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  As it was, Wheems stayed back against the far wall and out of reach of the hugely strong arms under the fat. As far as he knew, Drago San preferred to kill at a remove, by some device or by delegating the matter to some minion, but there was no telling what he might do while stuck in a cell, with only the option of a single person on which to slake his thirst for killing.

  And that, broadly, was what this private conference with his client was about.

  "That is an entirely unethical suggestion," Wheems said primly. "I cannot be party to-"

  "Oh, give it a rest, Wheems," said Drago San wearily. Now that he was out of the public eye of the hearing-chamber, his façade of catatonia had left him, and he was entirely in possession of himself.

  "You're no doubt thinking that these walls are simply packed with monitoring and recording devices," he said, "busily monitoring and recording away, as a matter of course. You're probably right, as it happens - in the fact that they exist, but not that they're busily monitoring away and recording."

  He smiled a little gloatingly, which seemed, to Wheems, to be something of his default state, whether he was actually smiling or not. "For somebody who makes such a good living besting the Judges at their own game, you seem to have a profound paucity of understanding as regards the innermost workings of their minds."

  "Why don't you enlighten me, then," said Wheems, in much the same way that one cannot allow fear to show to an angry dog. If dogs had still existed.

  Again he reminded himself, there was nothing that Drago San could actually do, here and now, with his paraplegic floater disabled.

  "You have to remember," said Efil Drago San, "that the Judges of this fair city-state tend get a little, shall we say, over-zealous about the procedures of their Law. The unkind might say they're entirely and positively fetishistic about it.

  "Look at the way they dress - I mean, all that black polypropylene and padding might be just the ticket when they're riding around on their glorified scooters, but they're just plain silly when investigating murders, conducting door-to-door-searches or holding interdepartmental meetings. Even the most heavily equipped combat-troopers of history, I gather, didn't wear their combat gear when they were off the battlefield. In that respect, I've always thought the Judges of Brit-Cit had the right idea. The Brit-Cit Judge with the highest clear-up rate in the city goes around with no more protection than a grubby old raincoat.

  "In any case, I digress. It's a bad habit of mine. I really should do something to curb it. I'll be talking away, don't you know, completely going off on some tangent or other, utterly oblivious to the fact that some people regard it a form of slow torture while they wait for me to return to something even so much as approaching the point.

  "For some reason they seem a little hesitant about simply telling me to shut up and get to the point. I can't imagine why. I mean, it's not as if I'd take umbrage and start busily contriving some manner of bringing about their slow and excruciating deaths. Most of the time, anyway. A significant minority of the time, at least. If I really did go around killing absolutely everyone whom I considered would be better dead, I'd never be stopping.

  "What was I talking about? Oh, yes. The point about this fetishisation of the Law is that they find themselves entirely bound up in it, as it were. It leaves no room to think about anything else. They've got it into their heads that the rules of this so-called hearing require private consultation between defendant and counsel. It would never even occur to them to break that privacy. It's like a blind spot in their minds.

  "The upshot is, I believe, that you can tell me anything in here, without having to worry about how it sounds. Do, please, tell me your objection to the direction in which I see my defence proceeding, without the self-serving rigmarole of whether it's ethical or not."

  "We'll never get away with it!" Wheems wailed. "They'll never stand for it!"

  Some detached and coldly clinical piece of his mind realised, without really caring either way, that his voice was cracking. There was something of the quality of an upset child. "Whatever happens to you, they'll make it their business to go after me. They'll destroy me. I should go now. Rescue myself from the hearing. Maybe they'll go easy on-"

  "You will do nothing of the kind, Wheems," said Drago San.

  "What?" Barnstable Wheems was momentarily puzzled by the abrupt change in Drago San's tone. It took him a moment to get it.

  "I've gone to quite a considerable amount of time and effort, off and on, over the years, to put myself precisely in this current position." The smooth inconsequentiality of Drago San's demeanour had gone completely, to be replaced by an utter, dead and vicious coldness.

  His tone was entirely informative - it didn't threaten you with death, it flatly told you that you were dead. All that was left, at this point, was the quibbling over the details and how long you had left.

  "I haven't gone to all that time and effort," he continued, "just to have you fall apart on me now. You're worried about what the Mega-City Justice Department can do to you? Well, believe me, that's nothing to what I, in my small way, can cause to happen. Unless you've forgotten the unfortunate incident of the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton."

  Just the standard spray-and-spatter of a single living creature stabbed brutally to death, no more than that.

  And this was, of course, the threat that had been hanging over the head of Barnstable Wheems all this time.

  "All it will take," said Efil Drago San, "is for the Lady Honoria Slocombe to learn of the evidence connecting you to the disappearance of her cat to make your life... interesting in a wide variety of ways, if extremely short. You know how these old biddies get about their pets.

  "She'll spend the last dregs of her wealth and power getting to you, even if you manage to place yourself in Protective Custody - and I have no doubt that she'll think of things to do to you, once she has you, that would not occur even to me."

  Every effort had come to nothing, then. Walking away now would put Wheems back in square one. It was, however, still preferable to carrying on like this.

  "Then I'll fight to prove my innocence," Wheems said. "I'll prove it somehow, because I know that I did not kill the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton and cut her up with a big knife and throw the bits around my bathroom."

  "Ah, well, the thing about that," said Efil Drago San, "is that actually, you did."

  There was another of those moments of blank incomprehension.

  "What?" said Wheems.

  "Physically, it was your hand on the big knife, and your brain and body making it do things," said Efil Drago San. "The fact that certain mental-conditioning techniques and mind-restructuring nanospores were involved, courtesy of an associate of mine who shall for the moment remain nameless, is neither here nor there."

  "What?" Wheems said again, as this new information took its own good time to sink in. "You're telling me I was... conditioned somehow so that I actually killed the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton and cut her up with a big knife?"

  Efil Drago San sighed. "As ever, you have it the wrong way round. The plain fact is, over your years of association with the Lady Honoria Slocombe, you came to loathe and despise what I believe you would passionately term 'that filthy, disease-ridden excuse for a flea-bag'. And you were none too fond of the cat, either. It took nothing more than a bare minimum of influence - light contact-hypnosis, I understand - to have you experiencing a psychotic break, abducting the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton, killing her with a big knife and enjoying it all the while.

  "That was when my associates went to work in earnest, wiping all memory of the incident and actively restructuring your mind. You are, in actual fact, a slightly but significantly different person in several respects.

  "A person who, for one thing, would never kill the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton with a big knife... and would find it impossible to even so much as imagine doing so. That's why, of course, you have been so blankly - even hysterically - su
re of your fundamental innocence, without the thought that you might have, somehow, been made to do it even occurring to you."

  Drago San sighed again. "The upshot is, fight as you will, there is absolutely no way you can wriggle out of taking the consequences for killing the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton with a big knife... with the extra twist, in fact, that you will be the only person in the entire world who believes that you didn't do it. Even though you know that you actually did."

  Drago San regarded Wheems with reptile-eyes. "That is what will happen if you don't get out there and say precisely what I need you to say. I leave it up to you to decide whether it's worth it or not."

  "I'm Danni Consart, this is Mega-City News - plugging fact into your news-hole like we were pretending it was a penis made out of news and we were doing sex!

  "Coming up on channel 17,412, Big Dan Ratersnap and his Cavalcade of Country Pickin' Glee, sponsored by Whimslowe Shirts, the only shirt to wear if you feel the sudden need for a shirt. But first, hot news that could change the very face of the Big Meg forever!

  "It seems that the Lady Slocombe of Shangri La Towers hab-block has lost her cat - that's her animal companion of the feline persuasion, apparently, and not any kind of euphemism at all. Not exactly all that hot in the ole news stakes, you might be thinking, but you'd be thinking wrong.

  "Seems like the old biddy is so desperate to get her small domesticated animal back that she's offered a reward of half her fortune - that's the order of seven hundred million creds - no questions asked. This has prompted a large number of citizens to turn up with anything from a stuffed child's toy to an Undercity para-rat scavenger spray painted tortoise-shell brown over its more usual fluorescent green.

  "The area immediately around Shangri La Towers, Sector Nine, has now been declared an official No-go Zone until the riots are brought under control and the bodies, together with various inextricably-lodged feline forms, are hauled away.

  "In other news, new developments in the trial of Drago San mean that it looks like dragging on for hours yet. Live feeds are available if you want, but for the moment, we here at Mega-City News will be providing up-to-the-minute animated artists' impressions of what might ultimately happen to the prisoner if a gang of Janie-crazed Lesbian shok-punk chicks were to storm the Hall of Justice and start opening fire with a Screaming Meatgun.

  "Big Dan Rattersnap, coming next, after these important messages."

  "Having received instruction from my client," said Wheems, when the various personnel attendant to the hearing had at last been reassembled, "I should like to present further reclaimed evidence that I believe is pertinent to the case in question..."

  Backflash: 01: 28: 2125

  In the fungus jungles of Boranos, Dredd became aware of a change in Drago San's tone. The constant litany of bad-tempered muttering had become, by this time, little more than background noise. Now the specifics of what Drago San was saying percolated through into his conscious mind.

  "I mean," Drago San said, "it's not as if the chap didn't have better things to do, like shooting jaywalkers in the knees or some such."

  It was a large part of a Judge's nature that he or she did not rise to the bait of insults and slander. If they did, after all, they'd never be stopping and things would rapidly escalate out of control.

  To the extent that he allowed it to be, however, the rumour that he went around shooting jaywalkers in the knees purely for the hell of it was a sore spot. It had never actually happened, but it was one of those urban legends that never seemed to die.

  "What did you say?" he growled.

  "I was merely going to say," said Efil Drago San, "that if you hadn't come all the way out here in the first place, in your needlessly obsessive hunt for this so-called Justice of yours, then we would neither of us be in our present sorry circumstance."

  "You'd have preferred to be left where you were, would you?" Dredd said. "They were going to hang you for selling poisoned foodstuffs, eventually."

  "There is that, I suppose," Drago San admitted. "People around these parts tend to be more... forthright in these matters than those of the Mega-Cities. No bad thing, in my opinion. I'm all for it. Keeps the population down, if nothing else."

  "No bad thing until it comes to you, you mean," growled Dredd.

  "But of course. Suffering and misery and shrieking bloody death are just the very ticket, until it comes to me. I'm happily hypocritical in that respect and I've never pretended otherwise. Whereas you, Dredd, are simply a hypocrite."

  "What did you say?" Dredd asked. Drago San was just trying to needle him - but he was getting drokking tired of these continual snipes.

  "You heard me. The truth is that this Law you serve has, in the end, nothing whatsoever to do with crime and punishment - as you know full well. In the end, it's a system of expediency. It changes by the day, reverses itself on a credit and then attempts to justify itself in terms of keeping order."

  Yet again, there was the sense of Drago San's taunts striking slightly too close for comfort. There was not a word of truth to them, but yet again they could be twisted to fit the facts.

  "There are two billion people in Mega-City One," Dredd said. "Two billion potential creeps and perps. Measures - harsh measures, sometimes - must be taken to keep them in control."

  "And control is the actual point," said Drago San smugly. "That's what you want - in just the same way you tried to control Puerto Lumina.

  "You could have gone all out to organise resources so that every one of your so-called citizens could have a life worth living, or frankly taken measures that would... shed the surplus population. Instead, you took the weasel way. Isn't it lucky that a job riot occurs, just when those possessing obsolete skills become unnecessary? Isn't it fortunate that a hab-block war occurs just at that point where the overcrowding in those particular hab-blocks becomes problematic?"

  "That's not how it works," Dredd growled. "You drokking know it. Things flare up and we have to deal with them. The only way to deal is hard. We do what we have to do and no more."

  "Oh, yes," said Drago San. "These things flare up. You do what you have to - no other choice - and so your hands stay clean. Tell me, Dredd - have you ever, perchance, heard of what they call the Big Lie?"

  "Objection!" This from SJS-Judge Slithe, who had leapt from his seat as though it were wired to the power-grid at the mention of these words. "The use of that term is derogatory and entirely inappropriate for a public forum!"

  "Come now," said Barnstable Wheems, looking for all the world as if he was entirely in command and control. Of the situation and himself. "The Big Lie - there, I used the term again - is common knowledge in Mega-City One. And it is common knowledge, also, that the procedures and processes that went under that name are no longer in place. Unless you're telling me," he added meaningfully, "that these procedures and process are still being used...?"

  "Nothing of the sort," said SJS-Judge Slithe, hurriedly. "I'm merely saying that there are secondary and supplementary aspects to what was quite erroneously called the Big Lie - without having any direct relationship, whatsoever, of course - that might be damaging to city-state security if made public." He indicated the floating news-service microcams. "I merely ask that we have the chance to vet the information contained in this evidence until we see where it leads."

  Chief Judge Hershey thought about it. There was always the possibility that the evidence for the defence might drop a bombshell, but she couldn't quite see where. Then again, of course, the point about dropping a bombshell is that, nine times out of ten, the people it lands on never see it coming.

  On the other hand, the Special Judicial Service obsession with secrecy for its own sake never failed to stick in her craw.

  "I think we'll risk it," she decided at last. "The point about city-state security, as I understand it, is to keep potentially harmful information out of the wrong hands - and if it's already in the hands of someone like the defendant then I'd say that horse has bol
ted.

  "Besides..." she glanced pointedly at the news-service microcams. "What with several thousand channels out there, with anything from All Nude Hydroponic-vat Makeovers to Xenomorphic Hentai Slash, I doubt there's anyone out there watching who's awake enough to care."

  "What are you talking about?" Dredd said. The casual mention of the Big Lie had caught him off his guard.

  Drago san snorted. "Give me some credit. The biggest secret of the Mega-City One Justice Department - and so, of course, everybody knows. Everybody who matters, anyway. The blanket tranquilisation of entire Sectors, keeping the population quiet and down..."

  "That was ended," Dredd said. "That was ended years ago-"

  "Oh come now, Dredd. You know as well as I do that it still occurs sometimes. In special circumstances. Without anybody actually mentioning it."

  Drago San paused for a moment, thoughtfully. "Then again, could it really be that you've bought into the official line? Hook and sinker? Like a blind spot that has you failing to see the perfectly obvious even when it's right under your nose? Has it never so much as occurred to you that your 'explosions of mass-violence' still occur precisely when and where someone, or something, decides that they should be? Something to think about, in any event."

  Dredd was lost for words. This distortion of the way things were was so basic, so fundamental, that for a moment he did not know what to say.

  "Be that as it may," said Efil Drago San. "We're getting somewhat off the point, which is this: I'm a killer, Dredd. I glorify in it, and I've never so much as pretended otherwise. What I have never done is to set a killing up so that I can sanctimoniously pretend that it was necessary or right."

  Act III: Walking through Walls

  "In science - in fact, in most things - it is usually best to begin at the beginning. In some things, of course, it's better to begin at the other end. For instance, if you wanted to paint a dog green, it might be best to begin with the tail, as it doesn't bite at that end. And so-"