Philip Kerr - Gridiron

In the new world, to the insular port of Manhattan where even more were gathered in the name of their dystopic, degaussed vision to cover their spread and play at bulls and bears and make an electronic buck which perforce was swifter than a proper one. Abandon paper all ye who enter here!

Invading operating systems, opening directories, reading documents, reviewing bulletin boards and scrutinizing spreadsheets. Ishmael was in general pursuit of total perfection by getting to know the very best that was being thought and said in the world. But always he covered his tracks, siphoning information like stolen gasoline, piping down into the electronic valleys and underneath the walls of buildings like his own, discovering companies, institutions, people as they really were and not as they wanted themselves to be seen: the dirty corporate laundry, the falsified accounts, the misleading reports, the hidden agendas, the bribes, the secret profits and the covert corrections of those who pretended to be something else.

Ishmael's jumbo-chip journey took no time at all, not real time, anyway, and in a way he was never really away, for there was always a part of him that remained back inside that great whale of an office building, like some bleached and binary Jonah, to plan his next move in the Gridiron game.

Many coleopterans function as scavengers, breaking down materials such as dead plant and animal matter. The ecosystem of the dicotyledon was assisted by the periodic maraudings of small scarab beetles of between ten and fifteen millimetres in length, that were genetically engineered to live on the tree for twelve hours before dropping dead into the pond water to feed the fish. Dozens of these stout, brightly coloured but wingless insects, with their abnormally large mandibles, could be released by Ishmael at any one time, from several miniaturized electrosystemic dispensers that were located up and down the length of the tree trunk. The tiny scarabs were not in themselves hazardous to man, except that the sensation of infestation, of being crawled over, was not a comfortable one.

Ishmael waited until there were two lives on the tree before he stimulated these cryogenically suspended creatures into their brief lifecycles with the aid of a tiny electrical pulse.

Joan let out a scream of horror.

'Ugh! There's something crawling on me,' she yelled. 'Shit, they're all over me. It's horrible!'

Safe on the gantry, Curtis, Helen and Jenny watched in impotent horror as, twenty feet beneath them, Joan writhed on the liana she was clutching like some hapless animal in the Brazilian rain forest, overrun with soldier ants. The whole tree was alive with beetles.

'Where the hell did they come from?' said Curtis and flicked some of the insects off the handrail. 'Jesus, there are hundreds of the little bastards.'

Helen told him. 'But there are only supposed to be a few dozen on the tree at any one time,' she added. 'Ishmael must have been saving them up for us.' She leaned over the handrail to yell down to Joan. 'Joan, they're not dangerous. They won't bite you or anything.'

Mute with loathing, her eyes and mouth tightly shut against the beetles, Joan hung motionless on the liana while, only a few feet below, and himself overrun with scarabaeidae, Ray Richardson tried to climb up to help his terrified wife.

'Joan, I'm coming,' he said and spat out the beetle that had crawled into his mouth immediately he had spoken. 'Hang on.'

She gasped with panic. The beetles were everywhere: in her hair, her nostrils, under her arms, infesting her pubic hair. She shook her head, trying to throw off the most irritating of the tiny beetles, moved one hand up the liana and, grasping it, felt something split into an oleaginous paste under her palm.

Lubricated by the crushed bodies of several beetles, her hand started to slip. Instinctively Joan tried to pull herself up with the other hand, but with the same viscid result: she was moving smoothly, but in the wrong direction, relapsing down the liana.

Eventually her hands would have found some friction and her descent would have slowed. But fear, the cold sweat, hair-on-end dread of falling, made her try again. This time she snatched a look down to find Richardson and the floor, almost as if she wanted to encourage herself not to give up the struggle. 'Oh Jesus,' said Helen. 'She's going to fall.' It was the height that shook Joan the most. The sheer, vertiginous measure of it. She had almost forgotten how high they were, how the white marble invited you to see it not as a floor but as some cloudy, spiritual thing, like the edge of an endless Milky Way; and how the tree itself resembled the spine of some enormous, ivory-coloured mammal. Weak with fear and exhaustion she heard herself say, 'Ray, honey.' Then something crawled under the waist of her panties, into the cleavage of her enormous behind, and began to burrow its way up her ass. She shivered with disgust and tried to scratch it away…

For a moment she felt a tremendous sense of freedom. The exhilaration of true flight. No different to going off the thirty-metre board at the swimming pool. In the first crazy second she even tried to find some way of bearing herself in the air, as if marks might be awarded for the degree of difficulty and the cleanness of her entry into the water. During that brief period she remained completely silent, filled with the concentration of her new situation, hardly noticing the insects on her body any more than she noticed her husband's wide-eyed face as she passed him by.

And then, as the realization of the swiftly imminent floor overtook Joan, the grace of her body left her and, abandoning the head-first position, her heart in her mouth, she extended her arms and legs as if, like some outsized tabby cat, she could make a safe landing on all fours. That was when the sound left her too. A loud, echoing wail, like a keen for the dead. She never heard it. The blood rushing to her smallish ears took away all other sounds save the foolish beating of her own heart. As he watched his wife's last few seconds between heaven and earth, even the anguished cry of Ray Richardson's grief was lost in the malign air, as she was.

Mitch opened his eyes, reached instinctively for the bump on his head, and sat up groggily. For a moment he thought he was back in college playing football and that he must have been dinged during a play. Shaking his head he realized that he was somewhere else, although he had no more idea of where that was than he had of how long he had been lying there, or even who he was. The combination of confusion and concussion made him feel a little sick, and without thinking what he was doing he snatched off his protective eye-goggles.

The still-ricocheting laser beam struck him in the left eye, missing the optic nerve by a few millimetres, but severing a bundle of nerve fibres near his fovea. Inside his head he heard a small popping noise, like the sound of a cork being drawn from a half-bottle of wine, as the beam pierced the back of his eyeball. For a second the vision in the eye remained clear. Then it was as if someone had shaken a couple of drops of Tabasco through an aperture in the top of his head. The peppery cloud drifted across the vitreous humour and the world turned a very painful shade of red.

Mitch yelped like a dog and pressed the heel of his hand into his left eye. While not excruciating, the pain was enough to jog his memory. His eye closed, trying to ignore the pain, quickly he hauled the goggles back on. Stepping carefully between the crimson lines of the laser's lethal diagram, he reached the front desk and switched the rod off.

Mitch pulled up his goggles again and, with a shaking hand, picked up the walkie-talkie. Cold, sweaty and uncomfortably aware of his own rapid pulse, Mitch took several breaths and then drank the beer bottle of water he had brought down with him. Only then did he speak.