Tuesday Falling by S Williams Read Free Book Online

with concertinaed tubing snaking away to remove the moisture and prevent corrosion.
    I walk in, open up my satchel, and grab a couple of high-end laptops with solid-state delivery, and a bunch of mid-level phones. Most smart phones these days have a GPS chip soldered directly onto the board so the phone can be tracked, but you can still find units that only have it as an add-on, but are still ok for Wi-Fi hot-spotting. I also pick up some external drives and some Bluetooth headsets.
    All the stuff down here in the tunnels isn’t registered yet, cos half the staff are on the steal. It doesn’t actually get on any books until it goes front-of-house. Perfect for me. I take a couple of prestige pieces to sell and then shadow-walk my way out of there, through the system and back to my crib.
    For a while I toyed with buying stuff off the Silk Road before it got shut down. And then off BMR. I kept one laptop solely for subbing through the Dark Web: the web hidden under the Web, used by criminals and hackers, and art-terrorists and, for that matter, real terrorists. The BMR is a kind of eBay for Dark-webbers. I thought I could get my hardware there. Maybe some guns.
    Well I could have, but the whole system was so full of spooks from all the covert security agencies that it was like scuba-diving through police sea, so I sacked it.
    When I get back to my crib I do the rounds, making sure everything’s safe and secure, and then I hook up my new gear to my speakers and cue up the
World Service
. It’s late and there’s a programme on about the formation of matter. I tune out my head, and wash myself down, and do my business.
    Then I drink down a protein shake and go night night.
    Nothing to see here.

24
    Brooks Military Antiquities is the kind of shop in the kind of alley that demands dark skies and even darker conspiracies. From the moment they come out of the tube station at Leicester Square and walk down St Martin’s Lane, DI Loss is filling up with foreboding. The sky is a seething mass of grey, and black, and blue, and as low as if London had a ceiling over it. His phone vibrates in his pocket: a text. He pulls out the phone and opens it up.
    ‘Jesus!’
    ‘What, sir?’
    ‘The footage of Lily-Rose’s rape, which kept on being posted on all those revenge-porn sites that we failed to shut down cos they never show faces and are not controlled in this country, and God knows what else … it’s been replaced with footage of the mayhem on the tube.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I don’t mean good as in it was good what happened to those boys. I just mean good as in I’m glad the Lily-Rose images aren’t there anymore. Just because no one was identifiable, well, it’s still going to be understood by all those kids on the estate, isn’t it? And now they’re seeing those boys who did it.’
    ‘Allegedly.’
    ‘Whatever. Now they’re going to see them get fucked over. So “good”.’
    Loss replaces his phone, feeling as if control is not so much slipping away from him, as running full-pelt. The air of the capital is hot and humid, and the bombardment of smells coming from all the street vendors makes him both nauseous and light-headed. The noise is incredible: tourists armed to the teeth with electronic gadgetry, clicking, and whirring, and flashing, all shouting at each other. The locals no better; many speaking a language he can’t understand, either because he’s too old and can’t decode the intonation, or they aren’t speaking in English. Almost half have strange contraptions in their ears and are shouting at the air in front of them. Amazingly, his DS seems to be enjoying herself. She even stopped and bought them each an ice-cream from a vendor working out of a rickshaw with a cooler-box attached to the back.
    As they stroll down the lane towards the Coliseum Theatre, a deep throb of thunder pulses across the sky, as if it’s being fracked. Loss is having difficulty walking. He isn’t sure whether it’s