Underlife by Robert Finn (different e readers txt) 📕

More so in fact, because Karst would sometimes give these little illustrative lectures aimed at realigning the sensibilities and motivations of her direct reports, whereas the others paid no attention to him at all.

Despite the danger, Kieran found himself trying to learn more about who these people were and how they were able to do the remarkable things they could do. From time to time he would see evidence of their strange abilities which, breathtaking though they were, certainly had limits.

Unfortunately for him, Karst eventually became aware of his interest and decided to give him another corrective lesson. But first, as always, she wanted to explain.

“You need to understand that my ability to manipulate you psychologically is what keeps you alive. If we ever reach the point where I can think of no way to make you do what I want, then your usefulness would be gone. That fact underlies any other deal we might have in operation.”

She gave him a kind of moonlit smile and said, “Your intellectual curiosity is valuable to your work, but if I come to believe that work alone is not enough to occupy your thoughts we will have reached an impasse. And I only know one method for resolving those.”

She continued, “You have the whole wide world to distract yourself with and a surfeit of professional challenges. Unless you can redirect the curiosity you feel in some new direction, I will be forced to replace you.”

Kieran was doing his best to listen to her, but by now he was also aware that the talking part of the lesson would soon be over and the hurting him and breaking things part might be about to start.

But a thought occurred to Karst and she said in a voice that was almost kindly, “It might interest you to know that I was born a very long time ago, and believe it or not I once had a mother. There was a piece of advice she would sometimes give to people. It doesn’t translate very poetically, but let me try: it was something along the lines of ‘why study power when you can study happiness instead?’. I have never been able to do much with it, but perhaps you will. I think if you can take it to heart, it could save your life.”

And then instead of hurting him or issuing some terrible prediction about what would happen a day or a week later, she drove him to one of their buildings in the City and locked him in its ancient cellar. She left him there in total darkness to ‘give him some time to think about the nature of curiosity’ and to ‘make pacts with himself about how he would behave if she ever let him out’. Previously, she had fought his defiance by combining fear and pain; now she fought his curiosity by mixing fear with sensory deprivation.

Nearly two days had passed when she finally returned to release him. And he did indeed find that his curiosity was much lessened for a time, wonderfully so in fact. In that cellar, with absolutely nothing to focus on except his own thoughts, he’d done just as she’d expected and come to wholeheartedly regret his inquisitiveness. She had more or less cured him of his curiosity.

And perhaps things would have stayed that way if he hadn’t met someone who offered him a way out from under Karst’s control.

The fact was that Kieran was no longer happy. In fact, at his core, he was miserable. But the impossibility of escape and an appreciation for just how perceptive Karst could be kept him from acting on it. The problem was that he had changed. His old pleasures didn’t satisfy him any more and he found himself gradually giving them up, only indulging himself sufficiently to stop Karst suspecting some fresh shift in his character which might lead her to look for new torments with which to manipulate him. He thought wryly to himself that perhaps he was just getting old. He was nearing his fiftieth birthday, feeling like he was ninety, while the face he saw in the mirror could certainly pass for late twenties.

The way out he was offered came from one of Karst’s colleagues. Much as she would have done, he first made it clear how easy it would be to reciprocate if Kieran betrayed him. Then he explained that, much like Kieran, he wanted some independence. But before he could strike out on his own, he needed to get his hands on one or two of life’s little comforts to make sure that his voluntary exile was as agreeable as possible. For this he needed information. Kieran wouldn’t need to physically do anything. He’d simply need to compile a picture of the operations which he supervised and then hand that information over. In exchange, he would receive a lump sum of two hundred thousand U.S. dollars in cash and a chance to start over, with Karst and her friends thinking he was dead.

Once upon a time, two hundred grand U.S. would have meant very little, but these days his access to funds was severely restricted. Karst let him have almost anything he wanted, but someone else always paid; he had very little discretionary cash of his own. Unless he wanted to risk getting caught, then squirrelling away even fifty thousand pounds would be a struggle. Given his increasingly frugal tastes, two hundred grand would be enough. In fact, to his surprise, he realised he would have done it for no money at all; his freedom was what he really wanted.

Still it took him two months to work up the nerve to say yes — even though from the moment he heard the offer he knew he had to take it. It was just that crossing Karst was not something you did on the spur of the moment. In fact he’d come to think of it as playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

He never learned very much about the identity of the man who made him the offer, beyond the initial he used to identify himself: ‘J’. Over the course of six months Kieran copied all sorts of data for him: e-mails, bank records, property transactions, travel information. Kieran was administering a large organisation, and while he often didn’t know what purpose its activities served he was still in a position to record many of them.

He did his best to give no clue to Karst that anything had changed. But inside, he was the happiest he had been for a very long time. Though it hadn’t had quite the effect she intended, he had found the advice Karst had passed on from her long-dead mother surprising memorable. It really resonated with him. So much so that he had had it engraved on a little silver card that he kept in his wallet. It had taken him a long time to get there, but he felt as though he might actually be ready to start enjoying the simple things in life.

As the time approached for him to hand over the information, and undergo his fake death, it even looked like he was going to get away with it. In the end, he never found out what had given the game away, but a full day ahead of schedule he got a call from J telling him to bring what he’d got right that second because someone was on to them.

“This will still work,’ J told him, “They don’t know that I’m involved. I can still cover your tracks when you disappear. In fact, this might make things easier.”

They met in the big train station at Stratford in East London. J handed over a backpack full of bundles of hundred dollar bills; Kieran handed over two data CDs packed with files. He knew J would only need to pick up the phone and his life was over, but he also knew it would be difficult for him to do so without incriminating himself. Just to make things even more secure, Kieran had a second pair of discs in his old briefcase and they contained some extra files he hadn’t given to J, including a couple of e-mails they’d exchanged. It wouldn’t necessarily keep him safe — unless J anticipated something like this — but it would make it just that bit more difficult for J to get away with it, if he double-crossed Kieran.

When the exchange was complete, Kieran walked away from J with the beginnings of an irrepressible smile spreading across his face. He found a gents toilets, shut himself into a cubicle and transferred the cash into his old briefcase, wrapping two bundles of notes in cling-film and slipping them in alongside a 9mm semi-automatic and a fake passport, both of which he’d owned since before Karst had come onto the scene. Then he changed into clothes he’d bought in a charity shop, putting his Armani suit in the bag J had given him, and dropping that into a litter bin near the station. Then he boarded a Jubilee Line train for Canary Wharf, where he would pick up the rest of his things and get a taxi to City Airport. At that moment, he allowed himself to believe it was going to work.

And he very nearly made it. He was getting off the tube train, when the young man in the cheap suit came pelting towards him with someone chasing after him and Kieran realised that his one chance of freedom had slipped away. They’d sent a couple faces he wouldn’t recognise and dressed them as police, but he instantly saw them for what they were. Very few ordinary people moved the way they did. You needed to be young for a lot of years to acquire that murderous grace. His spirits were in free-fall.

Dressing them as some sort of police SWAT team was a nice touch. Ideal if you wanted to haul someone away in broad daylight with no questions asked. No other criminal organisation would even dare to try something like that, but he knew that Karst’s people could call on some astonishingly illustrious official connections if they needed to. Not that they’d probably have bothered; none of their kind would worry about being captured or questioned. They could break through any cordon, resist any attempts to contain them. Short of calling in the army, they were unstoppable.

So it seemed like Kieran was going to be captured and dragged back to Karst. Then she would want to know who he’d been working with. If he was lucky she would just kill him once he talked. But knowing Karst, she might decide to use him as an object lesson to her other direct reports. That was enough to turn your stomach, just thinking about it. Very soon now, he was going to die — one way or another — that was pretty much a certainty. And he found that finality lent him a certain determination, almost like courage, that he hadn’t experienced before. The fact was that if he decided that he wouldn’t allow himself to be hauled back to face Karst then that was all there was to it. He would find a way out whatever the cost. It was all he really wanted now anyway: to be free.

*

Clipper stood at the entrance to the rear cab and looked outwards towards the dark track. Light from behind him illuminated part of the dim interior and a little of the tunnel beyond. He could see that one of the train’s rear windows was missing. Presumably that was the result of the gunshot he’d heard just after Warren cornered Kieran in here.

The outer door of the train lay open as well. It hinged, not along its side like a normal door, but along its bottom edge,