She said nothing, grinning stupidly into the screen, feeling just great.
"I mean it," he said.
Embarrassed in the best possible way, she shrugged. "Just a question of programming, all that expensive education you gave me. Anybody else could've done it. What will you do now?"
"Do you know who authorised the destreaming?"
"No, sorry. It began nine months ago, listed as part of one of our famous simplification/economy drives."
"Can you find out?"
"Tricky. However, I checked with personnel, and none of the Zanthus managers have left in the last year, so whoever the culprit is, they're still with us. Three options. I can try and worm my way into Zanthus's 'ware and see if they left any traces, like which terminal it was loaded from, whose access card was used, that kind of thing. Or I could go up to Zanthus and freeze their records."
"No way, Juliet," he said tenderly. "Sorry."
"Thought so. The last resort would be to use our executive code to dump Zanthus's entire data core into the security division's storage facility, and run through the records there. The trouble with that is that everyone would know it's been done."
"And the culprit would do a bunk," he concluded for her. "Yes. So that leaves us with breaking into Zanthus. Bloody wonderful, cracking my own 'ware. So tell me why this absolves the top rankers?"
"It doesn't remove them from suspicion altogether, it just means they aren't the prime suspects any more, now we know the monitor codes weren't compromised. Whether security personnel are involved or not depends on how good the original vetting system is. Certainly someone intimate with our data-handling procedures is guilty."
"That doesn't surprise me. There's always rotten apples, Juliet, remember that. All you can ever do is hope to exclude them from achieving top-rank positions."
"What will you do now?"
The hand massaged his brow again. "Tell Walshaw, for a start. If we can't trust him then we may as well pack up today. After that I'll bring in an independent, get him to check this mess out for me—security, Zanthus management, the memox-furnace operators, the whole bloody lot of them."
"What sort of independent?"
He grinned. "Work that out for yourself, Juliet. Management exercise."
"How many guesses?" she shot back, delighted. He was always challenging her like this. Testing.
"Three."
"Cruel."
"Good night, Juliet. Sweet dreams."
"Love you, Grandee."
He kissed two fingers, transferring it to the screen. Her fingers pressed urgently against his, the touch of cold glass, hard. His face faded to slate grey.
Julia pulled the sheet over herself, turning off the brass swan wall-lights. She hugged her chest in the warm darkness; elated, far too alert for sleep to claim her.
Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, Guest Suite Seven.
CHAPTER THREE
Eleanor had been living with Greg for exactly two weeks to the day when the Rolls-Royce crunched slowly down the dirt track into the Berrybut time-share estate.
It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and the sky was a cloudless turquoise desert. Eleanor and Greg shifted towels, cushions, and drinks out on to the chalet's tiny patio to take advantage of the unseasonable break in the weather. March was usually a regular procession of hot hard downfalls accompanying a punishing humidity. Greg could remember his parents reminiscing about flurries of snow and hail, but his own childhood memories were of miserable damp days stretching into May. Fortunately, typhoons hadn't progressed north of Gibraltar yet. Give it ten years, said the doomsayer meteorologists.
Eleanor stripped down to scarlet polka-dot bikini briefs, a present from Greg when he found she couldn't swim, promising to teach her. He rubbed screening oil over her bare back. Pleasantly erotic, although the heat stopped them from carrying it any further. They settled down to spy on the birds wading along the softly steaming mudflats at the foot of the sloping clearing. Most months saw some new exotic species arriving at the reservoir, fleeing the chaos storms raging ever more violently around the equatorial zones. The year had already seen several spoonbills and purple herons, even a cattle egret had put in a couple of appearances.
Greg lay on the towel, eyes drooping, letting the sun's warmth soak his limbs, slowly banishing the stiffness with a sensuousness that no massage could possibly match. Eleanor stretched out beside him on her belly, and loaded a memox of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings into her cybofax. Every now and then she'd take a sip of orange from a glass filled with crushed ice, and scan the shoreline for any additions.
Usually the girls he went with would drift away after a couple of days, maybe a week, unable to cope with his mood changes. But this time there hadn't been any; he had nothing to get depressed about, her body kept the blues at bay. And her humour, too, he admitted to himself. She rarely found fault. Probably a relic of her claustrophobic kibbutz upbringing, you had to learn tolerance there.
He wasn't quite sure who was corrupting whom. She was sensual and enthusiastic in bed, they screwed like rutty teenagers on speed each night. And he hadn't bothered to see any of his old mates since she moved in, not that he was pushing them out of his life. But her company seemed to be just as satisfying. It would be nice to think—dream really—that he could cut himself loose from the pain and obligations that came out of the past.
The rest of the country was in an electric state of flux, one he could see stabilising in a year or two. He had wondered on odd occasions if he could manage the transition, too. Start to make a permanent home, stick to ordinary cases, earn regular money. There was just so much of the past which would have to be laid to rest first.
Whistles and shouts floated down from the back of the chalet row, the estate kids' twenty-four-hour football game in full swing. Up towards Edith Weston, bright, colourful sails of windsurfers whizzed about energetically. The county canoe team was out in force, enthusiastically working themselves into a collective heat stroke as their podgy coach screamed abuse at them through a bullhorn. Hire-boats full of amateur fishermen and their expensive tackle drifted idly in the breeze.
Greg hadn't quite nodded off when he heard the car approaching. Eleanor raised herself on to her elbows, and pushed her sunglasses up, frowning.
"Now that is unreal," she murmured.
Greg agreed. The car was old, a nineteen-fifties vintage Silver Shadow, its classic, fabulously stylish lines inspiring instant envy. The kind of fanatical devotion invested in both its design and assembly were long-faded memories now, a lost heritage.
Astonishingly, it still used the original combustion engine with a recombiner cell grafted on, allowing it to burn petrol. Two pressure spheres stored its exhaust gas below the chassis, ready for converting back into liquid hydrocarbon when the cell was plugged into a power source. The system was ludicrously expensive.
He watched in bemused silence as it drew up outside the chalet, shaming his two-door electric Fiat Austin Duo. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his neighbours staring in silence at the majestic apparition. Even the football game had stopped.
Given the car, the driver came as no surprise; he was decked out in a stiff grey-brown chauffeur's uniform, complete with peaked cap.
He didn't bother with the front door, walking round Greg's vegetable patch to the patio, scattering scrawny chickens in his wake. The way he walked gave him the authority. Easy powerful strides, backed up by wide powerful shoulders and a deep chest. He was young, mid-twenties, confident and alert.