Edge. Part 14

Josh started blinking, very fast.

Gun coming up, half the face exploding and my G.o.d he's just a kid just a kid "out now, breathe in, let the feeling out, Josh, that's right, and you're fine now."

"Jesus." He rubbed his face, sweat-slick as if in a sauna. "Sorry."

Clyde started to approach. "Sir? Are you all right?"

"He's fine." Suzanne waved him back. "We're doing OK."

"s.h.i.t." Not the language he would normally use over dinner, not with someone like this. "I don't know what happened. Something took me back"

"You've had counselling, after battlefield trauma."

"I guess that's what you'd call it. Sure."

"And they used similar techniques with you, working successfully almost all of the time, is that right?"

"Sure." He rubbed his mouth. "Most of the time."

"So you had a little resonance of memory, and it's all gone now."

"It... it has gone. I feel OK."

"Good."

"How did you do that?""Well." Her smile and gaze hummed with mystery, deep as voodoo. "Call it magic if you like."

Casting some kind of spell, for sure.

Suzanne noted, as they walked, the way Josh cast his attention outward, in what looked like a trained pattern: left-right-left, starting close and extending to the distance. He made a soft humming noise as he spotted something about a building, then continued scanning.

"What did you notice?" she had to ask.

"Huh? Oh, those flats, how the building went from stables to warehouse to homes over the centuries."

"You're kidding." She saw the black iron crosses, part of the supports that held swelling brickwork in place. "I guess the place is old."

"Look how the place used to be mercantile, and before that rural, because the roads follow the natural contours. See?"

"Hmm. Interesting."

So he could overlay mental pictures across reality, make deductions that were not obvious; and if he was the kind of software expert she thought, he could wrap himself in highly abstract, creative visualisations of complex systems she could not imagine. This was not how she had imagined an ex-soldier would be.

"Where is your car?" she asked.

"Not far."

From a tiny motion of his head, she realised it was behind them somewhere, and that his walking her home took him further from the vehicle. It was good that she could read these nuances, because in some ways Josh c.u.mberland was unknowable, his physicality breathtaking, diverting her from the reason for their meeting.

"Have you thought what's going to happen once you find Richard?"

"Er, taking him home seems like a good idea."

"It wasn't me he was running from."

"No." Josh stopped and scanned in all directions, before turning to her. "I won't take him back into danger."

"I believe the physical danger comes from his school. The home environment is stressful in other ways."

"Yeah, I got that. Doesn't make Broomhall a bad man. I mean, he's money-grabbing and corporate, but I've met worse."

"We agree. He's just different from his son."

"Ah. Right."

Again, he scanned the street. Did he ever stop?

"I'm going to ask you a favour." Her heart, warm in her chest, reminded her of their conversation, the neuropeptide basis of emotion. "Let me help you look for Richard."

Was it for Richard's sake she was asking? Or to spend more time with this man?

Doesn't matter to Richard. We just need to get him back.

"I'll call you," he said.

They walked on, reaching the door to her apartment house too soon. She went inside, stopped in the hallway, and looked back out. Josh gave a little fingertip wave, an informal salute, and slipped away. It felt as if something had been pulled out of her.

Part of her awareness, throughout the meal, had observed the natural matching of their body language, the interlocking rhythm of microgesture, and the subliminal courting dance of pheromones, their effect surfacing in the dilation of eyes, the flaring of nostrils, the inability of either person to look away.

Josh c.u.mberland.

The name rolled around in her brain, warming her, threatening her equilibrium. Perhaps he was good news, perhaps he was bad; what she could not do was ignore him.

[ ELEVEN ].

A plain budget hotel room at five in the morning. How often had Josh woken up in places like this? Sometimes when rich corporates paid his expenses he slept in five-star elegance; other times it was hard soil or rock beneath his sleeping bag, the Brecon Beacons or Tibetan Alps or the expanding Sahara, snow or heat, always different. But like a turtle in its sh.e.l.l, he was always at home, because of the discipline, the routines he carried everywhere.

Drinking tap water from a plastic cup, he unrolled his screen and keypad, thumbed his phone to life, and began amending his search arguments, changing his choice of algorithms based on the new patterns he had to look for. Most of the framework remained unaltered, while his coding changes had more to do with the London Transport network, an environment he had not hacked before. Soon his more-than-querybot call it a stealthbot was ready to ship.

"Hey, Petra," he dictated, his phone turning speech into text, "if you could load this inside the interface shield, we might save a missing kid."

He sent the message, his stealthbot attached inside an anonymous archive file, along with a manifest that made it look like an ordinary in-house complex written by the Transport Police.

For a few minutes he waited, on the off-chance that Petra was awake at this hour, then he shut everything down. What he needed was to keep fit and maintain his reflexes, so he pulled a pillow from the bed and a cheap soccer ball from his bag. It would not look like a fight gym to most people; but it was enough.

A cat-stretch press-up, slow at first, then fluid and fast: two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups in fifteen minutes. It was deep knee-bends for the next quarter hour, five hundred Hindu squats. Then, putting the pillow on the floor, he arched backward, weight on his feet and the top of his head at first, before stretching to press forehead and nose into the pillow. He held position for four minutes, following it with a forward bridge and ab crunches to finish.

Then he was ready to fight.

When a struggle goes to the ground and you're on top, the guy underneath is squirming which was what the football reproduced. Josh worked rolls and flips and reversals, grappling manoeuvres on the floor with the ball twisting beneath him. On his feet, he practiced rapid-fire hand drills, adding elbows, knees and powerful kicks. Finally, he drew his knife, and worked the combos with blade in hand, over and over on imaginary enemies; and at last he was done, taking huge breaths to slow down, his body encased in warm, slick sweat. Then he spun, a half-second before a thump rocked the door.

He checked through the spyhole, then opened up in silence.

"It's 6.30 in the morning." The guy in the corridor was round and soft-bodied. "You could have someconsider"

Then his eyes triangulated on Josh's blade."I like to keep sharp." Josh smiled. "Stay a cut above the rest."

"Er... Look..." A swallow. "I... Um."

"My apologies."

Josh closed the door, shutting the guy out. There was a long pause, then stumbling footsteps receded.

Before going to bed, he had filled two canteens with water from the bathroom tap, and mixed in purifying powder, because you could never trust a hotel to have clean filters. Now he drank, half a litre at first, then another half with powdered peas and milk mixed in, before checking his messages. Petra had responded, but not in the way he wanted.

"Sorry, Josh. You've obviously worked hard on this one. But there's been a couple of, well, questionable uses of privileges recently. Internal Investigations are looking motivated. Sorry again."

And that was it. No help from Petra.

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks."

Then he felt chill. It might have been the sudden cooling-off, his body still inside its layer of sweat; or perhaps it was something else.

She changed her mind overnight.

Not only that, but the message was way too polite for her. Had someone warned her off?

Sluicing off in the shower was a simple pleasure, always enhanced by a workout beforehand; but now that his plans were derailed, he could have scheduled exercise for later and got something else going instead. However wonderfully his querybot was crafted, if he couldn't insert it inside the official surveillance systems, its functionality was useless.

There was another way in, but he did not want to try it yet, not without knowing why Petra had backed off from helping him. What he wanted as though he needed an excuse was to talk to Suzanne d.u.c.h.esne again. And he had promised to call her; but she probably thought that meant at a civilised hour.

So hurry up and wait.

He cranked up text-only and read from the autobiography of Lyoto Machida, a j.a.panese-Brazilian fighter from the civilised days of MMA cage fights. The samurai mindset was admirable, except for the daily drink-yourown-urine ritual, allegedly traditional. Josh glanced at the dregs of his pea-and-milk shake, and shook his head.

Then, hoping that Suzanne was an early riser, he placed the call.

"Hey. How are you this morning?"

"A little surprised that you're calling."

"You mean, at this hour. I don't have any news."

"All right."

"You must be busy. Can I buy you lunch later on?"

"I'll be at Elliptical House working with clients. Is two pm too late?"

"Perfect."

"Then I'll see you."

"See you. Cheers."

Outside the window a silver summer rain began to fall, rippling with sunlight, like magic. Probably it was there all the time, the wonder, but people were too busy to see it.

Two o'clock. Lunch.

"Oh, yeah."

Good news. He could almost forget Sophie lying comatose, the beeping life support, or the wreckage of his marriage to Maria, testament to a decade or more of bad decisions.

Like h.e.l.l he could forget.

The Tube carriage rocked, half full, as Josh checked the hidden and not-so-hidden cameras. They were potential routes into the surveillance net most transmitted realtime to relays and servers outside but too restricted for what he needed. At the far end of the carriage, two men b.u.mped into each other, hands going for hilts, then stopping as they rethought their situation. An abbreviated apology, a delayed nod, and they moved away from each other, eye contact broken.

Josh's phone gave a characteristic vibration.

Who's sending this?

There were people looking relaxed or bored or hacked off by their jobs; none looked away suddenly at his gaze. Someone professional then, who had redfanged a short-range message while his attention was on the two guys. There was no easy way of telling who it was; and besides the train was slowing. This was his intended stop.

"Victoria Station. Mind the gap."

He could have played tag games, trying to flush out the message sender, but instead he got out as planned, keeping in the midst of other pa.s.sengers as he ascended to the mainline station. Far outside rush hour, the concourse was still busy. Hunching his shoulders, he pulled out his phone, tilting it so no surveillance cams could see the screen.