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Chapter Six Our Lady of the Crystals

Biting back tears. How the hell do you bite back your tears, LizAlec wondered crossly to herself, wiping them away with the back of her hand. Laughing Boy had just waddled in to slop her down with a bucket of water. At least, LizAlec hoped it was water: the liquid was certainly cold enough, but she wasn’t taking bets. Not that she didn’t need it, even she could tell she stank.

And she’d been cold enough before Laughing Boy appeared. In fact, the air was so chilled it burnt her throat as she pulled it into her lungs. LizAlec wasn’t sure if the two goons had known in advance that part of this strange wrecked building was still pressurized, or whether they just got lucky, but either way, over the last week keeping her warm hadn’t seemed part of their plans...

Now one of them was back again, wrestling with the door. The hinges were old, not rusty but thick with grit. Which was how LizAlec knew someone was coming into her cell. All the same, she stayed curled into a little ball in the corner and kept her violet eyes tight shut, even though the stinking cell was way too dark for Mickey or Laughing Boy to see she’d been crying.

Except it wasn’t the fat depressive or the man in the plastic mask.

“Lady Elizabeth?” Someone clicked their fingers and for the first time in days light pushed in against her scrunched-up eyes. Without even being aware of it, LizAlec pulled her sodden paper gown more tightly around her.

The new voice was cultured, its accent well-bred Parisian. Lady Elizabeth Alexandra Fabio rolled away from the wall, blinking into the sudden glare. This was no simple lightstick like Laughing Boy’s. The new man held a small Braun lamp, the circular kind she’d seen on sale in the Rue de Rivoli. And his clothes were a whole gold card away from those worn by the two goons. Silk jacket padded at the shoulders to give him width, double cuffs kept closed with jade links, an obsidian signet ring circling the little finger of his left hand. Even his black English-made shoes were unscuffed by the dust.

He was tall enough to tower over LizAlec and he was so thin that it looked like someone had just lacquered his bones with skin and missed out the muscle. All of that LizAlec saw, but she missed the small enamel button in his lapel indicating membership of an Order that tithed five per cent of everything he earned and made Opus Dei look liberal. And she missed the discreet contacts that changed his eyes from green to grey.

Crouched back on her heels, bare knees tight together, LizAlec pressed her hands hard against the ground to steady herself and took another look at the man. He was in his early forties, maybe late thirties, with long swept-back hair that was flecked with grey. His face had character enough to pass for experienced, but was not so lined that it was yet old. The twist to his lips was natural, by the look of it. His sneer was practised, but not quite perfect enough to come from a surgeon’s lipid-coated scalpel. LizAlec had a nasty feeling she’d seen the man before, and she hadn’t liked him then either.

“Lady Elizabeth?” Impatience was what LizAlec heard and what she reacted against.

“It’s LizAlec,” she said shortly, pushing herself upright.

“No,” he said, “it’s whatever I want it to be.” And before LizAlec could reply, he caught her left arm and twisted it hard up behind her back until she thought the bones would break. LizAlec could almost feel his eyes rake down her naked spine and buttocks, and then he shoved her forward, bouncing her into a wall.

Shock, LizAlec told herself furiously, scrabbling to her feet and pushing her clenched hands into her eyes to stop fresh tears. That’s all it was, shock, not pain. LizAlec reached deep into herself and ripped out what she always held in reserve: utter contempt for anyone who showed emotion, herself included.

“Arsewipe.” She spat the word back without having to think about it, looking the thin man up and down as if he was something she’d just stepped in. The tears were already drying on her cheeks.

“I could hurt you badly,” the man said simply.

“No,” replied LizAlec, refusing to drop her gaze. “You think you could, but you couldn’t.” She held up two thin hands in cold, mocking surrender. “Not that I want you to try.”

The tall man pursed his thin lips, as if thinking. So it wasn’t going the way he intended, well LizAlec was glad about that. He looked like somebody who was too used to getting his own way.

“You know your problem?” The man’s voice was dangerously quiet.

LizAlec kicked one heel against the cold wall behind her, then shrugged dismissively. “You mean, besides getting kidnapped by some fuck-head tailor’s dummy?” She watched with icy disdain as the man fought down his urge to slap her; she kept kicking her heel against the wall, waiting for him to tell her to stop. LizAlec was good at disdain: she’d had a lot of practice.

When the man said nothing, LizAlec shrugged again. “Oh, come on,” she said, “you can tell me...”

“You’re too like your mother.” He made it obvious no compliment was intended.

“You know Lady Clare...?” LizAlec stopped herself. Stupid question. With that accent he was bound to have met her. Lady Clare was an Imperial Minister, aide de camp to Louis Napoleon, the Prince Imperial, and head of the Third Section. Everyone in Paris who counted for anything knew her mother. Poor bastards.

“Lady Clare?” The amusement in the man’s voice should have warned LizAlec that the balance was shifting again and not in her favour. Though how much further it could shift against her when she was sodden, kidnapped, shuddering with cold and wrapped in a wet hospital gown LizAlec didn’t know.

“You think Lady Clare is your mother?”

“Of course she is,” LizAlec answered. There was no “think” about it. “You think I’d have anything to do with that bitch if she wasn’t?”

“Lady... Clare... is... not... your... mother.” He left mocking gaps between the words, as if giving LizAlec time for the words to sink in. But they didn’t. However hard she tried she couldn’t pin any meaning on them except the obvious one. And that wasn’t possible.

“Your mother’s dead.” The man’s eyes were bright, coldly amused. But for the briefest second, there was something else there that might just have been pity, but probably wasn’t. It was wiped so fast LizAlec couldn’t be sure.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out to touch one hunched shoulder. “I assumed you knew...”

The hell he did.

LizAlec’s fist swung towards his elegant face before even she realized what she was doing. But her punch never landed. Instead the tall man twisted fast sideways, swivelling so LizAlec’s fist slipped uselessly past his face, throwing her off balance. She didn’t fall. She couldn’t. Iron fingers gripped her thin wrist and the cell did a half-spin as he flicked her round and slammed her face first into the rough polycrete wall. She stayed upright, but only because the man had her arm twisted halfway up her back.

I’m going to have to stop this, LizAlec thought when the man finally stopped pulling her arm out of its socket and she got her brain back. Casually, callously, he spun the girl round so she could took at him.

“Lady Clare is French,” he said coldly, “Well bred, European, white...” The man laid the list out in front of her. “You’re black.”

LizAlec looked up at him and frowned. No, she wasn’t. If anything, she was cafe au lait, like most girls at St Lucius. Like most of the world, really. LizAlec started to shake her head.

“She’s pure European,” the man said heavily. “You’re black — how do you think that happened?”

“Maybe she met someone and they fucked,” suggested LizAlec. She placed bitter emphasis on her last word. “Maybe her gynaecologist just mixed me up in a Petri dish. How should I know?”

“Your father wasn’t black, Lady Clare isn’t black...” The iron grip on her wrist tightened further, grinding bones against each other until LizAlec bit her bottom lip but kept silent. Arrogant he might be, and probably psychotic, but it sounded like he held the missing piece to her life, and she wanted to know it. Unless the whole thing was just a mind fuck, which wouldn’t have surprised her.

“How do you know my father wasn’t black?” LizAlec asked. Because if that was all he knew, it was still more than she did. Lady Clare and LizAlec didn’t communicate much, not these days, but they’d never talked about her father at all. Not ever, not even back when she was a kid.

“How do you know?” LizAlec demanded crossly.

“Because I know your father,” said the man.

“He sent you.” LizAlec had the words out of her mouth before she could stop them.

The man actually laughed. “Sent me? I doubt if he even knows you exist. But take it from me, your father’s many things, starting with insane, but he’s not responsible for the melanin coding in your DNA. That shit’s down to Stepping Razor.”

“Razz!”

LizAlec knew Razz. Hell, every retarded Left Bank student and martial arts fetishist knew Razz. Razz was dead but that didn’t mean she didn’t still live on, naked and oiled in endless adolescent-owned tri-D posters, silver skin glinting, lizard-skin and shark-cartilage shoulder-armour polished to a sheen. She was GoreFest wank material, nothing more. Fixx loved her, no matter how much he pretended to despise everything Razz stood for.

LizAlec looked down at her own thin legs, her narrow shoulders and bony hips. It didn’t seem likely. Having Lady Clare for a mother was bad enough. But Razz... LizAlec didn’t think so. It was like discovering she was related to Ronald-fucking-McDonald.

“Razz?” LizAlec said in disbelief.

The man looked at her, then spat pointedly in the dust. The gesture didn’t come naturally, but it made plain his position. “Get used to it. That silver bitch was your mother, you stupid, spoilt, sullen little shit.”

There was a long silence, the kind that reaches out and stills everything except the thud of your heart and the roar of blood in your head. Under the silence, LizAlec could hear the low rumble of a distant pump and the slow hiss of an air-recyc.

“So tell me,” said LizAlec. “Just who did Razz fuck to produce me and where does Lady Clare come into this?”

“Gibson,” the man told her viciously, “That’s who. You’re the by-blow of a hired killer and the world’s only living god. And now look at you...”

Alex Gibson. That didn’t sound bad to LizAlec, in fact it sounded pretty good. Okay, Alex Gibson didn’t own most of Shanghai like Anchee’s dad, but a god? She could live with that... LizAlec straightened up and stared at the man. It was a bad mistake.

She was still sneering, staring him in the eyes when the tall Frenchman pulled back his fist and sucker punched her in the gut, dropping LizAlec to her knees. Breath exploded from her lungs as blackness swirled like dark mist in front of her eyes, eating at the edges of the room.

When LizAlec came to, she was curled up on the ground and above her she could hear the man’s elegant, contemptuous voice, far away down a long tunnel.

“Stupid little cunt.” Somewhere in the background Laughing Boy grunted. LizAlec hadn’t remembered him being there. Maybe he wasn’t. Perhaps he was back in a control room somewhere and it was all being captured on i/red camera so the suit could watch it all again for fun, later on. Except that wasn’t it. LizAlec had just been out for longer than she remembered.

“Okay,” said the tall man. “Let’s deal with this, shall we?” A hand yanked back her hair, reaching for the nape of her neck. LizAlec tensed as fingers expertly ripped away a tiny circle of plastic skin to reveal a minuscule glass chip, half the size of a rice grain. LizAlec couldn’t remember it being fitted, but she felt it being pulled away, blood welling up where tiny electrodes had fed beneath her skin.

“Tracer,” the man said contemptuously, cracking it under his heel. “Okay,” he said to LizAlec. “Get up.”

LizAlec didn’t.

“Get up,” he said crossly and when she still didn’t move he crouched down beside her. LizAlec felt hands brush across her small breasts and then she felt his fingers grip nipples that were already upright with cold. But it wasn’t cheap sex he was interested in. Grasping her nipples between first finger and thumb, the man yanked LizAlec to her feet.

“I say move, you move,” the man said bluntly. “Try anything that stupid again and I’ll break both your arms. Understand me?” He punctuated the last word with a vicious jab to her kidneys that had LizAlec wimpering with pain.

“Now,” he said. “Let’s get this over, okay?” The man produced a tiny Sony camcorder and tossed it gently into the air, waiting while the machine spun up into a corner to steady itself a hand’s breadth below the rough grey ‘crete of the ceiling. When it was stable, a single green diode lit at its base and the lens whirred slightly as the camera clicked into fine focus.

“Say something,” the man told the quivering girl.

“Say what?” She had her hands folded tight across the front of her paper gown, clutching her sides in pain.

“Oh... That you’re fine, unharmed...” He smiled coldly, the smile lifting his thin lips at one corner. High cheekbones framed his deep-set eyes and a pointed chin. His face would have been rat-like but the expression was too self-confident. Maybe he was a weasel, thought LizAlec. Wasn’t that one social step up from a rat?

“Do it,” the man said, “And talk direct to the camera.”

LizAlec did. “I’ve been kidnapped by two gorillas,” she said coldly, staring straight at the little satellite. “Sexually molested by a moron...” That was all she had time for before a second punch dropped her back to her knees.

She wiped her lips with the back of a hand and spat into the dirt. Sweet from blood and sour from vomit, her mouth was turning into a regular Chinese meal. “Well,” LizAlec gasped, when she stopped heaving. “That should convince them everyone’s behaving.”

“Jesus,” hissed the man. “You really are a poisonous little shit...” He clicked his fingers at Laughing Boy. “You, hold the bitch still.”

LizAlec felt vice-like fingers tighten on her shoulders and pull her upright. It hurt, but LizAlec reckoned it was still an improvement on the tall man’s method. For a second, it looked as if the suit was going to punch her again, but he didn’t, which was interesting in itself. LizAlec knew all about deferred gratification. Instead the man dipped his fingers into the side pocket of his immaculate jacket and pulled out a smallish silver ball.

“Do you know what this is?”

LizAlec didn’t, but she had a nasty feeling she was about to find out.

“Should I?” she said coldly.

Fingers brushed her cheek making her shiver, and the man smiled. “You know what?” he said softly.

The girl shook her head.

“Maybe we’ve all got it wrong,” said the man, sounding amused. “Maybe culture really is more important than race...”

LizAlec just looked blank.

“You’re really very like Lady Clare. And believe me,” he added quickly, “that isn’t intended as a compliment...” He took the silver ball and held it close to LizAlec’s face. “This is an unhatched worm. You have heard of bioSemtex?

Of course she had. Semi-intelligent explosive. It was what the Vernacular Front had used in London to take out the orbital ring of high-rise slums, back before she was born. It was what fundamentalists in Megrib had used more recently to blow out the glass-roofed souk at M’Dina, killing thousands.

“Good,” the man said watching her eyes. “I wouldn’t want you to remain ignorant. You,” he nodded at Laughing Boy, dipping his fingers into his pocket again, “you know how this works?”

The fat man nodded and held out one podgy hand. He took a heavy black ring from the tall Frenchman and slipped it onto his own little finger. Then held out his hand for the bioSemtex ball.

“Prime it,” the Frenchman said, and Laughing Boy pressed his black ring into the silver ball’s soft surface.

“Try to run away,” said the tall man, keeping his voice so politely matter-of-fact he could have been standing in the crush bar of the Paris Opera discussing Verdi, “and you’ll be...”

“Dead?” LizAlec asked, her voice as polite as his, her accent if anything even more polished. She could do that shit if she had to. The tall Frenchman flushed.

One to me, thought LizAlec. He might be psychotic but he was also a raving snob. Which might be useful, if only she could work out how. But LizAlec never got the chance. She was still trying to suss out who might want to kidnap her when the Frenchman made his move, suddenly grabbing her neck with one hand to press his thumb in against an upper vertebra, half paralysing her. His other hand dipped down, pulling the edge of LizAlec’s paper gown away from her thin buttocks.

“You just don’t learn, do you?” The man nodded over her shoulder at Laughing Boy. “Do it.”

“No,” LizAlec’s voice was almost a howl. But he still understood what she said.

“Oh yes,” the man said softly. “We’ve got to get this worm into you somehow. And we can hardly hang it on a chain round your neck, can we?” At her back, LizAlec could feel Laughing Boy begin to push the wriggling worm hard between her buttocks.

LizAlec screamed, hard and long. A real scream this time, one that burnt the air with its noise as she twisted desperately away from Laughing Boy, pulling free from the other man’s grip on her neck. Frantically, LizAlec kicked at Laughing Boy’s fingers, sending the wriggling worm into the dirt.

“Shit.” Laughing Boy was on his knees now, scrabbling along the cell floor to grab the silver worm which was trying to slither away, collecting a caddis-shell of grit as it went. Wiping the worm against his shirt, Laughing Boy stilled it, watching as the worm flowed back into a liquid silver ball. “Mouth,” he suggested sullenly. “Or nose. They’re both easier. More effective, too.”

Even LizAlec could see the tall Frenchman didn’t like being questioned, but in the end he just shrugged. “Whatever...” And before LizAlec could protest, Laughing Boy had slammed one arm round her neck and had his other hand over her nose and mouth.

“...fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen...”

LizAlec gulped air as Laughing Boy released his hand on twenty, and froze in horror as she felt the worm slither up her nose. She did the obvious, screaming as she clawed desperately at her own face, but it was already too late. The worm was settling inside her, curled up in a sinus cavity.

“500 paces,” the Frenchman said shortly. “More than that and the worm will crack your head open.” He pointed to the ring nestling around Laughing Boy’s little finger. “As for closing the circuit, touch that with the worm still in your head and...” The man paused and ruffled LizAlec’s filthy black curls. “You can kiss all this goodbye.”

LizAlec shuddered. She was still shuddering when the man left her cell, opening the door with a simple touch of his hand to let himself out of her life.

He would kill the girl, of course, once he’d got what he wanted. And then an S3 sweeper would go in to clean up Laughing Boy and Mickey. Lazlo Portea smiled, a grin so wide it almost split his face. The man was pleased with life and with the success of his plan, but most of all he was pleased with himself. All his life he had lived on the edges of real power. Sterling silver to Lady Clare’s gold: never quite handsome enough, adept enough or rich enough to catch the eye of the Prince Imperial.

Well, that was going to change. In fact, a lot of things were going to change. Starting with who ruled Paris. If Lady Clare wanted that little half-breed back she’d have to do what Lazlo demanded. And she would. Lazlo knew that. Everyone had a weakness and where Lady Clare Fabio was concerned it was her dangerously sentimental sense of duty.

Paris or that little bitch. It was an impossible choice and with any luck deciding would kill her.