They made the switch without a hitch. Zee dropped the newspaper, and Ali picked it up smiling white-teethed as he slipped the fiche between the sheets.
Zee walked on in one fell motion – daring not to look back.
Up ahead was a check-point Charlie Zee had passed through numerous times. Once even with Gillespie holding hands under their raincoats. But now Zee did not fancy it and pulled up before the crowd heading up the hill into the warren of the Old Casbah.
His heart went out to it. That crowd for which he had suffered and continued to suffer. – Though, there was mutuality in the sufferance!
Zee dropped his head – hiding his eyes under the brim of his hat.
Suddenly, the whistle blew.
Zee looked round as if pretending it was not for him.
But the whistle kept blowing.
Zee broke into a run.
An old man with a donkey and a cart was in front of him.
Zee swerved and ducked under the donkey, who chapped his teeth.
Suddenly he was off again – the ever elusive pimpernel, Agent Zee.
Cyclop’s men whistled and called behind him.
He ducked down a side street… he wove his way in and out of the warren that he knew so well, clutching the fiche in his breast pocket.
When he came out into the piazza, hardly anyone was about.
There was a workman’s shed in the middle of the street. All around it were hoardings plastered with the brilliantine face of Mee.
He walked up to it boldly, ducked inside and seized upon the cover of the man-hole.
Down the iron ladder he went and leaped from the last rung into the running water.
Zee was in the large complex of sewer works under the city. Water flowed all around him, and he ran, splashing his trousers till they were soaked, but Zee did not care. He kept running through the running water of the sewer.
A sickly-sweet smell greeted his nose at every turn, but after months of hiding he was used to it.
Finally, he made it to the forgotten shallow that had become his home in the underground.
He hauled himself up by the rope and pulled it up after him.
Zee read the fiche with the glass. He read it hurriedly, straining at times for the light and the paucity of the glass. He read in code of the things that had recently happened – of the nuclear accident in Faraway that had been blamed on certain members of the Council. He read of how cynically Mee manipulated the situation to his advantage.
Now no one can pretend Mee did not wipe out the Council and put in all his place-men, including that monster of his, Cyclops. No one can pretend none of these things did not happen. Mee made them happen, and then he made them disappear – these events, which now I skirt over, because time presses upon Zee.
Now Zee took up his notebook – the one he kept in the satchel that was all that remained of his possessions – and he began to write.
One Eye’s men are moving in, he wrote. I shall put the fiche behind the brick in this wall.
A piece of infective occurred to him.
Me rations us, he wrote. He gives us tokens. We cheer at our bonus points. We hail the team, the gladiators of the field. And we go home – still dissatisfied, ever discontent.
I ask you: is Man destined to be controlled by Mee’s thugs of war?
Suddenly, Zee stopped writing – caught by solipsist strands of memory.
Then he wrote on:
What happened to Birdy, Zee? – What did Birdy ever do to Mee?
You saw as I did – that day in the piazza when they came for him in their trench-coats, boorishly chewing gum. Gillespie, poor Gillespie, wrapped up in his innocence. They took him away as he clung to himself, like vanquished prey. He tried to flap his wings, but it was too late. The trench-coats took him by the shoulders, and frogmarched him off.
Even now, I remember, Birdy. I will treasure it. Savour it in these notes that will appear on the margins, or as erratum of some old book later retrieved. An example of caustic and sarcastic wit to be studied in the libraries of long ago.
Zee, can you hear the song of the starlings that our friend so loved?
Zee, it is Zummer Time. Our Time. Our time – for you, Birdy and me, when we would play together among the buttercups and daisies of our solitary field. Never forget we defied them.
Zee, Mee may have triumphed, and our love dashed on the paint-splattered walls of this underground sewer. Indeed, this may be the end Mee covets and the beginning of our annihilation. “Cherchez the resistance!” he will say in some mockery of a speech designed to awe the masses. Even as I write this, and in the course of this accursed story that is now finishing, we shall be subsumed. Become simply Mee.
The subtitle was always: the resistible rise of Mee.
The strapline was never: how one man defies Mee, exposes Mee and destroys him. For Mee is much too cunning for Thee.
Birdy, here it is zummer. Zummer time. – This is a rap on my name that was to be the beginning of our love story, how I the hero fell in love with you. And we defied Mee in the Name of All.
Will they one day forgive our arrogance?
But now it is too late. There is no time.
I am writing this by torchlight. You will not believe how hard it was to find this nib – how painful it is to scratch. Now the ink is running out. I have no cartridge left.
Birdy, now I go to meet you. Together we will post this missive in the letterbox of All and be damned for these words.
The ink had run out.
Agent Zee tore the pages from the notebook, placed them in the envelope with the fiche, and placed the envelope behind the brick in the wall. Then he lay down and prayed for Birdy, you and me.