Still, at least she’d be cool . . . Louisa couldn’t help what she did next: she raised her arms, aeroplane mode, and allowed refrigerated air to creep under her blouse and stroke her skin.
Douglas was watching her. “Your hair really has changed colour, you know,” he told her.
“It was deliberate.”
“Disguise, sort of thing?”
“Yes,” she said. “That sort of thing.”
River said, “How big’s your team down here?”
Douglas gave him a superior look which fit him about as well as his moustache. “That’s classified.”
“Classified,” said River. “Gotcha.” He paused. “Can I see your Service card?”
“My what?”
“Your Service card. To verify your security rating.”
“. . . I don’t have a Service card.”
“Right.”
“I’m not Service. You already know that.”
“Right,” River said. “But see, that’s where the whole classified thing gets complicated. Because my security rating’s higher than yours. You know, because you haven’t got one.”
“I’ve been vetted,” Douglas said.
“That’s obvious,” Louisa began, but ran so smoothly into her next sentence that River’s warning glance was unnecessary. “You’re in charge of this facility, you’ve got a lot of . . . equipment, there’s no way you got here without undergoing pretty vigorous assessment.” She tugged at her blouse again, allowing more air to circulate. “But we get ridden pretty hard too, Douglas, which is how come we’re cleared for the serious stuff. You know, the full-on hardcore action . . . Do you know what I mean, Douglas?”
Douglas cleared his throat. “Ungh. I mean, I think so.”
River seemed to having an allergic reaction to the chilled air: he’d put finger and thumb to his nose, and was squeezing hard.
“That’s good, Douglas.” Louisa released her blouse, and ran a hand through her hair. “So that puts us on the same side, doesn’t it?”
“. . . Um, yes. I guess so.”
“That’s lovely. How many others are down here with you, Douglas?”
“Er . . . right now? Or usually?”
“Right now.”
“None.”
“How about usually?” River asked.
“Well, usually . . . none.”
“None,” said River.
“Except there’s a walk-through once a week. My boss does a sweep, makes sure everything’s how it should be.” He raised a finger to his upper lip, checking on his moustache’s progress. “The rest of the time, we’re on our own.”
“We?” said Louisa.
“Me and Max.” Douglas coloured slightly. “It’s what I call my computer.”
“You’ve given your computer a name,” Louisa said, without inflection.
“It’s voice-responsive.”
So was Louisa’s keyring, but she hadn’t formed a club with it.
Douglas tugged at his collar, in unconscious imitation of Louisa’s cooling-down procedure. “So, er, what exactly is it you guys are after? Is it about that pair who were here earlier?”
“Which pair’s that?” River asked.
“Wandering around up there. Between the buildings.”
“One in his fifties, grey hair, well built? The other one shave-headed?”
“Yeah, that sounds like them. Only we get a lot of hobos up there, well, obviously. But these guys were different.”
“Don’t worry,” Louisa told him. “They’re not a problem.”
“We get film crews too sometimes. It’s a good place to blow up a car.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“It’s funny, they’ll be out there making a movie, and here I am watching, and they don’t even know I’m here. It’s like . . . ” He meshed fingers, demonstrating the interconnected complication of real life and fantasy playing out in parallel, some of it above ground, some of it underneath. “I get a kick out of that.”
“Uh-huh,” said Louisa.
“Kids screwing in cars, too. That happens a lot.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three years.”
It was on the tip of Louisa’s tongue to ask how long the shifts were, but she decided she didn’t want to know. The possibility that Douglas had spent three years on his own here, without a break, was seeming likelier by the minute.
River was looking at the bank of monitors, and the lifeless scenes they displayed. He indicated the one showing the warehoused crates and box files. “Is that the stuff that was delivered last month?”
Douglas reluctantly shifted his gaze from Louisa. “Yeah. It took them two days.”
“That must have been exciting,” Louisa said. “I mean, compared to . . . ”
Absolutely bugger-all happening is what she meant, but Douglas begged to differ.
“Oh, it’s always exciting.
This last in a whisper, as if the surreptitious nature of his role extended to all discussion of it.
“But it was pretty cool when the phone rang,” he admitted. “I thought it had actually, you know. Happened.”
“. . . ‘Happened’?”
“Yeah, you know. I mean, this place was designed as a survival facility. I thought maybe there’d been an . . . event.”
A dirty bomb or a toxic splash, he meant; something to drive city dwellers underground. Or at least, those whose security clearances allowed them access to survival facilities.
“But it turned out a false alarm.”
“That must have been very disappointing.”
“Yeah, well. Shit happens.”
River said, “So how far away is it?”
