Daniel said, ‘I wondered why all the noise.’
‘I’ve decided it’s the only way to commute. I asked them to turn on the siren and lights, but the guy driving this thing— Wow.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘We went over a bump or a wave or something. The guy said I’d already attracted enough attention.’
She was trying to make light of it, to assure Daniel that she was okay. To assure herself.
Daniel said, ‘Helena tried to get access to you. So did I. They invoked the usual terrorism bullshit. Jen and I are with Helena in her chambers right now, in fact. Did they make you sign anything?’
‘They took a statement.’
‘But did you sign it?’
‘They didn’t ask me to sign anything,’ Chloe said. ‘And I only told them the truth. If you want to check it, I have a copy.’
‘I’ll take a look. So will Helena.’
‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘I know. Did you say they were taking you to the office?’
‘I didn’t want to go home.’
‘I’ll get there as soon as possible,’ Daniel said. ‘Hang in there. Don’t talk to anyone.’
She wanted to ask him about Ram scooping up fragments of the disintegrating avatar, but he’d rung off.
There were no journalists waiting for her at the little dock that stuck out from the low wall of the stopbank, no journalists waiting outside the entrance to the warehouse. She stood in the shadowy street under the plaque on the wall that indicated the new level of the river and called Neil. Because she wanted him to know that she was okay; because she needed to ask him something.
He’d seen a clip of the attack on the BBC news, wanted to know if she was all right.
She told him she was fine. ‘Did you know there are police cells in Kingdom Tower? I was locked up in one for more than an hour before they realised that I didn’t have anything to do with the so-called assassin.’
‘Apart from knocking him to the ground,’ Neil said.
‘By total accident. I was trying to brain him, and splashed that stupid knife thing of his instead. I had no idea it would blow up like that. Anyway, the police took a statement, released me without charge, and gave me a ride back to work.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Neil said.
‘I’m not so sure. The one thing you’re never supposed to do when something kicks off is get in the middle of it. And by the time I reacted, it was too late.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Neil said again. ‘My sister, the hero. A reporter from the Daily Mail called me. She got hold of my mobile number, offered cash for photos of you.’
‘I hope you accepted. She’d be paying for what everyone can get for free on the web.’
‘She wanted childhood photos,’ Neil said. ‘You know, with Mum.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t worry. I told her exactly where to go.’
‘I bet you did.’ Chloe smiled, imagining Neil’s freezing politeness.
He said, ‘If you need a place to hide out until this blows over, Sue and I can put you up. We’ll put up the barricades, send out for some Indian from Raja.’
‘I don’t want to put you guys in the middle of this. And I think my boss is going to come up with some kind of plan.’
‘As long as you’re okay.’
‘I’ll tough it out.’ Chloe paused, then said as casually as she could, ‘By the way, did you get around to checking that database, and asking your friend if he could help out?’
Only Ram Varma was in the office. He wasn’t surprised to see Chloe: Daniel had told him she was on her way.
‘You’re famous,’ he said. ‘All over the media.’
The big monitor on his workbench was patched with half a dozen windows playing loops of the assassination. From the committee room’s cameras, from the TV crew’s camera, from Jen Lovell’s phone. There were feeds from BBC 24 and Sky News, too. The avatar smiling at the assassin as the knife came down, a blur of motion off to one side resolving into Chloe swinging at the man with the water jug, a white flash, the man and the avatar collapsing. Different angles. Slow-motion recaps. Stills.
According to the BBC, the assassin was Richard Lyonds, an unemployed accountant. He’d been fired from his accountancy firm for stealing from a client’s account, had just been released after spending two months in prison for shoplifting, did not appear to have been associated with any of the anti-Jackaroo groups.
‘He used a taser knife,’ Ram Varma said. ‘They aren’t commercially available, but there are build instructions on the net. Take two thin blades, glue them together with an insulating spacer, wire them up to a battery and capacitor stack in the handle, and you’re good to go. You shorted out the capacitors when you threw water over the guy. He got the full benefit of their stored charge.’
‘How did he get it past security?’
‘He hid in a cleaning cupboard, sneaked out when the session began. Someone in security is going to catch it,’ Ram said. ‘Bad luck for the avatar that it was so lax, but good luck for me.’
He told Chloe that he’d just received the preliminary results of the analysis of the avatar fragments that he’d dropped into ice-cold mineral water and managed to smuggle out in the confusion after the attack.
‘I rode down in a lift full of policemen, sweating like a pig. And once I was outside I realised that I couldn’t do my prize justice. So I called one of Ada Morange’s people, an exobiologist I met at that conference in Lyons last year. Ten minutes later a courier on a motorcycle appeared, and rushed it over to a lab in Imperial College. They did a quick combustion analysis, and ran a sample through an atomic-absorption spectrometer,’ Ram said, and pulled up graphs of spiky lines on the big monitor.
‘I see it, but I’m not sure I understand it,’ Chloe said.
‘It’s mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. A carbon-based life form. Also calcium and phosphorus,’ Ram said, pointing to different spikes. ‘Potassium and sulphur, sodium, small amounts of iron and copper…Pretty similar to the composition of the human body. The stable isotope ratio suggests that either it was made here, or it was doped to make it look as if it was. The Americans probably know this stuff already, and much more. The Chinese and the Russians and Indians too. The Brazilians…Anyone who has managed to get hold of a fragment. But no one shares information, and there’s a ridiculously high signal-to-noise ratio in the rumour mill. So all of this is new to us. I’m told that Dr Morange herself is very interested.’
Ram was smiling like a kid whose every Christmas had come at once. He was about Chloe’s age, soft-spoken and capable, one of the smartest people she knew.
‘It was a cool move,’ Chloe told him. ‘Actually pulling something useful from this mess.’
‘Most of the sample had dissolved by the time it reached the lab, but the people at Imperial managed to filter out and stabilise what appear to be fragments of a giant macromolecule. Like DNA, but much, much bigger. Maybe the avatars are woven from a single such molecule. Different sections could have different properties, different functions. Memory storage, information processing, musculature and so on. Amazing, right? Way ahead of anything we can make. As you might expect. Right now, I’m waiting for the results of electron and atomic force microscopy. Hopefully before the police and security services work out what I did. Because while we’re analysing the fragments, they’ll be analysing every microsecond of footage of what went down. It’s like a race where you know you won’t reach the finish line, but try to get as close as possible.’
Ram switched the monitor back to the tiled news feeds. One of them showed a woman scurrying from the front door of her house to a taxi, barging through a scrum of reporters and cameramen and photographers. Richard Lyonds’s ex-wife, according to the chyron. Chloe felt a pang of sympathy.