"Data."
His expression was thunderstruck. "How did you know? Nobody knows I deal in data."
Greg gave him a lopsided apologetic smile. "Somebody does. Cover him."
Ellis swayed backwards as Victor produced his Lucas pistol. "No violence, no violence." It was almost a mantra.
Greg walked across the room and looked down on the Castlewood's dark blue diving pool. The lounge was on the corner of the building, two sides of it were glass. The balcony ran all the way round, one-third of it under the condominium's weather-resistant covering.
"Whoever you are, you're an idiot," Ellis said, "You have absolutely no conception of what you've gone and walked into. The kind of people I associate with can tread you back into the mire that gave you birth."
Greg smiled right back at him, baring his teeth. "I know. That's why we came, for your top-rank friends."
Whatever Ellis was going to say died on his tongue.
"Wolf," Greg said. Naked alarm rocked Charles Ellis's already fraught mind. "Medeor." It produced the same response. "Tentimes."
"Never heard of them."
"Wrong. I'm psychic, you see."
Ellis's face hardened, forestalling the onrush of fear and suspicion kindling behind his eyes.
"In fact, you are Wolf, aren't you?"
True, the mind before him blurted helplessly.
"Thank you," said Greg.
Ellis looked at him with revulsion and hatred.
"Do you know what these are?" Greg asked Victor casually. He rested a hand on one of the three grey football-sized globes that were sitting on a leather-topped Edwardian writing desk. A Hitachi terminal was plugged into each of them with flat rainbow ribbons of optical cable. "They're Cray hologram memories. You can store half of the British library in one of these."
Greg tapped the Hitachi's power stud. LCDs flipped to black across its pale-brown surface, forming a standard alphanumeric keyboard. The cube lit with the Crays' data storage management menu. "You'll note that they're kept in isolation, not plugged into the English Telecom grid. So nobody can hack in. After all, bytes are money, especially when you know how to market them as well as Medeor here."
"What are you going to do?" Ellis's voice was a grizzled rasp coming from the back of his throat.
"Whatever I have to." Greg read the menu codes and accessed the first Cray. "Sixty-two per cent capacity used up," he observed. "That's one fuck of a lot of data. Now I could go through a whole list of names I'm interested in and see which your mind flinches at, but that would be very time-consuming. So I'm just going to ask you to tell me instead. Who paid you to organise the blitz on the Event Horizon datanet?"
Ellis shook his skeletal head, jaw clenched shut. "No."
Greg showed his card to the Hitachi's photon key, using his little finger to activate it. The percentage figure began to unwind at an impressive speed as Royan's data-crash cancer exploded inside the Cray. He hadn't been totally sure it would work on lightware. Admitting now he should've had more faith. The percentage numerals vanished from the cube, sucked away down some electronic black hole. The cube placidly reverted to showing the menu.
"No!" Ellis howled, an unpleasant high-pitched wheezing sound. He ignored Victor's unwavering Lucas pistol to stumble frantically across the lounge to the antique writing desk, looking down in consternation at the cube display. "Oh my God! Do you know what you have done?" His hands came up to claw at Greg, stopping impotently in midair. His face was contorted with fury. "There were seven million personnel files in there, everybody of the remotest interest in the country. Seven million of them! Irreplaceable. God curse you, gland freak."
"Kendric di Girolamo," Greg said calmly.
Stark horror leapt into his mind at the name.
It was very strange; a circle of bright orange flame suddenly burst from Ellis's head to crown him with a blazing halo. For one fleeting moment his mind inveighed utter incomprehension, wild eyes beseeching Greg for an answer. Then the flickering mind was gone, extinguished in an overwhelming gale of pain. The corpse was frozen upright, steaming blood spewing fitfully out of its nose and ears. Its corona evaporated, there was no more hair to burn; the skull blackened, crisping. He heard the iron snap of bone cracking open from thermal stress.
Realisation penetrated Greg's numbed thoughts as the reedy legs began to buckle, pitching the body towards him.
"Down!" he screamed. And he was dancing with the corpse, slewing its momentum to keep it between himself and the silvered balcony door as he flung himself on to the fringed Wilton rug. They crashed on to the worn navy-blue weave together. There was a drawn-out sound of glass smashing as Victor tumbled to the floor behind him.
Greg was flat on his back, the throat-grating stench of singed hair and charred flesh filling his nostrils. A wiry hand twitched on his thigh, not his. Ellis's dense curved weight pressed into his abdomen.
"Jesus," Victor bawled. "Jesus, Jesus."
"Shut up. Keep still."
The air heaved, alive with raucous energy; creaking and groaning as it battled to stabilise itself. A pile of paper forms took flight from the Edwardian desk, rustling eerily as they fluttered about the invisible streamers of boiling ions. The end of the discharge came with an audible crack which jumped the carpet fibres to rigid attention, dousing them in a phosphorescent wash of St. Elmo's fire.
Greg sent his espersense whirling, perceiving the star sparks of minds swilling through the concrete beehive maze of the Castlewood. Seeing the galvanised ember of victory fleeing.
"OK, they've gone," he croaked through the backlash of neurohormone pain. Even that sliver of sound seemed distant.
Victor was kneeling beside him, a rictus grimace on his face, rolling Ellis's body off. The back of the skull had cleaved open, a fried jelly offal spilling out.
Victor wrenched aside and vomited; coughing, dry retching, and sobbing for an age. When his convulsions finished he was on all fours, his hair hanging in tassels down his forehead, skin sallow and filmed with cold sweat. "Jesus, what did that to him?"
Greg looked at the wall opposite the balcony door; it was criss-crossed by narrow black scorch marks. Glass fragments from the cabinets were heaped on the carpet, figurines glowed a faint cherry pink on smouldering shelves. "Maser," he said. "Probably a Raytheon or a Minolta, something packing enough power to penetrate the silvering on the glass."
"Bloody hell. What now?"
Greg wriggled his legs from under the small of Ellis's back, and propped himself up on his elbows, gulping down air. Looking anywhere but at the ruined flesh at his feet. The world was a mirage, wavering nauseously. "Cover up. Call your squad, this apartment has got to be scrubbed clean, there must be nothing left to prove we ever visited. You'll have to take the body out tonight—cleaning truck, something like that. And get these Crays to Walshaw. Lord knows how long it'll take to go through their contents, though."
"No police?"
"No police. We need the Crays' data. Besides, I'd hate to try and explain what we were doing here. Let Ellis become another unperson, nobody's going to ask questions."
"Oh. Yes." Victor was dazed, moving and thinking with a Saturday night drunk's shell-shocked apathy.
"Call your squad now."
"Right." He tugged his cybofax out of an inner pocket. "Your nose is bleeding."
Greg dabbed at the flow with some of Ellis's tissues while Victor yammered out increasingly urgent instructions. Flies were beginning to feed on the open skull. Greg pulled a white lace tablecloth over Ellis, and collapsed into one of the low chairs, exhausted.
"On their way," said Victor. "You want to flit, find a doctor or something?"
"No. I think I'll just sit here for a minute. Oh, and be sure to have this place swept for bugs." His nose had stopped bleeding.