Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

The hazardous-material suit was largely an affectation but appearances had to be kept.

‘Brilliant,’ du Bois muttered to himself. He was looking at a surprisingly small pile of rubble where a house used to be. The houses on either side looked as if they had chunks bitten out of them as well. The whole lot was underneath a large hermetically sealed tent. The place was crawling with scientists and technicians in similar yellow plastic suits. Most of them, however, were only engaged in spraying the area down with steam hoses and various chemicals.

Professor Franklin Kinick was a distinguished-looking, rake-thin man whose prominent nose and bushy white eyebrows made him look like a bird of prey wearing a hazmat suit. The professor worked for the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down, near Salisbury. Professor Kinick wasn’t looking at the hive of decontamination industry going on around him; instead he was looking at du Bois as if he was something to be studied in a lab.

‘So imagine my surprise when I was asked to drive all the way down from Wiltshire and bring some very particular instruments designed to measure some very particular things? Particular things that don’t tend to be used in a counter-terrorism investigation. And then report all my findings to you, when, despite my clearances, I don’t even know your organisation or rank,’ the scientist finished.

Du Bois turned to him, smiling.

‘How much would you like to know, Professor?’

Kinick just looked at him. Du Bois knew that Kinick, who was probably more than a little curious and whose nose was more than a little out of joint, had been at this game long enough not to push the issue. He had narrowly avoided the purge in the late 80s. Kinick held du Bois’s gaze. He was convinced that he was looking at some kind of shadowy intelligence-operative cowboy.

‘Well, we found lots of interesting stuff. Pretty much traces of the entire electromagnetic radiation spectrum, dust, energetic charged subatomic particles, beta and gamma radiation. In fact, do you know where we would be most likely to find all these things at this level?’

‘Deep space?’

‘Yes. You don’t seem very surprised.’

There was more than a little anger in Kinick’s voice. Du Bois had heard this before. This was people trying to cope with having their world view radically changed in a moment.

‘Pick an explanation you like and hold on to it for dear life,’ du Bois suggested. Not that it’ll matter , he thought. On the other hand they were so close to the end that at least Kinick wouldn’t be reprogrammed or assassinated, the latter being a lot less resource intensive.

‘Want to know something else interesting?’ the professor asked.

No , du Bois thought sarcastically. Please keep all the interesting information from me . He tried to suppress his annoyance.

‘As far as we can tell, there is a lot of the house missing, and if there were people here then I can’t find any trace of them at all. It’s as if it all just disappeared.’

‘How much material?’

‘Initial estimates put it at about seventy-five per cent.’

Du Bois nodded. Kinick noted that again there was not much in the way of surprise. Du Bois turned to leave but at the last moment he swung back to Kinick.

‘You won’t listen to me, but if I were you, enquiring mind or not, I’d try not to dwell on what you’ve seen here too much.’

Kinick said nothing. He just watched du Bois head for the tent’s airlock.

DC Nazo Mossa was not good at concentrating when there was a lot of background noise. This made her singularly badly equipped to work at Kingston Crescent, the main police station in Portsmouth, or indeed any other police station. The mobile command centre that they had set up had been even worse, so she had found an empty house up for rent and had quietly broken in.

As du Bois reviewed the second-generation Senegalese émigré’s file, this small crime was enough to endear her to him a little. He minimised her personnel record on his phone and brought up the narcotics and vice file she was looking at on her laptop as he entered the house. Mossa was a solid-looking, athletic black woman, her cornrowed hair tied back into a ponytail. She was sitting at a table in the front room. She looked up as he entered, recognising du Bois as the arsehole who had given PC Danes such a hard time.

‘Fuck off, you rude bastard. I’m busy,’ she told him, looking away.

‘I don’t care,’ du Bois said, his face wrinkling in a look of mock confusion. With a thought the screen on his phone displayed nine photographs of the inhabitants of the destroyed house and their most regular visitors, all of whom the drugs and vice squads had under occasional surveillance. Most of them were dressed in black, were pale and wore too much make-up. He placed his phone down on the table next to DC Mossa. She glanced over at it but went back to work.

‘Who are these people?’

Frowning, DC Mossa looked back at the phone and then her own laptop.

‘Did you just hack our systems?’ she demanded angrily.

‘Hacking suggests a degree of effort,’ he told her. ‘Look, I don’t mean to be rude, which is unusual, but this is going to go my way. How easy or hard do you want to make this on yourself?’

Mossa stared at him.

‘You’ve got a small penis, haven’t you?’ she finally said.

‘Nice,’ du Bois said, smiling.

‘You like that?’

Du Bois nodded. ‘But isn’t that just something that people with windsock-like vaginas say?’

DC Mossa stared at him with mock confusion.

‘Oh I get it. I insulted your manhood, therefore I must be some kind of crazy slut. That’s really clever.’

‘Seriously though, I could sit here exchanging crude sexual insults with you all day, but I don’t want to get all buddy movie with you; I just want to expedite getting this information.’

‘Act and talk less like a wanker then,’ she suggested.

‘Please, will you answer my questions?’ he asked, mildly exasperated.

‘Such a pain having to deal with us little people, isn’t it? Answer me first. What’s going to happen?’

Du Bois looked at her for a while, trying to decide how much to tell her.

‘D notice,’ he finally said. ‘Nothing goes out on the news; a cover story will be found for the locals. It’ll become an urban myth.’

‘It’ll go out on the Internet,’ Mossa said.

No, it won’t , du Bois thought. The Circle had the resources to police even that. He shrugged.

Mossa pointed at the nine pictures on the phone. ‘These kids weren’t terrorists.’

Du Bois didn’t answer.

‘Look. You’ve got everything on the files, obviously, but that’s not what you want. You’re looking for a little bit of local info, right?’

Du Bois nodded.

‘This wasn’t a terrorist incident?’

‘It seems unlikely.’

‘Then what?’

‘Drugs lab explosion,’ he told her, failing to sound even remotely sincere.

‘With deco? Hazmat? Techies from some agency I’ve never even heard of? You want to insult my intelligence, you can go and fuck yourself.’ She turned back to her laptop.

‘You know I’m not going to tell you, right? If it’s any consolation, the ongoing investigation is going to have nothing to do with you,’ he said impatiently. Reasoning with people is such a chore , du Bois thought.

Mossa turned back to face him. ‘Fine. Level with me. Is this something I have to worry about?’

Du Bois gave this some thought.

‘Yes. However, it’s not something you can do anything about. Feel better?’

Mossa studied him for a moment.

‘That I believe. They’re a group of goths, or emos, or whatever unhappy white kids like to call themselves these days. They set themselves up as some sort of club of hedonists. Sex, drugs, ropey music, that sort of thing.’