Ack-Ack Macaque Read Online Free PDF Page B

before returning to England to record their first single.
    Inside, the place was quiet, even for a rainy November Sunday in Paris. He shook out his umbrella. The dinner crowd had gone and only the solitary drinkers remained. A radio behind the counter played spacey Parisian electronica: low, dirty beats and breathy female vocals. The whole place smelled of coffee and red wine. Steam from the silver espresso machine fogged the mirror behind the counter. A sign on the café’s glass door advertised free WiFi. A small TV at the end of the counter showed a news channel. The sound was off and the screen too far away for him to read the headline ticker. All he could see were the pictures: troops from China, India and Pakistan facing each other across the windswept borders of Kashmir. Another murder victim in London. UN helicopters plucking survivors from the floods in Thailand.
    The café’s proprietor was a bored-looking woman in her late fifties, with thick, dark eyebrows and a mole on her cheek. If she recognised him as he came in, she gave no sign.
    The walls of the café were covered in framed photographs of old-fashioned Zeppelins from the 1930s, and the newer, much larger, modern skyliners.
    Working together in the decades following their unification, and partly in response to pressure from the Americans, who were less than thrilled by the alliance, Anglo-French engineers built a new generation of lighter-than-air behemoths. Merovech glanced at the pictures as he crossed the floor. In the last decades of the twentieth century, skyliner production had kept alive the British and French shipyards, rescuing them from a post-war drop in demand. And during the economic turbulence of the seventies and eighties, when the tantrums of the OPEC nations forced the Western world to take a long, hard look at its dependence on oil, the skyliners had really come into their own, offering cheap and relatively carbon-neutral transportation. Now, with their impellers driven by nuclear-electric engines originally designed for use in orbital satellites, the big old ships still plied the world’s trade routes, unfettered by the market peaks and troughs that had so bedevilled the traditional airlines.
    Julie was sat at the table farthest from the door, against the back wall. She looked up from her coffee as he approached.
    “Did you get away okay?”
    Julie Girard was a native Parisian and a fellow politics and philosophy student at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. She had purple hair. She wore jeans and a sweater under her anorak. He wanted to kiss her. Instead, he slipped into the opposite chair and said, “I went out through a service entrance.”
    “They will be angry.”
    He gave a shrug. “What can they do? They can’t keep me locked away forever.”
    Julie glanced around the café. Her shoulder bag hung from the back of her chair. As she moved her head, he caught the glint of silver music beads in her ears.
    “But is it safe for you to be out like this, on your own?” She looked worried. “I did not think. I should not have asked you—”
    A candle burned on the table, little more than a stub jammed into the neck of a wax-streaked wine bottle. He reached around it and took her hand.
    “I’m not on my own. I have you.”
    She raised an eyebrow. “And what good am I going to be if someone comes at you with a gun?”
    He squeezed her fingers. They were cool and dry. His were wet and cold from the rain.
    “No-one’s going to come at me with a gun.”
    “You don’t know that. Look at what happened to your father.”
    His jaw tensed. He let go of her hand, and sat back in his chair.
    “I can’t live in fear of terrorists, Julie. If I do, they’ve already won.”
    She ran her index fingernail around her coffee cup’s rim.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just had to see you. It’s been nearly a week.”
    So far, the majority of their relationship had taken place online using anonymous, pay-as-you-go smart phones, skipping