Iain Banks - Dead Air

Table of Contents

Iain Banks sprang to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. Since then he has gained enormous and popular critical acclaim with further works of both fiction and science fiction, all of which are available in either Abacus or Orbit paperbacks. In 1993 he was acknowledged as one of the Best of Young British Writers. In 1996 his number one bestseller, The Crow Road was a dapted for television. The Times has acclaimed Iain Banks the most imaginative British novelist of his generation.

Iain Banks lives in Fife, Scotland.

Praise for Dead Air

Bankss clever, tense book gives a good idea of where fiction might usefully go with this material. Staying away from the media-described events at Ground Zero, he impressively details the social aftermath in London: paranoia on underground trains and in high buildings, suspicion of foreigners, a delirious new edge to political argument and sexual encounters

Mark Lawson - Guardian

Banks ranks - along with Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin - as one of Scotlands most successful writers, and his new novel, Dead Air , will do nothing to diminish his reputation. A thrilling read, its a dazzlingly clever, edgy, suspenseful book

Scotland on Sunday

A Buchanesque adventure yarn set in 21st-century London

The Times

Dead Air is just one of many immediate responses to a shocking event, the kind of exhausting, careering ride of a novel adored by speed junkies. Possibly though, its just what we all need

Independent

City life, political integrity and personal trust come under Bankss coruscating spotlight

Mirror

The trademark dark wit is at its best, and this daring book looks set to become one of the most important novels this year

Vivid

Praise for The Business

Devilishly inventive and inventively devilish

Sunday Times

For any lover of a good story well told, a new book by Iain Banks is always a treat. Imagination, wit and complexity are his hall-marks and The Business is no exception

Sunday Express

Written with enormous energy, crunchy wit and more curves than an alpine road this is a poisoned bonbon, a bitter fairy tale The Business is the business

Independent

A highly inventive piece of work, amusing and sinister by turns any chapter of The Business picked at random will give an idea of Iain Bankss merits: the technical pizzazz, the profound compassion, above all an understanding of the way the world works

Guardian

It is impressive to find a British novelist with such evident range intellectually exhilarating

Observer

Eng. Lit. for the age of www

Independent on Sunday

Further praise for Iain Banks

The most imaginative novelist of his generation an exceptional talent

The Times

His technical facility with language now matches his instinct for story-telling. And the combination makes him one of the best British novelists

Guardian

Currents of dark wit swirl through Bankss writing, enriching its buoyancy and like Graham Greene, he can readily open the readers senses to the foreign-ness of places

Scotland on Sunday

His satire is exquisitely poised, his story-telling gripping

Independent

A phenomenon!

William Gibson

by Iain Banks

THE WASP FACTORY
WALKING ON GLASS
THE BRIDGE
ESPEDAIR STREET
CANAL DREAMS
THE CROW ROAD
COMPLICITY
WHIT
A SONG OF STONE
THE BUSINESS
DEAD AIR
THE STEEP APPROACH TO GARBADALE

And as Iain M. Banks
CONSIDER PHLEBAS
THE PLAYER OF GAMES
USE OF WEAPONS
THE STATE OF THE ART
AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND
FEERSUM ENDJINN
EXCESSION
INVERSIONS
LOOK TO WINDWARD
THE ALGEBRAIST
MATTER

Dead Air

IAIN BANKS

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2008

Copyright 2002 Iain Banks

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any
resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher,
nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7481 0989 0

This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

Hachette Digital
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette Livre UK Company

For Roger
With thanks to Mic and Brad

One

B IS FOR APPLE

Youre breaking up.

orry?

Never mind.

at?

See you later. I folded the phone.

This was three weeks before the stuff with the Clout club and Raine (sorry; the stuff with the Clout club and Raine) and the taxi and the road under the railway bridge and the window and the nose-biffing incident and basically the whole grisly West-to-East-End night experience when I realised some bastard or bastards unknown seriously wanted to harm me, or even - and this was according to their own threats - kill me.

All of which actually happened not far from here (here where were starting; here where were picking up our story precisely because it was like the start and the end of something, a time when everyone knew exactly where they were), all of it probably within sight, if not a stones throw, of this raised here . Maybe; theres no going back to check because the place where were startings not there any more.

Whatever; I associate what happened in one place with what happened in the other, with things beginning and finishing and - like the first tile in one of those impressive but irredeemably geeky record-breaking domino-falling displays that people stage in sports halls, where one tiny event leads to a whole toppling, fanning, branching cascade of tiny events, which happen so fast and so together they become one big event - with just stuff generally being set in train , being pinged from a rest state into restless, reckless, spreading, escalating motion.

Who was that? Jo joined me at the parapet.

No idea, I lied. Didnt recognise the number.

She pushed a short glass into my hand. There was ice in the whisky and an apple squatting on top of the glass like a fat red-green backside on a crystal toilet. I looked over my shades at her.

She extracted a strip of celery from her Bloody Mary and clinked my glass with hers. You should eat.

Im not hungry.

Yeah. Precisely.

Jo was small with very thick black hair - cut short - and very thin white skin - variously pierced. She had a wide, rock-stars mouth, which was sort of fitting as she did PR for the Ice House record label. Today she was looking vaguely Drowned World-era Madonna-ish, with black tights, a short tartan skirt and an old leather jacket over an artfully ripped T-shirt. People, not all Americans, had been known to call her cute and feisty, though not normally twice. She had a temper, which was why I automatically lied about the phone call even though I had no reason to. Well, almost no reason.

I hoisted the apple from the glass and took a bite. It looked shiny and great but tasted of nothing much. Jo was probably right that I ought to eat something. Breakfast had been some orange juice and a couple of lines of coke each. I did very little of that stuff these days, but I had this theory that the last time you want to get coked up is late at night when you just make your body stay up way beyond the time it wants to and you therefore stand a good chance of missing the next day; snort during the hours of daylight instead and sort of slide off into alcohol as the evening descends, so maintaining something remotely like the bodys usual rhythms.