The City & the City - China Mieville [123]
We both looked up at percussion in the otherwise empty locked-down sky. A helicopter the only thing in the air, backlit by its own powerful lights as it left us below.
“It’s them,” I said. “We’re too late.” But the copter was coming in from the west, towards the riverbank. It was not an exit; it was a pickup. “Come on.”
Even in such a distracting night Ashil’s driving prowess cowed me. He veered across the dark bridge, took a one-way total street in Besźel the wrong way, startling pedestrians trying to get out of the night, through a crosshatch plaza then a total Ul Qoma street. I was leaning to watch the helicopter descend into the roofscape by the river, half a mile ahead of us.
“It’s down,” I said. “Move.”
There was the reconfigured warehouse, the inflatable gasrooms of Ul Qoman buildings to either side of it. No one was in the square, but there were lights on throughout the Sear and Core building, despite the hour, and there were guards in the entrance. They came towards us aggressively when we entered. Marbled and fluorescently lit, the S&C logo in stainless steel and placed as if it were art on the walls, magazines and corporate reports made to look like magazines on tables by sofas.
“Get the fuck out,” a man said. Besź ex-military. He put his hand to his holster and led his men towards us. He came up short a moment later: he saw how Ashil moved.
“Stand down,” Ashil said, glowering to intimidate. “The whole of Besźel’s in Breach tonight.” He did not have to show his sigil. The men fell back. “Unlock the lift now, give me the keys to reach the helipad, and stand down. No one else comes in.”
If the security had been foreign, had come from Sear and Core’s home country, or been drafted in from its European or North American operations, they might not have obeyed. But this was Besźel and the security was Besź, and they did as Ashil said. In the elevator, he drew out his weapon. A big pistol of unfamiliar design. Its barrel encased, muzzled in some dramatic silencer. He worked the key the security had given us, to the corporate levels, all the way up.
THE DOOR OPENED onto gusts of hard cold air amid surrounds of vaulting roofs and antennae. The tethers of the Ul Qoman gasrooms, a few streets off the mirrored fronts of Ul Qoman businesses, the spires of temples in both cities, and there in the darkness and the wind ahead of us behind a thicket of safety rails the helipad. The dark vehicle waiting, its rotor turning very slowly, almost without noise. Gathered before it a group of men.
We could not hear much except the bass of the engine, the siren-infested putting down of unification riots all around us. The men by the helicopter did not hear us as we approached. We stayed close to cover. Ashil led me towards the aircraft, the gang who did not yet see us. There were four of them. Two were large and shaven-headed. They looked like ultranats: True Citizens on secret commission. They stood around a suited man I did not know and someone I could not see from the way he stood, in deep and animated conversation.
I heard nothing, but one of the men saw us. There was a commotion and they turned. From his cockpit the pilot of the helicopter swivelled the police-strength light he held. Just before it framed us the gathered men moved and I could see the last man, staring straight at me.
It was Mikhel Buric. The Social Democrat, the opposition, the other man on the Chamber of Commerce.
Blinded by the floodlight I felt Ashil grab me and pull me behind a thick iron ventilator pipe. There was a moment of dragged-out quiet. I waited for a shot but no one shot.
“Buric,” I said to Ashil. “Buric. I knew there was no way Syedr could do this.”
Buric was the contact man, the organiser. Who knew Mahalia’s predilections, who had seen her on her first visit to Besźel, when she angered everyone at the conference with her undergraduate dissidence. Buric the operator. He knew her work and what she wanted, that abhistory, the comforts of paranoia, a