redRobe by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Author:Jon Courtenay Grimwood [Grimwood, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf
Published: 2000-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Cutting A Deal

The onions made his eyes water but Axl kept at it, cutting out the rotten bits and tossing the onion flesh that was still edible into an iron bucket. He was sitting on a bench in the kitchen at Escondido preparing supper.

The Hideaway.

Axl didn’t know if it was Kate who’d called the place El Escondido. He only knew Father Sylvester wasn’t based there and the monastery was unoccupied except for Kate, the kid, Kate’s servant Louis and the Clone. And except for the kid they were all down in the village, doing something he wasn’t meant to know about.

There was nothing of value in the enormous house, unless you liked old statues and musty wall hangings that reeked of damp and dust. Axl knew. He’d laboriously checked every room from the slab-floored cellars to the empty attic with its broken roof tiles that let heat out and rain in.

Mind you, Axl hadn’t expected to find some elegant little smartbook belonging to Kate, still powered up and containing details of transparent bank accounts at Hong Kong Suisse in Zurich. Not straight off. Unlike His Excellency, Axl didn’t believe in miracles. He believed in sex and cheap drugs and all the other shallow gratifications that made life bearable.

Only you couldn’t get 4-MTA in Cocheforet. In fact, from what Axl remembered from the newsfeeds back home, you couldn’t score anywhere on Samsara. The wheelworld was a drug-free zone. Privately, Axl doubted that. All he needed to make life bearable was a heat source, some fairly basic chemicals and a half-intelligent twelve-year-old amateur chemist. And if crystalMeth was off the menu then someone somewhere had to be cooking china white. All that took was bloody poppies, for God’s sake, the kind Kate kept doping him with.

But if the kid was to be believed there was no meth, no china white and not even any cooking sulphate. There would be—of course—somewhere. In one of the tourist towns just outside Vajrayana. Some makeshift kitchen would be turning out meth by the tray. The big problem for Axl was he didn’t know where that town was and couldn’t afford the time to get there even if he did.

On the other hand, supplies aside, he could hardly claim life wasn’t interesting. In the last week he’d got beaten up, fucked somebody’s wife without even bothering about retro Virus, taken down that fat sergeant… What was even better, he’d made contact with Kate without having to leap through too many hoops. All he need do now was get into the Japanese girl’s confidence and find out what the fuck was making Kate so jumpy.

It was hardly a difficult assignment. He went in, he found Kate and grabbed her. Then he revealed himself as a member of the Rights Police, pulled a Section 53i on Tsongkhapa and took the woman to Vajrayana for repatriation. The job was so basic even a kid could have done it. Axl knew that for a fact, the Cardinal had told him so.

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