‘This apartment has even more cameras per hundred square feet than the rest of the facility,’ she says, ‘but they’re all concealed, for realism. We can analyse every tactical simulation with incredible specificity. The action couldn’t be clearer if it was in chess notation.’
Now the Burmese guy is filling an electric kettle from the tap. The linoleum tiles on the floor have a hexagon pattern.
‘So what’s he supposed to be making here?’ says Raf. ‘Explosives?’ If this is how Lacebark have chosen to array their simulated high-value target, then presumably at least one of their real high-value targets is believed to be hiding out in a real laboratory somewhere.
‘For the purposes of the tactical exercises, all that matters is that there may be volatile chemicals in the apartment.’
Raf rehearses his next question in his head a few times before he voices it. ‘I’m curious to know how much evidence you have that a tactical exercise in a controlled environment like this can translate to concrete results out on the street.’
‘Do you mean from our own experience? I don’t have direct access to a lot of that information. But based on what I’ve heard from Lacebark personnel in London, it’s hard to overestimate how helpful this facility has been to prepare for their recent operations.’
How far can he push this? ‘Those operations. .’
‘Obviously I’m not at liberty. .’
‘Right. Sure.’
‘Is there anything else you’d like to see?’
Raf shakes his head. ‘This is already a lot to take in,’ he says, truthfully.
As they leave the kitchen, Raf turns back for one last look, and by accident he makes eye contact with the Burmese guy, who is standing there watching them go while the kettle boils. For an uncomfortable second they have both broken character, although if any coded signal passed between them, Raf wouldn’t be able to say what it was. He follows Belasco back down the stairs and out into the ‘street’. Rain is still trickling from the trees.
‘How long are you staying in London?’ she says.
Raf begins to relax. The tour has reached its epilogue of rote small talk. Now all he has to do is get to the exit. ‘Just until tomorrow morning.’
‘And then more travel?’
Raf remembers that town she mentioned earlier. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Straight back to Fehedou.’
Belasco frowns. ‘But I understood that Nostrand pulled out of Fehedou right after the truck bomb.’
A puff of liquid nitrogen in Raf’s guts. How bad was that slip? He can’t tell. But now Belasco is looking straight at him, and he knows that just because he’s got this far without fucking up, it won’t necessarily keep her from leaving him with a security guard while she calls Nostrand to check his credentials. He thinks of the order of service sheet in his pocket. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We did.’ If he tries to explain away the mistake he’ll just make another one. But Belasco has a fontanelle of her own, and Raf’s best option is to put his thumb on it. ‘By the way, Denise, the core scenario installation you showed me: I was wondering about the smell. Is that all artificial too?’
His guess is that if he’d asked any other question, Fehedou would still have been on Belasco’s mind. But instead she looks as if now she just wants this conversation to conclude as fast as possible.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘All artificial. We use the latest Biopac Scent Delivery System, with sixteen cartridge slots. I guess it might have been a little, uh, a little too thick in the air today!’
She smiles, and Raf smiles warmly back. Inside his polished black shoes all ten of his toes are clenched so hard they feel as if they might snap off.
4.15 p.m.
It’s about glow. It’s got to be about glow. This is what Raf says to himself as he unclips Rose’s leash after a trip to the Iranian corner shop for booze and dog food. Back at Lacebark’s doll’s house, when Belasco showed him the fake laboratory, the reason he asked about bombs in particular was that news footage from the War on Terror was looping in his head, satellite maps riddled with ‘black sites’ like tumours on a CT scan. But Belasco didn’t confirm that and he shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. Instead, he needs to get to his computer and do some homework to batten his new hunch. He’s trying not to think too hard about the risk he took today, because now that the adrenaline’s turned to vinegar and he’s safely back in his flat, there’s some chance he might start whimpering to himself. And it’s funny that for comfort he’s turned instinctively to a bottle of whisky and a faithful hound, which makes him feel like some sort of red-faced country squire. But no one has invented a pill yet that does the job so well.
A laboratory is like a radio transmitter: if you have one in your flat you might just be a hobbyist but you are more likely a criminal. Most of the laws you can break with a glass pipette involve either drugs or weaponry. Once in a while the two coincide. There’s a synthetic opioid called 3-methylfentanyl that’s about six thousand times as strong as morphine and has its own small population of addicts dispersed across the Baltic States like an obscure and wretched religious sect, but which was also the basis of the aerosol spray that killed over a hundred hostages when the Spetsnaz pumped it into the air-conditioning system of that theatre in Moscow in 2002. In principle, an entrepreneurial terrorist planning an attack on the London Underground could wholesale half his 3-methylfentanyl to drug pushers in order to subsidise the production of the other half. But what rules out 3-methylfentanyl here, along with sarin and acetone peroxide and every other high explosive and nerve agent that Raf can find listed on the internet, is that none of them has organic precursors. If Lacebark are using herbicides against something that’s blossoming outside council estates, it must be for the same reason that Thai customs officers confiscate sassafras oiclass="underline" they’re trying to scotch one of the ingredients in a drug recipe. And in this case it’s not going to be coca shrubs or opium poppies or sassafras trees. So what is it?
At first, Raf tries reasoning forward from the precursor to the drug. Thinking of that anonymous email, he wonders if the precursor might be one of the forty-three plants that Linnaeus listed for his flower clock. But none of them is known to have narcotic derivatives. The best he can do is the Icelandic poppy (7 p.m.), which has some of the same alkaloids as the opium poppy but not nearly enough to be useful, and the dandelion (5 a.m.), which makes dandelion wine. Raf feels pretty confident that Lacebark haven’t come to London for dandelion wine. He’s leaning too hard on a rickety clue. Perhaps the precursor is just some other plant with the potential to fill a slot in the Horologium Florae but that wasn’t necessarily known to Linnaeus. That could be any one of a few hundred thousand species.
So he tries reasoning backwards from the drug to the precursor. With real ecstasy so scarce, London is a salon of avant-garde compounds at the moment: ethylbuphedrone and DMBDB and MDPV and a lot of other pretenders. But there’s one that stands out. Glow. Cherish asked him about it at the rave. Ko offered to sell him some a few days later. That’s why he was wondering about it even before he started this research.