Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

Julia hated flying in thunderstorms. Her Dornier tilt-fan might have every safety system in existence built in, but it seemed so insignificant compared to the power outside.

Another flash burst over the city. Glossy roof-top solar panels bounced some of the light back up at her, leaving tiny purple dazzle spots on her retinas. She had seen the Event Horizon headquarters building dead ahead, a seventeen storey cube of glass, steel, and composite panels. There was nothing elegant about it, thrown up in twenty-six frantic months so that it could accommodate the droves of head office data shufflers necessary to manage a company of Event Horizon’s size, as well as Morgan’s security staff. A monument to haste and functionalism. Its replacement out at Prior’s Pen would be far more aesthetic; the architects had come up with a white and gold cylinder which, with its panoply of pillars and arches, resembled the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Only straight this time, of course. Event Horizon didn’t build crooked.

She poured herself a chilled mineral water from the bar, and switched the bulkhead flatsereen on, flicking through the channels until she came to the Northwest Europe Broadcast Company. Jakki Coleman was on, a middle-aged woman with iron-cast gold-blonde hair, wearing a stylish mint-green satin jacket. She was sitting behind a Florentine desk in the luxurious study of some mansion.

Julia grinned gamely as she sprawled back on the white-leather settee, propping her feet up on the chair opposite.

Jakki Coleman was the queen of the gossipcasts; rock stars, channel celebrities, aristocrats, sports personalities, politicians, she shafted them all.

“Pauline Harrington, the devoutly Catholic songstress, seems to have mislaid her religious scruples,” Jakki said, her French accent rich and purring. “At least for this weekend. For whom should I see but the delightful Pauline, who is at number five with “My Real Man” in this week’s white soul chart, with none other than Keran Bennion, number one driver for the Porsche team.”

The image cut to a picture of Pauline and Keran walking through the grounds of a country hotel, somewhere where the sun was shining. They were hand in hand, oblivious of the fountains playing in stone-lined ponds around them, in the background bushes blazed with big tangerine blooms. The recording had obviously been made with a telephoto lens, outlines were slightly fuzzy.

“Perhaps Keran’s wife sent him for singing lessons,” Jakki suggested smugly. “The three days they spent together should certainly have got his voice in trim.”

A swarthy young male in a purple and black Versace suit walked into the office and put a sheet of paper in front of Jakki. She read it and ‘Ohooed’ delightedly. Well, fancy that,” she said.

The item was about a Swiss minister and her toyboy. After that was one about a music biz payola racket.

Julia took a sip of the mineral water, then noticed her boots. They were crusted with mud from the tower site. She tried rubbing at them with a tissue as Jakki stage whispered that certain pointed questions were being asked about a countess’s new-born son, apparently the count was absent the night of the conception.

Julia chortled to herself. It was the set she moved in which featured in the ‘cast, Europe’s financial, political, and glamour elite; snobbish, pretentious, corrupt, yet forever projecting the image of angels. And she had to deal with them on that level, the great pretence, all part of the grand game. So it was a joy to watch Jakki spotlighting their failings, taking a machete to their egos; a kind of second-hand revenge for all the false courtesies she had to extend, the interminable flatteries.

“The big event in England yesterday was the Event Horizon spaceplane roll out,” Jakki said. “Simply anybody who is anybody was there, including little moi.”

Julia held her breath. Surely Jakki wasn’t going to lampoon the Prince’s haircut? Not again?

“And I can tell you several self-proclaimed celebrities were left outside explaining rather tiresomely that their invitations had been squirted to their holiday houses by mistake,” Jakki gushed maliciously. “But leaving behind the nonentities, we enter the interesting zone. Appropriately for an event so large, and très prestigious, it boasted the greatest laugh of the day.” Oh, dear Lord, it was going to be the Prince: “Mega, mega-wealthy Julia Evans has spent a rumoured three and a quarter billion pounds New Sterling on developing the sleek machine intended to spearhead England’s economic reconstruction.”

Julia scowled. Where had Jakki got that estimate from? It was alarmingly close to the real one. Not another leak in the finance division, please!

The flatscreen image switched to the roll out ceremony, showing her escorting the Prince and the Prime Minister around the spaceplane.

“Unfortunately,” Jakki continued, ‘these daunting design costs must have left poor dear Julia’s cupboard quite bare. Because, as you can see, her otherwise enviably slim figure was clad in what looks to me like a big Valentine’s Day chocolate-box wrapper.”

The Dornier landed on the raised pad at the centre of the headquarters building’s roof. Caroline Rothman held a broad golfing umbrella over Julia as they made their way to the stairwell door. Rachel and Ben marched alongside. Nobody was looking at her. It could have been coincidence. But then they had all been incredibly busy when she came out of the tilt fan’s rear lounge as well.

Be honest, girl, she told herself, stomping out of the lounge. That bitchsluthussy!

Sean Francis, her management division assistant, was waiting for her inside the building. She actually quite liked Sean, although be annoyed a lot of people with his perfectionist efficiency. She had appointed him to her personal staff soon after inheriting the company.

He was thirty-four, a tall dark-haired man with a degree in engineering administration who had joined Event Horizon right after graduation. It said a lot for his capability that he had risen so far so fast. Greg had checked him out for her once; his loyalty was beyond reproach.

He was wearing the same conservative style of suit as every other data shuffler in the building. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if she let it be known she preferred employees to wear tank-tops and Bermuda shorts. Knowing the way people jumped around her, they probably would all turn up in them.

Might be worth doing.

“Did you have a nice flight, ma’am?” Sean asked pleasantly.

Julia put her hands on her hips. “Sean, it’s pissing down with rain, and the bloody plane nearly got skewered by lightning bolts. What do you think?”

His jaw opened, then closed. “Yes, ma’am,” he said humbly. “Sorry-”

She caught a tiny flickering motion from the corner of her eye, and thought Caroline was making a hand signal. But when she turned her PA was rolling up the umbrella, a guileless expression in place.

It’s a conspiracy.

She took a grip on her nerves. I am not affected by what that senile whore Jakki Coleman said. I’m not.

“My fault, Sean.” She gave him one of her heartbreaker smiles. “Those thunderbolts are frightening when you’re so close to them.”

“That’s all right, ma’am. I’m scared of them, too.”

The conference room was on the corner of the headquarters building; two walls were made from reinforced glass with a brown tint, giving a view over the rain-dulled streets of Westwood. It was decorated in the kind of forced grandeur which was endemic among corporate designers the world over: deep-piled sapphire-blue carpet, two Picassos and a Van Gogh hanging between big aluminium-framed prints of the Fens before the Warming, huge oval oak table, thickly padded black-leather chairs, pot plants taller than people. Everything was shameless ostentation.