The Mandel Files (25 page)

“True.” He pushed all the suspicions emanating from intuition out of his mind, cancelling the gland secretions, trying to sketch in a wholly logical course on the resultant virgin whiteness. “I want to take you to Wilholm and meet Philip Evans sometime.”

“What for this time?”

“Two things. Give the staff the once-over to see if they knew about the NN core. And see if there’s going to be another attack on him. If there is, it would mean I’m wrong about the opposition aiming at the giga-conductor. We’d be back to vengeance, Kendric di Girolamo, and the mole.”

“Makes sense. When?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. I’m busy in the morning.”

“So you are.”

He couldn’t tell whether her carefully neutral tone was disguising anger or amusement. Her mind gave the impression of total indifference. A balance of the two, perhaps?

“Will Julia be at Wilholm in the afternoon?” he asked.

A broad smile spread across Gabriel’s chubby face. “You know, I do believe she will.”

CHAPTER 19

Ninety per cent of England’s road network had been abandoned in the PSP decade; the energy crunch put paid to most private travel, and the incendiary sun steadily deliquesced the tarmac to a worthless residue. A pre-Warming style maintenance programme was out of the question, economically unfeasible, environmentally unsound. Motorways and critical link roads were kept open, but the rest was left to waste away. People who could afford cars bought them configured to cope with the rough terrain. The A47 was one of the roads the PSP was forced to refurbish; it was an essential transport artery between Peterborough and the A1, and the PSP desperately needed the goods which the city manufactured. It meant that the A47’s traffic levels were high, and most of the vehicles commercial. Driving down it was a new experience for Eleanor; she began to realize how different England’s city life had become from the pastoral existence of the countryside and smaller market towns. It was almost as though the country was developing a split personality. Of course, the gulf was more pronounced here than anywhere else.

Peterborough struck her as a tripartite Babylon, the old, the new, and the waterbound condemned by adverse circumstances to live with each other, rival siblings cooped up in the same house. It sat on the shore of the gigantic salt quagmire which used to be the most fertile soil basin in all of Europe. The Lincolnshire Fens were originally marshes, drained over centuries to provide a rich black loam which could grow any crop imaginable. They were perfectly flat, like Holland; on clear days you could see for forty or fifty kilometres over them, so some of Oakham’s refugees had told her. The trouble was, the Fens’ average height above sea level was two metres; in some places, like the Isle of Ely, they were actually below sea level. When the Antarctic ice melted they never stood a chance.

Peterborough absorbed nearly two-thirds of the population displaced by the rising water; the city had no choice, it was hemmed in between the new sludge to the east and a shabby band of tent towns on the high ground to the west. None of the refugees was going to move; they had lost their homes, they had found a functioning urban administration, and they were through with running, so they sat and waited for government to get off its arse and do something. The three attempts the PSP mounted to disperse them ended in riots. So the Party was left with no choice. They poured money into permanent accommodation projects, as well as allowing in foreign investment to ease the load on the Treasury, and as a result it became one of the most prosperous cities in England. Huge housing estates mushroomed to serve vast industrial precincts, a crazy mismatch of developments sprawling venomously over the green belt. A deep-water port was built above the drowned cathedral; dredgers reopened the Nene, gouging out a new laser-straight channel directly into the Wash.

Trade links, determination, and money, lots of money; that was the giddy synergy brew. Peterborough became England’s Hong Kong, a unique city state of refugees determined to carve themselves a new life. High on that special energy which crackles around Fresh Start frontiers. Everybody was on the up and up, on the make, on the take. If you couldn’t find it in Peterborough, it didn’t exist. A philosophy completely out of phase with the rest of the country’s lethargy. The PSP city hall apparatchiks just couldn’t move fast enough to keep track of the construction chaos that boiled out from the suburbs. Half of the economy was underground, Eurofrancs only; smuggling was rife; spivs bought themselves penthouses in New Eastfield. A resurgent Gomorrah, her father had called it.

Eleanor followed a big methane-powered articulated lorry down the gentle slope towards the bloated Ferry Meadows estuary, née Park, the Duo’s suspension thrumming smoothly on the tough thermo-cured cellulose surface. The A47 turned left at the bottom of the slope, running along the top of a small embankment above the filthy, swirling water. After the lorry rumbled round the bend, she could see a string of ten barges moored across the mile-wide estuary between the base of the embankment and Orton Winstow. Artificial islands of rock and concrete were rising beside each of them.

She watched a crane swinging its load of rock from a barge across to the centre of an island, dropping it with a low rumbling sound. A cloud of dust billowed up. When it cleared, she could see a gang of men swarming over the pile, rolling rocks down on to flat-topped carts so they could be packed behind the encircling wall of concrete.

The idea for an eddy-turbine barrage had been started back when the PSP was in power. They were generators that looked like propeller blades, mounted in narrow nacelles and tethered between the islands where the current spun them as it ebbed and flowed.

Peterborough’s post-Warming industrial base had been founded on light engineering and gear production, easily served by the city’s electricity allocation from the National Commerce Grid, and supplemented by solar panels. But the explosion of manufacturing had begun to attract heavier industries, pushing the power demand close to breaking point. Then after the Second Restoration the newly legitimized Event Horizon arrived. With its wholly modern industries, Peterborough was the obvious choice to supply the cyber-factories with components once Philip Evans brought them ashore. The already vigorous city went into overdrive. But its expanded fortunes brought it up against infrastructure capacity limits. The eddy-turbine barrage was intended to relieve the now chronic energy shortage, one of a dozen projects rushed into construction to cope with the excessive demands Event Horizon was placing.

The traffic was snarled up in front of the Duo. Eleanor slowed, and saw a bus in front of the lorry had stopped to let out its passengers. They were all men in rough working clothes, carrying or wearing hard hats. They joined a group of about seventy waiting on the embankment below the road, level with the line of barges. There was a small jetty at the bottom of the embankment. A boat had just cast off, ferrying some of the men out to the islands. She could see a clump of men who’d been left behind on the jetty arguing hotly with a pair of foremen.

“They’ll be lucky,” Greg murmured as the Duo drove past the crowd milling aimlessly on the embankment.

“Why?”

“Tell you, the eddy-turbine barrage is a council project, right. Unless you’re on the city council labour register, there’s no way you’ll get to work on it.”

“Well, why don’t they sign on with the council, then?” she asked.

“A lot of people on the dole right now are ex-apparatchiks. And the New Conservative Inquisitors have got their hands full purging the administration staff of any that got left behind after the PSP fell. The government is nervy about them; what with inflation and the housing shortage, a few well-placed PSP leftovers could cause serious grief. So the last thing the council wants is to take them back, especially not on a project as important as this one.”

“Why don’t you apply to join the Inquisitors?” she teased. “That’d be a regular job.”

Greg grinned. “They couldn’t afford me.” He pointed ahead. This is the turn. We’ll park in Bretton and walk the rest of the way.”

She took a left through the old Milton Park golf club entrance. The Duo powered along the rough cinder tracks lined by hemispherical apartment blocks that’d sprung up to replace the greens, tees, and bunkers. The three-storey buildings were self-contained Finnish prefabs, a burnished pewter for easy thermal control. Fast-growing maeosopsis trees dominated the estate, their long branches curved over the tracks, affording a decent amount of shade. There were small allotments ringing each of the silvery hemispheres, laid out with uniform precision.

“Tidy,” she remarked, approvingly. “They’ve got a different attitude here.”

“You’re not being fair. Think what this’ll be like in twenty years’ time. Just the same as Berrybut.”

“It might, then again it might not. These people are more in tune with the future, they believe in it.”

They drove by a clump of mango trees in full fruit. She saw children playing around the trunks, seemingly immune to the ripe temptation dangling above their heads. “Whatever happened to scrumping?”

“Do you want to move?” Greg asked.

“No.” She grinned. “You couldn’t live here.”

They left the rustic eloquence of the Milton estate behind and slowed, slotting into the chain of vans and rickcarts trundling through the grid maze of the Park Farm industrial precinct. It was made up of bleakly functional sugar-cube factory units with coal-black solar-collector roofs. Nearly half of them sported the Event Horizon triangle and flying V emblem, she saw, most of the rest were overseas companies, some kombinate Logos. The foreign factories were anathema to the PSP, economic imperialism, but they had to let them in to pay off the massive investment loans which the Tokyo and Zurich finance cartels had made in Peterborough’s new housing.

“Do you mean you would move if it wasn’t for me?” Greg asked.

“Don’t be silly.” She was still grinning. He looked like he had bitten something sickly.

“You don’t have to come with me to see Royan, you know,” he said. “It isn’t exactly a picnic at the best of times. It’ll only take me an hour or so.”

“Oh, no,” she said loudly. “You don’t get out of it that easily, Greg Mandel. Do you realize I know practically nothing about the time between you leaving the Army and meeting me? This is the first glimpse you’ve ever allowed me into this section of your life.”

“You only had to ask.”

She shot him a quick glance. “If you’d wanted me to know, you would’ve told me. And now you’re starting to. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m bloody pleased.”

“He takes some getting used to,” Greg offered. She recognized the tone, regret for the impulse decision to invite her. Just how bad could his friend be?

“You said he was hurt?”

“Very badly. Completely disabled, and burnt. It’s not pretty.”

“I won’t embarrass you, Greg.”

“I didn’t imagine you would; rather, the reverse. My put is not totally savoury.”

“Women?”

“No!”

“There were,” she corrected demurely. “That sort of knowledge isn’t exactly hereditary.”

He gave her a weak smile and gave up. Happier, though, she thought. However badly disfigured this Royan turned out to be, she was determined Greg would never be disappointed he’d introduced them.

The narrow streets and iron-red bricks of Bretton were registering through the windscreen. She parked in an old school yard, next to an impressive New Conservative council banner proclaiming its incipient refurbishment as the community’s cultural centre. The classrooms were all boarded up, and someone had driven surveyor’s stakes through the playground.

She got out and looked at him expectantly. He was wearing Levis and his leather jacket over an olive-green T-shirt. She’d dressed in a shapeless navy-blue sweatshirt and black jeans; nondescript, as he’d told her. Now she was beginning to realize why; Bretton was a backwater, untouched by the vitality which roared through the rest of the city. The houses she could see all had heavy wooden shutters over the windows, and solid metal security doors.

Greg blipped the Duo’s lock.

They were quickly surrounded by about fifteen kids, none of them in their teens yet. Silent, eyes shining bright out of grubby faces.

“Car watch, fella?” piped a prepubescent voice.

“Highway robbery,” Greg protested.

The ritual was a relief in an obscure fashion, putting her back on solid ground. Bretton was still plugged into the rest of the city, during the day, at least.

“Five pounds,” the lad said.

“I think we’ll park in the next street,” Greg retorted.

“Four.”

“It’s very dirty,” Eleanor pointed out.

The kids put their heads together.

She exchanged an amused glance with Greg.

“Three,” declared the summit. “And we wash it, too.”

“Half now?”

Two now,” said the highly affronted ringleader.

He and Greg showed cards, both of them pictures of woe.

“Wonder what Walshaw will make of a three-pound transport expense item?” Greg mused whimsically as the kids moved in on the Duo, two racing away for water and sponges.

She let him guide her into the centre of Bretton, pleased he was with her. The place looked rough. She would never have gone into it by herself.

The main street was roofed over by an erratic collage of plastic sheeting, solar cells, corrugated iron, even thatch; all supported by an equally bizarre collection of trusses like telegraph poles and rusting chunks of electricity pylons. It was a twilight world where relief from the sun’s heat was tempered by the clouds of arid dust any motion kicked up. The stalls snaking along the pavements lacked the cramped clutter of Oakham’s disarray, here the shops were coming back into use. There was a greater emphasis on material goods. Food was appearing in packages again. But no tins yet, she noticed.

They grazed the stalls for stuff Greg said Royan would want. Junk, Eleanor thought. He picked out circuit boards, electric motors, inexplicable mechanical gizmos that were parts of bigger machines, antique watches, the wind-up sort. Three plastic carrier-bags full, which came to thirty pounds. There was no logic behind it. He seemed delighted when he found a Sanyo VCR. It was lying among Mickey Mouse phones and kettles on a stall which was half lobster-tanks, half broken gear. He haggled the owner down to a tenner and departed well pleased.