Jon Grimwood - End of the World Blues

The Stroll Garden held sakura, plum, and satsuma. The willow only survived because of its ability to lower fever, and even kouyou, the flaming red foliage of autumn, so loved by Lady Neku’s grandfather, had not been enough to save the maple. She’d seen the pictures. Well, one of them. A woodblock print so ghostly that leaves fell across rice paper in a waterfall of fading ink.

It was possible that the idea to segment the moon came from Satsuma itself. A hard core of her family had taken to referring to the vanished province by its old name, which was their way of rejecting the original Meiji settlement and the abolition of the provinces.

The fact the destruction of the shogunate had happened in 1851, nearly seven hundred years before, they regarded as irrelevant. After all, the world was considering the first, and quite probably, the greatest exploration of time ever undertaken. What were a few centuries when millennia were about to be opened?

Lady Neku shook her head. So naïve. So ridiculously childish. Even a half-wit like her could see that opening up time was never going to work like that. All that shit about avoiding the Great White and sending humanity to explore its own future history. It was obvious what time shifting was really good for.

Where better to house every criminal and political refugee than here, the end of the world? As for exploring the future of human history, that might have been possible if whatever humanity became hadn’t already left by the time their visitors arrived.

The area of South London through which Maxim drove was not quite suburb and not really inner city. A sea of small white-faced villas, redbrick shops, and pubs filled the gaps between old Victorian houses, all of which had been converted to flats.

A handful of shops on a run-down estate were still in business and one of the pubs, but most of the ground floor flats stood empty, with studded steel plates sealing doors and windows against squatters. Signs warned that guard dogs patrolled the area and the estate was awaiting redevelopment. To judge from the faded state of the signs it had been waiting quite a while.

When Maxim turned up a narrow alley before exiting into a busy road, Kit felt obscurely relieved. As if the grey concrete of the estate behind him was one thing too many.

Time had not been kind to the local high street, or maybe it was town planners. The people who lived there, however, made do. East European kabaks had replaced most of the old kebab shops in the fifteen years since Kit had been anywhere near this part of the city, and newsagents had sprouted icons and window posters written in Cyrillic, although they still had the metal grilles. A Methodist church on the corner had been made over in Russian Orthodox style and a crowd of old women were spilling from its door.

Middle-aged men sat outside cafés, nursing tiny cups of coffee or shot glasses of vodka, which they seemed to be washing down with water, unless it was another clear spirit.

“Welcome to Little Russia,” said Maxim, opening the front door to another walk-up. “Everyone’s home away from home.”

The club behind the flat was called Bar Poland. A naked girl clung to a pole on the sign above its door just in case the pun was too subtle. Actually, she was three girls in silhouette and the neon was wired to twirl her endlessly round the pole as each silhouette lit in turn.

A young black man inside the walk-up seemed to be watching her with casual intensity. “Classy, eh?” he said, stepping back to let Kit clamber over a tiny generator on his way to the window. It was beginning to look as if British intelligence provided one of the biggest markets for crappy accommodation in the city.

“This is Alan,” said the Brigadier, but Kit’s attention was on the neon girl. She was retro kitsch, the kind of icon that had begun to spring up all over East Shinjuku and the bits of Roppongi not yet colonised by haute couture and impossibly expensive estate agents.

“What’s the latest?” asked Amy, sounding brightly professional. The one advantage of the SUV over the Volvo was that Kit and Amy had been able to sit with the suitcase flat between them. In the last hour Amy hadn’t spoken one word to Kit; hadn’t even looked at him, come to that.

“That CTV camera above the door is live,” said Alan. “We’ve jacked a feed. De Valois has a man at the top window watching the courtyard below. Since he’s been there for the last six hours we figure he’s shitting in a bag and peeing in a bottle…” Catching Amy’s eye, Alan raised one hand in apology. “That’s the truth and it works in our favour.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“He’ll be bored,” said Kit. “Also pissed off. That’s never good.” Turning to Alan, he asked, “How about sound?”

“The phone bug went down again, when Mr. de Valois ran a sweep. We’ve still got parabolics on his windows but the fooler loops are keeping us out. We can get it all back up by morning, if necessary.”

“Should we be worried?” said Brigadier Miles.

“I doubt if he even knows we’re here,” Alan said. “It’s all pretty low level.”

The Brigadier smiled, as if the technician was about twelve and not a professional in his early twenties. “And the Japanese kid?”

“Sat in one corner, drawing a weird-shit comic strip and talking to herself. At least she was last time we checked.”

“Which was how?”

“Man in suit.”

“We report noise to the local council,” Alan told Kit, “then wait for a local official to come out to inspect the club or bar or whatever we’re watching.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?” Amy asked.

“Not really,” said Alan. “We don’t tell them anything in advance. Just grab them when they get back and debrief them out of sight. You’d be surprised how much a bureaucrat with a clipboard notices—it’s their blind ignorance keeps them safe,” he added. “Even our best people can’t fake it.”

Kit began by refusing to wear the flack jacket. This was more a vest than a jacket, made from woven Kevlar and reinforced with callous-like pads over the heart and across the sides.

“Liver,” said Alan, producing the garment. “And kidneys. More of a target than you think.”

“No.” Kit shook his head.

“Come on,” said Alan. “It’s regulations.”

“Not my regulations,” said Kit; so Alan went to fetch the Brigadier, and to give Brigadier Miles her due the first thing she asked was, Why not?

“Because it will show.”

“Not if you wear a jacket over the top.”

“Think about it,” said Kit. “It’s hot, it’s muggy, we’re at the beginning of July. No way is anyone round here going to wear a jacket, unless it’s a hoodie.”

“Which would look absurd on you,” said the Brigadier.

“Exactly.”

They compromised on clothing, Kit agreeing to wear black jeans and a white cotton tee-shirt, one thin enough to make it obvious he wasn’t wearing a flack jacket, pocket recorder, or receiver.

“Here’s your gun,” said Maxim, producing a heavy-looking Colt automatic from his briefcase.

“What?”

“Ben Flyte always went armed. Stupid little prick. Besides—” Maxim grinned and dropped out the clip, jacking out the first five bullets. “We need you to take this inside for us.” Extracting what looked like the next five slugs, Maxim passed Kit a tiny tape recorder. “Old school,” he said happily, before reloading the clip and snapping it back into the gun.

“How does it work?”

“Noise activated,” said Maxim. “It’s already running.” When Brigadier Miles looked worried, the old man smiled. “We need to check it’s working. I’ll reset the chip when he leaves.”