The Devil You Know

I slipped out of the archive at lunchtime and crossed the road to Euston Station. I’ve never liked the place; it looks like a scaled-up model of something run up by a Blue Peter presenter out of the slatted interiors of fruit boxes. But it teems with people around the clock, which made it an ideal place for a private meeting. Feeling guilty and hunted because of what I was carrying under my shirt, I glanced around behind me. The crowds parted for a moment, and a female figure ten paces or so behind me turned and took a sudden interest in a newspaper display. I wasn’t sure, but again I thought I recognized her as Damjohn’s girl. Rosa. I hesitated. I had to meet Nicky, and I knew he wouldn’t wait, but I was in a maze, and any Ariadne would do. I took a few steps toward her, but then a few more clusters of people eddied past, and when I got to the newsstand, there was no sign of her.

With a grimace of annoyance, I moved on to the Burger King. It doesn’t have any doors; it just opens out directly onto the concourse, which was why I’d chosen it. Nicky likes to have a clear field of vision in all directions.

As soon as I sat down in the coffee shop, he was pulling out a chair and slipping in next to me. He must have been circling around for a while, waiting for me to show, but it would go against the grain for him to sit down first. I felt the chill coming off him; he’d be wearing freezer packs under his bulky fleece, and probably a thermos of dry ice somewhere to freshen them up. Unlike most of the risen dead, Nicky was always pragmatic and prepared.

From his pocket he produced a thin sheaf of A4 pages, folded in half and then in quarters. He handed them to me, and I looked a question.

“Dead girls,” he said. “The stuff you were asking about.”

“Quick work,” I said, impressed.

“Easy work. But like I said, you gave me a sloppy brief; there’s a lot of stuff there. You’ve still got your work cut out. Now, what’s today’s crisis?”

I took the small but heavy bundle out of my shirt and slid it across the table to him: hard, rectangular, wrapped in newsprint from that morning’s Guardian. He unwrapped it and stared at it as though he’d never seen one before.

It had taken a lot of nerve to walk past Frank with that stuffed up my shirt. I’d thought of asking him for my coat, but I didn’t want to risk drawing any more attention to myself. “I need it looked at,” I told Nicky. “Looked at properly. Dissected, autopsied, and written up in excessive detail. The file you’re particularly looking at is called RUSSIAN1. It’s a database file. I want to know if it’s been tampered with—if anything unusual has been done to it anywhere along the line.”

“This is somebody’s laptop,” Nicky said.

“Yeah.”

“Not yours?”

“No.”

“Stolen, Castor?”

“Borrowed. It’ll get back to its rightful owners in due course.”

“And you’ve got the brass balls to pass it on to me?”

“Sure, Nicky. They’re already out to get you, remember? And you’re dead. You don’t have a damn thing to lose.”

Nicky wasn’t amused. “The work I do,” he muttered, glaring at me, “I try to keep it as low profile as I can. I try not to disturb the grid. Because the grid”—he gestured with his hands, fingers spread—“is like a great, flowing river. And along the banks of the river, a whole army of guys are sitting on folding chairs with rods and lines all set up. Everything you touch, Castor—everything you touch is a hook. There are people out there who want to know everything there is to know about you. So they can control you. So they can neutralize you. So they can kill you whenever they want to. You think I don’t know that paranoia is a clinical condition? I know better than anyone. But you embrace it when it becomes a survival trait.”

“And the scariest thing is that you’re making sense to me,” I observed sourly. “Listen. I swear to you, your name never gets mentioned. Nothing you do for me goes any further—even to the guy who hired me. I just use it to corroborate what I already know or think I know. And afterward, I’ll owe you a favor. A really big one.”

Nicky nodded slowly, more or less satisfied. “I like people owing me favors,” he said. “Okay, Castor, I’ll shag your laptop.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to tell if someone’s doctored that file?”

He laughed mirthlessly at that. “Are you joking? I’ll be able to tell if anyone farted in the same room as this machine. And what they ate beforehand. I’ve got my methods, Castor—and my resources. Your succubus, by the way, she’s been around for a while.”

The body swerve left me standing. “What?”

“There are descriptions of her in some of the grimoires. The black eyes. The dead white skin. The name.”

“Juliet?”