Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“She understands the rules perfectly,” Greg retorted. “You just don’t like losing. Seventeen years old, and she can outsmart you from dawn till dusk. You shouldn’t be worried, Kendric, you should be terrified. But then you are, aren’t you,”

Kendric’s lips closed. “It is not I who will feel terror.”

“No?” Greg asked scornfully. “You even misjudged your new partner here. Armstrong isn’t interested in vengeance, he’s like you, he’s after the giga-conductor. You’re just his front man, a cheap puppet.”

“You do have tenacity, don’t you, Mr Mandel?” Armstrong said. “Perhaps that’s why Event Horizon hired you. But you’re wrong. The money accrued from giga-conductor licence production will be split between us. A valuable source of income to further my aspirations.”

“Aspirations,” said Gabriel. “What aspirations?”

“Ah yes, Miss Thompson, isn’t it?” He affected to notice her for the first time. “My return to mainstream politics.”

“You can’t be serious. You’ll never resurrect the PSP.”

“Not the old Party, no. It’s a fool who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. My new organization will be structured along different lines.”

“Tentimes,” Greg said. “You’ve been paying for Tentimes and the rest of Charles Ellis’s hotrod team to screw up all those companies.”

“Indeed, and my people have been quick to point out the inevitable failings of the free-market system. There is a large groundswell of resentment building against the New Conservatives and their mismanagement of the economy. One I intend to encourage.

“Bollocks,” Gabriel snorted. “No matter how bad things get, nobody’s going to vote for hard-left policies again. You don’t understand just how much people hated everything you stand for.”

“Miss Thompson, if you could still see into the future you’d know that I’m not aiming for the grand slam this time. You can only ever do that once. I was very unlucky in that events beyond my control conspired to put an end to PSP rule. The energy crisis, the Warming, the Credit Crash. No government could withstand that combination. Take a look around at other countries. How many of the leaders of ten years ago remain in power today? We were the ones who were blamed. People don’t like to blame their own greed and exorbitant life styles. They want someone to hold responsible. And government gets it in the neck every time, from outbreaks of food poisoning to hurricanes. Blame the government.”

“From protesters being whipped to death in the street to seed potatoes being dished up on the tables of Party members,” Greg said.

“Those kind of incidents were inevitable to start with. But the abuses were solvable, given time.”

“You had ten years,” Greg said. “All they ever did was get worse.”

“The people who made up the PSP’s local committees were unused to power. If they had been allowed to establish themselves, then we would’ve seen stability. But of course, Mindstar and that plague of urban predator gangs incited trouble in the cities, goading the Constables.” He flexed his hands in agitation. “We were…misrepresented.”

Gabriel laughed unsteadily. “What’s the matter, Armstrong? Did you think the hard-left had a monopoly on political agitators?”

For a moment Greg thought he would hit her, but the ex-president eventually sighed resentfully. “This time I have settled for a more slow-burning form of reformation. There are thousands of my appointees still in place throughout the civil service, primed and waiting. “The New Conservatives will soon have to order an intervention as the private and denationalized companies begin to falter, bringing them back into the government fold. My people will assume the management duties, with a great deal of success. And I shall direct them, president in all but name and public visibility.”

“We’ll fight you,” Greg said levelly. “We’ll fight you with everything we’ve got. Bows and arrows if that’s all that’s left, we’ve done it before. And we beat you before.”

“Yet here I am. This seems to be the month of miraculous comebacks.” He laughed, and grinned round at the faces in the living room. “I do believe I’m talking to a reactionary. However, I don’t intend to spend hours justifying my actions to you, Mr Mandel, nor debating the pros and cons of centrally controlled economies. You were brought here to answer questions. And that is what you will now do.”

Greg thought he must’ve flinched, certainly he stiffened.

“No, no, we don’t go around beating confessions out of people here. There are much simpler methods. But understand one thing, Mandel, you are going to die. Just as soon as you have provided me with every byte I require. How you die will be decided by your behaviour. The old easy way or hard way; you can have a bullet through the head, quick and clean. Alternatively, you can be dumped into the old river bed, alive and kicking.”

“It doesn’t make one fuck of a lot of difference in the end, does it?”

Armstrong picked up a cybofax from the coffee table and sat in the last remaining leather chair. “Think about it,” he said knowingly. “Dwell on it. You might find your attitude adjusting. Neville, we’ll begin now.”

Turner opened a drawer in the rose-teak desk and extracted a spaghetti tangle of nylon straps and optical fibres. “Take off your shirt,” he told Greg with a doctor’s examining-room impartiality.

Greg thought about it. Refusing would be a rather trivial token, the shirt would only be cut or ripped off. Besides, he was thinking of being slung into that bottomless mud. God curse Armstrong. He shrugged out of the jacket and began on the shirt buttons, Flakes of dried blood wedged under his fingernails.

“Good,” Armstrong said. “Quite an ironic twist for you, Mr Mandel, I imagine. On the receiving end of a lie detector for once.”

Turner velcroed a strap around each of Greg’s wrists. They prickled, minute needle-tipped sensors probing into his skin, tasting salinity, heat, conductivity, heart-rate. The St Christopher was flicked to one side and another strap went round his neck, tightening noose-style.

Leopold Armstrong’s fingers drummed on his cybofax. “I have a number of queries. And you’ll answer each one honestly. For every lie you make we’ll break a bone in Miss Thompson’s body. The bigger the lie, the bigger the bone. Understand?” Again, there was no malice, Leopold Armstrong was just telling it the way it was.

“Yeah,” Greg replied, as a tiara band was placed on his head. Turner pressed an infuser against his arm. There was a bee-sting of pain, turning to an ice-spot.

“Relaxant,” Turner said, and began plugging the optical cables into a gear module which was already interfaced with the Olivetti deck. The cube lit with scrawling sine waves. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and began typing. Data rolled down an LCD display. “Name?” he asked.

The correlation went on for what seemed an age to Greg. The relaxant acted like a gentle influx of rosé wine, pleasantly inebriating, amplifying sounds like squeaking leather and rustling clothes, turning the air warm, drying his throat, Of course, he could still concentrate. If he wanted to.

They seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of his life stored in the Olivetti. Stuff he could barely remember:

Secondary school exam results, Army postings, nicknames of barrack mates, neighbours at the time-share estate. Nothing recent, though. Nothing from the last couple of years.

“He’s ready,” Turner shouted out eventually.

Armstrong consulted his cybofax. “One. Does anyone on the mainland suspect I am alive?”

Greg had worked out that this was a crux, To answer or not to answer? Watching Gabriel being systematically snapped apart before him. The noise of all those cracking bones would be deafening. But they were going to die anyway. It would be noble to confound Armstrong.