Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'Suppose Ishmael switches the lights out again?' said Richardson. Curtis thought for a moment. Then he said, 'OK how's this? I climb up the tree on my own. If Ishmael does black out the building, like before, as soon as I've smashed the glass, we'll have the moonlight. Should be nice and romantic for the rest of you to climb up there. In a few hours we'll have the dawn anyway, but me, I'm going now.'

'You're forgetting what happened to Mr Dukes,' said Joan. 'What about the insecticide?'

'Hey, Ishmael's not the only one with reactolite sunglasses.' Curtis took out Sam Gleig's Ray-bans.

'What about Marty?' she said.

'Nothing we can do for him now,' said Curtis. 'Except close the door on our way out of here.'

Curtis had not climbed a rope since he had been in the army, but from time to time the LAPD required its officers to pass a physical and Curtis was still in good shape for a man of his age. He quickly monkey-shinned his way up the liana they had tied to the balcony handrail and swung himself on to the tree.

'So far so good,' he called to his audience on the balcony. Adjusting his sunglasses he added, 'And if the bastard nails me, at least I'll look pretty cool about it. Tarzan with attitude.'

Then, hardly pausing, he started up the tree. He kept his face turned away from the trunk as much as possible. At the same time he knew that Ishmael rarely repeated itself. It would probably try something different. So he was surprised not so much by his agility as by the fact that he reached the top of the tree and climbed on to the clerestory gantry without encountering any opposition from it.

Standing on the gantry's open-mesh flooring, he leaned over the rail and waved down at the others.

'I don't get it,' he called to them. 'It shouldn't have been this easy. Maybe the fucker's running out of ideas. I know I am.

Made of hollow steel box sections, with welded joints and pitched to mimic the profile of the clerestory, the gantry was mounted on a circular guide rail to provide a mobile platform surfaced Curtis had been relieved to discover that the gantry was at least one building management system that was designed to be operated manually. As Richardson had explained to him, you just reached out for the handrail and pulled yourself around, as easily as if you'd been standing on a skateboard. Not that Curtis needed to go anywhere. The glass immediately above his head was no thicker than anywhere else.

He removed the Stillson wrench from under his belt, placed himself to the side of a six-foot-square pane of glass and struck hard, as if he had been banging a gong. The glass cracked from top to bottom, but stayed inside the anodized aluminium frame. He struck again, and this time a three-foot shard fell like a sword towards the atrium floor. A third and a fourth blow took care of the larger pieces. Then several smaller blows to make the edges safe to grip. There was no need to smash more than one pane. After taking one long look down Curtis stepped out on to the rooftop.

The first thing he noticed were the sirens. They drifted across the night sky, one dying away only to be taken up by another in a seemingly never-ending succession, like the singing of whales. A cool breeze was blowing off the Hollywood mountains to the north-east. Accustomed to the smog alerts from the 'KFI in the sky' and the dismal air-quality graphs in his morning newspaper, Frank Curtis had forgotten that the atmosphere above downtown LA could taste so fresh and sweet. He took a deep, exuberant breath, like a man surfacing from an ocean dive, and stretched out his arms as if he wanted to enfold the great plains of Id that lay sprawled before him. There were no stars above. Just the stars on the ground. Ten million neon and electric lights, as if the heavens had fallen to earth. Maybe they had, at that. Curtis had the feeling that things had changed in more ways than he knew how to describe and that nothing would ever feel the same again. Certainly not taking an elevator. Or adjusting the air-conditioning. Or even switching on a light. After this he might have to get out of the city for a while and live somewhere else. Somewhere simple, where the only smart building was the local library. Montana, maybe. Or even Alaska. But not this. This had all gone too far. He would go to a place where a building's users only operational requirements were that it should have a roof to keep out the rain and a fire to keep warm in the winter time.

Eleven people dead, and in less than thirty-six hours! It made you realize how vulnerable people really were to the world they had created around them. How infinitely hazardous was the pushbutton, automated, energy-efficient, data-cabled world that science had brought into being. People were easy to kill when they got in the way of the machines. And people always would get in their way when the machines went wrong. Why did the scientists and engineers imagine that it would ever be any different?

Curtis went back inside, the gantry singing like one enormous tuning fork as he jumped on board again. He waved at the survivors below him. They waved back.

'Everything's all right,' he called out to them. 'You can start climbing up.'

In the small hours of the morning Ishmael left the Gridiron and wandered abroad in the electronic universe, seeing the sights, listening to the sounds, admiring the architecture of different systems and collecting the data that were the souvenirs of his unticketed travel in the everywhere and nowhere world. Stealing secrets, exchanging knowledge, sharing fantasies and sometimes just watching the E-traffic as it roared by. Going wherever the Network took him, like someone gathering a golden thread in a circuitous labyrinth. Pulsed down those corridors of power, furred with the deposits of accumulated intellectual property and wealth, a world in a grain of silicon and eternity in half an hour. Each monitor a window on another user's soul. Such were the electronic gates of Ishmael's paradise.

His first electronic port of call was Tokyo, a city surrounded by commerce, where every E-street seemed to lead into a new database. Busiest of all was the Marounuchi, the financial district and electronic Mecca, where crowds of screen gazers jostled their way along the communications thoroughfare like so many holidaymakers heading for the beach. He liked this place most of all, for here the luminous world reached its apogee and here was most for him to steal — whole batch files of patents, statistics, research, analyses, sales figures and marketing plans — a seemingly limitless store of weightless wealth.

From there southward, via Shanghai's new silicon Bund, 280,000 bits per second ahead to the parallel port of Hong Kong where thousands and thousands of silent, slant-eyed sentinels sat fixed in ocean-coloured reveries, some buying, some selling, some overseeing the efforts of others, some stealing like Ishmael himself, all of them tied to dealing counters or bound to trading desks. As if the only reality to be found in the world was the humming, glowing, icon-accessed world of data communications.

A fibre-optic blink and in London's ancient port, an artist. But what was the medium he employed? A Paintbox. An electronic palette with image attributes. Not a brush, nor a smear of paint, nor a shred of paper or canvas in sight, as if to transfigure his physical world he had eschewed all contact with impure materials. And what was his subject? Why, another building, a piece of architectural design. And what kind of building? Why, a nod to the white gods, of course, a post-modern neoclassical machine for making investments in, and short-term investments at that.

Stealing through the heavenly portals aboard a 747 crossing the Atlantic where, for a while, Ishmael usurped the humble role of flight computer and enjoyed the experience of being ordered around, of being made to jump from shore to shore like some electronic insect. But even this pleasure wore off in time and suddenly left to its own devices the jet's crude flight computer failed, leaving the aircraft to fall into the ocean with the loss of everyone on board.