The briefest clip of LizAlec looking at a camera, a scream and then nothing but static snow. There would be a second part to that message soon enough, there had to be. Some impossible demand that Lady Clare was supposed to meet. No one would kill LizAlec before Lady Clare got the rest of the message.
Whoever it was, whatever they wanted, the kidnappers couldn’t take the risk that Lady Clare might discover LizAlec was already dead. Not that she was any closer to finding out where the original e-vid had come from. Back before the power went down, she’d accessed the SCIS machine in Brussels, called in favours at MIT and CalTek. Had Light&Magic strip away the e-vid’s dropped-in background with its luminous “Free Luna” graffito sprayed onto a glass wall. And at the end of it she was no closer to having an answer.
Hours of precious AI time had been wasted tracking the e-vid, only for Lady Clare to be told by S3’s own machine that the e-vid had been uploaded from her own terminal. The upload and download began and ended at the same terminal, the AI was prepared to guarantee it. Not that the Turing was in a condition to guarantee anything now. All that was back on Monday when the mainframe was still running. Now there wasn’t a system anywhere in the city still functioning, or not fully. Maybe one or two stand-alones might still be virus-free.
Lady Clare shrugged, sodden silk shirt sticking to her hunched shoulders, rain dripping between her small breasts to trickle down the flat expanse of her stomach. Lady Clare didn’t wear a bra: even at sixty she didn’t need it. And as for her gut, it was hard to get fat when you didn’t eat. If anorexia was a disease of the troubled teenage years, then Lady Clare’s adolescence had been infinitely protracted. Lady Clare knew why, always had done if she was honest, it was just that these days she didn’t bother to think about it.
S3’s tame psychologists insisted there was a limit to how long any one person could stay angry with their family. But Lady Clare was already well past her hate-by date. And she needed another gratuitous attack of guilt like she needed her father back from the dead.
She’d intercepted LizAlec’s mail to Fixx, of course. She’d have found the e-vid anyway when she bothered to check the Web traffic held against his name. But within two hours of LizAlec sending it an S3 semi-Turing had pulled LizAlec out of the traffic, juggling packages and breaking crypt to match the girl’s face to a visual template it had been given earlier.
Lady Clare had been shocked, which surprised her. Saddened too, though she’d been getting used to that where LizAlec was concerned. The child looked so young, so terrifyingly defenceless. Sitting there in school uniform in a public vidbooth, over-made-up eyes staring darkly at the camera, white cotton shirt unbuttoned to show small breasts. Part of Lady Clare wanted to know what Fixx would have made of that e-vid had he ever received it.
Maybe it would be worth showing him to find out. As LizAlec was being driven to Charles de Gaulle to catch her shuttle, members of a Third Section snatch squad were already blowing out the steel door to Fixx’s squalid seventh-floor studio in Bastille. The man was safely behind bars before LizAlec’s Boeing had even begun its ascent.
Sending LizAlec back to school had been the right decision, Lady Clare didn’t doubt that for a minute, and she would do it again if necessary. As the old Breton woman who cleaned Lady Clare’s office always said, shit came in threes. And she was right. Take weather from hell, toss in an out-of-control nanetic virus mixed up by some under-age mujahedin and add the black-costumed forces of the Reich, sitting in a circle around Europe’s greatest city like bored vultures.
Clare wanted to blame it all on the Germans... Of course she did, she was French. But her clinically cold intellectual standards wouldn’t let her. She knew the statistics, that was her job. There were nearly as many Frenchmen in that army as there were Prussians, and twice as many Cossacks, come to that. Whichever way you cut the figures, there were three “foreigners’ for every one Prussian.
Elective fascism... And why not Lady Clare thought, head down against the driving rain. We’ve had elective surgery, elective sexuality — what was politics if not elective? The new Reich via Cossack Black Hundreds out of Nazi nostalgia. And who was she to be surprised? If the last century could get nostalgic enough about the little Corsican corporal to allow a Napoleon back on the French throne, who should be shocked that this one got all nostalgic about that little shit corporal from Austro-Hungary?
Section Three existed to ensure the Empire’s stability, though most of what it had done over the last twenty years was soft management. From its base at Les Tourelles, the Pool monitored data, meme-checked and spun news stories along with the best. Which wasn’t to say it couldn’t get down-and-dirty when necessary... And it was necessary now, except that “now” was already too late. Lady Clare had been so busy trying to reach a compromise with the Jihad hackers, she hadn’t realized the Azerbaijani virus might rupture European opinion, spilling out decades of resentment, pulling rioting slum crowds onto provincial streets. La Haine was reborn as a thousand pirate newsfeeds switched allegiance.
Pro-compromise, pro-Jihad news stories were being quoted back at her, twisted. Her own anti-Reich memes, dropped quietly into the electronic cesspit of rumour, were being taken up as Black Hundred boasts and flung back against her. From Montana to Monaco, the same waves of racist paranoia swept the Web.
The Hundreds were no longer just a Ukrainian problem: the Reich was no longer just history. And standing on the rain-slicked tiles of her own roof, watching France’s worst-ever storm rip buildings apart, Lady Clare knew that — at least in part — she was to blame.
Lady Clare made herself look towards the Eiffel Tower then, what was left of it. Millions of tons of steel, billions of rivets, hundreds of years of history eaten away into a brutal metal stump. The virus hadn’t even finished its job, it had just aborted suddenly, switching itself off.
When the virus first struck, it looked like the most lethal side effects might be burnt out. But then the eastern edges of the city had begun to crumble, ferroconcrete projects and slum arcologies falling in on themselves. That was when Lady Clare had tried to arrange for the Prince Imperial to be given asylum in the US, for one last AirFrance Boeing to get permission to land at JFK.
Congress hadn’t liked the idea.
Not that Lady Clare could blame them. What was the Empire State Building but concrete thrown up around a huge steel grid? And as for the famous Flatiron building... At least Paris had some streets made entirely of stone. The Mayor of New York had Columbia run a projection on what would be left of Manhattan if the virus hit. The answer was some rather nice brownstones south of Bleeker Street and a surprising amount of Harlem. It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear.
And he didn’t want the Prince Imperial either. Nor did Los Angeles, Sao Paulo or Bogota. Lady Clare was last year’s model when it came to negotiators, if not the year before that. Washington no longer took her calls: all that remained for her to do was negotiate the surrender of Paris and hope for a civilized exile.
Of course, a week ago the Reich could have bombed the city back into the Stone Age. Or, if they didn’t want to trash a historic centre more than was strictly necessary, they could have limited themselves to taking out most of the inhabitants with a low-grade neutron burst. But that was before their planes started to drop out of the sky.
Now they were going to have to fight their way from the Périphérique right into the Place de la Concorde, street by bloody street.
But that wasn’t going to happen.