The Man with the Golden Torc

CHAPTER THREE Chilling at the Wulfshead

I disappeared down into the Underground, mixing in with the crowds, and took the next train to Tottenham Court Road station. I joined the army of people bustling up and down Oxford Street, just another face among many, and browsed shop windows until I was sure I hadn’t been followed. Because when you work for the Drood family, the rest of the world usually is out to get you. I headed down into Soho. The city’s gentrified the hell out of what used to be the last truly wild part of London, but there’s still plenty of sin, sleaze, and secrets to be found there, if you know where to look.

Just a little off the beaten track, down a side street that never gets any sunlight, lies my very favourite Internet café. It’s a part of the Electronic Village chain, but I like it because it’s open twenty-four hours a day, serving twilight people like me. The single window in the shopfront is whitewashed over, and the neon sign above the door hasn’t worked in years. The people who come here like their privacy while they do strange, illegal, and possibly unnatural things with their computers. I entered the café and stopped just inside the doorway to let my eyes adjust to the gloom. There were chairs and tables and computers and absolutely nothing else. The surprisingly large area had an air of quiet reverence not unlike that of a church. The customers sat huddled over their glowing screens, deaf and dumb to those around them. The only sounds in the room were the swift tapping of keys and the quiet chirping of working machines.

The café’s manager came forward to greet me. Willy Fleagal was a tall gangling sort, with bifocals, a high forehead, and a ponytail, wearing a T-shirt saying Information Wants to Be Free ™. He gave me a big smile and a limp handshake. He knew me as a regular customer, with special privileges guaranteed by the chain’s owners, but that was all he knew. I’ve dropped him the occasional hint that I might be an investigative journalist, chasing the corporate bad guys, and he loved that.

"Wow, hello again, Mr. Bond," he said, trying hard for cheerfulness but not quite making it. Willy was a conspiracy theory freak of long standing, and therefore tended towards depression, misery, and gloom as natural default positions. "Always a pleasure to see you in here, man. Are you sure you weren’t followed? Of course you are, course you are." He produced a handheld scanner and checked my clothing for any planted bugs. All part of the service, for Willy.

"You seem busy enough, Willy," I said. "Turned up anything juicy recently?"

He nodded quickly and lowered his voice as he filled me in on the latest conspiracy gossip. Most of which I already knew, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. His watery eyes glowed behind the bifocals as he solemnly assured me that the British royal family is actually descended from ancient lizard gods who had their awful genesis in the German Black Forest; that the U.S. Pentagon actually has a secret sixth side invisible to all but the chosen few, where all the really important decisions are made; and that a certain Hollywood actress is actually a shape-changing alien, which is why she can put on and take off weight so easily while never seeming to age. That last one was new to me, and I made a mental note to check it out later. The family knows of four shape-changing alien species currently busy on our world, and part of the agreement is that they’re supposed to stay out of the public eye.

Willy finally ran down and led me past his oblivious customers to the back room reserved for my use. He unlocked the door, ushered me in with a last dismal sniff, and then left me alone. I waited till I heard him lock the door again, and then sat down before the waiting computer. I didn’t need to check whether Willy or anyone else had tampered with it; if anyone but me even approached it, the whole thing would self-destruct in a quite impressively nasty manner. Willy didn’t know that, of course. He didn’t need to know. He also didn’t need to know that inside the standard computer shell was nothing more than a properly prepared crystal ball. Far more powerful than any computer and a damned sight harder to hack.

I said my real name out loud, and the monitor screen turned itself on, showing me an image of my usual contact, Penny Drood. A cool blonde in a tight white sweater, sweet and smart and sexy enough, in a distant sort of way. I like Penny. She doesn’t take any shit from me.

"You’re late," she said. "Agents in the field are required to report in exactly on the hour."

"Yes, I did manage to avoid being killed or severely injured, thank you for asking, Penny. May I inquire why the mission briefing didn’t inform me about the bloody big demon dog standing guard outside Dr. Dee’s?"

Penny sniffed. "Demon dogs come as standard these days, Eddie. As you’d know if you actually bothered to read all the updates I send you."

"If I read everything the family sends me, I’d never get anything done. And this was a really big bastard."

Penny smiled briefly. "The day you can’t handle a demon dog, Eddie, we’ll retire you. Now make your report, please. I do have other agents on my watch, you know."

"Ah, but they don’t worship your very existence like I do."

"Idolatry will get you nowhere. Make your report."

I launched straight into it, fluent and precise with the ease of long practice. Just the relevant details; the family doesn’t need to know everything, as long as the mission is completed successfully. I didn’t mention my brief, unfortunate meeting with the Karma Catechist. But when I got to the end of my report and sat back in my chair, the very first thing Penny said was "Tell me about the Karma Catechist." I sighed deeply, but I wasn’t really surprised. The family knows everything, remember? That’s just the way it is. So I told Penny what happened, being very careful to emphasise that none of it was in any way my fault, and at the end she just nodded and broke contact. The screen went dead, and I stood up, stretching slowly, feeling rather relieved. If I’d been in any trouble, she would have told me to wait while she kicked it upstairs.

So, report over, mission concluded. Time to repair to a civilised hostelry and get utterly rat-arsed.

I left the Internet café, nodding good-bye to Willy, who was busy sending anonymous hate e-mail to Bill Gates. I shut the door firmly behind me, and then looked casually up and down the side street to make sure no one was about. The afternoon was shading into evening now, the shadows growing darker and deeper. The side street ended in a grimy brick wall, covered with faded graffiti. I stood before the wall, said certain Words, and a door appeared in the brickwork before me. A door of solid silver, deeply etched with threats and warnings in angelic and demonic script, and with absolutely no trace of a handle. I placed my left hand on the silver, and the door swung open before me. Try that when your name isn’t on the approved list and the door will bite your hand right off; but one of the things I like most about the Wulfshead Club is how jealously it guards its privacy and that of its patrons.

The club isn’t actually in London; you can enter it from any city in the world, as long as you’re a member in good standing and know the current passWords. I’m not sure if anyone knows exactly where (or indeed when) the Wulfshead is really located. Which makes it the best of all possible places to go when you need to get away from the world and its demands.

I stepped through the door into dazzling light, pounding music, and the roar of people determined to have a good time, no matter what. The Wulfshead is very up to the moment, very high-tech. All neon strip lighting and furniture so modern half the time you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be. The walls are giant plasma screens showing dramatic views from around the world, constantly changing. Every now and again they flash up the bedroom secrets of famous and important people, covertly recorded by Peeping Toms with access to far too much technology for their own good. The music slammed and pounded, while girls in hardly any clothing at all stomped and strutted on the spotlit miniature stages, dancing their hearts out till the sweat flew from their flailing bodies, and the bass lines shuddered up through the floor.

The club was crowded, as always, full to the brim with the most interesting people you’ll find anywhere. The Wulfshead is where all the weird people go to relax and to enjoy a drink and a chat with their own kind. The club’s membership includes the supernatural, the superluminal, the super-scientific, and all the rest of the superhuman crew. It’s a cosmopolitan mixture, embracing good guys and bad guys and all the strange people in between. Deals are made, people and others get laid, the odd murder or transformation occurs, and a good time is had by all. Got a hell of an atmosphere.

The club is neutral ground, by long tradition, but the occasional brawl is only to be expected. It’s just high spirits. The bartender keeps order with a steamhammer, and the bouncers are golems, so they can’t be bribed or intimidated.

I made my way to the long bar at the back of the club: a gleaming high-tech structure that looked more like a piece of modern art than anything functional. The club prides itself on having anything you can name on tap; everything from absinthe to human blood to steaming nitric acid with an LSD chaser. In fact the choice is so wide that most of us believe the club keeps its stock in a pocket dimension attached to the bar by a hyperdimensional link. It’s still best to avoid the house wines, unless you’re already on your third stomach.

The bar snacks are appalling, but then bar snacks always are.

I nodded and smiled at old friends and familiar faces as I eased my way through the press of bodies. They know me only as Shaman Bond; just another face on the scene. None of them even suspected I might be a Drood, and I was determined to keep it that way. We protect the world, but no one ever said we were popular. I ordered a chilled bottle of Beck’s from the bar and looked around me. To my left, Charlatan Joe was holding forth to a select group, and I wandered over to listen. Joe was a city slicker and confidence trickster; a shark on legs in an Armani suit. Listening more or less patiently to his boasting and preening was another familiar face: Janissary Jane. She nodded briskly to me as I joined the group. Her army fatigues were stiff with black blood, and up close she smelled of smoke and brimstone.

"Just back from the battlefield?" I said, raising my voice to be heard above the din. "Where did you end up this time?"

Jane shrugged, gulping her whiskey straight from the bottle. She wore her black hair cropped short so no one could grab it during a fight, and if her scarred face had ever been pretty, that was a long time ago. She was a good drinking companion, as long as you kept her off the gin. Gin made her maudlin, and then she tended to shoot people.

"Some demon war, in another dimension," she said finally. "Some damned fool necromancer opened up a hellgate, and the call went out for all good mercenaries to rally to the flag. Pay was good, but I’d have gone anyway, for the fight. Hate bloody demons."

"Who doesn’t?" said the Indigo Spirit, splendid as always in his midnight blue leathers, cape, and mask, sipping his Manhattan cocktail with his little finger carefully extended. "Damned things are worse than cockroaches."

I raised my bottle to him briefly. "Good to see you again, Indigo. How goes the war on crime? Killed any interesting supervillains recently?"

"Just the usual scum, dear boy. Nothing wrong with them that two bullets in the head won’t cure. I have to say the current breed of diabolical masterminds and deadly fiends is really very disappointing…No style, do you see; no sense of occasion. Sometimes it’s hardly worth dressing up in the outfit. I mean, is it really too much trouble for a villain to at least wear a domino mask in his secret lair?"

Charlatan Joe had given up on his story now, since no one was listening, and sipped sulkily at his port and lemon. Beside him, the Blue Fairy was pissed as a fart, bemoaning the approaches of middle age and complaining that his wand didn’t work as well as it used to.

"So," I said, loud enough to drown out the Blue Fairy, "what’s the latest gossip, people?"

There’s always someone trying to take over the world, or blow it up, or make it A Better Place; all equally dangerous and disturbed.

"Dr. Delirium is up to something nasty again," said the Indigo Spirit.

"Swanning around in the depths of the Amazon jungle. Thinks he’s so big, just because he has his own private army. The only reason he’s got an army is because his uncle left it to him."

"Right," said Janissary Jane, gesturing a little too wildly with her whiskey bottle. "Never trust private soldiers. Nice uniforms, but no real guts. No fire in their bellies. If they can’t outnumber you ten to one, they don’t want to know. Delirium tried to get me to sign up a few years back, but of course I said no. The pay offer was really lousy."

"Delirium," said Charlatan Joe. "Isn’t he the one who collects new plagues, and then threatens to turn them loose on the civilised world, unless he’s paid off?"

"That’s the one," I said. "Always wants to be paid off in rare postage stamps. I guess once a collector, always a collector."

"There’s a rumour going around that one of the Old Ones is slowly waking from its long sleep under the Arctic Circle," said Charlatan Joe. "And that’s why the polar ice pack is melting so much faster than it should be."

Janissary Jane sniffed loudly. "Every time there’s a blip in the weather, someone thinks the Old Ones are coming back. Not gonna happen. They’ve been asleep so long now you couldn’t wake one up if you stuffed a nuke up its backside and detonated it."

"I did hear that the troll problem’s getting worse in the Underground train tunnels," said the Indigo Spirit. "Nasty things; all teeth and appetite and no manners. Word is, they could be getting close to swarming again."

Janissary Jane brightened. "Always good money to be made during a cull. I’ll contact my agent, see if anyone’s hiring. The city better not have tendered it out to Group Forty-two again; those bastards always want to see the heads as proof of kill. Last time I came up out of the Underground like Santa Claus with a sack full of goodies."

"Got some new videos in, if any of you are interested," said Charlatan Joe. "I know this guy who knows this guy who claims his television set is receiving transmissions from the future. He’s selling best-of compilations on VHS and DVD, and I can get my hands on some for a really reasonable price…"

"I wouldn’t," I said. "I’ve seen that tape. Just a bunch of guys in weird clothes, showing their bums to the camera and giggling a lot. Technology is just wasted on some people."

So we drank and talked and drank some more, and the evening passed pleasantly enough. Charlatan Joe put it all on his tab, since he was still flush from his latest sting. Janissary Jane tried to chat up some guy in chain mail, and then shot him in the arse when he turned his back on her. The Indigo Spirit offered to show me his secret cave, but I politely declined. The Blue Fairy passed out cold and lay snoring on the floor at our feet. "Don’t step on him," Charlatan Joe said wisely, "Or it’ll rain for forty days and forty nights."

At some point, the conversation got around to the latest sightings of the infamous Drood family and their golden agents, and I shut up and paid attention. Never know when you might learn something useful. There are always sightings of my family at work, most of them apocryphal or wishful thinking. If a Drood agent’s done his job properly, no one but the victims should even know he was there. But we’re a bit like crop circles and cattle mutilations; we get blamed for all kind of things that are nothing at all to do with us. The current sightings included action in Moscow, Las Vegas, and Venice. That last one was particularly nasty; no one seemed to know precisely what happened, but the city was fishing bodies out of the canals for hours afterwards. I made a mental note to check up on that one, though it sounded rather sloppy for us.

My family gets a lot of credit (or blame) for things we haven’t actually done, but we never confirm or deny anything. It’s enough that the world is protected; they don’t need to know family business. Besides, it’s all good for the reputation.

The company is usually good at the Wulfshead, but there’s always one in every crowd. A large figure loomed suddenly over us, brandishing a pint of lager and insisting on joining our conversation. He had to be seven feet tall, with shoulders to match, in a battered oversized biker’s jacket and scuffed leather trousers. This, it turned out, was Boyd, Bodyguard to the Stars. A newcomer to the Wulfshead, young and strong and stupid enough to believe the club’s rules didn’t apply to him. He was obviously a Hyde, using a distillation of Dr. Jekyll’s old formula. Potent enough to keep him big and brutal while diluted enough that he was able to maintain control.

He just talked right over us, insisting on telling us all about his new job as bodyguard to a major Hollywood actress. Who, if Boyd was to be believed, couldn’t do a thing without him there to supervise it. He also dropped heavy hints that he’d sampled her famous body when he wasn’t guarding it.

"Really?" said the Indigo Spirit. "I always thought she was a Friend of Dorothy."

"Don’t know if I’d go that far," I said. "But if they were shorthanded, she’d probably help out."

Boyd glared at me. "That’s just tabloid trash. Gossip and spite. She’s all woman, and I should know. Right?"

He glared around at all of us, but I must not have looked convinced enough, because Boyd decided he needed to push me about a bit, just to show he wasn’t to be contradicted. He jabbed me hard in the chest with one large finger, and I looked at him thoughtfully as he raised his voice to me.

He was twice my size and more, most of it muscle. I could have taken him easily if I armoured up, but I couldn’t do that. Strict family rule: the armour is only ever to be used for family business. More important, the armour would have given away to everyone that I was a Drood, and then I’d never be able to come back here again. I liked being just Shaman Bond, and I wasn’t about to give it up.

The bartender was already looking meaningfully in our direction, getting ready to intervene, and I really did consider letting him handle it. For about a second or two. But I didn’t spend most of my life being trained to fight the good fight just so I could let a mere Hyde push me around. Besides, if I let him get away with this, I’d never be able to drink here in peace again. Even the weird and terminally strange have their pecking order. Still, given that Boyd was a Hyde and more than twice my size, I sure as hell wasn’t going to fight fair.

So I held his gaze with mine, quietly retrieved the portable door from my pocket, activated it, and flipped the door neatly under the Hyde’s feet. Boyd had just enough time to look startled before he fell through the new opening and into the cellars underneath the club. He landed with a satisfyingly loud crash, followed by a series of low moans. I picked up my portable door and the floor returned, sealing Boyd in the cellars until someone could be bothered to go down and rescue him. The bartender nodded his thanks, glad he hadn’t had to get involved, and the watching crowd gave me a round of applause. Janissary Jane and I shared a high five, while Charlatan Joe considered me thoughtfully.

"Where did you get your hands on a restricted device like a portable door, Shaman?"

"Found it on eBay," I said.

Time continued to pass pleasantly, and by the early hours of the morning I was drifting through a drunken haze and chatting up a giggly sex droid who’d dropped in from the twenty-third century to do some research for her dissertation on strange sexual hang-ups of the rich and famous. She was tall and buxom and one hundred percent artificial, sweetly turned out in a classic little black dress cut high enough at the back to show off the bar code and copyright notice stamped on her magnificent left buttock. Her fizzing steel hair was full of sparking static, her eyes were silver, and she smelled of pure musk. She ran off a nuclear power cell located in her lower abdomen, which was just a tad worrying, but then, no one’s perfect.

"So, what brings you to the Wulfshead?" I asked.

"Just playing tourist," she said with a smile so wide even Julia Roberts couldn’t have matched it. "I’ve got so much more spare time since we finally got unionised. Let’s hear it for Rossum’s Unionised Robots!"

"Down with the bosses!" I said solemnly. "Work is the curse of the drinking classes."

"Oh, I love my work," she said, batting her huge eyelashes at me. "It took more than one man to change my name to Silicon Lily."

And that was when my mobile phone rang. I was not pleased. The only people who have that number are my family, and I shouldn’t have been hearing from them so soon after a completed mission. It had to be some kind of bad news, and almost certainly more mine than theirs. People all around me scowled at the phone in my hand and gave me significant looks; you’re supposed to turn off all communication devices before entering the Wulfshead. I hadn’t thought to, because the family so rarely bothers me when I’m on downtime. I smiled weakly, shrugged apologetically, blew a quick kiss to the sex droid, and retired to a more or less private corner to take the call.

"I thought I told you never to call me here," I said coldly.

"Come home," said an unfamiliar voice. "Come home now. You are needed for a personal briefing on an urgent mission."

And that was it. The phone went dead, and I slowly put it away, my mind racing. Another mission, already? That was unheard of. I was guaranteed at least a week between missions. Too much work in the field, and you burn out fast. The family knows that. And why did I have to go home to be briefed? Ordinarily they send me my mission brief, and whatever hardware I might need, via a blind postal drop that I rotate on a regular basis; and then I just go off and do whatever needs to be done and do my best not to get killed in the process. Make my report to Penny afterwards, and then go to ground till I’m needed again. The family and I maintain a civilised distance, and that’s the way I like it.

I scowled into what remained of my drink. The phone call had shocked me sober again. I really didn’t want to go home. Back to the Hall, ancestral home of the extended Drood family. I hadn’t set eyes on the place in ten years. I left right after my eighteenth birthday, to our mutual relief, and the family sent me a regular and (fairly) generous stipend guaranteed to continue as long as I continued to work in the field. If I ever chose to give up my career as an agent, I could either go home or be hunted down and killed as a dangerous rogue. That was understood. They allowed me a short leash, but that was all. I was a Drood.

I left home because I found the weight of family duty and history more than a little suffocating, and they let me go because they found my attitude a pain in the arse. I’d kept myself busy, down the years, accepting assignment after assignment just to avoid having to go home again and submit to family authority and discipline. I liked the illusion of being my own man.

But when the family calls, you answer, if you know what’s good for you. I was going home again, damn it to hell.

In the morning. Tonight, there was Silicon Lily…