Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith Page A

near him, the plan was to scale the wall and slip into his room that way. If they let him roam the hotel by himself it was unlikely there'd be that many guards in his suite. A narrow alley ran behind the hotel, and I crossed to the far side of it to look up and judge how hard the climb was going to be.
    It didn't look too bad. There were plenty of sills and ornamental bits, and with the pads I only really needed them as backup anyway. I walked silently up to the wall and prepared myself for being intrepid. Again.
    The pads were the latest InsectoSukz® model. They're not easy to use, because you have to get the knack of turning the suction on and off at the right times, but for all your wall-scaling needs, there's simply no better product.
    I'm pretty flash with pads, and within a couple of strenuous minutes I was level with the third floor. Going sideways for a while I negotiated myself until I was up next to the window to suite 301. The window was open, I noticed gloomily: I wasn't even going to have to force it. The longer this kind of luck went on, the worse things were going to get sooner or later.
    The curtains were drawn, which was a bit of a bummer. Obviously I hadn't been able to go up to the third floor and waltz around, checking exactly where the rooms were, and it would have been nice to have had some confirmation that this was the right one. I suspected glumly, however, that things were probably still going to be going my way for a while yet.
    Bracing my feet on the top sill of the window of room 201, I took off the hand pads and rolled them up. 301's window slid open easily and I hooked one elbow inside while I took the pads off my feet, hoping vaguely that if any Stable policeman was going to take a shot at me at any point it wouldn't be now. They didn't, and I quickly and reasonably lithely levered myself up and into the room.

6
    Looking back, the next five minutes were the last straightforward ones of the whole job, the last time when I still thought it was going to be just a run-of-the-mill, albeit rather intrepid, 'find-this-man-and-rescue-him' kind of job.
    I know I still haven't explained what it is I do, exactly, but the problem is, I can't really, not the important stuff. Most of the time it's just a sort of fixer, finder, deal-with-a-small-problem kind of job. There are a lot of people who do that kind of thing. Sometimes, as you may have gathered, I'm prepared to go a little further and take a steal, cover-up, kill-someone kind of job. There's quite a few who'll handle those too.
    And sometimes it's something else again, something nobody else can do, and it's that I'm going to find hard to explain to you. It's to do with me, and someone who died a while back. But mainly to do with me.
    Still, my point is, nothing much happened in the next five minutes. I stepped silently into the room, and saw that Alkland was sleeping in the bed.
    My run of dismally good luck was continuing: there was no one else in the room, not a single guard of any shape or description. A small suitcase lay on the floor in front of the wardrobe, which interested me. Presumably it and its contents had been provided by Alkland's captors. Whoever they were, they were going to some lengths to keep him happy. The suite, if you're interested, was roomy and looked comfortable, and though some of the upholstery was in questionable taste I'd say it represented reasonable value for money.
    Once I'd established that there was no one who was going to leap out at me and spoil my composure, I locked the suite door and put the catch down. I unwound a length of the microcable I had with me and tied it round one leg of the bed, putting the dispenser on the windowsill ready for later. Then I pulled a chair up to beside the bed and lit a cigarette.
    I've done this sort of thing before, you see, and I can tell you that there are very, very few ways of waking someone up quietly. If you poke them, they make a noise. If you do that nonsense about