The Hotel Vulcan.
The Vulcan was a big, empty slab of concrete like a parking structure, hard by an overhanging cliff. It had been intended as a bit of luxury, a stopover for the jet set. Break your cruise at the Vulcan. Party in absolute privacy, play in the casino, no paparazzi allowed. It had a James Bond look from back when Connery had had the role, as if it might at any moment unleash a space rocket into the atmosphere or gape to reveal a diamond raygun. And it was derelict, or supposed to be, because the money had run out almost before the thing was finished. A rockfall during one of Mancreu’s fiercer seismic events had sheered off one wall of the main structure – incidentally revealing that the contractors had not used specified materials and the whole thing was unsafe – making it into part of the island’s landscape as much as the empty chemical plant on the other side. In another place it would have been a spawning ground for Mancreu kids looking for somewhere to go crazy, but Beauville was filled with those and the Vulcan was genuinely inhospitable. So it was just there, like a backdrop.
There was a utility entrance halfway along the cliff road. When the Sergeant pressed his palm against it, the door swung open soundlessly. He made sure the mask was in place and went in. A light burned somewhere ahead, but the corridor was black.
You do love your underground hideouts, don’t you?
He felt the chill again, caught a flash of understanding as it surfaced in his mind. He reached for it. Corpse-white and alien, the idea slid away from him into the dark.
He went on.
The sound of his own breathing echoed, reassuringly vile, from the walls. He was careful, checking the path ahead for trips and plates, letting the sound and the airflow tell him there was no one sneaking up behind. The sharkpunch lay along his hand. But that wasn’t it. This wasn’t a trap. Not this.
He saw the monster again in his mind’s eye and let it flee, let the rhythm of his steps take him inside his own head. What are you afraid of? Where’s the dance going, that you don’t want to be?
Tigerman, the boy, Jack and Sandrine. Kershaw and Dirac and the Fleet. Inoue, but she wasn’t in it, she was near it, through him and not. Raoul. Mancreu, Beauville and dead dogs. The dogs were bad, but this place was worse. He didn’t know why, knew that he should. The Vulcan. Vulcans. Star Trek. Romans. Gods… None of that. Sean Connery, that was the heart of the problem. Sean was bad news. Sean and Vulcan and the underground hideout. Jack, and the photograph in the cave: the boy and Shola. Pechorin and the killers and Sean Connery in his dinner jacket. The missile. There’s always a missile, always a ticking clock, always a double agent and a beautiful girl who needs saving. Pechorin released by Arno. Pechorin, who might be undercover. I tell you another time. Where had he got the heroin? If it wasn’t his, had he seized it? Stolen it? And the photograph of Shola along with it? How had he known about it? Someone had told him, had let him know. Jack, of course, Jack who knew everything, setting up Pechorin as his cat’s paw. Jack, who used everyone, who was everywhere, who saw everything.
Pechorin, and the cave, and the night which had forced him to be Tigerman in earnest.
Which he had enjoyed, and been terrified by, and which he had wisely put away because it was mad. But someone had made it news and the press had come.
But then he’d had to do it again when the Quads came and he took in the refugees – and where had the Quads come from, with their shiny bikes? Just like Shola’s killers, out of nowhere. And he’d been a hero right in front of those cameras, and Mancreu was in the news again, right now, when it was dying.
And now Sandrine needed saving and here he was again, because it let him be who he needed to be. But he had not exactly chosen it, had he, more been chosen by it. Tigerman thrust upon him, oh, yes. Reluctantly made a hero. Helped along, every step of the way, his paths made obvious and unambiguous by love, and need. Helped, or herded.
The corridor broadened into the lobby. The lobby of the Hotel Vulcan.
Vulcan and Sean Connery. James Bond and the space-rocket hotel.
Bad Jack’s home. His secret base.
Secret Vulcan base.
No. Not quite.
His secret volcano base.
Oh, please, no.
He stepped into the room, and knew he was right.
The lobby was a huge open space, and along the inner edges it was still very much itself, a little cracked: gold chandeliers and a huge pop art rendering of Marilyn Monroe singing for Kennedy printed onto one wall. The outer section was gone, and the huge plate of stone which had cut it away made a tolerable seal against the concrete and rebar. The space was neatly kept, and forty yards along a side. The furniture from the casino had been dragged here, so half of that was roulette tables. The light was from looped industrial working lamps. A thick trunk of cable ran out beneath the cliff and was probably spliced into Mancreu’s power grid out at the main road.
At the far end of this space was a bed, a work desk with a familiar old laptop, and a selection of bookshelves. Some of these were occupied by digital Betacam cassettes. Yes, of course. The video from the cave. You made it, you put it out. These days you could buy a transmitter on eBay, and they weren’t big.
And all across the carpet, some in random piles and others in perfect neat lines and grids, were comic books, and a dozen chairs and cushions and tables to read at.
He even told me. ‘Many floors underground in my secret volcano base. I drink brandy, wear a smoking jacket.’
The Sergeant took off his mask.
‘Hello, Jack,’ he said.
‘Hello, Lester,’ the boy replied.
It’s not a monster at all. It’s just the end of the world.
‘Is she out there?’ the Sergeant asked after they had stared at one another for a while. ‘Sandrine?’
‘No, of course not,’ the boy said. ‘She is back on the hillside. The town makes her crazy. Crazier. Everything is too big. Too loud. I sent the jeep, the woman. They sang to her and she went with them. It works sometimes.’
The Sergeant nodded. Yes. I see.
‘She cannot,’ the boy began, and choked. He tried again. ‘She cannot be anywhere else. Do you understand? For her, this is the whole world. It is all she is. They cannot evacuate the island. She will still be here, even if we take her away. And in a camp, while they make forms and argue, she will die.’ His voice harshened. ‘And it is a lie! It is unnecessary. Worse, it is stupid. They say it will save the world but Inoue says it will not. I read her reports. All of them. It will not help and they will do it anyway because it is some stupid game! To make law and then hide from it and pretend that is good. And for this stupid game of law they will kill my mother. Throw her away like trash. Because they have no better answer than to explode her home.’
‘So what did you need me for?’
A flash of shame. ‘We were friends.’
‘I thought so.’
‘That is real! We were friends. But I needed magic. And you are magic.’
‘I’m just some bloke!’
The boy shook his head. ‘Not any more. Lester Ferris is a real hero.’
‘Bollocks. You did it all. You made it happen.’
The boy shook his head. ‘Some. I laid a path. But you were more, always. You made it real. The riots, the cave. And you saved my life. In Shola’s.’
‘And you finished the job.’
‘Yes.’ Not a hint of doubt. Yes. I killed the men who would have killed me, who killed Shola. ‘I made it so that they would die. I let it be known that they were talking, and something must be done. That is how it is. Something must be done, and it is.’ He sighed.