Steal the Lightning: A Field Ops Novel (Field Ops #3)(7)

Here was a picture of him with a woman on his lap. It took a moment till I realized that this pretty blonde, with her impish little smirk, was my new friend, Melody Duchess. “You were beautiful,” I almost said, then stopped myself, wary of the past tense. “A proper beauty,” I told her, though the styles and fashions were long out of date, so that at times it was like seeing portraits of some primitive, far-distant tribe.

Melody nodded, graciously acknowledging my praise.

“We were a handsome couple, yes. Everybody said so.”

I ooh’d and ah’d and asked all the right questions, and when her glass emptied I filled it with another shot, and fetched the soda water for her, and was attentive and charming as any cheap seducer could be. And when I judged she’d softened up a bit, and when she sat there with a small, nostalgic smile upon her face, I broached my suit.

“Melody,” I said, “there’s something in my pocket that might interest you.”

She eyed me sideways, like a cadaverous Mae West.

She raised an eyebrow.

I burst out laughing.

“Sorry. That was the wrong thing to say. I don’t mean—”

She was chuckling, too, her shoulders shaking, the whiskey slopping in her glass.

“Heh. A girl can dream.”

She was drunk. Not so surprising, I suppose. I wondered if I ought to leave, come back tomorrow. But I thought about the job again. Maybe I could get it over with. It wouldn’t really be unfair, just running through things with her, would it? Just to show her what we were about. I wouldn’t make her sign anything, I wouldn’t even ask for promises . . .

I took the reader from my pocket.

“See this?” At a glance, it looked like a mobile phone, but when I switched on, the screen lit up in columns, green, yellow, red, and blue, then died again, waiting instructions.

She pulled a face, mimed disappointment.

“It’s called a reader. We use them in the Registry, part of our work. You see the bars here?” I lit the screen again. “Gods release a form of energy, each with its own specific signature. Some are stronger than others. With this, we can tell how much power we could harness from it, if we caught the thing. It can also give a big clue to its origins—similarity to other documented specimens, and so on. Which means, if there’s a god in the vicinity—”

She sniffed.

“If there’s a god,” she said.

“Well—yes. And I was wondering if, just for the record, if you’d let me take a reading here. I can do it right now, if you like. Just set the balance, program it . . . I promise, all it does is measure. Nothing else. But you’d find out what you bought. If you got your money’s worth or not.”

“Oh. I think I can go one better than that.”

Pushing on the chair arms with her hands, she levered herself up. It was hard to watch. Like seeing a paper doll unfold itself and try to walk. She moved across the room in a series of lurches, almost like controlled falls, catching herself with a hand on the magazine pile, then moving again, resting her knuckles on the sideboard, on the stack of clothes piled on the armchair. Then she bent, and, from beneath a bureau, produced a metal strongbox, just about big enough to hold a pair of shoes.

She was breathing hard when she straightened up. I went over to her.

“That’s it?”

“You hold your horses. I got the key here, somewhere . . .”

She rummaged for a while. She emptied out a coffee cup full of buttons, paper clips, old matchbooks and string. (Matchbooks, I thought: how long since people stopped handing out those?) She stirred the debris with a biro, and clicked her tongue. No key.

She sifted through the drawers. She dug into a stack of empty gift boxes, the kind of things an upmarket store will place your purchase in, if you say it’s for a special occasion. She had me move a stack of papers, reach down and feel behind the bureau. We’d been at this a while before I realized it was all a gag.

“You know where the key is, don’t you?”

“Oh, of course I do.”

On top of the bureau were a couple of cactus plants, stumpy, woody-looking things, and she reached up, felt about in the nearer pot, then held the key up, grinning.

“See? There all the time.”





Chapter 8

Negotiating with the Damned




“Come on, Christopher. Let an old girl have her fun . . .”

She eased herself into the chair.

I cleared a space on the table in front of her, and placed the box there.

“I was just fooling with you, hey? You know I like doing that.” She grinned, showing a row of perfect, even teeth, unnaturally white. “It gives me a laugh,” she said.

“OK.”

But I was losing patience now.

Her hands were stiff. She had some trouble with the lock, or she pretended to. At last, though, she turned the key.

Then she folded her hands upon her lap, and looked at me.

“Now then,” she said.

I stood back. That made her smile. I kept at arm’s length, cautiously lifting the lid, then flipped it open. It fell back, clattering.

And nothing happened.

I looked inside.

A piece of folded paper lay at one end of the box. At the time, I thought it could have been a letter, probably from Frugs.