Sean Francis took his cue flawlessly. ‘Nuclear waste disposal has enabled us to upgrade our estimates on space-related industry turnover by forty-five per cent over the next four years,’ he said. ‘It is a completely untapped revenue source. Should it be exploited fully, its potential is staggering. No government on the planet will be able to refuse its electorate a safe and final solution to disposing of radioactive material. And there are currently forty-three redundant nuclear power stations in Europe alone, with a further seventeen scheduled to be decommissioned over the next decade.’
‘Such a pity the consortium didn’t consider my Sunderland vitrification plant a worthwhile investment,’ Julia said. ‘You could have shared in the profits. The margin is considerable, given that I now have a virtual monopoly on the technology.’
Sir Michael leaned forward earnestly. ‘We would be very happy to fund any expansion to the vitrification plant, Julia. Now that the requirement has been proved, and very ably proved if I might say so. The nuclear waste disposal contract is a marvellous development, we’re all very pleased.’
No, Juliet, absolutely not, cut them out of the vitrification. Squeeze the bastards.
She gave Sir Michael a smile which withered his sudden display of enthusiasm. ‘The vitrification plant was a five hundred million pound risk,’ she said in her lecturer’s voice. ‘And having taken that risk all by myself, I intend to benefit all by myself. The profits generated by this new venture will be more than sufficient to fund its own expansion. Thank you.’
‘Julia, I think we are all agreed that your handling of the company is impeccable,’ Sir Michael said. ‘And in view of this we would like to offer to set up a floating credit arrangement of three billion New Sterling which you can call upon at any time to fund new ventures. This way we could avoid the delays and queries inherent with having to process loan requests through the consortium’s standing review committee.’
The other representatives murmured their approval, all of them watching her, willing her to accept.
We’ve got ’em, Juliet. They don’t offer anyone a blank cheque unless they’re under a lot of pressure. Now, remember what we agreed, girl?
Hit them with the wind-up scenario. Then the Prior’s Fen scheme.
That’s my girl.
She tented her fingers, and gave them an apologetic look. ‘Oh dear, how embarrassing. I believe my finance director has a summary he wanted to present. Alex, if you would, please.’
Alex Barnes stood up, a fifty-three-year-old Afro-Caribbean with a receding cap of grizzled hair. His suit with velvet lapels did at least lift him above the level of corporate clone. He began to recite a stream of accounts; figures, dates, and percentages merging together in a wearisome drone of statistics.
The representatives were looking very itchy by the time he finished.
‘What it means,’ Julia said sweetly, ‘is that the loans which the consortium has so far extended to Event Horizon will be repaid in seven years. After that, the company will be totally self-financing. Now, as the company’s expansion plans have already been finalized for that period, with the exception of Prior’s Fen, I really can see no reason to extend my period of indebtedness. Certainly not at the level of your floating credit proposal, which I have to say is disappointingly paltry given Event Horizon’s size.’
There was a moment of silence as the representatives exchanged a comprehensive catalogue of facial expressions. Interestingly, only Argon Hulmes allowed any ire to show. So much for solidarity amongst fellow youth-culture subscribers.
Some clandestine and invisible voting system elected Sir Michael as their spokesman. ‘Exactly what were you proposing to do out at Prior’s Fen?’ he enquired in a chary tone.
Karl Hildebrandt remained behind after the meeting. The request for a talk – ‘Not business, I assure you’ – from the wily old German was intriguing enough for Julia to humour him.
Sean remained seated at her side, while Caroline helped shepherd the others from the room. Eventually there were only the three of them left at the table, plus Rachel sitting quietly on a chair by the window.
Diessenburg Mercantile, the Zurich bank which Karl represented, was one of the larger members of the consortium, accounting for six per cent of the investment total. Karl himself was in his late forties, and putting on weight almost as fast as Uncle Horace; a fold of pink flesh was overlapping his collar (she could count about four chins), his blond hair was veering into silver. His suit came from Paris, a narrow lapel helping to de-emphasize his barrel chest; steel-rimmed glasses were worn for effect, bestowing an air of dependability.
She approved of him for the one reason that he didn’t try to pretend, like Argon Hulmes.
‘I know it has been said before, Julia,’ he said. ‘But you are quite a remarkable young girl.’ There was hardly any German accent. Perhaps one of the reasons he’d been selected as a representative.
‘Thank you, Karl. You’re not going to come on to me like Argon, are you?’
He laughed softly, and closed up his cybofax, slipping it into his inside jacket pocket. ‘Certainly not. But to squeeze a fixed interest twelve billion pound investment loan out of banks and finance houses is an achievement beyond some kombinates.’
‘Prior’s Fen is a viable project. No risk.’
‘The cyber-precincts, maybe. But to make us pay for a rail link before we can invest in them. That’s cruel, Julia.’
‘You get your interest payments, I get my cyber-precincts. Point to a victim, Karl.’
‘None, of course. That is why you triumph all the time.’
‘So you think the review committee will approve the loan?’
‘Yes,’ he said simply.
‘I thought this wasn’t going to be business.’
‘I apologize. But everything has its roots in politics.’
She couldn’t ever remember seeing Karl in such an ambivalent mood before. It was as if he wanted to talk about some important topic, but didn’t quite know how to broach the subject. A parent explaining sex to a giggly teenager. ‘You want to talk about politics? I wasn’t old enough to vote at the election even if I had been in the country. I will in the next, though.’
‘You certainly play politics like a master, Julia. That’s why I was not surprised when you were given the nuclear waste disposal contract. Admiring, but not surprised.’
‘Thank you, it took some arranging, but I’d like to think I am flexible when it comes to co-operating with the English Ministry of Industry.’
‘Yes. However, there are questions being asked in some quarters about the closeness of Event Horizon and the Ministry. It might almost be referred to as a partnership.’
‘I have never offered cash to an MP,’ she said. ‘And I never will.’
‘No. But the relationship, imaginary though it is, can be seized upon by opposition parties. The Big Lie, Julia; say something loud enough for long enough, and people will begin to believe. Ultimately that will affect Event Horizon; artificial constraints will be placed on you. Your bids will be refused simply because they are yours; politicians publicly demonstrating that they are not showing any favouritism. And that cannot be allowed.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘It’s bad for profits, if nothing else. Bad for us.’
Julia began to wonder which ‘us’ he was talking about. ‘I will just have to shout louder. And I can shout, very loud indeed.’
‘An official denial is like an Oscar to a rumour.’
‘Are we going to sit here all afternoon and quote bons mots at each other, Karl?’
‘I would hope not.’
‘Well, what would you like to see me do?’
‘Some circumspection wouldn’t hurt, Julia. I know you are reasonably adroit, that’s why I find your latest action somewhat puzzling.’
She sneaked a questioning look to Sean. But he just shrugged minutely.
‘What action?’
‘Imposing that Mindstar veteran, Greg Mandel, on the Kitchener inquiry. It was terr
ibly public, Julia. You were his bridesmaid. Really! It leaves you wide open to the rabble-rousers and conspiracy theorists.’
She regarded him thoughtfully. ‘How did you know about Greg?’
‘It was all over the channel newscasts.’
‘Oh.’ Even so, it was odd that he should know so quickly. She had spent most of the morning swotting up on datawork for the meeting, and that was with nodes augmenting her brain. Did he really have each news item concerning Event Horizon brought to his attention? Then she remembered Jakki bitch Coleman. It hadn’t been every minute, after all. ‘I take your point, Karl. Actually, I’ve already started damage limitation.’
‘Mandel has been taken off the case?’
‘No, I need to know who killed Kitchener. But you won’t be hearing about the link between Greg and myself any more, not on the channels.’
‘Ah. I’m glad to hear it.’
9
Nicholas wasn’t really interested in his surroundings any more, so the pokey interview room didn’t lodge in his mind until Greg Mandel looked at him. Looked inside him, more like, right through his skull into his brain.
The lawyer, Lisa Collier, had explained about the psychic being assigned to the investigation. She had seemed very irate about it, going on about how his rights were being violated, procedural irregularities, hearsay being taken as evidence. Nicholas didn’t mind a psychic being appointed; anything, anything at all which would bring the killer a step nearer to justice was totally justified. That was simple logic, obvious. Why couldn’t the Collier woman see that?
He had been staying in one of the cells at Oakham police station since Friday, although the door was always left unlocked. ‘You aren’t being held on remand,’ the police kept explaining. ‘You’re just here to help us.’ He nodded at their anxious faces, and answered every question the detectives asked. They seemed surprised that his answers were so consistent. As if he could forget anything that had happened on that night.
It was the last night of his life. Nothing had happened to him since. There was only the mechanics of the body, eating, going to the toilet, sleeping. That was all he had done since then, slept and answered questions. He was allowed to mix with the other students, but they never expected him to say anything anyway. They had moaned about the accommodation, about not being allowed out, the food, the bathroom.
The one person he wanted to talk to, Isabel, was further away from him now than she had ever been at Launde. She would sit in one corner of the rest room they had been assigned, her legs tucked up against her chest, peering vacantly out of the window; and he would sit in the corner opposite, just gazing at her. He was too afraid even to say good morning, because if they did talk he would have to hear about her and Kitchener and Rosette. What happened in that bedroom, how many times it happened. Even why it had happened. He couldn’t possibly stand that.
Kitchener had been the architect of his mind. For the first time in his life he had really begun to think straight. Kitchener, with his own love of knowledge, had been the one who nurtured his talent, who made him realize his ability was nothing to be ashamed of, wasn’t freakish like people said. Kitchener was the one who encouraged him to join in the Abbey’s camaraderie.
Kitchener had taken Isabel from him.
Kitchener was dead.
The world, which had been so close to becoming accessible, had eluded him once again. Which was why he said he didn’t mind the psychic asking questions; after all, Kitchener had used neurohormones. They couldn’t be bad.
Except, now he was faced with the prospect of actually going through with the interview, it didn’t seem quite so easy.
There was a very unforgiving quality about Greg Mandel as he sat patiently behind the desk, some weary tolerance which even Nicholas, with all his social inadequacy, could recognize. The man had the appearance of having been everywhere, witnessed every human state. Excuses would not work, not on him. Yet at the same time, he could see how receptive Greg was. It was confusing, the two almost contrasting aspects of character existing side by side.
Nicholas dropped into the chair, not in the least reassured by the formality of the proceedings as Vernon Langley and Lisa Collier made their stiff lead-in statements for the AV recorder. There was something unnaturally creepy about someone rooting round in his mind; for a start there were so many pathetic secrets about himself, all those hundreds of failings and disasters littering his life.
‘I can’t plug into your memories,’ Greg said in a palliative tone. ‘So you can stop worrying about the time you pinched your little brother’s chocolate bar.’
‘I haven’t got a brother,’ Nicholas blurted. ‘Only a sister. And I’ve never stolen anything from her.’
‘There you are then, I can’t tell.’
‘Oh, right.’ He felt such a fool. ‘How did you know I was worried about you reading my memories?’
‘Because everybody does that when they meet me. Vernon and Jon here are worried about the cash they lifted from the station’s Christmas party box, Mrs Collier is extremely worried about her dark past. But the only thing I can sense inside a brain is the emotional content. So the sooner you relax and all that worry vanishes, the sooner I can ask the questions, and the sooner you can be out of here. OK?’
Nicholas nodded vigorously, secretly cheered by the way Lisa Collier’s disapprobation had darkened still further at the gibe. ‘Yes. Of course. I do want to help.’
‘Yeah, I can see that. You really liked Kitchener, didn’t you?’
Lisa Collier had warned him never to lie to the psychic; no matter how painful any admission, he would see it, and it would be entered against him. ‘I did. I do. But …’
‘Isabel,’ Greg said sympathetically.
‘I didn’t know about her and Kitchener. Not before that night.’
‘What time did you see her and Rosette going into Kitchener’s room?’
‘About a quarter past one.’
‘And then what did you do?’
‘Went to bed.’
‘Did you sleep?’
‘Suppose so. I was thinking a lot at first. But I was asleep when I heard Rosette screaming.’
‘Before you went to sleep, did you hear anything?’
‘No!’ Nicholas said hotly.
‘I meant, Nicholas, anybody walking about in the Abbey?’
He knew he would be blushing again. Why couldn’t he ever understand what people meant straight off? Why did they always have to use baby talk to get through to him? ‘Oh. Sorry. No, nobody was moving round.’
‘So you didn’t hear Isabel and Rosette leaving Kitchener’s room?’
‘No.’
‘What were you doing in the time between leaving Uri’s room and seeing Rosette and Isabel?’
‘Running the Antomine 12 data through a detection program. I was looking for dark-mass concentrations.’
‘Dark mass?’ Greg sounded privately amused.
‘Yes. In space. Kitchener was interested in them. He thought they might act as wormhole termini. You see, if you move a wormhole in a specific fashion it may be possible to generate a CTC directly. A non-paradoxical temporal loop would …’ Nicholas forced himself to stop, chastened. He’d done it again. There was that dreadfully familiar expression of polite incomprehension on Greg’s face. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘Don’t be ashamed of a gift, Nicholas.’
He looked up, startled. But Greg was serious.
‘I go on, sometimes,’ he said limply. ‘I don’t realize. Cosmology is interesting, Mr Mandel.’
‘I know what it’s like. My wife tells me I talk about Turkey too much.’
‘Turkey?’
‘The war.’
It took a moment before Nicholas remembered the Jihad Legion. He had been eight or nine at the time the Islamic forces had invaded Turkey, so it was classed alongside all the other terrible incidents which childhood jumbled together. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘About the detection program,’ Greg prompte
d. ‘Were you running it on the Abbey’s Bendix?’
‘Yes.’
‘Until when?’
‘When I saw Isabel and Rosette, quarter-past one. I couldn’t work after that.’
‘Did you use the English Telecom datanet that night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘I had to, the Antomine data comes direct from its mission control in Toulouse. There’s no other way of accessing it.’
‘So you only used the one datalink?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’ Greg typed something into his cybofax. ‘Did you know Rosette was mildly insomniac?’
Funny question. He couldn’t think why Greg should want to know. ‘No. But she was never tired at the end of an evening, when we were in a room, or if we went to the Old Plough. And she was usually first up. So I suppose, thinking about it, I knew she didn’t sleep much.’
‘Have you ever taken syntho, Nicholas?’
‘No,’ he said, because it was true, so he could say it without any guilt showing. But he dropped his gaze in shame. There was an achingly long moment of silence.
When he risked looking up, Greg was giving him a calculating stare. All his doubts about the psychic searching freely through his memories returned in a flood.
‘Let’s see,’ Greg said. ‘You took another kind of narcotic?’
‘No,’ Nicholas said miserably.
‘Somebody offered you syntho?’
‘Yes.’
‘Rosette?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you refused?’
‘Yes. I know Kitchener says there’s nothing wrong with it. But I didn’t want to.’
‘I can see the incident has a lot of connotations for you, what else happened?’
Nicholas decided the best thing to do was just say it fast. Greg might move on to another subject. He stared unblinkingly at his Nike trainers. The lace on the left foot was fraying. ‘She wanted me to go to bed with her.’