‘Look at the airships!’ Cat said.
‘Yeah, I’ve never seen so many in one—’
‘No, look!’
Things were dropping from the airships, black dots – Jordan turned to look at the closest, floating above Finsbury Park. He saw the canopies open, and tried to scan the whole sky, see everything at once. All around, as far as human eye could see, parachutes and hang-gliders descended on the open spaces of the city like a selective fall of multicoloured snow.
‘Air hostesses!’ Cat said, and then wouldn’t say anything else.
The nearest parachutes came down out of sight, a kilometre or so eastward. Jordan was relieved they hadn’t landed at the near end of the park—they were probably going for the tactically more important junction at Seven Sisters.
Fonthill Road was deserted. Jordan paid the cabbie in B-marks, gaining a surprised look of thanks, and walked with Cat to the doorway of the block where he’d last worked, less than a fortnight ago. A Warrior stood outside. His submachine-gun covered their approach. The sensation that at any second he could be ripped in half was a new one for Jordan.
‘What’s your business, sir?’
‘River Valley Distribution,’ Jordan said, passing him a laminated card.
‘And who have you come to see?’
Jordan smiled politely. ‘MacLaren & Jones.’ If he knew his former partners, nothing short of shells coming through the window would keep them away from their desks.
The Warrior passed the card swiftly through a reader, and peered at the result. Jordan tried not to hold his breath. His fictitious company’s status as an approved supplier, left over from his SILK.ROOT program, was the nearest he had to a security clearance.
The guard nodded and handed the card back. ‘You’ll find them up the stairs and on the right.’
He stepped aside. Jordan held the door open for Cat. She went up the stairs with surprising speed, and let Jordan lead the way into the offices. The great workroom was almost empty, most of the screens dead.
Debbie Jones, who’d usually worked evenings when Jordan had been her partner, was standing by the desk they’d serially shared. She faced the door, evidently alerted she had a visitor. The screen behind her bled with the colours of falling shares.
‘Jordan! I never expected to see you back here!’ She sounded half-welcoming, half-disapproving. Jordan had always thought of her as quite a nice girl, intelligent but conventional; unmemorable oval face, straight long hair, straight long dress. Her glance flicked to Cat and back to Jordan with a look of marginally increased understanding that he was beginning to find irritatingly familiar. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Do you know why I left?’
She shook her head. ‘And I’m not interested, frankly.’ Another glance at Cat. ‘It was a bit inconsiderate of you. Though in all fairness we didn’t do too badly out of your selling out to us.’
‘Glad to hear it,’ Jordan said. ‘I’m sorry about the inconvenience I must have caused you.’ He wondered if she knew he’d left Beulah City entirely. If she hadn’t, it suggested Mrs Lawson had been more anxious to cover up than to investigate.
‘Actually,’ he went on with an embarrassed-sounding laugh, ‘I’m not here to see you at all. I just have some matters to clear up with Mrs Lawson. Security stuff, you know?’
Debbie frowned. ‘I don’t see—’
Jordan looked past her. ‘Hey, what’s happened to the Dow Jones?’
Debbie looked over her shoulder. ‘Oh, rats!’ She sat down and started rapid-fire keying. In the thirty seconds of distraction this afforded Jordan walked briskly to Mrs Lawson’s office.
‘Where is everybody?’ Cat asked, looking around.
‘They must be on strike.’
‘Ha, ha.’
He knocked on Mrs Lawson’s door.
‘Come in.’
Jordan looked at Cat. ‘After you, lady.’
Cat opened the door and sailed through. Jordan hung back for a moment, then stepped in and closed it. Mrs Lawson was standing behind her pine desk, her hands on top of her head. Her whole attention was on Cat’s derringer; her face showed shocked bewilderment.
Then she looked up and saw Jordan. Her expression deepened to one of utter dismay. Her mouth opened…
Cat raised one hand. Mrs Lawson’s lips clenched.
Jordan climbed over the desk to the terminal, avoiding passing between her and Cat. He tapped in the code and hit Enter.
The ghosts were gone now, and the animal mind of the gun. He was on his own, looking down at the country like a god. It was more than a map, more than a view from a fantastic unclouded height. A moment’s attention was all it took to take him close. He saw armoured columns, and he could zoom in on individual tanks. He saw the sinking silk, the rising smoke, and focused in on a city centre where ANR fighters attacked a police barracks with nerve-shattering ferocity. He heard the yelled slogans, the shouted pain.
He was there and he wanted to be there. He looked at London, saw the converging lines, the closing circles, the bright sector of Norlonto and, just to its south, a dark patch, a blindspot. It too lit up, flickering (hand over bank of switches), and he turned away.
He looked up and saw them beside him in the imagined sky. They were exactly like the tiny sparks of light he’d sometimes seen when gazing at a clear blue sky. On this scale they were shining silver ships, UFOs insolently dancing in the air over Britain, alien intelligences waiting to be noticed.
He reached out to warn them.
Jordan turned away from the terminal.
Cat chucked him a roll of heavy-duty tape from her handbag.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lawson,’ he said, peeling off a metre of it. ‘You know how it is. Nothing personal.’
Mrs Lawson nodded. ‘That’s quite all right, Jordan.’
He taped her securely to the office chair, after checking as best he could that the chair itself didn’t conceal any alarm switches. If she had one about her person, she’d probably used it already, and in any case they could hardly remove her teeth one by one. Then he taped the chair to the radiator at the window.
When he was about to tape her mouth she shook her head.
‘No need,’ she said. ‘The room’s completely soundproof. I’d appreciate it if you’d let someone know where I am once you feel safe.’
‘No problem about that, but I’ll still have to do it. Voice activation.’
Mrs Lawson looked at him as if she’d never heard of it.
‘You’re taking this very well,’ said Cat, still keeping her covered. ‘Something we should know, yeah?’
Mrs Lawson laughed. ‘Oh, no, nobody’s on the way. It’s only that I’m quite used to interpreting finger movements as keystrokes – years of watching people enter passwords. You were rather fond of Engels and Lucretius, weren’t you Jordan? I recognized the code you tapped in just now.’ She looked from him to Cat, and back. ‘Is this the Catherin Duvalier I’ve heard so much about? Did she persuade you that Kohn was wrong and Donovan was right?’
‘What’s Donovan got to do with this?’ Jordan snapped at her, baffled. He didn’t understand the reference to Kohn either.
Mrs Lawson gave him an impatient, scornful look. ‘Oh, stop playing games, Jordan. Who else would want to turn off my security software?’
‘The ANR, if you must know,’ Jordan said, stung by her insinuations.
She stared at him for a moment and then began to giggle, at first in a schoolgirlish, sniggering tone and then with a rising pitch that bordered on hysterical. In a surge of fury and disgust he slapped the tape across her mouth.
‘You’re the one who’s playing games,’ he said bitterly.
Tears leaked from her eyes and her shoulders quaked.
‘Breathe OK?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
He moved behind Cat and opened the door. They backed out and walked quickly to the exit. Debbie Jones leapt up from her seat.