Blue Genes - By Val McDermid Page 0,90

the hour. So if you're cloning phones, you set aside a room with a dozen or so cloned phones in it, and hire the room out for, say, twenty pounds per per¬son per hour, and as soon as one phone gets cut off, the hirer just moves on to the next phone on the table. The hirer gets their calls dirt cheap and untraceable. And the crook's got virtually no outlay once they've got the origi¬nal scanner and stolen phones."

"And you found one of these at Sell Phones?"

"We did."

"So I'm flavor of the month?"

"Let's see how tonight goes down."

At ten past eight, Delia and I descended into the club via the fire escape, as I'd prearranged with Tony. He was waiting for us, nervously toking on his Marlboro. "Your friends got here," he said, his unease and resentment obvious.

"Where are we going to do this?" I asked.

Tony pointed to a small circular table in the far corner, surrounded on three sides by a banquette. "That's my table, everybody knows that. Anywhere else and he's going to be even more suspicious than he is already."

I followed him across the room while Delia made for the bar and the dirty glasses stacked ready for her. The lights were up, stripping Manassas bare of any preten¬sions to glamour or cool. In the harsh light, the carpet looked stained and tacky, the furnishings cheap and chipped, the colors garish and grotesque. It was like see¬ing a torch singer in the harsh dressing room lights before she's applied her stage makeup. The air smelled of stale sweat, smoke, and spilled drink overlaid with a chemically floral fragrance that caught the throat like the rasp of cheap spirits.

Tony gestured for me to precede him into the booth. I shook my head. There was no way I was going to be sand¬wiched between him and Lovell. It wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that I was about to become the vic¬tim of a classic double cross, and if Tony Tambo had decided to hitch his wagon to the rising star rather than the comet starting to dip below the horizon, I wasn't about to make it any easier for him. "You go in first," I told him.

He scowled and muttered under his breath, but he did what he was told, slipping over upholstery cloth made smooth by hundreds of sliding buttocks. I perched right on the end of the seat, so Lovell wasn't going to be able to corner me without making a big issue of it. Tony pulled the heavy glass ashtray toward him. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said.

"So do I. Or we're all up shit creek."

"I fuckin' hate you women with the smart mouths, act¬ing like you've got balls when all you've got is bullshit," he said bitterly, crushing out the remains of the cigarette with the sort of venom most people reserve for ex-lovers.

"You think I like hanging out with gangstas? Get real, Tony. It'll all be over soon, anyway."

He snorted. "So you say. Me, I think this'll be rum¬bling around for a long while yet." He leaned forward and shouted in Delia's direction. "Hey, you!" Delia looked up from the glass she was polishing. "Do something useful and bring me a fuckin' big Southern Comfort and lemonade."

Delia's look would have shriveled Priapus, but Tony was too tense to care. "You want the usual, Kate?" she asked me. I nodded.

The door at the far end of the club crashed open with the force that only a boot can produce. All three of us swung around, startled. In the doorway stood a tall, thin man dressed in the kind of warm-up suit top tennis play¬ers wear to arrive at Wimbledon. He was flanked by two men who could have played linebacker on an American football team without bothering with the body padding. Their shoulders were so wide they'd have had to enter my house sideways. They looked as if they were built, not born, complete with suits cut so boxy they seemed to have been constructed out of Lego.

The trio moved across the room at a measured pace and I had the chance for a proper look at Peter Lovell. He had a narrow head with the regular features of a fifties matinee idol, an image nurtured by a head of thick brown hair swept straight back like Peter Firth. It was an impres¬sion that crumbled at closer range, when skin wrecked by teenage acne became impossible to disguise or to