25
London The London Cage occupied one part of a former paper-recycling plant on the river at Creekmouth, an industrial suburb east of the city. Caitlin and Dalby set out along the A13 after overnighting at the Ibis Hotel on Commercial Street in Aldgate. More than half the hotels in London had closed over the previous three years, but the Ibis chain had survived by virtue of a contract with the government to provide discounted accommodations to civil servants traveling for work. Caitlin had stayed there before. She'd been too young to work behind the Iron Curtain, but she imagined that the old Soviet-era tourist hotels had probably been something like this. Clean but drab, with at least one 'experience' to be savored in every room. A threadbare towel. A half-empty bar fridge. Flickering lightbulbs. Reused soap. And surly, off-putting security staff, a disconcerting number of whom were forbidding bull dykes seemingly recruited from some underground lesbian wrestling league. They prowled the floors constantly. Her first stay at the Aldgate Ibis, one had knocked on her door three times during the night, to 'check that everything was in order,' leaving her alone only after Caitlin had jammed the muzzle of a Glock 17 in her face and shouted that apart from her not being a morning person, everything was 'just fucking fine.'
This trip they checked in well after midnight and left just after dawn, with Dalby brushing aside all the usual demands for travel warrants, internal passports, and itineraries with a brusque refusal to cooperate and an imperious flick of his ID badge into the bleary, sleep-deprived face of the night manager, who was still on duty at six in the morning.
'You know, sometimes I think we should be done with it and just get ourselves Gestapo outfits,' Caitlin said. 'You know, some really spanking long black leather coats and dark fedoras. Then we wouldn't even have to worry about badging people or waving Glocks in their fucking faces. Everybody would just know to fear us.'
Dalby gave her a quizzical look as they rode the elevator down to the car park.
'Sometimes with you Americans it is impossible to know whether you are being funny or simply far too enthusiastic.'
'Jeez, Dalby, and they reckon we don't get irony.'
'Nobody gets irony anymore, Caitlin. We live in a post-ironic world.'
She slung her backpack, a small overnight bag really, into the back of Dalby's precious little car and folded herself into the passenger seat. He turned on the radio after doing up his belt, locking the doors, and keying the ignition-the exact same sequence of actions he performed every time they climbed into the compact Mercedes. Caitlin wondered why he didn't just leave the radio on, but she was coming to understand that Mister Dalby was a man of very particular habits. The only music he ever played in the car was a CD compilation of popular classics. And when he wasn't playing that, he would listen to BBC Radio 4, which was what she would have called a news radio channel.
He flicked that on now as Caitlin ran her fingers through still-damp hair, tying it back with an elastic band. She'd had time for a quick shower this morning but not for much else in the way of personal grooming. At least the water had been reasonably hot this time. On her last extended trip to the Cage the hot water in the hotel had been out for two days, and when it did come back on, it smelled strongly of sulfur. Dalby drove out of the car park as Charlotte Green finished a report on trials of GM wheat and soy in Wiltshire.
'We were part of that,' said Caitlin. 'Bret was supposed to go to a briefing up in Swindon before Richardson's crew tried to hit him.'
Dalby turned onto Whitechapel Road before negotiating the turn onto the A13. Traffic was very light as always, just a few commercial vehicles and a bus coming in from the suburbs. It was three minutes before they saw another private car like their own. Most of the shops along the retail strip were still closed, many of them boarded up for good. Here and there, though, she did see a new cafe, and in one case a knitwear store had opened. So perhaps the chancellor of the Exchequer was not talking entirely through his ass when he spoke about a few 'promising green shoots' poking through the ashen wasteland of Britain's post-Wave economy. After all, they had been getting increasing orders for Bret's farmhouse goat cheese these past three months, which was very much a luxury item, something he had begun pottering about with, in the English style, after reading an article on Britnet about artisan cheese making.
'Do you enjoy the farm, Caitlin? It's not in your family history, is it? Farming, I mean. You were an air force child as I recall.'
She had never told him that, but she wasn't surprised that he knew. As soon as Dalby had been given her case, he would have called for her personnel file and had probably even spoken to her old controller, Wales Larrison, who worked liaison in Vancouver these days. Thinking of Wales gave her an unexpected pang of homesickness.
'My grandparents on Mom's side scratched at the Dust Bowl for a while in Oklahoma,' she said. 'But not for long. So no, I wouldn't say we were farming folk. But I do enjoy it, Dalby. It's… peaceful, you know. Even getting out of bed at four in the morning to go fist some poor cow in a freezing barn… it's better than being stuck in the cells at fucking Noisy-le-Sec, let me tell you.'
'You don't have to tell me,' he said without elaborating.
The six o'clock bulletin came on, read by Alan Smith.
'Fighting continues in New York,' he announced, 'after a failed attempt on the life of President James Kipper yesterday. U.S. forces press on with their counteroffensive to retake the strategic port against heavy resistance. Prime Minister Howard will call the Cabinet Security Committee together this morning to discuss what help might be offered the U.S. administration.'
'Do you really think that business was an assassination attempt on Kipper?' Dalby asked as they passed a small convoy of Ministry of Resources vans heading into town. 'I mean, it seems a rather ham-fisted way to have at a chap, I would have thought. It's not as though your Mister Kipper doesn't present himself as a tempting target most days of the week, anyway, with this living among the people rubbish of his.'
'Why, Dalby,' Caitlin said in a delighted voice, 'I do believe that's the most disapproving tone I have ever heard from you. Not a Kipper man, then, eh?'
The Home Office man nearly blushed at his indiscretion.
'Oh, I'm sure I don't have any opinion at all of U.S. politics, Caitlin. I find the plethora of new green parties and millennarian crazy men to be quite beyond fathoming. As I'm sure many of your country folk must long for the certainties of the old two-party system.'
'Like here?' She smirked.
'Point taken,' he muttered as they drove slowly past a minibus that had been pulled over by heavily armed special constables. The occupants were filing out, hands on heads, and lining up by the side of the road in front of a cash and carry and a money transfer bureau, apparently both owned by the same Indian family. A hand-painted sign hanging in the window of the money transfer announced 'Fresh Basmati this Tuesday!' The minibus passengers looked like they were probably Pakistanis, or 'deshis from the Enclosures in South London, being bused into the city for a work detail. They had a sullen, beaten-down air of resignation about them and paid no heed to the three Indian children who came laughing and spilling out of the shop to watch. One of the specials crouched down on one knee while keeping his MP5 trained on the detainees to exchange a joke with the smiling, chattering children. Caitlin wondered whether the detainees envied those on the watch list who'd been deported. The Enclosures was a very grim and isolated place.
And then they were past the scene. Alan Smith continued in his calm, almost sublime way, recounting tales of horror from the night. The firebombing of a Hindu corner store in Newham that had killed the family of eight sleeping in the rooms above. The famine in western China. And an Amnesty International report on death squads in President Morales's South American Federation led into a final bookend report on Brazil's resurgent nuclear weapons program.
Caitlin listened despondently, wondering whether there might be a lighter story at the end of the bulletin simply to lift the spirits. But before handing off to the sports desk, the newsreader finished with a reminder that government inspectors would be double-checking ration cards this week after a significant increase in the incidence of forgeries.
'Enough gloom for one morning, I think,' Dalby said, and he switched the audio to his classical compilation CD. The track that came on was Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, which to Caitlin's way of thinking wasn't exactly 'Disco Inferno.' It was more 'music to eat your pistol by,' and she did her best to block it out.
'Have you sent anything to Wales about Baumer yet?' she asked. 'He'd want to know.'
'Mister Larrison, you mean? Yes. Vancouver liaison gets a routine weekly brief from the Cage on all of our
