The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [114]
We watched as they entered the smoking lounge. We quickly tiptoed across the hall floor and found ourselves at the ornate door. I counted to three and we burst in.
“Thursday! My dear girl, how predictable!”
I stared. Hades was sitting in a large armchair, smiling at us. Mycroft and Jane were looking dejected on a chaise longue with Felix8 behind them holding two machine pistols trained on Bowden and me. In front of them all was the Prose Portal. I cursed myself for being so stupid. I could sense Hades was here; did I suppose he could not do the same with me?
“Drop your weapons, please,” said Felix8. He was too close to Mycroft and Jane to risk a shot; the last time we met he had died as I watched. I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“Haven’t I seen your face somewhere before?”
He ignored me.
“Your guns, please.”
“And let you shoot us like dodos? No way. We’re keeping them.”
Felix8 didn’t move. Our weapons were by our side and his were pointing straight at us. It wouldn’t be much of a contest.
“You seem surprised that I was expecting you,” said Hades with a slight smile.
“You could say that.”
“The stakes have changed, Miss Next. I thought my ten million ransom was a lot of money but I was approached by someone who would give me ten times that for your uncle’s machine alone.”
Mycroft shuffled unhappily. He had long ago ceased to complain, knowing it to be useless. He now looked forward only to the short visits he was permitted to Polly.
“If that is the case,” I said slowly, “then you can return Jane to the book.”
Hades thought for a minute.
“Why not? But first, I want you to meet someone.”
A door opened to the left of us and Jack Schitt walked in. He was flanked by three of his men and they were all carrying plasma rifles. The situation, I noted, was on the whole less than favorable. I muttered an apology to Bowden then said:
“Goliath? Here, in Wales?”
“No doors are closed to the Corporation, Miss Next. We come and go as we please.”
Schitt sat down on a faded red upholstered chair and pulled out a cigar.
“Siding with criminals, Mr. Schitt? Is that what Goliath does these days?”
“It’s a relativist argument, Miss Next—desperate situations require desperate measures. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. But listen, we have a great deal of money at our disposal and Acheron is willing to be generous in the use of Mr. Next’s notable invention.”
“And that is?”
“Ever seen one of these?” asked Schitt, waving the stubby weapon he held at us both.
“It’s a plasma rifle.”
“Correct. A one-man portable piece of field artillery, firing supercharged quanta of pure energy. It will cut through a foot of armor plate at a hundred yards; I think you will agree it is the high ground for land forces anywhere.”
“If Goliath can deliver—” put in Bowden.
“It’s a mite more complicated than that, Officer Cable,” replied Schitt. “You see—it doesn’t work. Almost a billion dollars of funding and the bloody thing doesn’t work. Worse than that, it has recently been proved that it will never work; this sort of technology is quite impossible.”
“But the Crimea is on the brink of war!” I exclaimed angrily. “What happens when the Russians realize that the new technology is all bluff?”
“But they won’t,” replied Schitt. “The technology might be impossible out here but it isn’t impossible in there.”
He patted the large book that was the Prose Portal and looked at Mycroft’s genetically engineered bookworms. They were on rest & recuperation at present in their goldfish bowl; they had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and