The Mandel Files (35 page)

He was dropped abruptly at the top of the gangplank, stumbling. Something with the force of a runaway train slammed into his backside. He tried to curl up into the trusty old paratroop landing crouch, but it didn’t seem to work very well. He saw a fast, confusing snapshot sequence of yachts and water and sky at impossible angles, each black interstice punctuated by a new burst of pain that mercifully shut off almost as soon as it registered, leaving a patch of numbness. The bioware node spliced into his cortex which regulated his gland was also programmed to blank out nervous impulses above a predetermined pain level. Mindstar had included the limiter as an experiment to try and alleviate shock in combat injury cases, but the Army had never brought it into widespread use, there was too much danger of squaddies ignoring the damage they’d received and making it worse.

The unyielding concrete of the quay arrested his helter-skelter momentum with a sickeningly loud slap. His brain seemed to be floating at the centre of a closed insensate universe. There was harsh laughter from afar followed by running feet. Hands grasped him, hauling him upright.

“Shit. You OK? Can you walk?”

Tactile sensation eased back, the cortical node reopening enough nerve channels for him to regain control over his limbs. Bruises throbbed sharply across his legs, arms, and back. His left leg was shaking. Both hands smarted from wide slashes of grazed skin, filming over with blood. Tunnel vision showed his suede desert boots at some vast distance. He couldn’t breathe through his nose, it was full of warm sticky liquid.

“Come on, lean on us.” That was Suzi.

Greg did so, gratefully.

“You want those pillocks taken out?” There was a note of hope colouring her voice.

“No.” He shook his head. Big mistake. The world reeled alarmingly, acid bile rose, scouring his throat.

“Green south, green south, stand down. We’re bringing Thunderchild in. Gold west, cover please.”

There was a small Cambridge-blue three-wheel sweeper-float ahead of him now, its front roller brushes retracted, inclined at forty-five degrees, looking like rusty felt mandibles. The name GUS’S SANITIZING was written down the side in bold yellow letters.

Greg was urged on to the narrow seat in the Perspex-bubble cab, and Des climbed in behind the wheel while Suzy rode shot-gun on the footplate. The two Trinities were both wearing jaunty red shirts and matching trousers, complemented with Gus’s company caps, burger-bar uniforms.

Des swooped the float into a hard turn, and set off back down the quay at a good five kilometres per hour, squirting a thick spray of bubbly detergent in their wake. He fumbled with the dash switches and cut the rain of cleanliness, cursing hotly.

“I’ve got to go back,” Greg said, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger.

“Fuck that,” Des said. “We’ve blown cover hauling you out. I’ve gotta get my squad safeguarded. Standard procedure; you should know that, Mr Military Hotshot. This operation is now over.”

“What the hell do you want to go back for?” Suzi asked.

“I have to see something.”

They shot out on to the promenade, and Des tilted the joystick sharp left. Pedestrians hopped out of the way, hurling abuse.

“Listen,” Des said. “You wanna go back, that’s fucking fine by me. I’ll stop right now and you can walk. But you’re on your own. We’ve been burning our arses off for you, and I don’t see anything to show for it.”

“OK, drop me here.”

“Shit.” Suzi and Des exchanged anxious befuddled glances. “You can’t,” said Suzi. “Come on, Greg, you can’t hardly walk. We’ll bring you back in a couple of days, when it’s cooler.”

“It has to be now.”

“The photon amps are still in place, how about we take you back to Angelica’s? You can watch from there.”

Greg probed his nose tenderly, it didn’t feel broken, and it’d stopped bleeding. “Not that sort of watching, not visual. I want to use my espersense on them.”

“Jesus,” Des spat. “You Mindstar?”

“Yeah.”

“Bloody hell,” Suzi muttered. “I knew there was something about you. Father never said nowt.”

Greg said nothing, he had always held back from mentioning it to the Trinities. People developed funny attitudes to psychics, kids especially. Let them just think he was lucky, outfits like that put a lot in superstition.

“Jesus,” Des said. “Fucking Mindstar active in Peterborough. Think on it. Party always pissed itself over you people. Look, just what is going down on that yacht?”

“If I knew for sure I wouldn’t have to go back.”

“Shit, just how close do you have to get?”

They compromised. Des drove into the maze of service alleys behind the promenade shops, and swapped clothes with Greg. Then he went off to organize the squad’s withdrawal, leaving Suzi to drive Greg. There’d be no more retrieval posses if Toby and Mike came after them; but the snipers would remain in place until Greg had finished.

Suzi drove back out on to the promenade and deployed the brushes before moving up the quay next to the Mirriam’s mooring. Seagull crap dissolved into creamy puddles, frizzy bristles whisking it away into the float’s tanks.

“Stop here,” Greg told her once they were opposite Kendric’s yacht.

She climbed out of the little cab. “Don’t be too long,” she implored, and lifted the engine cowling.

Greg relaxed, sinking back into the thin cushioning of the bench, and instructed the cortical node to shut out the sharp throbs of pain his nerves were reporting loyally.

The gland: stressed, taut like a marathon runner’s calf on the home straight. A sluice of neurohormones bubbled out amongst his axons.

He wanted a sensory extension that went way beyond his usual short-range emotion perception. To find it he retreated inward, ignoring his blood heat, heartbeats, breathing. The state waited for him right down at the bottom of the mental well, a fragile central pool. Gaseous shapes meandered below its surface. He slipped softly below the interface.

Greg perceived shadows, treacherous grey cobwebs congealing into misleading forms, aching empty gaps of grainy mist. The vision was silent, neither hot nor cold. Through it all, minds shone like diamond-point mirages, a flat cyclonic swirl of fireflies with himself at the tranquil storm-eye. He concentrated, seeking the opaque distortion of Mirriam, the familiar signature of one mind.

The water resolved as a sheet of black ice, a dead zone; he drifted across it, stretching out close to his absolute limit. Mirriam’s hull rose above him, a cliff of insubstantial gauze. Passing through.

The three figures were cloudy alien protrusions into his lonely universe; their shape fuzzy, a pseudo-locus rippling around a solid kernel. Kendric and Hermione slid fluidly over and round Katerina, the three together a tightly knit serpentine coil.

Katerina was a soul in torment, hating herself for what she was doing, unable to refuse. She closed out the degradations Hermione performed, warm with the conviction her reward would come.

Greg observed her arousal growing as Kendric pleasured himself with her, his mind leaking distorted pictures of Julia. Fissures of intense rapture multiplied through her mind, interlacing, spreading to conquer, reducing her to animal abandon. Orgasm brought a blazing concussion of frenzied ecstasy, a neural nova.

Instinct and dusty memory fused within Greg’s tarnished cranium, and at last he knew what Kendric had done to her.

The intangible universe twisted, spectral images elongating and spiralling down to a tightly wound vanishing point. The marina’s sights and sounds boiled up around him, solid and loud.

“Let’s go home,” he said weakly. Sustaining such a vast psi-effusion was severely debilitating. Gravity seemed to have quadrupled.

“Bout time,” Suzi grumbled, slamming down the cowling and locking the catches with a vicious twist. “You look like shit, you know?”

“Thank you.” The sky overhead was jaundiced, its turbidity fluctuating in time to his heartbeat.

“That gland must really take it out of you.” Her foot pressed down on the accelerator pad.

“It does.”

“Thought so, you were thrashing about like you were having a nightmare. Get what you want?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, your nose has started bleeding again.”

“It’ll stop in a minute.”

CHAPTER 27

“Of course Kendric wouldn’t know Wolf’s name,” Eleanor snapped irritably. “He’s the man at the top, the one with the cleanest hands in town. He buys people who buy people who buy Wolf. That’s why there was no response to the name, there’ll be a whole chain of tekmercs between him and the cutting edge of the operation to get rid of Philip Evans. It’s like that precaution you use in gear, what do you call it? And keep still.”

“Cut offs.” Greg’s voice had a throaty rasp to it.

She’d got his hands spread out on the chalet’s kitchen bar, spraying his knuckles with Colman’s dermal seal. From her own past experience she knew it stung, but it was the best on the market. The treacly salve fizzed over his grazes, quickly solidifying into a flexible powder-blue membrane which would enhance tissue repair, moulting after a couple of days.

Eleanor concentrated on keeping her hand steady as she moved the can back and forth, getting an even deposit. Her shoulders ached, and her back was cramped from hunching over him for three-quarters of an hour. She was getting tired, and her temperament showed it.

The lion roar of the Triumph bike trailing the Duo into the Berrybut estate had triggered some kind of premonition in her. She’d come running from the shore as Des helped Greg out of the Duo. There seemed to be blood all over him, his Stewart sweater was torn, he couldn’t walk without leaning on Des.

She’d felt resentful as Suzi and Des carried him into the chalet: an invasion of her personal space. The chalet was symbolic with all that was good in life right now. They were violating that, harbingers of pain and violence. She knew she’d always associate them with disruption now, no matter how much Greg praised them.

They’d seen Greg on to the lounge sofa and departed on the Triumph, Suzi, surprisingly, as awkward as she was. Who would have thought the girl possessed that much sensitivity?

Eleanor had been thankful for her animal husbandry courses, it let her deal with his injuries without the vapours, keeping a rigid leash on her nausea. She’d frozen his nose and clotted the burst blood vessels inside, painted numb-all on his swollen left eye, immobilized his left ankle in a thick sock of quik-set medical polymer, and generally cleaned him up. The clothes would have to go, though; she’d throw them on the bonfire tonight.

“You’re right,” he said. “Tell you, I thought I’d got it all sussed. I thought Kendric would light up like a Christmas tree when I mentioned Wolf. It was the proof I’d need to convince Morgan Walshaw. And I’ve got to convince him somehow. Kendric is absolutely jungle crazed about Julia.”

“I know,” she said. “I reviewed the surveillance memox the Trinities made.”

“That’s not the half of it. Kendric really is—” He broke off, letting out a long painful breath. “That’s why I went on board. I’m worried about Julia, what he’ll do. Stupid of me. Breaking all the rules about personal involvement. So you wind up with me looking like this. Sorry. Not a nice sight for you.”

She’d never heard him sound so dejected. She leant over the bar and touched her lips to his face. “I couldn’t live with the kind of man who felt nothing for her. You wouldn’t be human.”

“That’s been said before.”

“Not by me.” She began spraying again. “Besides, this is nothing; superficial apart from the ankle, and that’ll be all right in a week.”

“Good. Anyway, my visit wasn’t a complete disaster. You remember Katerina Cawthorp?”

Eleanor paused, flipping through her mental files. “Friend of Julia’s?”

“Got it. Well, right now she’s living with Kendric and Hermione.”

“And Hermione?”

That brought a weak grin to his lips. “Yeah. That’s how Kendric must’ve found out about Philip Evans’s NN core. He would be bound to question Katerina about every aspect of her relationship with Julia, and that includes her time at Wilholm. She told him about the NN core. There is no mole, never has been.”

“So how did Kendric get hold of the Zanthus security monitor programs?”

“A topnotch solo hotrod burnt into Walshaw’s cores. Kendric could afford it.”

She finished spraying on the dermal seal, and inspected his hand. “But what about the buyout?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I still don’t understand that, But the blitz was definitely a vengeance act. Katerina proves that; she’s the link, the common factor. God, Eleanor, you wouldn’t believe what he’s done to that poor kid. Tell you, she’s a virtual cyborg, no messing.” He flexed his fingers gingerly, watching the dermal-seal stretch over his knuckles.

“Has he drugged her?” she asked.

“Sort of. That’s something else we’ll have to sort out when this is finished. Christ, as if we didn’t have enough to do identifying Wolf and the remaining hotrods.”

“You know, if you wanted to flush some compromising evidence out of Kendric’s brain you should’ve asked him how much the blitz had cost him. Then you’d have seen the guilt, clear-cut and irrefutable. I’ll have to bind that forefinger.”

“Bugger. Next time I’ll take you along. Someone who can think straight.”

Her heart fell. “Oh, Greg, you’re not thinking of going back there are you? Wasn’t this enough?”

“No, I’m not marching up to confront Kendric again; I’ve learned my lesson. From now on the macho routine is all down to Morgan Walshaw and his hardliners. Hopefully, all I have to do is wait for Royan to backtrack Wolf’s payments to O’Donal, find out who the hell he is. Then we can start establishing how Wolf is plugged in with Kendric. The proof’s there, somewhere, like you said, another intermediary between Wolf and Kendric, maybe two. But I’m convinced it’s him at the end of the trail. Does that sound paranoid to you?”

“No, I believe your intuition works; and like you say, having Katerina on his yacht explains how he knew about the NN core.” She consulted the Event Horizon terminal. The first-aid kit’s diagnostic was plugged into it, the cube showing a white-shadow schematic of Greg’s body. His pain points glowed a mild amber; she’d treated all of them. He was relaxed now, growing drowsy from the general tranquilizer she’d given him earlier. She held open his right eyelid, shining the pencil light directly on the pupil, then away, watching the dilation. The terminal said it was within acceptable limits. “Have you been overdoing the gland?”