Page 46 of Iron Debt
I put a form on the table.
“Here’s what happens,” I said. “Kev’s debt goes into the Syndicate Ledger. Ours, not theirs. Filed correctly, witnessed, entered in the book. The terms are service, same as everyone else – he does his Highers, he stays in school, he doesn’t take another loan from anyone who isn’t sitting at this table. Your ma’s address goes on the protection list. The flat gets a new back door and someone from Ewan’s contacts at the council fixes the damp. Clean.”
Fergus stared at the form. His Adam’s apple moved.
“In exchange,” I said, “you feed the Gravedigger’s network exactly the information I specify. Nothing more. Nothing less. You are not making amends – you are doing a job. The job has a start date and an end date and the end date is the Winter Wager. After that, you’re clear.”
“You’re making me a –”
“I’m making you useful.”
He looked at me. The redness in his eyes was still there but the panic was settling into something else – the expression of a man who has been drowning and has just been shown a lifeboat and cannot quite believe it isn’t made of paper.
“You should be kicking my head in,” he said.
“Aye, well. I’ve got different plans for your head.”
He almost laughed. It came out as a choked sound, half-swallowed, and he rubbed his face again and picked up the pen I’d placed beside the form.
“The first thing I need you to pass along,” I said, “is the Wager’s start time. Tell them it’s midnight on the twentieth. Not the nineteenth. Can you do that?”
He looked up. Understanding crossed his face – the slow, settling weight of comprehension, the realisationthat the information I was feeding him was wrong on purpose and the wrongness was the weapon.
“Aye,” he said. “I can do that.”
He signed the form. I witnessed it. The gold ink dried on the page and the strip light hummed and the dock chains clanked outside and Fergus sat across from me with his mother’s safety written into the same ledger system that ran the rest of Cairndhu.
Fergus stood. He pulled his jacket on. He got as far as the doorway, then turned back. The dock light caught his face – young, tired, the look of a man who had just been given something he didn’t deserve and was trying to work out how to carry it.
“He’s dying, by the way,” he said. “McInnis. Six weeks, maybe eight.”
I looked at him. The information landed without surprise – it confirmed something I’d been suspecting since the acceleration in McInnis’s movements, the increasingly reckless expansion, the urgency that didn’t match the historical pace of a man who had spent thirty years building his operation one contract at a time.
“I know,” I said.
Fergus nodded. “Then you know he wants to go out massive.”
“Aye.”
A pause. The wind rattled the Hook’s signage outside – the old pub sign with its painted anchor, rusted at the hinges, swinging in a pattern I could predict because I’d heard it every night for six years.
“That’s why we finish this first,” I said.
Fergus looked at me. He nodded once more. He left.
The door closed. The strip light hummed. I pickedup my phone and sent Lachlan a message:Fergus turned. Phase one active. False time delivered.The reply, characteristically, was a single word:Good.
The dock was quiet at ten.
I poured the cold tea down the sink. I washed both cups. I locked the back room and walked to the dock edge.
The Clyde moved below – black and oily and heavy, the current pulling towards the sea with the slow insistence of a river that had been doing this for longer than anyone on its banks. The container yard was lit – the orange sodium lights that made everything look like a photograph from the seventies – and a ship was being unloaded at berth three, the crane swinging containers onto the quay with the mechanical patience of something that never got tired.
The first piece of misinformation was in play. Fergus would pass the false start time within twenty-four hours – the Gravedigger’s people would position for the twentieth, which gave us the nineteenth clear. Twelve hours of advantage. Enough to move the dock crews into place, to seal the three routes that McInnis needed for the extraction, to put my people at every access point before his people knew the door was closing.
My phone was in my hand. I turned it over. I thought about calling before I decided to call.
She answered on the second ring.
