Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

Greg hadn’t known this kind of opulence existed in England any more. Yes, his usual clients were well off. But at most that meant a detached house with maybe three or four bedrooms; or some overseas-financed condominium apartment loaded with pieces of family heritage saved from the magpie acquisition fever of tax-office apparatchiks.

Given normal circumstances the local PSP committee would’ve turned the manor into accommodation modules for about forty families who’d then work the surrounding land in some sort of communal farm arrangement, either a co-op or a fully fledged kibbutz. Wilholm’s renovation was recent, post-Second Restoration.

The butler led Greg up a broad, curving stair to the landing, and he caught a glimpse of the formal gardens at the back. Bushes clipped into animal shapes sentried wide paths. A statue of Venus in the middle of the lily pond sent a white plume of water shooting high into the air. Spherical rainbows shimmered inside the cloud of descending spray.

The inevitable swimming pool was a large oval affair, a good twenty metres long. A tall tower of diving boards stood guard over the deep end, and there was a convoluted slide zigzagging along one side. A couple of big inflatable balls were floating on the surface. Three teenagers cavorted about in the clear water; two girls, one boy.

They seemed out of place, interlopers, their lively shrieks and splashes discordant with the funereal solemnity that hung through the rest of the manor.

He was shown into Wilholm’s oak-panelled study; and the day finally began to pull together into some sort of sense. Philip Evans was waiting for him.

There had been this girl, Greg couldn’t remember her name now, but the two of them had got rapturously drunk watching the coronation together. The triumph of the Second Restoration remained for ever buried in that alcoholic netherland, but he distinctly remembered Philip Evans sitting in the abbey’s congregation. The cameras couldn’t keep off him. A small man in his mid-seventies, stiff-backed, using a stick to assist his slow walk, but managing to smile brightly none the less.

Philip Evans was the PSP’s bête noire; their Whitehall media department set him up as a hate figure, a campaign of vilification which left Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein standing. It’d backfired on them badly. Evans became a romantic pirate to the rest of the country. A living legend.

Event Horizon’s cybernetic factories floated with blissful impunity in international waters, churning out millions of counterfeit gear systems each year. Molecular-perfect Korean flatscreens, French memox-crystal players, Brazilian cybofaxes, a long, long list of the consumer goodies which R &D-starved State factories couldn’t match, and PSP economic policy prohibited importing.

His fleet of Stealth transports made nightly flights over England, distributing their wares to a country-wide network of spivs like demonic Santas. They proved unstoppable. One of the PSP’s first acts on reaching office had been to disband most of the RAF.

The black-market gear hurt the economy badly, undermining indigenous industries, turning more people to the spivs. A nasty downward spiral, picking up speed.

Evans had changed for the worse in the intervening two years since the coronation. The flesh sagged on his face, becoming pasty-white, highlighting dark panda circles around his eyes. His hair had nearly gone; the few wisps remaining were a pale silver. And not even the baggy sleeves of his silk dressing-gown could disguise how disturbingly thin his arms were.

He was sitting at the head of a long oak table. Two holo cubes flanked him, multi-coloured reflections from their swirling graphics rippling like S-bend rainbows off the highly polished wood.

Greg sniffed the cool dry air; there was a tart smell in the study, peppery. Philip Evans was badly ill.

The ageing billionaire dismissed his butler with an impatient flick of his hand. “Come in, Mandel. Can’t see you properly from here, boy, my bastard eyes are going along with the rest of me.”

There was another man in the study, standing staring out of the window, hands clasped behind his back. He didn’t look round.

Walking down the length of the table Greg saw that Evans was only whole above the waist. His legs and hips had been swallowed by the seamless cylindrical base of a pearl-white powerchair, torso fusing into an elastic chrome collar. It was a mobile life-support unit, analogue bioware organs sustaining the faltering body. But the mind was still fully active, burning hot and bright.

Greg shook his hand. It was like holding a glove filled with hot water.

“What do they call you, boy? Greg, isn’t it?” The accent was pure Lincolnshire, blunt, as much an attitude as a speech pattern.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I’m Philip, Greg. Now sit down, it ricks my neck craning up at you.”

Greg sat, one chair down from Evans.

“This is my security chief, Morgan Walshaw.”

The man turned, looking at Greg. He was in his late fifties, with close-cropped grey hair; wearing a blue office suit, plain fuchsia tie. Shoulders squared. Definitely ex-military. The recognition was instantaneous. A mirror.

Eyeing each other up like prize fighters, Greg thought. Stupid.

“Mr Walshaw doesn’t approve of my asking you here,” Evans explained.

“I don’t disapprove,” Walshaw said quickly. “I just consider this an internal affair; sorry, nothing personal.”

Greg looked to Evans, politeness software loaded and running. Showing respect. “May I ask why you chose me in particular for a job? Random selection is, frankly, unbelievable.”

“Haven’t decided whether you are going to do a job for me, yet, boy. You’ll have to prove you’re what I’m looking for first. I believe you cleared up a problem for Simon White last year? Delicate, a real ball-crusher. That right?”

“I know Mr White, yes.”

“All right, don’t go all starchy on me. I do business with Simon, he recommended you. Said you only work for the top man, keep your mouth shut afterwards. Right?”

“That’s correct,” Greg said. “Naturally I offer confidentiality. But in taking on corporate cases I do so only for the board or chairman. Office politics are a complication I can do without.”

“You mean I couldn’t hire you?” Walshaw asked.

“Only if the chairman approved.”

“You’re ex-Army?” the security chief persisted. “Mindstar?”

“Yes.”

“So it was the Army which gave you your gland,” Evans said. “How come you didn’t sign on with a kombinate security division after you were demobbed, or even turn tekmerc?”

“I had other things to do, sir.”

“You could’ve earned a fortune.”

“Not really,” Greg said. “The idea that gland psychics are some kind of superbreed is pure tabloid. If you want someone who can see through brick walls then I’m not your man. Glands are not an exact science. I tested out psi-positive with top marks on esp, so the Army volunteered me for an implant thinking I would develop a sixth sense that could pinpoint enemy locations, index their weapons and ammunition stocks. But the workings of the mind don’t follow a straight logical course. I was one of the disappointments, along with several hundred others. People like me were one of the major factors in the decision to abandon the Mindstar programme, and that was long before the PSP obliterated the defence budget.”

“So what can you do?” Evans asked.

“Basically, I can tell if you’re lying. It’s a kind of super empathy, or intuition, a little mix of the two. Not much call for that on the battlefield. Bullets rarely lie.”

“Don’t run yourself down, boy. Sounds like you’ve got the kind of thing I’m looking for. So tell me, did I enjoy my breakfast orange?”