Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'Kind of stiff,' grunted Ellery and, releasing the wrench for a moment, spat on his hands. 'God, I hope this works.'

'What's this cable here?' Mitch asked himself. 'FSS. ESS. What's that?

This one goes to the wall surrounding that branch pipe.'

He flicked the cursor arrow to the top of the screen and pulled down the Glossary.

'Fire Stop Sleeve. Earthquake Stop Sleeve.'

Mitch frowned. 'I guess if this pipe moves within the sleeve then it makes… Willis, no!'

Willis Ellery never heard Mitch.

As he pushed the Stillson wrench against the joint, the smart pipe shifted within the specially designed stop sleeve, making contact with the piezoelectric metal actuator that warned Abraham to stiffen the exterior perimeter's steel frame against seismic shock.

Willis Ellery let out a scream that was a mixture of pain and surprise. Like any human body he made an excellent conductor of electricity, producing as good a reaction as any electrolyte solution. It was not a particularly high current that electrocuted him, just the standard current alternating at sixty cycles per second. But Ellery's hands had been damp with spit and sweat, and when the power hit him it was impossible for him to release his grip on the Stillson and break the passage of the current. It was as if the electricity that gripped him did so with the serrated strength of the Stillson itself. The Stillson gripped the joint; and electricity gripped the Stillson; and Willis Ellery could do nothing but stand there and hold on, shaking up and down, screaming like an hysterical child.

Seeing Mitch reach for Ellery's arm, Curtis struck him aside with a blow of his fist.

'Don't touch him!' he yelled. 'You'll be electrocuted too.'

Ellery uttered a feeble cry as he tried desperately to release his grip on the wrench. 'Ple-e-ease!' he screamed. 'He-elp me-eee!'

'We have to find something non-conductive to pull him off,' shouted Curtis. 'A brush handle, or a length of rope. Hurry!'

He ran back to the kitchen and surveyed the area. There was nothing that looked as if it might not conduct the electricity from Ellery's body into the hands of his rescuers. Then he had an idea. The kitchen table. Sweeping everything off the wooden surface on to the floor he yelled to Mitch, 'Here, we'll use this.'

'Well, thanks a lot,' protested Marty Birnbaum. 'I just sorted out our supplies on that.'

Ignoring him, Curtis and Mitch picked up the table and carried it into the corridor where Ellery was still in the grip of the electrified wrench and now only just conscious of what was happening. There was a strong smell of burning in the air. Like singed hair in a barber's shop. Curtis flung the table over on to its side.

'Slide it into him,' he said, 'like a cow-catcher.' Both men took hold of a table leg and pushed it hard into Ellery's jerking body, forcing him away from the Patching Cabinet. As his grip on the wrench was broken, Ellery yelped with pain and one of his thumbs emitted a blue flash that disappeared into the carpet with a puff of acrid smoke. The combined force of the electricity discharging itself from his body and the table ramming into his side was enough to fling him across the corridor, where he collided with the wall and collapsed unconscious on to the floor.

Curtis was on him in a second, like some unsporting wrestler, flipping the man on to his back, tearing open his shirt front and pressing his ear against his chest. 'Is he dead?' said Helen.

Straddling Ellery's thighs, Curtis said nothing and, placing one hand over the other, with elbows locked, he began to press Ellery's heart between his breastbone and spine, trying to find a rhythm in his chest compression that would squirt enough blood out of it to supply the unconscious man's brain.

'Helen,' he said breathlessly, 'find out if Nat's OK. Jenny? Get a blanket, a table cloth, something to keep this man warm. Mitch, call Richardson on the walkie-talkie and let him know what's happening.'

Curtis kept up the compression for another couple of minutes and then leaned forwards, listening for a heartbeat. He shook his head and started to undo Ellery's urine-soaked pants. Jenny returned with a table cloth.

'Pull these down,' he yelled, 'and get a hold of his femoral artery.'

He started the compressions again. Jenny pulled Ellery's pants down. Ignoring the stink of urine, she pushed the scrotum in Ellery's underpants to one side and let her fingers reach for his groin.

'Can you feel it yet?' he grunted. 'Can you feel it when I press his chest?'

'Yes,' she said after a momentary pause. 'I can feel it.'

'That's good. Someone find out what that asshole Beech is doing. Has he managed to pull the plug on this son of a bitch yet?'

Curtis put his ear to Ellery's chest and listened again. This time he heard a feeble heartbeat. The bigger problem was that Willis Ellery's respiratory muscles had seized up and his breathing had not yet restarted.

'You can let go of his crotch now,' he told Jenny. 'Did you speak to Nat?' he asked Helen.

Kneeling by Ellery's side, he pinched the man's nose and started to give him mouth-to-mouth respiration.

'Nat's OK,' Helen told Curtis. 'The water's up to his waist and rising, but he's OK.'

With his mouth pressed periodically to Ellery's there was no time for Curtis to answer her. Not that he had much to say. He told himself he was all out of good ideas. There were no options left that he could think of. It was all down to Beech now.

Ten minutes passed and still Curtis did not give up on Willis Ellery. One of the things he had learned as a young patrolman was that victims often died because the person attempting to resuscitate them gave up too quickly. He knew he just had to keep going. But he was already tiring. He knew he was going to need help.

Between forcing breaths into Ellery's traumatized lungs, Curtis asked Jenny if she could take over for a while. Covering Ellery with the table cloth, she looked at Curtis with tears in her eyes and nodded.

'You know how?'

'I took a first-aid course in college,' she said, and moved alongside Ellery's head.

'Don't give up until I tell you,' he ordered. 'There's the danger of anoxia. Suspended respiration might cause blindness, deafness, palsy, you name it.' But it was plain to see that Jenny would keep going for as long as it took. Curtis stood up stiffly and watched her carry on. Then he went to speak to Beech.

Bob Beech was worried.

The last time he had felt so worried had been in the middle of the 1980s, on his graduate course in computer security at Caltech, when he had constructed his first self-replicating program or, as he had subsequently learned to call all such SRPs, a computer virus. In those days everyone had been writing them, inspired by an article that had appeared in Scientific American .

With three hundred lines of MS-DOS Beech had created TOR, after Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. Beech's idea had been to create a program that would destroy the heresy of pirated MS-DOS software in the Far East, where software piracy was almost endemic, and then to sell the successful result to the Microsoft Corporation. The trouble was that TOR had behaved more like a real computer virus than Beech had ever anticipated and had combined with another virus, NADIR, the existence of which Beech had been quite unaware, to create a new superstrain of virus, later known as

TORNADO. This mutation had acted with catastrophic effects,

destroying not just data written with pirated Microsoft product, but data written with legitimate software too. At the second A-life conference in 1990 at Los Alamos, Beech had heard one delegate estimate the cost of the damage wreaked by TORNADO to be several billion dollars.