Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“How?” he demanded.

“One has contacts.”

“Not for that. Atomic structuring is the biggest ultra-hush there’s ever been.”

“Not so, apparently.”

Squeeze him, Juliet, go for the slam. You can dictate your own terms now. I never did like the little bugger, not a patch on his father.

“Do you still want to offer me a partnership?” she asked.

“I’ll consider any bid you submit.”

“Good. Have your office contact Peter Cavendish. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. I’ll be generous, Clifford. The person who delivers the theory for a nuclear force generator to Event Horizon will be a very rich person indeed. I hope it’s you, Clifford, I really do. For old times’ sake.”

My girl, Philip Evans said smugly.

Ask him about the source, NN core two said.

“Clifford.” He looked at her, not angry. Wary, though, she thought, a wounded animal, cornered but prepared to fight. “If you provide me with your source, where you obtained the data from, I’ll offer you forty-five per cent royalties, and we’ll close the deal this afternoon.”

“No way, Julia. You want the generator, you deal through me.”

“As you wish.” She rose to her feet, brushing down her skirt.

“Hey, wait.”

“Call Cavendish, you have the number. I’ll review what the two of you come up with; if I think it’s good enough, I’ll thumbprint on the dotted line, if not, your opposition get their big day.”

“Who are they? Who else is offering this?”

She gave him a sweet smile. “No way, Clifford,” said with her old Arizona twang. Philip Evans’s gusty laughter echoed through her brain, her cybernetic mind twins projected quiet satisfaction. She left an acutely flummoxed Clifford Jepson on the bench, and headed back to the marquee. Her bodyguards closed in to escort her.

An end-of-term-prankster had fastened a crude bra made out of pillowcases to the top of the flag-pole above the school’s art and design block. It was flapping slowly in the breeze. The bishop and the governors had been facing it all through the speeches. Julia started to laugh.

The interest was trickling back into Greg’s brain, like a hit that charged his neurone cells with a dose of raw energy, leaving the mind clean, thoughts flowing with cold perfection. He hovered on the razor’s edge between satisfaction and dismay. Tracing the girl, and through her Royan, was supposed to be a duty, not one of love’s labours. But it felt good, the way he’d made it all come together in Monaco. Most of what they had learnt was negative information; it was a challenge making sense out of that. Dropped straight into a premier deal after fifteen years out in the cold, and still managed to hit the floor running. Not bad at all.

He knew Eleanor had feared this the most, that he’d enjoy himself, remember the good old days, how it used to be, the excitement and the danger. When they met she’d been more than a little impressed by the romance of being a private detective. Even now, time tended to obscure the years before that, when he was out on Peterborough’s streets; the brain’s natural defence mechanism fading out the pain and anguish associated with the Trinities. But if he really thought about it, those moments were there, hiding in the shadows beyond the firelight.

Eleanor didn’t have anything to worry about, he decided, not really. Chasing after Charlotte Fielder wasn’t about to trigger the male menopause. In any case, there was something slightly unreal about this investigation; carried from location to location in millionaire style, every fact uncovered pounced on by Victor’s division and Julia’s NN cores, producing a flood of profile data. All very swift and painless.

In fact the interest would be purely abstract if it hadn’t been for his eagerness to talk to Baronski, it was almost impatience. The Pegasus had to fly subsonically over land. He resented that, knowing how fast the plane could go.

There was something else fuelling his mood, though, something darker, his intuition imparting a sense of time closing in. He hadn’t confessed that to Suzi yet.

The flatscreen on the forward bulkhead showed the Austrian alps slipping by underneath the plane. They reminded Greg of Greenland’s coastline after the ice had melted, a range of lifeless rock, scarred and stained. He could see massive landslides, where the pine forests had died leaving the soil exposed to torrential rains. Thick white-water rivers snaked down every valley, tearing out more soil and flooding the pastures. Reforestation was progressing slowly, the ecological regeneration teams had to build protective shields around their plantations. From the air they showed as green rectangles sheltering in the lee of the mountains, fragile and precarious. But there were new hydropower dam projects everywhere, ribbons of deep blue water accumulating in the deeper gorges. Most of the electricity was sold to the kombinate cyber-factory precincts in Germany. Austria had little heavy industry of its own, although low taxes and loose genetic-engineering laws had attracted investment from the biotechnology companies after the Warming. Event Horizon had several research centres in the country, he knew, as well as its main clinic at Liezen. He’d spent some time there himself, recuperating after tracking down the people who squirted the virus into Philip Evans’ NN core. It was where he had proposed to Eleanor.

He smiled at the memory, then turned back to his cybofax which was showing Baronski’s data profile. Dmitri Baronski was sixty-seven, a Russian émigré, leaving his motherland when he was twenty-three as an exchange student and never going back. He’d spent ten years as a PR officer for the Tuolburz kombinate, only to be dismissed for creaming off too high a percentage on the girls and boys he was supposed to supply for visiting executives. After that there were some arrests for pimping, one for fencing stolen artwork. Then fifteen years ago he’d hit on the idea of providing escorts for the wealthy, going for quality rather than quantity. He gave his girls an education in deportment equal to a Swiss finishing school, and discreetly presented them to European society.

He ran about a dozen at any one time, and the snippets of information they provided from pillow talk earned him about three-quarters of a million Eurofrancs a year from the stock exchange. It could have been more, but he was surprisingly honest with the girls, giving them a percentage.

“Christ, will you look at this!” Suzi exclaimed.

Greg left Baronski’s exploits to look over her shoulder. She was busy reviewing Charlotte Fielder’s profile on her cybofax.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“This girl has run up a medical bill that a hypochondriac millionaire would envy.”

“She’s ill?”

“Neurotic, more like. There ain’t much of the original Charlotte Fielder left, the biochemistry she’s carrying around! Her piss’d rake in a fortune on the street.” She ran her index finger down the wafer’s screen. “Get this, vaginal enlargement! What’s she been bonking, King Kong? Follicle tint hormones. Submaxillary gland cachou emission adaptation. What the flick is that?”

“It’s a biochemical treatment to alter her saliva composition,” Rachel said. “Makes her breath smell sweet the whole time, even the morning after. Especially the morning after.”

“Jesus wept. Bigger tits, yes, I can understand that; but this lot…”

Greg enjoyed her growing choler; Suzi didn’t show her real feelings often enough, keeping them bottled up in the mistaken belief that remaining unperturbed was more professional. “What? You mean it’s not natural?”

Rachel laughed.

Suzi started to snap at him, then grinned weakly. “All right. But I don’t know why we’re bothering looking for off-planet aliens. This girl isn’t anywhere near human any more.”