Philip Kerr - Gridiron

Mitch looked round.

Speeding towards him was the floor-cleaning droid.

Marble is one of the easiest materials to maintain. The beauty of the white stone can be enhanced by polishing with a good silicone wax, although care needs to be taken to prevent staining. Thus there existed SAM, the Semi-Autonomous Micro motorized surface-cleaning droid —

the most sophisticated maintenance system for marble flooring in the world, designed to deal with every kind of hazard, including oil, citrusfruit juice, vinegar and similar mild acids. SAM was about the weight and height of a medium-sized refrigerator, and shaped like a pyramid. Powered by thirty silicon-embedded micro-motors, the machine was practically a semiconductor wafer chip on wheels, with the circuitry of eighteen computers, fifty different sensors to detect obstacles, and an infrared video camera to find dirt. SAM was supposed to travel at no more than one mile an hour, but it hit Mitch square against his ankle at nearer fifteen. The impact knocked him off his feet.

As he rolled over the apex of the pyramid-shaped droid, Mitch recollected the clean floor around Arnon's body and, before he landed hard on the marble, he told himself that he ought to have remembered SAM. He was still picking himself painfully off the floor when the machine hit him again, this time on the knee cap. Bellowing with pain, he fell back, clutching his leg.

With sufficient distance to build up momentum for another potentially damaging impact, the SAM droid spun around on its short axis and, once again, accelerated.

Mitch drew Dukes's gun, aimed it at the centre of the electronic pyramid and fired, hitting it several times. But if the SAM was damaged it gave no indication, and Mitch found himself cannoned towards the empty pond at the bottom of the tree. Grateful for the hint, he scrambled over the low wall to safety. For a minute or so SAM patrolled the perimeter of the pond and then set itself to clean the blood from the floor underneath the piano.

'Mitch?' It was Curtis speaking on the walkie-talkie. 'You OK?'

'A few bruises.' He tugged down his sock to inspect an ankle that was already turning a dark shade of purple. 'But I don't think I'll be able to outrun that thing. I shot at it couple of times. Didn't even slow it down. Right now it's cleaning the fucking floor.'

'That's good. It's doing what it's supposed to do.'

'Well, that makes a change around here.'

'Because I've got an idea. We'll bomb the motherfucker.'

'How's that?'

'We'll drop something to make a mess. Get it positioned underneath us, and then we'll nuke the sonofabitch. Drop something heavy right on top of it.'

'It might work.'

'Keep your head down, pal,' chuckled Curtis. 'I'll be back on air when we've got the Fat Man ready.'

'I think I know what will do the job,' said Helen.

She led them to a room near the elevators where a solitary object stood on a remover's trolley, awaiting its final destination.

The Buddha's head was over a metre high. It was all that remained of a thousand-year-old bronze statue of the Tang dynasty that must have been enormous. Curtis took hold of the usnisa , the protuberance on top of the Buddha's head that marked the attainment of supreme wisdom, and rocked the object gently.

'You're right,' he told Helen, 'it's perfect. It must weigh a couple of hundred pounds.'

Joan shook her head with horror. She didn't know which part of her was more outraged: the Buddhist or the art lover.

'No, you can't,' she said. 'It's priceless. Tell them, Jenny. It's a holy object.'

'Strictly speaking,' said Jenny, 'Buddhism and Taoism are diametrically opposed. I can't see anything wrong with doing this, Joan.'

'Ray, tell them.'

Richardson shrugged. 'I say we use Bud here to nail the droid before it nails Mitch.'

They wheeled the statue to the balcony and, while Curtis and

Richardson positioned the head at a point on the edge of the level a little further along from where Arnon had fallen to his death, Jenny searched the kitchen where the air was now quite breathable for something that would make a mess on the droid's clean floor. Bomb bait, Curtis called it. She returned with a couple of ketchup bottles.

'This should really piss that thing off,' she said.

Mitch watched the droid turn around from the clean floor under the piano and scan the explosion of glass and ketchup on the immaculate white marble with its video camera. Immediately it moved towards the mess, inspecting the perimeters of the large red cleaning task that now lay before it.

'Wait for my signal,' said Mitch. 'It's still on the edge of the mess. We'll let the fucker get right in the middle before you hit it.'

But the droid remained motionless on the edge of the ketchup. It was almost as if it suspected a trap.

'What's it doing?' asked Jenny on the walkie-talkie.

'I think it's — '

Suddenly, the droid sped into the centre of the huge ketchup splash and Mitch yelled, ' Now ! Do it now!'

The head of the Lord Buddha seemed to take for ever to fall to the ground. As if it was on invisible wires, moving very little in the air, it fell with a serenity, as if calling the earth to witness the climactic event of its last journey, until, with a tremendous impact, it struck the SAM droid in a huge balloon burst of metal and plastics.

Mitch ducked behind the pond wall as pieces of debris flew overhead. When he looked again the droid had disappeared.

As soon as the air in the boardroom was completely breathable again, Bob Beech announced that he wanted to return to the terminal, to continue with his attempts to fathom Ishmael's thought processes. Curtis tried to dissuade him. 'You're going back in there? To play chess?'

'My position is better than I thought it would be. Ishmael's game seems rather hesitant. In fact, I'm sure of it.'

'Suppose Ishmael pulls another stunt like before? Suppose he gasses you. What then? Have you thought of that?'

'Look, I don't actually think he meant to kill anyone but Willis Ellery.'

'And that makes it OK?'

'No, of course not. All I'm saying is that I think I'll be safe enough as long as we're playing the game. Besides… I don't suppose you'd understand.'

'Try me,' challenged Curtis.

'It's more than just a game. I created this monster, Curtis. If it does have a soul I think I have a right to know about it. The maker would like to have a conversation with his creature, if you like. After all, it was me who promoted Ishmael from the darkness. Despite everything that he's done, I can't treat him as my enemy. I want Ishmael to speak to me, to explain himself. We can have a dialogue. Maybe I can find a way of defusing the time bomb.'

Curtis shrugged. 'It's your funeral,' he said.

When Beech sat down in front of the screen again the quaternion turned towards him. Then it nodded, as if welcoming him back to the game. Beech surveyed the pieces for a moment, although he had memorized the board and already knew the move he was planning to make. He had the idea that Ishmael might have made a mistake.

Beech clicked the mouse and moved his King to Knight 1.

He was glad that the rest of them were too afraid to come back. Now he had the chance to be alone with his electronic Prometheus. Besides, he had his own private set of priorities to present to his creation.

The head had been hollow, like a great chocolate egg: the face had broken off as one complete shard and Mitch saw how details like the lips and eyes of the Buddha could be traced in relief on the inside of the metal. He limped across the floor, picking his way among the combined wreckage of the Buddha's head and the SAM droid and wondering what was the statute on the feng shui for desecrating the image of the Far East's pre-eminent holy man.