“That is a mystery we cannot answer now, let us not waste time on it.”
“It matters to me!”
“We have to talk escape. We must not be The Captain’s insurance.”
“Suppose we do escape? What then? We’re two head of surplus on the public drains. Have you thought about that?”
“I would far prefer to die on the public drains than serve the purposes of a malignant swine like The Captain,” Pezzini said.
“Well I would not. I want a death worth dying. Starving to death on the public drains is not my kind of death.”
He heard Pezzini laugh softly at that.
“A top killer who seeks a hero’s death?” Pezzini carried on with his cackling. Lawrence could not prevent a sense of shrivelling within himself in the face of such derision. He struggled to regain some self-respect.
“Well I have an idea, Pezzini. We head for London and make contact with my father. He’s a senior judge of the Land Court—that means town society takes him seriously. He’s above the sovereigns and their squabbling—he’s the guy who decides which sovereign is right and which is wrong. TK can’t just chuck him away in a place like this.
“I don’t suppose my father would accept much from me, really, given my… history.” Lawrence slowed in saying these words. Is it not strange how one’s own voice can be the bitterest critic? This moment was the first time in his life he sensed a crack in the certainty of his top killer’s convictions. A lion treading on a thorn will stagger but keep going, too proud to limp, yet vaguely aware the thorn will slowly kill it. Lawrence kept talking. “But you’re a guy he’d take seriously. I get you inside the Central Enclave and into my father’s study. After that, it’s up to you to convince him the Value System exists and he has to take such action as is required to destroy it. That’s the plan.”
Pezzini said nothing, so Lawrence continued.
“There is only way that stands even a remote chance of success. We take a barge and sail away. This place is miles inside a marsh that runs south all the way to Cambridge. Trying to cross a marsh in winter is simply impossible. There are mud pools that swallow trucks whole, a man is just a light snack, and there are no landmarks. Without a compass, you’ve got no chance.”
“We would need a trained crew to handle a barge.”
“One determined man can do it,” Lawrence said. “They’re designed to sail light handed—and I have a Master’s Certificate. I know barges, do not worry about that. What concerns me is we can’t stock food for the trip. Even carrying water will be a challenge. We won’t last long at sea without water.”
“What about guards?”
Lawrence paused. In all his nocturnal explorations, he had never ventured out as far as the Tidal Basin. The necessity to take the risk had not arisen, so he had not taken it.
“Guarding isn’t the style of the ultramarines.” He frowned. It was a puzzler. “There have to be guards. Look, there is no easy way out, Pezzini. At best, we have maybe a 10% chance of getting away. We can improve the odds through preparation. Are you still so dogmatically fixated on escape now?”
“You do not appear to grasp the seductive effects of ceremony. Once you dress in the beautiful black, swear before witnesses and accept their gifts and camaraderie, you will never turn back.”
Lawrence was feeling exhaustion from the long day creeping upon him. There was also a deeper fatigue—that crack in his convictions ached inside him. He had to force himself to keep speaking.
“To get out, we need a barge. No barge, no way out. Saturday night is our only chance, because there’s no evening shift and they expect plenty of noise. Sometimes they have several barges in over the weekend. Other times, none at all. It’s out of our hands. We’ll meet again Saturday lunch time, very briefly, to agree on go or no-go. Until then, we ignore each other.”
“Suppose there’s no barge?”
“Then we take The Captain’s offer and escape when we get the chance.”
“Let us hope there is a barge.”
Privately, Lawrence hoped there was not. It was lunacy to think of escape in late November. He pushed out through the bushes and loped back along the gravel path, easily able to follow it blind in the dark. He focused on practical details of escape to keep his mind off other things.
By next Saturday, low tide would be at about five in the morning and evening. It would be high tide at around eleven on Saturday evening, which meant a nice early morning ebb to get them well out to sea by first light—if a barge was there. Any barge would have to arrive either on the tide of Friday evening or that of early Saturday morning. Either way, the Saturday morning shift would be too late to unload it, so the afternoon shift would have to do that, leaving an empty barge over Saturday night and Sunday for loading on Monday. No other permutation was likely enough to bother about.
But of course, there might be no barge at all.
He took a long time to sleep that night, the sharp edge of reality chafing the flesh of his
