11) Of Rats and Rain

SEPTEMBER

THE WARRENS

SHEFFIELD

Being a probationer, Alex needed to serve for the full duration of an operation, under an experienced eye. There didn't appear to be any criteria about what kind of operation probationers got assigned to. Police, traffic, Customs Control, FedCon or any other entity. In recognition of his past sins, Alex found himself in one of the less salubrious zones: The Warrens, in Sheffield.

The housing projects of the 1960's and the past century had long outlasted their useful life, rotting away from within as vermin and environment gnawed away at them. They had been demolished in the Civic Initiative Action of the early twenty-first century, the vacant ground then being allocated to various local projects before the Accelerated Housing Program began building. AHP was intended to provide relatively low-cost, relatively high-quality accommodation; the deck access design should have lasted for fifty years with a safety factor of fifty per cent. Now, however, they were old before their time. Patched-up, frangible, subject to a hundred forms of fabric fatigue, they now existed to house the underclass who moved into what became known as "The Warrens".

They were not unique to any one city; Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow, London, all had areas of urban blight where crime and poverty were endemic, either as cause or effect or both.

Alex, as part of an ongoing police monitoring operation, run locally, came to replace a FedCon liaison officer who wanted to go on holiday (some holiday, in Alex's opinion - a month on the moon!).

Yorkshire people spoke oddly, to Alex, long used to the tones of the Home Counties. Yorkshire people spoke with a thick accent, strange dialect, slang that didn't seem English. The Sheffield sense of humour was unusual, too; dry and cutting. Like a saw.

The police made an effort to look after Alex when he arrived, bunking him down in their private quarters and giving him all sorts of goodies - periodicals, reference works, anachronistic 2-D pictures of pre-CIA Sheffield, glossaries and annotated reports. They wanted him to be well informed. Incidentally, the sheer amount of information Alex would have to ingest meant he would have to be intellectually able in addition to being physically capable. They also wished him to be adept at social monitoring, so they partnered him with an experience officer as an instructor and guide. From on high came an order to carefully monitor the monitor, as a favour to FedCon, a favour that could be traded in future for a return favour (such as access to Internal Net, FIDO or even PolSat). They didn't want their assignee to come to harm, so he got an anti-harm suit; they wanted him to harm others if necessary, so they gave him a gun (which he never removed from his station locker).

'That,' said Sergeant Barnes, 'is a drop.'

Alex glanced from the corner of his eye at the police officer. Of course it was a drop. Any sheer fall of over thirty metres could be called "a drop".

The pair were at mid-point of a walkway between two tenement blocks on the outskirts of The Warrens, where things got bad but not too bad, certainly not too bad for an assigned monitor. Merely murders, assaults, spectra of drugs offences, robbery, vandalism, plus innumerable other crimes.

'Oi, Sarge, fuck off and die you fucker!' chorused a flock of children no older than five, running past them. Barnes ignored them, so Alex ignored them too.

'Just playing,' explained Sergeant Barnes. ' When things are bad they throw poison darts.'

Oh great, thought Alex, no stones, just a curare cocktail on a spike. Don't let things get bad while I'm here!

The escorting policeman, noticing his charges scepticism, turned to explain: when the weather became hot, tempers ran ragged and the sporadic viciousness of daily life became pandemic. When the weather was cold or wet or both simultaneously it became much easier.

To return to the drop: it acted as the temporary deposit for illegal pharmaceuticals, left by a courier for another courier to collect. And why there? Because at the junction of two pre-fabricated slabs a small nick had been made, allowing a fine wire to dangle over the side from a little retaining toggle, at the end of which a small bag could be hung. Ergo, a drop. This time, nothing there.

On they went. People walking past stopped talking to stare sullenly at them, creating an unpleasant feeling that reminded Alex of his time in Kosovo. Sergeant Barnes was able to point out a lot of the onlookers with a précis of their involvement with the forces of the law: that was Irwin Moore, brother of Karl, who was currently doing seven years penal servitude in Wandsworth; she was Lisa Nixon, suspected of carrying for the Bacon brothers; that was Jolly James, no fixed abode, chronic alcoholic and petty thief; that was Peter Morrisey, out on bail for car theft (sixth time); Claire Heaney, who had beaten him over the head with a spike shoe end and who frequently did the same with her children; Simon Clarke, suspected of carrying and of killing ("no proof yet but we're working on it").

A whole compendium of offences. There was also a confounding factor present; when criminals went out for their constitutionals, non-criminals went indoors and stayed there, so an uninitiated onlooker may have gained a rather biased perception.

Barnes pointed out a thin wire strung between two tenement decks, easily a hundred metres from block to block.

'See that? Pirate radio antenna. The kids club together for the hardware, then they hire William Tell. He puts up the aerial and they broadcast until the BPI comes along and does them.'

"William Tell", it transpired, was a local with a crossbow, who could shoot a wire connected to a bolt across the gaps between buildings and thus create an aerial. Never arrested, he remained only a nick-name. The police didn't worry much; broadcasting kept a certain fraction of the local youth occupied, away from more nefarious pursuits. Pirate radio stations were like weeds anyway, get rid of one and another two sprang up to fill the airwave gap.

They descended a stairway, sixteen flights with refuse heaped rotting in every stairwell, because the refuse chutes broke years ago and the council collection service was erratic. Once at the bottom they walked out into the open, away from the sides of the tenement blocks. The tip was, either stay under the walkway or keep well clear of it, because if you were only a few metres of it horizontally then a large and heavy object might be propelled over the balcony to descend on your head. Like a wardrobe. Or a concrete paving slab.

Alex looked around and about, up and down, not only looking but seeing. In a pressure-cooker estate like this all you could do was expect the worst from people and be surprised if they didn't all turn out so. Barnes confirmed these unspoken thoughts by pointing out a few locals who were criminals, the offspring of criminals who were themselves the offspring of criminals. People like them never reformed; perpetual recidivists, they only persisted in what they saw as normal behaviour.

The twosome paused. On either side rose the tenements, great artificial cliffs stained with ancient bird droppings, where graffiti had been chiselled into the walls with power drills. Voices called like lost birds between the cliff faces as neighbours called to each other, no words distinguishable, just tones. The duo detoured into a vast recess in Block Fifteen, even danker and gloomier than the rest of the block, an access and service point for the ventilation and air conditioning ducts. Giant corroded pipes ran the width of the recess (ten metres or so in breadth), kinked and knuckled to allow council engineers access, not that they actually ever came any more.

The reason they detoured was so Sergeant Barnes could light up; not illegal or contra-regulations but it made him more human to any observers and he didn't want that.

Alex sat atop a pipe while Barnes smoked.

'I wouldn't do that,' said the policeman, amused.

'Oh. Why not?'

'Because there's some right queer creatures living in those ducts. Cockroaches and the like.'

"Cockroach" did it. Alex leapt down, his bottom tingling with alarm. To him, "cockroach" meant the Balkan variety, a monster that hissed, bit and flew with equal facility. Many families in Eastern Europe kept a trained pet rat to deal with them. Th Greater London Cockroach didn't measure up to it's cousin but it remained a nasty little beast. All the tenement blocks were infested with them. Also, there were winged ants, a thing called a silverfish totally unknown to Alex, plus earwigs, beetles and wasps.

'Why can't they get rid of them?' asked the tourist.

Ah, explained Barnes. To get rid meant having to fumigate, and to fumigate properly the interstices of the whole block needed to be gassed, a major operation that council purse-strings limited to an annual event. Even then, the target vermin over generations had developed a tolerance to chemical agents and many survived the gas attack. Within a month there would be as many little guests in residence in each household as there had been pre-operation.

'What we could do with, really, is a terrier bred down to about four or five inches long. You don't acquire tolerance to a bloody Jack Russell!'

"Terrier", "inches" and "Jack Russell" were unfamiliar to the Serb but he followed his companions line of thought anyway.

'What you need is a trained rat.'

'Pardon! A trained rat!'

'Yes. I am surprised you never heard of them. We used to keep one at home for the Brontejowa - uh, that is, the cockroaches. Lots of people do. They eat them right up. These blocks could do with a whole pack of them.'

Barnes nodded slowly and thoughtfully.

'You have an idea there.' A note went into his personal greenscreen and the two carried on. Once out of the tenement's shadow bright sunlight warmed their spirits and bodies the instant the sun came out from behind the clouds.

Every five minutes they needed to check in with Despatch Control to prove they were still alive and unharmed by giving their names and numbers. This acted almost like a barometer of how tense the Warrens were; if times between the checks were twenty minutes you could guarantee it was a cold, wet, miserable day with all the wrongdoers sensibly indoors; when the check-ins sidled down to forty-five seconds a mob riot would be imminent, guns and beer bottles full of home-made napalm. Five minutes could be described as the tense side of normal.

They warmed up for a few minutes. Barnes called in. Despatch spoke back to him in their impenetrable crackle-and-hiss, from which Alex could discern absolutely nothing. Perhaps a few years of duty in the Warrens listening to urgent chatter filtered through a handset of dubious quality enhanced hearing.

Their next route led into the very heart (still, not beating) of the Warrens; a square mile in the English measure, consisting of scrubby grass patches and dirt where a set of playing fields once existed.

'Odd,' commented Barnes, not explaining why. He called up Despatch Control. Alex took a good look around and saw nothing pleasant yet nothing out of place. There were grimy tenements on all sides, spotted with mould and rust; an ancient rusted relic (once a car) lay not far away, dead for years and rusting into obscurity; at dead centre of the barren grass stood a collection of pre-fab huts slotted together in the fashion of a child's building kit, surrounded by a high fence.

'I take it that we are going there?'

Barnes said nothing, just gradually increased his pace so his partner found that he had to make longer strides to keep up. Alex wondered what the game was. There didn't seem to be anyone around to threaten them.

In fact, as the staff at the station informed him later, the apparent absence of people gave cause for concern to any experienced watcher. Normally, as far as things around the Warrens ever approached normal, hordes of children played football on the Wreck, as the bare land was known; older children drove bikes across it, chased each other across it and watched adults trek across it to the police station to make out complaints, fulfil bail conditions, keep probation appointments.

Yet now there were no people present at all.

So why are we one notch short of running? Wondered Alex again. While they jogged on, Barnes threw quick glances from side to side, rapid cautious looks that made Alex peer closely in the direction of his associate's gaze. All around, the tenements seemed empty, but in the ground level garages - weren't those things moving in a few of them? People, maybe. Staying-out-of-sight people, people Plotting Unpleasant Things, maybe.

In front of them lay the pre-fab police station, surrounded by a three-metre fence topped by rusty razor wire. A thoughtful person already held the gate open in readiness for them and stood holding the gate and a four-kilo padlock, ready to shut it all up again. They beckoned urgently in a come-here gesture.

'Run!' they shouted.

Alex perversely looked to see what they would be running from, since he already knew where he'd be running to. He saw a mob of youths. Footballs and frisbees were gone, replaced by knives and nailed clubs. Clearly these sportsmen were now playing a different game today: Hunt the Policeman.Both policeman and probationer raced the last fifty metres like rabbits, into the palisaded station, hearing with mutual mixed feelings the gate rolling shut behind them. True, they were in and safe but they were also stuck in the station. They would have to wait until the helicopter arrived with canisters of pepper gas and aerosol anaesthetic. An unpleasant way to spend the weekend. Alex waited in the canteen, expecting gangs of riot police to arrive, coerce him into donning protective gear and make sorties against the assembled youngsters thirsting for blood and action outside. Shit, it felt as bad as conscription again. That itself had been abysmally awful, two years sitting in barracks being shouted at by loud-mouthed morons in uniform, with periods of standing on street corners armed with batons and shields: "Duties in Support of the State".

'What we really need,' said Barnes, ' is a spell of bad weather. 'Just our luck we've got an Indian summer. No chance of what we want.'

'Summer Indian?' asked Alex, unfamiliar with the idiom.

12) 

HAMBURG

MEDICAL ANNEXE

POLIZEI PLAZA OST

Once again the FedCon psychologist dropped himself into an over-stuffed armchair, but since the last time he had learnt to put a cover on his coffee cup. No spillage.

'Hello there,' said the other staffroom resident, a doctor. 'Tough morning, hmm?'

'Ja - sorry, yes, yes it has been,' replied the psychologist , reverting to his native Dutch for a second. 'I am getting nowhere with Subject Hellman. Very odd, very strange.'

The other man became professionally curious.

'Oh yes? The one I tested samples for -'

The Dutchman looked chidingly at his companion.

'Ethics, ethics…'

'Sorry. Hmm. Well, whoever I did those tests for had ingested one hell of a lot of drugs in the past. You should have seen the spectrograph - came out like a reference chart of illegal drugs.'

'But nothing chemically appropriate, really.'

'What do you mean by that?'

Careful not to mention names, the psychologist explained that the subject in question -

'Oh, damn it,' he grumbled, ' enough of this silly behaviour. Here's a transcript.'

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A VERBATIM ACCOUNT AS GIVEN BY THE UNDERSIGNED, GIVEN FREELY AND WITHOUT DURESS. THIS TRANSCRIPT IS DERIVED FROM TAPE RECORDS OF 21ST INST.

SUBJECT: Is it on? Yeah? Oh, right. Uh, my name is - what? Oh. Yeah, okay, I'll remember. No name. Um. It was back in the summer, beginning of June I think, the seventh or eighth. No, it was the eighth. I remember now, we - Theo and me, that's who I mean - oh shit should I have said his name? Well anyway we were doing a tour in Germany. No, no, a tour is when you do courier work for drug gangs, you know, carrying for them. you go from one place to another and they give you a per centage. Anyway we were down near Munich, a place called Bergen near an airstrip. Ah, we were sleeping rough in a wood, after we'd been dropping acid and tripping. It was good because you could lie on your back and watch the jets coming in to land and take off. Ah - yeah, well like I said we used to watch the jets coming down or going up. Then we heard this one coming in low, but it wasn't making the right noise, like the engines had failed, yeah? It was like a whistling - I know, like those dive-bombers you see in old war films. Theo and me both got up to see what was going on with it and this jet just went smack! Right into the fucking ground, blew itself to bits. Loads of bits, they were all flying all over the place. I ducked but Theo just stood there staring. Then he, uh, what was it - oh yeah he said - ah! - well he said to me "It's absolutely un-fucking-believable, it's not blown up any more." That's pretty much what he said.

SUBJECT PAUSED FOR 10 SECONDS

Can I have a glass of water? Nothing stronger? Just a thought. Right, well, okay, I looked up where Theo was pointing and this jet that had exploded was putting itself back together. No lie, I swear. All the bits sort of floated back together and they weren't burnt of twisted or anything. When it stopped it looked like it never crashed at all. It just sat there in a crater all of its own.

SUBJECT PAUSED FOR 30 SECONDS

Ah, Theo and me looked at each other at the same time and I could tell he was thinking what I was thinking as well - are we tripping out or what! So I said "did you see that crashed jet go back together again" and he said "yes" so I knew it couldn't be a hallucination because we both saw the same thing at the same time. Well, Theo decided to go and see what this thing was, so he walked out of the wood. And then this guy got out of the cockpit and climbed down. The pilot. Surprised me to see that, somehow I didn't think there'd be anyone in the jet. He was poking around the wheels - it had it's wheels down you see - and he had his back to us so he didn't see Theo coming at him. Me, I didn't want to have anything to do with it, it gave me a weird feeling, fucking gooseflesh, right? I mean, I've seen strange things before but this - I don't know, it felt wrong, sort of. You don't expect to see things like that when you're straight, man. Suddenly this guy heard Theo, who was about ten metres away and he turns round and shoots him. Just like that. Bang. Then he looked around and kept on shooting because he didn't see any witnesses. That did it for me, I legged it out of there. I don't mind telling you I was just about crapping myself before that psycho got out of his fucking death-jet. Shooting Theo, I couldn't take that. It felt like being in the middle of the worst trip ever except it was real life. So I got as far from Munich as fast as I could and ever since then I've tried to keep well clear of the Fed. It was a FedCon jet, you see, with that great big sign of theirs on the side. I never trusted them before and now …

DEBRIEFER: Did the jet crash? Maybe you hallucinated it.

SUBJECT: It left a fucking great crater! Of course it crashed! I know the difference between real life and imagination and being on a trip. And he killed Theo - d'you think I imagined that? No way. It's no wonder I kept well away from you lot, is it! That bitch in Hamburg dropped us right in it, I'd never have gone near that warehouse if I'd known it was FedCon. Is there any chance of being sent back to the police?

SUBJECT PAUSED FOR 2 MINUTES

SUBJECT: That's it. That's all. You want me to take the lie test, I will. But there's something fucking weird going on in the world if things like that go on. You get me?

END END END

After his companion finished reading the psychologist took back the transcript and shrugged.

'We gave him the Taunus test and guess what? He passed. So he believes what he told us, at the least.'

'What do you think happened?'

'Ah! Good question. Along the lines of: subject Lothar being on a drug trip, murders his friend and subsequently forms a confabulation to avoid confronting it.'

There were holes large enough to drive a truck through in that theory, however.