A Dream Of Locomotives

This used to be one of the top hotels in London, before Park Lane became a riot zone and the Arabs sold up and moved out. The area's on the way up again, I hear, but it's still a pretty grotty place. Twenty years ago I would never have got in here without booking at least a month in advance, but earlier this evening the man on the front desk barely gave me a second glance, even with my face covered in skinsub and micropore I'd bought at an all-night chemists' in Turnpike Lane.

No comment either about my lack of luggage. All I arrived with was a crinkly biodegradable plastic bag containing a toothspray and the hair dye and blue contact lenses I'd bought when I still thought changing my appearance had some value. Stupid. I could never change it enough.

The knees of my jeans are torn and the skin underneath is grazed from where Ballinger's men dropped me. Someone has stolen the room's first-aid kit and I didn't want to push my luck by calling room service for one, so I had to make do with cleaning the cuts and grazes in the bathroom sink.

I still have about three hundred euros in paper currency, the remains of the money Ballinger stuffed into my pocket in the house on Muswell Hill. And I have my credit cards, which I daren't use because the monster will be monitoring all the credit terminals in the South East. Similarly with my bank card, which in theory should allow me to access my bank account, but in practice will only get me killed.

I can't even get at the black accounts I banked my poker winnings in, because the monster knows about them too. Paranoia, real paranoia, is being hunted by something which knows all about you, from the date and circumstances of your first wank, to the last time and place where you took a piss.

After the incident with the Baron, Ballinger gave me a week off, and I sat around the flat watching Rixi systematically dismantling our life and shipping it up the West Anglia Great Northern tracks to Oakleigh Park. We didn't say a word to each other, and it was a relief when Ballinger called me back to the cards.

The thing with the Baron must have made an impression on him, though, because he started to sit in on some of the games. He always pretended he didn't know me, but sometimes he was on first-name terms with the other players, which made me so nervous I had to ask him to stop turning up.

For two months we - that is, I - made good money. I hardly saw the flat, and when I did it was always with some surprise that Rixi hadn't managed to move out yet.

Ballinger's second proposal was as reasonable as the first, and it came right out of the blue.

He called me one lunchtime, invited me out for a drink. Just a chat, old son. A discussion of the winnings.

We met in town, in a pub just outside the Temple. He had his lopsided grin, faint ghost of an evening's Paco. I had sore eyes and a fuzzy head and I kept tipping a glass of Perrier to my mouth, just to feel the icecubes against my lips.

We didn't talk about winnings. Always straight to the point, Ballinger. He'd made some kind of connection, something from far outside the Real World. I was too weary to do anything but listen and nod.

He said he was being paid to find someone to pick an executive, a corporate defector with some very valuable inside knowledge. Whoever owned this executive had him under a hypnotic lock not to spill his secrets. They'd also altered his blood chemistry so that truth drugs would either destroy his memory altogether or not work at all. No, they needed a good pick to do the job, and Ballinger had found me for them.

There would be a lot of money in it for me, and there was also the usual downside B say no and Ballinger would tell my poker-playing pals I'd been reading their minds...and so on and etcetera.

I remember lifting the glass and holding it to my forehead. He needn't have bothered with the threat; I was so far gone that the promise of the money would have been enough.

He turned up at the flat the next afternoon, dragged me out of bed and wandered about wrinkling his nose at themess while I tried to find some clothes.

When I had my act more or less together I sat on the sofa and blinked at him. He unzipped hiscalfskin document case and handed me a big padded envelope, stapled across the mouth. There were names and addresses front and back, none of them Ballinger's, and a smeared postmark defacing a big patch of ten-franc stamps in one corner. I turned it over and pulled at the tear-strip on the back. A snowfall of polystyrene packing beads cascaded into my lap, and with them something larger, heavier.

Well. Someone once told me that the world is made up of strata. Most people walk the same comfortable familiar middle stratum all their lives, and if they're lucky they're never more than dimly aware that there are levels above and below them. The thing that fell into my lap fell out of a stratum so far above anything I understood that it was very nearly occult.

It's on the bed now, bundled up in a pocket of my jacket. Tangle of optical ribbon, slim unit, skeletal headset. I should have thrown it away.

Rixi followed stuff like this, permanently tuned to exotic technologies that sift down from the upper strata and manifest themselves as photos and specs in the magazines, pirated printouts worn almost transparent by the number of clever hands they've been through. But I doubt that Rixi had ever heard of anything like this; it was so new, so esoteric, it still had its factory-prototype seals, and it made the burner she had built look like a thing of wood and straw.

Ballinger said it originated in the place where the CIA and Special Forces fade off into an unknown zone of mythical hardware and bizarre violence. A factory-fresh piece of American military necromancy.

I didn't say anything for a while. I sat with the burner's lead tangled around my fingers, the headset dangling between my knees. Finally I told Ballinger that with a burner like this the nearest dog could do the picking for him.

He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. Good joke. Three days to get used to the hardware, then it could happen any time. I'll let you know.

I told him this wasn't going to be like reading minds at a poker table. I needed an angle on the man I was going to pick, something I could identify with, but he was ahead of me there. From his case he produced a little chip player and half a dozen memory sticks. The first one I listened to had train noises on it. And the second. And the third. And so on.

Likes trains, Ballinger told me. Really loves the sound of trains. Diesels, mostly.