The Mandel Files (3 page)

A mirage of her own face, six months younger, unfurled behind her eyes. She compared it to the one in the mirror. There was some change. A burning-off of puppy fat, her cheeks were rounder then. Fractionally.

There had been a time, a couple of months back, when she’d considered plastique, but eventually shied away. Having herself altered to match some channel-starlet ideal would be the ultimate admission of defeat. As long as there was still some development there was hope. Perhaps she was being impatient. But how wonderful it would be to make the boys ogle lustily.

Commit Vanity#Twenty-five. The mirror image, with all its melancholia.

“Thank you, Adela,” she said.

The maid nodded primly, and made one final stroke with the brush before departing. Julia watched her go in the mirror, some deep instinct objecting to ordering people around like cattle. But it was an instinct which was nearly dead, the Swiss boarding school had seen to that. Besides, Adela wasn’t one of the grudging ones. At twenty-two years of age she was close enough in years for Julia to feel comfortable with her; and she was certainly loyal enough—to the extent of sharing Wilholm Manor’s considerable quantity of below-stairs gossip.

Julia shrugged out of her robe and flopped down on the big circular bed, stretching luxuriously on the apricot silk sheets, The room was huge, so much empty space, and all her own. So very different to the little stone burrow she’d lived in for the first ten years of her life at the First Salvation Church warren. Space was undoubtedly the best part of being rich.

The bedroom was a celebration of opulent decadence, with its satin rose ceiling, thick pile carpet, walk-through wardrobes, a marbled bathroom. It was a feminine room; a boudoir, foreign and exotic.

She’d spent a fortnight with an increasingly harried interior designer selecting exactly the style she wanted. A distant memory of an old memox video-cartridge, a costume romance of handsome dukes and willowy heroines in a more genteel age.

Her grandfather had come in when the bedroom was finished, his eyes rolling with bemused tolerance. “Well, as long as you’re happy with it, Juliet.”

He hadn’t paid many visits after that. Not that she minded him. But it was delicious to be left alone, privacy still seemed a bit of a novelty. Her security hardline bodyguards accompanied her everywhere outside the mansion; not nudging her shoulder, they were too professional for that, but always close, always watching, And once inside Wilholm’s ‘ware-saturated perimeter nothing went unseen.

Some part of Julia’s nature rebelled against being a cosseted princess, treated like some immensely precious and delicate work of art. Yes, she was valuable, but not fragile. However, there were subtle ways to defy the surveillance, to indulge herself without suffering the silent censure of the hardliners’ ever-vigilant eyes, keeping some little core of personality secret to herself.

Open Channel to Manor Security Core. The ‘ware came on line, a colourless menu of surveillance circuits and defence gear streaming into her mind, all of it listed as restricted. She fed her executive code in, and every restriction was lifted.

Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, First-Floor Corridor. Route Image Into Bedroom Three.

She rolled over and rested her chin in her hands, legs waving idly. A picture formed on the theatre-sized wall-mounted flatscreen opposite the bed. It showed the corridor outside, a slightly fuzzy resolution. Adrian was walking down the thick strip of navy-blue carpeting, dressed in a long burgundy towelling robe. Barefoot, she noted, and no pyjama trousers either.

Peeping Tom, her mind chided. Her cheeks were suddenly very warm against her palms, but Pandora’s box was open now.

Adrian stopped outside one of the bedroom doors, and looked furtively both ways along the corridor before opening the door without knocking.

For one glorious instant Julia allowed herself to believe it was her bedroom he’d entered, even twisting round to look. But of course her door was closed.

Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, Guest Suite Seven.

Katerina’s room, bathed in a musky green light. Now here was something very interesting. By day it was Adrian who took charge of their little group; Julia and Katerina listened to him, laughed at his jokes, followed him when he wanted to go swimming, or horse riding, or playing tennis. But here in private the roles were reversed, Adrian did as Kats told him.

Julia studied her girl friend as best as the irritatingly grainy Image allowed. Kats had lost some of her youthful daytime frivolity, becoming imperious, a confidence verging on arrogance.

Open Memory File, Code: AmourKats.

So she could retain all the impressions she saw on the big screen, and then retrieve them at any time for future consideration. AmourKats was going to be an objective study in seduction.

Kats was kneeling on her bed as Adrian came in, dressed in a provocative taupe-coloured silk camisole top and a short waist slip, blonde hair bubbling down around her shoulders.

A real-life sex kitten. She told Adrian to take his robe off.

It was more like an order, Julia thought. Her heart leapt at the prospect of seeing Adrian naked at last, jealous and excited. Seeing him in his swimming trunks all afternoon had been a real treat.

Adrian was nineteen years old, ruggedly handsome, and possessed of a truly heavenly physique, each muscle perfectly proportioned, nothing like the ugly excess of a body-builder, just naturally lean. Mesomorph, her implant dictionary subsection told her.

The towelling robe formed a dark puddle around Adrian’s feet.

Julia slowly turned on to her side, looking away from the flatscreen; shame finally overpowering greed.

Exit Surveillance Camera.

Adrian had been so nice to her, treating her no differently than he did Kats during the day as the three of them roamed Wilholm’s vast grounds. She’d really hoped the attraction was mutual this time. She never seemed to be able to attract, much less hold, a boy as desirable as Adrian.

The memory of Primate Marcus, leader of the First Salvation Church, floated out of that little dark core of anguish to haunt her once more. He’d favoured her mother for several months when Julia had been eight. The patronage had enabled her to walk like a queen through the desert commune’s airy underground tunnels, the happiest time of her young life. Daughter of the Primate’s chosen one.

Primate Marcus was an obese fifty-year-old, wrapped in a huge toga to hide his slovenly frame. With her eyes closed she saw the big round head with its full grey beard leaning down towards her. Fat fingers adorned with gold rings tickled her ribs, and she shrieked her joy. The air had been thick and sweet from his marijuana. “One day soon, I’ll fill you with Jesus’ love,” his slurred voice rumbled.

She had laughed then. Shuddered now.

But then, she thought miserably, that was always the way when it came to men—boys. She just never seemed to have any luck. So far they had fallen into two categories; the first she hadn’t even believed existed until afterwards. More handsome than Adrian, wittier than a channel comedian, with the culture and manners of a Royal. But most of them had no real money—executive assistants, flavour-of-the-month artists, impoverished aristocracy, men who could make deals to retire on if they just had backing. They haunted the fringes of society, sharks who homed in on her name, her money like fresh meat, which in a way she was. She had been too young, to stupidly blind with the whirlwind of holiday romance. And in bed his immaculate body had made her scream out in glory. Only afterwards did she find out she was simply part of his grand scheme.

She had fled from one extreme to the other. Back to her exclusive Swiss school, and into Joel’s arms, a boarder at the boys’ school down the road. He was the same age as her, the sensitive type, mild-mannered, caring, just perfect for a true first love, she knew he would never exploit her. And in bed he was an utter disaster; she would lie in his twitchy embrace and remember how sensational sex could be. Thankfully it had fizzled out soon enough, her leaving her school, him returning to France, neither making much effort to keep in touch.

The soul-bruising knocks and disappointments had set up a barrier, a psychological flinch. And the boys seemed aware of her mistrust, finding it difficult to breach. Anyone who could was too smooth, those that couldn’t would be like Joel. What she wanted more than anything was one good-looking boy who didn’t know who she was to look at her and think: yeah!

Then Kats had come to stay at Wilholm, injecting some much-needed laughter to the long procession of warm, wet, boring days; and she’d brought Adrian with her. Adrian: who fitted the bill as though he had been born for her, mature, athletic, no doubt very experienced in bed, fun, intelligent, not at all arrogant. And when he had smiled and said hello there had been no barrier, no hesitancy at all. It would’ve been utterly sensational, if Kats hadn’t enchanted him first.

Julia shivered slightly at the involuntary recollection of Primate Marcus and the cult. She’d been ten when the upheaval came, the big Texan, known later as Uncle Horace had arrived to take her away. Over the sea to a near-mythical Europe and a grandfather she’d never even known she had. Lady Fauntleroy, the other commune kids had teased before she went, bowing, curtseying. She’d giggled with them, playing along, secretly terrified of leaving the gently curving sandstone passages with their broad light-wells and the eternal magnificent desert above. Her mother had stayed with the cult, her father had accompanied her.

The bioware processors helped Julia suppress the name, the whole concept of father, pushing him below conscious examination, a fast, clean exorcism. He brought too much pain. Childhood ignorance was a blissful existence, she reflected.

Europe and Philip Evans, her grandfather; and the astonishing revelation of Event Horizon. A company to rival a kombinate in size, heroically battling the British PSP, which surely made Grandpa a saint. Socialism was the ultimate Antichrist.

Her grandfather had sent her to the school in Switzerland, where starchy tutors had crammed her with company law, management procedures, finance; twittery grande dames teaching her all the social graces, etiquette and deportment, refining her. She’d dropped her American accent, adopting a crystal-cut English Sloane inflection to lend a touch of class. A proper Lady. Then on her sixteenth birthday she’d left the school and spent a month in Event Horizon’s ultra-exclusive Austrian clinic.

She was given five bioware implants, nodes of ferredoxin protein meshed with her synaptic clefts: three memory-cell clusters, two data processors; a whole subsidiary brain to cope with the vast dataflows generated by Event Horizon. The parallel mentality didn’t make her a genius, but it did make her analytical, objective. A conflation of logic and human inspiration, she was capable of looking at a problem from every conceivable angle until she produced a solution. An irrational computer.

“It’s the only way, Juliet,” Philip had told her. “I’m losing track of the company, it’s slipping away from me. All I ever get to see in cubes are the summaries of summaries, a shallow overview. That’s not enough. Inertia and waste are building up. Inevitably, I suppose. Department heads just don’t have the drive. It’s a job to them, not a life. Maybe these nodes will enable you to control it properly.”

Julia let desire war with her conscience. How did you captivate a boy like Adrian?

Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, Guest Suite Seven.

A laughing Kats was straddling Adrian, playing with him, her hands caressing, tongue working slowly down his chest. He was spreadeagled across the mattress, clutching the brass bedposts with a strength which came close to bending them, face warped in agony and ecstasy, pleading with her.

Commit AmourKats.

Julia had never done anything like this, not leading, not making all the moves. She wasn’t sure she would have the nerve. Kats seemed so totally uninhibited. Shameless. Was that the key? Could boys home in on abandon? Kats sat back on Adrian’s abdomen, then crossed her arms and gripped the hem of the camisole. She peeled it languidly over her head, shaking her hair out. Julia felt a sharp spasm of envy at seeing her friend’s well-developed body. That was one reason why Kats had Adrian, she acknowledged bitterly, they looked like godlings together. At least she had longer legs than Kats. Skinny, though; nothing like as shapely, two beanpoles really.

Exit Surveillance Camera.

Her mental yell was contaminated with anger and disgust. Peeking on the lovers had seemed like a piece of harmless fun. Certainly using the security cameras to spy on the manor’s servants had been pretty enlightening. But this wasn’t the gentle romantic love-making she’d been expecting. Nothing near.

Pandora’s box. And only a fool ever opens it.

Anger vanished to be replaced with sadness. Alone again, more than ever now she knew the truth.

Boys were just about the only subject she never discussed with her grandfather. It never seemed fair somehow. He’d taken over every other parental duty, a solid pillar of comfort, support, and love. She couldn’t burden him with more. Not now. Certainly not now.

Part of the reason for her being at Wilholm was so she could be his secretary. Philip Evans needed a secretary like he needed another overdraft, but the idea was to give her executive experience and acquaint her with Event Horizon minutiae, preparing her to take it over. A terrifying, yet at the same time exhilarating prospect.

Then this morning at breakfast he’d taken her into his confidence, looking even more haggard than usual. “Someone is running a spoiler operation against Event Horizon,” he’d said. “Contaminating thirty-seven per cent of our memox crystals in the furnaces.”

“Has Walshaw found out who was behind it?” she’d asked, assuming she was being told after the security chief had closed down the operation. It was the way their discussions of the company usually went. Her grandfather would explain a recent problem, and they’d go over the solution, detail by detail, until she understood why it’d been handled that particular way. Remote hands-on training, he’d joked.