Then the 'boss' spoiled it by hitting a silent alarm that brought the retainers running. Since finishing them off too would violate Lally's orders to keep quiet, I was obliged to submit and got a room to myself the hard way when they slung me in the cooler, which was a sort of ex-meat locker where the naughty boys and girls go. In the interests of harmony I waited an hour or two before I picked the lock, but I'd done everything I needed to by then to put them in their place and so I'd wait for Lally alright, but I wasn't going to do it on anyone's terms but mine.

Trilly's Story, Part Two

2011-12-24T04:50:00.000-08:00

There's a part of New London Town that you might not have heard of called Chattel Street. It's in the east end of the city but I couldn't tell you where exactly because they took me there in a box. It had air holes and everything, but it was still a box. They unloaded me off the back of the truck, opened the lid and pulled me out and there I was, their former queen-in-all-but-name, standing on the block with fifteen scrawny types and wearing nothing but a sack-cloth gown. I tried looking around for clues but it was hard to tell where anything was. I could see the dome of the Palace in the distance, of course, but that thing's so big you can see it from anywhere, so all I could tell was that this thriving slave market was near the old docks. There were lots of people gathered around the platform, bidding for what was on offer, and here and there I could see a few elites - actual elites! - buying slaves. I would have thought, you know, with two hundred-odd death laws, that slavery would be one of them, but no. All quite legal and above board. From what I overheard, the Red-Twos sell themselves into short-term slavery when they can't pay their debts and sometimes, if FJD doesn't get them first, orphans end up there too. Well, when it came my turn to be sold, you could have heard a pin drop. There I was, the most beautiful young woman in the world, offered up like a slice of pie for those slobbering ignoramuses. Presumably because it was his job, the auctioneer gave them all a spiel about what a 'prize catch' I was and then he proceeded to pull up the dress and show them bits of me that nobody gets to see unless they've got something I want, at which point he discovered that the Pendletons had neglected to shackle me.

After they'd stretchered him away and found a stand-in - and put some manacles on me - the auction resumed, with them keeping their distance while the requisite thugs kept guns on me. With no other option I had to stand there and let them treat me like a piece of meat and it dawned on me, at least partially, just what it must be like for the commoners who go through this. They really are pitiful creatures, commoners, aren't they? They just let it happen but I stood up for my class and headbutted the first one to try and cop a feel. By the time the bidding started I was in a cage again and they were terrified to go near me. It was during the bidding that I saw Lally in the crowd, along with one of her lieutenants. They were in mufti to a point - to Lally anything that's not a uniform qualifies as mufti - and they were bidding, obviously trying to buy me out of my predicament, which I appreciated. Unfortunately, as I said, there were other elites there and they had money too and they may even have recognised me, which made for an interesting scenario. Long story short, Lally was outbid and I was sold to someone else, a retainer for the Delaforce family. They're nothing to write home about, Green-Twos with ideas above their station like pretty much all the middling elite. I've heard the name and there's not really much more to them than that. Some property on the south coast just the right side of the Shore Patrol's jurisdiction and I think that's about it. Maybe they wanted me to be a domestic; I didn't know and I didn't plan on hanging around to find out because the moment I was out of this sordid little market I planned to make a run for it.

I didn't see Lally as they dragged me away but I knew she wouldn't have given up so easily. Daddy and the Caucus might have washed their hands of me but she's my big sister and the only member of the family I give a damn about. I knew that if she couldn't buy me out then she'd break me out. Of course, it might make things complicated for her if I did a runner in the meantime, but she's a major in the Criminal Investigation Unit and she should be used to expecting the unexpected. The only thing that really bothered me was what they'd do to my Record if I did run. Given that I was Red-Two when I was sold, the rule might be that I'd be demoted to Red-Three and shot on sight and that wouldn't do at all. Well, it was all just speculation. What was fact was that I had no intention of becoming the property of the Delaforce clan. Whatever my Record might say, I'm higher-born than those grubby guttersnipes and they're the ones who should bow to me. Unless slave training turned out to be fun, I planned to make their lives a living hell, and it was while I was in such a foul mood that they uncaged me - at gunpoint - and chucked me in the back of a truck with five other bedraggled specimens, none of whom would sit near me. That suited me fine since I didn't want any of their germs, but they went too far as the truck started its drive to my new home because none of them would answer my questions and one of them even went so far as to tell me to shut up! Well, I couldn't let that go unpunished and so, as the truck made its way through the bustling city streets, I 'liberated' him by throwing him out the back. His ankle, of course, was still chained to the stanchion inside, same as everyone else, and the truck drivers didn't notice, so by the time we got to where we were going there wasn't a lot of him left. Mind you, the others were really polite to me after that, so it was worth it.

I concocted a story that he'd tried to escape and that satisfied the driver because at the end of the day there's no accounting for stupid people. Mr Delaforce would just claim the money back and we'd have more room in the dormitory, so everyone won. Of course, I planned to have the dorm to myself before too long and if they didn't like that, well, tough. I didn't ask to be thrown into slavery and I like to make the best of things, you know. I think it's a testimony to my natural humility that I let them share a truck with me and, really, the one who fell out only had himself to blame. It's not as if I did anything wrong - I asked a polite question, he told me to fuck off and he had to be punished. I wouldn't have dwelt on it in any case because I have far more important things to worry about than the life of one slave, but it was funny the way all the others tried to avoid me and wouldn't say anything to contradict my version of events. Spineless, the lot of them, just like all commoners. Anyway, there we were, all lined up on the gravel outside the Delaforce house, waiting for matron to give us the once-over, when I was struck with how easy it actually would be to leg it there and then. Two armed guards and one turret system was all I could see. They were so dumb, they actually relied on the honour system! It was all I could do not to laugh and so I didn't mind so much when matron gave me the once-over and then assigned me to work as servant to the daughter of the house. I'd really landed on my feet there because while the other slaves were mucking out the pigs or whatever slaves in the countryside do, I would be in a position where I could plunder his lordship's computer and start making life difficult for Daddy. On the whole, it could have been a lot worse.

Trilly's Story, Part One

2011-12-23T03:44:00.000-08:00

When Daddy returned from exile the Caucus panicked. They were in it up to their elbows and every man jack of them was corrupt. I tried to govern fairly and in the interests of the blobs but, at the end of the day, people can be so ungrateful! Daddy flew back into the city in the Shadow II gunship codenamed Bird Alpha, can you believe? He actually nicked my special royal call sign and took it for himself! Well, I couldn't let him run his sticky fingers all over it and so I ordered the Royal Guard to shoot him down... oh, wait... no I didn't. That's right, the Caucus deposed the Royal Guard, didn't they? Replaced them all with retainers like Rhona here, though not many of them were even half as competent even if she does look like someone took a hedge trimmer to her face. Anyway, I told the retainers to activate the Palace defence systems and send him into the river and then fish out the little bits and jump on them, but the cowards wouldn't obey me and so Daddy swept into the Palace on a tide of Pendleton retainers! And Wastelanders! Can you believe it? The domestics must have spent days sweeping the dung up off the floor after that lot trooped in! Pendletons - pah! You remember them from that Liberty Day party at old Tommy Atkins' gaff. Half of them were drunk and the other half were so twisted up with hate and petty grievances that it was almost a kindness to put them out of their misery. A year or so in the tenements has done them a world of good, though, because they're all so thin now and one or two of them were really rather dishy and it's a pity it wasn't a social event or we might have got down to it right there. I never got round to having sex on the throne, you know. I thought about it and I even selected a nice young bodyguard for the ride, but then he went and got himself killed on a raid north of the river and so that was that. In an ideal world we could have done it during Sessions, right there in front of the Council, just for the look on their wizened old faces.

Anyway... Daddy's apes threw me in a cell while they decided what to do with me. He reconvened the Caucus and reminded them who they really worked for, i.e. him and not me, and then the despicable milksops were lining up to denounce me. Honestly, there was a queue half a block long of people who'd 'suddenly remembered' treasonous acts I'd committed. The cell where they put me overlooked the old coach yard that hasn't seen use since the year dot. The sheds are full of mouldering carriages and a lot of rats and dead flies but the cobbled yard itself was clear of junk until maybe a day after I was thrown in there, when a noise of trucks and carpentry reached me. I'd been sitting in that cell, twiddling my little thumbs and pondering the revolver and single bullet that some helpful person pushed through the cat flap, when the sound reached me. I dragged a chair over to the high, barred window, stood on it and peered out to see two trucks from FJD down there and a bunch of the Department's techs erecting a portable gallows, a dear little thing with enough space on the beam for one rope, and it was about my size. It looked as if Daddy was looking for the Caucus to vote me a Red-Three and declare me a non-citizen but in the meantime they made it known that I was welcome to cut through all the red tape by putting the pistol to good use. Now, you know as well as anyone that I lead a charmed life - not as charmed as Elenna's, maybe, but there's only so many miracles a girl can witness before she loses her marbles - and I had no intention of making Daddy's life easy. Besides, not all the Caucus were totally spineless as I discovered late that afternoon when work on the gallows halted and then they started dismantling it again. As it happens, I didn't know we even had portable gallows. I thought that when they wanted to knock someone off in a hurry they just picked up the phone and called Cardinal to come and clean up the mess, even if by doing that they usually created a bigger one.

With the techs taking the gallows to bits again I was left in that gloomy little cell with just the revolver and my pet rat who I named Gerald, in honour of my cousin. Truth be told, it wasn't a very nice revolver at all. It was really rather rusty, you know, and when I spun the chamber it got stuck. Nobody in their right mind would consider blowing their brains out with that thing - you could have played Russian roulette with it and had a winning streak, it was so wobbly! But, just to be sure, when the retainers came back to the cell that evening I put it to good use by shooting one of them, albeit on the third try. The rotters tried to take it off me after that and I hit them with it, the silly boys. They forgot how well I did in self-defence back at the Academy and the good thing about basic wooden furniture is that you can pick it up and give it a jolly good swing! I'd put down four of them before they shot me with a trank dart and I woke up in a straitjacket, in a cage in the middle of the Council Chambers, with about fifty zillion of them gawking at me. The Caucus was there too, of course, looking as shifty and gutless as always and you should have seen them squirm whenever I made eye contact. Daddy was lording it over them in his best uniform even though I was sure I'd burned all his stuff when I kicked him out the first time. He made this really long, boring speech about how I was such a danger to society, how I was so nasty and mean and how I'd stolen what was rightfully his, by which I think he meant the kingdom and then, when he'd finished slandering me - his own daughter! - he told them all to make up their weaselly minds what to do with me if they wouldn't let him string me up.

Well, that's when Mr Pendleton spoke up. I don't know which one he was because they all look the same to me, but he spoke like a true toady when he suggested exile. Daddy wasn't interested in that at first, but I could tell that Lally was because her ears pricked up at once. I know for a fact that she was on my side because, well, she's my big sister and that's what big sisters do, but she was stuck because she's the apple of Daddy's eye whereas, if I'm anything, I'm his crab apple. She wanted to rescue me but she was on probation, restored to Daddy's good graces as long as she did as she was told, so she was there and looking really uncomfortable because she has less interest in Mason family business than most people. But the moment Mr Pendleton said the 'E' word up she perked and, when I saw that, so did I. But then Mr Pendleton spoiled it by qualifying 'exile' with 'slavery' and the swines actually voted to sell me! I'd been their queen-in-all-but name not a week before and here they were, voting to pass me along like second-hand goods, to 'knock some decency' into me! Outrageous! Of course, I let them know in no uncertain terms what I thought of that but, with hindsight, I think I over-egged the pudding when I reminded them all that I knew where they lived. I probably should have pleaded a bit, you know, played the cards that nature gave me by exaggerating how small and harmless and delicate I am. Oh well, benefits of hindsight and all that tosh. At least Daddy couldn't just have me killed. Doesn't do to go against the vote because then it becomes you against the family and they don't like that. Well, Daddy left the details to Mr Pendleton and walked out and that was it, session concluded and Trimillion Lucrezia Mason was officially proscribed and a non-citizen. Slavery beckoned and, with it, whips, chains, restraints and all that saucy stuff. And I decided there and then, that when I'd had my fun, I was going to come back to the Palace, rip the top of Daddy's skull off, and shove the blade of a food blender in there. Daddy's days were numbered from that moment on, but he was so cocky and full of himself that he didn't know he was dead yet.

Nest of Vipers

2011-12-22T04:44:00.000-08:00

Well, the embers are there but I don't have any chestnuts so I'm going to have to rely on metaphor as I scuff my toe in the ashes of Garamond Mason's pet project. Operation Perdition is concluded and the Draftee compound is a smoking crater. There are SP ground troops poking through the rubble in a half-hearted search for survivors and salvage but, to be honest, the moment the compound's armoury went up finding either became pretty unlikely. I watched the attack and the subsequent clean-up from the safety of the forest workers' garage while considering what move to take next. I haven't been in contact with Monica Grayne since all this blew up and I'm hoping that she accepts the disappearance of her courier, Lieutenant Rish, as one of those things that happen in wars. I don't believe, based on what I knew of him, that the uprising he sparked in the compound was authorised by Daylight. I can understand what it might have been meant to achieve - i.e. denying the regional extermination centres the services of the Draftees - but I'm convinced that he wasn't thinking of 'the cause' when he went off half-cocked, but of personal vengeance. From his perspective the orders prohibiting him from taking his revenge on the three people most responsible for wrecking his career (Rhona, Trilly and I) must have chafed like a pair of horsehair knickers and in the end his intemperance got the better of him. In all probability he got his own team killed in the process if they didn't recognise that he'd gone off the deep end and legged it before the gunships arrived. As of now I'm on my own in this, as usual. Well, I say on my own - I do have those elements of the Department in on the conspiracy to fall back on, as well as Rhona Woodley and, to a lesser extent, Trilly. What we need to do next is dissuade Cardinal from having anything to do with the extermination centre project.

This might be trickier than merely poisoning a bunch of people or inciting a riot because even though the terrorists no longer control me, they might be tempted to blackmail me and they have plenty of material. I'm hoping they won't do that and banking on them recognising that, at the end of the day, I'm a nobody in the wider scheme of things. Even though I'm the Department's most prolific headcutter, I haven't pulled the lever on anyone for over a year and I have no intention of starting up again. Hopefully Daylight will understand that I'm well past my sell-by date and concentrate on frying bigger fish like the FJD Board of Commanders instead. The normal route for 'expired' headcutters (term-expired, not dead!) is to go to Dunbar-2 for a mind wipe and a new personality. I, on the other hand, seem to be a free agent in a totalitarian state, which ought to make me a marked woman. As things stand, I seem to get an awful lot of freelance jobs that generally end with me being fired, beaten up and reassigned, like a sort of peripatetic drudge. It's mainly down to my Green-One loyalty rating, the highest rank to which a low-born commoner can aspire. It means I'm officially trusted, insofar as a grubby, gutter-born creature like me can be but when you get right down to it, I'm still common and worth far less to a blackmailer than the likes of Councillor Merpath. Come to think of it, though, I have no idea where I was born, who my parents were or anything. I could have been born of kings, for all I know, but I'm officially an orphan and highly-regarded enough that Merpath is willing to turn me loose in the full knowledge that I'll return to my cage at sundown. This time that's going to be dicey because Daylight are already roosting in said cage, the country farmhouse that the Department gave me as a reward for eleven years of 'dedicated' service.

Rhona and Trilly are of the opinion that we ought to report to Southwark, where the Department of Extraordinary Actions (aka 'Cardinal') has its headquarters now. Rhona used to work for them and I first met her in her professional capacity as the senior NCO of one of their hunter-killer squads. She arrived in Cardinal via the Special Police, where she'd worked as an infiltrator before she was betrayed, mutilated and ultimately fired. There's a vicious knife scar that bisects her face diagonally, from right to left and which has left her with a permanent sneer, and her fingers are gnarled and arthritic, a legacy of when her captors fed her hands into the spinning tracks of a Panther scout car. She's had an operation since we last met that has repaired some of the damage and allows her to at least use a pen properly, but she's still using a disabled-adapted firearm with a cut-away trigger guard so that she can draw and shoot without too much fumbling. She's a member of the Mason family's retainer force now, technically a mercenary, but Cardinal has never been a particularly formal outfit and people come and go from its ranks all the time. She still has a lot of her Cardinal gear in the apartment that she rents, certainly enough to outfit the three of us. It helps that not every trooper has a uniform - in fact, a lot of them rely on armbands - and an organisation that sloppy very often loses equipment, and occasionally gains stuff too. That's how, in one instance when the officers conducted an inspection of one of the outlying 'bases' (a rented warehouse), they found a thriving little community of indigents sub-letting the place, including a number of Wastelanders. Since one of Cardinal's main duties is thinning the ranks of the Wastelanders, this amounted to a minor scandal. Rhona assures me that such petty graft is rife, largely because Cardinal pays its enforcers a pittance: they get less than a freshly minted Executioner would expect, about two shillings a month, so it's hardly surprising that they find ways to augment their wage.

I was surprised to learn that it wasn't always the case. Once upon a time, maybe three years ago, the Department of Extraordinary Actions paid quite well and provided a modest benefits package that made the prospect of becoming a paramilitary killer slightly more attractive. Then some new bods moved in at the top and began a ruthless campaign of cost-cutting, leading to the rabble we have now. The new bods in question are the Snetterton family, a bunch of grasping, social-climbing lizards. There was a Snetterton in the cells on the Draftee compound when Operation Perdition was launched, but it's too much to hope for that he's dead. He'd have been evacuated long before the bombs fell, but he's a nasty little man with a short temper and a big thing for cudgels and he's typical of the breed. The middling elite are often like this - desperate to scale the heights and with very few scruples as to how they go about it. Presumably they acquired their stake in Cardinal the way all elites do, via cutthroat competition, either marrying or murdering their way into the boardroom. It's bitterly ironic that we Executioners regularly hang commoners who commit murder but when an elite does it, it's accompanied by a round of 'For He's A Jolly Good Fellow' and a golden handshake. Mind you, if infiltrating Cardinal is as easy as Rhona suggests, we ought to be able to spike the mineral water with cyanide at the very least. The only thing I really have misgivings about is placing that sort of free license to commit murder in the hands of someone like Trilly. Before we take this step to place ourselves in the viper pit, we need to know from the horse's mouth exactly how she wound up in Daylight's hands, just in case there are any more surprises waiting for us...

Death of a Project

2011-12-21T04:34:00.000-08:00

The Draftee compound is in flames and my heart soars at the sight. I'm watching as Operation Perdition unfolds from the safety of Rhona Woodley's hideaway in the ornamental forest to the south. Because it is ornamental, there are a couple of huts and a small garage in there that the gardeners use and, because Rhona's a former infiltrator who specialises in getting into places that she shouldn't, it was short work to hack her way past the garage's security and set up a little warren under a nice leak-proof roof. It was certainly an improvement on the trench or lean-to that I was expecting because, if nothing else, it had a computerised link to the outside world that she'd also hacked and I wasted no time in getting on the hotline to FJD headquarters to inform Councillor Merpath that I was alive and well and to please ask the SP not to bomb the forest. He was happy to hear that I was alright and fortunately neglected to ask how I'd got past two automated turrets and a solid padlock while under heavy bombardment, because that would have entailed telling him about Rhona. She was a weapon I intended to keep secret, especially from him because, at the end of the day, he was the one who sleepwalked the Department into its ill-advised alliance with the terror group, Daylight. Rhona exists outside that particular loop and, what's more, is a member of the enemy's private army, which gives me access to a priceless pair of ears that Councillor Merpath lacks. Likewise, I made no mention of Trilly, who officially never existed now that her father rules the Council. While I might, at a push, get away with having a Mason retainer on the team, having an actual Mason would be a leap of faith too many for the Department. There's a price on Trilly's head that, if Councillor Mason discovered that his errant daughter had returned to Britain, would quadruple overnight.

If truth be told, I'm not sure what to do about Trilly. Now that she's broken her programming she's very obviously seething with rage and while she took some of that out on the Draftees, it's very likely a bottomless well. She'll kill and keep on killing out of a desire for revenge that can never be satisfied and now that we're together again it'll be just like old times: anyone who dies at her hands will be my responsibility as her senior officer (her Assistant Executioner rank was never revoked) and, latterly, her very unwilling and exasperated surrogate mother. I learned long ago that keeping Trilly on the straight and narrow is impossible: the best that can be done is to guide an unstoppable force into a hopefully useful, or at least manageable, outcome. There's an edge to her personality now that I haven't seen before, an aura of grimness and, dare I say it, a hint of maturity. Actually, though, the latter is unlikely because I just can't picture a mature Trilly. She's always been the gleeful, careless, freewheeling psychopath who looks out for her 'friends' even if that renders them accomplices. I could tell that she was enjoying the flattening of the Draftee compound from the way she whooped with delight as the helicopters swooped, strafed and soared away. She clapped her hands and bounced excitedly as the remains of the admin block was blown to splinters and her applause was liberally sprinkled with gasps of 'cor!' and 'wow!' even though the curling of her fists spoke volumes as to her background anger.

I tried to concentrate on what Councillor Merpath was telling me over the phone but, what with the bombing and the campus lockdown, the line was very bad and we both had to keep repeating ourselves. It didn't help that he frequently referred to me as 'Mary' and I had to keep correcting him. The slip was far more marked when he was stressed and right there, as his own Department's Academy was being bombed, he was very stressed indeed. There was good news, though, and that was that Dr Theobald Brown, the political appointee largely responsible for this mess, is out on his ear as of now. It had been his crazy idea to arm the Draftees and train them to operate the security and day-to-day drudgery of the regional extermination centres and now the elephants were coming home to roost. His armed quasi-elite had rebelled at the instigation of the Daylight operatives who infiltrated the compound and now Garamond Mason's workforce is literally going up in smoke. As had the few Draftees lucky enough to be outside the compound when the insurrection began, those Orphans who Brown elevated have also been disarmed and confined to the cells. That means the snotty little 'gas chamber kids' of the likes of Student Griers will no long be able to lord it over their peers. I've brought them down to earth with a bump once already by inciting the riot that saw the far more numerous 'gallows kids' beat the hell out of them but while that might have been seen as a much-needed venting of steam, this time around it would have far more serious consequences and I can readily imagine a great many 'gas chamber kids' suddenly swearing blind that they were forced to accept the better living conditions, money and privileges that marked them as 'special' before. The Academy will undergo a period of bureaucratic pruning while Dr Brown's 'reforms' are reversed and then, when all the cronies and hangers-on have been evicted (and, in an ideal world, charged) then the much-missed, incompetent but well-meaning Principal Martin will return from exile. All will be restored at the Academy and it's a significant blow to the extermination centres.

I discussed it with Rhona after I broke the connection. With the Department's formal withdrawal from the REC project our initial aims have been achieved. The senior REC engineers are dead and now that FJD has walked away from the table, the easy source of personnel is gone as well. Whatever Garamond might think of the Department, we have the only facilities in the country wherein professional killers - those who have no other duties - can be trained. Councillor Merpath can point to the insurrection and the seeds that Garamond's flunky sowed and with a clear conscience have no further part in the scheme, leaving the RECs high and dry. The only other possible source of people willing to kill for a pittance is Cardinal, the Council's paramilitary death squad. Cardinal's people are not professionals in the way that the Department's Executioners are. FJD trains its headcutters to respect the dignity of those that they kill to the point where a great deal of mercy is exercised. Cardinal has no such scruples and most of its people are drunkards with firearms. The thought of extermination centres manned by those bastards makes my blood run cold but I can at least see the finishing line now. If we can somehow remove Cardinal from the picture Garamond will be left with either his own retainer force or, more likely, nothing. It will fatally undermine his position and the Council might even oust him. Rhona is ex-Cardinal and knows how the force functions. She also, as it transpires, knows who's at the top giving the orders: the Snetterton family.

Operation Perdition

2011-12-20T05:38:00.000-08:00

Chaos in the Draftee compound. It was open war and I knew that even without the triggering of the panic alarm, the Special Police gunships would be on their way. The FJD Academy is on the southern outskirts of the city. SPHQ is on the northern boundary near the river, at most ten minutes' flying time away. The attack birds would be fueling up right now, their ground crews frantically plugging hoses into tanks while the armourers attached cluster bombs and incendiaries. I saw the plans for what they called 'Operation Perdition' some years ago and I knew we had to get the hell out of the compound because they were going to flatten the place. I knew there were two evacuation tunnels that were big enough to drive vehicles through, but we were nowhere near either of them. The bar on the compound is nearer to the 'southern fortification area' - the electric fence with its turret defences - than the admin block where the tunnels are to be found. The smartest thing to do would be make our way to the gatehouse and get out that way, but of course everybody who was in on the secret of Operation Perdition would be doing exactly that and I had no desire to be trapped in a crown of desperate, stampeding people when the gunships arrived. The alternative was to go for the southern access gate and hope that our security clearance would be enough to persuade the turrets to let us pass. Escapers occasionally tried to exploit the southern gate that opened into the ornamental forest near where Dr Brosnan had met his end. More often than not, though, it was how the security teams brought the bodies back. There was a small morgue close by that saw use on such occasions but while it had thick, insulated walls, it wasn't much good for stopping bombs.

More than anything, I hoped Rhona was on the ball. Even though she was a Mason retainer and not part of the staff she would know that an uprising in the Draftee compound would have dire consequences and if she had any sense, she'd put some distance between her and it. However, I was banking on her not having that much sense because I needed her to help us get away. I guessed that she would have subverted the security systems around the south gate because that was where she was living rough and part and parcel of the covert life was staying out of camera range. She had a Green-Two loyalty rating which marked her as middling elite and that sort of electronic nepotism was usually enough to guarantee that elites got away with murder. However, I had no means of getting in contact with her so all I could really do was run for the fence and hope for the best. I discussed the problem with Trilly and she agreed that the south gate was the only realistic option, mainly because she only had fifteen rounds of ammunition left in her rifle and the pistol I'd liberated from Rish had only seven in it. We were both crack shots but there were something like two hundred Draftees on the compound and for all we knew they were all up in arms. Either way they had nothing to lose because Perdition was a mission of extermination: anyone identified as a Draftee would be killed whether they'd rebelled or not. The only thing that could realistically save the life of a Draftee now was tutor intervention - if a staff member sheltered one or two of them, they might live through the coming firestorm, but those were long odds because the Draftees had been resented from day one, untrained amateurs at best and convicted criminals at worst. I'd met only one in my career for whom I had a good word, a fallen elite by the name of Lionel Standbent, who had worked as my Assistant a few years ago. He'd been a schoolmaster who was removed from his post and railroaded into FJD after giving failing grades to one of his pupils in ignorance of the status of the child's father, an influential Councillor with a very short temper. Lionel had been witty, very clever and, most importantly for a gallows crew, easy to get along with and when he finally went to Dunbar for re-education I was sorry to lose him. But Lionel excepted, the Draftees were scum as far as I was concerned. I'd seen the results of their training up close and their casual brutality horrified me. I would quite happily stand by and watch the Special Police torch the compound and then roast chestnuts on the embers, but the 'standing by' bit required me to be on the other side of the fence.

We couldn't hang around in the bar, much as I could have done with a fortifying shot of liquor. I don't normally touch the stuff but if ever there was a time for Dutch courage it was now. Besides, I could have hit someone with the bottle if the need arose because I had little confidence in Rish's sidearm, the handgrip of which wobbled noticeably. Something else that was noticeably wobbly was Dr Theobald Brown's grip on the Academy, which had been iron-hard since Councillor Garamond Mason had grabbed the throne. It had presumably been their idea to promote the Draftees to the security force preparatory to them assuming a similar role when the regional extermination centres went online. It had been obvious to those with eyes to see it - i.e. everyone on campus who was actually employed by FJD - that it was going to end in tears and, thanks to Lieutenant Rish and Daylight, the Draftees were now taking their bloody revenge on the Department. There was gunfire right across the compound and here and there isolated tutors, security and a few unfortunate Orphans made a run for the gatehouse, firing weapons if they had any. Part of the admin block was already in flames, as were the Test Gallows sheds and I could hear distant rotor blades. If memory served, Operation Perdition called for a squadron of Shadow gunships to be deployed in the 'sterilisation' of the compound. That translated as twelve heavily armed attack helicopters and, presumably, more on stand-by in the unlikely event that anything was still standing after the first wave had discharged its firepower. I did at least have confidence enough in the SP not to worry about collateral damage: the Draftee compound was very clearly demarcated on the campus, well away from the Orphans' facilities and those of the staff. It had been designed with the contingency of Perdition in mind, so that if the need arose it could be surgically eliminated with no risk to those parts of the Academy that the Department actually cared about. That said, of course, they would be ruthlessly picky about who they let out once the attack started. Having an FJD uniform was no guarantee because, after all, a Draftee could murder a tutor and steal his clothes. Likewise the Record card. The only defence was to be on the other side of the fence when the helicopters arrived and so we ran as if the demons of hell were snapping at our heels.

I could see the south gate clearly enough. There wasn't a lot to it, just a sentry box, a couple of turrets and a barrier that incorporated a Record card scanner but, with the compound on high alert, there was no chance of merely swiping our cards and then opening the gates: the computer would want to verify our identities and we would have to comply or be blasted to confetti by the turrets. The ground in this part of the compound was relatively clear, as was to be expected. After all, there was no sense in providing cover for an escapee to exploit. The killing ground in front of the south gate was about a hundred yards wide and I could see the turrets tracking us as we ran. The odd bullet pinged around us but I ignored them. Trilly stopped once to pivot and fire a single shot in the direction of the morgue building but that was the only time we stopped. The rotor blades were now clearly audible and we had minutes at most before the bombs fell. We reached the sentry box and there was Rhona Woodley, clad in a camouflaged Security uniform that she must have liberated from stores. The sentry box had been pocked with gunfire already and had been abandoned. She greeted us with a terse nod of the 'you took your damn time' variety and then set about punching our Record details into the computer. She had just finished entering the data and the gate had started to swing open when the first gunship roared over the treeline and raked the compound with cannon fire.

Epitaph of a Courier

2011-12-19T04:03:00.000-08:00

The weight pressing down on me eased suddenly as my attackers unexpectedly fell away. I didn't wait to find out why they'd retreated because, concussed as I was, I knew I was in dire peril, at most scant seconds away from rape and death. There was a roaring noise in my ears as my heart pounded but it was punctuated by a puzzling series of muffled thuds that didn't sound much like my heartbeat. I could taste blood running down the back of my nose into my mouth and I reflected ruefully that at this rate the wounds Rhona had inflicted were never going to heal. It had been bruise upon bruise these past few days and I was starting to resent it. With that feeling of anger some of my strength returned and I shoved at the bodies for a few moments before I noticed that I was meeting no resistance. That was when I spied Trilly. She was standing over me with a rifle in her hands. She was so petite that the rifle looked huge in her arms and I recalled dimly that that was why she preferred sub-machine guns but, even so, she'd certainly learned to use one and she'd put that to the test while I was momentarily visiting the land of nod. The thin wisp of smoke curling from the barrel told its own story and as I hoisted myself shakily up I saw that our attackers were down - all of them - and that with the exception of Rish they were dead, drilled precisely through the head. The man himself was on his knees, stark panic etched across his face, an expression I often saw on those who met Trilly for the first - or if they were really unlucky - second time. Those last fevered moments as the gang piled in on top of me must have been the impetus she needed to shake off the programming that had kept her a quiescent and unwilling bystander. Now freed, as I had expected, she'd burst into incandescent life, filled with vengeful and unholy rage and these would-be rapists, the utter scum of the dregs of the earth, had been the unwilling witnesses, caught out in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

I slumped against the wall, feeling the fresh bruises protesting, while I considered our next move. It should have been obvious to all that Rish wasn't going to be walking out of here but even though Trilly had momentarily spared his life, it had been in case we needed answers and certainly not out of compassion. I don't honestly think Trilly understands the concepts of compassion, mercy or any of the other tenets of ethics that the tutors here tried fruitlessly to hammer into her skull. She looked slightly bored, if truth be told, as if the fun was over and it was time to go home. Her finger was curled around the rifle's trigger and all it would have taken for her to send Rish off to join his comrades would have been the slightest twitch. I motioned to her to shoulder arms, or at least point it somewhere else for the moment, so I could talk to the erstwhile courier without having to worry that his head might explode in mid-sentence. The fact that I was more bothered about getting blood on my uniform than ending a human life went to show - yet again - just how dehumanized I'd become in my service to the Department. I expect any normal human being would have been horrified at the carnage we'd wrought - and I fully accepted my guilt by association - but that's the thing about the Final Justice Department: they're not exactly anti-emotion, but they much prefer it if their Executioners can learn to compartmentalise their feelings and do their wailing and rending of garments in private, later. As far as I was concerned, the uppermost feeling right then was of relief at having survived the ordeal. I long ago stopped bothering about any post-traumatic stress and simply hardened myself because one thing the Department doesn't deal in is counselling. As they see it, there are plenty of fish in the sea and if an Executioner dies or burns out there's more where he came from and while I felt a degree of responsibility for the deaths, it was very strongly tempered by what they'd tried to do to us. Given the fact that there are 202 laws on the books for which the death penalty can apply, it was something of a novelty to end the lives of people who actually deserved it.

As for Rish, I crouched beside him and went through his pockets, looking for anything that might be of use. I wasn't searching for something specific because I had no idea how one went about being a courier for a terrorist organisation, but he yielded a concealed pistol with one magazine and, more importantly, a notebook that proved to be filled with scribbled names, numbers and what looked like amateurishly encrypted diary entries. It didn't look particularly hard to work out and I was confident that between us, Trilly and I could decipher it. From the look on his face when I liberated the book, its contents were important and Rish knew it. Even more than fumbling his mission here at the Draftee compound, in losing his notebook he looked to have dropped the ball monumentally. I pocketed it and then gave him one chance to divulge anything that might persuade us to let him live. Frankly, the odds against that were astronomical and we all knew it, but it was important to me to offer him that chance, so that I could at least tell myself I'd not merely shot him out of hand the way that the likes of Cardinal would. As expected, he spurned the offer and told me to go to hell in the same breath but, being honest about it, I've lived my entire life in hell and there's not much left that could make it worse. Sighing, I stood up again and moved out of the line of fire as Trilly brought the rifle down. I nodded once and she pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked and it was over, quick and clean, just as an Executioner should do it.

There wasn't any sense of closure as we left the cellar and made our cautious way through the empty bar. Rish had been the enemy. He hadn't been a good man fallen on hard times, just as he'd never been that much of a bastard. He was just... a man - a natural product of a society that values birth and family name more than life. He had been of low elite origin, a third son or something of that ilk, with no inheritance and no prospects. He'd been an average pupil of the Youth Police Cadre that all elite kids attend, he'd graduated and then he'd found himself running a flea pit of an Urban Police station, sinking deeper and deeper into the bottle as his life turned to slurry around him. I don't know, maybe it was a feeling of injustice that had driven him into the arms of Daylight, the dark knowledge eating away at him that while his classmates had gone on to bigger and better things, he'd drifted into the gutter. He'd tried to get back at the society that scorned him and, in the process, made one bad decision after another and now, at the very end, what was he? In the cold light of day he was nothing more than a statistic, one more notch on the Council's belt. Nobody would avenge him and very few would even notice that he was gone. Even as I inspected and loaded the pistol I'd taken from him I knew that the firearm was far more real than he had ever been. It wasn't much to show for a life. It wasn't even a very good gun. It was workmanlike and rather dirty, very much like its late owner and I planned to discard it at the first opportunity.

Draftee Compound, Part Three

2011-12-18T03:29:00.000-08:00

The fact that he'd taken off his mask proved that Rish intended to kill me. Now that I'd seen his face and knew for sure that he was a traitor, there was only one way that this could end - with me dead on the floor. The fact that I was a traitor too merely added to the irony of the situation because, if he had his way, by the time the State got involved there would be nobody left to punish. I could tell just by looking at him that what he was doing now was outside the scope of his orders. Whatever authority Monica Grayne may have had over him in the outside world, down here in this cellar he was the law and he intended to wield it with all the force and brutality he could muster. As for me, my options were very limited, down to a straight choice of killing or being killed. It was hard to be sure in the gloom but there were about eight Draftees in the cellar along with Rish, all of them carrying the FJD version of the Miller-135 automatic rifle with its 'bullpup' configuration and jagged bayonet. The Department's version of the weapon was strictly semi-automatic and carried a smaller magazine, as befit a security team with a comparatively small sphere of influence. Unlike the Special and Urban Police forces, FJD security was responsible for the Academy and headquarters and that was it. The gallows station crews had weapons of their own and saw to their own safety. If needed, a security team could fly to the assistance of a besieged station but that was rare. The result was that the Department's private army was weaker even than some of the retainer forces. On the other had, that wasn't much use to me right then because all it meant was that Rish's cronies would have to take more careful aim before they shot me full of holes.

I stayed close to Trilly, keeping one arm protectively around her while dividing my attention between her and the Draftees. She was still fighting her conditioning and I prayed that she would be able to break it before Rish took the gloves off but even though her lips were moving in silent curses, her expression was blank and it was clear that she was losing. She moved like an automaton as I backed her away from the Draftees. The naked lust in their eyes was frightening to behold and I knew it wouldn't be long before they gave into it. They were obeying Rish for now but the moment he turned them loose there would be no stopping them. I cast around, desperately searching for something to fight back with but there was nothing. I might be able to hurl a bottle or two, perhaps floor a couple if they came close enough, but then the rifles would open up... and there was nothing to say I had to be physically intact before they had their way with me. A curious sort of calm came over me as the Draftees pushed us back. I wasn't going to give them any satisfaction if I could help it and least of all was I going to beg. I would go down fighting and I would keep them off Trilly for as long as I drew breath. Murderous and psychopathic she might have been; right here and now she was helpless, trapped inside a body that refused to obey it's owners commands.

The cold stone of the cellar wall stopped my retreat and the Draftees fanned out around us in a semicircle. There were rows of barrel racks on either side of me and I'd retreated between more of them so that now, in this small labyrinth, there wasn't much handy that I could wield as a weapon. We'd left the bottles behind near the entrance, where they waited to be put properly away. There was a shelf to my left upon which a couple of brass spigots lay. Presumably they were for tapping the barrels with and, for want of anything else, I grabbed the biggest one, to the sneers of the Draftees. I hefted it in my hand and it was pleasingly solid. Given room, I could probably do something with it and, as far as I could see, only these immediate cronies had come down with Rish. One barrel tap, one Elenna Pointer, nine bastards with rifles: not good odds, but that was the story of my life. The nearest thug put his rifle down, standing it on its butt against one of the barrel racks. He was a big and burly type, with tattoos on his hands that crept up under his sleeves. His nose was broken and he was missing both of his front teeth which made his leer even wetter, and he advanced on me and fumbled with his trousers. Clearly he was claiming first dibs and I was happy to let him try because, fueled by a potent and dangerous cocktail of testosterone and rage, he'd walked straight into his comrades' line of fire and put himself completely at my mercy - and I didn't have any. I didn't bother with the formalities of rape because screaming and pleading are not my style. Hardened as I am after more than a decade on the scaffold, I've seen pretty much the worst that the human race can offer and this tattooed thug who thought he was a hard man didn't even come close. Compared to what I'd seen and done in my career as an Executioner, he was a wide-eyed innocent and he got the treatment he deserved. I held the spigot by the tap and, as he closed on me, I rammed the pipe end into his face with all the force I could muster. It felt as if I was shoving it into a block of wood because my arm jarred with the impact, but the results were very satisfying. The pipe caught him just under the cheekbone and there was a satisfying crack as his face broke. He lurched away, yelling in shock and pain, clasping his hands to the wound and yelling 'the fucking bitch spiked me!' That moment of astonishment was what I was waiting for. I shoved Trilly to one side, behind the barrel racks and into cover as the rifles came up. I followed her in and tumbled to the floor as the firing started.

Thank the Councillor Christ for the Department's decision to buy the cheaper semi-automatic rifles. There might have been a storm of gunfire as I half-crawled, half-dragged Trilly further into the maze. Instead there was an intermittent flurry of badly aimed bullets and a lot of cursing. As far as I was concerned it was one down and eight to go, including Rish. I couldn't see him and in the confusion I didn't dare take a peek for fear of catching a stray round. Anyway, the cellar wasn't that big and, in truth, for a maze it was rather limited in scope. The Draftees split up, with a couple of them following me and the others swarming in from other directions. There's not much joy to be found when you're on the receiving end of an attempted gang rape, but it's the little moments that stick in the memory - like the angry, pain-filled shriek of a Draftee being shot in the back by a comrade. At least one of them was still firing wildly and endangering everyone and I reflected, as I dragged Trilly along, that someone that highly strung would have made a rotten Executioner. Actually, given the total loss of unit cohesion the moment I'd done the unexpected, I wouldn't have held out much hope of any of them graduating, much less lasting more than a week on the gallows before they either burned out or were murdered. It was with that thought in mind that I reached the last corner and the final bolt-hole. I'd been making for the steps that led up into the bar proper, hoping to get Trilly up and out of the cellar and, just maybe, find a phone and call for help... except that I rounded that final bend and there was Rish, rifle in hand, sneering at me and then, suddenly, the Draftees were upon us, bearing us to the ground in a violent, flailing heap. I fought hard and I fought dirty, the way I'd been taught, leaving no rotten move unexplored, but sheer weight of numbers did for me. The Draftees piled in, fists and rifle butts rising and falling and, somewhere along the way, everything went fuzzy...

Draftee Compound, Part Two

2011-12-17T05:23:00.000-08:00

The path by which we arrived in this cellar is a little convoluted but in short form, the fire alarm was a hoax and not a funny one either. Standard procedure when the alarm goes off is to evacuate and then call the roll a safe distance away. In this case I hurried out with Executioners Smith and Thomas to find a bunch of armed Draftees - the ones Dr Brown had put on Security - waiting for us. They had Trilly with them and she was standing, head bowed, looking cowed and pathetic, every bit the achingly petite, tiny girl that she is. It was an act, of course, and one that I was familiar with. Trilly always plays the 'vulnerable female' card just before she hits someone but right there and then wasn't the place for it because they had guns and she didn't. We were likewise disarmed and herded into a cluster and then from within the knot of aggressive Draftees a familiar figure emerged. It was the Daylight courier, clad in his usual plain black boiler suit, boots, face-concealing woolen mask and the vocal scrambler that made him sound like a bad answering machine. I looked around urgently but there was no sign of the compound's regular security team and the automated turrets were quiescent. It had all the hallmarks of an insurrection, albeit a quiet one, and the nagging unease I had felt before exploded inside me as the adrenaline surged. This was a bad situation to be in. I had no idea as to the disposition of the compound's staff but with luck they were merely under house arrest rather than anything worse. As ever, the Daylight courier radiated arrogance and contempt. He strode up to us and separated Trilly and I from Smith and Thomas, who were quickly and roughly hustled away. There were fading shouts and cries of pain as the Executioners disappeared back inside the refectory and then, as the voices rose, I heard a fusillade of shots followed by laughter.

I lunged at the courier but he stepped back easily and the guards grabbed me. Trilly, I saw, still had not moved and it dawned on me that she had probably been 'switched off', the mental conditioning that Daylight had implanted in her brain compelling her to stay quiet while the courier had his fun. I could see the struggle on her face, that faintest of grimaces and a sheen of sweat as she fought for control but for now I was on my own - just me against this terrorist enforcer and a squad of bastards who should never have been given weapons. I wondered if Dr Brown had truly understood what he was doing when he cut the corners and promoted the Draftees. I knew he'd made promises to them but pledges are worthless when both sides intend to renege. I could see now what the Daylight plan had been: put simply, to work on the Draftees and bring them over to the 'cause'. It can't have been a difficult job, given the resentment that was second nature to Draftees anyway, and now the inmates were in control of their prison. If what had just befallen Smith and Thomas was anything to go by, they must have hacked the security system a long time ago because there was supposed to be a red-button alarm for situations like this, when it appeared as if control might be lost. That red button would bring the Special Police gunships and then the compound would be bombed into submission, but the air was worryingly devoid of helicopters. I was on my own - again. I sighed and told the courier just to get it over with, whatever he was planning. Even though I couldn't see his face I could hear the sneer through the voice modulator as he reminded me that I still worked for him and had a job to do. As soon as I'd 'relearned my place' I would be back over the wire and into the Orphan campus and there I would damn well carry out my orders and give his people the security clearance they needed to take over that part too.

The fact that they already had control of the Draftee compound made this a bit pointless, to my mind. After all, they'd subverted systems that were ten times more stringent than anything that controlled the Orphans, and if it had been that easy to do then it was anyone's guess why they needed me. Based on the way he was acting, though, I got the strong impression that he was asking me to endanger the Orphans because he knew I cared about them. It was, in short, an act of petty spite and nothing more. He didn't need me; he just wanted me to suffer. It was also clear that he was expecting me to jump to it and he appeared disconcerted when I didn't. I just told him where he could shove his orders and offered to draw him a diagram if he had any trouble with the longer words. That had at least one beneficial effect because he lost his temper and lashed out at me. I ducked under his fist and landed him a good one in the solar plexus but before I could follow it up with more, one of the Draftees shoved the barrel of his rifle into my face and forced the issue. The courier was hunched on his knees, struggling to draw breath and if I'd had the opportunity I would have had no compunction about using his head as a football. Kicking people while they're down is part and parcel of Executioner self-defence training: after all, people who fight fair usually end up second. However, I was obliged to let him get up again even though the way he tried to reassert his authority over Draftees was comical after he'd allowed himself to be taken down so easily. There was anger in the flat mechanical voice as he ordered his cronies to 'escort' Trilly and myself down into the cellar below the compound's bar where, I expected, he would take advantage of the privacy to go to town on us. There was clearly something very personal in all of this: ever since I first met him when he barged into my house, the courier has treated me like something to be scraped off the bottom of a shoe. As I've never seen his face and thus have no idea who he is, I can't account for his hatred except in the broadest terms - most likely he lost a relative or loved one to the gallows and, as the Department's most prolific headcutter, he holds me responsible. That's the kind of thing Executioners have to live with, a sort of general background loathing that occasionally explodes into violence. You deal with it and get over it, or else it gets on top of you and you crumple under the weight.

Surrounded by armed guards, though, there was no chance of escape or even of resisting. I've read some very grim reports of what happens to female Executioners caught by the mobs. Gang rape is only the start of it - there's something that people consider alien about women who kill and, as such, we seem to warrant a special sort of revenge in our turn. Merely explaining to them that the Final Justice Department employs Executioners of both sexes on an equal footing is pointless because people don't want to accept that. Nature and, to a lesser extent, society, says that the female of the species is the nurturer and the life-giver and that, therefore, we've somehow let the side down far more grossly than a male Executioner would. I've never really given it much thought but now was one of those times when I wish I had, because the guards were all male and their faces bore that familiar expression of scorn, contempt and rage that lynch mobs assume right before the nooses and burning tyres are brought out. The only possible silver lining was that they wouldn't be setting fire to us, not in an underground cellar at any rate. On the other hand, though, the place offered the kind of privacy that really bad people love - that in which anything can and does go. Therefore I expected the worst when we were shoved down the ramp and into the depths of the cellar and the courier and his goons followed us in. This was a case of now or never: either I could fight back - and go down fighting - or I would be sent on a slow boat to hell in the company of a dozen armed and vengeful men. There were weapons aplenty in there for those trained, as we were, in the fine art of brawling, but with those rifles still leveled there was no chance to grab a handy bottle. I stayed close to Trilly, willing her to snap out of her fugue, and then the courier stepped up with a pistol in his hand, radiating hostility and a sort of vicious and smug satisfaction. His hands rose to the mask that he wore and then the scrambler and balaclava fell away to reveal his face.

It was Lieutenant Rish.

Draftee Compound, Part One

2011-12-16T05:13:00.000-08:00

The Draftee compound is like the Academy campus in miniature. Aside from dormitories it contains classrooms, a lecture hall, a gymnasium and the Test Gallows shed, along with quartering and equipment for the legion of guards and staff whose express purpose it is to keep the inmates corralled. Theoretically a Draftee should never have to leave the compound until graduation because everything needed to complete the training is right there, up to and including the heavily secured bar with its zero-tolerance attitude to infractions. Every now and then a Draftee tries to escape but they never get very far. Even though one side of the compound faces forest, it's far from being the easy option because there are remote turrets and cameras concealed therein and escapees who take that route come back on a stretcher, usually riddled with bullets. I guessed that the forest would be where Rhona was hiding and, given her former career as an infiltrator, I doubted if she'd have had much trouble with the security devices. On the other hand, though, Half-Hanged Smith insisted that the person who broke into the Compound had used that route too. He'd said there was a gap in the camera coverage, although security claimed to have plugged the leak, which I doubted. Given the number of Draftees actually on the security team, the chances of them doing a proper job of it were remote and so it was with a feeling of unease that I passed through the gatehouse and into the compound proper. I could feel the eyes on me as I followed Trilly and Rish in the direction of our first stop, the refectory. The reason we were going there was that it was where the majority of Draftees were to be found at this time of day and, also, the staff offices were close at hand. My intention was that while Trilly got on with whatever she was meant to be doing, I could divest myself of Rish for a while and share some convivial space with Half-Hanged Smith.

I duly met up with him in the refectory. As a member of staff, he had his own table and, when I joined him, he was in conversation with his Assistant Executioner, a wrinkled veteran by the name of Austin Thomas. I pulled up a seat to join them and because we would be talking shop and it was none of Rish's damn business, I told him to go away and bother someone else. He looked very nervous to be in the refectory, probably because, in his retainer uniform, he was clearly marked as an outsider. I noticed that he passed one cluster of Draftees on his way to the lunch counter and words were exchanged, followed by threats, and then the guards intervened and sent him on his way. I put Rish from my mind for the time being and instead concentrated on Smith and Thomas, who confirmed that Dr Brown's goons had turned the compound over several times since the break-in and had found nothing. It was old news now, of course and little had changed since the last time we discussed it. In truth, I was less concerned with the break-in and far more so with what the Draftees were being taught under the new regime. However, the moment I mentioned Brown's 'innovations', the Executioners grimaced and Smith confirmed that, just as on the main campus, on this side of the wire the Department's ethos had been trodden into the mud. The Draftees had been segregated the moment Brown arrived, being split into those more than a third of the way through the course and those who had only recently started it. While the former were left to carry on, for the latter things were very much different. For one thing, Brown's thinned the ranks by selecting the biggest and burliest Draftees and rotating them onto the security team, overriding the protests of the senior officers in the process. Once that was done, the remaining Draftees were instructed in the fine art of gas chamber operation as it pertained to the poor bastards on the ground floor who had to clear up the mess. Labeled 'Special Duties' operatives, they were to be little more than labourers and it became apparent that the real 'work' of operating the gas chambers would be left to those of a more violent disposition. That made a certain amount of sense because while the Draftees might have been reprieved criminals, it didn't necessarily follow that they were willing to kill. With 202 offences on the statute books for which the death penalty could be applied, there were only so many violent offences to go around and so it was unlikely, for instance, that someone imprisoned for stealing cars was going to be particularly inclined to gas his fellow citizens. That had always been the problem with Draftees anyway, and one the Department had had difficulty in getting through to the Council when it was originally decided that FJD's personnel issues could be solved by compelling criminals to serve on the gallows.

As far as I was concerned, what it all meant was that the rottenest of the extermination centre jobs, that of the actual killing, would be left to the most violent and homicidal of the Council's henchmen, the paramilitaries of the Department of Extraordinary Actions. I'd already considered the possibility that the DEA (more commonly known as 'Cardinal') would be involved and I'd discussed it with Rhona, who used to be a member. Smith and Thomas concurred with the assessment: nobody had a good word to say about Cardinal, not even Rhona. The Executioners may have been hate figures, but Cardinal was despised. In a way it was a little bit reassuring because it meant that there was a level of gutter lower than the one we occupied, but it was hardly inspiring to know that the Council was prepared to employ such murderous amateurs. At the end of the day Cardinal employed the absolute dregs, those rejected by the Urban Police and the Final Justice Department as too incorrigible or psychopathic to touch with a ten-foot pole. Given a uniform, some (very) basic training and a firearm, most Cardinal troopers did nothing more than blindly obey their orders, kill whoever they were ordered to and then spent every evening in their barracks getting blind drunk. With a work ethic like that they were the ideal personnel to man the gas chambers. It was a sobering thought and, with it, came the realisation of just how far the Council must have fallen if it had allowed itself to be lulled by Garamond Mason's promises that the RECs were a temporary measure. I'd seen such 'temporary measures' like it before, as could anyone who picked up a history book. Heavily censored as our history might have been, it was still a fact that the gallows stations were meant to have lasted no longer than post-war Reconstruction and yet here were were, a century later, still using the things. As with pretty much everyone involved in the nuts-and-bolts of capital punishment, Smith and Thomas found the idea of the regional extermination centres abhorrent and were more than willing to throw a spaniard in the works if the opportunity arose and I was just considering how best to employ them to such an end when the fire alarm went off and we had to evacuate the refectory.

Closing The Net

2011-12-15T05:12:00.000-08:00

Bugger. Lieutenant Rish has put in an appearance at long last and vetoed Trilly's visit to the Draftee compound, citing 'security reasons'. Actually, being accurate about it, what he's objected to is her going in alone, not because she's such a small, petite, vulnerable-looking female, but because he knows damn well her capacity for violence. She was, after all, the one who did the lion's share of the damage when we wrecked the Urban Police station Rish commanded. As I recall, I hit someone with a chair and knocked him out but while I was following through on the backswing, Trilly floored two more, throwing one man out of a window and then shoving another's head into an oven and burning off his hair. Rish knows perfectly well what's likely to happen if she goes into the Draftee compound alone: someone will jump her, assume she's helpless, and, if he wakes up at all, will be confined to the quadriplegic ward for the rest of his days. It's their security he's worried about, not hers. Rish's misgivings are to a large extent irrelevant, however. Trilly's orders are clear in a bureaucratically ambiguous way: she's to report to the Draftee compound and knock some discipline into them. How or why is not really explored and it comes across as an ambition to put her violent tendencies to good use rather than having them moulder. From the perspective of Lieutenant Rish it's as if all of his bad dreams have come true at once because not only is he having to shepherd me around, he's also forced to deal with Rhona Woodley and now Trilly. Between the three of us we wrecked his Urban Police career and left him languishing in a dead end job with the Mason family retainers. The fact that he's not allowed to take his revenge must grate on his nerves daily. Anyway, I proposed a compromise that would allow her to do her job and ease his fears: I suggested we both accompany her on her initial tour of inspection, to keep her out of trouble. That way he could at least pretend to supervise her even if he had about as much chance of reining her in as we did turning back a whirlwind.

That settled, I found time to place a private call on the scrambled line that Rhona set up. I'm not sure where she's hiding but she was obviously near to the phone because it only rang twice before she picked up. I spoke the prearranged codeword and then told her what was going on. I wanted to have her on hand somewhere in the vicinity of the Draftee compound in case anything went wrong. Everyone needs a secret weapon and she's be mine because she's working with me in the cause of destroying the extermination centres and she's also keen to settle things with Daylight. At the moment the most likely people to end up running those foul places are the Draftees, alongside her former comrades in the Council's death squad, Cardinal. I don't know what the Draftees are being taught in there but from the way the ones promoted to the security team carry themselves it's likely they're learning the fine art of intimidation, meaning they'd be the blunt instruments, forcing victims into the underground gas chambers without the slightest flicker of conscience. I know Rhona's wangled some equipment from somewhere, probably as a result of lying to her employers, and it's all about reassurance at this point. I won't be able to communicate with her directly but she's former Special Police and knows a thing or two about protection duty. So long as she can see me clearly at least some of the time, I'll get a measure of outside help. It's not perfect but if I insist on staying outside it'll raise suspicions. The rest of the time I'll have to rely on Trilly, God help me. I don't actually have any worries about her dealing with the rowdies. I'm more concerned about getting her to stop dealing with them once they've gone limp. Knowing when to quit is not one of that girl's strong points.

As of now Rish is in the process of getting the necessary permissions from the Draftee computer system that will allow us free access without having to flash our Record cards at every turret and scanner. On the rest of the campus that doesn't matter because the Orphans aren't a problem. Raised here from the age of four, they know no other life and they're fine with the regime here but the Draftees, as the name suggests, were coerced and they're a lot more outspoken with their feelings. In a way that adds some legitimacy to Trilly's 'mission' because, as the Department's one and only volunteer Executioner, she was treated as a privileged Draftee in that she was quartered in the compound but allowed more freedom to roam. The result for her was that she was able to mingle with the Orphans and learn a lot more but she also knows the compound inside out and, what's more, can be trusted a lot more than any guide Dr Brown might provide. As for my own objective, between letting Trilly nose around inside while Rhona stakes the compound out from the perimeter, hopefully I can start to close the net on the Daylight courier. Based on what Executioner-in-residence Half-Hanged Smith told me, someone broke into the Draftee compound and is apparently still in there even though the headcount hasn't changed. Searches have turned up nothing but, thanks to their association with the Department, Daylight knows all the places to hide. Right now that courier is the biggest problem, far and away more so than the Snetterton family who've recently crawled out of the woodwork, because he knows me and I don't know him. I don't even know what he looks like. For all I know, he might even be aware of our impending fishing expedition and be making plans to counter it. That said, he'd better take down Trilly first because, if he fails to, she'll feed him to the fish in handy bite-sized pieces.

Dormant Personality

2011-12-14T04:39:00.000-08:00

After Trilly brought the news that Regional Extermination Centre 1 had been destroyed I did some surreptitious poking around to confirm or deny the story. I was meant to stay in contact with my boss, Councillor Merpath in any case, but with one thing and another, I've never got around to posting any situation updates. Now that I finally had the chance, I told him I'd heard a rumour to that effect, leaving out any mention of Trilly as the source because she's not supposed to be here. Pissing Hugh was guarded with his comments, possibly because he no longer trusts the people who run the Academy. I knew that the line was probably tapped and that the campus plods would be listening in but, at the end of the day, I was talking about internal FJD business and we all supposedly work for the same organisation. They could spy on me if they liked - they could monitor me until the cows came home - but what I was asking for right then was not seditious in the slightest. The laws about grapevine, rumours and tattle in this country are very explicit: you can listen to them if you like, but woe betide if you don't report them. That's exactly what I was doing, therefore: reporting tattle to my superior officer. Whether or not he chose to give me a straight answer was not my prerogative because, in making the call, I'd fulfilled my civic duty and anything I received in return was therefore bonus. Anyway, drawn as they were from the ranks of the Draftees, I had my doubts that the plods would act on anything they overheard because they were criminals too, and had secrets of their own that they dared not risk exposing. The only difference was that Dr Theobald Brown, the Academy Principal, had chosen to give them the sort of second chance that only a madman would bestow, promoting them not merely to the status of student Executioners, but full-blown internal security officers. However, any plod who got too zealous would likely find his own past under scrutiny and I doubted if many of them would want the dirty laundry aired in public.

At any rate, Councillor Merpath said that there had been 'an incident' at REC-1 and wouldn't go into further detail. There wasn't any need to. Reading between the lines and knowing the way he harrumphs when there's bad news to deliver, I knew that the story was true. Daylight had indeed destroyed the first regional extermination centre and Councillor Merpath had found himself in the same moral and political quagmire as I was. He'd made a bargain with terrorists and deluded himself into thinking that he was in control but, from the moment we offered the olive branch, Daylight drifted further and further from the spirit of the deal and we became more and more implicated in high treason. The original plan was that Daylight would dig into areas where we have no access and, in our turn, we would provide Daylight with documentation and evidence about the RECs. Naively, nobody gave much thought to what Daylight would do once they had that information. All that the very few who were in on the secret had planned was that the extermination centres be 'controlled' or 'curtailed'. In fact, lots of vague adjectives were used when the REC project was discussed but everybody shied away from specific terms like 'bomb' and 'assassination' and now we're on our way to hell and we're driving in the express lane. I know that Merpath wants out but for the moment we're stuck in the quicksand because even as we've been accumulating dirt on Daylight, they've been doing the same to us. Councillor Fraser, who was intent on selling us all out at the first opportunity, has been blackmailed into silence, the evidence of her social transgressions safely stored in a vault in France, to be brought out whenever Daylight wants a concession. I know there's plenty of evidence against me because Monica Grayne, a Daylight cell chief, is actually living in my house and its automated defence systems have been subverted to recognise her - and her associates - as friends. It all amounts to a very big problem and we've sleepwalked into it with the best of intentions. It's time to start putting things right.

In that respect Trilly might be a problem too, but I feel a whole lot better having her where I can see her than allowing her to run loose. At least here I can work with her, to help her break her conditioning. With hindsight, perhaps having Rhona Woodley dunk the Academy's chief re-education officer in the lake was a bad move, because if he was still alive he might have been able to remove Trilly's conditioning as he had mine... except that Dr Brosnan was one of a short list of old hands at the Academy who wasn't rotated away or simply fired by Dr Brown when he took over. As such, Dr Brosnan was personally acquainted with Trilly and knew about her strained relationship with her father, Garamond. Furthermore, whatever steps Garamond has taken to rewrite recent history, it's still a fact that Trilly was de facto queen for several months before he usurped her. Dr Brosnan wasn't stupid: the moment she turned up in his office he would have blown the whistle on us, so hindsight isn't necessarily correct. We're better off without him, but that does leave Trilly re-educated and with an artificial personality that's driving her to act in the interests of Daylight and France. She's slowly shaking it off and I think they underestimated her willpower, but I'm worried about what she might do the moment she does break the conditioning. I've tried to talk to her about it, keeping my questions deliberately vague in case the programme comes with a termination code, but even though I can see in her big blue eyes the muted gratitude for my attempts to help, all that comes out of her mouth are twisted, acidic denials that are not hers. She can't be specific about anything because whenever she tries to be, the artificial personality simply grabs the controls and steers her conversation away. It's frustrating for both of us, knowing that the real personality is in there, imprisoned within its own skull, watching and listening but unable to speak and so the only thing I can do to keep her sane is give her a mission, something that the artificial personality can approve of and which might take her mind off things a bit.

Ostensibly she's here at the Academy to put the fear of God into the Draftees and - that same God knows - they need the discipline. Trilly's approach to that sort of thing has always been violent. She might only be five feet two inches tall, she might only weigh eight or nine stones, but she's got a punch on her that can fell trees and I know that when she was a student here she scored the all-time highest mark for self-defence when she put two of her instructors and seventeen students in hospital and wrecked the gymnasium when she was supposedly demonstrating restraint techniques. As I recall the chief instructor was so impressed with her that he awarded her 101% and a distinction and, in the same breath, recommended she be graduated and sent away as soon as possible. Given what happened to me when I tried to get into the Draftee compound, it might be better if I send Trilly instead. The Daylight courier almost certainly uses the Draftee compound as his gateway to the outside world and he's probably getting help from the inmates. I don't know who the courier is and nor do I know where he is, but if anyone can root him out it's Trilly. I'll have to be very careful how I phrase her orders, though, because the courier is Daylight and, for the moment, so is she. I can't simply tell her to kill him because the artificial personality will a) balk at that and b) probably warn him. But if I can apply just the right tone of whitewash I think I could get the real Trilly who's buried inside to strangle him with her bare hands.

Family Rivalries

2011-12-13T06:15:00.000-08:00

Well, Trilly's here at last and she's brought with her news from an outside world I'd almost forgotten existed. It seems that while I've been stirring up trouble on the Academy campus, Daylight has taken the problem of the regional extermination centres well in hand by destroying the only one that was anything like complete. Naturally enough, because the Council censors bad news, nobody here had any clue it even happened, but Daylight apparently exercised their preferred option of driving a truck bomb into the underground workings, detonating it and burying most of the facility. There's no word on casualties but they were probably heavy. I didn't press Trilly on that point because human life is so inconsequential to her that she wouldn't have cared. From the 'secret' film that Penny Drayton made it was plain that the site, REC-1, was a very large operation employing several hundred workers who were no doubt press-ganged and had no other option but to build the place. The deaths of those people are what some might call 'acceptable collateral damage' but to me it was cold-blooded murder. I know that, as trained and very prolific Executioner, don't even have a high horse to get onto, but it still seems wrong-headed to kill the very people were supposedly trying to 'save'. The REC project is already stalled because, with the deaths of the engineering team, there's no one to solve the constant problems that crop up during a big tunneling project like this one. That alone has put the plan behind schedule because replacements have to be briefed, vetted, supervised until they proved themselves trustworthy... all of which takes time. I know I had no objections to blowing in the tunnel before, but that had been while the French were doing my thinking for me. Now that the re-education has been rooted out, I can't help but feel shocked by what's been done in the name of freedom.

Charles Rish was with me when Trilly arrived on the campus and, as with most people she considers her social inferiors, she took an instant dislike to him. She flashed her Green-Three loyalty rating at him and ordered him to carry her bags from the car while she chatted to me about her 'assignment' here at the Academy. I was impressed at the speed with which she wangled a transfer here after receiving my call for help, but the fact that she was so quick suggests that there was a plan in place and ready to go, to cover just such an eventuality as their agent (me) needing back-up. According to the paperwork she showed me, she's here to 'put some fire up the Draftees', to motivate them into accepting the extermination centre project and their ultimate part in the scheme. It's pure lies, of course, but lies on headed paper, which lends them an air of authenticity that nobody's likely to challenge. Once again I was impressed by the broadness of Daylight's reach because whoever they have inside the Department, they must be very close to the top of the ladder. Had their agent had been as low to middling as the police think, they couldn't have got away with printing and circulating her transfer because Trilly is officially a proscribed person. Booted out of power when her father grabbed the throne, she was 'disappeared', something that usually involves concrete wellies except that, in her case, she turned up in France with an artificially induced set of new notions about the Council. Anyway, the point is that if her name had simply turned up on an internal transfer request, every alarm bell in FJD HQ ought to have rung at once and the police would have come running - but there's been not a peep out of anyone. It suggests to me that the Daylight mole has routine access to the personnel files and must have altered Trilly's to remove the official warning from it and the upshot is that she's free to come and go as she pleases, to do her bit to spread the Daylight contagion while simultaneously scouting out the Snetterton situation. We discussed all of this while Rish, some twenty paces behind us, struggled to lug four suitcases along, safely out of earshot. Given the disdain with which she treats underlings, I doubt if Trilly would have lowered her voice in any case, but I was glad we didn't have to take the risk because few things look more suspicious than people deliberately muting their conversation.

The means by which the Snettertons have regained their power are a bit vague at the moment. Monica's digging but, at the moment, everything she's found suggests back-handers of some sort. As a Junior Council family they would have been doing everything in their power to get above the glass ceiling that separates them from the Green-Three aristocracy at the top, making deals and stabbing backs as necessary, just like everyone else. Last time they latched onto Councillor Fraser, deputy commander of FJD, and tried to worm their way in that way. This time they seem to be riding on the Mason family's coattails, but if they are then it means they'll be competing with the Pendletons for Garamond's attention. Knowing the Masons the way that I do by now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Garamond let the Snettertons in so that they and the Pendletons could squabble themselves into early graves and save him the trouble of having to eliminate them. A nudge here, a whisper there and the two junior families would be at war and then, once the ranks were suitably thinned, the Masons would simply steal the rug from under them, grab whatever assets had survived and then condemn the survivors to the gutter. In the meantime, of course, it gives the Snetterton family some room to flex its muscles. They have a serious beef with FJD after Councillor Merpath ejected them from the Department and, because Merpath is powerful, they've chosen to take out their ire on me. That's why Simon Snetterton attacked me, after all. As far as I know he's still in the cells but he probably won't stay there for long. One phone call and he'll be free and then he'll come back here to have another crack at me... and find Trilly waiting for him. She may not have anything to do with her father's schemes anymore, but she knows a rival when she sees one. If Simon leaves here with the same number of limbs that he started with, he'll be ahead of the game. There's been one murder on the campus already. All it will take for that number to double will be Simon Snetterton barging into things that don't concern him. I don't like the thought of possibly ending up doing Garamond's dirty work for him, but at the end of the day the Snettertons are my enemies too and this is a case of self-preservation.

A Sense of Hiatus

2011-12-12T04:33:00.000-08:00

I finally encountered Rish on the campus this afternoon. He was looking rumpled and a bit tired but there was a cold glint in his eye when he saw me. Still between jobs and feeling distinctly ornamental, I was wandering aimlessly around the campus and offering the benefit of my supposed wisdom to the Orphans who approached me shyly to ask for it. Even though word had gone around that Elenna Pointer was persona non grata it did little to quell the hero-worship. Frankly, normally the attention turned my stomach. To be set up on a pedestal and worshipped by these corrupted innocents for no other reason than having a high body count was repellent. And yet... someone had to guide them because what else did they have except the Department's propaganda? Dragged here as screaming little children at the age of four, left to grow to eighteen sucking down nothing but the ethos of FJD, a bitter brew of lies and statistics sugar-coated with illusions of ethics, of course they looked up to me - because I'm the Executioner who bucked the trend, the one who lived... the one who still lives because Fate is too mean to let her die. I was in an uncommonly foul mood and I had to work hard to keep the bitterness from my voice as I spoke to the Orphans, but I knew I ought to be cheerful because Trilly was on her way and, whatever our personal differences, I could always count on her to cause a ruckus and open people's eyes. She was the one and only citizen of Council Britain who took up the Department's offer and volunteered to become an Executioner and in the eyes of most of my comrades, actually wanting to do the job automatically disqualified her from it. Nobody asked to become a headcutter, asked to sacrifice everything and everyone they'd ever known and to trade it all in for the reputation of a killer, despised and hunted at every turn before finally succumbing to the bottle or the bullet... but she had. Trilly was mad, and right then madness was what I needed, because the Academy, the place where I, too, had grown up, was becoming a warped spectre of itself. With her cheerful, gleeful murderousness I knew I could rely on Trilly to change at least some of that.

As he fell into step beside me and started to give me a piece of his shambolic mind I quietly bumped Rish to the top of the list of those destined to suffer. Nobody else knew it, but there was already one freelance killer on the campus in the form of Chief Warrant Officer Rhona Woodley, ostensibly Lieutenant Rish's subordinate but in reality far removed from the notion of paying his rank anything more than lip service. Rhona and Rish had history. Sooner or later that history would catch up and become the Present, and it wouldn't be wrapped in a pretty bow either. I'd asked her to stay away from him and officially she was gone from the Academy, her rotation concluded, her assignment changed... except that she hadn't left at all. She was still here, somewhere, living rough on the grounds or swanning it in style in one of the vacant Staff Block apartments - I didn't know, but I knew she was still here because I caught glimpses of her now and then. She'd acquired a security force uniform and she was putting her old infiltrator training back into use, brushing the dust from the mindset of the betrayer and turning the clock back to her good old days, back when she'd been someone to respect and not merely fear. There was a sense of hiatus in the air, a feeling of calm before the maelstrom and I knew that when the clouds burst, things would be altered forever. I didn't really care anymore if I was caught and condemned for my association with Daylight. I didn't care if they dragged me to the gallows and hanged me. It would be poetic justice, after all: a fitting reward for all that I'd done... and a way to silence the voice of my conscience that had led me to take one unwise risk after another in my search for some way to make up for my crimes.

I ignored Rish and tried to concentrate on other matters. Trilly would be here soon, with orders from her Daylight masters to report to me. She was shaking off her conditioning, I knew, and soon the real Trilly would return, hell-bent on vengeance, an unstoppable force of rage... and I wondered if Daylight knew what kind of genie they'd bottled? The moment she broke the conditioning, she would turn on them and savagely bite the hand that had force-fed her. If they had any sense Daylight would run for cover... But what if they knew all that and had done it to her anyway? Were they really that cock-sure of themselves that they were willing to risk losing control of her? If I knew anything about Monica Grayne, it was that she was a thinker, a tactician, someone who coldly and logically followed her path and planned for the bumps and potholes along the way until she reached her goal unscathed. To so catastrophically misjudge Trilly's capacity for revenge seemed breath-takingly foolish and not like the Monica I knew at all... so something else was going on and I couldn't shake the feeling that, deprogrammed or not, I was still playing into her hands. I'd summoned Trilly here to help me deal with Dr Brown, with the Snetterton family, with the Draftees who Brown had seen fit to elevate, with the 'gas chamber kids' who lorded it over their obsolete gallows-trained siblings like miniature tinpot aristocrats... Purge all of these elements from the Academy and it would be pure again. It would still be a school for killers, but the perverted politics and the cult of personality that Garamond Mason was fostering would be gone. The Academy was a linchpin of Garamond's regional extermination centres but it was not the only one. If the Orphans rejected the philosophy and the Draftees were dissuaded, that still left the endlessly corruptible Urban Police - the 'pay rats' - and the ruthless thugs of Cardinal. They might not follow the philosophy heart and soul in the way that the Orphans could be conditioned to, but they could still be bought... But they were a problem for someone else to deal with. My only thoughts were of saving the Orphans from the immediate contagion. Everything else beyond the grounds of the Academy, Daylight could have with my blessing. Give me this, the freedom of these innocents from schemes that they had no stake in, and I would be happy. After all, what else was I but a killer myself? I was what this place had made me. Now those who ran it would have to deal with the consequences. The riot had been a start; a flexing of muscles and a blowing off of steam, but once Trilly got here, once Rhona was ready, there would be a real reckoning and I no longer cared if the blood that was spilled was my own...

Compact Little Dynamo

2011-12-11T04:43:00.000-08:00

Persuading Trilly to join me at the Academy was easier than I'd anticipated, probably because of the conditioning that Daylight and the French put her through. Like me, she was subjected to re-education, albeit with a different purpose in mind, and she's been their unwilling tool ever since. Trilly's big trump card is her Green-Three elite status - she hails from the very pinnacle of the aristocracy and even if she's a rogue toff at the best of times, as the saying goes, she walks the walk and she talks the talk. She has contacts, insider knowledge and a way of getting people to do her bidding that occasionally chimes with their needs but which more usually involves what they call 'percussive persuasion'. Trilly is Garamond Mason's second daughter, the offspring he wishes he'd never sired, because even though he had a plan worked out for both of his daughters that involved placing the Mason family right at the top of the tree, she rebelled spectacularly. Given that Garamond's approach to parenting involved ruthless and brutal discipline whenever either girl stepped out of line it was only natural that at least one would reject the mission - actually, I'm still surprised that Lally, her sister, didn't join her. At any rate, Trilly has been a thorn in her father's side ever since, doing everything she can to get up his nose, including joining the most despised of Council organisations, the Final Justice Department. In that simple act of volunteering to become an Executioner she managed to associate the Mason name with all the worst, most beggarly, most despised elements of the regime and in the process dragged the family through the mud. Now that he's the ruler of Britain and has the Council dancing to his tune he doesn't have much time for his errant child. I don't know how she ended up in Daylight's hands but she's still up to her tricks, making his life as difficult as possible, except that now she's doing it to advance a French agenda.

Our Daylight handler Monica Grayne answered the phone when I rang but she had no hesitation in handing it to Trilly, no doubt because she was monitoring the call anyway. As far as anyone in Daylight knows, I'm still under the sway of their conditioning and likewise doing my bit for France. Daylight wants me to survey the Academy and find weak spots that their assassins can exploit. I got this much from their courier, a phantom of a man who haunts and who is due for a letter-opener up his nose sometime soon. I sent him away with a flea in his ear, revolted as I was at the prospect of setting up the Orphans for murder, but if I have been programmed to do Daylight's bidding then my subconscious will be obeying the order even if my conscious mind is not. The 'monitor' personality that the late Dr Brosnan removed from my cortex spoke French. He said it was there to spy on me and to influence my actions, presumably going so far as to physically take control of my body when I'm asleep. Now that it's gone I find I have a clearer appreciation of what it would want me to do to carry out my orders without consciously knowing it, and phoning Trilly and asking her to join me would be a logical next step because she's a ticking time bomb just looking for a place to go off. At any rate, she agreed to join me even though I played cagey about what I wanted her for. I told her I was lonely and needed a friend and thanks to her own willful ignorance, she's convinced that I'm her best buddy. Monica raised no objections, Trilly said she'd be right over and that was that, job done. I put the phone down and pondered on my remaining problems.

Right at the top of the list was Charles Rish. I hadn't seen him since I left him, sozzled, in Minnie's, one of the Academy's two pubs (three if you count the heavily guarded one in the Draftee compound), but he ought to have put in an appearance by now. It was mid-afternoon - surely he must have sobered up. I wondered if he'd been taken to the infirmary to have his stomach pumped - after all, he'd downed the best part of a bottle of the good stuff, strong medicine that would have overwhelmed anyone but a dedicated alcoholic, but I realised I'd never be that lucky. He was about, somewhere on the campus, possibly tattling to Dr Brown, and I was bound to bump into him sooner or later. In the meantime I had the other big problem to deal with: Simon Snetterton. He was in a cell in the Draftee compound guardhouse, taken there by his nervous escort and banged up on charges of assaulting an Executioner. Presumably he was on the campus with Dr Brown's blessing, which meant he wouldn't stay in prison long, but Brown was in the meantime assembling a nice long charge sheet to use against me and there wasn't much I could do about it. Yes, I incited a riot among the Orphan trainees, but that could just as easily be seen as opening a safety valve and letting them get rid of a lot of pent-up anger. Anyway, they only fought each other and they'd got over it now. As for assaulting Rish and Snettereton, well, they started it in both cases and I was only defending myself in the way that this very Academy had taught me to, so to my mind the Principal could hardly complain if I put my training to good use. Provided he didn't overly censor his report, there wasn't that much damage that he could do to me and given that I was here at the behest of Councillor Merpath, the man who Dr Brown seems to have forgotten pays his wages, theoretically little of the mud should stick. Unfortunately for that happy little theory, it took no account of Garamond Mason, whose man Brown actually was. FJD employee as he might have been, deep down he was just another crony playing a double game. I had reams of facts about the Brown regime here, everything from his divide-and-conquer approach to administration to his blatant breaking of the segregation rules that allowed the Orphans and the Draftees to mix. Councillor Merpath had his suspicions; I had the facts. He might have been edging toward senility and have a distressing habit of confusing me with his dead wife, but Merpath was very protective of the Department and had a robust attitude to rotten eggs like Theobald Brown.

The Snettertons were a wild card here. They were no friends of Merpath and they seemed to have allied themselves with the Masons, presumably still searching for that elusive back door to promotion. Brown we could handle, because at the end of the day he was just a political appointee in an oversized hat, but the Snettertons held a real grudge against Merpath because he had publicly humiliated them. In their turn they had aped the Pendleton clan, riding the Mason coattails in the hopes of slipping into the Palace and even if they were eventually sidelined, in the short term they could do a lot of damage. Merpath would need to know that they were back but, if Trilly did her job properly, we could pull their teeth before they bit too deeply. If Trilly can be relied upon to do one thing, then it's to remorselessly hunt down her enemies and destroy them. Opposed as she is to her father's regime, she ought to see the Snettertons as just such mortal foes, so all I really needed to do was take that compact little dynamo of relentless self-interest and violent psychopathy and point it in the right direction. She wouldn't take much encouraging, even with her conditioning. After all, the Snettertons were elite and Daylight hated them on principle. Trilly would be a weapon and all I would have to do would be point and shoot...

An Old Enemy Returns

2011-12-10T05:24:00.000-08:00

The darkness lasted only a few seconds, more than enough time for my attacker to disarm me and drag me to a chair that was fitted with very sinister straps - but unfortunately for him, the instant the cosh descended my training kicked in and I went onto the very aggressive autopilot that's kept me alive so often in the past. My vision was fuzzy and the bruises I'd acquired from Rhona still throbbed but there was nothing wrong with my forehead, which was the part of me that connected with his face as he bent to fasten the straps around my wrists. He let out a shocked gasp and staggered away, blood bursting from his nose. I was on my feet in an instant, my hands instinctively going for the nearest weapon. The beauty of Executioner training is that anything can be a weapon. Not for us the niceties of the martial arts - we're brawlers trained to be the last one standing and if that means fighting dirty then we'll do it, gleefully, with smiles on our faces. There wasn't anything convenient to hand so I used my boot, following up the well-aimed headbutt with a kick in the balls that dropped him with a whistling scream that I might have enjoyed more if I hadn't been more concerned with problem number two, the campus plod in the corner of the room who had a gun on me. There was nothing for it but to surrender because he had me bang to rights, except that after everything I've been through in the past few days I wasn't in the mood to simply throw in the towel without getting anything in return. I sized him up, noting the tremble of the gun barrel and the way his uniform seemed a size too big. He was young, he had curly ginger hair and his brow was shiny with sweat. He was very much a lad out of his depth and I guessed what had probably transpired beforehand. The groaning heap on the floor had probably told him not to worry, that with one quick bang on the noggin she'd be down for the count and you, Sunny Jim, wouldn't even have to get involved. Well he was involved now and it was plain that he was terrified.

That was no good. Scared people act rashly. Terrified people are on a whole different scale of dumb and that was the main reason why the Department opted to start tranking the customers before they were hanged, because otherwise people set eyes on the waiting nooses, panicked, and proved unmanageable without the presence of a squad of armed guards. If I could have tranked the plod in front of me I'd have done it in a split second because he looked less than that away from pulling the trigger on his sub-machine gun and at that short range he couldn't miss. Even if he did, the noise would bring the others running and and from what I'd seen of Dr Brown's creative approach to security in the Academy, the guards would probably be trigger-happy Draftees just itching to put a few rounds in an Executioner. Words were needed here, not deeds. I took a few calming breaths and assumed what I hoped was a relaxed posture and then I asked him, in a steady voice, exactly what was going on and, more to the point, why the idiot on the floor had attacked me. The guard, though, knew nothing. He was just a random officer dragged in for threat value and we had that much in common because the higher-ups rarely told me anything either. I turned my back on him - another consciously reassuring action - and crouched by the injured man, who was curled up in a ball and weeping in pain. I straightened him out briefly but I didn't recognise him. He was a civvy, clad in dress-code greys and he was balding and a bit stocky. Beyond that he was completely unremarkable and so I liberated his Record card to see if that could be of help. It revealed that his name was Simon Snetterton and with that I recoiled. Snetterton was a name from the past, something I'd hoped was buried and forgotten, and now this. I could forget about visiting Half-Hanged Smith now. The troubles in the Draftee compound would have to wait their turn because this was leagues ahead in terms of importance - not for Daylight, not for the plot to scupper the regional extermination centres, but simply for Elenna Pointer. Of all the times for this to happen, it had to be now, right when I'm up to my elbows in trouble. As far as playing the hand Fate dealt me goes, I'm fine with it. I accept my place in the scheme of things, even knowing that I'm a hate figure, cursed as a traitor by my own people, and I can deal with that. But this was just unfair. This was Fate actually cheating and I resented the interference because Snetterton had nothing at all to do with the ongoing saga of the RECs and had no business barging back into my life like this.

The trouble harked back to an incident about four years ago when I had a run-in with Junior Councillor Cedric Snetterton. The Junior Council is the lower house where the Green-Two and Green-One Councillors are to be found, condemned by their low birth to separation from their Green-Three superiors. The Snettertons are absolutely typical of the breed, a family of social climbers squashed up against the glass ceiling and fighting for scraps from the table. Promotion from the Junior house to the Council itself is judged strictly on performance - one of the few places in the country where ability counts for more than family. The reason for that is that the Council is populated with 'our sort', those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Therefore, promotion to it is reserved for those who can demonstrate a compatible philosophy. As the saying goes, the Council saw the Snettertons coming, didn't like what they saw and firmly locked the door on them. Cedric, though, wasn't the sort to take no for an answer and he tried to bend the rules to squirm that extra rung up the ladder. Specifically, he latched onto Councillor Fraser, the number two at FJD, and wormed his way into the Department with the idea of using it as a back door to promotion. The logic is sound enough, since FJD is so ill-regarded that there's not much competition for the top jobs, but he failed to grasp the Department's 'family' ethos and so when he started spouting nonsense about what wonderful killers we were, it got people's backs up. He was unable to understand why the headcutters took what he thought were compliments as insults and, when he happened to remark that 'that Pointer woman wasn't really ruthless enough' I saw red and decked him. In any other circumstances punching a Councillor would have been a fatal mistake except that Councillor Merpath intervened, publicly castigated Snetterton (who he couldn't stand) for provoking his staff and then fired him. Cedric went back into the wilderness with a bruised reputation and he swore revenge - not against Merpath, who was too powerful to take on - but against me. And that was the last I saw of them - until now. If Simon Snetterton is here on the campus then it means he's got the ear of Dr Brown and Brown, in his turn, has the ear of Garamond Mason, a magnate who attracts the lesser families like a cur draws fleas. I can't take on Garamond, Daylight, Rish and the Snettertons, not in one lifetime. I'll need bigger guns for this. I've already got Rhona but I think I need Trilly too.

The Compound

2011-12-09T04:06:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning blissfully alone, having duly wedged a chair under the apartment door and then locked the window so that Rish couldn't get in. For extra security I made sure my pistol was on the bedside table within easy reach. I've tried sleeping with a gun under the pillow but experience has demonstrated that unless you choose a small gun it's bloody uncomfortable. Having attended to the morning's necessaries I dressed and armed myself. The pistol went into its shoulder holster and I checked to make sure that my boot dagger was secure in its scabbard. Given that what I was planning to do today was riskier than normal I'd opted also to wear a garment that headcutters almost universally scorned, something that gloried in the name of 'Miss Prudence's Self-Defence Support'. I have no idea who Miss Prudence might be, but her approach to decolletage would have landed most people in the loony bin, specialising as she did in what were otherwise known as 'intimate weapons'. The intimate weapon in particular was standard issue to all female Executioners, a bra with a removable underwire that was actually a garrote. Supposedly it was for those occasions where the Executioner might find herself exposed, as it were, and placed in a position of extreme helplessness. Since it, too, was mightily uncomfortable, most of us wore the damn things because we had to, jettisoned the garrote and cursed the name of Miss Prudence.

I stood there plucking at it for about ten minutes, trying to get comfortable, before I gave up. That's the thing about garrotes - they aren't really all that elastic and just to add to the unflattering image, actually removing the wire in order to use it required the Executioner to place herself in a level of jeopardy she would otherwise not have had to resort to. I've heard that male Executioners have something just as embarrassingly deadly tucked away in their shorts but I've never dared ask. On this occasion, though, I was willing to accept all the help I could get because I would be paying a visit to the Draftee compound to ascertain the truth of Half-Hanged Smith's allegation, that a very professional thief (or other miscreant) managed to break into the place under the noses of the security team. Because I'm almost certain that this thief has something to do with Daylight, the anti-Council terrorist organisation currently trying to manipulate me, it's become a matter of self-preservation that I find out. There's a member of Daylight who seems to be following me around - he calls himself 'the courier' and that's the only name by which I know him - and he has access to my home, my life, my Record and, latterly, my lodgings here at the FJD Academy. He's getting too close for comfort but he probably still thinks he can control me because, as far as I know, the fact that I've broken the re-education programming is a secret known only to myself, Rhona Woodley and the late Dr Brosnan.

Getting into the Draftee compound is never easy, and with good reason. While to the Orphan students the Executioner training might be a calling, it's something that's very much thrust upon the Draftees. Without exception they're reprieved criminals, all convicted of death crimes, all offered the choice of hanging others rather than suffering it themselves. With motivation like that - little short of blackmail - it's small wonder that the Draftees are kept inside the compound under constant guard. Behind the walls, the razor wire fences, the automated turrets and the landmines, the Draftee compound is like the Academy in miniature, with a Test gallows shed, classrooms, lecture halls, seminar rooms, dormitories, a refectory and - heavily supervised - a bar. I've always had misgivings about providing convicted criminals with alcohol but the feeling, as ever, is that as a Department 'we're all in this together'. It's the Department's credo of family again, something that binds the Orphans and the staff closely together but of which few of the Draftees want any part. Each Draftee is issued with a card that accrues points over the duration of their training that they then spend in the refectory and, of course, the bar, so that they can get nicely fuzzy and forget themselves at least once a week. It's a privilege that can be revoked at any time and it was granted in the first place in recognition of their status as almost-fellow students and, to their credit I suppose, few of them abuse it. Those that do get banned from the place, for good, and so they behave. The bar is the best place to meet individual Draftees in something approaching cordial circumstances, even if the place is heavily monitored and the staff are armed. Drinking is permitted there; drunkenness is not.

I was planning to meet Half-Hanged Smith in the bar because he was working in the compound and the restrictions for the inmates didn't apply to the staff and it was more convivial than simply retreating to his office and locking the door. The Draftees wouldn't bother us and had to ask permission before they could address staff outside the classroom, and once I was inside I could find out more about the break-in. Perhaps it was the dormant gene that my stint in the Criminal Investigation Unit had stimulated; I was convinced that the compound would be where I would find the answers that I sought and so I went straight there as soon as I was ready. Curiously, there was no sign of Lieutenant Rish. I'd expected to have to dodge him, or at least step over him, but he was conspicuous by his absence and that bothered me. I didn't feel guilty about getting him hammered and leaving him behind in Minnie's - after all, he'd probably woken up in worse places - but I was concerned that he could be getting up to mischief, possibly pestering Dr Brown about me. As far as I could see it was situation normal on the campus that morning, with Orphans traveling to and from lectures, a few of them performing morning calisthenics, but there was another notable absence: no Draftees training with them. Whatever dubious privileges Dr Brown had extended to the Draftees, with the break-in they seemed to have been suspended. I recalled that Brown had promoted some of them to the campus security force, which is probably why Rhona was able to murder Dr Brosnan so easily without any of them noticing. It seemed likely that Brown was grooming the Draftees for a future role in the regional extermination centres, possibly as guards alongside the Cardinal troopers. It would make sense, given their lack of grounding in the twin subjects of ethics and morals that set trained Executioners aside from mere hired killers. However, even though I knew more or less what to expect when I visited the Draftee compound, it still came as something of a surprise when, the moment I stepped into the gatehouse, something heavy smacked down on my head and the lights went out.

Half-Hanged Smith

2011-12-08T04:04:00.000-08:00

Technically I was violating the agreement when I left Rish snoring in the bar, but then I never signed the agreement in the first place. If I really wanted to play the technicalities card, Rish was a Mason crony and I'm bought and paid for by FJD and so he had no authority over me. However, the simple and quick answer to that is that Garamond Mason is Speaker of the Council, a king in all but name, and so if he wanted to send his lapdog to follow me around, well, that was all the authority he needed. I expected that there would be fuss - perhaps even quibbling - later, after he woke up and unglued his tongue from the roof of his mouth, but for now I was free to go wherever I wanted, to do whatever I pleased. That would have been a far more attractive prospect if there actually was anything to do, but until Dr Brown restores my teaching status I'm the Academy's official fifth wheel. The only real option at this time of night was turn in. Rhona had already departed to wherever she was lodging, probably the guardhouse, where she would no doubt face the clumsy questions of campus plods anxious to eliminate her from the inquiry into the death of Dr Brosnan. I had no concerns for her safety. Rhona was ex-Special Police and she could lie for England. She might only have been an average, unremarkable infiltrator who ended up getting caught and mutilated by those she'd spied on, but she was leagues ahead of the Department's security force and she would no doubt sell them a first-class load of manure garnished with a pretty bow that they'd then swallow whole, disgusting mental image or not. As for me, my plans for the evening went exactly as far as taking an early night and, for extra insurance, wedging a chair under the apartment door to discourage Rish from any more breaking and entering.

As I passed through the security surrounding the Staff Block I bumped into Half-Hanged Smith, an old hand in the Department. Smith was one of the Academy's Executioners-in-Residence, of whom we have six. He got his nickname ten years ago when his gallows station - one of the really dangerous inner-city ones - was stormed and overrun by a mob who killed his Assistant and then decided that he, Smith, ought to be launched into the hereafter on his own gallows, which none of them had any idea how to operate. When simply pushing the lever didn't work (the safety pin was still in place) they settled for throwing the rope over the beam and then hauling him up. They were still there, delighting in his kicking, when the SP arrived, having been summoned by the emergency button Smith's Assistant had managed to press before he died. The mob was apprehended and Smith woke up in hospital with a croak for a voice and the nastiest rope burns anyone had ever seen. The scar stayed with him and so did the name, but in a rare display of compassion the Department revoked his operational status and rotated him to the Academy, where he's been ever since. Like most of the veterans who've managed to avoid compulsory re-education at the end of their service, Smith was generally decent and a good deal more prepared to forgive than his employers and so unless a student really fouled up in a practical assessment he usually dispensed sound advice and encouragement rather than discipline, which made him very popular with the Orphans. The Draftees he couldn't stand, and I was right there with him on that one. He'd just finished a twelve-hour day in the Draftee compound and was about ready to submerge himself in the staff bar and do his best to forget about it, but he always had the time of day for fellow travelers.

Because I had nothing else to do, and because Smith was good company, I agreed to join him for a swift half in the bar in the Staff Block that gloried in the name of 'The Sunshine Spot', which gave it a cheeriness it didn't really warrant. It looked a lot like the place I'd just left, which changed its name as often as it changed hands. Currently that one was called 'Minnie's' but I didn't expect it would remain Minnie's for long. Last time I was here it was called 'Tetchworth's Place' and, before that, simply 'The Watering Hole'. The bars were off-limits to the students, of course, except for those who, like Student Griers, had decided to accept the voluntary 'social skills' class that mainly involved getting them hammered for reasons that are lost to me. The Sunshine Spot wasn't particularly airy or very bright, being lit a sort of tasteful amber colour, and was subdivided into the usual booths for privacy. I settled into one with Smith and he bought the ale. I'm not really much of a drinker, a quality unusual in a headcutter, but Smith respected that and made sure that what I had was as chemically inoffensive as beer could be. Then we settled down to chew the fat as old hands do. It was strictly shop since, beyond the job, neither of us has much in common, but he did let one interesting fact slip: two nights ago there was a break-in at the Draftee compound. I had to ask him to repeat himself since, as far as I knew, the Draftees only ever tried to break out, but he confirmed it with a disbelieving nod. According to the plods, someone found a blind spot in the camera coverage, jammed the turrets, snipped their way through two razor-wire fences and then picked the lock of a small and inconsequential storehouse on the edge of the compound. When the break-in was discovered there was a swift head count that showed all present and as correct as Draftees could be and that, furthermore, nothing appeared to be missing. The response was to lock the compound down and institute a thorough search for contraband, which turned up some alcohol, cigarettes and drugs, all the usual stuff such crackdowns tend to come up with. While the miscreants were duly punished for these violations, it seemed such an extraordinary amount of effort to go to that the burglar couldn't simply have been on the beer run. Something else was going on, but nobody had any clue as to what it might be. Of course, I had more than an inkling even though I said nothing. I didn't fool myself into believing I was safe from Monica Grayne here within the Academy. After all, her courier had already got in once and this sort of breath-taking arrogance had that man's stamp all over it. It suggested to me that he was getting help from the Draftees, which made sense. He might even be hiding in there right now. I didn't have a clue what he looked like because I'd never seen his face, but if he was here in the Academy then it meant my plan to sever my links with Daylight was in jeopardy. I had to find the bastard and sort him out once and for all.

Unexpected Support

2011-12-07T04:02:00.000-08:00

Well, for a supposedly hardened drinker Rish keeled over fast. The bottle is still half full and he's slumped over the table, snoring. I prodded him with my boot dagger to make sure he wasn't faking but all he did was dribble a bit. He smelled like a brewery and I was satisfied that he was out of it at last. He'd spent the preceding hour or so working his way down the bottle while his mouth ran on autopilot, delivering a stream of steadily thickening invective that finally morphed into an incoherent, rambling slur. Once I was satisfied that he'd passed the point of no return I got up and made my way past the throng at the bar to the booth where Rhona waited. The head on the pint glass on her table had disappeared and the brew looked quite flat but otherwise it seemed untouched, as if it had only ever been there for show. She acknowledged me with a hint of a smile as I sat down and shuffled closer so that we could talk without having to raise our voices. She congratulated me on getting rid of 'the lush' and then, with little further ado, brought me up to speed with what had befallen Dr Brosnan. As of now the campus force are treating the death as an accident, having found a submerged log close to where he went in that could easily account for the bruise on his head. She knew the log was there, of course, having dragged it over from its previous resting place elsewhere in the ornamental lake. As an aside, she assured me in a rather frank tone that skinny-dipping in winter is not all it's cracked up to be and thanked the Councillor Christ for hot hairdryers.

On the subject of Rish, she brought me a few insights garnered over the course of their uneasy time together in the Mason retainers. It didn't seem, to her, as if he'd learned an awful lot from his experiences in the Urban Police. For all that he'd tried (and failed) to stamp his authority on her, those above him in the chain of command despaired at his ineptitude. She ticked off the litany of woe on fingers that were still gnarled and slightly curled even after her operation. He'd taken a squad of retainer recruits on a route march and got lost. He'd been disciplined twice for being drunk on duty. He'd been found absent from his guard post on the Mason family estate. There were other lapses to take into consideration too, such as his habit of disappearing every so often and then coming back hours later smelling of spirits. It was a mystery to Rhona that he was still employed because not even nepotism could ordinarily save someone this far gone. The Rish family, such as it was, prospered in groceries. They ran shops and victualing centres, getting up at cock-crow and turning in at midnight, working hard for their crust, but Charles Rish was a sheep so black you couldn't have picked him out with a spotlight. She surmised that they'd thrown him out, a fate common among the second, third or nth siblings and he'd subsequently meandered through his life, drifting from pillar to post without ever displaying any hint of drive. All in all it strongly suggested that he was here at the Academy not because his commanders had any great faith in him, but because they wanted rid. If that was the case, perhaps my disgrace wasn't as deep as I'd thought?

It was certainly worth pondering and it made sense of Dr Brown's standoffishness. After all, I hadn't heard a peep out of him since the news of Rish's transfer and, gentlemen's agreement or not, there was only so much that could be inferred from silence. Rhona didn't know, of course, having been sent here for the sole purpose of beating some sense into me. As she hadn't been briefed for anything else, she was out of that particular loop and probably wouldn't ever get into it. Of more pressing concern to her was my involvement with Daylight. I didn't bother trying to lie to her, and not even because she's a friend. Rhona's a trained infiltrator and one of the core skills of the job is learning how to tell colossal porkies with a straight face. Naturally, once you master that, it becomes easy to spot when amateurs try their hand at it. If I'd lied she would have known instantly and so I had to settle for the truth, at least insofar as it didn't implicate anyone else. Key to the whole thing was Garamond Mason and his dearly cherished regional extermination centres. Because they were supposed to be a work in progress and officially a secret, nothing had been said about them in public yet beyond Penny Drayton's non-expose a few weeks ago. Because she didn't get to see much TV and considered Penny one short step away from being a whore in any case, it was news to Rhona and I was banking on her feeling some of the horror that I'd felt when I learned of them. Fortunately I read her right: she was every bit as disgusted as I'd been.

Given her former career as a hired thug and murderess in the pay of Cardinal, it might have been surprising to discover that Rhona hated the idea of the RECs. After all, what else were they but labour-saving devices, albeit on a grand scale? A factory that fed living bodies in one end and sent sacks of processed fertiliser out the other ought to have been music to the ears of someone used to dragging people off the street, shoving them against the nearest convenient wall and then riddling them with bullets. For the Executioners it was easier to see: offended professional pride was part of it, but mostly the revulsion was based on what we learned at the School of Ethics here at the Academy, all that stuff about 'preserving the dignity' of the occasion and, more importantly, of treating the victims like human beings rather than cattle. But if the headcutters prided themselves on delivering a precise and merciful service, what was there about the extermination centres that could cause Cardinal to recoil? Put simply: nothing at all. The chances were good that if FJD proved unequal to the task of providing recruits, Garamond would simply buttonhole the Department of Extraordinary Actions, a.k.a. 'Cardinal', instead. But its people would be less used to industrialised death and probably more prone to the kind of lapses that FJD bred out of its people but, at the end of the day, if the money was right I knew that a Cardinal trooper would do anything. Rhona was not a typical example of the breed. Like Rish, she was fallen elite and, while her upbringing might have been a distant memory, it was still there, part and parcel of her DNA, and so the idea of the RECs pressed a button in her subconscious marked 'damned unsporting and damned un-English'. As I say, given the bloody remorselessness with which she'd shot Rish's men, it was a surprising attitude to find, but I was no less grateful for it. Provided I stayed away from Daylight she was fine with the idea of nobbling the extermination centres and offered me what little support she could. It ought to have been a proposal to drink to, but all we had was flat shandy and cold coffee.

Feeding the Addict

2011-12-06T04:48:00.000-08:00

Alright, I admit it: I was deliberately toying with Rish. After what he tried to do to me when we first met, I reckoned he had it coming and he got it in spades. If there's one things most adults will avoid like the plague, it's being made to look cowardly or stupid in front of children and here, in Test Gallows Shed 2, there were twenty of them, all staring at him with penetrating, hawk-like gazes. He was the object of their attention because the class tutor, standing on the gallows platform above them, had just asked for a volunteer to come up and be fettered by the students so that they could hone their practical skills and I'd put his surprised and reluctant hand up. If I'm entirely honest he was by far the best candidate anyway because, as a visitor to the Academy, he was entirely unversed in 'gallows etiquette' - exactly, in fact, as if he was a real customer for the noose. I suppose I could have climbed the thirteen steps myself, stood on the chalked mark on the trapdoors and allowed the students to practice on me, but I'm a veteran of the job and I wouldn't have been able to simulate the right degree of helplessness. In my experience even the ones who wanted to get it over with quickly, the ones who cooperated as much as the drugs would let them, still ended up being more of a hindrance. Far better when they were completely tranquilised and out of it and you could push and pull at their limbs without having to fend off their clumsy and well-meaning 'help'. Rish, having never set foot in a gallows station in his life, was perfect fodder and, mortified at the prospect of making a fool of himself in front of the kids, he allowed himself to be escorted up the squeaking steps while I watched from the ground.

I tried to keep the pleasure from my bruised face as I watched the students at work on him, but it was a struggle. Rish was a bastard and a tinpot office dictator with a predilection for the bottle and his weakness had ended up costing the lives of five of his men and ending his career in the Urban Police. He didn't deserve my sympathy and nor did he get it. Add to that the way he'd burst into my apartment and tried to drag me out of the shower and I found myself wishing that the students could have gone the whole hog and noosed him as well. Even though I've sworn off that part of my life and I want to make amends for what I did, every now and then there comes along someone whose very existence makes you nostalgic for the old days. I try to be as fair-minded as I can and it's a plain fact that the vast majority of the people who died at my hands did nothing to deserve it, but it's sometimes hard to separate duty from personal enmity. There's an ironic saying among some of the old hands that goes, 'I never met a murderer I didn't like'. It's ironic because there are currently 202 laws on the statute books for which the death penalty can be applied and murder is only one of them. Therefore, we headcutters are generally far more guilty than those we dispatch and, since we're all in this together (if you cleave to the Department's siege mentality), the saying holds true. There are few friendships closer than the bond shared by Executioners, because nobody loves a headcutter - least of all, at this moment in time, Charles Rish.

I let the students practice fettering Rish for about twenty minutes before it was decided that he'd suffered enough. Given that a good team could have had him out of the tumbrel and on the end of the rope in about fifty seconds, I think he accrued a great deal of experience that might set him in good stead later, especially if he carried on making enemies at the rate that he was. I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly seven in the evening. For the students curfew was fast approaching and, given the riot that took place recently, it was going to be enforced with a good deal more vigour than usual. The staff weren't bound by it and often took evening walks that tended to end at one of the two bars on the campus but with my unique status as a visiting alumnus, supply tutor and, latterly, security risk, I would be under a stricter leash. I'd still received nothing formal from Principal Brown but, knowing him, that meant he was probably still drafting the wording in the rich verbosity of a born paper-pusher. In practice what it would mean was that if I wanted to go anywhere that wasn't directly related to the job, I had to get Rish's permission and, thus far, we hadn't exactly hit it off. However, the staff bar was the only place I wanted to go right now and, from the look of him, Rish could probably use a stiff drink too. Therefore, once he got down off the platform, I offered him my insincere (but artfully delivered) apologies and invited him to come for a drink with me. As I'd anticipated he was more than up for it. I don't know how strongly the retainers enforce sobriety among their personnel, but if ever there was a time to jump off the wagon it was now and, when I sweetened the deal by offering to pay for the rounds, he was sold. I intended him to get royally plastered and spend the evening in the loving embrace of his favourite whore, whisky, while I got up to speed with Rhona Woodley. With any luck I'd be able to divest myself of him while we talked because the last thing I needed was a cantankerous watchdog still capable of standing, if for no other reason than that if he tried to draw on Rhona, well, shooting dead a drunkard would not be the least bit sporting. I knew she wasn't going to try anything herself, but Rish had an axe of immense proportions to grind with her and I didn't trust him not to try to settle things the instant he set eyes on her.

We made our way to the staff bar in silence - comparatively. In fact, he was very vocal about the way I'd treated him, as if I had somehow violated his hospitality or taken advantage of his good nature, not that he actually had one. In my turn, I refused to rise to the bait and said nothing. I suspected that only the twin hooks of duty and impending alcohol kept him with me and, if he wasn't obliged to spend every waking minute supervising me, he'd do exactly what every other sane person did in the presence of an Executioner and make himself so scarce that we'd need to turn over rocks to find him. When we pushed open the door of the bar and entered the warm gloom, the muted hum of conversation and quiet music washed over us like a warm and welcoming blanket and his eyes lit up at the prospect of inebriation. I glanced around and spotted Rhona in a booth in the corner, nursing what looked like a pint of dark ale but, knowing her, was probably actually shandy. Like me, Rhona is a hate figure thanks to a career with the Council's death squad, Cardinal, and she knows never to let her guard down even in supposedly 'safe' places like this one. Rish didn't see her because he gravitated to the bar. I tagged along and bought him a bottle of the finest - and strongest - spirits available, setting my account back by nearly ten pounds, and ordered a coffee for myself. Then I followed him into a booth of our own and let him get on with pickling his liver. We had things to discuss, Rhona and I, and the sooner I could divest myself of Rish, the better.

Lost Innocence

2011-12-05T04:20:00.000-08:00

Word spread across the campus like wildfire. Even as the sun set over the dreaming spires of the Final Justice Department Academy's chapel (which sees little use but was too pretty to demolish) a security team was assembling the components of a forensics unit at the ornamental lake, from which the late Dr Brosnan had been fished an hour previously. From a cursory examination of the footpath along the lake the officer in charge concluded that Dr B, taking his afternoon constitutional as usual, slipped in the mud and took a header into the water where, for whatever reason, he found himself unable to climb out and regrettably slipped into the hereafter with a mouthful of frog spawn. He seems to have been immersed for about three hours before he was found by one of the students who was taking a walk to clear her head after an exam. She was clearly one of the better Orphans because, having ascertained that he was indeed deceased, she left him where he was and made her way to the nearest telephone to call the campus plods. She wasn't offered any counselling afterwards and nor did she need any: as a Level Three Probationer she'd have seen a fair few corpses already and, after a while, it became a case of 'seen one, seen them all.' Anyway, Dr B's demise wasn't likely to be mourned. As chief re-education specialist at the Detention Block it was his job to take backsliding pupils and rewire their brains - usually without their consent - to turn them into model students. Having been on the receiving end of this myself, I personally felt no sorrow for his passing. I was actually more concerned about his assassin. Born of low elite, Rhona Woodley went through the Youth Police Cadre like every elite kid and was selected for infiltrator training, then went on to make a career as a professional betrayer before politics led to her being shunted into Cardinal, the Council's paramilitary death squad. While her hands might be clean compared to mine, she still has about a hundred killings to her name and Dr B was one more notch on her belt. She hadn't spelled out to me exactly how she would deal with him - we'd just agreed on drowning and I left the fine detail to her - but I guessed that she must have found a way of artfully pitching him in without it being apparent that his trip down the slipway had been assisted. I planned to meet up with her later for a quiet debrief in the staff bar, assuming of course that none of the campus plods found anything suspicious.

In the meantime I was left to 'entertain' my watchdog, Lieutenant Charles Rish of the Mason family's private army, the retainers. Rish is a petty bastard and he and Rhona have history of the worst sort, so I'm doing what I can to keep them apart. Thanks to the way he tried to stamp his authority on me when we first met, I'm putting him to as much trouble as I can and, since the Academy is more of a 'home' to me than it is for him, he's getting a whistle-stop tour of the nastier parts - nastier, that is, for an outsider. I suppose if you haven't grown up on the campus the way the Orphans have, it must be a very sinister place indeed, a school with the sole purpose of turning children into Executioners. However, the kids are so used to it that they see nothing untoward about the place and, alumnus that I am, for me it was more a trip down memory lane than anything else. But Rish was jumpy as hell the moment he learned that we were to visit the Test Gallows sheds because those parallel rows of plain metal warehouses are where the Academy teaches the students their hands-on skills. There are three rows of sheds, though they're more like long, narrow hangars if truth be told. Each one contains a row of eight gallows of the model found at the gallows stations that the graduates will eventually serve in, along with a separate storage area for spare parts, maintenance kits, classrooms and whatnot. The outside door was guarded by the usual plods plus the ubiquitous automated defence turrets, but a swipe of my Record card got me in and Rish, as a 'guest', got a limited-access pass, meaning that he was free to wander around the gallows but was barred from the classrooms. It was the same chilly temperature within as without and the only real advantages were the bright lights and the lack of rain. There was a class underway at the nearest scaffold and so I wandered over to take a look.

Rish looked pale as hell as he watched the lesson. Possibly his discomfiture was down to the fact that the students were Level One Probationers, aged ten to twelve, surely far too young to be exposed to life's brutalities. The fact was, though, that once students reached Probationer status they were hardened to the Department's credo of dispassionate extermination and already had a minimum of six years' indoctrination behind them that they were by then itching to put into practice. I'd been exactly the same when I was their age and, even if I was now secretly working to bring down the system, the upbringing left me with feelings of affection and a sort of motherly pride for the kids rather than the abhorrence that Rish felt. The kids were studying the art of restraint and twenty necks were duly craned as the tutor, Mr Robertson, demonstrated the process with a lifelike mannequin that bore a sign on its chest that read 'Arfur'. Arfur and Mr Robertson stood above the students on the platform, beneath the beam of the gallows although there was no noose, that not being the purpose of the exercise. However, the dummy had obviously taken the plunge many times before because the flesh-coloured paint was all but worn away from its neck, revealing scuffed metal. In a sop to traditional student humour the world over, someone had taken a paintbrush to Arfur's face and applied a set of comedy glasses and a moustache but apart from that indignity the dummy looked to be in good condition. Mr Robertson caught my eye and nodded a greeting but the students, absorbed in the lesson, didn't even look at me. Rish did, though, and his expression was one of nausea. Of course, he probably saw the students not as innocent children but neophyte monsters and, on some level, maybe he was right. As I say, though, he's an outsider, which is probably why, when Mr Robertson called for someone to come up onto the platform to stand in for Arfur, I immediately volunteered Rish.

Inconvenient Watchdog

2011-12-04T02:59:00.000-08:00

To say that the conversation with Rish was an interesting one would be to sell short exactly how odd it was. There he was, my supposed watchdog, handcuffed to the kitchen table leg, on the floor and with as many bruises as Rhona had left me with, along with two fewer teeth. When I emerged from the bedroom with the battery-powered hairdryer in my hand he visibly cringed, probably taking it for a pistol. As his eyes were nicely swollen and blackening at that point it was an understandable mistake to make, but he'd badly misread my character if he thought I was going to go to the trouble of beating him into a stupor and then wasting a bullet on him. In a way it's symptomatic of how people regard Executioners: all they see is the mountain of body bags and they forget the manner in which they're accumulated. Thanks to the Academy's School of Ethics, Executioners are very well versed on the subject of morality and only kill when they have to, when there's no other choice in the matter, and it's done clinically, efficiently and with the customer's wellbeing paramount (the Department shies away from calling them victims, saying that it's bad for morale). At any rate, I'd already inflicted as much harm upon Rish as I intended to mete out; any more would be on his head, as it were. I wasn't going to start anything unless he did. I offered the olive branch in the form of the first aid kit that I dropped on the floor next to him. I don't actually know the first thing about first aid but the look of the thing counts for a lot. If he knew how to treat bruises and contusions, fine. If not, tough. I had no sympathy for him at all but I was prepared to reach an accommodation if it meant we could work together, or at least bump along.

For his part, he had the sense not to curse me or waste my time with any 'you'll regret this' speeches. He was smart enough to realise he'd fouled up and, to my genuine surprise, he apologised for provoking me. I was momentarily speechless but I'm very familiar with the lengths that people who hate me will go to to get a free crack at me, so if his intention was to gull me into letting him go he was disappointed because I made no move to unfetter him. Instead I accepted the apology for the (probably hollow) gesture that it was, and offered him a cup of coffee. He declined, possibly suspecting I intended to poison him. Such is the fear and paranoia that Executioners generate. It can be incredibly frustrating sometimes, in those few interactions that we have with the general populace, because so many people know the myths and very few know the truth. They seem to think we're permanently on the prowl, looking for innocents to kill. The sigh that I unleashed was heartfelt, but fine - if he didn't want one then I'd be partaking on my own. I put enough water in the machine for two, in case he changed his mind, then crossed over to the computer in the living room to check tomorrow's schedule while the machine hissed and bubbled. There wasn't a lot in store for me, as it turned out. Presumably Dr Brown or one of his cronies had been in touch with Dr Bellows, my boss in the School of Ethics, and cancelled everything in light of my transgressions because, one lunchtime Q&A session in the library notwithstanding, I had nothing to do. That was going to make living with Rish even more tense because there would be nothing to take my mind off him.

There was another problem looming on the horizon too, in the form of Rhona Woodley. At the moment she was in the process of setting Dr Brosnan, the Academy's chief re-education specialist, up for an accidental drowning, but after that her schedule was blank too and she wasn't expecting to be rotated off campus for another day. Even though I trusted her to deliver the goods as far as Dr Brosnan was concerned, if she fled the campus early it would be suspicious. It meant, of course, that there was every danger that she and Rish would cross paths and, if Rish hated me, then there were no words for the depth of his enmity toward Rhona. If I was lucky I'd be able to keep them away from one another, but it would have to be with the luck of the gods. While she was unlikely to have a go at him, I couldn't bank on him exercising any similar restraint. She had, after all, personally shot dead five of his officers and, in the process, killed his Urban Police career as well. It's not the sort of thing the elite tend to forgive, not even gutter examples like Lieutenant Rish. Duels have been fought for less but if Rish fancied challenging her to anything so formal then he was stupider than I thought because, as they saying goes, she'd wipe the floor with him and then use his skin for chamois leather. On the other hand, if the opportunity to shoot her in the back arose, I had no doubt that he'd take it. One or other of them needed a mission and the safest thing to do would be to go somewhere myself and drag him along with me. Technically I was on suspension until Dr Brown reached a decision as to what to do with me, but I'd had no formal notification. Generally such suspensions were reached by a sort of mutual assumption: he'd assume I knew I was out of circulation and in turn, I'd tacitly accept my unspoken house arrest. Such gentleman's agreements were the grease in the cogs of state but I could always play dumb and pretend I hadn't known.

Thus decided, I went back into the kitchen and poured my coffee before unshackling Rish. I told him that I would be heading out later and that, as my watchdog, he would have to accompany me. Out of curiosity as to his reaction, I told him I was going down to the Test Gallows sheds to observe the evening class. Actually, going there would neatly sidestep any accusations of bad faith or stupidity because, even if Brown had sidelined me, I was still an Executioner and the gallows were part and parcel of the job. Predictably Rish looked very uncomfortable with the idea. After all, the sheds weren't really that obtrusive a feature on the campus and if you missed them, what you were left with was a large gated school that was no more sinister than any other. At any rate, I wasn't all that inclined to make things easy for Rish after the way he'd introduced himself and so I laid it on as thickly as I dared, informing him that he'd have to watch as the students went about their business and, furthermore, that he'd have to watch as they carried out live drops with real, living customers on the ropes. Although there was no way in hell that would be happening, the look on his face made the lie worth it and my mood lightened considerably as I sipped my coffee and made ready to scare the dickens out of him.

Off On The Wrong Foot

2011-12-03T04:50:00.000-08:00

It's agreed. Dr Brosnan will suffer his terrible accident this afternoon, while I'm elsewhere on campus and safely removed from the scene. Rhona's going to do the deed, intercepting the good doctor in the course of his afternoon constitutional and then throwing him into the ornamental lake and keeping him there until he croaks like a frog. I was surprised she didn't take more persuading, actually. I asked her to do it and she agreed. I didn't even have to play the friendship card, with I was loath to do anyway. Having someone like Rhona Woodley for a friend is tricky because she's not exactly charming or the life and soul of the party and it may simply be because we're so alike that we gravitated to one another. After all, our common ground is that, between us, we're directly responsible for about three and a half thousand deaths, although the lion's share of those are on my card. Rhona's a Mason retainer - a mercenary serving one of the 'great families' - but before that she was a senior sergeant in the Council's death squad, Cardinal, meaning that she's no stranger to (often unprovoked) violence. Sooner or later there's going to be trouble between us because she knows I'm mixed up with the anti-Council terror organisation, Daylight, but for now she accepts my explanation that I'm trying to extricate myself from their clutches - which is the truth. Dr Brosnan's removal of the French mental conditioning was a big step in that direction but he's become a liability, hence his impending afternoon swim.

In the meantime I have a far greater problem to deal with in the form of Lieutenant Charles Rish, with whom I haven't exactly got off with on the right foot. Rish is also a Mason retainer and the fact that he's got a commission makes it awkward because Rhona's only a Chief Warrant Officer. To add further spice to the brew, they hate each other and, in Rish's case, with good reason. In her capacity as a Cardinal enforcer Rhona put five of Rish's Urban Police officers up against the wall and shot them and then, after the volley, picked her way through the mess and finished off the survivors. That act of brutality was the last nail in the coffin of Rish's Urban Police career because, on his watch, the dead men had assaulted two FJD Executioners and come off worst. Revealed to the world as an inept officer unable to even protect his men, let alone control them, he'd carried the can and lost his job. Somehow he'd found his way into the retainers and begun to rebuild his career, and then discovered that Rhona had also joined. Given his petty tinpot ways it was inevitable that he would have tried to make her life a living hell, but she'd managed to get his goat even more by ignoring his efforts and it didn't take much imagination to picture the steam blasting out of his ears. I don't know exactly how the chain of command works in the retainer units but the fact that he couldn't even get her court-martialed for disobedience says a lot. At the end of the day the only retainers the Masons care about are the upper echelons, the ones from the old servant families who've been in harness for generations. In those circumstances johnny-come-latelies like Rish would scarcely register on the radar.

Anyway, the first I saw of Lieutenant Rish was when he let himself into my quarters without knocking. Actually, I'd locked the door and he still got in, so he's either handy with a lockpick or he's got a master key. The reason the door was locked was because I was in the shower, having parted from Rhona an hour or two earlier. In keeping with yet another member of humanity who hates my guts, he strode into the bathroom and slid open the stall door without even a by-your-leave. I think he expected to exploit my naked defencelessness as a means of stamping his authority on me. However, in the intervening eighteen months or so since we last met, he seems to have forgotten who he was dealing with. I was, after all, the one who precipitated his fall from grace when I joined Trilly in knocking the hell out of the five officers who Rhona later shot. I've lived at the sharp end for nearly twelve years now, with people plotting my demise every single damn day, and I've survived through a combination of good fortune and an absolute determination to be the last one standing. Over the hiss and spatter of the water I heard the door unlock and the soft footfalls of an intruder trying to be stealthy and so I grabbed the nearest weapon to hand, which turned out to be the back brush. It's green, plastic, rather ratty and a bit forlorn but, for a trained Executioner who scored very highly in unarmed combat the FJD way, anything is a weapon. To a beginner the brush would be about as much use as a rubber dagger (which I could also probably do some damage with) but it had a nice balance and I gripped it halfway along its length, in the manner of a short sword, with the bristles at my end so that when Rish flung the stall open, he got the handle of the back brush in his solar plexus.

He folded nicely and in keeping with tradition his nose made contact with my rising knee and that was it: he was down, stunned and I was able to conclude my shower in peace. I washed off the remaining lather, turned off the water and wrapped myself in the towel and then stepped over him, heading for the bedroom where my clothes were. Unfortunately, crouched and gasping for air or not, Rish wasn't out of the picture and he made a grab for me, ripping away the towel. At that point I had to make a quick decision, i.e. whether to call a halt to proceedings by talking to him, or by laying him out. I mentally flipped the coin and then introduced his mouth to my elbow. It had the desired result of knocking him backwards but when he fumbled for his pistol I knew things were getting too serious. While in most circumstances a man claiming self-defence after shooting a naked and unarmed woman would find it hard to be taken seriously, the fact that he was a retainer officer and probably a law unto himself made it all the more likely that he'd try it anyway. I wasn't prepared to give him the chance and he'd already outlived his welcome so I leapt at him, gripped his head and rode him to the floor like a falling tree. I wrenched the pistol from his hand and hit him with it, using the Razer's handgrip as a bludgeon and, somewhere around the third or fourth impact, he lost consciousness. Had I been Trilly, I wouldn't have stopped there, but instead would have carried on until he was unrecognisable, but unlike her I know when to stop. I settled for locating my official handcuffs (two pairs, carried as standard for subduing rebellious customers), fettered his wrists and then, as an afterthought, used the second set to fasten him firmly, by the ankle, to the kitchen table. Then I rolled him into a recovery position, returned to the bedroom and got dressed.

Bad Blood

2011-12-02T04:19:00.000-08:00

My watchdog should be here by this evening. Lieutenant Charles Rish, formerly of the Urban Police and now a Mason retainer, will act as my jailer for the duration of my stay at the FJD Academy. At the moment my handler is Rhona Woodley, an old friend who came here in response to the riot that I stirred up that had the effect of embarrassing her paymaster, Garamond Mason. One clinical and precisely applied beating later and we're back in the Staff Block, wondering what best to do about Rish. Rhona's met him a few times and doesn't like him much, but then, there aren't that many people who she does like. Rhona's friendship was something I earned the hard way, in the civil war and its aftermath, but it's hardly of the coffee-morning-and-chitchat variety: Rhona's a stone cold killer and something of a fixer with it. She's extremely cynical, as am I, of everything that pertains to this nasty little republic that we live in, and our friendship is based as much on shared guilt as it is shared hardship. According to her, Lieutenant Rish has a chip on his shoulder so big that he has trouble carrying it. Like Rhona, he's of low elite origin and, also like her, circumstances pushed him away from the dizzy heights of aristocracy and firmly into the gutter. As commander of Urban Police Station 16 on Carver Street he had the kind of petty authority often wielded by those who fall from grace. He ran it like a martinet and incurred the contempt of his subordinates and ended up taking to the bottle for want of comfort. After my short and disastrous sojourn at Carver Street, life for Rish went downhill very quickly. After a gang of his 'officers' tried to take advantage of Trilly and myself (and we put five of them in hospital in return), the Lieutenant was fired and ended up on the streets, fallen about as far as it's possible for an elite to fall, before he gratefully (and desperately) took up an offer from the Mason retainers, who were recruiting at the time. Still, he was a lot luckier than his men because, not long after he was dismissed, Cardinal paid Carver Street a visit.

Cardinal is the codename of the Council's paramilitary death squad. They're a rough bunch, most of them ex-Urban Police, and Rhona was the senior NCO on that occasion. Armed with a complaint from FJD Deputy Commander Yvonne Fraser the Cardinal team dropped in on Carver Street, identified the guilty parties, dragged them out of the infirmary, put them against the wall and shot them. I hadn't known any of this and it came as a shock when Rhona related the story in her calm and unemotional voice. As far as I was concerned Trilly and I had defended ourselves against unwarranted male attention and we'd given the offenders the thumping they deserved. As far as we were concerned, that was the end of the matter. To find that Fraser had had them executed horrified me. For one thing, it was a matter of Urban Police internal discipline: it should have been handled 'in-house', insofar as the pay rats are capable of that. More importantly, though, Cardinal isn't in the business of resolving inter-service rivalries. There are proper channels to go through for this sort of thing. Cardinal's job is to comb through the tenements and whisk people away in the night, more or less as the Urban Police does but with less aplomb and a lot more mess. Actively setting the UP and Cardinal against one another was breathtakingly irresponsible and, on reflection, one more good reason why having Rish and Rhona in the same place - i.e. here - would be a recipe for fireworks.

In the meantime, there are other issues to resolve. To begin with, there's the very real problem of the inconvenient witnesses to my re-education. Top of the list is Dr Brosnan, the senior re-ed at the Academy and the one who dug out and killed the 'monitor' personality that the French techs installed in my mind. Sooner or later he's going to betray me and, when he does, it'll be from a safe position where I can't get back at him. The other witness, of course, is Rhona, and friendship only goes so far. Like me, she's thoroughly implicated in the crimes of the regime and so neither of us is entitled to any moral high ground, but the merest sniff of foreign influence is a hanging offence in Britain and I've just revealed signs of full-blown French tampering in my brain. The fact that she hasn't reported me is as much down to her personality and cynicism as it is her own perceived lack of honour. Because we're as guilty as each other, I think she's happy to keep my secret as long as doing so doesn't land her in any trouble. Unfortunately, in this country 'secrets' and 'trouble' are interchangeable terms and she's been a Council enforcer all her life. She might not voluntarily betray me but, as she amply demonstrated when she obeyed Garamond's command to beat my head in with a cosh, she'll talk if she's ordered to. So it becomes a dual exercise of ensuring Rhona's continued loyalty and shutting Dr Brosnan's mouth. Rhona's not stupid: she knows I'm mixed up with dangerous people and she probably suspects Daylight, but as long as she continues to believe that I was entrapped rather than that I volunteered, then she'll stay on-side. After all, who would believe that Daylight, the Council's most vehement (and violent) critic, would freely employ a headcutter with a reputation as brutal as mine? I'm not comfortable with lying to Rhona, but I wouldn't be comfortable with her shooting me either. Of the two key people in my life right now - her and Monica Grayne, my Daylight 'handler' - Rhona's by far the more dangerous. In the meantime, though, a look at Dr Brosnan's schedule suggests that he's fond of talking walks through the little copse on the campus of an afternoon. There's an ornamental lake in there that, in the summer, attracts skinny-dipping Orphans, and it's certainly deep enough to drown an interfering scientist in...

De-education

2011-12-01T04:16:00.000-08:00

Re-education is never a fun experience. The knowledge that I was lowering my guard and allowing a complete stranger to trample all over the lawn of my cerebral cortex scared me like very few things do. I'm not afraid of dying: I've been listed as the cause of death for over three thousand other people, so to be afraid in return would be hypocritical. If Dr Brosnan inadvertently tripped the termination code then I would be very annoyed and, shortly after, very dead, so there was no real point in being scared of that. No, what worried me was that he'd mess around in my brain, press the wrong button, and I'd live out the remaining few years of my life as a vegetable. The re-education process consists of a double-barreled therapeutic approach: a pre-hypnotic chemical with the mouth-bruising name of 'hypertritonamine' that relaxed the mind and induced a suggestible state, and the actual hypnotism that was administered via a globe on an armature that was suspended over the subject's head so that they could watch as the colours on its surface swirled, flowed and throbbed in time with their pulse. The actual commands and programmes would then be administered via headphones that linked the subject directly to the computer and the re-ed himself. I knew from prior experience what to expect but even though the last time I was treated was when I was aged nine and everything looked big, the syringe still looked huge twenty years later. Dr Brosnan worked quietly and efficiently, testament to his professionalism and the fact that Rhona Woodley, her Mason retainer uniform as forbidding as it was immaculate, was standing guard with one hand on her shoulder holster. To be honest, I doubt if Dr B would have tried anything silly if she'd been unarmed. He'd seen the damage she'd inflicted on me earlier and probably knew that she'd not even been trying very hard. If she decided to go to town on him, he'd know about it.

I can't say I remember a great deal about the experience. It was the same when I was a little girl - the re-ed had given me the injection, hooked me up to the computer, activated the programme and my mind had turned to mush in about thirty seconds. I'd been completely defenceless, I never had a chance to resist, and for years afterwards I was the Department's star pupil and finest Executioner, all of my extraordinary prowess and longevity courtesy of men like Dr Brosnan. By the time I shook off the conditioning I was so set in my ways that it was impossible to feel angry or even to resent it: I was so thoroughly implicated in the crimes of the regime that to try to blame the re-eds for what I'd eventually done willingly was pointless. That's another reason why I was happy to let Dr B fool around inside my head: one small portion of my conscience was screaming aloud that if anything went wrong, I would deserve it. As it was, armed with two decades-worth of cynicism and an ingrained distrust of authority, I put up more of a fight than I intended and I watched twenty minutes pass on the clock face before my memory went blank. The next time I looked at the clock over an hour had elapsed and Dr Brosnan was unfastening the straps on the couch. With Rhona's help he guided me over to a chair by the wall. My head felt thick and my nose was bleeding again. Luckily, I still had plenty of tissues to staunch it with, dabbing as I listened to the good doctor's verdict. He said he'd found evidence of recent tampering in my mind, just as I'd suspected, but what surprised them both was that as I'd slipped under, I'd started talking in French, a language I don't even pretend to understand. He said he had a duty to report it to the authorities, but he changed his mind when Rhona told him she had a duty to paint the wall with his brains if he did. What I had, he said, was not a 'mask' programme but a 'monitor', a semi-dormant artificial personality encoded into my cortex to watch through my eyes and guide my hands, giving me an extra nudge now and then when something needed doing - he was rather vague on this point but I suspected that what I'd done at Garamond's party had been one such 'something'. He said the monitor was entirely passive and hadn't even to defend itself. It had simply keeled over and died the moment he cut the metaphorical cord, taking any termination codes it may have had with it.

Thus cleansed, my mind would heal itself and I would be myself once more. Actually, I'd probably feel no different but at least I could be sure that I was doing my own thinking rather than furthering someone else's agenda. Now I was left with the problem of how to keep Dr B from carrying out his patriotic duty and reporting me. While he wouldn't have done anything while Rhona was on the campus, I had no doubt that sooner or later he'd find it expedient to drop me in it, probably once he'd worked out a way of covering his own skinny arse. Buying his silence was out of the question - he was a Green-Two elite and as such had far more income than I'd ever see and, because he lived and worked on the campus and never had cause to venture out, blackmail was going to be shaky too. That left option three, the tragic accident. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of more innocent blood on my hands, but as they say, there's innocent and there's innocent. It's largely thanks to Dr B and people like him that I'm the killer that I am, so he was hardly blameless. More to the point, he was doing it to other kids on a daily basis, taking the reluctant students and backsliders and turning them into dedicated headcutters. While we'd needed Brosnan to tweak the re-ed systems to strip the 'gas chamber kids' of their enthusiasm for the regional extermination centres, he personally wasn't vital to that process and there's more than one way to skin a cat. He'd already written the programme - or rather, adapted what was already there - and as far as I knew it was in the system and active, so we didn't technically need him anymore. Therefore it was a simple, brutal choice: my life or his. Daylight wanted me to damage the Academy, something I wasn't going to do and which I'd told that bastard of a courier already, but if they really craved a pound of flesh then that of Dr Brosnan would have to suffice. Even as I shook his hand and thanked him, I was concocting the means of his death.

Blast From The Past

2011-11-30T03:51:00.000-08:00

I've heard of cauliflower ears before, but right now I have a cauliflower face. Thanks to Rhona's attentions I have two black eyes, puffy lips, a cut eyebrow and a nice crop of bruises and contusions everywhere else. My nose is throbbing and keeps bleeding, which is why my pockets are stuffed with tissues but, thankfully, the damage is superficial. It ought to fade in a few days and then I'll have my looks back, such as they are. My teeth are intact, which is a relief: dentistry is a little rough and ready down at this level and I've known people to die of a toothache when the infection from the rotting cavity reaches the bloodstream. All in all I think I've emerged reasonably well. It always helps when the heart of the person beating you up isn't in it. Torturers who say 'I don't want to do this' before whaling on you with a lead pipe are ten-a-penny in our society, but those who genuinely hold themselves back are a rarity. Rhona's in the latter category - at least, as far as smacking the hell out of friends is concerned. She did just enough to make it look like I'd had a proper going-over without doing any serious damage. My vision is a bit blurry and I've got a headache that doesn't respond to aspirin, but nothing's broken and that's to the good. Nevertheless, the silence that fell in the staff canteen when I walked in was like a knife to the heart for someone used to passing unnoticed through life. Now all eyes were on me as I made my way to the self-service counter, selected a meagre salad and paid for it. I peered around the canteen feeling like a blob on a microscope slide, and then spotted Rhona at a table in the corner. She was alone and the adjacent tables were empty too, because she was an outsider at the Academy. She wasn't family, she wasn't 'one of us' and, on the orders of the Principal's paymaster, she'd violently assaulted a member of staff. Needless to say, it made for an awkward assignation.

She apologised unreservedly for what she'd done, but I waved it away. It's not that I was ungrateful that she'd 'manned up' and said the words; it was more that we both knew she'd had no choice and she wasn't the one who should have been apologising. My feelings with regard to Garamond Mason have never been what you'd call affectionate - my list of grievances grows by the day - but for the meantime he was strictly a back-burner thing. I had more immediate problems to worry about - far more, as it turned out. According to Rhona, Garamond was sending an officer to be my 'watchdog' for the duration of my time at the Academy. Now that I'd demonstrated that I was untrustworthy, I would need a 'handler' who would live in my apartment with me and accompany me everywhere, which meant that I had precious little time consult Dr Brosnan about my re-education before he arrived. I held out the vague hope that the handler would be Rhona, but while having a friend beat me up might have appealed to Garamond's sense of humour, having that same friend then escort me around was a non-starter. My new best chum was to be none other than Lieutenant Charles Rish, formerly of the Urban Police and now a retainer officer. My heart sank. I remembered Rish from last time around, when Trilly and I were detained at his station on Carver Street during the Pargeter affair. It was hard to forget because UP Station 16 was a typical dumping ground for thugs. Being presumably starved for female company (I don't know; maybe they were barred from the houses of comfort) some of the officers tried it on with Trilly and myself and, in the rumpus that followed, we put five of them in the hospital. Forgetting, as many do, that headcutters fight dirty, they'd assumed that we'd be easy meat and Rish was one of those who paid for the mistake. He'd been booted out of the Urban Police, something I thought was impossible in a place so endemically corrupt, and now he worked for Garamond. He had more than just an axe to grind with me and so the news that he was coming here was about as bad as it could be.

In the meantime Rhona handed me a dot-matrix printout that she'd blagged from the Academy computers while I was having my cuts stitched. Because the computers were part of the National Net and she worked for the people in power, it was easy enough for her to bypass security and the document basically consisted of a set of hints and tips for infiltrators anxious to avoid dying of termination code-itis. Because the codes are explicitly written to trip the moment the subject tries to answer a specific question (usually of the 'who do you work for?' variety) it was deemed helpful if the agent could avoid dying horribly if such a question was asked rhetorically or in jest. Basically, it was a list of breathing exercises and relaxation techniques of the sort designed to bring the heart rate down, it being a given that the more tense and panicky a person was, the more likely that the code would activate. The activation of a termination code was down to how the agent's subconscious reacted to a perceived threat: fight, flight or self-destruction. If I read and absorbed the lessons within and then spoke to Dr Brosnan about disarming the code, I ought not to fall victim to it. It was all about pulling the fuse from the bomb. To be honest, I'd hoped for more, perhaps some spoken 'disarm' command, but that would be too easy and not really in keeping with the CIU mindset. After all, what was to stop such a secret leaking? It was far safer (from their point of view) to lose the odd agent here and there than risk losing them all to a security breach. While that was great on paper, it was not very encouraging for the agents at the sharp end - hence these relaxation therapies. Still, it was a great deal better than nothing and so I nibbled my way through the salad, trying not to wince, and then set it aside and accompanied Rhona back across the campus to the Detention Block. Mr Snapper was there again, apparently waiting for a naughty student to be released from custody, and he tipped his hat to me and glared daggers at Rhona, who ignored him. I only had time to exchange a few quick words with the Chief Porter before Rhona was barging into Dr Brosnan's office, surprising him in mid-sandwich. Then she explained to him, in very precise language, exactly how happy he would be to help us sort out a small matter of re-education for which he would also be delighted to waive his fee. Thus motivated, we explained what was required of him, declined to answer his astonished questions, and told him to get on with it.

Delivering the Message

2011-11-29T04:23:00.000-08:00

Rhona hasn't changed. She still wears her retainer uniform, with its Mason crest and the stylised words, vel alius, on her shoulder, with neat and immaculate precision. She's been promoted too, since I last saw her. She was a sergeant then; now she's a Chief Warrant Officer which translates, I think, as a squad leader of some sort. It's a sign that the Masons trust her, inasmuch as they can trust any retainer. After all, most of the retainers are mercenaries at the end of the day, although a few of the senior ones come from longstanding servant families. One possible reason for Rhona's promotion may be her elite origins. Low to middling or not, she's from broadly the same stock as the Masons and if there's anything the elite respect it's bloodlines. She also seems to have had surgery on her hands, which, even under the black gloves she habitually wears, look noticeably straighter. I can only assume that the operation was a reward for services rendered since, elite or not, she couldn't afford it before. She nearly lost the use of her hands after she was exposed as an undercover agent, an infiltrator, and her erstwhile colleagues fed her fingers to the spinning caterpillar tracks of a Panther scout car. When she sat before me in the interrogation cell in the Academy's guardhouse she was holding a gold-plated pen and she wrote a few notes in her pad with a neat script that was not at all like the gnarled and clumsy letters she used before. She seemed glad to see me. Her smile was genuine enough; I'm sure of that. She also congratulated me on managing to kick up a riot on the Academy campus, something that the mild-mannered and largely inoffensive Orphans were thought to be incapable of. Then the smile vanished and she told me that her paymaster, Garamond Mason, was furious about it. As I'd dreaded, she was here in her official capacity, to deliver Garamond's message to me personally. She underlined this by placing a black, heavy cosh on the table between us and then dismissing the guards.

Neither of us made any move as the door closed. I couldn't move because I was chained to my chair. She, on the other hand, looked as reluctant as I've ever seen her. Rhona and I go way back, at least a year, which is a very long time in headcutter circles, considering that most of us scarcely live six months after graduation. That made her an old friend and I didn't want to believe that, simply because her master clicked his fingers, she would dispassionately deliver his 'message' of blunt-force trauma. Unfortunately, it's never that simple. Low elite or not, she was as much a prisoner to the loyalty ratings as anyone in this benighted country. If she refused to carry out her orders she'd have her rating yanked and she'd be cast out into the street to fend for herself. Her loyalties were bought and paid for and now she was being asked to prove it. It was an awkward moment for us both, she because she knew this had to be done, I because I knew she couldn't avoid it. Garamond had decreed that as punishment for stirring up the hornet's nest, I was to be 'disciplined' and, because that was the way the world worked, that's what was going to have to happen. I took some small shred of comfort from the knowledge that she didn't want to do it, but I knew that wasn't going to stop her from carrying out her orders. Tentatively I asked exactly how far she'd been ordered to go and whether my teeth were safe. In response she picked up the cosh and walked around behind me. Even though I was expecting it, the blow still took me by surprise, slamming into the side of my skull and raising a welt on my cheekbone. If not for the chains, it would have toppled me out of the chair. Involuntarily, I let out a cry. Rhona paused and then told me she was here to kill two birds with one stone, referring to our telephone conversation. She pulled the table out of the way so that she could better reach me, then lamped me another one that split my lip. Then she asked me what I wanted to know about the infiltrator programme.

It was a surreal and very painful conversation that ensued. The shared knowledge that she was going to beat the shit out of me whatever I said made it all the more odd that every time she landed a blow, she would then give me an answer to one of my questions. She confided, as the cosh rained down, that she'd had to volunteer to do this in order to get to see me and that, if Garamond had had his way, he'd have sent one of his torturers instead. If that had that been the case I would have been looking at serious longterm damage rather than this 'superficial' going-over that I was getting instead. I suppose I ought to have been grateful, but it's difficult to be glad when you're having your head used as a pingpong ball. But when - through swelling lips - I asked her how to defeat a re-ed termination code, she stopped abruptly and the concern on her face broke through. First and foremost, she wanted to know what the hell I'd got myself mixed up in that led me to think I might have one. She hooked the cosh into her belt and drew up the other chair. Termination codes, she told me in a low and urgent voice, were wired directly into that part of the cortex that controls involuntary muscle actions. The brain death story, she said, was just that - a story. The re-eds haven't figured out how to simply 'switch off' a brain and so they settled for erasing the commands that control breathing. The code would trip and then the subject would suffocate. It wasn't particularly quick and it was very unpleasant for all concerned. She'd never seen it happen but she had seen the statistics. Usually one or two infiltrators a year succumbed to termination codes, something the Criminal Investigation Unit termed 'an acceptable loss rate'.

She found a handkerchief from somewhere and dabbed at the rivulets of blood running from my stinging nose, working carefully and pausing when I winced. The complete sea-change in her attitude, from reluctant drone to attentive nurse, was surprising but then, with Rhona, nothing is ever straightforward. She undid my shackles and told me to pinch my nose shut until the bleeding stopped. She carefully cleaned the cosh as she spoke, choosing her words with care. Re-education can be reversed - occasionally the Department likes to recall a pensioned headcutter from the wilds - but it can be tricky. Mostly, they settle for reviving the slumbering personality and the subject ends up a chemically-induced schizophrenic as the original and artificial personalities battle for control. It's messy and usually fatal, which is why it's so rarely done. On the other hand, an agent programmed for infiltration will be fitted with a sort of psychological 'mask' that can simply be switched off, termination code and all, once the mission is concluded. If the agent is simply on a fact-finding job that doesn't require deep cover, it's usually simple enough to snip the mask away. Since I suspected that I'd been re-edded but I was still basically the same person, it was probable that I had one of these masks. Therefore, deprogramming me ought to be straightforward. It all depended on what the code's triggers were. She advised me to go back to see Dr Brosnan and discuss it with him in the third person because, if I inadvertently spoke about myself specifically, that might set it off. They key, she told me, was to take it by surprise. Then, satisfied that Garamond's message had been delivered, she called the guards back in and booked me into the Academy's hospital for a check-up. She said that she'd wait for me in the staff canteen and then stood aside and let them haul me away. That's the thing about Rhona Woodley, I reflected as I settled onto the gurney: whether or not you like what she does, it can't be denied that she's memorable.

Dehumanization

2011-11-28T04:01:00.000-08:00

It must be over a year since I last had the pleasure of staring at they grey wall of a prison cell, after the then-head of FJD security, Mr Wilson O'Connor, had me dragged in on trumped-up charges for a going-over at the behest of Councillor Fraser. It's encouraging this time around to note that nobody's laid a finger on me yet although Sergeant Sheary, the campus plod in charge of my wellbeing, tells me that Dr Brown is mortified by what I did, and that the volunteers are very upset. Frankly, I don't give a damn how mortified Brown is, because he's partly responsible for it, as far as I'm concerned. After all, if he hadn't taken it upon himself to introduce gas vans to the Academy to 'harden' the students to the new way of working, then he wouldn't have alienated most of them and produced a bubbling cauldron of resentment that was one short stir of the ladle away from boiling over. I accept that it was my hand on the ladle when I urged the 'gallows kids' to beat the tar out of their gas-chamber fellows, but all I really did was open the safety valve. There was always going to be violence sooner or later because, in advancing some students and making them a new elite, Dr Brown created competition where there hadn't been any before. Even a blind idiot could have seen where that was going to go. He should be thanking me for helping them get it out of their systems. As for the volunteers, well, let's just say my feelings about them are mixed. They're a necessary part of the training process, I accept that, and nobody forces them to offer themselves up as fodder for the test gallows but while I can understand the necessity, I've always had trouble condoning the practice. The problem for me is that the gallows are a punishment. Whatever I might think of the bloated and senseless death laws (202 capital offences and counting), the fact remains that there's an all-but endless stream of customers anyway and we shouldn't have to go around asking people to put their heads in the noose for us. As with most things the Council does, the logic behind the volunteer programme is twisted: they hold the opinion that sending prisoners to the Academy to serve as live bait a) provides them with dignity they don't deserve and, b) can cause unnecessary 'kerfuffle' on the platform. And yes, 'kerfuffle' is exactly the word used when the question was raised in the Council Chambers a couple of years ago.

The view of the Department is that the Orphans have to be wrapped in cotton wool to a certain extent. I've never understood that but I never gave any thought to it when I was a student. For all that the Orphans spend fourteen years at the Academy, from the age of four until they graduate at eighteen, they see no more than a handful of 'live' executions each and work the rest of the time with crash test dummies that they learn to hang with dispassionate, mechanical precision. The reason underlying this is that the Department never tells the Orphans the truth, feeding them instead a poisonous mix of propaganda and statistics to 'prove' that, contrary to the rumours, Executioners are not despised and vilified bogeymen. Therefore, exposing them to a bunch of convicted criminals, any one of whom might spill the beans, is a risk the Department is not prepared to take, hence the volunteers. Most of them are terminally ill, generally with cancer of some sort, a common legacy of the atomic bombs that ended the 14-18 War. Usually impoverished, they sign a devil's bargain with FJD whereby in return for their lives, the Department pays a lump sum to their families. We always honour these bargains, paying promptly and to the last penny, and that's probably why there's a steady trickle of people willing to sign on the dotted line. I still think it's wrong to 'buy' lives the way that we do, but I'm in a minority and, besides, my hands are hardly clean in the matter because I've 'processed' such volunteers myself. There's never been any point in crying over it, though. At best it's spilt milk. All that the students can really do is remember their training: firmly squash any emotion and write the best damned report they can on the exercise so that they can turn it into something worthy. Thankfully, though, none of the volunteers are sent to the Draftees. They get the crash test dummies because they know damn well what's in store for them after they graduate.

Anyway, it's thanks to Dr Brown's abuse of the the volunteer system - by herding them into the gas vans - that I'm here, detained at the Council's pleasure. It's symptomatic of what this place does to people - including me - that I was upset at his violation of protocol rather the because a dozen people were going to die. It would be laughable - if it weren't so tragic - just how far FJD dehumanizes people. If I was an ordinary commoner my opinion of the Department would be unprintable but, because I'm a product of it, I can get my knickers in a twist over a breach of process, as if the fact that lives would have ended as well is incidental. I can't help it; I did my fourteen years here just like all Orphans and it's left an indelible stamp on my personality because I know full well that if those people had been going to the gallows I wouldn't have lifted a finger to save them. They did a damn good job on me as a student and then they set me up on a pedestal to be worshipped by the next generation. As for what the Draftees think of me, I don't care. They're all gallows-fodder anyway, it's just that they were lucky and someone reprieved them. They have no rights, no liberty and, as far as I'm concerned, no business being here. It is reassuring, though, to note that someone cares about me. Specifically, that someone is Rhona Woodley, and I know this because Sergeant Sheary says she's coming here to 'get' me. He didn't elaborate on what that meant, though, and with Rhona anything's possible. If she's on her way here as a result of our phone call then that's to the good I suppose, but it's worth remembering that, whatever her private feelings might be, she's a Mason crony because she's taking their money and today's riot was a very public kick in the teeth for her paymaster and, if Garamond Mason hates anything at all, it's defiance of his authority.

The Brawl

2011-11-27T02:45:00.000-08:00

I've never had cause to use the word 'pandemonium' in casual conversation before, but if ever there was a time for it, it was when I blew out the black maria's two rear tyres and the vehicle lurched to a halt at the side of the road. The gas truck at the front of the convoy continued blindly on its way, its crew oblivious to the anarchy breaking out in their wake, but for those manning the black maria it was very immediate and, no doubt, very frightening. I might have felt some satisfaction at the sudden discomfiture of the bus's crew except that the small swarm of 'gas chamber kids' accompanying it drew their pistols almost as one and took a very precise bead on me. It was an awkward moment but although it would be nice to say I prevailed because I had Right on my side, more accurately they didn't shoot me on the spot because I was a tutor and they were only students. Nevertheless, I was suddenly confronted with the unwavering barrels of about twenty P128 pistols and, even if the standard student firearm was only a measly .22, it still meant twenty holes in me. Shooting wasn't going to defuse the situation - even less so after the black maria's crew added their .38 P883 Razer pistols to the phalanx. The only way to calm things down was to snap the students back into reality with a bit of good old fashioned verbal.

On the face of it, calling a bunch of armed kids a disgrace to the uniform, simpering scum, sniveling little weasels, traitors, Mason lapdogs, et cetera, might not be the way to command their respect, but if there's one thing the population of this country respects, it's loyalty rating and I played that card as if my life depended on it - which in fact it did. I pointedly reminded them that I was a Green-One citizen, a time-served veteran, hell, that I was the Black Widow and the Department's most respected Executioner, while they were nothing more than disgraced Orphans and Red-Twos for that matter who, by participating in this farce, had brought shame upon the Academy. I could see my words working on some of them. One or two gun barrels dipped and a couple were actually holstered but then one of the Level Three Probationers forced his way to the front of the group and denounced me in very ripe terms. The kid had 'prefect' written all over him and he was undoubtedly one of the more favoured of the advanced tutor group and, as with Student Griers, the power had clearly gone to his head. The security team looked confused as hell and, cut off from any sort of support, they didn't know who to obey and settled for pulling back out of any potential line of fire. In fact, the craven bastards actually hid behind the black maria, from within which a steady stream of confused shouting was emerging. It could have got quite nasty except that at that point Student Blackwell returned with all the 'gallows kids' he'd managed to rouse at short notice. I guessed he'd found about forty or so in the first dorm and they were all armed and 'up for a rumble', as the saying goes. They clustered around the black maria and drove the 'gas chamber kids' back until they had nowhere to go. As they did, the shouting and insults intensified and then one of the 'gas chamber kids' threw a stone. It was enough and the floodgates opened. The 'gallows kids' surged forward, laying into their detested fellows as months of resentment and anger spilled over. Sirens started to sound across the campus as, finally, one of the security team found his voice and screamed for help on the radio, but it was already too late. There was a full-scale insurrection in progress, 'gallows kids' streaming across the campus from all directions, drawn by the noise, all of them eager to hand the 'gas chamber kids' a damn good seeing to.

I stood back and let it happen, calmly unloading my pistol and jacking back the slide to eject the round in the chamber. I moved away from the brawl in a sort of warm and rosy fog, enjoying the spectacle as if I was watching it on a cinema screen. I put the pistol, ammunition and my boot knife on the ground and then moved about twenty feet away from it and sat cross-legged on the grass to await the campus plods. I wasn't going to give them any excuses and 'resisting arrest' was always the first choice of officers who liked to avoid the paperwork. I knew that there was very shortly going to be hell to pay and however charmed my life might have been up until then, fomenting a full-scale rebellion on the Academy campus wasn't likely to be forgiven or forgotten anytime soon. I'd deviated quite spectacularly from the scope of my mission and so I'd probably crossed Daylight too, but that was down to Monica Grayne to decide. For all I knew, puppet that I was, they might have intended this to happen, priming my subconscious with just the right level of righteous anger and wounded pride that would all but guarantee that I lashed out. I could hear the bestial clatter of approaching caterpillar tracks as the Academy security teams went on high alert. Very shortly the campus would be locked down. I could already hear gunfire coming from the Draftee compound and it meant that there was either an attempted breakout in progress or, more likely, the security team was using the alert as an excuse to thin the Draftee ranks.

Things around the black maria only calmed down when two Leopard APCs clanked up and disgorged fifty armed officers. At that point all of the students still capable of swinging a punch snapped to attention. It was encouraging to note that while they'd spent their time learning to operate gas chambers, the advanced students seemed to have neglected their unarmed combat. Executioners are trained to fight dirty and the 'gallows kids' had upheld the tradition proudly. From where I was sitting I could see at least three 'gas chamber kids' with visible bite marks on their hands and faces. Most of them were on the ground, squirming and crying, seven bells duly knocked out of them, and I allowed myself a smile of satisfaction as the few remaining unbroken fingers pointed in my direction. I got slowly and carefully to my feet as the security team approached, drawing their attention to my discarded weapons, and I allowed them to cuff me without a fight. To be honest, had they laid a finger on me, I wouldn't have fancied their chances of getting away alive because the Orphans' blood was up and they were still armed. The plods certainly knew it and handled me like bone china as a result. The squad captain politely asked me to accompany him back to the guardhouse while the students - both groups - were separated into those capable of walking and those who could not. They would be confined to their dormitories while the authorities figured out what to do with them, but it was to a cold cell that I was bound. I allowed the guards to shackle me to a stanchion inside the APC and the last thing I saw before the hatch shut was the bewildered volunteers being led away from the abandoned black maria.

Student Rebellion

2011-11-26T05:43:00.000-08:00

I ran after the black maria with my pistol drawn. To tell the truth, I wasn't thinking straight at that point; I was acting purely on instinct and adrenaline. Had I stopped and thought about it I would have made note of the fact that the 'gas chamber kids' were all armed, as were the convoy guards and the people in the bus wouldn't take kindly to being 'rescued' anyway because they firmly believed that they were going to worthwhile deaths. If anything, I would likely be regarded as a dumb interloper and something of an embarrassment, to be hustled out of the nearest side exit for a private dressing-down later. However, those are the sort of revelations that come with calm and rational thought and at that moment I was anything but calm. It was only when I collided with one of the students at the rear of the group, a young lad with the most distressed and forlorn expression I've ever seen, that I halted. The boy was clearly a 'gallows kid', one of the standard Orphans who Theobald Brown hadn't seen fit to include in his new elite and from the way he was babbling it was clear that he knew what was about to happen. I tried to calm him and get a word in edgeways but he was so traumatised that it was impossible and so I resorted to the time-homoured tradition of slapping him one to get his attention. It did the trick and he shut up, staring at me with imploring blue eyes. I quickly interrogated him and found out some of what had been going on at the Academy since Brown arrived.

Apparently these trucks have become something of a feature at the Academy over the past month or so. In keeping with their wish to acclimatise the students to the new form of capital punishment that the Council was being pushed to embrace, Garamond Mason and his cronies had devised what they called Mobile Demonstration Systems, an innocent name for what amounted to gas vans. In and of themselves, gas vans were nothing new. In the years immediately after the 14-18 War, while the Council was stamping its authority on the country, they found it necessary to demonstrate what happened to those who disobeyed the Reconstruction Laws. In keeping with their neat, tidy, bureaucratic heritage the first Council decided that shooting people into ditches or stringing them up from the trees was, a) unnecessarily messy, b) a time consuming waste of resources and, most importantly, c) not in keeping with their taste for innovation. So some bright spark conjured the idea of combining the stocks of leftover chlorine gas with the rattletrap lorries that the army used, to create the first gas vans. They were insidious, terrible and faceless devices because offenders went in, the pumps were switched on and, after a period of muffled shouting and banging, corpses were stretchered out later. Thankfully common sense prevailed and after a few of the gas vans were waylaid and burned in transit (on one occasion by its own crew) they were phased out and the gallows stations brought in.

This new gas van was improvised in exactly the same manner, except that there were one-way windows along either side, together with fold-away steps so that the students could peer in and watch as the gas did its work. The boy I'd accosted, Student Blackwell, had been among those selected to observe one of the first gassings and it had left him in such a state that Brown had ejected him from the advanced tutor group to languish with the 'gallows kids'. Now every time he saw one of the trucks he got as bad a case of the jitters as I've ever seen, much to the amusement of his ex-peers, who took great delight in taunting him for his supposed glass stomach. Given that he was a Level Two Probationer he'd presumably seen a few executions already, so he was hardly unblooded, but whereas the gallows were clinical and precisely calculated for maximum result versus minimum suffering, the gas vans were anything but. You would have to be pretty cold inside not to be revolted at the prospect of the spectacle to come and I could only put it down to the psychological tinkering of Dr Brosnan and the other re-eds at the Detention Block. I absolutely could not face the thought that the 'gas chamber kids' had become so heartless without outside interference because, if they had, then every ethical pillar upon which the Department stood would have gone and the Academy would be training not skilled technicians but bloody-handed murderers.

Quickly and breathlessly I gave Student Blackwell his orders. I told him to hurry to the nearest dorms and rouse the 'gallows kids' and get them back here on the double and to do it on my authority. As a supply tutor I had the clout necessary and I made sure the boy memorised my ID code in case anyone charged him with mutiny, which was exactly what I was fomenting. When they got to the Test sheds the 'gallows kids' had my permission to make clear to the 'gas chamber kids' exactly what we thought of them. They were to stop short of firearms but anything else was fair game because the snotty little bastards seemed to have no idea just how far short of the ideal they had fallen and sometimes violence is the only answer to snobbery. While Student Blackwell was rousing the Orphans I would delay the convoy because as far as I knew, although the gas van would work perfectly well at any time, its victims were not yet inside it and the observers were not all present. The further away from the Test sheds I could halt it, the better. This course of action was probably going to get me arrested and carted away in a black maria of my own but there wasn't time to think about that now because whether or not they'd volunteered to die for the Academy, the people in the bus would not have been told what was coming, which meant that Dr Brown had violated the pact before the ink had even dried. As far as I was concerned, if they really, really wanted to die for FJD, then they could come back again later, once the dust had settled and then we'd do it properly - but not like this. Therefore, as Student Blackwell hared away, I waited for a clear line of sight and then shot the black maria's tyres out.

Systems Test

2011-11-25T04:27:00.000-08:00

Uncertain of how closely they were monitoring me, I had to be careful about what I did next. I made my way across the campus to the nearest student dorm, Accommodation Unit N, and located the payphones within. It's always struck me as odd that these things are here, because N Block is one of the Orphan dorms and the students have got nobody to call even if they wanted to. Conversely, there are no payphones in the Draftee blocks for obvious reasons. As it stands the only group able to make use of them are the Volunteers, and at the moment there are none. To my knowledge there was only ever one Volunteer Executioner and that's Trilly. People occasionally step up to (literally) put their head in a noose for the benefit of the students, but they don't need payphones either. If anything, they need psychiatric help but there's none of that to be had here. Because of this, the phones are dusty, poorly maintained and, after I'd tested five and found them dead, clearly totally ignored by everyone. I struck lucky with the sixth and last phone and ignored the curious looks of the Orphans as I closed the booth's door behind me. I didn't have much money but the phone had a slot for Record card access that I took advantage of. As usual, the duration and distance of call was dependent upon the card-holder's loyalty rating. The little LCD screen informed me that as a Green-One commoner I was entitled to ten minutes of privacy, after which the Special Police monitoring line would be activated. Even though that was intrusive enough, I hated to think what it would be like for a Red-Two commoner. They probably had to make an appointment with the SP in advance.

The earpiece clicked and rattled as I laboriously turned the rotary dialler and then it began to purr as the call connected. After four rings a sleepy and rather irritated voice answered and I had to grin. Clearly they'd put her on the night shift since it was hardly more than midday and Rhona Woodley wasn't one to sleep late. I reminded her who I was and then asked to see her as soon as possible, preferably off-campus and in some safe place where we couldn't be monitored. The way I talked put her on-guard immediately. I knew I was taking a hell of a risk contacting Rhona - after all, she was now a Mason retainer and, therefore, the enemy. However, she was on a very short list of people who I trusted and she'd made it plain enough that she was only taking the Mason shilling because she was broke. As a former SP infiltrator bundled out of her job by a scandal, she'd been reduced to penury in the service of Cardinal, the Council's paramilitary assassination unit and now she was more or less a mercenary. However, she was of low elite background and as such was as loyal to the Council as I was - which was to say, we both recognised the regime as evil and manipulative but, given the lack of any alternative, necessary. More importantly, she stuck by her friends and that sort of loyalty was hard to find and impossible to buy. We'd been through a lot in the civil war and now I needed her help. She agreed without question and suggested the Tenement West-14 marketplace, which was a busy sprawl that was very hard to spy on. Of course, it went without saying that if I turned up in uniform I'd be swinging from the nearest lamppost inside ten minutes, but there was mufti aplenty on the Academy grounds. All I'd have to do would be liberate a set of overalls and I'd be good to go. I didn't tell her where I currently was and I had no intention of filling her in on what I'd been up to since we last parted. I needed advice, not a partner in crime. I was compromised enough and I didn't want to spread the poison any further than necessary because Rhona didn't deserve to fall with me. She'd known me as a Special Police investigator and was aware that I was an Executioner, so she was well aware of the risks I ran on a daily basis. She would no doubt accept whatever I told her at face value as long as I did nothing to raise her suspicions. Unfortunately, once a cop, always a cop. Even if she spent her days marching around after the Masons and clearing up their messes, she'd gone through the SP training college and graduated highly enough to be placed on the infiltrator programme, so she had the instincts even if she was deactivated. I'd have to be careful what I said to her lest it reach Mason ears.

With the call concluded within the allocated ten minutes I left the dorm and began to walk in the direction of the Staff Block. However, as I made my way along the footpath at the edge of the main campus highway I beheld a curious sight. Two trucks - wheeled rather than tracked - were driving in my direction. The vehicles were painted a nondescript drab grey although they sported the FJD crest in the form of hastily applied transfers. As they got closer I realised that the rear vehicle was in fact a black maria with painted-out windows, a prison bus of a sort that the Department phased out decades ago when the pressurised, caterpillar-track trucks were brought in. As the convoy drew level I saw that there was a comet's-tail of students in their wake and I grabbed one of the kids and demanded to know what was going on. The look on the boy's face said it all: he regarded me with the superior sneer I've come to expect from the advanced trainees. It marked him clearly as a 'gas chamber kid' because he evidently looked down on me even though I was head and shoulders taller than he was. Tutor or not, to him I was a 'gallows kid' and therefore an inferior. He declined to answer and was in the process of marching disdainfully away when I decked him. It didn't matter that he was half my age and a foot shorter, or even that he was only a child: the Academy has the same rules about rank as the police colleges. I was his superior and woe betide him if he thought otherwise. I resisted the temptation to put the boot in and instead let him get to his feet. By now the truck and the black maria were some distance away and I could see that he was torn between running after it and answering my questions. Sensibly he plumped for the latter option since it was obvious I wasn't going to let him go until he told me what was going on. He casual reply, laced with the sort of churlishness I'd come to expect from the likes of Student Griers, chilled my blood. The black maria contained volunteers who had agreed to die for the benefit of the students but, when they reached the Test Gallows sheds they would not be hanged, but rather transferred into the truck and gassed while the students watched though viewing hatches. It would be a vital cornerstone of the boy's education and I was making him miss it! I had never dreamed that the extermination centres were so far advanced that they were ready to test the systems and it dawned on me that the volunteers in the black maria probably hadn't been told what lay in store for them. They would have filled in the paperwork, signed their lives away and expected the Department to pay their families. The RECs were still a secret, Penny Drayton's report notwithstanding. Because of that, this would not be a test run - it would be murder. I knew, even as I drew my pistol and ran in pursuit of the vehicles, that I couldn't let it happen.

Limited Options

2011-11-24T04:39:00.000-08:00

I'm in a quandary of titanic proportions. On the one hand I have a mission to fulfill but, on the other, I'm now all but certain that my willingness to pursue that mission has been programmed into me by exactly the same sort of people as Dr Brosnan - re-education specialists at a military hospital in Dee Yepp, France. I realised as I fretted in my room that everything I'd done - every illogical and disloyal act since I found out about the regional extermination centres - made perfect sense if I accepted that I'd been re-educated. My original involvement was strictly limited: I was to have been a courier delivering the Department's offer to Daylight's representative. I should have found the contact, delivered the message and then brought the reply back to Councillor Merpath and that would have been the end of the matter. Instead I'd been kidnapped and now I was as good as a Daylight soldier, happily carrying out their agenda in the name of the 'greater good'. I'd encountered Trilly at Dee Yepp and saw that she'd been re-educated, but that was obvious because her gleeful brand of psychopathy is instantly recognisable and I knew something was up the moment she started talking about this greater good as well. I'd been so concerned about her wellbeing that any thought of my own completely escaped me. That had been clever of the bastards - they knew how I felt about Trilly and they'd exploited it to distract me.

How I felt about Trilly... That in itself was an odd concept and it gave me pause to wonder exactly who was doing the thinking inside my head. I've known that girl since she was a fresh graduate. Like Student Griers - though for different reasons - Trilly had been advanced at the Academy. As a Volunteer she took a specialised version of the training that was two years long, rather than the very basic one year crash course of the Draftees. The shortened courses reflect the Department's acceptance that they're never going to be able to indoctrinate the Draftees to the same extent as the Orphans, but there's some indoctrination for the Volunteers that's included on the basis that since nobody forced them to attend, they can't have too many preconceived bad ideas. Anyway, Trilly was in and out of the Academy as if by a revolving door and although her Student Record is filled to the brim with praise it's obvious if you read between the lines that they advanced her because they wanted to get rid of her. She was basically foisted on me at gallows station Alpha Delta Foxtrot, along with orders forbidding me to send her away again. We were diametric opposites and very quickly drove each other mad, but while she was immature and could be very spiteful, I've always considered myself to be (under the circumstances) very adult and level-headed and I suppose the age gap helped. Next birthday I'll turn thirty. She's only eighteen and, because I seemed condemned to forever clear up after her, I suppose some sort of maternal feelings were inevitable. That's not the same as saying I harboured any affection for Trilly, though: I've run the gamut of emotions in dealing with her, everything from rage to frustration to the desire to physically knock some sense into her but because I've never had children of my own and have no intention of starting now, I don't know what a mother would do although I'm leaning toward giving her a damn good smack.

The point is, Daylight had a plan for Trilly and at the same time they managed to make her look vulnerable and I suppose that's why I reached out to her. They must have known that I would, based purely on our prior relationship. I've never been able to shake the feeling that Trilly and I are joined at the hip somehow - no matter how far away we go from one another, something always draws us back and I think she's as puzzled about it as I am. She's forever calling me her 'best chum' even though I've told her to her face that I'm not, but she seems to want me - need me - to believe her. I think she's quite lonely and that, too, is eminently exploitable, but now I don't know if my desire to help her is truly mine or some emotional construct of theirs. I don't like being exploited like this. At least the Department had the decency to tell me I was a puppet, but Daylight has taken every emotion I thought was my own and used it to steer me like a boat. What's worse is that I can't even feel angry about it! One of the skills the Academy teaches the students is self-reflection. Headcutters have to be aware of what they're doing at all times so that they can improve techniques and also spot the imminent signs of burnout. It's because of this that I'm able to sit here and contemplate what may or may not have been done to me without losing my temper, but the realisation that I might have been re-educated is not the same as being able to do anything about it.

Up to this point I've fulfilled every task that Daylight has asked of me, and I've done it out of the deeply held conviction that it's right. I've been so absorbed in the big picture that I've missed all the little pictures that don't make sense. I spent some time in the company of a former Special Police infiltrator, Rhona Woodley, and she made it clear that the SP re-educates infiltrators as and when there's a need. Deep-cover operatives have to pass for native and so entire personalities can be buried away out of harm's reach and only reactivated when the mission is over. At the same time, though, they're equipped with a termination code that kicks in automatically should certain situations arise. If, say, the infiltrator is busted and then questioned, the code will activate entirely on its own and the infiltrator will suffer immediate and total brain death. That knowledge or, more to the point, the uncertainty, was the one thing preventing me from running straight back to Dr Brosnan for a scan because if there's anything guaranteed to trip a termination code it has to be re-ed. It leaves me in the position of having a very long 'to-do' list but a very short list of actual options: I have to not only extricate myself from this mess, but rescue Trilly as well. I have to ensure that my efforts don't harm the fight against the extermination centres, because I still believe in that cause. Finally, I need revenge. With every passing day Daylight reneges further and further on the deal they struck with us and sooner or later - when they've got what they want - they're going to betray us. Then there'll be no extermination centres, no FJD and the machinery of justice will be crippled. It'll be a major coup for Daylight and a huge embarrassment for the Council and, while I may not love the Council as much as I did when I was an indoctrinated child, right now they're very much the lesser evil. So I need a way to break my conditioning without killing myself in the process and, once that's done, a way to separate Daylight from the Department so that they can be dealt with, finally, once and for all...

Dawning Realisation

2011-11-23T04:27:00.000-08:00

It'll be some time before the interference with the re-education system bears fruit. The results we hope to achieve are the sort that come out in the wash later, when statistics are analysed and discussed. For the moment Dr Brosnan has agreed to insert a few of what he calls 'mood modulators' into the re-ed software. I'm not entirely clear on what a mood modulator is, but I get the impression that it's a sort of heightened emotional response to a situation rather than an explicit command as such. With a mood modulator installed, a person can be conditioned to react in a certain way to predetermined stimuli or to close down when exposed to others. It's basically the same sort of thing that deep-cover infiltrators - the so-called 'nutters' - get and it'll have the same effect: a guaranteed response that will appear completely natural rather than rehearsed. Dr Brosnan quoted one instance that he knew of where an infiltrator with an entirely natural aversion to the sight gore was successfully 'mood-modulated' in order to get inside a bloodsports cartel. While we're not looking at anything so extreme in the Academy, the good doctor assures me that it'll be a simple matter to attune the students' natural repugnance toward the extermination centres to the point where none of them will want anything to do with the places. Morally that puts me on shaky ground because I'm very much opposed to unnecessary re-education and on the face of it this looks a lot like tinkering for the sake of it, but I have to look toward the wider perspective of knackering the extermination centres before they can be brought online. It was with that in mind that I took my leave of Dr Brosnan and the Detention Block and returned to my guest quarters in the Staff Block, ostensibly to write up my report on the seminar that Student Griers had disrupted. In reality I intended to get on the phone to Monica Grayne, my Daylight 'handler', to see what the rest of the organisation was getting up to in my absence. Instead I got an unpleasant surprise because the Daylight courier was in my room, casually sitting on my sofa and waiting for me. As usual he wore his nondescript boiler suit, balaclava and vocal scrambler and, on the living room coffee table there was the usual valise. I made no move to open it because I'd had enough of his games. Instead I told him to take it and get the hell out of my room before I called security, but we both knew that was an empty threat and he laughed out loud. There was no way I'd be able to get rid of him without blowing my own cover and it was pretty obvious that even if he went to the gallows close-mouthed about Daylight, he'd sell me down the river in a hot second. Therefore, reluctantly, I opened the valise to see what nasty little gifts he'd brought for me this time. To my relief it was nothing lethal. Instead it contained a very small, compact camera with a microphone built in that he told me I had to wear in order to find holes in the Academy's security that his organisation could exploit.

My blood froze when he said this, because it was an escalation too far: getting into the Academy to spy on those responsible for pushing the regional extermination centres I had no problem with, but now they were asking me to expose the students to mortal peril. Whatever Daylight thought I might be, I'm only selectively treasonous and while I might take great delight in stitching up the part of the Council that danced to Garamond Mason's tune, I drew the line at targeting the Department. The whole point of the alliance with Daylight was to halt the REC project. Nowhere had we agreed to fall on our swords for a bunch of terrorists and allowing them to take a pop at the students was not on at all, and I duly said so in very biological terms. Once again, the only response I got from him was a laugh, and a patronising one at that, and so I was obliged to explain to him that the children within these walls were exactly that - children. Whether or not the Department was conditioning them to be unquestioning killers was beside the point: some of them were only four years of age and even the Level Three Probationers, the ones due to graduate soon, were minors. Whatever Daylight thought of them and whatever ghosts haunted me at night, they were still family and, come to that, the only family I've ever known. My mission here was to cut out the cancer that Dr Brown had brought, not to murder the host. I snapped the valise shut and ordered the courier out. I was expecting a fight or even a threat, but to my surprise he calmly stood up, gathered his things and left without another word, and that on its own had me worried. However much I might like Monica Grayne on a personal level, professionally I didn't trust her an inch and with very good reason. Monica was an enemy of the state, exactly the sort of person that the Department had been created to deal with. She had infiltrated the Council's medical profession and wormed her way into a position of trust that she had subsequently abused to the advantage of a terrorist network. Monica might not have been the traitor at the heart of the web, but if she wasn't then she was very close to that person and probably knew who it was - and yet she had blindly placed her faith and trust in me, a disaffected Senior Executioner with a lot of guilt to expunge. In return for that trust I had committed eight murders, killings that I couldn't even sugar-coat with the veneer of justice that I had applied to the other three thousand deaths on my conscience. I'd been wracked with yet more guilt as I'd done it and the fact that I seemed to have got away with it made me feel even worse because I knew, more than anything, that I didn't deserve to be free... and yet what had happened next? I'd got a bit drunk, made myself heartily ill, thrown some abuse at Monica... and then cheerfully got on with the job of infiltrating the Academy in pursuit of Dr Brown and his cronies. I'd jumped on Monica's merry-go-round with hardly a second thought, I'd blackmailed a Councillor at her behest and now they were asking me to help them kill the kids...

It was in that moment that the nasty realisation dawned. The Elenna Pointer who'd grown up in the Academy was a brainwashed servant of the State, just like the students here now. That much was true and I accepted it because it was the only mitigation for what I'd done since. However, that Elenna Pointer would have had nothing to do with Daylight's schemes. Instead, she'd have stewed, fretted and tried to solve the problem of her conscience on her own. It was that uneasy conscience that had led me into my dalliance with the Special Police, but under no normal circumstances would I have killed without either official sanction or in self-defence... and yet all Monica had had to do was ask and I'd casually poisoned eight people. I thought back and the memory came easily: I'd been drugged and then smuggled out of Britain and woken up in a hospital in France. A hospital! How long had I been unconscious? Nobody had given me a clear answer and for some odd reason I hadn't pursued it... because I'd been programmed not to. The bastards had re-educated me! Just as they had with Trilly, they'd hooked me into a re-ed while I was dopey with the drugs and they'd rewritten my mind, reducing me to a loyal little puppy-dog willing to do whatever they wanted with no more than a nod and a wink. Nobody does that to me and gets away with it and I promised right there and then that I would find out what they'd done, break the conditioning and then strangle them with my own puppet strings.

Moral Quagmire

2011-11-22T06:48:00.000-08:00

As I surmised, Dr Brosnan has serious reservations about the regional extermination centres. In a way that's not surprising because the re-education specialists have a way of holding themselves aloof from the abuse that's fundamental to the Academy's existence. Sadly, a great many of those who serve the Department are either wilfully ignorant of this abuse or else they actually believe that it's a good thing. The fact is that in the Final Justice Department's Academy, little kids of four years of age go in one end and eighteen-year-old Executioners come out the other. From the moment they arrive to the moment they graduate the regime is one of work, work, work, and most of that is repetition by rote. If you actually look at it on paper there's nothing like fourteen years of study to be found here; if pushed, I'd say there was about two or three years at most, but that's where the repetition sets in. Once you finish a course, you sit some exams and do a few practical exercises and then you start it again, except that the restarted course has a different name and some of the words are longer. It's literally a case of same shit, different day, and the result is kids who, as they grow up, are completely comfortable with the idea of ending the lives of fellow human beings and really don't see anything wrong with it. That's the abuse and that's also where the Academy is at its most invidious because it takes ideas that would be abhorrent in any normal society and transforms them into an accepted norm. However, any student who displays a capacity for rebellion or laziness goes straight to Dr Brosnan and his colleagues, to have such regrettable tendencies moderated at the point of a syringe.

On the face of it you'd have to be a pretty amoral person if you could take a child and rewrite its personality just because said child was perhaps a bit lippy or had aptitudes that clashed with yours, but it's part of being an Academy re-educator that you believe that what you are doing is for the good of that child. What stirred Dr Brosnan's uneasy conscience was the orders he was receiving from the Principal, Dr Theobald Brown, to take kids who'd done nothing wrong and re-educate them as well. I'm talking here about star pupils in some cases, students who regularly scored in the high nineties and who would in any other circumstances be a credit to the faculty. However, because they're also the ones who cleave most closely to the Department's ethos it makes them 'gallows kids' and, in the new and 'modernised' world of the regional extermination centres, anachronisms. In order to bring these otherwise excellent pupils into line with the REC philosphy Brosnan and his team are giving them the full works, usually after the campus security teams have grabbed the kids from their dorms in the dead of night so that they're sleepy, bewildered and less able to resist. As far as the re-educators are concerned, this is abuse. When I asked - strictly on the quiet and as one colleague to another - the good doctor provided me with a list of names, of those who had been treated so far, and I was distressed to note how many of them were suffixed with an asterisk.

It might only be a punctuation mark, but that asterisk is significant because, in re-ed-speak, it signifies that the child has been treated and then conditioned to consciously forget about it. While the likes of Student Griers might be snotty, arrogant and nasty little brats, the really good pupils - the ones suffering now - show great promise and their minds are as precious as antique bone china. Therefore the intrusion has to be minimised while the effects are maximised, and that means eliminating any upsetting memories that the child can rebel against later. My blood ran cold as I absorbed this, because under the previous regime of Principal Martin it would have been unthinkable but, in the name of 'progress' whatever rights the students may have had were dumped wholesale. Dr Brown was treating the kids as raw material that could be cut, polished and fashioned as easily as if they were chunks of rough diamond and he was the jeweler, and if any of them split or shattered along the way, well, there were plenty of others to work on. Not surprisingly, given his rather strange set of morals, Dr Brosnan was profoundly shocked at what he was being asked - and compelled - to do. Re-education is all about working with what's there, not with creating stuff from scratch, and the star pupils, the 'gallows kids' not surprisingly found the idea of subterranean gas chambers disgusting and wanted no truck with it. Because of that, the re-eds were having to pound the new doctrine into their skulls with the force and finesse of a jackhammer, and usually with just as much mess to clear up after. Brosnan's repugnance was easy to harness. Like Mr Snapper, he wanted the flustered, incapable but kindly Principal Martin back along with a return to the 'good old days' when he didn't have to feel like an accomplice, and he was very open to the idea of inserting a few extra commands into the re-education computers that would compel the students to question the nature of the RECs and to reject Dr Brown's ideas wholesale. I realised that this put me squarely in the same moral quagmire as Dr Brosnan but, if it worked, Dr Brown would be forced to concede that twisting the Academy to the new philosophy wasn't going to work. With that admission Garamond Mason would be forced to acknowledge that his cherished project was in deep trouble because, with the engineers dead and the students turning against him, railroading it through the Council was going to be anything but plain sailing and that, for me, would be a result.