Billy did not know where Jason was. They had no time to arrange a meet. He had given Wati the number of the phone he had—without much difficulty, even in the miserable aftermath of that assault—stolen. Wati found Jason and passed on the number.
“Do you understand what’s happened?” Billy said. “They took him. Chaos Nazis. You know what that means.” Billy felt as if he knew, too, as if this was where he had lived a long time. Dane, unlike him, had had no angelus ex machina watching.
“What do you want from me?” When he spoke, even down the line, Billy felt as if he knew Jason from somewhere.
“We need to find him, and we need to know what’s going on. There’s bad connections going on here. Listen.” Billy hooked the phone with his shoulder and swung through a tear in wire into a fenced-off yard. “These Nazis are being paid by the Tattoo. And his people are also the ones doing shit to Wati’s pickets. Along with the police.
“We need to know how deep those connections go. For all we know the cops might be holding Dane. They’re obviously in some sort of cahoots with the Tattoo, they must at least know where he is. So we need you. But even if we could find them you couldn’t walk into the Nazis, it wouldn’t work, right?”
“No,” said Jason. “They’re not paid, so it’s a nonstarter. They’re committed, and I can’t hide behind belief. That and proper knacking’ll screw me.”
“Right. So you need to go into Neasden Station and see what they’ve got on all this. Find out what you can. Jason, it’s Dane.”
“… Yeah,” Jason said. “Yeah.”
Though his voice had not admitted the possibility that Jason would refuse, Billy closed his eyes in relief. “Call me when you’re done, tell me what you can find out,” Billy said. “Thanks. You need to do this now, Jason. Thank you. We’ve got no idea where they are.”
“What are you …?”
“I’ve got some other stuff I need to find out about. Jason, please do this now. We need to find him.” Billy disconnected.
How do you walk away from a scene like that? All Billy had been able to do, in the cold quiet overlooked by big dead buildings, when Dane had been taken, was follow Wati’s voice. The rebel spirit had led him from his pocket and from what few figurines it could find in that awful empty sector.
Billy said, “The Londonmancers.”
“Keep it down, mate,” Wati had told him from some la-la Billy did not even see. “No one’s going to help us.” That inner core, Fitch and Saira and their little crew, the stunned man Billy had shot and unintentionally press-ganged, could not come to his aid. Billy had no safe houses, no hides.
“Oh bloody hell,” said Wati.
As if it weren’t in trouble enough, the UMA had to act as babysitter for this suddenly bereft little messiah. But Billy had not obeyed his injunction to raise the metal lid out of the street, with intricate finagling and a strength he had not had a few weeks before, to slip into the undercity. Instead, Billy had paused, clenched without clenching, and felt time hesitate and come back, moving like a shaken blanket. He had told Wati to come with him, rather, and gone and stolen a phone. He had taken the innermost doll of a Russian doll set from some shop, held it, not his foolish Kirk, though he had kept that, up to his eyes, and said to Wati, “Here’s what we need to do.”
“OF ALL THE LITTLE TOERAGS WE EVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH,” BARON said, “the bastarding Chaos Nazis are the ones I hate most.”
He stood between Collingswood and Vardy. He was scratching his face furiously, anxiously. They crowded around each other to look through the reinforced glass into a hospital room, where a bandaged man was shackled by tubes, and by shackles, to a bed. A machine tracked his heartbeat.
“You actually said ‘toerags,’” Collingswood said. “Are you auditioning for something?”
“Alright,” he said vaguely. He sniffed. “Arseholes.”
“Fuck’s sake, boss,” Collingswood said. “Up your game. Shitfoxes.”
“Bastards.”
“Spitfish, boss. Fucklizards. Little cuntwasps. Munching wanktoasters.” Baron stared at her. “Oh yeah,” Collingswood said. “That’s right. I got game. Say my name.”
“Tell me,” Vardy interrupted. “What precisely do we have from them? There were several of them, correct?”
“Yeah,” said Baron. “Five in various degrees of injuredness. And the dead.”