Филип Керр - The Second Angel

She stood up painfully and glanced along the bay-curved, beach-colored corridor, from where the footprints had originated. It took only a matter of seconds to walk around the bend and find the two bodies. The attendant, she recognized. She’d tried to get to know most of them by name. Just to remind herself that this was not a prison, and that the attendants were not warders. But the other man — the old, half-naked one — was a stranger to her.

As soon as she saw the two bodies, Lenina turned around and headed back to the hyperbaric chamber she shared with Rameses Gates. Only a few minutes before, she had abruptly walked out on an argument with him over this crazy guy, Dallas, whose harebrained scheme she had thought would surely result in Gates getting sent back to Artemis Seven. Or something worse. Robbing a blood bank probably counted as a major blood felony, for which the penalty would almost certainly be death. Not just any blood bank either, but the biggest and best of them all, the First National Blood Bank on the Moon. Lenina had thought that only served to underline how deluded Dallas really was. It was asking for trouble. Begging for it. Like slapping a grizzly bear on the nose. Not that there were any of those left either. An outbreak of ursine parvovirus had seen the extinction of pretty much the whole of the world’s bear population. Now that really was a pity, thought Lenina. She had liked bears. Perhaps that was the reason she liked Gates. And why she was prepared to humor him now. Maybe even ready to go along with him and his new scheme. After all, this Dallas guy he had told her about, the one who said he built the blood banks and who was hiding out in the hotel, well, maybe he was for real. It certainly looked as if someone had come after him, someone from the Zone who was not just dressed to kill, but seriously equipped for it as well. Perhaps Dallas had been telling the truth.

Rameses Gates was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing a puzzled expression, as if he was wondering why Lenina had stormed out of the chamber. Seeing her in the doorway, Gates stood up and sheepishly started to apologize.

‘Forget it,’ Lenina said, cutting him short. ‘I think your new friend might be the real thing after all.’ She explained about the bloody footprints she had found and the two bodies farther up the corridor.

‘Dallas is on the floor above,’ said Gates, hauling a bag out from underneath the bed. ‘Sounds like someone got the wrong room.’

‘Not a someone. A she. They were a woman’s footprints.’

‘Then you can shoot her.’ Gates threw her a gun, collecting a second weapon for himself — a recoilless fifteen-millimeter automatic — and sprang off the bed. ‘C’mon, let’s go. We’ve got a rich uncle to take care of.’

Lenina followed the big man through the chamber door, inspecting the piece he had given her. ‘Been a while since I shot anyone.’

‘It’s like riding a bicycle,’ said Gates, heading toward the stairs. ‘You never forget how.’

Outside the door to 1218, Rimmer inserted the attendant’s electronic key into the security lock and opened the control panel.

‘Looks like Dallas must be in here, all right,’ he said, jerking his head up at the green light above the door. ‘This one’s not even pressurized. Kind of pointless coming to a hyperbaric chamber and not switching the thing on, wouldn’t you say? Like going to a restaurant to read a book.’

Ronica’s hand tightened on the little Matahari automatic in her coat pocket. Now that she had seen the instant effect of a clean head shot she was thinking she ought to shoot Rimmer in the same way. This time she would be ready for the blood — although her shoes were ruined, there was still her coat to think of. As soon as Rimmer opened the chamber door, and Dallas registered that it was him, she would do it. Just the way the director had ordered. As a demonstration of the company’s goodwill toward its most brilliant designer. But instead of opening the chamber manually, as she had been expecting, Rimmer started to adjust the pressure controls and, a second or two later, the green light over the door was replaced by a red one.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘What’s it look like?’ said Rimmer, not even turning around. ‘I’m putting him under pressure.’ He uttered a sadistic little chuckle. ‘Quite a lot of fucking pressure, as it happens.’

‘Shouldn’t you make sure he’s in there?’ asked Ronica. ‘I mean, suppose he’s not? Suppose it’s someone else? By the time you’ve finished screwing around with that pressure, it might be quite hard to identify if it’s Dallas, or not. And the director will want to know that you made sure, Rimmer.’

‘You heard the attendant, didn’t you?’ sneered Rimmer. ‘Dallas checked into 1218. Well, this is 1218. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to decipher what’s written on these doors, Ronica. Besides, the point of my screwing around with the pressure is not to kill Dallas, merely to make him more amenable to me offing him when eventually I do open the door. Dallas has got a gun, you see. And he’s quite likely to use it unless I can soften him up a bit first. Squeeze him with some breeze, so to speak.’

Ronica bit her voluptuous lips, wondering just how useful Dallas would remain to her employer by the time Rimmer had finished giving him the hyperbaric equivalent of peine forte et dure. There might be nothing left of his brilliant mind to make it worth her while returning him to the company. As Rimmer moved from the control panel, she caught a glimpse of the pressure gauge and a needle flickering dangerously close to the red section of the value arc. She realized she could delay no longer. It was now or never.

Still facing the door, Rimmer felt something as cold and metallic as the voice that controlled it pressed hard against his scrawny neck.

‘Turn it off,’ she said. ‘Now. Or I’ll kill you.’

There was something comic in his situation that made Rimmer laugh.

‘Is that a gun?’ He started to turn around and found the object gouging the flesh under his ear, pushing his head back toward the chamber door.

‘It’s not a stethoscope. Now turn that pressure off or I’ll give you the irrefutable proof.’

Rimmer reached for the hyperbaric controls and reversed the chamber pressure.

‘Empiricism,’ he said coolly. ‘That’s always been my problem. A linguistic expression can only be significant for a man like me if it’s accompanied by something that can be experienced.’

‘Now step away from the door. Slowly. I’d hate you to discover that my threat was more than just syntactical. For you the principle of verification is likely to come in the shape of a fifteen-millimeter bullet.’

‘Fifteen mill, eh?’ said Rimmer, moving away with the gun still pressed against the nape of his neck. ‘That’s quite a load you’re packing.’

‘More than enough to trepan your skull, Rimmer. I’ve already ruined a good pair of shoes. Don’t make me spoil this coat as well.’

‘Must be one of those little three-shot autos. Pussy gun. Been inside your panties all this time. Nice. Mmm, perhaps you’ll let me smell it later. After we’ve sorted out this small misunderstanding.’

‘I’ll only need one shot to put a groove in you. Now face the wall and keep your mouth shut.’ She glanced at the red light above the door, hoping to be able to avoid killing Rimmer until Dallas was there to witness it. Or maybe she would let Dallas kill Rimmer himself. If he was still up to it. Either way, killing Rimmer was going to be the easy part. Much harder still was going to be the sales pitch that followed — trying to convince Dallas that the director had not ordered Rimmer to murder Dallas’s family. Ronica could see no reason why he would believe her. Surely a man as intelligent as he would see through her little charade.