‘God knows, Juliet. I’m praying that some smartarse hotrod has found a method of cracking the monitor’s access codes, however unlikely that is. The alternative is bad.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Sit and think. They’ve been gnawing away at us for eight bloody months, a few more days won’t kill us. But we’re taking a quarter of a million Eurofranc loss per day, it’s got to stop, and stop dead. I have to know the people I put on it are reliable.’
They couldn’t afford major losses, Julia knew. Philip Evans’s post-Second Restoration expansion plans were stretching the company’s resources to breaking point. Microgee products were the most profitable of all Event Horizon’s gear, but the space station modules tied up vast sums of capital; even with the Sanger spaceplanes, reaching orbit was still phenomenally expensive. They needed the income from the memox crystals to keep up the payments to the company’s financial backing consortium.
The fact that he’d admitted the problem to her and her alone had brought a wonderful sensation of contentment. They’d always been close, but this made the bond unbreakable. She was the only person he could really trust in the whole world. And that was just a little bit scary.
She’d promised faithfully to run an analysis of the security monitor programs through her nodes for him, to see if the codes could be cracked, or maybe subverted. But she’d delayed it while she went horse riding with Adrian and Kats, then again as the three of them went swimming, and now subverting the manor’s security circuits.
Guilt added itself to the shame she was already feeling from spying on the lovers. She’d been appallingly selfish, allowing a juvenile infatuation to distract her. Betraying Grandpa’s trust.
Access High Steal.
Sight, sound, and sensation fell away, isolating her at the centre of a null void. Numbers filled her mind, nothing like a cube display, no coloured numerals; this was elemental maths, raw digits. The processor nodes obediently slotted them into a logic matrix, a three-dimensional lattice with data packages on top, filtering through a dizzy topography of interactive channels that correlated and cross-indexed. Hopefully the answer should pop out of the bottom.
She thought for a moment, defining the parameters of the matrix channels, allowing ideas to form, merge. Any ideas, however wild. Some fruiting, some withering. Irrational. Assume the monitors are unbreakable: how would I go about concealing the loss? An inverted problem, outside normal computer logic, its factors too random. Her processor nodes loaded the results into the channel structures.
The columns of numbers started to flow. She began to inject tracer programs, adding modifications as she went, probing for weak points.
Some deep level of her brain admitted that the metaphysical matrix frightened her, an eerie sense of trepidation at its inhuman nature. She feared herself, what she’d become. Was that why people kept their distance? Could they tell she was different somehow? An instinctive phobia.
She cursed the bioware.
Philip Evans’s scowling face filled her bedside phone screen. ‘Juliet?’ The scowl faded. ‘For God’s sake, girl, it’s past midnight.’
He looked so terribly fragile, she thought, worse than ever. She kept her roguish smile firmly in place – school discipline, thank heavens. ‘So what are you doing up, then?’
‘You bloody well know what I’m doing, girl.’
‘Yah, me too. Listen, I think I’ve managed to clear security over the monitor programs.’
He leaned in towards the screen, eyes questing. ‘How?’
‘Well, the top rankers anyway,’ she conceded. ‘We make eighteen different products up at Zanthus, and each of the microgee production modules squirts its data to the control centre in the dormitory. Now the control-centre ’ware processes the data before it enters the company data net so that the relevant divisions only get the data they need – maintenance requirements to procurement, consumables to logistics, and performance figures to finance. But the security monitoring is actually done up at Zanthus, with the raw data. And that’s where the monitor programs have been circumvented, they haven’t been altered at all.’
‘Circumvented how?’
‘By destreaming the data squirts from the microgee modules, lumping them all together. The monitors are programmed to trip when production losses rise above fourteen per cent, anything below that is considered a maintenance problem. At the moment the total loss of our combined orbital production is thirteen point two per cent, so no alarm.’
Julia watched her grandpa run a hand across his brow. ‘Juliet, you’re an angel.’
She said nothing, grinning stupidly into the screen, feeling just great.
‘I mean it,’ he said.
Embarrassed in the best possible way, she shrugged. ‘Just a question of programming, all that expensive education you gave me. Anybody else could’ve done it. What will you do now?’
‘Do you know who authorized the destreaming?’
‘No, sorry. It began nine months ago, listed as part of one of our famous simplification/economy drives.’
‘Can you find out?’
‘Tricky. However, I checked with personnel, and none of the Zanthus managers have left in the last year, so whoever the culprit is, they’re still with us. Three options. I can try and worm my way into Zanthus’s ’ware and see if they left any traces, like which terminal it was loaded from, whose access card was used, that kind of thing. Or I could go up to Zanthus and freeze their records.’
‘No way, Juliet,’ he said tenderly. ‘Sorry.’
‘Thought so. The last resort would be to use our executive code to dump Zanthus’s entire data core into the security division’s storage facility, and run through the records there. The trouble with that is that everyone would know it’s been done.’
‘And the culprit would do a bunk,’ he concluded for her. ‘Yes. So that leaves us with breaking into Zanthus. Bloody wonderful, cracking my own ’ware. So tell me why this absolves the top rankers?’
‘It doesn’t remove them from suspicion altogether, it just means they aren’t the prime suspects any more, now we know the monitor codes weren’t compromised. Whether security personnel are involved or not depends on how good the original vetting system is. Certainly someone intimate with our data-handling procedures is guilty.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me. There’s always rotten apples, Juliet, remember that. All you can ever do is hope to exclude them from achieving top-rank positions.’
‘What will you do now?’
The hand massaged his brow again. ‘Tell Walshaw, for a start. If we can’t trust him then we may as well pack up today. After that I’ll bring in an independent, get him to check this mess out for me – security, Zanthus management, the memox-furnace operators, the whole bloody lot of them.’
‘What sort of independent?’
He grinned. ‘Work that out for yourself, Juliet. Management exercise.’
‘How many guesses?’ she shot back, delighted. He was always challenging her like this. Testing.
‘Three.’
‘Cruel.’
‘Good night, Juliet. Sweet dreams.’
‘Love you, Grandee.’
He kissed two fingers, transferring it to the screen. Her fingers pressed urgently against his, the touch of cold glass, hard. His face faded to slate grey.
Julia pulled the sheet over herself, turning off the brass swan wall-lights. She hugged her chest in the warm darkness; elated, far too alert for sleep to claim her.
Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, Guest Suite Seven.
3
Eleanor had been living with Greg for exactly two weeks to the day when the Rolls-Royce crunched slowly down the dirt track into the Berrybut time-share estate.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and the sky was a cloudless turquoise desert. Eleanor and Greg shifted towels, cushions, and drinks out on to the chalet’s tiny patio to take advantage of the unseasonable break in the weather. March was usually a
regular procession of hot hard downfalls accompanying a punishing humidity. Greg could remember his parents reminiscing about flurries of snow and hail, but his own childhood memories were of miserable damp days stretching into May. Fortunately, typhoons hadn’t progressed north of Gibraltar yet. Give it ten years, said the doomsayer meteorologists.
Eleanor stripped down to scarlet polka-dot bikini briefs, a present from Greg when he found she couldn’t swim, promising to teach her. He rubbed screening oil over her bare back. Pleasantly erotic, although the heat stopped them from carrying it any further. They settled down to spy on the birds wading along the softly steaming mudflats at the foot of the sloping clearing. Most months saw some new exotic species arriving at the reservoir, fleeing the chaos storms raging ever more violently around the equatorial zones. The year had already seen several spoonbills and purple herons, even a cattle egret had put in a couple of appearances.
Greg lay on the towel, eyes drooping, letting the sun’s warmth soak his limbs, slowly banishing the stiffness with a sensuousness that no massage could possibly match. Eleanor stretched out beside him on her belly, and loaded a memox of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into her cybofax. Every now and then she’d take a sip of orange from a glass filled with crushed ice, and scan the shoreline for any additions.
Usually the girls he went with would drift away after a couple of days, maybe a week, unable to cope with his mood changes. But this time there hadn’t been any; he had nothing to get depressed about, her body kept the blues at bay. And her humour, too, he admitted to himself. She rarely found fault. Probably a relic of her claustrophobic kibbutz upbringing, you had to learn tolerance there.
He wasn’t quite sure who was corrupting who. She was sensual and enthusiastic in bed, they screwed like rutty teenagers on speed each night. And he hadn’t bothered to see any of his old mates since she moved in, not that he was pushing them out of his life. But her company seemed to be just as satisfying. It would be nice to think – dream really – that he could cut himself loose from the pain and obligations that came out of the past.
The rest of the country was in an electric state of flux, one he could see stabilizing in a year or two. He had wondered on odd occasions if he could manage the transition, too. Start to make a permanent home, stick to ordinary cases, earn regular money. There was just so much of the past which would have to be laid to rest first.
Whistles and shouts floated down from the back of the chalet row, the estate kids’ twenty-four-hour football game in full swing. Up towards Edith Weston, bright, colourful sails of windsurfers whizzed about energetically. The county canoe team was out in force, enthusiastically working themselves into a collective heat stroke as their podgy coach screamed abuse at them through a bullhorn. Hireboats full of amateur fishermen and their expensive tackle drifted idly in the breeze.
Greg hadn’t quite nodded off when he heard the car approaching. Eleanor raised herself on to her elbows, and pushed her sunglasses up, frowning.
‘Now that is unreal,’ she murmured.
Greg agreed. The car was old, a nineteen-fifties vintage Silver Shadow, its classic, fabulously stylish lines inspiring instant envy. The kind of fanatical devotion invested in both its design and assembly were long-faded memories now, a lost heritage.
Astonishingly, it still used the original combustion engine with a recombiner cell grafted on, allowing it to burn petrol. Two pressure spheres stored its exhaust gas below the chassis, ready for converting back into liquid hydrocarbon when the cell was plugged into a power source. The system was ludicrously expensive.
He watched in bemused silence as it drew up outside the chalet, shaming his two-door electric Fiat Austin Duo. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his neighbours staring in silence at the majestic apparition. Even the football game had stopped.
Given the car, the driver came as no surprise; he was decked out in a stiff grey-brown chauffeur’s uniform, complete with peaked cap.
He didn’t bother with the front door, walking round Greg’s vegetable patch to the patio, scattering scrawny chickens in his wake. The way he walked gave him the authority. Easy powerful strides, backed up by wide powerful shoulders and a deep chest. He was young, mid-twenties, confident and alert.
He looked round curiously as he approached. Greg sympathized, the little estate had begun to resemble a sort of upmarket hippie commune. Shambolic.
Eleanor wrapped a towel around her breasts, knotting it at the side. Greg climbed to his feet, wearily.
The chauffeur gave Eleanor a courteous little half-bow, eyes lingering. He caught himself and turned self-consciously to Greg. ‘Mr Mandel?’
‘Yes.’
‘My employer would like to interview you for a job.’
‘I have a phone.’
‘He would like to do it in person, and today.’
‘What sort of job?’
‘I have no idea.’ The chauffeur reached inside his jacket and pulled out an envelope. ‘This is for your time.’ It was two thousand pounds New Sterling, in brand-new fifties.
Greg handed it down to Eleanor, who riffled the crisp plastic notes, staring incredulously.
‘Who is your employer?’ he asked the chauffeur.
‘He wishes to introduce himself.’
Greg shrugged, not that impatient for details. People with money had learnt to become circumspect in advertising the fact. Furtiveness was a national habit now, not even the Second Restoration had changed that. The PSP’s local committees had become well versed at diverting private resources to benefit the community. And they’d made some pretty individualistic interpretations on what constituted ‘community’.
Greg tried to get a feel from his intuition. Nothing, it was playing coy. And then there was the money. Two thousand just for an interview. Crazy. Eleanor was waiting, her wide eyes slightly troubled. He glanced down at the frayed edges of his sawn-off jeans. ‘Have I got time to change first?’
The Rolls-Royce’s dinosaur mechanics made even less noise than an electric car, sublime engineering. There was a glass screen between Greg and the chauffeur, frosty roses etched around the edges. It stayed up for the whole drive, leaving questions stillborn. He sank into the generous leather cushioning of the rear seat and watched the world go by through sombre smoked windows. Chilly air-conditioning made him glad of the light suit he was wearing.
They drove through Edith Weston and on to the A1, heading south. The big car’s wheelbase bridged the minor roads completely. Over a decade of neglect by the PSP had allowed grass and speedwells to spread out from the kerbs, spongy moss formed a continuous emerald strip where the white lines used to be. It was only thanks to farm traffic and bicycles that the roads had been kept open at all during the depth of the dark years.
Horses and cyclists pulled on to the verge to let them pass, curious faces gaping at the outlandish relic. The impulse to give a royal wave was virtually irresistible.
There was some traffic on the dual-carriageway A1 – horse-drawn drays, electric cars, and small methane-fuelled vans. The Rolls-Royce outpaced them effortlessly, its suspension gliding evenly over the deep ruts of crumbling tarmac.
The northbound side of the Wetland bridge had collapsed, leaving behind a row of crumbling concrete pillars leaning at a precarious angle out of the fast-moving muddy water, pregnant from five weeks of heavy rains. The bridge had been swept away four years ago in the annual flooding which had long since scoured the valley clean of all its villages and forms. During the dry season the river shrank back to its usual level, exposing a livid gash of grey-blue clay speckled with bricks and shattered roofing timbers, the seam of a serpentine swamp stretching from the fringe of the Fens basin right back to Barrowden.
The chauffeur turned off the A1 at Wansford, heading west, inland, away from the bleak salt marshes which festered across the floor of the Nene valley below the bridge.
Greg hated the waste, President Armstrong’s legacy. It was all so unnecessary, levees were amongst the oldes
t types of civil engineering.
The Rolls turned off on to a dirt track. It looked like an ordinary farm path across the fields of baby sugar cane, leading to a small wood of Spanish oaks about three-quarters of a kilometre away. There wasn’t even a gate, simply a wide cattle grid and a weatherbeaten sign warning would-be trespassers of dire consequences.
The chauffeur stopped before the grid, and flicked a switch on the dash before driving on. There was nothing between the metal strips, no weeds, puddles, only a drowning blackness.
They drove through an opening in the trees, under a big stone arch with wrought-iron gates, kept in excellent condition. Stone griffins looked down at the Rolls with lichen-pocked eyes.
There was a long gravel drive beyond the gates, leading up to a magnificent early eighteenth-century manor house. Silver windows flashed fractured sunbeams. A tangle of pink and yellow roses boiled over the stonework, tendrils lapping the second-storey windowsills.
Five dove-grey geodesic globes lurked amongst the forest of tall chimneystacks. Very heavy-duty satellite antennas.
The Rolls pulled to a smooth halt level with the grey stone portico. ‘Wilholm Manor,’ the chauffeur announced gravel-voiced as he opened the door.
A couple of gardeners were tending the regimented flowerbeds along the edge of the gravel, stopping to watch as Greg stepped out.
Something was moving in the thick shrubbery at the foot of the lawn, dark, indistinct, bigger than a dog, slipping through the flower-laden plumbago clumps with serpentine grace. Spooky. Greg reached out with his espersense, detecting a single thread of thought, diamond hard. He placed it straight away, an identification loaded with associated memories he’d prefer to forgo. He was focused on a gene-tailored sentinel panther. It padded along its patrol pattern with robotic precision, bioware archsenses alert for any transgressors.
He sucked in his breath, stomach muscles clenched. The Jihad legions had used similar animals in Turkey, a quantum leap upwards from modified Rottweilers. He’d seen a sentinel take out a fully armoured squaddie after the animal had been blown half to bits, jaws cutting clean through the boy’s combat suit. They were fucking lethal. The manor’s elegant façade suddenly seemed dimmer; fogbound.