"You're going to freerun through Waterloo?"
"Through it, under it, and over the top," said one of the others. "Gonna be good."
"I'll be watching," said Josh. "Take it easy."
"You, too."
He wandered away, heading east alongside the river, staring at the crowd and food vendors. Across the darkening waters, the stately turbines were slowly rotating, their vanes' leading edges rippling with electrophosphorescent red, glowing like blood on a blade.
Suzanne. I wish I'd invited you.
But she might be with a client now, and if she were free and came, his attention would be on her. He was here was to find Richard Broomhall, and everything else was secondary.
Reaching the South Bank complex, he stopped. There was a jumble of grey concrete blocks and ramps, the old theatre building with its balcony patio where the clientele were drinking wine spritzers, while down below some twenty young men and women were wandering among the people and the architecture, doing pretty much the same as Josh: taking in every aspect of the geometry, internalising a model of the surroundings in three-dimensional detail.
It felt strange to be among kindred spirits. But their goal was different from his, because they were mapping vectors of movement across a 3-D urban setting for the sheer flowing fun of it; while he was planning to snatch a kid – Richard, or else Opal, if only she appeared.
The incident with the idiot had made him realise that if Richard or Opal called for help, there would be dozens of athletic helpers all around. While he might be able to beat them in a straight run on barren land, in this cluttered city world, with a struggling kid in hand, he would have no chance of getting away.
Suzanne, if she were here, would find some way of explaining to the gekrunners that it was for Richard's benefit; but for Josh there was too much risk. And there was something else, because of the promise he had made to Viv, the woman at the shelter who had helped him – he would not drag Richard back to his father against his will. And that meant no police.
He circumnavigated the boxy building several times, then moved along the nightrunners' probable route, towards the Imax Ruin in Cardboard City, and up to the Victorian-looking sculpture of Waterloo station's entrance: stone flags and banners, memorials to former railway workers who fell during wartime, defending the country against an implacable enemy.
Had there been a single conflict since then that made as much moral sense?
Forget it. Look and concentrate.
In the station he drank coffee and ate a yoghurtcoated flapjack, used the facilities, then left via the pedestrian skyway over the EuroLev terminal – if Suzanne were here, they could be in Paris within the hour – and descended to ground level. He followed the streets and underpasses back to South Bank, made a final looping circuit of the theatre complex, and found a place to sit near the riverside railings.
Waiting was one of his best skills.
When it was dark, they began to congregate. All wore shirts that gleamed with light – some with blazing white backgrounds across which moving figures jumped and tumbled, while slogans scrolled down the garments, many reading: Le Mouvement, C'est Moi; others with shining kaleidoscopic patterns that lit up the night in a sea of shining colours.
It was terrific, a spectacle Josh had not expected. It was also horrific in terms of identifying a solitary kid. There were non-gekrunners among the throng, but at least two hundred wore the shining animated shirts, rendering the surroundings darker by contrast, as much a problem for the omnipresent cameras as for human vision.
French voices sounded among them. Gekrunning came from and coexisted with parkour, as created in the northern suburbs of Paris. Josh knew that, though the closest he had come to freerunning was swarming over endless assault courses.
Shit. Where's this Opal?
He was trying to zero in on the smaller figures among the gekrunners, but their relative shortness would mean they were hidden by the shining shirts and other gear. This was a nightmare of a mission that should have been straightforward: look for a kid and find him.
"Listen up, everybody." The speaker was a Frenchman, standing on one of the concrete blocks that served as seat or sculpture. "We start the main run in twenty minutes. For now, have fun around these structures" – he crouched down to slap concrete – "and in twenty minutes, we will meet our Waterloo!"
Two hundred people cheered, and even Josh laughed.
Then the night exploded into brilliance as movieimage garments shone and their wearers leaped in all directions, tumbling and spinning, performing running jumps, vaulting over seats and off railings, while others skated at high speed across the flagstones, boots set to near-zero friction, and some began to spider up the theatre's external walls, using gek-gloves.
All those moving images were an absolute Idiot.
– golden opportunity for anyone who thought of himself as a tech-head, a warrior-geek from the Regiment's Ghost Force, who ought to know better than to feel stymied when he was surrounded by technology that was waiting to be subverted. From his pocket he took out his rolled-up touchboard, unfurled it and clipped his phone on top, the tiny current causing his touchboard to snap into useful rigidity.
Come on, Cumberland. You can do it.
Well, of course he could, but the question was whether he could do it in time, because in twenty minutes – less now – these buggers would be gone, running over the buildings as well as past them. If it was hard enough to spot a missing kid now, it would be impossible when the night run was in full flow.
The time to have had this idea was an hour ago, maybe two, when he could have dawdled over his coffee and flapjack and worked the way an old coder knew best. But his fingers were already flowing across the touchpad.
Here we go.
This was the true Zen, the immersion in a task so total there was no bandwidth left for self-conscious thought. He went deep, very deep, out of necessity; so that when he finally sucked in a breath and came out of it, his task completed, there were runners all around getting ready for the off. Twenty minutes had passed. His opportunity was almost gone.
But in his display, several panes were blinking red, code was ready to be loosed, packages anxious to be broadcast. Compiled and zipped, loaded and ready to go.
"So, everybody" – it was the French guy standing on the same concrete block – "we count down, ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five…"
Sound disappeared from Josh's awareness as he focused on the display, letting the code fly. Then he brought himself back.
"…two… er, what is-? I mean, let's go!"
Every shirt blazed the exact same shade of pink, then mutated to a sapphire blue, while in the centre of each garment, front and back, a picture of Opal (retrieved by backtracking from her avatar) appeared. Beneath it scrolled a message in scarlet:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?
No one could transmit to every shirt through the web at once, but Josh's phone redfanged to those nearest, and those shirts redfanged to their neighbours, and the whole cascade took place in under a second. Now, every shirt appeared synchronised as Opal faded out, and an image of Richard appeared.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?
The runners' concentration was broken. Some faltered in their first manoeuvres; others simply turned inward, congregating with their nearest neighbours, all voicing some variation of "What the hell is this?", "Qu'est-ce qui se passe?" or "C'est merde!"
There was a ripple in the pattern of light, and that was all he needed. He redfanged the abort, and every shirt resumed its normal display.
"Everyone, come on!"
Freerunners and gekrunners flowed into motion, tumbling and running over obstacles, some of the gekrunners ascending the theatre walls like gymnastic spiders, their shirts pulsing with light, a beautiful spectacle for anyone with time to watch, but not Josh. He broke into a run, trying to catch the eye of the storm, the centre of the rough circle of disturbance: the reaction of people near Richard or Opal. From the way that centre had moved, he thought it must be the girclass="underline" someone capable of running with the rest.