There had been this girl, Greg couldn’t remember her name now, but the two of them had got rapturously drunk watching the coronation together. The triumph of the Second Restoration remained for ever buried in that alcoholic netherland, but he distinctly remembered Philip Evans sitting in the abbey’s congregation. The cameras couldn’t keep off him. A small man in his mid-seventies, stiff-backed, using a stick to assist his slow walk, but managing to smile brightly none the less.
Philip Evans was the PSP’s bête noire; their Whitehall media department set him up as a hate figure, a campaign of vilification which left Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein standing. It’d backfired on them badly. Evans became a romantic pirate to the rest of the country. A living legend.
Event Horizon’s cybernetic factories floated with blissful impunity in international waters, churning out millions of counterfeit gear systems each year. Molecular-perfect Korean flatscreens, French memox-crystal players, Brazilian cybofaxes, a long, long list of the consumer goodies which R &D-starved State factories couldn’t match, and PSP economic policy prohibited importing.
His fleet of Stealth transports made nightly flights over England, distributing their wares to a country-wide network of spivs like demonic Santas. They proved unstoppable. One of the PSP’s first acts on reaching office had been to disband most of the RAF.
The black-market gear hurt the economy badly, undermining indigenous industries, turning more people to the spivs. A nasty downward spiral, picking up speed.
Evans had changed for the worse in the intervening two years since the coronation. The flesh sagged on his face, becoming pasty-white, highlighting dark panda circles around his eyes. His hair had nearly gone; the few wisps remaining were a pale silver. And not even the baggy sleeves of his silk dressing-gown could disguise how disturbingly thin his arms were.
He was sitting at the head of a long oak table. Two holo cubes flanked him, multi-coloured reflections from their swirling graphics rippling like S-bend rainbows off the highly polished wood.
Greg sniffed the cool dry air; there was a tart smell in the study, peppery. Philip Evans was badly ill.
The ageing billionaire dismissed his butler with an impatient flick of his hand. “Come in, Mandel. Can’t see you properly from here, boy, my bastard eyes are going along with the rest of me.”
There was another man in the study, standing staring out of the window, hands clasped behind his back. He didn’t look round.
Walking down the length of the table Greg saw that Evans was only whole above the waist. His legs and hips had been swallowed by the seamless cylindrical base of a pearl-white powerchair, torso fusing into an elastic chrome collar. It was a mobile life-support unit, analogue bioware organs sustaining the faltering body. But the mind was still fully active, burning hot and bright.
Greg shook his hand. It was like holding a glove filled with hot water.
“What do they call you, boy? Greg, isn’t it?” The accent was pure Lincolnshire, blunt, as much an attitude as a speech pattern.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’m Philip, Greg. Now sit down, it ricks my neck craning up at you.”
Greg sat, one chair down from Evans.
“This is my security chief, Morgan Walshaw.”
The man turned, looking at Greg. He was in his late fifties, with close-cropped grey hair; wearing a blue office suit, plain fuchsia tie. Shoulders squared. Definitely ex-military. The recognition was instantaneous. A mirror.
Eyeing each other up like prize fighters, Greg thought. Stupid.
“Mr Walshaw doesn’t approve of my asking you here,” Evans explained.
“I don’t disapprove,” Walshaw said quickly. “I just consider this an internal affair; sorry, nothing personal.”
Greg looked to Evans, politeness software loaded and running. Showing respect. “May I ask why you chose me in particular for a job? Random selection is, frankly, unbelievable.”
“Haven’t decided whether you are going to do a job for me, yet, boy. You’ll have to prove you’re what I’m looking for first. I believe you cleared up a problem for Simon White last year? Delicate, a real ball-crusher. That right?”
“I know Mr White, yes.”
“All right, don’t go all starchy on me. I do business with Simon, he recommended you. Said you only work for the top man, keep your mouth shut afterwards. Right?”
“That’s correct,” Greg said. “Naturally I offer confidentiality. But in taking on corporate cases I do so only for the board or chairman. Office politics are a complication I can do without.”
“You mean I couldn’t hire you?” Walshaw asked.
“Only if the chairman approved.”
“You’re ex-Army?” the security chief persisted. “Mindstar?”
“Yes.”
“So it was the Army which gave you your gland,” Evans said. “How come you didn’t sign on with a kombinate security division after you were demobbed, or even turn tekmerc?”
“I had other things to do, sir.”
“You could’ve earned a fortune.”
“Not really,” Greg said. “The idea that gland psychics are some kind of superbreed is pure tabloid. If you want someone who can see through brick walls then I’m not your man. Glands are not an exact science. I tested out psi-positive with top marks on esp, so the Army volunteered me for an implant thinking I would develop a sixth sense that could pinpoint enemy locations, index their weapons and ammunition stocks. But the workings of the mind don’t follow a straight logical course. I was one of the disappointments, along with several hundred others. People like me were one of the major factors in the decision to abandon the Mindstar programme, and that was long before the PSP obliterated the defence budget.”
“So what can you do?” Evans asked.
“Basically, I can tell if you’re lying. It’s a kind of super empathy, or intuition, a little mix of the two. Not much call for that on the battlefield. Bullets rarely lie.”
“Don’t run yourself down, boy. Sounds like you’ve got the kind of thing I’m looking for. So tell me, did I enjoy my breakfast orange?”
Greg saw the gland, glistening ebony, pumping. Physically, it was a horrendously complex patchwork of neurosecretory cells; the original matrix had taken the American DARPA office over a decade to develop. An endocrine node implanted in the cortex, raiding the bloodstream for chemicals and disgorging a witches’ brew of neurohormones in return.
The answer was intuitive: “You didn’t have orange for breakfast.”
Morgan Walshaw blinked, interest awakened.
Evans grunted gruff approval. “The last quarter profits from my orbital memox-crystal furnaces have been bad. True or false?”
“They’ve been awful.”
“You ain’t bloody kidding, boy.” The chair backed out from the table, and trundled over to a window. Gazing mournfully across the splendid lawns, the billionaire said, “This job isn’t for my benefit. I suppose you know I’m dying?”
“I guessed it was pretty serious.”
“Lymph disorder, boy, aggravated by using the old devil deal hormone to keep my skin thick and my hair growing. So much for vanity, serves me right. This thing I’ve got, very rare, so they tell me. After all, it would never do for me to die of something common.” He snorted contemptuously at his own bitterness. “Everything will go to my granddaughter, Julia. She’s the one out there in the pool; the brunette. The lovely one.”
“What about her parents? Don’t they stand to inherit?”
“Ha! Call ‘em parents? Because like buggery I do. If I hadn’t paid off her mother she’d still be in that Midwest cult commune, smoking pot and screwing its leaders for Jesus. And that son of mine is incapable of taking on Event Horizon. Couldn’t anyway, even if he wanted. Legally incompetent.
“Best detox clinics in the world have tried to straighten his kinks. Too late. He’s been on syntho so long-and I’m talking decades-the dependence is unbreakable. You cold-turkey his body and the lights go out. They shoved him through the whole routine-counselling, group analysis, deprivation motivation, work therapy-it amounted to one great big zero. The only time he even knows there’s an outside world is when he’s tripping.” The anger rose again. “It’s fucking humiliating. I was prepared for some rebellion, a bit of antagonism between us. That’s the way it always is between father and son. But him! We had nothing, no love, not even hate. It was like everything I was achieving didn’t even register with him. He walked out the door on his twentieth birthday, and that was it, not another word for twenty-five years. The only reason I found out I had a granddaughter was because that freako cult he wound up with tried to leach me for donations.