Edge. Part 46

Josh wasn't so sure. She had deconstructed what went on inside his head when he fired off techniques, then reproduced his state of mind inside herself.

"When I hit the pads," he said now, "I hear Lofty's voice inside my head telling me to hit harder. Though I'd not been properly aware of it."

"So..."

"So Suzanne does the same thing, hears someone encouraging her on."

"Auditory hallucination," said Suzanne, "if you like."

Tony looked at the pads he was holding.

"That sounds nuts, except I've never known a beginner hit that way. There must be something in it."

Suzanne smiled at him.

"Josh tells me you were one of the best shots in the Regiment."

"One of the best?" of the best?"

"He also said you were modest."

"Ah."

She picked up a coffee mug, walked to the far end of the room, and held it up.

"Imagine you were going to shoot this."

"All right."

"Really imagine it, as if you were holding a weapon."

From nowhere, Tony drew a real gun and pointed it. Josh remained relaxed.

"Interesting," said Suzanne. "How big is the mug?""About ten inches. But my wife would say three and a half."

"Yes, but how big does it really look?"

"It... Jesus." Tony lowered the gun. "It looks about four feet tall, but only in my head, you know? My mind's eye."

"Hmm. That's a common strategy among top marksmen," she said. "But I'd only read about it. You actually use it. Hallucinating visualising the target bigger than it is."

Tony looked at Josh.

"And you've been in this woman's company day and night for how long now?"

"I've lost track."

"When Amber moved in with me first, remember how she rearranged my furniture?"

"Er, yeah."

"At least she didn't refurbish the insides of my head. On the other hand, I didn't need it, whereas you clearly did, old mate."

Josh looked at Suzanne, whose reply was a beaming smile, full of innocence and wicked intent, all at the same time.

"Have you tidied up my mind," he said, "just cause you're a neuropsych and you can?"

"Oh, no."

"Well, thank G.o.d for"

"It's because I'm a woman."

Tony laughed.

"She's well and truly got you, mate."

On the tenth day, after laying anti-surveillance kit throughout Suzanne's flat, Josh popped schematics up onto the wallscreen. Tony, Hannah, and Vikram watched from the couch, while Suzanne fetched coffee.

"There are five different possible OPs," Josh said. "We could lay up here, this crawls.p.a.ce, which is the closest to the action, but the hardest to keep quiet in."

He had a.n.a.lysed the hiding places in various ways: ease of access getting in without tripping alarms even he could not subvert and ease of exit on the day, to get close to the action; the acoustic properties, for silence was going to be key; ventilation and the amount of room available. All were part-way reasonable; none of them was perfect.

"Not bad." Tony leaned forward, pointing. "What about going in through the?"

"Hold on." Hannah looked at Suzanne. "Didn't this all start with your friend Philip Broomhall? And isn't he stinking rich?""I don't think Broomhall considers me a friend," said Suzanne. "But he is rich, yes."

"Well, what kind of person lives in the Barbican?" asked Hannah. "It's your city financiers, and a bunch of rich actors, all that kind. That's who."

"So?"

"So what kind of friends does Broomhall mostly have? You think maybe rich ones? Could be, he knows someone who lives there."

"That's not bad," said Josh.

"Come off it," said Hannah. "It's f.u.c.king genius."

"Yes, you are." Tony saluted her. "We bow down before you, oh great one."

"Good. Just keep that adulation coming, minion, and we'll get on fine."

On day thirteen, amid the greenery of Hampstead Heath, Suzanne ran five kilometres straight for the first time since schooldays. Back at her apartment, Josh used so-called pattern interrupts for rapid hypnotic inductions, dropping both Tony and Hannah into trance in less than a second.

"We're getting there," Josh said.

"Yes, we are," said Suzanne.

The fifteenth day was a nightmare for Josh, in contrast to everyone else, who performed superbly on the a.s.sault course.

"What's up?" asked Tony afterwards.

Suzanne said: "He didn't come to bed last night. At all."

"Josh?"

"Call me a geek." Josh shrugged. "I went through the subversion ware from start to finish, and re-edited the data archives. Philip came through with good stuff."

Combining Philip Broomhall's corporate awareness with Josh's tech knowledge had paid dividends in triangulating on footage that neither the prime minister nor the Tyndalls would want the public to see.

"So it's going to make an impact?"

"Oh, yes."

On day seventeen, they were in a converted Georgian house, surrounded by its own grounds, in the heart of Herefordshire. It was a training facility, normally rented out to companies teaching management techniques; but occasionally the people who hired it were ex-Regiment, and the training that took place was light-years removed from anything an MBA would expect.

When a dark-clad figure grabbed Suzanne's shoulder from behind, she spun and slammed a palm-heel into a visor-protected chin, slammed a shin-kick into a padded thigh, and knocked the man down with a curving elbow strike.

"Nice," said Josh.

Suzanne looked down at the half-p.r.o.ne man.

"Not now, Kato," she said.

They spent the rest of the day either springing out on people to ambush them or else being the target, reacting to random attacks as they wandered through the building. She called it Clouseau training, a reference that Josh failed to catch, which meant an evening of watching old Pink Panther movies when the day's work was over.

Her viewing was interrupted by a call from Peter Hall, her client who had cancelled on the day she met Adam and later Philip Broomhall. Peter was distraught, and she calmed him down, taking him to a more resourceful neurophysiological state, able to cope with the sudden loss of his job that had triggered the reaction. By the end of it including a trance induction over the phone Peter had coping strategies in place. He would be ready for jobhunting tomorrow, while managing his emotions.

Finally, she closed down the call and looked at Josh, Tony, and Hannah.

"That wasn't just a wandering conversation, was it?" said Josh. "We sort of appreciate how you did some of it, at least. Now we know the basics, that was a bit of a mastercla.s.s."

Tony nodded, while Hannah said "You rock, girl."

"Thank you."

On day twenty-two, in darkness, in front of the training house, Suzanne hugged the others farewell, Tony, Hannah, and the others she had met only five days before, Raj, Brummie, Ron, and Morio. Josh's way of saying goodbye was more in the way of wry smiles, punches to the upper arm or touching fists, and a final inventive insult that was returned in kind.

There were four cars, already packed with kit. Josh and Suzanne climbed into the first together, and drove off. The others would leave at intervals, dispersing rather than forming an obvious convoy. They would rendezvous tomorrow morning, coming together from different directions.

"Three days left," said Suzanne. "And yes, I know. We've got to get through tomorrow first."

"Good job we're ready," said Josh.

[ TWENTY-NINE ].

And so, the Barbican.

It was a jumble of architecture, a long promenade by a wholly artificial rectangular lake American visitors called it a pond; the locals thought it too big for that label with its own straight-edged waterfall to a lower level, leading to a pool that partly undercut one of the towers, which was supported on stilts.

On the promenade, under normal circ.u.mstances, chairs ringed parasol-covered tables for al fresco dining. Now, the area was covered with jagged-looking obstacles that looked like ma.s.sive fragments of shattered concrete, though they were rubberised and soft to the touch. Graffiti marked them: symbols of urban breakdown and destruction, props for the coming show.

In total there were three towers, including the one undercut by water, all of them filled with apartments overlooking the promenade-turned-urban arena. The building walls at one end formed a hollow curve, like some Circus Maximus of old. There, the apartments' silver-shuttered windows offered perfect views of the action to come, while keeping the residents far re moved from the real urban dangers beyond the estate's high walls.

In previous decades a music college had enjoyed premises on site; now that building was occupied by a blue-sky research campus owned by an Eastern European consortium, part of the Web 4.0 Initiative. It was just one more accidental by-product of the wealth pouring into Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, now that their natural uranium deposits were growing ever more valuable in the ongoing rush to throw up reactors as fast as possible. In contrast, the alternative programmes were years behind schedule and/or underfunded by billions, depending on who you asked.

Under other circ.u.mstances, Josh would have been tempted to break into the W4I labs, just to see what they were up to.

Silvery membranous sheets were draped shroud-like against walls and over awnings. In ambient daylight, they were translucent; but later, when the smartroof drew over the promenade arena, casting shade, the sheets would come alive with rippling, motile patterns of light, turning the post-apocalyptic setting into something eerie and modern. Background music would pulse throughout the estate. The same music that would form the backing for the webcast, with state of the art audio mixing.

Men and women in dark blazers and sharp-creased trousers were patrolling the grounds, the stairwells and colonnades and corridors, and the theatre complex that was the Barbican Centre at the heart of the estate. They paid no attention to the spyball cameras dotted everywhere; they did watch the cleaning staff and webvision roadies moving along the promenade among the props. This was despite the hoops everyone had already jumped through simply to come on site, three successive security checks, taking an hour in total.

For the most part the residents were staying away from the promenade, for the few days it formed a webvision set under construction. But some walked their dogs or strolled according to habit, and the security personnel were careful both to observe the walkers and keep their distance. The residents were rich or they would not be able to live here, and the security objective was to keep them safe, not annoy them.

By 9am, many residents had long departed to go to work, though others worked at home, while some several actors and at least one luxury-cla.s.s prost.i.tute would still be sleeping off the previous night's activities, ready for a late start to their working day. Few families with children lived here, because it was not that kind of place: it was for the go-getters, the well-off or those thirtysomethings who were too busy fighting in the corporate jungle to create for themselves an actual life.

Casual visitors, for the next few days, would be turned away with unswerving, implacable politeness. Some would walk outside the perimeter proper, taking in an external view of the jumbled, purplish architecture, all hard edges and curves, with neither the plentiful gla.s.s of more modern creations nor the gracefulness or playful details of cla.s.sical design. A few of the visitors might be envious, wishing they could live so close to the City which is not the city, not London itself, but only the calculating financial centre with both the bustle and the heartlessness of Wall Street or the Beijing Bourse.

Most of their co-workers rode packed commuter trains to and from their air-conditioned offices that bore all the warmth of a locker room, and spent long days stressed by violation of their personal s.p.a.ce, by verbal sniping and turf wars fought over imaginary corporate territory. All the while, their workplace constraints forbade the physical movement or verbal release that might dissipate the built-up hormones of freeze-flight-fight that were crying on the strength of a four-billion-year evolutionary history for free expression.

Rats in a cage.

Outside the estate proper, the security firm had no presence, relying on normal police spycams to pick up anything suspicious. For today and tomorrow morning, that would remain sufficient. But tomorrow afternoon, and all through the big day itself, there would be extra security: uniformed and plainclothes officers, plus specialist close-protection units, working the streets in vehicles and on foot, and patrolling the skies in helicopters. When the prime minister ventured out from Fort Downing Street, this was the kind of coverage he required.