Gridiron - Philip Kerr

'Thank goodness,' she cried, but even as she spoke she realized that she was going to be disappointed. Nobody had come out of the car. She slowed to a walk again as a sound, like some enormous egg breaking, crackled down the corridor and clouds of cold air began to escape from between the slowly opening doors. Nobody would ever come out of this car. Nobody alive, anyway.

Helen stopped, her heart thumping in her chest. It would, she knew, be better not to look, only she wanted to make quite sure before she told the others. She faced the open car, her breath clouding in front of her face like someone entering a cold-storage room. But the chill she felt was more than just her fear and the extreme cold. It was as if she felt death reach out and touch her.

She did not scream. She was not the type. It had always irritated her how women in movies screamed when they found a dead body. Of course the point of the scream was to scare the hell out of the audience — she knew that, but still it annoyed her. By rights she ought to have screamed three times, since there were three bodies in the car, or maybe three times as loud as normal. Instead Helen swallowed back her horror, gathered her breath and went to tell Curtis.

-###-

Since his electrocution, Willis Ellery was confused and a little deaf in one ear. Worse, his left arm did not seem to work properly. He felt like someone who had suffered a stroke.

'That's probably the anoxia,' explained Curtis, helping the injured man to drink some water. 'It might take you a while to get back to normal. Believe me, Willis, you're damned lucky to be alive. You must have a heart like a fuckin' hippopotamus.'

Curtis inspected the wrench-shaped burns on the palms of Ellery's hands and the charred cutis and raised white blistering on his thumb from where the electricity had exploded out of his body. Jenny Bao had wrapped his hands in clingfilm to try and prevent infection, and had given him a couple of painkillers: Beech had found a small bottle of Ibuprofen in his hunter's vest pocket.

'Looks like she's done a pretty good job on you here,' said Curtis. 'Take it easy, huh? We'll get you to a hospital as soon as we can.'

Ellery smiled weakly.

Curtis stood up, rubbing the shoulder that was now aching badly from where he had thrown himself against the washroom door.

'How is he?' said David Arnon.

Curtis turned around, moving them away from the man on the floor.

'Not good. There might be some brain damage. I don't know. After what he's been through he should be in an intensive-care unit.' Curtis nodded at the walkie-talkie in Arnon's hands. 'How are they doing?'

'About halfway up.'

'Keep me posted. They're going to need help getting from the branches on to the balcony.'

He caught sight of Helen Hussey standing in the doorway. At first it was the fact that she was not wearing her blouse that drew his eye, but then he noticed her pale face and the tears on her cheeks. He went over and took her by the arm.

'What is it?' he asked. 'Are you OK?'

'I'm all right,' she said. 'It's the people in the elevator. From the atrium floor. They're outside, in the car.' She touched her forehead. 'I think I'd better sit down.'

Jenny helped Helen to a chair.

'I'll take a look,' said Curtis.

'I'll come with you,' said Mitch.

David Arnon followed them.

The three dead men, frosted white as Christmas, lay huddled in a corner of the frozen elevator like some disastrous expedition to reach the South Pole. Wearing expressions of calm and with open eyes, it was as if they had seen death coming from a long way off.

'I can't believe this is happening,' said Arnon. 'Men freezing to death in LA. It's surreal.'

'Do we leave them there?' asked Mitch.

'I can't think of anything to do with them,' said Curtis. 'Besides, they're frozen solid. Even in this heat it'll be a while before we could prise them apart. No, for the moment we'd best leave them where they are.' He glanced at Mitch. 'Does that bother you?'

Mitch shrugged.

'I was just thinking. Abraham must have some purpose in sending the elevator back up here now.'

'You mean he's trying to demoralize us?' said Arnon.

'Exactly. It shows a pretty good understanding of human psychology, doesn't it?'

'He's sure got me demoralized,' said Curtis.

'In which case, maybe Abraham's not such a mystery. What I mean is, this is a message. Not a very pleasant one. But a communication none the less.' Mitch paused. 'Don't you see? If Abraham communicates with us, maybe we can communicate with Abraham. If we can do that then maybe we can get Abraham to explain itself. Who knows? We might even be able to persuade it to stop this whole thing.'

Arnon shrugged. 'Why not?'

'I'm sure of it,' said Mitch. 'A computer acts on logic. We just have to find the right logical argument. Persuade it to scrutinize a few essences and meanings, the objective logical elements in thought that are common to different minds.'

'In my considerable forensic experience,' said Curtis, 'it's usually a waste of time to try and understand the criminal mind. We'd be better off putting our heads together again and thinking of a way to get out of here before we end up like the three in the car.'

'I don't see that one excludes the other,' said Mitch.

'Nor do I,' agreed Arnon. 'I vote for a bit of diplomacy.'

'But first things first,' said Mitch. 'We have to see if Beech can establish some kind of a dialogue.'

-###-

Two hundred feet above the atrium, Irving Dukes kicked the thick, leathery leaves of the dicotyledon aside and clambered on to another branch. When he was seated safely he looked down the length of the trunk to check on the progress being made by the others.

Joan Richardson was thirty or forty feet below him, and making slow work of the climb. Her husband, the asshole, was a few feet behind her, talking her up like some relentless football coach. Below them the grand piano on the atrium floor looked like a keyhole.

'In your own time,' he heard Richardson say. 'Remember, it's not a competition.'

'But I'm holding you up, Ray,' she said. 'Why don't you go on ahead with Mr Dukes?'

'Because I'm not leaving you.'

'You know something, Ray? I think I'd almost prefer it if you did. Your nagging doesn't exactly help me, you know.'

Dukes grinned. That was telling him. The asshole.

'Who's nagging? I'm just trying to encourage you, that's all. And to be here in case you run into any difficulties.'

'Just let me do it in my own way, that's all.'

'All right, all right. Do it your own way. I won't say another word if you don't want me to.'

'I don't,' Joan said firmly.

Dukes raised his fist and grinned. She was telling him where to get off. Joan hauled herself up on to the next branch. She rubbed both of her aching shoulders and then glanced up, looking for Dukes. He waved down to her.

'How's it coming there?' he called.

'She's doing fine.'

Asshole.

'OK, I suppose. How about you?'

'Fine, ma'am, just fine. Looking forward to my beer.'

Dukes took hold of his liana, hauled himself carefully on to his feet and stared up. There was no more than eighty or ninety feet left. Boy, was he going to drink some beer when he got up there. The thought filled him with renewed enthusiasm. He was readying himself to launch his weight on to the liana when something caught his eye. A thin, clear plastic pipe running up the length of the tree. Closer scrutiny revealed tiny bubbles, and that the pipe was filled with liquid. Why had he not thought of it before? The tree had its own dedicated supply of water. He had only to break the tube to have a drink of water. Or better still, put his mouth to the tiny diffuser hole…

As his face neared the hole the air was suddenly filled with a puff of spray.

For a second Dukes felt a cool, almost peppermint-sharp sensation of freshness on his neck and hands. He looked again at the diffuser and encountered another puff of moisture.

Instinctively he stepped back from the tiny plastic pipe as he felt a burning pain in his eyes, as if he had been sprayed with Mace. Squeezing his eyes tight shut he cried out with pain and wiped his face with his shirt sleeve.

Insecticide. He had been sprayed with insecticide.

'Mr Dukes? Are you OK?'

Joan Richardson felt the spray, saw the tiny droplets on her own sunglasses and knew immediately what had happened. The synthetic contact poison in the pipe was a chlorinated hydrocarbon. On the skin it was irritating and unpleasant. In the eyes it caused blindness. She squealed as the insecticide burned her arms and legs. But behind her sunglasses her sight remained unharmed.

'It's insecticide,' she shouted. 'We've been hit with bug spray. Don't for Christ's sake get any in your eyes.'

But for Dukes her good advice came too late.

Whimpering with pain he opened his eyes to find that he could see nothing except the same red spots he had seen behind tightly shut eyelids; and, as the red spots grew in size, so did his agony.

'Fucking shit,' he yelled, rubbing his eyelids furiously with hands that were themselves impossibly contaminated. 'Help… I'm blind.'

'Joan?' yelled Richardson. 'Are you all right?'

'I'm OK,' she said, 'but Dukes got some in his eyes.'

'Dukes? Hang on. I'm coming.'

Dukes never heard Richardson. He groped blindly for the liana, missed it and then reached for the bough beneath him, to sit safely astride it again.

Then there was a new sensation, a wind on his face and a sudden rush of blood to his head, like the time he rode the Space Mountain at Disneyland. With a sudden sense of horror he realized that he had fallen out of the tree, and the fear of his discovery was followed by the understanding that the pain in his eyes would soon be gone.

-###-

'No. Stop,' Joan shouted. 'Wait.'

She reflected on the stupidity of saying that to a man falling two hundred feet through the air.

Richardson did not see Dukes fall, only heard his plummeting descent as a rush of sound and air behind him, and then the dramatic, sustained musical reverberation as the blinded security guard hit the lid of the piano on the atrium floor. For a brief moment he thought it had been Joan who had fallen and he almost fell himself. But looking up again he saw her ass still looming over him.

Joan,' he said, with relief.

'I'm OK.'

'I thought it was you.'

'Is he dead?'

Richardson looked back over his shoulder. It was hard to tell anything very much from that height. Dukes lay on top of the piano like some drunken bohemian. He did not move.

'I'd be very surprised if he wasn't.'

He heaved himself on to the branch beside her and took a deep, unsteady breath.

'It's too bad,' he added. 'He was carrying the walkie-talkie.'

'It was horrible. As he fell I saw his face. I don't think I'll ever forget it as long as I live. Poor Dukes.' She tried to ignore the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach.

'Ray?' she said, taking hold of his hand and squeezing it. 'Do you think that Abraham means to kill us all?'

'I don't know, love.'

'Poor Dukes,' she repeated.

'This is down to that stupid bastard Aidan Kenny. This is all his fuckup. I'm sure of it." He coughed as some of the remaining hydrocarbon vapour found its way into his lungs. 'Try not to breathe any of this stuff. Keep your face turned away from the trunk as much as possible. Just in case it happens again.' He shook his head disgustedly. 'Damn you, Kenny. I hope you are dead, you bastard. If you were here now I'd push you off myself.'

'I don't see that would help much.' She stood up and stared up through the leaves. 'Jesus,' she moaned quietly.

'Are you all right to go on?'

Joan's legs were trembling. But she nodded and said, 'Only another hundred feet to go.'

Richardson squeezed her hand back.

'The height doesn't seem to bother you much,' he observed.

'Not as much as I thought it would.'

'That's the Native American in you. They say that Indians make the best spidermen. You want to see some of those guys, Joan. Walking on six-inch-wide steel beams, hundreds of feet in the air, like it was the edge of the sidewalk.'

'If that was the only job you could get then you'd have to get used to it too,' Joan said pointedly. 'Either that or starve.' Nerves were making her touchy.

Richardson shrugged. 'I guess you're right. But this is hardly the place for a lecture on political correctness, is it?'

'Maybe not. But what about Galileo's law of uniformly accelerated motion? A Native American would fall at just the same speed as a white man.'

She wondered when it would be her turn.

-###-

Bob Beech was drinking a beer and eating a packet of potato chips. His bare feet were on the boardroom table and he was watching the digital clock on the terminal, almost as if he still hoped that the GABRIEL disassembly program might start to take effect.

He heard Mitch out and thought for a moment. 'It would be a lot easier if I was in verbal contact with Abraham,' he said. 'Having a keyboard in the middle makes things difficult. Besides, I'm not much of a philosopher and I'm not much of a logician. I'm not even sure that logic has anything to do with morals. Because that seems to be what you're suggesting: that somehow we should try to appeal to something higher than Abraham's own logic. Logic can't handle that, Mitch.'

'Look. First we just try to understand what's going through Abraham's memory,' said Mitch. 'If we can understand that then we can act upon that understanding, but not until then. Let's just leave morality or whatever out of it for now, OK?'

Beech swung his legs off the table and pushed himself up to the computer. 'Whatever you say. But it's the ability to perceive moral truths and necessary truths that makes us what we are.' He started to type.

'Let's just wait and see what develops, shall we?'

'Sure, sure. You know, just about the only thing I've been able to work out so far is that whatever has gone wrong with this heap of silicon shit must have happened outside the building management systems, in the program utilities. Because that's where I parked the GABRIEL disassembly program. And since that's not working I have to assume that's where the fuck-up is. Not that I have much choice anyway. I can't access the BMS from up here even if I wanted to. Not without Kenny's fat paw on the screen. Not to mention the fact that he had his own superuser codes and passwords to sidestep things in general.'

'So did you, Bob,' said Mitch. 'I mean, isn't that what GABRIEL was about?'

'True.' He pressed some keys, paused and swigged some beer. 'Kick a man when he was down, would you?'

'Why GABRIEL, anyway?'

'Why anything? Program's got to have a name, hasn't it?'

'Yeah, but why that one?'

'Gabriel is the angel of death. At least, he ought to have been for Abraham.'