An ambulance came and took Petra away. I wandered around the tiny garden, kicking at a plastic bag, until they were gone. I was starting to feel very tired, though more solid after the tea and biscuits.
According to Pat, Young had said that I should get back in touch. Obviously we couldn't get back in all the way to him. We'd managed to sneak out but getting back in wasn't going to be very easy. Young's “Barricade Zone” was occasionally porous, when the police were concentrating their attention on another part, but not reliably so. The fact that they'd tracked us down fairly easily to Garnier Memorial indicated that, even if there weren't cops visible on all the exits, they were watching.
I checked the news on my phone. There were “reports of a shooting in a Croydon shopping centre”. The device made a message beep and a little penguin started dancing in the top right corner, waving a letter. I had a mail claiming to be from Charley.
Hi Elboy, Charley here. Are you okay? I heard the news, and I just got a call from Young. Call if you get this.
He'd programmed a number in for him, and I selected it.
“Charley?”
“Hi Elboy. Are you okay?”
“Yes, I'm okay. I'm not too bad. We got out. Petra, the woman I was going to meet, she got hurt though, not too bad but she's going to the hospital right now.”
“It looked bloody awful. I've been watching some of the security camera footage. Don't worry, you're not on any of it, not the stuff I've been able to get off the net, anyway. The general consensus is that the guy must have been a cop or probably a soldier. That rifle he was using is a French liquid-propellant model, it's really expensive but sniper teams have just started using them. It looks like the police got him. I think they moved an armour in there and got him with gas.”
“Charley, do you know Young?”
“Uh, I know him... not that well, but I know him to talk to. I know a lot more about him after reading his files. I expect you know him better than I do, personally.”
“Can you do me a favour? Can you look some stuff up for me? It's some sort of mystical thing, you know, the sort of stuff Young's into. Focuses, grey focuses and maybe other colours I suppose. They're supposed to absorb things called flows. The grey one collects... broken flows? Disrupted flows? Something like that. I think flows may be lives. This is a bit vague, isn't it?”
“Well, I can try. Do you have any particular piece of Young's magickal activity that this might be connected with?”
“Sorry mate, I haven't really had time to read through the stuff you gave me.” A sudden flow of thoughts, from thinking about him loading the files onto my phone, then to me using the phone whilst hiding under the bench. “Shit. Charley, I used this phone to call 999 from the Centre.”
“That's okay, that's okay, doesn't matter. I fixed it. Your phone actually goes through a proxy now, and connects so it looks like someone else entirely is calling. Even the phone company will have trouble tracking it. Try not to do that too often though, or they might work out the method we're using.”
“Oh yeah... they did say I was calling from an untraceable location....”
“Yes, normally there's a... shit. Sorry.” There was a scratching sound and a pause. “My eyes are really itchy today. Sorry about that. Normally there's a location that goes along with your call but it's been set to make people think you're calling from an old phone that doesn't support that protocol.”
“Right.” Whatever. “Look, just as long as I can call people on it and that's okay.”
“Yes, yes, you can call people on it, that's no problem. I just wanted to know that you were okay, really. I'll get onto doing that search for you. I don't want to bother you with a load of details. Sorry, I sometimes go off on a tangent, just tell me to shut up.”
“No, that's okay, I was just....”
“I'll send that data through as soon as I find anything out, okay?”
“Yeah, that would be great, mate. Thanks a lot for doing that for me.”
“It's no problem at all. I'll let you know as soon as it's done.”
“Okay. I'll see you later. Cheers.”
“See you, bye.”
I remembered that Young had known that I'd read files on him, but I had a feeling it wouldn't have been very hard for him to get that information out of Charley, so that was another thing that wouldn't have been down to his 'mystical powers'. So what? Was this some sort of coincidence, that some guy starts shooting at exactly the same time as Petra puts whatever this “focus” thing is in the same place? Out of everywhere in the city he could have picked, all the times, he picks the same one? Can't see that one, personally. So what's going on here? How could Young have got someone to do that on cue? Why would he have? To convince people he did have mystical powers? Or was it not Young at all? God, this was just getting more and more confusing. I had the urge to talk to Tomas. Things always looked a bit more straightforward once he'd given his input.