The Mandel Files (105 page)

“MacLennan?” he bellowed. “It doesn’t work on me, you shit!” He stood up, pointing the rifle ahead.

LASER ACQUISITION.

The red dot was flashing from behind some saplings away to his left, dancing about like a firefly caught in a hurricane. MacLennan was moving away from the jeep. Greg started to jog towards the dot, ducking under the low branches, swerving round the trunks.

“Greg?” It was Philip. “The crash team will be with you in two minutes.”

“Keep them in the air until I give the all clear.”

“All right, boy, it’s your show.”

The laser picked out MacLennan running down a row of saplings, about eighty metres ahead. A clockwork humanoid, legs and arms pumping in a fractured rhythm. Slender grid lines chased after him coiling round his limbs and torso.

DO YOU WANT TARGET MODE???

“Not yet. I have to be sure.”

SURE SURE SURE? WHAT KIND OF BLOODY SURE? HE TRIED TO KILL YOU.

Greg ran out into a tractor lane, four metres wide, the branches arching overhead, not quite meeting. It made the going a lot easier; he risked increasing his pace. “Sure about Clarissa Wynne.”

MacLennan vaulted over the fence at the bottom of the grove, and sprinted over the field towards Hambleton Wood.

Gotcha, Greg thought. He arrived at the fence, scaling it quickly.

MacLennan reached the boundary of the wood, and charged through the waist-high fringe of undergrowth. He suddenly fell forwards, disappearing from sight below the nettles. Greg heard a distant curse.

The grass underfoot was awkward, shifty and slippery with rain. He had to slow down again, especially as he was cutting down the slope. There was that distinctive sound of brittle wood snapping up ahead as MacLennan thrashed about in the dead hawthorn bushes.

Christ, I hope it is MacLennan after all this! But his intuition was giving him a powerful high, as if he was just going through the motions. The outcome was already decided.

MacLennan’s upper torso reappeared amid the bushes. He was flinging himself desperately at the knotted tangle of vines strung between the old trees. It wouldn’t do him any good, you needed either a tank or a bulldozer to break into the wood. He jerked round, right arm coming up. Red dot.

LASER ACQUISITION.

Greg slowed to a halt thirty metres from the wood, raising the rifle to his shoulder. “Give me targeting mode, and expand the magnification.” He ordered his cortical node to increase the neurohormone secretion level.

ABOUT BLOODY TIME.

Blue circles clicked into place. The targeting laser sweep contracted around MacLennan. It was as though he was standing two metres in front of Greg, the warped network of red lines bright enough to give off a faint coronal hue. An oversized pistol was gripped in his right hand, nozzle blazing. His espersense encountered the mind inside the reticulated head. It was MacLennan.

Greg aimed at the pistol and fired.

MacLennan howled, convulsing, right arm hugged to his chest. His pistol tumbling away. A hot throb of pain lanced into Greg’s mind. Behind it came the raw malevolence, the near-frenzied fear, and the abhorrence.

“Hold it,” Greg commanded as MacLennan began to look around his feet for the imprinter, the tendrils of desperation uncoiling in his gibbering mind. He walked forward until he came to the edge of the nettles. “Why did you come here, MacLennan? Why did you set them on me?”

“Because it was you!” MacLennan bawled. “You! Mindstar freak. You found the paradigm.”

“How did you know that?”

“You were from the Home Office, you burnt into the memory core. You! It was you. Freak fucker.”

“Oh shit.” The rush of energy which had carried him out of the house and across the grove suddenly bled away. There was no determination left in him. No pride at completing the case, only weariness. He just wanted this over. Finished.

MacLennan started sobbing.

“Shut up!” Greg yelled.

“It hurts me! It hurts. You’ve burnt my hand in half, you bastard. Get me to a hospital, for Christ’s sake.”

Every emotion reached rock bottom. Greg felt dangerously calm. “It hurts, does it, MacLennan? How did Clarissa Wynne feel do you think? When you pushed her head under the lake. Did she hurt, MacLennan?”

“Clarissa?” It came out like a whinny.

“You killed her. Didn’t you? Eleven years ago, you shot her full of syntho and killed her.”

“She was going to claim all the credit!”

“Even now you’re lying! It was her work.”

“Wasn’t!”

Guilt corrupted every thought in MacLennan’s head. And there was nothing left to say.

Greg took a laboured breath. “Royan, shoot it over.”

The grid snapped off for an instant as the targeting laser stabbed at MacLennan’s eyes.

He heard the paradigm as it came surging through the communication link, a near-ultrasonic wheee in his earpiece, a blast of photons encapsulating the essence of Liam Bursken, accompanied by a monomaniac hatred for one man.

Poetic justice, or intuitive inspiration; Greg didn’t know which, only that it was right. It fitted.

He pulled the photon amp strip from his face, twin circles of skin around his eyesockets pinching as it came free. The real world rushed back in on him, dark and dank, awash with human failings. The clean simplicity of the laser return virtual graphics was almost preferable. Somewhere behind him flames were soaring up into the night from the wreck of the jeep. Rain pattered down, beating the dusky vegetation towards the muddy ground.

MacLennan’s prim face was contorted with pain, hair plastered down into a straggly cap. His jaw was working silently, as though he was choking.

“Do you know who you hate, Liam?” Greg asked quietly. “Do you?”

MacLennan stared back at him with insane eyes, mouth screwing into a joyous smile. “Yes. Me. It’s me. Me!”

“That’s right.” He took the vibration knife from his belt, switched it on, and dropped it at MacLennan’s feet.

MacLennan snatched it up with his good hand. “Redemption. He has granted me redemption.” He laughed rhapsodically as he shoved the blade into his stomach. Blood foamed out. He sank to his knees, teeth clenched with effort, cheeks bulging, and pulled the blade up towards his sternum. “Yes. Oh, yes. My Lord.”

Greg turned and walked away. Back to the farmhouse and Eleanor, where he belonged.

High above the reservoir, the security team’s tilt-fan dived out of the clouds, turbines shrieking with urgency.

CHAPTER 25

Julia found her hand straying towards Robin’s hair. He was sleeping sprawled out on his belly in the middle of the bed, head fallen between two big fluffy pillows, mouth slightly agape. She stroked his hair softly, smoothing down the ruffled tufts. Seen in the lush morning light which was prising its way round the edges of the curtains he was even more handsome than the first time she had caught sight of him at the pool. And he was so terribly sweet. Tender, anxious, and eager all at once—excellent body too. He lacked Patrick’s ruthless dynamism, which had made their sex far more sensual. She still wasn’t quite sure if she was his first. But she was certainly near the front of the queue. A thought to treasure.

He stirred below her hand, and she held her breath. She didn’t want to wake him up just yet. The poor dear must be tired after last night.

She would have a cup of tea, skim through the breakfast ‘casts, nip into the toilet, then it would be time for him to perform again.

NN Core Access Request.

No peace for the wicked. And last night she had been gloriously wicked.

Open Channel To NN Core.

Morning, Juliet.

Morning, Grandpa. We can’t be having a crisis this early.

Not a crisis, no.

Thank heavens for that. What then?

I’m curious about something you did yesterday.

Spying on me again?

No. I was just reviewing some of your data traffic. Double checking. That’s what I’m here for, your safety net.

Yah, go on. She had a pretty good idea where this was leading.

You accessed one of our biochemical research labs yesterday. Using your executive code, no less. Mind telling me what for, gid?

No, I don’t mind. She leaned over to the bedside cabinet and poured her tea from the silver service.

Juliet!

Oh, you wanted to know right now?

If I still had a body, I’d put you over my bloody knee, m’girl.

Grandpa, behave. Besides, I’m too big and too strong these days. And I don’t fight fair, either.

You learnt that from me, Juliet. Now are you going to tell me?

She picked up her cup and saucer, and settled back into the pillows. Yah, all right. I wiped every record of the retrospective neurohormone from our memory cores, the analysis report, molecular structure, conclusions, everything. Then I sent Rachel over there, and she tipped all the remaining ampoules into the toxic waste disposal furnace. Happy now?

Bloody hell, girl. Why?

The tea was too hot to drink. She blew across the top of her cup as she marshalled her thoughts. Because I don’t want something like that let loose in the world, Grandpa. It’s bad enough having people like Gabriel being able to see what I might do in the future, or Greg knowing how badly I’ve been misbehaving just by looking at me. I don’t want someone standing in this room ten years from now taking a simple infusion and being able to see what I did last night.

Hardly a simple infusion, girl.

Exactly. The Home Office have slapped a restriction order on what really happened at Greg’s farm and Launde Abbey. Admittedly their main concern is the way MacLennan abused his paradigm project; if word got out that the New Conservatives had been allowing a company to research what amounts to a mind-control system there would be hell to pay. Certainly It would cost them the next election. Marchant didn’t need much prodding to include the neurohormone. And there are now only fifteen people in the world who know a retrospection neurohormone is even possible. With those numbers we might just be able to keep it that way. Even if the news does event ually leak out, it would take an immense research effort to produce it again, if we ever could. Kitchener was a very clever man, not to mention idiosyncratic.

You can’t fight progress, Juliet.

A retrospective neurohormone isn’t progress, Grandpa. Quite the opposite. And there is already more than enough freely available technology in this world capable of being misapplied by tekmercs and others. Corporations and kombinates are going to have to start becoming responsible again. After all, we do fund ninety per cent of all the significant scientific research these days.

Lord preserve us, a global citizen with a conscience.

Somebody has to be, Grandpa. There is more to Event Horizon than making nifty household ‘ware gadgets. Do you really want me to use all that influence for the bad?

Juliet, you are beautiful. I’m so proud of you.

She knew her cheeks would be reddening. Didn’t care. Not this morning. Thank you, Grandpa. I am what I am because I have the best teacher in the world.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Seductress!

Yah. And proud of it.

Eat your breakfast in peace, Juliet, I’ve got plenty of data-work piled up for you later.

Exit NN Core.

She took a sip of tea and fired the remote at the wall-mounted flatscreen, keeping the volume low. It was the East England channel, and she was on again. Yesterday’s gala reopening of the Stock Exchange. Another invitation impossible to refuse, half the companies listed were heavily dependent on Event Horizon contracts. The exchange had been operating out of temporary quarters at Canary Wharf ever since the PSP had fallen and trading became legal again. Party activists had razed the old exchange a couple of months after President Armstrong came to power. So a new purpose-built building had risen up out of the old site, one with plenty of spare data processing and communications capacity, ready for the challenge of regeneration.

Very symbolic, she thought caustically.

She watched herself walking down the main hall with the exchange officials, most of them male, and most over fifty. So boring, no conversation outside money. Esquiline had dressed her in a white dinner jacket made from a fabric which played clips of old black and white films over its surface.

Superbly unconventional, and formal at the same time. Going to Esquiline had turned into one of the best decisions she had made for a long time—if for no other reason than Esquiline’s fitting team was a fantastic new source of gossip, opening up the underbelly of the social scene. According to them, Lavinia Mayer didn’t even need to intervene on her behalf with the Coleman cow. Apparently Jakki Coleman’s agent had read her the riot act, effectively neutering her; it turned out he had a major contract with Esquiline to fit out several of his clients. And being thrown off an agent’s books for being difficult was worse than death in the channel universe. At least if you were dead, cult status repeats boosted your ratings.

Jakki hadn’t said a word against her for the last three days. Julia on the flatscreen cut the ribbon to the trading floor as Charlie Chaplin waddled across her back twirling his cane. All the jobbers cheered her enthusiastically.

Now they had been fun to talk to at the reception afzerwards. Most of them were under thirty.

She took another sip of tea as the scene changed back to East England’s breakfast studio. The blond twentysomething female presenter in a tight sweater was lounging back on a deep settee.

“That was yesterday’s opening ceremony,” she gushed warmly. “And to review it, I have our fashion correspondent, Leonard Sharr.”

The camera panned back to show the most effeminate man Julia had ever seen sitting at the other end of the settee, dressed in leather jeans and a purple jacket with half-sleeves, topaz handkerchief hanging flamboyantly out of his breast pocket. She bit back on her giggles.

“Leonard, what did you think of Julia’s clothes?”

“I found her choice so very, very appropriate. Tatty old design, showing tatty old films, at a tatty old function. It said simply nothing to me, except perhaps: look what a disaster I am, and I’m too rich to care. Really, this simply will not do for someone of her standing. She could be such a pretty little girl if she just made an effort and wore some nice frocks.”