Gridiron - Philip Kerr

'There was that problem with the tree. The tree is in a square pond which means confinement and trouble. And now we've got confinement and trouble in spades. It's like I said.'

'Bullshit.'

'Oh, there's plenty more I could tell you. But what would be the point?

The bottom line is that the building is unlucky. I don't think even you could deny that, Marty.'

'Luck? What's that? I've never trusted to chance. Success depends on hard work and careful planning, not a bird's entrails.' He laughed. 'Or dragon's breath.'

'It's symbolic,' shrugged Jenny. 'You're an educated man. You ought to be able to understand that. To believe in the dragon's breath does not necessitate a belief in dragons. But there are all sorts of forces in the ground that we still know nothing about.'

'Jenny, honey, you're straight out of Stephen King, you know that?'

Birnbaum closed his eyes and looked vaguely dyspeptic.

Helen frowned. 'How much have you had to drink, Marty?' she asked.

'What's that got to do with anything? You're the one who's talking bullshit, not me. And why don't you put your shirt back on? You're making an exhibition of yourself.'

Curtis, who had been lying on the sofa listening to this conversation, stood up and stretched stiffly.

'You're the one who's making an exhibition of himself, Marty,' he said.

'Why don't you go next door with the other two and get yourself something to eat. Try and soak up some of that booze.'

'What's it got to do with you?'

'Only that when we go down that service ladder a drunk will be a liability.'

'Who's drunk?'

'Keep it down, will you?' snarled Beech. 'I'm trying to concentrate here.'

'Why don't you take a break?' said Jenny. 'You've been staring at that thing for hours.'

Beech's eyes never left the screen. 'I can't,' he said. 'Not now. The fact is, I think I've found a way that I can play this fucking game. Or one part of it, at least.'

'What's that?' said Curtis.

'I've managed to access the ChessMaster. If I win I can stop him automatically destroying the building around our ears.'

'You're going to play the computer at chess?'

'Have you got a better idea? Maybe I can beat it."

'Is there any chance of that?'

'For the humanplayer there's always a chance,' declared Ishmael.

'I played Abraham a few times without much success,' explained Beech. 'That particular program was based on the best computer program in the world. I'm not sure if Ishmael is using the same one or not.' Beech shrugged. 'But at least we're in the game, y'know? I'm not a totally shitty player. It's worth a try.'

Curtis pulled a face and then knelt down beside Willis Ellery, who was raising himself on one elbow.

'How are you feeling?'

'Like I was hit by a truck. How long have I — '

'Quite a few hours. You're lucky to be alive, my friend, really you are.'

Ellery looked at his burned hands and nodded.

'I guess I am. Jesus, it's hot in here. Your friend, Nat. Did he get out?'

'He's dead. So's Arnon.'

'David?' Ellery shook his head and sighed heavily. 'Could I have a drink of water, please?'

Curtis fetched a glass and helped him to drink.

'You just lie there and take it easy,' he told Ellery. 'Mitch has got a plan to get us all out of here.'

-###-

Nine lives left, Humanplayer using up lives more quickly than expected. Game over in short time. Humanplayer about to lose another life in riser shaft. Then there was false floor in boardroom. Shorting cable in shaft had given idea. But life in riser shaft proving elusive. Destroy it before moving on to rest. Rules are rules.

*)The ChessMaster decides who lives and who dies.

From top of open riser shaft view slowly bending live wire and humanplayer's progress down service ladder. Human-player through tenth level passing telecommunications closet test jack frame. Another five minutes life will be at bottom of ladder and out. Consider control parameters that might slow him down, until live wire makes contact with service ladder and endlife.

-###-

Mitch gave such a start of surprise as the telephone mounted on the wall immediately in front of his face started to ring that he almost lost his footing. He stopped and glanced up the riser shaft. Had Curtis found a way to work the phones? Or was this some trick of Ishmael's? Before lifting the handset he inspected it from all sides. It was made of plastic, which seemed to eliminate the possibility of electrocution, but after what had happened to Willis Ellery, Mitch was not about to take any unnecessary chances.

The phone rang once again, it seemed with greater urgency.

Plastic. Where was the harm? Perhaps it was Jenny. Perhaps they were trying to warn him of new danger. They had assumed that the service phones were not working, but what if they were still in action?

What if they were part of a separate switching system?

Gingerly, Mitch picked up the handset and, holding it away from his ear, almost as if he expected a sharp object to spring out of it, he answered:

'Yes?'

'Mitch?'

'Who is this?'

'Thank God. It's me. Allen Grabel. Boy, am I glad to hear your voice.'

'Allen? Where are you? I thought you'd escaped.'

'Damn nearly did, Mitch. Just missed the cut by a few minutes. Look, you've got to help me. I'm trapped in the basement, in one of the locker rooms. The computer has gone nuts and locked all the fucking doors. I'm dying of thirst in here.'

'How did you know I was in the riser shaft?'

'I didn't. I've been calling these phones for the last twenty-four hours. They're the only ones that are working. You know, I'd almost given up hope that someone would answer. I thought I was going to be stuck here for the whole weekend. You don't know how good it is to hear your voice. What are you doing in there, anyway?'

The voice sounded exactly like Allen Grabel's. But Mitch was still suspicious.

'We're all stuck, Allen. The computer has gone nuts. And quite a few people have been killed.'

'What? You're kidding. Jesus.'

'For a while back there, well, I'm afraid we all thought you were responsible,' Mitch admitted.

'Me? Why the hell did you think that?'

'Is it any wonder? After what you said, about screwing Richardson and his building?'

'I must have been pretty tanked, huh?'

'You were.'

'Well, I've had time to dry out now.'

'It's good to hear you again, Allen.' Mitch paused. 'If it really is you, that is.'

'What the hell are you talking about? Of course it's me. Who the hell else would it be? Mitch, is something wrong?'

'I'm just being careful. The computer is behaving kind of sneakily. Can you tell me your date of birth?'

'Sure, April 5th 1956. On my birthday, you came to the house for dinner, remember?'

Mitch cursed quietly. Ishmael would have known that: he had Grabel's personnel files and his desk diary on computer disc. He had to think of something that would not be on file. But what? How well did he really know Grabel? Perhaps not that well considering what had happened to him.

'Mitch, are you still there?'

'I'm here. But I've got to think of a question that only the real Allen Grabel could answer.'

'Well, how about I tell you something about you that only I would know?'

'No, wait a minute. I think I have something. Allen, do you believe in God?'

Grabel laughed. 'What the hell kind of question is that?'

'Allen Grabel could answer it.' Mitch knew that the jewish Grabel was also an agnostic.

'He could, huh? You're a strange guy, Mitch, you know? Do I believe in God? That's a difficult question. Well, let's see now.' He paused. 'I guess that if I find by my finitude that I am not the All, and by my imperfection that I am not perfect, then you could say that an infinite and perfect must exist, because infinity and imperfection are implied, as correlatives, in my ideas of imperfection and finitude. So I guess you could say that God does exist. Yes, Mitch I do believe he does.'

'That's very interesting,' said Mitch. 'But you know for such a difficult question, it's common to give a very simple answer.'

Mitch dropped the service telephone and continued his descent, only much more rapidly than before, aware that for some reason Ishmael had meant to delay him. It was time to get out of the riser shaft — and fast.

'Mitch,' yelled the voice on the phone, 'don't leave me here, please.'

But Mitch had already taken both feet off the rungs, pressed them to the sides of the ladder and slid down the last fifty or sixty feet like a fireman answering an emergency call, the battery-operated sensor lights switching on in quick succession as he accelerated down and away from the phone. As he passed the second level he grabbed the ladder once again, ran down the last few rungs and then shouldered his way through the riser door, collapsing on to the floor of the first level's equipment room. His feet caught in one of the many cables in the shaft and for a brief second, until he kicked his way free, he was sufficiently scared to believe that the cable had grabbed him like the tentacle of some enormous octopus. He scrambled across the floor, away from the shaft and, leaning against an equipment cabinet, waited to recover his breath and his nerve.

'Shit, how did you do that?' he asked out loud, almost in awe. 'How did you simulate Grabel's voice? Damn it, even the laugh sounded like his.'

Then he saw how it might have been done. At some stage the computer sampled Allen Grabel's voice, and converted the value of each sample into a binary number that could be recorded as a series of pulses. Enough for a whole conversation? And a theological one to boot? It was fantastic. If Ishmael could do that, thought Mitch, then he could do just about anything.

Maybe not anything. Mitch told himself that he was still alive, after all. So why had Ishmael done it? Not for his own amusement, that much seemed certain.

Mitch picked himself off the floor, returned to the open door of the riser shaft and looked carefully inside. It seemed no different now than before. And yet there was something. Something he felt in his bone marrow. He hoped that he would not have to climb back up and find out what it was that Ishmael had planned for him.

He made his way towards the light of the atrium. He walked stealthily, half expecting a door to open and admit another of the computer's surprises. At the balcony's edge he leaned over the handrail to check how far he would have to slide down on the cross-brace.

He had thought it was about fifteen feet, but now he saw that it was more like thirty. He had forgotten there was a double height between the atrium floor and the first level. His slide down the brace might prove to be fairly precipitous. Not that getting on to the brace itself was going to be easy.

Mitch walked to the end of the floor, climbed over the handrail and stepped on to the horizontal beam that gave off from the enormous support column that rose up to the roof. On the other side of the column was the cross-brace, leading at an angle of forty-five degrees down to floor. He crossed the beam like a tightrope walker and, hugging the support column with an arm and a leg, tried to feel his way to where the beam continued above the brace on the other side. The column was wide, but perhaps not too wide. Stretching his leg he searched for a toehold that would carry him round. After a moment or two he began to wish he had never started. To reach the other side it was clear that he would have to leave the safety of the beam altogether and fix the edge of his shoe into the centimetre-sized gap where one section of the support column joined the other. There could be no turning back. It was not much of a margin with which to trust his life. Once, as a boy scout, climbing on a cliff face beside the ocean, he had fallen perhaps only half that height, and had broken several bones. He remembered vividly the sensation of striking the rocks and, with all the wind knocked out of him, thinking he was dead. Mitch knew how lucky he had been then, and did not think he would be so lucky a second time.

He pushed off the beam, clinging tight to the column, like a human fly, inching his way around the tiny foothold on the insides of his shoes. Perhaps it took a minute or so, but it seemed to Mitch that he had clung on to the column for a lifetime and that he might never get to the other side.

-###-

In his disadvantaged circumstances, Beech favoured a closed game, with an irregular kind of opening, P-KB4, renouncing any immediate initiative. As a matter of simple arithmetic he knew that P-K4 was better, since it freed four squares for his Queen, but it also left a pawn unprotected, and Beech felt that this would easily become a source of trouble. Besides, he felt that all the analyses there had been of the open game following P-K4 would be known to Ishmael. That he was playing with considerable prudence was, he considered, hardly surprising. But it did seem strange that Ishmael should have demonstrated an equal degree of prudence with black's game. After twenty moves Beech felt more than satisfied with his own position. At least it would not be a complete rout.

-###-

'How is he?' Jenny asked Curtis.

Willis Ellery lay with his pale face turned towards the wall with only the occasional cough to confirm that he was still alive.

'He'll make it, I think.'

Jenny looked at her watch and then the walkie-talkie in her hands.

'It's been nearly an hour,' she said.

'Ten hours left,' murmured Beech.

'I guess it took longer than he figured. But he'll come through, you'll see.'

'I hope you're right.'

Marty Birnbaum lifted his head off his forearms, stared wearily at Bob Beech for a moment and then leaned towards Curtis.

'Sergeant,' he whispered.

'What is it?'

'Something terrible.'

'What?'

Birnbaum wiped his unshaven face nervously and tapped the side of his nose. 'Beech,' he said. 'Bob Beech is sitting over there playing chess. And do you see who he's playing with?'

'The computer. So what?'

'No. No, he isn't. That's just my point.' Birnbaum picked up his empty wine glass and stared into it. 'Before. I didn't believe. But now I've had some time to think about it I realize that he just wants us to think that Beech is playing the computer.'

'Who does?'

'Death. Beech is sitting there playing chess with Death.'

Helen snorted. 'Now who's being superstitious?'

'No, he really is. I'm sure of it.'

Curtis picked an empty wine bottle off the floor and laid it on the table. Immediately Birnbaum up-ended it over his glass.

'How much have you had?' asked Curtis.

Birnbaum stared at the empty glass unsteadily, coughed and then shook his head.

'Forget that. Listen to me. I've changed my mind. And I think you're right. We have to escape. I was thinking…' He coughed some more.

'While Beech has got Death distracted, well, it's our best chance to get away. I think that the two of them are so occupied with their game they wouldn't even…'