Take Back The City - Part One of the 'Life in London Town' series

26 - Best of Enemies

“Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  Jamieson lobbed the ICL circuit board he had found at Piccadilly Circus into a blank, white, copper pipe-covered wall, his frustration having got the better of him. He had hidden himself away in the head office of Aldwych Station, which looked out over the vacant void of the Strand via a sizable semi-circular sash window at one end, for the entire morning, fiddling with the two ICL chips and trying to figure out what, if anything, they did. Obviously, whatever technological know-how the man had had not been enough to unhinge the metaphorical door withholding their secrets; those characteristic signs of Jamieson’s rage – the wide eyes and the red blotches in his skin - had been present for almost an hour now. To Will Carter-Gladstone, who had been dipping in and out of the office on return trips to the Aldwych Common Room, it had been a complete miracle that he hadn’t launched half the furniture out of the window by now.

  “Can’t you leave it for one night?” Will asked assertively, leaning against the door of the office like a slightly manlier version of a lovelorn wife begging her husband to come to bed. “You’ve been trying to figure out how those circuit-boards work since three o’clock now.”

  “So?”

  “It’s ten-thirty,” said Will forcefully. Wearily, he flicked himself from the door and strode over to the plain, plywood bench on which Jamieson had been working, and then slapped his hands lightly onto it not an inch away from where Lyle Oxendon’s old circuit-board sat. “You know, we could be working on an actual plan to recapture Holborn right now...”

  “And then what!” boomed Jamieson, slamming the workbench with force significant enough to send every single object not strapped down a good six feet into the air. “Once we’ve got Holborn an’ all the other stations back, what are we supposed to do? Instead of sittin’ on our arses here, we’d be sittin’ on our arses in some other station doin’ exactly what we’re doin’ here: nothin’.”

   Will backed away from the desk, raising his hands as if he had a Roman imperial shield latched onto them. He was slowly deflating, yet Jamieson looked fit to burst. “We don’t have anythin’ to go on,” he moped. “Tryin’ to find out exactly what these circuit-boards do is the best hope we have of defeating the Faceless. If we found out exactly how critical these things are to them, we might be able to stop them in their tracks.”

    Admitting defeat, Will took a deep, slightly melancholy huff of breath and turned to slink out of the office. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “If we did manage to find a way out of this bolt-hole, what else could we do?”

    “How about take control of all of Central London?”

    Jamieson glanced over at the door. He was greeted not by one face, but four. “Who the hell let them in here?” he asked furiously, almost flipping his workbench over as he rose to his feet as graciously as an elephant with giraffe legs. “What kind of arsehead...”

   “Leave it out for now, Jamieson,” I said as I marched up to the workbench. “First of all, we need to set a few things straight.”

    Having slapped a smudged map I had drawn up on the back of a napkin in front of Jamieson, I walked straight back across the room, plucked Lyle from the group of three people whom were, at that point, standing by the door, and led him straight into Jamieson’s nervous glare. “Lyle Oxendon,” I declared proudly. “Son of Patrick and Abigail Oxendon, resident of 26 Malfont Road, Denmark Hill and childhood friend of Nox Devereux.” I looked smugly at Jamieson’s piggy eyes. “Need any more detail?”

   “One more,” he said, composing himself. “What about the ICL chip?”

   I picked up both of the ICL circuit-boards from the plywood workbench, and surveyed them in my hands before showing them to Jamieson in much the same way he had to Victor last night. “We figured that out, too,” I continued. “We realised that the boards did make both Lyle and that corpse you nicked the other one off of Faceless – we saw Lyle’s Faceless side shortly after you spotted him walking around outside the Common Room – but after removing the circuit-board from his head we also realised that the Faceless were all born human and, when Lyle admitted that he heard voices in his head whilst the chip was in his head, we realised that the boards were being used to transmit orders from a central location – after all, the Faceless themselves can’t talk.”