Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'I still don't get it,' said Cheng, pocketing the envelope without opening it. 'What's in it for you?'

'What's to get?' The Japanese shrugged. 'It's like I told you when we first met. You want to demonstrate against the Yu Corporation's involvement with the Communist Chinese. And I want to sponsor you to do it.'

Cheng Peng Fei recalled the occasion of their only other meeting: the Japanese — he still did not know his name — had tracked Cheng down after seeing his name in the newspapers in connection with the original demonstration on the new Hope Street Piazza.

'But I think you should be less polite. You know what I'm saying?

Make a little more fucking noise out there. Throw a few rocks or something. Get tough. It's a good cause, after all.'

Cheng wanted to say that he had thrown a piece of rotten fruit at a car entering the Gridiron's underground car park, only he thought that the Japanese would find that funny. What was a piece of fruit beside a rock?

Instead he said, 'Is that what you really think? That it's a good cause?'

The Japanese looked puzzled.

'Why else would I be doing this?'

'Why else indeed?'

The waiter came to take Cheng's order.

'A Tsingtao,' he said.

'You're not eating?' said the Japanese.

Cheng shook his head.

'Too bad. This is really very good.'

When the waiter had gone, Cheng said, 'Shall I tell you what I think?'

The Japanese forked some fish into his mouth and stared levelly at Cheng. 'You can say what you like. Unlike the People's Republic of China, this is still a free country.'

'I think that you and your employers are probably business rivals of the Yu Corporation and that you would like to see them embarrassed in any way possible. I'll bet you're in the electronics and computer business too.'

'Business rivals, huh?'

'Don't you Japanese have a saying — business is war? Is that why you want a demonstration outside their new building? Although I can hardly see why it should matter very much in the corporate scheme of things.'

'It's an interesting theory.' The Japanese laughed, wiped his mouth with his napkin and stood up. Still smiling he threw a handful of dollars on to the table. 'You have imagination. That's good. So get imaginative. Think of some way of making your protest a little more noticeable.

'Oh, one more thing,' added the Japanese. 'You get arrested for something? You never even met me. I hope it goes without saying that I would be very unhappy if I found out you spoke about this to anyone. Is that clear?'

Cheng nodded coolly. But when the Japanese had gone he realized that he was afraid.

Mitch had made a temporary office for himself on the twenty-fifth floor, in those parts of the building that were nearest completion and that would soon become the luxuriously appointed private and semiprivate domains of senior Yu Corporation personnel. Most of the rooms had tall doors made of dark varnished wood with silver aluminium frames designed to look like the Yu Corporation logo. Some of the rooms were already carpeted — light grey, to contrast with the darker grey carpet in the corridors — and a few of them were already marked by the negligent footprints of the electricians, plasterers and joiners who were still working there.

Now that the work was almost complete there was a general air of desertion about the building. Mitch found this unsettling, especially at night when the downtown area emptied and, like a modern Marie Celeste , the very size of the Gridiron seemed to point up the lack of human occupants. It was strange, he thought, how books and movies dwelt on the fears people had on finding themselves alone in old buildings, when new ones could be every bit as unnerving. The Gridiron was no exception. Even in the middle of the day a sudden moan of airconditioning, a whisper of water in a pipe or a groan of new woodwork as it expanded or contracted could momentarily raise the hair on the back of Mitch's neck. He felt like the one-man crew of an enormous spacecraft on a five-year mission into deep space. Bruce Dern in Silent Running . Keir Dullyea in 2001: A Space Odyssey . Now and then he was inclined to take Jenny Bao's feng shui as seriously as he affected to treat it when he was with her: maybe there really was a spiritual energy, for good or evil, in a building. More rationally, he wondered if perhaps it was something to do with the observer illusion with which the computer had been endowed: maybe the feeling he had was simply that of being observed by the computer itself.

For all that, he usually enjoyed being alone in the Gridiron. The peace and quiet gave him a chance to think about his future. A future he hoped would include Jenny Bao, but not Richardson and Associates. Mitch was bored with being Ray Richardson's technical coordinator. He wanted to go back to being an architect, pure and simple. He wanted to design a house, or a school, or maybe a library. Nothing showy, nothing complicated, just attractive buildings that people would like looking at as much as being inside them. One thing was for sure. He had had quite enough of intelligent buildings. There was just too much to organize. As Mitch went from floor to floor wearing his laptop computer on an ergonomically designed harness, he found few signs of activity: a solitary plumber connecting one of the automatic executive washroom modules, prefabricated, like many of the Gridiron's systems and components, by the Toto Company of Japan; a telecommunications engineer installing the latest videophone-a fast-packet system with a caller ID and polygraph facility.

Mitch was reasonably satisfied with the progress that was being made, although he could not see how the client could take occupation in anything less than six weeks. Many of the floors were in a remarkably unprepared state, while others that were supposed to have been completed were already showing the kind of damage that was the inevitable result of the continuing work. Although on the whole he was happy with the overall standard of workmanship, Mitch knew that no matter how hard everyone tried, Ray Richardson would manage to find fault with something. He always did.

For Mitch, that was one of the essential differences between the two of them and was probably why Richardson had got to be where he was: Richardson was the kind of man who believed that it was possible to achieve perfection in something while Mitch believed that architecture and building provided a perfect miscrocosm of a universe in which order existed, rather precariously, on the very edge of chaos.

Chaos and complexity were what interested him most at that moment: the more complex the system, the closer to the edge of chaos you got. It was one of the things that disturbed him about the whole concept of smart buildings. He had tried discussing this with Ray Richardson in relation to the Gridiron, only Richardson had got hold of the wrong end of the stick.

'Well, of course the building's complex, Mitch,' he had said. 'That's the fucking idea, isn't it?'

'That's not what I mean. What I'm saying is that the more complex a system is, the bigger the chance that something might go wrong.'

'What are you saying, Mitch? That this level of technology worries you? Is that it? Come on, buddy, wake up and smell the coffee, will you?

This is an office block we're talking about, not the Pentagon's earlywarning system. Get with the programme, will you?'

End of conversation.

When, towards the end of the day, Aidan Kenny telephoned Mitch and told him to get his ass down to the fourth floor, he hardly expected to find that in a small way his earlier concern might have been justified.

The computer centre on the fourth floor was like no other computer room Mitch had ever seen. You reached it by an underlit bridge of greenish glass, gently arched as if it led across a small stream instead of the many electrical cables it had been carefully designed to conceal. The double-height door was made of heavy, clear Czechoslavakian glass, spoiled only by a sign warning that the room was protected by a Halon 1301 fire-retardant system.