Armstrong now held up Greg’s Trinities card, a prosecuting counsel with a bloodstained, fingerprinted knife.
‘You’re a Mindstar veteran,’ he said. ‘What on Earth are you doing consorting with scum like this?’
He was setting the tone, speaking normally, no threats, no gloating dominance charades. The ex-president was concerned only with facts, reality; he didn’t possess time to waste on life’s inessentials.
‘Only a total paranoid would be frightened of ghosts,’ Greg said.
The Trinities card was pocketed. ‘You mean Philip Evans?’ Armstrong asked. ‘I admit the potential of that fancy NN core of his alarms me. He was remarkable when he only had a human brain. A giga-conductor with a transcendent Evans masterminding its marketing strategy would be a definite setback for me. He’s so depressingly efficient at that sort of thing. A clever man. Pity we have opposing political viewpoints. But that’s life.
‘However, the conflict between Evans and me goes much deeper than that, as I’m sure you’re aware.’
Greg stared at him dumbly.
‘Good Lord, he never told you, did he? Think on it, Mr Mandel. You’ve seen Event Horizon’s Prowlers at work, I believe?’
‘Yes.’ No ultra-hush there, he wasn’t giving anything away.
‘Military hardware, Mr Mandel. Good-quality American military hardware, as provided by that vicious profiteering little arms merchant, Horace Jepson.’
Greg started. And Leopold Armstrong caught it. ‘Didn’t you know? Oh yes, Mr Mandel, Jepson is a US government convenience. He sells to their allies, discreetly, mark you, and in return their IRS overlooks Globecast’s somewhat irregular tax returns.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss about you is. You’re not half as good as everyone says. But then Mindstar never did fulfil its promise, did it?’
‘You were worried enough, I remember,’ Greg said. ‘You and your People’s Constables. Never had much joy catching us, though, did you?’
Armstrong pursed his lips. ‘Quite. Well, now you have the facts, make the connection.’
Greg read the anger in his face, sharp-focused determination, riding him hard. Armstrong was vengeance seeking, said his native intuition, a strong clear message. ‘My God,’ he said wonderingly. ‘Philip Evans blew up Downing Street.’
Gabriel threw Greg a quick startled glance, then twisted sharply to look up at Armstrong.
‘Very good, Mr Mandel,’ said Leopold Armstrong. ‘The electron-compression warhead was brought into the country by one of his Prowlers, smuggled into Downing Street by his security division’s hardliners. Kendric here tells me Evans laughed when the warhead exploded, thinks of himself as a more successful version of Guy Fawkes, no doubt, très romantique. He obliterated me once, Mr Mandel; just believing I was dead was enough for the country to march in rebellion against the PSP. But now, now that bastard has exploited his money to do it to me again, to do it to all of us. Immortality, Mr Mandel. He has bought himself immortality, with his imperialist power, his obscene personal wealth. Another twenty years I’m good for, and a lot can be done in that time. But what is a pitiful twenty years to Evans now? He has eternity. He will see me dead again, for real this time. And do you know what the real ball-kicker of it is? He won’t even care; my actual death will be of supreme indifference to him. Because to him, secure in his present incarnation, we are all less than nothing. That, Mr Mandel, cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged. That is why I risked blowing my cover, all my preparations. Because I am not going to allow him to escape death. Death is universal, making us all equal in the end.’
‘How about you, di Girolamo?’ Greg asked. ‘You believe all this crap? You’ve got enough obscene personal wealth to translocate your memories like Philip Evans. You going to die when you don’t have to?’
Armstrong put on a pained expression. ‘Please, Mr Mandel. Kendric and I are not going to be driven apart by your desperation. Our mutual interests are too strong.’
‘I can’t figure you,’ Greg said to Kendric. ‘You knew about the giga-conductor, yet you let Julia buy your family house out of the Event Horizon backing consortium. Why? You’ve kissed goodbye to a fortune.’
‘A deal,’ Kendric said thinly. ‘In return for informing the President of Philip Evans’s NN core I will be given Event Horizon on a plate; not some derisory percentage, all of it.’
‘After it’s been nationalized,’ Armstrong interjected smoothly. ‘Then naturally an international financier of Kendric’s stature would be a perfect choice as chairman. Regretfully, his appointment would have been difficult to justify if Evans junior had exposed his earlier impropriety, which is why he agreed to sever their financial link. But she won’t be in a position to issue such paranoiac ultimatums for much longer, after all, we can hardly allow a teenage girl to run a company so important to the country’s economic prosperity, now can we?’
‘Julia Evans will be stripped of her wealth and power,’ Kendric said. He looked straight at Greg, smiling mechanically, a slim line of flawless white teeth showing. ‘You understand, don’t you, Mr Mandel? You know how it is between Julia and me. There was a time when it was a fun game, she was an excellent player. But unfortunately she is too young, she does not fully comprehend the rules of this world. If I do not take Event Horizon from her, she will use it to harm me, my family house. What would you do in my place?’
‘She understands the rules perfectly,’ Greg retorted. ‘You just don’t like losing. Seventeen years old, and she can outsmart you from dawn till dusk. You shouldn’t be worried, Kendric, you should be terrified. But then you are, aren’t you.’
Kendric’s lips closed. ‘It is not I who will feel terror.’
‘No?’ Greg asked scornfully. ‘You even misjudged your new partner here. Armstrong isn’t interested in vengeance, he’s like you, he’s after the giga-conductor. You’re just his front man, a cheap puppet.’
‘You do have tenacity, don’t you, Mr Mandel?’ Armstrong said. ‘Perhaps that’s why Event Horizon hired you. But you’re wrong. The money accrued from giga-conductor licence production will be split between us. A valuable source of income to further my aspirations.’
‘Aspirations,’ said Gabriel. ‘What aspirations?’
‘Ah yes, Miss Thompson, isn’t it?’ He affected to notice her for the first time. ‘My return to mainstream politics.’
‘You can’t be serious. You’ll never resurrect the PSP.’
‘Not the old Party, no. It’s a fool who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. My new organization will be structured along different lines.’
‘Tentimes,’ Greg said. ‘You’ve been paying for Tentimes and the rest of Charles Ellis’s hotrod team to screw up all those companies.’
‘Indeed, and my people have been quick to point out the inevitable failings of the free-market system. There is a large groundswell of resentment building against the New Conservatives and their mismanagement of the economy. One I intend to encourage.’
‘Bollocks,’ Gabriel snorted. ‘No matter how bad things get, nobody’s going to vote for hard-left policies again. You don’t understand just how much people hated everything you stand for.’
‘Miss Thompson, if you could still see into the future you’d know that I’m not aiming for the grand slam this time. You can only ever do that once. I was very unlucky in that events beyond my control conspired to put an end to PSP rule. The energy crisis, the Warming, the Credit Crash. No government could withstand that combination. Take a look around at other countries. How many of the leaders of ten years ago remain in power today? We were the ones who were blamed. People don’t like to blame their own greed and exorbitant life styles. They want someone to hold responsible. And government gets it in the neck every time, from outbreaks of food poisoning to hurricanes. Blame the government.’
‘From protesters being whipped to death in the street to seed potatoes being dished up on the tables of Party members,’ Greg said.
‘Those kind of incide
nts were inevitable to start with. But the abuses were solvable, given time.’
‘You had ten years,’ Greg said. ‘All they ever did was get worse.’
‘The people who made up the PSP’s local committees were unused to power. If they had been allowed to establish themselves, then we would’ve seen stability. But of course, Mindstar and that plague of urban predator gangs incited trouble in the cities, goading the Constables.’ He flexed his hands in agitation. ‘We were … misrepresented.’
Gabriel laughed unsteadily. ‘What’s the matter, Armstrong? Did you think the hard-left had a monopoly on political agitators?’
For a moment Greg thought he would hit her, but the ex-president eventually sighed resentfully. ‘This time I have settled for a more slow-burning form of reformation. There are thousands of my appointees still in place throughout the civil service, primed and waiting. The New Conservatives will soon have to order an intervention as the private and denationalized companies begin to falter, bringing them back into the government fold. My people will assume the management duties, with a great deal of success. And I shall direct them, president in all but name and public visibility.’
‘We’ll fight you,’ Greg said levelly. ‘We’ll fight you with everything we’ve got. Bows and arrows if that’s all that’s left, we’ve done it before. And we beat you before.’
‘Yet here I am. This seems to be the month of miraculous comebacks.’ He laughed, and grinned round at the faces in the living room. ‘I do believe I’m talking to a reactionary. However, I don’t intend to spend hours justifying my actions to you, Mr Mandel, nor debating the pros and cons of centrally controlled economies. You were brought here to answer questions. And that is what you will now do.’
Greg thought he must’ve flinched, certainly he stiffened.
‘No, no, we don’t go around beating confessions out of people here. There are much simpler methods. But understand one thing, Mandel, you are going to die. Just as soon as you have provided me with every byte I require. How you die will be decided by your behaviour. The old easy way or hard way; you can have a bullet through the head, quick and clean. Alternatively, you can be dumped into the old river bed, alive and kicking.’
‘It doesn’t make one fuck of a lot of difference in the end, does it?’
Armstrong picked up a cybofax from the coffee table and sat in the last remaining leather chair. ‘Think about it,’ he said knowingly. ‘Dwell on it. You might find your attitude adjusting. Neville, we’ll begin now.’
Turner opened a drawer in the rose-teak desk and extracted a spaghetti tangle of nylon straps and optical fibres. ‘Take off your shirt,’ he told Greg with a doctor’s examining-room impartiality.
Greg thought about it. Refusing would be a rather trivial token, the shirt would only be cut or ripped off. Besides, he was thinking of being slung into that bottomless mud. God curse Armstrong. He shrugged out of the jacket and began on the shirt buttons. Flakes of dried blood wedged under his fingernails.
‘Good,’ Armstrong said. ‘Quite an ironic twist for you, Mr Mandel, I imagine. On the receiving end of a lie detector for once.’
Turner velcroed a strap around each of Greg’s wrists. They prickled, minute needle-tipped sensors probing into his skin, tasting salinity, heat, conductivity, heart-rate. The St Christopher was flicked to one side and another strap went round his neck, tightening noose-style.
Leopold Armstrong’s fingers drummed on his cybofax. ‘I have a number of queries. And you’ll answer each one honestly. For every lie you make we’ll break a bone in Miss Thompson’s body. The bigger the lie, the bigger the bone. Understand?’ Again, there was no malice, Leopold Armstrong was just telling it the way it was.
‘Yeah,’ Greg replied, as a tiara band was placed on his head. Turner pressed an infuser against his arm. There was a bee-sting of pain, turning to an ice-spot.
‘Relaxant,’ Turner said, and began plugging the optical cables into a gear module which was already interfaced with the Olivetti deck. The cube lit with scrawling sine waves. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and began typing. Data rolled down an LCD display. ‘Name?’ he asked.
The correlation went on for what seemed an age to Greg. The relaxant acted like a gentle influx of rosé wine, pleasantly inebriating, amplifying sounds like squeaking leather and rustling clothes, turning the air warm, drying his throat. Of course, he could still concentrate. If he wanted to.
They seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of his life stored in the Olivetti. Stuff he could barely remember: secondary school exam results, Army postings, nicknames of barrack mates, neighbours at the time-share estate. Nothing recent, though. Nothing from the last couple of years.
‘He’s ready,’ Turner shouted out eventually.
Armstrong consulted his cybofax. ‘One. Does anyone on the mainland suspect I am alive?’
Greg had worked out that this was a crux. To answer or not to answer? Watching Gabriel being systematically snapped apart before him. The noise of all those cracking bones would be deafening. But they were going to die anyway. It would be very noble to confound Armstrong.
Decisions. Decisions. Gabriel was silent. Unhelpful as always.
The relaxant’s health-spa glow had seeped through his entire body, levitating him. He was back in the womb again, warm, cosy, and untroubled.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody knows.’
Leopold Armstrong’s smile illuminated the whole world.
33
Ade O’Donal had discovered that hard cash had its own special weight. Yeah, like no weight at all. He’d filled two Alitalia flight bags with New Sterling and Euro-francs; thick, hard wads of notes. Kilograms of them, stretching his arms as he walked down the stairs, but he could’ve carried them for ever. The bags were new, clean, and bright; when people saw them, their exotic foreign logo, they’d know he was for real. One shit-hot guy.
The crappy top stair creaked when he put his foot on it. That was all he needed – Sashy to hear him leaving. He’d waited until late afternoon before scooting, fewer eyes seeing what he was about, and she was still sleeping off an afternoon of majestic sex. It’d been one serious way of splitting. He’d been tempted to take her with him. Her compact brown body was the absolute best screw ever, like her brain was loaded with Kama Sutra software. But he was travelling light, ‘Bat Out of Hell’ time, breezing down the open road. A woman would hold him back; worse, Sashy was into family in a big way. Brothers, parents, cousins, hundreds of them. Daft girl spent half the day on the phone. She wouldn’t understand, he had to get lost, out of here, like he’d never existed. Kick loose from the shit glitching his life right now – Wolf, the two Event Horizon bastards.
He’d spent a couple of days collecting the money from cashpoints after that hard guy and the fat slag had turned up, initially terrified they’d pull the money from his Cayman account because of the blitz. Psychics, fucking psychics! Unhumans. Ade O’Donal still got cold burn in his balls thinking about it. His mind being torn open like a paper bag, thoughts held up to the light and examined. That was heavy-duty shit. Wolf must’ve gone acid crazy thinking they could get away with a burn against Event Horizon. That company was the biggest scene in England, even kombinates pissed themselves about Event Horizon.
Ade O’Donal had plugged himself but good into the circuit after the psychics had left; making serious connections, a cruise for any hard-core hotrod. Giga-conductor. New word. The circuit was ringing with it. The biggest deal in the known universe was going down, and Wolf had tried to run a spoiler. Shit. He could’ve been hurt. Hurt bad. Wasted!
The little patch of red blistered skin on his belly where the Event Horizon hardliner had zapped him with the Mulekick was still sore. A good memory. If he ever thought this was one giant curved syntho trip, that patch would set him straight. Might even be a scar. Girls like scars. Scars were macho.
There was a noise down below in the darkened hall. Footsteps clicking on the tiles.
‘Bru
ne? Hey, Brune, that you?’
He’d sent Brune out after lunch to top up the BMW, gas and watts. This was going to be one long flight. Cornwall, maybe. Ade O’Donal hadn’t made plans. He’d figured just go with the flow was safest. That way no one could load a tracer on him.
Brune was staying here, Brune with his leg in a tube of quik-set polymer. The guy was out of hardlining for a month anyway. Even the BMW would get axed eventually. Then there’d be just him, the money, some of the memoxes, and the Burrows terminal. That Burrows terminal was going to turn him into the circuit’s sexiest hotrod.
After the psychics had left Ade O’Donal had plugged the gate circuits into the Burrows to try and see how the fuck they’d opened it without tripping the alarms. Fifty Richter disaster time. The Burrows had crashed, totally, the only thing left working was the power LED, not even the menu showed. Whatever had been in the gate circuit was hot enough to melt through the hardware core guardian programs Wolf had given him.
That convinced him he had plugged into the biggest underclass operation running. Cancer software that was better than Wolf’s! When he settled down he was going to retro that Burrows, no matter what it took. Those bytes were going to earn him mega money, like what Wolf paid was just small change.
He’d go for a total reincarnation, plastique, sign on the circuit as a virgin, build a reputation from scratch. A genuine hotrod, not dependent on anyone. Pity about Tentimes, mind, it was a slick kind of handle, told the girls all they needed to know out front.
‘Brune?’
There was a figure in the hall, bending over a large crumpled bundle on the tiles. It straightened up as he reached the bottom of the stairs. And something about it was mega-shit wrong. The hospital had shaved Brune’s head, coating the back of his skull in dermal membrane. It looked like he was wearing a Jew’s skull cap from a distance. Good for a piss-take.