The Mandel Files (106 page)

“Arsehole!” Julia completely forgot her cup was still half full. The tea went everywhere.

CHAPTER 26

The forensic team had cleared away all their polythene sheets and peeled the bar code tags off the furniture, they’d even returned the cacti to the table below the window, but somehow the room wasn’t the same. Nicholas stood at the foot of the circular bed, surveying the place that had been home for a few short months. Coming here originally had been the pinnacle of his life. Now it left him totally unmoved. It wasn’t that Launde Abbey was full of bad memories, rather it didn’t hold any memories for him at all, good or bad. Even the ghosts had departed—Kitchener, Eleanor...

He dropped his maroon shoulder-bag at the foot of the bed, and stared round in some perplexity. His rock band holoprints were missing. What had the forensic team wanted them for anyway?

He began opening drawers, and of course none of his clothes were where they should be. He settled for dumping everything on the bed to be sorted out later. The uniformed policeman who had driven him up to the Abbey wasn’t going to hustle him along. Oakham police couldn’t extend enough courtesies right now.

There had been a press conference to announce they were releasing him from custody, that he was in no way implicated in the murder of Edward Kitchener, The reporters had clamoured for details; but apart from saying he was glad it was all over, and that he thought the police had done a good job under difficult circumstances, and no he wasn’t going to sue for wrongful arrest, he didn’t answer any questions. Amanda Paterson and Jon Nevin had stepped in sharpish to deflect any awkward shouted queries. And then amazingly the press had left him alone, no intrusion into his private life, no chasing after his parents or Emma, no big-money offers for exclusives. That was down to Julia Evans, he suspected. He was rather pleased he could work out that such underground pressures were being applied. The old Nicholas would have accepted their lack of interest without thought, never wondering about the fast manoeuvring and horse-trading that must have gone on deep below the surface of public awareness.

He smiled. The old Nicholas, as if he’d emerged from a chrysalis, born again. But it was true enough. The world was exactly the same, only his perception of it had altered. Matured, rather. What did they call it? Realpolitik. And his first encounter with that phenomenon had come two days ago, the morning Vernon Langley had let him out of the cell, telling him he was free to go.

Greg Mandel had arrived at the station, looking grieved and tired, and told him what had actually happened. There was a secrecy order to sign and thumbprint, and it had been made very clear he wasn’t to speak to anybody about paradigms or retrospective neurohormones ever again. Officially, MacLennan had let Liam Bursken out of Stocken Hall for the night, bringing him to Launde to murder Kitchener.

Bursken was permanently incommunicado, unable to protest his innocence, perhaps not even wanting to—let the sinners believe the Lord could reach out to them through bars of steel. MacLennan was dead. Suicide, Greg said. And looking at his stony, impassive face, even Nicholas’s perpetual inquisitiveness had tacitly retreated.

As the price of being vindicated, adopting that particular masquerade was cheap indeed.

He emptied the last drawerful of socks on to the bed. It was raining quite heavily again, thick clouds darkening the morning sky. Roll on April and the start of England’s long summer. When he walked over to the window he could just make out the grubby grey strip of road running through the park.

Night-time, when the rain had fallen like a biblical deluge. The jeep crawling down the slope cowards the river. The vivid flash he had thought was lightning.

He shuddered and turned away.

The cacti on the copper-topped table hadn’t been watered for over a week, the soil in their pots was bone dry. And he never had seen them flower the way Kitchener had told him they would.

He decided to take a couple with him. There had to be something of the old man’s that would stay with him, some tangible personal memento. And he doubted he would be welcome to visit Rosette and her baby. Although you never knew. Motherhood might soften her...

Nah. No chance.

Grinning, he picked up two of the cacti pots.

Someone knocked quietly on the door.

“Come in.” He put the cacti down again, thinking it would be the uniformed policeman.

It was Isabel.

He stared dumbly at her, completely tongue-tied. The old Nicholas wasn’t so distant after all.

She was wearing a lavender-coloured dress, curly hair held back by a broad black velvet band. As lovely as always. It was so painful just seeing her. Everything he ever wanted. Unreachable.

“Hello, Nick.”

“Er, hello. I was just collecting my things.” Nothing had changed, he still couldn’t talk to her, say what he wanted. Pathetic!

“Me too. The executors are going to take over the running of the Abbey in a couple of days. Did you know they are going to open it as a sort of ashram for university science students?”

“Yes, I’d heard.” He looked down at his trainers.

“I’m sorry I didn’t help you with the police.” She clenched her hands in front of her, fingers twisting. “We all are actually. It was so unfair on you. I don’t know how I could have ever believed you were involved.”

“That’s all right.”

“Hardly, Nick.”

He risked a glance. She was looking out of the window, face composed, dispassionate.

“I did do it, you know,” he said. “It was me.”

“No. Your hands, but not you.”

He considered that. If Isabel, someone so intimately involved with Kitchener, could accept his innocence, then maybe he was blameless after all. “Isabel?” he began.

She parted her lips in a small knowing smile. “No, Nick, I didn’t love him. That was just a part of Launde, the wonder and the craziness. I was swept along like all the others. I wanted to tell you. I was going to tell you the next morning.”

He hung his head.

“And what about you?” she asked. “What are you going to do next?”

“Er, I’ve been offered a research post by Event Horizon, actually. In Ranasfari’s team at Cambridge. I think I detect the hand of Greg Mandel behind that. If Event Horizon is prepared to employ me, then I must be innocent. That’s what people will think, anyway.”

“Yes. That was nice of him.”

“Greg’s all right. Once you get round him having a gland.”

“You’ve changed, Nick. You’re stronger now. That’s good.”

Not enough. Not enough. I haven’t! “What are you going to do?”

She smiled secretively. “I’m going to get my doctorate. At Cambridge, actually; I’ve been accepted by a college.”

Nicholas turned bright red. He heard Kitchener’s delighted mocking laughter echoing out of... somewhere, and took a deep breath. “Isabel, I love you. And, I know I’m not much—”

She kissed him softly, silencing him. His arms went round her. They fitted just fine.

THE END

The Nano Flower

The Greg Mandel Trilogy Book 3

By Peter F. Hamilton

CHAPTER 1

Suzi crapped the Frankenstein cockroach into the toilet bowl, then pushed the chrome handle halfway down for a short flush.

She concentrated on the neural icon which seemed to hover at the periphery of her consciousness, and marshalled her thoughts into a distinct instruction sequence. Activate Sense Linkage and Directional Control, she ordered her bioware processor implant.

When she closed her eyes the ghostly image from the cockroach’s infrared-sensitive retinas intensified to its full resolution. There was a moment of disorientation as she interpreted the picture being fed along the optical fibre plugged into her coccyx ganglion splice. It was a hazy jumble of Möbius topology, shaded red, pink, and black, a convolution through which green moons fell. The cockroach was clinging to the bottom of the sewer pipe directly underneath a shower of droplets from the toilet downpipe. Directional graphics superimposed themselves across the picture, resembling an aircraft pilot’s command display.

Suzi guided the cockroach up the side of the sewer pipe until it was out of the water channel, then set it walking. Optical fibre began to unspool behind it, thinner than a cobweb.

Perspective was tricky. She allowed herself to believe she was walking through some baroque nether-world cathedral. The fluted walls had a black-mirror sheen, carved with a fabulous abstract glyph. Above her, the curving roof was punctured by elliptical ebony holes, all of them spitting phosphene-green globules. A small river slithered down the concave floor, bearing away unidentifiable lumps of pale fibrous matter. She was suddenly very glad Jools the Tool hadn’t stitched any olfactory receptors into the Frankenstein cockroach when he was putting it together for her.

Pressure-sensitive cell clusters detected the rush of air, warning her of the approaching flush. She scuttled the cockroach right up to the roof of the sewer. The burst of water churned past underneath her. A turd the size of a cargo ship rode the wavefront, trailing ribbons of disintegrating paper.

She waited until the surge had gone, then brought the cockroach back down the curving pipe and carried on forwards. Fungal growths were blooming out of cracks in the concrete, moonscape mattresses of slime. The cockroach clambered over the humps without even slowing, all the while spinning out its gossamer thread.

Up ahead, where the pipe contracted to a black vanishing point, she thought she saw something move.

In a way, Suzi considered the Morrell deal as a vindication of the way she had lived the last twelve years. There was no violence involved, not even a hint of it. Violence had launched her into the tekmerc game after she got out of prison. Organized violence, deliberately and precisely applied. It was her trade, all she knew.

Her teens and early twenties had been spent in the Trinities, an anti-PSP gang operating out of the Mucklands Wood estate in Peterborough during the years when the People’s Socialism Party controlled the country, a long dark decade of near-Maoist dictatorship just after the Greenhouse Effect ran riot.

She had joined up the day after a squad of PSP Card Carriers ransacked her parents’ hotel, stripping out the fittings, stealing the booze. Her father had been pistol whipped, a beating which left him partially paralyzed down his right side. Her mother had been gang-raped, a trauma she never recovered from. They were middle-aged middle-class suburbanite innocents, well-to-dos who couldn’t believe what was happening to their green and pleasant England, and didn’t know how to stop it.

The only reason Suzi had been there when it happened was because the PSP had shut down Welbeck College, the British Army’s officer cadet boarding school. A military career was all she had wanted for as long as she could remember.

An ambition subtly reinforced by her slightly disreputable maternal grandfather who spun enticing stories of glory and honour back in the days when he’d served in the Falklands and the Gulf. Gaining one of the fiercely contested places at Welbeck, despite her physical stature, had been the zenith of her young life.

She had wanted to fight that afternoon when the Party militia came, young struts with their red armbands and bright new cards that had President Armstrong’s signature bold along the bottom to say whatever they did was official. Fresh from her four terms of unarmed combat classes and rifle shooting and square bashing she considered herself invincible. But her father, bigger and stronger, had forced her into a storeroom and locked her in. Suzi hammered on the door in rage and humiliation until sounds of the looting penetrated, the crash of breaking glass merging with anguished screams. Then she shrank into a corner, hugging herself in the dark, and praying nobody smashed down the door to find her.

The police discovered her the next morning, all cried out. As she saw the wreckage that was once her home and her parents, rage turned to demonic hatred. She could have prevented it, she knew. if she’d just been given the chance, been given the weapons hardware to complement her determination and amplify her size.

The Trinities were led by an ex-British Army sergeant, Teddy La Croix, called Father by the kids under his command. He put her to work as a runner.

Peterborough in those days had a raw frontier-town edge to it. Over fifty thousand people had descended on the city, one step ahead of the rising sea that was slowly devouring the Fens, and more were on the way. The polar melt and thermally expanded oceans eventually sent the muddy water to lap at the city’s eastern suburbs, turning the lush Nene valley into an estuary. This on top of an indigenous population still struggling to adapt to the year-round heat, the imminent collapse of public gas, electricity, and water grids, food rationing, and austerity economics.

Suzi flittered about the congested streets, soaking up the buzz of grim determination everyone seemed to possess. She watched the old temperate vegetation die in the steambath atmosphere exhaled by the Fens quagmire, only to be replaced by the newer more vigorous tropical plants with their exotic blooms. She walked entranced along the rows of stalls which sprang up along each road as the traffic faded away, stealing often, eating well, and fighting with the barrow boys.

Nobody noticed her, one more kid running wild in a city teeming with thousands of her kind. She thrived in her environment, but all the while she moved with purpose, keeping tabs on Party members, watching who went in and out of the town hall, acting as a sentry for raids on Party offices. At nights she would be there in the riots organized by the Trinities, an incongruously small skinny figure compared to the rest of her platoon, which aimed for muscle bulk and favoured combat fatigues and leathers.

She learned tradecraft from Greg Mandel, another ex-Army man working with Father to overthrow PSP oppression; how to make Molotovs that didn’t go out when they were thrown, how a platoon should deploy to jump a police snatch squad, what to use against assault dogs, the correct way to break riot shields, a long interesting list of tactics and weapons no one had ever mentioned at Welbeck.