"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 incidents 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 denationalised 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 the 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 encyclopaedic 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 noble to confound Armstrong.
Decisions. Decisions. Gabriel was silent. Unhelpful as always.
The relaxant's health-spar 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.
Chapter Thirty-Three
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 Eurofrancs; 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! Un-humans. 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 cl
icking on the tiles.
"Brune? 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 flick 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.
But the guy facing him was albino-white; death-mask face with jet-black lips, a close-cropped Mohican strip of titian hair running from the bridge of his nose over his crown and disappearing below the collar of his biker jacket. Ade O'Donal knew the look. Tribal. The guy was from Stoneygate.
Stoneygate wasn't somewhere Ade O'Donal went even in daytime, loaded with freaked-out psychos. Five tribes protecting Leicester's syntho vats, from the police and from each other, that district was wound up but tight.
Ade O'Donal dropped the Alitalia bags, making a dull slap on the hall tiles. "Brune?" it came out all wavery, like a whimper. And the broken thing on the floor was Brune, a puddle of blood spreading from a jagged rip in the dermal membrane. An ocean of blood, glistening sickly.
"Tentimes?" asked the Stoney.
"Shit, like no way. I ain't never heard of him."
"Lying, O'Donal, dey squirt me yo' file."
"Shit, man, I never told those two nothing, not a byte."
"No crap, Tentimes. No interested."
Ade O'Donal closed his eyes, didn't want to see the gun, or knife or whatever. Praying it would be quick.
"Job for yo'."
He risked a peek, ready to slam his eyes shut again. The Stoney was looking at him contemptuously.
"Say what?"
"Job. Burn."
"That's it?"
"Yay."
"All you want is like a fucking burn, and you waste Brune for that! You syntho-crashed shit." Ade O'Donal wanted to smash the Stoney with his fists, pound him into a pulp. His life was exploding into the all-time downer. People out of his nightmares kept coming for him, like every shitty deal in the world was his fault.
There was a tiny click, and a matt-grey ten-centimetre blade appeared a centimetre from Ade O'Donal's eye, diamond tip reflecting tiny slivers of cold blue light. "Don' gi' me lip, I slice yo'."
"Sure, OK, no problem, just cool it, man, right?"
"Where yo' terminal?"
The temptation to let the Stoney open the door was near-overwhelming. But he was wearing leather gloves, the charge might not be enough to penetrate. Too dangerous. "Down here," Ade O'Donal sighed.
The Stoney took in the wine cellar's hardware with a stoic gaze. "Alien," he murmured.
Ade O'Donal crumpled into his chair behind the table that held his terminals. "What's the burn?"
"Wolf say finish Event Horizon, d' core. Suit yo'?"
"How?"
A shrug.
"Shit."
"Be good. I break cover fo' yo'."
Cover? What the hell did that mean? No way could this arsehole be Wolf in person. This was getting extreme deep, the kind of deep he wasn't likely to climb out from. "Hey, listen, how are you gonna know if I take out the core? I mean, you're gonna leave me alone if I pull this off, right?"
"Friends, dey watching."
"And if it works?"
"Yo' still jiving tomorrow."
Ade O'Donal nodded slowly, as low as he'd ever been. But the Stoney needed him. If he did the burn there was a chance. Small, though, fucking small. Brune drowning in blood.
There were only two terminals on line, that psychic hardline bastard had screwed the Hitachi and the Akai, the super cancer from the gate had crashed the Burrows; that just left the Event Horizon and the Honeywell. And no way was he going to use the Event Horizon terminal, that name was too much bad karma right now.
Ade O'Donal tapped the Honeywell's power stud, slipping its throat mike round his neck; muttering, typing, eyes locked into the cube. A melt virus got him into Event Horizon's datanet, disguised as a civil engineering contractor's bid for a new flatscreen factory at Stafford. He loaded a memox Wolf had given him for the blitz, studying company procedure. Bids would be processed by the finance division, the lowest three forwarded to the freaky Turing core for a final decision.
He pulled a memox from the shelves, one he'd planned on taking with him. "This is like the best I've ever written, you know," he said, a sudden urge to explain, to let the Stoney know he was dealing with a real pro hotrod. "It scrambles databus management programs. That's the beauty of it, man; once it's in, you can't access the system to flush it out. Total internal communication shutdown. The core will be sliced right out of the datanet, along with anything it's interfaced with."
"Dat sound sweet."
"OK." Ade O'Donal pushed the memox into the Honeywell's slot, hands quivering.
The cube showed the bid's data package wrapping around the virus, geometric tentacles choking a crystalline egg. Ade O'Donal probed the finished Trojan with tracer programs. There was no chink in the covering, nothing that hinted at the black treasure beneath the surface. Smooth. And he had made the quotes for the factory ridiculously low, the bid package would be shunted to the core, no sweat.
Idiotically, pride overrode his depression. This was it, his construct, all his own, a solo hotrod burn. Tentimes had made solo.
O'Donal fed the Trojan an activation code keyed to the core's dump order. It would pass clean through the finance division processors, then once they forwarded it to the core the fucker would detonate, digital H-bomb. Wipe-out time.
Index finger tapped: download.
"Might take a while," O'Donal said.
"No matter."
The diamond-tipped blade clicked softly.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Julia had insisted on relieving the nurse at Katerina's bedside in the afternoon, keeping a solitary vigil over her brain-wasted friend. She hated every second of it, knowing she deserved it. Pushing Kats towards Kendric had seemed so clever at the time, an elegant solution. Everybody would wind up with what they wanted, no tears, no heartache.
Greg was right, she'd only thought of the deed, never the consequences. Too shallow and self-obsessed. Still a child. Idiot savant.
Katerina stirred, turning, her sleep troubled. Dr. Taylor had given her a trauma suppressor. Short-term amnesiac, the woman had explained, it'll kill the craving for now; but she'd made sure Katerina was infused with tranquillisers throughout the day, only leaving a few periods of brief semi-lucidity for eat
ing and going to the toilet.
Julia had been the one spooning soup into her. Katerina had swallowed automatically, incapable of coherent speech. Compounding the anguish.
Julia had got three of Event Horizon's premier-grade executives working flat out on securing Katerina that Caribbean treatment, trying to buy a place in the detox clinic. They'd been told there was an eight-month waiting list. Julia refused to let that bother her, pulling in the company's favours, bullying the clinic with financial and political pressure. Dr. Taylor had warned her that Katerina's cranial blood vessels were saturated with the symbiont; if its grip was ever going to be broken then it would have to be done swiftly.
She'd buy that bloody Caribbean island if necessary. Anything. Anything at all. She just wanted Kats back to her old self. Frivolous, vaguely annoying, and utterly carefree.
The sun had nearly dropped below the horizon, fluorescing a cloud-slashed western sky to a royal gold, fading to black at its zenith. Julia watched it from the bedroom window, seeing the shadows pool in hollows and nooks across Wilholm's grounds, spilling out over the grass. The fountain in the lily pond died down spluttering, its light sensors switching off the pump.
Julia activated a single wall-mounted biolum, then crossed the room and drew the heavy Tudor curtains across both windows. When she'd first left America and the desert she'd been entranced by dawn and dusk in Europe, cool blues and greens gleaming dully under fiery skies, always different. It'd been magical, the expected sadness that she'd miss the desert's beauty never materialising.
Tonight the sight left her totally unmoved. Her emotions seemed to have shut down. The climax would come tonight, she was sure of it. The game had ceased to be a game. And she was responsible, she and Grandpa. Kendric's manoeuvrings and power ploys had been thwarted at every stage. She'd stalemated him all across the board. There was nothing left to him now but the physical. Kendric would have no qualms about that.