nothing can make us die. That is what it is to be free. That’s why I
“A curious choice of conversational matter,” he said with a half-laugh. “Are you telling me in the hope that I will… maybe reconsider my orders; perhaps, even, permit your demise? A strange hope, for a creature who blazes without thought for lesser species in its path. Perhaps you’re just telling me for the sake of telling someone. It must be lonely, yes indeed, of course it must, inside your life. Not quite anything at all. Not quite human, not quite angel. Come be we and be free – and you’re stuck as both, and neither. Indeed, difficulties, naturally. I am tired.”
“Tired? Is that it?”
“For now,” he replied, waving absently towards the door. “Charlie!” He hardly raised his voice and Charlie was there. I stood up, acknowledging my dismissal, and noted his slow, shuddering breaths.
“Mr Sinclair?”
“Yes?”
“Who do you think betrayed us the night you were shot? How did they know we were there?”
“A pertinent question, indeed, yes. I would say Oda – but no, it isn’t her style. Perhaps the warlock…”
“He’s dead. He died fighting Lee. Lee stuffed paper down his throat to catch his dying breath.”
“Indeed.” Sinclair showed not a tremor. “I trust the fortune-teller, she has too much history to be a convincing suspect; and the wizard died. The Bag Lady, well, she is…”
“I know about the Bag Lady.”
“Well, then,” said Sinclair mildly, “you are starting to run short of suspects, aren’t you, Mr Swift?”
I nodded and forced a smile. “Thank you, Mr Sinclair. I hope you recover soon.”
“I will, Mr Swift, I assure you, I will. It’s all in the blood.”
I glanced at his face, but his eyes were shut and his expression that of a sleeping child, innocently relaxed as if it had always been that way. I let Charlie show me out, and wandered off in search of a bus.
This is the history of Harris Simmons.
He was born Harry Simon in a small town just outside Colchester, a fact that he didn’t like other people knowing – to the tune of one dead teacher, a mysteriously vanished family member with a Swiss bank account, and an arson attack at the local County Records Office. At the age of twenty-two, Harry Simon disappeared from his job at the local estate agency and Harris Simmons materialised in London with a degree in Econometrics from the London School of Economics, a perfect new pinstriped suit, a big briefcase, an accent that could have been polished on velvet and three months’ work experience with HSBC in Boston. Perhaps it was simply a bad year for PricewaterhouseCoopers in terms of intake – or perhaps they respected the kind of man capable of forging such credentials, as a useful asset to the team on his own basic merits. Whatever the reason, potential employers found it hard to say no to such a confident and self-possessed young gentleman, and Harris Simmons was soon earning more per bonus than his entire family had earned in twenty years of taxi-driving and bar service down at the pub. Sinclair ascribed no great moral evil to the fact that Simmons no longer supported his family – once he was so much more than just Harry Simon, he didn’t look back; and that, it was grudgingly admitted, was probably the only way to survive, with such an ambitious agenda.
At twenty-five, Harris Simmons became the youngest, best-paid executive inside the Golden Mile, that area of EC postcodes in the centre of London where between Monday and Friday you cannot move for sharp suits, and which on Saturday and Sunday lies as still as the morgue. Somewhere around this point, he was also introduced to the supernatural, and on the realisation that it was possible to manipulate markets by something as easy as cursing a German steel company on the Wednesday, having invested in their competitors on the Tuesday, he took to it with the slick ease of a man bred to such devices. At the age of twenty-six, a few months before I abruptly found myself dead beside the river, Harris Simmons was approached by Mr San Khay on behalf of a budding new finance and investment company largely owned by Mr Robert Bakker, and asked if he would like to be a partner. When he demanded what this company had going for it that made it worth his highly expensive time, the answer was simple. Market manipulation was a profitable business and at this company they knew the value of a good goblin in the files. Thus, Kenrick, Simmons and Powell was born, and quickly swept into the FTSE 100 and onto the markets with Simmons’s hand at the rudder. Indeed, its success was so astounding and its predictions so true and accurate, as it followed market fluctuations, that several discreet investigations were launched within its first year, in an attempt to determine whether it might be influencing events to its own advantage. But no conclusive evidence was found, and even the concerned citizens, of whom Sinclair was one, had difficulty understanding how such a new company could have such astounding success.
The profits from KSP did as profits do – fed more profits, and more, cycling back forever into the system that created them, largely for the sake of yet more profit. When that profit was simply too absurdly large to invest, and after the taxman had been sent away with the sneaky suspicion that he hadn’t taken his fill, the rest – millions a month – was siphoned off into the organisation loosely known as the Tower. Some went on simple personal pleasures – the wine, girls and general luxury of a particular lifestyle. Some went to Lee, to fund his bribery and blackmail throughout the lower magicial communities in the city; some was sent to other cities to establish more links for the Tower. And a large part went on what was simply known in the records as “Operations”.
It took Sinclair eighteen months to get an inventory of the needs of Operations, and the result explained to a large extent why so much was sucked into it each year. The silver teeth of dead prophets, the finger bones of ancient sorcerers, the blood of mythic beasts filtered through a sieve of frozen mercury, the jade-encrusted skull of a deceased necromancer, the still-beating heart of a newborn child whose mother’s womb was cursed by the hand of a voodoo witch – these things all cost money, particularly in the quantities in which Bakker, Khay, Simmons and Lee were acquiring them. For Lee, a regular supply of corpses and high-quality paper seemed a priority; for Khay, his tattoos were hardly cheap; for Simmons, endless trinkets of magical enchantment were wanted, to compensate for what was by nature a weak magical inclination.
To Bakker went all the rest. I recognised some of the ingredients and could guess at their purpose. There were only so many reasons why tens of thousands of pounds could have been spent on phone lines, modems, servers and intercept technology, only so many excuses to purchase shards of stone dug up from the first Roman ruin found underneath the city’s streets; only certain spells that could possibly require blue laser light reflected off a fairy’s aluminium wing – it was easy enough to recognise the ingredients of summonings and enchantments in Bakker’s wish-list, and to guess at their purpose. And it was all paid for by KSP, and Harris Simmons.
Did we need to find him?
Perhaps.
What would we do if we found him?
A problem for another time. Best not to think about it now.
I started by making a few phone calls.
“Good morning, KSP reception, how may I help you?”
“Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Amiltech Securities, I’m hoping I could make an appointment to see Mr Simmons.”
“Mr…”
“Harris Simmons, yes, sorry, you must have a lot in the business.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Simmons’ schedule is entirely full…”
“I’m willing to be very, very persistent.”
“Amiltech, was it?”
“Yes.”
“Can I take your name?”
“Adam Rieley.”
“Just a moment.”
The moment lasted five minutes of what sounded like the nose-pipe rendition of “Greensleeves”; it felt like five years. When she came back, I was so close to falling off the end of my hotel bed in dismay and irritation that I nearly did just that from surprise.
“Mr Rieley?”
“Still here.”
“I’m very sorry, but Mr Simmons is out of the country right now on business and won’t be back for several
