The Mandel Files (100 page)

There were five of them. Kids, still in their teens, two girls, three boys. Filthy, greasy jeans, frayed black leather jackets, denim waistcoats with studs, long straggly hair. The garage walls were slick with condensation, junk furniture—broken settees and armchairs—lined up around the walls, and an oil lamp hung from the ceiling.

Greg’s photon amp threw the whole scene into starkly etched focus. Two of the kids were screwing on the floor, grunting like pigs. Another two stood on either side, watching, giggling. The fifth was huddled in a corner, arms over his head, weeping quietly.

Greg shot the one closest to him. A girl, about seventeen, her neck freckled with dark infuser marks. The stunshot spat out a bullet-sized pulse of blue-white lightning. It hit her on the side of her ribcage. Her squeal was choked off as she reeled round. There was an impossibly serene smile on her face as she crumpled on to the legs of the rutting couple.

Pulling the trigger was incredibly hard. They weren’t innocent, not even close. Just profoundly ignorant, pitiable. He had to keep on reminding himself the stunshot wasn’t lethal, though God alone knew what it would do to a metabolism fucked up so badly by syntho.

He turned slightly. Aim and fire, nothing else matters.

The second kid gurgled as the pulse hit him in the stomach, curling up and falling forwards. Aim and fire. The girl on the floor was struggling to get up as her partner collapsed on top of her. Aim and fire.

The boy in the corner was looking straight at Greg, face ecstatic, tears streaming down. “Thank you, oh thank you.”

Aim and fire.

The kid slumped down again, head bowed.

“Lord, what a waste,” Teddy said. “Someplace else they could’ve been real people.”

Greg stepped over the prone bodies and extinguished the oil lamp, letting the night claim its own. “You can get syntho anywhere.”

“Not in Mucklands, you flicking couldn’t. I look after my kids. Anyone tries peddling that shit near me an’ they end up swinging by the balls. Blackshirts don’t even look after their own.”

“You’re preaching to the converted. Come on.”

According to the bright yellow co-ordinates the guido was flashing up, he was standing fifty metres from the target house. Its green template glowed lambently, the walls and roof remaining outside the photon amp’s resolution.

“Colin, how are we doing?”

“He’s still there, Greg.”

“OK, we’re closing in now.”

He trotted down the road, watching the house gaining substance. It was a large detached three-storey affair, with bow windows on either side of the front door, built from a pale yellow brick with blue-grey slates. Nothing fancy, virtually a cube. Diamond shapes made from blue bricks set between the first-floor windows were the only visible ornamentation. A tall chimney stack was leaning at a worrying angle, a number of bricks from its top were missing. The chimney pots themselves ended in elaborate crowns, all of them playing host to tussocks of spindly weeds.

A metre-high wall enclosed a broad strip of garden at the front. Greg stopped just outside; it took him a moment to realize there were no solar panels. The house’s residents must be right at the bottom of the human pile, and in Walton the bottom was as far down as you could get. All the windows had their curtains drawn; the photon amp revealed vague splinters of light round the edges. There was no gate, its absence marked by rusty metal hinge pins protruding from the wall.

He walked down the algae-slimed path. Dog roses had run wild in the garden, reducing itto a thorny wilderness sprinkled with small pale flowers. A panel with eight bell buttons was set into the wall at the side of the door. Very primitive, there was no camera lens as far as he could see. He took the sensor wand from its slot on his ECM ‘ware module, and ran it round the door frame. Apart from the lock system, it was clean.

“We’re at the front door now,” Greg said. He was surprised by the ‘ware lock, a tiny glass lens flush with the wood. He already had the vibration knife in his hand ready to cope with a mechanical lock.

“I can feel you,” Colin said. “Yes, you’re very close now. He’s above you, Greg. Definitely higher up.”

“OK.” He showed his card to the lock, using his little finger to activate it rather than the usual thumbprint. A Royan special was loaded in the card, a crash-wipe virus designed to flush lock circuitry clean. There was a subdued snick from the lock. He pushed the door open a crack, and slipped the sensor wand in.

“It’s clear,” he told Teddy.

The hall went straight through to the back of the house.

He saw a set of stairs halfway along. A candle was burning in a dish on a small table just inside the door. Its flame flickered madly until Teddy closed the door shut behind him. The lock refused to engage.

Greg let his espersense expand. There were four people on the ground floor, none of them showing any awareness that the front door had been opened.

They went up the stairs fast. The first-floor landing had five doors. One was open; he could just make out an ancient iron bath inside. His espersense picked out seven minds, two of them children. Murmurs of music from channel shows were coming through some of the doors.

“Which way, Colin?”

“Walk forward, Greg.”

He took three paces down the worn ochre carpet. Teddy stayed at the top of the stairs, watching the other doors.

“Stop,” Colin said. “He’s on your left.” The strain in his voice was quite clear, even through the satellite link.

“Thanks, Colin. Now you shut your gland down, right now, you hear?”

“Greg, my dear chap, there’s no need to shout.”

Greg let his espersense flow through the door. There were two people inside, one male, one female, sitting together.

Judging by the relaxed timbre of their minds he guessed they were watching a channel.

The door lock was mechanical, an old Yale. With Teddy standing behind him he. shoved the blade clean through the wood just above the keyhole and sliced out a semicircle.

Knebel’s room was just as seedy as he had been expecting: damp wallpaper, cheap furniture, laminated chipboard table and sideboard, plain wooden chairs, a settee covered in woolly brown and grey fabric, its cushioning sagging and worn; thin blue carpet. The light was coming from some kind of salvaged lorry headlamp on the table, shining at the ceiling, powered from a cluster of spherical polymer batteries on the floor. An English Electric flatscreen, with shoddy colour contrast, was showing a channel current affairs ‘cast.

Greg didn’t know the woman, a blowzy thirty-year-old, flat washed-out face, straw hair, wearing a man’s green shirt and a short red skirt.

Knebel had grown a pointed beard, but Greg would have recognized him anywhere. The apparatchik was wearing jeans and a thick mauve sweater, buckled sandals on bare feet. He had aged perceptibly; he was only forty, almost Greg’s contemporary, but the flesh had wasted from his face producing sunken cheeks, deep eyes, thin lips. Mouse-brown hair with a centre parting hung lankly down to his ears.

The two of them were sitting on the settee, facing the flatscreen, heads turning at the clatter of the lock hitting the floor. Greg aimed the stunshot at the woman and fired. It sounded dreadfully loud in the confined space. The pulse caught her on the shoulder. She spasmed, nearly slewing off the settee. Her eyes rolled up as she emitted a strangled cry.

Greg shifted the stunshot fractionally.

Knebel stared at him, his mouth parted, jaw quivering softly. His startled thoughts reflected utter despair. He closed his eyes, screwing up his face wretchedly.

“One sound, and you won’t be dead, you will simply wish you were,” Greg said. “Now turn the flatscreen off.”

Teddy closed the door behind him.

Knebel opened his eyes, showing the frantic disbelief of a condemned man given a reprieve. A shaking hand pawed at the remote.

Greg ignored him, his espersense hovering around the other minds on the first floor. Two of them had heard the commotion. Curiosity rose, they waited for something else to happen. When nothing did their attention wavered, and they were drawn back into the mundane routine of the evening.

He waited another minute to make sure, then pulled the photon amp band from his eyes.

Knebel managed to crumple without actually moving. “Oh my God. Greg Mandel, the Thunderchild himself.”

It had been quite some time since Greg had heard anyone use his army callsign. Not since he left the Trinities, in fact.

But of course, the PSP had access to all the army’s personnel files. “I’m flattered. I wasn’t aware Oakham’s Lord Protector had taken an interest in me.”

“You were believed to be an active member of the Trinities, and you live in the Berrybut estate. No close family, no special woman as far as we knew. Very high ESP rating. Plenty of combat experience. I took notice all right.”

“Lived. Lived in Berrybut. I’ve moved now.”

“Of course,” Knebel said with bitter irony, “do excuse me, I haven’t accessed your file lately. My mistake.”

“If you knew all that, how come you never came hunting for me, you and your Constables?”

Knebel stroked the hair of the unconscious woman, gazing tenderly at her shivering face. “And if we’d missed? Which was more than likely with that freaky Thompson woman guarding your future. I had enough trouble keeping the ranks in order as it was. You were busy here in Peterborough. The last thing I needed was a fully trained, fully armed Mindstar monster gunning for us when we left the station to go home at night.”

“Figures. You people never did try anything physical unless the odds were ten to one in your favour.”

“Could you spare me this ritual of insults, and just get it over with, please?”

Greg gave him a frigid grin. “Tell you, Knebel, this is the luckiest day of your entire shitty little life. I’m not here to snuff you.”

Knebel’s hand stopped. “What?”

“True. I only want some bytes you’ve got.”

“An’ you gonna give ‘em to us, boy,” Teddy growled.

Swellings of terror and hope disrupted the surface thoughts of Knebel’s mind. “Are you serious? Just information?”

“Yeah.”

He licked his upper lip, glancing nervously at Teddy. “What about afterwards?”

“You join her in dreamland, we leave. And that’s a fucking sight more than you deserve.”

“God, you must be loving this, seeing what I’ve been brought down to.” The eyes darkened with pain. “Yes, I’ll plead with you for my life, I’ll tell you anything you want, answer any question, I don’t care. Dignity isn’t something I have any more, your kind broke that. But you gave me something in return; I’ve found there’s a great deal of peace to be had once every pretension has been stripped out. Did you know that Mandel, can you see it? I don’t worry about the ways things are any more, I don’t worry about the future. That’s all down to you now. Your worries, your power politics. And you’ve wasted your time coming here, because I don’t know anything about the Blackshirts’ weapons stocks, they never tell me anything. I’m not a part of that.”

“Not what we’re here for.”

“Speak for yourself,” Teddy muttered.

“What then?” Knebel asked.

“Launde Abbey.”

“What?” Knebel blurted loudly. He shrank back when Greg motioned with the stunshot. “Sorry. Really, I’m sorry. But... is that it? You came to ask me about Launde Abbey?”

“Yeah. Now I’ve come a long way, and gone to a lot of trouble to rap with you. So believe me, you don’t want to piss me off. You know I’m empathic, so just answer the questions truthfully.”

“All right. I saw you on the newscast the other night. You were appointed to the Kitchener murder, something to do with Julia Evans.” His eyes lingered on the ‘ware modules hanging from Greg’s belt.

Greg switched in the communication module’s external mike. “Tell me about Clarissa Wynne.”

“Clarissa? God, that was years and years ago. I’d almost forgotten about her until the other day. That newscast brought a lot of memories back.”

“Ten years ago. What can you remember?”

Knebel closed his eyes, slim eyebrows bunching up. “Ten? Are you sure? I thought it was eleven.”

“It could have been.”

“Well, what does it say in her file?”

“That is the reason I’m here, Knebel. Someone has erased every byte of Clarissa Wynne from Rutland’s memory cores; police, council, local newspapers, you name it, the lot.”

“God.”

“Do you know who?”

“No.”

“Right. You say you thought she died eleven years ago?”

“Yes, I’m sure it was eleven.”

“OK, what orders did you get from the Ministry of Public Order about her death?”

“To wrap it up immediately, make the coroner enter a verdict of accidental death, not to cause any ripples, especially not to antagonize Kitchener and the other students.”

“Why not? Why was the PSP so anxious to hush the girl’s death up? What made her so important?”

Knebel gave him a humourless smile. “Important? Clarissa Wynne wasn’t important. God, the Ministry didn’t even know her name. She was an embarrassment. You see, eleven years ago, the PSP was applying to the World Bank for a very large loan, billions. You remember that time, Mandel; the seas were reaching their peak, we’d got hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring inland from flooded coastal areas, we didn’t have any food, we didn’t have any industry, we didn’t have any hard currency. It was a fucking great mess. We needed that loan to get the economy started again. And the Americans didn’t want to help a bunch of Reds. No matter we were elected—”

Teddy growled dangerously. Greg held up a hand, sensing just how hostile Teddy’s mind was.

“OK. All right. I’m sorry,” Knebel said. “No politics. But look, the point was, the PSP couldn’t afford a human rights issue. The Americans would have leapt on it as an excuse to block the loan, destabilize the Party. Kitchener, for all he was bloody obnoxious personally, was internationally renowned, someone whose name people knew all over the world. Can you see the disinformation campaign the Americans would have mounted if I’d started questioning the students and Kitchener thoroughly? Their friend and colleague has been tragically drowned, and all the PSP does is persecute them with inquiries and allegations. It would have been Sakharov all over again. We needed that money, Mandel, people were starting to starve. In England, for God’s sake! Pensioners. Children. So I did what I was told, and I kept my mouth shut afterwards. Because it was necessary. And to hell with you and your rich bitch mistress. I don’t care how wise after the event you are.”